Category Archives: Modernity

“The tribal peoples’ access to forest has almost gone. Their life-style is changing rapidly. They have already mingled with the non-tribals and imbibed their culture and life-styles. The fact of the matter is they can no longer live like their ancestors, no longer depend on the vanishing forests for their sustenance. It will be to their advantage if they are equipped to meet these changes with a balanced approach; otherwise they will just be swept over. We hope they will retain the tribal values that have relevance even today and accept the good brought in by modernization. It is a question of survival.” – Rama Sastry & B. Ramdas in “Work and Wisdom of Vernacular” (Supported by UNESCO)
https://indiantribalheritage.org/?p=1929

“Scheduling was the act of committing certain areas to a written list or inventory of ‘special administrative regimes’; here, normal laws and regulations prevalent in the rest of British India would not be applicable. […] The underlying belief behind this categorization was that modern representative democracy with electoral politics and law courts was highly unsuited to tribal communities.” – Saagar Tewari, quoted by Richard Kamei (doctoral candidate at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai) in “Uncivilising the Mind: How anthropology shaped the discourse on tribes in India” (Caravan Magazine, 1 March 2020)
https://caravanmagazine.in/books/anthropologists-tribes-india
https://indiantribalheritage.org/?p=11544

“Despite the modern obsession with factories, mines and airlines in a newly independent India, [Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay] pointed out that for millions of villagers […] handicrafts were a source of income and pride.” – Feminist writer Gloria Steinem reviewing “A Passionate Life: Writings by and on Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay” by Ellen Carol Dubois and Vinay Lal Openmagazine (7 April 2017)
https://www.openthemagazine.com/article/books/kamaladevi-chattopadhyay-the-last-teacher
https://indiantribalheritage.org/?p=20948

“A group of women recall their bygone days: In our big village we girls and boys were together in pairs. But the pairs of our friendships are no more. Some of us have shut ourselves up indoors. Some of us have chained ourselves and have multiplied like the roots of a banana plant.” – Synopsis by Boro Baski for “Rasi Nato (Big Village)”, a song composed and performed by staff and students of the Rolf Schoembs Vidyashram (Non-formal Santal school, Ghosaldanga village, Dist.-Birbhum, West Bengal), included in the Santali video album “Ale Ato” (Our Village)
https://youtu.be/3UbSfSI2jN4
https://indiantribalheritage.org/?page_id=25317 


“The recent trend is to use exotic species for manicured lawns and gardens. This means indigenous species are losing even more space, and our local species decline with them. New lifestyle patterns are also changing things. For example, India’s urban sparrow population has dipped. Even growing up, sparrows were as common as a crow or a pigeon. But now they’ve almost disappeared. Why? For one thing, our architecture is changing, and building facades no longer offer nesting sites. Even the old grain shops, which used to have grain strewn in the road, have turned into packaged super markets. Suddenly, you have an entire species disappearing because you’ve taken away its food source, habitat, and flight path.” – Rashneh Pardiwala in “Why It’s Hard to ‘Change Mindsets’ on Environmental Protection Among India’s Elites”; interview on environmental education at her Centre for Environmental Research and Education (CERE) in Mumbai (Asia Blog, 27 July 2015)
https://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/interview-why-its-hard-change-mindsets-environmental-protection-among-indias-elites
https://indiantribalheritage.org/?p=14402

“India lives in its villages, but it has been forced to go to its cities to work. We have created a nation where nearly half of the wealth is generated by the labour of these unseen and unheard men, women and children. We call them migrant labour. For all the wealth generated by the cities, the migrants live in poverty, working in jobs that profit others but bring them very little.” – Chitvan Gill in “The lives of the unseen, unheard men and women who build the cities we inhabit” (Scroll.in, 31 May 2020)
https://scroll.in/article/962825/photo-essay-the-lives-of-the-unseen-unheard-men-and-women-who-build-the-cities-we-inhabit
https://indiantribalheritage.org/?p=33992

“Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi had distinguished the modern university from its medieval forerunners by envisaging for it an autonomous sphere in relation to the emerging nation-state.” – Suranjan Das, Vice-Chancellor of Jadavpur University Kolkata (The Telegraph, 30 September 2020)
https://www.telegraphindia.com/west-bengal/calcutta/the-relevance-of-vidyasagar/cid/1793177
https://indiantribalheritage.org/?p=35639

“In Nehru’s view, the process of modernization must not be taken as forcing a sudden break with the tribals past but help them build upon it and grow by a natural process of evolution.” – Chittaranjan Mishra in “Tribal Philosophy and Pandit Nehru” (Odisha Review, November 2017)
https://magazines.odisha.gov.in/Orissareview/2017/November/engpdf/100-110.pdf
https://indiantribalheritage.org/?p=16310

“[T]he primary identity of every citizen of India, over and above all other identities of religion, caste, language, race and suchlike, is that of an Indian.” – Romila Thapar (Emeritus Professor of History, Jawaharlal Nehru University) quoted in “Nationalism does not allow the Hindu in India to claim primacy” by Ziya Us Salam (The Hindu, 2 March 2016)
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/historian-romila-thapar-says-nationalism-does-not-allow-the-hindu-in-india-to-claim-primacy/article8300752.ece
https://indiantribalheritage.org/?p=20996

“[N]o good purpose can be served by turning a blind eye to corrupt practices and the resulting failures of policies, thereby distorting the picture of the true conditions of tribal populations. […] The tribals were dislodged from their traditional sources of livelihood and places of habitation. Not conversant with the details of acquisition proceedings they accepted whatever cash compensation was given to them and became emigrants. With cash in hand and many attractions in the nearby industrial towns, their funds were rapidly depleted and in course of time they were without money as well as without land. They joined the ranks of landless labourers but without any training, equipment or aptitude for any skilled or semi-skilled job.” – Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf in Tribes of India: The Struggle for Survival. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982 [observations among Indian tribal populations spanning the period from 1940 to 1980]
https://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/rarebooks/downloads/Haimendorf_Tribes_of_India.pdf
https://indiantribalheritage.org/?p=12724