“While benefiting from affirmative action in some cases, Adivasis or indigenous people in India also feel the claustrophobic confines of their identity which has been imposed on them by others, be it the colonial administrator, the colonial anthropologist, the missionary or the neo-liberal, neo-imperialist forces that rule global economy today.” – Santali poet, scholar and translator Ivy Imogene Hansdak in “Is tribal identity relevant in today’s world?”, Inaugural Speech, National Conference “Tribes In Transition-II: Reaffirming Indigenous Identity Through Narrative” (2017)
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“[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
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
PAPPU VENUGOPALA RAO The focus was on music history, its religious aspects and some unique technical nuances. […] Kota Drums: The first lecture was by Prof. Richard Wolf of the Harvard University. Richard worked on ‘Of God and Death: Music in Ritual and Everyday Life. A Musical Ethnography of the Kotas of South India’ for … Read more
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