Shruti Botre
Anthropological accounts of tribal communities have largely provided working definitions of the term’ tribe,’ which have often been specific to their site of study. Given that tribes differ considerably in terms of their population size, mode of livelihood and level of integration within the capitalist economy, there is huge differentiation, for example, in the range of occupations practised.
The question of how communities deignated as ‘tribes’ should relate to the wider society has generated one of the most enduring debates in modern Indian anthropology. At the centre of that debate stand two classic positions: Verrier Elwin and G. S. Ghurye.
Verrier Elwin, writing first as a missionary and later as an anthropologist-citizen of India, argued for the cultural protection of tribal communities. He insisted that tribes should be allowed to “live their own life,” shielded from forced assimilation into the caste-Hindu order. For Elwin, assimilation meant cultural death; protection meant the right to remain different.
G. S. Ghurye, approaching the same empirical landscape from a textbook “sociological Hindu” perspective, rejected the idea of tribal separateness. In his view, tribes were simply “backward Hindus” who had drifted to the geographic and ritual margins. Integration, not isolation, was therefore the logical policy: Fuller absorption into the Great Tradition would complete a centuries-old historical process.
Between these poles, Elwin’s cultural protection and Ghurye’s assimilationist Hinduism, lies the space where most contemporary policy and ethnographic practice now operate. The middle path recognises that the country is moving forward economically and demographically; yet any sustainable solution has to be negotiated with the communities themselves. Education, informed consent and transparent information become preconditions rather than afterthoughts.
As an ethnographer working with marginalised groups, I treat that negotiation as the first step of fieldwork. The methodological principle is simple: research with people, not on them. Before we interpret or prescribe, we ask the community what futures they imagine for themselves. In that sense, the old Elwin-versus-Ghurye controversy is no longer an abstract academic dispute; it is a daily ethical practice of co-producing knowledge and policy with the people whose lives are at stake.
Reference
Xaxa Committee 2014, The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin, Schedule Tribes: G.S. Ghurye
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Shruti Botre is a Young India Fellow, Ashoka University
