BEYOND COLONIAL ARCHIVES: ORAL TRADITIONS AS SOURCES OF ADIVASI HISTORY

Abstract

India's official historical record of its Adivasi communities was built almost entirely from colonial administrative documents: revenue records, forest settlement reports, ethnographic surveys, and accounts of "tribal uprisings." These sources are important but deeply limited. They were produced to serve the interests of colonial governance, not to preserve Indigenous memory. Outside this written record, however, Adivasi communities have maintained their own historical archives in the form of oral traditions, including migration songs, cosmological narratives, genealogical recitations, and place-based memory systems. This article argues that these oral traditions are not supplementary to written history but constitute parallel and often more complete historical sources that have been systematically underused in Indian historical scholarship. Drawing on case studies of the Santal Hul of 1855 to 1856, the Ulgulan of 1899 to 1900, and oral traditions from Odisha and Jharkhand, the article examines what oral sources reveal that written archives conceal. It also considers the growing legal and political role of oral testimony in forest rights claims and land disputes, and the methodological challenges involved in incorporating oral tradition into academic historical practice. The article concludes that a genuinely inclusive Indian historiography requires listening to these living archives with the same seriousness currently given to colonial documents.