Ethnological classifications and the tribe

If depictions of Chhotanagpur and its inhabitants varied so remarkably in the early nineteenth century, and the Oraons, caught between the cross-currents of translocal and local considerations, were seen as savage barbarians or, alternatively, as a village community of settled agriculturalists, this was to change by the middle of the nineteenth century. As disciplinary initiatives began to influence frames of thought and there was a search for universally applicable categories, ethnology emerged as the scientific framework for the study of the linguistic, physical, and cultural characteristics of dark-skinned, non-European, uncivilized peoples. ‘Race’, in this phase, was increasingly seen as the defining marker of human beings, though perceptions shifted as race, which was initially understood to be philologically determined, came to be seen as physiologically determined. The uneasy balance and the asymmetrical tension between philological and anatomical orientations within ethnology in Europe was reflected in the often-uncomfortable interactions of Orientalist, Utilitarian, and evangelical thought in the colony.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The image of the tribe in colonial representations of the 1860s and 1870s needs to be located amid this changing mosaic of intellectual shifts and emerging trends; links were established by colonial administrators between language groups and peoples, between complexions and civilization, and between physical features and nations/races. In order to point to the shifts in the image of the Oraons under the influence of contesting ethnological trends in Britain and their impact on colonial ethnology, this section analyses the writings of Justice CampbellFootnote ¹¹¹ and Dalton,Footnote ¹¹² both of whom drew upon, in addition, earlier bureaucratic writings and their own experiences of governance.

The earliest concepts of aboriginality, which came to be tied with the idea of tribe, were ethno-linguistically determined, as Trautmann has pointed out, from the early phase of Orientalism.Footnote ¹¹³ The idea of a distinct ‘Dravidian language family’ to which all ‘aboriginals’ belonged, emerged from discussions that took place in Madras between British Orientalists studying Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada, and Indian scholars. In 1816, Francis Whyte Ellis, a young civil servant in the Madras presidency, identified these languages as part of the Dravidian family; this was followed by a comparative study of non-Sanskritic languages. By the 1840s, Brian Houghton Hodgson, a colonial administrator, and Rev John Stevenson, a missionary, wrote about the existence of a unitary aboriginal language and of a group of people with a distinct language, religion, customs, and manners who existed in India prior to the arrival of the Aryans.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In the Deccan, where these original inhabitants of the soil had retained possession of their lands, their Dravidian languages were believed to show much integrity and refinement. On the other hand, the ‘aborigines’ who had been pushed into the ‘jungly and malarious recesses of the north’ spoke the ‘great Kol language’,Footnote ¹¹⁵ which, although derived from the Dravidian language, was broken into ‘innumerable rude and shapeless fragments’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This idea of an aboriginal unity on the basis of a shared originary Dravidian language was a widely shared hypothesis until 1854, when Max Mueller introduced for the first time the idea of the Munda language family ‘as an independent body of speech apart from the Dravidian’ and gave it a name.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In 1856, Bishop Robert CaldwellFootnote ¹¹⁸ confirmed the existence of this third language group, distinct from the Aryan and the Dravidian language families. This was the Munda or the Austro-Asiatic group of languages. Behind the ‘discoveries’ of the Dravidian and Munda language families, it must be noted, was an underlying premise, carried over from pre-colonial times: agriculture fostered civilization and more refined speech; non-settled occupations, a backward civilization and a ‘ruder’ language. Civilization also came to be linked with complexion: Aryans, the most civilized, were of white skin; the Dravidians of the south were of darker complexion, while those living ‘beyond civilization’ in inaccessible regions were almost ‘black’.

These were the ideas that Campbell inherited when, in the post-mutiny phase, the Asiatic Society of Bengal was losing its access to Sanskrit manuscripts. In 1866, Campbell spearheaded the new ‘ethnological’ initiatives that the Asiatic Society undertook when it upheld ‘actual observation’ as the mode of ethnological inquiry.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In collecting ‘lists of the races and classes existing in the various districts’, Campbell's agenda was to provide an ‘ethnological skeleton’ for officials who had ‘little knowledge of ethnology as a Science, and whose practical knowledge and nomenclature’ were ‘limited to their own particular parts of India’,Footnote ¹²⁰ and who were nevertheless engaged in the task of data collection. One of the earliest British officials to give precedence to physiological factors over linguistic ones in the understanding of the Indian people, although never entirely negating the importance of the latter, Campbell classified the ‘Kols’ as a distinct racial group of aboriginals in the ethnological map of India.Footnote ¹²¹ Dalton, on the other hand, an administrator posted in Chhotanagpur, was a popular officer who had the benefit of first-hand knowledge of the people gathered in the course of a long tenure of over 20 years as commissioner there.Footnote ¹²² By selecting two of Dalton's writings—‘The “Kols” of Chota-Nagpore’ (1866) and his Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (1872)—I illustrate how Campbell, who had used Dalton's earlier writings, eventually produced an over-arching ethnological frame that influenced the later writings of Dalton and the concept of the tribe in the context of Chhotanagpur in the pre-1880s.

Campbell suggested that ethnology be taken in its ‘broadest sense’ as possible as he outlined what was subsequently to become part of anthropological dogma in colonial India: the value of ‘actual observation’, ‘personal experience’, and ‘travels to parts of India’ to meet the ‘subject of observation and inquiry’Footnote ¹²³ were the methods of investigation as opposed to a search for texts and translations. India, because of the presence of several races, was an ideal field for this nascent discipline of ethnology. Anticipating some of Herbert Hope Risley's conclusions, Campbell argued that the practice of ethnology was ‘only possible in the countries and on the spots where the various races are found, or where specimens of them may be collected together’.Footnote ¹²⁴ Thus, while ‘aboriginals’ from distant Chhotanagpur came as dhangars to Calcutta, these dhangars were to be studied not in Calcutta where their racial characteristics had been diluted but in the country from which they had originally migrated. As it was increasingly recognized that tribes—no longer seen as forest-dwellers—were in constant interaction with their neighbours, leading to an intermixing of races, the search was for isolated tracts where purity of form, features, and language could be preserved.Footnote ¹²⁵ ‘Aboriginal tribes’, Campbell wrote, were ‘like scattered remnants of a substance floating here and there in a mass of water’ and ‘the greater part of their substance’ had ‘already commingled in the fluid around them’; ‘the remainder’ was ‘saturated with it’. It was ‘only in the very kernel and inner centre of the largest lumps, that something like the pure original substance’ was ‘to be found’.Footnote ¹²⁶ The ‘real original characteristics existing in a palpable and little-diluted form’, Campbell concluded, could be located ‘in small and detached tribes … wherever a bunch of hills or an unhealthy jungle has given them a refuge’.Footnote ¹²⁷

The following ‘ethnological markers’ were employed in his classificatory schema: physical appearance, language, religion, laws and manners, and mental characteristics.Footnote ¹²⁸ ‘Physical characteristics’, on the basis of which Campbell recognized the universal races of the Caucasian, Mongolian, and the Negro or Negrito,Footnote ¹²⁹ were given precedence over language that was considered to be region-specific. Campbell identified the ‘general physical type of all the purest Aboriginal tribes’ to be ‘commonly known as the Negrito’,Footnote ¹³⁰ although in India, he noted, the ‘Negrito type’ was different from the ‘muscular … Africans’:Footnote ¹³¹ ‘They are small and slight, very black, face broad and flat, the thick lips … very prominent, noses broad and nostrils wide, beard scanty, hair very abundant and tangled, of a shock-headed appearance, sometimes curly or even woolly.’Footnote ¹³² The Oraons, as the purest type of aboriginals, belonged to this group. The ‘purer’ the aboriginal was because of his isolated existence, the darker he was in complexion and the more backward was his location in the scale of civilization: ‘civilizational logic was thus imported into race science’ as Dravidians, and in this case the Oraons, were identified with ‘demonology, fetishism, frantic dances, bloody and even human sacrifices, in a way which reminds us of the worst African types’.Footnote ¹³³ The ‘savage and barbaric’ Oraon of the 1820s was now depicted in the 1860s as belonging to the Negrito race. As Trautmann has argued, the collapse of biblical chronology for human history that resulted from the ‘revolution in ethnological time’ accorded to ‘proto-anthropology’ the responsibility for constructing universal histories that were naturalist, gradualist, and developmental.Footnote ¹³⁴

Campbell, however, used language, which he had admitted earlier to be an imperfect guide to race, to distinguish between the Oraons and the Mundas. In earlier Orientalist representations, the Oraons and Mundas were seen as part of a unified Cole/Kol village community of Chhotanagpur; they were now split ethno-linguistically into two groups: Kolarians and Dravidians. The Oraons were believed to belong to the Dravidian family, the Mundas to the Kolarian. Max Mueller and Caldwell had already introduced the idea of a Munda family of languages; Campbell, however, used the term ‘Kolarian’ to designate a linguistically determined racial group. What is interesting is that Campbell was never confident of the validity of his own conclusions. As he wrote, ‘Beyond the difference of language, I am unable to state with confidence any marked features distinguishing the Dravidian and Kolarian groups of tribes (each taken as a whole) from one another.’Footnote ¹³⁵ Falling back upon speculation, he made the following observation: ‘Ethnographers seem to distinguish the Negritoes of the Southern Seas into two groups, a woolly or curly haired group, and a straight-haired group; perhaps there may be found to have been some such division in India.’Footnote ¹³⁶ The time of the confident ‘scholar-administrators’, who would supervise the extensive statistical or ethnographic surveys sponsored by the colonial state, though imminent, was yet to come. Campbell's classifications are a classic example of the indefiniteness of ethnology and the difficulties in imposing a hierarchy on ethnological markers. Yet, Campbell's classification, arbitrarily arrived at, paradoxically became the basis for ethnological classification in Chhotanagpur in the decades to follow, until Risley challenged this in 1891. Anthropologists’ emphasis on physical features may have predominated in Europe in the 1860s, but the legacy of the Orientalists in determining aboriginality in the Indian context was far from eclipsed as the idea of the ‘Dravidian’ was mapped onto the ‘Negrito’.

While describing the Oraons, Campbell preferred the term ‘aborigine’ to ‘tribe’. ‘Aborigines’, in contrast to the other constituents of the ‘Indian population’Footnote ¹³⁷ (the ‘Modern Indians’ and the ‘Borderers’), distinguished spatially ‘those tribes who still live apart, forming communities by themselves, under their own leaders, and often speaking their own peculiar languages’.Footnote ¹³⁸ An extension of the civilizational logic could also be seen in the distinction that Campbell drew between the ‘Arian’ who followed ‘settled agriculture’, believed in the concept of ‘private property in land’, and was attached to his ‘native soil’, and the ‘tribal’ who had ‘little local attachment to the soil’ and followed ‘shifting agriculture’ or jhum. Being acquainted from his days as an administrator in Punjab with the idea of the ‘Indian village or commune’ as the ‘constitutional unit of the Arian’, Campbell argued that ‘among the non-Arians’, the ‘property in the soil’ was ‘tribal rather than individual’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Thus, Campbell concluded: ‘The aboriginal tribes of India move from one place to another, abandoning one location and taking up another in a light way; they are even ready to give up their land to become labourers, and to immigrate in a way to which the Arians are by no means prone.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The aboriginal, in this frame of reasoning, was not one who was rooted in the land as an original inhabitant, but one who showed a remarkable lack of attachment to it! In fact, the aboriginal seemed to have little attachment to anything as he drifted from place to place: ‘They seem to have among themselves no caste, they eat anything and everything. Marriage is, I fancy, but a loose tie.’Footnote ¹⁴¹

This perception of the aboriginal tribe as one with no sense of belonging to land is blurred as we once again move into the heartland of Chhotanagpur, amid colonial officials familiar with the land and its people as they resolved disputes and legislated on agrarian matters. For Dalton, who did consult available ‘published works’ and ‘valuable original notes drawn up … by friends in different parts of the county’, and in the case of Chhotanagpur, ‘Babus Rakhaldas Haldar and Kalidas Palit and Mr L. R. Forbes, all of whom were Assistants to the Commissioner of Chutia Nagpur’,Footnote ¹⁴² his own experiences were ultimately ‘responsible for the accuracy of a large proportion of the descriptions given’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Projecting himself primarily as a man of the field, his articles, often personal accounts based on his travels,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ were based on his interactions with people and his experiences in administration.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ ‘Though without any pretension to scientific knowledge of the subject, without practice as an author, or experience as a compiler’, Dalton believed that he ‘probably had more opportunities of observing various races and tribes, especially those usually called Aborigines, than have been conceded to any other officer now in service’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Land, Dalton pointed out, was extremely important for the Kols. Drawing upon, and thereby affirming, ‘a very elaborate report … written by Doctor Davidson in 1839’,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Dalton wrote: ‘The Kols of Chota-Nagpore, generally a good-tempered, mild, inoffensive race, become wild with excitement on this question [of land], and nothing can reconcile them to a decree or order which in any way infringes on what they consider their proprietary right.’Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In the ‘Postscript’ to his essay,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Campbell was quick to note this change. Lamenting that he could only ‘hastily’ glance through ‘Colonel Dalton's paper on the Kols’ since his own ‘had nearly passed through the press’, and anticipating that Dalton's paper ‘would admirably fill up just what was wanting’,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ he reluctantly admitted: ‘Colonel Dalton's account of the tenacity with which some of the tribes cling to the ancient rights in the soil seems somewhat at variance with the information which I had noted respecting their ready emigration. That many of them do emigrate is certain; but perhaps my information has reference to the Dravidians and less settled tribes.’Footnote ¹⁵¹ Unlike Dalton's, Campbell's insights had little impact at the level of structuring agrarian legislations in Chhotanagpur. Yet, his classifications had an impact upon the ‘ethnological’ understanding of the ‘tribe’ and the Oraons. To elaborate my argument, let me turn to Dalton's essays, to show how his perception of the Oraons, in turn, changed over time under the influence of Campbell's classifications.

In the Orientalist mode, Dalton, in 1866, used tribe interchangeably with ‘race’, ‘nation’, and ‘nationality’.Footnote ¹⁵² Unlike Hamilton, who had suggested in the 1820s that the tribes of Chhotanagpur had lived far away from civilization from time immemorial, Dalton argued that the ‘heterogeneous collection’ of ‘non-Arian tribes’, or the ‘Kols of Chota Nagpore’, had come together in the ‘secure asylum’ of the hills of Chhotanagpur after being driven away from the plains by the victorious ‘Arian’ ‘Brahminical invaders’.Footnote ¹⁵³ What had united these Kols, or the ‘non-Arian tribes’ of ChhotanagpurFootnote ¹⁵⁴—‘Oraon’, ‘Moondah’, ‘Kheriahs’, ‘Sonthals’, ‘Bhoomij’, ‘Hos’, ‘Juangs’, ‘Khund’, and so onFootnote ¹⁵⁵—was their shared fate of oppression at the hands of the ‘Braminical Arians’. As in Orientalist perception, these Aryans were heroes of a great adventure of migration and conquest who had expanded from their west-Asian homeland to impart their religious and moral heritage across far-flung new zones of dominion in the Indian subcontinent.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Brahmans were seen to be the representatives of this Hindu Aryan order. Dalton painted a picture of counterpoised groups—the Aryans and non-Aryans—drawn into an epic battle. The victims were ‘the two races’ of the Oraons and the Mundas, who ‘must have been for ages the only colonists of the plateau’Footnote ¹⁵⁷—and this is what made them ‘aboriginals’ in Dalton's frame of reasoning. They withdrew into seclusion from ‘civilization’ after the Aryan expansion, but were once again ‘outwitted’Footnote ¹⁵⁸ by the Aryans who now settled afresh on their lands. Amid two events—one which took place thousands of years ago, when they were driven into the forests, and the second in contemporary times, when they were being excluded from them—the tribes lived in Chhotanagpur, ‘untouched by history’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Inspired by Arcadian principles, Dalton celebrated a time and space when people had lived in forests in communion with nature. Untouched by modernity and insulated from the destructive impact of external influences, they regulated their social activity through collectively accepted customs and norms. As a part of the Kol community, the Oraons had ‘increased and multiplied, and lived a happy arcadian sort of life under their republican form of government for many centuries’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ So similar were the customs of the Mundas and Oraons that Dalton commented on the ‘almost identical’ village systems of the two, noting that there were only a few ‘points of divergence’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Although they did not inter-marry, they ‘lived as one people’.Footnote ¹⁶² Describing an almost idyllic world, Dalton discussed in detail their ceremonial practices such as name-giving, marriage and death rites, dancing, jatras or festivals, and so on; these were a part of their cultural world, of which women were an essential part. In eulogizing terms, Dalton went on to describe women: ‘I never saw girls quarrelling, and never heard them abuse each other … A Kol girl's vocabulary is as free of bad language … as a Bengalee's is full of it.’Footnote ¹⁶³ Interestingly, hierarchies within a tribe were acknowledged by Dalton only when he referred to, following Davidson's report, the different kinds of claims to land among the Oraons.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Dalton's image of the Oraons was, in addition, structured by the evangelical mode of reasoning.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Nineteenth-century Christian polemics urged him to implicate the ‘Brahminical’ ‘Hindu’ as culprits of contamination who had brought about a degeneration in the character of the Kols. ‘Those who have never left their own country,’ Dalton wrote, ‘have far more pleasing manners and dispositions, than those who return to it after years spent in other parts of India or beyond the seas.’Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The Brahman was the one who was crafty and scheming, waiting to outwit the naive and gullible aboriginal with a cunningness that was born out of their religious practices. Sympathetic as he was towards the Kols of Chhotanagpur, Dalton shared the Christian revulsion for their religion, separating this from other aspects of Kol culture, as he described ‘the great propitiary sacrifices to the local deities or devils’ as ‘carousals at which they eat, drink, sing, dance and make love’.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ And ultimately, true to the Christian cause, Dalton predicted in Chhotanagpur the spread of Christianity and its ultimate triumph. ‘The darkness’ in which this ‘primitive and interesting people have so long dwelt’ would be ‘dispelled by a brighter light’ and ‘their paganism’ would ‘yield’ to the ‘gentle influence of Christian teaching’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

In addition to his personal observations, Dalton's understanding of the ‘tribe’ and the Oraons was part of an ongoing universal dialogue shaped by the newly emerging ‘science’ of ethnology, and reflected its ambiguities as well. Acquainted only with the rudiments of the discipline, he was keen to incorporate its tools. Dalton sought to understand the differences between the ‘heterogeneous population’ of Chhotanagpur according to ‘race’, determined by language and physical characteristics. Like Orientalists, Dalton emphasized the former. As differences in ‘linguistic characteristics’ and ‘physical peculiarities’ indicated, the Mundas and Oraons did not belong to a ‘family’ and were not of ‘common origin’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ On the basis of ‘pronunciation, formation, construction or general character’, and ‘with petty copious vocabularies’ and ‘notes on the language’ provided by Rev Frederic Batsch, who had come to India as a missionary of the German (later Gossner) Evangelical Lutheran Mission at Ranchi, Dalton found ‘no similarity’ or ‘analogues’ between the language of the Oraons and the Mundas. While Oraons and the ‘hill-men of Rajmehal’ shared a ‘guttural and harsh’ language, ‘Moondahs and their cognates’—the ‘kindred tribes’ of the ‘Hos’, ‘Santhals’, ‘Korewahs’, and ‘Kherriahs’—shared a language that was ‘soft and sonorous’.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Once linguistic affiliations were separated, Dalton moved on to differentiate between the two groups on the basis of their physical characteristics. The Mundas, identified as ‘the finer race of the two’, were ‘taller, fairer, better proportioned, and [had] more intellectual features’. The Oraons were, in contrast, ‘a very small race, not short and squat like some of the Indo-Chinese stock, but … a well-proportioned small race’. In the ‘great variety in feature and colour’Footnote ¹⁷¹ found among the Oraons, those who lived in ‘isolated positions’ and beyond civilization, were of ‘the purest blood’ and therefore had the ‘darkest’ complexion and the ‘ugliest’ of physical features.Footnote ¹⁷² ‘If we take those who, living in isolated positions, may be supposed to offer us the purest blood, we find them generally dark and ill-favoured.’Footnote ¹⁷³ These ‘ill-favoured’ people were described by Dalton as follows: ‘They have wide mouths, thick lips and projecting maxillary processes, nostrils wide apart, and no elevation of nose to speak of, and low though not in general very receding foreheads.’ The ‘woolly crispiness of hair’ made the Oraons similar to ‘the Negro’.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Conversely, in ‘more civilized parts of the province’, there was an improvement ‘in appearance’.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Complexion and sharpness of physical features, then, indicated the level of civilization achieved. Implicit in these statements is the fact that this ‘purity’ of blood was something that was not always to be found. This was an issue that Campbell had also referred to. ‘Mixed communities’, or a sharing of cultural practices, were very much a part of experiences in Chhotanagpur.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Dalton's account is largely descriptive. In his account, the Oraons appear as part of a culturally united non-Aryan Kol village society and as an economically marginalized people who cultivated the agricultural fields of Chhotanagpur. Ethnologically differentiating the Oraons and the Mundas was clearly not on Dalton's agenda. The ‘village system’, which had once included the tribal and non-tribal population in Davidson's report of 1833, was confined in Dalton's account to the ‘non-Arian tribes’ of Chhotanagpur, collectively referred to as the ‘Kols of Chotanagpur’. Those once incorporated into the ‘village community’ by Davidson and those who had always remained outside it became, in contrast, the Suds, or the ritually pure.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The many variations in his description of the Oraons in 1866 were erased, as Dalton, in 1872, responded to the demands for scientific classification. While Dalton's ethnography—the ‘descriptive’Footnote ¹⁷⁸ part—was quoted by colonial administrators, missionaries, and anthropologists, his ethnological classifications moved into the Census Report of 1872. They were eventually displaced by Risley in 1901 when ethnology, as a field of study, entered newer horizons. While I distinguish between the ethnographic and ethnological contents of Dalton's account, I should point out that the boundaries between ‘ethnology’ and ‘ethnography’ were not, as yet, clearly drawn; this was to happen in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Dalton wrote his Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal in 1872 in response to Dr Joseph Fayrer's suggestionFootnote ¹⁷⁹ that the Asiatic Society of Bengal host ‘a great ethnological Congress in Calcutta, which was to bring together in one exhibition typical examples of the races of the Old World, to be the subject of scientific study when so collected’.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Emphasizing in a letter to the Asiatic Society the ‘advantages to be derived by anthropological science from a study of races themselves in life’, Fayrer was able to persuade Campbell of the importance of his project. Campbell was now convinced that ‘an exhibition of the Aborigines would be the easiest thing in the world’: as excellent labour, these ‘coolies’ could put in order the Exhibition grounds; at other times, they could take their seats as functioning objects for the instruction of the public with whom they could converse and in turn be observed.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Conversations, or rather understanding differences in languages, would enable one to ‘observe’ the tribes in order to differentiate between them. As Campbell reiterated in 1869:Footnote ¹⁸² ‘We have not sufficient knowledge to enable us to inter-classify the tribes according to their physical characteristics; but, when we take the test of language which, if not under all circumstances an infallible guide, is certainly one not to be neglected, we are at once enabled to distinguish … great classes of these tribes…’.Footnote ¹⁸³ Dalton was asked to ‘draw up a descriptive catalogue which might prove a useful guide to the ethnological exhibition’ and provide future ‘ethnological guidelines’.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ But once the idea of the grand exhibition of all the races was abandoned due to lack of funds, among other reasons,Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Dalton was requested in 1868 to ‘draw up an account of the tribes in Bengal from all available sources of information’.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ This account was to be ‘abundantly illustrated’.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Most illustrations in the book were copies of the photographs taken by Dr Simpson, a contributor of photographs at the London exhibition of 1862, who, to quote Dalton, had ‘kindly added much to their value by contributing also the measurement of the individuals photographed’. The ‘Chutia Nagpur collection’ was enriched by the ‘artistic labors’ of Tosco Peppe, an amateur photographer.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

If missionaries were Dalton's earlier informants, and he had also considered ‘traditions’ received from ‘the most venerable and learned of … Oraon acquaintances’ in 1866,Footnote ¹⁸⁹ his Descriptive Ethnology was largely based on Campbell's ‘ethnological skeleton’.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Dalton wrote in 1872:

In Dalton's 1866 account, the Kols were seen to represent a ‘collection of heterogenous tribes’ of whom the most important were the Mundas and the Oraons.Footnote ¹⁹² In 1872, however, he used the term ‘Kol’ to indicate a language and those who spoke it as the Kolarians. The ‘aboriginal or non-Aryan tribes of Bengal proper, Bihar and Orissa’, Dalton now asserted, were split ‘according to their most obvious affinities’ of linguistic markers into the Dravidian and Kolarian races. The Dravidians spoke a language allied to Tamil or Telugu and included the Oraons, Paharias, Gonds, and Kandhs;Footnote ¹⁹³ the Kolarians spoke the Kol languageFootnote ¹⁹⁴ and included the Santals, Mundas, Kharias, Bhumij, and Hos.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ To distinguish between the Oraons, a Dravidian race, and the Mundas, a Kolarian race, Dalton traced the history of their migrations. Like his Orientalist predecessors who were influenced by ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, he referred to the ‘Orientalist Muir’,Footnote ¹⁹⁶ who had provided ‘theories or surmises on the subject now commonly received’.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ In order to trace the journey of the Oraons from the far south through the Rohtas plateau, and finally into Chhotanagpur, Dalton analysed the origins of ‘Khurnkh’, ‘the term with which they [the Oraons] invariably call themselves’.Footnote ¹⁹⁸

While writing on the Oraons, Dalton referred to, as before though in much greater detail, their geographical distribution, numerical strength, physical traits, dress, coiffure, food habits, houses, land tenure systems, religious and social practices, marriage, festivals, birth and funeral ceremonies, and dance and music.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ In many ways, however, this was an account that was clearly different from what he wrote in 1866. Describing the Oraons as ‘semi-savages’,Footnote ²⁰⁰ despite appreciating some of their practices, Dalton distinguished them from the sud/sudh/sudhan (pure) Hindus, a term that included all ‘castes’—Brahmans, Rajputs, Goalas, Kurmis, Kahars, and so on.Footnote ²⁰¹ While in 1866, Dalton had found Oraon homes to be of ‘most venerable and picturesque appearance’, by 1872, he was describing their huts as ‘wanting in the organ of constructiveness’, ‘badly built, and incapable of affording decent accommodation to a family’, ‘seldom properly drained or cleaned’, and ‘huddled together in a manner little conducive to convenience, health, or decorum’.Footnote ²⁰² Again, unlike the ‘good looking Aryans’,Footnote ²⁰³ the Oraon was seen to be ugly in countenance. In striking contrast to his earlier depiction of the Oraons in 1866, Dalton wrote:

Finally, it may be noted that in Dalton's ethnological frame, the relationship between ‘tribe’ and ‘exogamy’ was mentioned, albeit fleetingly, as he tried to briefly grapple with the idea of ‘primitive marriage’ put forward by a ‘recent author’:Footnote ²⁰⁵

The Tirki could not eat young mice; the Ekhar could not eat the head of tortoises; the Kirpotas did not eat the stomach of the pig; and the Lakrar could not eat the tiger's flesh. Risley's analysis of totems in the Census Report of 1901 had found its antecedents.

Risley and anthropology

By the late nineteenth century, anthropology had emerged as the discipline that configured understandings of race in Europe. Colonial ethnographers and ‘scholar administrators’, already engaged in conducting ethnographic surveys and census operations in order to seek information about the subject population, increasingly believed in the efficacy of anthropology as an enabling tool for comprehending the different categories into which the population of India were being slotted. As Samarendra has argued, persistent problems in statistical computations were fast rendering untenable projects like the census which were initially merely concerned with the collection and computation of data.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Administrators like C. J. Lyall, Risley, and William Crooke,Footnote ²⁰⁸ among others, collaborated closely with academic institutions in England and contributed articles to scholarly journals; they were also members of various societies of learning like the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The correspondence and fractures between an academic agenda, the requirements of the colonial state, and the experiences of governance are perhaps best exemplified in the writings of Risley, who from the 1880s, guided the ethnographic projects of the colonial state for the next two decades.Footnote ²⁰⁹ As Risley sought to make his mark in academia as an anthropologist, and yet responded to the interests of the state, and as he upheld the scientificity of his anthropological methods, and yet attributed his ability to question the limitations of disciplines to his administrative experiences, anthropology acquired its unique character in a colonial context. Towards the last decade of the nineteenth century, the image of the tribe and of the Oraons shifted from earlier times. In 1901 Risley, drawing on evidence from across the country, provided the first comprehensive definition of the tribe in an all-India official document: a descriptive category had eventually acquired a definition. I analyse Risley's The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, published in four volumes in 1891,Footnote ²¹⁰ and his Census Report of 1901, in order to situate the image of the tribe and of the Oraons in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Let me add here that I refer to the continuities in the arguments made by Risley in his The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, published in 1891, and in his Census Report of 1901.

Unlike Dalton, who considered his field experiences as his asset, Risley believed that it was his familiarity with anthropology and the scientificity of his experiment that distinguished his work from earlier state-sponsored experiments. As disciplinary boundaries were becoming more rigid in Europe in the late 1880s, Risley, in the tradition of anthropologists in the West, differentiated ethnology from ethnography. Ethnography, he argued, collected and arranged large masses of social data and went into minute descriptive detail. Ethnology, on the other hand, was, in his view, a comparative method of investigation; it was a rational exposition of the human aggregates and organizations known as hordes, clans, tribes, and nations (especially in the earlier, savage and barbarous stages of their progress), and framed hypotheses concerning the origin of the tribes.Footnote ²¹¹ The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, he confidently asserted, was ‘the first attempt to apply to Indian ethnography the methods of systematic research sanctioned by the authority of European anthropologists’.Footnote ²¹² The results, he hoped, ‘might be of some service to students of comparative ethnology in Europe’. India, he pointed out, was a ‘colony of living races’, where a ‘large body of barbarous or semi-barbarous custom, both Aryan and non-Aryan’ still survived. It was for anthropologists, to quote Pinney, the ‘living museum of mankind’.Footnote ²¹³ The need for the survey in Bengal was, for Risley, ‘partly academic’:Footnote ²¹⁴ it would respond to the needs of ‘salvage ethnology’ which was an essential component of Victorian anthropology. As he argued, ‘the old aboriginal faiths’ were being ‘rapidly … effaced’Footnote ²¹⁵ and ‘if the enquiry is postponed till after the next census … a mass of information of unsurpassed interest will be lost to the world’.Footnote ²¹⁶

Yet, the difference between a ‘partly scientific’ and a ‘partly administrative’ enterprise was there in the minds of colonial officials, and Risley was aware that he needed to convince the colonial state of the ‘practical’ utility of his survey against a criticism that it was a much-avoidable ‘luxury’.Footnote ²¹⁷ Thus, while his primary interest, I argue, was in ‘ethnology’—in the classification of races—his attempts to persuade the colonial state of the efficacy of the survey inevitably dealt with the uses of ‘ethnography’. The Bengal government, Risley suggested, required knowledge of ‘the system upon which the whole native population regulates its domestic and social relations’ since, for legislative or executive action to be effective, ‘an ethnographic survey of Bengal, and a record of the customs of the people, is as necessary as an incident of good administration as a cadastral survey of the land and a record of the rights of its tenants’.Footnote ²¹⁸ A conference on the ethnography of northern India was organized in Lahore in 1885: D. C. J. Ibbetson, J. C. Nesfield, and Risley met to clarify ‘some doubtful points of Ethnographic nomenclature’.Footnote ²¹⁹ Modelled on the questionnaire prepared by the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1874, a set of guidelines and detailed ethnographic information in English and in the vernacular were provided as guidelines to district officers and private individuals involved in the collection and systematization of data.Footnote ²²⁰ Through personal enquiries and correspondence, and with the help of district officers, 190 correspondents were inducted; scattered across every district of Bengal, they communicated in turn with an ‘indefinite number of representatives of the tribes and castes’, the subjects of their enquiry.Footnote ²²¹ Indeed, a survey of such massive proportions could not have been conducted without involving so many ‘local correspondents’ who were now instructed to ‘extend their inquiries over a wide field, to mistrust accounts published in books, to deal with the people direct, and to go for their information to the persons most likely to be well informed on questions of custom, such as priests, marriage brokers, genealogists, headmen of caste panchayats, and the like’.Footnote ²²² Risley subsequently declared the quality of responses sent by these correspondents to be largely good, and sometimes ‘extremely valuable’.Footnote ²²³ And yet, paradoxically, his proclaimed ‘endeavour’ was ‘not so much to strike out new lines of inquiry as to adapt the methods already sanctioned by the approval of European men of science to the special conditions which have to be taken account of in India’.Footnote ²²⁴ In organizing the enquiry, his objective ‘was to multiply independent observations and to give as much play as possible to the working of the comparative method’.Footnote ²²⁵

Interestingly, a careful survey of these circulars sent to the batches of correspondents reveals that these largely dealt with questions around ‘caste’: correction of caste names in the 1881 census data, and collection of information on physical appearance and dress styles of communities (Circular A); clarification about local castes for which data were obscure (Circular B); details on exogamy and marriage (Circular C); and knowledge about the ‘social precedence’ of castes (Circular D).Footnote ²²⁶ When it came to eliciting information on tribes, these circulars were woefully inadequate. Surely an elaborate questionnaire which required close interaction with communities should have yielded more enthusiasm for including ethnographic information on tribes. Although Risley defended the surveys on the grounds that they had opened the way to ‘more exhaustive forms of research’, he admitted that the ethnographic surveys on which he had relied were ‘superficial and inadequate’ and ‘fell far short of the high standard of research’ that Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen had achieved among Aboriginal Australians (1899) or W. H. R. Rivers among the South Indian Todas (1906). Thus, despite his employing Baboo Girindra Chandra Banerji, Gagan Chandra Banerji, F. A. Slack Esq., Baboo Rakhal Das Haidar, C. A. G. Lillingston Esq., and the Munsif of Palamow to conduct enquiries in Chhotanagpur,Footnote ²²⁷ it was Dalton's account of 1872 that formed the basis of Risley's 12-page ethnographic report on the Oraons,Footnote ²²⁸ in which he, like Dalton, used ‘Kurukh’ as a synonym for Oraon.Footnote ²²⁹ Clearly, then, Risley's primary interest, particularly in the context of tribe, was not in ethnography but in ethnology! Babu Rakhaldas Haldar, who had been especially mentioned by Dalton for his notes on the ‘tribes’ of Chhotanagpur, was asked by Risley to provide a list of castes, which he sought to organize with ‘extreme difficulty’ on the basis of ‘social precedence’.Footnote ²³⁰ On the importance of Risley's handbooks, Fuller argues that these were never considered to be significant by anthropologists in Britain who were more ‘intrigued’ by ‘the supposedly primitive, “animist”, hill and forest tribes’.Footnote ²³¹ Extending his argument, I suggest that this disinterest was precisely because Risley's writings displayed his peripheral ethnographic interest in ‘tribes’ in comparison to his concerns with ‘caste’.

What, then, was Risley's preferred method for his ethnological investigations? Authentic historical data that would provide information about society, he believed, did not exist in India.Footnote ²³² Moreover, having framed the ethnographic enquiry, he argued, rather incongruously, that since different communities had borrowed customs and practices from one another, it was not possible to classify them on the basis of direct enquiry or observations. Physical characteristics, in contrast, tended to be preserved. Unlike ethnography, anthropometry—the method of measuring the head, nose, and stature of a person—was best suited for ethnological classifications. Through the study of physical characteristics, it was possible to connect ‘great families of mankind’,Footnote ²³³ and ‘fix vague personal impressions by reducing them to statistical formulas’.Footnote ²³⁴ On the advice of William Henry Flower, director of the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, London, and William Turner, the anthropologist from Edinburgh, Risley drew upon techniques suggested by Paul Topinard, a student of Paul Broca and Oldfield Thomas.Footnote ²³⁵ Foregrounding anthropometry as a ‘part of the circle of studies grouped together under the head of anthropology’, Risley emphasized the importance of this method:

For Risley, it was the visible, physical characteristics of the human body upon which taxonomists were to base their racial classifications. On the basis of his anthropometric data, he distinguished two extreme types of features and physique, which he provisionally termed ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian’; within ‘the people of the Indian Empire’, he identified seven ‘physical types’: Turko-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Scytho-Dravidian, Aryo-Dravidian, Mongolo-Dravidian, Mongoloid, and Dravidian.Footnote ²³⁷ Risley challenged, thereby, the relevance of philological connections in defining race. Unlike ‘the elder generation of philologists’ who had assumed that ‘affinity of language implies affinity of race’, he argued that if races spoke the same language, it was proved that they had at some time or other been in close contact.Footnote ²³⁸ The ideas of Campbell that Dalton had drawn upon in his Descriptive Ethnology were now overthrown by Risley:

As Trautmann has pointed out, anthropometry saved the unity of the aboriginal against the linguists, and sustained a two-race theory of the making of the Indian people.Footnote ²⁴⁰ Except for a relatively long (dolichocephalic) head that the Aryan and Dravidian types were believed to share, ‘all other characters present a marked contrast’. Risley described the Dravidian race, which included the Oraons, as follows:

Dalton had used race almost interchangeably with that of the ‘nation’; for Risley, race acquired a more specialized meaning. It came to signify the visible, physical characteristics of the human body, expressed in abstruse terms, upon which taxonomists were to base their classifications. The Oraons of Chotanagpur were represented through two tables: a sample of a hundred Oraon men between the ages of 25 and 45 was taken as representative example from Lohardaga, their birthplace; they were measured according to different indices such as nasal, nasomalar, cephalic, and so on.Footnote ²⁴²

But what made the Dravidians a tribe? After all, the social division of race, as Risley pointed out, could take the form of ‘either tribes or castes’.Footnote ²⁴³ While anthropometry had helped him to identify races, it was the doctrine of evolution in anthropology that enabled him to establish a connection between race and tribe. Race, at its most primitive stage, Risley argued, appeared in the form of tribe; the tribe, as ‘primitive society’, appeared in its most uncontaminated form when in isolation. The Dravidians, who lived over a vast area ‘extending from Ceylon to the valley of the Ganges and pervading the whole of Madras, Hyderabad, the Central Provinces, most of Central India, and Chota Nagpur’,Footnote ²⁴⁴ were the ‘most primitive’Footnote ²⁴⁵ and ‘the oldest of the seven types’ of races in India.Footnote ²⁴⁶ The ‘savage’ and the ‘barbarian’ tribe in earlier descriptions was now, on the evolutionary scale, the ‘primitive’: onto spatial differences was added a temporal dimension. ‘In its most compact and vigorous form’, Risley wrote, the Dravidian tribe existed ‘among the people of Chota Nagpur’,Footnote ²⁴⁷ where the isolated existence of the Munda, Santhal, Oraon, Kharia, and other tribes in the region had ensured the preservation of their original profile. He elaborated upon his argument: ‘the vast stretches of fever-haunted jungle, the absence of roads, and the compact tribal organization and independent spirit of the Dravidian races have tended to preserve them singularly free from the intrusion of foreign influence, and for these reasons I believe that their measurement may be taken as fairly typical’.Footnote ²⁴⁸

Understanding marriage patterns was critical to Risley's anthropological framework. Risley believed that the use of anthropometry was possible in India given ‘the unique institution of marriage’ in the country which had prevented ‘the constant intermixture of types’ as had happened in Europe.Footnote ²⁴⁹ In Europe, ‘anthropometry has to confess itself hindered, if not baffled, by the constant intermixture of types, obscuring the data ascertained by measurements’; in India, in contrast, ‘the process of fusion was long arrested’ because of ‘an inexorable social law’ that prevented members of the ‘mutually exclusive aggregates’, into which the population was divided, to ‘marry outside of the group to which they themselves belong’.Footnote ²⁵⁰ In the context of tribe, equated by him with the most primitive of races, Risley drew upon concepts from evolutionary anthropology to discuss the importance of totems, which it was believed were critical for the selection of a spouse in primitive societies. The tribes in Chhotanagpur, he wrote, were ‘usually divided into a number of exogamous groups, each of which bears the name of an animal or plant common in the locality’.Footnote ²⁵¹ ‘Totemistic septs’ were ‘found among the … Oraons’, who still retained ‘their original language’, worshipped ‘non-Aryan gods’, and had ‘a fairly compact tribal organization’; 73 such groups were identified by Risley.Footnote ²⁵²

Although an individual totem was considered by Risley to be crucial for the selection of a spouse, its role in other social interactions, he observed, was marginal. How, then, was he to justify, on the basis of ‘Indian data’, the criticality of totems when these were apparently of little significance in the everyday life of tribes? Explaining the ‘rationality’, or ‘the lack of it’, behind the attachment to totems in tribal communities, Risley wrote:

In other words, then, when anthropological concepts did not correspond to his observations, Risley often resorted to far-fetched explanations that could not be accommodated within the Western scientific paradigm.

In yet another instance that reflected Risley's inability to reconcile anthropological frames that he had inherited with his experiences in the field, he wrote to Tylor, requesting him to look at an article that he had written on ‘Primitive Marriage in Bengal’ that was published in the Asiatic Quarterly Review.

Thus, although striving to be a theorist, Risley was, in the final analysis, ‘the man on the spot’. It seemed that it was almost in despair that Risley, who had so emphasized the importance of anthropology, wrote:

In contrast to the professional anthropologist, Risley believed that the colonial administrator's long years of service and interactions with his subjects made him better equipped to understand traditional societies. ‘If such figures as Herbert Spencer or John Lubbock’ had had some personal knowledge of ‘even a single tribe of savage men’, he observed, ‘they would have been forced to realize the extreme difficulty of entering into savage modes of thought, of the imperfection and untrustworthiness of testimony, and of the extraordinary fluidity and mutability of custom itself’. Field experiences would have given them a ‘profound distrust of the statements made in books of travel’ and that indescribable ‘sense of the place’ without which understanding of another culture was impossible.Footnote ²⁵⁶

It was, then, Risley's field experiences, his method of observation, his ‘good fortune … to have been brought into very intimate relations with some of the strongest and most typical Animistic races in India’ that ultimately gave him the edge over the academic anthropologist of the West. Unable to consistently differentiate tribe from caste in the course of his ‘several years of district work in Chota Nagpore’, and finding not just ‘tolerably compact tribes’ but also ‘less definite groups which form a debateable land between the tribe and the caste,Footnote ²⁵⁷ Risley's classifications, descriptive and polythetic, whether based on occupation, totemism, kinship patterns, language, territoriality, or marriage customs, were now tempered. He defined ‘tribe’ with a sprinkling of anthropological jargon, with ample qualifications and tropes of negation, but without certitude of any sort:

Towards a conclusion

Let me summarize the arguments that I seek to make in this article. Colonial officials, who thought and acted in diverse ways, required different modes of ratification of authority at different levels, even when they sought to express the ‘authority of imperium’.Footnote ²⁵⁹ Dialogues and interactions with the ‘native’ populace and observations of local practices were important, but the colonial image of the tribe, particularly from the second half of the nineteenth century, was overarchingly informed by emerging Western disciplines and their methods. Some administrators identified themselves as men of science and academics; there were others who could not always reconcile anthropological theories in circulation with personal observations and experiences in the field. Those like Dalton, as I have demonstrated, revised their accounts as they responded to theoretical imperatives. Others, like Risley, preferred to theorize, supremely confident as they were of their academic accomplishments and their knowledge of anthropology. Yet, almost all expressed their disquiet, and often despair, when evidence from the field and personal experiences failed to match the Western academic theories that they had sought to uphold. There remained, then, an uneasy tension between wider intellectual trends in Europe and their reverberations in the colony, and the imperatives and experiences of governance.

Anthropology, too, we need to recall, was a young discipline, a new intellectual practice that sought to convince the colonial state and the wider world of its importance in the creation of colonial knowledge and its indispensability for administrative purposes. Yet, the tension between knowledge generated from anthropological imperatives, on the one hand, and from philological and linguistic imperatives, on the other, could never be amicably resolved.Footnote ²⁶⁰ For example, even though some of his ideas were subsequently questioned,Footnote ²⁶¹ Risley's conclusions, asserted with characteristic confidence, influenced many, among whom was also G.A. Grierson who had engaged closely with colonial ethnology and contributed to the section on the languages of India in the 1901 Census; Grierson later headed the linguistic survey of India, the introduction to which was published in 1927.Footnote ²⁶² When Risley requested that Grierson examine the ethnological value of linguistic evidence, Grierson, despite writing about the ambiguous relationship between ethnology and philology,Footnote ²⁶³ seemed to eventually agree with Risley's conclusions when he upheld the importance of anthropology in determining questions of race. Grierson wrote:

As Javed Majeed has pointed out, ‘the institutional weight of ethnology and race in the British Raj made it a master discourse hard to break free from’.Footnote ²⁶⁵

However, Grierson's central dilemma persisted: how could one compare anthropology and philology, or rather, knowledge produced through the census operations and the linguistic survey? Did Grierson uphold Risley's belief that ‘ethnological indications given by language’ would corroborate his conclusions about race as understood through anthropometry? In the context of discussing the difficulties in identifying the boundaries of a language, Grierson found that ‘two different observers report different conditions as existing in one and the same area’. Comparing the Census of 1911 and the Linguistic Survey, and now, negating Risley's conclusions, Grierson wrote: ‘I no more maintain that the Survey figures are right than that the Census figures are wrong. From one point of view, both are right, and from another both are wrong. It is a mere question of personal equation.’Footnote ²⁶⁶

I have demonstrated in this article that colonial knowledge on the tribe and the Oraons in particular, and colonial knowledge itself more generally, was produced not always with arrogance and assurance but also with doses of uncertainty and hesitation. Further, as colonial officials, in the course of the nineteenth century, described unknown lands and unfamiliar peoples, the hugely divergent representations of the tribe and of the Oraons reflected the working of a series of lenses: imperial ideologies, scientific concerns, departmental agendas, and personal affiliations. Yet, in the shifting representations of the tribe across the nineteenth century, there is a pattern. In the pre-1850s, indigenous voices could be identified in Orientalist depictions of the inhabitants of Chhotanagpur, local nomenclature was adopted, and voices of dissent—expressed through repeated agrarian protests in Chhotanagpur—were addressed.Footnote ²⁶⁷ By the 1850s, the utilitarian agenda structured colonial imaginaries and administrative interventions. The 1860s witnessed the interplay of incipient ethnological concerns, missionary beliefs, and Arcadian principles that shaped the ‘aboriginal’ tribes of Chhotanagpur. From the 1890s, the idea of tribe was overwhelmingly structured by the supremacy of disciplinary knowledge systems that increasingly supplanted the role of the ‘native’ informant. The shifts within this sequence and across time periods, let me add, were neither smooth, nor instantly recognizable. But what is important to acknowledge is that the tribe was inevitably understood through vocabularies of contrast: sud/shud–mlecchha, plains people–forest dwellers; raja/jagirdar/thikadar–village community; Hindu–Kol aboriginal; Aryan–Dravidian/Kolarian; caste–tribe.