Ecologies of Power: A Feminist History of State Building in the Gond Kingdom of Garha, 1500-1870s

Abstract

This thesis examines the histories of the Gond kingdom of Garha from the early modern to the early colonial period. In attending to the ecologies of this kingdom within a feminist analytical framework, it makes both historiographical and historical contributions to scholarship on South Asia’s histories. Chapter one demonstrates how the gendering and sexualization of elephants in early modern South Asia was crucial for state building in Garha, embedding the kingdom into the social, political, and economic fabric of the wider region. This chapter also reveals that Garha’s ecologies produced specific meanings for “queen,” who were socially and politically powerful actors in this kingdom. Chapter two examines shifts and continuities as the former kingdom of Garha came under British colonial rule in the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how British colonial actors mobilized gender and sexuality to discursively co-construct Gond people, forests, and the nonhuman animals who inhabited them as primitive, isolated, and unchanging, or “wild,” in the arenas of witchcraft, hard drinking, and hunting. This, then, enabled the production of an elite British colonial masculinity and a paternal British colonial state needed to “tame” the wild, justifying the appropriation of labor and resources from Garha. Nevertheless, this thesis also makes visible the on-going importance of Gond queens and other powerful Gond women, of internal differentiation among Gond communities, and of Gond people’s knowledges of forests and particular nonhuman beings in this region through the nineteenth century.