Decolonizing Knowledge: Tribal Epistemology and Ontological Pluralism in India

Abstract

This article explores how colonial and postcolonial regimes of knowledge production in India have methodically invalidated the epistemological traditions that tribal communities hold. What has been forfeited here is not a tidy set of utilitarian information, but an entire architecture of knowing, for example: the scaffolding behind how people make sense of the world. If we incorporate Santos’s concept of epistemicide, Mignolo’s coloniality of knowledge, Quijano’s coloniality of power, and Smith’s decolonizing methodologies, together, it becomes possible to place the Indian situation within broader-global debates on decoloniality, while also insisting on its own historical specificity. Central to the article, there is a sustained engagement with the work of Bodhi S. R., whose theorization of tribal knowledge as ability-based, practice-centred, and relationally embedded, and whose conceptual triad of epistemological stability, distortion, and disintegration, offers a more analytically precise vocabulary for theorizing tribal epistemologies than the anthropological frameworks, historically dominated the field. The article discusses the contours of tribal epistemic life through cosmovision, oral tradition, sacred ecology, thereby demonstrating how these dimensions simultaneously constitute ways of knowing. Structural threats, displacement, assimilationist education, biopiracy, and digital-cultural penetration are shown to continue the epistemicidal project through ostensibly developmental means. The article concludes by arguing that the recognition of tribal epistemologies is not a matter of cultural accommodation, rather it should be viewed as cognitive justice - a prerequisite for the pluriversal reorganization of knowledge.