Representation of ‘Tribe’ and ‘Tribal Place’ in Sanskrit Literature, Adivasi Oral Tradition and Colonial Ethnographic Accounts

Abstract

This paper seeks to focus on in what way the tribal communities and their place of living were represented in pre-colonial Sanskrit texts which will help us to understand the trajectory of colonial discourse in which colonial ethnographers conceptualize their notion of the tribe. Colonial ethnographers who were deeply influenced by Sanskrit/Brahmanical tradition invented the caste and tribe of precolonial caste order. Indian history informs us about different ways of looking at forests and forest dwellers within ever-changing contexts and perceptions. The changing attitude towards forests has been reflected in different texts written in different languages such as Sanskrit, Prakrit, Tamil and other languages as also in oral tradition. Deriving the terms and concepts of tribes from ancient Indian Sanskrit texts the Orientalists and ethnographers of the nineteenth century constructed a dominant body of knowledge on Indian tribes. Not only in colonial India but in pre-colonial or even in the early Indian context, agricultural civilization and forests were regarded as civilized and wild. In the Adivasi oral tradition forest is not unknown and distant here but it is their home so they had a symbiotic relationship with the forest and trees.