Rediscovering the Primitive: Adivasi Histories in and After Subaltern Studies

Presenter:

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Abstract

Once a mere anthropological curiosity, the “tribal” as a quintessential subaltern figure came to be reworked in the 1980s and 1990s as the anti-colonial rebel par excellence with his own impenetrable lifeworld and habits that stood in opposition to the modern state and capitalism. The old colonial tropes of irreducible cultural difference, underwritten by a paternalistic ideology of “primitivism,” now re-emerged, most notably in the writings of Ranajit Guha, as the basis of a new historiographic and theoretical turn in postcolonial India.

To show what such Subalternist historiography leaves out and why, I turn to Guha’s evocative description of the Santal Hul of 1855. For Guha, as for his colonial predecessors, the Hul represented the outburst of the irrational savage, entirely at odds with the workings of the modern world. Yet colonial records clearly document, on the one hand, the Santals’ well-established grievances of the Santals against moneylenders, their petitions and appeals to the local state, and, on the other hand, the influence of Christian missionaries in the rebels' articulation of “millennarian” ideas. Reflecting on the problems inherent in Guha’s historical methods and turning afresh to the same colonial archive, a different view emerges of adivasi engagements with the modern state and economy in the mid-nineteenth century. This view of the past depicts the modern tribal subject within the logics of modern statemaking and capitalism, not outside or prior to them. Acknowledging how state and tribe constitute each other in the margins of modern India is, I argue, a necessary task for radical historiography today.