Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that it was the agency of the tribal people which eventually made scheduling a politically expedient move for the Congress Nationalists. It recapitulates emerging Adivasi readings of history, constitutional deliberations, communist led movements and analyzes the activities of Jaipal Singh.

Paper long abstract:

By the early 1940s, the discourse on the future of tribal communities in India had matured substantially leading to the emergence of binaries such as 'Protection versus Assimilation'. In essence, what began as a debate on the scheduling of predominantly tribal areas gained considerable currency and generated bitter contestations between the Nationalists on the one hand and the sympathetic 'Official Block' on the other. As a result of this dialectic, the 'tribal question' indeed came of age. However, its resolution through special provisions enshrined in the Indian Constitution (namely the Fifth and the Sixth Schedules) remains unexplained: why did the Indian National Congress which had maintained a fairly consistent policy of opposing the territorial segregation of tribal tracts in British Indian Provinces agree to provisions for scheduling? In this context, there is an urgent need to evaluate the role that tribal peoples themselves played in the twilight of colonial rule.

This paper argues that it was the agency of the tribal people which eventually made scheduling a politically expedient move for the Congress Nationalists. Moving through several interrelated themes, it recapitulates voices of tribal representatives about a communitarian Adivasi history, summarizes the final stage of colonial administrative discourse which fed deliberations of the Constituent Assembly of India, surveys the major communist led movements in tribal areas (1945-50) and finally enquires into the charismatic figure of Jaipal Singh who emerged as the leading tribal leader.