Reordering Adivasi Worlds
In recent times, adivasi communities have been increasingly visible as subjects in debates around indigeneity, identity, development, and conversion. Let me dwell on some such instances drawn from the state of Jharkhand1 that are relevant for this book, vignettes from a much larger canvas of events, sometimes mundane and sometimes astonishing, as a variety of interests play out in postcolonial India.
In August 2017, the Jharkhand Legislative Assembly, despite opposition from regional political parties such as the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha, passed the Religious Freedom Bill, 2017, which forbids ‘forcible conversion’, particularly of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.2 e target of the bill is the Church and its converts.3 e perception that Christian adivasis, despite their small numbers, have had, compared to non-adivasis, better access to higher education and jobs, makes the Church bear the brunt of many an attack by non-Christian adivasis. Taking advantage of, and sometimes inciting the controversies around conversion, the Hindu Right, and especially the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has been advocating ghar wapasi (homecoming or reconversion) in order to bring Christian adivasis,
1 e Jharkhand state was created in the year 2000 as a result of the oldest autonomy movement in India. See S. Bosu Mullick, ‘Introduction’, in e Jharkhand Movement: Indigenous People’s Struggle for Autonomy in India, Document No. 108, edited by R.D. Munda and S. Bosu Mullick (Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous A airs in collaboration with Bindrai Institute for Research Study and Action, 2003), ii.
2 Various communities across India have been clubbed together under the o cial categories of Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST). Belonging to the category of SC and ST enables one to partake of the 15 and 7.5 per cent reservations in government sector jobs and public universities. As per the Constitution, the Indian state recognizes about 744 STs. According to the 2011 Census of India, the STs constitute a little more than 8.6 per cent of the population.
3 S.K. Kiro, ‘Religious Freedom Bill Cleared by Jharkhand Assembly, Tribal leaders Call it “An Attempt to Break Our Identity” ’, e Wire, 13 August 2017. Available at https://thewire.in/politics/religious-freedom-bill-jharkhand-tribes-sarnas, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
Reordering Adivasi Worlds. Sangeeta Dasgupta, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190127916.003.0001
regarded by them as erstwhile Hindus, into its fold. e di culties faced by adivasis in their everyday existence, it is believed, make them particularly vulnerable to proselytizing by missionaries. At Bishunpur in Gumla district of Jharkhand, Vikas Bharati, a non-governmental organization set up by Ashok Bhagat, an RSS ideologue and recipient of the Padma Shri in 2015, claims to represent adivasi interests and projects itself as representing the real voice of the adivasis.4
In its opposition to Christian missionaries, the Hindu Right has been supported by sections of adivasis who advocate Sarna Dharam.5 In 2013, thousands of Sarna adivasis marched to a new Church on the outskirts of Ranchi and threatened to remove the statue of Mary depicted in a white sari with a red border, carrying an infant in a sling; the indigenization of Mary, they argued, was part of the Church’s attempts to convert local adivasis.6 Among Sarna adherents, there are, however, also those who have a di erent agenda. Under the leadership of Karma Oraon, anthropologist and Professor Emeritus at Ranchi University, they have been demanding a separate Sarna code in the census. Without such an arrangement, they argue, they are counted as Hindus, which they are not.7
Just a few months before the severely controversial Religious Freedom Bill was enacted, the Jharkhand Legislative Assembly passed in November 2016, without adequate discussion and debate, the most contentious of amendments to the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 that had aimed to protect the customary rights of adivasis to land.8 Under Raghubar Das, the rst non-adivasi chief minister of Jharkhand,
4 D.S. Edmond, ‘Waiting for BJP, an RSS-backed NGO with Ashrams, Welfare Initiatives and Funds’, e Indian Express, updated 26 November 2014. Available at https://indianexpress.com/ article/ india/ politics/ waiting- for- bjp- an- rss- backed- ngo- with- ashrams- welfare- initiativesand-funds, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
5 e Sarna Dharam is a religious practice among adivasis of Jharkhand who proclaim themselves to be worshippers of nature. Followers of Sarna celebrate, for example, the Sarhul festival soon a er the new leaves grow before the beginning of summer.
6 A. Yadav, ‘In Jharkhand’s Singhbhum, Religious Census Deepens Divide among Tribals’, Scroll.in, 20 September 2015. Available at https://scroll.in/article/754985/in-jharkhandssinghbhum-religion-census-deepens-divide-among-tribals, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
7 Kiro, ‘Religious Freedom Bill Cleared by Jharkhand Assembly’.
8 A.S.T. Das, ‘Jharkhand Erupts in Protest Against Changes in Land Laws’, Indian Express, 26 November 2016. Available at http://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2016/nov/25/ jharkhand-erupts-in-protest-against-changes-in-land-laws-1542593.html, last accessed on 28 December 2018. See also ‘Amendment in CNT/SPT is a Death Order of Already Marginalised in Jharkhand’, Statement issued by CNT/SPT Act Bachao Andolan, New Delhi Chapter. Available at https://www.facebook.com/Ulgulan.1908, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
the suggested amendments, many adivasis believed, were neither unexpected, nor surprising. In response to the proposed amendments, there were large protests across Jharkhand from di erent quarters of society, and regional and national political parties such as the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, the All Jharkhand Students Union, and the Indian National Congress (also referred to as Congress). e protest raised, in addition, broader issues of land acquisition and unaccounted police rings on protesters in di erent parts of Jharkhand.9 e government was ultimately compelled to reconsider the bill. For adivasis facing displacement, forced resettlement, and loss of rights to forests in Jharkhand, ‘jal, jangal, jameen’,10 or ‘water, forests, land’, has emerged as an evocative rallying slogan supported by rights activists, large sections of civil society, and non-governmental agencies. Using the same slogan, although in a somewhat di erent and more aggressive sense, young leaders of the Pathalgadi movement, symbolically drawing upon the Munda custom of placing a large stone to mark the death of a person, have erected huge stone plaques, or pathalgadi, on which are inscribed excerpts from the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA), 1996, warning outsiders against entering adivasi villages. In Kochang, a stronghold of the Maoists, where the biggest pathalgadi installation ceremony was held in February 2018, the plaque reads: ‘Adivasis have the right over the land they live in. Adivasis are the owners of natural resources. Voter IDs and Aadhaar cards are anti-adivasi documents.’11 e foregoing kaleidoscope of events is linked to the question of identity, and clearly indicates that at many levels, adivasis are being marginalized, their interests ignored. Yet, amidst all of this, there also lies a story of the assertion of adivasi agency: the voices of adivasis, although multiple and fractured, can be heard as they assert their identity, express their politics, and creatively negotiate with the state and its
9 ‘Jharkhand Opposition to Raise Land Acts, Police Firings in Assembly’, Business Standard, Ranchi, 16 November 2016. Available at https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/ jharkhand-opposition-to-raise-land-acts-police- rings-in-assembly-116111600963_1.html, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
10 B. D. Sharma, Tribal A airs in India: e Crucial Transition (Mumbai and New Delhi: Sahyog Pustak Kuteer [Trust] and India Centre for Human Rights and Law, 2001), 4.
11 A. Tewary, ‘ e Pathalgadi Rebellion’, e Hindu, 13 April 2018. Available at https://www. thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/the-pathalgadi-rebellion/article23530998.ece, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
institutions. Adivasi communities, we need to recognize, are di erentiated among themselves along several axes: access to resources and ritual importance based on lineages and patterns of migration; identi cation with Christianity, the Sarna Dharam, local practices, or Hinduism; access to education and government jobs; response to patronage extended by political parties, non-governmental organizations, and religious groups; and so on. e stories of adivasis, then, must be told not just to express di erence, but also to demonstrate the multiplicity of cultures and myriad ways of thinking.
While I do not argue for an inevitable linearity, the genesis of some of the issues raised above can be traced to the colonial past. And that is what this book hopes to unravel. It seeks to question the postcolonial understanding of ‘tribe’12 by unpacking colonial ethnography, missionary narratives, and anthropological writings; it explores issues of adivasi identity and resistance, and shows how contemporary adivasi protest draws upon memories of the past. It is part of the ongoing dialogue among those who write adivasis into the larger project of history-writing.13
12 Subsequent uses of the word ‘tribe’ or ‘tribal’ will not be within inverted commas unless required.
13 Woven around the adivasi, some of the monographs and collections of essays that have been published in the last decade and a half are as follows: A. Prasad, Against Ecological Romanticism: Verrier Elwin and the Making of an Anti-modern Tribal Identity (New Delhi: ree Essays Collective, 2003); D. J. Rycro , Representing Rebellion: Visual Aspects of Counterinsurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005); A. Baviskar, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Con icts over Development in the Narmada Valley (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); P. Banerjee, Politics of Time: Primitives and History-Writing in a Colonial Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); S. Ratnagar, Being Tribal (Delhi: Primus Books, 2010); A. Shah, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010); B. Bhukya, Subjugated Nomads: e Lambadas under the Rule of the Nizams (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2010); D.J. Rycro and S. Dasgupta, eds, e Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); B. Pati, ed., Adivasis in Colonial India: Survival, Resistance and Negotiation (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2011); S. Das Gupta, Adivasis and the Raj: Socio-economic Transition of e Hos, 1820–1932 (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2011); S. Das Gupta and R. Basu, eds, Narratives from the Margins: Aspects of Adivasi History in India (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2012); C. Bates and A. Shah, eds, Savage Attack: Tribal Insurgency in India (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2014); M. Carrin, P. Kanungo and G. To n, eds, Politics of Ethnicity in India, Nepal and China (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2014); S. Dasgupta, ed., ‘Reading the Archive, Reframing Adivasi Histories’, Special Issue, e Indian Economic and Social History Review 53, no. 1 (January–March 2016): 1–157; M. Radhakrishna, ed., First Citizens: Studies on Adivasis, Tribals, and Indigenous Peoples in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016); A.K. Sen, Indigeneity, Landscape and History: Adivasi Self-fashioning in India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2017); and B. Bhukya, e Roots of the Periphery: A History of the Gonds of Deccan India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017). Journals such as Adivasi, a journal of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Research and Training Institute, Bhubaneswar, and Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies have also been published.
At the same time, it will provide, I hope, a critical lens through which other non-adivasi worlds can be viewed. It re ects my own dilemmas as I combine my search in the colonial archive with experiences in the ‘ eld’—conversations with my informants, copious recording of oral narratives, and reading of pamphlets and petitions distributed in the streets of Ranchi. What sense do I make of the complex interplay between the past and the present, the oral and the written? How do I analyse the contending ‘truths’ that are produced in narratives woven around adivasi protest, the claims that are made, the politics that is expressed? is book is, more speci cally, a story of the Oraons14 and of the Tana Bhagats (also referred to as Tanas)15 in Chhotanagpur, a part of the present state of Jharkhand. Since I argue for the importance of ‘adivasi’ as a category and emphasize the necessity to move away from the problematic category of tribe, I must begin by analysing ethnographic, missionary, and anthropological narratives on the tribe in the colonial period that continue to have resonances in the postcolonial. is is what the rst section of the book deals with. rough a focus on the Oraon, it questions the stereotypes and essentialisms associated with the term ‘tribe’; it examines the tensions in the possible and continuing usages of this category; it seeks to unravel the pasts of those we designate today as the tribe and uncover the di erent ways in which the markers for identifying a tribe were generated and acknowledged in colonial and postcolonial times.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conceptions of the tribe, with all its divergences, were not just abstract imaginaries but determined in many ways colonial interventions in Chhotanagpur. ese a ected the shaping of customary rights in elds and forests; the understanding of the rural world and its legal terminologies; the making of reports and the promulgation of acts; the perception of adivasi customs and practices; and the responses to their modes of protest. e second section deals with the reordering of rural and social landscapes and the ways in which the Tana Bhagats, a marginalized section in the internally fractured community
14 e Oraons are adivasis who live primarily across central and eastern India; they are also to be found in Assam, Tripura, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where they went largely as migrant labourers to work on tea plantations and to clear forests for cultivation.
15 From among the Oraons, some have become Tana Bhagats; the movement began in 1914, as our colonial records inform us, when Jatra Bhagat emerged as the Tana guru.
of the Oraons, responded to the di erent interventions in their world. Questioning the assumption that the Oraons lived in the ‘shadows of the state’,16 shared an egalitarian structure, and pursued common economic, social, and religious practices, this section delineates the reordering of the Oraon world as the Tana Bhagats negotiated with the sarkar, sahukar, and zamindar (state, moneylender, and landlord), questioned the hierarchies within the Oraon world, and engaged with Gandhi and the Congress. It discusses how the Tana Bhagats continue in postcolonial times with their poignant dreams and negotiate with the sarkar—government o cials in Jharkhand and the Congress high-command in Delhi—at di erent levels, drawing upon diverse experiences and distinctive memories.
Authenticating Voices, Contending Narratives
Determining the parameters for identifying a tribe is an onerous task for the Indian government.17 As di erent communities vie for recognition as Scheduled Tribe, judicial and legislative enactments, along with battles in courts, re ect the use of widely varying criteria for understanding the characteristics of adivasi communities.18 Texts of ethnographers, missionaries, and anthropologists written in the colonial period are referred to in this context. Competing communities, and groups within communities, have repeatedly made claims to recognition as Scheduled Tribe as idealized notions of culture, identity, and di erence are projected. It is in this context that I begin this section with a legal case—Kartik
16 is expression is borrowed from the title of Alpa Shah’s monograph (see Shah, In the Shadows of the State).
17 ‘Rights Activist Demands ST Status for Van Gujjars in U’Khand’, Press Trust of India, Dehradun, 15 June 2013. Available at https://www.news18.com/news/india/rights-activistdemands-st-status-for-van-gujjars-616276.html, last accessed on 28 December 2018. See also P. Gooch, ‘We are Van Gujjars’, in Indigeneity in India, edited by B.G. Karlsson and T.B. Subba (London: Kegan Paul, 2006), 97–116; and T. Middleton, e Demands of Recognition: State Anthropology and Ethnopolitics in Darjeeling (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).
18 See Kartik Oraon vs David Munzni and Anr. on 14 November 1963, available at www. indiankanoon.org/doc/204475, last accessed on 28 December 2018; and N.E. Horo vs Jahan Ara Jaipal Singh on 2 February 1972, available at www.indiankanoon.org/doc/453229, last accessed on 28 December 2018. e Indian government’s formal criteria for Scheduled Tribe recognition are as follows: (a) indication of primitive traits; (b) distinct culture; (c) geographical isolation; (d) shyness of contact with the community at large; and (e) backwardness. See e National Commission for Scheduled Tribes Handbook 2005 (Government of India, 2005), quoted in Middleton, e Demands of Recognition, 9.
Oraon versus David Munzni and Anr. Filed by Kartik Oraon against the Protestant convert David Munzni before the Election Tribunal at Ranchi in 1963, this case was ultimately resolved in the Supreme Court in 1967 and dealt with the question of whether race or religion determined ‘tribal’ identity. Interestingly, the memory of Kartik Oraon was resurrected in Jharkhand in the controversy around the implementation of the Religious Freedom Bill, 2017. A day before the anti-conversion bill was to be tabled in the Legislative Assembly, the Raghubar Das-led Jharkhand state government posted a highly controversial advertisement in newspapers invoking the name of Kartik Oraon. e advertisement stated that the dream of Kartik Oraon would be ful lled with the implementation of the Religious Freedom Bill.19 is section engages with the production of colonial knowledge and the creation of social categories, on which much has already been written in recent years.20 e dominant strand of postcolonial historiography21 talks about the obsessive need of the colonial state, an ‘ethnographic state’ as Nicholas Dirks terms it, to collect information for purposes of governance; it focuses upon the production of colonial knowledge through the onslaught and imposition of new, imported epistemic regimes of Western/ European knowledge systems that swamped the colonized in the process. e revisionist critique,22 on the other hand, views indigenous intellectuals
19 Apoorvanand, ‘Jharkhand Government is Misusing Gandhi, Public Funds to Fuel AntiChristian Hate’, e Wire, 12 August 2017. Available at https://thewire.in/politics/jharkhandgandhi-advertisement-christians, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
20 e relationship between knowledge and power was put forward in the context of early modern Europe by Michel Foucault in the 1960s. Edward Said’s Orientalism draws upon this argument (see E. Said, Orientalism [New York: Pantheon Books, 1978]), and has, in turn, greatly in uenced postcolonial historiography.
21 See R. Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); B.S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987); and N. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
22 See E.F. Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India 1795–1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); S. Bayly, ‘Caste and Race in the Colonial Ethnography of India’, in e Concept of Race in South Asia, edited by P. Robb (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); T.R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); N. Peabody, ‘Cents, Sense, Census: Human Inventories in Late Precolonial and Early Colonial India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, no. 4 (October 2001): 819–50; P.B. Wagoner, ‘Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 4 (October 2003): 783–814; and S. Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013).
as active, although unequal, partners who contributed towards a dialogue between the colonizer and the colonized. Others, like Padmanabh Samarendra, have gone beyond the binary of discontinuity and continuity and underline the multiple spheres of knowledge-production within the apparatus of the state; the colonial state did not necessarily have an unequivocal or decisive say in all these spheres, Samarendra argues.23
While caste has emerged as the ‘key discursive category’ for historians who have analysed ‘discourses of colonial social knowledge and administrative policies’, 24 the concept of tribe remains comparatively unexplored. Indeed, studies on the concept of tribe in colonial and postcolonial times have been neither vast nor varied. But there have been shi s in approaches that one needs to recognize. In the 1960s, the predicament of distinguishing between caste and tribe had begun to haunt anthropologists, who began to contest the idea that the tribe referred to communities that were bounded, unchanging, isolated, and undi erentiated.25
F.G. Bailey’s model of a tribe-caste continuum,26 or Surajit Sinha’s modied version of ‘continua’ along two sets of polarities—‘tribe-caste’ in the framework of extended kinship and ‘tribe-peasant’ in the framework of territorial systems27 recognized the di culties of a complete separation between caste and tribe. S.C. Dube argued against tribes ‘living in isolation’ and pointed to their patterns of migrations.28 Andre Beteille suggested the need for recognizing ‘the co-existence of the tribal and other types of social organization within the same social and historical context’.29
23 P. Samarendra, ‘Anthropological Knowledge and Statistical Frame: Caste in the Census in Colonial India’, in Caste in Modern India, A Reader, Vol. 1, edited by S. Sarkar and T. Sarkar (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), 255–96.
24 S. Sarkar and T. Sarkar, ‘Preface and Acknowledgements’, in Caste in Modern India, A Reader, Vol. I, edited by S. Sarkar and T. Sarkar (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), ix.
25 See F.G. Bailey, ‘ “Tribe” and “Caste” in India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 5, no. 1 (1961): 7–19; S. Sinha, ‘Tribe-Caste and Tribe-Peasant Continua in Central India’, Man In India 45, no.1 (January-March 1965): 57–83; N.K. Bose, Tribal Life in India (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1971); and A. Béteille, ‘Tribe and Peasantry’, in Six Essays in Comparative Sociology (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 58–74. is shi in the1960s, Surajit Sinha points out, was because Indian anthropology and sociology moved under the in uence of American anthropology, leading to micro-studies of culture change.
26 Bailey, ‘ “Tribe” and “Caste” in India’, 13–14.
27 Sinha, ‘Tribe-Caste and Tribe-Peasant Continua in Central India’, 61.
28 S.C. Dube, ‘Introduction’, in Tribal Heritage of India: Ethnicity, Identity and Interaction, Vol. 1, edited by S.C. Dube (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), 2–3.
29 A. Béteille, ‘On the Concept of Tribe’, International Social Science Journal 32, no. 4 (1980): 826.
A critique of the category of tribe is thus not novel. By the 1990s, however, this question was reframed in terms of whether the tribe was a colonial construct, and how far the discipline of anthropology was implicated in this construction.30 African and Paci c specialists responded to some of these debates within the discipline of anthropology,31 debunking the colonial stereotype of tribe as misleading and inaccurate in understanding realities.32 e debate moved forward with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; scholars came to be increasingly perceived as advocating particular political interests.33
30 See S. Devalle, Discourses of Ethnicity: Culture and Protest in Jharkhand (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1992); B.B. Chaudhuri, ‘ e Myth of the Tribe? e Question Reconsidered,’ e Calcutta Historical Journal 16, no. 1 (1994): 125–56; C. Bates, ‘Race, Caste and Tribe: e Early Origins of Anthropometry’, Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies, no. 3, 1995, 1–34; F. Padel, e Sacri ce of Human Being: British Rule and the Konds of Orissa (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); N. Sundar, Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, 1854–1996 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); A. Skaria, ‘Shades of Wildness: Tribe, Caste and Gender in Western India’, Journal of Asian Studies 56, no. 3 (August 1997): 726–45; A. Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); S. Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, 1200–1901 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); V. Damodaran, ‘Colonial Constructions of the “Tribe” in India: e Case of Chotanagpur’, Indian Historical Review 33, no. 1 (January 2006): 44–75; W. van Schendel, ‘ e Dangers of Belonging: Tribes, Indigenous Peoples and Homelands in South Asia’, in e Politics of Belonging in India, edited by D.J. Rycro and S. Dasgupta (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 19–43; and U. Chandra, ‘Liberalism and Its Other: e Politics of Primitivism in Colonial and Postcolonial Indian Law’, Law & Society Review 47, no. 1 (2013): 135–68.
31 See, for example, T. Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973); J.A. Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions and Texts (London: Cambridge University Press, 1982); G.W. Stocking, ed., Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); J. Cli ord and G. Marcus, eds, Writing Culture: e Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); J. and J. Comaro , Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Colorado and Oxford: Westview Press, 1992); P. Pels and O. Salemink, eds, Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); and H. Kuklick, e Savage Within: e Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
32 See, for example, A. Southall, ‘ e Illusion of Tribe’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 5, Issue 1–2 (1970): 28–50; J. Ili e, A Modern History of Tanganyika (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); T. Ranger, ‘ e Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in e Invention of Tradition, edited by E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 211–62; L. Vail, ed., e Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and T. Ranger, ‘ e Invention of Tradition Revisited: e Case of Colonial Africa’, in Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa, edited by T. Ranger and O. Vaughan (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1993), 62–111. For an excellent survey article that explores a range of studies regarding the ‘invention of tradition’, ‘the making of customary law’, and the ‘creation of tribalism’ since the 1980s, see T. Spear, ‘Neo-traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa’, e Journal of African History 44, no. 1 (2003): 3–27.
33 B.G. Karlsson and T.B. Subba, ‘Introduction’, in Indigeneity in India, edited by B.G. Karlsson and T.B. Subba (London: Kegan Paul, 2006), 1–17.
Recent discussions on the concept of tribe in India oscillate between two extreme positions. On the one hand are Susan Devalle,34 Ajay Skaria,35 and Sumit Guha36 who argue that tribe is a ‘colonial category, ahistorical and sociologically groundless’,37 ‘a product of colonial theories and practices’ and not a ‘continuation’ of ‘Indian practices’.38 Rather than discussing the speci cities of local experiences in the Indian context that, in addition to Western thought and Victorian anthropology, structured the idea of tribe, Skaria argues that it was the interaction between the discourses of anachronism and Orientalism that ‘gave force to colonial categories’. To understand a tribe, Skaria accords primacy to ‘anachronistic thought’ that ‘ranked . . . societies in relation to each other, situating them above all in relation to time, or, in relation to the modern time that was epitomized by Europe’.39 e operative categories in precolonial Indian society, Guha points out, were not caste and tribe.40 e tribe–caste binary emerged out of late colonial racial ethnology which transformed Indian society’s understanding of itself.41 It is time to discard the ‘Victorian anthropological baggage’ and restore ‘the forgotten indigenized term “khum” which might serve for all ascriptive social categories, both tribe and caste’.42
Others uphold the role of indigenous agency in the production of the concept.43 Colonial epistemology, Vinita Damodaran argues—even as it drew upon eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions of race, an environmental determinism, and a humanitarian concern—aligned itself with Brahmanical notions of caste, values, and laws.44 Colonial discourse analysed real landscape di erences, and did not conjure an imaginary landscape.45 e complex history of Aryan migration into Chhotanagpur
34 Devalle, Discourses of Ethnicity.
35 Skaria, ‘Shades of Wildness’.
36 Guha, Environment and Ethnicity
37 Devalle, Discourses of Ethnicity, 50.
38 Skaria, ‘Shades of Wildness’, 730
39 Skaria, ‘Shades of Wildness’, 727.
40 S. Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present
41 Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, 10–29.
42 S. Guha, ‘States, Tribes, Castes: A Historical Re-exploration in Comparative Perspective’, Economic and Political Weekly L, nos. 46 and 47 (21 November 2015): 56–7.
43 See B.B. Chaudhuri, ‘ e Myth of the Tribe? e Question Reconsidered’, where Chaudhuri critiques Devalle, Discourses of Ethnicity. See also Damodaran, ‘Colonial Constructions of the “Tribe” in India’.
44 Damodaran, ‘Colonial Constructions of the “Tribe” in India’, 44.
45 Damodaran, ‘Colonial Constructions of the “Tribe” in India’, 44.
from a very early period led to an increasing marginalization of the nonAryan tribes in the precolonial world; this was abetted by colonial intervention. e colonial stereotype of a simple tribal people who needed protection against exploitation thus had a historical basis. Revisionists and postmodern readings of tribal history, she argues, by questioning the notion of ecological noble savages, pristine forests, and isolated tribal peoples, attribute no theoretical legitimacy or historic validity to the claims of indigenous people for autonomy.46 us, Damodaran argues for a long-term structural continuity between the precolonial and colonial periods.47 Yet, her hypothesis proceeds through questionable binaries—Aryans–non-Aryans, Hindus–tribes, outsiders–insiders, and so on. A greater problem lies in the seamless continuity posited between Brahmanical ideas and Orientalism, and between precolonial understandings and colonial discourse. ere are still others who veer between these two rather contradictory positions on the notion of tribe48 as a colonial construct. Sanjukta Das Gupta, for example, argues that the ‘colonial rulers’ had ‘appropriated and restructured certain pre-existing social norms and thereby introduced new attributes, meanings and applications in the communities they identi ed as tribes’.49 However, she is somewhat uneasy about accepting it as such since she sees the tribe as an ontological reality, pushing its presence to precolonial times. As Das Gupta writes, since precolonial times, ‘tribes were distinct from Hindu caste society and were separated and distanced from it by reciprocal perceptions of di erence’.50
Uday Chandra moves beyond these binaries as he traces the continuing tension between the ‘constitutional ideal of liberal citizenship and the disturbing reality of tribal subjecthood produced by colonial and post-colonial Indian states’.51 Primitive populations were, paradoxically, subjects of both improvement and protection, Chandra argues, as he
46 Damodaran thereby questions Sumit Guha’s argument that colonial regimes had invented caste and tribe out of pre-colonial systems that were mobile. See V. Damodaran, ‘Review, S. Guha’, Journal of Political Ecology: Case Studies in History and Society 7, no. 1 (2007): 12–17. Available at http://www.library.arizona.edu/ej/jpe/jpewem.html, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
47 Damodaran, ‘Colonial Constructions of the “Tribe” in India’, 46.
48 Das Gupta, Adivasis and the Raj, 7–12.
49 Das Gupta, Adivasis and the Raj, 10.
50 Das Gupta, Adivasis and the Raj, 10.
51 Chandra, ‘Liberalism and Its Other’, 136.
traces the intellectual career of primitivism—with both its continuities and changes—as an ideology of rule from its origins in Victorian India to the postcolonial present.52 Limiting the multifaceted strands that went into the making of the idea of tribal subjecthood to a monolithic strand of primitivism, I assert, is restrictive. e criteria and practices of tribal recognition were ‘constantly revised, torn asunder, and revised again’; its operatives, as Townsend Middleton demonstrates, worked in dialogue with anthropological and proto-anthropological thinkers throughout the European world.53 Moreover, as I will go on to argue, we need to recognize the changing role of adivasi agency in structuring the idea of tribe and, for that matter, the biases of ‘native’ informants who o en came from the upper echelons of society, and worked in close tandem with colonial o cers.
Taking up the Oraons as a case study, I draw upon, and move beyond, some of these debates. As British o cials, missionaries, and anthropologists, despite mutual di erences, became part of a project to grapple with unknown lands of Chhotanagpur and its unknown peoples, the tribes in Chhotanagpur became subjects of administrative attention, missionary concern, and anthropological interest. While the categories of caste and tribe were interchangeably used in early colonial records and there is evidence of the existence of uid relations between communities, points already made by scholars such as Devalle, Skaria, and Guha among others,54 by the end of the nineteenth century there had emerged in o cial perception distinct tribes in Chhotanagpur: Oraons, Mundas, Kharias, Hos, and so on. How were di erences between these tribes inscribed in colonial records? e Oraons, as one of the tribes in Chhotanagpur, as argued in Chapter 1, traversed across diverse categories—mlecchhas, chuars, dhangars, village community, race, and tribe—in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century records. ese shi s within the understanding of the term tribe, as argued, were related to, among other things, the working of o cial minds, changing assumptions, and di ering terminologies; the tensions within the discipline of anthropology and its application in the colony; varying ideologies of governance and the imperatives of rule;
52 Chandra, ‘Liberalism and Its Other’, 138.
53 Middleton, e Demands of Recognition, 60.
54 Devalle, Discourses of Ethnicity; Skaria, Hybrid Histories; and Guha, Environment and Ethnicity.
and interactions with the ‘native’ populace. I do not, however, suggest arbitrariness in the choice of categories; one can identify patterns within colonial representations. In the pre-1850s, colonial administrators were more dependent on indigenous voices and local categories as they sought to understand Chhotanagpur, ‘a little-known province of the empire’, to borrow the title of F.B. Bradley-Birt’s book,55 and to address repeated protests by Oraons and other communities in the region. is dependence came to be gradually dissipated as disciplinary concerns came to structure colonial representations. e category of tribe was thus continually improvised upon in response to changing situations; emerging disciplines intersected with personal experiences and moulded interpretations. And amidst the deviations and dissonances within o cial voices, descriptive ways of understanding the Oraons were transformed as the tribe was de ned in an all-India o cial report—the census report of 1901. e missionaries, as outlined in Chapter 2, by engaging in the everyday concerns of the people as they negotiated with several categories— heathen, pagan, savage, race, tribe, and aboriginal—and by publishing ethnographic accounts of the Oraons, collecting their ‘fast-vanishing’ folklore, and giving a structure to their history, contributed to the making of Oraon identity. When they initially encountered the Oraons in unfamiliar lands, the missionaries drew upon their experiences and interactions in the mission eld but framed their depictions in biblical and evangelical language: the Oraons were represented as heathen and savage races, immersed in idolatry and demonology, awaiting salvation. Religion here was the de ning feature. However, by the 1850s, as the missionaries engaged sometimes consciously, and o en tangentially, with the emergence of ethnography and anthropology that gave new meanings to race and tribe, missionary narratives were gradually transformed: the Oraons became a part of the universal category of tribe; their ‘primitive’ religion was termed as ‘animism’. I would, however, take the above argument further. If missionary writings were powerful in understanding the Oraons
55 F.B. Bradley-Birt, Chota Nagpur: A Little-known Province of the Empire (New Delhi and Madras: Asian Educational Services, 1998). e book was rst published in London by Smith, Elder& Co. in 1903. Bradley-Birt, an English member of the Indian Civil Service, began his career in 1896 as an assistant magistrate and collector and was initially assigned to Khulna, Midnapore, Hooghly, and Calcutta. He later became commander-in-chief in India. Bradley-Birt wrote both ction and non- ction based on his travels in India, Persia, and the Middle East.
in the middle of the nineteenth century, paradoxically, the voice of the missionary lost its salience and became a part of bureaucratic memory once o cial ethnographic texts came to be written.
e anthropologist Sarat Chandra Roy, as elaborated in Chapter 3, caught within the traditions of British social anthropology and its links with the colonial state on the one hand, and seeking, on the other, to establish a unique ‘Indian’ approach to anthropology, veered between shi ing notions of denigration and appreciation of tribes and tribal culture as he wrote about the Oraons of Chhotanagpur. An analysis of some of Roy’s writings on the Oraons published between 1915 and 1937, along with his private papers, would reveal these di erent shades of opinion that were re ected in Roy’s work as he sought to understand the Oraons and the category of tribe. Again, as he organized his thoughts in the vernacular and in English, Roy gave di erent descriptions of the Oraons. e Oraon jati in the Bengali journal Prabasi56 became the ‘purely aboriginal tribe’57 in e Oraons of Chota Nagpur as Roy, the anthropologist, moved away from writing for the literate Bengali elite and addressed an academic, anthropologically oriented audience. e Oraons, who were depicted in Prabasi as ‘having the capability of reaching the same standard as their Hindu and Muslim neighbours’58 were found under the in uence of Victorian evolutionary anthropology to be ‘rude’ and ‘primitive’.59
Many Narratives of Tana Pasts
Colonial ethnographic and anthropological texts were, on the one hand, describing communities and de ning categories. On the other, colonial administrators believed they had to reckon with ‘irrational primitives’ who thought that ‘bullets would turn into water’, with ‘badmashes’ (wretches) who ‘tumbled down mountains’ and were ‘bloodthirsty in
56 S.C. Roy, ‘Chotanagpurer Oraon Jati’ [ e Oraon Jati of Chotanagpur], Prabasi (Baishakh, Ashar, Srabon, 1320 [April–May, May–June, June–July, 1913]): 73–82.
57 S.C. Roy, e Oraons of Chota Nagpur (Ranchi: Man in India O ce, 1984 [1915]), 8.
58 S. C. Roy, ‘Oraon der Aitijya’ [Oraon Tradition], Prabasi (Kartik 1321 [October–November 1914]), 89–91.
59 Roy, e Oraons of Chota Nagpur, 124.
their vengeance’, with ‘lunatics’ who deserved to be imprisoned.60 is stereotype of the irrational, unchanging, and primitive adivasi with his bow and arrow, forever on the verge of rebellion, was re ected in nationalist narratives as well.61 It was in order to counter this image that Jaipal Singh Munda, a leader of the Jharkhand Party, sarcastically stated during the Constituent Assembly debates on the Fi h and Sixth Schedules of the Constitution: ‘I am very sorry to disappoint . . . that, in supporting the Fi h Schedule, I did not dress in my bows and arrows, the loin cloth, feathers, earrings, my drum and my ute.’62
Early studies of adivasi resistance re ected this idea of tribal primitiveness.63 As communities considered to be distant from Western ideas of modernity and progress, their acts of protest were believed to be spontaneous. In the 1960s, even when there was an attempt by historians to restore to adivasis their ‘rightful place’ in Indian history,64 there was a continuation of the premise of earlier nationalist narratives: adivasi movements were assessed largely in terms of their contribution to the nation and its making.65 Operating within the rhetoric of modernity common in colonial and nationalist narratives, their mode of protest, located within an evolutionary schema, was initially regarded as millenarian;66 it assumed an ‘agrarian’ dimension when it confronted colonial
60 See Chapter 4. For a detailed analysis of o cial records, see R. Guha, ‘ e Prose of Counterinsurgency’, in Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by R. Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 1–42.
61 One of the earliest exceptional attempts, however, to study adivasi protest not as ‘incidents and episodes’ or as sporadic acts of violence but as ‘movements’, appeared in Man in India as early as 1945 (see Rebellion Number, Man in India 25, no. 4 [December 1945]).
62 Constituent Assembly of India Debates [Proceedings], 9,132,219. Available at https://www. constitutiono ndia.net/constitution_assembly_debates/volume/9/1949-09-05, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
63 Chandra, ‘Liberalism and Its Other’. See also Banerjee, Politics of Time.
64 See, for example, K.K. Datta, e Santal Insurrection of 1855–57 (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1940); D.N. Baskey, Saontal Ganasangramer Itihas (Calcutta: Pearl Publishers, 1976); J.C. Jha, e Kol Insurrection of Chota-Nagpur (Calcutta: acker, Spink and Co., 1964); K.S. Singh, e Dust-Storm and the Hanging Mist: A Study of Birsa Munda and His Movement in Chotanagpur, 1874–1901 (Calcutta: Firma KL Mukhopadhyay, 1966); and J.C. Jha, e Bhumij Revolt, 1832–33: Ganga Narain’s Hangama or Turmoil (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1967).
65 As K.S. Singh put it, the story of the people of India, or of their freedom movement, will not be complete till the spotlight of research is turned on the life and movement of the tribals through the ages.
66 Stephen Fuchs was one of the rst to use the term ‘millenarian’. is was later used by, among others, K.S. Singh.
intervention into the land structure; such movements assumed a political form only a er integration with national politics.67
e Subaltern Studies initiative in the 1980s that had sought to inscribe the marginalized, or ‘a people without a history’ to quote Ranajit Guha, into the pages of history was undertaken precisely to rectify this form of history writing. Guha talked about the ‘triumvirate’, the ‘sarkari, sahukari, and zamindari’ nexus (collusion between the state, moneylender, and landlord);68 David Hardiman referred to the ‘spirit of resistance which incorporated a consciousness of “the adivasi” against the “outsider” ’;69 Partha Chatterjee saw community movements (and in this case adivasi movements) as re ecting the natural solidarity of the community.70 Despite their contribution to new modes of history-writing, subaltern historians have been critiqued from both within and outside their frame.71 Earlier historiographical approaches, I assert, despite differences, remained constricted by a xed set of suppositions. Con ict was inevitably read as the resistance of adivasis against non-adivasis. e Subaltern Collective had thus accepted, as Skaria argues, the ‘basic terms of the colonial distinction’—the separation of the worlds of the adivasi and non-adivasi—although they had inverted ‘the valences’.72 And as Sumit Sarkar has pointed out in the context of the later Subaltern Studies writings (to which Chatterjee’s essay belongs),73 ‘in the name of theory, then, a tendency emerged towards essentialising the categories of
67 K.S. Singh, ed., Tribal Situation in India: Proceedings of a Seminar (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1972), xix. It is paradoxical that Singh, while in the anthropological tradition of the 1960s, was o en unable to draw sharp distinctions between the tribal and non-tribal worlds, focused upon an insider–outsider, or a tribal–non-tribal divide in his study of protest movements in colonial India.
68 R. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 8.
69 D. Hardiman, e Coming of the Devi (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 15.
70 P. Chatterjee, ‘Communities and the Nation’, in e Nation and Its Fragments (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 220–39. Chatterjee writes: ‘ ey claim precisely the right against externality and secession, they seek determinate existence precisely in “property” and “representation” through collectively recognised heads, they speak in the language of love and of self-recognition through the free surrender of individual will to others in the community’ (see Chatterjee, ‘Communities and the Nation’, 231–2).
71 See, for example, R.C. Guha, ‘Subaltern and Bhadralok Studies’, Economic and Political Weekly 30, no. 19 (August 1999): 2056–8; and S. Sarkar, ‘ e Decline of the Subalterns in Subaltern History’, in Writing Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 82–108.
72 A. Skaria, ‘Being Jangli: e Politics of Wildness’, Studies in History XIV, no. 2 (July–December 1998): 194.
73 Chatterjee, ‘Communities and the Nation’, 220–39.
“subaltern” and “autonomy”, in the sense of assigning to them more or less absolute, xed, decontextualized meanings and qualities’.74
In the more recent historiographical turn, the adivasi is seen as a modern subject negotiating with modern state power. Alpa Shah, for example, dismantles the representation of adivasi societies by indigenous activists as egalitarian and communitarian and unpacks the ‘dark side’ of the discourse of indigeneity to show how it marginalizes the ‘poorest’ sections among the adivasis who remain ‘in the shadows of the state’.75 Das Gupta questions the supposed communal nature of adivasi landownership and argues that the village-based social organization of the Hos was partly designed to ensure the control of the founders of the village over the village resources, a control rendered essential in view of the scarcity of resources and the unstable nature of agricultural production.76 Chandra moves beyond the analytic of ‘millenarianism’77 through which resistance and rebellion by ‘primitive’ subjects under colonial rule have been typically understood by historians and social scientists. ‘Tribal’ religious traditions, he notes, were far more deeply intertwined with the apparently profane workings of modern statecra , agrarian political economy, and the politics of conversion.78 Tanika Sarkar points out that in the designation of sel ood of the ‘adivasi rebel’, there is no ‘true, essential core identity’ as subaltern historians had earlier suggested. Rather, what can be demonstrated is ‘the fragility of all naming’ as the ‘rebel’ displayed plural identities.79
In this quest for writing adivasi histories of protest, there has been, and increasingly so in recent years, a critical, though di erentiated, engagement with the archive. How is one to record the experiences of people
74 Sarkar, ‘ e Decline of the Subalterns in Subaltern History’, 88.
75 Shah, In the Shadows of the State, 7–8
76 Das Gupta, Adivasis and the Raj, 36–7.
77 ‘Millenarianism typically denotes an ideology of social protest in which those who have not fully adapted to the demands of modernity fall back on pre-modern ‘religion’ to express their material and non-material grievances, usually unsuccessfully’(see U. Chandra, ‘Flaming Fields and Forest Fires: Agrarian Transformations and the Making of Birsa Munda’s Rebellion’, e Indian Economic and Social History Review 53, no. 1 [January–March 2016]: 69–70).
78 Chandra, ‘Flaming Fields and Forest Fires’, 71.
79 T. Sarkar, ‘Rebellion as Modern Self-fashioning: A Santal Movement in Colonial Bengal’, in e Politics of Belonging in India, edited by D.J. Rycro and S. Dasgupta (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 66–7. In this article, she revisits her earlier analysis of Jitu Santal’s movement that appeared as a part of the original Subaltern Studies project (see T. Sarkar, ‘Jitu Santal’s Movement in Malda: A Study in Tribal Protest’, in Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by R. Guha [Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985], 136–65).
who appear only occasionally in the colonial archive and are subjects of ‘salvage ethnology’ in anthropological literature? Responses have been varied. K.S. Singh, one of the earliest to write on adivasi protest, went beyond the colonial archive and referred to songs that celebrated Birsa Munda’s ulgulan (great revolt); yet, these songs, never analysed, were merely included in the appendix of his text. An extract from a song eventually became the title of Singh’s monograph, e Dust-Storm and the Hanging Mist. 80 Guha talked about the ‘insigni cant . . . actual volume of evidence yielded by songs, rhymes, ballads, anecdotes etc.’ compared to the ‘size of documentation available from elitist sources’;81 he therefore advocated ‘reading against the grain’. e colonial archive was a ‘record of observations’ that was contaminated by ‘bias, judgement and opinion’;82 it was, Guha argued, a ‘prose of counter-insurgency’.83 To counter the ‘intractability’84 of the archive, however, it was ‘possible for the historian to use this impoverished and almost technical language as a clue to the antonymies which speak for a rival consciousness—that of the rebel’.85 Hardiman, from the Subaltern Collective, used his eld notes to trace ‘the origins and transformations of the devi’,86 but cra ed his interpretation of adivasi resistance largely from documents in the colonial archive. Skaria, writing Hybrid Histories, engaged more centrally with oral narratives of the Dangis, the vadilcha goth or stories from the past, which showed the tensions and the ‘irreducible distance’87 between oral narratives and archival sources. Discussions on the ‘archival turn’—perspectives on the archive as an institution or as a symbol of knowledge and power; the practices of reading and writing, seeing and knowing, that are contingent on the archive; and the systems of regulation and coercion that the archive imposes88 have only sharpened the unease already expressed by
80 Singh, e Dust-Storm and the Hanging Mist
81 Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, 14.
82 Guha, ‘ e Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, 15.
83 Guha, ‘ e Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, 15.
84 D. Chakrabarty, ‘Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts’, in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial ough and Cultural Di erence (Princeton University Press, 2000), 101.
85 Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, 17.
86 Hardiman, e Coming of the Devi, 18–54.
87 Skaria, Hybrid Histories, 18. e use of oral narratives and the practice of oral history transformed the reading of ethnicity in African history. Yet, this was not so in the case of adivasi studies in India where historians depend largely on the colonial archive.
88 See, for example, N.Z. Davis, Fiction in the Archives. Pardon Tales and eir Tellers in Sixteenth Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); C. Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); and A.L. Stoler, Along the Archival
those who actively engaged with adivasi protest as they sought to navigate between the oral and the written.
However, it is not just the invisibility of the adivasi in the colonial archive, or the ways of countering this, that I am talking about. With the recent assertion of adivasi voices, historians reconstructing and rewriting histories of adivasi protest need to re ect on and engage with the voices of the adivasis which, in Ivy Hansdak’s words, have been ‘shrouded in polite silence for too long’.89 Adivasi scholars, as Bhangya Bhukya has pointed out, have begun to increasingly emphasize the importance of an alternative archive—oral narratives—that would help to overcome the de ciency of the colonial archive, and o er important insights into the lived history of adivasi communities.90 In the opinion of Ruby Hembrom, ‘Memory is a tool . . . in our own path towards emancipation. We remember our stories, customs and techniques, lineages, grievances, humiliations, struggles and defeat to embrace who we are, and reconcile with who we have become, and cope with our lifeways.’91 If Prathama Banerjee had argued that adivasis are disadvantaged ‘because they have not been able to claim alternative archives and alternative histories of their own’,92 Hembrom writes o the importance of colonial archival records in a single stroke when she states: ‘We are living documents ourselves.’93 It is the experience of ‘being
Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
89 I. Hansdak, ‘Is Tribal Identity Relevant in Today’s World?’ Inaugural Speech, Report for the ICSSR sponsored Two-Day National Conference ‘Tribes in Transition-II: Rea rming Indigenous Identity rough Narrative’, organized by the Department of English and Outreach Programme, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, 27–28 February 2017’. Available at https:// indiantribalheritage.org/?p=23032, last accessed on 28 December 2018. In the critical turn that has taken place within dalit studies since the 1990s, dalit voices were inscribed into what were earlier seen as studies of lower castes and of untouchability. e emerging educated dalit intelligentsia, which now refused to be passive subjects for academic scholarship, demanded that the experiences of the trauma of untouchability be included in narratives that sought to recover dalit pasts (see R.S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana, Dalit Studies [Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016]). Dalit literature and life-writing, then, become important as repositories of ‘facts’ about dalit lives.
90 B. Bhukya, Subjugated Nomads: e Lambadas under the Rule of the Nizams, 19–20.
91 R. Hembrom, ‘ e Santals and the Bodding Paradox’, Norsk Tidsskri for Misjonsvitenskap 71, no. 3 (2017): 51–8. Available at https://www.egede.no/tidsskri sarkiv/santals-and-boddingparadox, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
92 P. Banerjee, ‘Writing the Adivasi: Some Historiographical Notes’, e Indian Economic and Social History Review 53, no. 1 (January–March 2016): 131–2.
93 Hembrom, ‘ e Santals and the Bodding Paradox’, 53. See also R. Hembrom, ‘Reclaiming the Reproduction of Adivasi Knowledge: e Lens of an Adivasi Publisher’, December 2017.
adivasi’ that is important in this narrative. We are dealing here, then, with two kinds of imperatives, sometimes mutually exclusive though not always so. One is based on reading the colonial archive, recovering adivasi voices from it, and supplementing these with oral narratives; the other is more of a communitarian initiative which privileges myths and legends, oral narratives and lived experiences. ese are two di erent ways of knowing and making sense of the past, of accessing it, that do seldom converge.94
is section is on the Tana Bhagat movement among the Oraons of Chhotanagpur in colonial and postcolonial times. I begin with a brief introduction of the Tana Bhagats in present times, drawing upon my interactions with them and my experiences in present-day Jharkhand. I also talk about my own predicament: as a historian, most comfortable in the colonial archive, how do I cra narratives of adivasi pasts when confronted by a community that still worships Jatra Bhagat and Gandhi and yet has moved on? I outline the various facets of the Tana Bhagat movement between 1914 and 1919, explore the Tana relation with the Congress in the period a er 1920, and look at the multiple ways in which the Tanas view their movement over time. As I counterpoise the colonial archive with Tana oral narratives, and their pamphlets and petitions in order to analyse di erent renditions of the Tana past, I deal with three sets of stories: one, the story of the Tana Bhagats from the colonial archives; two, the historian’s understanding of Tana protest; and three, Tana narratives of their past. Between the histories constructed from the ocial archives, and the one that the Tanas emphasize, there are marked differences. While it is critical to include the Tana’s own perceptions of the self and the meanings that they may attach to their attributed unity, it is also necessary to deconstruct these narratives and recognize the politics of representation.
In order to re ect on the archive and question the narratives that are so crucial to the di erent readings of the Tana Bhagat movement in colonial and postcolonial times, Chapter 4 draws upon church records,
Available at Reclaiming-the-Reproduction-of-Adivasi-Knowledge, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ inequalityandpoverty/ les/2017/12/pdf, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
94 S. Dasgupta, ‘Mapping Histories: Many Narratives of Tana Pasts’, e Indian Economic and Social History Review 53, no. 1 (January–March 2016): 99–129.
administrative reports, and the writings of S.C. Roy and W.G. Archer, to construct a story of the Tana Bhagat movement. It also discusses the Tana belief system. My intention in presenting a chronological narrative is, however, not to etch out di erences between phases as most historians have done while analysing the Tana Bhagat movement but, rather, to argue against them.
Chapter 5 suggests an alternative reading of Tana protest in the period 1914–22. It discusses patterns of migrations of adivasi communities which determined claims to land and ritual privileges; emphasizes the importance of geographical landscapes and changing terrains in shaping adivasi protest; points towards cleavages within adivasi communities which were strengthened and reordered with colonial intervention; and analyses the ritual world of the Tanas constituted by deotas (godlings), bhuts (ghosts), nads (spirits), and babas (gods). Reiterating some of the points made in an earlier essay,95 I argue for the need to question the representation of adivasis as homogeneous communities, always united in their opposition to exploitative outsiders, and recognize the internal conicts that such representations occlude. With colonial intervention in Chhotanagpur strengthening the existing hierarchies within the Oraons, the Tana Bhagat movement symbolized not merely adivasi resistance to non-Oraons—landlords, moneylenders, and the British state—but also revealed internal tensions within the Oraon community. It articulated the demands of a marginalized group from within the Oraons who were o en against an agrarian order and the hierarchies that it sustained. Tana protest occurred at a time when land was becoming increasingly valuable in Chhotanagpur particularly in view of decreasing arable space and the consequent struggle over forestland, and the British were seeking to understand customary and community rights over land through surveys, settlements, and legislative enactments.
ere is a second interrelated point that I would like to make as I brie y engage with some of the debates within agrarian and environmental
95 S. Dasgupta, ‘Reordering a World: e Tana Bhagat Movement in Chhotanagpur, 1914–19’, Studies in History 15, no. 1, 1999: 1–41. (Copyright © 1999 Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. All rights reserved. Permission taken of the copyright holders and the publishers, SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi). While Singh, Sirsalkar, and Moorthy, among others, have pointed to an economic di erentiation within tribal communities in as early as the 1970s (see Singh, ed., Tribal Situation in India, xxv), economic di erences were inevitably subsumed within a presumed egalitarian structure when it came to a study of tribal movements.
history. Within the frame of agrarian history,96 adivasis, usually identi ed as forest peoples, were not considered as contributors to growth and modernity and therefore remained invisible, or at best marginal. Only those adivasi communities that practised settled agriculture were deemed to be important, and were recognized as ‘agricultural groups’, ‘indistinguishable from the general population’.97 us Chhotanagpur, with settled agriculturists, emerged as ‘the window on this tribal world, the scene of the sharpest interaction of historical forces and of tribal revolts, the most politicised and best known region’.98 In contrast, the NorthEast, where shi ing cultivation was practised, was ignored because of its perceived ‘relative absence of tribal issues’.99 Environmental historians,100 on the other hand, whose concerns were with deforestation, forest acts, and resistance against forest encroachments, celebrated the lives of adivasis as forest peoples. e relationship between agrarian and environmental history was thus necessarily antagonistic; settled agriculturists and forest peoples were seen to be di erent.101 Recent studies are indicative of a rapprochement of the two extremes: forests and elds, shi ing cultivators and peasants, have been linked; the importance of a shared colonial context and political economy is emphasized.102 Arun Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan,103 talking about ‘agrarian environments’, discuss the arti ciality of such categories as arable, forest, and pasture, and the forms of livelihoods based on them: settled agriculture, shi ing cultivation, hunting–gathering, and pastoralism. e strong interdependence between various modes of livelihood, and the radical changes over time in landscape, markets, climate, and human strategies of land, they note, defy such simple distinctions between di erent worlds.
96 Agrarian history, from its very outset in the 1960s, has been obsessively concerned with productivity, growth, and stagnation; tenancy legislations, revenue policies, and credit mechanisms; peasant communities, settled agriculturists, and agrarian movements.
97 Singh, ed., Tribal Situation in India, xix.
98 Singh, ed., Tribal Situation in India, xvii.
99 Singh, ed., Tribal Situation in India, xv.
100 Environmental history is seen to have emerged in India since the 1980s.
101 N. Bhattacharya, ‘Introduction’, Studies in History XIV, no. 2 (July–December 1998): 165.
102 See, for example, A. Prasad, ‘ e Baigas: Survival Strategies and Local Economies in Colonial Central Provinces’, Studies in History XIV, no. 2 (July–December 1998): 325–48.
103 A. Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Introduction: Agrarian Environments’, in Social Nature: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India, edited by A. Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1.
e point that I seek to make is somewhat di erent. In areas of Chhotanagpur where agriculture was less pro table, the extent and nature of dependence on forests and elds was changing from time to time, particularly for the marginalized in Oraon society. us, while the relatively prosperous among Oraon ‘settled agriculturists’ took advantage of British intervention in agrarian legislation and administrative arrangements and supported agrarian expansion, the marginalized among them opposed the plough and even agricultural festivities, and yearned for the forest and shi ing agriculture. Moreover, by emphasizing the continual revision of community boundaries, I demonstrate that the movement of the Tana Bhagats was not a singular event, motivated by necessarily similar imperatives. We need to recognize multiple forms of protests and demands that vary across divergent locales and geographical terrains.
Chapter 6 attempts to understand the Tana perception of ‘Gandhi Baba’, his charkha (spinning wheel) and swaraj (self-rule). It endeavours to move beyond nationalist historiography which represents Indian nationalism as a venture in which the leaders of the Congress led the masses towards freedom through an anti-colonial struggle;104 and the subalternist intervention which emphasizes adivasi initiatives as independent subjects of history. Drawing particularly on the missionary archive, I look at Congress propaganda at the local level, and the myths and rumours that grew around Gandhi. Congress ‘nationalists’ re gured their slogans in locally understandable terms; local leaders, more aware of the Tana cultural world, adopted a di erent mode of propaganda to popularize their messages; the Tanas spoke in the name of Gandhi but interpreted these o en open-ended messages in very di erent ways, and expressed through these their earlier vocabulary of protest.
Chapter 7, which draws upon Oraon myths and legends, oral narratives, and lived experiences, compares two kinds of ‘histories’—that which the o cial archive provides for us and that which the Tana Bhagats inscribe through di erent renditions of their past. It emphasizes the importance of analysing the narratives of Tana gurus delivered at ritual gatherings, along with the pamphlets and petitions that Tana Bhagats submit to state o cials. ese stories, pamphlets, and petitions help us to capture the voices of the Tana Bhagats and their memories of the past; they also
104 See, for example, Singh, e Dust-Storm and the Hanging Mist.
re ect modern sensibilities of negotiation with the Indian state and the Congress. e Tanas draw on the memories of events passed down generations, but carefully rework these in conjunction with events relevant in the present. eir representations of the past, though not always mutually exclusive, are at times historically framed; at times decidedly evocative; at times consciously cra ed; at times intuitively structured.
e Adivasi
Before I conclude, let me explain my preference for the term adivasi over the contending categories of ‘tribe’, ‘Scheduled Tribe’,105 and ‘Indigenous People’,106 o en con ated in common parlance.107 Since these terms are neologisms, and are products of distinct genealogies,108 for academics and non-academics, the choice of which nomenclature to use is usually
105 ‘Scheduled Tribe’, distinct from ‘tribe’ and yet drawing upon many of the parameters on which the colonial category of tribe was de ned, is a legal and constitutional category. As Xaxa has pointed out, it is rooted in the state’s concern for the protection, welfare, and development of the tribal population (see V. Xaxa, ‘Formation of Adivasi/Indigenous Peoples’ Identity in India’, in First Citizens: Studies on Adivasis, Tribals, and Indigenous Peoples in India, edited by M. Radhakrishna [New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016], 35). Post-Independence India, Xaxa argues, has been more concerned with the identi cation of tribes (or rather Scheduled Tribes) than with their de nition; the criteria for identi cation—geographical isolation, simple technology, backwardness, the practice of animism, di erences in language, or physical features— were neither clearly formulated nor systematically applied (see V. Xaxa, ‘Tribes as Indigenous People of India’, Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 51 [18–24 December 1999]: 3589).
106 ese are people who are represented as victims of conquest and colonization, who have been dispossessed of their sources of livelihood, are facing decimation of their collective identity, and hence culture shock. From their experiences and memories of ‘genocide’ stem the claim of Indigenous People to their rights. ‘ ere is’, Andrea Muehlebach writes, a ‘remarkable consistency’ in the ‘cultural political arguments’ of those who identify themselves as Indigenous People. ‘In part, this consistency has its roots not only in the histories of oppression shared by indigenous peoples, but in the carefully cra ed discourse developed over time that has enabled them to speak jointly of this oppression’ (see A. Muehlebach, ‘ “Making Place” at the United Nations: Indigenous Cultural Politics at the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations’, Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 3 [August 2001]: 421).
107 e Hindu Right uses the term ‘vanvasi’ or ‘people of the forest’ in place of adivasi. e forest habitat is emphasized here rather than the claims of adivasis to indigeneity as the original inhabitants of the land. rough the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, which is the RSS front speci cally for vanvasis, the Hindu nationalists seek to expand the social basis of Hindu nationalist politics, a phenomenon that has become particularly marked since the 1980s. Adivasis are being assimilated into Hindutva politics and increasingly participating in the activities of the Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (see N. Sundar, ‘Adivasi Politics and State Responses: Historical Processes and Contemporary Concerns’, in Narratives from the Margins, edited by S. Das Gupta and R.S. Basu [Delhi: Primus Books, 2012], 241).
108 Karlsson and Subba, ‘Introduction’, 2.
