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
