An Anthropological History of Bastar State
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FROM MILLENNIA TO THE MILLENNIUM: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL HISTORY OF BASTAR STATE 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<ed standard 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 <ind study. 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 India, 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 Bastar district. 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, Madhya Pradesh 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 Princely State 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.