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FORUM: 1776. Views from the British World: Tribes, Forests, and East India Company Rule in the Bengal Presidency during the Age of 1776

Part of: 1776: Views from the British World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2026

Saptarshi Sengupta
Saptarshi Sengupta*
Affiliation:
History, JAIN (Deemed-to-be-University), Bengaluru, India
*
Email: saptarshi.sengupta@jainuniversity.ac.in
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Abstract

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article examines 1776 through the eyes of tribal and forest-based societies in the Bengal Presidency, including the Chuar, Paharia, Santhal, Ho, and Bhumij. It argues that the North American imperial crisis of 1762–83 drove increased fiscal reliance on Asian revenues and a renewed East India Company incursion into Bengal’s forested and tribal areas. Intensified revenue extraction and infiltration into self-governing tribal areas restructured traditional subsistence systems and fell disproportionately on women, whose forest-based labor was rendered invisible in colonial revenue accounting.

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Journal of British Studies , Volume 65 , 2026 , e101
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on British Studies.

Introduction

A group of North American colonists declared liberty, consent, and self-government to be universal political tenets in July 1776 when they signed their Declaration of Independence. That same year, officials of the East India Company (EIC) extended their tax systems, control, and claims to land in the forests of the newly settled frontiers that were home to the Chuar, Paharia, Bhumij, Ho, and other Adivasi peoples. For the Indigenous tribal Adivasi peoples of India, 1776 was not the start of liberation from foreign rule; rather, it represented an increase in imperial occupation. In fact, the same imperial crisis that created the Declaration of Independence also led to the consolidation of EIC control in eastern India. Political upheaval in North America occurred alongside significant changes to the British Empire’s manner of governance, its financial resources, and its imperial boundaries. However, the experiences of Indigenous communities in eastern India are still largely excluded from these global narratives about 1776. Focusing on Adivasi viewpoints allows for a contextualization of Bengal’s forest frontiers within the imperial and global transformations of the Revolutionary period. Although the Declaration of Independence has been associated with freedom and self-determination, the events that triggered it also generated new mechanisms for extracting resources, expanding settlement, and dispossessing other colonial subjects, particularly those on the forested edges of the Bengal Presidency. These changes fell hard on women in particular, whose labor in forest foraging, slash-and-burn rotational cultivation, and household subsistence work went unrecorded in colonial revenue registers—and unprotected when those registers became the basis for taxation and dispossession.Footnote 1

In the twentieth century, historians placed considerable emphasis on the ideological roots of the American Revolution.Footnote 2 These studies cast 1776 primarily as a political story, with a focus on ideas of political freedom, representative government, and the development of the United States into its own polity. Recent studies have shown that Atlantic-centered interpretations of the American Revolution have limitations when placed in the context of a wider imperial and global framework. Several scholars have called for the Declaration of Independence to be repositioned as a global event with broad imperial consequences that were not confined to the Atlantic.Footnote 3 If these studies have changed our understanding of the geographical scope and nature of the American Revolution, subaltern and environmental histories of India—on topics such as tribal resistance, agrarian transformation, and forest governance—have nevertheless rarely informed this new global historiography of 1776.Footnote 4 This has meant that tribal and forest-dwelling peoples have been overlooked in discussions of the events that occurred across the British Empire in 1776. Placing the Chuar, Paharia, Bhumij, Ho, and Santhal peoples of eastern India into the broader narrative and history of 1776 reveals the reach and reverberations of the new imperial order that both triggered and was wrought by the Declaration of Independence—a reminder that the fiscal and territorial costs of that order fell as heavily on the forest frontiers of Bengal as on the shores of the Atlantic.

At the outset, a clarification about chronology is necessary. This article uses 1776 as a historiographical hinge point rather than as a singular causal date. The events examined here—the Diwani acquisition (1765), the Chuar Rebellion (1768–72), Augustus Cleveland’s Paharia settlements (from 1778), and the Permanent Settlement (1793)—unfold across roughly three decades. The argument is not that 1776 caused these changes in a single year, but that 1776 represents the moment at which the fiscal logic driving them became most legible and most acute. By the mid-1770s, the Atlantic dimension of the imperial crisis was most openly expressed in Bengal’s revenue records, and in 1776 the Board of Revenue issued its most explicit instructions to bring the jungle pergunnahs (forested frontier revenue districts inhabited largely by Adivasi communities) under systematic assessment. To read 1776 from the Bengal forest frontier is to interrogate the frame itself, not merely to add new content within it.

Prior to 1773, when North American colonial revenues became unavailable for political purposes, the Calcutta government had the ability to manage Bengal’s frontier territories through selective intervention and negotiated accommodation. After 1773, and particularly after 1776, the Company felt increased pressure from the metropole to demonstrate the revenue-generating potential of Bengal, which meant that the Company moved from the use of selective intervention as a means of managing revenue to a systematic program of assessment, mapping, and permanent settlement (and thus dispossession) of Bengal’s tribal forest lands. The Bengal Revenue Consultations that were held in March 1776 do not demonstrate that the Company established a new interest in the tribal forest lands of Bengal at that time; rather, they suggest a new urgency expressed through administrative directives aimed at tribal forest lands. The events of 1776 illustrate that there was a distinction between the gradual encroachment on, and the systematic dispossession of, these lands.

The decline of British power was not only signaled by the American Revolution but was also part of a larger reconfiguration of the British Empire that included the increasing fiscal and strategic importance of South Asia.Footnote 5 P. J. Marshall and H. V. Bowen have argued that fiscal pressure imposed by wars, administrative expansions, and political crises made it more important for the British to understand how Indian revenues could be managed, especially during the 1770s.Footnote 6

The Atlantic Crisis did not result in a smaller empire, but rather in a reorienting of it. The inability of the thirteen colonies to provide revenues meant they became less politically valuable to the British government; conversely, Bengal became financially vital to Britain’s resource needs. The EIC’s acquisition of the Diwani—the right to collect land taxes in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa—from the Mughal emperor in 1765 made the Company a territorial power instead of just a trade organization. The fiscal emergency in the 1770s transformed the Company from a territorial power into an institution whose sole purpose was extracting wealth from its subjects. The first governor-general of Bengal, Warren Hastings (Figure 1), had to manage an empire deeply involved in fighting against British colonists in North America and suffering from serious fiscal difficulties, but whose agricultural revenue base had also been devastated by famine in Bengal from 1769 to 1770. Hastings attempted to resolve these two problems by moving beyond the exhausted flat land of Bengal into the forested and hilled areas bordering the settled agricultural areas to collect revenue.Footnote 7

Figure 1.

Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal (1772–85). Mezzotint engraved by Thomas Watson after Sir Joshua Reynolds, London, 28 March 1777. National Portrait Gallery, London / Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Warren Hastings seated in formal attire, holding a quill pen.

The acquisition of the Diwani (1765) was the first step to making the EIC a territorial power, while the broader imperial crisis of the late eighteenth century led to increased attempts to map, categorize, and regulate revenue-generating landscapes. The forest fringes of the Bengal Presidency were part of this broader process of empire-restructuring, resulting in formerly autonomous communities becoming more closely tied to British colonial administrative and fiscal intervention.Footnote 8 This created violent and damaging conflicts between the Company and the tribal people who had lived in those areas for millennia.Footnote 9 As Britain experienced a series of economic and political crises in North America, the EIC amplified its attempts to turn the forests along the frontiers of Bengal into lands that could produce revenue. For Adivasi communities living there, 1776 marked the beginning of a new colonial regime that surveyed their land, taxed them based upon valuations created by those surveys, and regulated how they administered their lands.

Forests, Tribal Societies, and the Pre-Colonial Order

The forest frontier of eastern India was neither empty nor peripheral. The extensive forested tracts of Rajmahal, Birbhum, and Purnea were home to the Paharia, Chuar, Bhumij, and neighboring communities, whose political and economic lives were inseparable from those forests (Figure 2). The Company’s territorial advance into Bengal’s forested areas therefore encountered not vacant land but societies whose political structures reflected their relationship to those forests. These communities engaged in a type of flex-farming that included rotating the land cultivated between the forest and cleared land. The fallow ground was given time to recover from cultivation, helping to support agriculture among the Chuar and Bhumij communities. Colonial revenue officers viewed such practices as wasteful, so they established new policies as a result. Forest products such as lac (resin), mahua flowers, honey, and timber were available for consumption as well as for trade (i.e., for generating subsistence as well as for generating monetary value) by the communities; these products were entirely ignored by the Company when they looked at the exclusive revenue generated from agricultural land. The practice of hunting was a subsistence activity for many of these communities, but this practice was also associated politically and religiously with the power of the sardar (headman) as a right to lead. These leaders allocated and designated use-rights for forests, settled disputes, and represented the community externally in relationships with outside entities with whom they sought to interact.Footnote 10

Figure 2.

“The Jungleterry District in the Province of Purnea, Birbhoom, Rajmahal, Boglipoor &c.” Map showing the forested frontier regions of eastern India and the tribal territories that became increasingly subject to EIC revenue administration and territorial intervention during the late eighteenth century. John Arrowsmith, The Jungleterry District in the Province of Purnea, Birbhoom, Rajmahal, Boglipoor &c., based on surveys by James Rennell, nineteenth century; accessed via the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.

Historical map of Jungleterry District in eastern India, showing key regions like Purnea and Birbhoom. See long description.
Figure 2 Long description

This historical map of the Jungleterry District in eastern India highlights regions such as Purnea, Birbhoom, Rajmahal and Boglipoor. It is oriented with north at the top and includes a scale for distance measurement. The map features major rivers and roads, depicted with solid and dashed lines, respectively. Administrative boundaries are marked, showing divisions within the district. The title, ′The Jungleterry District,′ is located in the upper right corner, along with the mapmaker′s name, John Arrowsmith and the date of creation. No legend is present, but the map uses line styles to differentiate features. The map′s purpose is to illustrate the geographical layout and administrative divisions during the late eighteenth century.

Such forest communities did not exist apart from the larger economic systems of the Indian subcontinent. The Paharia leaders on the Rajmahal Hills provided military service to rulers in the plains in return for acknowledgment of their traditional rights. The Chuar zamindars (landholders) in the western borderlands of Bengal collected revenue for the Mughal Empire and, in return for sending tributes to the Mughal government to recognize their territorial authority, were able to manage their community’s affairs according to traditional practice. The Bhumij rajas in Chota Nagpur fulfilled a similar role.Footnote 11 Although such arrangements were unequal, they were reciprocal; the ruler of the plains received tribute and military service, while the tribal community received recognition of its autonomy. The forest was considered a common resource, to be used by the community as a whole in accordance with their customarily recognized use rights. These use rights had substance and could be enforced as if they existed in writing.Footnote 12 It was this understanding of the forest as a common resource, and the institutional arrangements that sustained the common use of the forest, that the Company systematically dismantled when it altered its revenue operations.

The Santhal and Ho from Chota Nagpur and the Rajmahal Hills (Figure 3) occupied a comparable but distinct place within this precolonial scheme of order. The Santhal lived in the forested tract between the Rajmahal Hills and the Damodar valley and had a system of village governance based on the manjhi (village headman) and jog manjhi (assistant headman). Their jurisdiction included granting rights to clear the forest, adjudicating disputes, and collectively organizing cultivation. The Ho of Singhbhum had a similar form of governance through a council structure, known as Manki-Munda, within which the Munda headman was responsible for granting forest use-rights within a specified territory or territories. Both communities’ economies were based on a combination of shifting cultivation, collection of forest products, and regulated hunting. The communities treated the forests as a common resource, where the headman acted as the trustee of that resource for the benefit of the community.Footnote 13

Figure 3.

“The Rajmahal Hills (Country of the Santhals),” sketched from the Ganges. Engraving published in The Illustrated London News, 1855. The image depicts the forested frontier landscape of the Rajmahal Hills, a region increasingly incorporated into East India Company systems of revenue extraction and administration from the late eighteenth century onward. Illustrated London News (London), 1855, British Library Digital Collections.

An engraving of a sailboat on a river with mountains in the background.

Two important ramifications stemmed from this government structure. First, the Company faced an organized, legitimate source of community-based authority in each new area where it was collecting revenue. Second, the dismantling of headman authority as a result of the revenue settlement process had an impact on community functioning at the constitutional center of life, not just on its economic fringes. The Ho and Santhal peoples were not subject to the full force of revenue settlements until the period from 1820 to 1840, but administrative structures that would eventually affect them were already being established in the Bengal Revenue Consultations of the 1770s.Footnote 14

1776 and the Conversion of the Forest: Revenue, Gender, and the Restructuring of Authority

Company officials in 1776 increasingly felt the effects of the Atlantic Crisis and were, therefore, looking for ways to make up for decreased revenues and to compete for available funds. The Bengal Treasury and Revenue BoardFootnote 15 commented on this pressure in a very direct manner, instructing Collectors to locate and assess properties across Bengal that were not yet producing regular revenue. This directive extended to the “jungle pergunnahs,” where tribal communities’ refusal to accept permanent boundaries around individually cultivated plots had, until then, kept these lands outside the reach of Company assessment.

In Midnapore, one Collector met with much difficulty in creating an accurate record of the revenues from his District due to the flex-farming practices and the tribal culture of the community.Footnote 16 Reports received by the Board from the Collectors of Birbhum and Bhagalpur contained similar descriptions of communities that viewed the forest as a commons subject to traditional use-right rather than as a taxable private property. The Company revenue officials regarded the existing arrangements as allowing the local tribes to “conceal” their farmed area; and instead of viewing customary independence as an exercise of inherited rights, they viewed it as a means of defrauding the government. As such, the Board recommended two proposals: military removal of the headmen who resisted surveys, and the establishment of a permanent land tax. This tax was designed to settle land for agriculture, taking away custom-based forestry rights and converting land from tribal common land to private taxable hereditable plots. These recommendations did not arise out of a generic administrative aspiration, but from a specific directive to maximize revenue yields in a year when the Atlantic revenues backing the Empire had become politically and financially unreliable.Footnote 17

Revenue requirements did not allow the Company to operate from unwritten customs of any tribal community. Instead, revenue procedures required all production to be formally documented through written land assessment, recorded tenure, surveyed boundary mapping, and individual accountability for tax payment. As such, the common land of the forest did not fit into these requirements. Revenue surveys delineated the line between “waste” land and cultivated land by determining that flex-farmed crops that were fallow when surveyed could not be considered as lands that were officially cultivated, so were therefore designated “wasted.” This permitted their lease to a new settler or, alternatively, to direct Company exploitation. The timber contracts allowed private merchants to occupy and utilize those lands that had been governed by customary law; and the lac tradeFootnote 18 generated huge amounts of taxes. Consequently, the surplus generated by tribal women’s labor was paid to the Company.Footnote 19

Mapping and describing the jungle mahals Footnote 20 was a way to create a new physical environment for resource extraction as Company officials recorded the territory, categorized the land, assigned names to various areas for tax purposes, and created a new space that transformed the common land of the forest into a framework of private ownership through individual tenures and government-owned lands free of trees. These revenue-generating systems impacted the members of tribal communities differently; gender was used throughout the creation of these revenues and sites of change in terms of what could be possessed, as well as who was otherwise regarded as an economic participant. The Paharia people of the Rajmahal Hills went through these changes in a much clearer way than other communities when Augustus Cleveland, who was the Collector of Bhagalpur in 1778, became recognized in Company history as a leader who “pacified” the Paharia by forming a partnership with a paid group of Paharia chiefs whose pay depended on their cooperation with the revenue system and the pacification of the territory.Footnote 21

Revenue conversion in the 1770s produced administrative violence in both the public and private spheres, restructuring the very institutions of community life. Women’s work was critical to the forest economy of the region in ways that were made invisible by the EIC’s classification of revenue. The collection of small forest products such as mahua flowers, tendu leaves, medicinal plants, and honey all constituted predominantly female labor and took place in forest margins bordering villages. These products sustained household nutrition for women and their families during periods of scarcity between harvests, while also contributing to some degree of female economic autonomy within household economies, but were excluded from and given no value as agricultural production in the colonial revenue system. Once forest product collection became subject to duties, monopoly purchasing through the Company, or prohibition via the categorization of lands as Company timber reserves, the impact of these changes on women’s economic space was far greater than on men’s. Men’s economic power and control of whatever was left of the economy was consolidated under the authority of male headmen affiliated, and in good standing, with colonial authorities.Footnote 22

The disruption of flex-farming resulted in effects that transcended agricultural production. Flex-farming established the annual labor cycle, as well as providing a system for the social relations of production (as clearing new plots generally relied on collective labor through local community networks), and a method for sustaining the forest’s ecological health.Footnote 23 Revenue settlements that mandated permanent boundaries also penalized apparently abandoned land, classifying productive fallows, essential to the flex-farming cycle, as underutilized. These settlements therefore disrupted more than just one productive technique in agriculture; they also disrupted the social and ecological systems that support flex-farming.Footnote 24

Seasonal movement, previously used as a strategy for ecological adaptation and an important component of flex-farming, became reclassified as evading taxes. The criminalization of mobility was one of the earliest and least recognized forms of colonial control on the edge of the forest.Footnote 25 The alteration of headman authority might be the most substantial of all the changes to have occurred during this period. Headmen in precolonial times served multiple purposes, such as settling disputes, leading religious ceremonies, allocating resources, and organizing military functions.Footnote 26 However, once colonial administration was implemented, only one aspect—the headman as an intermediary for tax collection—was formally legitimized and compensated through administrative channels (by the government). Moreover, military and religious roles were suppressed.Footnote 27 Consequently, the recognition of a headman’s status became dependent upon recognition by European colonial authorities rather than precolonial community support, as seen in instances of both sardar and Munda headmen being employed under agreement with the colonial government rather than continuing to hold traditional powers.Footnote 28 Tribal organizations interacted with each other, Company officials, and the developing colonial administration in a manner that constituted more of a restructuring than a renegotiating.Footnote 29 This included a reorienting of the internal government of the tribes themselves to accommodate colonial derivative revenue, as well as a change in who the headman was accountable to: his tribe or the revenue bureaucracy.Footnote 30

Dispossession and resistance among the Chuar, Paharia, and Bhumij communities occurred in distinct, albeit recognizable, patterns. In all cases, the overall aim was identical: replace reciprocal, community-based authority with that of a revenue account collector who derived relevance from the colonial state rather than the community he nominally served. Yet people in forest societies did resist Company authority. In 1776, tribal communities in the Bengal Presidency experienced an escalation of struggles that had been developing since the Battle of Plassey that would eventually culminate in the significant uprisings of later generations: the Chuar rebellions (in 1798), the Kol uprising (in 1831–32), and the Santhal Hul (in 1855). Analyzing these uprisings in light of administrative choices made in the 1770s suggests that there was a causal chain linking the fiscal need created by problems in the Atlantic World to Adivasi communities’ use of armed resistance three and four generations later.

This was, therefore, a process of co-optation rather than elimination. Unlike elsewhere in Bengal where the Company displaced local zamindars and brought in new tax collectors from outside to take their place, Cleveland retained the local zamindar as an intermediary, even if he deprived him of everything but the collecting of revenue. The Chuar Rebellion (1768–72) was caused to a great extent by the British government’s introduction of new revenue collectors from outside the area to replace the traditional zamindars who used to collect taxes from the local people.Footnote 31 Zamindars were landowners by birth whose right to collect taxes from their land was sanctioned by the Mughal emperors in return for the provision of various services to the farmers. This demonstrated that Chuar communities could mobilize collectively and successfully resist government overreach when pushed beyond the boundaries of their customary practice.Footnote 32 Although the later Chuar Uprising of 1798–99 was the most dramatic manifestation of the grievances that had been building for years, these grievances had their roots in the administration’s actions of the previous decade.

Reading 1776 from the Forest: The Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary

The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence may evoke the reading of this document in terms of its purported universal principles—the definitive political articulation of the concepts of natural rights and self-determination—and its creation of a foundation for the expanded freedoms of the centuries to come. However, this interpretation is limited and privileges the rights of some colonial subjects over others. The fiscal crisis created by the Atlantic complex imposed additional revenues on the Bengal administration, and, as the American colonies resisted and their revenues were unavailable, the communities and forests of Bengal bore a considerable amount of the empire’s overall fiscal burden. While in Philadelphia the declaration that valid authorities are created from the people’s consent and that every individual has the right to self-determination was being championed, elsewhere in the British Empire these rights were being systematically denied as a direct result of these claims.

Two larger implications arise from this analysis, both of which call for a more genuinely global accounting of the Age of Revolution. First, treating South Asia’s forested peripheries as constitutive of that period’s imperial transformations, rather than as simply footnotes to those transformations (as has typically been the case), provides a more nuanced understanding of the interconnectedness of imperial sites. Second, forest people complicate understandings of global environmental and labor history. In this case the experiences of the Adivasi reveal that gender was central to the ideologies that justified colonial dispossession and environmental degradation as it was part of the structures that undergirded colonial agricultural and tax policies. The erasure of women’s forest labor from the revenue ledger was not an oversight but a founding principle of colonial property making.

There are several questions still to be answered here, and there is potential for more research into this topic. However, it is clear that reading 1776 through Adivasi experience extends the global turn in studies of the American Revolution. Rather than serving as peripheral to the global Age of Revolutions, the forests of Bengal were one of its defining theaters. The 1776 moment cannot be fully understood without the Chuar, Paharia, Santhal, Ho, and Bhumij who participated in these transformations. The authority of these communities diminished as a direct consequence of the same imperial crisis that produced the most celebrated declaration of freedom in modern history. Complicating the public narrative of 1776 on its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary does not diminish the significance of the freedoms it proclaimed; it clarifies the costs at which they were secured.

Dr Saptarshi Sengupta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at JAIN (Deemed-to-be University), Bangalore, India. He completed his MPhil in History (2016) from JAIN (Deemed-to-be University) and earned his PhD in History (2023) from the Department of History and Archaeology, Central University of Karnataka, India, where his doctoral research examined Santhals and their socio-political condition in colonial Bengal, 1855–1932. Please address any correspondence to: /

References

1 Sanjukta Das Gupta, “Accessing Nature: Agrarian Change, Forest Laws and Their Impact on an Adivasi Economy in Colonial India,” in Nature, Knowledge and Development: Critical Essays on the Environmental History of India, ed. Arun Bandopadhyay (Primus Books, 2016), 81–108.

2 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Harvard, 1967); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (North Carolina, 1969); Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Georgia, 1986).

3 For example, see David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard, 2007), 1–16; Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard, 2012), 1–24; Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 1–22, 347–70.

4 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Duke, 1999); David Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (Oxford, 1987); Sumit Guha, Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–1991 (Cambridge, 1999); K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford, 1999).

5 Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1793, 2 vols. (Longmans, Green, 1952–64); P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2015, 3rd ed. (Routledge, 2016). See also the article by Tiraana Bains, “The Loss of America and the Case for British India,” in this Forum.

6 P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c. 1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005), 177–202; H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757–1773 (Cambridge, 1991), 1–25.

7 Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires, 177–202; C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (Longman, 1989), 1–32.

8 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Harvard, 1989), 114–37; Julian Hoppit, Britain’s Political Economies: Parliament and Economic Life, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2017), 244–68.

9 Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires, 177–202; Bowen, Revenue and Reform, 1–25; Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Duke, 1996 [1963]), 11–38.

10 Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests, 19–55; Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, 58–89.

11 W. W. Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal, 3 vols. (Smith, Elder and Co, 1868), 1: 210–52; Sunil Kumar Sen, Agrarian Struggle in Bengal, 1946–47 (People’s Publishing House, 1972), 44–78.

12 Hermann Kulke, “Early State Formation and Royal Legitimation in Tribal Areas of Eastern India,” in The State in India 1000–1700, ed. Hermann Kulke (Oxford, 1995), 63–88; Sanjukta Das Gupta, Adivasis and the Raj: Socio-Economic Transition of the Hos, 1820–1932 (Orient BlackSwan, 2011), 25–60.

13 L. O. Skrefsrud, Horkoren Mare Hapramko Reak’ Katha [The Traditions and Institutions of the Santals] (The Santal Mission of the Northern Churches, 1887); Sarat Chandra Roy, The Mundas and Their Country (Asia Publishing House, 1970 [1912]), 279–334; Das Gupta, Adivasis and the Raj, 25–60.

14 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1994), 16–39; C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996), 23–48.

15 Bengal Revenue Consultations, 15 March 1776, India Office Records (hereafter IOR) P/70/1, British Library (hereafter BL).

16 Bengal Revenue Consultations, 15 March 1776, IOR/P/70/1, BL; Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal, 11–38.

17 Bengal Revenue Consultations, 15 March 1776, IOR/P/70/1, BL; Baden Henry Baden-Powell, The Land-Systems of British India, 3 vols. (Clarendon Press, 1892), 1: 84–116; Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal, 24–67; Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996), 57–90; Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires, 177–202.

18 “Lac” is a natural resin, a sticky, hardened secretion produced by the lac insect (Kerria lacca) that lives on certain host trees common in the forests of eastern India (like palash, ber, and kusum trees). Historically it was one of colonial Bengal’s major forest-based commodities: it was harvested, processed, and exported for use in dyes, sealing wax, and later shellac (used in varnishes, polishes, and—much later—early phonograph records).

19 Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces, 1860–1914 (Delhi, 1996), 1–30; Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests, 56–95.

20 “Jungle mahals” translates literally as “forest estates” or “forest revenue districts”; it was the colonial-era term for Bengal’s forested frontier tracts assessed as distinct revenue units, equivalent to the jungle pergunnahs referenced earlier in this article.

21 J. H. Harington, “Memoir of Mr. Cleveland,” in Historical Memoir on the Rise and Progress of the Bhagulpore Frontier Agency (Calcutta, 1815), 1–20; Parita Mukta, “The Rajmahal Hills and the Paharia,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 28, no. 1 (1991): 1–22.

22 Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge, 1994), 181–224; Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, 110–25.

23 Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests, 19–95; Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Oxford, 1989), 21–56.

24 Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal, 39–67; Baden-Powell, The Land-Systems of British India, 1: 84–116.

25 David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 141–70; Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 57–90.

26 Roy, The Mundas and Their Country, 279–334; L. O. Skrefsrud, Horkoren Mare Hapramko Reak’ Katha [The Traditions and Institutions of the Santals] (The Santal Mission of the Northern Churches, 1887).

27 Das Gupta, Adivasis and the Raj, 41–86; Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests, 56–95.

28 Mukta, “Rajmahal Hills,” 9–14; Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, 90–109.

29 Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 57–90; Bayly, Empire and Information, 23–48.

30 Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal, 39–67; Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1994), 16–39.

31 J. C. Price, “The Chuar Rebellion of 1799,” in Adivasi Resistance in Early Colonial India: Comprising the Chuar Rebellion of 1799 (Brill, 2025); Ananda Bhattacharyya, ed., Relevant Midnapore District Collectorate Records from the Eighteenth Century (New Delhi: Manohar, 2017).

32 Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, 41–76; Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal, 1: 233–52.

Figure 0

Figure 1. Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal (1772–85). Mezzotint engraved by Thomas Watson after Sir Joshua Reynolds, London, 28 March 1777. National Portrait Gallery, London / Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Figure 1

Figure 2. “The Jungleterry District in the Province of Purnea, Birbhoom, Rajmahal, Boglipoor &c.” Map showing the forested frontier regions of eastern India and the tribal territories that became increasingly subject to EIC revenue administration and territorial intervention during the late eighteenth century. John Arrowsmith, The Jungleterry District in the Province of Purnea, Birbhoom, Rajmahal, Boglipoor &c., based on surveys by James Rennell, nineteenth century; accessed via the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.Figure 2 long description.

Figure 2

Figure 3. “The Rajmahal Hills (Country of the Santhals),” sketched from the Ganges. Engraving published in The Illustrated London News, 1855. The image depicts the forested frontier landscape of the Rajmahal Hills, a region increasingly incorporated into East India Company systems of revenue extraction and administration from the late eighteenth century onward. Illustrated London News (London), 1855, British Library Digital Collections.