Write short note : The future of tribal culture. (1984)
Asked in 1984, the question assumed decline was the only trajectory. Four decades on the evidence is more interesting: tribal culture in India is eroding in its everyday institutions while consolidating as public identity. Its future turns on which process sets the terms for the other.
What is being lost
- Language. The UNESCO atlas of endangered languages lists 197 Indian languages, more than in any other country, most of them tribal. Census practice compounds it: mother tongues with fewer than 10,000 speakers have not been listed separately since 1971, so tongues like Birhor and Korwa disappear administratively before they disappear socially. Ganesh N. Devy’s People’s Linguistic Survey of India documented 780 living languages and estimates roughly 220 lost since 1961.
- Institutions. The youth dormitory — the Muria ghotul that Verrier Elwin studied (The Muria and Their Ghotul, 1947), the Oraon dhumkuria — has largely gone, undone by schooling, missionary disapproval and reformist embarrassment. With it went a mechanism of peer socialisation that no school replaces.
- Everyday markers. Dress, cuisine, spirit deities and community festivals give way under Sanskritisation (M. N. Srinivas), conversion and wage migration. Nirmal Kumar Bose’s “Hindu method of tribal absorption” (1941) described the classical route: a guaranteed occupational niche traded for autonomy.
What is being asserted
- Script and status. Santali entered the Eighth Schedule through the 92nd Amendment (2003); the Ol Chiki script devised by Pandit Raghunath Murmu in 1925 made a spoken language a literary one, and the Constitution of India was published in Santali in Ol Chiki in December 2025, on the script’s centenary.
- Religion. In Census 2011, 49.57 lakh people returned Sarna under “Other Religions and Persuasions”; the demand for a separate tribal religious code before Census 2027 insists that tribal faith is not a residual category. Donyi-Polo in Arunachal Pradesh shows the same move — an oral tradition codified with prayer houses, hymnals and a calendar.
- Art, letters, media. Gond and Bhil painting entered gallery and market circuits from the 1980s; Adivasi writing in Santali, Ho and Mundari and in Hindi and English now constitutes a literature; social media lets young Adivasis circulate song, dance and protest without intermediaries.
The catch: commodification
- Market recognition cuts both ways. The tourist gaze rewards what is visible and photographable — costume, dance, festival — and strips the ritual and land relations that gave them meaning. The “human safari” controversy over the Andaman Trunk Road through the Jarawa reserve is the extreme case; the festival stage the everyday one.
- Virginius Xaxa points out that tribes have changed religion, language and livelihood without ceasing to be tribes: change is not extinction. André Béteille adds that the category is defined by distance from the surrounding society, so assertion itself alters what “tribal” means.
Conclusion
Tribal culture will not vanish, but neither will it survive as ethnography once imagined it. It is moving from a lived totality to a chosen identity — thinner in daily practice, louder in public life. Its quality will be decided by control over the material base: secure rights in land, forest and language are what let a culture change on its own terms instead of being changed. That is why the Forest Rights Act, PESA and the script and census demands belong in one answer.