Every year on 9th August, the United Nations calls upon the world to observe the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples. It is a day marked by panels, policy reports, cultural showcases, and social media hashtags. The intention is noble: to highlight the struggles, rights, and contributions of Indigenous peoples across the globe. But as the date approaches again, one cannot help but ask — what does this "international" day mean to the tribal communities of India? Does this commemoration speak from within their lived experiences, or does it impose an imported framework upon them? This is not a rhetorical question. In an age of increasing global convergence, such international observances have a way of becoming the dominant way of remembering. And yet, the very notion of indigeneity in India does not sit comfortably within the categories prescribed by the West.
The Indian Context:
India is home to over 700 recognised Scheduled Tribes. From the Gonds of Central India to the Dimasa Kacharis of Assam, from the Santhals of Jharkhand to the Apatanis of Arunachal Pradesh, these communities constitute a vast archive of indigenous knowledge and ecological wisdom. But unlike in settler colonial societies, Indian tribal societies were not completely displaced from their lands (though many have been pushed to the margins due to colonial imperialism). Nor were their cultures erased in the same way.
Instead, what we find in India is something unique: a continuity of Indigenous knowledge and cosmology that has persisted across centuries, resisting erasure even in the face of colonial disruption, modernist rationality, and global homogenisation. This cultural continuity is not merely about the survival of rituals or festivals, but the endurance of entire epistemic frameworks — ways of knowing, being, and relating to the natural and metaphysical worlds. They are not communities waiting to be remembered. They are communities that have always remembered themselves.
This is where the International Day, as currently framed, begins to feel inadequate. Its model of indigeneity is rooted in a binary of absence and recovery, trauma and representation. But in India — it is about presence, persistence and regeneration
Tribal communities have contributed to India's civilisational ethos not merely as peripheral or folkloric presences, but as foundational knowledge bearers whose ecological wisdom, cosmological insights, and ethical lifeways have informed agriculture, medicine, festivals, linguistic practices, and spiritual worldviews This enduring presence calls for a re-writing of Indian history that centers Indigenous perspectives not as residues of the past, but as custodians of cultural continuity and sustainable futures.
Tribal Festivals as Memory:
In Western discourses on indigeneity, there is a heavy focus on recovering forgotten rituals and restoring lost languages. In contrast, many tribal communities in India continue to mark time through their own calendars, linked to the moon, the crops, the river, and the ancestors.
For eg the Dimasa Bushudima festival is a communion with ancestors through song and rhythm — a way of affirming belonging to a lineage and a land. The Sarhul festival of the Oraon, Munda and Ho community is a celebration of sacred groves and the flowering of Sal trees, tied to ideas of fertility and renewal. Kharchi Puja in Tripura has strong tribal roots in its worship of earth deities and the cleansing of ancestral sins. These are not cultural artefacts on display.
The Problem of External Recognition:
The roots of this distortion lie deep in colonial anthropology and missionary ethnography. These disciplines, under the guise of scientific inquiry or moral upliftment, often reduced Indigenous life worlds to data points, rituals to spectacles, and oral traditions to primitive folklore. Such categorisation robbed communities of their intellectual dignity. Colonial archives classified Indigenous people as 'subjects' to be governed and studied — not as thinkers, philosophers, or theorists in their own right. The legacy of this objectification persists in modern academia and policy discourse, where tribal knowledge is often viewed as secondary, pre-modern, or quaint.
Towards Rooted Celebrations:
In this context, the observance of 9th August should be approached not merely as a symbolic act, but as an opportunity to decolonise our understanding of tribal life. Rather than mimic global formats, we must turn to our own cultural landscape and ask: How do Indian tribal communities remember themselves? What are their modes of archiving memory, history, and resistance?
For tribal communities in India, Janajati Gaurav Diwas — commemorated on 15th November — is not merely a calendar event. It is a day born of memory, resistance, and reverence. Marked on the birth anniversary of Birsa Munda, a legendary tribal freedom fighter and spiritual leader, the day offers an opportunity to move beyond symbolic recognition towards self-defined celebration.
It is declaration of civilisational continuity and Indigenous ethics.
Let us reflect not just on what is remembered, but how and why it is remembered. For many tribal communities in India, the deepest forms of memory are not marked by declarations or dates. They are marked in the grain of rice offered to ancestors, the first song taught to a child, the sacred grove that is never cut, and the ritual that welcomes the monsoon. The real work of honouring Indigenous life is not performed on stage. It is carried in nature, forests, in courtyards, in prayer, and in the quiet dignity of communities that have never needed a reminder to remember who they are.
The writer is Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Systems at the Jawaharlal Nehru University