Tribes, castes,...their evolution, culture and problems...
Introduction - This relates to the chapters on tribes in the NCERT history textbooks. Often for young and old the word tribe has strong symbolic associations and much of it is as adjectives like ‘uncivilized’, 'uncultured', ‘primitive’ and more severely ‘barbaric’, ‘savage’. Though many of these attributes do have a historical significance, in the discourse of commonsense these features carry strong negative connotations. These chapters in NCERT books - 'What books and burials tell us' ( Class VI TB), 'Tribes, Nomads and Settled Communities' (Class VII TB) and Tribals, Dikus and the Vision of Golden Age (Class VIII TB) seek to present a much needed corrective. But rather than dealing with these chapters separately in classes VI, VII and VIII, it can be done as one long unit for a more comprehensive and contemporary understanding of tribal issues. The word tribe is a very loaded term and therefore I have tried to qualify the word often, though no