The weekly tribal market

Periodic markets, held on a fixed day each week, are central to life in peasant societies. They bring people from nearby villages together and link local economies to towns and the wider world.

In hilly and forested adivasi (tribal) areas, the weekly market, the haat, is the main place to buy and sell, and also the main place for social life: meeting relatives, settling marriages, sharing news, enjoying entertainment.

Colonialism changed these areas. Roads opened them up; traders, moneylenders, mining companies and plantation owners came in. Many adivasis fell into debt and lost their land. Tribal markets became linked to regional and national markets.

The Dhorai market in Bastar (Chhattisgarh), studied by the anthropologist Alfred Gell, shows how a market mirrors social hierarchy:

• The buyers are mostly adivasis, such as the local Muria Gonds.
• The sellers are mostly caste Hindus: traders, potters, weavers, and others from outside.
• Forest officials come too, to pay forest labourers.

Gell describes the market day as a whirl of activity: trade in grain, vegetables, cloth, pots and jewellery; officials; craftsmen; and even religious ceremony, with the market deity honoured.

Where people stand in the market, who sells and who buys, how they speak to each other, all reflect the inequality between tribal people and caste Hindus. The weekly market has also changed over time, as roads and outside traders bring new goods and new relations.