The Tharus- A Study In Culture Dynamics

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The book The Tharus-A Stady in Culture Dynamics" is a comprehensive ethnographic study of the Tharu community. This study is based on two years original field work of good quality, and represents an appreciable addition to anthropological knowledge. The author has investigated the main aspects of Tharu culture. The documentation of the material aspects of Tharu culture with the help of 27 photographs, 37 drawings and 10 maps and plans is commendably full and much concrete demographic information is contained in 30 carefully prepared tables and a detailed village census. In a comprehensive ethnographic monograph of this kind it is not possible to deal very fully with individual problems of social organization or any other special aspects of culture but the author has shown that he is capable of handling ethnographic material on a broad basis and his account is balanced and interesting.

This is for the first time that a full length monograph of a tribe of Uttar Pradesh has been brought out. Further the author, in this book, has focussed upon some of the important aspects of the problems of contact, the discomforts and benefits derived from them, and has brought forth the material which would be very useful not only to the ethnographers and the anthropologists but also to the social planners and administrators alike. This work, therefore, fills in a wide gap between the people and the knowledge of their culture dynamics in Uttar Pradesh and has opened new areas of further research. This book would certainly stimulate the social scientists for taking up similar problems in other regions of India.

Dr. S. K. Srivastava did his M. A. in 1947 and Ph.D. in 1951 in Anthropology from Lucknow University. During the course of his research career he received University fellowship. He was the first recipient of UP State Govt. scholarship for two years during 1951-53. He taught under-graduate and post-graduate students in Sociology and Anthropology in D. A. V. College, Dehradun. In 1953 he was awarded Fulbright and Ford Foundation Fellowships to carry on Post-Doctoral Studies in the Department of Social Relations. Harvard University, U.S.A where he worked for two years on inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural research and got special training in Projective Techniques. In 1954 Dr. Srivastava was elected as a Foreign Fellow of Americal Anthropological Association. In 1955 he assisted in a cross-cultural study of Power and Communication at the Centre for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

After his two years study abroad he was appointed the Director, Tribal Research Institute, Chhindwara by M. P. Government, in 1956 he joined Planning Research and Action Institute of U.P. Government, Lucknow as the Senior Associate to Rural Life Analyst and Incharge of the Section.

After occupying some of the key positions in the Government he has again returned to his former profession of teaching and research in October 1956 at the Institute of Social Sciences, Agra University where he has been working as a Reader in Anthropology. teaching post-graduate classes in Sociology and Anthropology and guiding research. Dr. Srivastava organised the Post Graduate Department of Sociology at the University of Jodhpur in 1963 and later on was appointed Malviaya Professor of Sociology at Banaras Hindu University in 1965 and became the Founder of Department of Sociology in B.H.U. He was also the Director of the centre for the Study in Nepal and retired in 1988. He directed a dozen projects sponsored by the Planning Commission, NCERT, NICDP, ICSSR and UCG. Dr. Srivastava has been contributing papers on various social problems for the last fifty years to various scientific Journals in India and abroad, He has been the Asstt. Secretary and member of the Excutive of the India Sociological Conference. Published more than forty papers and ten books both edited and original. His book on the THARUS-A Study in Culture Dynamics recieved International recongnition in 1995 at the Norgenian. Institute of International Affairs OSLO (Norway.

My interest in anthropological field work goes back to the year 1947, when I undertook a tour of Chhota Nagpur Tribes in Bihar in connection with my work for my M.A. degree. Later, it was my teacher, Dr. D.N. Majumdar who suggested to me to take up research work among the Tharus of Naini Tal Tarai. Dr. Majumdar had already writ ten extensively about these people and had conducted several pioneer ing serological and anthropometric studies during the Census Opera tions of 1941. the present work is largely based upon the investigations carried on during my research career from 1948 to 1950 and is the outcome of two years, concentrated study of the Tharus in Naini Tal Tarai of Uttar Pradesh. On the basis of the field study, I submitted a Doctoral Dissertation, "The Dynamics of Culture Change in Naini Tal Tarai of Uttar Pradesh' in Lucknow University. The manuscript sub mitted for the Ph.D. degree has been considerably changed both in its factual as well as literary presentation. Therefore, the present title "The Tharus- A Study in Culture Dynamics" has been carefully chosen to denote the scope and nature of this study.

Various accounts of the Tharus and their culture have been written by the Government officials and anthropologists, such as, J.C. Nesfield, S. Knowles, W. Crooke, H.R. Risley, E.T. Atkinson, Dr. Buchnan, H.R. Nevil, A.C. Turner, H.D. Pradhan and D.N. Majumdar. But most of these writers have not made any intensive study of Tharu culture as a dynamic process, though their works have been helpful in an analysis of the historic past of the Tharus. It is for the first time that a comprehensive ethnographic study of the Tharus of the Naini Tal Tarai has been presented in this book. All the aforesaid authors have concentrated their attention mainly on the Tharus of the Gonda, Pilibhit and Kheri districts.

Sociology is one of those branches of study which has not so far received from Indian scholars the attention which it deserves. To a large extent such contributions as have been made depend for their source on the great wealth of material provided by Sanskrit literature. The Ramayan and the Mahabharat, the Puranas the Dharamasutras and the Smritis provide a glimpse of the life of society in its various aspects and levels and the development of the cultural milieu, manners and customs down the ages. For certain purposes this is the only possible method of study but in cannot take the place of that first-hand knowledge which is derived from field-work.

Anthropology, perhaps the most important branch of Sociology, is a comparatively new entrant in the world of scientific studies in our Universities. The general public knows little about it and was, for the first time, brought into intellectual contact with workers in this field with the discovery of large number of human skeletons near Rupkund. The origin of the skeletons in still untraced and public interest has shifted elsewhere but Anthropology remains an important branch of study, interesting and instructive. Indian anthropologists will, naturally, have to carry out their field studies in the country itself. There is a vast virgin ground for such studies almost everywhere. Uttar Pradesh with its large population composed of elements obviously descended from different ethnic stocks with distinctive culture patterns offers a particularly rich field for such studies. There is hardly any cross-section of the population which can maintain its claim to racial purity. As for the culture strains, they have been undergoing a process of blending and transformation ever since they came face to face. The process has been accelerated in to immediate past by deliberate effort. The impact of Western culture and civilization, bringing the benefits of education and ravel in its wake and initiating rapid changes in the social and economic set-up, has upset such balances as social forces might have struck in the past and is effecting a rapid metamorphosis of the whole pattern of life. A sociological study carried out at such a time will be immensely useful because its will be a study of the dynamics of human life, behaviour and belief.

Dr. Srivastava has been interesting himself in the Tharus for quite a long time. This group of people, unfamiliar except perhaps by name to most men outside the small strips of territory inhabited by them, deserves such attention. The present monograph is a result of patient study carried on for some years and in probably the first work of its kind.

Dr. Srivastava's study of a section of the Tharu tribe will be welcomed by all those interested in the ethnography of India. Up to now the Tharus have received little attention on the part of anthropologists, and even their exact distribution is still a matter of speculation. Besides those inhabiting the Tarais regions of Uttar Pradesh, there are large numbers of Tharus inside the frontiers of Nepal, dispersed as in its seems over an area extending all along the foot-hills from the Sarada River on the western border between India and Nepal to the valley of the Kosi River in Eastern Nepal.

Though predominantly Mongoloid in their physical make-up, the Tharus appear to be distinct from the Mongoloid tribes occupying the middle ranges of Nepal, and the description of their cultural characteristics contained in Dr. Srivastava's ethnographic study confirms the view that they represent the northernmost extension of the Middle Indian aboriginal races rather than an offshoot of any of the Mongoloid peoples inhabiting the mountain country such of the Himalayan ranges. Too little is as yet known of the Tharus of Nepal to permit a more definite view on their racial and cultural affinities, but from the another's account of the section found in the Tarai areas of the Naini Tal District it would seem that most of their cultural characteristics confirm roughly to the culture pattern prevailing among the aboriginal tribes of Middle India.

The strong influence of ideas stemming from Hindu concepts of castes is apparent in the emergence of endogamous divisions of different status. Social advance is conceived in the terms of an imitation of high caste customs and practices, and the Tharu reform movements are a striking example of the educated aboriginal's tendency to see salvation not so much in a development of tribal values, but in the assimilation to the culture pattern of the dominant Hindu castes of the region.

**Contents and Sample Pages**