Define ethnicity. Discuss the factors responsible for the growth of ethnic movements in India. (2022)
Ethnicity is not a quantity of culture a group possesses but a relation it maintains with others. That shift — from content to relation — explains why culturally stable communities mobilise at particular moments.
Defining ethnicity
- Max Weber (Economy and Society, 1922) defined ethnic groups as those entertaining a subjective belief in common descent, resting on custom or memories of migration. The belief need not be true; it matters because it underwrites monopolistic closure — keeping others from land, jobs and honour.
- Fredrik Barth (Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 1969) made the decisive move: what defines the group is the boundary, not the cultural stuff it encloses. Boundaries persist as people and customs cross them. Ethnicity survives contact and is often sharpened by it.
- Three families follow. Primordialists — Clifford Geertz (“The Integrative Revolution”, 1963) and Edward Shils — treat ethnic ties as coercive “givens” of birth and language. Instrumentalists — Paul Brass, Abner Cohen (Custom and Politics in Urban Africa, 1969) — read ethnicity as a resource elites mobilise in competition for state goods. Constructivists, after Benedict Anderson‘s Imagined Communities (1983), see identity manufactured by census, map and print.
- T. K. Oommen (Citizenship, Nationality and Ethnicity, 1997) localises this: a collectivity holding its ancestral homeland is a nation; severed from it, or settled in another’s, it becomes an ethnie. Ethnification follows territorial dislocation, making displacement and migration the engines of Indian ethnicity. Ethnicity is therefore not tribe: a tribe becomes ethnic only when it organises its difference against others.
Factors behind the growth of ethnic movements in India
- Uneven development and relative deprivation. W. G. Runciman (1966) showed deprivation is felt comparatively, against a reference group. Chotanagpur’s minerals financed steel towns while Adivasis lost land; K. S. Singh traced the Jharkhand movement’s passage “from ethnicity to regionalism”.
- Migration and the sons-of-the-soil dynamic. Myron Weiner (Sons of the Soil, 1978) modelled it exactly: a locally rooted group lagging in modern-sector credentials faces migrants holding the jobs, and the demand becomes nativist preference — Assam’s anti-outsider agitation, the Bodo movement, nativism in Bombay.
- Reorganisation and the politics of recognition. Reorganisation in 1956 taught every collectivity that identity converts into territory. In August 2026 the Centre constituted a committee to negotiate a “permanent political solution” to the Gorkhaland demand. Cultural markers institutionalise the same way — Santali in the Eighth Schedule (2003), the Sarna code demand before Census 2027.
- Competition for reservation and scheduling. The Scheduled Tribe list is a prize. A Manipur High Court direction of March 2023 on Meitei inclusion triggered the violence of 3 May 2023; in September 2026 the state told its Assembly that of roughly 60,000 displaced, about 36,000 were resettled and 24,000 remained in camps.
- The opportunity structure of electoral democracy. Numbers win seats, so ethnicity pays. The Bodo Accord of 27 January 2020 converted an armed movement into council politics, contested peacefully at the Bodoland council election of September 2025.
Limits of the explanation
Structural factors over-predict: most ethnic difference never becomes a movement. Ashutosh Varshney (Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life, 2002) found associational inter-communal engagement, not the absence of difference, keeps the peace; Dipankar Gupta adds that ethnic mobilisation contests the nation-state itself, communal mobilisation only the government of the day.
Conclusion
Ethnicity in India is not a survival of tradition awaiting modernisation; it is modernity’s own product — of the census, the state list, the mine and the ballot. Movements grow where a dispossessed boundary group with a homeland is also handed a democratic instrument for redress — which makes most of them a demand to enter the nation on better terms, not to leave it.