Adivasi and peasant: Reflections on Indian social history

Abstract

This essay looks at recent historical approaches to tribal societies in India and examines their political implications. Building on this criticism, it synthesizes a range of secondary literature in history and anthropology, in an attempt to formulate an alternative approach that locates tribal societies within the wider framework of south Asian history and is capable, at the same time, of marking changing patterns for different periods of the past. Finally it examines the way the word peasant is used in historical writing in order to show that the special history of tribal societies and their conversion into peasants in the colonial period is fundamental to an understanding of contemporary Indian society.

Notes

1 See Richards [1993: 17, 130 and 169].

2 For example Singh [1966], Hardiman [1987], Sundar [1998], Skaria [1999] and S. Guha [1999].

3 See S. Guha [1999].

4 Hardiman [1995: 13].

5 R. Guha [1983].

6 Skaria [1999: 38–40].

7 S. Guha [1999].

8 S. Guha [1999: 201].

9 Hardiman [1995: 12].

10 Skaria [1999: 149].

11 Grigson [1991: 125–30].

12 Hardiman [1995: 12].

13 Patel [2000].

14 Elwin [1949 (1991): xiii].

15 Sontheimer [2004: 401–19].

16 Sontheimer [2004: 409].

17 Ibid.

18 See Hobsbawm [1990].

19 Hardiman [1995: 15–16] and Skaria [1999: 273–8].

20 S. Guha [1999: 202–3].

21 S. Guha [1999: 5].

22 Anderson [1974: 213].

23 See Kosambi [1956 (1975)].

24 See for example Sharma [1958 (1990): 332–45].

25 For the Cheros, see Singh [1985: 39–40 and 79–80]; for the Raj-Gonds, see Fürer-Haimendorf [1979: 122–51].

26 Singh [1985: 45].

27 Fürer-Haimendorf [1979: 122–51].

28 Singh [1985: 44].

29 Singh [1985: 102, 212].

30 Kolff [1990: 59, 184].

31 Subrahmanyam [2004: 16–17].

32 See Wink [1986: 193–4].

33 See Kumar [1968: 162, 172] for the dramatic increase in cultivated area in western Maharashtra in the nineteenth century.

34 Habib [1999: 21–4].

35 Hardiman [1995: 68–85].

36 Hardiman [1995: 81].

37 See Breman [1985 and 1994].

38 Breman [1985: 72].

39 Breman [1985: 134].

40 Wolf [1969: xiv–xv].

41 Habib [1995: 175].

42 Habib [1999: 392–4].

43 Chandra [2003: 86].

44 Chandra [2003: 100–101].

45 Chandra [2003: 107].

46 Beteille [1974: 40–74].

47 S. Guha [1999: 116–17].

48 S. Guha [1999: 119].

49 Kolff [1990: 12–13].

50 See Kolff [1990] for an extended discussion.

51 Bayly [1983].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shashank Kela

Shashank Kela worked as an organizer in a trade union of adivasi peasants in western Madhya Pradesh during much of the 1990s. He's currently working on a book length study of adivasi history and politics in the region from the colonial period. Acknowledgements: to D.W Karuna, my collaborator in an ongoing book length study of which this is an edited extract. To the New India Foundation, Bangalore, for a fellowship that made some of the research and all the writing on the larger project possible.