A guide to exploring India’s diverse Indigenous (Adivasi) cultures

India conjures up images of a colorful chaos, spiritual wisdom and Bollywood; a place of palaces and monuments, a colonial imprint, pilgrimages, yogis and spices. Beyond these well-worn narratives and the tourist trails, in the heart of its forests, verdant valleys, windswept desert dunes and red earth, lives another India – one that has existed for millennia, and one that resists marginalization and erasure. This is Indigenous India, marking 104 million people, forming 9% of India’s 1.43 billion population, across 705 ethnic native groups recognized by the government as Scheduled Tribes.

I am from this India. I am Santal, who are the largest homogeneous tribal community of India, with over 10 million people. Santals also live in the neighboring countries of Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan.

Who are the Adivasis or Indigenous Indians?

During British colonial rule, many Indigenous communities in India were classified as "tribes," marked as socially and culturally distinct from the dominant non-tribal population. After Independence, this designation evolved into the official category of Scheduled Tribes (ST) with the adoption of the Indian Constitution in 1950. This reclassification granted certain constitutional rights, political recognition, and administrative safeguards. However, the process of categorization was and does remain deeply contested. Across states, tribal communities have often been misclassified, excluded or inconsistently listed in official records. As a result, estimates of the ST population in India remain unreliable, reflecting systemic gaps rather than demographic reality.

Tribal, Scheduled Tribe, Indigenous or Adivasi – which is correct?

The nomenclature "Tribal," "Scheduled Tribe," "Indigenous" and "Adivasi" (adi meaning first and vasis meaning inhabitants), are used both distinctively and interchangeably to speak of Indigenous India, with each term bearing its own etymologies. With neither the use of "Indigenous" or "Adivasi" officially recognized, "tribal" or "ST" becomes a functional catch-all term to refer to India’s Indigenous population. The self-given term "Adivasi" conveys a sense of empowerment, augmented by self-identification and solidarity with indigenous people’s movement across the world. Being Adivasi is not about suffering alone, but about the resilience emerging from it, and a celebration of ancestral approaches to life.

Although India’s Scheduled Tribes account for less than 9% of the country’s population, they represent an astonishingly rich and varied cultural mosaic. Far from being a homogenous category, Adivasi communities differ from one another in language, belief systems, lifestyles, and in their histories of contact with mainstream society. They maintain worldviews and cosmologies that stand entirely outside of Hinduism and the caste system, while others have experienced varying degrees of assimilation and influence.

Diversity in terms of demographic composition plays out across regions, too. India’s central, eastern and western states, including Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, and West Bengal are home to more than 55% of the country’s tribal population. Large groups like the Gonds, Bhils, Santals, Mundas, Oraons, and Meenas each number in the millions, while others, such as the Birhor, Asur, and the Indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands, count fewer than 200 people.

Linguistically, Adivasi India is nothing short of kaleidoscopic. While most of India speaks Indo-European languages, only a tiny fraction of tribal peoples do, mostly among the Bhils and Halbis. Instead, Adivasi communities speak a wide range of tongues: from Dravidian languages (like those spoken by the Gond, Khond, Koya, Oraon and Toda peoples), to Sino-Tibetan languages in the Himalayas and northeast, and Austro-Asiatic languages like those of the Santal, Munda, Kharia and Ho.

Where to experience these cultures as a traveler 

Adivasi life in India has too often been portrayed through a narrow lens of exoticism – painted bodies at festivals, dancers swirling around bonfires, bow-carrying elders, and slow-moving village life idealized as untouched or timeless. These postcard images, while visually striking, flatten the lived complexity of India’s Indigenous communities. Such portrayals obscure a deeper reality: of peoples with dynamic cultures, rich oral traditions and literatures, distinct conceptions of wellbeing, fierce histories of resistance, and ongoing struggles for land, language and justice.

Adivasi India isn’t a static museum. It is living, moving, resisting, reimagining; it is contemporary, political, and plural, adapting while remaining firmly rooted in their ancestries. From the forested plateaus of Jharkhand and the hill tracts of Odisha to the red-earth heartlands of Chhattisgarh and the cloud-covered cliffs of the Khasi Hills, Adivasi regions are abundant in story, memory and intricacies. These are places shaped not only by their biodiversity but by their shared ideologies of land as kin, language as inheritance, and wellbeing as a shared, collective rhythm. Here are some of the places to experience Adivasi culture.

Chhattisgarh

Bastar, in the state of Chattisgarh, in central India, offers us the experience of forest ecologies, tribal crafts and resistance histories, held together by the Gond, Muria and Maria communities. Beyond the striking Chitrakote waterfalls, and thick sal (shorea robusta) forests lies a land where metal, earth and wood are shaped into art, and where the land is spoken of as kin. Kondagaon is renowned for its traditional bell-metal and wrought-iron craftwork. 

Jharkhand

Jharkhand, further east, is home to 32 tribes, like the Santal, Munda, Ho and Oraon peoples. This is a land where song, resistance, and farming have long been intertwined, from the Hul or Santal rebellion of 1855 to today’s Jal-Jangal-Jameen (Water-Forest-Land) movements. Experiencing Bhognadih, Jharkhand, the Santal village where the Hul or Santal rebellion against the Indian Zamindars (landowners) and the British rule started in 1855, commemorated annually on June 30, is both humbling and riveting.

Southern India

Down South, in the Nilgiris, in the Tamil Nadu and Kerala border, the Toda, Kota, Kurumba and Irula communities have lived in harmony with the shola-grassland ecosystem for centuries. Their circular dairy temples where milk from the sacred water buffalo is stored, and the Toda "Poothkuli" shawls, in striking red, black and white intricately embroidered geometric patterns that are graphically impressive and symbolically rich, speak of deep cosmological ties with land. These communities also offer a wild-foraged cuisine of honey, tubers and greens. Indigenous food, too, is an ancestral story: hand-pounded rice, forest greens, smoked meats, millets, handia (fermented rice beer); each meal is a philosophy of seasonality and sharing.

Nagaland

In the northeast of India, Khonoma, in Nagaland, crowned as India’s first Green Village, and inhabited by the Angami Naga tribe, upholds community-led forest protection tied to customary law. Hornbill Festival, also called the "Festival of Festivals" is a Naga cultural extravaganza held annually in Kisama Heritage Village, Nagaland, in the first week of December, provides a unique platform to witness not only Naga cultural diversity, but also that of other northeastern states, as a means of cultural exchange, where music, dance, literature, adventure sports, art, handicraft, fashion and food are showcased.

Meghalaya

In Meghalaya, the Garo, Khasi and Jaintia tribes uphold a matrilineal social order and are stewards of some of India’s last sacred groves, like the Mawphlang Sacred Grove. This landscape also holds 100 identified living root bridges (Jingkieng Jri) across 72 villages in the East Khasi Hills and West Jaintia Hills, where the Khasis wove, and still weave, the roots of the Indian rubber tree along hollowed-out trunks of the areca palm and bamboo; these turn into sturdy footbridges in about 15 to 30 years, spanning from 4.5m to 76m in length, and enduring for over 500 years.

Be prepared to bring a different tourism mindset

Traveling through Adivasi homelands requires a shift in gaze, an invitation to reimagine what it means to travel at all. It is not about seeking out the authentic tribal experience, but about slowing down and bearing witness; showing a willingness to let go of tourist expectations shaped by spectacle, and recognizing Indigenous sovereignty in practice. It is about understanding that what might appear remote or undeveloped to some is, in fact, a place of deep ecological knowledge and political resilience. In these regions, markets are not just places of commerce but of exchanging stories. Forest paths are not just scenic trails, but routes of ancestral significance. And language is more than just words, it is survival.

To experience Adivasi India, travel not with a checklist, but a grounding of how one can be in relationship with place and people, and not just in transit. Some ways in which we can do this is by:

Endorsing the local: Travel with local or Indigenous-run operators. Support locally owned businesses and homestays.
See people as hosts and storytellers, not as attractions: Always ask permission before taking photographs, especially of people, rituals or sacred spaces.
Supporting cultural continuity: Purchase handicrafts, artwork, or textiles directly from Adivasi artisans and not from intermediaries. This helps keep knowledge systems and livelihoods alive.

Understand the history and listen to Adivasi voices to travel responsibly

Before setting foot in Adivasi regions, engage with their cultural expressions. Learn a few words of greeting or expressing gratitude, including the right ways to pronounce and address the community. Take time to read about its history, political struggles and culture from Adivasi voices. Adivasi writers, such as Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, and filmmakers, like Biju Toppo, provide insight that enables responsible travel.

Adivasi communities have faced centuries of displacement and erasure and the land tells that story. Recognize that the presence of police, surveillance or military in these areas is often a reflection of deeper historical injustices. Indigenous communities here are navigating the incursion of extractive development and militarization.

To meet Adivasi India is to understand that there have always been many Indias, and some of them speak not in Hindi or English, but in Santali, Gondi, Ho, Kui, Warli, Naga and Khasi. This is not the India of postcard clichés, it is the India that pulses underneath, and it is speaking through rivers and drums, tattoos and metaphors, protests and poems.