Routledge Handbook of Tribe and Religions in India

This handbook explores the diversity of religious practice in tribal cultures in India. It looks at the interactive spaces where the religious practices of tribes and other communities have changed and adapted through the years in contemporary India.

Tribe as a social category emerged in India during the colonial period; this handbook departs from the conventional approaches to studying ‘tribal religion’ and analyses the intersections of spirituality, rituals, gender and identities within tribal religion through a crosscultural and pan-Indian perspective. Tribes in India follow various religious denominations including Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and traditional indigenous faiths. The chapters in this volume provide insights into the cross-cultural religiosity of tribes via ethnographic accounts and the study of animism, life cycle rituals, ancestor worship, shrines and religious institutions, revivalism, religious identities, religious conversion, transcendental religious spaces and the space for gender, identity and politics within religious traditions. It also discusses conflicts, contestations, anxieties within and the politics of religious traditions and identities in India and how tribal communities and the state negotiate with these issues.

This and its companion handbook, The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Readings on Tribe and Religions in India: Emerging Negotiations, provide a comprehensive look into the religious life and practices of a very diverse group of tribes in India. This book will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the fields of religion, anthropology, indigenous and tribal studies, social and cultural anthropology, sociology of culture, sociology of religion, development studies, history, political science, folkloristic, and colonialism.

Maguni Charan Behera is a Professor of Tribal Studies (retired) at Arunachal Institute of Tribal Studies, Rajiv Gandhi (Central) University, Arunachal Pradesh, India. Dr Behera was also a Professor of Indigenous Culture Studies and Dean School of Cultural Studies, Central University of Jharkhand. He has been working on tribes for about 40 years. His present interest is to develop tribal studies as an academic discipline and in this direction he is editing books on different themes from multidisciplinary perspectives. He has the credit of introducing tribal studies as an undergraduate course of Rajiv Gandhi University under distance mode.