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        Ihave 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!