In this article, Viswanath discusses her five-month fieldwork with the Irular nomadic tribe in India. She documented the tribe’s customary songs and dances, through which they narrate their experience with law and the State. Above is an illustration of the Irular customary dance, by Surbhi Badhani, used as part of Viswanath’s legal argument.
A quick look at the results of a “cultural rights” query in any search engine is enough to realise their visibility in international law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community;" the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) tells us that all peoples should be able to “freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development,” and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) establishes the rights of minorities “to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language.” It is clear, then, that cultural rights are important.
But what are they?
"Fair question," answers Raghavi Viswanath, EUI Department of Law researcher and expert on international human rights law. "To some communities, it is their language, or spiritual practices, or food, or material heritage. Ultimately, it is about your cultural identity and worldview. But what I found in my research is that there is a very limited understanding of what even constitutes culture for communities who are not Western, because their thought was never given space within international law."
The point of departure for Viswanath’s research project was the analysis of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which codify cultural rights and bind 180 nations – almost the entire world. By analysing the jurisprudence of these treaties, she gained insight into how they are interpreted and implemented. What she found was a very romanticised interpretation of culture, overly focused on concepts such as nature, harmony, uniqueness, and materiality.
“It is a very superficial understanding of cultural rights that has carried on for a long time and ignores how these communities want to articulate their culture,” she says. Part of it, she believes, is a consequence of ignorance. “There is a very small group of people sitting in The Hague, or Geneva, or New York, creating the boundaries of what culture should mean for the whole world, not knowing how this whole world thinks about culture. So, they establish that cultural rights should merely extend to the protection of subsistence practises or heritage sites.”
Viswanath argues that most of this superficiality is deliberate, and stems from the colonial epistemic structure of the international legal discipline. “For a lot of indigenous communities, culture is at the centre of their demands for sovereignty, or economic and environmental demands,” she clarifies. In the hierarchical system of international law, cultural rights fall into the “second generation” category – below civil and political rights, which carry the highest level of obligation for states. “By pigeonholing cultural rights into this small, superficial space, international law dilutes substantive claims that marginalised communities could make and the duty of states towards guaranteeing these claims. After all, if you grant economic and cultural self-determination to all minorities and marginalised peoples, next thing you know, states will lose the power they currently enjoy.”
The absence of the voices of marginalised communities in international law was a gap Viswanath was hoping to bridge during her fieldwork with the Irular tribe in India, a semi-nomadic community based in southern India. To her, the translation process normally associated with ethnographic fieldwork – traditionally mediated by civil society actors and language interpreters – is symbolic of the structural silencing of Indigenous peoples by and within international law. "You have a community whose claim is first translated by a local mediator to a lawyer, who then needs to express it in a way that a judge understands," she enumerates. "In this translation process, whatever the community originally wanted ends up being completely ignored. I wanted to make sure that I did not repeat that mistake during my fieldwork."
Which is not to say it was simple. "A gaping challenge was confronting my positionality. I had to be honest about it, and the fact that I am part of a privileged caste and class in India, even if I am a minority elsewhere, such as in Europe. Confronting my positionality also meant rethinking about the language in which I spoke. The vernacular we speak is a product of our socialisation, and so the language that I speak is completely associated with caste in India.” With that in mind, she made a decision: "I decided to re-learn my mother language, and I would learn it in a non-casteist way so that I could come through as an ally."
Did it work?
"I literally did not last even a day," she laughs, openly amused at her naivete in hindsight. The minute she started speaking what she refers to as ‘her new mother tongue’ – drawing emphatic quotation marks in the air – the Irulars she was talking to balked. “Of course, we know your caste,” they said. “We can see it from the colour of your skin. We can see it from your name. We can see it from the fact that you do not eat beef. Everywhere, it screams that you are an upper caste person.”
Viswanath realised that her efforts to convey her genuine allyship made her seem disingenuous. “I looked like just another one of the many privileged caste Indians who do research with marginalised communities. They speak to them, and then never acknowledge these communities as authors of the knowledge that is the basis of their PhDs,” she explains. “The cognitive extractivism in these situations is immense, and so marginalised communities are – understandably – very sceptical.” Viswanath then adopted a new strategy: patience. “I spent one month just regularly going to that village, waiting for the Irulars to feel comfortable to speak to me.”
The breakthrough, she recalls, came quite unexpectedly. “I came into the courtyard of the village one day, and everyone went inside. I was yelling out: ‘Hello, my name is Raghavi. I’m writing a book about the Irular community. I want to know more about your cultural practices. I’m a lawyer.’ But no one came out.”
When the rain started, Viswanath remained in the courtyard, waiting. One hour later, a villager, returning from work, asked her why she was outside in the rain. She repeated her pitch: she was there to write a book about the Irulars, and her name is Raghavi – a name that, as it turns out, she shared with the villager’s daughter. “She told me then she would be happy to speak to me. Afterwards, she told everyone to come out; that I was a good one.”
She recalls that moment with evident excitement, as it was the start of a five-day period in which she would come into the community and ask the Irulars about their culture, lifestyle, and interaction with law and justice. But one day, she returned to the village and there was no one there. “That’s when it hit me: of course, they are semi-nomadic. They move,” she says, with an ironic smile. “So, they were gone, and there was no way for me to make contact with them again. I was like: what have I done?”
Viswanath circled back with the two organisations that acted as key interlocutors for her project, STEPS – the founder of which, Mr. Rajesh Dheena, she calls the bedrock of her project – and the Pazhangudi Irular Paathukaapu Sangam. “They said: look, this is how it is. The best thing would be for you to actually move with the community.” And so, Viswanath added a new question to her list when she went to the next village: “If you are going somewhere, can I come with you?”
In the end, the Irulars created her fieldwork plan, and Viswanath credits its success to them. “My fieldwork was completely participatory. They would ask me what I was interested in and suggested that I speak to their relatives who lived in a different area, such as the mangrove forest. So, I would go there,” she starts counting in her fingers. “Then they’d say, why don’t you go and speak to our relatives who live along the coast? That’s because, based on area, their relationship with culture, and justice, changes.”
For five months, Viswanath lived a nomadic lifestyle with the Irulars. In those months, she spoke to 800 Irular families across mangrove forests, plains, and coastal areas in Villupuram and Cuddalore, two districts in the topographically diverse state of Tamil Nadu. “Some were Hindu, but also Christian, pantheistic, animistic; they would worship snakes and forests. To the community, this was not just their lifestyle, but also a way for them to resist the authoritarian practices of the state,” she explains. “These are not things I could have ever found out just by reading about them.”
The Irulars speak Irula, a purely oral language with no script; after many years of lack of state patronage and political pressure, they also adopted Tamil – Viswanath’s mother tongue. Some of her interviewees spoke Telugu and Malayalam, languages spoken in neighbouring Indian states through which the Irulars historically moved.
But their communication, she realised, was not limited to text. “A lot of their ideas, a lot of their knowledge, occurs through music and dance and poetry. And so, when I asked them a question, oftentimes they would compose a song – impromptu – to respond to me.” She makes a visible effort not to exoticise these practices to her interlocutors as she narrates them. “This was not ‘supplementary information’ for my PhD,” she emphasises. “When they are singing and dancing, they are actually narrating their experience with law and the State. When I came back from my fieldwork, a big challenge was how to translate this. I was writing a legal PhD, and I had videos of people singing and dancing, but, to me, that is knowledge that should hold the same status as a court issuing a judgement. So, I had to incorporate these into the body of my argument.”
To accomplish this, Viswanath hired a team which included a Delhi-based illustrator, Surbhi Badhani, who creatively imagined stills emerging out of some of the videos of the community’s customary dance. “Surbhi’s illustrations became the anchor of my legal argument,” she adds. “I would use her illustrations of dancing Irulars as analogies to explain the dynamics between various actors: civil society, government, courts, and the community.”
The result was a PhD thesis with chapters that are full of illustrations, dance, and music, as well as a (currently private) YouTube playlist – of which she shared a snippet – and co-written in Tamil, the vernacular of the Irular community, to honour their epistemic choices.
The struggle to make the voices of marginalised communities resonate through international law, even in treaties that enjoy widespread accession – such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights – is an ongoing one. Viswanath’s work is part of a broader, historical effort amongst critical and postcolonial scholars to decolonise institutions of international law, including universities. “The decolonising project to me extends far beyond facial representation. It’s about who you cite and why you cite them,” she clarifies. “It’s about who you read. And it’s about how much space you create for different ways of thinking, especially those that challenge the mainstream colonial ways of thinking.”
Raghavi Viswanath is a researcher at the EUI Department of Law, specialising in international human rights law, decolonising, and epistemic injustice. Her thesis title is ‘Re-articulating cultural rights in international human rights law using Global South epistemologies. A case study of the Irulars’. Her supervisor is Neha Jain.