Modernisation and Gender Performance Amongst the Santals

Navigating Gender Identity within Indigenous Communities in India

India is home to over 100 million indigenous people, composed of 255 officially recognised groups categorised under ‘scheduled tribe’ in the official census. A term rooted in British colonial rule, the ‘scheduled tribe’ categorisation is controversial today due to its exclusionary prerequisites and racist conception.

All of these indigenous groups (including the Gonds of central India, Bhils of Western India, and the Santals of Eastern India) face a common issue today - how to undergo the process of modernisation spreading through India whilst retaining their distinct cultural identities. Interestingly, when we apply this issue to gender, it becomes all the more pertinent. Early anthropological texts depicted Santals and other tribes as backwards and 'uncivilised', partly through the relative androgyny described. Santals lived (and still continue to live) an agrarian lifestyle, and although men and women often played quite separate roles, ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ as we know today were largely non-existent. 

Santals and other East Indian tribes are known not just for their relative androgyny but also for their gender egalitarianism. Women are able to own property and land, choose partners to marry, divorce without constraint, and never have to participate in the exchange of dowries (or bride prices). This is in stark contrast to the lack of self-determination seen amongst women of the majority Hindu communities, where dowry-related suicides are still widespread today. Santal women also work outside the house, most often in paddy fields, and therefore contribute to household finances leading to a degree of financial independence. This androgyny and egalitarianism were often used by colonialists to justify the supposed superiority of the Victorian British, whose relatively extreme performance of femininity was portrayed as a sign of civility.

Things are changing fast, however. With mobile phones becoming more and more accessible, Santals have developed a hugely popular cultural platform online - heavily influenced by the advent of the dominating Bollywood cinema industry. This has in turn been shaped by Western forces, that portray extreme gender binaries in depictions of gender performance and roles. Today, this platform is one way Santals are coping with modernisation - fusing traditional melodies and rhythms of the tumdak and tamak with modern instruments such as synthesisers and drums, and traditional dress such as panchi and gamcha with modern clothing including jeans and dresses. This is of course a natural process, and in many ways necessary for minority communities to survive in a globalising world. After all, all communities need to adapt and take advantage of changes shaping our world today. Even in terms of gender, this influence is liberating in some ways - a choice from a wider array of gendered performance can surely never be a negative influence - but when combined with the various processes of integration into Hindu society, some worrying patterns can be seen. 

For example, the 2009 Right to Education Act made education free and compulsory for all children; a huge step forward in empowering Santals. However, it also symbolises a broader movement of one-way integration - partially because formal education has offered no room for teaching indigenous values, and instead is seen as a way of lifting Santals out from their ‘backwards’ lifestyle - and has coincided with many Santal youth passing through education and aspiring to a middle-class Hindu lifestyle. There is a pattern of educated Santals moving away from villages into towns and cities, choosing to wear Hindu clothing and raising children with their first language as Bengali, the dominant Hindu language in West-Bengal. This has included a shift in attitudes towards women, with bride-prices becoming more frequent and relationships before marriage - along with divorce - becoming stigmatised. 

An event I experienced during my childhood in West-Bengal highlights this issue. A group of teenage boys, with growing responsibility in their communities, reacted extremely to a relationship between a younger teenage girl from their village and a boy from a neighbouring community. As the relationship grew, the boys from the girl’s community decided it was unsafe and bringing dishonour to her family, and took direct action to hinder their relationship - by beating up the boy. Relationships like this used to be very open and accepted amongst Santals (and often still are), yet these boys, having received formal education, had adopted the mindset of local Hindu Bengalis - that relationships before marriage were wrong.

Better access to education, in many cases, has led to the embourgeoisement of some sections of indigenous society. However, instead of a greater financial income liberating women, as you would expect, the opposite seems to have occurred. Women have stopped working (outside the home that is - unpaid domestic labour is still carried out by women, of course). Again, this may be traced to integration into Hindu society, where women working is seen as a sign of financial hardship, in contrast to wealthier families where women often don’t work. The adoption of this symbolism is a clear step backwards for Santal women as it means they have less influence in the household and community and greater dependence on male relatives.

Santali communities have developed in many ways since British rule, not least through reduced material hardship. For example, malnutrition and child deaths are declining, and access to education and healthcare has improved. Santal women have of course benefitted from this, but they are facing unique challenges that the rest of Indian society has not seen. With more binary gender roles imposed upon them and reduced independence, Santal women will need to seriously assess the changes they are going through as part of modernisation and take leadership in articulating their lived experiences to better their lives for themselves.

Words by Ishani Milward-Bose