State, Society, and Tribes: Issues in Post-Colonial India by Virginius Xaxa

Author:Virginius Xaxa [Xaxa, Virginius]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pearson India
Published: 2008-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The Politics of Language, Religion, and Identity: Articulation of Social Difference

Language and region, each on its own, are important marks of difference, but they tend to coincide with each other in the Indian context. In fact, together have been the driving force behind the reorganization of society and polity in India in the post-independence era. Language and region, though important, however, do not tell us anything about the inner workings of the society and polity that they embody. What is even more striking is that despite differences based on language and region, societies are enormously similar in their societal characteristics—religion and caste being predominant among them. Indeed, religion and caste cut across region and language, and to that extent constitute the common threads across the diversity of languages and regions (Dumont 1998). It is this commonality that has come to be the principal unit of sociological study and discourse in India. This partly explains why language and region have not become rallying points for sociological deliberation and analysis. Analyzes of language and region are not unimportant, but these aspects were embedded in the institutions of caste and religion. It is within this commonality of Indian society that tribes in India have been posited and are constituted by sociologists and social anthropologists in India.

The commonality has been so pervasive and persuasive that even colonial ethnographers could not escape its influence when they began conceptualizing tribes in the Indian context. Thus, to colonial administrators-cum-ethnographers, tribes came to be constituted as peoples who practiced animism or tribal religion. In such a conceptualization, colonial administrators described tribes as communities located outside of historical and textual religions and their accompanying social organizations. Of course, other criteria such as primitive living conditions and living in isolation were not left out of the analysis, but they followed more as a corollary from the first postulate.

In anthropological literature, tribes in general have been defined in terms of language, culture, territory, and government. However, these features have not been brought to the centrestage of sociological discussion. Béteille in his essay (1960) has discussed these issues and pointed to the kinds of inadequacies that these present in the Indian context. However, a new analysis based on these features as a starting point was not pursued. As stated earlier, tribes came to be conceptualized residually, in terms of the contrast with the general or universal features of Indian society rather than the particular features they embodied. This is not to say that the particular features were overlooked, but that they were not at the centrestage of the conceptualization of tribes. For people at the grassroots level, it was not so much the common features, namely caste and religion that mattered. Rather what mattered most were language and culture, now often referred to as ethnicity, and were considered the most pronounced markers of distinctiveness. In the regional context, tribes were invariably posited against the dominant regional community, which also happened to be a distinct linguistic and cultural community. This is evident

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