The colonial policy of exclusion of tribal areas was largely an outcome of the work of ethnographers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians and Christian missionaries studying tribal cultures in India. The most important of these works includes that of Verrier Elwin. Elwin’s study on Baiga (1939) made him realize that exploitation of these tribes was severe and this community hopes to have a Baiga Raj, where they have their own ruler and no interference and exploitation by the others. This study led Elwin to adopt ‘leave them alone’, ‘national park approach’ or ‘isolation approach’.

Elwin’s ‘National Park Policy’ of keeping the tribals as “museums, specimens became the model for administration. The British adopted two broad approaches on tribal development. The first approach advocated by the British was to isolate tribes from the larger society and, therefore, separate tribal areas from the purview of normal administration. This model treated tribal communities as ‘isolates, tribals as ‘Noble Savage’ and the primitive condition as ‘Arcadian Simplicity’. The tribal communities were seen as too subdued and innocent to understand the socio-economic processes and much more prone to the exploitation by the non-tribals and the moneylenders. Practically, the policy of isolation adopted by the British further alienated the tribals living on the hills, in forests and in other remote areas. The tribal remained unaffected by the benefits of the developmental measures initiated for the rest of the society. The current lack of development among the tribal needs to be understood in this historical perspective.

The second point of view saw tribes as animists, on the ground that they belonged to a religious tradition other than that of major religions of India. Thus, they were a society unto themselves and constituted a society different from the larger society.

The concept of protecting the tribal communities from too rapid integration into economy and polity was born out of the direct nature of the British rule. It was a product of calculation on the part of British on two major issues:

a. Administration of the far-flung tribal areas would be difficult, and

b. The isolation would also keep tribals away from political movement developing at that point of time.

Within the larger framework of the policy of isolation, legislations were enacted. For instance, the British promulgated Inner Line Regulation in 1873 that aimed to minimize tribal-non-tribal contact by controlling tribal industries and trade in the tribal areas of northeast. As a result of the isolation approach, even though the tribal areas remained uninterrupted, the enactment of legislations like India Forest Act, 1878 and Land Acquisition Act, 1894 establishing absolute propriety of the colonial state over the forests land led to massive discontent among the tribals and resulted in rebellions in various parts of India.

The isolationist model was, indeed, criticized as it was severely compromised on the ground that the colonial state’s objective of revenue extraction made it adopt the policy as the tribal regions were richest in terms of endowments of forest and mineral wealth. A few roads were constructed for security reasons and to allow the British to exploit the forest produce. The policy of isolation did nothing for the welfare and development of tribals. Thakkar Bapa criticized the isolation theory in the following words “to keep these people confined to isolation in their accessible hills and jungles is something like keeping them in glass-museum for the curiosity of purely academic persons”.