Describe the distinctive features of tribal communities in India. Discuss the factors affecting tribal identity. (2005)
India’s 705 notified Scheduled Tribes, 10.43 crore people or 8.6 per cent of the population in Census 2011, share no single sociological trait. The distinctive features are best stated as a cluster holding in the aggregate; identity must then be explained historically, since, as Virginius Xaxa argues, it is produced by interaction with the wider society rather than inherited as a primordial essence.
Distinctive features
- Territory and descent, not occupation. Membership follows birth into a clan settled on a common habitat. The Imperial Gazetteer (1911) formula — common name, common dialect, common territory — still names the core, to which D. N. Majumdar added a developed system of mutual obligation.
- Language. Each tribe typically has its own speech, drawn from the Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Dravidian families — long the single best marker distinguishing tribe from caste.
- Segmentary political organisation and customary law, run through clan and village councils rather than a state or jajmani hierarchy.
- Community control of resources — the Munda khuntkatti tenure, shifting cultivation, collective rights over forest produce — instead of private, ritually graded landholding.
- Religion of nature, ancestors and place: sacred groves, totemic clans, no scriptural canon, no priestly order claiming ritual supremacy.
- Relative egalitarianism, including markedly greater female autonomy in work, marriage and divorce than in neighbouring caste society.
- The caveat. Every trait fails somewhere: the Meena and Bhil have been in dense contact for centuries, most tribes now cultivate settled fields, the Toda and Naga are internally stratified. André Béteille therefore holds the tribe definable only negatively, by relative distance from the surrounding caste-peasant civilisation, and notes that the category is administrative before it is sociological — Article 342 makes an ST whoever the President has notified.
Factors affecting tribal identity
- Colonial restructuring is the deepest layer. The Indian Forest Acts of 1865, 1878 and 1927 turned customary rights into state-granted privileges; revenue settlement manufactured landlords over lineage-held land; the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 criminalised whole communities. The diku, outsider trader and moneylender, became the figure against which tribal identity was defined — witness the Santhal Hul (1855) and Birsa Munda’s Ulgulan (1899–1900).
- Development and displacement. Tribal areas hold the minerals, forests and dam sites; Walter Fernandes‘s widely cited estimate puts tribals at roughly 40 per cent of those displaced since 1947, against a population share under nine per cent. The Forest Rights Act, 2006 was to correct this, yet 36.4 per cent of claims disposed of by 31 December 2025 were rejected.
- Religion. Sanskritisation, Christian conversion and the Sarna code movement pull in three directions, making the census religion column a battleground before Census 2027.
- Language loss. Against 2,843 mother tongues recorded in 2011, the government’s scheme for endangered languages has identified 117 as at risk, most of them tribal.
- Internal differentiation. Reservation and education have produced an urban tribal middle class asserting identity culturally and politically, while the poor mobilise over land and forest; the two no longer coincide.
Conclusion
The features describe a type; the factors explain a trajectory. Tribal identity in India is neither a survival nor a fiction but a continuously reconstructed response to dispossession — which is why it strengthens politically even as its classic cultural markers erode.