The Tribal Dances No More.

An Open Letter to the Pradhan Sevak

My dear Pradhan Sevak Ji,

I write this to you in the evening, taking a slow sip of ಕಳ್ಳು (Kallu)—fresh, earthy toddy from the local gadang angadi —while watching news anchors on television bellowing with the kind of manufactured rage that usually precedes a bad stomach.

Every evening, your loud-mouthed cheerleaders preach the gospel of “One Nation, One Language”. They dress it up in the shiny foil of national unity, painting the country in a single, monotonous shade of saffron. To hear them tell it, anyone who doesn’t speak Hindi, bow to the same central authority, or worship in the pre-approved, standardized manner is practically a traitor.

What utter, unadulterated nonsense. What is this bizarre, unnatural obsession with a monochrome India? We are a land that naturally worships a sprawling, chaotic pantheon of thousands of localized gods, spirits, and guardians. To try and collapse that infinite spectrum into a single, regimented, monochrome mold is an insult to the very cosmos this country arose from.

India was never meant to be a monolithic government block. It was meant to be an unruly, vibrant, chaotic bazaar. But in your zeal to flatten this country into a single, uniform stamp, you are suffocating the very soul of the land—the indigenous, tribal, and regional cultures that were here long before your ideologues invented their ideas of statehood.

Look closely at Tulu Nadu. Long before Parashurama supposedly brought the Brahmins to the coast, indigenous people lived in deep, spiritual reciprocity with the land. When the Brahmins arrived, they didn’t conquer this landscape with rigid dogmas; they had to survive by absorbing what was already there. To this day, even the most traditional Brahmin families in Tulu Nadu rely on the Daivas—the family Bhoota, the protective Yaksha, and the fierce Naga—for protection and guidance. These are not Sanskritic imports; they are indigenous spirits, absorbed directly from the people who walked these forests first.

When people are in deep distress, they don’t climb the marble steps of a grand, standardized temple to listen to high-handed moralizing in a language they barely speak. They go to Koragajja or worship the local Bhootas.

Now, your clean-cut, pure-vegetarian cultural police would probably faint at the sight: Koragajja isn’t offered pristine, sanskritized prayers. He is given a bottle of raw, unrefined ಕಳ್ಳು -ಕೊರಿ, (local brew and meat) and beedis. He is a fierce, earthy, un-saffronized spirit born of the marginalized, meeting people right in the dirt where their actual lives are lived.

When you ignore this, you ignore the deep, festering generational trauma of oppressed indigenous peoples who have been systematically dispossessed, erased, and pushed to the absolute margins. Is it any wonder, then, that when state oppression meets decades of unaddressed indigenous trauma, it ignites into armed rebellion and Maoist insurgencies? Armed conflict doesn’t grow in a vacuum; it grows in the fertile soil of cultural erasure, stolen lands, and forced silence.

Indigenous culture isn’t a museum piece to be displayed on Republic Day floats while you bulldoze forests and homogenize traditions the rest of the year. These traditions are living, breathing archives. They know how to handle human suffering, generational pain, and local wisdom through raw, unfiltered community.

When you force a single language and a single, rigid cultural mold onto a nation this vast, you aren’t unifying it—you are cutting its roots. You are shaming the young tribal population and the southern youth that their ancestors’ tongue, their local spirits, and the way of life are inferior to the grand Hindi-belt narrative.

When an elder is forced to give up cultural autonomy to fit your state-approved “tradition,” it isn’t unity; it is oppression. And when the youth rebel against this imposed silence, their anxiety and rage aren’t just modern insolence—it is a desperate fight for survival. They are trying to save themselves from inheriting a sterile, homogenized wasteland where everyone speaks the same tongue, sings the same tune, and thinks the exact same approved thoughts.

True strength lies in having the stomach for chaos, diversity, and difference.

So drop the delusion of turning this magnificent, messy country into a single, regimented ashram. Stop treating indigenous heritage like an inconvenience to be ironed out. Sit down, listen to the voices at the margins, learn to tolerate a little raw kallu alongside your pure ghee, and ask yourself the only question that will actually matter to history:

Out of vulgar curiosity … do you even pause to ask…”What is my legacy?” or do you need Jai from Aiyari to ask you, “aap ke generation hamare generation ko virasat mein kya choda?”

No, insecticide is not the answer.