Algorithms

After Edward Snowden became a public figure – blowing the whistle on the US government’s extraordinary surveillance of its own citizens, not to mention the citizens of other countries – quite a few commentators complained that Snowden, not the US government and the NSA, had become the focus of media attention. Their point was well taken: there can be little doubt that the attention paid to the messenger diverted the mainstream media from the message itself, saving the Obama administration from sustained public scrutiny and debate. Over the past several weeks, however, as Snowden has remained holed up in the no-man’s-land of a Moscow airport, under threat of being handed over to American authorities, the complaint has become insupportable. The messenger and the message are not two separate stories, one less important than the other. It is quite apparent that they are both pieces of the same story of power and its abuse. Snowden is the human face of that story, and it is hardly his fault that most commentators in the US are unable or unwilling to see that his fate is actually a microcosmic enactment of the fate – and indeed, the possibilities – of democracy and responsible government in this country and others.

Through its relentless and illegal pursuit of Snowden, preceded by the essentially pseudo-legal treatment of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, the Obama administration has displayed the same unappetizing traits that are reflected in its secret courts, secret judgments, secret interpretations of laws (that amount, effectively, to secret laws), and secret policies of surveillance that erode the Constitution (which has the great flaw of not being secret). There is, for instance, the penchant for bullying. Obama, Holder and their pals in Congress have gone after a solitary man – a man without an army, powerful allies or unlimited resources – who dared to challenge and embarrass them. They cannot claim to be upholding some lofty principle of the law: none of this vindictiveness was in sight when the same administration refused to prosecute or even investigate the abuses of the Bush-Cheney regime. Not one torturer faced the courts, not one policy-maker was hauled into court; it was all ‘look ahead, not behind.’ James Clapper lied blatantly to Congress – a felony, incidentally – without so much as a slap on the wrist from the Department of Justice. Not one of the men involved in the Haditha massacre did jail time; the bankers and CEOs who wrecked the economy were  protected and rewarded. Trigger-happy pilots and drone operators who blow away civilians like boys playing video games are protected from the sight of the public, lest anybody take offence or suggest punishment. It is those who insist upon showing that are hounded and punished. This is not simply hypocrisy. Like all forms of bullying, the persecution of Snowden and Manning is also a straightforward sign of cowardice. These men are politically defenseless, unlike the torturers, bombers and CEOs.

Moreover, the governmental instruments and agencies that might afford the bullied some defense – what is, ideally, known as due process – have themselves been corrupted so badly that due process can only be a cynical joke. What sort of justice (which is what awaits Snowden, one US government spokesman ominously declared some weeks ago) can be expected from a regime of kangaroo courts, black sites and indefinite solitary confinement? And more broadly, what kind of democracy can be expected from a regime in which every branch of the government has become complicit in illegalities, to the extent that the only sure legality is secrecy itself?

The degree of the cynicism with which Snowden, Manning and the rest of us are confronted is particularly evident in the behavior of the two veteran legislators from California, Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats, and both of whom have gone out of their way to defend the NSA surveillance program. Years ago, as a teenager in San Francisco, I met Ms. Pelosi. It must have been before she was a member of Congress, although she was already in the DNC. I forget now what the forum was – probably Model UN. Even then, I was startled by how intolerant and, well, brainless she was: a party hack defending the party line from teenage critics, without a thought of her own. It is not that Feinstein and Pelosi are especially invested in specific surveillance programs, beyond their own complicity. They are easily recognizable as machine politicians: what matters to them, more than anything else, is power. That means doing absolutely anything to maintain themselves and their party in office, but it also means being obsessed – to the point of total identification – with the machinery of the state itself.

Unlike the classical machine politicians of the days of Tammany Hall, who actually interacted with ordinary voters and their petty corruptions, the new machine politicians serve, and function as, mechanisms of pure, cold, concentrated violence. The public is either irrelevant or an irritant. Nancy Pelosi in her expensive pantsuits exhibits the same dead-eyed form of power and arrogance that hides behind a policeman’s sunglasses or a bureaucrat’s computer monitor. She and her colleagues continuously enforce a militarism that is so normative that it does not register as militarism. They enforce, simultaneously, a corruption that does not register as corruption, because it has been legalized at the level at which governments and corporations operate. (And that, of course, is the difference between the West, where there is ‘no corruption,’ and the Third World with its cash-filled suitcases.) How naïve we were when we assumed that Barack Obama would remain a creature of human dignity in a state in which oversized police cars bristle with more antennae than warships and are referred to as ‘cruisers’ and ‘interceptors’! There was no other possibility, not because Obama is a Chicago man, as one might be tempted to say, but because he is a hollow man who entered the machine. (With Hilary Clinton, of course, there was never any doubt that she was already of the machine.)

The element of ordinary self-interest in American machine politics is easy enough to identify: the government is secretive, selective and violent because it suits the proverbial one percent that circulates between company boardrooms and government offices. And what the Snowden affair has shown is how ubiquitous and incestuous such elites are. What we have seen is not so much mutual back-scratching as a veritable circle-jerk of the governments of the US, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and even Russia: the big bully and his catamites, who are also little bullies. The rulers of each of those countries, and quite a few others, have shown themselves to be a single tribe of power, organized as a network of gangs hidden behind metaphorical sunglasses and computer screens, guns and badges, cruisers and interceptors. No democracy left behind! Jimmy Carter said as much recently in Der Spiegel, to the general indifference of an American media that paid more attention to the pregnancies of nincompoops. (Even Der Spiegel left the story out of its English edition.) Carter’s point, however, was not just about the determination of politicians, bureaucrats and their corporate cronies to line their pockets while pretending to ‘defend’ the public. It was about the nature of the modern state itself, which has become entirely inconsistent with democracy.

That development, obviously, is as old as the democratic state. Gandhi wrote about the shamelessness of Parliament and its connection with violence in Hind Swaraj more than a hundred years ago, and he was not the first; his insights remain valid today, as do Orwell’s and Huxley’s on the statecraft of ‘security’ and soma. Heinrich Böll’s novels of the 1960s and 1970s show that even an apparently unaggressive and ‘reformed’ society like West Germany was its own violent, secretive empire of power. When Böll protested against the Adenauer-initiated fetish of ‘normalcy’ in the West German state, he was not saying that Adenauer had returned Germany to Nazi times; he was, rather, pointing out the brutal normalcy of a type of modern bully-state that included the Third Reich as well as the Federal Republic. Norman Mailer said the same thing about the United States, more or less at the same time.

But whereas present-day Germans are still able to make those kinds of connections (between the Stasi on the one hand, and Angela Merkel’s BND on the other, for instance, thanks partly to the East German interlude – it’s not surprising that the only significant public protests against state surveillance have come in Germany), Americans are locked into a model of citizenship that includes absurd levels of anxiety, deference, syrupy sentimentality and the worship of uniformed personnel. Germans would have found it familiar – in 1913. When strangers are urged, every year, to approach random soldiers with ‘Thank you for your service, sir,’ and shops offer discounts to military personnel in the same way that small-town merchants give discounts to high-school athletes, the garbage about permanent war and giving aid and comfort to the enemy becomes a pervasive stench in the air we breathe. We learn to hold our own breath and concentrate on shopping. Any information that is not advertising becomes dangerous, subject to ‘collection.’ Trying to locate an old friend recently, I Googled his name. Within minutes, my Yahoo page was asking me if I wanted to find low prices on Lincoln Wong, whose name had been interpreted as a brand by some well-behaved algorithm. This could be either amusing or disgusting, depending upon your mood at the moment. But that algorithm is the model American citizen today.

Gandhi, Orwell, Huxley, Böll and Mailer inhabited a world in which certain balances of power still existed, and those balances – like the Cold War, or Non-Alignment, or anti-colonial nationalism – allowed for the existence of politics (real politics and not circle-jerks) that generated spaces of resistance and asylum. And in the disappearance of the prospect of asylum for Edward Snowden we can see the full extent of what has been lost.

July 29, 2013

A Jarawa in Munich

In Munich last week, I attended a conference on the Andaman Islands. The other participants included academics and activists, Europeans as well as Indians. There were, of course, no Andamanese present. It would be unthinkable these days to have a conference in Australia or North America about issues that concern aborigines, without including aborigines as participants. But the organizers of the meeting in Munich can hardly be blamed: everybody knows that there are no Jarawa anthropologists or Onge activists, that there are fewer Andamanese than there are Australian aborigines or Native Americans, and that the Indian authorities would not allow them to travel to Germany. So we ended up in a rather old-fashioned colonial ritual of talking about people who are acknowledged to be alive, but for whom self-representation would be unnatural. It was as if the Andamanese have been consigned to a state of political death, or something below the condition of human life: 'bare life' confined to a camp, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben might say. This reflects perfectly the mainstream discourse of ‘what to do about the Andamanese,’ but for that very reason it is (or ought to be) deeply disturbing. Not only should we – i.e., those operating within liberal-nationalist discourses of communities and the state – hope to see a Great Andamanese historian or two at conferences a generation from today, we should expect to see Onge activists at conferences now; we should, likewise, refuse to see the Andamanese as people in an advanced state of extinction, who can do nothing except die continuously.

These expectations and their apparent quaintness are both rooted in the history of aboriginality and citizenship in India. The viability of the Jarawa in Munich requires that we confront, first, what it means for natives to have their own natives; second, the fractures and gradations within that lower level of nativeness; and third, some practical aspects of the problem at hand, when it comes to aboriginal populations. All of these dynamics have been shaped by the historical, ideological and political realities of articulating nationhood in a colonized society, although other political and, indeed, ethical considerations can also be identified, especially when it comes to the problems of the present time. When we think about indigenous or aboriginal populations in the context of the modern state, we tend to slip into a mode of analysis that is borrowed largely from settler-colonial situations. But when it comes to post-imperial nation-states like India, the settler-colonial model has obvious limitations. This does not invalidate or eliminate the relevance of categories like aborigine and indigenous, but it shifts their meanings and their political purposes. The larger society and its political institutions adapt to these new meanings, and certain expectations are formulated regarding the place of the aborigine in the national body and the state. The new meanings and expectations can, in fact, be liberating and democratic. But when this shifted, or recast, discourse of indigenousness encounters a more conventionally settler-colonial model of aboriginality, as in the Andamans, we have an impasse for which no resolution has yet emerged. This impasse is closely tied to a particular notion of racial purity and morbidity. Within its logic, we assume that a certain kind of aborigine is particularly ‘pure,’ and as such, particularly vulnerable to dying of impurity. Being well-meaning liberals, we seek – with infinite clumsiness – to forestall that eventuality by insulating them from everything that does not fit our understanding of their identity, including concepts like ‘activism,’ ‘democracy’ and ‘rights.’

When Indian nationalists at the turn of the century looked at groups like Santals and Gonds, or the so-called ‘tribal people’ of the Indian mainland, they saw an anomaly of race and civilization, i.e., creatures located within anthropology, not history. There was, however, more to the context. From Bankimchandra Chatterjee onwards, the search for universal and positivist markers within Indianness were accompanied, in the same individuals, with an obsessive search for what was distinctive, i.e., different from what was declared to be universal but tacitly understood to be European. These compulsions and desires led to a very particular ideological development, which is not only the invention of the adivasi, but also the location of the adivasi partially within the folk.

The possibilities of that location become clear if we look briefly at Benoy Kumar Sarkar, who was the most prominent Indian social scientist in the period between the world wars. Sarkar held out a model of locating the aboriginal within the national that was both right-wing and democratic – more democratic, in fact, than the vaguely leftist paternalism that undergirds Indian policy in the Andamans today. Between 1917 and 1922, he made a concerted attempt to identify an Indian race. His objectives were both descriptive and prescriptive: not only did Indian identity have its roots in the tribe and the folk, it should be embraced as such. Just as pertinently, there was no sharp line between tribe and folk, and it was with this grey area between tribe and folk, between the forest, the village and the small town, that Sarkar became fascinated. Tribes shaded into the folk, and functioned as a soil out of which the modern national community grew. Cultural anthropology became a legitimate and alternative national history.

Sarkar thus represents a way of thinking about race that is undoubtedly elitist but also inclusive, determined to look beyond – and below – the colony to find the postcolonial nation. His construction of early India was based on a Romantic conception of wholeness that was itself a rebellion against Orientalist narratives of the Orient. Sarkar understood that the ‘Oriental’ tended to be either all-spirit or all-body. Wholeness – and hence humanity – was the preserve of the European. Here, Sarkar made a direct intervention in the discourse of race. Culture itself became the stuff of bodies, as much as it was the stuff of poetry. The discovery of the unrestrained, uncivilized body became the revival of the 'optimism,' or culture infused with political action, that enables change, politics, history and justice. This conception of culture was affiliated with the anti-liberalism that Andrew Sartori has identified in Bengal after Bankim, but it was neither entirely reactionary nor divorced from liberalism.

It was the investment in physicality, among other things, that took Sarkar beyond the urban culture of Brahmo-influenced bhadrata, with its stifling emphasis on restraint, to the rustic world of folk and tribal culture. He developed, firstly, a particular outlook on folk culture: it is necessarily part of the nation, but it is also an externally located asset that must be identified and nationalized. Secondly, Sarkar was very aware of his location within a wider Hindu race that had seen centuries of internal ‘circulation of elites’ (he borrowed the expression from Pareto) and in which the classical ‘Aryan’ elements had constantly been infiltrated and mongrelized by the marginal, aboriginal, and mongrel. Sarkar was happy to embrace the mongrel aspects of his Hindu identity, but it was a jittery happiness: it was secure only as long as the right sort of Hindus were in charge of the boundaries of the community. The ‘right sort,’ however, were not the existing urban elites, but an emerging vanguard that could come from unexpected places, such as the margins of the folk world.

Sarkar’s long collaboration with Haridas Palit might be seen in this context. Palit came from a very poor, Namasudra background, which he advertised even as he advertised his rise to respectability as a lawyer, educator and activist. His humble origins on the margins of Bengali society became an asset in the formulation of his subsequent social status: it gave him access to knowledge that the born-respectable did not have. Whereas Sarkar had left provincial Malda for the cosmopolitan world of Calcutta and Leipzig, Palit had remained on this inner frontier of Bengali culture, facilitating what might be called an inward-directed cosmopolitanism. Like many contemporary collectors of folk culture, he cultivated a reputation as a wanderer in places dislocated in time, a man uniquely in touch with the illiterate and the tribal. He introduced Sarkar to his specific interests, such as the Gambhira and Gajan festivals of rural and small-town life; these quickly became Sarkar’s own areas of investigation.

Rituals like the Gambhira and Gajan appealed to Sarkar for multiple, layered reasons. They were provincial, rural, Dionysian, nocturnal, hidden, lost, glimpses of the past in the present, glimpses of a true – or at any rate, alternative – racial Self, political community and form of knowledge. Because the primitive precedes modern political identities and politically frozen boundaries, stilled migrations and disrupted contacts, the folk and the tribe could function as the level of an ancient cosmopolitanism. What had been locked into a colonial hinterland could prove to be a means of ‘traveling’ in a world of folks and tribes. Similarly, the folk produced new links between Indians of various regions, showing (in Sarkar’s words) that ‘notwithstanding the narrow provincial spirit of the modern educated Indians, due to the growth of habits and sentiments in watertight administrative compartments, the soul of India is really one.’

By seeing a national ‘soul’ in the folk, Sarkar echoed the German Romantic-nationalist Herder, but with a significant distortion. For Sarkar, diversity was valuable within a unified national project. At the Gambhira, he wrote, the observant ethnologist would find not only peasants and tribal people, but also ordinary Bengalis dressed as ‘Santhals and other aboriginal tribes,’ dancing wildly, their bodies pierced by burning arrowheads. Folk culture thus brought out racial confusion and provocative fusions, which were highly desirable to the native in search of racial wholeness. Sarkar’s was not a search for racial purity; it was, rather, the deliberate searching out of ‘impurities’ as the new substance of race, or a reconstitution of race in the colony.

Within Indian academia, Sarkar engaged with P.T. Srinivas Iyenger and C.V. Vaidya on the foundational questions of ethnographic nationalism in India: the reality (or otherwise) of an Aryan race, its origins, and its relationship to non-Aryans. Iyenger was dismissive of the idea of a race with foreign origins, seeing the Arya-Anarya distinction as merely a difference of ‘cult.’ Vaidya, on the other hand, was inclined to celebrate the ‘Aryan invasion’ theory of early India, positing clear ethnic and political lines between Aryan settlers and Dasyu ‘aborigines.’ Sarkar was more receptive to Vaidya than to Iyenger, but he inserted caveats. Race, he felt, develops historically, through the gradual accumulation of ‘impurities’ and the development of political purpose. He agreed that Dasyus were aborigines, distinct from Aryans. But he was not interested in fetishizing Aryans as the exclusive insider-race in India. There were multiple insiders, Aryan and non-Aryan, and he wanted them all as his ancestors. That anthropological diversity was a discovery – or at least the claim – of unexplored nooks and crannies of ancestry and origin, which was exciting to a man invested in a world of exploration.

Indeed, the fluidity of ethnic interpenetration was highly desirable to Sarkar, because it reflected the operation of political power – the ebb and flow of armies and peoples – without which India would be reduced to unworldly irrelevance. The compulsively miscegenating, politically alive folk could be mined for the masculinity and militarism the elites desperately wanted, especially if its deepest racial origins were unearthed. We find, here, Sarkar suggesting that the folk constituted not only a racial root, but also an alternative bedrock of the Indian state, and a basis of anti-colonial politics. Whereas the administrators of what Nicholas Dirks has called the ‘ethnographic state’ of British India imagined a menagerie to possess, manage and enjoy, Sarkar was proposing a counter-state of the menagerie, in which primitive rituals demonstrated the repossession of the state by the racialized.

The particular racial qualities that Sarkar desired were, however, also dangerous, in need of control and repression. At a time when the Criminal Tribes Acts were still very much in effect, folk militarism was the other side of the delinquency of entire populations. What made the state viable was precisely what the state must manage constantly through punishment and education. Folk festivals function in Sarkar’s narrative as an ancient national education, explicitly described as being both moral and political. Crucially, we find that education has taken on a distinctly democratic appearance: it is not just a top-down process of the urban elite teaching the rabble, but of the rabble teaching themselves, and even teaching the elites a lesson or two about town planning, sanitation and governance. The knowledge of modern civic life is thus democratized and diffused throughout the body politic, and democracy was nothing less than the secret history of the folk.

The idea of the democratic nature of tribal society was not new, but Sarkar brought it to bear on the wider community of Indians through the mechanism of the folk. Folk festivals revealed the existence of submerged indigenous elites in the villages of 24 Parganas, and even Taliganj, he wrote. The most authentic Indians could thus be found right on the edge of the colonial metropolis. Describing the worship of Mangala-Chandi in this proximal margin of colonial civilization, Sarkar insisted that this folk goddess was in fact the guardian angel of every Bengali home. He was suggesting that folk traditions serve as multiple bridges, connecting the bhadralok world with the world of peasants, the world of peasants with that of tribal people, the culture of the present with the distant past. This connectedness fleshed out the nation, reducing the gap between those who value culture and those who constitute culture. Just as importantly, it established the private interior of the home, as opposed to the public altar of the temple, as the secret location of folk tradition: at heart, therefore, the bhadralok are also part of the folk. Indians were, among other things, an emerging tribe.

Sarkar was not saying that Indian folk rituals constituted modern statecraft, or that villagers were the ‘real’ modern Indians. Rustics in a particular imaginary mode were like modern citizens, or useful shadows of the modern citizen. As a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Welsh as the mlechcha of England indicates, Sarkar knew he was dealing in ascribed identities and utilities. But just as the European folk could function as a bedrock and a foreshadow of European modernity, the Indian folk was a thrilling vision of the modern in the primitive and the primitive in the modern, akin to seeing a ghost. As in any Romantic project of recovering the folk, that ghostly element was reinforced by an anxiety – both sharp and decadent – that the folk were dying out, destroyed inexorably by a vulgar modernity that could not be disavowed. But the very awareness of that death could be racially invigorating. Sarkar quoted the poet Baradacharan Mitra as saying that ‘We should, all of us, do our best to see that ancient festivities of Bengal like those of the Gambhira do not die out.’ It was by becoming aware of racial loss that modern Indians could realize their race as a new political truth.

We thus have in Sarkar the construction of an indigeneity that is simultaneously internal and external to the national self. And this is a very basic aspect of the adivasi as a paradigm of indigeneity. It is not quite the Self, it is dangerous, it is subject to morbid anxieties, but it is also intimate and admissible. For the non-adivasi, it promises a receptable – temporal, spatial and racial – for that part of the modern self which is at odds with the generic, mundane, liberal framework of the democratic state. It holds a part of the self in abeyance, as it were, from a subjecthood with roots in colonialism. And that is precisely why it is democratic: it permits, in theory and to some extent in practice, a two-way movement, between modern citizenship and aboriginality. So Jaipal Singh – hockey star as well as adivasi activist – could pose with either a hockey stick or a spear, and Sarkar could be either a sociologist armed with numbers and charts, or a Romantic receding into the fog of ‘exotic’ folk traditions.

Even during the debates of the 1950s surrounding Verrier Elwin and tribal policy, it was understood that tribals represented a primitive Indianness. So we can talk about adivasis being exploited and their lands being stolen, just as we can talk about peasants being exploited and their lands being stolen, but we cannot reasonably talk about adivasis and their land being colonized, because that word brings with it assumptions about race, political community and membership that do not apply. Indeed, the concept of the adivasi is a rather elegant resolution of modern India’s problem with the primitive. It is an updating, rather than a total replacement, of older, extra-colonial notions of the porous boundary between wilderness and civilization. Within this resolution, extreme forms of violence and exploitation have persisted, but that is partly because the boundary has been poorly managed by the state.

That framework, however, falls apart when we look at the Andamans, because it becomes clear, here, that not all aborigines are adivasis. It is useful to go over what is different in the Andamans, at the risk of stating the obvious. Firstly, the Andamans are both literally and metaphorically islands in the mainland Indian imagination: belonging to the nation, but cut off from the nation.

Secondly, that dislocation has been most acute when it comes to the Andamanese, who entered Indian discourse very differently than did the tribals of the mainland. Santals and Mundas did not have to wait for the British in order to become known to Indians, or even to be known as Indians. H.H. Risley and company had no monopoly on the processes of knowing. The Andamanese, on the other hand, came to India largely through British mediation. Under the circumstances, the Andamanese that Indians conceived remained fundamentally alien: accidental discoveries, as it were, unsupported by indigenous discourses of familiarity and kinship. They entered India not as the semi-open category of the adivasi, admissible into folk and nation, but as the fully closed category of the adeem janajati, too fragile for contact with the world beyond the reservation.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the Indian-national encounter with the Andamanese has been colonial, and on at least four interconnected levels. At one is the straightforward business of expropriation: the various kinds of crowding out, hemming in, and encroachment, enabled and justified by the total displacement of one set of ideas about land, space and ownership by another. At another is a museological-zoological outlook: tourism operators getting Jarawas to dance, but also, at the level of the intelligentsia, relegating the Andamanese to the status of museum objects and a species that might become extinct. We do not use the rhetoric of extinction with the Santals or the Welsh, no matter what the circumstances. The third is the issue of ethnocide. The fourth is political exclusion, which enables all of the others.

What links these various predicaments together is a question of coming and going, which is familiar to us from the adivasi debates of the 1950s. At the heart of what Elwin and others debated were the questions: can non-adivasis ‘go to’ advisasis, and can adivasis ‘come to’ the nation-state? Because adivasis are unquestionably Indians, both these questions were ultimately answered in the affirmative, although obviously coming and going were not going to be on equal terms. But adeem janajati are not unquestionably Indians, and the imbalance of coming and going in the Andamans has corresponded to this exclusion. Outsiders can go to the Andamans: the very existence of the place is an invitation to colonization. But more pertinently, the Andamanese cannot come out, literally and metaphorically. Not only can the Jarawa and Onge not leave the tribal reserved without quickly being escorted back, they cannot leave an ethological-administrative category that admits of no change, movement or agency.

Why can’t they come out? Why can’t they want to cross what has become a kalapani in reverse: a forbidden expanse of water and jungle, but even more than that, an expanse of race? It is worth remembering that Tasmanian aborigines – not long ago regarded as an ‘extinct race’ and close cousins of the Andamanese – have since ‘come out’ of extinction, not by Jurassic Park style cloning or a sudden outbreak of fecundity, but by a radical alteration of the concept of aboriginality that did away with the insistence on racial and cultural purity, and placed control over the boundaries of aboriginality in the hands of the aborigines themselves. It is possible, now, for the Australian cricketer Jason Gillespie to be an aborigine without having to prove his purity or ‘looking’ a certain way. Likewise, it should be possible now for an Onge or Jarawa to travel to Munich and talk to scholars and activists about what they want, to marry a German anthropologist or a Turkish cabbie or a Tamil journalist, and have children who are still Onge or Jarawa if that is what they choose to call themselves. They need not become activists; they are already activists, because their everyday relations with people on the margins of the reservation – settlers, policemen, poachers, Adeem Janajati Vikas Samiti workers, anthropologists – are, and have long been, marked by resistance, negotiation and political agendas. They are not ‘innocents,’ and to treat them as permanent innocents is the worst kind of mismanagement, not least because it puts them in a situation reminiscent of the lions in Gir Forest: an enclosed population, that can be wiped out by a few HIV-positive policemen or truck drivers on the Andaman Trunk Road.

 This is where we come to the issue of ethnocide. We should be extremely careful about using terms like ethnocide when it comes to the Andamans. When we do that, we make a fetish of race that inevitably produces ethnicity as a fossil, and makes being Andamanese inseparable from the condition of the dying primitive. It’s not all that far removed from the imperial decadence of wringing one’s hands at the inevitable death of the savage. Obviously, it is too late now to ‘not go’ to the Andamans. That boat has sailed; the idea of total isolation is a fantasy. But it not too late to react prosaically, realistically, to the impact of the boat people, which means making it easier for the Andamanese to come out, instead of focusing on sealing them off from the outside and seeing contact and change as racial death. I do not pretend to know how this should be done, although basic steps like access to education, information, voting rights, health care, the courts and the media would have to be at the core of any program. But we should begin by accepting that the Andamanese are not more special, or subject to extinction, than Bengalis, the Welsh or Tasmanians. They would then at least have a chance to reformulate their ethnicity and their political relationship with others. They might no longer be Jarawas or Onges, and that might be a loss. But it is more damaging, and more colonial, to think of it as our loss.

June 29, 2013

Wankfest: The Academic Conference

Conferences, those central rituals of academia, are not all the same. Some are small and intimate, tucked away in a corner of a single university department; others are enormous and as impersonal as the Hyatts and Hiltons at which they are held. But there is nevertheless a certain predictability about the institution: a common promise of what is most enjoyable as well as all that is disgusting about being a working scholar.

The big conferences are typically annual affairs. For North-America-based scholars of South Asia, historians in particular, the most important of these are the AHA (American Historical Association), the AAS (Association of Asian Studies), and the South Asia Studies shindig in Madison, WI. The first is especially notorious. Being the major site of job interviews for historians, the AHA meeting is pervaded by the smell of fear. There is, for instance, a blue-curtained area where the poorer schools (which cannot afford hotel suites) hold their interviews, and rows of young men and women sit miserably with clammy palms and increasingly rancid suits. Even scholars who are not on the market feel a fat icicle penetrate them unnaturally when they walk past: they are transported, for a second, to being twenty-nine, ‘finished’ and unemployed. The AAS is less stressful than the AHA, but even more officious: ‘volunteer’ Brownshirts stand guard outside the conference rooms to make sure that nobody without a badge (i.e., who has not paid the hefty conference fee) gets in to steal the wisdom on offer.

Madison, in comparison, is a laid-back holiday, a sort of fall break devoted to meeting old friends and enemies, and to general debauchery. (It is the University of Wisconsin.) Around midnight, the elevators in the hotels around State Street open their doors to streams of unlikely couplings, booty calls are made, and the halls echo with the muffled cries of intellectuals in ecstasy. I used to go every year when I lived in the Midwest, mainly for the social side of the affair. A good friend from Glasgow, with the look and manner of a young Kirk Douglas, would brush off a small cloud of ardent graduate students, put away an astonishing number of beers, pay for the drinks of his envious friends, and go off to his room to sleep – alone. Curiously juvenile games are played at the panels. One woman used to glare reproachfully at me, to remind me of a disappointing evening in Delhi. Another would always show up at my panels, but inevitably walk out just as I was about to read my paper. I am ashamed to note that I retaliated in kind. Perhaps I started it; it became hard to remember. I enjoyed going to Madison, but I don’t miss it.

There are a fairly limited set of ‘types’ that may be found at any given conference. There is the compulsive self-promoter: usually an ambitious sort who has not managed to climb the ladder as far as he would have liked to. A friend and colleague, who I have known for many years, epitomizes this type. Happy to have found a familiar face in a sea of unfamiliar visages in the ballroom of a generic hotel, clutching your drink coupon, you may find yourself engaged in pleasant conversation with this woman. All of a sudden, she will spot – across the crowded room – an editor or a scholar more famous than either of you. Before you can say what the fuck, she will have shot across the hall like a guided missile. If you sidled up, you would hear the sounds of vigorous posterior-kissing, name-dropping, back-biting and self-praise, interspersed with polite exclamations. (Before you accuse me of biting back, dear reader, please note that I have named no names.) ‘She’s such a good networker,’ a mutual acquaintance says defensively. Indeed she is.

Then there is the acknowledged big shot, more evident at smaller conferences. He knows – or believes, at any rate – that the audience has been waiting for him. His entrance is a strut that would put P. Diddy to shame. Like Diddy, he has his entourage: a small, smug train of favored students and junior scholars. He also has his wife, who is typically a younger Indian scholar and his former graduate student, who has married up and is now well-placed in the field. He is, of course, the subalternist. (Sometimes he is just Ashis Nandy.) He is indulgent to his entourage, but otherwise disinclined to waste time on them: they are beneath him. (It’s all very Gramsci, you shee.) He reserves his egalitarian-democratic impulses for other subalternists, not for subalterns. He may find himself approached by the occasional self-promoter like my friend mentioned above, and he may even adopt one temporarily, but there is no question of friendship or loyalty. If you were a young scholar up for tenure but not a full member of the club, you would be well advised to watch your back.

The panels themselves are often interesting for the wrong reasons, most of them anthropological. We observe, for instance, that academics have not fallen under the spell of the clock: they tend to treat time-limits on individual presentations as an inside joke or a quaint suggestion. Audience members sometimes fall asleep: my old dissertation advisor would do this quite regularly. Nudged awake by his amused neighbor, he would smile good-naturedly and resume his gentle snoring, which never dampened the enthusiasm of the delinquent ignoring the clock. Discussants, particularly women from the subcontinent (for some reason, Delhi more than any other place), often give the impression that they eat their young, tearing into paper-presenters and colleagues with a ferocity that takes your breath away. (At a recent conference, one such spirited historian was asked by her co-panelist – a distinguished anthropologist – whether this was really necessary. ‘You’re a pompous ass,’ she shot back into an open microphone.) When you recover from your shock, you realize that these are people who take the business of being intellectuals extremely seriously. They believe their blathering matters in the world, even when they work on the minute details of Maratha taxation.

Not surprisingly, sooner or later at every conference worth its salt, comes the great Call For. This is an arcane concept and needs some explanation. The Call For is a paper presented, typically, by a big shot. But it is identified as such by a new member of the big shots’ club. The act of pointing it out is, in fact, a ritual of admission into the club. Following the conference, it will emerge – in an edited conference volume, or an article in the American Historical Review, or at least a well-received monograph – that in Washington/Philadelphia/Madison, so-and-so ‘called for us’ to chart some hair-raising new territory, like the intersection of caste, land revenue and Adorno in mid-nineteenth-century Bengal, or the marginality of left-handed women in nationalist narratives of penal transportation. Apparently, while my advisor slept and I doodled airplanes in my conference-issued stationary, the rest of the audience had thrilled to this clarion-call and gauntlet-throw, and some alert young scholar had recognized the paradigm shift. Now this individual had given the signal, and an army of South Asianists, shuddering with purpose and solidarity, was ready to march off into battle against no one in particular, giving the signaler a prominent place in its midst.

Conferences are, I find, rather lonely spaces – even Madison. The longer they last, the more depressing they become. This is, no doubt, due to my inability to regard my own profession with the required seriousness. But it is also because conferences bring out the eroded condition of friendships and old loves, and the fraudulent nature of collegiality, which seldom rises higher than one-upmanship, narcissism and cliquish behavior of the sort patented by middle-schoolers. In the worst cases, you find yourself doing it too. I’m always happy to leave and take a shower.

May 27, 2013