Mawasi

The Mawasi descend from the Korku people, one of the oldest tribal groups in central India, traditionally tied to hunting, forest gathering, and subsistence farming in the highlands of Madhya Pradesh. Over time, the Korku organized into four major subgroups, and the Mawasi became the largest and most numerous of them.

A tradition of origin passed down among the Korku links the formation of their clans to a sacred story involving the god Shiva, who is said to have decreed that each group take the name of the object under which its ancestors had taken shelter, with the rule that marriages always take place outside one's own clan. This memory helps explain why Mawasi life is still organized around distinct clans today.

Mawasi life revolves around the land: most cultivate small plots or work as day laborers in agriculture, and some still hunt in the forests and hills where they live. Among the younger generation, casual work outside farming is growing, a sign of a traditional economy in transition.

Community councils handle the group’s affairs, and marriages are usually arranged after discussions between the leaders of the families involved. At the table, they are not vegetarian, but avoid beef, cook with mustard oil, and drink milk and tea often; many also smoke beedis, the traditional hand rolled cigarette common across South Asia.

The Mawasi are, almost entirely, Hindu, and their faith reflects the broader religious tradition of the Korku peoples, which combines worship of Hindu deities with older beliefs rooted in ancestral spirits and nature itself, such as the sun, the moon, the rivers, and the forest that surrounds them.

This faith is not merely doctrine but daily practice: rituals, offerings, and reverence for ancestors are part of community life just as much as the better known Hindu temples and festivals, weaving religion and tribal identity into a single fabric. The very organization into clans, according to Korku tradition, traces back to a sacred story tied to the god Shiva, showing how faith and social belonging move together among the Mawasi.

The Mawasi speak Hindi, a language into which the Bible has already been fully translated and for which there is an abundance of audio and video materials. The obstacle is not a lack of text but reach: the people’s low literacy calls for the gospel to arrive by oral means, and the mobile phone, increasingly present even in rural areas, has become the most realistic entry point for this content in Hindi.

Being Mawasi is deeply tied to being Hindu: social identity determines who marries whom, who takes part in community councils, and who truly belongs to the group, which makes any change of faith a high social risk. Life in the isolated hills of Madhya Pradesh also limits contact with any Christian message, and low literacy makes the written word a poor path for reaching them.

Many Mawasi live off small scale farming and daily field labor, a reality that leaves entire families vulnerable to poor harvests and unstable income. Access to formal education is also limited, restricting opportunities for younger people already seeking work outside farming.

In the spiritual realm, the need is just as concrete: as far as is known, there is no Christian community among the Mawasi, meaning a person from this people would today have almost no one from within their own group to talk to about Jesus.