https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0249-1574
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ABSTRACT
This research article examines the contest between indigenous forest-dwelling communities and settler colonial policy in post-Partition central India. According to official estimates, from 1961–71 the population of indigenous communities declined by nearly 50% in Dandakaranya within central India even as overall the population grew by a large margin during the same period. Despite perceptions of India as a post-colony committed to decolonization, this article examines how this state project, one of the earliest acts of governmentality, was deeply implicated in a settler colonial logic of elimination. Following the mass migration of Partition refugees in 1947 across newly demarcated borders, the Indian government earmarked Dandakaranya Forest as the site of a refugee resettlement project for lower-caste Partition refugees from East Bengal (now Bangladesh). Drawing on Lorenzo Veracini’s notion of ‘probationary settlers’ as exogenous others without prior claims to land, refugees are understood within this argument as probationary settlers reliant on the state for their survival. Rather than narrating the biography of the state through its various experts and institutions, this paper foregrounds the perspective of the marginalized on their environment: displaced forest-dwelling indigenous communities and lower-caste (Dalit) refugees.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the journal's editors Janne Lahti and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, production editor Pasumpon Mayilvaganan, and two anonymous reviewers for all their help. Thanks especially to Douglas E. Haynes, Reiko Ohnuma, Sienna Craig, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Kolby Hanson, Elizabeth Lhost, and other members of the Dartmouth South Asia Studies Collective for comments on the first draft; Gyan Pandey for the invitation to present an early draft to the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Colonial Postcolonial Studies at Emory; audience members at the Association of Asian Studies New England Conference; the Kiran Nadar Museum Research Intensive workshop for providing access to archival materials; my History department colleagues at MTSU, particularly Emily Baran and Martha Norkunas, for supporting my application for the MT-IGO research grant and Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Aijazuddin Ahmed. ‘Regional Development process and distribution of Tribal Population in Mid-India’, in Population Redistribution and Development in South Asia, eds. L.A. Kosinski and K.M. Elahi (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co, 1985), 75. Refugees from East Pakistan were first settled in West Bengal and Tripura. It was when these states could not cope that they were transferred to what is now Odisha (Malkangiri) and Chhattisgarh (Paralkote), but also to the Andamans and Tripura. See Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also, Uditi Sen, Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
2 For an analysis of Partition and Dalits, see Ramnarayan Rawat, ‘Partition Politics and Acchut Identity: A Study of the Scheduled Castes Federation and Dalit Politics in UP, 1946–48’, in Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India, ed. Suvir Kaul (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). See also, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury, Caste and Partition in Bengal: The Story of Dalit Refugees, 1946–1961 (Oxford University Press, 2022). For two different views on the case of Meo Mewatis, see Majid Hayat Siddiqi, ‘History and Society in a Popular Rebellion: Mewat, 1920–1933’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 3 (1986): 442–67 and Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997). See also, Pankhuree R. Dube, ‘Partition Historiography’, The Historian 77, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 55–79.
3 Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Kashmir: Is it Settler Colonialism?’, Positions Politics. Episteme 8, Indigeneity in the Settler Colonial Present (May 2022). https://positionspolitics.org/kashmir-is-it-settler-colonialism/ See also for a qualification of the applicability of settler colonialism to indigenous peoples in the South Asian context, Kaushik Ghosh, ‘Indigenous Incitements’, in Indigenous Knowledge and Learning in Asia/Pacific and Africa: Perspectives on Development, Education and Culture, eds. Dip Kapoor and Edward Shizha (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 35–46.
4 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409, 390.
5 Dalit (literally ‘ground down’) is the term developed by Marathi activist Jyotiba Phule (1827–1890) for lowest castes oppressed by the Hindu caste system. Adivasi (literally ‘original inhabitant’) refers to India’s indigenous tribes; this term is politically significant as it first appeared in contemporary Jharkhand in 1938 as part of the Adivasi Mahasabha. The terms ‘adivasi’ and ‘indigenous’ will be used interchangeably throughout this article; the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘probationary settler’ will also be used interchangeably.
6 U. Bhaskar Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation (Faridabad: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Publications Division, 1967), 207.
7 Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism’, 388.
8 D.E.U. Baker, ‘“A Serious Time:” Forest Satyagraha in Madhya Pradesh, 1930’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 21, no. 1 (1984): 71–90.
9 Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000), 105.
10 Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces, 1860–1914 (Oxford University Press, 1996).
11 Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Indigenes and Settlers (Fourth World)’, in A Companion to Global Historical Thought, eds. Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy, and Andrew Sartori (John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 451–465, 451.
12 Prathama Banerjee, ‘Culture/Politics: The Curious Double Bind of the Indian Adivasi’, in Subaltern Citizens and their Histories, ed. Gyan Pandey (New York: Routledge, 2009), 125–142, 130.
13 Rao, Story, 197.
14 Although other scholars focus on Saibal Gupta and the Bengali context of this project, Saagar Tiwari provides the definitive account of official debates regarding this development scheme from its very inception based on an extensive review of archival materials; see his, ‘Developing Bastar: The Dandakaranya Project’, in The Heart of the Matter—Development, Identity and Violence: Reconfiguring the Debate, ed. Ravi Kumar (New Delhi: Aakar Books and Sruti, 2010), 115–134, 117.
15 Tiwari, ‘Developing Bastar’, 119.
16 An example of scholarship published during the period of the rehabilitation scheme that sought to enfold Dandakaranya within such Hindu myth is Amiya Kumar Roy Chowdhury, Bharatavarsha: An Evolutionary Synthesis of India. Volume I: Dandakaranya and Mahakantara Central Highlands (Calcutta: Rupa & Co., 1975), 18–19.
17 Jennifer Baka, ‘Do Wastelands Exist? Perspectives on “Productive” Land Use in India's Rural Energyscapes’ in RCC Perspectives, No. 2, Energizing the Spaces of Everyday Life: Learning from the Past for a Sustainable Future (2019), 57–64.
18 Government of India (hereafter GOI). Board of Rehabilitation, Ministry of Labour and Small Industry Extension Training Institute, Confidential: Feasibility Studies in Dandakaranya: Manufacture of Vegetable Tannin Extracts (Hyderabad, 1971).
19 See, E.P. Flint, ‘Deforestation and Land Use in Northern India with a Focus on Sal (Shorea robusta) Forests 1880–1980’, in Nature and the Orient: Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, ed. Richard Grove (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 421–458, 435.
20 See, for example, two reports in the Hitavad newspaper about industrial uses for this tree: ‘Major Source of Non-edible Oil: Only 1 per cent of sal Forests Being Tapped’, Hitavad. Bhopal. September 28, 1976 and ‘Foundation Stone of Sal Seed Solvent Extraction Plant Laid’, Hitavad. Bhopal. November 23, 1976.
21 Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism’, 389.
22 ‘Crop Failure in 800 Bastar villages’, Hitavad. Bhopal. December 24, 1976.
23 J. Sisodia, V.N. Singh, and J.P. Mishra, ‘Agricultural Development in Tribal Madhya Pradesh’, Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics 25, no. 3. Conference Issue (July-September 1970), 190–197, 191.
24 Directorate of Archaeology, Archives and Museums of Madhya Pradesh, Bhopal, Satpura Bhawan Repository, Register 2: Revenue and Agriculture 1892–1905. Bundle Number 18. File 159–160: ‘Settling the Baigas of the Mandla Dist to regular plough cultivation (1893)’, Letter from R.H. E. Thompson, Officiating Conservator of Forests, Northern Circle, CP to Commissioner, Jubbulpore Division dated 31st May 1892.
25 Tiwari, ‘Developing Bastar’, 122.
26 Maitreye Devi, Exodus. Dandakaranya: Council for Communal Harmony (Calcutta: S. Das, 1974).
27 Jagannath Ambagudia, Adivasis, Migrants and the State in India (Routledge, 2020), 137–156.
28 For instance, a typical laudatory piece: ‘29 New Villages Established in Dandakaranya: Progress Report’, Yojana Number 14. July 18, 1965, 13–15.
29 Veracini, ‘Kashmir: Is it Settler Colonialism?’.
30 Veracini, Settler Colonialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 18. Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 32.
31 Tiwari, ‘Developing Bastar’, 121.
32 For a more detailed analysis of the privileges of Indian citizenship, see Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History (Harvard University Press, 2013). For two discussions of the indigenous leader Jaipal Singh Munda and debates on the ‘Tribal Question’ during the drafting of the Indian Constitution, see Saagar Tewari, ‘Framing the Fifth Schedule: Tribal agency and the making of the Indian Constitution (1937–1950)’, Modern Asian Studies 56, no. 5 (2022): 1556–1594. See also, Nandini Sundar, ‘“We will teach India Democracy:” Indigenous Voices in Constitution Making’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (Published Online April 2023).
33 Subhasri Ghosh, ‘In Search of “Home:” Dandakaranya and the East Bengali Migrants, 1957–1977’, in Südasien-Chronik: South Asia Chronicle (7/2017), S. 95–122, 97. See also, Anwesha Sengupta, ‘Moveable Migrants, Laboring Lives: Making Refugees “useful” in Post-colonial India’, in Work out of Place, Vol. 3, ed. Mahua Sarkar (De Gruyter, 2017), 121–148.
34 According to one refugee memoir, he only became aware of caste discrimination and met his first bamun-kayet (Brahmin Kayastha), an East Bengali refugee himself, who considered himself vastly superior to lower caste refugees; it was employed in this doctor’s household and through interactions with the doctor’s wife, that the author learned what caste discrimination meant in the everyday. Manoranjana Byapari, Interrogating my Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit, trans. Bengali by Sipra Mukherjee (New Delhi: Sage, 2018), 42–45.
35 Devi, Exodus, 43–44.
36 Deep Halder, Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre (HarperCollins India, 2019). See Annu Jalais, ‘Dwelling on Morichjhanpi: When Tigers Became “Citizens”, Refugees “Tiger-Food”’, Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 17 (2005): 1757–62. See also, Abhijit Dasgupta, ‘Residues of Partition’, in Displacement and Exile: The State-Refugee Relations in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016).
37 Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, ‘Ghost of Marichjhapi Returns to Haunt’, The Hindustan Times, April 25, 2011.
38 Byapari, Interrogating.
39 Ibid., x.
40 Ibid., 25. After the public conversion of prominent Dalit activist Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891–1956) to Navayana Buddhism on October 4th, 1956, many Dalits in India renounced Hinduism. Namasudra refugees arriving in Dandakaranya would not necessarily have been receptive to renouncing Hinduism.
41 ‘In mythology, this area [Dandakaranya] with forest and hills is mentioned as a place of retreat or recluse for the exiled or for the hermits from Northern Indian Aryan tribes.’ Chowdhury, Bharatavarsha, 72.
42 Sekhar Bandopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872–1947, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011).
43 Byapari, Interrogating, 133.
44 A.B. Mukherji, ‘A Cultural Ecological Appraisal of Refugee Settlement in Independent India’, in Population Redistribution and Development in South Asia, eds. L.A. Kosinski and K.M. Elahi (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co, 1985), 102.
45 S.K. Gupta, ‘Dandakaranya: A Survey of Rehabilitation I. The State of Agriculture’, The Economic Weekly, January 2, 1965, 15–26, 16.
Amiya Sen, Aranyalipi [Original Publication 1966, Bengali]. Excerpt translated from the Bengali by Bhashwati Ghosh. Muse India e-Journal. Literature of Refugees Issue. Hyderabad. No pagination.
46 Byapari, Interrogating, 134–135.
47 Sabyasachi Ghosh Dastidar, ‘Rebirth of Bangladeshi Hindu Refugee at Dandakaranya: The Rebirth (PunarJanma) of the Bangladeshi Hindu’, Empire’s Last Casualty. Sunday December 28, 2008. Stable URL: http://empireslastcasualty.blogspot.com/2008/12/rebirth-of-bangladeshi-hindu-refugee.html.
48 Byapari, Interrogating, 135–136.
49 Vinoo Kaley et al., Bamboo in Dandakaranya (Adyar: PPST Foundation, 1993). See also, Madhu Ramnath, Woodsmoke and Leaf Cups: Autobiographical Footnotes to the Anthropology of the Durwa People (HarperCollins India, 2015). See also, Savyasaachi, ‘The Sage Forest’, Indian International Centre Quarterly Volume 26/7, Volume 26: 4/Vol 27: 1 Faith (Winter 1999/Spring 2000): 13–20.
50 Byapari, Interrogating, 134.
51 S.K. Gupta, ‘Dandakaranyer Udvastu’ as quoted in D.K. Sarkar, ‘Refugee and Migration Problems in West Bengal: Society, Economy, and Polity’ (Univ of North Bengal, Unpublished D. Phil thesis, 2016), 205. Gupta explained that although in other cases there would have been state relief offered when the ‘spectre of famine is in sight,’ refugees were barred from state relief under the rationale that they had already received the full quota of agricultural loan, bullocks and milk cow and seed. Ibid., 23.
52 Mukherji, ‘Cultural Ecological’, 103.
53 Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 117.
54 See Felix Padel, ‘Forest Knowledge: Tribal People, their Environment and the Structure of Power’, Nature and the Orient, 891–917, 912.
55 Kiran Nadar Museum Archives, New Delhi (hereafter KNMA). Interview with Jaidev Baghel, ‘Of “Devis” and “Devas”’ as told to Roshan Kalapesi in Shilpakar, ed. Carmen Kagal, 40–48. Published by Vasant Honavar (Chairman) Crafts Council of Western India, 1982, 41.
56 Duke University Library and Archives. South Asia Pamphlets Collection, 1920–2000 (hereafter DSAPC). Box IN-7: ‘Preliminary Trials on Cultivation of Some Important Medicinal Plants in Madhya Pradesh.’ B. Nath and H.O. Saxena (Jabalpur: State Forest Research Institute, 1967); ‘Progress and Scope of Timber Engineering in India.’ N.J. Masani, Dehra Dun Forest Research Institute Forest Leaflet No. 166. Faridabad: Manager of Publications, 1962.
57 DSAPC. Box IN-82 ‘Report on the Industrial Potential Survey in and around Sunabeda in Koraput District.’ Bureau of Statistics and Economics (Cuttack: Government of Orissa, 1966).
58 KNMA, 41.
59 Pradip Kishen, Jungle Trees of Central India: A Field Guide for Tree Spotters (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2014), 24. For further analysis of the Sanskrit etymology of jungle which denoted open vegetation cover and yet by the eighteenth century entered Anglo-Indian usage to denote the exact opposite (‘tangled thickets’) see, Francis Zimmerman, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine (University of California Press, 1987), vii.
60 KNMA, 41–42.
61 ‘In Praise of Laksmi: Gurumay Performing the Jagar Part 1.’ Recorded for Sahapedia, Oct 18th 2018 in Bastar. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBiqrozQh_8.
62 See, ‘The Oral Epics of the Women of the Dandakaranya Plateau: A Preliminary Mapping’, Journal of Social Sciences 8, no. 2 (2004): 93–104, 99.
63 DSAPC. Box IN-4. ‘How the Madhya Pradesh Government is Fighting Drought and Widespread Scarcity.’ Government of Madhya Pradesh, 1973.
64 Currently Gond and Baiga women farmers in Mandla District, Madhya Pradesh are reviving the millets. Sajin Saju, ‘“Forgotten” Kodo-Kutki millets on a comeback trail in this MP tribal belt’, Indian Express, October 11, 2018.
65 Asha Hans, ‘Ch.9: Refugee Women and Children: Need for Protection and Care’, in Refugees and the State: Practices of Asylum and Care in India, 1947–2000, ed. Ranabir Samaddar (New Delhi: Sage, 2003), 355–395, 362.
66 Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism’, 388.
67 ‘Forest Land Lease to Tribals.’ Hitavad Bhopal, November 28, 1976.
68 Ibid.
69 Nandini Sundar, The Burning Forest: India’s War against the Maoists (New York: Verso Books, 2019). See also, Sundar, Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar (1854–2006), 2nd ed (Oxford University Press, 2008). Sundar and T.N. Madan, eds. Scheduled Tribes and their India: Politics, Identities, Policies and Work (Oxford University Press, 2016).
70 R.K. Barik, ‘Ch.2: Faulty Planning in a Tribal Region: The Dandakaranya Development Authority’, in Tribal Development in India: The Contemporary Debate, ed. Govind Chandra Rath (New Delhi: Sage, 2006), in passim.
71 These wide variations in statistics reflect the lack of a verified official record of these demographic shifts due to official cover-ups of the devastating toll of the government project. Ahmed, ‘Regional Development’, 76.