Resistance as Negotiation: Making States and Tribes in the Margins of Modern India

By Uday Chandra

"Tribes" appear worldwide today as vestiges of a pre-modern past at odds with the workings of modern states. Acts of resistance and rebellion by groups designated as "tribal" have fascinated as well as perplexed administrators and scholars in South Asia and beyond. Tribal resistance and rebellion are held to be tragic yet heroic political acts by "subaltern" groups confronting omnipotent states. By contrast, this book draws on fifteen years of archival and ethnographic research to argue that statemaking is intertwined inextricably with the politics of tribal resistance in the margins of modern India.

Uday Chandra demonstrates how the modern Indian state and its tribal or adivasi subjects have made and remade each other throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras, historical processes of modern statemaking shaping and being shaped by myriad forms of resistance by tribal subjects. Accordingly, tribal resistance, whether peaceful or violent, is better understood vis-à-vis negotiations with the modern state, rather than its negation, over the past two centuries. How certain people and places came to be seen as "tribal" in modern India is, therefore, tied intimately to how "tribal" subjects remade their customs and community in the course of negotiations with colonial and postcolonial states. Ultimately, the empirical material unearthed in this book requires rethinking and rewriting the political history of modern India from its "tribal" margins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9781503639157

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SOUTH ASIA IN MOTION

EDITOR

Thomas Blom Hansen

EDITORIAL BOARD

Sanjib Baruah

Anne Blackburn

Satish Deshpande

Faisal Devji

Christophe Jaffrelot

Naveeda Khan

Stacey Leigh Pigg

Mrinalini Sinha

Ravi Vasudevan

RESISTANCE AS NEGOTIATION

Making States and Tribes in the Margins of Modern India

UDAY CHANDRA

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2024 by Uday Chandra. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chandra, Uday (Political scientist), author.

Title: Resistance as negotiation: making states and tribes in the margins of modern India / Uday Chandra.

Other titles: South Asia in motion.

Description: Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2024. | Series: South Asia in motion | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023058058 (print) | LCCN 2023058059 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503638112 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503639157 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Government, Resistance to—India—History. | India—Scheduled tribes—Politics and government. | India—Politics and government—1765-1947. | India—Politics and government—1947-

Classification: LCC GN635.I4 C469 2024 (print) | LCC GN635.I4 (ebook) | DDC 323/.0440954—dc23/eng/20240104

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023058058

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023058059

Cover design: Susan Zucker

Cover photograph: Akashanthoney, Forest of Jharkhand, 2017

Typeset by Newgen in Adobe Caslon Pro 10.5/15

For all those who have taught me

and believed in me over the years

CONTENTS

Map, Figures, and Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Ancien Régime, or When Margins Were Not Margins

2. Colonial Paternalism and the Making of the Modern Tribal Subject

3. Tribal Resistance and Rebellion

4. Reconstituting Tribal Margins in Colonial India

5. From the Colonial to the Postcolonial

6. The Postcolonial Developmental State and the Modern Tribal Subject

7. Tribal Resistance and Rebellion Revisited

8. Remaking the Postcolonial State from Above and Below

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

MAP, FIGURES, AND TABLES

MAP

1. Map of Jharkhand showing districts and bordering states

FIGURES

1.1. The Goddess Mauliksha of Maluti

1.2A. Façade of a typical temple at Maluti

1.2B. Śiva lingas atop yonīs inside a temple

2.1. Lurka Cole

TABLES

1.1. Table Showing Break-Up of Victims’ Occupations

7.1. Socioeconomic Stratification among Households and Support for Rebels in Killum

8.1. Quantitative Portrait of the Lac Commodity Chain in India, 2009–10

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN over fifteen years in the making. Without doubt, my fondness for the longue durée has, to use a cricketing metaphor, eased my lengthy stay at the crease. But committed as I am to slow academia in today’s high-speed knowledge economy, I have relished the time to imbibe, absorb, reflect, edit, and revise amidst the vagaries of life and work.

Researching for and writing this book has been a truly transformative experience for me. It took me to new places, introduced me to new situations, and enabled me to make new friends. Overall, reading, writing, and debating adivasi histories has shaped me not only as a scholar, but as a person. My politics, as the pages of this book will reveal, is about listening to and learning from people, and paying attention to the minutiae of their lives. Of necessity, then, I abjure the politics of ventriloquism and virtue-signaling that, alas, invariably accompany writing on adivasis in India.

Over these years, I have accumulated far too many debts to recount, let alone repay. At Yale, it was a dream to work with my intellectual hero Jim Scott, who never fails to inspire. To him, I owe my enthusiasm for studying rural politics and for writing clear, sharp prose. K. Shivi Sivaramakrishnan was a bulwark of support throughout my Yale career. Very few mentors, least of all someone as busy as him, spent as much time as him entertaining my inchoate ideas about anthropology, history, and politics. I am also grateful to Elisabeth Libby Wood, Karuna Mantena, Mridu Rai, Helen Siu, Bernard Bate, Vivek Sharma, Stathis Kalyvas, Ian Shapiro, and Steven Smith who taught and supported my work at critical junctures over my graduate career at Yale. I also recall with much fondness my long hours of conversation, drink, and mirth with Mohsin Alam, Ashish Chadha, Sabyasachi Das, Rishabh Dhir, Kasturi Gupta, Annu Jalais, Atreyee Majumder, Durba Mitra, Shivaji Mukherjee, Kirti Sharma, and Vikramaditya Thakur. Last but not the least, I must acknowledge the generous research funding from Yale University as well as the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) that launched my career in graduate school.

During fieldwork, my debts were many and great. I remain eternally grateful to the professionals of the Jharkhand unit of Utthaan (name changed), particularly Binju Abraham and Pradyut Bhattacharya, who have taught me so much about living and working in rural Jharkhand, at times unintentionally. Few can match the generosity and intelligence of my fieldwork interlocutors, especially Anil, Barnabus, Jaimassih, Joachim, and Kalyan. Members of the PLFI and MCC who welcomed me despite the risk to themselves, their families, and their colleagues deserve a lal salaam (red salute). Lastly, I owe a massive debt to the archivists and librarians in Ranchi, Khunti, Kolkata, Delhi, London, and Berlin whose patience and generosity matched their depth of knowledge about long-forgotten yet invaluable government records. I miss my daily conversations about Indian history over cups of chai with Dr. K.K. Singh in the old Commissioner’s Record Room in Ranchi as much as the regular scoldings from Bidisha-di in the West Bengal State Archives on Bhawani Dutta Lane.

After Yale, I took up a fellowship between May 2013 and July 2015 at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Germany. This was a time of extraordinary intellectual productivity for me, and it could not have happened without a chance encounter on Facebook with Nate Roberts, a fellow at the institute. Nate, along with Lisa Björkman, Ajay Gandhi, and Sahana Udupa, must be the best one can expect of a colleague. Our seemingly endless chats in and outside our offices over meals, wine and cheese, and impromptu gatherings in the garden will stay with me forever. I am grateful to Peter van der Veer, without whose support and encouragement I would never have embarked on postdoctoral research on migration from Bihar and Jharkhand to Mumbai. At Goettingen, Ravi Ahuja, Gajendran Ayyathurai, Devika Bordia, Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Patrick Eisenlohr, Sumeet Mhaskar, Srirupa Roy, Lalit Vachani, and Rupa Viswanath enriched my intellectual and social life in unparalleled ways.

I moved to Doha in August 2015 to start teaching at Georgetown University in Qatar. I am grateful to Mehran Kamrava and his colleagues at the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) for hosting a workshop on my book manuscript in 2016. I thank, in particular, Rachel Brulé, Jason Keith Fernandes, Praskanva Sinharay, Malini Sur, and Suryakant Waghmore, for their incisive comments on my manuscript. I mulled over them for months before working out how to revise my initial draft of this book. At Georgetown, I have been fortunate to have taught and mentored excellent undergraduate students, particularly Shiza Abbasi, Pragyan Acharya, Taha Kaleem, Aashish Karn, Irene Promodh, Fiza Shahzad, Kartikeya Uniyal, and Shikoh Zaidi, who pushed me in seminars and beyond to think anew about resistance as well as South Asian politics and history. My colleagues at Georgetown, especially Rogaia Abusharaf, Rory Miller, Gerd Nonneman, Reza Pirbhai, Sohaira Siddiqui, Amira Sonbol, Clyde Wilcox, and Mohamed Zayani, have been enthusiastic supporters of my scholarship and teaching. I recall warmly the encouragement of our former dean Ahmad Dallal, who placed more faith in my abilities than I could muster at times.

Friends, mentors, and interlocutors have offered feedback on paper presentations and/or specific chapters of the book and, more generally, made academia less daunting and more palatable. In alphabetical order, I would like to thank Avinash, Ashok Acharya, Amita Baviskar, Mukulika Banerjee, Ishita Banerjee-Dube, Crispin Bates, Dag Erik Berg, Neilesh Bose, Sugata Bose, Jesus Chairez, Kanchan Chandra, Indrani Chatterjee, Partha Chatterjee, Vinayak Chaturvedi, Divya Cherian, Vinita Damodaran, Sangeeta Dasgupta, Erik de Maaker, Faisal Devji, Pankhuree Dube, Saurabh Dube, David Gellner, David Gilmartin, Eva Gerharz, Navyug Gill, Will Gould, Ajay Gudavarthy, Sumit Guha, Barbara Harriss-White, Zoya Hasan, Brian Hatcher, Frank Heidemann, Ayesha Jalal, Muhammad Ali Jan, Nico Jaoul, Indivar Kamtekar, Pralay Kanungo, Lamia Karim, Prakash Kashwan, Malavika Kasturi, Sudipta Kaviraj, Sankaran Krishna, George Kunnath, Anatol Lieven, David Ludden, Hasan Mahmud, Dilip Menon, Townsend Middleton, Lauren Minsky, Lisa Mitchell, Edward Moonlittle, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Christian Novetzke, Polly O’Hanlon, Reema Omer, Anastasia Piliavsky, Uma Pradhan, Shalini Randeria, Mircea Rainu, Anupama Rao, Ram Rawat, Mujibur Rehman, Indrajit Roy, Arild Ruud, Padmanabh Samarendra, Swagato Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, Andrew Sartori, Asoka Kumar Sen, Uditi Sen, Alpa Shah, Juned Shaikh, Jyotirmaya Sharma, Sara Shneiderman, Matt Shutzer, Dina Siddiqui, Radhika Singha, Subir Sinha, Ajay Skaria, Luisa Steur, Ajantha Subramanian, Mark Swislocki, Tariq Thachil, Mark Turin, Nasir Uddin, Rashmi Varma, Judy Whitehead, Jeff Witsoe, Anand Vaidya, Anand Yang, and Philipp Zehmisch. It is customary to thank everyone at this time, and to state that any errors that remain are mine alone. However, if I have gone astray over the years, a significant number of these individuals must also be called to account.

The central claims of this book as well as specific portions of it were presented at conferences and on campuses across the world. The Association of Asian Studies (AAS) annual meetings as well as the yearly Madison South Asia conference have, in particular, provided me steady intellectual nourishment over the past decade or so. I am ever so grateful to hosts and audiences who invited me to speak about my research on Jharkhand at Amherst, Ashoka University, Bergen, Cambridge, Copenhagen, Delhi University, El Collegio de México, the Ethnological Museum in Zurich, FLAME University, Goettingen, Grinnell, Harvard, IIT Mumbai, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jindal Global University, the LSE, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, NYU, NYU Abu Dhabi, Leeds, Lisbon, Oxford, Oslo, Princeton, Ruhr-University Bochum, Stanford, Stockholm, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, the University of Connecticut, and Yale. This is undoubtedly a better book thanks to the feedback I received at these venues.

Portions of the book have appeared already in print. The kernel of my argument, laid out in the introduction to this book, draws on Rethinking Subaltern Resistance, Journal of Contemporary Asia 45 (4) (2015): 563–73. Chapter 3 is a revised version of my argument in Flaming Fields and Forest Fires: Agrarian Transformations and the Making of Birsa Munda’s Rebellion, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 53, no. 1 (2016): 69–98. Extracts from Chapters 2 and 5 are drawn from Liberalism and its Other: The Politics of Primitivism in Colonial and Postcolonial Indian Law, Law and Society Review, 47, no. 1 (2013): 135–68. Selections from Chapters 6 and 7 appeared earlier in Beyond Subalternity: Land, Community, and the State in Contemporary Jharkhand, Contemporary South Asia, 21, no. 1 (2013): 52–61. I thank the publishers of these journals for letting me reprint some or all of my prior work in this book.

If writing a book is no walk in the park, publishing it can be just as nerve-wracking. Yet I have been incredibly fortunate in this regard. Thomas Blom Hansen has been a tireless supporter of my work for a decade. I still recall the time when he told me about the SUP series South Asia in Motion in Goettingen and reiterated it in his inimitable style in Doha a few years later: There is a book inside you that I want to publish! Dylan Kyung-lim White has been a terrific editor to work with. His calmness throughout the publishing process has been most reassuring. Sarah Rodriguez and Cindy Lim have helped push the book through production. Aashish Karn and Pragyan Acharya went over the final manuscript before submission, checking the footnotes and ensuring each reference is formatted correctly according to the Chicago Manual of Style. At short notice, Vinayak Varma designed for me the map of Jharkhand that appears at the beginning of the book. At the last minute, Tanvi Kapoor chided me for using too many words, particularly conjunctions, in the book blurb. I am grateful for her sharp eye, which spared me the blushes later.

My parents Michael and Chandana have always been there for me. They took an active interest in my research on Jharkhand, and supported me in far too many ways than I can acknowledge here. Above all, they, along with my extended family scattered around the globe, have let me pursue my dreams and to reach for the stars. What more can I ask for in life? For much of the time it took to research and write this book, Lipika Kamra was a constant companion and interlocutor. Our work and lives intertwined in ways that made our time together memorable. As life takes us now in different directions, I can only express my deepest gratitude.

Doha, Qatar

August 2023

INTRODUCTION

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, I traveled to rural Jharkhand for the first time. Tucked away in a corner of eastern India, the forest-covered Chotanagpur Plateau lies at the heart of the state of Jharkhand today. As a graduate student in a political science department, I sought to learn about the Maoist insurgency raging in the region, which formed a part of the so-called Red Corridor across eastern and central India. In 2006, the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, declared that the Maoist insurgency was the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by the country and that it was directly related to underdevelopment.¹ Who were these Maoists? Why were they taking up arms against the Indian state? How did this insurgent group mobilize rural populations? These questions took me into the forest villages of central Jharkhand, where adivasi or tribal groups have been at the forefront of Maoist mobilization.²

Living among the Mundas in their ancestral lands in Khunti district, I listened to the stories and songs of my interlocutors.³ They narrated oral traditions and memories of past struggles for recognition and rights that continue to shape the present. Anil, Joachim, Kalyan, Gomia, and others who opened their homes to me so graciously also taught me how to speak and think in the Mundari language. Their families, especially the children, took a special delight in teaching me common words for flora and fauna as well as proverbs and idioms that made the language come alive for me. At times, my fieldwork took place, quite literally, in the fields, where the staple paddy (dhaan) crop is cultivated in the state. At other times, a smorgasbord of seasonal festivities and ritual ceremonies kept me busy as an ethnographer. Anil’s mother Philomena adopted me at the outset. She gave me not only a place in her household and community but also a sense of belonging to a place that is now a home to me. I can still hear her telling me that I would never learn Mundari by writing down words and phrases: Just talk to me in Munda. Speaking is the only way you’ll ever learn. If I could repay my hosts and their hospitality, I realized, I had to tell the story of Jharkhand’s adivasis in their terms. Beyond my initial preoccupation with Maoism, which appears in the final two chapters, I resolved to unlearn much of my graduate training in American political science by delving into dusty archives, buried artifacts, and far-flung places to piece together an anthropological history of adivasi resistance vis-à-vis statemaking processes in modern India.

MAP 1. Map of Jharkhand showing districts and bordering states. Map by Vinayak Varma.

This book, written by a rogue political scientist among historians and anthropologists, does not, however, tell a romantic tale of defeated heroes and lost arcadias. As Kalyan dada, who recently passed away after contracting COVID-19, reminded me repeatedly, "We, adivasis, made our history. Everyone else—the British, Christian missionaries, and sarkāri babus [government officials], worked with us because they could not work against us. Adivasi agency, whether expressed peacefully or not, suffuses the chapters to come. This agency delineates what I dub resistance-as-negotiation, by which generations of adivasi women and men in Jharkhand have made and remade the modern state from below. Eager to establish their political authority in the region, colonial and postcolonial regimes have had little choice but to work with representatives of rural adivasi communities. But Mundas and other adivasi groups such as Oraons, Santals, and Hos have not been left untouched by their clear-eyed negotiations with colonial and postcolonial states over the past two centuries. Theirs is a complex story of becoming adivasi or tribal" since their first brush with the British East India Company. This is, in other words, a book about tribal modernity that bucks the scholarly tendency to characterize adivasis as primitive or antimodern subjects. It treats adivasis not as atavistic Others or vestiges from the prehistoric past but as fully coeval with the rest of us as moderns seeking rights and recognition.⁴

RETHINKING RESISTANCE IN THE TRIBAL MARGINS OF THE STATE

On a balmy July afternoon, I trekked three miles up to the forest village of Uliburu in the heart of the Chotanagpur plateau. As a student of James C. Scott, I wondered whether the modern state could climb these uplands where dense thickets alternated with paddy fields. How far is the nearest government building from here? I inquired. My guide Anil coolly replied: Farther than you can see, but it is actually everywhere. Puzzled, I did not quite know what he meant. However, over lunch with my host in the village, Nearen, I learned that the Collector, the highest-ranked state official in the district, had visited a week earlier. She had arrived with security guards in her white AMC Ambassador to inquire into the state of development projects in the area, waded unperturbed through slushy paddy fields, and promised to bring more development (vikaas) to the village. It’s been a while since someone that important visited our village, observed Nearen, following it up with the ominous warning: But I’m pretty sure we’ll have to make up for it somehow now. No one knew how, but everyone muttered in agreement. What made Nearen and the others, all Munda adivasis, mock the state in these margins of modern India? The answer, I propose in this book, is a relationship of intimate antagonisms between adivasis and the modern state, a paradoxical proposition that invites us to rethink what it means to resist the state vis-à-vis a logic of negotiation.⁵

This is, of course, at odds with how resistance is usually understood, in a spatial sense, in the margins of the state. In his classic account of historical statemaking in the margins, James C. Scott has described the fraught dialectical relations between states and empires, on the one hand, and zones of relative autonomy and their inhabitants, on the other.⁶ A study of one of these autonomous zones, Zomia or the Southeast Asian massif, reveals it to be not simply a space of political resistance but also a zone of cultural refusal.⁷ For Scott, tribal or indigenous homelands the world over are essentially shatter zones where the expansion of states, empires, slave-trading, and wars, as well as natural disasters, have driven large numbers of people to seek refuge in out-of-the-way places, whether in Zomia, Amazonia, or the Caucasus.⁸ In much the same vein, Willem van Schendel has argued that Zomia is today relegated to the margins of ten valley-dominated states with which it has antagonistic relationship in East, South, and Southeast Asia. However, he adds, these tribal margins and their inhabitants, by their very nature, resisted the projects of nationbuilding and statemaking in their respective countries.⁹ Here, margins are regarded as stateless zones inhabited by unruly subjects who refuse to come under the sway of civilizing states and empires. Similarly, Bengt Karlsson writes of the Khasi Hills in northeastern India: The region’s distant location and otherness continues to be its dominating force even as it seems to open a critical space against State and capital intrusion.¹⁰ The anthropologist Alpa Shah has ventured farther to describe the margins of the state as arcadian spaces with visions of alternative moralities.¹¹ Resistance appears straightforwardly as the antonym of power. The margins of the state are thus conceived in terms of this sense of resistance as negation, opposition, or refusal.

To unpack this common sense, let us travel back in time. Long before the recent wave of interest in Zomia and other nonstate spaces, anthropologists studying North Africa and South America sought to illuminate the politico-ecological basis of the Arab-Berber divide or what they saw as the stubborn statelessness of the Aché-Guayaki Indians.¹² In his synoptic account of tribes in India, Stephen Fuchs, for instance, wrote nearly half a century ago:

Many of the aboriginal tribes in India were without doubt in ancient times simply food gatherers and primitive hunters. When their hunting and collecting grounds were gradually appropriated by cultivating immigrants coming from distant lands, and in the possession of a superior culture, the food-gathering tribes had to yield to them. Some of the tribes allowed themselves to be subdued and assimilated by the new-comers, others escaped into areas still comparatively free of settlers, and others again retained their nomadic and collecting way of life in defiance of the new situation.¹³

The tribal margins of the state in India appear here, much as in Scott’s sense of shatter zones, in opposition to a putative mainstream, namely plains-based societies. But let us delve further back in time to uncover the roots of this rhetoric. A little over a century ago, Francis B. Bradley-Birt, a colonial bureaucrat based in Chotanagpur, wrote, Driven out from [the plains], when or how no trace remains, [the Mundas] gradually fell back on the plateau of Chota Nagpore. Here, admirably adapted as it was for defence, they finally made their home.¹⁴ Bradley-Birt, however, was not the progenitor of this theory about tribal margins. It was Major Edward Tuite Dalton, the pioneering anthropologist-administrator in Chotanagpur, who characterized the eastern portion of the extensive plateau of Central India as a watershed that became home to a heterogeneous collection of non-Aryan tribes . . . driven from their original sites at different periods by Braminical invaders, [who] gradually fell back . . . and formed new nationalities in the secure asylum they found there.¹⁵ These subcontinental tribes, claimed Dalton without offering the slightest shard of evidence, had prior to the Aryan occupation of the Gangetic provinces been the dominant race, veritable living illustrations of the progress of mankind almost from the stone age to the confines of modern civilization.¹⁶ We do not need to trace a direct genealogy connecting Dalton and Scott to grasp how the simple binary opposition between power and resistance became spatialized in the tribal margins of colonial and postcolonial states. What is striking, nonetheless, is the debt that neoromantic yearnings for tribal arcadias today owe to colonial preconceptions about tribes in India.

Why are scholars committed to radical politics so seduced by colonial discourses of spatial alterity? To answer this question, we must appreciate how the notion of tribes has become a metonym for arcadian spaces in opposition to neoliberal logics of rationality. For Sebastian Junger, tribes denote a sense of collective well-being and belonging that distinguished Native Americans from settler colonialists motivated by individualistic Lockean agendas.¹⁷ Joshua Greene has, similarly, written in approving terms about contemporary politics as shaped by moral tribes that cohere around a social psychology of us and them.¹⁸ The upshot is resistance to the neoliberal status quo in society and politics, based on cold economic rationality, in the form of collective mobilization. The Yale law professor Amy Chua, following Francis Fukuyama’s recent exploration of identity politics as the pursuit of recognition by others, has painted a dismal portrait of a world of tribes at war with each other even as each tribe seeks to maximize its group’s advantages in a competitive game.¹⁹ Even when tribes are disparaged as unruly and disruptive of bourgeois politics, as Marlene Wind does in a recent book on the tribalization of Europe, these less sanguine assessments nonetheless recognize the moral psychology of tribes resisting the status quo.²⁰ Whether one approves of them or not, tribes are now widely regarded as the Other of contemporary capitalism, frequently bemoaned for their baleful influence over democratic politics. By a curious twist of history, the tribal Other now lies within Western liberal societies, not outside it, as in the colonial era.

Nevertheless, if we set aside old and new stereotypes of the tribal Other, we can study the spatial logics of how modern state margins, tribal or not, are constituted. When we reproduce the worldview of colonial anthropologist-administrators, we end up justifying, often unwittingly, earlier patterns of Othering.²¹ Administrators of tribal spaces such as Major Dalton crafted policies by which [t]he tribal habitat was marked off and separated from the administrative jurisdictions to which it originally belonged and kept out of the . . . operation of the usual laws and regulations.²² Yet the colonial conception of tribal spaces was, as we shall see in Chapters 2 and 3, constantly challenged by changing social realities on the inner and outer frontiers of colonial states. Besides reinforcing colonial stereotypes, conceiving margins as stateless utopias misses their centrality to modern statemaking processes. As David Ludden puts it,

When the process rather than structure of empire becomes the subject of historical study, [margins] become central sites for research. . . . Borderlands and frontiers may be critical sites where empire adapts sensitively and diversely to new conditions.²³

Colonial state margins and their subjects might, in other words, be more intimately linked than is typically assumed. This insight has been borne out by anthropologists working across the Global South who have shown that the margins of postcolonial states are spaces where sovereignty is negotiated from above and below.²⁴ The complexities of making and maintaining modern state margins, whether characterized as tribal or not, push us beyond colonial and contemporary accounts of tribal margins as arcadian spaces or utopias-in-waiting.

The making or constitution of modern state margins is an intricate process with an incremental, snowballing logic that unfolds over time. Yet we must be mindful that a state’s margins are not its blind spots. Margins are, in fact, anything but peripheral to the workings of colonial and postcolonial states. Gautam Bhadra has remarked perceptively on the co-constitution of modern states and their margins:

The centre would always try to have its mastery over [the] margin and would never be foreign to it. [But t]he margin, through its own formation, may have an edge to pierce the centre, to dislocate it. Shifts in particular modes of marginal formations may also lead to displacements in the periphery conceived and recognised by the centre. Margin versus Centre and vice versa. It may not always be so. One also constitutes the other, changing relations may form new alignments, spatially and historically.²⁵

We can make sense of the mutual imbrication of modern states and their margins while recognizing, too, that margins have the potential to pierce the centre, to dislocate it, that is, to remake states from below. In a related vein, Anna Tsing has defined modern state margins as simultaneously zones of unpredictability at the edges of discursive stability, where contradictory discourses overlap . . . where discrepant kinds of meaning-making converge and an analytical placement that makes evident both the constraining, oppressive quality of cultural exclusion and the creative potential of rearticulating, enlivening, and rearranging the very social categories that peripheralize a group’s existence.²⁶ The margins of modern states exist, as Talal Asad has noted, wherever their sovereignty is contested and negotiated by resisting subjects.²⁷ They are not simply ecological or cultural spaces that can be identified a priori. On the contrary, margins are constituted in the course of modern statemaking and its concomitant processes of subject-making.

If modern states and their margins are mutually constituted, then we must revise our received ideas about resistance. Recent scholarship on the everyday state and society deconstructs our received notions of states to show that they are constituted in the same social field as its subjects.²⁸ To the extent that actually existing states are not the Hobbesian leviathans of our imagination, their sovereignty might be understood to be embedded and constituted in the everyday workings of society.²⁹ In the margins of modern states, the state and its subjects are entangled inextricably. In early modern China, for instance, Helen Siu and Deborah Sutton show how imperial statemaking in the margins took place in tandem with new notions of culture and ethnicity in the Pearl River delta.³⁰ Gunnel Cederlöf and K. Sivaramakrishnan have argued, similarly, that the tribal margins of British India, whether in the Nilgiris or the Jungle Mahals, are useful sites to study processes of colonial statemaking.³¹ In Singhbhum, south of Chotanagpur, village elders were stipend-earning local state officials and makers of customary law.³² As we shall see in Chapters 3 and 4, rebellions such as those led by Birsa Munda or the Tana Bhagats targeted dominant lineages within adivasi society as they sought to remake the state from below. As Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash put it, there is a need to situate all forms of resistance within the ordinary life of power . . . where social structure appears as a constellation of contradictory and contestatory processes because neither domination nor resistance is autonomous; the two are so entangled that it becomes difficult to analyze one without discussing the other.³³ To resist is, therefore, not simply to negate or oppose a distant sovereign, but to negotiate the everyday state from the margins.

Resistance as negotiation, rather than negation, is admittedly far from intuitive. With reference to James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak, Sherry Ortner writes:

Once upon a time, resistance was a relatively unambiguous category, half of the seemingly simple binary, domination versus resistance. Domination was a relatively fixed and institutionalized form of power; resistance was essentially organized opposition to power institutionalized in this way.³⁴

After Michel Foucault, such a binary between (state) power and resistance seems simplistic. In Foucault’s terms, Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.³⁵ For Lila Abu-Lughod, resistance is merely a diagnostic of power, that is, in the rich and sometimes contradictory details of resistance the complex workings of social power can be traced.³⁶ In a similar vein, Timothy Mitchell has argued that positing a dualism of power and resistance prevents us from appreciating how domination works through actually constructing a seemingly dualistic world.³⁷ However, these revisionist notions of resistance attribute, on the one hand, a totalizing view of state power as domination and, on the other hand, an ambivalence or ambiguity to the acts of resisters. The implications are profoundly conservative in terms of social change. There is no room here for the everyday entanglements between state and society such that resistance possesses a potency of its own. This is why I propose, instead, a subtler conception of resistance as negotiation, by which, first, those who resist the status quo in society may not be fully aware of all the implications of their actions even as, in pragmatic terms, they act as agents with calculative rationality and sufficient purpose;³⁸ second, resistance itself may be power-laden to an extent, but not wholly, and this is what permits social change to occur at least partly from below.³⁹ Such a conception of resistance as negotiation stays close to the spirit of Scott’s original formulation of everyday resistance or weapons of the weak, particularly what he saw as the Brechtian struggles of peasants during transitions to modernity, without romanticizing resistance as the negation or antonym of power.⁴⁰

To return to Nearen’s subversive quip about the Collector’s visit, rethinking resistance as the negotiation rather than negation of power allows us to appreciate the intimate antagonisms between adivasis and the state in modern India. As I show throughout this book, whether during the heyday of the Maoist insurgency or the well-known rebellions of the nineteenth century, tribal or adivasi subjects remained deeply entangled in logics of colonial and postcolonial statemaking even as they sought to remake it from below. At the same time, as I explain in Chapter 2, the locus afforded by modern state margins cannot be taken as simply a top-down imposition or domination by an interventionist state. In the words of C. A. Bayly,

The ideologies of low-caste, tribal and poor peasant movements . . . appropriated notions of rights and representation widely disseminated across a society, in which the politics of the literate and the moral claims of the poor had long resonated with each other.⁴¹

The interactive nature of claim-making and statemaking permits us to place adivasi agency at the center of our analysis here.⁴² The process of becoming adivasi is not what that some scholars have described as the colonial construction of tribe, which grants only the colonial state any agency to act politically.⁴³ As I demonstrate in this book, adivasis were not merely objects of colonial policies but political agents in their own right. They could protest peacefully, as I explain in Chapter 3 and 6, with petitions, pleas, and other forms of rightful resistance, ⁴⁴ but, as I point out in Chapters 2, 3, and 8, they could also resort to collective bargaining by riot. ⁴⁵ There is, in fact, a close connection rather than a sharp division between peaceful and not-so-peaceful repertoires of resistance as negotiation.⁴⁶ I speak in Chapters 3 and 7 of a switch from the former to the latter. This does not imply any judgment on the efficaciousness of political violence, which can, of course, backfire and lead to brutal reprisals during counterinsurgencies. Yet overtly violent forms of resistance or rebellions reshape existing social structures and processes during intense phases of conflict, militarizing, polarizing, and fragmenting societies at times and fostering social cohesion at other times of liminal uncertainty.⁴⁷ In the chapters to follow, we will find instances of both tendencies, which, paradoxically, reinforce the intimate antagonisms between adivasis and the modern state.

To rethink resistance in the margins of modern India, in sum, we do not need to invoke exotic ideas about tribal zones of anomaly or romanticized conceptions of resistance.⁴⁸ Once we recognize the mutual constitution of modern states and their margins and of everyday state and society, our understanding of resistance appears closer to its etymological root re + sistere, meaning to endure or withstand, which is the basis of negotiating power from below. Resisters are consciously engaged in a classic Gramscian war of maneuver that seeks to soften the resolve of those in power to yield to the demands of their subjects.⁴⁹ Equally, the margins of the modern state are not its blind spots or fiscally sterile territory but spaces in which wily subjects negotiate and rework state power from below. These were and are spaces defined, too, by the anxieties of administrators, whether in the nineteenth century or in counterinsurgency operations in the Red Corridor over the past decade.

BECOMING ADIVASI

The term adivasi was coined by activists in Jharkhand roughly a century ago.⁵⁰ It is a Sanskritic neologism, akin to swaraj (self-rule) or loktantra (democracy), that designates at least 100 million Indians today as aboriginal. At first glance, we might conclude that this is a settler-colonialist label transposed from the New World onto a very different context. Yet, if we compare it to Dalit (literally, broken or fragmented), we can recognize how both terms emerged in the colonial public sphere in dialogue with an ethnographic state.⁵¹ Adivasi heroes such as Birsa Munda and Jaipal Singh, much like Dalit icons such as Jyotirao Phule and B. R. Ambedkar, fought for the rights and freedoms denied to them.⁵² However, unlike Dalits, who were disparaged as untouchable labor for centuries, if not millennia, groups recognized as adivasis today were previously regarded as forest-dwelling jatis and incorporated in myriad ways into precolonial polities across the Indian subcontinent. Forests, which covered up to half of South Asia until approximately 1850, have long been spaces for royal hunting expeditions, princes and warriors in exile, monastic orders and ashrams, and floating communities specializing in foraging and hunting alongside subsistence agriculture.⁵³ The political fortunes of Bhils in western India, for instance, were closely connected with those of Mughal, Maratha and British colonial, and Indian postcolonial regimes successively over four centuries.⁵⁴ Similarly, forest dwellers in Bastar and highland Odisha were enmeshed in complex