Who is Indigenous to India?

Who is indigenous to India? Who is aboriginal to India? Who is a foreigner? Who is a native? This straightforward question has drawn a lot of ire over the decades because of how politically charged it is. In this article, we must attempt an unbiased and fair analysis that judges popular notions of aboriginality using a consistent standard. Till date, there doesn’t seem to be consensus in India. I argue this is because of epistemic lethargy as most popular newspapers and journals on both sides of the political spectrum have not spent much time in defining the label. This relative haziness around who is indigenous helps serve political purposes in some cases and is just dismissed as common-sense in others. Before you start reading this article, I recommend you to read this article where I explain the genetic history of India. Now, we must begin by listing stereotypes.

The popular perception in Indian academia is that the Aryans are foreigners. The language they spoke is Sanskrit and their religion is Hinduism; this makes both Sanskrit and Hinduism foreign intrusions into India. The aboriginal natives of India are considered to be the Dravidians who inhabited the Indus-Valley Civilization before the Aryans displaced them. Indra therefore, stands accused. One-step above this view is a more nuanced take (often propagated by people who publish non-academic histories) which considers the Dravidians to be foreigners as well (immigrants speaking Proto-Elamite) while a third group, one closely related to the Jarwa of Andaman are deemed indigenous to India (“First Indians”). Another view, common in (but not limited to) Indian nationalist circles, is that the Indus people are the Aryans and they spoke Sanskrit. This makes both Sanskrit and Hinduism indigenous to India. This view is deemed scoffworthy and chauvinistic in academia, influenced by a desire of Indian nationalists to project an eternally untainted and pure past (with nativity corresponding to purity).

However, all the views listed above seem to be abiding to one severely flawed standard of aboriginality. Whether they realize this or not. In short, to be indigenous you must be the direct descendant of the first homo sapiens to reach your geographical land mass after the migrations out of Africa. Indadvertently, all these above positions seem to abide to the doctrine of discovery and the idea of terra nullius to assign land claims to particular groups, which assigns aboriginality and nativity.

I call this standard severely flawed; because first, it is arbitrary. It makes the cut-off the OOA (out of africa) migrations of Homo Sapiens and assigns aboriginality to the first Homo Sapien discoverers/settlers of different landmasses. (keep in mind, other zoological & taxonomic humans such as Neanderthals and Denisovans had already discovered and settled in most of these lands). Second, the definition never explains when someone stops being indigenous or whether the matter is one decided by culture, genetics, language or all of the above. Does an aboriginal in Australia stop being aboriginal if his mother tongue is now English and his culture Western? If not, then aboriginality is genetic. However, does an aboriginal with 25% or 50% or 75% or even 85% European ancestry stop being aboriginal because he is not a direct descendant? (The Australian government doesn’t seem to think so, see this for example).

The third reason; this is not how international cooperative organizations like the United Nations, whose views serve as a directive & unbiased ‘world governance’ standard for media and academia, define aboriginality. This is also not how many state and national governments decide who is indigenous or not, neither is this how popular media outlets in India define autochthonity.

The United Nations for example defines indigenous people as “inheritors and practitioners of unique cultures and ways of relating to people and the environment. They have retained social, cultural, economic and political characteristics that are distinct from those of the dominant societies in which they live” — there is zero mention of aboriginality here or when the ancestors of these indigenous people came to live here. In short, for the UN, someone is indigenous if they have a unique culture that is necessarily a minority culture.

This is what lets them consider the Sami to be indigenous to Scandinavia despite them coming to Scandinavia at least a millenia after the ancestors of modern Norwegians and Swedes (see Ancient Scandinavia : an archaeological history from the first humans to the Vikings, pg 311 onwards for further discussion).

This is also the same standard that lets them consider the Gond, Ho, Munda and Santhal Austroasiatic speaking tribes to be indigenous (ādi-vāsi, lit. first inhabitants) to India despite recent genetic & linguistic evidence showing them to be relatively recent (3-3.5 millenia old) Austroasiatic migrants to India from South-East Asia. This means it’s quite plausible that the much demonized Aryans and the much romanticized tribals came to the subcontinent at the exact same time, or that the Aryans even came to India before the Austroasiatic tribals did. The only difference being where they came from and where they settled (North-West vs. South East).

What to make of the fact that Bantu people like the Zulus (who are today considered indigenous) came to South Africa less than a millenia ago when it was already settled by the Bushmen; thus, by definition, making them colonizers. (For further discussion on the Bantu Iron Age package brought to South Africa, refer to this and this).

What of the Polynesian (and by extension, Austronesian) people, who originally come from modern-day Taiwan but spread all over the Pacific by virtue of their superior sea-faring abilities? Are they indigenous to Taiwan or to New Zealand (where they arrived just 700 years ago)?

Fig 1: the Austronesian expansions. The Maoris reaching New Zealand in 1200 CE

Clearly, pop culture and world government organizations like the UN deem all the above listed people to be indigenous. Though, the definition being used is one based on them being either supressed minorities or having recently faced European colonization. Then you have governments like Australia, which make indigenous identity something based on self-identification. So it doesn’t matter if you speak English or have 90% European ancestry, you are indigenous if you identify as such.

The media doesn’t take these narratives of aboriginality lightly and aggressively pushes for them to be mainstreamed. For example, in India, popular media outlets such as the Scroll erroneously label tribal people as the “original Indians” (ādivāsi) despite the Government of India (GOI) refusing to sign the United Nations C169 - Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169). The Indian government never uses the term ādivāsi either, see this for example.

This means that while the Indian government officially does not recognize any indigenous or ādivāsi people and has refused to be a signatory of the UN convention on this, media outlets and NGOs repeatedly keep pushing the unsubstantiated idea of labelling a section of Indian people as the “original inhabitants”

This does not even take into account that genetic and linguistic research shows many of these tribals (Gond, Munda, Ho, Santhal) are simply ‘foreign migrants’ themselves. If you’re an attentive reader, you’ve understood by now what is going on. There is no scholarly objective (and consistent) standard of aboriginality and the indigenous label is simply being used to delegitimize some groups (majority cultures, dominant groups, recent colonizers) while legitimize other groups (minority cultures, recently colonized people etc). Whenever two groups exist, their power dynamics are judged and the one with the more power is more liable to be considered ‘foreign’ while the one with less power is automatically given the privileged badge of indigenous. I don’t care about the politics behind this; I’m aghast at how no one is talking about what’s really going on here. The average person don’t really think twice when he hears the Munda being called ādivāsi and accepts it prima-facie that the Munda’s ancestors have always been here (for that is how the word indigenous, ādivāsi, native is colloquially understood) while his may not have always been here.

After such a long overview of the whole situation, we must come back to the original conundrum and the pop-culture views of history we listed. We must strike at the heart of the question. What makes the Aryans who came to India four millenia ago (according to modern scholarship) “foreigners” but Austroasiatic tribals who came to India around the same time or slightly later (according to modern scholarship) as ‘adivasi’ ? The answer now seems simple, it is only politics and delegitimization of the dominant ethnic groups.

The solution I propose is quite simple. The Aryans and the Harappans are both native to the Indian subcontinent. Both of these groups have been in the subcontinent for at least 4000 years, stretching up to 9000 or 11,000 years in the case of early Mehrgarh. Rigvedic culture (c. 2000-1200 BCE) was formed not by the Proto-Indo-Aryans but by a population that was a mixture of the Aryans and the Harappans. (See this for further genetic information on this issue).

Most importantly, the Rigvedic people never identified as being foreigners or having a foreign culture that was antagonistic to the ‘locals’

You will find no mention of the Pontic-Caspian Steppes or Balochistan in the Rigveda and for good reason. The tribes that composed this piece of poetry were born and raised in modern-day Punjab, Harayana and Western-Uttar Pradesh. This was their home and the locus mundi of their life. The rivers they praise are the Saraswati, Ganga and Yamuna – not the Volga or Amu Darya. For all practical purposes, these Rigvedic Aryan people considered themselves indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. The Harappan people who mixed with them quickly adopted their culture, language and even their Gods. Many of these putative Harappans would rise to the rank of tribal chieftain (Balbutha, Bribu) and some would even become seer-poets (Kavasa, Kanva) of the Vedic culture. (For more scholarly discussion on this, refer to Harvard Professor of South Asia, Dr. Michael Witzel’s work on Indian prehistory - here and here).

Fig 2: Geographical locus of the Rigveda and its poets.

The table above by Dr. Witzel shows that all the Rigvedic poets lived in India and all the books of the Rigveda were composed in India, specifically in the Punjab. The Rigveda is considered to be the canonical foundational text of Hinduism and it’s complete localization in India by default affords Hindu canon scripture a more privileged status of aboriginality that it affords the Quran or the Bible. This should be non-controversial and quite clear to most. The Bible does not become an Old Norse text composed by Vikings just because someone wants it to be; it arose out of a Jewish culture in the Levant and was redacted by Jews in the Levant. The Quran arose in a Middle East where people were either Christians or Pagan Arabs or Zoroastrians. The Quran was composed by Arabs and in Arabic. The holiest sites of Islam are in the Middle East, not in India. Hinduism by contrast, originated wholly in the subcontinent of India. The holiest pilgrimage sites of Hinduism are in India. It’s scripture speaks entirely of India and puts India as a privileged land (karmabhūmi) above other lands. This should suffice to explain why Hinduism gets privileged status in nativity claims in India but Islam and Christianity don’t.

To conclude this post, it must be kept in mind that the standards being used to classify aboriginality cannot be different for different cultures. If your arbitrary standard is that first homo sapien settlement in a landmass makes someone indigenous — then be my guest and get most of the world to stop calling themselves indigenous first. Start policing a 100% blood-quantum and linguistic purity to ensure that only “real descendants” of the “first settlers” can be indigenous. This won’t happen, ever. Neither will pop-culture media, NGOs or the United Nations stop considering later-migrants like the Mundas or Sami or the Zulu as indigenous people.

So why should most non-tribal Indians of the dominant culture, be whatsoever their caste or regional status, stop considering themselves indigenous to the subcontinent? And why should they stop considering their religion indigenous to the subcontinent? The question is rhetorical but the answer is simple; they shouldn’t.

For all practical purposes, we are suggesting that ethnic groups such as the Marathis, Bengalis, Tamils, Telugus, Kannadas etc are all indigenous to India. Not just the limited number of 8% tribals.