What changes have taken place in the tribal social stratification pattern in recent times? Describe the factors responsible for these changes. (1997)
Tribal societies were never unranked, but they ranked people by principles unlike those of the surrounding society: age, sex, generation, lineage seniority and ritual office rather than property or purity. What has changed in recent decades is less the fact of inequality than its principle — the axes of ranking have been replaced, and new ones imported.
The traditional pattern
- Ranking ran through age-grades and generation, through clan and lineage precedence (the founding khunt over later settlers), and through ritual office — the pahan or naik as priest, the manki-munda or gaonburha as headman.
- Authority was functionally specific and reversible: a headman had no monopoly of land, arms or ritual, and feasting redistributed whatever advantage accrued. André Béteille would call such inequality dispersed rather than cumulative.
- Chiefship existed among some — Gond, Bhil, Khasi syiem, Naga angh — but rarely allowed hereditary appropriation of others’ produce on a large scale.
How the pattern has changed
- From ritual rank to economic class. Ownership of land, a salaried post or a contract now outranks lineage precedence. A contractor’s son and a landless migrant may belong to the same clan and no longer to the same social world.
- Entry of caste-like hierarchy. Through Sanskritisation — the concept is M. N. Srinivas’s — settled tribes adopt vegetarianism, hypergamy and commensal restriction and claim Kshatriya descent. F. G. Bailey (Tribe, Caste and Nation, 1960) and Surajit Sinha described this as a tribe–caste continuum rather than a boundary, in which rank becomes hereditary and purity-based.
- Sharpened gender stratification. Women lose ground as customary usufruct gives way to titled property recorded in men’s names, and accusation of witchcraft becomes a mechanism of dispossession — which is why Jharkhand legislated against witch-branding in 2001 and Assam enacted its Witch Hunting (Prohibition, Prevention and Protection) Act, 2015, brought into force in 2018.
- Stratification between tribes. Numerically large, road-connected tribes monopolise reservation and office while the 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups fall further behind; Census 2011’s ST literacy of about 59% against 73% nationally conceals a far wider internal spread.
- New cleavages of religion and residence: converted against non-converted, urban salaried against forest-dependent, plains against interior.
Factors responsible
- Land and revenue settlement, which made land private and alienable, and commercialisation, which brought moneylender, market and debt.
- Industrialisation, mining and displacement in the central Indian belt, creating both a proletariat and a compensation-holding elite.
- Protective discrimination and education — reservation, Eklavya Model Residential Schools, public employment — which reward the already advantaged among tribes.
- Democratic politics: PESA, 1996 and panchayat and assembly seats transfer authority from customary office-holders to elected leaders and party brokers.
- State development effort itself: the Dharti Aaba Janjatiya Gram Utkarsh Abhiyan, launched on 2 October 2024 with ₹79,156 crore for 63,843 villages, will reach some villages and households better than others, redistributing rank as it delivers services.
Conclusion
The direction of change is from dispersed, ascriptive, ritually anchored inequality to cumulative inequality organised by property and education. Tribal society is being restratified rather than levelled — and the danger is precisely that the new hierarchy, unlike the old, reproduces itself across generations.