“The reality of the complex world of the Adivasis… does not conform to the much-romanticized picture of idyllic communities unitedly resisting the encroachment of ‘outsiders’.”

On a long night in prison, does Umar Khalid think about returning to Singhbhum?

Perhaps he remembers the road to Chaibasa, the villages he passed through, and the archive rooms where he opened files written by British colonizers. I wonder if he still hears the goods trains moving through the region, carrying timber and minerals away. Fractured Communities is Khalid’s doctoral thesis researched and written before his imprisonment; it follows two centuries of struggle over land, forests, authority and belonging in colonial Singhbhum, tracing how British occupation transformed the landscape and the relationships within Adivasi society. 

But while reading Fractured Communities, I could not help thinking about the journey of Umar Khalid the scholar, a journey that the Indian state has taken from him. Today Khalid is known less for this scholarship than for the nearly six years he has spent imprisoned under the draconian anti-terror law, UAPA (Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967). And as I write this, Khalid has filed yet another bail petition before the Delhi High Court, placing his hope more in a miracle than in the justice that has evaded him all these years.

As Khalid says, “Nurturing hope in prison is a risky business,” and yet he continues to do so within the bounds of prison, reaching out to those who continue to hope for him in the outside world.

And much of Khalid’s hope is revealed in the final paragraph of his thesis that leaves us at the edge of an unfinished journey. Reflecting on the questions, he writes: “Sometime in 2015, I decided to visit these ‘bases’ of the rebellion myself, specifically to observe how those at the very margins of even Adivasi communities related to, and negotiated with, dominant structures of their communities, even as they were creating new ones. But, as fate would have it, for reasons beyond my control, it became impossible to travel back to Jharkhand after 2016. Hopefully, at a saner time in the future, I will return to this story to interrogate the possibilities and limits of radical social change that this rebellion promises.”

Reading Fractured Communities brought to the surface several assumptions I had carried into the book. I had encountered Adivasi history largely through stories of resistance against those seeking their land, but Khalid complicates this by showing negotiation, collaboration, and inequalities within Ho society itself. My understanding of colonialism, too, had often rested on a clearer division between colonizer and colonized. Here, the empire works through existing hierarchies, reshaping them in the process. The book similarly complicates my understanding of Hinduization, tracing a history far older and more uneven than the contemporary Hindutva project. It was through these complications that I entered Singhbhum.

Entering Singhbhum through the colonizer’s lens

To follow Khalid into nineteenth-century Singhbhum, we first have to enter an archive built by the empire that came to govern it.

What does it mean that so much of the written history available to us begins with the officials who arrived to conquer, occupy, and reorganize the region for colonial rule?

Khalid, as a scholar, cannot simply discard these papers. Much of the surviving written evidence is contained within them. His study centers on the Ho communities of Singhbhum, while also engaging with the wider histories of Adivasi societies across the Chotanagpur plateau and beyond. Rather than rejecting this documentation, he asks us to read it differently. As he writes, many existing interpretations emerge from an “uncritical acceptance of the framework in which the colonial archive casts the Hos and other Adivasi communities.”

The warning is easy to miss: these sources tell us not simply what happened, but how the colonizers wanted those events to be understood.

And so, where an official records a crime, Khalid looks for resistance. Where the documents describe Adivasis as gullible or “naturally turbulent,” he finds political choice, negotiation, and refusal. Where the administration presents itself as orderly and assured, he notices fear. Of course, this way of reading carries its own danger. If every official account is treated with suspicion, one can begin to discover resistance everywhere. Khalid’s reading remains disciplined precisely because he resists that temptation. The book is as interested in compromise, collaboration, and unequal power within Adivasi society as it is in resistance against the colonial state.

Colonial officials worried that intrusive surveys would provoke discontent and that rebellion in one part of the wider Chota Nagpur plateau, of which Singhbhum formed a part and which witnessed repeated Adivasi uprisings against colonial rule, might spread into another.

He also notices cracks within the state itself. Officials in Singhbhum, Calcutta, and Patna disagreed over how the region should be governed. The official description of colonial policy concealed many of these tensions because the colonizers needed to appear firmer and more coherent than they were.

Colonial officials could document land, settlements, and customs without ever fully understanding the social and political worlds they encountered. Calling a community “primitive” was never a neutral description. It was also a way of explaining why it needed to be governed. I was particularly struck by Khalid’s discussion of sasandaris. As he notes, “Descendants of the founding families could be traced via stone slabs on graves, locally known as sasandaris, scattered throughout the region. These common burial grounds and stone slabs effectively served as the title deeds for khuntkatti status in the pre-colonial period.” Claims to land often rested on custom and oral tradition rather than written title deeds. Yet colonial law found paper, and the documents produced by landlords and intermediaries, easier to recognize than histories carried through memory and practice.

Khalid reads these sources carefully and suspiciously. I found that one of the book’s greatest strengths, but also one of the places where its limits become most visible. He is working with sources in which the colonizer speaks, page after page, while the colonized appear only in occasional petitions, testimony, or police reports. That silence is not only a limitation of the surviving evidence; it also means some conclusions must necessarily remain provisional. I never felt Khalid mistook absence for proof, but the available sources nevertheless set the boundaries of what any historian can finally claim.

How does an empire enter a village?

“The Constitution is yours. The borders are yours. The sovereignty is yours. The flag is yours. What is ours? What is that is both tribal and Indian in the Constitution?”

Jaipal Singh Munda’s question, quoted in Fractured Communities, exposes the unresolved terms of India’s incorporation of Adivasi peoples. What does it mean to belong to a nation whose borders, sovereignty and symbols are claimed as common property, while the institutions that govern land, law and political authority continue to define some communities as peripheral?

Empires rarely arrive by confronting a unified society. They enter through existing fractures, widening them as they go. Colonial power did not encounter a single, undifferentiated Ho community in Singhbhum. It entered an existing social order, mapped its hierarchies and learned how to govern through them.

Empires enter how they always enter: through the fractures within communities. They slip inside the social order. Colonial power did not confront a unified Ho community; it governed through differences already present within it and gradually transformed them.

As Khalid notes through S.T. Cuthbert’s early nineteenth-century account of Singhbhum:

“After the jagirdars, local chiefs granted lands for a quit rent to the mankis and the mundas through a ritual that involved the conferral of pugrees. Below the jagirdars, mankis and mundas were the mahto (the civil head) and the pujari (the religious head), who led the village community and conducted its affairs. These village functionaries would lease land to the raiyats… and would in turn collect rent… passing it on to their superiors.”

Khalid is careful not to romanticize Adivasi society as a perfectly egalitarian world interrupted by colonialism. Rather than dismantling existing authority, the British selectively recognized particular Mankis, hereditary heads of clusters of villages, and Mundas, village headmen, attaching new administrative, policing, and revenue responsibilities to their offices, rewarding cooperation and redirecting their accountability toward the empire. In doing so, they strengthened some leaders, consolidated land and influence in their hands, and deepened existing inequalities. What appeared to be the preservation of custom became one of colonialism’s most effective tools of governance in Singhbhum.

A similar pattern emerges in contemporary India. In the Great Nicobar mega project, the very Gram Sabha resolutions cited as proof of tribal consent have themselves come under judicial scrutiny, with allegations that they relied on settlers rather than indigenous communities and even repeated signatures. The Hos entered the written record as a distinct tribal society, fundamentally different from caste India and, according to nineteenth-century racial thought, occupying one of the lowest rungs of civilization. Their land was measured, their customs documented, and their lives rendered legible to the colonial state.

Who wrote the law, and who became the criminal?

Colonial officials marked new forest boundaries in Singhbhum with small heaps of stones. Within months, some had disappeared. On one inspection, the lines were so overgrown with thorns that workers refused to follow them. Elsewhere, villagers knew that a boundary had been drawn through the forest but could no longer locate it.

The boundary had disappeared from the landscape. On paper, however, it remained.

Singhbhum had been cast as an exceptional frontier, inhabited by people considered too “primitive,” “backward,” and “isolated” for ordinary governance. That language gave colonial officials extraordinary discretion over which customs, authorities, and land claims would receive legal recognition.

Settlement operations turned those decisions into written rights. Native chiefs, zamindars, and selected tribal headmen were able to consolidate claims over land and forests, while others who had long depended on those lands were increasingly excluded. Recording rights did not simply preserve the existing order; it changed who could claim those rights.

But those lines were being drawn through a world already dense with ordinary life. During the lean months, people traveled from distant villages and built temporary homes inside the forests to collect mahua flowers. Trees supplied timber for houses and goods that could be sold in local markets; streams provided fish, while parts of the forest served as hunting and grazing grounds. In years of scarcity, families returned to these forests for food and other resources to help them survive.

The forest also carried ritual and social meaning. When the sal trees came into full bloom, Bah Bonga began. Young boys and girls wore sal flowers in their hair, houses were decorated with them, and flowers were carried to families remembered as founders of the village. The choice of sal itself mattered: many villages stood on land that had once been sal forest. Sacred groves were also preserved within cleared land and associated with deities believed to affect rainfall and crops. The forest, then, was not simply timber waiting to be measured. It was woven into work, hunger, worship, kinship, celebration, and the memory of how a village came to be.

Then timber became vital to the railways. Forests once dismissed as uncultivated wastelands were surveyed, fenced, and reserved under colonial control. Access narrowed for the communities who had lived with them for generations, while commercial extraction expanded. The same forests that sustained people through periods of scarcity were increasingly treated as state property and as sources of revenue.

We repeat the phrase “law and order” so often that it begins to sound as though neither word has an author. But somebody wrote that law and decided which order it would protect.

Reading these pages today, long after the colonizers left, I found the resemblance unsettling. Contemporary India is not simply colonial Singhbhum being carried over: the Constitution, the Fifth Schedule, PESA, and the Forest Rights Act have created legal protections that did not exist then. Yet conflicts such as Hasdeo Arand return us to a familiar question of power: who ultimately gets to decide the future of Adivasi land? Too often, environmental approval becomes a matter of how quickly a project can move forward rather than whether the forest should be opened to extraction at all.

Roads, railways, and mines would soon follow these laws into Singhbhum. But what, exactly, were they built to carry?

The train carries coal, not people

“The trains arrive every day. They simply are not meant for the people who live here.”

Chaibasa is not isolated from the Indian economy. During Khalid’s field trips, the regular sound of trains followed him through Chaibasa. An assistant in the district record room explained that they were maal-gaadis, goods trains carrying timber and coal from the interiors of Singhbhum toward port towns. The only passenger train Khalid records, a Jamshedpur–Calcutta Shatabdi, stopped at Chaibasa for just two minutes. Yet for many residents, reliable passenger rail remains absent. They continue to pile on overcrowded buses and shared jeeps, traveling on broken roads. The railway leaves full; the village stays waiting.

We often imagine that infrastructure automatically connects neglected regions to centers of economic opportunity. Khalid asks us to look beyond. A railway line can connect a mine to a factory without ever meaningfully connecting a village to a hospital. A highway can shorten the journey of minerals while leaving the people who live beside it no closer to healthcare, education, or secure livelihoods. Integration into the national economy does not necessarily mean inclusion within it.

Beyond their resistance, who are the Adivasis?

One of our deepest betrayals of Adivasi communities is not only what has been taken from them, but how we have reduced them to a political symbol. We remember them most easily as protesters, victims, or protectors of forests. Their history becomes a history of resistance alone rather than a history of living.

When we reduce Adivasis to symbols of resistance, we leave much of their social and cultural life unseen, creating space for others to define it. Hindutva does precisely this: the RSS claims Adivasis as vanvasis, forest dwellers who have always belonged within an eternal Hindu civilization.

As Khalid shows, however, Hinduization within Ho society has a much longer and more complicated history. Drawing primarily on D.N. Majumdar’s ethnographic work, Khalid argues that sections of the upwardly mobile Ho elite increasingly adopted Hindu rites and rituals, confined women to the home, practiced purdah, and gave up pork in favor of vegetarianism as markers of social respectability. I found this argument persuasive because Khalid presents it as a broader social shift among sections of the Ho elite rather than as a universal transformation. Assimilation, then, was deeply gendered. A man’s ascent into dominant society could depend upon a woman’s shrinking world.

Majumdar records one particularly unsettling scene involving Gono, a popular priest whose disciples were expected to experience spirit possession as part of his religious practice. While passing through the villages, Majumdar witnessed fellow disciples beating the son of the influential Manki, Dulu Manki, because the young man had not yet become possessed. Khalid reads the episode as part of a wider struggle over religious authority and social change within Ho society, rather than evidence of a simple or linear movement towards Hinduization.

These transformations did not end with colonialism. Many of the ways the colonial state classified, governed, and extracted from Adivasi regions continued after Independence, now within a postcolonial order shaped by caste hierarchy, capitalist accumulation, and increasingly, majoritarian nationalism.

The Books Prison Prevents from Being Written

Reading Fractured Communities, I could not help but wonder what other books we might already have had if Umar Khalid had not spent years behind bars.

A book does not end with the research. It continues through conversations with editors, unanswered doubts, forgotten references, revisions made months later, and the reassuring possibility that if a question arises, the author can simply be asked. We rarely think about this invisible labor because it usually unfolds without interruption. Umar Khalid has had to rely on others to sustain those conversations. It is perhaps no coincidence that the first book about him, Umar Khalid and His World, is an anthology edited by Anirban Bhattacharya, Banojyotsna Lahiri, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, bringing together voices that prison prevented him from gathering himself.

What struck me most is that prison has shaped not only Khalid’s life but also his scholarship. Every stage that followed had to move at the pace of prison bureaucracy.

In July 2026, amid the CJP-associated protests, Khalid’s name once again echoed through the streets of resistance. Videos of his earlier speeches, in which he invoked Gandhian principles, went viral. Soon after, Instagram withheld the account @free.umarkhalid in India following a government request under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act. For years, the page had documented his incarceration, court proceedings, and more recently, introduced readers to Fractured Communities. I found it difficult not to see the irony. In Bengaluru, a woman was booked for holding a placard and raising slogans in support of Umar Khalid. Even in an opposition-ruled state, the space to demand justice for Umar Khalid seemed precariously small.

To me, this is the larger loss prison produces. Sharjeel Imam, who was arrested in the same 2020 Delhi pogrom as Khalid, recently sought access to his PhD research material so that he could continue his thesis from prison. The court left that decision to the prison superintendent. If a prison superintendent can decide whether a scholar completes a PhD, it becomes difficult to believe that colonial restrictions on intellectual life have been left entirely behind.

Who Gets to Tell Adivasi Histories?

Perhaps in another world, I would have been able to email my questions to Khalid. Throughout this essay, I have tried to bring Khalid’s lens to Singhbhum. He reads against the grain of colonial papers to recover histories they were never meant to preserve. In doing so, he demonstrates what rigorous, patient scholarship can do. It does more than recover forgotten voices; it changes how we learn to read the past.

That is why the imprisonment of scholars should concern us all. It is sinister not only because it silences an individual but also because it interrupts an intellectual life. Every year Umar Khalid spends in prison is another year in which work that only he could have done is deferred.

The question Jaipal Singh Munda posed decades ago remains unanswered. That is precisely why it remains urgent. Fractured Communities reminds us that the structures governing Adivasi life did not disappear with colonial rule; many were inherited, adapted, and expanded by the postcolonial state. If the book leaves us with one responsibility, it is to keep listening to places where history has too often chosen not to, whether in Adivasi villages or inside prison cells.