A Rogue and Peasant Slave: Adivasi resistance, 1800-2000 attempts to reconstruct the history of Adivasis in central India's Adivasi belt, primarily through the experience of the Bhil Adivasis of the Nimar area in western Madhya Pradesh, in order to try to understand their present reality. Based primarily on archival materials, Shashank Kela's narrative captures the lives of Adivasis vividly and in great detail, as people in transition and not frozen in time; Kela tracks historical continuities into the present. He presents the Adivasis not as a uniform group, but as vastly heterogeneous peoples, differing within regions and even within single tribes, in how they have sustained their lives, and in their relationships within tribes and with the 'outside' world. As he works through colonial archives, Kela critically deconstructs these sources to shed their inherent biases: the 'civilising' mission of the colonialists, and the constructed notion, shared by the colonialists and casteist Hindus, of the Adivasis as unruly and irrepressibly evil. This lucid and empathetic perspective is presumably the result of the author's experience as an activist working with the Bhils between 1992 and 2004, briefly with the Narmada Bachao Andolan and later with the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangh, a trade union. The result, as it turns out, is a rather unfinished critique of the Adivasi movement and its position in India today that unabashedly sides with what could be called the 'Adivasi postion'.
The first part of A Rogue and Peasant Slave challenges the stereotyped view of Adivasis as inherently criminal, 'primitive' hunter-gatherers and peasants, perpetually exploited and stuck at the bottom rung of society and therefore requiring the protection of a paternalistic state. Instead, Kela espouses a historical view of how colonialism redrew the socio-political realities of Bhil society, how the state subjugated and drove into penury what was once a largely self-reliant and autonomous community. Kela finds that the "boundaries between Adivasi societies and agrarian order broke down" alongside the breakdown of traditional cultural systems upon the advent of colonial rule. This historical process, the author argues, systemically and structurally affected almost the entire Subcontinental mainland, and especially so the central Indian Adivasi belt. In this view, the Adivasis' present emancipation struggle must be informed by an understanding of their past – rather than current trends towards further subservience, subjugation and co-option by a patronising state.
Historically, Bhil rights stemmed from territorial jurisdiction based on clan authority. They occupied essentially independent realms that overlapped with the territories of neighbouring fiefdoms and kingdoms controlled by 'mainstream', caste societies. These overlapping claims to sovereignty often resulted in conflicts, though of a limited kind, mainly to assert Bhil hegemony over an area. Villages in such contested zones often paid tribute to the Bhil naiks (chiefs chosen by kinship) in order to get protection. Yet the Bhils, perceived as powerful, were also poor. They survived by foraging in the forest, leaving them vulnerable during seasons of drought and scarcity. When in need, they raided nearby villages for grain and cattle, in what they saw as a legitimate practice within their customary and traditional territorial jurisdiction.
But colonialism transformed all these norms. It changed the relationship between the Bhils and the titular overlords; colonial officials started dealing directly with the Bhil naiks without the mediation of local elites. Though there was no direct rule over Bhil areas and hardly any interference in their internal affairs from 1818 to 1862, the British then began dispatching regular punitive expeditions, ostensibly to quell raiding, but in reality were intended to subjugate the Bhils and bring them under the colonial order. Of course this meant the extension of colonial hegemony over Bhil territory. Suddenly, the customary Bhil behaviour of raiding was treated, by the British, as rebellion. At the same time, the enclosure of the forests by colonial authorities restricted the Bhil's access to their primary sources of livelihood – forest foraging and shifting cultivation.