Colonial Legacies of Anti-immigrant ‘Sons of the Soil’ Conflict in India

• In Event: Historical Legacies for Anti-Immigrant Attitudes, Warfare and Nationalism

Abstract

What is the role of colonial institutions in creating the conditions for nativist sons of the soil (SoS) insurgency? The literature on sons of the soil conflicts has not explored the historical legacies of colonial institutions for insurgency, neither has it analyzed SoS insurgencies in ideological leftist cases. I address this gap, by engaging with Weiner (1978) and proposing a theory of how different types of British colonial indirect rule in India created extractive land tenure institutions and natural resource exploitation of indigenous tribes by ethnic outsiders, which persisted through path dependence (Mahoney 2000) and internal colonialism (Baruah 1999), and how SoS grievances were mobilized by Maoists to foment rebellion. I use the case of Maoist rebels in the former princely state of Bastar in central India to do process tracing of the mechanisms leading from colonial indirect rule to SoS insurgency (Goertz 2017). Future research will analyze SoS dynamics in other leftist insurgencies in Nepal, Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Philippines.

Author

• Shivaji Mukherjee, University of Toronto