Modernity, exclusion, and moral loss: A narrative inquiry into Indigenous lives

Abstract

The present study analyzes the impact of modernity on the moral sustainability of the two adivasi (Indigenous) communities – the Bondas and the Kandhas (B&K), residing in the Malkangiri district of south-west Odisha, India. Although these communities are traditionally rooted in ecological intimacy and oral knowledge systems, in the recent times they face increasing displacement and cultural erosion due to modernity-driven mobility and marginalization that eventually leads to epistemic injustice. One crucial manifestation of this injustice is hermeneutic opacity, wherein the lived experiences of B&K communities are unintelligible within dominant cultural and policy frameworks. This condition disrupts their ability to articulate and defend their own values, conventional lifeways, and ethical systems in public discourse. Not only does it result in a loss of cultural specificity, but it is also a fundamental threat to moral sustainability. The article pursues two major objectives. First, it examines how modernity, through mobility and progress, generates epistemic exclusion and displaces indigenous moral systems. Second, it analyzes how such exclusion undermines moral sustainability by silencing community agency of B&K and distorting indigenous value structures. The study brings into context more recent developments in epistemic injustice including epistemic smothering, epistemic violence, purposeful hermeneutical ignorance, and forms of linguistic and competence-based injustice, more particularly Fricker’s formulation of epistemic injustice, which together bring forth the complex and layered ways in which marginalization is experienced by the B&K communities. Thus, the study critiques the dominant equation of modernity with universal progress and sustainable development. Through a conceptual and contextual analysis, the study calls for a rethinking of sustainability in plural terms, recognizing relational ontologies, indigenous epistemologies, and the moral weight of culturally rooted worldviews. Finally, it is argued that genuine sustainability must include the ethical and epistemic survival of communities historically pushed to the margins.