What led forest dwellers to migrate during this age.
Answers
Explanation:
The term ‘adivasi’ denotes the prime dwellers of an area since time immemorial. Despite ‘progress’ elsewhere, they were happy in their own abode, if not disturbed by the ‘civilised’ in the name of extending territories into ‘their’ forests.
The late 18th and early 19th century were a decisive period for the British rule in the Indian sub-continent. When the British were keen to expand their control, the conflicts over India’s forests were one of the most important forms of protest ascribed to tribals all over the sub-continent. With the introduction of the Forest Act 1878, subsequently amended in 1927, shifting cultivation, foraging, grazing and hunting were all banned, thereby eliminating the livelihoods of those living in and on the margins of the forests.
However, the adivasis were not passive to this development. Their armed rebellions and the active retaliation of the Andamanese in particular were branded as ‘savage attacks’ by the British even when the tribals were actually defending their long-standing rights over the forests. When the forests were finally brought under their control and the tribals were subdued, the British became paternalistic.
In order to establish supremacy over the indigenous population, the British had started terming them as savages while themselves using methods of extreme savagery. To justify their actions, the colonialists cited many practices of the tribals. The ‘Meriah’ rite of sacrifice amongst the Konds of Odisha was one such. It was often held up as the foremost example of savagery and depravity of the tribals in central India. It was not only a rite, but a powerful myth, used here as elsewhere to justify the colonization of areas of the globe defined as ‘savage’. In a sense, this rite was more than spilling blood to propitiate their deities and ensure good harvest, but instrumentally served both social and political functions.
Such was the case with the Andamanese too. The British colonial power and, in its footsteps, the state power post-Independence tried to control their lives. Extreme violence was used to impose ‘civilisation’ on the population and the idea of the savagery of Andamanese became clearly essentialised in order to legitimise the violence of such colonial policies. The other spectrum of this sad episode is the constant fight of Jarawa people since colonial times till date against the attack on ‘their’ forests and their mobility within the forest. In a sense, the ‘savagery’ of the Andamanese is very much a reflection, even an imitation, of the violence to which they were subjected.
During the Communist movement for land and wage reforms in the 1960s in Kerala, the upper caste paternalist concern for Dalits and adivasis could still be considered revolutionary. With the rise of the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha (AGMS), they had shown the party that it had to take them seriously. Their loyalty became strictly conditional.
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