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Paper short abstract:

This paper takes a Sahlins-ian approach to study the Santal 'Hul' in colonial India as a culturally dictated response to the social engineering policies of the East India Company and the forced sedentarization of the Santals to facilitate land reclamation and forest clearing in the mid-1800s.

Paper long abstract:

The relationship between land reclamation, social benefit, and social policy, has been a matter of contention across disciplines. This paper contributes to the debate on its transformative consequences from a deep-history perspective; by studying the Santal Rebellion in nineteenth-century India. Beginning in the 1820s, until a violent revolt broke out in 1855, the English East India Company undertook massive land-reclamation activities in eastern India, inhabited by several tribal groups including the Santals. This paper interprets the similarities between the Santal rite of 'bitlaha' (ostracism) and the events of the Santal Rebellion (Hul) observed by Elizabeth Rottger-Hogan (1982) as a cultural response to the disruption of the deep history of the Santals coinciding with the social engineering of the colonial state in the forested Damin-i-Koh. This paper argues that such land-'reclamation' policies leading to forced sedentarization, in fact, did not "improve lives" but engendered a cultural and social crisis within the community that is traceable in both the form of the rebellion and the songs and rumors circulating in the region at the time. This paper concludes that the Hul can be interpreted as an act of 'bitlaha' writ large— performed by the community to expel what they understood as the source of pollution—the colonial state. The events then assumed political significance by the dynamics of cultural transformation theorized by Marshall Sahlins enabling the Santals to engage politically with State-systems instead of evading them.