Explain the definitional problems concerning the tribal communities in India. (2020)
India has 705 notified Scheduled Tribes and no definition of a tribe. The difficulty is structural, not careless: it sits in three layers — a concept borrowed from elsewhere, an administrative list that replaced it, and a politics that now decides who enters the list.
The conceptual layer
The tribe entered Indian usage through colonial ethnography and the census, which from 1901 set “tribe” against “caste” and relabelled the same populations repeatedly — hill and forest tribes, “primitive tribes” in 1931, “backward tribes” under the Government of India Act, 1935, Scheduled Tribes in 1950. Each label assumed an earlier evolutionary stage awaiting absorption. Virginius Xaxa makes the decisive point: tribes were conceptualised residually, by what they were not — not caste, not Hindu, not settled — so the category never acquired positive content. André Béteille reached the same conclusion from the other side: since Indian tribes have lived on the fluctuating margins of civilisation for millennia rather than across a colonial frontier, tribe here can only be a matter of relative distance — of degree, not kind.
The administrative layer
The Constitution transfers the problem rather than solving it. Article 342 lays down only a procedure — presidential notification after consulting the Governor, alteration only by Parliament — and Article 366(25) defines STs as those so notified. Scheduling rests in practice on the Lokur Committee (1965) tests: primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact, backwardness. The Xaxa Committee (2014) held these obsolete and pejorative, recording an observer’s condescension rather than a social structure. Scheduling is also state-specific: the same community may be ST in one state and OBC across the border, so identity becomes a function of jurisdiction.
The political layer
Because the list carries reservation, protected land rights and Fifth or Sixth Schedule cover, it is fought over. Manipur’s Meitei claim — a High Court direction of March 2023, deleted in February 2024 after the violence that followed — and Maharashtra’s long Dhangar–Dhangad dispute show a sociological category being settled by agitation and litigation. The politics runs internationally too: India ratified ILO Convention 107 but not 169, and voted for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) while holding that all Indians are indigenous, so resisting the Adivasi claim. Jharkhand’s renewed demand for a separate Sarna religious code before Census 2027 shows the contest from within.
Conclusion
No better checklist will solve this. “Tribe” in India is an administratively created and politically contested status, and the honest course — as Xaxa argued — is to rest it on distinctive social organisation and a documented history of dispossession rather than on primitiveness.