A Study of Ambedkar on Adivasis and Gandhi on Dalits

Abstract

From the mid-19^th century onwards, the colonial state spent a lot of intellectual energy trying to understand caste and tribe, leaving behind copious amounts of literature written by ethnologists and administrators. These texts explain the dominant narrative that was prevalent around that time, when ideas such as the “martial race theory”, the “inward migration theory” and the “original inhabitant theory” were explained through the lens of Victorian anthropology. The census exercise, which involved enumeration of vast bodies of people starting in the 1880s, was a direct result of this intellectual activity. In the 1920s, categories of caste, tribe and religion were broken up into smaller categories, which to this day influence politics in the subcontinent.