Adivasis and Comparative Indigeneity: Decolonial and Postcolonial Perspectives
In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in “decolonial” theory. How does decolonial thinking align with the growing Adivasi activist and intellectual movement in India? Can the experiences of Adivasis be compared to those of indigenous communities elsewhere -- including North and South America, Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand), and elsewhere?
Much decolonial thinking is loosely aligned with expanding on the broad foundation of postcolonial theory, with a specific emphasis on the experience of displaced and dispossessed indigenous people. For these communities, the end of formal European colonial control did not lead to actual substantive independence. Rather, they remained colonized as internal minorities. Within India, for example, Adivasi communities have had some meaningful protections in the form of reservations and protection of traditional "tribal" lands, but they have also frequently experienced displacement and dispossession, as well as a mainstream culture that looks down on their cultures, religious practices, and language. Adivasis are also outside of the traditional caste system, and as a result their interests and orientation to politics are aligned with Dalit communities (though the two groups are not the same). As a result, Adivasi languages are under threat and many are disappearing, while Adivasi communiites are experiencing impoverishment and emigration.
To fight the loss of language, a growing number of Adivasi writers aim to write in their own languages, and some self-translate to Hindi or English. In some cases, Adivasi writers, discovering that their language might not have a traditional script, have in fact created their own.
All of the patterns described above are explored in detail in Adivasi literature featured on this site.
Some Adivasi writers have made the comparison to other indigenous experiences explicit. One example might be this story by Adivasi journalist Gladson Dungdung, where he compares the situation of Adivasi children in Tribal boarding schools to that of Native Americans in the U.S. Also check out this poem by Anuj Lugun that makes the comparison with respect to land rights and settler colonialism.
Below, I’ll try and explore postcolonial and decolonial perspectives on the question of comparative indigeneity, acknowledging the complexity entailed in making valid comparisons. Our sense is that the word “decoloniality” is sometimes used loosely and with only a vague understanding of cultural specificity and local political factors. There is not a single “decolonial theory” that is equally and straightforwardly applicable to all indigenous communities. Rather, there may be different decolonial accounts that adhere to different communities, and our use of this term requires nuance.
Decolonization – Postcolonial and Decolonial Approaches
Let us begin with a basic concept in postcolonial theory, the concept of decolonization of the mind.
African writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe have debated the linguistic legacies of colonialism; their exchange has been a particularly important site for thinking through the challenges of decolonization. Ngugi has written highly influential esays on the role of English in leading educated Kenyans under British colonialism into a mentality of subservience. In his 1986 book, Decolonizing the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature, Ngugi writes of how British colonialism in Kenya entailed “the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the coloniser” (Ngugi 1986: 16). For Ngugi, there is a direct link between language as a means of communication and language as a means of transmitting and disseminating culture through storytelling.
Under colonialism, this link was disrupted for many Kenyans, leading to a psychic state Ngugi describes as “colonial alienation.” In response, Ngugi advocates that writers in newly independent African and Asian nations return to their communities’ primary languages: “I believe that my writing in Gikuyu language, a Kenyan language, an African language, is part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggles of Kenyan and African peoples” (Ngugi, 1986: 28). Moreover, Ngugi is highly attuned to the ways in which literature operates institutionally. In his essay, “On the Abolition of the English Department” (1972), Ngugi pointedly describes how the institutional division of knowledge (specifically the divide between “English department” and the “Department of African Languages” at the University of Nairobi as it existed at the time of the essay’s publication) perpetuated the marginalization of knowledge about African societies. As a result, Ngugi advocated the creation of a Department of African Languages and Literatures which was to include education in both Kenyan languages and a “selected course in European literature” (Ngugi 1972; cited in Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 440).
Many of these dynamics are by know well-known in other formerly colonized regions of the world. However, unfortunately, the hegemonic status of Englsh remains unchanged since Ngugi wrote the words quoted above. Also, the transition to digital communication and a world connected via the internet and social media has only further intensified the status of English as the language of global business and technology. However, in recent years there has been a vibrant growth of internet activity in Indian languages; there are, for example, many materials on Adivasi literature that are presently available in Hindi but not in English.
On "Decoloniality"
The term decoloniality might be a helpful umbrella term that denotes the evolving ways in which contemporary world writers have continued to “decolonize the mind.” Decoloniality is in widespread use in the Latin American studies context, where it is particularly strongly linked to the ideas and work of the Argentine theorist Walter Mignolo, as well as Anibal Quijano, Catherine Walsh, Gurminder Bhambra, and amany others. However, the mode of analysis and ideological orientation that Mignolo refers to as the “decolonial option” might also be a powerful mode of thought for understanding contemporary world literature in other geographic regions, including writing from Asia and Africa as well as indigenous writing from North America and Australia.
Decoloniality, as articulated by Mignolo, involves several epistemological shifts from the dominant, colonial model. One is the turn towards what Mignolo describes as an “irreversible polycentric world order” under capitalism (Mignolo 2011: xiv). For Mignolo, in contrast to Marxists like Hardt and Negri, capitalism itself doesn’t constitute a new order or space of hegemonic totality, but is rather a space of contestation between East and West, North and South (Mignolo suggests that emerging economic powers such as China and Brazil work within global capitalism to achieve versions of what he calls “dewesternization,” leading to an increasingly decentralized world economic order). British social theorist Gurminder Bhambra has suggested that the difference of perspective between Marxist, Postcolonialist, and Decolonialist thinking is at least partly disciplinary -- decolonial critics tend to be much more influenced by world systems theory than do Marxist and postcolonial thinkers (Bhambra 2014).
A second key premise in decolonial thinking is that relations of power in developing nations are as likely to be dominated by local elites for their own interests as by powerful transnational forces like the large multinational corporations or the political elites in Europe and North America. Thus, the ongoing project of decolonization in Bolivia or Peru is as much oriented towards challenging the local dominance of ethnically white groups, and systematically rewriting the national narrative with an emphasis on the indigenous population as well as the descendents of slaves. Thus, Mignolo cites the “Indianismo” embraced by political figures like Bolivia’s Evo Morales as exemplars of a decolonizing turn in contemporary Latin American politics.
Decolonial critiques have been emerging in North American Studies as well, with the growing emphasis on indigenous people in contemporary literature and theory. For contemporary indigenous writers like Tommy Orange, exploring Native American lives and cultural legacies, the prospect for a conventional end to settler colonialism seem improbable, even impossible. But a different kind of decolonizing mission is envisioned by this group of writers: a strong impulse to renarrate key features of North American history around the narratives of dispossession, displacement, and the genocide of indigenous peoples.
It may be that a version of this analytical framework could be applied in Asia, particularly South Asia, where it could be linked to the longstanding debates about subalternity. If decoloniality in Latin America asks us to consider the legacy of European colonialism and the dispossession of indigenous peoples as an ongoing epistemological problem, in a society like South Asia, a decolonial mode of analysis might lead us to challenge the continued subjugation of Adivasis, Dalits, and women and sexual minorities from all of these communities as a type of colonial dominance.
This site will consider how Adivasi writers themselves might be understood as contributing to that project.
Maximalist Decoloniality
As the above account hopefully indicates, alongside a general usage of "decolonial" to signify alignment with indigenous communities, there is also a somewhat more specific usage of “decoloniality” that theorists like Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh have put forward. This is a more aggressive usage, which suggests a desire to “delink” indigenous epistemology and culture from mainstream, colonial narratives. On the one hand, exploring this mode of thought often leads to challenging thought-experiments: if the name “America” honors a figure associated with the Spanish / European colonialism, what might happen if we renamed it using indigenous names for the same territories – Abya Yala (a term used by the Kuna Tule people of the Darien Gap to describe North America), or Turtle Island, based on a creation myth told by indigenous communities from the northeastern part of North America (Iroquois, Lenape, and Ojibwe)?
Catherine Walsh lays out a theory of decoloniality that aligns with what one might think of as a ‘maximalist’ position:
Decoloniality denotes ways of thinking, knowing, being, and doing that began with, but also precede, the colonial enterprise and invasion. It implies the recognition and undoing of the hierarchical structures of race, gender, heteropatriarchy, and class that continue to control life, knowledge, spirituality, and thought, structures that are clearly intertwined with and constitutive of global capitalism and Western modernity. Moreover, it is indicative of the ongoing nature of struggles, constructions, and creations that continue to work within coloniality’s margins and fissures to affirm that which coloniality has attempted to negate. (“The Decolonial For,” 17)
The position articulated by Walsh and Mignolo suggests a fairly radical reorientation to structures of power and the positing of an alternative to “global capitalism and Western modernity.” However, it may be that the maximalist position is difficult to sustain as colonialism and colonial modernity remain indisputable facts of life, and nation-states established via settler colonialism remain do not appear to be going anywhere. It is promising to consider saying Turtle Island instead of "America," but without meaningfully delinking across a range of areas it may be merely window-dressing -- a kind of empty symbolism.
Adivasiyat
Some Adivasi activists express positions that align with the maximalist decoloniality described above. A South Asian analogue to decoloniality might be “Adivasiyat,” a philosophical orientation to indigenous cultures, religious practice, and epistemology that might be translated as “Adivasi-ness.”
A recent collection of Adivasi writings expresses views along these lines. Here for example is Roshan Praveen Xalxo introducing his interpretation of Adivasiyat:
That inner voice of the community brings forth the indigeneity or ‘Adivasiyat’ — a strong sense of connection to land, nature, spirits and community. With modernity unsettling the life of a tribal person, a fusion in life must be sought to preserve the tradition and culture. (Xalxo, “Tribal Philosophy: Fusion of Tradition and Modernity” from India’s Indigenous Peoples 2021)
Other writers, including many of the writers represented on this site, might articulate a slightly different approach to the subject. Writers like Abhay Flavian Xaxa or Honsda Sowvendra Shekhar, for example, seem to express a more pragmatic approach – insisting on Adivasi rights and cultural identity without necessarily understanding that as other to or separate from the realities of modern Indian political and cultural life.
As we continue to expand this site, we will dive further into Adivasiyat as a philosophy and as a possible South Asian indigenous analogue to decolonial theory.