SMELTED IDENTITIES

What does ‘tribal’ mean? At best it’s an ensemble of archetypes, each one more problematic than the other

- SUNIL MENON

TRIBAL’. The word teems with life, like a forest of meanings. Its very arrival sets off in our minds a sensory explosion. Colour, sound, feel— a rich, compound expressivity. But what does it mean really? Here we trail off into a zone of semantic ambiguity. Neither average townsfolk—equipped with a sense of the self as ‘non-tribal’—nor scientist will be able to supply an exact meaning. That’s because it lacks one. The most anyone can do is tap into an ensemble of archetypes: primitive and/or unsophisticated, savage, tightly-knit communities living isolated in forest, desert or savannah, away from the systems of rationality that built civilisations.

Each of those is problematic. Take ‘irrational’. An environmentalist travelling to the uplands by the Narmada in the mid-’90s was astounded to see the local Bhils making river water flow uphill—using a series of strategically created depressions to aid the flow in their ‘pat’ irrigation system! Consider ‘primitive’. Iron was first smelted in India, in the second millennium BC, by people you would now call tribals, all across the land. From sites dotting the Deccan to the Netarhat hills in Jharkhand and the Kaimur range, south of Banaras— the bloomery furnace still used by the

Asura and Agaria people there is what made the Iron Pillar of Asoka, which stands unrusted by time. “Itinerants of the forest in 800 BC had access to stateof-the-art military technology,” writes historian Sumit Guha, in a wry aside in