Introduction
This article focuses on the shifting rights over land that emerged in the wake of the establishment of colonial administration in the ex-zamindari of Borasambar, in the Chhattisgarh division of the British Central Provinces in the eventful period from 1860–1926. It also traces how events from this period have shaped land memories of Adivasi villagers in relation to their claims over land. Oral narratives and documents preserved by Binjhal villagers juxtaposed with archived records of military expedition, village surveys, administrative letters, and land settlement reports reveal that Binjhal ancestors lost titled land and offices of village headmanship in this period. These losses impoverished and diminished the descendants of Binjhal headmen in the rural social hierarchy, while codification of legal rights produced secure occupancy rights for tenant-cultivators and grounds for contestation over these rights among the co-sharers of land. This article argues that the colonial officials were receptive to past structures, fractures, and disputes in the local society and shows how local actors interpreted legal culture around land in transacting with the administration, illuminating the routes through which a pre-colonial land-controlling group became Adivasi.
The transition of many social groups in nineteenth-century Central India from militant tribesmen to impoverished low status groups on the periphery of agrarian societies marks a pivotal moment in Adivasi history. Colonial administrators described the ex-zamindari of Borasambar initially as a shelter for rebels and bandits and later as a valuable estate that required improvement. Under the administration of the British Central Province, the area gained the duality of forested famine-prone tracts inhabited by aboriginals and fertile valleys with multi-caste villages. Bates argues that the land revenue system that created access to land in this province was based on the cultivation of specific plots that rendered nomadic groups and Adivasi shifting cultivators into landless labour.Footnote 1 Prasad dates the dispossession of the Adivasis to the late eighteenth century, which brought an end to the Maratha rule and accelerated agrarian sedentarization.Footnote 2 Colonial writers associated the province's past with Gondwana, the ancient kingdom of the Gonds, and were receptive to the special attributes of the inhabitants of this region.Footnote 3 The 1872 census of the province identified a third of the population in most districts as aboriginals or hill tribes, with Gonds being the largest group.Footnote 4 Later in the twentieth century, colonial administrative enquiries would find that the aboriginal inhabitants of the province were vulnerable to exclusion from land and in need of state protection.Footnote 5 But in the Central Provinces, as Bates argues, changes under colonial rule came late and proceeded gradually.Footnote 6 For much of the nineteenth century, property forms that would regulate land in the province were a work in progress.
Colonial property regimes are synonymous with the expropriation of Adivasis’ land through the creation of land scarcity, production of labour surplus reshaping natural environments, and diminishing forest economies.Footnote 7 But contemporary Adivasis tend to use historical protective legacies from this period to support their claims for restitution, reparation, and justice, paradoxically in the context of contemporary land dispossessions.Footnote 8 Since Adivasis are associated with non-legal or extra-legal land, in existing scholarship disputes over land mediated through revenue tenancies, titles, and tenures have remained peripheral to Adivasi histories, which tend to focus on the spectacular episodes of resistance. In this article, Adivasi history is attempted by following the nodes where the land memories from the ethnographic present of Binjhal villagers meet the debates and decisions about the land categories and associated rights among the administrators of the British-ruled Central Provinces. Contemporary Adivasis often find lost ancestral land in colonial-era records of rights, titles, and disputes. However, these roles and entitlements also illuminate the administrative decision-making that supported the mapping, assessment, and regulation of land to establish improved and productive villages in a conquered territory that led to simplifications and mistranslations of existing land use along with notions of possessive rights.
Loss of ancestral lands, tied to contemporary processes of landlessness, is a founding event for the politics of modern Adivasis, drawing them ever closer to ideas of indigeneity, even though such identifications are criticized in scholarship.Footnote 9 Damodaran views indigeneity linked to ethnic purity and the notion of ancient and pre-political ties to territorial land as problematic.Footnote 10 Others such as Padel find that the Adivasis were a remnant of a fragile indigenous culture rooted in an ecologically sensitive non-agrarian habitatFootnote 11 and subject to external threat.Footnote 12 For Shah, notions of indigeneity obscure the social and economic inequalities that emerged from capitalism and the modern state and caused these conditions for Adivasis. Footnote 13 The use of indigeneity for ‘ideological projects of protection and assimilation’, moreover, erases the heterogeneity of Adivasi history.Footnote 14 Others find indigeneity is best viewed as a symbolic resource that is deployed by modern Adivasis in the politics of redistributive justiceFootnote 15 and to negotiate with the state.Footnote 16 As Steur argues, when local groups describe themselves as Adivasi and mobilize around notions of indigeneity, they disrupt the coherence in dominant discourses about the Adivasi.Footnote 17 Contrasting views about Adivasi conditions and political practices provide a window into the complexity of their experiences that forges particular relationships and attitudes to lands that they occupy, use, remember, and claim in relation to the past. While the Adivasis are not similar to ‘pre-conquest societies’, there is value in understanding the historicity in their land memories beyond the argument that these merely revealed the justificatory myths and discourses of imperial rule or that they reflected only the pulls of present politics.Footnote 18 This understanding emerges from the problems and possibilities of juxtaposing two different forms of accounting for the past in this article: the memories of Binjhal Adivasi villagers, located in the ex-zamindari of Borasambar in East-Central India, and the ethnographic present and the archived accounts of the establishment of colonial rule in this region.
Figure 1. Borasambar zamindari in the Central Provinces. Source: ‘Map.20. Political divisions of the Indian empire’, in The Imperial Gazetteer of India, Atlas, Volume 26. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909.
Impoverished Binjhals in many villages claimed a valuable tract of land, the headman's share, through idioms of estranged kinship, transgressions of boundary-crossing women, and the facts of legal records. Colonial reports associated a similar land category as central to the contractual obligation of village headmen under the Central Provinces tenancy laws. A curious thread in the village stories foregrounds the roles played by women from the headman and zamindar families in land transactions. Headman stories established land as socially embedded and framed by patriarchal brotherhood and criticism of land sellers in a context where the transfer of land became common. Women as eternal outsiders to agnatic groups are both endowed with mobility and deemed unsuitable to be landowners, allowing them to become important intermediaries in the transfer of land.Footnote 19 Archival records suggest that women's inheritance claims to headman's land emerged here in response to the contractual roles and legal categories that were created to regulate land occupation, access, and transfers in the nineteenth century.Footnote 20 The central theme of headman stories resonates with the findings of an administrative enquiry about the dispossession of ‘aboriginal’ headmen and tenants in the Central Provinces that took place through the process of ‘the indirect method of surrender to the landlord’. This form of transaction subverted the prohibition against buying and selling of land under the Central Provinces tenancy law.Footnote 21 Unlike Adivasi claims that describe ancestral loss of ancient land, administrative reports explain exclusions of ‘aboriginal’ headmen and tenants as gaps in implementation or local fraudulent practices, from the baseline of colonial provincial law.
This article emphasizes the need to account for the historicity,Footnote 22 as well as pragmatic interest of the agents, in headman stories that frame the glorious past of the Binjhal Adivasis. The historical fact, as Ricoeur argues, is ‘not the event itself given to the conscious life of a witness, but the contents of a statement meant to represent it’, but history is more than just narration or fiction.Footnote 23 In this article, a historical account of Adivasi land is attempted through a ‘confrontation of testimonies’Footnote 24 obtained from the moral accounts of villagers about the loss of headman land and administrative reports and debates around the military, revenue, and agrarian projects of the colonial state that frequently invoked the ‘aboriginal’ character of the province. Examination of the disputed versions of the headman's land contributes to the understanding of the multiple moorings of the Adivasi condition: how groups once described as aboriginal became landless, the grounds for their landed belonging, and how idioms of disrupted solidarities arise around access to land bound by legal permissions and prohibitions.
Historians have shown how colonial property regimes that supported projects of productivity and labour mobilityFootnote 25 or legitimized revenue systems and markets in landFootnote 26 were plural and contingent in nature and subject to diverse forces.Footnote 27 While providing the legal and political environment for the operation of market forces and penetration of capital, the effects produced by such regimes were contradictory.Footnote 28 As Mosse argues, the principles of property, revenue, or law were practices that took shape through ruptures in existing social and political systems, and their transformational agenda was often tempered with concerns about order and stability.Footnote 29 Officials were attentive to rights and practices,Footnote 30 while indigenous agents deployed property law, extending its liberal commitmentsFootnote 31 within ambitious programmes of transformation. Shutzer describes how land rights in colonial Orissa were created to prevent unjust expropriation by the state based on ‘Lockean principles’ and not territorial group identities.Footnote 32 Disputed versions of entitlements around land, in Adivasi memories and past administration, enable the understanding of the nature and forms of exclusions that took place during a period of rapid political, economic, and social change when protected tenancy titles transferred conditional rights to groups who were deemed more supportive of colonial revenue policies, while local resistance mediated how such distributions would take shape, who it would affect, and which groups would helm the land scarce/labour surplus society that emerged. Present memories and archived reports produce coherent narratives to describe and explain the consequences of such distributions for the aboriginals in records and Adivasis in the present context.
The narratives explored in this article draw upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted over 12 months in 2002–2003 in several villages of Borasambar ex-zamindari, a region in Western Odisha. Colonial village land records and reports were consulted at the state archives in Bhubaneswar, the district record room at Sambalpur, and the India records room at the British Library in London. The remainder of the article is structured as follows. The next two sections draw on ethnography to describe stories of ancestral loss and disputes over the bhogra, a category of land associated with village headmanship. The three sections that follow are based on archival research that trace critical moments in the transition of Borasambar ex-zamindari from a border kingdom with respect to the regional Marathas in the eighteenth century to a part of the British Central Provinces. In Borasambar ex-zamindari, the ancestors of Binjhal villagers, a pre-colonial land-controlling group, fought to preserve pre-colonial roles by participating in uprisings that resulted in early gains, but they were less successful in maintaining titles and tenancy rights, resulting in agrarian landlessness, labour bondage, and forest dependence.
An Adivasi village
In my early days in Mahulkonda, the principal fieldwork village, cautious residents encouraged me to visit Adivasi areas since their village had no special features to interest a visitor. Mahulkonda, they would insist, was not an Adivasi village due to the development of agriculture, growing literacy, and the depletion of forests. But for a naive outsider like me, even most agrarian villages of Borasambar could evoke an Adivasi area effortlessly. Everywhere, the landscape was dotted with luxuriant trees of Mahul, Char, Semel, and Sahaj,Footnote 33 the undulating bush-covered lands were interrupted only occasionally by embanked fields of rice, and, depending on the season, the area could appear wildly non-agrarian, embodied by the casually slung axes on the shoulders of men, the lines of women clad in identical blue-green homespun who walked uphill with head-loads of bamboo, and the rough and shaded village paths where the call of cicadas would be broken only by the rhythmic note of paddy huskers.
Mahulkonda was only 30 kilometres from the sub-divisional headquarters. But miles of walking or bumpy jeep rides were needed to reach the nearest bus route to take the villagers into the town, which was not more than a large market village. Enveloped by red-brown cattle dust at dawn and dusk, Mahulkonda and the surrounding villages appeared remote and distant from the crowded caste-ordered villages of both Odisha and Chhattisgarh, the states on whose borders the region was located. I learnt with time how the great trees and animals of the forests flanking the boundaries of villages had disappeared decades ago and how, with the loss of the forest, sightings of the boundary spirits became rare. In the area, being Adivasi was associated with specific social groups who were classified as Scheduled Tribes but more generally with unmodern practices of the past mired in poverty, famines, and forest dwelling. In Mahulkonda, an average-sized village, with 300 households, people took pride in talking about agrarian prosperity, the quality of its produce, and the contradictory stories about the Adivasi past.
Over time, I learnt to observe the order of the well-tended farms and the mainly earthen homes that stood sentinel on the two sides of the main street. Every fragment of the up and down land was also a numbered field that could be found in the village map, even as their esoteric names summoned ancestral deeds. Ancient disputes often interrupted the mundane conversations through which fields were bought, sold, inherited, gifted, sharecropped, tree-cleared, and mortgaged. My questions about land were received warily and guided into particular routes. I was invited to visit farms, to taste produce, and to many homes for meals but also cautioned about forests, witches, and gossips. In the endless conversations with people in Mahulkonda, Adivasi and non-Adivasi, women, men, and children, while a devastating drought season was unfolding, I found the multiple meanings, transactions, and relationships that anchored people to land. Captivated especially by the dramatic accounts of the Binjhals who were a prominent Adivasi group of this region,Footnote 34 constituting 27 per cent of the households in Mahulkonda, I chased land memories from village to village and record rooms to archives for many years. The discussions in this section are based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2002–2003.Footnote 35 Introducing the referents of Binjhal Adivasi identity in the local society and ending with the infamous disputes over the headman's bhogra land, this section sets the context for discussing the events and processes that led to the transfer of headmanship in many villages in this area.
Binjhals, marginal cultivators, and landless farm workers are associated with the past history and cultural heritage of the ex-zamindari of Borasambar in myths, legends, stories, and songs. Mahulkonda is located in the southeast of the area in the valley of the Ong, a minor tributary of the Mahanadi river. ‘Zamindari’ is an administrative term from the colonial period, but Sambalpur district zamindaris are very different from the permanently settled zamindaris of Bengal. The eastern part of Borasambar is considered more agricultural and village society is made up of many castes. Binjhals are a numerically predominant group in the western villages, which are also more forested.Footnote 36 Despite the association of the group with the rulers of the zamindari, the position of the Binjhals in the social hierarchy was low as the rural society was dominated by landowning cultivator castes like the Kultha, Brahman, and Haldiya-Teli. Among the farming community, Binjhals were associated with the labouring role and status they held. A popular translation of the term—‘Bin-jhalo’—means those who do not sweat, indicating the capacity of the group to labour hard.Footnote 37 Binjhals mostly rejected the ascriptions of inferior status, including the ranks and hierarchies based on caste, by recounting collective memories of having been a ruling and land-controlling community once. For the farming community, Binjhals’ relationship with land was a form of ritual guardianship that was understood through the colonial-era service tenure of the jhankar (priest) that can be found in all villages in this area. The jhankar conducted protective ceremonies around planting, harvest, forest produce, and sacrifices to the fertility deity and boundary spirits in the shrine located in the village sacred grove.
For the Binjhal villagers, the jhankar symbolized the remnant of the great social, economic, and political power of the Adivasis in this region that was derived from prior settlement and rule. To give me an authoritative account of this ‘glorious past’, some Mahulkonda Binjhals took me to meet an important community leader. The leader informed me later that he was collecting historical data about the community from colonial gazetteers of Odisha and Chhattisgarh. The Binjhals, according to him, were an honest and patriotic people with royal connections, but they became impoverished due to their deficient moral qualities. Like the curators of the Adivasi musem interviewed by Alice Tilche, the Binjhal community leader emphasized the need for moral reform in order to restore the glorious pastFootnote 38 of the Adivasi. The following excerpt is from one of my several conversations with the leader that took place in a dusty classroom of a primary school in a village called Kunopalli:Footnote 39
The Binjhals were not bandits. Their rulers like the zamindars of Ghens were patriots who fought the British.Footnote 40 They were once a great people who held important positions of authority. But being Adivasis they were also fond of chasing the barah (boar) in summer months and forgot to tend their farms. They had great knowledge of forest, shamanic rites around fertility, diseases and harvest, but they loved mahul (liquor distilled from mahua flowers). But even as poor people, they remained honest and simple, like all Adivasis. You must have heard about the campaign against Bauxite mining on the Gandhamardan hills.Footnote 41 The Binjhals came out with their bows and arrows to protect their land, as they have done many times in the past.
In the leader's account, the Binjhals assumed a generic Adivasi identity, now linked to a past ‘culture’ of soldiering and deification of rulers as patriots, through what Vitebsky describes as the idioms of ‘retro-continuity’.Footnote 42 Recalibrating the soldiering identity of the Binjhals to the campaign against Bauxite mining, an aggressive new claimant of land, saw the successful mobilization of the collective and composite upland culture.Footnote 43 The headman stories, commonly recounted by Binjhal villagers and well known in many villages of Borasambar, were about prior settlement and at some distance from the xenophobic politics that has increasingly found a receptive audience among the Adivasis.Footnote 44 In Binjhal headman stories, in all villages of Borasambar there were two headmen. While the juna (old or earlier) headman was a Binjhal, the nua (new or later) headman belonged to a different social group, usually from local farming castes. Instead of the mythical bow-wielding forest dwellers, headman stories reframed and embedded the land claims of the Binjhal Adivasis within colonial and pre-colonial administrative roles. These stories reframed land as an ancestral and legal right, and embedded it in the brothers’ share obtained through labour.
Binjhal headman stories
In the Borasambar villages not a single field was unclaimed. Land was worshipped, owned, occupied, used, sold, and mourned in many ways. Rippling under the surface of order were recurrent disputes between many unequal contenders: landlords and farm workers, headman and cultivators, women and their affines. Stories about how many Binjhal households lost access to arable land when their ancestors were evicted from the bhogra were common in many villages. The bhogra constituted a large stretch of continuous land in all Borasambar villages that is irrigated and supported more than one crop season in an area of frequent droughts. It showcased productivity, industry, and represented the power and authority of the gountia (headmen). Under the British Central Provinces law, the bhogra was the revenue official's rent-free land, and under colonial law, a fourth of all agricultural land in every village. Depending on the size of village, the bhogra could range in size from 50–400 acres. In the past, the bhogra was cultivated with the beth-begari (free labour) of tenant-cultivators of the village.
Binjhal households, who traced their descent from the old headman family, claimed the bhogra as their ancestral land, although it was the private property of the descendants of the new headman family. A significant feature of this dispute was how the land memories mobilized by the Binjhal villagers in their claims making revolved around the motif of internal disruption within the group through the immoral actions of some members and the unjust exercise of power by others. Rather than reinforce the known divisions and confrontations around tribal land, such as caste-tribe or state-community, these stories open up a different discussion about the pasts of Adivasi actions around land. But these stories also reflected the growing competition over land, in the context of the declining power and influence of agrarian landlords, assertiveness of labour, and the rise of tribal politics.
The Binjhal stories were collected from four villages in a 25 kilometre radius of Mahulkonda. In the first story, the widow of the Binjhal headman resigns the title of office to the Borasambar zamindar. In the second story, relations of the Binjhal headman, who was evicted from the bhogra, refuse to allow new occupants to farm the land. In the third story, the Binjhal headman is forced to resign the headmanship after being charged with banditry in a famine year. In the fourth story, after the headman's widow resigns the office to the zamindar, the relations of the headman are evicted from the bhogra and forced to settle on inferior land. The transfer of headmanship described in all four stories can be found in the village record of rights, and in two cases, from the legal eviction notices shared by the descendants.
Resignation
When the long rainless days of unending summer erased the very traces of cultivation from the fields of Borasambar, elderly Binjhal men were occupied with delicate odds and ends, making fish traps or repairing birdcages. As they worked strips of bamboo into intricate shapes, they told me stories about their ancestors. One afternoon, Shankaro, an elderly Binjhal man and descendant of the ex-headman family of Mahulkonda, told me how his ancestors lost the bhogra. The land was spread over 100 acres and was among the most fertile fields in the village. What follows is a paraphrased version of conversations that took place over many days.
A long time ago, Shankaro's ancestors performed a valorous deed for the Borasambar zamindar. In return the grateful ruler gave them the rights over the malikana (rent) and malguzari (revenue) of 12 villages, including Mahulkonda, as inam (gift).Footnote 45 About five generations ago, one of their ancestors, Jogendra Singh Bariha, became the headman of Mahulkonda. When he died without a male heir, his widow Kaushilya, following some differences with Jogendra's relations, submitted istafa (resignation) from the headmanship to the zamindar. Kaushilya, according to family lore, wished to marry her brother-in-law. When this proposal was rejected, she complained to the Borasambar zamindar about the misdeeds of her husband's family. The zamindar accepted her resignation, compensated Kaushilya with land, and arranged her marriage to one of his khamari (farm supervisor). And thus Mahulkonda was made a khamar (domain of the zamindar) and the bhogra was subsumed in the zamindar's ‘home farm’. To mark the transition, the zamindar came to Mahulkonda on his elephant and had village criers announce the change of rule. Shankaro asked me to check the village record of rights to verify his story.
Through this process, Jogendra's agnatic relations (brothers and uncles), who were the hissadars (co-sharers), lost the rights to cultivate the bhogra. This made them landless, as all other agricultural land was occupied by tenants and recorded as tenant-holdings. They named a child born that year (1917) ‘Zabti', from zabt (confiscation).Footnote 46 In 1942, the zamindar sold the village revenue contract to a man from the farmer caste, making him the new headman of the village, who also obtained the rights to the bhogra land. After Independence and zamindari abolition, this bhogra became the private property of the descendants of the ‘new’ farmer caste headman.
Passionate discussions about the significance of this story, in the sun-baked and rain-soaked courtyards of my respondents, veered from gift and brotherhood to court-cases, lawsuits, rent receipts, and records. Shankaro represented 25 Binjhal households, who traced their descent from Jogendra Singh's disinherited relations. During these conversations, tattered copies of village records changed hands and were read for clues. In the village records from 1906, Jogendra Singh Binjhal is the headman of Mahulkonda, but in the 1924 record, the zamindar appears in the column for headman. Much later, I would relate this incident to the changes that took place during the 20-year land settlement operations under the Central Provinces administration but what was insightful, during my fieldwork, was Shankaro's reasoning about the meaning of bhogra.
By local custom the bhogra was the first land to be settled in Borasambar villages and rights over it were not limited to the person who was appointed as headman by the zamindari administration. The widows of headmen did not have rights to inherit the titles when male agnates were present. The headman represented the interests of his agnatic kinsmen, who had equal claims over the bhogra that they had jointly cleared, cultivated, and settled and which represented services rendered to the state in the past. Since any male from the agnatic group could assume the position of headman, the absence of direct heirs after Jogendra Singh's death should not have extinguished the rights of kinsmen. The participants in such discussions were convinced about the powers of the English sarkar's (government's) records and believed that these contained evidence that refuted the transfer. The zamindar and the widow were mercilessly castigated for immoral conduct and the usurpation of the rights of brothers:
What right did Kaushilya have to surrender jama (lineage) land? How could the raja (ruler) sell what had not belonged to him? The point is not about paying or not paying malguzari (rent). Mahulkonda belonged to us. It was our inam (gift) village, given to our great-great-grandfathers. The zamindar was a Binjhal like us, he was our brother but he betrayed us. Perhaps he was not really a Binjhal. They say that the sons of Bhagat Bariha had been poisoned and the one who took his place was an impostor.
Deceitful conduct of those who only posed as brothers and by women were idioms used by the descendants of ex-headmen in many villages in the context of claims making around the bhogra. Non-Binjhal villagers suggested that, being Adivasis, the Binjhals lacked the capacity to perform official duties, such as collection of malguzari (land revenue), leading to the loss of headmanship. The emphasis in Shankaro's story was on how the zamindar recognized the headman position as a relation with an individual rather than as the joint rights of kinsmen who had long bolstered the powers of the rulers of Borasambar. Shankaro described how, after their eviction, his ancestors forcibly occupied the bhogra, despite facing repression and starvation. The zamindari officials repeatedly burnt their crops; confiscated farm equipment, weapons, and tamba-patta (copper plate deed); and instituted a fouzdari (criminal) case against them.Footnote 47 Since many headmen lost their position during the tenure of this zamindar, local rumours continued, up to the present day, that the zamindar was a non-Binjhal since a true descendant of their last great ruler, Bhagat Bariha, would not have deprived his own community.
Kaushilya's unusual actions that provoked the anger of patriarchal agnates require some explanation. Some historians describe such forms of agency as women's continuous need to appeal to distant authority to circumvent local power and how this was sometimes achieved through legal strategies during the colonial period.Footnote 48 The colonial legal systems, though, were not necessarily supportive of women's independent claims to property and tended to describe women making such claims as either schemers or victims of male manipulation.Footnote 49 Interpretation of her role may also be contextualized in terms of contemporary land disputes in this area, where widows and daughters were known to brave patriarchal opposition to assert inheritance claims when aided by law. But women who obtained access and control over family land, called jama land, often achieved this when supported by natal kin, influential villagers, or factions from within the agnates. In-marrying women in Borasambar villages were eternal strangers: never called by their given names, they continued to be identified by natal village long after they became grandmothers. Attributing dispossession to actions of strangers (and women) was how patriarchal ideology was protected and perpetuated, despite internal differences, fractures, and feuds.
Women appeared in critical roles in early twentieth-century headman stories in Mahulkonda and accounts from other villages. Assuming ownership of land, following the death of their husbands or in the absence of male siblings, is also common. Mahulkonda had some prominent women landholders. If rumours thrived about the immorality of their conduct, women too were openly critical about the conduct of their relations and discussed the tortuous routes through which they obtained rights over land. As the contract and commodity attribute of land emerged in the colonial period, women sometimes obtained tenancy rights, but, viewed as unsuitable rights holders and outsiders, they also experienced pressure to relinquish these rights. It was common in Mahulkonda to pressure women to sell or lease land, making them important intermediaries in the land market. In the next headman story, a widow from the zamindar's household who inherited the bhogra was forced to negotiate with the relations of the evicted headman who threatened retribution. Women, as the next account shows, were seldom only the victims in headman stories.
Retribution
In the village of Kondapalli during a visit on a summer afternoon, I heard the second story about lost headmanship. It was a hot day and the burst seedpods of the silk cotton filled the air with the soft white fibres. On the way, we met men and women returning from the forest with baskets loaded with the red-purple, sweet char berries.Footnote 50 My guide, an elderly Binjhal man, pointed out the bhogra, where a gleaming stretch of sunflower crops irrigated by a diesel pump-set presented a rare sight in a drought year. The descendant of the Binjhal ex-headman family, Gobardhan, whom we were visiting, lived in a small mud house with an ornate wooden door. Outside the half closed door, a few goats were grazing lazily. We were received graciously, some older men were summoned, and soon we were discussing the stories about lost headmanship.
Gobardhan told us that his grandfather and his brothers lost the headmanship of Kondapalli village because they had not paid malguzari (revenue) regularly. As in Shankaro's story, his ancestors did not see this as a credible reason to be evicted from what they believed was their family land. On receiving a notice for eviction, they had vowed vengeance on the zamindar and marked this by ‘burying their weapons in the bhogra’. For many years thereafter, his ancestors prevented the zamindar's farm workers from cultivating the bhogra. But the feud was unequal. The zamindar was a magistrate, who used his police powers to raid the homes of the ex-headman family and initiated criminal proceedings against them. During this period, his ancestors lost all their valuable possessions such as household equipment, grains, weapons, and livestock. Over time they became more impoverished than the poorest tenant cultivators of Kondapalli.
After the zamindar's death, his widow inherited the headmanship. Gobardhan's ancestors not only prevented her from cultivating the bhogra but also made her feel unwelcome in the village in any way that they could. The story goes that she feared to drink water in the village, afraid that the angry relatives of the ex-headman would poison her. After avoiding the village for a few years, the widow initiated a truce with them by offering them 50 acres. But this land was not from the fertile bhogra fields, but from an uncultivated patch of village scrub-forest. Gobardhan's ancestors accepted this unfair compensation because ‘they were dying of hunger’. The bhogra was sold to a farmer caste person who became the (new) headman. The descendant of the Binjhal ex-headman, Gobardhan, waved his arm: ‘the houses you see between the electric pole to the tube well are dirt-poor’. This story, as the one before, indicated the intricate and indirect processes through which dispossession was experienced and remembered by the landless descendants of village headmen.
While walking back from the village, engaged in animated discussion about the ex-headmen, I asked my guide, also a Binjhal man, known for his knowledge of water courses and ability to tame birds, about his story of land. All Binjhals did not belong to Borasambar's village headman families. He had laughed and said that his grandfather was a late migrant to Borasambar from a neighbouring kingdom. He was related to the jhankar (priest) family. All jhankars of Sambalpur district had access to a small land portion in a village as service tenure during colonial rule. When his grandfather arrived here, almost ‘all the land was taken’. The family worked as farm labourers and were always too poor to buy land. After a pause, he said that his father had cleared a small patch of forest for cultivation, though they did not have legal rights to this land. Headman stories, then, were not necessarily significant for all Binjhals. Yet, there are memories about the jhankars being from Binjhal headman families and the service tenure was a fraction of the size of bhogra land. Whatever these differences meant in the past, inequalities within the Binjhals were erased; as fewer households had obtained legal rights to land, most depended on farm wage labour, and subsisted on fragments of forest or wasteland.
Punishment and betrayal
Later that same summer, I visited other villages where the landscape was hillier and more forested. Associated with these poorer villages were memorable stories of nineteenth-century rebellion and twenty-first century death from hunger. But even here, headman stories could easily surface. In Loharmal village, my host Jibardhan Bag told me how his ancestors obtained the village headmanship as a reward for assisting the government in quelling a rebellion. His ancestors were good marksman (musket-shooters) and served as laskhar (troops) for the English sarkar (government). But during the great famine of 1900, they had fallen out with the government and were punished for sheltering bandits. The hills around Loharmal resound with the exploits of bandits and brigands who raided farmers and used the headman's house to store grain, gold, and cattle. The Borasambar zamindar told his ancestors that either they resigned from the headmanship or they could go to prison. They chose to give up the headmanship. Rendered landless and on the verge of fleeing from the village, his ancestors were requested by the tenant cultivators to take a part of the village pasture and a patch of scrub forest to make new farmland. Thus his ancestors became officially sukhbasi, a term used to refer to landless and itinerant villagers in this region.
In Mohda, a village close to Loharmal, the headman's childless widow Amarti (like Kaushilya) had submitted the resignation from the office of headmanship, with great encouragement, as the story goes, from the zamindar. Mohda was surrounded on three sides by forest-covered hills. The high fields of the village were verdant with groves of Neem, Mango, and Mahul trees. A group of old Binjhal men met us to discuss headman stories, but evaded our request to share old documents. My host was Suraja, a Binjhal woman, who was married in Mahulkonda. Over a long conversation, covering the state of drought to the crop of mangoes, the headman descendants discussed their feud with the zamindar. Over half of the residents of this village traced their descent from the ex-headman family, who lost the rights to 236 acres of bhogra. As in the other villages, the dismissed headman's relations had initially refused to give up the bhogra and ‘grew rice on it’ for years, even after their names were expunged from the record of rights.
In this story, disputes had broken out among the ex-headman's relations when the zamindar allowed one household to retain a bhogra field, under the service tenure of the jhankar (priests). A second family from the evicted group purchased 10 acres from the zamindar. But these were fields located outside the bhogra. Some years later, this family discovered that they had been registered as sharecroppers and not raiyats (tenants). Even later, during zamindari abolition, they found that some of the fields that they had purchased would be resumed by the state as these had been declared as the zamindar's ‘ceiling surplus land’. At this point they became landless and were forced to resume litigation with the zamindar's family members. In Mohda and Loharmal the descendants of ex-headman families subsisted on the most precarious livelihoods in this area: felling trees, making liquor, and peddling charcoal. These uncertain and fragile modes of subsistence are also viewed as typical Adivasi livelihoods.
Enacting the past
Most non-tribal villagers identified the Binjhals through an affinity with forest work, suggestive of continuity between their present and past status. Binjhal memories contained references to prior settlement rights in land, of which the most common type was the displacement of their headman. The new headman, who belonged to one of the locally dominant farming castes, is well known as one of the biggest landlords in this region. In recent times, headman land stories have been revived to renew the dispute over the bhogra. Sometime in the 1990s, Mahulkonda villagers had watched in surprise as a group of Binjhal men had declared the fields owned by the (new) village headman as their ‘ancestral land’, in the middle of the main agricultural season. I heard about this incident from Basuki, a Binjhal woman whose husband worked as a ploughman for the new headman,
It happened on a day when the farm servants were ploughing the headman's field below the water reservoir. Several Barihas Footnote 51 arrived and unhitched the oxen from the yoke. Many villagers gathered to watch the fight. We told the Barihas not to fight with us; we just work for the headman. Then the police came and took them away. In my opinion the new headman owns the land. The Bariha elders had sold it to them. Now they are saying it is theirs. Do you think they will they get it back? The headman is not interested in land since they are not farmers. Every year they sell some fields. They have sold nearly all of Sahajmal.Footnote 52
Basuki was rapidly picking the mahul flowers from the ground as we spoke. As we stood talking, in her field below the Bonabira dongar,Footnote 53 she remarked on the dwindling trees and the poor quality of soil of her hillside field. Her household could not purchase the expensive valley fields that the new headman was selling. Labouring for landowning farmers was essential to her livelihood and she refused to take sides in feuds against them. Later, I picked up the same conversation with the perpetrators, the ex-headman family. They admitted their role in the incident, the aim of which was to reopen the conversation about the bhogra. They were disappointed that the court had refused to discuss old disputes. What created the new urgency for them was the concern that the dispute would lose relevance once the bhogra fields were sold. My visits to their crowded courtyard always resulted in lively interchange. Younger men exhorted me to find the truth of the matter, older men suggested calm, and sceptical women worried about the expense of a court case and trouble with the police. A typical exchange, after one of my visits to the district records room, went as follows:
K: So, what did you find out? What records did you see in Sambalpur?
Me: Same as what you have here, but more complete versions.
S: So shall we get our land back? What do you think?
Me: It does not seem likely.
K: (very agitated) You don't understand anything.
S: You are going by what is written in the papers. They wrote lies to confuse us.
K: You must listen carefully to what our old men say.
S: Villagers had asked the (new) headman to produce proof after the fight.
K: He told them that the original transfer papers were lost.
S: He could only show a ryoti patta (tenancy title) from Major settlement.
Me: But his name is there on village land records.
K: He did that by pretending to be our brother before the settlement officer.
S: We are fighting a case and won't give up till we win.
K: He has a map with a stamp by English sarkar …
Many such conversations remained unresolved during my stay in the village.
Conclusion to the headman stories
Headman stories show how an important group of Binjhal households remember their displacement from the political and agrarian centre of the village to the forested periphery to become insecure occupants of land. Regardless of whether these intricate displacements were viewed as an Adivasi issue, then, I draw some observations from the headman stories that would enable the exploration of the debates about land access and occupation in this region from the period when headmanship was a key category of revenue administration. Memories of headmanship loss contest the reduction of the bhogra to a particular form of interest in land that is limited to remuneration attached to the office of the state rent-collector. The Binjhal villagers viewed the extinction of the rights of their elders on the bhogra as illegitimate since these rights emerged from labouring to clear the forest and cultivate the land as well as belonging shaped by the myths of ancestral deeds in protecting and settling the land.
The rhetoric around the villainous actions of women indicates typical ways of the transfer of land in this region where land sellers are always subject to criticism for reducing the shares of the patriarchal agnatic kin groups. Widowhood marks a critical transition point when disputes tended to erupt in the village. Although legally entitled to inherit, women were under pressure to sell as agnatic claimants resisted their occupation, use, and independent actions around land. Litigation and a show of strength were ways in which impoverished villagers sought the attention and intervention of state authorities to circumvent the power of local landlords. The legal terms that appeared in the narratives, land records, and receipts shaped and anchored access to land in this area and indicate the working of the authority of law, the need for many categories of rights holders to seek external arbiters, and the actions of the government during colonial rule in this region. The specific role of the Borasambar zamindar, administering revenue non-payment or policing against banditry, which resulted in punitive action against headmen, may have been informed by his position as a state official during colonial rule.
Memories are narratives that suit the pragmatic needs of subjects or the context of the conversation where it was elicited, but they are also, as Ricoeur argues, the capacity to act, summon, and recognize what has passed or the nature of past things.Footnote 54 Based on the understanding of memory as ‘truthful claims’ about the past, the key concerns raised by headman stories are used to frame questions for exploring the archives. In this process, headman stories are abstracted from their place, time, and context of conversations in the Borasambar villages.Footnote 55 The point is neither a quest for subaltern voices in the archives nor the verification of the facts distilled from the ethnographic present with past records stored in archives, but to understand the changing meaning and actions around headman's land in administrative memories. The next sections explore the narratives of nineteenth-century officials and administrators, and their quest to police and improve land, utilize labour, and improve the moral qualities of subjects in the Borasambar zamindari in the nineteenth century. It begins with the period when the Maratha confederacy's scattered territories were ceded to the British East India Company (EIC), and the Borasambar zamindari, embedded in the networked kingdoms of the Mahanadi valley, appeared as a policing challenge.
Guardians of the pass
The military administrators of the EIC governing the South Western Frontier of Bengal described the Borasambar zamindari as a dangerous but strategically important area in their political communications.Footnote 56 In their reports, the EIC soldiers travelling through the zamindari explained the hostility of the local villagers as evidence of Maratha misrule. But even as their relations with the Marathas improved, the officials would describe the locals as savages. For local kingdoms in the Mahanadi valley, 1800–1820 was an uncertain period when tribute, trade, and political relationships with rival regional overlords, the Marathas, and the Company were undergoing rapid change.Footnote 57 The purpose of this section is to discuss the events around an armed encounter between British military administrators and the Borasambar zamindar during this period. Company officials viewed the inhabitants and the ruler of the zamindari as a problem as their relationships with the Maratha confederacy transitioned. Borasambar, a border kingdom with allegiance to the Marathas in 1818, transformed into a ‘valuable estate’ through the centralization of state power under colonial rule after 1860. Colonial conquest was different from prior rule with respect to land, because of the nature and depth of state intervention through centralizing authority, close monitoring of rights holders, and an emphasis on regulatory legislation, primarily to protect settled land, the colonial state's main source of revenue. As a region with negligible agricultural resources and dense forests, Borasambar was a surprising candidate for agrarian attention. The early encounters indicate that the reasons for settling a farming community in this area derived from military reasons, in order to safeguard the settlements on fertile areas and, later, as a source of labour.
Figure 2. Borasambar villages in Odisha. Source: Map data, Google 2022, scale 1:5 million, https://www.scribblemaps.com/, created by the author, date generated 7 November 2021.
Located within a constellation of small forest kingdoms in the Mahanadi valley, Borasambar was a part of the area ruled by the Marathas of Berar, the Bhonsla king who ruled from Nagpur.Footnote 58 When EIC administrators were consolidating their newly acquired territories of Bengal, Orissa, and Nagpur, they found that the rulers of the local forest kingdoms were uncooperative.Footnote 59 Like other local rulers, the Borasambar zamindar had refused to allow the EIC soldiers access to build a postal route (dawk) through the zamindari.Footnote 60 Cutting across Borasambar was an important caravan route that carried salt and grain traders, pilgrims, and soldiers. Conflict over controlling this route precipitated a number of armed encounters from 1804–1830 that was resolved only after the defeat of the Marathas in the third Anglo-Maratha war.Footnote 61 Imperial administrators justifying the need and cost of military actions to their superiors, archived as ‘political communications’, provide insights into the contemporary concerns of the early administration.Footnote 62 Official communication ascribed the sources of power of the Borasambar zamindar to the rugged hills and forested terrain and ties of kinship with the ‘wild’ and ‘savage’ inhabitants of the zamindari. The commanding officer of the Ramgarh Battalion of the South West Frontier Agency, Major E. Roughsedge, emphasized the importance of capturing the road through Borasambar by describing the power and resources of the zamindar, the Binjhwar residents of the area:
It will be necessary for the protection of the great road to Nagpoor, to have parties of sipahis at each extremities of Borasamber, if this man retains his present power and resources, he is at the head of a very savage and warlike caste called Binjiwar on whom no dependence can with safety be placed.Footnote 63
Described as rebels and insurgents, these reports generated long-standing prejudice about the numerically dominant communities of forest areas by highlighting their militant activities. In addition to blocking access to a critical road route, described as ‘….an admirable road without a single ghaut or pass from Sumbhulpoor to Raepoor lying through the heart of Bora Samber whilst any deviation to the right or left would involve it in mountains and passes’,Footnote 64 Major Roughsedge also emphasized the long-standing hostility of the zamindar towards the authority of British officials and representatives by describing earlier encounters in which the zamindar had declined the British overtures of peace and the terms of the offered treaty agreement:
When a subject of the British Government, his demeanour towards colonel Broughton and Mr. Elphinstone the resident at the Court of Berar, was equally independent, he positively refused to allow the latter to establish a dawk through his country, and when colonel Broughton in the course of his tour round Sumbhulpoor and Patna, visited his residence, he made his appearance at the head of five hundred burkundazees with lighted matches…. he took to the hills and openly defied our authority…Footnote 65
In 1817–1818 the EIC was fighting the pindari war.Footnote 66 The Borasambar zamindar's close ties with a wanted pindari leader came up in Roughsedge's communications with the governor general's office.Footnote 67 After his defeat in battle, the Borasambar zamindar had protested that, far from being hostile to the Marathas, his actions were guided by the authorization received from the Marathas. The Marathas had complained to the British about arrears of unpaid tributes by the zamindar and how they were ‘obliged to make him presents, where any merchandize of more than ordinary value passed through his pergunnah from Cuttuck in progress to Nagpoor’.Footnote 68 In contrast, the zamindar, Bhagwant Bariha, had informed the EIC officer that he had not only improved his ties with the Marathas but they had given him a ‘rahadaree parwana’, formal recognition of being the guardian of the pass to collect tolls and taxes. The Maratha agent, Antaji Nayak, who was captured by the British in 1805, mentioned the delivery of the parwana to the Borasambar zamindar, how they exchanged presents (a pair of shoes and some money), and that he was given the permission to stay and travel through the zamindari.Footnote 69
According to the EIC commander, the Borasambar zamindar had illegitimately acquired territories from its neighbouring kingdoms. The zamindar said that the villages had been given to his father, Bhagwant Bariha, for defending these kingdoms against the Marathas.Footnote 70 Reluctant to relinquish these areas under the new treaty conditions, he had avoided meeting the officials for as long as possible. After his defeat, the zamindar Ramdayal Bariha signed a treaty with the EIC under which he had to cede 120 villages to the raja of Patna.Footnote 71 He was, however, allowed to retain 84 villages that he had captured from the neighbouring zamindari of Phuljhar.Footnote 72 A tribute payable to the British was fixed and ‘parties of sipahis’ (soldiers) were posted on either end of the zamindari.Footnote 73 After the battle, peace was declared and the cultivators were asked to return to their farms.Footnote 74
The inhabitants of Borasambar zamindari resembled the wider militarized countryside of India.Footnote 75 Many rulers had war bands and armed peasants were a familiar feature of the countryside.Footnote 76 In 1840 the tour report of the political agent, Captain. J. R. Ouseley, described the inaccessibility of the zamindari and the propensity of the zamindar to shelter rebels and bandits. Describing himself as an emissary of the Maratha kings and a protector of Maratha territories, the political agent criticized the conduct of the minor ruler and his relatives as unreliable and disloyal towards the British:
Here the country becomes still wilder and the people more savage, of the Binjwall caste, the Raja Soonder Burria is a minor, age about 14, his mother and relations conduct affairs, they live among hills in an almost inaccessible valley…to this place I had to proceed leaving my camp about 7 miles off, took 24 sowars, and having had a long conversation with the mother, I explained that if she persisted in harbouring Aram Sing and his brothers rebel zemindars of his Highness the Berrar (Nagpore) Raja's, who lived among the hills and had a body of 150 plunderers, that I should be compelled to use force, and the prospects of her son and all the family will be ruined.Footnote 77
As a participant in the struggle over territorial boundaries, the EIC added confusion to the massive shifts in political alliances during this period. But, as the century progressed, the reputation of zamindari inhabitants fell into disrepute through accumulating evidence of banditry and rebellion.Footnote 78 Historians tend to date tribal dispossession from land in central India to the end of the Maratha rule and agrarian sedentarization under colonialism.Footnote 79 Accounts of EIC military engagements reveal the gradual emergence of policies of indirect rule, a model of imperial administration that expanded through the incorporation of indigenous structures.Footnote 80 Such a strategy involved recognition of diverse ranks of traditional rulers as ‘independent sovereigns’ by dissolving alliances between and within local kingdoms that were based on complex ties of friendship, kinship, and rivalries, and tying the freed segments to the central authority of the colonial government.Footnote 81 Local rulers who controlled compact territories through their hold over the inhabitants became important agents in the consolidation of colonial rule. But in most cases EIC officials were involved in selecting successors to the numerous local kingdoms. Local resistance to such interventions led to many uprisings and eventually to the annexation of Sambalpur in 1849 under the doctrine of lapse policy.Footnote 82 Sambalpur was one of the wealthiest Mahanadi kingdoms, where the many claimants to their rule were unhappy with British interference in succession from the 1820s.Footnote 83 The annexation triggered widespread rebellion by unhappy zamindars that continued until 1870.Footnote 84
While the long rebellion ebbed and flowed, Borasambar was incorporated into the district of Sambalpur in the Chhattisgarh subdivision of the new administrative unit, the Central Provinces, in 1861.Footnote 85 After the suppression of the rebellion, many zamindars were reinstated, though they were subordinated to the authority of the colonial district administration. Footnote 86 The strength of tribesmen and alliances and kinship with other rulers became irrelevant as a source of power and permanence.Footnote 87 The zamindars’ adherence to the terms of the kabuliyat Footnote 88 or revenue contracts with the British administration were essential to retaining zamindaris, after the first 12-year land settlement which took place between 1876–1888 in the Sambalpur district.Footnote 89
The zamindars were also provided with a set of assessments, in the form of the wajib-ul-arz, whose terms were revised after each land settlement.Footnote 90 The district administration determined succession in the zamindari and had the power to remove zamindars if they mismanaged their estates.Footnote 91 If zamindari land, revenues, and inhabitants were jealously guarded secrets in the past, this period was characterized by surveys, settlements, and efficient rent collection. Maps and records made classes of land, categories of tenants, and types of people visible and legible. Borasambar was the largest zamindari in Sambalpur.Footnote 92 In Charles Grant's Gazetteer, published in 1870, the place is described as covered by hills, forests, and pasture grounds, and criss-crossed by cart tracks used by Banjara traders.Footnote 93 Part of the zamindari was cultivated and the remaining land was covered by forests of Sal, Saj, Tendu, and Bamboo, and populated by wild animals, bears, panthers, tigers, and wild buffaloes.Footnote 94 Touring officers mapping the forests lost their way and were chased by villagers who set fire to dry Bamboo forests,Footnote 95 signalling the continued hostility of inhabitants. Whether for such reasons or reasons of difficult access, the Borasambar forests remained unsurveyed and relatively open access until the first quarter of the twentieth century.Footnote 96
During the Court of Wards administration, from 1885–1900, the zamindari obtained an agrarian appearance.Footnote 97 Hundreds of villages were carved out of forests, cultivation expanded, and land revenue and forest incomes increased.Footnote 98 Borasambar was now described as forested compared to neighbouring plains areas and the inhabitants were identified as agriculturally backward aboriginals.Footnote 99 The Binjhals faced dispossession through competition from cultivators, moneylenders, and liquor traders.Footnote 100 Completion of the Bengal-Nagpur Railways in 1896 reduced the importance of road routes, making the farms and forests of the zamindari distant from the markets while increasing the price of rice and the value of land. Famines in 1899–1900 wreaked havoc among the Binjhals and Kondhs aboriginals.Footnote 101 From 1902–1906, during the term of the settlement officer Francis Dewar, records of all zamindari villages were prepared.Footnote 102 In the 1911 Census, the number of Binjhals were reduced to a quarter of the total population,Footnote 103 which drew the attention of officials. In 1927, the settlement officer K. B. Hamid attributed the changing demography of Borasambar and the declining numbers of the Binjhals to the competition between castes and tribes.Footnote 104
The principal aboriginal tribes are the Binjhals and the Gonds…there has been a steady influx of Hindu cultivators from the khalsa villages…who have taken up the open banks of the Aung River … are penetrating even the western villages. The aboriginals especially the Binjhals are…steadily driven to the wall.Footnote 105
The transition narratives of settlement officers at the turn of the century also established the older and prior claims of the aboriginals. With changing land use, the societal forms termed ‘aboriginal’ changed into the pre-history of revenue villages, while groups classified as tribes gained distance from those defined as ‘castes’ in the census reports.Footnote 106 But these changes did not unfold as events with predetermined outcomes. The landscape and the inhabitants tied in pre-colonial political structures influenced the direction and outcomes of revenue policy in the district which the process of standardization encountered, erased, or managed. The processes and events in Borasambar zamindari, described in this section, enable us to understand the ways in which pre-colonial attachments to land, and local practices of authority, belongings, and entitlements, became the subject of discussion, intervention, and revision as administrative attention gravitated towards regulating increasingly smaller units of the governed territory.
After 1860, village revenue contracts became the primary instrument for promoting productive landscapes in the reinstated zamindaris. For village inhabitants, adhering to the conditions in revenue contracts became the prerequisite for cultivating and occupying land. During this period groups termed as aboriginals were found unsuitable to be village headmen but the presence of aboriginal headmen in hundreds of villages was justified as a temporary state, derived from ‘un-improved’ conditions in the territory.Footnote 107 When the zamindars were identified as ‘thriftless’ ‘aboriginals’, the management of their estates was given over to the Court of Wards.Footnote 108 Village headmen were key to establishing cultivation in a thinly populated area, but the powers of headmen were also balanced with that of agricultural tenants once this group became established.
Village contractsFootnote 109
Contracts were provided to village headmen, who were called as malguzars, to bring land under cultivation from forest under the revenue policies of the Central Provinces.Footnote 110 The malguzars were defined as the village landlord who stood between the greater landlord, the zamindar, and the tenant-cultivators or raiyats. Dependence on this position made the village headman central to the taxation system of the Central Provinces.Footnote 111 The malguzars who invested their own resources to mobilize labour and expand cultivation were awarded property rights and tax-free land. A variation of this policy was enforced in Borasambar zamindari (and also zamindari and feudatory states in the Sambalpur district) to create an agrarian frontier.Footnote 112 By the end of the nineteenth century, competition over land produced a market for village contracts. Colonial revenue policy favoured non-aboriginal malguzars and the numbers of such headmen increased with the thriving trade in village contracts. Resonating with the feuds over the bhogra in Adivasi memories, discussed in the previous section, were the village contracts that guided the pattern of land occupation and access in the district. In this section the land tenures in Sambalpur district zamindaris are examined to understand how headmanship was defined in village contracts and why these contractual specificities helped to produce the entitlements and exclusions for Binjhal headmen and co-sharers in Borasambar villages.Footnote 113
The Central Provinces (CP), the last territory to come under British rule, was constituted in 1861. It had 18 directly ruled districts and more than 100 indirectly ruled zamindari estates and feudatory states.Footnote 114 The malguzari settlement of this province was a variation of the Bengal Permanent Settlement.Footnote 115 But unlike Bengal, where the revenue was fixed in perpetuity, here land revenue settlements were revised after 30 years (20 years in Sambalpur district). The CP administrators felt that permanent settlement was not justified in a region that was sparsely populated, which had a large expanse of potentially cultivable land but underdeveloped communication.Footnote 116 Sir Richard Temple, the first commissioner of the province, believed that a permanent settlement would limit the growth of productive agriculture:
It would not be right to allow a permanent settlement to an estate which might include a large or indefinite area of waste, at present quite beyond the means of the owner to reclaim, but capable in the future of being rendered valuable by a variety of contingencies. Thus in these provinces, there are many estates and villages, many entire tracts and some entire districts where a permanent settlement could not at present be properly introduced.Footnote 117
Rights to land rested with the district administration and the permission to occupy or use land was conditional on the payment of revenue by various categories of rights holders who had entered into specific contracts with the government through their representative, a person designated as the lambardar.Footnote 118 The colonial administration based this policy of state ownership of land and the leasing of land revenue on eighteenth-century Maratha policy. According to Temple, landownership under Marathas rested with the state, while a range of revenue collectors managed the villages and estates, by holding leases for a fixed term of years. The principal leaseholder was the direct tenant of the state, while those who occupied and cultivated the land were the sub-tenants of the leaseholder.Footnote 119 The British administration initially aimed to reverse the exploitative conditions of temporary rights and unreasonable revenue demands by introducing private property and making the revenue demands more rational and predictable. In paragraph 184 of the 1862 administrative report, titled ‘Farmers declared Proprietors’, the above goal is described as follows,
Such, briefly was the tenure of the land up to a very recent date, whence it followed that except in the Zemindaree estates, there was no such thing as private property in land. But recently it has been proclaimed… in future the Government will relinquish his proprietory claims and that the rights of absolute ownership shall be in future subject of course to payment of land tax be vested in those who may establish a fair claim.… Those who have been long in possession will be sure of confirmation as such…The word ‘farmer’ and the word ‘lease’ except under special and extraordinary circumstances will be banished from our fiscal vocabulary.Footnote 120
Endowment of property rights to revenue collectors was a policy that was followed in many provinces. But as the nineteenth century progressed, this policy was changed, based on the belief that giving property rights to the malguzar would have detrimental effects on the cultivators. For the purpose of expanding cultivation in the areas opened from the ‘the vast estates of forests and wastes conserved by the Government’, raiyatwari principles were described as a better option.Footnote 121 Based on such beliefs, in 1863, when village headmen were recognized as ‘proprietors’ of villages, the fields of the tenant-cultivators were measured, assessed, and mapped, and they too were given ‘proprietory rights’.Footnote 122 Conferring ownership rights by the state to the rent-collectors (malguzars) and tenant-cultivators (raiyats) was the innovation that was to mark British progress over pre-colonial Maratha policy. But political conditions in Sambalpur district were found unsuitable for the implementation of this policy. As a consequence, ‘proprietory rights’ were not given either to the village headmen or the cultivators. Anxiety among administrators about the loyalties of their political subjects grew as land surveys and mapping were repeatedly disrupted. The settlement officer's report in 1891 cited details such as incomplete surveys, militancy, and disloyalty of zamindars, and included descriptions of zamindari inhabitants as ‘marauders’ as justification for making rights over land more flexible and temporary:
From 1857 to 1862 the country was…infested by bands of marauders under Surendra Sai. Nine if not ten of the zamindars joined this man and their estates were confiscated, they were restored …on the proclamation of amnesty in 1859.Footnote 123
Thus Sambalpur land tenure came to differ in important ways from the Central Provinces.Footnote 124 Official correspondence reiterated that village headmen should be referred to as thekadar or holder of contract and not gaontia (owner of village).Footnote 125 Within this, villages in the zamindari and those under direct British rule were also governed by different regulations. In zamindari villages, the headman only had tenancy rights on the bhogra land (deemed as the headman's share), while in the directly ruled areas, the headman had ownership rights over the bhogra. The power of the headman in both jurisdictions was balanced by recording the rights of cultivators who were treated as tenants of the state and could not be evicted from land or overcharged by the headman. Thus the Sambalpur land settlement was a hybrid of the raiyatwari and malguzari systems in which the rights of village headman were limited to the bhogra land and these rights were made temporary and subject to revisions.Footnote 126
The final decision taken in 1871 went back on the proclamation of 1862. What was in substance a raiyatwari settlement was made under which the gaontia was treated as a village headman who collected the revenue and the proprietory rights conferred on him were limited to his ‘bhogra’ or home farm…raiyats on land other than the home farm became Government raiyats paying Government revenue assessed on their several holdings and not rent, ouster being allowed only on non-payment of revenue, and the right of the raiyat being heritable but not transferable.Footnote 127
The above excerpt from the report of the settlement officer, A. M. Russell, shows how the revised policy in 1871 disconnected the rights of cultivator from the headman's authority and the headman's rights from the zamindar's authority, making all three categories of rights holders accountable to the district administration. None of the groups had ownership rights. They could neither sell nor transfer their land, and would lose their tenancy if they failed to pay the revenue demand.Footnote 128 The revisions that modified the land revenue policy for the zamindaris attempted to balance the powers of different rights holders on land by increasing the responsibilities of the cultivators and restricting the rights of the headman to the home farm known as the bhogra.
The village wajib-ul-urz or village papers contained the rights and duties of the headmen who were called thekadar or thikanedars (and sometimes village managers). The thekadari could be inherited but the headmen could neither transfer nor sell it. The continuity of this office was dependent on the payment of revenue determined by the revenue officer.Footnote 129 The bhogra (called sir in Chhattisgarh) was occupied by the headman, including his family, and viewed as the salary for performing official duties for the zamindari administration. The bhogra was not assessed for revenue but the headman was expected to cover the shortfall in payments by the raiyats whenever necessary.Footnote 130 The administration could remove the headman for non-performance of duties and the headman also had the power to resign from their position. Administrators were particularly concerned about preventing the fragmentation of the bhogra. This category of land could neither be partitioned nor bought or sold. The bhogra could only be transferred if the village thekadari or revenue contract was sold. As the rights to the bhogra were linked to the office of headmanship, which obtained its legal basis from the village-contract, this land moved to the person purchasing or inheriting the revenue-contract.Footnote 131 Fearing the dissipation of revenue, headmanship was conferred only on one person who was recognized as the lambardar by the zamindar, and co-sharing of the office was discouraged. In the wajib-ul-urz, the roles and rights of the headman and co-sharers were stated as follows:
No co-sharer in a gaontiahi or maufi village can claim to have his share partitioned and separated. A raiyat of a village in which sharers have made a private partition among themselves can always claim to pay his revenue direct to the lambardar gaontia than to his co-sharers…The lambardar gaontia is appointed by the zamindar in accordance with local custom…. He is the only person whom the zamindar recognizes as possessing authority to collect rent from the raiyats…. He is responsible to the zamindar for the collection of rent and management of the village.Footnote 132
Details of tenure reveal the chain of command created to safeguard both small and large holdings for the purpose of steady and predictable revenue generation. Partition of the bhogra could fragment the powers and responsibilities of the headman, creating ambiguous accountability through shared authority. Revenue collection could suffer if the cultivators used the existence of multiple authorities to delay or avoid paying taxes. Identity and caste attributes of the headman later emerged as important considerations in selecting persons who could take the ‘responsibility’ for land improvement and the collection of revenue from tenants. The relatively less secure land rights in the zamindari were also based on the evolving administrative knowledge about the distinctive attributes of castes and tribes. Although the wish to remove such persons from the headman or tenant positions was never explicitly stated, as the demographic changed, the settlement officers viewed this as progressive change.
Most of the managers of individual villages, both in khalsa and zamindaris are now Hindus. The Binjhals, Gonds, Gandas, are usually not proprietors but lessees holding from zamindars in the more backward tracts.Footnote 133
Groups identified as tribal or lower caste obtained less secure rights to land. F. W. Dewar, the settlement officer presiding over the second land settlement in Sambalpur, argued that land rights would evolve from insecure to permanent as village management changed from ‘aboriginal’ to ‘Hindu’ castes. As Bates and Shah argue, distinction between castes and tribes had acquired clarity by the 1860s based on evolutionary legal theories and racial ideologies.Footnote 134 In Dewar's report, discussion around village contract holders, both headmen and tenants, were viewed and classified in racial terms.Footnote 135 Village contracts defined how rights to land were allowed or withdrawn, but these were guided by implicit assumptions about castes and tribes. The right to occupy land was tied to the demonstration of agrarian improvement and was embedded in the attributes of the group.Footnote 136
Memories of land thus preserved in records can be read to locate the domination or classificatory problems underpinning British misunderstanding of local culture.Footnote 137 But such assumptions would also suggest a reactive or unresponsive social world where the state and society appear as opposites, devoid not just of contingency, instability, or change but also the possibility that legal understandings of land could be mutually constituted or learnt.Footnote 138 In Sambalpur, superior moral qualities were first associated with agrarian castes and, at other times, with aboriginal tribes, indicating changes in state priorities, but landlords and disentitled tenants and headmen also made use of colonial legal systems to settle their disagreements.Footnote 139 Contradictions were common in land tenures and custom was routinely cited to introduce new ideas about property.Footnote 140
An important contradiction that may have been generated for groups like the Binjhals, who were described as aboriginals in the settlement reports, was how, as their ancient ties to land became visible records and reports, their entitlement to occupy and use land diminished. The past would become significant for such groups, who would be later known as Adivasi, to interpret and understand their impoverished status. But colonial policies were not consistent. In the period between the first and second land settlement, administrative concern about the loss of headman and tenancy rights of aboriginals in the Borasambar zamindari led to a policy of protection of village headmen.Footnote 141 During this period Borasambar zamindari was under the management of the Court of Wards. After the third land settlement (1902–1926), when the cadastral survey of all zamindari villages was complete, Dewar suggested the removal of ‘protected status’ by describing it as ‘unnecessary intrusion’ into zamindar-thekadar relations. This was a reversal of the position taken in the 1880s.
Protection and dispossession
A trade in village contracts ensuing from Sambalpur tenures led to transfers of villages and dismissal of headmen after the preliminary land settlement in 1876–1888 and 1889–1902.Footnote 142 Administrators feared that moneylenders were becoming entrenched in the villages, creating insecurity for cultivators and to the detriment of village development, while political instability could engender support for rebels. Protective legislation for village headmen was implemented by the district administration, in 1891, under section 65A of the Central Provinces Land Revenue Act of 1881.Footnote 143 Prior to this, village headmen held village revenue contracts on three-year terms. In the zamindari, ‘aboriginal headmen’ were found to be at a greater risk of being displaced by moneylenders. Sir J. B. Fuller, the settlement commissioner, argued that the speculators, who had entered the region following the establishment of British peace, had increased their control over many villages and this could foment local rebellion.Footnote 144
Following this understanding, a special section was created in the village wajib-ul-arz mentioning the protection of the thekadars.Footnote 145 A detailed account of the status of village headmen in Borasambar zamindari that led to the decisions about the endowment of protected status can be found in a survey conducted in 1888–1889 by the deputy commissioner of Sambalpur, H. H. Priest. During this investigation, ‘protected status’ was given to village headmen, if they provided evidence of long occupation and agrarian improvement. See, for instance, an entry from Priest's survey of Borasambar villages below.Footnote 146
The entry for every village contained information about the village headman, date of settlement, number of revenue-paying tenant groups, costs borne by the headman, extent of cultivation, digging of irrigation tanks, planting of fruit-bearing trees, and names and testimony of witnesses who would attest to the truth of these details. Each entry had an order that provided grounds for conferring protected status on the headman or rejecting this appeal. The Binjhal headman of Kautabahal village received protected status through this process, based on the evidence of improvement.
Kautabahal–Saro-Bhugto-Binjhal gaontia
This village has been founded by my grandfather many years ago and it has remained in the family ever since. I have myself been gaontia for 30 years or 40 years. My father and I have planted 1500 mango trees which bear fruit. My father made a kata (tank) costing Rs.600. I have made another costing Rs.1000. Both of these hold water all the year round. There are 6 (khut) of raiyati, 3 of bhogra. I take 2 hals and 2 ploughs as bheti begari…Parmanand gaontia of Semelmunda says that this man has been gaontia for 40 years. He and his father have made 2 katas one costing Rs.500, the other Rs.1000. Both hold water all the year round.
Order: the State records show that this gaontia has himself held for 24 years and his father and grandfather apparently held before him. He has spent some 1500 Rs. in constructing two fine tanks and has planted more than 1000 good mango trees. Saro gaontia in entitled to protected status.Footnote 147
Mahulkonda was one of the villages where the Binjhal headman was given ‘protected status’ following Priest's investigation.Footnote 148 The entry on Mahulkonda shows that the right on the bhogra was ‘enjoyed by the shikmi gaontia’ (sub-tenant). The right of the Kallar family to whom the Binjhal headman family had sub-contracted the village revenue collection rights was deemed invalid.Footnote 149 The survey concluded that the headmanship had been with the family for four generations and sufficient improvement was found to provide the Binjhal headman with protected status. The policy to protect village headmen lasted the 20 years’ duration of settlement. During this time, all headmen in Borasambar who were granted protected status were not Adivasi. But during the next land settlement, Dewar raised concerns, specifically about the lack of resources and capacities of ‘aboriginal headmen’, arguing as follows:
A very serious consequence of the ‘protection’ legislation was that the ‘aboriginal’ headmen who constituted a majority of the protected-thekadars, freed from the stimulating dread of being ousted had fallen into careless ways and debt. At the same time the encroaching Hindu bidders were making deals with aboriginal headmen that gave rise to multiple leaseholders between the village and the zamindar, creating complications for revenue collection.Footnote 150
For Dewar, village development required that the protected status of headmen should be revised or renewed based on the assessment of villages at each settlement.Footnote 151 At the beginning of the twentieth century, when this report was published, the distribution of headmanship in the district showed great diversity by caste and tribe: headmen in 47 per cent of villages were aboriginal and 42 per cent were listed as Hindu castes. Out of 2,947 villages, Gonds were headmen in 886, BinjhwarFootnote 152 in 487, Rajputs in 472, Brahman in 429, Kolta in 346, and others in 327.Footnote 153 Although communities deemed aboriginal were not preferred as headmen or tenant-cultivators by officials, the Adivasis were not displaced from the land, paradoxically due to the protective policy of the colonial administration that was aimed at protecting the revenue stream.Footnote 154 Changes in the groups occupying the office of headman emerged only through the revision of this policy during the tenure of the new Borasambar zamindar who was selected and trained by the Court of Wards and took office in 1905.
Colonial institutions such as the Court of Wards played an important role in expanding the control of the administration over local society, by ‘developing the resources and control of its wards’ who were nurtured into fulfilling the roles of ‘landed magnates’.Footnote 155 Anand Yang describes the Court of Wards as an interventionist institution that initiated unpopular changes such as resuming rent-free tenures and leasing out estates to speculators.Footnote 156 In Borasambar zamindari, village headmen, especially if they were aboriginal, received protection from speculators during the Court of Wards management. The goal of the institution in the Sambalpur zamindari was that of ‘permanent improvement’ by increasing the incomes from land revenue and forests to secure the future interests of zamindar, tenants, and headmen. But the administrators were also apprehensive about the future of the zamindari once indigenous management was resumed.Footnote 157 During the Court of Wards administration of Borasambar from 1885–1900, a comprehensive land settlement operation took place during which the fertile eastern part received greater attention.Footnote 158
This estate was on the death of the late zamindar Bhagat Bariha and during the minority of his eldest son Gajendro Singh, a lad aged twelve years, taken under the management of the Court of Wards with the Chief Commissioner's sanction on the 24th November 1885…the administration of this estate has been thoroughly overhauled and reorganized and an efficient police force has been established.Footnote 159
In this period, Borasambar was considered a ‘valuable and extensive estate’ but ‘backward’ and in need of ‘improvement’ and ‘opening up’.Footnote 160 New villages were established and trade in village revenue-collecting leases grew in this period. In 1885, during the first comprehensive land settlement, the number of villages in Borasambar was 383;Footnote 161 by end of the second land settlement there were 434 villages.Footnote 162 By 1926, 42 new villages had been established by reclaiming forests.Footnote 163 Although the zamindari had dense forests, the Forest Conservation Act 1878 was made applicable only in government reserve forests.Footnote 164 People fleeing the directly governed Sambalpur district due to high revenue demands or rebellion obtained village headmanship by purchasing thikedari leases in newly reclaimed villages, often settling their own caste members as tenants. Thus, zamindari villages in the fertile eastern Borasambar came to resemble the multi-caste villages of Sambalpur, while the western part of the zamindari retained clearer links with the old society.
When the new Binjhal zamindar assumed his position in Borasambar, many villages were resumed as state land and revenue-collecting contracts were sold to cultivator castes and Brahmans.Footnote 165 Supported by the district administration, these decisions helped to consolidate the zamindar's status as an autonomous ruler free from the demands of kinship, a Hindu kshatriya king following the prevalent model in the princely states, and an efficient manager of an estate. Zamindar Rajendra Singh forwarded many applications to the Sambalpur Board of Revenue seeking the cancellation of the protected status of thekadars. Once the applications were sanctioned, village leases could be resold to new leaseholders.Footnote 166 In one such application by the zamindar about a large and prominent village, Saraikela, he argued that the protected village headman's successor had violated the terms of the contract by sub-leasing the village to a farming caste person and effectively selling the bhogra. In response to this letter, the commissioner had explained why the protected status could not be changed as this would violate the provisions of the Central Provinces Land Revenue Act:
From
Sr. Rajendra Singh
Zamindar of Borasambar
To
The Deputy Commissioner
Sambalpur
Padampur the 27th May 1903
Sir,
I have the honour to report that one Bhalu Binjhal of mouza Saraikela in the Borasambar Estate zamindari had obtained a protected status certificate in…of the village under orders conveyed by the junior secretary's letter no. 1725 S/153 dated 2nd December 1889. Bhalu Binjhal is now dead. His son Jagannath Binjhal has perpetually sub leased the village by a registered deed on 17-3-97 to one Bhagirathi Kulta on consideration of Rs.1000 reserving for himself only about 11 acres of ‘bhogra’ land for his lambardari rights. As a perpetual lease of his rights by a lessee is virtually a transfer of the same by sale and therefore a violation of one of the incidents of the tenure of a protected thikadar, I would request your…the Honourable the Chief Commissioner to cancel the protected status certificate granted to Bhalu Binjhal in respect of mouza Saraikela.Footnote 167
In the case of Saraikela village, the zamindar's application was not accepted. However, in several other cases the protected status of village headmen was cancelled, divesting them of their rights over the bhogra land. A document of a civil ejectment suit filed by the Borasambar zamindar against the headman of Loharmal village, preserved by the descendants (and obtained from present descendants during fieldwork), showed that the zamindar's application for the cancellation of the protected status of the headman of Loharmal was approved by the Board of Revenue in 1924.Footnote 168
That the defendant since 1912 has become a regular defaulter in making payment of thikajama and other dues of the plaintiff and so the plaintiff had to file suit no. 346 of 1915, 77 of 1922 against the—defendant and got decrees from the court on 8/7/1915 and 2/1/1923 respectively…that as the defendant was a protected thikadar, the plaintiff had to apply to the Honourable Board of Revenue for cancellation of protection certificate of the defendant for his being a regular defaulter and the Honourable Board of Revenue was pleased to cancel the protection—certificate of the defendant on 3/8/23 in case number 12-19/2 of 1923–24.Footnote 169
Removal from headmanship became a source of contention between Binjhal headmen and the zamindar Rajendra Singh, who is remembered as usurping the rights of ‘brothers’ through selling the village lease.Footnote 170 Most disputes and litigations resulted from the extinction of co-sharers’ rights in the bhogra when headmanship and the bhogra land went to the purchaser of the village revenue contract. Several such cases are found in Sambalpur land settlement reports and in the discussions around the Central Provinces Land Revenue Administration Law of 1881. The dispute in Mahulkonda remembered in headman stories (in the second section of this article) is mentioned in the third settlement report of Sambalpur district as a typical example of the disputed rights on the bhogra. Here the headman's widow reappears as the person who surrendered the village contract to the zamindar in 1917. We also learn from the report that the protected status of the village headman was cancelled in 1914.
In some thikadari villages there has been some trouble. The main source of trouble is the division of the ‘bhogra’ lands between the thikadar and his relatives which the zamindar does not recognize in the event of the village lapsing to him by surrender. The following case is a typical instance of the trouble I am referring to: village…was held by a family of Binjhal thikadars. In 1891 the then thikadar was granted protected status under section 65 A of the Central Provinces Land Revenue Act. Subsequently in 1914 the protection was withdrawn and in 1917…widow of the last recorded thikadar surrendered the thika to the zamindar. The thikadar's uncle and cousin refused to give up possession of their shares of the bhogra lands and the zamindar brought an ejectment suit against them which was dismissed by the subordinate judge. On appeal the high court upheld the judges decision holding that the grant was a permanent grant originally made to one Raja Bariha whose descendants were entitled an interest in the grant…The high court therefore held that the surrender by Musammat Konshalya in 1917 was invalid. The present position is that the zamindar is in possession of the village but the late thikadar's relatives have retained possession of their bhogra lands.Footnote 171
Mahulkonda Binjhals often argued that the ‘court’ had ruled ‘in their favour’ but their elders had been too impoverished to pursue the outcome of the litigation. Settlement reports suggest that co-sharers may have lost their tenancy rights on the bhogra, despite positive rulings by the court in later settlements. Frequent fighting of lawsuits with the zamindar indebted Binjhal families to village sahukars. During fieldwork I heard infamous stories about the nexus between the zamindar and the Court of Wards officials. In some the ‘real’ sons of the zamindar Bhagat Bariha were poisoned and an imposter was made the zamindar. The Court of Ward's meticulous documentation registers the deaths of two heirs to the zamindari, the first in 1887 from cholera and the second in 1888, possibly from malaria.Footnote 172, Footnote 173 Such incidents may have fuelled the rumours of usurpation of power by stealth. In the village contracts drawn up after the Dewar settlement, the Borasambar zamindar described himself as ‘Bindhyagiri basi’ (inhabitant of the Vindhyachal) and not Binjhal, perhaps emphasizing his symbolic distance from aboriginals, necessary to build a prestigious identity as a Hindu ruler.Footnote 174 For the Binjhal villagers who later read these records, this may have provided further evidence for the belief that the new zamindar was a ‘stranger’.
The zamindar of Borasambar may have been guided by the terms and conditions that defined his responsibilities as a progressive estate manager and magistrate of the British district, undeterred by the pressures of kinship, community, or brotherhood. His position was also tied to the contractual obligations of malguzari and subject to appropriate conduct towards the district administration. The wajib-ul-urz for Sambalpur zamindaris recognized that women (zamindarins) could also be holders of zamindari contracts.Footnote 175 His actions may also have been derived from a theme identified in administrative enquiry reports that argued that because of the restriction in the direct sale of land in the province, malguzars used the route of ‘surrender’.Footnote 176 Once the surrendered land became state property, it could be transferred to a new tenant under a fresh contract. All the headmen, whose titles were protected in 1882 and cancelled in 1900, were not Binjhals or Adivasis, but being aboriginal became a code for official incapacity. To some extent, the zamindar was not autonomous with respect to decisions about land transfers as the Board of Revenue had the final say.
Administrative papers referred to the transfer of headman and tenant cultivator land despite legal prohibition in the Central Provinces on the sale of land. Special provisions in the Central Provinces Tenancy Law aimed to protect cultivators from moneylenders, but administrators debating changes in these provisions in the early twentieth century believed that these were ineffective. Loss of co-sharer rights, following the surrender or illegal transfer of rights, became an issue only when disputes and litigation broke out and the settlement officers were swamped with petitions; then administrative attention turned towards such exclusions. While Hamid criticized sections 46 and 47 of the Central Provinces Land Tenancy Act of 1898 as the cause for litigation, the earlier settlement officer, Dewar, argued that the transfers that took place despite this prohibition resulted in loss of revenue for the state.Footnote 177, Footnote 178 Co-sharers in the headman's bhogra who made their grievances known during inheritance, succession, and settlement processes sometimes obtained the right to retain land as ordinary tenants.
Following Paul Ricoeur's advice about attention to the nature of memories, and the subject whose memories these were, has led to different stories about Adivasi land. The above sections drawn from the archives show how land in Borasambar became bound in revenue law and how people became fixed on land through the formal and informal rights that grew around titles and tenancies, and, increasingly, by transactions around land that were mediated by colonial revenue law and understandings about the capacity of local agents to make this possible. Administrative memory documented the permissions and prohibitions allowed by law. Disputes provide a particularly important arena to observe the efficacy of law in upholding the interests of the state, and that of the rights holding categories through which law became embedded in the practices of inheritance, belonging, identity, and claims making around land in revenue villages. The bhogra continued to be the best agricultural land in Borasambar villages (and in the district) and the centre of contentious claims. In the settlement report published in 1906, 60,840 acres, 26 per cent of the cultivated area in the zamindari, was under bhogra and 161,945 acres or 68 per cent land was under ‘occupancy tenants’.Footnote 179 The co-sharer households who were evicted from the bhogra were unlikely to obtain access to tenancy land since cultivators (raiyats) occupied most of the cultivable land outside the bhogra.Footnote 180 Transfer of tenancy land took place through inheritance, and occupation of land was conditional on the payment of revenue.Footnote 181 Jama groups (revenue payers) maintained tight control over all land outside of the bhogra, while the forest department was in charge of the land designated as state forests.
Much of Adivasi politics at present hinges on the legacy of colonial tenures that recognized collective and territorial forms of claim. In the Central Provinces, the recognition of the ancestral territories of the Adivasi was marginal to military and revenue concerns, although the Adivasi nature of local kingdoms was a much-discussed issue and later Adivasi exclusion from recorded titles and tenancies was debated exhaustively.Footnote 182 While the aboriginal people obtained no special recognition of their collective claims on land, they survived as part of headmen and tenants bodies in this area. Aboriginal headmen and tenants received sporadic protection from the colonial state on permissible rights,Footnote 183 perhaps due to administrative memories of rebellion, desertion of cultivation, de-population, and growing disenchantment with the rising demands and litigations of the farmers in the twentieth century.Footnote 184 But as Khan Bhadur Hamid, the Sambalpur settlement officer and deputy commissioner, whose name, along with Francis Dewar, is memorialized in Borasambar villages, wrote, ‘however irresponsible the provisions of these clauses, we have got to administer the law as it is’.Footnote 185 Binjhal headman stories, then, appear to rest on ancestral memories that grew upon such unlikely and inhospitable administrative pasts of Adivasi land connections.
Conclusion
The processes around the settlement of land from 1860–1900 in the densely forested, heterogeneous societies of the Central Provinces led to land enclosures for agriculture and forest reservation, guided by administrative requirements. According to historians of the province, this led to a decline in the extensive land-use practices and associated rights of the Adivasis and numerous mobile communities at the close of the nineteenth century.Footnote 186 Also during this time, the identification of many groups among the region's inhabitants as aboriginals informed a range of official actions.Footnote 187 In Sambalpur district, included in the Central Provinces from 1862–1905, official policies favoured forest clearing and agrarian settlement, even in poor land or densely forested zamindaris, for military reasons. Borasambar, the largest zamindari of the district, was viewed as a land frontier where hundreds of new villages were established from 1885–1905.Footnote 188 The Binjhals, a predominant Adivasi group of this area, experienced dramatic changes in their economic and social status.
For the scholarship of Adivasi land history, the land dispossession trajectory of the Binjhal headmen raises two important concerns. First, historians believe that in the Central Provinces, the British left the Adivasi undisturbed or in whichever state that they found them. The Borasambar context shows a continuous and unfolding process of administrative engagement and negotiation of officials with the rulers and inhabitants of zamindari areas. Second, it is believed that Adivasi dispossession or protection were aspects of imperial policies that were created to serve the colonial administration. In Borasambar villages, Adivasi dispossession emerged from the conditional rights offered by the revenue contracts created to expand agrarian settlement and prevent land fragmentation. Revenue farming was dependent on the cooperation and resources of the zamindari inhabitants, mainly the land-controlling Adivasis like the Binjhals.
Village contracts, though, were not based on motives of altruism or social protection. Instead, through these instruments, the risks and responsibilities of revenue payment were devolved to increasingly smaller units of the local society.Footnote 189 While occupancy and access to land were kept temporary and conditional, land was regulated, classified, and recorded in fixed entitlements attached to categories of revenue-paying tenants. As village headmen, Binjhals were initially at the apex of this system but became peripheral to the agrarian project after the 1899–1900 famines that diminished their population and as tenant-cultivators became more established. Later, dispossessed Adivasis would remember ancestral losses through the memories of recorded rights over specifically demarcated land. This article followed the stories of headman's land, a category that was central both to revenue administration and to the land claims of the Binjhals at present. Understanding the complex historical legacy of the past that shapes the land memories of the Binjhals enables the discussion about the diversity of Adivasi pasts. The exclusions that occurred due to the legal sanctions associated with partition, transfer, and inheritance that governed the headman's land or the bhogra, found in records and reports, constitute the scaffolding for remembering the pasts of the Adivasi and the loss of these worlds.Footnote 190
The headman's rent-free land—the bhogra—in all revenue villages was an irrigated, fertile stretch of rice-growing land. The bhogra in Binjhal memories represented the shared claims of prior settlers, while the Central Provinces revenue contract recognized it as the entitlement of a village official. When many headmen were removed from their positions by the Borasambar zamindar trained by the Court of Wards, in 1905 the bhogra in these villages was redesignated as the zamindar's home-farm. Later, such lands were transferred to those who purchased the village revenue contract from the zamindar. In 1906, 60,840 acres of land in the district were classified as bhogra Footnote 191 and there were 487 Binjhal headmen.Footnote 192 By 1926, only 134 headmen were Binjhals.Footnote 193 To facilitate the transfer of headmanship, the protection given to the aboriginal headmen under section 65A of the Central Provinces Land Tenure Act, from 1882, was withdrawn.Footnote 194 The contracts between the district administration and various revenue payers, from the zamindar and headman to the tenant-cultivators, only recognized the heads of households (lambardars). This process rendered many land users, such as relations and dependents, invisible in village records of rights, while increasing the powers of patriarchal heads over them. With the loss of headmanship, evicted co-sharers lost access to the bhogra. New cultivable land was difficult to obtain during this period because of the closure of the land frontier.Footnote 195 Binjhal Adivasis remembered their ancestors becoming landless and being forced to occupy village forests following their eviction from the bhogra.
Many reasons are provided for the transfer of headmanship, from non-payment of revenue, poverty, or misdemeanours in the letters of the zamindar to the Board of Revenue and in settlement reports of this period. Revenue officials did not approve of many such transfers. In official enquiries, such processes were described as ‘transfer through surrender’ caused by the legal restrictions on the selling and purchasing land in the Central Provinces. In stories narrated by the descendants of headman, loss of the bhogra land was remembered as betrayal by the zamindar who recognized women, rather than agnates, as inheritors of titles and the widows of headmen who surrendered headmanship. In official accounts, changes in the composition of landholding tenants and headmen were viewed as progress enabled by revenue policies, while aboriginal landlessness was attributed to their incapacity to withstand the competition from ‘encroaching hindu castes’. Increasing concern for dispossessed aboriginals reopened discussions about illegal processes of ‘surrender’ in administrative enquiries only in the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 196 For the Binjhal co-sharer families, the failure to retain rights over headman's land had real consequences, such as dependence on insecure categories of state land such as village wastes, pastures, and forests, and on itinerant farm labouring, taking them closer to the generic past of the Adivasis. The demand for the recognition of co-sharer rights met with little success because of the limited resources of the Adivasi ex-headmen litigants.Footnote 197
The important question that needs to be answered is whether these processes and events from Borasambar can be understood within the existing debates about the Adivasis and colonial rule and policies in central India. Bates and Shah discuss how, by the 1860s, colonial accounts narrated a story of invasion and retreat in which the Hindu Aryan invaders forced the original inhabitants of India—its aboriginal tribes—into the hilly forested parts of the country. Sambalpur settlement officers drew upon similar narratives to describe the decline of aboriginal headmen in the district in terms of progress and survival. The general argument made by Bates and Shah is that in the context of Central Provinces, colonial policy was defined solely by revenue or timber and ‘strategies of divide and rule’ kindled interest in protecting ‘minority interests’ and ‘a flurry of official enquiries pointing to the impoverishment and decay of tribal communities…’.Footnote 198 But this article shows that administrative interventions were flexible and based on dynamic understanding of changes in the revenue villages. These were based on continuous local resistance, disputes presented to officials for arbitration, and laws that officials felt that they were bound to follow. Principles of property and revenue law took shape through compromise and contingent actions or ruptures in existing social and political systems.Footnote 199 Arresting the fragmentation of revenue lands, control over scarce labour, disaffection of dominant Adivasi groups or desertion by fearful tenant cultivators, and depopulation after high mortality among the Adivasis in the zamindaris after famine and epidemics were important administrative concerns that shaped tenancies in unexpected ways.
Although academic scholarship criticizes the coherence and foundational truths in the accounts of Adivasi pasts, it is also important to avoid reducing Adivasi pasts to memory politics. Adivasi histories should consider ‘experientially meaningful’ narratives to guard against what Vitebsky describes as ‘radical discontinuity’ or ‘retro-continuity’, which carries the risk of forgetting lived pasts and ancestral worldsFootnote 200 or reducing the practices that constitute the social world to ‘the principles that command discourse’.Footnote 201 Colonial land records preserve aspects of Adivasi land, especially around inheritance, intervention of external authority, and legal frameworks. The historical possibilities in memorialized land disputes enable the understanding of how the categorical differences and inequalities that define the Adivasi were forged through ‘historically situated social processes’, not ‘timeless truths’.Footnote 202 Incommensurable memories from the Adivasi villagers in the present day and administrative decisions around the roles, entitlements, and laws that regulated access to and use of land in Borasambar villages create both challenges and possibilities for Adivasi history, which, following Ricoeur, are animated by the ‘dream of emulating the cartographer and the diamond cutter’.Footnote 203 Surpassing the limitations of the actors who inhabit these stories, historical strategies provide unexpected insights into the Adivasi pasts of the Binjhals from ex-headmen families, who were among the most impoverished inhabitants of the fertile eastern villages of Borasambar where most of the headmanship losses took place. Although many Binjhals possessed marginal lands, most swelled the armies of itinerant, circular labour that fanned outwards from the villages of their ancestors by the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 204
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Sangeeta Dasgupta, Vinita Damodaran, Gunnel Cederlöf, and Felix Padel who read an earlier version of this article, which was presented at the 25th European Conference on South Asian Studies, 2018, and made many helpful suggestions. She would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of MAS for their insightful comments and suggestions.
Competing interests
None.
Glossary
Banj , ara: nomadic pack bullock carter-traders of salt
Beth-begari: free or unwaged labour for the zamindar or headman
Binjhal/Binjhall/Binjiwar/Binjhwar: Adivasi community
Bhogra: Rent-free land of the village headman (called sir in the Central Provinces)
Burkandazee: armed men who worked for the zamindar
Gaontia/Gountia/Gaontiah: village headman
Gaontiahi: village headmanship tenure
Inam: grant or gift by a superior
Jama: land revenue demand; patrilineal households responsible for paying
Juna: old
Jhankar: Binjhal village priest
Khamar: rent-free land of the zamindar
Khalsa: domain land of the ruler
Lambardar: person with the number on rent-roll, also head of household
Lashkar: soldiers
Malguzar: landlord in the Central Provinces
Maufi: rent-free grant of land or land tenure
Patta: title
Pindari: light infantry/demobilized soldiers
Praja: subject or tenant (same as raiyat)
Raiyat/ryot: cultivators who were tenants of the government
Rahdaree Parwana: order to guard and collect toll from the highways
Raiyatwari: land tenure based on tenant cultivators
Sarkar: government
Sowar: cavalry
Tamba-Patta: copperplate deed
Thekedar/thikedar/thikanedar: holders of village revenue contracts
Thika: contract
Zabt: confiscation of land by administration
Zamindar/zemindar: landlord, indigenous elite, revenue collector
Zamindarin: a woman holding the position or belonging to the family of the zamindar
