UPSC Mains 2019 Anthropology Optional Question Papers with Model Answers
All 56 questions of the 2019 Civil Services Main Examination, Anthropology Paper I and Anthropology Paper II, with marks and a suggested time per part. Solve each part on paper first, then open the model answer, or send it to answer-writing practice for evaluation.
UPSC Mains 2019 Anthropology Paper I
Question 1 (50 marks)
Q1(a) · Foundations of Anthropology · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Relationship with Other Disciplines
The relationship between Linguistics and Social-Cultural Anthropology
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भाषाविज्ञान और सामाजिक-सांस्कृतिक नृविज्ञान के बीच संबंध
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(a)
Approach: A short note: show how language and culture are interdependent, name the key scholars (Boas, Sapir, Whorf, Lévi-Strauss, Hymes) and the methods each field lends the other, with examples.
Language is the main vehicle through which culture is learned and transmitted, so linguistics and social-cultural anthropology have grown together since Franz Boas, who insisted that fieldworkers learn native languages.
Language shapes and reflects culture: the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis proposes that language influences thought, as Whorf argued for Hopi ideas of time (a strong version now widely rejected). Kinship terms reveal social structure: Morgan classified kinship systems as classificatory and descriptive, and Dravidian terms that separate cross from parallel cousins fit cross-cousin marriage.
Methods borrowed: Lévi-Strauss applied structural linguistics (Saussure, Jakobson's binary oppositions) to kinship and myth; the emic-etic distinction comes from Kenneth Pike's phonemic and phonetic analysis; ethnoscience used componential analysis of folk categories.
Anthropology enriches linguistics: Dell Hymes's ethnography of speaking and communicative competence, sociolinguistic studies of caste dialects (John Gumperz in India), and work on endangered tribal languages such as Great Andamanese show language in social use.
The two fields together form linguistic anthropology, one of the four fields of the discipline.Q1(b) · Culture and Society · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism
Cultural Relativism
हिंदी में प्रश्न
सांस्कृतिक सापेक्षवाद
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(b)
Approach: A short note: define cultural relativism with Boas and Herskovits, distinguish its methodological and moral forms with examples, and state its limits.
Cultural relativism is the principle that beliefs and practices should be understood in terms of the culture in which they occur, not judged by the standards of another; it grew from Franz Boas's historical particularism and was developed most fully by Melville Herskovits, who argued that judgements rest on experience interpreted through one's own enculturation.
Methodological relativism: suspending judgement during fieldwork to grasp the emic view; Verrier Elwin (1947) showed the Muria ghotul, condemned by outsiders as immoral, to be a disciplined youth institution.
Moral relativism: the stronger claim that no practice can be judged across cultures; Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934), contrasting the Zuni, Kwakiutl and Dobu, is often read this way.
Limits: strong relativism can shield harmful practices such as witch-hunting and child marriage, and is self-contradictory if tolerance becomes a universal value.
Hence relativism is best treated as a method of understanding, not a licence to excuse every practice.Q1(c) · Economic Organisation · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Production, Distribution and Exchange
Pastoralism in India
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भारत में पशुचारिता
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(c)
Approach: A short note: define pastoralism and its forms, give Indian pastoral communities by region, their social and exchange features, and present challenges with the legal response.
Pastoralism is a mode of subsistence based on herding domesticated animals; in India it is mostly transhumant, with seasonal movement between summer and winter pastures, rather than fully nomadic.
Communities: the Gaddi of Himachal Pradesh (sheep and goats across the Dhauladhar), the Bakarwal and Gujjar of Jammu and Kashmir, the Changpa of Ladakh (pashmina goats), the Raika or Rebari of Rajasthan (camels), the Maldhari of Gujarat and the Toda of the Nilgiris, whose buffalo herding is tied to sacred dairies.
Features: herds are household property while pastures are common; movement follows customary routes; and pastoralists depend on exchange with farmers, trading manure, milk and wool for grain. David Mandelbaum described such interdependence among the Toda, Kota, Badaga and Kurumba.
Challenges: loss of commons to farming, plantations and protected areas, forest restrictions and pressure to settle.
The Forest Rights Act, 2006 recognises grazing and seasonal resource access of nomadic and pastoralist communities; secure routes and markets would help this adapted livelihood survive.Q1(d) · Anthropological Theories · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Culture and Personality, Neo-evolutionism and Later Theories
Cultural Materialism
हिंदी में प्रश्न
सांस्कृतिक भौतिकवाद
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(d)
Approach: Define cultural materialism through Marvin Harris, explain infrastructure-structure-superstructure and emic-etic with the sacred cow example, and evaluate.
Cultural materialism is the research strategy of Marvin Harris (The Rise of Anthropological Theory, 1968; Cultural Materialism, 1979), which explains cultural differences and similarities by the material constraints of producing food, energy and people.
Model: every society has an infrastructure (mode of production and reproduction: technology, ecology, demography), a structure (domestic and political economy) and a superstructure (religion, art, ideology). The principle of infrastructural determinism holds that infrastructure probabilistically determines the other two. Harris gave priority to etic (observer’s) over emic (insider’s) explanations.
Example: in a 1966 paper Harris argued that the Hindu ban on killing cattle in India is ecologically rational, because cattle supply bullocks for ploughing, dung for fuel and manure, and milk, and dead animals feed leather-working castes. He similarly explained Aztec sacrifice and pig taboos in material terms.
Critics such as Sahlins and Geertz accused it of reducing meaning to calories and ignoring history and symbolism; yet it remains a leading scientific, testable approach.Q1(e) · Prehistoric Archaeology · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Principles of Prehistoric Archaeology and Dating Methods
Relative Dating Methods
हिंदी में प्रश्न
सापेक्ष काल-निर्धारण प्रणालियाँ
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q1(e)
Approach: Define relative dating, explain the main methods with their principle and a classic example, and close with their value and limits.
Relative dating arranges sites, layers and objects in sequence (older or younger) without giving an age in years. It was the only method before radiocarbon and remains the framework for all excavation.
Stratigraphy: by Steno's law of superposition, lower layers in undisturbed deposits are older; river terraces in the Soan and Narmada valleys and glacial sequences were correlated this way. Typology and seriation: styles change in order; Flinders Petrie's sequence dating of Egyptian graves (1899) is the classic case.
Fluorine and FUN tests: buried bone gains fluorine and uranium and loses nitrogen over time; Kenneth Oakley used them to expose the Piltdown forgery in 1953. Palynology: Lennart von Post's pollen zones record vegetation change.
Biostratigraphy dates deposits by evolving fauna, such as East African pigs and elephants; patination, cross-dating (Harappan seals in Mesopotamia) and palaeomagnetic reversals add further markers.
Relative methods are cheap and widely applicable but depend on local conditions, so absolute dates anchor them.
Question 2 (50 marks)
Q2(a) · Primates · 20 marks≈ 14 min
Comparative Anatomy of Man and Apes and Erect Posture
Discuss the evolutionary significance of bipedalism and erect posture.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
द्विपादिता और उच्छ्रित संस्थिति के विकासीय महत्त्व की विवेचना कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q2(a)
Approach: Define bipedalism and erect posture, give the fossil evidence for their early origin, the anatomical changes, the theories of why they evolved, and their evolutionary consequences and costs; a skeleton or pelvis comparison helps.
Bipedalism is habitual walking on two legs with an erect trunk. It is the defining and earliest hominin trait, appearing millions of years before a large brain, which makes it the threshold of hominisation.
Fossil evidence: the forward foramen magnum of Sahelanthropus (about 7 to 6 million years), the femur of Orrorin (about 6 million years), Ardipithecus ramidus (about 4.4 million years) with a partly opposable big toe, Lucy's pelvis (about 3.2 million years) and the Laetoli footprints (about 3.66 million years) show a long, gradual, mosaic development.
Anatomical changes: a central, downward-facing foramen magnum; an S-shaped spine with lumbar lordosis; a short, broad, bowl-shaped pelvis with gluteal muscles acting as abductors; a femur angled inward (bicondylar angle about 8 to 11 degrees); a locking knee; and an arched foot with an aligned big toe.
Why it evolved: the savanna hypothesis (now weakened because early hominins lived in woodland); Owen Lovejoy's provisioning hypothesis (1981), linking food carrying to pair bonding; energy efficiency (Sockol and colleagues, 2007); Peter Wheeler's thermoregulation hypothesis; and seeing over grass. Most scholars see several factors acting together.
Evolutionary significance: freed hands allowed carrying and, later, tool making (Oldowan, about 2.6 million years), setting up the feedback between tools, diet and brain growth that Washburn (1960) described. Efficient walking allowed wide foraging ranges and, with Homo erectus, dispersal out of Africa.
Costs: back problems, hernias, varicose veins and a difficult birth through a narrow pelvis, which encouraged helpless infants, long childhood and cooperative care.
Diagram: side views of a standing human and a knuckle-walking chimpanzee, labelling foramen magnum, spinal curves, pelvis, femur angle and foot.
Bipedalism was thus the foundation on which the other human traits, the brain, technology and culture, were later built.Q2(b) · Anthropological Theories · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Functionalism, Structural-Functionalism and Structuralism
How did Radcliffe-Brown and Levi-Strauss study kinship in terms of social structure?
हिंदी में प्रश्न
रेडक्लिफ-ब्राउन और लेवी-स्ट्रॉस ने सामाजिक संरचना के रूप में नातेदारी का अध्ययन किस प्रकार किया था ?
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q2(b)
Approach: Contrast descent-centred structural analysis of Radcliffe-Brown with Lévi-Strauss’s alliance-based structuralism, covering definitions of structure, key principles and ethnography; the atom of kinship can be drawn.
Both scholars treated kinship as the core of social structure, but they meant different things by structure. For Radcliffe-Brown it was an observable network of relations; for Lévi-Strauss it was an unconscious model built by the analyst.
Radcliffe-Brown: in “The Mother’s Brother in South Africa” (1924) and “The Study of Kinship Systems” (1941) he explained kin behaviour by structural principles: the unity of the sibling group, the unity of the lineage group, the equivalence of brothers and the merging of alternate generations. Joking and avoidance relationships, and the indulgent mother’s brother among the BaThonga, were explained by their function in keeping order in a descent-based society. This line led to the descent theory of Fortes and Evans-Pritchard.
Lévi-Strauss: in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) he made alliance through marriage, not descent, the basis. The incest taboo forces exchange of women between groups; restricted exchange links two groups, generalised exchange (matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, as among the Kachin) links many in a circle. His atom of kinship joins four relations, brother-sister, husband-wife, father-son and mother’s brother-sister’s son, with opposite attitudes balancing.
Leach and Needham later debated these models. In short, Radcliffe-Brown studied how kinship maintains society, Lévi-Strauss how it expresses a universal logic of exchange.
Diagram: the atom of kinship as a kinship chart (triangle for male, circle for female, equals sign for marriage), with plus and minus signs on the four relations.Q2(c) · Prehistoric Archaeology · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Cultures
Elucidate Mesolithic culture and associated rock art with examples from India.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भारत से उदाहरणों के साथ, मध्यपाषाण संस्कृति एवं संबंधित शैल कला (रॉक आर्ट) को सुस्पष्ट कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q2(c)
Approach: Elucidate the Mesolithic (context, microliths, economy, settlement, burials) with Indian sites, then the rock art (sites, themes, style, significance); sketch microliths.
The Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age of Holocene foragers) began with the warmer, wetter climate after about 11,700 years ago; in India it is marked by microliths and lasted, in places, until contact with farmers.
Technology and economy: microliths (backed blades, lunates, triangles, trapezes) of chert and chalcedony were hafted into arrows and sickles. People hunted deer, wild cattle and pig, fished and gathered plants; Bagor and Adamgarh show early herding of sheep, goat or cattle.
Settlement and burial: Sarai Nahar Rai, Mahadaha and Damdama in the Ganga plain had hut floors, hearths and extended burials of tall, robust people with bone ornaments; Langhnaj (Gujarat) also yielded burials, and Chopani Mando (Belan valley) shows huts and handmade pottery.
Rock art: V.S. Wakankar discovered Bhimbetka in 1957 (UNESCO World Heritage Site, 2003); other painted shelters include Adamgarh, Pachmarhi and Lekhahia in the Kaimur hills. Mesolithic paintings, in red and white, show hunting with bows, honey collection, dancing, childbirth and burial, with animals sometimes in X-ray style.
Significance: the art records the hunting technology, group life and possible ritual of these communities, while the later superimposed scenes of horse riders and cattle show contact with farmers and herders.
Diagram: a microlith-tipped arrow beside sketches of a lunate and triangle, and a stick-figure hunting scene with a bowman and deer.
Similarities with Saora and Warli wall painting point to living traditions descended from the Mesolithic.
Question 3 (50 marks)
Q3(a) · Culture and Society · 20 marks≈ 14 min
Society, Social Institutions, Groups and Stratification
Discuss social stratification according to any three major approaches.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
किन्हीं तीन प्रमुख उपागमों के अनुसार सामाजिक स्तरण की विवेचना कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q3(a)
Approach: Choose three approaches (functionalist, Marxian, Weberian) and add Dumont's cultural approach briefly for caste; for each give the core argument, an example and a criticism, and end with a synthesis.
Social stratification is the hierarchical arrangement of groups with unequal access to wealth, power and prestige; three major approaches explain why it exists and how it works.
Functionalist approach: Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (1945) argued that every society must fill functionally important positions that need scarce talent and long training, so it attaches greater rewards to them; stratification is thus universal and necessary.
Its critique: Melvin Tumin (1953) showed that importance is hard to measure, that stratification limits the discovery of talent among the poor, and that elites pass advantages to their children regardless of merit.
Marxian approach: Karl Marx held that classes are defined by ownership or non-ownership of the means of production; the bourgeoisie exploits the proletariat by extracting surplus value, and ruling ideas legitimise this; conflict leads to change; the critique is that it reduces all inequality to economics and failed to predict a growing middle class.
Weberian approach: Max Weber separated three dimensions: class (life chances in the market), status (social honour and lifestyle, as in status groups such as castes) and party (power); they can diverge, as when a poor Brahmin has high status but little wealth; this multi-dimensional view suits India, where caste, class and power overlap but do not coincide.
Dumont's addition: for caste, Louis Dumont (1966) argued that the religious opposition of pure and impure, not power or wealth, is the basis of hierarchy, though critics such as Berreman stress power and dissent from below.
A synthesis is best: functionalism explains integration, Marx explains exploitation and conflict, and Weber explains the many dimensions of rank; together they show stratification as both an order and a field of struggle.Q3(b) · Fossil Hominids · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Neanderthal Man, Rhodesian Man and Homo sapiens
"Europeans are closer to Neanderthals." Critically discuss in view of the African origin of humankind.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
"यूरोपीय लोग नियन्डरथलों के अधिक करीब हैं ।" मानवजाति के अफ्रीकी उद्भव की दृष्टि से समालोचनापूर्वक इस पर चर्चा कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q3(b)
Approach: "Critically discuss" the claim: set out the morphological and genetic basis for it, show what genomes actually reveal (similar or higher Neanderthal share in East Asians), and reconcile it with the African origin.
Neanderthals lived in Europe and western Asia until about 40,000 years ago, while modern humans arose in Africa (Jebel Irhoud, about 315,000 years) and entered Europe about 45,000 years ago; the claim is that Europeans are specially related to Neanderthals.
Basis of the claim: multiregionalists (Frayer, Wolpoff) saw continuity in early European features, Trinkaus read the Lagar Velho child (Portugal, 1998) as a hybrid, and in 2010 Svante Pääbo's team found that Neanderthals share more variants with non-Africans than with Africans.
What genomes show: Europeans, South Asians, East Asians and Papuans all carry about 1 to 2 percent Neanderthal admixture, from interbreeding probably in western Asia soon after the exit from Africa; East Asians have slightly more than Europeans, so Europeans are not uniquely closer; Oase 1 (Romania, about 40,000 years) had a Neanderthal ancestor four to six generations back, but left no clear descendants.
Reconciling with African origin: about 98 percent of a European genome traces to the African dispersal, and no Neanderthal mtDNA or Y chromosome survives today; the Neanderthal share is a small addition, not a separate origin.
Hence the statement holds only in the limited sense that all non-Africans carry some Neanderthal genes; it supports a recent African origin with minor interbreeding rather than regional continuity.Q3(c) · Prehistoric Archaeology · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Cultures
Discuss briefly the major traditions in the Upper Palaeolithic culture of Europe.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
यूरोप की उत्तर पुरापाषाण संस्कृति में प्रमुख परंपराओं पर संक्षेप में विवेचना कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q3(c)
Approach: Introduce the Upper Palaeolithic and its general traits, then discuss briefly each European tradition in chronological order with type site, tools and art, and conclude on significance.
The Upper Palaeolithic of Europe (about 45,000 to 12,000 years ago) is associated with modern humans and marked by blade-and-burin technology, bone, antler and ivory tools, ornaments, burials with grave goods and art. Its traditions are named after French type sites.
Châtelperronian (about 44,000 to 40,000 years; France and northern Spain): curved backed knives with some ornaments; whether Neanderthals made it is debated.
Aurignacian (about 43,000 to 33,000 years; Aurignac): thick carinated scrapers, retouched blades and split-base bone points; the earliest figurative art, such as the ivory Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel and the Hohle Fels figurine in Germany, and the paintings of Chauvet cave.
Gravettian (about 33,000 to 21,000 years; La Gravette): narrow backed points, the famous Venus figurines (Willendorf in Austria), fired-clay figures at Dolní Věstonice (Czech Republic), and rich burials.
Solutrean (about 22,000 to 17,000 years; Solutré): thin laurel-leaf and willow-leaf points made by pressure flaking, sometimes after heat treatment, during the Last Glacial Maximum.
Magdalenian (about 17,000 to 12,000 years; La Madeleine): microblades, barbed harpoons, spear-throwers and eyed needles, reindeer hunting, and the cave art of Altamira, Niaux and much of Lascaux.
These traditions show rapid innovation, regional styles and symbolic life; the Magdalenian finally gave way to the Mesolithic Azilian as the climate warmed.
Question 4 (50 marks)
Q4(a) · Population Genetics, Race and Human Variation · 20 marks≈ 14 min
Race and Racism
With reference to the somatoscopic and morphometric characteristics commonly used for racial classification, make critical comments as to whether 'Race' is a valid concept.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
प्रजातीय वर्गीकरण के लिए आमतौर पर उपयोग किए जाने वाले काय-वीक्षिक (सोमैटोस्कोपिक) एवं आकृतिक (मॉर्फोमेट्रिक) लक्षणों के संदर्भ में, समालोचनात्मक टिप्पणियाँ कीजिए कि क्या 'प्रजाति' एक मान्य संकल्पना है या नहीं है ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q4(a)
Approach: Describe the somatoscopic (observational) and morphometric (measured) criteria used in racial classification with their categories, then critically evaluate whether they support race as a valid concept, using plasticity, clines, discordance and genetic evidence.
Classical physical anthropology, from Blumenbach to Risley, Guha and Coon, classified races by visible and measurable bodily traits, assuming that these were stable, inherited and concordant.
Somatoscopic characteristics (observed): skin colour (graded by colour charts such as von Luschan’s scale); hair form, straight (leiotrichy), wavy (cymotrichy) or woolly (ulotrichy); hair and eye colour; eye form, including the epicanthic fold; nose form and profile; lip thickness; facial prognathism; and body hair.
Morphometric characteristics (measured): stature; the cephalic index (head breadth/length × 100), classing heads as dolichocephalic (below about 76), mesocephalic (about 76 to 81) or brachycephalic (above about 81); the nasal index, classing noses as leptorrhine (below 70), mesorrhine (70 to 85) or platyrrhine (above 85); facial index; and limb proportions. Risley ranked Indian castes partly by nasal index.
Critique: (i) these traits vary continuously, so category boundaries are arbitrary; (ii) they are discordant, since skin colour, head form and nose form do not vary together; (iii) many are environmentally plastic: Boas (1912) showed changed cephalic index among immigrants’ children, and Harry Shapiro (1939) found Japanese migrants in Hawaii differing from their relatives in Japan; (iv) many are climatic adaptations, such as nose shape (Thomson’s rule), body build (Bergmann’s and Allen’s rules) and pigmentation tracking ultraviolet radiation, so similarities can reflect convergence rather than kinship; (v) genetic data show that most variation lies within populations (Lewontin, 1972) and that variation is clinal.
Assessment: somatoscopic and morphometric traits describe adaptation and local population history, but do not divide humanity into discrete races. Race is thus not a valid biological concept, though the study of human variation through populations and clines remains valuable.Q4(b) · Religion · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion
Critically explain the anthropological approaches to religion.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
धर्म पर नृवैज्ञानिक उपागमों की समालोचनात्मक व्याख्या कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q4(b)
Approach: Critically explain the main approaches (evolutionary, psychological, functional, structural, symbolic-interpretive, and briefly Marxist) with scholar, core idea, example and limitation for each, ideally summarised in a comparison chart.
Anthropologists have asked how religion began, what it does and what it means; each question produced an approach with strengths and limits.
Evolutionary: Tylor's animism (1871), Marett's animatism (1909), Müller's naturism and Frazer's sequence of magic, religion and science placed religions on a ladder. Critique: speculative armchair theory, as Evans-Pritchard (1965) said, and contradicted by Lang and Schmidt's evidence of high gods among simple peoples.
Psychological: Freud traced religion to the Oedipus complex, Jung to archetypes, Otto to the numinous and Malinowski to anxiety at life crises. Critique: hard to test and neglects the social form of religion.
Functional: Durkheim (1912) saw Arunta totemism as the clan worshipping society itself; Radcliffe-Brown saw Andamanese rites as expressing social sentiments. Critique: explains persistence but not content, and neglects conflict and change.
Structural: Lévi-Strauss analysed myths as binary oppositions, such as nature and culture, and totems as good to think. Critique: neglects actors, context and history.
Symbolic and interpretive: Turner on Ndembu symbols and liminality, Douglas on pollution (1966) and Geertz on religion as a cultural system; Asad (1983) added that meanings are shaped by power. Marxist views treat religion as ideology, the opium of the people.
Each approach captures one dimension, origin, function, structure or meaning, so a combined approach, as Vidyarthi's sacred complex of Gaya shows, gives the fullest understanding.Q4(c) · Population Genetics, Race and Human Variation · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Hardy–Weinberg Law, Genetic Polymorphism and Inbreeding
Differentiate between transient and balanced genetic polymorphism. Illustrate your answer with suitable examples from human populations.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
अल्पकालिक और संतुलित आनुवंशिक बहुरूपता के बीच विभेदन कीजिए । मानव समष्टियों से उपयुक्त उदाहरणों के साथ अपने उत्तर को सुस्पष्ट कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q4(c)
Approach: Differentiate the two types of polymorphism on mechanism, stability and outcome, then illustrate each with human examples, ending with a comparative statement.
Genetic polymorphism is the coexistence of two or more alleles at a locus, the rarer exceeding about 1 per cent, at frequencies too high to be explained by recurrent mutation (E.B. Ford). It may be balanced or transient.
Differences: (i) mechanism: balanced polymorphism is maintained by opposing selective forces, chiefly heterozygote advantage or frequency-dependent selection, whereas transient polymorphism occurs while directional selection favours one allele; (ii) stability: balanced polymorphism reaches a stable equilibrium frequency, transient polymorphism is a passing phase; (iii) outcome: balanced keeps both alleles indefinitely, transient ends in fixation of the favoured allele.
Human examples of balanced polymorphism: sickle-cell haemoglobin, where carriers resist falciparum malaria (Allison, 1954), keeping HbS frequent in Africa and among tribes of central India such as the Gond and Bhil; beta-thalassaemia in the Mediterranean and India; HbE in north-east India and South-East Asia; G6PD deficiency; and highly diverse HLA genes, favoured because rare alleles help resist pathogens.
Human examples of transient polymorphism: the rise of lactase persistence alleles among pastoral peoples over the last several thousand years; the decline of HbS among African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans in malaria-free environments; and the spread of skin-lightening alleles in northern latitudes.
Thus balanced polymorphism reflects stable adaptation to a constant pressure, while transient polymorphism records evolution in progress.
Question 5 (50 marks)
Q5(a) · Primates · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Primate Adaptation, Behaviour and Fossil Primates
Adaptive primate radiation
हिंदी में प्रश्न
अनुकूली प्राइमेट विकिरण
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q5(a)
Approach: A short note: define adaptive radiation, then trace the main primate radiations (Eocene, Madagascar lemurs, New World monkeys, Miocene apes and Old World monkeys, hominins) with causes, and conclude.
Adaptive radiation, a term popularised by H.F. Osborn, is the rapid diversification of one ancestral form into many species occupying different niches, usually after entering a new area or after competitors disappear.
Early radiation: after the extinction of the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago, primates of modern aspect, the lemur-like adapids and tarsier-like omomyids, spread across the forests of the Eocene northern continents.
Madagascar lemurs: isolated on the island without monkeys as competitors, lemurs radiated into forms ranging from the tiny mouse lemur to leaping sifakas, the insect-hunting aye-aye and giant subfossil lemurs. New World monkeys: after reaching South America from Africa, probably by rafting about 40 to 35 million years ago, platyrrhines diversified into marmosets, howlers and spider monkeys.
Miocene apes and monkeys: apes radiated widely in the Miocene; later, Old World monkeys with bilophodont molars diversified as apes declined.
Hominins: between about 3 and 1.5 million years ago Australopithecus, Paranthropus and early Homo coexisted in Africa. Each radiation shows how ecological opportunity shapes primate diversity.Q5(b) · Human Evolution: Theories and Concepts · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Synthetic Theory and Concepts of Evolutionary Biology
Implications of mutation in evolution
हिंदी में प्रश्न
विकास में उत्परिवर्तन के निहितार्थ
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q5(b)
Approach: A short note: define mutation and its types, explain its role as the raw material of evolution with human examples, and note that most mutations are neutral or harmful.
A mutation is a heritable change in the genetic material. It may be a point (gene) mutation, such as a base substitution, insertion or deletion, or a chromosomal mutation, such as a deletion, duplication, inversion, translocation or change in chromosome number. Hugo de Vries (1901) first stressed its role in evolution.
Raw material of evolution: mutation is the only source of new alleles; recombination, drift, gene flow and selection then work on this variation.
Human examples: the HbS mutation, harmful in homozygotes, protects heterozygotes against malaria, giving balanced polymorphism in Africa and among some central Indian tribes. Mutations near the lactase gene allowed adult milk digestion, and the fusion that formed human chromosome 2 separates us from the great apes.
Limits: mutation rates are low and random with respect to need, and most mutations are neutral (Kimura's neutral theory, 1968) or harmful, causing disorders such as haemophilia. Neutral mutations serve as a molecular clock, as in mitochondrial DNA studies of human origins.
Mutation thus supplies variation, while selection gives evolution its direction.Q5(c) · Fossil Hominids · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Australopithecines and Plio-Pleistocene Hominids
Olduvai Gorge
हिंदी में प्रश्न
ओल्डुवई गोरज
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q5(c)
Approach: A short note on a site: location and geology, the history of research by the Leakeys, the key fossils and tool industries, and why the site matters.
Olduvai Gorge is a ravine about 48 km long on the edge of the Serengeti plain in northern Tanzania, cutting through lake and volcanic deposits of roughly the last 2 million years.
Research: Louis and Mary Leakey worked there from 1931; the sequence is divided into Beds I to IV and above, and its volcanic tuffs gave the first potassium-argon date for a hominin site (1961).
Fossils: Zinjanthropus boisei (OH 5, now Paranthropus boisei), found by Mary Leakey in 1959, about 1.75 million years; Homo habilis (type specimen OH 7, named by Leakey, Tobias and Napier in 1964); and OH 9, a Homo erectus skull of about 1,060 cc from Bed II.
Tools: the Oldowan industry of choppers and flakes is named after the gorge (Bed I), followed by the Developed Oldowan and Acheulian handaxes higher up.
Olduvai thus records robust australopiths, early Homo and H. erectus side by side and the Oldowan-to-Acheulian shift in one sequence.Q5(d) · Reproductive Biology, Demography and Applied Anthropology · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Applications of Anthropology
Anthropological inputs in facial reconstruction
हिंदी में प्रश्न
आननी पुनर्निर्माण (फेशियल रीकंस्ट्रक्शन) में नृवैज्ञानिक निविष्ट (इनपुट)
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q5(d)
Approach: A short note on what anthropology contributes to facial reconstruction: skull morphology, tissue depths, population variation, and the methods.
Facial reconstruction recreates the probable face of an unidentified person or ancient individual from the skull, to aid recognition in forensic cases or to visualise the past.
Anthropological inputs: estimation of sex, age and ancestry from the skull, which decide overall proportions; knowledge of craniofacial anatomy and muscle attachments; soft-tissue depth tables at standard landmarks, which differ by sex, age, nutrition and population; and rules linking bone to features, such as nose projection from the nasal spine and eye position from the orbits.
Methods: Mikhail Gerasimov's Russian anatomical method (his reconstruction of Timur, 1941), the American tissue-depth method and Richard Neave's combined Manchester method, now increasingly digital using CT scans.
Ears, lips and hair remain guesses, so reconstruction is an investigative lead rather than proof; Indian tissue-depth data are needed for accurate Indian cases.Q5(e) · Ecological Anthropology, Epidemiology and Human Growth · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Human Growth, Development and Ageing
Genetico-environmental factors affecting human growth
हिंदी में प्रश्न
मानव संवृद्धि को प्रभावित करने वाले आनुवंशिक-पर्यावरणीय कारक
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q5(e)
Approach: Explain genetic factors and environmental factors affecting growth, with examples, and show their interaction.
Human growth results from the interaction of a genetic potential with the environment in which it unfolds.
Genetic factors: parental height strongly predicts a child’s adult height, and twin studies show high heritability of stature (around 0.8); sex chromosomes and hormones produce sex differences; population differences exist, as in the small body size of the Mbuti; and genetic or chromosomal disorders such as achondroplasia, Turner and Down syndromes limit growth.
Environmental factors: nutrition (protein, energy, iron, iodine), infectious disease, socio-economic status, maternal health and birth weight, altitude, climate and season, psychosocial stress (psychosocial dwarfism), physical activity, urbanisation and pollution.
Interaction: genes set the range, environment decides where within it a child grows. The taller children of Japanese migrants in Hawaii and the secular trend show environment acting on similar genes, while stunting of 35.5 per cent of Indian children (NFHS-5) reflects environment limiting genetic potential.
Question 6 (50 marks)
Q6(a) · Anthropological Theories · 20 marks≈ 14 min
Culture and Personality, Neo-evolutionism and Later Theories
Examine critically the contributions of Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz in anthropology.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
नृविज्ञान में विक्टर टर्नर एवं क्लिफ़र्ड गीर्ट्ज़ के योगदानों का समालोचनात्मक परीक्षण कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q6(a)
Approach: Present each scholar’s major contributions with ethnography and concepts, then a short comparison and critical assessment of their combined legacy.
Victor Turner (1920–1983) and Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) led the symbolic and interpretive turn of the 1960s and 1970s, shifting anthropology from function and structure to meaning, symbol and performance.
Turner’s contributions: (i) social drama: from fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia (Schism and Continuity in an African Society, 1957) he analysed village conflicts in four phases, breach, crisis, redressive action and reintegration or schism. (ii) Symbols: in The Forest of Symbols (1967) dominant symbols such as the milk tree in girls’ puberty rites are multivocal, with a sensory pole (breast milk) and an ideological pole (matriliny, social unity). (iii) Liminality and communitas: extending van Gennep, in The Ritual Process (1969) he showed that the liminal phase strips status and creates an egalitarian bond, seen also in pilgrimage and in movements such as the Franciscans.
Geertz’s contributions: (i) a semiotic concept of culture as webs of significance and the method of thick description (1973); (ii) religion as a cultural system that gives moods, motivations and a sense of order; (iii) ethnographies of Java (The Religion of Java, 1960, with abangan, santri and priyayi variants) and Bali, especially “Deep Play” on the cockfight; (iv) Agricultural Involution (1963) on Javanese wet-rice intensification under colonial rule; (v) Local Knowledge (1983) and Works and Lives (1988) on anthropologists as authors, preparing the postmodern turn.
Comparison: Turner analysed what symbols do in social process; Geertz interpreted what they mean as public texts.
Assessment: both were faulted for neglecting power, economy and history (Asad), and Geertz for privileging his own reading. Yet their legacy is lasting in the anthropology of ritual, pilgrimage, performance, and in interpretive and reflexive ethnography.Q6(b) · Ecological Anthropology, Epidemiology and Human Growth · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Ecological Anthropology and Bio-cultural Adaptation
"Human adaptations are always bio-cultural in nature." Discuss with reference to human adaptation to high-altitude climate.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
"मानव अनुकूलन हमेशा जैव-सांस्कृतिक प्रकृति के होते हैं ।" अति-ऊँचाई की जलवायु में मानव अनुकूलन के संदर्भ में, विवेचना कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q6(b)
Approach: Explain why adaptation is bio-cultural, then show the biological (physiological, developmental, genetic) and cultural responses of high-altitude peoples and how they interact, with Himalayan and Andean examples.
Human adaptation operates at several levels at once, genetic, developmental, physiological and cultural, as Gabriel Lasker (1969) showed. High altitude, with its hypoxia, cold, aridity and poor soils, is the clearest case where biology and culture work together.
Biological responses: lowlanders who climb show faster breathing and heart rate, then a rise in haemoglobin within weeks. Highland natives show developmental adaptation, larger chests and lung volumes in Andean Quechua, and genetic adaptation: Tibetans and Sherpas carry EPAS1 and EGLN1 variants that keep haemoglobin moderate while raising breathing and blood flow, protecting them from chronic mountain sickness and heavy birth-weight loss; Ethiopian Amhara show yet another pattern (Beall).
Cultural responses: Andean peoples use coca leaves, layered woollen clothing and terrace farming of potatoes and quinoa; Ladakhis and Tibetans use yak and goat herding, butter tea, barley, thick-walled houses that conserve heat, and polyandry in some communities, which limited land division. Seasonal transhumance moves herds to lower pastures in winter.
Interaction: cultural practices reduce cold and nutritional stress so that physiology can cope with hypoxia, which culture cannot remove; over generations, natural selection worked on populations already sustained by culture.
Thus adaptation to high altitude is bio-cultural: neither genes nor culture alone could sustain life on the Tibetan plateau or the Andean altiplano.Q6(c) · Ecological Anthropology, Epidemiology and Human Growth · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Human Growth, Development and Ageing
Discuss the methods of studying human growth with their merits and demerits.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
मानव संवृद्धि का अध्ययन करने की विधियों पर उनके गुणों एवं अवगुणों के साथ चर्चा कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q6(c)
Approach: Explain the three main methods (longitudinal, cross-sectional, mixed-longitudinal), plus semi-longitudinal and retrospective variants, each with its design, examples, merits and demerits; a comparison and conclusion follow.
Growth is a process over time, so its study requires repeated or age-graded measurement of standard variables such as height, weight, circumferences and skinfolds. Three main methods are used.
Longitudinal method: the same individuals are measured at regular intervals over many years, as in the Harpenden Growth Study of J.M. Tanner and R.H. Whitehouse. Merits: gives individual growth curves, velocity, the timing of the adolescent spurt and tracking of individuals. Demerits: takes many years and is costly; subjects drop out; measurers and techniques may change; results come late and samples are small.
Cross-sectional method: different individuals of each age are measured once, and means for each age are joined into a distance curve. Merits: quick, cheap, large samples, suitable for national standards such as the WHO and Indian growth references. Demerits: gives only average size at each age, not individual velocity; averaging smooths out the adolescent spurt; and secular or sampling differences between age groups may bias results.
Mixed-longitudinal method: several overlapping cohorts are followed for short periods, combining speed with some velocity information, though analysis is complex. Semi-longitudinal designs and retrospective use of school or clinic records are other options.
The choice depends on the question: cross-sectional for norms and screening, longitudinal for patterns and velocity, mixed-longitudinal as a practical compromise in field conditions.
Question 7 (50 marks)
Q7(a) · Economic Organisation · 20 marks≈ 14 min
Globalization and Indigenous Economic Systems
Discuss how indigenous people encounter globalization.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
चर्चा कीजिए कि देशज लोग वैश्वीकरण का मुकाबला किस प्रकार करते हैं ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q7(a)
Approach: Discuss the ways indigenous people encounter globalization, as loss, adaptation, resistance and use of global tools, with theory and Indian and world cases, ending with the conditions for a fair encounter; a before-and-after flow diagram helps.
Indigenous peoples meet globalization through markets, mining and plantations, media, migration and international law; anthropology shows that they are not passive victims but negotiate this encounter in several ways.
Theoretical lenses: Wallerstein's world-system places tribal regions at the periphery supplying raw materials and labour; Eric Wolf (Europe and the People without History, 1982) showed that such peoples were long linked to global trade; Appadurai (1996) and Sahlins's indigenization of modernity stress local reinterpretation.
Encounter as loss: land alienation despite the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (1908), displacement by dams such as Sardar Sarovar, which the Narmada Bachao Andolan opposed on behalf of Bhil and Bhilala villagers, distress migration and loss of ecological knowledge.
Encounter as adaptation: communities enter markets on their own terms through cooperatives, self-help groups, GI-tagged produce such as Araku coffee and crafts such as Warli and Gond painting; the Kani of Kerala shared licence fees for the herbal drug Jeevani based on their knowledge of arogyapacha.
Encounter as resistance: the Dongria Kondh defended the Niyamgiri hills, seat of their deity Niyam Raja, against bauxite mining; after the Supreme Court's order of April 2013, the gram sabhas consulted rejected the project.
Using global tools: the Kayapó of Brazil used video to publicise their struggle (Terence Turner), and indigenous activists invoke the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), courts and social media.
The encounter is fair only when it rests on consent and rights: the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, PESA (1996), the Forest Rights Act (2006) and free, prior and informed consent allow indigenous people to choose how far and on what terms to join the global economy.
Diagram: a box for the indigenous economy (subsistence, commons, reciprocity) and a box for the globalised economy (cash crops, wages, private land), joined by arrows labelled loss, adaptation, resistance and global tools.Q7(b) · Reproductive Biology, Demography and Applied Anthropology · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Applications of Anthropology
"Applied human genetics has come to touch every sphere of human life." Discuss in light of recent advances in molecular anthropology.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
"अनुप्रयुक्त मानव आनुवंशिकी अब मानव जीवन के हर क्षेत्र को स्पर्श करने लगी है ।" आण्विक नृविज्ञान में हाल की प्रगतियों के प्रकाश में इस पर चर्चा कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q7(b)
Approach: Discuss the statement by showing how applied human genetics, driven by molecular advances, touches health, reproduction, law, identity, agriculture and policy, then add ethical limits.
Applied human genetics uses knowledge of human heredity to solve practical problems; molecular anthropology studies human variation and evolution through DNA and proteins. Advances such as PCR (1983), DNA fingerprinting (1985), the Human Genome Project (2003), next-generation sequencing and CRISPR (2012) have spread genetics into every sphere of life.
Health and reproduction: carrier screening and genetic counselling for thalassaemia and sickle-cell disease, prenatal and preimplantation diagnosis, gene therapy and pharmacogenomics. Law and identity: DNA profiling in crime, paternity and disaster victim identification; ancestry testing that shapes personal identity.
History and society: molecular anthropology showed Out-of-Africa origins and Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture (the work recognised by Svante Pääbo's Nobel Prize, 2022), the ANI-ASI mixture of Indian populations (Reich and colleagues, 2009), and the Rakhigarhi genome (2019), which entered public debate on Indian origins. Endogamy-linked founder effects explain why some Indian communities carry specific recessive diseases.
Economy and environment: GM crops such as Bt cotton, livestock breeding, and genomic surveillance of pathogens during COVID-19; workplace and insurance genetics raise new policy questions.
The statement is largely true, but this reach also brings risks: genetic discrimination, privacy breaches, a revival of eugenic thinking and misuse of ancestry data for identity politics, so the field needs ethical and legal safeguards.Q7(c) · Culture, Communication and Research Methods · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Tools of Data Collection and Analysis
Evaluate participant observation in producing anthropological knowledge.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
नृवैज्ञानिक ज्ञान उत्पन्न करने में सहभागी प्रेक्षण का मूल्यांकन कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q7(c)
Approach: Define participant observation, explain how it produces knowledge (emic insight, context, imponderabilia), give examples, then evaluate its limitations and remedies.
Participant observation, established as anthropology’s central method by Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands (1915–1918), means living with a community for a long period, learning its language and taking part in daily life while systematically observing and recording.
Strengths in producing knowledge: (i) it gives access to the emic view, what actions mean to people; (ii) it reveals the gap between what people say and what they do, as Malinowski showed with the ideal and actual rules of Trobriand exogamy; (iii) it captures the imponderabilia of everyday life and context that surveys miss; (iv) rapport opens sensitive areas such as religion, sorcery and conflict; (v) it is holistic and inductive, generating new concepts. Evans-Pritchard’s understanding of Azande witchcraft and Srinivas’s concept of the dominant caste from Rampura both came from participation.
Limitations: subjectivity and selective perception; the observer effect; role conflict and over-identification (going native); gendered access, since male researchers often missed women’s worlds, as Annette Weiner showed for the Trobriands; small samples limit generalisation; and long stays are costly. The Mead-Freeman controversy showed how findings can differ.
Remedies include reflexivity, restudies, triangulation with surveys and genealogies, team research and ethical transparency. With these, participant observation remains the most valuable source of anthropological knowledge.
Question 8 (50 marks)
Q8(a) · Prehistoric Archaeology · 20 marks≈ 14 min
Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age
Discuss with examples the Megalithic culture of India in the archaeological context.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
पुरातात्त्विक संदर्भ में भारत की महापाषाणयुगीन संस्कृति की उदाहरणों के साथ विवेचना कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q8(a)
Approach: Define megaliths, classify the burial types, give the regional distribution with named sites, then the material culture, chronology, society and the debate on origins, ending with living megalithic traditions; draw a port-holed cist in section.
Megaliths (Greek megas, large, and lithos, stone) are burial or memorial monuments built of large stones. In India they belong mainly to the Iron Age, from about the late second millennium BCE to the early centuries CE, and are most abundant in the peninsula.
Types: cists (stone boxes, often with a port-hole in one slab), dolmens (upright stones with a capstone), cairn circles (a stone heap ringed by boulders), menhirs (single standing stones) and alignments, urn burials, terracotta sarcophagi, and in Kerala rock-cut chambers and umbrella or hood stones (kudakkal, topikal).
Distribution: Vidarbha (Junapani, Mahurjhari, Naikund, where an iron-smelting furnace was found); Karnataka (Brahmagiri, excavated by Mortimer Wheeler in 1947, Maski, Hallur and the large dolmen field of Hirebenakal); Tamil Nadu (Adichanallur urn burials, excavated by Alexander Rea around 1900, and Kodumanal); Andhra Pradesh and Kerala; also Burzahom in Kashmir with menhirs, and Kakoria in the Vindhyas.
Material culture: iron swords, daggers, axes, sickles, tridents and horse bits; black-and-red ware; carnelian and etched beads; gold ornaments and, in later graves, Roman coins. Burials are often secondary (bones collected after exposure) and may hold several individuals.
Society: megalith builders were agro-pastoral communities whose ranked graves suggest chiefs and warriors; Sangam poems describe urn burial and hero stones, linking them to early historic Tamilakam.
Origins debated: some, such as Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, linked them to Dravidian-speaking migrants arriving from West Asia, while others see local development from the Neolithic–Chalcolithic of the Deccan, supported by continuity at sites such as Hallur and Brahmagiri.
Diagram: a port-holed cist in section, with four upright slabs, a capstone, a circular port-hole in the eastern slab, pots and iron objects inside, all enclosed by a circle of boulders.
Megaliths are still erected by the Khasi (memorial menhirs and table stones) and the Munda (sasandiri burial slabs), making them a living tradition and a rich field for ethnoarchaeology.Q8(b) · Reproductive Biology, Demography and Applied Anthropology · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Demographic Theories and Factors of Fertility and Mortality
Discuss the bio-cultural factors influencing fertility in light of the relationship between fecundity and fertility.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
बहुप्रजता और जननक्षमता के बीच संबंध के प्रकाश में जननक्षमता को प्रभावित करने वाले जैव-सांस्कृतिक कारकों पर चर्चा कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q8(b)
Approach: First explain the fecundity-fertility relationship (potential versus realised, with the gap), then the bio-cultural factors that widen or narrow it, ending with Bongaarts' proximate determinants.
Fecundity is the biological potential to bear children and fertility the realised outcome. The maximum natural fertility recorded, about ten children among the Hutterites (Eaton and Mayer, 1953), shows roughly what fecundity allows; actual fertility everywhere is lower because culture intervenes.
The relationship is one-way: fecundity is necessary but not sufficient. A sterile couple has zero fertility whatever its wishes, while a highly fecund couple using sterilisation may have two children; demographers call the shortfall the gap between natural and controlled fertility, a term Louis Henry (1961) clarified.
Biological factors: menarche and adolescent sub-fecundity, age, menopause, nutrition, disease (genital tuberculosis, malaria, sexually transmitted infections causing secondary sterility), genetic conditions and consanguinity.
Cultural factors: age at marriage, polyandry and polygyny, widow remarriage taboos, postpartum and ritual abstinence, prolonged breastfeeding (birth intervals of about four years among the !Kung San), son preference, contraception and abortion. Some act through biology: diet taboos in pregnancy raise foetal loss, and Marvin Harris and Eric Ross (1987) showed that pre-industrial societies regulated numbers through such practices.
John Bongaarts (1978) showed that four proximate determinants, proportion married, contraception, postpartum infecundability and induced abortion, explain most of the difference between fecundity and fertility; fertility is therefore best studied as a bio-cultural outcome.Q8(c) · Culture, Communication and Research Methods · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Fieldwork Tradition, Technique, Method and Methodology
Discuss phenomenology as a research method in anthropological studies.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
नृवैज्ञानिक अध्ययनों में एक अनुसंधान विधि के रूप में घटनाविज्ञान की विवेचना कीजिए ।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper I, Q8(c)
Approach: Define phenomenology and its philosophical roots, explain how it is used as a method in anthropology (lived experience, embodiment, dwelling) with examples, and evaluate.
Phenomenology is the study of lived experience, of how the world appears to consciousness before theoretical explanation. Edmund Husserl asked researchers to bracket (epoché) prior assumptions; Martin Heidegger stressed being-in-the-world; Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception, 1945) located perception in the body; Alfred Schutz applied it to the everyday social world.
As a method in anthropology it means: (i) suspending one’s own categories to describe experience as people live it; (ii) attending to the body, senses, emotions and practical engagement rather than only to rules and symbols; (iii) long participation so that the researcher shares the rhythms of daily life; (iv) first-person and descriptive writing.
Examples: Thomas Csordas proposed embodiment as a paradigm (1990), studying healing among Catholic charismatics; Michael Jackson’s Paths Toward a Clearing (1989) on the Kuranko of Sierra Leone developed radical empiricism; Tim Ingold’s dwelling perspective (2000) studies how hunters and herders perceive environments through skilled practice. Studies of pain, illness, pilgrimage and possession in India have used the same approach.
Evaluation: it brings depth and corrects the over-intellectual reading of culture. Critics, however, argue that it neglects structure, history and power, that experience is itself culturally shaped, and that findings are hard to generalise. It works best combined with structural and comparative analysis.
UPSC Mains 2019 Anthropology Paper II
Question 1 (50 marks)
Q1(a) · Evolution of Indian Culture and Civilization · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Palaeo-anthropological Evidence and Ethno-archaeology in India
Phylogenetic position and morphological features of Ramapithecus.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
रामापिथेकस की जातिवृत्तीय स्थिति एवं आकृतिक विशेषतायें।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q1(a)
Approach: A short note: key morphological features, then the shift in phylogenetic position from hominid to orang-utan relative.
Ramapithecus is a Miocene hominoid named by G.E. Lewis (1934) from Siwalik jaws found near Haritalyangar, Himachal Pradesh, about 12 to 9 million years old.
Features: small incisors and low canines, thick molar enamel, broad flat-wearing molars, a deep robust mandible and a short face; the dental arcade was reconstructed as parabolic by Simons and Pilbeam in the 1960s.
Phylogenetic position: these traits made it the supposed earliest hominid; but the molecular clock (Sarich and Wilson, 1967) dated the human-ape split to about 5 million years, complete jaws showed a V-shaped arcade, and the Sivapithecus face GSP 15000 (Pilbeam, 1982) showed orang-utan features such as a concave face and narrow interorbital space.
Ramapithecus is now included in Sivapithecus, a great ape of the orang-utan lineage, and is no longer considered a human ancestor.Q1(b) · Evolution of Indian Culture and Civilization · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Palaeo-anthropological Evidence and Ethno-archaeology in India
Ethno-archaeological analysis of hunting activities of contemporary tribal communities.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
समसामयिक जनजातीय समुदायों की आखेटक गतिविधियों का नृजातीय-पुरातात्विक विश्लेषण।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q1(b)
Approach: A short note: what ethno-archaeology of hunting studies, Indian tribal examples, the archaeological insights gained and a caution.
Ethno-archaeological study of hunting records how living communities hunt, butcher, share and discard animals, so that stone tools, bone refuse and camp sites of prehistoric hunters can be interpreted; Lewis Binford's work among the Nunamiut Inuit (1978) is the classic model.
Indian examples: the Birhor of Jharkhand hunt monkeys and small game with nets; the Onge and Jarawa of the Andamans hunt wild pig with bows and arrows and leave shell and bone middens; the Chenchu use bows and traps; and communities such as the Pardhi of central India use snares.
Insights: composite arrows explain how Mesolithic microliths were hafted as tips and barbs; butchery and sharing patterns explain the distribution of burnt bones around hearths at sites such as Mahadaha; net hunting leaves few stone tools, warning that low artefact density need not mean little hunting; and seasonal camps explain small, repeated occupations in rock shelters.
Present hunters use iron and trade with neighbours, so their practices are analogies to be tested, not survivals frozen since the Stone Age.Q1(c) · Demographic Profile and the Traditional Indian Social System · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Ethnic and Linguistic Elements in the Indian Population
Distribution of Tibeto-Burman group of languages in India.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भारत में तिब्बती-बर्मी (Tibeto-Burman) भाषा समूहों का वितरण।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q1(c)
Approach: A short note: the family, its share, region-wise distribution with major languages and tribes, and status issues; a map helps.
The Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan family was spoken by 1.01 percent of Indians in Census 2011, but it has the largest number of distinct languages of any family in India, concentrated along the Himalaya and in the north-east.
Western and central Himalaya: Ladakhi, Balti and Tibetan in Ladakh; Lahauli and Kinnauri in Himachal Pradesh; and Bhutia and Lepcha in Sikkim. Arunachal Pradesh: the Tani languages of the Adi, Nyishi, Apatani and Mishing, and Monpa and Sherdukpen.
Assam and Meghalaya: the Bodo-Garo group, Bodo, Dimasa, Garo, Rabha and Tiwa, and Karbi. Nagaland and Manipur: the many Naga languages (Ao, Angami, Konyak, Lotha, Sema) and Meitei (Manipuri). Mizoram and Tripura: the Kuki-Chin languages such as Mizo, and Kokborok in Tripura.
Manipuri (1992) and Bodo (2003) are in the Eighth Schedule, but most Tibeto-Burman languages are small, often unwritten and listed as endangered by UNESCO, and the boundaries between language and dialect are frequently contested.Q1(d) · Demographic Profile and the Traditional Indian Social System · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Varnashrama, Purushartha, Karma, Rina and Rebirth
Use of doctrine of Karma and rebirth in justifying the Varna system.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
वर्ण व्यवस्था के औचित्यन में कर्म और पुनर्जन्म के सिद्धान्त का प्रयोग।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q1(d)
Approach: A short note: how karma and rebirth were used to legitimise varna rank, with the textual basis, the sociological reading (Weber, Dumont) and the critiques.
The doctrine of karma and rebirth holds that one's present birth results from deeds in past lives. The Chandogya Upanishad states, in paraphrase, that those of good conduct enter a good womb, of a Brahmin, Kshatriya or Vaishya, and those of evil conduct an evil womb, directly linking rebirth to varna rank.
Justification: birth into a high or low varna was presented as earned, so inequality appeared just; doing one's svadharma faithfully, even a low one, promised a better rebirth, as the Bhagavad Gita (3.35) praises one's own duty; this discouraged revolt and encouraged acceptance.
Max Weber (The Religion of India) saw karma as the most consistent theodicy, binding people to caste duty; Louis Dumont located the system's logic in purity and pollution, with karma as supporting ideology.
Bhakti saints, Phule (Gulamgiri, 1873) and Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste, 1936) rejected this use, and ethnography shows lower castes often contest their rank through Sanskritization rather than accept it.Q1(e) · Caste System and Religions in Indian Society · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Dominant Caste, Caste Mobility, Jajmani System and the Tribe–Caste Continuum
The Jajmani system and contemporary market economy.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
जजमानी प्रथा और समसामयिक बाज़ार अर्थव्यवस्था।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q1(e)
Approach: Contrast the logic of jajmani (hereditary, ritual, non-market) with the market (contract, cash, choice), show how the market has eroded it with examples, and note what survives.
The jajmani system (Wiser, 1936) was a non-market exchange: hereditary ties, payment in grain shares and gifts, and services carrying ritual meaning. A market economy rests on contract, cash prices and free choice of partners.
The market has eroded jajmani in several ways. Factory goods replaced the potter's pots and the weaver's cloth; tractors and threshers made the carpenter and blacksmith less necessary; cash wages replaced harvest shares after the Green Revolution; and service castes left for towns or took up new trades.
Oscar Lewis and Victor Barnouw (1956) already found these ties weakening in Rani Khera, and Jan Breman (1974) showed patronage in Gujarat giving way to casual wage labour without the old security.
Yet ritual services by barbers and priests at life-cycle rites, and some customary payments, survive. The market has dissolved the economic core of jajmani but not all its ritual residues.
Question 2 (50 marks)
Q2(a) · Evolution of Indian Culture and Civilization · 20 marks≈ 14 min
Prehistoric Cultures of India
Describe the Palaeolithic culture with special reference to Soanian tradition. Indicate the problems of describing the Indian Palaeolithic. (15+5=20)
हिंदी में प्रश्न
सोन (Soan) परम्परा के विशेष सन्दर्भ में पुरापाषाणिक संस्कृति का वर्णन कीजिए। भारतीय पुरापाषाण युग के वर्णन करने की समस्याओं को निर्दिशित कीजिए। (15+5=20)
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q2(a)
Approach: Two parts (15 + 5): describe the Indian Palaeolithic in its three stages with the Soanian tradition in detail, then list the problems of describing the Indian Palaeolithic.
The Palaeolithic is the Old Stone Age of hunter-gatherers in the Pleistocene, divided by tool technology into Lower, Middle and Upper stages; in India it spans from about 1.5 million to about 10,000 years ago.
Lower Palaeolithic: two traditions were described, the Acheulian handaxe-cleaver industry of the peninsula (Attirampakkam, about 1.5 million years; Isampur; Didwana; Bhimbetka) and the Soanian of the north-west. Middle Palaeolithic: flake tools on prepared cores, Sankalia's Nevasan industry, with early dates at Attirampakkam. Upper Palaeolithic: blades, burins, bone tools and art (Patne, Baghor, Kurnool caves).
Soanian tradition: defined by de Terra and Paterson (1939) from the Soan river terraces of the Potwar plateau after the 1935 Yale-Cambridge expedition. Early Soan had pebble choppers and chopping tools and flakes; Late Soan had more refined flakes, some of prepared-core type. They correlated the terraces with four Himalayan glaciations. Indian equivalents occur in the Siwalik belt of Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Jammu (Beas-Banganga valley, Hoshiarpur), studied by B.B. Lal and G.C. Mohapatra.
Today the Soanian is seldom treated as a separate culture: handaxes occur in the Siwaliks, pebble tools occur in Acheulian sites, and the glacial chronology has been abandoned.
Problems of describing the Indian Palaeolithic: few hominin fossils (only Narmada Man), so makers are unknown; most tools come from surface or river gravels without secure stratigraphy; dating is difficult beyond radiocarbon range; terminology borrowed from Europe (Acheulian, Levallois) may not fit; regional names multiply (Madrasian, Soanian, Nevasan, Series I-II-III); and survey is uneven, leaving the Ganga plain and north-east poorly known.
Diagram: a chronological chart of Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic with key sites, and sketches of a chopper, chopping tool and handaxe.Q2(b) · Weaker Sections, Ethnicity and Tribal Change · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Ethnicity, Tribal Unrest, Regionalism and Pseudo-tribalism
What has been the contribution of tribal people to the Indian Independence movement?
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भारतीय स्वतंत्रता आन्दोलन में जनजातीय लोगों का क्या योगदान रहा है?
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q2(b)
Approach: Describe tribal contributions to the freedom struggle in phases (early resistance, nineteenth-century rebellions, participation in Gandhian and later movements) with named leaders, regions and dates, and assess their significance.
Tribal people resisted colonial rule from its earliest days, often before the organised national movement, because colonial land, forest and revenue policies struck directly at their autonomy.
Early resistance: the Khasi chief U Tirot Sing fought the British from 1829 to 1833, and the Kol rebellion (1831 to 1832) shook Chotanagpur.
Great rebellions: the Santal Hul (1855 to 1856) under Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu against zamindars, moneylenders and the Company; Birsa Munda's Ulgulan (1899 to 1900); the Bastar Bhumkal (1910) led by Gunda Dhur; the Bhil movement of Govind Guru, ending in the Mangarh massacre (1913); and the Rampa rebellion (1922 to 1924) under Alluri Sitarama Raju.
Joining the national movement: the Tana Bhagats (from 1914) joined Non-Cooperation, wore khadi and refused rent; the Zeliangrong movement of Haipou Jadonang and Rani Gaidinliu (1930s) linked religious reform with anti-colonial struggle, and Nehru called Gaidinliu 'Rani'; Lakshman Naik of Koraput led Quit India protests and was hanged in 1943.
Significance: these struggles exposed the exploitative nature of colonial rule, forced protective laws such as the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (1908) and Santal Parganas administration, and inspired the Constitution's tribal safeguards; K.S. Singh and others stress that many were agrarian and identity movements, not merely 'national' ones.
Their recognition is recent: Janjatiya Gaurav Divas (since 2021) and tribal freedom fighters' museums such as the one in Ranchi (2021) restore them to national memory.Q2(c) · Religion and Tribes; Tribe and Nation State · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Impact of Religions on Tribal Societies
Describe the impact of Buddhism on the tribal populations of India.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भारत की जनजातीय जनसंख्या पर बौद्ध धर्म के प्रभाव का वर्णन कीजिए।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q2(c)
Approach: Describe which tribes follow Buddhism and how it spread, then the impact on religion, social organisation, education, art, economy and identity, with examples from Arunachal, Sikkim, Ladakh, Himachal and Tripura-Mizoram.
Buddhism reached India's frontier tribes from two directions: Tibetan Mahayana-Vajrayana Buddhism across the Himalaya, and Theravada Buddhism from Myanmar and Thailand into the north-east.
Tribes: Monpa and Sherdukpen (Arunachal Pradesh), Bhutia and many Lepcha (Sikkim), Bot, Changpa and others in Ladakh, the tribes of Lahaul, Spiti and Kinnaur (Himachal Pradesh) follow Tibetan Buddhism; the Khampti and many Singpho (Arunachal), Chakma (Mizoram, Tripura) and Mog (Tripura) follow Theravada.
Religious impact: Buddhism overlaid but did not erase older beliefs; Bon and local mountain and household deities survive alongside the Buddha, and lamas replaced many functions of shamans in healing and death rites.
Social organisation: monasteries such as Tawang (1680 to 1681) and Hemis became landholding and administrative centres; families traditionally sent a son to the monastery; Buddhist ethics moderated feuding and encouraged charity.
Education and art: monastic schools spread literacy in Bhoti and the Khampti Tai script; thangka painting, mask dances (cham) and festivals such as Losar and Hemis Tsechu enriched culture.
Economy and networks: monasteries linked tribes to trans-Himalayan trade and pilgrimage; today they draw tourism.
Identity: Buddhism gives these tribes a distinct identity within India, visible in demands for Bhoti language recognition and in the Chakma Autonomous District Council. Its impact has been integrative, giving literacy and organisation without the rupture associated with conversion elsewhere.
Question 3 (50 marks)
Q3(a) · Evolution of Indian Culture and Civilization · 20 marks≈ 14 min
Harappan Civilization and Tribal Contributions to Indian Civilization
What kind of society may be reconstructed from the archaeological evidences of Harappan culture?
हिंदी में प्रश्न
हड़प्पा संस्कृति के पुरातात्विक साक्ष्यों के आधार पर किस प्रकार के समाज को परिकल्पित कर सकते हैं?
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q3(a)
Approach: Reconstruct Harappan society from archaeological evidence under heads: settlement and planning, economy and specialisation, stratification, polity, religion and ideology, burials and health, gender; note what the evidence cannot tell.
With the script undeciphered, Harappan society must be reconstructed from material remains: cities, houses, artefacts, burials and skeletons. The picture is of an urban, specialised, ordered but not obviously despotic society.
Urban order: citadel and lower town, grid streets, covered drains, baked bricks in the ratio 1:2:4 and standard weights across a huge area imply strong shared rules and civic organisation. Economy: farming of wheat, barley and cotton with cattle herding supported specialist crafts, bead-making, shell-working, metallurgy and pottery, organised in workshops (Chanhudaro, Lothal), and trade with Mesopotamia and the Gulf.
Social stratification: house sizes range from single rooms to large courtyard houses, workers' quarters existed at Harappa, and burials vary in grave goods, showing inequality; yet there are no royal tombs, palaces or great temples. Polity: Possehl called it a 'faceless' civilization; Kenoyer suggests several city-states run by merchants, landowners and ritual specialists, debated against a single state.
Religion and ideology: the Great Bath suggests ritual purity, fire altars at Kalibangan and Lothal suggest fire rituals, and female figurines, the seated horned figure, sacred trees and animals suggest fertility and nature cults. Burials and health: extended burials with pots and ornaments in Cemetery R37 at Harappa; skeletal studies by Gwen Robbins Schug and colleagues (2012) found more injuries and infection among people buried outside the formal cemetery, hinting at social marginalisation, and stress rose in the late phase.
Gender and family: many female figurines, bangles and ornaments suggest women's ritual and domestic importance; house plans suggest households, perhaps extended families, sharing courtyards.
Diagram: a plan of Mohenjo-daro with the citadel (Great Bath, 'granary') to the west and the lower town grid to the east.
The evidence cannot reveal language, kinship terms or titles, so reconstructions are provisional; Harappan society appears urban, specialised and ranked, bound by shared ideology and trade rather than conspicuous kingship.Q3(b) · Indian Village, Minorities and Social Change · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Processes of Socio-cultural Change
Discuss the impact of media on the social life of Indian villages.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भारतीय ग्रामों के सामाजिक जीवन पर मीडिया के प्रभाव की विवेचना कीजिए।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q3(b)
Approach: Trace the spread of media into villages (radio, SITE, television, mobile phones and the internet), then discuss impacts on information, culture, family and gender, politics and economy, with negatives, and conclude.
Media reached Indian villages in stages: All India Radio's rural programmes, the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE, 1975–76), which beamed educational programmes to about 2,400 villages, the spread of Doordarshan in the 1980s, and the mobile phone and cheap data revolution after 2016.
Information and development: farm advice, weather forecasts, health campaigns such as polio and sanitation drives, and information on schemes reached villagers directly, reducing dependence on local intermediaries.
Culture: the televised Ramayan (1987–88) created a shared national viewing ritual, and films and serials spread urban fashions, ideas of romantic love and consumer goods, homogenising regional cultures while also reviving some folk forms on new platforms.
Family, gender and politics: media exposure has been linked to greater autonomy for women and smaller desired family size; social media helps mobilisation and political awareness, as in the farmer protests of 2020–21.
Negatives: misinformation on WhatsApp contributed to mob lynchings, leading the Supreme Court to issue guidelines in Tehseen Poonawalla (2018); a digital divide of gender and caste persists; and consumerism raises aspirations faster than incomes.Q3(c) · Tribal Administration and Applied Anthropology · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Tribal Administration, Policies and PVTGs
Critically assess the existing plans and programmes meant for tribal welfare.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
जनजातीय कल्याणार्थ मौजूदा योजनाओं एवं कार्यक्रमों का समालोचनात्मक मूल्यांकन कीजिए।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q3(c)
Approach: Critically assess the main existing plans and programmes for tribal welfare (DAPST, education, livelihood, PVTG, rights-based laws), with their achievements and failures, and suggest improvements.
Tribal welfare in India rests on a funding framework (the Tribal Sub-Plan, now the Development Action Plan for STs), sectoral schemes run mainly by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs (1999), and rights-based laws.
Education: post-matric scholarships, ashram schools and Eklavya Model Residential Schools have raised ST literacy to 58.96% (2011) and produced graduates; yet dropout is high, teaching in alien languages persists, and hostels face safety and quality problems.
Livelihoods: TRIFED, minimum support price for minor forest produce and Van Dhan Vikas Kendras (2018) add value to forest produce; but coverage is small, prices often below market, and many enterprises inactive.
Rights: the Forest Rights Act (2006) had produced about 25 lakh titles by 2025, but high rejection of claims, weak community forest rights and conflicts with conservation persist; PESA (1996) is unevenly implemented.
PVTGs and convergence: Conservation-cum-Development plans and PM-JANMAN (2023) promise infrastructure but are top-down.
Common failings: diversion and under-use of sub-plan funds, poor convergence, staff shortages, corruption, and planning without gram sabhas, as the Xaxa Committee (2014) found; displacement by development undercuts welfare gains.
Improvements require statutory, non-lapsable tribal budgets, gram sabha planning under PESA, mother-tongue education, secure forest rights and independent social audits.
Question 4 (50 marks)
Q4(a) · Anthropology in India · 20 marks≈ 14 min
Indian Anthropologists and Tribal and Caste Studies
Give an account of the contributions of Iravati Karve and B. S. Guha to the analysis of race and caste in India. (10+10=20)
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भारत में प्रजाति एवं जाति के विश्लेषणार्थ ईरावती कर्वे और बी. एस. गुहा के योगदानों का एक विवरण दीजिए। (10+10=20)
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q4(a)
Approach: The mark split (10+10) needs two balanced halves of about 125 words each: Karve on caste and race, then Guha on racial classification and its relation to caste, with a short closing comparison.
Both scholars brought biological data to the old debate, begun by Risley, on whether castes were racial groups.
Iravati Karve (10 marks): working at Deccan College, Pune, Karve carried out anthropometric and blood-group surveys of castes in Maharashtra, partly with Y.M. Dandekar. She found that castes, even those claiming the same varna, differed from one another as separate endogamous populations, while castes of different varnas in one region were often closer to each other than to their namesakes elsewhere. She concluded that jatis arose from distinct local groups, sometimes tribal, that were later arranged in the varna frame; caste was thus a social and kinship phenomenon of local origin, not the product of racial conquest. She developed this in Hindu Society: An Interpretation (1961), linking it to her kinship zones (1953).
B.S. Guha (10 marks): trained at Harvard, Guha used measurements from the 1931 Census to classify India's population into six main racial elements: Negrito, Proto-Australoid, Mongoloid, Mediterranean, Western brachycephals and Nordic, each with sub-types. He treated India as a meeting ground of migrations, with Proto-Australoids forming the base of many tribes and Mediterranean and brachycephalic elements more common in upper castes of some regions, while noting heavy mixture. His Negrito claim for south Indian tribes remains debated. As first Director of the Anthropological Survey of India (1945) he institutionalised such research.
Guha's scheme kept a racial lens, while Karve's showed caste to be local and social; modern genetics, which finds ancient mixture followed by long endogamy, supports Karve's emphasis on endogamy more than any racial ranking of castes.Q4(b) · Tribal Situation and Problems in India · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Development Projects, Displacement, Forest Policy and Tribals
What has been the impact of development projects on the environment and livelihood of forest-dwelling tribes?
हिंदी में प्रश्न
वनवासी जनजातियों के पर्यावरण एवं आजीविका पर विकास परियोजनाओं के क्या प्रभाव हुए हैं?
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q4(b)
Approach: Show the dual impact of development projects on forest ecology and on tribal livelihoods, with cases (dams, mines, industry, plantations, parks), and close with sustainable alternatives.
Forest-dwelling tribes depend on forests for food, fuel, fodder, medicine, minor forest produce and ritual life, so projects that alter forests affect both the environment and their livelihood.
Environmental impact: dams such as Sardar Sarovar and Polavaram submerge forests and river ecosystems; open-cast coal and iron mines in Jharkhand and Odisha strip forest cover, pollute rivers and lower water tables; industries pollute air and water; and roads and railways fragment wildlife habitats. Compensatory afforestation often uses monoculture plantations far from the affected area.
Livelihood impact: loss of forests ends access to mahua, tendu, sal seeds, honey and tubers; shifting cultivation and grazing lands disappear; and polluted water damages farming and fishing. The Paharia and Santal of the Rajmahal hills, for example, have suffered from stone-quarrying and coal mining. Displaced families become labourers or migrants, and women, who collect most forest produce, lose most.
Protected areas created under the Wildlife (Protection) Act (1972) also displace forest dwellers, as with relocation from tiger reserves.
Sustainable alternatives include FRA community forest rights, gram sabha consent under PESA, strict environmental impact assessment, benefit-sharing through District Mineral Foundations, and models such as Mendha-Lekha, where communities manage forests profitably.Q4(c) · Tribal Administration and Applied Anthropology · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Tribal Administration, Policies and PVTGs
Identify some special programmes for particularly vulnerable Tribal Groups (erstwhile PTGs).
हिंदी में प्रश्न
विशेषतः सुभेद्य जनजातीय समूहों (निवर्तमान पी.टी.जी.) के लिए बनाये गए कुछ विशेष कार्यक्रमों की पहचान कीजिए।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q4(c)
Approach: Identify the special programmes for PVTGs (central scheme and CCD plans, micro projects, PM-JANMAN, habitat rights, island policies, health and education measures) with brief comments on each.
The 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, earlier called Primitive Tribal Groups (identified from 1975 to 1976 and renamed in 2006), receive special attention because of their pre-agricultural technology, low literacy, subsistence economy and stagnant population.
Development of PVTGs scheme: a fully centrally funded scheme under which states prepare Conservation-cum-Development plans (from 2007 to 2008) covering housing, land, agriculture, health, education and culture, flexible to each group's needs.
Micro projects and agencies: special agencies for particular groups, such as Odisha's micro projects for the Bondo, Juang and Lanjia Saura, and the IFAD-supported Odisha PVTG Empowerment and Livelihoods Improvement Programme.
PM-JANMAN (2023): 24,104 crore rupees for 11 critical interventions, including housing, roads, water, electricity, mobile medical units, hostels, Anganwadis and Van Dhan centres, through nine ministries.
Rights and protection: habitat rights under the Forest Rights Act for groups such as the Baiga; the Andaman and Nicobar Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation (1956), the Jarawa policy (2004) and the Shompen policy (2015).
Health and education: priority in the sickle-cell mission (2023), nutrition support and residential schools.
These programmes are valuable, but success depends on group-specific planning and community consent rather than uniform targets.
Question 5 (50 marks)
Q5(a) · Weaker Sections, Ethnicity and Tribal Change · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Ethnicity, Tribal Unrest, Regionalism and Pseudo-tribalism
Ethnicity and regionalism.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
नृजातीयता एवं प्रादेशिकतावाद।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q5(a)
Approach: A short note distinguishing ethnicity from regionalism and showing how they overlap in ethno-regional movements, with Indian examples.
Ethnicity is identity based on a belief in common descent, culture or language (Weber, Barth), whereas regionalism is loyalty to a territorial region and the political assertion of its economic, linguistic or cultural interests within the nation.
Difference: ethnicity is people-centred and may cross regions (Santals live in Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha and Assam), while regionalism is territory-centred and may unite several ethnic groups; Telangana's movement (state formed 2014) was regional, based on uneven development rather than ethnicity.
Overlap: when an ethnic group is concentrated in a territory, the two fuse into ethno-regionalism: the Jharkhand movement combined Adivasi identity with regional deprivation of Chotanagpur; Bodoland, Gorkhaland and the Dravidian movement are other examples.
Explanations: Myron Weiner's 'sons of the soil' (1978) and Michael Hechter's internal colonialism (1975) explain why regional grievances take ethnic form.
India accommodates both through linguistic states, the Sixth Schedule and Article 371, showing that recognition can strengthen national unity.Q5(b) · Indian Village, Minorities and Social Change · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Processes of Socio-cultural Change
Panchayati Raj as a facilitator of social inclusion in rural society.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
ग्रामीण समाज में सामाजिक समावेशन के सुसाध्यक रूप में पंचायती राज।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q5(b)
Approach: A short note: how reservation and the gram sabha make panchayats instruments of inclusion, with evidence, and the limits.
The 73rd Amendment (1992) made panchayats a facilitator of social inclusion by reserving seats and chairpersons' posts for SCs and STs in proportion to their population and at least one-third for women, raised to 50% in most states, and by making the gram sabha of all adult villagers the base of local democracy.
As a result lakhs of Dalit, tribal and women representatives have entered public life; PESA (1996) extended self-rule to Fifth Schedule areas. Studies such as Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004) show that reserved leaders shift spending toward the needs of their groups, and panchayats deliver inclusive schemes such as MGNREGA and housing.
Inclusion is limited by proxy leadership, dominant-caste pressure on reserved sarpanches, poor attendance of women and Dalits in the gram sabha, and weak devolution of funds.
Panchayati raj is thus a necessary but not sufficient instrument of inclusion; training, fiscal devolution and protection of marginalised leaders are needed.Q5(c) · Tribal Administration and Applied Anthropology · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Anthropology and Regionalism, Communalism and Ethnic Movements
Anthropological understanding of communalism.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
साम्प्रदायिकता की नृविज्ञानात्मक व्याख्या।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q5(c)
Approach: A short note defining communalism (Bipan Chandra) and summarising key anthropological understandings (Brass, Varshney, Veena Das, Kakar), with a conclusion.
Communalism, in Bipan Chandra's definition (Communalism in Modern India, 1984), is the belief that people who follow the same religion share common secular interests that differ from, and conflict with, those of other religious groups.
Constructed, not primordial: anthropologists and historians such as Bernard Cohn showed how colonial census and representation by religion hardened fluid identities into communities.
Production of riots: Paul Brass (2003), studying Aligarh, described 'institutionalised riot systems' of politicians, local leaders and specialists who produce violence, often around elections.
Civic ties: Ashutosh Varshney (Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life, 2002) found that cities with inter-communal associations, such as Calicut, stayed peaceful, unlike Aligarh.
Experience of violence: Veena Das (Mirrors of Violence, 1990; Critical Events, 1995) studied Partition and the 1984 anti-Sikh violence; Sudhir Kakar (The Colors of Violence, 1996) explored the psychology of communal identity in Hyderabad.
Anthropology thus treats communalism as a political process that everyday inter-community ties can resist.Q5(d) · Tribal Situation and Problems in India · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Problems of Tribal Communities
Issues relating to tribal education.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
जनजातीय शिक्षा से जुड़े मुद्दे।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q5(d)
Approach: A short note on the main issues in tribal education (access, language, poverty, quality, culture) with data and current measures.
Tribal literacy was 58.96% in Census 2011, against 72.99% nationally, and only 49.4% among ST women, with high dropout after the elementary stage.
Key issues are distance and poor infrastructure in scattered hamlets; the language barrier, as children start school in a language they do not speak; curricula that ignore tribal culture and knowledge; poverty, child labour and seasonal migration; early marriage of girls; and absent or poorly trained teachers.
Residential ashram schools and hostels can also cut children off from their culture, and conflict in Left-Wing Extremism areas disrupts schooling.
The Xaxa Committee (2014) noted that ST learning outcomes lag even where enrolment has risen, and that Eklavya and ashram schools need better staffing and monitoring to close the gap.
Measures include Eklavya Model Residential Schools, scholarships, multilingual education in tribal mother tongues (as in Odisha) and NEP 2020's mother-tongue emphasis; local teachers and community involvement are essential.Q5(e) · Evolution of Indian Culture and Civilization · 10 marks≈ 7 min
Prehistoric Cultures of India
Distribution of Neolithic sites in India.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भारत में नवपाषाण स्थलों का वितरण।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q5(e)
Approach: A short note mapping Neolithic sites by region with their characteristic traits.
Neolithic sites in the subcontinent fall into regional clusters with distinct ecologies and traits, beginning at Mehrgarh (about 7000 BCE) in Baluchistan.
North: Burzahom and Gufkral in Kashmir, with pit dwellings. Vindhyan-Ganga: Koldihwa, Mahagara, Chopani Mando and Lahuradewa in Uttar Pradesh, with rice. East: Chirand and Senuwar in Bihar, Kuchai and Golbai Sasan in Odisha. North-east: Daojali Hading and Sarutaru in Assam and Selbalgiri in the Garo hills, with shouldered celts.
South: Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, at Utnur, Kupgal, Budihal, Sanganakallu, Brahmagiri, Maski, Piklihal, Tekkalakota and Hallur, and Paiyampalli in Tamil Nadu, with ash mounds and cattle herding.
Diagram: an outline map of India shading these six zones and marking two or three sites in each.
The distribution shows that farming arose in several regions with local crops and animals, not from a single centre; western India and the Deccan instead moved directly into Chalcolithic village farming.
Question 6 (50 marks)
Q6(a) · Indian Village, Minorities and Social Change · 20 marks≈ 14 min
The Indian Village
Identify the theoretical concepts that have emerged out of village studies in India.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भारत में ग्राम अध्ययनों से जो उत्पन्न सैद्धान्तिक संकल्पनायें हैं उन की पहचान कीजिए।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q6(a)
Approach: List the concepts with their authors and villages, grouped by theme (caste and mobility, civilisation, economy, politics, method), explain each briefly, and assess their value.
The village studies of the 1950s and 1960s, by Indian and foreign anthropologists, turned the Indian village into a laboratory of theory. Several enduring concepts came out of them.
Caste and mobility: M.N. Srinivas's work on the Coorgs and on Rampura produced Sanskritization, Westernization and the dominant caste, showing that caste rank is fluid and tied to land and numbers. He also coined 'vote bank' to describe how caste entered electoral politics.
Village and civilisation: Robert Redfield's little community and the idea of peasants as a part-society with a part-culture framed the village within a wider civilisation. McKim Marriott, from Kishan Garhi (1955), proposed universalisation and parochialisation to describe two-way flows between little and great traditions. Dumont and Pocock (1957) argued that the village is only a locality, since caste and kinship cross its boundaries.
Economy: William Wiser's jajmani system (Karimpur, 1936) described hereditary exchange between patrons and service castes, later debated by Beidelman and Fuller. F.G. Bailey's economic frontier (Bisipara, 1957) showed new wealth reshaping caste rank, and T.S. Epstein's comparison of Wangala and Dalena (1962) showed how irrigation and diversification produced different paths of change.
Politics: Oscar Lewis (Rani Khera, 1958) highlighted factions; Bailey proposed political arenas and brokers linking village to state; André Béteille (Sripuram, 1965) showed caste, class and power separating.
Method: the 'field-view' of Indian society, championed by Srinivas against the text-based 'book-view', became the hallmark of Indian sociology.
These concepts remain central to the study of Indian society, though critics note that they often relied on upper-caste male informants and presented villages as more harmonious than they were.Q6(b) · Tribal Administration and Applied Anthropology · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Tribal Administration, Policies and PVTGs
Critically discuss the role of NGOs in tribal development.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
जनजातीय विकास में ग़ैर-सरकारी संगठनों (NGOs) की भूमिका की समालोचनात्मक विवेचना कीजिए।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q6(b)
Approach: Critically discuss NGO roles in tribal development (service delivery, livelihoods, rights advocacy, research) with named organisations, then their limitations and controversies, ending with a way forward.
Non-governmental organisations have worked in tribal areas since independence, from the Bharatiya Adimjati Sevak Sangh (1948) founded under A.V. Thakkar to today's specialised agencies, filling gaps in state delivery.
Health: SEARCH (Gadchiroli, 1986) showed that home-based newborn care by trained village women sharply reduced neonatal deaths (The Lancet, 1999); Ekjut's women's groups in Jharkhand and Odisha did the same (2010).
Education: the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (Bhubaneswar, 1993) educates tribal children free; the Ramakrishna Mission runs schools in Abujhmarh.
Livelihoods: PRADAN (1983) built women's self-help groups; BAIF promoted orchard-based farming; Keystone Foundation works with forest produce in the Nilgiris.
Rights: Vasundhara and others helped gram sabhas claim community forest rights; legal aid groups fought displacement cases.
Limitations: dependence on foreign or corporate funds, with FCRA rules tightened in 2020; urban, non-tribal leadership; patchy coverage; duplication with government schemes; and accusations of religious agendas against both Christian and Hindu organisations, or of obstructing development.
Way forward: partnership with gram sabhas and tribal organisations, transparent funding, independent evaluation and building local tribal leadership, so that NGOs become facilitators rather than substitutes for the state or for communities.Q6(c) · Indian Village, Minorities and Social Change · 15 marks≈ 11 min
The Indian Village
Describe the impact of industrialization on the economic and social aspects of India's villages.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भारतीय ग्रामों के आर्थिक एवं सामाजिक आयामों पर औद्योगीकरण के प्रभाव का वर्णन कीजिए।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q6(c)
Approach: Separate economic and social impacts, use field studies (Epstein's Wangala and Dalena, Vidyarthi's Hatia, Breman), and balance gains against costs.
Industrialisation reaches villages through nearby factories and mines, commuting, migration to cities and the spread of factory goods; its effects depend on how villages are linked to it.
Economic impact: it created non-farm jobs and wage income, raised local wages and reduced dependence on landlords. T. Scarlett Epstein (Economic Development and Social Change in South India, 1962) found that dry Dalena, near the new town of Mandya, diversified into trade and services, while irrigated Wangala stayed agricultural and kept its old structure. Factory goods displaced village crafts, and land acquisition for industry dispossessed many, as L.P. Vidyarthi showed at Hatia near Ranchi (1970), where displaced tribals became unskilled labourers.
Social impact: commuting and migration loosened jajmani ties, caste commensality and the authority of elders; joint families tended to split; new occupational groups and a wage-earning class emerged. Male migration increased women's farm work, and remittances changed consumption and housing.
Costs include inequality between those who obtained factory jobs and those who did not, pollution, loss of commons and the casual, insecure labour described by Jan Breman.
Industrialisation has thus diversified village economies and weakened traditional hierarchy, but its benefits have been uneven.
Question 7 (50 marks)
Q7(a) · Indian Village, Minorities and Social Change · 20 marks≈ 14 min
Processes of Socio-cultural Change
Discuss how the elements of Little and Great Traditions combine in the emergence of social/political/religious movements, giving any one example to illustrate the issue.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
लघु और वृहद् परम्पराओं के तत्त्व सामाजिक/राजनैतिक/धार्मिक आन्दोलनों के आविर्भाव में संघटित कैसे हो जाते हैं, इस विषय को स्पष्ट करने हेतु कोई एक उदाहरण देते हुए विवेचना कीजिए।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q7(a)
Approach: Explain the little and great traditions and how they interact, then illustrate with one movement in depth (the Birsa Munda movement), showing which elements came from each tradition and how they combined; mention other examples briefly.
Robert Redfield distinguished the great tradition of written, elite, Sanskritic culture from the little tradition of oral, local, folk culture; McKim Marriott showed that the two constantly exchange elements through universalisation and parochialisation. Social, religious and political movements often draw on both, using great-tradition ideas to give local grievances wider legitimacy.Q7(b) · Anthropology in India · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Scholar-Administrators and the Beginnings of Indian Anthropology
Write about the role of colonial administration in the development of Anthropology in India.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भारत में नृविज्ञान के विकास में औपनिवेशिक प्रशासन की भूमिका के बारे में लिखिए।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q7(b)
Approach: Show how colonial administration generated anthropology (motives, census, surveys, monographs, institutions, policy), with names and dates, then give a brief critical note.
Anthropology in India grew largely out of the needs of colonial administration: to collect revenue, keep order, administer customary law and manage frontier tribes, officials had to know the people they ruled.
Beginnings: Sir William Jones founded the Asiatic Society at Calcutta in 1784, and Francis Buchanan surveyed Mysore (1800) and Bengal and Bihar (1807–1814). E.T. Dalton's Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (1872) was the first major survey of eastern Indian tribes.
Census and surveys: the first synchronous Census of 1881 made caste and tribe tables a major ethnographic tool. H.H. Risley, as Census Commissioner in 1901, ranked castes and launched the Ethnographic Survey of India, which produced the Tribes and Castes volumes of Crooke (1896), Thurston and Rangachari (1909) and Russell and Hira Lal (1916).
Monographs: district officers wrote detailed tribal studies, such as Gurdon's The Khasis (1907), Hutton's The Angami Nagas (1921) and Mills's Naga monographs. Hutton, Census Commissioner in 1931, supervised the last full caste count and argued for protecting tribes.
Policy: this knowledge shaped the Criminal Tribes Act (1871), the Scheduled Districts Act (1874) and the excluded and partially excluded areas of 1935.
Colonial administration thus laid the empirical base of Indian anthropology, though its evolutionist and racial categories served rule and had to be rethought by Indian scholars.Q7(c) · Tribal Situation and Problems in India · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Problems of Tribal Communities
What are the salient issues faced by pastoral communities in India? Discuss with suitable examples.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भारत के चरवाहा समुदायों को कौन सी महत्वपूर्ण समस्याओं का सामना करना पड़ता है? उचित उदाहरणों सहित विवेचना कीजिए।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q7(c)
Approach: Introduce India's pastoral communities with examples from different regions, then discuss their issues (grazing land, conservation laws, markets, conflict, services, climate, identity), and suggest remedies.
Pastoral communities live mainly by herding and often move seasonally: the Gaddi of Himachal Pradesh and the Bakarwal of Jammu and Kashmir migrate between high summer pastures and winter plains; the Van Gujjars herd buffaloes in the Shivalik forests; the Raika (Rebari) of Rajasthan breed camels; the Maldharis graze the Banni grasslands of Kutch; the Toda keep buffaloes in the Nilgiris; and the Changpa herd pashmina goats in Ladakh.
Loss of grazing land: commons have been enclosed for farming, plantations, industry and urban growth; the Banni grasslands are invaded by the shrub Prosopis juliflora; and pasture routes are blocked.
Conservation laws: national parks and sanctuaries under the Wildlife (Protection) Act (1972) exclude herders, as when Van Gujjars were evicted or resettled from Rajaji National Park; grazing rights recognised in FRA (2006) are rarely granted.
Markets and change: demand for camels has collapsed with mechanisation, despite Rajasthan declaring the camel its state animal in 2014; wool prices are low; and young people leave herding.
Conflict and services: crop damage disputes with farmers, harassment by forest staff, and mobility that denies children schooling and families health care and rations.
Recognition of community grazing rights under FRA, mobile schools and veterinary services, market support for pastoral products and pastoral participation in conservation can secure their future.
Question 8 (50 marks)
Q8(a) · Religion and Tribes; Tribe and Nation State · 20 marks≈ 14 min
Tribe and Nation State
Discuss with appropriate examples how tribal unrest may be understood as emerging out of an incompatibility between tribes and the nation-state.
हिंदी में प्रश्न
उपयुक्त उदाहरणों सहित विवेचना कीजिए कि जनजातीय असन्तोष कैसे जनजातियों और राष्ट्र-राज्य के मध्य असंयोजन से आविर्भावित रूप में समझा जा सकता है।
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q8(a)
Approach: Explain the theoretical incompatibility between tribal societies and the nation-state (Clastres, Scott, Weber) on territory, law, resources, identity and borders, illustrate each with Indian cases, and conclude whether the incompatibility is inherent or can be reconciled.
Tribal societies are typically small-scale, kin-based and territorially rooted, with customary law and collective control over land; the nation-state claims sovereign control over all territory and resources, uniform law and a single national identity. Pierre Clastres (Society Against the State, 1974) and James C. Scott (The Art of Not Being Governed, 2009) argued that many tribal peoples actively resisted state control, so friction is structural.
Land and resources: the state's doctrine of eminent domain conflicts with community ownership; mining and dams in central India have displaced tribals and produced resistance, from Koel-Karo to Niyamgiri and Hasdeo Arand.
Law and authority: codified law and police replace customary courts and councils; the Pathalgadi movement (2017 to 2018) in Khunti asserted gram sabha sovereignty against the state.
Identity and nationhood: where tribes see themselves as nations, as the Nagas did in 1947, the nation-state's claim is contested; Naga and Mizo insurgencies followed.
Borders: state boundaries divide peoples (Nagas across India and Myanmar, Mizo and Chin, Khasi-Garo and Bangladesh), turning kinship ties into security problems and bringing laws such as AFSPA (1958).
Security and violence: in Bastar, where Nandini Sundar's Subalterns and Sovereigns (1997) traced a long history of resistance, Left-Wing Extremism and the state-backed Salwa Judum (declared unconstitutional in 2011) caught Adivasis between two forces.
Reconciliation: India has also shown that accommodation is possible: the Sixth Schedule, Article 371A, statehood and accords (Mizo 1986, Bodo 2020) brought peace where autonomy was genuine; PESA and FRA recognise customary rights.
Diagram: two overlapping circles, tribal society and nation-state, with zones of conflict (land, law, borders) outside the overlap and zones of accommodation (Sixth Schedule, PESA, FRA) inside it.
Unrest therefore arises less from an inherent incompatibility than from a nation-state that ignores tribal autonomy; plural, consent-based governance resolves much of it.Q8(b) · Caste System and Religions in Indian Society · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Sacred Complex, Nature-Man-Spirit Complex and the Impact of Religions
What has been the impact of non-Hindu religions on the emancipation of Schedule Castes in India?
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भारत में अनुसूचित जातियों के उद्धारण पर गैर-हिन्दू धर्मों का प्रभाव क्या रहा है?
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q8(b)
Approach: Assess each religion (Buddhism, Sikhism, Christianity, Islam) as a route of Scheduled Caste emancipation, weigh gains against the persistence of caste and loss of SC status, and conclude.
For many Scheduled Castes, conversion to a non-Hindu religion has been a form of protest and exit from a hierarchy that ranked them as polluting.
Buddhism: B.R. Ambedkar's conversion at Nagpur on 14 October 1956 with lakhs of followers, mostly Mahars, gave Dalits a new identity, self-respect and a political consciousness; Owen Lynch traced a similar shift among the Jatavs of Agra.
Christianity: nineteenth-century mass movements in Punjab, Andhra and Tamil Nadu brought mission schools, hospitals and literacy, enabling occupational mobility. Sikhism offered langar and an egalitarian creed, and Islam offered membership of a community of equals in principle.
Limits: caste followed converts. Mazhabi and Ravidassia Sikhs built separate gurdwaras and deras; Dalit Christians face separate seating and cemeteries; Arzal Muslims remain at the bottom. Converts to Christianity and Islam also lose Scheduled Caste status, which the 1950 Presidential Order restricts to Hindus, Sikhs (from 1956) and Buddhists (from 1990). The Ranganath Misra Commission (2007) recommended delinking SC status from religion, and the K.G. Balakrishnan Commission was set up in 2022 to examine the issue.
Non-Hindu religions have thus advanced the dignity and education of Scheduled Castes, but have not by themselves ended caste discrimination.Q8(c) · Weaker Sections, Ethnicity and Tribal Change · 15 marks≈ 11 min
Exploitation of SCs, STs and OBCs and Constitutional Safeguards
What are the constitutional safeguards to protect the interests of the Indian tribes?
हिंदी में प्रश्न
भारतीय जनजातियों के हितों की रक्षा के लिए संवैधानिक रक्षोपाय क्या हैं?
Model answer
Paper and question: Paper II, Q8(c)
Approach: List the constitutional safeguards for Scheduled Tribes under protective, developmental, political, service and institutional heads, including the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, and add the supporting laws.
Scheduled Tribes are communities notified by the President under Article 342 (8.6% of the population in 2011). The Constitution protects their land, culture and autonomy.
Protective safeguards: Article 46 protects them from social injustice and exploitation; Article 19(5) allows restrictions on free movement and property to protect tribal interests; Articles 29 and 350A protect culture and mother-tongue instruction.
Area-based safeguards: Article 244(1) and the Fifth Schedule provide Scheduled Areas in ten states, Tribes Advisory Councils and the Governor's power to modify laws and regulate land transfer and moneylending; Article 244(2) and the Sixth Schedule create ten Autonomous District Councils; Articles 371A and 371G protect Naga and Mizo customary law and land.
Developmental safeguards: Article 275(1) provides grants for tribal welfare and Scheduled Areas, and the proviso to Article 164(1) requires a tribal welfare minister in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha.
Political and service safeguards: Articles 330, 332 and 243D reserve seats in the Lok Sabha (47), assemblies and panchayats; Articles 16(4), 16(4A) and 335 provide 7.5% reservation in central posts.
Institutional: the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (Article 338A, 89th Amendment, 2003). These are reinforced by PESA (1996), the Forest Rights Act (2006) and the Prevention of Atrocities Act (1989).
Together they form a strong framework of integration with protection, though weak implementation, as the Xaxa Committee (2014) noted, limits their impact.