The Tribal Problem in All-India Perspective

In an industrialized India the destruction of the aboriginal's life is as inevitable as the submergence of the Egyptian temples caused by the dams of the Nile. . . . As things are going there can be no grandeur in the primitive's end. It will not be even simple extinction, which is not the worst of human destinies. It is to be feared that the aboriginal's last act will be squalid, instead of being tragic. What will be seen with most regret will be, not his disappearance, but his enslavement and degradation.Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe, 1965

Fifteen years ago Nirad C. Chaudhuri, the provocative analyst of the Indian social scene, published this gloomy forecast, and readers of the foregoing chapters may well agree that the dice are heavily loaded against the likelihood of an unclouded future for the forty million Indian aboriginals. A comparison of the fate of the tribes of Andhra Pradesh, who share their environment with Hindu populations, and those in sole possession of the highlands of Arunachal Pradesh indicates the alternative lines along which tribal communities may develop. However, the choice of the road which any tribal society will take is hardly ever left to the tribesmen themselves but is imposed on them by external circumstances outside their own control.
During the last years of British rule in India, there raged a passionate controversy about the policy to be adopted vis-à-vis the aboriginal tribes. While anthropologically minded administrators advocated a policy of protection, which in specific cases involved even a measure of seclusion, Indian politicians attacked the idea of segregation and seclusion on the grounds that it threatened to deepen and perpetuate divisions within the Indian nation, and delayed the aboriginals' integration into the rest of the population. Today this controversy, though occasionally revived in newspaper articles and political speeches, has largely abated. It has become obvious that, on the one hand, a measure of integration is coming about automatically even in protected regions such as Arunachal Pradesh, but that, on the other hand, compulsory integration, even if rapidly progressing, has rarely benefited the tribals in the sense of assuring them a satisfactory place in the wider Indian society.
The protagonists of integration usually ignore the fact that there exists no homogeneous Indian society with which tribal groups could merge by adopting a standard cultural pattern. The so-called advanced Indian society, with its linguistic, religious, and caste divisions, is far from uniform, and it has never been specified into which of the numerous divisions any particular tribal group could be integrated. India's tribal population is equally divided, for its heterogeneity extends to race, language, and cultural levels, quite apart from its scattered distribution over numerous disparate environments.
Racial distinctions are superficially most obvious, though their social implications are of minor significance. As the most ancient population element in the subcontinent, some of the aboriginals belong clearly to very archaic racial strata. The oldest is formed by the Veddoids, exemplified by tribes such as Chenchus and Kadars (see the Introduction). They represent a racial type which extends from south Arabia eastwards across India, and as far as parts of the Southeast Asian mainland and Indonesia. Intermixed with other racial types, the Veddoid element is found in most of the tribes of Southern and Middle India, and its prevalence among the Gond tribes is reflected in the term Gondid , which some physical anthropologists apply to one of the Veddoid subtypes.
The Veddoid element is absent among the hill tribes of Northeast India, who belong to a racial stratum usually described as Palaeo-Mongoloid, which extends over wide areas of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia and the Philippines. Mongoloid traces are discernible also among some of the hill tribes of Orissa, such as Saoras and Bondos, and it is not unlikely that in prehistoric times, before the invasion of India by waves of peoples of Caucasoid race, there were some marginal contacts between the Veddoids inhabiting Middle and Southern India and the Mongoloids who occupied the Himalayan and northeastern regions.
In discussion of the prospects for the integration of the aboriginals with the majority of the Indian population, these racial factors are often overlooked. Yet many tribals differ in appearance from the dominant population of their respective regions, and even complete cultural and linguistic assimilation cannot remove the fact that an Apa Tani or Nishi looks different from the members of Assamese Hindu castes or a Chenchu from the peoples of Hyderabad City. Khasis and Nagas of Northeast India often comment on the fact that on visits to Delhi or Bombay they are taken for Burmese, Thais, or Malayans, and are asked to produce their passports.
It is all the more remarkable that, despite racial differences no less obvious than those found in countries with acute race problems, India has never experienced any serious racial tensions. While religion and language have frequently figured as factors in communal controversies, distinctions in physical make-up have never been played up as facts of political significance. One of the causes of the unimportance of the race factor may be inherent in the ideology of Hindu caste society, which accepts that humanity is divided into intrinsically distinct groups. Since the endogamy and social exclusiveness of Hindu castes are in themselves a bar to close inter-group relations, there is no need to place social distance between racially differentiated groups. The normal operation of the caste system is quite sufficient to prevent intermarriage, commensalism, and intimate social intercourse between members of different communities, and hence there is no need to bring in the race factor. There is very little likelihood of any substantial miscegenation involving persons of basically different racial groups, and whatever progress in the cultural assimilation of tribal communities may be made, there can be no doubt that for a long time to come most tribes will persist as groups with distinct racial characteristics.
Another decisive factor is language, but unlike race, this is not an immutable feature. While a tribal community cannot change its racial make-up in order to conform to the characteristics of the population dominant in a region, its members can become proficient in the main regional language. The first step in such a process of assimilation is usually bilingualism, and many aboriginals in contact with advanced populations are fluent in languages other than their mother tongue. Sometimes bilingualism is only a transitional phase, followed by the decline and ultimate extinction of the tribal tongue. A process of linguistic assimilation has gone on for hundreds and probably thousands of years, and many tribal communities have lost their original tongues and speak today one of the main languages of India.
The smaller a group is, the greater is the likelihood that it will lose its tribal language and adopt the language of economically stronger and culturally more advanced neighbours. Examples of the displacement of one language by another are numerous. Telugu, one of the Dravidian languages with a substantial literature, is steadily gaining ground at the expense of minor unwritten tribal tongues, which also belong to the Dravidian language group. This process can be observed in the Telengana districts of Andhra Pradesh. The Koyas of some groups of villages south of the Godavari still speak their tribal Gondi dialect, but use Telugu as a means of communication with their Telugu-speaking neighbours. The majority of Koyas, however, have given up Gondi altogether and speak Telugu even among themselves.
The contact zones between tribal and non-tribal populations provide instructive examples of the manner in which new languages may infiltrate the speech of small communities. The Bondos of the Orissa highlands, for instance, speak a Munda language, but in conversation with their lowland Hindu neighbours they employ Oriya. Such contact is mainly in the sphere of commerce, and the Oriya terms for the higher numerals, lacking in Bondo, and those for weights and measures have been incorporated into Bondo speech. Surprisingly, many prayers and magical formulae are also spoken in Oriya, because the Bondos think it proper that deities and spirits should be addressed in a "superior" language. Thus Oriya is fast becoming the ritual and not only the trade language of the Bondos. School education imparted through the medium of Oriya no doubt accelerates the erosion of the tribal tongue. It goes without saying that the displacement of a tribal language also involves the loss of the entire oral literature of the tribe concerned, and this in turn leads to a blurring of the tribal identity and world-view.
Whatever the results of linguistic change for the development of tribal cultures may be, there can be no doubt that in an age of rapidly improving communications extreme diversity of languages cannot persist unmodified. In some parts of Nagaland one could, even when travelling on foot, pass in a single day through three different language areas, and this linguistic fragmentation had come about because villages were isolated from each other by long-standing feuds, often involving head-hunting raids, and there was hence no occasion for people from different settlements to converse with each other. The pacification of tribal areas in Northeast India has put an end to the isolation of small communities and created a need for a common language. In Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh a kind of pidgin Assamese partly fulfils this need, but the people of both territories have now chosen English as their official language and medium of instruction, and the educated, at least, increasingly use English for communication between members of different tribes.
The attitude of the Government of India and the various state governments to the tribal languages is ambivalent. In Andhra Pradesh, the use of Gondi as the medium of instruction in primary schools for Gond children was abandoned, and since the breakup of Hyderabad State no more books in Gondi have been printed. The avowed policy of the government is clearly to educate all children through the medium of Telugu, which is now the official language of Andhra Pradesh, even though much of the official business is still conducted in English.
Notwithstanding the fact that educational experts in most Indian states are unanimous in advocating education in the mother tongue at least up to high school level, this principle is not applied to tribal children, even in the case of such large tribal groups as Santals and Hos, who speak Munda languages not even remotely related to Hindi, the dominant language of the state of Bihar. The Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes Commission set up by the Government of India in 1960 under Article 339 of the Constitution severely criticized the reluctance of state governments to satisfy the tribals' demand for primary education in their own languages. Under Article 350A of the Constitution, every state must endeavour to provide children of minority groups with adequate facilities for instruction in their mother tongue at the primary stage of education, but the commission pointed out that some of the states had taken this matter very casually, and failed to provide textbooks in even the major tribal languages. It does not appear that these admonitions have induced state governments to change their policies, and the prospects for the future of tribal languages are thus far from encouraging. The voluminous publications issued by the office of the commissioner for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes and other agencies concerned with tribal welfare contain very little information on the problem of tribal languages, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that politicians and officials alike regard their ultimate disappearance as inevitable and even desirable in the interest of the integration of the tribes with the majority communities.
Only in some states of Northeast India, where the growth of political consciousness has led to a new evaluation of tribal identity, is there also a revival of interest in tribal languages. Thus Khasi, an Austroasiatic language spoken in Meghalaya by one of the two tribal majority communities, has been developed as a literary language suitable as a medium of instruction. This move had the result that even the University of Gauhati, though situated in Assam, has now recognized Khasi as a language in which certain examination papers may be written. For major tribes determined to cultivate their own languages, bilingualism would seem to be a solution which would enable a people to participate in the wider national life without losing touch with its cultural heritage.
Besides differences in race and language, there are various cultural factors which set the tribesmen apart from the bulk of Hindu society. Some of these are intangible and do not lend themselves to statistical assessment or comparative analysis. For many years the factor of religion was a criterion by which the tribes were distinguished from such communities as Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, or Christians. Until 1931 millions of aboriginals were returned in the census reports as adherents of tribal religions, but in more recent census reports tribal religions were not separately listed but were included under the head "Others." The reasons for the discontinuation of the heading "Tribal
Religions" are partly of a practical and partly of a political nature. Tribal religions are clearly not as easily definable as Islam or Buddhism, and whereas no doubt usually exists whether a person is a Muslim or an adherent of a tribal religion, it is not so easy to distinguish between some tribal cults and certain types of popular Hinduism. The political objections to the separate listing of tribal religions are based on the argument that census statistics on religion tend to perpetuate communal divisions.
The undoubted tendency to classify members of aboriginal tribes as Hindus and to play down the distinctions between tribal religions and popular Hinduism must not be considered indicative of an organized movement to convert tribals to Sanskritic Hinduism. Apart from the discouragement of such customs as cow sacrifice and the use of intoxicating liquor as an offering to tribal gods, there is on the part of local Hindu communities little desire to induce the tribals to change their beliefs and religious practices. Indeed, a cynical observer of the relations between tribals and Hindus in such regions as the highlands of Adilabad may come to the conclusion that the Hindus "want the Gonds' land and not their souls." Though in areas of close contact between Hindus and tribals Hindu ideas and customs may gradually spread to tribal communities, they usually find acceptance as an addition to tribal beliefs rather than as their replacement. "Conversions" of tribesmen to Hinduism in a sense comparable to conversions to Christianity or Islam are comparatively rare, even though in recent years Hindu missions have been active in some tribal regions of Middle India. Their efforts have concentrated more on modifying social customs than on propagating a new doctrine. Even where there are no such agencies for the propagation of the Hindu way of life, school-teachers and minor government officials, who—except in Arunachal Pradesh—are almost invariably non-tribals, tend to discourage tribal customs objectionable to Hindu sentiment, and although India is constitutionally a secular state, there have been instances of official interference with such tribal religious practices as animal sacrifices.
In this respect there are certain discrepancies between the policies advocated by the central government and those pursued by individual states. The official policy of the Government of India is one of tolerance towards the beliefs, customs, and way of life of the tribal people, whereas some of the state governments have shown themselves less sensitive to the right of tribal communities to follow their traditional pattern of life, even in matters not affecting the interests of other sections of the population.
It is paradoxical that in many areas where tribals are exposed to the influence of caste Hindus just those features of Hindu society which modern India strives to discard are newly introduced among populations to whom they had hitherto been foreign. Thus, not only the prejudice against certain occupations such as leather working and butchering, but also dietary taboos, child marriage, and restrictions on the remarriage of widows and divorcées are gaining a foothold among the hill- and jungle-folk at a time when they are losing ground in the larger urban centres. This development is almost inevitable as long as throughout rural India compliance with the puritanical precepts of Hindu morality remains the principal criterion of social respectability.
Acceptance or denial of the necessity for assimilation with Hindu society is ultimately a question of values. Are the tribals to be left to follow their own inclination in emulating or rejecting the cultural pattern represented by their Hindu neighbours, or are they to be coaxed to abandon their own cultural traditions and values? In the past Hindu society has been tolerant of groups that would not conform to the standards set by the higher castes, and in some areas, notably Kerala, the emulation by low-status groups of upper-caste fashions in such matters as dress or marriage celebrations was resented and often prevented because the higher castes saw their monopoly of certain cultural features endangered. In recent years, however, there has been a change of attitude vis-à-vis cultural divergencies, and it may be the influence of the Western belief in universal values which has encouraged attempts to enforce conformity with the standards of dominant populations. Yet India is not only a multi-racial and a multi-lingual country, it is also a multi-cultural one, and as long as Muslims, Parsees, and Christians are free to follow their traditional way of life, it would seem only fair to respect also tribal customs and beliefs, however distinct from those of the regional majority community they may be.
Hinduism is, of course, not the only ideological force which has brought about fundamental changes in tribal culture and mores. Christian missions have been active in tribal areas, with the result that about 50 percent of all Nagas and Mizos and 20 percent of all Mundas and Oraons have been converted to Christianity. The advantages of missionary activities lie mainly in the field of education, for many of the literates among these tribes were educated in mission schools, and literacy certainly aided them in resisting exploitation by non-tribal populations. By reducing tribal languages to writing, usually in Roman script, missionaries were also helpful in securing the survival and development of tribal tongues, which without their efforts might have been displaced by regionally dominant languages. On the other hand, missionary influence has eroded much of the tribes' cultural heritage, which was inseparably linked with the traditional mythology, beliefs, and rituals, and wilted when these were abandoned. Above all, the conversion of part of a community tends to destroy the social unity of the whole tribe, as we have seen in chapter 11. Today foreign missionaries no longer play a significant role, but their work is continued by Indian Christians whose tolerance of tribal customs is no greater than that of the earlier European or American missionaries. Indeed, nowhere in India has there been a merging of Christian and traditional tribal practices such as I have observed among autochthonous communities in Mexico and Guatemala, where representations of Maya gods adorn the walls of some Catholic churches, and libations to ancestor spirits are offered in the aisles.
In the political sphere the interests of tribal populations should have benefited from the introduction of a system of grass-roots democracy, known as panchayati raj , which was intended to take the place of the more paternalistic form of government characteristic of the days of British rule, both in the British provinces and in the princely states. In territories such as Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, where tribals are in an overwhelming majority, government by elected bodies, both on the local and the state level, has certainly boosted the tribals' self-confidence and has also brought them some tangible advantages. In areas where tribals are in the minority, however, such as in Andhra Pradesh, decentralization has had far from desirable results. As early as 1963, the commissioner for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes expressed in his report for the year 1962–63 the fear that, due to the existing pattern of concentration of social and economic power in the hands of a dominant section of the population, democratic decentralization may lead to a more extensive exploitation of the scheduled tribes. This apprehension was fully justified, for recent experiences have shown that the panchayat samithi and zilla parishad , which in some states took over the functions of the former district officers, were dragging their feet in the implementation of tribal welfare schemes, for the simple reason that their leading members belonged to the very classes which traditionally profited from the exploitation of the tribes. By diluting the powers of civil servants, who alone were likely to safeguard the interests of the tribals, decentralization certainly did more harm than good to the tribal cause.
A problem even more important than the introduction of panchayati raj is the impact of industrialization on the tribes in areas rich in mineral resources. Certain areas within the tribal belt of Middle India, and particularly Orissa, West Bengal, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh, contain rich deposits of minerals, and their exploitation and the establishment of great steel works in the very centre of the tribals' homeland have already led to a large-scale displacement of tribal populations. Focussing on one particular incident connected with such industrialization, the Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes Commission reported that out of 14,461 tribal families displaced from an area of 62,494 acres, only 3,479 were allotted alternative land. The disruption of the tribal econ-
omy and the degradation of tribals by large-scale industrialization, such as any visitor to the Ranchi area of Bihar can observe with his own eyes, is well described in the following paragraph of the commission's final report on the problem:
The tribals were dislodged from their traditional sources of livelihood and places of habitation. Not conversant with the details of acquisition proceedings they accepted whatever cash compensation was given to them and became emigrants. With cash in hand and many attractions in the nearby industrial towns, their funds were rapidly depleted and in course of time they were without money as well as without land. They joined the ranks of landless labourers but without any training, equipment or aptitude for any skilled or semi-skilled job.[1]
Though the commission recommended that the government, as trustee of the scheduled tribes, "should not allow the tribes to go under in the process of industrialization," little was done to rehabilitate the displaced tribesmen and to train them for work in the new industries. Their eventual proletarization seems inevitable, and in the streets of Ranchi one can still see Munda and Oraon riksha pullers who not long ago were independent cultivators tilling their own land.
Destruction or alienation of tribal land as a result of industrialization is not a process peculiar to India, and it is well known that in areas such as the Solomon Islands or Melanesia or the tropical forests of Brazil the welfare of primitive tribes was sacrificed to the interests of local or multinational companies exploiting mineral or forest resources. Great as the inroads into tribal forests have been in India, some comfort may be derived from the fact that the forests are exploited mainly by local contractors and not by large companies who have acquired felling rights for long periods. Thus, state governments are still free to reverse their policies and to take up a system of forest exploitation compatible with tribal interest, such as has been suggested by Dr. B. D. Sharma (see chapter 3).
Yet the drive for modernization and industrialization pursued by all Indian governments committed to the improvement of the country's standard of living does not augur well for the future of tribal populations affected by projects promising to raise industrial output. This applies in particular to hydroelectric and irrigation projects located in hilly country inhabited by tribals whose land is to be submerged by the construction of reservoirs. One example of such a project is a great dam to be built in the 1980s across the lower course of the Godavari. This will involve the flooding of all the riverside villages of Reddis and Koyas, many of whom settled there because the reservation of
forests had forced them to move down from the hills on which they used to practise slash-and-burn cultivation. At a time when a growing population pressure has produced a scarcity of cultivable land throughout India, any resettlement of displaced communities is inherently difficult, and tribals, who have no political pull, are likely to remain at the back of the queue for land promised as compensation for their holdings sacrificed on the altar of India's modernization.
There can be no doubt that the establishment of vast industrial enterprises in tribal zones lends urgency to the extension of protective measures to all tribals whose rights and way of life have been placed in jeopardy. The architects of the Indian constitution were determined that, while the age-old isolation of the scheduled tribes would have to be ended, they should be saved from exploitation and from the erosion of their rights to their ancestral land. It was clear that this aim could be achieved only by special legislation, but unfortunately for the tribals the original idealism of politicians and legislators is wearing thin, and while the laws for protecting tribals are still in existence, their implementation leaves much to be desired. Even among educated Indians, there seems to be a growing unwillingness to face the fact that forty million tribal people will for a long time form a separate and unassimilated element within the Indian nation. While many may concede that there is a need for some special protection, there is also a widespread feeling that any privileges enjoyed by tribes were required only for a period of transition, and that within a span of perhaps ten or twenty years the integration of the tribes within the mainstream of the population should be completed, whereupon there would be no more justification for the continuation of scheduled areas and privileges for scheduled tribes.
This new trend in public opinion represents as great a threat to the future prospects of tribals as the greed of land-grabbers does to their present well-being. The manner of the integration of the tribals into the wider Indian society will ultimately be determined by political decisions, and these will be made on the basis of moral evaluations. It thus seems that unless the intellectually leading sections of the Indian population develop a spirit of cultural tolerance and an appreciation for tribal values, even the most elaborate schemes for the economic improvement of tribal populations are likely to prove abortive.
In conclusion I can do no better than to quote from the principles which Jawaharlal Nehru, the most idealistic of Indian politicians, formulated as a guideline for the policy to be pursued by his administration in its dealings with tribals:
People should develop along the lines of their own genius and the imposition of alien values should be avoided.

Source: http://content.cdlib.org