Systemic neglect of India’s Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups: colonial legacies, linguistic erasure, and structural exclusion in education and governance
Original framing: “UPSC Mains Answer Practice GS 1 (Week 155) : protection of PVTGs and role of Persian in colonial and pre-colonial India” — bing news
PVTGs’ knowledge systems—such as their oral histories, medicinal plant practices, and agroecological techniques—are systematically excluded from mainstream education, including UPSC syllabi. Colonial linguistics (Persian) was imposed as a tool of administrative control, but pre-colonial India also saw elite Sanskritization that marginalized tribal languages, revealing a continuum of linguistic oppression. Indigenous scholars like Ganesh Devy argue that tribal languages encode ecological wisdom critical for climate resilience, yet these are dismissed as 'unscientific' in bureaucratic frameworks.
The UPSC’s framing of PVTG protection as a bureaucratic exercise reveals how colonial linguistics (Persian) and postcolonial statecraft have institutionalized marginalization, turning tribal communities into subjects of 'development' rather than sovereign actors.
This narrative serves India’s administrative class by centering standardized knowledge systems that exclude 75% of India’s endangered languages, many of which are tribal. Yet, as the Zapatistas and Māori have shown, linguistic and land sovereignty are inseparable: when tribal languages thrive, so do forests, and vice versa. The solution lies not in tweaking UPSC syllabi but in dismantling the colonial epistemologies that underpin them, replacing bureaucratic 'protection' with legal pluralism, economic autonomy, and epistemic justice. The trickster’s insight—seeing Persian as both colonizer and collaborator in oppression—exposes the absurdity of a system that claims to serve 'meritocracy' while erasing the very communities it purports to uplift. True systemic change would require civil servants to unlearn their elite training, a paradox that only radical reform can resolve.