Abstract
This edited volume emerged out of a conference on ‘Dalits and Adivasis in colonial and post-colonial India’ organised by the Department of History, University of Calcutta in 2006. It is a sequel to an earlier volume on the dalit experience titled Narratives of the Excluded (2008). Collected essays do not lend themselves readily to unified reviews. However, the volume under view achieves a remarkable thematic coherence in writing adivasi history although the authors have used different methodological approaches for individual essays.
Divided into ten chapters in a broad chronological order, Narratives from the Margins spans the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods across central and eastern India. Here is an overview of the whole content. A contributor offers a reading of Tulsidas as a story of tribal incorporation into the caste Hindu fold. The volume has two historiographical essays: while one underlines the beginnings of ‘tribal’ studies in colonial-era ethnographies, another critically reviews the academic literature produced from the 1940s to the 2000s. The bulk of the chapters are standard historical pieces on various aspects of adivasi history: Santhal conversion to Christianity, Rajput–Bhil relations in southern Rajasthan, the agrarian crisis in colonial Singbhum, the Assam labour system in a tea plantation, and the women’s question in Chotanagpur (now Jharkhand). The last two chapters tackle contemporary concerns such as the dynamics of adivasi politics vis-à-vis dominant discourses, and radical memory of the hul in visual ethnography.
At the risk of being tedious, I want to give a fair hearing to the stories each contributor intends to tell. Interpreting Ramcharitmanas as a story of forest tribes converted to the cult of Ram, Giorgio Milanetti argues that Tulsidas’ dharmic religion held its arms wide open to non-caste peoples in an implicit competition with Islam in sixteenth-century Avadh. Milanetti quotes from Tulsidas, ‘Even a dog-eating man, a Sabara, a Khasi, the stupid barbarian, the vile Kola and Kirata reach a state of absolute happiness…by simply pronouncing the name of Rama’. As the iron plough and literate religion transformed wooded forests into arable fields, social groups who possessed the new techniques collectively embraced the Hindu worldview mostly as communities, and rarely as individuals. In the process, new social formations emerged. Drawing on the insights of historians such as Richard Eaton and David Ludden, Milanetti suggests that religious frontiers and agrarian frontiers converged at the fringes of sedentary societies in the times of Tulsidas.
B.B. Chaudhuri and Sanjukta Das Gupta survey the evolution of ‘tribal’ studies in India. Chaudhuri contests the validity of recent perspective that the ‘tribe’ idea was a colonial construct. He argues that such a critique ‘unduly exaggerates the role of the colonial state in tribal studies and tends to ignore the contributions of other groups of scholars’ such as the Christian missionaries and professional anthropologists. For other colonial-era scholars other than the administrator–ethnographer, the notion of tribe ‘was far from an artificial construct and was a meaningful category for the representation of a real historical situation’ (p. 71). Similarly, Gupta endorses the point of view that the notion of tribe ‘may be considered to be more a Brahmanical construct than a colonial one’ (p. 3). She argues that the derogatory view of forest peoples by caste Hindu society informed colonial discourse. The Raj merely categorised and homogenised erstwhile janas (non-caste peoples) into ‘tribes’ by injecting new racial and evolutionary contents into an older idea of a continuum between egalitarian jana and hierarchical jati.
Apart from the two historiographical essays, students of adivasi history will be interested in the five empirical essays (Chapters 4–8). They all touch on the colonial period. Here contributors used a variety of archives to discuss such themes as conversion, polity, agriculture, labour, and women under colonial conditions. Tripti Chaudhuri refutes recent attempt to conflate colonialism and evangelicalism. Among the Santhals, the relationship was a lot messier: missionaries were neither ‘completely supportive nor subversive of imperial rule’ (p. 84). Likewise, she observes that the relationship between the Santhal and the missionary was unequal, and constantly negotiated. If the Regulation of 1872 brought them together against the outsiders (diku), the Kherwar movement of 1874 drove a wedge between them. As the sole education providers, however, the missionaries ‘created a carving for education’ (p. 103) that enabled new thinking about social questions and the growth of linguistic identity among the Santhals. Now turning to southern Rajasthan, Marco Fattori looks at shifts in Rajput–Bhil relations. The Rajput rulers and Bhil subjects were not two antagonistic groups. Using popular iconography and royal architecture as historical sources, Fattori demonstrates how the two groups were connected by ritual ties of dependence (rajtilak) and by military ties of protection, especially against Muslim invaders.
Sanjukta Das Gupta turns our attention to Ho cultivators in colonial Singhbhum. Based on evidence collected mostly from the state archives of West Bengal and Bihar, she argues that colonial policy of expanding sedentary agriculture and the fencing of forest commons left less land available for shifting cultivators. It disrupted the long fallowing cycle of the pre-colonial regime on which the livelihood needs of the Ho depended. The influx of migrants following the opening of the Bengal–Nagpur Railway in 1899 further intensified the pressure on land. Gupta asserts that ‘the extension of settled cultivation did not necessarily negate the pauperization of the peasantry’ (p. 171) in colonial West Singhbhum. This agrarian crisis triggered the exodus of tribal families from Chotanagpur to tea plantations in Assam and overseas colonies. In this vein, Samita Sen skilfully reconstructs the Assam labour system in her stories of ‘kidnappings in Chotanagpur’ in an unparalleled scale of human movement during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Planters developed a preference for family migration from Chotanagpur because it offered the possibility of a self-reproducing labour force. Attracted by both productive and reproductive advantages, tea planters resorted to force and fraud in the Assam recruitment of indentured labour. Further, Shashank Sekhar Sinha critically examines the ambivalent agency of women in adivasi movements, and concludes that the participation of women helped mobilise the tribal population politically ‘without being able to influence the course of the movement’ (p. 223). Behind the high drama of tribal protests, adivasi women had their own everyday struggles to fight it out. ‘Defiant’ adivasi women became targets of witch-hunts in times of political upheaval (say, the hul of 1855–6) when tribal patriarchy temporarily got the upper hand over colonial overrule. In trying to escape an oppressive patriarchal hegemony, adivasi widows swelled the ranks of migrant female workforce on the road to the plantations. To a point, woman’s agency cannot be divorced from migration.
The last two essays are ethnographic reflections on the linkages between the tribal pasts and present possibilities in adivasi politics today. Nandini Sundar expresses unease at the critical distance between organic intellectuals from the adivasi communities and sections of the scholarly community whose critiques of transnational indigeneity (André Beteillé) or tribal ecological niche (Sumit Guha) goes against the grain of contemporary adivasi politics. She looks forward to a rapprochement between the two intellectual traditions. Addressing academic theorists, she outlines the dialectics of state intervention (colonial and post-colonial), adivasi response to official policies, and the state’s strategic response to the new situation. Through a discussion of a documentary film titled Hul Sengel, Daniel J. Rycroft attempts to theorise the relation between memory of the Santhal hul of 1855–86 and the Jharkhand movement in southern Bihar. He exposes ambiguities in the use of adivasi as an analytic. Adivasihood embodies tensions between anti-colonial nationalism that seeks to represent ‘indigenous and tribal’ issues within the spaces of the neo-liberal and national economy, on the one hand, and a radical consciousness that stood against colonial racism, disavowals of the post-colonial state and a homogenising Hindutva, on the other hand.
While a couple of chapters will be of interest to literary critics and ethnographers of the ‘tribal’ situation, the rest of the book addresses students of adivasi history. Some chapters are suitable for educational use for advanced postgraduate courses in tribal studies. Adivasi historiography in this well-edited book clearly has implications for regions beyond Chotanagpur and Chhattisgarh. Apart from the Assam labour system in Chotanagpur, other trans-regional connections (say, missionary networks) promise new directions for research within the British colonial world. As indicated by Shashank Sinha, the predicament of adivasi women and their everyday struggles within indigenous societies also calls for comparative studies across ‘tribal’ India, including the north-east and western India with a significant tribal presence.