ABSTRACT
Why were there - why are there - 'tribal societies in peninsular India? India's 'tribals' (or Adivasis) are not really tribes (i.e. ethnic groups) at all, but are numerically dominant agricultural castes which hold, or used to hold, land in clan-based village communities in the more remote, forested and hilly parts of the subcontinent. The puzzle exists because, except in tribal areas, Indian rural society has a characteristic layered caste/class structure which failed to develop fully in the statelets, or so-called 'jungle kingdoms' with tribal majorities (Schnepel 1996). Traditionally, Indian rural society was founded on the twin pillars of landlordism and officialdom; that is, the extraction of rents and land revenue from the peasant masses by high castes. In the 'jungle kingdoms', while they were able to maintain themselves intact, revenue extraction was underdeveloped. There were no layers of greater and lesser landlords between the 'tribal' cultivator and the Raja at the apex of the kingdom. In the tribal areas society was, so to speak, two-dimensionally hierarchical, founded on a stark opposition between the mass of ordinary subjects (the tribes) and the king and his court. By contrast, the more developed type of traditional kingdoms (known in the literature as 'little kingdoms') were three-dimensionally hierarchical in that a dense screen of social barriers and material relationships of clientship and extraction intervened between the very high and the very low, creating the minutely nuanced, infinitely graduated social hierarchy most students of Indian society recognize today.
