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“ Tribal rights in land and forest should be respected” – Jawaharlal Nehru on five principles for the policy to be pursued vis-a-vis the tribals > Source: Nandini Sundar in Encyclopedia of India by Stanley Wolpert, Editor in chief. In recent years, while some adivasi communities have been mobilized by Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) political forces , others have attempted to revive traditional adivasi religions like the sarna dharm (sacred grove religion). Competitive proselytization by Christian and Hindu groups has also served to reduce the space for the expression of an autonomous adivasi culture, language, and religion. Given the desperate situation in which many of the central Indian adivasis live, survival issues have usually dominated over identity questions. The “tribal question” in central India has traditionally been posed in two ways by academics and policy makers: the question of differentiating between tribes and castes on the one hand, and tribes and peasants on the other and the question of how best to improve what is universally seen as a poverty-stricken condition among tribals. The intellectual, political, and administrative rationale for treating all these communities together under a single “tribal” rubric remains unclear. Northeast-India contains another major portion of the tribal population, including the different Naga subtribes, Khasis, Garos, Mizos, Kukis, Bodos, and others. There are also pockets of tribal communities in the south like the Chenchus, Todas, and Kurumbas, and very small endangered communities in the Andamans, like Jarawas, Onge, and Sentinelese. They occupy a belt stretching from the Bhil regions of western India through the Gond districts of central India, to Jharkhand and Bengal, where the Mundas, Oraons, and Santals predominate. The “tribal” peoples or adivasis of India, according to the 2001 census, constitute roughly 8.1 percent of the country’s population, some 83,6 million people, classified under 461 different communities.
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“The tribal culture at its best provides a living example of the Gandhian concept of trusteeship” – Lachman Khubchandani in Indigenous Peoples: Responding to Human Ecology | Download this and related books on >