PROBLEMS IN DEFINING A TRIBE IN INDIA
The tribe is a social gathering of a typical type of people having vast differentiations with the rural and urban citizens. There is a controversy regarding the problems of defining a tribe in India and different writers have given different opinions. However, in India, the term ‘tribe’ conveys a meaning of a group of people who have been known by the various names from time immemorial as Vanvasi, Adivasi, Vanyajati, and Adimyati.
Konda Reddis of a riverside village in the Godavari Valley; the men wear langoti tucked into a belt of twisted creeper.The difficulty in designating a tribe in India, according to Xaxa (2008, p 14), the term tribe was used in more than one sense in general parlance when the British began to write about Indian society. It was once used to refer to a group of people who claimed to be descended from a common ancestor. In another sense, it referred to a group of people who lived in primitive or savage conditions; this latter meaning arose during the colonial period.
Reddi woman and child of the hill village of Gogulapudi; Reddis buy cotton cloth and gilded nose ornaments from neighbouring plainsmen.In India, there are 427 groups had been recognized as Scheduled Tribes in the year 1981. They formed approximately 8.08 percent of the total Indian population. In 2011 they formed 8.6% of India’s total population. (104 million). They are found all over the world. They are called by different names such as ‘primitive’, ‘tribal’, ‘indigenous’, ‘aboriginal’, ‘native’, and so on. The tribes have a large number of people and the major tribes in India are the Gonds, Bhils, Santals, and Oraons.
Source: Tribes of India The Struggle for Survival by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf
One of the unique features among the indigenous community is their distinct linguistic variation. According to thinkers the indigenous dialects also can be identified as a part of their life making them considered a tribe. For instance, Beniwal (2016, pp 3-4) has mentioned about tribal languages in India originate from five language families, i.e. Andaman’s, Austro-Asiatic, Dravidian, and Tibeto-Burman. It is also important to point out that those tribals who belong to different language families live in distinct geographic settings. For example, in South Orissa, there are languages that originate from the Central Dravidian family, Austro-Asiatic (Munds) family, and the Indo-Aryan. In the Jharkhand area, languages are from the Indo-Aryan, North Dravidian, and Austro-Asiatic. Tribes in India live in the following five territories:
The Himalayan belt:
The Himalayan belt is Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, hills of Uttar Pradesh, and Himachal Pradesh.
Apa Tani men and women on the verandah of a house; the men wear rass pins in their hair-knots. Central India:
In central India, Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, and Madhya Pradesh. Thus, 55% of the total tribal population of India lives in this belt.
Western India:
On the western corner of India are Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Goa, Dadra, and Nagar Haveli.
The Dravidian region:
In south India, the Dravidian region in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu.
Lastly, Andaman, Nicobar, and Lakshadweep islands.
Hill Maria girl wearing silver nose-studs and ear-rings, and several strings of glass beads.
Source: Tribes of India The Struggle for Survival by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf
Conceptual Definitions of Tribe
There is no exact definition or criteria for considering a tribe as a human group. However, researchers defined it in various forms at different times. Sometimes they called “Tribe” as “aboriginal” or “depressed classes” or “Adivasees”.
Normally, ‘tribe’ may be a group of individuals during a primitive or barbarous stage of development acknowledging the authority of a chief and typically regarding them as having the same ancestor.
The term Scheduled Tribes first appeared in the Constitution of India. Article 366 (25) defined scheduled tribes as “such tribes or tribal communities or parts or groups within as are deemed under Article 342 to be Scheduled Tribes for the purposes of this constitution”.
Article 342 The President may, with respect to any State or Union territory, and where it is a state, after consultation with the Governor thereof by public notification, specify the tribes or tribal communities or parts of or groups within tribes or tribal communities which shall, for the purposes of this constitution, is deemed to be scheduled tribes in relation to that State or Union Territory, as the case may be.
As per the definition of Oxford Dictionary, ‘a tribe is a group of people in a primitive or barbarous stage of development acknowledging the authority of a chief and usually regarding themselves as having a common ancestor’.
The renowned Indian anthropologist D. N. Majumdar defines a tribe “as a social group with territorial affiliation, endogamous with no specialization of functions ruled by tribal officers hereditary or otherwise, united in language or dialect recognizing social distance with other tribes or castes”.
A. B. Bardhan defines the tribe as a “course of a Socio-cultural entity at a definite historical stage of development. It is a single endogamous community with a cultural and psychological make-up going back into a distant historical past.” In this definition, the emphasis is on the cultural and psychological make-up.
Jose George and S. S. Shreekumar State “A tribe is a social group of a simple kind, the members of which speak a common dialect, have a single government, act together for common purposes and have a common name a contiguous territory. Relatively of common descent. Here the tribe is considered as a social group with common dialect, purpose, name, and culture”.
According to Gillian and Gillian: “A tribe is a group of the local community which lives in a common area, speaks a common dialect and follows a common culture.”
According to Risely “A tribe is a collection of families or groups of families bearing a common name which as a rule does not denote any specific occupation, generally claiming common descent from a mythical of a historical ancestor”. Occasionally the name is derived from an animal only by the obligation of kinship, members speak the same language and occupy (or professing to occupy) a definite tract of country.” (Shashi Birathi 1992:2)
Even G. S. Ghurye, in his book The Scheduled Tribes (1963), writes: “The Scheduled Tribes are neither called the ‘Aborigines’, nor the ‘Adivasis’, nor are they treated as a category by themselves. By and large, they are treated together with the Scheduled Castes and further envisaged as one group of the Backward Classes”.
Problems in defining a tribe in India
Andre Beteille noted the conventional lack of interest of the sociologists and the social anthropologists in a clear definition. They were more concerned with ‘facts’ which were relevant to a discussion on tribes rather than in a definition. In his view, a rigid and clear-cut definition was a fruitless exercise. However, he argued that clarity of concepts’ was a necessary step towards a scientific study of the tribes.
During the course of history, the concept of the tribe has undergone changes under British imperialism. Early British writings on India did not study groups or communities from the perspective of the tribe. The Asiatic Society of Bengal (15 January 1784), defined the scope of its mission as the study of ‘nature’ and ‘man’. Hence, the sense in which British ethnographers used the term tribe in India, especially in the early phase, is not very clear. The term tribe itself has a sense of common ancestry that may have been more common than the usage in the sense of primitive or barbarous living conditions. Anthropologists lacked the conceptual clarity of tribe in India.
The problems in defining a tribe in India are as followed –
Nomenclature:
India’s tribal world is diverse and ethnically differentiated. The tribal communities are not generally familiar with each other, except those living in the immediate neighbourhood. The term ‘scheduled tribe’ is a generalization. It glosses over the underlying heterogeneity. It is an imperative of social geographical research to take stock of the existing tribal communities, and place them in their proper spatial or regional context.
Administrative Anomalies:
Ethnographers evidently had difficulties in defining tribe in the initial stage. In the census reports of 1881, when the first ‘proper’ all-India census was under-taken, the term used was not ‘tribe’ but ‘forest tribe’, and that too as a sub-heading within the broader category of agricultural and pastoral castes.
Risley and Gait, who were in charge of the 1901 and 1911 censuses respectively, added the category of ‘so-called animists’ to the list of caste and others, and included against each the number of people professing to follow Hinduism and animism. Marten followed the same pattern in the 1921 census, except that he changed the heading from ‘animism’ to ‘tribal religion’. Hutton continued with the distinction between tribes and others in terms of religion. Tribes were distinguished from others by the type of religion they practiced, such as Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, etc. Tribes were distinguished from others not on the basis of caste, or caste-like features, but religion. For Hutton, then, the tribe–caste distinction was maintained only on the basis of religion. Tribes were thus defined as those that practiced ‘animism’.
Ghurye (1963: 205) on the other hand went to the extent of describing the tribes as ‘Backward Hindus’. He writes that so-called aboriginals who form the bulk of the scheduled tribes, and who have been designated in the censuses as Animists, are best described as Backward Hindus.
Although officially the census operation were not satisfied with this basis for the demarcation of tribes. They were of the view that it was difficult to distinguish the religion of the tribes from the religion of the lower strata of Hindu society. The criteria worked out for making such a distinction were thus far from satisfactory.
Spatial Distribution:
The Indian tribes display a very high degree of ethnic diversity both in their racial composition and dialectal and linguistic affinity. The fact that the scheduled tribes include as many as 285 different communities is an important index of their ethnic diversity. No less impressive is the pattern of their spatial distribution. It has been commonly observed that the tribes reveal strong tendencies of clustering and concentration in the hilly, forested, and geographically inaccessible tracts of the country.
Whatever may be the nature of the perceived reality, the issue of their definition as tribes remains an open question. There is no easy answer to this question. Perhaps there is no general agreement on the definition of the tribe itself, although a more agreeable position would be that they are ethnic tribes more than anything else. Indian tribes have been living between two worlds: their own tribal world which is in transition, and the new social order which opens up vistas for their transformation. Eventually, Bailey also stated that the only solution to the problem of defining tribes in India is to conceive of a continuum of which at one end are a tribe and at the other are caste. The tribes have segmentary, egalitarian systems and are not mutually interdependent as are like castes in a system of organic solidarity. They have direct access to land and no intermediary is involved between them and land.
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References
Beniwal, A. (2016). Indian Tribes. K. K. Publications.
Xaxa, V. (2008). State, Society, and Tribes: Issues in Post-colonial India. Pearson India.
Digal, P. (2016). De-constructing the term “tribe/tribal” in India: a post-colonial reading. International Journal of Pedagogy, Innovation and New Technologies, 3, 85-92.
Xaxa, V. (2011). Tribes and social exclusion. CSSSC-UNICEF Social Inclusion Cell, An Occasional Paper, 2, 1-18.
CONCEPT OF SCHEDULED TRIBE (CC-10, UNIT -3)
Majumdar, D. N. (1993). Ethnicity and regionalism in North-East India. Regionalism in India (265-72). New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications.
Xaxa, V. (1999). Transformation of tribes in India: Terms of discourse. Economic and political weekly, 1519-1524.
Xaxa, V. (1999). Tribes as indigenous people of India. Economic and political weekly, 3589-3595.
Ghurye, G. S. (1959). The Scheduled Tribes.
Von Fürer-Haimendorf, C., & Von, F. H. C. (1982). Tribes of India: The struggle for survival. University of California Press.
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