South Asia in Motion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024. US$75.00, cloth. ISBN 9781503638112
“I am telling you, sir ji, these sister-f**kers don’t even give us proper maps of these jungli places.” In Resistance as Negotiation, Uday Chandra recounts this embittered complaint by a jawan (a low-ranking Indian soldier) who felt abandoned by the local police he had come to assist. The complainant, Ram Singh, was one of the thousands of jawans from northern India serving in Operation Green Hunt, a brutal counterinsurgency campaign targeting Maoist cadres operating from within India’s dense eastern forests. For the more ideological Maoists, they fought for the interests of the region’s tribal peoples, whose forests were repeatedly appropriated by the state for industrialized extraction. However, Chandra wishes to disabuse those who see “the Maoist insurgency in contemporary India as an all-out ‘civil war’ between an omnipotent state and a revolutionary party with mass following” (231). This was a mistake caused by a top-down status view of political life. By the time of Chandra’s fieldwork in the mid-2010s, many Adivasis were just as disillusioned with the Maoists as Ram Singh was with his supposed allies in the local police. Resistance as Negotiation is an ambitious monograph. It tackles the interlocking topics of land rights, peasant revolts, and the politics of categories, most importantly tribe and indigeneity, with most of the book addressing the 1850s onwards. Centre stage are the lands that now comprise Jharkhand, one of India’s newest states, and Chandra focuses on communities identifying as tribal or Adivasi, principally the Santhals, Mundas, and Oraons.
The primary theoretical contribution of Resistance as Negotiation is to reframe histories of revolts in Eastern India by seeing them as one of many ways Adivasis negotiated with precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial powers. The state, Chandra argues, is often negotiated from below, and this has been frequently underreported across the social sciences. In framing the monograph this way, Chandra locates himself at the end of a long series of debates about the nature of resistance that were feverish in the 1980s and 1990s and have now somewhat lulled as academic trends shifted. Aiming to have something of the last word on resistance, he posits that scholars should focus on “resistance as negotiation, rather than negation” (9).
The influence of Chandra’s graduate supervisor, the late, great anthropologist of Southeast Asia, James C. Scott, runs throughout the monograph. Whereas Scott took Southeast Asia’s empires to task for their oppressive practices, Chandra steps out of his mentor’s shadow by taking states to task, some 40 times throughout the monograph, for a different charge—paternalism—treating tribal subjects as nature’s children rather than fully formed political subjects. Chandra also repeatedly sets his sights on paternalistic liberals (167) and their close ally, “the radical anticolonial historian” (84). Following closely on, Chandra charges journalists and scholars with romanticizing Adivasis’ lives and the notion of resistance (11, 80, 115). Yet it seems to me that a desire for more autonomy does run through the book. Twice Chandra tells readers he is a “rogue political scientist among historians and anthropologists” (3, 241); clearly, revealilng his own yearnings for autonomy.
In keeping with the book’s longue durée ambitions, chapter 1 covers the dynamics of precolonial state-making in Eastern India. It builds on the classical Indological such as the rituals of kingship and shows how these histories are narrated by contemporary political actors in Jharkhand. Chapter 2 covers the arrival of the British colonial state and its accompanying anthropological and census categories. Here Chandra begins to lay out one of his other theoretical arguments, namely that “a generation of South Asian historians writing in the Subaltern Studies tradition … accepted the colonial ideology of primitivism at face value” (79). He unpicks colonial-era accounts of primitivism while looking at the intellectual legacies of these representations.
In chapter 3, Chandra recasts some of the most famous case studies in postcolonial theory, the tribal uprisings analyzed by the Subaltern Studies collective, which includes notable theorists such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Ranajit Guha. Chandra shows how these uprisings were less anti-colonial than previously understood, and a lot more complicated—claims that might irk Indian historians of a more nationalist bent who have valorized nineteenth century Adivasis as proto-nationalists. Another more subtle facet of the monograph also begins to emerge in this chapter: Chandra as an attentive historian of Christianity in Eastern India.
Chapter 4 looks at the aftermath of a tribal rebellion and how Catholic missions began shaping Adivasi claim-making. It shows how anthropology was further embedded in colonial state-making through the works of pioneering Indian activist anthropologist Sarat Chandra Roy.
Chapter 5 is an important addition to the emergence of the postcolonial Indian state due to Chandra’s account of the life of understudied Olympian turned Adivasi leader, Jaipal Singh Munda (1903–1970). After 1947, Jaipal Singh led demands for greater autonomy for Adivasis through the creation of the state of Jharkhand, which was belatedly achieved in 2000.
Chapter 6 turns its attention to the birth of the postcolonial developmental state in Jharkhand and its allied industries, such as coal mining. The central case study discusses the Koel-Karo Jan Sangathan non-violent protest movement against dam construction.
Chapters 7 and 8 mark a turn in the book as they incorporate more of Chandra’s fieldwork in Jharkhand. It is in these chapters that the Maoist insurgency is discussed in depth. One of the strengths of Resistance as Negotiation is the range of voices appearing in these closing chapters. We hear from Lutheran ministers, NGO workers, Adivasi villagers, jawans like Ram Singh, and Maoists, like Protima, who ran away from abusive domestic employers and ended up, almost by chance, taking up arms in Jharkhand. Alongside these narratives is an analysis of the hierarchical tensions present in Adivasi villages, which are often praised for their egalitarian ethos, another representation Chandra wishes to disabuse. More subtle is Chandra’s account of how states exercise power over peasants through NGOs.
Resistance as Negotiation successfully shows how episodes of negotiations during repeated Adivasi revolts have been underestimated by previous scholars. The monograph will be of interest beyond agrarian studies, especially to scholars studying indigeneity in South Asia, political violence, postcolonial theory, and Christianity among tribal peoples.
Edward Moon-Little
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia