The two-minute-byte media culture needs homogenisation, for it has no time for the ?Other? or for reflection. Very few people read the Institute of Rural Management Anand?s (IRMA?s) chapter on the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act of 1996 (PESA) districts and yet everybody has strong views on it. My rather pedantic plea that academics should be given a hearing and if disagreed with should be contested but not banned, goes unheeded. I always argue that the sponsors of research should state their objections and the authors should adjust to that. If the authors feel they are right, then they should state the official critique of their work and their response to it. All this should be done with some humility. I don?t know of any government that fell because an academic wrote a critique. On the other hand, academics also need to have a sense of proportions about their impact, which generally is in the long run, when ideas matter.
Interestingly, in some of the recent debates, there have been simultaneous references to Dr Padel. The learned anthropologist is in a very distinguished lineage of British scholarship and yet his work is in a different stream than that of IRMA?s. For example, he was extensively quoted by the Morse Commission on Narmada. ?Dr Padel told us that since 1940, there has been a tendency in some sections of Hindu society to claim that tribal peoples are just a poorly integrated part of the mainstream culture of India?. The Indian social anthropologist GS Ghurye and India?s freedom movement get the short end of the straw. ?His arguments have their place in India?s nationalist movement. Ghurye sought to avoid an emphasis on tribal indigenous status that could appear politically divisive?.
Jawaharlal Nehru, who was the butt of tasteless sarcasm in the first sentence of the Morse Independent Review, in his foreword to the second edition of ?A Philosophy for NEFA? by Verrier Elwin, wrote on October 9, 1958: ?We cannot allow matters to drift in tribal areas or just not take interest in them. In today?s world, that is not possible or desirable. At the same time, we should avoid over-administering these areas and in particular, sending too many outsiders into tribal territory. It is between these two extreme positions that we have to function. Development has to be ensured in various areas, such as communications, medical facilities, education and better agriculture.?
As is well-known, after the colonial government hanged an adivasi freedom fighter, Mahatma Gandhi and Thakkar Bapa tried to raise the conscience of India. Gandhiji set up the Bhil Seva Mandal, which was a predecessor to many voluntary organisations working in this area. In 1927, an enquiry committee was constituted by voluntary workers for looking into the problems of tribals. This committee, under the chairmanship of Thakkar Bapa, included prominent social workers like Jugatram Dave, Narhari Parikh, Kishorilal Mashruwala, Kalyanji Mehta and Chhagan Joshi (all Gandhians). The real impact of the earlier works of the Gandhian workers among the tribals is that a large number of voluntary organisations grew in every tribal region and these drew inspiration as well as guidance from Gandhian thought to organise their voluntary efforts for tribal development.
The entire scholarly tradition relating to the subaltern religions of India shows how Hinduism and other Indian religions adapted themselves to the requirement of popular culture at the level of artisans and rural workers (mainly scheduled castes and scheduled tribes). Examples extend across Sufism, the Bhakti Movement, Mazhabi Sikhs and others. But this adaptation has often been ignored. The relevance of such a subaltern tradition to the Narmada Valley and central India is also well-known. Anthropologist Chris Degan has documented the religious tradition of tribals in 1992. John Stratton Hawley describes the Bhakti Movement that had gathered force by the 14th century by showing that its members, though part of no overarching formal organisation, were united in their commitment to the value of personal experience in religions. Therefore, they questioned the ex opere operato ritualism characteristic of the sort of Hindu worship superintended by Brahmins, and they often criticised the caste conceits that went with it. Another consequence of their belief in the value of personal experience was their use of vernacular religious language as an appropriate action of faith. Hawley shows how the religion of saints who were Sikhs, low-caste Hindus and Muslims is a major dominating force in India today. As Degan says, ?Under the heavy pressure of modernisation in the global context, it is often difficult to maintain a balanced view of such large culturally unexplored places.? This balance is, however, important and India must never ignore it.
The author is a former Union minister