Write short note : Emergence of classes among tribes. (2003)
Classical ethnography treated the tribe as the contrast to class society: production for use, corporate rights in land, no surplus to appropriate and so no propertied stratum. That picture no longer describes Adivasi India. Class has entered tribal society through property, the market, the state and, paradoxically, through protective discrimination itself.
The baseline and its qualification
- Tenures such as Munda khuntkatti and Oraon bhuinhari vested land in the founding lineage, not the individual; rank followed age, lineage seniority and ritual office rather than wealth, and redistribution through feast kept accumulation shallow.
- The picture was never absolute. Kumar Suresh Singh, in Tribal Society in India: An Anthropo-historical Perspective (1985), showed that many tribes had long been inside state systems, with chiefly lineages, tributary relations and the beginnings of a landed stratum — the Gond and Bhil rajas are the obvious case.
How class emerged
- Colonial land settlement. Recording occupancy in individual names turned corporate clan land into alienable property and created landlord, tenant, sharecropper and labourer where those categories had not existed. The Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, 1908 conceded khuntkatti only after the Munda ulgulan — by then differentiation was under way.
- Market and debt. Moneylender, trader and liquor contractor drew tribal cultivators into cash relations; land alienation and mortgage produced a permanent stratum of tribal agricultural labour.
- Industrialisation and displacement. Mines, dams and steel towns in the central Indian belt proletarianised some and enriched a small class of contractors, compensation-holders and transporters.
- Education, employment and reservation. Reservation in services and legislatures, and residential schooling, created a salaried tribal middle class — the subject of Virginius Xaxa’s analysis of the tribal middle class (Sociological Bulletin, 2024), which distinguishes an older, mission-educated elite from a newer bureaucratic and professional one.
Evidence of differentiation
- Between 2001 and 2011 the share of cultivators among Scheduled Tribes fell by roughly ten percentage points while agricultural labourers rose by about nine — the statistical signature of proletarianisation within a single Census decade.
- The Forest Rights Act, 2006 distributes overwhelmingly individual titles — 23,89,670 of the 25,11,375 granted up to 31 May 2025 — converting a commons claim into private holdings of unequal size.
- Benefits concentrate: large tribes near towns capture schooling and posts, while the 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups needed a separate mission, PM-JANMAN (₹24,104 crore, 15 November 2023).
- The sharpest recognition is judicial. In State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024) a seven-judge bench permitted sub-classification within Scheduled Castes and Tribes, a majority urging states to identify and exclude a creamy layer — a constitutional admission that tribes are now internally stratified by class.
Interpretations
A. R. Desai’s materialist reading absorbs tribes into the national class matrix, caste and tribe becoming idioms of class position. André Béteille cautions that inequality here is dispersed rather than cumulative, and Xaxa insists differentiation does not dissolve tribal identity — the middle class leads identity assertion precisely because it competes with non-tribal elites.
Conclusion
Class among tribes is no longer emergent but established. The unresolved question is political: whether a stratified Adivasi society can still act as one interest group, or whether the creamy-layer debate marks the point at which tribal solidarity begins to fracture along class lines.