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Adivasi Writers: An Introduction to India's Indigenous Literature

Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar Photo

This page is referenced by:

Adivasi Writers: an Introduction to India's Indigenous Literature
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.

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.)  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, 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 P argana 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
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.
Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar (1983- ): Author Profile Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar was born in Ranchi, in the Indian state of Jharkhand. He is trained as a medical doctor.

Shekhar has won considerable national attention and praise for this English language works, including The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey (2014), The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Stories (2015), Jwala Kumar and the Gift of Fire: Adventures in Champakbagh (2018), and My Father's Garden (2018). He also translated Manoj Rupda's novel Kaale Adhyaay into English as I Named My Sister Silence; that translation was published in 2023.

A brief summary of the prizes and recognition Shekhar has received is in the following from Wikipedia:
For his debut novel, The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey, Shekhar won the 2015 Yuva Puraskar,[34][13] was shortlisted for the 2014 Hindu Literary Prize[35] and a 2014 Crossword Book Award in the Fiction category,[36] longlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award,[37] and jointly won the 2015 Muse India Young Writer Award.[38] The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey was named by The Hindu in December 2019 as one of the ten best fiction books of the decade.[39]

For his second book, The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Stories, Shekhar was shortlisted for the 2016 Hindu Literary Prize.[40] The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Stories was included by Frontline (magazine) in August 2022 in a list of 25 books “that light up the path to understanding post-Independence Indian literature.”[41]

A representative quote from "The Adivasi Will Not Dance":
“But what can we do? They outnumber us. [...] They are only interested in making us sing and dance at their weddings. If they come to help us, they will say that we Santhals need to stop eating cow-meat and pig-meat, that we need to stop drinking haandi. They too want to make us forget our Sarna religion, convert us into Safa Hor, and swell their numbers to become more valuable vote banks. Safa Hor, the pure people, the clean people, but certainly not as clean and pure as themselves, that’s for sure.[...] In the eyes of the Hindus, we Santhals can only either be Kiristan or the almost Safa Hor. We are losing our Sarna faith, our identities, and our roots. We are becoming people from nowhere.” (Shekhar, “The Adivasi Will Not Dance”)
Journalistic writings by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar:

At the Caravan

Short story by Shekhar available online:

"Joga"