It is a matter of great pride and happiness that a deserving candidate has become the President of this country. It is appropriate that we redefine what ‘caste’, ‘varna’, ‘jati’, and ‘tribes’ mean in the Indian context. The colonials superimposed ‘caste’ that grew in western contexts on the varna and jatis of India to create a most obnoxious ‘caste-system.’ The only reality of India is the various ‘jatis’ that have constantly evolved, grown in number, merged, and even dissolved across hundreds of years. The social, political, and economic dominances have fluctuated for various jatis across time and space in India. Varnas, always four, has been perhaps more of an ideal. A one-to-one correlation between the jatis and the varnas has almost been an impossible task. Our social sciences not only failed to question the colonial narratives but kept providing ‘data’ to further the narrative.
The colonials understood the country within the divisive framework of castes and tribes. Unfortunately, identifying groups as ‘Hindu’ and ‘tribals’, implying a difference, encouraged an artificial divide in the country. Scheduled Tribes in India constitute 8.2% of the total population (Census 2001). The criteria to identify a tribe are: primitive traits; distinctive culture; geographical isolation; shyness of contact with the community at large; and backwardness. These are subjective, ambiguous, and many times circular. Similarly, the Indian Constitution has yet to clearly define the word ‘Hindu’. It is still essentially a negative definition of anyone in India who is not a Muslim, Christian, Jew, or Parsi.
Adivasi (adi, original; vasi, inhabitant), a word coined in the 19th century, is hardly a self-description of the tribals. The Aryan Invasion Theory, propagated by the colonials, claimed that the Aryans came to India in the middle of the second millennium BCE and pushed the original Dravidians (to the south of Vindhyas) and the tribes (into the forests and the hills). In settler colonies (America, New Zealand, and Australia), ‘aboriginal’ made sense to distinguish the European settlers from the natives. However, in non-settler colonies like India, the term ‘aboriginal’ became a pure colonial construct, where the urban and agriculturally advanced peoples became the ‘majority’ group. This imaginary division of the Indians as ‘natives’ and ‘invaders’ is a permanent colonial legacy.
The concepts of race and tribe are in the dustbin of the western social sciences, even though getting rid of them has proved difficult. The impossibility of defining the term ‘tribe’ and its broad usage is responsible for its incoherence as a category. Scholars feel that ‘tribe’ is a key but obsolete concept from anthropology’s early history that usually served colonial, administrative, and ideological purposes to mainly paint the local groups as “primitive” or “backward.” In the post-colonial era, even international forces like the ILO (International Labour Organization) strengthened the idea of a distinction between ‘dominant national communities’ and ‘indigenous/tribal peoples’, introducing an internal coloniality and a permanent faultline. The ‘minority tribal communities’ become racially and culturally distinct from the ‘majority national communities.’
The ancientness of the Hindu religion itself to pre-Aryan times makes it as ‘aboriginal’ as the tribal populations. The similarities between Hindu traditions and the tribal traditions in their fundamental polytheistic nature and paganism (deifying the feminine, nature, and animals) show them clearly distinct from the prophetic-monotheistic religions. Interestingly, anthropologists deny that the tribals of Jharkhand and the North-East are even the ‘original’ inhabitants. Tibeto-Chinese speaking communities (Northeast India) and Austro-Asiatic speaking ones (East India) immigrated to India in ancient historical times and met with existing indigenous Indian populations living already on their migration routes. Hence, the historical data do not support the division of India’s population into ‘aboriginal tribals’ and ‘non-tribal’ invaders.
The Indian political-bureaucratic-education systems used these divisions only for gathering votes and fissuring our society. The Varna-jatis of India prevented the disintegration of civilization in the face of a constant onslaught for hundreds of years. Untouchability was a noxious weed that was rightfully attacked and reformed from within. It was a dangerous colonial narrative carried forward by some of our own intellectuals that says Hinduism equals the caste system, which equals untouchability, and the solution to untouchability is the destruction of Hinduism. What needs urgent dissolution are words like caste, sub-caste, tribes, and all the divisions going on in their name by politicians and agenda-driven academics. Indologists use discredited theories from earlier social sciences to make outlandish claims regarding our culture. A scholar rues that the anthropologists spent about 100 years attempting to get rid of a pernicious and incoherent concept like ‘tribe’ only to see it sneak back in, via Indology, into the Indian Constitution, Indian legislation, and their administration. Can we attempt a serious understanding of our social systems instead of simply parroting western narratives?
RANDOM MUSINGS 