Indigenous Agency: Customary Rights and Tribal Protection in Eastern India, 1830–1930

INTRODUCTION

The greatest physical impact of globalization today on people and landscape in South Asia is happening in the mountainous parts of Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, in eastern India, which are coincidentally among India’s poorest states. ¹ This is because they possess most of the previously untapped reserves of iron, bauxite and water, all crucially contested in the spiralling Asian demand for minerals and metals. The rural population of these heavily forested regions consists mainly of indigenous ( adivasi ) people, very vulnerable to the processes of modernization and land alienation that accompany the huge pressures for mineral extraction and dam-building. Since the onset of colonization, and especially as the forces of globalization have speeded up, increasingly vigorous contestations for space and resources have taken place between adivasis , peasants, the state, and mining and other commercial companies. The environmental terrain of contemporary eastern Indian states such as Orissa and Jharkhand can be captured in opposed dualities: tribal versus caste Hindus; hill versus plain, mining versus displacement, submergence versus flood control. The history of this polarization lies in the chequered set of developments which existed under colonial rule but rapidly accelerated following independence. More recently, since 1991, as the last pretence of tribal protection has been given up, eastern India has become subject to new kinds of internal and external colonization, far more traumatic in impact than pre-1947 colonization. ² The history of globalization and state intervention in the period immediately after independence and since reveals these new and disturbing trends, along with continuities and discontinuities from the earlier period. In this article I document the colonial response to indigenous resistance and the emergence from about the 1830s of a protectionist discourse in relation to tribal areas that put a partial brake on the wholesale exploitation of the tribes and their forested landscapes.

The current revisionist position in history and anthropology has focused on dismantling terms such as ‘tribe’, ‘forest’ and ‘indigenous’, used extensively in the past, and this has had a significant negative impact. As notions of ‘indigeneity’ and ‘customary rights’ come under revisionist attack the marginalization and proletarianization of forest-based communities and their traditional livelihoods gain pace all over the world. ³ Recently however there has been a reassessment of the significance of customary law among tribal communities, in terms of access to resources and also of how people use it to claim citizenship. Parallels can be drawn between areas as far afield as England, Australia and Indonesia. ⁴ As E. P. Thompson noted, in eighteenth-century Britain ‘custom’ was invoked to legitimate almost any usage, practice or demanded right. ⁵ In a new collection, edited by Nandini Sundar and including work by sociologists, anthropologists and lawyers, the idea of custom as enshrined in colonial law makes a comeback. It is noted that while Indian courts are currently far from the judicial revolution heralded in Australia by the landmark Mabo judgement of 1992, they nevertheless recognize custom provided it is established as such by clear and unambiguous evidence. ⁶ Whilst rightly challenging the static understandings of custom, Sundar points out that ‘custom deserves serious reconsideration as a discursive product of engagement between local communities and forging visions of the future in the name of the past and the spaces the state allows for pockets of exceptionalism’. ⁷ It has also been argued recently that customary law may help to overcome the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ – the theory that open access to common property may lead to over-exploitation by self-interested individuals. Customary law systems in contrast are mostly concerned with (limited) common rather than public property. ⁸ Historically grounded understandings of the conflict over customary rights and understanding customary law in the colonial context thus become crucially important.

COLONIAL NARRATIVES OF TRIBE, LANDSCAPE AND CUSTOMARY RIGHTS

This article attempts to understand the colonial narratives of tribe, custom and landscape with particular reference to the District of Singhbhum in Chotanagpur, a high plateau, part of the Bengal presidency, which became part of the modern state of Bihar and is now Jharkhand. Located in the eastern part of the Gondwana mountain range in colonial south-west Bengal, Chotanagpur, which was the size of England, was on the periphery of the Mughal empire and regarded as a frontier in nineteenth-century British colonial reports. Exposed to Maratha incursions from the west and to tribal depredations this region was seen as an area to be gradually pacified and brought under British control. In nineteenth and twentieth-century historiography and anthropology it was described as covered with ‘primeval forests’ and peopled with ‘ungovernable tribes’. A close look at the record suggests that we should not too hastily dismiss colonial narratives as tending consistently to misread people and places. Earlier generations of ethnographers and landscape surveyors, especially in the period 1800–50, very often did in fact understand the complexities of landscape difference, ethnic identity and cultural dynamics. Colonial discourse did not just conjure up an imaginary landscape, but analysed real landscape differences. In fact, it can be said that the material and the imaginary landscape in complex ways constituted one another. The narratives of travellers and of surveyors and officials of the East India Company (which from 1757 gradually exercised control over much of India until 1858 when the British crown assumed direct control under the British Raj) were not merely a ‘representation of place’ that could be used to root colonial claims to possession, but had a far more ambiguous relationship with the place and its native inhabitants. ⁹ In such a post-modern reading the ambiguities, contradictions and often acute observations of Company officials go unrecognized. It is against this background that colonial representations of customary rights and constructions of indigeneity need to be seen. Nancy Lee Peluso has criticized colonial constructions of customary rights in the Indonesian context as having little basis in reality and leading to the ‘racialization’ of the landscape with ‘ethnic access’ to resource use. ¹⁰ In the Indian context, however, the history of debates on customary rights reveals colonial preoccupations with the detail of local rights and their practice, especially in the forest lands. Given the nature of the state and the dominance of the property interest, these undocumented customary rights proved difficult to recover and to protect by legislation, because they belonged only to practice and to oral tradition. Despite this, genuine attempts were frequently made in the beginning and the latter half of the nineteenth century to document local rights and land-use customs and to protect some customary practices. In the context of the discourse of indigeneity, these attempts are of enormous importance, although they are rarely given enough attention.

It has been argued by historians that notwithstanding the rich and complex histories of acculturation and settlement of the communities on the Chotanagpur plateau, colonial discourse produced and perpetuated stereotypes of tribe and landscape which had important implications for future settlement there. Naturalists, surveyors and occasionally commercial travellers had begun to document the landscape of eastern India from the early part of the nineteenth century. Colonial south-west Bengal had two traditions of governance: the Bengal tradition which emphasized elaborate regulation based on British home models of due process and the Punjab tradition of large exempted (‘non-regulation’) provinces in which political agents and district officers governed paternalistically. In the Kolhan, in Singhbhum district of Chotanagpur, a non-regulation system of government was established under the administration of Thomas Wilkinson, who was affected by ideas of social reform and aligned himself with the Munro tradition. ¹¹ Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras in 1820, was credited with introducing the ryotwari system of revenue collection in South India and dealing directly with the peasants or ryots thus creating a more humane system of administration, distinct from the more ruthless form of revenue exaction in Bengal under the Permanent settlement. ¹²

The whole Chotanagpur region was gradually accorded different treatment from the rest of the Bengal Presidency and from 1833 legislation was introduced to protect its special status. The history of tribal unrest had resulted in a new legislative enactment of 1833 when Palamau, Kurukdeha, Ramgarh and Korunda were separated from the old district of Ramgarh and these, together with the Jungle Mahals (a Mahal was an administrative unit of 23 divisions), were formed into a non-regulation province called the South Western Frontier Agency. The protection of the tribes and their forest rights, and the colonial narratives concerning them, are the focus of this paper. I argue that despite the prevalence of racial, evolutionary ideas vis-à-vis tribes, British attitudes towards indigenous peoples in India in the nineteenth century were not homogenous or unchanging. While it is difficult to unravel all the multifarious skeins that made up British policy in the period, certain main strands in the thinking of officials, administrators and anthropologists need to be identified in order to assess the overall impact of colonial interventions on the landscape and the lifestyles of the ‘tribes’.

The nineteenth century had seen the emergence of humanitarian sentiments about aboriginal peoples and their futures. ¹³ A vision of partnership between the colonial state and non-Aryan groups is evident in the writings of nineteenth-century ethnologists such as the Indian civil servant William Hunter. Throughout East Bengal, he noted:

Santhals, Dangars, or other hill men may be found living apart from the Hindu and preserving their national customs … patient of labour, at home with nature, the hill people of the west furnish the sinews by which English enterprise is carried on in Eastern Bengal. ¹⁴

Colonial epistemology built both on Brahamanical notions of caste and on eighteenth and nineteenth-century European ideas of race. ¹⁶ In the eighteenth century ‘savages’ had been generally assumed to share essentially the same psychic nature as Europeans. In the first half of the nineteenth, this essential unity was eroded by racialism. ¹⁷ Early ethnologists of the Company period – often administrators and Company soldiers (like Lt Col. Samuel R. Tickell in the 1840s) – meticulously recorded the ethnology and languages of the different tribes. Later ethnologists viewed tribes in the north-eastern parts of India such as the Nagas and the Mizos as the ‘true wild tribes of India’, and ‘unlike the broken tribes found in Chotanagpur’. ¹⁸ For these colonial administrators the ‘tribal’ model with its essential unity, clear body of customary law and unambiguous legitimacies was best suited to the task of maintaining public tranquillity. ¹⁹ These constructions of difference and the rigid drawing of boundaries had important implications for the discourse on tribes. In the context of the increasing migration of Hindus into remote adivasi areas, and as Brahmanical values acquired legitimacy as a strategy for the exclusion and subordination of tribals, British racial ideas acquired a new meaning. ²⁰

Migration by different groups into Chotanagpur from a very early period rendered the whole idea of ‘isolated’ tribes questionable, though Company records reveal that Khuntkhatti – the original land tenure system of the Munda tribes – was still vigorous when the company acquired the revenues of Bengal in the late eighteenth century. The Mundas like the Oraons and the Hos (or Larka Kols, closely akin to the Mundas) were among the tribal communities settled in the Chotanagpur plateau from an earlier period who practised both sedentary and shifting cultivation. Inward migration over a period of time had led to a complex acculturation process and had also resulted in the spread of hierarchy and differentiation and the gradual loss of status of tribal communities. Inroads by a money-lending landlord class ( zamindars and mahajans ) had steadily intensified the decline and marginalization of these communities which had started in the precolonial period and was assisted by the British in the eighteenth century.

It is clear that the social downgrading of these communities quickly followed their defeat by the Mughals in the seventeenth century. In the region of Singhbhum, the advent of outsiders had resulted in a growing unrest among the Ho population. Here, the interventions of the East India Company in the eighteenth century unleashed further forces of change. ²¹ The 1830 Kol rebellion was the culmination of this process of change.

EARLY COLONIZATION AND REGIMES OF GOVERNANCE

The early incursions by the British into the region had resulted in the formation in about 1780 of a district known as the Ramgarh Hill Tract, and magisterial courts were held first at Shergati to the north-west of Hazaribagh. The British tried to exercise control through the local chief but by 1800 that policy was abandoned in favour of more direct rule. This was implemented militarily: the whole region was placed under the magistrate of Ramgarh in 1816 and the district was governed in accordance with ordinary regulations in force in Bengal. The effects were immediate and most visible in Tamar district, where exploitation by moneylenders, whose activities were endorsed by colonial courts, resulted in widespread protests which continued unabated until the 1830s. ²² As ‘good government’ was introduced through the court at Shergati, locals had to travel long distances in the land disputes which resulted from the seizure of Munda lands by Hindu and Pathan moneylenders. ²³

When the courts failed to redress their grievances protest seemed the only answer. British administrative reports in the early nineteenth century show bewilderment at the hostility of the tribes to ‘good government’. The Commissioner of Circuit in 1830 reported colourfully on the Munda rebellions of 1830. They were, he noted:

Restless, wild and furious … they rushed into an insurrection scarcely paralleled for ferocity. Eager for plunder and universally prone to inebriation and infuriated by real or imaginary wrongs, the whole population yielded to the unobstructed tide of rebellion – fire, rapine and murder marked their paths; nor was their vindictive spirit confined to those to whom their injuries were ascribed. ²⁴

We complained to the raja of the munshi [steward] having sided with his father-in-law and deprived my wife of her chastity and of the Singh having forcibly taken and kept my sister. When we had told the Raja [landlord] our grievances we returned home. We four were subsequently sent for by Krishna Dewan who told us that as we were Kols we might do as we pleased, but be careful not to involve Raja Achet Singh in any difficulties in our conduct. We returned home, invited all the kols our brethren and caste to assemble at the village inn where we had a consultation. The Pathans had taken our honour and the Singh our sisters and the Kuar Harnath Sahi had forcibly deprived us of our estate of twelve villages which he had given to the Singh. Our lives we considered of no value and being of one caste and brethren it was agreed that we should commence to cut, plunder, murder and eat. We said if any were hanged it would be us four. If any put in irons it should be the four. We four should be answerable and if the gentleman sent for any it would be us, who were ready to submit to whatever might be the sentence. It is with this resolution that we have been murdering and plundering those who have deprived us of both honour and homes that committing such outrages our grievances would come to light and that if we had any master notice would be taken of them and justice rendered. ²⁶

That these rebellions forced colonial policy to contend with ‘indigenous’ ideas of place and being is not in doubt. Native resistance to European land claims forced a recognition of Munda rights and exposed the limits of colonial power. The process revealed the ambivalence of the colonial state and the interaction of indigenous narratives of resistance with narratives of power. ²⁷ Some representations of rebellions also make the case for indigenous agency quite strongly. Here, we see a doctrine of human nature where the savages are endowed with moral judgement, and a sharp sense of injustice which stands in contrast to ideas of the ‘noble’ or ‘ignoble’ savage. Through the conscious exercise of their will to transform their unhappy circumstances into a better social condition the tribes are seen as active agents of their own future. In these accounts which see ‘tribes’ as cultural beings, the tribals are afforded more genuine respect as human beings. The result is a critique of British imperial policy from within the system which was brutalizing fellow human beings and destroying their culture.

William Blunt, a member of the Governor-General’s Council who had been located in Chotanagpur, noted in 1832:

I think a serious error was committed in introducing our regulations into Chotanagpur, or in attempting to create a revenue from taxes to be levied from subjects so uncivilized and so poor. It is worthy of remark that the insurrection which occurred in Palamau in 1817–18 was produced by the illegal or fraudulent dispossession of the hereditary proprietors of some of the jagir lands in that Pergunnah, combined with other local causes. ²⁸ It now appears that in Pergunnahs Sonepur, Tamar, Silee, Baranda and Boondooo, in which quarter the insurrection in Chotanagpur commenced, most of the hereditary proprietors the Moonndas and mankis [headmen] have been dispossessed of their lands, which have been transferred in farm [sic] to foreigners [ theekadars and mahajuns ] whose expulsion and destruction appears to have been a primary object of insurgents. It further appears that the most grievous opposition and exactions have long been practised by the native officers of government, especially the Police Darogas which alone, amidst a people so poor, might well account for any general feeling of discontent. ²⁹

Similar humanitarian sentiments were expressed by administrators, missionaries and ethnologists in the aftermath of the Santhal rebellion of 1851. One official noted that ‘the Santhals were excessively simple and quite unacquainted with or unable to comprehend the most simple accounts and the mahajans [moneylenders] and zamindars [landlords] … take advantage of their defects of character in this respect by cheating them both in money transactions and arrangements for holding their land’. ³¹ While the repression of the rebellion was extreme, a growing perception of the plight of the ‘indigenous’ inhabitants, endangered by the ruthless interventions of moneylenders from the plains and by colonial institutions, becomes more evident in the writings of administrators from about the 1850s. It was reported that the ‘keen-eyed Hindu merchants from the north were quick to gauge the simple character of the primitive peoples’. ³² Henry Ricketts, a member of the Board of Revenue, noted in 1854 that ‘there seems reason to apprehend that the people of the district, the coles suffer much injustice at the hands of the foreign middleman introduced by the raja , their zamindar ’. ³³ In 1854 another official, Major Hannyngton, Agent to the Governor General and the first District Commissioner of Chotanagpur, noted the ways in which dikus (outsiders) had tried to rob tribals of land: ‘in Chotanagpur, the bhooi [traditional tenure holders] lands which exist in every village have been exposed to the rapacity of the middlemen, aliens who are hated by the people and who to obtain these lands, spare no species of force or fraud’. ³⁴ This critique of changing conditions in the region by officers and commentators was to continue until the late nineteenth century. As Francis Bradley-Birt of the Indian Civil Service noted in 1903: ‘the new-comers had under-rated the risk’.

The Kols and Oraons they so much despised were dangerous foes when pushed too far … Fire and sword struck terror into the hearts of zemindars and interlopers, and taught the British government that special cases needed special laws, and that a backward people at the mercy of unscrupulous adventurers called for timely assistance and protection. ³⁵

ENVIRONMENTAL TROPES OF OTHERNESS

Descriptions of the tribes in colonial discourse are replete with references to the forest environment. The notion that the tribes of Chotanagpur were different because they inhabited a forested landscape is an important feature of much of the writing. This no doubt bolsters the claim of ideas of environmental determinism. However, one needs to examine the complexity of such ideas and to note that the term jungle was not an unchanging one even in the Indian context. ³⁶ Ideas of savagery were associated with an inhospitable forest environment. Sivaramakrishnan has argued that these tropes resulted in the production of ‘primitive places’. ³⁷ However, the argument that colonial discourse tended to overemphasize the relationship of local communities with forests and tended to misread the landscape has to be examined more carefully.

What is clear from these colonial histories of the region (many of them conjectural) is that the communities in Singhbhum and elsewhere were not in any sense ‘isolated’ but were constantly interacting with other groups from the north. Furthermore, they contain interesting qualitative information about the landscape and changes in the land. Lt Col. S.R. Tickell of the Bengal Native Infantry in the 1840s waxed eloquent about the flora and fauna of Hodesum in the Kolhan:

the westerly Peers [a pir was an area comprising several villages] are situated among hills and vast jungles, and Saranda in the far south is one mass of mountains, clothed in forests, where the inhabitants … can scarcely struggle for mastery with the tiger … an entomologist would find an exhaustive field of research and discovery in the jungles of the country, the decayed saul trees are tenanted by species of Prionus and Cerambyx; the rocks contain endless beautiful varieties of Coleoptera … wild tribes of ants, bees and wasps. ³⁸

In the 1860s Valentine Ball recorded his experience of Chaibasa in Kolhan:

the station is a small one, consisting of the public offices, a few private bungalows and a small native bazaar. It is not altogether unpicturesquely situated, but there is an appearance of desolation in the surroundings, and one cannot but experience the feeling of being at the very outskirts of civilization when in Chaibasa. To the west and south-west one might travel through the widest of jungle for several hundreds of miles, without coming upon a single sign of any kind to indicate that the people have, in any way, been brought into contact with the British power – save, perhaps, that afforded by their quiet and undisturbed condition. ³⁹

In a refreshing study of forest rights and new forms of forest governance in colonial Kumaon, in North India, Arun Agarwal has emphasized the importance of understanding colonial interpretations of rights. Using Foucauldian ideas of governmentality he talks of governmentalized localities or governmentalized local communities as part of the new regime of control that creates fresh political and economic relationships between centre, localities and subjects. ⁴¹ Governmentality for him thus does not signify the proliferation of oppressive state institutions. Developments in Kumaon in the 1920s, on the contrary, involved a greater role for communities in environmental control and a redefinition of relations between state and locality, which resulted in the production of environmental subjects and new regulatory communities. In the context of increasing market pressures, Agarwal persuasively argues that these new regulatory arrangements were able to soften and attenuate the results of market pressures – and perhaps even withstand them. In nineteenth-century Chotanagpur, similarly, the colonial state (both in the Company period and after) and officials on the ground made attempts to understand and legislate in favour of local rights in the context of forest reservation. While one may not be able to talk of decentralization of forest governance as in Kumaon in the 1920s, these attempts need to be understood and analysed by examining particular contexts.

It is by recognizing forestry as also a matter of governance that we can see the colonial concern with rights. In Agarwal’s study of Kumaon, his focus on the idea of governmentality emphasizes the move by the colonial state away from methods of coercion towards other ways of shaping behaviour in the context of environmental resource use. This latter approach could be useful for understanding the colonial discourse on rights. Administrators came to believe that rights – in this case rights of indigenous communities – needed to be settled and preserved in order to facilitate governance. That this realization came gradually is not in doubt. By the 1860s, this paper argues, serious attempts were being made to engage and understand the local historical ecological setting and the rights of local communities.

LOCAL REGIMES OF GOVERNANCE AND FOREST RIGHTS

For another tribal community, the Hos, administration by the South Western Frontier Agency brought no dramatic improvement. Wilkinson tried to pacify the tribes by granting the village headmen or Mundas and mankis (headmen) of certain areas official documents confirming their title to the land and fixing the rent in perpetuity. But this did not always work in practice. His reforms were based on a fundamental misunderstanding. As a result of the granting of land titles to village headmen, arrears of rent meant that several villages came into the hands of diku (outsider) landlords. British courts participated in this expropriation as Mundas of villages had no title deeds to their land and could not prove ownership in British courts. ⁴² Without proper records, land grabbing by dikus , in cahoots with the courts, could continue to an unparalleled degree. Edward Dalton was to note in the 1860s that ‘it was during the administration of the south western agency that the greatest disturbance of peasant proprietary tenure occurred’. ⁴³ Yet it is important to note that the period had seen the recognition and the strengthening of the indigenous system of governance.

One motive for the subjugation of Kolhan and its being brought directly under British administration was the government’s fear that the Hos were being provoked by zamindars . Wilkinson also believed that by organizing the Hos into an ordered society the company would be able to generate more revenue from the area. ⁴⁴ By orders of 6 June 1837 some rules for the criminal justice in the Kolhan under the political Agent were approved and sanctioned by the government of Bengal. The assistant to the Agent in Kolhan was empowered to receive and investigate all complaints, information and charges brought before him with regard to crimes committed, and where appropriate to proceed to conviction. Wilkinson required his assistant Tickell to go through the local headmen or their assistants and to have direct contact with the people. This was a very important concession. The local chief’s undefined claim to supremacy over the larka Hos (a term used to describe the fighting Hos) was disallowed and Ho local institutions were strengthened. Wilkinson directed Tickell to preserve and strengthen the manki munda system for fiscal and police purposes. The large pirs (areas of several villages) were subdivided and the small pirs were placed under the superintendence of the manki (headman). In effect Wilkinson was attempting to preserve the indigenous village system in the Kolhan. The manki munda system continued to have a life in the region well into the twentieth century.

In the wake of late nineteenth-century tribal rebellions, such as the 1890s Birsa Munda revolt, further protection of forest rights ensued. As forests were increasingly recognized as a revenue resource by the district administration, the clash between foresters and administrators became more apparent. Often while forest conservancy was insisting on the need for direct control of timber extraction and systematized regulation of what was perceived to be a dwindling resource, local administrators urged caution in overriding local forest rights. The conservancy approach has been seen as part of the development discourse of the colonial state: the focus on efficient and systematic production of timber for public interest enunciated ‘the productionist agendas that we take as characterizing developmental policies in the twentieth century’. ⁴⁵ The district administration, however, continued to be concerned with the issue of rights. By the 1880s forests in Chotanagpur were organized under a variety of arrangements: reserved, protected, private or leased from the political states. It was generally argued that the interests of the agriculturists were amply safeguarded during the creation of the reserved forest (since in the hilly regions fifty per cent of the forest area was generally excluded from reservation while in the plains the non-reserved areas set aside as village commons were three times as large as the reservation). But the history of forest reservation and the evidence of unrest indicates that the interests of small farmers living adjacent to forests were far from secure. The outcomes of forest policy in Chotanagpur played out differently in different contexts, as can be seen by looking at the contrasting pressures for protection of forest for a variety of reasons (including water supply), ⁴⁶ the revenue-generating possibilities of timber produce and the issue of local rights. In West Singhbhum, for instance, while the productionist agendas of the forest department clearly influenced the way that Saranda was administered, in the Porahat estate on the other hand, as we shall see, protection of local rights took priority in the context of conflict with local communities. Porahat estate was confiscated from its Raja in 1858 on account of the rebellion of the Raja and its revenue administration passed to the British. It was incorporated into Bengal and Singbhum in 1892. ⁴⁷

Forest rights played a significant role in the Birsa rebellion. The main cause of discontent lay in restrictions affecting the protected forests of Piring in the Porahat area, where the measures taken to mark off village forests and to prepare a record of forest rights caused much unrest. Petitions were submitted by various mankis – Jeta Manki of Gudri, Rasha Manki, Mona Manki of Durkapir – ‘claiming resumption’ of their old rights to free firewood, grazing and so on. Birsa himself led a deputation of raiyats (peasants) from Sigrida village to Chaibasa to petition for remission of forest dues. Men from six other villages had preceded him but nothing came of it. ⁴⁸ The strength of the Birsa movement, however, along with official recognition of traditional Mundari khuntkhatti tenure, resulted in preservation of some forest rights in the protected forest areas, where efforts were made to establish records of local rights, as in the case of the Porahat Settlement. The role of the district administration in recording and defending local rights against the productionist agendas of the foresters was thus highly significant.

T. S. Macpherson, the Survey and Settlement Officer responsible for preparing the record of rights in Porahat district, reported in 1908 that reservation of the Porahat forest was a serious encroachment on khuntkatti rights of the Mundas.

But when the reservation came and with it the evictions, the infringement of their ancient customary rights was obvious and was immediately resented. They made light of the pattas [land documents] from the rent receiver and to use the words of the joint forest settlement report, protested that the memorial stones of their ancestors were their pattas . ⁴⁹

A. N. Moberly, who was in charge of the operation to demarcate twenty-five large blocks of protected forest in Porahat, recorded extensive resistance from Munda and Mankis .

The Mundaris of Karla, Sankai and Todanghatu and Kundruguttu pir obstructed the amins [government functionaries] and when sent for persisted in their obstructive attitude and informed me that they would not permit the lines to be cut, although I warned them that I should be compelled to send for the police unless they promised to assist. An armed force camped in these villages until the lines had been cut and were inspected by me and a certain amount of new cultivation was included in the protected blocs as a punishment. … I strongly suspect that the manki had organized opposition throughout the pir , but I could not get sufficient evidence by which to proceed against him. ⁵⁰

… the reservation had created a general feeling of dissatisfaction and distrust of the government which it will take long to live down. The tenants evicted from a number of villages lost their khuntkhatti status for which no grant of raiyati [peasant] lands elsewhere could compensate them. Now when the law recognizes their khuntkhatti status they clamour that something should be done for them. The opposition to the demarcation of protected forests is due to the fear that eventually the tenants will be excluded from them, and I strongly urge here that no restrictions should be placed on the use of the jungle at least by the residents of the village where it lies, except such as are necessary to prevent its total destruction. ⁵¹

For Macpherson then, the customs of Chotanagpur were radically different from other parts of Bengal. As he noted,

to comprehend rights and customs in Chotanagpur and particularly in Pargana Porahat the most important requisite is to discard completely all ideas of land tenure acquired in other parts of Bengal. The relationship of landlord to tenant in extensive tracts of Chotanagpur is radically different from the same relation in Bengal and Bihar, the unit of Chotanagpur not being the individual tenant, but a community and the landlord being not the owner of the soil but merely receiver of a charge called rent and having no direct relation with the cultivators. ⁵³

In his report therefore Macpherson set out to systematically protect customary rights of local communities against the onslaught of the proprietor.

Macpherson and his colleague James H. Taylor, who surveyed the estate belonging to the zamindar or proprietor of Porahat, both advanced unanswerable arguments that the undemarcated portions of the protected forest should be left to the management of the village headman and mankis under the nominal supervision of the forest department and that all proprietorial claims over this area should be disallowed. ⁵⁴ Taylor warned that ‘unless the village forests were left under the control of the headman, the management of the forests by the raja, or rather by his subordinates would be very detrimental to the interests of the tenants’. ⁵⁵ The protected forest was to be managed on behalf of the village communities, the zamindar already having received his share of the forest in the shape of reserves. Clearly here one can see a move by Macpherson and Taylor to establish and protect certain customary rights. In fact one can argue that the settlement aimed to limit the rights of the proprietor and to protect the rights of the manki . ⁵⁶ Macpherson also elaborated on the custom of the sarna (sacred grove), where strict custom prevented any cutting: ‘no one may cut down trees here whether green or dry and … not even the dry wood may be taken out of the grove’. In Ranchi, new landlords were unaware of prevailing custom and did cut trees in the sarna until they were charged and convicted. The proprietors were disqualified and the Commissioner called their offence a sacrilege to the village community and its beliefs. The zamindar of Porahat also claimed the right to cut trees in the sacred grove: this too was judged sacrilegious. In Porahat in particular, as Macpherson noted, the zamindar was expressly banned by the terms of his indenture from interfering with the wasteland. ⁵⁷ The zamindar here was seeking to restore his old feudatory rights by claiming the forests and wasteland. This legal enforcement of the status of sacred groves was a very important recognition of local rights and cosmologies.

The Commissioners therefore concluded that all unreserved jungle and waste land and any produce from it must be protected from sale, the zamindar had no right to take it for personal use, nor any right to interfere, save to regulate the enjoyment of rights by members of the village communities. The tenants had unrestricted rights to make use of such land and its produce in accordance with the customs of the village, without having to render payments to or ask permission from the zamindar . Residents of the estate could take free, without permission and for their own use, all uncultivated forest produce from the waste lands or jungle surrounding the villages, except from trees of certain species in some villages where they had already been apportioned by the villagers amongst themselves. By custom then all residents of the village had reciprocal rights in the jungles of other villages in the estate. ⁵⁸ To prevent misconception Macpherson hammered home the point that the zamindar was not the owner of trees in cultivated land, village sites or jahiras (sacred groves) nor entitled to any produce or revenue from them and that he had no right to cut them down or sell them under any circumstances.

In order to give practical force to these records of rights Macpherson required that certified copies of the record be made available to local headmen or in their absence to influential tenants. He also made extensive recommendations with regard to the dismissal of headmen and appointment of new headmen, which he wished to place in the hands of the District Commissioner. Such arrangements, he noted, were essential if the record of rights was to have practical value: ⁵⁹ ‘of all the tenants who have been placed in difficulties by the change of Porahat from a political state to a zamindari in British India, the aboriginals of these pirs most require and merit the protection of government by legislation’. ⁶⁰

Sometimes, however, customary rights were misused by the local communities themselves, fearing the imminent seizure of the forests by the state. In Ranchi district with the beginning of the forest settlement, it was reported, local communities were apprehensive that the settlement would reduce their forest rights and had used their customary rights to sell timber in large quantities, denuding the forests in their locality. Interestingly, when the situation proved to have a marked effect on the community and its fuel resources, some local attempts at conservation were recorded. These involved rigid prescriptions against cutting down certain trees. Unfortunately, Macpherson recorded, these local conservation attempts were few and far between and varied enormously.

The debates on customary rights in the protected forests revealed colonial concerns with local rights. At the same time sweeping legislation allocated nearly one sixth of India’s land as forest reserve. While the motives behind this forest legislation have been a subject of much debate, mainly among environmental historians, much less has been written about the discourse of customary rights. It can be argued that forest rights in the Chotanagpur context became an important part of the discourse of Ho and Munda exclusiveness both for the colonial state and for the indigenous peoples themselves.

In Chotanagpur customary rights – while open to misinterpretation, misrecognition and sustained erosion – did indeed have a basis in the lived environment as E. P. Thompson identified it: ‘comprised of practices, inherited expectations, rules, norms and sanctions both of law and neighbourhood pressures’. Their recognition by the colonial state has to do with the contradictory nature of political power. Thompson goes on to note that ‘unequal as were the terms of power in this conflict, yet power must submit to some constraints because power might bring itself into danger if abuse of customary rights outraged the populace’. ⁶¹ The reality of customary rights is not in question here.

A study by Allen Adamson and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos examines the links between myths of land-relatedness and regimes of property in land and shows the different ways in which ‘mythical land relations’ are reproduced through the courts. In Australia, for example, contemporary Australian aboriginal groups are obliged to approach the courts to establish land rights. As Abramson and Theodossopoulos point out, ‘the dominance of the courts in matters relating to the ratification of land relatedness, means that often with anthropological aid, clans folk are both able and obliged to translate mythical categories into legal terms. Ancestral tracks and ritual sites become the basis for drawing up boundaries, whilst spiritual guardianship transposes as legal ownership’. ⁶² In the Chotanagpuri case similarly one can see that brute facts of colonialism were sometimes reversed by recognition of a limited number of customary practices and local land myths. The entangling of colonial narratives with indigenous narratives is all too apparent here. Nevertheless the concessions made by the colonial state to indigeneity and locality were ultimately insufficient to stem a rising tide of turbulent protest in Chotanagpur. Indeed, the concessions probably encouraged the Ho and Munda along a path leading eventually to claims for autonomy. In the process a minority culture was creatively reworked during struggles to actualize rights. ⁶³

Not all colonial officials followed Macpherson’s line. Legislative attempts to limit obvious exploitation by outsiders developed alongside the notion of ‘civilizing’ the tribes. This was made most clear in the debate on shifting cultivation ( jhuming ) in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Richard Temple, Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces, for example, argued strongly in favour of ending the practice. Jhuming was said to be wasteful and a threat to the jungles in the remoter areas. The language of settling and improving these groups was always in evidence. ⁶⁴ It is also important to note that the legislative exercise of the latter half of the nineteenth century which was intended to redress the most pressing grievances of the tribes in Chotanagpur did not fail to rouse debate on the merits of a policy that provided for an ‘excluded’ or ‘partially excluded area’. James Forsyth, the Administrator of the Central Provinces, was vociferous in his criticism of colonial policy regarding these tracts. He proposed that the Mandla plateau (or savannahs as he called it) should be opened up for permanent cultivation.

We have here a tract eminently fitted to yield results from the application of European energy, intelligence, and capital to the supervision and direction of native labour … none but a capitalist can now practically occupy the waste lands so as to secure a legal proprietary title; and the aborigine never has such capital as would enable him to do so. ⁶⁵

The Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 was the result. It attempted further to define and record tenures and to ‘register … rights, privileges, immunities and liabilities affecting holders’, with the aim of ending the disputes which had assumed ‘so chronic a character in connection with these special tenures’. While the Act recognized khuntkhattidar rights, however, it did not entitle khuntkhattidars to retain possession against the wishes of the landlord. Its limitations were clear. ⁶⁷

All this does not detract from the fact that some effort was made by the colonial state to record and protect customary rights. Often misjudged, but sometimes appropriate, the efforts to protect these customary rights helped to institutionalize the fact of tribal autonomy. The move to protect local rights was fuelled by resistance movements of the nineteenth century, and by the fact that colonial administrators were forced to contend with the power of indigenous knowledge. As I have argued, we thus need a more sophisticated understanding of colonial ethnography that takes into account various strands of thinking and the great variety of imperial agents involved in the process of colonization. A whole generation of ethnologists and administrators in the nineteenth and early twentieth century had systematically studied ‘tribal culture’. Starting with the work of Tickell and Ricketts in the 1840s and ’50s and continuing with that of William W. Hunter and Edward Dalton in the late nineteenth century and of the Indian ethnographer S. C. Roy in 1910 and William G. Archer in the mid twentieth century, the idea of a distinct tribal Munda, Ho or Oraon culture was given textual force and meaning which translated into legislative protection of sorts. It came to be believed that rights – in this case rights of indigenous communities – needed to be settled and preserved in order to facilitate governance.

We also need to locate the work of administrators like John Davidson, John Hannyngton and Henry Ricketts in the 1850s and ethnologists like S. C. Roy in 1900 within a broader framework of nineteenth-century humanitarianism. ⁶⁸ In fact, the young science of ethnology owed its institutional origins to the humanitarian impulses embodied in the Aborigines Protection Society, founded in 1833 ‘to promote the spread of civilization and the protection of their rights’. Stocking argues that in the period 1830–70 the organization and the ideology of empire were in a state of irresolution as humanitarians, colonists, colonial reformers and free traders pushed their respective concerns in the metropolitan political arena. ⁶⁹ The story of missionaries such as Constant Lievens and his successor John Baptist Hoffman, Jesuits in Chotanagpur in the last years of the nineteenth century, must also be seen in this context.

MISSIONARIES AND THE DISCOURSE OF TRIBAL PROTECTION

Important new work on missionaries is allowing us to reassess their work. It has sometimes been argued that missionaries provided a more authoritarian instrument for the attempted control of indigenous communities in India and Africa, but recent work suggests that their role could be more ambivalent, both in Britain’s imperial expansion and in local power struggles. In her important book on missionaries in the Cape Colony and Britain Elizabeth Elbourne proposes that the religious ‘conversation’ between the missionary and his parishioners was more like the ministrations of the Good Samaritan than a clash of dichotomous cultures. ⁷⁰ Mission activities could give missionaries a close understanding of local issues, and some took great interest in local language and culture. Missionaries in India sometimes challenged colonial policy and attacked an indifferent or even greedy administration.

In Chotanagpur, four missionaries of the Gossner Mission came to Ranchi in 1845. They were Germans who had been invited to preach in Chotanagpur by its first Commissioner, Major J. C. Hannyngton. ⁷¹ In 1850 they baptized four Oraons and the first church was founded; two Mundas were baptized in 1851. The Anglican Mission established its work in Ranchi in 1869; and the Roman Catholic mission started work in Chotanagpur soon after. Work on Protestant missionaries elsewhere has argued for the close association of Protestantism with empire. Protestantism was an important element of the constitution of ‘British’ identity in the nineteenth century and as such helped to unify diverse communities. Jesuit radicalism on the other hand developed in Chotanagpur as an important critique of colonial state policy – a tradition that continues to this day.

Missionary discourses fed into anti-imperial networks of communication and the agitation of the Mundas and the Hos. One significant figure in this linkage was John Baptist Hoffmann, a German Jesuit whose years in Sarwada (Ranchi) were to make him a great missionary, a philologist, anthropologist and social reformer ⁷² and who became a strident critic of colonial policy towards tribes. Hoffmann was perturbed by the anger and the hostility of the Mundas who under their leader Birsa were secretly plotting their rebellion in the hills and the forests and planned to launch an attack on the government and the missionaries. Hoffmann’s writing ascribes agency to the communities whose unhappiness was fuelled by the neglect of grievances by the state.

Birsa persuaded his followers that god had given him the task of liberating the tribals and instituting a new religion. His religious activities, Hoffmann noted,

gave a harmless appearance to the numerous sardar meetings in which the intended rising was settled without arousing any serious suspicions in either government or missions. It facilitated the gathering of about 6,000 armed men around Birsa in Chalkad in August 1895, after which it was announced that he would call fire from heaven to destroy the aliens (dikus) … then a few young men who were still wavering between Christianity and the new religion came in and begged me to leave immediately for Ranchi, because the very next morning the armed men with Birsa would start to massacre all the foreigners, adding that I as the nearest European to Chalkad was already designated as the first victim. Since I refused to move, they gave me up for lost and went away. ⁷³

The Birsa movement brought home to missionaries such as Hoffmann the strength of local protest and the inability of the colonial state to deal with the grievances of the communities. For tribal converts like Birsa, then, the reimagination of community through the use of invented and traditional symbols became more potent than Christian discourse. It was in this context that the missionaries also came under attack because they were no longer ‘vectors of contact’ with the British imperial centre. In the past these connections with the missionaries had helped to strengthen the challenge to the overwhelming incursions of the colonial state and the zamindars . Deeply aware of the social and economic problems in Chotanagpur, Hoffman’s strategy had been to work through the courts. With experience of their shortcomings he now argued that changes in the law were required if the injustice done to the Mundas by zamindars , thikadars and moneylenders were to be rectified. Hoffmann seized the opportunity to propose to the government, through the Commissioner, a scheme for amending the laws because – as he had so often said of the rebellion – many of the complaints of the tribals were just. Hoffmann’s detailed research into the Munda land system was consulted by Edward Lister, the Settlement Officer, during the Survey and Settlement operations in 1902. In fact, many of the Act’s provisions relating to the aborigines were drafted by Father Hoffmann himself. It is recorded that Lister and Hoffmann talked far into the night and that Hoffmann rendered valuable research assistance to Lister with regard to the Munda land system and local customs. ⁷⁴ Hoffmann helped draft the special laws in connection with Mundari Khuntkhatti which appeared in Appendix 1 of the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908. Underlining the necessity of settling aboriginal rights, Hoffmann recorded:

It is no exaggeration to say that the state of insecurity of nearly all kinds of tenures and titles to possession was so universal as to seriously depreciate the value of lands and cripple agriculture. This insecurity was not limited to the raiyats ’ holdings, but extended to the zamindars as well. So much so that it was common belief that any man with a little audacity and a little money might take possession of what lands he pleased. The courts, having little or nothing to go upon but oral evidence were in practice not merely powerless, but were in a way bound to assist rather than to check spoliation. This I know is a startling statement … consider how legal records of tribal rights and customs in the absence of all legally fixed and demarcated boundaries of villages as well as fields, among an ignorant people, who could neither understand the court language, nor make themselves understood except through interpreters, how easy it was I say in these circumstances for them to prove in court any claim they might choose to make. In their bewilderment and despair, the aborigines were driven to attempts at risings and in fact always lived in a state of disaffection. In such a state of affairs, a general settlement was a necessity. Now that it has been completed, it has, in the course of years furnished the plainest proof of its importance and utility. ⁷⁵

The Chotanagpur Tenancy Act aimed to amend the laws and codify them in line with custom and usage. However, when the act came into force only 156 villages were registered as having full Mundari khuntkhatti rights and only 203 square miles as being bhuinhari (traditional tenure) fields. It was found that out of 3,614 square miles of cultivated land only 405 square miles were registered as ancestral property. ⁷⁷ From this we can say that the Act came too late. Nevertheless, it had great significance for the Mundas as it recognized the Munda land system itself, for which they had been struggling for so long. Hoffmann himself was optimistic about the impact of the Act:

… for more than a hundred years the Mundas were calumniated as savages or semi-savages, whose claims were too exorbitant and absurd to be listened to, as stubborn rebels whom nobody could satisfy, and therefore justly subjected to severe military reprisals as the Kols who were fit for nothing, but carrying burdens and being serfs. And now after a cruel martyrdom that has lasted all too long, their claims have been recognized officially as having been perfectly right and their land system appears as one of the wisest creations of pre-historic times. So after all they are neither savages nor semi-savages, but a race of martyrs most deserving of the sympathy and respect of all right minded men. Therefore the Act is a justification and a rehabilitation of the highest moral value. ⁷⁸

BY WAY OF A CONCLUSION

This paper has argued for a reassessment of colonial discourses concerning the tribes of Eastern India. Since independence Eastern India has become subject to new kinds of both internal and external economic colonization, far more traumatic in impact than colonization before 1947. The most urgent threat to adivasi communities and their landscapes has emerged since 1991 as large-scale foreign investment has been allowed into India for mining projects. The region possesses some of the world’s best deposits of the bauxite used in aluminium production. This wealth was recognized in the 1920s by Cyril Fox, a British geologist who first planned a scheme integrating bauxite-mining and dam-building to produce the electricity required for dam production, a colonial template that has proved highly resilient. Since 1945, and much more since 1990, contestations for space and resources have intensified in the context of very weak central and state governance. The level of state and corporate violence (including extra-judicial killings) against adivasis and other peasants has steadily increased, while with a persistent background of low-level armed Naxalite insurgency throughout the central spine of India there has been a rising tide of violent and non-violent resistance. The Kalinganagar massacre in 2006, where twelve tribals were killed for protesting against the seizure of their lands by Tata, the iron and steel company, may mark a turning point in the breakdown of governance. ⁸² Arguably, the Indian central government is ceasing altogether to be able effectively to control or to disentangle itself from the activities of multinational companies and their agents. These are intent on alienating indigenous land, irrespective of the legal protection conferred in 1950 by Schedule 5 of the Indian constitution, whose origins can be traced to the colonial discourses of tribal protection which I have delineated here. It may well be that current trends in globalization are creating a new post-colonial imperialism even less accountable than its predecessor: one characterized by ecological inequity, growing environmental injustice, human-rights abuses and a consequent rising tide surge of state violence and counter-violence. The inherently violent, environmentally destructive and effectively lawless conditions of the expanding corporate frontier are contributing to a fundamental destabilization of the state in India in which all pretensions to notions of judicial credentials, already enfeebled, might soon be abandoned.

NOTES AND REFERENCES