ABSTRACT
Words like ‘tribe’ and ‘tribals’ have come to acquire a salience in any discourse on social science and social change. They denote both an anthropological entity and a metaphor for the most victimized of our society. The term covers a repertoire of social organizations at various levels of development. The origin of this concept dates back to the colonial period. Many present-day tribes were once nations with whom the colonists entered into treaties. Colonialism marked the beginning of radical change in the tribal situation in India, a land marked by an extraordinary range of ecological, cultural, religious, and linguistic heterogeneity. Tribal resources became a commodity. The tribal world was aggressively and brutally exploited. By the end of the British raj, the Scheduled Tribes (STs) had emerged as a distinct constitutional category (Singh 2005: ii). Tribal situations are marked by diversity. The STs of kerala form 35 to 38 distinct communities. Adivasi, the Malayalam term used in kerala, is equivalent to the english word ‘tribe’.
