Some books arrive like a door left open onto a world you had always lived beside but never quite entered. It Takes a Tribe is one of them, and its cover speaks before a single word is read. Against a sky washed in coral and dusk-rose, a snow-crowned mountain rises toward a soft sun, and around it a whole universe gathers: a peacock, a red hibiscus, a tribal drum, a slate chalked with d [k, a spinning wheel, a hockey stick, boxing gloves, a medal, a quiver of arrows, a thatched hut, a stack of books beside an oil lamp, and a small placard reading QUIT INDIA. Every object is the emblem of a life waiting inside.
Vaishnavi Wahi’s illustrations give the book its gentle, glowing pulse. Each of the twenty-five profiles opens beneath an arched vignette. Tilka Manjhi drawing his bow from the branches of a tree, Rani Gaidinliu striding spear in hand across her hills, Gaura Devi with her arms around a tree trunk, Birsa Munda standing tall as roots spread from his feet. Along the foot of every page runs a delicate Warli-style frieze, so the reader is never allowed to forget the living landscape from which these lives were drawn. It is art that does not merely decorate the book but belongs to it, rooting each story in the folk idiom of the very communities it honours.
Ramendra Kumar, one of India’s beloved writers for children, a storyteller who writes up to the young rather than down, opens not with history but with tenderness. His introduction begins with Eklavya (p. 1), whose severed thumb has for centuries stood as the price of Adivasi excellence, and moves into a portrait of India’s oldest keepers of the land: more than seven hundred communities, a hundred million people, whose lives are braided into jal, jungle, zameen. But the essay is no simple hymn. It sets down, with unflinching honesty, the long arc of dispossession: forests enclosed, families displaced by dams and mines, the unfinished struggle running from colonial forest law to the Forest Rights Act of 2006. It is a rare children’s book that holds both wonder and injustice in the same open hand.
And then the lives begin. There are the rebels who blazed long before our textbooks begin: Tilka Manjhi, the Santhal chief whose uprising shook the British eight decades before 1857; Thalakkal Chanthu, the Kurichiyan archer; Govind Giri, whose Bhil followers were gunned down at Mangarh Hill six years before Jallianwala Bagh, in a massacre history almost forgot; and Laxman Naik, the gentle Gandhian who walked to the gallows telling his captors that Mother India’s freedom was as real as the sun and the moon. What binds them is not martyrdom alone, but resistance rooted in defence of land and dignity, decades ahead of the national story that would later claim, or forget, them.
There is the one who carried the forest into Parliament: Jaipal Singh Munda, an Oxford Blue, Captain of India’s 1928 Olympic hockey gold, who then stood in the Constituent Assembly and reclaimed a slur with his head high: ‘I am proud to be a jungli’ (p. 37). He asked not for charity but for dignity, reminding the powerful that democracy was something they might learn from the tribes rather than bestow upon them.
More than half of the twenty-five are women, and their chapters trace, with quiet fire, the walls each had to climb. Rani Gaidinliu took up her hanged mentor’s rebellion at sixteen and spent close to fourteen years in colonial jails; Nehru called her the ‘daughter of the hills’ (p. 50). Dashriben Chaudhuri, at fifteen, vowed to wear only khadi until Swaraj. Puttalimaya Devi slipped away to Congress meetings once her father had left for work (p. 68). And Gaura Devi, widowed at twenty-two, led the women of Reni into the trees and, when a woodcutter drew his gun, planted herself in his path: ‘This forest nurtures us like a mother; you’ll only be able to use your axes on it if you shoot me first’ (p. 77); the first great action of the Chipko movement, the first time women led in the absence of men.
There are the guardians of culture, knowledge and earth, and here the book deepens from portraiture into argument. Its finest instance is the story of the Soligas and Dr C Madegowda. Kumar lays out a whole Soliga cosmology—six clans, each worshipping its own animal, the tiger revered as divine (p. 97)—before the grievance: that symbiosis was ‘rudely shattered’ by the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, and within two years the Soligas were recast as encroachers (p. 98). That dispossession is the grievance the book’s argument turns on. The Forest Rights Act becomes the turning point: ‘For the first time, we had a law that spoke for us’ (p. 99) and Madegowda’s conclusion reframes the debate: ‘Conservation doesn’t mean keeping people out; it means bringing people and forests together’ (p. 102). Around him stand Tulasi Munda, who could barely read yet built seventeen schools and taught twenty thousand children (p. 84); Jangarh Singh Shyam, founder of the Jangarh Kalam school of Gond art, who carried its cosmology to the Pompidou in 1989; and Dhaniram Toto, who spent ten patient years building a thirty-seven-letter script so his people’s language would outlive its last speaker.
Alongside them stand the fighters for land and voice: Dayamani Barla, the ‘Iron Lady of Jharkhand’; CK Janu, who addressed the UN and gives the book one of its defining lines: ‘the forest is like a mother to us; the forest doesn’t go anywhere’ (p. 118); and Jamuna Tudu, the ‘Lady Tarzan’, who raised a brigade of tribal women against an armed timber mafia (p. 143).
And there are the champions who carried the tribal name onto the world’s brightest stages, where the book always shows the collective hand behind the individual triumph: Dilip Tirkey, India’s most-capped hockey player; Mary Kom, who returned to the ring as a mother to prove a girl from a remote Manipuri hamlet could ‘rise, fight and triumph’ (p. 157); and Poorna Malavath, the youngest girl to climb Everest, who tells every listening child to ‘never fear the unknown’ (p. 185).
For all its range, the book is held by a few insistent themes: Nature as kin rather than resource; education and culture as weapons of survival; and the passage from the margins to the national and global stage, always narrated as vindication rather than exception. For the teacher building a reading list where every child can find a mirror; for the Adivasi girl who has rarely seen herself in a printed book; and for every child whose sense of the nation has had room only for the familiar, It Takes a Tribe is a gift and a gentle correction. It closes a silence that should never have fallen.