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Author : S. N. Chaudhary

Publisher: Rawat Publications

Publication Year : 2025

Price : 1095

About the Book

More than 90 percent of the tribes in central India live in villages, and their lives revolve around their culture. The state is still far away from the lives of most of them in a functional sense. This book is an attempt to highlight some of the core elements of tribal culture, with particular reference to the Bhils and Gonds of Madhya Pradesh, who constitute about 74 percent of the tribal population in the state. These core elements have survived due to their indispensable socio-economic and environmental functions since time immemorial.

Efforts made by concerned change agents for tribal development have either failed to provide relief or improve their quality of life, or have taken the cultural cost of development. Their environmental base is also at a crossroads. This is partly because we try to achieve socialist goals through a capitalistic path and partly due to the complete neglect of their cultural heritage in development projects. Hence, the broad purpose of this book is to help change agents prepare culture-coded prescriptions for tribal development. There is a need to understand these communities and then culture closely, so that feasible coping strategies within their culture can be identified, making development more inclusive, participatory, and productive. The book will be useful to research scholars, teachers, and policymakers working with tribal communities. It will also be of interest to change agents and tribal representatives.

About the Author

S.N. Chaudhary, currently the Tagore Fellow at the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, New Delhi, and affiliated with IGRMS Bhopal, is a former National Fellow of ICSSR, New Delhi, former Fellow of ILAS. Shimla, and former Fellow of SMH Paris. He is also the former Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Barkatullah University, Bhopal, and the former Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the same university. Dr. Chaudhary served as the Rajiv Gandhi Chair Professor (MHRD, New Delhi) at Barkatullah University from 2006 to 2019. He has conducted fieldwork among First Nations people in British Columbia, Canada, and has published two books on them. Prof Chaudhary has published more than 80 articles, written/edited/translated 36 books, produced 42 PhDs, completed 25 research projects and organized 15 national seminars and one world conference Currently, he is working on tribal culture and environmental sustainability.