You Cannot Understand Bharat Without Understanding Its Tribal Traditions: An Investigation By Shriram Tiwari

Tribal Society is Not Backward, It is the Foundation of India’s Knowledge System: An Investigation By Shriram Tiwari, Advisor to Chief Minister, Govt. of Madhya Pradesh & Director, Maharaja Vikramaditya Shodhapeeth

India’s tribal or Aadi tradition offers us a unique lens to see and recognise our deeply-rooted culture. Without experiencing it, we cannot comprehend our glorious past, our culture and our knowledge tradition in its entirety.

The issue is not merely of cultural fragmentation. In the last two to three hundred years, the Western gaze has branded tribal communities living in forests and hinterlands as backward and uncivilised, thereby creating multiple fault-lines.

Terms like ‘Arya’ have been given a nostalgic, cultural-linguistic spin to artificially divide Indian society and prepare the ground for its fragmentation.

The word ‘Aaranyak’ is derived from ‘Aranya’, meaning forest. In our knowledge tradition, forests were not isolation, but centres of learning, teaching, penance, sadhana and exploration. How can the complete picture of Indian civilization be drawn without understanding the cultural contact and exchange of knowledge between rishi-ashrams and the forest-dwelling communities?

Why should the indigenous knowledge of tribal society pertaining to herbs, medicine, water, agriculture, weather and environment be considered inferior to modern knowledge? Their songs, tales, and oral traditions are also vital sources of our knowledge.

The answer to Bharat’s diversity does not lie in pitting one culture against another. We need to see what the Veda and the Vana, the Rishi and the Lok, the Shastra and the Parampara learnt from each other.

And we must not forget – in contrast to an individualistic life-culture, what can we learn from the simple, collective life of tribal society?

The question should not be which community was separate from which, but what communities imbibed from one another. How did mutual harmony evolve and which cultural threads continued together for centuries?

The constructive answer to the discourse on India’s divisions is not to pit one community against another, but to foreground the dialogue, exchange and shared cultural symbols that exist amidst diversity.

I wish to share a few questions that strike my mind: Why can we not view tribal societies through the lens of ‘Karmayogi’? Will these so-called modern sociologists, who deem forest-dwellers and tribal communities uncivilised and illiterate, ever be able to truly understand them?

Our self-styled power-elite intellectuals have glorified an individualistic and isolationist lifestyle, whereas the first and indispensable strength of tribal society is its sahaj – its simple, natural and effortless living.