Adi deo arya devata: A Max Weber of India

V SUNDARAM
newstodaynet.com

I have just finished reading are markably original, pioneering and landmark book on Indian anthropology and sociology titled Adi Deo Arya Devata: A Panoramic view of Tribal-Hindu Interface by Sandhya Jain. In this book she presents kaleidoscopic and panoramic macro view of micro Tribal-Hindu Cultural Interface. In a majestic sweep she declares in a succinct manner the main burden of her thesis in the introduction to this book:

'The Colonial Era Unleashed a Genre of Scholarship that portrayed India's adivasi or tribal population as an aggregate of primitive social groups that were separate from, and beyond the pale of mainstream Hindu society. Scholars are now looking as askance at this established orthodoxy as even the most cursory mapping of the spiritual-cultural landscape reveals a deep symbiotic relationship between tribals and non-tribals from very ancient times. The dynamic interaction between the two groups, posited as polar opposites, defies the deadening stereotype of tribals living an isolated existence in remote forests or mountain ranges. In its place, a more complex picture emerges in which tribes (gana, janajati) evolve into and actively engage with caste and Varna society, even as some opt for relative, though not complete, seclusion. Meticulous field work by anthropologists and ethnographers in the colonial period itself sheds light on the incessant nature of the exchange between the so-called tribal and so-called Hindu society. This is reinforced by glimpses from ancient literature and conventional history, particularly from the early medieval period onwards, of which records are available. It is therefore baffling that a phenomenon widely acknowledged and scrupulously documented by investigators in the field continues to be denied due recognition in mainstream academia'.

The Imperial and Colonial English administrators of British India with sinister political intentions (very much like the debauched, degraded Sonia-directed UPA Government today!) mischievously equated the VANVASIS with Adivasis or 'original inhabitants' only to show that they did not form an integral part of larger mainstream Hindu society. The British Colonial policy of divide and rule made the British rulers advance this pernicious and untenable theory. This was strongly supported by missionaries like Bishop William Carey in Bengal, Bishop Caldwell in Madras Presidency and Bishop Heber in Orissa, Chota Nagpur and Central Provinces the 19th century who enjoyed unconditional British support in their evangelical programme of divide and convert. Thus the ruling British authorities and Christian organisations formed an unholy alliance to divide the colonized Indian people. The most striking example was the imaginary, fictional and artificial Aryan-Dravidan divide created by European officials, missionaries and scholars who were quite often in the pay of colonial governments. Pseudo-secular, Islam-embracing, Christianity-coveting and Hindu-hating Indian historians, Mullah historians from Aligarh and Marxist historians from Jawaharlal Nehru University would go to the end of the world to avoid facing the irrefutable fact that the famous Max Mueller was paid by the East India Company to discredit the Vedas and help the missionaries in their programme of religious conversion. This stereotyped approach of treating Vanvasis as aliens wholly outside the fold of Hindu tradition continues uncontrolled and unchallenged to the present, in one form or another. Sandhya Jain firmly establishes through incisive logic and acute analysis of facts and figures embracing all parts of India that Vanvasis have made an enormous contribution to India's civilization. We can clearly see that all the major Gods of the Hindu tradition cutting across centuries have always had Vanvasi links. Even caste, always viewed as the keynote of Hindu society, possibly originated in the Vanvasi clan or gotra.

Sandhaya Jain

The main points that emerge from Sandhya Jain's brilliant book can be summarised as follows :

a. Even in the days of our struggle for freedom, Mahatma Gandhi and great social workers in the field of tribal welfare like Thakkar Baba had strongly protested against the subterranean mischief let loose by British colonial rulers among Vanvasis and Tribes living in remote forest areas of India by deliberate attempts to delink them from the main body of Hindu society through the administrative imposition of racial classifications / categories / groups (in actual effect planned and planted subterfuges !) in Census Operations. This wicked process initiated by Herbert Risley (1851- 1911), the Census Commissioner of 1901 reached its zenith under J H Hutton, the Census Commissioner of 1931. Mahatma Gandhi never failed to assert from every available public platform that the tribals of India constituted an indivisible, inseparable and inalienable part of larger Hindu society.

b. Intimate and unbroken ties have always existed between tribal and mainstream Indian society from the dawn of Indian history, historically spanning both the socio-cultural continuum as well as the economic-political spectrum.

c. The concepts of 'Mainstream' and 'Fringe', the pernicious notion of core- fringe conflict have to be logically viewed as British Colonial constructs and artifices. To quote the pointed words of Sandhya Jain: 'Colonial rhetoric not withstanding, tribals have never been passive recipients of Hindu Upper Class (what Max Muller labeled as 'Brahminical') cultural models, but have rather contributed actively and enormously to the infinite variety of India from its primordial beginnings. This shall become evident as we examine the 'tribal' Gods of the Hindu pantheon.'

d. In accordance with their policy of 'Divide and Rule', the British colonial State always proclaimed that Brahmins, peasants, untouchables and tribals were separate groups with distinct customs and beliefs and that Brahmins always sought to subjugate all others to establish their permanent hegemony. This philosophy has become the bedrock of Jungle Vote Bank Politics of Communal Quota Raj today.

e. All our great national leaders before independence rejected the colonial contention that India was an artificial construct, a motley collection of assorted faiths, communities, and ethnic entities situated in a specific geographical area. Great Hindu nationalists like Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai, Madan Mohan Malvia, Sri Aurobindo and others emphasized the underlying cultural unity, social coherence and spiritual integrity of our civilization dating back to Vedic India. As Sandhya Jain puts it, 'They attributed the great variety of beliefs and practices to the unique Hindu characteristic of representing all levels of consciousness and accepting the legitimacy of all pathways to the divine'.

f. The nationalist minded anthropologists like Verrier Elwin, Sarat Chandra Roy, G.S.Ghurye, and K.Suresh Singh have scientifically explained the strong affinity between the tribal concept of divinity and Hindu Dharma (Santana Dharma), as noticed in practice, mythology and recorded history. There was and has always been a dynamic, living two way traffic and percolation between the so called the Brahminical values on the one hand and belief systems of supposedly 'lower' social strata. Only the British colonial rulers made a dastardly attempt to codify social groups in terms of a pre-conceived hierarchy.

g. McKim Marriott, Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the University of Chicago, has done extensive research on the villages, villagers, and urbanites of India, South Asia and Japan. Finding that Western conceptual constructs and categories often present obstacles to the proper understanding of the peoples of these and other areas, he has constructed a new structure of alternative social science models for studying differing cultural realities, using formal modelling and simulations. Marriot has also clearly stated that there is adequate evidence to show that the spiritual spectrum in India, through the ages, has always embraced tribal and classical Hindu dharma, with tribal elements freely entering the formal Hindu tradition even as vital elements of the latter were getting integrated, absorbed and harmonized into tribal mores of culture and modes of worship, uninterrupted and unbroken, all the time.

h. India's native culture and civilization have continuously grown upon a common bedrock substratum. Therefore it is absurd to talk of unnatural and artificial categories such as 'tribal' and 'Hindu', the way in which the British colonial administrators did for their imperial purposes before our independence and the dastardly way in which the Islam-embracing, Christianity-coveting and Hindu-hating tribe of Pseudo-secular historians and politicians do today.

i. It has been the standard academic convention to refer to faith or culture or religion tribal communities as belonging to 'Little' tradition and to view faith or culture or religion of all Hindus (practices in temples according to Shastric rites) as forming part of 'Great' tradition. Sandhya Jain's cardinal and seminal finding is that in reality these two realms readily commingle and compliment each other; they solidly supplement and not supplant each other. Sometimes, as in the case of Orissa, they coalesce into well defined regional tradition of Jagannath of Puri, a Tribal God Par Excellence.

The scientifically rigorous way in which Sandhya Jain has marshaled a vast array of disparate and discordant facts into a manageable and coherent whole brings to my mind the following beautiful observations of Poincare: 'The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living'. I mean the intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts and which a pure intelligence can grasp. 'It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts; that we take delight, now in following the giant course of the stars, now in scrutinizing with a microscope that prodigious smallness which is also vastness, and, now in seeking in geological ages the traces of the past that attracts us because of its remoteness'. All in all Sandhya Jain's book is a thing of beauty and a joy forever!

For their own colonial and imperial purposes, the British rulers always claimed that tribals were the most important ancient native inhabitants of the various regions of India, who had been literally pushed to the hills and forests by incoming communities. Despite all this, the tribals had managed to preserve their social structures in splendid isolation. G.S. Ghurye rejected this view of British administrators and scholars on the ground that the chronology of the internal movements of peoples is unknown and unknowable and hence he said 'it is highly unscientific to regard some tribe or the other as the original owner of the soil'.

Sandhya Jain observes 'The word 'tribe' is alient to Hindu thought and does not exist in Indian vernaculars. There is also a genuine difficulty in determining the boundary line between 'tribe' and 'non-tribe' as both groups were porous and lived cheek by jowl for centuries. That is why the carefully constructed colonial archetype, which fixed the typical traits of a tribe as isolation, self-sufficiency and autonomy, falted on careful scrutiny. Unfortunately, Indian sociologists as a class bowed to the pressure of the dominant Western intellectual discourse and accepted castes as distinct from tribes; they failed to realize that they had fallen into the colonial trap of studying the so called different tribes from the point of view of their contemporary decline, which itself was largely due to the depredations of the colonial State'. It was G S Ghurye who clearly saw through the British colonial game and came to the conclusion that the British land revenue and legal systems, accentuated the pace of dispossession of the Chota Nagpur tribes as land became a saleable commodity that could be easily sold and transferred. Thus tribal lands fell into the hands of money-lenders and other non-cultivating classes.

Despite their own field-level observations and findings to the contrary, the British rulers continued to distinguish and differentiate tribal communities from Hindu society. This practice was by no means limited to India or even the British rule. The idea of dividing a conquered people in the name of 'race science' was a standard ploy used by colonial officials and Christian missionaries. Much of the blood-spilling in ethnic conflicts in different parts Africa today is the direct result of such colonial mischief. To quote the appropriate words of the French anthropologist Jean-Pierre Langellier on the horrific Hutu-Tutsi conflicts: 'The idea that the Hutus and the Tutsis were physically different was first aired in the 1860s by the British explorer John Speke'. The history of Rwanda [like that of much of Africa] has been distorted by Pere Blancs [White Fathers], missionaries, academics and colonial administrators. They made the Tutsis out to be a superior race, which had conquered the region and enslaved the Hutus. 'Missionaries taught the Hutus that historical fallacy, which was the result of racist European concepts being applied to an African reality. At the end of the fifties, the Hutus used that discourse to react against the Tutsis.'

This assumed and subsumed physical difference was conveniently transferred also to the cultural field in the guise of anthropology. Physiognomy became a convenient cover for racists to act as objective anthropologists. Such racists enabled Hitler and the Nazis to develop their famous Aryan Theory, thereby giving 'race science' a bad name. Long before the arrival of Hitler, Herbert Risley, the Indian Census commissioner of 1901 Census and a highly influential head of the Anthropological Survey of India, raised a whole colonial edifice based on fictional racial classifications mixed with culture and caste. To quote his own words written in 1891 in this context: 'The social position of a caste varies inversely as its nasal index'. Community of race is the real meaning of the caste system. So you have it: the more aquiline the nose, the higher the caste! At the same time, it has to be noted that when Risley was not serving his colonial masters, he did not hesitate to present the cardinal truth as he saw it with his own eyes and understanding: 'It is impossible to differentiate between Hinduism and Animism (Tribalism or Adivasism) as each merged imperceptibly into the other. Hinduism was Animism more or less transformed by philosophy'.

Modern science has completely dislodged the whole notion of 'race'. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, one of the most distinguished geneticists of the 20th century, has completely demolished scientists' attempts to classify human populations into races in the same way that they classify birds and other species into 'races'. The study of demographics had already well-established that fact, based on linguistic, cultural, and archaeological clues, but it had become overlaid with nationalist and racist ideologies. Cavalli-Sforza initiated a new field of research by combining the concrete findings of demography with a newly-available analysis of blood groups in an actual human population.

While Cavalli-Sforza is best known for his work in genetics, he also, in collaboration with Marcus Feldman, initiated the sub-discipline of cultural anthropology known alternatively as co-evolution, gene-culture co-evolution, cultural transmission theory or dual inheritance theory. The seminal publication Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach (1981) made use of models from population genetics to investigate the transmission of culturally transmitted units. This line of inquiry initiated research into the correlation of patterns of genetic and cultural dispersion.

Cavalli-Sforza has demolished the claim of British rulers and many modern day cultural anthropologists who blindly use the British colonial conceptual constructs that Vanvasis (tribals) of India are the original inhabitants while caste Hindus are later intruders. After a comprehensive study, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza has declared: 'Taken together, these results show that Indian tribal and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic heritage of Pleistocene southern and western Asians and have received limited gene flow from external regions since the Holocene.' This fully endorses the major finding of Sandhya Jain that Vanvasis and caste Hindus share a common genetic pool dating back to the primordial days of hoary Hindu antiquity. In short all the Indians share a common biological, cultural and religious origin.

Sandhya Jain's work overthrows the myths created by British Indologists and the slavish Indian Indologists who aped them and continue to ape them that janajaati populations of Bharat are people on the margins of Hindu society and establishes firmly that janajaati indeed constitute the very core of Hindu identity. She traces the roots of adi Sanskriti, Sanathana Dharma and the contributions made by janajaati to the evolution of dharma.

This book should adorn every single Hindu household and every single library of the country and be included as suggested reading for students, at all levels, of civilization, culture, history, sociological and anthropological studies.

Sandhya Jain rightly notes that there is to this day a close relationship between the Kurukba, Lambadi, Yenadi, Yerukula and Chenchu janajaati and Shri Venkateshwara of Tirupati. Lord Ayyappan in Kerala and Mata Vaishno Devi in Jammu also appear to have janajaati links. According to her, Jagannath or Vishnu, as Lord of the world, offers one of the most conspicuous instances of the transformation of a tribal God into a pre- eminent deity of the classical Hindu pantheon.

Khandoba is the God of tribal food-gatherers and hunters in the forest and hills of the Western Deccan. His sphere of influence is broadly co-terminus with the present States of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. He is generally recognized by the names Khandoba, Khanderaya (Maharashtra), Mallanna (Andhra), Mailara, Mairala, Mallaya (Karnataka). Sandhya Jain says that there are close parallels between him and Murugan who finds mentioned in the early Tamil Sangam Literature of the 3rd and 4th centuries AD as the Hill God. Early Sangam Literature also throws up interesting parallels between Khandoba, Murugan and Rudra. The Veneration of the Serpent (Naga) and the Mother Goddess (Devi) deeply permeates the psyche of tribals, villages, rural and urban folk and the classical Hindu traditions.

Redfield has beautifully described this beautiful cultural interaction which mocks at times and remains unaltered and imperishable in India:

'This is perhaps the most important conclusion of recent anthropological studies of Hinduism .the unity of Hinduism does not exclusively reside in an exemplary set of norms and scriptures, such as those defined by Sanskritic Hinduism, or in an alternative 'lower level' popular Hinduism of the uncultivated masses. The unity is to be found rather in the continuities that can be traced vin the concrete media of song, dance, play, sculpture, painting, religious story and rite that connect the rituals and beliefs of the villager with those of the townsman and urbanite, one region with another, and the educated with the uneducated.'

Sandhya Jain has produced an outstanding book on the roots of Hindu civilization and the binding unity of Hindu culture, founded on janajaati itihaas. Seeing her bold, original and patriotic work, I am reminded of the following lines of Mark Twain:

'My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing . . . to watch over . . . Institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing and clothing can wear out or become ragged . . . To be loyal to rags, that is the loyalty of un-reason. It is pure animal. The citizen who thinks he sees that his country's political clothes are worn out, and yet, holds his peace, and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway.'

Sandhya Jain truly belongs to this class of firebrand agitators.

(The writer is a retired IAS officer)
e-mail the writer at vsundaram@newstodaynet.com