What if the Adivasi archive is larger than the names under which we are searching for it?
So far, we have followed particular trails.
Johann Baptist Hoffmann.
Menas Orea.
Alfred Nottrott.
Nathanael Tuyu.
Ferdinand Hahn.
Mundari.
Kurukh.
Grammars.
Dictionaries.
Stories.
Songs.
Each trail gives us something tangible to follow. But perhaps it also creates a danger. Because archives rarely inherit the world exactly as communities understand themselves. They inherit categories. And categories have histories.
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What Name are we Searching under?
Suppose we enter a German archive looking for records concerning the Munda.
We search: Munda.
Then: Mundari.
Perhaps: Chota Nagpur.
And we find something. But what if an older catalogue used another term?
Historical missionary and ethnographic records frequently grouped different peoples of Chota Nagpur under categories such as “Kol” or “Kols.”
Those terms could encompass communities that we would now identify separately:
Munda.
Oraon.
Ho.
Kharia.
And others.
The terminology is historically important.
It is also problematic.
Because an archival category can outlive the intellectual world that created it. A researcher searching only contemporary community names may therefore walk past material that concerns those communities without recognising it.
Suddenly the problem is not simply:
Where is the archive?
It is:
Under whose vocabulary has the archive been filed?
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Classificataion has consequences
Archives require categories. So do libraries. So do museums. A document needs a title. A photograph needs a description. A box needs a number. A collection needs a catalogue entry. But every act of classification makes a decision.
This belongs with that. These people are called this. This object is ethnographic. This practice is religious. This story is folklore. This language belongs in this family. These communities belong under this collective term. Some classifications are extremely useful. Others reflect the assumptions of their time.
And some can make people difficult to find inside records about themselves. This is not unique to Adivasi archives. It is a fundamental archival problem. But in the history of Indigenous and colonised peoples, it acquires particular significance.
Because the person creating the catalogue and the person being described have often occupied very different positions of authority.
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The Map begins to Expand
The German encounter with Adivasi India was never confined to a single scholar or a single community. Missionary networks operated across Chota Nagpur. Their records encountered Munda, Oraon, Ho, Kharia and other communities. Their correspondence moved between mission stations and administrative centres.
Reports travelled to Europe. Books were printed. Letters were filed. Photographs may have circulated. Church records accumulated. Schools produced records. Linguistic work generated manuscripts. People travelled. And institutions changed.
The Gossner Mission’s own history in India stretches back to the nineteenth century and continues through relationships with Adivasi churches in Chotanagpur and Assam today.
Its historical archive in Germany includes correspondence and reports concerning the mission in India and the churches that emerged from it.
Some of those records are now digitised. So perhaps the archive we are looking for is not one archive at all.
Perhaps it is a network of archival fragments.
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The Archival Breadcrumb
Consider one apparently ordinary catalogue entry. A file survives in Germany. Its description might say:
Correspondence with the mission field.
Another:
Reports from India.
Another:
Kolsmission.
Another:
Gossner Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Nothing in those titles necessarily tells us whether the pages inside contain:
a Munda writer,
an Oraon teacher,
a Kharia speaker,
a village dispute,
a song,
a land question,
a school report,
a translated letter,
or the name of someone who helped produce a dictionary.
The catalogue describes the administrative container. Our question concerns the human knowledge inside it. That distinction may become fundamental to The Journey of Knowledge.
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Beyond the Famous Book
Historical research naturally gravitates towards published works. They are visible. They have authors. They have titles. They have dates. They sit in libraries. But the most interesting evidence for provenance may be somewhere else –
A letter.
A handwritten vocabulary.
A margin.
A school register.
A note attached to a manuscript.
A missionary diary.
An annual report.
A list of teachers.
A photograph caption.
A translation draft.
A receipt.
A name written on the back of an image.
Sometimes a tiny administrative trace can restore a person to a history from which the published book has removed them.
That changes our research method.
We cannot only read the finished publications.
We have to follow their documentary lives.
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And Beyond Missionaries
There is another boundary we should resist. The India–Germany Adivasi archive cannot automatically be equated with missionary archives. Missionaries provide one historically significant route through which knowledge travelled.
But other routes may exist.
Linguistics.
Anthropology.
Ethnology.
Universities.
Museums.
Botanical collections.
Photography.
Government service.
Church institutions.
Academic correspondence.
Private papers.
Later twentieth-century scholarship.
The German archive of Adivasi India may therefore be scattered across institutions that never imagined themselves as holding parts of the same story. The connection exists not because the institutions are connected.
It exists because the communities are.
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What if we Searched Community first?
Archives generally ask:
What do we hold?
What if our project begins with another question:
Whose knowledge are we looking for?
Take one community.
Munda.
Then search across:
mission archives,
university libraries,
museum catalogues,
linguistic collections,
digitised databases,
personal papers,
published bibliographies,
photographic collections,
and Indian repositories.
Then another.
Kurukh/Oraon.
Then Ho.
Kharia.
Santal.
Birhor.
And others, wherever the historical evidence leads.
The unit of research changes. Instead of reconstructing the history of a European collection, we begin reconstructing the distributed documentary history of a community. That is a very different archive.
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The Problem of the Map
There is also a geographical problem. “Chota Nagpur” itself can become too convenient. Historical Adivasi worlds do not necessarily fit neatly inside later administrative borders.
Languages travel. People migrate. Mission networks expand.
Communities extend across present-day Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh and beyond. Santali intellectual history takes us elsewhere. Gossner relationships eventually extend into Assam. Modern migration takes Adivasi communities much farther still.
So Beyond Chotanagpur means two things. Beyond one historical geographical label. And beyond the assumption that knowledge belongs only where an archive says it was collected.
The geography of knowledge may be much larger than the geography of the catalogue.
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An Archive can Hide by being Visible
This produces a strange possibility. Perhaps parts of the Adivasi archive in Germany are not lost. They may be catalogued. Preserved. Digitised. Searchable. Perfectly visible. And still difficult for an Adivasi researcher to find.
Because visibility depends on knowing:
which institution to search,
which historical spelling to use,
which German term appeared in the catalogue,
which missionary society created the record,
which administrative category contained the community,
and which old ethnographic terminology must be searched without accepting that terminology as valid today.
The problem may therefore be not simply preservation.
It may be discoverability.
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Imagine another Catalogue
What if we created a parallel discovery layer?
Not replacing existing German catalogues.
Connecting them.
A researcher could begin with:
MUNDA
and discover records catalogued historically under:
Munda,
Mundari,
Chota Nagpur,
Kolsmission,
Gossner Mission,
particular mission stations,
individual scholars,
historical spellings,
and other relevant categories established through research.
Each record would retain its original catalogue information.
But beside it would sit another layer:
Contemporary community: Munda
Historical terminology: recorded as originally catalogued
Language: Mundari / other
Knowledge form: song / vocabulary / correspondence / photograph / land / story / etc.
Named Adivasi contributor: if known
Contributor role: if known
Place of origin: if known
Current repository: institution
Digital access: yes / no
Community annotation: pending / completed
Suddenly we are not creating another archive.
We are creating a map through archives.
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The Blank Field matters too
And when we do not know? We should say so.
Knowledge holder: not identified.
Translator: unknown.
Place: uncertain.
Original manuscript: not yet located.
Community attribution: requires verification.
These are not failures. They are research findings.
A blank field tells us exactly what needs to be investigated next. It also prevents something more dangerous: the appearance of archival certainty where certainty does not exist.
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From Catalogue to Conversation
And eventually the work must leave the catalogue. Because a German archivist may recognise a collection history. A historian may recognise a missionary. A linguist may recognise a nineteenth-century spelling. But a Munda speaker may recognise the word. A Kurukh scholar may recognise the story. A Ho elder may recognise the place. A Kharia researcher may recognise that a catalogue description has grouped something incorrectly.
Different people know different parts of the record. Perhaps the future archive therefore cannot be produced by one discipline.
It requires encounter.
Archivist.
Historian.
Linguist.
Community scholar.
Knowledge holder.
Designer.
Translator.
Institution.
Each sees something the others may not.
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THE JOURNEY OF KNOWLEDGE
Mapping the Distributed Adivasi Archive
As part of its emerging Journey of Knowledge inquiry, Tribal Design Forum is exploring the possibility of creating a research framework for identifying Adivasi-related knowledge dispersed across German archives, libraries, missionary collections, museums and other repositories.
The project would not seek initially to create a new physical archive.
Instead, it could create a provenance and discovery map connecting material already held in different places.
A preliminary research register could record:
Community
Contemporary name
Historical catalogue terminology
Knowledge form
Knowledge holder
Writer / speaker / singer
Translator / intermediary
Collector / researcher
Place of origin
Date
Publication / object / record
Current repository
Catalogue reference
Digitised?
Accessible?
Community attribution present?
Contemporary community interpretation
Research status
Such a resource could eventually allow someone to begin not with a European institution, scholar or collection — but with an Adivasi community.
TDF is currently undertaking preliminary research and identifying possible community, academic, archival and cultural partners in India and Germany. No institutional partnership has yet been established or should be inferred.
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THE EMERGING QUESTION
Perhaps the Adivasi archive in Germany is not missing. Perhaps we have not yet learned how to search for it. And that leads to a larger question: What would an archive look like if communities, rather than collections, became the starting point for finding knowledge?
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READINGS & BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archival starting points
Evangelisches Landeskirchliches Archiv in Berlin / Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.
Gossner Mission archival holdings relating to India, including historical records organised under the Gossner Mission in India, the “Kolsmission” and the Gossner Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Gossner Mission.
Historical and contemporary material concerning its work and relationships with Adivasi churches in Chotanagpur and Assam.
Modern India in German Archives — MIDA.
Long-term German–Indian research initiative identifying archival holdings concerning modern India across German repositories.
Historical and scholarly context
Dasgupta, Sangeeta.
“‘Heathen aboriginals’, ‘Christian tribes’, and ‘animistic races’: Missionary Narratives on the Oraons of Chhotanagpur in Colonial India.” Modern Asian Studies, 50(2), 2016.
Dasgupta’s work is particularly useful for understanding how missionary descriptions of Oraon and other Adivasi communities changed over time and interacted with emerging colonial ethnographic categories.
Hoffmann, Johann Baptist et al.
Encyclopaedia Mundarica.
Hahn, Ferdinand.
Kurukh Grammar; Kurukh (Oraon)-English Dictionary; Kurukh Folk-lore in the Original.
Nottrott, Alfred.
Historical linguistic and missionary writings relating to Munda communities and the Gossner Mission.
Further research will extend beyond these well-known published sources into correspondence, mission reports, institutional catalogues, personal papers, photographs and other primary material.
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RESEARCH NOTE & DISCLAIMER
This article proposes a research methodology. It does not claim that every community, knowledge form or archival category mentioned above has already been located within a German collection.
Historical missionary and ethnographic terminology varied considerably. Terms such as “Kol” were applied inconsistently and sometimes collectively to communities now identified separately. Such terminology is reproduced here solely because understanding historical catalogue language may be necessary for archival discovery. It does not reflect TDF’s contemporary terminology.
Similarly, the presence of a community name in a catalogue does not establish the provenance, accuracy, circumstances of collection or community status of the material concerned. Each record would require individual verification.
The proposed list of communities is therefore a starting point for research, not a claim about the contents of particular German repositories.
The inquiry will distinguish throughout between: what has been located, what historical sources state, what contemporary scholarship interprets, and what remains to be discovered.
Corrections, alternative historical spellings, archival references and leads from Adivasi communities and researchers are particularly welcome.
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India × Germany: Encounters with Tribal Knowledge
A Tribal Design Forum research and writing series