India, Sept. 12 -- Umar Khalid's Fractured Communities: Adivasi Histories and the Politics of Power traces the political history, from the colonial to the post-colonial period, of tribal people in the area that now constitutes Singbhum district in Jharkhand. Those who know of Umar Khalid from Indian news television that paints him as a desh drohi and agitator will be surprised to see that he comes across as an astute writer and serious scholar in this book adapted from his PhD thesis submitted to Jawaharlal Nehru University's Centre for Historical Studies. Indeed, his research on the tribal experience in that part of India adds significantly to the existing knowledge of tribal history in general. There is a tendency in the northeast, where I am from, to imagine tribal life and history as the preserve of northeastern tribes. This may have to do with the fact that at least four of the states there - Mizoram, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh - have tribal-majority popula-tions. The fact, however, is that the northeastern tribes constitute only about 12% of the Scheduled Tribe population in India, and the states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Jharkhand hold the bulk of the tribal population in the country. Khalid's work is focused primarily on the Ho tribals in the Kolhan areas of Singhbhum. This is a part of the Chota Nagpur plateau, which nominally came under the British East India Company in 1765, when it acquired the diwani rights of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. The British, who came into proper contact with the Hos of Singhbhum about 50 years later, referred to them as Larka Kols (or, Fighting Kols). Colonial accounts emphasised the "wild nature" of the Ho country, a "forbidden land through which no strangers could pass." The people were characterised as warrior-like, athletic, simple and given to excessive drinking. The Hos have a two-tiered system of chieftainship. While the Mundas are headmen of a village, the Mankis ruled over a cluster of villages. As the book demonstrates, these headmen occupied a pivotal position in the "politics of power" of the tribes through the colonial to the post-colonial periods. The colonial conquest of these tribal areas was seen as necessary for security and strategic reasons. As colonial rule expanded around them, skirmishes between tribal chieftains and the intruding colonial power became inevitable. When the clashes intensified, colonial authorities undertook military expeditions and subdued disparate tribal chieftains one by one. The burning of entire villages and granaries was the norm to ensure surrender. Then, the colonialists would present an offer to the chiefs that they could not refuse: submit and be the colonial power's proxy in their villages. As colonial rule deepened, the role of the headmen became crucial in matters such as realising rents from newly converted arable lands and controlling and managing forests. As the power of the headmen increased, so did popular opposition to them and to the colonial government that propped them up. To suppress those movements, the colonial government used the headmen against their own people. In the post-colonial period, the position of the Mundas and Mankis came to be challenged by the Panchayati Raj system, with its elective, democratic system. However, attempts to do away with the Munda-Manki system have, so far, proved unsuccessful. The book does not engage in a comparative analysis with other tribes in other regions. Yet, it is one more piece of evidence that the modalities of colonial rule in tribal areas - whether in Chota Nagpur, the Indo-Burma borderlands, or in Africa - were more or less the same. The similarity between the Ho tribals and their chiefs described here and the Zo tribals in the Indo-Burma borderlands, for example, is striking. There are also eerie similarities in the manner in which popular discontent against colonial rule and the chieftainship system builds up, and to claims of independence by the tribes as they feel squeezed in within the newly emerging polity. This book chronicles the changes and continuities experienced by the Ho tribal people during the last 200 years or so. Khalid critiques the portrayal of tribal societies as solid and homogeneous and adroitly shows how the colonial power exploited the rifts within to advance its own ends. The last part of the book captures the state of siege that the tribals are in as their customs-governed life-world clashes not just with state bureaucracy, but also with rapacious state-aligned corporations. A telling snippet about the train station at Chaibasa, the administrative headquarters of Singbhum district, hints at which way the wind is blowing. All the trains running through this busy station, except for one, are goods trains transporting timber and coal from the tribal hinterland to the coastal ports. The one passenger luxury train running through the town stops for two minutes. As for the people, they still ride rickety buses on bumpy roads....