Reading 13. (A) Ch. 1: Women and Gender: Aspects of Inequality in Tribal Society.

(Virginius Xaxa) Ethnographic accounts of tribes have been the hallmark of tribal studies in India until the country attained Independence. It is mainly from such accounts that we can get an idea of the position of women in tribal societies (restrictions, taboos, rights, privileges, freedom etc.). Tribal Women in Traditional Setting: Indian Anthropological Society, 1987- Region wise survey of tribal women- points out that that the subject of tribal women have been either ignored or merely briefly dealt with; with the exception on Verrier Elwin and Furer Haimendorf. But even in such works, the assignment of status of women has been far from uniform. Eg. The Naga (mostly Nagaland) and the Baiga (Jharkhand) tribal women as described by Elwin. And Furer who talks about how women in most civilized parts of India may well envy the women of the Naga Hills. Hutton attributes a higher social status to Sema Naga women on the grounds that marriage among the tribe is based on choice and a girl is never married against her will. Now the discrepancy in the exact description of the status of women mainly arises because of the way the term status has been conceived by various scholars. 2 views: (i) Status of women as linked with womens role in the social system. (ii) Status of women in the sense of prestige and pride, i.e. in terms of womens legal status and opportunities. However, in tribal studies, such a distinction of the terms usage has been overlooked and almost used interchangeably. Also another important issue here is that such tribal societies have been mostly studied in relation to the other. This is problematic. Hardly any attempt has been made to study tribes in terms of the values prevailing in those tribal societies. Women in a Changing Tribal Society: A distinction has been maintained between a tribe and civilization, but the two have not been understood in isolation. The understanding that they are in interaction with the other has subsequently led to the dominant perspective that a tribal society is not static but undergoing a process of change. Thereby, changes occurring in tribal society have been conceived in terms such as the tribe moving in the direction of becoming a part of civilization and being assimilated into the society that such a civilization represents. Bose: Tribes being absorbed into the Hindu society such that they are being converted into castes. Also, the movement towards Christianity; both have been considered as significant processes of cultural change. Roy Burman: Sanskritization process among tribes, hence opting for early marriage and discouraging widow remarriage and divorce. Mann also says the same with the example of Bhil women. While the change moved in a somewhat different direction w.r.t the conversion to Christianity. Equal religious worship participation, access to modern education for women. However, it also introduced a variety of restrictions on the name of church ethics and law that militated against the freedom that tribal women had enjoyed earlier (Such as segregation of boys and girls, no divorce etc. Note: In Hinduization, such

restrictions were part of the concern with maintaining respectability and status. While in Christianization, the concern was of religious morals and values. Assumptions Underlying the Study of Tribes: Basic assumption: Tribes are primitive, savage and backward. This point is made repeatedly in accounts of their means of livelihood and survival, technology, food habits, lifestyle, and more importantly through representations of their bodies. A dominant view of tribes and tribal societies led to treating them almost socially and culturally like animals. Study indicating that almost 95% upper caste women considered the Bhil tribal women to be socially inferior Mann. This sort of view was also internalized to some degree by the members of the tribes themselves, as their inherent values were contrary to the dominant values of the larger society. Mandelbaum suggested this couldve arisen due to the tribal peoples inclination towards direct, unalloyed satisfaction in pleasure of the senses- food, alcoholic drink, sex or dance. Ethnographers, British as well as Indian, were on the whole rooted in the spirit of Enlightenment rationality (Freedom, equality, fraternity basic values of assessment). Therefore, they judged the position of women in tribal society in the context of the dominant values of the west which were contrary to the dominant values of the larger Indian society. In recent years, tribal women portrayed to have a better status than those held by women of caste-based societies, mostly based on sex-ratio and female work-force participation. Note: Topics such as economic burden and workload borne by tribal women, access to education, foodnutrition, modern occupations, and political participation have mostly not been considered. Stages of Social Formation: Position of tribal women in context of all around socio-economic changes in tribal society has been another area of focus in the study. One of the dominant ways of looking at change though this is to study changes in the means of livelihood and survival. This can be seen through the transition from food gathering to food production or from slash and burn/ swidden to settled agriculture. This has led to the event wherein the belief of prevailing inequality in traditional tribal society was thereby under scrutiny. Gender equality has been highlighted as the most pervasive, of these. The relative position of women and men under different types of social formation (such as food gathering, swidden agriculture, settled agriculture and state formation) has been studied here. Also another way has been through studying of different tribal societies without using their social formations as the reference point but w.r.t division of labour, forms of property, religious institutions, family organization and the state. Nathan uses the example of Khasis (Meghalaya): The higher social status of women due to their rights of ownership is subsequently neutralized by the mens control over the decision making process. Also, the problem of witch-hunting (Kelkar and Nathan) mightve been associated in certain ways with the attempt of obtaining the property rights by the male agnates of the deceased. But as per Xaxa, such a generalization cannot be made. Examples of customary laws, such as Bride price amongst certain tribes of Arunachal Pradesh (Nongbri discusses this), wherein according to Nongbri women are treated as mere commodities, have been discussed to highlight the inherent gender inequality in such societies. Unnithan Kumar discusses the practice of bride price in certain other societies such as the Taivar tribe of Rajasthan. Finally, Xaxa comments: (i) Division of labour in tribal society is based

on sex, is an accepted fact. However, the notion of studying tribal women from the perspective of their inherent values is difficult. Therefore, rather than talking about high and low status, it is more pertinent to talk about gender inequality. (ii) Nathan: Ploughing land for women in tribal society was seen as a taboo and couldve been due to the denial of women control over the means of production, eg. Oraon and Ho women. Xaxa feels that such an understanding is not adequate as the Brahmans were also forbidden from ploughing as per the customary laws. Social Differentiation: Social differentiation is mainly rooted in forces outside of tribal societies, such as introduction of private property, growth of trade, emergence of the market, emigration of non-tribes in search of land & employment, modern education, opening up of new occupations, state-sponsored programmes etc. Many lost their land and were compelled to take up employments as labourers. Also, a minority were able to take advantage of the forces unleashed by the market and the benefits extended by the state to the tribes. This has led to differentiation among the tribe based on criteria such as education, occupation, income, wealth and assets. This has led to emergence of class relations originally absent in traditional tribal societies. The women of the well off sections enjoy certain advantages: primary education, higher education away from native land, migration to cities etc. While in contrast, women from the lower stratum have low school enrolment, higher dropout rates, and hence they hardly move beyond the primary level and thereby constrained to work as labourers. Tribal Movements: One of the general concerns in the study of tribal movements in India has been to provide a system of classification. Such study has been absent mainly due to the assumption that there is no class differentiation in tribal society. Forest-agrarian movement: greater bearing on the lives of tribal women, yet accounts of their dominating role in such movements are absent. However, there have been accounts wherein women participated in other tribal movements. The Tebhaga movement (1946-7), Agrarian-forest movement by Jharkhand Mukti Morcha & Marxist Coordination Committee, and also the Santhal rebellion (1855) are examples of the same. Rani Gaidinliu and Raj Mohini Devi: Tribal Women leaders who led the anticolonial struggle amongst the Nagas. Economic and Political Development: Post-independence, various provisions were made by the state for the protection and upliftment of tribes. However, the benefits under these provisions have been distributed very unevenly across the tribes. Within the tribes too, distribution is very uneven along the line of sex. Refer to table 10.1. (The data clearly points out that there is a bias against women in the values of tribal societies, especially in the domain of politics social and economic life. Women are now exposed to greater hardships due to depletion of resources level of household and the community but also to the greater danger due to the changing nature of work and livelihood, such as collecting fuel wood, water etc. This also leads to large scale migration of tribal men and women due to the lack of alternative modes of livelihood.

Emerging Discourse: Tribal communities in India are both diverse and heterogeneous with regard to language, physical characteristics, demographic traits, means of livelihood and cultural exposure. Therefore, it is difficult to generalize about the position of women as whole amongst all thee varying tribal societies and thereby what can be observed will at best be merely being illustrative and heuristic. Despite such heterogeneity, tribes share one trait in common, that they are different from the dominant community of the region who are often perceived as aliens or outsiders. This is mostly seen in cases wherein the recognized tribal groups are engaged in intense competition and conflict with those from outside such tribal community. Jharkhand: Outsiders here can be invariably described as oppressors and exploiters and are addressed by the term diku. Meghalaya: The term used for outsiders here in dakhar, it is a very strong term but carries lesser degree of exploitative connotations. In a social arrangement such as this, tribal societies have been experiencing a serious threat to the identity on account of the kind of changes taking places - steady erosion of life support systems land & forest, increasing pauperization, sense of loss of language, minority in their own land. One of the most important points to note here is the large scale alienation of tribal land from tribes to non-tribes. One way by which non-tribals acquire tribal land is by marrying a tribal woman. Tribal women entering such marriages are not only seen as aligning with the dikus but also as conduits of such form of land transfer, which is an emotive issue. Hence the opposition against tribal women marrying nontribal men is compounded by the weight of tribal tradition, according to which marriage outside the community is regarded a crime as serious as incest.