Breaking down the question
The question asks you to reconstruct one of the foundational debates in Indian sociology and anthropology — the disagreement between G. S. Ghurye and Verrier Elwin over how the tribal communities of India should relate to the wider society. The operative words are main features and debate. You are expected not merely to describe two positions but to set them against each other and draw out where they clash, where they converge and how the argument was eventually resolved in policy.
The word development in the question is significant. The dispute was ultimately about the goal of change for tribal peoples: whether they should be protected in their distinctiveness, absorbed into the Hindu fold, or brought forward on their own terms. A strong answer keeps this normative question of what counts as tribal welfare in view throughout.
You should also register that this was a debate conducted in a particular historical moment — the late colonial and early independence years — when the fate of tribes was being decided for the new nation. The positions of Ghurye and Elwin were not abstract; they fed directly into the constitutional and administrative approach that India finally adopted.
How to approach it
Open by locating the two protagonists. Ghurye, the founding figure of academic sociology in India, wrote as a nationalist who saw the tribes as an organic part of Hindu civilisation. Elwin, an English self-exiled missionary-turned-anthropologist, wrote as a defender of tribal autonomy who had lived intimately among the Baigas and Gonds. This contrast of standpoint frames the whole debate.
Then set out each position clearly. Present Elwin's early advocacy of a measure of isolation, often summarised — somewhat unfairly — as the national park idea, and his fear that unregulated contact would pauperise and demoralise the tribes. Present Ghurye's counter-argument that the tribes were best understood as backward Hindus already integrated into the Hindu social order, for whom assimilation was both natural and desirable.
Next, bring the two into direct dialogue on the axes of contact, culture, exploitation and the endpoint of change. Note carefully that both men modified their views: Elwin moved from isolation toward a philosophy of integration, and the debate matured. Close by showing how the resolution — Nehru's integrationist middle path, the Panchsheel of tribal policy — drew on both. You can direct readers to related material on colonial policies and tribes for context. End with an assessment of the debate's lasting relevance.
Model answer
The debate between G. S. Ghurye and Verrier Elwin, unfolding through the 1930s and 1940s, remains the classical reference point for any discussion of tribal development in India. It was a debate about ends as much as means — about what change should make of the tribal peoples, and by whose measure their welfare should be judged.
The starting point of the disagreement was a difference of standpoint. Ghurye wrote as the leading academic sociologist and as a cultural nationalist, for whom the unity of Indian civilisation was paramount. Elwin, an Oxford-trained Englishman who had renounced the missionary calling and settled among the tribes of central India, wrote as a participant observer devoted to the peoples he lived among. Where Ghurye looked at the tribes from the vantage of the Hindu whole, Elwin looked outward from within tribal life.
Elwin's early position, developed from his experience of the impoverishment of the Baigas and Gonds under the pressure of moneylenders, contractors, forest law and disease, was that the tribes needed a period of relative protection from predatory outside contact. This was popularly, and somewhat crudely, reduced to the idea of a national park in which tribal culture would be preserved. Elwin's real concern was not to fossilise the tribes but to shield them from the demoralisation, land alienation and exploitation that unregulated contact had repeatedly produced. His was a plea for controlled, sympathetic change rather than for permanent isolation.
Ghurye mounted a sharp counter-argument in his work on the aborigines, whom he preferred to call the backward Hindus. He held that the tribes were not a people apart but were already, through centuries of contact, borrowing and Sanskritisation, a part of the larger Hindu society, occupying its outer and lower reaches. For Ghurye, isolation was both false as description and harmful as policy: it would arrest the tribes at a low level of development, expose them to conversion, and cut them off from the civilisational mainstream. The proper path was assimilation into Hindu society, which he regarded as the natural direction of their history.
The main features of the debate can thus be set out along several axes. On the question of contact, Elwin initially urged regulation and Ghurye urged openness. On the question of identity, Ghurye saw continuity between tribe and caste Hindu, while Elwin stressed the distinctiveness and integrity of tribal cultures. On the question of exploitation, Elwin foregrounded the damage done by outsiders, whereas Ghurye trusted the absorptive capacity of Hindu society. On the endpoint of change, Ghurye pointed toward assimilation and Elwin, at least initially, toward preservation.
It would be a distortion, however, to freeze the two men in these positions. Elwin himself moved decisively away from any suggestion of isolation toward a philosophy of integration that respected tribal culture while allowing selective, protected change. His later thinking, especially as adviser on the North-East Frontier, emphasised development at the tribes' own pace and in their own idiom. The debate therefore matured into a shared recognition that neither the museum nor the melting pot would serve.
The resolution came in the integrationist policy of independent India. Jawaharlal Nehru, drawing explicitly on Elwin's later counsel, articulated the tribal Panchsheel — that tribes should develop along the lines of their own genius, that their rights in land and forest should be respected, that they should not be overwhelmed by a multiplicity of outsiders, and that development should be judged by the quality of human character it produced rather than by statistics. This was a middle path between Elwin's protective concern and Ghurye's insistence on incorporation, and it became the constitutional temper of the Fifth and Sixth Schedules.
In conclusion, the Ghurye-Elwin debate was not a simple contest of isolation against assimilation, as it is often caricatured, but a serious argument about how a modernising nation should carry its most vulnerable communities into change. Ghurye's warning against romantic separation and Elwin's warning against destructive contact were both vindicated, and the integrationist synthesis that governs tribal policy to this day is their joint legacy.
Examiner's perspective
The commonest and most costly error on this question is to present the debate as a flat opposition — Elwin for isolation, Ghurye for assimilation — and to leave it there. Examiners look for candidates who know that Elwin's position evolved and that the debate culminated in an integrationist synthesis. Showing that movement is the single clearest marker of a well-read script.
Credit is given for grounding each position in the standpoint of its author: Ghurye the cultural nationalist and founder of Indian sociology, Elwin the participant observer and defender of tribal autonomy. Naming Ghurye's phrase backward Hindus and correctly explaining the national park caricature, rather than repeating it uncritically, both signal careful reading.
The strongest answers organise the contrast along explicit axes — contact, identity, exploitation, endpoint — which keeps the comparison analytical rather than narrative. They then close the loop by connecting the debate to Nehru's tribal Panchsheel and the Schedules, demonstrating that the argument had real policy consequences.
Avoid taking sides polemically or importing present-day activism anachronistically. The examiner wants a measured reconstruction that treats both thinkers charitably and recognises the enduring value of each warning. An answer that traces the debate to its integrationist resolution and reflects briefly on its continuing relevance will sit in the top band.