The paper presents Louis Dumont's point of view on the ‘tribes’ of India according to his controversy with F. Bailey in Contributions to Indian Sociology. I focus in particular on the influences of the Europeanist experience and on the Maussian formation of Dumont on his later perspective in the Indian field. One can then see that what Dumont called the ‘local point of view’ was his specific perspective (adapted from Robert Hertz's legacy) regarding the Indian ‘tribes’. The last part of the article tries to show that this ‘point of view’ is still fruitful in as much as it combines holistic and ethnohistorical perspective, here particularly on the relations between the ‘tribes’ and the ancient local kingdoms.