Atlas of Tribal India (An): With Computed Tables of District Level Data and its Geographical Inerpretation

About the Book : An Atlas of Tribal India, the first of its kind, displays the salient features of the tribal population of India with the help of a series of maps, diagrams and photographs. The Atlas contains 188 Plates of all-India maps including a series of regional insets and portrays the distributional aspects of the tribal population, ecological setting of the tribal habitats, their socio-cultural attributes, such as linguistic/dialectal and religious affinity, sex composition and marital status, literacy levels, participation in economic activity and the structure of their workforce. The Atlas is organised into eight Sections. Plates of maps in each Section are preceded by an explanatory text, and followed by appendices containing processed data. The text highlights the theoretical questions posed by the map patterns and discusses their policy implications. An introductory chapter explains the social relevance of this exercise, and focuses on the significance of the tribal ethos within the wider and regionally diverse spectrum of India national polity. Keeping in view the crucial significance of the regional dimension in the proper understanding of the socially diverse character of the Indian polity, this attempt towards an evaluation of the geographical parameters of the tribal reality in India makes a bid to throw new light on the penumbra around the shadow zone of the opaque body of colonial anthropology. With emphasis on the regional dimension of the tribal reality and on the real variations of the tribal ecosystems and their social phenomena and employing the quantitative and cartographic methods of analysis, the Atlas will prove a powerful tool of social research dealing with the problems of tribal society in India.

About the Author : Moonis Raza, a scholar of international repute is currently Professor Emeritus of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Naik National Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Honorary Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies, President of the National Association of Geographers, India and President of the Indian Council of Educational Planners and Administrators. He was, until recently the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Delhi. He was earlier Professor of Geography, Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was also a member of the faculty of Aligarh Muslim University, and Professor and the Principal at the Regional Engineering College, Srinagar. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Cornell University. Among the distinguished posts he has held are that of the Founder Chairman of the Centre for the Study of Regional Development and Rector of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Director of the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, member of the Executive Boar of the Commonwealth Council of Educational Administration. He was twice the National Administration. He was twice the National Lecturer in Geography. He has singly and in collaboration authored and edited twenty books and contributed to numerous others besides having published a large number of research papers. Aijazuddin Ahmad is Professor of Geography at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and a former Chairman, Centre for the Study of Regional Development. Born in 1932, he was educated at the Aligarh Muslim University where he served on the faculty of the Department of Geography for a decade before joining the Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1972. His research interests include Social Geography, Historical Geography, Regions and Regionalism, Man-Environment Interaction in Arid and Mountainous Regions and Agricultural Climatology. His recent contribution to research have been published in Indian and foreign journals.