Fractured Communities: Adivasis and their elusive homelands in modern India

Fractured Communities: Adivasi Histories and the Politics of Power

by Umar Khalid

Published by Juggernaut

400 pages            ₹499

 

Nations are built on selective memory, and India’s founding myth — secular, tolerant — has always coexisted in parallel with the reality of exclusion. That reality keeps finding new subjects in women, tribals, particular castes, particular faiths, at the whims of those in power.

 

Umar Khalid was hounded by the media and public after the 2016 Jawaharlal Nehru University sedition row, rusticated from his university and only permitted to finish his research because of the Delhi High Court’s intervention — this is the context in which  Fractured Communities, a dissertation on the tribes of Singhbhum, was researched and written. The book stands on its own as a piece of scholarship.

 

 

Historian Ramachandra Guha, in the introduction, calls it one of history’s “tragic ironies” that Khalid “has become known not for his scholarship but for having spent almost six years in prison without bail under a draconian law altogether unworthy of a (...) constitutional democracy”. Sociologist Nandini Sundar discusses in the afterword how Khalid is made to be “just one aspect of his identity”, so that whatever he writes or says is seen as “violent, anti-national and a threat to the ‘Indian mainstream’.”

 

There are two versions of Khalid here — the endlessly discussed activist and the rarely acknowledged scholar who spent years researching and writing. Focusing only on the former does a disservice to the latter.

 

The book follows the question Jaipal Singh Munda, a prominent advocate for Adivasi rights and a separate homeland, asked after the Constitution came into force: “The Constitution is yours. The borders are yours. The sovereignty is yours. The flag is yours. What is ours? What is there that is both tribal and Indian in the Constitution?”

 

The Adivasi, in the popular imagination, is painted in simplistic strokes of colonial inheritance, with adjectives like “helpless”, “childlike”, “lesser intelligence”, “violent”, “easily manipulable”. Drawing on records, studies, correspondence, books, and journals spanning centuries, Khalid’s book traces exactly how we got here.

 

Singhbhum can be seen as a microcosm of India, but also of colonial manoeuvring. Violence and barbarity were justified by exaggerating and demonising “the other side”. Distinct tribes and populations were lumped under a single undifferentiated mass, except when it served expansionist ends to do otherwise. Fissures were manufactured wherever local rulers and chiefs had competing ambitions.

 

When needed, colonial attitudes changed rapidly. “The “savage” Larka Kols, “a refractory tribe of plunderers and freebooters”, were now “Arcadian ‘noble savages’”. They were no longer a threat to civilization; rather, their existence constituted a living critique of the “reputed evils of civilization,” writes Khalid. But how to justify a takeover? Easy; you call it a rescue. “[T]he British takeover of the region in the 1830s was represented,” Khalid writes, “as an attempt to save the tribal population from their oppressive chiefs and avaricious neighbors”.

 

Beneath this paternalism lay transactionality. In one region, Dikus (outsiders) were condemned for exploiting the “innocent” aboriginal Hos. Yet, in another mineral-rich territory, they were happily tolerated, where they supposedly didn’t influence the natives all that much. Even prominent Indian anthropologists inherited similar contradictions, their views on religion and colonial policy shaping how they studied the Adivasis, in turn shaping how these populations would be understood for generations after. “The one connecting point between the colonialists and people like [Sarat Chandra] Majumdar, however,” Khalid writes, “remained a paternalistic attitude toward the Adivasis, who were seen as incapable of taking their future into their own hands.”

 

The colonial masters used a convenient double standard: An apocalyptic image of Indian forests being destroyed was conjured to end local burning and shifting cultivation, even as the British themselves exploited those forests, exempt from the conservation rules they enforced on others.

 

Conservation, in practice, was confiscation. It had “less to do with the needs of its people than with the economic riches its forests and mines offered to corporations and real estate dealers”. As forests were “gradually declared protected and reserved by the colonial state and their access subsequently restricted,” the consequences were ghastly — “the region became more prone to scarcity, and the suffering of the people was much greater in times of famine”.

 

The British didn't know this terrain and lacked the might to dominate it outright. So they recruited allies, a section of locals turned rent-collecting officials, chosen precisely because they possessed knowledge of the terrain and legitimacy among the tribal communities. Some readings mistake this for self-rule, but as Khalid cautions, “it is important to distinguish between intentions and compulsions”. What the British built by propping up certain castes and headmen — mankis and mundas specifically — were new fissures and hierarchies, carved into a space that had been relatively un-hierarchical before their arrival.

 

Nationalist suspicion of British divide-and-rule added another layer to this already fractured landscape. But for many Adivasis, the threat wasn’t the departing colonisers but “the possibility of a transfer of power to an upper-caste dominant Hindu leadership that would continue to discriminate against and exploit them”. The “foreigner they referred to was not the British, but representatives of the Bihar Congress”.

 

And what changed, really, once the British left? Adivasis in Singhbhum remain homeless in their own homes, considered only for the material goods their forest provides. Even as panchayats promise decentralised governance, power still sits in Delhi. Industrialisation simply accelerates. The disenfranchisement continues.

 

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The reviewer is a journalist, writer, and editor. Instagram/X: aroomofwords