Write short note with a sociological perspective on the following in not more than 150 words: Unity and diversity among the tribes in India. (2011)
India’s 705 notified Scheduled Tribes — 10.43 crore people, 8.6% of the population (Census 2011) — form a single administrative category covering communities that share no common language, religion or economy. The sociological question is therefore what holds the category together. André Béteille‘s answer, that tribes share a relation to the wider society rather than a culture of their own, frames their unity as structural and political rather than cultural.
Axes of diversity
- Language: tribal speech spans four families — Austro-Asiatic (Santali, Mundari, Ho), Tibeto-Burman (Naga, Mizo, Bodo), Dravidian (Gondi, Kurukh) and Indo-Aryan (Bhili). Santali entered the Eighth Schedule in 2003, while scores of smaller tongues are officially counted as endangered.
- Scale and region: Gonds and Bhils number in crores, while several of the 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups — the Sentinelese, Great Andamanese, Shompen — survive in hundreds. L. P. Vidyarthi‘s division into Himalayan, middle-Indian, western, southern and island culture zones remains the standard mapping.
- Economy: from hunting-gathering and shifting cultivation, through settled peasant agriculture, to a salaried urban tribal middle class created by reservation.
- Religion: Sarna and Donyi-Polo faiths in central India and Arunachal Pradesh, substantial Christianity in the north-east and Chotanagpur, and Hinduised tribes drawn in by what Nirmal Kumar Bose called the Hindu method of tribal absorption.
- Political-legal status: Sixth Schedule autonomy and demographic majority in the north-east, against Fifth Schedule protection for scattered minorities in central India.
Sources of unity
- A common relation to land and forest, and a shared history of dispossession — colonial forest law, land alienation, and displacement by dams and mines, of which Scheduled Tribes are roughly 40% (Xaxa Committee, 2014).
- Relatively egalitarian, kin-ordered social organisation standing outside the purity–pollution ranking that orders caste.
- A shared constitutional status that has manufactured a pan-tribal politics: the Adivasi claim, the Sarna code demand pressed again before Census 2027, and common entitlements under PESA (1996) and the Forest Rights Act (2006).
- A repeated history of common political action, running from Birsa Munda‘s ulgulan of 1899–1900 to the twelve Niyamgiri gram sabhas that refused bauxite mining after the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling.
Conclusion
Unity among Indian tribes is an achievement of history and policy, not an inheritance of culture. Diversity is the ethnographic fact; unity is the political project built on shared dispossession — which is why Virginius Xaxa reads “tribe” in India as an administratively created and politically contested category rather than a cultural type.