Ethnicity and Identity Movements in India

Defining Ethnicity and Ethnic Mobilization

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• Ethnicity identifies a group of people on the basis of shared markers — culture, race, language, religion, custom, history, and economic experience among them — combined with actual mobilisation into collective action toward specific demands; which and how many of these markers matter is genuinely contested, and is often decided less by objective criteria than by the choices of the ethnic group’s own leadership.
• Indian scholars generally reserve the term “ethnic” for mobilisation built on multiple attributes together, treating single-attribute mobilisation by its own specific name instead — language-based mobilisation as “linguistic,” caste-based mobilisation as “Dalit” or “backward” mobilisation, and so on. Scholars working in the American and European tradition, by contrast, tend to classify even single-attribute mobilisation (language, religion, caste alone) as ethnic — Paul R. Brass, for instance, uses “ethnic” and “communal” mobilisation interchangeably.
• Dipankar Gupta, in The Context of Ethnicity: The Sikh Identity in a Comparative Perspective, draws a sharper distinction: ethnic mobilisation implicates the nation-state directly — its territory and sovereignty — and calls the ethnic group’s loyalty to the nation-state itself into question, whereas communal mobilisation stays confined to a dispute between the government and two or more communities (typically over jobs or specific community rights) without ever questioning the nation-state’s legitimacy as such. Crucially, Gupta stresses that group identities are not fixed: an ethnic identity can become communal, and a communal identity ethnic, depending entirely on the specific context of time and place.
• Ethnicity is inherently a relative term — an ethnic group defines itself specifically against other groups that share some but not all of its attributes, feeling the need to protect its identity and interests against perceived or real threats from those neighbouring groups; the terms “ethnicity,” “nationality,” and “nation” are frequently used interchangeably in the scholarly literature on this basis, since a multi-attribute-based mobilised community can plausibly be described using any of the three terms. Punekar identifies religion, race, region, and caste as the four principal bases of ethnicity operating in the Indian context specifically.

Ethnic Movements and the Limits of the Nehruvian Nation-Building Model

• Independent India’s nation-building strategy — commonly termed the Nehruvian or Mahalanobis model — presumed that ascriptive identities (language, caste, tribe, religion) would gradually dissolve in the course of development and modernisation, giving way to a secular national identity built around shared citizenship rather than ascriptive markers.
• This presumption was challenged well before the model’s effects could fully materialise, across nearly every major axis it had assumed would fade: the Nagas’ rejection of the Indian Constitution in the North-East, which developed into an outright secessionist movement; the Dravidian ethnic movement and the demand for linguistic states more broadly; the movement for a separate Andhra Pradesh; movements in Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab; and the Shiv Sena’s regionalist mobilisation against South Indian migrants in Mumbai — a genuinely wide spread of ethnic assertion across nearly every major region of the country in the decades immediately following independence.
• These self-determination movements, in their varying forms — demands for regional autonomy, for creation of separate states, for outright secession, or for sustained insurgency — collectively call into question the very nation-state-building model independent India adopted at the outset, which is precisely why they are analytically significant beyond their individual, region-specific grievances.

Linguistic and Ethnic Movements in Tamil Nadu

• Following E.V. Ramaswami Naicker’s legacy, three linked issues shaped Tamil ethnic mobilisation through the first two decades after independence: opposition to the imposition of the (North Indian) Hindi language, the assertion of a distinct Dravidian culture, and religion — the movement’s leadership argued that imposing Hindi, Brahminical Hindu religion, and Aryan culture together threatened the survival of Dravidian identity, initially framing the demand as secession from India outright.
• By the late 1960s the secession demand was abandoned in favour of a demand for greater state autonomy within the Indian union — even as Dravidian assertion has since become milder, sentiment against Hindi imposition specifically has remained a persistent mobilising factor. The scale and violence generated by these movements led S. Harrison to describe the 1950s and 1960s as the “most dangerous decades” for Indian national unity.
• Andhra Pradesh’s own linguistic reorganisation followed a similar, initially reluctant, trajectory: the state government resisted reconsidering demands for a linguistic Andhra state until the death of the Gandhian Potti Sreeramulu, who died on hunger strike specifically demanding a separate Andhra Pradesh, forced the government’s hand — his death catalysed the linguistic reorganisation of Indian states in 1953, though reorganisation itself did not end further demands for separate states elsewhere in the country.

Ethnic Movements in Punjab: From Punjabi Suba to Khalistan

• Punjab’s ethnic movement rested on three linked issue-clusters: regional, religious, and economic. Spearheaded by the Akali Dal, the movement’s leadership argued that because Sikhs follow a distinct religion and speak a distinct language, they merited a separate state — a demand that, on occasion, hardened into outright communal division between Hindus and Sikhs within the state. The resulting Punjabi Suba movement, sustained through the 1950s and 1960s, drew on both constitutional means (memoranda, rallies, marches, and penetration of the Congress organisation to influence party policy) and agitational means (marches to Sikh shrines, intimidation, and force), according to Baldev Raj Nayar’s analysis — culminating in Punjab’s creation as a separate state on 1 November 1966.
• Paul R. Brass identifies an unwritten central-government code governing how such demands were handled through this period: an aversion to creating states on explicitly religious grounds, no concession to demands framed in purely linguistic, regional, or other culturally defined terms, and no concession to either side of an ethnic dispute unless both contending groups supported some resolution — in his reading, the demand for a separate Punjab state was accepted only once there was a parallel demand for a separate, Hindi-speaking Haryana carved from the same undivided state.
• Punjab’s ethnic movement resurfaced far more violently in the 1980s, this time directly challenging the sovereignty of the Indian nation-state itself through the demand for a sovereign Khalistan grounded in Sikh religious tenets — a period commonly referred to as the “Punjab Crisis,” which became closely identified with terrorism in popular, academic, and political discourse alike. Advocates argued Sikhs, as a minority religious community, had been discriminated against despite their substantial contribution to the Indian economy and army.
• The 1980s crisis had a specific political genesis: facing an Akali Dal challenge to Congress dominance in Punjab, the Congress enlisted the Sikh religious leader Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale ahead of the 1980 Punjab assembly elections — a decision with lasting consequences, since it emboldened Bhindranwale to assert independent authority and assume leadership of the Khalistan movement himself, attracting large numbers of Sikh youth as well as support from abroad. The state’s response — Operation Blue Star, sending armed forces into the Golden Temple complex at Amritsar to remove militants including Bhindranwale — ultimately led to Indira Gandhi’s assassination and deepened the Hindu-Sikh ethnic divide in Punjab considerably.
• Scholars explain the 1970s–80s Punjab crisis through two competing lenses. Those working within a Marxian, socio-economic framework point to the Green Revolution’s aftermath: Sikh farmers’ inability to keep pace with rising agricultural investment costs, rising youth unemployment, and the spread of consumerist culture, all of which fed a felt sense of eroding Sikh identity and contributed directly to rising militancy. Those offering a political explanation find the socio-economic account insufficient on its own, arguing the crisis was substantially the product of deliberate political manipulation of religion and popular grievance by politicians on multiple sides.

Ethnic Movements in Jammu and Kashmir

• The ethnic movement in Jammu and Kashmir rests on a distinct combination of language, religion, and geography — since the state’s ethnic composition along all three axes differs from the dominant ethnic pattern elsewhere in India, a section of the population has argued the region warrants distinct treatment; positions within this current range from outright secession, to advocacy for merger with Pakistan, to demand for a wholly separate state, to advocacy for reunifying the Pakistan- and India-administered portions of Kashmir into a single state — with insurgency, violence, and material loss accompanying the more militant of these positions, and support from foreign forces (Pakistan specifically) sustaining them.
• The state’s own popular leadership was divided from the outset on its relationship to the Indian union: Hari Singh, the ruling Maharaja, initially opposed accession to India but agreed under the pressure of Pakistani attack; Sheikh Abdullah initially supported merger with the Indian Union but wavered over time, going on to form the Plebiscite Front — a move that led to his incarceration by the central government from 1953 to 1964.
• Balraj Puri attributes the roots of Kashmiri insurgency to a combination of factors: the attitude of the central government, the absence of effective political opposition within the state, unemployment and other unresolved popular grievances, Cold War dynamics, and Pakistan’s role. Even within Jammu and Kashmir, smaller-scale ethnic movements exist among Ladakh and Jammu specifically, both alleging discrimination by the state’s dominant religious community and more prosperous Kashmir region.

Tribal Ethnic and Identity Movements

• Tribal communities offer perhaps the most complete illustration of multi-marker ethnic mobilisation in India, since almost every factor tribal communities plausibly share — culture, custom, language, race, indigenous religion, and economic circumstance — genuinely contributes to their mobilisation, even where a movement begins around a single marker and accumulates others as it develops. Tribal ethnic movements have taken virtually every form available to ethnic mobilisation: insurgency, defence of indigenous culture and economy against outside exploitation, secession, autonomy movements and demands for separate statehood, and outright ethnic conflict and rioting.
• The most consistent driver of tribal ethnic mobilisation has been a perceived or real threat to indigenous culture, economy, and natural resources (minerals, forests, and modern market opportunities) from outsiders. Nineteenth-century tribal uprisings — involving the Mizos, Kols, Mundas, Daflas, Khasis, Garos, Kacharis, and Kondhas, among others — spanned Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Mizoram, and Nagaland.
• K.S. Singh has explicitly disputed the tendency of scholars like Desai, Gough, and Guha to treat post-independence tribal movements simply as a variant of peasant movements, pointing to tribals’ distinct social and political organisation, their relative isolation from the mainstream, and their distinct leadership patterns and modus operandi as reasons the two categories should be kept analytically separate — tribal community consciousness, in his reading, is simply too structurally different from peasant class consciousness to collapse the two together.
• Land alienation, forced labour, and exploitative moneylending were recurring triggers: when tribals could not repay loans, moneylenders and landlords routinely seized their land, reducing tribal cultivators to tenancy or outright bonded labour on land they had previously owned, while police and revenue officials — themselves often ignorant of tribal customary land systems — provided no protection and sometimes conscripted tribal labour for unpaid work. Colonial forest-management legislation, permitting merchants and contractors to fell forest tracts tribal communities depended on for their livelihood, triggered further revolt, particularly in Andhra Pradesh.
• Raghavaiah’s 1971 chronology of tribal revolts between 1778 and 1970 lists 70 distinct uprisings; the Anthropological Survey of India’s 1976 survey identified 36 tribal movements still ongoing at that time. Although not especially numerous or frequent taken individually, there is scarcely a major tribe across middle or eastern India that has not, at some point over the past 150 years, resorted to organised protest. L.K. Mahapatra notes a telling geographic and demographic pattern: movements were concentrated in the North-East and Central India, and were essentially absent among the tribes of the southern states specifically because those tribes are comparatively small, isolated, and geographically dispersed — too fragmented to sustain organised movements even where exploitation and discontent were equally real.

Classifying Tribal Movements

• Post-independence tribal movements can be classified by cause into movements arising from outsider exploitation (the Santhals and Mundas), movements arising from economic deprivation (the Gonds of Madhya Pradesh, the Mahars of Andhra Pradesh), and movements arising from separatist tendencies (the Nagas and Mizos); by orientation into movements for political autonomy or statehood (Nagas, Mizos, Jharkhand), agrarian movements, forest-based movements, and socio-religious or socio-cultural movements (the Bhagat movement among the Bhils of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, or Raghunath Murmu’s movement among the Santhals).
• Multiple independent typologies converge on broadly similar categories from different angles. Mahapatra classifies tribal movements as reactionary (seeking to restore an idealised past), conservative (seeking to maintain the status quo), or revolutionary/revisionary (seeking to purify or improve existing culture by eliminating specific evil customs or beliefs). Surajit Sinha identifies five types: ethnic rebellion, reform movements, political-autonomy movements within the Indian Union, secessionist movements, and agrarian unrest. S.M. Dube proposes four categories: religious and social reform movements, movements for separate statehood, insurgent movements, and cultural-rights movements. Ghanshyam Shah, more economically, groups them into three: ethnic, agrarian, and political.
• K.S. Singh’s own four-category post-independence classification — agrarian, Sanskritisation-oriented, cultural, and political — pairs with his account of the pre-independence phase, in which British efforts to extend administration into tribal areas provoked direct conflict with tribal chiefs (the Oraon and Munda revolts in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and the North-East being cases in point); after independence, tribal movements pursued cultural-identity maintenance, separate statehood, Sanskritisation-driven status assertion as caste Hindus, or purely economic demands, depending on the specific community and region.
• Stephen Fuchs analyses a distinct sub-category he terms “messianic movements,” led by individuals the community itself elevates to a Messiah-like role during periods of acute economic distress or social/political oppression — Fuchs treats such a movement’s success as substantially dependent on the individual charisma of its leader, though his broadly descriptive analysis stops short of offering a genuine theoretical framework explaining why some charismatic leaders succeed and others fail. B.K. Roy Burman distinguishes proto-national movements, which emerge as tribes transition out of purely tribal-level interaction and reflects an expanding orbit of development, from sub-national movements, a product of social disorganisation led by an acculturated elite whose relationship with the outside world involves continued contraction rather than exclusion — sub-nationalism, in this framing, is a response to disparities within development rather than exclusion from it, and rests more heavily on the coercive power of the community itself.
• The Jharkhand movement in Bihar illustrates this trajectory concretely: a movement of settled tribal agriculturalists influenced by Vaishnavism, arising in Chhotanagpur — the most educationally and industrially advanced of India’s tribal regions, substantially shaped by Christian missionary activity that promoted education, introduced the notion of private land rights, and cultivated a strong sense of separateness from the rest of India. K.S. Singh traces the movement’s post-1950 evolution “from ethnicity to regionalism,” through a fragmentary phase (1963–75) marked by the Jharkhand party’s factionalisation, before the BJP-led central government finally announced the creation of two tribal states — Jharkhand from Bihar and Chhattisgarh from Madhya Pradesh — in 1998.
• L.K. Mahapatra’s broader time-sequence analysis of tribal movements notes several recurring tendencies: reformist movements, though typically initiated by charismatic leaders, tend to gradually rationalise and institutionalise, affecting organisational structure without necessarily producing deeper structural change; movements of any orientation have consistently appeared among numerically strong, settled, comparatively well-off tribal populations rather than the most impoverished; small and primitive tribes have instead tended toward large-scale religious conversion or separatist withdrawal rather than organised movement; the sheer geographic dispersal of India’s tribal population makes a genuinely pan-Indian tribal movement structurally unlikely; and fragmented democratic politics among tribal groups has tended to block the emergence of a unified tribal civil collectivism.

Contemporary Developments: Manipur and the Persistence of Ethnic Conflict

• Nandini Sundar’s research on police human-rights violations in Bastar (Burning Forest) develops what she terms the “root causes perspective” on Naxalism — attributing the movement’s growth and spread substantially to poverty, the absence of genuine development, and the lack of basic services like health and education, an analytical framework directly applicable to the broader pattern of tribal ethnic mobilisation this article has traced. Sanjib Baruah similarly attributes demands like Bodoland to the North-East’s development process persistently failing to meet regional aspirations — a direct continuation of the disparities-in-development logic B.K. Roy Burman’s sub-nationalism concept anticipates.
• The Meitei-Kuki conflict in Manipur, ongoing since May 2023, offers a live contemporary case study combining several of this article’s recurring themes at once: colonial-era administrative divisions between the Imphal valley and surrounding hills, uneven economic and demographic development between the two regions, and unresolved disputes over land, identity, and political representation, sharpened further by the specific trigger of Scheduled Tribe status demands and instability spilling across the Myanmar border. By 2025–26, the state remained functionally partitioned into two ethnic zones separated by buffer areas and security patrols — the valley under Meitei majority control, the hills under Kuki-Zo and other tribal communities — with fresh clashes recorded into 2026 even after President’s Rule was revoked and a new state government took office in February 2026, underscoring how unresolved an ethnic conflict of this kind can remain even after formal political normalisation.