Tribal Ethnography: Religious Beliefs, Syncretism, and Revivalist Movements Among Indian Tribes

Ask a British census officer in 1901 what religion a Gond or Santhal family practised, and he would likely write down one word: animism. It was a tidy label for anything that wasn’t Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or one of the other “world religions” on the form. But step into a Sarna grove in Jharkhand or a Donyi-Polo shrine in Arunachal Pradesh today, and you’ll find belief systems far too layered for a single colonial-era word to hold. Tribal religion in India is not one thing. It is a constantly negotiated space where ancient beliefs in soul and spirit meet Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism, and where communities are now fighting to have their own faiths recognised on their own terms.

How the colonial census invented “animism” 🔗

The word animism didn’t emerge from any tribal community itself. It was a category created by British census administrators between 1871 and 1931, who used it to mark out the “aboriginal” population as religiously distinct from caste Hindus. After independence, the census dropped “Animism” and replaced it with the vaguer heading “Other”, forcing millions of Adivasis to describe their faith using a label meant for leftovers.

This bureaucratic sidelining had real consequences. With no dedicated code for their religion, tribal citizens have effectively been nudged toward ticking Hindu, Christian, or another listed faith even when their actual practice looks quite different. It’s the root of a demand that has grown louder in recent decades: the call for a proper Sarna religious code in the Indian census, a subject we’ll return to.

Soul, spirit, and the sacred landscape 🔗

Strip away the outdated label, and what you find across tribal India is a strikingly consistent worldview. Central to it is a belief in the soul’s immortality and some form of life after death, alongside a conviction that ancestors continue to watch over the living. Nature itself is inhabited: mountains, rivers, and forest groves hold spirits or “bongas” that must be respected through ritual and offering. Religious specialists, often called pahan or dihuri depending on the community, mediate between people and these supernatural forces during birth, marriage, death, and the agricultural calendar.

Named belief systems, not a single “tribal religion” 🔗

What’s often flattened into “tribal religion” is actually a family of distinct, named faiths.

Sarna or Sari Dharma, followed by the Santhal and neighbouring communities, centres on worship at sacred groves called jaherthan, home to deities such as Jaher Ayo, Singbonga, and Buru Bonga, and celebrated through festivals like Sarhul and Sohrai. It remains the largest of these named traditions, concentrated in Jharkhand, Bihar, and Chhattisgarh, along with Odisha and West Bengal.

Gondi, or Koya Punem, is the faith of the Gond and Koya tribes of central India. It revolves around clan deities known as Persa Pen, alongside a high god referred to as Baradeo or Bhagavan, and village guardians worshipped before any major festival.

Adi religion, practised by the Adi people of Arunachal Pradesh, shares its cosmology with the wider Tani group and forms one of the strands that later fed into the organised Donyi-Polo movement, discussed below.

According to the 2011 census religious groupings, Sarna alone accounted for close to 4.9 million respondents, with Gondi at around a million and Sari Dharam and Donyi-Poloism numbering in the hundreds of thousands each. These aren’t fringe practices; they’re substantial, living religious communities.

Syncretism: when tribal faith meets Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism 🔗

Centuries of contact with neighbouring communities have reshaped tribal religion in ways that vary widely from region to region. Syncretism here rarely means one belief system erasing another. More often, it means two systems running in parallel, or blending at the edges.

Growing closer to Hinduism 🔗

Many tribes in central India have absorbed Hindu festivals and deities alongside their own. Among the Santhal, for instance, ethnographic studies describe how Hindu festivals get thoroughly localised, with figures like Moreko-Turika worshipped at the jaher than in ways that merge with existing bonga worship, even as only individual households that have formally converted to Hinduism actively participate in the full Hindu ritual calendar. Others in the community simply observe as onlookers, keeping the traditional Sarna framework intact.

Adopting Islam 🔗

Other tribal groups have moved toward Islam through centuries of political and social contact. The Bakarwal, a nomadic pastoralist community of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, are a Muslim ethnic group and sub-group of the larger Gujjar community, sharing language, religion, and custom with Muslim Gujjars. In central India, the Tadvi Bhil of the Gujarat-Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh border trace their conversion to a historical alliance with the medieval Faruqi kingdom, while related Bhil communities nearby remain largely Hindu. The Siddi, a community of African descent scattered across Gujarat, Karnataka, and Maharashtra, present perhaps the most striking case of religious plurality within a single ethnic group: they practise Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam depending on the region, while still sharing core cultural rituals such as annually honouring their elders.

Following the Buddha in the northeast 🔗

Buddhism has taken deep root among several tribes of Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, and Tripura. The Monpa and Sherdukpen of West Kameng and Tawang follow Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhist traditions closely tied to monastery life, while the Khamti and Singpho of the Lohit and Tirap regions practise Theravada Buddhism, reflecting their historical migration routes from present-day Thailand and Myanmar. The state’s Buddhist population stands at roughly 11.8 percent, concentrated in these tribal belts. The Chakma, settled in Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura after displacement from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, are overwhelmingly Theravada Buddhist, at close to 98.5 percent in Arunachal Pradesh. Not every community in the region fits neatly into this Buddhist frame, though; the Apatani and several neighbouring Tani-speaking tribes remain rooted primarily in the animist Donyi-Polo tradition rather than Buddhism, underlining just how much religious diversity exists within a single state.

Christianity and the rise of multiplex religious identities 🔗

No religion has reshaped tribal India’s religious map as dramatically as Christianity, particularly in the northeast.

Near-total conversion among the Naga and Mizo 🔗

Missionary activity from the nineteenth century onward transformed Nagaland and Mizoram into two of India’s only Christian-majority states. By the 2011 census, Christians made up 87.93 percent of Nagaland’s population, while in Mizoram, Christians accounted for 87.16 percent of the state overall, and more than 90 percent among the Scheduled Tribe population specifically. In both states, older tribal religious systems now survive mainly as minority traditions or cultural memory rather than lived practice for most people.

Kharia’s threefold blend 🔗

The Kharia of Jharkhand and neighbouring states illustrate a more even three-way split. According to 2011 census figures, 46.1 percent of Kharias identify as Christian and 43.4 percent as Hindu or Sarna, with smaller numbers following Islam, Buddhism, and other faiths. Crucially, this isn’t a clean divide: Kharia Christians typically retain indigenous festival practices and social customs, so the religious label on a census form rarely captures the full picture of daily belief and ritual.

Santal and Oraon: identity spread across four religions 🔗

Few communities demonstrate India’s tribal religious complexity better than the Santal and Oraon. Both groups today have members identifying as Hindu, Christian, Sarna, and, in smaller numbers, other faiths, often within the same extended family. Since the 1970s, growing numbers of Santal in particular have chosen to identify as Sarna specifically rather than under vaguer “Other” or Hindu categories, a shift that pushed the recorded Sarna population from around 300,000 in 1971 to 1.8 million by 1991. This multiplex identity is less about confusion and more about different branches of the same community responding differently to missionary contact, education access, and government incentives over generations.

Fighting to be counted: indigenous religious revival movements 🔗

Faced with the pressure to fold into larger, recognised religions, several tribal communities have organised formal movements to protect and revive their own traditions.

The Seng Khasi movement 🔗

In Meghalaya, the Seng Khasi movement was founded on 23 November 1899 in Shillong by sixteen young Khasi men under the mentorship of Babu Jeebon Roy, in direct response to the erosion of indigenous belief and identity under colonial missionary pressure. More than a century later, it remains an active institution with hundreds of branches, still working to protect Niam Khasi, the traditional Khasi religion, and pushing for its formal recognition as a minority faith.

Donyi-Polo and the Hemphu-Mukrang tradition 🔗

In Arunachal Pradesh, a parallel revival took shape around the worship of the sun and moon. The movement was pioneered by Talom Rukbo following a 1968 meeting of Adi intellectuals in Along, convened specifically to counter the erosion of indigenous identity and the rapid spread of Christianity from the 1950s onward. The institutionalised form of Donyi-Polo runs alongside a related revival among the Karbi and Nyezi-No communities, known as the Hemphu-Mukrang tradition, both aiming to give older, informal animist practice a defined, organised religious identity fit for the modern era.

The push for Gondi, Koya Punem, and Sarna recognition 🔗

These regional revivals connect to a wider national campaign. Tribal organisations, led by groups like the Gondwana Mahasabha, have been demanding formal recognition of Koya Punem and Gondi as distinct religions since before 1950, a demand that has still not been granted. Activists point out that the pre-independence census allowed an “Aboriginal” option that let tribal citizens self-identify outside the Hindu-Muslim-Christian framework, and argue that its removal after 1947 has effectively erased tribal religious identity from official records for over seven decades. The demand for a separate Sarna code, backed by state assembly resolutions in Jharkhand, sits within this same broader movement: an effort to have Adivasi belief systems counted as what they are, rather than folded into categories that were never designed for them.

What do you think? If tribal religions like Sarna, Koya Punem, and Donyi-Polo were finally given their own census codes, do you think that recognition would change how these communities are treated in policy and public life? And where would you draw the line between healthy religious syncretism and the slow erosion of an indigenous tradition?

References

1. https://participedia.net/case/13432
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaherthan
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondi_people
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism_in_India
5. https://serialsjournals.com/abstract/24063_8.pdf
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakarwal_people
7. https://minorityrights.org/communities/siddi/
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_in_Arunachal_Pradesh
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chakmas_of_Arunachal_Pradesh
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_Nagaland
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_Mizoram
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharia_people
13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seng_Khasi_Movement
14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donyi-Polo_(religious_movement)
15. https://m.thewire.in/article/caste/adivasi-religion-recognition-census