Tribes of India: The Struggle for Survival (Photostat)

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This book tells of observations among Indian tribal populations spanning the period from 1940 to 1980. Ever since 1936, when a study of the Konyak Nagas marked the beginning of my career as an anthropological field worker, I have maintained contacts with Indian tribesmen. True, there were years when I concentrated on the study of the mountain peoples of Nepal, but even then I paid periodic visits to some of the tribal areas of India, and this enabled me to keep abreast of current developments. When in 1976 I retired from the Chair of Asian Anthropology at the University of London and could devote more time to fieldwork, I decided to undertake a systematic investigation of social and economic changes affecting the tribal societies which I had studied in the 1940s. A grant from the Social Science Research Council of Great Britain, as well as subsidiary awards from the Leverhulme Trust Fund and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, provided the material basis for this project, which included also the funding of parallel research by my young colleague Dr. Michael Yorke. It is to be hoped that in future years Michael Yorke will returnto the same tribal area, and thus extend the period of observation from forty to sixty or perhaps even seventy years. The School of Oriental and African Studies, which provided the administrative framework for the project, will preserve the documentation, storing all my field notebooks and diaries from the years 1940 to 1980, as wellas photographic data.

Financial assistance from the Indian Council of Social Science Research enabled Mr.Jayaprakash Rao of the Osmania University in hyderabad to participate in the project by undertaking a detailed study of the present condition of the KondaReddis, a tribe of Andhra Pradesh which figured prominently in my research forty years earlier. His contribution tothe volume (chapter 10) provides an Indian view of the problems of tribal populations. Both he and Michael Yorke, the author of chapter 9, are solely responsible for their contributions, which do not necessarily coincide in alldetails with my observations. This book is the third of three volumes which have so far resulted from the project, the first two being The Gands of Andhra Pradesh: Tradition and Change in an Indian Tribe (Delhi and London, 1979) and A Himalayan Tribe: From Cattle to Cash (Delhi and Berkeley, 1980), and it is planned that additional publications originatingfrom the project will follow in due course.

One phenomenon inherent in the nature of the plural society of the Indian subcontinent is the coex- istence often in a narrow space of populations varying greatly in the level of material and intellec tual development. Confrontation and eventual harmonization are the two possible outcomes of such a state of affairs, and this book focusses on the social problems created by the mounting influence of economically advanced and politically powerful groups on autochthonous societies which persisted until recently in an archaic and in many respects primitive life-style. A full understanding of the disruption caused by this impact within the whole fabric of tribal life cannot be gained from generalizations embracing the totality of the forty millions of Indian tribal populations. The diversity of ethnic groups and cultural conditions is so great that such an approach would be impracticable, and it is for this reason that I have concentrated on a series of microstudies, each dealing with a specific tribal society and with particular problems cognate to the process of social change. While anthropologically interested Indian readers will have no difficulty in visualizing the tribes mentioned in the appropriate geographic and cultural context, those unfamiliar with the Indian ethnographic scene may well be confused by the kaleidoscopic pattern of tribal societies from which I have chosen concrete examples to illustrate contemporary developments among the tribesmen of the two regions best known to me, Andhra Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh. At the risk of repeating what I have written in earlier publications, many now out of print, I propose therefore to set the scene with a catalogue raisonne describ ing briefly the various ethnic groups whose members appear as dramatis personac in the pages of this book. For the convenience of the reader wishing to probe deeper into the cultural background of the individual tribes, I have appended to cach of the ethnographic vignettes a bibliography listing the main anthropological sources containing information on the group in question. To forestall any accusation of egocentricity, I may mention that in the case of several tribes, such as the Chenchus and Apa Tanis, few published ethnographic data are available apart from the results of my own field research.