Adivasi Voices in the Colonial Archive
Slides:
As one dives more deeply into the social issues today’s Adivasi writers cover, one finds that many present-day issues have long backstories – especially British Raj era rules about forest management and hunting rights concerns that have continued to adversely affect forest-dwelling communities to the present day. As I delved more deeply into some of the legal issues and institutional discrimination while developing the site, it seemed important to also explore the colonial backstory. So now, alongside the emphasis on contemporary literature, the site also aims to use the colonial archive to recover Adivasi voices and cultural knowledge from the past.
As the origin point especially for the “criminal tribe” designation and many other errors and distortions, the colonial archive is of course highly problematic. The British created the “criminal tribe” designation in 1871 with the first Criminal Tribes Act; members of communities affected by the designation were subject to compulsory registration and a pass system that their movement and where they could reside. Up until independence, they continued to expand the range of affected communities; after independence, the law was repealed and the communities came to be notified as “Denotified Tribes”; other Adivasi communities were also included in a broader legally protected category, “Scheduled Tribes.” The government of India has, since then, passed a number of laws designed to protect these communities, though the laws are inconsistently applied and sometimes overridden in the interests of development and industrialization. (The most famous example being the plan to build the Narmada dam, which displaced thousands of predominantly Adivasi people. The Adivasi writer Haldhar Nag also writes of an earlier incident, the Hirakud Dam in Odisha, which also displaced thousands of Adivasis back in the 1960s.)
Adivasis continue to be subject to misidentification, misnaming, and mischaracterization – even after the concept of the criminal tribe was retired. Even proper community names can be slippery: Gond is an exonym; members of the community refer to themselves actually as Koitur; Oraon people call themselves Kurukh, etc. Even the name “Adivasi” is a kind of catachresis (in the Spivakian sense) – a Sanskritic word and concept that was externally imposed, albeit with a benevolent intention, on a vast array of communities with highly heterogeneous cultural traditions, religious practices, and language groups. And there is the problematic word “tribal,” which is constitutionally recognized and used by many people in India descriptively and non-pejoratively, including by Adivasis themselves.
Despite the inordinate damage and legacy of displacement and marginalization caused by the colonial legacy and despite continuing marginalization, there are also seeds of resistance and alternative narratives we can discover if we know where to look. Within colonial missionary accounts and early ethnographic accounts by writers like Verrier Elwin, there are at times traces of Adivasi voices we can locate and center.
In pursuing this project I was partially inspired by the thinking of Vincent Brown, who has written a history of a famous slave revolt in Jamaica, Tacky’s Revolt, and also created a digital resource to educate readers about that event. As Brown notes, “Every slave revolt drew a congeries of participants into close engagements, but the rebels’ stories must be learned mainly from the records left by their enemies.” Elsewhere, he writes, “As with the records of military and government officials, merchants, and missionaries, we must discover the history of the enslaved through the unreliable narrations of their captors” (13). That speaks to my own approach here. Who are the local interlocutors whose voices appear in Elwin’s writings and inform his thinking? Could it be possible to find a narrative of Adivasi emergence against the grain in the colonial archive?
Before 1947, mainly due to pervasive illiteracy, only a limited number of people from Adivasi backgrounds are found telling their own stories in print. We see writers like Sushila Samad (1906-1960), a Munda writer who worked for a time with Gandhi in the independence movement and published two volumes of poetry in Hindi (1935, 1948), though these rarely addressed her background. Another early writer also from the Munda community is Alice Ekka (1917-1978), who wrote short stories in Hindi, mainly for publication in magazines. These were finally collected by the editor and author Vandana Tete in 2015 (Alice Ekka Ki Kahanian). Other than these two, the figure who is most often named as a pioneer for Adivasi rights is Jaipal Singh Munda, an activist who was in effect adopted by a British missionary and given an elite education in England before going to teach at various places, including for a time Ghana. Munda is best-known today for his leadership of the first Adivasi Sabha (which first met in 1939), and for his advocacy for the state of Jharkhand as a homeland for Adivasis from several different communities. Reading his memoir, Lo Bir Sendra, we see Munda as clearly an important figure with a complex legacy; his influence with younger generations of Adivasis is largely through his coinage of the term Adivasiyat – or Adivasi-ness. This is a movement essentially oriented to considering the question of Adivasi identity; it has exploded today and is widely prevalent among the younger generation of Adivasi writers who are currently active.
However, there are also British sources we can look to, though are also are challenges to using the British colonial archive that my account from Vincent Brown above might underline. Here, a key figure might be Verrier Elwin (1902-1964), a British writer who first came to India as an Anglican Franciscan Christian missionary. Initially based in Pune, he joined the Christa Seva Sangha (CSS), a group that attempted to indigenize Christianity to make it more appealing for potential Indian converts. CSS members lived together communally and wore khadi, ate vegetarian food, and used elements of Indian music and art in their self-presentation. Within a few years, however, Elwin appeared to outgrow the CSS and became involved in the Indian National Congress, through which he came to know Gandhi and other Congress leaders.
Elwin quickly published several books reflecting his new enthusiasm for Indian anti-colonialism, including The Dawn of Indian Freedom, and Truth about India: Can We Get It? –both published in London in the early 1930s. After a brush with authorities who threatened to revoke his ability to live in India on account of his anti-government activism, Elwin decided to pull back from formal political engagement and opened a new Ashram among the Adivasis of central India, specifically the Gond (or Koitur) people who are spread of the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and other regions. This marked the beginning of a dramatic shift in emphasis – as Elwin ceased any attempt at proselytization, renounced his allegiance to the Anglican church, and began living with Adivasi communities full time for the next three decades of his life, publishing more than twenty books on the communities he encountered and lived among, and putting forward their interests as a sympathetic advocate. He is best known in his early years for his work with the Gond / Koitur community as well as a more remote and precarious hunter-gatherer community called the Baiga (today classified by the government of India as a “particularly vulnerable tribal group” [PVTG]), though after the government of independent India stationed him in the northeast frontier he began to study and write about northeastern Adivasi communities as well.
His writings are notable in part because they are often so transparent and direct, with a lightness and sense of humor that comes partly from his elite British educational background. Elwin was not trained as an anthropologist, and perhaps that enabled him to approach his subject with a more personal touch. Leaves from the Jungle, his book on his life with the Gonds, published in 1938, has some explanatory essays, but is mostly structured as a pretty entertaining diary. As he became more invested, Elwin clearly diagnosed some of the reasons for the continued impoverishment of Adivasi communities. In 1939, Elwin published the first full-length book on the Baiga, a community who lived in jungle Karanjia (where he had his Ashram); at the time, it was one of the most immersive and comprehensive ethnographic accounts of its kind to have been produced.
The Baigas are what are sometimes referred to as hunter-gatherers, or more in more formal ethnographic parlance they practiced shifting cultivation. Foraging materials and food, and cutting trees on a small scale played a central role in their livelihood, as did the idea of continual movement that allowed depleted forest regions to replenish their resources. In Hindi this approach to sustenance is referred to as Bewar. Unfortunately, in line with their other restrictions on groups they considered Criminal Tribes, the British Raj aggressively aimed to limit Bewar in favor of modernized land use and forest management. This meant banning any unauthorized tree-cutting, limiting hunting practices, and essentially dispossessing the Baigas from their open-forest movement. Instead, as Elwin describes, they were limited to their traditional mode of livelihood to a tiny patch of forest (24,000 acres) in the Ramgarh tehsil of the Mandla district – an area known as Baiga reservation or chak. Elwin quotes from an affected member of the community, Dholi Baiga, who wrote a petition to the government soon after the formation of the Baiga reserve stating the following:
A version of this issue is, unfortunately still with us today, as independent India passed laws to essentially ban any tree cutting at all in 1972. They later created an exception for Adivasis (the Forest Rights Act of 2006), though that too has been largely voided by the Indian Supreme Court (2019) after a case brought by Wildlife preservation NGO, leading potentially millions of Adivasis being forcibly displaced. I can’t get too deeply into those issues here, but suffice it to say, Adivasis have a point when they claim that the Government of India treats their claims to cultural autonomy and access to ancestral lands no differently than did the British Raj. (And scholars might also be right to invoke decolonial theory in connection with Adivasi issues.)We daily starve, having had no food grain in our possession. The only wealth we possess is our axe. We have no clothes to cover our bodies with, but we pass cold nights by the fireside. We are now dying for want of food. We cannot go elsewhere, as the British government is everywhere. What fault have we done that the government does not take care of us? Prisoners are supplied with ample food in jail. A cultivator [of the soil] is not deprived of his holding, but the Government does not give us our right who have lived here for generations past. (The Baiga, p. 130)
Elwin also wrote a book on the The Agaria – a traditional blacksmith community with artisanal practices and its own religious lore related to smithery. The Agaria blacksmiths had been blocked from practicing their traditional skill due to a colonial government tax on furnaces; Elwin’s books showed how forest laws relating to wood-gathering and the use of furnaces had led to the collapse of Agaria livelihoods.
In books like Leaves from the Jungle, Elwin gives an account of his first years living with the Gond. The account is surprisingly unguarded and open – with extensive references to his traveling partner and best friend in India, Shamrao Hivale, as well as numerous friends and interlocutors from the Gond community itself. The group seems to grow larger over the months and soon years of Elwin’s stay with the Gonds, and the narrative charts the growth of an effective social welfare project – involving the construction of several schools, an ashram, and a charitable leper colony. The precondition for Elwin’s success as a writer and advocate for Adivasi rights – both here and in his other books – really goes through these Indian helpers – people who helped Elwin when he was ill (which was often), backed him up when things got difficult with local officials (which was also often), and translated local cultural practices and languages for him. Another important figure in this text as wells as several others Elwin published in these years is a Gond healer and clergyman named Panda Baba. Panda Baba is a colorful older man who is also a fount of knowledge and stories reflecting his own idiosyncratic approach to Gond religious practices and cultural knowledge. Shamrao Hivale did publish some accounts of his own, including a book on an Adivasi community called the Pardhans, in 1946 (The Pardhans of the Upper Narbada Valley).
For the Adivasis themselves – like Panda Baba – who appear in Elwin’s narratives, we have little external validation or archival documents. Nevertheless, it may be possible to reframe his narrative accounts of communities like the Gonds, the Baiga, and the Agaria blacksmiths with markers of who appears to be telling him what. In other words, we can think of these narratives as not authored only by Elwin, but by this entire group of storytellers.
Here, Elwin writes about his Adivasi interlocutors in his books from the 1930s:
At the same time, in the Mandla villages at least, there were alliances into which one entered. You took someone as your Mahaprasad (mine was Mahatu the Baiga priest) or your Sakhi (Panda Baba, of whom there is a lot in Leaves from the Jungle), had several Jawaras and so on. But Shamrao and | acquired so many of these that they did not disturb the general relationship: a whole village was our Sakhi or Jawara. (Oxford India Elwin, 36)
It’s curious that he refers to Panda Baba as Sakhi (witness). It's a little frustrating, however, that he refers to Adivasi interlocutors as "friends" rather than crediting them more formally as informants who made his ethnographic research possible.
As some of you probably already know, Elwin was not a perfect anthropologist and he was an imperfect man. The most talked-about incident is his decision, in 1940, to marry a Gond girl named Kosi Armu. She was under-age and the marriage went against the wishes of both his family and hers. And while the age gap did not cause a huge scandal for him at the time, it is hard to ignore today. The marriage, it should be noted, did not last, and in the autobiography he published near the end of his life Elwin appeared to consider it to have been a mistake. As he said: “And my greatest failure was in my first marriage. I cannot even now look back on this period of my life without a deep sense of pain and failure…indeed I can hardly bear to write about it.” (The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin, p. 138)
Despite his flaws and the ambivalence through which many Adivasis see him today, many of the goals he outlines fo Adivasi advocacy align with goals of Adivasi activists today, including the right to maintain religious beliefs and practices distinct from and outside of Hinduism, the right to continue speaking their community’s languages against the encroachment or imposition of national languages, and the right to control over land use and traditional hunting rituals. Writers like Elwin (along with peer anthropologists like W.G. Archer and S.C. Roy, who shared his interest in Adivasi culture) could give us a lens on the colonial archive as a potentially more productive place to locate at least some historically grounded material that could be of use to Adivasi writers and activists in understanding what got us to the mess of the present moment. Again, in using this work from the colonial archive, my goal is to locate and credit Adivasi interlocutors (i.e., “native informants”) wherever possible – sometimes reading against the grain of the ‘master’ text that writers like Elwin and Archer produced with their help.