FROM MILLENNIA TO THE MILLENNIUM:

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL HISTORY OF

by

WALTER ALEXANDER HUBER

B.A., University off British Columbia, 1975

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF

THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS

IN

THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

(Department of Anthropology and Sociology)

We accept this thesis as conforming

to the )j7equ-i

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

June 1984

® Walter Alexander Huber In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference

I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission.

Department of

The University of British Columbia 2075 Wesbrook Place Vancouver, Canada V6T 1W5 ii

ABSTRACT

In this thesis I present an anthropological history of a remote and little-known area of , the ex-Princely

State of Bastar. While numerous ethnographic studies have been made of the predominantly tribal people of Bastar, there have been no attempts to contextualize properly the anthropology of what is now . It is for this reason that an historical approach was chosen.

This approach has led to the uncovering of a number of salient, anthropological problems: firstly, the identifica• tion of tribes in India, which process has engendered both definitional difficulties in the anthropology of India and less than felicitous behavioural consequences for those involved in the process itself; secondly, the nature of the political structure of Bastar State, leading to questions as to how it, and similar 'tribal' or 'Hindu-tribal' states of

Middle India, came into being -- as well as an inquiry into the features which maintained Bastar's integrity; and lastly, a consideration, via a biographical account of the last king of Bastar, of the millenarian character of con• temporary Bastar history and, in close relation, the problem of divine kingship.

In response to the first problem I show that from an

'emic' perspective the term tribe is an incontestably valid and meaningful concept in understanding the majority of Bas-

tar peoples. From an anthropologically objective point of

view I take on the scholarly controversy of 'tribe' versus

'caste' in India in order to demonstrate that also on the

level of disciplinary discussion the term 'tribe' has a meaningful place, at least in reference to Bastar.

In regard to the second problem, i.e., of Bastar state

formation, my description initially concentrates on the pol•

itical aspects of the Hindu-tribal symbiosis, showing that

the early Hindu (Kakatiya) monarchy of Bastar and the area's

distinct tribal polity were nevertheless permutations of

each other linked by weak central authority. This is fol•

lowed by a cultural focus on Bastar divine kingship by which

it is shown that the true integrity of the kingdom rested on

a ritual plane.

Extending the theme of divine kingship into modern

times, the narrative of Bastar's last Maharaja details the

confrontation of religious with secular power, and how the

outcome of this confrontation led to a millenarian movement

headed by a Hindu holy man believed to be the reincarnation

of the last king.

I conclude this thesis by drawing all these themes to•

gether, mainly in light of the writings of the doyen of Ind•

ian anthropology, Louis Dumont. With particular regard to

his writings on Indian kingship and his theory of caste, I

show the case of Bastar to be an important exception, and IV although not disproving Dumont's theories, I demonstrate the need for their modification. In the last analysis, the discussion in this thesis centres on divine kingship as a problem in the dualistic nature of power. V

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE

Title Page i Abstract ii Table of Contents v Illustrations vi

CHAPTER 1. The problem of Bastar, an introduction 1

CHAPTER 2. Physical background and ethnographic intro- 9

duction

CHAPTER 3. Historical context and Bastar state formation 36

CHAPTER 4. Synchronic context of divine kingship 63

CHAPTER 5. Historical prologue to modern divine kingship 97

CHAPTER 6. The last king and the advent of the millennium 112 CHAPTER 7. The meaning of Bastar history and some implica- 174 tions for the anthropology of India

BIBLIOGRAPHY 216 vi

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAP PAGE

1. Bastar District, 14(a) 1

Chapter 1 : The problem of Bastar, an introduction

With few exceptions, the anthropological study of India has been dominated by a close focus on small-scale units of

research: an individual tribe, a particular village, a spe•

cific caste, or, where the interest is cultural, a concept• ual domain abstracted from a relatively narrow context.

There are good practical reasons for this, and in fact it is

the hallmark of anthropology, the ethnographic enterprise, which is responsible for such microscopic approaches. After

all, "it is with the kind of material produced by long-term, mainly...qualitative, highly participative, and almost

obsessively fine-comb field study in confined contexts that

the mega-concepts ...(of) contemporary social science...--

legitimacy, modernization,, integration, conflict, charisma,

structure,...meaning -- can be given the sort of sensible

actuality that makes it possible to think not only realist•

ically and concretely about them, but, what is more import•

ant, creatively with them" (Geertz 1974: 23). In short,

"small facts speak to large issues..." (ibid.), and this,

for the most part, describes my own orientation to the

anthropology of Bastar, a former of India.

However, beginning with Wilfred Grigson (1938), and

continued in the main by Elwin (1943, 1947), Thusu (1965),

Hajra (1970), Jay (1 970), Popoff (1 980), and most recently 2

Gell (1981, 1982), the study of Bastar has really not risen above 'small facts'. These, in the form of study after study of particular tribes, have not addressed larger issues, nor for the most part have they in any detail considered the larger context of which they form parts. The result has been a series of monographs and articles existing as fragments of a larger, until now untold, story.

The larger story, or more precisely, the hitherto unavailable one, is in the first instance the problem of

Bastar. Although each successive study has added to the fund of knowledge concerning the tribes of Bastar, they remain as isolated cases, existing as if in a vacuum, the perfunctory setting of context in most cases quite insufficient to real•

ize that "there must have been some institutions or system

in this apparently unordered Bastar to have kept her togeth• er and free..." (Grigson 1938: 14). Grigson's insight here serves to indicate that the problem of Bastar, the larger story involving the development of the structure that held

its parts together, is a problem of history. Appropriately, as Levi-Strauss has said of history, "its method...proves to be indispensable for cataloguing the elements of any struct• ure whatever... in their entirety" (1 972: 262). History in this sense is indispensible for getting at the holistic aspect of structures, even while concentrating on elements.

Of course, this varies with the kind of history that is presented, in Levi-Strauss' terms, with low or high-powered

history: 3 Biographical and anecdotal history, right at the bottom of the scale, is low-powered history, which is not intelligible in itself...(it) is the least explanatory, but it is the richest in point of information, for it considers individuals in their particularity and details for each of them the shades of. character, the twists and turns of their motives, the phases of their deliberations. This information is schematized, put in the background and finally done away with as one passes to histor• ies of progressively greater 'power' (ibid.: 261).

In this thesis both kinds of history are to some extent

present: the biographical in chapter five and the more

schematic in chapter two, although in the former there are

some interpretations interspersed and issues raised which

elevate biography to the level of institutions.

On the other hand, this thesis is not merely concerned

with a cataloguing of historical elements, but also with

their meanings and the contexts of these meanings in terms

of their stability over time. Thus, in the second instance,

the problem becomes one of reconciling history with anthro- i pology, diachrony with synchrony. I do not mean to imply

that the problem has been, or even can be, overcome, rather

to indicate that an attempt is made to transcend the

minutiae of ethnography and history without sacrificing

their relevance to larger issues, the structure and meaning

of Bastar state.

I begin in chapter one with an introduction to Bastar

as a scarcely paralleled, somewhat pristine backwater of Indian history and geography. After establishing its physi• cal remoteness and inaccessibility, factors in its enduring isolation and cultural continuities over the centuries, I then present a consideration of its predominantly tribal inhabitants. This takes shape as a discussion on the question of identity of the so-called Gonds. Over the centuries the term Gond has gained a currency without any real value, that is, without any true reference. In the case of the Bastar 'Gonds' the lack of a negotiated identity has been supplanted by a series of images emanating from the non-tribal populace of Bastar -- and then elaborated and fixed by anthropological publication. The result is a semantic field composed of a combination of generalized,

Hindu representations of tribal people and scientific attributes used to distinguish the various tribes of

Bastar. My analysis of this semantic 'jungle' is intended to point out the precariousness of this one-sided expression of identity mobilization and how such cultural stereotyping serves the interests of the non-tribal, that is Hindu popu• lation of the area. In the last sections of chapter one a . more conventional ethnographic description is offered, followed by a structural statement of the ideological rela• tions between and Gond religion so that sociologic• ally a premise is laid for the nature of Bastar state.

The elaboration of this premise takes place in chapter two where, following an account of ethnohistorical 5

consciousness and a summary treatment of early Bastar history, the development of the political structure of

Bastar is analyzed in terms of a model of territorial organ•

ization prevalent in the 15th century in the

area north of Bastar. The analysis suggests that in this

development a point of stability was reached which saw egal•

itarian tribal society smoothly integrated with hierarchical

Hindu polity headed by divine monarchy.

In a synchronic mode chapter three endeavors to show

that the integral nature of Bastar was based not so much on

politico-economic factors as on a ritual synthesis of Gond

and Hindu religion at their highest levels. While at times

unavoidably inferential the argument in this chapter draws

substance from an analysis of Gond theology, and from an

examination of the royal Dasara rituals during which the

divinity of the king and his symbolic marriage to the

dynastic tutelary goddess -- equivalent to the Gond goddess

of the earth -- is celebrated.

Chapters four and five take on a narrative form which

concentrates on events involving the political actualities

of kingship in Bastar, focusing especially in chapter five

on the charismatic and apparently atavistic qualities of the

last divine king of Bastar, Pravir Chandra Bhanj Deo. To

paraphrase Levi-Strauss, the modern story of Pravir is a

fairly detailed exposition of 'twists and turns of motive,

phases of deliberation and shades of character'; but it 6 describes not so much an atavism as a set of continuities in the nature of Bastar kingship. These continuities, part of a scripturally-based Hindu tradition of kingship, are also contained in the follow-up to the last Bastar kingship: the millenarian movement of the reincarnated king, the mendicant

Bihari Dass. An interpretation of Bihari Dass' millennium rounds out the anthropological history of the ex-princely state of Bastar.

The conclusion to this thesis attempts to link together a number of implications present in the body of the text.

These implications speak more directly than in the main text to the 'large issues' of social science -- at least as the latter, in particular anthropology, has been practiced in relation to India. The discussion proceeds in a reflective manner, using as a sort of foil the writings of Louis

Dumont, whose work has become a benchmark in Indian anthro• pology. Dumont's relevance is traced via his position on three closely interrelated topics: the tribe/caste distinc• tion; the nature of the state in traditional India (his relevance here is more indirect); and the character of

Indian kingship. The data from Bastar are held up against

Dumont's pronouncements and in some cases the resulting confrontations suggest that the author has clearly over• reached himself as, for example, in the problem of tribes and castes in India. Ultimately, Dumont's major contribution to Indian anthropology, his theory of caste society, is 7 also called into question. Arrived at in relation to

Dumont's essay on ancient Indian kingship (1970: 62-88), the challenge of Bastar resides in it being a counterfactual to the 'secularization' of kingship, which Dumont considers essential to the existence of the caste system. However, upon closer examination, divine kingship in Bastar is found not so much to 'disprove' Dumont's theory as to call for an enlargment of its contextual scope. For the latter purpose the research and analysis presented in this thesis is only a beginning step.^ 8 Footnotes to Chapter 1

A short period of fieldwork for this thesis was under• taken between December 1979 and April 1980. The research consisted firstly in an effort to obtain else• where unavailable documentary data from government archives, newspaper files and records in India. A number of interviews were also conducted with various individuals who were either closely involved with Pravir Chandra Bhanj Deo or who were otherwise import• ant figures in post-independence Bastar history. Much of the data on the Bihari Dass movement come from discussions with 'Mana' Bajpai, a lawyer representing Bihari Dass, and Kirit Doshi, a vehemently anti-Bihari Dass journalist living in Jagdalpur. The fieldwork thus described is most evident in chapter five, although my documentary research in India occa• sionally plays a crucial role in the early chapters concerning pre-independence Bastar history. My acquaintance with the Gonds of Bastar, resulting from approximately three months travel through Maria and Muria villages in 1977-78, is as yet only impression• istic. For an initial introduction to Bastar and its tribal people I am indebted to Vikas Bhatt, former director of the Zonal Anthropological Museum at Jagdal• pur. For additional help and moral support I would also like to record my thanks to 'Shashi' Pandey, Sharad^ Varma and Niranjan Mahawar. Although he will likely never read this, Mangtu Ram Dugga, Muria of Narayanpur tehsil, also deserves a certain gratitude for managing my exposure to some of Bastar's tribal villages. 9

Chapter 2: Physical background and ethnographic introduction

Approaching Bastar within the geographical borders of modern India, the thought arises that one is entering a

region little affected by the consequences of agricultural

over-exploitation. Contrasted to the denuded, relatively

featureless plains of northern India with its immense popu•

lation densities, the cool, deciduous forests of Bastar

constitute a welcoming sanctuary. The many and various hills, valleys and streams of Bastar, aesthetically inviting

and soothing, are nothing so much as a refuge' from the

ever-increasing press and crush of humanity with which so much of India has become burdened. Journeying southwards

from the monotonous Gangetic heartlands, traversing the

low-lying Vindhya range of hills, and once more south-east• wards across the flatlands of what used to be called the

Central Provinces, one enters Bastar as if to penetrate an

area untainted by the ravages of history.

Such is of course an initial illusion, yet one's

sensory responses do seem to inspire the romance of the pastoral vision. To the Indian sensibility, if one may speak

so generally, Bastar evokes something more to the contrary:

a fear and mistrust of nature untransformed, of mysterious,

dark jungle unrelieved by civilized community. But in the

Western perspective, there is undoubtedly a temptation to 10 eulogize Bastar's natural environment.

Verrier Elwin, the English missionary-turned-ethno• grapher, and the man most responsible for bringing Bastar to the attention of the rest of India as well as to anthropolo• gy, certainly exemplifies the pastoral sentiment. His des• cription of Bastar resonates with the fondness so character• istic of his explorations of India's tribal hinterlands:

The great plain of Chhattisgarh stretches down past Raipur and Dhantari in hot and dusty monotony till it spends itself against the hills of Ranker. Thenceforward the journey is a never-failing delight; as the traveller moves towards the Bastar plateau the countryside breaks into song about him; he is greeted by hardy smiling woodmen singing at their work, the skyline is broken by fantastic piles of rock; all around is the evergreen sal forest. Presently he sees looming up before him a row of sharply-rising hills, the sentinels that stand guard before the country of the ghotul. The white pillars that mark the boundary of the State are soon passed, and the long steep ascent of the Keskal Ghat must be essayed. From the summit there is a magnificent view of the great sea of hill and forest below (1947: 3).

Even to a writer less prone to sentimental excess -- I am here referring to W.V. Grigson, a scholar-administrator who made the first serious contribution to Bastar ethnography -- the appeal of Bastar, "that beautiful land", was undeniable

(Cf. Grigson 1938). Modern day observers too, such as the present writer, have also succumbed to the attractions of an environment that remains as being what much of India, long ages past, must once have been. In Bastar, one seems spared the ennui and disenchanted irony of Levi-Strauss' tristes tropiques. 11

The modern district of Bastar lies in the south-east corner of Madhya Pradesh State in Central India. With an area of 39,060 km2 it is the largest district in India, comparable to the size of Belgium. The population is

1,515,956, of which 68.2 percent is classified as Scheduled

Tribes. Of the total population, 98 percent is rural. Popu• lation density is well below the Indian average of 182 per km2 at 39 per km2. Bastar is thus a relatively under-popu• lated area and this fact has encouraged, over a lengthy span of time, considerable in-migration, mainly from Hindi or

Hindi dialect-speaking areas to the north. In more recent times, this fact likely played a major role in the decision by the Government of India to resettle large numbers of refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.

Topographically, the greater part of the district is an undulating plateau of about 2000 feet which drops to near sea level on the plains of south-west Bastar. However, there are also a few hilly ranges in the south and west, with peaks rising to 4,000 feet. Bastar is bisected by the Indra- wati River which neatly provides the district with north and south designations. Two other important rivers drain the region: the Mahanadi in the north flowing to the Bay of

Bengal, and the Sabari River running south into the Godavari

River of Andhra Pradesh. The Indrawati originates in the hills of Orissa, neighbouring in the east, and flows across

Bastar's western boundary into Chanda District of Maharash- 12 tra State. After this it also conjoins with the Godvari at the latter's middle reaches.

The climate of the northern half of Bastar, because of its elevation, is comparatively cool, while the southern plains tend to be hot and humid. Average rainfall is almost

50 inches, falling for the most part during the monsoon months of June to October. The winter season, which runs from November to March, is mainly dry and temperate, while the spring months, culminating in May, bring rapid increases in temperature, with extremes approaching 120 degrees Fahr• enheit.

A large part of Bastar, distributed over 56.8 percent of the area, is covered by tropical moist, deciduous forests which are comprised of about 100 species, mostly hardwood such as teak, sal (Shorea robusta) and laurel. The balance, about 20 percent, is made up of bamboo. This degree of forest cover is unusually high for most of India, and has always been considered, at least since Bastar came to out• side notice, a primary target for resource development. The present State and Central Government authorities have con• tinued this tradition of fostering plans to exploit Bastar1s commercial wood product potential.1 In addition to hard• woods, Bastar's other major resource lies in mineral deposits, in particular the rich iron ore areas of Raoghat in north Bastar and of Bailadila in the south. The Bailadila deposits have been developed and the extracted ore is sent 13 to Japan on long-term contract, For this purpose a rail line has been constructed to connect the mines with the port of

Vishkapatam in Andhra Pradesh. This is the only rail link that Bastar possesses and has only recently begun to include passenger service.

Bastar's network of roads is similarly minimal. There is one main highway, essentially a single lane running north-south approximately 180 miles, which connects the capital Jagdalpur (pop. 25,000) with the city of Raipur to the north, the main urban centre in Chhattisgarh. Motor travel along this route can often be nerve-wracking as oncoming traffic forces each vehicle onto a precarious dirt shoulder in order to pass by without collision. Secondary roads run east-west, one in north Bastar leading to Narayan- pur, a small town some 40 miles west of , a slight• ly larger town situated on the national highway about two hours by bus north of Jagdalpur. A second western running road originates at Jagdalpur and proceeds 134 miles through

Gidam, Bijapur and Bhopalpatnam up to the Maharashtra border, with a branch at Gidam which connects up to Dante- wara, site of the Danteshwari goddess temple, and somewhat beyond to Bacheli at the foot of the Bailadila hills. There is also a southern extension which runs from Jagdalpur 114 miles to Sukma and Konta from which latter town there is a road link to Warangal in Andhra Pradesh. In addition to these paved roads, there are a number of fair-weather forest 14 tracks which lead through various portions of the interior of Bastar, but these tend to skirt most areas without pene• trating them. Aside from this over-all meagre network of roads upon which, except for the Jagdalpur-Raipur route, a rather infrequent bus service plies, "the principle means o locomotion (is) travel by foot over jungle paths" (Jay 1970

39).^ This is the main logistical reason why there is relatively little administrative intervention in tribal affairs and it is revealing to note that the bulk of tribal village settlement patterns tends to avoid proximity to the main roads.

For purposes of administration, Bastar is divided into

8 tehsils: Bhanupratapur, Ranker, Narayanpur and Rondagaon in the north; Bijapur, Dantewara, and Ronta in the south; with Jagdalpur tehsil straddling the central, eastern section of the district. The tehsil headquarters, after which the tehsils are named and where revenue and judicial administrative activities are concentrated, are fairly even ly spaced in relation to the distribution of population. At the apex of the administrative hierarchy, located in Jagdal pur, is the Collector, an official who directs and oversees all judicial, revenue and developmental functions in the district. The bureaucracy over which the Collector is para• mount at the district level is in large part patterned on the British system of administration of pre-independence

India, and with mostly minor variations is still cumber- MAP 1

MAP OF BASTAR DISTRICT, MADHYA PRADESH

Chhattisgarh

Rajnandagaon • / astar strict \ \ Drug f s District \ ^ : y/} Raipur i. ' J^'s District

Orissa Kondagaoji State Maharashtra

State .v

River Godavari district highway other road river

Andhra Pradesh State

100 kilometres SOURCE: Survey of India Map, 1973 15

somely prevalent over most of the country. Although a civil

servant, the Collector's is the most powerful political

position in the region. In some ways, it is the Collector who has implicitly succeeded, since 1948, to the mantle of

the kingship which previous to that time characterized the

polity of Bastar. Before turning to the beginnings of the

historical process (or at least as much of it as can be

recovered) which culminated, indeed much later than at

Indian Independence, in the King's supersession by the

Collector, it is appropriate to round out the present

chapter with some ethnographic considerations.

Generically, the tribal people of Bastar are known as

Gonds, a term perceived as pejorative by many of those to

whom it is applied. While it would thus be preferable to use

their own name for themselves, that is, Koitor3, the terms

Gond and Gondi (denoting the Dravidian, non-literate lan•

guage spoken by Gonds) will have to be retained for reasons

of their pervasiveness and antiquity in the anthropological

and historical literature.

This literature (summarized by von Furer-Haimendorf

1979) reveals that the Gonds of Bastar are only a few of the

many Gond groups that populate the area covered by the

present state of Madhya Pradesh. There are also Gond groups

found in eastern Maharashtra, northern Andhra Pradesh, and

some minor branches in Orissa. Their total population of

over 4 million, out of an all-India tribal population that

V 16 is approaching 40 million,^ along with a political promin• ence reaching back several centuries, underlies the asser• tion that "among the tribal populations of India there is none which rivals (the Gonds) in numerical strength and historic importance..." (von Furer-Haimendorf 1974: 206). On the other hand, it is doubtful, strictly speaking, as to whether any such group as "the Gonds" actually exists. For rather than possessing any apparent cultural or linguistic homogeneity, less than 50 percent of the so-called Gonds speak Gondi; and of those that do, many speak dialects that are barely, if at all intelligible to each other. To this diversity must be added a variety of types of subsistence activities, from the axe-and-hoe, shifting cultivation of isolated hill-dwelling peoples to the sedentary, plough agriculture of plains-living groups who are hardly distin• guishable in most respects from their Hindu peasant neigh• bours.

The question then arises as to just who are "the

Gonds", and more specifically (in hope of a particular sort of answer) where have they come from. The responses have perforce been couched in the usual origin-and-migration type of ethnological conjecture which most modern anthropology tends to eschew. This does not inhibit (naturally enough) the venerable Gond expert, von Furer-Haimendorf, from tackl• ing the question: "Indeed, I believe that we shall fail in our approach to the Gond problem -- one of the cardinal 17 problems of Deccan enthology -- unless we envisage the possibility that the tribes now known as Gonds, far from being the dispersed offshoots of a once more homogeneous people, attained a certain and very limited measure of cultural uniformity only when they came under the sway of the same dominant linguistic influence" (1979: 2). The

Dravidian influence, he goes on to say, need not have been the result of wholesale migrations from South India, rather

it would be "sufficient to postulate the invasion of a people limited in numbers but superior to the older tribal folks in organization and material equipment, and the subse• quent spread of its Dravidian language and perhaps certain elements of its culture among the tribes previously speaking one or several older tongues" (ibid.). In the absence of any substantial data to support this hypothesis, even if it is

indirectly buttressed by the common Indian occurrence of a tribal tongue being lost due to its replacement by a foreign language, one can only agree to its plausibility as a specu• lation. Even so, as von Furer-Haimendorf himself admits, the

Gond question "will perhaps remain forever unanswered..."

(1 979: 3).

Part of the intractability of the Gond 'problem1, which for most purposes is a non-problem, lies in the naming pro• clivities of non-tribal peoples. I shall have more to say on

the question of names below but it is useful to keep in mind

the following: 18 Everywhere it is...usual to call primitive tribes by the local Hindu name for them, and not by their own name for themselves. So over much of India the prevailing Hindu name Gond, and not Koi, is used; and with his usual passions for standardization the official in India has tried gradually to call the Koitor race Gonds, whatever the name by which they call themselves or the local vernacular name for them, and even to include under the generic term Gond other races or tribes who are not Koitor.... If official and ethnographer would always use the names by which tribesmen call themselves when speaking their own language, we should possibly find many of the so-called branches of the primi• tive races not branches at all, but merely classi• fied as such in the past owing to unintelligent failure to realize that in different tracts differ• ent Hindus have used different names for the same race or tribe (Grigson 1938: 34-35).

The name Gond itself originally referred mainly to (a man of) a low tribe (Popoff 1980: 1).

Whatever the causes of the confusion, we are left with the problematic fact of ethnographic diversity lumped under the term Gond. Initially at least, linguistic criteria can be employed to sort out some of this diversity. Thus, aside from those Hinduized Gond groups now speaking local dialects of Hindi, Telugu or Marathi, the true Gondi-speaking popula• tions can be classified along lines of broad similarity.

These lines serve to enclose a number of blocks of Gond groupings which are internally relatively homogeneous but which differ quite considerably in language and culture from other such groupings. In Madhya Pradesh, the Gonds of Betul,

Chhindwara and Seoni districts form one such block; the former states of Kawardha, Sakti, Raigarh, and Sarangarh, once known as the Chhattisgarh States and at the time 19

(pre-1947) ruled by Gond , form another. In what is known as Maharashtra, there are two districts, Yeotmal and

Chanda, which together with the contiguous district of

Adilabad in Andhra Pradesh, can also be considered an area

of Gond cultural uniformity (von Furer-Haimendorf 1979: 3).

At variance with these, as well as with the Gonds of the

former Chhattisgarh States and of some of the northern

districts of Madhya Pradesh, are the main Gond groups of

Bastar: the Muria, the Hill Maria, and the Bison-horn Maria.

Here unfortunately, the naming problem reasserts

itself: ethnographer and native have combined to give the

Bastar Gonds distinct but somewhat specious identities. The

problem has the same source, the external imposition of names unrelated to true differences. However, Bastar tribal names have been given a narrower and more complexly symbolic

currency through ethnographic fieldwork as interpreted in,

and fixed by, anthropological publications (esp. Grigson

1938, in which was introduced the designations Hill and

Bison-horn Maria; and Elwin 1943, 1947, which followed,

often enthusiastically, Grigson's more sober lead).

First of all introduced via the non-tribal (mostly

Hindu) experience of tribal society, Bastar tribal names were little more than geographical or otherwise external

distinctions attached to a certain amount of apocryphal,

received wisdom. Adopted by non-academic anthropologists

(Grigson and Elwin, the determinitive Bastar sources) who 20 more or less rejected Hindu prejudices, tribal names were then textualized not only in positive, i.e., 'objective' terms, but also in judgmental language that sought to modify or correct prevailing images. Now, apart from the debatable validity of separating these groups on the basis of super• ficial differences, the outcome has been a concatenation of images, some affirmative, some derogatory, but all stereo• typical to the extent that non-tribal attitudes and behav• iour towards tribals have become characterized by supercili• ous misconceptions. This is not an unusual situation of course, but in Bastar it has contributed to the notion that tribal people are a 'commodity' of which to take advantage, especially in terms of unskilled labour, goods and other services, as well as illicit enjoyments. This will become clear in the following composite portraits of the three main

Bastar Gond groups.

I shall begin with the Muria who are found to the north of the Indrawati River, mainly in the tehsils of Narayanpur and Kondagaon. Along with the Todas of South India and the

Nagas of the North-east, the Muria are one of the most famous tribes of India. Their fame extends beyond the bound• aries of anthropology into the realm of the Indian public imagination. The subjects of many photographic expeditions, it is not unusual to see the Muria depicted in the litho• graphs and calendar posters so ubiquitous all over India.

This position of renown is largely the result of the highly affectionate attention paid to the Muria in both scholarly 21 publications and the popular press by Verrier Elwin. Even now, forty years after Elwin's exuberant affirmations of

Muria morality and culture, this group still epitomizes for many non-tribal Indians the Noble Savage part of their image of tribal life. This is often articulated by referring to the Muria as exemplars of aesthetic and sensual expression which is found lacking in non-tribal culture. More than any other aspect of Muria society, it is the gotul, or youth dormitory, which is the source of this high-profile image.

Much like Margaret Mead's early research in the South

Pacific, Elwin's writings championed what he saw as the un• trammelled, yet not irresponsible adolescent sexuality and cultural vigor of the Muria gotul as a healthy antidote to twentieth century Hindu Victorianism. It would have been to his chagrin had Elwin realized that his promotions would at• tract as much or more prurient as admiring interest in the

Muria.5 On the other hand, perhaps he did so realize for his writings often inveighed against the Hindu reformer or

"uplifter", as well as against the pretextual and disruptive visits of the minor administrative official in actuality in• tent on his desire "to enjoy", as the Indian English euphem• ism has it. At any rate, it has become a standard Muria res• ponse to strangers' inquiries to deny strongly the preval• ence of any sexuality in connection with the gotul.

Situated in the mountainous, south-western portion of

Narayanpur tehsil, the Hill Maria, known among the Gonds of

Bastar as Meta Koitor, that is Gonds of the highlands, also 22

have the gotul. However, although still set apart spatially

in the village and remaining a locus of cultural expression

(song, myth and dance) as among the Muria, the youth dormit•

ory here is not of both sexes but is restricted to young,

unmarried males. Seen as a simpler, more straightforward

institution, the Hill Maria gotul has been taken as the

prototype of the Muria gotul. As such, it has been adduced

as part of the evidence for regarding the Hill Maria as the

original Bastar Gonds from which, following plainswards migrations, have evolved both the Muria and, to the south of

the Indrawati, the Bison-horn Maria.

The Abhujmar area (about 2400 kn^), which is home to

the Hill Maria, is the most inaccessible region of Bastar

District. It has traditionally been shunned by non-tribals

because of its perceived character as a wild and insalubri•

ous country, inhabited by wild savages. The hilly terrain, with access almost exclusively over steep, jungle paths,

certainly discourages all but the most intrepid of visit•

ors. For the few, unannounced outsiders that may arrive at

interior Hill Maria villages, there awaits the disconcerting

probability of a sudden, headlong exodus of all the

villagers that might happen to be present. This obviously

gives the lie to their 'fierce savage' reputation and

evinces rather a more accurate stereotype of the Hill Maria

as a ~shy, pacific people prone more to flight from, than

confrontation with, foreign intrusion. 23

Given the prevalence of the ancient Indian tribal

tendency to retreat from the aggressive newcomer into relatively inaccessible refuge, it is not improbable that the Hill Maria regard their habitat as a sanctuary. It is definitely the case that some of the early British adminis•

trators of Bastar State so viewed the Hill Maria's choice of domain, and thus introduced in the late 1920's certain administrative measures to maintain the protective function of its isolation. These steps were taken in favor of a very gradualist policy of tribal development, which was formulat• ed to prevent the all-too-common occurrence of cultural and economic devastation attendant upon the unrestricted open-

ing-up of relatively untouched tribal areas. Even today, the

Abhujmar, with its stable population of about 13,000, remains mostly unsurveyed and special permission is required from the District Collector for any non-official entry into the area.6

The; Hill Maria, considered the most 'primitive' of

Bastar Gonds, are, as mentioned, thereby assigned prototypi• cal status in the progressive differentiation of Bastar tribal culture(s). The Muria immediately to their east, epitomized by the more complex gotul system, are thus viewed as one offshoot, while the Bison-horn Maria to the south are seen as another. The Bison-horn get their name from the impressive head-dress worn by male dancers, particularly at marriage celebrations. Elwin described (1943: 18-19) the 24 dance as a "superb spectacle":

The men, in their splendid head-dresses of bison horns and carrying their long drums, move in a large circle with a great variety of turns and changes: the 'bison' charge and fight each other, pick up rings or leaves on the points of their horns, and chase the girl dancers. The girls, each with a dancing stick in her right hand, form a long line and go round and through the men dancers with many different movements and steps.... Masked mummers, clowns dressed in straw, naked acrobats with enormous genitalia, add to the gaiety of the scene.

Elwin, in another context (1964: 161), goes on to remark

that "this headdress, and the dance, is the sole expression of the Maria's aesthetic sensibility.... Everything they have to say goes into the dance." Typical of Elwin's hyper• bolic enthusiasn for tribal culture, such exaggeration

serves to indicate the bias towards the exterior which marks

the identification of Bastar Gonds. The name Bison-horn was only comparatively recently coined (Grigson 1938) and with

it a superficial distinction has since been raised to the

level of emblematic yet seemingly intrinsic identity.7

On the other hand, although somewhat analogously, the

Bison-horn Maria have come to be known in a decidedly darker

light. In this instance, it is their homicidal proclivities

that have signified "Bison-horn" as a distinction sui generis. Reacting to his discovery of a relatively high murder rate among the Bison-horn, Grigson resorted to a kind of psychological portraiture to account for it: ...the Bison-horn is a man of far stronger feelings than the Hill Maria. The former actually runs amuck on occasion like the Malay;...(He) is subject to sudden fits of blind rage... capable of nursing his revenge for a long time...(and) will in his fury declare an implacable enmity by stalking around his foe's house three times, either plucking straws from the thatch, or whistling the peculiar su'i whistle, or throwing some of his own pubic hairs at the house; and the inevitable result is murder (1938: 94).

If it was not for Grigson's express distaste for the travel• ler's tale, one might suspect that something of the sort was here coloring his account. Of course, such is the problem with this kind of portraiture that the emotion-laden specif• ic comes to stand for (and against) a more proportionate, disinterested whole. Thus homicide became the overriding behavioral metaphor for the Bison-horn Maria. This image was firmly entrenched when Elwin, made curious by Grigson's findings, conducted his own investigations which were pub• lished under the title Maria Murder and Suicide (1943).

Interestingly enough, besides the several proximate causes of (rather than motives for, since few were premedi• tated) homicide listed by Elwin -- including quarrels over property, women and "family" matters as well as drunkenness and suspicion of witchcraft -- he posits an underlying general explanation: the root problem is that the Bison-horn do not have the Muria gotul. As Elwin saw it, the Muria dormitory was "an ideal method of training the youth of the tribe in the civic virtues, in eliminating jealousy and in 26

teaching everyone to live together as a family" (1943:

38-39). Whatever the merits of this explanation, what is

interesting is that the epitomized institutional symbol of

one group is used in its absence to account for the epitom•

ized behavioral identity of the other. In this way, the way

of ethnographic "inscription" (to borrow a notion from Boon

1982: 26), through which "all cultures may stand as moieties, each playing to another the vis-a-vis", replete with exaggeration and superficial discriminations, are the

tribes of Bastar 'created'. To object that such a formula•

tion confuses image with reality is to submit to a criterion

of false consciousness. The image may be false but for all

that it is no less real. Reality, in the dissemination of

anthropological knowledge at least, lies not so much in

truth or falsity as in the writing (creating) of a more

persuasive image.

Beyond this 'meta-ethnographic' commentary, it is also necessary to enter into the account some additional ethno•

graphic elaborations. The first of these is that while the

three groups so far discussed carry the salient symbolic weight of tribal imagery, there are a number of other tribes

in Bastar that also bear mention. The second raises analyti•

cal issues in that taken altogether the 'tribes' of Bastar,

the number ranging from seven onwards depending on the kinds

of distinctions used to specify them, can roughly be

assigned a place on a scale bounded at each end with 27 criteria of 'least-Hinduized1 and 'most-Hinduized'. (The

Hill Maria would clearly be found associated with the former extreme while the Muria and Bison-horn would be situated somewhere around the middle.) The third point, which is more a complication than elaboration, harks back to the import• ance of names. One sociological consequence is that, over time, the tribals of Bastar have begun to use outsider terms for themselves and have accepted the similarly foreign status implications involved. In short, they have accepted the idiom of caste, defined by inter-tribal food and mar• riage prohibitions, while not being intra-tribally caste- structured. Nonetheless, the result is a loose form of status-ranking which is an expression of the historical fact that Bastar was a Hindu kingdom. It is a corollary to this fact that the closer the group either spatially or concept• ually was to the centre of the kingdom, the most important site for which was Jagdalpur, the higher status it was (and is) accorded. In the contemporary context, status competi• tion is often played out in emulationist strategies whereby one group may deny inferiority (or Hindu-perceived inferior practices, such as beef-eating) and lay claim to a superior title through (often dissembled) superior practices.

In practice then, the Hill Maria, Bison-horn Maria and the Muria are ethnographically joined by and with the

Bhattra, the Halba, the Dhurwa, and the Dorla. Ambiguity, and thus the probability of status competition, most 28 surrounds the Muria title, which also refers to, and is used by, the very Hinduized tribal people living in the Jagdalpur area. For example, a Bison-horn living in Dantewara tehsil but close to the Jagdalpur border may deny his appellation and say instead that he is a Muria, while a Jagdalpur Muria may further distinguish himself by saying he is a

Muria, a Muria having been in close association with the kings of Bastar. The Raja Muria, in turn, may call himself a

Bhattra in an attempt at self-promotion, while Bhattras, and here we reach the most-Hinduized extreme, subdivide into higher and lower categories both of which are more Hindu peasant caste than tribal. None of these so-called Muria south of the Indrawati have the gotul.

Also found south of the Indrawati are the Dhurwa and the Dorla who both have a comparatively low status in the

Bastar caste hierarchy. The Dorla, the lower of the two, are low-land Koitor inhabiting the southern plains (Konta and

Bijapur tehsils) of Bastar and differ from the Bison-horn

Maria mainly by their Telugu-influenced Gondi. The Dhurwa on the other hand, occupy a somewhat unique position in Bastar ethnography in that they display a cultural homogeneity and exclusiveness which is expressed in origin myths proclaiming absolute aboriginal, and thus high, Bastar status. The simultaneous existence of another myth, prevalent among most of the groups in proximity to Jagdalpur, by which the Dhurwa are said to be a group of royal retainers who accompanied 29

the conquering Kakatiya kings of Bastar from adjacent

Warangal (see chapter 2), likely represents an accommodation

made to Hindu supremacy. This myth also'retains an assertion

of higher status than is actually accorded.

The last group here needing mention is the Halba. Their

origins are most closely associated with the Bastar kings in

that they are considered to have been attached to the

monarchy as a kind of native militia. Although they have a

religious centre at Bare Dongar in north Bastar, Halba

groups are located in small pockets scattered all over the

district. This 'tribe' -- the term in this case having a

more official than sociological denotation -- ranks in the

upper sections of the caste structure, consonant with its

relatively prosperous agricultural infrastructure and inte•

grated Hindu code for conduct (dharma). Related to their

diffused population pattern, the Halbas have had their non-

Dravidian language adopted as common currency in Bastar

social intercourse.

In this connection, note should be made of the 'purely'

Hindu castes of the area, which include the Brahman, Dakar

('Warrior1 Cultivator), Kallar or Sundi (Distiller), Rawat

(Cowherd), Muslim and Christian (Isai), Mahar and Ganda

(both Weaver), the Ghasia (Ornament-maker), Lohar (Black•

smith), and Chamar (Leather-worker). A distinction must be

drawn between members of the foregoing castes which have

immigrated to Bastar, such as, for example, the Oriya 30

Brahmans and various Bania (Merchant) castes from Maharash• tra, northern Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh who are settled in Jagdalpur and other semi-urban areas, and members of these castes which are indigenous, in a sense, "homeg• rown". Excluding Brahmans, who have always been imported in some fashion or other, most of these castes have been made up of tribal people who have taken to Hindu occupations, but have not lost their tribal socio-cultural integrity except in regard to that loss entailed by a minimal measure of ritual exclusion from tribal life. A much smaller percentage

(the exact figure is not available) of these same castes is represented by those caste members who are of non-tribal origin, and thus only they can strictly-speaking be called, pure Hindu. To rephrase an earlier point, while the idiom of caste has penetrated tribal society right up to the foot• hills of the Abhujmar, the ideological or sociological substance of caste (concepts of purity and pollution, the complementary separation of status and authority, in other words, a rigorous structure of hierarchy) is largely undetectable beyond the confines of immigrant Hindu popula• tion centres.

And so to return to the Gonds of Bastar, specifically to the main three groups and their more normative ethno• graphy: all the Gonds of Bastar have a tradition of swidden agriculture, the Hill Maria still practising it almost exclusively, while the Muria and Bison-horn, even though 31 strongly attached to their "axe-and-burn" preferences, have

taken to non-shifting rice cultivation as their predominant mode of food production. It is important to note that all

Bastar tribals rely heavily on forest foraging to supplement food supplies (especially in lean periods such as the mon• soon), for construction and fuel sources, and for minor com• mercial exploitation.

Social organisation in all three groups is based on patrilineal clan exogamy, all clans being either akomama or dadabayi to each other, that is either "wife-clan" or

"brother-clan", the system taking on a moiety-like character with a patrilocal, bilateral, cross-cousin marriage ensuring an egalitarian bias. Clan structure is typically segmentary, old clans splitting up into new clans under the pressure of population growth, or in some cases becoming extinct due to administrative, political or biological disruptions.

Spatial organisation of social groups follows basically two patterns: Hill Maria clans tend to preponderate each to an entire village, a group of agnatically related clan- villages forming a "territorial brotherhood" (Popoff 1980); much more densely populated, Bison-horn and Muria areas contain non-nucleated villages with plural clan residence, although also (at least conceptually) bounded within terri• torial brotherhoods linked to a founding clan.

Again, in typical fashion, tribal society is at one with tribal religion, for the differentiation of clan is 32 identical with, at this level, the differentiation of deity. Clans are both unified and separated by clan deities, more broadly, "ancestral deities", displaying a continuum of conception and conceptual transformation culminating in the all-inclusiveness of the Earth, specifically the Earth

Goddess Tallur Mutte among the Muria, Tallin Ochur among the

Bison-horn, and Talo Dai among the Hill Maria. These are only the more generic names among many for the supreme female deity, and there are as well many 'refractions' which occur in more localized contexts such as to be represented as "Village Mother". As posed by Grigson for both types of

Maria (1.938: 1 97; and similarly, if more complexly for the

Muria by Popoff 1980: 164), "...the fundamental relation between the Earth, the clan-god and the Village Mother...is that the clan-god is the Earth in its dealings with the clan, and the Mother the Earth in its dealings with the village". As a part of these relations of equivalence, brought into relation by the same transformational process, are the Hindu tutelary goddess Danteshwari, and, until quite recently, the Bastar kings, who were credited with divine status.

While it is true that Danteshwari has as yet fully to enter the Hill Maria pantheon, the significance of the

Maharajas (or Feudal Chiefs, Ruling Chiefs, or Rajas, as the

British over time successively came to call them) has been pervasive. An apprehension of this significance can be seen 33 in the intuitive statement that to any Bastar Gond, "the human population... is the crop of men that the Bhum or Earth raises for the clan, or for the Ruling Chief" (Grigson 1938:

125). Sociologically implicit in this statement is that relations of equivalence here enter into (or are encompassed by) relations of hierarchy proper. The whole (the erstwhile

State of Bastar) that results is constituted by a relation of unified, complementary opposition.

This sets the stage for the next chapter in this thesis, which will deal historically with the formation of

Bastar State, and with how such a complementary opposition

(or, in another sense, reciprocal dichotomy) was made to structure it. The following chapter will then present a descriptive analysis of how it was maintained over approxi• mately 20 generations, while in so doing the foregoing ethnographic sketch will be filled out to the extent that is relevant to the constitution (synchrony) and contemporary transformations (diachrony) of Bastar. 34

Footnotes to chapter 2

However, most of these plans, including a recent attempt to set up a modern pulp and paper project, have foundered on an inadequate taking into account of tribal relationships to the forest. These relationships are of major importance in the ecology of Bastar and have long been a contentious issue in the history of the region.

Jay is here referring specifically to the mountainous Abhujmar area, but in my experience his description readily applies to most of Bastar.

This transcription follows an older style of represent• ing the Gondi language, such as in Grigson 1938, and does not make any claim to linguistic accuracy.

Figures here are derived from the 1961 Census of India. In subsequent enumerations, no figures for individual tribes are available.

The late D.N. Majumdar, a noted Indian anthropologist, seems to have ungraciously succumbed to the titillat• ing attractions of the gotul. Under the pretense, one suspects, of scientific curiosity, Majumdar had the temerity to burst in upon a gotul late one night and to illuminate the scene within by a powerful flashlight. See Majumdar 1939: 205. Perhaps acceptable in an era of the 'sexual life of savages', such ethnographic proced• ures can today hardly be considered defensible. Regret• tably, the legacy still persists, as in a recent publi• cation, The Night Life of Indian Tribes (Sashi 1980), of which the author is also apparently an anthropolo• gist.

It is not likely that the Hill Maria will much longer be allowed to maintain their self-elected isolation, nor their strong attachment to swidden agriculture. They are among the last tribal groups in India who have as yet to undergo the 'modernization' process, a process, as has been well documented, fraught with ambivalence, ambiguity and, almost invariably (except in the north-east), a good deal of trauma. Exactly when this process will begin is difficult to predict, although the timing will probably coincide with the conclusion of natural resource surveys presently being conducted. At any rate, the "immunisation (from devel• opment) of the (Abujhmar) area through administrative tradition is fragile since it has no legal base" (Sharma 1979: 145). Possibly the most trenchant otnotes, con't,

and informed treatment of tribal modernization, in both its positive and (mostly) negative aspects is found in von Furer-Haimendorf, Tribes of India, The Struggle For Survival 1982. In this book, Furer-Haimendorf finds himself in the depressing position of having to chron• icle "the decline and ultimate disintegration of tribes", mostly in Andhra Pradesh. However, after having the unexpected opportunity to revisit an area "which has been saved from the ills afflicting the tribes of that state", in other words, after having rediscovered the "unblemished tribal haven" of Bastar District, he was convinced that in "Peninsular India,

too,Dthere are still regions -- rapidly shrinking, unfortunately -- where tribal people lead a life in accordance with their own traditions and inclinations" (ibid.: 200-201). For the most part I would agree with this assessment but must unhappily repeat that the Bastar tribals1 "economic independence and joie de vivre" (ibid.) is not likely to survive indefinitely.

It should be evident that my discussion here is located in contemporary time. What needs spelling out is that as yet there is no account which offers a Bastar tribal worldview in any sort of comprehensive manner. Gell (1980, 1982) and Popoff (1980) contain some remedy for this deficiency but remain fragmentary. 36

Chapter 3: Historical context and Bastar state formation

Early beginnings being what they are, that is, general• ly obscure or at best debatable, it is not surprising that the history of Bastar starts with a reach into the unknown.

In the case of Bastar, and in much of Indian history in this respect, the resulting "shrouded-in-the-mists-of-time11 character of its historiography is in part marked by Hindu scriptural speculation. Largely in lay tradition, but also represented in amateur scholarly publications (for example,

Tripathi Prachya Pratibha, Vol. V, No. 2) Bastar has been tentatively (yet fondly) identified as the location of some of the major events in the Ramayana epic. , as the early Bastar is putatively known, was the place of forest exile for the god-king of the Ramayana, Rama, who came there to live out his 14 years of banishment. However, as in most efforts to lay claim to sacred geography, there are enough uncertainties and counter-possibilities such that historical accuracy has been overshadowed by the products of mythic manipulations. This other kind of truth serves to alleviate somewhat the air of mystery that pervades Bastar origins, as well as to endow the area with a sense of relig• ious respectability. On the other hand, the hopefulness of this 'truth' is made conspicuous by the absence in Bastar of any pilgrimage site associated with the Ramayana. Moreover, 37 cultural geographic research on pilgrimage in India has shown, via the epic literature, namely in the more relevant

Mahabharata, that pilgrim routes have avoided "the areas which even today contain most of the scheduled tribes popu• lations of India" (Bhardwaj 1973: 56). That there are a few

Rama tirthas (sacred sites) just beyond, but definitely out• side, the southern boundaries of ancient Bastar, and that these were patronized by s ome of the Bastar kings (Thakur

1909: 3), only further indicates the makeshift qualities of

Hinduistically-inspired, early Bastar history.

These expediential qualities, which transform history into ethnohistory, find their locus in and arise from the tradition of in-migration to the region. Never in great numbers, the non-tribals, mostly Hindu and a few Muslim traders, began arriving in the last decades of the 19th

Century. For them, as for the non-tribals of neighbouring districts, Bastar was "a land of savages, seeking still for human victims to sacrifice to their fetishes, skilled in herbs and simples, and potent practitioners of magic and witchcraft" (Grigson 1938: 3). Grafted on to this relatively timeless set of assumptions were those characterizations contained in the equally more or less atemporal Hindu discourse. In fact, except as stages in the process of the production of knowledge, it is difficult to separate the two sets of ideas. For example, the ideas of the magically potent savage is as much an outcome of travellers' tales, 38 that is, the word-of-mouth spread of 'knowledge' from the peripheries to the centres of Hindu inhabitation, as it is an actual part of Sanskritic literature. In the latter one can find full-blown the negative stereotype of the aborigin• als. They were:

like 'all the nights of the dark fortnight rolled into one,' 'a crowd of evil deeds coming together,' 'a caravan of curses of the many hermits dwelling in the Dandaka Forest... their one religion is offering human flesh to Durga; their meat is a meal loathed by the good; their shastra (science or law) is the cry of the jackal; their teachers of good and evil are owls; their bosom friends are dogs; their kingdom is in deserted woods; their feast is a drinking-bout;...their wives are the wives of others taken captive; their dwelling is with savage tigers; their worship of the gods is with the blood of beasts, their sacrifices with flesh, their live• lihood by theft; and the very wood wherein they dwell is utterly destroyed root and branch' (Bana's Kadambari, c. 6th Century A.D., quoted in Elwin 1960: 29-30).

Taken altogether, these conceptions, and/or variations thereof, constituted the limits of ethnohistorical awareness for several generations of Bastar immigrants. Aside from this perdurable corpus of distortions^ (for that is how they must objectively be judged) the Bastar settlers were almost entirely "ignorant of the customs and history of

Bastar" (Thakur 1909: 9). As far as could be determined, that is by an early 20th Century observer, "even the natives of Bastar, who like their forefathers have lived here since birth, are just as ignorant of conditions in Bastar as are these newcomers..." (ibid.). Thus did ignorance compounded 39 by pro magnified stylizations of Hindu culture find their place in the ethnohistorical consciousness of Bastar's non-tribal population. More abtractly, for a lack of known events, a diachronic understanding had been supplanted by a synchronic representation of Bastar ethnography.

This is not to say that there is an absolute lack of early history as such. The remnants of temples at Barsur,

Bhairamgarh and Dantewara in south Bastar provide evidence for the existence of an outpost of classical Hindu civiliza• tion. Inscriptions and copper plates found at these ruins

(recorded in Epigraphica Indica, Vols. IX and X) indicate that a Telegu kingdom, originating in what is now Andhra

Pradesh, thrived in Bastar and in fact was raided many times between 844 A.D. and 1150 by Eastern Chalukya, Chola, West• ern Chalukya, and Hoysala princes -- all from South Indian dynasties (Grigson 1938: 4). There is also mention of a

Karnatak (Mysore) kingdom in northern Bastar. However, very little is known of these early infiltrations into the tribal forests of ancient Bastar. Hence, while "there were times when pioneers of advanced civilizations settled among the aboriginal tribesmen... there were (also) periods when such outposts of higher culture shrank into insignificance....

There can indeed be little doubt that throughout ancient and medieval times the larger part of...(Bastar) remained a land of vast forests and poor communications" (von Furer-Haimen• dorf 1979: 5). It is only in the 15th Century that Bastar 40 attained a significance that can be traced, though still sketchily, up to modern times.

This significance came about as a consequence of the

Muslim penetrations of the Deccan region of South India. The

Mughal emperor, Ahmad Shah Bahmani, sent his armies to engage the Hindu Kakatiya kingdom of Pratap Rudra at Waran- gal just south of Bastar which at that time, about 1425, was

"an outlying and loosely-held group of feudal dependencies of Warangal" (Grigson 1938: 4). Warangal was taken, as was

Pratap Rudra's life, in the ensuing battles, but a younger brother, Anam Deo, managed to escape with a small army of followers northwards across the Godavari River into what became known for the first time, as a result of Anam Deo's subsequent consolidation, as the independent kingdom of

Bastar. However, even so, up until this time Bastar's subordination to Warangal had been more nominal than actual,

"the real authority resting with local chiefs or in the heads of the old tribal organisation that was so marked a feature of the medieval kingdoms of the eastern Central

Provinces and some of the Chhota Nagpur and Orissa States"

(ibid.). Although "real authority" was a matter of particu• lar reference and in terms of tribal organization remained within roughly egalitarian social categories, the point here is that Anam Deo's flight into and conquest of Bastar secured for him and his successors over-all authority for twenty generations to come. In other words, this continuity 41 of Bastar's political identity lasted from approximately

1425 until 1948 -- and unofficially until 1966.

Unfortunately, between 1425 and 1853, when Bastar entered into direct political relations with the British, there is a period of over four hundred years during which the kingdom once again enters what is largely an historical vacuum. It has been noted, however, that the process of consolidation tended to move in a northward direction, presumably to situate the seat of power as far away as possible from any further confrontation with Muslim forces.

These did in fact, in 1610, attempt to take Bastar, but were overcome, not so much by Kakatiya defenders as by the "heavy rain, the difficulty of communications and dearth of provisions in this heavily forested and thinly-populated tract" (Grigson 1938: 5). The expansion northwards also had the effect of changing the cultural and linguistic character of the Kakatiya kingdom by replacing Telugu with Hindi influences. The limit was reached in contact with the Rajput kingdoms of Raipur and Ratanpur (in Chhattisgarh) and

Ranker. In conquest over Ranker the Rakatiyas took the areas around Bare Dongar which was the centre of the Halba peoples, a martial group of mixed aboriginal and non-aborig• inal origin whose language, Halbi, became the lingua franca of Bastar.

Despite the paucity of data, it is possible to lay out some of the likely structural developments of this period 42 which could be designated, after Sinha (1962: 35-79), as the era of Bastar state formation. As noted above, the earliest known kingdoms in Bastar were of a classical Hindu, temple- building type. The breakdown of these early extensions of

Hindu civilization around the end of the 12th century was concurrent with similar degenerations of Jain and Buddhist kingdoms in other parts of Central India. Again more or less concurrently, these areas, like Bastar, also witnessed the rise in late medieval times of tribal, or more accurately,

Hindu-tribal, kingdoms. Unlike Bastar, which came into existence by way of conquest, the other kingdoms emerged either "mainly through internal developments out of a tribal base" or as a result of immigrant Rajput adventurers (from western India) "gaining power in the tribal tracts by manoeuvering the narrow-range clan-bound tribal" organiza• tion of these areas (Sinha 1962: 71). In all cases, however, the processes of formation were more or less alike in essential features: a feudalistic superstructure built upon a tribal foundation. In Bastar in particular then, two related questions arise. One is how "the equalitarian primitive clan-based organization... adjusted itself to the centralized, hierarchic, territorially oriented political developments"; and the other concerns the specifics of the

"...interaction between the primitive ritual symbols of the tribe and the advanced symbols sponsored by the State"

(ibid.: 37). Before proceeding with these questions, the 43 first in this chapter, the second mainly in the next, it is necessary to enter here a few qualifying remarks of a more general nature.

I have used above the adjective 'feudalistic' advised• ly. This is because the political economy of feudalism has connotations inapplicable to Indian monarchy (regardless of tribal foundations). In Bastar, as elsewhere in India,

'feudalism' was not rooted in any economic exclusivity inhering in the reigning monarch. The king was not the owner of all the land, "in effect, no one owned the land" (Tyler

1973: 96). Rather, the system was one in which economic control revolved around rights to shares in the produce of the land. "The king was merely the preeminent landholder who apportioned a share of the revenue among his servants in the civil administration. The land itself was a deity and could not be possessed by mortals" (ibid.). While these statements refer to a much earlier period of Indian history than presently under discussion -- a period when the models for political economy were first formulated2 -- their core religiosity is evident throughout the development of Indian kingship. It would be in vain to attempt to specify the origin of these religious ideas. Whether or not, for example, they emerge from a tribal 'sub-stratum', is a question beyond the scope of the present discussion.

However, it is a fact, over most of central India, that in tribal ideology the earth is also a deity. 44

At any rate, in general, there was no question of

'divine right' in Indian monarchy and its economic relation• ships. It was more a question of the distribution of divin• ity, or, more specifically, the exchange of the products of divinity, as expressed and facilitated by a structure of ritual. As summarized by Tyler, "...the devolution of rights to the produce of the land was ultimately not articulated within a paradigm of fealty, vassalage, and overlordship.

Instead, these rights were homologized to ritual interdepen• dence.... Each level in the hierarchic devolution of rights to revenue was simply a small scale replica of the level above it.... The 'king's' position and right to revenue at whatever level in this hierarchy was conditional on his participation in a system of exchange" (ibid.). Keeping this in mind, we can now turn more directly to Bastar state formation.

As mentioned above, the Kakatiyas reached the limits of their military expansion when they came into contact with

the medieval kingdoms of Raipur and Ratanpur. Inyso doing, they employed as a means of organizing and maintaining the areas they had conquered the model of territorial control that was prevalent in those (Chhattisgarh) kingdoms. While there is little evidence to document the details of this adaptation, there is not much doubt that the system as employed was not at any substantial variance with that of the Chhattisgarh model. For this insight, and the 45 reconstruction of the model itself, Bastar historiography is indebted to the painstaking work of C.U. Wills (1919).

In his small monograph on the subject, Wills notes that the medieval system, essentially a hierarchical organization conforming closely to classical prescriptions,

was not at any time exemplified in full detail everywhere in Chhattisgarh. It was no more than a 'theory'...on which the system worked: 'it is well known to all who have enquired into Indian institutions that they are directed by a general understanding, seldom if ever by precise rules; and that understanding is so loosely acted upon that amongst the innumerable deviations that are met with, it is no easy task to discover the most universal and established practice1 (1919: 199; internal quote Vans Agnew 1820).

It is doubtless a difficult situation, as Vans Agnew and numerous later writers have remarked on the understanding of

Indian social institutions, but the problem of deviation and universality (or "unity and diversity", as contemporary authors put it, cf. Mason 1967) is here exacerbated by the highly precarious quality of the historical data. It must be emphasized, as with Wills, that

...we are forced...to recognize the extraordinarily unreliable character of much of the evidence we possess. We can put full trust in no one. The whole period which we are investigating is...so much legendary that at most we can hope to glean a half-truth here and a half-truth there. The early writers were men with few opportunities for study or comparative enquiry. They either like Capt. Blunt in Ratanpur in 1794 fill one with dismay at the opportunities they let slip or like Motte they write in columns of discursive matter in flowing Georgian style without ever coming to a clear statement of actual fact (Wills 1919: 226). 46

However, in Wills himself we have at least one exception to this general state of affairs.

What emerges quite clearly then, is a territorial model of political organization that was being followed in the kingdoms to the north of Bastar even before the Kakatiya kings arrived from Warangal. The first evidence of the deployment of that model in Bastar indicates that it was in place shortly after the Kakatiya's arrival: "In 1502 A.D.

Pratap Rajdeo came to the throne. He conquered 18 forts around Dongar and assigned them to his younger brother as appanage... in 1856 we again read that the Rajah of Bastar

Rajah Bhyro Deo invested his younger brother Dalganjan Singh with '18 Garhs as an appanage for his livelihood'" (ibid.:

200).

This evidence also serves to indicate the conventional• ity of the system. The number 18 is used repeatedly in descriptions of territorial organization in Chhattisgarh and represents a dichotomization of domain. In other words,

Ataragarh, or eighteen forts, is one-half of Chhattisgarh, which means thirty-six forts. Within the garh or fort the number 84 is also repeatedly used and it represented the next level of subdivision, an area of 'eighty-four' villages

(Chaurasi) held by a Diwan (minister) or Thakur (lord). At the lowest level of the model, the Chaurasi was subdivided into units of 12 villages (Barhons, later known as Taluqs) each held by Barhainhas or Taluqdars, grantees called by 47

Wills "minor chiefs" (ibid.: 199). Early writers were often inclined to take these numerical designations literally, but in fact they were applied to subdivisions of a kingdom regardless of actual numbers. Furthermore, although Bastar was to become one of the Chhattisgarh Feudatory States, at the time of Bastar's formation Chhattisgarh was less a place name than a term for a system of territorial organization.

Another important feature of the system was that, at the higher levels at least, it was articulated through kinship ties. As the system proliferated in Bastar, the various subdivisions being parcelled out -- in 1821 there were 48 -- the character of these links became more and more affinal, and, in a number of senses, distant from the royal house. Each new royal marriage saw a further consolidation of Bastar territory and a new distribution of rights to revenue shares, as well as a further hierarchic devolution of power. Of the original 48 Zamindars (a term synonomous with but later than Taluq), Vans Agnew wrote that "each pay rent long since established and which does not vary. They exercise an almost unlimited authority within their respect• ive Zamindaris but are subject to the Rajah in all that refers to the general interests of the State. At the present they are all obedient to his orders" (quoted in Wills 1919:

236). These latter statements bring us to the question of the king's authority.

In order to situate this question in its proper 48 context, it must be appreciated that the Rajput territorial model was being integrated with non-hierarchic, tribal societies. On the other hand, the dissimilarities between these two types of societies were not as great as has often been assumed. Couched in the racial terminology of the time the following remarks reveal both the context of the author ity of Bastar kingship and what has been a tenaciously-held misconception of population differences in India:

...we must first disabuse our minds of the popular view which regards the Aryans as fair-skinned, highly-civilized invaders overrunning a country peopled by black-faced and squat-nosed barbarians. The more we get to know of medieval history the more we have reason to minimize the divergence in political, social and intellectual capacity between the Aryan and non-Aryan peoples. The Aryan had developed a monarchical form of rule which, so far as we can learn, was foreign to the indigenous tribes in this part of the country. Being thus organized under a single head it was impossible for the non-Aryan tribes to make any protracted resist• ance to them. But in many respects the non-Aryan social and political organization, though independ• ently developed, bore a remarkable resemblance to the Aryan; and when the two systems met they presented no real antagonism to one another (ibid.: 231 ) .

With reference to political organization, what this amounts to is that in neither case, tribal nor non-tribal, was auth• ority, this is, centralized authority over a whole domain, very strong institution. As a result, "the weakness of cent ral authority...(became) an essential characteristic of the medieval politics in and around Chhattisgarh" (ibid.: 234). 49

. This essential characteristic was concomitant to the

territorial organization. Each level, by virtue of the authority delegated to its head, acted as a restraining

influence on the level above it. Ultimately, the king "was not an autocrat but was rather primus inter pares -- the administrative, social and religious head but nevertheless bound to regard the customs of his people whose welfare and

the maintenance of whose customary rights were of even more

importance than the maintenance and extension of the person• al authority of kingship" (ibid.: 250), and as Wills con• cludes, "we may call this a feudal system if we like but, as

it was a relation more of status than of contract" (ibid.).

To anticipate somewhat, in the Indian context status implies religious values, which in the context of Bastar refer to

the divinity of kingship.

Descending to the lowest levels of this feudalistic

system, to its foundation in tribal society, we find an homologous situation. The homologue was in respect to Gond clan organization, which was touched upon in the introduc•

tion. To speak in evolutionary terms -- reading 'evolution' broadly as socio-cultural complexification -- Bastar tribal

society at the time of the beginnings of monarchy was a

relatively recent societal predecessor of that kind of monarchy. This in fact is Wills' observations on Aryan/non-

Aryan similarities cast in more anthropological language. In

such terms the Gonds of Bastar can be represented as a 50 tribal segmentary society, "a permutation of the general model in the direction of extreme decentralization, to the extent that the burden of culture is carried in small, local, autonomous groups while higher levels of organization develop little coherence, poor definition, and minimum function" (Sahlins 1968: 20). Also in such terms, the

Kakatiya Rajputs which overran Bastar (as well as those

Rajput adventurers which took part in the formation of the

Chhattisgarh states) represented at this time merely another permutation taken in the other direction: a chiefdom, with

"...integration of the segmentary system at higher levels. A political superstructure is established, and on that basis a wider and more elaborate organization of economy, ceremony, ideology, and other aspects of culture" (ibid.). Neverthe• less, what remains more or less constant across the various permutations of the tribal segmentary model lies in the nature of authority.

Thus, the political aspects of clan organization are simply replicated at higher levels. Among the Gonds on

Bastar, whether it was among the Hill Maria, Bison-horn

Maria or Muria, the exercise of authority was the preroga• tive of one office, that of the 'headman', who was generally the "priest of the Village Mother" (Grigson 1938: 196). How• ever, the kasyeq-gaita (perma among the Bison-horn, kesser gaytal among the Muria) or village headmen did not so much possess authority as wield it, and at that only insofar as 51 the decisions that they handed down had been arrived at through a consensus-reaching consultation with a group of village elders known as the panchayat. Without the concur• rence of this venerable Indian institution, the headman had little influence. As Sahlins lightly remarks of the position of tribal headman, "one word from him and everyone does as he pleases" (1968: 21). More seriously, the point is that the office of the headman was homologous to the office of kingship; each, in a sense, is modeled on the other.

For confirmation of this point, we may refer back to

Wills' characterization of the king as "primus inter pares", restricted from autocracy by the intervening levels of authority below him, and make the comparison with what

Grigson calls the "natural democratic tendencies of the tribe": "In the village the kasyeq-gaita or the gaita is merely primus inter pares in regard to the village elders and in the clan or pargana the pargania gaita in regard to the gaitas and kasyeq-gaitas of the other villages of the clan or pargana" (1938: 290). Furthermore, Grigson is here in fact confirming through ethnographic observation in the early twentieth century what Wills' documentary research uncovered nearly one hundred years earlier: that in the tribal societies of the area "'government (is) by the moral influence of its natural heads alone to the entire exclusion of the principle of coercive authority1" (Wills 1919: 248; internal quote Macpherson 1845). There is no reason nor 52 evidence to suggest that this situation was any different from conditions prevailing at the time of incipient monarchy in Bastar. Again to quote Wills, those conditions were:

...a king restrained by the powers of his Zamindars and the Zamindars influenced by their Taluqdars and the Taluqdars influenced in turn by their village Headmen, and the whole subject to the customary authority of a regular system of Panchayats which at any rate administered justice according to the convictions and prejudices current at the time among the mass of the people..." (ibid.: 254).

Of course, one must recall the nature of the evidence upon which Wills was forced to base these observations. But it must also be remembered that he was writing about a model, his reconstruction of it an unassailably well-argued one, the validity of which is persuasively corroborated by its applicability to Bastar social history and ethnography.3

In my general remarks on the background of kingship in

India there was occasion to refer to the structural similar• ities of normative ancient monarchy with the monarchies of the medieval Chhattisgarh States. It is important to add that there are differences as well which for diachronic reasons need to be taken into account. In the first place, it should be said that nearly all versions of ancient king• ship in India are situated in caste societies. Thus, what• ever the actual societal accomodations necessary to conform to the prescriptions set down in the texts of ancient polity, they are already assumed to have occurred and be 53

present in caste society. The result is that kingship and

caste society are inextricably interlinked and are given as

a seemingly immutable structure the standards for which are

enshrined in the rituals of the king's court. In Hocart's

well-known statement on this structure, the

king's state is reproduced in miniature by his vassals: a farmer has his court, consisting of the personages most essential to the ritual, and so present even in the smallest community, the barber, the washerman, the drummer and so forth (1950: 68).

It is plain that in dealing with the small community in

Bastar we are not, for the most part, dealing with caste

society and occupational specialization. Tribal society in

Bastar, which had comparatively little or no specialization whatsoever, presented Hindu monarchy, especially the so to

speak disembodied one that had to start afresh in Bastar,

with the problem of adaptation. Even at the point of great•

est structural similarity, at the level of relations of

authority, the Kakatiya monarchy, having been reduced to

mere chiefship by the vicissitudes of conquest,^ was at a

considerable remove from "classical" Hindu conditions.

Nevertheless, the classical model remained a standard

toward which the Bastar monarchy was inclined, and according

to which it made its adjustments to Gond tribal society.

Thus, on the level of authority, the Bastar kings eventually

began to make appointments of headmen in various tribal and

semi-tribal groupings. 'Caste headmen1, as they came to be 54 called, were given insignia of office, such as particularly colored turbans, and had conferred upon them powers quite beyond the keeping of traditional leaders. While the extent of this political penetration into tribal society was limit• ed to a proximate radius centered finally^ at Jagdalpur, within this sphere of direct control, the khalsa portion of an Indian kingdom, the nature of tribal society became transformed along the lines of caste organization.6 it was in the khalsa, being the first area of influence in which the standards of kingship could be firmly established, that the normative model of kingship with a full complement of castes could be closest approximated.

Writing of Orissa between the seventh and twelfth centuries, Kulke's comments on the organization of Orissan kingdoms7 apply to Bastar between the fifteenth and seven• teenth centuries: "These little rajas organized their sub- regional power according to the Hindu law books (sastras) which stressed the dominant role of the Hindu raja and his court" (1978: 31-32). In so doing, in organizing their power according to the Hindu law books, the Kakatiyas began to effect the social transition from chiefship to monarchy -- mainly that is, within the confines of the khalsa.

Beyond the confines of the khalsa (and beyond the khalsa equivalents in the zamindaris) a different system prevailed. The Hill and Bison-horn Maria, for instance, did not have caste headmen appointed to their villages. Instead, 55 most authority remained vested in the tribal panchayat, represented by the village headman as spokesman. In these areas, the "panchayats did not, like those of Hindu castes, deal only with social matters, but also with petty crime and with the administration and agricultural management of the villages and clans, as well as with their relations with the officers of the State" (Grigson 1938: 286). In the regions beyond the khalsa then, tribal headmen remained primus inter pares, whereas within the khalsa the Kakatiya kings were beginning to become true Hindu monarchs, that is, with strong central authority.

As the development of monarchy continued, including the regularization of revenue collection and growth in the requirements of village labour and supplies for State projects, the demands on the tribal populations increased.

In tribal villages, these demands (often unconscionable, according to Grigson 1938: 285) fell upon the shoulders of traditional headmen who found themselves having to accept the bulk of official anger for, essentially, not being in a position to meet those demands. Over time, this intolerable situation led to an innovation in the tribal authority structure. As noted above, village leadership rested in the kasyeq-gaita or perma in Hill and Bison-horn villages, and the kesser gaytal in the Muria areas where to some extent caste headmen had not been appointed. Along with these leaders, there existed (and still exists) a secondary 56 figure with complementary fuctions. The pen pujari, peda

(among the Bison-horn) or gaita (among the Hill maria) led and performed the rituals concerning the clan (ancestral deities), but were not charged with village leadership, or were at best sources of support to the kesser-gaytal, etc., to whom they stood in a classificatory (and subordinate) kin relationship. In response to the growing economic interven• tion and expropriation of tribal goods and services by the

State, especially along the more well-travelled routes through the kingdom, many village panchayats put forward the pen pujari (or his equivalent) as the village leader. In this pseudo-leadership capacity, the pen pujari -- sometimes even the village idiot -- became a kind of "dummy as the headman for secular affairs, the real leadership remaining with the religious headman...but the dummy being available to bear the brunt of official wrath, though powerless to effect anything without the consent of the village elders"

(Grigson 1938: 285). It was upon this deception that the distinction between secular and religious tribal headman came into being. As Grigson saw it, "Formerly there seems little doubt, the...(religious headman) also discharged the functions of the secular headman; the differentiation of the two functions was the result of the State officials' treat• ment of the aboriginal" (ibid.). Of supportive, conceptual evidence for this development, it is worthy of note that the

Muria, as one, though very likely representative, instance, 57

"do not distinguish between priests and laity..." (Popoff

1980: 18). This is contemporary evidence, to be sure, but there is no reason to believe that it is not also tradition• al.

Recalling now the original question as to how clan- based tribal organization adapted itself to hierarchic, political developments, we have come at least part way to an answer. In Bastar, subsequent to making a series of minor, local conquests, a relatively small company of military retainers headed by a fugitive Hindu prince and his close family initiated a process of monarchical development.

Starting out as a fallen aristocracy, in other words as reduced monarchs without a body politic and thus in fact having little authority, the Kakatiyas adopted as a model of political development the Rajput territorial system of the

Chhattisgarh States. The appropriateness of this choice was that the Rajput model was a solution to the same problem faced by the Kakatiyas: the incorporation of tribal societ• ies under centralized, hierarchic authority. The solution to the problem involved the facilitating of that incorporation by means of weak central authority structurally congruent with tribal polity.

The next stage of political development saw the Kakati• yas establishing themselves at a centre and beginning the process of moving to the more classical model of Hindu king• ship. Still not on a large scale, a Hinduized domain began 58 to be created, partially through the importation of Orissan

Brahmins and other service castes and their influence on surrounding tribals.

The last political step in this direction was to construct a network of caste headmen for the Hinduized domain and indirectly to cause an adjustment in authority relations in the non-Hinduized, tribal areas. Concurrently, a royal bureaucracy took shape which was interposed between the court and the village mainly for purposes of revenue collection but which in the khalsa also exercised civil and criminal powers. The result of these political developments was that the kingdom of Bastar came to be implicitly divided into two parts. I do not mean simply the khalsa and non- khalsa, for the zamindaries were also divided into a Hindu centre and an outer, tribal part. Thus one part took on more and more a Hindu character with close connections to the

State, while the other remained distinctly tribal and in political and economic terms experienced comparatively little intervention into customary practices.

This is not, of course, a complete picture. In the next chapter socio-religious detail will be added to flesh out this skeletal frame. Also, it will have been noticed that the foregoing account of Bastar state formation has been presented without much temporal specificity. There are few dates of any consequence prior to 1853 and fewer still which would help to pinpoint the chronology of Bastar political 59 development. Nonetheless, on the basis of what data do exist, it would seem quite probable that the sequence initiated in 1425 took place as described, and that a certain measure of stability of political structure was entrenched by the time of the coming of the British. -Writing not long after their arrival as the new paramount power,

Chapman (1898, cited in de Brett 1909: 61) noted that:

The whole of the khalsa was divided into parganas or taluks. There were 5 large parganas under paid officials called Diwans or talukdars, who exercised civil and criminal powers besides collecting the revenue. The wilder and more distant parganas were for purposes of revenue collection under officials called thanedars, negis and hikmis. Under all these officials, who were themselves remunerated by fixed salaries, were paid servants called paiks who received a monthly stipend.

This serves to indicate the kind of dual structure which had developed over the four centuries of Bastar state forma• tion. This formation saw a vaguely demarcated area of broad• ly homogeneous, 'acephalous', Gond tribal societies organ• ized and transformed into a political whole characterized by a dominant Hindu core loosely connected to, and supported by, an outer tribal encirclement. The outcome can be under• stood as an implicit societal bifurcation, the halves of which had reached a fairly stable, interdependent equilib• rium. 60

Fpotnotes to chapter 3

These distortions are produced out of the confrontation of superficially observed tribal behaviour with the Hindu moral system or code. Bana's metaphors are cult• ural constructions imposed on tribal life so as to accentuate its antithetical nature. For instance, to the Hindu the owl is idiomatic of evil and stupidity; the dog is the most despised creature in India; and the meat 'loathed by the good' is of course beef, relished by tribals but its consumption abhorred by most Hind• us. The drinking of alcohol, as much a religious as a social activity for the tribal, is also an abomination to orthodox Hindus for whom the intake of even the smallest drop of liquor is sufficient to brand the imbiber an alcoholic. The reference to the destruction of forests is a similar exaggeration, referring to the practice of swidden cultivation. The ambivalence of non-tribal attitudes is revealed by the simultaneous existence of the noble savage idea: the carefree, joyous, totally honest, non-materialist living happily and harmoniously among the sylvan glades. However, the negative side tends to predominate. As one psychologic• ally-inclined commentator would have it, this complex of attitudes is maintained by the desire of upper-caste Hindus to have tribals "remain as they imagine them -- lazy, feckless, libidinous -- because it confirms their self-image as industrious, orderly, adult, and socially organised. The corollary is that the subject-people represent a negative identity in the unconscious of the dominant -- what it has been warned not to become" (Lannoy 1974: 169). While this seems plausible, Lan- noy's conclusion is based on little more than an intuitive and undemonstrated assumption.

The most important early work is the Artha Shastra. It should be noted that "though the kernel of...(this) work may perhaps look back to the fourth century B.C., in its present form it is possibly as late as the fourth century A.D." (de Bary 1958: 232). More signifi• cantly, "this work is of exceptional interest and value, for it has almost revolutionized the traditional view regarding certain aspects of ancient Indian hist• ory and culture" (ibid.). However, it is also important to point out that in terms of kingship, the traditional "magico-religious" aspect was definitely not 'usurped' by this textual revolution. See Dumont 1970: 71-73.

Wills also cites inscriptional data which further supports this assertion: "There is...in Bastar (vide No. 213 of Rai Bahadur Hiralal's descriptive List of 61 Footnotes, con't.

Inscriptions) a...record of a notification of the 'elders of the 5 great assemblies' in which they denounce the exactions of the King's officers on the occasion of his coronation and direct that such extra• ordinary levies shall only be collected from well established residents of the villages" (1919: 249).

According to a source cited by Wills (1919: 138) the first kings of Bastar paid tribute (along with Sumbal- pur, Rs. 5105) in 1563 A.D. to the Rajas of Ratanpur -- the paramount locus for medieval Chhattisgarh kingdoms.

The capital of Bastar moved a number of times, from Dantewara to Bare Dongar, Chintapur and Rajnar, and Bastar (presently a small village 12 miles north of Jagdalpur), before being fixed at Jagdalpur about 280 years ago (Kedarnath Thakur 1908: 11).

The methods of transformation included a very direct form of Hinduization, the creation of caste status by patronage and purchase: "The Raja used...to dispose of the sacred thread to men of low caste and as a solace in cases where fines were inflicted for offences against law or religion" (de Brett 1909: 65).

Kulke disagrees with Sinha that it was only upon the breakdown of earlier, 'classical' Hindu-Buddhist-Jain civilizations in Central India that Hindu-tribal king• doms came into existence. It may in principle be accepted that "there had been a continuous yet very slow process of Hinduization since the first millenium A.D. which radiated from the capitals of the Hinduized chiefs and rajas" (Kulke 1978: 36); but in the case of Bastar there is as yet no historical data available sufficiently to illuminate the nature of ninth century Telugu 'Bastar' kingship, nor adequately to describe conditions in Bastar during the period between the decline of those Telugu Nagvanshis in the twelfth cent• ury and the coming of the Kakatiyas in the fifteenth. Consequently, we must for the time being at least still accept the plausibility of Sinha's 'breakdown' theory to account for the lacuna in the historical record. At the risk of overloading this note, I will include most of what information exists in the area of first millen• nium Bastar. What follow are mainly fragments of dyn• astic chronology found in the Orissa District Gazet• teer , Koraput (1966). Possibly the earliest reference to what is now called Bastar mentions the Vakatakas, a minor South Indian royal lineage, establishing a seat of power in the Bastar-Koraput area in the third cent• ury A.D. (p. 45). On the basis of numismatic evidence, 62 Footnotes, con't.

it is possible to assert that the Vakatakas were succeeded by the Nalas who established a strong kingdom in the South Kosala (Chhattisgarh) and Kalinga (Orissa) regions between the fifth and seventh centuries (p. 41). As learned from another hoard of gold coins found in 1957, it can be confirmed that the Telugu Nagas, or Nagvanshis, took over from the Nalas in the eleventh century. The script on these coins belong to the south• ern type of characters of the twelfth century and a similar type is used in the inscriptions of the Chaluk- yas and Kakatiyas. 63

Chapter 4: Synchronic context of divine kingship

To posit the implicit societal bifurcation of Bastar into a tribal portion and a Hindu portion, the whole loosely integrated under flexible politico-economic arrangements, is a necessary but not sufficiently meaningful analysis with respect to Bastar social and cultural history. In the present chapter I will further the discussion of the wholeness or unity of Bastar State in a more synchronic manner. To this end, it is now appropriate to take up the second of Sinha's questions: the nature of the "interaction between the primitive symbols of the tribe and the advanced symbols sponsored by the State" (1962: 37). The following response to this question is made in a largely synchronic mode for the main reason that there is even less chronological and diachronic specificity in the textual materials on culture than in those dealing with political development.

We can start with the 'primitive symbols of the tribe'. In the ethnographic introduction some of these in the form of conceptions of divinity were described. Focusing on the Earth Goddess, it was asserted that the conceptual process that generates divinity in tribal religion also allows it to accept the introduction of non-tribal deities.

Taking the Muria example first, in which in many respects the interaction between 'primitive' and 'advanced' symbols 64

is greatest, Bastar Gond religion can be delved into some•

what more deeply in order to analyze the nature and charac•

ter of symbol construction. The discussion is in the ethno•

graphic present but it will be assumed that certain aspects

notwithstanding the broad conditions described are equally

valid for any point in the temporal continuum starting with,

though probably pre-dating, the arrival of the Kakatiyas.

Although it is true as stated earlier that Muria vil•

lages tend toward plural clan residence, it is also the case

that a single clan,- usually the founding clan, is dominant,

ritually if not also economically. Villages are made up of a

-number of hamlets, or para, to one or some of which belong

the descendants of the founding clan ancestor. The clan, or

par, of any single village is often only one of many inhab•

iting a clan territory, the pargana. At the level of the

pargana, however, all clans are related in a classificatory

manner, that is by an acknowledgement of common descent from

an all-embracing "ancestral deity", namely Barha Pen (Popoff

1980: 139).

Now, Muria religion could be said to correspond to the

tribal 'ideal type'. Religious conceptions are organized at

various segmentary levels at which "different classes of

spirit have as their primary congregations social groupings

of different order" (Sahlins 1968: 18). At the most over•

arching level, responsible for all creation but now having

the least to do with it, is the supreme, male deity, Ispur- 65 iyal. Typically more or less otiose, Ispuriyal is in effect superseded by the active power of his closest offspring, the female deity, Tallur Mutte. As the goddess of the earth, she is the source of all fertility, although to be accurate she is viewed by the Muria less as creatrix, than as genetrix.

Life was created by Ispuriyal, whereas the function or power of making it manifest is left over to Tallur Mutte (Popoff

1980: 40-41). Together, Ispuriyal and Tallur Mutte form a complementarity in reference to which the entire Muria people act as a congregation. Nevertheless, it is only

Tallur Mutte who is the direct focus of propitiation at this level.

Proceeding from Tallur Mutte, the process of segmenta• tion and differentiation begins in earnest. Thus the afore• mentioned Barha Pen, in a sense the summation of all ancest• ral deities, is also equated with Tallur Mutte but is active in more localized contexts. These are twofold: one is the pargana unit in which all clans are linked; and the other is the village unit in which Barha Pen acts as either the progenitor or sibling of various, specifically named ancest• ral deities. Moving genealogically closer to the living, though unspecifiable until they make their troublesome pres• ence felt, there are the ghosts of recently departed ancest• ors, the anask. These anask "generally... are said to wander the earth in search of food and to give sickness to kin, particularly those who fail to remember them sufficiently, 66 in order to obtain food given in appeasement..." (Popoff

1980: 150). For the most part, however, the anask do not remain in this unfulfilled state indefinitely. The' occasion for their deliverance is a series of rituals, collectively known as kam'k, the purpose of which is to raise the anask to the level of pen-anask, the generic term for ancestral deities (ibid.: 156). Some notable aspects of the kam'k will be dealt with shortly, but here the point is that when wor• shipped or propitiated individually, the pen-asnak are given specific names and various male or female forms which behave, marry and reproduce like human beings. The continu• ity of the divine 'hierarchy' is engaged when all these ancestral deities are unified by way of common 'ascent' into

Barha Pen. In a sense, they 'become' Barha Pen as, through time, they lose their individuality and taken together as an identity of masculine and feminine principles, represent the timeless totality of Muria theology. In the same way, through absorption at a higher level, this is how Barha Pen becomes equated with Tallur Mutte, who in turn but represents the manifesting form of unmanifested creative power, Ispuriyal.1 Here is completed the circuit which delineates Muria theology: arising from the exercised power of unmanifested creation, the Muria see themselves forever moving through a set of transformational experiences which eventually return them to unmanifest, transcendent divinity.

As an instrumental stage in this circuit, the kam'k 67 rituals also present an opportunity to introduce some diachronic observations. The kam'k in simple terms is a set of commemorative acts performed in honor of the dead ancest• ors and taking place before a number of erected, unevenly sized stones, in some cases quite large. (Having found similar practices all over tribal, peninsular India, early anthropologists termed such rituals inclusively as part of

"megalithic" culture.) In Maria areas these stones are called kotokal, a word translated by Grigson (1938: 139) as

"Stones of the Dead". In all areas, whatever the variations in the ritual acts, the manifest purpose remains the same, that is to render benevolent and elevate to divinity the recently departed.

However, among the Muria, at least those of Benur

Pargana in Naryanpur Tehsil, the kam'k has undergone an elaboration which clearly indicates the intrusion and subse• quent incorporation of Hindu culture. This elaboration is in the form of a dramatization "in which the villagers and their affines act out a market scene (atum karsna, to play market)" (Popoff 1980: 157). The 'play market'2 has become part of the kam'k due to its connection to the parent ancestral deity, whose village, some Muria say, was the first market in Benur Pargana. During the actual rite by which the deceased "are said to be 'permitted to join the company of their elders'" (ibid.: 156), the Muria perform their market skit. As Popoff describes it, it 68

...is for the most part a light-hearted and playful affair -- the affinal relatives of the 'true owners of the earth' (the founding clan) assume various caste roles higher than those of the Muriya which are played by the agnatic kin of the deceased. An affinal relative dresses as a member of the Kallar caste (Liquor Seller) and sells liquor to the Muriya who purchase it with leaves. Other affines dress as Hindu government servants who strut around the bazaar sampling food and drink without paying for it. Throughout the market these kos'k or 'government agents' march up to the Muriya and in a mixture of Halbi and Hindi ask why they don't speak Hindi and question their beef eating habits. Mar• ried sisters and daughters who have returned to their natal village assume the dress of higher caste women and set up places in the market with 'baskets' (goppa) of roots, vegetables, grains and fried breads. Some Muriya women also attempt to sell their produce in the play but no one wants to buy from them (ibid.: 158).

In this socio-economic satire the Muria are acknowledging their subordination to the Hindu world and its caste hier• archy. At the same time, by surrounding the actual ancestral rite with this satire, they are associating and incorporat• ing the Hindu world with the Gond world in terms of the pro• cess of ancestral deification. The basis of this interpreta• tion rests on the similarities in the objects of veneration on the one hand, and those of pointed ridicule on the other. Both anask and Hindu outsiders are considered potent• ially troublesome, meddling influences, and are both desired to be kept at a distance -- and both are in a sense apotro- paically placated in an attempt to ensure they remain at a distance. These similarities come to light in the general semantic field of the market, which in the Muria view is 69

at the same time...an environment that provides food and...one that is threatening. The market is seen as a place where forest products are sold to outside merchants and where prestige items such as ghi, cloth and coconuts are purchased from outsid• ers. It is likened to the forest which is a source of food and a source of danger for here the Muriya and other "jungli people" come in contact with kos'k -- 'outsiders', 'strangers'. The ambivalence towards the market and its association with the forest is indicated by the market festival for Barha Pen which is held in the forest and in the way the Muriya speak of market transactions (Popoff 1980: 168-9).

It is of course true that the ordinary Hindu outsider is not deified,3 but it is quite relevant that the Maharajas of

Bastar -- clearly representing all Hindus -- were deified.^

In order to demonstrate the affinity between tribal gods and Hindu kings, we can consider in a more general anthropological context the process of deification in a tribal religious system:

The "system" is the segmentary system of the tribe, the ranking of spirits a symbolic transposition of the segmentary hierarchy. The high gods are tribal gods, spirits of everyone, concerned with things that happen to everyone. Ancestral spirits are tutelaries of the clan or lineage, concerned with the particular destinies of these groups; while ghosts of the recently departed...particularly influence familial or individual fate (Sahlins 1968: 18).

Now this description accords well with what has been presented of the Muria religious system and in no systemic way differs from the religions of the Hill Maria or 70

Bison-horn Maria. It is in fact inaccurate to suggest that

Bastar tribal religion exists in the plural. Its structure and theology are replicated throughout Bastar tribal society. The degree of replication can be seen in the uniform presence in all three major groups of i) ancestral deities linked to clan segmentation; ii) the fundamental conceptual importance of the Earth, or the Earth Goddess and her associated tellurian ('first fruits') rituals; and iii) the transformational quality of the Earth 'cult' as represented in the multiplicity of deity or pen (glossed by

Popoff as "divine feminine power", 1980: 48). This last commonality, the transformational potential, allows at the highest practical level the acceptance of the Hindu royal tutelary Danteshwari as equivalent to, yet ultimately superordinate over, the Gond Earth Goddess. Relatedly, by way of symbolic marriage to Danteshwari, the Maharajas of

Bastar were also considered divine and thus at the apex of the Bastar religious hierarchy.

At the kam'k the non-divine, recent mortals are unified with the divine ancestors according to the metaphor of marriage. For the Muria this takes place explicitly on the first day of the kam'k in the maringa marmin, the 'second marriage' ceremony:

...the 'earth master1 circumambulates the 'ancestral stones' followed by sisters and daughters of the deceased in whose memory the ceremony is performed. The 'earth master' places 71

a 'mark' (tika) of rice on each stone and, in accordance with marriage rites, anoints it with 'fire turmeric', a mixture of oil and turmeric... this ritual...activity...comes to be thought of as purposive and productive with the union of mascu• line and feminine principles (Popoff 1980: 163).

In Popoff's interpretation, "the union of opposites that the

Muria have in mind in speaking of 'joined' or 'married' ancestors is more than that of recently departed 'ancestors' as wandering spirits joined with agnatic 'elders' in the

'ancestral-deity1. For them it is a marriage that calls to mind the recently departed 'ancestors' as agnatic kinsmen and unites them with the earth, the primordial ancestress"

(ibid.). Accepting that Popoff's assumptions concerning the mental workings of the Muria are more or less valid (and there is in Grigson 1938: 197, some supportive agreement), his interpretation of the 'second marriage' leads directly to an almost identical, metaphorical process in the deifica• tion of kings.

However, to suggest that there are two processes is only somewhat of an analytical distinction. It is quite likely that we have here the reconvergence of two branches of the same deificational process. It is in this kind of context that we can accept Dumont's early dictum "that most so-called 'primitives' in India are only people who have lost contact..." (1957: 8). In the context of the forging of the Bastar divine kingdom, they are obviously regaining contact.

In any event, Hindu kingship enters into its divinity by the same route: a symbolic marriage of mortal to deity, or more precisely, the Goddess. In a contemporary, compara• tive Indian setting, Mayer glosses the perception of sacral kingship as "the specific combination of male and female principles in royal rule" (1981: 147); the female principle residing in the nature of the Goddess, and the union with it achieved in the ritual context of the king ascending his gaddi (the throne), "the Seat of the Devi" (ibid.: 146), the

Goddess. If we take a step back closer to the time under discussion, to the medieval textual sources, the marital nature of this combination comes more clearly into focus, and almost literally 'grounds' divine kingship at the junc• ture of tribal and Hindu theistic conceptualization. In his commentary on a major treatise concerning early medieval kingship, Ronald Inden observes that,

The king is said to be the "husband" and "lord" (Vallabha, pati) of the land or earth and these two are regarded as the "father" (pita) and "mother" (mata) of the people, their "children" (praja).... Like husband and wife, the king and the earth were to act as a single, corporate entity, guided by him, in producing good offspring and good crops .... The personification of the earth and her subordination to the king suggests that...a rela• tionship to the body or person of the king that we would consider mystical or supernatural,...was the feature that defined the Hindu kingdom...(1 978: 30)

What this also suggests, if entered into a statement of structural relations connecting the Gond theistic system with the Hindu monarchy of Bastar, is firstly that the king is to the earth as the ancestors are to the ancestral 73 deity -- that is, by virtue of hierogamy. Furthermore, the king (the Maharaja of Bastar) is to the Goddess (the tute• lary, Danteshwari), as Danteshwari is to Tallur Mutte -- by virtue of the hierarchy of equivalences generated by the

'interaction of primitive and advanced symbols'. The result is that in Bastar both Hindu and tribal symbols are brought together on the same plane of divinity. But on that plane, they form a hierarchy, figuratively something like the multiple ascending heads of Brahma, in which the Maharaja encompasses Danteshwari, Danteshwari encompasses Tallur

Mutte -- and Tallur Mutte, is all of creation.

This analysis has been intended to show how the unity of Bastar State was conceptually forged. However, while it reveals a hierarchy at the highest levels, this should not obscure the fact that at lower levels, that is tribal levels, the hierarchy is much attenuated by relations of equivalence. Gond religious structure -- and I am here interpreting Popoff's version of it -- has a more horizon• tal than vertical dimension, consistent with its egalitarian social structure. The 'refractions' of deity are different• iated according to context and behaviour rather than to attributes of superiority and inferiority. Thus, in contrast to Hindu hierarchy where qualities of purity and pollution vertically order high gods and low gods, tribal 'hierarchy' is more a pervasive, omnipresent continuum divisible into segments by the predominance of certain moral qualities. 74

Movement along the continuum is motivated and fueled by the desire to perpetuate it, to perpetuate in other words, life, which never ceases as such but is eternally transformable by virtue of the divine transformational states in terms that are shared throughout the continuum but are variably concen• trated in the various segments of it.

At the human end of the divine continuum, that is to say not radically separate from divinity, men and women are by their nature and by the demands of their life-cycles seen, in potential, as variously both moral and immoral, benevolent and malevolent. The first transformation towards divinity occurs at death, upon which humans become ancestral ghosts who are primarily immoral and malevolent. In the fashion discussed above, ancestral ghosts become ancestral deities who are primarily moral and benevolent. Ancestral deities, generically, genealogically and sexually summed, become, in the sense of 'are equivalent to', the Goddess of the Earth, who, like human beings, is potentially both malevolent and benevolent.

The point is that in Gond religion all existence is conceptualized dualistically and that the various states of material and spiritual being are distinguishable not with respect to any hierarchy of purity and pollution, but in terms of varying concentrations of the potential to effect benign and/or malignant change in the quality of existence.

This kind of potential is actualized by human behaviour 75 which is either morally acceptable or unacceptable (polo), acceptability being defined by a code of and for conduct applicable to the satisfaction of desire -- for food and progeny, in the Muria model of desire (Popoff 1980: 189 ff.).

This interpretation can be taken further by positing in the moral code a tension between self-willedness and self- restraint (Burridge 1976: 658 ff.). In this view, morality is contained in the exhortative, 'thou shalt not', injunc• tion against the usurpation of the divine prerogative of independent action. Expressed in positive terms, the moral prescription of self-restraint in Gond society involves an ideal construction of pre-eminently social behaviour which, because it is 'tribal' and relatively undifferentiated (as in the lack of distinction between priests and laity), must also be egalitarian. However, this egalitarian system became encapsulated or encompassed by its growing interpenetration and conceptual synthesis with Hindu monarchy. The conceptual synthesis, being operational almost solely at the apex of the two systems, allowed the populations of both these systems to co-exist in a separate-yet-unified symbiosis over a very long period of history (in some respects until

1965). In short, one has synthesis at the highest conceptual levels, and symbiotic, vaguely hierarchical relations at the socio-economic levels of the two otherwise independent yet interdependent systems. 76

Having said all this, however, is not having said any•

thing much about necessary relations, about concrete aspects

of intention and causality. Shifting the level of symbolic

analysis a few notches lower on the scale of abstraction will allow some access to these aspects. Thus, besides the

evidence of economic and symbolic penetration of Hindu

monarchy into tribal society that is present in the rural market and the market ritual, there were other, more mani•

festly purposive linkages that came to be effected. \

One such linkage came about through the adoption by the

Kakatiya kings of a particular Gond god called Anga. Anga

Pen was (and is) perhaps the most dramatic of Gond deities,

in action as well as shape. In a religion of very little

iconographic elaboration, the Anga truly stands out as the most visible representation, and actuality, of deity.

According to Elwin (1947: 189),

The Anga is in form and character unique among the aboriginal gods of India. In form it is an arrange• ment of three parallel poles...over which are tied... cross-pieces of bamboo or saja. The central pole is the actual god, the two side-poles being simply intended to enable his two or four bearers to raise him and carry him about. This central pole has a curious head called koko which resembles that of a snake or bird. At the junctions of the logs and cross-bars there are tufts of peacock feathers. Silver ornaments, symbols of the sun and moon and sometimes plain rupees, are nailed to the ends of the poles. Bands of silver may be hammered round them.... Sometimes the Anga is two-headed: husband and wife live together.... Sometimes the Anga's wife is made in. the form of a pole and placed upon him.

On the basis of appearance alone it is not surprising that 77 the Anga among all the other Gond deities was chosen to be taken into the king's palace at Jagdalpur. There is no hist• orical data to specify when this first took place but oral testimony takes it as far back as the Bare Dongar court of the sixteenth century (Grigson, introduction to Elwin 1943:

X). With perhaps more reliability, it is said that one such installation occurred in the time of Raja Bhairon Deo (of the mid-nineteenth century) who, upon "hearing of the fame of the Anga in the wilds, had a copy made and installed in the palace at Jagdalpur" (Elwin 1947: 182). In any event, it is of course more than just appearance that led to the adop• tion of Anga Pen as a royal deity. The nature of Anga and its capabilities were such as to warrant its acquisition.

Known as the "clan-god" in the older anthropological literature, Anga fits into the above discussion of Bastar

Gond theism as a pen-anal (pi. pen anask) or ancestral deity. Often referred to as the offspring or sibling of

Barha Pen, Anga Pen however does not denote just one ancest• ral deity, but many, each named and specific to the various

Gond clans and villages where those clans predominate. As guardians of morality, the Anga are especially "capable of detecting truth or falsehood. Thus it is said that if a witch or thief resides in a village and an anga... is carried to each household, the evil presence is indicated by the pen manifesting itself in the actions of its bearers...to whom the 'ancestral deity' comes" (Popoff 1980: 161). Elwin's description of such a witch hunt is witness to this oral 78 evidence (Cf. Elwin 1947: 192-3).

The motivation for the transfer of this tribal symbol to the domain of Hindu kings was on one level quite straightforward: it generated revenue. Grigson recalls his

"amused astonishment when in 1927 during an inspection of the accounts of the Jagdalpur temples managed by the State

Court of Wards I found that the villagers around Jagdalpur frequently requisitioned his (the Anga's witch-hunting) services...paying for them a fee of Rs. 5 into the State

Treasury" (Elwin 1943: X-XI). On another level, the acquisi• tion of the Anga Deo (the Halbi term for this deity) acknowledged and reflected the very marked influence of tribal symbols on state religion.5 This also indicates that the interaction of symbols was definitely a two-way process. The acceptance of Anga Deo matches in the reverse direction the tribal acceptance of Danteshwari as the para• mount goddess.^

In the most complexly symbolic, ritual interaction of tribal and State deities, in the king's Dasara festival, 7

Danteshwari and Anga Pen and a multitude of other Hindu and tribal deities are brought together. In fact, so much of the social and religious life of Bastar is brought together in the Dasara that it would require a separate thesis or mono• graph to do it full justice. And this would only be possible in light of systematic field research of only the more sal• ient aspects of the Dasara as can be gleaned from the little

(and incomplete) documentation that exists. 79

The introduction of Dasara in Bastar, or more accurate•

ly the beginnings of its development since it is unlikely

that it arrived fully formed, can plausibly be traced to the middle of the fifteenth century. It was about this time that

an early king of Bastar, Purushottamdeva, is said to have

inaugurated the Jagannath-style, chariot procession -- a

central feature of the Bastar Dasara (Kedarnath Thakur 1908:

111). In general the Dasara was a development of early medi•

eval rituals of the "lustration" or nirajana type which took

place toward the end of the monsoon. "These had as their

objective the renewal and reconstruction of cosmos, society,

and kingdom" (Inden 1978: 59). As the ceremony of medieval kingship, the Dasara in Bastar did incorporate such lofty

objectives, but it did so by means of a concrete incorpora•

tion of symbols that crosscut the entire conceptual environ• ment and the whole of the tribal-Hindu sacred pantheon.

Taking place annually in October,8 the Dasara festi•

val's most prominent sacred figure is Danteshwari, in whose

honor it is held. As the tutelary of the Kakatiyas, she is

said to have accompanied the founding king, Annam Deo, on his flight from Warangal. According to tradition, it was

Danteshwari who advised Annam Deo to flee from Warangal and

the oncoming Muslim forces. Indirectly, Dasara is homage to

Bastar itself, which name in folk tradition means 'ornament

of the Goddess.'

To give some atmosphere to the Dasara, I will begin by

quoting from the Bastar Bushan (Kedarnath Thakur 1908: 101), 80

a Hindi history not without a good lacing of characteristic

hyperbole:

At the time of Dashara, Jagdalpur becomes as if heavenly. The nine days of celebration in Jagdalpur is even bigger than the one (Durga Puja) in Calcut• ta. From within all the 13,000 square miles of Bastar the villagers come, including the Mukhiya Manjhi, Palki Chalan, Pargannia Hikmi, Samat Naik, Kamdar, Tehsildar, Zamindar and other leaders; siraha and pujari also come....All the top leaders come to Jagdalpur bearing presents, riding on elephants or horse-drawn carts, accompanied by the playing of drums. They used to bring deer, ante• lope, rabbit, falcon, doves, peacocks.... The merchants and visitors, dancers and celebrants come from great distances.... Thousands of goats are given in sacrifice. The nearby villages and jungles are also filled with people. At the present time there are twenty to twenty-five thousand visitors.

Immediately preceeding the Dasara proper, though very much a part of it, a procession takes place to the Kachin temple on

the outskirts of Jagdalpur. Kachin is the goddess of the

Mahara (Weaver) caste which, still largely tribal in ident•

ity, provides for the occasion a young girl dressed in new

clothes. The Maharaja arrives with an entourage at the

temple grounds, upon which a wooden swing has been erected with a seat covered in thorns (in later times studded with nails). The girl circumambulates the swing, a generic symbol of the Goddess, and on her last round receives a staff and

shield. From the crowd accompanying the Maharaja, a spirit medium (siraha) comes forward similarly armed and engages

the girl in mock battle. After an inconclusive outcome to

the fighting, the girl exhibits possession behaviour 81

(foaming at the mouth, swooning) and lies down on the

thorn-covered seat of the swing. "The Raja now asks the

(temple) priest to pray to the goddess to ensure an auspi•

cious Dusserah festival....She (the possessed girl) pretends

to listen to the prayer of the Raja communicated by the priest and slowly takes off a flower garland from her neck, offers it to the Raja through the priest and grants that the

Dusserah shall proceed smoothly" (Majumdar 1939: 212). In

short, the goddess Kachin, identified in the Mahara girl, confers upon the king the sanction and blessings to proceed with the festival.

Returning to his palace, the king holds a Darbar (court assembly) at which is announced the programme for the festival. After this, the king ceremonially transfers the duties of state management to his Diwan, or Chief Minister, and then removes his royal finery to emerge dressed in a dhoti (a voluminous loin-cloth), his upper body well-anoint• ed with sandal paste. In effect, the king splits his role as combined religious and secular head of state and retains only his spiritual function. This is made quite manifest when after midnight on the second day a surrogate ascetic

(from the Halba castes) is installed in a low, obviously cave-like pit in the Darbar hall where for the next nine days he is to sit in meditational pose and undertake the

austerities and hardships involved on behalf of the king

(ibid.: 213). The king, however, does not lose his ascetic persona and in fact he takes on (one might say, usurps) a 82

Brahmin type status in being the sole ritual officiant at all subsequent Danteshwari pujas (honoring ceremonies). This is a significant detail and needs emphasis: "As long as the

Devi is on this visit to Jagdalpur, the king himself does her puja" (Kedarnath Thakur 1908: 105).9

On the third day the first chariot procession starts.

On the square platform forming the top of the lavishly decorated, five metre high chariot, the king sits on a throne which has been set on top of a jhula, or swing. Not only with respect to the symbolism of the swing itself, in

Bastar "...the occupancy of an elevated position atop some mobile platform is a very cogent expression of superior or divine status..." (Gell 1980: 230). On this first day of chariot procession, which procession is repeated for the next five days, the chariot is pulled by both Muria and

Dhurwa tribals.' The route taken by the chariot on most days circles the centre of Jagdalpur, around the four square blocks that enclose the Jagannath and Maoli (a 'refraction' of Danteshwari) temples as well as the central, daily market. It is significant that the temples and market are adjacent to each other for it indicates the association of food with divinity. Also, one of the final ritual acts of the king is to perform arati, the puja of flame, at the entrance to the central market.10

On the eighth and ninth days of Dasara the chariot is kept immobile. Instead, these are days of concentrated ritual and worship. At midnight of the eighth day the king 83 performs, along with the officials of state, puja at the

Danteshwari temple within the palace compound. There partially completed, the king's worship is continued until dawn at a garden site a quarter mile distant from the palace.

The ninth day is one of climax. It starts with Kumari

Puja, at which nine virgin girls, representing nine mani• festations of the Goddess, are worshipped, fed and clothed

(Majumdar 1939: 214). The Brahmin officiants at this puja are also given food and clothes, "after which the Raja is given a dish of cooked rice which represents the first hand• ful of the newly cropped rice" (ibid.). This is an important symbolic event and warrants immediate exegesis. The king's ceremonial meal is rooted in tribal 'first fruits', or more literally, 'new eating' (nawa khanna) ceremonies. These are the largest and most important occasions in the Bastar Gond ritual cycle. They occur throughout the agricultural year to mark the ^transition when unripe or immature crops become

"thought of as food that is 'ripe' (pakka or pand), 'mature' or 'married'" (Popoff 1980: 181).11 In particular, the

Muria "connect all first eating ceremonies with procreation and the perpetuation of the lineage and the clan. With each first eating ceremony, a festival is held and all villages in the pargana are required to bring their 'ancestral deity' to the parent 'ancestral deity', Barha Pen. Villages of the pargana, irrespective of caste, come 'to see' and to be in the presence of the 'ancestral deities'" (ibid.: 182). Here 84

again we see the association of divinity with food and how

the Dasara festival celebrates this idea at the highest

level, that of royal divinity. For many tribals, the Dasara

is a time "when their king eats the new rice and when they

go 'to see' him and Danteshwari" (ibid.: 185). This again

demonstrates the conceptual continuity of tribal thought and

how at the Dasara the synthesis of Hindu-tribal symbolism is

effected.

After the king's new eating ceremony on the ninth day,

the Halba ascetic is propitiated and released from his

austerities in the pit, "care being taken that the Raja may

not meet him or recognize him in the role of an ascetic"

(Majumdar 1939: 215). This care is taken because it is the

king who at this point re-assumes the overt role of the

ascetic, thereby absorbing the surrogate's accumulated store

of meritorious sanctity, by once again appearing in dhoti,

bare-bodied and bare-footed. So prepared, the king walks out

to the outskirts of Jagdalpur to meet the image of the

goddess Danteshwari who has been carried in a palanquin

(doli) the 54 miles from the main temple at Dantewara.

Around nine in the evening, the king arrives at the Dante• wara road and respectfully greets the palanquin and performs

arati. He then takes one pole of the palanquin upon his

shoulder and together with the Danteshwari priest and the

Jia (temple manager) from Dantewara, they carry the divine

burden back to the palace where the goddess is placed in a

special throne in the Darbar hall. After the king is given 85

Danteshwari prasad (sanctified offerings which have been given to the deity and redistributed to its worshipers), an auspicious time is fixed for the next day when the king resumes his full identity. At that time, in other words, he will again put on the full regalia of his divine office and in so doing re-incorporate secular authority (danda) as part of his mandate.

Thus, on the tenth day, "clad in purple and red, decked with all jewels and ornaments" (ibid.) the king returns to the Darbar hall and then proceeds to ascend the larger of the two chariots used in the Dasara, the smaller one having been ridden up to this point. On this occasion the chariot is pulled by Bison-horn Maria. The chariot makes two rounds of its route around the market and main temples. The king is then returned to his palace and he enters the Darbar where he receives a delegation of palace members, officials and members of the public who pay tribute to him and offer gifts. After reciprocating with courtesies and counter-gifts the king retires to his royal apartments.

The eleventh day of Dasara heralds a rather special event. Late in the evening, while the king is asleep he is abducted by a group of tribals, Maria, Muria and Bhattras, who carry him on a palanquin to Kumra Kot, a few miles from

Jagdalpur. Kumra Kot is the place where "the king's ancest• ors are said to have camped when they first came (to

Jagdalpur) and where the king listened to the grievances of his subjects after performing the ceremonial hunt (parad) 86 in the forests, "and any game, birds or animals they can secure are offered to the Raja along with rice, vegetables and coins which they can afford" (Majumdar 1939: 216). In the morning, the king is taken back to Jagdalpur on the big chariot. He sits on a swing on top of the chariot platform and is dressed in yellow clothes with bow and arrow in hand. The return procession is a matter of "triumphant joy to the people and huge crowds (which) greet the procession while the chariot is dragged home....As the chariot slowly winds its way back through lively crowds the day fades into twilight and the palace as well as the houses lining the route are illumined by garlands of lights and festoons"

(ibid.) Interestingly, the chariot makes one stop on the way at a Hanuman temple where an offering is made in recognition of the help Hanuman (the monkey god) gave to Rama in his battles with Ravana, the demon king of Lanka. It is likely that this ritual recognition is very much bound up with the

Muria "self-perception as lowly descendants of the demon king Ravan... (Popoff 1980: 220), which notion is probably shared by most Bastar Gonds. At any rate, the king soon arrives back at the palace where he immediately makes obeisance at the . He is then greeted in the Darbar hall by the more important female members of his household, one of whom performs a small ritual designed to ensure the safety of the king after his foray into the

'dangerous' tribal encampment in the 'jungle' of Kumra Kot.

The thirteenth and fourteenth days see a winding down 87 of the Dasara ceremonies. On the thirteenth, Kachin, the goddess of the opening of Dasara, is again worshipped, but now in a thanksgiving manner. The fourteenth, and last day of the festival, is the time for Kutumb Yatra Puja, at which all the miscellaneous deities, native and borrowed, are jointly worshipped by the royal house. The last act of the

Dasara, before the varied social and symbolic components of

Bastar once again dissociate, is the celebration of the return of the Danteshwari palanquin to the goddess1 seat at

Dantewara.^ 2

As stated earlier, this account of the Bastar Dasara only touches upon, at its most salient points, the complexi• ty of the festival. I have interwoven some interpretation however, and can now draw most of the remaining threads together. The abduction sequence leading to Kumra Kot is plainly a re-enactment of the original encounter between the

Kakatiyas and the tribals of Bastar. The scene represents a clash of antagonstic forces^ which manage to reconcile and support each other. This same theme on the level of divinity is enacted in the ritual flight at the Kachin temple. On a broader conceptual level, the Dasara reconciles a number of oppositions at various planes of abstraction: Hindu/tribal society and religion, secular authority/divine authority, low caste/high caste, and unity/fragmentation. The Dasara rituals collapse each distinction under the overall instru• mentality of divine kingship.

This can perhaps best be illustrated in light of a 88 fundamental (and almost everywhere ubiquitous) opposition between inside and outside. At numerous points we can detect a kind of oscillation between these two referents. The very first ritual performance, the Kachin ceremony, takes place outside of Jagdalpur, as does the penultimate, the Kumra Kot abduction. Pujas to Danteshwari take place both inside the palace as well as outside in the garden, patently a symbol for the jungle. Kutumb Yatra Puja, bringing together under the royal umbrella nearly all the deities of Bastar, unfolds outside the palace in a treed setting (Majumdar 1939: 216).

And of course conversely, throughout the Dasara there are many ritual performances -- many more than can be described here -- which in location and focus emphasize the

1interiority' or centricity of power, prosperity and mater• ial well-being. However, ultimately, the source of power which the king must absorb comes from outside, from Dante• shwari, who is seated more than fifty miles away from

Jagdalpur and whom the king must meet on the outskirts of his capital. In a sense, the Dasara is the occasion of a hierogamy whereby the king assumes his divinity and his divine superordinance by way of a marriage to the

Goddess.14

The opposition 'inside/outside' has venerable forebear- ers in Indian textual traditions, especially those concern• ing kingship. As Heesterman (1978: 10) points out: \

89

Indian civilization offers a basic paradigm, used in many contexts, for such an opposition, namely the opposition between the settled agricultural community (grama) and the alien outside sphere of the jungle (aranya)...the two spheres complement each other in a number of ways. The settled commun• ity needs the jungle for grazing ground, source of new land, manpower and forest products, link between settled areas and finally as refuge. The jungle and its "tribal" inhabitants on the other hand look to the settled areas as a source of agricultural produce, cattle, and other riches as well as employment either in a military capacity or as agricultural labour.

"In other words," the author continues, "grama and aranya are complementary" (ibid.). As expressed in the Dasara rituals, this complementarity traces the king's path as a cyclic pattern, alternating between the two. His authority and divinity are centered in the grama (or pura), but the source of these as well as their material basis must be sought in the aranya or forest. Thus the Dasara, also consistent with the symbolism of food, is a ceremony of regeneration, re-divinisation and continuity of both the king and the institution of kingship.

To return to my opening statement in this chapter in regard to the implicit societal bifurcation of Bastar, the subsequent discussion has shown how this bifurcation was culturally expressed in the opppositions of kingly and tribal ritual.15 The ultimate effect of these rituals, how• ever, was to unify the oppositions and bifurcations under the legitimacy and authority of divine kingship. What could not be achieved on the plane of secular authority (politics 90 and economics) was achieved on the plane of ritual and ritual meanings.1^ The result, over approximately a four hundred year period of time, was the unity and virtual self-sufficiency of Bastar State. 91 Footnotes to chapter 4

1 The discussions which have to do with Muria religion mainly attempt to follow Terrel Popoffs dissertation on Muria theism (1980). It is difficult to be very confident of my reading of Popoff because, perhaps, of his over-reading of his own data. His constructions, elaborations and qualification upon qualification of Muria theistic conceptions impress one as revealing a great depth of insight. But at the same time they make for a very slippery and elusive semantic field with which to grapple. That in such manner his analysis accurately reflects the situation on the ground unfort• unately does little to assuage the related need for constant clarification and concision. On the other hand, with enough internal cross-referencing, checking and re-checking, a number of conceptual consistencies emerge in Popoff's work which, when linked together, form a sensible interpretation on a general level. Subject to the aforementioned insecurities, of this I am confident.

2 An article has recently appeared by Alfred Gell (1982: 470-491) on an actual Muria market at Dhorai, not far south of Benur Pargana. Gells' research is illuminating in its emphasis on markets as locations for symbols of the social order which ideologically emanate from the former seat of monarchy, Jagdalpur. Nevertheless, his argument takes on some ironic twists. While he does bring out the symbolic aspects of the market, in order to defend himself against possible charges of mystifi• cation of the social order that the market displays, he insists on grounding the market as a "straightforwardly instrumental institution" (p. 489). Yet, by subtley transposing his analysis of the market with the effect he purports the market to produce, he goes on to declare that the market is "profoundly mystifying" (ibid.). This is not the place to launch a full-scale review of Gell's analysis. However, I should say that his assumptions rest on some very debatable interpreta• tions of Muria ethnography. Furthermore, had Gell been aware of the Muria kam'k rituals, at the very least he would have found it rather difficult to assert that "there is no element of make-believe, no communicative intent, behind the...matter-of-fact transactions which collectively make up for the market" (ibid.). The kam'k rituals are precisely such a communicative intent. On the subject of Gell's ethnographic underpinnings I should make a final point. Also taking into account Gell's earlier paper on Muria shamanistic possession (1980: 219-248), one finds major ethnographic discrep• ancies, in particular with Popoff's work. As a result of my own observations in Bastar and for reasons having to do with Gell's apparently less sustained and less 92 Footnotes (con't.)

Gondi-oriented fieldwork, that is less so than Popoff's, I find myself siding with the latter. Still, it is interesting that Gell seems to have anticipated something of the problem when he suggests that the interpretations of the "symbolic statements made in the course of a ceremony are always, and only, claims, for which no validation can ever be finally found" (1982: 489; original emphasis). Unfortunately for Gell, this does not really get him off the hook. There are, after all, some claims which are better than others.

It is not impossible, on the other hand, that deifica• tion of an 'ordinary' outsider could take place. There was a phase in the tribal iconography of Central India when caricaturized wooden images of important govern• ment officials were erected at the boundaries of tribal villages. Usually of the British senior civil servant and his wife, these statues were propitiated at regular intervals,mostly in the winter touring season, with the intent to keep such outsiders away from the village (Elwin 1951). In Bastar there is also the interesting example of the deification of a Muslim sub-assistant surgeon which occured at the turn of the last century. Following his death from cholera on the Keskal pass at the northern entry to Bastar, this surgeon became deified as Doctor Deo, and his spirit was "attached by the surrounding Murias as a peon or servant to the shrine of Bhangaram at the head of the pass, where from generations past the final scene of disease-riddance or bohorani ceremonies...had taken place..." (Grigson 1938: 193).

Before proceeding, I should clarify the diachronic implications of the kam'k rituals. The changes they underwent as a result of the imposition of Hindu hegemony are more or less impossible to chronicle with much precision. One can only point out the before the advent of the British in 1853 -- and consequently before the economic motivation to open up Bastar -- there were very few markets in the kingdom. See also Footnote 10 below.

Writing on divine kingship in the tribal areas of neighbouring Orissa, L.K. Mahapatra sees the patronage of tribal deities by Hindu kings as a result of the feeling "that the tribal component of the population would become overpowering is allowed to remain too long outside the Hindu fold" (1977: 176). He goes on to say that "a similar process might have been at work in Bastar in elevating the goddess Danteswary beyond the tribal pale (compare Sinha 1962)" (ibid.: 174). In the first instance, although it seems superficially

V 93 Footnotes (con't.)

plausible, I would argue that Mahapatra overstates his case. The majority of Indian tribal populations never aspired to overcome Hindu domination, rather throughout nearly all of Indian history they attempted to avoid , and retreat from Hindu domination. In the second instance, Mahapatra is plainly wrong. As we have seen above, Danteshwari was not elevated but extended, not beyond, but in order to encompass, 'the tribal pale'. Mahapatra has seriously mis-read his source, Sinha, who explicitly speaks of the "royal goddess Danteswari..." (1 962: 69).

6 The word 'anga' has an interesting Sanskrit etymology and accordingly is taken to mean 'body' or 'limbs'. In Inden's usage as 'limbs', there were seven anga which were seen to comprise medieval Hindu kingship. Some of these were made into "an extension of the king's person" (1978: 30), and it is a tempting speculation that the Bastar Anga could be taken precisely as such an extention.

1 There are numerous different spellings of this festival including 'Dussehra', 'Dasehra', 'Dassera', and so on. I have chosen to use the simplest, probably Sanskritc form, Dasara, following Inden (1978).

8 There is mentioned a period in recent history when the Dasara was held in Chait, or April-May,, as a result of a young king's educational schedule outside Bastar (Kedarnath Thakur 1908: 110). This gives some idea of the importance of the Dasara to the kingdom, and also indicates to some degree the control over it exercised by Bastar kingship. I should also mention that there is another major festival, Chaitrai, which is the more usual festival to take place in April-May. I suspect the Chaitrai has much the same significance as Dasara. Unfortunately, besides the fact that in contemporary history the Chaitrai festival included a large amount of Maharaja-tribal interaction, there is very little detail available to confirm this suspicion.

9 Majumdar corroborates this statement when he remarks that "worship in the temple of Dhanestwari...is performed by the Raja" (1939: 214).

1° This market ritual is an aspect of Dasara that obvious• ly came into being before the time period in which the present description is situated. However, as mentioned earlier, it is likely not prior to the late eighteenth century since it was only after that time that a market system was developed under the impetus given by the 94 Footnotes (con't.)

British. Both Glasfurd (1863) and Elliot (1861) report• ed very few markets in Bastar. Those few that did exist were minor developments that had grown up around revenue depots at which grain levies were collected and stored. From these depots revenue would proceed to the royal granary at Jagdalpur. From these various reposit• ories, however, a certain amount of redistribution also took place. This was in payment for services rendered by the revenue bureaucracy, or in consequence of cere• monial obligations, or in response to extreme hardship such as natural disaster. In the following model of the redistributive function of 'chieftainship' Sahlins provides the appropriate orientation to the development of Bastar monarchy in the pre-British period:

Rights of call on the produce of the underlying population, as well as obligations of generosi• ty, are everywhere associated with chieftain• ship. The organized exercise of these rights and obligations is redistribution.... This... takes various forms: subsidizing religious ceremony, social pageantry or war; underwrit• ing...the construction of...public and religious edifices; redistributing diverse local products; hospitality and succour of the community (in severalty or in general) during shortage. Speaking more broadly, redistribution by powers-that-be serves two purposes, either of which may be dominant in a given instance. The practical, logistic function -- redistribu• tion -- sustains the community, or community effort, in a material sense. At the same time, or alternatively, it has an instrumental function: as a ritual of communion and of subordination to central authority, redistribu• tion sustains the corporate structure itself, that is in a social sense. The practical benefits may be critical, but, whenever the practical benefits, chiefly pooling generates the spirit of unity and centricity, codifies the structure, stipulates the centralized organization of social order and social action (quoted in Appadurai 1981a: 34; with additional ellipses).

Appadurai comments that this "'chiefly' model of redistribution fits the deity of a South Indian temple perfectly" (ibid.). With equal perfection it fits the Bastar divine monarchy and in cultural terms is conceived and organized in the Dasara. 95 Footnotes (con't.)

11 In Popoffs interpretation, the semantic burden carried by food has far-reaching implications: "From the Muriya point of view it becomes food in the sense that it is suitable for 'true men' or men of culture who have assumed the moral responsibilities of a married house• holder. For the householder, that which 'ripens' to become food, a product of culture, is something that is useful and purposive instead of dangerous and 'morally unacceptable' to eat" (Popoff 1980: 181).

12 Certainly a monograph could have been written on the social organization of the Dasara; and could still be written of the contemporary version of the festival except for certain political sensitivities which have turned it into an aerna of conflict. Majumdar, at any rate, leaves us with little more than a listing of social units:

The construction of the chariot is left with the Saonras, the Lohars make the iron nails and bars for the chariot. Dhakars supervise the construction. The Khatis are the special pujaris of the chariots.... The Gadabas supply bearers for the Rajas palanquin. The Halbas supply the Jogi and also guard the Raja with drawn swords when the latter camps in the Muria settlements. They also take part in the sacri• fice as a Halba is invariably engaged to kill animals for sacrifice. The Murias, Dhurwas and Dandami (Bison-horn) Marias pull the chariot while the Bhatras figure prominently on the occasion of the triumphant entry of the Raja to the capital after the kidnapping by the Murias. The Maharas supply the girl who determines the auspiciousness or otherwise of the festival (1939: 217).

From earlier (Kedarnath Thakur 1908) and later descrip• tions (Popoff 1975) of Dasara it is possible to discern a fair amount of variation in the social division of labour. Some of this variation is accountable as a result of the decline of certain groups, for instance the Gadabas, who for the most part are now found only in Orissa. In any case, Majundar's list does not exhaust the tribes and castes involved, but it is indicative of the almost total social unity brought about by the Dasara ceremonies. Only the Hill Maria, whose attendance has always been sporadic and light, are the partial exception. 96 Footnotes (con't.)

13 The particulars of the Kumra Kot abduction, which in general recognizes the importance and resourcefulness of the king's tribal subjects, should not obscure an ancient significance of the triumphant return of the chariot. In Vedic thought, the chariot drive ceremony of the rajasuya (royal investiture) ritual cycle "...is clearly marked as a symbolic war expedition..." (Heesterman 1978: 66).

^ If there were more detailed information on the Dasara, which were to be closely analyzed, this tentative statement could be confirmed. As it is, there are enough hints of marriage symbolism in the extant descriptions to support my inference as a valid one.

15 in modern, nationalist India, the question of tribal versus Hindu religion is complicated by political motivation which seeks to subsume the former under the latter. "The real problem however," according to Elwin (in Grigson 1944: 8), "is not whether Gonds or Muria are Hindus or not, but how far contact with Hinduism has affected tribal religion." This inspires Elwin to pose "a very curious question. Why is it that Gonds, Pardhans and Baigas of Mandla, who live along the main pilgrim route to sacred Anarkantak, have hardly any religion at all, either Hindu or tribal, while the Murias who live in Bastar far from Hindu influence, have a highly developed, authoritative and richly furnished system of worship that is actually, while wholly tribal, far more akin to real Hinduism? The Mandala aboriginal is completely hinduised, yet he knows nothing of the religion; the Bastar aboriginal is quite unhinduised, yet his care of the gods, his beautiful little shrines, his sacrifices and festivals, his priests and pilgrimages have much in common with Hinduism" (ibid.). In one sense it is curious indeed that in his discussion of this question Elwin omits reference to the long period of Bastar divine monarchy, which was beginning its development at the time when Mandla, also a prominent 'tribal' kingdom, was beginning to disintegrate. In another sense it is not very curious at all, for although Elwin knew the background of the Chhattisgarh kingdoms quite well -- in 1940 he was appointed Honourable Ethnographer to Bastar State -- his orientation to the anthropology of the time precluded much of an appreciation of historical context.

16 As remarked of the effect of Dasara, "in a certain sense, the entire district with its population of over a million is like a single village on...this... occasion" (Jay 1972: 163). 97

Chapter 5: Historical prologue to modern divine kingship

The developments in Bastar discussed in the last two

chapters took their course over a period of time during which the historical "curtain fell upon the country"

(Grigson 1938: 4). The resulting obscurity was, as has been

shown, not complete: a different kind of historiography

produced a different kind of history, more structural than

chronological. It is thus nevertheless true that history in

the sense of dates and events is not much evident in Bastar

prior to the nineteenth century. In this chapter, which is

an historical prologue to the story of the last divine king,

I will resume the chronicle of events begun in chapter two

and take it to the advent of the most well-known, modern yet very traditional Maharaja of Bastar.

The files and records of the British government that held sway over India until 1947 are the principal sources

for.mention of Bastar from about 1795 onwards. It was at

that time that Captain J.T. Blunt made the earliest recorded

attempt to explore the kingdom. Captain Blunt was sent out by the Bengal government to explore a route to south India

that would also fill in the blank that represented Bastar on

British maps, as well as to determine its usefulness to the

growing British hegemony over India. Blunt's mission was

directed by a policy that, short of outright annexation,

regarded the Princely States, of which there were about 98

600 large and small, as "useful props of the empire"

(Jeffrey 1978: 1). This was the beginning of Kipling's day when the Princely (or Native) States were the 'dark places of the earth'. Relations were to be established which expressed that 'darkness' as a negative example for the population of British India. As Elphinstone put it:

It appears to me to be in our interest as well as our duty to use every means to preserve the allied Governments. Their territories afford a refuge to all those whose habits of war, intrigue or depreda• tion make them incapable of remaining quiet in ours; and the contrast of their Government has a favourable effect on our subjects, who, while they feel the evils they are actually exposed to, are apt to forget the greater ones from which they have been delivered (quoted in Thompson 1944: 271 )'.

In a certain sense, Bastar conformed to this description:

Blunt's attempt to enter it was met with forceful Gond resistance, which persuaded him to go around Bastar rather than through it. The reasons for the Gond repulsion of

Blunt's party were not merely ones of plunder and pillage, nor even the alleged 'habits of war'.1

The main reason was that Blunt was associated with the

Maratha empire which had established itself over Central

India, in particular over the Ratanpur kingdom, which by the eighteenth century had become weakened to the extent that it could no longer resist.outside invasion. By 1745, the Chhat• tisgarh kingdoms, including Bastar, were under the overlord- ship of the Bhonsla rulers in Nagpur (Babb 1975:

6). However, while the old territorial system had all 99

but disappeared in the central Chhattisgarh regions, in

Bastar it still held and with it a considerable degree of

independence was maintained. The Marathas were not able to

exert much influence over Bastar and the tribute they

demanded was rarely forthcoming. In conversation with the

Maratha governor of Ratanpur in 1795, Blunt "asked him if

the Maratha government was not efficient there; to which he

replied that, for the last four or five years, the Raja (of

Bastar) had paid no tribute, that they had never had the

entire possession of the country; but by continuing to pillage and harass the Gonds, they had brought the Raja to

acknowledge the Maratha government and to promise the payment of an annual tribute" (Wills 1924: 133). From the

Raja of Ranker, a small kingdom immediately to the north,

Blunt received an even less felicitous account of conditions *

in Bastar. According to this informant, the Bastar Raja,

Daryao Deo, was

very treacherous and powerful, having possession of a great extent of country, divided into forty-eight parganahs. Daryao Deo, at the time of the decease of his father, had three brothers, two of whom he had seized and, having put out their eyes, he still kept them in confinement; but the third had made his escape to Nagpur. Many acts of the most horrid treachery, which he had been guilty of towards his own people, were then related to me;.... Daryao Deo had removed his residence from Jagdalpur to a neighbouring hill fort...on which he had secured himself against the Marathas, and paid them no more tribute than he felt himself inclined to; on which account they plundered his country and encouraged all the zamindars in the neighbourhood of Bastar to do the same and to wrest from him as much territory as they could. Sham Singh (the Ranker Raja) next stated to me that, under such circumstances, I could not expect that Daryao Deo would pay much attention to my Maratha parwanah (freedom of passage)...(ibid." 134). 100

It could hardly have been a surprise, then, to Blunt, when his expedition was "fiercely attacked by the 'Bastar Gonds'

both by day and night, and though their bows, arrows and

axes were no match for his firearms, he abandoned the

attempt to enter Bastar, and learned later...that he had

retired just in time, as word had been passed from zamindar

to zamindar in Bastar to plunder his party" (Grigson 1938:

10-11). Blunt's own account of his harrowing experiences

also gives an indication of the internal conditions in

Bastar, which were in fact endemic in the Princely States: palace intrigue and succession struggles.

The question of succession was the linchpin in the process of Bastar1s external relations. Even the tribute the

Marathas did receive was not so much a result of punitive

expeditions as a consequence of being invited to intervene

in royal rivalries over the throne. Also, the relatively

small amounts the Marathas were given in compensation for

their military aid did not imply anything further. The

Bastar kings retained full local independence. The only

interference came at the behest of the Resident at Nagpur which had been overrun in 1818 and with which victory the

British had extracted an acknowledgement of fealty. The

Resident was a senior officer in the Indian Political

Service, holding a post attached to the larger of the Native

States and representing the interests of the British

Government. From 1837 onwards, there had been increasing

rumours that Bastar had been engaging in ritual human 101

sacrifice. In 1842, the Diwan of Bastar, Lai Dalgangan

Singh, brother to Raja Bhopal Deo, was summoned to Nagpur to be questioned, while a detachment of police was sent to

Dantewara to stand guard at the Danteshwari temple where the

alleged human sacrifices were thought to be taking place.

However, although reports continued periodically to reach

the British authorities, there was never, according to

Grigson, "a single authenticated instance of human sacrifice

in Bastar. Nearly all the stories emanated from Jeypore,

(one of the Orissa states) the Maharaja of which was at

bitter emnity with the Chief of Bastar" (1938: 8). Even as

late as 1913 Bastar remained under suspicion, as when the

Inspector of the Madras police reported his personal belief

that the then Raja, Rudra Pratap Deo, was planning a human

sacrifice at Dantewara because he had no son to succeed him

(ibid.: 9).2

The British policy of 'non-interference' in the affairs

of the Native States gradually underwent a number of changes

during the first half of the nineteenth century. From a

position of virtually ignoring the inner workings of most

States to a disposition to draw up a great number of com•

mercial treaties, later versions of which enjoined a more

'civilized' mode of government, British policy by the 1850's

developed a striking prediliction for annexation. The

motives for these changes were mixed. On one side, there

were the "imperial interests of a trading company anxious to

expand and rule cheaply," and on the other there was the 102 utilitarian zeal, often spurred by English missionaries crying out against oppression, which demanded administrative reform (Jeffrey 1978: 10-11). Thus, with the latter in mind, in 1839 the Nagpur government interdicted the Bastar Rajas from inflicting capital punishment and it was arranged that the Rajas' prime minister, the Diwan, should always be appointed with the sanction of the British Resident. As Sir

Richard Temple, the Chief Commissioner for Nagpur, conclud• ed, "it is indeed most desirable that the Raja should learn to exercise his authority according to civilized ideas, and by non-interference should be made his own responsibility.

But in cases of bloodshed, his administration is found so efficient as to retard the progress of society" (1862, reprinted 1923: 80). It was also Temple who decreed that "on the wise management of the...(Bastar State)..., the gradual peopling of rich but scarcely inhabited tracts, and the civilizing of semi-barbarous tribes, will materially depend"

(ibid.: 81).3 Thus intent on their civilizing mission as well as on attempting to ensure the proper conditions for economic exploitation -- a combination of motives which were seen as complementary -- the British began to pay increas• ingly closer attention to Bastar.

The transition from focusing that attention indirectly through the Maratha Nagpur State to dealing directly with

Bastar as its paramount sovereign was effected by the

British in 1853 through the annexation of the Nagpur State. 103

Bastar then automatically became a tributary of the Govern• ment of India and entered into direct political relations with it. The Nagpur annexation was based on the principle of

escheat, the reversionary right of the paramount power to

assume direct title to a state upon a failure of succes•

sion. Escheat was a European feudal doctrine the British

applied by virtue of their military power to the Princely

States in pursuance of building the empire. As more became known of them, both Nagpur, with its areas of rich, black,

cotton-producing soil, and Bastar as its subsidiary State with valuable timber reserves, came to be seen as worthy

additions to the list of subordinate allies of the British

Empire. A more direct influence on administration and

revenue extraction, one of course serving the other, was

therefore justified in British policy.

The next step in the growing closeness of relations between Bastar State and the British came in 1862 when the king was served with an adoption sanad, or patent of succes•

sion. This move was taken in order to offset the fears of

annexation that might result from the failure of heirs to

the throne. It was also a step that recognized the contrib• uting influence that the large numbers of annexations by the

British had had on the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857. The

Bastar sanad read as follows: 104 Her Majesty being desirous that the Governments of the several princes and chiefs of India, who now govern their own territories, should be perpetuat• ed, and that the representation and dignity of their Houses should be continued; in fulfillment of this desire, this Sunnud is given to you to convey to you the assurance that on failure of natural heirs, the British Government will recognise and confirm any adoption of a successor made by your• self or any future Chief of your State that may be in accordance with the Hindoo Law and the customs of your race (de Brett 1909: 14).

Eight years later, the slight assurance of autonomy conferred by the adoption patent was more or less obliterat• ed by a required acknowledgement of fealty from the Bastar ruler:

I am a chieftain under the Administration of the Chief Commissioner of the . I have now been recognised by the British Government as a Feudatory, subject to the political control of the Chief Commissioner, or of such officer as he may direct me to subordinate myself to.... I will take such order with my subjects that they shall have no cause to complain against injustices of mine.... When the Chief Commissioner or his Officer shall give me instructions or advice, I will obey such instructions and accept such advice. And I will conform, and cause my subjects to conform, to such Forest Regulations as the Chief Commissioner may be pleased to prescribe. If, at any time, through the misconduct of myself or my successor, my State should fall into great disorder, or great oppres• sion should be practised, then I or my successor shall be liable to suspension or forfeiture of my or his governing powers (ibid.: 70).

In signing this declaration the Raja of Bastar, at this time

Bhairam Deo, was committing himself to an involvement the likely consequences of which were anticipated by the 105

British. It was known by them that Bastar had proved unruly under the Marathas and was likely to continue to be trouble•

some under its new masters. The British were thus preparing

for the possibility of a direct take-over of Bastar State.

They were also preparing the way for the development of com• mercial interests in Bastar's forest resources.

The first test of Bastar's fealty came on the occasion

of the visit of the Prince of Wales to India in 1876. As a

recognized feudatory of the British Empire, Raja Bhairam

Deo was expected to meet the Prince in Bombay. Before he was to leave, the force of the institution of divine king•

ship intervened in Bhairam Deo's plans. The intervention

came in the form of about 10,000 Murias and Bhattras who

laid seige to the palace for several weeks and refused to

allow their divine benefactor to leave the kingdom. Undoubt•

edly fearing disruption in the cycle of prosperity and

stability guaranteed by the king's presence, the Gonds protested vigorously against his departure and also against

their being left in the hands of some of his ministers who had acquired a fearsome reputation for tribal oppression.

The attendants of one of these ministers overreacted to the protests and shot and killed some of the Murias. Eventually a large detachment of troops arrived to quell the presumed

insurrection and was followed by the Political Agent for

Bastar. Upon relating to him their grievances, the tribals received satisfaction to the extent that the accused 106 ministers were banished and order was restored within a few days (Pandey 1967: 21 ).

However, the British influence on Bastar and their interest in the development of Bastar's forest wealth did not abate. Continuing trouble within the kingdom and the declining effectiveness of Bhairam Deo's rule led to the virtual supersession of the old king by 1886, and upon his death in 1891 the British assumed full management of Bastar

(Grigson 1938: 14). Grigson, with his close perspective on the administrative history of the State, describes this period as one of escalatory turmoil, economic oppression and disruption of traditional practices:

From 1886 to 1891 and for the first few years of the long (1891 -1 908) minority of Raja Rudra Pratap Deo, a series of subordinate officials were lent as Diwans to the State, and a further evil arose in the growing array of minor State officials abusing the ancient custom of bisaha, or the payment by villagers of a twentieth of their crops for the feeding of the Raja's servants, by interpreting it as a right to commandeer any aboriginal's produce at an arbitrarily fixed and often nominal price, and generally forgetting to pay even that. The new• ly-cleared roads seemed to run through wilderness, for on villagers of roadside villages the burden of begar, or forced labour, and bisaha fell with especial severity. Being 184 miles from Raipur, the headquarters of the Commissioner and the Political Agent, Bastar was seldom visited, and the people were far too much at the mercy of the incompetence or knavery of the local officials. The latter mean• while were carrying on the prescribed policy of opening communications, introducing the criminal 107 police and judicial system of British India, and exploiting the forests (again by forced labour)" (ibid.: 14-15).

Along with the new officialdom, the lower ranks of which

"regarded service in a native state only as a means to the rapid acquisition of wealth" (ibid.: 15), there came the new immigrants. These were Hindu and Muslim agriculturalists who were encouraged to settle in Bastar and to expand permanent cultivation. Easily taking advantage of their opportunities, the first wave of these immigrants soon found themselves as nominal landlords or lessees over long established tribal villages, and over the heads of traditional headmen. So established,

the lessees at once proceeded as fast as possible to get the best land into their own hands...to ignore the use and wont of village life, especially the sari-bori or co-operation in supplies and labour for village bread-winning and village festivals, to introduce Hindu and Mussalman settlers, and to turn the natives of Bastar into bondservants little better than slaves by advancing them money, on terms which made repayment practi• cally impossible, in return for their labour or that of their sons (ibid.).

Although there was a short period of amelioration of these conditions near the turn of the century, by the end of the first decade many of these same abuses of 'modernization' regained currency. Furthermore, the renewed tribal discon• tent which resulted was heightened to the point of outrage by the machinations of the former Diwan and cousin of Raja 108

Bhairam Deo, Lai Kalendra Singh, whose aim it was to usurp the succession to the throne from his nephew, the young Raja

Rudra Pratap Deo.

The 1910 Rebellion, as it is called in Bastar history, broke out with a vehemence that underscored tribal hostility to immigrant exploiters and the demand to keep Bastar for

Bastar forest dwellers (Standen 1910: 7). Thus, the most provocative action which caused this rebellion to occur was the reservation of large areas of State forest in which every tribal village was summarily and without warning destroyed. The tribal attachment to the forest, whatever its symbolic ambivalence, was one of fundamental importance and the exclusion of its use threatened the very survival of large numbers of Gonds. The rebellion began with arson, robbery and violence to foreign immigrants, and as the

British investigating officer remarked, "it was a regular revolt against civilization, against forest conservancy,

(and) against the opening up of the country by Hindu settlers" (ibid.). However, this misstates the case, for it was not against civilization or forest conservancy as such that the rebellion was directed, but against how these new goals were implemented. The list of grievances which the tribals later put forward included "high handed treatment and unjust exactions on the part of Forest Officials, maltreatment of pupils and parents by schoolmasters in order to extort money, forcible collection by schoolmasters 109 of money to purchase supplies for the Tahsildar and

Inspector, purchase by schoolmasters of supplies at one fourth of the market price, similar acts by the State

Police, with the addition that they exact begar (forced labour) and beat village servants to compel the cheap supply of grain..." and the list goes on, the judgement being reached that the truth of these grievances was largely incontestable (ibid.: 18).

The rebellion was in short order and efficiently put down, its leaders punished for the violence of their methods, the scheming Diwan deposed and an Englishman appointed in his place. While not formally deposed, Raja

Rudra Pratap Deo henceforward was obliged to maintain a very passive role in the administration of his kingdom. After his early death in 1921, the British again took over direct management of the State during the minority of the heir, the

Maharani Prafuklla Kumari Devi.4 The Maharani acceded to the throne in 1924 but subsequent illness forced a return to

British management. The Maharani's son, the late Maharaja

Pravir Chandra Bhanj Deo, was to become the last of the

Kakatiya kings of Bastar, the last true representative of the old order and yet, ironically, the man in whose name the new age was to be heralded. 110 Footnotes to chapter 5

1 The Gond 'habits of war' are placed in their correct context in the following selection from an 1812 Report on East India affairs, referring, among others to the tribals of Bastar: "The people in general although rude and barbarous, may yet be denominated warlike, as they have always distinguished themselves as bold and persevering champions of the great law of nature. Being driven to their wild unwholesome fastnesses among the mountains, they frequently descend in harvest time into the lowlands, to dispute the produce of their ancient rightful inheritance with the present possessors, but their incursions are desultory and simply impelled by the pressing want of subsistence" (quoted in Grigson 1938: 10). It is also true that throughout Bastar history, right up to the events of 1965 dealt with in the next chapter, it was the 'want of subsistence', or the fear of starvation to put it less euphamistically, that was fundamental in any warlike outbursts by the Gonds.

2 Such rumours die hard, and have even been uncritically picked up by the prominent, present-day mythographer, Joseph Campbell, who states that in "the year 1830, a petty monarch of Bastar, desiring her grace, offered on one occasion twenty-five men at her altar in Dantesh- vari (sic)..." (1962: 5). Campbell's source is listed as the 1928 edition of the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, in which the entry on Indian human sacri• fice merely represents another proliferation of Bastar's notorious, hearsay reputation.

3 Along with some of the earlier Marathas, Temple also recognized that the first civilizing influences to enter Bastar State were the Banjaras, a nomadic group of herders and traders originating in Raj asthan in Western India. Still present in small enclaves in Bastar, the Banjaras had introduced to the Gonds the desirability of salt and sugar for which they encour• aged "them to be more industrious in collecting the produce of their jungles, such as lac, iron ore, and other articles for barter..." (Grigson 1938: 11). The British had much respect for these intrepid Banjaras, although it was not without ambivalence: "As traders and carriers, these Bunjarahs ramify all over the country, and form a free masonry among themselves; they travel from Bombay to Mirzapore, from Bundlecund to Masulipatam;...(with) vast herds of bullocks (they)... have to meet different dangers in the damp and dark forest, the putrefying vegetation, the malarious exhalation, the pestilential swamp...The character of these men is in some respects fair; but they are often 111 Footnotes (con't.)

daring and turbulent and sometimes suspected of participation in robberies" (Temple 1923: 11). I think it is not unreasonable to suggest that the Banjaras brought the precursors to the modern Bastar market, where they can still be found selling ceremonial clothing and cowrie-studded artifcats to the Gonds, especially in Muria areas.

4 As Grigson notes, the "hereditary title of the Ruling Chief of Bastar was raised from Raja to Maharaja in ••' 1 932" (1 938: 1 7). This indicates the role played by the British in elevating the status of Bastar State in relation to many of the other, less important Princely States of India. 112

Chapter 6: The last king of Bastar and the advent of the

millennium

So it seems that, when we start from the sacral of kingship, the different pieces may fall into a consistent pattern (Heesterman 1977: 3).

"So, given Pravir's belief in his own supernatural protection..." "Not supernatural, natural." "Why natural?" "Because, he understood one thing, that he's the natural leader of this district..." "But this is then a different question. I asked you if Pravir believed in his supernatural powers, that means supernatural protection, so his putting himself in a position of danger, based on his..." "No, no, he, no, he did not put himself in a position of danger, with your meaning, with a design. Because you know, firing took place when there was lull, then he came out and then in order to appease the government officials he said if you want to arrest these people, then take them, why do you resort to firing and try to harass these people? They are here, you take them to jail." "OK. So why did they shoot him?" "Huh?" "Why did they then shoot him?"1

In this chapter I will present a biographical account of the last king of Bastar State, a king who called himself the tribal, or "adivasi god". The narration will touch upon psychological judgements, not in any analytical sense, but as part of the description of the controversy that surrounded his actions. The analytical emphasis will instead be on the controversy itself. What the king, Pravir Chandra 113

Bhanj Deo, actually did — frequently at best a matter of

speculation -- is relatively less important than what he

said he was doing; and, often in contradiction, how those to

whom his actions were significant interpreted what he said

he was doing. These assertions and interpretations, which mark the various ideological positions around the person of

the king, take shape as a process which has been called the

"management of meaning" (Cohen and Comaroff 1976). As much

as it is central to an understanding of Pravir's biography,

the management of meanings is central to the comprehension

of Bastar State (now District) as a whole. Such an approach,

both as method of analysis and as descriptive orientation,

is very useful in my theme that Bastar is an entirety -- a

complex socio-religious fact at best desultorily

acknowledged in the not inconsiderable anthropological

literature on the area -- and that its pivotal point was,

and in a millenarian sense continues to be, its kingship.

As was presented in chapter three, one very salient

aspect of that kingship was its divinity. In order to grasp

that saliency in modern time it will be necessary to come to

grips with the biographical context of Pravir's mortality.

Almost paradoxically, the importance of divinity in the life

of Pravir was never as great as subsequent to his death. It

was his divinity which, in a symbolic and transformative

sense, led to his rebirth. 114

The substance of this chapter will be formed by the construction of a narrative from the main voices that were available to me in my research. Of relevance to the structure and meaning of the narrative, the picture that will emerge is pieced together from both very disparate and for the most part antagonistic sources. Much of the

'factual', that is to say documentary, data come from a judicial inquiry into Pravir's death conducted by a Justice of the Madhya Pradesh Government. Its impartiality consists primarily in finding fault with both sides of a struggle, which, essentially, was between the king and a large following of Bastar Gonds on one side, and a relatively small number of powerful politicians and locally prominent, high ranking administrators on the other. Despite its balancing of blame however, there is in Justice Pandey's. report an implicit yet pervasive condemnation of Pravir. His selections of events and actions from the Maharaja's life and his evaluations of them are consistently and exclusively cast in negative language. It suggests a portrait of Pravir as an unfortunate eccentric, recklessly and dangerously forcing the hand of fate. >

Often bitter and abusive in its own bias, the other major source from which I draw material is the account which

Pravir himself gave of these same events. Although titled _I

Pravir The Adivasi God, it is not so much an autobiography as a highly polemical and angry text narrowly bent on self- 115 vindication. Regularly erupting into vituperative denunciation, its vilification of the government, the

Congress political party, officials and administrators is contrasted with the benevolent politess of former British suzerainty and the natural superiority of monarchy in a traditional state. Interspersed are characterizations of the hapless aboriginal exploited at every turn by scrofulous non-tribals in collusion with corrupt officials and politicians. While my description here borders on caricature, it is exactly this kind of expression which colours the contentious dialogue which constitutes these two sources.

The modification and minor linkages which I will introduce in order to transform this dialogue into a narrative are based on my own fieldwork data. Having interviewed some of the secondary yet nevertheless influential figures in these events enables me to make statements which temper the polarization evident in the main texts. The verbal texts, so to speak, are two steps removed from the actual events: they are reflections on their original testimonies -- cited in some cases in Pandey -- as well as secondary reflections on the actions which gave rise to those testimonies. In the examination of these texts both uncertainties and, in comparison with earlier versions, alterations are detectable. Such fluctuations of memory and attitude produce inconsistencies and emendations familiar to 116 any ethnographer. In the present case, in which ethnography and history methodologically overlap, and in which all the data are by no means available -- again, an aspect of the inescapable anthropological deficit -- it is not possible to come to any absolute conclusions. This is not, of course, intended to undermine the validity of my own analysis, but rather to indicate some of its limits. More with regard to history, or more particularly ethnohistory, one of these limits is its "inherent debatability", a condition applicable to any account of the past (Appadurai 1981.:

201 ) .

The Bastar monarchy passed to Pravir Chandra Bhanj Deo in July 1947, within a few weeks of his having reached the age of eighteen. He was born far from his heritage, in Moss

Bank, Darjeeling on June 13, 1929. His mother had married

Prafulla Chandra Bhanj Deo, a prince of the ruling family of

Mayurbhanj State in Orissa, then a congeries of small kingdoms similar in some ways to Bastar. His father, known as a practitioner of siddhi (supernatural power) oriented

Tantric Hinduism, the influence of which was passed on to

Pravir, was nonetheless not allowed to participate directly in the upbringing of his son. This was due to the tacit suspicion that he had designs on the throne of Bastar.2 The official reason, somewhat of a non sequitor, was that since

Pravir was to be trained as a ruler his father's guardian• ship was considered to be inappropriate. 117

The Maharani died in London in 1936, leaving Pravir (a few years older than his brother, Vijay Chandra) to a succession as a minor. A retired Indian army officer along with his wife were appointed as joint tutors and worked in that capacity until June 1945. This period of his youth saw

Pravir shifting from one educational institution to another without achieving any final academic qualification. His main accomplishment was considered to be his ability to speak fluent and gracious English, the foundations for which were attributed to a four year stay with his ailing mother in

England from 1933 to 1936.

A second pair of tutor-guardians, Mr. and Mrs. P.C.

Mathews, took over in loco parentis to the teenaged Maharaja in 1946. At this point Pravir's life began to accrue a rather scandalous reputation, the initial responsibility for which seems to lie in the Mathew's 'tutelage'. There are hints that Mrs. Mathews seduced the young Pravir, that her husband's unscrupulous financial manipulations were fully self-serving, and that despite attempts to have them removed, their joint efforts encouraged Pravir to take to "a life of debauchery and dissipation" (Pandey 1967: 24).

Accusing him of depravity, irresponsibility and "inordinate moodiness", his father in October of 1952 is quoted as having written to the Prime Minister requesting him to advise the President to withdraw recognition of his eldest son and to confer the throne on his younger brother: "All 118 efforts to bring my eldest son back to reason and normal ways of life have been exhausted and I, as his father, have been most assiduous in my efforts in this direction"

(Statesman February 13, 1961). Undaunted by these events,

Pravir continued to build a reputation for prodigality that became almost legendary. An oft-repeated story has it that on his visits to Raipur, a city about 180 miles north of

Jagdalpur, where he usually stayed at a particular hotel, he would rain from the first floor one hundred rupee notes down onto the expectant and excited throngs of people gathered below. This was made much of in subsequent events and tended to be associated with assessments of his character as

inconsistent, whimsical and unpredictable. Taken together such evaluations, congealed into a ready-made psychopathol- ogy by repeated press coverage, were labelled megalomania.

Speaking of later events, one of my informants recounted to me a plan, partially carried out, in which a medical doctor was persuaded to prepare a psychiatric judgement to that effect and an institution was set ready for Pravir's commit• ment. It would be appropriate to infer from this anecdote that many of the accusations and assessments of Pravir bore something of the nature of persecution, the truth of which is probably not as far-fetched as most of his opponents were prone to claim. At any rate, in the event it was not an insane asylum, rather a prison near the state capital to which he was, albeit temporarily, committed. 119

In the wider context of Indian political developments at the time of his succession -- the coming of independence and the incorporation of the Princely States into the Indian

Union -- Pravir was caught in the role of naive pawn.

Shortly before the transfer of power from the British, rumours flourished that Bastar1s rich mineral resources were to be leased to its large and rich, southern neighbour,

Hyderabad State. The English Resident of Hyderabad had (in

1946) suggested to the Political Department that Bastar should form a political unit with Hyderabad. This prospect was not received by the government with a great deal of favour. A senior British Political Officer wrote the Govern• ment of India:

From the Hyderabad border to Bailadila iron ore areas, it is hardly 100 miles with a good fair weather road. The country is sparsely populated and the local Marias can easily be tempted by plenty of drink and tobacco. Hyderabad's negotiations with the Indian Dominion seem to have come to a deadlock and in the difficult times ahead, it is not inconceivable that Hyderabad may do some propaganda and encourage infiltration with a view ultimately to carve a slice out of Bastar if the difficulties and preoccupations of the Government of India serve them as an opportunity.... I submit we cannot afford to remain complacent, and should henceforth regard Hyderabad as a potential danger, particular• ly in a terrain sparsely but predominantly inhabit• ed by plastic aboriginals (sic) and administered by ruler and their officers whose loyalty to the Indian Government is yet to be tested (quoted in Menon 1956: 156). 120

Soon after his investiture, Pravir was invited to Delhi to have impressed upon him that any such possible shifting of his loyalty from the Indian Government to Hyderabad would be severely dealt with. The Secretary for the States Depart• ment, V.P. Menon, "was surprised that full ruling powers should have been conferred on so young a boy: (ibid.).

Certainly out of his depth, Pravir had little choice but to ignore Hyderabad, just as seven months later he could not avoid signing the merger agreement which ceded to the

Government of India full and exclusive jurisdiction over what became the District of Bastar in the State of Madhya

Pradesh.

However, it soon became apparent that Pravir was not at all reconciled to the loss of his briefly-held autonomy. On the one hand considered to be displaying, later to be condemned for, many of the traits which made up the cynical stereotype of the sybaritic, self-indulgent style of Indian royalty, and on the other politically manipulated and in quick order disenfranchised as a result of Indian Independ• ence, Pravir refused to be relegated to history. Instead, he began to use it.

Foreshadowing what was to become a standard technique of indirection, Pravir in 1951 wrote to the government to complain that false rumours were circulating that he was

"anxious to covet the throne once more" and that these might lead to an uprising of the region's tribals similar to the one that had occurred in 1910 (Pandey 1967: 25). That this 121 uprising, the 1910 Rebellion discussed in the last chapter, was brought about in circumstances quite different from those Pravir now associated with it, was of little importance in contrast to the challenge that its proclaimed potential for recurrence implied.

The Maharaja's first responses had been subdued and seemingly resigned. The threat of economic blockade had been sufficient to ensure his acquiescence in the loss of his kingdom. However, his subsequent unsuccessful attempts to engage in business ventures, occasioning substantial monetary losses, likely served to remind him of, and increase the resentment he felt over, the emptiness of his kingship. His superficially sullen refusal in 1953 to receive the President of India who was then on an official visit to Bastar is somewhat indicative: "I was not a full-fledged Ruler and was not officially bound to meet the

President" (Pandey 1967: 25). His reasoning, of course, was faulty -- there were no more "full-fledged Rulers" in

India. Nevertheless, his interpretation of the President's visit -- that "the Government wanted to make my brother

Shree Vijay Chandra Bhanj Deo an instrument for their own ends" (Bhanj Deo 1965: 52) -- was clearly more to the point, especially in view of his father's aforementioned letter to the Prime Minister. In any case, by this refusal he was considered to have thrown down the gauntlet. 122

Retaliation came swiftly. Presumably originating with the Prime Minister, Nehru, who had communicated to the

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, Ravi Shankar Shukla, that he was enraged with Pravir's conduct, an official inquiry was launched into the Maharaja's behaviour. It found that "i) he was squandering away his money like an insane person; ii) he had been indulging in abnormal activities; iii) his ways of living were abnormal and he was wild, irrelevant and incoherent in his talk; and iv) he had been suffering from hallucinations in the nature of megalomania" (Pandey 1967:

25). These 'findings' were deemed sufficient to justify an order under section 5 of the Central Provinces Court of

Wards Act, 1899, passed on June 20, 1953, declaring Pravir a person incapable of managing his own estate because of mental infirmity and that henceforth his estate was to be under the superintendence of the Court of Wards. Shocked into silence at first, Pravir later responded that "the people of Bastar took resentment against the Government order..." (Bhanj Deo 1965: 52), and thus revealed his assumption that he was not without a following. His next step, which was to enter the political arena proper, showed that this assumption was well-founded.

As was his usual style from behind the scenes, Pravir directed the formation of an organization called the Adiwisi

Kisan Mazdoor Sewa Sangh, or roughly, the Aboriginal Peasant

Labour Service Society. Its main function was to conduct 123 mass rallies in order to demand the release of Pravir's property from the Court of Wards. The Madhya Pradesh

Government moved against these protest demonstrations by declaring them inimical to law and order. Keeping himself to the background and working through key tribal supporters,

Pravir ignored these warnings from the government to call a halt to the organization's activities. Eventually, one Bhira

Manjhi, a tribal leader, was arrested in 1956 under the

Preventive Detention Act. This served to bring the organization to heel, but at the same time implicitly recognized Pravir's political clout, which became explicit shortly thereafter when the Congress Party, the only other force of significance in Bastar politics, invited Pravir to join their ranks. With some contempt, Pravir recollected:

"Aboriginal combination and team work were exasperating to the Government... they now wanted to give me their party ticket and all allegations that I was mad were ruled out completely by them- after coming to this decision" (Bhanj Deo

1965: 58-9). Despite his contempt, he decided to join his accusers. In the general elections of 1957, Pravir, as

President of the Bastar District Congress Committee, and nine of his nominees were returned to the Legislative

Assembly of Madhya Pradesh.

Scarcely concealing his exuberance, he is said to have boasted to the Bastar Collector about his great influence over the tribals and also about having acquired 124 extraordinary abilities through his Tantric practices. In a letter to his immediate superior, the Collector described this conversation:

After mentioning his supernatural powers, he switched over to...the tremendous influence that he possesses with the Adiwasis. He said the Government cannot take any action against him because if he was to be imprisoned, 40,000 Adiwasis would court imprisonment and 900,000 Adiwasis would rise in revolt. He then said he could get anything done by the Adiwasis, including the burning of the bunga• lows of senior Government Officers at Jagdalpur, if he so desired. He added the 40,000 Adiwasis would go at their own expense to Delhi and protest before the Prime Minister of India for getting the property of the Maharaja of Bastar released from the Court of Wards. He even made bold to say that the administration in the former Bastar State is being run at his sufferance and that, if he likes, he can completely paralyse it any day (Pandey 1967: 26) .

The Collector also mentioned that Pravir had stated that no harm could come to himself from disregarding what he consid• ered an illegal order of the Court of Wards.

It is in all likelihood that Pravir had intended by his election to the Legislative Assembly to use that position as a means to have his estate released from the Court of

Wards. The concerned authorities, although making many prom• ises to that effect, did not comply. Resigning in protest,

Pravir went back to his tribal supporters and reconvened the

Adiwasi Kisan Mazdoor Sangh under a new name, the Adiwasi

Seva Dal, the Aboriginal Service Society, thereby eliminat• ing any non-tribal connotations and replacing them with 125 a sense of divisive confrontation. The speeches and demonstrations made by this group, 'called by Pravir a

"democratic institution: whose "progress...was normal and quite constitutional" (Bhanj Deo 1965: 63), were taken by the government as a further threat to the maintenance of civil peace. In 1960, the Chief Minister asked Pravir to leave the district and take up residence elsewhere. His answer was threatening: "...if Government are not careful, there may be a rebellion here. Information has reached me that your life may be in danger along with all officers if further steps are taken to remove the Maharaja from Bastar.

Kindly note that I am not joking; the matter may become serious" (Pandey 1967: 27). When the press noted the possi• bility of his 'de-recognition', (Statesman November 23,

1960), Pravir's threats became even more vociferous.

The frequency and scale of these warnings, threats and counter-threats began at this time to be markedly increased, as was the prominence given in the daily press to what appeared to be a growing political crisis. In fact hencefor• ward the press took on a very attentive attitude to events in Bastar, becoming, as is often the case, both a conduit for communication between the two sides and a catalyst for the amplification of the conflict. The voice of government, slower to respond that Pravir's, spoke with muted, yet forceful displeasure in its pronoucements. Pravir's style 126 in contrast, tended to be sarcastic, more than a little outrageous and inclined to introducing dire scenarios. A more significant difference in the dispute is that while the government addressed itself mainly to Pravir as an individu• al, Pravir's counter statements almost invariably included reference to his tribal following.. He repeatedly pointed out that an attack on himself was an attack on the tribal people of Bastar. The government tried publicly to dissociate

Pravir from his supporters by making accusations in the press that he was simply manipulating tribal sentiments. To this Pravir replied: "They are jealous of me because of the traditional loyalty of the people towards me" (Statesman

December 8, 1960). He also disclosed that he had a plan to form a united federation of tribals of the whole country to press constitutionally for their rights. Always sure to situate himself within the scheme of things, Pravir added:

"India will once again be the land of kings" (ibid.).

Despite the bombast and apparent absurdity of Pravir's communications at this time, they indicate a coherent intention. By insisting on the pre-eminent value and moral superiority of tradition, as most importantly constituted by divine monarchy integrated ideologically with tribal solid• arity, Pravir was bringing the past into the present in order to re-create a version of the former in the future. In doing so, in more or less full contradiction to the existing 127 state of (political) affairs, he was establishing himself as a fully charismatic figure. Charisma is meant here to be much more than merely an attribute of personality, although my informants did frequently attest to something approximating this in Pravir's presence. It is rather to be regarded as a set of social relationships between leader and followers "...in process within a complex and shifting and/or symbolic environment" (Burridge 1977: 215-16). Innate in his status as king, Pravir's charismatic potency had been undermined and much, though not completely, attenuated as a result of the usurpation of power by the newly independent

Government of India. A significant example of this attenuation was Pravir's refusal to participate fully in the

Dasara ceremonies in the early years after Bastar's merger with the Indian Union. As was shown in chapter three, Dasara is a kingly ritual par excellence in Bastar, one that is a microcosmic, complex and rich semantic environment indeed.

By his incomplete participation in the Dasara, Pravir was

(perhaps spitefully) removing himself from the centre of things and thus reinforcing his coerced superannuation.

However, the messages broadcast by him in the ensuing debate with the new sources of power over the control of his estate signal a phase in the process by which his charismatic qualities were beginning to be regained. The traditional relationships between king and tribals were gradually being re-activated, albeit in new forms. Moreover, these new 128

'secular' forms were achieving a measure of success and the immediate goal of a release from the Court of Wards was placed subservient to an eventual return to the "land of kings".

Of course, at the level of government perception, most of Pravir's statements were taken as little more than inflated rhetoric. Nehru is quoted as having said that the

Bastar situation was "hardly a situation, but a matter for a

District Magistrate to deal with" (Statesman December 22,

1960). Heedless of this downplaying by the Prime Minister,

Pravir travelled to Delhi to present his grievances in person. These grievances, which criticized the local

Congress party leaders and administration of Bastar and accused them of misappropriating development funds and neglecting tribal interests, were sternly disregarded by the

Home Minister. In addition, for his pains he was told he was not allowed to return to Bastar and that the authorities planned to banish him. This set off another round of sparring during which he reiterated a declaration to set himself up as an independent ruler. A few weeks later orders were said to have been passed for the arrest of Pravir under the Preventative Detention Act when and if he returned to

Bastar (Statesman January 29, 1961). Questioned on these orders, the Madhya Pradesh government denied they had been passed or that Pravir had been banned from Bastar. This denial was given on February 10, 1961 and on the next day 129 as he was inconspicuously re-entering his former kingdom,

Pravir was arrested, taken to a jail outside the district, and in rapid follow-up on Feburary twelfth de-recognized as the Maharaja of Bastar. In summarizing its case against him the government "regretfully" came to the conclusion "that the Maharaja is engaging himself in extremely prejudicial activities and that he had forfeited all claims to the continued enjoyment by him of his present position as the

Ruler of the former State of Bastar. Accordingly...under

Article 366 (22) of the Constitution, the President hereby directs that...His Highness Maharaja Pravir Chandra Bhanj

Deo Kakatiya of Bastar to (sic) cease to be recognized as the Ruler of Bastar and that his brother, Yuvraj Vijay

Chandra Bhanj Deo Kakatiya be recognized as the Ruler of

Bastar in his place: (Pandey 1967: 28-9). A few weeks later,

Vijay waas installed as the new Maharaja at Dantewara, in the temple of Danteshwari.

If the government considered these actions sufficient to subvert the escalation of the Bastar problem, it did so under (and probably guided by the Prime Minister's) assumption that the Bastar kingship was a personal rather than a social matter. This assumption had already been belied by Pravir's successful foray into electoral politics, which had been effected through substantial tribal support.

That such support was based on traditional charismatic relationships, which Vijay did not have, was an insight 130 to which the government blinded itself by insisting on viewing those relationships in modernistic terms. The glosses on what was apparently the same language, the one used in the combative conversation conducted between Pravir and the government, were rooted in quite different interpretive systems. Of interest in this not uncommon

'talking-past-each-other' is that Pravir's reading of the situation did include a grasp of his opponents' ingenuous assumptions: "They had never expected such a staunch opposition from the adivasis which according to them was not possible for people in the new miraculous and democratic age. It was flabbergasting for them to know that a Maharaja of India was being so much revered by his own people" (Bhanj

Deo 1965: 70). The government's legalistic attempt to separate power from its constitutive elements was based on the too-facile premise that a distinction could be made

"between the trappings of rule and its substance" (Geertz

1977: 152). Supplanting Pravir's recognition, abolishing his

"trappings" so to speak, implies a rather simplistic perception of the symbolic power of charismatic authority.

Events were soon to prove that these actions served to intensify tribal identification, rather than to eliminate it.

In March of 1961 the news of Pravir's removal brought together a large number of tribals (reported at 10,000) at a village near Jagdalpur to demand his immediate release. 131

Mostly from areas closely surrounding the capital, these

tribals, predominantly Bhattra, Raj Muria and Bison-horn

Maria, voiced their protest in traditional and indigenous

forms. They declared that unless Pravir was released and

allowed to return to Bastar "their crops would fail, their

cattle would die and other calamities would fall on them"

(Saxena 1963, quoted in Bhanj Deo 1965: 110). The officials, who had come out to the village Lohandiguda in order to

confront and disperse the gathering, attributed no

importance to what they called adivasi superstitions. Unable

to placate the tribals, the officials proclaimed their

assembly unlawful and the police were ordered to fire tear

gas. The situation got out of control, "became riotous"

(ibid.), according to police officers, and subsequent gunfire resulted in the killing of twelve tribals. A number of them were later rounded up and committed to stand trial

for attempted murder. Acquitting all the accused, the magistrate concluded that much of the evidence was "entirely

articifical, bristling with improbabilities":

According to prosecution, the present accused along with several thousands of Adivasis formed an unlawful assembly and made a demand for the release of their Ex-Ruler of Bastar whom they regarded as their Pujari (priest). It may be that the demand was unreasonable, but not unlawful as it was not forced on the police or the government officials, in any unlawful manner. The Adivasi mob was anxious to ascertain the fate of their Ex-Ruler and was misconstrued. The situation, all the more worsened.as the local dialects...were not followed by the Officers. Nor the Adivasis followed the language of the officers. By seeing a huge mob, the Officers were scared away. When tear-gassed, there was a melee confusion, in which the police resorted 1 32

to firing without any formal order.... It is wrong

to say that the Police Station building at Lohand-

iguda was actually surrounded by the Adivasi mob

and was on the verge of being set on fire.... The

officers or the police were also not encircled by , the Adivasi mob, nor there was (sic) any danger of life to any of them, nor they were (sic) voluntari• ly hurt by the present accused in prosecution of any common object.... Viewed in this perspective, the prosecution has failed to establish the case against any of the accused (ibid.: 161-3).

The state government appealed this verdict to the High Court and also to the Supreme Court but both actions were summari• ly dismissed. This exoneration, though not redress for those killed, came nearly two years after the firing. Within a few weeks of the incident, on the other hand, Pravir was re• leased from jail on the grounds that there was insufficient cause for his detention.

The foregoing sequence of events, however, suggests an inverse interpretation: that there were in fact very good grounds for his release. Forced into facing the full weight of charismatic power to unite leaders and followers, the government saw that its strategies were inflaming the situa• tion they were intended to neutralize. These strategies, to extend somewhat my earlier point, were rooted in a misap• prehension of the nature of Bastar's identity. The ideology which expressed it, which organized it, which in Geertzian words, provided a template for action, was very far removed from being amenable to a 'modern' understanding. It was in- 133 stead ancient, and powerfully so. Not so powerful, of course, that its anachronicity could stand inviolate, yet its resistent capacities divulged to the officials of government that a reconsideration of just what it was they confronted was in order. But the "confusion of tongues"

(Geertz 1973: 9) was constantly to thwart the need to come to terms. Pravir's idiom was located in another world, a world where a Maharaja had extraordinary and divine powers.

The political world of post-Independence India was unlikely to find this intelligible. As Pravir put it himself, a trifle ironically: "In this highly religious country it is still difficult for people to understand that God is identi cal with his universe and not only a miracle that he is al• ways apart in a world of his own" (Bhanj Deo 1965: 82). Thi is a remarkably self-aware statement, and one that reflects both scripture and sociology. But of course it cannot be expected to have had much of a meaningful impact on secular ly conceived authority. Pravir was freed, an act of legal necessity, yet his tribulations persisted unredeemed.

After his release from jail, and with a confidence per haps born from having seen some of his predictions, more accurately, warnings, come to unwholesome fruition, Pravir quickly re-established himself at the centre of things. Sec ret marriage negotiations, which had been going on concur• rently with his public activities, were finalized in a hur• ried, private wedding in Rajasthan. The new Maharani, a Raj 134 kumari (princess) of Patan in Rajasthan, was a definite asset in Pravir's tribally perceived responsibility to bring harmony and prosperity to his domain. When she was brought to Bastar, her introduction helped to draw a record audience of 150,000 tribals (Pandey 1967: 30) which had come to Jag• dalpur to celebrate the Dasara festival. As stated above,

Pravir had withdrawn from the Dasara, most conspicuously from riding the chariot, since 1947. Edward Jay suggests

that this withdrawal "symbolized for many tribals the cessa•

tion of his rule" (1970: 219). Such may well have been the case, yet nearly all of the informants (26) polled by Jay

did not know who exactly did rule. Moreover, all of his

informants who were from the most remote area of Bastar

(Abujhmar), did know who and what the Maharaja was. (It is also the case that Jay's suggestion applies only to the years prior to 1960.) The important point is that this ces•

sation was temporary and superficial, and that Pravir's rule was more real than officially recognized. In the Dasara of

1961 he managed to re-ascend the chariot, instead of his brother and thus in contradiction, it will be remembered, to his 'de-recognition'. It is ironic that the more the govern• ment acted to prevent it, and thus perhaps because it did,

the more was Pravir able to regain his lost stature.

From the perspective of Pravir's over-all career,

thriving as it did on adversity, the Dasara of 1961 can be

seen as a turning point -- or perhaps more exactly as a

point of no return. A certain momentum had been built up, 135 appropriately like the movement of the massive Dasara chariot itself, which once started could no longer easily be contained. And in fact, a transition had been made after which, in the second decade of Pravir's precarious kingship, the pace of events was to become greatly and in some

instances wildly accelerated.

Focusing his attention on the general elections of

1962, Pravir formed his third non-traditional vehicle, the

Akhil Bharatiya (All-India) Maharaja Party. He drew upon his tribal support for membership and began a campaign for his chosen candidates. Although he himself lost the election, most of his candidates were returned. Policies and actions remained the same -- a demand for release from the Court of

Wards and for the restoration of his gaddi, his throne -- but his manifest following grew, and grew more intimate. By

1963 more and more tribals began to come to Jagdalpur and congregate at Pravir's palace. Nervously perceiving imminent trouble, the authorities tried to restrict these gatherings of armed (with bows and arrows) tribals, which again touched off violent confrontation. However, this time the target was reached. Two months after a tribal occupation of the Court of Wards office the state government directed the Court of

Wards to relinquish the superintendence of Pravir's estate.

Pravir celebrated this success by lavishly displaying his royal prerogative, which was to distribute large sums of money to his followers. Unable or unwilling to see how well 136 and legitimately this fitted within the Indian kingly tradition, Justice Pandey pronounced it "insensate charity"

(1967: 30). It may be presumed that for Justice Pandey to take seriously the kingly tradition was illegitimate and foolish, but equally it reveals how embedded were his assumptions in those of the government administration. And as part of the present context (this narrative) it serves to exemplify and reinforce the dichotomization inherent in a description of Pravir's activities. In particular, the question of money in Pravir's life is both of empirical significance and abstractly as one of the parameters of dichotomization, as we shall see below.

Continuing to spend freely throughout the rest of 1963,

Pravir also gave a number of press interviews which demonstrated his overarching ambition to reinstitute kingship. On October 12th he stated that the tribals had in mind to declare Bastar a separate state, independent of the

Indian Union and the Indian Government, with himself as the

Ruler and added that the tribals would do so during the

Dasara celebration in the coming weeks (quoted in Pandey

1967: 31). A number of similar statements he made during this time, which were avidly headlined by the press, once again brought Pravir into the public spotlight. However, all this attention was suddenly eclipsed when in November in a throng of highly excited alms-pleaders gathered at his palace, Pravir struck out with a sword and severed the left 137 hand of one of the grasping suppliants. A somewhat bizarre and never fully explicated act (Pravir claimed self-defense) thus resulted in hearings and court cases which preoccupied

Pravir for nearly the next two years.

While certainly a capricious event, and one that sticks out very curiously in the record of Pravir's life and that exists as a vivid illustration of his unpredictability, it points to the aforesaid problem of money. What must be realized is that money, in its modern sense as a highly specialized instrument in highly differentiated economies

(Douglas 1967: 120), was, and in much of Bastar remains, a relatively new and barely distinctive phenomenon, cowries having served until the early 20th century as a very restricted medium of exchange. The introduction of paper money and specie, mainly by the British, initiated the development of a series of highly ramifying and novel differentiations both at the level of monarchy and at the level of tribal society. For purposes at hand, the significance of money in Pravir's deployment of it, was in effect a confusion of moral values.

In making use of money in a traditional context as if it were a traditional measure of moral obligation, that is to say primarily as benedictions and guarantees of prosperity flowing from divine king to tribal subjects,

Pravir inadvertently opened the way for a whole new range of interpretations and responses to his activities. By the same 138

token the wider non-tribal society was drawn into the orbit of the king's expanded relationships, like those which comprised the excited crowds expectantly waiting below

Pravir's hotel balcony in Raipur, the balcony of largess as

it were. It is not that non-tribals were previously excluded, but that new avenues of access to Pravir were made available by the monetization of his status. Those avenues were, moreover, unrestricted by traditional moral reciprocities. The possibilities of wrong-doing, or at least

the perception of it, was therefore considerably increased.

Thus, in a sense it is not surprising that the person attacked by Pravir was an overly eager, low-caste Hindu rickshaw puller, an unfortunate individual caught in the vortex of discordant moral sensibilities.

This analytical excursus can be conveniently

complemented in light of subsequent events. Pravir's brother, Vijay, reacting to the lifting of the Court of

Wards, petitioned the authorities, including the Home

Minister, to gain possession of the palace and properties which he considered to be rightfully his as the new

Maharaja. His entreaties being refused -- on the basis of expedient reasoning by officials who wanted to avoid further

flare-ups in Bastar -- Vijay took the opportunity of his brother's absence from the palace during one of his court hearings to 'remove' several pieces of royal jewellery as well as a pair of gold rods used in the worship of 139

Danteshwari.

Here one has the opposite side of the coin, as it were, and that is the significance of treasure. Forming the other half in Burridge's (1969: 42) distinction between money and

treasure articles, as crucial in the differentiation of

'subsistence' from 'complex' economies, the articles stolen by Vijay clearly fall into the category of treasure. As opposed categories, both money and treasure were current in

Bastar, though as stated above money has still not reached complete ascendency. And while the presence of money, associated with particular socioeconomic and moral systems,

does imply the competitive and emergent nature of the dichotomized situation in Bastar, the point is that unlike

treasure articles money had not become the "basic measure of prestige and status" (ibid.). More than basic, rather the ultimate measure of not only prestige and status, the gold rods of Danteshwari represented instrumental, sacred, and

temporal power in Bastar. Without them, as declared by

Pravir when he discovered their theft, he would not be able

to perform the worship of Danteshwari. Not to do puja of the

Goddess was a direct threat to the material and moral

interests of Bastar's overwhelmingly tribal population.

If it is true, as remarked by one of my Jagdalpur

interlocutors, that Pravir was always on the look-out for confrontational issues, Vijay in this instance ensured that he did not have to look very far. In large numbers, tribal 140

groups gathered in Jagdalpur to demand the return of the

royal jewellery and Danteshwar's gold rods. Learning of

their intention to storm Vijay's residence, the Superintend•

ent of Police intervened to secure from him all the articles necessary for the worship of the Goddess. Thus again was

Pravir unofficially but pertinently recognized as superord•

inate in the religious and political world of Bastar. Offic•

ially, however, the competition for such recognition

remained at a stalemate.

The demand for the reconstitution of Bastar as an in•

dependent Hindu-tribal monarchy continued throughout 1964,

1965 and part of 1966 to be the backdrop of all other de• mands. But from the perspective of Pravir's followers there was no such distinction: all demands were equally Pravir's

and their own. With each successful outcome of confrontation with the government and local administrators the unity im•

plied by this identity of interests became strengthened.

This strength in turn implied a growing sense of separation which was organized by Pravir into an innovative set of roles modeled on political party idioms. He selected leading

tribal men and women from numerous villages in Jagdalpur

tehsil and conferred upon them the titles of member or memb-

erin and supplied them with insignia -- these being tradi•

tional media of affiliation -- such as red cloth (saris) for

the women memberins. To those selected who were already area 141

headmen (pargana manjhi) he gave the title Raja Manjhi and

distributed blue turbans while their assistants (chalki) were given yellow coloured livery and the designation Raja

Chalki. Even the village watchmen (kotwar) were incorporat•

ed, receiving the raja title and invested with rose hued

turbans. Justice Pandey, always the unwitting foil in his

view of the conceptual reality of Bastar's Maharaja-tribal

relations, commented adversely on these actions: "All these

Adiwasis, particularly the memberins, worked with a great

zeal if only to prove that they were worthy of the distinc•

tions conferred on them. They were always ready and willing

to carry out any direction given by Pravir Chandra Bhanj

Deo. Although he had done precious little for the Adiwasis,

he did not hesitate to wantonly use them as tools for his

own purposes" (1967: 35). Perhaps needless to say, the

superficiality of this statement is matched only by its

poverty of comprehension. It is typical, however, of the understanding, in the narrow sense, predicated by epistemo-

logical divergence.

That Justice Pandey ultimately must be considered a

government servant is of course relevant here, especially in

that his perception of the Bastar social world could only with great difficulty grant validity to tribal reliance on

divine kingship. Written not so long before the present

events were taking place, and thus available, theoretically

at least, for consideration, the following statement even 142

if taken into account would be unlikely to have been under•

stood: "The Maharaja is regarded as divine by all the Muria

and Maria.... So strongly do the aboriginals believe this,

that they greatly resent the Maharaja leaving the State even

for a short time. His absence means a withdrawal of divine

protection from cattle, crops and people" (Elwin 1947:

183). It would be wrong to take this as an indictment of modern Indian officialdom for not having an anthropological understanding. Nevertheless, acting on this knowledge,

instead of dismissing it as exploited credulity, might have

saved the administration much trouble.

One must hasten to add that the appropriate action does not always come easily, especially where administration is weakened by a certain measure of tolerance or accommoda•

tion. This was generally the case in the implementation of

administrative policy in the Princely States both before and

after their merger with the Indian Union. In many ways the

conditions in Bastar under Pravir were characteristic of millenarian activities. It is in this context that while

"the officers of an administration, looking down at their

charges, may act 'correctly' or 'rightly' within their own

terms of reference, in whatever manner they choose to

exercise the powers at their disposal it is difficult to see

how they might be 'correct' or 'right' in terms of the total

situation" (Burridge 1969: 56). The divine monarchy of

Bastar was just such a total situation with which the 143

administration could not come to correct terms.

However even within its own terms of reference the

Bastar administration committed major blunders. In the

drought-afflicted agricultural year of 1965-66, the Madhya

Pradesh government imposed a graded levy on rice production

on all of the rice growing districts of the state, including

Bastar whose administration complied with it unquestioning-

ly. The terms of this levy were imposed indiscriminately and without regard to local socio-economic variations. For

Bastar this meant ignoring the fragilities of tribal paddy

cultivation which not only yielded a much below average

quantity but also was not geared to surplus production.

Whatever paddy the tribals could save was intended to be used in the very lean monsoon months when in fact most

tribals turned to wild jungle produce as the final hedge

against starvation.

In the event, it was concluded that the imposition of

the levy "caused genuine hardship to the small cultivators

of Bastar district...(for the additional reasons that the)

quantities required to be levied on their outturn, unrelated

as they were to actual outturn, were fixed ad hoc solely for

the purposes of procurement without taking into account

either the expenses incurred for raising the crop or the number of dependents on individual cultivators" (Pandey

1967: 36). It could scarcely be surprising that the Bastar 144

tribal cultivators' response to the levy was in the main non-compliant, in some cases violently so.

This refusal to co-operate in the levy was organized and focused by Pravir's tribal members and memberins.

Pervasive as this issue was, it readily lent itself to large scale opposition to the administration. Perhaps more than any other single contention, the rice levy increased the breadth and depth of Maharaja-tribal interactions. Greater than ever before, the numbers of tribal people coming and going to and from Jagdalpur, and carrying out various disruptive strategies, created a highly apprehensive atmosphere in the capital. Furthermore, extending far beyond

Jagdalpur, though tactically emanating from there, these tribal non-co-operation activities prompted authorites to prepare militarily for a major conflagration.

By the end of February 1966, matters had become even tenser as the anti-government agitations spread to include the obstruction of all government operations from the preparation of voter lists to the non-payment of taxes. In addition, in March, the celebration of the Chaitrai festival brought unprecedentedly large numbers of tribals to

Jagdalpur to gather at the king's palace. That most arrived armed with bows and arrows and axes, though not illegally so, increased the degree of nervousness influencing the authorities and police. A rapidly approaching sense of climax began to overtake the situation, although on the 145

surface a cool front was adopted, particularly by the officials who took the opportunity to remove themselves from

the vicinity of Jagdalpur.

The third week of March saw much ritual activity as part of the Chaitrai ceremonies. This included the raising of a log pole in the palace premises. The police authorities

considered the pole-raising objectionable as they

interpreted it as a Vijay Stambh, a symbol of victory against the government. This interpretation was no doubt

consistent with the tenor of the over-all context of the

time and within the terms of Hindu tradition in general. But

in terms of tribal culture, this was likely a mis-reading of what the post represented. While there is insufficient data

in the Bastar sources to be definite on the symbolism of the pole, there is all over western Orissa a goddess named

Stambesvari, the "lady of the post", known since about 500

A.D. (Eschmann 1978: 86). In fact, she was the tutelary of

the Bhanja dynasty, the royal line of Mayurbhanj, a modern

scion of which was Pravir's father. Whether or not this was known by the Bastar authorities, the pole-raising was taken

to be intentionally provocative.

As well, it was taken to be sufficiently provocative

for the police to harass and physically abuse some of the

tribal men and women who were carrying the pole into the palace. The Maharaja was informed of these actions and came out of the palace to meet the Senior Superintendent of 146

Police who had arrived at the scene to avert what seemed imminent, an all-out battle. According to the Superintend• ent, "Pravir came in rage and threatened me with dire consequences. He (also) said...that he was a Tantric and that he could convert bullets into water" (quoted in Pandey

1967: 42). Appealing to Pravir's status as a fellow Kshatri- ya (the warrior caste) the police officer placated him some• what and eventually managed to defuse the explosive nature of the situation.

For the next six days Jagdalpur remained quiet, although the tribals continued to occupy the palace in participation of the lengthy Chaitrai rites. On March 24th about 1,000 tribal men and women left Jagdalpur to attend the weekly market at Bastar village, some eleven miles north of the capital. This village was of some importance for other than commercial reasons in that it was the residence of Suryapal Tiwari, a Congress Party worker in close associ• ation with the district administration and an outspoken critic of the Maharaja. Some two or three hundred tribals surrounded his house in the village, from which he was absent, and chanted independence slogans as well as demand• ing the documents of merger of Bastar State with the Indian

Union. Upon learning that Tiwari was away from the village, the tribals were persuaded by the police to disperse and they returned to the palace at Jagdalpur.

The incident at Bastar village seems to have been the 147 preliminary catalyst which led the next morning to the promulgation of order under section 144 of the Indian Code of Criminal Procedure "which prohibited, for a period of 14 days, all processions and meetings, assembly of five or more persons and the possession or keeping of bows, arrows, lathis (bamboo staffs) and other lethal weapons within the limits of Jagdalpur Municipality and also within a radius of five miles" (Pandey 1967: 107). According to the authorit• ies, on the other hand, section 144 had been imposed for much more ominous reasons. In their account of causal sequences, a police informer had slipped into the palace and had witnessed a strategy meeting between Pravir and all the tribals present there. The informer reported that at this gathering it was decided that in order to set up the

Mahajara for independent rule, the jail would be attacked, the Indrawati bridge (connecting the capital to the national highway) would be damaged, telegraph and telephone wires would be cut, the bungalows of the officers would be dest• royed, and the Collectorate and government godowns (ware• houses) and the godowns of sahukars (liquor sellers/money lenders) would be looted. Subjecting this report, its timing, and other testimony given by senior officials at the commission of inquiry to a very close scrutiny, Justice

Pandey exposed it as a fabricated, post hoc document intend• ed to justify the use of excessive force in the following climactic events. 148

The actual and immediate events which led to the declaration of section 144 were the speeches delivered to the amassed tribals by two Samyukta Socialist Party politicans. The police had learned that these speeches urged the tribals to take out a procession through the town further to remonstrate over their grievances. One could speculate that the alleged plan of revolt was concocted on the basis of this relatively innocuous set of encourage• ments. In any case, armed police parties were posted at the palace entrances and a precautionary vigil was begun. In the palace at the time, the morning of March 25, 1966, were a score of under-trial prisoners incarcerated at the judicial jail. One of these prisoners started a commotion which attracted the attention of a group of tribals who were camped in the adjacent grounds. The escort guards took rough action against the approaching group of tribal men which provoked them to retaliate with a volley of arrows, overcoming the police defenders. The jail was then smashed open, the prisoners released, and the prison guards chased out of the palace grounds. At the main gates the tribals encountered the police party stationed there to enforce section 144. This party was also engaged, the result of which was the commencement of tear gas and rifle fire forcing the tribals to retreat. While retreating, the tribals returned the rifle fire with arrow shots, wounding one policeman and killing another. Enraged and apparently 149 completely out of control, the police chased the tribal group through the palace gardens and into the palace buildings. It was at this point when Pravir, coming out onto his porch to see what was going on, was shot and killed.

Such, at least, was the finding produced by Justice

Pandey at the conclusion of his commission of inquiry (1967:

107-109). It should be noted that the summary given above by no means reflects the difficulties, both inherent and

contrived, faced by him in trying to determine exactly how

Pravir met his end, and also the circumstances concerning

the eleven tribals who were killed along with him. He was presented with, and had to sift through, seven full and

severally contradictory versions of the final events in

Pravir's life. Some of these versions raised the suspicion

of premeditated conspiracy, and while such an accusation was

voiced in the Indian parliament, Justice Pandey discounted

the possibility in so far as any conspiracy could only have been post hoc and at that simply to cover up official

incompetence and police 'irregularities'. Nevertheless,

there were later demands for a fresh inquiry on the basis of new evidence, evidence previously suppressed, and claims of

false evidence given before the Pandey Commission, all of which was compounded by the fact that no tribal witnesses

had been called to testify (Statesman September 6, 1967;

October 13, 1967). And as part of my own interview research

into these matters, it became clear that an air of 150

controversy, doubt and mystery still surrounds the demise of

Pravir Chandra Bhanj Deo. However, despite the temptation to

do so, it is perhaps best to refrain from an attempt to

dispel these uncertainties. The effort would be purely

speculative and of little significance in the larger scheme

of things. In fact, it is precisely this doubt and uncertainty which may be said to describe the environment

of, and to set the stage for, the transition from millenarian activities to a full-scale millenarian movement. The circumstances of this movement are of their nature an extension, a symbolic extension to be sure, of the

life and life-story of Pravir Chandra Bhanj Deo. In a sense,

the Baba Bihari Dass Movement, which reincarnated Pravir in

the form of a Hindu sannyasi (mendicant), is a kind of

epilogue to the Pravir story, rather than existing

separately from it. For this reason I will continue with the

life of Pravir, now as it became transformed through death and 'resurrection 1.3

The early aftermath of Pravir's death was one of shock, confusion and severe demoralization, a state of affairs most pronounced among the tribal communities. Among the officials, on the other hand, there was a fear that there might be a dangerous backlash from the tribals once it became generally known that their god-king had been killed.

Curiously (perhaps because of this fear), now that he was dead, the authorities granted more significance to Pravir's 151

divinity than when he was alive. To prevent what was antici•

pated as potential large-scale tribal violence all over the

district, they devised the ruse of having a local man imper•

sonate the Maharaja and had him driven around Jagdalpur and

along the main roads of Bastar in the royal Rolls Royce. As

another precaution, a palace rounshi (clerk-messenger) was

given the task of speading the 'news' that Pravir had not

died in the firing but was proceeding to take refuge or

exile in the jungle.

Within a year or two, rumours began to circulate that

Pravir had returned and that he was to be found at Chapka, a

village some 15 miles from Jagdalpur. Up to this point it was still not accepted that he had actually been killed, so

that when it was found that the man at Chapka did not bear much resemblance to Pravir, nor had his fair complexion, the

explanation was given that his skin had become darkened from

the smoke of gun fire during the palace shooting. In order

further to substantiate the story, scars on the man's body were pointed out which were said to be from bullet wounds

sustained in the firing. However, as more and more tribals

flocked to Chapka to see this transformed Pravir, the story began to change. It came at last to be believed that Pravir had in fact died, that he was martyred for the moral trans• gressions of tribal people, and that his return was as an

avatar, a reincarnation of the divine in the form of a

sadhu, a Hindu mendicant named Baba Bihari Dass. To pay for 152

and redeem their 'sins' the tribals were told that they had

to give up traditional practices considered immoral, such as

drinking liquor, dancing and eating meat.

As a sign of this expiation they were encouraged to wear a bead sacred to Vaisnava Hindus, called Kanti beads, which cost them Rs. 1.25 each, a not insignificant sum to

most-tribal people. At the same time, many tribal women,

attracted by the charistmatic accessibility offered by

Kanti-wallah Baba, as he was known in the beginning, took to

Hindu symbols such as sindhor, the streak of red powder worn

along the central part in the hair to indicate married

status.

The happenings at Chapka drew increasing attention from

all corners of Bastar. By early 1969, district officials and

local journalists began to view the developments at Chapka

in a serious light. Considering Kanti-wallah Baba's

alarming, widespread popularity -- at the height of his

influence having an estimated 400,000 followers -- they

decided they had better find out who this man really was.

In fact, no one really knew. It was never admitted to most outsiders that he was considered an avatar of Pravir, nor did the man himself reveal anything of his identity

except his name, Baba Bihari Dass, and vaguely, his origins

as a sadhu from north India. Even this information, upon attempted verification, proved either unreliable or false.

When questioned as to what he was doing he simply replied 153

that he was trying to 'uplift' the tribals, to work for

their moral improvement. His questioners were not particularly satisfied with these responses, feeling that

Bihari Dass was perpetrating a huge fraud, a successful

confidence game by which he was winning a considerable

fortune. Despite their suspicions, however, the officials

could not find anything illegal in Bihari Dass' activities.

Taking a fresh tack, the Collector of Bastar, a pro-tribal idealist yet orthodox Brahmin, decided to try to

co-opt Bihari Dass. In accordance with his own biases he

covertly tried to enlist Bihari Dass further to emphasize

the proscription against liqior and meat -- mand-mas, as

they were idiomatically rendered in Halbi. Not wishing publicly to endorse Bihari Dass, or to appear to be giving him official sanction, the Collector approached him

indirectly through his main tribal associates as well as

through the old palace munshi who were now important functionaries in Bihari Dass' growing organization. With

little need of persuasion, the Baba readily accepted the

Collector's tacit support. However, he not only accepted it, but with increased confidence gained from the unofficial encouragement bestowed upon him by Bastar's most powerful political figure, he both strengthened the force of his exortations by threatening excommunication for those who refused to wear the Kanti (adding that all fish caught by

transgressors would turn to stone), and enlarged the 154 symbolic efficacy of his by now millennial myth by foretelling a long 72 hour night of doom during which would occur the final judgement and punishment for all sinners.

Only those, it was said, who disposed of all the black objects in their possession, including their black livestock such as chickens, sheep, goats, cattle and water buffalo, would be saved from eternal damnation.

It is important to note that this was not an unprecedented event. It was in fact an almost exact repeat of an earlier occurrence:

In 1932 a rumour went through all the tribes of Jeypore and spread thence to Bastar that a god had descended on one of the mountains of the Eastern Ghats and commanded all men to give up keeping black poultry and goats, wearing clothes or using umbrellas or blankets with any black in them, and using beads or articles made of aluminium alloy. The message was rapidly bruited abroad, and everywhere villages had 'bohorani' (disease-riddance) ceremonies for purifying themselves from disease, and cast out black goats, cocks, hens, umbrellas, blankets, 'waskats' (waistcoats), beads, aluminium ornaments and domestic utensils on the village boundary. Mohammedans began to make a good thing out of slaughtering the goats or exporting them. Strenuous propaganda by the State soon stopped this impoverishing rumour, and some of the villagers in the end recovered much of their property from the police, who had been ordered to take charge of it (Grigson 1938: 76).

In 1970 most of these same circumstances also netted lucrative profits for non-tribal middlemen, but to a greater extent, as the Bastar administration was now initially hamstrung by its behind-the-scenes complicity. When the 155

Collector finally did react to the Chapka millennium, the

new moral order, he did so in a sharp and direct manner,

seizing without much in the way of counter-propaganda all

the livestock the tribals were losing in give-away

transactions.

Furthermore, for the Baba, the Collector's intervention

was not a great set-back since it resulted in minimal effect

on the ideological commitments of Bihari Dass' followers who, in any case as tribals were generally and often

vehemently predisposed to see the administration as one of

their worst enemies. In this context the Baba was easily

able to extend and deepen his influence to the point where

he began acting as an alternate administration. It was

simply a matter of exercising his royal prerogitive, as the

Maharajah's avatar, to act as the authority and arbiter in

tribal affairs. Thus he assumed the role of judge in any

problems or disputes that were brought before him.

Unencumbered by the delays and confusions of formal judicial process, the Baba's dispensations were increasingly sought.

He. continued to press for tribal reform, the mand-mas prohibition, and in addition to imposing fines in the

settlement of village disputes, he also imposed (and

collected) them when he found the individuals concerned, or

anyone else, not wearing his Kanti bead. Along with his own

spear-carrying, khaki-wearing police force, Bihari Dass

included in his services the making of himself available 156 for village tours, as the Maharajah used to do, of which each visit required a large monetary retainer.

Deeming these extensions of influence as a thoroughly unacceptable usurpation of official powers, the Bastar administration instituted various court cases against Bihari

Dass. His consequent arrest led to massive reaction by the tribals, large numbers coming to Jagdalpur in his support, holding protest demonstrations, agitations and generally creating a very tense atmopshere entirely reminiscent of the days before the palace firing that killed Pravir. At this point, early February 1972, the Collector ordered Bihari

Dass to leave the district within 7 days. Before the month was out, it was the Collector who, removed from office and given one day's notice, was required to leave the district.

The reasons for this abrupt reversal are relatively simple: a fear that there might be a recurrence of the incidents of 1966, and, in light of imminent elections, the outcome of covert vote-bargaining between Bihari Dass and the Madhya Pradesh (Congress Party) Chief Minister. In a further recapitulation of Pravir's career, Bihari Dass won several seats for the Congress Party in 1972. During the campaign it was reported that for the declared quarter rupee

Congress Party membership fee, the Baba demanded a-full rupee from the money-poor tribals. I mention this not so much to emphasize culpability, a special issue to be dealt with below, but to indicate its journalistic source. In 157 general, the press exerted an all-out attack on Bihari Dass, selecting in characteristic fashion the slings of moral decrepitude and salacious depravity as the main weapons of assault. In 1973 the newspapers carried the story that

Bihari Dass had made pregnant two of his attendant tribal girls.

While many such allegations against him were widely accepted as true by non-tribals, Bihari Dass' following remained strong and united. Moreover he now had formally legitimated status in the modern political sphere and consequently proceeded even more vigorously to capture the spiritual title to Bastar. The included re-directing the district ceremonial and ritual centre to Chapka where he had a new chariot built for the celebration of the Dasara.

Riding atop the chariot in the position of the king, Bihari

Dass1 enactment of the Dasara came closest to explicitly proclaiming himself as the royal incarnation. His duplication of the functions of the Bastar kings included the selling of the sacred thread. Later, declaring the stream flowing alongside his Chapka headquarters as 'pure' as the river Ganges, he sold bottles of holy water to his visitors who were convinced of the efficacy of the baba's

Hindu guarantees of spiritual/temporal power -- the power to manifest the New Age under the mantle of the old order, divine kingship. 158

Beyond the millennial pale, however, political events were soon to overtake the progress of Bihari Dass' Bastar.

His Congress superiors, realizing that the Baba's overwhelming dominance over Bastar was both a source of much sought-after favour, yet also a threat to any control over him, played a double game: extending one hand in supplication, the other holding in readiness the cloaked dagger. The coup de grace came in 1975 when Bihari Dass was arrested and jailed for two years under the Maintenance of

Internal Security Act. His property was seized, the activities at Chapka came to a standstill, and his close tribal following dispersed. The Baba Bihari Dass Movement subsided into a state of uncertainty and waiting. This does not end the story of Baba Bihari Dass. His movement started up again after his release from prison and continues up to the time of this writing, albeit in weakened form -- the

Baba now justifying his leadership as a kindling of modern socio-economic awareness among the adivasis of Bastar.

This does, however, end my account of his story, and also, in a sense, the story of Pravir Chandra Bhanj Deo. The continuities brought about by the king, and extended further still by the sadhu, take their place as concrete actions and events. They are as concrete as a Muria tribal placing a lithograph of Bihari Dass alongside one of Pravir and one of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi on the wall space fronting a room containing the altar of the ancestors. Yet at the same time 159 they are also symbolic actions taking place in a very meaningful context. It only remains here to describe the meanings of the Bihari Dass story within the terms of its own telling.

The first of these meanings concerns the term referring to the nature of Bihari Dass' activities, a term which springs from Hindu culture and which can be translated as

"political movement": 'andolan', as in the Baba Bihari Dass

Andolan, a title given by the Indian press. Of the connotations of the term, the one that is most appropriate here emphasizes movement as a restoration of a previous situation (Nicholas 1973: 68). There can be little doubt that this accurately describes the process begun by Pravir and continued by Bihari Dass. As noted above (p. 91), it was

Pravir's prophecy that 'India will once again be the land of Kings' and in fact for the district of Bastar so it was:

Bihari Dass ideologically became the new king. I stress the word new for both its connotations, but to bring out especially the notion of a new kind of king. Metaphorically speaking, Bihari Dass was Pravir, yet he was also something more than Pravir for he promised not only a state of well-being, but one premised on Hindu (Brahmanic) values and morality. It is significant that such values were in opposition to, and a movement away from, kingly or Kshatriya values. This evokes another of the connotations of movement applicable here, that being in the sense of swinging back 160 and forth or oscillating (Nicholas 1973: 68). The Bihari

Dass Movement set free the contradictions that had been imprisoned in the synthesis achieved by Pravir's Hindu divine kingship. The oscillation set in process was in the direction of creating the separation of power from status.

This implication will be developed further in my concluding chapter.

From the perspective of the Bastar tribal participants, however, the Bihari Dass Movement initiated a "liminal" process. It was liminal in Turner's sense, that is as a

"'passage' between two radically different states of persons or societies", a passage that implied a markedly altered pattern of meaning (ibid.); and, importantly, a "passage of power from one locus to another" (Burridge 1969: 153). The shift in the centre of gravity of power from Pravir to

Bihari Dass-as-Pravir was the determining feature in the transition from millenarian activities in Bastar to the full-scale millenarian movement. As Burridge has shown

(1969: 150-53), it is the transfer of power that generates the possibility of the emergence of the prophet who in turn articulates the millennium. It is not necessarily the case that the prophet wi11 emerge under such conditions. For example, in the circumstances of the transfer of power in

1947 to the Indian Government Pravir did not undertake such a role. However, in the subsequent years as Pravir reconsolidated his traditional power, he began to lean more 161 and more in that direction. His claims of having miraculous powers, of being able to turn bullets into water, and also his taking on the appearance and demeanor of a sannasyi with his ochre clothes, long hair and Tantric practices all this indicated a building up of the prophetic persona. As observed by an intrigued guest at Pravir's'palace for a period in the early 1960's:

He is a yogi and has been practicing yogic Upasana (discipline) for the last twelve years.... One day, the Maharajah told me that he was once planning to renounce this world. At that time he suddenly saw in his dream a Devi (goddess) who told him, 'You have got a great role to play in this world and should not take full-fledged sannyas (vow of renunciation) just now'. In that dream he was also told, as he went on saying, about a tree by which leprosy could be healed. Though he failed to recollect the exact identification of the tree, he is still in search of it. One gentleman who knows the Maharajah from boyhood said, 'Maybe it was for this reason that he was then busy searching for trees. Perhaps for the same reason he had been for so many years in forests and on hills'" (Gupta 1964: 41-2).

There are other implicit yet nonetheless compelling reasons for Pravir's association with the forest, including those as discussed in the analysis of the Dasara rituals (see above, p. 64-65), and not least of which has to do with the forest as home of the renouncer-sage, but here the point is that

Pravir did not take the final prophetical step "out of an established framework into a quite new ambience of awareness" (Burridge 1969: 154). He issued no revelation, no promise of a new order, and introduced no new framework of 162 awareness or pattern of meaning. However disingenuous, his picking up where Pravir left off (or was made to leave off),

Bihari Dass did provide the fundamental message of the millennium: the new heaven, the new earth.

It could be stated that the general conditions or ideology of liminality in a millenarian movement are such that "it is a period of vanquishing evil and injustice, the interim between the end of the old and the beginning of the new. The movement may be conceived as marking the end of time as it was previously known and the beginning of eternity, or as the transition to the good and just society, or as the return to the uncontaminated life of the ancestors. The ideology of a movement projects an image of a new life that is outside ordinary experience and for which persons must take preparatory action" (Nicholas 1973: 68).

In particular, the image of the new life promoted by Bihari

Dass was of a good and just society based on an idealized, or 1sanskritized1 version of Hindu culture. The medium for this promotion was constructed of bhakti, or Hindu devotional, symbolism -- the Kanti bead, a stress on

Vaisnava hymn-singing and worship -- by virtue of which the

Bihari Dass Movement exemplified the age-old function of the sadhu and the bhakti cult to introduce innovation into

Indian civilization. The.sadhu/renouncer is as much responsible for the major Hindu heterodoxies, such as

Buddhism and Jainism, as for the missionary introduction of 163

Hindu devotionalism to tribal cultures (Cf. Sinha 1968).

At the level of participation in this missionary

experience the sadhu is seen as a very ambivalent figure.

Always liable to be suspected as a fraud, the sadhu is

entrenched in the tribal mythology of Central India as both

a magical provider and lustful criminal (Elwin 1944: 330).

Naturally enough, this also closely approximates the Hindu predispostition toward the sadhu, which fact, in many respects, accounts for both the antagonism of Hindu journalists -- who only saw fraud, depravity and

superstition (as they saw in Pravir) -- and the incomplete conversion of the Bastar tribal populace to the Bihari Dass

Movement. It is in this context that the issue of culpability is pertinent. Bihari Dass may well have been guilty of the kinds of exploitation of which he was accused, but this was only of relevance to those who were not his

followers. To them, his followers, it was not exploitation or oppression, allegations at any rate easily ignored as emanating from a tradition of perceived persecution, rather

it was as pointed out above a necessary precondition, an essential preparatory action.

The preparations enjoined by Bihari Dass are from an analytical point of view perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the Bastar millenium. In the first place there is

the matter of the precedent set in the 1930's when the

salience of the colour black in the millennial 164 myth was established. On this issue it is to be noted that the feature of recurrence is not an uncommon one: millenarian movements as a category of cultural process are episodic rather than continuous or regular and can be characterized as, in Nicholas1 terms, 'contagious' and

'successive' (1973: 70). The first quality refers to the consequences of the communication of the millennial myth across social and regional boundaries, for example as in the spread of news and subsequent proliferation of cargo cults from one area to another in Melanesia. By the second quality, succession, Nicholas means:

...the tendency for earlier movements to become paradigms for later ones within a single society, as in the "prophetic tradition" of ancient Israel, the recurrence of Crusades in medieval Europe, and of peasant revolts in Russia since the seventeenth century.... In many societies, movements of particular types become a patterned form of response to roughly equivalent circumstances over sustained periods of time (ibid.)

Except for Grigson's brief mention of the spreading of a rumour of a god descending from the eastern mountains there is no indication of the circumstances which (presumably) set the pattern for the Biahri Dass Movement. All that can be said with certainty is that Bihari Dass' appearance as an avatar or divine reincarnation was analagous to the divinity, whichever it was, that descended from the eastern mountain. With less certainty but on the other hand in all probability, it can be inferred that the original pattern 165 was selected from or influenced by Christian missionary teachings. Now with 11 denominations centred mostly in

Jagdalpur, the Christian influence began in 1885 when the first missionary arrived in Bastar, a Father Fraser of the

Methodist Church, who was given land by the then Maharaja to set up a mission (personal communication, Reverend Victor

Peter, Methodist Church, Jagdalpur, March 1980). It is interesting to note that Father Fraser arrived in Jagdalpur on horseback from Orissa after having negotiated the steep passes of the Eastern Ghats.

Without doubt the most meaningful aspect of the preparatory actions prescribed in Bihari Dass' millennial myth centres on the symbolism of the colour black in Gond religion, particularly as influenced by Hinduism. The significance of black, a central or 'dominant' symbol, thus

"multivocal" or "polysemic" in Turner's (1967) rendering, is linked up with, as is so much else, the Muria market. As discussed in chapter 3, the market is the interface of

Hindu-tribal relations and conceptually part of the context of the synthesis that held the kingdom of Bastar together.

Initially the colour black enters into the meaning of the market by way of the kam'k or market rituals at which Barha

Pen, the great god of Gond religion, is encouraged to assimilate the recently departed ancestors on a plane of divinity. The protean character of Barha Pen, which is the generic name for any ancestral deity, lends itself to be 166

identified with a deity sometimes called Laccmi, a variant of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity:

For the Muriya Barha Pen is identical to Laccmi and is the deity the individual lineage segments are sometimes said to privately propitiate for good crops, wealth and prosperity. When the Muriya consume a meal of domestic products and refer to it as Laccmi they do not believe they are consuming the Deity of Food. They use it metaphorically to recall a personal experience of the deity Laccmi, that is, it relates to their experience of not being poor, having propitiated the deity and having produced an abundance of food. It is in this metaphorical sense that Laccmi means good or luxurious food (Popoff 1980: 166).

Now Barha Pen as Laccmi the Deity of Food is symbolized by a black basket studded with cowries -- cowries, it will be

recalled, having been the traditional currency of Bastar.

The representation of Barha Pen/Laccmi is not found in villages but is housed in a shrine "usually marked by the

presence of black flags" (ibid.: 167) and situated in virtually every market. At one of three annual festivals which are focused on Barha Pen and the market, the site of

the market is moved to a clearing in the forest where a black flag is raised and where in addition to the normal necessities, sweetmeats and "luxurious" food are sold

(ibid.). Throughout the day of this forest market festival a

les'ke or shaman, carrying the cowrie shell basket and wearing a black sari in upper caste Hindu style, is possessed by Barha Pen/Laccmi. Villagers come to have

darshan, 'to see', the les'ke, who moves in counter- 167 clockwise procession around the market place.

It should here be recalled (above p. 68-69) that the semantic field of the market, in particular as expressed in the kam'k rituals, is an ambivalent one. The market, the luxury foods available there, the forest, the Hindu outsid• ers present in the market (and in the forest) and even Barha

Pen itself are all regarded as both danger and benevolence.

These cognitive and affective aspects of the market are linked to symbolic action, for example in the processional sequence of market festivals in which the direction of circumambulation is "the same as that during funerals and so connects the 'ancestral-deities' and the Deity of Food as does the colour black. A black sari, black flags and a black cowrie basket symbolize Barha Pen and black is the prescribed colour of all 'ancestral chicks' sacrificed to

'ancestors; and 'ancestral-deities' (Popoff 1980: 169).

Given this complex of associations evoked by the colour black, the question then is how does it and its diffusion of meanings, its 'multivocality', answer (as it were) to the call of Bihari Dass' millennium?

Not surprisingly, the answer is complex and one must delve even further into ethnography to get at the whole of it. 'The whole of it' once again centres on Barha Pen and the fullness of the deity's definition. Thus, in one context, in the home, Barha Pen is taken as Langgur Pen, a household or lineage deity that is also identifiable as the 168 deity of a wife's matrilineage, an unstressed but vital line of descent in an ideologically patrilineal society. A man is

indebted to his wife's matrilineage, especially to his wife's mother, for both "his social being and for the provision of a daughter..." and thus, as Popoff earlier states, "each family and its lineage provides the means for the continuation of the other and each is the other's source of life and development..." (ibid.: 173ff). The consequences of this alliance structure are manifold, but in general they trace out the lineaments of obligation in Muria Gond society. As such, they figure as relations of competition rooted in the "conflicting interests and desires surrounding marriage, women and the birth of children" (ibid.: 174).

This in turn gives rise to a perception of danger and threat to the fulfillment of requisite obligations. It is this perception that constitutes the potential danger of Barha

Pen contextually specified as the feminine (matrilineal)

Langgur Pen.

In this role Barha Pen is universally acknowledged as a

"constant source of illness and trouble to women and children, especially daughters", and the ceremony addressed to such suffering is also everywhere the same: the deity is encouraged to leave the vicinity, 'to return' to where it originated from (ibid.": 172-3). As Popoff puts it: 169

In order to placate the pen and 'return' it, the Muriya 'give back' objects that in some way bring to mind the particular deity at a 'cross-road' or 'boundary'.... In instances where Barha Pen figures as a source of illness in a woman or her young offspring, she is invariably 'returned' with a piece of cloth, a few coins or a child's broken bangle. Many Murya point out that these articles are associated with the market which is the environment connected with the Deity of Food (ibid.: 173).

And so is Barha Pen 'returned', correlatively via Langgur

Pen, to the Deity of Food, and analytically to the

'objective correlative' in which all the foregoing Muria theistic conception and moral awareness is condensed: the symbol of the colour black.

At this point we are drawing near the site of entry by which this symbol is incorporated in the Bastar -- for it pre-dates Bihari Dass' -- millennial call. Isolating its various meanings or associations, black is implicitly but above all a Hindu colour. It 'is' also the colour of a wife's matrilineage assumed to be secretly dedicated to the deity Laccmi; the colour of danger and external threat; and the colour of indebtedness or obligation. On the other hand, black 'is' the colour of food (literally in the most important 'first-eating' festivals, the colour of pupulk or black gram), especially luxury food, but also as guarantor of all food from forest, market or field in the name of

Barha Pen/Laccmi. Food is in fact a fundamental and profound object of Muria desires, both for itself and as a means 170 to progeny; in short, for its life-giving properties.

Nevertheless, the Deity of Food, symbolized by the colour black and answering negatively to the competitive demands of mortals, is a pervasive source of illness, for which treatment must take the form of placation, the 'returning' of the deity to the environment beyond the village boundaries. The same logic underlies the bohorani or disease-riddance ceremonies mentioned by Grigson (1938: 193) among the Murias and Bhattras of Jagdalpur and Kondagaon tehsils. At the final rites of these ceremonies various symbolic objects were also discarded, 'given away' in the

Gond sense. These rites took place at the head of the Keskal

Pass which, significantly, marks the northern boundary of the former Bastar State.

It is this 'cultural' logic, I would argue, that underwrites the Bastar millenial promise reiterated by Baba

Bihari Dass. It is not, of course, that the Bihari Dass

Movement was simply a disease-riddance ceremony writ large, though it could be seen that way, especially if the objective is taken as the riddance of the 'diseased' old order. There is certainly more to it than that. Black as symbolizing the old order implies many oppositions, even in one sense opposing itself. The conceptual synthesis which was at the core of Bastar identity, the unification of tribal and Hindu gods, already contained elements of the new order: the 'new' kind of Hinduism propogated by Bihari Dass. 171

On the other hand, by giving up all their black possessions the Gonds were giving up the ambivalences, competitive social demands, fears and mistrust associated with the

incorporation of Hinduism, and even divine kingship, within

Gond tribal culture. Black, as the constitutive symbol of this incorporation not only had to be 'given away' or

'returned', it had to be de-constituted, dissolved entirely not into a new synthesis but to be replaced by another

thesis altogether. In effect, it became, in Bihari Dass' formulations, a central tenet of a Gond eschatology.

Thus the millennium is engaged: when the eschatology is announced so begins the transition to, and the liminal phase before, the new order. As a result of this transition the eschatology is superseded by the millennium. The end, the dissolution of the colour black, comes to "represent or

symbolize the millennium" itself (Burridge 1969: 165). The millennial preparations represent a levelling of society, a slate wiped clean of ambivalences, of indebtedness and obligation. As Burridge puts it, the preparations take place as a process "through which men and women express and discharge their obligations to each other..." (ibid.). Once these obligations are discharged, the final articulations of the millennium come into play. The constitution of the new earth is proclaimed -- new forms of self-restraint, new forms of morality are adopted -- as is the new heaven with

its new gods. And in Bastar, so it came to pass. The 172 prophet Bihari Dass became the new god, leaving the old

one, Pravir, behind, and tribal society and culture was

'returned' to the wilderness of unknowing, to be replaced by

a purely Hindu salvation.

( 173

Footnotes to chapter 6

1 This is an extract from an interview with Ravi Shankar Bajpai, a lawyer of Jagdalpur and political opponent of Pr avir Chandra Bhanj Deo, February 23, 1980.

2 Interview with Swarup Chandra Bhanj Deo, a descendant of the Mayurbhanj ruling house. In another account, Pravir's father is described as "a man of independent nature and...not in (sic) compromising terms with the then foreign rulers. Whenever he had realized that the foreigners were doing injustice to him and to the people of Bastar, he opposed the Government tooth and nail....This resulted in a strained relation between him and the paramount power so much so that he had to forego all his claim over the throne.... To add insult to injury, his children were not allowed to be with him though he was forced to live in the same town.... Ultimately, he was ordered to leave the Bastar State" (Gupta 1964: 35-36).

3 The following version of the Bihari Dass Movement relies heavily on interviews with Kirid Doshi, a Jagdalpur journalist with a very strong bias against Bihari Dass. Comparative material from other oral evidence has been used to edit out some of the grosser distortions. However, I cannot make any claim to absolute veracity in my reconstruction of events which in their re-telling took on almost mythic qualities. A more serious problem is my lack of access to Bihari Dass himself or to his tribal followers. An insider view of the Bihari Dass Movement and its aftermath awaits further research. 174

Chapter 7: The meaning of Bastar history and some

implications for the anthropology of India

The foregoing text, from its beginnings, both has and has not had an endpoint at which to arrive, a thesis to demonstrate, or an hypothesis to test. The closest approximation to such ambitions has been to adopt an analytically and descriptively diachronic approach to a very general (and heretofore untried) problem: the structure and significance of Bastar as an ex-Princely State of India. At the same time, however, the problem itself has necessarily generated a certain synchrony which must be reconciled with the mode of approach. This reconciliation must then in some sense be transcended in order to situate my undertaking truly within an anthropological appreciation. It is in this sense that the foregoing chapters do entail an endpoint -- which is a consideration of, and pronouncement upon, divine kingship both as a topic and as an actuality in a particular context.

I will begin then with the issues as they were presented, dealing first with the discursive implications of

Bastar ethnography. This will be followed by an analysis of the political structure aspects of Bastar within the civilizational field of India. Thereafter the topic of divine kingship will be considered, its properties defined 175

and related to its expression in Bastar, and, finally, what

this definition has to say to the anthropology of India.

However, before proceeding it is necessary to introduce

an author overwhelmingly germane to the anthropology of

India. The writings, assertions and theories of Louis Dumont have become a standard, against or in favour of which many

contributors to the field have formulated their findings.

With his programmatic statement, "For a Sociology of India"

(with David Pocock, 1959: 7-22), Dumont has from early on

been contentious, controversial, obscure and mostly

intractible in response to his critics. But above all else

he has been greatly influential. T.N. Madan, successor to

Dumont and Pocock as editor of the first forum of proposition and debate (Contributions to Indian Sociology),

sums up Dumont's impact by pointing out that criticism of

his sociology of India has not decreased, or has acceptance become general: " the measure of influence is seen rather by

the manner in which most contributors to the field of the

sociology of India have found it imperative to define their

own respective positions on various problems -- be it

caste, kinship or power -- in relation to Dumont's" (1981:

411). Even the most contending perspective on the

anthropology of India -- here taking anthropology as

embracing sociology -- the "ethnosociology" of Marriott and

Inden, has in its own theoretical challenges articulated proposals that are rooted in Dumont's methodological 176 injunctions (see Marriott 1976: 189-195). There is no gainsaying the imperative mentioned by Madan if only for the reason that Dumont's answer to the problem of the social anthropology of India -- that proverbial 'great blooming, buzzing confusion' -- was so encompassing (as it were) that it left hardly a stone unturned. The task was accomplished with a deftness and subtlety of style that has been both compelling and exasperating. Moreover, the scholarly response to Dumont's work has yet to abate and in a recent stock-taking (David 1977) has been seen possibly to amount to something of a revolution in South Asian anthropology. A younger generation of anthropologists has also taken to

Dumont, whose influence they have combined with that of

David M. Schneider's kind of cultural analysis to produce new and very sophisticated kinds of interpretations of

Indian culture and society (see Barnett, Fruzetti and Ostor

1976: 627-646).

However, as mentioned above, this should not be taken as indicating that any kind of theoretical consensus has been reached. On the contrary, like anthropology in general,

South Asian anthropology has splintered into a profusion of positions, roughly according to either a materialist or a symbolicist theoretical persuasion. As plainly spoken by

Kenneth David, the situation "sometimes gives the impression of 10,000 prima donnas, each singing in his or her own key" (1977: 484). The crumbling of the positivist 177 edifice has led to a "baroque proliferation of microfields"

(ibid.) and idiosyncratic articulations which, for better or worse, seems to leave anthropology disconcertingly close to

the fate of Humpty Dumpty.

Be that as it may, for South Asian studies Dumont's work remains a benchmark around which much of contemporary analysis is arrayed. In the issues more or less left

implicit in this thesis, there is also such a quality of reflection vis-a-vis Dumont's anthropological signature. For what follows, then, I will employ mainly his assertions and arguments to elucidate the problems tacitly present in the anthropological history of Bastar.

In chapter one of this thesis, the question "who are

the Gonds?" evokes, in terms of definitional problems,

Dumont's early though still influential note that most tribes or "so-called 'primitives' in India are only people who have lost contact..." and that the failure to recognise this "has been one of the reasons which retarded Indian ethnology and sociology as a whole, despite a few brilliant exceptions" (1957: 8). Of course, to put it this way begs the question in the sense that the Gonds are assumed to be tribes without really examining the meaning of the term, nor

its applicability to the inhabitants of Bastar. Perhaps one should ask,if it is possible that what Grigson in the late

'30's,and Elwin in the '40's described as 'tribes' were in

'reality' castes; and secondly, that what they dicussed as 178 tribal religion was rather a particular form of Hinduism.

This in fact was how Dumont later approached the question in regard to a reading of Elwin's Religion of an Indian Tribe.

After this critical encounter, however, Dumont substantially qualified his earlier remarks: "To write, as we did, that most so-called 'primitives' in India are only people who have lost contact...is at the same time too ambitious and too narrow" (1959: 60). What led to this disclaimer in the review of Elwin's book was the admissability of evidence for the "idea of heterogeneity between tribal religion and

Hinduism" (ibid.). Nonetheless, the evidence -- that the characteristically Hindu emphasis on the intricacies of pure and impure are absent from the tribal (i.e. Saora) religion

-- did not restrain Dumont from assigning overriding weight to contrary evidence. He rhetorically asks, "By what stretch of the imagination could such a religion be considered absolutely alien to Hinduism?" (ibid.: 66). Here Dumont reveals the crux of the problem: a long-standing tradition of attempting to distinguish tribes and castes, or tribal religion and Hindu religion, either as a relation of absolute opposition or as the absolute lack of any significant distinction.

This tradition stems for the most part from the British administrative tendency (exemplified in Bastar by Wilfred

Grigson) to protect what were assumed to be tribes from

Hindu exploitation. The protectionist attitude was 179

reversed to some degree in the 1940's under the influence of

Indian nationalism which sought to subsume the tribal

question under a unified Hindu theology. For scholarly

purposes this was also Dumont's initial position as

influenced by Marcel Mauss (see Dumont 1962: 121). At any

rate, in the contemporary (post-independence) period

political considerations have resurrected the earlier protectionist attitude, although not without a marked degree

of dissent -- some of it from Indian sociological circles

(see Ghurye 1963) .

Sociologically, the problem of the 'either-or' approach

to the problem of tribes and castes was most ably handled by

F.G. Bailey (in response to Dumont). Bailey, concerned to

strip all but the purely sociological from the question, set himself the "rudimentary exercise" of distinguishing between

tribes and caste (1961: 11). In so doing he was the first to

get down to the task of actually asking the question: "What

distinctions are to be made between tribal social organization and caste social organization?" (ibid.: 10).

Bailey's distinctions were conceived with reference to how groups were organized to achieve political and economic

ends. In this way a tribe was defined as having segmentary

organization of groups inhabiting a clan territory, "but

these groups are not hierarchically arranged and they are not interdependent through economic specialization" (ibid.:

12). Castes, according to Bailey, are also organized 180 territorially for politico-economic pourposes but are arranged hierarchically, are economically specialized and interdependent. Caste society, in short, is "organic".

Applying this conceptual framework to his Orissan ethnographic data, Bailey found that it did not adequately distinguish caste from tribe. To account for this lack of fit into mutually exclusive categories, he proposed the idea of a continuum according to which castes and tribes could be located at different points along a line, "some nearer to the tribal segmentary model, others close to the organic caste society. In other words," Bailey goes on to say,

of each society we must ask the question: To what extent is this society organized on segmentary principles and to what extent is it organic? We do not ask disjunctively: Is this a tribe or a caste? Societies which fall near one pole or the other, we will in a rough and ready way call either caste systems or tribal systems. For those at the centre it will be impossible to say whether they are tribes or castes, for the concrete world of social behaviour does not permit the exclusiveness and exhaustiveness which can be achieved in logic and the framing of definitions (ibid.: 14, original emphasis).

The criteria Bailey used to decide the approximate location of a given society along the peripheries of the centrally interminable tribe-caste continuum were based on the accessibility of land: where accessibility is more proportionately direct, the closer is that society to the tribal end of the continuum; and "conversely, the larger 181

is the proportion of the people whose right to land is

achieved through a dependent relationship, the nearer does

that society come to the caste pole" (ibid.). However,

having presented these criteria and the definition they are

based on, Bailey warns that they should not be used to

categorize concrete societies, but only "to help our

understanding of modes of behaviour in the process of

political and economic change" (ibid.: 19). He further warns

against conferring the loose, common-sense or "all-purpose"

definition of tribe -- "which involves economics, religion,

habitat, and so forth" -- with the "relatively limited and'

relatively rigorous scientific meaning" (i.e., a segmentary political system) which he assigned to it (ibid.). Such

confusion, asserts Bailey, "is at the root of the whole

debate" (ibid.).

While it is true that if one accepts the strictures as

laid down by Bailey the debate appears to be resolved, it is not the case that one must necessarily accept those

strictures. In a three-page response, Dumont (1962: 120-22)

raised a number of issues which challenged the distinctions

and restrictions applied to the question by Bailey. It

should be pointed out that the disagreements between Dumont

and Bailey on the tribe-caste system are only part of a more

general and fundamental divergence of views on the topic of

a sociology of India (see Bailey's rather outraged but

perduring critique 1959: 88-101). 182

For present purposes, this divergence is exemplified by

Dumont's insistence on bringing religion into the discrimination of tribal from non-tribal societies. Although

Bailey expressed the hope later "to link politico-economic differences with differences in kinship and in ritual and religious behaviour" (161: 17), it is clear that such

linkages would have counted as secondary to the ideological or religious values, especially Hindu hierarchy, that

Dumont holds up as of primary importance in any tribe-caste differentiation. For Dumont, the politico-economic dimension as expressed in territorial rights, dependent or otherwise,

is "relatively impertinent": a tribe "becomes a caste when

it acknowledges the values of the caste system" (1962:

122). In this phrasing Dumont returned, after stating some agreement with Bailey, to his unshakeable foundation.

Values, that is on the broadest level cultural values, take precendence in the explanation or understanding of (Indian) society. Rejecting such cultural determinism, Bailey cited

Nadel to the effect that 'society' is at a higher level of abstraction than is 'culture'. At "this level cultural similarities becomes irelevant", and moreover, "cultural explanations simply beg the question" (Bailey 1959: 98). As a final thrust, Bailey also rejected the use of sociology as a description of the kind of analysis -- called by Bailey

'culturology' -- proposed by Dumont (and Pocock). Obviously the debate was unresolved -- because irresolvable on even 183

the most basic of assumptions.

In most respects, the impasse thus reached remains the

status quo in terms of the anthropological position on the problem of tribes and castes in India. Indian anthropologists have more or less been constrained to accept governmental decree as to the identification of tribes and

castes. Most non-Indian anthropologists have, since the

1950's, either been prohibited for political reasons from doing research on what are classified as tribal groups, or,

for various reasons, have lost interest in Indian tribal

societies in favour of village, caste or Hindu cultural

studies.1 Given this state of affairs, the question must now be asked how the situation bears on Bastar, and

consequently to what extent the results of this probe

can ease the deadlocked discussions of the tribe-caste problem.

We may begin by considering the possibility that

anthropological distinctions are pointless. This is the position of Stephen Tyler, one of the few non-Indian

anthropologists to have worked with Gond-related peoples in

the contemporary period. He argues that from "the Indian point of view, castes, tribes and sects are simply jatis,

species of humans, and the anthropological classification not only is pointless but is nonsensical in its own terms,

for designation as a caste, tribe or sect is based on no

effective principles of structural differentiation 184

(1973: 179, original emphasis). Recalling Bailey to mind,

this may seem a rather summary dismissal, yet by employing

the qualifier "effective" Tyler involves the practical difficulties (admitted by Bailey) in applying the criteria of differentiation to the tribe-caste continuum. Where Tyler does disagree is in his insistence on the Indian perspective and in this he is in alignment with Dumont, although he moves beyond Dumont by suggesting that1- all castes, tribes or

sects are included within a system of hierarchic ranking.

These groups all agree that each "ought to be rigorously classified and assigned positions in a hierarchy" (ibid, original emphasis). However, despite the irrelevance of anthropological efforts to sort out any definitional differences between tribes and castes, Tyler goes on to offer a set of descriptive characteristics for Indian tribal populations:

Groups traditionally called tribes almost always live in relatively isolated hill or jungle areas, follow a form of shifting cultivation, hunting and gathering, or pastoralism, quite frequently speak a language that is different from that spoken in the surrounding plains, and participate less completely in the higher forms of Hindu religious ceremonial. This, it seems, is the real basis for the anthropological tradition of calling some Indian groups tribes rather than castes (ibid.).

Here we may re-enter Bastar directly into the discussion.

Tyler's descriptive explanation for calling certain

groups tribes undoubtedly applies in most respects to the 185

Gonds of Bastar. But while the anthropological tradition of naming certain groups tribes may be thus accounted for, the

charge that all else is pointless is not particularly well- grounded. From the available ethnography (including Grigson

1938, Elwin 1947, Jay 1970 and Gell 1982) the Bastar Gonds

certainly do not insist on rigorous classification of groups and assigned positions in a hierarchy. There is, as discussed in chapter one (pp. 15-18) a caste structure in

Bastar into which the various Gond groups are integrated, but the integration is a very loose and often vague one, in which caste characteristics result much more from expedience

than internally normative compulsions. Furthermore, the norms or values which are present in Gond society are not

those which characterize caste hierarchy. As observed by

Gell, the concept of hierarchy and "the full rigors of caste

ideology are attenuated in Bastar society, where, in contrast to the typical Indian pattern, it is only the state which is hierarchically organised" (1982: 484, original emphasis). This reiterates an earlier point made by Gell in reference to the Muria in which he notes the "basic opposi•

tion" as being between "the state (hierarchy) and the vil• lage (equality)" (1980: 247). Clearly, here is a distinction of some importance which Tyler, in his over-enthusiasm for

the 'native category' perspective, has eliminated as a possibility. Bailey, although he did not emphasize the

equality/hierarchy distinction, did at least recognize 186 it and consequently incorporated it into his discussion of the tribe-caste question. It is for this reason that

Bailey's concept of the continuum remains in a 'rough and ready' way valid and useful in the discrimination of castes from tribes -- and thus was so employed in my ethnographic opening. Nonetheless, Bailey's stripped-down definition of hierarchy (as 'organic') has not survived the challenge of

Dumont's ideological elaboration.

There is much yet to be discussed on the topic of hierarchy, which discussion in passing will put the finishing touches to the tribe-caste question, but first a brief digression on 'native categories' is in order. In chapter one a description of a set of 'categories of the native', or in other words of tribal identifications, was given. Such identifications, as they are absorbed by the

Hindu population of Bastar, come to reflect the common-sense attitudes toward Bastar natives, the bedrock of which is a sense of otherness generically labelled adivasi or aboriginal. This prevailing image contains orientations toward adivasi people as primitive, child-like, manipulable, etc., and allows a moral latitude of action which has all the negative connotations of dominance. For the most part, the Bastar Gonds passively accept the adivasi label (along with the particularities of the label as they apply to specific groups) and respond, and have responded notwithstanding certain important exceptions to the rule, 187

submissively to the exercise of dominance. This marks the primary character of Hindu-tribal relations. At the same

time, on the most general level, this delineates the sense

of separation, the 'we-they' conceptualization, experienced by the two cultures (cultures used here in the sense of

patterns of meaning historically constituted). In other Gond

areas of India, for example, in the plains areas of Andhra

Pradesh to the south-west of Bastar, the 'we-they' separa•

tion has begun to dissolve as the economic interdependence between Hindu and Gond has grown. In this situation,

the Gonds themselves have actively tried to direct their changing identity. The administrative concept of "tribal" rather than the indigenous one of adivasi, or aboriginal, with all its (legal) conno• tations of a privileged minority, has become a new banner to wave (Yorke, in Furer-Haimendorf 1982: 248) .

The contemporary situation in Bastar, however, is more

complex. Amongst a sizeable population of Gonds the new banner to wave has been mainly in the hands of Baba Bahari

Dass; while among the remainder (the majority), Gond identi•

ty is still of the nature of 'adivasi'. The motivation for

the retention of the adivasi identity has been argued as originating in a certain perceived advantage:

The Tribals' basic motivation is the continuation of a hedonistic lifestyle to which they are deeply attached, but the price paid for it is the continu• ous exchange of myths -- the myth of tribal primi- tiveness, Hindu patronage -- with the Hindu popula• tion. Intelligent tribal men have firm views on the threat to themselves posed by Tribals to infiltrate the Hindu-dominated power structure. It is because 188 the interests of Tribals are protected by the aura of the myth which surrounds them that the exchange of these myths, which one can see taking place very clearly in the marketplace, assumes such import• ance. But they are only myths: the resource base in which tribal society rests is a rich one by Indian standards, and it has not passed into the hands of outsiders. The effect of the market is to establish a stereotype of Tribals, and tribal-Hindu rela• tions, in which Tribals retain actual control of their resource base, at the expense of becoming symbolically peripheral to Hindu society, wards of the state. For Hindus it is the establishment of symbolic hegemony, for Tribals, real security (Gell 1982: 490).

There is certainly some truth to this assessment but the

author unfortunately has drawn some unwarranted conclusions

from the 'exchange of myths'. There is also a problem with

the attribution of "hedonistic lifestyle". This has the

taint of the same kind of stereotype about which Gell

appears to be objective. Hedonism, after all, can hardly

fail to be an over-generalized stereotype when applied to

entire populations. Gell seems to have been unwittingly

drawn into the very 'myths' he describes. Somewhat

similarly, Gell significantly overestimates the control and

security of the tribal resource base. As difficult to enforce as it is correspondingly easy to circumvent,

legislative protection of tribal interests falls far short of providing 'real security', let alone any entailed in the rather dubious idea of mythic auras. A consideration of the history of Gond relations to the forests of Bastar, and of

the slow but steadily increasing alienation of Gond land, 189

among other very real threats to their security, would

reveal the naivete of Gell's judgements.

While it is necessary to outline these matters of fact,

the point to make in regard to the above is that whether

'tribal' or 'adivasi', such terms have very definite

meanings as they are applied to the Bastar Gonds. Not only

meanings, but also actions concommitant with these meanings

infuse the moral environment of tribal Bastar. And present-

day Bastar, with its millenarian tensions, grievance-laden

cultural relations, and recent, volcanic political history,

is very much caught up in the dilemmas of this environment.

On the level of observation, the identification of the

Bastar Gonds as tribal is a valid, necessary and meaningful

aspect of the anthropology of Bastar. On this level of

abstraction there is little room for protracted debate.

Dumont's concept of hierarchy, of course, is at a much

higher level of abstraction. As such, it is the quintessen•

tial concept of his theory of caste society and simultan•

eously, because so defined, of Hindu culture. For Dumont,

ideology (read as culture) is structure, and structure

organizes society. That such a reading requires making these

concepts, in particular ideology, do rather special work is

to some extent recognized by Dumont, yet defended: "Life is not limited to what ideology brings to the fore, but each of

its situations is coloured, not to say structured, in varying degrees, with reference to the global ideology" 190

(Dumont 1980: xxxvii). The media for this 'colouration', which can be translated into modes of behaviour, are values, most powerfully those of purity and pollution. Here the primary opposition in Indian culture is engaged. The opposition of purity and pollution lends itself to a definition of hierarchy not as a linear notion but rather as one involving a series of oppositions between ranked status categories, the most important pair being the Brahmin and

Kshatriya. Together, these two are opposed to the rest of society. In this phrasing hierarchy becomes wedded to the indigenous theory of varna (the four traditional social groupings) so that the abstract "principle by which elements of a whole are ranked in relation to the whole" is appropri• ately informed as a cultural construct (Dumont 1972: 104-5, original emphasis). More specifically, hierarchy is a relig• ious concept, "it being understood that in the majority of societies it is religion which provides the view of the whole..." (ibid.: 105). It follows in this view that religi• ous status (the Brahmanic priesthood) is superior to secular authority (kingship) -- although in practice the religious must stand in attendance upon the secular. As Dumont puts it:

It is a matter of an absolute distinction between priesthood and royalty. Comparatively speaking ,the king has lost his religious prerogatives; but does not sacrifice, he has sacrifices performed. In theory, power is ultimately subordinate to priest• hood, whereas in fact priesthood submits to power. Status and power, and consequently spiritual auth• ority and temporal authority, are absolutely distinguished (Dumont 1972: 111, emphasis added). 191

This is a crucial statement, for it leads Dumont to argue that it is essential to his theory of caste society. Secular kingship (or its modern continuity, the dominant caste)

"share(s) to some extent in the absolute dignity whose servant" it is (ibid.: 118) -- which is a contradiction of the ideology of hierachy. In Dumont's reckoning this does not invalidate his theory of caste society for to so pronouce it as invalidated is to be prejudiciously influenced by the sociocentric (Western, ideologically egalitarian) perpsective. It is not really a matter of contradiction but of complementarity and this is because the hierarchical perspective "is not perfectly realized in actuality, or, in other terms, does not allow direct consciousness of all that it implies" (Dumont 1980: xxx). In his most recent formulation, hierarchy implies not,

"essentially, a chain of super-imposed commands, nor even a chain of beings of decreasing dignity, nor yet a taxonomic tree, but a relation that can succinctly be called 'the encompas'sing of the contrary'" (ibid.: 239). This is

Dumont's ultimate defense in maintaining the distinction between status and power at the primary (the ideological) level, while allowing it to be fused at secondary

(empirical) levels.

If, for the moment, one accepts this theory -- that caste society is made possible by the hierarchical separation of (secular) power and (religious) status, the 192

the former encompassed under the latter, and the society as

a whole characterized by the dominant values of purity and

pollution which structure the interactions of hereditary,

interdependent, occupational specializations -- then its

negation, tribal society, comes clearly into view. And thus,

generically speaking, we can return to the tribal society of

Bastar. In it there is no relation of opposition between

Brahmin and Kshatriya, or between any comparable social

categories. Status and authority, notwithstanding

superficial, modern accommodations (see P. 39 above) are

not split into opposing roles, as is tribal society not

split into any thorough-going differentiation of function.

Similarly in terms of values, in Bastar tribal society one

cannot speak of purity and pollution in any convincing way.

That there are transitional cases, groups such as the Halba

and Bhattra, which have to some extent submitted to the

values of purity and pollution, does not mark Bastar as a

caste society. When Dumont writes of the acknowledgement of

the values of the caste system such that caste "is here the

dominant element, even though it is tolerant to certain

tribal features" (1962: 122), he overstates his case.

Acknowledgement is not a synonym of submission. For Bastar,

his statement is better reversed: tribe is there the

dominant element, even though it is tolerant to certain

caste features. However, to be fair, it should be mentioned

that Dumont, having come a considerable distance from his 193

intial iconoclastic position on the question of tribe, does

finally grant a certain implicit legitimacy to the concept

as it is manifested in peninsular India. Concluding his

analysis of the ethnography of the Saora of highland Orissa

a tribe similar in many respects to the Gonds of neighbour•

ing Bastar, Dumont remarks:

It is interesting to note that outwardly the Saoras maintain their autonomy, and consequently have not submitted to the intricacies of pure and impure, while inwardly they recognize the prestige of their (Hindu) neighbours (1959: 74).

Because he is concerned to emphasize the interrelatedness o

Hindu and tribal religion, which though rather self-evident

has often been a contentious issue in South Asian anthropol

ogy, this is as close as Dumont has come to admitting the

conceptual and empirical validity of tribes in India. The

data from Bastar can only affirm and reinforce this validi•

ty.

The preceding discussion has presented the relevance o

Dumont's theory of caste for the question of tribe as a

societal distinction in Bastar. As has been shown, this

theory is predicated on a particular model of Indian king•

ship as represented in the Brahman-Kshatriya relation. The model is what Dumont calls "conventional kingship" (1970:

73). The conditions for its formulation and subsequent

pervasiveness were established as a process of secular- 194 ization which, Dumont speculates, took place in the vedic period (ibid.: 68). Prior to this time kingship was of the

"magico-religious" type, which, despite Brahmanical

'secularization' on one level, remained "in contact with popular mentality" on another (ibid.). Nevertheless, the ideological shift from magico-religious or divine kingship to conventional or secular kingship is the root of the caste system, "while the caste system we know is that described by

Hocart plus this fundamental transformation" (Dumont 1965:

90, original emphasis). There follows from this a problem: how are Dumont's assertions on the development of caste society to be reconciled, if at all, with the case of

Bastar, which seems to be an emphatic counterexample to his argument? There are two implications to be considered in relation to the problem. The first concerns the nature of the state in Bastar, in this thesis taken up as the development of its political/social structure (chapter two); and the second involves the nature of Bastar's divine kingship, taken up intially as a demonstration of the ritual integration (at the highest levels) of tribal and Hindu religion, then manifested as a biographic/analytical description of modern divine kingship (chapters three and five).

In the introductory remarks it was stated that the traditional state of Bastar was "constituted by a relation of complementary opposition" (p. 20 above). This serves 195 simply to indicate the basic conceptual dichotomy between the tribal equality at the peripheries and the Hindu hierarchy at the centre(s) of Bastar state. The complementarity of the two concepts lies in their mutual completion, the result of which is the unification of Bastar as a whole. Along this line of reasoning there is little problem in accepting Dumont's dictum on hierarchy as the encompassing of the contrary. As well, this is a satisfactory way of summing up the process described earlier as the solidifcation of Raj put-inspired rule over a tribal populace (chapter two). But it does not say very much about the nature of the state thus constituted. In potential remedy one has recourse to the literature (especially Fox

1971, 1977) on 'realm and region in traditional India1.

However, this area too has been imprinted with Dumont's contentious influence. On the one hand there are those scholars "who wish to understand Indian realms and regions from within, by deciphering or translating the indigenous idiom of rule and power, of frontier and centre"; and on the other there are those "who hope to comprehend traditional states and society from without, by employing models and methodologies derived from cross-cultural comparison and by using categories of analysis drawn from their respective scholarly disciplines" (Fox 1977: xxv). It is a little curious that such a confrontation has come into being in 196

that its instigator, Dumont, has been at pains to situate

himself at the juncture of these two approaches (see Dumont

1980, preface).

At any rate, one focus of confrontation has been the use of models derived from African ethnography to account

for the traditional kingly state in India. The particular model under discussion, the concept of the segmentary state

developed by Aidan Southall (1953), has its antecedents in

the work of Evans-Pritchard and Fortes (1941). Its most

recent application has been at the intiative of Burton

Stein, who considers the Chola kingdom of South India in

relation to the segmentary state conception (1977: 3-51).

It is unnecessary here to enter into the arguments against

the segmentary state model since most deal with sterile

debates on the classification of polity, or make the unwarranted assumption that because the model does not fit a particular case, it is therefore suspect in fitting any case

-- in other words that there must be one to one correspondence between model and reality. The latter point

is related to the neglect in this cricticism of the processual development of state organization. In fact, the

segmentary state model is especially appropriate to the development of Bastar state organization as presented here

in that it is "taken to represent a position on the continuum of goverance formations" (ibid.: 9). However, in 197 order to proceed I shall have to make clear some differences vis-a-vis Stein in my own approach to the segmentary concept.

What Stein (following Southall) has termed a segmentary state I have called (following Sahlins) a chiefdom (p. 34 above); which amount to the same thing except for a certain angle of approach. My own usage of segmentary is rooted in the Gond tribal system and moves to meet an advanced permutation of it, the Rajput system, on the level of weak central authority, i.e., the primus inter pares king. Over time there developed a thorough ritual integration at the state level, while economically and politically the state retained a very loose set of linkages between Hindu centres and tribal peripheries. Except for the British propping up of the kingdom in times of trouble and elevating the Bastar kingship to a level more exalted than it intrinsically was, the latter set of conditions persisted up to Indian independence. On the other hand, Stein takes Chola kingship as an already established segmentary state with an only inferential reference to its "tribal situation", as he diacritically puts it (1977: 30). This he admits is a weakness in his argument (ibid.: 39), and it has been criticized as a more or less invalid demonstration of the opposition between tribal and caste organizations (Fox 1977: xvi) . 198

Be that as it may in ancient Tamilnadu, the application of Southall's model to medieval Bastar and beyond presents no such difficulties. While there is some indistinctness at the overlapping area marking tribal-Hindu interaction, there

is a definite opposition at the central/peripheral extremes of caste/tribal organizations in Bastar. Southall's defini• tion of the segmentary state accounts for this configuration

in the following ways:

1) Territorial sovereignty is recognized but limit• ed and essentially relative, forming a series of zones in which authority is most absolute near the centre and increasingly restricted towards the per• iphery, often shading off into a ritual hegemony.

2) There is centralized government, yet there are also numerous peripheral foci of administration over which the centre exercises only a limited control.

3) There is specialized administrative staff at the centre, but it is repeated on a reduced scale at all the peripheral foci of administration.

4) Monopoly of the use of force is successfully claimed to a limited extent and with a limited range by the central authority, but legitimate force of a more restricted order inheres at all the peripheral foci.

5) Several levels of subordinate foci may be dist• inguishable, organized pyramidally in relation to the central authority. The central and peripheral authorities reflect the same model, the latter being reduced images of the former. Similar powers are repeated at each level with a decreasing range, every authority has certain recognized powers over the subordinate authorities articulated to it (Stein 1977: 9-10).

As well as a sixth point dealing with the shifting allieg- ances of the more peripheral subordinate authorities, Stein 199 offers a number of elaborations of Southall's model, the more important of which include:

1) In a segmentary state sovereignty is dual. It consists of actual political sovereignty or control and what Southall terms "ritual hegemony" or "ritual sovereignty"...

4) The segmentary state as a whole is made up of subordinate units -- segments -- the organization of which, as in the state as a whole, is pyramidal. Pyramidal segmentation may be said to exist in two senses. First, the relationship between the centre and the peripheral segments of any single element is the same -- in reduced form -- as the relationship between the prime center and all peripheral foci of power.... The other sense in which pyramidal seg• mentation may be said to exist is that there is opposition which is complementary among the parts of the state as a whole as well as within any constitu• ent segment (ibid.: 10-11)

There are thus also two senses in which the segmentary state concept is appropriate to Bastar: one in which complementary opposition structures caste-tribe relations, and the other in which subordinate authorities, the traditional zamindars or 'little rajas' are complementarily opposed to the central domain (the khalsa around Jagdalpur, above p. 40). At its widest level the segmentary model, culturally manifest as the Rajput model described by Wills, accommodates Bastar itself as a subordinate authority articulated to the Chhat• tisgarh kingdom of Ratanpur. Now, these levels of comple• mentary opposition ultimately were co-ordinated as a structure of hierarchy, each one encompassed by a succeeding relation of generality until finally the centre was reached 200

-- in the case of Bastar at least, in divine kingship.

Ritual hegemony or sovereignty is the aspect of the segmentary state concept most appropriate to the anthropology of Bastar. It is the link to divine kingship proper and, once again, though here as a challenge, to

Dumont's theory of Indian society. What was granted above in order to argue the caste-tribe distinction, the separation of status and authority, will have to be critically re-examined in light of Bastar state as a whole.

Chapter three of this thesis established the ritual synthesis of Bastar Gond and Hindu religion. It presented the conception that the loose politico-economic integration of Gond and Hindu societies was completed by an over-arching ideological fusion (as revealed in the Dasara rituals) dominated by the divinity of Bastar kings. While it can be accepted that such an arrangement conforms to the notion of feudal sovereignty, it is clear in the Indian case (at least) that the greater emphasis must lie with 'ritual' as opposed to 'political' sovereignty -- although this is a purely analytical distinction for in the Indian state ritual is politics as well as legitimization of economic relationships.2 Nevertheless, more important is the fact that in terms of kingship the "idiom of ideology in pre-modern India was religious..." (Stein 1977: 19), this point of course being the starting position of Dumont's theory of Indian society. 201

But, as we have also seen, Dumont insists on the 'con• ventionalization' or 'secularization' of kingship as the prerequisite for caste society 'as we know it1. What, then, can be made of Bastar's divine kingship? At last, therefore, it must be asked: what is 'divine kingship' and, in light of the answer, how are we to view Bastar society? If the Bastar monarchy conforms to the definition of divine kingship and if Bastar society conforms in its Hindu part, as it does, to

Dumont's theory of caste organization, how in the end can that theory be upheld?

The study of divine kingship, as every student of anth• ropology knows, begins with Frazer, whose prodigious labours spawned a whole generation of similar studies, as well as a movement, a secondary project of diffusionism, so-called the

'Myth and Ritual School' (Hooke 1958: 1-4). Perhaps the last major expression of divine kingship studies came in the mid-fifties with the Vlllth International Congress for the

History of Religions, the central theme of which was "sacral kingship" (Widengren et al, 1959). It would be impossible to summarize this enormous body of literature but it is pos• sible at least to summarize the relevant features of a variety of instances of divine kingship.

The 'classical' example in anthropology of divine king• ship is of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan (Evans-Pritchard

1962). Divine kingship among the Shilluk, the author tells us, must be understood as a mediation between man and god, 202 that it must be viewed as a ritual rather than a judicial or administrative office, and that "is the kingship and not the king who is divine" (1962: 210). Generalizing from these insights, Evans-Pritchard concludes that

kingship everywhere and at all times has been in some degree a sacred office. Rex est mixta persona cum sacerdote. This is because a king symbolizes a whole society and must not be identified with any part of it. He must be in. society and yet stand outside it and this is only possible if his office is raised to a mystical plane (ibid.).3

For present purposes the most important inference to be drawn from these pronouncements is that kingship, and antecedently, power, is dualistic in nature. Kingship appears as a unity, as it must if it is to represent the whole-, but is composed of distinct attributes, one as the source of power and the other as its execution -- the latter among the Shilluk left in most circumstances to the lineage chieftains. Succinctly put, "the king of the Shilluk reigns but does not govern" (Evans-Pritchard 1962: 200). From a comparative perspective, and although more with regard to general prosperity, Hocart nonetheless makes the same point:

"The king cannot alone cast increase. He must have the assistance of departmental principals, as we may call his chieftains" (1970: 102). In yet another phrasing the point is brought home: "'A single wheel cannot turn,' says the 203

Arthasastra, rather inaccurately, 'and so government is only possible with assistance. Therefore a king should appoint councillors and listen to their advice'" (Basham 1959: 98).

Thus in theory divine kingship combines these aspects, the legitimization and the exercise of power. In practice, however, the exercise of power is left in other hands.

This can be brought out further in considering two other classical cases, those of Egyptian and Mesopotamian kingships. In Egypt, although the Pharaoh was seen as a god

(Frankfort 1948: 237), combining "in his complex personality divine transcendence and immanence... for practical purposes he delegated his functions to the professional priesthood who shared in some measure in his personality" (James 1959:

65). In the Mesopotamian monarchy, where the king was not god incarnate, rather "a mortal made to carry a superhuman charge which the gods could remove at any time..."

(Frankfort 1948: 238), the rulers were primarily oracular and executive in function, interpreting the will and purposes of the gods. In a sense this is the reverse of the

Egyptian situation. But the duality inherent in kingship is preserved and manifested again in the priesthoods, which

"were the teachers and learned section of the community conserving all knowledge human and divine" (James 1959:

67). Whether as divine incarnations like the Pharaohs or as servants of the gods as in the case of Mesopotamian rulers, the kings in these examples could embody and enact power 204

only if one or the other function was made to reside in actuality elsewhere.

Another aspect of Mesopotamian monarchy is directly

relevant to the divine kingship of Bastar. While normally

the Mesopotamian king was not considered a god, there were

certain rulers who represented a fusion of humanity and

divinity (Frankfort 1948: 295). These were kings who were

deified by virtue of a sacred marriage with a goddess and who were thus "credited with an influence on the prosperity of the land far exceeding that for which the usual

Mesopotamian terminology allowed" (ibid.: 299). Here we are

reminded of the Bastar kings' relationship to their tutelary

goddess, a point to which we shall return below. For the moment it is necessary to note that a comparison of Egypt with Mesopotamia on this basis is not more than superficial:

In both Egypt and Mesopotamia the king was instrumental in furthering the natural processes, but the character of that instrumentality differed. In Mesopotamia the goddess claimed a service which the king rendered; in this respect at least the deification of the king during the ritual...was in keeping with the prevalent Mesopotamian view that the king was the chosen servant of the gods. Pharaoh, on the other hand, was never deified. He was divine in origin and essence...(ibid.).

From these sketches of divine kingship in other cultures it

can be seen that Bastar kingship was something of an

amalgamation of Near Eastern features. On the one hand 205

Bastar kings claimed divine origins, and on the other were subservient, albeit as chief priests to the state goddess

(see above, pp. 58-9).

It is interesting to note that this particular form of the duality of kingship is carried on in the Kakatiya dynastic mythology. In one version of the latter, the founders of the Kakatiya line, "during (whose) time golden rain fell" (Elliott 1856: 65), were considered incarnations of Mahadeo (or Siva). In later shifts in the seat of power, such localizations implicit with female deity (see above p.

51), subsequent generations of kings became associated with differently named goddesses: in Delhi she was 'Deleiswaree', in Mathura she became 'Bhowaneshwaree', in Warangal 'Manik- eswaree', and of course Danteshwari in Bastar. Despite the name changes the continuity of the association of king with goddess expresses the relationship which constitutes Bastar kingship. It is a relationship of power constituted by a merging of the symbol of power, its 'essence' (the goddess), with its manifestation (the king). This is another way, the

Bastar way, of saying 'rex est mixta persona cum sacer- dote'. It is in this way that "...all kingship has some of the features of the divine kingship..." (Evans-Pritchard

1962:. 210), a point which has also been demonstrated in a number of contexts by Clifford Geertz (1977). 206

This is not to say that Indian kingship, or Bastar divine kingship for that matter, is not a special case.

Bastar notwithstanding for the moment, Indian kingship admits of a number of problems, the first having to do (as above) with its nature in a comparative context. The diffi• culty can be stated as follows:

The Hindu king cannot be classed with the kings of early Egypt or Japan as a transcendent divinity, a source of authority himself separated from and uninvolved in the immanent and day-to-day affairs of his kingdom. Nor, on the other hand, can he be grouped with the monarchs of ancient Mesopotamia, Persia, China, or for that matter, medieval Europe, as a "mere" human agent or servant of the tran• scendent divine, an immanent administrator of his kingdom ever dependent on the authoritative grace of a god. Rather, the Hindu king appears as a contradictory combination of the two, a figure who is expected to transcend;the world as a divine, yet humble, almost ascetic worshipper and passive focus of authority on the one hand, and to make himself immanent as a divine warrior and administrator, decisive in the everyday concerns of his realm, on the other (Inden 1978: 29).4-

In an immediate sense the reason for this difficulty, the apparent contradiction in views on kingship, is that there is no consistent position in the tradition of pronouncements upon kingship in India: there is no unified view of king• ship. Although "the religious aspect of kingship cannot be denied" (Heesterman 1978: 3), the problem is that sacral or divine kingship is essentially an unfinished patchwork

(thought note that this is on the textual level): 207 All the parts seem to be available but the texts do not try to put them together. They remain isolated and disparate pieces of evidence spread over different contexts. What is lacking is a consistent overall scheme that would give substance to a consolidated theory of sacral kingship. As it is, however, kingship remains, even theoretically, suspended between sacral and secularity, legitimate and arbitrary power, dharma and adharma (ibid.).

And the reason for this undecided state of affairs,

Heesterman continues, is "...that it is not the king but the

Brahmin who, according to the classical conception, holds

the key to religious values and therefore to legitimacy and authority (ibid.: 4). This brings us to the Brahmin-Ksha-

triya relationship proper.

From the foregoing it might be expected that there is

"an essential conflict in Hindu society between priest and king" (Dumont 1958: 58). But for Dumont, as we have seen, there is no conflict, no question of 'either-or' (either resolution in favour of the Brahmin or the Kshatriya, in favour of purity or power), rather that there is both.

Furthermore, he upbraids Hocart for "unjustifiably", in his opinion, "elevating the Kshatriya as a divine king, initiator and receiver of the cult" (ibid.). The difficulty with this, however, is that it is based on a reading of the texts which asserts that divine kingship was superseded by a

'conventionalized' one -- which is a truly unjustifiable result of trying to represent the entire Indian tradition along a single axis. The fact is that divine kingship even on a textual level (dated much later than the putative 208 transformation of magico-religious to secular kingship) is not so easily dismissed, as has been ably demonstrated by

Ronald Inden (1978). There is a coherent corpus of texts having to do with the meaning of divine kingship in the

Indian tradition. And in a sense, these texts can be considered the raw material from which actual, that is,

Bastar divine kingship, was put together.

According to the Indologist Jan Gonda, "in examining the status of the ancient Indian king from the religious point of view we should never forget that he is called a deva, that is to say, not God, the sole Eternal Lord and

Creator of all things, nor his representative, but one of a class of powerful beings, regarded as possessing supernormal faculties and as controlling a department of nature or activity in the human sphere" (1966: 24). The local working out of this idea is present in twenty generations of

Kakatiya kings of Bastar having their names suffixed with deo, a derivitive of the Sanskirt deva.5 The author continues:

According to some authoritative texts, e.g. Manu 7, 4ff, the king was in the beginning created from eternal and essential particles-of Indra, and the seven other great devas, who in later literature are grouped as "guardians of the world" (loka- pala....These divinities very significantly represent those functions and activities which are the essential characteristicc of kingship (ibid.: 25). 209

Extracted from Gonda's survey, the salient features of

Indian divine kingship include: "the brilliant principle of supernormal might, which enables...(the king) to perform great exploits..."; the "concern with vegetation and fruitfulness"; the qualities of productivity, wealth and generosity, for example, "he is thought to present his loyal followers with various gifts..."; the conception that the king "is the divine counterpart of the earthly priesthood: he is the 'priest', the chief priest.... So priesthood may be said to be the most salient feature of his character";

the concern "with growth, vitality and vegetation",such that

"by regulating the powers of fertility, by causing rain, welfare, and the growth of crops...(the king) was considered a source of prosperity..." (1959: 173-5).

In this list of essential qualities can be found a very accurate portrayal of the meaning of divine kingship in

Bastar. Thus, "when we start from the sacral of kingship, the different pieces may fall into a consistent pattern. The king would then primarily be a religious figure: divinity as well as chief celebrant" (Heesterman 1978: 3). While it remains true, as Heesterman cautions, that on a total

textual level all this is essentially a construction, on the

level of observed reality, of the local working out of

ideas, it is a manifest construction made manifest in Bastar kingship — pertinently as can be found in Pravir Chandra

Bhanj Deo's kingship. Although not necessarily his full 210 motivation, much of his behaviour can be understood as a working out of the ideals of divine kingship, complemented by the congruent responses of his tribal followers. One merely needs to recall some of the particulars of Pravir's

de facto kingship -- his great emphasis on public

generosity, his repeated assertions of supernatural power,

the belief among the Gonds of his presence guaranteeing the proper rains, fertility and prosperity, his status as the

chief priest (as well as husband) to the goddess Danteshwari

-- to see how very closely his rule, and without much doubt

the enture Bastar Kakatiya line, followed the ancient

tradition.

What, however, becomes of the problem of status and

authority? Dumont, of course, answers that it is a matter of

'hierarchical complementarity'. "That is," says Dumont, "the priest is subordinate to the king in mundane matters that regard the public order.... (nevertheless) Priests are

superior, for they are inferior only on an inferior level"

(1982: 14). By means of this hierarchical complementarity,

the differentiation of the two functions is linked by Dumont

to the evolution of institutions (ibid.). In India sacral

sovereignty gave way to the ideological differentiation that

led to caste society. It is here that the core of the problem is reached. Sacral sovereignty of whatever ideology, as we have seen in the examples above, contains an implicit differentiation of power so that the functions (status and 21 1

authority, which concepts refer to the source or

legitimation of power and its execution respectively) become distinct. And what is implicit in divine kingship in India

is made ritually explicit. Inden, for example, has shown in his exegesis of the rajyabhisheka the installation ritual of

the Indian king, that "the apparent contradiction between

the transcendent and immanent aspects of Hindu kingship, between the king as ceremonial specialist and administrator-warrior, is resolved by cyclic oscillation between the two, that this oscillation is logically necessary and desirable" (1978: 59). In other words, by means of this cyclic oscillation Hindu divine kingship found a place for both status and authority -- and thus for the caste system -- without having to resort to a thorough-going

secularization of kingship. In the rajyabhisheka the Brahmin played a crucial role in activating the divinity of the king

(ibid.: 54), but once activated, the king became 'superior on the superior level' -- because he became the chief priest, at least in a primus inter pares sense. As Dumont himself says, "Hierarchy thus offers the possibility of reversal" (1980: 224). Even if the ideology of divine kingship bespeaks a unity (of king and priest, status and authority), it is also a hierarchical institution and thus must in some way come to terms with differentiation. What the global ideology perforce combines, the rituals of divine kingship, by the logic of hierarchy, differentiate. 212

This is also the case in Bastar and the evidence for it

(though as yet incomplete) is found in chapter three of this thesis in the account of the Dasara rituals. It is in the enactment of these rituals that we can see the ideological reverse that Dumont mentions. Rather than the distinction between status and power maintained at the major level while being fused at the minor level, the distinction is carried out at the minor level while being fused at the major. The major level may be said to be that of the global ideology, that is of divine kingship. The minor level is represented by the logical necessity of differentiating the separate functions implicit in divine kingship, which necessity is expressed ritually. The king at the Dasara is divided into roles which are identifiable by virtue of these functions.

The saddhu surrogate installed in his "cave" exists as the spiritual sanction of divine status while the manager of the state takes on the full responsibility of secular power or authority. This leaves the king the sole identity of transcendent divinity, free to participate in the ritual hierogamy that the Dasara ultimately celebrates.

While it would thus appear that Dumont's fundamental assumption in his theory of caste society is mistaken, it is more a matter of correcting the context of this assumption.

Divine kingship implicitly permits the distinction between status and authority, as it must if society is to remain unified and viable, but it does not do so at the ideological 213

expense of losing its religious prerogatives. Dumont is not

necessarily wrong; he has simply not realized the full

possibilities of the working out of his theory.

In the last analysis the meaning of Bastar history must

be seen as the development of an ingenious solution to the

conundrum of Indian kingship. The significance of

contemporary Bastar history lies in the confrontation of

traditional religious kingship with modern, secular

authority, the resulting final transfer of power leading to

the Baba Bihari Dass millenarian movement.

The most important implication of this thesis for

anthropology in general is that divine kingship is not merely an outworn topic yet again investigated but that it,

especially in the case of Bastar, must be looked at afresh

-- that is, in terms of the inherently dichotomous nature of

power. 214

Footnotes to chapter 7

1 A partial exception to this generalization is the continuing interest of German anthropologists, particu• larly from Heidelberg, in research among Indian tribal populations. The younger generation involved in this research tradition has renewed the moral partisanship often inherent in Indian tribal studies (see Moser and Gautam 1978).

2 See Clifford Geertz 1974, 1980, for the example of Bali, also an Indie state: "Court ceremonialism was the driving force of court politics. Mass ritual was not a device to shore up the state; the state was a device for the enactment of mass ritual" (1974: 344). Of course, Bastar was not exactly a 'theatre state' in the mode of Bali, but can be taken to some extent as proto• typical .

3 Compare Pravir's earlier quoted statement regarding the nature of his own divinity: "...it is difficult for people to understand that God is identical with his universe and ...(yet) he is always apart in a world of his own (Bhanj Deo 1965: 82).

4 Inden continues with the following which relates to the nature of the Indian state as discussed above: "These opposed views of kingship are, of course, implicitly linked with the views of Indie kingship as decentral• ized and feudal (segmentary) or centralized and bureau• cratic (whether constitutionalist or absolutist). The transcendent variety of kingship in which the divine king, acting primarily as a ceremonialist, exercises ritual sovereignty, fits with the decentralized or segmentary model. The immanent type, where the monarch functioning as an administrator and warrior exercises political sovereignty fits with the centralized and absolutist model" (ibid.). This, however, ignores the diachronic implications connecting the two models. As argued in chapter two, not only is one model a success• or to the other over time, but also logically they are permutations of each other. Evans-Pritchard supplies the corrective view when he says of divine kingship that "...it is an institution typical of, though doubt• less not restricted to, societies with pronounced line• age systems in which the political segments are parts of a loosely organized structure without governmental functions. In societies of this kind the political organization takes a ritual or symbolic form which in polities with a higher degree of organization gives way, though never actually entirely, to centralized organization" (1962: 210). It is in this light that 215

Footnotes (con't).

the segmentary state model must be seen, that is, as part of the continuum, in this thesis an historical continuum, of governance formations. Bastar nicely exemplifies this continuum, keeping in mind the qualification 'though never entirely'.

5 A dynastic list is available in Pandey (1 967: 124) . 216

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