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In the Shadows of the State
INDIGENOUS POLITICS, ENVIRONMENTALISM, AND INSURGENCY IN JHARKHAND, INDIA
By ALPA SHAH
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4765-1
Chapter One
The Dark Side of Indigeneity
The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed increasing transnational concern about the lack of a universal system of protection for indigenous rights and development. This concern gained prominence with the formation of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (UNWGIP) in 1982. United Nations established a Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2000 and appointed a Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people the following year.
More generally, the first United Nations International Decade of the World's Indigenous People (1995-2004) promoted global interest in the protection of indigenous rights and a second such decade began in 2005. While indigenous peoples are highly heterogeneous in their views and agendas, advocates for most groups make certain familiar arguments. These include the ideas that indigenous people around the world have been marginalized for centuries, various settler populations have stolen and colonized their lands, their numbers are in decline, their cultures are threatened, and they live in states that give more weight to the values and interests of the nonindigenous than to those of the indigenous.
The global spotlight on indigenous issues goes hand in hand with an increasing interest in global warming, environmentalism, and people-centered nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Indigenous communities around the world have collaborated with NGOs such as the Minority Rights Group International, the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Forest People's Movement, Survival International, Human Rights Watch, Cultural Survival, and the Rainforest Action Network. Some anthropologists who seek to defend indigenous rights to land and resources have also championed the cause of these peoples. A number of scholars argue that these indigenous actors are resisting their historical subjugation not through the "hidden transcripts" of "weapons of the weak," but through flamboyant "open transcripts" of overt representations and public acts of opposing the nation-states in which they live. Thus they are part of the genre of (new) social movements that lies between mass revolution and small-scale resistance, and that offers marginalized people a political voice besides that offered by mainstream development or Marxism and socialism. The idea is that poor, colonized, exploited, indigenous populations must be protected; their cultures must be preserved; and their rights must be enshrined in U.N. human-rights legislation. As I will show, these are controversial arguments made in the name of the protection of indigenous rights. Globally, they have produced renewed and heated debate among scholars.
India, a country which some say has the second largest indigenous population in the world, is home to over eighty-four million people classified as members of Scheduled Tribes-that is 8.2 percent of India's total population. The official position of the Indian government, however, is that there are no indigenous people in the country. The government's claim is based on the country's complex migration patterns which means that unlike in other nations such as Australia or Canada, it is impossible to identify the original settlers of a particular region. However, beginning in 1985, Indian activists have participated in the UNWGIP meetings. These activists sought to claim indigenous status for India's adivasi populations, peoples previously known as tribals, and who are recognized officially in government censuses as members of Scheduled Tribes. In 1987 the Indian delegates to unwgip represented a newly founded Indian Council of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, affiliated with the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. The leading members of the Indian group were from what is now the State of Jharkhand.
The Jharkhandi activists claimed that India's Scheduled Tribe populations qualified for the new transnational term "indigenous peoples" because they were culturally different from mainstream Indian society, and especially because they had been internally colonized and dominated by a system of values and institutions maintained by the ruling groups of the country. They argued for the need to secure "the collective right of self-determination" in order to restore "land and forest rights" to India's indigenous people-something that they felt would be possible through negotiation via internationally approved rights and safeguards.
This argument has historical roots. Activists in Jharkhand had been struggling for the autonomy of the region from Bihar State, within the Indian federal union, since the late 1920s. The initial struggles argued for a separate state on the basis that the region housed culturally autonomous indigenous people, classified as Scheduled Tribes by the government, and more popularly known as adivasis. Later, realizing that the demographic reality meant that a significant Jharkhandi population did not count as members of a Scheduled Tribe, at least according to the census, the independence promoters became more inclusive. Their new rhetoric was that Jharkhand was an internal colony of Bihar-that Bihar was reaping the benefits of Jharkhand's mineral, forest, and land resources. This enabled the movement to broaden its social base while maintaining that the area's identity emerged from the exploitation of its population and its distinct cultural heritage, and therefore the region should be restored to its original "sons of the soil." The linking of the cultural politics of Jharkhand with transnational concerns some sixty years later was thus the latest phase of an old movement. Nevertheless, Jharkhand's separation from Bihar on 15 November 2000 was in many ways a triumph for Jharkhand's transnational activists.
The implications of such transnational indigenous rights activism for targeted people in specific localities, however, are far from clear and have received very little in-depth scrutiny. In this book, I explore the lives and experiences of some of the poorest adivasis in rural Jharkhand to analyze common claims made at a global level on behalf of indigenous populations. For instance, I will examine the promotion of special forms of indigenous governance (chapter 2), the way development takes shape in the name of the poorest people (chapter 3), what I will call the eco-incarceration of indigenous people through arguments about their love for and worship of nature (chapter 4) as well as their attachment to their land (chapter 5), and claims that they harbor revolutionary potential (chapter 6).
I show that the opinions, desires, and concerns of the poorest rural adivasis often contradicted and subverted those of the well-meaning urban-based middle-class activists, as well as those of local rural elites aspiring to rise up the class hierarchy. I move between the small village of Tapu, surrounding villages, the local administrative town of Bero, and Jharkhand's capital city from January 1999 to March 2007. I follow the everyday lives of some of the poorest villagers as they chase away protected wild elephants, try to cut down the forests they allegedly live in harmony with, migrate to work in distant brick kilns to experience amorous relationships, maintain a healthy skepticism about the revival of the indigenous governance system, and escape Maoist guerrillas who claim to represent them. I juxtapose these experiences to the accounts of the village elites, as well as to the rhetorical arguments of the Ranchi-based indigenous rights activists fighting on behalf of the villagers. My central proposition is that the activists' arguments actually further marginalize the people they claim to speak for.
In writing this book, my hope is to open up grounded scholarly examination into the unintended effects of well-meaning measures for indigenous protection and development. I want to move the debate beyond both the arguments that consider the concept of indigenous people anthropologically and historically problematic, and those that consider indigeneity a useful political tool. I focus on one specific locality, a region in Jharkhand, to illuminate the broader point that there may be a dark side of indigeneity that it is well worth highlighting, especially to those who urge us to shelve our critical scholarship in case we weaken the advocacy of promoters of indigenous rights and development.
The dark side of indigeneity suggests that local use of global discourses of indigeneity can reinforce a class system that further marginalizes the poorest people. This class dimension to the indigenous rights movement is likely to get erased in the cultural-based identity politics it produces. Moreover, the transnational movement for indigeneity may obscure those spaces of hope, of a good life, that may lie beyond the shadows of the state. These are the spaces inhabited by people like those of the Jungle Raj in Tapu, the spaces from which a radical politics could emerge to better serve the poor.
Before I explore the history of debates and concerns that leads to the arguments of this book, I would like to make a brief comment about my style of writing. I hope this book will engage not only a varied academic audience but also journalists, human rights and political activists, environmentalists, development workers, policymakers, and the general reader. In this endeavor, I have tried to make my theoretical analysis emerge from the stories of Jharkhand without burdening the body of my text with the conventionally voluminous academic references to comparative, theoretical, and regional literature. For the specialist, I have developed my engagement with the latter through extensive endnotes. Where particular authors are absolutely central to the arguments being developed, I have tried to make them appear and disappear from the text like my Jharkhandi friends and informants. I hope that these decisions will mean that the book is detailed enough for the specialist while being accessible enough for the generalist. The writing of academics is a political act, and I believe we should make every effort to make our texts as accessible as possible to a wide audience.
TRIBES OF MIND?
The transnational concerns over indigenous people, rights, and development have reignited a controversy over indigeneity. On the one hand, there are those who argue for the special categorization and protection of indigenous peoples. On the other hand, there are those who question whether indigeneity is a product of the mind, whether those classified as indigenous are in fact an "invention of the primitive," to borrow Adam Kuper's phrase, and whether policies should actually be aimed at assimilating these people into the mainstream of society. To understand how the Tapu situation speaks to these transnational concerns, it is important to historically trace the key issues in the Indian context. As in many other countries, in India debates central to indigeneity have a much longer history than the recent transnational concerns.
The contested issue of tribal status goes back at least as far as India's colonial period, when British anthropologists and administrators viewed the country's aboriginals as primitive tribes. The need to order Indian society was at the heart of nineteenth-century anthropology in India. At first sight a confusing kaleidoscope, India presented the administrator and the anthropologist with the challenge of meaningfully ordering a hierarchical society in which caste was understood to embody racial and cultural difference. Race and racial ideology were the norms of a broader political order at the time and affected the categorization and classification of India's primitive tribes. For one of India's most influential administrators, H. H. Risley, who directed the 1901 Census, caste status was inscribed on the permanent physical exteriors of Indian bodies. In particular, Risley saw what he called the nasal index as a guide to the status of the nose's owner. Those with the finest noses (and lightest complexions, closest to those of Europeans) were descendants of the Aryan invader upper castes such as Brahmans, Rajputs, and Sikhs, and those with snub noses (and dark complexions approaching those of black Africans) were the aboriginal primitive tribes, the forest and hill dwellers, occupying the oldest and lowest strata in India.
This racial anthropology was conveniently appropriated by some Indian elites seeking to both justify local hierarchy and assert parity with upper-class Europeans. Some scholars argue that Indians played a greater role in colonial constructions of the tribe. Nevertheless, one conclusion is that members of the Indian elite and colonial administrators and anthropologists together created the representations that have a powerful effect on society and politics in India today-stereotypes of the forest folk as living in a timeless harmony with nature, disturbed only in recent times by the market and the state. Twentieth-century isolation of remote jungle tribes is, then, not just some survival of an earlier period but a product of the mind of both colonial rulers and Indian elites.
THE PRODUCTION OF ADIVASIS
While the nineteenth century in India was, in many ways, a period that marked the invention of the primitive, a number of policies and events also served to unite a wide variety of communities living in India's forests and hills. One set of policies were those that extended state control over land and forests, via revenue collection. This state expansion was enabled and accompanied by a new influx of exploitative state officials from outside the region, moneylenders, and landlords, forming the trinity of "sarkar, sahukar, and zamindar." Where they could not hide or flee from this officialdom, some affected people, like those in western India, mobilized through a religiously inspired purifying struggle espousing upper-caste norms. In other areas, most notably in the Chotanagpur region of eastern India that is now Jharkhand, there were a series of more violent rebellions. Despite these multiple reactions, increased state control in many forested and hilly tracts created a shared experience of domination and subordination, and thus united a wide range of people.
A unifying event, especially for inhabitants of the Chotanagpur Plateau, was the reaction of the colonial administration to the nineteenth-century resistance movements. The government made some effort to provide a range of protectionary measures for adivasis based on a codification of their customary rights to land. For instance, following the 1830s Kol rebellion, the Wilkinson Rule provided for self-rule in present-day Singhbhum. There, tribal village councils were given authority to function independently. After the 1855-56 Insurrection, the Santhal Parganas Regulation Act included provisions for the nontransferability of land in Santhal Parganas. Similarly, the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny and the 1859-65 Sardar Movement led to the protectionary measures of the 1869 Chotanagpur Land Tenures Act. This act recognized bhuinhari tenures (special common ownership rights over lands of the original settlers in Oraon areas) and set up a system to demarcate such lands in a survey. This was followed by the 1908 Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, which prohibited transfers of land to nontribals, and ensured community ownership and management of the rights of forest communities over khuntkatti areas (where descendants of original settlers held common ownership over certain lands in Munda areas). The Birsa Rebellion of the 1890s also preceded this act. Thus, along with adivasi rebellion, and colonial imagery of isolated tribes, more humanitarian colonial measures also encouraged the institutionalization of tribal autonomy.
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