What is the nature of religious change among tribal communities? Illustrate with two examples from colonial and post-independence times. (2017)
Tribal religion is classically non-textual, non-congregational and territorial — spirits of hill, grove and ancestor mediated by a village priest, not a scripture. Change in such a religion is never a simple exchange of faiths; it reorganises the relation between community, land and the sacred. Four processes capture its nature, and two movements a century apart show how they work.
The nature of the change: four processes
- Sanskritisation. M. N. Srinivas coined the term in Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952) for adoption of the practices of a ritually higher group. Among tribes it usually takes a Vaishnavite form: blood sacrifice abandoned, liquor and certain meats given up, a personal deity, a guru and temple worship admitted. Nirmal Kumar Bose named the wider mechanism the “Hindu method of tribal absorption” (1941) — a secure occupational niche exchanged for ritual subordination.
- Conversion. Christian missions offered literacy, medicine and legal defence against landlords and moneylenders. This is change by rupture, not accretion.
- Revitalisation and reform. Anthony F. C. Wallace’s revitalisation movement (1956) fits the Indian record: under stress a prophet reorganises the tradition itself, purifying rather than abandoning it.
- Secularisation and syncretism. Sacred groves shrink with the forest, priestly authority passes to state and market, and what survives is often a mixed form.
Colonial illustration: the Tana Bhagat movement among the Oraon, from 1914
- Colonial settlement in Chotanagpur had turned Oraon khuntkatti cultivators into tenants of outsider dikus. On this ground Jatra Bhagat began preaching in 1914 in Ranchi district.
- Its content was reformist and Sanskritising: one supreme god, rejection of the older bhut and bonga cult, an end to animal sacrifice, liquor and meat, and refusal of wage labour for dikus.
- Its form was anti-colonial: withholding of rent, of begar and of chowkidari tax — satyagraha before the word, which flowed into the Non-Cooperation movement from December 1920 and left the Tana Bhagats permanently Gandhian and committed to ahimsa.
- Change here is reform from within: an idiom of purity borrowed from the dominant religion to press a political claim on land.
Post-independence illustration: the Donyi-Polo revival in Arunachal Pradesh
- Christianity in Arunachal Pradesh grew from roughly one per cent of the population in 1971 to about thirty per cent in 2011. The response was not counter-conversion but institutionalisation of the indigenous faith.
- Led by Talom Rukbo, Adi intellectuals’ deliberations from 1968 produced the Donyi-Polo Yelam Kebang in 1986. An oral tradition acquired what it never had: prayer halls (gangging among the Adi, nyedar namlo among the Nyishi), printed hymnals and prayer books, standardised ritual, weekly congregation and a festival calendar. Census returns track it — 36,954 in 1971 against 3,31,370 in 2011.
- Change here is reflexive: religion becomes a self-conscious “religion”, adopting the congregational form of its rival in order to resist it.
What the two illustrations reveal
Both answer a loss of control over resources and identity, and both are at once religious and political; only the reference group differs — a Hindu idiom in 1914, a Christian organisational template after 1947. Census 2011 records 79,37,734 persons under “Other Religions and Persuasions”, 89.39% of them Scheduled Tribes, including 49,57,467 returning Sarna. The Sarna code demand — resolved by the Jharkhand Assembly in November 2020 and pressed on the Centre again before Census 2027 — is the same claim in administrative form.
Conclusion
Tribal religious change is neither steady Hinduisation nor steady Christianisation but a dialectic: contact produces absorption, absorption produces assertion. What is really changing is the form of tribal religion — from diffuse territorial practice into a bounded, named, countable faith. That is a gain in political voice bought at the cost of the very diffuseness that once defined it.