Discussion of the religious status and political rights of the tribals is rendered more difficult by the term commonly used to designate them: âdivâsî. Christian missionaries and secularists have popularized the belief that this is a hoary self-designation of the tribals (unmindful that this would prove their intimate familiarity with Sanskritic culture, as the term is a pure Sanskrit coinage), e.g.: “These peoples are called adivasis, which means ‘first inhabitants’. Like the American continent, India has its Indians.”33
Contrary to a widespread belief, this term is not indigenous. It is not listed in the 19th-century Sanskrit dictionary of M. Monier-Williams, a zealous Christian who would gladly have obliged the missionaries if only he had been aware of the term. The Sanskrit classics attest the awareness of a separate category of forest-dwellers, but used descriptive terms for them, e.g. âtavika, from atavî, “forest”.
Christian authors feign indignation when such descriptive terms are preferred. Thus, A.J. Philip: “In the lexicon of Hindutva, the word adivasi has disappeared. The Sangh Parivar prefers to call them vanvasis (dwellers of forests or jungles). It is just a step away from calling them junglis (illiterate, uncouth and uncivilised). Thus the fall in the status of a people who take pride in calling themselves the adi (original) people of the land is at once apparent. (.) It is all part of a grand project of rewriting history which the Parivar and its affiliates have ventured into.”34 No, the imposition of the term adivasi during the colonial period was itself an instance of replacing facts of history with an imaginative theory.
The history-rewriting, in A.J. Philip’s case, is also in the eye of the beholder. While insisting on the use of the colonial-imposed term adivasi, he manages to give an anti-colonial twist to his story: “The adivasis, whom the anthropologist call the Fourth World or the indigenous people, suffered the first lexical assault when they were brought under the official term Scheduled Tribes”.35 But it was the British themselves, with their race theories, who had redefined the tribals as the “indigenous races”, and who had even introduced the concept of “tribe” as distinct from “caste” (after an initial period when they had used the term interchangealy, e.g. “the Brahmin tribe”).
The colonial term aboriginal, “pre-colonial native”, has been indigenized in India in the 19th century through its literal translation âdivâsî. The term aboriginal had gained currency in the “New World”, where it made good sense from a European viewpoint: a white colonist (or an imported black slave) was a “new inhabitant”, and a Native American, Native Australian or Maori was an “original inhabitant”. This term says one thing about its referent, viz. that he is not an immigrant, and another about its non-referent, viz. that he is an immigrant, a coloniser.
The excluded ones, the non-Adivasis, all the urban and advanced agricultural communities, suddenly found themselves labelled as immigrants who had colonized India and chased the aboriginals to the most inaccessible places. The message of the colonial term Adivasi was that the urban elites who were waging a struggle for independence, could not claim to be the rightful owners of the country anymore than the British could. Likewise, it served to present Hinduism, the religion named after India, as a foreign imposition. The only non-tribals considered aboriginal were the Untouchables, supposedly the native dark-skinned proletariat in the Apartheid system imposed by the white Aryan invaders to preserve their race...
Many people use the term “Adivasi” quite innocently, but the term is political through and through. Its great achievement is that it has firmly fixed the division of the Indians in “natives” and “invaders” in the collective consciousness, on a par with the division in natives or aboriginals and the immigrant population in America and Australia. Thus, an indologist specializing in tribal culture said to me, off-hand: “The Âdivâsîs are the original people of India-well of course, that is precisely what the word âdivâsî means.” The parallel with the American and Australian situations is driven home, e.g. in the title of a booklet on India published by the Dutch and Belgian administrations for development cooperation: “Adivasi, Indianen van India” (Dutch: “India’s Indians”).38 As if the term were not a deliberate modem construction but an ancient witness to an ancient history of aboriginal dispossession by Dravidian and Aryan “invaders”.
Anglicized Hindus, too, have interiorized the parallel White/Amerindian = Hindu/Adivasi.39 However, no conscious Hindu now accepts the ideologically weighted term Adivasi, much to the dismay of those who espouse the ideological agenda implied in the term, viz. the detachment of the tribals from Hindu society and the delegitimation of Hinduism as India’s native religion. Thus, the Times of India complains: “In the Indian context, it is sad to note that, despite the affirmative action promised by the Constitution for the Scheduled Tribes and despite the appellation of adivasi (original inhabitants) being used for them, the government still does not accept that tribals are the indigenous peoples of India. In fact, it is not without significance that the BJP (…) prefers to refer patronisingly to tribal peoples as vanvasis (forest dwellers) rather than adivasis.”40
The assumption that the term “forest-dweller” is condescending is simply not correct from the viewpoint of the forest-dwellers themselves, who hold their forests and the concomitant life-style in high esteem, just as the Vedic people did.41 Likewise, Mahatma Gandhi’s indigenous term for the tribals, Girijan or “hill people”, far from being a condescending exonym, is actually the self-designation of many communities in India. Many Dravidian-speaking tribes have names derived from ku- or malai-, meaning “hill, mountain”, e.g. Kurukh, Malto, and of course the non-tribal Malayali.
Historian and anti-Hindutva activist Gyanendra Pandey writes: “A special number of the RSS journal Panchjanya, devoted to the ‘tribal’ peoples of India and published in, March 1982, is significantly titled ‘Veer vanvasi ank’. The use of the term ‘vanvasi’ (forest- or jungle-dwellers) in place of the designation ‘adivasi’, which had come to be the most commonly used term among social scientists and political activists talking about tribal groups in India, is not an accident Adivasi means original inhabitants, a status that the Hindu spokespersons of today are loath to accord to the tribal population of India.”42
Gyanendra Pandey builds on the accomplished fact of the widespread use of the ideological term Adivasi,-which is “not an accident” either, witness its “common use” by “political activists”. In fact, not just “Hindu spokespersons” but everyone who cultivates the scientific temper would reject a term which carries the load of an entirely unproven, politically motivated theory, viz. that the tribals are “the” (i.e. the only) original inhabitants of India. Nobody is “loath to accord to the tribal population the status of original inhabitants”, certainly not the Hindu nationalists.43 But every objective observer would reject the effective implication of the term Adivasi, viz. that the non-tribals are not original inhabitants, on a par with the white colonisers who decimated the Native Americans...
http://voiceofdharma.com/books/wiah/ch9.htm
Economic growth will be fast paced from mid-July onwards,” the Chief Minister said, while addressing the Annual General Body meeting of Goa State Industries’ Association here last evening.