Environment and Ethnicity in India 1200-1991, by Sumit Guha. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (1999). Reviewed by Dr. Vinita Damodaran (original) (raw)

2000, Journal of Political Ecology

Environment and Ethnicity in India studies the peoples of the Vindhydri, Sahyadri, Satpura and Satmala ranges of western India over several centuries. Following Barth's ecological model, where it is argued that a Pathan lifestyle was viable in a rugged terrain inaccessible to central authority, Guha suggests that such 'no go areas' existed in every part of the subcontinent. Nonetheless, he goes on to argue that a complex political economy existed in the region well into the eighteenth century, where even apparently isolated groups such as the Baiga participated, and tribute and exchange with settled peasants was part of the life of forest communities. Such interaction, he notes, needs to be seen as adaptation, a strategy to draw on the resources of the surrounding countryside. The forest communities were at an advantage in this regard, because of their familiarity with the woodlands and the possibility of flight into them to evade the control of the local landlords. In analysing the forest polities of the early modern period he engages with the terms "indigenous" and "tribe" on a theoretical level and argues that an uncritical adoption of these categories is not supported by the historical record. This latter exercise is the more problematic one, for while he is quite aware of the political efficacy of using these terms, for example by people displaced in recent times by dam projects to claim compensation, he condemns their usage as being historically inaccurate. Indeed, Indian nationalists have traditionally been suspicious of such claims to an authentic "indigenous" status and such discourse has in recent times been co-opted by right wing proponents of the nation-state based on the notion of a unified national culture and a singular national history. Despite these developments, Guha is quick to dismiss these categories as being historically invalid. He seems to sympathise with the position of the unashamedly assimilationist sociologist, G.S.Ghurye (1943), who held the position that adivasis (indigenous peoples of India)1 were part of mainstream Hindu culture and needed to be totally assimilated. If, in the process they were further marginalised, so be it. Much recent work has moved beyond mere assertions of the historical invalidity of such categories, and has effectively argued that ethnicity and ethnic ideologies are historically contingent creations. Thus, much of what Guha says may or may not be true depending on the specific case. For example, it is true that the Chakmas of the Chittagong Hill Tracts were by no means the first people to enter CHT; in fact, they were one of more the recent immigrants, following the Arkanese and Tripurans. Nonetheless, today Chakma identity is firmly linked to the hill tracts where they have sought to develop an "indigenous" model of state, society and culture. Elsewhere in India, as Hardiman (1987) argues, the term adivasi relates to a particular historical development, that is, the subjugation to colonial authority of a wide variety of communities during the nineteenth century. These communities, which had been relatively free from the control of outsiders before colonial rule, experienced a shared spirit of resistance, which incorporated a consciousness of the "adivasi" against the "outsider." As Hardiman notes, the term was used in the 1930s by political activists in the area of Chotanagpur in eastern India with the aim of forging a new sense of identity among different 'tribal' peoples, a tactic that has enjoyed considerable success. What was the process that led to the marginalisation of many local forest communities? Guha argues that the appropriation of a European racial ethnography was used by indigenous elites to justify an indigenous hierarchy on the one hand and to assert parity with the European upper classes on the other. The upper strata took enthusiastically to racism and the academic study of "raciology." In his chapter on race and racial ideas in the nineteenth century, he notes that these ideas had considerable resonance in colonial India. H.H. Risley advertised India as an ethnographer's paradise on precisely such grounds. The caste system had prevented mixing and the 'primitive' tribes were not dying out as a consequence of western contact, and could therefore be readily measured by the visiting ethnographer. These ideas were well received by the Indian elites and Risley noted the alacrity with which his ethnographic exercises were assisted by various "native gentlemen". However, Guha needs to make more of the fact that the new racial science confirmed the old hierarchy at home. To be linked to the wilderness or the jungle had been considered pejorative from ancient times up to the eighteenth century and was not a recent phenomenon. It must be noted, and I fear that in his haste to dismiss the notion of the unchanging primitive tribe Guha does not sufficiently emphasise this fact, colonial epistemology lined up with Brahmanical knowledge, resulting in the depoliticisation and emasculation of many communities that came to be later termed as adivasi. Brahamanical theories of society that had long been propounded in the ancient centres Reviews