Continuity and change in tribal society

A seminar on the tribal situation in India was held over twenty years ago at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Shortly thereafter the Institute published the proceedings of the seminar edited by K.S. Singh. The volume ran into several reprints within a short period of time. Apart from being the first serious cumulative effort by intellectuals of the country at taking a serious look at the "original-in however relative a sense we might use the word inhabitants of this country whom we call 'tribals', the volume proved useful in many other ways. It initiated a debate and thereby inspired research in Universities as well as in other academic bodies, and in the span of a few years acquired the status of almost a text book for University students studying for their degrees in Anthropology, Sociology, and Politics. The country has, however, seen dramatic changes since the seminar was held. The tribal question has played a significant role in some of these changes. The Institute, therefore, decided that it was time to hold another collective intellectual exercise to take stock of the situation after a lapse of more than twenty years. And so we had the December 1990 seminar on Tribal Society: Continuity and Change. The first seminar emphasized many inadequacies in our approach towards the understanding of tribal societies, and in our ideas about "developing" these societies. But, on the whole, it was informed by an optimism which generally marked the intellectual life of the country in the years after independence. Thus the seminar issued a fifteen-point statement, representing the collective wisdom of the participants and as a guideline for policymakers, administrators and researchers. But our experience of the last two decades of national life and its imponderables has taught us more caution, if nothing else. The seminar, whose proceedings the present volume brings together. lacks perhaps the optimism of the first; whether or not. however, this lack of optimism is matched by a sharper perception of the reality is for the reader to judge. K.S. Singh puts the matter as follows: "Around the time of the first seminar in 1969, we thought of tribes as a relatively homogeneous category and of tribal regions as of a piece. Today we are sharply aware of the complexities, diversities and variations in the study of the people and in dealing with tribal matters."