Humility is an important but often overlooked relational quality. It's commonly confused with self-deprecation or servility, but referring to its derivation from the Latin humus, meaning earth, reminds us that to be humble is to be grounded. It's human nature to project ourselves into the world with great force and purpose, but this stirring up of energy can dislocate our true self. When, in seeking power and pride, we present a false image of how we want to be rather than who we are, we receive back a false reflection from the world, which only incites us to more posturing.

 

To be humble enough to receive from others, we must first receive within. This act of self-love gives ourselves not just an appropriate amount of power and pride but, more importantly, lets us receive others' love. This is a tricky distinction. We try so hard to replace negative internal messages with positive messages, but unless we humbly receive them, we will continue to believe, and struggle desperately to disprove, the old ones.

 

One aspect of humility is knowing there are infinite things we'll never know. We have been so wrong in our self-assumptions, motives and beliefs. And if we can be wrong once, it's very likely we're still wrong in other as-yet-undiscerned ways. Our coping mechanisms may have served to protect us through childhood, but in adult relationships any self-defense will block the light of intimacy. Healthy, enlightened life constantly corrects itself. Respect for truth makes humility possible and gives us the ability to touch the authenticity of our actual inner earth, our groundedness. To share how we perceive rather than what we believe invites in the truth that we are still growing, still finding more about ourselves each day. What we will discover tomorrow requires the humility of self-renewal.

Source: Mirror of Intimacy.

 

Happy Mindfulness Day 2024

 Dearest Friends and my Well-wishers,

After a long break, I am reviving my Blog, thank God that I am alive and active. This revival is today, which is an auspicious day, 12 September. Today is also the Mindfulness Day and I extend my best wishes to all of you on this day.

Briefly, mindfulness is about spending the day for oneself, ignoring the bitterness of the past and all expectations of the future. It's also to keep oneself away from the social media platforms to find time for introspection and meditation to enliven oneself. If we miss one day, who knows, we might miss a great life-time opportunity. 

Again, my best wishes to all of you. Also request you to bless me to enjoy my day by sending me a message and pardon me for the mistakes that I have committed (some people have already me as an Aghori), or if not too busy, by calling me for a second.

With love and best wishes,

Kamal.

Tribal Assimilation in Orissa

This article has been published at Muse India

Introduction

In common parlance, tribes in India are perceived as ‘different’ socio-cultural groups living in isolation since the mythical Aryan invasion of the Indian sub-continent. It has been hypothesized by many that the tribes were pushed by the invaders—the ‘pure’ races—with superior military strength into the interior hilly and forest abodes and since then the tribes have been leading a life of seclusion. This hypothesis is given credence due to the false belief that the tribes or mlechhas had at no time in the historical past constituted a part of the conventional four-fold varna hierarchy of Vedic India, and hence, the inevitable undermining of their cultural potential. This commonly held notion has led to the portrayal of the tribal population as ‘uncultured’ and ‘semi-naked’ forest dwellers, whose mobility in the direction of the mainstream Indian culture is incompatible with their way of life.

Contrarily, there are also enough evidences to suggest that the concept of tribe does not refer to a set of static economic, social and ideological parameters; it simply means ‘the people’ (Leach 1964, Fried 1966) or communities of people, referred to as jana in Vedic literature of India (Ray 1972). These communities with their differential life style are believed to have possessed equally rich cultures, which also undergo the processes of change, adaptation and acculturation like other cultures while maintaining their tribal identity. Mention has been made about the Kiratas, Jangamas, Savaras, Dravidas, Dasas, and so on, who had very powerful kingdoms in historical times, indicating tribal association with the mainstream Indian culture. The militia of the tribal kingdoms had extended their friendship to the kings of ‘Aryan’ descent in fighting great wars in historical and pre-historic times, setting to rest the speculation about their extreme isolation and seclusion from the mainstream Indian culture. Similarly, it is noticed among the tribes of Chotanagpur that the kings of ‘Aryan’ descent were often invited by the tribes to rule the tribal principalities, so as to protect the sovereignty and integrity of these regions (Misra 1986). It was the British administrator-scholars who formalized the ‘great divide’ between castes (jatis) and tribes in India with the census enumerations of 1901, 1911, 1921, and 1931 under the guidance of Risley, Gait, Lowis and Hutton, respectively, as there was no exact lexical reference to tribes in the pre-British period.

The tribal-nontribal interface is perhaps more glaring in the case of Odissa, where the culture is better construed as an amalgamation of tribal and sanskritic elements, represented in its religious beliefs and practices, rituals, myths and folklores, the emotions and everyday behaviour of the Odiyas. The state of Odissa has been a land of adivasis, literally the original inhabitants of the land, and known as tribes in common parlance. According to the latest Census, the tribal population constitutes 22.2% of the state population and divided into 62 groups with their distinct cultures, customs and languages (for details see www.tribal.nic.in/). The culture, heritage and folk life of Odissa, identified with the cult of Jagannath, is believed to have originated from the pantheon of the Savara – one of the adivasi communities inhabiting this part of the country for millennia. Mention has been made in the Utkala khanda of the Skanda Purana that the legendary king Indradumna, ruling from a city called Avanti in the Kingdom of Malwa was a great devout of Lord Vishnu, who deputed his close confidant, Vidyapati, to meet the Savara king Viswabasu and bring back the idol of Lord Jagannath, believed to have been worshipped in absolute secrecy as Nilamadhava by the Savara. The legend goes that Vidyapati had to marry the daughter of the Savara king, Lalita, in order to locate the idol. Eventually, king Indradumna had to visit Odissa on divine instruction to collect the piece of wood for the fabrication of the idol of Lord Jagannath (Das 2005). Despite many different legends on the origin of the cult which do not have any credible historical evidence either to accept or reject, “it is clear that the present form of the Lords bear resemblance to tribal art. Hence, the tribal origin of Jagannath cannot be ruled out” (Dash 2005).

With this social, spiritual and historical background of Odissa, what is contended here is that tribes and castes were and are not mutually exclusive cultural categories in Odissa and other states of India, although this division could, at best, culminate in analytical categories for academic purposes. In other words, mobility between castes, popularized as Sanskritization by Srinivas (1972), has been complemented with an additional process of tribe-caste mobility, placing both the categories on a continuum. This essay aims at exploring this continuous process of mobility in the state of Odissa with ethnographic evidences indicating how some tribes have acquired the caste status and some castes have acquired most of the tribal cultural features being encysted in tribal dominated regions of the state.

Conceptual Framework

It is established from many historical records that during the mediaeval times the process of tribe-caste integration and particularly, status mobility of tribes to castes, was mostly patronized by the temple administrations, the local kings or feudal chiefs or influential zamindars, thus institutionalizing the achieved higher status of specific tribes (Mahapatra 1976). This, however, does not undermine the usual process of tribal cultural assimilation with the castes, even without patronage, as a part of prolonged association and influence by the neighbouring populous caste groups. What is still more amazing is the process of assimilation of the caste communities into the tribal cultures, when the former remain encysted for long in a tribal dominated region.

Although the Indian system of caste had drawn the attention of Indologists since long, social anthropological research on Indian civilization made its beginning after the World War II, mostly under the influence of the Chicago School of Anthropology. The major consideration of the School was to understand and analyze inter-caste interaction and mobility (Redfield 1956), which was later stretched to include the possibility of tribe-caste mobility. Notwithstanding their varied ideological and empirical bases, the models were primarily designed for scrapping the enigmatic hangover about the rigid, monolithic and closed character of the Indian caste system. These paradigms also assumed a formal and institutionalized interaction and mutual assimilation of culture traits between castes despite their differential positions in the scale of social hierarchy. Even though the process of caste mobility and assimilation was the major focus of these models, tribe-caste interaction and gradual adoption of caste characters by the tribes could be objectively explained with their help.

The explication of interaction and culture change was conceptualized by Redfield through various levels of traditions from the insight he gained in Mexican villages (1956). He assumed that “Each civilization consists of two traditions, one of the elites and the reflective few where it is formally articulated, and the other of the folk or the unlettered peasants. The former he called ‘Great’ and the latter ‘Little’ tradition” (Singh 1980). Redfield, in fact, postulated that both the traditions interact freely and mutually borrow the elements of culture more openly in any civilization. This paradigm was imaginatively applied in the Indian context by Singer, who reformulated it saying that “… because India had a ‘primary’ or ‘indigenous’ civilization which had been fashioned out of pre-existing folk and regional cultures, its ‘Great Tradition’ was continuous with the ‘Little Tradition’ to be found in its diverse regions, villages, castes and tribes” (Singer 1959).

The more or less static concepts of great and little traditions, as postulated by Redfield (1956) and corroborated in the Indian context by Singer (1959), were charged with a more dynamic orientation by Marriott, who proposed and gave prominence to the processes of universalization and parochialization (Marriott 1961). While the former concept delineated gradual incorporation of ‘folk’ or ‘peasant’ or ‘local’ tradition into the elitist or sanskritic tradition, the latter was with reference to the process of adopting higher level culture traits by the local peasantry. The argument centered round the fact that both upward and downward mobility are continuous and hence, there is an inevitable exchange of cultural elements between the folk and sanskritic levels of traditions (Marriott 1961).

Contrary to the foregoing paradigms, which were mainly concerned with mutual exchange of relations between the sanskritic and folk levels of the civilization, another popular model of ‘Sanskritization’ explained the process of emulation by a lower caste or tribe the elements of culture from a caste, which invariably comprised the reference group, to achieve a higher status in the local social hierarchy. The concept was defined as “… the process by which a ‘low’ Hindu caste or tribal or other group, changes its customs, ritual, ideology and way of life in the direction of a high and frequently, ‘twice-born’ caste” (Srinivas 1972). This model of exclusive upward mobility by gradual emulation and adoption of culture traits, followed by a claim of upper caste status was mostly a Brahminical model, as it is apparent from Srinivas’ earlier writings (Srinivas 1972), which was reformulated by him later.

The sanskritic models, as explained, were aimed at studying the interaction and processes of mobility between the castes, while the tribal communities were thought to be marginally involved in this process. When there was a realization that the tribal communities in India also shared similar cultural heritage and the process of interaction between sanskritic, folk and tribal cultures was in vogue since time immemorial, systematic attempts were initiated to bring the tribes into the fold of folk-urban continuum and extend it to tribal-rural-urban continuum. The early findings by Indologists reveal that Indian civilization during the Vedic period had different levels of culture, which instead of being closed and compartmentalized, were mutually interactive, and only a full consideration of all these levels could characterize the Indian civilization.

Ray in his thought provoking paper cites that there are sastrachara or textual, desachara or regional and lokachara or folk models of Indian civilization, which explain different levels of tradition (Ray 1972). Empirical investigations in Central India by Sinha (1962), in different parts of Bihar by Vidyarthi (1978), in Bengal and Odissa by Bose (1967) explicitly reveal the processes of ‘Rajputization’, ‘Kshtriyaization’, etc. to manifest in clearer terms the process of tribal assimilation with the caste system, however lowly their changed caste status might be. But many other empirical studies as well reveal the opposite process of ‘tribalization’ found in many tribal pockets of the country with gradual internalization of many of the tribal customs, mores and religion by the neighbouring caste groups, which are in many respects antithetical to the caste ideology in India (Kalia 1959). My prime intention of bringing together all these models is precisely to show that like other cultural regions of India, Odissa also has been experiencing mutual exchange and adoption of cultural elements between the tribal and caste communities since historical times to give the tribal-rural-urban continuum a firm base, in spite of the strongly held closed character of the Indian caste system.

Odissa: The Land of Encysted Castes

The geo-physical character of the state of Odissa with its natural landscape overshadowed by high mountains, deep forests and difficult terrains with an extensive chain of river systems, was perhaps most inaccessible in ancient times, but might have been an excellent abode for the refugees (Bose 1967). The difficult land route and dangerous
river passes might have provided a safe and unmolested habitation for those indigenous communities, who were pushed back to the interior and hilly regions by the invading population from the north-west. This refugee population, in all probability, might have been the indigenous population or the autochthones of the land, and hence, the culture of Odissa has a strong tribal base. But the later waves of migration must have brought in small groups of ‘Aryan’ communities, who might be completely encysted by the indigenous communities and influenced by their culture. Bose aptly observes:

Of the many aboriginal tribes who inhabited Orissa in early times, the foremost were the Savara. They have been in contact with people speaking Indo-Aryan languages for a very long time, and they have had some share in building up Orissan civilization. Scholars who study the history of languages say that the language of Orissa owes something to the Savara (ibid.).

Besides the Savara influence on the language, in the sphere of religion also the Savara have a significant place. As I have noted earlier, the principal deity of Hindu Odissa, Lord Jagannath, is said to be of Savara origin and the Odissan myths and oral traditions are enriched by the stories of sincere endeavour and devotion of the kings and nobles in ordaining the status of the principal deity to this tribal shrine. Even today a section of the servicing population (sevayata) of the deity, namely ‘Daitas’, has a claimed tribal origin, which has been established and endorsed in many scholarly writings.

Due to the predominance of caste population and the spread of world religions during the mediaeval and early-modern periods of Odissan history, the reverse trend gained prominence with the tribes emulating cultures and customs of the neighbouring caste groups with a view to assimilate with the latter. This process of cultural assimilation has been widely noticed among many agriculturist tribal populations of the state, as this occupation has been made open for a variety of castes and communities, unlike many other occupations having a strong caste reference and affiliation (viz. barbers, washermen, potters, smiths, carpenters, sweet makers, gardeners, and so on). There are, however, other elements of culture as well, which are also adopted in different degrees, facilitated by the stretch of positional proximity between the tribes and castes of Odissa and their long historical linkages.

Advanced tribes and lower castes in Odissa tried to emulate the style of life of the castes that ranked higher than theirs in the local social order to attain higher social status and thereby prepare the ground for modernization. As suggested by Srinivas (1972), it is a social axiom that a group or a community adopts the life style of the economically, politically and numerically dominant group readily available locally as a reference group to ensuring upward status mobility among the tribes and relatively lower caste groups.

Empirical Findings on Cultural Assimilation

It is already pointed out that the process of cultural assimilation and mobility along the tribe-caste continuum in Odissa is bi-directional with mutual emulation of culture traits and the way of life. But the formal and institutionalized integration is only confined to the tribes being given the caste status and declared as touchables. Similarly, although the tribal-encysted castes mostly adopt tribal customs and cultures in their everyday life, there is hardly any tangible evidence in Odissa to prove the deviation of the rule of endogamy with respect to these castes.

Bose’s contemplation on the cultural absorption of the Juang (one of the Primitive Tribal Groups or the PTGs living in Keonjhar and the neighbouring districts) of Odissa with the proximal Hindu communities may be taken as a glaring example and the outcome of a pioneering research in Odissa. The Juang, inhabiting the rugged terrain and dense forested area of Keonjhar were not observed to be so close to caste culture, as had happened in case of a section of the tribe migrated to the plains of the neighbouring Dhenkanal district. They were mostly basket makers with wet agriculture supplementing their livelihood. Bose has delineated in very clear terms the adoption of Goddess Lakshmi as their deity and Her propitiation along with frequent use of terms like satya, devata, dharma, etc. in their religious and magical lore. These evidences have made Bose to infer the subtle operation of the process of Hinduization among them (Bose 1967). It is evident from these observations that although the plains living Juang have not voiced their claim for a caste status per se, the trend of Hinduization is distinctly discernible. Like a caste-based occupational monopoly and exclusiveness, basket making has been adopted and internalized by this section of the Juang to give credence to the process of cultural mobility. In another tribal group, the Bada Gadaba, inhabiting Koraput district of Odissa, the institutionalized idol worship of the Hindu Gods and Goddesses, such as Lakshmi, Radha Krishna, and the sacred plant Tulsi (Ocimum sanctum), observance of Hindu festivals as per the Hindu calendar with usual pomp, etc. give credence to the ongoing process of Hinduization among the tribes of Odissa.

Similar process of Hinduization among many other tribal communities of Odissa can also be evinced in relatively modern times and their claim to have achieved the status of a farming caste for precisely the reason mentioned earlier. Example may be cited of the Rajkuli Bhuyian of Keonjhar, who have solely taken up wet cultivation as their primary occupation and are converted to the caste of cultivators with the use of typical surnames of the caste (Behura 1983). Even the Bhuyian of more remote and less accessible Bonai of Sundergarh have become converted to the caste of warriors or the Khandayat, when some of them acquired landed property in course of time (Mahapatra 1976). While the Desia Kondh of Phulbani, Suddha Saora of the Ganjam Agency and Koraput, and Sadhu Hor Santal of Mayurbhanj are on the verge of being converted to the caste of a cultivator because of their practice of wetland farming, the Raj Gond, Mirdha and other such communities of Sambalpur and Sundergarh have started tracing their origin from the local chieftains and claiming their Kshtriya ancestry. The process of parochialization and eventual infiltration of the Hindu cultural ideologies and practices have made them Hindus for all practical purposes. Hindu barbers, washermen, and other service castes have started serving them. This process warrants probing into the possibility of ethnic and cultural admixture among some of the dominant agricultural castes in India, like the Mudaliar of Tamil Nadu, Kunbi of Madhya Pradesh, Reddy of Andhra Pradesh, Okkaliga of Karnataka, and Khandayat of Odissa.

The preceding examples, however, are not suggestive of the fact that tribal assimilation is merely confined to the achievement of a caste status of a warrior or an agriculturist, rather the adoption of craft specialization is not uncommon in tribal Odissa. Besides the acceptance of basket making by the Juang (Bose 1967), there are instances of Bathudi barbers, washermen and potters in Mayurbhanj, who were recognized by the Raja of Mayurbhanj and were conferred the caste status, are now undergoing the process of Sanskritization for an upward caste mobility in the local social hierarchy (Behura 1978).

The other trend in the mechanism of bi-directional flow of culture traits is just the reverse process of what has been delineated above. The internalization of typical tribal characters by the encysted caste communities and the operationalization of the processes of universalization and tribalization are also not uncommon in Odissa. Behura observes that among the Koya, Kondh and Gadaba of south Odissa, three artisan castes have become assimilated to such an extent that except the retention of caste endogamy, they can be easily identified with their encysting tribes. These three artisan castes of blacksmiths, potters and weavers have settled down among these tribes for generations and have been serving them for pecuniary advantages through out their span of habitation (Behura 1983).

The process of universalization, besides the case of Savara deity Jagannath, has been observed among the Hill Bhuyian of Sundergarh, where a tribal deity, Kanta Kuanri, had been given the status of a state deity by the Raja of Bonai and was later identified as Durga. A similar example is often cited that the Goddess Samalai of Sambalpur was claimed to be worshipped by the local Sahara community and was eventually adopted as the state deity by the king of Sambalpur (Mahapatra 1976).

This bi-directional flow of culture between the tribes and castes of Odissa can be, under no circumstances, be reduced only to the process of Hinduization, as there has been a tendency towards total assimilation. There was emulation of the typical form of social organization, economic pursuits, language or dialect, along with the ideological system of the neighbours (Behura 1983). The encysted castes have even adopted tribal dialects and tribal way of life, to the extent of participating in community festivals with them, quite often headed by a tribal priest. It is, therefore, plausible to assume that despite many strong claims of tribes and castes of Odissa belonging to two separate cultural genres, in reality the boundary has been much more fluid and porous facilitating tribe-caste continuum on a long-term basis, each one of them contributing to what we see today as the Odiya culture.

Media of Cultural Assimilation

It is indicated earlier that the temple system, the local kings and zamindars and the people who mattered in the local context were primarily responsible for the tribal assimilation into the caste fold in Odissa. With the insight gained from Sinha (1962), Mahapatra holds that “Sinha has thrown sufficient light on the role of tribal Rajas and feudal overlords in the spread and intensification of Brahminical tradition in tribal areas” (Mahapatra 1976). Mahapatra has taken the examples of the contributions of the Rajas of Bonai and Sambalpur in recognizing not only the tribal deities of the Bhuyian and Sahara respectively, but their role in elevating the status of the Bhuyian from exterior ones to that of a touchable, so that any caste can accept water from its members. This has perhaps given moral boosting to them to claim themselves of having a warrior origin. The other medium was the temple services as the servicing communities were recognized as belonging to the fold of Hinduism by virtue of rendering essential services to the deity. Mahapatra has taken the examples of the temples of Jagannath in Puri and Lingaraj in Bhubaneswar to highlight this route in the legitimization of caste status in Odissa.

A pragmatic analysis of the bi-directional flow of culture traits and the process of cultural assimilation has been attempted by Ray in a more scholarly fashion. He opines that superior technological, economic, political, social and cultural forces affect and influence the less powerful cultures in their vicinity (Ray 1972). To quote him:

… these [indigenous or tribal] people were able to maintain somewhat their socio-religious, economic and cultural identity. But because of their close locational proximity and the steady pressure of the larger and techno-economically more organized communities, they were obliged to enter into social and cultural and more importantly, economic contacts, communication and exchanges with their neighbours who were socially, culturally and economically more dominant”.

A similar but more logical analysis has been presented by Bose, which suits mostly to the post-independence situation in India. Bose is of the opinion that despite cultural richness “Culture ….flows from a politically and economically dominant group to a subservient one” (Bose 1967). He emphasizes the role of productive organization, which is the binding factor between communities and the spring of political power. Therefore, more accurately, culture for him:

… seems to flow from an economically dominant group to a poorer one when the two are tied together to form a larger productive organization through some historical accident.

Along side all these, the extension of market network in more recent times plays a significant role in facilitating close interaction and cultural assimilation in tribal areas. In this connection, Sinha (1958) observes:

These tribal communities have been in touch with the traditional network of weekly markets whereby they are involved in economic symbiosis with at least ten or more Hindu castes.

Conclusion

In Indian society tribe and caste are not exclusive and clear-cut social universes. They no doubt constitute separate social domains that are in socio-economic interaction since millennia. In social science parlance ‘tribe’ and ‘caste’ are understood as distinct social types for analytical purposes. There is no difference of opinion with regard to the fact that tribal culture constitutes a dimension of the ‘Little Tradition’ of the Indian civilization with its rich cultural heritage and has contributed to the shaping up of this great Indian civilization. Tribe and caste not only mutually influence each other, but together they interact with the ‘Great Tradition’ of India. Despite the British policy of tribal isolation in India and deliberate division of Indian social universe into that of the tribes and castes, tribes share Indian civilization in its broadest spectrum, in spite of varying degrees of their agglomeration, economy and variation in speech. Therefore, caste system, which is usually conceptualized as immutable and monolithic, is a misnomer, which is evidenced from the empirical evidences of bi-directional cultural flow between the tribes and castes of Odissa. Because of their contribution to the composite culture and religion of Odissa, tribal cultures ought to occupy same space in the contemporary discourse on Odiya culture, language and history as do the castes of Odissa.


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