Chapter 12: The Tribal World

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To speak of Odisha’s tribal communities as a singular phenomenon is already to begin from the wrong place. There is no one “tribal world” here — there are sixty-two recognized Scheduled Tribe communities, speaking dozens of languages across at least four language families, practicing forms of agriculture, worship, art, and governance so varied that the only thing unifying them in the administrative imagination is the fact that they exist outside the caste Hindu mainstream. They number approximately one crore — 22.8 percent of Odisha’s population, one of the highest tribal proportions of any state in India — and they are concentrated in the western and southern highlands, in the districts of Koraput, Malkangiri, Rayagada, Kandhamal, Keonjhar, and Mayurbhanj, where the Eastern Ghats fold into dense sal forests and the laterite plateaus give way to river valleys terraced by hand over centuries.

Thirteen of these communities are classified as Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) — a designation that means, in the dry language of government welfare policy, that their populations are small or declining, their technology is pre-agricultural or at subsistence level, their literacy rates are among the lowest in the country, and their way of life is under existential threat. But to understand what these communities actually are — not as categories in a census but as living civilizations with their own epistemologies, their own architectures of meaning, their own ways of being human — requires something more than demographic data. It requires, first, the willingness to see them as peoples with agency, not as specimens in an anthropological display case. And second, it requires reckoning with what the Indian state and Indian capital have done to them in the name of development.

This chapter attempts both.

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The Scale of What We Are Talking About

Before the portraits, the numbers. Not because numbers are sufficient, but because without them, the sheer scale of tribal Odisha is impossible to grasp.

Odisha’s 62 Scheduled Tribe communities constitute one of the highest concentrations of tribal diversity anywhere in India. The state is home to roughly 9.6 million tribal people as per the 2011 Census — a figure that has certainly crossed the one crore mark by now. These communities range from the Santal, one of the largest tribal groups in all of eastern India with a population in the millions spread across Odisha, Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Bihar, to the Juang, endemic to Odisha and numbering perhaps 50,000, and the Lodha, whose population hovers around a few thousand.

The geographic concentration tells its own story. The tribal heartland runs along the western and southern rim of the state — precisely the zone where the Eastern Ghats rise from the coastal plains, where the forests are densest, the roads fewest, the state’s administrative machinery thinnest, and the mineral wealth greatest. This last fact — the coincidence of tribal habitation and mineral deposits — is not a footnote. It is the central tension of tribal Odisha’s modern history, the engine that has driven displacement, resistance, and an ongoing collision between two fundamentally incompatible ideas of what land is for.

But the numbers, as always, conceal as much as they reveal. “Tribal” is an administrative category inherited from the colonial period, refined through successive census exercises, and maintained because it enables affirmative action and welfare targeting. It tells you almost nothing about the internal diversity of the communities it encompasses. A Santal farmer in Mayurbhanj and a Bonda woman in the Malkangiri hills share a constitutional category. They share almost nothing else — not language, not livelihood, not cosmology, not the texture of daily life.

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Portraits: Six Communities, Six Worlds

The Dongria Kondh of Niyamgiri

In the Niyamgiri Hills, straddling Rayagada and Kalahandi districts, live approximately 10,000 Dongria Kondh in about a hundred scattered settlements perched on hillsides between 500 and 1,500 metres elevation. They are, by any reasonable assessment, among the most sophisticated horticulturalists in India.

The Dongria Kondh practice a form of hill agriculture that outsiders have historically dismissed as “shifting cultivation” — a term that carries connotations of primitiveness and ecological damage. What they actually do is far more complex. Their terraced gardens on the steep slopes of Niyamgiri grow over a hundred varieties of crops, including several varieties of turmeric, ginger, pineapple, oranges, bananas, jackfruit, and millets. They maintain dongar (hill-slope) orchards that function as managed agroforestry systems, blending cultivated crops with semi-wild species in arrangements that mimic the layered structure of the surrounding forest. Their knowledge of the medicinal properties of forest plants is encyclopedic. The sacred groves they maintain — patches of forest left entirely untouched because they belong to Niyam Raja, the mountain deity — function as biodiversity reservoirs, seed banks, and watershed protectors.

Niyam Raja is not a metaphor for the Dongria Kondh. He is the sovereign of the mountain. The streams that flow from the hilltops, irrigating the valleys below, flow because Niyam Raja permits them to flow. The forest exists because it is his domain. To mine the mountaintop — as Vedanta Resources proposed to do, extracting the estimated 73 million tonnes of bauxite that lies beneath the summit plateau — would be, in the Dongria Kondh understanding of reality, not an environmental issue but a cosmic violation. The mountain is not a resource. It is a person.

This is what made the Niyamgiri case extraordinary. When the Supreme Court of India ruled in April 2013 that the gram sabhas — village assemblies — of the affected communities must be consulted before mining could proceed, it was doing something unprecedented in Indian jurisprudence: it was recognizing that a tribal community’s religious and cultural relationship with a landscape constitutes a legal right that cannot be overridden by industrial interest. Between July and August 2013, all twelve gram sabhas voted unanimously against mining. The Dongria Kondh, a community of 10,000 people with no lawyers and no lobbyists, had defeated a multinational corporation valued at billions of dollars.

The victory was real. It was also fragile. Vedanta’s mining lease was eventually cancelled, but the company’s refinery at Lanjigarh, at the foot of the hills, still operates — importing bauxite from elsewhere. The Dongria Kondh’s immediate threat has receded, but the bauxite remains in the mountain, and the policy frameworks that enabled the threat remain in place. The question is not whether the Dongria Kondh won but whether the system that threatened them has changed.

The Bonda of Malkangiri

In the remote hilltops of Malkangiri district, in the far southwestern corner of Odisha, live approximately 12,000 Bonda — one of the most isolated communities in India and among the 75 PVTGs identified nationally. The Bonda Hills, rising above the Machhkund River valley, are accessible only by a handful of roads that become impassable during the monsoon. For most of their recorded history, the Bonda have had minimal and largely hostile contact with the outside world.

Bonda women are immediately recognizable — their shaved heads adorned with elaborate bead necklaces stacked from collarbone to chin, heavy brass and aluminum neck rings, and ringa (waist bands) made of palmyra fibre. These are not ornaments in the cosmetic sense. They are markers of identity, social status, and community belonging, their specific arrangements encoding information about clan, age, and marital status that is legible to other Bonda but opaque to outsiders.

The Bonda social structure contains matrilineal elements that set it apart from most communities in the region. Women exercise significant authority within the household. Marriages are often initiated by the woman’s family. The bride price is paid to the groom’s family — an inversion of the dominant pattern in Hindu society. These arrangements are not survivals from some imagined matriarchal past; they are functional features of a social system adapted to a specific ecology, where women’s labour in hill agriculture is the primary engine of subsistence and women’s knowledge of plant cultivation is the community’s most critical intellectual resource.

The Bonda’s isolation has been both their protection and their vulnerability. Protected from the worst forms of land alienation and cultural assimilation that have affected more accessible tribal communities, they have nevertheless suffered from extreme deprivation — high infant mortality, limited access to healthcare, chronic malnutrition, and a population that has remained nearly stagnant for decades. Development interventions have had mixed results. Government efforts to settle the Bonda in valley villages, introduce wet-rice cultivation, and integrate them into the market economy have often been rejected or resisted, not out of irrational conservatism but because the Bonda recognize — correctly, in many cases — that the proposed alternatives are worse than what they already have.

The Santal: From Forest to Governance

The Santal are one of the largest tribal communities in eastern India, spread across Odisha, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Bihar, and Bangladesh. In Odisha, they are concentrated in the northern districts of Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, and Balasore. Unlike the smaller, more isolated PVTGs of southern Odisha, the Santal have a long and complex history of engagement with the wider world — including one of the most significant anti-colonial uprisings in Indian history.

The Santal Rebellion of 1855-56, known as the Santal Hul, began in what is now Jharkhand but resonated across the entire Santal homeland. Led by Sidho and Kanhu Murmu, it was a response to the exploitation of Santal communities by moneylenders (mahajans) and the zamindari system imposed under British revenue administration. The Santal had been pushed from their traditional forest lands into settled agriculture, then trapped in cycles of debt bondage that effectively re-enslaved them. The rebellion, though ultimately suppressed by British military force, led to the creation of the Santal Parganas — a separate administrative district with special protections for tribal land rights.

In contemporary Odisha, the Santal occupy a unique position. Mohan Charan Majhi, who became Chief Minister of Odisha in June 2024 following the BJP’s victory in the state elections, is a Santal — the first tribal person to hold the office of Chief Minister in the state’s history. This is not a symbolic appointment. In a state where 22.8 percent of the population is tribal and where tribal communities have historically been governed rather than governing, the elevation of a Santal leader to the highest executive office represents a structural shift whose implications are still unfolding. Whether it translates into substantive changes in tribal welfare, forest rights, and mining policy — or remains a form of representational politics that leaves underlying power structures intact — is one of the defining questions of Odisha’s current political moment.

The Juang: Endemic and Endangered

The Juang are found nowhere else on earth. Endemic to Odisha, concentrated in the hill tracts of Keonjhar and Dhenkanal districts, they number perhaps 50,000 — small enough that a single sustained shock could push them toward demographic collapse. They are among the PVTGs, and their story illustrates the particular vulnerability of communities whose entire existence is contained within one geographic pocket.

The Juang traditionally practiced shifting cultivation on the forested hilltops, supplemented by gathering forest produce — tubers, mushrooms, leaves, fruits, honey — and hunting small game. Their material culture was minimal by industrial standards and extraordinarily sophisticated by ecological ones. Their knowledge of the forest was not “traditional ecological knowledge” in the sanitized sense that phrase carries in development reports; it was a comprehensive operating system for surviving and thriving in a specific landscape, accumulated over centuries of observation and experiment.

Colonial forest policies began the erosion. When the British declared forests to be state property in the nineteenth century, they criminalized the very practices — shifting cultivation, forest burning for new growth, collection of timber for housing — on which Juang survival depended. Independent India continued this framework. Forest conservation laws, however well-intentioned, often had the effect of making tribal people illegal occupants of their own homeland. The Juang were told to settle, to farm fixed plots, to send their children to school, to become legible to the modern state. The results, measured by the state’s own metrics — health, nutrition, literacy, income — have been mixed at best. Measured by the Juang’s own criteria — the integrity of their community, their relationship with the forest, their capacity for self-governance — the results have often been catastrophic.

The Lanjia Saora: Painters of the Dream World

In the hill villages of Gajapati and Rayagada districts live the Lanjia Saora, a community whose artistic tradition has, in recent years, attracted international attention. Their wall paintings — called idital — are among the most distinctive art forms produced by any community in India.

Idital are painted on the interior mud walls of Saora houses, typically by a shaman (kudan) or a trained painter. They are not decorations. They are maps of the spirit world — visual narratives that depict the relationship between the living and the dead, between the human community and the forces that govern harvests, health, illness, and rainfall. The imagery is densely packed and abstract: human and animal figures rendered as skeletal outlines, interlocking geometric patterns, ladders connecting earth to sky, trees whose branches become rivers, suns with human faces. The effect is closer to Paul Klee or Aboriginal Australian dot paintings than to anything in the mainstream Indian art canon.

The paintings are created for specific ritual purposes — to honour the dead, to cure illness, to ensure a good harvest — and they are traditionally renewed or painted over as the ritual occasion demands. They are not meant to be permanent. This creates an obvious tension with the contemporary art market, which wants to preserve, frame, collect, and commodify. Saora painters have increasingly been invited to paint on canvas and paper for exhibition and sale, and some have achieved significant recognition. Whether this market engagement sustains the tradition or transforms it into something unrecognizable is an open question — one that the Saora themselves are navigating with considerably more sophistication than outside commentators typically credit them with.

The Paraja: Literature’s Witness

The Paraja are one of the largest tribal communities in southern Odisha, concentrated in the Koraput plateau. They would be considerably less known outside the state were it not for Gopinath Mohanty’s novel Paraja (1945), one of the masterpieces of Odia literature, which traces the destruction of a Paraja family through the mechanisms of debt bondage.

Mohanty’s novel is not ethnography dressed as fiction. It is a precise, unsparing account of how a system works: how a tribal farmer, Sukru Jani, loses first his autonomy, then his land, then his daughters’ freedom, then his own personhood, through the interlocking mechanisms of moneylender exploitation, forest department regulations, and a legal system that is technically available to him but practically inaccessible. The novel’s power lies in its refusal to sentimentalize. Sukru Jani is not a noble savage. He is a man with intelligence, dignity, and agency who is ground down by a system designed to extract from him everything he has.

The conditions Mohanty described in the 1940s have not entirely vanished. Debt bondage — the goti system, in which a debtor pledges their labour to a creditor, sometimes for years — was officially abolished but persisted in attenuated forms well into the late twentieth century. Distress migration from the Koraput region to brick kilns, construction sites, and agricultural labour markets in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala remains a feature of the economy. The Paraja, like many tribal communities in southern Odisha, have been caught between two insufficient options: the traditional subsistence economy, which provides autonomy but not security, and the wage labour market, which provides cash but at the cost of displacement, exploitation, and the erosion of community bonds.

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Tribal Worldviews: The Forest as Everything

To understand why tribal communities resist certain kinds of development with an intensity that baffles planners, it helps to understand what the forest means — not as a resource but as a cosmology.

For most of Odisha’s tribal communities, the forest is not an environment. It is a society. It contains spirits, ancestors, deities, medicines, building materials, food, water, and law. The sacred grove — sarna in Santal, lau in Kondh, with equivalents in nearly every tribal language in the state — is not a conservation area in the modern sense. It is a place where the forest’s personhood is most concentrated, where cutting a tree is not an environmental act but a social violation, equivalent to assaulting a community member. The spirits of the grove regulate the rains, the harvests, and the health of the village. They are consulted through ritual before major decisions. They are propitiated when things go wrong.

Decision-making is communal. The village council — the form varies by community, but the principle of collective deliberation is nearly universal — operates by discussion and consensus rather than by voting. The gram sabha votes on Niyamgiri in 2013 were powerful precisely because they used a mechanism (the gram sabha, a statutory body under Indian law) that mapped onto something the Dongria Kondh already had: a tradition of collective decision-making in which every adult voice matters and unanimity is the goal.

Oral tradition carries the weight that written texts carry in literate societies. Verrier Elwin, the British-born anthropologist who became an Indian citizen and spent decades living among tribal communities in central India, collected approximately 1,000 stories in his Tribal Myths of Orissa (1954) — creation narratives, origin stories, trickster tales, explanations of natural phenomena, moral parables, and accounts of how particular communities came to live where they do. These stories are not “myths” in the dismissive sense. They are compressed knowledge systems: they encode ecological information (which plants are edible, which animals are dangerous, which seasons are safe for which activities), social norms (how disputes should be resolved, how marriages should be arranged, how the dead should be honoured), and cosmological frameworks (why the world exists, what humans owe to the non-human world, what happens after death) in forms that can be transmitted orally across generations without the technology of writing.

The animist worldview — the understanding that rivers, mountains, trees, and animals possess something analogous to consciousness or personhood — is not a quaint belief system awaiting replacement by scientific rationality. It is, in many respects, a more ecologically accurate framework than the one that treats the non-human world as inert matter available for extraction. The tribal communities of Odisha, who have maintained forests, watersheds, and biodiversity for centuries without the apparatus of environmental regulation, have done so not because they lack the technology to exploit these resources but because their worldview does not permit it. The forest is not theirs to destroy. It is a relative.

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The Collision: Development Against Survival

The numbers are stark. According to estimates compiled by the sociologist Walter Fernandes, approximately 2,155,317 tribal people were displaced by development projects in Odisha between 1951 and 1995. This figure — over two million people — represents one of the largest forced displacements of indigenous peoples in the post-colonial world. The projects responsible include dams (Hirakud, Rengali, Upper Kolab, Indravati), mines (iron ore in Keonjhar, bauxite in Koraput, chromite in Jajpur), industrial plants (Rourkela Steel Plant, NALCO, IISCO), and infrastructure corridors.

The pattern is consistent enough to constitute a system. Minerals are discovered beneath tribal land. A mining lease is granted — often by the state government, which controls mineral concessions. The affected community is offered compensation — typically inadequate, sometimes non-existent. Those who resist are characterized as obstacles to development. The project proceeds. The displaced scatter — to urban slums, to other people’s farmland as labourers, to brick kilns and construction sites in distant states. The wealth generated flows outward. The social and environmental costs remain.

Four cases illuminate the pattern and its variations.

Hirakud Dam (1957): The first major post-independence dam displaced over 100,000 people from 285 villages, the majority of them tribal. Rehabilitation was a promise, not a plan. Jawaharlal Nehru, visiting the dam site, reportedly told the displaced: “If you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of the country.” The sentence has become a dark epigraph for the entire history of development-induced displacement in India.

Kalinga Nagar (2006): On January 2, 2006, police opened fire on tribal protesters at Kalinga Nagar in Jajpur district who were opposing the construction of a boundary wall by Tata Steel on land the community claimed had been taken without proper compensation. Twelve adivasis were killed, including women. One policeman also died. The Kalinga Nagar firing became a national symbol of state violence against tribal communities and galvanized tribal resistance movements across Odisha. The land acquisition eventually proceeded, but at a cost — to the state’s legitimacy, to the company’s reputation, and to the twelve families that buried their dead.

Vedanta/Niyamgiri (2003-2013): The decade-long battle over Vedanta Resources’ proposed bauxite mine on the Niyamgiri Hills is discussed above in the context of the Dongria Kondh. What bears emphasis here is the structural lesson: it took a Supreme Court intervention, a globally visible advocacy campaign (supported by Survival International, ActionAid, and numerous Indian civil society organizations), and the legal mechanism of the gram sabha to produce a tribal victory. Communities without that combination of legal access, media visibility, and organized advocacy rarely prevail.

POSCO (2005-2017): The proposed $12 billion steel plant by South Korean steel giant POSCO in Jagatsinghpur district would have been the largest foreign direct investment in Indian history at the time of its announcement in 2005. The project required the acquisition of approximately 4,000 acres, including betel vine gardens that supported thousands of farming families. The affected communities — not predominantly tribal in this case, but following the same displacement logic — organized sustained resistance for over a decade. Police force was used repeatedly against protesters. The Dhinkia and Gobindpur villages became sites of prolonged standoffs. POSCO eventually withdrew from the project in 2017, defeated not by a court order but by the sheer persistence of community opposition. The withdrawal was also driven by falling global steel prices and the company’s own strategic recalculations — a reminder that resistance is most effective when it raises costs long enough for economic conditions to shift.

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The Scholarship of Resistance

The struggles of Odisha’s tribal communities have produced a significant body of scholarship that deserves attention not merely as academic work but as a form of witness.

Felix Padel, a British anthropologist and great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, spent years among the Kondh communities of southern Odisha. His work argues, with considerable evidence, that the pattern of displacement, cultural destruction, and resource extraction imposed on tribal communities constitutes a form of “cultural genocide” — a term he uses deliberately, aware of its weight. His book with Samarendra Das, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel (2010), traces the global commodity chain of aluminium from the bauxite mountains of Odisha to the smelters and consumer products of the industrialized world, demonstrating how the ecological and human costs of extraction are systematically externalized onto the communities least able to resist.

Ranjana Padhi’s Resisting Dispossession: The Odisha Story documents the specific mechanisms of land acquisition and resistance across multiple sites in the state, providing granular accounts of how communities organize, what tactics they use, what legal tools are available, and why some struggles succeed while others fail.

Virginius Xaxa, one of India’s foremost tribal scholars and himself a tribal person, has written extensively on the theoretical frameworks through which tribal communities are understood — and misunderstood — by the Indian state. His work, including State, Society, and Tribes: Issues in Post-Colonial India, challenges the assumption that tribal communities are relics of a pre-modern past awaiting integration into the mainstream. They are, he argues, contemporaneous societies with their own modernity, their own forms of political organization, and their own valid responses to the conditions they face.

Institutional scholarship matters too. The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Research and Training Institute (SCSTRTI) in Bhubaneswar, established in 1952, is one of the oldest tribal research institutions in India. Its museum — the Museum of Tribal Arts and Artefacts, commonly known as the Museum of Man — houses one of the most comprehensive collections of tribal material culture in the country. The museum is an ambiguous institution: it preserves what is being destroyed, but the act of preservation in a museum implicitly frames living cultures as objects of study rather than subjects of their own history.

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The Paradoxes

Tribal Odisha is structured around a set of paradoxes so sharp they cut through every policy discussion, every development plan, every electoral promise.

The mineral paradox. Odisha’s mineral wealth — iron ore, bauxite, chromite, manganese, coal — is overwhelmingly located beneath tribal land. The communities that live atop some of the most valuable geological deposits on earth are among the poorest people in India. The mining districts show higher per capita incomes in aggregate, but disaggregate the data and a disturbing picture emerges: mining areas often show worse outcomes on child malnutrition, higher rates of displacement, and greater environmental degradation than non-mining tribal areas. The wealth passes through. The damage stays.

The forest paradox. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 was supposed to correct a historic injustice — the colonial and post-colonial seizure of forest land from communities that had lived on it for centuries. The Act recognized both individual land rights and community forest rights, the latter giving villages collective ownership and management authority over their traditional forests. In practice, implementation in Odisha has been uneven. Individual claims have been processed in significant numbers, but community forest rights — which are arguably more important because they protect the collective relationship with the forest that defines tribal life — have been granted far less frequently. The bureaucratic requirements for claiming community rights are complex, the documentation demands are onerous for communities with limited literacy, and there are structural incentives within the forest bureaucracy to resist the transfer of authority from the department to the village.

The mainstreaming paradox. The Indian state’s approach to tribal communities has oscillated between two poles: isolation (leave them alone, protect them from contact) and integration (bring them into the mainstream through education, markets, and governance). Neither has worked well. Isolation, as advocated by Verrier Elwin in his early career, risks condemning communities to deprivation by denying them access to healthcare, education, and economic opportunity. Integration, as practiced by most development programmes, risks destroying precisely the cultural, ecological, and social systems that make tribal communities functional — replacing them with dependency on a market economy that offers casual labour at the bottom and dispossession at the top. The honest answer is that no one has figured out a third way that preserves autonomy while enabling access — though the Forest Rights Act, properly implemented, comes closest.

The representation paradox. Mohan Charan Majhi’s elevation to Chief Minister in 2024 was a milestone. A Santal from Keonjhar district, he became the first tribal person to lead Odisha. But representation and power are not the same thing. The question is whether a tribal Chief Minister, operating within the existing structures of party politics, bureaucratic governance, and capital-driven development, can alter the fundamental dynamics that have dispossessed tribal communities — or whether the structures are powerful enough to absorb the representative without changing the outcomes. This is not a question about Majhi’s intentions. It is a question about systems.

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Tribal Odisha Today

The present is not a single story. It is several, running simultaneously, sometimes in opposite directions.

Central and state welfare schemes have expanded access to food, housing, and cash transfers in tribal areas. The Public Distribution System reaches deeper than it did two decades ago. The PM Awas Yojana has built houses. MGNREGA provides, in its better implementations, a floor of employment security. Multidimensional poverty in Odisha has declined significantly — the state was among the fastest improvers in NITI Aayog’s assessments. But aggregate improvement can coexist with specific deprivation. The tribal districts of southern and western Odisha still record some of the worst indicators in the country for child stunting, anaemia among women, and access to sanitation.

Climate change threatens tribal livelihoods in ways that are only beginning to be understood. Shifting rainfall patterns affect rain-fed agriculture — and most tribal agriculture is rain-fed. Rising temperatures alter forest ecology, changing the availability of the non-timber forest products (tendu leaves, sal seeds, mahua flowers, medicinal herbs) on which many communities depend for supplementary income. Increasingly erratic monsoons make shifting cultivation riskier. The communities with the smallest carbon footprints on earth are among the most vulnerable to the consequences of emissions produced overwhelmingly elsewhere.

Young tribal people are navigating a passage between worlds that has no reliable map. Education, when it works, opens access to employment, mobility, and political participation. When it fails — as it does in the chronically understaffed, under-resourced schools of remote tribal areas — it produces a generation that has lost fluency in traditional knowledge without gaining adequate modern skills. The residential school system (ashram schools) for tribal children has been plagued by reports of poor food, inadequate supervision, and, in the worst cases, abuse. The migration of young tribal men and women to cities for work — to Surat’s diamond workshops, to Kerala’s construction sites, to Hyderabad’s domestic labour market — provides income but at the cost of family separation, cultural disconnection, and exposure to exploitation.

Tribal art is finding new markets and new forms. Saora idital paintings are exhibited in galleries. Dhokra (lost-wax metal casting) from the tribal artisans of Mayurbhanj and Dhenkanal has become a recognized craft category with national and international buyers. Tribal dance forms — the Dhemsa of the Koraput communities, the Ghumura of Kalahandi — are performed at festivals and cultural events. The market attention brings income and recognition. It also raises questions about authenticity, appropriation, and who benefits when a sacred art form becomes a commodity.

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What the Tribes Teach

There is a particular irony in the story of Odisha’s tribal communities that deserves to be stated plainly, because it is too often buried beneath layers of development jargon and welfare statistics.

The communities that have been most displaced by the project of industrial modernity — pushed off their land for mines, dams, and factories, told that their ways of living are backward and their relationship with the forest is primitive — may possess precisely the knowledge that the planet most urgently needs.

The ecological crisis of the twenty-first century is, at its root, a crisis of the relationship between human societies and the non-human world. Industrial civilization treats the natural world as a stock of resources to be extracted, priced, and consumed. The result — climate change, biodiversity collapse, soil degradation, water scarcity — is now threatening the material basis of that civilization itself. The tribal communities of Odisha, who have maintained forests, watersheds, and biodiversity for centuries without the apparatus of environmental regulation, have done so through a worldview that recognizes the non-human world as possessing something analogous to rights. The sacred grove is not a conservation area managed by a forest department. It is a place where cutting is prohibited because the forest is a relative, not a resource.

Communal decision-making — the village council that deliberates until consensus emerges, the gram sabha that hears every voice — is not a primitive precursor to representative democracy. It is, in certain contexts, a more effective form of governance, particularly for managing common resources. The political scientist Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for demonstrating, with extensive empirical evidence, that communities can and do manage common-pool resources sustainably through self-governance — without either privatization or state control — when certain institutional conditions are met. The tribal communities of Odisha have been practicing precisely this for centuries. The conditions Ostrom identified — clear boundaries, locally adapted rules, collective decision-making, effective monitoring, graduated sanctions — describe the governance of a tribal sacred grove with eerie precision.

The question is not whether tribal knowledge is “relevant” — a condescending framing that implies it must justify itself before the tribunal of modernity. The question is whether modern societies have the humility to learn from people they have spent two centuries dispossessing. The Dongria Kondh’s understanding that a mountain is a person, not a deposit. The Bonda’s knowledge of which plants heal and which harm. The Juang’s capacity to live within the carrying capacity of a forest without exceeding it. The Saora’s ability to render invisible realities visible through art. These are not museum curiosities. They are intellectual resources of the highest order, developed through millennia of careful observation and experiment, encoded in languages and practices that are disappearing faster than the forests that produced them.

Odisha has, within its borders, both the problem and something that resembles an answer. The problem: an extractive economy that treats land, forests, and minerals as inputs to industrial output, regardless of the human and ecological costs. The answer — partial, imperfect, but real: communities that have demonstrated, over centuries, that it is possible to live well without destroying the basis of life. Whether the state has the wisdom to learn from these communities rather than simply administering them is perhaps the most important question Odisha faces.

The tribal world of Odisha is not a relic. It is not a problem to be solved. It is a civilization — sixty-two civilizations, in fact — with something to say about how human beings might live on this earth. The least we owe them is to listen.

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