Tribal Identities and Scalar Politics in Postcolonial India

Abstract

In this chapter I analyze how the Bhotiyas have leveraged the performativity of scale through various narratives and social practices to effectively voice their demands for tribal status in postcolonial India. The argument is divided into four empirical parts: As an entry point into the discussion, the first part introduces the narrative of Old Lady Jasuli, a widow who lived in the Darma valley during late colonial rule. The activities of the Kumaon Bhotiya Peoples’ Federation (KBPF), which was founded shortly before India’s independence in 1947, are analyzed in the second part. Its’ members re-assembled representations that the British had coined about Kumaon’s trans-Himalayan traders, especially in terms of gender relations. In so doing they articulated the Bhotiyas’ tribalness by producing Bhot (or the region inhabited by the Bhotiyas) as a scale effect in independent India. This effect of scale materialized as a ‘real’ frame of social action when state officers notified the Bhotiyas as a Scheduled Tribe (ST) in 1967. Only a few years later, as explored in the third part, a new generation of politically organized Bhotiyas started to challenge and transform these inherited scalar categorizations and arrangements, which were then perceived to reinforce rather unequal power relations within the ST community. They deployed the character of Old Lady Jasuli to convey an alternative sense of their tribal identity whilst reproducing independent India as a scale effect in Bhot. In the fourth part I then analyze how caste Hindus challenged the Bhotiyas’ tribal status when Uttarakhand was carved out as an independent state of the Indian Union in 2000. These new competitors staked the claim that the Bhotiyas’ ST-designation is a scalar expression that does not pertain to a specific people but to a region, including all its ‘native’ residents. The research contributes to emergent scholarship focusing on the ways in which identity and scale interact as categories of practice, particularly at times of macro-institutional transformations: the shift from British imperial rule to nation-state sovereignty or the creation of new states within a country’s federal system of government.