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Review: Fractured Communities by Umar Khalid
This book on the tribal experience in Jharkhand’s Singbhum adds significantly to the existing knowledge of tribal history in general
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Umar Khalid’s Fractured Communities: Adivasi Histories and the Politics of Power traces the political history, from the colonial to the post-colonial period, of tribal people in the area that now constitutes Singbhum district in Jharkhand. Those who know of Umar Khalid from Indian news television that paints him as a desh drohi and agitator will be surprised to see that he comes across as an astute writer and serious scholar in this book adapted from his PhD thesis submitted to JNU’s Centre for Historical Studies. Indeed, his research on the tribal experience in that part of “mainland India” adds significantly to the existing knowledge of tribal history in general.
There is a tendency in the northeast, where I am from, to imagine tribal life and history as the preserve of northeastern tribes. This may have to do with the fact that at least four of the states there – Mizoram, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh – have tribal-majority populations. The fact, however, is that the northeastern tribes constitute only around 12 percent of the Scheduled Tribe population in India. The mainland states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Jharkhand hold the bulk of the tribal population in the country, though, as a percentage of the total, the share of the tribes in each of these states is quite small.
Khalid’s work is focused primarily on the Ho tribals in the Kolhan areas of Singhbhum. This is a part of the Chota Nagpur plateau, which nominally came under the East India Company in 1765 when it acquired the diwani rights of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. The British, who came into proper contact with the Hos of Singhbhum about 50 years later, referred to them as Larka Kols (or, fighting Kols). Colonial accounts emphasized the “wild nature” of the Ho country, a “forbidden land through which no strangers could pass.” The people were characterized as war-like, hardy and athletic, ignorant, savage, simple and truthful, migratory and given to excessive drinking.
The Hos have a two-tiered system of chieftainship. While the Mundas are chiefs or headmen of a village, the Mankis ruled over a cluster of villages. (The terms chief and headman are used interchangeably, here and elsewhere, but the latter is preferred in official usage). As the book demonstrates, these headmen occupied a pivotal position in the “politics of power” of the tribes through the colonial to the post-colonial periods. Unlike the plains where land is fertile and economic incentives often drove colonial expansion, the colonial conquest of these inhospitable tribal areas was often necessitated by security and strategic reasons. As colonial rule expanded around them, skirmishes between tribal chieftains and the intruding colonial power became inevitable. When the clashes intensified, colonial authorities undertook military expeditions and with their superior technology and organized military force, subdued the disparate tribal chieftains one by one. The burning of entire villages and granaries were the norm to ensure submission and surrender. Then, the colonialists would present an offer to the chiefs that they could not afford to refuse – submit and be the colonial power’s proxy and agent in their own villages. In return, subject to their good conduct, they would be allowed to retain their titles and power with regard to their people.
Under this framework of indirect rule, local headmen were incorporated into the colonial power structure. As colonial rule deepened, the role of the headmen became all the more crucial in matters like realising rents from newly converted arable lands and in controlling and managing forests. As the government depended on them more and more in accomplishing its economic and political objectives, the chiefs, in turn, leveraged their position to enhance their economic and social standing. As the power and prestige of the headmen increased, so too did popular opposition to them and the colonial government which propped them up. To suppress those movements, the colonial government had no choice but to empower and use the headmen against their own people. In the post-colonial period, the position of the Mundas and Mankis came to be challenged by the Panchayati Raj system, with its elective, democratic system. However, attempts to do away with the Munda-Manki system has, so far, proved unsuccessful.
The book does not engage in a comparative analysis with other tribes in other regions. Yet, this book is one more piece of evidence that the modalities of colonial rule in tribal areas – whether in Chota Nagpur, the Indo-Burma borderlands, or in Africa – were more or less the same. The similarity between the Ho tribals and their chiefs described here and the Zo tribals in the Indo-Burma borderlands, for example, is striking. Right from the colonial representation of the tribals’ anthropometric details and character traits to their mode of incorporation into the colonial system of rule, and right up to the uneasy, anomalous coexistence of the chieftainship system with the democratic grassroots institutions in the post-colonial period, the similarities of experience between the two places are astounding. There are also eerie similarities in the manner in which popular discontent against colonial rule and the chieftainship systems builds up as the system got entrenched, and to the claims of difference and independence by the tribes as they feel squeezed in within the newly-emerging polity.
One distinctive land tenurial feature introduced amongst the Singhbhum tribes is the idea of the Khuntkatidar, a term given to the perceived “original settlers” of the place. These were people who first laid claim to the land by clearing the forests for cultivation and founding new villages. Under the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act (CNTA) of 1908, those deemed as Khuntkattidar were given protection and privilege in terms of ownership and payment of rent on the land. Of course, determining who can rightfully claim to be a Khuntkattidar turned out to be a vexatious affair. But those recognized as such have their rights and privileges recognized, even in the post-independence period. In this way, customary and statutory laws continue to cohere uneasily.
This book chronicles the changes and continuities experienced by the Ho tribal people during the last 200 years or so. Khalid critiques the portrayal of tribal societies as solid and homogeneous and adroitly shows how the colonial power exploited the rifts within to advance its own ends. The last part of the book captures the state of siege that the tribals are in as their customs-governed life-world clashes not just with state bureaucracy, but also with rapacious state-aligned corporations. A telling snippet about the train station at Chaibasa, the administrative headquarters of Singbhum district, hints at which way the wind is blowing. All the trains running through this busy station, except for one, are goods trains transporting timber and coal from the tribal hinterland to the coastal ports. The one passenger luxury train running through the town stops for two minutes. As for the people, they still ride rickety buses on bumpy roads.
Thangkhanlal Ngaihte is assistant professor of Political Science at Churachandpur College, Manipur and PhD candidate at Mizoram University, Aizawl.
