Tribal Peasantry In Bonai Hills

Abstract

Recently, due to capital intensive global transformation, the natural resources have gained market importance. As a protective measure in the interest of forest dwellers, a few Acts and Rules have been passed and put into force by Government of India as well as the Government of Odisha. However, as a result, for unfinished development and welfare initiatives in mainstreaming the tribal peasant communities, it became necessary to search for a better alternative approach. There is no single muse of development to prolix, but research findings of stalwarts which are usually found enduring since decades deserve to be circulated in form of text. While SCSTRTI is committed to honor scientific empirical research and searching for effective references on development including the areas of tribal peasantry, it has realized the importance of one of the scientific studies undertaken by Prof. L.K. Mohapatra, a think-tank, that remained unpublished deserves to be published. This manuscript, on a cursory reading, gives an immense insight about the life style, culture, customs and tradition etc. of tribal peasantry. In a sense, the work portrays insitu the realities of the past that have gone into the fading history in the rapid pace of socio-cultural transformation due to acculturation and their process of integration to the modern life among the PaudiBhuyan. The 'Tribal Peasantry in Bonai Hills' is a pioneering classic anthropological research work undertaken by Prof. L. K. Mohapatra, an anthropologist of eminence. He stayed on the hill among the PaudiBhuyans - the shifting cultivators of north Odisha during the period when post independent rural India was in the age of bullock carts and one had to reach the tribal villages on foot crossing sneaky mountainous paths. One would be lost in the book depicting the image of tribal Odisha six decades ago as he/she reads the pages that proffer detailed ethnography of the PaudiBhuiyans. The study of shifting cultivation practised in Bonai Hills with a comparative dimension offers significant insights on ecological adaptation of people, whose forest and land dependency was their lifeline. As a monumental piece in the field of practical anthropology, this work epitomizes the hill society in situ on shifting cultivation, which is indispensable to the planners and developers and students of social sciences.