| Summary, etc. |
Culturally primitive, exploited, exotic-stock words to profile a tribal. In the not too distant past, Western anthropologists viewed tribals in a rather bizarre light: describing them as a queer species, existing in isolated pockets and more often than not far removed from the national mainstream-almost as if they were museum curios; with the result that the tribals have for long carried a distorted socio-cultural image in popular perception.<br/><br/>Constituting almost 7 per cent of the country's 850 million population they are thus a major segment of India's social tapestry with a legitimate share in the subcontinent's unmatched pluralities. Indian tribals today, like others of their kind, are in transition, inevitably exposed, as they are, to the influences of modernity and social forces.<br/><br/>Tribal Transformation in India, edited by Prof. Bud dhadeb Chaudhuri in 5 Volumes is not just the pluses and minuses of primitive customs or kinship, quaint life cycle, rituals etc, but a collaborative effort of Indian scholars to capture the changing tribal scenario in its totality. With the latest concepts/re search tools in anthropology and related disciplines, the authors look afresh at micro and macro-level dynamics of tribal situation in India vis-a-vis the socio-cultural realities of the subcontinent.<br/><br/>The contributors are anthropologists, economists. social scientists, geographers, political scientists, ad ministrators and policy makers, environmentalists, and folklorists-among whom figure such distin guished scholars like Prof. A.K. Danda, Prof. Amitabha Basu, Prof. Anand C. Bhagabati, Prof. Asis Banerjee, Dr. Bhupinder Singh, Prof. B.K. Roy Burman, Prof. Gagumci Kabui, Prof. Ghanshyam Shah, Prof. Jaganath Pathy, Prof. J.B. Ganguly, Dr. Jawaharlal Handoo, Dr. K. Mohan Rao, Prof. K.N. Sahay, Dr. K.S. Singh, Prof. L.K. Mahapatra, Dr. L.R.N. Srivastava, Prof. P.S. Ramkrishnan, Prof. Ram Dayal Munda, Prof. R.K. Kar, Dr. R.S. Mann, Prof. Sachchidananda, Prof. S.K. Chand, Prof. S.L. Sharma, Prof. S.N. Rath, Dr. Sitakant Mahapatra, Dr. Stephen Fuchs, Prof. Surajit Sinha, Dr. T. akshmaiah, Dr. Walter Fernandes and others. |
