Colonial Constructions of the ‘Tribe’ in India: The Case of Chotanagpur (original) (raw)
Related papers
Tribes and Tribal Studies in North East India: Deconstructing the Politics of Colonial Methodology
While engaging with knowledge production and discourse, neither methodologies nor methods are chosen in isolation from ontological and epistemological positions. The British colonial administrator-ethnographers in India were pioneers who surveyed and carried out expeditions on tribes but often their methods were questionable. Their survey reports and documents became the source of invaluable information about such region and at the same time a tool for their continuous expansion of colonial administration. However by using official machinery and tour for collecting data they bypassed the ethical consideration of research. Their writings in many ways ended up contorting tribes as being synonymous with being backward, uncivilized and barbarous. This paper critically analyse the notion of tribes in India as perceived and studied by anthropologists. It also interrogates the Ontology and Epistemic premises of their Knowledge Production on tribes in India. The paper concludes by discussing the politics of methodology.
The Oraons of Chhotanagpur: A Journey through Colonial Ethnography
Modern Asian Studies, 2022
This article explores nineteenth-century colonial representations of the Oraons of Chhotanagpur. Described in administrative reports of early nineteenth-century Chhotanagpur as mlecchha and dhangar, or as part of a 'village community' of Coles/ Kols, these Oraons, by the late nineteenth century, were referred to as a 'tribe'. To trace the categories through which the Oraons journeyed across colonial records, I discuss texts and reports which later became part of bureaucratic memory. The shifts within official understanding, I argue, were related to the working of official minds, changing assumptions, and differing languages; the tensions within the discipline of anthropology and its application in the colony; the variations within ideologies of governance and the imperatives of rule; and interactions with 'native' informants and correspondents, along with personal observations of local practices. There remained, however, an uneasy tension between wider intellectual trends in Europe and their reverberations in the colony, and the experiences of governance: colonial knowledge was not always produced with arrogance and assurance but also with doses of uncertainty, hesitation, disquiet, and often despair. In the shifting representations of the tribe across the nineteenth century, there is, I suggest, a pattern. In the pre-1850s, local nomenclature was adopted and voices of dissent-expressed through agrarian protests in Chhotanagpur-were addressed. By the 1850s, the utilitarian agenda structured colonial imaginaries and interventions. The 1860s witnessed the interplay of ethnological concerns, missionary beliefs, and Arcadian principles. From the 1890s, the idea of tribe was overwhelmingly structured by the supremacy of disciplinary knowledge systems that increasingly supplanted the role of the 'native' informant.
Through a critical appraisal of old, new, and emergent scholarship on the ‘tribe’, this entry traces and places the invention, institutionalization, and the later local infatuation with the colonial category of the ‘tribe’ in Northeast India. Further tracking the social life of the tribal category in Northeast India, the entry then relates how in the postcolonial epoch the ‘tribe’ revealed both as an affective source of embodied and emplaced identity and as a compelling, competitive, and conflictual principle of political mobilization, recognition, and claim-making.
Journal of Political Ecology, 2000
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
Landscape, Culture and Belonging, 2019
This essay is a reflection on coming to terms with the category ‘tribal’ through a decade and a half of researching the Northeast. As a non-historian who has worked on issues as diverse as agricultural change, pro-development groups, Northeast migrants, race and the media, and inter-ethnic relations in urban India, I come to this essay from a position of puzzlement: What am I supposed to do with the category ‘tribal’? Challenge it? Adopt it? Stand up for it? Further, what are ‘we’, as scholars engaged with the Northeast professionally and personally, to do with the category? On the one hand, scholars are finely attuned to the category as a thin colonial construction, and scarcely a seminar or special issue goes by without a call to challenge the category, deconstruct it, rethink it, or lay bare its precarious assumptions. On the other hand, the category is used by those subject to it, is desired by those who do not have it, and is resolute in a great deal of scholarship on the region as evidence for an ongoing ‘identity crisis’ that offers a ready-made logic for almost everything. As many authors have pointed out, including many in this volume, communities of the region, particularly in the hill areas, are largely de-historicized in this process: history is for the valleys, anthropology for the hills. As such, the past is told as a series of recent encounters: communities in the region emerged out of primitive pasts through contact with colonial authorities and missionaries, were categorized and subject to forms of colonial subjugation which dramatically altered their previously unchanging lives, and were then forced to survive in the modern Indian state. Recent scholarship has posed a major challenge to these standard practices of understanding the region. Despite these welcome shifts, I still find the category challenging, particularly as much of my academic life has required me to explain ‘tribal’ for audiences outside the Northeast, and often outside South Asia entirely. Further, having used race as a way of analysing the politics of integration, solidarity, and representation for Northeast communities in India, I have noted a fascinating reaction from scholars anxious about the use of race lest it transgress the tribal/non-tribal distinction in the region. This has called for a careful retelling of a particular historical narrative by scholars and by activists and politicians. In this paper, I explore the resoluteness of the category ‘tribal’, and some alternative ways of approaching it, by using the example of Meghalaya. Although I have conducted little research in Meghalaya since 2010 as my focus has shifted to other parts of the region, Meghalaya was the first place I went as a researcher. I spent almost a decade researching here – almost all of it in the Khasi Hills – including all my doctoral work. Thus, it was – and remains – the setting where I have struggled most with the category of ‘tribal’: its past, its legacy, and what I am to make of it. Though this, I suggest, holds true for other contexts in the Northeast too.
Subjects, Citizens and Law: Colonial and independent India, 2016
In course of their colonial adventure in India, the British sought diverse ways to establish law and order as the main foundation of their rule, thereby transforming pre-existing power structures and political economies. Confronted with the 'exceptional' nature of particular regions, the men on the field devised and enacted special legislation and created different forms of subjecthood. Such an exercise in adaptation, however, became a harder task in the second half of the 19th century, as the idea of a unified corpus of imperial laws gradually gained ascendancy over local differentiation, and the economic interests of the empire required a more effective integration of localities. The interplay between local and imperial perceptions was thus a driving force behind the gradual evolution of the Indian empire as well as in the conceptualisation of its legal subjects. An important contribution to the full understanding of this process may come from enquiries into the nature of the British administrative policies, along with the ideologies and notions inspiring them, in connection with the tribal community of the Hos of Singhbhum, a district in the erstwhile Chotanagpur Division of Bengal Presidency.