Examine the colonial policy of segregation of tribes under the Government of India Act, 1935. (2020)
The Government of India Act, 1935 did not invent tribal segregation; it gave a sixty-year administrative habit its final legal form. Section 91 let the Crown declare Excluded Areas and Partially Excluded Areas; Section 92 placed them outside the ordinary reach of the new legislatures. Whether that was protection or insulation is the question, because the Constitution inherited the architecture.
The lineage of exclusion
- The Scheduled Districts Act, 1874 created “non-regulation” tracts where general British Indian law did not automatically apply.
- The Government of India Act, 1919 relabelled them Backward Tracts and kept them outside the reformed provincial councils just as dyarchy extended representative government elsewhere.
- The Simon Commission (1930) held these populations unfit for the coming parliamentary system and advised that the Governor administer them personally. The 1935 Act and the Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas Order, 1936 executed that advice.
The architecture of segregation
- In Excluded Areas — the Naga and Lushai Hills, the North-East Frontier Tracts and the Chittagong Hill Tracts — the Governor acted in his discretion, without ministerial advice.
- In Partially Excluded Areas — Chotanagpur, the Santhal Parganas, the Agency tracts of Madras, the Bhil and Gond tracts of central India — ministers advised, but the Governor kept his individual judgement.
- Under Section 92 no Act of either legislature applied unless the Governor notified it, with whatever modification he chose.
Reading one: protection
Segregation had real protective content, officially justified as shielding “backward or primitive” people from “more sophisticated neighbours”. Revenue settlement, moneylending and forest law had already dispossessed tribal cultivators; the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, 1908 showed special law could restrain transfers where general law could not. Verrier Elwin (The Baiga, 1939; The Aboriginals, 1943) put the strongest case: protected zones where tribes could meet the plains on their own terms.
Reading two: insulation and divide and rule
- Exclusion withheld representative government exactly where the rest of India received it, so no tribal electorate or legislature could form.
- It kept the resource frontier of forest, coal and minerals under direct executive control.
- Entry was regulated selectively — traders, contractors and missionaries admitted, nationalist organisers not; in the 1940s senior Assam administrators canvassed detaching the north-eastern hills as a Crown Colony.
- G. S. Ghurye, in The Aborigines So-Called and Their Future (1943), made the charge sociologically: isolationism served the colonial state, because missionary and anthropologist together manufactured a separateness that denied tribes a place in the Indian nation. His own remedy, assimilation of tribes as “backward Hindus”, invites the opposite objection.
A weighed judgement
Protection was the stated purpose and had real effects; insulation was the structural consequence. What makes it segregation is the absence of tribal agency: the protected were never consulted, and their guardian was the executive that licensed the dispossession. André Béteille‘s point applies — in India tribe is an administrative category before a sociological one, and 1935 is where that definition hardened.
The afterlife
The Constituent Assembly democratised the design rather than discarding it, through sub-committees under Gopinath Bardoloi and A. V. Thakkar within Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel‘s Advisory Committee. Excluded Areas became the Sixth Schedule, whose autonomous district councils legislate on land, forest and custom — ten across Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram. Partially Excluded Areas became the Fifth Schedule Scheduled Areas in ten states, still resting on a Governor’s discretion; PESA, 1996 and the gram sabha consent affirmed in Niyamgiri (2013) put the people where the Governor once stood.
Conclusion
The 1935 Act turned administrative convenience into constitutional form: it protected tribal land while removing tribal politics. Independent India kept the form and reversed the logic, substituting the gram sabha’s consent for the Governor’s discretion. That the Fifth Schedule remains largely unused, while Ladakh agitates for Sixth Schedule cover, shows the colonial architecture still frames how autonomy is claimed.