Adivasi, Tribe and the Politics of a Category

Around a hundred million people in India are officially designated Scheduled Tribes. They are not a caste, their exclusion is not principally ritual, and the framework of the previous four lessons describes them badly.

They are also the clearest case in Part 6 of a category imposed by a colonial state, retained by a postcolonial one, and then taken up and turned into a political identity by the people it was applied to.

A word with two histories.

"Tribe" entered Indian administration through the colonial state. It was applied to populations that were geographically remote, practised shifting cultivation or forest livelihoods, spoke languages outside the major families, followed religions the state could not classify as Hindu, Muslim or Christian, and — decisively — were not paying land revenue in a legible form.

The category did administrative work: it marked out populations to be governed differently, through Scheduled Districts, Excluded Areas and Partially Excluded Areas where ordinary law did not fully apply, administered by officials with special powers.

And it carried a theory. These were "primitive" peoples, at an earlier stage of development, requiring either protection from civilisation or assimilation into it — a debate the anthropologist Verrier Elwin and the sociologist G. S. Ghurye conducted publicly in the 1930s and 40s, with Elwin arguing for protected isolation and Ghurye arguing that they were "the backward Hindus," already partly assimilated and best integrated further.

Neither asked the populations concerned.

And then the second history.

"Adivasi" — adi (original, first) + vasi (inhabitant) — is a term that emerged in the 1930s, in the Chota Nagpur region, from within the movements themselves. It makes a claim: that these are the original inhabitants, prior to the populations that displaced them.

It is contested as history — the archaeological and genetic evidence does not support a simple original/later distinction on the subcontinent, and Indian nationalists have objected that it implies later arrivals are foreign.

And it is decisive as politics. It converts an administrative designation into a claim: not a stage of development, but a prior right.

Which is the whole subject of this lesson. The state produced a category; the people inside it produced a different one; and the two now coexist in the same institutions.

The analytical problem is that the caste framework does not fit, and forcing it produces error.

Caste operates through: ritual ranking, purity and pollution, endogamy within a shared social order, and hereditary occupation within a village economy. Adivasi communities were historically outside that order, not at its bottom.

Their exclusion is principally territorial. It concerns land, forest and resources, not commensality or temple entry. The defining relations are with the state, the forest department, the moneylender, the contractor and the mining company — not with a Brahmin.

Which produces the classification problem: are Adivasis a distinct kind of social formation, or the lowest stratum of the same hierarchy?

Ghurye's answer — "backward Hindus," differing in degree of assimilation. Elwin's answer — distinct societies with their own integrity, requiring protection. The Adivasi movements' answer — distinct peoples with prior claims, requiring rights.

And the answer matters institutionally, because it determines what the remedy is. If they are backward Hindus, the remedy is development and integration. If they are distinct peoples with prior claims, the remedy is autonomy and land. India's constitutional arrangements attempt both, which is why they are internally contradictory.

The category and its content

Scheduled Tribes are around 8–9% of India's population — roughly 104 million at the 2011 census, which would make them, if a country, among the world's twenty largest.

The criteria used administratively: indications of primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact with the community at large, and backwardness. These are the official criteria and they are indefensible as social science — "shyness of contact" is a description of avoidance produced by a history of predation, presented as a trait.

The population is enormously diverse. Several hundred communities, speaking languages from at least four families, concentrated in central India, the north-east and scattered elsewhere. The Santhal, Gond, Bhil, Munna, Oraon and Mizo have almost nothing in common beyond the classification.

And the north-east is a distinct case entirely — where "tribal" populations are majorities in several states, have their own political structures, and where the relation to the Indian state has involved decades of armed conflict and special constitutional arrangements.

The Fifth Schedule governs Scheduled Areas in most of India: restrictions on the transfer of tribal land to non-tribals, a Tribes Advisory Council in each state, and gubernatorial powers to modify the application of laws.

The Sixth Schedule governs the north-east: Autonomous District Councils with legislative and judicial powers over land, forests, inheritance, marriage and social custom. A substantially stronger arrangement, reflecting the different political history.

PESA (1996) — the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act — extended local self-government to Scheduled Areas with the crucial provision that the Gram Sabha (village assembly) must be consulted before land acquisition and has authority over minor forest produce.

The Forest Rights Act (2006) — formally, the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act — is the most significant. Its preamble states that it seeks to redress "historical injustice": that colonial and postcolonial forest law had declared as state property land that communities had occupied and used for generations, converting inhabitants into encroachers.

It recognises individual rights to cultivated forest land and, more importantly, community rights to use, manage and conserve forest resources.

And its implementation has been contested at every stage — with claims rejected in large numbers, community rights recognised far less than individual ones, and a 2019 Supreme Court order (subsequently stayed) that would have evicted over a million households whose claims had been rejected.

The specific history is worth following, because it explains the present better than any general account.

Before the mid-nineteenth century, forest use in most of India was governed by local custom: communities cultivated, grazed, gathered, hunted and managed forest under arrangements that varied enormously and were not written down.

The Indian Forest Acts of 1865, 1878 and 1927 progressively declared forests state property, classified them as reserved, protected or village forests, and made customary use a privilege granted by the state rather than a right.

The driver was revenue and timber. The railways required sleepers in enormous quantities; the navy required shipbuilding timber; and the state required revenue. Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil's work documents this in detail.

The effects on forest-dwelling populations were immediate and severe: shifting cultivation criminalised; grazing restricted; gathering made a privilege; and communities that had occupied land for generations reclassified as encroachers on it.

And the resistance was continuous. The Santhal rebellion (1855–56), Birsa Munda's Ulgulan (1899–1900), the Rampa rebellions, and dozens of others. These are among the largest anti-colonial uprisings in Indian history and they are substantially absent from the standard nationalist narrative, because they were directed at land and forest rather than at national independence.

The postcolonial state retained the framework. The Forest Act of 1927 remained in force; the forest bureaucracy continued; and development projects — dams, mines, industrial plants, wildlife sanctuaries — were sited disproportionately in Adivasi areas because that is where the resources and the least politically powerful populations were.

The displacement figures are contested and large. Estimates of those displaced by development projects since independence run into the tens of millions, with Adivasis substantially over-represented — commonly estimated at around 40% of those displaced, against 8–9% of the population. Resettlement has been widely documented as inadequate.

Which is the whole argument of this lesson in one sequence: a category was created for administrative purposes, the land underneath it was reclassified as state property, the people on it became encroachers, the resources beneath it were extracted, and the resulting dispossession is now the subject of a rights framework that the same state administers.

Movements and mobilisation

Adivasi politics is among the most sustained social movement activity in India, and it takes several forms.

Statehood movements — the most successful. Jharkhand (2000), Chhattisgarh (2000) and Uttarakhand (2000) were created after decades of campaigning, of which the Jharkhand movement is the oldest and most explicitly Adivasi.

Anti-displacement movements — the Narmada Bachao Andolan against the Sardar Sarovar dam is the best known internationally, and made displacement and resettlement a global development issue.

Land and forest rights movements, which produced the Forest Rights Act.

And the armed conflict. The Naxalite/Maoist insurgency has operated in central Indian forest districts for decades, in areas of dense Adivasi population. The sociology here requires care. The movement is not an Adivasi movement — its leadership and ideology are not — but it operates in Adivasi areas, recruits from Adivasi populations, and both the insurgency and the counter-insurgency have been extremely costly for those populations, who have been caught between armed parties and displaced by both.

Salwa Judum, a state-supported militia in Chhattisgarh, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2011 after displacing large numbers of villagers into camps.

None of this is a story with heroes, and accounts that present it as one — in either direction — are not describing what happened.

Go deeper

The category problem, generalised

"Tribe" is one of anthropology's most criticised concepts, and the criticisms apply well beyond India.

It has no consistent definition. Attempts to specify it by size, political organisation, subsistence mode, kinship structure or territoriality all fail to produce a coherent class.

It implies a stage. The term carries an evolutionary sequence — band, tribe, chiefdom, state — from nineteenth-century anthropology, in which tribes are what societies are before they become states. This is the denial of coevalness (6.1.1): treating contemporaries as belonging to an earlier time.

And in Africa it was substantially an administrative creation (6.1.1): Mamdani's bifurcated state, in which colonial rule invented and hardened "tribe" as the political category through which rural populations were governed by chiefs under "customary" law.

Which produces the standard scholarly recommendation: use the terms people use for themselves, specify the actual social formation being described, and reserve "tribe" for cases where it is the self-designation.

And in India the recommendation runs into the constitution. "Scheduled Tribe" is a legal category attached to substantial entitlements (6.2.4). It cannot simply be abandoned without abandoning the rights — which is the census dynamic again, at its sharpest: the category is analytically indefensible and politically indispensable.

The comparative frame

The Indian case sits within a global category that has its own politics: indigenous peoples.

International instruments: ILO Convention 169 (1989) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), which establish rights to land, self-determination and free, prior and informed consent for projects affecting them.

And India's position is instructive. India voted for UNDRIP and maintains that all Indians are indigenous — that the concept of a distinct indigenous population does not apply to a country where the entire population is native to the territory, and that Scheduled Tribes are covered adequately by domestic provisions.

Adivasi movements have contested this, and it is a genuine analytical dispute rather than a merely political one: the indigenous concept was developed in settler-colonial contexts — the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic Sámi — where a distinct settler population arrived and displaced an existing one. Whether it transfers to contexts without that structure is a real question, and it is being argued in Africa and Asia as well as India.

What travels regardless: the substantive claims about land, prior occupation, self-governance and consent, whatever category they are made under.

And what the discipline gets from this

Three things:

A case where the category is the object of study. Nowhere is it clearer that a classification produced by a state can become the identity around which people organise, and that the classification's analytical incoherence does not prevent it from being politically real. This is Hacking's looping effect (5.7.2) at national scale.

An analysis of dispossession that is not about class in the ordinary sense. The mechanism — reclassifying occupied land as state property, converting inhabitants into encroachers, and extracting the resources — is what Marx called primitive accumulation (4.1.10) occurring continuously in the present, and the Adivasi literature documents it better than any other body of work.

And a corrective to caste-centred Indian sociology. A field organised around caste describes badly a population whose exclusion is territorial, whose relations are with the forest department rather than the temple, and whose politics is about land. Indian sociology has had to build a second framework, and it has done so substantially through scholars from those communities — Virginius Xaxa, Abhay Flavian Xaxa, Alpa Shah and others — which is 5.6.1's standpoint argument occurring inside a national tradition.

"Tribes are the lowest castes." They are outside the caste order rather than at its bottom, and their exclusion is territorial rather than ritual. Ghurye's "backward Hindus" position is one side of a long argument, not a finding.

"Adivasi means the same as Scheduled Tribe." ST is an administrative category with legal entitlements; Adivasi is a self-designation making a political claim to prior occupation. They overlap and are not the same.

"Adivasi communities were isolated." Most had extensive trade, tribute and political relations with neighbouring states for centuries. "Isolation" was substantially produced by the reclassification of forest land and the restriction of movement.

"The Forest Rights Act solved the land question." Implementation has been contested at every stage, community rights recognised far less than individual ones, and a 2019 Supreme Court order would have evicted over a million households before it was stayed.

"The Maoist insurgency is an Adivasi movement." It operates in Adivasi areas and recruits there; its leadership and ideology are not Adivasi; and Adivasi populations have borne the costs of both the insurgency and the counter-insurgency.

"'Tribe' is simply a colonial invention." In Africa, largely (Mamdani). In India, the populations and their distinctiveness are real; the category, its criteria and its administrative content are colonial products.

Why it matters

It is the clearest case of a category creating what it names. An administrative classification, built on criteria that are indefensible as social science, became a legal status, then an entitlement, then a political identity — and is now both analytically incoherent and impossible to abandon.

It documents primitive accumulation in the present tense. Land reclassified as state property, inhabitants reclassified as encroachers, resources extracted, and populations displaced in the tens of millions. This is not a stage of capitalism's history; it is happening now, and it is documented.

It corrects a national sociology's own centre of gravity. Indian sociology built itself around caste and describes badly a hundred million people whose situation caste does not explain — and the correction has come substantially from scholars from those communities, which is the standpoint argument occurring inside a tradition rather than between traditions.

And it poses the question of categories at its sharpest. The category is wrong and it carries the rights. You cannot dissolve it without dissolving them. Every argument about identity categories in every country runs into this, and India has been living inside it for seventy years.

"Tribe" entered Indian administration as a colonial category marking populations that were remote, forest-dwelling, linguistically distinct and not paying legible land revenue — governed through Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas, and carrying an evolutionary theory. Elwin argued for protected isolation; Ghurye for integration as "backward Hindus"; neither asked the populations.

"Adivasi" — "original inhabitant" — emerged from the movements in the 1930s, is contested as history, and is decisive as politics: not a stage of development but a prior claim.

The framework does not fit caste. Exclusion is territorial, not ritual; the defining relations are with the forest department, the contractor and the mining company.

The mechanism: the Indian Forest Acts (1865, 1878, 1927) made forests state property and customary use a privilege, driven by railway sleepers, timber and revenue; communities became encroachers on land they had occupied for generations; and the postcolonial state retained the framework. Displacement by development projects runs into the tens of millions, with Adivasis at roughly 40% of those displaced against 8–9% of the population.

The constitutional response: the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, PESA (1996), and the Forest Rights Act (2006), whose preamble names "historical injustice" — with implementation contested at every stage.

Movements: statehood (Jharkhand, 2000), anti-displacement (Narmada), forest rights — and the Maoist insurgency, which operates in Adivasi areas without being an Adivasi movement, and in which both the insurgency and the counter-insurgency, including Salwa Judum, have been costly for those populations.

And the category problem at its sharpest: "tribe" has no consistent definition, implies an evolutionary stage, and was substantially an administrative creation — while "Scheduled Tribe" carries constitutional entitlements that cannot be abandoned with it. Analytically indefensible and politically indispensable.

Scheduled Tribe — India's constitutional category, around 8–9% of the population, carrying reservations and land protections.

Adivasi — "original inhabitant"; a self-designation asserting prior occupation.

Fifth and Sixth Schedules — the constitutional arrangements for Scheduled Areas and for the north-east's Autonomous District Councils.

PESA (1996) — extension of local self-government to Scheduled Areas, with Gram Sabha consultation on land acquisition.

Forest Rights Act (2006) — recognition of individual and community forest rights, framed as redress for historical injustice.

Indian Forest Acts — the colonial legislation converting customary forest use into a state-granted privilege.

Denial of coevalness — representing contemporaries as belonging to an earlier stage of development.

Free, prior and informed consent — the international standard for projects affecting indigenous peoples.

Primitive accumulation in the present — the continuing conversion of commonly used land into state or private property.

One — trace a category to its criteria. Look up the official criteria for Scheduled Tribe status. Ask which are descriptions of a group and which are descriptions of what was done to it.

Two — find a reclassification of land. In any country, identify a moment when customary use became a state-granted privilege. Ask what the state wanted from the land, and what happened to the people on it.

Three — check the displacement figures. Look up estimates of development-induced displacement in India and the share accounted for by Scheduled Tribes. The disproportion is the finding.

Four — test the indigenous concept. Ask whether it applies to a context you know that is not settler-colonial. The difficulty of the answer is why India's position is arguable and contested.

Five — sit with the dilemma. Take an identity category in your own society that you think is analytically incoherent and that carries real entitlements. Work out what you would actually do about it. Most people find they cannot.