The politics of marginality and theconstruction of indigeneity inChotanagpur

VINITA DAMODARAN

This article explores the way in which the different ethnic and national groupsliving on and impinging on the Chotanagpur plateau, in eastern India,perceived and used the landscape as a symbolic terrain for definitions ofChotanagpuri identity. It explores the plateau as an economic, ethnic,religious and ecological terrain, and looks at the ways in which landscapewas reclaimed and reconstituted. In doing so, it unfolds the relationshipbetween the history of the sacralisation of the landscape by local communitiesand the explosion of emotions guiding contemporary ethnic autonomymovements in the region.

It is important to note in this context that some current revisionism inenvironmental history and ecological anthropology has been focused ondismantling such long-established terms as ‘tribe’, ‘forest’, ‘indigenous’, andso forth. The revisionist argument that earlier ethnographers and colonialadministrators had mistakenly thought that ‘tribes’ were static entities ledmany of the revisionist critics to conclude that distinct tribes never existedand that the claims of indigenous people for autonomy must have notheoretical legitimacy or historical validity.1 Work on ethnicity in othercontexts has moved beyond assumptions of the historical invalidity of suchcategories and has effectively argued that ethnicity and ethnic ideologies arehistorically contingent creations. The recognition of the ‘invented’ nature ofmany traditions and the notion of the constructed nature of culture, race andethnicity allows us to approach these questions meaningfully through ahistorical lens. What emerges then is the links between culture and power andculture and resistance: culture as a medium in which power is bothconstituted and resisted. One is thinking here of political separatist move-ments in a global context which use the notion of a separate ethnic identity tochallenge the notion of a homogenous national culture. Instances of dramaticresistance to cultural hegemony and power of a particular class or group orwestern capitalism show also that culture need not always be on the side ofpower. Indigenous peoples’ movements strikingly demonstrate this. Forexample, while it may be true that the Chakmas of the Chittagong hill tractswere by no means the first people to enter these regions*/in fact, they wereonly one of a succession of immigrant cultures following the Arakanese andTripurans into the area*/today Chakma identity is firmly linked to the hill

ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/06/020179�/18#2006 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies

DOI: 10.1080/13688790600657843

Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 179�/196, 2006

tracts where they have sought to develop an ‘indigenous’ model of state,society and culture.2 Elsewhere in India, as David Hardiman argues, the termadivasi relates to a particular historical development: that of subjugationduring the nineteenth century of a wide variety of communities, which beforecolonial rule had remained free or relatively free from the control of outsiders.The experience generated a spirit of resistance which incorporated a‘consciousness’ of the adivasi against the ‘outsider’. As Hardiman notes,the term was used by political activists in Chotanagpur in the 1930s, with theaim of forging a new sense of identity among different ‘tribal’ peoples*/atactic that has had considerable success.3

The idea of the ‘invented’ nature of culture, however, needs to be qualifiedsomewhat. In the context of Indonesia, Tania Li has argued that a group’sself-identification as tribal or indigenous is not natural or inevitable butneither is it simply invented, adopted or imposed. It is rather a positioningthat draws on ‘historically sedimented practices, landscapes and repertoires ofmeaning, and emerges through particular patterns of engagement andstruggle’.4 She draws on Hall who has argued: ‘cultural identities comefrom somewhere, have histories. But far from being eternally fixed in someessentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘‘play’’ of history, cultureand power.’ For Hall, then, identities are always about becoming, as well asbeing, but are never simply invented. Such a view, as Li argues, ‘offers a wayout of the impasse in which those who historicize the identities are accused ofundermining subaltern political projects founded on ordinary perhapsessential truths’.5

It is somewhat in this sense that I explore the engagement of localcommunities with their forests in Chotanagpur over a long period of time,their histories of struggle with the colonial and postcolonial state, and thegrowing articulation of an indigenous identity. As we shall see, the politicsaround indigeneity had important consequences for rights, resources andultimately statehood.

Landscape and identity

The forested landscape of Chotanagpur provided the material background tocolonial and nationalist debates on notions of indigeneity. In colonialdiscourse, a ‘tribal’ way of life was seen to be one intimately linked withthe forested environment, though this was changing all through the nine-teenth century, as the lands and the forests of the local communities cameunder sustained attack both by an aggrandising colonial state and by privatelandowners. The impact of the destruction of the local forest environmentwas exacerbated in the context of increasing landlordism in rural Chota-nagpur. It is of course important not to see Chotanagpur as a monolithicwhole but to look at interregional variations in colonial policy, indigenousresponses and the effect on resource use and the environment.

The northern districts had begun to be heavily overrun by Hinduimmigrants long before the advent of the British. The pace of changeincreased under colonial rule, and even the southern districts began to feel

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threatened by the mid- and late nineteenth century. The Mundas in Ranchi,for example, had managed to hold on to their traditional (khuntkhatti)tenures only in part in the face of outsider landlord encroachment. By thetime of the census operations in 1881, the original indigenous population inthe districts of Palamau and Hazaribagh was only 36 per cent and 34 per cent,respectively, while in the remoter districts of Ranchi and Singhbhum it was 74per cent and 75 per cent. In the northern districts of Palamau and Hazaribaghand in the Santhal Parganas, increasing subinfeudation and the growingspread of debt bondage were the main grievances of the peasantry. In theSanthal Parganas, in certain districts such as Barbhum, the invasion ofthe pargana by a powerful English company bent on destroying the rights ofthe Ghatwals or Bhumij khuntkhattidars gave rise to much disturbance. Theserights, all across Chotanagpur, were to be challenged by colonial courts andsuperior land interests. One settlement report recorded: ‘But it is commonexperience in Chotanagpur that the aboriginals are ruined by their incapacityto state their claims intelligently.’ Clearly the discursive framework in whichthey had to operate disadvantaged local communities. This situation was onlyto intensify during the twentieth century.6

In many places the landlord and the state battled with each other to securelarge areas of jungle land, extinguishing the traditional common rights of thepeople.7 In Ranchi district, several of the landlords looked upon the junglesas a providential asset to be exploited for payment of debt.8 They wereprevented from fully exploiting this asset only by difficulties of communica-tion, so that the more remote jungles survived. However, most of the latterwere taken over by the state for forest reserves under the rigorous policy offorest conservation introduced by the end of the nineteenth century. By the1890s the total area of reserved forest in Chotanagpur was 5839 square miles.Of this over 5431 square miles was closed for grazing purposes. In 1894 allstate lands within the five districts of Chotanagpur division were declared tobe protected forest, further controlling hitherto unclassed forests. Wherepatches of jungle survived the grip of both state and the landlords the spreadof the railway system further aided the process of destruction.

It was in this context, and given a growing sense of injustice, that thelandscape of Chotanagpur became a symbolic terrain for definitions ofChotanagpuri identity. Identities were transformed in the context of this rapidecological and cultural change.9 It must be noted here that the term landscapeis a complex concept. As Cosgrove argues, the term can be seen as a ‘socio-historical construct’, a way of seeing projected onto the land which has itsown techniques and which articulates a particular way of experiencing arelationship with nature.10 It can be argued in a similar fashion that thelandscape of Chotanagpur has been reclaimed and reconstituted in definingChotanagpuri identity.11 Patrick Kirch and Marshall Sahlins have noted inthe context of Hawaii that ‘the landscape and its legends inscribe a criticismof the existing regime. In the current jargon, the landscape is text. Places andnames evoke an alternate society older, truer and more directly related to thepeople.’12 In this way were the landscapes of Chotanagpur organised bystories and legends of conquest and through memories of better times.

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The landscapes of Chotanagpur were lived as a human landscape in thepast through multiple engagements of local communities with their environ-ment. The original forests were spread out over thousands of square miles,especially in the districts of Hazaribagh, Singhbhum, Palamau and Ranchi,all of which had large forest areas. Local rulers had tended to preserve theforest for military reasons and, as Walter Hamilton noted in 1820, in severalparts of Chotanagpur the woods had been forested with great care by therajas as a protection against invasion from without. The trees were mainlyeither moist deciduous or dry deciduous and the whole division had a richgrowth of sal (Shorea robusta).

Settlement reports note that most of the communities, even the settledagricultural ones and particularly the women of these communities, had ahighly sophisticated technical knowledge of their jungles. The Hos ofSinghbhum, for example, had names for all the common plants and thoseof economic importance to them and, like the forest Mundas, were wellversed in the edible properties of plants. The Birhors, in the extreme east ofSinghbhum, were a wandering community who lived by snaring monkeys andby collecting the fibre of the Bauhinia vahlii creeper.13 The forest environ-ment, and a knowledge of it, were thus of critical importance to the localpeople, particularly in dietary terms. This importance in terms of food wasparalleled by an equal significance in terms of belief, and the two were nottruly separable. Chotanagpur folk taxonomy was completely embedded inand mediated by the local cultural order.

Munda understandings of the landscape and its productivity seem toencompass conceptual links between women and forests. Every Mundavillage, for example, had its own particular spirits whose duty it was to lookafter the crops. These spirits were known as bongas, which was the genericname referring to spirits and the power and force of mountains, hills, forests,trees, rivers, houses and village. One such spirit, known as Desawali, played alarge part in Munda festivals which were connected with the cultivation of theland. The home of this presiding deity was the sarna or sacred grove, a littlepath of jungle that when all else was cleared for cultivation was left as a refugefor the gods where they might live apart. At all seasons of the year offeringswere made in the sarna , for on the favour of the Desawali depended thesuccess and failure of the crops. Among the Hos, the religious and symboliccommunity incorporated the forest in various ways. The twofold division ofthe landscape into tame (hatu) and wild (buru) represented the ongoingattempt of the communities to pacify and live with the forest (buru), and itsspirits (Burubongako).14 As M. Yorke notes, religious boundaries ensuredimportant notions of community. All the springs, hills and large forest treesleft standing in the village after clearing still harboured spirits against whichthe protection of the village spirit was necessary. All animals and plants weredivided into those that were domesticated and hence of the village, and thosethat were wild and belonged to the forest.15 The Chotanagpuris tended toexperience the forest and village as ontologically part of each other, the onebeing the life force for the other’s continuing existence. An interesting studyamong the Nayakas of south India by Nurit Bird David argues for a similar

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cosmic economy of sharing.16 The Nayakas converse, dance, sing and evenshare cigarettes with the spirits of the forest, which they invoke withshamanistic experience.

What can be forcibly argued here is that Chotanagpuri understandings ofthe landscape, their stories of nature, and their lived history were to differradically from the perceptions of nature and the land of colonial scientistsand policy makers and later of a modernising nationalist elite. To say this isnot to romanticise indigenous peoples and their relationship to nature. In hisrecent reply to Obeysekere, Sahlins has noted that the post-modern attack onthe notion of a bounded and coherent culture has occurred at the verymoment when groups such as the Maoris, Tibetans and Australian aboriginesaround the world ‘all speak of their culture using that word or some otherequivalent, as a value worthy of respect, commitment and defence’. He arguesthat no good history can be written without regard for ‘ideas, actions andontologies that are not and never were our own’.17 To the Chotanagpuris,therefore, the landscape was an important context for their ritual andcustomary traditions. The destruction of forests that was to occur as a resultof colonial intervention in the nineteenth century and later was to change thisrelationship between the people and their environment. However, the memoryof the landscape was to live on and it became a repository of Chotanagpur’snostalgic past to be revived in complex oppositional contexts.18

It can be argued that the despoliation of the forested landscape and thetransformation of the people’s relationship with their environment inChotanagpur in the nineteenth century was a powerful memory that wasrevived in periods of cultural resistance. In the latter half of the twentiethcentury this resulted in specific cultural images of the landscape being evokedthrough the ritual festivals of the sacred grove and emerging as a factor inprotest. Images of the landscape have long played a role in cultural resistancein other regions. For example, as Daniels notes, the ‘ethnic nationalismfuelling the dissolution of the soviet union was codified by pictorial images ofindependent homelands’.19 Resistance may have been fanned by memory ofbetter times in a less despoiled setting. These memories were present in the‘landscape of their current servitude’. In the context of Chotanagpur, the‘remembered landscape’ was to fuel a long cycle of protest.20

All through the nineteenth century the local communities of Chotanagpurhad sought to protest against growing cultural and physical incursions intotheir lives. Beginning with the unrest in Tamar in 1816 and the Mundarebellion in 1832, disaffection continued through the mutiny of 1857, and thelast decades of the nineteenth century saw unrest in almost every district ofChotanagpur.21 The Birsa Munda uprising in the 1890s and the Tana Bhagatmovement of the early twentieth century were the culmination of this periodof rebellion.

British forest reservation laws had long proved irksome to the Mundas andin the context of the degradation of their forest environment, exploitation byHindu money lenders and a modernising colonial state, they rose in protest.Perhaps it was through the mapping of the notion of the diku or outsider inthese resistance movements that a new sense of community was renegotiated

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and a radical consciousness began to emerge. The resistance movements ofthe latter half of the nineteenth century were critical to this growingconsciousness. By the twentieth century there was thus an establishedtradition of protest in the region.

Modernity and its discontents

The second decade of the twentieth century saw the development of a modernpolitical idiom which sought to arrest the marginalisation of the localcommunities. The concept of adivasi (‘original inhabitant’) began to comeinto use. It is interesting to examine the changing notions of this term overthis period. In the beginning a pan-adivasi identity was also asserted underthe Chotanagpur Unnati Samaj, which was started in 1915. The leaders ofthis organisation were mainly Christian converts, English-educated studentsbelonging to the Munda and Oraon tribes, and they embodied an inter-denominational unity of the missions for political purposes.22 At times,however, the Samaj tended towards sectarian behaviour against non-‘tribal’autochthones.

Rising adivasi consciousness was given an impetus by the activities ofChristian missionaries and by colonial writings which categorised people intoessentialised tribal identities with fixed boundaries.23 Hoffman’s Encyclopae-dia Mundarica and other early missionary writings on the tribes ofChotanagpur helped in part to construct their identities as distinct fromthe plains Hindus and helped to distinguish between different tribal groups:the Hos, Oraons and Birhors, for example. The romanticisation of tribes alsocontinued to be part of the stereotype, and it was claimed that thegovernment was responsible for decay of an authentic ‘tribal’ culture where‘in ancient times they had no kings and were kept together by theirconferences. The fields they cleared were their own and their whole landbelonged to them.’24

The link between tribes and territory was one that had been established inthe nineteenth century through the many tribal rebellions over land and thespecial administrative status accorded to Chotanagpur.25 This claim toterritory was reformulated in the period after the Second World War oncethe discourse of indigenous rights began to be politically articulated in themodern period by raising the issue of a separate state. In 1937, the UnnatiSamaj was reorganised as the Adivasi Mahasabha and, for the first time,raised the question of a separate Jharkhand state. We see here also for thefirst time the usage of the term adivasi in a political context. The immediatecause of the formation of the Mahasabha was the experience of the firstelections held in 1937 under the Government of India Act of 1935. TheCongress swept the polls and there was a growing realisation among theeducated tribals that, unless they organised themselves, the Congress wouldhold sway in Chotanagpur as elsewhere. It was felt that the Congress had littlein it to offer the indigenous inhabitants of Chotanagpur and was a party ofthe dikus (foreigners). This provided the impetus for some Christian and non-Christian tribals to join forces under the Adivasi Mahasabha.

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The Adivasi Mahasabha continued its efforts to forge a pan-tribal identityand also opened up its membership to non-adivasis of that region, although itmust be remembered that the strict distinction between tribals and non-tribals in the popular mind had crystallised only years after the announce-ment of the Scheduled Tribes list in 1936. In its manifesto in 1937, the Sabhaemphasised unity among the different ‘tribal’ groups above all. This emphasison unity was in keeping with a growing understanding that only a broadmovement would strengthen the hands of the Sabha vis-a-vis the state. Itsexpressed objectives were to be the improvement of the economic andpolitical status of adivasis in Chotanagpur.26 The party was opposed to theCongress in this period and was seen as loyalist by the British. It thereforeremained outside the mainstream of nationalist politics.27 The attitude of theadivasi leadership to the Congress in this period was in part because theCongress was seen as a party of the dikus which had little respect for ‘tribal’tradition and culture.

However, events in the preceding period had resulted in ethnic argumentsbased on the notion of a separate tribal identity losing its force in favour ofregionalism, as the Jharkhand party began to embrace the discourse ofwestern modernity. In 1950, the Adivasi Mahasabha was wound up to formthe Jharkhand party, which gradually changed its policy vis-a-vis theCongress. The party then had to broaden its base and attempted to enlistmore non-Scheduled Tribe members. By the 1950s it was clear that ethnicityalone could not be the basis of a political dialogue in Chotanagpur. Thecensus of 1951 showed that the tribals had become a minority inChotanagpur. The party was therefore thrown open, at least in principle(as embodied in its constitution), to all Chotanagpuris. A significanttransition from ethnicity to regionalism emerged as the formative factor inthe movement. This is not to say that ethnic arguments lost their force butonly that the Jharkhand party saw it as politically tactful to air moreregionally based arguments. Notions of ethnicity had to be reconstituted indifferent historical moments. The history of cultural contact with the plainspeoples, migration both to and from Chotanagpur, and growing inequalitywere challenging notions of a pure adivasi identity. Many of the more recentmigrants into Chotanagpur were in fact poor low-caste plains Hindus. It wasfelt that the new Jharkhand parties had to contend with this change byabandoning the old political language, though indigeneity continued to beinvoked at specific moments.

The foremost ideologue of the Jharkhand party in the 1950s was a western-educated Munda, Jaipal Singh. He had been active in the Adivasi Mahasabhaand epitomised the new breed of leadership, which was western-educated,Christian and had an urban outlook. As a charismatic leader, he had a largefollowing,28 but soon after the party entered a period of decline. At theleadership level, there was a growing split between the Christian and non-Christian adivasis on account of the former controlling high party positions.There was also a growing realisation among the people that the party hadfailed to deliver the goods. It did not have any concrete agrarian programmeand the leadership was drawn from the high strata of tribal society, that is,

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mainly from Mundas and Mankis (village headmen) in many parts and fromamong the Manjhi and educated Christians from the Munda and Oraonareas.

As agrarian conditions continued to deteriorate, new measures were neededto remedy widespread impoverishment but the party organisation was tooweak, and it had no radical programme.29 Eventually, the search for funds ledit into dealing with the hated diku class of exploiters. In 1962, the partyaccepted as member an ex-zamindar of Chotanagpur and appointed asecretary from the money-lending community. By 1962, the Congress, with itsprogramme of garibi hatao (eradicate poverty), actually seemed to be more intune with mass demands to end poverty. Support for the Congresscorrespondingly increased with the decline of the Jharkhand party. In the1962 elections the Jharkhand party was reduced to twenty seats in the BiharAssembly and it appeared that it could no longer maintain itself as a viablepolitical organisation. The merger of the Jharkhand party with the Congresswas thus a natural corollary to these events. Jaipal Singh accepted a portfolioin the Bihar cabinet and many of his supporters never forgot this betrayal.30

The merger signalled the end of the Jharkhand party as a party of the peopleand effectively outlawed the radical stream.

A period of dissent followed, with grassroots activists struggling to build apolitical base. A radicalisation of politics was inevitable given the increasedexploitation of the Chotanagpuri communities under the Congress regime.Indeed, Congress policy towards tribal areas in the post-independence periodhad totally alienated the adivasis. After 1947, the ‘isolationist’ thinking of thecolonial rulers was heavily criticised by the nationalist state, wedded, as itsimperial precursors had been, to the ideology of development.31 There was anattempt to challenge the limited legislative protection afforded to the tribesunder colonial rule. The report of the Scheduled Tribes Commissioner,known as the Dhebar report, on the Indian state’s policy towards tribals,argued that the British policy of isolating them had resulted in theirexploitation.32 G S Ghurye, a long-time critic of British rule, voiced thischange in thinking when he stated that ‘the policy of protecting the so calledaborigines through the constitutional expedient of excluded areas or partiallyexcluded areas evoked a protest from politically conscious Indians and wasresented by many of them’.33 In a conscious attempt to move away from theBritish policy towards the tribes, the new policy was unashamedly assimila-tionist, its professed aim being to draw the tribes into the mainstream ofIndian political culture. The consequences of such a policy were predictablydisastrous and fuelled more tension in the region.34

The government of Bihar pushed ahead with a massive exploitation of theforest and mineral wealth of the region while maintaining in its official ‘tribal’policies that the ‘tribals’ should be allowed to develop according to their owngenius. After the 1950s, thousands of acres of adivasi land were lost to newindustries. The cities of Ranchi, Dhanbad and Jamshedpur continued to growrapidly through an ever-increasing in-migration of non-adivasi dikus. By1961, there were already half a million migrants in Dhanbad and Singhbhum.There was also an extensive loss of land through sales by adivasis to

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non-adivasis not only for business purposes but for erecting residentialbuildings.35 The result was an increasing ‘de-tribalisation’, with communitiessuch as the Bauris becoming descheduled on account of their development ascoal miners.

The 1971 census disclosed an alarming state of affairs. The percentage ofthe ‘Scheduled Tribes’ in the population of the districts of tribal Bihar hadfallen sharply in the decade from 1961: in Ranchi from 61.61 to 58.08, inSinghbhum from 47.31 to 46.12 and in the Santhal Parganas from 38.24 to36.22. This was not only due to the slow growth rate of the adivasipopulation, which was in fact among the lowest in India, but also due tothe influx of people from other parts of Bihar. In this period, struggles to haltthese dramatic changes developed under a new leadership and resulted in thecreation of political organisations such as the Birsa Seva Dal and theJharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM). The new political extremism was reflectedmost clearly in the formation, in 1973, of the JMM, whose object was to forma separate Jharkhand state, end the exploitation of ‘tribals’ by ‘non-tribals’,and secure preferential treatment for ‘sons of the soil’ in the matter ofemployment. Under the aegis of this organisation, adivasi consciousnessacquired a new political orientation. They led large-scale movements ofprotest to regain tribal lands in the 1960s and 1970s. The period 1967�/1974saw many struggles under the aegis of the JMM to recover alienated landsfrom moneylenders and rich peasants in Chotanagpur, amounting to arenewed assertion of strength of a people long exploited.36

A history of this period of obvious exploitation can help us understand thenature of the counter-discourse of the local people in Chotanagpur. Facedwith economic and political marginalisation, the adivasi leadership in Biharunder the Jharkhand party first sought to assert its political views byemphasising a broad convergence of interests with other non-adivasi groups.In a region where the adivasi/non-adivasi distinction had been blurredthrough decades of migration and where the poorer parts of the Hindumigrant population were as badly off as their adivasi brethren, it would havebeen politically inept to emphasise only an adivasi identity. However, theconstitutional policy followed by the Jharkhand party through its embracingthe language of modernity, and the lack of a radical programme in thecountryside, soon resulted in its decline and its ultimate merger with theCongress in 1963.37 That this happened with disastrous consequences forthe adivasi people’s struggle in the 1960s is evident from the attempts made inthe later 1960s and 1970s to evolve new independent political organisations tomeet popular demands, and, specifically, the emergence of the JharkhandMukti Morcha as a radical organisation developing out of the agrarianstruggles of the 1960s. This organisation was to attempt a successful culturalrevival in the 1970s and 1980s and to revive the image of the Jharkhandpeople as the inheritors of their ancestral lands and forests. A new andinteresting period in the struggle, by what was increasingly beginning to beseen as the ‘indigenous people’ of Jharkhand against an oppressive state, hadbegun.38 It was in this context and given a growing sense of adivasi

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consciousness that the landscape of Chotanagpur became a symbolic terrainfor definitions of Chotanagpuri identity.

Jal, Jangal, Jameen : the discourse of the indigenous forest

The JMM gave particular emphasis to a cultural revival of adivasi ritualsrelated to the land and signalled the revival of the sahrul puja . This ‘festivalof the sacred grove’ which was traditionally confined to the villages nowbecame a grand political event in urban centres, and was accompanied bylarge processions, drum beating and dancing, with large crowds lining thestreets.39 In the context of a despoiled landscape, the ritual harked back to thedays of an idyllic environmental past. It can be seen as a selective use ofmemory, where the memory, of a pristine environmental past, is linked to thesolution of contemporary political and economic problems. Given theecological degradation in Chotanagpur today and the poor state of its villagesacred groves, often left with only one remaining tree, this ritual took onenormous symbolic significance in the 1980s and 1990s. It evoked a particularimage of the landscape, ‘older, truer and more directly related to the people’,and was used to revive memories of better times and to criticise the inequitiesof the current regime. It symbolised a flamboyant assertion of ‘tribal’ identityand strength and can be compared to the Ramanavami or Moharrumprocessions40 in demonstrating militancy.41

The puja thus became a highly visible, elaborate and ritualised culture ofpublic celebration involving both the performers and the crowds in acollective act articulating the special relationship of the Chotanagpuri peoplewith nature and asserting their rights as true custodians of their lands andforests.42 It is possible to argue, in this context, as Paul Gilroy does when hedescribes the performance of black expressive cultures, that these perfor-mances were an attempt to transform the relationship ‘between theperformers and the crowd in dialogic rituals so that spectators acquired theactive role of participants in collective processes which are sometimescathartic and which may symbolise or even create a community’.43

This reinvention of ‘tribal’ traditions happened in a complex oppositionalcontext where indigenous populations were threatened by forces of progressand modernity. Migration had changed the character of Chotanagpur society,and by the late nineteenth century it was a society that could not really becategorised as predominantly adivasi , yet an adivasi culture was assertedthrough a revival of ethnic symbols and myths. Elements of adivasi self-government were also revived or reinvented. The Biasi (assembly) in theSanthal Parganas began to function as a court, without fees or pleaders, todeal out simple justice. Traditions of collective farming, and preservation ofjungles, pastures and common land began to be asserted more forcefully,while common grain pools were encouraged.

The attitude of the JMM towards non-adivasis, however, was stillambivalent. While the concept of diku was central to the notions of adivasiidentity and solidarity, the Jharkhand parties began to realise that they couldnot sustain an appeal based on ethnicity alone.44 Many of the low-caste

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migrants who had arrived in the region in the nineteenth century felt that theyhad as much right to be in Chotanagpur as the adivasis. Any politicalprogramme for Jharkhand therefore had to include these groups, and theJharkhand parties were therefore only partly constituted by ethnic meaningsand groupings.

Thus, while an adivasi identity was emphasised, these boundary mechan-isms were breached with ease. Instead, a more regional identity was takingover, based on secondary cultural markers, that is, on a shared history ofexploitation, a territorial boundary and a shared culture of the adivasigroups. The last is important because, although there was a growingunderstanding that the future of non-tribals was assured in the envisagedstate of Jharkhand, the parties continued to lay importance on ‘tribal’ culture.The appeal to voters was made on grounds of a common economic andcultural predicament. Ethnicity continued to have force in Jharkhand to theextent that it was a politically powerful argument against the way in whichstate and national political arenas were structured in favour of the dominantoutsider groups. Thus, although the parties emphasised a regional identity,ethnic arguments continued to be aired at the popular level.45 The flag of theJharkhand party was green in colour, deliberately to emphasise the commoncultural and ecological heritage of all Jharkhandi adivasis, while the electionsymbol was a sismandi (a particular kind of fowl sacrificed to a bonga). TheJMM flag had the traditional weapon of the bow and arrow as its symbol oftribal resurgence.46 Diku culture, it was argued, showed little respect for anyof these symbols. But there is little doubt that a homogenous ‘adivasi identity’can no longer be asserted, given the history of the region and the impact ofthe long history of low-caste Hindu migration, though ethnicity continued torear its head in different guises.47

The Jharkhand parties also attempted in this period to attack the relativelycareless attitude of the Bihar state government with regard to environmentalissues in Chotanagpur. One of the most widespread movements in the area inrecent times was motivated against attempts by the Forest DevelopmentCorporation to replace sal by sagwan (teak), since the latter is more valuableas wood in the market. This had grave consequences for the lifestyle of thelocal people. Sal products have been useful to them in various ways. In 1978,resistance to the planting of teak was sparked off when the forest departmentundertook to plant teak in 2000 hectares of the sal forest. A strong popularbelief developed that nothing grew under teak, and particularly not the grassroots and tubers on which the local wildlife and people subsisted. It was alsoalleged that since elephants did not eat teak leaves, they would be forced toseek food in areas where crops grew, thus increasing their depredations. Theagitators also argued that fruit-bearing trees were being cut down to establishteak nurseries, thus depriving the tribals of a source of food.48

A detailed analysis of the forest andolan (movement) in Singhbhum districthas been provided by Father Matthew Areeparampil, a Jesuit priest who untilhis death in 2004 had been working among the Hos for many years and whowas actively involved in defending the court cases against them.49 It can

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perhaps even be argued that Jesuit mission activity in this region fired localprotest. Areeparampil noted that,

the immediate cause for this sudden outburst were certain actions of thegovernment which the tribals felt were detrimental to their interests. In 1973 thegovernment nationalised the kendu leaves trade. In 1976 it took over the salleaves trade and in 1978 all the Minor Non-Forest Produce (MNFP) was takenover by the government. In 1975 the Forest Development Corporation wasformed and a total area of 1.92 lakh hectares were leased out to the corporationsfor purposes of clear felling and planting high yielding varieties like teak.50

The first major incident of the uprising against these actions took place atSimdega on 4 August 1978, when police fired at a crowd of adivasis, killingone person. As the andolan progressed, the forest issue came to acquiregreater prominence. Forest officials were assaulted on a large scale, and aspart of the direct action programme in support of the movement for aseparate state 2000 adivasis from the forest areas of Chakradharpur, Sonua,Goilkera and Bandgaon, with their bows and arrows, took part in thisdemonstration. Areeparampil notes that the jungle katai andolan (clear thejungle movement) was started at the same time, where trees were felled inforest areas for the purpose of making fields. The movement also attemptedto reclaim lands which had sasandiri (burial stones) of their ancestors asevidence that these lands once belonged to them.

The Bihar administration reacted by intensifying repression and firing onpeaceful demonstrators. In Gua in 1978, fifty-nine rounds were fired by theBihar military police and three adivasis were killed outright. What followedwas indescribable. The police in south-west Singhbhum district had moved atthe behest of local politicians, mine owners and timber contractors to arrest4100 tribals and non-tribals for unlawfully cutting trees.51 The Morcha wasdriven underground, only to emerge again in new guises and locations.52 Inthe context of a state-declared scarcity and with famine stalking the land, theresistance of the Singhbhum adivasis was laudable and there is little doubtthat the movement for a separate Jharkhand state was renewed andintensified during this period.

In recent years many ethnic movements have legitimised their claims byreference to a global environmentalism.53 This involves arguing that the localpeople are the best stewards of the landscape and have the best claims tocontrol it. The discourse of the rights of indigenous peoples to their forest wasthus an important part of the struggle of the Jharkhand parties. In the late1960s and 1970s, the Birsa Seva Dal, Bihar Prant Hul Jharkhand party andthe Jharkhand Mukti Morcha were each set up to contest what they saw asthe tyranny of developmentalism both within and outside the parliamentaryarea. These organisations participated in elections, while their activists werealso involved in the forcible cropping of diku lands, in sabotaging localtransport lines and in organising new forest satyagrahas.54 There was also arenewed attempt to preserve the sacred groves of the adivasis and a growingprotest against dam-building as at Koel Karo. The effort to prevent theflooding of tribal lands and groves under this project generated widespread

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support. The main outcry seemed to be directed against the destruction of thesacred groves where the gods are said to reside. Over the years the activistswere successful in stalling the project, indicating the power of collectiveresistance.55

By the mid-1980s a full-fledged movement was under way to claim thelands and the forests expropriated by outsiders and the state as their own. Theattack on forest lands held in the reserved forest areas that was inaugurated inSinghbhum soon spread to other areas in neighbouring Ranchi where, underthe auspices of the Jharkhand parties, large areas in the protected forest zonescame to be legitimate targets for struggle.56 As the forest department foughtback, attacks on forest guards and the burning of forest department resthouses in the Saranda forest area became a regular feature of the protest. Theslogans of jal , jangal and jameen (water, forest and land) and the movementfor securing ‘indigenous’ rights had come to acquire new significance. InSinghbhum alone 4000 acres of forest were illegally cut.

Areeparampil has provided an analysis of both the strong and weak pointsof the jungle katai andolan . He argues, I believe rightly, that this was animportant new phase in the history of the movement*/a time when it becametruly popular, with a wide participation of all groups including women.However, it was plagued with problems, not the least being the ambiguoussupport of the traditional Jharkhand leaders for the movement. There wasalso little support for the movement from the plains adivasis or the non-adivasis. Furthermore, the large-scale looting of forests that followed mainlybenefited contractors, timber merchants and corrupt politicians; in Porahatin the 1980s, a raid unearthed timber worth 10 lakh rupees in several sawmillsand timber godowns.57 It is interesting to note that a trend towards ecologicalvandalism had been noted by settlement officers in Ranchi a century earlier,in the context of forest settlements and the imminent seizure of forest lands bythe state. We can note a similar process here, but one that had markedlyintensified given the inroads of the forest department in cahoots with timbercontractors and middlemen in the post-independence period. This extremereaction of local communities to these excesses by the state and timbercontractors was thus to be expected. Often their reactions further denudedthe forest cover.

The phase of environmental vandalism that occurred in Jharkhand in the1980s and 1990s leads one to a reassessment of ‘indigenous’ forest rights. Italso leads one to question whether local people should have the right to freelypursue traditional practices or to develop their lands, especially when theexercise of these rights has implications in conflict with environmental values.This is an issue that is currently being debated globally.58 The debate has beenparticularly controversial where threats to the survival of endangered specieshave been involved. It has been noted in the context of the American Indiansthat the traditional subsistence conservationist practices of indigenouspeoples have not really led to a sound modern environmentalism.59

Furthermore, the granting of land rights to indigenous people in theAmerican Indian context has repeatedly led not to their returning to

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traditional subsistence practices, but instead to their seeking to develop theirlands economically without any respect for the environment.

In the case of Chotanagpur, while one cannot deny that traditionalindigenous practice incorporated valuable environmentalist lessons, as wehave seen, the terrible toll on the land associated with state intervention andcapitalist interests in the colonial and postcolonial period has resulted inthese communities demanding the return of their forests, not necessarily todevelop them sustainably as in the past, but in order to harvest them, oftenuneconomically, in order not to lose out to commercial interests. Very oftenthey have been abetted in the process by commercial interests. Meanwhile,contractors, timber merchants and corrupt politicians have used the cloak ofthe popular movement of the jungle katai andolan to loot forests.

In an interesting recent article, Roy Perrett argues that the conflictsbetween indigenous rights and environmental interests can be seen asconflicts between local and global justice. He argues that it is unlikely that(given the history of injustice) local people are going to give way when theexercise of their land rights happens to conflict with environmentalist values.In the case of Chotanagpur, the value of these debates lies in the framing ofpolicy where local communities have a stake in protecting their environmentalresources. Examples of what may happen when trees rather than local peoplebecome the objects of conservation have been provided in many accounts.60

New policy departures need to be evolved that will prove effective inextending the life span of the world’s remaining forests, and in counteringthe formidable interests in exploiting them for short-term gain. Co-manage-ment of resources and joint forest management have been seen as the wayforward. Only individual case studies will show the extent of participation orshow the ways in which definitions of ‘community’ have in fact strengthenedcertain hierarchies in society.61

The cultural struggle for indigenous rights being waged in many parts ofcontemporary India must be seen, I think, as essentially a movement directedtowards transforming the balance of power in the region. In Gramscian termsit may be seen as a struggle for hegemony in the cultural and political arena.In rejecting terms such as jangali (savage), which forms part of a discoursethat aids compliance with forms of economic and political domination, byforcefully claiming indigenous status and rejecting the notions of back-wardness and inferiority in comparison with the plains Hindus, adivasileaders in the twentieth century attempted to secure political advantage in thecolonial and postcolonial period. In the process, claims about the inherentoriginality or purity of adivasi culture are made, while the history ofacculturation with the dominant Hindu culture is pushed aside. It is in thismoment of struggle against dominant values and the narratives of the state,as Homi Bhabha notes, that the ‘meanings and symbols of culture areappropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew’.62 It seems very likelythat ethnicity will increasingly dominate Indian politics. As the discourse ofthe nation-state in India becomes increasingly undemocratic, ethnic politicsseeks to express itself more forcefully. There is little doubt that with thecreation of the new states of Jharkhand, Uttaranchal and Chattisgarh, ethnic

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arguments in India have come into their own; but the politics of ethnicitycontinues to tread a complicated path.63 The extraordinary attempts of theJharkhand government to award indigenous land claims on the basis ofcolonial documentation dating back to the 1920s must be seen in this context.More surprising is the limited success achieved by the Right-wing BharatiyaJanata Party in co-opting the adivasis. This has included a determinedeffort on the part of the Hindutva brigade to Hinduise tribals, in the processdropping the word adivasi from the lexicon and substituting it with vanvasior forest dweller. This can be seen as a move to deny ‘indigenous’ status tothe tribals because it runs contrary to the Hindutva notion that the aryans arethe original indigenous people. The attempt to ban cow slaughterand conversion to Christianity is part of the determined effort to ‘returntribals to the Hindu fold’. The Right-wing agenda to co-opt these groupsindicates the ways in which the term ‘indigenous’ continues to be a highlycontested one.

In conclusion, one might state that, given the history of the Jharkhandmovement, claims to an ‘authentic indigeneity’ cannot be so easily dismissedby revisionist writers.64 Dirks, Eley and Ortner have usefully argued thepolitical significance of these categories for surbordinate and marginalisedgroups seeking to contest the power of hegemonic formations, whetherconstituted within academic disciplines, institutional fields or at the level ofwhole societies.65 They note, ‘if otherness is a category that must always besuspected, nevertheless it may facilitate our attempts to listen to the voices ofanthropologist informants and colonised subalterns’. The fact that the termadivasi , with its connotation of autochthonous power, has found most favourwith these communities is of great significance. It can be seen as a way ofcreating alternative power structures and of being outside the narratives ofthe Indian nation state. As Skaria puts it, ‘being adivasi or indigenous isabout the shared experience of the loss of the forests, the alienation of land,repeated displacements since independence in the name of development, andmuch more’.66 A reassessment of the post-1865 period, in particular, will needto take into account the local traditions and transforming historicaldevelopments that have led gradually to the emergence of the identity ofthe adivasi . In the absence of such an analysis, the argument that invocationsof indigeneity can only have explosive consequences simply ignores wholesalethe real and extant politics of such identity formations in India.67 Theembracing of the identity of indigenous or adivasi must be seen in politicalterms. We thus come back to the notion that, although at the theoretical andconceptual level we have moved away from the notion of culture as boundedunits, at a political level this version of culture is maintained. While it may betrue that fostering essentialist ideologies of culture and identity may havedangerous political consequences, it is inevitable in the Jharkhand context,given the effects of economic exploitation, political disenfranchisement, socialmanipulation and ideological domination on the cultural formation ofminority subjects and discourses. In this context, it becomes useful to seecontemporary adivasi culture and the assertion of indigenous rights in many

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parts of India today as a form of continuing political struggle, albeit onedeeply connected with a critical global environmental predicament.

Notes1 For work in this vein, see, for example, Sumit Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, 1200�/1901 ,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. In this book Guha argues for well-integrated local

communities with forest folk engaging extensively in trade in eighteenth-century western India,

rendering the idea of ‘isolated’ Bhil tribes invalid.2 William van Schendel, ‘Invention of Jummas; State Formation and Ethnicity in Eastern Bangladesh’, in

R H Barnes, A Gray and B Kingsbury (eds), Indigenous Peoples of Asia , Michigan: American

Association for Asian Studies, 1995.3 David Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India , Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 1987, p 15.4 Tania Li, ‘Environment, Indigeneity and Transnationalism’, in Watts M and Peet R (eds), Liberation

Ecologies, London: Routledge, 1996, p 339.5 Li, ‘Environment, Indigeneity’, p 343.6 Report of the Rent Settlement Officer in Giridih subdivison, 1939, Ranchi Record Room.7 See Final Report on Survey and Settlement Operations in the District of Hazaribagh , Patna: Government

Press, 1917.8 Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the District of Ranchi, 1902�/1910 , Calcutta:

Government Press, 1912.9 As Daniels notes (and this is certainly true of both ethnic and national identities), ‘Identities are often

defined by legends and landscapes, by stories of golden ages, enduring traditions, heroic deeds and

dramatic destinies located in ancient or promised homelands with hallowed sites and scenery. The

symbolic activation of time and space often drawing on religious sentiment gives shape to the imagined

community of the nation.’ Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and Identity in England

and US, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993, p 5.10 D Cosgrove and S Daniels ed., The Iconography of the Landscape, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 1988, pp 1�/8.11 For more recent writings on history, landscape and identity, see David Lowenthal, ‘British National

Identity and the English Landscape’, Rural History 2, 1991.12 Patrick Kirch and Marshall Sahlins, Anahulu: Historical Ethnography: The Anthropology of History in

the Kingdom of Hawaii , vol. 1, Historical Ethnography, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992,

p 25.13 See S C Roy, The Birhors, Ranchi, 1925.14 M Yorke, ‘Political Structure and Discourse Among the Ho Tribals of India’, unpublished PhD thesis,

School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1976, p 53.15 M Yorke, ‘Political Structure and Discourse’.16 See Nurit Bird David, ‘The Original Affluent Society’, Current Anthropology 33(1), 25�/34.17 See Marshall Sahlins, How Natives Think about Captain Cook, for Example, Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1995, p 13.18 Simon Schama has noted that ‘Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the

imagination projected onto wood, water and rock [. . .] once a certain idea of the landscape, a myth, a

vision establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making

metaphors more real than their referents; of becoming in fact part of the scenery.’ Simon Schama,

Landscape and Memory, London: HarperCollins, 1995, p 61.19 Daniels, Fields of Vision , p 7.20 See Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu , p 25, for the idea of the remembered landscape.21 Purshottam Kumar, Mutinies and Rebellions in Chotanagpur 1831�/1857 , Patna, 1991, p 87 See also

Sangeeta Dasgupta, ‘Reordering a World: The Tana Bhagat Movement, 1914�/1919’, Studies in History

15(1), 1999, pp 29�/30.22 See K S Singh, ‘Tribal Autonomy Movements in Chotanagpur’, in K S Singh (ed.), Tribal Movements in

India , vol. 2, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.

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23 On missionary discourses and the creation of an African identity, see Jean and John Comaroff,

Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in Southern Africa , Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1991, p 288.24 See J Hoffman, Encyclopaedia Mundarica , Calcutta: Government Press, 1906, pp 2390�/240125 E Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal , Calcutta: Government Press, 1872, p 3.26 See Chotanagpur Unnati Samaj ki Varshik Mahasabha ka Report aur Chotanagpur Adivasi Sabha ka

Uthpathi , 1937, pp 1�/14.27 Bihar State Archives, Political Special, file no. 25.4.1946.28 Interview with Cornelius Ekka, Ranchi, April 1992. Ekka remembers going to Jaipal Singh’s meeting in

1945 where there was a crowd of nearly 50,000 people.29 See Singh, ‘Tribal Autonomy Movements in Chotanagpur’, p 7.30 Interview with Jharkhand party leader, N E Horo, Ranchi, April 1992.31 Verrier Elwin noted that at the time ‘there was endless talk of tribal development’. V Elwin, The Tribal

World of Verrier Elwin , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p 299.32 For details of these views, see S Corbridge, ‘State, Tribe and Region: Policy and Politics in India’s

Jharkhand 1900�/1980’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1987.33 G S Ghurye, The Aborigines, So-called and their Future , Delhi, 1943, p 293.34 This was not just confined to Bihar; von Furer-Haimendorf has noted that a massive invasion of tribal

land by outsiders all over India occurred specifically after 1947. See Christopher von Furer-Haimendorf,

Tribes of India: Struggle for Survival , Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989, p 39.35 See Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India , Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1978, p 165.36 For details see R N Maharaj and K G Iyer, ‘Agrarian Movement in Dhanbad’, in Nirmal Sen Gupta

(ed.), Fourth World Dynamics: Jharkhand , Delhi: Authors Guild Publications, 1982, pp 165�/200.37 The merger was declared illegal shortly afterwards and the Jharkhand party was revived. See a

memorandum by the Jharkhand party submitted to the Prime Minister of India, 12 March 1973.38 Ram Dayal Munda, The Jharkhand Movement: Indigenous People’s Struggle for Autonomy in India ,

Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2003.39 I was told on a visit to Ranchi town in 1992 that the scale of the Sahrul puja I had witnessed there was a

new phenomenon, and an ‘invention of tradition’ in Hobsbawm’s terms. As Clifford notes, ‘throughout

the world indigenous populations have had to reckon with the forces of ‘‘progress’’ and ‘‘national’’

unification. The results have been both destructive and inventive. Many traditions, languages,

cosmologies and values are lost, some literally murdered but much has been invented and revived in

complex oppositional contexts.’ See James Clifford, Predicament of Culture , Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1988, p 16.40 The celebrations of the Hindu religious festival of Ramnavami and the Muslim festival of Muharram

were often used to assert the strength of these communities in urban areas and sometimes resulted in

inter-communal rioting.41 A reassertion of traditional cultural practices is an intrinsic element of the economy and political

struggles of third world peoples. See Arif Dirlik, ‘Culturalism as Hegemonic Ideology and Liberating

Practice’, Cultural Critique 6, 1987, pp 13�/50.42 Some scholars studying ‘festive culture’ have interpreted rituals as manifestations of an evolving folk

culture, creating meaning and helping people to cope with an alien world, as instruments for the

promotion of group solidarity and as public assertions of group power and demands. See Kathleen Neils

Conzen, ‘Ethnicity as Festive Culture: Nineteenth Century German America on Parade’, in Werner

Sollors (ed.), The Invention of Ethnicity, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p 46.43 Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack : The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation , London:

Hutchinson, 1987, p 214.44 Whereas in 1872, 51.38 per cent of Chotanagpuris were classified by the British as aboriginals and semi-

aboriginals, by 1971 only 30.14 per cent of the region’s population belonged to Scheduled Tribes in

Bihar. See Census of India , Patna: Government of India Press, 1971.45 As Nash notes: ‘Ethnicity is a resource in political economic and cultural struggle [. . .] When economic

ends are sought (opportunity, wealth and income redistribution or claims to ownership of a national

patrimony) the ethnic group may approximate a political class and exhibit a form of class struggle

powered by an ethnic ideology, not a false consciousness but often a true appreciation of the existing

state of economic affairs.’ Nash, The Cauldron of Ethnicity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989,

p 127.46 P C Hembram, ‘Return to the Sacred Grove’, in Singh, Tribal Movements in India , p 89.

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47 Homi Bhabha has emphasised the ‘hybrid moment of political change where ideas and forms arerearticulated; where there is a negotiation between gender and class where each formation encountersthe displaced’. He argues that the agents of political change are discontinuous, divided subjects caughtin conflicting interests and identities. See H Bhabha, The Location of Culture , London: Routledge, 1994.

48 Bhabha, Location of Culture , p 20.49 See Writ Petition no. 371�/375 of 1983 in the matter of Matthew Areeparampil and others versus state of

Bihar and others (personal copy). Father Matthew Areeparampil died in 2004. His death is a seriousloss to scholars and activists of Jharkhand.

50 Ibid.51 ‘Gua Massacre of Tribals’, Economic and Political Weekly XV(38), 1980, p 1123.52 See A K Roy, ‘Sal means Jharkhand, Saguwan means Bihar’, Sunday (weekly), Calcutta, 8 April 1979,

pp 46�/47.53 For an interesting discussion of this in India, see Pramod Panjuli, ‘Beyond Capitalised Nature;

Ecological Ethnicity as an Area of Conflict in the Regime of Globalisation’, Ecumene 5(2), 1998, pp186�/217.

54 See Singh, ‘Tribal Autonomy Movements in Chotanagpur’, pp 14�/21.55 The recent efforts of the BJP-led NDA government to recommence work on the project were met with

stubborn resistance, resulting in the death of ten adivasis in police firings. A recent PUCL bulletinsigned by Thomas Kochery, M G Sanjay and Medha Patkar notes that this recommencing of the projectis ‘indicative of the fact that in these heydays of globalisation and liberalisation, the government andpower elites of the tribal states of Jharkhand and Chattisgarh are preparing for mortgaging the forestsand rights of tribals for the sake of national and multi-national capital’. See http://www.pucl.org/reports/Bihar/2001tapkara-pr.htm.

56 Matthew Areeparampil, ‘Forest Andolan in Singhbhum’, in S Narayanan (ed.), Jharkhand Movement,

Origin and Evolution , New Delhi: Inter India Publications, 1992, pp 143�/186.57 Areeparampil, ‘Forest Andolan in Singhbhum’.58 Roy W Perrett, ‘Indigenous Rights and Environmental Justice’, Environmental Ethics 20(4), 1998, pp

377�/391.59 Perrett, ‘Indigenous Rights and Environmental Justice’.60 See Sato’s account of the Karen people living in ‘ambiguous lands’ in buffer zones between areas

designated for forest conservation and farming in ‘People in Between: Conversion and Conservation inForest Lands in Thailand’. See also Cohen’s depiction of the upland Akha populations of the Laospeople’s democratic republic who have been shifted to settlements on lower slopes and incorporated intolowland commercial Tai agriculture as an important, opium-addicted wage labour force, in ‘Resettle-ment, Opium and Labour Dependence: Akha�/Tai Relations in Northern Laos’. These two articles arein Development and Change 31(1), 2000, pp 179�/200.

61 Nandini Sundar, ‘Unpacking the Joint in Joint-Forestry Management’, Development and Change 31(1),2000, pp 255�/279.

62 Bhabha, Location of Culture , p 37.63 This is not to argue that the politics of the new state will be radically different from the preceding state

of Bihar. Corruption continues to plague the new state and the NDA alliance of the BJP and the Samataparty was bogged down with controversies. The threat posed by the ultra-left MCC (MaoistCoordination Committee) in attacking small zamindaris proved a major irritant to the new state inthe period leading up to December 2001. The fact remains that the NDA alliance was seen to soft-pedalon the ‘indigenous’ issue. The Marandi government has taken up the cudgels in favour of ‘indigenes’ byits ‘domicile policy’ for clerical government jobs, causing outrage among the settled Biharis. The policefiring in Ranchi, where five people were killed, is witness to this. The fact remains that the indigenouspopulation in the current state of Jharkhand number less than 30 per cent. Any policy for ousting‘outsiders’ or redistributing resources can only be painful and bloody. It remains to be seen how the statewill fare in relation to its impoverished communities. The dangers from dikkus seem insignificant incomparison to the new dangers from the vast and accelerating incursions of multinational miningenterprises who are being sold land at knock down prices by tribal elites in government.

64 See, for example, Guha, Environment and Ethnicity.65 N Dirks, G Eley and S Ortner, Culture, Power and History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994,

p 38.66 A Skaria, Hybrid Histories, Forests Frontiers and the Wilderness in Western India , Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 1999, p 281.67 See Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, ‘Afterword’.

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