What is the nature of religious change among tribal communities? Illustrate with two examples from colonial and post independence times?
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
Religious massacres in the Punjab and in the streets of the national capital of Delhi, Military occupation of tribal regions on the Indo-Burmese frontier. Bitter mobilization and counter-mobilization to glorify or resist the revival of sati, the immolation of a woman on her husband's funeral pyre. Fisherfolk, forest dwellers and agricultural laborers protesting "development" policies that leave them destitute - only to face police brutality and general condemnation for slowing India's progress toward a "Great Nation" status.
The list of "Black Laws" restricting civil liberties grows, and the examples of officially sanctioned violations of human rights multiply. All are instituted by temporary "winners" of provincial and national confrontations who, in their attempts to stabilize their own power, find that they have ensured alienation and conflict that will further destabilize the entire system.
Recently more and more Indians have had to return to the questions that surfaced in the years before Independence: Whose nation is this? Just who or what is an Indian? What cultural characteristics and attitudes are required? For whose benefit, for whose vision, shall the power of an evolving nation-state be used - or restrained? Many of these questions seemed to fade in the years after Independence. Now, we are once again facing the depressing spectacle of the words unity, national integration and progress serving as rationales for bloodshed and oppression.
The stakes are high. At the very least, the local environment, the occupations, the culture, even the very physical existence of some "losers" may be snuffed out. At worst, increasingly numerous segments of a highly complex society may find themselves in conflict with one another under conditions that will destroy both the fabric of society and the strained ecosystem that all need for survival.
Some of the problems and patterns underlying these conflicts are familiar to many parts of the world. Social and economic changes have come rapidly, in ways that constantly alter the status quo; indeed, change has become the status quo. Not only do the relative resources and powers of the players change, but their very identities change, too. Green Revolution technology spawns large-scale commercial farmers, who mobilize to defend their own profits in competition with large-scale industrialists and the fragile new phenomenon of agricultural labor unions. From among millions of separate Brahman and Muslim and Sikh females, a few become "Women" and seek a new place in society for all women. Scattered tribal communities in the northeast develop a greater sense of common Naga identity as they face land-hungry Hindu and Muslim farmers.
Raid and pervasive change also brings a society with a heightened sense of both expectations and insecurities. People learn to want more and fear more (Will some other group's gains dash my own hopes for a better tomorrow?). Such anxieties are played out on an increasingly large scale, as developments in communication and transportation make it easier for people to mobilize over broad areas. Leaders search for rallying symbols, through strategies ranging from high-tech religious extravaganzas and commercial cinema to low-budget amateur video and pamphleteering.
Answer:
In keeping with the nature of Indian religion generally, these particular religions often involve traditions of ancestor worship or worship of spirits of natural features. Tribal beliefs persist as folk religion even among those converted to a major religion.