Tribal depopulation (Khairwar Tribe): Anthropology case study

Topic:

• Paper 1: Magic religion and science; Totemism; Religion in India,  
• Paper 2: Tribal depopulation, Tribal health problems, Nature- Man- Spirit complex, tribal Problems due to contact

The Khairwar tribe in  Madhya Pradesh is on the verge of extinction because of the tribe members’ inability to conceive. In the past five decades, villagers say, there has been only one birth in the tribe. And that child too -– born in 2011 — died within a year.

Why are the members of this community not able to have children? Locals attribute it to the curse of the mother goddess or ‘black magic’ practiced by other tribal groups (the Baigas) in the area.

• The problem seems peculiar to the Khairwars, since other tribes in the district are procreating.
• A study conducted almost 20 years ago by the Jabalpur-based Regional Medical Research Centre for Tribals (RMRCT attributed the villagers’ infertility to syphilis which they might have contracted from migrant labourers who had come to the area in the 1960s. However, no follow-up treatment reached the village located in an inaccessible part of the Sidhi district surrounded by a dense forest. Even though the matter was taken up in Parliament by then Sidhi MP Jagannath Singh in the early 1990s and the Indian Council of Medical Research also initiated certain investigations, nothing much came of it.
• Successive district collectors also have made fragmented efforts to tackle the issue. Pankaj Agrawal, an earlier collector, is said to have issued a licensed gun to the village head when he insisted that firing shots in the air could remove the curse on the community members.
• The pradhan — who had married five times in his attempts to have children — died childless.
• There are only about 30 families left -– all childless couples who are either old or middle-aged and past their reproductive age. There is little likelihood of the community surviving for more than a few years.

Additional points: The tribe have a large number of exogamous groups named after plants and animals. Members of the mouse, tortoise, parrot, pig, monkey, vulture, banyan tree and date- palm. These group worship their totem animal or tree, and when they find the dead body of the animal they throw away an earthen cooking-pot to purify themselves

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