Globalization processes link centres of power and culture all over the world. But these are surrounded by peripheries, whose integration in the global paradigm is neither an inevitable nor an automatic process, as a naïve perception might lead us to believe. In South Asia, such peripheries seem a long way from the cosmopolitanism of Bombay or Bangalore and the crisis is hardly the same to the ecologist statesman and the herdsman looking for pasture. Societies in the South Asian wilderness - Jangal - are closely tied to the environment but peripheral to the system of power. For them, the landscape is symbolically charged, and the meaning with which natural and social surroundings are instead tends to produce an identification as against others, expressed in terms of ethnicity. Changes at the symbolic level imply a danger of losing identity. The peripheral groups studied in this volume are the Santals, the Rona, the Bondo, the Pengs of Orissa, the Jadopatias of Bengal, the Kulava of Kerala and the Todas of Nilgiri among others. It is in the periphery that the confrontations between development projects, conservation efforts and local populations are most marked. The contributors deals with various peripheries, faced with intrusion by more powerful groups, as well as by environmental crisis. But the responses are various as the authors of this volume show.
Contributors to this landmark volume include Georg Pfeffer, Peter B. Andersen, Gunnel Cedderlöff, Deepak Kumar Behera and Srikant Patel among many others.

The book partakes of the post-colonial reassessment of the nineteenth century, where agency is seen to lie, not just with the colonizing centre, but also with the colonized periphery. Here, missionaries from a peripheral part of Europe- including a Norway striving to decolonize itself- try to convert the Santals, an Indian tribe which had rebelled against the intruding colonial order. Provincializing the European origins of the missionaries, the authors try to explore the Santal response. Missionary sources have been used to recast such encounters, but the response seldom has had a documented voice. The Santals, however, wrote thousands of pages as part of the missionary project to document their culture showing their efforts to reconstruct and reappropriate their own culture. Subaltern voices emerge, as working-class missionaries and Santals meet, bypassing the centres of hegemony, and oppose the disenchantment of colonial experience to the memory of a glorious past. For some years, a space is created at the edge of empire where the missionary adventurer, and Santals in search of a new identity, together builds a new community. The missionaries succeed only because of the Santal engagement – born, not just from their appropriation of missionary ideas, but also from their resistance to the Hindu majority and to internal colonialism. But soon colonial power relations erode missionary independence, as they come to depend on the churches of their homeland, while the Santals are absorbed into the exploitive economics of colonialism. The space allowed by an “encounter of peripheries” is closed.