APLICACIÓN DE LAS REGLAS DE LLOYD`S REGISTER OF SHIPPING

As in earlier or later periods, the most militant outbreaks tended to be of tribal communities, which, in the words of a recent scholar, 'revolted more often and far more violently than any other community including peasants in India'. (K. Suresh Singh) The term 'tribe' is used to distinguish people so socially organized from 'caste' and should not convey a sense of complete isolation from the mainstream of Indian life. Actually, apart from some isolated and really

primitive food-gatherers, the tribals were and are very much a part of Indian society as the lowest stratum of the peasantry subsisting through shifting cultivation, agricultural labourers, and increasingly, coolies recruited for work in distant plantations, mines and factories. British rule and its accompanying commercialization strengthened already present tendencies towards penetration of tribal areas by outsiders from the plains—moneylenders, traders, land-grabbers and contractors, the dikus so hated by the Santals. British legal conceptions of absolute private property eroded traditions of joint ownership (like the khuntkatti tenure in Chota Nagpur) and sharpened tensions within tribal society. Christian missions were active in many tribal areas (particularly in Bihar and the Assam hills), bringing education and some promise of social ascent, but often provoking an interesting variety of reactions which included hostility as well as attempts to use some Christian tenets in anti-

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foreign ways. A new but increasingly important factor from the 1870s and '80s was the tightening of control by the colonial state over forest zones for revenue purposes. Shifting

cultivation— which required no plough animals and therefore was often essential for the survival of the poorest in rural society—was banned or restricted in the 'reserved' forests from 1867 onwards, and attempts were made to monopolize forest wealth through curbs on use of timber and grazing facilities.

The tribal response included, as before, occasional violent outbursts, but also movements of internal religious and socio-cultural reform. Such movements of 'revitalization', borrowing elements from Christianity or Hinduism and promising a sudden miraculous entry into a golden age, became increasingly typical in the period 1860-1920, generally following in the wake of defeated uprisings under traditional chiefs. Thus the Santal rebellion (1855) was followed by the Kherwar or Sapha Har movement of the 1870s, which preached monotheism and internal social reform at first but had begun to turn into a campaign against revenue settlement operations just before it was suppressed. Millenarianism (belief in an imminent golden age) could also take more violent forms, as when the Naikda forest tribe in Gujarat attacked police stations in 1868 in a bid to establish a dharma-raj, or the Kacha Nagas of Cachar in 1882 attacked the whites under a miracle-worker named Sambhudan who claimed that his magic had made his followers

immune to bullets. Old District Gazetteers and anthropological surveys contain in fact numerous references to such things, and are at times strangely moving. In Vizagapatam Agency, for

instance, in 1900 a Konda Dora named Korra Mallaya 'pretended that he was inspired ... gathered round him a camp of 4-5000 people ... gave out that he was a reincarnation of one of the five Pandava brothers; that his infant son was the god Krishna; that he would drive out the English and rule the country himself, and that, to effect this, he would arm his followers with bamboos, which should be turned by magic into guns, and would change the weapons of the authorities into water.' The result was predictable: the police shot dead 11 of the 'rioters' and put 60 on trial, of whom two were hanged. (Thurston and Rangachari, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Vol. III, Madras 1909, p. 353)

The hills of the neighbouring Godavari Agency had been the 46

scene of a much more formidable rebellion in 1879-80. Its heart lay in the 'Rampa' country of Chodavaram, whose tribal Koya and Konda Dora hill chiefs (muttadars) had risen against their overlord (a mansabdar family which had come to an understanding with the British in 1813) in 1840, 1845, 1858, 1861 and 1862. The major revolt of March 1879 was rooted in the

mansabdar's efforts to enhance taxes on timber and grazing, while police exactions, new excise regulations restricting domestic preparation of toddy, exploitation by low-country traders and moneylenders, and restrictions on shifting cultivation (podu) in forests provided additional grievances. The rebellion at its height affected no less than 5000 square miles, and it could be suppressed by November 1880 only with the use of six regiments of Madras infantry. In another uprising in the same area in 1886, the rebels called themselves Rama Dandu (Rama's army), and Rajana Anantayya, one of their leaders, made an interesting 'proto-nationalistic' appeal to the Maharaja of Jeypore: 'Is it good, if the English be in our country?. . . We . . . should wage war with the English. The Russians are also troubling the English. If the assistance of men and arms are supplied to me, I will play Rama's part.' (David Arnold, 'Dacoity and Rural Crime in Madras, 1860-1940', in Journal of Peasant Studies, January 1979) A use of the Ramayana legend rather different from Gandhi's later concept of Ram-rajya!

The best-known of the tribal rebellions of this period, however, is the Ulgulan (Great Tumult) of Birsa Munda in the region south of Ranchi in 1899-1900, the subject of a fine recent study by the anthropologist and historian K. Suresh Singh. The Mundas in course of the nineteenth century

had seen their traditional khuntkatti land system (joint holdings by khunts or tribal lineages) being eroded by jagirdars and thikadars coming from the northern plains as merchants and moneylenders. The area had also become a happy hunting ground for contractors recruiting indentured labour. A succession of Lutheran, Anglican and Catholic missions appeared to promise some help, but eventually did nothing about the basic land problem. In the early 1890s, the tribal chiefs (Sardars) attempted to fight the alien landlords and the imposition of beth begari (forced labour) in the courts, throueh a Calcutta-based Anglo-Indian lawyer who seems to have cheated them. A missionary reported the Sardars as complaining: 'We have appealed to the Sarkar for redress and got nothing. We have turned to the Missions and they too have not saved us from the Dikus. Now there is nothing left us but to look to one of our own men.'

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The Munda saviour came in the shape of Birsa (c. 1874-1900), son of a sharecropper who had received some education from the missionaries and had then come under Vaishnava influence, and who in 1893-94 had participated in a movement to prevent village waste lands being taken over by the Forest Department. In 1895 young Birsa is said to have seen a vision of a supreme God, after which he claimed to be a prophet with miraculous healing powers. Thousands began flocking to Chalked to hear the 'new word' of Birsa with its prophecy of an imminent deluge, while the Sardars started introducing an agrarian and political note into the initially religious movement. Birsa was jailed for two years in 1895 by the British who feared a conspiracy, but he returned much more of a firebrand. A series of night meetings were held in the forest during 1898-99, where Birsa allegedly urged the 'killing of Thikadars and Jagirdars and Rajas and Hakims and Christians' and promised 'that the guns and bullets would turn to water'. Effigies of the British Raj were solemnly burnt, and the Mundas responded enthusiastically to passionate hymns of hate: