TRIBAL WOMEN IN INDIA: POPULAR RHETORIC AND LIVED REALITIES
TRIBAL WOMEN IN INDIA: POPULAR RHETORIC AND LIVED REALITIES

Summary/Abstract: Popular rhetoric on gender relations in tribal societies in general, and the status of tribal women in particular, swings between two uncompromising extremes. While the development administrators and some selected NGOs perceive an impressive state of empowerment of tribal women, thanks to the post-independence developmental interventions, their critiques, on the other hand, highlight their destitution in more than one instances. Looking at these mutually antagonistic paradigms, I contend that tribal gender relations have not yet received critical attention, which is due to them. As I have been arguing for quite some time now, it is not prudent to assert a rigid Cartesian dichotomy between a ‘higher’ and a ‘lower’ status of a tribal woman vis-à-vis a tribal man. Contrarily, I suggest, it is a mixed bag of specificities and complexities that needs critical examination without being tempted to make a sweeping generalization. I intend to discuss in this paper how economic self-sufficiency and structural dependence, ritual power-holding and ritual segregation, submissiveness and stiff resistance to domination, etc. are witnessed in the life of a tribal woman that should refrain us from looking at status as a monolithic entity rather than as a dynamic one.

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