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 PresentHistory 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 SinghbhumEvery 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 colonial rule. Before British intervention, the region consisted of multiple political and territorial formations connected through shifting relationships of tribute, kinship, warfare and customary authority rather than any unified administrative structure. “Singhbhum” as a district was not merely governed by the colonial state; it was constituted by it. The very object whose history colonial administrators purported to describe was an artefact of colonial state formation. States do not merely administer territories; they produce them.Also read: ‘I Must Acknowledge the Role of the Present Regime and its Foot Soldiers…’: Umar KhalidThis insight extends to the colonial understanding of tribal society itself. One of the enduring legacies of colonial ethnography has been the representation of Adivasi communities as isolated, self-contained and timeless – a description that served an obvious administrative purpose. If tribal society appeared outside history, exceptional governance could be justified as a necessary adaptation to primitive conditions rather than as a political response to the difficulties of conquest. Khalid patiently dismantles this representation. The Hos were never an isolated people living beyond history. They participated in regional networks of exchange, negotiated relationships with neighbouring polities, and possessed institutions that had evolved through their own experience. Colonialism entered an already historical society; it did not introduce history into a timeless wilderness.The repeated military campaigns of the East India Company against Kolhan revealed the limits of conventional conquest. Difficult terrain, decentralised social organisation and determined resistance made prolonged military occupation prohibitively expensive. It was this political predicament, rather than any principled respect for tribal autonomy, that compelled the British to search for an alternative mode of governance. The answer was not the suspension of state power but its reconfiguration.Instead of replacing indigenous institutions with an imported bureaucracy, colonial administration gradually reorganised the existing manki-munda system. Wilkinson’s settlement and the regulations that followed did not simply recognise customary authority; they fundamentally altered its character. The manki, who traditionally exercised authority over a cluster of villages, and the munda, the village headman, were absorbed into the colonial administrative structure.Their customary functions expanded to include revenue collection, maintenance of order, reporting of disputes and implementation of government directives. Their authority increasingly derived from official recognition, written regulations and administrative accountability rather than solely from community consent. Custom survived – but in transformed form. Their social legitimacy became intertwined with the authority of the colonial state, while the colonial state itself acquired legitimacy by presenting its rule as the preservation of indigenous tradition.Much of the historiography of indirect rule oscillates between two familiar interpretations: one views it as pragmatic preservation of indigenous institutions; the other regards it as cynical divide-and-rule. Khalid proposes a more nuanced understanding. The colonial state neither preserved custom nor destroyed it. It translated custom into administration. This mutual transformation is what he aptly describes as administrative exceptionalism – not an act of colonial generosity but a political solution to the problem of governing territories where direct bureaucratic control had proved impossible. The frontier became exceptional because empire encountered its limits there.Equally significant is the author’s refusal to romanticise the internal structure of Adivasi society. One of the recurring tendencies in both nationalist and activist writing has been to imagine tribal communities as internally egalitarian, with hierarchy entering the story only through colonial intervention. Khalid’s analysis is considerably more sophisticated. Colonial rule certainly intensified inequality, but it did so by selectively empowering specific actors within the existing institutional framework. The recognition accorded to mankis and mundas enhanced their authority, facilitated the accumulation of land and prestige, and produced new forms of social differentiation within Ho society itself. Colonial domination operated not simply between rulers and ruled but through changing relations among the ruled themselves.Also read: Of Shame, Impunity, Immunity: The Matter of Umar KhalidThis is perhaps the book’s most important historiographical intervention. It shifts attention from the familiar binary of state versus tribe to the more complex process through which the state reorganised social relations internal to tribal society. The same analytical perspective informs Khalid’s treatment of forests and land. Forests were not simply natural resources awaiting commercial exploitation; they constituted an intricate web of customary rights, obligations and collective practices. Colonial forestry sought to render these relationships administratively legible through surveys, classifications and legal codification. The resulting regime was neither complete bureaucratic domination nor untouched customary autonomy, but an unstable compromise in which administration and custom became increasingly intertwined.By the end of this historical reconstruction, Singhbhum no longer appears as an isolated frontier or an untouched tribal commons. It emerges as a laboratory in which the colonial state experimented with a distinctive technology of governance – one combining military conquest with institutional adaptation, administrative control with customary authority, and legal differentiation with political incorporation.From Administrative Exceptionalism to State-Mediated Social ReproductionThe concept of administrative exceptionalism is undoubtedly the book’s most important theoretical contribution. But it invites a question the author only partially addresses: was administrative exceptionalism merely an expedient devised for an inaccessible frontier, or does it illuminate a more general principle of state formation in India?I believe the latter possibility deserves serious consideration.Modern states rarely encounter societies as blank slates upon which entirely new institutions can be constructed. They inherit complex social formations already structured by kinship, religion, caste, tribe, customary authority and local hierarchies. Their problem is not merely how to govern society but how to transform these inherited structures into stable mechanisms of political rule. Indian history has followed a more complex trajectory than the classical modernisation account would suggest. The modern state has certainly introduced bureaucratic institutions, representative government and constitutional law. But it has rarely governed by abolishing inherited social structures. More often, it has selectively transformed them, assigning them new institutional roles within an expanding administrative order.This process is visible far beyond the tribal frontier.At first sight, the Fifth Schedule appears to represent a decisive rupture with colonial administration. Its normative foundation is unquestionably different: colonial exceptionalism was an instrument of imperial governance; the Fifth Schedule embodies the constitutional commitment to protect historically disadvantaged communities. To equate the two would be both historically inaccurate and politically misleading. Yet institutional history rarely proceeds through absolute rupture.Flooded premises of a residential school after heavy rain, in East Singhbhum district, Jharkhand on June 29, 2025. Photo: PTI.The constitution did not abolish differentiated governance in tribal regions; it constitutionalised it. Governors were entrusted with special responsibilities; Scheduled Areas retained distinct administrative arrangements; protective land laws continued to regulate land relations; PESA sought to reconcile representative democracy with customary self-government. The administrative language changed from imperial control to constitutional protection, but differentiated institutional arrangements remained central to the governance of tribal India.A parallel process is visible in the state’s relationship to caste. The constitution abolished untouchability and created an elaborate framework of reservations and affirmative action. Yet caste was not sought to disappear from public life. Electoral mobilisation, political representation, bureaucratic recruitment and developmental policy continue to be profoundly shaped by caste. The democratic state has not governed by ignoring caste; it has continually reorganised caste through new institutional forms. Neither caste nor tribe remains what it was before the modern state. Both are transformed through their incorporation into new institutional arrangements.This suggests what might be called state-mediated social reproduction: the process through which modern states consolidate themselves by reorganising inherited social institutions rather than abolishing them. Hierarchies are neither simply preserved nor simply abolished. They are translated into new institutional forms. The concept does not imply that the state consciously seeks to preserve hierarchy. Nor does it deny the emancipatory aspirations embodied in constitutional democracy. Rather, it draws attention to the historical process through which states continually adapt existing social structures to new political purposes.The paradox, however, lies elsewhere. The very regions enjoying the strongest constitutional protection have repeatedly experienced some of the largest episodes of displacement in independent India. Jharkhand provides the clearest example. Rich in mineral resources and protected by some of the country’s strongest safeguards against tribal land alienation, it has nevertheless witnessed extensive acquisition of Adivasi land for mining, dams, steel plants and industrial corridors. The constitutional guardian of tribal rights thus frequently appears as the principal agent of their displacement. This contradiction cannot be dismissed as a mere failure of implementation. It reveals a structural tension within the developmental state itself: the postcolonial state simultaneously bears two constitutional responsibilities – to protect historically vulnerable communities and to promote economic development through industrialisation and resource extraction. Where mineral wealth lies beneath protected tribal land, these two objectives collide. The result is not simply policy inconsistency but an enduring contradiction built into the very structure of governance.The Limits of Administrative Exceptionalism: The Missing Political EconomyEvery significant historical work also reveals the limits of its own explanatory framework. Khalid’s study is no exception. If it’s principal contribution lies in demonstrating how colonial administration reorganised customary institutions to consolidate state power, its principal limitation lies in the relative autonomy it accords to the state itself. Administration occupies the centre of the analysis; political economy remains comparatively underdeveloped.Administrative exceptionalism explains how the colonial state governed Singhbhum. It explains much less clearly why the state invested such effort in governing this apparently remote frontier. The answer lies beyond administration. Singhbhum was never simply a difficult frontier inhabited by independent tribal communities. It was a region of enormous strategic and economic significance – its forests supplying timber for railway expansion and military purposes, its mineral wealth acquiring increasing importance as colonial capitalism deepened its integration into the global economy. Administrative exceptionalism was not an autonomous principle of governance. It was the political form through which a particular economic project became possible.This relationship between state and capital deserved fuller theoretical treatment. The point becomes even more significant in the postcolonial period. The transition from colonial extraction to developmental planning and subsequently to neoliberal accumulation introduces transformations that cannot be explained solely through administrative continuity. During the colonial period, mining and forestry served imperial accumulation. In independent India they became instruments of national development. Under liberalisation they increasingly came to serve corporate accumulation integrated into global commodity chains. The legal institutions protecting Adivasi land remained substantially intact, but the economic pressures acting upon them changed dramatically. The contradictions surrounding the Fifth Schedule and the tenancy acts cannot therefore be understood solely as administrative dilemmas; they are equally contradictions generated by successive regimes of capital accumulation.This omission also affects the book’s treatment of social differentiation within Ho society. Khalid’s most valuable insight is that colonial intervention produced new inequalities by selectively empowering mankis, mundas and other intermediaries. Yet the analytical vocabulary remains that of differentiation rather than class formation. Were these emerging inequalities simply administrative privileges, or did they represent the beginnings of new class relations rooted in changing patterns of property, revenue collection and control over land? The question assumes even greater significance after Independence. The emergence of contractors, mining interests, local political elites, educated middle classes and bureaucratic intermediaries has profoundly altered the internal composition of tribal society. The old customary elite has not simply survived; it has been joined, and in many cases displaced, by new classes whose relationship with the state is mediated less through custom than through markets, contracts, political office and development programmes.A further question remains. Was administrative exceptionalism truly exceptional? The British governed through zamindars in Bengal, taluqdars in Awadh, princely rulers in the Indian States, and village headmen across much of the countryside. The modalities differed, but the underlying logic – the incorporation of pre-existing authority into state structures – appears remarkably widespread. Administrative exceptionalism may itself be one instance of a more general principle of colonial state formation rather than a distinctive frontier strategy. These criticisms should be understood in the spirit in which they are offered. They do not diminish the book’s achievement; they arise precisely because Khalid has opened a theoretical space that invites further exploration.Beyond SinghbhumEvery significant historical work changes not only our understanding of its immediate subject but also the questions we ask of history itself. Fractured Communities accomplishes precisely this. On the surface it is a meticulously researched regional history. At a deeper level it is a study of state formation, institutional transformation and the changing relationship between power and society over two centuries.The study also resonates with a question that has occupied much of my own work on caste and democracy: how do hierarchical societies reproduce themselves despite repeated political ruptures? The persistence of hierarchy cannot be explained solely by ideology, religion or economic interest. It also depends upon institutions – institutions that continually adapt to changing political regimes while preserving underlying structures of power. Khalid’s study demonstrates a comparable process in the history of Adivasi society. Colonial rule endured not because it simply imposed new institutions, but because it transformed existing ones into vehicles of state authority. The persistence of hierarchy, whether among caste or tribe, cannot be understood without examining the institutional forms through which power reproduces itself.Regional histories often remain confined to the regions they describe. Fractured Communities escapes that fate. It compels us to rethink not merely the history of Singhbhum but the historical sociology of the Indian state itself – the ways in which a democratic state has repeatedly sought to govern a profoundly stratified society by transforming, rather than abolishing, the institutions through which that stratification has historically been organised. It shows that the relationship between state and society cannot be understood simply as one of domination or resistance; it is equally a history of institutional translation, adaptation and reconstruction.History, in this account, does not merely survive in memory. It survives in institutions – a lesson that this book’s own circumstances of production make harder to forget.Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO of Petronet and professor at IIT Kharagpur and GIM, Goa. He is also a writer and civil rights activist.