Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, 1854-1996 (review)

Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, 1854-1996. By Nandini Sundar (New York, Oxford University Press, 1998) 296 pp. $28.95

This book focuses on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of Bastar, a region in central India that is larger than many European states. Inhabited largely by the Gonds, this extensively forested area has been seen by officials of the colonial and postcolonial state as possessing a "unique virginity," with "ample scope for large-scale industrialisation and colonization" (xii).

Sundar has written a superb account, at once impassioned and scholarly, of what this colonization has meant for Bastar. It is an ironic, even disbelieving, contribution to that genre of scholarship that, over the last two decades, has tried to bring together anthropology and history. One of the principal contributions of the book lies in its narrative performance of this skepticism (Sundar has articulated this skepticism only glancingly in theoretical terms).

The book's implicit critique of the categories of anthropology and history proceeds, in part, through a genealogy of the distinction, made initially by colonial officials, between the tribes and castes of India. Colonial officials believed that the tribes--usually communities that lived in or around forested and hilly areas--were the original inhabitants of India, and had been driven into the forests by the incursions of later communities. The tribes, by this account, were autochthonous and largely isolated groups, dependent on modes of subsistence that were primitive in comparison to the castes. They practiced an animist religion distinct from that of the castes. This book persuasively shows how even Bastar, often treated as a paradigmatic example of tribal India, resists fitting into the tribe-caste distinction. This supposedly isolated tribal area is extremely diverse linguistically and culturally; it has seen considerable in-migration over the centuries. The political and religious practices prevalent in the region were far from being outside any "mainstream" of Indian history.

But Sundar's intention is not to argue that the caste-tribe distinction is an erroneous myth that should be set aside. Instead, she explores how the practices of the colonial and postcolonial state made this distinction real. Administrators who thought of themselves as sympathetic to the tribes made influential arguments for the isolation of "tribal" groups from the corrosive influences of mainstream India.

The implications of Sundar's argument are far reaching. It is conventional to criticize figures like Verrier Elwin (the most prominent of the anthropologist-administrators) by pointing to the ways in which they participated in a colonial agenda. Sundar's argument, however, implies that by depending on the tribe-caste distinction to frame their arguments, these officials remained much within the problematic and thematic of colonial thought. In this sense, the protection that Elwin sought to extend to the tribes was essentially colonial, just as the tribes that he sought to protect were products of colonial policy. Similarly, the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Indian Constitution (which were adopted under the influence of figures like Elwin), though often effective bulwarks against the aggressive assimilationism of one strand of Indian nationalism, ironically share a distinctly colonial genealogy with the assimilationism that they oppose.

Implicit in this critique of the tribe-caste distinction, and the simultaneous acknowledgment of the inescapability of that distinction in the contemporary world, is a critique of the workings of anthropology and history. Anthropology posits spatially distinct cultures. In classical anthropology, each culture belonged to a specific society, which occupied a distinct geographical space. The problem was that no culture ever occupied a space entirely exclusive of other cultures. Partially to deal with this problem, anthropology also separates cultures along a linear time, thus temporally distinguishing societies that occupied the same space. By placing the tribes in an earlier time, the colonial outlook separated them from the castes with which they shared the subcontinent. Critics of classical anthropology show that these different communities--tribes and castes, or...