The Riang of Tripura in Transition

Abstract

In India, the tribal people live in different ecological conditions spread over a vast geographical tract across the country. While understanding these tribal communities as anthropologists, we refer to ‘structure’ as ‘social structure’, which consists of all those relatively stable features of a social system, that may be understood, perhaps, by a consideration of the continuity of social structure through time. The present paper attempts to make an overview of the Riang, the most numerically dominant Primitive Tribal Group of northeastern India, to generate information in the tight of ecology, habitat, demography, language, economy, social system, religion, politics, acculturation, the processes of change and so on in terms of the dimensions of time and space. One of the major concerns of the present study is to look into the structure of the Riang society to get a normative pattern of a particular tribal society of Tripura and it will also be a major concern to decipher the process of transformation that has taken place in their society through the passage of time. It is apparent that the process of transformation took place in stages where history played a major role.