The Saora

Abstract

During the past few years, particularly ever since the approach of Tribal Sub-Plan was put into action, the matters concerning the tribal life and culture, their welfare and future are much more talked over now than ever before. Among those who have little contact with tribal communities and are not sufficiently acquainted with literatures on tribal life and culture, it is the general belief that the tribals are single entity in respect of their language and culture; religion and society; occupation and mode of life. In fact, as is well known, it is not so. The tribes of India possess a variety of culture. Every tribal group has a specific pattern of culture, artistic tradition and habits and customs.The most important implications of this cultural relativism is that different tribal communities follow different way of living as dictated by their cultural background and geographical conditions and the conclusion which flows from this premise is that the strategies and the plans need to be community-specific as well as location specific so that each group can make full use of the developmental programmes with greatest ability and efficiency. The best way of achieving a better understanding of the tribal communities is to live with them and work with them. It may not be possible for all people. In that case the other way is to study standard literatures about tribal life and culture. But such reference materials on many major and minor tribal communities are lacking. Some years back, Government of India in the Ministry of Home Affairs has decided in a meeting of the Directors of Tribal Research Institutes (TRIs) that separate tribe-wise popular writes-ups should be prepared for those who are not too well-informed about the Scheduled Tribes of the country, but are otherwise interested to know about them. The Ministry has entrusted the TRIs of the country with the task of preparing popular monographs on both advanced and primitive and large and small tribal groups. The publications of popular series on the Bondo, the Juang, the Kondh and the Saroa which are brought out by the Tribal &Harijan Research-cum-Training Institute (THRTI) are in response to this task. The present book is a short popular monograph on the Saora tribe of Odisha. The ethnographic materials which have gone into these popular write-ups were collected both from the tribal people by the senior research staff of the Institute during their field work and also from many secondary sources.