Nov 3, 2014
The British-born Oxford scholar Verrier Elwin was a rebel against the Raj.
Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India was first published in the spring of 1999. Fifteen years on, I remain very fond of it, and have thus issued it in this expanded edition. In the main text, I have corrected a few errors of fact and interpretation. I have prefaced the new edition with this introduction, while also revising and updating the epilogue.
Beyond my own emotional investment in the book, there may be at least five reasons why younger Indians might wish to read about this British-born Indian, this Oxford scholar who lived with adivasis, this Rebel against the Raj:
The first is that Elwin thought deeply about inter-faith relations. The history of modern India has been marked by rivalry and discord between Hindus and Muslims. Outside India, the hostility between Christians and Muslims has spectacularly escalated in recent years. On the other hand, like Mahatma Gandhi, by whom he was greatly influenced in this respect (albeit not in some others), Elwin demonstrated that one could practice one’s faith seriously without disparaging the faith of others. He was an ordained priest of the Christian Church, who refused to convert the tribals he worked with. He wrote brilliantly on the parallels between Christian and Hindu traditions of mysticism. Later, he developed a keen interest in Buddhism;
Second, Elwin was both a serious scholar as well as a superb prose stylist. Whereas physicists and mathematicians (and perhaps philosophers and economists too) have to resort to technical language to express their research findings, historians and anthropologists do not need to do so. Yet practitioners of these humanistic disciplines also often cloak their arguments in a battery of neologisms. Their language is so dense and obscure that one forgets that these scholars are supposed to be writing about real, living, people;
Bad writing is unfortunately ubiquitous in the academy—sometimes out of a mistaken solemnity, sometimes because of plain incompetence. In this dreary, jargon-ridden climate, younger anthropologists, historians and literary scholars would do well to read Elwin, who communicated his research findings in prose that sparkled;
Third, Elwin was a precocious environmentalist. As a student at Oxford he came under the spell of William Wordsworth. Like his hero, he wrote evocatively about the glories of unspoilt nature. Later, living with adivasis in the Central Provinces, he understood the deep bond they had with their environment, a bond threatened by the commercial forest policies of the state. In his years in the North-east, Elwin likewise studied the often sustainable livelihood practices of tribal communities. His work is of great relevance today, when, across India, communities and ecologies are being ravaged by an excessively resource-intensive, energy-intensive, model of development;
Fourth, Elwin’s work underscores the failures of Indian nationalism in understanding the predicament of the adivasis. Gandhi and other nationalists recognized the need to end untouchability, to emancipate women, and to forge a honourable compact between Hindus and Muslims. Dalits and religious minorities also had important leaders who were not part of the Congress-led national movement (such as B. R. Ambedkar). Yet the special nature of adivasi life, the special needs of tribal people, largely eluded those who shaped political discourse in late colonial India. This failure has had deep consequences for life in independent India. Whereas Dalits and Muslims are organized as voting blocks, and have their interests (at least symbolically) addressed by major political parties, adivasis are largely voiceless. Excluded from effective democratic participation, they are also subject to systematic exploitation, displaced and dispossessed by mining and hydel projects that usurp forests and lands they consider their own. Their political exclusion, and their economic vulnerability, have been taken advantage of by Maoist revolutionaries, who in recent decades have made major gains in tribal areas. Here, Elwin’s writings remain a key point of reference, worth revisiting if one wishes to restore the faith of our adivasi compatriots in the (noble but often dishonoured) ideals of the Indian Constitution;
Finally, there is the charm of Elwin’s life itself, the thematic and geographical range he travelled, the grand themes he touched and illuminated. He was, as I describe him in these pages, a serial bridge-builder—between Christianity and Hinduism, the forest and the city, India and England, elite and subaltern, the locality and the globe. His remarkable, incident-filled life is a window into the history of modern India and perhaps the history of the modern world itself.
Excerpted with permission from Penguin Books India from the book Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India (New and Updated Edition) by Ramachandra Guha. Penguin, Rs 599.
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