Exploring Strategies to Maintain Tribal Identity in Sundarban Island, India

The Munda people are one of the first tribal settlers in the Sundarban region, but most of them are landless or hold a small agricultural land. Living in small hamlets spread in different parts of the Sundarban islands, they are influenced by the socio-cultural lives of Bengali neighbours. The tribal identity and socio-cultural and economic activities in Sundarban are a result of a long process of acculturation to live with a changing physical and socio-cultural, economic and political environment in Sundarban islands. Is it important for tribal people in the Sundarban to maintain the socio-cultural identity? Is it critical for them to adopt the process of acculturation to live with non-tribal neighbours? The main objective of the study is to explore the strategies of acculturation that strengthen tribal identity and build a consistent and socially acceptable adaptive space. An ethnographic study in a village of the Indian Sundarban island has found that Munda people are conscious of social discrimination and their identity. Socio-cultural and economic marginalisation of the Munda people encourages divisions of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. They experience the processes of acculturation and Hinduisation, but do not wish to convert to Hinduism. However, the changing nature of primary resource-based livelihood activities and diversification of income generation activities have created a wider space for communication and a symbiotic relationship between tribal and non-tribal communities in the village. The education, better communication and participation in decentralised democratic governance system have brought them closer to other communities. They speak the Bengali language and have adopted the socio-cultural lives of Bengali neighbours to avoid discrimination and better assimilation. The process of acculturation is not for social mobility, but a strategy for survival, along with protecting socio-cultural tribal identity in the Sundarban islands.