Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies - August 2016 (original) (raw)
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In anti-colonial, as well as in anti-imperial, struggle, a very thin line often separates wider nationalist claims from more limited – even parochial – dimensions. Different factors operate at different levels providing support and legitimization to the resistance movement(s), although sometimes pursuing partially antithetic aims. At grassroots, local grievances can play a key role in fuelling insurgencies, especially along the fringes or at the intersections of the main imperial structures; at the same time, some basic identitarian elements (such as religion, family, and group affiliation) can act as (not unambiguous) proxies for other – maybe ‘higher’ – form of political consciousness. The uprisings dotting north-west India in late nineteenth/early twentieth century provide a striking example of this kind of intermingling. Originally seen as occasional, religious-driven outbursts of violence, product of the ‘fanaticism’ and the ‘inherent savagery’ of the local tribes, they increasingly emerged as a major threat to the imperial order. The 1897/’98 the frontier-wide ‘Great Pathan revolt’ forced British authorities to set up a large-scale pacification efforts involving more than 40,000 men and having wide-range political consequences, with the establishment, in 1901, of the tribal areas as an autonomous political entity, separated from the so-called ‘settled districts’, within the framework of the newly established North West Frontier Province. The persistence of instability – and its worsening especially in times of crisis – accounts for the structural character of these uprisings. At the same time, the external influences affecting them, account for their relevance in the international field. The efforts that the Axis powers (and of Italy among them) carried out during World War II to support and fuel the rebellion of the Faqir of Ipi, in Waziristan, and to steer his action in a direction better fitting their wartime interests are only one example of the relationship existing among local conflict, imperial stability and international balance. Moving from these premises, the paper aims at analyzing – with reference to the tribal areas of present-day Afghan-Pakistani border and to the period of the British domination – the role that proto-national disgregative dynamic played, and the implications that they had on regional stability, with a special focus on the political and military aspects. Its aim is to underline how, in this context, the ‘multiple identities’ of the subjects involved operated, and how they interacted in shaping the complex net of ideological, political and material interests that – after the crisis and the dissolution of the Raj – still support the non assimilation of the FATA within the Pakistani state system.
Kol, Coolie, Colonial Subject: A Hidden History of Caste and the Making of Modern Bengal
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Tanika Sarkar (eds.), Caste in Bengal: Histories of Hierarchy, Exclusion, and Resistance (Ranikhet: Permanent Black), 2022
A Hidden History of Caste and the Making of Modern Bengal uday chandra istorical anthropologists of modern India such as Bernard Cohn, Arjun Appadurai, and Nicholas Dirks have argued forcefully that caste, as a modern social institution, came to be revived and reproduced by the colonial state via its classificatory and enumerative policies. 1 Yet this colonialismcentred perspective, though useful in many senses, obscures the everyday socio-cultural and political-economic processes by which the colonised organised themselves under colonial overlordship. Insofar as caste is a system of organising labour on the basis of a hierarchical social logic, it is important to understand how distinctive "regional modernities" were built, quite literally, on the backs of labouring groups assigned the lowest ritual and socioeconomic status in these new regions. 2 This essay uncovers a "hidden" history of one such labouring group in nineteenth-century Bengal, who appear in the colonial archives as "Kols", despised in caste terms by the Hindu bhadralok yet categorised subsequently via ethnological accounts as "tribes". The 1 Appadurai, "Number in the Colonial Imagination", 314-40; Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; Dirks, Castes of Mind. 2 Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal, ed., Regional Modernities.
The Indian Hierarchy: Culture, Ideology and Consciousness in Bengali Village Politics
Modern Asian Studies, 1999
The Subaltern studies project has been a major contribution towards rethinking the role of groups such as peasants, lower castes, labourers or women in forming the course of Indian history. The project has also brought the issues of culture, ideology and consciousness to the forefront of Indian history writing. Although the importance of non-elite action on the historical developments of the Indian independence movement has already been noted by more mainstream historians, the concertedness of the project has created a whole new situation in which the subalternist perspective has become a new paradigm for Indian history writing, indeed, the subalternist perspective has increasingly come to dominate the formation of perspectives and concepts. As Masselos points out, the Subaltern studies has become the establishment.
Conformity and conflict: tribes and the 'agrarian system' of Mughal India
Indian Economic & Social History Review, 1988
To repeat what now appears a truism, the magnificient structure of the Mughal state and the continued dominance of its ruling elite rested upon the state's ability to appropriate a major part of the surplus generated by this agrarian society. The production of agricultural surplus, its systematic appropriation by the dominant zamindars and the Mughal state apparatus and subsequently its distribution amongst sections of the governing class (jagirdars, madad-i-maash holders, and so on) together constituted much of what is now, quite acceptably, called the Mughal 'agrarian system'. Contributing to the emergence of this system and important to its functioning was the structure of the village-community, its internal dynamics and response to forces and factors around it. One of the earlier expositions of the classical village-community as a whole under Mughal rule has, probably, been made by Irfan Habib,4 and some other researches have engaged in examining its details and variations.5 Two features seem to have been almost essential to the village-community; namely, its considerably stratified nature and the pivotal role of the peasant in agricultural production.' The picture of the village community consisting of dominant zamindars, cultivating peasants, artisans and landless labourers, and so on, is only too familiar now to require repetition. Equally well aquainted are historians with the medieval Indian peasant, with his 'title to permanent and hereditary occupancy of the land he tilled,' and the inviolability and salability of these rights.' The strength of the peasant's rights was, however, matched by his inescapable obligation to cultivate the land over which he raid claim.x explaining the manner in which agrarian society in Bengal differed. Another monograph that is influenced by this widely accepted picture of the 'agrarian system'
Assertion of Political Identity: the Ho Adivasis of Singhbhum 1770-1859
Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies (JAIS), 2014
The story of resistance and rebellion by the Ho adivasis of Kolhan in erstwhile Singhbhum district of Bihar has for some decades been studied under the broad rubric of anti-British uprisings. These writings more or less foregrounded adivasi struggles as negating colonial rule, rather than emphasising identity assertion as the positive trigger. Moreover, there is not much attempt to critically examine colonial records, on which these reconstructions were largely based, to expose the hegemonic mentality, which conducted the erasure of the indigenes. This essay seeks to underline their assertion, over the territory they inhabited. This is premised on the very consciousness of agency or a maker, rather than subjecthood and marginalisation, stimulating them either to resist any bid to encroach into it or rebel when alien rule was imposed on them. The paper is divided in three broad sections. After exploring the fructification of Ho agency in the first, the second portrays the story of resistance and rebellion by progressively narrating Ho resistance to feudal expansion: 1770-1800, to local chiefs and the English in 1820-21, to feudal rule and British expansion 1830-37 and Civil Rebellion of the Hos during1857-59. Summing up the deliberations, the last highlights how this assertion may be identified as the prehistory of Jharkhand movement.
A Tryst with the Tribes: A Comparison of State – Tribe Relations in Pre-Colonial and Colonial India
2020
It is well-known that the relationship between the colonial State and the Tribes in nineteenth century India had been particularly conflict-ridden and interrupted by periodic ‘insurrections’ or rebellions. This paper studies the relationship between the pre-colonial Mughal State and its tribes and juxtaposes it against the colonial state’s management of the Khonds and the Santals, and explores what can be known about the nature of the nineteenth century ‘Indian’ state that is fundamentally different from its earlier avatars. Employing police reports and legal court files, this paper concludes, that the uniqueness of the colonial State lay in its unilateral interactions with the tribes that is a product of the transition from a state that exercised ‘narrative sovereignty’ over its territories to one that aspired to enforce ‘actual sovereignty.’ This categorical change in the nature of the state, this paper argues, employing Marshall Sahlins’ ‘possible theory of history,’ caused struc...