Through a selective deployment of conceptualisations from subaltern studies, in particular the concepts of political (un-civil) society and an autonomous domain (or a people's politics that suggests the plausibility of dominance without hegemony), this article distinguishes a subaltern social movement (SSM) formation and related anti-colonial SSM pedagogies of place in rural eastern India (Orissa), from Euro-American cartographies of social movements and learning and their varied liberal-capitalist and/or collective-socialist political commitments to modernisation, industrialisation, development, globalisation and progress. The historical resilience and contemporary proliferation of SSM pedagogies in the age of empire is instructive for similar trans/local movements and anti-colonial and anti-capitalist projects of adult learning in imperial and colonial societies implicated in a politics of capitalist hegemony. The propositions advanced here are based on the author's practical and research involvements with Adivasi (original dweller) and Dalit (untouchable out-castes) SSMs since the early 1990s and a funded research engagement (2006-2009) pertaining to 'Learning in Adivasi social movements' in India. (Contains 4 notes.)