Documentary Screening: Indigenous Products and Practices – Adivasi Narratives of Survival and Change
When: Thursday, February 26, 2026, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Where: Room 3.1, Centre for Commercial Law Studies
Speaker: Dr Abhijeet Kumar
Documentary Screening: Indigenous Products and Practices – Adivasi Narratives of Survival and Change
A short documentary by Dr Abhijeet Kumar
When legal systems fail to recognise what communities consider essential to their survival, how do people respond?
Told entirely through first-person narratives, this documentary offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of five Adivasi communities in India – Toda, Bodo, Dongria Kondh, Warli, and Bhil – as they navigate the gap between state law and lived reality.
The film traces how Indigenous knowledge, artistic traditions, and ecological practices are appropriated and reshaped within legal frameworks that struggle to recognise collective stewardship. A Warli artist reflects on sacred motifs reproduced on commercial merchandise without consent. A Dongria Kondh elder speaks of protecting a sacred mountain. A Bodo elder describes traditional designs copied and marketed globally. These accounts move beyond cultural storytelling, revealing the limits of existing legal frameworks when confronted with Indigenous systems of value and responsibility.
Alongside loss, the documentary captures resilience. Adivasi communities sustain their own norms of access, attribution, and care – alternative legal orders that operate where formal law falls short. Narrative assertion, strategic refusal, and cultural stewardship emerge as forms of resistance to legal categories unable to name what they seek to protect.
Developed from ethnographic field research conducted during Dr Kumar’s doctoral work at CCLS, QMUL, the film centres Adivasi voices without academic mediation. Previously screened at the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2025, it invites viewers to reconsider law as a contested terrain in which authority is continuously negotiated.
A discussion with the filmmaker will follow the screening. Conversation may range from documentary practice and ethnographic method to intellectual property law, Indigenous rights, visual research, and the challenges of representing legal dissonance through film.
Directed and Produced by Dr Abhijeet Kumar | Edited by Dr Ogulcan Ekiz
Profile
Dr Abhijeet Kumar is Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law at the University of Leicester. His research explores the relationship between Indigenous rights, intellectual property, pluralist jurisprudence, and socio-economic questions in the Global South. His creative practice brings visual ethnography into dialogue with socio-legal scholarship, using films and images to examine how legal authority is experienced, contested, and reimagined.
