Chapter 4 Tribal People 113motivated to describe them (typically colonial administrators, Western mission-
aries, or anthropologists), their lifeways could be regarded as preserved modern
specimens of ancient cultural systems. They are sadly anachronistic peoples, in
this view, and probably destined for extinction. Here is a common view:
The Shendus, Pankhos, Mrus, Murangs, and Bonjugis of the Chittagong
Hill Tracts are yet to receive even a peripheral contact with the civilized
world. Their way of life is timeless. Their cultural configuration is still
intact, the outlines still hard and sharply drawn against the contrasting
background of civilization with no sign of dimming. Their religious beliefs
and practices completely insulate them against the demands of modernism.
Even their economy is antediluvian. (Van Schendel 1995)
After constructing this model of tribal identity, colonial administrators set
about “clarifying” the model on the ground, so to speak. As new peoples were
encountered, their “tribe” or ethnicity was identified (or a label was assigned),
very frequently by a term applied to them by other peoples. Maps of their terri-
tories were drawn up. Censuses attempted to sort everyone into one and only
one ethnic category. An evolutionary model identified the social attainments of
ethnic groups in relation to each other (and to the colonial society), and efforts
at “uplift” aimed to educate, convert, civilize, and develop those groups held to
be wanting. Political benefits accrued (or didn’t) as one was or wasn’t a mem-
ber of targeted ethnicities. Finally, this model was passed on to the modern
independent states that emerged from colonial control and has continued to
dominate policy in the new states. And so, in a strange way, this mistaken
model of ethnic identity has become real. Every Asian nation today has its
identified “ethnic minorities” that are regarded as problematic in various ways
and toward which governments direct special policies. Members of these desig-
nated groups have gone along with it in the interest of political survival.
However, if you read carefully the writings of some observant early travel-
ers in the years before the model was fully developed, a different picture
emerges. In the 1790s, at the very beginning of British control in India, Francis
Buchanan traveled in the Chittagong Hills of what is now eastern Bangladesh
(where Sendos and Pankhos were said to await contact with the “civilized
world”). He described a complex ethnic situation in which there were villages
inhabited by swidden cultivators belonging to different language groups. There
were other villages consisting of a dominant group of one ethnicity together
with their debt peons from different groups, and villages where leaders had ser-
vants from several other groups. There were chiefs who collected tribute from
households belonging to an amalgam of ethnic groups. Because of their style of
agriculture (swidden) and because of raids and warfare, all groups were contin-
ually on the move. There was no question of isolated “tribes” living in distinct
territories, but instead there were a number of different patterns of multiethnic
integration (Van Schendel 1995). In other words, the isolated, autonomous,
and self-conscious “tribe” of the classical model was a rare phenomenon, not
just in the Chittagong Hills, but throughout most of Asia.