Some Indian tribes

According to the Census of 1961, the population of India was nearly 440 million. Some areas like the plains of the Ganga or the eastern coastal plain stretching from Bengal to Cape Comorin in the south are densely populated, while the hills and jungles of Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Bihar or Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura in the north-east and Himachal Pradesh in the west do not carry the same burden of population on every square mile of land.
In these hilly and forested regions, there live many communities speaking languages of their own and who have succeeded in preserving their social customs, artistic traditions and religious beliefs to a large extent. And these are, more or less, distinct from the culture of their neighbours who speak either Assamese or Hindi or some other language. Such distinctive tribes are 'backward' in their economy, which means that they can support fewer people per square mile of land by means of their indigenous productive system, and often at a comparatively lower standard of living than the neighbouring communities who depend on agriculture and animal husbandry, and are supported by groups of artisans practising specialized arts and crafts. Under the economic pressure of the latter, the tribal communities have often been forced into some kind of interdependence with their neighbours, where they have not actually been reduced to some form of subservience.