Thinking
Futures conference, Port Blair, 4-5 December 2014
Satadru
Sen (City University of New York)
In Munich last year, I attended a conference on the Andamans. Several of you were there also. There were, of course, no Andamanese present. So we ended up in a rather old-fashioned ritual of talking about so-called primitive people who are acknowledged to be alive, but for whom self-representation would be unnatural.
The situation is not too different here in Port Blair. I don’t
mean that the organizers should have brought a couple of Jarawas or an Onge to
make a token appearance. But nearly seventy years after independence, we should
have been able to have a Jarawa or an Onge appear at a conference like this on
their own initiative, to speak as their own agents. That these expectations
seem unrealistic is not too different from Victorians scoffing at the prospect
of natives with Ph.Ds. It is a sign that something is not right.
Since
I’m critiquing the very concept of the primitive tribe, let me bore you for a minute
with the history of primitiveness. Primitivism refers broadly to the Western
fascination with the idea of ‘the primitive,’ manifested primarily in
non-Western societies but also secondarily within the West itself. As a
‘movement’ that emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century, it developed a
particularly close relationship with the politics of imperialism. It reflected,
on the one hand, the confident new realities of racism and colonialism, and on
the other hand, a growing disenchantment with the Enlightenment, an affected
rejection of modernity, and a pessimism about the permanence of ‘civilization’
and its racial order.
At
the most readily apparent level, this was an oppositional relationship: the
primitiveness ascribed to newly discovered people underscored the modernity to
which the civilized were attached. At the same time, primitivism became part of
a complex relationship of objectification. To be modern and civilized was also
to consume the primitive aesthetically, scientifically and economically.
Nineteenth-century
primitivism was simultaneously appreciative, contemptuous and ‘objective’ in
its outlook on what it consumed. It was appreciative in the sense that it was
closely intertwined with Romanticism, in which the alien, primitive and dying became
desirable counterparts to the competitive, utilitarian and thriving West. This
desire marks the growing appetite in Western markets for ‘primitive’ arts and
artifacts, either collected in colonial locations or fashioned in the West
itself. By the end of the century, the Andamans had been integrated into this
pattern, with the aggressive collection of artifacts and photographs that
showcased pacified savages producing what Europeans perceived as an authentic
pre-industrial harmony, beauty and genius.
Yet
primitivism was contemptuous in the assumption that modernity possessed a
higher value than what was appreciated as primitive. And it was objective in
the sense that it bestowed its aficionados with the equanimity of the scientist
or the curator rather than the zeal of the conquistador. Primitive people existed
to be studied, as clues to the nature of humanity and living fossils that would
not long survive the triumph of a civilization equipped with battleships and
capitalism. For evolutionist anthropologists in particular, the savage or
primitive contemporary, once a menacing proposition, now became synonymous with
frailty, death and extinction – a discourse which has dominated the narrative
of the Andamanese since the 1880s.
M.V.
Portman explicitly described the Andamanese as a chemistry experiment in its
final stages, and the islands as a laboratory of natural history: a substance
that had long existed in the vacuum of insulation, he argued, was violently
dematerializing at the touch of air. It was sad but exciting, an insight into
the primordial nature of mortality. The death-by-demoralization hypothesis has
never gone away: much of our present-day idea of the Andamanese as a doomed
people flows from the notion that primitive people confronted by modernity
become so demoralized that they die.
In
turn-of-the-century Europe, the morbid savage had an important variation: in anthropology-inspired
popular literature like Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness, the primitive threatened to infiltrate Europe itself, or to show
itself as having been there all along. This valorization of a primitive mode within
whiteness was not benign. Most straightforwardly, it encouraged casual violence
against native people. In settler colonies like Australia, the historian
Patrick Wolfe has pointed out, the indigenous population was superfluous to the
social, political and economic order. And even in colonies where indigenous
labor was a rational requirement, Michael Taussig has suggested, primitivism
generated irrational excesses of violence and terror. Colonizers appropriated
the apparent primitiveness of aborigines and deployed it against them, killing
them without constraints. I don’t need to remind anybody here about the
violence visited on the Andamanese tribes from the moment the HMS Viper sailed
into these waters: the shootings, kidnappings, flogging, forced labor, exhibitions,
etc. The primitiveness ascribed to the native justified ‘uncivilized’ conduct
by the civilized: not only had the native invited the violence visited upon
him, his ‘obsolete’ condition suggested that he was already extinct, and
killing him not especially damning.
How
much of this history can be applied to independent India – a nation of natives
with natives, so to speak? The answers are a mixed bag. An interest in the
primitive is certainly discernible within Indian nationalist narratives, but much
of the time, the primitive was identified with the roots of the Self, but not placed
in direct opposition to the modern Self. It was neither valorized nor denigrated
for its primitiveness: the Indian-nationalist tendency has been to highlight
how modern its ancestors were, but at the same time, to assign to it a higher
moral value than the colonized and degraded present.
The
Adivasi model of aboriginality was invented to fit this frame, but it was an
uneasy fit, because quite early on, the nationally-oriented class conceived
them partly through the lens of European primitivism. And certainly, within a nationalism
articulated by upper-caste Hindus, the Adivasi was racialized to some extent.
But for a couple of reasons, this was a limited Othering. One is that Indian
nationalist discourse quickly found a niche for the non-Aryan within the national geography and the
national Self: by the early twentieth century, the liberal wing of Indian
nationalism – the Tagore family, for instance – had decisively adopted the
Adivasi as a pristine repository of Indian culture, and even Hindu-nationalist
ideologues like Savarkar were emphasizing an Indian race from which Adivasis were not separate. And certainly if
we were to look below the layer of elite nationalism, to the lower-caste world
of mofussil towns and villages, the Adivasi was only semi-distinct, with no
sharp line between the world of the tribal and that of the peasant.
The
other is that by the time the Tagores were patronizing the incorporation of
Santals and Mundas into the national body as art, folklore and even history,
there already existed a politics of Adivasi self-assertion. I don’t mean the
hools and rebellions beloved of Subalternist historians. I mean the work of politicians like Jaipal Singh, which brought
Adivasis into active and participatory roles in the national mainstream. They
entered wearing primitiveness like a contextual badge of identity that was not
essentially different from other modern identities. It was, however
imperfectly, a self-directed, negotiated and modern union with Indianness,
premised more on similarity and equality than on difference and inferiority. It
provides, in fact, a model of self-representation that could be quite useful to
projects like a tribal museum in the Andamans.
But these maneuvers were premised on
the near-total absence of a discourse of superfluity. The absence was, on the
one hand, part and parcel of exploitation in Indian society: as with blacks in
apartheid South Africa, there was space for tribal people because there was a
need for their labor. But on the other hand, it remained possible for those
designated as Adivasis to contest oppression politically, socially and even culturally.
In other words, there was space for them as living people even when there was
no obvious need for them as Santals or Gonds.
The
South African parallel is actually quite instructive. Wolfe pointed out
recently that apartheid was not based on a fantasy that entire groups of people
would cease to exist. It was oppressive and appropriative, but there is
something worse, which we see in settler-colonial situations where there is no
conceptual, political or actual space for the aborigine.
We
have come close to that in the Andamans. After independence, several things have happened in tandem to make the situation more
settler-colonial than before. One is, of course, the accelerated migration from
the Indian mainland. Unlike convicts, the migrants have become a politically mobilized
demographic, able to approach the state with their claims on local resources. The
peculiar status of the tribal population, in which they are normatively limited to a shrinking patch
of jungle instead of being located in a wider society and geography, has only
encouraged settlers to regard them as superfluous people taking up space. The
other is that the administration has remained in the hands of people invested in
the primitive. This investment is itself partly an inheritance of colonial discourses
of race, and partly an organic response to the peculiar political and
professional opportunities present in the combination of managerialism and
democracy, in which some people are managed and others demand representation.
The
continuing primitive status of the Andamanese has thus become a fundamental aspect
of the insular quality of the Andamans: these are islands in India, and the
Andamanese are islands within Indianness. I cannot emphasize this enough:
insulation produces primitivism, and primitivism is for the dead, not the
living. The Andamanese have become progressively insular, as growing numbers of
Indians have become infected by the primitivist vision of the state-affiliated
managers of the tribal population. So whereas tribals on the mainland have lost
their status as objects of ethnography, the Andamanese have become reified in
their ethnographic condition. Middle-class, urban Indians no longer fantasize
about going into the jungle to see Santals, although there was a historical and
cultural moment when they did – I’m thinking of Satyajit Ray’s film Aranyer Din Ratri. I don’t think it’s
stretching it too far to say that this is partly because eastern Bihar, where
modern Bengalis used to go to see tribals, is now a tribal state, with a tribal
chief minister. It’s become a part of the prosaic mainland of Indian politics. Instead,
Indians now want to go on safaris in the Jarawa reserve, to see the last
primitives in the national zoo.
Obviously,
the Adivasi politics of the mainland did not take hold in the Andamans, and this
failure has come at great cost to the Andamanese, who have been consigned to a
protected innocence – life without politics – that deprives them of agency,
representation and life itself. And enforced primitiveness will continue to
fail as a policy, because the modern genie cannot be put back in the bottle: we
cannot undo the history of the past two hundred and twenty years. We cannot
even close the Andaman Trunk Road. And frankly, I am not convinced that the ATR
should be closed. It is the
historical norm that people will move about and interact, even if the
interaction is not on equal terms. It is segregation that is coercive and extraordinary,
and it doesn’t work.
So
the question is, what would work? To begin to answer that question, we have to decide
what ‘work’ means in this context. If it means clinging to a romantic
preservationism, i.e., fetishizing an inflexible, anti-historical idea of what
it means to be an aborigine, then that work will amount to little more than
liberal hand-wringing. It will be an extended funeral, not only for people, but
for an unsustainable ideal of racial and cultural purity. It will mean making
films about the dying in anticipation of their death, and I think film-makers
who work on the Andamanese must think very carefully about why they are making
their films. Are they documenting a way of life, or a way of death?
For
the answer to be ‘life,’ ‘work’ will have to mean a form of assimilationism. You
cannot live in a modern state and reject assimilation altogether without
placing yourself at a terrible disadvantage. It is only the assimilated who can
resist effectively, and who can re-articulate their identity. But
assimilationism can mean many things. It can mean, for instance, the total
deregulation of contact. I don’t think we can really predict what would happen
under those circumstances: it is possible that the Andamanese would quickly
lose their land and be absorbed into a laboring underclass. Would this be a bad
thing? Well, yes, in the sense that economic exploitation is a bad thing, but
the exploitation of the Jarawa would not be a worse thing than the exploitation
of the Santal, or of the non-tribal poor, for that matter. If we assume that it
would be a bigger tragedy, we fall into the primitivist trap, and take the
Andamanese with us.
But
total deregulation is not the only available form of assimilationism. The most
reasonable approach, I think, would be a minimalist one that protects the tribal
reserve, guaranteeing the exclusive ownership of its land to the tribal group.
But what the members of the tribe do on that land should be absolutely up to
them. If they want to meet tourists or filmmakers, that should be their
business. If they want to leave, return, start a business, marry a Tamil, or
download pornography on their phones, that should be their business. Beyond
ensuring their ownership of the reserve, the state and civil society
organizations should make certain options available to them: schools,
dispensaries, access to the economy in the form of jobs and micro-finance,
access to the courts, access to information, voting rights, the ability to
travel, the ability to become unrecognizable to those who are invested in the
primitive. Information must be a two-way flow, not only must we learn about the
tribes, but the tribes must know what options are available to them through the
Indian state and society.
By way of an ideological framework,
I want to mention something Partha Chatterjee once wrote about the Muslim Civil Code. The individual member of the minority group, he wrote, must have
the option of functioning as a generic rights-bearing citizen, without giving
up his or her minority identity. The state must protect both options: the
generic as well as the particular. It might be argued that the Jarawa and Onge
are not like Muslims or even Adivasis, that they are extraordinarily vulnerable.
But this perception of extraordinariness is the problem. The so-called
primitive groups have to be allowed to be ordinary. It is ordinariness that
must be facilitated by well-wishers of the Andamanese: ordinary resources,
ordinary identities, ordinary constitutional status.
This
facilitation need not be an abstract or exotic concept. It can follow the
standard model of Indian federalism, in which there is no contradiction between
a particular identity (like being Bengali) and the generic identity (being
Indian). The state can take unremarkable, practical steps to make this
possible, such as teaching Andamanese languages in the local schools in
addition to Hindi and English, teaching the history of the islands in addition
to Indian history, employing the Andamanese as teachers, and ensuring ST quotas
in employment and education.
Whether we like it or not,
primitives – by definition – live in the modern world, subject to relations of
unequal power. Whether we like it or not, our perceptions and policies impact
upon them, and have already impacted upon them. The urge to insulate them from
the world, or to place them under the guardianship of a few wise brown parents
who are entirely fallible, is a part of that unequal power, and as much a form
of objectification as any colonial art, scholarship or governance. It prevents them from responding to the impact of modernity, and
perpetuates the injustices of their situation. The only effective defense of
the primitives we wish to protect lies in giving them the means of
understanding our understanding of
primitiveness, giving them access to our
means of power.
