Ezra Rashkow's "The Nature of Endangerment in India"

Ezra Rashkow is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. He is the author of numerous articles on the history of hunting, conservation, protected areas, and endangered species in South Asia. He has lived for many years in rural central India.

Rashkow applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Nature of Endangerment in India: Tigers, 'Tribes', Extermination & Conservation, 1818-2020, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a reasonable page to browse if you are trying to get a feel for my book, The Nature of Endangerment in India: Tigers, ‘Tribes’, Extermination & Conservation, 1818-2020.

The book is mostly about what I call ‘tribal endangerment discourse’. It documents the long history of rhetoric used by colonial administrators, anthropologists, activists, and others, describing tribes as vanishing, disappearing, or endangered with extinction, and therefore in need of protection, cultural conservation, or even preservation. In particular, it focuses on dehumanizing animal analogies, which have often equated endangered tribes with endangered tigers and other vanishing wildlife species in India and beyond.

So, page 99 begins with a look at one author’s assessment of whether India’s Adivasis, or so-called tribals, are endangered. This author points to the rise of a tribal middle class in one region (Jharkhand) and the historically dominant position of another community labeled as tribal (the Raj Gonds), in order to complicate this evaluation.

I then go on to discuss the Government of India’s history of ‘paternalistic protectionist projects which treated Adivasis as vanishing forest tribes’, despite the examples just mentioned. And I specifically identify the continuity in Government of India tribal policy which bridged the colonial and postcolonial era, where the colonial government in 1931 first generated lists of ‘primitive tribes’, then in 1935 lists of ‘backward tribes’, then used these same criterion of primitiveness and backwardness to generate their lists of ‘Scheduled Tribes’ in the 1950s and 60s. Specifically, the Lokur Committee stated in 1965 that, ‘we have looked for indications of primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, [and] shyness of contact’ when identifying which communities to label as tribal. The more exotic a tribe was perceived to be, the more authentic they were deemed to be, and therefore the more in need of protection.

Page 99 doesn’t get into the many problematic comparisons that have been made between exterminating and conserving India’s tigers and tribes over the years, and it also doesn’t highlight the fieldwork and archival work that is the backbone of the book. Still, for a casual browser, page 99 does do some important work, complicating the picture of Adivasi or ‘tribal’ identity in India. By pointing to government policy, it also offers an excellent example of how significant an impact this perception of India’s tribes as endangered has been.

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--Marshal Zeringue