For years, Bastar was a mystery the British chose to misread. Colonial records described it as a primitive woodland inhabited by cannibals - an island of primitiveness amid civilizations. Shantanu Nandan Sharma, in his book Rebel Bastar, shows how this was built on hearsay, not fieldwork.
Consider Henry Harpur Spry, an East India Company official who wrote that Bastar people 'sacrifice and eat their fellow creatures'. He never set foot in Bastar, relying on Captain Crawfurd of Bengal Artillery. His account reads more like chatter than documentation. He even called Rajput Raja a Gond, carrying over from a flawed translation of Tarikh-i-Firishta.
The 1812 East India Company report provided a skewed view - inhabitants were 'rude and barbarous' yet praised for staunch defence of 'ancient rightful inheritance' - the lowlands, for which they would descend from mountains during harvest to dispute produce.
The counting was equally flawed. First census on Nov 5, 1866 claimed 2,69,684. By 1872, it inexplicably dropped 70% to 78,856. That 1,90,828 vanishing cannot be explained by cholera or famine of 1868-69 alone. J.W. Neill, officiating secretary to Central Provinces, admitted glaring inconsistencies. 1866 figures were estimates based on area, 1872 claims of rigorous method still failed - 'the children were not enumerated'.
Worse was categorization. Caste, occupation, race, religion remarks created a whopping 19,000 categories. Enumerators listed infants as 'sucking', children as 'playing', newcomers as 'guest'. Term pesha-i-khud, loosely self-employed, left officers scratching heads. Neill noted enumerators couldn't differentiate between 'lunatics and idiots'.
What emerges is colonial knowledge production as fiction - othering Bastar as barbarous to justify control, while failing to even count it. The colonial gaze created Bastar as savage, isolated, and ungovernable - a narrative that still haunts policy today.