British Rule and Tribal Revolts in India: The curious case of Bastar

Note on the documentation of archival sources: All archival material for this article was collected from the National Archives of India in New Delhi (NAI), the British Library in London (BL), and the Deshbandhu Press Library (DPL) in Raipur. I use the following citation formats--for NAI: title, date, department, branch, year, file number. For BL: title, date, shelfmark, year. For DPL: subject number, bin number, article number. Sometimes larger files from these archives were numbered, so I also include page numbers where applicable.

Introduction

The Pax Britannica is so firmly established that the idea of overt rebellion is always distant from our minds, even in a remote State like Bastar.

- B. P. Standen, Chief Secretary to the Chief Commissioner, Central Provinces, 1910¹

In February of 1910 the tribal population of the princely state of Bastar in eastern India rose in rebellion against a small British force stationed within the kingdom. This event, referred to as bhumkal (earthquake), established Bastar as a major battleground for tribal (adivasi)²revolt during the colonial period. Almost exactly 100 years later, in April 2010, 76 members of the Indian Central Reserve Police Force were ambushed and massacred by Naxalite rebels, most of them adivasis, in the thick jungles of the Bastar region.³The puzzling fact about Bastar, however, is that unlike so many other regions of India beset by tribal conflict, it never came under the direct control of the British during the colonial period.

A large body of historical literature has documented how British colonialism gave rise to widespread rural unrest in India.⁴During the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was a major increase in the number of tribal revolts throughout the country. Kathleen Gough has noted that 'British rule brought a degree of disruption and suffering among the peasantry which was, it seems likely, more prolonged and widespread than had occurred in Mogul times.'⁵Ranajit Guha writes, 'For agrarian disturbances in many forms and on scales ranging from local riots to war-like campaigns spread over many districts were endemic throughout the first three quarters of British rule until the very end of the nineteenth century.'⁶Along these lines, scholars have shown how new colonial policies,...