







































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 5 (2): 139-143, July 2022 

BOOK REVIEW 

The Making and Re-making of Adivasi Worlds 

Nishaant Choksi  

Sangeeta Dasgupta, Reordering Adivasi Worlds: Representation, Resistance, 
Memory, New Delhi: Oxford, 2022 

Reordering Adivasi Worlds is 
the culmination of Sangeeta 
Dasgupta’s decades-long 
research on the Oraon 
community of Chhota 
Nagpur, Central India, and, 
in particular, her equally 
intense scholarly 
engagements with the Tana 
Bhagat movement. For 
those who are familiar with 
her earlier writings, this is a 
much-anticipated synthesis 
of the different arguments 
and research presentations 
she has made over the years. 
For the unfamiliar, on the 
other hand, it bears 
mentioning that Dasgupta 
has been singular in urging 
researchers on the Adivasi 
groupings in India to be 
particularly attentive to how 
there has been a “continual 

 
 IIT Gandhinagar, nishaant.choksi@iitgn.ac.in 

Copyright © Choksi 2022. Released under Creative Commons Attribution © 
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of  Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581–6152 (print); 2581–6101 (web).  

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v5i2.727 

 

mailto:nishaant.choksi@iitgn.ac.in
https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v5i2.727


 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [140] 

 

remaking of community boundaries” (Dasgupta 2022, 28).  

The book is divided into two major sections. The first section discusses the 
“representation” of the Oraon community through early and late colonial, 
missionary, and ethnographic texts. The argument suggests that the 
yardstick of “authenticity” to which groups had to conform to determine 
their tribal status was primarily developed as a result of colonial 
interventions in Chhota Nagpur in the late nineteenth and early twentieth 
centuries. Early colonial accounts of the Oraon, in fact, did not classify the 
Oraons as “tribal”; rather, they saw them and the other Adivasi groups of 
Chhota Nagpur as a stratified agricultural society, albeit one that went 
beyond the “civilized” Aryan pale. Dasgupta traces the descriptive interplay 
in these accounts by analysing the terms used to describe them, such as 
mleccha, borrowed from Sanskrit, which sees Oraons as wild forest-dwellers, 
and dhangar, which signalled their poor economic condition, propensity for 
hard work, and position as precarious agricultural labour.  With the rise of 
Orientalism, ethnography, and disciplinary anthropology in Britain, colonial 
administrators began to reinterpret the complex identity of the Oraon as a 
homogenous ethno-linguistic community or as a “tribe” with unique racial, 
linguistic, and cultural characteristics that represented both their nobility 
and their primitiveness. In this time—and through the works of colonial 
ethnographers such as Dalton, Campbell, and Risley—the Oraon and other 
Adivasi groups in Chhota Nagpur were projected through the Arcadian lens 
of the “noble savage”: as isolated, primitive people in communion with 
their ecology and, therefore, easily taken advantage of by the outside world. 
This move—to an ethnographic definition of the tribe—impacted the later 
representations of the community by missionaries and Indian 
anthropologists such as Sarat Chandra Roy.  

The “noble savage” idea encouraged missionary activity, as missionaries 
believed that these heathen races were the least touched by Hindu 
influence. This led to an intense investigation and even appreciation of the 
“material and cultural world” of the Oraons and particularly their “village 
system” (Dasgupta 2022, 103). Missionaries also made a distinction between 
sections among the Oraon who adhered strictly to the system of nature and 
spirit-worship, and who therefore were considered “authentic”, and others 
who accepted their status as “inferior” Hindus (109). Like with other tribes, 
such as the Santals and Mundas, missionaries were also instrumental in 
documenting in detail the Kurukh language of the Oraon and their 
folktales, thereby textually establishing the distinct origin of the community. 
In seeking to convert the Oraon, these missionaries also ended up 
contributing to building up what was later seen, even by many Oraon 
themselves, as the foundation of an independent community identity.   



[141] Nishaant Choksi 

 

Dasgupta then traces how these missionary and colonial representations 
shaped the discipline of anthropology in India through an exploration of 
the work of Sarat Chandra Roy, who wrote extensively on the Oraons. 
From his roots as a “scientific” anthropologist in the colonial mould, in his 
later work, Roy changed his stance from one of an observer and 
documenter of Oraon customs and traditions to an “avid ‘champion’ of the 
aboriginal cause”, along the same lines as others, such as Verrier Elwin, 
who worked at the same time. The Oraon, through Roy’s work, went on to 
become the subject of a national debate on how Adivasis could be 
integrated into the new postcolonial nation-state and on what terms. 

While the first part of the book is informative and offers new insights in 
relation to the colonial history of the Oraons and the rise of anthropology 
as a discipline in colonial and postcolonial South Asia, I believe its true 
strength lies in the second section, which is a historical examination of the 
“many narratives of the Tana pasts”.  It is in this section that Dasgupta 
makes a significant contribution that challenges the homogenous and fixed 
representation of the Oraons by anthropologists, historians, and colonial 
administrators by taking seriously how Oraons—in this case, those that 
form part of the small but influential spirituo-social movement known as 
Tana—understand their own history. In many ways, the Tana Bhagats (as 
Tana followers are known) seem to be outliers to dominant representations 
of the “tribe” or “Adivasi” constructed through the colonial archive and 
ethnographic texts. Their proscriptions against spirit worship, animal 
sacrifice, meat-eating, dancing, and singing seem very much to mirror a 
move toward Brahminical Hinduism or Christianity.  Yet, the Tanas actively 
positioned themselves against both upper-caste Hindus and Christian 
missionaries. Consequently, they did not fit in any of the framings of the 
tribe as a “pure” aboriginal race following animistic ways or as inferior 
Hindus or Christian converts.  

As a historian, Dasgupta locates the emergence of the Tana movement as a 
form of resistance not only as a part of a “tribe” against oppression by 
outsiders, but also as the struggle of Oraons who were positioned lower on 
the economic and cultural hierarchy within their own community.  British 
colonial interventions, Dasgupta argues, exacerbated the divide between the 
Bhuinhar—the class of Oraon whom authorities believed were the 
guardians of customary law and traditional land—and the poorer Oraons 
who worked the land of the Bhuinhars or travelled to the plains as migrant 
labour. The Tana movement, made up mostly of the latter group, therefore, 
targeted the socio-spiritual authority of the Bhuinhars, who controlled 
access to both land and spirits. The demand to give up the plough because 
it hurts cattle, return to the forests, and prohibit ritual interaction with 



 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [142] 

 

spirits and animal sacrifice, Dasgupta suggests, should be seen in light of 
the struggle within Oraon society as well as against the colonial state 
structure.   

Moreover, far from being an “isolated” group, the Tana actively 
incorporated ongoing national and international events into their struggle.  
As the movement coincided with the beginning of World War I in Europe, 
Tanas incorporated “German Baba” as one of their prophets and referred 
to “zeppelins, bombs, and cannons” (253) in their speeches. This meant 
they were aware that their existing situation was linked to the British Raj, 
and that there were external forces (in this case Germany) that could 
potentially undermine this status quo. Later, in the 1920s, as Dasgupta 
discusses extensively in Chapter 6, this awareness laid the groundwork for 
the Tana Bhagats’ active embrace of Gandhi (“Gandhi Baba”) and the 
nationalist movement.  Along with the founding prophets, the “Raj” that 
Gandhi had presumably promised in Tana ideology would free them from 
oppressive agricultural hierarchies and allow them to live a life of swaraj 
(self-rule) according to their understanding of the term.  

Throughout the book, Dasgupta writes as a historian engaging with colonial 
source material, but in the last chapter, she moves more to an ethnographic 
rather than a strictly historical modality when discussing how the Tana 
Bhagats sought to understand their own past. This involves analysing 
contemporary Tana performances, gatherings, and the textual material 
produced by the community in an attempt to grasp what aspects of their 
history remain relevant for them. For instance, in contemporary pamphlets 
and retellings at Tana functions, the Bhagats tend to stress their links with 
Gandhi and the national freedom movement while omitting the more 
militant aspects of their movement. This gesture to non-violence could be 
interpreted as efforts to leverage their participation in nationalist struggles, 
like the no-rent campaign to reclaim land rights. For the Tanas, the past is 
one that resonates with the situation they find themselves in within both 
post-colonial India and Chhota Nagpur, much of which now lies in the 
state of Jharkhand.  Dasgupta does not dispute their interpretation, but 
rather uses this material to demonstrate how history survives among a 
people, interacting with the contemporary moment to produce different 
kinds of political struggles. 

By challenging the homogenous representation of tribes and attempting to 
take seriously movements like the Tana, Dasgupta’s book advances studies 
on Adivasi communities, colonial India, and the nationalist movement.  In 
addition, it shows a way forward by which historians can be attentive to the 
archive while also remaining sensitive to people’s own interpretations of 
their pasts. Thus, it can also be read as an excellent contribution to the 



[143] Nishaant Choksi 

 

historiographical method that has wide relevance for other social science 
disciplines as well.    

 


