Write short note : Issues of tribal identity. (1997)
Tribal identity in India is less a cultural inheritance than a contested political category. Because Article 342 makes a Scheduled Tribe whoever the President notifies, and because notification carries reservation, land protection and Fifth Schedule cover, the boundary of “tribe” is an object of organised struggle. André Béteille‘s warning applies: a sociological category that is also a prize of politics cannot be defined sociologically alone.
The list as a resource: claims to be scheduled and de-scheduled
- The Lokur Committee (1965) criteria — primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact, backwardness — appear nowhere in the Constitution, yet still govern inclusion. Groups outside agitate to enter; groups inside resist dilution.
- Manipur is the sharpest contemporary case. After a High Court direction of March 2023 to consider Meitei inclusion in the ST list, tribal solidarity marches from 3 May 2023 triggered violence that ran through President’s Rule (13 February 2025 to February 2026); the Court deleted the offending paragraph in February 2024. ST status here is not a description of a way of life but a claim on land, seats and hill-valley power.
- The Denotified and Nomadic Tribes, freed of the Criminal Tribes Act in 1952, largely remain outside the ST list altogether — identity stigmatised but unrecognised.
Indigeneity: Adivasi against vanvasi
Virginius Xaxa (Economic and Political Weekly, 1999) argues that Indian tribes meet the substantive criteria of indigenous peoples — prior occupation, distinct culture, subordination by a dominant society. Béteille, in his 1998 essay on the idea of indigenous people, replies that no group in India can establish exclusive first occupancy, and that the settler-colonial frame that fits the Americas or Australia distorts an Indian society of continuous migration. Against both stands the vanvasi (forest-dweller) usage, which absorbs tribes into the Hindu fold. The vocabulary one chooses is already a position.
Insider and outsider
The diku opposition survives in modern form: domicile rules, land-transfer law and employment quotas in Jharkhand, the Bodoland councils, and the Sixth Schedule areas of the North-East. Statehood for Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh in 2000 converted cultural assertion into territorial politics without resolving who counts as a local.
Religion, language and the census
Census 2011 placed 79,37,734 people under “Other religions and persuasions”, nearly 89 per cent of them Scheduled Tribes; the Sarna code demand for a distinct column before Census 2027 is a bid to be counted as neither Hindu nor Christian. Language claims run parallel — Santali’s inclusion in the Eighth Schedule (92nd Amendment, 2003) stands against 117 officially identified endangered languages, mostly tribal.
Differentiation within
Urban and migrant tribal populations sustain identity through associations and festivals rather than territory. Meanwhile State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (1 August 2024), a seven-judge bench ruling 6:1, permitted sub-classification within Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and a majority endorsed excluding a creamy layer. The better-placed tribes’ capture of benefits, against the 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, is now a constitutional question.
Conclusion
The issue of tribal identity is not whether tribes are culturally distinct but who is entitled to claim that distinctiveness, and for what. Identity has become the medium through which tribal communities bargain with the state — which strengthens it as politics even as it weakens it as a description of shared life.