Excluded Areas as the limit of the political: the murky boundaries of Scheduled Areas in India

ABSTRACT

This paper outlines how entrenched ideas such as ‘state of nature’ and ‘traditional societies’, as outlined primarily in the political thought of liberal imperialists such as John Locke and Henry Maine, cause modern colonial and post-colonial states to enforce a ‘limit of the political’. It argues that such a limit of the political excludes from the political domain imaginaries of collective life shaped by communities that came to be categorised as tribal. By marking the influence of these categories on British parliamentary debates on Schedule VI of the Government of India Act, 1935, the arguments of Gopinath Bardoloi and his Sub-Committee Report on the ‘Excluded Areas’ of Assam, and on the Constituent Assembly Debates of India on 'Excluded Areas' and 'Partially Excluded Areas' in India, this paper demonstrates that a ‘limit of the political’ came to be enforced by the legal creation and maintenance of ‘murky boundaries’. It defines murky boundaries as non-dichotomous boundaries drawn between both people and areas to demarcate the gradated manner in which those the modern state categorises as tribes are included, partially excluded, and excluded altogether from the political. This paper argues that such murky boundaries were created so that the state could organise its standoffishness towards routine administration, standardisation, and legibility of its diverse tribal subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• State of nature
• traditional society
• liberal imperialism
• murky boundaries
• Scheduled Areas
• standoffish state

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 U. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); J. Pitts, ‘Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism’, Annual Review of Political Science 13 (2010): 211–55, https://doi.org/10.1l46/annurev.polisci.051508.214538.

2 B. Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); J. Tully, ‘Rediscovering America: Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights’, in An Approach to Political Philosophy Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

3 B. Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

4 K. Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

5 U. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought.

6 A. Naseemullah and P. Staniland, ‘Indirect Rule and Varieties of Governance’, Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions 29, no. 1 (January 2016): 13–30.

7 L. Jayaseelan, Conflict Mapping and Peace Processes in North East India (Guwahati: North East Social Research Centre, 2008).

8 N. Sundar, The Burning Forest: India's War in Bastar (New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2016).

9 A. Agrawal, Environmentality Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); P. Banerjee, ‘Writing the Adivasi: Some Historiographical Notes’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 53, no. 1 (2016); S. Baruah, In the Name of the Nation: India and Its Northeast (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020); G. Cederlöf, ‘Founding an Empire on India's North-Eastern Frontiers, 1790–1840 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198090571.003.0003; S. Guha, Beyond Caste : Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (London: Brill, 2013); V. Xaxa, State, Society, and Tribes: Issues in Post-Colonial India (New Delhi: Dorling Kindersley, 2008).

10 L. Tillin, ‘United in Diversity? Asymmetry in Indian Federalism’, Publius 37, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 45–67, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4624781; S. Tewari, Debating Tribe and Nation: Hutton, Thakkur, Ambedkar, and Elwin (1920s-1940s), vol. 86, NMML Occasional Paper: History and Society (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 2017); N. Sundar, The Scheduled Tribes and Their India: Politics, Identities, Policies, and Work (Oxford University Press, 2016), https://books.google.com/books?id=ObBRjwEACAAJ; N. Gopal Jayal, ‘Balancing Political and Ecological Values’, Environmental Politics 10, no. 1 (2001): 65–88, https://doi.org/10.1080/714000508.

11 J. Whitehead, ‘John Locke and the Governance of India's Landscape: The Category of Wasteland In Colonial Revenue and Forest Legislation’, Economic and Political Weekly 45, no. 50 (11 December 2010): 83–93.

12 R. Guha, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India (University of Chicago Press, 1999); P. Chatterjee, ‘The Curious Career of Liberalism in India’, Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 3 (2011): 687–96, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244311000412; K. Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism.; Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

13 S. Baruah, Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); N. Sundar, The Burning Forest: India's War in Bastar; N. Sundar, ‘Is Devolution Democratization?’, World Development 29, no. 12 (2001): 2007–23, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-750X(01)00085-7.

14 R. Chitkara, ‘Indigenous Peoples Rights to Land in India and Europe’, in Dimensions of Constitutional Democracy, ed. Anupama Roy and Michael Becker (Singapore: Springer, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3899-5_10.

15 A. Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). J. Pitts, ‘Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism’.

16 This tension is brought out most effectively in the contexts of Australia and Canada by the work of Duncan Ivison and James Tully. D. Ivison, Postcolonial Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); J. Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in the Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

17 K. Khan Suan Hausing, ‘Asymmetric Federalism and the Question of Democratic Justice in Northeast India’, India Review 13, no. 2 (2014): 87–111, https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2014.904151.

18 N. Gopal Jayal, ‘Balancing Political and Ecological Values’; P. Kashwan, ‘The Politics of Rights-Based Approaches in Conservation’, Elsevier 31 (March 2013): 613–26, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2012.09.009.

19 R. Bajpai, Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India (Oxford: Oxford University Preess, 2011).

20 Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism.

21 Naseemullah and Staniland, ‘Indirect Rule and Varieties of Governance’.

22 Hausing, ‘Asymmetric Federalism and the Question of Democratic Justice in Northeast India’; Tillin, ‘United in Diversity? Asymmetry in Indian Federalism’.

23 J. C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, The Yale ISPS Series (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

24 D. Slater and D. Kim, ‘Standoffish States: Nonliterate Leviathans in Southeast Asia’, TRaNS : Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia 3, no. 1 (January 2015): 25–44.

25 Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism.

26 P. Parmar, Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings, Cambridge Studies in Law and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139962896; Sundar, The Scheduled Tribes and Their India: Politics, Identities, Policies, and Work.

27 M. Pereira et al., Gender Implications of Tribal Customary Law: The Case of North East India (New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2017); M. Pereira et al., Grounded in Tradition, Seeking Change: The Khamptis of Arunachal Pradesh (Guwahati: North East Social Research Centre, 2018); M. Pereira et al., Continuity and Change: The Maras of Mizoram. (Guwahati: North East Social Research Centre, 2019).

28 D. Bhattacharyya, ‘History of Eminent Domain in Colonial Thought and Legal Practice’, Economic and Political Weekly 50, no. 50 (12 December 2015): 45; P. Bose, B. Arts, and H. van Dijk, ‘“Forest Governmentality”: A Genealogy of Subject-Making of Forest-Dependent “Scheduled Tribes” in India’, Land Use Policy 29 (2012): 664–73; G. Cederlöf, Founding an Empire on India's North-Eastern Frontiers, 1790–1840 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198090571.003.0001; A.G. Nilsen, Adivasi and the State: Subalternity and Citizenship in India's Bhil Heartland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

29 This paper relies on Timothy Mitchell's analysis of the role of social sciences in shaping 20th-century discourse and power structures. See T. Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

30 Whitehead, ‘John Locke and the Governance of India's Landscape: The Category of Wasteland In Colonial Revenue and Forest Legislation’.

31 Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism.

32 Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism, 1996; Tully, ‘Rediscovering America: Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights’.

33 This paradox was explained as an outcome of a paternalist strain in liberal thought Pitts, ‘Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism’.. This paternalist strain assumed that people cannot participate in a political community unless they adopted or ‘reached a stage in time when they could adopt’ the same modes of shaping their political lives as those in modern imperial centres Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). The racialisation of this paternalist understanding towards participation in the political was held responsible for justifying imperialist coercion over colonised people Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought.

34 J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett, 24th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 384–97.

35 Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism, 1996.

36 Tully, ‘Rediscovering America: Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights’. 139.

37 Whitehead, ‘John Locke and the Governance of India's Landscape: The Category of Wasteland in Colonial Revenue and Forest Legislation’.

38 Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

39 Bhattacharyya, ‘History of Eminent Domain in Colonial Thought and Legal Practice’.

40 R. Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); M. Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India's Central Provinces, 1860–1914 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Whitehead, ‘John Locke and the Governance of India's Landscape: The Category of Wasteland InColonial Revenue and Forest Legislation’.

41 G.A. Barton, ‘Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism’ (Doctor of Philosophy in History, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University, 1999), Proquest.

42 Cederlöf, Founding an Empire on India's North-Eastern Frontiers, 49.

43 Naseemullah and Staniland, ‘Indirect Rule and Varieties of Governance’.

44 Naseemullah and Staniland.

45 Baruah, In the Name of the Nation: India and Its Northeast, 29.

46 Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism.

47 Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984).

48 Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 Whitehead, ‘John Locke and the Governance of India's Landscape: The Category of Wasteland In Colonial Revenue and Forest Legislation’.

55 Ibid.

56 ‘Rights’ here was a fairly ambiguous category as they did not act as a guarantee from the colonial state to its colonised subjects.

57 Barton, ‘Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism’.

58 ‘The Scheduled Districts Act, 1874 Complete Act - Bare Act’, Pub. L. No. ACT No. 14 of 1874 (1874), https://www.legalcrystal.com/act/135088/the-scheduled-districts-act-1874-complete-act.

59 ‘Government of India Bill 1935: SIXTH SCHEDULE.—(Excluded Areas and Partially Excluded Areas)’, Vol 301 § (1935), https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1935/may/13/sixth-schedule-excluded-areas-and.

60 Ibid. While what this paper focuses on is the operation of murky boundaries as the technique of excluding tribal communities from the political, the debate constantly running parallel to, and sometimes entwined with, the formation of murky boundaries was the question of progress when it comes to tribal communities in particular. Unfortunately, there is little space here to delve into this specific question here as the subject matter would constitute a whole paper by itself.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity.

64 D. Das and A. Saikia, ‘Early Twentieth Century Agrarian Assam: A Brief and Preliminary Overview’, Economic and Political Weekly XLVI, no. 41 (8 October 2011): 72–80, https://www.epw.in/system/files/pdf/2011_46/41/Early_Twentieth_Century_Agrarian_Assam_A_Brief_and_Preliminary_Overview.pdf.

65 Barton, ‘Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism’.

66 Government of India Bill 1935: SIXTH SCHEDULE.—(Excluded Areas and Partially Excluded Areas.).

67 Government of India Bill 1935: SIXTH SCHEDULE.—(Excluded Areas and Partially Excluded Areas.).

68 G. Minto, ‘The Indian Papers of the 4th Earl of Minto: Foreign Department’, 1905 1899, MS. 12589-12594, National Library of Scotland, https://microform.digital/boa/documents/3081/foreign-department?q=Henry%20Maine#.

69 G. Bardoloi and North-East Frontier (Assam) Tribal and Excluded Areas Sub-Committee, ‘NORTH·EAST FRONTIER (ASSAM) TRIBAL AND EXCLUDED AREAS SUB-COMMITTEE: Volume II’ (New Delhi: Constituent Assembly of India, 1947), https://dspace.gipe.ac.in/xmlui/handle/10973/17705.

70 G. Bardoloi, ‘NORTH-EAST FRONTIER (ASSAM) TRIBAL AND EXCLUDED AREAS SUB-COMMIITEE: Volume I’ (New Delhi: Constituent Assembly of India, 1947).

71 Bardoloi and North-East Frontier (Assam) Tribal and Excluded Areas Sub-Committee, ‘NORTH·EAST FRONTIER (ASSAM) TRIBAL AND EXCLUDED AREAS SUB-COMMITTEE: Volume II’.

72 Ibid.

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid.

75 ‘Constituent Assembly Debates of India, Volume IV: Question of Representation’, IV § 4.26 (1947), https://www.constitutionofindia.net/constitution_assembly_debates/volume/4/1947-07-18?paragraph_number=75%2C74%2C73#4.26.%2075.

76 Constituent Assembly Debates of India, Volume IV: Question of Representation.

77 Ibid.

78 ‘Constituent Assembly of India Debates – Volume IX’, Pub. L. No. Sixth Schedule, IX 9.133 (1949).

79 Constituent Assembly of India Debates – Volume IX.

80 U. Mehta, ‘Constitutionalism’, in The Oxford Companion to Politics in India, ed. N. Gopal Jayal and P.B. Mehta (New Delhi: Oxford University Preess, 2010).

81 Constituent Assembly of India Debates – Volume IX.

82 M. Franke, War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas (London: Routledge, 2009).

83 M. Pereira, A. Gupta, and S. Rodrigues, Growing Up in a Conflict Zone: Children Surviving Conflict in Manipur (Guwahati: North East Social Research Centre, 2016).

84 S. Tewari, Debating Tribe and Nation: Hutton, Thakkur, Ambedkar, and Elwin (1920s–1940s).

85 Constituent Assembly of India Debates – Volume IX.

86 D. J. Rycroft and S. Dasgupta, eds., The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi, Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series (New York: Routledge, 2011).

87 Jayal, ‘Balancing Political and Ecological Values’.

88 Kashwan, ‘The Politics of Rights-Based Approaches in Conservation’.

89 Ibid.

90 W. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity; Q. Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/columbia/detail.action?docID=5334152.

91 Kashwan, ‘The Politics of Rights-Based Approaches in Conservation’.

92 Government of India, ‘THE PROVISIONS OF THE PANCHAYATS (EXTENSION TO THE SCHEDULED AREAS) ACT, 1996’, No. 40 of 1996 § (1996), https://tribal.nic.in/actRules/PESA.pdf; Kashwan, ‘The Politics of Rights-Based Approaches in Conservation’.

93 N. Sundar, ‘Pathalgadi Is Nothing but Constitutional Messianism So Why Is the BJP Afraid of It?’, Thewire.In, 16 May 2018, sec. Politics, Rights, https://thewire.in/rights/pathalgadi-is-nothing-but-constitutional-messianism-so-why-is-the-bjp-afraid-of-it.

94 C.R. Bijoy, ‘Forest Rights in the North East Inching towards Exclusion’, Economic and Political Weekly 54, no. 45 (November 2019): 17–19.

95 R. Ranjan, ‘Unraveling the Narratives of Adivasi Dispossession: A Case Study of Land Acquisition in Nagri Village, Jharkhand’, Development 60, no. 3–4 (2017): 227–34, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41301-018-0171-8; Bose, Arts, and van Dijk, ‘“Forest Governmentality”: A Genealogy of Subject-Making of Forest-Dependent “Scheduled Tribes” in India’; Nilsen, Adivasi and the State: Subalternity and Citizenship in India's Bhil Heartland.

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Shaunna Rodrigues

Shaunna Rodrigues is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation titled Anchoring Constitutionalism in Islam: Muslim Minorities and Justificatory Discourse in India, which outlines Islamic justifications for constitutionalism in India. She gratefully acknowledges intellectual inputs on versions of this article from Joshua Simon, Rahul Ranjan, and the anonymous reviewers.