From rebellion to litigation: Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (1908) and the Hos of Kolhan Government Estate

Tribal protest and resistance in colonial India has usually been depicted as rebellions, violent upsurges and ‘savage attacks’ against the state. However, since the late nineteenth century ‘tribal’ communities had also taken recourse to legal battles in the law courts in order to establish their rights – which, in fact, has been far less discussed by scholars. Resistance and rebellion are both forms of identity assertion, and I argue that these interventions have to be understood and analyzed on the basis of the specific histories of individual communities. In course of the rent settlement of 1914-18 which took place following the enactment of the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (CNTA) of 1908, Ho tenants of the Kolhan Government Estate set out to establish their khuntkatti status through legal claims in the settlement court at Chaibasa. By making khuntkatti tenures secure against encroachments by landlords, the British colonial government intended the CNTA to be a measure of protection for the adivasis of Chotanagpur. However, in practice it had very different implications in Kolhan, as land rights and the social hierarchy there had developed on significantly diverse trajectories from the rest of Chotanagpur ever since the British annexation of the estate in 1837. This article traces how the Hos reinterpreted their past and proposed a new blueprint for their future in the context of this Act. It therefore draws attention to the agency of the Hos who negotiated actively and with considerable adroitness with the colonial administration from their position of subalternity. In doing so, they reshaped tradition and redefined the parameters of community identity.