Indian Anthropology II: Tribe and Scheduled Tribe, PVTGs and Distribution, the Birsa and Naga Movements, Tribal Development, Constitutional Safeguards, Inclusion and Exclusion, Panchayati Raj and Traditional Political Organisations, and Self-Help Groups

"Tribe" has two lives in India, as an anthropological concept and as a legal category, and they do not coincide. In general anthropology a tribe was a stage or type of political organisation between the band and the chiefdom (Service, 1962), or a people with a common name, territory, language and culture, organised by kinship rather than by the state. The colonial Imperial Gazetteer defined a tribe as "a collection of families bearing a common name, speaking a common dialect, occupying or professing to occupy a common territory", usually endogamous. Indian scholars soon found that no such definition separated tribes cleanly from castes. D.N. Majumdar stressed territory, kinship and the absence of specialised occupations; G.S. Ghurye, in The Aborigines — "So-called" — and Their Future (1943), called the tribes of central India "backward Hindus", imperfectly integrated into Hindu society, and argued for their assimilation; F.G. Bailey ("'Tribe' and 'Caste' in India", 1961) proposed a continuum on which a group stands nearer the tribal end the larger the share of land it controls directly through kinship rather than through dependence on others; Surajit Sinha described tribe–caste and tribe–peasant continua and showed, among the Bhumij, how a tribe could claim Kshatriya status; André Béteille (1986) reviewed the concept and concluded that in India tribes are best understood historically, as communities that stood outside the state and civilisation of the plains. The words adivasi ("original inhabitant"), used by movements in Chotanagpur from the 1930s, janjati and vanvasi each carry a view of this history; internationally, India supports the rights of indigenous peoples while holding that the concept, as defined in the Americas and Australia, does not map simply onto Indian conditions. The legal category is the Scheduled Tribe. Article 366(25) defines Scheduled Tribes as the tribes or tribal communities, or parts of them, deemed under Article 342 to be Scheduled Tribes; under Article 342 the President notifies them for each State and Union Territory, and only Parliament can amend the list. The Lokur Committee (1965) set out the working criteria: indications of primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact with the community at large, and backwardness. At the 2011 Census the Scheduled Tribes numbered about 10.4 crore, 8.6 per cent of the population, in more than 700 notified communities; unlike the Scheduled Castes, there is no religious condition. Among them, groups that are especially vulnerable were identified from the Fifth Five-Year Plan onward, following the Dhebar Commission's (1960–61) observation of inequality among tribes: first called Primitive Tribal Groups, they were renamed Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups in 2006. The criteria are a pre-agricultural level of technology, a very low level of literacy, economic backwardness, and a stagnant or declining population. Seventy-five groups are recognised, in eighteen States and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, with Odisha having the largest number (thirteen). They include the Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa, Sentinelese and Shompen of the islands; the Toda, Kota, Kurumba, Irula, Paniyan and Cholanaikan of the Nilgiris and the Western Ghats; the Chenchu and Kolam of the Deccan; the Birhor, Asur, Hill Kharia and Sauria Paharia of Jharkhand; the Baiga, Bharia and Sahariya of Madhya Pradesh; the Abujh Maria, Kamar and Pahari Korwa of Chhattisgarh; the Bonda, Dongria Kondh, Juang and Lanjia Saora of Odisha; and the Katkari (Kathodi) of Maharashtra. In November 2023 the central government launched the Pradhan Mantri Janjati Adivasi Nyaya Maha Abhiyan (PM-JANMAN) to bring housing, roads, water, health, education and livelihoods to PVTG habitations.

Anthropologists from B.S. Guha to L.P. Vidyarthi divided India's tribes into broad regional zones. The Himalayan zone includes the north-eastern tribes of Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura — speakers mainly of Tibeto-Burman languages, with the Khasi and some others speaking Austroasiatic — and the tribes of the central and western Himalaya such as the Tharu, Bhotia, Gaddi and Gujjar. The central or middle Indian zone, the largest, runs from Gujarat and Rajasthan through Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra to Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal, and includes the Gond, Bhil, Santal, Munda, Oraon, Ho, Kondh and Saora; the western zone, sometimes separated from it, includes the Bhil, Mina, Garasia and Warli. The southern zone includes the Toda, Kota, Kurumba, Irula, Chenchu, Koya, Yanadi and the tribes of the Western Ghats. The island zone contains the Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa and Sentinelese, whom the older literature classed as "Negrito", and the Nicobarese and Shompen, whom it classed as "Mongoloid" — racial labels now cited only as a record of those classifications — and, in Lakshadweep, a Muslim population wholly classed as Scheduled Tribe. Linguistically the tribes speak Austroasiatic (Munda: Santali, Mundari, Ho, Kharia, Savara), Dravidian (Gondi, Kurukh, Kui, Toda), Tibeto-Burman and Indo-Aryan languages. By the 2011 Census, Madhya Pradesh had the largest Scheduled Tribe population (about 1.5 crore), followed by Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan and Gujarat; the highest proportions were in Lakshadweep (about 95 per cent), Mizoram, Nagaland and Meghalaya; Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Chandigarh and Puducherry have no notified Scheduled Tribes. The Bhil are the most numerous tribe, followed by the Gond. Of tribal movements, K.S. Singh distinguished movements over land and forests, movements of socio-religious reform, and political movements for autonomy or statehood. The Birsa movement is the best-studied of the first two kinds together. The Munda of the Ranchi plateau held land under the khuntkatti system, by which the lineage of the founders who cleared a village held its land jointly; from the nineteenth century outsiders — dikus: landlords, moneylenders, traders and contractors — acquired their land and imposed rents and begar (forced labour), and the Sardari larai ("war of the chiefs", from about 1858) sought redress through petitions and courts. Birsa Munda (born 1875 at Ulihatu), who had been through a mission school and Vaishnava influence, emerged in 1895 as a prophet and healer, preaching a reformed religion — one god, abstinence from liquor, the giving up of sacrifices and spirit-worship — and the end of diku and British rule; he was called Dharti Aba, "father of the earth". After a first imprisonment (1895–97), he led the ulgulan, the "great tumult", in December 1899 and January 1900, with attacks on police stations, missions and landlords; it was crushed at Dombari hill, and Birsa died in Ranchi jail on 9 June 1900. The Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (1908) followed, recognising khuntkatti rights and restricting the transfer of tribal land. K.S. Singh's The Dust-Storm and the Hanging Mist (1966) is the standard study; since 2021 his birthday, 15 November, is observed as Janjatiya Gaurav Divas. The Naga movement is the longest political movement among India's tribes. The Naga Club (1918) told the Simon Commission in 1929 that the Nagas should be left out of any reformed India; the Naga National Council (1946), led from 1950 by A.Z. Phizo, declared Naga independence on 14 August 1947 and held a plebiscite in 1951; armed conflict followed from the mid-1950s. The moderate Naga People's Convention negotiated a sixteen-point agreement (1960), and Nagaland became a State on 1 December 1963, with Article 371A protecting Naga religious and social practices, customary law, and ownership of land and resources. The Shillong Accord (1975) was rejected by a group that formed the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN, 1980), which split in 1988 into NSCN(IM), under Isak Chishi Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah, and NSCN(K), under S.S. Khaplang; a ceasefire with NSCN(IM) has held since 1997, and a Framework Agreement was signed in 2015, with a final settlement still under negotiation. Anthropologists have studied how the movement built a pan-Naga identity out of many tribes — Angami, Ao, Sema (Sumi), Lotha, Konyak, Tangkhul and others — with separate languages and histories.

Tribal policy began as a debate among anthropologists. The colonial state had "excluded" and "partially excluded" areas, governed apart. Verrier Elwin, in The Loss of Nerve (1941), argued for protecting tribes from exploitation and from hasty "civilising", and was accused of wanting to keep them in "museums" or "national parks"; Ghurye argued for their assimilation into Hindu society. The third position, integration, prevailed. Jawaharlal Nehru set out five principles — "tribal Panchsheel" — in his foreword to the second edition of Elwin's A Philosophy for NEFA (1959): people should develop along the lines of their own genius; tribal rights in land and forests should be respected; tribal people should be trained to do the work of administration and development themselves; tribal areas should not be over-administered or overwhelmed with schemes; and results should be judged not by money spent but by the quality of human character that is evolved. Institutions followed: Multipurpose Tribal Development Blocks (1954), reviewed by a committee chaired by Elwin (1959); the Dhebar Commission on Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes (1960–61); and in the Fifth Plan (1974–79) the Tribal Sub-Plan strategy, under which a share of plan funds proportional to the tribal population was earmarked for tribal areas, delivered through Integrated Tribal Development Projects or Agencies (ITDPs, ITDAs), Modified Area Development Approach pockets, clusters, and special projects for Primitive Tribal Groups. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs was created in 1999; TRIFED (1987) handles minor forest produce; Eklavya Model Residential Schools provide education. The Xaxa Committee (2014) found that the Scheduled Tribes lagged on almost every indicator, and that development projects — dams, mines, industries, protected areas — had displaced tribal people out of all proportion to their share of the population. The constitutional safeguards for the Scheduled Tribes are social, economic, political and protective. Article 46 directs the State to promote their educational and economic interests and protect them from injustice and exploitation; Articles 15(4) and 16(4) permit reservation; Articles 330 and 332 reserve seats in the Lok Sabha and the Legislative Assemblies, and Article 243D and 243T in panchayats and municipalities; Article 275(1) provides grants for tribal welfare; Article 338A (from 2003) establishes the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes; Article 339 gives the Union control over the administration of Scheduled Areas. Article 244 applies the Fifth Schedule to Scheduled Areas in States other than Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram — ten States at present — where a Tribes Advisory Council advises on welfare and the Governor may direct that any Act of Parliament or the State Legislature shall not apply or shall apply with modifications, and may make regulations to prohibit or restrict the transfer of land by or among Scheduled Tribes and to regulate moneylending; the Supreme Court's Samatha judgment (1997) held that tribal land in Scheduled Areas could not be leased to private mining companies. The Sixth Schedule governs tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram through Autonomous District Councils — ten at present — with legislative, executive and judicial powers over land, forests, customary law, inheritance, marriage and village administration. The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA), following the Bhuria Committee, extends the 73rd Amendment to Fifth Schedule areas with a stronger gram sabha: competence to safeguard traditions, customs, community resources and customary modes of dispute resolution; consultation before land acquisition; ownership of minor forest produce; and power to prevent land alienation and control moneylending. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (FRA) set out to "undo the historical injustice" of colonial and post-colonial forest law. It recognises individual rights to land under occupation (up to four hectares), community rights such as grazing, fishing and minor forest produce, and the right to protect and manage community forest resources, for forest-dwelling Scheduled Tribes and for other traditional forest dwellers who have lived there for three generations (seventy-five years), with 13 December 2005 as the cut-off date; the gram sabha initiates the process of determining rights. In 2013 the Supreme Court, in the Niyamgiri case, required the consent of the gram sabhas of the Dongria Kondh and others before bauxite mining could proceed, and the gram sabhas rejected it.

Social exclusion names the processes by which groups are kept wholly or partly from full participation in the society in which they live — from resources, rights, services, markets, political voice and recognition. The term was popularised in France by René Lenoir (Les Exclus, 1974) and taken up in development studies; Amartya Sen (2000) distinguished constitutive exclusion, which is itself a deprivation, from instrumental exclusion, which leads to other deprivations, and active exclusion, by deliberate policy, from passive exclusion, through social processes. In India the concept joins older anthropological ideas. Caste-based exclusion is rooted in rules of purity and pollution, restrictions on commensality, marriage and entry to temples, wells and homes, and in the historical denial of land and education; Sukhadeo Thorat and colleagues documented continuing discrimination in labour markets, housing and public services. Tribal exclusion is more often spatial and ecological: the loss of land and forests, displacement by projects, distance from schools and hospitals, and the non-recognition of languages, customary law and ways of life. Exclusion also works within communities, by gender, age, disability or sexuality, and through the "creamy layer" problem, when the benefits of inclusion go mainly to the better-off within a category. Inclusion, correspondingly, has several instruments. Protective discrimination — reservation in education, employment and legislatures — is the most visible; the Eleventh Five-Year Plan (2007–12), titled Towards Faster and More Inclusive Growth, made inclusion a planning goal; legislation such as the Atrocities Act, the FRA and PESA, and programmes of scholarships, hostels and livelihoods, aim at different dimensions of it. Anthropologists add that inclusion is not only access but also recognition: communities want their languages taught, their customary institutions respected, and their own definitions of development heard. They also study the tensions inclusion creates — over who is listed as a Scheduled Tribe or Caste, over the demands of groups seeking inclusion (for example, communities in several States campaigning for ST status) and the fears of those already included, over sub-classification within lists, and over the gap between legal entitlement and what reaches a village. Reading exclusion ethnographically means asking how it is experienced in everyday life — at the water source, the school, the ration shop and the police station — and how people resist it.

Panchayati Raj in its present form rests on the report of the Balwant Rai Mehta Committee (1957), which recommended "democratic decentralisation" through a three-tier structure of village panchayat, panchayat samiti at the block and zila parishad at the district; Rajasthan inaugurated it at Nagaur on 2 October 1959. After decline in the 1960s and 1970s and the Ashok Mehta Committee's (1978) proposal of two tiers, the 73rd Constitutional Amendment (1992, in force from 24 April 1993) gave panchayats constitutional status in Part IX: a gram sabha in every village; a three-tier system in States above two million people; direct elections every five years; reservation of seats for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to their population and of not less than one-third for women (raised to half in many States); State Election and Finance Commissions; and an Eleventh Schedule of twenty-nine subjects. The 74th Amendment did the same for municipalities, and PESA (1996) extended the panchayat system to Fifth Schedule areas on terms that respect customary institutions. Anthropologists have studied how elected panchayats interact with older forms of authority. Caste panchayats regulated the internal affairs of a caste — marriage, divorce, commensality, disputes and outcasting — and village panchayats of elders, often of the dominant caste, settled disputes among castes. Tribal communities have their own political organisation, often layered from the village to a federation of villages. Among the Santal the village is led by the manjhi (headman) with the paranik (assistant), jog manjhi (in charge of the youth and morals), naeke (priest) and godet (messenger), and groups of villages form a pargana under the parganait. The Munda and Ho have the village munda (headman) and pahan (priest), with a patti or parha of villages under a manki. The Oraon organise villages into parhas, confederacies with a parha raja and a flag and emblem for each village. Among the Khasi, the village dorbar shnong is headed by a rangbah shnong, and a group of villages forms a hima (state) under a syiem (chief). The Adi of Arunachal Pradesh have the kebang, a village council of elders that also settles disputes; the Angami Naga village is often described as a democracy of clans, the Konyak villages were led by hereditary chiefs (ang), and the Mizo chieftainship (lal) was abolished in 1954. Self-help groups (SHGs) are small groups, usually of ten to twenty women from similar backgrounds, who save regularly, lend to their members, and link with banks for credit. The SHG–Bank Linkage Programme of NABARD began as a pilot in 1992; the Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (1999) and then the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (Aajeevika, 2011; renamed Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana–NRLM in 2016) built a national network of SHGs and their federations, and Kerala's Kudumbashree (1998) linked them to local government. Anthropological studies credit SHGs with increasing women's access to credit, mobility and public voice, and with providing a platform for collective action; they also note the burden of repayment, the risk of over-indebtedness when microfinance lenders multiply, the exclusion of the poorest who cannot save, and capture by better-off members.