Tribal communities

Tribes were long defined by what they lacked: no written script, no state, no religion of the Hindu or Islamic kind, no caste. Scholars classified them by:

• permanent traits: region, language, physical (racial) features, and size of population;
• acquired traits: their livelihood (hunting, shifting cultivation, settled farming) and how far they had been assimilated into Hindu society.

Some facts: about 85 per cent of tribal people live in middle India, from Gujarat across to Odisha and West Bengal. In 2011, tribals were 8.6 per cent of India's population (about 104 million). Among the largest groups are the Gonds, Bhils and Santhals. Most speak languages of the Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman families.

By the 1970s, these definitions broke down. Tribes were not isolated 'primitive' societies untouched by civilisation:

• there were Gond kingdoms in central India;
• tribes traded with others, and some served as soldiers (militias) for kings.

Some scholars argue that 'tribe' as a category was itself created by contact with states and colonial rulers.

Development and loss: after independence, national development, through dams, mines and factories, often came at the cost of tribal land and forests. Tribal people lost their homes, and in some regions (such as Jharkhand), in-migration by outsiders made them a minority in their own land.

Tribal identity today, as the sociologist Virginius Xaxa shows, is built through interaction: through resistance to land loss, struggles for statehood (Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh), and a new educated middle class among tribal people. Tribes are not 'pristine' remnants of the past; they are living communities shaped by history.