In the last piece where I started a conversation on a civilizational approach to “blasphemy” in the context of Section 295A of the IPC, I had ended the piece with the following questions:
“How does one determine the indigeneity of thought? Does this translate to recognition of the concept of terroir of a certain thought i.e. the territory in which a certain position holds sway owing to the nexus between civilization and territory of its origin? Such a question is often erroneously conflated and confused with nexus between ethnicity and territory which, I dare say, is a colonial, superficial and hence skin-deep approach, pun intended. The questions that must engage us are- how is the nexus between a thought and territory established? Is it through conquest or conversion or does it need to be more organic? Or do all three modes have a role to play in carving out a territory or a sphere of influence for a certain worldview?”
Before addressing the scholarly literature on these questions, I think it is important to understand the current legal lay of the land on “indigenous peoples” and “indigeneity”. The Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations concerns itself with issues relating to Indigenous Peoples and a Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) was established by it in 2000. In September 2007, the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was adopted by the General Assembly, which appears to be the most current international instrument that captures some form of a global consensus on who constitute indigenous peoples and what their rights are. The Declaration has been adopted by 148 countries with 11 abstentions (Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burundi, Colombia, Georgia, Kenya, Nigeria, Russian Federation, Samoa and Ukraine). According to the official website of the UN:
“Today the Declaration is the most comprehensive international instrument on the rights of indigenous peoples. It establishes a universal framework of minimum standards for the survival, dignity and well-being of the indigenous peoples of the world and it elaborates on existing human rights standards and fundamental freedoms as they apply to the specific situation of indigenous peoples.”
The premises embedded in these claims and the nature of the claims themselves warrant examination. However, let us first get a sense of what the document contains and does not contain before dissecting it for its assumptions. In any case, the assumptions can be understood fully only with reference to its drafting history i.e. its travaux préparatoires. While the Declaration enumerates the rights of “indigenous peoples” in 46 Articles, the term itself has not been defined. Even the International Labour Organization (ILO) which has a longer history of working on the rights of “indigenous peoples” does not have a definition for the term.
The term has been broadly understood by scholars as referring “to the living descendants of pre-invasion inhabitants of lands now dominated by others”. While on the face of it this definition is broad and could throw up more questions than it addresses, by and large, such non-legal definitions have evolved based on the consensus that the status of being indigenous has a specific temporal and locational reference to it i.e. those peoples who inhabited a certain geography (which is different from the use of “territory”) prior to the advent of the European colonizer, especially the European settler colonizer, which is between the 15th and 18th centuries. Clearly, indigenous peoples as a term has an oppositional origin which is based on the colonizer’s point of entry into their societies.
Does this mean that the identity of indigenous peoples is necessarily tied to the European colonizer, even if in oppositional terms? Do they not have an independent identity and consciousness of their own, both not being the same? It may help to understand that the need for identification of indigenous peoples has arisen from the factum of colonization and decolonization which devastated their ways of life, perhaps irreparably and irreversibly, given the forced insertion of the coloniality/modernity/rationality complex by the European colonizer in every colonized society. Therefore, the identification of the self in this case is necessitated by the domination of the self by the other to whom othering was central to his worldview. This means othering is inevitable and inescapable if one squares up to history notwithstanding our current-day self-styled professions of universalism, globalism and cosmopolitanism, all of which rest on colonial foundations and universalization of a specific provincial thought, namely European/Western thought.
Having said the above, was the process of othering or the establishing of an othered relationship limited to the transaction between the colonizer and the colonized? Or was the transaction with reference to a third entity? At least from the perspective of the European colonizer, the transaction with indigenous peoples which took the shape of colonization was only incidental to his true objective- acquisition of territory for his worldview and subjugation through conversion or elimination of those who stood in the way. The colonizer had no use for indigenous peoples because they were impediments to his Divine right to establish his dominion over nature/land/territory. The only Divine purpose fulfilled by the colonized indigenous peoples was to present the Christian European colonizer with an opportunity to fulfil his Christian obligation, namely to pierce and save the soul of the savage heathen with the Word of God. Given the tendency to reduce such issues to politics of land and access to resources, which is only one half of the story and is the colonizer’s half, the identity of indigenous peoples and their indigeneity must be understood firstly through the prism of their ontology towards nature/land, and contrasted with the colonizer’s approach to land. I will discuss this in the next piece.
J. Sai Deepak is an Advocate practising as an arguing counsel before the Supreme Court of India and the High Court of Delhi.