The Status of Women in Tribal Societies: Gender Roles and Division of Labour

Walk into a tribal village anywhere in India and you will notice something quickly: the lines between “men’s work” and “women’s work” are drawn very differently than in the mainstream Indian household. Most anthropologists agree that women in tribal communities generally enjoy a higher social position than women in caste-based, non-tribal society. This does not mean tribal societies are free of inequality. It means the shape of that inequality, and the freedoms women hold within it, look nothing alike from one community to the next. To understand this, we need to look at how gender roles are defined, how labour is divided, and how ideas of purity and spiritual power shape a woman’s everyday life.

Defining gender roles in tribal culture 🔗

Every society takes biological differences between men and women and turns them into social expectations. A gender role is simply the set of responsibilities, behaviours, and privileges assigned to a person because of their sex. In most tribal discussions, this conversation centres on men and women, since these are the categories textbooks and field studies have historically documented.

One long-standing theory in anthropology claims that matriarchal and matrilineal societies, where descent and property pass through women, existed before patriarchal ones became the norm worldwide. This idea was popularised by nineteenth-century scholars and later picked up by Marxist and feminist theorists, but contemporary anthropologists treat it as a contested hypothesis rather than settled history, since the ethnographic evidence used to support it has been reinterpreted many times over. What is not in dispute is that matrilineal societies exist in India today, and that women’s economic contribution, combined with their role in childbearing and child-rearing, makes them indispensable to the functioning of every tribal community, regardless of who holds formal power.

Division of labour and economic participation 🔗

The clearest window into gender roles is the division of labour, because it reveals who controls resources and who depends on whom. The household is the basic unit where this plays out daily, and it extends outward into rituals, festivals, and community work, where men and women often participate as near equals rather than in a strict hierarchy.

The Andaman Islanders and shared economic life 🔗

The indigenous groups of the Andaman Islands are frequently cited as a classic example of balanced participation between the sexes. Early ethnographic material on the Andaman Islanders was detailed enough that researchers eventually concluded these communities were broadly egalitarian in their social structure, challenging the assumption that a rigid sexual division of labour is universal to human societies. Both men and women contributed to subsistence tasks, and the sharp opposition between “male work” and “female work” seen in many settled agricultural societies was far less pronounced here.

Matrilineal inheritance among the Khasi and Garo 🔗

In north-east India, the Khasi and Garo tribes of Meghalaya offer a striking contrast to most of the country. Property here passes not to a son but to the youngest daughter, known as the Khadduh among the Khasi and the Nokna among the Garo, and the pattern of husbands moving into their wife’s household reinforces this female-centred structure, as detailed in research on matriliny and women’s wellbeing in Meghalaya. It is worth noting that inheriting property is not the same as holding political authority. In practice, the maternal uncle often manages family and community decisions on behalf of his sister’s children, so women’s economic security exists alongside male administrative control. This is a useful reminder that a matrilineal system is not automatically a matriarchal one.

In patrilineal tribes, which make up the majority in India, this pattern reverses: sons inherit land and lineage names pass through the father. The household remains the basic economic unit in both systems, but who controls its assets depends entirely on which line of descent a community follows.

Purity, pollution, and spiritual practices 🔗

Tribal cosmologies often attach specific taboos to the female body, particularly around menstruation and childbirth, which are treated as spiritually powerful but ritually polluting states. These taboos restrict what women can do during certain periods, yet they exist alongside spiritual roles where women hold real authority, sometimes power that men in the same community cannot access at all.

The Toda tribe and the sacred dairy 🔗

The Toda people of the Nilgiri hills in Tamil Nadu built their entire religious life around buffalo herding and dairy work, and their rituals surround nearly every dairy activity, from milking to churning butter to shifting pastures with the seasons. Their dairies function as temples, graded by levels of sacredness, and only ritually purified priests are permitted to milk the most sacred herds and prepare products for temple use. Women are excluded from this priestly role entirely. Pollution beliefs extend further into a woman’s life cycle: a Toda woman’s first pregnancy was traditionally seen as a threat to the ritual purity of her village’s dairy, and she was required to spend time in a separate hut built outside the village during her pregnancy. Many of these customs have softened with modernisation, but the underlying logic, that female biological processes carry spiritual risk to sacred spaces, remains a strong example of how purity and pollution beliefs shape a woman’s movement and role.

Female shamans among the Saora tribe 🔗

Restriction is only one side of the story. Among the Saora tribe of Odisha, spiritual authority is shared between male and female shamans, referred to locally as Kudan and Kudanboi, who together act as priest, prophet, and healer for their community. According to the Odisha government’s tribal research institute, both male and female shamans exist to fulfil the community’s religious needs, and the position is not inherited but earned through a personal, often trance-based, calling from the spirit world. In some regional traditions this figure is also referred to as a Dishari. These women serve as more than religious mediators. They diagnose illness, prescribe remedies, and are trusted as medicine women in communities where formal healthcare facilities remain scarce. This combination of spiritual and medical authority gives certain Saora women a standing that many men in the same village never achieve.

Where patriarchal tribes still elevate women’s status 🔗

Not every tribe with higher female status is matrilineal. Several patrilineal and even strongly patriarchal tribes still grant women more freedom and respect than caste Hindu society typically does.

Among the Gond tribe of central India, one of the country’s largest tribal groups, women are consulted in domestic decision-making and generally have a strong say in choosing their own marriage partners, according to an ethnographic overview of Gond society. Divorce is comparatively easy to obtain, and widows face none of the social restrictions on remarriage that Hindu caste widows historically encountered. This is a patrilineal, patriarchal society in structure, yet daily life gives women meaningful autonomy that many caste communities did not extend to their women until recent legal reform.

The Naga tribes of Nagaland present a more complicated picture. Among the Angami, a tribe whose traditional society was organised around warfare and male-led self-governance, women were still assigned enormous importance as daughters, wives, and mothers, and their moral and social training was taken as seriously as any other aspect of community life, as described in a study of Angami women in traditional society. Similarly, debates around the status of Ao Naga women reflect this tension directly: some scholars argue tribal custom treated women as near-equal partners in principle, while others point out that in practice, patriarchal norms around inheritance and formal authority limited how far that equality extended. Both tribes illustrate a pattern seen across much of tribal India: patriarchy exists, but it rarely produces the same degree of seclusion, restricted mobility, or economic dependence that characterised much of non-tribal Indian society for centuries.

Reading gender roles as a pattern, not a rule 🔗

Put together, these examples show that tribal gender roles cannot be summarised in a single sentence. The Andaman Islanders point to relative economic equality. The Khasi and Garo show that inheritance rights do not always translate into political power. The Toda demonstrate how purity beliefs can restrict women even while their labour remains economically central. The Saora show that spiritual authority can belong to women just as much as men. And the Gond, Angami, and Ao Naga tribes prove that even firmly patriarchal, patrilineal societies can still offer women more freedom than the surrounding caste society. The common thread is that tribal gender roles are shaped by ecology, economy, kinship structure, and belief, not by a single universal rule about which sex is “naturally” dominant.

What do you think? If economic contribution and spiritual authority both matter as much as inheritance rights, which factor do you think plays the bigger role in shaping a woman’s real, everyday status within her community? And do you think practices like the Toda’s pollution restrictions can coexist with genuine respect for women, or does one usually undermine the other?

References

1. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/21a-218j-identity-and-difference-spring-2010/1a8026f73c90c09cf82772d3b91a252c_MIT21A_218JS10_lec09.pdf
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953625006860
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Toda-people-India
4. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375837613_THE_STANDARD_OF_LIVING_SOURCES_OF_WEALTH_AND_CULTURAL_PRACTICES_OF_THE_TODA_TRIBES_IN_NILGIRIS_DISTRICT_OF_TAMIL_NADU_-A_SOCIO_-ECONOMIC_ANALYSIS
5. https://www.scstrti.in/index.php/communities/pvtg/91-tribes/315-lanjia-saora
6. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/anthropology-and-archaeology/people/gond
7. https://www.granthaalayahpublication.org/journals/granthaalayah/article/view/5906