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Fractured Communities: Adivasi Histories and the Politics of Power is no ordinary book. It began life as a doctoral thesis, but not one produced under ordinary academic circumstances. It was written by a student-activist who, for nearly a decade, was relentlessly hounded by the state.

In the midst of his research, Umar Khalid was arrested, subjected to a sustained campaign of vilification, and even survived an assassination attempt by a fanatic.

Fractured Communities: Adivasi Histories and the Politics of Power, Umar Khalid, Juggernaut, 2026.

After completing the thesis, he encountered yet another obstacle when Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) initially refused to accept its submission, relenting only after judicial intervention.

Earlier, his name had briefly surfaced in the Bhima Koregaon FIR, though it disappeared when the case was expanded into the alleged Maoist conspiracy that led to the arrest of 16 rights activists from across the country. He was eventually arrested in the Delhi riots case arising out of the anti-CAA protests and has remained incarcerated for nearly five years, with his bail applications repeatedly rejected.

Yet the significance of this work does not lie in the extraordinary circumstances of its production, compelling though they are. To judge it merely as a testament to personal resilience would be to do it a disservice.

Its real importance lies in its scholarly ambition, archival depth and conceptual originality. It deserves to be engaged with on its own intellectual merits, not out of sympathy for its author. I had earlier reviewed the published book that emerged from this thesis. What follows is an engagement with the thesis itself, whose fuller academic apparatus allows one to appreciate the scope and depth of the original research more completely.

History Returns through the Present

History acquires renewed urgency when the present forces us to revisit it. Few regions illustrate this more vividly than Jharkhand. During the past three decades, conflicts over mining, forests, displacement, industrialisation and constitutional protections have repeatedly returned Adivasi history to the centre of political debate.

The controversies surrounding amendments to the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act and the Santhal Parganas Tenancy Act, the struggles over PESA implementation, and the continuing displacement caused by mining and infrastructure projects have transformed the colonial past into active terrain of contemporary politics.

History here is neither antiquarian curiosity nor nationalist nostalgia; it is a resource through which competing visions of development, democracy and justice seek legitimacy.

Yet these debates often proceed through a remarkably simplified understanding of that past. The dominant narrative presents Adivasi history as a moral opposition between two homogeneous entities: an egalitarian community living in harmonious relationship with land and forest, and an intrusive colonial or postcolonial state bent upon dispossession in the interests of outside capital. Colonialism appears as the moment of rupture; resistance follows almost naturally from it. The analytical categories are morally compelling and frequently inadequate.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

It is precisely this historiographical framework that Khalid’s meticulously researched study seeks to unsettle. Based on extensive archival research, the book reconstructs two centuries of state formation in Singhbhum, tracing the changing relationships among customary authority, land, forests, colonial administration and postcolonial governance.

Rather than treating colonialism as the simple destruction of an autonomous tribal commons, Khalid demonstrates that colonial rule governed by selectively reorganising indigenous institutions, transforming them into instruments of administration while simultaneously altering their social character. The colonial state did not merely conquer the frontier; it reconstructed the institutions through which the frontier governed itself.

The book describes this process through the concept of administrative exceptionalism. Singhbhum, particularly the Kolhan region inhabited by the Ho people, was governed through legal and administrative arrangements distinct from those prevailing elsewhere in British India. Direct bureaucratic administration proved difficult where repeated military expeditions encountered determined resistance and the terrain rendered conventional governance costly.

Instead, colonial authority evolved a system of indirect rule centred on incorporating existing institutions – above all the manki-munda hierarchy – into the administrative machinery. Customary authority was not abolished; it was translated into administrative authority. The frontier was pacified not through conquest alone but through institutional transformation.

This, in my view, is the book’s central insight. But it also points toward a larger theoretical question that extends well beyond the history of Singhbhum.

Rewriting the History of Singhbhum

Every important historical work begins by questioning categories that have become so familiar they appear self-evident. Khalid’s study performs precisely this function. Before narrating the history of colonial rule, the book asks a more elementary question: what exactly was Singhbhum?

The answer is less obvious than it appears. Colonial records present Singhbhum as a naturally existing geographical and administrative entity awaiting British discovery – an identifiable frontier inhabited by identifiable tribes governed through identifiable customs. Khalid demonstrates convincingly that this apparent coherence was itself a product of........

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