ABSTRACT
In course of their colonial adventure in India, the British sought diverse ways to establish law and order as the main foundation of their rule, thereby transforming pre-existing power structures and political economies. Confronted with the ‘exceptional’ nature of particular regions, the men on the field devised and enacted special legislation and created different forms of subjecthood. Such an exercise in adaptation, however, became a harder task in the second half of the 19th century, as the idea of a unified corpus of imperial laws gradually gained ascendancy over local differentiation, and the economic interests of the empire required a more effective integration of localities. The interplay between local and imperial perceptions was thus a driving force behind the gradual evolution of the Indian empire as well as in the conceptualisation of its legal subjects. An important contribution to the full understanding of this process may come from enquiries into the nature of the British administrative policies, along with the ideologies and notions inspiring them, in connection with the tribal community of the Hos of Singhbhum, a district in the erstwhile Chotanagpur Division of Bengal Presidency.1
