The conversation around Indigeneity within Global political and cultural movements has gained increasing academic attention in recent years (Daigle 2024). Indigenous communities worldwide have become more visible in articulating their struggles for both cultural and physical survival in contemporary contexts. This heightened visibility has secured a growing presence on the international stage. Yet, despite these gains, interactions between sovereign states and Indigenous communities are often overlooked. Too frequently, Indigenous peoples are treated as a homogenous global category rather than as diverse, autonomous collectives with distinct cultures, epistemologies, and political traditions.

It is against this backdrop that Debasree De’s Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Indigeneity in India: A Local Perspective on a Global Movement (Springer, 2025) makes an important intervention. In this work, De offers a critical and needed examination of Indigenous communities in India and their ongoing struggles with colonial powers, state intervention, and cultural erasure. The book engages with key issues in moulding Indigenous existence in contemporary India, including the rise of Hindutva politics, the legal and political implications of language, questions of environmental coloniality, and enduring global concerns around territory and land rights.

The book’s strength lies in its phenomenological exploration of how Indian Indigenous communities encounter, negotiate, and resist the ongoing coloniality of state structures. De convincingly demonstrates how Indigenous autonomy is systematically rendered non-threatening to state sovereignty, while drawing comparative insights from case studies of First Nations in Canada and Aboriginal communities in Australia. These comparisons provide a broader analytic frame, situating the Indian experience within global Indigenous struggles while also highlighting India’s unique colonial dimensions.

In this language, and its semiotic and political implications, emerges as a central theme in De’s analysis. She demonstrates how the vocabulary of “Indigeneity” is often mobilized reductively within globalized discourses, displacing Indigenous peoples from substantive participation in state-building conversations. As De writes: “The inroads of colonialism continue to influence the postcolonial perception of traditional culture and its related constructions which are translated into indigenous traditional culture itself of the contemporary time and deter the process of the accommodation of fundamental indigenous principles into the modern nation-building process” (De 2025, 64).

The work is theoretically ambitious, with De seemingly and unknowingly engaging with key decolonial theorists like Quijano (2000) and their theory of the coloniality of power, but applying it through an Indian context. Here, De illustrates how the Indian state does not rely exclusively on forms of coercion, but through engaging with forms of consent, soft power, and cultural assimilation. Highlighting and drawing the reader’s attention to how these forms of coloniality are used to undermine Indigenous sovereignty. This approach is particularly evident in her analysis of Indigenous rituals, festivals, and religions chapter, with the case of the Oraons, India’s fourth-largest tribal group. That since the 1970s, with the rise of the Hindutva movement has sought to convert Indigenous groups to Hinduism. Despite fundamental epistemological differences, most notably the rejection of caste hierarchies (De 2025). In this, such pressures, De argues, constitute a form of assimilation that displaces and erases Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies with wider state-sanctioned ontological and cultural practices that ultimately work in consolidating state power.

In this, by foregrounding assimilation and erasure as central strategies of state power, De (2025) demonstrates how Indigenous communities in India are systematically incorporated into the dominant polity in ways that weaken their claims to sovereignty and land. Resistance becomes less effective, both politically and legally, as Indigenous peoples are redefined as “minorities” within the Indian nation-state rather than as sovereign Indigenous nations.

In carefully tracing these dynamics across domains of culture, law, language, education, and territorial politics, De provides a rigorous and nuanced analysis of the Indian state’s ongoing colonial practices. Far from treating colonialism as a historical episode, Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Indigeneity in India illustrates how coloniality remains an active, structuring force in contemporary governance in India that operates to render Indigenous peoples politically, socially, culturally, and economically incapable of living outside and independently of India’s colonial state apparatus (Quijano 2000).

In this, De’s empirical and theoretical work in the book is an invaluable contribution to Indigenous studies and South Asian scholarship. De’s insights illuminate the specificities of Indigenous struggles in India while also advancing comparative conversations within global Indigenous politics. Through demonstrating how a state like India reproduces colonial patterns of power, De reminds us that colonialism is not merely a relic of the past but an ongoing process that continues to shape the lives and futures of Indigenous peoples today.

References:

Daigle, M. (2024). Indigenous peoples’ geographies I: Indigenous spatialities beyond place through relational, mobile and hemispheric & global approaches. Progress in Human Geography, 49(2), 182-193. 

Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology, 15(2), 215-232. 

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Cole Virk is a PhD student within the Human Geography department at the University of Sheffield.