Fractured Communities

Umar Khalid completed his PhD thesis on the history of the Adivasi tribes of the Singhbhum region of Jharkhand under extraordinary circumstances. He was facing sedition charges, had spent time in jail and had been rusticated from the university.

The thesis was submitted at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for Historical Studies in July 2018. Since then, it has garnered significant attention among scholars and historians. Ramachandra Guha has called it ‘one of the most accomplished doctoral dissertations by an Indian that I have read’, while Nandini Sundar described it as a ‘deeply insightful’ work by a ‘brilliant mind’.

In Fractured Communities, published in book form for the first time, Khalid combines archival rigour with analytical clarity to illuminate the history of Singhbhum’s tribal societies under British rule. The book is both a valuable work of history and a critique of histories written from positions of power, which tend to "flatten differences among and, more crucially, within communities.

At a time when public debates are increasingly shaped by simplistic versions of the past, the inquiry at the heart of Fractured Communities acquires a contemporary relevance that few historical works can match. And running through the narrative is a political philosophy grounded in democratic values and genuine concern for the marginalised.

Umar Khalid is an activist and public intellectual who has engaged with questions of democracy, constitutional rights and minority rights in India. A student of Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he was pursuing PhD, he emerged as a prominent voice during the 2016 student movement, which sparked nationwide debate on dissent and free speech. Thereafter, he helped build campaigns against hate crimes targeting Muslims and became an important voice in the democratic protests against the communal amendments to the citizenship law. In 2020 he was arrested under UAPA in connection with the Delhi riots case and remains in jail without trial. His incarceration has raised questions about the limits of democratic dissent in India today.