Abstract
History has a long and strong tradition of research in peasant and peasant society. In India too, for a long stretch of time, history confined itself to the study of the peasant. It is only in recent years that they have turned to the study of tribes. Indeed, of the social science disciplines other than anthropology and sociology, history has been one discipline which of late has been increasingly engaged with the study of tribes. The Adivasis and the Raj: Socio-economic Transition of the Hos, 1820–1932 by Sanjukta Das Gupta is part of this new venture in historical research in India.
The book is divided into eight chapters. In addition there are introductory and conclusion sections. The introduction gives an outline of the historical writings on tribes in general and Chhotanagpur region in particular. It examines and critiques the way historical and other writings have depicted tribes, especially the characterisation, of tribes as having a homogenous pan-tribal identity. The homogenisation, the introduction argues, glosses over the wide range of individual specificity and response. The book focuses on this dimension of the Hos of Kolahan. Following the introduction the book discusses the village organisation of the Hos. It shows how the village organisation centres on the primacy of settled cultivation and how the founding clan’s control over village resources goes to constitute the central determinants of economic, social, cultural and religious life in a village.
Chapter 2 is about political authority, which basically engaged with the state-system in pre-colonial India. It points to the fact that the Ho villages were not isolated and self-contained as generally believed with tribes in India. Rather, the Ho villages were integrated with the larger political authority in the form of a feudalistic bureaucracy associated with military services, collection of tributes and other impositions on the subjects. The third chapter is about the British Intrusion and Administrative Re-organization. From an initial strategy of building a system of collaboration with local elites to quell the rebellion, the British move to a policy change in the form of the Kolahan Govt. Estate comprising of Ho-dominated areas. Following this, the Ho community became more integrated with the Raj that had deep implications on their socio-economic status especially in regard to inter-personal relationships and the livelihood patterns.
The processes through which the Hos emerge as tenants are discussed in the fourth chapter. The chapter shows how it was not the need for revenue that led to new agrarian arrangement, but desire to gain stability and legitimacy, at least in the initial phase. Subsequently, however, the need for revenue as evident in revenue revision became important. The fifth chapter discusses the issue of forests, as it was intricately linked to their economic, social and religious life. Though there was no fixed boundary between the forest and settled cultivation traditionally, the British created a rift between the two as they treated forests as a commodity to be exploited for profit. The state thus emerged as the key right holder in the forests, which restricted the access to the use of forests that tribes had enjoyed.
Chapter 6 deals with change in the agrarian economy especially the extension of cultivation, absence of change in method and technique of cultivation, failure of rain and scarcity of food leading to emigration for work in tea estates in Assam. The relations between the Hos and the outsiders have been dealt in Chapter 7. The Hos invariably saw the outsiders as exploiters; the epitaph they used to describe them is ‘diku’. This is followed by Chapter 8 which discusses the aspects of identity as has been articulated among the Hos. The identity articulation, the chapter states, had assumed two forms; political and socio-religious.
While the book is about the Hos, the discussion does bring about issues of larger significance and concern. It is not possible to bring them all. However, I would like to touch upon a few. The supra power structure within which the villages have been located is interesting and insightful. The question is how to think of this supra power structure. Is this to be thought as the state? It may be fairly tenable to think of it as state when the elites constituting the supra power structure were well knit and integrated. However, can this still be thought of as state, when they had begun to fiercely compete with each other for the loyalty and support of the Hos? Did supra structure and the state coincide. There is a reference to some ambiguity in agrarian policy through the introduction of the category of tribes as a distinct segment of the population of the empire and as tenants of the government estate. Is there an anomaly in the use of the term tribe and tenant? As to what is the base of this anomaly is not clear. Is there a dichotomy between tribe and tenant? In the context of the discussion on forests, it has been stated that since adivasi societies had no means of knowing if going beyond certain limits could damage the locality’s ecosystem in the long run, one may conclude that notions such as conservation and protection were unknown. The book begins by questioning the generalisation and homogenisation. Discussions such as this tend to put the work on the same schematic framework that the author has taken pains to critique.
The book is an important addition to adivasi studies in general and the study of the Hos in particular. The story of society as it unfurled itself in the time span of more than 100 years has been comprehensively and insightfully captured. The range of issues dealt with in the book adds even greater value to the book. The book has been written with clarity and lucidity and in a style that one finds reading pleasant. Those engaged in the study of villages, tribes, agrarian and forest questions, the issue of identity and movement will find the book resourceful and rewarding.