Rethinking Tribes in Indiathrough Context of Tribe-Caste Continuum: Negotiation of Identity and Exploration of hypervisiBility Among Siddi Tribe

The study of tribes in India remains a complex and often paradoxical field, primarily when tribes are observed as distinct ethnographic units. A central question in tribal discourse is whether Adivasi studies can be treated as a distinct discipline and how it relates to other primary academic fields such as history, economics, and political science. A significant challenge in tribal studies seems to be that tribes are invisible in modern state archives, making it difficult to construct a coherent historical narrative for them, as opposed to other subaltern groups like Dalits. This omission perpetuates a narrow understanding of Adivasis, which frequently reduces them to ethnographic subjects while disregarding their contributions to broader historical, economic, and cultural debates. This paper critically examines the socio-political identity of Indian tribes, with a particular emphasis on the Siddi community, to investigate their historical, cultural, and contemporary status. The research explores the construction of "tribe" as a colonial and postcolonial category, focusing on its role in marginalizing tribes by romanticizing them as the "primitive other." This portrayal has reinforced their exclusion from contemporary socio-political structures. The paper also examines the persistence of exceptionalism in postcolonial discourse, which obscures the complex historical connections between tribal communities and other groups in India. The paper uses content analysis as its primary methodology to investigate both historical records and contemporary narratives, offering a critical rethinking of tribal identity and autonomy. This research tries to challenge the dominant discourse by integrating tribes' historical and contemporary experiences based on the proposition of hypervisibility, particularly those of the Siddi community, and focuses on contributing to a more encompassing understanding of tribal identity, representation, and integration in contemporary India.