It is worth noting that contemporary tribes are in transition displaying spectacular changes in their social, economic and political life-ways. So religion is not the only field of change in tribal communities. But this change has a difference in identity construct, for the changes in these fields, despite breeding inequalities, have not created horizontal conflicting and exclusive divisions like different religious groups in a tribe. Even language shift also does not create a sense of intra- tribe division. Members of a tribe or the tribe as a whole, by shifting to a new tongue due to one or the other reasons, take pride in the language tradition as a cultural heritage. On the other hand, religion shift creates a binarity of core philosophy between old and new faiths. The point is that religious divisions in a tribe do not have feelings of a cultural wholeness, though each group shows its community consciousness beyond religious affiliation. When a single tribe displays religious divisions, ethnographers record not a tribe based religion, but different religious traditions. Understandably, the notion of ‘tribal religion’ appears to be a misnomer in its community-specific connotation corresponding to emerging religious divisions in a tribe.

In India, colonial administration constructed the social category of ‘tribe’ in contrast to caste-based occupational groups called Hindus. Arguably, tribal religion was conceptualized as binary opposite to Hinduism. Similarly, the construct of tribe in general was ‘other’ to Europeans and thus to their Christian religion. Therefore, in their ‘Civilising Mission’ conversion to Christianity, particularly of tribal communities, was one of the main objectives. Moreover, there is no record available to establish tribe-Christianity interface in pre-colonial period.

On the contrary, during pre-colonial period, several tribes had interaction with neighboring Hindu traditions and a few had adopted Hinduism. During the period of reference, there were tribes professing Islam and Buddhism also. Evidently, what the tribes were not exposed to was Christianity. It is therefore, argued that tribal religion was conceptualized practically in contrast to Christianity. Interaction with prevalent pre-colonial religions does not mean that tribes were assimilated or integrated with them. There were also tribes outside Hindu, Islam and Buddhist folds. What these tribes professed is what we call tribal religion.  However, they were but a small constituent of the category of tribe and their numbers shrinking in our contemporary time due to religion-shift.

Some major tribes, however, organize revival movements to protect traditional religion against the onslaughts of external religions. In revivalism, what evolves is an institutionalized syncretism tradition of two or more religions. Not only in revivalism, but in other religious denominations like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism in a tribe, what we see practically is religious syncretism- a conglomeration of features of tribal religion and the institutionalized religion in different degrees. Moreover, revivalism is not tribe specific; in Sarana and Donyi polo religions it engages more than one tribe. Further, a crucial point about the influence of Hinduism is that the emerging tradition in many tribes does not adopt Hindu nomenclature, but continues with its old name. Revival religious traditions, on the other, are found adopting new names like Heraka, Sarana, Bhagat, Sapha Hor, Heraka, Donyipolo, Rangfra, etc. It should be mentioned that tribes in general did not have a name for the faiths and beliefs they professed.

Revival movements are not post-independence phenomena. Such movements were organized as a means to mobilize people against colonial rule. Interestingly, leaders of Bhagat and Sapha Hor movements went to the extent of denouncing their traditional gods and spiritual beings as their protectors. Needless to say, new gods were incorporated in traditional pantheon.

In the present context, a tribe fully or partly converted to new religions consider the change in the perspective of indigenization. For the fully converted tribe, indigenization of the new religion might display tribe-specific nature, but the problem underlies where two or more new religions exist in a tribe. Tribe specificity in the former case still raises the question of understanding the notion of tribal religion as a constituent of culture in general. There is no denying the fact that a wide range of diversity exists across tribal communities in the sphere of faith and beliefs. The diversity takes different pattern even with exceptions such as the example of Mirs of Gujarat who profess both Hinduism and Islam simultaneously to please both groups. Undoubtedly, the emerging issue of interface between tribe and religion is a  very complex dynamics. Tribe and religion framework carries greater scope to engage with contemporary religious dynamics among the tribes without sacrificing the notion of tribal religion. Moreover, it gives a sense of openness to engage in ‘tribe and religion’ contrary to the narrow scope of ‘tribal religion’ in terms of one-to-one correspondence.