Adivasis of Assam

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Answer 2 Follow Request More 2 ANSWERS Rizwan Islam , lives in Assam, India Answered Jan 27 Adivasis  are the aboriginal tribal people of India. It is a Sanskrit word  Adi+Vasi  meaning  Original/Earliest Inhabitants.  They belong to the Australoid and Negrito group and have been living in India before the arrival of the Aryans. The British set up Tea gardens in Assam after  Robert Bruce  discovered tea near Rangpur. It was in 1839, when the first company for growing and making tea was set up in Assam. The tea garden communities are known as Adivasis but they are not recognised as tribals in Assam. However there was a dearth of labours to maintain the huge plantations. As such the Assam Tea Company started to recruit labourers from ...

Why and how did the descendants of the tribal people whose ancestors were brought to Assam from other parts of India cease to be tribal people in their present environment? The answer lies in the peculiar rules that determine such recognition, according to which a person’s tribal identity is irrevocably and forever linked to her or his place of origin — in the present instance, the persons’ ancestral origins. For instance, the progeny of a Munda, a recognised tribal community in Jharkhand and other contiguous States, one of the 96 communities listed under the category, Tea Garden Labourers, Tea Garden Tribes, Ex-Tea Garden Labourers and Ex-Tea Garden Tribes in the official ‘Central List of Backward Classes, Assam,’ who was taken to Assam to work in the tea gardens over a century-and-a-half ago has lost his tribal identity, though were such a person to return to his (now notional) ancestral place, he would regain his tribal identity.

By official count around 12% of Indian tribals live in the Northeast, but they do not include the Adivasis who are Munda, Oraon, Santhal and other tribals of Jharkhand origin but are not in the schedule in Assam. They are included among what are popularly called Tea Tribes. Their exclusion is a symbol, not the cause, of their exploitative situation and of the low self-image which makes them different both from the Jharkhand tribals and their counterparts in North Bengal whose ancestors too came from Jharkhand. Their younger leaders want their community to free itself from their state of exploitation. Their search for a new identity and liberation from their exploitative status is a pastoral challenge to the Churches that believe in Him who came to make all things new. A sense of being human is the new world that they are searching for. As a response to it in this paper we shall focus on the causes of their present situation and ways of supporting their efforts to free themselves fro...