An Atlas Of Tribal India

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MOONIS RAZA Vice-Chancellor, University of Delhi, and Professor Emerius at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Born 1925 he was educated at the Aligarh Muslim University where he taught for about fourteen years before joining as Prosor of Humanities at the Regional Engineering College, Srinagar. During his long career as a teacher an administrator he served in different capacities as Principal. Regional Engineering College, Srinagar, Chairman, Centre for the Study of Regional Development Rector, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Director, National Institute of Educational Planning and Admiration. His principal interests are Social Geography, Historical Geography, Regional Geography, Geography of Transport and Regional Development Planning fields in which he has extensively published his research.

ALAZUDDIN AHMAD is Professor of Geography at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and a former Chairman, Centre for the Study of Regional Development. Bom in 1932, he was educated at the Aligarh Muslim University where he served on the faculty of the Department of Geography for a decade before joining the Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1972. His search interests include Social Geography, Historical Geography, Regions and Regionalism, Man-Environment Interaction in Arid and Mountainous Regions and Agricultural Climatology. His recent contributions to research have been published in Indian and foreign journals.

The Centre for the Study of Regional Development of the Jawaharlal Nehru University has, since its establishment in 1971, a deep commitment to the study of the deprived and the under-privileged. As the deprivation of the tribal peoples of the country is intrinisically woven into the fabric of persistent under- development, an analysis of the ecological and socio-economic attributes of their life may be considered to be a crucial input in the interpretation of the contemporary social reality of India. It is, therefore, not surprising that the geography of the Indian tribes has been one of the important focil of curricular as well as the research activity of the Centre. The undersigned were the initiators of this tradition since the incep- tion of the Centre and have tended it with some care for well over a decade and a half. Quite a few of our students caught the contagion, transcended the boundaries of the trendy and yet spurious radicalism of the campus and developed a commitment to the study of the deprived which was not an escape from but an aid to scholarship. Asoka, who is no more, was the first of these. Let it be put on record that her study of the clustering and concentration of tribal population was the first dissertation to be submitted to the Jawaharlal Nehru University for the award of the M.Phil degree.

The present work is a response to the need for an authentic aid to researchers who are engaged in the examination of the regional dimension of the tribal phenomenon in India. It became possible on the basis of painstaking and sustained research effort spread over a number of years.

It is hoped that the spatial patterns of tribal distribution and some of its corelates having been inden- tified and preliminary explorations having been made in the search for explanatory models, the ground would have been cleared for deeper probes into the human condition in tribal India.

In addition to an introductory chapter, this volume is divided into eight sections as under. A. Spatial Distribution and Region Formation B. Ecological Setting C. Rural-Urban Composition D. Sex Ratio and Marital Status E. Cultural Aspects F. Literacy G. Participation in Economic Activity H. Structure of Workforce Each Section is composed of the following: i) a text interpreting the spatial patterns and processes which have been depicted on maps and which indicate the directions along which explanations for these may be sought; ii) plates depicting the spatial patterns and processes with the help of maps and diagrams; and iii) tables giving the district-wise values for derived variables which provide the basis for mapping as well as analysis.

The volume has a bibliography of references at the end.

There is no point in presenting an assessment of the research effort that has gone into the present work for it would be obvious to those who have handled district-level census data at two different points of time; and no description can give a clue to those who have not. It may, however, be stated that the present work consists of 188 maps, tables with-derived variables, appendices and 221 bibliographic references.

Particular attention is drawn to a tabular presentation of spatial continuum of tribal population wherein with the district in the rows, the strength of the various tribes inhabiting that district is given in the column.It may be considered to be a table with the contiguity constraint imposed on it.

A work of this complexity and magnitude is bound to have many inadequacies, limitations, shortcom ings and errors. There are some which operate outside of our control. Only a few of the problems posed, for example, by the non-comparability of same time-series data have been satisfactorily solved. They have, however, been used in the present work with the hope that if the Indian People can survive polluted air, un- filtered water and adultrated food, Indian social science research can survive changes in the definition of 'worker".

The undersigned are strongly conscious of the fact that inspite of their best efforts to reduce the in-cidence and intensity of the inadequacies of the present work, there are many that still remain. We strongly hope that our students and colleagues would point them out to us so that improvement may be made in the next edition. The best and most effective response to the limitations of the present work, however, would be to consider it as a halting step forword towards developing a geography of Indian Tribes and move fur- ther in that direction with greater understanding and methodological rigour.

**Contents and Sample Pages**