British Legislative Framework for Tribal Areas: From Regulation I to Government of India Act 1935

For nearly 150 years, British administrators struggled with one question: should tribal communities be governed by the same laws as everyone else, or do they need a separate legal framework altogether? The answer changed at least four times between 1782 and 1935, and each shift left a permanent mark on how tribal regions are administered even today. Understanding this legislative journey helps explain why India’s Fifth and Sixth Schedules look the way they do.

Why the British needed a separate approach 🔗

By the late eighteenth century, the East India Company controlled most of Bengal and Bihar through the ordinary court system and the zamindari network. This system worked reasonably well in the plains, but it collapsed the moment it touched hill and forest communities. Tribal groups like the Paharias of the Rajmahal hills had no concept of written land titles, formal revenue demands, or courts staffed by outsiders. When zamindars and moneylenders pushed into these areas anyway, the result was constant friction, raids, and open resistance. The Company’s early response, under officers like Captain Brooke in the 1770s, was blunt military suppression. It did not work.

Augustus Cleveland and the birth of a new model 🔗

The turning point came with Augustus Cleveland, the young Collector of Bhagalpur. Rather than continuing the campaign against the Paharias, Cleveland proposed a policy of pacification built on stipends, land grants, and self-government rather than force. In April 1782, he secured official sanction to withdraw the entire Rajmahal Hill tract from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts, replacing them with a Hill Assembly where tribal sardars and naibs tried civil and criminal cases according to their own customs.

This was a genuine break from precedent. Instead of forcing the Mal Pahariyas and Sauria Paharias into the zamindari system, Cleveland’s model freed them from zamindar exploitation and let them hold land directly from the government, rent-free, in exchange for keeping the peace. He also recruited tribal youth into a Hill Ranger corps, giving the community a stake in maintaining order rather than resisting it. The approach worked well enough that the Paharias came to see Cleveland as a protector, and it became the template that later administrators would borrow for other tribal tracts.

Regulation I of 1796: turning a personal policy into law 🔗

Cleveland died young, in 1784, and personality-driven arrangements rarely survive their creator. To make the Hill Assembly system permanent, the Company promulgated Regulation I of 1796, which formally defined the procedures of the Assembly and confirmed the withdrawal of the tract from ordinary law. For a while, this gave the region a stable, semi-autonomous administrative structure.

But the Regulation depended on the honesty of the local sardars and naibs who now held delegated judicial power. Over time, several of these appointees began using their position for personal gain rather than community welfare, extracting dues and favouring their own interests in disputes. Corruption spread through the very system meant to protect tribals from exploitation, and by 1827 the Company judged the experiment a failure. Regulation I was withdrawn, and tribal areas of the region were brought back under the jurisdiction of ordinary courts, ending the first major experiment in differentiated tribal governance.

The Santhal revolt and a return to special legislation 🔗

The retreat to ordinary law did not solve the underlying problem, and it resurfaced violently three decades later. The Santhal Hul of 1855-56, led by Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu, erupted in the Damin-i-Koh region after Santhal settlers there were trapped in debt by moneylenders and dispossessed of land by fraudulent documentation. The rebellion was crushed with heavy loss of life, but it forced the colonial government to admit that ordinary administration was unworkable in tribal tracts. The immediate result was Act XXXVII of 1855, which carved out a new, separately administered Santhal Parganas district. This is widely regarded as the direct precursor to the broader legislative protections that followed in the following decades.

The Indian Councils Act of 1861 🔗

The Indian Councils Act of 1861 extended this logic across British India. It restructured legislative councils in the presidencies and provinces, and, crucially for tribal administration, it gave local governments wider powers to apply, modify, or withhold particular laws for specific territories. This meant that a district experiencing tribal unrest, like the Santhal Parganas, could be governed under a distinct set of rules without waiting for a fresh act of the central legislature every time. It was less a tribal-specific law than a general reform that made targeted, territory-based legislation administratively possible.

The Scheduled Districts Act, 1874 🔗

By the 1870s, the Company (now the Crown) had accumulated a patchwork of regulations, notifications, and district-specific exemptions across tribal tracts, and nobody was entirely sure which laws applied where. Act XIV of 1874, known as the Scheduled Districts Act, was passed to bring order to this confusion. It listed a specific set of territories as “Scheduled Districts” and empowered the government to declare, by notification, which general Acts and Regulations would apply to them and which would not. In effect, it formally excluded these tracts from the automatic operation of ordinary law, giving the government a legal tool to protect tribal custom, land, and self-governance from the assumptions built into mainstream legislation. This Act is considered the direct ancestor of the tribal Scheduled Areas recognised in the Constitution today, and later academic work on India’s Scheduled Areas traces this institutional lineage directly back to 1874.

The Government of India Act 1919: giving isolation a legal shape 🔗

The policy of keeping tribal regions apart from mainstream administration had existed in practice since Cleveland’s time, but it had never been tied to a clear constitutional structure. The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms changed that. The reformers argued that there was no basis for extending representative institutions into hill and forest tracts inhabited by what they called “primitive” populations, so these areas were kept outside the new system of provincial self-government being introduced elsewhere.

Under the resulting Government of India Act, 1919, tribal regions were divided into two categories. Wholly excluded areas, such as the North-East Frontier tracts and the Naga Hills district, were removed entirely from the operation of ordinary law, with legislative authority resting solely with the Governor-General or Governor acting alone. Partially excluded areas, spread across parts of Bihar, Bengal, Orissa, and the Central Provinces, remained under a dual arrangement where some laws applied and others did not, depending on notification. This distinction gave the older idea of isolation a formal legal boundary for the first time, even though the terminology used in the Act itself was closer to “backward tracts” than the later, more familiar labels.

The Government of India Act 1935: a constitutional foundation 🔗

The final and most detailed stage came with the Government of India Act, 1935, drafted largely on the recommendations of the Simon Commission. The Act replaced the earlier “backward tract” language with the now-standard categories of excluded areas and partially excluded areas, both placed beyond the ordinary legislative reach of the federal and provincial legislatures. Under the Act, the Governor could make regulations for the peace and good government of these areas, and in excluded areas specifically, the Governor exercised these functions in his own discretion, without needing the advice of his ministers. This mattered because provincial autonomy under the 1935 Act had, for the first time, handed real power to elected Indian ministries, and the exclusion clauses were a deliberate mechanism to keep tribal administration outside that elected control.

The exact boundaries of these excluded and partially excluded areas were laid out the following year through the Government of India (Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas) Order, 1936, issued under Section 91 of the Act. Decades later, the Supreme Court would revisit this history directly, noting in the Samatha judgment how the 1935 framework built on the Simon Commission’s concern that ordinary law exposed tribal communities to two specific dangers: loss of their land and disruption of their customary self-governance. This same 1935 structure, largely unchanged in substance, was carried forward into the Constitution as the Fifth Schedule for central and eastern India and the Sixth Schedule for the north-eastern hill areas, a continuity that later research on excluded and partially excluded areas traces in detail.

Reading the pattern across 150 years 🔗

Looking at this timeline as a whole, a clear pattern emerges. Every major piece of legislation, from Cleveland’s Hill Assembly to the 1935 Act, was a reaction to a specific failure: exploitation by zamindars, an armed uprising, administrative confusion, or a political commission’s findings. None of it was designed from first principles with tribal welfare as the sole goal. Protection of land and custom was almost always tied to a parallel colonial interest, whether that was preventing rebellion, simplifying revenue collection, or limiting the reach of newly elected Indian ministries. That dual motive is worth keeping in mind when evaluating how effective, or limited, each of these laws actually was for the communities they claimed to protect.

What do you think? Do you see the shift from Cleveland’s personal, relationship-based model to the impersonal, notification-based systems of 1874 and 1935 as genuine administrative progress, or as a loss of the flexibility that made the earlier experiment work? And does a framework built primarily to prevent unrest and protect colonial revenue interests still deserve credit for protecting tribal land and custom?

References

1. https://www.humanitiesjournals.net/archives/2026/vol8issue3/PartC/8-3-9-738.pdf
2. https://www.britannica.com/event/Santhal-rebellion
3. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/106667942/
4. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/representation-and-forest-conservation-evidence-from-indias-scheduled-areas/BF8BB4821C97E6E67E682D71345DA0FE
5. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5and1Edw8/26/2/section/92/enacted
6. https://www.escr-net.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/samatha_judgment.pdf
7. https://polsci.institute/democracy-and-development-northeast-india/excluded-partially-excluded-areas-northeast-india/