READING THE TEA LEAVES - The understanding of tribal status must be rid of colonial errors

SANJIB BARUAH
The Telegraph, 11 December

After the mayhem in Guwahati around the adivasi rally of November 24, the government of Assam is reportedly considering legislation that would restrict the public display of bows and arrows and other ‘traditional’ weapons.

That a group that provided the muscle for the 19th-century capitalist transformation of Assam today finds the bow and arrow to be an attractive ethnic symbol is rather interesting. So is its preferred self-description as adivasis, in sharp contrast to the English term ‘tribe’ preferred by most other groups that have legal recognition as scheduled tribes in northeast India.

The adivasis of Assam trace their roots to Munda, Oraon, Santhal and other people of the Jharkhand region. They are descendants of indentured labourers brought to the tea plantations of Assam. Adivasi activists argue that since their ethnic kin in their places of origin are recognized as STs, they should have the same status in Assam.

According to some estimates, there are as many as 4 million adivasis in Assam — more than half of Assam’s tea labour community. They constitute the majority of the tea labour community in Lower Assam, but other groups outnumber them in Upper Assam. If ST status is about whether a group deserves reservations in jobs and in educational institutions, the case for adivasis being recognized as STs is indisputable.
A study on the tea labour community by the North Eastern Social Research Centre found that 60 per cent of the girls and 35 per cent of the boys in the age group of 6 to 14 are out of school, and only 4 per cent study beyond class VII. Tea plantations are still the major sources of employment: half of them live near plantations and work as casual labourers.

Many adivasis were displaced during the Bodoland agitation because they or their forefathers had settled in reserved forest lands after giving their working lives to tea plantations. Since their villages were not legal settlements, the government did not facilitate their return to their homes even after the Bodo movement ended.

Political mobilization of a community in support of a demand for inclusion on a schedule that would entitle them to preferences is not surprising. Yet the demand of the tea workers’ descendants for ST status, and the framework within which the debate is being conducted, draw attention to our continued reliance on a highly questionable stock of colonial knowledge about Indian society and culture. This should be a source of embarrassment, as well as cause for serious introspection.

The tribal affairs minister, P.R. Kyndiah, a politician from the Khasi community, recognized as a scheduled tribe, says without any sense of irony that ST status for adivasis would involve examining the case using the criteria of “tribal characteristics, including a primitive background and distinctive cultures and traditions”.

Ethnic activists opposed to the adivasi claim cite with approval the statement of the home minister, Shivraj Patil, that the adivasis have “lost their tribal characteristics”. They also argue that the adivasis are not “aborigines of Assam”. Since STs of Assam are not treated as STs in other parts of the country and even Bodos are not recognized as STs in Karbi Anglong, says a leader of an indigenous tribal organization, migrant communities cannot be recognized as STs in Assam.

The argument points to a peculiarity of ST status in northeast India that goes back to British colonial thinking about race, caste and tribe in this region. However, whether migrants should be considered ST or not, given the contribution of the tea labour community in blood and in sweat to the formation of modern Assam, no other group has a better claim to full citizenship rights and compensatory justice than they do.

Colonial ethnography relied on racist notions of tribes having fixed habitats and ethnic traits that are almost biological and even inheritable. In northeast India, the so-called ‘hill tribes’ were thus all fixed to their supposed natural habitats. Therefore, it became necessary to distinguish between so-called pure and impure types to account for those that stray away from the assigned physical spaces, or do not conform to particular ethnic stereotypes.

The distinction between plains tribes and hill tribes can be traced to this difficulty of colonial ethnic classification. As the anthropologist, Matthew Rich, has shown, the relatively egalitarian mores and habits of many of the peoples of northeast India — for instance, the absence of caste in the hills — presented a ‘problem’ for colonial ethnographers.

Since India for them was a hierarchical and a ‘caste ridden’ civilization, the question was: were these people outside or inside India? There was no easy answer, since many of the ethnic kin of the people without caste also performed Hindu-like rituals just a short distance away.

The opposition between hills and plains became the solution to this conceptual ‘problem’. It is this history that explains why a number of groups that today seek ST or sixth schedule status were distinguished sharply from ‘hill tribes’ in the colonial classificatory system. For instance, the Koch Rajbongshis were labelled caste Hindus and not a ‘tribe’, and the Bodos were labelled a ‘plains tribe’.

Tea workers posed a classificatory problem for the census as early as in 1891. The “aboriginal tribes of central India” were explicitly excluded from the “forest and hill tribes” in the census of Assam, and instead were classified simply as labourers.

Colonial knowledge continues to shape categories of Indian census. Thus of the 23 STs in Assam, 14 are hill tribes and 9 are plains tribes. Since the census counts tribes only in their supposed natural habitats, it produces the absurdity of the number of people classified as plains tribals being zero in the hills, and those classified as hill tribals being zero in the plains. This is the source of the complaint of Bodo activists that Bodos are not a scheduled tribe in Karbi Anglong, which is a hill district. Thus, if one goes by the Indian census, the number of hill tribals living even in metropolitan Guwahati is zero.

The discourse surrounding the adivasi claim to ST status underscores a major structural dilemma for our practice of citizenship. The effect of making indigenousness the test for rights, says the African intellectual, Mahmood Mamdani, in another context, is that the state penalizes those that the commodity economy dynamizes.

Seen through the prism of the global political economy, the adivasis of Assam are part of the same 19th-century migration that took Indian labourers to plantations in various parts of the British Empire, such as Fiji, Guyana, Mauritius or South Africa.

We now celebrate the Indian diaspora. The Pravasi Bharatiya Divas honours descendants of those migrants to far-away shores, some of whom rose to become presidents and prime ministers of their countries. But the descendants of those who remained within India’s borders are reduced to defending their ordinary citizenship rights, and making claims to compensatory justice, with a borrowed idiom of remembered tribal-ness.

It is time to rethink our image of northeast India as remote and exotic, and recognize that the region was incorporated into the global capitalist economy earlier and more solidly than many parts of the Indian heartland. The basis for making claims to rights and entitlements in such a region must be common residence and a vision of a common future, and not only a real or imagined shared past.

The genocide in Rwanda was ultimately the product of the Hutu and Tutsi being constructed as native and outsider, thanks to the legacy of colonial knowledge embedded in African political institutions. This should serve as a warning against trying to manage conflicts in northeast India by simply tinkering with institutions such as the sixth schedule and ST status that have ample traces of colonial knowledge built into them.

The author is at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi and the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati