What are the features that distinguish tribes from the rest of the population? (2013)
“The rest of the population” is the operative phrase: what marks tribes in India is nothing intrinsic but a set of features defined against caste-peasant society. For the 705 notified Scheduled Tribes — 8.6% of the population in Census 2011 — they hold in the aggregate and as tendencies, never uniformly; it is the cluster, not any one trait, that distinguishes.
Habitat and demography
Tribal India is an ecological India: the hill and forest interior, the central mineral belt and the frontier. Madhya Pradesh holds the largest ST population and Mizoram the highest share; Fifth Schedule areas cover ten states, the Sixth Schedule four in the north-east. The 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups and the island communities — Jarawa, Onge, Sentinelese — mark the extreme of that separation.
Economic organisation
- The defining feature is a direct, largely unmediated relation to land and forest. F. G. Bailey put it sharply: the tribal economy is technological — hunting, gathering, shifting cultivation, minor forest produce — while the caste economy is institutional, occupation fixed by birth and mediated by the jajmani order.
- Tenure is corporate, not individual — the Munda khuntkatti system of lineage ownership, recognised in the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, 1908, has no analogue in caste society.
Social organisation
- Kinship is the master principle. David Mandelbaum argued that in tribal life kinship organises not only marriage and descent but inheritance, the division of labour and the distribution of power — in caste society those are distributed by the ritual hierarchy.
- Structure is segmentary and clan-based: exogamous clans within an endogamous tribe, a tribal council and customary law instead of a supra-local hierarchy.
- There is no purity–pollution ranking and no untouchability among tribes; women enjoy comparatively greater autonomy, and the Muria ghotul and Oraon dhumkuria youth dormitories have no caste counterpart. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, among the Raj Gonds of Adilabad and the Chenchu, took this egalitarian ethos and personal autonomy to be the real contrast with caste, and showed how contact eroded it as Gond land passed to immigrant cultivators.
Language, religion and culture
Language is the strongest single marker: tribal communities speak across all four Indian language families — Austro-Asiatic (Santhali, Mundari, Ho), Tibeto-Burman in the north-east, Dravidian (Gondi, Kui) and Indo-Aryan (Bhili) — and Santhali’s inclusion in the Eighth Schedule by the 92nd Amendment (2003) recognised that. Religion centres on nature spirits, ancestors and sacred groves rather than temple, text and priest, which is the basis of the Sarna code demand, carried by a Jharkhand Assembly resolution of November 2020 and renewed before Census 2027.
Political and legal distinctiveness
A tribe is a political community coterminous with a cultural one; a caste is one segment inside a larger polity. Indian law preserves the difference — the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, PESA, 1996 and the Forest Rights Act, 2006 give tribes a collective legal personality no other group holds.
How far the contrast holds
Every feature leaks at the margins: the Bhils speak the regional language, Munda landlords held serfs, the Toda and Naga are ranked, and most STs now cultivate settled fields. André Béteille therefore defined tribe negatively, by distance from the surrounding civilisation, and Virginius Xaxa calls it a residual category; G. S. Ghurye pushed this furthest, reading tribes as “backward Hindus”. The north-east escapes the argument altogether, never having stood inside the caste order.
Conclusion
The durable distinguishing feature is structural, not cultural: a community whose land, livelihood, polity and belief were organised outside the caste-state order and have been dispossessed by its expansion. That is why the 36.4% rejection rate of Forest Rights Act claims says more about who is tribal in India today than any trait list.