Folk and tribal roots

The roots we have seen so far are well recorded in texts. India also has rich oral traditions: teachings and practices passed on through everyday life, without written texts (as the Vedas were). Among them are many folk traditions, passed on by ordinary people, and tribal traditions, passed on by tribes.

Today, anthropologists usually describe a tribe as a group of families or clans who believe they share common ancestors, a culture and a language, living as a close community under a chief and holding no private property.

Interestingly, ancient India had no word for 'tribe': tribes were simply janas living in a particular setting, such as forests or mountains. The Constitution of India uses the words 'tribes' and 'tribal communities' in English, and janjāti in Hindi.

According to official figures, in 2011 India had 705 tribes spread over most states, with a population of about 104 million people: more than the populations of Australia and the United Kingdom together!

In the 19th century, anthropologists often called tribes 'primitive' or 'inferior' to 'civilised' people. Deeper study of tribal communities and their rich, complex cultures has led to such unfair judgements being mostly dropped.

Folk and tribal traditions and the main schools of thought have always influenced each other: gods and goddesses, ideas, legends and rituals have passed both ways. For example, by tradition Jagannath, worshipped at Puri (Odisha), was originally a tribal deity, and so were various forms of the mother-goddess worshipped across India. Going the other way, some tribes adopted Hindu deities long ago and have their own versions of the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, from the northeastern states all the way to Tamil Nadu.

Why did this exchange happen so easily? Because folk, tribal and Hindu belief systems share many ideas. In all three, parts of nature (mountains, rivers, trees, plants, animals and even some stones) are treated as sacred, because there is consciousness behind all of them. For the Toda people of the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu, over thirty peaks are homes of gods or goddesses, so sacred that the Todas avoid pointing at them with a finger.

And despite many deities, many tribal groups, like Hinduism, believe in one higher divinity. Several tribes of Arunachal Pradesh worship Donyipolo, a combined form of the Sun and the Moon who later rose to be a supreme god; there is also the god Khandoba in parts of central India; and in eastern India the Munda and Santhal peoples worship Singbonga, the supreme deity who created the whole world. The sociologist André Béteille sums it up: 'That the tribal religions have been influenced by Hinduism is widely accepted, but it is equally true that Hinduism, not only in its formative phase but throughout its evolution, has been influenced by tribal religions.' The result of this long exchange has been mutual enrichment.