Can design become the language through which India finally connects welfare with authorship – protection with participation?
On the occasion of 125 years of Birsa Munda’s Ulgulan, the Tribal Design Forum reflects on what ails the economic prosperity of India’s tribal communities – and whether design can be a tool to address it.
“Let the land and the forest be our teachers.” – Birsa Munda
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Birsa-Ulgulan Context
When we remember Birsa Munda, we remember courage. But the deeper legacy is a philosophy: that people, land, and knowledge are inseparable and must be stewarded together. Ulgulan was not only an uprising against exploitation; it was a call to reorder the moral economy – to place custodianship at the core of governance and daily life. Across seventy-eight years of nationhood, India made two powerful machines run in parallel. One machine, led by ministries, was engineered to protect: it delivered schemes, reserved spaces, and sought to shield communities from harm. The second, led by design institutions, was engineered to produce: it fashioned symbols for a modern nation, incubated industries, and accelerated innovation. Somewhere between these two machines, custodianship – the principle that creation must remain linked to its community of origin – was quietly set aside.
Policies – How the Language of Welfare Forgot the Logic of Custodianship
The ministries approached tribal life as a question of vulnerability to be managed. The vocabulary of policy reflected this: beneficiary, protection, implementation, impact. In that grammar, creativity appeared either as heritage to preserve or as livelihood to subsidise. What it rarely became was intellectual property to co-own or revenue to share. Because custodianship was never a declared objective, instruments to enable it were never built. There were mechanisms for physical security and service delivery, but few for shared authorship, benefit-ledgers, or recurring royalties. The State excelled at distributing value created elsewhere, not at recognising the value created within communities and ensuring it continued to circulate there. Even when policies engaged culture, they did so as spectacle, not as a system of rights. Over time, this produced a paradox. Success was measured by the scale of protection offered –numbers covered, funds disbursed – but not by the extent of sovereignty gained – ideas credited, enterprises created, returns shared. In the ledger of policy, custodianship had no column.
Practices (Design) – Innovation Without Reciprocity
Design institutions, meanwhile, oriented themselves to modernity and markets. In studios and labs, the language was ambitious: innovation, systems thinking, impact. The tribal world was present — as colour, motif, material, and story – yet mostly as input, not as co-authorship. Projects travelled a familiar arc: observe, extract, adapt, present. Aesthetic distance replaced ethical proximity. Appropriation could look like admiration when credit lines were optional and benefit-sharing was unimaginable. Production cycles rewarded novelty and visibility; they did not ask where the novelty came from, or whom visibility should lift. Because custodianship was not a criterion of excellence, it could not become a habit of practice. The portfolio glowed while the provenance dimmed. And slowly, a generation of designers learned to treat tribal epistemology as a resource bank – limitless, ownerless, and consequence-free.
The Tribal Gap
What Disappears When Custodianship Is Missing
What was lost in this dual forgetting was not only income. It was continuity. Custodianship is how knowledge survives: through credit that affirms origin, through contracts that sustain practice, through reciprocity that keeps relationships alive. The gap appears in small, telling ways. A pattern migrates without a name. A ritual becomes an aesthetic without a story. A healing practice is translated into a product without a license. The community that holds the memory becomes a backdrop to the market that holds the profit. When custodianship is absent, the future behaves like the past: communities remain visible as symbols and invisible as stakeholders. Innovation advances, dignity stalls. The economy grows, the authors vanish. That is how a nation can ‘celebrate’ its indigenous heritage and still fail its indigenous people.
How Can It Be Bridged?
Four Near-term Moves
To remember custodianship is to rebuild the bridge between protection and production. The work is practical and proximate:
• Name the source – require clear attribution to the community or knowledge-holder wherever tribal epistemology informs a design, product, or service.
• Share the return – attach a small royalty, equity warrant, or benefit-share to downstream use; publish a simple ledger of flows.
• Co-create, not consult – if a project draws on tribal knowledge, seat tribal co-authors at the table from brief to launch.
• Teach the ethic – make custodianship a learning outcome in design curricula and a principle in project rubrics.
These are not burdens; they are mechanisms of continuity. They keep value where it was born long enough to nourish the next generation – and they invite the nation to participate not in charity, but in fairness.
A Call to the Custodians & Reflections for Tribal Professionals
If you are a tribal professional – designer, strategist, administrator, technologist – you stand at the place where systems can be rewritten. Custodianship will not arrive as a policy alone; it will arrive as a practice that you normalise in your teams and contracts. Start small and near. Write attribution into your next brief. Ask who the origin is and how return will flow. When you recruit, look for co-authors in the community, not only informants. When you publish, put the custodians’ names in the light. This is profitable work: it builds reputation anchored in respect, attracts partners who value integrity, and opens markets seeking traceable, ethical creation. It is stimulating work: it will challenge your craft to be precise about provenance and generous about credit. It is giving-back work: it lets you translate opportunity into continuity for the villages and voices that shaped you. You are not leaving the world you’ve earned a place in. You are enlarging it – until it can finally recognise where you come from.
Call to Action
Engage with the Tribal Design Forum to explore these possibilities further – and to co-create practical custodianship tools for your organisation or project.
If this article resonated with you, tell me in one line what stayed with you – even by DM.
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Disclaimer
This essay is published by the Tribal Design Forum (TDF) as part of its ongoing public-awareness series What India and Its Tribal Communities Have Lost. It represents an independent research-reflection initiative under Ulgulan 2025 and does not necessarily reflect the official views of any ministry, design institution, or governmental agency. The content is intended for educational, archival, and dialogue-building purposes under the Fifth Schedule framework, UNESCO–WIPO guidelines on Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, and the TDF Custodianship Principles. All references to historical figures, institutions, or programmes are for contextual analysis only. Reproduction or citation is permitted with acknowledgment of Tribal Design Forum (2025)
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To explore how tribal epistemology can reshape the future of knowledge, design and authorship – and to read more insights, essays and reflections at the intersection of indigenous knowledge and innovation – visit www.ulgulan2025.com
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Whether you’re curious about custodianship, intellectual sovereignty, or how tribal communities are reframing design and scholarship, there’s much to learn and engage with.
