• Tribes in India differ from tribal groups elsewhere in the world because they are not homogeneous, and even within a single tribe there exists internal heterogeneity due to varying levels of integration with the larger society.

• Historically, Indian tribes maintained a largely harmonious relationship with mainstream society until the arrival of the British, when their social and cultural life became subordinate to colonial economic interests, a condition that largely continued even after Independence, leading to unrest in some regions.

• The Indian state has faced persistent difficulty in defining tribes, resulting in the absence of a coherent and consistent development policy for tribal communities.

• Recent processes of deforestation and mineral exploration in tribal regions have revived serious concerns about displacement and tribal development.

• Nowhere else in the world is there such a high concentration of tribal population within the mainstream society as in India.

• There are more than 700 Scheduled Tribes, notified under Article 342 of the Constitution of India.

• According to the 2015–16 Annual Report of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, the population of Scheduled Tribes is 10.45 crore, which, as per the 2011 Census, constitutes 8.6% of India’s total population.

• Indian tribes show wide regional diversity in religion, kinship and political organisation, and their spatial distribution is uneven, with states like Haryana and Punjab having almost no tribal population, while central Indian states have a significant concentration.

Features of Tribal Groups

• According to Mandelbaum, Indian tribes possess distinctive socio-cultural features, such as the centrality of kinship as the main basis of social bonds, the absence of a clearly defined hierarchy, and the lack of strong, complex and formal organisation.

• They are characterised by a communitarian system of land holding, with little or no notion of private property, a segmentary social structure, and a tendency to place little value on surplus accumulation, capital formation and market exchange.

• Tribal religion shows an absence of sharp distinction between form and substance, and tribals display a distinct psychological orientation towards enjoyment of life.

• In addition to Mandelbaum’s ideal-typical description, Indian tribes generally have simple and totemic religions, absence of caste, and distinct languages.

• On the basis of racial features (though the racial theory is now largely rejected by genetic research), Guha classified Indian tribes into Proto-Australoid, Mongoloid and Negrito groups.

• Sociologically, tribes are also studied in terms of their specific social organisation and problems, which differ from those of the mainstream population.

• Major tribal problems include land and forest alienation, indebtedness, displacement, health issues and insurgency.

• As per the 2011 Census, tribals have a sex ratio of 990, but a low literacy rate of 59%, and a school dropout rate exceeding 60%.

Definitional Problems

• Historically, Indian tribes have been referred to by various terms such as Adivasi, aborigines, primitives and backward Hindus, and the definitional problem of tribes involves both the difficulty of defining tribes and of understanding them in the Indian context.

• During the British period, administrators used the term tribe mainly to estimate the numerical strength of cultural communities, and early British administrator-anthropologists made little distinction between caste and tribe, viewing the difference largely in terms of mode of production and settlement pattern, and considering Indian society as a largely inward-looking single community.

• This view later changed as anthropological studies of groups like the Gonds (Central India), Todas (Nilgiris) and Adivasis (Andaman Islands) highlighted their distinct lifestyles and religions, leading to the distinction that agricultural village groups were castes and forest-based, primitive occupational groups were tribes.

• In an ethnocentric and evolutionary perspective, some early ethnographers equated tribes with primitive bestiality, and classical evolutionary theorists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries described tribes as contemporary primitives, remnants of early humanity marked by savagery and barbarism.

• British administrators applied subjective labels, with Hutton calling them Aborigines and Elwin referring to them as Aboriginals.

• Many Indian scholars rejected the binary opposition between caste and tribe, as S.C. Roy argued that Jana (tribe) and Jati (caste) coexisted for long, Mandelbaum denied strict cultural differences between them, and S.C. Dube spoke of the coexistence of the Great Tradition of Hinduism and the Little Tradition of tribes, supported by L.P. Vidyarthi and Ghurye using ancient textual evidence.

• A.R. Desai classified tribes by their degree of assimilation into mainstream society, and Andre Beteille differentiated tribal groups by language, religion and degree of isolation, making later Indian approaches more empirical and realistic.

• In contemporary sociology, tribes are identified not by a rigid definition but by general features such as shallow recorded history, indigenous character, common name, common territory, strong kinship bonds, endogamy, distinct customs and rituals, simple social and political organisation, and common ownership of resources.

• Earlier, the use of a single category for very diverse communities was largely for administrative convenience, as reflected in the Imperial Gazetteer of India, which defined tribes as a collection of families with a common name and dialect, occupying or claiming a territory, and not necessarily endogamous though they might have been originally.

• Tribes in India are often defined negatively as communities that traditionally did not follow a religion with a written scripture, lacked a formal state or political organisation, had no sharp class divisions, enjoyed relative equality of status, possessed weak historical consciousness, and generally had no caste, being neither Hindus nor peasants in the classical sense.

• Positively, tribes are classified by permanent traits such as region, language, physical features and ecological habitat, and linguistically they mainly speak Austric and Tibeto-Burman languages, though Indo-Aryan and Dravidian are also used.

• On the basis of acquired traits, tribes are differentiated by mode of livelihood and degree of incorporation into Hindu society, and economically they are grouped as fishermen, hunters and food gatherers, shifting cultivators, peasants, and plantation or industrial workers.

• Scholars have also classified tribes by linguistic groups (Dravidian, Austric, Tibeto-Chinese), racial criteria (e.g., Herbert Risley, 1908, The Peoples of India, identifying seven racial groups), geographical distribution (e.g., North-East tribes as Mongoloid stock), economic activity, and degree of cultural contact or acculturation (e.g., Verrier Elwin’s four-fold typology).

• These definitions were never uniformly valid, as they were based largely on ideal-typical primitive tribes and failed to capture the high heterogeneity of Indian tribes, ranging from highly underdeveloped Jarawas of Andaman to largely assimilated groups like Meenas of Rajasthan and Negis of Himachal Pradesh.

• Tribal diversity is reflected in variations of culture, habitat, occupation and lifestyle, with some practising animistic religions, others following Hinduism or Christianity, some speaking distinct tribal languages, and others using dialects of mainstream languages such as Hindi and Dravidian tongues.

• Many tribes are no longer geographically isolated nor confined to primitive occupations, and backwardness is no longer a valid criterion, as some tribes are advanced while many non-tribes remain backward, making rigid definition difficult in India’s composite and fluid culture, where the European notion of an indigenous group does not apply.

• Because of these limitations, scholars proposed flexible approaches, such as Ghurye’s view of tribes as Backward Hindus, classified into Hinduised Tribes, Partially Hinduised Tribes and Hill Tribes, and F.G. Bailey’s Tribe–Caste Continuum, though critics argue that tribes differ fundamentally due to the absence of purity–pollution ideology.

• During the 1960s, debates focused on whether tribes and castes formed a continuum or were distinct communities, but by the 1970s, major definitions were shown to be faulty, as distinctions based on size, isolation, religion and livelihood did not hold.

• Today, tribal identity is understood through their interaction with the mainstream and their resistance to preserve distinctiveness, rather than through any primordial characteristics, and the Constitution makers avoided strict definition and instead emphasised developmental strategies.

• The continuing definitional problem remains crucial because identity is directly linked to policy and development planning, and changing definitions reflect the evolving attitude of the mainstream, making definition the starting point for socio-economic development and cultural preservation.