Abstract
This book makes highly significant contributions to understanding environmental and social change in Northeast India, specifically Nagaland. It is an exercise in historical anthropology, blended with careful fieldwork study of shifts in farming practices and impacts of development project funding.
A key chapter starts from a violent encounter experienced by the anthropologist when the car he was travelling in was stopped by insurgents. This event is contextualised by incisive reflections on violence from colonial times, through the terror of the 1950s–1970s, to the ‘invisible’ violence of the ceasefire presently in place. As Das recounts, British officials brought Naga areas under government control through tours of ‘pacification’ from the nineteenth century to the 1940s; in the case of Yimchunger Nagas, in a remote area of eastern Nagaland bordering Burma, the first such tours took place during the 1920s. These were aimed at stopping headhunting and slavery but involved colonial violence of their own, including burning of villages and food stores as well as occasional killings. A parallel from the 1830s–1860s took place in the Kond areas in Orissa, where the same method was employed of ‘pacification’ tours, aimed at suppressing, in the Kond case human sacrifice, as well as forcing Kond subjection to British rule (Padel, 2010). The symbolism of these tours, as a ‘show of force’, asserted British hegemony, which was legitimised by emphasising the ‘savagery’ of the violent customs suppressed, and memorialised through well-known photographic collections, of colonial officials meeting Naga chiefs for example.
These parallels aside, the influence of several administrator-anthropologists was even more striking in the Naga than in the Kond case; including the way that they ‘primitivised’ jhum – the practice of shifting cultivation or swidden farming which lies at the heart of this book. In central India, Verrier Elwin’s defence of shifting cultivation in The Baiga (1939) was immediately attacked by Thakkar Bapa, who spread the model of ashram schools for tribal children throughout central India (Thakkar, 1941), and Ghurye (1943), a key founder of Indian anthropology/sociology.
The attack on swidden farming continues today, though Das shows how recent development projects dress this up in discourse superficially respectful of ‘indigenous knowledge’ (rather than directly dismissing swidden, as before), masking takeovers of land for plantations of forest and cash crops. In other words, land used for growing food that was repeatedly allowed to return to forest has been essentially converted into private property and taken out of circulation for either human food or reversion to natural, biodiverse forest.
A key conclusion of the book is that, in spite of the relentless advance of plantations, the present situation actually shows the resilience of swidden farming in composite manifestations. Managers of the development projects under study have tended to be out of touch with people’s actual needs on the ground, so the decisions that key villagers make concerning what to grow and how to use the money on loan have had only an incidental relationship with a project’s declared intentions.
We reach these conclusions through a journey through political, agricultural and religious transformations taking place over the last hundred years. This book’s trajectory, traversing the area’s earlier history with meticulous care, shows us quite brilliantly how deeply flawed recent development projects have been. Foreign funds intended for bringing about egalitarian, productive change have been siphoned off by new elites who rose through political and religious patronage, with many loans never repaid, and a strategic shift in the discourse eliciting funds, from development through cash crops towards climate change and preserving biodiversity. The author here draws on the work of David Mosse (2005), whose thought-provoking Foreward opens this book.
The text is complemented by astute usage of visual anthropology, with numerous photographs that illustrate shifts in how Nagas and jhum are portrayed. Placing the anthropologist’s own experience of violence as a central problematic blurs the dualistic dichotomy between subject and object, objectivity and subjectivity; and the use of a wide range of illustrations draws the reader into an intimate association with Naga villagers at different periods of their subjection to outside modes of domination, including photography.
The social structure of insurgency in Northeast India is notoriously complex (Fernandes 2018; Pereira et al., 2016). Often it appears that every tribe and sub-tribe has its own militia. As negotiations surrounding the attack on the author’s vehicle illustrated, the situation is far from any simplistic binary between state security forces and insurgents, who maintain complex relations with politicians and development projects. If the British ‘pacification’ process that incorporated Naga peoples under the Government of India was often violent, this violence intensified hugely under Nehru—though lamentably, this book avoids any spotlight on Nehru’s role. The notorious Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) was enacted in 1958, among other draconian legislation, that manifested in countless burnings of Naga villages during the 1950s–1970s. Tours in the 1950s were eerily similar to those of colonial times. This episode in India’s post-Independence history is too little known, though sociologist Desai’s books (1986; 1990) quote several episodes of disturbingly violent repression in Naga villages.
The book explores the violence of anthropology too, showing how Nagas have been objectified through negative stereotypes that have become embedded in popular culture. The violence of anthropology has become particularly visible in Northeast India and is ripe for decolonising (Kamei, 2021; Teron, 2011; Thong, 2014).
‘The role of Christianity in instigating changes in labour and class relations, as well as other aspects of social change, is analysed with considerable sensitivity. Piers Vitebsky’s long-term fieldwork among Lanjia Sora in Odisha provides a fruitful comparison (Vitebsky, 2018). Counterintuitively, wholesale conversion to Christianity has worked, among Sora as among Naga, to complement government-and corporate-led changes – for example, rice as symbol of being ‘civilised’, and the move towards privatisation of property. The role of education here needs further examination since schooling plays a hugely significant role in many of the social changes that Das analyses. In this regard, Nagaland’s ‘Communitization of Education’ programme appears outstanding in terms of empowering village communities, though, as with the agricultural projects analysed in this book, there may be significant divergence between policy and practice.
The concluding chapters of this book tie many loose threads and show serious disjunctions at the heart of development discourse, as well as paradoxical transformations in the structure of power since British rule. Project authorities show a blindness to the actual workings of loans and debt, through Self Help Groups and microcredit. Development projects that are meant to reduce inequalities often compound them.
This book is a significant contribution to the anthropology of Northeast India and environmental history, at a time when this region faces huge changes imposed in the name of facilitating development and communication (Bhattacharya, 2019; Kikon, 2019; Yumnam, 2021), and it will appeal to a wide range of readers.