Articles on Adivasi culture in Folio Special issue

Ever since the Portuguese travel writers and missionaries decided to describe the vast variety of ethnic and occupational groups and sects of the Indian subcontinent in terms of “caste” and “tribe”, the terms have stuck to society as long-worn masks that start becoming one’s real personality. The result is that today no Indian describes society without taking recourse to the categories “caste” and “tribe”. In the initial period of India’s contact with western nations the two terms were used as synonyms, the difference lay only in the social status of the groups they described. The synonymy was finally shattered through a legal intervention by the colonial rulers when an official list of communities was prepared by them (in 1872) as the list of tribes. A similar list was prepared in the previous year for communities that were mistakenly thought of as ‘criminal’ and were covered by the provisions of an inhuman “Criminal Tribes Act of India, 1871.” Since then the “tribes” are perceived as a distinct segment of Society.

Ganesh Devy in “Rethinking tribals”
ADIVASI Special issue (The Hindu, Folio, July 16, 2000) >>

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“Tribal men and women mix freely, but with respect for each other; they drink, sing and dance together without disgracing themselves. They love flowers; the forests are a part of their lives, they live in harmony with nature. […]
But caste Hindu society in India is so convinced of its own superiority that it never stops to consider the nature of social organisation among tribal people. In fact it is one of the signs of the ‘educated’ barbarian of today that he cannot appreciate the qualities of people in any way different from himself – in looks or clothes, customs or rituals. […]
Few bureaucrats have the cultural calibre or the intellectual curiosity to try to understand the nature of the societies over which they rule.” – Guest Column in India Today >>

“Tribal communities are a standing example of how women play a major role in preservation of eco historic cultural heritage in India.” – Mari Marcel Thekaekara (writer and Co-founder of ACCORD-Nilgiris) | Learn more >>

Articles and authors

1. Rethinking tribals by GN Devy
2. Call us adivasis, please by Gail Omvedt
3. A society in transition by Suresh Sharma
4. To be governed or to self-govern by Smitu Kothari
5. Strong sense of self and place by Amita Baviskar
6. Dishonoured by history by Meena Radhakrishna
7. Curators of biodiversity by KK Chakravarthy
8. Treading lightly on earth by Ashish Kothari
9. A symbiotic bond by Mari Thekaekara and Stan Thekaekara
10. Vicious cycle by Dilip D’Souza
11. A better quality of life? by Roopa Devadasan and N Devadasan
12. A history of alienation by Pankaj Sekhsaria
13. Cultural expressions by Jaya Jaitly
14. Through Adivasi eyes by Mari Thekaekara and Stan Thekaekara
15. A Toda friend by S Anandalakshmy

Source: Folio (Special issue with the Sunday Magazine): ADIVASI: JULY 16, 2000 from the publishers of THE HINDU
Address: http://www.hindu.com/folio/fo0007/fo000700.htm
Date Visited: 15 March 2018 (discontinued since)

Research the above issues with the help of Shodhganga: A reservoir of theses from universities all over India, made available under Open Access >>

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“Air is free to all but if it is polluted it harms our health… Next comes water… From now on we must take up the effort to secure water. Councillors are servants of the people and we have a right to question them.” – Mohandas K. Gandhi, Ahmedabad address on 1 January 1918; quoted by his grandson, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, in “On another New Year’s Day: Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘khorak’ a 100 years ago” (The Hindu, 1 January 2018)

“Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you …. For this reason, many people—including those we might see as good and kind people—could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense, not active and openly hateful of this or that group.” | Learn more about India’s caste system and the effects of “casteism” on tribal communities >>

See also

• Adverse inclusion
• Denotified Tribes, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes – Report and Recommendations (Technical Advisory Group)
• Fact checking
• Imprisonment & rehabilitation
• Map | An alphabetical journey across India: from Andaman to West Bengal
• Search tips | Names of tribal communities, regions and states of India
• State wise population of Scheduled Tribes (ST) and their percentage to the total population in the respective states and to the total STs population
• “What are the Rights of Scheduled Tribes?– Government of India (National Commission for Scheduled Tribes, NCST)
• “What is the Forest Rights Act about?” – Campaign for Survival and Dignity
• “Who are Scheduled Tribes?” – Government of India (National Commission for Scheduled Tribes, NCST)
• Zonal Cultural Centres: List of “Component States” allocated to each centre

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1. toggle to normal view (from reader view) should the interactive map not be displayed by your tablet, smartphone or pc browser
2. for details and hyperlinks click on the rectangular button (left on the map’s header)
3. scroll and click on one of the markers for information of special interest
4. explore India’s tribal cultural heritage with the help of another interactive map >>