Write in brief about the life of Adivasis in the pre - colonial period.
Answers
Adivasi is the collective term for tribes of the Indian subcontinent, who are considered indigenous to places within India wherein they live, either as foragers or as tribalistic sedentary communities.
They comprise a substantial minority population of India, making up 8.6% of India's population, or 104.2 million people, according to the 2011 census. Adivasi societies are particularly prominent in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Assam, Odisha, West Bengal, and Northeast India, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Though considered to be the original inhabitants of India, many present-day Adivasi communities formed after the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation, harboring various degrees of ancestry from ancient hunter-gatherers, Iranian farmers, Indo-Aryan, and Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman language speakers.Tribal languages can be categorised into six linguistic groupings, namely Andamanese; Austro-Asiatic; Dravidian; Indo-Aryan; Sino-Tibetan; and Kra-Dai.
Adivasi studies is a new scholarly field, drawing upon archaeology, anthropology, agrarian history, environmental history, subaltern studies, indigenous studies, aboriginal studies, and developmental economics. It adds debates that are specific to the Indian context.