EDUCATING THE TRIBES OF INDIA

Some Gleanings from History for Today

Joseph Bara

Education of the tribes of India, more of tribal masses, is an ignored area in discussions
on tribes. The present essay does a broad survey of the educational ideas and policies
on tribal masses in the pre-Independence and post-Independence years. The effort is
to show how colonial ideas have crept in and have shaped our thinking in tribal
educational planning. Examples are often cited from Chhotanagpur, an important tribal
region, which has been remarkably inundated by various agencies, forces and ideas,
including colonial Western education, in recent times, under British colonialism and
post-independence developments.
The literacy status of a social group is the simple index of its education status.
From this elementary index, the Scheduled Tribes are educationally the most backward
segment of the country. According to the Census of India, 2001, only 47.1 per cent of
the tribals are literate against the national rate of 64.84 per cent and of 55 per cent of
the Scheduled Castes. What is further worrisome is the incident of the highest growing
dropout rate of STs enrolled in schools in the initial two-three years. According to a
Performance Audit of Educational Development of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled
Tribes by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, conducted in 2007, the SC/ST
combined dropout rate was 15.1 per cent in 2001-02, which went down to 16.6 per cent
in 2003-04. Though not mentioned separately, within this, the ST dropout rate was
bound to be higher.
Various government measures- free mid-day meal, free books and uniform, special
incentive to girl child, freeships and so forth- have been able to retain some ST students
in the schools. But sustainability remains a problem. Before acquiring the skill of literacy
- which has been generally possible by four-five years of continuous education - a
major chunk drops out. Class VI-X is the stage which is traditionally known for the
incidence of heavier dropout rate, though the present liberal promotion government

*An earlier version of the paper was presented at international seminar on 'Adivasij Sf Communities in India:
Development and Change', 27-29 August 2009, organized by Institute for Human Development, New Delhi.

Voice of Dalit Vol. 3, No. 1, 2010, pages 23-29

© MD Publications Pvt Ltd
Corresponding Author Email : [email protected]
24 Joseph Bara

guidelines of promotion up to class VIII may disguise it to some extent. In the state of
Jharkhand, for instance, the tribals, who comprise about 30 per cent of the total
population, are the predominant majority of the annual failures in the class X board
examination. The picture in the area of higher education cannot be better. The already
small number of students, who are admitted in the institutions of higher education,
decline to an insignificant number by the level of the university degree.
Where does the fault lie in tribal education: is it in the tribal culture making the
tribals poor learners, or is it due to the system implanted among them? This fundamental
question is discussed by way of survey of ideas and approaches in pre-Independence
and early Independence years. It is argued that state attitude and policy has been not
only indifferent, but also insensitive to the tribal culture; overall, it has been highly
paternalistic.
I

The trend of poor rate of educational growth among the tribals of India has
been historically set. The educational history of modern times indicates that common
peoples' education has generally grown in a sluggish manner. This has been more so
in the colonial setting. The plain reason is that the political economy of colonialism
gave no priority to popular education. The proposition of people's education entailed
heavy expenditure, but promised no commensurate return. Even more importantly, it
was likely to raise forces of political reaction to the colonial rule. That was how the
British devised the notorious 'filtration' theory that aimed to educate only those from
upper classes who were inclined to education and who were, in due course, supposed
to mediate percolation of education down to the masses. Under this policy framework,
the tribal societies, forming the periphery of the colonial mainland societies, were the
last to be drawn into the British colonial system of education.
The British rule penetrated the tribal regions, politically and administratively,
mainly from the mid-nineteenth century, by when regions like Bengal, Bombay and
Madras had not only a network of schools, but actually dozens of colleges. To make
up the gap, the tribal societies were in dire need of more earnest efforts and faster
pace of development, which, however, was not forthcoming from the colonial state
machinery. Some newly posted young European officials did take personal interest,
but colonialism as a system soon dampened their enthusiasm. The officials became too
preoccupied with other priorities in the newly reclaimed administrative regions. The
colonial state actually evaded the responsibility because the tribal societies were
considered the most difficult terrains for educational operations, both geographically
and culturally.

Voice of Dalit
 Educating the Tribes of India: Some Gleanings from History for Today 25

Yet, after 1850, certain political developments compelled the colonial state to talk
of mass education, which was pronounced in the famous Wood's Educational Despatch
of 1854. As part of this, for the first time the colonial state came up with a policy of
educating the tribals. The state would, however, not burden its skeletal machinery for
this. It found a way, i.e. the provision of grant-in-aid to non-government agencies.
Under this, the government discovered the Christian missionaries as the only agency
ready to work among the tribal masses and projected them as the ideal ones from the
beginning.
The colonial state interests and missionary interests were two different interests,
not organically compatible to each other. There were instances of conflict of the two
interests in various regions, especially after 1857 when the colonial state was extra-
cautious of not hurting the religious sentiments of the Indians. The tribal arenas were
not free from such conflict of interests. Yet, the tribal people were found to be not so
sensitive on religious matters compared to others. This somewhat assured the British
of safety of the empire in various tribal regions on the score of missionary presence.
That was how many tribal regions in the north-east and central India became
educationally missionary-dominated.
Missionary infrastructure, though brought in educational avenues in many
inaccessible tribal areas, was not really the ideal or adequate answer to the tribals'
educational needs. The missionary educational work was loaded with missionary
agenda. The objects of training a local missionary ministry and consolidating the nee-
converts, often in large numbers, by predominant Christian instruction, dictated the
actual educational needs of the tribal masses. Like the agency of the government, the
missionary educators often failed to see the difficulties of the tribals from the tribal
point of view - the tribals' total unfamiliarity with any formal system of education,
foreign medium of instruction and, above all, their extreme poverty.
Overlooking the tribals' difficulties resulted in the setting of an abysmally slow
trend of progress. It especially came to light from 1920s when the British government,
forced by the nationalist movement, undertook review of its performance in mass
education in relation to political preparedness of India for democracy. The educational
growth among the tribals was found to be most stagnant. The government reviewers
in the Indian Statutory Commission found in the case of the Chhotanagpur tribals that
during 1922-27 out of 91,000 students in class I, 61 per cent were repeaters- of these 34
per cent for two years and 27 per cent for more than two years.
The whole state of affairs indicated that the colonial state had been, all these
years, indifferent to the subject of tribal education. It nominally operated on the
model of what it did elsewhere, i.e. encouraging one or two 'model' institutions at

Voice of Dalit
26 Joseph Bara

some central places, under the aforesaid filtration model. It almost gave a free hand to
the missionaries. The missionaries on their part were more concerned with only those
clusters of villages where they had sizeable converts or prospective converts. Thus,
many tribal areas were simply untouched or bereft of the system till the dawn of
independence.

II

Against this backdrop, for the first time, from the second decade of the twentieth
century the nationalist conscience on the dismal plight of the tribal societies was stirred.
This was the age of nation making through social service. A prominent organization
of the time, the Servants of India Society, planned to enter the tribal field for the
purpose under the stewardship of A.V. Thakkar, who formed the Bhil Seva Mandai.
The Mandai's effort of schooling the Bhils in Gujarat' s interior parts became the first
alternative non-governmental agency to missionaries in the field . There were, of course,
a few indigenous tribal self-help efforts in the missionary dominated regions. But the
efforts, unlike large and widespread enterprises elsewhere among the general
communities were, on the whole, sporadic and freak. The prime reasons were to be
found in the local churches discouraging independent enterprise and the emergent
tribal intelligentsia being too small and economically not secure.
Meanwhile, the Nationalist concern for tribal uplift was distracted by Gandhi's
special'Harijan' agenda. Gandhi persuaded AV Thakkar and a new recruit of Gandhian
social work, Verrier Elwin, to give priority to 'Harijan' work. The first love of both,
though, remained the tribals. This gave rise to a new phase of indigenous missionary
effort of tribal social work in 1930s. Both Thakkar and Elwin became constant keepers
of nationalist conscience on the subject to the political leadership of the time. Thakkar's
effort, in particular, concretized into a pan-Indian organization called the Adimjati
Seva Mandai, that became a premier non-governmental agency to work for tribal uplift
and influenced the nationalist policy on tribes a good deal from the pre-independence
years.
Soon after independence, the Adimjati Seva Mandai became the leading agency
to conduct 'nationalist' schools among the tribals, generally called 'ashram schools' in
large parts of central tribal India from Gujarat in the West to Orissa in the east. The
nationalist educational effort under social work programme was based on certain
questionable notes. AV Thakkar stated in an essay in The Bombay Chronicle (15 March
1939): 'Education in the language of the district, Marathi, though the Bhil speaks his
own Bhil dialect, must be widely spread by Hindu missionary societies, like the Bhil

Voice of Dalit
 Educating the Tribes of India: Some Gleanings from History for Today 27

Seva Mandai with free hostels or Ashrams under devoted teachers aided by the State.'
Instead of planting schools in more needy parts of the tribal habitations, the Adimjati
Seva Mandai, guided by sectarianism, chose to open schools near church schools in
many cases in the early years of Independence. This initiated unprecedented communal
politicization of education in central tribal India, detrimental to the tribals' actual
educational needs.
Thakkar, who came to be known as Thakkar Bapa, was from the beginning an
'enthusiastic' member of the Hindustani Talimi Sangh as a 'natural corollary' of his
interest in tribal welfare. The Talimi Sangh promoted 'basic' schools, with craft being
the central medium of learning, which was enunciated by Gandhi in the Wardha conclave
of nationalist educational thinkers (October 1937). It found in the tribal societies an
ideal locale for this experimentation. The 'basic' education system was steadily rejected
by the larger Indian society in 1950s because of its stereotyped and static methods,
and lack of conceptual growth. Disregarding this, the Adimjati Seva Mandai promoted
the system under the 'ashram school' project, liberally sponsored by the nationalist
government.
The details above indicate that the state, whether the colonial state or the nationalist
state, had throughout been indifferent to education of the tribals. It was also
paternalistic. This mindset guided the Education Commission, 1964 to presume non-
availability of tribal teaching personnel in the tribal regions and pushed outsider job
seekers, who were insensitive to the tribal educational handicaps, among the tribals in
a big way. Whereas by the second decade of Independence, there were actually a
number of unemployed tribal matriculates and graduates who could easily be trained
and employed as teachers. Further, there was rarely an attempt to read the problems,
taste or views of the tribal audience. Careful observation of the tribal attitude shows
that the tribals of Chhotanagpur took slow but keen interest when the first British
school was opened in 1839. At that time, forging or tampering of documents by the
alien landlords and their subordinates as a means of exploitation was rife. The tribals
therefore especially took interest in literacy in relation to documents.
A century later, in the mid-twentieth century, the urge of the same tribals
changed to betterment of life and political security of the tribal interest under the
democratic polity of India. For this, they wanted good education under the Western
system that, they witnessed, had helped others in advancing. As an exclusive cultural
group they would not give up their culture. Thus, when Gandhi floated his 'basic'
schools, they were skeptical about them and even called the concept 'beseekh' or
non-education. They wanted reform, but from their viewpoint. That was why around
the time of the Gandhian reforms, a tribal cultural leader came forward with a
'Dhumkuria' concept of schooling, which sought to inake use of the tribal cultural

Voice of Dalit
28 Joseph Bara

edifices and languages for a tribal-friendly Western education. The experiment did
not last, mainly for the lack of funding . But it signified the inadequacy of the
government system. This cautions the present-day efforts of educational experiments
that tend to aptly start 'national' reform agenda from the tribal fields.
m
The root of educational paternalism lay in the idea of 'tribe'. The idea, in general
understanding, connotes to the tribals being history-less, or to use the phrase of
anthropologist, Eric Wolf, 'people without history' . This inspires one to treat the
tribals as people without culture. This common idea has subtly found its way
into social science thinking. British colonial ethnographers and ethnologists
actually discerned certain distinct cultural traits or features in the tribal societies
of India. But as those who were the colonizing power, their overall approach to
the tribal societies was to erase their history, overlook their distinct cultural traits
and silence the tribal cultural voices. It should though be qualified here that the
same data that the colonialists raised to deny the tribals their cultural identity
were, in some cases, supplied by the tribals themselves; also, the same colonially
processed data were, many a times, appropriated by the tribals to assert their
cultural identity .
The tribal conceptual assertion was powerfully suppressed making use of, under
Orientalist construction, the indigenous Indian data on tribes that were mainly Sanskrit
sources, which had already suppressed the tribes for ages. With this was admixed the
Darwinian racist idea of tribe depicting tribals as beastly barbarian. Conceptually, the
tribes were, thus, doubly suppressed in the colonial cultural discourse. This gave rise
to the argument for special tribal 'civilization mission', with a vanguard role of Western
education. The various educational colonial initiatives among various tribal groups
were rooted in this. The missionary attitude to the tribals, though in many cases
humanitarian, was not untainted by this. The missionaries largely took the tribes as
sub-humans. In fact, this was one of the points of ideological consensus between
evangelicalism and utilitarianism, the current of idea, which dominated the colonial
state thinking in the nineteenth century.
Nationalist India has not been able to purge its mind of the colonial idea of tribal
'civilization' of the nineteenth century. At the height of Indian nationalism, Verrier
Elwin found the tribals being seen either as 'tiresome savages' or 'colourful folks engaged
in sexual orgies, human sacrifice and head-hunting'. The factor assigned to this status
was the tribals being 'inferior in mental capacity, military organization, material
advancement and social efficiency'. The mindset sprouted such concepts as 'adimjati'

Voice of Dalit
 Educating the Tribes of India : Some Gleanings from History for Today 29

(primitive caste), 'vanavasi' (forest dweller) or 'backward Hindus' as variants of 'tribe'

and a corresponding idea of charity-type educational agenda of 'civilization'.
The state of internal colonialism in tribal regions, super-imposed under British
colonialism to continue with greater force in the present times, has provided the ideal
condition for the continuity of the colonial idea. The internal colonizers, prejudiced
and inimical to the tribal people, fed the British ethnographers with data as informants.
The official and academic discourses on tribes have not been able to free themselves
from the deeply entrenched colonial idea. Under this, nothing better can be expected
on tribal education. The tribal people have to be human first, with a rich and distinct
culture, in the Indian psyche for a meaningful tribal education.

References
Bara, Joseph, 'Seeds of Mistrust: Tribal and Colonial Perspectives on Education in
Chhotanagpur, 1834-1850', Histon; of Education, November 2005, vol. 34, no. 6.
Sara, Joseph 'Colonialism, Christianity and the Tribes of Chhotanagpur, 1845-1890', South
Asia, vol. XXX, no. 2, August 2007.
Bara, Joseph,' Alien Construct and Tribal Contestation in Colonial Chhotanagpur: The Medium
of Christianity', Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XLIV, no. 52, 26 December 2009.
Census of India, Census Data 2001: National Summan;, Final Population Totals.
Elwin, Verrier, The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin:An Autobiography (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1964).
Interim Report of the Indian Statu ton; Commission (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1929).
Jagadisan, T.N. and Shyamlal ed. Thakkar Bapa: Eightieth Birthday Commemoration Volume
(Madras: 1949).
Kujur, Ignace, fharkhand Do Muhane Par (Ranchi: Sudarshan Press, undated).
National Council of Educational Research and Training, Education and National Development:
Report of the Education Commission 1964-66 (New Delhi: NCERT, reprint, edition, 1971).
O'Malley, L.S.S. Modem India and tlze West: A Study of the Interaction of Civilizations (London:
Oxford University Press, 1941).
Watt, C.A. Serving the Nation : Cultures of Service, Association and Citizenship (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
Wolf, Eric, Europe and tlze Peoplewitlzout Histon; (Berkeley: California University Press, 1982).

Voice of Dalit