Ādivāsīs, tribes and other neologisms for erasing precolonial pasts

An example from Northeast India

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8961850
AutoresIndrani Chatterjee (0000-0002-9610-5354, Department of History, University of Texas, Austin, USA, autor de correspondencia)
Año2016
Volumen53
Número1
Páginas9-40
Fecha de publicación2016-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Indian Economic & Social History Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0019-4646 • E-ISSN: 0973-0893
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0019464615619530
OpenAlexW2289167218
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas33

This essay engages Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sumit Guha and James C. Scott by arguing that all of them overlook a historically well-evidenced set of subject positions and concepts of space. This was monastic governmentality. Lay and ordained populations attached to monastic teachers and lineages moved and interacted across a vast network of societies till the eighteenth century. The arrival of colonial European armies in the terrain marked by monastic geographicity led to the creation of sites set apart as ‘Nepal’, ‘colonial Assam’, ‘Burma’ and so on. Hitherto pastoralist but Bon-Buddhist monastic subjects were separated from their ‘brothers’ in monastic subjecthood. Such physical separation was reinforced by historical writing as well. In the twentieth century, colonially educated native scribes embraced both geographical and epistemic projects enthusiastically. Bhuyan, the foremost practitioner of this mode of history writing, thus failed to recognise the Buddhist and Bon Tantric cohabitants of the Brahmaputra river valley. In order to establish what was known of these people before Bhuyan’s time of writing, this essay has been organised in three parts. The first contains a short discussion of monastic governmentality and subjecthood. A second provides a truncated narrative of events that brought Mughal armies in the seventeenth century to the same terrain. The third surveys moments from the Company and British military accounts of 1794–1928 to explain the modern postcolonial Indian historian’s aporia towards Buddhist and Bon Tantric populations living alongside Muslim and Hindu groups in the Brahmaputra valley and plains

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Buddhism · Colonialism · Governmentality · Hinduism · Literature · Narrative · Politics · Sociology · Subject (documents · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Sociopolitical Dynamics in Nepal · South Asian Studies and Conflicts