Reordering Adivasi Worlds Representation Resistance Memory 1St Edition Sangeeta Dasgupta All Chapter

Reordering Adivasi Worlds:
Representation, Resistance, Memory

1st Edition Sangeeta Dasgupta
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/reordering-adivasi-worlds-representation-resistance-
memory-1st-edition-sangeeta-dasgupta/
For
Ma and Baba
(Tapati and Sujan Dasgupta)
for their infinite love and unending support

List of Images
1.1 Coles of the Dhangur Tribe, Natives of Nagpore (The Scavengers

of Calcutta) 46
1.2 An Oraon Youth 68
1.3 An Oraon Girl 68
1.4 Oraons: Fig 1—An Oraon of Chutia Nagpur; age, when the picture
was taken, about 23 (left); Fig 2—Romia, an Oraon girl of Chutia
Nagpur; age, when the picture was taken, 15 (right) 68
1.5 A Christian Oraon 70
1.6 The Rest at Noon 70
1.7 Oboe with Six Finger Holes 84
2.1 Harvesting Practices 101
3.1a Stone axe with ground cutting edge 127
3.1b Stone axe with ground cutting edge 127
3.1c Bronze flat axe 128
3.1d Padded fighting hat with three flaps 128
3.1e Bamboo needle 129
3.1f Arrow with tanged metal head, 33 mm long on reed shaft 129
3.1g Bamboo pellet bow with double string 129
3.2a Voice disguiser made from perforated clay cylinder covered
with membrane from egg-capsule of a spider 137
3.2b Leaves of sword-grass with spiders’ egg cases attached 137
3.2c Leaves of sword-grass with spiders’ egg cases attached 137
3.3 From the mounted collection of Haddon, an image of the following
photographs together: (1) Munda couple: Sanicreela and unnamed
woman (Dalton’s gardeners). E.T. Dalton/B. Simpson; (2) Two
Munda men and a Munda woman. S.C. Roy; and (3) Munda
household objects. S.C. Roy. 139
3.4 Sarat Chandra Roy and Egon von Eickstedt 140
3.5 Sarat Chandra Roy 141
x List of Images
3.6a An Oraon in war-dress: S.C. Roy 142
3.6b Roy’s notes at the back of the image 142
3.7a Oraons driving cattle disease spirit from a village: S.C. Roy 153
3.7b Roy’s notes at the back of the image 153
II.1 Tana Bhagats praying under the statue of Jatra Bhagat 175
II.2 Worshipping Jatra Bhagat 176
II.3 Gandhi Baba 177
II.4 and II.5 In the pandal 178
4.1 Mapping the Spread of the Tana Bhagat Movement 184
7.1 Tana Bhagats, Gandhi Smriti, New Delhi 291
Table
1.1 Oraon Tribe of Chota Nagpur 78

Notes on the Text
The translations from Bengali, Hindi, and German into English are not
always literal. I have preferred certain words and expressions while trans-
lating since these conveyed the ideas of the author better. I have not in-
cluded the original text in most cases but translations. When words and
phrases from the original are cited, the English translations are provided
alongside. For the convenience of the reader, titles of articles in journals
or of pamphlets and petitions have been translated into English. In the
case of articles in Bengali, the dates of publication in terms of the Bengali
‘Hindu’ calendar are mentioned along with their conversion to the
Gregorian equivalent. Further, some vernacular words have been trans-
lated or explained in the subject index.
While the footnotes in chapters provide titles and details of articles
from missionary journals, these have not been included in the bibliog-
raphy. The bibliography contains only the names of journals referred to.
My conversations with Tana Bhagats and the speeches of Tana leaders
were recorded. These were transcribed by Dr Sourav Kumar Mahanta,
who also helped me translate the pamphlets and petitions from Hindi to
English.
About the Author
Sangeeta Dasgupta teaches in the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal

Nehru University, New Delhi. She is also Senior Research Associate at the
Centre for World Environmental History, University of Sussex. She is co-
editor of The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi (Routledge,
2011), was guest editor for a special issue titled ‘Reading the Archive,
Reframing Adivasi Histories’ of The Indian Economic and Social History
Review, and co-guest editor for a special issue titled ‘Margins and the
State: Caste, "Tribe" and Criminality in South Asia’ of Studies in History.
Dasgupta has been Agatha Harrison Memorial Fellow at St Antony’s
College, University of Oxford; Asa Briggs Visiting Fellow at the
University of Sussex; and Visiting Fellow at the Fondation Maison des
Sciences de l’Homme, Paris. She has also been the recipient of fellow-
ships from the Charles Wallace India Trust, the Deutscher Akademischer
Austauschdienst; and the Nehru Trust for the Indian Collection at the
Victoria and Albert Museum.
List of Abbreviations
BL British Library, London

BSA Bihar State Archives, Patna
CRR Commissioner’s Record Room, Ranchi
GEL German (later Gossner) Evangelical Lutheran Mission
JMA Jesuit Mission Archive, Ranchi
RHL Rhodes House Library, Oxford
SPG Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts
WBSA West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata
CUL Cambridge University Library, Cambridge
Introduction
Reordering Adivasi Worlds
In recent times, adivasi communities have been increasingly visible as

subjects in debates around indigeneity, identity, development, and con-
version. Let me dwell on some such instances drawn from the state of
Jharkhand1 that are relevant for this book, vignettes from a much larger
canvas of events, sometimes mundane and sometimes astonishing, as a
variety of interests play out in postcolonial India.
In August 2017, the Jharkhand Legislative Assembly, despite opposi-
tion from regional political parties such as the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha
and the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha, passed the Religious Freedom Bill,
2017, which forbids ‘forcible conversion’, particularly of the Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes.2 The target of the bill is the Church and
its converts.3 The perception that Christian adivasis, despite their small
numbers, have had, compared to non-adivasis, better access to higher ed-
ucation and jobs, makes the Church bear the brunt of many an attack
by non-Christian adivasis. Taking advantage of, and sometimes inciting
the controversies around conversion, the Hindu Right, and especially the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has been advocating ghar wapasi
(homecoming or reconversion) in order to bring Christian adivasis,
1 The Jharkhand state was created in the year 2000 as a result of the oldest autonomy move-
ment in India. See S. Bosu Mullick, ‘Introduction’, in The Jharkhand Movement: Indigenous
People’s Struggle for Autonomy in India, Document No. 108, edited by R.D. Munda and S. Bosu
Mullick (Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs in collaboration with
Bindrai Institute for Research Study and Action, 2003), ii.
2 Various communities across India have been clubbed together under the official categories
of Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST). Belonging to the category of SC and ST en-
ables one to partake of the 15 and 7.5 per cent reservations in government sector jobs and public
universities. As per the Constitution, the Indian state recognizes about 744 STs. According to the
2011 Census of India, the STs constitute a little more than 8.6 per cent of the population.
3 S.K. Kiro, ‘Religious Freedom Bill Cleared by Jharkhand Assembly, Tribal leaders Call it “An
Attempt to Break Our Identity” ’, The Wire, 13 August 2017. Available at https://thewire.in/poli-
tics/religious-freedom-bill-jharkhand-tribes-sarnas, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
Reordering Adivasi Worlds. Sangeeta Dasgupta, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190127916.003.0001
2 Reordering Adivasi Worlds
regarded by them as erstwhile Hindus, into its fold. The difficulties faced
by adivasis in their everyday existence, it is believed, make them particu-
larly vulnerable to proselytizing by missionaries. At Bishunpur in Gumla
district of Jharkhand, Vikas Bharati, a non-governmental organization
set up by Ashok Bhagat, an RSS ideologue and recipient of the Padma
Shri in 2015, claims to represent adivasi interests and projects itself as
representing the real voice of the adivasis.4
In its opposition to Christian missionaries, the Hindu Right has been
supported by sections of adivasis who advocate Sarna Dharam.5 In 2013,
thousands of Sarna adivasis marched to a new Church on the outskirts of
Ranchi and threatened to remove the statue of Mary depicted in a white
sari with a red border, carrying an infant in a sling; the indigenization of
Mary, they argued, was part of the Church’s attempts to convert local adi-
vasis.6 Among Sarna adherents, there are, however, also those who have a
different agenda. Under the leadership of Karma Oraon, anthropologist
and Professor Emeritus at Ranchi University, they have been demanding
a separate Sarna code in the census. Without such an arrangement, they
argue, they are counted as Hindus, which they are not.7
Just a few months before the severely controversial Religious
Freedom Bill was enacted, the Jharkhand Legislative Assembly passed
in November 2016, without adequate discussion and debate, the most
contentious of amendments to the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act of 1908
that had aimed to protect the customary rights of adivasis to land.8
Under Raghubar Das, the first non-adivasi chief minister of Jharkhand,
4 D.S. Edmond, ‘Waiting for BJP, an RSS-backed NGO with Ashrams, Welfare Initiatives and
Funds’, The Indian Express, updated 26 November 2014. Available at https://indianexpress.com/

article/ india/ politics/ waiting- for- bjp- an- rss- backed- ngo- with- ashrams- welfare- initiatives-
and-funds, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
5 The Sarna Dharam is a religious practice among adivasis of Jharkhand who proclaim them-
selves to be worshippers of nature. Followers of Sarna celebrate, for example, the Sarhul festival
soon after the new leaves grow before the beginning of summer.
6 A. Yadav, ‘In Jharkhand’s Singhbhum, Religious Census Deepens Divide among Tribals’,
Scroll.in, 20 September 2015. Available at https://scroll.in/article/754985/in-jharkhands-

singhbhum-religion-census-deepens-divide-among-tribals, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
7 Kiro, ‘Religious Freedom Bill Cleared by Jharkhand Assembly’.
8 A.S.T. Das, ‘Jharkhand Erupts in Protest Against Changes in Land Laws’, Indian Express,
26 November 2016. Available at http://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2016/nov/25/

jharkhand-erupts-in-protest-against-changes-in-land-laws-1542593.html, last accessed on 28
December 2018. See also ‘Amendment in CNT/SPT is a Death Order of Already Marginalised in
Jharkhand’, Statement issued by CNT/SPT Act Bachao Andolan, New Delhi Chapter. Available
at https://www.facebook.com/Ulgulan.1908, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
Introduction 3
the suggested amendments, many adivasis believed, were neither unex-
pected, nor surprising. In response to the proposed amendments, there
were large protests across Jharkhand from different quarters of society,
and regional and national political parties such as the Jharkhand Mukti
Morcha, the All Jharkhand Students Union, and the Indian National
Congress (also referred to as Congress). The protest raised, in addi-
tion, broader issues of land acquisition and unaccounted police firings
on protesters in different parts of Jharkhand.9 The government was ul-
timately compelled to reconsider the bill. For adivasis facing displace-
ment, forced resettlement, and loss of rights to forests in Jharkhand, ‘jal,
jangal, jameen’,10 or ‘water, forests, land’, has emerged as an evocative
rallying slogan supported by rights activists, large sections of civil so-
ciety, and non-governmental agencies. Using the same slogan, although
in a somewhat different and more aggressive sense, young leaders of the
Pathalgadi movement, symbolically drawing upon the Munda custom of
placing a large stone to mark the death of a person, have erected huge
stone plaques, or pathalgadi, on which are inscribed excerpts from the
Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA), 1996, warning
outsiders against entering adivasi villages. In Kochang, a stronghold of
the Maoists, where the biggest pathalgadi installation ceremony was held
in February 2018, the plaque reads: ‘Adivasis have the right over the land
they live in. Adivasis are the owners of natural resources. Voter IDs and
Aadhaar cards are anti-adivasi documents.’11
The foregoing kaleidoscope of events is linked to the question of
identity, and clearly indicates that at many levels, adivasis are being
marginalized, their interests ignored. Yet, amidst all of this, there also
lies a story of the assertion of adivasi agency: the voices of adivasis, al-
though multiple and fractured, can be heard as they assert their iden-
tity, express their politics, and creatively negotiate with the state and its
9 ‘Jharkhand Opposition to Raise Land Acts, Police Firings in Assembly’, Business Standard,
Ranchi, 16 November 2016. Available at https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/

jharkhand-opposition-to-raise-land-acts-police-firings-in-assembly-116111600963_1.html,
last accessed on 28 December 2018.
10 B. D. Sharma, Tribal Affairs in India: The Crucial Transition (Mumbai and New Delhi: Sahyog
Pustak Kuteer [Trust] and India Centre for Human Rights and Law, 2001), 4.
11 A. Tewary, ‘The Pathalgadi Rebellion’, The Hindu, 13 April 2018. Available at https://www.
thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/the-pathalgadi-rebellion/article23530998.ece, last
accessed on 28 December 2018.
institutions. Adivasi communities, we need to recognize, are differenti-
ated among themselves along several axes: access to resources and ritual
importance based on lineages and patterns of migration; identification
with Christianity, the Sarna Dharam, local practices, or Hinduism; ac-
cess to education and government jobs; response to patronage extended
by political parties, non-governmental organizations, and religious
groups; and so on. The stories of adivasis, then, must be told not just to
express difference, but also to demonstrate the multiplicity of cultures
and myriad ways of thinking.
While I do not argue for an inevitable linearity, the genesis of some of
the issues raised above can be traced to the colonial past. And that is what
this book hopes to unravel. It seeks to question the postcolonial under-
standing of ‘tribe’12 by unpacking colonial ethnography, missionary nar-
ratives, and anthropological writings; it explores issues of adivasi identity
and resistance, and shows how contemporary adivasi protest draws
upon memories of the past. It is part of the ongoing dialogue among
those who write adivasis into the larger project of history-writing.13
12 Subsequent uses of the word ‘tribe’ or ‘tribal’ will not be within inverted commas unless
required.
13 Woven around the adivasi, some of the monographs and collections of essays that have
been published in the last decade and a half are as follows: A. Prasad, Against Ecological
Romanticism: Verrier Elwin and the Making of an Anti-modern Tribal Identity (New Delhi: Three
Essays Collective, 2003); D. J. Rycroft, Representing Rebellion: Visual Aspects of Counter-
insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005); A. Baviskar, In the
Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1995); P. Banerjee, Politics of Time: Primitives and History-Writing in a Colonial
Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); S. Ratnagar, Being Tribal (Delhi: Primus
Books, 2010); A. Shah, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism,
and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010); B. Bhukya,
Subjugated Nomads: The Lambadas under the Rule of the Nizams (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan,
2010); D.J. Rycroft and S. Dasgupta, eds, The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi
(London and New York: Routledge, 2011); B. Pati, ed., Adivasis in Colonial India: Survival,
Resistance and Negotiation (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2011); S. Das Gupta, Adivasis and the
Raj: Socio-economic Transition of The Hos, 1820–1932 (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2011); S.
Das Gupta and R. Basu, eds, Narratives from the Margins: Aspects of Adivasi History in India (New
Delhi: Primus Books, 2012); C. Bates and A. Shah, eds, Savage Attack: Tribal Insurgency in India
(New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2014); M. Carrin, P. Kanungo and G. Toffin, eds, Politics of
Ethnicity in India, Nepal and China (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2014); S. Dasgupta, ed., ‘Reading
the Archive, Reframing Adivasi Histories’, Special Issue, The Indian Economic and Social History
Review 53, no. 1 (January–March 2016): 1–157; M. Radhakrishna, ed., First Citizens: Studies
on Adivasis, Tribals, and Indigenous Peoples in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2016); A.K. Sen, Indigeneity, Landscape and History: Adivasi Self-fashioning in India (New
Delhi: Routledge, 2017); and B. Bhukya, The Roots of the Periphery: A History of the Gonds of
Deccan India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017). Journals such as Adivasi, a journal of
the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Research and Training Institute, Bhubaneswar, and
Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies have also been published.
Introduction 5
At the same time, it will provide, I hope, a critical lens through which
other non-adivasi worlds can be viewed. It reflects my own dilemmas
as I combine my search in the colonial archive with experiences in the
‘field’—conversations with my informants, copious recording of oral nar-
ratives, and reading of pamphlets and petitions distributed in the streets
of Ranchi. What sense do I make of the complex interplay between the
past and the present, the oral and the written? How do I analyse the con-
tending ‘truths’ that are produced in narratives woven around adivasi
protest, the claims that are made, the politics that is expressed?
This book is, more specifically, a story of the Oraons14 and of the Tana
Bhagats (also referred to as Tanas)15 in Chhotanagpur, a part of the pre-
sent state of Jharkhand. Since I argue for the importance of ‘adivasi’ as a
category and emphasize the necessity to move away from the problematic
category of tribe, I must begin by analysing ethnographic, missionary,
and anthropological narratives on the tribe in the colonial period that
continue to have resonances in the postcolonial. This is what the first sec-
tion of the book deals with. Through a focus on the Oraon, it questions
the stereotypes and essentialisms associated with the term ‘tribe’; it exam-
ines the tensions in the possible and continuing usages of this category; it
seeks to unravel the pasts of those we designate today as the tribe and un-
cover the different ways in which the markers for identifying a tribe were
generated and acknowledged in colonial and postcolonial times.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conceptions of the tribe, with
all its divergences, were not just abstract imaginaries but determined in
many ways colonial interventions in Chhotanagpur. These affected the
shaping of customary rights in fields and forests; the understanding of
the rural world and its legal terminologies; the making of reports and the
promulgation of acts; the perception of adivasi customs and practices; and
the responses to their modes of protest. The second section deals with the
reordering of rural and social landscapes and the ways in which the Tana
Bhagats, a marginalized section in the internally fractured community
14 The Oraons are adivasis who live primarily across central and eastern India; they are also to
be found in Assam, Tripura, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where they went largely as
migrant labourers to work on tea plantations and to clear forests for cultivation.
15 From among the Oraons, some have become Tana Bhagats; the movement began in 1914, as
our colonial records inform us, when Jatra Bhagat emerged as the Tana guru.
of the Oraons, responded to the different interventions in their world.
Questioning the assumption that the Oraons lived in the ‘shadows of the
state’,16 shared an egalitarian structure, and pursued common economic,
social, and religious practices, this section delineates the reordering of the
Oraon world as the Tana Bhagats negotiated with the sarkar, sahukar, and
zamindar (state, moneylender, and landlord), questioned the hierarchies
within the Oraon world, and engaged with Gandhi and the Congress. It
discusses how the Tana Bhagats continue in postcolonial times with their
poignant dreams and negotiate with the sarkar—government officials in
Jharkhand and the Congress high-command in Delhi—at different levels,
drawing upon diverse experiences and distinctive memories.
Authenticating Voices, Contending Narratives
Determining the parameters for identifying a tribe is an onerous task for

the Indian government.17 As different communities vie for recognition as
Scheduled Tribe, judicial and legislative enactments, along with battles
in courts, reflect the use of widely varying criteria for understanding the
characteristics of adivasi communities.18 Texts of ethnographers, mis-
sionaries, and anthropologists written in the colonial period are referred
to in this context. Competing communities, and groups within commu-
nities, have repeatedly made claims to recognition as Scheduled Tribe
as idealized notions of culture, identity, and difference are projected.
It is in this context that I begin this section with a legal case—Kartik
16 This expression is borrowed from the title of Alpa Shah’s monograph (see Shah, In the
Shadows of the State).

17 ‘Rights Activist Demands ST Status for Van Gujjars in U’Khand’, Press Trust of India,
Dehradun, 15 June 2013. Available at https://www.news18.com/news/india/rights-activist-

demands-st-status-for-van-gujjars-616276.html, last accessed on 28 December 2018. See also
P. Gooch, ‘We are Van Gujjars’, in Indigeneity in India, edited by B.G. Karlsson and T.B. Subba
(London: Kegan Paul, 2006), 97–116; and T. Middleton, The Demands of Recognition: State
Anthropology and Ethnopolitics in Darjeeling (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).
18 See Kartik Oraon vs David Munzni and Anr. on 14 November 1963, available at www.
indiankanoon.org/doc/204475, last accessed on 28 December 2018; and N.E. Horo vs Jahan

Ara Jaipal Singh on 2 February 1972, available at www.indiankanoon.org/doc/453229, last ac-
cessed on 28 December 2018. The Indian government’s formal criteria for Scheduled Tribe rec-
ognition are as follows: (a) indication of primitive traits; (b) distinct culture; (c) geographical
isolation; (d) shyness of contact with the community at large; and (e) backwardness. See The
National Commission for Scheduled Tribes Handbook 2005 (Government of India, 2005), quoted
in Middleton, The Demands of Recognition, 9.
Introduction 7
Oraon versus David Munzni and Anr. Filed by Kartik Oraon against the
Protestant convert David Munzni before the Election Tribunal at Ranchi
in 1963, this case was ultimately resolved in the Supreme Court in 1967
and dealt with the question of whether race or religion determined
‘tribal’ identity. Interestingly, the memory of Kartik Oraon was resur-
rected in Jharkhand in the controversy around the implementation of the
Religious Freedom Bill, 2017. A day before the anti-conversion bill was to
be tabled in the Legislative Assembly, the Raghubar Das-led Jharkhand
state government posted a highly controversial advertisement in news-
papers invoking the name of Kartik Oraon. The advertisement stated that
the dream of Kartik Oraon would be fulfilled with the implementation of
the Religious Freedom Bill.19
This section engages with the production of colonial knowledge and
the creation of social categories, on which much has already been written
in recent years.20 The dominant strand of postcolonial historiography21
talks about the obsessive need of the colonial state, an ‘ethnographic state’
as Nicholas Dirks terms it, to collect information for purposes of govern-
ance; it focuses upon the production of colonial knowledge through the
onslaught and imposition of new, imported epistemic regimes of Western/
European knowledge systems that swamped the colonized in the process.
The revisionist critique,22 on the other hand, views indigenous intellectuals
19 Apoorvanand, ‘Jharkhand Government is Misusing Gandhi, Public Funds to Fuel Anti-
Christian Hate’, The Wire, 12 August 2017. Available at https://thewire.in/politics/jharkhand-

gandhi-advertisement-christians, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
20 The relationship between knowledge and power was put forward in the context of early
modern Europe by Michel Foucault in the 1960s. Edward Said’s Orientalism draws upon this
argument (see E. Said, Orientalism [New York: Pantheon Books, 1978]), and has, in turn, greatly
influenced postcolonial historiography.
21 See R. Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); B.S. Cohn, An Anthropologist
among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987); and N. Dirks,
Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001).
22 See E.F. Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India 1795–1895
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence
Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996); S. Bayly, ‘Caste and Race in the Colonial Ethnography of India’, in The Concept of
Race in South Asia, edited by P. Robb (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); T.R. Trautmann,
Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); N. Peabody, ‘Cents,
Sense, Census: Human Inventories in Late Precolonial and Early Colonial India’, Comparative
Studies in Society and History 43, no. 4 (October 2001): 819–50; P.B. Wagoner, ‘Precolonial
Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge’, Comparative Studies in Society and
History 45, no. 4 (October 2003): 783–814; and S. Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in
South Asia, Past and Present (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013).
as active, although unequal, partners who contributed towards a dia-
logue between the colonizer and the colonized. Others, like Padmanabh
Samarendra, have gone beyond the binary of discontinuity and continuity
and underline the multiple spheres of knowledge-production within the
apparatus of the state; the colonial state did not necessarily have an une-
quivocal or decisive say in all these spheres, Samarendra argues.23
While caste has emerged as the ‘key discursive category’ for histor-
ians who have analysed ‘discourses of colonial social knowledge and
administrative policies’, 24 the concept of tribe remains comparatively un-
explored. Indeed, studies on the concept of tribe in colonial and postcolo-
nial times have been neither vast nor varied. But there have been shifts in
approaches that one needs to recognize. In the 1960s, the predicament of
distinguishing between caste and tribe had begun to haunt anthropolo-
gists, who began to contest the idea that the tribe referred to commu-
nities that were bounded, unchanging, isolated, and undifferentiated.25
F.G. Bailey’s model of a tribe-caste continuum,26 or Surajit Sinha’s modi-
fied version of ‘continua’ along two sets of polarities—‘tribe-caste’ in the
framework of extended kinship and ‘tribe-peasant’ in the framework of
territorial systems27—recognized the difficulties of a complete separa-
tion between caste and tribe. S.C. Dube argued against tribes ‘living in
isolation’ and pointed to their patterns of migrations.28 Andre Beteille
suggested the need for recognizing ‘the co-existence of the tribal and
other types of social organization within the same social and historical
context’.29
23 P. Samarendra, ‘Anthropological Knowledge and Statistical Frame: Caste in the Census in
Colonial India’, in Caste in Modern India, A Reader, Vol. 1, edited by S. Sarkar and T. Sarkar
(Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), 255–96.
24 S. Sarkar and T. Sarkar, ‘Preface and Acknowledgements’, in Caste in Modern India,
A Reader, Vol. I, edited by S. Sarkar and T. Sarkar (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), ix.
25 See F.G. Bailey, ‘ “Tribe” and “Caste” in India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 5, no. 1
(1961): 7–19; S. Sinha, ‘Tribe-Caste and Tribe-Peasant Continua in Central India’, Man In India
45, no.1 (January-March 1965): 57–83; N.K. Bose, Tribal Life in India (New Delhi: National Book
Trust, 1971); and A. Béteille, ‘Tribe and Peasantry’, in Six Essays in Comparative Sociology (Delhi
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 58–74. This shift in the1960s, Surajit Sinha points
out, was because Indian anthropology and sociology moved under the influence of American
anthropology, leading to micro-studies of culture change.
26 Bailey, ‘ “Tribe” and “Caste” in India’, 13–14.
27 Sinha, ‘Tribe-Caste and Tribe-Peasant Continua in Central India’, 61.
28 S.C. Dube, ‘Introduction’, in Tribal Heritage of India: Ethnicity, Identity and Interaction, Vol. 1,
edited by S.C. Dube (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), 2–3.
29 A. Béteille, ‘On the Concept of Tribe’, International Social Science Journal 32, no. 4
(1980): 826.
Introduction 9
A critique of the category of tribe is thus not novel. By the 1990s, how-
ever, this question was reframed in terms of whether the tribe was a
colonial construct, and how far the discipline of anthropology was impli-
cated in this construction.30 African and Pacific specialists responded to
some of these debates within the discipline of anthropology,31 debunking
the colonial stereotype of tribe as misleading and inaccurate in under-
standing realities.32 The debate moved forward with the UN Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; scholars came to be increasingly
perceived as advocating particular political interests.33
30 See S. Devalle, Discourses of Ethnicity: Culture and Protest in Jharkhand (New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 1992); B.B. Chaudhuri, ‘The Myth of the Tribe? The Question Reconsidered,’
The Calcutta Historical Journal 16, no. 1 (1994): 125–56; C. Bates, ‘Race, Caste and Tribe: The
Early Origins of Anthropometry’, Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies, no. 3, 1995, 1–34;
F. Padel, The Sacrifice of Human Being: British Rule and the Konds of Orissa (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1995); N. Sundar, Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History
of Bastar, 1854–1996 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); A. Skaria, ‘Shades of
Wildness: Tribe, Caste and Gender in Western India’, Journal of Asian Studies 56, no. 3
(August 1997): 726–45; A. Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western
India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); S. Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, 1200–1901
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); V. Damodaran, ‘Colonial Constructions
of the “Tribe” in India: The Case of Chotanagpur’, Indian Historical Review 33, no. 1 (January
2006): 44–75; W. van Schendel, ‘The Dangers of Belonging: Tribes, Indigenous Peoples and
Homelands in South Asia’, in The Politics of Belonging in India, edited by D.J. Rycroft and S.
Dasgupta (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 19–43; and U. Chandra, ‘Liberalism and
Its Other: The Politics of Primitivism in Colonial and Postcolonial Indian Law’, Law & Society
Review 47, no. 1 (2013): 135–68.
31 See, for example, T. Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca
Press, 1973); J.A. Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative
Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions and Texts (London: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
G.W. Stocking, ed., Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1983); J. Clifford and G. Marcus, eds, Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); J. and J. Comaroff,
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Colorado and Oxford: Westview Press, 1992); P.
Pels and O. Salemink, eds, Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); and H. Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social
History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
32 See, for example, A. Southall, ‘The Illusion of Tribe’, Journal of Asian and African Studies
5, Issue 1–2 (1970): 28–50; J. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1979); T. Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in The Invention
of Tradition, edited by E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), 211–62; L. Vail, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1989); and T. Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of
Colonial Africa’, in Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa, edited by T. Ranger
and O. Vaughan (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1993), 62–111. For an excellent survey ar-
ticle that explores a range of studies regarding the ‘invention of tradition’, ‘the making of cus-
tomary law’, and the ‘creation of tribalism’ since the 1980s, see T. Spear, ‘Neo-traditionalism
and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa’, The Journal of African History 44, no. 1
(2003): 3–27.
33 B.G. Karlsson and T.B. Subba, ‘Introduction’, in Indigeneity in India, edited by B.G. Karlsson
and T.B. Subba (London: Kegan Paul, 2006), 1–17.

Recent discussions on the concept of tribe in India oscillate between two
extreme positions. On the one hand are Susan Devalle,34 Ajay Skaria,35 and
Sumit Guha36 who argue that tribe is a ‘colonial category, ahistorical and
sociologically groundless’,37 ‘a product of colonial theories and practices’
and not a ‘continuation’ of ‘Indian practices’.38 Rather than discussing the
specificities of local experiences in the Indian context that, in addition to
Western thought and Victorian anthropology, structured the idea of tribe,
Skaria argues that it was the interaction between the discourses of anachro-
nism and Orientalism that ‘gave force to colonial categories’. To understand
a tribe, Skaria accords primacy to ‘anachronistic thought’ that ‘ranked . . . so-
cieties in relation to each other, situating them above all in relation to time,
or, in relation to the modern time that was epitomized by Europe’.39 The op-
erative categories in precolonial Indian society, Guha points out, were not
caste and tribe.40 The tribe–caste binary emerged out of late colonial racial
ethnology which transformed Indian society’s understanding of itself.41 It is
time to discard the ‘Victorian anthropological baggage’ and restore ‘the for-
gotten indigenized term “khum” which might serve for all ascriptive social
categories, both tribe and caste’.42
Others uphold the role of indigenous agency in the production of the
concept.43 Colonial epistemology, Vinita Damodaran argues—even as it
drew upon eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions of race, an en-
vironmental determinism, and a humanitarian concern—aligned itself
with Brahmanical notions of caste, values, and laws.44 Colonial discourse
analysed real landscape differences, and did not conjure an imaginary
landscape.45 The complex history of Aryan migration into Chhotanagpur
34 Devalle, Discourses of Ethnicity.

35 Skaria, ‘Shades of Wildness’.
36 Guha, Environment and Ethnicity.
37 Devalle, Discourses of Ethnicity, 50.
38 Skaria, ‘Shades of Wildness’, 730
39 Skaria, ‘Shades of Wildness’, 727.
40 S. Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present.
41 Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, 10–29.
42 S. Guha, ‘States, Tribes, Castes: A Historical Re-exploration in Comparative Perspective’,
Economic and Political Weekly L, nos. 46 and 47 (21 November 2015): 56–7.
43 See B.B. Chaudhuri, ‘The Myth of the Tribe? The Question Reconsidered’, where Chaudhuri
critiques Devalle, Discourses of Ethnicity. See also Damodaran, ‘Colonial Constructions of the
“Tribe” in India’.
44 Damodaran, ‘Colonial Constructions of the “Tribe” in India’, 44.
Introduction 11
from a very early period led to an increasing marginalization of the non-
Aryan tribes in the precolonial world; this was abetted by colonial inter-
vention. The colonial stereotype of a simple tribal people who needed
protection against exploitation thus had a historical basis. Revisionists
and postmodern readings of tribal history, she argues, by questioning
the notion of ecological noble savages, pristine forests, and isolated
tribal peoples, attribute no theoretical legitimacy or historic validity to
the claims of indigenous people for autonomy.46 Thus, Damodaran ar-
gues for a long-term structural continuity between the precolonial and
colonial periods.47 Yet, her hypothesis proceeds through questionable
binaries—Aryans–non-Aryans, Hindus–tribes, outsiders–insiders, and
so on. A greater problem lies in the seamless continuity posited between
Brahmanical ideas and Orientalism, and between precolonial under-
standings and colonial discourse.
There are still others who veer between these two rather contradictory
positions on the notion of tribe48 as a colonial construct. Sanjukta Das
Gupta, for example, argues that the ‘colonial rulers’ had ‘appropriated and
restructured certain pre-existing social norms and thereby introduced
new attributes, meanings and applications in the communities they iden-
tified as tribes’.49 However, she is somewhat uneasy about accepting it as
such since she sees the tribe as an ontological reality, pushing its presence
to precolonial times. As Das Gupta writes, since precolonial times, ‘tribes
were distinct from Hindu caste society and were separated and distanced
from it by reciprocal perceptions of difference’.50
Uday Chandra moves beyond these binaries as he traces the contin-
uing tension between the ‘constitutional ideal of liberal citizenship and
the disturbing reality of tribal subjecthood produced by colonial and
post-colonial Indian states’.51 Primitive populations were, paradoxi-
cally, subjects of both improvement and protection, Chandra argues, as he
46 Damodaran thereby questions Sumit Guha’s argument that colonial regimes had invented
caste and tribe out of pre-colonial systems that were mobile. See V. Damodaran, ‘Review, S. Guha’,
Journal of Political Ecology: Case Studies in History and Society 7, no. 1 (2007): 12–17. Available at
http://www.library.arizona.edu/ej/jpe/jpewem.html, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
48 Das Gupta, Adivasis and the Raj, 7–12.
49 Das Gupta, Adivasis and the Raj, 10.
50 Das Gupta, Adivasis and the Raj, 10.
51 Chandra, ‘Liberalism and Its Other’, 136.
traces the intellectual career of primitivism—with both its continuities
and changes—as an ideology of rule from its origins in Victorian India
to the postcolonial present.52 Limiting the multifaceted strands that went
into the making of the idea of tribal subjecthood to a monolithic strand
of primitivism, I assert, is restrictive. The criteria and practices of tribal
recognition were ‘constantly revised, torn asunder, and revised again’; its
operatives, as Townsend Middleton demonstrates, worked in dialogue
with anthropological and proto-anthropological thinkers throughout the
European world.53 Moreover, as I will go on to argue, we need to recog-
nize the changing role of adivasi agency in structuring the idea of tribe
and, for that matter, the biases of ‘native’ informants who often came
from the upper echelons of society, and worked in close tandem with co-
lonial officers.
Taking up the Oraons as a case study, I draw upon, and move beyond,
some of these debates. As British officials, missionaries, and anthropolo-
gists, despite mutual differences, became part of a project to grapple with
unknown lands of Chhotanagpur and its unknown peoples, the tribes in
Chhotanagpur became subjects of administrative attention, missionary
concern, and anthropological interest. While the categories of caste and
tribe were interchangeably used in early colonial records and there is ev-
idence of the existence of fluid relations between communities, points al-
ready made by scholars such as Devalle, Skaria, and Guha among others,54
by the end of the nineteenth century there had emerged in official per-
ception distinct tribes in Chhotanagpur: Oraons, Mundas, Kharias, Hos,
and so on. How were differences between these tribes inscribed in colo-
nial records? The Oraons, as one of the tribes in Chhotanagpur, as argued
in Chapter 1, traversed across diverse categories—mlecchhas, chuars,
dhangars, village community, race, and tribe—in nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century records. These shifts within the understanding of the
term tribe, as argued, were related to, among other things, the working
of official minds, changing assumptions, and differing terminologies;
the tensions within the discipline of anthropology and its application in
the colony; varying ideologies of governance and the imperatives of rule;
52 Chandra, ‘Liberalism and Its Other’, 138.

53 Middleton, The Demands of Recognition, 60.
54 Devalle, Discourses of Ethnicity; Skaria, Hybrid Histories; and Guha, Environment and
Ethnicity.
Introduction 13
and interactions with the ‘native’ populace. I do not, however, suggest ar-
bitrariness in the choice of categories; one can identify patterns within
colonial representations. In the pre-1850s, colonial administrators were
more dependent on indigenous voices and local categories as they sought
to understand Chhotanagpur, ‘a little-known province of the empire’, to
borrow the title of F.B. Bradley-Birt’s book,55 and to address repeated pro-
tests by Oraons and other communities in the region. This dependence
came to be gradually dissipated as disciplinary concerns came to struc-
ture colonial representations. The category of tribe was thus continually
improvised upon in response to changing situations; emerging discip-
lines intersected with personal experiences and moulded interpretations.
And amidst the deviations and dissonances within official voices, de-
scriptive ways of understanding the Oraons were transformed as the tribe
was defined in an all-India official report—the census report of 1901.
The missionaries, as outlined in Chapter 2, by engaging in the eve-
ryday concerns of the people as they negotiated with several categories—
heathen, pagan, savage, race, tribe, and aboriginal—and by publishing
ethnographic accounts of the Oraons, collecting their ‘fast-vanishing’
folklore, and giving a structure to their history, contributed to the making
of Oraon identity. When they initially encountered the Oraons in un-
familiar lands, the missionaries drew upon their experiences and inter-
actions in the mission field but framed their depictions in biblical and
evangelical language: the Oraons were represented as heathen and savage
races, immersed in idolatry and demonology, awaiting salvation. Religion
here was the defining feature. However, by the 1850s, as the missionaries
engaged sometimes consciously, and often tangentially, with the emer-
gence of ethnography and anthropology that gave new meanings to race
and tribe, missionary narratives were gradually transformed: the Oraons
became a part of the universal category of tribe; their ‘primitive’ religion
was termed as ‘animism’. I would, however, take the above argument fur-
ther. If missionary writings were powerful in understanding the Oraons
55 F.B. Bradley-Birt, Chota Nagpur: A Little-known Province of the Empire (New Delhi and
Madras: Asian Educational Services, 1998). The book was first published in London by Smith,
Elder& Co. in 1903. Bradley-Birt, an English member of the Indian Civil Service, began his
career in 1896 as an assistant magistrate and collector and was initially assigned to Khulna,
Midnapore, Hooghly, and Calcutta. He later became commander-in-chief in India. Bradley-Birt
wrote both fiction and non-fiction based on his travels in India, Persia, and the Middle East.
in the middle of the nineteenth century, paradoxically, the voice of the
missionary lost its salience and became a part of bureaucratic memory
once official ethnographic texts came to be written.
The anthropologist Sarat Chandra Roy, as elaborated in Chapter 3,
caught within the traditions of British social anthropology and its links
with the colonial state on the one hand, and seeking, on the other, to es-
tablish a unique ‘Indian’ approach to anthropology, veered between
shifting notions of denigration and appreciation of tribes and tribal cul-
ture as he wrote about the Oraons of Chhotanagpur. An analysis of some
of Roy’s writings on the Oraons published between 1915 and 1937, along
with his private papers, would reveal these different shades of opinion
that were reflected in Roy’s work as he sought to understand the Oraons
and the category of tribe. Again, as he organized his thoughts in the ver-
nacular and in English, Roy gave different descriptions of the Oraons. The
Oraon jati in the Bengali journal Prabasi56 became the ‘purely aboriginal
tribe’57 in The Oraons of Chota Nagpur as Roy, the anthropologist, moved
away from writing for the literate Bengali elite and addressed an aca-
demic, anthropologically oriented audience. The Oraons, who were de-
picted in Prabasi as ‘having the capability of reaching the same standard
as their Hindu and Muslim neighbours’58 were found under the influence
of Victorian evolutionary anthropology to be ‘rude’ and ‘primitive’.59
Many Narratives of Tana Pasts
Colonial ethnographic and anthropological texts were, on the one hand,

describing communities and defining categories. On the other, colo-
nial administrators believed they had to reckon with ‘irrational primi-
tives’ who thought that ‘bullets would turn into water’, with ‘badmashes’
(wretches) who ‘tumbled down mountains’ and were ‘bloodthirsty in
56 S.C. Roy, ‘Chotanagpurer Oraon Jati’ [The Oraon Jati of Chotanagpur], Prabasi (Baishakh,
Ashar, Srabon, 1320 [April–May, May–June, June–July, 1913]): 73–82.

57 S.C. Roy, The Oraons of Chota Nagpur (Ranchi: Man in India Office, 1984 [1915]), 8.
58 S. C. Roy, ‘Oraon der Aitijya’ [Oraon Tradition], Prabasi (Kartik 1321 [October–
November 1914]), 89–91.

59 Roy, The Oraons of Chota Nagpur, 124.
Introduction 15
their vengeance’, with ‘lunatics’ who deserved to be imprisoned.60 This
stereotype of the irrational, unchanging, and primitive adivasi with his
bow and arrow, forever on the verge of rebellion, was reflected in nation-
alist narratives as well.61 It was in order to counter this image that Jaipal
Singh Munda, a leader of the Jharkhand Party, sarcastically stated during
the Constituent Assembly debates on the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of
the Constitution: ‘I am very sorry to disappoint . . . that, in supporting
the Fifth Schedule, I did not dress in my bows and arrows, the loin cloth,
feathers, earrings, my drum and my flute.’62
Early studies of adivasi resistance reflected this idea of tribal primi-
tiveness.63 As communities considered to be distant from Western ideas
of modernity and progress, their acts of protest were believed to be
spontaneous. In the 1960s, even when there was an attempt by histor-
ians to restore to adivasis their ‘rightful place’ in Indian history,64 there
was a continuation of the premise of earlier nationalist narratives: adi-
vasi movements were assessed largely in terms of their contribution to
the nation and its making.65 Operating within the rhetoric of modernity
common in colonial and nationalist narratives, their mode of protest,
located within an evolutionary schema, was initially regarded as mille-
narian;66 it assumed an ‘agrarian’ dimension when it confronted colonial
60 See Chapter 4. For a detailed analysis of official records, see R. Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-
insurgency’, in Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by R.
Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 1–42.
61 One of the earliest exceptional attempts, however, to study adivasi protest not as ‘incidents
and episodes’ or as sporadic acts of violence but as ‘movements’, appeared in Man in India as
early as 1945 (see Rebellion Number, Man in India 25, no. 4 [December 1945]).
62 Constituent Assembly of India Debates [Proceedings], 9,132,219. Available at https://www.
constitutionofindia.net/constitution_assembly_debates/volume/9/1949-09-05, last accessed on

28 December 2018.
63 Chandra, ‘Liberalism and Its Other’. See also Banerjee, Politics of Time.
64 See, for example, K.K. Datta, The Santal Insurrection of 1855–57 (Calcutta: University of
Calcutta Press, 1940); D.N. Baskey, Saontal Ganasangramer Itihas (Calcutta: Pearl Publishers,
1976); J.C. Jha, The Kol Insurrection of Chota-Nagpur (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1964);
K.S. Singh, The Dust-Storm and the Hanging Mist: A Study of Birsa Munda and His Movement in
Chotanagpur, 1874–1901 (Calcutta: Firma KL Mukhopadhyay, 1966); and J.C. Jha, The Bhumij
Revolt, 1832–33: Ganga Narain’s Hangama or Turmoil (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1967).
65 As K.S. Singh put it, the story of the people of India, or of their freedom movement, will
not be complete till the spotlight of research is turned on the life and movement of the tribals
through the ages.
66 Stephen Fuchs was one of the first to use the term ‘millenarian’. This was later used by,
among others, K.S. Singh.

intervention into the land structure; such movements assumed a political
form only after integration with national politics.67
The Subaltern Studies initiative in the 1980s that had sought to in-
scribe the marginalized, or ‘a people without a history’ to quote Ranajit
Guha, into the pages of history was undertaken precisely to rectify this
form of history writing. Guha talked about the ‘triumvirate’, the ‘sarkari,
sahukari, and zamindari’ nexus (collusion between the state, money-
lender, and landlord);68 David Hardiman referred to the ‘spirit of resist-
ance which incorporated a consciousness of “the adivasi” against the
“outsider” ’;69 Partha Chatterjee saw community movements (and in this
case adivasi movements) as reflecting the natural solidarity of the com-
munity.70 Despite their contribution to new modes of history-writing,
subaltern historians have been critiqued from both within and outside
their frame.71 Earlier historiographical approaches, I assert, despite dif-
ferences, remained constricted by a fixed set of suppositions. Conflict
was inevitably read as the resistance of adivasis against non-adivasis.
The Subaltern Collective had thus accepted, as Skaria argues, the ‘basic
terms of the colonial distinction’—the separation of the worlds of the
adivasi and non-adivasi—although they had inverted ‘the valences’.72
And as Sumit Sarkar has pointed out in the context of the later Subaltern
Studies writings (to which Chatterjee’s essay belongs),73 ‘in the name of
theory, then, a tendency emerged towards essentialising the categories of
67 K.S. Singh, ed., Tribal Situation in India: Proceedings of a Seminar (Simla: Indian Institute of
Advanced Study, 1972), xix. It is paradoxical that Singh, while in the anthropological tradition of
the 1960s, was often unable to draw sharp distinctions between the tribal and non-tribal worlds,
focused upon an insider–outsider, or a tribal–non-tribal divide in his study of protest move-
ments in colonial India.
68 R. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1983), 8.

69 D. Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 15.
70 P. Chatterjee, ‘Communities and the Nation’, in The Nation and Its Fragments (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 220–39. Chatterjee writes: ‘They claim precisely the right against ex-
ternality and secession, they seek determinate existence precisely in “property” and “rep-
resentation” through collectively recognised heads, they speak in the language of love and of
self-recognition through the free surrender of individual will to others in the community’ (see
Chatterjee, ‘Communities and the Nation’, 231–2).
71 See, for example, R.C. Guha, ‘Subaltern and Bhadralok Studies’, Economic and Political
Weekly 30, no. 19 (August 1999): 2056–8; and S. Sarkar, ‘The Decline of the Subalterns in
Subaltern History’, in Writing Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997),
82–108.
72 A. Skaria, ‘Being Jangli: The Politics of Wildness’, Studies in History XIV, no. 2 (July–
December 1998): 194.

73 Chatterjee, ‘Communities and the Nation’, 220–39.
Introduction 17
“subaltern” and “autonomy”, in the sense of assigning to them more or
less absolute, fixed, decontextualized meanings and qualities’.74
In the more recent historiographical turn, the adivasi is seen as a
modern subject negotiating with modern state power. Alpa Shah, for ex-
ample, dismantles the representation of adivasi societies by indigenous
activists as egalitarian and communitarian and unpacks the ‘dark side’
of the discourse of indigeneity to show how it marginalizes the ‘poorest’
sections among the adivasis who remain ‘in the shadows of the state’.75
Das Gupta questions the supposed communal nature of adivasi landown-
ership and argues that the village-based social organization of the Hos
was partly designed to ensure the control of the founders of the village
over the village resources, a control rendered essential in view of the scar-
city of resources and the unstable nature of agricultural production.76
Chandra moves beyond the analytic of ‘millenarianism’77 through which
resistance and rebellion by ‘primitive’ subjects under colonial rule have
been typically understood by historians and social scientists. ‘Tribal’ re-
ligious traditions, he notes, were far more deeply intertwined with the
apparently profane workings of modern statecraft, agrarian political
economy, and the politics of conversion.78 Tanika Sarkar points out that
in the designation of selfhood of the ‘adivasi rebel’, there is no ‘true, es-
sential core identity’ as subaltern historians had earlier suggested. Rather,
what can be demonstrated is ‘the fragility of all naming’ as the ‘rebel’ dis-
played plural identities.79
In this quest for writing adivasi histories of protest, there has been, and
increasingly so in recent years, a critical, though differentiated, engage-
ment with the archive. How is one to record the experiences of people
74 Sarkar, ‘The Decline of the Subalterns in Subaltern History’, 88.

75 Shah, In the Shadows of the State, 7–8.
76 Das Gupta, Adivasis and the Raj, 36–7.
77 ‘Millenarianism typically denotes an ideology of social protest in which those who have not
fully adapted to the demands of modernity fall back on pre-modern ‘religion’ to express their
material and non-material grievances, usually unsuccessfully’(see U. Chandra, ‘Flaming Fields
and Forest Fires: Agrarian Transformations and the Making of Birsa Munda’s Rebellion’, The
Indian Economic and Social History Review 53, no. 1 [January–March 2016]: 69–70).
78 Chandra, ‘Flaming Fields and Forest Fires’, 71.
79 T. Sarkar, ‘Rebellion as Modern Self-fashioning: A Santal Movement in Colonial Bengal’,
in The Politics of Belonging in India, edited by D.J. Rycroft and S. Dasgupta (London and
New York: Routledge, 2011), 66–7. In this article, she revisits her earlier analysis of Jitu Santal’s
movement that appeared as a part of the original Subaltern Studies project (see T. Sarkar, ‘Jitu
Santal’s Movement in Malda: A Study in Tribal Protest’, in Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South
Asian History and Society, edited by R. Guha [Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985], 136–65).
who appear only occasionally in the colonial archive and are subjects of
‘salvage ethnology’ in anthropological literature? Responses have been
varied. K.S. Singh, one of the earliest to write on adivasi protest, went
beyond the colonial archive and referred to songs that celebrated Birsa
Munda’s ulgulan (great revolt); yet, these songs, never analysed, were
merely included in the appendix of his text. An extract from a song even-
tually became the title of Singh’s monograph, The Dust-Storm and the
Hanging Mist.80 Guha talked about the ‘insignificant . . . actual volume of
evidence yielded by songs, rhymes, ballads, anecdotes etc.’ compared to
the ‘size of documentation available from elitist sources’;81 he therefore
advocated ‘reading against the grain’. The colonial archive was a ‘record of
observations’ that was contaminated by ‘bias, judgement and opinion’;82
it was, Guha argued, a ‘prose of counter-insurgency’.83 To counter the ‘in-
tractability’84 of the archive, however, it was ‘possible for the historian
to use this impoverished and almost technical language as a clue to the
antonymies which speak for a rival consciousness—that of the rebel’.85
Hardiman, from the Subaltern Collective, used his field notes to trace ‘the
origins and transformations of the devi’,86 but crafted his interpretation of
adivasi resistance largely from documents in the colonial archive. Skaria,
writing Hybrid Histories, engaged more centrally with oral narratives of
the Dangis, the vadilcha goth or stories from the past, which showed the
tensions and the ‘irreducible distance’87 between oral narratives and ar-
chival sources. Discussions on the ‘archival turn’—perspectives on the
archive as an institution or as a symbol of knowledge and power; the
practices of reading and writing, seeing and knowing, that are contin-
gent on the archive; and the systems of regulation and coercion that the
archive imposes88—have only sharpened the unease already expressed by
80 Singh, The Dust-Storm and the Hanging Mist.
81 Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, 14.
82 Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, 15.
83 Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, 15.
84 D. Chakrabarty, ‘Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts’, in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial
Though and Cultural Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000), 101.

85 Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, 17.
86 Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi, 18–54.
87 Skaria, Hybrid Histories, 18. The use of oral narratives and the practice of oral history trans-
formed the reading of ethnicity in African history. Yet, this was not so in the case of adivasi
studies in India where historians depend largely on the colonial archive.
88 See, for example, N.Z. Davis, Fiction in the Archives. Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in
Sixteenth Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); C. Steedman, Dust
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); and A.L. Stoler, Along the Archival
Introduction 19
those who actively engaged with adivasi protest as they sought to navigate
between the oral and the written.
However, it is not just the invisibility of the adivasi in the colonial ar-
chive, or the ways of countering this, that I am talking about. With the
recent assertion of adivasi voices, historians reconstructing and rewriting
histories of adivasi protest need to reflect on and engage with the voices of
the adivasis which, in Ivy Hansdak’s words, have been ‘shrouded in polite
silence for too long’.89 Adivasi scholars, as Bhangya Bhukya has pointed
out, have begun to increasingly emphasize the importance of an alterna-
tive archive—oral narratives—that would help to overcome the deficiency
of the colonial archive, and offer important insights into the lived history
of adivasi communities.90 In the opinion of Ruby Hembrom, ‘Memory is a
tool . . . in our own path towards emancipation. We remember our stories,
customs and techniques, lineages, grievances, humiliations, struggles and
defeat to embrace who we are, and reconcile with who we have become,
and cope with our lifeways.’91 If Prathama Banerjee had argued that adi-
vasis are disadvantaged ‘because they have not been able to claim alter-
native archives and alternative histories of their own’,92 Hembrom writes
off the importance of colonial archival records in a single stroke when she
states: ‘We are living documents ourselves.’93 It is the experience of ‘being
Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2009).
89 I. Hansdak, ‘Is Tribal Identity Relevant in Today’s World?’ Inaugural Speech, Report for
the ICSSR sponsored Two-Day National Conference ‘Tribes in Transition-II: Reaffirming

Indigenous Identity Through Narrative’, organized by the Department of English and Outreach
Programme, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, 27–28 February 2017’. Available at https://
indiantribalheritage.org/?p=23032, last accessed on 28 December 2018. In the critical turn that
has taken place within dalit studies since the 1990s, dalit voices were inscribed into what were
earlier seen as studies of lower castes and of untouchability. The emerging educated dalit intel-
ligentsia, which now refused to be passive subjects for academic scholarship, demanded that
the experiences of the trauma of untouchability be included in narratives that sought to recover
dalit pasts (see R.S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana, Dalit Studies [Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2016]). Dalit literature and life-writing, then, become important as reposi-
tories of ‘facts’ about dalit lives.
90 B. Bhukya, Subjugated Nomads: The Lambadas under the Rule of the Nizams, 19–20.
91 R. Hembrom, ‘The Santals and the Bodding Paradox’, Norsk Tidsskrift for Misjonsvitenskap
71, no. 3 (2017): 51–8. Available at https://www.egede.no/tidsskriftsarkiv/santals-and-bodding-

paradox, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
92 P. Banerjee, ‘Writing the Adivasi: Some Historiographical Notes’, The Indian Economic and
Social History Review 53, no. 1 (January–March 2016): 131–2.

93 Hembrom, ‘The Santals and the Bodding Paradox’, 53. See also R. Hembrom, ‘Reclaiming
the Reproduction of Adivasi Knowledge: The Lens of an Adivasi Publisher’, December 2017.
adivasi’ that is important in this narrative. We are dealing here, then, with
two kinds of imperatives, sometimes mutually exclusive though not al-
ways so. One is based on reading the colonial archive, recovering adivasi
voices from it, and supplementing these with oral narratives; the other is
more of a communitarian initiative which privileges myths and legends,
oral narratives and lived experiences. These are two different ways of
knowing and making sense of the past, of accessing it, that do seldom
converge.94
This section is on the Tana Bhagat movement among the Oraons of
Chhotanagpur in colonial and postcolonial times. I begin with a brief
introduction of the Tana Bhagats in present times, drawing upon my
interactions with them and my experiences in present-day Jharkhand.
I also talk about my own predicament: as a historian, most comfortable
in the colonial archive, how do I craft narratives of adivasi pasts when
confronted by a community that still worships Jatra Bhagat and Gandhi
and yet has moved on? I outline the various facets of the Tana Bhagat
movement between 1914 and 1919, explore the Tana relation with the
Congress in the period after 1920, and look at the multiple ways in which
the Tanas view their movement over time. As I counterpoise the colonial
archive with Tana oral narratives, and their pamphlets and petitions in
order to analyse different renditions of the Tana past, I deal with three
sets of stories: one, the story of the Tana Bhagats from the colonial arch-
ives; two, the historian’s understanding of Tana protest; and three, Tana
narratives of their past. Between the histories constructed from the offi-
cial archives, and the one that the Tanas emphasize, there are marked dif-
ferences. While it is critical to include the Tana’s own perceptions of the
self and the meanings that they may attach to their attributed unity, it is
also necessary to deconstruct these narratives and recognize the politics
of representation.
In order to reflect on the archive and question the narratives that are
so crucial to the different readings of the Tana Bhagat movement in co-
lonial and postcolonial times, Chapter 4 draws upon church records,
Available at Reclaiming-the-Reproduction-of-Adivasi-Knowledge, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/

inequalityandpoverty/files/2017/12/pdf, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
94 S. Dasgupta, ‘Mapping Histories: Many Narratives of Tana Pasts’, The Indian Economic and

Introduction 21
administrative reports, and the writings of S.C. Roy and W.G. Archer,
to construct a story of the Tana Bhagat movement. It also discusses the
Tana belief system. My intention in presenting a chronological narrative
is, however, not to etch out differences between phases as most histor-
ians have done while analysing the Tana Bhagat movement but, rather, to
argue against them.
Chapter 5 suggests an alternative reading of Tana protest in the pe-
riod 1914–22. It discusses patterns of migrations of adivasi communities
which determined claims to land and ritual privileges; emphasizes the
importance of geographical landscapes and changing terrains in shaping
adivasi protest; points towards cleavages within adivasi communities
which were strengthened and reordered with colonial intervention; and
analyses the ritual world of the Tanas constituted by deotas (godlings),
bhuts (ghosts), nads (spirits), and babas (gods). Reiterating some of the
points made in an earlier essay,95 I argue for the need to question the rep-
resentation of adivasis as homogeneous communities, always united in
their opposition to exploitative outsiders, and recognize the internal con-
flicts that such representations occlude. With colonial intervention in
Chhotanagpur strengthening the existing hierarchies within the Oraons,
the Tana Bhagat movement symbolized not merely adivasi resistance to
non-Oraons—landlords, moneylenders, and the British state—but also
revealed internal tensions within the Oraon community. It articulated
the demands of a marginalized group from within the Oraons who were
often against an agrarian order and the hierarchies that it sustained. Tana
protest occurred at a time when land was becoming increasingly valuable
in Chhotanagpur particularly in view of decreasing arable space and the
consequent struggle over forestland, and the British were seeking to un-
derstand customary and community rights over land through surveys,
settlements, and legislative enactments.
There is a second interrelated point that I would like to make as I briefly
engage with some of the debates within agrarian and environmental
95 S. Dasgupta, ‘Reordering a World: The Tana Bhagat Movement in Chhotanagpur, 1914–19’,
Studies in History 15, no. 1, 1999: 1–41. (Copyright © 1999 Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Delhi. All rights reserved. Permission taken of the copyright holders and the publishers, SAGE
Publications India Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi). While Singh, Sirsalkar, and Moorthy, among others,
have pointed to an economic differentiation within tribal communities in as early as the 1970s
(see Singh, ed., Tribal Situation in India, xxv), economic differences were inevitably subsumed
within a presumed egalitarian structure when it came to a study of tribal movements.
history. Within the frame of agrarian history,96 adivasis, usually iden-
tified as forest peoples, were not considered as contributors to growth
and modernity and therefore remained invisible, or at best marginal.
Only those adivasi communities that practised settled agriculture were
deemed to be important, and were recognized as ‘agricultural groups’, ‘in-
distinguishable from the general population’.97 Thus Chhotanagpur, with
settled agriculturists, emerged as ‘the window on this tribal world, the
scene of the sharpest interaction of historical forces and of tribal revolts,
the most politicised and best known region’.98 In contrast, the North-
East, where shifting cultivation was practised, was ignored because of its
perceived ‘relative absence of tribal issues’.99 Environmental historians,100
on the other hand, whose concerns were with deforestation, forest acts,
and resistance against forest encroachments, celebrated the lives of adi-
vasis as forest peoples. The relationship between agrarian and environ-
mental history was thus necessarily antagonistic; settled agriculturists
and forest peoples were seen to be different.101 Recent studies are indic-
ative of a rapprochement of the two extremes: forests and fields, shifting
cultivators and peasants, have been linked; the importance of a shared
colonial context and political economy is emphasized.102 Arun Agrawal
and K. Sivaramakrishnan,103 talking about ‘agrarian environments’, dis-
cuss the artificiality of such categories as arable, forest, and pasture, and
the forms of livelihoods based on them: settled agriculture, shifting culti-
vation, hunting–gathering, and pastoralism. The strong interdependence
between various modes of livelihood, and the radical changes over time
in landscape, markets, climate, and human strategies of land, they note,
defy such simple distinctions between different worlds.
96 Agrarian history, from its very outset in the 1960s, has been obsessively concerned with
productivity, growth, and stagnation; tenancy legislations, revenue policies, and credit mechan-
isms; peasant communities, settled agriculturists, and agrarian movements.
97 Singh, ed., Tribal Situation in India, xix.
98 Singh, ed., Tribal Situation in India, xvii.
99 Singh, ed., Tribal Situation in India, xv.
100 Environmental history is seen to have emerged in India since the 1980s.
101 N. Bhattacharya, ‘Introduction’, Studies in History XIV, no. 2 (July–December 1998): 165.
102 See, for example, A. Prasad, ‘The Baigas: Survival Strategies and Local Economies in
Colonial Central Provinces’, Studies in History XIV, no. 2 (July–December 1998): 325–48.
103 A. Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Introduction: Agrarian Environments’, in
Social Nature: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India, edited by A. Agrawal and K.
Sivaramakrishnan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1.
Introduction 23
The point that I seek to make is somewhat different. In areas of
Chhotanagpur where agriculture was less profitable, the extent and na-
ture of dependence on forests and fields was changing from time to time,
particularly for the marginalized in Oraon society. Thus, while the rela-
tively prosperous among Oraon ‘settled agriculturists’ took advantage of
British intervention in agrarian legislation and administrative arrange-
ments and supported agrarian expansion, the marginalized among them
opposed the plough and even agricultural festivities, and yearned for the
forest and shifting agriculture. Moreover, by emphasizing the continual
revision of community boundaries, I demonstrate that the movement of
the Tana Bhagats was not a singular event, motivated by necessarily sim-
ilar imperatives. We need to recognize multiple forms of protests and de-
mands that vary across divergent locales and geographical terrains.
Chapter 6 attempts to understand the Tana perception of ‘Gandhi
Baba’, his charkha (spinning wheel) and swaraj (self-rule). It endeav-
ours to move beyond nationalist historiography which represents Indian
nationalism as a venture in which the leaders of the Congress led the
masses towards freedom through an anti-colonial struggle;104 and the
subalternist intervention which emphasizes adivasi initiatives as inde-
pendent subjects of history. Drawing particularly on the missionary ar-
chive, I look at Congress propaganda at the local level, and the myths
and rumours that grew around Gandhi. Congress ‘nationalists’ refigured
their slogans in locally understandable terms; local leaders, more aware
of the Tana cultural world, adopted a different mode of propaganda to
popularize their messages; the Tanas spoke in the name of Gandhi but
interpreted these often open-ended messages in very different ways, and
expressed through these their earlier vocabulary of protest.
Chapter 7, which draws upon Oraon myths and legends, oral narra-
tives, and lived experiences, compares two kinds of ‘histories’—that
which the official archive provides for us and that which the Tana Bhagats
inscribe through different renditions of their past. It emphasizes the im-
portance of analysing the narratives of Tana gurus delivered at ritual gath-
erings, along with the pamphlets and petitions that Tana Bhagats submit
to state officials. These stories, pamphlets, and petitions help us to capture
the voices of the Tana Bhagats and their memories of the past; they also
104 See, for example, Singh, The Dust-Storm and the Hanging Mist.
reflect modern sensibilities of negotiation with the Indian state and the
Congress. The Tanas draw on the memories of events passed down gener-
ations, but carefully rework these in conjunction with events relevant in
the present. Their representations of the past, though not always mutually
exclusive, are at times historically framed; at times decidedly evocative; at
times consciously crafted; at times intuitively structured.
The Adivasi
Before I conclude, let me explain my preference for the term adivasi over
the contending categories of ‘tribe’, ‘Scheduled Tribe’,105 and ‘Indigenous
People’,106 often conflated in common parlance.107 Since these terms are
neologisms, and are products of distinct genealogies,108 for academics
and non-academics, the choice of which nomenclature to use is usually
105 ‘Scheduled Tribe’, distinct from ‘tribe’ and yet drawing upon many of the parameters on
which the colonial category of tribe was defined, is a legal and constitutional category. As Xaxa
has pointed out, it is rooted in the state’s concern for the protection, welfare, and development
of the tribal population (see V. Xaxa, ‘Formation of Adivasi/Indigenous Peoples’ Identity in
India’, in First Citizens: Studies on Adivasis, Tribals, and Indigenous Peoples in India, edited by M.
Radhakrishna [New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016], 35). Post-Independence India, Xaxa
argues, has been more concerned with the identification of tribes (or rather Scheduled Tribes)
than with their definition; the criteria for identification—geographical isolation, simple tech-
nology, backwardness, the practice of animism, differences in language, or physical features—
were neither clearly formulated nor systematically applied (see V. Xaxa, ‘Tribes as Indigenous
People of India’, Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 51 [18–24 December 1999]: 3589).
106 These are people who are represented as victims of conquest and colonization, who have
been dispossessed of their sources of livelihood, are facing decimation of their collective iden-
tity, and hence culture shock. From their experiences and memories of ‘genocide’ stem the claim
of Indigenous People to their rights. ‘There is’, Andrea Muehlebach writes, a ‘remarkable con-
sistency’ in the ‘cultural political arguments’ of those who identify themselves as Indigenous
People. ‘In part, this consistency has its roots not only in the histories of oppression shared by
indigenous peoples, but in the carefully crafted discourse developed over time that has enabled
them to speak jointly of this oppression’ (see A. Muehlebach, ‘ “Making Place” at the United
Nations: Indigenous Cultural Politics at the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations’,
Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 3 [August 2001]: 421).
107 The Hindu Right uses the term ‘vanvasi’ or ‘people of the forest’ in place of adivasi. The
forest habitat is emphasized here rather than the claims of adivasis to indigeneity as the original
inhabitants of the land. Through the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, which is the RSS front specifically
for vanvasis, the Hindu nationalists seek to expand the social basis of Hindu nationalist politics,
a phenomenon that has become particularly marked since the 1980s. Adivasis are being assimi-
lated into Hindutva politics and increasingly participating in the activities of the Bajrang Dal,
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (see N. Sundar, ‘Adivasi Politics
and State Responses: Historical Processes and Contemporary Concerns’, in Narratives from the
Margins, edited by S. Das Gupta and R.S. Basu [Delhi: Primus Books, 2012], 241).
108 Karlsson and Subba, ‘Introduction’, 2.
Introduction 25
a careful one. There is, after all, a specific politics behind ascribing a con-
ceptual unity to categories that have their own sets of limitations.
With the formation of the Adivasi Sabha in Jharkhand in 1938, the
term adivasi, translatable as ‘original inhabitants’, came into use for the
first time in a political context.109 By claiming for themselves a long
tradition of ‘insurgency’ against colonial rule for their rights over land
and against economic exploitation in postcolonial times, adivasis enjoy,
in the words of Banerjee, ‘a kind of political hyper-visibility—a hyper-
visibility quite disproportionate to their numbers’.110 Adivasis are distinct
from Scheduled Tribes, Virginius Xaxa asserts; adivasis, through bonds
of emotion, view themselves as belonging to the same community ir-
respective of whether or not a group or a segment of it is listed in the
Constitution as ‘Scheduled Tribe’.111 Yet, paradoxically, in demographi-
cally enumerating the adivasi population, often references are made to
available data on Scheduled Tribes.112 Moreover, the usage of the term
adivasi, we need to recognize, is spatially limited. While tribal commu-
nities confined to the Fifth Schedule areas in eastern, central, western,
and southern India identify themselves with the politically assertive term
adivasi, for those living in areas of the North-East that are governed by
the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, the anthropological cat-
egory of tribe, despite its racial and primitivist connotations, or the
global category of Indigenous People, is acceptable.113 In fact, adivasis
from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha who went to Assam in the
109 See Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi, 15; and S. Bosu Mullick, ‘Introduction’, iv–xvii. For
tracing the background of scheduling, see Chandra, ‘Liberalism and Its Other’; and S. Tewari,
‘Tribe and Development: Nation-making in Bastar, Central India (1930–80)’, PhD thesis, Centre
for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2014.
110 Banerjee, ‘Writing the Adivasi’, 140.
111 Xaxa, ‘Tribes as Indigenous People of India’, 3595.
112 See, for example, A. Shah, J. Lerche, R. Axelby, D. Benbabaali, B. Donegan, J. Raj, and V.
Thakur, Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in Twenty-First-Century
India (London: Pluto Press, 2018).
113 In states under the Fifth Schedule (Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Gujarat, Himachal
Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, and Rajasthan), the Governor
protects the rights of the adivasis, especially their land rights, and intervenes in the development
of the Scheduled areas. In states under the Sixth Schedule (Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya, and
Mizoram), district councils and autonomous regional councils have the legislative and executive
powers on land transfer and use, forest use, water resources, local customs, and tribal culture.
Certain judicial powers are also given to these bodies. Tribal communities in these areas have
historically enjoyed a greater degree of economic and political autonomy resulting in relatively
higher levels of education, employment, and health facilities.
nineteenth century to work at British tea plantations are not recognized
as Scheduled Tribes in areas governed by the Sixth Schedule.114
What is the specific politics behind the use of the term adivasi?
Scholars who prefer the term adivasi have been assessing the relevance of
the nomenclature in a variety of contexts. Indeed, the meaning attached
to adivasi, and consequently studies woven around adivasi, has changed
with historiographical shifts, disciplinary interventions, and with pol-
itics as it operates on the ground. More recently, adivasi resistance has
gained a new currency with the emergence of indigenous rights move-
ment across the globe,115 the neoliberal developmental initiatives of the
Indian state,116 and the ultra-Left underground Maoist insurgency in the
country.117
One of the earliest to privilege the term adivasi over tribe was
Hardiman. Unlike tribe which has ‘strong evolutionist connotations’, adi-
vasi, he argues, relates to a particular historical development—‘that of the
subjugation in the nineteenth century of a wide variety of communities
which before the colonial period had remained free, or at least relatively
free, from the control of outside states’. Traders, moneylenders, and land-
lords, who had established themselves under the protection of the colo-
nial authorities, taking advantage of the new judicial system, deprived the
adivasis of large tracts of land. It is this that gave adivasis a sense of collec-
tive identity.118 Yet, not all who shared a common fate identify themselves
as adivasis, writes Xaxa, who is critical of Hardiman and other ‘radical
114 For example, in 2016, the ‘tea tribes’, along with five ‘Other Backward Communities’ from
Assam—Moran, Muttock, Tai Ahom, Koch Rajbongshi, and Sootea—met Home Minister
Rajnath Singh in order to ask for Scheduled Tribe status. See ‘Assam’s Tea Tribes: The Group that
Could Swing the Election is too Disaffected to Care’, Scroll.in, 3 April 2016. Available at https://
scroll.in/article/806082/assams-tea-tribes-the-group-that-could-swing-the-election-is-too-
disaffected-to-care, last accessed on 28 December 2018. See also ‘Panel Set Up for SC Status to 6
OBC Communities in Assam’, The Hindu, New Delhi, 1 March 2016. Available at https://www.
thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/panel-set-up-for-st-status-to-6-obc-communities-
in-assam/article8297458.ece, last accessed on 28 December 2018.
115 See Guha, Environment and Ethnicity; and Shah, In the Shadows of the State.
116 See F. Padel and S. Das, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel
(New Delhi and Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2010); and A.G. Nilsen, Dispossession and
Resistance in India: The River and the Rage (London: Routledge: 2010).
117 See A. Shah and J. Pettigrew, eds, Windows into a Revolution, Ethnographies of Maoism in
India and Nepal (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2012); N. Sundar, The Burning Forest: India’s
War in Bastar (Delhi: Juggernaut, 2016); and A. Shah, Nightmarch: A Journey Into India’s Naxal
Heartlands (Noida: Harper Collins, 2018).
118 Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi, 15.
Introduction 27
scholars’ of his ilk. Xaxa talks about ‘adivasi consciousness’: the realiza-
tion of adivasis that they have no power whatsoever over ‘anything (land,
forests, rivers, resources) that lies in the territory that they inhabit’.119 It is
the ‘aspect of marginalization that is to be taken note of while designating
a group as adivasi’.120 Damodaran links with the adivasi the idea of indi-
geneity. Recognizing this link, she points out, is critical as ‘the marginali-
zation and proletarianization of many forest-based communities and the
demise of their traditional livelihood gains pace all over the world’.121 On
them has been wrought, argue Felix Padel and Samarendra Das, a ‘cul-
tural genocide’ or ‘the killing of people’s culture by uprooting them from
their ancestral lands’.122
In a new historiographical turn, however, the adivasi, rather than
just being situated in the experience of subjugation and difference,
is increasingly seen to be embedded in a politics of representation.
Crispin Bates and Alpa Shah underline the necessity for a historically,
socially, and politically focused approach to understand the ways in
which particular forms of resistance are considered as adivasi at par-
ticular points in time.123 Daniel J. Rycroft and Sangeeta Dasgupta em-
phasize the need to recognize that different social groups, by referring
to themselves as adivasi, stake their claim to material and symbolic
resources. This imparts to the term a legitimacy that is difficult to ig-
nore, and yet which needs to be reviewed, embroiled as it is in a host of
historical and representational contests and controversies.124 Taking
cognizance of the politics of ‘becoming adivasi’ helps identify the
multiplicity of events, sites, and representations through which the
concept of the adivasi is, and has been, constructed and negotiated.125
119 Xaxa, ‘Tribes as Indigenous people of India’, 3595.

120 Xaxa, ‘Tribes as Indigenous people of India’, 3591.
122 F. Padel, Sacrificing People: Invasions of a Tribal Landscape (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan,
2011), 334.
123 C. Bates and A. Shah, ‘Introduction, Savage Attack: Adivasis and Insurgency in India’, in
Savage Attack: Tribal Insurgency in India, edited by C. Bates and A. Shah (New Delhi: Social
Science Press, 2014), 2.
124 D.J. Rycroft and S. Dasgupta, ‘Introduction: Indigenous Pasts and the Politics of
Belonging’, in The Politics of Belonging in India, edited by D.J. Rycroft and S. Dasgupta (London
and New York: Routledge, 2011), 2.
125 D.J. Rycroft and S. Dasgupta, ‘Preface’ in The Politics Sof Belonging in India, edited by D.J.
Rycroft and S. Dasgupta (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), xiv.
We need to, then, unravel the pasts of those we designate today as adi-
vasis, and note the continual remaking of community boundaries. It is
this idea of ‘becoming adivasi’ and not just ‘being adivasi’,126 I argue,
that accommodates the multiple histories around the subject of the
adivasi.127
126 S. Dasgupta, ‘Adivasi Studies: From a Historian’s Perspective’, History Compass 16, no. 10
(October 2018): 4-5.

127 See also T. Sarkar, ‘View from Outside the Field: An Afterword’, The Indian Economic and

1
Description to Definition
Oraons in Colonial Ethnography
I was working as a researcher at the Commissioner’s Record Room in

Ranchi in 1994. It had been an exasperating day: the search for inter-
esting files on the basis of entries in the catalogue had been futile. The
tattered cover of a file would emerge, but without any content. One of
the commissioners in the post-1947 period, I was told, had exercised
his wisdom and foresight: in view of the shortage of space in the re-
cord room, he had decided to burn many of the nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century records included within the files, but had decided
to retain the coversheets for future reference! Toppo ‘saab’, the Munda
archivist, looked at my disappointed face and in order to raise my de-
flated spirits, decided to tell me the story of the migration of the Oraon
and Munda ‘tribes’ into Chhotanagpur. As I delightedly began to take
notes, only to later wonder why the story sounded so strangely fa-
miliar, he said with an expansive flourish: ‘Do you know where I know
all this from? It is from Dalton’s Descriptive Ethnology. I can show you
the book. It was the Sahibs who recorded the history of the Oraons and
Mundas. The Bihar sarkar, along with those who come from outside,
just want to loot the adivasis. We adivasis were happier during the rule
of the Sahibs.’
Even today, ethnographic texts and ethnological surveys conducted
by the colonial state continue to be cited as evidence, as validating yard-
sticks, to understand adivasi identity. And, as Xaxa has incisively pointed
out, the identity that was ‘forced’ on adivasis ‘from outside, precisely to
mark out differences from the dominant community, has now been in-
ternalized by the people themselves’. This imposed identity has become
‘an important mark of social differentiation and identity assertion’ and
Reordering Adivasi Worlds. Sangeeta Dasgupta, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190127916.003.0002
‘an important tool of articulation for empowerment’.1 This chapter ex-
plores nineteenth-century colonial representations of the Oraons of
Chhotanagpur. Described in administrative reports of early nineteenth-
century Chhotanagpur as mlecchha, chuar, and dhangar, or alternatively
as part of a ‘village community’ of Coles/Kols,2 these Oraons, by the late
nineteenth century, were declared to be a tribe. How did the image of the
Oraons change in the course of a century in colonial representations? In
order to trace the categories through which the Oraons journeyed across
colonial records, I discuss some of the texts and reports which later be-
came a part of bureaucratic memory; I also look at nineteenth-century
lithographs and photographs of the Oraons, and material objects that
represent the Oraons in anthropological museums, along with the notes
that accompanied such material.
Western academic theories, and particularly the emerging discipline
of anthropology from the latter half of the nineteenth century, I argue,
informed the colonial imagination of tribe; it was also shaped by of-
ficial interactions with the ‘native’ population: dialogues with ‘native’
elites, observations of community practices, and the compulsions of
responding to local grievances that were expressed through a series of
agrarian protests that engulfed Chhotanagpur in the course of the nine-
teenth century. In the process, categories and imaginaries—both Western
and indigenous—were drawn upon, but recast, as colonial knowledge
of the peoples of Chhotanagpur came to be constituted.3 Indeed, repre-
sentations, hugely divergent, reflected the working of a series of lenses—
imperial ideologies, scientific concerns, departmental agenda, and
personal affiliations—as unknown lands and unfamiliar peoples were de-
scribed in myriad ways. Colonial officials often identified themselves as
men of science and academics; they were also administrators who could
1 Xaxa, ‘Tribes as Indigenous People of India’, 3589.

2 The term ‘Cole’ or ‘Kol’, which in colonial records included the different communities of
Chhotanagpur, was ‘one of the epithets of abuse applied by the Brahminical races to the abo-
rigines of the country’ (see E.T. Dalton, ‘The “Kols” of Chota-Nagpore’, Journal of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal 35, part 2, Supplementary Number [1866]: 154). ‘Kol’ is translated in the
Sanskrit dictionary as a hog or boar; as an outcast or a barbarian; and as a ‘tribe’ inhabiting
the hills in central India (see P.K. Gode and C.G. Karve, Revised and Enlarged Edition of Prin.
V.S. Apte’s The Practical Sanskrit–English Dictionary (published in 1890), Vol. I [Poona: Prasad
Prakashan, 1957], 608).
3 I move beyond Middleton’s argument which identifies in Dalton’s account ‘British and
Brahmanical figuring of the tribe’, or an ‘interplay of British and Brahmanical worldviews’ (see
Middleton, The Demands of Recognition, 67).
Description to Definition 37
not always reconcile imperial ideologies and their own experiences in the
field, or anthropological theories in circulation and personal observa-
tions. Scholar administrators, to borrow the language of Susan Bayly, like
Dalton, as I will go on to demonstrate, revised their accounts as they re-
sponded to theoretical imperatives. Others like H.H. Risley preferred to
theorize, supremely confident as they were of their academic accomplish-
ments and their knowledge of anthropology. Yet, almost all expressed
their disquiet, and often despair, when evidence from the field and their
experiences failed to match the theories and methods that they sought to
uphold. Anthropology, too, we need to recall, was a young discipline, a
new intellectual practice that was seeking to establish, though not always
successfully, its indispensability for administrative purposes. Colonial of-
ficials, who thought and acted in diverse ways, required different modes
of ratification of authority at different levels, even as they sought to dem-
onstrate the ‘authority of imperium’.4 Dalton’s idea of the ‘village commu-
nity’ and ‘tribe’ shaped the Chota Nagpur Tenures Act of 1869 and was
fundamental in the structuring of land rights in Chhotanagpur; his sup-
port to a privileged section within the Oraon community eventually led
to a sharp differentiation within the Oraons. Risley’s definition of tribe in
the Census Report of 1901, in dialogue with anthropological concerns,
went beyond local specificities and structured categories at the all-India
level, a project with far-reaching political ramifications for the future of
the Indian state.
In the shifting perceptions of the tribe across the nineteenth century,
there is, however, I argue, a pattern of sorts. In the pre-1850s, indigenous
voices could be identified in Orientalist depictions of the inhabitants of
Chhotanagpur, local nomenclature was adopted, and local grievances—
expressed through repeated agrarian protests in Chhotanagpur—were
addressed.5 By the 1850s, the utilitarian agenda structured colonial
4 N. Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Shaping of the Rural World
(New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2018), 3.

5 The importance of addressing local grievances was mentioned even as late as 1872 by
Dalton. He wrote: ‘It has certainly sometimes happened, owing perhaps to the difficulties
of applying the complicated machinery of civilized laws to a wild and rough people, that real
grievances have remained unredressed till they were resented. And instances have occurred of
insurrection having been traced to official acts or omissions that were subsequently considered
impolitic and were atoned for; and it is surely of importance that all such features in the ex-
isting causes of disturbances should be kept well in sight’ (see E.T. Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology
of Bengal, Illustrated by Lithographic Portraits Copied from Photographs [Calcutta: Office of the
Superintendent of Government Printing, 1872], 3).
imaginaries and administrative interventions. The 1860s witnessed
the interplay of incipient ethnological concerns, missionary beliefs,
and Arcadian principles that shaped the idea of ‘aboriginal’ tribes of
Chhotanagpur. In the 1890s, the idea of tribe was overwhelmingly struc-
tured by the arrogance of scientific concerns and the supremacy of dis-
ciplinary knowledge systems that increasingly supplanted the role of the
‘native’ informant. In 1901, the term tribe was defined for the first time
in an all-India official report, namely the Census Report of 1901. I begin
this chapter by discussing notions about the Oraons between the 1820s
and the 1850s; I move on to sketch the changes in perception between the
1860s and 1870s; and finally, I trace the transformation in the represen-
tation of the Oraons between the 1890s and 1900s when they came to be
categorized as tribe.
The shifts within this sequence and these time periods, let me add, were
neither smooth nor instantly recognizable. Paradigms are more resistant
to change than we imagine.6 The new paradigm which emerges after a
gradual recognition that the existing ‘system’ can no longer provide an
adequate explanation ‘is likely to be—indeed must—retain enough of the
old to make it recognisable’7 as a paradigm that, in the first place, could
move beyond the earlier one. The movement to a new paradigm does not
necessarily mean the abandonment of the earlier one. Dalton’s Descriptive
Ethnology, published in 1872, provided an account of the tribes in Bengal
for an ethnological project of listing the races included within the juris-
diction of the province.8 This he did by, first, in the Orientalist tradition,
including in his text ‘lists of vocabulary’,9 ‘declensions, conjugations and
short sentences to show the grammatical construction’ in dialects.10 But
to these he added, at a time when physiological determinants were as-
suming importance, photographs which were enhanced in value through
the inclusion of the ‘measurement of the individuals photographed’.11
Again, even as late as the 1880s when anthropology was emerging in
Britain and impacting the colony as the paradigm for understanding the
6 A. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative
Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 5.

7 Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 5.
8 Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, i.
9 Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, 69–76; 93–4; 107–8; 120–1; and 302–4.
10 Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, 235.
11 Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, iii.
‘primitive’, the Oraons continued to appear in colonial records as a ‘tur-
bulent people’, as chuars and dakaits (thieves or robbers). For instance,
a ‘local disturbance’ in Chhotanagpur was seen to arise not from ‘real
grievances’ but from the ‘desire . . . for plunder and rapine’.12
Mlecchha, Ryot, and Dhangar
Far away from the metropolis, Chhotanagpur was ‘totally distinct from
the Presidency [of Bengal] to which it belonged’.13 In the subah (province)
of Behar in the Mughal period, there is no mention of Chhotanagpur; the
Raja of Chhotanagpur seldom paid the stipulated tribute to the Nawab of
Behar, and troops were invariably sent for its realization—in the form of
diamonds or cash.14 As earlier references to this area, found in the works
of Ptolemy, in the Akbarnamah and Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, and in the travel
accounts of Tavernier and Nicolo Conti indicate,15 Kokrah or Jharkhand,
as Chhotanagpur was referred to in medieval times, was known for of its
natural wealth, and particularly for its diamond mines.
British contact with Chhotanagpur was initiated in 1765 with the grant
of the diwani of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa by the Mughal emperor Shah
Alam II to the East India Company. As Chhotanagpur came within the
ambit of the British imperial structure and revenue arrangements, ad-
ministrative requirements necessitated the gathering and recording of in-
formation about the land and its people, their customs and practices. Here
was a society where literacy was absent: the mahto (village headman), for
example, who mediated between the zamindar and the cultivators, made
his calculations by means of ‘little bits of gravel, instead of by pen and ink’
12 Letter No. 11, dated 22 May 1880, Ranchi, from Babu Rakhal Das Haldar, Special
Commissioner under the Chota Nagpore Tenures Act, to the Deputy Commissioner,
Lohardugga, Papers Relating to the Chota Nagpore Agrarian Disputes, Vol. I, 82, Commissioner’s
Record Room, Ranchi (hereafter CRR). Haldar quotes extracts from earlier reports.
13 Bradley-Birt, Chota Nagpur: A Little-known Province of the Empire, 2.
14 Chhotanagpur was not mentioned in the ‘Tukseem Jumma of the Subbah of Behar’ pre-
pared by Akbar’s Revenue Minister Todar Mal and set forth in the Ain-i-Akbari (see the unti-
tled note prepared by S.C. Roy which was found among the papers of S.C. Roy, once available
at the office of the Man in India Ranchi, and H.F. Blochmann, ‘Notes from the Muhammadan
Historians on Chutia Nagpur, Pachet, and Palamau’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 40,
part 1 [1871]: 113).
15 Blochmann, ‘Notes from the Muhammadan Historians on Chutia Nagpur, Pachet, and
Palamau’.
since he could ‘neither read or [sic] write’.16 Captain Depree, who headed
the Topographical Survey in 1868, gives an interesting account of the
transactions that went on at the akhra (dancing ground where the vil-
lage community assembled) between the thikadar (intermediate tenure-
holder) who took ‘possession of a village’, and the mahto, pahan (village
priest), and other members of the village community. At the ‘dictation of
the Mahto’, Depree notes, the thikadar wrote down ‘the account of the cul-
tivation of the old ryots, noting down the number of “pawas” [unit of land
measurement] and the rents’.17 Once arrangements with the new ryots
were made, ‘the quantity of land and the rent’ were fixed, and ‘a “gotee”, or
lump of the soil’, was given to them ‘as a sort of bind-bargain; and in the
same way a blade of “dhoob” grass . . . on the sale of cattle being effected
[sic]’.18 With British rule, reports, records, manuals, lists, and schedules
were prepared; custom was codified; the land system was discussed; man-
uals were prepared to rationalize and standardize the data collected. After
all, even as late as 1839, it was reported that in Chhotanagpur there was
‘no land measure, the quantities of land signified by Bhuries, Kharies and
Pawas are quite arbitrary, Pawas in the same village often differ in size and
they differ very much in different villages’.19 But there were other texts
like those of Walter Hamilton20 that ignored the nitty-gritty of admin-
istration but were concerned with expounding the imperial project. It
is, then, important to analyse British writings on Chhotanagpur in the
16 Letter, dated 29 August 1839, Kishenpore, from John Davidson, Personal Assistant to
the Governor General’s Agent, to Major J.R. Ouseley, Governor General’s Agent, published
in S.C. Roy, ‘Ethnographical Investigation in Official Records’, The Journal of the Bihar and
Orissa Research Society xxi, part iv (1935): 12. Roy, who studied ‘old records preserved in the
Commissioner’s Record-room’, decided to reproduce some of these reports in The Journal of
the Bihar and Orissa Research Society which he found interesting ‘from the point of view of the
ethnologist, sociologist, and the student of the early history of human institutions’ (see Roy,
‘Ethnographical Investigation in Official Records’ [1935], 1).
17 Captain G.E. Depree, Report Geographical and Statistical on that part of the Chota Nagpur
Division which has come under the Operations of the Topographical Survey, Office No. 4,
Topographical Party, Chota Nagpur Divisions Survey, Dorundah 15th July 1868, CRR. The
pawa, applicable to wet cultivation, was, as Depree noted, ‘quite an arbitrary area’: ‘in some cases
it is sufficient to sow two maunds of seed, in others ten or twelve maunds’.
18 Captain G.E. Depree, Report Geographical and Statistical on that part of the Chota Nagpur
Division which has come under the Operations of the Topographical Survey, Office No. 4,
Topographical Party, Chota Nagpur Divisions Survey, Dorundah 15th July 1868’, CRR. See also
Roy, ‘Ethnographical Investigation in Official Records’ (1935), 12.
19 Roy, ‘Ethnographical Investigation in Official Records’ (1935), 19.
20 W. Hamilton, A Geographical, Statistical, and Historical Description of Hindostan and the
Adjacent Countries in Two Volumes (London: John Murray, 1820).

pre-1850s: general accounts written from a trans-local gaze, and specific
revenue and administrative reports about the land and its people. In the
former set of writings, the inhabitants of this undulating and forested
region of Chhotanagpur were differentiated from the ‘pure’ and settled
plainsmen of Bengal and denigrated as barbarians, robbers, and savages,
as mlecchha, chuar, dakait, or dhangar. On the other hand, in revenue
reports that focused on a concerned locality without always bringing in
a comparative perspective, the Oraons were depicted as part of the Cole/
Kol ‘peasantry’ or as ‘aboriginal ryots’ in the highly stratified society of
Chhotanagpur. Alongside these texts, I discuss one of the earliest picto-
rial depictions of the Oraons by Colesworthy Grant.21
In 1820, Hamilton22 provided one of the earliest references to the
district of ‘Ramghur’ that included ‘Palamow, Pachete, and Chuta
Nagpoor’.23 His two-volume text, part of the imperial project of describing
‘Hindostan’ as ‘a component of the British Empire’ and not as ‘a mere as-
semblage of Nabobs, Sultans and Rajas’,24 belonged to the genre of writings
that showed the close relationship between ‘imperial governance’ and the
‘colonial science of geography’.25 The location and topography of this ‘ex-
tensive hilly tract’, ‘much covered with wood’ and ‘unhealthy jungles’,26 or
with ‘rocky and unproductive’ terrains that could not be ‘brought into a
populous or cultivated condition,’27 had ensured, Hamilton pointed out,
that the land was only partially integrated into the Mughal and British
empires. Differences in types of habitat had determined the opposition
between the uncivilized and civilized ‘temperaments’ of the hill and
21 C. Grant, Sketches of Oriental Heads. Being a Series of Lithographic Portraits Drawn from
Life, Intended to Illustrate the Physiognomic Characteristics of the Various People and Tribes of
India, W. Thacker and Co., Calcutta, London, and Bombay, published between 1838–50, British
Library (hereafter BL). For a biographical sketch of Grant, see P.C. Mittra, Life of Colesworthy
Grant, Founder and Late Honorary Secretary of the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals (Calcutta: I.C. Bose and Co., 1881).
22 Hamilton, A Geographical, Statistical, and Historical Description of Hindostan and the
Adjacent Countries.
Adjacent Countries, 288.

Adjacent Countries, v.
25 S. Basu, ‘The Dialectics of Resistance: Colonial Geography, Bengali Literati and the Racial
Mapping of Indian Identity’, Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 1 (2010): 73.

plains people respectively.28 Along with the ‘process of construction of
geographic knowledge’, then, was a rich exploration of the ‘ethnographic
composition of different inhabitants of different environmental spaces’.29
Unlike the varying images of fear, or of romanticizing the forest and its
peoples, or of sometimes even breaking down the dichotomy between the
‘wild’ and ‘domesticated’/‘civilized’ in texts from ancient and medieval
India,30 Hamilton’s representation was unambiguously denigrating: ‘The
inhabitants of the adjacent plains have an unconquerable aversion to the
hills, owing to the pestilential distempers they are liable to, as well as to the
extreme barbarity of the hill natives, and the abundance of beasts of prey,
such as tigers, bears, wolves and hyenas.’31 These were people of ‘savage
and ferocious habits’ who ‘frequently committed’ murder ‘through in-
stigation by zamindars’, or through ‘mere ignorance and superstition’.32
Their ‘customs’ displayed ‘their primitive barbarity’: an ‘aversion to reg-
ular industry, and a proneness to predatory rapine, at which they are par-
ticularly expert’.33 Among the ‘most remarkable of these tribes’, Hamilton
wrote, were the ‘Gonds, Bheels and Coolies’.34 The last was probably a ref-
erence to the Coles.
As Hamilton looked for ‘authentic documents’ on which to base his
account, he was careful to limit his search to printed documents and
manuscript records deposited at the India Board, along with the writ-
ings of colonial administrators such as Francis Buchanan-Hamilton,
28 For a discussion of the jungle mahals as ‘zones of anomaly in the emerging governmentality
of colonial rule’, see K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental

Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 35.
29 Basu, ‘The Dialectics of Resistance’, 73.
30 For the multiple perceptions of the forest and its people in texts from ancient India, see
R. Thapar, ‘Perceiving the Forest: Early India’, Studies in History, 17, no. 1 (2001): 1–16; B.D.
Chattopadhyaya, ‘State’s Perceptions of the “Forest” and the “Forest” as State in Early India’,
in Tribes, Forest and Social Formation in Indian History, edited by B.B. Chaudhuri and A.
Bandopadhyay (New Delhi: Manohar, 2004), 23–37; and K. Roy, ‘The Antelope, the Yak,
and Other Things: An Exploration of Banabhatta’s Harsacarita,’ in Early Indian History and
Beyond: Essays in Honour of Professor B.D. Chattopadhyaya, edited by O. Bopeareachchi and S.
Ghosh (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2019), 66–77.


Adjacent Countries, xxiv.


B.H. Hodgson, and others. Oriental phrases, he emphasized, had ‘as
much as possible been avoided’.35 And yet, in the choice of categories
used to describe the ‘tribes’ of ‘Chuta Nagpoor’, Hamilton, who had
never travelled to these distant lands that he wrote about, aligned him-
self with the opinion of ‘native’ priests and the plains-people as he repre-
sented the inhabitants of the region as savage, barbaric, and impure, as
the mlecchha. In this, he drew upon Orientalist conceptions: the essence
of Indian civilization was celebrated in its ancient ‘Aryan’ past, to be un-
derstood through studies on language, laws, and institutions. Sanskrit
was the root of the language family of Indian vernaculars; the ‘polished
languages’ that were written and had literatures were of Sanskrit or-
igin.36 For him, those lying outside the orbit of this Aryan ‘civilization’
were necessarily savage and barbaric. The languages they spoke had
‘little affinity with Sanskrit’, and were not spoken in the ‘fertile provinces’
of India, but in the ‘mountainous and sparsely inhabited’ regions of the
country.37 The beginnings of a unified aboriginal identity, as Thomas
R. Trautmann has pointed out, could then be traced to the Sanskritists
for whom ‘comparative philology’ and ‘ethnology’ were closely related to
each other.38 It was largely these ideas that Hamilton expressed when he
found in the ‘impervious jungles’ of the ‘zemindary’ of Chhotanagpur,
‘many strange tribes, who, even at this late period of Hindoo pre-
dominance, have not become converts to the Brahmanical doctrines’.
They were ‘consequently classed by the priests among the abominable’.
These people—‘the Khetauri, the Koeri, and the Dhanggar’—were the
‘principal inhabitants of Chuta Nagpoor’.39 These ‘races of mountain-
eers’ were ‘probably the true aborigines’ who could be distinguished
from the ‘Hindoo natives’ by their ‘religion, character, language and
manners, as well as by their features’;40 their ‘practices’ were ‘impure’,
‘the sacred order having never been at any pains to instruct them’.41
Adjacent Countries, ix–x.
36 Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 148–9.
37 Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 149.
38 Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 149.
The ‘Dhanggar’, he wrote, were ‘impure, and probably unconverted or
Mlechchas’.42 Significantly, the ‘environmental theme’—the notion of
climate, terrain, and physical environment as determinants of ‘national
character’—could also be traced in the works of the eighteenth-century
social theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment.43
Hamilton conflated the savage, the barbarian, and the mlecchha. But the
‘savage’ in Europe was ‘distinctively different’ from ‘the Indian concept of the
barbarian’—or mlecchha.44 Mlecchha, in the early Indian context, referred to
people living beyond the border; the perception of differences—linguistic,
cultural, and physical—set the mlecchha apart from the respectable and
honourable Arya, an inhabitant of Aryavarta.45 Mlecchha behaviour was
seen in Brahmanical texts to be a threat to varnasramdharma (duties pre-
scribed to varnas at various stages of life; specifically applicable to men). Yet,
as Romila Thapar has pointed out, the Aryas and the mlecchha were not al-
ways in ‘binary opposition’; 46 Aloka Parasher-Sen argues that the latter had
been incorporated into the mainstream of brahmanical society from the
‘earliest time’. 47 By the early decades of the nineteenth century, this blurring
of divisions had been erased, and differences between the ‘Hindoos’ and the
impure lower orders, or the mlecchhas, clearly drawn. The mlecchha, in con-
trast to the ‘Arya’, was ritually impure, lying beyond the pale of civilization
and its moral values.48
What was the relationship between mlecchha and dhangar, terms
used interchangeably by Hamilton to indicate a people distant from civ-
ilization and its norms? While dhangar was used to describe the Oraons
throughout the nineteenth century, the connotations of the term

43 See Bayly, ‘Caste and “Race” in the Colonial Ethnography of India’, 174. In the eighteenth
century, as Trautmann points out, we find among writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, discus-
sions of the triad of savagery, barbarism and civilization (see T. R. Trautmann, ‘The Revolution
in Ethnological Time’, Man n.s. 27, no. 2 [June 1992]: 380).
44 R. Thapar, ‘The Image of the Barbarian in Early India’, Comparative Studies in Society and
History 13, no. 4 (October 1971): 408–36.

45 Thapar, ‘The Image of the Barbarian in Early India’, 436.
46 Thapar, ‘The Image of the Barbarian in Early India’, 408.
47 A. Parasher-Sen, ‘ “Foreigner” and “Tribe” as Barbarian (Mleccha) in Early North India’, in
Subordinate and Marginal Groups in Early India, edited by A. Parasher-Sen (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 291.
48 For a greater elaboration of the meanings of ‘Arya’ and the ‘mlecchha’ in Monier-Williams’
Sanskrit-English Dictionary, see Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 12–13.

differed across representations. In 1822,49 Lieutenant Colonel Francis
Wilford, writing the ‘ancient geography of India’ based on ‘several ge-
ographical tracts in Sanscrit’,50 provided one of the earliest expositions
of the term dhangar. In ‘spoken dialects’, the region of the Vindhyan
forests that extended from the Gulf of Cambay to the Bay of Bengal
was referred to as ‘Jhati-c’handa’ or ‘Jhari-c’hand’; this was ‘a country
abounding with jhari, or places overgrown with thickets and under-
wood’. From the words jhari, jhanci, or jhancar, which the ‘natives’ of
these forests were said to have pronounced as ‘dangi’ and ‘dangar’,51
as Wilford suggested, was derived the term ‘dangayas’,52 or the people
who lived in this forested country. Simply put, a dhangar was a forest
dweller. It was in this sense that Hamilton had also used the term. Like
the mlecchha, the forest dweller was different from the plains people
of Bengal, the ritually pure ‘Hindoo’ who followed Brahmanical doc-
trines and practices. Even when a dhangar came to work as a labourer
in Bengal, in a land distant from his own, this aspect of ritual impurity
remained attached to him.
To illustrate the point, I take up a lithograph by Colesworthy Grant,
titled ‘Coles of the Dhangur tribe. Natives of Nagpore (The Scavengers
of Calcutta)’ (Figure 1.1). In this lithograph, Grant depicts the dhangar
in his working ambience, on the outskirts of the city, wearing a loincloth,
and holding the implements with which he performs the task of scav-
enging. A popular artist of the British school of art whose works were
commissioned by Thacker and Company to portray the life of the Indian
people to an English audience, Grant sought to identify ‘physiognomic
characteristics’—the cast or form of a person’s features, expression, and
49 Lieutenant Colonel F. Wilford, ‘On the Ancient Geography of India’, Asiatick Researches; or
Transactions of the Society, Instituted in Bengal, For Inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the
Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia XIV (July–December, 1822): 373–470. Wilford’s text, al-
most contemporaneous with that of Hamilton’s, sought to expunge ‘entirely mythological’ from
the ‘entirely geographical’, and was written with the intention of understanding the ‘Ancient
Geography’ of India perhaps as a prelude to later writings that would explore the geographical
contours of British India (see Wilford, ‘On the Ancient Geography of India’, 373).
50 Some of the ‘geographical tracts’ that Wilford refers to are parts of the Cshetra-samasa, or
‘collection of countries’ (see Wilford, ‘On the Ancient Geography of India’, 373). This compila-
tion, initially commissioned by Bijjala, the last Raja of Patna who died in 1648, was completed
much later; it was considered by Wilford to be a ‘most valuable work’, in parts ‘entirely ‘geo-
graphical’, but with historical and mythological details in addition (see Wilford, ‘On the Ancient
Geography of India’, 376–8).
51 Wilford, ‘On the Ancient Geography of India’, 392.
52 Wilford, ‘On the Ancient Geography of India’, 392.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
CAPITOLO VIII.
I DISTRUTTORI DI MACCHINE.
Poco tempo prima che Ernesto si presentasse come candidato al

Congresso, nella lista socialista, il babbo solennizzò ciò che egli
stesso chiamava, a porte chiuse: «la serata dei profitti e delle
perdite», e il mio fidanzato: «la serata dei distruttori di macchine».
In realtà, era un pranzo di uomini di affari, di piccola gente d’affari,
naturalmente. Non credo che alcuno, fra loro, fosse interessato in
un’impresa il cui capitale superasse i duecentomila dollari.
Rappresentavano perciò perfettamente la classe media del traffico.
C’era il signor Owen, della Casa Silverberg, Owen e C. una
importante ditta di drogheria, con numerose succursali, di cui noi
eravamo clienti. C’erano i soci del grande deposito di prodotti
farmaceutici Kowalt e Washburn; c’era il signor Asmunsen,
proprietario d’un’importante cava di granito nella Contea di Contra
Costa, e parecchi altri della stessa specie, proprietari e
comproprietari di piccole industrie, di piccoli commerci e di piccole
imprese: in una parola, piccoli capitalisti.
Erano persone abbastanza interessanti, con i loro visi furbi, e il loro
linguaggio semplice e chiaro. Si lamentavano, all’unanimità, dei
consorzi e la loro parola d’ordine era: «Uccidiamo i trusts!». Questi,
secondo loro, erano la fonte di tutte le oppressioni; e tutti, senza
eccezione, ripetevano lo stesso lamento. Avrebbero voluto che il
Governo si impossessasse delle grandi imprese, come le Ferrovie e
le Poste e i Telegrafi, ed essi predicevano lo stanziamento di tasse
enormi, e ferocemente progressive sulle entrate, allo scopo di
distruggere i grandi accumulamenti di capitali. Essi lodavano anche,
come un possibile rimedio alle miserie locali, la proprietà municipale
delle imprese di pubblica utilità, come l’acqua, il gas, i telefoni, e i
tranvai.
Il signor Asmunsen narrò, in modo particolarmente interessante, le
sue vicissitudini di proprietario di cava. Confessò che questa sua
cava non gli aveva dato mai nessun utile, nonostante l’enorme
quantità di ordinazioni che gli aveva procurato la distruzione di San
Francisco. La ricostruzione di questa città, era durata sei anni,
durante i quali, il numero dei suoi affari era stato quadruplicato, ma
egli non era, per questo, più ricco di prima.
— La Compagnia delle Ferrovie è al corrente de’ miei affari meglio di
me, — spiegò. — Conosce fino al centesimo, le spese di
sfruttamento, e sa, a memoria, i termini de’ miei contratti. Come mai
è così bene informata? Non so immaginarlo. Deve certo avere delle
spie pagate fra i miei stessi impiegati e avere accesso presso i miei
soci. Perchè, ascoltate bene questo: appena ho firmato un grosso
contratto, favorevole a me, e che mi assicura un buon guadagno, i
prezzi di trasporto aumentano come per incanto. Non mi si dànno
spiegazioni, ma la ferrovia si prende il mio guadagno. In simili casi,
non ho mai potuto decidere la Compagnia a rivedere le sue tariffe,
mentre, in seguito ad incidenti o ad aumenti di spesa di sfruttamento,
o dopo la firma di contratti meno vantaggiosi per me, sono sempre
riuscito ad ottenere un ribasso. Insomma, la Ferrovia si prende tutti i
miei guadagni, siano essi grandi o piccoli.
Ernesto lo interruppe per chiedergli:
— Ciò che vi rimane, in fin dei conti, equivale presso a poco, senza
dubbio, allo stipendio che la Compagnia vi darebbe come direttore,
se fosse essa la proprietaria della cava?
— È proprio così, — rispose il signor Asmunsen. — Or non è molto,
ho fatto fare uno specchietto dei miei conti in questi ultimi due anni,
ed ho constatato che i miei guadagni erano precisamente come lo
stipendio di un direttore. Non ci sarebbe stato assolutamente nulla di
diverso se la Compagnia avesse posseduto la mia Cava e mi avesse
pagato per sfruttarla.
— Però, con questa differenza, — disse Ernesto ridendo, — che la
Compagnia avrebbe dovuto caricarsi dei rischi che avete avuto la
bontà di assumere per lei.
— È vero, — ammise il signor Asmunsen, con tristezza.
Dopo aver lasciato esprimere ad ognuno ciò che aveva da dire,
Ernesto rivolse delle domande agli uni e agli altri. Cominciò prima
dal signor Owen.
— Sono circa sei mesi che avete aperta una succursale, qui, a
Berkeley?
— Sì, — rispose il signor Owen.
— E da allora, ho osservato che tre piccoli droghieri del rione hanno
chiuso bottega. La vostra succursale ne è, senza dubbio, la causa?
— Non avevano nessuna probabilità di riuscita lottando contro di noi,
— affermò il signor Owen, con soddisfazione.
— Perchè no?
— Avevamo un capitale più forte. Nel grosso commercio, la perdita è
sempre minima, e il guadagno più grande.
— Dimodochè il vostro negozio assorbiva i guadagni delle tre piccole
botteghe. Capisco. Ma ditemi: che è avvenuto dei proprietarii delle
bottegucce?
— Uno conduce i nostri camions di scarico. Non so che cosa
facciano gli altri.
Ernesto si voltò repentinamente verso il signor Kowalt.
— Voi vendete spesso al prezzo di costo, spesso perfino in
perdita [53]. Che ne è dei proprietarî delle piccole farmacie che avete
messo con le spalle al muro?
— Uno di essi, il signor Haasfurther, è attualmente a capo del nostro
servizio di ordinazioni.
— E voi avete assorbito i guadagni che stavano per realizzare?
— Certamente: per questo siamo negli affari.
— E voi, — disse bruscamente Ernesto al signor Asmunsen. — Voi
siete offeso, non è vero, perchè le Ferrovie vi sottraggono i
guadagni?
Il signor Asmunsen accennò di sì col capo.
— Vorreste invece intascar voi i vostri guadagni?
Nuovo segno di assentimento.
— A spese degli altri?
Nessuna risposta. Ernesto insistette:
— A spese degli altri?
— In questo modo si guadagna, — replicò seccamente il signor
Asmunsen.
— Dunque, il gioco degli affari consiste nel guadagnare a detrimento
degli altri, e ad impedire agli altri di guadagnare a spese vostre. È
così, non è vero?
Ernesto dovette ripetere la sua domanda e il signor Asmunsen alla
fine rispose:
— Sì, è così; senonchè, noi non opponiamo difficoltà perchè gli altri
facciano pure i loro guadagni, purchè non siano esorbitanti.
— Per esorbitanti intendete, senza dubbio, grossi guadagni. Però
non vedete nessun inconveniente nel fare grossi guadagni per
vostro conto... non è vero?
Il signor Asmunsen confessò facilmente la sua debolezza su questo
punto. Allora Ernesto si rivolse a un altro, un certo signor Calvin, un
tempo grosso proprietario di latterie.
— Qualche tempo fa, combattevate il trust del latte. — gli disse
Ernesto, — ed ora partecipate alla politica agricola [54], al Partito
delle Fattorie. Come mai questo cambiamento?
— Oh! non ho abbandonato la lotta, — rispose il personaggio, che
infatti aveva un’aria aggressiva. — Io combatto il trust sull’unico
terreno ove sia possibile combatterlo, sul terreno politico. Vi spiego:
qualche anno fa, noi lattai, facevamo ciò che volevamo.
— Ma voi facevate concorrenza gli uni agli altri, — interruppe
Ernesto.
— Sì, e perciò i guadagni erano a un livello basso. Allora tentammo
di organizzarci, ma c’erano sempre dei lattai indipendenti che
guastavano i nostri disegni. Poi venne il trust del latte.
— Sovvenzionato dal capitale esuberante, della Standard Oil, [55] —
disse Ernesto.
— È vero, — ammise il signor Calvin. — Ma non lo sapevamo, a
quel tempo. I suoi agenti ci affrontarono con la mazza in mano, e ci
posero questo dilemma: o entrare nella lega, e ingrassarci, o star
fuori, e perire. La maggior parte di noi entrò nel trust; gli altri
creparono di fame. Oh! in principio, quanto danaro!... Il latte fu
aumentato, di un cent al litro, e un quarto di quel cent era nostro. Gli
altri tre quarti andavano al trust. Poi il latte fu aumentato di un altro
cent, ma di questo non toccò nulla a noi. Le nostre lagnanze furono
inutili. Il trust era divenuto il padrone. Ci accorgemmo che eravamo
delle semplici pedine sulla scacchiera. Infine anche il quarto di cent
addizionale ci fu tolto. Poi il trust cominciò a stringere le viti. Che
cosa potevamo fare? Fummo spremuti. Non c’erano più lattai, non
rimaneva che un trust del latte.
— Ma col latte aumentato di due cents, mi pare che avreste potuto
sostenere la concorrenza, — suggerì Ernesto con malizia.
— Lo credevamo anche noi. Abbiamo tentato. — Il signor Calvin
fece una pausa. — E fu la nostra rovina. Il trust poteva mettere il
latte sul mercato a un prezzo inferiore al nostro. Poteva ancora
avere un piccolo guadagno quando noi eravamo in pura perdita. Ho
speso cinquantamila dollari in quell’affare. La maggior parte di noi ha
dichiarato fallimento [56]. Le latterie sono state distrutte.
— Dimodochè, avendo il trust preso i vostri guadagni, — disse
Ernesto, — voi vi siete dato alla politica, affinchè una nuova
legislazione distrugga a sua volta il trust e vi permetta di riprendere
le latterie?
Il viso del signor Calvin si rischiarò.
— È proprio quanto ho detto nelle mie conferenze ai fittavoli. Voi
concentrate tutto il nostro programma in un guscio di noce.
— Però il trust dà il latte a miglior condizioni dei lattai indipendenti?
— Perbacco, può ben farlo, con l’organizzazione e il macchinario
ultimo modello che può avere con i suoi capitali.
— Questo è fuori di discussione. Può certamente farlo, e, ciò che più
conta, lo fa, — concluse Ernesto.
Il signor Calvin si lanciò allora in un’arringa politica per esporre il suo
modo di vedere. Parecchi altri lo seguirono con calore, e il loro grido
unanime era che bisognava distruggere i trusts.
— Poveri di spirito! — mi bisbigliò Ernesto. — Ciò che vedono, lo
vedono bene; solamente, non vedono più in là del loro naso.
Dopo un poco riprese la direzione della discussione, e, secondo la
sua abituale caratteristica, la tenne per tutta la sera.
— Vi ho ascoltati con attenzione, — cominciò, — e vedo
perfettamente che seguite il gioco degli affari in maniera ortodossa.
Per voi, la vita si riassume nel guadagno. Voi avete la convinzione
ferma e tenace di essere stati creati e messi al mondo con l’unico
scopo di guadagnare molto danaro. Soltanto, c’è un ostacolo: sul più
bello della vostra attività proficua, ecco il trust che vi taglia i vostri
guadagni. Eccovi in un dilemma apparentemente contrario al fine
della creazione; e voi non vedete altro mezzo di salvezza oltre
l’annientamento di questo disastroso intervento.
«Ho seguito con cura le vostre parole, e vi voglio dire l’unico epiteto
che possa definirvi: Siete dei distruttori di macchine. Sapete che vuol
dir ciò? Permettetemi di spiegarvelo. In Inghilterra, nel secolo XVIII,
uomini e donne tessevano il panno su telai a mano, nelle loro
casette. Era un procedimento lento, maldestro e costoso, quel
sistema di manifattura a domicilio. Poi venne la macchina a vapore,
col suo corteo di ordigni per economizzare il tempo. Un migliaio di
telai riuniti in una grande officina e messi in moto da una macchina
centrale, tessevano il panno a molto minor prezzo dei tessitori che
possedevano telai a mano. Nell’officina si affermava la
combinazione davanti alla quale si cancella la concorrenza. Gli
uomini e le donne che avevano lavorato da soli, con telai a mano,
andavano nelle fabbriche, e lavoravano ai telai a vapore, non più per
loro stessi, ma per i proprietarii capitalisti. Ben presto anche i
fanciulli si affaticarono attorno ai loro telai meccanici, in cambio di
salari ridotti, e sostituirono gli uomini. I tempi divennero duri per
questi. Il loro livello di benestare si abbassò rapidamente. Morivano
di fame e dicevano che tutto il male proveniva dalle macchine.
Allora, vollero rompere le macchine. Non vi riuscirono; erano dei
poveri illusi.
«Voi non avete ancora capito questa lezione; ed ecco, dopo un
secolo e mezzo, volete anche voi distruggere le macchine. Avete
confessato voi stessi che le macchine del trust fanno un lavoro più
efficace e a minor prezzo del vostro; per questo non potete lottare
contro di esse; e nondimeno vorreste distruggerle. Siete ancora più
illusi dei semplici lavoratori d’Inghilterra. E mentre voi ripetete che
bisogna ristabilire la concorrenza, i trusts continuano a distruggervi.
«Dal primo all’ultimo raccontate la stessa storia, la scomparsa della
rivalità e l’avvento della unione. Voi stesso, signor Owen, avete
distrutto la concorrenza, qui, a Berkeley, quando la vostra succursale
ha fatto chiudere bottega a tre piccoli droghieri, perchè il vostro
mercato era più vantaggioso. Ma, appena sentite sulle vostre spalle
il peso di altre industrie più forti, quelle dei trusts, voi vi mettete a
urlare.
«Questo, perchè non siete una società forte, ecco tutto. Se formaste
un trust di prodotti alimentari per tutti gli Stati Uniti, cantereste
un’altra canzone, e la vostra antifona sarebbe: «Siano benedetti i
trusts!» Eppure, non soltanto la vostra piccola industria non è un
consorzio, ma avete voi stesso la coscienza della sua poca forza.
Cominciate a presentire la vostra fine. Vi accorgete che, nonostante
tutte le vostre succursali, non rappresentate che un gettone sul
tavolo del gioco. Vedete gli interessi madornali inalzarsi e crescere di
giorno in giorno; sentite le mani guantate di ferro dei profittatori
impadronirsi dei vostri guadagni, e prendervi un pizzico di qui, un
pizzico di là: così il trust delle ferrovie, il trust del petrolio, il trust
dell’acciaio, il trust del carbone; e voi sapete che alla fine vi
distruggeranno, vi prenderanno fin l’ultimo centesimo dei vostri
mediocri guadagni.
«Ciò prova, signore, che siete un cattivo giocatore. Quando avete
strozzato i tre piccoli droghieri di qui, vi siete gonfiato, avete vantato
la efficacia e lo spirito dell’impresa, avete mandato vostra moglie in
Europa, con i guadagni che avete fatto divorando quei poveri
negozietti. È la legge del cane contro cane, e voi avete mangiato in
un sol boccone i vostri rivali.
«Ma ecco che alla vostra volta siete morsicato da molossi, e urlate
come una puzzola. E quanto dico di voi, è vero per tutti coloro che
sono seduti qui attorno. Urlate tutti. State giocando una partita, e la
perdete. Questo vi fa gridare.
«Soltanto, lamentandovi, non siete sinceri; non confessate che vi
piace sfruttare gli altri, smungendoli, e che fate tutto questo chiasso
perchè altri tentano di fare lo stesso con voi. No, siete troppo scaltri
per questo, e dite tutt’altra cosa. Fate i discorsi politici dei piccoli
borghesi, come il signor Calvin, poco fa. Che cosa diceva? Ecco
alcune delle sue frasi che ricordo: «I nostri principî originarî sono
solidi». «Questo paese deve ritornare ai metodi americani
fondamentali, e ognuno sia libero di approfittare delle occasioni
aventi uguali probabilità...«. «Lo spirito di libertà secondo il quale è
sorta questa nazione... Ritorniamo ai principii dei nostri avi!...».
«Quando parlava dell’uguaglianza delle probabilità per tutti, alludeva
alla facoltà di spremere dei guadagni, licenza che gli è ora tolta dai
grandi trusts. E l’illogicità è in questo: che, a furia di ripetere queste
frasi, voi avete finito col credere in esse. Desiderate l’occasione per
svaligiare i vostri simili uno alla volta e vi ipnotizzate al punto di
credere che volete la libertà. Siete ingordi e insaziabili; ma persuasi
dalla magìa delle vostre frasi, di fare, invece, opera di patriottismo.
Mutate il desiderio di guadagno, che è puro e semplice egoismo, in
sollecitudine altruistica per l’umanità sofferente. Vediamo un po’ qui
fra noi, siate sinceri una volta, guardate la cosa in faccia e ditela con
termini giusti.
Intorno alla tavola si vedevano visi congestionati che esprimevano
una grande irritazione, mista a una certa inquietudine. Erano tutti un
poco spaventati da quel giovanotto dal viso glabro, e dal suo modo
di parlare e dirigere le parole, nonchè dalla sua terribile maniera di
chiamare le cose col loro nome. Il signor Calvin si affrettò a
rispondere:
— E perchè no? — chiese. — Perchè non potremmo ritornare ai
costumi dei nostri padri che hanno fondato questa repubblica? Avete
detto molte cose vere, signor Everhard, per quanto duro ci possa
esser stato l’inghiottirle. Ma qui, fra noi, possiamo parlarci chiaro.
Togliamo le maschere, ed accettiamo la verità come il signor
Everhard l’ha chiaramente detta.
«È vero che noi piccoli capitalisti diamo la caccia al guadagno, e che
il trust ce lo toglie. È vero che vogliamo distruggere i trusts per poter
conservare i nostri profitti. E perchè non lo faremmo? Perchè no,
ditemi, perchè non lo faremmo?
— Ah! eccoci all’ultima parola della quistione, — disse Ernesto, con
aria soddisfatta. — Perchè no? Cercherò di dirvelo, quantunque non
sia facile. Voialtri, vedete, avete studiato gli affari nella vostra cerchia
ristretta, ma non avete affatto approfondita la questione
dell’evoluzione sociale. Siete in pieno periodo di transizione
nell’evoluzione economica, ma voi non ci capite nulla, e da questo
deriva tutto il caos. Mi chiedete perchè non potete ritornare indietro?
Semplicemente perchè non è possibile.
«Non potete far risalire un fiume verso la sorgente. Giosuè fermò il
sole sopra Gedeone, ma voi vorreste sorpassare Giosuè; voi
sognate di far ritornare indietro il sole. Aspirate a far camminare il
tempo a ritroso, dal mezzodì all’aurora.
«Davanti a delle macchine che risparmiano il lavoro, alla produzione
organizzata, all’efficacia crescente delle società, voi vorreste
ritardare il sole economico di una o più generazioni, e farlo ritornare
ad un’epoca in cui non c’erano nè grandi ricchezze, nè grandi
macchine, nè strade ferrate: in cui le legioni di piccoli capitalisti
lottavano l’una contro l’altra, nell’anarchia industriale; in cui la
produzione era primitiva, dispendiosa e non organizzata. Credetemi:
il compito di Giosuè era più facile, ed egli aveva inoltre Jehova per
aiuto! Ma voi, piccoli borghesi, siete abbandonati da Dio. Il vostro
sole declina, e non risorgerà mai più, e non è neppure in vostro
potere fermarlo ora nel suo corso. Siete perduti, condannati a sparire
completamente dalla faccia della terra.
«È il fiat dell’evoluzione, il comando divino. L’associazione è più forte
della rivalità. Gli uomini primitivi erano poveri esseri schiavi che si
nascondevano nelle fessure delle rocce, ma un giorno si unirono per
lottare contro i loro nemici carnivori. Le fiere avevano il solo istinto
della rivalità, mentre l’uomo era dotato di un istinto di cooperazione;
per questo egli stabilì la sua supremazia su tutti gli altri animali. E da
allora non ha fatto che creare associazioni sempre più vaste. La lotta
dell’organizzazione contro la concorrenza data da un migliaio di
secoli, e sempre ha trionfato l’organizzazione. Coloro che si
arruolano nel campo della concorrenza sono destinati a perire.
— Però i trusts stessi sono nati dalla concorrenza. — interruppe il
signor Calvin.
— Giustissimo! — rispose Ernesto. — E i trusts, infatti, l’hanno
distrutta. Per questo appunto, a quanto avete voi stessi confessato,
non siete più nella bambagia.
Alcune risate corsero per la tavola, e furono le prime in tutta la sera,
ed il signor Calvin non fu l’ultimo a partecipare dell’ilarità che aveva
egli stesso provocato.
— Ed ora, poichè siamo al capitolo dei trusts, cerchiamo di chiarire
un dato numero di punti, — riprese Ernesto. — Vi voglio esporre
alcuni assiomi; e se non vi vanno, non avrete che a dirlo. Il vostro
silenzio implicherà il vostro consenso.
«È vero che un telaio meccanico tesse il panno in maggiore quantità
e a minor prezzo di un telaio a mano?
Successe una pausa, ma nessuno prese la parola.
— Per conseguenza, non è profondamente stolto distruggere i telai
meccanici per ritornare al processo grossolano e costoso della
tessitura a mano?
Le teste si agitarono in segno di assentimento.
— È vero che l’associazione d’interessi conosciuta sotto il nome di
trust produce, più praticamente e più economicamente, quanto non
produce un migliaio di piccole imprese rivali?
Nessuna obiezione s’udì.
— Dunque, non è irragionevole distruggere questa associazione
d’interessi economici e pratici?
Nuovo silenzio, che durò un momento, poi il signor Kowalt domandò:
— Che fare allora? Distruggere i trusts è la nostra sola via di
salvezza, per sfuggire al loro dominio.
Subito Ernesto parve animato da una fiamma ardente.
— Ve ne indico un’altra, — esclamò. — Invece di distruggere quelle
macchine meravigliose, prendiamone la direzione. Approfittiamo del
loro buon andamento e del loro buon mercato. Soppiantiamo i
proprietarî attuali, e facciamole agire noi stessi. Questo, signori, è il
socialismo; una combinazione più vasta di trusts, un’organizzazione
sociale più economica di quante sieno esistite finora sul nostro
pianeta. Essa continua l’evoluzione in linea retta. Affrontiamo le
associazioni con un’associazione superiore. Abbiamo buone carte in
mano. Venite con noi e siate i nostri compagni di vittoria.
Immediatamente si manifestarono segni e mormorii di protesta.
— Preferite essere degli anacronismi, — disse Ernesto ridendo, —
ecco il vostro affare. Preferite fare i padri nobili. Siete condannati a
sparire come tutte le reliquie della tradizione. Vi siete mai chiesti che
cosa vi capiterà, quando nasceranno delle associazioni d’interessi
più formidabili delle attuali società? Non vi siete mai preoccupati di
ciò che diventerete quando i consorzi si fonderanno con il trust dei
trusts, in una organizzazione sociale, economica e politica insieme?
E voltosi improvvisamente verso il signor Calvin:
— Dite se non ho ragione. Sarete obbligati a formare un nuovo
partito politico, perchè i vecchi partiti sono nelle mani dei trustisti.
Questi costituiscono il principale ostacolo alla vostra propaganda
agricola, al vostro partito delle fattorie. Ogni noia che incontrate, ogni
colpo che vi tocca, ogni sconfitta che subite, tutto deriva dai trusts.
Non è forse vero?
Il signor Calvin taceva imbarazzato.
— Se non è vero, ditemelo. — insistette Ernesto con voce
incoraggiante.
— È vero, — confessò il signor Calvin. — Ci eravamo impadroniti del
potere legislativo dello Stato dell’Oregon ed avevamo fatto
approvare ottime leggi protezioniste, ma il governatore, che è una
creatura dei trusts, ha opposto il veto. Invece, al Colorado, avevamo
eletto un governatore che non potè entrare in funzione, per
opposizione del potere legislativo.
«Due volte abbiamo fatto passare un’imposta nazionale sul reddito,
e due volte la Corte Suprema l’ha rigettata come contraria alla
Costituzione. Le Corti sono nelle mani delle associazioni; noi, il
popolo, noi non paghiamo i nostri giudici abbastanza bene. Ma verrà
un giorno...
— In cui l’associazione dei cartels dirigerà tutta la legislazione, —
interruppe Ernesto, — in cui l’associazione dei trusts formerà il
Governo.
— Mai! mai! — esclamarono i presenti, eccitati e combattivi.
— Mi volete dire che cosa farete, quando sarà venuto quel giorno?
— chiese Ernesto.
— Ci solleveremo con tutta la nostra forza, — esclamò il signor
Asmunsen, la cui risolutezza fu salutata da nutrite approvazioni.
— Sarà la guerra civile, — osservò Ernesto.
— E sia la guerra civile! — rispose Asmunsen, approvato da nuove
acclamazioni. — Noi non abbiamo dimenticato le gesta dei nostri
antenati. Per la nostra libertà siamo pronti a combattere e a morire.
Ernesto, sorridendo, disse:
— Non dimenticate, signori, che poco fa eravamo tacitamente
d’accordo che la parola libertà, nel caso vostro, significa licenza di
spremere gli altri per ricavarne un utile.
Tutti i convitati erano infuriati, animati da uno spirito bellicoso. Ma la
voce di Ernesto dominò il tumulto:
— Ancora una domanda: dite che vi solleverete con tutta la vostra
forza quando il Governo fosse strumento dei trusts; per
conseguenza, il Governo adopererebbe contro la vostra forza
l’esercito regolare, la marina, la milizia, la polizia, in una parola tutta
la grande macchina della guerra organizzata dagli Stati Uniti. Dove
sarebbe allora la vostra forza?
Sui volti apparve una profonda costernazione.
Senza lasciar loro il tempo di riflettere, Ernesto lanciò un nuovo
assalto:
— Or non è molto, ricordatevene, il nostro esercito regolare era di
soli cinquantamila uomini. Ma i suoi effettivi sono stati aumentati da
un anno: ed ora conta trecentomila uomini.
E rinnovò il suo attacco:
— Non basta: mentre vi lanciavate all’inseguimento del vostro
fantasma favorito, il guadagno, e improvvisavate delle omelie sulla
vostra cara mascotte, la concorrenza, delle verità ancor più potenti e
crudeli sono state inalzate dalla associazione: c’è la milizia.
— È la nostra forza. — esclamò il signor Kowalt. — Con lei
respingeremo l’attacco dell’Esercito regolare.
— Cioè, farete parte voi stessi della milizia, — replicò Ernesto. — e
sarete mandati nel Maine o nella Florida, nelle Filippine, o in altro
luogo, per domare i vostri compagni rivoltosi, in nome della libertà.
Nello stesso tempo i vostri compagni del Kansas, del Wisconsin, o di
un altro Stato, faranno parte anch’essi della milizia e verranno in
California, per soffocare nel sangue la vostra stessa guerra civile.
Questa volta i presenti rimasero addirittura scandalizzati e muti.
Finalmente, il signor Owen mormorò:
— Non ci arruoleremo nella milizia. È semplicissimo: non saremo
così ingenui.
Ernesto scoppiò in una schietta risata.
— Voi non capite affatto il gioco stabilito. Non potrete difendervi:
sarete incorporati a forza nella milizia.
— Esiste una cosa che si chiama diritto civile, — insistette il signor
Owen.
— Ma non quando il Governo proclama lo stato d’assedio. Il giorno
in cui parlaste di sollevarvi in massa, la vostra stessa massa si
leverebbe contro di voi. Sareste compresi nella milizia, volenti e
nolenti. Sento qualcuno pronunziare le parole: habeas corpus. Come
habeas corpus, avreste, post mortem, in fatto di garanzia, l’autopsia.
Se rifiutaste di entrare nella milizia o di obbedire, una volta
incorporati, sareste tradotti davanti a un Consiglio di guerra
improvvisato e sareste fucilati come cani. È la legge.
— Non è la legge, — affermò con autorità il signor Calvin. — Non
esiste una legge simile. Quanto avete detto, l’avete sognato,
giovanotto. Ma come? Parlate di spedire la milizia alle Filippine?
Sarebbe contro la Costituzione. La Costituzione specifica
espressamente che la milizia non potrà mai essere mandata
all’estero.
— Come c’entra la Costituzione? — chiese Ernesto. — La
Costituzione è interpretata dalle Corti, e queste, come ha detto il
signor Asmunsen, sono strumento dei trusts. Inoltre, come ho
affermato, la legge vuole così. È legge, da anni, da nove anni,
signori.
— È legge, — chiese il signor Calvin, con aria incredula, — che si
possa essere trascinati a forza nella milizia... e fucilati da un
Consiglio di guerra improvvisato, se ci rifiutiamo di marciare?
— Precisamente, — rispose Ernesto.
— Come mai allora non abbiamo mai sentito parlare di questa
legge? — chiese mio padre; e capii benissimo che anche a lui la
cosa riusciva nuova.
— Per due motivi, — disse Ernesto. — Primo, perchè non si è mai
presentata l’occasione di applicarla: se fosse stato necessario, ne
avreste già sentito parlare. Secondo, perchè questa legge è stata
approvata frettolosamente dal Congresso e in segreto dal Senato:
per modo di dire, cioè, senza discussione. Naturalmente i giornali
non ne hanno fatto mai cenno. Noi socialisti lo sapevamo e
l’abbiamo pubblicato nei nostri giornali. Ma voi non leggete mai i
nostri giornali.
— Ed io sostengo che sognate, — disse il signor Calvin, con
ostinazione. — Il Paese non avrebbe mai permesso una cosa simile.
— Eppure, il Paese l’ha permessa di fatto, — replicò Ernesto. — E
quanto al sognare, ditemi se di questa stoffa sono fatti i sogni.
E, tratto di tasca un opuscolo, l’aprì e si mise a leggere:
«Sezione I., ecc., ecc.: È decretato, ecc., ecc., che la milizia si
compone di tutti i cittadini validi, di età superiore ai diciotto anni e
inferiore ai quarantacinque, abitanti i diversi Stati o territorî, come il
distretto di Columbia...
«Sezione VII. Che ogni ufficiale o uomo arruolato nella milizia —
ricordate, signori, che secondo la Sezione I, siete tutti arruolati —
che rifiuterà o non si presenterà all’Ufficiale di reclutamento, dopo
essere stato chiamato com’è prescritto qui contro, sarà tradotto
davanti a un Consiglio di guerra e passibile di pene pronunciate dal
detto Consiglio...
«Sezione IX. ... che la milizia, quando sarà convocata in servizio
attivo, per gli Stati Uniti, sarà soggetta agli stessi regolamenti e
articoli di guerra delle truppe regolari degli Stati Uniti».
— Ecco a che punto siamo, signori, cari concittadini americani e
compagni di milizia. Nove anni or sono, noi socialisti pensavamo che
questa legge fosse rivolta contro i lavoratori, ma sembra che sia
rivolta anche contro voialtri.
«Il congressista Wiley, nella breve discussione, quale fu permessa,
dichiarò che il disegno di legge «procurava una forza di riserva per
prendere la plebe alla gola». La plebe siete voi, signori, «e per
proteggere ad ogni costo la vita, la proprietà, la libertà». E in
avvenire, quando vi solleverete con tutta la vostra forza, ricordate
che vi rivolterete contro la proprietà dei trust e contro la libertà
legalmente accordata ai trusts, di sfruttarvi. Signori, vi hanno
strappato i denti, vi hanno tagliato le unghie. Il giorno in cui
insorgerete, armati solo della forza della vostra virilità, ma sprovvisti
di unghie e denti, sarete inoffensivi come una legione di molluschi.
— Non credo una sola parola di questo. — esclamò il signor Kowalt.
— Una simile legge non esiste. È una storia inventata da voialtri
socialisti.
— Il disegno di legge è stato presentato alla Camera il 30 luglio del
1902 dal rappresentante dell’Ohio. È stato discusso rapidamente e
approvato dal Senato il 14 gennaio del 1903. E proprio sette giorni
dopo, la legge è stata approvata dal Presidente degli Stati Uniti [57].
CAPITOLO IX.
LA MATEMATICA DI UN SOGNO.
Fra la costernazione provocata dalla sua rivelazione, Ernesto riprese

la parola:
— Una dozzina di voi, questa sera, ha proclamato impossibile il
socialismo. Poichè avete dichiarato ciò che è inattuabile,
permettetemi ora di dimostrarvi ciò che è inevitabile: ossia, la
scomparsa non solo di voi piccoli capitalisti, ma anche di grossi
capitalisti e perfino dei trusts, a un certo momento. Ricordate che il
progresso dell’evoluzione non permette ritorni al passato. Senza
riflusso, essa procede dalla rivalità all’associazione, dalla piccola
cooperazione alla grande, dalle vaste combinazioni alle
organizzazioni colossali, sino al socialismo che è la più gigantesca di
tutte le organizzazioni.
«Voi mi dite che sogno. Benissimo! Vi esporrò i dati matematici del
mio sogno. Anzi, vi sfido in anticipo a dimostrare la falsità dei miei
calcoli. Voglio esporre davanti a voi il carattere fatale del crollo del
sistema capitalistico, e dedurre, matematicamente, la causa della
sua fatale decadenza. Coraggio, e abbiate pazienza se il punto di
partenza è un po’ lontano dall’argomento.
«Esaminiamo, dapprima, i procedimenti di un’industria privata, e non
esitate ad interrompermi se dico cosa che voi non potete ammettere.
Prendiamo, ad esempio, una fabbrica di scarpe. Questa fabbrica
compera il cuoio e lo trasforma in scarpe. Ecco del cuoio per cento
dollari, che passa in fabbrica e ne esce in forma di scarpe, per un
valore di cento dollari, supponiamo. Che cos’è avvenuto? È stato
aggiunto al valore del cuoio un altro valore di cento dollari. Come
mai? Il capitale e il lavoro hanno aumentato il valore iniziale.
«Il capitale ha procurato la fabbrica, la macchina e ha pagato le
spese. La mano d’opera ha dato il lavoro, lo sforzo combinato del
capitale e del lavoro ha incorporato un valore di cento dollari al
valore della merce. Siamo d’accordo?
Le teste si curvarono, affermativamente.
— Il lavoro e il capitale, avendo prodotto cento dollari, si danno da
fare per la ripartizione della somma. Le statistiche che trattano delle
divisioni di questo genere, segnano sempre numerose frazioni: ma
ora noi, per maggiore comodità, ci accontenteremo di
un’approssimazione poco rigorosa, ammettendo che il capitale
prenda per sè cinquanta dollari e che il lavoro riceva, come salario,
una somma uguale. Non litigheremo per questa divisione [58],
qualunque siano i contratti, si finisce sempre col mettersi d’accordo,
a un tasso o a un altro. E non dimenticate che ciò che io dico per
un’industria, si applica a tutte. Mi seguite?
I convitati approvarono.
— Ora supponiamo che il lavoro, avendo ricevuto la sua quota di
cinquanta dollari, voglia ricomperare delle scarpe. Potrà comperarne
solo per cinquanta dollari, non è vero?
«Passiamo ora da questa operazione particolare a tutte le operazioni
che si compiono negli Stati Uniti, non soltanto col cuoio, ma con tutte
le materie grezze, coi trasporti, e col commercio in generale.
Diciamo, in cifra tonda, che la produzione annuale della ricchezza,
negli Stati Uniti, è di quattro miliardi di dollari. Il lavoro riceve
dunque, come salario, una somma di due miliardi l’anno. Dei quattro
miliardi prodotti, il lavoro può riscattarne due. Non c’è nessuna
discussione in proposito, ne sono sicuro: la mia valutazione è molto
larga. A causa di ingerenze capitalistiche d’ogni sorta, il lavoro non
ottiene la metà del prodotto totale.
«Ma sorvoliamo su ciò, ed ammettiamo che il lavoro ottenga i due
miliardi. È evidente, allora, che il lavoro può consumare solo due
miliardi, mentre bisogna render conto degli altri due miliardi che il
lavoro non può nè riscattare nè consumare.
— Il lavoro non consuma neppure i suoi due miliardi, — dichiarò il
signor Kowalt. — Se li spendesse, non avrebbe depositi nelle Casse
di risparmio.
— I depositi nelle Casse di risparmio, sono una specie di fondo di
riserva, che può essere speso in fretta, come in fretta è stato
accumulato. Sono le economie messe da parte per la vecchiaia, le
malattie, gli accidenti e le spese dei funerali. Sono il boccon di pane
conservato nella madia, per il domani. No, il lavoro assorbe la totalità
del prodotto che può riscattare con i suoi guadagni.
«Due miliardi sono lasciati al capitale. Dopo aver pagato le spese,
consuma il resto? Il capitale divora i suoi due miliardi?
Ernesto si interruppe e rivolse apertamente la domanda a parecchi,
che alzarono la testa.
— Non ne so niente, — disse francamente uno di essi.
— Ma sì, voi lo sapete, — rispose Ernesto. — Riflettete un istante.
Se il capitale consumasse la sua parte, la somma totale del capitale
non potrebbe aumentare: resterebbe costante. Esaminate invece la
storia economica degli Stati Uniti, e vedrete che il capitale aumenta
continuamente. Dunque, il capitale non divora la sua parte.
«Ricordatevi dell’epoca in cui l’Inghilterra possedeva molte delle
nostre azioni delle ferrovie. Con l’andar degli anni le abbiamo
riscattate. Che cosa si deve concludere, se non che la parte del
capitale impiegato ha permesso questo? Oggi i capitalisti degli Stati
Uniti possiedono centinaia e centinaia di milioni di dollari di azioni
messicane, russe, italiane e greche: che cosa sono esse se non un
po’ di quella parte che i capitalisti non hanno consumato? Fin dalle
origini del sistema capitalistico, il capitale non ha mai consumato
tutta la sua parte.
«E ora siamo al punto: quattro miliardi di ricchezza vengono prodotti
annualmente negli Stati Uniti. Il lavoro ne riscatta e ne consuma due
miliardi; resta perciò una forte eccedenza che non viene distrutta.
Che cosa si può fare? Il lavoro non può sottrarne perchè ha già
consumato i suoi guadagni. Il capitale non se ne serve, perchè già,
secondo la sua natura, ha assorbito tutto quanto poteva. E
l’eccedenza resta. Che cosa se ne può fare? Che cosa se ne fa?
— Si vende all’estero, — dichiarò spontaneamente il signor Kowalt.
— Precisamente, — assentì Ernesto. — Da questo soprappiù nasce
il nostro bisogno d’uno sbocco esteriore. Si vende all’estero; si è
obbligati a venderlo all’estero; non c’è altro mezzo per impiegarlo. E
quest’eccedenza venduta all’estero costituisce ciò che noi
chiamiamo: la bilancia commerciale in nostro favore. Siamo intesi su
ciò?
— Certamente, perdiamo il tempo trattando di questo A. B. C. del
commercio, — disse il signor Calvin, con dispetto. — Lo sappiamo
tutti a memoria.
— Se ho posto tanta cura nell’esporvi queste norme elementari, è
perchè mi servono per confondervi. — replicò Ernesto. — È questa
la parte piccante della cosa. E vi confonderò completamente.
«Gli Stati Uniti sono un paese capitalistico che ha sviluppato le sue
risorse. In virtù del suo sistema industriale, possiede un ramo di
produzione superflua di cui deve sbarazzarsi all’estero [59].
«Ciò che è vero per gli Stati Uniti, lo è pure per tutti i paesi
capitalistici le cui risorse sono sviluppate. Ognuno di questi paesi
dispone di un superfluo ancora intatto. Non dimenticate che hanno
già trafficato gli uni con gli altri e che, ciò nonostante, c’è un
superfluo disponibile. In tutti questi paesi il lavoro ha speso i suoi
guadagni e non può più comperare nulla; in tutti, il capitale ha
consumato solo ciò che gli permette la sua natura. E il rimanente è
un peso morto, perchè non possono scambiarselo fra loro. Come se
ne libereranno?
— Vendendolo ai paesi le cui risorse non sono sviluppate, — suggerì
il signor Kowalt.

Reordering Adivasi Worlds Representation Resistance Memory 1St Edition Sangeeta Dasgupta All Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Reordering Adivasi Worlds Representation Resistance Memory 1St Edition Sangeeta Dasgupta All Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Reordering Adivasi Worlds:

Representation, Resistance, Memory

for their infinite love and unending support

1.1 Coles of the Dhangur Tribe, Natives of Nagpore (The Scavengers

1.1 Oraon Tribe of Chota Nagpur 78

Sangeeta Dasgupta teaches in the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal

BL British Library, London

In recent times, adivasi communities have been increasingly visible as

Funds’, The Indian Express, updated 26 November 2014. Available at https://indianexpress.com/

Scroll.in, 20 September 2015. Available at https://scroll.in/article/754985/in-jharkhands-

26 November 2016. Available at http://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2016/nov/25/

Ranchi, 16 November 2016. Available at https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/

Authenticating Voices, Contending Narratives

Determining the parameters for identifying a tribe is an onerous task for

Shadows of the State).

Dehradun, 15 June 2013. Available at https://www.news18.com/news/india/rights-activist-

indiankanoon.org/doc/204475, last accessed on 28 December 2018; and N.E. Horo vs Jahan

19 Apoorvanand, ‘Jharkhand Government is Misusing Gandhi, Public Funds to Fuel Anti-

Christian Hate’, The Wire, 12 August 2017. Available at https://thewire.in/politics/jharkhand-

23 P. Samarendra, ‘Anthropological Knowledge and Statistical Frame: Caste in the Census in

and T.B. Subba (London: Kegan Paul, 2006), 1–17.

34 Devalle, Discourses of Ethnicity.

52 Chandra, ‘Liberalism and Its Other’, 138.

Many Narratives of Tana Pasts

Colonial ethnographic and anthropological texts were, on the one hand,

Ashar, Srabon, 1320 [April–May, May–June, June–July, 1913]): 73–82.

November 1914]), 89–91.

constitutionofindia.net/constitution_assembly_debates/volume/9/1949-09-05, last accessed on

among others, K.S. Singh.

University Press, 1983), 8.

December 1998): 194.

74 Sarkar, ‘The Decline of the Subalterns in Subaltern History’, 88.

Though and Cultural Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000), 101.

the ICSSR sponsored Two-Day National Conference ‘Tribes in Transition-II: Reaffirming

71, no. 3 (2017): 51–8. Available at https://www.egede.no/tidsskriftsarkiv/santals-and-bodding-

Social History Review 53, no. 1 (January–March 2016): 131–2.

Available at Reclaiming-the-Reproduction-of-Adivasi-Knowledge, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/

Social History Review 53, no. 1 (January–March 2016): 99–129.

95 S. Dasgupta, ‘Reordering a World: The Tana Bhagat Movement in Chhotanagpur, 1914–19’,

119 Xaxa, ‘Tribes as Indigenous people of India’, 3595.

(October 2018): 4-5.

Social History Review 53, no. 1 (January–March 2016): 155–7.

I was working as a researcher at the Commissioner’s Record Room in

1 Xaxa, ‘Tribes as Indigenous People of India’, 3589.

(New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2018), 3.

Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 5.

Mlecchha, Ryot, and Dhangar

Adjacent Countries in Two Volumes (London: John Murray, 1820).

Adjacent Countries, 288.

Adjacent Countries, 282.

of colonial rule’, see K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental

Adjacent Countries, 283.

Adjacent Countries, 284.

Adjacent Countries, xxiv.

Adjacent Countries, 70.

42 Hamilton, A Geographical, Statistical, and Historical Description of Hindostan and the

Adjacent Countries, 288.

History 13, no. 4 (October 1971): 408–36.

Sanskrit-English Dictionary, see Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 12–13.

Poco tempo prima che Ernesto si presentasse come candidato al

Fra la costernazione provocata dalla sua rivelazione, Ernesto riprese

You might also like