Tribal Monographs in the Constructive Phase: Institutionalising Social Anthropology in India

By the 1920s, tribal studies in India had outgrown the diaries of colonial officers and missionaries. Universities began training scholars to go into the field themselves, ask sharper questions, and turn observation into theory. This shift, often called the constructive phase of Indian anthropology, gave us the monographs on the Ho, the Juang, the Kharia, the Baiga and the Gonds that still shape how we understand tribal India today. Here’s how a handful of scholars, working out of new university departments, built the discipline from the ground up.

Universities and the growth of anthropology 🔗

Formal academic anthropology in India began almost simultaneously in two cities. Bombay University’s Department of Sociology was established in 1919 under Patrick Geddes, who was soon joined by G.S. Ghurye, a scholar trained under W.H.R. Rivers at Cambridge. Ghurye went on to head the department for 35 years and is widely credited as the founder of institutionalised sociology and anthropology in India.

Calcutta followed close behind. Anthropology had entered the University of Calcutta’s curriculum in 1918 as part of ancient history studies, and by 1921 it had grown into a full, independent department, now considered one of the oldest of its kind in Asia. These two departments became the training ground for a generation of Indian scholars who would take fieldwork seriously as a method rather than treat it as a colonial administrative chore.

Out of these departments came names that anyone studying Indian anthropology will recognise: Ghurye himself, along with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, M.N. Srinivas, D.N. Majumdar, T.C. Das, Irawati Karve and A. Aiyappan. Each carried the discipline into a different tribal region and a different theoretical direction, but all shared a common commitment: sustained, first-hand fieldwork rather than second-hand reporting.

D.N. Majumdar and the changing Ho 🔗

Dhirendra Nath Majumdar trained at Calcutta University before completing a doctorate at Cambridge, and he chose the Ho tribe of the Kolhan region in present-day Jharkhand for his fieldwork. The result, A Tribe in Transition (1937), was reviewed at the time as an account that went beyond a simple ethnographic description of the Ho, to trace how they were reacting to sustained contact with their Hindu neighbours.

Majumdar’s central concern was culture contact and acculturation. He argued that tribal societies were declining wherever a more dominant culture pressed against a smaller, simpler one, and that the changes in the Ho’s marriage customs and festivals were a direct result of this pressure. To explain how such change worked, he proposed a framework he called the MARC model, standing for Man, Area, Resources and Cooperation, the four elements whose interaction determined how any society was organised and how it responded to outside influence.

On policy, Majumdar took a clear stance. He rejected the idea of isolating tribes in separate reserved areas, arguing instead for what he termed “creative or generative adaptation,” a gradual, respectful integration of tribal communities into the wider Indian society rather than either forced assimilation or protective isolation.

Nirmal Kumar Bose’s Hindu method of tribal absorption 🔗

Nirmal Kumar Bose, later known for serving as Mahatma Gandhi’s personal secretary, built his most influential theory on a short period of fieldwork among the Juang tribe of the Pal Lahara region in present-day Odisha, conducted around 1928. He first published his findings as data-heavy papers in the journal Man in India, but it was a 1941 lecture at the Indian Science Congress that turned his fieldwork into a full theory.

Bose’s argument, later expanded in his book Tribal Life in India, was that tribes in contact with dominant caste Hindu neighbours gradually lost their distinct identity and were absorbed into the Hindu social order at a low caste rank. He pointed to the Juang’s adoption of Hindu deities, ritual bathing and vegetarian offerings as evidence of this slow absorption. The theory became so widely accepted that it was taught as an established fact in Indian anthropology and sociology courses for decades, even though it rested on a relatively brief period of fieldwork.

T.C. Das and the wild Kharias of Dhalbhum 🔗

Tarak Chandra Das, working out of Calcutta University, produced a series of monographs on tribes in the Chotanagpur region, including the Ho, the Kharia and the Bhumij. His study of the Bhumij was published jointly with Anathnath Chatterjee, but it was his monograph on the Kharias of the hills near Dhalbhumgarh and Ghatsila, whom he called the “Wild Kharias,” that most directly complicated Bose’s theory.

Das documented a gatherer-hunter community whose practices ran directly against the pattern of Hindu absorption: bride price rather than dowry, widow remarriage, a non-vegetarian diet, worship of non-Hindu nature deities, the drinking of rice beer, fowl sacrifice, and reliance on their own community priests rather than Brahmin ones. As one account of this debate puts it, Das’s fieldwork suggested that tribal identity could persist rather than dissolve into the caste hierarchy, even under prolonged contact with Hindu neighbours. Later scholars have argued that Bose’s theory was accepted so readily partly because Das’s more empirically grounded, contrary evidence was overshadowed in the mainstream discipline for years.

Verrier Elwin and Fürer-Haimendorf’s contributions 🔗

If Majumdar, Bose and Das worked mostly in eastern India, Verrier Elwin and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf carried fieldwork-based anthropology into central India and the Deccan.

Elwin among the Baiga, Agaria and Muria 🔗

Elwin, a British-born scholar who eventually took Indian citizenship, began with an intensive study of the Baiga in his 1939 monograph of the same name, followed by The Agaria (1942), an account of a Gond blacksmith community. His most celebrated work, The Muria and Their Ghotul (1947), examined the ghotul, a youth dormitory that sat at the centre of social, moral and religious life among the Muria Gonds of Bastar. Elwin argued for treating tribal cultures as equal but distinct, favouring what he called protective isolation over rapid assimilation, a position that would later shape his advisory role in framing tribal policy for the North East Frontier Agency.

Fürer-Haimendorf in the Deccan 🔗

Fürer-Haimendorf, an Austrian ethnologist who later taught at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, focused his fieldwork on the Chenchus, a forest-dwelling hunter-gatherer community, and on the Raj Gonds of Adilabad and the Reddis of the Bison Hills in the Deccan region. His studies paid particular attention to land alienation, showing how tribes lost access to forest resources and agricultural land as state regulation, forestry laws and outside settlers moved in. Unlike Elwin, he placed more weight on economic empowerment as the key to successful integration, arguing that cultural respect alone could not protect tribal communities without also securing their livelihoods.

W.G. Grigson and institutional milestones 🔗

W.V. (Wilfred Vernon) Grigson, a member of the Indian Civil Service, produced one of the earliest and most detailed monographs on the Maria Gonds of Bastar, published as The Maria Gonds of Bastar in 1938 and later revised with additional notes by Elwin. The monograph distinguished between the relatively unacculturated Hill Marias and the more acculturated Bison Horn Marias, covering everything from domestic economy and agriculture to religious ceremonies and social organisation, and remains a foundational reference for Gond ethnography.

This period also saw two institutional milestones that gave Indian anthropology a permanent home. In December 1945, the Anthropological Survey of India was established in Varanasi, growing out of the Zoological and Anthropological section of the Indian Museum, with Biraja Sankar Guha as its founding director and Verrier Elwin as deputy director; the headquarters later shifted to Calcutta in 1948. Then, in 1947, the University of Delhi set up its own Department of Anthropology, with P.C. Biswas appointed as its first head under Vice-Chancellor Maurice Gwyer, a department that would go on to train generations of anthropologists and later host the Indian Anthropological Association.

Ghurye, meanwhile, continued to shape the discipline from Bombay through his writing. His book Caste and Race in India examined the relationship between racial classification and the caste system, while The Aborigines “So Called” and Their Future made his controversial case against treating tribal communities as a category entirely separate from the rest of Hindu society, on the grounds that doing so could work against national integration. Together, these institutional foundations and this body of published fieldwork mark the moment when Indian anthropology stopped being a collection of scattered accounts and became a proper academic discipline.

What do you think? Does Majumdar’s idea of “creative adaptation” still hold up as a fair way to think about tribal integration today? And looking at how differently Bose and Das read the same kind of evidence, what does that tell you about the limits of short-term fieldwork in anthropology?

References

1. https://ncert.nic.in/textbook/pdf/kesy205.pdf
2. https://www.caluniv.ac.in/academic/Anthropology.html
3. https://www.nature.com/articles/141450a0
4. https://www.epw.in/journal/2018/17/special-articles/scrutinising-hindu-method-tribal-absorption.html
5. https://www.thestatesman.com/opinion/the-forgotten-thesis-ii-1484002202.html
6. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/authors/1246
7. https://ansi.gov.in/about?lang=en