Tribes, Nomads and Settled Communities

1. Beyond the Varna Hierarchy: Defining Tribal Societies

While mainstream urban and agrarian civilizations of medieval India were strictly structured according to the hierarchical rules of the varna system formulated by learned Brahmanas, vast sections of the subcontinent lived outside this orthodox social order. These autonomous communities did not follow Brahminical religious rituals, nor were they divided into unequal, segregated social classes. Contemporary historians designate these egalitarian, kin-based social groups as tribes.

Members of a tribal society were united by profound kinship bonds. Natural resources—pastures, forests, streams, and arable clearings—were owned and managed collectively by the entire clan. Each household was allocated land and forest produce according to mutual customary rules rather than private property laws. In terms of subsistence, tribal groups engaged in diverse, ecologically adapted livelihoods: extensive shifting cultivation (slash-and-burn) in hilly woodlands, hunting and gathering in deep jungles, and pastoralism across open grasslands.

2. The Oral Historical Tradition

One of the primary reasons tribal histories remained under-represented in pre-modern literature is that tribal communities rarely maintained written records or textual chronicles. While imperial courts patronized scribes to compose eulogistic prashastis, tribal peoples preserved their cultural memory, genealogies, folk ballads, and ancestral exploits through rich, meticulously transmitted oral traditions.

These oral narratives were passed down verbally from elders to succeeding generations during communal festivals and rites of passage. Modern historians reconstruct vibrant tribal pasts by cross-examining these oral traditions with archaeological findings, foreign traveler accounts, and contemporary imperial chronicles.

3. Symbiotic Interaction with Caste Society

Tribal communities and caste-based agrarian societies were neither mutually exclusive nor entirely isolated from one another. Instead, they existed in a dynamic relationship of continuous interaction, conflict, and economic interdependence. Settled peasant kingdoms depended on tribal communities for crucial forest commodities: timber for fortresses, elephants for armies, medicinal herbs, hides, honey, and iron ore. Simultaneously, tribes traded for agricultural grain, woven textiles, iron implements, and salt, creating an intricate economic symbiosis that reshaped both worlds.

1. Geographical Distribution across Northern and Western India

Tribal communities exercised territorial dominion across diverse geographic zones of the Indian subcontinent during the medieval period:

• Punjab and the Northwest: The Khokhars held sway during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, followed by the formidable Gakkhars. Akbar recognized the chief of the Gakkhars, Kamal Khan Gakkhar, as a high-ranking imperial mansabdar. In Multan and Sindh, the Langahs and Arghuns dominated extensive territories before being subdued by the Mughals. In the rugged northwestern mountains, the Balochis were divided into numerous powerful clans led by autonomous chieftains.
• Western Himalayas: The shepherd tribe of the Gaddis inhabited the alpine meadows, practicing seasonal transhumance.
• Western and Central India: The populous Bhils were dispersed across the Vindhya and Satpura ranges. While many remained nomadic hunter-gatherers, substantial sections evolved into settled agriculturalists and village headmen by the sixteenth century. Coastal Maharashtra and Gujarat were home to the Kolis and Berads.

2. Special Focus: Bihar and Jharkhand (The Chero Chiefdoms)

In eastern India, particularly across modern Bihar and Jharkhand, powerful tribal chiefdoms emerged by the twelfth century under the Cheros. Commanding fortified hill garrisons across Palamu and the Chota Nagpur plateau, the Cheros maintained independent political authority:

• Akbar's Expedition (1591 CE): Akbar's celebrated Rajput general, Raja Man Singh of Amber, launched a major military campaign against the Cheros, storming their hill strongholds and seizing substantial war booty, including valuable elephant herds. However, the Cheros were not completely subdued.
• Mughal Subjugation under Aurangzeb: During the mid-seventeenth century, imperial Mughal forces launched coordinated campaigns, capturing Chero fortresses and forcing the tribe into tributary vassalage.

Alongside the Cheros, the forested plateaus of Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, and Bengal were inhabited by the Mundas and Santhals, who preserved rich cultural institutions and fiercely defended their communal forest tenures.

3. Southern Tribes

In peninsular southern India, extensive forested and mountainous tracts were populated by martial tribes such as the Koragas, Vetars, and Maravars, who functioned as regional guardians of forest trade routes and retained autonomous local authority.

1. The Way of the Nomadic Pastoralists

Nomadic pastoralists traversed vast geographic expanses with their herds of goats, sheep, camels, and cattle. Subsisting primarily on milk, clarified butter (ghee), and pastoral derivatives, they occupied a vital ecological niche. They lived in portable tent encampments and practiced seasonal migration in search of fresh pasturelands.

Pastoralists engaged in regular barter trade with settled agrarian villages: they exchanged animal products (wool, ghee, leather) for cultivated grain, cotton textiles, iron agricultural tools, and salt. When pastures depleted, they dismantled their camps and migrated, transporting domestic goods and trade wares on the backs of their pack animals.

2. The Banjaras: Paramount Trader-Nomads

The most consequential and economically indispensable trader-nomads of medieval India were the Banjaras. Their organized trade caravans were designated as tanda. A single tanda was an enormous mobile commercial enterprise, often comprising several hundred families, traveling together with tens of thousands of loaded pack bullocks.

The Banjaras functioned as the primary bulk transport network of the subcontinent:

• Alauddin Khalji's Market Supply: Sultan Alauddin Khalji utilized the Banjaras to transport food grains from rural agricultural hinterlands into the city markets of Delhi, ensuring cheap and steady grain supplies that enabled his market price control system.
• Mughal Military Logistics: Emperor Jahangir noted in his royal memoirs (Tuzuk-i Jahangiri) that Banjaras procured grain from rural agricultural markets, loaded it onto bullocks, and transported it into urban bazaars. Crucially, during major Mughal military campaigns, Banjaras followed imperial armies as civilian supply contractors; a single tanda could transport grain on as many as 100,000 bullocks, keeping hundreds of thousands of soldiers provisioned.

3. Pastoral Breeders and Wandering Artisans

Other nomadic communities specialized in animal husbandry, selectively breeding high-quality cattle, war horses, and pack animals to sell to affluent urban elites. Alongside pastoralists wandered itinerant craft groups—ironsmiths, basket weavers, mat makers, and traveling puppeteers—who circulated between rural fairs, knitting remote hamlets into wider cultural and commercial circuits.

1. Economic Specialization and the Proliferation of Jatis

As medieval agriculture expanded and urban commercial centers flourished, the requirements of society grew increasingly complex. The traditional fourfold varna framework (Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra) proved inadequate to accommodate the multitude of specialized occupational, technical, and regional groups emerging across the subcontinent.

Consequently, smaller, occupational sub-castes termed jatis emerged within the varnas. In social practice, jati rather than varna became the primary functional unit for organizing societal status, occupational guild regulations, and marriage rules. Learned Brahmanas formally recognized specialized artisanal groups—such as blacksmiths (karmakara), carpenters (takshaka), goldsmiths (suvarnakara), and stone masons—as distinct jatis with legitimate ritual status.

2. Inscriptional Evidence: The Rathakaras of Tamil Nadu

A classic epigraphic record illustrating this transition is a twelfth-century stone inscription from Uyyakondan Udaiyar in Tiruchirapalli district, Tamil Nadu. The inscription records the proceedings of a village Brahmana assembly (sabha) deliberating upon the ritual and social status of the Rathakaras (literally, chariot-makers).

The sabha formally determined the professional prerogatives of this artisan jati: they were legally authorized to construct temple architecture, build ritual processional chariots, erect gateway towers (gopurams), carve sacred stone and wooden icons, and participate in designated sacrificial ceremonies. This demonstrates how orthodox institutions systematically incorporated emerging crafts into the caste hierarchy.

3. Rajput Lineages and the Assimilation of Dominant Tribes

Simultaneously, profound transformations restructured the Kshatriya varna. New warrior lineages, particularly the Rajputs (including clans of diverse origins such as Hunas, Chandelas, and Chalukyas), rose to sovereign power across northern and central India, displacing older tribal chieftains.

As powerful tribes like the Gonds and Ahoms developed centralized state structures, their leading ruling families intermarried with established Kshatriya dynasties, adopted Brahminical rituals, and entered the ruling aristocracy. Concurrently, the ordinary tribal peasantry was integrated into the lower tiers of the agricultural caste hierarchy, illustrating the fluid boundaries of medieval social mobility.

1. The Forest Realm of Gondwana and Shifting Cultivation

The Gonds inhabited an immense, densely forested hilly territory in central India known historically as Gondwana ("country inhabited by Gonds"). Originally an egalitarian society, the Gonds practiced shifting cultivation (slash-and-burn agriculture), clearing forest patches for short-term farming before moving to fresh woodlands. The tribe was partitioned into numerous clans, each headed by a clan chief styled as a raja or rai.

2. State Formation and the Chaurasi Administrative System

With the political decline of the Delhi Sultanate in the fourteenth century, prominent Gond kingdoms began absorbing smaller, fragmented Gond clans into centralized states. The Akbar Nama records that the premier Gond kingdom of Garha Katanga commanded an astonishing realm encompassing 70,000 villages.

Garha Katanga developed an elaborate administrative hierarchy:

• Garh: The kingdom was divided into administrative units called garhs, each held and governed by a specific Gond clan.
• Chaurasi: Each garh was subdivided into units comprising exactly 84 villages, known as chaurasi.
• Barhot: The chaurasi was further partitioned into smaller clusters termed barhots, each containing 12 villages.

As wealth accumulated, Gond rulers granted vast tracts of tax-exempt land to learned Brahmanas, accelerating the Sanskritization of Gond royal culture. Gond raja Aman Das adopted the prestigious Kshatriya title of Sangram Shah.

3. Rani Durgawati and the Mughal Invasion (1565 CE)

Sangram Shah's son, Dalpat, contracted a prestigious matrimonial alliance with the Rajput royal house of Mahoba, marrying Rani Durgawati, the heroic daughter of the Chandel raja Salbahan. When Dalpat died young, Rani Durgawati assumed the regency on behalf of her five-year-old son, Bir Narain, governing the kingdom with formidable administrative competence and expanding its borders.

Garha Katanga's immense wealth derived from capturing and exporting wild forest elephants to adjacent kingdoms. In 1565 CE, lured by this opulence, Mughal forces under Asaf Khan invaded Garha Katanga. Rani Durgawati mounted a valiant defense, leading her cavalry in armor. Wounded in battle, she chose to stab herself to death rather than surrender to the Mughals. Her son also died fighting heroically. The Mughals plundered colossal treasures in gold, silver, and thousands of elephants, annexing a substantial portion of the kingdom.

1. Migration and the Suppression of the Bhuiyans

The Ahoms were a Tai-Shan tribal group that migrated from modern Myanmar (Burma) into the upper reaches of the fertile Brahmaputra river valley during the early thirteenth century. Upon their arrival, they dismantled the older, fragmented political system of local feudal landlords known as bhuiyans, establishing a unified and militarized state.

During the sixteenth century, the Ahoms engaged in rapid imperial expansion: they conquered and annexed the kingdoms of the Chhutiyas (1523 CE) and Koch-Hajo (1581 CE), and subdued numerous surrounding hill tribes. The Ahoms demonstrated remarkable technological adaptability, manufacturing and utilizing firearms as early as the 1530s, and producing world-class gunpowder and large bronze cannons by the 1660s.

2. The Paik Labor System

The institutional foundation of the Ahom state was not monetary taxation, but compulsory, rotational manual labor known as the Paik system:

• Paiks: Every adult male in the kingdom was legally designated as a paik and was obligated to render physical labor to the state.
• Census and Rotation: The state conducted regular population censuses. Each village had to dispatch a designated quota of paiks by rotational shifts.
• Population Resettlement: To suppress regional rebellions and dismantle powerful local clans, the Ahom monarchy forcibly relocated populations from densely settled regions to sparsely populated frontiers, fracturing traditional clan solidarity.
• Public Works and Military Duty: During wartime, paiks served as front-line infantry and logistical porters. In peacetime, they constructed massive flood-control embankments, intricate canal irrigation networks, and introduced advanced wet-rice cultivation techniques across the Brahmaputra basin.

3. Khels, Buranjis, and Religious Assimilation

Ahom society was structured into extended clan organizations called khels, which controlled several villages. Because artisanal specialists were scarce in Assam, skilled craftsmen were imported from adjacent kingdoms. Arable land was allocated directly by the village community to peasant households; royal authority was legally prohibited from reclaiming land without village consent.

While the Ahoms originally worshipped their indigenous animist tribal deities, the influence of Hinduism increased dramatically during the seventeenth century. Under King Sibb Singh (1714–1744 CE), Hinduism was adopted as the pre-eminent state religion, though traditional animist rituals were never fully abandoned. The Ahoms patronized scholars, translated Sanskrit epics, and pioneered the writing of official historical chronicles called buranjis, inscribed first in the ancient Ahom language and subsequently in Assamese.

1. Dispelling the Myth of Tribal Isolation

A persistent misconception in colonial historiography portrayed tribal peoples as completely isolated, primitive populations living entirely outside the mainstream of Indian civilization. Contemporary historical research thoroughly disproves this static view. In reality, tribal societies and settled agricultural empires existed in a state of dynamic, perpetual interaction and economic interdependence throughout the medieval epoch.

Neither society could function in total isolation. Frontier zones served as bustling contact zones where pastoral nomads, forest hunter-gatherers, itinerant traders, and settled peasant villages engaged in continuous commercial exchange, political diplomacy, and cultural synthesis.

2. Ecological and Economic Complementarity

The economic relationship between tribal and caste society was fundamentally complementary:

• Pastoral-Agrarian Exchanges: Pastoralists supplied settled cultivators with essential commodities: animal manure for soil fertilization, sturdy draft bullocks for plowing, wool, hides, and dairy derivatives. In return, agricultural communities provided pastoralists with harvested grain, woven cotton cloth, iron sickle blades, and cooking vessels.
• Forest Commodities for Statebuilding: Imperial states relied completely on forest tribes for strategic military assets. The Mughals, Sultans of Delhi, and regional kingdoms purchased thousands of wild war elephants, high-quality timber for siege works and shipbuilding, honey, wax, and iron blooms directly from tribal frontiers.

3. Cultural and Religious Assimilation

This intense socio-economic contact catalyzed profound cultural exchanges. Local tribal deities—especially regional mother goddesses, sacred serpent motifs, and ancestral protector spirits—were gradually identified with mainstream Puranic Hindu deities (such as manifestations of Shiva, Durga, and Vishnu), entering the Brahminical pantheon.

Concurrently, Brahminical rituals, the Sanskrit language, and temple institutions diffused into tribal kingdoms like the Gonds and Ahoms. Tribal chieftains leveraged Brahminical genealogies to claim prestigious Rajput Kshatriya descent, transforming clan federations into monarchical empires while preserving their distinctive customary identities.