The colonization of India by the Britishers was not merely political and economic but also cultural and intellectual which had a profound impact on how different social groups who inhabited the Indian Subcontinent came to identify themselves. The British policy of enumeration and classification of the Indian population, particularly embodied in the census exercise played a crucial role in the development of self-identity among heterogenous social groups in India, as certain Western concepts like 'Religion' were imagined as water-tight boundary categories were imposed upon the Indian masses. The paradigm of 'World Religion' as Tomoko Masuzawa has conceptualized it was imposed upon the people in colonial societies which essentially lacked anything resembling 'Religion' in the Western sense of the concept. The outcome of this grand exercise of colonial sociology was the emergence of world 'religions' like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Taoism etc, which are still contested. However, one of the most negative impacts of colonial sociology was the erasure of religious beliefs and practices of non-literate and oral societies as they were labelled animism, totemism etc and classified as primitive and backward. The categories like 'caste', 'tribe' and caste-tribe continuum etc, and practices of religious conversion further led to the erasure of distinct tribal identity, which sparked a movement among the tribal societies to create a separate identity of themselves, distinct from Hinduism, Christianity and Islam etc. in which Religion played a central role. Movements like the Adi-Dharam and Sarana have emerged among different tribal groups to construct a 'Religion' in the World Religion paradigm for themselves with the demand of being included in the national census. This paper seeks to understand and explicate the genesis, dynamics and contestations of the ongoing Sarna Movement that demands a separate religious identity for the tribal communities.
