Resources for the classroom: Learning from and about India’s tribal communities, their culture and knowledge systems

“[I]t is some of the basic values and ideology imbibed in the traditional tribal socio-cultural milieus that should have been emulated and promoted amongst the non-tribal mainstream, not, as has been going on, the other way round.” – Arup Maharatna (Professor, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune), in Who Is Civilised?’: In Praise of Tribal … Read more

Interview with Richard K. Wolf on his study titled “The Black Cow’s Footprint: Time, Space, and Music in the Lives of the Kotas of South India”

Excerpt from an interview with Richard K. Wolf, author of an award-winning study of Kota culture: The Black Cow’s Footprint: Time, Space, and Music in the Lives of the Kotas of South India (Permanent Black, Delhi 2005 ISBN 81-7824-126-9) and University of Illinois Press, 2006. It was a promising start. While at the University of Illinois, Wolf met … Read more

Research on populations of different social rank: “The genetic heritage of the earliest settlers persists”

The word “tribe” itself, in fact, has always been a contentious term. Due to the lack of an adequate term, indigenous people chose to adopt it to identify their place in the world. The narrative is changing today. […] Tribes are people with a functional social order, culture, customs, cosmology and metaphysics. They must be … Read more

Publication: The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi

edited by Daniel J Rycroft, Sangeeta Dasgupta (2011) Source: The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi – Google BooksAddress : https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=z_Pe0z1ta_8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=falseDate Visited: Mon May 13 2013 18:24:39 GMT+0200 (CEST)

Understanding the challenges faced by Adivasi Society: “We will follow our beliefs, customs, deities, rituals, culture, in our own way”

As demands for a Sarna religious code in Census 2021 grow in Jharkhand, RSS-backed outfits are busy trying to convince the tribal people that they are Hindus. Abhinay Lakshman reports on the efforts of Sarna outfits to resist Hindu organisations and Christian missionaries alike, and define their identity through their religion. […] “Christian missionaries first … Read more