The Agony of Tribal Life (original) (raw)
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(Re)fashioning the Tribal Self-image: Reading Contemporary Tribal Writings from India in Translation
New Literaria
Tribal voices are perennially absent in the domains of disciplinary knowledges. Contemporary indigenous writings from different parts of the world contest this archival and textual invisibility of the indigenous subject by documenting the unremitting pain and anguish these communities undergo due to systematic territorial displacement and cultural dislocations. Literary narratives originating within these indigenous communities transcend paradigms of literature by offering a dynamic repertoire of indigenous epistemic practices and lived experiences. Keeping this understanding broadly in the background and contemporary tribal literature(s) from India at the focal point, this paper proposes to argue that critical readings of such texts problematize predominant discourses of ‘indigeneity’. Embedded within the (neo)colonial ethnic stereotypes is the reductionist understanding of ‘indigeneity’ which puts forward a dualistic image of the tribal subject who is either an innocent, vulnerabl...
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021
Tribality simply means the characteristic features of various tribal communities and the qualities of being tribal. In the 1940s leading anthropologists like Verrier Elwin and G.S.Ghurye tried to theorize and categorize tribal identities. However, they were often accused of representing either a ‘protective’ or ‘romantic’ notions of tribality. One cannot determine the tribality of a person based on their features, dialects, food habits or geographical location. Tribality is said to bind the pan-Indian Tribal literature which is again problematic considering language which is considered as the useful indicator of any identity. Tribal Literature is a distinct form of writing to represent people, things and ideas in their cultural authenticities. The tribals essentially have an oral culture and thus when a tribal writer like Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, a Government Doctor by profession, writes in the canonical English language, we will be tempted to probe if he seeks to ‘write in’ or ‘wr...
joell, 2018
The 'struggles' faced by women are portrayed in many literary works. Issues of women have also been voiced in public forums but the issues of tribal women have not been adequately represented. Tribal women face double marginalization of being a woman and also being part of an already oppressed class. The present paper thus attempts to illustrate and analyse the problems faced by the tribal women. The key question raised is-Is there really a serious issue for tribal women even after trying to secure them with new laws? The question is answered by comparing two short stories-Mahasweta Devi's The Hunt and Zora Neal Hurston's Sweat from two different continents. The texts used for analysis also project some tribal women characters who had the courage of raising their 'voices' against the existing social evils though being surrounded by the 'voiceless' masses.
2017
The twentieth century postcolonial India witnessed the rise of a host of new social, political and literary movements. Dalits, Tribals, farmers, women and various ethnic groups, who are the contemporary subalterns of 'free' India, came forward to raise demands and issues that have been left unattended in the established political and theoretical discourses. To protect their existence and identities, and to simultaneously seek their emancipation, their narratives struggle to fight exploitation and discrimination carried out against them due to their specific identities. In the emerging inequities and inequalities, the narratives of these marginalized sections need to be strengthened by intellectual contributions from the civil and literary society. The 1 The present paper is an edited version of a paper presented at the Resistance" highlights the importance of grassroot workers and intellectual activists engaged in addressing the problems among Tribal communities in Indi...
isara solutions, 2022
With the rising awareness regarding the 'self', the tribal groups have come together to raise voices against their systematic marginalization by the mainstream. Tribal or Adivasi literature, steeped with tribal concerns, is trying to carve out a place for itself in the arena of research and literature. Issues concerning tribal development like displacement, poverty, health and disease, indebtedness, land alienation, criminalization, etc. are the result of the econocentric approach of development programs initiated by the governments where tribal interests are not looked after. Adivasi with no real political power face severe challenges from the mainstream to protect their land. The various forces like modernization, globalization, industrialization and state power structures posed a big threat to their tribal existence.
From Orature to Ecriture: A Coup d'oeil at the Rise and Development of Indian Tribal Literature
Tribal Perspectives in India, 2020
Prosenjit Ghosh here is no universal definition of "Tribes' or "Tribal People', however, a common definition for a Tribe' could be a group of people that all have a common ancestry, a common culture, and live in their own enclosed territory. The idea of a tribe goes back to ancient times when Rome would create divisions within society based on class, family, and wealth. These divisions were tribes. The term has since then evolved while the people it describes may not have. Many tribal communities live in areas that lack industry and they live and create homes that do not accept the modern conveniences and behaviours. They choose to De close to nature and follow the customs and cultures of their ancestors. Thus they may not have succeeded to create a separate nation-state but they have successfully maintained separate Culture/s and society for themselves. India is known also for its nuge population of tribal communities which constitute 8.6 percent 0r Country's total population, about 104 million people according t n e 2011 census. This is the largest population of the tribal PEOple in the world. One 'tribal belt' lives along the Himalayas
Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies - February 2021
Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies, 2021
This is indeed a matter of great pleasure to be invited by an eminent scholar like Professor Asoka Kumar Sen to engage in an academic pursuit so close to my heart. Guest editing this issue of the promising and upcoming Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies has been yet another enriching experience. Even though, I had prior experience of editing essays for India's Scheduled Areas: Untangling governance, law and politics, as co-editor with Varsha Bhagat-Ganguly, I realized that the editorial responsibilities can be drastically different on occasions. Nevertheless, I am very happy to have agreed to this proposal and after several ups and downs we are in a position to present three essays and a book review. The essays by Namrata Chaturvedi, Santosh Kumar Kiro and Innocent Soren deal with three different aspects of the Adivasi people and their society while Suchibrata Sen contributes a book review. Namrata Chaturvedi offers a new methodological input so far as study of indigenous societies is concerned. She offers a comparative approach to study what she calls as 'solidarities and intersectionalities in Native American and Indian Adivasi women's poetry'. The method of analysis followed in the essay is so powerful that the reader will immediately realise the utility of the study. As global solidarities between indigenous groups are considered to be crucial in their resistance to marginalization this essay offers clue to formulate a solidarity which is located in the shared world views and values. Solidarity between indigenous groups is attempted to be achieved at a more emotional level by identifying the similar patterns through an exploration of Native American and Indian women poetries focusing on recurring themes of subjugation and marginalization on the one hand, and nature-human relationship and socio-cultural milieu on the other. Similarly, Santosh Kumar Kiro offers a sociological reading of folklores of Austro-Asiatic tribes of central India. Kiro also raises alarm over the depleting sources of Munda history which was once preserved in the rich repertoire of folklores. With oral narratives gaining increased recognition as source of reliable history it becomes important to preserve oral resources, primarily the folklores of the community. Kiro has analysed several folklores in his essay to bring home the point that Munda people enjoy harmonious relationship with nature and the wilderness due to a belief system weaved around their folk culture emerging from their life experiences and constructs an imaginary symbiosis between human and nature. The essay by Innocent Soren deals with the menace of liquor sale in Adivasi areas and the engagement of Adivasi people with this. Soren has adopted an approach which neither starts with creating a taboo around drinking nor succumbs to a rationalist and statist perspective. He approaches the issue from an indigenous perspective by not only acknowledging the continued significance of home-brewed v liquor for the Adivasi people but also providing an analysis of the issue avoiding the hollowness of the exercise as evident in researches where visible distance is created between the researcher and their subject. Soren offers a solution of regulating liquor production and consumption as well as sale through the gram sabhas (village assemblies). In suggesting this, Soren reiterates what is already present in the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996. Finally, we have a book review by Suchibrata Sen, an eminent scholar and historian, who argue that 'History writing is not only about looking at the past. The future crisis of climate change, which at present is also showing its dangerous face, may find its genesis from this book and herein lies the novelty of the book. One can hear 'both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor' from the book by Nirmal Kumar Mahato (2020) Sorrow Songs Woods: Adivasi-Nature Relationship in the Anthropocene in Manbhum. I am quite confident that the essays will contribute to the existing knowledge base of studies on Adivasis and will help scholars to know and explore more about the community.
Through a critical appraisal of old, new, and emergent scholarship on the ‘tribe’, this entry traces and places the invention, institutionalization, and the later local infatuation with the colonial category of the ‘tribe’ in Northeast India. Further tracking the social life of the tribal category in Northeast India, the entry then relates how in the postcolonial epoch the ‘tribe’ revealed both as an affective source of embodied and emplaced identity and as a compelling, competitive, and conflictual principle of political mobilization, recognition, and claim-making.
Emerging Identities of Tribals
A general notion prevails that tribal societies conventionally are isolated, maintain pure and pristine traditional culture and are indifferent to the changes taking place around them. However the reality is quite different. The post independent decades have influenced these societies significantly. Development and modernization has been a perennial source of socio-cultural changes that occur with passage of time, across societies, including tribal societies. A number of community development projects initiated by governments are therefore, likely to have hastened this process of change, even in remote areas. This, coupled with legal reforms introduced to streamline (control) land and forest ownership besides empowerment of village Panchayat through 73 rd Constitutional Amendment, has exposed even tribal population to bureaucratic form of participation in local management . While the rate, the process and direction of change may be different, the post independent changes in tribal societies have been instrumental in their journey from subjugation to empowerment.
CHALLENGES ENCOUNTERED BY TRIBAL POPULATION IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION page 97-105
International Journal of Advance and Innovative Research Volume 6, Issue 1 (XXVII): January - March, 2019, 2019
The Globalization affects the tribal population positively and negatively. Since the arrival of liberalization, privatization and globalization (LPG), has affect the culture, languages and life styles of tribals in India. The areas occupied by tribal population have been subject to various objections due to involuntary displacement. Due to neoliberal economy, the arena of development has turned into unipolar. In the name of up gradation of lifestyle of poor native tribal people, the market forces have created wealth for their benefits at the cost of livelihood and security of tribals. According to the World Bank, development schemes every year unwillingly displace one million people in the developing countries from their land-living and homes (World Bank, 1994). In India alone, between 1951 and 1990 around 21.3 million publics were displaced by development projects. Among this number 8.54 million (40 per cent) were tribal or indigenous people and only 2.12 million (24.8 per cent) were resettled. The areas occupied by native tribal people are facing wrath of not only monetary exploitation but ecological degradation due to extreme extraction of resources. The rehabilitation process for displaced tribals has been in dilly-dallying phase of implementation. This paper studies the impact of globalization on tribal population, the displacement and uprisings among tribals, and the role of government policies for the upliftment of tribal population in India.