Indigenous Agency: Customary Rights and Tribal Protection in Eastern India, 1830-1930

Abstract

reserves of iron, bauxite and water, all crucially contested in the spiralling Asian demand for minerals and metals. The rural population of these heav- ily forested regions consists mainly of indigenous (adivasi) people, very vul- nerable to the processes of modernization and land alienation that accompany the huge pressures for mineral extraction and dam-building. Since the onset of colonization, and especially as the forces of globalization have speeded up, increasingly vigorous contestations for space and resources have taken place between adivasis, peasants, the state, and mining and other commercial companies. The environmental terrain of contemporary eastern Indian states such as Orissa and Jharkhand can be captured in opposed dualities: tribal versus caste Hindus; hill versus plain, mining versus dis- placement, submergence versus flood control. The history of this polariza- tion lies in the chequered set of developments which existed under colonial rule but rapidly accelerated following independence. More recently, since 1991, as the last pretence of tribal protection has been given up, eastern India has become subject to new kinds of internal and external colonization, far more traumatic in impact than pre-1947 colonization. 2 The history of globalization and state intervention in the period immediately after inde- pendence and since reveals these new and disturbing trends, along with continuities and discontinuities from the earlier period. In this article I docu- ment the colonial response to indigenous resistance and the emergence from about the 1830s of a protectionist discourse in relation to tribal areas that put a partial brake on the wholesale exploitation of the tribes and their forested landscapes. The current revisionist position in history and anthropology has focused on dismantling terms such as 'tribe', 'forest' and 'indigenous', used