Ways of Seeing

Adivasi joins two words: ādi, “beginning” or “of earliest times,” and vāsī, “inhabitant.” Its sense is “original inhabitants.” It is a modern word. The historian David Hardiman traces it to the Chotanagpur region of present-day Jharkhand in the 1930s, where it named the Adivasi Mahasabha: formed in Ranchi in 1938 as the Adivasi Sabha, and renamed in 1939 under Jaipal Singh Munda. The social worker A. V. Thakkar carried it into wider use in the 1940s. In Bengali, and in the record of India’s Constituent Assembly, it is spelled Adibasi.

The word was chosen against older names. Colonial ethnography and the census called the same communities “aborigines,” “forest tribes,” and “animists”; later administration spoke of “primitive,” “backward,” and even “criminal” tribes. In the Constituent Assembly on 19 December 1946, Jaipal Singh Munda set those labels aside and spoke for “more than 30 millions of the Adibasis.” When the Assembly came to name the category in law, B. R. Ambedkar held that “Adibasi” had no fixed legal meaning. The Constitution instead speaks of Scheduled Tribes (Articles 342 and 366(25)), in Hindi anusūcit janjāti, communities listed by presidential order. It does not use the word Adivasi at all. Jaipal Singh asked that the Hindi term not be banjati, “forest tribes”: “The word Adibasi has grace.”

The names still carry politics. Hindu nationalist organizations prefer vanvasi, “forest dweller,” a word that sets aside any claim to prior habitation, and many Adivasi people reject it. Earlier coinages by Gandhian social workers, such as girijan (“hill people”), never took hold among the people they described.

Adivasi and Indigenous overlap, but they are not the same. Internationally, “Indigenous peoples” is the name under which communities claim rights, as in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). India voted for the Declaration, but its government takes the position that all citizens of India are indigenous, and it has not ratified ILO Convention 169, though it remains party to the earlier Convention 107. Scholars disagree as well. André Béteille argues that the idea travels poorly to India, where it is rarely possible to show who settled first; Virginius Xaxa that the claim rests less on literal first residence than on the prior claims of dispossessed peoples to land and resources; Sumit Guha that ideas of pristine indigenous ethnicity grew out of nineteenth-century colonial anthropology.

The word has regional limits too. Many communities in Northeast India call themselves tribal or indigenous and associate “Adivasi” with central India. In Assam, “Adivasi” names the descendants of Oraon, Munda, Kharia, Santal, and other workers brought from central India to the tea gardens in the nineteenth century, who are classified there as Other Backward Classes rather than Scheduled Tribes.

In this archive I use Adivasi, as many of the people and collectives it gathers do, and Indigenous where the conversation is international. Tribe and tribal appear where they are the language of the state or of a source; aboriginal only when quoting the colonial record. The 2011 Census counted 104 million people as Scheduled Tribes, 8.6 per cent of India’s population; in Jharkhand, 26 per cent.