'The word tribe still carries a colonial baggage'

Ezra Rashkow is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University, US, with a new book, The Nature of Endangerment in India: Tigers, ‘Tribes’, Extermination & Conservation, 1818-2020. He talks to TOI about combining years of fieldwork and archival research to examine fears of interlinking biological and cultural diversity loss: What does your research into colonial constructions of ‘the tribal problem’ reveal? My book explores the rhetoric around tribal endangerment and extinction. Fears that ‘tribes’ were under threat, vanishing, or endangered and in need of protection, are as old as the colonial encounter itself. In fact, from the very outset of the Age of Exploration, shortly after Christopher Columbus supposedly discovered the New World, Bartolomé de las Casas would be appointed to the position of Protector of Indians in 1516. And already at that time there was talk of tribal extinction as well. By the mid-19th century, the term ‘tribe’ came to take on socio-cultural evolutionary connotations, referring to people who were seen by Europeans as less than human, and who would probably be obliterated in the struggle for survival unless white saviors intervened. Unfortunately, the word ‘tribe’ still very often carries this colonial baggage today. That’s why I put the term in scare quotes. medium98432418 In India, questions over colonial impact on so-called tribal populations – such as the Bhil and Gond communities with whom I work – started appearing in the archive as soon as the British began conquering their lands. Colonial officers described a process of extermination or eradication of the Bhils and Gonds, with language reaching genocidal proportions at times (in 1821 one officer wrote ‘Nothing but a war of extermination can put an end to… the race of these marauders’). But some colonists also described efforts to prevent their extinction. Missionaries thought they would ‘save’ tribal peoples by saving their souls. Others thought that the best way to protect the tribes was by ‘civilizing’ them. Alternating between the paternalistic and the dehumanizing, the Bhils were described as both ‘wild children’ and ‘wild animals’ to be tamed. In 1926, it was said of one district collector: he ‘hunted his tigers, spanked his wild children with paternal hand and ruled with untrammelled authority’. By the early twentieth century, the ‘tribal problem’, or the question of what should be done about the tribes – whether they were endangered and could be saved, or whether they were inexorably doomed for extinction – became a major colonial anxiety for administrators, anthropologists and others, especially a newly emerging class of Indian nationalist anthropologists What overlaps have you found in the endangerment discourse around tribals and tigers, and how are these overlaps injurious? When people hear the word ‘endangered’ they typically think ‘endangered species’. And so, one reasonable critique might be that calling indigenous peoples endangered is offensive because these are the same people who have historically faced a barrage of racist, dehumanising, attacks comparing them to wild beasts to be exterminated, and now they are being compared to endangered wildlife species to be conserved. And these kinds of analogies between endangered tigers and tribes are definitely still there in a lot of social and environmental activism today. But a major argument in my book is that concern for disappearing tribal societies occurred centuries before any equivalent environmentalist push to protect endangered species – especially species of carnivores like tigers that until the mid-twentieth century were seen as dangerous vermin to be eradicated – and that in fact the environmental discourse of endangered species and wildlife conservation emerged from the language of this earlier concern Can you share some insights from your fieldwork among tribal communities resettled because of the Narmada dam? First of all, in the case of the Narmada, the level of tribal endangerment discourse has truly been intense at times. Labeled as ecocide, ethnocide, and even genocide, the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam was said to threaten to destroy not only the Bhils’ way of life but the Bhils themselves. Medha Patkar and Baba Amte, in an award speech for their work with the Narmada Bachao Andolan spoke of ‘tribal societies which cannot be allowed to be extinct’. And language pairing ethnocide and ecocide would become a defining feature of the outward face of the anti-dam movement. There was a common refrain among external, middle-class, activists, many coming from urban centers such as Bombay and Delhi, and international activists coming from around the world, that not only was the valley being drowned, but also tribal culture and a forest-based way of life along with it. In my own experiences in the valley, it’s a lot more complicated than just a simple declaration that these communities are endangered or extinct. For communities struggling for rights and recognition, the assertion by outsiders that they are vanishing, or even that they are already extinct, can be particularly damaging. But for some Adivasis who are activists themselves, it might also make sense to embrace this kind of trope – in an act of what might be called strategic essentialism – as an attempt to garner support or gain sympathy from NGOs, the media, etc. Overall, the choice of whether or not to identify as endangered has major implications for Adivasi politics and for the way Adivasi identity is conceived. If you talk to many Adivasis themselves, talk to local leaders in the Narmada movement from the late 1980s through early 2000s, let’s say, you will find that (a) their communities are very much alive and not extinct, and that (b) they don’t usually think of themselves or their culture as particularly endangered. When it comes to the Bhils, this a huge, heterogenous, community of somewhere north of 16 million people in India today, made up of different communities like Bhilala, Pawra, Padvi, Tadvi, Vasava, etc., and so different people are certainly going to have different ideas about the health of their community, culture, traditional livelihoods, languages, identity, etc. Similarly, the Gond population of India is over 13 million. So, I am not speaking here of some small-scale, isolated, relic population, only existing in one mountain village, that is fading away. Overall, people are proud of their culture and traditions, and even though now living in resettlement colonies, many old NBA leaders insisted that they had won their fight. As I recount in the book, one former leader told me: ‘we didn’t lose. We won. Medha’s fight was to stop the dam and save the environment. Ours was for land, to make sure we could have a decent life’. In his perspective, his community got a reasonable resettlement package with good agricultural land to farm. They were resettled together as a community and even their traditional teak timber-framed homes were moved down from the hills, giving them a sense of continuity as well. Attending a traditional Bhil wedding in a resettlement colony, watching people sing and dance to traditional songs one evening, an anthropologist friend of mine who had been living with this particular community for years, turned and joked to me: ‘See! Here are your endangered tribals’ This is not to say that there is no real suffering or precarity. There certainly is, especially in resettlement. But the perspective that says ‘tribal = forest’ and that loss of forests equals death for so-called tribals is a gross oversimplification, and one that relies on a whole long history of romanticist, primitivist stereotypes about who and what these communities are. Living and working with Bhil and Gond communities, I have rarely encountered this kind of framing – a metanarrative of what I call endangerment discourse – unless prodded by activists to express their plight this way. Instead, people are concerned about the everyday struggles in their lives. What did you find out specifically about the resettlement process of free, prior and informed consent? Following mobilisation by various activist groups, some of those displaced from the Narmada Valley gave informed consent when it came to resettlement. But in the case of populations being displaced from national parks and other protected areas, there has been less outside intervention, less media attention, and a much less protracted process. Here, many communities do give prior consent to moving out of their forest villages, but this consent is not usually well informed. The question of how free such decisions are is also tricky. Back in 2005, when I first started doing oral history interviews of local people being displaced from conservation areas like Kanha National Park and the Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve, I was shocked to hear that many people either wanted to move out of the parks, or if they had already moved out, had willingly agreed to do so. These people told me that they wanted access to basic things like schools, hospitals, roads and electricity, and that they were unable to get access to any of these amenities living inside the parks. Some were also sick of being harassed by park officials, and so wanted to move. This is not to say that upon doing follow-up interviews years later that everyone was happy in resettlement (that’s far from the case). While growing up as a teenager in America, I was exposed to a big dose of NGO activist imagery from groups (like Survival International) that say removing indigenous peoples from forests will equal cultural death for these communities, and that we westerners have to help save the tribes before it is too late. So, I was surprised to learn that a significant number of Adivasis I interviewed – but not all – were actually opting to move out of these forest areas. Even as the Ladakh demand to be included in the Sixth Schedule gathers strength, how successful have you found this constitutional provision to be in its goal of preserving tribal cultural heritage? I only ever visited Ladakh once, in 2009. It was absolutely beautiful. But I don’t think I have enough experience to speak much about the situation there. I will say, however, that all constitutions are historical products, representative of their day and age, and in the 1950s characteristics such as ‘primitive traits’, ‘shyness of contact’, ‘geographical isolation’ and level of ‘backwardness’ were being used as indicators for determining how ‘Scheduled Tribes’ should be classified and protected by the Indian government. So, there’s an important historical lesson here, and it’s one of the important lessons of the book: old colonial paradigms have an eerie way of repeatedly creeping back up into present politics. Many British anthropologists and administrators specifically wanted to protect what they saw as the more exotic, and thus supposedly authentic, features of tribal societies. This logic stuck when the constitution was being written. And the same outlook has come up again since the 1980s, when urban Indian middle-class activists, as well as international tribal rights organizations, started getting involved in various struggles for Adivasi land rights. In what way do you find the protectionist discourse about tribals unnecessarily pessimistic? Pessimistic isn’t exactly the word I’d use, but I would say that historically it’s often been paternalistic, romanticist, and primitivist. Indian nationalist anthropologists offered stinging critiques of this kind of colonial protectionism, calling people like Verrier Elwin ‘isolationists’ and ‘anthropological dictators’, and accusing them of wanting to keep tribes in a zoo or museum. But to be fair, the other side of the coin certainly hasn’t been any better. Of course, there were those in the colonial era who literally called for genocide of indigenous peoples – folks like Charles Dickens who expressed absolutely atrocious sentiment like: ‘I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth’ and referred to ‘wars of extermination’ as ‘the best thing I know of him’. But even in independence era India people like GS Ghurye argued that India’s tribes had no unique or endangered culture and were merely backwards Hindus to be reincorporated into the national mainstream. And the Sangh Parivar still today has organizations like the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, which seek, in their own words, ‘to eliminate the chasm between Hindu community and their Vanvasi brethren’, thus promoting a goal of assimilating the tribes into the Hindu mainstream and erasing any trace of tribal distinctiveness. How would you assess the impact of the Forest Rights Act? Well, the verdict is literally out right now. Since 2019 there has been a case winding its way through the Supreme Court, which according to tribal rights activists threatens to evict millions of people from the nation’s forests. One group, literally called Wildlife First, which ‘believes in the ideology of strictly protected wildlife reserves’, is pushing for these evictions, as they are calling most claims made under the FRA ‘ineligible and bogus’. A ruling might be coming any day now. In principle, I support the FRA. People should have the right to live in their ancestral forest villages, and maintain a forest-based way of life, if that’s what they want. Unfortunately, however, it’s rarely been that simple. It has been immensely difficult to move away from the old fortress conservation paradigm, which sees a need to maintain strictly human-free protected areas. And there are many in positions of power who would portray the FRA as nothing more than a populist land grab. The way the FRA was originally framed has major problems as well. It paints Adivasis with a veneer of ecological nobility, with phrases in the act like ‘conservation is embedded in the ethos of tribal life’. And this kind of rhetoric points to a whole history of even more problematic attempts to preserve tribal people and their cultures in nature. The last chapter of my book, for instance, is all about the long and disturbing history of the idea that endangered tribal cultures should be protected, like forms of wildlife, in national parks.Photo by Ezra Rashkow