IDENTITY
All Indians Are Indigenous
A phrase the state coined to erase its own indigenous people — and ended up naming me anti-national
“International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples,” I say it slowly; I get breathless at the end of saying it. Three adjectives, each falling over the other for attention, their vanities competing and cancelling the other’s scale — international, as though nations had ever agreed to notice exploitation of ‘marginalised’ people; world, as if humanity recognised that the planet was an interconnected web; indigenous, meaning, apparently, whoever the first two words haven’t already claimed, and those on whom a condescending identity charity is practiced. This terrible mouthful of an expression has the vocabulary of a civilisation still conducting its post-colonial paperwork, in triplicate. On glossy art paper with high GSM to essentially continue to signal authority — nothing else really. Not love, not human sympathy, not remorse for historic unfairness. Not togetherness, not camaraderie.
I am an Indian — a South Indian; my ancestry goes back to pre-colonial times; there is continuity too there, no non-Indian marriages in the family’s ancestry. India voted in favour of the 2007 UNDRIP, but with a caveat: the government insists that the category “Indigenous peoples” does not apply to India, since it considers all Indians indigenous. I would celebrate this but at the cost of ignoring how one indigenous group oppresses the other, marginalises and obscures the other. Here the move was, under the optics of uniting the colonised against the historical colonisers, to merge the diverse and gloss over the marginalised populations into ‘all Indians are indigenous’.
All of 8 billion in the world are ‘indigenous’, and this is not a cruel rhetoric against the marginalised. It is to say that pay attention to the dynamics of marginalisation, which has not changed. In this ‘all 8 billion are indigenous’ framing, I truly marvel at the genetic admixture that I am, what with the scientifically established three waves of immigration into the Indian subcontinent. First came the African hunter-gatherers into the bio-rich and productive subcontinent, then came the Iranian plateau’s farmers to till the fertile lands, and finally the Steppe’s horse-people, pastoralists too, arrived, rebranding themselves Aryan, to take over whatever was left by the farmers in the directly undomesticable higher and remote reaches of the landscape.
So, ‘all humans are indigenous’, but look at the ahistoric churn, the strife and the dispossession continuously unleashed, wave after wave, and the ripple-generation has not ceased. The second wave led to the pushback of the first immigrants; the third wave pushed the by-now indigenous first and second waves of immigration into poverty and marginalisation, creating poor farmers and poor hunter-gatherers. These pastoralists came with not just an economic model but with hymns and chants and a definitive violent colonising urge without waging a war.
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Have the ‘Adivasis’ — ‘adi’ (original), ‘vasi’ (resident) — not always been marginalised? There have always been the colonisers, and there have always been the oppressed indigenous people. Adivasis had superior tribes and inferior ones, and there have always been the unequal power dynamics between them; this holds even as of today.
The apparatus most likely to have done the marginalising retains sole custody of the word for the marginalised.
I am not a bloodline. I am these sedimentary layers that are compressed and cemented into a solid rock. I am a settlement history that keeps getting layered, more and more at scales of decades to millennia, stratified and hierarchised. This is where the real absurdity sits, and it is not mine — it belongs to the men who wrote the definition. “Indigenous,” under the instruments that matter, means historical continuity with a place, self-identification as such, and — this is the unbearable clause — non-dominance within the state and state of affairs that currently governs “you”. Which means the category is not a fact about a people. It is a relationship to whoever presently holds the pen, the gun and, in ultra-contemporary history, the media. In immediate history, the state gets to identify and schedule its own victims. The apparatus most likely to have done the marginalising retains sole custody of the word for the marginalised, and issues it, or withholds it, with an eye for holding under reserves, the scheduled people and deciding on who happens to sit under on the soil in question, and where exactly geographically. This is not a flaw in the system. It functions as intended and is designed exactly to that end, including the indigenous celebrating that status, which is the part I find appalling, if not tragic.
It is laughable how teary-eyed, file-wielding international bureaucrats tout definitions, glibly name the marginalised, yet are unable to articulate the dynamics of marginalisation. Is there not something sinister there?
Yes, despite all that, I possessed a distinct cultural, social, and linguistic identity till the point of my adolescence. Since then, I have forged my independent identity, archaeologically recognised, genealogically affiliated, but never the foundation of my identity, nor was the new identity in pursuit of the ‘indigenous identity’. But, since 2014, because of a form of nationalism holding sway over contemporary Indian culture, I experience marginalisation and subjugation, making me fall into the definitional trap of the ‘indigenous’. Exactly the kind of trap intended by ‘all Indians are indigenous’ framing.
Still, they continue to marginalise me — the authentic indigenous.
Neither am I allowed to marvel at the historical process of admixturing that has created present identities. Nor am I allowed to worry about the ahistorical fact of the dynamics of ‘power’ in this process of colonising. Not even deep history is allowed me; not ancient, not pre-history. Only medieval and modern, only the definitionally convenient reaching back into history is granted. Pre-colonial ancestry, but of what kind of colonialism? British, Mughal — easily declared colonisers. But the Princely and the Feudal? I am grudgingly granted the Princely and the Feudal forms of ‘colonisation’.
With a confidence known to states and the audacity of the raging sentiment among citizens, they have decided who the authentic indigene is. It is not, apparently, someone like me. I have acquired the sensation the word is built to describe — marginal, made to explain myself, subject to a majority’s account of who belongs — and do not because I rebel against the victimising identity, and the archaic definition of me.
The silence of the organisations practising identity-charities under the dictates of the likes of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP 2007), ILO Convention 169 (1989), Martínez Cobo Report, 1980s gets sinister when ‘nationalism’ is the order of the world, and ‘dispossessions’ are the very structural elements of global economic models that these organisations thrive under. Ironically, the governments adopt these with the caveat of ‘all Indians indigenous’ to insist on a common historical enemy, reinforce a non-existent traditional identity, and tear-jerk on symbolic days for the ‘rights of indigenous people’, waxing eloquent in international fora. Still, they continue to marginalise me — the authentic indigenous.
So: solidarity, recognition, commemoration, celebration, diversity, human-rights advocacy, wokeness, virtue-signalling, post-colonial responsibility, global-justice discourse. Ten postures, laid out like items in a restaurant menu, and the invitation is to select one and call it conscience — I reject the food court, not from contempt for anyone whose claim is real, but because the offices of ruling government and identity-charity NGOs have no standing to ask me to feel anything at all.
