• Surajit Sinha was an anthropologist who served the Government of India in various capacities on anthropological issues and was Deputy Director of the Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta.
• He conducted extensive fieldwork on the Bhumij tribe of Bengal and Bihar and had special interests in tribal transformation in central India and the structure of Indian civilization.
• His work focused on the following themes:
  • Tribe-caste and tribe-peasant continuum
  • Levels of economic initiatives and ethnic groups
  • Tribal movements
  • Sociology of religion
  • Field studies on the people of India
• Sinha demonstrated the possibility of the orthogenetic development of civilization in India from a primitive cultural level, comparable to less acculturated tribes of peninsular India.
• He identified elements of transaction in tribal cultures moving towards peasant cultures, based on Redfield’s folk-peasant-urban continuum.
• Sinha examined tribal-caste interactions and proposed concepts like tribal-peasant continuum, Bhumij-Ksatriya continuum, and tribal-Rajput continuum to understand the process of transformation in middle India.
• In his study of the Bhumij, scheduled tribes of West Bengal and Bihar, Sinha analyzed how tribals integrated with the regional Hindu caste system.
• He defined two ideal levels of socio-cultural systems: the ‘tribal’ level and the emergent ‘Hindu peasantry’ level, distinguishing them in terms of habitat, economy, social structure, and ideological system.
• The peasant level included features like surplus economy based on settled agriculture, social stratification, ethical religion, and puritanical values, contrasting with the egalitarian and non-puritanical nature of the tribal level.
• Sinha viewed the tribe as a system of social relations and a state of mind and cultural traditions, both characterized by isolation and lack of stratification.
• Upper Hindu castes had weak social interactions with tribes and considered their way of life as unsophisticated and wild.

Theoretical and Methodological Understanding

• Sinha derives the characteristics of tribe-caste and tribe-peasant polarities from Redfield’s concepts of ‘folk-urban continuum’ and ‘peasant society and culture’.
• He redefines only the polarities, specifically oriented to analyze the nature of the continuum in central India.
• Sinha’s analysis primarily focuses on the concepts of tribe, caste, and peasant.

Tribal Society

• According to Sinha, tribal society is isolated in terms of ecology, demography, economy, politics, and other social relations from other ethnic groups.
• This isolation generates and is reinforced by a strong in-group sentiment.
• Internally, the group is characterized by homogeneity due to the lack of social stratification and role specialization, with differentiation only by age, sex, and kinship.
• Such an isolated, homogeneous, and unstratified group is disconnected from the great traditions of Indian civilizationin terms of objective reality and objective awareness.
• The value system within the tribe emphasizes equality, closeness between the human, natural, and the supernaturalworld, with a lack of systematization of ideas.
• The tribal society lacks a ‘sophisticated’ stratum of culture, ethical religion, and puritanical asceticism.

Caste Groups

• In contrast to the isolated, homogeneous, and unstratified ‘tribe’, ‘caste’ is typically connected, heterogeneous, and stratified.
• Caste is characterized by the following social structural features:
  • Multi-ethnic residence in the local community.
  • Interaction with inter-ethnic groups and stratified land tenure.
  • Ranked and interdependent interaction with other ethnic groups.
• Critical features that distinguish the caste pole of the level of ‘culture’:
  • Interaction with the sub-cultures of other ethnic groups in the region.
  • Interaction with the great traditions.
  • Polarization of lay and elite cultures, with elaboration and systematization of cultural ideals in the elite culture.
  • Hierarchic view of social relations supported by the concept of ritual pollution.
  • Emergence of ethical religion and a puritanical view of life.