DEBATING DUSSEHRA AND REINTERPRETING

REBELLION IN BASTAR DISTRICT,

CENTRAL INDIA

N S
Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi

This article unpacks the history of a ‘tribal’ region in Central India to show that the current
appearance of ‘two-dimensionality’ or stark opposition between the people and the state is
a product of colonial and post-colonial policies rather than a pre-colonial relic. It challenges
the idea of ‘coercive subordination’ as an adequate explanation for kingship in this area, as
argued by the late Alfred Gell. Instead, this article uses the same phenomena, annual Dussehra
rituals and successive rebellions, to argue for a more dialectical concept of hegemony. It also
takes issue with culturalist interpretations of rule, arguing instead for a historically nuanced
political economy.

The rapprochement between history and anthropology (Cohn 1981; Comaroff

& Comaroff 1992; Kelly & Kaplan 1990; Rogers 1992; Roseberry 1996) has
had enormously productive consequences for both disciplines.Yet, when done
badly, the meshing of the disciplines yields something which, as they say in
Hindi, is like a washerman’s dog: it belongs neither to the home nor to the
washing ghat. As Roseberry (1989: ix) notes, ‘within too many understandings
of cultural anthropology, history is little more than a new terrain into which
to extend anthropological practice.Anthropologists seldom let what they know
about history affect what they think about culture’. On the other side of the
divide, ‘what is taken from anthropology (such as the study of custom and
ritual in the past or “thick description”) is used not to do history but to evade
doing history’ (Sider 1986: 4).
One area in which the absence of historical sensitivity, as against the mere
absence of attention to historical events, is particularly marked is in the study
of so-called ‘tribal societies’ in South Asia. Not only is the category of the
‘tribal’ taken as given, without attempting to understand the formation of the
concept in historical terms, but tribal societies are characterized as isolated,
homogeneous, or egalitarian. It is assumed that this state of affairs has lasted
over several hundred years, with some minor blips caused by colonialism and
the industrializing urge of the post-colonial state.
The late Alfred Gell (1997) attempted to explain the persistence of such
societies, drawing on the political history of Bastar, in Central India. Bastar,
with its predominantly tribal population, was one of several princely states
that were to be absorbed into the state of Madhya Pradesh.
© Royal Anthropological Institute 2001.
J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 7, 19-35
20 NANDINI SUNDAR

Gell starts by assuming that Bastar has always been ‘socially remote’ or cul-
turally and politically isolated, and its state two-dimensional, consisting pri-
marily of the king and his subjects, with few intermediaries. The economy
was marked by low levels of revenue extraction over the long term, which
was primarily responsible for the absence of a dense ruling class or the ladder
of social hierarchies that existed in other parts of India. His basic argument
is that the responsibility for this two-dimensionality and the lack of extrac-
tion, even by colonial authorities, lies with the tribal people themselves
who played on an ‘image of wildness’ totally at odds with their lack of
military organization or political leadership (Gell 1997: 435). The annual
Dussehra festival and successive rebellions both had the intention (or func-
tion) of exalting the king ritually and thereby keeping the state weak in
practice. The assembled population overwhelmed the king by their pres-
ence at times of worship like Dussehra, and the fear this generated in the king
was amplified during times of rebellion. Gell (1997: 436-7) refers to this phe-
nomenon as ‘coercive subordination’, ‘rituals of rebellion’, or ‘pre-emptive
unrests’.
This article begins with some historical and ethnographic detail on Bastar
which is intended to provide an alternative account to Gell’s.1 I show first that
the region was not isolated throughout its history; secondly, that the polity
was not ‘two-dimensional’, consisting only of ruler and subjects; thirdly, that
low rates of land revenue extraction were not the defining feature of the local
economy and that as forests and minerals became more commercially viable
surplus extraction depended on the extraction of these resources. Industrial
exploitation of forests meant keeping people out of them, and it was negoti-
ation over this which was the primary cause of resistance in the major rebel-
lion of 1910, not taxes. The importance of forests and other natural resources
in contests over defining the local economy in South Asia as a whole is cor-
roborated by the weight of new ecological work (see essays in Arnold & Guha
1995; Grove, Damodaran & Sangwan 1998).
My central thrust, however, is that state legitimacy is rarely one-sided, rarely
imposed by the state from above or, as Gell argues, by the people from below.
The balance of forces that make up its legitimacy change over time, and these
changes must be understood in their own context, not in terms of a given
cultural template. In discussing the three rebellions by Bastar peasants, in 1876,
1910, and 1961-6, Gell (1997: 437) argues that ‘the symbolic mechanism in
all of these uprisings was the same, i.e. the assertion of tribal control over the
Raja’s person and, through him, the capacity to resist the extension of the
power of the state’. Against this, I argue for a historically specific account of
each rebellion, which is alive to continuities and the underlying importance
of political economy, but which does not subsume each event in the same
cultural framework or assume a static economy.
At different stages in the history of Bastar, popular allegiance to or rebel-
lion against the king served as the metaphor for negotiations with a chang-
ing order, an order which went far beyond the immediate relations between
people and king. The appeal to a ‘just king’ in 1876 gave way in 1910 to
rebellion against the entire colonial apparatus and those associated with it,
including the king, and then finally, in 1966, to tribals rallying around the
former king as a protest against the policies of the independent Indian state.
 NANDINI SUNDAR 21

Ideologies of legitimate rule were selectively invoked at times of rebellion and

did not constitute the glue of the polity in the manner that Gell claims.Where
successive events draw upon each other, it is not because people are locked
into the same old conceptual schemes. Rather, at moments when people come
together they draw upon (but are never determined by) a collective, though
often fractured and differently experienced, ‘historical imagination’ (cf.
Comaroff & Comaroff 1992), which in turn affects the manner in which the
events play themselves out in time and space. This historical understanding is
itself produced at every moment, often through conscious mobilization.

The political and demographic history of pre-colonial Bastar

Contrary to received wisdom (Centre for Science and Environment 1985: 86),
Bastar, even in the pre-colonial period, was never a political backwater, but
part of the various power struggles in the region. The ruins of medieval Shiva
temples with several images of Sanskritic gods and goddesses, as well as Naga
stone inscriptions which mention the presence of a variety of castes ‘from
various countries’ including traders and priests, indicate the presence of high
Hinduism and a supra-local organization, which anthropologists have tradi-
tionally found difficult to reconcile with their image of ‘primitive,’ ‘tribal’, and
‘isolated’ Bastar.
The Naga kings, who ruled from about the eleventh to the fourteenth cen-
turies AD, conquering previous kingdoms in the area, were in turn supplanted
by intruders from the south, the Kakatiyas of Warangal. The Kakatiyas ruled
from 1323 till 1947, when the last king of the dynasty, Pravir Chandra Bhanj
Deo, acceded to the Indian Union. However, smaller chiefs or zamindars in
the south and west of Bastar, some of whom were appointed by the Kakatiya
kings and others who pre-dated the Kakatiyas, were fractious well into the
nineteenth century. Some of them maintained bands of Afghan mercenaries,
their raids causing large-scale depopulation.This picture is characteristic of the
whole Central Indian belt. While the more powerful dynasties contended for
power, local authority remained in the hands of local chieftains or headmen
(Mahapatra 1987: 11).
There were also periodic incursions from larger powers such as the
Haihaibanshi kings of Ratanpur, north of Bastar, and the Qutb-Shahis of
the Deccan to the south. In 1780, Bastar came under the Bhosalas (Marathas)
at Nagpur, paying Rs. 4,000 per annum as tribute. The collection of tribute
under Maratha paramountcy was fraught with tension on both sides, with
the Marathas ordering the sack of Bastar villages and the raja and zamindars
retaliating with raids.
In demographic, ecological, and cultural terms, as in political, Bastar was
both internally differentiated and part of a larger cultural region, the Dan-
dakaranya forest belt, which was broken up into different administrative
provinces by the British. Almost each group in Bastar has its own language,
but Halbi serves as the lingua franca, perhaps owing to the fact that in the sev-
enteenth century Halba soldiers were posted to different parts of the country.
The main pertinent groups in Bastar include Halbas, Bhatras, Dhurwas, Dorlas,
Abujhmaria, Ghotul Muria, Jhoria Muria, Damdami Maria, and Raja Muria.
22 NANDINI SUNDAR

There are also small pockets of Mundas, Saoras, and Gadabas. However, the
extent to which they constituted tribes, rather than diverse populations speak-
ing a common language or sharing an occupational specialization, is doubt-
ful (see S. Guha 1999; Sundar 1997). Finally, there is a range of groups
(Maharas, Rauts, Kumhars) which fall under the official category of ‘castes’,
since they are relatively more Hinduized, and generally speak Halbi or Hindi.
Other groups were brought in by successive Kakatiya kings and zamindars to
spread settled agriculture (Brahmins from Orissa), to function as scribes and
officials (Kayasth and Marathi Brahmans), as priests and advisers to the king
(Maithili Rajguru Brahman family), or as mercenaries and traders (Rohillas).

Defining the state: forsaking ‘two-dimensionality’

Gell (1997: 433-4) argues that society in Bastar, like other ‘tribal areas’, was
‘two dimensionally hierarchical founded on a stark opposition between the
mass of ordinary subjects (the tribes) and the king and his court. By contrast,
the more developed type of traditional kingdoms … were three-dimensionally
hierarchical’ in that there were layers of intermediaries between the people
and the king. State activities here are defined narrowly in terms of tax col-
lection, and the ruling class one which subsists on this surplus in taxes.
Even by conventional definitions, however, the pre-colonial state in Bastar
has to be understood as a complex concatenation of state and proto-state fea-
tures, or ‘tribal organisations, chiefdoms, archaic states and larger state systems’
(Sinha 1987: xi). Evidence from the middle of the nineteenth century sug-
gests that there were multiple centres of power – small kings and zamindars,
pargana majhis, and village headmen – all of whom dispensed justice, performed
ritual activities, managed order, or decided on land allocations. At the village
level, the village headman, who in many, but not all, cases also combined the
role of the earth priest, and almost invariably belonged to a dominant or
founding lineage, collected revenue and cesses from each household/lineage
and organized corvée.Village rituals and the resolution of social offences, such
as those related to violations of caste rules, were decided by a council of elders,
who included the headman, the priest, and so on. Above the village, there
were parganas, or administrative units whose boundaries were sometimes
defined by former chiefdoms, sometimes by clan boundaries, and sometimes
by administrative fiat. Pargana majhis represented their various territories at
Dussehra and in all other relations with the centre. Individual zamindars exer-
cised power over their pargana majhis, who also owed allegiance to the king
at Jagdalpur (see Sundar 1995: appendix I; 1997: 94-6).
Under indirect colonial rule, the administration was ostensibly run by the
king and his adviser, the diwan. The distance from Raipur, the unfamiliar and
dense jungle en route, and the reputation of its inhabitants for savagery and
raids on the Chhattisgarh plains below, all made the British wary of direct
military intervention and take-over. While functioning through native diwans,
however, the British gradually encouraged the introduction of certain laws
prevalent in British India.The ‘state’ was a much wider entity in this case than
the kingdom of Bastar alone. That Bastar did not simply become like other
parts of the Central Provinces was partly, of course, due to the pre-emptive
 NANDINI SUNDAR 23

actions of the local peasants, and Gell is not the first to point this out
(see Sundar 1995; 1997: 90). Equally important were a series of paternalist
anthropologist-administrators who believed the tribals must be left in peace
in order to develop differently from the rest of India. However, even where
the formal state withheld itself by granting a space to ‘customary law’, it
entered into the very marrow of local custom, politics, and ways of relating
to the state (Sundar 1997: 156-90). The absence of an ‘established ruling class’
(even were one to agree with Gell (1997: 436) that ‘grubby malguzars, traders
and moneylenders’ did not constitute such a class) is not the same as the
absence of a state. To say, as Gell (1997: 436) does, that the ‘whole mechanism
of state was made to revolve around the divine ruler’ thus amounts to a mere
fetishization of the state as kingship at the expense of a realistic understand-
ing of how governance worked in practice.
To summarize, neither society nor the polity were two-dimensional, nor
were local conceptions of the state centred solely on the king. The idea that
Rohilla mercenaries could be employed by Gond (tribal) zamindars, the variety
of political and military negotiations with outside powers and smaller chiefs,
the existence of a composite culture which had to be created out of the inter-
mingling of several linguistically and ethnically different groups, all suggest that
we need to revise our idea of the homogeneity of tribal life. Certainly tribal
society was not a ‘protean mass’ characterized by a ‘lack of military organisa-
tion or political leadership’ (Gell 1997: 435).

Defining the local economy in terms of forest resources

In describing the ‘power-vacuum’ in Bastar, Gell lays great stress on low rates
of land revenue extraction. ‘Wholesale under-extraction’ of revenue by the
state in pre-colonial Bastar continued under British rule, with ‘a modus
vivendi’ being established ‘between the ruler, the British government and the
tribal people, which allowed the latter to flourish and do what they had always
done best, i.e. avoid creating any surplus value for the state or any ruling class’
(Gell 1997: 435, 447). I argue here that land revenue was not the only source
of surplus extraction, or the only basis for a ruling class. Increasingly, under
the British, forests came to be a much more important source of revenue.The
Bastar peasants were a great deal less successful than Gell imagines at staving
off the state.
During the Maratha period, raiding villages and travellers was an important
part of the economies of forest polities, with zamindars and little kings some-
times hiring out the services of their people to larger powers engaged in ter-
ritorial battles (S. Guha 1999; Skaria 1999: 124-5). The distribution of the
goods looted on these raids was central to the construction of local kingship,
which was founded on the building-up of alliances through gift-giving rather
than the extraction of taxes (Dirks 1987; Skaria 1999: 132-44).
Although the rates may not have been as high as elsewhere, indirect
colonial rule was associated with increases in the rates of land revenue. Under
the malguzari settlement, first introduced in 1867, the malguzar collected
revenue payments from the peasants and in turn paid a fixed sum to the state.
If the number of households or the land under cultivation increased between
24 NANDINI SUNDAR

settlements, the malguzar kept the difference. The settlements were apparently
so favourable to malguzars that many of them abandoned cultivation them-
selves and lived entirely on the excess rents of their tenants or on the basis
of begar (forced labour) extracted from them.
In heavily forested areas like Bastar, however, it was not land surpluses, but
forest revenues and trade in non-timber forest produce (NTFP), which were
the major sources of income for the state.2 In the pre-colonial period, while
there was some amount of commercial exploitation of the forests by the raja
and the zamindars, there was no systematic forest department or policy. The
tropical, moist, deciduous forests of Bastar contain sal (Shorea robusta) and teak
(Tectona grandis), both important commercial species. British interest in the
timber trade started as early as the 1860s, but it was only after the state came
under direct management in 1891 that the reservation of forests began.
Between 1891 and 1910 the state attempted to reserve one-third of all forest
land, which meant deporting entire villages which came within these demar-
cated reserves, and putting an end to their shifting cultivation. Colonial
authorities despised swidden not merely because it produced low surpluses,
but because it interfered with state control over forests, which were impor-
tant sources of revenue to the state (see also Gadgil & Guha 1992: 152). To
argue, as Gell (1997: 446) does, that peasants resorted to rebellion in order to
keep taxes low rather than because they needed their forest land to subsist,
misses out on several factors intrinsic to shifting cultivation as a mode of pro-
duction. Under shifting cultivation, peasants needed a larger amount of forest
land for subsistence, compared to settled agriculture, especially since swidden
was mostly accompanied by hunting, fishing, and gathering of forest produce.
Low taxes were an important factor, of course, but swidden was also valued
as a form of risk diversification, especially when the rains failed or bullocks
died, making rice agriculture difficult.
The colonial attempt to take over forests for commercial production also
involved granting monopolies on NTFPs to outside traders and imposing
duties on peasant consumption of forest produce and grazing. While little
research has been done on the importance of NTFPs to local economies, pri-
marily because of the colonial designation of these products as ‘minor’ com-
pared to the ‘major’ product, timber, there is some evidence that these products
were of great trading importance in the pre-colonial period. One common
route for itinerant traders (Banjaras) was from north to south through Bastar.
In 1862 the annual volume of traffic on this route was as high as 10,000 laden
bullocks. In return for lac, resin, wax, galls, horn, dyes, teak, silk cocoons, ele-
phants, and so forth, the Bastar peasants purchased salt and cloth from the
Banjaras. The discovery of Buddhist stupas, usually found along trade routes,
in north Bastar further reinforces the importance of Bastar and its forest
produce in pre-colonial trading networks, which colonial rule disrupted.
Even now, Bastar appears to be a beneficiary of several development pro-
grammes, and its people pay very little in the form of land revenue. Indeed,
local traders argue that the adivasis are a pampered lot.The Centre for Science
and Environment report of 1984-5 (1985: 93) revealed, however, that although
Rs. 50 million were spent every year on the region, the annual revenue gen-
erated from it (in the form of forest and mineral wealth) was Rs. 470 million.
In other words, pointing to low rates of revenue extraction through time does
 NANDINI SUNDAR 25

not sufficiently characterize the economy; nor is it sufficient evidence of two-

dimensionality in the polity. Low taxes were not the central means of surplus
extraction in this region nor were they the most central issue in peasant–state
relations. The peasants may have been successful in maintaining low rates of
land revenue, but they were not as successful in maintaining the most basic
aspects of their lives, such as swidden and hunting, or in getting good rates
for their labour in NTFP collection.

Ethnographic insights into legitimacy and hegemony

We now come to the crux of my disagreement with Gell, the nature of state
legitimacy or hegemony. In his interpretation, the state was maintained from
below. By praising and worshipping the king in such excess and in such large
numbers, the peasants forced him to conform to their expectations. In the
process, they got their way in terms of lower taxes. All their rebellions were
actually pre-emptive uprisings to make sure that the king remained the centre
of rule, but one without any real extractive power.
I argue, on the contrary, that the kingship was founded on force from above,
but was sustained through rituals which accommodated local customs and
aspirations. Far from the state being an ‘ontological given’ (Gell 1997: 448),
oral histories of settlement in south Bastar emphasize that the villages were
there before any state was established. They also contain historically embed-
ded memories about how the Kakatiya dynasty came to govern and the variety
of local polities it had to contend with (Sundar 1997: 21-77). In other words,
the reality of the kingship was far more dialectical than Gell assumed. Before
going further, I want to consider briefly different types of approaches to the
question of state legitimacy.
For heuristic purposes I have divided the ethnographic literature on legiti-
macy and ideological hegemony into three broad categories. Unavoidably,
much of this ethnography is centred around class and caste relations rather
than subject positions with respect to the state.
The first dominant camp is a Durkheimian-Weberian or ‘culturalist’ one
(Dumont 1962; Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1940; Geertz 1983; Gluckman 1963;
Sahlins 1985), which assumes that one can identify particular cosmologies that
form the basis of state legitimacy and that these are shared throughout the
culture. Within this school, one can place the majority of early structural-
functional and symbolic descriptions of the political system in non-Western
societies. The principles that underlie non-Western polities are seen to be dif-
ferent from the liberal theories of representation and contract underlying the
liberal democratic polities in the West. While one welcomes the portrayal of
alternative rationalities at work in sustaining political order, this school assumes
too much uniformity in the acceptance of the ruling ideology. There is insuf-
ficient examination of the manner in which the rituals and ceremonies sur-
rounding the political figure-head are inscribed and enforced, within the
configurations of power relations, so as to become the ‘ruling’ ideology (cf.
Asad 1983: 240).
The second school of thought recognizes that the legitimation of power
may not be universally accepted. This can be divided into three further
26 NANDINI SUNDAR

approaches. The first is a ‘moral economy’ approach, which sees grievances as

generated by a popular consensus shared by rulers and ruled about what is
legitimate behaviour (Thompson 1993). Some have argued that this overt con-
sensus is covertly contested. Whether or not people resist at the level of prac-
tice is a different question, and one that depends on the objective possibilities
(Scott 1985: 184-6). The second approach claims that popular culture (con-
ceived of as non-utilitarian and communal) is directly antithetical to the hege-
monic culture (feudal or capitalist) (R. Guha 1999; 1983; Taussig 1980). The
third approach focuses on practice, and sees cultural hegemony as internally
contested, but often reproduced through the very process of dissension (Rebel
1989; Roseberry 1989; Sider 1986; Willis 1977).
The third camp questions the very validity of using ‘legitimacy’ or even
‘hegemony’ as if they were things that discrete entities called ‘states’ possessed
or exercised. Tracing the concepts of sovereignty and legitimacy to the need
to justify royal power from medieval times onwards, Foucault (1980: 96) views
these concepts as implicated in the relations of domination: ‘Right should be
viewed not in terms of a legitimacy to be established, but in terms of the
methods of subjugation it instigates’. Following him, there have been some
attempts to focus on how power constitutes people rather than how people
view power (Ferguson 1990; Mitchell 1988). A world-systems approach
(Wallerstein 1984), though on the opposite end of the spectrum with its focus
on grand narratives and interconnections on a world scale, would none the
less join in questioning the possibility of framing the issue of legitimacy within
a single state.
Gell’s argument straddles the culturalist and the moral economy schools
outlined above. It is culturalist in the sense that he assumes everyone in Bastar
followed the same ideology, making no differentiation between region, prox-
imity to the centre of power, or position within an indigenous hierarchy. It
is a variant on the moral economy approach in that he sees the ruling ideo-
logy as imposed by the people from below or what, following Appadurai, he calls
‘coercive subordination’ (Gell 1997: 436).
The problem with Gell’s argument is that it assumes the imposition of
ideology is one-sided. Much as earlier accounts of domination ignored the
role of popular consent in enabling hegemony, Gell ignores the role of royal
force in first establishing the structure of the state, or the terms of the mutual
relationship between people and king. The dialectical character of this rela-
tionship is explicated through an account of Dussehra and the various rebel-
lions that occurred in Bastar from 1876 onwards: the Dussehra rituals were
critical in shoring up royal hegemony, while the rebellions were crucial in
reconfiguring this hegemony.

Dussehra through time: the establishment of royal hegemony

Dussehra encapsulates the process of state-formation under the Kakatiyas both
spatially and historically. Spatially, Dussehra incorporated all the areas within
the kingdom; conversely, as different zamindaris were alienated from Bastar,
their people continued to attend the Bastar Dussehra for a while and then
gradually drifted away. Each ritual of the festival provides a glimpse of the
 NANDINI SUNDAR 27

textured construction of hegemony though time. For instance, the organized

and orderly routines and imagery of imperial durbars were based on and refash-
ioned old regime assemblies; sports days and agricultural exhibitions coexist
with the wild dance of the shamans in possession; and finally, in independent
India, the Collector and the Commissioner, the Member of the Legislative
Assembly and the Member of Parliament, have succeeded to the mantle of
the king.
Dussehra in Bastar has always been a performative act of legitimation.
Within the agricultural mode of production, Dussehra was an extension of
the village jatra, local festivals necessary to preserve fertility and avoid sick-
ness. The king was seen as necessary to the performance of this function for
the kingdom as a whole. Danteswari, as the tutelary goddess of the Kakatiya
king, performed the role of a village mother goddess at state level. However,
the manner in which she came to be regarded as chief goddess, by accom-
modating local mother goddess rituals, as well as the goddess of the defeated
Naga kings, Manikeswari, indicates the manner in which ritual was imbricated
in the establishment of royal hegemony (for details, see Sundar 1997: 61-4).
During Dussehra, every single group in the kingdom, however small in
number, has some role to play. Certain functions are carried out on a caste
basis and certain others on a regional basis. For instance, a village which has
been assigned to bring wood may have several castes, all of which are involved
in the task. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the villages in a pargana
would pool resources and send rice, goats, and other presents to the king
through the majhi. Certain parganas contributed supplies, while others con-
tributed labour.
The clearest example of how the kingdom is integrated through Dussehra
comes in the making of the two chariots which are required to make a circuit
round the centre of the town during Dussehra. Every year, one of the chari-
ots is made afresh. The wood for the base is brought by one set of villages,
while that for the roof is brought by another; a third group brings the coal
for smelting the iron used in joints, while a fourth set brings the creepers to
make chariot ropes. In all, some seventy-two villages appear to be involved in
bringing construction materials for the chariots alone, and several more are
associated with making them and pulling them through the streets of the
town.
Through the incorporation of different groups as participants and contribu-
tors in ritual, the Kakatiyas ensured their contribution in terms of corvée and
revenue to the more mundane and regulated aspects of state construction and
sustenance. For instance, throughout the state every village maintained a rest-
house and two village functionaries to serve the needs of visiting officials;
several villages contributed labour and supplies to the royal household. The
latter was the real service the people performed for the state, but its ritual
overlay, Dussehra, came to be seen as equally central to the continued exis-
tence of the polity. The mechanisms of mobilization for everyday corvée and
Dussehra were essentially the same, through village institutions and, in the case
of Dussehra, upwards through the pargana majhi.
The central theme of the Dussehra festival, taken generically, is said to be
the worship of the goddess by the king on behalf of the kingdom, in order
to ensure its well-being. However, the various rituals of Dussehra in Bastar
28 NANDINI SUNDAR

are multi-layered accretions of different meanings going back to different

historical periods and events and drawing upon different ensembles of tradi-
tion, some pan-Indian and high-Hindu, and some specific to Bastar (for a
fuller description, see Sundar 1997: 57-76). Here, I shall focus on one crucial
ritual, the Kumdakote ceremony or Nayakhani.
On the 12th day of Dussehra as it was celebrated in royal times, the king
was ‘kidnapped’ to a place called Kumdakote, to the east of Jagdalpur, where
the people presented him with gifts of cash, game, fruit, brooms, mats, and
hawks. The practice was known as Joharni, johar being a term of greeting in
Halbi. It was also a time when the king partook of new grains (Nayakhani).
In the context of the quick-ripening millet and coarse paddy grains of the
shifting cultivation cycle that was prevalent all over Bastar, Dussehra made
sense as a harvest festival. The Mawli Priest claimed in a 1992 interview that
the offering of forest produce was intended to reassure the king that neither
the people nor he would starve, even during drought. According to Menon
(1938), the tribals felt aggrieved that, despite being the majority of the king’s
subjects, they could not take part in the essentially Hindu celebrations. They
wanted their own Dussehra, ‘which, they said, could only be held in their
own home, the jungle’. So they kidnapped the king when asleep and took
him and his chariot to Kumdakote, which was a dense jungle then. The king
came to some understanding with them, and rode the chariot back in
triumph. In yet another interpretation, one might read the offering of grains
and first-fruits as a symbolic assertion of the people’s rights to the forest in
the first place.
The Kumdakote Nayakhani reveals Dussehra as an act of negotiation
between people and king. The king legitimized his own position as essential
to the well-being of the land through the ritual eating of the first grains and
fruit, sacrifices, and other rituals. The people, in turn, subordinated the king-
ship to their own ends of agricultural prosperity. Through this, they also
asserted their rights to the land and its produce, and the king’s dependence
on them for his own livelihood.
The same incident has been described by Gell as the simultaneous domes-
tication and exaltation of the king. By offering him their own food, they were
bringing him down to their level, but were also treating him as their goddess
by making offerings of food and money. Yet rather than treating this as evi-
dence of a political pact between ruler and people, Gell (1997: 443) argues,
‘it would be quite incorrect to suppose that the Raja was consciously sub-
mitting to being placed on his throne by the excited tribal mob even if such
may appear to be the case objectively’. Instead, the Raja identified himself
with the Hindu king, Ram, and his return to Ayodhya to maintain Rajput
warrior status. The difference between the Bastar Dussehra and the ‘military-
expansionist’ model of Dussehra described by Fuller (1992) for other king-
doms in India lay, according to Gell (1997: 443), in the fact that the Bastar
king merely regained his own kingdom through popular support rather than
divesting other kings of theirs.
Rule in Bastar, however, was not the peaceful affair that Gell assumes, and
arms were taken up against both fractious subordinates and external powers.
Although claims by little kings to Rajput status were a regular feature (Sinha
1962), this did not necessarily rest on an identification with Ram. Apart
 NANDINI SUNDAR 29

from May, the colonial administrator on whom Gell relies, none of the
sources on Dussehra from the early part of the century onwards, or the Hindu
priests who might have been expected to be zealous over the conventional
Rajput-Hindu claims of the royal family, mention the Ram story. Other king-
doms in Orissa and elsewhere, with adivasi populations, also had one member
of the dominant tribe performing the investiture ceremony, and no king
appeared to find it denigrating to be thus placed on his throne (Mahapatra
1987).
While Dussehra was a moment for the expression of public loyalty, it was
simultaneously contingent on the king’s proper behaviour and acknowledge-
ment of the role of his subjects. Their loyalty could fracture, as happened in
1910, 1876, and even earlier in 1774, when the Halbas of Dongar rebelled
against King Daryaodev, led by his half-brother, Ajmer Singh. The establish-
ment of hegemony is not a one-time accomplishment, but something cease-
lessly contested and constantly re-established. In the following section I shall
discuss three rebellions in turn, bringing out the manner in which they were
responses to administrative restrictions, rather than pre-emptive uprisings. In
the process, we see the changing role of the kingship.

One-dimensional ‘pre-emptive uprisings’ versus two-dimensional rebellions

In 1876, the Raja of Bastar set out from his capital to meet the Prince of
Wales. En route he was intercepted by a deputation of peasants who com-
plained bitterly about two men in charge of the administration (the diwan and
munshi) and said that, despite being loyal subjects of the king, who paid him
revenue and performed free labour for him, they were much oppressed. Petty
officials forced them to supply free goods, land revenue rates had gone up,
and they were heavily fined and imprisoned for petty crimes under the new
penal code. The peasants threatened to leave the kingdom if they did not get
justice. In the ensuing skirmish, the peasants threw clods of earth, stones, and
cow bones (thought ritually polluting) at the raja. In turn, the raja or his diwan
ordered his men to fire on the crowd, leaving two dead and six badly injured.
The raja returned to Jagdapur and was besieged for a month by peasants, pri-
marily from villages nearby. The peasants were led by their headmen who,
even by British accounts, maintained perfect order. Eventually, the Deputy
Commissioner of Sironcha, the colonial official in overall charge of Bastar,
arrived and resolved the siege by dismissing the two chief offending officials.
To a large extent, the rebellion of 1876 may be read as a variant on the
customary rebellion approach, which sees rebellion as defending the kingship
against the shortcomings of a particular king (Gluckman 1963; 1966). Here,
the peasants were invoking the ideal of a just king in order to protest against
changes in the balance of power that were taking place at their expense. But
the order that existed just before the rebellion was not simply one of tradi-
tional kingship. There were issues beyond the corruption of the two officials
that tied into long-term processes connected with colonialism: their insistence
on improving the finances of the state, in which the introduction of the mal-
guzari system was one element; and the introduction of new (British) judicial
procedures or codes.
30 NANDINI SUNDAR

There are two interesting aspects of the 1876 rebellion: first, the king’s
plaintive complaints to the British about being hit by clods of earth and being
treated with contempt by his subjects indicates a scepticism about the king’s
divinity that was shared by ruler and ruled alike; secondly, in this case, the
upholder of custom was not the king but the colonial official who restored
order. Consequently, we might be better off understanding the 1876 rebellion
not merely as a ‘customary rebellion’ or ‘ritual of rebellion’ in the traditional
sense, but as a new stage of the encounter between the Bastar peasants, their
ruler, and the British paramount power.
As mentioned before, at the turn of the century one of the most impor-
tant issues locally was the reservation of forests and the prospect of being dis-
placed from their villages, which in turn would have meant the disruption of
the special relationship the villagers had with their ‘Earth’. The Earth is the
main object of worship in Bastar, far more important than any Danteswari or
any king. Local elites who were also involved in rebelling against the state
resented the loss of their untaxed land and the reduced opportunities for
commercial exploitation of the forest. Colonial rule also meant an influx of
petty officials and traders and an increase in official demands on peasants for
free labour and supplies. Increased land revenue rates were only one among
many other complaints.
In 1910 all these factors sparked a major rebellion, popularly known as the
Bhumkal. It was rather different from the 1876 rebellion. Whereas the 1876
siege was peaceful, confined to the palace, and involved only a few parganas
around Jagdalpur, the 1910 rebellion was dispersed and covered most of the
state, with bazaars looted, traders killed, and government property attacked. It
was preceded by weeks of planning among the villages and consultations with
elites in the town, though actual leadership was in the hands of pargana and
village headmen. In 1876, the protest was put down in a month, while in
1910 it took the colonial authorities from February to mid-May to capture
and punish all the rebels. In both cases, the majority of rebels appear to have
been from tribal and low-caste groups, although in 1910 town elites also took
a prominent role. There were also some zamindars and tribal headmen, who
had gained from the new land revenue system, who collaborated with the
British in 1910. The greater spread of the Bhumkal, as well as the existence
of both rebels and collaborators, reveals the greater entrenchment of colonial
rule by 1910.
The king, who was equated with the unpopular government, was
clearly one of the targets of the rebellion. Some evidence suggests that the
rebels were keen to replace him with his cousin, Lal Kalandar Singh, but
there is other evidence to show that the mass of peasants regarded a
tribal shaman called Gunda Dhur as their real leader. Gunda Dhur has never
been clearly identified and remains a mysterious but inspirational figure in
the area.
After 1910, the colonial government backed off somewhat under a series
of sympathetic administrators, but their efforts were ultimately limited. Inde-
pendence brought little relief in terms of land and forest policies, and the
problem was exacerbated by the electoral opportunism of political parties like
the Congress. The last king, Pravir, had been dispossessed of his kingship
after accession. His property had also been taken over by the government,
 NANDINI SUNDAR 31

which had declared him insane. In order to get it back, he toyed with
electoral politics first by supporting the Congress party and later by setting
up a series of his own party and non-party organizations. These organizations
were popular because they also focused on village-level issues, such as reclaim-
ing common property resources from the clutches of Congress leaders and
other elites, tree-felling, and the taking-over of government land and of land
owned by upper castes, moneylenders, or traders. In 1965-6, at a time when
the entire country was suffering from a food crisis, a forcible grain levy
brought several hundred villagers, especially women, out onto the streets. The
rice issue and that of restoring the king to his throne (or to his legal posi-
tion as ex-ruler, to be precise) became synonymous in people’s minds.
They believed that the government was not to be trusted, and that if the grain
was collected and given to the king instead, he would redistribute it among
the poor.
A series of public protests, demonstrations, and the like throughout the
1960s culminated in Pravir’s death in a gun battle with the police in 1966.
Although official estimates say that only eleven others died along with the
king, there are rumours of hundreds having died or having been injured.
Pravir’s success was not simply an adaptation of ‘traditional’ kingship to
‘modern’ electoral politics (Bailey 1963). Nor was it a continuation of divine
kingship, though of course there was some element of that, which he pur-
posely played upon. While the ritual importance of the king in warding off
drought was common to both 1876 and 1966, the public expression of this
demand was quite different in both cases. Pravir’s popularity and the move-
ment arose at a particular historical juncture and represented a critique of the
post-colonial state.
Following this brief description of the three rebellions, let us now appraise
Gell’s interpretation of them. According to Gell, all these rebellions were in
support of a ruler (or a claimant) against the government. The outcome the
peasants were trying to stave off was not actual abuses but the ‘disruption of
the all-important relationship between the Raja and his subjects by an over-
mighty Prime Minister or later the Indian government’ (Gell 1997: 437). Since
the people of Bastar were better off than those elsewhere in terms of taxes
and restrictions on access to land, water, and forest, this had to be a pre-
emptive move on their part to ward off higher taxes, rather than reactions to
state oppression (1997: 437-7, 446).
The Bastar peasants, however, were not keen students of comparative taxa-
tion, content that their taxes had been raised only slightly compared to the
one-third that was extracted from peasants elsewhere. What upset them was a
decline in their own circumstances compared to their own past, rather than
the fact that they might be better off than those elsewhere. Gell’s argu-
ment is incapable of explaining the timing of the rebellions. They were both
pre-emptive and reactive. While the threat of repeated popular resistance was
instrumental in ensuring indirect, as against direct, British rule, there is enough
written and oral evidence to show that, in each period, the peasants had spe-
cific economic complaints. After every rebellion certain key decisions, such as
the reservation of one-third of the forest land to the state or the imposition
of a forcible grain levy, were rescinded, even as the structures of the state were
more firmly entrenched.
32 NANDINI SUNDAR

Moreover, if the rebellions were so culturally specific to Bastar, and so

caught up with the kingship alone, how does one explain the similarities in
the modes of rebellion that took place across the country (R. Guha 1983),
and indeed in the wider imperial context (see Adas 1992). Nor could one
then account for the fact that there were many rebellions around that period
in response to restrictions on land and forest rights (Gadgil & Guha 1992:
146-80; for an Indonesian parallel, see Peluso 1992).
In Gell’s analysis the rebellions are treated simply as blank slates for anthro-
pological interpretation. All the data provided by careful historical analysis,
bringing out the collusion of some strata and regions in the rebellions and
not of others, or changing attitudes towards the king and the government, is
summarily dismissed by Gell (1997: 436) on the grounds that this ‘assimilates
[the rebellions] as far as possible to revolutionary mass-action as understood
in the West’. Instead, he prefers to assume an ideological cohesiveness across
Bastar that stays static through time.
Rather than conflating the three instances of rebellion into a single cul-
tural prototype, we need to be sensitive both to their particularities and con-
tinuities. Each rebellion drew significance from its own context, while at the
same time it dwelt on the organizational forms and the imagery of the past.
In popular accounts of 1966 we find echoes of 1910: a belief that the bullets
of the enemy would turn into water, a belief that the leader (Gunda Dhur or
Pravir) had not really died, a belief that if the requisite prayers had been com-
pleted the rebels would not have lost. In some cases, this was a conscious
attempt to recreate past inspiration, and in others the inspiration came forth
through the fault lines of history. As each new event drew upon the past, it
also rewrote that past, with different sections of society recording and remem-
bering events differently. Inevitably, there has also been a process of forget-
ting, as the state enforces its own version of events.
Assuming as Gell does, that history repeats itself in ideological terms and
that only the particular context changes – for example, that all the rebellions
were about recapturing the king in order to keep off an intrusive adminis-
tration – impoverishes our understanding of how ideology is related to posi-
tion (e.g. class, caste, gender) and practice, and how it changes over time.

Conclusion
In this article I have attempted to do two things. The first is to provide an
account of the political and ritual history of one ‘tribal’ district in Central
India which brings out the manner in which so-called isolated or two-
dimensional regions were always connected to larger historical, economic, and
political processes. The pre-colonial polity, cobbled together partly through
force and partly through ritual, tried to weld together a heterogeneous, par-
tially stratified, and often fractious populace. This was later ironed out under
colonialism to create the appearance of binary opposition between people and
state that has come to be the hallmark of tribal areas.
The second objective of this paper has been to argue against purely cul-
turalist interpretations, which reduce this complex history to a unidimensional
level. The whole course of the Bastar polity cannot be explained simply as
 NANDINI SUNDAR 33

the outcome of successive and successful attempts by the tribals to keep the
king to themselves and make him rule in their interests, through ‘rituals of
rebellion’, as Gell argues. In the interests of showing that rule was not uni-
laterally imposed from above, Gell veers too far in the other direction by
claiming that the kingship was invited or self-imposed by the people. The
reality is more dialectical. In any case, the kingship was just one aspect of the
changing polity, and several political-economic changes were introduced in
the colonial and post-colonial period that affected different sections of society
in different ways. The rebellions were only partially successful in staving off
the worst effects of these changes. No one belief can explain all the rebel-
lions. While each was a response to economic changes and each built upon
the past, there was a historical and cultural specificity that made each a unique
event. In the end, for all their neatness and intellectual enticement, purely cul-
turalist interpretations can never be a substitute for historically nuanced politi-
cal economy.

NOTES

I am grateful to Satish Deshpande, Ramachandra Guha, Patricia Uberoi, Siddharth

Varadarajan, and the JRAI’s anonymous referees for their suggestions.
1
I have not referenced each fact individually in this article, as all the citations are available
in Sundar (1997) and, especially, Sundar (1995), on which Gell (1997: 435, 446-8) relies for his
description of the pre-colonial economy and rebellions. Theoretical perspectives often come to
the surface only when two anthropologists dig in the same ‘field’, for example, Redfield (1930)
vs. Lewis (1951), or more recently Sahlins (1985; 1995) vs. Obeysekhere (1992). By now it is
fairly passé to note that in most ethnographic arguments, differing interpretations are not just
a function of contrasting theoretical tools or ways of reading the same evidence, but are also
affected by varying sources of information, differing ways of defining the boundaries of the
‘field’, the number of years and the particular years spent there, gender, nationality, and so on,
however much these latter features may be downplayed under the guise of objectivity (Gupta
& Ferguson 1997: 16-18). But since Gell explicitly acknowledges my research for his sum-
maries of the rebellions, this particular problem does not seem acute. At the same time, much
of my argument against Gell rests on the fact that he has ignored key features of both Dussehra
and the rebellions as well as the changing political-economic context in which they occurred.
Ultimately, the strength of a theoretical position within anthropology cannot be divorced from
its ethnographic underpinnings.
2
Timber and NTFPs continue to be more valuable than land in Bastar. A major scandal in
the 1990s revolved around the purchase of land by traders and politicians solely in order to
sell standing trees.

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Le débat sur Dussehra et une réinterprétation de la rebellion

dans le District de Bastar en Inde Centrale
Résumé
Cet article déballe l’histoire d’une région ‘tribale’ en Inde Centrale afin de montrer que l’ap-
parence courante de ‘bi-dimensionalité’ ou d’opposition tranchée entre le peuple et l’État est
un produit des politiques coloniales et postcoloniales plutôt qu’une relique pré-coloniale.
L’article remet en question l’idée de ‘subordination coercive’, telle que l’avait proposée le feu
Alfred Gell, comme explication appropriée de la royauté dans cette région. En contraste, cet
article utilise les mêmes phénomènes, notamment les rituels de Dussehra et les rébellions
successives, à l’appui d’un concept plus dialectique de l’hégémonie. Je prends aussi à parti les
interprétations culturalistes du gouvernement en faveur d’un examen historique nuancé de
l’économie politique.

Institute of Economic Growth, University Enclave, Delhi-110007, India. NandiniSundar@yahoo.com