Rethinking the Imagined Community: Changing Religious Identity of Tribes in Chotanagpur during the First Half of Twentieth Century
This paper intends to study how the religious community is determined by the geographical expression and by the political boundary. In colonial Indian census, there was a category of tribal religion which disappeared after political freedom of India. All non- Muslim and non Christian tribals were assumed as a Hindu in post colonial census. The assimilation of the faith of minority by the religious majority through the imagined political boundary or so called the national movement is part of my research endeavour. I will try to figure out how the political boundary became a determining force in reconstructing a religious community or how the faith of tribals was replaced by Hinduism. In this paper I will focus on two tribes of Chotanagpur i.e. Munda and Oraon. How the faith of tribal in general and the religion of Mundas and the Oraons in particular got changed through the concept of Indianisation will be the key point of discussion in this paper. It would be interesting to know how far the dominant majoritarian politics of Hinduism incorporated and assimilated the tribal faith into Hinduism through the ‘imagined native religion’ which perhaps was none other than Hinduism.
