All that I Wanted to Know about Caste System but NOT Afraid to Ask

‘tribal organisation’ and ‘Hindu organisation’. technology of production. Tribal technology is believed to be inferior.  By contrast, the caste system has a superior technological apparatus and a system of occupational specialisation and inter-dependence castes are primarily associated with the agricultural mode of production While caste society is considered to be surplus producing, tribes are essentially subsistence economies, in which whatever is produced is for the purpose of consumption. From this, we may infer that if a caste society is ‘future-oriented’, a tribe is rooted in its ‘present’. Against this background, whenever the tribes had difficult economic periods, they entered the portals of caste society, taking up an occupation and supplying its product to non-tribal groups, thus entering into what has been called in north India, the jajmanî system (the system of patron-client relations). If it was im...

Conversion to Buddhism

Table 1: Percentage of Tribal People in Different States and Union Territories of India State/Union Territory Percentage of Tribespersons among the Total Population Andhra Pradesh 6.60 Arunachal Pradesh 64.20 Assam 12.40 Bihar 0.90 Goa -- Gujarat 14.80 Haryana -- Himachal Pradesh 4.00 Karnataka 6.60 Kerala 1.10 Madhya Pradesh 20.30 Maharashtra 8.90 Manipur 34.41 Meghalaya 85.90 Mizoram 94.50 Nagaland 88.90 Orissa 22.10 Punjab -- Rajasthan 12.60 Tamil Nadu 1.00 Tripura 31.10 Uttar Pradesh 0.10 West Bengal 5.50 Jammu and Kashmir 10.90 Uttrakhand 3.00 Jharkhand 26.30 Chhattisgarh 31.80 Andaman and Nicobar Islands 8.30 Chandigarh -- Dadra and Nagar Haveli 62.20 Daman and Diu 8.80 Delhi and Pondicherry -- Lakshadweep 94.50

Nehru was a staunch critic of cultural impositions. It 264 On the Situation of Tribes in India is well known that in his Foreword (dated 16 February 1957) to the Second Edition of Verrier Elwin’s Philosophy for NEFA (1957), the fi rst principle he enunciated was: ‘People should develop along the lines of their own genius and we should avoid imposing anything on them’. In another context, he (1955: 2) wrote: ‘We are welcome to our way of living but why impose it on others’?

Generally, when anthropologists speak of tribes, they mean communities of people who have remained outside of the state and civilization, whether out of choice or necessity; that was the reason of calling them ‘non-civilized’, but certainly not ‘uncivilized’. In India, ‘they all stood more or less outside of Hindu civilization’ (Bèteille, 1992: 76). The examples of these tribal communities, though few in number, are the Naga tribes (particularly, Ao, Angami, Tangkhul), Mizo, Khasi, Mina, and those sections of tribal communities in central India which have embraced Christianity.