4 - ‘You Are Now the Masters of the Country’: Negotiations and Consolidations

Summary

The hundred-year period stretching from the end of the Anglo-Maratha wars in 1818 to the early 1920s was not just an era of state-making from above in the Bhil heartland. It was also a ‘rebellious century’ (Tilly, Tilly, and Tilly 1975) during which the unequal power relations that were forged between dominant and ruling groups, on the one hand, and subaltern and ruled groups, on the other hand, were vigorously contested from below. Across the century, Bhil communities mobilised in a variety of ways to resist the adverse terms upon which they were being incorporated into the politico-administrative structures that underpinned the new forms of colonial and princely power that were being consolidated in the region. One of the key objectives of this chapter is to interrogate this resistance as an integral dimension of the making of colonial state space in the Bhil heartland.

Importantly, what emerges from this investigation is a portrait of resistance that is considerably at variance with that proposed by key contributions to the early Subaltern Studies project, in which peasant insurgency was understood as constituting ‘the necessary antithesis of colonialism’ (Guha 1983: 2). As I pointed out in the introductory chapter, the collective action of the peasantry in colonial India was understood by authors such as Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, and Sudipta Kaviraj as acts of absolute opposition to the intrusions of the colonial state. In contrast to this portrayal, the resistance that was mobilised by Bhil communities during the period in question took the form of what might be called contentious negotiations of the terms on which they were being incorporated into the new state–society relations that were crystallising in the region.

Two features characterised these negotiations in particular. First, the rebels justified their insurrections through oppositional appropriations of moral economies of rule and idioms of state-making that defined what was legitimate and what illegitimate in terms of how relationships between the state and the population over which it reigned were constituted. Second, insurgent Bhils pursued their opposition to adverse incorporation in the emerging politico–administrative structures in ways which suggests that they conceived of the state not as an entirely alien and external Leviathan, but rather in disaggregated terms, as an institution consisting of separate and hierarchically ordered echelons.