Ādivāsīs, tribes and other neologisms for erasing precolonial pasts

An example from Northeast India

Bibliographic Data

ID8961850
AuthorsIndrani Chatterjee (0000-0002-9610-5354, Department of History, University of Texas, Austin, USA, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume53
Issue1
Pages9-40
Publication date2016-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Indian Economic & Social History Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0019-4646 • E-ISSN: 0973-0893
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0019464615619530
OpenAlexW2289167218
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited33

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