The indigenous people of all around the world, having diverse histories of struggle, share common experience and are going through common crisis. They are compelled to get integrated into the mainstream so that their collective presence can be diluted from the national imagination. Although the indigenous people have been given citizenship, yet state policies are framed with an assimilative rather than accommodative approach which ill behoves indigenous identity. The modern nation state on the other hand keeps on changing the historical, religious and juridical conceptualisation of the indigene periodically and the indigenous people are still confronting a different equality in which subalterns are considered as second-class citizens and their existence is invalidated. The stereotypical notion of ‘indigeneity’ as a hallmark of primitivism envisages a kind of internalisation of the stigmas attached by the dominant castes and somewhere the indigenous people themselves cannot help interiorise it. This stigmatisation when imposed on the indigenous people gets institutionalised in two ways, either they resort to self-hatred and self-abnegation so that they could climb upstairs of the social ladder or they choose the path of complete rejection of the outer world and confine themselves into their own world which gradually leads to a culture of resistance. The formation of indigenous identity is very much dependent upon the circumstances, historical evolution of their community life and cultural characteristics of indigeneity. The indigenous people have invented the survival strategy to cope with the existing risks and challenges. It is more of a political instrument rather than cultural or ethnic for that matter which helps them construct and interpret different facets of their indigenous identity and mode of subsistence. In the cultural and academic discourse, the concept of indigeneity is a decolonised social category with a political weightage. In Indian context, it is said that there is no category called indigenous people as all people are indigenous which rubs out the difference on which the critical potential of indigeneity rests. The characteristics of indigenous people in India are bound by cultural formations which stress on the organic, authentic and originary; which is inherently attached to land, oral traditions, cultural memory, kinship ties and a historical legacy of resistance. Finally, the concept of indigeneity is a strategy of enfranchisement that goes on to form indigenous sensibility when they fight to design it for a cause.