Provincializing exception: the creation of (anti) tribal spaces in British India, 1776 - 1874

The influential narrative of tribal divergence argues that identities professed by Scheduled Tribes, Adivasis and Indigenous Peoples in South Asia today are colonial artefacts. The creation of specific “non-regulation” territories, governed separately from the rest of British India, was the key mechanism that facilitated the emergence of this myriad of ethnicities. The British rationale was either ideological, or divide-and-rule tactics, or a combination of the two. An alternative reading is that such governance arrangements were the practical result of the colonial liberal project’s pursuit of frugal government and security. They were not exceptional, comprising one of many institutional arrangements implemented in an empire characterized by administrative heterogeneity. Special territories demographically separated rather than consolidated individual communities. Their impact should have been, in anything, anti-ethnographic. Tribal spaces did not create ethnic difference; there was ethnic difference and therefore the British created tribal spaces.