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The Oraons of Chhotanagpur: A journey through colonial ethnography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2022
Abstract
This article explores nineteenth-century colonial representations of the Oraons of Chhotanagpur. Described in administrative reports of early nineteenth-century Chhotanagpur as mlecchha and dhangar, or as part of a ‘village community’ of Coles/Kols, these Oraons, by the late nineteenth century, were referred to as a ‘tribe’. To trace the categories through which the Oraons journeyed across colonial records, I discuss texts and reports which later became part of bureaucratic memory. The shifts within official understanding, I argue, were related to the working of official minds, changing assumptions, and differing languages; the tensions within the discipline of anthropology and its application in the colony; the variations within ideologies of governance and the imperatives of rule; and interactions with ‘native’ informants and correspondents, along with personal observations of local practices. There remained, however, an uneasy tension between wider intellectual trends in Europe and their reverberations in the colony, and the experiences of governance: colonial knowledge was not always produced with arrogance and assurance but also with doses of uncertainty, hesitation, disquiet, and often despair. In the shifting representations of the tribe across the nineteenth century, there is, I suggest, a pattern. In the pre-1850s, local nomenclature was adopted and voices of dissent—expressed through agrarian protests in Chhotanagpur—were addressed. By the 1850s, the utilitarian agenda structured colonial imaginaries and interventions. The 1860s witnessed the interplay of ethnological concerns, missionary beliefs, and Arcadian principles. From the 1890s, the idea of tribe was overwhelmingly structured by the supremacy of disciplinary knowledge systems that increasingly supplanted the role of the ‘native’ informant.
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- Research Article
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- Modern Asian Studies , Volume 56 , Special Issue 5: Multiple Worlds of the Adivasi , September 2022 , pp. 1375 - 1415
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 The word ‘tribe’ will not hereafter be placed in inverted commas. The terms used to replace the category of tribe are those of ‘Adivasi’ and ‘Indigenous People’. These terms, though used interchangeably, have distinct lineages. See S. Dasgupta, ‘Adivasi studies: From a historian's perspective’, History Compass, vol. 16, issue 10, 2018, pp. 1–11. See also Karlsson, B. G. and Subba, T. B., ‘Introduction’, in Indigeneity in India, edited by Karlsson, B. G. and Subba, T. B. (London: Kegan Paul, 2006), p. 2Google Scholar.
2 ‘Scheduled Tribe’, although distinct from the word ‘tribe’, draws on several parameters through which the colonial category of tribe was structured. It is a legal and constitutional category, rooted in the state's concern to address the issue of the protection, welfare and, development of the tribal population (see V. Xaxa, ‘Formation of Adivasi/Indigenous Peoples’ identity in India’, in First citizens: Studies on Adivasis, tribals, and Indigenous Peoples in India, edited by M. Radhakrishna [New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016], p, 35). The Indian government's formal criteria for Scheduled Tribe recognition are as follows: indication of primitive traits, distinct culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact with the community at large, and backwardness (see The National Commission for Scheduled Tribes Handbook 2005, Government of India, 2005, quoted in T. Middleton, The demands of recognition: State anthropology and ethnopolitics in Darjeeling [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016], p. 9).
3 ‘Rights activist demands ST status for Van Gujjars in U'Khand’, Press Trust of India, Dehradun, 15 June 2013. See also P. Gooch, ‘We are Van Gujjars’, in Indigeneity in India, edited by Karlsson and Subba, pp. 97–116; and Middleton, The demands of recognition.
4 Xaxa incisively points out in this context that the identity that was ‘forced’ on Adivasis ‘from outside, precisely to mark out differences from the dominant community, has now been internalized by the people themselves’; it has become ‘an important mark of social differentiation and identity assertion’ and ‘an important tool of articulation for empowerment’ (see V. Xaxa, ‘Tribes as Indigenous People of India’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 34, no. 51, 18–24 December 1999, p. 3589).
5 See Kartik Oraon vs David Munzni and Anr. on 14 November 1963: www.indiankanoon.org/doc/204475, [accessed 21 January 2022], and N. E. Horo vs Jahan Ara Jaipal Singh on 2 February 1972: www.indiankanoon.org/doc/453229, [accessed 21 January 2022]. See also Dasgupta, S., ‘“Heathen aboriginals”, “Christian tribes” and “animistic races”: Missionary narratives on the Oraons of Chhotanagpur in colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 2, March 2016, pp. 472–477CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 The Oraons are Adivasis who live primarily across central and eastern India; they are also to be found in Assam, Tripura, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where they went largely as migrant labour to work on tea plantations and to clear forests for cultivation.
7 See Bayly, S., ‘Caste and “race” in the colonial ethnography of India’, in The concept of race in South Asia, edited by Robb, P. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 170Google Scholar.
8 The relationship between knowledge and power was put forward in the context of early modern Europe by Michel Foucault in the 1960s. Edward Said's Orientalism draws upon this argument (see E. Said, Orientalism [New York: Pantheon, 1978]), and has, in turn, greatly influenced post-colonial historiography. For reference to historiographical debates, see Dasgupta, ‘“Heathen aboriginals”’, pp. 439–440.
9 Bailey, F. G., ‘Tribe and caste in India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol. 5, no. 1, 1961, pp. 7–19Google Scholar; Sinha, S., ‘Tribe-caste and tribe-peasant continua in central India’, Man in India, vol. 45, no. 1, 1965, pp. 57–83Google Scholar; Bose, N. K., Tribal life in India (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1971)Google Scholar; and Beteille, A., ‘Tribe and peasantry’, in his Six essays in comparative sociology (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 58–74Google Scholar.
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11 Sinha, ‘Tribe-caste and tribe-peasant continua in central India’, p. 61.
12 Dube, S. C., ‘Introduction’, in Tribal heritage of India, edited by Dube, S. C. (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), pp. 2–3Google Scholar.
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15 See, for example, B. S. Cohn, An anthropologist among the historians and other essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987); N. Dirks, Castes of mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and R. Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
16 See, for example, E. F. Irschick, Dialogue and history. Constructing South India 1795–1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); C. A. Bayly, Empire and information: Intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Bayly, ‘Caste and “race”’; T. R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); N. Peabody, ‘Cents, sense, census: Human inventories in late precolonial and early colonial India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 43, no. 4, 2001, pp. 819–850; and P. B. Wagoner, ‘Precolonial intellectuals and the production of colonial knowledge’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 45, no. 4, October 2003, pp. 783–814.
17 S. B. Devalle, Discourses of ethnicity: Culture and protest in Jharkhand (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1992), p. 50.
18 A. Skaria, ‘Shades of wildness: Tribe, caste and gender in Western India’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 56, no. 3, 1997, p. 730.
19 S. Guha, Environment and ethnicity, 1200–1901 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 10–29.
20 S. Guha, ‘States, tribes, castes: A historical re-exploration in comparative perspective’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. L, nos. 46 and 47, 21 November 2015, pp. 50–57.
21 See V. Damodaran, ‘Colonial constructions of the “tribe” in India: The case of Chotanagpur’, Indian Historical Review, vol. 33, no 1, 2006, p. 44. See also B. B. Chaudhuri, ‘The myth of the tribe? The question reconsidered’, The Calcutta Historical Journal, vol. 16, no. 1, 1994, pp. 125–56, where Chaudhuri critiques Devalle's arguments.
22 Damodaran, ‘Colonial constructions of the “tribe” in India', p. 44.
23 Damodaran thereby questions Sumit Guha's argument that colonial regimes had invented caste and tribe out of pre-colonial systems that were mobile (see V. Damodaran, ‘Review, S. Guha’, Journal of Political Ecology: Case Studies in History and Society, vol. 7, no. 1, 2007, pp. 12–17).
24 U. Chandra, ‘Liberalism and its other: The politics of primitivism in colonial and postcolonial Indian law’, Law and Society Review, vol. 47, no. 1, 2013, pp. 135–168.
25 P. Samarendra, ‘Anthropological knowledge and statistical frame: Caste in the census in colonial India’, in Caste in modern India, Vol. 1, edited by Sarkar and Sarkar, pp. 255–296.
26 Middleton, The demands of recognition, p. 60.
27 Middleton's argument, which identifies in Dalton's account ‘British and Brahmanical figurings of the tribe’ or an ‘interplay of British and Brahmanical worldviews’, I therefore argue, needs to be qualified (see ibid., p. 67).
28 F. B. Bradley-Birt, Chota Nagpur: A little-known province of the empire (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1903).
29 Chhotanagur was not mentioned in the ‘Tukseem Jumma of the Subbah of Behar’ prepared by Akbar's Revenue Minister Todar Mal and set forth in the Ain-i-Akbari (see the untitled note prepared by S. C. Roy which was found among the papers of S. C. Roy, once available at the office of the Man in India journal, Ranchi). See also H. F. Blochmann, ‘Notes from the Muhammadan historians on Chutia Nagpur, Pachet, and Palamau’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. xl, part 1, 1871, p. 113.
30 Ibid.
31 Letter, dated 29 August 1839, Kishenpore, from John Davidson, Personal Assistant to the Governor General's Agent, to Major J. R. Ouseley, Governor General's Agent, published in S. C. Roy, ‘Ethnographical investigation in official records’, The Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, vol. xxi, part iv, 1935, p. 12.
32 Captain G. E. Depree, ‘Report Geographical and Statistical on that part of the Chota Nagpur Division which has come under the operations of the Topographical Survey’, Office No. 4, Topographical Party, Chota Nagpur Divisions Survey, Dorundah, 15 July 1868, Commissioner's Record Room and Library, Ranchi. The pawa, applicable to wet cultivation, was, as Depree pointed out, ‘quite an arbitrary area: in some cases it is sufficient to sow two maunds of seed, in others ten or twelve maunds’.
33 Ibid. See also Roy, ‘Ethnographical investigation in official records’ (1935), p. 12.
34 W. Hamilton, A geographical, statistical, and historical description of Hindostan and the adjacent countries in two volumes (London: John Murray, 1820).
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., p. 288.
37 Ibid., p. v.
38 S. Basu, ‘The dialectics of resistance: Colonial geography, Bengali literati and the racial mapping of Indian identity’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 44, no. 1, 2010, pp. 53–79.
39 Hamilton, A geographical, statistical, and historical description of Hindostan, p. 3.
40 Ibid., p. 282.
41 For a discussion of the jungle mahals as ‘zones of anomaly in the emerging governmentality of colonial rule’, see K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern forests: Statemaking and environmental change in colonial eastern India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 35.
42 Basu, ‘The dialectics of resistance’.
43 For the multiple perceptions of the forest and its people in ancient texts and folk literature, see R. Thapar, ‘Perceiving the forest: Early India’, Studies in History, vol. 17, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–16; B. D. Chattopadhyaya, ‘State's perceptions of the “forest” and the “forest” as state in early India’, in Tribes, forest and social formation in Indian history, edited by B. B. Chaudhury and A. Bandopadhyay (New Delhi: Manohar, 2004); and K. Roy, ‘The antelope, the yak, and other things: An exploration of Banabhatta's Harsacarita’, in Early Indian history and beyond: Essays in honour of Professor B. D. Chattopadhyaya, edited by O. Bopeareachchi and S. Ghosh (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2019), pp. 66–77.
44 Hamilton, A geographical, statistical, and historical description of Hindustan, p. 283.
45 Ibid., p. 284
46 Ibid., p. xxiv.
47 Ibid., p. 70.
48 Ibid., pp. ix–x.
49 Trautmann, Aryans and British India, pp. 148–149.
50 Ibid., p. 149.
51 Ibid.
52 Hamilton, A geographical, statistical, and historical description of Hindostan, p. 288.
53 Ibid., p. 90.
54 Ibid., p. 729.
55 Ibid., p. 288.
56 Bayly, ‘Caste and “race”’, p. 174. In the eighteenth century, as Trautmann points out, we find among writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, the triad of savagery, barbarism, and civilization (see T. R. Trautmann, ‘The revolution in ethnological time’, Man (New Series), vol. 27, no. 2, 1992, p. 380).
57 R. Thapar, ‘The image of the barbarian in early India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 13, no. 4, 1971, p. 436.
58 A. Parasher-Sen, ‘“Foreigner” and “tribe” as barbarian (mleccha) in early North India’, in Subordinate and marginal groups in early India, edited by A. Parasher-Sen (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 275–313.
59 Thapar, ‘The image of the barbarian in early India’, p. 436.
60 Ibid., p. 413.
61 Parasher-Sen, ‘“Foreigner” and “tribe” as barbarian (mleccha) in early North India’, p. 302.
62 Thapar, ‘The image of the barbarian in early India’, p. 413.
63 Ibid., p. 431.
64 Ibid., p. 408.
65 Parasher-Sen, ‘“Foreigner” and “tribe” as barbarian (mleccha) in early North India’, p. 292.
66 Ibid., p. 291.
67 For a greater elaboration of the meanings of ‘Arya’ and the ‘mleccha’ in Monier-Williams’ Sanskrit-English dictionary, see Trautmann, Aryans and British India, pp. 12–13.
68 Lieutenant Colonel F. Wilford, ‘On the ancient Geography of India’, Asiatick Researches; or Transactions of the Society, Instituted in Bengal, For Enquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia, vol. XIV, July–December, 1822, pp. 373–470. Wilford's text, almost contemporaneous with that of Hamilton's, sought to expunge the ‘entirely mythological’ from the ‘entirely geographical’, and was written with the intention of understanding the ‘Ancient Geography’ of India perhaps as a prelude to later writings that would explore the geographical contours of British India (see ibid., p. 373).
69 Among some of the texts that Wilford refers to are parts of the Cshetra-samasa or ‘collection of countries’, as ‘entirely geographical’ and as a ‘most valuable work’. Commissioned by the raja of Patna who died in 1648, this was referred to as a ‘modern work’, though nevertheless a ‘valuable and interesting performance’ (see ibid., p. 373).
70 Ibid., p. 392.
71 Ibid., pp. 373–374.
72 K. Ghosh, ‘A market for aboriginality: Primitivism and race classification in the indentured market of colonial India’, in Subaltern studies X, edited by G. Bhadra, G. Prakash and S. Tharu (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), pp. 8–48.
73 E. T. Dalton, ‘The “Kols” of Chota-Nagpore’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, no. 35, part 2, Supplementary Number, 1866, pp. 153–198.
74 V. Ball, Jungle life in India or the journeys and journals of an Indian geologist (London: De La Rue, 1880). Ball, a fellow of Calcutta University and of the Geological Societies of London and Ireland, and a member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the Zoological and Botanical Society of Vienna, and the British Ornithologists’ Union, wanted to introduce his readers to ‘the lives of men, wild beasts and plants, in regions many of which have been seldom visited or described before’. Through the form of a ‘personal narrative’ of his ‘journeys’, which he had kept with ‘tolerable regularity’ in his diaries, Ball gave an account of the ‘various races and tribes with which’ he had ‘come in contact’.
75 Ibid., p. 646.
76 See Chotanagpur Commisioners Records, Lohardagga District Old Correspondence Volume prepared during 1834–49, Vol. No. 86, 1–544, Bihar State Archives, Patna.
77 Cuthbert's report was reproduced in S. C. Roy, ‘Ethnographical investigation in official records’, Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, vol. VII, part IV, 1921, pp. 1–34. It is the longest available report in this early period. Extracts of the report are also published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1846, and parts of it are quoted in Letter No. 11, dated 22 May 1880, Ranchi, from Babu Rakhal Das Haldar, Special Commissioner under the Chota Nagpore Tenures Act, to the Deputy Commissioner, Lohardugga, Papers Relating to the Chota Nagpore Agrarian Disputes, Vol. I, Calcutta, 1890, Commissioner's Record Room and Library, Ranchi.
78 Roy, ‘Ethnographical investigation in official records’ (1921), p. 8.
79 Davidson's detailed report was reproduced in Roy, ‘Ethnographical investigation in official records’ (1935), pp. 3–20.
80 Sarat Chandra Roy was one of the pioneers of anthropological studies in India who wrote extensively on the Adivasi communities in Chhotanagpur (see S. Dasgupta, ‘The journey of an anthropologist in Chhotanagpur’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 42, no. 2, 2004, pp. 165–198).
81 Roy, ‘Ethnographical investigation in official records’ (1935), p. 2. The administrative system of the South-Western Frontier Agency, later renamed the Chota Nagpur Division, differed from the earlier system of administering these tracts as an ordinary ‘Regulation District’ with elaborate legal codes and ‘regulations’.
82 Ibid., p. 3.
83 Letter No. 11, dated 22 May 1880, Ranchi, from Babu Rakhal Das Haldar, Special Commissioner under the Chota Nagpore Tenures Act, to the Deputy Commissioner, Lohardugga, Papers Relating to the Chota Nagpore Agrarian Disputes, Vol. I, p. 82. I refer in this context to the 106 letters spanning 544 pages that are in the Chotanagpur Commissioners Records, Lohardagga District Old Correspondence Volumes prepared during 1834–49, and to the Judicial Criminal Proceedings, West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata.
84 Letter No. 11, dated 22 May 1880, Ranchi, from Babu Rakhal Das Haldar, Special Commissioner under the Chota Nagpore Tenures Act, to the Deputy Commissioner, Lohardugga, Papers Relating to the Chota Nagpore Agrarian Disputes, Vol. I, p. 82.
85 Roy, ‘Ethnographical investigation in official records’ (1921), p. 29.
86 Ibid., p. 23.
87 Ibid., p. 2.
88 Ibid., p. 9.
89 Ibid., p. 13.
90 Ibid., p. 20.
91 Ibid., p. 14
92 Ibid., p. 13.
93 Ibid., p. 2.
94 Ibid., p. 14.
95 Ibid., pp. 3–12.
96 N. Bhattacharya, ‘Remaking custom: The discourse and practice of colonial codification’, in Tradition, dissent and ideology: Essays in honour of Romila Thapar, edited by R. Champaklakshmi and S. Gopal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 25.
97 Roy, ‘Ethnographical investigation in official records’ (1935), p. 3.
98 Ibid., pp. 19–20.
99 Ibid., p. 3.
100 Ibid., p. 14. The ‘Munda’ and the ‘Muhto’ assigned land to the ryots, collected rent, and deposited the same with the landlord; the ‘Pahn’ performed the ‘poojas’ and looked after religious matters; the ‘Bhandari’ assisted the ‘Muhto’ in his functions; the ‘Gorait’, of the ‘Gorait’ caste, was the watchman of the village; the ‘Gowallah’, of the ‘Ahir’ caste, grazed the cattle of the village (see ibid., pp. 14–16).
101 Ibid., p. 19.
102 Ibid., p. 13.
103 Ibid., p. 8.
104 Ibid., p. 11.
105 S. Dasgupta, ‘Reordering a world: The Tana Bhagat movement in Chhotanagpur, 1914 –19’, Studies in History, vol. 15, no. 1, 1999, pp. 1–41.
106 Roy, ‘Ethnographical investigation in official records’ (1935), p. 7.
107 Ibid., p. 3.
108 Ibid., p. 5.
109 Ibid., p. 16.
110 G.W. Stocking Jr, Victorian anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987), p. 75.
111 Justice Campbell, ‘The ethnology of India’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 35, part 2, Supplementary Number, 1866, pp. 1–152.
112 Dalton's ‘The “Kols” of Chota-Nagpore’ appeared along with Campbell's introduction in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1866. His Descriptive ethnology of Bengal, Illustrated by lithographic portraits copied from photographs was printed for the Government of Bengal under the direction of the Council of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1872.
113 Trautmann, Aryans and British India, p. 145.
114 B. H. Hodgson, ‘The aborigines of Central India’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 17, no. 2, 1848, p. 551.
115 ‘Through the Uraon speech’, Hodgson traced ‘without difficulty’ the ‘further connection of the language of the Koles with that of the “hill men” of the Rajmahal and Bhaugalpur ranges’ (see Hodgson, ‘The aborigines of Central India’, p. 551).
116 In a table titled ‘Comparative Vocabulary of the Aboriginal Languages of Central India’, Hodgson compares ‘Sinbhum Kol’, ‘Sontal’, ‘Bhumij’, ‘Uraon’, ‘Mundala’, ‘Rajmahali’, and ‘Gondi’ (see Hodgson, ‘The aborigines of Central India’, pp. 553–558). Interestingly, Pagden has pointed out that the emphasis placed on the role of language in the formation of the human community was commonplace in much Greek and later Roman thought (see A. Pagden, The fall of natural man: The American Indian and the origins of comparative ethnology [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], p. 70).
117 G. A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 1, Part 1, Introductory (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch, 1927), p. 14.
118 Bishop Robert Caldwell, Comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages (London: Trübner and Co., 1875).
119 Campbell, ‘The ethnology of India’, p. 1.
120 Ibid.
121 ‘The more one learns, the more one sees one's ignorance and the vast amount of inquiry that still remains,’ Campbell wrote. His ‘only desire’ was ‘to tell so much as (he knew) [emphasis added] … and to suggest points on which inquiry is desirable’. See ibid., p. 3.
122 In accepting the proposal to compile a Descriptive ethnology of Bengal, Dalton wrote: ‘It is right, however, to state in apology for the selection made by a compiler, and for my acceptance of such a duty, that I am conscious I was applied to solely because it was known that I had spent the greater portion of a long service in Asam and Chutia Nagpur, the most interesting fields of ethnological research in all Bengal; and though without any pretension to scientific knowledge of the subject, without practice as an author, or experience as a compiler, I had probably had more opportunities of observing various races and tribes, especially those usually called Aborigines, than have been conceded to any other officer now in service’ (see E. T. Dalton, Descriptive ethnology of Bengal, Illustrated by lithographic portraits copied from photographs [Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1872], p. ii).
123 Campbell, ‘The ethnology of India’, p. 1.
124 Ibid., p. 1.
125 Ibid., p. 20
126 Ibid., p. 21.
127 Ibid., p. 20.
128 Ibid., p. 21.
129 Language, as a means of classification and ‘as a sure guide’, Campbell pointed out, had lost its importance since the ‘considerable philological acquirements … necessary to enable an observer to make useful observations of a language’ were difficult to master. Besides, ‘language’, as ‘the means of communication between man and man, caste and caste, without distinctions of race or creed’, could never be ‘exclusive’ (see ibid., p. 8). To quote Campbell, ‘… however much by religion and race a tribe may be segregated, if it be politically and to a great extent socially united with other peoples, it almost always in the end adopts their language, or a common language is formed by intermixture’ (see ibid., p. 11).
130 Ibid., p. 22.
131 Ibid., p. 8.
132 Ibid., p. 22. Campbell illustrated his position by quoting from Dalton: ‘The Jushpore Oraons are the ugliest of the race, with foreheads “villainously low”, flat noses and projecting maxillaries, they approach the Negro in physiognomy … the Oraons have more of the African type of feature and I have seen amongst them woolly heads’ (see ibid., p. 22).
133 Ibid., p. 29.
134 Trautmann, Aryans and British India, pp. 1–3.
135 Campbell, ‘The ethnology of India’, p. 29.
136 Ibid.
137 Ibid., p. 14.
138 The ‘Modern Indians’ and the ‘Borderers’ included, respectively, ‘all those people who have been either completely or partially amalgamated into Hindoo society, whether as proper Hindoos or as Helots and outcasts’ under the rubric of ‘modern Indians’; it also included ‘the numerous half-breeds, borderers, and people of imperfect type’ who were included within the category of ‘borderers’.
139 Campbell, ‘The ethnology of India’, pp. 10–11.
140 Ibid. Maine, who structured the notion of the traditional ‘village community’, saw it as ‘the only true organisation of which the Hindu race is capable’. In contrast, the tribe was ‘a patriarchal society, a nomad horde, merely encamped for the time upon the soil which afforded them subsistence’ (see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, pp. 119–120).
141 Campbell, ‘The ethnology of India’, p. 11.
142 Dalton, Descriptive ethnology of Bengal, p. iv.
143 Ibid., p. iii.
144 See, for example, E. T. Dalton, ‘Notes of a tour made in 1863–64 in the Tributary Mahals under the Commissioner of Chota-Nagpore, Bonai, Gangpore, Odeypore and Sirgooja’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. XXXIV, no. 1, 1865, pp. 1–31.
145 Chatterton, the SPG (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel) missionary, wrote of Dalton: ‘… the girls, bedecked with flowers, would go out and meet him with dances as he went through the villages … Even his own private house is open from morning till evening for every one, even for the lowest, the meanest, the most unworthy, and never, as much as I know and have seen, has a poor sufferer been obliged to go away without having got a hearing and a practical advice …’ (see Eyre Chatterton, The story of fifty years’ mission work in Chhota Nagpur [London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1901], p. 82).
146 Dalton, Descriptive ethnology of Bengal, p. ii.
147 Dalton, ‘The “Kols” of Chota-Nagpore’, p. 173.
148 Ibid., p. 175.
149 Campbell, ‘The ethnology of India’, p. 150.
150 Ibid.
151 Ibid., p. 151.
152 Sanskritists, points out Trautmann, had used ‘nation’ and ‘race’ interchangeably. Unlike the political significance attached to the ‘nation’ in the late nineteenth century, ‘nation’, in Orientalist perception, had a genealogical aspect, an aspect of co-descent and membership by birth; it also had a religious tincture since the nation was the unit of the story in the English Bible upon which this style of ethnology was based. It was in this sense that Dalton used the term ‘nation’ (see Trautmann, Aryans and British India, p. 192).
153 Dalton, ‘The “Kols” of Chota-Nagpore’, p. 175.
154 Ibid., p. 153.
155 Please note that I have used the spellings that appear in Dalton's report.
156 See Bayly, ‘Caste and “race”’, p. 173.
157 Dalton, ‘The “Kols” of Chota-Nagpore’, p. 172.
158 Ibid., p. 158.
159 Guha shows how a similar representation of the tribe had emerged in colonial ethnography (see Guha, Environment and ethnicity, 1200–1901, p. 19).
160 Dalton, ‘The “Kols” of Chota-Nagpore’, p. 160.
161 Ibid., p. 176.
162 Ibid., p. 172.
163 Ibid., p. 197.
164 Ibid., pp. 173–175.
165 Dalton's relationship with the Christian missionaries and Christian converts finds mention in missionary literature. Chatterton wrote in 1901: ‘As a deep student of these native races of India, amongst whom it was his lot to live during a long and distinguished service, his great work on “The ethnology of Bengal” will entitle him for ever to a high place of honour amongst the rulers of India. But in Chota Nagpur his memory will, for many a long day, be cherished for even higher reasons … his name will be cherished for many a long year by the grateful Christian Coles’ (see Chatterton, The story of fifty years’ mission work in Chhota Nagpur, pp. 95–96).
166 Dalton, ‘The “Kols” of Chota-Nagpore’, p. 197.
167 Ibid., pp. 158–159.
168 Ibid.
169 Ibid., p. 130.
170 Ibid., pp. 169–170.
171 Ibid., p. 170.
172 Ibid.
173 Ibid., pp. 170–171.
174 Ibid., p. 171.
175 Ibid.
176 Ibid., p. 170.
177 This trend of differentiating between the Aboriginals and the non-Aboriginal Aryans in the ‘province of Chutia Nagpur’ as two distinct ‘nationalities’ is even more marked in Dalton's report of 1872 in which he described the ‘Aryans’ as ‘foreigners’ and ‘intruders’. As ‘Hindus’, they referred to themselves as the ‘pure’ or ‘Sud’, ‘Sudh’, or ‘Sudhan’, a term which was applicable for ‘all castes, Brahmans, Rajputs, Goalas, Kurmis, Kahars & c’. The ‘Kols’, in turn, referred to them as the ‘Diku’, a term ‘not intended to be complimentary’ (see Dalton, Descriptive ethnology of Bengal, pp. 308–309).
178 Ibid., p. 245.
179 Dr Frayer was professor of surgery at the Medical College, Calcutta. See Gyan Prakash, Another reason: Science and the imagination of modern India (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 27.
180 Dalton, Descriptive ethnology of Bengal, p. i.
181 Prakash, Another reason, pp. 27–28.
182 G. Campbell, ‘On the races of India as traced in tribes and castes’, Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, vol. 1, no. 2, 1869, pp. 128–140.
183 Ibid., p. 129.
184 Dalton, Descriptive ethnology of Bengal, pp. i–ii.
185 Dalton pointed out the difficulties of such an exercise. He wrote, ‘It was of importance that the wild tribes of India should be fully represented. Yet it is sometimes no easy matter to induce those shy creatures to visit even the stations nearest to them, and to induce them to proceed to a remote and unknown country for a purpose they could not be made to comprehend, would in many cases have been utterly impracticable. It was also pointed out that such people were liable to suffer in health from change of climate’ (see ibid., p. i).
186 Ibid., p. ii.
187 Ibid.
188 Ibid., pp. ii–iii. For details of Tosco Peppe, see Anonymous, ‘Can you help?’, Chowkidar, vol. 10, no. 4, Autumn 2004, pp. 78–79.
189 Dalton, Descriptive ethnology of Bengal, p. 245.
190 Campbell, ‘The ethnology of India’, p. 1.
191 Dalton, Descriptive ethnology of Bengal, p. 152.
192 Dalton, ‘The “Kols” of Chota-Nagpore’, p. 153.
193 Dalton, Descriptive ethnology of Bengal, p. 243.
194 Ibid., p. 152.
195 Ibid., p. 151.
196 For a brief introduction to Muir as a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, see A. A. Powell, ‘Modernist Muslim responses to Christian critiques of Islamic culture, civilization, and history in Northern India’, in Christians, cultural interactions, and India's religious traditions, edited by J. Brown and R. E. Frykenberg (Michigan and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 61–91.
197 Dalton, Descriptive ethnology of Bengal, p. 244.
198 Ibid., pp. 245–246.
199 Ibid., pp. 246–263.
200 Ibid., p. 248.
201 Ibid., p. 308.
202 Ibid., pp. 246–247.
203 Ibid., p. 250.
204 Ibid., pp. 250–251.
205 While Dalton does not mention the name of J. F. McLennan, he was probably referring to him. As an anthropologist, McLennan's work was much quoted, particularly in the Indian context.
206 Dalton, Descriptive ethnology of Bengal, p. 254.
207 Samarendra, ‘Anthropological knowledge and statistical frame’, p. 270.
208 An English civil servant and a scholar of Arabic, C. J. Lyall was elected fellow of the British Academy, of the University of Calcutta, and of King's College London. He became vice-president of the Royal Asiatic Society, president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, honorary member of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, and an official representative of the Government of India at international Oriental congresses between 1899 and 1908. William Crooke was a key figure in the collection and documentation of folklore, particularly of the North-Western Provinces. A prolific writer, he became president of the Anthropological Section of the British Association and of the Folklore Society in Britain.
209 A member of the Indian Civil Service, Risley served in India from 1873 to 1910. He began his career by surveying land tenures and preparing gazetteers, and started his service in Midnapur, part of which was on the fringes of Chhotanagpur. In 1869, when Hunter commenced the Statistical Survey of India, the results of which were published in the Imperial Gazetteer of India in 1881, Risley prepared the volume on the hill districts of Hazaribagh and Lohardaga. He eventually became the honorary director of the Ethnological Survey of the Indian Empire, the census commissioner, and the president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (see W. Crooke, ‘Introduction’, in The people of India by Sir Herbert Risley, 2nd edn, edited by W. Crooke [Calcutta and Simla: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1915], pp. xii–xv). See also C. J. Fuller, ‘Ethnographic inquiry in colonial India: Herbert Risley, William Crooke, and the study of tribes and castes’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 23, issue 3, 2017, pp. 603–621.
210 In 1884, the Government of Bengal entrusted Risley with the task of conducting an enquiry into the castes and occupations of Bengal; the survey was followed by the publication of the four volumes of The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, a work of monumental importance that structured the Census Report of 1901 (H. H. Risley and E. A. Gait, Census of India, 1901, Vol. I, India, Part I: Report [Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903]), and Risley's The people of India, published in 1908.
211 H. H. Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, Vol. I (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1892), pp. xxv–xxvi.
212 The names of the anthropologists acknowledged by Risley were John Lubbock, Henry Maine, E. B. Tylor, Herr Bachofen, Fustel de Coulanges, and Adolf Bastian (see Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, Vol. I, p. vi).
213 Christopher Pinney, ‘Colonial anthropology in the laboratory of mankind’, in The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947, edited by C. A. Bayly (London: Abbeville Press, 1990), p. 253.
214 Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, Vol. I, p. vi.
215 Ibid., p. iii.
216 Ibid.
217 The difficulties in convincing the colonial government about the use of anthropological knowledge for administrative purposes, and the insufficiency of funds for the publication of ethnographic monographs even in as late as the 1930s, is clear if one looks at personal correspondences between anthropologists. See, for example, the letter dated 16 February 1929 written from the Kohima Naga Hills by John Henry Hutton (deputy commissioner and honorary director of ethnography for Assam who was census commissioner for the 1931 Census) to Henry Balfour (the first curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford). Hutton wrote: ‘As for the monographs, I have asked the Assam Govt. for funds to publish them while I am on leave and can see them thro the Press. I am afraid I shan't get them and at the outside can hope for enough for the Angami monograph only, but if you could get at the Assam government thro the Anthrop. Institute it wd probably help tremendously. I suppose one couldn't induce the University press to publish the Sema monographs. I know nothing about it but imagine it is endowed and if so its function ought to be to publish works that can't pay for their own cost’ (see Mills Papers, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford). In the context of George Abraham Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India, Javed Majeed makes a similar point when he writes about the financial constraints under which Grierson conducted the linguistic survey, and his attempts to negotiate with the colonial state for funds to carry on with his work (see J. Majeed, Colonialism and knowledge in Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India [Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019], pp. 52–56).
218 Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, Vol. 1, p. vii.
219 Ibid., p. 5.
220 ‘Proceedings of conference held on ethnography of Northern India, Held at Lahore on the 18th – 22nd March 1885’, Appendix II, in H. H. Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, Vol. II (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1892), pp. 143–73. For the conference on the ethnography of northern India, Ibbetson, Nesfield, and Risley met in order to prepare ‘a note on certain difficult points of ethnographic terminology, a series of general questions calculated to elicit the salient characteristics of the several castes, and a set of special questions dealing with caste customs in greater detail, to be used by those whom inclination might lead to pursue the subject further’ (see ibid., p. 144).
221 Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, Vol. I, p. 10.
222 Ibid., p. xiii.
223 Fuller, ‘Ethnographic inquiry in colonial India’, p. 606.
224 Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, Vol. I, p. v.
225 Ibid.
226 Fuller refers to Risley's note on ‘ethnographic enquiries in Bengal’, 22 December 1886, in Government of India, Home (Public) Department Proceedings, May 1887, pp. 741–867 (esp. pp. 744, 859–861), IOR/P/2952, in Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library (APAC, BL). See Fuller, ‘Ethnographic inquiry in colonial India’, pp. 606–607.
227 ‘List of correspondents selected to take part in the ethnographic survey of Bengal’, Appendix IV, in Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, Vol. II, pp. 189–193.
228 Ibid., pp. 138–150.
229 Ibid., p. 538.
230 Rakhal Das Haldar, a Bengali Brahman who was the Chota Nagpur estate manager in Ranchi, returned lists A and B with corrections, but also conscientiously wrote out his own complete list of castes divided into 12 classes, itemizing their subdivisions. He called his list ‘fairly correct, but not thoroughly complete’, and said he had striven to organize castes by social precedence, though it was ‘a matter of extreme difficulty’ (see Fuller, ‘Ethnographic inquiry in colonial India', p. 612).
231 Ibid., p. 618.
232 Risley and Gait, Census of India, 1901, Vol. I, India, Part I: Report, p. 513.
233 Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, Vol. 1, p. vi.
234 Ibid., p. xxx.
235 Crooke, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii.
236 Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, Vol. I, p. xxx.
237 Risley and Gait, Census of India, 1901, Vol. I, India, Part I, Report, p. 500.
238 Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, Vol. I, p. xli.
239 Ibid.
240 Yet, Risley inevitably fell back upon ‘philological terms’ to fit his ‘ethnological conclusions’ (see Trautmann, Aryans and British India, p. 203). The justification provided by Risley was that linguistic conclusions merged with popular opinion. To quote him: ‘In adopting, even tentatively, the designations Aryan and Dravidian I am aware that I am disregarding advice which Professor Max Müller was good enough to give me, about three years ago, in a letter since published (I believe) in an Appendix to his latest work. He warned me against the confusion which might arise from using philological terms to denote ethnological conclusions. I am entirely sensible of the value and the necessity of the warning, and fully recognize his right to speak with authority on such questions. But we must have some general names for our types: it is a thankless task to invent new names; and I trust to justify my invasion of the domain of philology by the universal practice of the Indians themselves…’ (see Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, Vol. I, p. xxxi).
241 Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, Vol. I, pp. xxxii–iii.
242 H. H. Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Anthropometric data, Vol. IV (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1892), pp. 399–412. See also H. H. Risley, ‘Anthropometric instructions’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. lxii, part iii, 1893, pp. 1–19, where Risley outlines the method of anthropometric data collection.
243 Risley and Gait, Census of India, 1901, Vol. I, India, Part I, Report, p. 514.
244 Ibid., p. 500.
245 Ibid., p. 506.
246 Ibid., p. 508.
247 Ibid., p. 515.
248 Ibid., p. 507.
249 Ibid., p. 496.
250 Ibid.
251 Risley and Gait, Census of India, 1901, Vol. I, India, Part I, Report, p. 515. As Stocking has pointed out, totemism and exogamy intrigued Victorian evolutionist anthropologists (see Fuller, ‘Ethnographic inquiry in colonial India’, pp. 611–612).
252 Risley and Gait, Census of India, 1901, Vol. I, India, Part I, Report, p. 530.
253 Ibid., p. 536.
254 ‘H. H. Risley’, Tylor Papers, Box 13, R7, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
255 Ibid., p. 351.
256 H. H. Risley, ‘The study of ethnology in India’, The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. XX, 1891, p. 238.
257 Risley, The tribes and castes of Bengal. Ethnographic glossary, Vol. I, p. lxxxvi. In this context, Risley refers to ‘the progress of the great religious and social movement described by Sir Alfred Lyall as “the gradual Brahmanising of the aboriginal, non-Aryan, or casteless tribes”’ (see ibid., p. xv).
258 Risley and Gait, Census of India, 1901, Vol. I, India, Part I, Report, p. 514.
259 Bhattacharya, N., The great agrarian conquest: The colonial shaping of the rural world (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2018), p. 3Google Scholar.
260 It is important to point out here that while nineteenth-century philological occupation was with ancient India and Sanskrit, for G. A. Grierson, the Linguistic Survey of India's distinguishing mark was its focus on the ‘facts regarding the languages of India as they stand at present’. For a reference to the letter sent by Grierson to W. W. Hunter on 22 December 1886, see Majeed, Colonialism and knowledge in Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India, p. 5.
261 See Crooke, ‘Introduction’, pp. xvi–xxi.
262 Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India, in 21 volumes, encapsulated, codified, and analysed India as a multilingual entity. It was a massive exercise, bringing all the languages and dialects in the areas it covered into relationship with each other within one framework (see Majeed, Colonialism and knowledge in Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India, pp. 2–3).
263 Although Grierson was critical of philology's ‘unholy alliance’ with ethnology, he was unable to make a clean break from it. He stated that philology could sometimes guide ethnology, justifying his statement by referring to a suggestion made by ‘so distinguished an ethnologist as the late Sir Herbert Risley’ (Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 1, Part 1, Introductory, p. 80).
264 Ibid., p. 28.
265 Majeed, Colonialism and knowledge in Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India, p. 81.
266 Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 1, Part 1, Introductory, p. 31.
267 The importance of addressing local grievances was mentioned in as late as 1872 by Dalton. He wrote: ‘It has certainly sometimes happened, owing perhaps to the difficulties of applying the complicated machinery of civilized laws to a wild and rough people, that real grievances have remained unredressed till they were resented. And instances have occurred of insurrection having been traced to official acts or omissions that were subsequently considered impolitic and were atoned for; and it is surely of importance that all such features in the existing causes of disturbances should be kept well in sight’ (see Dalton, Descriptive ethnology of Bengal, p. 3).