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• 1 2025-05-06T12:27:16-04:00 Adivasi Writers: an Introduction to India's Indigenous Literature 28 Educational Resource Collection for India's "Tribal" (DNT, Scheduled Tribe) Writers plain 2025-06-18T12:15:43-04:00

  Edited by Amardeep Singh and Srishti Raj, Lehigh University 2025
  
  हिंदी संस्करण
  
  This site aims to be a hub and educational resource for Adivasi writing, with the aspiration to share South Asia's indigenous literature with the broader world. We will be creating profiles for individual authors, information about their communities and cultures, topical tags to show groupings and themes, and maps to help readers situate these writers in their cultural and spatial contexts.
  
  Where possible, we will also be providing short excerpts of writing in English or in translation from various Indian languages with permission from the authors or their descendents; many important Adivasi voices have never been translated into English. Those will be collected here. 
  
  Another resource we are developing is an inclusive list of Adivasi writers whose names and literatures we have encountered. This is drawn from lists from Hindi language and English language Wikipedia pages, but also includes the names of authors that do not appear on either list. 
  
  We are also working on Hindi language translations of the main English materials of our site to make the project more accessible to readers in South Asia.
  
  Who are Adivasis? 
  
  India’s indigenous communities are known by a number of different names – Tribals, Adivasis, Scheduled Tribes (a government name), Denotified Tribes (since 1952; another government name), and the British colonial government’s rather ominous Criminal Tribes (1871-1952).  

  The most respectful, politically empowering term in use is probably the term Adivasi, which is a Sanskrit word that means “Original Inhabitants." The term has been in use by activists since the 1930s (the term is thought to have been coined by the Gandhian activist Thakkar Bapa). Here, we will use the term Adivasi in most instances to describe these communities – though there are some historical and ethnographic complexities in doing so. Many Adivasi writers and activists use the word "Tribal" to describe themselves. Others might emphasize their specific communities in describing their orientation to identity. 
  
  Adivasi communities are extremely culturally and linguistically heterogeneous. Some of their languages have Dravidian roots, others are Austric, and yet another branch are closely related to Southeast Asian languages. Their cultures are also quite diverse, and many Adivasis have ancient belief-systems and ritual practices that are clearly distinct from Hindu culture. In recent years, a sizeable number of Adivasi writers and intellectuals have converted to Christianity, and several of the writers profiled on this site come from Christian backgrounds. 
  
  What is Adivasi Literature?
  
  A vibrant Adivasi activist movement emerged in parallel with Dalit activism beginning in the 1970s and 80s; Adivasis have been involved with agitations for land rights, language rights, and cultural and political autonomy within the Indian nation state. Writers like Sushila Samad (1906-1960), Julius Tigga (1903-1971), and Alice Ekka (1917-1978) were active during the nationalist movement before Indian independence, but were not well-known at the time. (Contemporary writers and editors have been working to make their works more available, with the writer and editor Vandana Tete publishing the first collection of Alice Ekka's stories from the 1960s in 2015.) An important figure in Adivasi political history is Jaipal Singh Munda, who advocated for Adivasi rights in India's Constituent Assembly. A second generation of Adivasi writers emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, with writers like Laxman Gaikwad, Lako Bodra, and Sita Rathnamal. While earlier writers generally wrote in Hindi or English, this generation also began to write in their own languages; in some cases, they even created their own scripts for language groups that previously had not had them! (In Lako Bodra's case, he created the Warang Chiti script for the Ho language, spoken by more than 2 million people in eastern India.)
  
  Finally, a vibrant third generation of Adivasi writers has emerged in the 2000s, most visibly with figures like Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Jacinta Kerketta, Anuj Lugun, and Vandana Tete. Some of the new generation have been publishing in English, while others have used Hindi as well as their own languages. The newer generation (exemplified by Shekhar and Kerketta) often focuses on the consequences of the encounter with modernity and global capitalism on Tribal communities (see for instance the poem Santhal Pargana by Nirmala Putul or Shekhar's short story "The Adivasi Will Not Dance"). Other topics covered by contemporary Adivasi writers continue to follow the themes of land rights, geographical and cultural dispossession, exoticization and marginalization by the mainstream media, and ecological themes. 
  
  Many urban Indians were first introduced to Adivasi issues through Savarna (high caste) writers like Mahashweta Devi and G.N. Devy. Mahashweta Devi worked closely with Adivasi activists in Bengal and Bihar/Jharkhand in the 1960s and 70s, and also described the struggles of these communities in many of her works of fiction (see especially "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, Pirtha"). Some of Mahashweta Devi's Bengali writings about Adivasis were also notably translated into English by the scholar and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, which helped bring awareness of Adivasi people to western readers. For his part, G.N. Devy edited an important collection of Adivasi writings (Painted Words, 2002), as well as a more recent collection Being Adivasi: Existence, Entitlements, Exclusion (co-edited with Abhay Flavian Xaxa, 2022). He also founded the non-profit Bhasha Research and Publication Centre as well as the Adivasi Academy in Tejgadh.
  
  These projects have all been important contributions, though we will not be centering the voices of G.N. Devy, Gayatri Spivak, or Mahashweta Devi on this site.  
  
  Transnational Rhetorics of Indigenity:
  
  Some Adivasi writers have explicitly engaged the rhetoric of indigeneity (or: Adivasiyat), coming to see their struggles for justice, recognition, and cultural preservation as aligned with other Indigenous rights movements around the world, including Native American communities in North America, Aboriginals in Australia and New Zealand, and others. For more on comparative theories of indigeneity and decoloniality, see our theoretical note here. 
  
  Language:
  
  The majority of published Adivasi literature we have encountered is in Hindi, though a growing number of Adivasi writers have been publishing in English. There is also a vibrant movement for writing and publishing in Adivasi languages. Here, we will focus on Adivasi literature published primarily in Hindi and English, with an expectation that readers will benefit from having access to previously untranslated materials in some instances.  
  
  Size of population
  
  The Indian census of 2011 estimated about 8% of the country’s population to be Adivasi, meaning that the population is 100 million or more. There are also indigenous/Tribal communities in other South Asian countries. There is an estimate that 1% of the population of Bangladesh is also Adivasi. And about 600,000 Bhils reside in Pakistan; there could be more.

  There are certain regions that have particularly high concentrations of Adivasis; many Adivasi writers profiled on this site come from those regions -- Jharkhand, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, but also Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. The following map from Wikipedia shows population concentrations per capita. 

  
  The area that runs through the central part of the country is often referred to as the “Tribal Belt.” The regions in the north (Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh) and the Northeast have high proportions of the population understood to be “Tribal,” but these are much more sparsely populated areas overall. So it's that middle region of the country -- the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa (Odisha), Chattisgarh, Jharkand, Bihar, and West Bengal that have historically been the center of Adivasi activism. That said, it's important to note the emergence of a growing community of writers from the northeastern Indian states who identify as Adivasi, including Easterine Kire, Temsula Ao, and Avinuo Kira. 
   

  Historical and Ethnographic Complexities. Names and Naming; ST, SC, DNT, OBC...

  The Adivasi populations around India are quite heterogeneous, with some communities likely with ancient roots in certain regions of India that might predate other settlers (such as the Indo-Aryans) In other cases, linguistic and ethnographic evidence suggests the communities might have migrated from other regions of Asia, including Southeast Asia (this is especially likely to be true for Tribal communities in Northeastern India); some of these communities continue to be nomadic, hunter-gatherer societies to the present day. So these communities may not ‘predate’ other (dominant) groups, but they nevertheless have been treated the same as the others historically. Also, the communities can be quite diverse, even internally, with several different sub-groups of the Gond, Bhil, and Munda communities (for example). Sometimes those subgroups have their own names, and there are some inconsistencies regarding whether and how they are marked as separate from the larger groups.

  One important point of clarification – the communities listed below are specifically understood as indigenous “Scheduled Tribes” by the Indian government. For this project, we are generally not including communities known as “Scheduled Castes” (i.e., Dalits); our focus is specifically on communities that have been included under “Scheduled Tribes.”  However, there is at least some overlap between writers understood as Dalit and those defined as Adivasi. 
  
  Finally, some of the writers we are profiling and including on our lists may not be strictly speaking members of Scheduled Tribes (ST). The Chhara community in Ahmedabad, for instance, is technically classified by the government as a Denotified and Nomadic Tribe (DNT), under the broader category of the Other Backward Classes (OBC). However, the writer Dakxin Bajrange Chhara has indicated he believes that classification is a mistake, and communities like the Chharas (who were formerly referred to by the British as Criminal Tribes) should in fact be reclassified as a Scheduled Trib (see our profile of Dakxin Chhara here).