Abstract

The lecture will be divided into five parts. At the outset, the speaker shall introduce the different conceptual categories that have emerged in thinking about tribes in post-independence India. Then the talk will situate tribes in colonial setting and discuss ways in which they were integrated into the larger Indian society. As to how they were impacted in the process and what was their response will be explored.  In the third part, discussion on the nature and types of provisions provided for tribes in Indian constitution will be addressed along with the status of tribes following its realization through state policies and programmes. The status will be probed in reference to social development indicators such poverty, education and health. In the last segment, the speaker shall problematize the policy of affirmative action in case of tribes especially of mainland India.

Bio Sketch of the speaker

Prof. Virginius Xaxa, presently Professor of Eminence at Tezpur University, began his academic career in North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) where he taught Sociology from 1978- 1990. He joined Delhi School of Economics in 1990 and taught there till 2011. He joined the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 2011 to head the Guwahati Campus and completed his term in September 2016.

Prof Xaxa was awarded the Ph.D. for his thesis on Agrarian Social Structure and Class Relations in North Bengal at IIT, Kanpur (1978). He held post-doctoral fellowship under Indo-French Cultural Exchange Programme at Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris (1982). He was a Commonwealth Academic Staff Fellow at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1988) and a Fulbright Fellow at University of California Santa Cruz, USA (1998). He held the Rajiv Gandhi Chair in Contemporary Studies at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong from 2006-2008.

Prof Xaxa works in collaboration with students and colleagues in attempting to understand sociological concerns of plantation labourers, tribal communities, agrarian structure and development, social exclusion and has published several books and articles. He is the author of Economic Dualism and Structure of Class: A Study in Plantation and Peasant Settings in North Bengal (1997) and State, Society and Tribes: Issues in Post- Colonial India (2008). He is also the co-author of Plantation Labour in India (1996) and co-editor of Social Exclusion and Adverse Inclusion: Adivasis in India (2012, Forest Lanterns: A Collection of Essays on Solutions for Nourishing India’s Tribal Children (2016) and Work, Institutions and Sustainable Livelihood: Issues and  Challenges of Transformation (2017) Employment and Labour Market in North-East India: Interrogating Structural Changes (2018) .  He is also on the editorial advisory board of reputed International Journals such as Asian Ethnicity, Social Change, History and Sociology of South Asia and Contribution to Indian Sociology, Sociological Bulletin.

Besides contributions to research and teaching, Prof Xaxa has been a member of the various committees of the Govt. of India and governing boards and advisory committees of various research institutes, universities and NGOs. Prof. Xaxa has been a member of National Advisory Council of the Government of India and the Chairperson of High Level Committee to study educational, health and economic status of the tribal communities in India.