The construction of textual knowledge about Indian communities in the colonial milieu resulted in an extensive literature on almost all communities that was not only used as a source of legal and general administration but also to establish colonial domination. In this process the adivasis of India were constructed apposite to civilised society, therefore a distinct society. Unfortunately, post-colonial scholarship did not decolonise this colonial construction of adivasi society
SPECIAL ARTICLEEconomic & Political Weekly EPW september 27, 2008103The Mapping of the Adivasi Social: Colonial Anthropology and Adivasis Bhangya BhukyaThe construction of textual knowledge about Indian communities in the colonial milieu resulted in an extensive literature on almost all communities that was not only used as a source of legal and general administration but also to establish colonial domination. In this process the adivasis of India were constructed apposite to civilised society, therefore a distinct society. Unfortunately, post-colonial scholarship did not decolonise this colonial construction of adivasi society.Bhangya Bhukya (bhangya@hotmail.com) is with the History Department, Osmania University, Hyderabad.During the colonial era, a range of disparate groups that lived for the most part in the more inaccessible hill and forest tracts, and survived largely from hunting and gathering or rudimentary swidden agriculture, were categorised by the British as “aboriginals” or “early tribes”. They were distinguished by theirclan-based systems of kinship and their “animistic”religious beliefs. Sometimes, they were defined in terms of their habitat, as “jungle tribes”. In this way, a category was created, and a body of knowledge produced, about the so-called “tribes of India”. In the process, scattered communities were granted a unitythatthey had not hitherto possessed. During the 20th century,asdifferent fractional interest groups within India asserted their right to self-determination, “tribal” groups claimed to be the “original” or “in-digenous” people of the subcontinent who had been deposed by later interlopers. They deployed the Hindi term for“indigenous” – that of “adivasi” – to describe themselves.1 In this paper we shall use the same term adivasi just to avoid colonial derogatories. As has been mentioned above, the construction of textual knowledge about Indian communities was a major genre in the colonial milieu as part of the project of colonial knowledge crea-tion as a means of the extension of colonial power. This resulted in extensive literature on almost all communities that was not only used as a source for legal and general administration but also to establish colonial domination. This has been greatly brought out by recent studies. As Edward Said says, “Knowledge of subject races or orientals is what makes their management easy and profitable; knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge”.2 It is this dialect of knowledge and domination that pushed the colonial state to acquire more knowledge on its subject communities. The colonial state interestingly had widened and reoriented its project of colonial knowledge crea-tion as its control expanded and penetrated farther.3 This was very much postulated in Curzon’s speech in the House of Lords on September 27, 1909. He stated: Our familiarity, not merely with the languages of the people of the East but with their customs, their feelings, their traditions, their history and religion, our capacity to understand what may be called the genius of the East, is the sole basis upon which we are likely to be able to maintain in the future the position we have won, and no step that can be taken to strengthen that position can be considered undeserving of the attention of his majesty’s government or of a debate in the House of Lords.4 Creation of Knowledge by the Colonial StateIt is understood from Curzon’s statement that the future of colonial power pivoted on the acquisition of knowledge of the colony. Indeed, the colonial state was by the end of the 19th century
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SPECIAL ARTICLEEconomic & Political Weekly EPW september 27, 2008105deploying huge resources to create detailed knowledge of the colony. In the beginning, European travellers’ accounts, such as those of Duarte Barbosa of Portugal, and Jean Baptiste Tavernier of France who visited India in the early 16th and early 17th century, were used as major sources for administrating the colony. Barbosa makes general observation on thecastes of India but Tavernier gives a very detailed description of 72 castes.5 Later, with the establishment of British suzerainty in the late 18th century, there was a rapid acquisition of scientific knowledge of Indian commu-nities with the aid of administrative officials, missionaries and professional orientalist scholars. This whole literature has been analysed to telling effect by post-colonial scholars. Edward Said, the pioneer in this respect, brought out how colonial knowledge was transmitted into power and used in establishing persistent domination and hegemony over the colony.6 Ronald Inden has revealed how the indological branch of orientalism constructed a notion of a “timeless” Indian society that remained fundamen-tally unchanged from ancient times.7 Bernard Cohn has bril-liantly illustrated how colonial historiography, documentation, certification, and representation, as state modalities, transformed knowledge into power.8 Nicholas Dirks’ recent work critically illuminates colonial anthropological projects, bringing out how they invented a wholly new notion of caste.9 Post-colonial theoretical analysis has nonetheless remained largely indifferent to the adivasi issue, tending to club the colo-nial anthropology of the “tribe” within the general anthropology of caste. There have been some exceptions in this respect. Studies carried out by David Hardiman, Crispin Bates and Ajay Skariya from the 1980s onwards have shown how the adivasis were placed within the wider system of colonial knowledge.10 Analogously, my task here shall be to establish how adivasis were reflected and viewed in colonial anthropology, and how post-colonial writings on adivasis did not dislodge colonial derogatories. Adivasi anthropology was distinct from caste anthropology in its methodology, colonial approaches and perceptions of adivasis. The initial construction of knowledge on them took place in the context of their violent resistance to colonial expansion into their forest world, which began with therevolt of the Pahariya Sirdars of Bihar in 1778. With the Assam adivasis’ revolt of 1816-24, the British approach to adivasis changed and they began conceiving them as a separate entity. The Santhal revolt of 1855 was another such landmark, which led to the commissioning of a number of studies of their material and cultural conditions.11 Colonial period adivasi anthropology can be grouped into four categories: darvanic anthropology or official anthropology, missionary an-thropology, romantic anthropology, and Hindu nationalist an-thropology from the early 20th century. Each school of thought had its own agenda in producing and reproducing adivasi society. The Darvanic (taxonomies of race) anthropology of colonial Indiadeveloped within the abstract understanding of the 19th century – European racial theories served legal and administra-tive purposes, as well as helping to establish a persistent British hegemony over the inferior race.12 Much of the early work on racial classification was, as in Europe, undertaken by biologists, and based on a hierarchical classification in which adivasis were identified with older races and languages. Biologising of race by anthropologists involved the dividing of human species based on their physical measurements. It grouped the round headed with new races, and the longheaded with old races.13 Based on this, it was argued that elements of the Negritos, one of the oldest races, could be found in the Kadars of Cochin state in south India, and the Australoid (brown race) in some of the other southern Indianhill and forest adivasis. Similar primitive groups, accord-ing to them, were the Mala Pantaram tribe of Travancore, the Paliyar of Madura district, the Malavetan, the Thantapulayan and the Urali, all of whom were said to share strong proto-Australoid traits.14 Indologists claimed that the adivasi languages were the oldest ones spoken in India. They unearthed 30 different groups of languages in India, and asserted that half a dozen of these belong to the family known as austric, which was the oldest, and that these were spoken by the adivasis. They argued that probably the most ancient types survived in south India, where the climate favoured the growth of the heavy forests that provided a refuge for these primitive groups.15 These classifications of race and language in colonial census reports, monographs and ethnographic notes pushed adivasis to the bottom of the civilisational ladder. Adivasi culture was branded as uncivilised, while the Aryan (brahmin and the edu-cated) race and Indo-Aryan languages were considered by orien-talist scholars to be relatively civilised.16 Unfortunately, this stig-matisation of adivasis as “primitive” and “unchanged” continues to inform an understanding of them in India to this day. Racial TheoryAbstract ideas of racial theory continued to influence scholars throughout the period of colonial rule, though there was a shift during the closing years of the 19th century towards establishing racial classification based on measurable physical traits. The foremost figure in this exercise was H H Risley of the Bengal civil service. He was the pioneer of the anthropometric survey of Bengal, and under his influence the government of India resolved to carry out an ethnographic survey throughout India at the time of the 1901 Census. Risley appointed Edgar Thurston to carry out this work for Madras presidency.17 He was an anatomy lecturer at the medical college in Madras, and had experience as superin-tendent of the Madras museum. His long association with the Anthropological Survey of India produced seven volumes on the castes and tribes of south India, a study of the Todas, and his famousEthnographic Notes on south Indian castes and tribes. In all his works, the anthropometry that he had imbibed from Risley provided the dominant methodology.18 Dirks describes his mode of study:According to Thurston, the most important division of anthro-pography was anthropometry, which he defined as the measurement and estimation of physical data relating to people of different races, castes and tribes; indeed Thurston felt that his best results came from his anthropographic labours, for example in scientifically demonstrat-ing that the nasal index was lowest in Aryans and highest in jungle tribes, and that the index increased as body height diminished.19 Body measurement provided themain criteria for his classifica-tion of human species; he measured foreheads of 30 to 60 members of a caste or tribe, and mapped them under certain racial categories.
SPECIAL ARTICLEseptember 27, 2008 EPW Economic & Political Weekly106In some cases only six to seven individuals were measured.20 Cer-tain tribal communities were branded as habitual criminals on thebasis of their physical features, and this provided a basis for police surveillance and control. Every police officer and station was equipped with a notebook of criminal tribes of the region, and the books by Gunthorpe and Mullaly on criminal tribes and Thurston’s ethnographic notes were very popular in police training centres in south India. Thurston was often requested to speak at such places. The ability to carry out anthropometric measurements enhanced promotion prospects within the police force.21 Thurston’sEthnographic Notes is a huge volume that deals with marriage customs, idolatrous cults, sacrifices, hookswinging rituals, witchcrafts, mantras (spells), earth eating, and other exotica. With regard to adivasis, he either tries to link their practices with those of the Hindus, or exaggerates their idio-syncrasy as evidence of a supposed primitivism. For example, heelevates the Kurubas of Nilgiri hills to the level of Pandavas, as they had a custom of marrying several brothers to one wife.22 The marriage ceremony of the Savara tribe of Ganjam was compared with “lord” Krishna’s romance with Rukmini, as the Savara boy would traditionally go to a girl’s house, plunge an arrow into its thatched roof, take away an empty pot, and then, when thegirl went to thestream for water, he would capture her and take her into theforest, after which they would return and get married.23 Similarly, Thurston linked the marriage ceremony of the Lambadas of south India with thebrahmanical saptapadi (seven feet), which is theessential and binding portion of Hindu marriages, as they went around two grain-pounding pestles seven times.24 This sort of description, which merged the identity of the adivasis into the Hindu fold, was later replicated by Hindu propagandists. Hindu organisations like the Rashtriya Swayam- Sangh and Vishwa Hindu Parishad have, taking their cue from such texts, been converting adivasis to Hinduism by sprinkling Ganga ‘jal’ (water of the Ganga) over their heads, a sort of purifi-cation act.25 In other respects, Thurston primitivises the adivasis, branding them as homo-Dravida and similar to Australian aboriginals. He exoticises them in a number of ways, for exampleheclaims that the Kois of Godavari district place some pests (animals) in the hand or mouth of dead bodies and bury or burn those.26 He emphasised their common practice of making fire through friction with two pieces of wood – a supposedly “primitive” custom.27 This gave a negative connotation to adivasi life and culture; they were portrayed as examples of primitive civilisation and “museumised”. There is also a problem with Thurston’s ethnography for coin-ing terms for each community. After his serious study of anthro-pometry, taking information from his assistants and K Rangachary (a botany lecturer), he compiled seven volumes on the castes and tribes of the south India in alphabetical sequence, covering a brief history of their origin, customs, religious practices, and occupation, and classed them within particular groups based on their occupation and his anthropometric studies. In the case of the Lambadas of south India, after measuring their foreheads and considering their occupation as grain and salt transporters, he described the community as bothLambada and Banjara, and used both terms interchangeably in his 30-page description of the group in the volumes.28 To our surprise we do not find these terms used by early travellers. Jean Baptiste Tavernier wrote that there were four tribes called Manaris, who were transporting goods such as corn, rice, pulses and salt from one country to another. William Crooke, the editor of Tavernier’s Travel in India, argued later that manari is a corruption of the term Banjara.29 Other studies of his time illustrated how they were of mixed castes and from different religions – Hindu, Islam and Sikh.30 Census and ethnographic notes on the other hand, placed the community within one uniform and seamless community. Similar kind of studies were also carried out in the adjoining princely states of Hyderabad and Mysore by Syed Siraj ul Hassan31 and L K A Iyer,32 where the transporting community were called Banjaras. In this way, colonial anthropology created a new form of understanding. Civilising MissionThe supposed primitivism of the adivasis was also emphasised in the writings of missionaries from the early 19th century onwards. The implication was that such communities could be saved and civilised through conversion to Christianity. Walter Elliot, a prominent missionary in south India, thus noted the “barbarism” of the Marvars and Kallars and the supposed practice of human sacrifices by the Khonds and Meriahs of Ganjam district. Such views were propagated in the Anglican missionary journal called Church Missionary Intelligencer, which printed studies by mis-sionaries of races, castes and tribes.33 In a similar vein, C M Edward, a missionary working in Hubli for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, noted in a report on Lambadas and other criminal tribes that dacoity was like any other trade handed down to them by their forefathers and that they took pride in it. He pronounced that “the Lambadas do not consider a man to be worth his salt unless he has proved himself an expert thief, even women will not marry if the man did not prove to be a successful robber”, and he argued that the Lambadas were relegated to that miserable state in the hands of police because of the exclusive-ness of the caste system which ordained that a son should follow in his father’s footstep; this also meant that they were disregarded in mainstream society which cast them out.34 In this, the mission-ary view was largely in common with the anthropometric under-standing of official ethnographers. This propaganda encouraged them to take their conversion agenda into tribal society, and they were successful in certain areas, notably in north-east India. Missionary ethnography also largely converged with official ethnography, for it saw the liberation of criminal tribes, and for that matter the entire liberation of Indian, as lying in the mod-ernisation agenda of the colonial state.35 The Romanticism CurrentThere was a strong strand of romanticism in the orientalist understanding of India that grew out of 18th century western romanticism. This outlook was shared by certain colonial officials, Indologists, historians, sociologists and anthropologists.36 For example, colonel James Todd, who was appointed to the com-mand of the escort of his friend Graeme Mercer, then government agent at the court of Daulat Rao Sindhia between 1805 and 1817
SPECIAL ARTICLEEconomic & Political Weekly EPW september 27, 2008107and held the post of political agent of western Rajputana between 1818 and 1822 in the East India Company, was greatly fascinated by Rajput tribal heroism and wrote the genealogical history of 36 clans and tribes, entitledAnnals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, first published in two volumes in 1829, and later in three volumes edited by William Crooke. The first two volumes dealt with the geography of Rajasthan, the origin and polity of Rajput clans andthe third one was on the feudal system in Rajasthan.37 Tod developed a strong romantic affection with the main clans – notably the Sisodiyas of Mewar and the Rathods of Marwar – and he provided support for them while helping to pacify the region.38 This sort of celebration of martial communities was later ex-tended to adivasi communities.Hardiman and Skariya have shown in a revealing way how tribal masculinity was celebrated by colonial administrators and forest officers in western India. They equated the egalitarian values (honesty, frankness, communal life) of the tribals with Rousseau’s state of nature, seeing them as innocent and childlike. They depicted them as noble, honest, loyal and ruggedly inde-pendent. Some officials internalised adivasi values and culture and started drinking and hunting along with them. As Skariya says, “This celebration is ethnocentric and ethnocentrism is anti-ethnocentric”. 39 Indeed, the underlying intention was to acquire more knowledge of the adivasiworld and to then encourage them to adopt more “civilised” ways of life. Officials, after acquainting themselves with the adivasis, gradually directed them towards settled and commercial agriculture and encouraged outsiders (moneylenders, traders and peasants) to come into the forest so as to incorporate adivasis within wider civilisation, supposing that it would then be easy to control them.40 Many colonial forest officials were ‘shikaris’(hunters) and needed the assistance of forest-dwelling adivasis in their hunting. With this intention, forest officials developed rapport with adivasis by internalising adivasi culture and methods in hunting, but this process went hand-in-hand with the exclusion and subordination of the adivasi, the adivasi free hunter being reduced to a mere labourer serving the interests of British trophy-hunters. As Skariya puts it, “The colonial celebration of the wild and the forest are best understood as a civilised dalliance with wildness – the dalliance that often goes by the name of primitivism”.41 In fact this primitivism was premised on domination and mastery. Their celebration of primitivism itself alluded to their domination over subordinate adivasis, and it all served to extend their control over them. Eventually, it led to the brutal eviction of adivasis from the forests in a phased manner to serve the forest conservation agenda of colonial rule. With the entry of the professional anthropologist from the early 20th century, romantic understanding entered a new phase. Anthropologists went into adivasiareas with presupposed ideas that adivasis were uncivilised, innocent and honest, but taken advantage of by unscrupulous outsiders. They tried to immerse themselves in the lives of those they studied, even in some case marrying tribal girls to prove their commitment to tribal culture and life.42 Among them Haimendorf and Verrier Elwin were two stalwarts who worked with the adivasis of central and southern India; adivasis still have great reverence for them, not realisingthe wider implications of their work. Haimendorf was sent by the British to Hyderabad state in the early 1940s to advise theNizamin his handling of the rebellious Gond adivasis of Adilabad. His career as an anthropologist was helped consider-ably by his appointment as adviser to the Nizam for tribal and backward classes and professor of anthropology at Hyderabad’s Osmania University. He and his wife travelled often to the tribal areas, where they stayed for long periods developing a rapportwith the people. These periods of research produced four reports on the socio-economic conditions of, respectively, the Hill Reddis, Gonds, Koyas and Chenchus.43 In these, he as-serted that adivasi society was exclusive and isolated, so that any intervention was likely to cause devastation of their simple and naturalistic life. He argued that much damage had been done by outsiders, including state bureaucrats, and suggested that enhanced powers be granted to tribal leaders along lines adopted by the British in areas of indirect rule.44 In practice, this strategy entirely failed to protect the mass of the adivasis, as their leaders merely became the instruments of the state in the recruitment and exploitation of adivasis as forest workers and road construction labourers. Verrier Elwin was trained originally in English literature and then theology at Oxford. His training in classical English roman-tic literature was to influence his romantic approach to adivasis. He came to India in the 1920s as a missionary, but later broke with his mission and settled in a Gond village, where he carried out social and educational work. He eventually married a gond tribal woman. He worked extensively with the adivasis of the Central Provinces and Bastar and wrote a series of monographs on the Khonds, Baigas, Marias and Agarias.45 He also viewed adivasis as creatures of nature whose worldview was entirely at odds with that of civilised people.46 This was a hopelessly one-sided encounter, in which the aboriginal stood to lose his land and forests, and his culture and self-esteem. In a major work titledLoss of Nerve, he grouped adivasis into three classes – the elites, the so-called Hindus, and the primitives – arguing that the second category was corrupted and culturally undermined by contacts with caste Hindus and missionaries.47 The solution, as he saw it, was to protect the adivasis by creating national parks for them. His celebration of adivasi life was not, however, always in their best interests. In his monographs he made much of certain exotic customs, for example, that the human sacrifices of Khonds were linked with their belief that their turmeric crop would lack the prized deep red colour without the shedding of blood, or that Maria women who refused to offer tobacco48 to their husband’s younger brother were liable to be murdered.49 All of this helped to stigmatise adivasis as human sacrificers and murderers. His positions were also contradictory. For example, he adopted a positive attitude towards commercialisation and the creation of property rights in land.50 Despite his condemnation of the inculcation of caste values among adivasis, he demanded a caste status – that of Kshatriya – for them, as they were, in his view, martial races.51 Later, having fought strongly against state expansion into tribal society, he accepted an appointment as adviser on tribal affairs to the north-east frontier agency between 1954 and 1964, so
SPECIAL ARTICLEEconomic & Political Weekly EPW september 27, 2008109approach is seen in its other publication and its journal Man in India.66 The post-colonial debate on the position of the adivasi in modern India had strong roots in the period immediately preceding decolonisation and failed to provide any alternative understanding of the adivasisociety. Likewise the Indian Institute of Advance Studies, Simla, has brought out three volumes:The Tribal Situation in India (1969) edited by K Suresh Singh,Continuity and Change in Tribal Society (1993) edited by Mrinal Miri andFrom Tribe to Caste (1997) edited by Dev Nathan. They focus on the supposed fusion of tribes into castes. Following an evolutionist Marxian paradigm, they apply a teleology of a progress from tribe to caste to class.67 Thereare parallels here with Risley’s notion of a race-tribe-caste evolution within the civilising process.68 Most orthodox Marxist scholars have accepted this approach, and celebrate anti-colonial adivasi revolts as a stage towards the creation of a new class-consciousness. Though they designate such struggles as sporadic, spontaneous and unorganised, they welcome these revolts as theyprovide an opening for the education of adivasis in class consciousness by Marxist party workers, allowing tribal areas to become bases for radical politics and movements. The Telangana peasant armed struggle and Naxalite movement are the best ex-amples where tribal revolts and tribals are considered to have played a very creative role.69 Marxist scholarship has however failed to provide an adequate understanding of adivasi society, as it fails to delineate it from low caste society, and is rooted in the class-based agenda of Marxism.70 Colonial anthropology thus endeavoured to homogenise and totalise Indian adivasicommunities ignoring the historically built differences between adivasicommunities and the interde-pendency between adivasis and caste-Hindu society. Although this project failed in many respects it ended up in stigmatising adivasi social as primitive, uncivilised, isolated, barbaric, violent, human sacrificers, criminal, backward, and completely distinct from that of the normal human species in mentality and mode of livelihood. It was also said that each group has distinct physio-logical and cultural traits and maintains a propound distinction with its sub-group or sub-clan. Post-colonial scholarship has in many crucial respects failed to escape from the framework of knowledge about such people created by colonial ethnography. It is important to decolonise colonial mentality in order to provide an ideological integrity to the adivasis. Notes 1 David Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India, Delhi, 1995, pp 11-17. 2 Edward W Said, Orientalism; Western Conceptions of the Orient, London, 1995, p 36.3 Nicholas B Dirks,Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, New Delhi, 2002, pp 107-24 4 Quoted in Edward Said’sOrientalism, p 214. 5 Bernard S Cohn, ‘Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture’inMiltton Singer and Bernard S Cohn (eds), Structure and Change in Indian Society, Chicago, 1968, p 6. 6 Said, Orientalism. 7 RonaldInden, Imagining India, Oxford, 1992.8 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, Princeton, 1996. 9 Dirks,Caste of Mind. 10 Hardiman, Coming of the Devi; Crispin Bates, ‘Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India’ in Robb (ed), The Concept of Race in South Asia, New Delhi, 1995; Ajay Skariya,Hybrid Histories, Forest, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India, New Delhi, 1999.11 V R Raghavaiah, ‘Background of Tribal Struggles in India’ in A R Desai (ed), Peasant Struggle in India, Bombay, 1979: 12-27, also see K S Singh, TribalMovements in India Vols I&II, New Delhi, 1982 and 1983. 12 Bates,Race, Caste and Tribe,p 221.13 Ibid, p 229.14 J H Hutton, Caste in India: Its Nature, Function and Origin, London, 1946, p 3.15 Ibid, p 5. 16 Inden, Imagining India, p 89. 17 Dirks,Caste of Mind, p 211. 18 Edgar Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India, Madras, 1906, preface. 19 Dirks,Caste of Mind, p 185.20 Edgar Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India,Vol I, New Delhi, 1987, see introduction.21 G W Gayer,Some Criminal Tribes of India and Reli-gious Mendicants, Saugor, 1907, introduction; also see Dirks,Caste of Mind, p 185. 22 Edgar Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India, Madras, 1906, p 150.23 Ibid, p 20.24 Ibid, p 60.25 Arjun Patel, ‘Hinduisation of Adivasis: A Case Study from South Gujarat’ in S M Michael (ed), Dalits in Modern India Vision and Values, New Delhi, 1999, pp 189-91.26 Thurston,Ethnographic Notes, p 155.27 Ibid, p 464.28 Thurston, Castes and Tribes, pp 206-36.29 Jean Baptiste Tavernier,Travels in India, London, 1925, p 34.30 R E Enthoven, The Tribes and Castes of Bombay, Vol II, Bombay, 1920, p 333.31 S S Ul Hassan, The Castes and Tribes of H E H The Nizam’s Dominions, Bombay, 1920, pp 15-27.32 L K A Iyer and M V Nanjundaya, The Mysore Tribes and Castes, Vol II, Mysore, 1928, pp 163-96. 33 See Dirks, Caste of Mind, particularly chapter 9.34 C M Edward, The Criminal Tribes in India, London, 1922, pp 3-6.35 Ibid, p 12.36 Inden,Imagining India, p 93. 37 James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Vol I, edited by William Crooke, London, 1920, see introduction; also see H E A Cotton, ‘Review Article on Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan’ in Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, 2:1, London, 1921, p 141. 38 Cotton, ‘Review Article’, p 142.39 Skaria,Hybrid Histories,p 199.40David Hardiman, ‘Power in the Forests: The Dangs 1820-1940’ in David Arnold and David Hardiman (eds),Subaltern Studies VIII, New Delhi, 1994, pp108-12; and also see Skariyas, Hybrid Histories, pp 198-200. 41 Skaria,Hybrid Histories, p 198. 42 Verrier Elwin, Maria Murder and Suicide, London, 1943, see preface.43 C V Furer-Haimandorf, Tribal Hyderabad, Hydera-bad, 1945, see forewords.44 Ibid, pp 33-35. 45 Elwin, Maria Murder, see preface.46 Ramachandra Guha, ‘Savaging the Civilised; Verrier Elwin and the Tribal Question in late Colonial India’,Economic & Political Weekly, VolXXXI, No 35, 1996, p 2378. 47 Varrier Elwin, Loss of Nerve (1942).48 In Maria tradition a man who wishes to have sex with any other woman goes to her and ask for tobacco, if she offers him tobacco it is considered to be acceptance to have sex with him.49 Elwin, Maria Murder, p 1.50 G S Ghurye, Scheduled Tribes, 1959, Bombay, p 155.51 Guha, ‘Savaging the Civilised’, p 2386. 52 Ghurye, Scheduled Tribes, see introduction; also see Guha, ‘Savaging the Civilised’,p2380. 53 Dirks, Caste of Mind, p 247. 54 Ghurye, Scheduled Tribes, pp 7-12.55 Ibid, p 20.56 Ibid, pp 27-47.57 M N Srinivas,Social Change in Modern India, New Delhi, 1966, see preface.58 Ibid, p 6.59 Ibid, p 2.60 Hardiman,Coming of the Devi, p 160.61 D D Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, Bombay, 1956, p 356.62 Dirks, Caste of Mind, p 254.63 Guha, ‘Savaging the Civilised’, p 2380.64 ArchanaPrasad,Against Ecological Romanticism, New Delhi, 2003, see Preface. 65 K S Singh,The Scheduled Tribes, New Delhi, 1994, see note on the series, and also introduction to the series; under the People of India project (1985-92) he studied 4635 communities’ ethnographies across India out of which 461 were adivasi com-munities deploying the colonial anthropological apparatuses. 66A range of anthropometric studies has been published by ASI: for example see P Gupta (ed), Anthropometry in India, 1962, also see S H Ahmad (ed), Anthropometric Measurements and Ethnic Affinities of the Bhil and Their Allied Groups of Malwa Area, 1991.67 MrinalMiri,Continuity and Change in Tribal Society, Shimla, 1993: see introduction; also see Devnathan, From Tribe to Caste, Shimla, 1997: introduction.68 Inden, Imagining India, 1992: 62.69 See P Sundarayya, Telangana People’s Struggle and Its Lessons, Calcutta, 1972; also see K S Singh, Tribal Movements, 1982 and 1983; and also see Desai,Peasant Struggle in India, Bombay, 1979.70 RanajitGuha,Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, New Delhi,1983: see introduction.
SPECIAL ARTICLEEconomic & Political Weekly EPW september 27, 2008103The Mapping of the Adivasi Social: Colonial Anthropology and Adivasis Bhangya BhukyaThe construction of textual knowledge about Indian communities in the colonial milieu resulted in an extensive literature on almost all communities that was not only used as a source of legal and general administration but also to establish colonial domination. In this process the adivasis of India were constructed apposite to civilised society, therefore a distinct society. Unfortunately, post-colonial scholarship did not decolonise this colonial construction of adivasi society.Bhangya Bhukya (bhangya@hotmail.com) is with the History Department, Osmania University, Hyderabad.During the colonial era, a range of disparate groups that lived for the most part in the more inaccessible hill and forest tracts, and survived largely from hunting and gathering or rudimentary swidden agriculture, were categorised by the British as “aboriginals” or “early tribes”. They were distinguished by theirclan-based systems of kinship and their “animistic”religious beliefs. Sometimes, they were defined in terms of their habitat, as “jungle tribes”. In this way, a category was created, and a body of knowledge produced, about the so-called “tribes of India”. In the process, scattered communities were granted a unitythatthey had not hitherto possessed. During the 20th century,asdifferent fractional interest groups within India asserted their right to self-determination, “tribal” groups claimed to be the “original” or “in-digenous” people of the subcontinent who had been deposed by later interlopers. They deployed the Hindi term for“indigenous” – that of “adivasi” – to describe themselves.1 In this paper we shall use the same term adivasi just to avoid colonial derogatories. As has been mentioned above, the construction of textual knowledge about Indian communities was a major genre in the colonial milieu as part of the project of colonial knowledge crea-tion as a means of the extension of colonial power. This resulted in extensive literature on almost all communities that was not only used as a source for legal and general administration but also to establish colonial domination. This has been greatly brought out by recent studies. As Edward Said says, “Knowledge of subject races or orientals is what makes their management easy and profitable; knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge”.2 It is this dialect of knowledge and domination that pushed the colonial state to acquire more knowledge on its subject communities. The colonial state interestingly had widened and reoriented its project of colonial knowledge crea-tion as its control expanded and penetrated farther.3 This was very much postulated in Curzon’s speech in the House of Lords on September 27, 1909. He stated: Our familiarity, not merely with the languages of the people of the East but with their customs, their feelings, their traditions, their history and religion, our capacity to understand what may be called the genius of the East, is the sole basis upon which we are likely to be able to maintain in the future the position we have won, and no step that can be taken to strengthen that position can be considered undeserving of the attention of his majesty’s government or of a debate in the House of Lords.4 Creation of Knowledge by the Colonial StateIt is understood from Curzon’s statement that the future of colonial power pivoted on the acquisition of knowledge of the colony. Indeed, the colonial state was by the end of the 19th century 
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SPECIAL ARTICLEEconomic & Political Weekly EPW september 27, 2008105deploying huge resources to create detailed knowledge of the colony. In the beginning, European travellers’ accounts, such as those of Duarte Barbosa of Portugal, and Jean Baptiste Tavernier of France who visited India in the early 16th and early 17th century, were used as major sources for administrating the colony. Barbosa makes general observation on thecastes of India but Tavernier gives a very detailed description of 72 castes.5 Later, with the establishment of British suzerainty in the late 18th century, there was a rapid acquisition of scientific knowledge of Indian commu-nities with the aid of administrative officials, missionaries and professional orientalist scholars. This whole literature has been analysed to telling effect by post-colonial scholars. Edward Said, the pioneer in this respect, brought out how colonial knowledge was transmitted into power and used in establishing persistent domination and hegemony over the colony.6 Ronald Inden has revealed how the indological branch of orientalism constructed a notion of a “timeless” Indian society that remained fundamen-tally unchanged from ancient times.7 Bernard Cohn has bril-liantly illustrated how colonial historiography, documentation, certification, and representation, as state modalities, transformed knowledge into power.8 Nicholas Dirks’ recent work critically illuminates colonial anthropological projects, bringing out how they invented a wholly new notion of caste.9 Post-colonial theoretical analysis has nonetheless remained largely indifferent to the adivasi issue, tending to club the colo-nial anthropology of the “tribe” within the general anthropology of caste. There have been some exceptions in this respect. Studies carried out by David Hardiman, Crispin Bates and Ajay Skariya from the 1980s onwards have shown how the adivasis were placed within the wider system of colonial knowledge.10 Analogously, my task here shall be to establish how adivasis were reflected and viewed in colonial anthropology, and how post-colonial writings on adivasis did not dislodge colonial derogatories. Adivasi anthropology was distinct from caste anthropology in its methodology, colonial approaches and perceptions of adivasis. The initial construction of knowledge on them took place in the context of their violent resistance to colonial expansion into their forest world, which began with therevolt of the Pahariya Sirdars of Bihar in 1778. With the Assam adivasis’ revolt of 1816-24, the British approach to adivasis changed and they began conceiving them as a separate entity. The Santhal revolt of 1855 was another such landmark, which led to the commissioning of a number of studies of their material and cultural conditions.11 Colonial period adivasi anthropology can be grouped into four categories: darvanic anthropology or official anthropology, missionary an-thropology, romantic anthropology, and Hindu nationalist an-thropology from the early 20th century. Each school of thought had its own agenda in producing and reproducing adivasi society. The Darvanic (taxonomies of race) anthropology of colonial Indiadeveloped within the abstract understanding of the 19th century – European racial theories served legal and administra-tive purposes, as well as helping to establish a persistent British hegemony over the inferior race.12 Much of the early work on racial classification was, as in Europe, undertaken by biologists, and based on a hierarchical classification in which adivasis were identified with older races and languages. Biologising of race by anthropologists involved the dividing of human species based on their physical measurements. It grouped the round headed with new races, and the longheaded with old races.13 Based on this, it was argued that elements of the Negritos, one of the oldest races, could be found in the Kadars of Cochin state in south India, and the Australoid (brown race) in some of the other southern Indianhill and forest adivasis. Similar primitive groups, accord-ing to them, were the Mala Pantaram tribe of Travancore, the Paliyar of Madura district, the Malavetan, the Thantapulayan and the Urali, all of whom were said to share strong proto-Australoid traits.14 Indologists claimed that the adivasi languages were the oldest ones spoken in India. They unearthed 30 different groups of languages in India, and asserted that half a dozen of these belong to the family known as austric, which was the oldest, and that these were spoken by the adivasis. They argued that probably the most ancient types survived in south India, where the climate favoured the growth of the heavy forests that provided a refuge for these primitive groups.15 These classifications of race and language in colonial census reports, monographs and ethnographic notes pushed adivasis to the bottom of the civilisational ladder. Adivasi culture was branded as uncivilised, while the Aryan (brahmin and the edu-cated) race and Indo-Aryan languages were considered by orien-talist scholars to be relatively civilised.16 Unfortunately, this stig-matisation of adivasis as “primitive” and “unchanged” continues to inform an understanding of them in India to this day. Racial TheoryAbstract ideas of racial theory continued to influence scholars throughout the period of colonial rule, though there was a shift during the closing years of the 19th century towards establishing racial classification based on measurable physical traits. The foremost figure in this exercise was H H Risley of the Bengal civil service. He was the pioneer of the anthropometric survey of Bengal, and under his influence the government of India resolved to carry out an ethnographic survey throughout India at the time of the 1901 Census. Risley appointed Edgar Thurston to carry out this work for Madras presidency.17 He was an anatomy lecturer at the medical college in Madras, and had experience as superin-tendent of the Madras museum. His long association with the Anthropological Survey of India produced seven volumes on the castes and tribes of south India, a study of the Todas, and his famousEthnographic Notes on south Indian castes and tribes. In all his works, the anthropometry that he had imbibed from Risley provided the dominant methodology.18 Dirks describes his mode of study:According to Thurston, the most important division of anthro-pography was anthropometry, which he defined as the measurement and estimation of physical data relating to people of different races, castes and tribes; indeed Thurston felt that his best results came from his anthropographic labours, for example in scientifically demonstrat-ing that the nasal index was lowest in Aryans and highest in jungle tribes, and that the index increased as body height diminished.19 Body measurement provided themain criteria for his classifica-tion of human species; he measured foreheads of 30 to 60 members of a caste or tribe, and mapped them under certain racial categories. 
SPECIAL ARTICLEseptember 27, 2008 EPW Economic & Political Weekly106In some cases only six to seven individuals were measured.20 Cer-tain tribal communities were branded as habitual criminals on thebasis of their physical features, and this provided a basis for police surveillance and control. Every police officer and station was equipped with a notebook of criminal tribes of the region, and the books by Gunthorpe and Mullaly on criminal tribes and Thurston’s ethnographic notes were very popular in police training centres in south India. Thurston was often requested to speak at such places. The ability to carry out anthropometric measurements enhanced promotion prospects within the police force.21 Thurston’sEthnographic Notes is a huge volume that deals with marriage customs, idolatrous cults, sacrifices, hookswinging rituals, witchcrafts, mantras (spells), earth eating, and other exotica. With regard to adivasis, he either tries to link their practices with those of the Hindus, or exaggerates their idio-syncrasy as evidence of a supposed primitivism. For example, heelevates the Kurubas of Nilgiri hills to the level of Pandavas, as they had a custom of marrying several brothers to one wife.22 The marriage ceremony of the Savara tribe of Ganjam was compared with “lord” Krishna’s romance with Rukmini, as the Savara boy would traditionally go to a girl’s house, plunge an arrow into its thatched roof, take away an empty pot, and then, when thegirl went to thestream for water, he would capture her and take her into theforest, after which they would return and get married.23 Similarly, Thurston linked the marriage ceremony of the Lambadas of south India with thebrahmanical saptapadi (seven feet), which is theessential and binding portion of Hindu marriages, as they went around two grain-pounding pestles seven times.24 This sort of description, which merged the identity of the adivasis into the Hindu fold, was later replicated by Hindu propagandists. Hindu organisations like the Rashtriya Swayam- Sangh and Vishwa Hindu Parishad have, taking their cue from such texts, been converting adivasis to Hinduism by sprinkling Ganga ‘jal’ (water of the Ganga) over their heads, a sort of purifi-cation act.25 In other respects, Thurston primitivises the adivasis, branding them as homo-Dravida and similar to Australian aboriginals. He exoticises them in a number of ways, for exampleheclaims that the Kois of Godavari district place some pests (animals) in the hand or mouth of dead bodies and bury or burn those.26 He emphasised their common practice of making fire through friction with two pieces of wood – a supposedly “primitive” custom.27 This gave a negative connotation to adivasi life and culture; they were portrayed as examples of primitive civilisation and “museumised”. There is also a problem with Thurston’s ethnography for coin-ing terms for each community. After his serious study of anthro-pometry, taking information from his assistants and K Rangachary (a botany lecturer), he compiled seven volumes on the castes and tribes of the south India in alphabetical sequence, covering a brief history of their origin, customs, religious practices, and occupation, and classed them within particular groups based on their occupation and his anthropometric studies. In the case of the Lambadas of south India, after measuring their foreheads and considering their occupation as grain and salt transporters, he described the community as bothLambada and Banjara, and used both terms interchangeably in his 30-page description of the group in the volumes.28 To our surprise we do not find these terms used by early travellers. Jean Baptiste Tavernier wrote that there were four tribes called Manaris, who were transporting goods such as corn, rice, pulses and salt from one country to another. William Crooke, the editor of Tavernier’s Travel in India, argued later that manari is a corruption of the term Banjara.29 Other studies of his time illustrated how they were of mixed castes and from different religions – Hindu, Islam and Sikh.30 Census and ethnographic notes on the other hand, placed the community within one uniform and seamless community. Similar kind of studies were also carried out in the adjoining princely states of Hyderabad and Mysore by Syed Siraj ul Hassan31 and L K A Iyer,32 where the transporting community were called Banjaras. In this way, colonial anthropology created a new form of understanding. Civilising MissionThe supposed primitivism of the adivasis was also emphasised in the writings of missionaries from the early 19th century onwards. The implication was that such communities could be saved and civilised through conversion to Christianity. Walter Elliot, a prominent missionary in south India, thus noted the “barbarism” of the Marvars and Kallars and the supposed practice of human sacrifices by the Khonds and Meriahs of Ganjam district. Such views were propagated in the Anglican missionary journal called Church Missionary Intelligencer, which printed studies by mis-sionaries of races, castes and tribes.33 In a similar vein, C M Edward, a missionary working in Hubli for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, noted in a report on Lambadas and other criminal tribes that dacoity was like any other trade handed down to them by their forefathers and that they took pride in it. He pronounced that “the Lambadas do not consider a man to be worth his salt unless he has proved himself an expert thief, even women will not marry if the man did not prove to be a successful robber”, and he argued that the Lambadas were relegated to that miserable state in the hands of police because of the exclusive-ness of the caste system which ordained that a son should follow in his father’s footstep; this also meant that they were disregarded in mainstream society which cast them out.34 In this, the mission-ary view was largely in common with the anthropometric under-standing of official ethnographers. This propaganda encouraged them to take their conversion agenda into tribal society, and they were successful in certain areas, notably in north-east India. Missionary ethnography also largely converged with official ethnography, for it saw the liberation of criminal tribes, and for that matter the entire liberation of Indian, as lying in the mod-ernisation agenda of the colonial state.35 The Romanticism CurrentThere was a strong strand of romanticism in the orientalist understanding of India that grew out of 18th century western romanticism. This outlook was shared by certain colonial officials, Indologists, historians, sociologists and anthropologists.36 For example, colonel James Todd, who was appointed to the com-mand of the escort of his friend Graeme Mercer, then government agent at the court of Daulat Rao Sindhia between 1805 and 1817 
SPECIAL ARTICLEEconomic & Political Weekly EPW september 27, 2008107and held the post of political agent of western Rajputana between 1818 and 1822 in the East India Company, was greatly fascinated by Rajput tribal heroism and wrote the genealogical history of 36 clans and tribes, entitledAnnals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, first published in two volumes in 1829, and later in three volumes edited by William Crooke. The first two volumes dealt with the geography of Rajasthan, the origin and polity of Rajput clans andthe third one was on the feudal system in Rajasthan.37 Tod developed a strong romantic affection with the main clans – notably the Sisodiyas of Mewar and the Rathods of Marwar – and he provided support for them while helping to pacify the region.38 This sort of celebration of martial communities was later ex-tended to adivasi communities.Hardiman and Skariya have shown in a revealing way how tribal masculinity was celebrated by colonial administrators and forest officers in western India. They equated the egalitarian values (honesty, frankness, communal life) of the tribals with Rousseau’s state of nature, seeing them as innocent and childlike. They depicted them as noble, honest, loyal and ruggedly inde-pendent. Some officials internalised adivasi values and culture and started drinking and hunting along with them. As Skariya says, “This celebration is ethnocentric and ethnocentrism is anti-ethnocentric”. 39 Indeed, the underlying intention was to acquire more knowledge of the adivasiworld and to then encourage them to adopt more “civilised” ways of life. Officials, after acquainting themselves with the adivasis, gradually directed them towards settled and commercial agriculture and encouraged outsiders (moneylenders, traders and peasants) to come into the forest so as to incorporate adivasis within wider civilisation, supposing that it would then be easy to control them.40 Many colonial forest officials were ‘shikaris’(hunters) and needed the assistance of forest-dwelling adivasis in their hunting. With this intention, forest officials developed rapport with adivasis by internalising adivasi culture and methods in hunting, but this process went hand-in-hand with the exclusion and subordination of the adivasi, the adivasi free hunter being reduced to a mere labourer serving the interests of British trophy-hunters. As Skariya puts it, “The colonial celebration of the wild and the forest are best understood as a civilised dalliance with wildness – the dalliance that often goes by the name of primitivism”.41 In fact this primitivism was premised on domination and mastery. Their celebration of primitivism itself alluded to their domination over subordinate adivasis, and it all served to extend their control over them. Eventually, it led to the brutal eviction of adivasis from the forests in a phased manner to serve the forest conservation agenda of colonial rule. With the entry of the professional anthropologist from the early 20th century, romantic understanding entered a new phase. Anthropologists went into adivasiareas with presupposed ideas that adivasis were uncivilised, innocent and honest, but taken advantage of by unscrupulous outsiders. They tried to immerse themselves in the lives of those they studied, even in some case marrying tribal girls to prove their commitment to tribal culture and life.42 Among them Haimendorf and Verrier Elwin were two stalwarts who worked with the adivasis of central and southern India; adivasis still have great reverence for them, not realisingthe wider implications of their work. Haimendorf was sent by the British to Hyderabad state in the early 1940s to advise theNizamin his handling of the rebellious Gond adivasis of Adilabad. His career as an anthropologist was helped consider-ably by his appointment as adviser to the Nizam for tribal and backward classes and professor of anthropology at Hyderabad’s Osmania University. He and his wife travelled often to the tribal areas, where they stayed for long periods developing a rapportwith the people. These periods of research produced four reports on the socio-economic conditions of, respectively, the Hill Reddis, Gonds, Koyas and Chenchus.43 In these, he as-serted that adivasi society was exclusive and isolated, so that any intervention was likely to cause devastation of their simple and naturalistic life. He argued that much damage had been done by outsiders, including state bureaucrats, and suggested that enhanced powers be granted to tribal leaders along lines adopted by the British in areas of indirect rule.44 In practice, this strategy entirely failed to protect the mass of the adivasis, as their leaders merely became the instruments of the state in the recruitment and exploitation of adivasis as forest workers and road construction labourers. Verrier Elwin was trained originally in English literature and then theology at Oxford. His training in classical English roman-tic literature was to influence his romantic approach to adivasis. He came to India in the 1920s as a missionary, but later broke with his mission and settled in a Gond village, where he carried out social and educational work. He eventually married a gond tribal woman. He worked extensively with the adivasis of the Central Provinces and Bastar and wrote a series of monographs on the Khonds, Baigas, Marias and Agarias.45 He also viewed adivasis as creatures of nature whose worldview was entirely at odds with that of civilised people.46 This was a hopelessly one-sided encounter, in which the aboriginal stood to lose his land and forests, and his culture and self-esteem. In a major work titledLoss of Nerve, he grouped adivasis into three classes – the elites, the so-called Hindus, and the primitives – arguing that the second category was corrupted and culturally undermined by contacts with caste Hindus and missionaries.47 The solution, as he saw it, was to protect the adivasis by creating national parks for them. His celebration of adivasi life was not, however, always in their best interests. In his monographs he made much of certain exotic customs, for example, that the human sacrifices of Khonds were linked with their belief that their turmeric crop would lack the prized deep red colour without the shedding of blood, or that Maria women who refused to offer tobacco48 to their husband’s younger brother were liable to be murdered.49 All of this helped to stigmatise adivasis as human sacrificers and murderers. His positions were also contradictory. For example, he adopted a positive attitude towards commercialisation and the creation of property rights in land.50 Despite his condemnation of the inculcation of caste values among adivasis, he demanded a caste status – that of Kshatriya – for them, as they were, in his view, martial races.51 Later, having fought strongly against state expansion into tribal society, he accepted an appointment as adviser on tribal affairs to the north-east frontier agency between 1954 and 1964, so 
SPECIAL ARTICLEEconomic & Political Weekly EPW september 27, 2008109approach is seen in its other publication and its journal Man in India.66 The post-colonial debate on the position of the adivasi in modern India had strong roots in the period immediately preceding decolonisation and failed to provide any alternative understanding of the adivasisociety. Likewise the Indian Institute of Advance Studies, Simla, has brought out three volumes:The Tribal Situation in India (1969) edited by K Suresh Singh,Continuity and Change in Tribal Society (1993) edited by Mrinal Miri andFrom Tribe to Caste (1997) edited by Dev Nathan. They focus on the supposed fusion of tribes into castes. Following an evolutionist Marxian paradigm, they apply a teleology of a progress from tribe to caste to class.67 Thereare parallels here with Risley’s notion of a race-tribe-caste evolution within the civilising process.68 Most orthodox Marxist scholars have accepted this approach, and celebrate anti-colonial adivasi revolts as a stage towards the creation of a new class-consciousness. Though they designate such struggles as sporadic, spontaneous and unorganised, they welcome these revolts as theyprovide an opening for the education of adivasis in class consciousness by Marxist party workers, allowing tribal areas to become bases for radical politics and movements. The Telangana peasant armed struggle and Naxalite movement are the best ex-amples where tribal revolts and tribals are considered to have played a very creative role.69 Marxist scholarship has however failed to provide an adequate understanding of adivasi society, as it fails to delineate it from low caste society, and is rooted in the class-based agenda of Marxism.70 Colonial anthropology thus endeavoured to homogenise and totalise Indian adivasicommunities ignoring the historically built differences between adivasicommunities and the interde-pendency between adivasis and caste-Hindu society. Although this project failed in many respects it ended up in stigmatising adivasi social as primitive, uncivilised, isolated, barbaric, violent, human sacrificers, criminal, backward, and completely distinct from that of the normal human species in mentality and mode of livelihood. It was also said that each group has distinct physio-logical and cultural traits and maintains a propound distinction with its sub-group or sub-clan. Post-colonial scholarship has in many crucial respects failed to escape from the framework of knowledge about such people created by colonial ethnography. It is important to decolonise colonial mentality in order to provide an ideological integrity to the adivasis. Notes 1 David Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India, Delhi, 1995, pp 11-17. 2 Edward W Said, Orientalism; Western Conceptions of the Orient, London, 1995, p 36.3 Nicholas B Dirks,Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, New Delhi, 2002, pp 107-24 4 Quoted in Edward Said’sOrientalism, p 214. 5 Bernard S Cohn, ‘Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture’inMiltton Singer and Bernard S Cohn (eds), Structure and Change in Indian Society, Chicago, 1968, p 6. 6 Said, Orientalism. 7 RonaldInden, Imagining India, Oxford, 1992.8 Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, Princeton, 1996. 9 Dirks,Caste of Mind. 10 Hardiman, Coming of the Devi; Crispin Bates, ‘Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India’ in Robb (ed), The Concept of Race in South Asia, New Delhi, 1995; Ajay Skariya,Hybrid Histories, Forest, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India, New Delhi, 1999.11 V R Raghavaiah, ‘Background of Tribal Struggles in India’ in A R Desai (ed), Peasant Struggle in India, Bombay, 1979: 12-27, also see K S Singh, TribalMovements in India Vols I&II, New Delhi, 1982 and 1983. 12 Bates,Race, Caste and Tribe,p 221.13 Ibid, p 229.14 J H Hutton, Caste in India: Its Nature, Function and Origin, London, 1946, p 3.15 Ibid, p 5. 16 Inden, Imagining India, p 89. 17 Dirks,Caste of Mind, p 211. 18 Edgar Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India, Madras, 1906, preface. 19 Dirks,Caste of Mind, p 185.20 Edgar Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India,Vol I, New Delhi, 1987, see introduction.21 G W Gayer,Some Criminal Tribes of India and Reli-gious Mendicants, Saugor, 1907, introduction; also see Dirks,Caste of Mind, p 185. 22 Edgar Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India, Madras, 1906, p 150.23 Ibid, p 20.24 Ibid, p 60.25 Arjun Patel, ‘Hinduisation of Adivasis: A Case Study from South Gujarat’ in S M Michael (ed), Dalits in Modern India Vision and Values, New Delhi, 1999, pp 189-91.26 Thurston,Ethnographic Notes, p 155.27 Ibid, p 464.28 Thurston, Castes and Tribes, pp 206-36.29 Jean Baptiste Tavernier,Travels in India, London, 1925, p 34.30 R E Enthoven, The Tribes and Castes of Bombay, Vol II, Bombay, 1920, p 333.31 S S Ul Hassan, The Castes and Tribes of H E H The Nizam’s Dominions, Bombay, 1920, pp 15-27.32 L K A Iyer and M V Nanjundaya, The Mysore Tribes and Castes, Vol II, Mysore, 1928, pp 163-96. 33 See Dirks, Caste of Mind, particularly chapter 9.34 C M Edward, The Criminal Tribes in India, London, 1922, pp 3-6.35 Ibid, p 12.36 Inden,Imagining India, p 93. 37 James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Vol I, edited by William Crooke, London, 1920, see introduction; also see H E A Cotton, ‘Review Article on Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan’ in Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, 2:1, London, 1921, p 141. 38 Cotton, ‘Review Article’, p 142.39 Skaria,Hybrid Histories,p 199.40David Hardiman, ‘Power in the Forests: The Dangs 1820-1940’ in David Arnold and David Hardiman (eds),Subaltern Studies VIII, New Delhi, 1994, pp108-12; and also see Skariyas, Hybrid Histories, pp 198-200. 41 Skaria,Hybrid Histories, p 198. 42 Verrier Elwin, Maria Murder and Suicide, London, 1943, see preface.43 C V Furer-Haimandorf, Tribal Hyderabad, Hydera-bad, 1945, see forewords.44 Ibid, pp 33-35. 45 Elwin, Maria Murder, see preface.46 Ramachandra Guha, ‘Savaging the Civilised; Verrier Elwin and the Tribal Question in late Colonial India’,Economic & Political Weekly, VolXXXI, No 35, 1996, p 2378. 47 Varrier Elwin, Loss of Nerve (1942).48 In Maria tradition a man who wishes to have sex with any other woman goes to her and ask for tobacco, if she offers him tobacco it is considered to be acceptance to have sex with him.49 Elwin, Maria Murder, p 1.50 G S Ghurye, Scheduled Tribes, 1959, Bombay, p 155.51 Guha, ‘Savaging the Civilised’, p 2386. 52 Ghurye, Scheduled Tribes, see introduction; also see Guha, ‘Savaging the Civilised’,p2380. 53 Dirks, Caste of Mind, p 247. 54 Ghurye, Scheduled Tribes, pp 7-12.55 Ibid, p 20.56 Ibid, pp 27-47.57 M N Srinivas,Social Change in Modern India, New Delhi, 1966, see preface.58 Ibid, p 6.59 Ibid, p 2.60 Hardiman,Coming of the Devi, p 160.61 D D Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, Bombay, 1956, p 356.62 Dirks, Caste of Mind, p 254.63 Guha, ‘Savaging the Civilised’, p 2380.64 ArchanaPrasad,Against Ecological Romanticism, New Delhi, 2003, see Preface. 65 K S Singh,The Scheduled Tribes, New Delhi, 1994, see note on the series, and also introduction to the series; under the People of India project (1985-92) he studied 4635 communities’ ethnographies across India out of which 461 were adivasi com-munities deploying the colonial anthropological apparatuses. 66A range of anthropometric studies has been published by ASI: for example see P Gupta (ed), Anthropometry in India, 1962, also see S H Ahmad (ed), Anthropometric Measurements and Ethnic Affinities of the Bhil and Their Allied Groups of Malwa Area, 1991.67 MrinalMiri,Continuity and Change in Tribal Society, Shimla, 1993: see introduction; also see Devnathan, From Tribe to Caste, Shimla, 1997: introduction.68 Inden, Imagining India, 1992: 62.69 See P Sundarayya, Telangana People’s Struggle and Its Lessons, Calcutta, 1972; also see K S Singh, Tribal Movements, 1982 and 1983; and also see Desai,Peasant Struggle in India, Bombay, 1979.70 RanajitGuha,Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, New Delhi,1983: see introduction.
