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NMML OCCASIONAL PAPER HISTORY AND SOCIETY New Series 86 Debating Tribe and Nation: Hutton, Thakkar, Ambedkar, and Elwin (1920s-1940s) Saagar Tewari Assistant Professor, Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana Nehru Memorial Museum and Library 2017 © Saagar Tewari, 2017 All rights reserved. No portion of the contents may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the author. This Occasional Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the NMML. The views expressed in this Occasional Paper are those of the author(s) and speakers and do not represent those of the NMML or NMML policy, or NMML staff, fellows, trustees, advisory groups, or any individuals or organizations that provide support to the NMML Society nor are they endorsed by NMML. Occasional Papers describe research by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. Questions regarding the content of individual Occasional Papers should be directed to the authors. NMML will not be liable for any civil or criminal liability arising out of the statements made herein. Published by Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Teen Murti House New Delhi-110011 e-mail: [email protected] ISBN: 978-93-84793-012 Debating Tribe and Nation: Hutton, Thakkar, Ambedkar and Elwin (1920s-1940s)1 During the period 1920-1950, an intense debate surrounded the ‘Tribal Question’, the issue of the future of tribal communities in the emergent Indian nation. This paper seeks to situate the debate historically, analysing in particular the arguments made by certain key figures involved in this discourse especially J.H. Hutton, A.V. Thakkar, B.R. Ambedkar and Verrier Elwin. In order to map the ideological landscape of this late colonial discourse, the work and opinions of this set of ideologues and protagonists must be engaged with, based as they are on different vantage points. For too long now, the intellectual history of the discourse on the tribal populations and their future in independent India has been trapped within the binary limits of the Isolation/Protection versus Intervention/Assimilation debate.2 In attempting to move away from this divide, this paper seeks to trace an earlier history through which I hope to show that the tone and tenor of the discourse on tribal populations was not set by Verrier Elwin and G.S. Ghurye, as has often been claimed,3 but found its first articulations in the works of frontier administrators such as J.H. Hutton. These administrators, in turn, were influenced by the prevailing trends in British Revised version of the Seminar Paper presented at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 9 June 2015. 1 This paper has been assembled out of my doctoral thesis titled ‘Tribe and Development: Nation-Making in Bastar, Central India (1930s-1980s)’ submitted in 2014 at the Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. 2 The debate arose over the question of whether (and how) the Nation-State should include the tribal people in its path towards ‘progress’ and ‘development’? By the 1940s, most leading anthropologists, administrators, and activists working amongst tribal communities had come to be divided into two camps: the Isolationists/Protectionists on the one hand, and the Assimilationists/Interventionists on the other. Both groups shared an evolutionary understanding with regard to tribes and held that these communities were different from the ‘mainstream’. The differences between them lay in their respective views about whether the tribal people should remain isolated or should instead be assimilated. 3 There is a long series of publications which assumes the centrality of the so-called ‘Ghurye-Elwin Debate’. A few key ones are Ghosh, Anjan. 1989. ‘Whither Indian Sociology?’, Other Sociology 1; Nongbri, Tiplut. 2006. ‘Tribe, Caste and the Indigenous Challenge in India’, in Bengt G. Karlsson and Tanka B. Subba (eds), Indigeneity in India, pp. 75-95. London: Kegan Paul; Singh, K.S.. 2006. ‘G.S. Ghurye, Verrier Elwin and Indian Tribes’, in A.R. Momin (ed.), The Legacy of G.S. Ghurye: A Centennial Festschrift, pp.39-45. Bombay: Popular Prakashan; Sinha, A.C.. 2005. ‘Colonial Anthropology vs Indological Sociology: Elwin and Ghurye on Tribal Policy in India’, in Tanka B. Subba and Sujit Som (eds), Between Ethnography and Fiction: Verrier Elwin and the Tribal Question in India, pp. 71-85. New Delhi: Orient Longman; Xaxa, Virginius. 18th December 1999. ‘Tribes as Indigenous People of India’, EPW; Xaxa, Virginius. 2003. ‘Tribes in India’, in Veena Das (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Sociology and Social Anthropology in India. Oxford: OUP. 2 Saagar Tewari Anthropology which had begun to emerge around the time of the First World War. Therefore, by the 1940s, the discourse on the tribal question was almost two decades old and this pre-history to the debates needs to be charted. Before we begin to do this, however, a few preliminaries are in order. The Background to the Debates Central to the late colonial debates on the tribal population was the issue of ‘scheduling’4 of predominantly tribal areas in the British Indian Provinces. Scheduling was the act of committing certain areas to a written list or inventory of ‘special administrative regimes’; here, normal laws and regulations prevalent in the rest of British India would not be applicable. Practically, it meant territorial segregation of predominantly tribal areas as far as judicial and legal administration was concerned. The colonial administrators vouchsafed it as a viable method for ensuring ‘protection’ to ‘primitive’ tribal communities from the degenerating effects of ‘culture- contact’ with ‘civilized’ areas. These special administrative regimes were divided into two categories viz. ‘excluded’ and ‘partially excluded’ areas.5 As the nomenclature suggests, notifying tribal areas under these categories meant that they were excluded, either totally or partially, from the legislative powers of the elected Provincial and Central Legislative Assemblies and Councils. The underlying belief behind this categorization was that modern representative democracy with electoral politics and law courts was highly unsuited to tribal communities. Thisbelief also presumed that owing to their peculiar socio-economic and cultural institutions and practices, the tribes were unfit to responsibly exercise the power of the vote. Instead, they could manage their life well with the help of tribal ‘customary laws’. Many of these assumptions had their roots in the nascent discipline of anthropology which vitally shaped this discourse in the run-up to Indian independence. In this period, anthropology was a subject whose contours and methodologies were still in the process of being worked out. While it is true that a number of ‘field-work’ based ethnographic studies by figures like J.H. Hutton, J.P. 4 The root of this key word lies in 14th century Latin term schedula which again is derived from scheda meaning ‘a strip of papyrus’ which was a surface used since ancient times by Egyptians, Greeks and Romans for recording of writing, Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, Allied Chambers (India) Limited, New Delhi, 2001 (2005 reprint), p. 1255. 5 This denotes a semantic shift from the administrative category of ‘Backward Tracts’ as used in the framing of the Government of India Act 1919 to a new reformed Constitution provided to British India under the Government of India Act 1935. NMML Occasional Paper 3 Debating Tribe and Nation: Hutton, Thakkar, Ambedkar, and Elwin (1920s-1940s) Mills, Verrier Elwin, William Archer, Christopher von Furer-Haimendorf and W.V. Grigson etc. were published at regular intervals from the 1920s onwards, only a select few of these individuals (Hutton and Haimendorf) had received rigorous formal training in the discipline.6 But despite the self-trained character of these protagonists, their published works rapidly established their stature as anthropologists. Since many of them came from the ranks of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), the visibility that their works received, was vitally dependent upon their perception as power-elite close to the higher echelons of the British Indian ruling establishment. Even non-official figures in this group like Elwin and Haimendorf gained prominence as ‘experts’ on the Indian tribal communities thanks to the patronage they received from their anthropologically minded ICS brethren. They were not, however, the founding fathers of this tradition and many of their arguments drew from a much earlier lineage of similar anthropologically-minded administrators.7 Given this background, the characterization of their published works merely as scholarly ethnographies misses out on the significant role that these texts played during the twilight of British rule in India. Taken together, there is a remarkable unity in the ideas of this ‘knot of men’8 whose writings played a crucial role in the articulation of ideas and strategies designed for the protection of tribal communities in future India. Without analysing this body of work, it is almost impossible to theorize the bridge which connects the late colonial to the post-colonial period in relation to the discourse on the Indian tribal population. At the time when these protagonists were propagating their ideas, the issue of the future of tribal communities was literally at the margins of the constitutional deliberations then taking place. The twin aspects of the ‘Communal’ question i.e. Hindu-Muslim relations and the Depressed Classes issue received the lion’s share of attention.9 Additionally, in the virtual absence of an 6 Hutton was awarded a Masters degree in Anthropology from the University of Oxford in 1919. Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf received his formal training at the University of Vienna in 1930s. 7 A few key figures in such a list are Augustus Cleveland (late 18th century), Captain Thomas Wilkinson (first half of the 19th Century), E.T. Dalton (latter half of the 19th Century) and H.H.