New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2022. xvii, 345 pp. (Figures, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$70.00, cloth. ISBN 9780190127916.
Over the years, a range of literature has surfaced to challenge the unified or singular narrative about South Asia’s Indigenous peoples or Adivasi struggles. (Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Adivasi and the State, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2019; Philipp Zehmisch, Mini-India: The Politics of Migration and Subalternity in the Andaman Islands, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017). These writings crucially demonstrate how various groups, their complex interaction with communities, and internal diversity within Adivasi society challenge any attempt at creating a monolithic narrative. Decades of research and roots in her doctoral thesis, Sangeeta Dasgupta’s Reordering Adivasi Worlds: Representation, Resistance, Memory, then, is an immersive dive into the many pasts of Adivasi struggles—woven together through descriptions, evidence, and careful attention to narratives, often resisting any unified representation. By opening the conceptual rigidness of the term “tribal” to possibilities and perspectives, the book divulges many narratives of Oraon’s past, struggles, and mobilization in Chotanagpur. By examining the Tana Bhagat, or “devotees of Tana,” an Adivasi reform movement (1914) led by the Oraon (Kurukh) tribe, the book presents, most crucially, a tapestry of indigeneity that is, of course, temporally constructed within the state of Jharkhand in India by drawing on historical registers of political memory. Dasgupta examines the socioeconomic dimensions of the Tana Bhagat movement to present the internal tensions and fractures with the groups emergence from within the dominant clans.
The book consolidates Dasgupta’s longstanding archival research over decades by beautifully crafting and featuring key characteristics of shifting history-writing practice. The work exemplifies methodological innovation through an extensive engagement with diverse Indigenous history(s), identity formations, and political struggles of Adivasis in Jharkhand. By pursuing a creative articulation, the patchwork between the past and the present—centring critique of colonial archives on Adivasi—Dasgupta envisions new pathways for using archival sources. While the book primarily draws strength from analyzing ethnographic, missionary, and anthropological narratives on the tribe in the colonial period, it also pierces, interestingly, through “the field,” an immersive site of anthropology, leaving the reader interspersed with reverberating resonances evident in emergent challenges of postcolonial India.
Amongst others, two key features allow the book to make new entries to study political struggles and identity politics in India. First, missionary archives provide a unique array of depth, expanding the confines of historical writings to new reaches. A vivid and perhaps remarkable example of this is an extended exploration of individuals and characters, including S. C. Roy, a trained lawyer and self-fashioned anthropologist, who presents a sharp contradiction in his deepest “sympathies for the ‘aboriginal’ inhabitants of the region” (132). Unlike other advocates (Verrier Elwin, for instance) of protectionism—a view that grants restricted mobility within tribal identity and communities, Roy’s loyalties to his “higher civilization” values is also confronted by his romanticized ideas of the Oraons. Dasgupta shows how this anathema—a concretion of identity advocated by various agents—invites the readership to tread through mucky, complex, and, most importantly, agential negotiation of the Adivasi communities who are often romanticized as docile subjects of history. Second, as an essential contribution to historical studies, the book expands disciplinary adherence to sources and explores missionary archives, contemporary pamphlets and materials from Adivasi protests.
A skilful demonstration of this shows how nineteenth and early twentieth-century conceptions of the tribe “were not just abstract but determined in many ways colonial interventions in Chhotanagpur” (5). The book is intensely visual in this sense. It presents various collections of visuals curated across multiple archives. By deploying a multimodal approach—to systematically “document and map the relationship across and between modes in texts, interactions, social practices, artefacts and spaces” (Rosie Flewitt, Sara Price, and Terhi Korkiakangas, “Multimodality: Methodological explorations,” Qualitative Research 19, no. 1 (2019): 3)—Dasgupta’s book creates a visual roadmap through curated use of photographs, which invariably, in many contexts contrasted with the imagination of the past. These concerted efforts of building bridges successfully help readers arrive at the “many narratives of the tana pasts” (14). These narratives emerge on the cusp of diary notes, field observations, regular visits, extended conversations, and a careful attempt by historians to capture the intergenerational memories of the past in conjunction with the present. This marks a methodological innovation that accentuates the relevance and immediacy of the book’s analysis. Close reading of the archives stapled with memories (photographs, pamphlets) creates a kaleidoscope of the interplay between the past and present voices, signalling an apparent new trend in historiography.
Perhaps every book leaves us wanting to know more, certainly those that interest us to the last page. Despite its luminous and detailed analysis, I yearned for a description of ethnographic memory in the book. While Dasgupta declares her narrative open-ended, “recognizing the limitations of history as an explanatory mode” (181), the subtitles of the book demand more attention. This compelling study, a must-read for interdisciplinary scholars, will create new frontiers for such research.
Rahul Ranjan
Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo