Write short note : Integration of tribes in Hindu culture. (2002)
Integration here names a long civilisational process, not a policy. The tribe has never been sealed off from Hindu society: communities have passed into the caste order, and tribal cults have passed into the Hindu pantheon. The traffic is genuinely two-way — but the terms of exchange are not equal.
The machinery of absorption
- N. K. Bose‘s “The Hindu method of tribal absorption” (1941), from fieldwork among the Juang of Odisha, is the classic statement. Hindu society absorbed tribes not by force but by offering a guaranteed occupational niche and the subsistence security of the jajmani order. The tribe surrendered corporate autonomy and reappeared as a jati.
- M. N. Srinivas‘s Sanskritisation supplies the cultural grammar of what follows: vegetarianism, teetotalism, Brahmin priests, new life-cycle rites, a twice-born model. Crucially, ritual claims ratify power already won — land, numbers, office — rather than create it.
- Surajit Sinha (State Formation and Rajput Myth in Tribal Central India, 1962) traced the elite route: Bhumij chiefs of Manbhum commissioned Rajput genealogies and turned chiefdoms into little kingdoms. The Raj Gond, Bhil and Meena show variants of the same Kshatriyisation.
What Hindu culture absorbed in return
- L. P. Vidyarthi‘s sacred complex (The Sacred Complex in Hindu Gaya, 1961) showed great and little traditions in continuous exchange at a pilgrimage centre, with sacred geography, performances and specialists drawn from below as much as imposed from above.
- The Jagannath cult at Puri is the sharpest case. The Daitapati servitors, who handle the images at the Navakalevara, claim descent from Vishvavasu the Sabara hunter. Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann Kulke and G. C. Tripathi (The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa, 1978) read the cult as a local deity Hinduised into a regional tradition, Kulke adding that temple-building in tribal tracts legitimised Hindu kingship at the frontier. Shabari in the Ramayana and the Kirata episode of the Mahabharata are textual traces of the same movement.
The price of entry
- Absorption is entry at the bottom. Clan-corporate land (Munda khuntkatti), the tribal council and relative egalitarianism give way to hierarchy, ritual disability and dependence.
- Women’s autonomy contracts: bride-price yields to dowry, and easy divorce and widow remarriage are traded for respectability.
- Hence the divergent readings — G. S. Ghurye saw an old process completing itself, Marxists read proletarianisation behind the ritual idiom, and assertion movements read erasure.
The counter-assertion
Census 2011 recorded 79,37,734 persons under “Other religions and persuasions”, close to 89 per cent of them Scheduled Tribes, including about 49.6 lakh Sarna and 3.31 lakh Donyi-Polo. The Sarna code demand for a distinct religion column, carried by a Jharkhand Assembly resolution in November 2020 and pressed again before Census 2027, is a refusal of Hindu enumeration; so, differently, is Christianity among the Oraon, Munda, Kharia and north-eastern tribes. Jharkhandi cultural revival — the sarna sthal, Santali publishing, the memory of Birsa Munda — works the same way.
Conclusion
Integration into Hindu culture is real, reciprocal and unfinished, yet profoundly unequal. Hinduism took tribal deities and gave them universality; it took tribal communities and gave them rank. That asymmetry, not contact itself, is what tribal assertion contests today.