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        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.