The first time it struck me in the gut wasn’t in a boardroom or on a conference stage, but during a quiet lunch at the Adivasi Academy. Three students from my alma mater were visiting, and our conversation turned to the cultural engagement frameworks they had studied in their coursework, ones they said had shaped “India’s global cultural narratives”.
A cultural framework in cultural diplomacy is a carefully designed strategy — a way for a country to tell its story to the world through culture, creativity and identity. It outlines who we are, what we stand for, and how we want to be understood by others. It can take the form of a programme, a campaign, a festival or a guiding set of ideas.
I’ve spent years creating such frameworks, not as tokens or visuals but as central ideas. I built them so that the tribal thought could shape global conversations — not as decoration but as design logic.
I listened to the students. And when it was my turn to speak, I asked if they knew who had created the frameworks. Pause. They didn’t know. They were not at fault. The name had been removed long before the material reached them. My name.
I am a tribal designer. Two words stitched across a historical fracture.
To be tribal is to be identified as close to the earth but far from intellect. To be a designer is to be recognised as urban, cosmopolitan. I have lived between
these frames, and in trying to reconcile them, I created work that now carries
the nation’s name across the globe —but not mine.
There is a blank space where the author’s name ought to be. This has been my firsthand experience in 20 years of work in design, nation branding, public diplomacy and cultural diplomacy.
The irony would be laughable if it weren’t so soul-shattering.
To be tribal in India is to be visible only when convenient. For Republic Day floats. For craft exhibitions. For painted murals. For speeches about inclusion. But in the day-to-day architecture of influence, of curriculum, citation and credit, we are erased in the most elegant ways.
Not beaten, not banned, only omitted. Smoothed over like fingerprints on glass. The crime is invisible. And that’s what makes it so complete.
It has taken me years to understand that this is not neglect. This is design. It is a slow, sustained, institutionally sanctioned procedure. A choreography of forgetting, with too many dancers to count.
What does authorship mean? To most, it is a byline, a credit line, a name tucked neatly beneath a title. For me, a tribal creator, authorship is about presence.
Every sentence, every visual, every structure I design is an act of negotiation between silence and recognition. Because our communities have never been part of the grammar of the state, the lexicon of policy or the vocabulary of modernity. We have been referenced. Researched. Occasionally romanticised. But rarely, if ever, credited with authorship.
When I began to trace the timeline of erasure, I found not a single moment, but a slow leak.
Erasure rarely looks like destruction. It rarely wears boots or batons. In most institutions, erasure arrives wearing lanyards and giving TED-style talks. It uses soft fonts. It joins Zoom meetings. It says the right things on Diversity Day. It smiles, nods and edits. Erasure happens quietly, and always with plausible deniability.
It begins with a renaming. A file saved under a new title, minus the name it once carried. Or a slide modified. Next, a paragraph rewritten in a neutral tone. “Inspired by earlier work” someone notes vaguely, with no footnote to follow. And just like that, the creation is detached from the idea. The name is uncoupled from the framework. The authorship begins to float — free, malleable, appropriable.
Erasure does not rush. It paces itself. Over months. Over years. At first, it
happens in backrooms — in curriculum committee meetings, in hallway discussions, in the silent revision of documents where the tribal contribution becomes
a placeholder — useful, but inconvenient to name. Then it becomes institutionalised. The framework you built is taught to students with no context of where it came from. It is referenced at symposiums as part of “India’s cultural positioning”. It appears in reports. It gets featured at expos.
You are invited to none of these. You are not even remembered. This is where it becomes dangerous, because if no one remembers, no one questions. But the world often forgets that tribals can see, hear, feel, think and speak too. And more importantly, remember.
And so I remember. In deep silence. Johar!
Sudhir John Horo of the Munda People