Verrier Elwin (29 August 1902 – 22 February 1964) was a British self-trained anthropologist, ethnologist and tribal activist, who began his career in India as a Christian missionary. He was a controversial figure who first abandoned the clergy, to work with Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, then converted to Hinduism in 1935 after staying in a Gandhian ashram, and split with the nationalists over what he felt was an overhasty process of transformation and assimilation for the tribals. Elwin is best known for his early work with the Baigas and Gonds of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh in central India, and he married a member of one of the communities he studied there. He later also worked on the tribals of several North East Indian states especially North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) and settled in Shillong, the hill capital of Meghalaya.
In time he became an authority on Indian tribal lifestyle and culture, particularly on the Gondi people. He served as the Deputy Director of the Anthropological Survey of India upon its formation in 1945. Post-independence he took up Indian citizenship. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru appointed him as an adviser on tribal affairs for north-eastern India, and later he was Anthropological Adviser to the Government of NEFA (now Arunachal Pradesh). His autobiography, The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin won him the 1965 Sahitya Akademi Award in English Language, given by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters.
The historian Ramachandra Guha’s biography Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India (1999) brought renewed attention in India to Elwin’s life and career. Guha writes: “Through the 1930s and 1940s, Elwin lived in central India: first in the forest belt of present-day Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, then in the tribal uplands of Odisha. He wrote a series of scholarly and well-documented books on adivasi culture, as well as many popular essays on their economic exploitation and political neglect. Through these writings he became known as an extremely effective spokesman for Adivasi rights. However, he attracted the ire of nationalists, who thought tribals were merely backward Hindus who had to be rapidly assimilated into the dominant religion. Elwin, on the other hand, emphasized their distinctive culture, their rich traditions of poetry, art, music, and dance; their love of nature and their identification with the land.”
After 1947, Verrier Elwin stayed on in this country. In 1954, by now an Indian citizen, he was appointed adviser on tribal affairs to the Northeast Frontier Agency (now Arunachal Pradesh). Despite his advancing age (and bulk), he retained his zest for field research. He travelled, by foot and on horseback, through the remotest parts of the territory, studying the culture and lifestyle of its tribes.
Elwin married a Raj Gond tribal girl called Kosi who was a student at his school at Raythwar (Raithwar) in Dindori district in Madhya Pradesh on 4 April 1940. They had one son, Jawaharlal (Kumar), born in 1941. Elwin had an ex-parte divorce in 1949, at the Calcutta High Court, writing in his autobiography, “I cannot even now look back on this period of my life without a deep sense of pain and failure” In 2006 Kosi was still living in a hut in Raythwar, their son Kumar having died, Elwin remarried a woman called Lila, belonging to the Pardhan Gond tribe in nearby Patangarh, moving with her to Shillong in the early 1950s. They had three sons, Wasant, Nakul and Ashok. Elwin died in Delhi on 22 February 1964 after a heart attack. His widow Lila died in Mumbai in 2013, aged about 80, shortly after the demise of their eldest son, Wasant. Even today not only the Adivasis of India but even the intellectuals prefer to talk about Elwin with respect and miss him.
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Photoline: Elwin with Jamnalal Bajaj and Pyarelal in Dhule Jail
