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States, Tribes, Castes

A Historical Re-exploration in Comparative Perspective
Sumit Guha

This paper begins by pointing out that the way the term
tribe is used in Indian sociology and political discourse
does not fit the observed characteristics of the peoples
labelled such in any part of the world. It then reconsiders
the long history of social categories across the Indian
subcontinent to develop a new model of dominant
landed community that would apply across all its
regions and faiths. In conclusion, it suggests some new
terms that might replace tribe in Indian social thought.

t the outset, I should clarify that this essay will discuss

both the denotation (or explicit meaning) as well as
the connotation (or sociocultural resonance) of the sociological term tribe. Like other terms used for social description,
such as class or caste, I use tribe as a summary label applied to
a perceived stable pattern of social life. I categorically reject the
idea that any of these denotes some observable array of genetic or
physiological traits. I will begin by contrasting the use of the word
within the Republic of India with that found beyond its borders.
Tribes across the world have, indeed, been in the news in
recent years. The BBC published an analytic report on tribal
politics in oil-rich Libya in 2011:
tribal rivalries are evident within the armed forces, where Mr Gaddafis
own tribe, the Qadhadfa, are pitted against Magariha... which are close
to the Warfalla tribe, said to number one million people. In turn, the
Warfalla are close to the Al-Zintan.1

This paper draws in part from the corrected Indian reprint of a

book titled Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and
Present published in 2013 by E J Brill, Leiden and now forthcoming
from Permanent Black in India. I am grateful to both publishers for
permission to reuse materials from that work.
Sumit Guha (sguha@austin.utexas.edu) teaches History at the University
of Texas at Austin.

50

Further east, the National Iraqi News Agency issued a press

release reporting hopefully on an agreement between the Anbar
[province] tribes to form an army. It quoted Sheikh Majid
al-Dulaimi: It was agreed to form/the elite brigade/consists
of 25 clans includes/2000/fighters from the sons of those
tribes, and the brigade will be under the leadership of the
finest military commanders of the former army.2 Yet further
east, the BBC commentary described how a few dozen armed
tribals had intimidated a column of 280 Pakistan army soldiers
commanded by a colonel into surrendering at a roadblock in
South Waziristan.3 Nor was this the first instance of such defiance
in the Afghan borderland: in 1764 a newsletter from Delhi
reported that the qaum of Yusufzai had blocked the Khyber
Pass just as Ahmed Shah Abdalis powerful army was approaching it (Guha forthcoming: 33). Elphinstone, who led a large
British delegation to Afghanistan in 180910, also noted of King
Ahmed Shah that he was wise enough to know that it would
need less exertion to conquer all the neighbouring countries
than to subdue the tribes of Afghanistan (1842: 22933). That
was not an exceptional event: Afghanistan at the time, while
designated a monarchy, functioned as a confederation of
tribes and khanates held together by the Shahs redistribution
of tribute and plunder from the region extending from western
Uttar Pradesh to the Khyber Pass (Elphinstone 1842; Tapper
1983: 14).
All over the world, therefore, tribe has generally referred to
strong organisations, often possessing much latent military
power. Nor should we view this as a situation confined to
specific regions of West Asia or North Africa. Owen Lattimore
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pointed out decades ago that although civilisations in the

Mediterranean basin or in Eastern or Southern Asia had long
conceived themselves as ringed by barbarian peoples, that was
not a historical reality. Instead, he provocatively suggested that
from their beginnings civilisations were giving birth to the barbarian tribes that they then sought to subdue or to excludeand
by whom they were periodically conquered. Tribes (he argued)
emerged out of simple bands of foragers or farmers because
emerging empires preyed upon them for slaves, encroached on
their territories, or sought to incorporate them as servile peasants.
At the same time, the riches of the civilisation offered opportunities to those hardy border communities that could manage
to coalesce into tribes (Lattimore 1962a). L H Morgan, who
profoundly influenced Marx and Engels, also based himself on
a study of the Iroquoisan innovative tribal confederacy that
strengthened itself as a response to the dangers and opportunities
posed by the expansion of rival French and English imperialisms
as they extended into the interior of North America (Richter 1992).
Origins of the Eccentric Indian Usage of Tribe

As we saw in the introduction, this is not how the Republic of

India perceives tribes. India probably has the largest tribal
population in the world, now exceeding 100 million. Yet, if
official definitions apply, they would be unlike any tribes West
of the IndoPakistan border. While tribes beyond India are
evidently powerful military and political formations, that defy
and occasionally destroy states, Indias tribes have been officially
defined, since at least the 1960s, as having five key features:
primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation,
shyness of contact with outsiders and backwardness (thus,
summarised in Moodie 2013: 26). The failure of the Gurjar or
Gujjar community of northern India to display these traits led a
judicial commission appointed by the Government of Rajasthan
to deny them entry into the list of Scheduled Tribes (STs) for
that state. This reiterated the conclusions of an earlier report
submitted to the government on 20 August 1981, which had
said of them: They are fairly well-off and suffer from no shyness of contact with people of other castes. Also, they do not have
any primitive traits (for them) to be considered for inclusion in
ST list (Samanta 2007). We are then left with a paradox:
tribes across the Old World, from the IndoPakistan border to
the Atlantic, would not meet the criteria for tribalism in India.
Nor indeed, as we shall see later in this article, would the
North American Comanche, Apache, Sioux or Seminole.
The unthinking acceptance of this strange geographical
dichotomy, I argue, derives directly from an obsolete theoretical
frame in which sociopolitical systems belong uniquely to the religiously defined civilisations, where they are observed. That
is the implied basis of the completely different use of tribe in
India and westward of it. The trope assumes that Indian (read as
Hindu) and Islamic civilisations were so different from each
other that scholarly understanding of the one could not inform
the other, even though more Muslims then lived in the subcontinent than in the entire Arab world. In this discourse, both sets
of tradition-bound and priest-ridden orientals were stereotyped as utterly remote from the dynamic West. So Indian social
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forms such as tribes need not be anything like those termed

such elsewhere. This corollary has been retained even after
the model of distinct religiously demarcated civilisations has
seemingly been abandoned as so much orientalist baggage.
If we give up religious demarcation, the other way we might
explain why India has tribes unlike those found elsewhere is that
they are defined against the master concept of caste. Lakshminarayana (1992) illustrates the practical difficulties that this
effort encounters. As Nicholas Dirks wrote, caste has become a
central symbol for India, indexing it as fundamentally different
from other places as well as expressing its essence (2001: 3).
Castes conceptual twin was the idea of tribe. This would be a
group defined as primitive and isolated: that was why it had
not become a caste. In this colonial formulation, caste and tribe
between them were assumed to have exhausted the social imagination of traditional India. In the colonial era these terms had
strong racial undertones. Some groups (the colonial officer
Charles Grant wrote in 1870) could not be given the polish
needed to make them suitable members of a civilisation. The
metaphor refers to an intrinsic quality of some types of stone; so
unpolishability was clearly perceived as a racial trait (Grant
1870: cx, cxii). As I have shown elsewhere, the tribe/caste binary
emerged out of late colonial racial ethnology which transformed
Indian societys understanding of itself (Guha 1999: 1029).
Indigenous observers had earlier perceived society as composed of stable, hereditary corporate groups, but generally used
the same term for all of them. In recent centuries, this was often
the Arabic qaum or the Persian t. Foreign observers initially
used nations or naco es (used in the old sense of descent
group), casta, race, tribe, clan and caste indiscriminately to
label a variety of social groups. Some, like Mountstuart
Elphinstone, sought greater exactitude: describing the political
organisation of the Afghans in the early 19th century he wrote:
when I speak of the great divisions of the Aufghans (sic), I
shall call them tribes, the next level would be termed clans
and below them khails (1842: 214). Other officials had to draw
from a larger vocabulary. One quote from the 1881 Panjab Code
of Customary Law illustrates the diversity of labels as well as
the racial character of colonial ethnography:
Generally, zt or kaum would be translated race or tribe; and got, tribe or
clan according to circumstances. Thus we should have the Massozai
section of the Zimusht tribe of the Afghn or Pathn race, the Mazari tribe
of the Beloch race The Jts might be a raceThis phraseology would not
properly apply to all groups of the population. Rjpts and Brhmans
are broken up into numerous tribes, but it would scarcely be correct to
speak of the Brhman race, or the Rjput race, as a whole. I think in
these two instances the word caste may safely be used without much danger of confusion. We might talk, therefore, of the Ghzi section of the
Bhatti tribe of the Rjpt race ([of the] Sialkot District) (Tupper 1881: 4).

But the emerging discipline of race theory and anthropology

gradually froze these categories. Tribes were by definition
aboriginal and primitive, outside the larger society where
Indians were governed by caste. Mid-Victorian racial anthropologists had already developed theories of weaker and
stronger races and also the idea of specific types of cultivation as
racially based. So the 1870 Gazetteer of the Central Provinces
(now Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Vidarbha areas)
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spoke of the Gonds as examples of less perfectly developed

races who had been expelled from the lowlands. The Gazetteer
added that it was also possible that aborigines being hunters
by taste rather than agriculturists had never cultivated the
heavy soils of valley bottoms. If they cultivated at all, it was by
cutting and burning temporary clearings. These lower races
(Grant continued) when in competition with the stronger race
of Aryans were reduced to low-caste status. Even the timidity
that the Government of India now requires all tribals to exhibit
can be found ascribed to the Madiaa shy race, avoiding all
contact with strangers... (Grant 1870: cvi-cxv). Racial anthropology proved amazingly durable: the 1968 Penguin edition of
the History of India stated that six races had successively
inhabited India. It declared that the
proto-Australoid were the basic element in the Indian population,
and their speech was of the Austric linguistic group, a specimen of
which survives in the Munda speech of certain primitive tribes. ...
the last to come were the Nordic peoples better known as the Aryans
(Thapar 1968: 2526).

This idea of fixed traits was strengthened after Indias independence when modernising bureaucracies strove to achieve uniformity. As a result, a fixed array of traits had to be demonstrated by each community as it was enrolled.4 A later newspaper
report doubted the validity of including some communities in
the ST list of Assam because the people do not rear fowls, pigs
or brew rice beer.5
Nor were such judgments confined to the press. In 1986 the
Vanjaris of Thane District claimed to be Banjaras and secured a
high court verdict that they should be regarded as such pending
investigation. Pratap Asbe, an expert with the Tribal Research
and Training Institute of the Maharashtra government, wrote
in 1992 that the Vanjaris were not entitled to claim rights given to
Banjaras because Vanjaris had lived in villages like other castes
for generations, and not in camps like the Banjaras. Banjara
women also dressed differently, while Vanjari women wore
sarees like the Maratha women (Asbe 1992: 5961). Ironically,
the once almost universal ghagra-choli of North-Western India
was now deemed to be a marker of primitivism.
Such tunnel vision had significant intellectual consequences.
Consider, for example, that Fredrik Barths studies of the Pathan or
Pakhtun tribes deeply influenced sociological study of ethnicity
in West Asia, North Africa and beyond. But he has largely been
ignored by social scientists studying India. This, despite the fact
that, he began his work in the Swat valley, an ancient centre of
Buddhism, on the north-western edge of the subcontinent. At
the time of his study, the dominant Yusufzai caste were at the
apex of a complex caste system geared to intensive irrigated
farming in which various hereditary specialist groups provided
services needed for intensive farming in return for a share of the
crop (Barth 1960). Every large village had a single dominant
landed caste, who organised the production process via their
control of the land. Across villages, the plenary assembly of all
landownerswho were largely Yusufzai descendants of a
conquering tribewas the governing body of the whole local
community. Lower caste men, even if they acquired land, had
no voice in the governing assembly (Barth 1960: 12627).
52

Barth has been ignored by Indian sociology even though the

congruence of political organisation from North Africa to India
was evident to the Arab scholar Ibn Battuta in the 14th century.
He readily identified a dominant social group in Western India
as a qabilaexactly the word still used in Iraq or Libya and
routinely translated as tribe (Guha forthcoming: 32). Thousands
of miles South-East of Swat, dominant landowners in the Tamil
country, a thousand years ago, were organised in ndus,
strongly
autonomous clusters of villages. Subbarayalus close readings of
innumerable inscriptions allowed him to name and map the
ndus
in the Chola dominions (1973, 2005). These units were,
as R Champakalakshmi (2011) has put it, peasant microregions, being both economic and dominant-caste territories.
Their militarypolitical roles were emphasised in Ronald Indens
study of the powerful Rashtrakuta empire in the greater Karnataka
region. He described how the masters of the janapada or ndu
village cluster were integral to the empire. A good number of
the young men of the Okkalu caste undoubtedly spent the
better part of their manhood as warriors, mostly foot-soldiers...
(Inden 2000: 222). The parallels to the Swat Yusufzai are evident.
Nor did such roles disappear under later empires. The Ain-iAkbari estimated that local chiefs (zamindars) maintained no
less than 4.4 million soldiers, mainly infantry, who must have
been drawn from the resident peasants in their territories
(Habib 1999: 203). Nurul Hasan described this:
The fact that in the majority of the parganas the zamindars belonged to
a single caste and also that persons of the same caste were zamindars
of many contiguous parganas suggests that certain families or clans held
zamindari rights over large tracts (1969: 2425; emphasis added).

That pattern of territorial control by dominant tribes has been

demonstrated for Mughal Panjab by Chetan Singh (1988), though
he unnecessarily assumes that this political system depended on
pastoralism being the basis of subsistence. We will consider the
historical origins of these post-tribal territories later in this article.
Kosambis Model of the Transition of Tribe to Caste

In the 1940s and 1950s, D D Kosambi developed a highly influential model of the emergence of caste society from the interaction
of tribes in an evolving agrarian mode of production in India.
He eschewed race as a category and founded his analysis on
a Marxist model of successive modes of production. So Kosambi
saw the tribe as a pre-state stage of social organisation characterised by a comparatively primitive agricultural system and an
inferior intellectual range when compared with the agrarian
order of kingdoms like Magadha (Kosambi 1955, Part I: 3638).
He argued that tribal communities were based on simpler
production techniques, such as pastoralism and swidden (slash
and burn) agriculture (Kosambi 1955, Part II: 236, n 21). Their
decay followed the spread of a superior production complex
(or mode of production), based on plough agriculture. The
latter gave rise to the caste system. But he also anticipated the
possibility of dominant castes constantly emerging from tribal
conquests on the Yusufzai model. Kosambi wrote:
militarised tribes headed towards oligarchy (over a conquered
population), monarchy, or with growing trade to nationhood; those
without weapons could survive only as guilds or castes. Both local and
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invading tribes (like the later Rajputs) were thus being absorbed into
society, at different levels, some giving their name to an entire province
(Kosambi 1955, Part I: 38; also Kosambi 1975: 15862, 21015).

Returning Indian Society to World History

I diverge from Kosambi in that I do not see the decay and

absorption of tribes as an irreversible one-time process. Modern
studies have shown swidden to be an efficient adaptation to
specific human and natural environments, and not a primitive
trait. Furthermore, rather than thinking of social and economic
institutions as going through set stages, it is more useful to think
of them as continually reproduced and inherently unstable.
We should study institutions through time in terms of the
larger forces that may mutate or apparently freeze them. As Barth
elegantly put it:
the Middle East is the homeland of states and empires; it has known
centralised political systems far longer than any other region of the
world. ... The tribal peoples that are found in the region do not retain
their tribal institutions through ignorance, but as a stable and successful
adaptation to the natural and social environment in which they find
themselves (1998: 132).

Ibn Khaldun noted this six centuries ago. Group solidarity was
what enabled the tribes of the desert to defeat urbanised monarchies: they deployed desert qualities, desert toughness, and
desert savagery. ([The tribes] members are used to) privation and
to sharing their glory (with each other)... (Khaldun 1967: 137).
Similarly, historians of what we may call Mongol Asia, extending from Russia to Japan, have long realised the importance
of tribal invasion in building and destroying states across the
Eurasian land mass. Barfield (1992) offers an outstanding
summary of this process in relation to China, whereby these
groups with their simple tribal organisation periodically overwhelmed powerful states around their boundaries. The effects
of such conquest on various countries down to the 19th century
were recently examined by the contributors to Khazanov (2001).
The North American Case

Nor were such patterns confined to the Old World. The Americas
constitute an important example of parallel processes occurring
on the eve of the industrial revolution. Lattimore, indeed,
made a brief comment on how American tribes suffered a fate
radically different from the tribes of the Chinese borderlands.
Tribal peoples of the New World were faced (he wrote) with
the sudden brutal invasion of a civilisation equipped with advanced military technology. They did not have the technological
near-parity or the centuries of adaptation that made the steppe
nomads so formidable (Lattimore 1962b: 107).
Still, the speed of adaptation was remarkable. The native
peoples of the Great Lakes and woodland regions encountered
Europeans a little later than the coastal people. They had no
gold to attract conquistadors, but soon developed a lively trade
in furs and some other commodities. The French, the Dutch and
the English began to supply steel tools and firearms. Despite the
ravages of Old World diseases, the interior tribes strengthened
their organisation and as L H Morgan described it, by 1675
their dominion covered the greater part of the modern American
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states of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as the Ontario

Province of Canada. Yet their numbers did not exceed 20,000
(Morgan 1877: 1256; Richter 1992). But even in this unpropitious
setting, bands of borderland huntergatherers could in fact
develop social organisation and weaponry adequate to terrorise and repel not one but two colonial empiresthe Spanish
and the Americanfor at least a century. Their case exemplifies the survival advantage conferred by dispersion and a mobile subsistence base.
It is well known that a handful of Spanish warriors equipped
with firearms, steel armour and weapons, and often mounted
on warhorses, were able to destroy large assemblies of Native
American or Indian warriors. Their prowess secured them
local allies, and a few decades were sufficient for them to oust
and replace major states built through centuries by the Incas
and the Aztecs. Feral cattle and pigs that escaped from the
Spaniards damaged the agricultural systems that had supported
Indian populations. New diseases as well as the rapacity of the
conquerors led to a precipitous population decline. Yet the
successful exploitation of newly-discovered gold and silver
mines vital to the global ambitions of the Spanish monarchy
needed a large servile labour force. The processes that
ensuedincluding the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade
supported a huge, long-lasting empire that drastically changed the
political structures and ethnic composition of the entire continent.
But while Spanish rule was successfully imposed in the
older agricultural centres, northern borderlands had been
unsuited to indigenous farming and the small populations of
these areas lived by hunting and gathering, together with
some minimal cultivation in suitable areas. They had little
wealth to attract the conquerors, but within a few decades
became targets of slave-raiding intended to supply workers for
the mines together with concubines and servants to support
Spaniards in the style they expected (Hall 1989: 5863).
Farming people like the Pueblo Indians suffered both from
extortionate tax demands and reprisals from nomadic people
angered by Spanish slave-raids. Nomadic peoples had hitherto
hunted, traded and fought on foot; but the Spanish inability to
prevent the escape of horses and slaves meant that wild and
tame horses began to be available to the bands dwelling in the
Great Plains region of interior North America. The acquisition
of, and adaptation to this new animal revolutionised the
Plains life. Groups without horses were subject to attack and
displacement by groups with horses. Their women and children
became captives sold into the Hispanic market. Hall adds that
peoples such as the Apache, who were frequently enslaved for
the silver mines, retaliated. They soon acquired the equipment
of Spanish horsemen, lacking only firearms (Hall 1989: 8586).
The Apache had also begun to adopt seasonal or even permanent farming, but that sedentarisation made them easy prey
for raids from the pure horse nomads called Comanche, who
were emerging on the Plains. The Comanche targeted the
Apache who were then forced off a large part of their lands,
gave up farming and moved into the arid north of Spanish
Mexico. Surviving Apache bands then had to develop a
specialised subsistence as raiders and hunters: the prime
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game of Apache hunters became Spanish horses and cattle

(Hall 1989: 10405).
The Comanche themselves were organised out a few bands
of hunters who were driven out of the woodlands by tribes that
had secured firearms via Canada. The refugees included
ancestors of the later Comanche. About 1,700 small bands of
Native Americans began to move into the Great Plains from the
mountains to the West, attracted by the possibility of efficiently
hunting the vast bison herds while mounted on horseback.
Their early allies, the Ute tribe, were soon to name them
enemies, a name corrupted to Comanche. Their appearance
under that title, writes Hamalainen, marked the beginning of
the long decay of Spains imperial power in what today is the
American Southwest. This expansion was achieved despite
rivalry with not only Spain, but also France and Britain
(Hamalainen 2008: 1830). After a long period of costly and
futile military effort, the Spanish managed to minimise
Comanche attacks across the present-day American Southwest
by a policy of gifts and encouragement to trade. But for half a
century the Comanches would cut back or step up raiding in
Spanish Texas, depending on the volume of gifts given to
them. So offerings of diplomatic presents became fixed tribute payments to protect the exposed colony. When the struggling independent government in Mexico City stopped funding this tribute, the resulting catastrophic raids depopulated
Spanish Texas and led to Anglo settlers being invited from the
United States in the hope they would help block the attacks.
That began a process that would culminate in the secession of
Texas from Mexico in 1836 (the paragraph above is based on
Hamalainen 2008: 184200). Hamalainen (2008: 2) writes
dramatically that for the century 1750 to 1850,
the Comanches were the dominant people in the Southwest, and they
manipulated and exploited the colonial outposts in New Mexico, Texas,
Louisiana, and northern Mexico to increase their safety, prosperity and
power ... The Spanish, French, Mexicans, and Anglo-Americans were all
restrained and overshadowed in the continents center by an indigenous empire (see also Wallace and Hoebel 1952: 36).

We could hardly have a more striking example of the power

of loose tribal organisations that had managed to organise even
in the most unpropitious circumstances. Indeed, it bears out the
truth of Frieds comment: Ironically, the tribe, the rapacious
violent tribe, may well be a product of the state or of the states
philosophers (1975: 111).
State Weakness and Community Resilience

As historians and archaeologists have always known, and political

scientists are just discovering, it is not uncommon for states to fail
as their component institutions fall apart or into disuse (Fried
1967: 231). (As we saw, Hamalainen has argued that the Comanche impact nearly destroyed the Spanish state in its northern
territories.) Periods of state failure would strengthen already
established networks of kin affiliation as people sought to survive, while royal political authority disappeared. Richard Tapper
has provided a study of this process in Iran. The Safavid dynasty
recruited several groups of Turkic pastoralists, titled them
devotees of the Shah (Shahsevan) and allotted them lands
54

on condition of military service. At this point, they were a prototribe, moulded by their devotion to a religious worthy. The dynasty, however, collapsed by 1724 and the Shahsevan gradually transformed themselves into an autonomous tribal federation that was
politically active into the early 20th century (Tapper 1974, 1997).
Nadir Shah and then the Qajar dynasty rebuilt the Iranian state:
one more turn in a cycle that had persisted through millennia.
In India, the first surviving political texts were written by
learned men in highly evolved second or third cycle states,
states rebuilt after previous collapses. As Thomas Trautmann
has persuasively argued, Indian political wisdom was systematised in the early centuries of the Common Era into the encyclopedic treatise entitled the Arthastra (the science of wealth/
politics) attributed to Kaut ilya (Trautmann 1971: 18687). We
find in the Arthastra clear indications of the existence of
bounded tribal communities analogous to Barths 20th century
Yusufzai. The territories are referred to as janapada, which
literally translates as the foothold of a people: each janapada
comprised some hundreds of villages. The janapada clearly
had a principal city or cities, and the inhabitants were
collectively termed paura-jnapada or citizens and rustics.
Kosambi used the Arthastra alongside a wide array of
Buddhist texts and Hellenic sources. But his source is very
much a centralising, royalist text; its description of the janapada
begins with its founding at the initiative of the king, who settles
thousands of farming households in village clusters in an
organised way, peopling them with settlers from overpopulated
regions of his territory or forcibly deporting them from
elsewhere. But it is unlikely that such movements into virgin
land could be successfully achieved without a strong underlying
organisation among the people of the new janapada. I suggest
that it is more likely that many of these footholds first took
shape as tribal or petty monarchical territories. Later on, imperial regimes were layered over them, but the underlying units
were early examples of bounded, stratified territories in South
Asia. In the fourth century bce, many such bounded states,
each centred on a small stronghold, were described as existing
alongside larger territories in the Greek narratives of Alexanders
invasion (327326 bce). Indeed, when we consider the lists of the
16 great janapadas transmitted in the Buddhist tradition, we
notice that several of them were clearly tribal territories named
after the dominant community, whereas others were monarchies
(Kosambi 1975: 15362; Majumdar 1969: 23543).
Monarchies slowly came to predominate. The transition
from rank society to monarchical state is depicted in a chapter of
the Artha stra. The text explains the strength of such egalitarian tribal communities (sagha) as lying in their cohesion.
Gaining their allegiance (it advises) is more valuable than adding
an additional army or ally, because their cohesion makes them
indomitable. Their support should (the text advises) be
obtained by pleasing discourse and gifts (sma-dna) and
their hostility quelled by intrigue and force (bheda-daa). If
they were hostile, the king whom they threaten is advised to
incite their lower ranks to demand ceremonial status, that is,
marriage and interdining with the higher ranks. Alternatively,
he could use agents to set the principal men at odds with each
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other (Kangle 1997: 11.1.13; 11.1.613). Clearly these communities are visualised as having moved beyond being mere rank
societies to politically organised, indeed, aristocratic proto-states
(for the typology used here, see Fried 1967: Chapters 45). The
refusal of intermarriage and interdining would obviously
begin to split the tribe into castes. So would migration, forced
or voluntary. Many of the tribal names occurring in this section of the Arthastra were applied to groups known through
the centuries as regionally dominant tribal communities. They
are divided into two classes: those who live as warrior-bands
(ksatriya-

re)these are Kmboja, Surs t ra, etc. Then there

are those who live by using the title king (rja). The latter are
all communities of the central Gangetic Valley. Several have the
derogatory suffix ka added to their ethnonyms (for example,
Vr j jika, Licchivika which clearly refer to the famous Vajji
confederacy and Licchavi tribe of the sub-Himalayan region)
(Kangle 1997: 11.1.45). Privileged but subordinate: a status
that suggests an analogy with later dominant rural warrior
groups of the same areas usually termed Rjpt (son of a raja),
who scorned farm labour and sought to live on rent and tribute
(Hitchcock 1959). The British officer who settled the taxes payable in Bareilly District in the 1870s noted that the locally dominant Thakurs (Rajputs) shared their name with the ancient
region of Kather. In the 18th century the Rohillas (a newly
formed tribe) largely ousted them and forced them down to
the level of village proprietors and privileged tenants. The
region acquired its new name: Rohilkhand. Bareilly District
then contained 23,122 proprietors in a population of over one
million; of these 8,623 were Thakurs, 5,180 Muslims, and
reflecting the rise of the clerical classes, 2,773 Kayasths
(Moens 1880: 7). Rajput zamindars often took lower rents
from men of their own caste. Moens wrote: Tribal feeling is
against it, and a respect for tribal feeling is very strong still
among our kutheriyas and jungharas. Additionally, the bellicose
habits of such dominant groups made rent-enhancement difficult, even by powerful zamindars. One Thakur, Jymul Singh,
sought to raise rents on distant kinsmen. The latter waylaid
him and his brothers as they returned with a decree and literally cut all three of them to pieces with tulwars..., escaping
punishment as no one dared to testify (Moens 1880: 11314).
Finally, we should note that when recalcitrant saghas had
been split by guile, the text recommends they be settled as farmers in separate groups of five or ten households each, because if
allowed to live together they would be capable of armed revolt.
They might also be posted on frontiers (Kangle 1997: 11.11.1719).
Such processes would scatter ethnically distinct groups among
the larger population and thus induce caste formation.6 Interestingly, the Mahbhrata contains an entire chapter addressing
the problem from the tribes point of view, almost as a rejoinder
to the Arthastra. Here, the wise Bhs ma is asked how a gan a
could flourish. As an answer, Bhs ma emphasises the danger of
internal rifts that would open the way for subversion by enemies.
On the other hand, if the people of the gan a maintained its
traditions and continued to consult each other, they would
gain wealth through the united manly strength of the tribe as
outsiders would seek its friendship (Guha forthcoming: 69).
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Barth has described how in Swat the institution which

provides a corporate expression of the local dominant caste is
simply a plenary assembly of all its members; this assembly
simultaneously constitutes the governing body of the whole
local community (1960: 12627). Participation in the council
was what both marked and consolidated tribal membership and
maintaining that tradition was what the Mahabharata advised.
But it seems that the deep history of processes of conquest and
division in the rich core lands of the central Gangetic plain gradually destroyed structures of self-governance evidenced in the
Buddhist records as well as the Arthastra, leaving behind
only the clans (qaum) of pargana lords or zamndrs so visible
in the Mughal-era record.
Collective janapada traditions persisted longer in other
regions, especially in peninsular India. In the second millennium
village clusters included a number of villagesfrom 20 to over
a hundredand had stable institutions of governance. Janapada
was, however, no longer used. The commonest names we find in
general use were ndu in southern India, dea and pargana
elsewhere. A persuasive picture of its structure was drawn by
Ronald Inden, who sought to connect local territorial dominance
with kingly power through the intermediate unit of a ndu
controlled by a dominant peasant caste. This caste, he argued,
comprised the citizenry par excellence, a citizenry tied to the
Rashtrakuta emperors through nested systems of military
service and fealty to district and provincial heads (Inden
2000: 20722). Thus, the classical Sanskrit jnapadapeople
with territoryis recognisable in later history under other
names. The question, however, is why did this organisation
survive at all when it presented obvious obstacles to royal
power? I address this in the next section.
.

Persistent Gan.a Samgha

We need at the outset to abandon ideas of linear social progress

and all ideas that the tribe was a peaceful and primitive
organisation (Guha 1999: Chapters 23). We must remember
that if the tribe was fragile in the face of the state, the dynastic
state was an even more breakable object. The turmoil of its
breakdowns periodically renewed, and re-energised dominant
gan a saghas; that in turn, revitalised the village-cluster even
as they reshaped boundaries and social order.
New tribes and tribal territories marked by ethnic hierarchy on
the pattern of Barths Swat Pathans have repeatedly emerged in
South Asia and its borderlands. Sometimes they have founded
new states; at other times they have repelled or even destroyed
them. It is my argument that the tribe as a type of reactive, defensive
and offensive political organisation never vanished even if particular ganas
did. Here I follow global anthropological usage of
the term tribe, meaning thereby regional, stratified sociopolitical
organisations characterised by diffused authority and collective
leadership such as (for example) a council of important chiefs.
Tribes, tribes transformed to dominant castes, and monarchies have all coexisted through the centuries in South and
West Asia (Lapidus 1990). Tribes have come into being and disintegrated, just as kingdoms have done. A number of kingless
or tribal peoples were reportedly conquered by Alexander of
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Macedon and presumably by the Maurya emperors. Yet, similar

groups reconstituted themselves into the first millennium CE, as
indicated by epigraphic references and some remaining coins
that refer to such communities (Majumdar 1969: 24470).
This re-emergence supports my argument that these processes
periodically renewed and re-energised the territorial janapada,
even as they reshaped its boundaries and social order. In the
course of time, some might move from aristocracy to autocracy
and form the nucleus of kingdoms that would in turn break
down. For a comparative trans-Asian perspective, we return to
Ira Lapidus erudite survey of tribes and states from Morocco
to Iran. He notes that fragmented rural populations were
repeatedly organised into conquest movements (usually based
in a religious community) in which kinship among the leaders
was a secondary phenomenon. The most common form of
leadership, he notes, was the warrior chieftaincy supported by
a lineage, clan, or war band that in turn won the allegiance of
other such warrior unitsagain, often using bonds of religion
and thereby dominated a subject population. Tribes were in
effect the creatures of religious or political elites. Genealogical
claims (he adds) were important for self-image, but not in the
actual organisation of the larger movements (Lapidus 1990:
2830). For Indian analogues to the Shahsevan that Tapper
studied, we can think of military brotherhoods like the Bangash
Pathans or Rohillas of the 18th century. Here successful war
bands created an originally heterogeneous elite that was
installed over a much larger subject population.
The area north-east of Delhi, for example, (now known as
Rohilkhand), lost its medieval name (Katehar) in the 18th
century as warrior-bands called Rohilla displaced the local
Katehriya Rajput gentry that had tenaciously resisted the power
of Delhi from the 13th century onwards. The Rohillas, in turn,
maintained the local tradition of resistance to central power into
the British colonial period. But there was no original Rohilla
tribe in Afghanistan. The Indian Rohillas had themselves been
assembled into a tribal community out of various Afghan war
bands and miscellaneous local slaves drawn into the following
of Daud Khan, a horse-trader turned soldier of fortune turned
tribal kinglet. Daud Khan selected two boys among the slaves
captured in a raid and adopted them as his sons. One, named
Ali Muhammad, was of local extraction and made a slave ...
[but] was generally considered an Afghan Rohilla (Gommans
1999: 11921). Another similar group, the Bangash, evolved
more quickly towards kingship and even made a near-successful
bid for the dominion of Awadh (Gommans 1999: 12832; Hamilton 1787: 4244; Moens 1880: 2334, 112).
In arid and unproductive areas, hierarchies resulting from conquest were shallower; that is, not all victors could live under the
name of rj as the Arthastra had put it. In the mid-19th century,
for example, S S Thorburn had an occasion to closely examine the
customs and history of conquering tribesmen when he settled
land tenures and taxes in the Bannu District, straddling the River
Indus in todays north-west Pakistan. He commented that Pathan
tribes divided new acquisitions on some established equitable
principle, e g, ancestral shares or number of mouths or families in
each Khel [lineage segment] (Thorburn 1879: 16, note).
56

The rise of the Sikhs in the 18th century is also an example

of egalitarian warrior bands displacing powerful states. They
first defeated the later Mughals and then even the Afghan
kings when the latter were at the height of their power in the
1760s. The Englishman George Forster observed the Sikhs closely
in the late 18th century, and wrote that their government bears
an appearance of aristocracy; but a closer examination discovers a large vein of popular power branching through many of
its parts (Forster 1798: 32830). His judgment is confirmed by
the latest historical research. Purnima Dhavan notes that the
Khalsa Sikhs remained more democratically resistant to hierarchy than any other contemporary warrior group, and emergent
rulers still periodically acknowledged the egalitarian claims of
the Khalsa in gatherings such as the gurmata (Dhavan 2011:
17475). Some 1500 years earlier, the Yaudheya (a name that
could mean warlike) had formed a long-lasting confederacy in
the arid plains between the lower Indus and the Ganges. Like
the Sikhs, the Yaudheya issued a common currency despite
their political divisions (Banga 1978: 36; Majumdar 1969:
25657; Kosambi 1975: 23133). New janapada territories and
village clusters developed elsewhere too. Around Delhi, the
contemporary visitor Modave noted in 1775,
there are many large villages in favourable positions and easy to
defend. The peasants of the neighbouring villages have abandoned
their hamlets in order to retire to these villages. They have formed a
common Council which governs all their public affairs. They recognise
neither the usurpers nor the legitimate masters of the province; they
only pay when they are forced to do it, some money to save their crops
(Modave cited in Umar 1998: 195, n 310).

Each such phase of state breakdown renewed the vitality of the

janapada institution under a new name, with new boundaries.
Iqtidar Alam Khan has shown that in the 18th century peasant
insurgents in the north frequently had serviceable muskets. When
deployed behind mud walls or thickets, they could seriously
deter troopers on expensive horses (Khan 2004). Blocs of armed
peasants expanded their power steadily across the north Indian
plain. This infusion of strength may then have generated the elaborate and extensive structures of community political organisation
evidenced among the Jat peasantry in the 19th and 20th centuries,
and studied by Pradhan (1966), Chakravarty-Kaul (1996) and
Gupta (1997). Were these councils the innovations of an expanding ethnic bloc or residues of earlier organisation? It is hard to say,
though British records show the existence of strong supra-village
organisations among dominant landed groups such as the
Rajputs, Jats, and Gujjars during the revolt of 185758 (Stokes
1970). The distinction of tribes and castes was reinforced by its
institutionalisation in the all-India censuses that began to be
published every decade from 1881 (Sundar 2000). But even then
tenacious community organisations stretch across hundreds of
villages (Kasturi 2002; Chakravarty-Kaul 1996).
Conclusions

The Indian sociologists have happily adopted the term caste

from Portuguese and tribe from Latin via English. Is it time to
discard these and all the Victorian anthropological baggage
embedded in these words? If we can naturalise a Portuguese
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derivative (caste), why not the forgotten indigenised term

khum which might serve for all ascriptive social categories,
both tribe and caste. New names would serve to clearly label
notes
1

2
3

4
5
6

Mohammed Hussain, Libya Crisis: What Role

Do Tribal Loyalties Play?, BBC News, 21 February 2011; available at: http://www.bbc.com/
news/world-middle-east-12528996.
NINA document, 2 September 2014; punctuation original.
Ahmed Rashid, BBC News, Pakistan Crisis
Hits Army Morale, 13 September 2007, available at:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/
6978240.stm.
Removal from list of 17 tribes, 131 castes suggested, The Times of India, 8 May 1967.
Six Assam Communities to Get Scheduled
Tribe Status, Statesman (Delhi) 10 May 1995.
This paragraph is deeply indebted to my longago reading of Kosambis Introduction to the
Study of Indian History in 1971.

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