Provincializing Exception: The Creation of Anti-tribal Spaces in British India, 1778 - 1874

The “tribal divergence” thesis argues that identities professed by Scheduled Tribes, Adivasis, and Indigenous Peoples in South Asia today are colonial artefacts. These myriad ethnicities were created by the imposition of special territories, governed separately from the rest of British India. This was either an ideological move, or a manifestation of divide-and-rule policies. This paper offers an alternative reading whereby precolonial tribes were ethnically distinct and politically independent. The British created tribal territories as the cheapest expedient to end conflicts caused by the curtailment of this independence following the dramatic expansion of the British colonial state and the subsequent exploitation of newly established tribal minorities by the majority communities of the agrarian plains. This was one of many variations in governance that emerged from the colonial liberal project’s pursuit, in a Foucauldian sense, of frugal government and security.