Trace the impact of cultural contact on the Indian tribes. (1993)
Indian tribes have never been sealed societies, so the question is not whether contact occurred but what kind it was. Traced over three phases, contact shifts from exchange between unequal neighbours to incorporation by a state and a market, and the cultural consequences change with it.
Pre-colonial contact: a continuum, not a frontier
- Nirmal Kumar Bose’s account of the Hindu method of tribal absorption (1941), based on the Juang of Odisha, showed the mechanism: a tribe gave up its self-sufficient economy for a specialised occupational niche and entered the caste order, usually low in it.
- Mobility ran upward too. Surajit Sinha, in “State Formation and Rajput Myth in Tribal Central India” (1962), traced how Bhumij and Gond chiefs built little kingdoms and claimed Rajput descent — M. N. Srinivas’s Sanskritisation operating at the level of a chiefdom.
- F. G. Bailey, in Tribe, Caste and Nation (1960), argued from the Kondhs of Odisha that tribe and caste are ends of a continuum, not distinct types.
- Absorption was therefore real but slow, and it left the tribe’s territorial base largely intact.
Colonial contact: the rupture
- Forest law and land settlement converted customary rights into revocable privileges; traders, moneylenders and settlers — the diku of Chotanagpur — acquired tribal land under the protection of the new administration, and tribes became tenants and labourers on their own soil.
- Labour recruitment for Assam’s tea gardens and overseas indenture moved tribal populations out of their habitats altogether. The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 criminalised whole communities.
- Missions brought schooling, literacy and script — and a rival cosmology, producing Christian tribal majorities in parts of the North-East and Chotanagpur.
- The response was rebellion, not passivity: the Santhal hul (1855) and Birsa Munda’s ulgulan (1899–1900), whose legacy the state now commemorates each 15 November.
Post-independence contact: development, market and media
- Development displacement replaced settler encroachment as the main solvent. Walter Fernandes estimates tribals at over 40 per cent of those displaced by dams and mines, against 8.6 per cent of the population (Census 2011).
- Market integration, circular migration, schooling and mobile media now reach remote habitats, while reservation has produced a salaried tribal middle class increasingly distant from the village.
- Contact also generates revitalisation. Santali secured recognition in the Eighth Schedule in 2003 and is written in the Ol Chiki script; 0.79 crore people returned “other religions and persuasions” in Census 2011, and the Sarna code demand continues before Census 2027.
What the concepts capture, and miss
Acculturation in the sense of Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton and Melville Herskovits (1936) assumes continuous first-hand contact changing both groups; in India the change has been overwhelmingly one-way. Detribalisation names the loss of institutions without entry into new ones, and cultural lag, after William Fielding Ogburn, explains why material change outruns normative adjustment. L. P. Vidyarthi’s division of tribal India into Himalayan, Middle Indian, Western and Southern zones is a reminder that contact has been uneven: the North-East retained autonomy the central belt lost.
Conclusion
Cultural contact has cost Indian tribes land, language and institutional autonomy, but it has also produced literacy, political organisation and a self-conscious Adivasi identity that did not exist before. The decisive variable is not contact but control — whether tribes entered the encounter on terms they could shape.