Book review: Aditya Pratap Deo,Kings,Spirits and Memory in Central India: Enchanting the State

The colonial state looms large in our historical consciousness and defines the way in which we think of Indian society in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Adivasi societies are no different; scholars have carefully documented the colonial-capitalist processes of violence, exploitation, and dispossession in the forest uplands as well as the open and hidden scripts of indigenous resistance against the colonial state. There are few historical volumes that seek to understand Adivasi society while decentring the state and reimagining its entanglements with indigenous polity. For this reason, Aditya Pratap Deo’s Kings, Spirits and Memory in Central India is a notable addition to the rich scholarship in the field of Adivasi Studies.

The book asks the reader to reconsider sovereignty in the colonial-princely state of Kanker in contemporary Chhattisgarh, India, in light of popular accounts, oral narratives, and ritual practices associated with ancestral deities of the Gond communities of the region. There are more than 13 million Gonds in India as per the Census of 2011. State formation in the central Indian forests took the form of Gond kingdoms and chieftaincies in medieval India (Bhukya, 2017). Contra the pre-political and culturalist framing of tribal societies, scholars have shown that Gond polities shared sovereignty with their Mughal and Maratha counterparts and engaged in relations of raid, trade, and tribute with lowland societies. Their image as primitive forest dwellers (or backward Hindus) is as much a consequence of state policies of dispossession and pacification as eco-romantic imaginaries of colonial and nationalist historiography (Prasad, 2011). Gondwana, the land of Gonds, is simultaneously a landscape and memory evoking the deep geological past and a call for an autochthonous political future for Adivasi communities (Chakrabarti, 2019).

The book under review goes beyond this state-centred history to rethink the political in Kanker as an assemblage of gods, ancestral spirits, kings, and the people (Bhumkal). Aditya Pratap Deo argues that the clan-gods and anga deo ancestral deities are a part of the political cosmos and their interventions in everyday lives of Gond villagers represent a negotiation of sovereignty with the king and colonial-princely state. As a direct descendant of the erstwhile rulers of Kanker, the author has the unique location of ‘ethnographer-king’ in this account and engages with his interlocutors—gaita (priests), siyan (village elders), majhi (headmen), villagers—and the archive through plural vantage points. Deo engages deeply with questions of positionality, power, and privilege even as he participates in and leads anga deo ceremonies inside and outside the royal palace, and connects with his respondents both as raja (king) and as researcher (Chapter 3: ‘Liminal Crossings’). The outcome is a historical-anthropological project with few parallels, where the scholar-sovereign meticulously unravels the bounded sovereignty associated with the territory, administration, and apparatus of the colonial state.

The anga deo occupy a central place in the lives of the people of Kanker and in the volume (Chapter 4: ‘The World of the Anga Deo’). They are ancestors who are responsible for the settlement of villages, for resolving disputes, and for ensuring the everyday peace, health, and well-being of the bhum (land). There are several anga deos of varying importance who are worshipped across villages, have overlapping territorial jurisdictions, and are propitiated through madai (annual fairs), jatra (village visits), and the annual palace festival on the occasion of Dusshera. The royal anga deos Bade and Chhote Pat occupy a hierarchical position in this world, and their position in the royal palace is integral to the domestication of the raja within the anga deo cosmology. Propitiating the anga deo and other non-ancestral deities is crucial to maintaining the balance between different powerful forces of the bhum. This is a continuous exercise in which the raja and the royal family are an important—but by no means, the dominant—actor. In fact, key moments, processes, and events in the book underscore the bilateral, negotiated, and shared sovereignty that exists between the raja and the anga deos. For instance, Deo describes in vivid ethnographic detail the play of anga deo in the royal palace during madai and Dusshera and the role of iqrarnamas (legal agreements) drawn up to request the raja to allow Chhote Pat to be taken to the villages to intervene in local crises, illnesses, sorrows, and conflicts. The Kanker royal family’s claim to sovereignty is contested through divine conversations, anga deo visits across the realm, and tests designed to diagnose and restore the balance of the bhum. In this manner, Deo argues that it is appropriate to conceptualise a raja–anga deo complex in which sovereign power is a matter of negotiation between both entities and is dependent on mutual respect and recognition.

In the final chapter of the book (Chapter 5: ‘The Enchanted Realm’), the author narrates several anga deo stories from the colonial period that emphasised the territorial contestations between the raja and the ancestral deities over political-sacred geographies of Kanker. In these accounts, the raja occupied only one loci of power and his authority is curtailed by the gods and other forces of bhum even in his own citadel (Garhiya Pahar, Kanker town). The anga deos who are clan-founders have their own territorial jurisdiction (anga deo pargana) across Kanker and their authority often excludes, exceeds, or escapes the sovereignty of the raja. Their power and skills are related to the ‘forces and rhythms of life’ such as making and divining rain, controlling the flows of rivers, and taming and hunting wild beasts. The end of raja’s rule after India’s independence and the merger of colonial-princely Kanker with the Indian Union (1947–48) also marks a decline in the power of anga deos and registers their increasingly symbolic presence in the postcolonial electoral politics of the region.

The clarity of arguments presented in the book is occasionally diminished by its theory-saturated language; an undergraduate student of history may find them difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless, Kings, Spirits and Memory in Central India is an important interlocution between historical scholarship which has suffused the colonial state with hegemonic sovereignty without analysing the concept itself and anthropological scholarship whose revaluation of state sovereignty under conditions of globalisation and neoliberalism has been somewhat ahistorical. Sovereignty, for the Gonds of Kanker, is not bounded, territorial, and tied to state power; nor is it a dispersed form of authority that is ‘grounded in violence performed and designed to generate loyalty, fear, and legitimacy’ (Hansen & Stepputat, 2006). Instead, as Marshall Sahlins and David Graeber have argued in their work On Kings, sovereignty devolves from metahuman beings (gods, ancestors, ghosts, demons) to royal authority, that is, kings are imitations of gods and not vice versa. It is this inversion that explains Gond anga deo cosmology and the limiting of sacred kingship by means of customs, ceremonies, and ritual practices (Sahlins & Graeber, 2018). Aditya Pratap Deo’s book enriches the conversation between historians and anthropologists and encourages us to rethink state, sovereignty, colonialism, and indigenous cosmologies in modern India.