Ādivāsīs, tribes and other neologisms for erasing precolonial pasts: An example from Northeast India

Abstract

This essay engages Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sumit Guha and James C. Scott by arguing that all of them overlook a historically well-evidenced set of subject positions and concepts of space. This was monastic governmentality. Lay and ordained populations attached to monastic teachers and lineages moved and interacted across a vast network of societies till the eighteenth century. The arrival of colonial European armies in the terrain marked by monastic geographicity led to the creation of sites set apart as ‘Nepal’, ‘colonial Assam’, ‘Burma’ and so on. Hitherto pastoralist but Bon-Buddhist monastic subjects were separated from their ‘brothers’ in monastic subjecthood. Such physical separation was reinforced by historical writing as well. In the twentieth century, colonially educated native scribes embraced both geographical and epistemic projects enthusiastically. Bhuyan, the foremost practitioner of this mode of history writing, thus failed to recognise the Buddhist and Bon Tantric cohabitants of the Brahmaputra river valley. In order to establish what was known of these people before Bhuyan’s time of writing, this essay has been organised in three parts. The first contains a short discussion of monastic governmentality and subjecthood. A second provides a truncated narrative of events that brought Mughal armies in the seventeenth century to the same terrain. The third surveys moments from the Company and British military accounts of 1794–1928 to explain the modern postcolonial Indian historian’s aporia towards Buddhist and Bon Tantric populations living alongside Muslim and Hindu groups in the Brahmaputra valley and plains.

Adivasi studies: From a historian's perspective

“…50–57). Attempts to treat neologisms as ontological verities, Chatterjee argues, are rooted in particular colonial and ongoing postcolonial attempts to erase complex precolonial political, military and economic relationships and histories (Chatterjee, , p. 9).…”

God, King, and Subject: On the Development of Composite Political Cultures in the Western Himalaya, circa 1800–1900

“…On "Zomia," see vanSchendel (2002) andScott (2009); for recent commentaries on its applicability to Himalayan regions, consultChatterjee (2016),Murton (2013),Shneiderman (2010), andWouters (2012). The rulers of Jubbal claim descent from an ancient dynasty of Sirmaur, the largest Rajput state to its south, and were similarly related to the rulers of easterly Garhwal through marriage (Punjab Government 1910).3 Integration into British India was further facilitated by monetization and proximity to the imperial capital of Shimla(Alam 2008;Pradhan 2007).4 For a comprehensive study of the cult and recent shifts in its perception at the local level, see G. S Bhatt (2010).…”