Revelations, Gods, and the Moral Order

Generally, the supreme god in the tribal pantheon resembles a deistic god that rarely inter­feres in the daily affairs of humans; rather it is the multitude of spirits, mostly capricious, that are the focus of tribal religious beliefs and practices.

Most revitalisation movements in tribal societies have emerged against the backdrop of exploitation, deprivation, and general dissatisfaction with the old order; besides, the tribes’ cognisance of the limitations of the old belief system or worldview comes close on the heels of culture contact with the advanced societies. Researches on tribal societies strongly sug­gest that British colonialism with its new policies and expansion of the state machineries accelerated the cultural contact between tribes and non-tribes. In this context, most impor­tant tribal movements have taken place during the colonial period; and more importantly, the religious revival among tribes has been influenced by the religion of dominant com­munities.

The ethnographic studies of tribal communities support an important proposition in religious study, that not all supernatural beings are conscious and morally-concerned beings (Tylor 1958:446) and Benedict 1938:633). In the context of Indian society, religion as a source of moral imperatives has existed only in major religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam; this does not imply that tribal communities lack moral impera­tives, but noticeably morality in tribal societies (adultery, homicide and theft) are largely understood within customary and judiciary imperative (Chophy 2019b). Mary Douglas in this context has argued that “there are primitives who can be religious without being moral and moral without being religious” (Douglas 1975:77). Noticing an absence of cor­relation between religion and moral order among the ‘primitive’ groups in India, Spencer wrote that “At the present time in India, we have freebooters like the Domras, among whom a successful theft is always celebrated by a sacrifice to their chief god Gandak” (Spencer 1896:808-809). The epistemology of a moral god is closely linked with the idea of justice, fairness, and emancipation; thus, the revitalisation movements in tribal societies involve a reinvention or reinterpretation of the image of a supernatural being.

In tribal societies, the new religious movements have involved a varying degree of repu­diation of the nature of old gods or spirits that are deemed unmoral if not immoral.

Besides, the tribal movements originating with a religious innovator have mostly required new moral imperatives for the followers. The followers of the Rajmohini Devi movement among the Gonds in Madhya Pradesh were asked to give up drinking traditional liquor and abstain from eating non-vegetarian food, and to venerate the cow (Ekka 1982); in Jadonang’s religious reform, the followers called Kamphais were told to give up superstitious customs and practices, and meaningless sacrifices to the spirits (Yonuo 1982); while among the Tana Bhagat, they were on ‘God’s command’ asked to “lead an ascetic life, abstain from meat, liquor, tribal dance and songs and showy ornaments” (Kumar 2008:723).

The most potent and successful tribal movements in India have either been religious ones or divine revelation has provided a basis even when the movements are largely political in nature. In some nativistic movements, the community projects a utopian past, and there­fore the objective of the movement is to bring back the past glory (Bower 1950 and Yonuo 1982); but even in such a case the community set their house in order by giving up many ‘unwholesome’ beliefs and practices from the traditional culture and start behaving as a new moral community to bring back the past glory. Here, the old gods get a makeover to make new revelations and supernatural interventions possible, while the various spirits in the old pantheon are discarded or get demoted to a position of lesser beings having no role in the new belief system. The ontology of supernatural beings or gods in tribal religion has a huge implication on the nature of revelations; as ethnographic studies show the religious innovators in tribal communities have had to reinterpret the nature of god(s) and reinvent the idea of revelation to lead successful religious movements. Revamping the image of tra­ditional gods and restructuring the moral order remain key elements in most revitalisation movements in tribal societies.

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