"Indian" of Four Continents: Reading for Horizontal Relations of Violence, Complicity, and the Making of White Settler Colonialism

Home , Ashif Shaikh, Book of Negroes, Four Continents (French), Indigo revolt, Settler colonialism, Shalabh Kumar

THE "INDIAN" OF FOUR CONTINENTS: READING FOR HORIZONTAL RELATIONS OF VIOLENCE, COMPLICITY, AND THE MAKING OF WHITE SETTLER COLONIALISM

Shaista Patel

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Social Justice Education University of Toronto

The "Indian" of Four Continents: Reading for Horizontal Relations of Violence, Complicity, and the Making of White Settler Colonialism

Shaista Patel

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Social Justice Education University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

This research study asks: How do we theorize the place of non-Black people of colour vis-à- vis Indigenous peoples and Black people in North America? Paying attention to transnational power relations, and colonial entanglements of differential racialization, I particularly inquire into the place of South Asian diaspora in North America. This study draws upon critical

Indigenous, Black, anti-caste, and transnational feminist theories to argue for the urgent need to place analyses of white settler colonialism here in conversation with other entangled histories, presented through discrepant spatialities and temporalities, in order to examine what we know and have yet to learn about entanglements of race, Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, caste, and relations of labor. My “unlikely archive” (Lowe, 2015) of complicity consists of a wide array of legal, representational and cultural artifacts. Drawing upon

Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading of texts, and Lisa Lowe’s methodology of paying attention to past conditional temporality, this study travels from analyzing lingering coloniality in a series of photographs titled An Indian from India by a contemporary South

Asian artist to Bengal of 19th century where I study Neel Darpan, an anti-colonial protest play. In both these chapters, I show how anti-colonial resistance narratives can often

ii replicate the logics of Empire and leave the very people who are the most marginalized subjects of history as subaltern, silent, and vestigial. My chapter on the figure of the wide circulation of the "Indian Queen" in 18th century Europe examines how she is formed at the nexus of race, coloniality, and capitalism but also understudied or suppressed histories of

Europe's Crusades against its Muslim Other. This analysis places anti-Muslim sentiments of the Old World into a much- needed conversation with conquest of the New World. In my last chapter, I study "Indian Arrival Day" a national holiday in the Caribbean celebrating the first arrival of Indians as indentured laborers. This chapter adds to the growing scholarship that moves us away from binaries of free versus unfree or coercive labor and towards more complex readings of modern racialized division of labor.

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Acknowledgements

I begin with thanking Allah and the spiritual and temporal leader of us Shi’i Ismaili Muslims, Prince Karim Aga Khan, for everything I have ever achieved in life, and for giving me the courage to live all the blessings and be patient with what I have lost.

This dissertation has taught me a lot about my own histories, but also about the limits of my knowledge, about the limits of my understanding of the world. The more I read and wrote, the less, I realized, I know. Throughout this process, holding my hand was my supervisor, Dr. Eve Tuck. Eve, I do not have enough words to thank you. Your generosity, writings, ethics, politics, readings, teachings, mentorship –all of it taught me how to orient myself to the world. I am going out of this PhD program holding onto every word, every advice of yours. You selflessly gave so much of yourself to my work. Thank you! To my committee members, Dr. Jodi Byrd and Dr. Dia Da Costa, I owe deep gratitude. You have shown me what brilliance and generosity look like. Without you three, my dissertation would not be what it is today. To my very generous and supportive examiner Dr. Piya Chatterjee and internal/external examiner, Dr. Carol-Ann Burke, thank you. I will always remain grateful for your careful and very generous reviews of my thesis, your insightful suggestions for future development of this work, and your support and encouragement. Each and every one of you taught me that intellect without generosity means nothing. Thank you.

Salima Charania, you have been my constant support for last 15+ years. When I first met you, I knew that I had found a sister in you. Our soul connection is deep. Thank you for always being there for me, for showering me with so much adoration, support, and strength. You keep me grounded and I am so grateful for that. Ethel Tungohan, who else can I talk to about Bollywood, politics, scholarship, and people around us, and that too all in one conversation? Gossiping with you is the kind of feminist I am. Your brilliance, love, generosity and support for me have been my sustenance for all these years and your friendship remains invaluable no matter where I go and what I do. Krittika Ghosh, aka my Sullu, you continued to believe in me even when I didn’t. I will always remain grateful for your generous love and friendship. You’ve shown me how to celebrate life and for that I am grateful. Kate Milley, I have had some of the best, most insightful conversations about my project with you in your car. You were the first one to hear my ideas and confirm that yes, this was indeed a dissertation. You have been nothing but supportive and a true friend all these years. Jiji Voronka, there’s nobody I have sent more Skype messages to than you during my ‘writing time’. Those Skype conversations gave me the courage to write even when the skies were grey and there were winter storms outside. Your love, support, and friendship in helping me navigate academia has been so very generous. Equally importantly, thank you for all the sushi dates! Tammy George, thank you for the healing hands, love, and listening ears. To Sobia Shaikh and Vannina Sztainbok, thank you for being with me throughout this journey, for listening to me, and giving me advice, love, support, and true friendship.

iv I owe so much gratitude to these friends who read drafts of various chapters, discussed my ideas with me, helped me think and rethink my orientation to my work, and constantly pushed me to be more ethical. Thank you Nisha Nath for reading drafts of my chapters and encouraging me to keep writing. To Rob Innes, your bad sense of humour but also brilliance has helped me so much. To Chris Andersen, Huma Dar, Zainab Amadahy, Hope Windu, Tiffany King, Alex da Costa, Erin Morton, Nishant Upadhyay, Mariam Georgis, Kendra Ann-Pitt, Sheelah McLean, and Susan Cahill, thank you for your constant friendship and support.

I am very grateful to my teachers at OISE and WGSI. Thank you for all that you have taught me. To Kristine Pearson and Sezen Atacan, what would I have done without you? Sezen, I came to your office with missed deadlines for forms and panic attacks more often than I should have. Thank you for always being there for me, and for your patience with me even when your desk had so much work to attend to.

During the process of completing my PhD, I lost my Dad. But this dissertation and everything good coming my way has only been possible because of his prayers. Thank you, Pappa, for watching over me even when you’re no longer here in body. You never stopped praying for me. To my Mum, I owe it all. I have never worried about much in life because I knew that your prayers are always here with me, Mummy. There is no way I can ever repay you even a bit for what you do for your children every day. To Akbain, I owe so much. It was your financial and emotional support, your taking Dad’s place afterwards that ever made this dissertation possible. I could not have stayed in academia or write this dissertation without your love and generosity. To Appa, thank you for all the makeup and bags you kept buying for me. They were the core sustenance of a weepy graduate student. Thank you both for being the best siblings ever! To Ramzan Bhai, thank you for becoming another brother to me. As for Anniyah (Anu) and Roham Ali (Amam), you two are my world! What more can I say? You two are the two halves of my heart. Daa would have done nothing in this life without you two here. Thank you for being here and constantly teaching me life lessons. I wrote this dissertation with the hope that by the time you are old enough to choose to read it, the world around you is a kinder, less racist and less colonial place. Much love to my niece, Freddie for being here in my life. You make me laugh with joy! My deep gratitude also to Wayne and Gourisankar Uncle for their help. Khatun Auntie, thank you for your constant love, support, and TV watching with me. Hartej Gill, this journey would not have begun without your love, support, and mentorship. Shukriya!

I have been spoiled with love in the process of writing my dissertation. I am sure there are so many people and moments I am forgetting at this stage of being overwhelmed with love and joy. But thank you for holding me in your heart and in your prayers. I have written this dissertation with passion and love and it could not have been possible without you all.

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iv Table of Contents ...... vi Dedication ...... ix

Chapter I - The “Indian” of Four Continents: An Introduction ...... 1 Introduction ...... 2 Complicity as an Ethic ...... 8 Approaching the Study ...... 9 On the Need to Pause ...... 9 Situating Me ...... 11 The Dreaded ‘I’ ...... 12 White Settler Colonialism ...... 15 Searching for Words ...... 23 The Time/liness of My Study ...... 26 The Question of People of Colour Complicity ...... 30 Theorizing “Settler of Colour” ...... 32 People of Colour Accountability ...... 39 Research Questions of The “Indian” of Four Continents ...... 45 Relational and Transnational Accounts of Complicity ...... 51 Anti-Blackness and White Settler Colonialism ...... 53 Theorizing Arrivants ...... 54 Overview of Chapters ...... 59

Chapter II Methodology ...... 60 Reading Practices ...... 64 The Disjunctive, Queer Archive ...... 68 Archive as a Contact Zone ...... 71 Reading for Relationality ...... 75 Ethical Considerations ...... 78

Chapter III- Theoretical Framework ...... 85 Introduction ...... 85 Critical Indigenous Theory ...... 86 Defying the "Dead Indian" Trope ...... 91 The Object of Critical Indigenous Studies ...... 93 Working Definitions of Indigeneity ...... 95

vi Different Orientation to Land ...... 97 Decolonization ...... 100 Resistance against Inclusion ...... 101 Conclusion ...... 102 Drawing upon Black Feminist Theories ...... 105 Refusing The Human of 1492 Epistemology ...... 107 Ethics of Approaching Black Feminist Theories ...... 111 Black Studies as “Wake Work” ...... 114 Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology ...... 117 Conclusion ...... 120 Anti-Caste Framework ...... 119 Caste Versus Race ...... 122 Caste and Knowledge Production ...... 123 Claiming Subalternity ...... 125 Conclusion ...... 131

Chapter IV- Columbus Fathers the “Indian Queen”: Tracing the "Undifferentiated Indian" through Europe's Encounters with Muslims, Anti-Blackness, and Conquest Introduction ...... 135 The Queen as the Fourth Continent ...... 141 The “Undifferentiated Indian” ...... 143 Playing “Indian” and Hailing the Four Continents ...... 146 The ‘Indian’ Indian ...... 151 Black “Indian Queen” ...... 155 1492 and “Indian"-Moor-European Encounters ...... 157 Producing the Muslim Enemy ...... 159 Moors and "Indians" and Crusades and Conquest ...... 163 Which Orient ...... 169 Conclusion ...... 173

Chapter V- Complicating the Tale of “Two Indians”: Mapping ‘South Asian’ Complicity in White Settler Colonialism Along the Axis of Caste and Anti-Blackness Introduction ...... 175 Reading for Empires and Complicity ...... 182 A Tale of Two ‘Indians’ ...... 184 Multicultural Engulfment of Indigeneity ...... 186 The White Girl-Child, Sari, And Caste ...... 190 Carlisle, Residential Schools and Indian Emplacement ...... 193 Over Black-Indigenous People ...... 195 South Asians in Anti-Blackness and Casteism ...... 197 “Indians” Staging Refusal ...... 202 Conclusion ...... 206

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Chapter VI- Histories out of the Blue: From Blue Hands, and Lands to Blue Destinies Introduction ...... 209 Transnational Travels of Indigo ...... 220 Reading Neel Darpan ...... 223 Setting the Context ...... 223 The Response ...... 225 On Caste, Whiteness, and Anticoloniality of the Play ...... 226 Caste, Enslavement, and Question of ‘Free Labour’ ...... 236 Learning from Daughters of the Dust ...... 243 Conclusion ...... 252

Chapter VII- Indian Arrival Day: On Question of Caste, Anti-Blackness and Indigeneity Introduction ...... 253 Indian Arrival ...... 260 Indian Arrival Day ...... 263 Slavery, Indentureship, and Colonialism ...... 266 Indo-Caribbean People and their Casteist Colonizing Labour ...... 271 Indo-Caribbean Encounters (with) Indigeneity ...... 276 Conclusion ...... 286

Chapter VIII - Conclusion: Writing in the Absence of Justice ...... 287

Works Cited ...... 294

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Dedication

To the people who are my whole world –Pappa, Mummy, Akbain, Appa, Anu, Amam, and Ramzan Bhai

Chapter I

The “Indian” of Four Continents: An Introduction

I am from the country Columbus dreamt of. You, the country Columbus conquered. Now in your land My words are circling blue Oka sky they come back to us alight on tongue.

Protect me with your brazen passion For history is my truth, Earth, my witness My home, This native land.

(“Oka Nada”, Kaushalya Bannerji, 1994, p.20)

1 2

It was a cloudy autumn morning in October 2012. I was in the basement of University of Toronto’s rare books archive. I was visiting that archive to look for a reference to a kind of gown worn by elite European women in the early modern era. I had the need to satisfy my curiosity after watching an entire episode on renaissance fashion in a popular American TV show. However, looking through what could be vaguely called the equivalent of modern day magazines from 18th to 19th centuries, I came upon a book by Sir Ambrose Heal, who was at the center of design and retail innovations in early 20th century Britain. It was a book in which he had compiled hundreds of 18th and 19th century signboards of old London shops. I began browsing through the ads. A figure consistently present in the collection caught my attention the most. It was a figure, drawn as a woman, and labelled as the “Indian Queen,” and appeared with purplish-black to almost white skin colours on different signboards. Wearing grand feather headdress in some images, beaded jewellery, and printed gowns in different styles, the queen appears royal, majestic, and often, racially ambiguous. This figure of the queen confused me because I could not place the “Indian” in it. Which Indian was being hailed in the picture? Was it an Indian like I was? The Indian of British Raj and East India Company? Or was it white settlers’ “Indian” of the New World? Why did the queen appear Black? Which Indian is present in Africa? I wondered what it would mean to try to trace her emergence. What other figures, histories, gaps, silences and archives would make their presence known to us in that effort? What demands was this figure making? Was she beckoning histories that need to answer my questions about my place and relations across empire(s)? Or do we have to make ourselves answerable to her? To her stories?

The figure of the “Indian Queen” with which I open this research study is an important part of my archive of complicity which I present as but one of the examples of transnational archives consisting of historical, legal, and cultural artefacts, and people spanning discrepant spatialities and temporalities in order to (re-)examine what we know and have yet to learn about entanglements of colonialisms, race, gender, religion, caste, capitalism, relations of labour, and also to respond to questions of ethical accountability and

3 complicity. As I discuss in Chapter 4 of my study, thinking about questions of which “Indian” was/were being hailed by the figure of the queen guided me to other unexpected figures and histories such as those of the Moors or Muslims, and the eight centuries of their presence in medieval Iberian Peninsula. Trying to trace the figure of the queen brought me into a critical understanding of working with obscure, suppressed, actively erased and forgotten objects. While I focus on reading the queen in only one of the chapters in this study, what holds true is that very often the figures I juxtapose in my “contrapuntal reading” (Said, 1993) of the archives seem incommensurable with each other. They seem incommensurable because they seemingly belong to different histories, to different spatio- temporal contexts. What, after all, did the Moors have to do with Bengali peasants whose experiences of growing neel, or indigo, I study in Chapter VI? What are the descendants of indentured Indian labourers in the Caribbean doing in a study examining photographs by a contemporary self-identified Indian-American photographer? I cannot trace all the connections I hint at or bring in this study. My goal is not to prove that these connections exist/ed. Rather, I try to read through these connections with an orientation to a futurity for all the colonized, Black, and Dalit-Bahujan people who come into my research study. There are gaps in the archives, and then there are gaps in my analyses. These also inform and are informed by the limits of my political imagination. There are so many uncertainties. The uncertainty of not knowing where tracing a certain object would lead to; the uncertainty of (never) arriving at a destination in terms of theory; the uncertainty of whether the arguments these study tries to make will be coherent and helpful for people working through these archives. And yet, despite all the uncertainties, I began with the assumption, and still believe that these objects which I follow are constituted through each other; these various figures of the “Indian,” slave, arrivant, white settler, master, crusaders, Moor, ryot, immigrant are all part of my archive of complicity in a study which is deeply invested in questions of complicity of non-Black people of colour in the US and Canada. This project has demanded a commitment to bringing together concepts and critiques from critical Indigenous theories, Black feminist theories, Dalit and other anti-caste theories, transnational and postcolonial feminist theories, as well as anti-racist feminist theories. Even if not all the theories I point out here are thoroughly engaged or to the same extent, I know that my archive of complicity is difficult to read outside of critical Indigenous feminist calls

4 for decolonizing the white settler state, Black feminist scholars’ middle passage epistemology and fight for abolition, postcolonial studies’ critiques of the modern nation- state, Dalit and anti-caste feminist calls to ending caste, migration and anti-border theories’ attention to violence of the colonial borders and displacement, and transnational feminist calls for orientation to multiplicity and instability of archives. The complicities I reflect upon are horizontal, vertical, circular, and they take several different forms: they are wilful; they are situational and structural; and, they are a result of “colonial unknowing” (Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, & Goldstein, 2016) and often produced through colonial and racist modes of archival organization. Wilful participation is easier to see, trace, understand and explain. It often comes from people in positions of dominance, of power (in terms of gender, caste, religion, class, citizenship etc) colluding with the white settler state to strengthen white supremacy. Here, whiteness is not a condition for colluding. More difficult and complicated to follow is complicity which is produced structurally. For example, the ways in which immigrants of colour, often as displaced people ourselves, are brought to, or arrive on new lands that are occupied and where the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of the land is ongoing; where Black death is an everyday reality. For racialized, class-oppressed people of colour, finding that small place of life and hope for ourselves within the workings of the state often comes at the expense of ongoing disposability of Indigenous lives and sovereignty. It is very difficult work to think about the ways in which non-Indigenous, non-Black people of colour continue to benefit from dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Tracking state-produced relations of complicity is important work because the white settler colonial governmentality pits Indigenous and/or Black, and other people of colour against each other. Often the ways in which non-Black people of colour fight for the last bit of respectability and access to resources helps further the project of the white settler state and white supremacy overall. A good example illustrating this complicity (wilful and state-produced) is the discourse of America being a “nation of immigrants”.1 While histories of colonialism in the US and Canada are different, I

1 This term, which was first coined by Senator John F. Kennedy in 1958 as part of Anti-Defamation League’s series. Kennedy’s book was later published in 1964. In later years too it was consistently used to allow genocidal white nation-state to claim innocence. In 1981, Ronald Reagan noted: "Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands”. However, post election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, US Citizenship and Immigration Services removed the phrase from its mandate. The previous

5 believe it can be safely asserted that in both cases, these discourses flatten the positions of Indigenous peoples who have always been here and continuing to fight, white settlers who came as colonizers, Black people brought to the continent as enslaved people and later as immigrants for labour, and other people of colour who have entered these white nation-states under various often-coercive conditions produced through imperial and neo-liberal structuring of the world in the 20th century. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, an American historian asks: Are “immigrants” the appropriate designation for the indigenous peoples of North America? No. Are “immigrants” the appropriate designation for enslaved Africans? No. Are “immigrants” the appropriate designation for the original European settlers? No.2

What Dunbar-Ortiz points to is one of the key ways in which this discourse is dangerous: Both Canada and the US are white settler colonial nation-states and claims of these states being multicultural and as “nation of immigrants” erases historical and ongoing colonial violence, as well as racial hierarchies, all of which structure relations of life and death in these states. While making colonizers/settlers into immigrants, stolen Africans into immigrants, it also erases Indigenous people who have been colonized since 1492 and resiliently fighting for their sovereignty and freedom for over 500 years. However, in very recent times, particularly post election of right-wing, dangerous white supremacist dictator Donald Trump’s election as 45th president of the United States, we are witnessing a resurgence in this discourse by the left-wing, pro-immigrants and immigration people. This very much includes racialized non-Black, non-Indigenous people of colour. In response to the various pernicious changes in policies such as the Muslim Ban and the repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) right after Trump came into presidency, left-wing, pro-immigration scholars, lawyers and activists in the US often co-opted the

mandate which began with the following phrase “USCIS secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants…” was replaced with “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nation’s lawful immigration system…” See https://qz.com/1213959/uscis-deleted-nation-of-immigrants-from-its-official- mission-statement/ for more details. 2 Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, (2006, May 29). “Stop saying this is a nation of immigrants!” https://mronline.org/2006/05/29/stop-saying-this-is-a-nation-of-immigrants/

6 discourse of “nation of immigrants” to ask for justice for themselves and others.3 For example, at several protests, left-wing protestors (both white and racialized) were singing national anthem and Woody Guthrie’s “This land is your land” to protest the ban and support the undocumented immigrants and refugees. This land, that is the Americas, is first and foremost stolen land. Secondly in occupied lands, Black and other people of colour have designated places which can never allow them to imagine the land as theirs like white settlers can and do. Seeing these responses that were pro-immigrants but articulated at the expense of Indigenous peoples and sovereignty, Melanie Yazzie, a Navajo scholar launched the hashtag of #NoBanOnStolenLand as a critique, but also in solidarity with Muslims, Latinx, Chicanx and all other targeted racialized people deemed illegal. It was important to remind the protestors that this land from which variously racialized people are being deported, being evicted, is Indigenous peoples’ land and occupied for centuries. Yazzie astutely noted that through various educational efforts of Indigenous protestors on site, other protestors changed their chants from U.S.A to “no bans on stolen lands”.4 As Nick Estes, a scholar of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate nation added, “It means that the United States, as a settler nation, does not have the final say on who or what comes into the country because it’s not theirs to own. When we do that as Indigenous people, it’s reclaiming our sovereignty, our citizenship, and more importantly our kinship”.5 The threat for Muslims, Latinx, Chicanx, Black and other immigrants6 is very real, the fear for life made very real through increasingly anti-immigrant and refugee policies of the US government. However, we, and I mean those of us who are privileged enough to have positions and a say in academia, media, and other political organizations need to do the work of educating ourselves and others on the importance of explaining how colonial borders and incarcerations are intimately connected to white settler state’s sovereignty. That sovereignty itself needs to be challenged by understanding these

3 For example, Moustafa Bayoumi, a well-respected Muslim scholar in the US, for example, noted, “America’s soul as a nation of immigrants is in peril”Moustafa Bayoumi (2017, Sept 6), “America’s soul as a nation of immigrants is in peril”. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/06/americas-soul-nation-of- immigrants-daca 4 Lenard Monkman, (2017, Feb 2)“No ban on stolen land, say Indigenous activists in the U.S.” http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/indigenous-activists-immigration-ban-1.3960814 5 Ibid. 6 These categories which I list here are of course not mutually exclusive. For example, as Khaled Beydoun (2018) notes in his new book, poor Latinx immigrants are one of the fastest growing Muslim populations in the U.S.

7 states as occupying, acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty and showing solidarity before the colonial borders can ever be erased. I also pay particular attention to the modalities through which complicities are produced and shored up by the organization of archives, through knowledge production, and from the kinds of intellectual projects we scholars commit to, both politically and personally. In his beautifully written powerful book, Culture and Imperialism, late Palestinian-American scholar, Edward Said (1993), reflecting on the ethics and politics of knowledge production, writes:

We need a different and innovative paradigm for humanistic research. Scholars can be frankly engaged in the politics and interests of the present -- with open eyes, rigorous analytical energy, and the decently social values of those who are concerned with the survival, neither of a disciplinary fiefdom or guild nor of a manipulative identity like ‘Indian’ or ‘America’, but with the improvement and non-coercive enhancement of life in a community struggling to exist among other communities. One must not minimize the inventive excavations required in this work. (p.312)

Here Said is discussing the responsibility of the scholar. The “inventive excavations” to which the researcher must commit to in order to examine, to challenge the power dynamics which produce and sustain dominant knowledges about our lives and about our world, are necessarily about refusing the disciplinary borders of academic fields, of archives and of theories that might be reproducing harm. Said asks us to excavate the relationalities of our pasts, presents and futures because that deep digging work has to be done to learn to become ethical about orienting ourselves to those we might continually be erasing in our scholarly and other political projects. This study, then, is also an effort at that “inventive excavation” where the goal is not to claim new knowledges or expertise in any particular field, but to ethically reflect on how this archive of complicity makes sense to me and how I can examine the entanglements I need to sit with/in to better understand how my work can move towards an ethos of justice.7 Vimalassery, Hu Pegues and Goldstein define colonial unknowing as “an epistemological orientation that works to preempt relational modes of analysis” (np). Later in my introduction, I discuss the term “settler of colour” as one such example of theorizing that

7 I discuss this notion of writing for justice in my concluding chapter.

8 is embedded in epistemologies of colonial unknowing because it cannot account for the broader imperial histories through which people of colour come or are brought to settle here in the first place. To only examine people of colour once they have arrived here, and to ignore the global imperial and colonial entanglements of race, caste, religion, gender and tribal politics that brought them here is to tell a selective, one-sided, and, possibly, even a dangerous story. As I said above, one of the ways to confront colonial unknowing in this instance is to become undisciplined, in fact, to become recalcitrant, to refuse to respect the borders of the archives, of the systems of domination and subordination, and to focus on and put into practice the “lived relations and incommensurable knowledges it seeks to render impossible and inconceivable” (Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein, 2017, p. 1042). Paying attention to the multiplicity of violence(s), and to interlocking of structures of domination and subordination demands paying attention to the ways in which archives are constructed, policed, manipulated, mobilized and experienced or felt.

Complicity as an Ethic With the goal of continuing to think about the dynamics of power relations as they inform knowledge production, I find Fiona Probyn-Rapsey’s (2004) definition of complicity “as [a] starting point and the condition of ethics itself” very useful for my purpose. Probyn- Rapsey encourages us to theorize complicity as a means of thinking beyond an injury, as about the individual. Rather, she emphasizes on the structural and the need to study our placement and investments in it. She theorizes complicity as

a reflection of the mutual implication of domination and resistance, as a critical interest in the effects of one’s praxis and as a mode of mutual recognition itself. Complicity as a way of understanding the universal and particular so that one is not seen as the antidote for the other. Complicity as form of critique that does not seek to ‘get over’ the challenge of paradox so zealously. Complicity as a shared language and as a condition of dialogue. (n.p.,para.36)

Assigning guilt and blame can appear to be about particular individuals, as moving vertically (from below to above or vice versa), as moving out of the zone of culpability, as trying to move and think beyond the collectives we are historically, politically and socially placed in and within. Complicity, in Probyn-Rapsey’s theorizing is like thinking about the structures

9 as more pervasive, horizontal and circular network of relations rather than vertically drawn out. Thinking about complicity in such a way can then attend to the multiple realities, violence(s), struggles, intention, histories, and actors. The framework of complicity allows for examining violence(s) within their particular contexts, but without drawing borders around these contexts. Complicity has to attend to the transnational. To think about complicity as an ethic, as a shared language and as a condition of dialogue then moves us away from a position of injury and grievance to ask questions about the implications of our various investments in upholding violence, whether wilfully and/or situationally, or through the organization of white supremacist structures that also underline the (colonial) organization of archives and knowledge production.

Approaching the Study On the Need to Pause In her foreword to Leigh Patel’s (2016) very timely book on critical educational research titled, Decolonizing Educational Research, Unangax feminist scholar Eve Tuck discusses “pedagogy of pausing” which “involves intentionally engaging in suspension of one’s own premises and projects, but always with a sense of futurity. While Patel beautifully discusses the work which the ethic of pausing does in the process of writing her book, I draw upon Tuck’s reading of it because I am very inspired by the way Tuck names it as “pedagogy of pausing”. Pausing is an insertion of space in time” (p.xii, emphasis in original). Pauses are places I know very intimately. The process of writing my Dissertation can be characterized as a story of several pauses over the years. These pauses have also worked as shifts, as breaks so that the linearity of my sentences, the flow of my paragraphs, the grammatical arrangement of my words, everything sometimes appears chaotic; it can appear haphazard. While it is because of the ‘chaos’ and sometimes difficult-to-find links in my archive, these pauses have also been necessary to generate discussions on subalternity, power differentials, and heterogeneity among colonized and racialized people(s). For example, I would begin a sentence with “people of colour” and then pause because I am not talking about all people of colour in this study. Sometimes I would begin a sentence with “South Asians” and then

10 realize that South Asian is not a homogenous category.8 There have been several pauses to cater to the unwillingness to move forward, to find space to think about how to frame the purpose of my writing. These pauses have been necessary because there is so much history to hold onto in trying to think about complicity. The question of how to do this work carefully without reducing it to an exercise of simply blaming some people of colour as more complicit, and others more ‘enlightened’ and in solidarity with Indigenous and Black people has generated lots of questions of ethics about approaching my questions. In this study, I am convinced that I cannot offer my readers any answers. I did not write this study with the goal of providing answers. I did not write with the goal of suggesting the best authors, the best methodology, the best way to answer questions which I raise throughout the project. I also know that the archive of complicity I work with cannot be yours or theirs. It is a small study with no motivation to provide any universal answers. In fact, this study is more invested in asking questions. As Patel (2016) writes, If we are to be other than owners invested in settler colonialism, educational research needs a radical restructuring of its relationship to knowledge. Rather than property, we should see knowledge, and more specifically knowledge about learning, as what we are answerable to. We should see ourselves as stewards not of specific pieces of knowledge but rather of the productive and generative spaces that allow for finding knowledge. But we must also learn to regard all knowledge as incomplete, partial, contextually created, and perspectival. (p.79, emphasis added)

The kind of answerability which Patel points to is one that is commensurable with asking more questions. It pays attention to multiplicities, to hierarchies and acknowledges that knowledge production is about power relations. That writing can be about thinking through questions to generate more questions, rather than coming up with solutions. Her argument is that scholarship is not about fencing certain kinds of questions and scholarship as mine/yours only; it is not about owning knowledge, about gatekeeping, about insisting that only I/you can do a certain project. But, the ethic of answerability is definitely about asking what is

8 I understand that South Asian is not a homogenous category. It is mired in power relations, organized along the axis of gender, caste, class, religion, sexuality, histories of indentureship, and the country in South Asia one hails from. Taking caution from the works of Naheed Islam (1993), Ananya Bhattacharjee (1997), Gayatri Gopinath (2005), Monisha Das Gupta (2006) and others, I employ this category because while negotiating this category uncomfortably, I also see it as a space from which some claims about common experiences of racial violence (in all its manifestations) can be made and strategized against.

11 ethical for me to do even if it presents an invitation to collaborate. To invite people in to say that this is where I am in my thinking. This is who I understand myself to be in relation to the study I am doing and to people I write about and for. Being answerable means to be open to challenges, to collaborations, to shifts and to be answerable to the relationalities, to the connections with people in the archives and people who are my teachers, my colleagues, and my readers. The kind of answerability which Patel writes about is about being always accountable.

Situating Me One very long pause had come because as I tried to think through what it means for me to write this study. Before I go on to write a dissertation on the presence of people of colour in North America through thinking about the transnational context of global imperial and colonial politics, I want to bring attention to the ways that I write parts of myself into this dissertation. It has been important for me to do so in the current study in order to better contextualize my archive of complicity, and the decisions I have made about what to trace, and how to do it. It was eight years ago now that I began coming to my research questions in my graduate study. I belong to a generation of people who came into their proper adulthood post 9/11. So, I came into a clearer understanding of the world around me with a sense of racial injury as I witnessed the intense racial securitization of the state against Muslims. I was angry at the racial profiling of men who were my father, my brother, cousins and all those who looked like them in public and private spaces. I was angry at the racism directed against me, at my body, and at the bodies of those who looked like me. I was scared, but also angry at the heightened circulations and workings of the death-making maxim of saving Muslim women from Muslim men. This sense of racial injury inspired me to write my Master's thesis which examined the Anti-terrorism Act of Canada and the racial targeting of Muslims at the site of law. However, it was a few years later, in my doctoral study, that I began to ask myself how I thought of the people who were the first to be labelled as “terrorists” in Canada? As I began to read up on Canadian settler-colonial histories and contemporary routinized exercise of colonial violence against Indigenous people, I began to understand

12 how this labeling of Muslim bodies as terrorists was the legacy of a white supremacist settler-colonial governmentality that continues to label Indigenous peoples of the land as terrorists, and then targets them for disappearance and death.9 As I reflected on this, my politics became guided by this question: How could I try to ethically live on this land, and talk about violence directed at my body, and at my people, without situating that violence and my work for social justice within the history of a nation-state literally founded on death and erased nations of Indigenous peoples?

The Dreaded 'I' However, even in this realization, there were so many other “forgettings”. The forgetting that the first Muslims arrived in North America in the belly of a slave ship. That they were the enslaved Africans who were stolen from their lands and brought to the stolen land, land that was and continues to be taken from Indigenous peoples of the Americas no matter how liberal and multicultural these white settler colonial states now appear to be, and no matter how they talk about reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. The anti-blackness, in the form of my forgettings did not make itself apparent to me for a while. But this is one forgetting I can even register. These collective forgettings are not only of my doing. I have forgotten what I have forgotten to remember. I also find late Muslim feminist Saba Mahmood’s (2005) reflections on agency particularly useful in my project. Mahmood described agency “not as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create” (p.203). These forgettings are of my doing but also (inter)-generational, and the rememberings are also a product of our times and my histories. So many of the erasures in my work have a genealogy that I can no longer trace and certainly not in this project. I am certain that these forgettings are a loud reminders of all the failures in this dissertation which remain hollow in places, which claim to be intersectional and relational while standing on suppressed truths and histories of my people, and of so many other people. If the forgettings are collective, then so is the "I" which I use in this dissertation. This "I" spans over years of my thinking through my questions, even if I did the actual writing within the last two years.

9 I discuss this at length in my 2012 article, “Defining Muslim Feminist Politics through Indigenous Solidarity Activism,” http://www.thefeministwire.com/2012/08/defining-muslim-feminist-politics-through-indigenous- solidarity-activism/

With much respect, and without claiming that my text is anywhere close to the brilliant work, Pedagogies of Crossing by Jamaican-Canadian Black scholar, Jacqui Alexander (2005), I cite her musings on the “I” in her text because it so beautifully articulates what I am still struggling to remember to write. She writes:

Rather, that “I” [through different chapters of the book] has shifted and transformed, so much so that different voices emerge. Audre Lorde would have us believe that this shift in voice is that of the poet bringing faint yet decipherable whispers of freedom, a conjunction of the aesthetic of creation, the beauty of the Sacred and the flight of imagination. Modulations in voice, therefore, are not solely speech at all –but instead are about an opening that permits us to hear the muse, an indication of how memory works, how it comes to be animated. But whose memory, whose voice, and whose history? (p.16)

The “I” is not just secular, of the body. It extends beyond this body to point to the things which the soul, as a connection to the world beyond, might remember. I believe my mind construes histories and memories of those histories as more bounded and boxed when in fact they are more expansive. This itinerant “I” caught between what I can understand and what I still try to touch, is represented by the seeming incoherence of my archives, of my sites, of my chapters. Before I began working with Eve Tuck who is my current Dissertation Chair, I was struggling as I tried to make sense of why I kept getting pulled to the sites I kept going to. I could not answer the question, “what is that one site that is your main focus” that kept getting posed to me. I was ashamed, thinking I have failed as a thinker. I could not figure out how to hold onto the multiplicities of my histories and the complexities of the presents I live in, and how those informed my archive of complicity as not the only, but simply as one of the many archives important for examining the relationalities and simultaneities of lives and histories usually stored in archives and advanced through regimes of knowledge production as separate and incommensurable with each other. I could not easily articulate what the Bengali peasants of 19th century, for example, had to say to an Indian-American photographer who mimics photos of white photographer, Edward Curtis and of other photographers commissioned by the Empire to take pictures of the “Indians” of America before, as they feared, these “Indians” were dying out and disappearing. To talk about complicity in caste hierarchies while at the same time trying to make sense of the

14 complexities of my own caste background (something which I still quickly dismiss in a footnote in my chapter on Neel Darpan because it is a story, a history that remains fragmented and passed over here and there in hushed silences, and I still do not know and cannot narrate those fragments even as I know them), to talk about my complicity as a citizen of a white settler nation-state in North America. But I also live with the daily fear that my family in Texas leaves our home, goes to work, goes to the mosque, and something unsettles in me every time I cross the border between the US and Canada, every time I think about my family that came to Pakistan as refugees years before I was born, to think that I should not visit Pakistan for fear of what a visa from that country would do to my future employment chances in the US, to fear deportation of extended family members in the US, to fear going to the mosque especially as I watched in horror the Quebec city mosque shooting in late January 2017, to fear for my niece and nephew who are growing up amongst racial hostility in a red state like Texas. All these fears, the insecurities that are yet again collective, they strip me to my very bare elements, strip me and stop me from writing beautifully, from writing in a language that can beautifully articulate the contradictions and the ambiguities of my ‘I’. Language fails me and I fail at language so constantly. I have written this Dissertation in ‘simple’ sentences and hope that the complexity of my thoughts and messiness of my histories and complicity are not compromised in that simplicity. It is with that bare-ness that I have tried to write through all the I’s in this Dissertation. I hope I am approaching this writing with humility; humility which Alexander calls “stripping”: “Stripping,” she notes, “is a methodology in the most literal, perhaps mundane, sense of constituting the practices through which we come to know what we believe we know” (17). I have tried to write without any pretence but my emotions, my fears and insecurities keep and kept “muddling” things up for which I remain apologetic as a writer. I will now turn to a brief discussion on white settler colonialism is. I do this to outline the violence of white settler colonialism, but also its commensurabilities with other colonialisms and imperialism. Afterwards, I enter into a discussion on the place of non-Black people of colour in white settler colonialism and the framework of Lisa Lowe’s (2015) “intimacies of the four continents” which has helped me think through my research questions.

White Settler Colonialism

On June 11, 2008, then Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave an apology on behalf of Canada and Canadians to survivors of Indian residential schools. Between 1870 to mid-1990s, according to conservative estimates, over 150,000 Indigenous children were stolen from their parents with the intent of “killing the Indian in the child”. The survivors of residential schools and their descendants live with memories of intense sexual violence at the hands of the nuns and priests, and with their lives, lands and cultures stolen from them. This over-120 year period is what Harper called only a "sad chapter in our history". 10 Resigning the era of residential schooling in Canada to mistakes of the past, as a mere "sad chapter," allowed him to then claim a mere 15 months later at a G20 news conference that "There are very few countries that can say for nearly 150 years they’ve had the same political system without any social breakdown, political upheaval or invasion. We are unique in that regard. We also have no history of colonialism" (emphasis added).11 In this neoliberal age of apologies offered to variously ‘harmed’ groups of people, and recognition extended by the white settler state of its past but not the continuation of violence of residential schools through high incarceration rate of Indigenous youth, and ongoing encroachment upon Indigenous peoples’ lands, two things are happening: Firstly, Indigenous struggles for sovereignty and self-determination against the white settler state are increasingly becoming subsumed under multicultural demands for justice for people of colour wronged or harmed by the white settler state; and, secondly, the state's quest for the real, pure, authentic Indian to whom the apology could legitimately be extended ( versus a ‘diluted Indian’, characterized by living and breathing Indigenous subjects formed in relation to ongoing settler colonial violence but also resistance to that violence). There is no contradiction between the two stipulations under which Indigenous people as “Indians” are inserted into demands for social justice. In both cases, it is the “Indian” as vestigial remnants of something long gone that becomes the object of the settler state’s various discourses. This allows the white settler state to ‘forget’ its ongoing crimes.

10 For full text of Harper's apology, see, https://www.aadncaandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100015644/1100100015649 11 See Aaron Wherry, "What he was talking about when he talked about colonialism," (Oct 1, 2009), http://www.macleans.ca/uncategorized/what-he-was-talking-about-when-he-talked-about-colonialism/

As Paula Gunn Allen (2006), Lebanese and Laguna-Pueblo scholar notes, "Americans are world champion forgetters". The same holds true for seemingly multicultural Canada. Colonialism is never admitted but even if it is, it is always quickly forgotten. Or, when admitted, it makes an appearance as a "sad chapter" and not the very foundation and present of the white settler state's existence. In fact, the story of benevolence, of Canadian colonialism being a much milder version of our neighbours to the South is a consistently popular national mythology of Canada. Where America has rugged cowboys, notes Eva Mackey (2002), Canada has the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. While the cowboys are dangerous, gun-totting people who hunted the “Indians,” the "Mounties in the Canadian image are symbols and representatives of the kind and benevolent state" (p.2, emphasis in original). Canada and the US, two nation-states I have lived between for 25 years now are both white settler states, and both are genocidal and also innately anti-Black. According to Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis (1995), settler colonies are “societies in which Europeans have settled, where their descendents have remained politically dominant over indigenous peoples, and where a heterogeneous society has developed in class, ethnic and racial terms” (p.3). I begin with this important definition of white settler colonialism with its focus on heterogeneity of settler colonial relations because analysis of white settler colonialism has paid little attention to the multiple ways in which the presence of people of colour is a significant way of transforming white settler colony into contemporary multicultural white settler democracies. I will focus more on the place of people of colour, South Asians in particular, later on in this dissertation. For now, I will spend some time discussing white settler colonialism. In his manifesto on anticolonialism, late Martinique-born Black scholar, Frantz Fanon (2004) writes about the violence which accompanies the natives; the violence from which the natives are born. He writes that the colonized world is a world divided into two: This compartmentalized world, this world divided in two, is inhabited by different species. The singularity of the colonial context lies in the fact that economic reality, inequality, and enormous disparities in lifestyles never managed to mask the human reality. Looking at the immediacies of the colonial context, it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to. In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich…In the colonies the foreigner imposed himself using his cannons and machines. Despite the success of his pacification, in spite of his

appropriation, the colonist always remains a foreigner. It is not the factories, the estates, or the bank account which primarily characterize the “ruling class.” The ruling species is first and foremost the outsiders from elsewhere, different from the indigenous population, “the others.” (p. 5)

This violence is a key characteristic of any colonial situation. Colonialism, for Fanon, is “the violence which governed the ordering of the colonial world, which tirelessly punctuated the destruction of the indigenous social fabrics, and demolished unchecked the systems of reference of the country’s economy, lifestyles, and modes of dress…” (p. 5-6). Colonialism is always about land, resources, power, a future for the colonizers and a negation of any possibility of life and future for the colonized. Colonialism is never only a project of material accumulation but one of destruction, elimination and ideological accumulation. In Fanon's theorizing, colonialism is in fact defined as an identity-making enterprise through which the colonizer comes to know themselves as certain kind of human beings, as superior people, and makes their fictitious supremacy ‘reality’ through the material impoverishment and brutalization of the colonized. There are distinctions drawn among blue-water colonialism, which establishes colonies of extraction, versus settlement colonies. While British Raj in India is an example of the former, while the latter typically includes white settler states such as Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Israel. As Australian white settler scholar Lorenzo Veracini (2011) notes, the distinction between settler colonialism and other forms, expressions or situations of colonialisms needs to be made. Firstly, he contends, whereas other forms of colonialism have focused on colonizing bodies as exploitable labour, with occupancy of colonized land ultimately subject to this goal (i.e. if exploitable labour might be located elsewhere, the settler colonialism is focused on permanently colonizing land and displacing, disposing or assimilating colonized bodies to serve this end (p. 2). This distinction, Veracini argues, results in different conceptions of colonized bodies: labour- focused colonialism emphasizes colonized bodies as docile (or disciplined in the service of colonial domination), while settler colonialism emphasizes indigenous populations as fragile or vulnerable and, therefore, disappearing (p. 4). Secondly, whereas labour focused forms/expressions of colonialism are, because of the will to exploitation, invested in “sustain[ing] the permanent subordination of the colonized,” Veracini argues that “this

18 permanence is not present under settler colonialism which, on the contrary, is characterized by a persistent drive to ultimately supersede the conditions of its operation” (p. 3; emphasis in original). Consequently, he writes, “colonialism reinforces the distinction between colony and metropole [and] settler colonialism erases it” (p. 3; emphasis in original). Moreover, “colonialism reproduces itself” while settler colonialism attempts to extinguish itself (p. 3; emphasis in original). Finally, the differing foci between labour-centred colonialism and settler colonialism necessarily result in “distinct anticolonial responses”: “if the fundamental demand is for labour,” Veracini contends, “opposition must aim to withhold it (or to sustain an agency that could allow withholding it)” (p. 3). However, “if the demand, by contrast, is to go away, it is indigenous resistance and survival that become crucial” in anti-colonial opposition (p. 2). The features that have been described as unique to settler colonial forms include the demographics of both the original landscape and the landscape after conquest or colonial settlement, the climate of the regions where Europeans took up settlement as a form of conquest, and the types of resources presents in the lands occupied. This distinction between blue water colonialism and settler colonialism have also been made in 1999 by Australian white settler scholar Patrick Wolfe, who is considered as another pioneer of the still- emerging field of settler colonial studies even though he did not necessarily work to invent a whole different field for the study of this difference. In his groundbreaking book, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (1999), Wolfe defines “settler colonialism” as the structure of permanent invasion focused on usurping indigenous land rights. "The primary object of settler-colonization is the land itself rather than the surplus value to be derived from mixing native labour with it," notes Wolfe. It is land and disappearing the natives through genocide which informs settler colonialism, unlike regular colonialism where labour of the natives and resources are central to the colonial logic. There is a permanence to settler colonialism. That in settler colonialism invasion is a structure rather than event. Thus Wolfe claims that unlike other colonial formations settler colonialism functions through a structure of Native elimination. Wolfe underlines that unlike Fanon’s formulation of colonialism where the colonizer is superfluous, in settler colonialism it is the Native that is superfluous. Indeed Wolfe distinguishes settler colonialism from other formations of colonial domination, through the notion of settler permanence: “The colonizers come to

19 stay”, thus, “—invasion is a structure not an event.” For Wolfe settler colonialism is structured through the elimination of the Native, whether through physical death, and removal, or through elimination via assimilation or the dissolution of Indigenous collectivity (their existence as peoples). Working against a sort of common rendering of colonialism as event, Wolfe defines it as a structure—a structure superimposed on Indigenous life, and produced through the elimination of the Native presence—that has both a permanence and continuity. “It is both a complex social formation and as continuity through time that I term settler colonization a structure rather than an event” (p.388). Signs of Indigenous presence and permanence are direct threats to settler permanence. As Wolfe (2006) contends, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism (p. 387). He continues “Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be— indeed, often are—contests for life” (p. 387). Though he clarifies that settler colonialism is not itself “simply a form of genocide”, the logic of elimination is at its core. For Wolfe, “colonialism destroys to replace," and,

As opposed to enslaved people, whose reproduction augmented their owners’ wealth, Indigenous people obstructed settlers’ access to land, so their increase was counterproductive. In this way, the restrictive racial classification of Indians straightforwardly furthered the logic of elimination. Thus we cannot simply say that settler colonialism or genocide have been targeted at particular races, since a race cannot be taken as given. It is made in the targeting. Black people were racialized as slaves; slavery constituted their blackness. Correspondingly, Indigenous North Americans were not killed, driven away, romanticized, assimilated, fenced in, bred White, and otherwise eliminated as the original owners of the land but as Indians. Roger Smith has missed this point in seeking to distinguish between victims murdered for where they are and victims murdered for who they are. So far as Indigenous people are concerned, where they are is who they are, and not only by their own reckoning. As Deborah Bird Rose has pointed out, to get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay at home. Whatever settlers may say—and they generally have a lot to say—the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element. (p.388, emphasis in original)

Therefore, for Wolfe (as for Veracini), settler colonialism is firstly always about the land and not about the labour of Indigenous peoples. While Black people were needed to work on the plantations and work at settling the land for their white Masters, Indigenous people had to

20 keep dying, keep disappearing for the settler to be at home. Also, Indians were made as a monolithic race out of tens of thousands of heterogeneous sovereign Indigenous nations precisely for the land acquisition. Race was made in the targeting for land. Thus in settler colonialism, to be seen as threat, “all the native has to do is stay home” to get in the way of settlers’ encroachment and ownership of the land. While agreeing with the very important premise that (white) settler colonialism is always fundamentally about the land, I want to ask whether or not this could be said of all colonialisms? Is colonialism only ever about territoriality in settler colonial conquest? Which colonialism is only an event? Was modern European colonialism not about marking the territory of whiteness and modernity across the entire globe, securing the coloniality of power? Is colonialism itself, in all its forms, not a process of elimination at its core, a move to destroy what was there before? Do not all colonialisms come to stay, to establish permanence? Which colonialism has ever been initiated with settlers agreeing to leave after a certain end date? I want to consider the fact that all colonialisms function through a violent form of destruction that seeks to eliminate what was there before and remained after the first colonial encounter. As Fanon writes, “colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and future of a dominated country. Colonialism is not merely satisfied with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of preserve logic, it turns to the past of an oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.” (86). In “What is Settler Colonialism?: An Anthropological meditation on Frantz Fanon,” Udo Krautwurst (2003) carries out a grammatological investigation of the term “settler colonialism” by reading Fanon’s essay, “On violence” in relation to scholars such as Patrick Wolfe, David Prochaska and Leo Kuper, all of whom have reflected on the concept. Krautwurst insists that “(m)any of the earliest appropriations of the concept (of settler colonialism) stem from the 1960s, within a historical context of decolonization” (p. 55-56). Offering “a cursory review of the concept,” Krautwurst finds “ that the meaning of both ‘settler colonialism’ and its Other has been variously constituted….Criteria for inclusion and exclusion have resulted in a number of different “hierarchical axiologies” (Derrida 1976), or oppositional dualisms, where the boundaries imposed while composing each term have created differing conceptions of settler colonialism and its Other.” (p.59-60). Some of the

21 dualisms Krautwurst names include settler colonies/colonies of intervention and exploitation, settler colonial mode of production/capitalist mode “proper,” trading colonies/colonies of settlement, white settler colonies as a hybrid between temperate colonies of immigration and settlement/tropical colonies of exploitation and administration, settlement colonialism/exploitation colonialism, and dependent colony/settler colony (p.59-60). However, Krautwurst insists that Every European colony was founded on the principle that it would be part of a Reich that would last a thousand years. All colonialism is settler colonialism. This is partly why I reject the distinction, drawn by Prochaska and others, between permanent settlers and temporary migrants from the metropole...Structurally, a place was made for traders, missionaries, tourists, administrators, farmers, social scientists, etc., regardless of the intentions of individual agents who occupied those subject-positions. However, these structural places were not fixed in context or content, but were continuously (re- )negotiated according to local conditions. (p. 58, emphasis in original)

Krautwurst’s argument that all colonialisms imply a structural, rather than a merely physical presence is an important one. The distinction between colonies of settlement versus dependent colonies has often been thought to be “demographic bias” where the native is either needed for his labour, or is to be eliminated. However, as he argues, “If this is indeed the case, then demography becomes curiously inseparable from questions of agency since there must be some means to establish in advance what kind of colony a territory was to become. The question has become who or what makes this determination and, if it is planned in advance, as implied, how is it done?” (p. 67). While he does not deny that there are distinctions between colonial forms, he underlines that colonialisms defined as settler were created and sustained through various forms of colonialisms and colonies. For example Canada, the United States, and Australia were made of various forms of colonial exploitations, various types of colonies, controlled by various European national powers, prior to confederations. Thus to write settler colonialism as a comprehensive, fully outlines strategy is perhaps an oversimplification of the histories of these white settler states. This understanding of white settler colonialism as not an isolated and closed formation is important to hold onto in my study. I try and pay attention to the ways in which white settler colonialism, British Raj and imperial policies were closely connected and interdependent. My study contributes to the various fields such as Ethnic Studies,

Transnational Studies, and even Settler Colonial Studies even as I am critical of the novelty of over 500 years old colonialism within the field of newly established settler colonial studies. For instance, Joanne Barker, Lenape scholar of American Indian Studies argues that there is a "troubled focus within settler colonial studies on structure to the erasure of Indigenous experiences and perspectives about colonialism even within analyses of the 'logic of elimination' that fuels colonial processes of social formation" (Barker, cited in Macoun & Strakosch, 2013, p. 436).12 Barker is critical of the emergence of the study of centuries old colonial violence (with 'unfortunate' sanitization of violence) as something new, as something which Indigenous peoples have not already been saying through centuries in their oral traditions, stories, challenges to the Crown sovereignty, blockades, land reclamation, and fight against sexual violence. In their article examining the "ethical demands of settler colonial theory," Alissa Macoun and Elizabeth Strakosch (2013) argue the strengths and shortcomings of Settler Colonial Theory (SCT). SCT, they argue, "remains a largely White attempt to think through colonial relationships" (426). Critiquing SCT for its failure to envision the end of settler colonialism, Macoun and Strakosch further write: The particular challenge of SCT's analysis is that it does not give an account of such a transformed future, or of the conditions for settler colonialism's demise. This can lead to a theoretical and political impasse and result in a kind of colonial fatalism. Such fatalism can be deployed to imply a moral equivalence between different forms of settler political interactions with Indigenous people, and, at worst, to deny the legitimacy of Indigenous resistances... Settler colonial structures, however, appear as highly stable and relatively impervious to regime change. Therefore, at the same moment settler scholars finally see the depth and reach of settler colonialism in the present they feel unable to find 'postsettler colonial passages'. (p. 435, emphasis in original)

Their critique is a really important one: It challenges the idea of a ready for decolonization white settler who can actually imagine the end of settler colonialism without centering himself. Just like the antiracist white subject (who needs to constantly be theorized into existence) refuses to acknowledge the power of white skin despite all the critiques, Settler Colonial Studies as a fenced, guarded area of study cannot grapple with Indigeneity as

12 Barker managed a blog under the name Tequila Sovereign. In 2013, she deleted her blog and therefore many of her posts on critiques of settler colonial studies are unavailable even in archives.

23 resistance and revolution, and that when the revolution will come, it will also burn the white picket fences around their homes on stolen land.

Searching for Words Thinking about complicity as “[a] starting point and the condition of ethics itself” (Probyn-Rapsey) came with another long pause because I had to think through the montage of words I had available to articulate my presence here: immigrant of colour, non-Black person of colour, racialized immigrant, racialized settler, settler of colour, arrivant. Which word was I going to (have to) use to refer to myself? Which word could place me here in a relation of accountability to Indigenous and Black people here? Thinking about questions of Indigeneity and race relationally means attending to multiple histories, presents, voices, and structures. However, coming to that realization took me some time. When I first began thinking about my presence on Indigenous lands in North America, the term “settler of colour” seemed like an appropriate category that could address my positionality as a racialized woman living on stolen lands. I had to distinguish myself from white settlers but also hold myself accountable for living on lands where I was not invited or merely “hosted” by Indigenous peoples of the various territories I move across on this continent.13 For some time now, I have been trying to search for what seemed like a grammatical impossibility for referring to non-Black people of colour (NBPoC) in white settler colonies. What do I/we call ourselves in white settler colonies? Immigrants? Settlers? Settlers of color? Racialized settlers? How do I refer to myself? The question, or rather the quest, is not simply about appropriate semantics; it was not simply about a label for myself and other people of colour here. It was part of my struggle to come to an understanding about my responsibilities here on this land and about a search to relate to the territories here and the Indigenous peoples but on terms which are different from the ones set out by colonial and racial modalities such as that of citizenship. The search was for means of relation, of

13 At various conferences, especially in recent years, I have often witnessed white and non-Black racialized people begin with territorial acknowledgements, and then say that they are grateful for being “hosted” by the Indigenous peoples of that territory. I take issues with such an assumption because as settlers and racialized migrants, we came to this land through following the protocols set out by white settler colonial governments and as such, there has been no place for acknowledging the sovereignty of the Indigenous peoples of the territories we live on. We were not invited as guests by these Indigenous peoples and to assume that we’re guests on their lands while colonial dispossession is ongoing is simply cruel.

24 offering “transformative accountability” (Byrd, p.xxx) to Indigenous peoples of the lands I now live on. At the time when I began with this project, I believed that I had to find my place within the settler/native binary through which I had come to understand power relations in North America. This was complemented by the Indigenous solidarity work which I was committed to doing in Ontario. I had joined a local CUPE/union group in Toronto which did solidarity work with Haudenosaunee people at the Six Nations of the Grand River territory in Ontario. Time and again, I was made to feel by the predominantly white group, that “real solidarity work” could only be done by white members of the group. Through covert and more blatant racism and lack of assigning any funding to support my ideas, I was discouraged from thinking about other sites where Indigenous solidarity organizing can, does, and must continue to happen, such as the mosque in Brantford which was in close proximity to the reclaimed territory. It wasn’t the case that I did not understand how limiting the binary of white settler and native was, or how important it was to mobilize those Muslim families that lived in Brantford, close to the Six Nations territory where white supremacist mobs routinely came to threaten the people of Six Nations over their reclamation of 40 acres of land in Caledonia.14 White solidarity activists would fill school buses with mostly white Torontonians who did not understand the history or politics of this work, nor the particularities of the situation at Six Nations. My argument that we should mobilize the hundred neighbouring Muslim families living next door to Caledonia so that they could step in every time the white mobs showed up, was regularly rejected because white activists would argue that it was their work. White solidarity activists carved out their territories (actual and metaphorical) everywhere. I had the critiques of what I was seeing in such activist spaces, and also in academia as I continued to read in white settler colonial studies which was in its early stages of solidifying as a field of study. The more I reflected on what I was experiencing and reading, the more I began to ask myself about the place of people of colour on Indigenous lands, in Indigenous solidarity work, and critically think about relationality between race and Indigeneity in consolidating white settler colonial power.

14 I am referring to what came to be known as the “Caledonia Crisis” whereby the Six Nations people of the Grad River Territory reclamation of the Douglas Creek Estates housing development in Caledonia in February 2006.

It was within this context that I initially took up the language of settlerhood and began mobilizing the term “settler of colour”.15 However, as I keep realizing, my framing of the question was inattentive to various histories of arrival and to the multiplicity of the term people of colour.16 There is no homogenous group of people under the umbrella term of “people of colour” or even terms with more specificity such as “non-Black people of colour”. While I use both these terms in my project, I am less willing to be arrogant enough to suggest that we do away with a term of politicized non-belonging adopted by Black women and immigrant women in North America who often came together to fight for life and freedoms against the white supremacist and settler state. However, since the term settler of colour could not account for the transnationality of our being and our histories through several different continents, I then began to think about orienting to my complicity and responsibility in different ways.

The Time/liness of My Study The question of investigating systems of domination and subordination and our place within structures of violence is always timely. However, I would still like to briefly discuss the following two events and the structures making them possible which further clarify the time/liness of this study.

Event #1: It was a cold day in January 2013. There was a crowd of hundreds of Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous people in solidarity with them at Dundas Square in Downtown Toronto. They were singing and drumming, and raising slogans against Bill C-45, the Conservative government's controversial omnibus budget bill which was part of the Crown’s increasing encroachment upon land and treaty rights of Indigenous nations. This was one of the earliest Idle No More protests in Toronto which I remember attending. There were protests throughout the settler state of Canada at the same time. Idle No More, as a movement, was launched in 2012 and led by Indigenous women and two-spirit people. The

15 The term “settler of color” was first used by Kanaka Maoli theorist, Haunani Kay-Trask who used it in her article in 2000. I discuss this term in more detail below in my chapter. 16 I have critiqued the term “people of colour” in my editorial in Feral Feminisms (2015). See http://www.feralfeminisms.com/complicities-connections-struggles/

26 impetus for the movement, however, lies in “centuries old resistance as Indigenous nations and their lands suffered the impacts of exploration, invasion and colonization”.17 Immigrant and settler allies had also brought colourful placards to show their support of the movement. One of the placards that caught my attention was held by a South Asian man. It read, “Indians from India in Solidarity with Idle No More!”.

Event #2: Immigration Voice, a right-wing Hindu American coalition with the motto of “Change for fairness and justice,” are preparing to table a Bill called, “Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2017”. Under this Bill, the group is advocating support for tightening border security in the US as well as collet funds to support President Donald Trump’s plan for building a 1,900 miles (3,100 km) long wall along Mexico in order to deter what Trump has repeatedly referred to as “illegal border crossings”. This wall, called “big, beautiful” by Trump and expected to cost exceedingly more than the $10 billion estimate given by the Trump administration, was a key selling point of his highly right wing (Republican) presidential campaign in which he has been consistently supported by Hindu nationalists in India and diaspora under groups such as the one aforementioned, and others like Republican Hindu Coalition (RHC) and Skilled Immigrants in America Coalition. These groups are advocating that Indian H1-B visa holders working in the US will collect a total of $4 billion dollars minimum through green card processing fee in exchange for a cut in the amount of time needed for securing residency. There is no doubt that the backlog of temporary work visas and the wait period for green cards are two of some of the most dysfunctional aspects of the current US immigration system.18 However, such a move by upper-caste Hindu Indians who have been advocating for Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim (among other antis) policies, are not just racist against undocumented border crossings but also casteist and Islamophobic.

17 To read more about the vision, mandate and story behind Idle No More, see the official website at http://www.idlenomore.ca 18 In 2016, the State Department estimated that 5 million people were waiting abroad, indefinitely, for approval of temporary visas. The more permanent green card is extremely hard to secure. Per-country caps mandate that no single country receives more than 7 percent of the 140,000 employment-based green cards allotted each year. To read more about right wing Hindu support for Trump’s proposed wall, see Thenmozhi Soundarajan’s 2018 article, “Why Are Some South Asian Immigrants Offering to Pay for Trump’s Wall? https://rewire.news/article/2018/02/14/south-asian-immigrants-offering-pay-trumps-wall/

On the surface, events #1 and #2 might seem to be very different and disconnected from each other. The first presents an example of South Asians in solidarity with Indigenous resistance movements in North America. The second event I highlighted makes the violence of borders and anti-immigrant politics of Trump and his upper caste Hindu supporters quite clear. However, both of these events are parts of longer hi/stories that connect them together through social formations of religion, caste, race, indigeneity, diaspora and citizenship. Both present sites of violence when read through a transnational framework of complicity. “Indians from India” has often been used as a means to distinguish people from the country of India from the name Christopher Columbus gave to Indigenous peoples of what is now known as the Caribbean. I will come back to this naming in later chapters as well, but I would like to briefly point it out here too since this is an important argument. Columbus’ Orientalist recycling of the name of actual Indian people he could never find was the beginning of invasion of the Americas and genocide of tens of thousands of Indigenous peoples already living there as part of organized sovereign nations. I have often heard these distinctions of “Indian from India” or “Indian-American versus American-Indian” or “dot-Indian versus feather Indian” being used by South Asians and others to distinguish between the two kinds of “Indians”. Granted, the naming of Indigenous peoples as Indians is dangerous and not simply offensive; it is legacy of colonial violence which has reduced sovereign Indigenous nations into mere colonial caricatures, and continues to be a reality for Indigenous peoples of the Americas. However, the naming of the other “Indian from India” is also not simply factual but about power. While the term “Indian” is a misnomer when used to refer to Indigenous peoples of Americas, it is important to point out that this term is also not an accurate label for the heterogeneous populations of the land we know as India. Many people(s) in India live under occupied conditions such as in Jammu and Kashmir and North East (of) India, including Assam, Nagaland, Manipur and Tripura, and Chhattisgarh. The Indigenous peoples of these states, known as Adivasis, actively resist being referred to as Indians while continuing to fight the constant encroachment upon their lands and lives. Similarly, Dalit- Bahujan people have also often refused to identify with the label of a nation-state that is actively committing crimes of casteism against them. I understand the category of "Indian" in this context too stands for a predominantly

Brahmanical, casteist, anti-Muslim, tyrannical occupant nation-state that is only as much of a democracy as any occupier-colonial nation-state can ever possibly be. Therefore, seeing the placard of “Indians from India in Solidarity” made me stop and think about who were these “Indians from India” standing in solidarity with Indigenous people here? It made me wonder whether in standing with Indigenous peoples here, do ‘we’ also ever extend that solidarity to Adivasis, Kashmiris, Dalit-Bahujan and so many other occupied people(s) living under Brahminical Indian occupation?19 Through reading the second event of Indian Hindus supporting Trump, anti- immigrant politics of right-wing upper caste Hindus comes to the fore, challenging the seeming homogeneity of the category of South Asian immigrants. Upper and mid-caste Hindus in diaspora constitute a large lobby of wealthy and white-collar professionals all across the US. They funded Trump’s campaign for presidency in the US, and continue to be avid supporter of the right-wing, genocide-instigator-against-Muslims and Dalits Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. Hindus for Trump is an actual group of mostly wealthy and upper-caste Hindus in the US who organized funds to support Trump’s presidency campaign. This group emerged from violently casteist and Islamophobic group called Republican Hindu Coalition. In 2016, the Republican Hindu Coalition campaigned within Hindu immigrant networks around the country pushing Hindu immigrants to become key voters for Trump in swing states like Ohio and Florida.One of the most notorious fundraising events was organized by Indian-American billionaire, Shalabh Kumar, who flew Bollywood/Hindi film industry’s B grade actors and models to come dance at the fundraiser in Edison, New Jersey in 2016.20 Global anti-Muslimness, including aiding and abetting the ongoing occupation of Israel and Kashmir in South Asia makes the US and India into

19 I use “we” here even though I am from Pakistan. In 1947, before the British left the Subcontinent, they divided up what was then known as India into Muslim-dominant Pakistan, and Hindu-dominant India. Therefore, my roots are from parts of towns and villages that are now known as India. But, even as a Pakistani woman, I will not deny that Pakistan is also occupying Baluchistan and other Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) regions and there is an increasingly resilient movement of occupied tribal people against the Pakistani government and the military for liberation. In my case, I have been trying to think about solidarity work more transnationally. 20 To read more about the event, see “Hindus for Trump: behind the uneasy alliance with right-wing US politics,” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/17/donald-trump-hindu-nationalism-india.

29 powerful allies, and hence makes Trump, Modi and their supporters into likely formidable allies.21 I do not say that my study is timely because it has Trump and a reference to increasingly strengthening Indigenous solidarity work as references in it. I say it is timely because the “Indians” it references are both, timely and timeless. The “Indian” of Columbus and white settlers has been around since 1492. It has inflected so many Western theories explaining the condition of our world. But this “Indian” is also readily taken up by people like me when we try to explain what kind of an “Indian” we are. The “Indian” in case of my people, and the “Indian” in case of Indigenous peoples of sovereign Indigenous nations living under occupation, both are names with long histories and inter-connections. What happened in 1492 is very timely now in 2018 and will remain so until white settler colonial states and all modern nation-states around the world remain. In an era of Idle No More, Black Lives Matter and so many other movements building around the world in confrontation to anti-immigrant, anti-labour and other misogynist, racist and casteist hierarchies holding our world order, questions of ethics and politics of how we are framing our projects for liberation, for justice, remain timely. As I see it, my study is a prequel to that question because it focuses on questions of place and complicity. How can we discontinue the harm? How can our critiques begin with the violences we are implicated in? That is what I hope can be thought about from reading my research study.

The Question of People of Colour Complicity

21 Israel's oldest newspaper, Haaretz reported that in 2012, Israel sold $7.5 billion worth of weapons and military technology to other countries. See http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium- 1.537501. India is one of the most notable buyers of Israeli arms. This purchasing of Israeli arms has never been contingent on which party is in power in New Delhi. For instance, the strong arms trade and political relations established between the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of India and Israel continued and in fact, strengthened, when the seemingly pro-Palestinian Congress led UPA government came to power. The arms trade between India and Israel, along with other political and cultural exchanges between the two occupying states, make them strong allies in maintaining occupations of Palestine and Kashmir. The realities of the oppressed also have similarities, of course. Kashmir has often been referred to as the "Gaza of South Asia" or "Kashmiri Gaza" and the term "Kashmiri Intifada" borrows from the Palestinian struggles for freedom and sovereignty. Gaza itself has repeatedly been referred to as the "world's largest open-air prison camp" with numerous checkpoints and the Apartheid Wall extending to about 55 km there. Similarly, Indian occupied Kashmir continues to be most militarized zone and one of the longest pending disputes on this planet. As Arundhati Roy (2011) said in one of her commentaries on the situation in the valley, "Kashmir has its own Abu Ghraibs spread across the valley".

While targeted for violence, the presence of people of colour in white settler colonies needs to be read vis-à-vis that of Indigenous peoples of the land to understand the shifts in the workings of white settler colonial violence over time. In most scholarship on white settler-colonialism, the field of analysis is divided into settlers (always read and represented as white bodies) and Indigenous peoples of the colony. In such conventional accounts, it seems as if the power dynamics are always vertically placed, with white settlers at the top of the hierarchy, and Indigenous peoples at the bottom, and no place for people of color, except to put them in the category of settlers with white settler subjects, or as equally colonized as Indigenous peoples, with little attention paid to the investments of people of colour in upholding the work of white settler colonialism, and of white supremacy. But I am interested in examining the place of people of colour in North America without pitting us along with white settlers, without assuming innocence as subjects outside of colonialism or as colonized ourselves in North American context, and equally importantly, without assuming that there is any stability to the category of people of colour. Razack et al. (2010) ask, "How can we theorize our "place" [as non-Indigenous people] when the place itself is stolen?" (p. 2) The authors encourage us to center stolen land in our analysis and think of race relations as bound to ongoing settler colonial relations here. Recent scholarship emerging from Indigenous Studies, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies are presenting different and new vernaculars and grammar for examining the relationship among histories of empire, slavery, colonialism, and migration (Byrd, 2011; Day, 2015; Dhamoon, 2015; Jackson, 2014; Jafri, 2012; Kale, 1998; King, 2016; Lowe, 2015; Patel et al., 2015; Patel, 2016; Phung, 2011; Tuck and Yang, 2012; Sehdev, 2011). The theoretical focus on the binary of white settlers and Indigenous people maintained in mainstream social theory cannot account for presence of people who have not come here as colonizers, and continue to be targeted by the predominantly white state and its ordinary settler citizens for racial violence. Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani (2001) argues that Mahmood Mamdani has argued that there is a distinction between settler and immigrant: “Settlers are made by conquest, not just immigration. Settlers are kept by a form of the state that makes a distinction—particularly juridical—between conquerors and conquered, settlers and natives” (cited in Ahluwalia 2001, 63). By that logic, not all migrations are settler migrations. Even

31 though Mamdani’s context is colonialism in Africa, his theory of difference between settlers and colonizers has been embraced by theorists dealing with settler colonial situations in other British white settler colonies. Veracini (2010) draws upon Mamdani to argue that that there is a fundamental difference between settlers and migrants: Settlers are founders of political orders and carry their sovereignty with them (on the contrary, migrants can be seen as appellants facing a political order that is already constituted). Migrants can be individually co-opted within settler colonial political regimes, and indeed they often are. They do not, however, enjoy inherent rights and are characterized y a defining lack of sovereign entitlement.” (p.3, emphasis in original).

Immigrants of colour are not founders of political orders. As immigrants, refugees, undocumented/illegal aliens, temporary workers, they systemically occupy the lower rungs of racial and class hierarchy. Racialized and spatial borders in these white settler colonies become one as most poor parts of the nation-state are often occupied by these racialized immigrants who continue to be policed, disciplined and exploited by various state institutions. However, that does not mean that our scholarship should not pay close attention to the ways in which people of color are made to become complicit in the workings of white settler colonialism. As Eve Tuck & Asian-American scholar K. Wayne Yang (2012) argue, “in this set of settler colonial relations, colonial subjects who are displaced by external colonialism, as well as racialized and minoritized by internal colonialism, still occupy and settle stolen Indigenous land. Settlers are diverse, not just of white European descent, and include people of color, even from other colonial contexts” (p. 7). They argue this to bring attention to the fact that we must pay attention to the “racialized, globalized relations” sustaining white settler colonialism and white supremacy in the world today. What I deeply appreciate about Tuck and Yang’s article is how they teach us to think about settler not as an identity, but as a set of relations instead. Inspired by their theorizing, in my own analysis of the presence of people of colour and questions of their complicity in Canada and the US, I have tried to carefully pay attention to questions of white settler colonialism, Indigeneity, anti-Blackness, and race within the context of the US and Canada, racialization, movements of people of colour to North America and other transnational histories and hierarchies, such as those of caste and anti-Muslimness.

Theorizing “Settler of Colour”

The literature discussing the presence of people of colour in relation to white settler colonialism is slowly building its place in critical theory. One of the important ways in which this discussion is being done is through the term “settler of colour”. There is a small but formidable scholarship from Hawai’i discussing the presence of Asians as settlers. Hawai'ian history and contemporary socio-political situation is quite different from that of continental US and Canada. While many Asians first came to Hawai’i as labourers imported by white plantation owners in the mid nineteenth century, settlement in Canada, for example, primarily privileged white migration until World War II. NBPoC have not been able to secure the same status in Canada or continental US, which several Asian immigrants, primarily the Japanese and Chinese, but also Filipinos and Koreans have been able to achieve in Hawai’i. In the next few paragraphs, I will highlight some key arguments representative of the essays by Indigenous Hawai'ian (Kanaka Maoli) and Asian settler scholars in a 2008 edited collection entitled, Asian Settler Colonialism: From local governance to the habits of everyday life in Hawai’i. The volume is highly cited and the foundation text for all major discussions on the term settler of colour. As Candace Fujikane, the Asian settler editor of the edited book notes, this book came out of a talk by Kanaka Maoli scholar, Haunani-Kay Trask on Asian settler colonialism. Trask, Fujikane notes, was hailed as "anti-immigrant" for asking Asian settlers for accountability. 22 This is a charge regularly levelled against Indigenous people fighting for sovereignty. Haunani Kay-Trask (2008), Kanaka Maoli nationalist leader and scholar argues that Hawai’i should be seen for what it is –a colony of the United States where the issue is not necessarily just white settlers (haole). She states: Today, modern Hawai’i, like its colonial parent the United States, is a settler society. Our Native people and territories have been overrun by non-Natives, including Asians. Calling themselves ‘local,’ the children of Asian settlers greatly outnumber us. They claim Hawai’i as their own, denying indigenous history, their long collaboration in our continued dispossession, and the benefits therefrom. (p.46)

Trask is clear about how she reads the presence of Asians in Hawai’i. She contends that Asians, as settlers, are complicit in the ongoing violence of dispossession inflicted upon the

22 See Candace Fujikane's interview. http://honoluluweekly.com/qanda/2009/04/critical-transformations/

Natives. The mythology of ‘discovery’ of land by Europeans is a pertinent feature of histories of all settler colonies. While Hawai’i is no exception, it is not only the white settlers whom Trask holds responsible for such colonial narratives. As she states, the history of colonization of the Kanaka Maoli is a “twice-told tale,” with the second part being as violent as the first (47). The first part of the colonial tale begins with the so-called discovery and settlement of the Islands by Europeans and Americans, and the second by Asian plantation workers who eventually rose to dominance in the islands. The original crime of the dispossession and genocide by white settlers is therefore not more violent than that of the present-day settlers, which includes Asian migrants (46). According to Trask, Asian ‘immigrants’ legitimize their presence in the colony by arguing that they have struggled against the Empire, and therefore deserve political and economic powers. She is particularly critical of this master narrative of hard-working Asian settlers who survived the harsh plantation conditions and triumphed over anti-Asian racism against them, a narrative which sounds uncannily similar to the colonial story of the white conquerors who seemingly fought the monstrosity of the barbaric wilderness and then peacefully settled the land (48). Such narratives of Asian-Americans progressing by overcoming racism and establishing themselves as successful often mobilized as a means to deny their role in the ongoing dispossession of Hawai’ians. The logic underlining such arguments is that when a group of people are themselves marginalized, they cannot participate in the oppression of other people. Asian immigrants had to work on plantations under conditions which white settlers often refused to put up with (Fujikane 2008, p. 20). They were brought to the colony as part of American Empire’s efforts to secure a labour base for settler plantation economy. However, while only a few of the Japanese settlers today actually worked on plantations during the Territory, these narratives continue to be an integral part of the Asian “settler ideology” which is based in acts of dispossession of the Indigenous peoples, and of staking claims to the territory (Trask, 48). In these stories of “intrasettler competition,” (p.48) between the haole and Asian immigrants, sovereignty claims of Kanaka Maoli, and their ongoing genocide, are actively and constantly erased. Struggle for sovereignty continues to be at the heart of Kanaka Maoli struggles for life, land, and dignity. This, in Hawai’i like in other settler colonies where the non-natives mobilize discourses of autochthony, has meant confronting the identity of Asian settlers who

34 often adopt the identity of “locals”, and understand themselves as being part of a local nation, just like the Kanaka Maoli are. As Trask writes, “Part of this denial [of settlerhood] is the substitution of the term ‘local’ for ‘immigrant,’ which is, itself, a particularly celebrated American gloss for ‘settler’” (46). Asian immigrants adopt the slippery identity of local to indigenize themselves to the land, as well as to distance themselves from the haole, at whose hands their ancestors have witnessed racial, colonial and imperial violence(s) (such as in the case of the Filipino settlers). But, instead of standing in solidarity and against the haole, Asian settlers have historically furthered their claims of belonging in response to the ever- resilient sovereignty movement of Hawai’ians (50). Ku’ualoha Ho’omanawanui studies the differences in aina (land) representations by Kanaka Maoli versus the Asian and haole settlers in contemporary literature of Hawai’i. Agreeing with Trask, Ho’omanawanui states that it is an act of anti-indigeneity to lump Kanaka Maoli literature with that of ‘local’ literature because it denies the peoplehood of the Kanaka Maoli (119). On the different understanding of land in the two literatures, she observes that the Kanaka Maoli and settlers are operating from different cultural paradigms and different language bases: This [difference] is particularly obvious in their continued nostalgia for plantation ‘roots’ that go back less than two hundred years, while ignoring Kanaka Maoli root t hat go back centuries. These differences are also apparent in settlers’ continued references to Hawai’i as a ‘landscape,’ ‘geography,’ and ‘environment,’ English words that connote a Western-based understanding of what land is, terms that overshadow and negate Native understandings of land as aina, which for Kanaka Maoli is familial” (pp.117-118).

35 do with finding a comfortable fit in Hawai’i that guarantees a rising income, upward mobility, and the general accoutrements of a middle-class American way of life. In her short chapter, “Hawaiian Sovereignty,” Mililani B. Trask discusses the ongoing sovereignty movement, Ka Lahui Hawai’i, the largest sovereignty initiative in Hawai’i ongoing since the illegal occupation of Hawai’i by the United States and more visibly since last three decades now. While her chapter maps out some of the more ‘technical’ policy details about the claims of the Kanaka Maoli, one of the points I want to highlight here is her assertion that as the Hawaiian sovereignty movement grows stronger, police intimidation, arrests and criminal prosecution of Hawai’ians have also been rapidly accelerating (p.75). While Trask does not particularly mention the role of Asian settlers in this violence against the Kānaka Ōiwi, Healani Sonoda, in her powerful essay, “A nation incarcerated,” discusses the prevalence of incarceration violence against Indigenous peoples in comparison to the white and Asian settlers. The rate of Kānaka Ōiwi incarceration is one of the fastest rising in the United States, leading the Hawai‘i Department of Public Safety under the directorship of Keith Kaneshiro (1996–1998) and Ted Sakai (1998–2002) to deport inmates to private prisons in Arizona and Oklahoma. As Sonoda notes, “With increasing deportation of Native inmates to U.S. continental private prisons, criminalization is yet another tool of American colonial power to control Native lands and deny Hawaiians sovereignty” (99). During the time that Japanese directed the Hawai’i Department of Public Safety (DPS), the agency that overseas all adult country jails, state prisons and inmates, hundreds of Native Hawaiian inmates were sent to continental facilities, where they suffered from gang violence, rape and drug abuse. Kānaka Ōiwi continue to be incarcerated at a much high rate than the haole or Asians, even though they constitute a much smaller percent of the actual arrests made, and both, white and Japanese settlers “utilize the prison system as a means of controlling the indigenous population” (p.110), making Hawai’i a nation incarcerated. Sonoda states that “the primary racial tension in Hawai’i is not between whites and people of color, but between white and Asian settlers and Hawaiians” (p.102). These Indigenous and ally theorists make clear distinctions between being oppressed and being colonized. The Asian settler-identified contributors to the collection share the analysis of their Indigenous counterparts, and understand themselves as settlers in Hawai’i. They agree that terms such as “local” and “immigrant” do not reveal the complicity of

Asians in ongoing colonialism, and therefore, the label of settler should be adopted by all Asians in Hawai’i so that their everyday struggles against racial violence do not erase colonial occupation of Hawai’i (Fujikane 2008; Kosasa, 2008; Saranillio, 2008; Yoshinaga and Kosasa, 2008). For Candace Fujikane (2008, p.6), a scholar of Japanese and Filipino origins in Hawai’i, all Asians in the colony are settlers as they actively participate in the processes of US colonialism, and uphold the narrative of American Dream at the expense of Indigenous peoples’ lands, lives and ongoing dispossession. For Fujikane, the question of settlerhood is not dependent upon who came and worked on plantations and who came later at the turn of the last century. Both old and new comers are settlers precisely because they all occupy the colony, and submit to the colonial governmentality of the U.S. settler state. Fujikane argues for adopting the label of settlers for Asians in Hawai’i. She notes:

As in every settler state, there are differences and power relations that cut across settler state populations, between white settlers and nonwhite settler, among Asian settler groups, between working-class settlers and the settlers who make up the more privileged classes…Nevertheless, an analysis of settler colonialism positions indigenous peoples at the center, foregrounding not settler groups’ relationships with each other or with the U.S. settler state, but with the indigenous peoples who ancestral lands settlers occupy. To focus only on the obvious differences among settlers evades the question of settlers’ obligations to indigenous peoples. (Fujikane, p.9)

White settler states are also white supremacist, so the work of whiteness cannot be undermined or overlooked. As Dean Saranillio (2013) who is of Japanese-Filipino origins and one of the contributors to the edited collection notes in one of his later publications, while each group is oppressed by structures of white supremacy, their historical oppressions are not the same. However, does this differentiation necessarily lead to racialized migrants being in less antagonistic relations with Indigenous peoples? Even if non-Black people of colour were not complicit in original dispossessions of Indigenous peoples, and because often people of colour are dislocated people themselves, they still can participate in the workings of white settler colonialism. Being racialized and encountering the brutal reality of anti-Asian racism in Hawai’i or any where else on colonized lands of Indigenous peoples in North America does not mean that racism equals colonialism, a slippage that often occurs under the myth that an oppressed group of people cannot be complicit in state’s activities.

While it is true that settlers are differently located and have different access to power, an analysis of settler colonialism demands that the ongoing colonial violence and dispossession of First Peoples be centered in all narratives of marginalization and empowerment. As Saranillio (2008) notes in his book chapter: The word ‘settler’ is a means to an end. The goal is not to win in a game of semantics or to engage in name calling, but rather for settlers to have a firm understanding of our participation in sustaining U.S. colonialism and then to support Native Hawaiians in achieving self-determination and the decolonization of Hawai’i. (p.257)

Adopting the label settler, according to these scholars then, is a political move and reminder to examine non-Indigenous peoples’ orientation toward Indigenous people, and foregrounding Hawaiian nationalist movement in their own struggles against racism and other forms of oppressions. Often, as Saranillio argues, Filipino migration to Hawai’i has been the result of imperial policies of the United States in the Philippines. People targeted in their own homelands come to the colony occupied by the enemy state, but with the American dream which has no place for decolonial alliance building with the Kanaka Maoli and the connections between anti-imperialist struggles of the Filipinos and the decolonial ones of the Kanaka Maoli people remain unconnected. For Saranillio then, the task is to place the struggles of Filipinos against racial profiling and discrimination within the context of ongoing colonial violence, so that settlers can stop using American patriotic narratives to fight for their own rights, while simultaneously accepting the sovereignty of the settler state. One of the arguments we often hear is that immigrants of colour have been forced to participate in processes of colonization. They do not exercise the kind of power which white bodies control, and because of their own precarious status here, a demand is made on them to stay in ‘their place’ and live according to the settler states’ rules. The struggles of racialized people in these white nation-states are many, and ongoing. But is it the case that because I am racialized, and not a white settler, I cannot work along the colonial logics, or cannot be complicit in ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples? Maile Arvin (2015), a Kanaka Maoli scholar, writes: …the discourse of Asian settler colonialism asks Asian settlers to disavow the project, not the place, and for the place to be recognized as Hawai’i nei, not America, and not the US state. Rather than an effort to name and divide populations into settlers and indigenes, Asian settler colonialism is a critique of,

as Victor Bascara says, the use of ‘the success stories of Asian Americans’ to erase both the conditions of empire that involved Asians in the racial-capitalist project of America and to mask the ‘new terms of empire’ under the more recent names of multiculturalism and globalization.” (p.92, emphasis in original).

What Arvin points out is that contributors to Asian Settler Colonialism offer us a framework for talking about our presence here. To think about our presence in relation to the Kanaka Maoli and to the ongoing settler government’s encroachment upon their lands. Such careful reflection also asks that we pay attention to just how is it that non-Black people of colour have been made complicit in the workings of the violence of colonialism. Similarly, several anti-racist scholars have argued that multiculturalism is simply a new iteration of transforming the white settler colony into a white settler state that gives the illusion of ‘tolerance’ and is always deeply invested in white supremacy and all its attendants logics (Bannerji, 2000; Povinelli, 2002; Thobani, 2007). White settler states are also white supremacist, so the work of whiteness cannot be undermined or overlooked. However, this differentiation does not necessarily lead to racialized migrants being in less antagonistic relations with Indigenous peoples.

People of Colour Accountability People of colour are not automatically less colonial in their practices and/or orientation toward Indigenous peoples of the white settler colonies we move to. An important reason for that could be that so many of us are already coming from postcolonial nation- states where we have received official and everyday education that is steeped in anti- Blackness and anti-indigeneity. For example, I know that under Pakistani education system, our curriculum is inherently anti-Black towards Black Pakistanis, who are commonly called Makranis but more aptly referred to as Siddi. This curriculum, always written from the perspective of the ruling Sunni Punjabi class is also elitist, sectarian, casteist and anti-tribal people. Therefore, when we come to a new country in case of first generation immigrants, we look only for people who share our cultural, ethnic and class background to form communities with, and often with little attention extended to questions of who else is here. There is also the fear of survival and making ends meet which creates competition for economic security, often against Indigenous, Black and other racialized people. It is also

39 because of how we are situated, or co-opted into supporting the anti-indigenous settler white state. A really clear example of this comes from Parvathi Raman’s (2006) account of the way in which Indians in South Africa came to define their belonging to the settler state of South Africa as “Indian South Africans” in Durban of 1940s. Drawing upon notions of “imperial brotherhood, and the developing dialogue of Indian nationalism, an idealised sense of Indian ‘tradition’ was integrated with a sense of belonging in South Africa” (pp. 193-94). This language of Indianness facilitated their fight for becoming permanent settlers from India with citizenship rights in South Africa. Raman carefully examines the category of “colonial-born” South Africans (p.197). These were the sons and daughters of indentured labourers, who were born in South Africa and became white-collar workers whose livelihoods depended to a large extent on the colonial administration. Inspired by Gandhi’s formulation of satyagraha and an anti-colonial nationalism for a free India, “colonial born” Indian people’s political struggle became about gaining the rights of citizenship in South Africa (p. 198). Land tenure was an integral part of the struggle in an era of apartheid and segregation. While Indians were targeted by various racialized policies of the colonial state, they were still allowed to purchase land, which indigenous Black people and Black merchants and workers could not. Moreover, these increasingly educated and upwardly mobile Indians “were not always against segregation per se; they wished rather to help shape segregationist legislations in ways that protected their interests” (p.198). This colluding with the apartheid state helped Indians in South Africa to gain a foothold and make progress on the backs of Black people who could not attain land, livelihood or citizenship rights. Similarly, in her study of South Asian labour history in Skeena region in northwestern B.C., Kamala Elizabeth Nayar (2012) outlines the story of encounters between predominantly low skilled Punjabi rural workers, white settlers and Indigenous peoples working in forestry and fishing industries. She discusses several examples of mutual hostility between Punjabi migrants and their Indigenous co-workers. The latter were particularly angry at how the Punjabis were given better and more skilful work and were constantly mobilized as the “hardworking Indians”. In one instance she notes that many Punjabis in B.C. did not want to be called “Indians” because of the term’s negative association with Indigenous people: “Even though the label ‘Hindoo’ was mainly used in a derogatory manner, Punjabis preferred it to ‘Indians’...” (p. 183) They could expect and deal

40 with their white settler co-worker and bosses’ racism but did not want any association with the “other Indians” whom they too read through white settler lenses as “lazy and dirty”. However, these interactions were mediated through white supremacy because of the way Punjabis were set up in competition with Indigenous people for the limited resources. Nayar also notes that by 1960s as Punjabis became more settled and the population of Indigenous people became more visible in Skeena, they began called Indigenous peoples as taike which means “[family] from my father’s eldest brother (taia)” (p.183). As yet another example, in her book, The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia's Indigenous–Asian Story, Peta Stephenson (2007) traces the story of interactions between white settlers, Chinese labourers, and Indigenous peoples of Australia, while paying particular attention to intimate relations and other trade and military collaborations between the latter two groups of people. Stephenson is very clear in explaining these interactions within the white supremacist state where both Asians and Aborigines were/are targets of racial and colonial violence, whether through various acts of colonial legislations and ordinary racism. However, despite this treatment there was no solidarity between the two groups. As she argues, “relations between them [Asians and Indigenous peoples] were not always amicable”: At times Chinese and other Asian settlers adopted colonialist attitudes towards Indigenous people. Chinese people viewed Australia as empty and barren and Aboriginal people were sometimes viewed as an impediment to their colonising mission. In their colonial endeavour, many Chinese sojourners aligned themselves both economically and politically with Europeans, rather than Indigenous people. (p. 68)

Stephenson explains that while Chinese people were not the equal of white colonists in any social, political or economic means, they still were higher up in the racial hierarchy than Indigenous people. Chinese labourers also often collaborated with the occupying state and acted against Indigenous peoples. She also highlights several examples of Indigenous peoples’ resistance to frequent Chinese incursions over their lands, including the sexual access which both Chinese and white men had to Indigenous women. In case of Canada too, when South Asians fought for citizenship, again the question of what it means to fight for the right to permanently settle in a white settler colony was never raised. Sunera Thobani (2007) aptly explains:

As racially excluded immigrants sought to expand the institution of citizenship to accommodate their own demands for inclusion, they left largely unchallenged the role of this institution in the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples. The extension of citizenship to these racialized immigrants thus resulted in their qualified integration into the political community, but at the cost of fostering their complicity in the colonial domination of Aboriginal peoples. (p. 76)

As Canadian citizens, people of colour in most cases have neglected to politically address the question of how is it that we have been invited into the white settler nation-state and how our participation which has primarily focused on improving our lives and living out some Canadian dream has necessarily meant more dispossession and loss of land for the Indigenous peoples of the land. South Asians fought for citizenship and voting rights and 1947, the year when the British left India, voting rights were made accessible to South Asians and also to Chinese people in 1947, followed by Japanese-Canadians in 1949. However, it was only in 1960 that status Indians could vote in settler government’s elections without losing their Indian status. Citizenship and voting rights are about ongoing and accelerating invasion on Indigenous peoples’ lands and sovereignty. As Tuck and Yang astutely note: The impossibility of fully becoming a white settler - in this case, white referring to an exceptionalized position with assumed rights to invulnerability and legal supremacy - as articulated by minority literature preoccupied with “glass ceilings” and “forever foreign” status and “myth of the model minority”, offers a strong critique of the myth of the democratic nation- state. However, its logical endpoint, the attainment of equal legal and cultural entitlements, is actually an investment in settler colonialism. Indeed, even the ability to be a minority citizen in the settler nation means an option to become a brown settler. For many people of color, becoming a subordinate settler is an option even when becoming white is not. (p. 18, emphasis added)

Tuck and Yang make the difference between fighting for equal rights versus decolonization very clear. The fight against the system for racial justice for people of colour who are willing to become subordinate settlers, to be accepted into the fabric of the white nation-state is never in good or ethical relation with Indigenous peoples if the end-goal is not to destroy the system, to challenge and ultimate end the white settler state’s sovereignty. Asking for equality and a place at the table when the table is on lands and lives of Indigenous people is

42 being complicit in colonial violence. Following this assertion, they transition into carefully describing the difference between anti-colonial critique and decolonization. They write: an anti-colonial critique is not the same as a decolonizing framework; anticolonial critique often celebrates empowered postcolonial subjects who seize denied privileges from the metropole. This anti-to-post-colonial project doesn’t strive to undo colonialism but rather to remake it and subvert it. Seeking stolen resources is entangled with settler colonialism because those resources were nature/Native first, then enlisted into the service of settlement and thus almost impossible to reclaim without re-occupying Native land. Furthermore, the postcolonial pursuit of resources is fundamentally an anthropocentric model, as land, water, air, animals, and plants are never able to become postcolonial; they remain objects to be exploited by the empowered postcolonial subject. (p.19, emphasis added).

“Subordinate settlers” do not have the power of whiteness but they too are fighting for a piece of lands and resources that further encroach upon the lives and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples. This is not to deny the power of whiteness, or that these subordinate settlers also live in an entanglement of racial and capitalist violence, but to be able to hold and examine how complicity is both, actively and situationally exercised in these instances. In case of the “colonial-born” Indians in South Africa, for example, their anti-colonial fight for liberating India from the British Raj could not see (or maybe not care about) how they were becoming complicit in settlerhood on other peoples’ occupied land. While I will discuss the elitism and casteism of the Indian nationalist movement in Chapter VI on Neel Darpan, it is so important to keep in mind that a decolonizing framework would have allowed the “subordinate settlers” to hold onto the simultaneity of their own positions of dominance as well. Beenash Jafri (2012), a Pakistani-Canadian scholar, differentiates between privilege and complicity to argue that the former does not allow us to read for the intersections of our locations in terms of race, gender, coloniality and other social formations. She notes that confessing one’s settlerhood privileges (perhaps, in particularly as people of colour) sometimes centers the “unlearning process of the dominant subject,” rather than decolonization and Indigenous peoples. On the other hand, to think “in terms of complicity shifts attention away from the self and onto strategies and relations that reproduce social and institutional hierarchies. The issue then is not about individual absolution of responsibility, guilt, and culpability (‘checking’ privilege) but, rather, one of re-examining strategies

43 through which we give ourselves that responsibility and become accountable in the first place”.23 The framework of complicity allows us to critically engage with horizontal relations of power, and examine how colonial relationships are supported, reproduced and reinforced. Therefore, what it allows for is an examination of complex relationalities. Examination of complicity leads to thinking about questions of accountability and ways of being in solidarity. For example, Robinder Sehdev (2009), a Punjabi-Canadian scholar argues that immigrants of colour must educate ourselves about the treaties that have been signed between the settler state and the Indigenous peoples of the territory we now live on. Sehdev notes: “We have played a crucial part in nation formation, but this is a settler nation whose borders extend to absorb Aboriginal people without regard for their sovereignty” (p. 265). A focus on complicity and holding onto transnational simultaneity of lives and lands has brought me to a place where I now think that the questions of responsibility and accountability of non-Black people of colour to Indigenous peoples and Black people is of utmost importance. Moreover, I have often feared that in an era of the neoliberal state’s (empty and apolitical) apologies and (irrelevant) recognition of its “past” (but never the present), naming bodies of colour as settlers and then debating who is not really a settler in the same way as I am, has not done much for letting us think about how deep, complicated and transnational the question of our complicity is in not only white settler colonialism but also in white supremacy. Words become empty (and therefore, dangerous) when the failure of our political imagination does not allow us to consider the multiplicity of violence(s) and complexities of resistance narratives and strategies. As Nishant Upadhyay, an Indo-Canadian (2015) scholar writes: …the debates around the term “settler of colour” make this work [of solidarity with Indigenous peoples] even more difficult. The resistance to the term in academia as well as in activist spaces has closed off many spaces instead of creating new(er) ones. We need to work with frictions but not make them so toxic that the analysis and work stops. While I understand the critique of

23 Beenash Jafri (2012). “Privilege vs. Complicity: People of Colour and Settler Colonialism”. Privilege vs. Complicity: People of Colour and Settler Colonialism, https://www.ideas-idees.ca/blog/privilege-vs-complicity- people-colour-and-settler-colonialism

performative self-identification as settler, I am also wary of not naming the complicities. What happens when we do not name? What gets invisibilized when we stop explicitly naming and identifying our presence as non-Indigenous peoples on these lands? (p.13)

As long as there is a commitment to working with Indigenous people for decolonization, a commitment to not fighting for a place within the state in ways that would reinscribe colonial logics of “disappearing Indians,” as long as our work does not invest in continuing the invasion of land, life and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, of keeping Black people, Latinx, Chicanx and Muslims incarcerated, as long as we are not invested in saving the capitalist prison state, I think we are doing the right thing.

Research Questions of The “Indian” of Four Continents

The primary research question guiding The “Indian” of Four Continents is: How do we theorize the place of non-Black people of colour, more specifically South Asians, in North America? At its core, The “Indian” of Four Continents is about tracing questions of complicity and connections among differently racialized and colonized people. I have been attentive to aspects of South Asian complicity because of my own identity. I began my Dissertation by placing myself in it because, firstly, all writing, I have come to believe, is autobiographical. I do not know how to write outside of my own desires, hopes, struggles, and failures. Writing is a way of connecting with the reader, but writing is also always a project that first centers its author and the futures she is invested in, and the past, present and futures she needs to inhabit. Secondly, at no point do I want to come across as hinting that I am outside of my critiques, or that by doing this research I can claim expertise on how to theorize settler colonialism, questions of complicity, or that I am able to present a strategy for 'getting over' my placement, my complacency and complicity. This Dissertation is, at its core, still about the placement of my body as a diasporic South Asian woman, within the workings of white settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and other systems of domination and subordination that support, reify, and complicate the heteropatriarchal anti-Black, anti- immigrant, white settler colonial workings of North America. Years ago, this project began with a very small intention: That of trying to theorize the figure of the “settler of colour” in North America. However, through my reading, thinking, and conversation with white

45 settlers, Indigenous peoples, Black and other people of colour, I have moved away from that figure, or rather, oriented myself to different figures and histories for some of the reasons I have discussed above. That one figure which I initially held onto splintered into so many other figures for me as I continued to look through my unruly, and seemingly unlikely archive. Theorizing South Asians as settlers, for example, signals a linearity of histories and hierarchies which cannot account for the myriad ways in which South Asians have arrived to the Continent. It cannot do justice to the caste and religion hierarchies among South Asians. It cannot account for the ways indigeneity works in South Asia. As I explained at the opening of this study, there is no coherent, stable identity of “Indian” even within the context of India. Therefore, we need to know that there is no coherent, stable formation called South Asian either. Holding onto settlerhood as the only formation misses the transnational and trans-historical simultaneities which I try to pay attention to in various chapters. That lone figure of settler of colour now compels me to continue thinking at the intersections of the four continents of Asia, Africa, America and Europe. Of course, the title of my dissertation, and the idea for this project, is very much inspired by, and indebted to the brilliant ground-breaking scholarship of Asian-American feminist scholar, Lisa Lowe. Her 2015 book, The Intimacies of the Four Continents gave further direction to my own research, and even, more importantly, allowed me to make sense of my archive which I had hitherto understood as disjointed, 'choppy', and unconnected. Her work has provided me with the language to articulate why and how my archive has been necessary for me to make sense of my place on stolen lands here amidst an imperialist world order. Lowe studies the obscured, forgotten but also deliberately erased connections between white settler colonialism, slavery, and the East Indies and China trade in the making of modern European liberalism. She argues that the (colonial) archive, far from being a “stable, transparent collection of facts,” (p.4) has been organized to give an illusion of stability in order to foreclose the space for holding onto different structures, histories, and people together in our analysis. Lowe argues: The modern division of knowledge into academic disciplines, focused on discrete areas and objects of interest to the modern national university, has profoundly shaped the inquiry into these connections. Even the questions we can ask about these histories are influenced by the unevenly inhabited and inconsistently understood aftermath of these obscured conditions. (pp.1-2)

The questions we (can) ask are often dictated by several types of constraints: Constraints of fields of study, the texts that are more commonly circulated or available to us, the limits of access to archives in terms of funding and also the colonial, racist and casteist organization of knowledge. I believe that each research question is a product of its time and, under conditions of such expansive racial and colonial violence, the questions I could, and am asking, are structured through several erasures of the kinds of connections that Lowe uncovers in her study. I have consistently struggled with reading my archive because I could feel, if not know, that it was giving me more than I could ask, articulate or even understand for now. What I do continue to find useful is that my desire for the seemingly disjointed archive was stronger than trying to toe the line, to conform the project to the conventions of doctoral projects in social sciences. And so I have stayed with this chaotic but carefully assembled archive of complicity, and with all the figures, histories, and complexities that I could read in it. I have not been able to trace the many connections that sit somewhere in my archive, remaining under-theorized or unattended to for now, but they have oriented me towards my future projects upon completion of my doctoral study. Inspired by scholarship of feminist scholars such as Lisa Lowe, Jodi Byrd, Eve Tuck, and the deep and expansive Indigenous, Black, Dalit, other racialized and transnational feminist scholarship, I have tried to think about the question of non-Black people of colour complicity across the unlikely archive of mine. Writing against the colonial organizing principle of archives, Lowe explores transnational, inter-institutional, and cultural connections between European and non- European sites, using the concept-metaphor of “intimacy” to bring the various accounts and archival domains into proximity with one another. The continents were not separate, so a single framework attendant to multiplicity can recover their intimacies. Intimacy appears in two senses in her work: Firstly, in the geographic sense, to allow for an examination of historical and geographical links between Europe and its colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas; secondly, as subjective, where the writings and life stories of private individuals, and the domestic sphere, are brought into line with the systemic workings of capitalism and world trade. Such a quest to disobey the linear, progression of archive and its neat boundedness also reflects my approach to my research question because as Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, & Goldstein (2016) write:

when white settler colonialism is deployed as a stand-alone analytic it potentially reproduces precisely the effects and enactments of colonial unknowing that we are theorizing in this introduction. Approaches to the analyses of settler colonialism, as isolated from imperialism and its differential modes of racialization, are consequences of the institutionalization of this work as a distinct subfield, which is claimed and consolidated through analytic tendencies that foreclose or bracket our interconnections and relational possibilities. Settler colonial histories, conditions, practices, and logics of dispossession and power must necessarily be understood as relationally constituted to other modes of imperialism, racial capitalism, and historical formation of social difference. (np, emphasis added).

In my discussion above on white settler colonialism, I argued that white settler colonialism was in conversation with other simultaneous workings of racial, imperial and colonial powers. The framework offered by Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein is in line with Lowe’s arguments, as well as those made by Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd’s (2011) groundbreaking work, The Transit of Empire. It was her book, even before Lowe’s, that gave a direction to my thinking and all my present and future scholarship will remain greatly indebted to her work. Connecting diverse intellectual traditions such as critical Indigenous theory with postcolonial and poststructuralist (while using the former to also critique the latter two), she also brings different but not unconnected histories of Indigenous peoples of the US, of the Caribbean, Cherokee Freedmen, Kanaka Maoli peoples, and Asian Americans into conversation with each other, while astutely drawing our attention to how liberal discourses of multiculturalism and post-racial ideologies in our contemporary moment are implicated in continuing the process of U. S. imperialism. I have found Byrd’s critical conceptual tool of cacophony and her theorizing of power to be very helpful in my own thinking. As Byrd suggests in her reading of Caliban as a “cacophonous textualization,” “we can see the complex dynamics of colonial discourses that exist horizontally among histories of oppression and inform continued complicities as historical narratives vie for ascendancy as the primary and originary oppression within lands shaped by competing histories of slavery colonialism, arrival, and Indigeneity” (p.xxxvi). She further notes: Framed in this way, then, cacophony exists not only in the desire and fear of the colonizer who needs to continually and repeatedly articulate ‘true’ and ‘real’ representations of the colonized, but it also resides within the ways historical oppressions created by liberal multicultural settler colonies exist relationally and in collusion with the processes of racial, gendered, and sexual

otherings that seek to make contesting histories and experiences resonate autochthonously through the lingering touch of the real. Cacophony, therefore, focuses not only vertically on the interactions between colonizer and colonized, but horizontally between different minority oppressions within settler and arrivant landscapes on the baseline between racialization and conquest that stretches the real in the movement between and among. (pp. 54- 55, emphasis added) `

A cacophonous reading provides us with a framework to examine the unlikely archives, to study the intimacies between the continents. Byrd asks that we pay attention to these competing voices that vie for legitimacy and recognition across multiple axes of colonial domination. My understanding of operations of power is indebted to this theorizing of power differentials working along horizontal plane as well as vertically. In fact, power operates circularly so that the colonized also become complicit with the colonizer in continuing the workings of Empire. Byrd writes, “cacophony, therefore, focuses not only vertically on the interactions between the colonizer and colonized, but horizontally between different minority oppressions within settler and arrivant landscapes on the baseline between racialization and conquest” (p.31). Unlike postcolonial theory’s primary concern with vertical relations of power between colonizer and the colonized, Byrd’s horizontal reading of power also pays attention to placement and grievances registered by people based on caste, gender, religion and other socio-political locations. In addition, paying attention to horizontal relations of power allows me to carefully think about what terms such as “people of colour” do for our politics and fight for freedoms and liberations. I discuss the intimacies between the four continents while paying close attention to the horizontal relations of power produced through differential placement of Black people and other racialized people vis-à-vis Indigenous peoples of North America and the Caribbean. I also pay attention to the work which caste and gender do in order to suggest that assumptions cannot be made about the experiences and histories of people under the labels of colonized or racialized. Bringing anti-colonial texts such as an 19th century play called Neel Darpan depicting the dire situation of Bengali peasants coerced into growing indigo alongside colonial archives that has speeches of British parliamentarians discussing how bonded labour is a step forward from slavery, that it’s a progress, I show that we cannot talk about white settler colonialism without bringing indentureship, slavery, and even anti- Muslim violence in medieval Europe together. A project that began with a perhaps

49 unproductive question of "are people of colour in Canada and the US settlers" has now shifted into thinking about 19th century Bengali peasants, the racially ambiguous "Indian Queen", the caste and citizenship privileged Indian-American photographer, the indentured Indian labourers in 19th century Caribbean and all the attendant social formations of colonialism(s), race, gender, religion, caste, capitalism, and relations of labour. I bring in these figures, or they make appearances in my Dissertation to allow me to inquire into the politics of knowledge production about the "New World". However, that does not mean that I let go of the "Old World". Binaries of the Old and New Worlds were disrupted in my project as examining the figure of the "Indian Queen" in particular took me to medieval Europe's eight centuries of encounters with the Moors, that is, its Muslim Other. Writing about why the "Indian" of the New World was perhaps separated by a mere six degrees from the treatment of Muslims of Europe was difficult. While the Moor is resigned to the Old World, the "Indian" of Americas is studied as part of a history that began in 1492 only. My dissertation presents a case for why these histories need to be brought together. That was an arduous task, at least at the beginning because of how the archives have been organized and categorized as separate. But my question in this study demands that we place analyses of white settler colonialism in conversation with other nodes of broader global workings of empire in order to make visible the lives, histories and investments that cannot be revealed through holding onto only race or colonialism or conditions of labour. Rather than foreclosing the space, I want to unfold the space for asking critical questions about the functioning of Empire and the ways in which Indigenous, Black and people of colour have been placed in those workings.

Relational and Transnational Accounts of Complicity

Even if non-Black people of colour hold onto the identification as settlers in relation to Indigenous peoples, the important question which remains is how to account for race and colonialism as dialectical. Without a complicated, transnational, dialectical, and relational theorizing of presence of people of colour in white settler states in relation to multi-headed, interlocking, and intricate logics of white supremacy such as settler colonialism, antiblackness, casteism, secularism, Orientalism, Islamophobia, and imperialists pasts and presents of Empire, our theorizing can replicate the other heads of the very violence(s) we

50 are invested in challenging, and, therefore, remain “incapable of exposing these inextricable logics of settler colonialism” (Day, 2015, p.113). Adopting an anti-nationalist lens that can also hold onto simultaneity of our positions of vulnerability and domination is therefore important. Moreover, as Alissa Trotz (2006) notes, “The veritable explosion of scholarly interest in transnational migration offers us a perspective less restricted by national boundaries and pushes us to think about our own disciplinary investments in territorial circumscription” (41). In my work on thinking about the presence of people of colour in North America, it has not been sufficient to claim that all South Asians, for example, are settlers of the same kind or degree. South Asians are not a homogenous group of people. Caste, class, gender, religion and other socio-political and historical locations determine how we have arrived here, who can afford to stay, who has the privilege of ‘going back home’ etc. I have paid particular attention to caste over other locations in terms of heterogeneity of South Asians, and discussions of colonial/postcolonial in relation to South Asia remains missing in this study. While aware of these differences and erasures in my own work, I have paid more attention to caste because of multi-sited study and my investment in reading a variety of transnational and transhistorical archives. As Anu Ramdas, a Dalit feminist scholar in North American diaspora writes: ...there is no Brahmin supremacy in societies that do not have a fully functional caste society. The Brahmin supremacy has territorial limits within the subcontinent. Outside of it, the Brahmin is simply another Brown person. To reclaim his superior status in the diaspora he has to be within South Asian groups at all times. He loses it the moment he is outside such Indian/SAsian groups or the occasional whites fascinated with the Browns...He is faced with the improbable task of institutionalizing caste as a global order for Brahmin supremacy to be given a chance outside of India’s borders.24

Examining the position of a Brahmin or highest caste Indian Hindu in diaspora means paying attention to how caste hierarchies and white supremacy work in tandem with each other. Theorizing Brahmins as people occupying the top-most position in caste hierarchy, and structurally and often wilfully complicit in, and actively invested in upholding white

24 Anu Ramdas. (2015). “The Brahmin Problem.” Round Table India. Accessed August 2015.

51 supremacy and colonial occupations in South Asia to solidify their position,25 meant attending to the fact that South Asians are not simply racialized people in diaspora. While ‘we’ maybe seen as just “brown people” in the US or Canada, for example, we are divided along the lines of caste, religion, class and relations of coloniality in South Asia. As a South Asian person whose last name affords caste privileges despite my origins in low caste, for me, critically examining my own and other caste South Asian people’s investments in caste, anti-Blackness and anti-indigeneity has been important. My theoretical framework, which is explicated in Chapter Three of this study draws upon Indigenous, Black, Dalit and ally scholars to outline theories which inform my understanding of the project, but also of the world I live in.

Anti-Blackness and White Settler Colonialism

Understanding race and colonialism as dialectical demands that we also pay attention to histories and presents of the millions of stolen Black people brought to the stolen land in belly of slave ships, and to the global politics of anti-Blackness. Anti-Black racism is a fundamental condition of the workings of white settler colonialism in North America and the Caribbean. As Black feminist scholar, Tiffany Lethabo King (2015) notes, “I think that we should always be struggling for analytic precision. It’s easy to rely on the terms and language that have currency and legitimacy in academia. For instance, it was important for me and other Black folks in Canada and the U.S. to push back against the discourse of ‘settler’”.26 Her “resistance” to this term, writes King, is primarily motivated by two factors: Firstly, “White settlers and Black people are not ontological/structural equivalents in this hemisphere,” and secondly, her “own need to find new and more precise vocabulary is motivated by a sincere desire to think about how Black life and political projects may bump

25 I discuss the connections between caste, gender, coloniality and white supremacy in chapter V. 26 Patel, Shaista, Ghaida Moussa, and Nishant Upadhyay. “Interview with Dr. Tiffany Lethabo King.” Feral Feminisms 4 (2015): n.pag. Web. 7 June. 2017.

52 up against and conflict with Native people’s work to end genocide and white-settler colonialism”.27 As Black Caribbean-Canadian scholar, Rinaldo Walcott (2014) also notes: Critical articulation of settler colonialism needs to engage the conditions and ideas of the plantation, the reservation, the ghetto, and neo-colonial dispossession, revealing the particular euphemisms of those discursive and violent material constructions, but also their linked and shared realities as the result of the logic and practice of anti-Blackness and thus a wider reach of coloniality. Only this relational logic can address the project of Canada which has skilfully produced these sites as non-related entities with separate dynamics so that 'priority neighbourhoods' have nothing to do with banlieues and neither of those have anything to do with European colonial practices in Canada's past on the reservation, nor the economic and cultural backyards in the Caribbean. (p.100, emphasis in original)

A framework that can account for simultaneity of white settler colonial states in North America as anti-Black plantation and carceral states is crucial. If non-Black people of colour are settlers, are they also always anti-black? If so, how does anti-Blackness manifest itself in South Asian communities in diaspora? What other social formations do we need to track in order to understand the anti-Indigeneity and anti-Blackness among South Asians, for example? And, even though I remain indebted to analyses of Asian settler colonialism for encouraging me to think about questions of my complicity, we must ask questions about the placement of Blackness in Hawai’i because the settler states in North America are simultaneously large prisons for Black people to date. As Nitasha Sharma (2011) argues in her essay on “Pacific revisions of Blackness,” “Whereas the experiences of Hawai‘i’s Blacks reveal the limits of race- or indigenous-only frameworks for understanding island dynamics, Blacks’ and Hawaiians’ linked experiences with White domination point to a shared interest in overcoming oppression” (p. 44). The erasure of Black people and Black-Indigenous and Black-Asian peoples in Hawai’i remains occluded when the central framework is one of settler/native binary, even though Black people have been present on the island since 1790, thus preceding the presence of Asian plantation workers (Sharma, p. 46).

Theorizing Arrivants

The search for different grammar, and different vocabulary, which King argues for is

27 Ibid.

53 important. No one word can hold the different situations and power relations which contextualize the ‘arrival’ of Black and non-Black people of colour. But the search for these terms allows us to think through and carefully articulate the tensions in adopting or moving away from certain terms. For instance, Byrd’s (2011) book, The Transit of Empire, introduced me to Black Caribbean poet, Kamau Brathwaite’s term of “arrivant”. Byrd uses the term to “signify those people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonialism and imperialism around the globe” (p.xix). Byrd distinguishes between “deep settler colonialism” and “arrivant colonialism” by recognizing that the latter need to account for complicity and work at not being in antagonistic positions against Indigenous peoples of the land, even if the histories of arrival of Black and other people of colour have been different from that of white colonizers. She urges the readers to pay attention to the “internally contradictory quagmires where human rights, equal rights, and recognitions are predicated on the very systems that propagate and maintain the dispossession of indigenous peoples for the common good of the world” (p.xix). These competitions, which Byrd calls the “cacophony of contradictorily hegemonic and horizontal struggles” requires a shift in how power relations in white settler colonial situations are understood. Byrd writes: “Identifying the competing interpretations of geographical spatialities and historicities that inform racial and decolonial identities depends upon an act of interpretation that decenters the vertical interactions of colonizer and colonized and recenters the horizontal struggles among peoples with competing claims to historical oppressions” (p. xxiv, emphasis added). I have been struggling to understand the conditions pertaining to arrivancy, or what sort of a noun or situation arrivant references. In my initial reading of Byrd’s invocation of the term, I found myself asking what it would mean for non-Black racialized immigrant people to use a term used by Brathwaite to refer to enslaved Africans brought to North America. In my initial reading of Byrd’s invocation of the term, I felt a sense of discomfort because I understood the term to be particularly reflective of a Black Caribbean and, in general, a Black feminist ethics of grounding without seeking to destroy to replace, which is a key feature of all colonialisms where the settlers come to replace Indigenous peoples of the occupied lands. As Wolfe (1999) has noted, “Settler colonialism destroys to replace.” As Tuck, Guess, and Sultan (2014) also write: “But ‘arrivants’ may also conceal the unique

54 positioning of Blackness in settler colonialism and the complicity of white people and nonwhite people (including Native people) in antiblackness” (p.4). I have not as yet come to a place of agreement or an understanding on where non-Black racialized people figure in this term, but I know that I will continue to think about this term and welcome the shifts in my thinking that would most definitely be a result of more conversations with other theorists thinking through similar questions. What I write here is just an initial effort to hold this term in my project. Gemma Robinson (2017) notes that “It is fitting then that Kamau Brathwaite would title his New World Trilogy The Arrivants, a noun that eludes particularized space, time, race, class, and gender even as it forces reflection on them” (p.114). Maybe more than a noun, arrivant is a space-holder for situated relationalities. It is a space not in antagonism with white settler colonialism, but a space that is parallel, perpendicular, encompassing but also encompassed by white settler colonialism. It is a space that is resultant of imperialism and colonialisms around the world. Brathwaite’s trilogy, The Arrivant, encompasses Europe, America, Caribbean and Africa in how he talks about the common Black experience of enslavement and the New World. This experience signifies the relationality between the Atlantic and Africa and the Americas. It is about a present of life in the Americas but without eliding the complex histories and presents of those lives. I have also been thinking about Jamaican-Canadian author, Dionne Brand’s theorizing of the notion of a “map to the door of no return” and how that has helped me think about Brathwaite’s arrivant. Brand writes: The door is a place, real, imaginary and imagined. As islands and dark continents are. It is a place which exists or existed. The door out of which Africans were captured, loaded onto ships heading for the New World. It was the door of a million exits multiplied. It is a door many of us wish never existed. It is a door which makes the word door impossible and dangerous, cunning and disagreeable…There is the sense in the mind of not being here or there, of no way out or in. As if the door had set up its own reflection. Caught between the two we live in the Diaspora, in the sea in between. Imagining our ancestors stepping through these portals one senses people stepping out into nothing; one senses a surreal space, an inexplicable space. One imagines people so stunned by their circumstances, so heartbroken as to refuse reality. Our inheritance in the Diaspora is to live in this inexplicable space. That space is the measure of our ancestors’ step through the door towards the ship. One is caught in the few feet in between. The frame of the doorway is the only space of true existence. (p. 19-20)

Arrival, in Brand’s prose, is the about loss but very importantly, also of orienting oneself to a different life. It is the loss of life, of freedom, and of being in a way that may no longer make sense to the self. But it is also about coming to inhabit the New World and in ways that is commensurable with land, with Indigenous worldviews, and in ways which stand as antagonistic to white settler ways of life. The space of arrivancy was a space of incarceration for the Africans stolen and brought to the Americas. It is a space of flux and life in transit – perpetually heading towards the door, but never reaching that space once inhabited by ancestors who did cross the threshold; and of not knowing the other side of the door either. This constant movement towards the door, but never reaching it, is also what makes the act of “settling” an impossibility. That “frame of the doorway,” which Brand asserts is the “only space of true existence” points to the negotiations which formerly enslaved people and their descendants have to make to make a life in the New World, even if Africa remains as a distant memory, or even as an unknown. Therefore, that door, which Brand discusses, seems to signify both, an event and structure --the event of Trans-Atlantic slavery that lasted for a few hundred years but has solidified into the coarse banality of intense anti-black violence through which settler colonial state, as simultaneously a plantation state, continues to work. The door remained open in that one direction, where Africans stolen from the continent were brought as enslaved people to work the stolen lands. The arrivance continues in how Black people continue to be marked for death by police violence, incarceration, and other means of killing. Arrivance, as such, escapes the limitations placed by the structure/event binary which has been useful in thinking about the permanency of white settler colonialism and allowing for its distinctiveness from other modes of coloniality. Brathwaite cites Kumina Queen: “Well, muh ol' arrivance ... is from Africa. ... That's muh ol' arrivants family. Muh gran'muddah an' muh gran'fadda. Well, they came out here as slavely ... you unnerstan'?” This focus on “slavely,” on the condition of Black people in America integrates them into the very structure of settler colonialism and in ways that does not allow them the humanity needed for settlerness (King, 2013). In that, slavery and indigeneity become commensurable as the otherwise of human, as the otherwise of life. In fact, Vimalassery, Hu Pegues & Goldstein connect arrivance to Anishinaabe poet, Gerald Vizenor’s notion of survivance “which names indigeneity as an active presence and continuation, rather than loss alone” (p.9).

Therefore, rather than understanding arrivant as even a third position between settler and native, Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein (2016) read Byrd’s invocation of arrivant as a “relational mode of analysis,” as being able to “productively destabilize a clear division between social location and claim to place, drawing attention to the interactivity of distinct bodily and territorial logics of dispossession and recognition” (p.8). Understood in this way, in my reading, the category of arrivant is more than about an identity or a noun. Arrivant is about simultaneity of positions in systems of domination and subordination (at least for non- Black, non-Indigenous people of colour); arrivant is about the spatial; Arrivant is about coming to the new continent under various conditions; arrivant is a placeholder. It offers an ethical and political space for reflecting on and negotiating horizontal relations of power in a multi-racial white settler colonial situation. In terms of thinking about non-Black people of colour too, I read the category of arrivant as signalling relationality; relationality between people dispossessed by white settler colonialism, ongoing invasions, imperialism and all modes of heteropatriarchal capitalist violence(s). Arrivant, in my understanding, is therefore a transnational feminist analytic. My understanding of transnational feminism is grounded in Indigenous and Black feminist scholarship. In a previous publication, I had asked, “Who does transnational feminist politics?” (Patel, 2015, p.16). That same year, an article entitled, “Transnational feminisms roundtable” was published and has been very helpful in conceptualizing my understanding of transnational feminisms. Three feminist scholars Maylei Blackwell, Laura Briggs, and Mignonette Chiu discuss the politics, possibilities and limitations of transnational feminism. As Blackwell notes, “Indigenous feminism was already transnational due to its indigenous nation-to-nation commitments, the way it navigates and challenges settler nation-states, and creates alternative relationalities grounded in Indigenous epistemologies that cross multiple national borders and question the colonial constructs of those borders” (p.4). As Black scholars also remind us, “Blackness is always transnational, always larger and bigger than the borders of nation-states. What can we name as more fluid, vibrant, and transnational than the Atlantic and the Black bodies buried deep in its’ heart?” (Patel, p.14). Arrivant, then can be understood as a transnational analytic for a few reasons. Firstly, it pays attention to “unaligned geographies of difference” (Blackwell, p.7). That is, it pays attention to the spatial, to horizontal and vertical relations of power, and does not assume that the here is

57 disconnected from there. As Seneca scholar, Mishuana Goeman (2015) notes, “there simply isn’t an unconnected place” (p.96). This analytic allows me to think through how white settler colonialism in North America is connected with the workings of British Raj, for example. How did white settler colonial formation sustain itself in relation to other violence(s)? Relatedly, arrivant as a mode of solidarity with Indigenous and Black peoples and other marginalized people, allows us to organize “not only across political boundaries of nation-states but across internal social, cultural, and structural differences as well” (Blackwell, p.7). So Black people, Brahmins, Dalits, and other racialized people are not the same kind of arrivants. The place of being an arrivant is not a place which non-Black racialized people can automatically inhabit. Rather, it is a place theorized in different ways by Black and Indigenous scholars about how non-Indigenous people of colour can live on this land in ways commensurable with Indigenous and Black presence and orient towards a futurity that has place for non-toxic modes of existence. Inhabiting this space means accountability for anti-Indigenous racism, anti-blackness, casteism, heteropatriarchy, transphobia, Islamophobia and all other violence(s) I name and/or forget to name in this Dissertation. Arrivant, therefore, in my understanding, also pays attention to “transnational feminisms emphasizes questions of the geopolitics of epistemology, knowledge production, and the role of the intellectual and the academy” (Upadhyay, 2015, 15). How do we come to know what we know? What is our place in that analysis? For me, writing about white settler colonialism as a binary between Indigenous and white settlers, or even as an Indigenous- Black-White triad was not sufficient; not possible. My research question emerges from my positionality. My framework is indebted to theories and praxis that are important in my everyday life as well. That, for me, is the work which thinking through an analytic such as arrivant facilitates.

Overview of Chapters Chapter Two, which discusses my methodological approaches to this study, makes explicit my choice of transnational archives, my decisions around citational politics, and other scholarly and political commitments to doing this writing. Drawing upon scholars such as Said (1978, 1993) and Lowe (2015), I spell out my commitment to refusing disciplinary

58 boundaries of archives and also methodologies that cannot account for complex relationalities of white settler colonialism within the context of anti-Blackness, global imperialism, heteropatriarchy, Orientalism, Islamophobia, and other violence(s) through or in response to which non-Black people of colour diasporas have been constituted. Chapter Three, titled “Theoretical Framework,” discusses some key analytics from critical Indigenous, Black studies and Dalit Studies in particular because each of these fields of knowledge production center lives which stand antithetical to the logic of knowledge production about our world since 1492 and in case of caste hierarchies, for thousands of years. As a South Asian Muslim woman thinking about questions of complexities of complicity, and about my place here in North America, I find it pertinent to center decolonizing, abolitionist and anti-caste politics which I continue to learn about from Indigenous, Black and anti-caste South Asian scholars. Chapter Four, titled, “Columbus Fathers the “Indian Queen”: Tracing the "Undifferentiated Indian" through Europe's Encounters with Muslims, Anti-Blackness, and Conquest,” places Columbus’s travels to the New World within a much older history of eight centuries of Muslim/Moor presence on the Iberian Peninsula. It argues that the Orientalist logics underlining the creation of the ‘New World Indian’ has a long history interpellated through figures of the Moor and Africans whom Europeans knew for centuries before they encountered the Indigenous peoples of the ‘New World.’ This chapter, through doing the genealogy of the creation of New World’s ‘Indian,’ argues for reading for complexities often obscured in organization of settler and other colonial archives because of colonizer and master’s anxiety in keeping colonized, enslaved and other racialized people as separate and unconnected even when the violence(s) underwriting their lives and destinies are intimately connected. Chapter Five, “Complicating the Tale of “Two Indians”: Mapping ‘South Asian’ Complicity in White Settler Colonialism Along the Axis of Caste and Anti-Blackness” centers the question of caste South Asian complicity in systems of domination and subordination. Through examining Indo-American photographer, Annu Palakannathu Matthew’s series titled, “An Indian from India,” I critique the moves to innocence in utterances (text and art) by South Asians who are invested in doing anti-colonial work but rewrite the very logic of Empire. Often, such claims are underpinned by the rationale that because we too were once colonized people, just like Indigenous peoples of Americas, we

59 can forge unproblematic and natural relations of solidarity with Indigenous peoples in North America. I examine Matthew’s photographs which mimic late 19th-early 20th century photographs of the seemingly “dying Indian” of America to raise questions about the co- ordinates along which South Asian diasporic subjects must trace our complicity in systems of domination. The next chapter, Chapter Six, titled, “Histories out of the Blue: From Blue Hands, and Lands to Blue Destinies,” centers the production of indigo by colonized Bengali peasants in 19th century India to examine the politics of anti-colonial resistance to British Raj. I pay particular attention to transnational travels of blue to make sense of seemingly disjointed spaces, temporalities and people which indigo brought into often intimate, and always asymmetrical encounters. I bring together two differently colonized spatial sites of enactment of racial violence such as Bengal and South Carolina by analysing two important cultural texts of resistance. The first one is a popular and important mid-19th century Bengali protest play that explicated the violence of colonizing indigo planters and the resistance of the peasants, called Neel Darpan or “indigo mirror”. I examine the anti-colonial politics of the play and reflect on the work which gender and caste do in it. I then argue that Black feminist films such as Julie Dash’s 1991 film, Daughters of the Dust, have much to teach caste South Asian resistance movements about how banal movements of resistance are actually very powerful, and can gesture towards a radically different future than the one laid out by colonizers and enslavers. Chapter Seven, titled, “Indian Arrival Day: On Question of Caste, Anti-Blackness and indigeneity,” briefly looks at “Indian Arrival Day,” a national holiday in Trinidad and Guyana to mark the arrival of indentured labourers from India post ‘Emancipation’ of enslaved Black people. Through examining secondary literature and Indo-Caribbean poet Cyril Dabydeen’s (1988) novel called Dark Swirl, I examine the strategies through which descendants of these Indian indentured labourers are making claims to land through playing native but also through anti-Blackness.

Chapter II: Methodology

"To see others not as ontologically given but as historically constituted". (Edward Said)

I understand methodologies to be the logical organizing principles linking our ontological and epistemological perspectives with the actual methods we draw upon to read/analyze the data. Drawing upon Indigenous, Black, anti-racist, transnational and anti- caste feminist theories, my project reads the unlikely, seemingly unrelated, unexpected, and incommensurable archives by doing a reading which can offer a theoretical intervention into how the local and global of Empire have been theorized. Every writing project is a commitment to performing the difficult task of lifting complex ideas into the public sphere. Intending to engage with complex ideas and make interventions in structures of power requires a serious commitment to understanding our contemporary moment. That in turn demands thinking beyond the constricting paradigms we have been raised to see the world within, and instead pay special attention to how we approach the world, the text, the reader, and our own writing decisions. To write to disrupt and possibly build something different demands moving beyond the clear organization of the settler and other colonial archives (Lowe, 2015). As Black feminist scholar Christian Sharpe (2016) writes, “we must become undisciplined” (p. 13). Even though Sharpe’s instructions are for other Black scholars who read archives on slavery, the ethic of being undisciplined, of refusing to work within the constraints of colonial paradigms is pedagogical for attending to relationality. There are more uncertainties to face when your archive is incoherent, disorganized and perhaps even chaotic. However, I am much inspired by the words of Black scholar Kyla Wazana Tompkins (2016) who notes that the core ethic of her pedagogy is to ask questions with no guarantees because “we aren’t here to learn what we already know”. Though Tompkins is addressing other teachers on how to guide and encourage students to

60 61

ask questions as part of critical learning, I believe that her words define my methodological approach to the project. More than seeking out definite answers, I have tried to become comfortable with silences, changing routes, and often getting completely lost in the web of intimate and intricate connections I have been finding in my tracings. Given that my research question led me to a transnational archive for thinking through questions of my complicity, paying attention to my reading practices has been of utmost importance to me. But before I talk about my particular reading of my archive, I want to clarify what I mean by calling my objects of analysis as my archive of complicity. I am not reading any official archive, nor so I dwell in any officially archived spaces. While holding onto the materiality of archives is of utmost importance to my methodology, my belief in archival fixity is less serious. Archives are everywhere and can be compiled not just by archivists and librarians under the guidance of historians but also ordinary citizens whose pasts and presents have not received sustained or critical attention. As Antoinette Burton (2005) notes in her introduction to Archive Stories: For archives do not simply arrive or emerge fully formed; nor are they innocent of struggles for power in either their creation or their interpretive applications. Though their own origins are often occluded and the exclusions on which they are premised often dimly understood, all archives come into being in and as history as a result of specific political, cultural, and socioeconomic pressures— pressures which leave traces and which render archives themselves artifacts of history. (p.6)

What I call my archive of complicity is also gathered through recognizing and paying attention to the heterogeneity of struggles of Africans, Indigenous South Asians, Arab and North African Muslims, Dalit-Bahujan people, white settlers/colonizers and so many others who are yet invisible to me. As I mentioned in my Introduction, getting scholars to recognize my objects even as some kind of a partial archive (like all archives are) was an arduous task until my current supervisor came to Toronto and took me on as her student. I do not believe that archival incarnations are only about daring to tread away from the right way of doing history; they are also about bringing those histories together which are not conventionally brought into same conversation and that is where my struggle has been. That is also what I am trying to do in my own incomplete and impartial ways. My transnational archive required an interdisciplinarity which could hold space for multiple time periods, spatilaities, and

62 forms of power to co-exist simultaneously. This interdisciplinarity also challenged some of the epistemic, intellectual, pedagogical, and institutional traditions that have kept the various histories and people I bring into a conversation here, as separate and unconnected from each other. This interdisciplinary reading has been particularly learned from scholars such as the late Palestinian-American scholar, Edward Said’s (1993) method of contrapuntal reading, and Asian-American scholar Lisa Lowe’s (2015) methodology of reading for the past conditional temporality as explicated in her book, The Intimacies of Four Continents. Thinking about how to read for power relations which informs our humanity or disposability, our place in our worlds, make us pause and acknowledge that our thinking and imagination are important sites through which white supremacy controls us, and realize that it has disciplined our thinking in particular ways. The labour of critically reading a text28 is firstly, an investment in reading ‘against the grain’. Such a reading is about a resistant versus a dominant reading of the text, and encourages reading for the invisible, forgotten and actively suppressed. It is an examination of the power relations to lay bare the logic, the episteme, which holds the text together and gives it meaning. In their article, “Reader Read, Readers Write,” Ortega, De la Rosa and Suárez (2014) define reading as “particular happenings embedded in a time, a place, and attached to a reading material” (p.1-2). Our readings are always mediated through our social location, and therefore, the power relations with/in which we live, embrace life, resist death, and make meanings of our realities and realize the worth of our deaths. Neither writing, nor reading, can ever be objective, without feelings, ever be outside of power relations. Reading is a complex practice, a negotiation between who we are, who or what we choose to read, and even who we choose to cite and what interpretive framework we (have to) choose or actively resist in order to make sense of texts we engage with. As such, reading is personal, but also a political and hermeneutical act. It is a social practice, imbued with power relations. In “The text, the world, the critic,” Edward Said (1975) notes that texts “impose constraints and limits upon their interpretations” (9). That is because, he continues, texts are in and of this world, not written with infinite imagination or unexplored-as-yet frameworks. Also, because texts “place themselves –that is, one of their functions as texts is to place themselves –and they are themselves by acting, in the world” (emphasis in original, p.9). Said continues:

28 By text, I mean actual written material, talk, situation or an event.

The point is that texts have ways of existing that even in their most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society – in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly. Whether a text is preserved or put aside for a period, whether it is on a library shelf or not, whether it is considered dangerous or not: these matters have to do with a text’s being in the world, which is a more complicated matter than the private process of reading. The same implications are undoubtedly true of critics in their capacities as readers and writers in the world. (p.9)

Paying attention to the “worldliness” of the text, interrogating the context in which they appeared, continue to appear, made themselves visible to us, were picked up by our colleagues, paying attention to some of the underlying assumptions about history, temporality, spatiality, causality, and ethics is what constitutes my practice of critical reading in this project. For example, when I read the popular Bengali anticolonial play, Neel Darpan, I juxtapose the two contexts within which this text made itself visible to me: anticolonialism, but also the casteism and anti-Muslimness through which Indian anticolonial struggles were articulated against the British. Without centering casteism that organized relations of life and death in the Subcontinent even before colonialism, I could not read for the resistance articulated in the play written by an upper caste Bengali man. In that vein, I have constantly attempted to problematize notions of anticolonialism, resistance, and subaltern. I tried to hold onto the question of what the concepts and theories do for social equity in our scholarship, and what do these ideas of liberation we often become so invested in do for the reading, and how it places my body as a particular kind of writer with a particular kind of goal. In his 1983 essay, “Travelling Theory,” Said notes that theories are constantly shaped and reshaped according to the local conditions of production, reception and resistance. They are, therefore, “a response to a specific social and historical situation of which an intellectual occasion is part” even as time and place-specific factors make their full transfer impossible (Said, p.237) As Kamala Viswesveran (2010) notes, it is interesting to track how analytical objects such as culture, colonial, or race “circulate across and through disciplines, places, and political formations” (p.4-5). This project and the methodology guiding it is not about being managed by theories but trying to understand how our critiques of the world (and its texts) can and do re/produce and manage life. My reading practices, as Lowe (2015) says about her methodology, "deeply respect the primacy of material conditions, [but] they also often defy or disrupt accepted chronologies" (p.6). When

64 the goal is to think about relationalities, more than chronologies, it is simultaneity, which becomes important to attend to. I discuss this point in more detail later on in this chapter when I talk about queering my archive. Reading for power relations is also a practice of confronting the systemic of white settler colonialism, other colonial and imperial relations, anti-Blackness and caste. I borrow this phrase “reading as confrontation,” from Denise Ferreira da Silva (2015) who talks about reading art as confrontation the modalities through which Otherness is produced. While there is a difference between reading art and reading written text since the former has more hollow spaces for interpretation (by the spectator) and the latter, more guided mediation of critique (given “the pages and pages of conceptual and methodological declarations” (Da Silva, p.4)), I still find the notion of reading as confronting useful for my purpose. Reading art (or written text) as confrontation is an anticolonial intervention that refuses to represent the Other in all its reductiveness so that it could be made available to the spectator or the reader for devouring whole. Presenting without representing is a refusal to expose the subjects of a text for the reader to poke and prod at. It is a refusal to present Indigenous, Black and other racialzied/subaltern people in a way that can be consumed by the (non-Indigenous, non- Black, non-subaltern) writer and reader. Reading as confrontation is a refusal to grant the reader the agency to make do with subjects of the text what they please, and also a refusal of the “’ethical closure’ effected by a reassurance of difference, namely of a given distance between ‘I’ (spectator/colonizer/Human Rights enforcer) and the ‘Other’ (exhibit/colonized/victim)” (p.4). The reader/spectator needs to place the self in relation to these subjects and try to negotiate her place vis-à-vis the systems of domination and subordination which produce these subjects. This refusal, as da Silva brilliantly argues, also turns the space between the reader and the text (and its subject(s)) into “trenches”. The reader needs to do the work of meeting the subject(s) and meet them on terms they are able to negotiate with the subject(s).

Reading Practices In my reading of the archive, I believe I am practicing what Edward Said (1993) calls a "contrapuntal reading" of texts. Methodological propositions are an important part of the late scholar's now-canonical book Culture and Imperialism in which he guides us on how to

65 do a reading for following the connections, multiplicity, mutability, and movement of characters/people and situations. Said’s data comprised of 18-19th century French and English novels and he astutely claims that the logic and structure underlining and supporting these novels was European imperialism, for both, the novel and imperialism are “unthinkable” without each other (p.70-71). A contrapuntal reading requires paying attention to intertwined and overlapping histories” (p.18) and to read for that which is absent, marginally present or ideologically represented (p.66). He writes: “In practical terms, ‘contrapuntal reading’ as I have called it means reading a text with an understanding of what is involved when an author shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England” (p.66). Interpreting contrapuntally is to keep holding onto different perspectives simultaneously to see how the text makes sense to its readers through particular historical conditions and present systems of domination and subordination. It is reading with, as Said notes, an “awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts" (p.51). Said’s method of contrapuntality lies in reading the past through the present –reading texts “retrospectively and heterophonically with other histories and traditions counterpointed against them” (p.161, emphasis added). Heterophony, in music, is about simultaneous variation of a single melodic line. It is about playing one basic melody but in multiple voices and each voice might play the melody in very different ways. There is chaos underneath the tones which eventually reaches the ear. Whether I use the word heterophony, contrapuntal, or cacophony (Byrd, 2011), they all indicate the same thing: My intent is to read for the multiplicity, simultaneity, incommensurability and chaos. For example, such a reading of most of Jane Austen’s novels, which Said engages with, would compel us to critically examine that which was, for the most part, confined to passing references in her novels: colonialism and slavery in the Caribbean and India. It would ask us to read for the ugly beneath the calm, romantic landscapes holding Austen’s characters. The wealth of Mr. Darcy in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and of the Bertrams in Mansfield Park would ask us to point out that these people were also the colonizers and masters from the Americas to Africa to Asia . Whose land? Whose resources and labour? Where did the money come from? These are the questions which a contrapuntal reading of Austen’s novels would ask us to do. To

66 read for the signs; to read for also the banal and made-into-uneventful things such as a slave ship in the background. Such a reading, as Said points out, also means to read for resistance. He writes: “The point is that contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded…” (p.66-67, emphasis added). Echoes of Said's approach to reading history can also be found in what Lowe calls “past conditional temporality". As Lowe writes, this denotes "the space of a different kind of thinking, a space of productive attention to the scene of loss, a thinking with twofold attention that seeks to encompass at one the positive objects and methods of history and social science, and also the matters absent, entangled, and unavailable by its methods” (p.40- 41). It is a space of thinking that allows the unthought to be inhabited. Past conditional temporality allows for spaces and pauses in the archive to think about that which has exceeded the commonsensical narratives about the objects we follow and the pasts we want to trace. I understand Lowe's notion of past conditional temporality to be more than a retelling of the history differently. That, in itself, can be a project of alternatives, and so, is important. However, Lowe, I believe, is arguing for the otherwise of history. She is encouraging a dwelling in the gaps and silences, to pay attention to the moments of uncertainties and heed to that which could have been and perhaps was but could not be told, and could not be contained within the parameters of the circulating narratives. It is a willing to pursue what could have been without any guarantees. That is, past conditional temporality is not about securing redemption. It is a refusal to want to return to some mythical pure, better past. It is a refusal to pay heed to some rituals of recovery. It is not about imagining what history’s others could have been outside of colonialism, enslavement, capitalism, imperialism, casteism. For those are situations that can only be imagined within the constraints of our present. Past conditional temporality cannot offer a clean, tight narrative. Instead, it welcomes digressions, personal stories, anger, other feelings, and interruptions. Like Said, Lowe’s methodology also points to the work which knowledge production does in the service of Empire. While Lowe is a historian, and her archives have various historical objects, my project still benefits from the way she discusses the politics and practice of knowledge production, especially as I look at historical data. She argues: ...history and historical knowledge often fix and determine the relationship of the

past to the present, and the structure and meaning it attributes to the past also determines what may be imagined as possible, now and in the future. The historical narrative establishes conventions for understanding human action and the collective organization of a people and suggests the role of material conditions in social change and transformation. In this sense, the historical narrative not only disciplines the criteria for establishing evidence, it also identifies the proper units for the study of the past, whether the individual, family, polis, nation, or civilization. (p.138, emphasis added)

She refers to her approach to reading history as “past conditional temporality,” in which the past is not treated as fixed or an event, but shifting and enabling multiple presents and futures (p.175). In juxtaposing seemingly "unlikely archives," and asking questions about how different figures inform each other and how histories have been contingent upon keeping these bodies and their stories separate, Lowe points to how we have been disciplined at the site of knowledge production; how our thinking and as such, our resistance practices too have become constricted within the categories and narratives we have (been allowed to) access to. Lowe’s methodology of unsettling these colonial practices of knowledge production of settlers and masters is a site of resistance for the colonized and racialized people who have been constantly forced into particular narratives about the worth of their lives and the ungrievability of their deaths. Such an approach to history allows us to be critical about the politics of knowledge production that gives us the “received history of our present” (p.173). It encourages us to ask not only what connections are missing, suppressed or actively forgotten in writing the story of our present, but also inquire into what conditions produced these distinctly shaped and separated areas of knowledge that cannot imagine the white settler state as concurrently a plantation state, a prison for Black, and other racialized bodies, and also a space intimately connected to other colonies, imperialists/colonizers and colonized across the globe.

The Disjunctive, Queer Archive

My archive is reflective of my intellectual and political journey in the process of writing my doctoral study. Several kinds of decisions have shaped my archive. While my broader research question is about the place of non-Black racialized people in North

America, my archive is not limited to colonial borders of a nation-state, or even the continent. If the histories and presents of encounters between Indigenous, Black, other racialized and white people are complex, so are the questions of complicity I have been asking. As my conception of the presence of non-Black people of colour in North America shifted from trying to insert us as settlers into a neat binary of settlers and Indigenous people, I began to think more expansively about the complex histories of war, displacement, labour, indentureship, caste, and realized that there wasn’t any singular readily formed and available archive for me to look into. Moreover, I have been very careful in my citational practices. My reading of the archive has been dependent on my decisions around whom to draw upon and cite. For example, drawing upon texts that seemingly presented critiques of one system of violence and yet either through the subtext or through the scholars’ otherwise active and loud investments in Anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, Islamophobia, casteism, anti- Palestinian-ism and otherwise dangerous politics meant that I could not find that one particular archive or discipline that would help me research my questions. Though refusing obedience and discipline, the decisions I made were, therefore, careful and systematic. Assembling my own archive through carefully treading my way through paying attention to various citational practices as important political and ethical choices then also became a critical politic of doing research for me. I call my archive an archive of complicity. Each chapter reads a different site, and with each, I try to make sense of presence of people of colour here through direct presence, or sometimes through reading (for) the shadows which indicated our presence here through other figures. This is something which will become clearer in later chapters of the study. For now, it is important to note that my archive consists of historical, political, representational and cultural artefacts such as primary documents, photographs, novel(s), stage plays, letters written by government officials of the British Raj, historical debates, news reports, magazines, speeches, autobiography, conceptual arguments, print media, signboards/advertisements (from previous centuries), European representations of New World subjects and of Islam, and secondary texts. Taken together, this archive defies historical chronologies and spatio-temporal boundaries of events. Each data chapter weaves in some banal event (whether contemporary and historical), theory, and cultural texts. I call these moments banal and not exceptional or extraordinary because I believe that these

69 moments of violence and resistance are many, dispersed, and have long genealogies. These are utterances that are ordinary even if the violence underlining them is deadly (and ordinary in its deadliness). Where I engage with a range of different theories, I also draw upon an archive that might be seen as “all over the place,” or as disjointed by standard social science disciplinary practices. However, in order to examine the questions that I am raising in this project, in order to think about and denaturalize the taken-for-granted knowledges, I take heed from scholars who have adopted the practice of queering the archives. Such practices indicate an interdisciplinary approach to a multi-sited project. While my project is not explicitly focused on gender and sexual identities, queering as a practice of reading the text and world is more than centering gender and sexual identities. Queer is more than the literal reference to the “sexual” (Puar, 2007). As Browne and Nash (2016) write in their introduction to Queer Methods and Methodologies: ‘Queer research’ can be any form of research positioned within conceptual frameworks that highlight the instability of taken-for-granted meanings and resulting power relations. Queer inflected perspectives, approaches and conceptualizations have been taken up, disputed and reworked in different disciplinary contexts, reflecting the traditions of knowledge production in those disciplines. (p.14)

Queering the archive, queering the narratives, is about adopting an anti-normative outlook towards the production of knowledge and life. Queering pays attention to multiple truths and rejects the single story (Adichie, 2009) which parades as the (only) truth about lives of the colonized and the racialized people; it means engaging with various forms of discourses to consider how power relations are constituted and maintained in the production of social and political meanings. Moreover, it encourages the researcher/writer/reader to sit with silences, and not force “arbitrary coherences and illogical ‘logical’ connections” (p.3) in data. Sitting in/with chaos, or challenging the often taken-for-granted stabilities in our scholarly and other political work is difficult, and a queering approach to the organization of colonial and racist archives, to unlearning, to subverting the given truths about us and our lives allow us to take hold of the structural, and while critiquing the individual (including ourselves), understand the multitude of ways in which we have been placed within these structures and how we, non-Black people of colour, continue to uphold them.

My unstable, unlikely to come together, and chaotic archive has made it acceptable (even preferred) for this doctoral project to not have consistent (or sometimes, even coherent) meanings and themes. Holding onto queering as a practice of examining the relevance of multiple positionings, normativities and intersections also justifies my choice of archive. Jasbir K. Puar (2007), discussing her choice of archive in Terrorist Assemblages notes: “Queerness irreverently challenges a linear mode of conduction and transmission: there is no exact recipe for a queer endeavour, no a priori system that taxonomizes the linkages, disruptions, and contradictions into a tidy vessel” (p. xv). In a way, that is also because I have tried to make my archive speak back to normative liberal assumptions about the connections among the figures of the ‘Indian,’ the Moor, the enslaved people, Dalit-Bahujans and the indentured people. And I have tried to listen to this archive, to think about a different reading of the past, present and threatened futurities. Queering, as I understand it, is a refusal to label this project as explicitly feminist, postcolonial, post-structural, anti-colonial, anti-casteist, as always-liberatory or never- problematic and necessarily anti-oppressive; it is a refusal to engage with one brand of theories, or engage with a more “standard” set of archive, follow one particular time period, stay within confines of nation-state boundaries, and importantly, to never be silly (Halberstam, 2011). My sites might appear to be disjunctive but given my interest in challenging the taken-for-granted knowledge formations, I am hopeful that this project will add to the set of alternative archives and theories, those that offer a shift (if not a different framework) from conventional understanding of theorizing the multiple workings of the Empire(s). This project is best described by Julietta Singh’s words (2018). My project is "geared toward the political futures of unthinking mastery" (Singh, vi, emphasis added). Mastery, Singh contends, is what the colonizers claimed to achieve over the colonized. As she writes, “Across anticolonial discourse the mastery of the colonizer over the colonies was a practice that was explicitly disavowed, and yet, in their efforts to decolonize, anticolonial thinkers in turn advocated practices of mastery— corporeal, linguistic, and intellectual— toward their own liberation" (p.2). The archival chaos, I think, offers us the space for pausing, for reflecting upon the ways in which the expansive European and American Empires have structured our thought. To try and imagine what it would mean to think outside the empire. To at least try, and perhaps, fail.

Archive as a contact zone While I chose some of the texts to analyze, it has been clear to me that sometimes, the texts (also) chose me. Why else would my visit to the rare collection texts at the University of Toronto, where I actually went, inspired by an American reality television series Project Runway to look for dress styles from early 20th century for creating my own designs, bring me to random advertisements from 18th century featuring the “Indian Queen”? The ways in which I could see white, brown, Black peoples’ encounters in that figure greatly inspired me to think about what was produced at the nexus of the four continents. While I discuss the expansive encounters which in/form the figure of the Queen in one of my data chapters, I consider this figure, along with the rest of my archive, as being part of a “contact zone” (Pratt, 1992) where the figures, facilitated through particular histories I am interested in following either make an appearance, or afford these moments, these texts a coherence in their often loud absence, or periphractic presences. Their traces, as I discuss below with Lowe’s (2015) work, can be found in those gaps where they reveal themselves if the researcher is patient and is open to thinking through the hitherto unthought of the mainstream archive organization. In her now classic book, Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt (1992) examines colonial meaning-making practices, and describes the "contact zone" as “the social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination—like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (p.4). The contact zone demands a praxis of a particular kind for meaning-making; it is “an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal co- presence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect” (p.7). These encounters are facilitated by asymmetrical (vertical and horizontal) workings of power. Pratt's analysis has given rise to a wide range of postcolonial texts engaging with multiplicity of contacts and encounters between geographically and historically dispersed people(s). While indebted to this significant theorizing of contact zone by Pratt, I want to also pay attention to Renisa Mawani's (2009) critique of Pratt's theorizing. Mawani notes that while scholars engaging with Pratt's work

72 have highlighted the spatial and temporal co-presence of Indigenous peoples and Europeans, "there were other 'promiscuous alliances' that were also constitutive of colonial contexts and that dramatically shaped their entangled trajectories and contemporary sediments, often in unpredictable ways" (p.6). Like Mawani, I also assert that these contact zones have been always been a feature of our world whether we look at the eight centuries of presence of Moorish Others in Europe, or the fact that when Columbus first landed in the Caribbean he might have said "Salam," the Muslim greeting (Weaver, 2005), or that people in 17th century court masques were playing Indian that combined cultural representations of “Indians” of what is now known as India, and that of the Americas, or that Indians from India were brought in to replace the seemingly ‘Emancipated’ Black people once slavery officially ended in the Caribbean in 19th century. The colonial matrices facilitating conditions of possibility for "Indians" to play Moors29, for example, need to be thought through for the work they do in disrupting the linear (colonial) modalities of time we encounter in postcolonial texts. Holding onto the "Indian" and the Moors together is an act of inhabiting several times (and spaces) together. It is about disrupting the linearity of time, to refuse the colonial construction of time as always progressive, as always progressing and moving forward unidirectionally. White, Black, and brown bodies have been in contact with each other no matter where time and history begins for us. Holding onto these relations that span different spatialities and temporalities in the same conceptual lens help illuminate the "variegated forms, patterns, and rhythm that underpinned colonial encounters and the racial epistemologies and modes of regulation that contoured imperial terrains" (Mawani, p.7). The Moors of the Old World and the "Indians" of the Americas existed in the same temporality. The Crusaders and Christian rulers of 15th century Iberian Peninsula were also the conquistadors of Americas. So it is important to read for the overlapping subjectivities, the overlapping but also conflicting temporalities that produced uneven and contradictory colonial geographies of racial power. Pratt’s theorizing of contact zone is an important approach to thinking about archives because it allows me to pay attention to power relations as asymmetrical, as coercive, conflictual, vertical, but also horizontal, and productive of new identities, and new knowledges. Treating my archive as a contact zone, and following on a quest of reading for

29 See Chapter IV on the “Indian Queen”.

73 multiplicity of such encounters and sites allows us theorists of race and colonialism to move beyond the binaries of colonizer and colonized, and to read for the heterogeneity of racial formations that are not limited to White-Black or settler/native binaries. It allows for reading caste hierarchies. Contact zones were not only inhabited by colonizer/colonized or settler/indigenous, and Black and white people, but also had other ‘cross-over’ or simultaneous subject positions such as that of the Master (who was also the white settler), the enslaved people, the indentured labourers and a large array of white and racialized domestic servants brought in to clean the homes of these Masters and white settlers and a whole range of “in-between population” (Mawani, p.167). It is important to hold onto these “in-between” racialized subjects whose presence were the result of racial heterogeneities of colonial rule. My project has allowances to pause for these "in-between" subjects and the dynamics which produced the 1492 world order that inherited anti-Muslim violence and were facilitators in the genocide of Indigenous peoples, slavery of Africans, imperialism and further consolidation of British and later American empires. In The Intimacies of the Four Continents, Lowe (2015) brings together transnational archives which she argues would be considered "unlikely" to be read alongside each other. For Lowe, the archive is never a “stable, transparent collection of facts” (p.4). The organization of the colonial archive might give us the facade of order and impermeable borders, but their ‘order’ is an effort to discourage analysis of the global white supremacy and connections among different forms of colonialisms and the intricacies of the workings of the Empire. In a way, it is the sanitization of violence; to show the workings of Empire as exceptional, rather than systemic and global. Nigerian-British feminist scholar, Amina Mama (1997), in her essay, “Sheroes and Villains,” argues for the need to hold onto the “pernicious continuities between colonial, nationalist, and postcolonial systems” (p.61). 30 The organization of the archive, the categorization, is to discourage us from following these pernicious continuities. As Lowe notes: [i]t is fair to observe that there is scarce attention to the relationships between the matters classified within distinct stores; the organization of the archives discourages links between settler colonialism in North America and the West Indies and the African slave trade; or attention to the conjunction of the abolition

30 I am grateful to Nishant Upadhyay through whose scholarship I came to know about Mama’s concept of “pernicious continuities”. See Upadhyay (2013) article, “Pernicious Continuities” in Sikh Formations for details.

of slavery and the importing of Chinese and South Asian indentured labor; or a correlation of the East Indies and China trades and the rise of bourgeois Europe” (p.5).

There is, therefore, an urgent need to pay attention to the ways in which colonialisms, institutions, territories and people have been organized as unconnected to each other, and how knowledge production is shaped by this (dis)organization. Bringing these archives together, reading across these separate repositories, she argues, “emphasizes the relationality and differentiation of peoples, cultures, and societies, as well as the convergence and divergence of ideas, concepts, and themes” (p.6). The “in-between” population, which Mawani centers in her work, are produced through “colonial entanglements of differential racialization, ” (Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, & Goldstein, 2016) creating the possibility for Indigenous peoples of the New World to play “Moor,” or appear burlesquing in “yellow- face” in Mawani’s archive (2009, p.8). The racial, colonial ad casteist anxiety that remains embedded in the organization of archives is then reproduced in how educational systems and all other liberal humanist institutions, discourses and practices, reproduce our histories and presents. The contemporary moment, which we understand to be presenting unique challenges in terms of race class, gender, and coloniality, all of those have been present with different shifts for centuries. To give two quick quick example here: the Muslim Ban in the process of being legislated by the Trump government in the US has its history in the eviction of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula in early 17th century.31 The casteist nature of anticolonial resistance in India gives it the façade of a secular, democratic postcolonial nation-state when in reality, it’s an occupation where intense casteist and anti-Muslim violence continues with impunity. My transnational archive of complicity has also encouraged me to adopt an interdisciplinary theoretical framework because I am working with several figures in this project, such as that of the “slave,” the "Indian", the indentured Indian labourer, Bengali peasant and the attendant figure of the colonizers, Masters, and the East India Company officials. In order to read for these figures, I draw upon critiques from several fields such as critical Indigenous studies (North-American based), critical race theories, postcolonial

31 For more information about the Muslim ban, please see Khaled Beydoun’s (2016) article, “ ‘Muslim Bans’ and the (Re)making of Political Islamophobia,” https://illinoislawreview.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/10/Beydoun.pdf I discuss the eviction of Muslims from 17th century Iberian Peninsula in Chapter IV.

75 studies, Black feminist studies, and Dalit and anti-caste studies into conversation with each other. I work with concepts and vernaculars that lie at the core of these fields when reading historical and contemporary moments for a different future.

Reading for Relationality The people and texts, which this project brings together, are symptomatic of the reality of empires. Empires have never been contained projects and the colonial knowledges produced and mobilized by these empires were always transnational and formed at the interstices of multiple lineages, global trade, movement and flows of peoples, ideas and institutions across colonies of the Empire that spanned Britain, North America, and other European colonies in Africa and Asia. Even though various colonial situations were rooted in particularities of time and space, it was also a global phenomenon that produced conditions of its thriving in a wider terrain of power and knowledge. Even if academia, along with other colonial institutions, has divided the simultaneous workings of these empires into discrete components and fields, what holds true is that empires have always been the product of "bundles of relationships" (Wolf, cited in Ballantyne, 2002, p.3). As Ann Laura Stoler (2006) notes, “Colonialisms of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries drew on and animated circuits of movement that crisscrossed metropoles and peripheries, that disregarded official histories and national borders” (p.40). The imperial legacies marked by economic, ideological, cultural and familial ties bound Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Asia as colonized laborers together through distinct but interconnected forms of violence in 18th and 19th centuries. Since knowledge production about the colonized continues to be such an important strategy of ruling, paying attention to interdependencies between different parts of the Empire and going “beyond the boundaries of the nation-state to understand the larger dimensions of the imperial system” (Gregg, cited in Stoler, 2006) is essential for challenging ongoing colonial and racial violence(s). Understanding these larger dimensions does not necessarily point to a comparative approach in a way that assumes a linear notion of time, space, or clean, unmessy categories of the colonizer and the colonized. Rather, my interest is in (re)thinking of methodological orientations that "invoke a different ontology of empire as multiplicity, movement, and mutability" (Mawani, 2014, p.618). However, I am much

76 inspired by Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick Ferguson (2011) approach to comparativism whose work echoes Renisa Mawani's orientation to research. They talk about the desire to identify and invent analytics through which to compare racial formations, in distinction to comparative race scholarship that simply parallels instances of historical similarity across racial groups in the United States. Such a project entails not only articulating commonalities between communities of color but imagining alternative modes of coalition beyond prior models of racial or ethnic solidarity based on a notion of homogeneity or similarity. (p.1, emphasis added)

Building their framework on a queer of color critique, which for them is thoroughly grounded in women of color feminisms, Hong and Ferguson argue that holding onto multiciplicity of empire is crucial, all the while not homogenizing people of colour and focusing on the asymmetrical relations of power to examine how they are pitted against each other. Such an approach to comparative methodology can allow us to see moments when certain racial groups could articulate a demand for incorporation, albeit unevenly, over and against other racial groups as complexly interrelated to the processes by which subjects, within racial collectivities, are differentially incorporated or excluded from the class, gender, and sexual norms of respectability, morality, and propriety and thus placed on different sides of the dividing line between valued and devalued. (p.2-3, emphasis in original)

Therefore, a comparative methodology, while rooted in spatial and temporal particularities, can allow us to challenge the binaries of the oppressor/oppressed but also take into account the multiplicity of subjectivities and horizontal relations of power negotiated people often confined into a singular category of people of colour is critical to my work (Byrd, 2011; Medak-Saltzman & Tiongson, 2015). Holding racial formation as analytical category moves the logics of a comparative approach to beyond just looking for similarities and differences. As Medak-Saltzman and Tiongson argue, comparative approaches also often fail when there is "the failure to grapple with how histories of colonialism and their legacies remain present and relevant in Europe and Asia as much as they do in settler colonial North America, and the failure to account for the heterogeneity of race within North American settler colonial contexts and the vexed relationship between Indigenous and diasporic subjects" (p.2).

While I treat my archive as a contact zone, I want to pay attention to the multiplicity, mutability, circulations of ideas and concepts, and movement of people in my archive. The empires and the histories, fates, and futures of the racialized and colonized peoples are entangled and intertwined rather than being discrete and isomorphic. For instance, holding onto the violence which introduced indigo to the modern Western world, I will argue that there are similarities in contexts between East India Company's rule in India and the activities of the Dutch West Indies Company in the Caribbean, also highlighting the connections between the lives of Indigenous peoples of Bengal and the enslaved people in South Carolina. The empires haunted each other. The coercive indigo growing conditions of Bengali peasants were also the experience of the enslaved Black people in South Carolina. I am careful that I never suggest that the violence were of the same nature. But indigo connected the ink-stained brown and black hands. Keeping the racial and colonial heterogeneities in focus will help reveal more about how discussions on slavery by the British government in the Caribbean and East Indian Company worked in tandem with each other. For instance, I briefly read for how sugar from the East Indies was somehow considered less blood-soaked by the abolitionists who argued for ending slavery in the Caribbean. Tracing these connections have brought to fore a range of figures such as that of the Indian peasant, the slave, and the EIC official who was in close proximity to the plantation owners in the Caribbean (when these weren't the very same people). It has also brought me to consider the social, historical and political formation of caste and the work it does in how colonized and racialized people of colour are oppressed and also how they resist. In my project, caste is an integral site of reading my data because colonialism and anti- Blackness of South Asians, for example, cannot be read outside of caste relations. The colonized subject of the British Raj was the elite Brahmin who was in bed with the colonizers but also the poor Dalit peasant who was victim of casteism long before the Portuguese or the British ever came to the Subcontinent. So there is no singular colonized South Asian subject and it would be reinscribing the dangerous monolithic faulty reading to think colonialism acted in the same way on all colonized South Asian people. Their histories are produced in relation to each other. Without these figures, the work of establishing white supremacy could not be done, and thinking about trajectories and place of South Asians in North America requires paying close attention to these interconnections.

Ethical Considerations We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism.

—Rigoberta Menchú, 1992

Doctoral dissertations that are not working with human subjects do not need to go through University’s ethics review board for approval. Universities are racist and colonial institutions that have long histories of approving and supporting problematic and otherwise deadly (for Indigenous, Black and other people of color) anthropological and other research projects so their ethics approval protocols do not say much even if these were developed and modified as a result of intellectual and other resistance movements by variously studied racialized and colonized people. But, what is interesting is that non-human-subject based research projects are deemed to be (relatively) unharmful and therefore not subject to rigorous ethical guidelines. Such projects are not expected to cause any harm to their subjects (and objects) of research. And yet, ethical considerations and dilemmas should always be central to any research project that hopes to challenge colonial and racist practices and politics of knowledge production. Ethical considerations need to be in line with an ethics of truth grounded in love, care, hope for a different futurity, and perhaps forgiveness. The theories from Indigenous, Black and Dalit-Bahujan scholars I engage with have so much to offer to researchers like me about radical democratic futures. A related issue was that of voice and framing of my subjects in this project. For instance, in Conquest, a settler scholar of Indigenous Studies, Andrea Smith (2005), noted that " Because Indian bodies are "dirty," they are considered sexually violable and "rapable," and the rape of bodies that are considered inherently impure or dirty simply does not count" (p.10). Since then, I have often seen this repeated as an axiom. While Smith and others repeat it to bring attention to the very reality of colonial violence and how it was unleashed through rape of Indigenous women, such claims also erase the 500 plus years of Indigenous women's resistance against colonial and sexual violence. Dalit women too have been framed as women who can be raped with impunity by upper-caste men. But, as Dalit feminist, Anu

Ramdas noted in a Facebook post32, would upper caste people like it if their women were constantly associated with rape only? Do Dalit women have no honor, no dignity? Do they not fight? In an article on Round Table India, an online forum for Dalit-Bahujan and Adivasi voices, she notes: “There is an immense quietness that surrounds our consistent struggles to civilize this society.”33 This framework is consistent with what Eve Tuck (2009) calls “damage-centered research” where Indigenous, Black, and other marginalized people are perpetually portrayed as broken and only ever as victims of violence. Such an understanding of their bodies and fates denies their active resistance against colonial, racial, and capitalist violence. Tuck writes: Though connected to deficit models—frameworks that emphasize what a particular student, family, or community is lacking to explain underachievement or failure—damage-centered research is distinct in being more socially and historically situated. It looks to historical exploitation, domination, and colonization to explain contemporary brokenness, such as poverty, poor health, and low literacy. Common sense tells us this is a good thing, but the danger in damage-centered research is that it is a pathologizing approach in which the oppression singularly defines a community. Here’s a more applied definition of damage-centered research: research that operates, even benevolently, from a theory of change that establishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation. (p.413)

Harm, injury, damage, and loss. These adjectives define the singular story told about Indigenous communities. It is not, as Tuck says, about the end-goal or about the intentions of the researcher. Even when stories of injury are retold in order to achieve something the researcher believes to be good for the communities a researcher works with, the coloniality of the narrative of “dying Indians” keeps getting reified. In order to avoid such an approach to research subjects, communities, and their histories, it becomes essential to be mindful of the stories we tell. Refusal is a critical modality of doing research that strives to be in conversation with decolonial politics. In their article, “R-Words: Refusing Research,” Tuck and Yang (2014) note: “Refusal and stances of refusal in research, are attempts to place limits on conquest and the colonization of knowledge by marking what is off limits, what is not up for grabs or

32 I a paraphrasing Ramdas' words here. 33 Anu Ramdas, 2012. "In solidarity with all rape survivors," (accessed 10 Feb, 2017). http://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6084:in-solidarity-with-all-rape- survivors&catid=119:feature&Itemid=132

80 discussion, what is sacred, and what can’t be known." (p.225). Refusal is a research methodology is about recognizing the agency of the subjects in my text. Refusal is about a peoples’ right to self-representation. In her 2007 article on ethnographic refusals, Anthropology scholar Audra Simpson draws from her personal experiences as a Kahnawake academic conducting ethnographic research in her home community. In doing so, she describes how research participants avoid discussing topics that they do not want known or misrepresented by outsiders—particularly academics. Academia’s historical and ongoing involvement in settler colonialism is examined, with Simpson discussing how anthropology has simultaneously portrayed Indigenous people as inferior, while misrepresenting and laying claim to Indigenous knowledges, experience and even futures. While I discuss this notion of refusal in detail in my chapter on Theoretical Framework, I bring up these words of caution here too because I have tried to be careful in what I can say and also what is not for academia. Similarly, I also acknowledge that there must be several stories which my subjects have refused to tell me in my reading of data. Rather than trying to excavate these stories, this project is a step towards learning to sit with these silences and refusals. Another important challenge for ethical consideration has been the matter of citations. Every research and writing project requires us to make these decisions. In April 2015, Tuck and Yang issued those of us writing for social justice the following challenge:

Reflect on the way you approach referencing the work of others in your own writing, presenting and thinking. Whose work do you build on to make arguments, describe the field and the problems you engage in your work? Who are you citing, and why do you cite them (and not others)? 34

This challenge needs to be seriously taken up by all of us because citational practices can inform the cannon, as well as disrupt it. As formations of canon in fields of anthropology, philosophy, sociology, history, political sciences and other fields in reveal, usually whiteness and masculinity are the prerequisites for being canonized in Western academia. It is the same few who keep getting cited and we know names of Freud, Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, or Deleuze more so than names of Indigenous, Black and other racialized and feminist scholars whose methodologies and theories might explain our contemporary moment better to us. In

34 Click here to access their challenge: http://www.criticalethnicstudiesjournal.org/citation-practices/

81 her article explaining why she “broke up” with Gilles Deleuze, for instance, Tuck (2010) notes: [H]ow do I attribute Deleuze’s notions of rhizomatic interconnectedness, a notion at the very center of his philosophies, when for hundreds and thousands of years, interconnectedness has been the mainstay in many Indigenous frameworks, both tribal and diasporic? How do I as one person account for the interface of these concepts without falling into the traps put in place by the colonizers’ and academy’s long history of exploiting, romanticizing, and mining of Indigenous knowledge and the US tradition of ‘playing Indian’ (Deloria 1998)? It’s an issue of false inventions and giving credit where credit is due, and again an issue of describing and engaging in contentious, complex ideas. (p.646)

Tuck's critical analysis of what she wittingly calls her “breaking up” Deleuze is an important ethical intervention in how she frames her scholarship. The issue of “false invention” is a critical one, and I would argue more so today, in the age of social media, where it is even more plausible to become "academic stars" with a few phrases and theories that are put into circulation at the cost of burying the research and writing done especially by women of color scholars. Tuck is absolutely poignant in asking why we need to go to the likes of Deleuze when so many have said this before, and have lived their lives in harmony with each other, with Earth, its water and its non-human inhabitants for thousands of years before the invaders landed on their shores. Sara Ahmed (2013) notes that citations are "successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies". If texts are a part of the world and if our critiques are informed by algorithms of life and death, and in turn determine whose life is commendable and whose death cannot be grieved, then whose struggles are recognized, whose scholarship gets reproduced over and over again are not unrelated to life and death questions on the street.35 In her latest book, Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed (2017) writes, “Citation is a feminist memory” (p.15). Ahmed discusses her refusal to cite white men who she considers to be institutions in themselves. She writes: “Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow” (p.15-16). Citational practices are about creating institutional memories and institutional memories are all white

35 Please refer to my turning to Sylvia Wynter's letter in my Theoretical Framework. Wynter writes about the branding of Black people as "No Humans Involved" by Los Angeles Police Department. She discusses how our epistemes for knowledge production are a matter of life and death.

82 and masculine here and Brahmin and masculine in South Asia. They are the “materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings” (p. 16). When I first began thinking about citational practices, like Sara Ahmed, my first instinct was to simply stay away from all white scholars. It made sense to me because white scholars get uninhibited exposure and in every instance, what they say has been said by scholars of color before too. The latter do not receive the kind of circulation needed to make their scholarship into part of the cannon.36 However, there were a few difficulties I encountered with that decision. Firstly, scholars of colour elaborately engage with some white theorists. For instance, Foucault's conceptualization of power informs a vast body of scholarship I draw upon so I cannot pretend that he is not there. He was a major part of my graduate studies courses and training. His theories also define my understanding of key concepts such as knowledge production, and therefore I do discuss his work. Secondly, just because somebody is a scholar of colour, it does not mean that they are not actively participating in global structures of violence or that they are necessarily against reproducing systems of domination and violent power relations among the oppressors and the oppressed. For instance, I had deep love and respect for Amitav Ghosh's (2008) award-winning work of fiction, Sea of Poppies and had initially planned on bringing it into my work as data to talk about race and caste relations in my project. However, his acceptance and loud defense of the million-dollar Zionist and anti- Palestinian Dan David Prize, despite requests and criticism from Palestinian and pro- Palestine activists and scholars supporting the cultural and academic boycott of Israel, convinced me that I needed to disengage from his work in my scholarship. In my revisions I have also taken out scholars who have been accused of sexual harassment of their students. For instance, I drew upon Dipesh Chakrabarty, the renowned historian and scholar of postcolonial and Subaltern studies. However, ever since he was accused by Christine Fair, a historian, of being sexually harassed, story followed up by other stories of student abuse, I

36 From my personal experience of having taught over 10 courses, TAing for multiple courses and also conversation with friends who teach in academia, I have come to realize that Black scholars like Frantz Fanon or Audre Lorde, for example, are taught only a fragment of times which these white philosophers are taught. In fact, one term, teaching a 4th year Sociology course, I realized that my students in Sociology could not even name three scholars of color whose work or ideas they were familiar with. This, of course, is not a failure of the students but of the academic industrial complex that in invested in keeping the dead white men (and women) alive at the expense of radical and urgently needed theories by Black, Indigenous and People of Colour.

83 decided to take him out of my project.37 In my project, I also critique other upper caste scholars who talk about race in Western academia while producing deeply casteist scholarship. While being conscious of not reproducing the cannon or draw upon the same white scholars without critically analyzing the way their work is being taken up, I have found it important to also not draw upon scholars of colour just because they are not white. People of color also participate in white supremacy and its attendant logics of violence. So many popular South Asian scholars of colonialism and Subaltern studies are outright casteist while continuing to talk about white supremacy and racism and misogyny. A case in point is Ania Loomba, an upper-caste postcolonial studies scholar whose book, Colonialism/Postcolonialism is extraordinary popular and a required reading in so many undergraduate courses in postcolonial studies. In her book there is an aversion to Dalit Bahujan scholars and she calls Kancha Ilaiah, a Bahujan scholar and Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit scholar as “problematic and polemical” for their critique that caste was death-making in colonial India and also in postcolonial India. She seemed particularly “upset” (a word I use deliberately) with Prasad’s argument that for the lower caste Indians, the British actually presented a progressive force because it challenged some of the orthodoxies (and centuries- old violent practices) towards the Dalit-Bahujan people (2005, p.197-198). I used to refer to her book for definition, for concepts, for genealogies of terms and now I am not sure how to respectfully engage with a Brahmin scholar who is so complicit, so invested in keeping caste hierarchies in place. I have respect for Sara Ahmed’s citational politics but I worry that 1) she herself does not cite of the feminists of the global south in her latest book where she discusses citational practices; and 2) it is a very clear white/non-white binary only for her when it comes to scholarship that is ethically citable. Texts speak, they are fluid and their meaning-making is dependent on how they are approached. They speak through their readers, and their interpretation is dependent on their readers’ socio-political location, their motivations, and their sense of social justice. So this is where the harm lies too: Reading various cultural and theoretical texts for understanding the work which colonial and racial violence do in our/my understanding of the world is a project that is very capable of reinscribing exactly those tropes which it sets out to critique. While I

37 To read Christine Fair’s (2017) letter to Dipesh Chakrabarty calling him out, see “#HimToo: A Reckoning,” https://www.buzzfeed.com/christinefair/himtoo-a-reckoning?utm_term=.cmLMwMGLL#.fgdGEGkxx

84 have tried to be careful as much as possible but it is very possible that I also bring in scholars whose otherwise politically astute work scholarship is not translated into their everyday lives or politics on ground. I state this in the genuine hope that I am able to find the courage to engage with my complicity in upholding systems of violence inside and outside academia. I also hope that my readers forgive me for my failing in citations and theorizing.

Chapter III Theoretical Framework

Introduction Columbus' arrival in the Americas in 1492 ushered in an epistemology of seeing the world which was very limited in terms of affording life and humanity to non-Europeans, to those colonized and enslaved. This of course was European legacy. The European society from which Columbus came was a barbaric, violent, misogynist society. The project for us, as Jamaican scholar Sylvia Wynter notes, is to examine this order of knowledge production. In her essay aptly titled, "1492: A New World View," she notes that there are usually two kinds of analyses of 1492: celebratory and dissident. This third perspective, which Wynter encourages us to adopt, takes into account the "ecosystemic and global sociosystemic 'interrelatedness' of our contemporary situation" (p.8). It is a "perspective of the species, and with reference to the necessarily partial interests of both celebrants and dissidents" (8). Critically examining the concepts, the categories which we have been given, which we use to explain our lives, worlds, and ideas to ourselves would allow us to see how the frameworks we inhabit to make sense of ourselves allow a very narrow and constricted space that can afford life only to a particular Western bourgeois specie its humanity, to demand life and justice for ourselves. I am invested in making 1492 epistemology a worldview, rather than a fact. It is important to critique, to denaturalize the knowledges and analytic objects that have been presented to us as the only co-ordinates along which we can trace the worth of our lives, or live our daily lives. In this dissertation, I draw upon critical Indigenous, Black studies and Dalit Studies in particular because each of these fields of knowledge production center lives which stand antithetical to the logic of knowledge production about our world since 1492 and in case of caste hierarchies, for thousands of years. Implicit in this theoretical or rather, epistemological framework are the worldviews and struggles of those who have been rejected as not-Human enough. The knowledges these fields produce are the "difficult knowledges," (Pitt & Britzman, 2003) the defeated knowledges that often live on periphractic spaces of an

85 86 otherwise white, anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and I would add, casteist academia. The concepts and scholars I discuss here challenge unjust social formations. What also ties these frameworks advanced by Indigenous, Black and Dalit-Bahujan38 intellectuals is that they work against the grain of nation-centered analysis. These critical theories advance voices and narratives which strengthen hope in a world that looks radically different from the current geo-political moment and one which can afford life to people who are not supposed to have any futures. Before outlining some of these concepts I would like to state that I am indebted to Amy Allen's (2016) definition of critical theory. Allen's project is to decolonize Frankfurt School critical theory, and her understanding of theory is situated in this school. However, she does provide a more expansive notion of theory which I find helpful in my project as well. Her understanding of critical theory is rooted in its "practical and political aim of freedom and emancipation" (xiv). This emancipation does not refer to a utopian world with no power relations but "the minimization of relations of domination" (xiv). The theories I draw upon in my dissertation suggest tools for challenging these relations of domination.

Critical Indigenous Theory

Natives, it seems, in the audition of settler colonizers are permitted first utterances and dying words but nothing in between. –Jace Weaver, American Indian Literary Nationalism, 2005

In her 1991 essay, "Who stole Native American studies," Crow Creek Sioux scholar of Native American Studies39, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that Native American studies and scholars have been marginalized, and Native Studies subsumed and "stolen" by various academic fields. She argues that anti-oppressive theories examining gender, class, race (limited to the black/white binary) are unable to engage with questions which Native Studies centers. These include examining ongoing colonial violence and stealing of land, Indigenous

38 I define this term when discussing Dalit Studies. 39 The term “Native American studies” is what Cook-Lynn uses. I use the term “Indigenous studies” when not directly citing Cook-Lynn, but both refer to the same for me. I am also hoping to be careful in not conflating critical Indigenous theories, which I draw upon, with the academic field of critical Indigenous studies. For understanding critical Indigenous studies as a field, see, Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s (2016) edited book, Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press).

87 languages, sovereignty and fight for self-determination, and reflecting on 20th century Indian laws, and treaties. At best, as Cook-Lynn argues, anticolonial struggles of Indigenous peoples become reduced to some identity issues as postcolonial studies began with the moment "after colonialism" for Third world scholars who began to enter the US academy in the 1970s (p.13). Ongoing colonialism and anti-colonial struggles of Indigenous peoples became subsumed by mandates of multicultural, postcolonial, racial and ethnic studies as Indigenous peoples' fight for sovereignty was swallowed by concepts of "ethnicity, immigration, slavery, feminism, and postmodern cultural studies" (p.17). In these moves, indigeneity was erased at the same time as Indigenous people were reduced to just another minority group in white settler states. For Cook-Lynn, "The mentality that would pervade the discipline [of Native American Studies] would center on two concepts: indigenousness (culture, place, and philosophy) and sovereignty (history and law)" (p.11, emphasis in original). Similarly Cree scholar Winona Stevenson (1998), reflecting on the launch of Ethnic Studies Department at University of British Columbia in early 1990s argues that Ethnic Studies can never be for Indigenous peoples since they are not a minority but “Original peoples of the land,” and that struggles against racism and other oppressions do not translate into the fight for decolonization. Naming the same sites of struggles as Cook-Lynn, such as Indigenous sovereignty, treaty rights, land use and federal-state relationship and ongoing colonial violence, Stevenson notes that being "included" under the label of “ethnic” "is colonialist because it completely disregards and undermines our [Indigenous] legal and political uniqueness, our histories, our relationship to the land, and our goals" (p.40). While Cook-Lynn argues that other academic fields stole Indigenous studies, Stevenson discusses how Ethnic Studies is a strategy for assimilating Indigenous peoples, and therefore, an act of "intellectual neocolonialism". Critical Indigenous theories, centered on modalities of Indigenousness, sovereignty, decolonization and attention to ongoing colonial violence is not aligned with the goals of anti-oppressive theories centering marginalized bodies, and gendered, racial and capitalist violence(s). What Cook-Lynn and Stevenson argue about the subsuming of Indigenous Studies (as a field) under Ethnic Studies and other fields of study continues to be an ongoing issue. As Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks (2008) notes, both "Native literature" and "Native American studies" are treated as "new or emerging fields" despite evidence to the contrary

(p. 234). This, as Brooks argues, is a denial of the existence of Indigenous intellectual traditions and epistemologies and the fact that the Indigenous peoples of America] are “part of a philosophical conversation, which did not emerge only in the last twenty years but has been ongoing on this continent for millennia" (p.235). These concerns about the treatment of Indigenous theories and Indigenous peoples in academia are grounded in ongoing experiences of erasure as part of colonial violence, and also over 500 years of Indigenous peoples’ resistance to the violence of colonialism, dispossession, and genocide. In one of her talks, Jodi Byrd (2015) reminds settlers that the origins of Indigenous Studies go back to first "contact" between Europeans and Indigenous peoples of North America.40 In their introduction to Theorizing Native Studies, Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (2014) propose that the project of theorizing Native Studies reconceptualizes what theory is and also provides a critical framework for "decolonizing political and intellectual praxis" (p.2). They begin with presenting ongoing debates about the validity of theory, the relativism which poststructuralist theory seems to espouse and the kinds of truth claims which theory can support without essentializing the life and struggles of its subjects. For these scholars, Native Studies must engage with theory and such an engagement also intervenes in the usefulness of critical theory in general. They argue: The real question on the table is not whether we should theorize. Rather, we need to ask how we can critically and intelligently theorize current conditions in diverse spaces inside and outside the academy, and how we can theorize our responses to these conditions. When we take account of the historical and political conditions that structure theory as a thing that appears through theory's relationships to capital, or in relation to discourses of civilization and savagery, we may ask how a heightened awareness about the history of ideas, and the practice of ideas, will not only allow us to theorize and critique robustly but also help us to build a more just set of relations between people. (pp.7-8, emphasis added)41

The authors make a really obvious but important point: The question is not whether or not

40 "Modern Critical Lecture Series --Jodi Byrd on Indigenous Studies," Oct 20, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyL1x6mUpbc 41 I am aware that questions about Andrea Smith’s claims to indigeneity have been raised within the very old colonial context of white people “playing Indian” (Deloria, 1998) and also the relatively new happenings of white people claiming indigeneity to secure positions in academia among other institutions. I have been careful in not referring to Smith as a Cherokee scholar ever since. However, I still cite her work with Audra Simpson because it’s an important book on the field of Indigenous studies. To read more about Indigenous women scholar’s open letter on discussions about Smith’s claims to indigeneity, please see https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/open-letter-from-indigenous-women-scholars- regarding-discussions-of-andrea-smith/ (Indian Country Today, July 7, 2015).

Indigenous peoples are theorizing for they have always been theorizing. An important question which the authors point to is, what is meant by theory? Here, I quote Anishinaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson (2014) who writes: A “theory” in its simplest form is an explanation of a phenomenon, and Nishnaabeg stories in this way form the theoretical basis of our intelligence. But theory also works a little differently within Nishnaabeg thought. “Theory” is generated and regenerated continually through embodied practice and within each family, community and generation of people. “Theory” isn’t just an intellectual pursuit – it is woven within kinetics, spiritual presence and emotion, it is contextual and relational. It is intimate and personal, with individuals themselves holding the responsibilities for finding and generating meaning within their own lives. (p.7)

Simpson’s conception of theory is one that is about life and how it is lived every day. It is not static, and shifts in relation to the contradictions and difficulties of life. It welcomes adjustments to different ways of being, to multiple realities and relationalities. Theory is something that works for and in relation with members of the family and the larger community. It has multiple truths that are shaped by spirituality, kinship, and therefore, without centering human as the all-knowing singular subject. As such various stories of origin told by Indigenous nations are stories that hold the message of how to live our lives. They are stories about origins with orientations for futures. But in Western academia, Indigenous peoples’ story-telling and their various theories do not count as more than anthropology or other social science and science’s object(s), as data of the Other (beings). This is also because Indigenous paradigms have always stood in opposition to, and as critiques of Western-centeric knowledge claims of objectivity and science, even as the figure of the “Indian” continued to be integral to European narratives of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The question then, for people like me to consider is: How are we (non- Indigenous, particularly non-Black scholars of colour and white settler scholars) engaging with critical Indigenous theory? How are we mobilizing the central tenets of this set of theories, and what are we making of the claims and teachings of Indigenous peoples? Considering these questions require us to pay careful attention to the ethics and politics of our praxis of our own "doing of theory" and engaging with Indigenous peoples in our research, writing, and teaching. From the outset, researchers/scholars must not do what Unanganx feminist scholar

Eve Tuck (2009) identifies as “damage-centered research”. In her powerful letter addressed to communities, researchers and educators who work with Indigenous communities, Tuck explains the ramifications of seeing Indigenous peoples as damaged people, as vulnerable people, as people who must be helped, and rescued. It is also about the question of what happens when we understand Indigeneity as only ever related to colonial violence. Tuck discusses the “troubled relations” with researchers encroaching upon Indigenous peoples' lands, sovereignty and lives, as people who remain “overresearched, and yet, ironically, made invisible” (p.411-412). Damage-centered research doesn’t necessarily ignore or efface colonialism and violence. However, it presents a singular story of these Indigenous communities as broken and in pain because of that violence. As she notes, an applied definition of damage-centered research is “research that operates, even benevolently, from a theory of change that establishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation” (p.413). Tuck, instead, advocates for a “desire-based framework” as an alternative (but not antonym) to damage-centered research (p.419). Desire-based frameworks encourage us to see communities and people as more than “broken and conquered” (p.416) and to see the hope and wisdom they hold onto and have to offer to the world. Arguing for desire as an “epistemological shift,” she states: Desire is a thirding of the dichotomized categories of reproduction and resistance. It is neither/both/ and reproduction and resistance. This is important because it more closely matches the experiences of people who, at different points in a single day, reproduce, resist, are complicit in, rage against, celebrate, throw up hands/ fists/towels, and withdraw and participate in uneven social structures—that is, everybody. Desire fleshes out that which has been hidden or what happens behind our backs. Desire, because it is an assemblage of experiences, ideas, and ideologies, both subversive and dominant, necessarily complicates our understanding of human agency, complicity, and resistance. (pp.419-420)

I am very deeply moved by Tuck’s theorizing of desire as an “assemblage of experiences, ideas, and ideologies, both subversive and dominant”. It has made me pause and listen to my thoughts, to re-read my writing, to pay attention to the scholars and work I draw upon to write this study. The deep seated investments in anti-indigeneity which have been taught to us through school curriculum but also through ordinariness of erasures of Indigenous sovereignty and life has made the process of being attentive to my own work against such

91 pedagogies difficult and challenging. But Tuck’s arguments force me, more than ever, to critically examine my place and approach to critical Indigenous theory, and through it, toward Indigenous peoples. To not narrate Indigenous peoples as always dying, to not harbor the desire for the “authentic” Indian of white settlers and state, to understand my constant even if suppressed desire to always present myself as a critical and ethical scholar. To counteract my own [racialized immigrant/arrivant] desires and see the complexities of my own position as a researcher here is difficult work but something I want to continually work towards.

Defying the "Dead Indian" Trope Indigenous theory engages with lives of those who continue to be objects of genocide and whose genocide has been written off as a necessary condition of modernity (O'Brien, 2010). And yet, the "Indian," as Europe's caricature of the centuries old inhabitants of a world they claim to have found, has been central to European knowledge epistemologies about the world. From drawing up world maps by colonizers, science, laws, property rights to notions of good versus evil, freedoms and questions of the Human and humanity, the figure of the “Indian” gives form to everything. As Robert Stam and Ella Shohat (2012) write: On innumerable occasions, European and Euro-American thinkers deployed 'the Indian' as an inspiration for social critique and utopian desire. The emergence into European consciousness of the indigene triggered an epistemological excitement that generated both the dystopian imagery of the nasty and brutish savage and the utopian imagery of an egalitarian social system markedly different from that of a rigidly hierarchical Europe. The concept of the free Indian living in a society without coercion helped spark revolutionary ideas in Europe. (p.8)

These literal and figurative encounters between Indigenous peoples of the New World and Europeans gave settlers of the New World the unique identity to differentiate themselves from their European forefathers, even as the genocide of the so-called New World inhabitants continued unabated. The motif of the “Indian” could not afford life and subjecthood to Indigenous peoples of the Americas even as it inflected all revolutionary ideals, all theories of the liberation, freedom, political economy, and all critical theories

92 whether they be Marxism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, post colonialism, western feminisms, and even anti-racism (Byrd, 2011; Coulthard, 2014; Grande, 2004; Stam and Shohat, 2012). Quechua feminist scholar, Sandy Grande (2004), in conversation with radical leftist advocates of critical pedagogy, notes that a focus on Indigeneity challenges the degree to which critical pedagogies retain the deep structures of Western thought exemplified by various notions of progress in which the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous peoples remain naturalized. Arguing that no revolution is possible unless it centers decolonization on stolen lands and understands violence against Indigenous peoples as dispossession and not merely oppression, Grande argues that analysis of revolutionary theorists fail to consider how "the notion of 'democratization' remains rooted in Western concepts of property; the radical constructs of identity remain tied to Western notions of citizenship; the analyses of Marxist-feminists retain Western notions of subjectivity and gender; and revolutionary conceptions of the 'ecological crisis' presume the 'finished project' of colonization" (p.165-6). Grande demands that an engagement with Indigenous theory's vernaculars challenge these Western paradigms of theory. The trope of the "dead Indian" which inflects all Western theories of liberation must be seen for what it is: as an attempt to liberate a world order founded on colonial violence of 1492 in which there is no Indigenous life, land, and sovereignty. 42 Critical Indigenous theory poses a challenge to the very “grammar of empire” (Grande, p.167).

The Object of Critical Indigenous Studies

If the figure of the “Indian” inflects all Western epistemologies of knowledge production, it is appropriate to assert that Indigenous critical theory works without laying claims to a particular territory of analysis but always, its goal is to un-do coloniality, both materially and discursively. As the Métis scholar Chris Andersen (2009) notes, what is important to consider in critical Indigenous theory is not an essentialist understanding of the Indigenous, but rather the "density of contemporary Indigeneity' (p.94) which works through terms such as nation, race, ethnicity and post-modernism and the social relations produced

42 I discuss this point about 1492 epistemology in more detail when I write about Black feminist theories later in this chapter.

93 through them. Andersen is critiquing Duan Champagne, an Indigenous Studies scholar, for his assertion that Indigenous Studies and its theories are fundamentally different and incommensurable with epistemological premises of Western disciplines and separates the Indigenous from colonial and other modes of oppression. Andersen, in his response to Champagne, asserts that, "A sophisticated Indigenous studies discipline must focus on Indigenous communities as a critique of colonial society" (p.94, emphasis in original). This of course is not to argue that Indigenous peoples' status here as sovereign people is not unique and that they are not simply another group of people targeted for racial violence. As Daniel Wildcat (2001), a Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma, writes in his preface to Power and Place:

In short, we [Indigenous people] do not fit comfortably or conveniently within Western civilization. This is not a regret. It is an affirmation-a living testimony to the resilience of American Indian cultures. If there is another group of people in America who have faced all the forces this society and its government could bring to bear in destroying their identity and fundamentally reshaping them in the image of the dominant society, I would like to meet them. (p.vii)

As Andersen argues, the density of Indigenous life is constituted through their lived subject positions within modernity. Rather than focusing on the cultural, it is this negotiation for life and future that is the focus of Indigenous critical theory. Byrd (2009) also notes that Indigenous critical theory is not necessarily limited to Indigenous peoples only, or about correcting some stereotype of them. Instead, it is the site of critical analysis for examining the " intersections (or better, competing hegemonies) among indigeneity, sexuality, colonialism, gender, race, and class" (p.15). Indigenous critical theory is a lens through which Indigeneity is operationalized as the entry point into analyses of systems of domination and subordination which unsettles the very framing of critiques of these systems. For Indigenous scholars and scholars of Indigeneity, the "object" of critical Indigenous Studies is Indigenous life and futurity. It harbors a critique of colonialism, an investigation into the processes of dispossession that mobilize living, breathing, resisting Indigenous peoples, both materially and in discourse, as Indians. And the subject(s) of Indigenous theory are Indigenous peoples as makers of their own lives and histories. As a non-Indigenous student approaching critical Indigenous theory, it also provides a map for harboring ethical,

94 intellectual and institutional relationship(s) between Indigenous peoples, white settlers, Black people and racialized migrants. In her chapter titled, "There is a river in me," Athabascan scholar, Dian Million (2014) uses the term "valence" to refer to the complexity of relations that are remembered, created and invested in Indigenism. Million defines Indigenism as a theory narrating the lives and strategies of peoples who are colonized. For her, Indigenism is focused on creating and catering to relations between different Indigenous peoples and with other colonized people(s) and is proactive and not simply reactive to violence or reduced to any settler nation-state's boundaries. Million states: Beyond Indigenism's symbolic positioning of our new global relations with other peoples for which land is a spiritual experience, valence denotes the vested position that Indigenism in its plural, Indigenous societies, takes against a world capitalism that seeks to commodify and own life itself. Regardless of any conflicts within any particular Indigenous political practice, Indigenism is a position that is active visioning of a present belief, valenced and mobilized as life exceeding life, not to be contained by or within capitalism's voracious appetites. It is an Indigenous politic that imagines human in relation with life's potential rather than as masters. (pp.38-39, emphasis in original)

To imagine “human in relation with life's potential rather than as masters” is indeed a life- changing lesson. It is envisioning life whose worth and grievability are not measured by capitalist modes of productivity; it is also a life which can offer different futurities in which human and non-human relations are held as important and vital for each other’s survival. Imagining human in relation with life’s potential offers pluralities of futurities. As an anti-capitalist theory that holds non-secular understandings of land situated in an understanding of Indigenous dispossession and genocide, and arguing for a different mode of living, one not confined by Empire-like-nation-state and its capitalist, racist and gendered variables of lives and deaths, Indigenous critical theory's investment is in cultivating a different mode of life, and the possibility of pluralities of futures that challenge the harmful world order we currently inhabit. It challenges out knowing the world (and oneself) and our relationship with other beings and life itself. It asks for centering Indigenous philosophies of life for all. As Vine Deloria Jr. (2001), the notable Lakota Dakota historian and theorist notes, "Indian Metaphysics" is the realization that the world, and all its possible experiences, constituted a social reality, a fabric of life in which everything had the possibility of intimate

knowing relationships because, ultimately, everything was related. This world was a unified world, a far cry from the disjointed sterile and emotionless world painted by Western science. Even though we can translate the realities of the Indian social world into concepts familiar to us from the Western scientific context, such as space, time, and energy, we must surrender most of the meaning in the Indian world when we do so. (p.2)

I am not essentializing Deloria's Lakota/Dakota worldview as standing in for that of all nations indigenous to Americas. I am not trying to find the core of indigeneity, or indigenous philosophies. However, I think is it clear that critical Indigenous theory, as an ethic, a practice, poses a challenge to the human-centered Western worldview.43 Indigenous theories/worldviews hold onto relations between humans, animals and all other "objects" which, as the Dakota scholar Kim TallBear (2011) notes, includes "our nonhuman others [which] may not be understood in even critical western frameworks as living" (n.p). Métis scholar Zoe Todd (who also identifies as a "fish philosopher") presents the notion of fish- human relations as an "active site of engagement" in northern Canada. Todd (2014) discusses the notion of "fish pluralities" to argue that these "relationships [between humans and fish] represent a whole host of social, cultural, and legal-governance principles that underpin life" in northern Indigenous community of Paultuuq (p.218). She further notes: The slipperiness of fish-as-beings—their ability to exist as simultaneously different entities—and the complex and diverse ways that humans engage with fish in northern Canada challenge existing articulations of human-environmental relationships that have emerged from human attempts to regulate and manage charismatic megafauna (Freeman and Kreuter 1994: 1) like polar bears caribou, muskox, wolves, and grizzlies. (p.218-19)

Understanding fish as kin of human beings allows for a conceptualization of a world order than stands as a critique of the capitalist, narcissistic evaluation of human as the only being that matters world order of the West, and western critical theories. It gently guides us towards the ethics of sharing, of learning about our interdependency with lives of other non- human beings, and of taking only what we need and letting the rest be for others with and after us. Such a reading immediately challenges settler and people of color’s orientation to land as property, as something to be owned.

43Sylvia Wynter makes a difference between human and Man. It is the latter which dominates western worldview (politics, science, philosophy). See my discussion on Wynter's work below.

Working Definitions of Indigeneity I want to briefly discuss the definition of Indigeneity within the context of North America which I hold onto in this dissertation. My aim is not to look for some pure or authentic ideas of Indigeneity. That is a colonial obsession. Rather, I look at some conceptions of Indigeneity to hold onto an understanding of the identity as put forward by Indigenous scholars. I have already discussed the notion of “Indigeneism” by Dian Million above. I just want to reflect on some more definitions of indigeneity. Drawing upon several scholars in Indigenous Studies, Cook-Lynn (2012) provides a definition of Indigeneity (or indigenousness) which is important in beginning to understand Indigenous critical theory. She explains Indigeneity as a condition of indigenousness to be used as a category of analysis: an intellectual and cultural recognition of the indigenes as a class rather than margin, as expanding rather than vanishing or diminishing, as a presence that is innate, not introduced, occurring and living naturally in a given geography; as a presence of intrinsic geographically based origins in the North American continent; promoted and expressed in scholarship to be used as a category of analysis of findings and methods of proof in history and culture at modernity’s end. (p.3)

Cook-Lynn is making several important assertions in her definition. One is recognizing the importance of land and apriority of Indigenous peoples in white settler colonies. This is an important claim to keep in mind when reading any critical theory with the intention of keeping Indigeneity and genocide foregrounded and not to fall into the trap of setting up a web of competitive claims for liberatory theories amongst Indigeneity, racism, colonialism, homophobia or other systems of oppression. This is important also because genocide and dispossession of Indigenous peoples were the first violence(s) that “founded” the settler colony. This understandings of Indigeneity or indigenousness are also mobilized as categories of criticism, as political categories based in Indigenous struggles for survival and resistance. At the very heart of Indigenous critical theory is 1) An understanding that white settler colonial violence continues and the genocide of Indigenous people and encroachment upon their lands are ongoing; and 2) Indigenous people and the sovereignty of their nations must be central to all theorizations of Empire regardless of our entry point into such analyses.

Finally, Lisa Brooks notes that the word for "native" in Abenaki, the language of her peoples, is alnôba or its longer version, alnôbawôgan, meaning "human nature" or "birth": "Literally, it can be translated as the activity of 'being (or becoming) human.' Thus, in Abenaki philosophy, the very nature of being human is rooted, not in consciousness of our morality, but our natality, and the active state of transformation that birth implies." (p.237). Human here is neither a noun nor an adjective, but a verb, a doing, and a becoming. As Brooks continues, "Therefore, 'Native' in the Abenaki language is not a term that is used to separate and distinguish us from other 'races' but is rooted in the recognition of relationship to other humans with whom we share common experience and common bonds. Identity is thus always relational, and grounded in a particular place and its history" (p.238). This conception of Indigeneity as being about the ongoing process of "becoming human" is different from bourgeois Western conceptions of human in which non-white, poor, not- Judeo-Christian, not-Western people could never be seen as human. I will discuss this notion of human more in my next section on Black Studies, particularly through the works of Jamaican scholar, Sylvia Wynter. But here, for now, I want to emphasize the fact that, as Brooks outlines, the process of becoming human is rooted in place and its history for Indigenous peoples. Place is significant in Indigenous ontologies of human, of life, of nation, and in any understanding of decolonization. As Goenpul scholar, Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) notes in the context of Australia: "Our ontological relationship to land is a condition of our embodied subjectivity. The Indigenous body signifies our title to land, and out death reintegrates our body with that of our mother, the earth" (p.17). The doctrine of terra nullius which wrote off lands of Indigenous peoples as empty and available for colonizers simultaneously made Indigenous peoples into homo nullius inhabitants of these lands. The white settler colonial logic of “no people on empty lands”. Therefore, Indigeneity or becoming human, for Brooks and other Indigenous scholars is rooted in land, in place and its histories. Critical Indigenous theory holds place as an important actor in the narratives they trace.

Different Orientation to Land Late Mohawk elder, lawyer, scholar and teacher, Patricia Monture (1999) writes

I want to tie the notion of human rights to the broader Aboriginal notion of land rights. As already discusses, the relationship that First Nations have to land is much broader than rights associated with the ownership of land. The relationship to land is spiritual and sacred. The relationship to land reaches beyond and behind individual ownership, recognizing both past generations (the bones of my ancestors in the land) and future generations (which we refer to as “the faces in the sand”). Earth is Mother. Land is seen as part of the ‘human’ family. It is part of all that is natural. Human rights in an Aboriginal frame of reference seem to me to include the relationship with the land. What I think human rights mean in this context is the right to be self-governing or self-determining or sovereign. This right is essentially the right to be responsible. This is the most fundamental of all human rights (or responsibilities). (p.60)

Theorizing land as a human relative, as living, as mother is not compatible with capitalist notions of land as something to be dominated, to be owned as property. Indigenous peoples have narrated land as being of spiritual value and rather than ownership, an ethos of taking care, of responsibility, defines one's orientation to land. As Simpson (2014) notes, within a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe epistemology of Mississauga Ojibwe peoples, land is "both context and process" where one learns "both from the land and with the land" (p.7, emphasis in original). She writes: Indigenous knowledge comes from the land through the relationships Indigenous Peoples develop and foster with the essential forces of nature. These relationships are encoded in the structure of Indigenous languages and in Indigenous political and spiritual systems. They are practiced in traditional forms of governance, and they are lived in the hearts and minds of Indigenous Peoples. (p. 378).

Ku’ualoha Ho’omanawanui (2008), a Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous to Hawai'i) scholar studies the differences between representations of aina (land) in contemporary literature of Hawai’i with a focus on distinction between land representations in the Kanaka Maoli literature and Asian and other settler literature in her essay. On the different understanding of land in the two literatures, she asserts that the Kanaka Maoli and settlers are operating from different cultural paradigms and different language bases: This [difference] is particularly obvious in their [settlers] continued nostalgia for plantation ‘roots’ that go back less than two hundred years, while ignoring Kanaka Maoli root that go back centuries. These differences are also apparent in settlers’ continued references to Hawai’i as a ‘landscape,’ ‘geography,’ and ‘environment,’ English words that connote a Western-based understanding of what land is, terms that overshadow and negate Native understandings of land as aina, which for Kanaka Maoli is familial. (p.117-118)

Ho’omanawanui is particularly critical of the term “landscape” to refer to land for it “implies a pristine, panoramic view of the land devoid of human beings; by being ‘land that feeds” (p.128) For both whites and Asian settlers, Hawai’i is but a commodified resource, a picturesque setting for people-centered stories, as is apparent from their treatment of land in literature, culture and politics. For the Kanaka Maoli, the land is “oahana” or family (p.122). What Leanne Simpson uses the work aki and Ku’ualoha Ho’omanawanui calls aina, is always going to be different from settler-colonial understandings of land as commodity, as something to be stolen, and as something for which the genocide of Indigenous peoples of these lands has been legally sanctioned and continues unabated. In a recent talk on ongoing white settler encroachment on land, Melanie Yazzie (2016), a Navajo scholar said that at the heart of every Indigenous resurgence, at the heart of their political struggles is one basic demand: "We want the fuckin' land back!". As colloquial as it may sound for referring to in academic writing, I believe that it cannot get any simpler. The quest if fundamentally for the land because Indigenous ways of living, and Indigenous epistemologies for viewing and engaging with the world cannot happen while the white settler colonial state is still standing. Land is an integral part of Indigenous peoples' lives and identities. Land is also what white conquerors came for, and continue stealing. Therefore, land is what must be repatriated to Indigenous peoples. This is a demand of all Indigenous peoples everywhere where the colonizers and settlers have not as yet left. However, repatriation on Indigenous terms is not simply about giving the land back without accounting for over 500 years of colonial violence. As Seneca scholar, Mishuana Goeman argues, it is not “not just about regaining that which was lost and returning to an original and pure point in history, but understanding the processes that have defined our current spatialities in order to sustain vibrant Native futures” (p.3). Goeman is making a crucial argument here. Neither land nor Indigenous peoples’ relationship to it is static and the same as it was before colonialism. Decolonizing land is a complex process. Goeman asks that settler scholars remember how these relationships have been mediated through racial, colonial and capitalist power relations: On one hand, Native relationships to land are presumed and oversimplified as natural and even worse, romanticized. In this, the politics of maintaining and protecting tribal lands drops out of the conversation. Notions of the warrior on the plains, the medicine man communing with nature in solitude, or Iron Eyes

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Cody with one tear in his eye as he surveys the destructive world that capitalism produces, appeals to the realm of the emotional, rather than reflecting on the intellectual and critical work that Native people undertake to pass on these sets of relationships for generations and generations. (p.28)

Colonial mindset just cannot see land like Indigenous peoples do and romanticing the “Indian” is a centuries old pedagogy of engaging with Indigenous peoples. Settler tactics of burning sage, trips to the sweatlodge and attending powwows is how they/we understand ourselves to be in solidarity with Indigenous peoples. However, these Indigenous theorists are telling us to be engaged ethically and be prepared to let go of the settler (state) power. Only then can settlers and non-Black people of colour even begin to critically understand the ethic and practice of decolonization.

Decolonization In their brilliant and urgently needed article, "Decolonization is not a metaphor," Tuck and Yang (2012) caution non-Indigenous people to be careful and attentive to how we use the term decolonization. They write: When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future. Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation. When we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn't have a synonym. (p.3)

Decolonization is one of the most commonly thrown around word, particularly in activist work and scholarship: decolonizing women, decolonizing the self, decolonizing the spirit, decolonizing the body, decolonizing schools, decolonizing curriculum, decolonizing decolonization and the list goes on and on. Such mobilizing of decolonization, the authors argue, are innocence-making claims and geared towards settler rather than Indigenous futurity (3). Tuck and Yang make a very important claim that decolonization must begin with repatriation of land, and not just symbolically (p.7). Decolonization is not about inclusion of Indigenous peoples into white settler colony’s transition into a multicultural liberal white

101 settler nation-state. Rather, it is about naming and confronting colonial violence, and unsettling white settlers through naming their work in colonialism and repatriation of land according to Indigenous nations’ guidance. The authors caution us settler and racialized scholars that there is no other way allowed for doing decolonization in critical Indigenous theory.

Resistance Against Inclusion Critical Indigenous theory's challenge to this myth of the timeless, static, and dead Indian which undergirds historical, political, cultural and other narratives of Empire and this linearity of time in which Indigenous peoples can be afforded no future is important to consider. Questioning the ways in which coloniality informs critical theory challenges the epistemological, ontological and de-ontological basis of knowledge production: What do we know, how do we know what we know and what relations of violence uphold the production of knowledge, and also of our knowing? How do we orient ourselves to a reading of/for future when doing critical theory?) In her groundbreaking book examining the literary, cultural and political genealogy on how "Indianness," and the making of colonized into Indians has functioned as a transit that enables the US to narrate itself as a legitimate Empire over and over again, Byrd's argues that "Indianness" and "Indigenous savagery" remain as "a prior prior theorizations of origin, history, freedom, constraint, and difference" (emphasis added). She further writes: These traces of "Indiannness" are vitally important to understanding how power and domination have been articulated and practiced by empire, and yet because they are traces they have often remained deactivated as a point of critical inquiry as theory has transitioned across disciplines and schools. Indianness can be felt and intuited as a presence, and yet apprehending it as a process is difficult, if not impossible, precisely because Indianness has served as the field through which structures have always already been produced. Within the matrix of critical theory, Indianness moves not through absence but through reiteration, through meme, as theories circulate and fracture, quote and build. The prior ontological concerns that interpellate Indianness and savagery as ethnographic evidence and example, lamentable and tragic loss, are deferred through repetitions. (p.xvii- xviii)

So the problematic is not that the Indigenous is excluded from critical theory. Critical Indigenous theory is not offering a method for including or recognizing the Indigenous.

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Rather, it offer methodology for reading how the Indigenous as “Indian,” as a mere colonial caricature produced at the nexus of white settler colonial violence and deferring of Indigenous futures holds the truth claims of certain theories together. It intervenes in mainstream theories to analyze how the “Indian” is constantly deferred to a past so that we can discuss justice and life for our non-Indigenous, non-Black selves through critically theorizing our world order? Critical Indigenous theory is also a refusal to become co-opted, and even compatible with Western epistemes and ontologies of knowledge production. It is not an absence, but an over-presence of the "Indian" and the work its continual production is doing that demands our attention as the "Indian" continues to be unsubjected in making claims for and about various subjects of critical theory. The "Indian" as the object, also exists as untimely whose deferring from the domain of our concerns, as Byrd notes, requires that it remains as such: as not belonging to any time and hence any modernity over which it can lay a claim.

Conclusion Critical Indigenous theory is doing several things: 1) It is challenging Western episteme of knowledge production by asking us to reconsider how we frame the demands for liberation for our (non-Indigenous, non-Black) selves; 2) It also points to the incomplete and failed project of white settler colonialism; and 3) It is oriented towards a world order that is not predicated on keeping the “Indian” dying at all times. As Audra Simpson (2011) notes in her article, "Settlement's Secret”: "The condition of Indigeneity in North America is to have survived this acquisitive and genocidal process and this to have called up the failure of the project [of settlement] itself" (p.205). If settlement were complete, there would not have been a need to contunally represent Indigenous peoples as always dying (O’Brien, 2011). Settler subjectivities need this dying Indian myth and the settler colonial apparatus (of law, policies, prisons, schools, history, culture) to keep the work of Indigenous death and dispossession ongoing. But no matter how resilient the settler state is in "writing Indians out of existence," (O'Brien) and showcasing them as vestigial remnants of a people long gone, Indigenous peoples' resilience and fight to survive keep challenging these settler stories. There is a constant refusal to not only die, but also to stop fighting for a different and sovereign future. In Mohawk Interruptus, Simpson (2014) writing about politics of nationhood of Mohawks

103 theorizes this notion of refusal to "stop being themselves" (p.2). She notes, "Refusal comes with the requirement of having one's political sovereignty acknowledged and upheld, and raises the question of legitimacy for those who are usually in the position of recognizing: What is their authority to do so? Where does it come from? Who are they to do so?" (p.11, emphasis in original). This refusal is also about revealing the insides of Indigenous lives, refusing to show settlers what we do not need to know. It is a denial to become an object. My approach to critical Indigenous theory in academia will always be incomplete. Part of it lies in the fact that unlearning the colonial education I have received is difficult and ongoing work. The slippages will show up everywhere in this project. Also, I mostly mobilize tenets of critical Indigenous theory to critique of Western epistemes of knowledge production. In a sense then, there is always injustice done (by me, in my work) to the span of possibilities which critical Indigenous theory offers on its own, outside the limits of what I am able to read and draw upon, and also because I read and write only in English. I am unable to read for the polyphony of overlapping voices and stories, all grounded in particular land, histories and struggles. Nor is it my place to do so. But, what has often happened is that my approach to critical Indigenous theory is reductive because I am at the very beginning stages of this engagement. I have tried to hold onto the complexities, but I know I haven’t always been able to do so. How can my approach to Indigeneity not be mediated by the context of ongoing colonialism and dispossession of Indigenous peoples? That violence probably makes an appearance through all that I say, that which I don't say and that which I don't even know should be said/not said; through all that which remains illegible to me. As Kwakwaka’wakw scholar Sarah Hunt (2015/2016) notes, knowledge productions (of Indigeneity) within dominant institutions including that of academia always involves "epistemic violence": "the work of discourse in creating and sustaining boundaries around what is considered real and, by extension, what is unable to be seen as real (or to be seen at all): ‘It is not simply, then, that there is a “discourse” of dehumanization that produces these effects, but rather that there is a limit to discourse that establishes the limits of human intelligibility'" (p.4). In a settler colonial context where Indigenous peoples have to constantly give proof of their life and resilience, treating Indigenous knowledges as legitimate knowledge that says no to simple recognition and to being docile and compatible disrupts Euro-American categories of making sense of human and of world order is always

104 challenging work. But in this, I read another instance of critical Indigenous theory's refusal. It's refusal to make itself legible to me, its refusal to be devoured by settler and racialzied scholars, its refusal to completely reveal itself to those who will always have a difficult time understanding the process of decolonization on its own terms; its refusal to speak that which I cannot know and should not know given my place in a white settler colony, and my contract (of citizenship) with the settler state. Writing about different productions and appearances of Indigeneity within the context of a mainstream geography conference and a potlatch, Hunt writes: One starting place might be accepting the partiality of knowledge. Its relational, alive, emergent nature means that as we come to know something, as we attempt to fix its meaning, we are always at risk of just missing something. If we accept the alive and ongoing nature of colonial relations, and the lived aspects of Indigeneity as critical to Indigenous ontologies, any attempts to fix Indigenous knowledge can only be partial. Reconfiguring ourselves as academics, geographers, or experts, could facilitate the creation of other kinds of hyphenations: expert/learner, geographer/settler, or academic/witness, for example. (p.5)

Critically engaging with Indigenous knowledges while never losing focus of colonial (and racial) violence in North America is a lifelong responsibility of mine. In that, I refuse expertise, embrace failure, and accept that what will be revealed to me, speak to me and that which I will be able to speak will always be partial. I have to pay attention to that which is refused to me. As Tuck and McKenzie (2015) note, "This is difficult terrain in working both with Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples: to acknowledge and include Indigenous knowledge and perspectives but in non-determined ways that do not stereotype Indigenous knowledge or Identities" (p.58). I end here with this significant advice on the ethics of approaching and drawing upon critical Indigenous theory.

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Drawing Upon Black Feminist Theories

“If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression" --Combahee River Collective Statement

In her essay called "How we Mistook the Map for the Territory," Jamaican novelist, essayist and scholar, Sylvia Wynter (2006) notes that while sociopolitical movements of 1950s and 1960s, especially those attached to various decolonization and other liberation movements, have had a major impact on knowledge production, this fact has seldom been recognized. This, she argues drawing upon Wlad Godzich, is for two reasons: The first is due to the “imperviousness of our present disciplines, to phenomena that fall outside their predefined scope”; the second, to “our reluctance to see a relationship so global in reach – between the epistemology of knowledge and the liberation of people – a relationship that we are not properly able to theorize.” (p.111-2, emphasis in original). The radical goals of these movements on ground became sanitized into the rubric of liberation-for-all paradigms in academia. In case of Black Studies, where sheer violence converted stolen African people into Blacks, Black liberation struggles of 1960s became co-opted into academia as African- American studies. What is the epistemology of critical Black Studies? What does it mean to engage with Black feminist scholarship to think about the anti-Blackness steeped in our non- Indigenous, non-Black peoples’ practices? In our scholarship? Engaging with scholarship of Black scholars who theorize the contemporary moment and center Black fungibility but also Black lives, I want to examine what is it that we must pay attention to in thinking about the place of South Asians and other racialized non-Black people in Canada and the US. Based on the works of Black scholars I study and draw upon, I begin with the firm belief that Black bodies have been constructed as the very antithesis to humanity in 1492 epistemology of knowledge production. Unless 1492 world order is confronted, challenged and broken to form new ways of living, there will be no liberation for any of us, whether Indigenous, Black, or other racialized people. In next few pages, I want to critically engage with some of the central tenets of Black

106 theories so that I can hold myself accountable to the anti-blackness that structures our knowledge production; so that I can critically examine how antiblackness as ontology underlines the epistemology of critical theory, and in order to hold onto appearances of Blackness in my archives. To begin, such an exercise is much indebted to the work of Black novelist, poet and scholar, Toni Morrison. In her book, Playing in the Dark, Morrison (1992) investigates the ways in which Black characters make an appearance in narrative strategies and idioms of American literary canon of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and others. She discusses how “American Africanist presence” (6) gives structure to works of these great white literary figures. Far from being mere ancillary characters, these Black characters, according to Morrison, function as metaphoric representations of a much larger set of societal issues. The presence of an enslaved people served as the playing field for the imagination in the construction of freedom and autonomy in the new society, the New World. Morrison notes: “The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this “ (17, emphasis in original). It requires hard work to not see the work which Black people are made to do in not only literature, but also in critical theories of liberation and social justice. And yet, the engagement with Blackness and Black death, when carried out by white and other racialized scholars, can be fetishizing of Blackness and of Black death (Weheliye, 2014). To not make Blackness into a metaphor that is detached from lives and deaths of Black people and from the context of slavery, and other ongoing anti-Blackness, and towards what Katherine McKittrick (2013) calls, "plantation futures," is difficult work. Critically and ethically engaging with Blackness is difficult work because we are all born into a world where Blackness is the necessary antithesis to humanity. We are born in a world where Blackness is dehumanized and where we (Black and non-Black people) are taught to keep distancing ourselves from the white-generated stereotypes of Black people that subjects all Black people to violence by the state and its agents. In the next section, I critically engage with Sylvia Wynter's differentiation between Man and human as I believe that this distinction is foundational to critical Black Studies scholars I draw upon. I will end with discussing the ethics of engaging with Black Studies.

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Refusing The Human of 1492 Epistemology In her 1994 letter entitled, “No Humans Involved,” Sylvia Wynter analyzes the category of N.H.I or "No Humans Involved" used by the Los Angeles Police Department to refer to its encounters with Black men. Whenever there are Black men, cops record the incident as encounter with nothing. Black men, couched within the matrix of criminality, could not be seen as human. Wynter writes this letter in the wake of the acquittal of the police officers who violently beat up a Black cab driver, Rodney King. Wynter asks: How did they come to conceive of what it means to be both human and North American in the kinds of terms (i.e. to be White, of EuroAmerican culture and descent, middle-class, college-educated and suburban) within whose logic, the jobless and usually school drop-out/push-out category of young Black males can be perceived, and therefore behaved towards, only as the Lack of the human, the Conceptual Other to being North American? (p.43, emphasis in original)

She points out that this proposal that the Black man is less than human, less human that any other race is the “founding premise, on which our present order of knowledge or episteme [Foucault, 1973] and its rigorously elaborated disciplinary paradigms, are based” (p.47, emphasis in original). In this conceptual order of human versus Black people, even if the latter are college educated, and with jobs and in a suit, they are always at the threat of violence. So I am being careful in not misreading Wynter’s argument as claiming that Black people in suits are not shot down by the cops and ordinary settler/Master citizens or that they can ever be counted as human in the current world order. Wynter’s scholarship is invested in examining the categories, specifically that of the conception of human, through which our world, our present and our histories make sense to us. Her argument that we mistake our “present local culture’s representation of-the-human- as-a-natural organism as if it were the human-in-itself mistakes the representation for the reality, the map for the territory” (49, emphasis in original) is integral to understanding the stories we tell ourselves about our rights and the worth of our lives, and the claims we frame as our basic human rights. Wynter ends her letter with words whose depth I struggle to understand. But I quote these words because they challenge my paradigm and encourage me to interrogate my own truth-claims about the world. She writes:

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The starving fellah, (or the jobless inner city N.H.I., the global New Poor or les damnés), Fanon pointed out, does not have to inquire into the truth. He is, they are, the Truth. It is we who institute this "Truth". We must now undo their narratively condemned status. (p.70, emphasis in original)

We must undo their narratively condemned status by critically re-examining the "death dealing episteme" (Sharpe, 2016) which mobilizes the Man versus the Black binary as the only possible organization of our world . Those who must keep dying for us to hold onto our Truth, our humanity, and continually reproduce them as the other of human, of Man, Black people must continue to die as welfare mothers, drug mules, criminals, jobless; as disposable lives, and as those who remain an excess to humanity. In Black Skin, White Masks, the prophet of anti-colonial resistance, Martinique-born Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, philosopher and critical race theorist, Frantz Fanon relates the infamous and often cited incident where he is "called upon" into existence by a little white girl in her utterance to her mother, "Look! A Negro". In a chapter titled "The Lived Experience of The Black Man, " Fanon writes, “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects” (p.82). He argues that the Black man cannot be afforded life and must dwell in the world as an inanimate being, as a mere object. As Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland (2003) ask in their introduction to a journal issue on engagement with Fanon in Black studies, “What does it mean to be that object, “in the midst of other objects” that thing against which all other subjects take their bearing? What is it to live in the domain of non-existence, to inhabit an impossible time between life and death, when one simply cannot be sure whether one is here or there, alive or dead” (p.53). To be an object in the way, Fanon speaks of, is to be denied any humanity, any subjecthood, life, and any opportunity for resistance. As Fanon says a bit later in the same chapter, “Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema; A Black man is woven out of a “thousand details, anecdotes, stories” spun by the white man. His corproreality is brought into existence through anti-Blackness where his flesh must always signify the Other of human itself. The "conceptual Other," as Wynter said above. As Fanon notes, “It will be seen that the black man’s alienation is not an individual question. Beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny” (p.4). This is a foundational claim made by

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Fanon for understanding the terms along which humanity is recorded. Human, for Fanon, is not simply about evolution or the developmental history of human beings. 'He' is also about social factors so that, as Sylvia Wynter (2003) notes, "Once you say, “besides ontogeny, there’s sociogeny,” then there cannot be only one mode of sociogeny; there cannot be only one mode of being human; there are a multiplicity of modes" (p.20). They theorize blackness, and consequently what stands as its antagonism –humanness, as a cultural category and not simply as a biological one. What Fanon’s statement of human as defined by phylogeny, ontogeny and sociologeny does is allow us to see how we, as biological beings, can only experience ourselves as human, through the “mediation of culture-specific masks” (Wynter, 2000, p.186). We understand our experiences through the narratives that give us our body. This does not mean that there is no materiality to our bodies. Rather, we understand that materiality through narratives of race, gender, sexuality and other social formations. Wynter differentiates the human from Man1 and Man 2. These definitions are important to hold onto in order to understand how the notion of human which gives form to our current order of knowledge production is invested in a very narrow understanding of life worth living and being allowed to live. For Wynter the overrepresentation of Man, as a bourgeois Western conception of human, is tied to her conceptualization of Man1 and Man2. The figure of Man1 came about during Renaissance and represented a break from the “theocenteric, ‘sinful by nature’ conception/’descriptive statement’ of the human, on whose basis the hegemony of the Church/clergy over the lay world of Latin-Christian Europe had been supernaturally legitimated” (p.263). This was the first secular, or what Wynter calls, “degodded” mode of being human in the history of species. The invention of this figure of Man1, Wynter writes, was “one of the major empirical effects of which would be ‘the rise of Europe’ and its construction of the ‘world civilizations’ on the one hand, and, on the other, African enslavement, Latin American conquest, and Asian subjugation” (p.263). The emergence of physical sciences attached to invention of Man1 and of biological sciences happening co-terminously with the 19th century invention of Man2 could become a possibility only with the invention of an already inhabited by millions of people world as "New". It was this new "descriptive statement" of what it meant to be human with which the colonizing West began to “replace the earlier mortal/immortal, natural/supernatural,

110 human/the ancestors, the gods/God distinction as the one on whose basis all human groups had millennially ‘grounded’ their descriptive/prescriptive statements of what it is to be human, and to reground its secularizing own on a newly projected human/subhuman distinction instead” (2003, p.264). It was Indigenous peoples of the New World and those stolen and enslaved from the coast of Africa, instead of non-Christians in general (which included Muslims whom Europe fought during Crusades and later in the Iberian Peninsula) who were made to “reoccupy the matrix slot of Otherness –to be made into the physical referent of the idea f the irrational/subrational Human Other” and this Other could never occupy the category of Man1 and later of Man2. To be a not-Man in this order of knowledge production means to not be quite human, so that the category of N.H.I. is a legitimate category for classifying these (Black, Indigenous and also poor racialized) people as people with no right to life. It was this Otherness and underside of the category of Man that was foundational to modernity and knowledge production. With interrogation of the categories of human, Man1 and Man2, comes the difficult responsibility of thinking the world anew, of thinking of new categories for conceptualizing our world. In her interview with David Scott, Wynter asks: "How can we think outside the terms in which we are? Think about the processes by which we institute ourselves as what we are, make these processes transparent to ourselves?" (2000, 206-7, emphasis in original). The work of thinking the world anew begins with refusing these Western categories. Black theories do not the liberal multicultural argument of "we are citizens too," or "we bleed just like you". As the powerful Black thinker Fred Moten notes, "I also know that what it is that is supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It can’t be repaired. The only thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something new.” Just like critical Indigenous theory refuses the neoliberal politics of acknowledgement and recognition (of partial humanity that comes with no land) extended by the white settler state to Indigenous peoples, Black theories I read in this Dissertation too refuse inclusion in the category of Man and instead demands for the world, as we know it, to end. Explicating Harney and Moten's term, "the undercommons," Jack Halberstam (2013) writes: "The undercommons is a space and time which is always here. Our goal – and the “we” is always the right mode of address here – is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed" (p.9, emphasis

111 added). In fact, as Fanon notes in BSWM, humanity can never be conferred on Black people because that would defeat the whole purpose of claiming humanity (by non-Black people) as a right to live and thrive. To ask us (non-Indigenous, non-Black people) to understand or recognize the violence which encloses Black life (and death) is futile if the goal is to build a just world. As Hartman writes in Scenes of Subjection, recognition of "slave humanity" (p.5) does not make the violence of slavery any less: "It was often the case that benevolent correctives and declarations of slave humanity intensified the brutal exercise of power upon the captive body rather than ameliorating the chattel condition" (p.5). These liberal modes of inclusion into the category of human are band-aid approaches to addressing the anti- Blackness which founded our current world order.

Ethics of Approaching Black Feminist Theories

How should a non-Black racialized person approach Black theories? This is a question which has consistently come up for me in thinking throughout my project. Black scholars have repeatedly written about the simultaneous desire for, and fear of Black people in quest for justice for our (non-Black, non-Indigenous) bodies, our liberation, and for our futures. In both cases, Black people continue to inhabit the "position of the unthought". In an interview conducted by Black Studies scholar, Frank Wilderson, Black feminist scholar of African-American literature and history, Saidiya Hartman states: “On one hand, the slave is the foundation of the national order, and, on the other, the slave occupies the position of the unthought. So what does it mean to try to bring that position into view without making it into a locus of positive value, or without trying to fill the void?” (p.184-5,emphasis added). This is a profound question and a challenge posed to us, white and racialized scholars trying to engage with Black Studies. Hartman notes that often the only way non-Black people consider the violence of slavery and anti-Blackness is by slipping into the very shoes of the slave, by placing our (non-Black) bodies at the center of that violence, so that these counter- narratives, these projects become the site of re-elaboration of that violence and a dead end for the Black figures in our narratives (Hartman, 2003). There is a certain pleasure which we (non-Black people) then begin to take in thinking about the violence of slavery. When white and other non-Indigenous, non-Black people write poetry and fictional (or not) prose about

112 slavery, often that pleasure is very visible. That excitement, raised voices, the exclamation points are all very clear. Hence, there is my struggle to engage with Black theories in ways that do not center my body; in ways that do not make me feel very comfortable in my place. In another article titled, “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman (2007) asks a question that has profoundly shaped my orientation to Black Studies. She asks:

What are the kinds of stories to be told by those and about those who live in such an intimate relationship with death? Romances? Tragedies? Shrieks that find their way into speech and song? What are the protocols and limits that shape the narratives written as counter-history, an aspiration that isn't a prophylactic against the risks posed by reiterating violence speech and depicting against rituals of torture? How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence? (p.4).

Bringing the figure of the enslaved body into our thought, critically paying attention to the work which anti/Blackness does in not only racist discourses but also our anti-racist, anticolonial narratives for social justice in a way that does not replicate the “grammar of violence” is difficult work. Difficult because, as I have been saying, the very episteme of Western knowledge is steeped in dehumanizing Black people, in the violence of slavery, in plantation economies, and in ongoing death of Black people. Hartman's (2007) book, Lose Your Mother has also been central in helping think about my pedagogy of engaging with Black scholarship. Her book is an autobiographical search for a place in both, Ghana and America. As a Black woman scholar of slavery, conducting research on slavery, Hartman goes to Ghana because she was "desperate to reclaim the dead, to reckon with the lives undone and obliterated in the making of human commodities" (p.6). This book presents all the difficulties Hartman comes up against in trying to find her kin, a sense of belonging, in trying to find her people and her place in Ghana (but eventually in the world). She refers to herself as a stranger there, and defines “slave” as stranger. Going with an expectation of having Ghanaians embrace her as their long-stolen relative, instead what she found was a dismissal of stolen Africans and their American descendents. She tries to search for the familiar (in emotions, in mutual histories) but isn’t able to. The "domain of the stranger is always an elusive elsewhere," (4, emphasis in original) she notes. Belonging can happen only if one is able to elude the slave past, something which is not possible in the post 1492 world order (p.42). She writes, "I was

113 determined to fill in the blank spaces of the historical record and to represent the lives of those deemed unworthy of remembering, but how does one write a story about an encounter with nothing?" (p.16). There was so much disconnect, and such an impossibility of securing a place for herself that, as Hartman writes, " for me, the rupture was the story" (p.42). This notion of rupture as the very story disallows Hartman to put the pieces (of her history and Ghanaian ancestors) ‘back’ or even together. Riding the waves in the opposite direction on the Atlantic did not bring her what she was expecting or hoping to find. As she notes, in Africa, "African Americans were tenants rather than sons and daughters" (p.104). What was lost could never be recovered. This note is important to keep in mind for understanding the demands which critical Black Studies is making. Like central tenets of Indigenous Studies, critical Black Studies enacts a refusal of inclusion, but also of recovery and redemption. How to approach Black feminist theories (or even critical Indigenous theories) without the mandate of trying to recover some authentic way of being pre-1492; how to not make slavery and colonialism the only (and damage-centered) stories of Black and Indigenous lives and realities, but also not romantizice Africa as the place of liberation (for ourselves). It is teaching me (even if I wasn’t necessarily the intended audience) how to sit with the gaps, with messy, entangled archives, with holes in stories and not try to recover that which I think is the missing piece. No mythos, legends, and what-not can achieve that recovery especially when presented by people like me. The refusal to be included and recovered, to be adopted into the category of the Human as it exists today,44 and a refusal to be included in the modalities through which humanity is conferred, such as modern nation- state. As Black Canadian scholar of cultural studies, Rinaldo Walcott (2014) writes, " The invention of Black people troubles understandings of land, place, indigeneity, and belonging because the brutal rupture that produced Blackness has severed Black being from all those claims now used to mark resistance to modernity's unequal distribution of its various accumulations" (p.95). Thus Hartman's scholarship, along with all critical Black scholarship, offers an alternative to the boundedness of home and nation-state. In not belonging, in being never able to become part of the state and in active refusal of such belonging is the hope for a

44 I will return to this little later when discussing Sylvia Wynter's work.

114 different future for, and I say this carefully, all of us and not just Black people. As Canadian poet and novelist of Trinidadian roots, Dionne Brand (2001) notes: Having no name to call on was having no past; having no past pointed to the fissure between the past and the present. That fissure is represented in the Door of No Return: that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New. The place where all names were forgotten and all beginnings recast. In some desolate sense it was the creation place of Blacks in New World Diaspora at the same time that it signified the end of traceable beginnings. Beginnings that can be noted through a name or a set of family stories that extend farther into the past than five hundred or so years, or the kinds of beginnings that can be expressed in a name which in turn marked our territory or occupation. I am interested in exploring this creation place --the Door of No Return, a place emptied of beginnings --as a site of belonging or unbelonging. (p.5-6)

Black Studies as "Wake Work In her brief response to Jared Sexton's article on Black Studies, Christina Sharpe (2012) asks: "Will the fact of black studies ameliorate the quotidian experiences of terror in black lives lived in an anti-black world? And, if not, what will be the relationship between the two?" (n.p) The question concerning Empire, state and ordinary white settler citizen sponsored and condoned terror in lives of Black people is an urgent one to think through. While I do not have the answer to Sharpe's important question, I believe that there is no other way to continue thinking about her question other than engaging with Black feminist theories. The Black scholars I bring here present us with an ethic of orienting ourselves to Black studies. Where Hartman asks us to be careful about the desire to imbue the figure of the slave with possibilities for our lives, Sharpe (2016) discusses the metaphor of "wake work" as an ethic of doing Black Studies. In her recently released and urgently-needed book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, she mobilizes the ritual/observance of wake which I consider to be an important orientation to Black Studies. She defines wake as: A reprise and an elaboration: Wakes are processes; through them we think about the dead and about our relations to them; they are rituals through which to enact grief and memory...But wakes are also "the track left on the water's surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming, or one that is moved, in water; in the line of sight of (an observed object); and (something) in the line of recoil of (a gun)"; and finally, wake means being awake and, also consciousness. (p.21)

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Within the context of staunch anti-blackness the metaphor of wake as an ethic of doing Black Studies is a powerful one. On one hand Blackness becomes a signifier for always-(un)timely deaths but on the other hand, also a practice of resistance. Writing about antiblackness in the wake of official end of slavery demands attention to ongoing Black deaths. It is to ground our critiques in the terror through which Blackness is produced. Sharpe asks, "what happens when we proceed as if we know this, antiblackness, to be the ground on which we stand, the ground from which we attempt to speak, for instance, an 'I' or a 'we' who know, an 'I' or a 'we' who care?" (p.7, emphasis in original). This "wake work" is not about mourning dead Black people from which I can move on or believe that Black people have moved on or that Black life has improved since the days of slavery, but about investigating my ongoing work in those deaths; very significantly, it is about holding onto my complicity. It is also about not looking for ways to treat modes of Black lives and deaths as simply being about the past. To approach Black Studies as wake work, for me, means to pay attention to anti-Black readings of our current world order, to hold onto the logics of race, violence, read against linear time-space continuums that present slavery as over. It demands that we hold onto the "plantation context" (McKittrick, 2013, p.3). As Katherine McKittrick explains, a plantation context "does not cite the plantation as a conceptual pathway that exclusively narrates an oppression/resistance schema; nor does it situate the plantation as the anchor to antiblack violence and dismal futures" (p.4-5). A plantation context holds onto how plantation logic continues to organize Black lives and deaths in the present; it asks that we pay attention to the plantation-to-prison mode of 'progress' for Black youth but also, that we think of the human and of our world order anew. That is something I discuss a bit later in this section, but what I want to add here is that a plantation context requires working towards "plantation futures" demands that we (especially non-Black people for whom Black people are always disposable) "imagine black-life as anticipatory" (p.11, emphasis in original). McKittrick writes, "In this formulation, the figure of the black subject --within slave and postslave geographies, in lie and in death --is indigenous, is planted, within the context of a violence that cannot wholly define future human agency" (p.11). This plantation context, as a modality of doing "wake work," where black lives are delinked from always-death, always-criminal, always-dispossessed, always- slave --"refuses a commitment to our present order of things" (McKittrick, p.14). All the

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Black scholars I read and cite here, all want us to ground our work in the plantation context, towards a plantation futures which is necessarily a demand for analyzing the episteme that produces Black death as interminable. As Sharpe writes: As we go about wake work, we must think through containment, regulation, punishment, capture, and captivity and the ways the manifold representations of blackness become the symbol, par excellence, for the less-than-human being condemned to death. We must think about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed work...At stake is not recognizing antiblackness as total climate. At stake too, is not recognizing an insistent Black visualsonic resistance to that imposition of non/being. How might we stay in the wake with and as those whom the state positions to die ungrievable deaths and live lives meant to be unliveable? These are questions of temporality, the longue durée, the residence and hold time of the wake. (p.21-22)

For Black and non-Black students of Black Studies then, "wake work" as an ethic forces us to critically engage with violence of slavery but also with Black people's resistance movements and Where institutions (from the police to academic departments of universities) treat Black people as Not Human, Black Lives Matter shows us how to do the "wake work" in both, "time of slavery," and "afterlife of slavery" (Hartman, 1998). Anti-Blackness is a totality and it is Black peoples' resistance that is teaching people like me how to not keep accepting the possibility of my life through continued Black death. Wake work also asks that we recognize Blackness as theory in itself, and anti-Blackness as anti-theory so that we do not treat critical Black studies as what Ann Ducille calls "an anybody-can-play pick up game performed on a wide-open, untrammeled field" (cited in Weheliye, p.5). Black studies takes "as its task the definition of the human itself," (Weheliye, 20) thus presenting a narrow conceptualization of human that is different from one taught to us in Western academia. As Alexander G. Weheliye notes: Given the histories of slavery, colonialism, segregation, lynching, and so on, humanity has always been a principal question within black life and thought in the west; or, rather, in the moment in which blackness becomes apposite to humanity, Man's conditions of possibility lose their ontological thrust, because their limitations are rendered abundantly clear. Thus, the functioning of blackness as both inside and outside modernity sets the stage for a general theory of the human, and not its particular exception. (p.19)

Paying attention to this "general theory of the human" is critical work. It has been critical ever since Europeans disguised Americas as terra nullius, and made kidnapped Africans into

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Black bodies on stolen lands. Black Studies demands that we critically interrogate the material and discursive constructions of this humanity we either inhabit or aspire to be included into. Black Studies, therefore, it is important to reiterate, challenges the present organization of knowledge by interrogating, critiquing and probing that which is taken as a given or, I would say, even held sacred: the human in critical theory. Just as critical Indigenous theory works by intervening in all liberatory theories by asking how the figure of the (dead) Indian inflects these theories, Black Studies as I understand and draw upon it, is invested in centering that which remains the "unthought" (Hartman) in critical theory.

Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology Most of the Black scholars I have discussed in this section ground their analysis of Blackness and anti-Blackness in origins of slavery. They ground Blackness within the analytics of slavery and its continuing resonance. However, for Black scholar Michelle Wright (2015), Blackness is more expansive than the Blackness conferred by the Middle Passage epistemology. She argues that the Middle Passage epistemology is grounded in linear notions of spacetime which necessarily becomes a progress narrative. For her, the Middle Passage epistemology writes Blackness as having a linear genealogy from a past in Africa to a future in the diaspora. Wright highlights three limits to the Middle Passage epistemology: Firstly, it creates space and time into absolute construct, thus rendering any discussion of blackness as having a particular origin; Secondly it employs a hierarchical or vertical means of representation that differentiates who or what is Black, leaving out certain identities because “the majority of dominant discourses in Black Studies, like most white discourses, implicitly or explicitly favor and focus on the heteropatriarchal male body as the norm in these histories and theories” (12); and lastly, it views Blackness as a form of agency in opposition to the actions of white people so that it becomes the case that “no Black progress has been made because of the continual oppression by white Western hegemonies” moving from slavery to colonialism to new technologies of power mobilized to keep Black people only as subalterns (p.8).

In contrast, Wright puts forward the notion of “epiphenomenal time” in order to understand the broad context in which Blackness comes to be. She writes:

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Our constructs of Blackness are largely historical and more specifically based on a notion of spacetime that is commonly fitted into a linear progress narrative, while our phenomenological manifestations of Blackness happen in what I Ephiphenomenal time, or the ‘now,’ through which the past, present, and future are always interpreted…In Physics of Blackness, ‘Epiphenomenal’ time denotes the current moment, a moment that is not directly borne out of another (i.e. casually created)…Even further, they underscore that while the linear progress narrative is an invaluable tool for locating Blackness, when used alone its very spatiotemporal properties preclude a wholly inclusive definition of Blackness, yielding one that is necessarily inaccurate. By contrast, Epiphenomenal time enables a wholly inclusive definition (appropriate to any moment at which one is defining Blackness). (p.4, emphasis in original)

For Wright, the Middle Passage epistemology is based on vertical and horizontal distributions of power that informs who is represented or unrepresented in a particular articulation of Blackness. I read this as people of Ghana not reading Hartman as African enough, and the Middle Passage epistemology which would see the Africans as not Black enough. Hartman has noted that the rupture was the story, and here it seems that Wright is naming the rupture through putting forth the idea of Epiphenomenal time to understand Blackness. Such a critique also helps us to think about how to hold onto an analysis of Blackness of Black people who did not cross the Atlantic.45 For Wright, such readings of Blackness also do not have any space for Black feminist epistemologies or the intersections of Blackness with gender and sexuality. Wright advocates for reading for “multidimensionality of Blackness, ” (p.23) which can happen through a horizontal relations which recognizes the limitless intersections of Blackness with multiple geographies, traditions, and archives (p.25). This spatiotemporal reconfiguration of being Black in space and time that is not oriented towards a progress that leaves out whole groups of Black- identified people thus advocates a context-responsive appreciation of Blackness predicated qualitatively on ‘when and where it is being imagined, defined, and performed’ (p.3, emphasis in original).

45 In another chapter, I will discuss Black people in South Asia. Not all Black people crossed the Atlantic, but it is important in global constituency of Blackness. So in saying that these Black people have not crossed the Middle Passage, and that I draw upon Wright’s formulation of epiphenomenal time to help me understand why and how their Blackness matters or makes an appearance in our understanding of what constitutes Blackness, I want to be read as still holding space for the Black/Red Atlantic. That crossing matters no matter what.

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Conclusion Black humanity and subjecthood on terms of Black people. These have been the arguments of the Black scholars I have discussed here. Slavery as an institution tried to crush all knowledges and even the desire for knowledge on the part of the enslaved. Slavery, beginning with landing of the Portuguese in West Africa in 1444 instituted a murderous institution that built Euro-American Empires and civilizations on bodies of Black people and lands of Indigenous peoples. Therefore, grounding analyses of Blackness and anti-Blackness in the crossings made on the Atlantic is important. However, stories of Blackness are multiple and while slavery too is never a singular story, Wright's critique of the Middle Passage epistemology offers an opening to reading for intersections of analytical categories which inform an innovative and interdisciplinary approach that necessarily reinvigorates academic and other politically transformative pursuits for a future-oriented, inclusive and ethical reading(s) of Blackness in the contemporary moment. Such readings (for ruptures) and different genealogies of Blackness hopefully also hold the potential for paying heed to Hartman's caution to non-Black scholars to not imbue and fixate Blackness with meanings it weren't supposed to have.

Anti-Caste Framework I hold onto the political and social formation of caste throughout this dissertation. Examining the place of South Asians in North American or any diaspora or talking about our relation and complicity in systems of domination is not possible without holding onto the category of caste because for thousands of years, caste hierarchies have decided who can live, how, and also, who must die. Indian caste system, based on Hindu scriptures, has divided people into political and social groups where assignments of humanity are determined by birth. Like race, caste is constructed as an innate, fixed and hereditary. Brahmins (priests), Shatriyas (soldiers), Vaishyas (traders) and Shudras (servants) inform the caste system. Dalits (previously pejoratively known as the Untouchables) fall outside of the traditional four-tier caste system, and living with extreme forms of everyday violence where they continue to be punished by death for even touching food and water of upper caste people. The organizing principles of the caste system are based on hierarchical arrangements

120 of duties and hereditary occupations, and on strict notions of purity and pollution, and policing of the rigid boundaries between the castes has been constant throughout the centuries (predating colonial encounters between the people of South Asian and European colonizers). Dalit-Bahujan scholars have time and again argued against the naturalization of caste. Bahujan, a Sanskrit word meaning "people in majority" is a term widely used by Shudra people in India. Both Dalit and Bahujan are used as umbrella terms for all those oppressed by caste structure, including Adivasis, and all people from the religious minorities. However, while I use the term Dalit-Bahujan as is often deployed in critiques of caste, I want to be careful and not conflate the histories, presents and struggles of Dalits with Shudra or lower caste people. According to Anupama Rao (2009), “Ambedkar understood Shudra identity to be unstable because Shudra critiques of caste came from a desire for incorporation into the caste Hindu order, rather than from the position of symbolic negation, as was the case with Dalits”.46 I use the term Dalit-Bahujan with a hyphen following Kamala Visweswaran’s (2010) practice. She notes that the hyphen signifies a “tentative alliance of thought and political mobilization” (p.257). The hyphen keeps our attention drawn to the caste hierarchies so that Dalits and Shudras are not used interchangeably and also to allow for the fact that Dalits in India have claimed that the Bahujan, while themselves being the targets of casteist violence, have also participated in anti-Dalit violence. In his book (1936), The Annihilation of Caste, considered a canonical anti-casteist manifesto now, champion of Dalit rights, scholar, jurist, and writer and architect of the Indian Constitution, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar argues that religious texts and notions of Hinduism from which caste relations emerge must be destroyed. He argued that since caste relations emerge from Hindu scriptures, it is these texts which must be destroyed so that caste hierarchies lose the very foundations upon which they have been constructed. But caste and caste-based violence(s) continue unabated in India but also other parts of South Asia such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Dalits continue to live in segregated housing, cannot enter caste Hindu places of worship, and mostly confined to jobs of cleaning sewages, removal of dead animals, digging graves, and doing other jobs considered unclean by caste Hindus (that is, those falling within the four-tiered caste system). History of violence against

46 Anupama Rao, http://www.india-seminar.com/2012/633/633_anupama_rao.htm

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Dalits under Brahmin and other upper caste Hindu rule includes violence(s) such as refusal to let Dalit women cover their chest (where punishment for covering chest was chopping off of the breasts), rampant raping of Dalit women by caste Hindus with no repercussions for the rapists, refusal to let Dalits leave home in daytime lest their shadows fall on Brahmins, and forcing Dalits to tie a broom to their backs so sweep off their footprints so that caste Hindus did not step on them by mistake. Dalits have always been resisting the caste Hindu paradigms that have refused them any dignity.47 The term Dalit literally means “crushed” “ground down,” or “ground into pieces”. Jyotirao Govindrao Phule, a Dalit activist and champion of Dalit-Bahujan women's rights, is credited with coining the term Dalit in 19th century. Since caste is entrenched in Hindu religious scriptures, Phule reread these texts to endow popular imagination with a radical anti-caste consciousness, thus beginning the era of Dalit resistance literature. Then, beginning with the Dalit Panther's movement in the 1970s, the term "Dalit" acquired a radical new meaning of self-identification and signified a new oppositional consciousness. As Rao writes, "Dalit history traces the paradoxical manner in which an identity predicated on a future outside or beyond caste was conceived with historical humiliation and suffering as its enabling ground; it is the narrative of how a new political collectivity was constituted by resignifying the Dalit's negative identity within the caste structure into positive political value" (p.1-2). Moreover, as Arjun Dangle (2007), one of leaders of the Dalit Panthers, argues: Dalit is not a caste but a realization and is related to the experiences, joys and sorrows, and struggles of those in the lowest stratum of society. It matures with a sociological point of view and is related to the principles of negativity, rebellion and loyalty of science, thus finally ending as revolutionary. (Dangle cited in Mukherjee, 2007, p.xiii)

Dalit has become a particular kind of political subject who is produced through casteist violence, but also actively resists it and refuses the (caste) order that has produced her as less than human. Dalit is not simply a demand for humanity by inclusion into the caste system. Rather, Dalit intervenes as an important critique of a particular world order in which caste determines ones humanity and consequently decides who can live, thrive and who must

47 I use the term "dignity" instead of "humanity" because Dalit theorists use the vernacular of dignity and humiliation. I will come to this again later on in this chapter.

122 continue to die. Dalit is a political and ethical subject who challenged existing accounts of history, politics, and culture. Just like critical Indigenous theory and radical Black Studies operate as critiques of the 1492 epistemology, Dalitness operates as an "anti-caste praxis" (Rajkumar, 2010) that is confrontational to Brahminical supremacist worldview. The term Dalit highlights the fact that caste is a construct, and that casteist hierarchies , written in Hindu scriptures, are a violence imposed on lower caste and Dalit peoples for thousands of years.

Caste Versus Race Caste is not race. It is important to clarify that at the outset. However, while both are social constructs and marked on bodies in different ways, caste is not always as easily read on the bodies as we think or understand race to be. However for political purposes, Dalit- Bahujan have drawn comparisons between the two, and sometimes even arguing that caste is race by another name. At the 2001 World Conference on Racism in Durham, Dalit attendees attempted to form analogies between race and caste in order to highlight the fact that in all the race-talk by Indians present, none of the caste Hindu attendee wanted to discuss caste hierarchies. While it was easy for these Brahmin and upper-caste Indians to talk about postcolonialism and problems of racism, talking about caste hierarchies and the extreme violence invested every day to maintain these hierarchies was not on their agenda. Knowing this, Dalit people present at the Conference drew connections between apartheid in South Africa and the "hidden apartheid" against Dalits in India (Visvanathan, 2001, p.2513). They argued that just like Black people in South Africa were segregated, and forced to keep a distance from white people, their property and belongings, Dalits in India are also policed for segregation and distance. As Visvanath writes, "Segregation is a key characteristic of both [apartheids]. Fundamental to the grammar of 'distance' are the notions of pollution, dirt, 'touch'. Any form of closeness is repulsive or defiling. A defiance of segregation leads to violence" (p.2513). In fact, some Dalit writers have argued that casteism is worse than racism. According to the Marathi Dalit writer, Gangadhar Pantawane (1977), Black people

123 were neither untouchable in the past nor are so in the present unlike Dalits.48 But, Visvanath notes, Dalits began defining caste as race only to command attention to the problem of casteism. Caste was reduced to a "subcontinental phenomenon, to an ethics of particularism rather than universalism" while race seemed to be a problem of and for everybody. Dalit activists wanted to highlight that caste was not an internal but rather an international issue.

What holds true are Gail Omvedt's (2001) words when she writes: The question of ``race and caste'' is simply the issue of the comparative analysis of caste as a form of social stratification. To say that two social phenomena are similar is, after all, not to say that they are identical: it is to raise the question of analysing how, in what ways they are similar and in what specific ways they are different. Since ``race'' is not a meaningful biological category, we are in reality dealing with ``racism'' - that is, a system of social differentiation based on an ideology that certain groups are genetically/biologically inferior. Ideologies or belief systems need not be ``true'' to be socially significant. 49

Both caste and race are similar, but that is not to claim that they are identical. Neither are essence nor identity but a product of social forms of discrimination.

Caste and Knowledge Production I want to briefly discuss the role of caste in knowledge production about the South Asian subject. Examining how caste is central to knowledge produced by and about South Asian subjects will be important even more so when I discuss the South Asian subject in diaspora as well as anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance movements of South Asian subjects in other chapters. Anti-casteist activism and scholarship have been propelled by the emergence of a new generation of Dalit activists and intellectuals since the 1990s. One of the primary factors that led to a widespread recognition of caste as a living and urban thing rather than a primordial and rural residue of days long gone was Indian government's decision to accept the recommendations in the Mandal Commission's report in 1993. Mandal Commission was created in 1979 by the government, and headed by Indian Parliamentarian B.P. Mandal to

48 In a Dalit literature in Kirti College, Mumbai, on 6 February 1977, Pantawane said: “African American literature is referred to in the context of Dalit literature. But the Blacks are not untouchable. Untouchability is a denial of humanity. This makes a big difference between these two literatures” (cited in Limbale, 2004, 101). 49 "Caste, Race, and Sociologists-I," The Hindu, http://www.thehindu.com/2001/10/18/stories/05182524.htm

124 examine the question of seat reservations and quotas in public sectors for people to redress caste discrimination. The main recommendation was to expand affirmative action policies from Dalits to OBCs (Other Backward Classes or lower-caste people). Government's decision to implement Mandal Commission's recommendations led to widespread protests from caste Hindus in all public and private sectors including academia and media. These protests, however, helped younger Dalit generation to rise in unison and become publicly critical of the left organizations, such as Marxist and Naxalite organizations that were all headed by Brahmin and other caste Hindus.50 More than ever now, it was clear that caste-based violence was as easily commensurable with Marxist, Naxalite and other so- called radical Leftist ideas of Indian democracy as the outright Right wing anti-Dalit, fascist Hindu discourses. As is always the case with rise of oppressed peoples, these realizations came within the context of increasing Dalit activism everywhere in India but especially southern India, the rise of Dalit feminist organizations in 1990s, and demands by Dalit participants at the 2001 "World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance" held in Durban, South Africa. The simultaneous rise of Dalit Studies allowed Dalits to represent themselves as political actors, as subjects living with but also actively resisting casteist violence for centuries. Before this, Dalits were represented as mere victims, as playthings of Brahmin and other caste Hindus, and as "victims, scavengers, and objects of reform" (Guru, cited in Rawat & Satyanarayana, p.10).51 52 In mainstream Indian scholarship, Dalits continued to be represented as people without history, culture, contributions, and as people without resistance

50 A Naxal or Naxalite is a member of any of the Communist guerrilla groups in India, mostly associated with the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The term Naxal derives from the name of the village Naxalbari in West Bengal, where the movement had its origin. Naxalites are considered far left/ radical communists, supportive of Maoist political sentiment and ideology. 51 It is common to pejoratively equate Dalits with the figure of the scavenger. Manual scavenging work in India is reserved for Dalits and no caste people take on that work. At least 90% of India's estimated at 1.3 million manual scavengers are Dalit women. According to Ashif Shaikh, founder of the Jan Sahas campaign in India, "It is not even a job, it's slavery," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "The women do not have a choice, they are paid a pittance, and are threatened with violence if they quit. There's a lot of pressure from the village, the community, and their own families." Dalit communities continue to face threats of violence, eviction and withholding of wages if they try to give up the practice as several human rights groups fighting casteist violence have argued. For more details, see "Socio economic status of women manual scavengers," (2014). http://in.one.un.org/img/uploads/Socio_Economic_Status_of_Women_Manual_Scavengers_Report.pdf 52 For a more detailed discussion on the paradigms through which Dalits were represented in Indian academia before the rise of Dalit Studies, see Rawat & Satyanarayana (2016)’s "Introduction".

125 and without any humanity, despite their long military resistance to Aryan-Brahmins (Rao, 2008). According to Ambedkar (1946): The mischief done by the Brahmin scholars to historical research is obvious. The Brahmin scholar has a two-fold interest in the maintenance of the sanctity of this literature. In the first place, being the production of his forefathers, his filial duty leads him to defend it even at the cost of truth. In the second place as it supports the privileges of the Brahmins, he is careful not to do anything which would undermine its authority. The necessity of upholding the system by which he knows he stands to profit, as well as of upholding the prestige of his forefathers as the founders of the system, acts as a silent immaculate premise which is ever present in the mind of the Brahmin scholar and prevents him from reaching or preaching the truth. That is why one finds so little that is original in the field of historical research by Brahmin scholars unless it be a matter of fixing dates or tracing genealogies.

This was, and even now continues to be the state of Indian academia and scholarship, where Dalits had no place as actors, as subjects or even as fully human. Even with the entry of Dalit people in Indian academia in 1990s, they continue to be considered as knowers of the particular only, that is, as people who have nothing to contribute to knowledges that can be used by non-Dalits. What does it mean to be enabled only to speak for the particular? Intervening in the debate on the failure of social sciences discipline in India, Dalit scholar Gopal Guru (2002) observes that social science practice in India have produced a cultural hierarchy that divided the academics into the pernicious binaries of "theoretical Brahmins" and "empirical Shudras". As Guru notes, it is as if "some are born with a theoretical spoon in their mouth and the vast majority [the Dalit-Bahujan] with the empirical pot around their neck" (p.5003).

Claiming Subalternity In their article, “Between Subalternity and Indigeneity,” Jodi Byrd and Michael Rothberg (2011) discuss the possibility, but also the need for facilitating conversations between Subaltern/postcolonial Studies and Indigenous Studies. They note that there is a lot common between the two intellectual and political traditions, for “[b]oth ‘subaltern’ and ‘indigenous’ name problems of translation and relationality; or/ to put it slightly differently, subaltern/indigenous dialogue is, among other things, a dialogue within and about

126 incommensurability” (p.4). This incommensurability is with dominant narratives that can never grasp the content (or subjectivity) of the subaltern or the Indigenous. But we need to think about who is the “subaltern” within the South Asian context. The figure of the subaltern, often understood as a colonized, a racialized but resisting violence subject has dominated the study of South Asia since the 1980s. However, even in Subaltern Studies, casteism remains intact, it remains supported, upheld. Subaltern Studies: Writings on Indian History and Society began in 1982 as a series of interventions in some debates specific to the writing of modern Indian history that had much in common with the "history from below" approach of English historiography (Chakrabarty, 2000, p.10). As Indian historiographer, Ranajit Guha (1984, p.vii) noted in one of the introductory essays of Subaltern Studies, "We are indeed opposed to much of the prevailing academic practice in historiography . . . for its failure to acknowledge the subaltern as the maker of his own destiny. This critique lies at the very heart of our project.” Related to this point and equally importantly, as Chakrabarty writes, Subaltern Studies entails “an interrogation of the relationship between power and knowledge (hence of archive itself and of history as a form of knowledge)” (p.472, emphasis added). Subaltern Studies, from its inception, was sympathetic to Foucauldian project of questioning the nature of power arrangement. Yet, it seems like Dalit-Bahujan subjects could not be afforded any agency as resistors to caste supremacy, or as makers of their own histories. Firstly, there are barely any Dalit and other OBC scholars who have ever been or are part of the Subaltern Studies. In Volume IX of Subaltern Studies, Kancha Ilaiah (1996), a Shudra scholar, noted: “The Dalit-bahujan experience—a long experience of 3,000 years at that—tells us that no abuser stops abusing unless there is retaliation. An atmosphere of calm, an atmosphere of respect for one another in which contradiction may be democratically resolved is never possible unless the abuser is abused as a matter of shock-treatment" (p.168-9). This is an important critique of Indian postcolonial studies. However, instead of critically engaging with this anti-casteist critique of Subaltern Studies, Dipesh Chakrabarty, one of the critical scholars of Subaltern Studies, dismissed it as "polemical" (158). Further, Chakrabarty argued, " Dalit historians have not always cared for “evidence” in the way that we might expect them to if they were our colleagues or students in universities" (p.157). Time and again, Dalits, like other colonized

127 and racialized people have had to prove that they have important critiques and competent scholarship to contribute but also challenge racist and casteist academies. But, Dalit scholars are either seen as too emotional and hence not rational like Brahmin scholars, or too empirical, working from particularistic assumptions rather that universalism which, like white subjects, can be claimed by the Brahmin subject only. While Chinnaiah Jangam (2015), a Dalit scholar based in Canada, does agree that Ilaiah needed to engage with Dalit historiography and its ground-breaking theoretical insights offered as part of anti-caste movement, nevertheless there has never been any place in Indian Marxist, Subaltern or any leftist scholarship for a critical engagement with anti-caste voices of Dalit-Bahujan scholars. As Jangam (2015) notes in his critique of Indian Subaltern Studies, “the very category of subaltern does not include the dynamics of caste domination and oppression; it also fails to represent the humiliating experiences of historically marginalized subjects like Dalits (66)”. Arun Prabha Mukherjee also writes the following in her English translation of the autobiography of Dalit writer, Om Prakash Valmiki’s (2003) Joothan: The dominant discourse of Postcolonial and Subaltern theories, which are often the frameworks used by Western academies to teach "Indian" literature, mostly "Indian" English Literature, not only refused to notice the high caste status of these writers but present them as resistant voices, representing the oppression of “the colonized.” (p.13)

When exclusion and dehumanization of Dalits is centered in "Indian" Subaltern Studies, we begin to also see how in its critique of the epistemic violence inherent in Western epistemologies and resistance movements to colonialism, such seemingly anticolonial critiques can also be complicit in keeping other violence(s) firmly in place. Both in India and in diaspora, South Asian, especially upper-caste Indian academics continue to be from relatively homogeneous economic, caste, cultural, political and educational backgrounds. Examining caste relation in university or their own lives has not really been on their agendas. In North America, only one Dalit scholar so far has ever received tenure. This is shocking considering the number and relatively stable positions of South Asians in North American academia.53

53 Chinnaiah Jangam at Carleton University in Ottawa is the only tenured Dalit scholar in Canada. I learned this through personal communication with him in April 2016 in Toronto.

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Thinking about caste in resistance movements makes the categories of colonized complicated. For example, colonized in the context of India does not necessarily mean Indigenous. If we only hold onto the category of colonized people in that context, we fail to see how Brahmins, for example, were in alliance with white colonizers, and even how complicated and splintering movements against colonialism was. As Shefali Chandra (2012), an upper caste scholar, discusses in her book, The Sexual Life of English, resistance to colonial power was always and already casteist. For instance, while Subaltern Studies has theorized resistance to English language as the language of the colonizers, Chandra points out that resistance to British arrogance and policies denying the Indians any culture or knowledge of literature simultaneously reinforced Marathi-speaking Brahmans’ dominance and (successful) attempts at forging the consensus that Marathi had always been the central language of India since pre-colonial times, thus evading the truth that it was, in fact, Persian that was the language of medieval and Mughal India (p.14-15). A language seen as belonging to “those Muslims,” enemies of Brahmans and other upper and middle caste Hindus, could never have been recognized as central by the casteist Brahmin hegemony.54 The trio of Marathi, Sanskrit and English came to be supported by various colonial authorities, further shrinking Persian from daily life and aiding in the dominance of “new colonial Brahmans” and their increasing control over land, language and power, while further marginalizing Indigenous peoples and Dalits in the Sub-continent. As Chandra notes, “This was a multilingual upper-caste formation, actively supported by the colonial state’s educational policies” (p.15). On the other hand, Mahatma Jotiba Phule and his wife Savitribai Phule, anti-casteist thinkers and educators, encouraged lower caste people and Dalits, especially their women, to learn English. Savitribai maintained in her writings that English had in fact provided them with some relief from the tyranny of Brahminical hegemony. While colonialism supported the casteist violence of Brahmanism at all levels and was no friend of Dalits, within its structures Dalits were able to grasp at some opportunities for education and to carve out new ways of resisting the violence in which they were born and killed. This is but one example to point out the complexities of our histories,

54 Caste hierarchies also exist among Muslims of the Sub-continent but take different form than in Hinduism. Also, there is a long history and present of Dalits and other lower caste people converting to Islam (and Buddhism) in order to escape the rigid caste boundaries they were born into. For a documentary film on Muslims in India, see Moustaffa Bouazzoaoui, “Dalit Muslims of India” (Aljazeera, Sept 2015), http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeraworld/2015/09/dalit-muslims-india-150902080746653.html

129 and social realities, and to understand how we need to pay attention to what narratives and which bodies remain suppressed or dead underneath the weight of our critiques. Holding onto caste is mandatory if we have to think about British Raj in India and think about colonial violence there. I discuss the work of casteism in upholding whiteness in Chapter Six when I read the Bengali anti-colonial play, Neel Darpan. Critiquing both Dalit and non-Dalit ally scholars who have argued that Dalit experience is some unconstructed viewpoint that offers a "privileged access" to reality (p.23), Guru argues that Dalit scholars must embrace social theory in order to "accord respect to their experience" and "restore to themselves the agency" (p.24). Guru is not simply arguing for the authenticity of Dalit experience or where they only theorize about their experience. Guru holds onto the notion of theory as universal and transformative while insisting that centering Dalit critique would allow us to design transformative theory for social justice because in India, rest of South Asia and in South Asian diasporas anywhere, our (South Asian) demands for racial justice for ourselves and our solidarity with colonized and Black people of the New World would mean nothing if our theorizing of the world weren't attentive to our privileges and complicities in maintaining caste hierarchies. 55 Guru argues further: “There are historical reasons that gave a structural advantage to the top of the twice born [upper castes] in consolidating its privileged position in doing theory. Historically accumulated cultural inequalities seem to have reinforced Dalit epistemological closure” (p.5005). These cumulative advantages have led to the epistemological isolation of Dalits in the academy (p.5006). Therefore, because of this erasure, what went unnoticed is that the rise of Dalit Studies coincided with the formal end of the subaltern studies collective (Rawat & Satynarayana, 2016, p.ix). While Subaltern Studies is critical of the colonialism versus nationalism model of anti-colonial nationalists, still "the political culture of caste and the intellectual history of radical anticaste thought appears for the most part as residual rather than as intrinsic and necessary to the development of political critique" (Rao, 2009, p.11). The figure of the subaltern, understood as a colonized subject resisting British Raj and colonial forces has dominated the study of South Asia since the 1980s when the field came

55 In my chapter where I discuss photographs of Indian-American artist, Annu Matthew, I will talk about intersections between caste and Blackness.

130 into existence in Western academia. The archetypical figure of the Subaltern has been the Third World peasant (Pandey, p.273). As Pandey notes, " The task of subaltern historiography was to recover this underdeveloped figure for history, to restore the agency of the yokel, recognize that the peasant mass was contemporaneous with the modern –a part of modernity -- and establish the peasant as (in substantial part) the maker of his/her own destiny" (p.273). But what kind of a peasant figure occupies the center of the critiques of Subaltern studies? Yes, this figure is male, for one, but also, a caste subject. The central figure of Subaltern studies, the peasant who is a true anti-colonial revolutionary, is still a caste subject.56 As editors to a new volume on Dalit Studies note:

Questions of caste discrimination were (and are) a crucial part of everyday life in modern India, but they remained on the margins because of the way the category of the subaltern subject was formulated. The unqualified use of the term ‘subaltern’ to mean peasant has tended to ignore the world of Dalit peasants and laborers within agrarian society and their exploitation and subjugation by the landlords and the subaltern peasants. In the subaltern studies project, the subaltern was an unmarked subject, and caste inequity was not the core feature of its cultural and political formation. The subaltern peasant in most cases belonged to “lower caste’ groups (but not to the untouchable castes), who were culturally committed to forms of Hinduism and values of caste inequality. (Rawat & Satyarayana, 2016, p.14, emphasis added).

The "unmarked subject" of Subaltern studies was a gendered masculine subject as Gayatri Spivak (1988) has argued, but equally importantly if not even more so, a subject constituted through caste hierarchies. Dalit Studies thus argues for centering the figure of the Dalit as a "political and ethical subject who challenged existing accounts of history, politics, and culture" (Rao, 2008, p.11). As Visvanathan argues, "We need a different point of entry, something that sees dalit sociology not through the eyes of the academe but in terms of its own emic categories" (p.3123). Just like the post-Enlightenment Western subject is fundamentally constituted through race and against all the "affectable others," as Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007) notes, the Indian (caste Hindu) subject is fundamentally constituted through caste, which is everywhere and yet, goes unacknowledged. However, while the Dalit subject is unable to escape her caste, the upper caste Hindu subject can perform castelessness. Transcoding caste

56 By "caste subject," I mean that it has a caste within the traditional four tier caste system.

131 and caste relations into something else is a regular feature of most upper-caste narratives. As Dalit scholar, M.S.S. Pandian (2002) argues, for upper caste intellectuals, “Caste always belongs to someone else; it is somewhere else; it is of another time. The act of transcoding is an act of acknowledging and disavowing caste all at once” (p.1735). While Brahmin and other upper-caste people can escape their caste by not naming that which is everywhere and which designs their everyday life (in terms of what can be eaten, what cannot be touched, who must not be allowed to enter their homes, have any contact with them, who they can marry etc), caste is made hypervisible for Dalits and Bahujans. Caste is reduced to Dalitness and therefore, analyzing the invisibility of caste in the formation of upper caste experiences, positionalities and privileges, becomes necessary as “castelessness holds the key to caste” (Deshpande, 2013, p.33).

Conclusion In an article entitled, "An Enlightened Diwali: Saving the Sacred at Standing Rock," Padma Kuppa (2016) writes: Sacred Native sites aren’t given the same importance, since they are part of the landscape, something Mother Nature created. Standing Rock protesters talk about the river having rights – contrasting it to how in the current socio-political climate, corporations have rights. As a Hindu, it’s easy for me to relate to the Sioux protesting the destruction of what they hold sacred, given that we too hold nature sacred: the holy river Ganga is mother, the wind is deified as the god Vayu, and Mt. Kailash is venerated as the abode of the Lord Shiva. (n.p)

Here Kuppa, an Indo-American politician is addressing caste Hindus who celebrate Diwali in American diaspora. Making connections between Diwali and Indigenous peoples’ struggles as the fight for the sacred, she requests Hindus to pay attention to the resilient resistance efforts by Indigenous peoples at Standing Rock, North Dakota.57 Standing Rock protest was launched by Sacred Stones Camp, Red Warrior Camp, and the Oceti Sakowin Camp to resist the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatens traditional and treaty- guaranteed Great Sioux Nation territory. Several Black and other racialized people, along

57 To learn more about Standing Rock, see the very detailed syllabus compiled by The NYC Stands for Standing Rock committee made up of a group of Indigenous scholars and activists, and settler/ POC supporters in 2016. https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/

132 with white settlers gathered at the site of the pipeline in solidarity with Indigenous peoples’ resistance movement. On the surface, this seems like a commendable act of offering Indigenous solidarity from a Hindu American woman. However, one has to understand what Diwali is, and why it is celebrated by caste Hindus every year, to know how the sacred in Indigenous peoples’ philosophies is not commensurable with Kuppa’s notion of sacred in Hinduism.58 Diwali is celebrated by caste Hindus to commemorate two different occasions: One is that of mythic Hindu God Ram's killing of a demon, Ravana and second, more popular in south is another mythic Hindu god Krishna’s killing of Narakasur. In popular (caste) Hindu mythology, Ravana kidnaps Sita, Ram's wife, and keeps her hostage. He stands in for everything impure, immoral and evil. So when Ram marches to Ravan’s castle with his army, frees Sita, beheads Ravana and burns down his castle and town (thus killing all the demons), it is seen as a moment of celebration and of Rama saving the honour of his wife, and consequently of all Hindu women. Every year effigies of Ravana are burned in huge celebrations. In this story of a god's triumph to protect the honour of his wife and burn the demons, what remains untold is that that Ravana as a mythological figure is owned and venerated by a large section of Dravida/Shudra/Dalit and Adivasi people(s). As Bahujan scholar, Kancha Ilayah (2013) notes:

The Dravidians and Dalit-Bahujans across the country treat Ravan as their representative. His action of abducting Sita was seen by them as an answer to mutilating the beautiful body of Shurpanaka, his own sister, by Lakshman at the instance of Ram himself. Further, he did not physically assault Sita at all. They see Shurpanaka and Sita as women who have equal rights for their dignity and self-respect. Why demonise Ravan alone? 59 60

58 I will discuss caste in more detail when I discuss anti-caste scholarship in Chapter III, “Theoretical Framework”. For now, it is sufficient to note that here I mean upper and mid-caste Hindus whose celebration of Diwali is rooted in anti-Dalit-Bahujan ideology. 59 See Kancha Ilayah, "This Diwali, think why we celebrate death". http://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7025:this-diwali-think-why-we- celebrate-death&catid=118:thought&Itemid=131 60 Shurpanaka was Ravan's sister. Lakshman, god Ram's brother dishonors her when she confesses her love for him, and with his sword, he cuts off her nose. Ravan kidnaps Sita to avenge the mutilation of his beloved sister. However, even though Sita was Ravan's captive for a long time, he never dishonored her and even according to Hindu mythologies, he always treated her with respect.

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Diwali is, therefore, another celebration of caste Hindu supremacy over Dalit-Bahujan and Adivasi people. It is yet another testament that non-upper caste Hindu women’s bodies are not as pure or honourable as that of Sita’s and other upper caste women’s bodies. Similarly, Narakasura is revered by Adivasis as representation of “black sturdiness” (Ilaiah), as their king and protector. All Hindu festivals such as Durga Puja, Navratri, Diwali, and Dussehra all commemorate a variant of this myth, often with idol displays depicting the killing itself. Just as history is written by those in power, these Hindu mythologies have been constructed by Hindu men from dominant caste/class. Burning effigies of a mythological figure who is representative of Dalit-Bahujan and Adivasi is symbolic violence that sits very comfortably with ongoing lynching and burnings of low caste, Dalit and Muslims in India. Every god or goddess venerated by caste Hindus has killed Bahujan and Dalit kings, queen and other people. Caste Hindu mythologies are full of these stories celebrating the death of these people (always represented as not-human, as demons). Given this very brief history of Diwali I have presented here, we can easily see why taking a festival loudly celebrating death of lower caste and Dalit people to talk about standing in solidarity with Indigenous peoples in a way that present your upper-caste body as an ally while erasing your active presence in upholding casteist violence can be an extremely dangerous move for any sincere, much- needed solidarity work with Indigenous solidarity. Caste Hindu 'sacred' is drenched in blood of lower caste, Dalit and Muslim blood. It is an extremely dangerous move to collapse this so-called sacred into water and other sites and practices sacred to Indigenous peoples of Americas. Holding onto the ways in which caste and caste hierarchies structure narratives of resistance of South Asians is important, as is keeping Ambedkar's call to annihilate caste. As Pandian whom I quoted above has said pretending caste does not exist or is only limited to Dalitness is casteist. My focus in this project is on narratives of South Asians with caste privileges. How to do it ethically, despite not being a caste Hindu, is still difficult work. As Guru (2002) notes: In view of the complete lack of theoretical intervention from dalit/bahujan scholars, some non-dalit messiahs have offered to represent dalit/bahujans theoretically. Their claim to fight this reverse orientalism on behalf of dalits looks attractive. It is argued by the TTB that they need to intervene in the dalit situation at the theoretical level only to restore voice and visibility to dalits and ultimately advance the dalit epistemological cause. But this also ends up

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producing reverse orientalism in a very subtle way. The claim to offer epistemological empowerment to dalits involves a charity element which by definition is condescending… these scholars choose to theorise dalit experience standing outside the dalit experience. This representation thus remains epistemologically posterior. (n.p)

To engage with Dalit -Bahujan critiques on their own terms is responsible work and something I hope I am doing in this dissertation. Critical Indigenous theories, Black feminist theories and anti-caste and Dalit theories all intervene in mainstream Western and (Hindu) Indian theories of making sense of the world and lives of their subjects. All these theories are interruptions, challenges and for caste-privileged non-Black South Asians in North American diaspora, it is difficult work to engage with the ethical and political demands made by these sets of theories and their authors. In this research study, I aim to do the difficult work of staying accountable to the demands made by Indigenous, Black, Dalit-Bahujan people(s). I often fail at it, and I know that. But, I am committed to keep trying for the rest of this study, rest of my scholarship and everyday life.

Chapter IV

Columbus Fathers the “Indian Queen”: Tracing the "Undifferentiated Indian" through Europe's Encounters with Muslims, Anti-Blackness, and Conquest

In 18th century Covent Garden, one of London's oldest business and entertainment centers, there hung a signboard for dyer Barnaby Darley. 61 The old signboard features a figure called the "Indian Queen". The Queen appears grand in all her royalty, bejewelled with a long cone shaped crown on her head, dressed in layers of a heavy calico gown. She is positioned as elegantly striding forward, her royalty gait juxtaposed against the two servants behind her. Both attendants are scantily clad, and wearing what appears to be feather head pieces. The adult attendant, appearing Black, is holding a large ornate umbrella over the Queen's head. The child attendant, drawn as lighter skin but appearing racialized, and probably Native American, is holding the tail of the Queen's gown. The "Indian Queen" has been a consistently popular figure in advertisements by dyers, mercers, play-card makers, wine bottles and as inn signs, road names among other objects from 17th - 19th century.62 A late 19th century article by Frank B. Mayer (1870-81), a prominent American genre painter discusses the quality, nature and wide presence of signs symbols from backs of fire engines to taverns, inns, advertisements and street signs in 18th century America and England. Mayer notes that just there was a wide exchange of figures and symbols between America and England, the former giving the latter its Indian kings and queens, Jim Crow, Uncle Tom and Red Rover. "Publicans," he writes, "have a strange fancy for Indian kings, chiefs, and queens, thus bearing out Trinculo's assertion of the nation at large: 'When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian'" (p.713). While ableist its language, it also quite powerfully relays the deep desire of white conquerors and

61 The Signboard of Old London Shops by Sir Ambrose Heal (1947) 62 Bitters bottles were also made in shape of "Indian Queens" with some variations given the companies. For more on these glass bottles, see http://www.peachridgeglass.com/2012/09/why-do-we-call-the-bottles-the- indian-queen/

135 136 their relatives in England for the Indian, even it his/her death. I use the pronoun ‘it’ to refer to the term ‘Indian’ rather than a gender binary pronoun or ‘they/them’ following Kawash (1998) who uses ‘it’ in reference to the homeless body. She discusses the homeless body as a conception, as a signifier for what the homeless body does and achieves for power and domination, rather as people who are homeless. Likewise, the term ‘Indian’ here refers to a concept, in this case a colonial caricature, figure constructed by white settlers. This figure must remain primitive, pre-modern, and unable to enter settler modernity, and therefore, life itself.63 The figure of these Indians in their various forms, were often found in an amalgamation of other Orientalist and racialized figures such as those of the "son of Africa" and the "turbaned Turk" (Mayer, p.713). The description of the Queen with which I opened this chapter is not unique. There have been several versions of this image used as signs and advertisements, with some variations, such as making both the attendants Black, or Indigenous. In some instances, the Indian Queen has been painted bare-chested, as cannibalistic, as monstrous. I briefly refer to the metamorphoses of the Queen below. But, what is significant to acknowledge is that the Indian (as king, queen, princess or chief) has always caught the fancy, the imagination of Europeans and Americans. When I initially saw this image, I also had a momentary confusion about which Indian was being referred to here, and this confusion has a historical context. This confusion interests me and I pause it in to read for that which is being produced; the meanings that are generated in and through the cacophonies, through the chaos. In this chapter, I am theorizing the work of these imprecise associations, creative transfers of meaning and symbols, performative enactments that circulate and produce undifferentiated identities as they both express and constitute conquest of lands, commodification, and the consolidation of the European as colonizers. Lowe (2015) points out the intimacies between Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas forged at the site of Victorian households' fetish for colonial commodities produced by enslaved and colonized people around the globe. The calico gown of the Queen might have contained "indigo-dyed

63 In their explanation of resistance to the term ‘Indian,’ Cannon and Sunseri (2011, p. xvi) write: “Indigenous people became Indians under a legal classification that did not distinguish between their linguistic and cultural differences, or the multiplicity of Indigenous nations at the time.” Also see Firsting and Lasting, in which Jean O’Brien (2010), a White Earth Ojibwe scholar of history examines the strategies through which Indigenous peoples of New England were made into ‘Indians’ as a mode of being written out of existence in various white settler narratives.

137 designs --[which ]represents India, the West Indies (Caribbean), the southeastern North American colonies, or perhaps all three, areas where Britons had grown or were growing indigo on plantations" (Feeser, 2013, p.15-16). As Andrea Feeser notes, London's business districts "mixed and matched pictures of colored people as emblems of colored attire" (p.15). In her chapter titled, "Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections," Joanna De Groot (2006) notes that the "Indian Queen" became associated with marketing textiles and china goods, just like "blackamoors" became associated with sugar, tobacco, coffee and "Chinamen" with tea and groceries (p.187).64 All these figures, produced at the nexus of race, gender, capitalism, coloniality, and imperialism were exotic and yet frequently encountered and recognized images of colonized and enslaved people(s) on the streets, homes, and every day experiences of Europe and later, the America.65 As De Groot notes, “The influence and transmission of the imperial images used to sell products were not confined to those who bought or sold them, since they became part of a shared visual culture in the streets and media” (p.187). These figures also worked at translating the harsh colonial/imperial and racist encounters with variously colonized peoples into “picturesque and pleasing forms” (p.190). The sugar, the indigo, tea and cotton that European homes could not live without was drenched in blood of the people who were reduced to this mere exotic imagery. The "Indian" was simply everywhere. As Robert Stam and Ella Shohat (2012) note, "The figure of the Indian [of the New World] got caught up in controversies about religion, property, sovereignty, and culture" (p.7). In this chapter, however, while holding onto this "Indian," I want to draw attention to another figure seemingly from a different history, different spatio-temporal context that foreshadowed the (be)coming of the "Indian" of the New World. I want to introduce the figurative (and literal) encounters between the "Indians" of the New World and the Moors or Muslim population as facilitated by Europe.66 I open

64 Blackamoors were not always Muslim-identified Black people. They caught the imagination of Medieval European artists and there is a wide breadth of scholarship analyzing that body of work which I am not able to address in this paper. I also want to point out that according to several estimates, about 10-15% percent of the slaves brought to the New World were Muslims. 65 I use the term Europe here even before the idea of Europe was formed. As several scholars studying Europe have argued, there was no idea of a homogenous Europe until at least 1700. Even until early 18th century, only a minority elite Europeans used the term to self-identify. See Vanita Seth (2010) for a discussion on the emergence of the idea of Europe. 66 In referencing eight centuries of Muslim presence in medieval and early modern Europe, I am not trying to recuperate the figure of the Moor as a victim of Europe’s Christians. In fact, Tariq ibn Ziyad came to Spain as commander of the Umayyad Caliphate, and thus, as an invader. Without trying to claim any innocence for

138 this chapter with the figure of the Queen to make a point about how pervasive the presence of the "Indian" was. I want to reflect on the cacophonies of race, colonialism, and imperialism that underline the making of this figure. I want to think about how the ‘Indian’ offers an important site to think more deeply and expansively about interconnections between white settler colonialism in North America and other histories of violence including anti-Blackness, war against Muslims, and Medieval and Renaissance Orientalist circulations of India. In this article, I argue that the body of the Moor, Europe’s Muslim Other, provided a map of imprecise associations and caricatures that were then incoherently imprinted onto newly ‘discovered’ Indigenous peoples of the ‘New World.’ To understand the Moor- ‘Indian’ connection, however, we must first commit to a methodological creativity that insists on understanding the obscured role of Muslims in often taken-for-granted aspects of European colonial epistemology in its encounter with the ‘New World.’ Such a task demands that we disobey the linear progression of the colonial archive and its neat boundedness; it demands that we allow the unthought to be inhabited—to pause in the archive and think about that which has exceeded the ordinarily circulated and acceptable narratives about the objects we follow and the pasts we want to trace. There is a need to bring together seemingly discrepant figures, spatialities, and temporalities in order to (re)examine what we know and have yet to learn about entanglements of colonialism, capitalism, race, gender, and other social formations. I am particularly attentive to how the ‘Indian’ of Columbus was interpellated through Europe’s eight centuries of encounters with its Muslim Other. In order to make sense of the newly ‘discovered’ peoples of the Americas, Europeans dived into their archive of readily available, already known exotic (and monstrous) Others. There are shadows of the Moors in Columbus’s ‘Indians,’ as I argue below. In this chapter, I argue that there is a need to excavate the attendant figures, spaces, histories and temporalities that made the wide circulation of the Queen possible. Through holding onto the figure of the queen, I will make an attempt to rethink analyses of white settler colonialism in North America and place them within the context of other entangled histories presented through discrepant spatialities and temporalities in order to learn about what we know and have yet to examine about entanglements of colonialism, capitalism, race,

Muslims of Spain, all I want to highlight is the complexity and multiplicity of Europe’s Others and point out an important set of prior encounters and relations that preceded the ‘Discovery’ (read invasion) of the Americas.

139 caste and gender. I had come to my research study wanting to closely examine the workings of white settler colonialism in North America. Through studying the figure of the "Indian Queen" and the attendant historical traces I found, I began to think more deeply and expansively about how settler colonialism in North America is so enmeshed with other histories and violence(s) including that of anti-Blackness, war against Muslims in medieval Europe, and medieval and Renaissance Orientalist circulations of “India”. While these may appear as completely disconnected sites, my whole argument is that these are intricately connected in how the figure of the "Indian" of the New World was made sense of through these histories. I will closely examine the “Indianness” of the Indian Queen to argue that this figure was produced at the intersections of the four continents of Asia, Africa, North America, and Europe (Lowe). The Orientalism which underpinned Columbus’ notion of Indians was not only about ‘India’ –the faraway place of spices in imaginary of Europe of Middle Ages –but also closely tied to various caricatures of Muslims who lives amidst Europeans. The Muslims whom the Crusading Europe had confronted in wars in recent history only were the primary enemies of Europeans –represented through figures forged at the nexus of anti-Muslim and anti-Black hatred –and called by various names of Saracens, Black Saracens, Moors, and Blackamoors. Discussing the presence of Muslims in medieval Europe in relation to Columbus’ “Indian” is one of the primary contributions of this chapter because hitherto, the connections between the histories and attendant figures of Crusaders and colonialism of the Americas have usually remained obscure. There is a need to bring these figures, histories and spaces together to think about how anti-Muslim violence, anti-Blackness and anti- Indigeneity within the context of North America inform the colonial caricature of the “Indian” of the New World. Holding onto the Queen, therefore, allows me to examine unexpected affinities as well as think about differences between discourses of New World and Old World, American and Asian, ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ “Indians”. In this chapter, I situate the complex, dynamic, and transient figure of the Queen within the context of violence(s) produced through colonialism/’Discovery’ of the New World, stealing and enslavement of African peoples, Orientalism(s), Crusades, and imperialism. The image of the Queen in all its variations and shifts has been consistently present in European, and later on, in white settler American

140 representation of Indigenous peoples of the New World. I begin this chapter with briefly outlining how the shifts that can be tracked in imagery of the Queen are closely tied to phases of colonialism and conquest of Americas. The Queen freely circulated as the colonial caricature of actual Indigenous peoples. Afterwards, I look at some 17th century plays where the Indian Queen, donned on by white actresses and European queens of Stuart court make appearance. These plays re-inscribe the violent ideologies associated with colonized peoples of the Americas, but also with Blackness, Black people, and with what we today understand as India. The figure of the Indian Queen did indeed interpellate the four continents (Lowe). Before moving further, I want to briefly explain how I use the term "Europe" which I employ in my chapter without necessarily mobilizing it as a continent, and a social and political actor we understand it to be today. In her remarkable book titled, Europe’s Indians, Vanita Seth (2010) critiques Edward Said (1979) and other scholars for collapsing distinct spatial and temporal eras. She argues that for these scholars, “it is possible to speak of the West as an entity that extends itself back to antiquity, an entity that is malleable to all historical conditions” (p.21). The self-other binary, which, Said argues, is foundational to construction of knowledge about the Orient, is not a static and constant mode of ordering and structuring knowledge. Rather, the self-other binary was a “grammatical feature of colonial representations” (p.22, emphasis in original). The “self” or Europe in this case was not an already in/formed category.67 Europe is an idea, a historical construct and that Europe and Europeans were never natural, self-evident, immutable, or historically natural entities (Burke, 1980). While the idea of European community as a social and political formation was emerging under the rubric of Christianity in fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, nevertheless to speak of Europe as a coherent formation before the 1700s is to “recognize its appeal as limited to the vocabulary of a small elite” (p.28). According to historian Peter Burke, “if the first context in which people became aware of themselves as Europeans was that of being invaded by other cultures, the second was that of invading other cultures, in other words discovery and exploration” (p.25). I try to hold onto the idea of Europe in this article without trying to reproduce it as a "meta Europe," and without intending to relay it as more than an unstable, incoherent formation that was in the process of becoming a great colonial and imperial power in the time period of concern to this chapter.

67 For a detailed genealogy of Europe’s emergence ,see Peter Burke, “Did Europe exist before 1700?” 1980.

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The Queen as the Fourth Continent With the European discovery of the Americas, the 'Indian' increasingly came to represent the fourth part of the world map, to show a quadripartite division of the world. America, represented as the fourth continent besides Asia, Africa and Europe, was an allegorical representation of this 'new continent'.68 The notion of America as fourth continent of the ancient world comes from Martin Waldseemiiller who, in the Cosmographiae Introduction (1507), defined it a “fourth part” of the world. As John Gillies (2000) notes, 'New World' strongly implied an orbis alterius, that species of entirely separate human and animal creation posited in ancient philosophy and out- lawed by the Christian doctrine of the unity of creation” (p.188) and there was great interest taken in portraying it. The embodiment of the fourth continent by a gendered Indian figure went through several phases. E. McLung Fleming (1965) has argued that there were five stages in the allegorical representation of the New World: From 1575-1765, it was Indian Queen with “attributes of a Caribbean culture” (p.65). By 1783, the Queen shifted into daughter of Britannia as America continued to be not only the fourth continent but also the thirteen Atlantic seaboard colonies of Great Britain. Following that, until the first quarter of 19th century, this Indian Princess was given attributes of United States’ sovereignty and this third stage overlapped with the fourth where the Princess shifted into a Greek goddess. It was finally replaced by masculine figures of Brother Jonathan and Uncle Sam by late 18th century as personification of early American Republic (p.65). The Queen, represented with attributes of different kinds of Indigenous peoples of Americas, was represented in savagery (surrounded by ‘monstrosity’ of various animals and even a human head at her feet to represent cannibalism) and riches to keep reifying colonizers’ worldview of Americas as a place of monstrous wilderness, untapped resources and uncivilized, barely human and barely present inhabitants. However, these representations were not exceptional by any means. Allegorical representations of four continents through various beings were very popular by 18th century. 69

68 The other continents represented on the map at the time were Europe, Asia and Africa. 69 For more details on the shifts in the figure of the Indian Queen and Americas, see Corbeiller, Clare le (April 1961), “Miss America and Her Sisters: Personifications of the Four Parts of the World,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 19(8). See also, Fleming, E. McLung (1965), “The American Image as Indian Princess

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While the New World was represented with shifts and fissures as a deeply unstable figure by the end of the seventeenth century, what is more interesting for me is the fact that that the metamorphoses of the Queen were reflective of the broader conceptualization of the New World and were always systematic (and systemic). These images, produced at the nexus of both, horror and desire, the metamorphoses of the Queen into Princess –as a ward of the state and daughter of Britannia who was no longer as sovereign as the Queen, or as un- virginal and sexually independent –was part of domesticating her. These representations were contradictory and unstable. From having Classical Age portrayal of the Queen played by a British actress Anne Bracegirdle, popularly known to be virginal, and hence imagined as a potential partner in relationships of exchange, alliance and marriage, how did the image transmorph into Indian Princess, as a ward of the British Empire but also less sexual into eventual alteration as Indian women drawn with sagging breasts and exaggerated features implying they were monstrous and cannibalistic and finally into masculine figures that were of (indigenized) settlers (Gillies, 2000)? Bernadette Bucher (1981) explains that as colonialism became more aggressive, the bodies of settlers’ Indian became monstrous in picturesque depictions, “showing mutual incompatibility between the two peoples and a taboo of miscegenation and intercultural marriage” (p.102). As Gillies notes, these shifts indicated a process whereby the New World is first apprehended as both alter- and mundus-orbis (a compound of 'lands and peoples'), and next apprehended as ontologically idem (same), though in the sense of a teleological extension (old-new). This second stage itself evolves through two stages. The teleological vision of renewal begins by including 'lands and peoples', but ends by excluding 'peoples'. In the end only these are alter, but by this stage the land is supplied with new peoples (Europeans), and together they comprise another species of new world which can be less problematically viewed as an offshoot of the old one. (p.188)

As people of this ‘New World’ become less and less human, the more the Indianness of the Queen is capitalized on to sell goods. The Queen becomes a figure imbued with desires of

1765-1783 ,” Winterthur Portfolio, 2, pp.65-81.

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Europeans, but with no challenge posed to the control over their newly acquired (read stolen) territories. As I discuss below through analyzing court masques, the figure of the Indian Queen in fact worked at legitimizing settlers’ presence on stolen lands of the Americas.

The “Undifferentiated Indian” A question that can be legitimately asked is, why focus on “Indian,” a term of violence, a term misattributed to sovereign Indigenous peoples of a very old world which an inept white man claimed to have found only in late 15th century? Gerald Vizenor, the Anishinaabe scholar and fiction writer notes in his remarkable book, Manifest Manners (1999) that the term “indian” “insinuates the obvious simulation and ruse of colonial dominance” (p.vii). He further writes: “The simulation of the indian is the absence of real natives –the contrivance of the other in the course of dominance. Truly, natives are the stories of an imagic presence, and indians are the actual absence –the simulations of the tragic primitive” (p.vii, emphasis in original). The indian is a simulation, an Occidental creation of Columbus and his time that has stuck because racism against Indigenous peoples and the quest to establish white settlers as legitimate owners of (stolen) land has been ongoing since 1492. There is a long (colonial and racist) history and present of romanticizing Indigenous peoples of Americas and the term “Indian” captures that Orientalist romanticism with a people construed as barely human yet exotic, despised and yet desired at the same time. The Indian of Europe and later America are invented beings; they are representations of colonial inventions of Columbus and his progeny. The Indian Queen, in that sense, is as much of an Indian as any other caricatured and degraded representation, or rather, as Vizenor says, simulation of Indigenous peoples being killed by cowboys in Westerns or the Indian that gives structure and holds the logic of various institutions including fields of research and study like law, anthropology, sciences, sociology and education. The Indian, as an object of research, is continually portrayed as without any political, legal, civilizational and religious system of belief. It is mobilized to represent the dead Indian and further consolidate settlerness.70

70 I discuss the trope of the “dead Indian” in my next chapter where I discuss the photographs by Annu Matthew.

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This “Indian” has always fascinated Europe. Before the New World was seemingly discovered, the Indians whom Europeans wrote about were people from South Asia, Southeast Asia and even Africans. The figure of the Indian Queen constellates (if not collapse) Europe with Asia, Africa and the Americas. I am not seeking to unify the various colonized and racialized peoples under the term “Indian,” or present a genealogy of the term. What interests me is thinking about the productive work which this ‘misnomer’ or misattribution has been doing ever since Columbus’ first voyage when Indian became what Jonathan Gill Harris (2012), a Shakespearean scholar, characterizes as the “capacious, portable, and problematic term for diverse peoples around the globe” (p.1). It is, as Harris observes, “fair to say that area studies has tended to regard the signifier “Indian” as transparent or disposable, an insignificant placeholder for real peoples who are culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and geographically disparate, and therefore not bound by a complex global history of ‘Indians’” (p.2). And, as Stephanie Pratts (2005) argues, "these [varied] representations operate at a highly generalized level, invoking the traditional repertoire of the four continents' Indians rather than any specific reference to particular places or peoples" (p.15). The culprit is not only area studies but also other fields such as Sociology, Anthropology, Educational Studies that take the figure of the Indian as a given (Tuck & Yang, 2012; Simpson, 2011; Byrd, 2011). In his book, Framing ‘India,’ Shankar Raman (2002), a scholar of late medieval and early modern literature and culture, calls India of early European imaginary as the “final frontier” of the exotic and unknowable” (p.83). He argues that “’India’ or the East is less a place than a boundary, a symbolic site upon which to negotiate the contradictory impulses and energies that shaped Renaissance Europe” (p.83). Raman is not interested in India per se but about European discursive formations through whose framing India and the East emerged as objects of colonial knowledge and practice. The specificity of what lied at the ‘frontier’ was never important for in every case, it was an invention of colonizers. India and Indians were never about any historical or even geographical specificity. As Daniel Francis (2011), a historian and journalist, writes in his book, The Imaginary Indian: “There is no “correct” image of the Indian, or if there is I am not the person to be saying what it is” (p.6). While Francis’ analyses is in reference to European claims of discovery and its Indian of the New World, the argument can also be extended to people of India.

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In her study of relationship between English dramatic literature of the early modern period, English colonial conquests in Ireland, Virginia, and Bermuda, and the consequent literary, ideological, and material changes wrought in England and the colonies, Rebecca Ann Bach (2000) explicates the notion of “undifferentiated Indian,” who came from “an indeterminate space of pure otherness” (Harris, p.2). Bach’s book is focused on stage plays, court masques and civic pageants produced during Renaissance era through which the “Indian” was constructed as a possessive commodity. Along with various accessories and dresses, the exotic flora and fauna associated with these Indians made it difficult to differentiate between the New World Indians and those from Asia (and even Africa). Bach notes that unlike late 20th century representations that took whiteness as normative, 17th century Jacobian and Caroline masques and entertainments explicitly had to install whiteness by contrasting it with “native strangeness” (p.174). In this process, it was not important to distinguish between India and the Americas for both denoted pure otherness. For example, while the masques could be called “Virginian Princes,” their gold embroidery and ostrich feathers connect them with the East Indies, and the riches of the gold mine in the court spectacle link them to both the Spanish South American colonies and the East” (p.175). Furthermore, Their Indianness is equated with strangeness: to be Indian is to be a stranger, to be estranged. And it is also visually linked with darkness. The ‘Virginian Princess’ have olive skin and long black hair, and they ride with Moors. The black slaves that attend the masquers work ‘as figures for the exotic or foreign’ (Hall 227). But unlike the black slaves in English aristocrats’ portraits, these figures associate the masquers with darkness rather than emphasizing a masterful whiteness. The masque postulates a hierarchy of difference –‘Virginian Priests’ and ‘Moores’, …like Indian slaues’ –but the hierarchy works within a frame in which all these Indian and African populations are subordinated to what is being established as the normative whiteness of James and the English court” (p.175-6, emphasis in original).

Literary genre has shaped the production of desirable-even-if-monstrous Indians and European subjects with the former available for possession by the latter. These masques, therefore, offer an important site for studying the un-differentiatedness of the Indian. In the next few pages, I briefly discuss these plays/masques that can illuminate the contradictory and unstable and undifferentiated figure of the Indian. I only discuss a couple of examples in which the main protagonist was some variant of the Indian Queen played by a white actor.

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This will also help explain the obviousness of the racially variant Queen on the streets of London.

Playing “Indian” and Hailing the Four Continents One of the most recurring images of the "Indian Queen" is that of the late 17th century British theater actress, Anne Bracegirdle. She performed the role of Semernia, the “Indian Queen”, in Aphra Behn’s (1640-1689) play The Widow Ranter, or, the History of Bacon in Virginia (c.1689). Aphra Behn's play was based on Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 in Jamestown, Virginia. The material for her plays and her novel, Oroonoko for which she is most popular, was collected in her life growing up as a colonist in British colony of Surinam where she lived with the family of lieutenant of the colony (Pulsipher, 2004, p.42). While Widow Ranter did not receive as much attention as Behn’s other literary productions, Sara Eaton (2012) writes that “hers [Behn] is the first extant play to use a colony in America, James-town, Virginia, for its setting, and to focus the play’s action on colonial and the natives’ lives there” (p.235). My reason for referencing the play is primarily to examine how the “Indian Queen” was mobilized as a colonial caricature needed for consolidating colonial power in Virginia even if it is seemingly a critique of white settler colonial treatment of Indigenous peoples of Virginia. As such, I am not concerned with the whole historical context of the play even as I do point out the nuances where relevant. The play depicts the events of the Rebellion but is not necessarily an accurate biographical or historical account of Bacon’s politics or actions, but rather one penned by colonialists to show their vigour, control, and benevolence. For instance, in the play, Bacon’s character is friendly with the Indigenous peoples, represented by only one nation rather than multiple ones in real Virginia. The Bacon of the play has a long history of friendship with Cavarnio, the Indian king, and twelve years of passionate longing for Semernia, the Indian queen even as they battle over land.71 After Bacon kills the king and accidently kills the fleeing cross-dressed Semernia, he takes his own life while declaring, “I have too long surviv’d my Queen and Glory, those two bright Stars that influenc’d my Life are set to all Eternity” (cited in Eaton, p.237). This was unlike the real-life Bacon who died a

71 Aphra Behn could not handle the complexities of Indigenous nations that were in Virginia at the time of the Rebellion and therefore, reduces them to just one nation so that she and her hero in the play have an easier time handling ‘their Indians’.

147 less glamorous and non-heroic death from lice and flux, but who, like other ordinary white settlers, was also was extremely racist and anti-Indigenous. As Jenny Hale Pulsipher (2004) notes, “twice in the historical record he justified destruction of friendly as well as hostile tribes because, frankly, he found it impossible to tell the difference between them” (p.44). Moreover, as history shows, he pursued both friendly and hostile Indigenous peoples in his campaign, hunting down and killing even the colony’s allies, the Pamunkey Indians, some of whom Cockacoeske, the chief of Pamunkey, had pledged to Berkeley to assist the English against ‘hostile’ Indigenous people. However, the similarities between the two Bacons, as Pulsipher notes is that neither could actually differentiate between allies and enemy ‘Indians’ and killed both and both were cruel colonizers even if Behn’s Bacon appeared ‘softer’ thanks to her mobilizing his image as friendly with people he is killing, but also, due to forging some mythical love story between him and the Indian queen. Behn simplified the “conflict” –more aptly known as colonial violence—and softened the figure of her hero by surrounding him with loving conquered people who, as Pulsipher notes, appear in the play as “epitome of the noble savage then prominent in English literary and popular thought” (p.45). This simplifying does not mean, however, that the play shows some utopian world order. The play clearly depicts the corruption and rebellion in a colony whose governor is absent. In fact, as Heidi Hutner (2001) notes, because this play was written at a time as when the Stuart monarchy was collapsing and Behn herself a true loyalist was experiencing a crisis because of it, the play registers the “chaos and confusion of her times “ (p.92). So like the rebellion here too is one of settlers vying for more power and every bit as racist, colonial and cruel towards Indigenous peoples as that of the established government. Moreover, “the New World is portrayed as already fallen, already inaccessible, already inaccessible, already contaminated and contaminated by Whigs and greedy white colonialists. As she herself recognizes, Behn both exposes and participates in the corrupt discourses of colonialism and expansionism” (p.92). The British audience was more sympathetic to Indigenous peoples of the New World than actual white settler colonizers and to soften Bacon, a love interest was needed –the kind of noble savage who is truly honorable in the English sense of the word and would do anything for her colonizer/Master even as she fights his continuing encroachment upon the land. Anne Bracegirdle had already played Indian Queen twenty years before The Widow

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Ranter, in a play called The Indian Queen written by John Dryden and Richard Howard. In both plays, she played her Indian perfectly, as in, how the colonizers wanted their Indians. While Dryden’s play portrayed a more colonial heroic enterprise since it was written during the restoration of King Charles II to the throne, and Behn’s play was written during the demise of King James II’s rule (Hutner, p. 89), the trope of honorable Indians accompanied by the attendant of always available Indigenous women, especially as Queen who had control over territories, is always there. Here, my focus has been the Widow Ranter only but it is not surprising that playing Indian on stage (and in real life) was a colonial strategy of disappearing actual Indigenous peoples of the land (Deloria, 1998). The metaphor of woman-as-land in the seventeenth century, and of engulfing of Indigenous peoples in their caricatures as Indians played by white people needs attention. For instance, in The Widow Ranter, while Cavarnio lies dying from wounds inflicted by Bacon, he turns to his murderer and says, “I know youl’l --visit— your Fair Captive, sir, and tell her –oh—but Death prevents the rest” (cited in Eaton, p.241). The King acknowledges the love between his Queen and his colonizer and murderer, which can also be read as his accepting the final authority of his murderous colonizer. Similarly, the Queen too submits herself to Bacon even as she lies dying from the wounds inflicted by his sword. She declares her love for him throughout the play, and claims that “Ev’n [Bacon’s] threats have charms that please the heart” (cited in Eaton, p.239). This story undoubtedly plays along the lines of seventeenth century interpretations of stories of various Indigenous princesses and queens such as Matoaka/Pocahontas and Cockacoeske, the powerful woman leader of Pamunkey nation whose people were brutalized by Bacon for stealing their land (Heidi, p.11). Semernia declares her love for Bacon, and claims to have been in love with him since she was 12, the same age as when Matoaka/Pocahontas apparently fell in love with her kidnapper and colonizer, John Smith. Semernia wants to marry Bacon, despite being married to "Indian King" Cavernio, just like Pocahontas previous marriage to an Indigenous man, Kocoum. And, similar to Cockacoeske, Semernia too runs and hides in a jungle to escape a white man, but in Behn's play, unlike the real queen who was never in love with Bacon, never surrendered to him, and, in fact, went to on wield more power after his death, Semernia fulfills white settler fantasy, and chose to surrender and be killed thanks to her unsuccessful escape from her passion for the white murderer and plunderer. As Bacon

149 comes nearer, one of Semernia's soldiers tells her that Bacon "demands the Queen with such a voice, and Eyes so Fierce and Angry, he kills us with his Looks" (V.i.198—199). When Bacon attacks Semernia and her soldiers, she cries, "Hold! Hold, I do Command ye . . . — hold thy commanding Hand, and do not kill me, who wou'd not hurt thee to regain my Kingdom" (V.i.204-206). In this instance, Semernia's passive resistance leads to her death and the destruction of her people. She is pleased to fall by Bacon's hand: as she dies, she tells Bacon that his killing her is "The noblest office of a Gallant Friend, thou'st sav'd my Honour, and has given me Death" (cited in Hutner, 101 ). Unlike the real Queen, Semernia wilfully falls victim to Bacon's sword, seeing Bacon's violent attack as "redemptive". The motif of the Indian Queen as a civilized, genteel, in-love with her murderous and savagely violent white colonizer who has stolen land and life of her people is very common in settler literature (Green, 1975). As Rayna Green notes, Matoaka/Pocahontas “sets up a model for Indian-White relations that persists –long after most Indians and Anglos ceased to have face-to-face relationships” (p.700-1). The images of these Indian princesses and queens, portrayed as loyal and loving toward John Smith, her white settler kidnapper in real life, was really popular and much needed for assuaging the white settler guilt of colonizers. If the colonized is willing and loving towards the colonizer, he can play benevolent. In that sense, the trope of Matoaka/Pocahontas and its variant versions of queens and princesses that were so common actually offer/ed a pedagogy for both, colonizers and colonials regarding how their Indian needs to be moulded into.72 It is through brutal rape of Indigenous women through which colonial violence, always working through sexual violence, was consolidated. As Green writes, “Traditional American ballads like ‘Jonathan Smith’ retold the thrilling story; schoolbook histories included it in the first pages of every text; nineteenth century commercial products like cigars, perfume and even flour used Pocahontas' name as come-on” (p.700). We know that these images were circulated in 17th and 18 centuries as well. The completely tamed/colonized Queen even appeared as the very representation of the early American state on its warships and clippers.

72Albert Memmi draws the distinction between colonizer and colonial. The latter, he argues, “A colonial,” he states, “is a European living in a colony but having no privileges, whose living conditions are not higher than those of a colonized person of equivalent economic and social status.” (p.10)

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In Playing Indian, Dakota historian Philip Deloria (1998) has argued that playing Indian allowed the white settlers or so-called revolutionaries an important position as a critic of the empire. Deloria argues: Throughout this history, I have suggested that whenever white Americans have confronted crises of identity, some of them have inevitably turned to Indians. What might it mean to be not-British? The revolutionaries found a compelling array of ideas in Indianness. What did mean to be American? What did mean to be modern? To be authentic? Using furs and feathers, headbands and hair, generations of white Americans have, at many levels and with varying degrees of intent, meet meanings and, with them, Identities. (p.156)

This can be seen in Behn's play as well where Bracegirdle's donning on feathers and some version of vague Indianness allows her to critique the poor and depraved condition of Indigenous peoples of Virginia as oppressed (but not resisting outside the script of colonizers), but also like with all white settler tales, the doom of her people is blamed onto her(self). Eminent postcolonial studies scholar, Albert Memmi (1965) distinguishes between colonizer who refuses and colonizer who accepts. Memmi calls the former a “colonial”. He lives in the colony, accrues settler privileges but since he is marginalized in terms or class or otherwise, imagines himself as a natural ally of colonized. But Memmi argues that there is no distinction between an elite colonizer and this category of colonizer where colonialism is concerned. As Memmi explains, “The colonial does not exist, because it is not up to the European in the colonies to remain a colonial, even if he had so intended. Whether he expressly wishes it or not, he is received as a privileged person by the institutions, customs and people” (p.17). All colonizers benefit from colonialism and harbour no desire of showing solidarity with colonized for decolonization on their terms. The play Indian Queen also offers only this kind of critique of brutuality of colonizers where in the end, all the white settler anxiety and guilt can then be projected onto Semernia; even that of her own death and destruction of her peoples. What often remains unchallenged in this 1492 epistemology is the very Indianness of the "Indian Queen". Deloria argues that the Indian of white man could be both “civilized and indigenous” (p.157) so that both the Indian king and the queen are pacifist (read civilized) enough to be friends with their white colonizers and indigenous, as in they fight for their land, but English civility or modernity wins over their ‘weak’ indigeneity. As Eaton notes regarding Semernia, “Her honor, her royalties to her husband and tribe, and her love for Bacon render her a

151 doubly inscribed ‘victim,’ her ‘Indianness’ (in Margot Hendrick’s words) ‘concealed by the rhetoric of conventionalized version of English femininity’ –the figure of the gentlewoman” (p. 239). The queen who lost to her passion for a white man colonizer, apparently lead her people to destruction while the white ‘rebel’ Bacon remains free from fault even as colonialism is critiqued. It is the good white settler’s colonial logic of critiquing colonialism without ever finding any perpetrators of violence in the story.

The ‘Indian’ Indian As I have already noted Europe had multiple Indians, spread out across the world. These Indians were not limited to Indigenous peoples of the New World as we already know. The conflations between Indians of India and of the New World were complex and dynamic. The geographically and lexically variant Indian of Europeans could not be articulated in any singular narrative. The word Indian comes from the Greek name for River Indus, which is one of the longest rivers in the world, situated in present day Sindh, Pakistan. The term “Indian” interpellated South, Southeast Asia, Ethiopians, and even as late as 18th century, the Maori of New Zealand and other Polynesian people to show for Europe’s Indian (Harris, 1- 2). Green notes that “it was the mythical scene, not the accuracy of detail that moved artists” (p.700) who designed their Indians on stage, in literature, and in advertisements for various products. The Indian along with their attendant geographies of ‘Ethiopia,’ ‘Indians’ and the Americas became objects of colonial knowledge. As Raman notes, “’India’ does not, consequently, so much denote a geographical space as name this complex relationship between desire, knowledge, and subjectivity. It figures the limit of desire in a double sense: as the ultimate goal to which desire is directed as well as the boundary through which desire constitutes itself” (p.84). Without denying the materiality of the people and spaces it consolidated under one misattribution, it is important to note that the Indian was a purely European, and later, American creation. The point about undifferentiated Indian is not to argue that there were simply no specificities, but to understand how these different Indians were mobilized as always caricatures of the actual people they were. Whereas on one hand, white English actor Anne Bracegirdle plays the “Indian Queen,” in various plays written by Behn and Dryden, on the other hand was a Stuart Queen, wife of Charles I, Henrietta Maria, who appeared before a

152 courtly public as Indamora, sovereign of the Hindu kingdom of Narsinga, on a Shrove Tuesday in 1635. Henrietta Maria was playing “Indian Queen” in William D’Avenant’s The Temple of Love. Amrita Sen (2012) notes that while the name ‘Indamora’ evokes a more general love for India and by extension all things (East and West Indian), ‘Narsinga’ suggested no vague, mythical geography, but was a pseudonym for the Hindu province of Vijaynagara in Southern India. Writing the ‘Indian’ in early modern England was often contradictory, oscillating between abstraction and specificity, metaphor and fact. (p.210-11)73

The queen’s Shrove-tide masque begins with Divine Poesy, the Secretary of Nature, alerting the spirits of ancient Greek poets to the imminent arrival of Indamora, Queen of Narsinga who is re-establishing the Temple of Chaste Love. While they prepare for the new temple, the anti-masque depicts grotto-dwelling magicians who attempt to corrupt a group of noble Persian youths, “Platonic lovers” who had initially set out to find the(ir) Indian queen. Fortunately, ladies of Indamora’s train arrive in time, dispelling all evil magic. The queen of Narsinga herself makes an entrance at long last, with her troop of singing Indian priests –the ancient Brachmani. As D’Avenant writes: AS chearefull [sic] as the Mornings light, Comes Indamora from above, To guide those Lovers that want sight, To see and know what they should love.

As order returns to court, the lead masquers dancing with assembled courtiers rejoice at Indamora’s chaste love for her Royal Hero, the Stuart king. Here, the Indianness of the Stuart queen who has true, deep love for her British Master-king worked at making her (and by extension her land) into a possession of the English. Moreover, as Sen notes, the fact that the temple was in England instead of India works at transforming the bodies of the Queen and her travelers into other commodities such as indigo, calicoes, silks, cotton and spices that were continually coming in via trade routes from India. India itself, represented through the figure of Indamora, becomes openly available to Europe. While the Indians were produced at the nexus of Europe’s imaginary of the three

73 The Hindu kingdom of Vijaynagara of 14-17th century is in present-day Karnataka state of India.

153 continents, the singing Brachmans (or Brahmins) in D’Avenant’s play gestures towards a more ethnographic particularity. In her excellent anti-colonial reading of Queen Henrietta Maria’s performance as Indamora, Sen notes that the “exotic flora, flauna, and singing Brachmani priests—intersected with other court ideologies, especially Caroline Neoplatonism, transforming conventional approaches to beauty and virtue” (p.211). These masques presented a whole range of ‘irregular Others’. For instance, on the stage for this play sat a Indian on a whitish Elephant, his legges shortning towards the necke of the beast, his tire and bases of severall coloured feathers, representing the Indian Monarchy: On the other side an Asiatique in the habit of an Indian borderer, riding on a Camell; his Turbant and Coat differing from that of the Turkes, figured for the Asian Monarchy: over these hung sheild like Compartiments: In that over the Indian was painted a Sunne rising, and in the other an halfe Moone; these had for finishing the Capitall of a great pillaster, which served as a ground to sticke them of, and bore up a large freeze or border with a Coronice. In this over the Indian lay the figure of an old man, with a long white haire and beard, representing the flood Tigris; on his head a wreath of Canes and Seage, and leaning upon a great Vrne, out of which runne water, by him in an extravagant posture stood a Tyger. (Davenant, 1872)

The “strangeness” of the flora and fauna in figure of the camel and tiger, animals hitherto not common in Europe, signified what Paula Findlen (2002) calls, “a mythologized conquest of nature” (p.302). These animals of “monstrous aspect, native to the horrid woods of India,” (Stahler, 1998, p.179) informed ideas about India and Indians through conflation of the exotic and the barbaric. As Jyotsna Singh (1996) notes, “from their earliest encounters with non-European natives, going as far back as antiquity, Europeans have described their travels in terms of discovering marvels and monstrosities” (1996, p. 2). Commodified, the body of Indamora, accompanied by her singing Brahmins, ‘exotic’ beats such as tigers and elephants presented a strangeness, a spectacle that let people at the Stuart Court know that the king was also the master of nature. Imperial (racial) power was always bound with desire for domination and Findlen traces this ideology back to the days of the Crusades. She notes that faith placed “a high premium on a different set of unusual objects”. She further notes: By the thirteenth century the Crusades had created a lively trade in relics, but also in natural objects that conformed to ancient accounts of the marvels of the East. The spoils of Christian conquest included a kind of mythologized conquest of nature: Egyptian crocodiles, ostrich eggs, alleged unicorn’s horns, griffin’s

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claws, and other examples of exotic nature, real and imagined began to appear in churches and treasuries throughout western Europe…In an era fascinated wit reports of omens and prodigies that signified God’s will in a world of divided faith, they were fully integrated into the cabinets of curiosities. (p.302)

Mastery over nature, over the “curious,” the “strange” objects and people all went hand in hand to define white man’s conquest. Colonialism, conquest and the pursuit of natural knowledge were not separate. This is clearly demonstrated not only through the strange accompanying Indamora’s appearance in Stuart court, but also in my previous discussion of varying representations in early middle ages of the Indian Queen as the fourth continent. The figure of the Brahmin accompanying the Indian queen is important. This time, the Indian Queen was Hindu and the accompaniment by Brahmin singers point out that she was certainly a Brahmin or some other upper caste Hindu. Caste and Indianness became conflated even if Henrietta Maria herself might not have carefully thought through this. The Indian priests had forever occupied an important place in European imagination. Sen illuminates the deep connections between Brahminism and Neoplatonism which dominated the Stuart courts, but what I want to point out here is Sen’s argument that the figure of the Brahmin or of the Hindu was constructed as genteel and honourable in opposition to barbaric Muslims whom the Europeans had encountered as their enemies since early 8th century. As she notes, “While Islamic empires, such as those of the Ottomans or the Moguls, might have seemed formidable to a European imagination, the (supposedly) peace-loving, ritualistic Hindus formed a less threatening third space” (p.215). The figure of the Brahmin allowed Europeans to romanticize their other Indians in a way which the reality of several centuries of encounter with powerful Muslim dynasties couldn’t afford them. Nabil Matar (1998), Samuel Chew (1965), and Richmond Barbour (2003) among others have argued that on English stage, Islam was represented as demonic antagonistic opposite of Christianity, and those who converted to it had to be destroyed. The Indianness of the Queen in this instance was therefore also constructed in opposition to the figure of the Moor/Turk/Saracen who could never be desirable for the Europeans.

Black “Indian Queen”

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Almost 30 years before Henrietta Maria entered Whitehall as Indamora, on January 6, 1605, Stuart Queen Anne, wife of King James, entered Whitehall with 12 of her ladies, all in blackface. She was performing in a play, The Masque of Blackness, written at her request, by Ben Johnson who joined hands with Inigo Jones, one of the most important 17th century English architects who designed the stage for both, The Masque of Blackness and The Indian Queen. Anne and her 12 ladies came dressed as daughters of River Niger. The play dramatizes River Niger’s search of a solution that can restore his now-black daughters to whiteness. And upon arriving on the British shoes, he is informed by Oceanus that the great British monarch posses the power “to blanch an Ethiop and revive a corpse” (Jonson, cited in Barthelemy, p.21). During the play, while the ladies enter discussing among themselves about how Black is beautiful they claim that what is ‘true’ is that ultimately light-skinned (or white) people are the best. According to a disapproving contemporary observer, these ladies appeared dressed “too light and curtisan-like, with their Faces and Arms up to the Elbows…painted black” (letter of Dudley Carleton, cited in Ferguson, p.483). The blackfaced Queen and her ladies entering was called “a very loathsome sight” and that the banquet “was so furiously assaulted, that down went table and tressels before one bit was touched” (Inigo Jones, cited in Strong, 1967, p.6). The masque of Blackness was the first recorded use of blackening to actually darken the skin of the royal maskers (Barthelemy, 1987, p.20). As Anthony Gerard Barthelemy (1987), an American professor of English, writes: Since masques were celebrations that sanctioned behaviour outside the usual boundaries of decorum, Moors, as well as other exotics such as Turks, Russians, or mythological figures, served well as symbols of the extravagance of these events. By masking as a recognizable Other, as one who is beyond the boundaries off course protocols, National custom, and civil and religious law, maskers toos placed themselves outside the demands of custom and protocol. That is, the maskers inscribed a circle within society in which unusual behaviour was temporarily expected and accepted… it is not surprising, then, that even polite maskers became known for their risqué conversation and overt flirtations. Such behaviour was, after all, the expected behavior of lustful Moors bloody Turks, and godless Saracens. (p.20)

There is an explicit understanding in The Masque of Blackness that to be black is to be an Other –both, spiritually and physically. But nobody wants to be Black, including the daughters of Niger. However, this ‘risqué’ behaviour was not without any thought. While

156 both Anne and Henrietta Maria presented a version of the Indian Queen that were implicated in racial violence, only one went blackface. Unlike Anne, Henrietta Maria did not put on a blackface even though in European imaginary, India and “Ethiop” (which was circulated to represent all of Africa) were often drawn black. Donning on blackface was irreconcilable with the Neoplatonic scheme of the play and the dancing Brahmins accompanying Henerietta Maria (Sen, p.219). Even before race was available to thought as a marker of (deathly) difference, “tropes of blackness drew their primary force from the dualism of good and evil and its association with African cultures and peoples” (Hall, 1995, 6). As Sophia Rose Arjana (2015), a scholar of Islamic Studies, notes in her book, Muslims in the Western Imagination, “As early as fifth century, black skin functioned as a symbol of the devil and other menacing religious frights. Dark skin was understood as a theological consequence of sin. Gregory the Great claimed that Ethiopia was a sign of the fall of mankind, and other Christian writers followed suit, tying dark skin to sin and perdition” (p.28). Where whiteness was desired, blackness was constructed as color of the damned. In addition to being thought as sinful, Barthelemy argues that Blackness was also equated with bestiality (p.4). Around 1526, Leo Africanus, born as Al-Hassan Ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Zayyati, wrote the singular most authoritative (antiblack) source of Africa for Europeans until the age of modern explorations.74 His work is also thought to have influenced Shakespeare and Europeans from all walks of life. He noted, “The Negros likewise lead a beastly kinde of life, being vtterly [sic] destitute of the vse [sic] od reason, of dexteritie [sic] of wit, and of all artes [sic]” (cited in Barthelemy, p.5). Whereas race was not a concept that was available to thought at that point in time in medieval vocabulary, bodily difference –including the colour and tone of skin –played a role in “formation of identity and in monster-making” (Arjana, p.28).75 It is, as Kim Hall notes, “the significance of blackness as a troping of race” rather than actual features or even presence of Black people in Europe that was important (p.14). Blackness and race, therefore, have always been more about power and culture than actual biological differences even if their signs were read on people’s bodies (p.6). It’s not that race was not available to though in early modern England, but that a broad spectrum of discourses and practices of difference represented that bodily difference. Loomba and Burton (2007)

74 He was a Muslim man born in Granada, Spain around 1494. His work was also the principal source of information for Europeans about Islam for 400 years. 75 I will come back to this point later on in this chapter when I discuss Crusades.

157 argue that “from the outset, thinking about difference has involved a variety of ideas regarding animality, environmentalism, kinship, religion, and strangeness” (p.3). Because Blackness functioned as monstrous and as a sign of evil, Indamora could not put on a blackface because blackness foreclosed the space for conversion (to Christianity) and spiritual reclamation. As I have noted above too, playing Black or Muslim were both lethal for the character which she was playing. However, Henrietta Maria still appears in an elaborate headdress inspired in part by Renaissance painter and engraver, Cesare Vecellio’s 1598 painting of costume design entitled, “African girl in the Indies” so that while the Queen appears ‘racially neutral,’ she is exotic and yet benign and familiar (Orgel and Strong, 1973). So, while Henrietta Maria does not don on a blackface, (anti)blackness was a silent presence (through the design) which enabled the performance of Indamora formed in Europe at the nexus of Asia, Africa and the Americas.

1492 and “Indian"-Moor-European Encounters In his essay, “Splitting the Earth,” Cherokee scholar of religion, Jace Weaver (2005) writes:

“Salam Alaykum.” As preposterous as it might seem, those may be the first words Natives ever heard uttered by Christopher Columbus. Although, at this late date, we will never be able to know with certainty, the notion is not as odd as it appears at first blush…The charts that Columbus took on his voyage was drafted by Moorish cartographers. In fact, his entire enterprise was only possible because Moors had been forced off the Iberian Peninsula after years of bloody warfare. (p.1)

It is common knowledge that by the time Columbus set sail to look for India, there was a large population of Muslims, known as Moors and Moriscos76 (the derogatory name used for Muslims who were coerced into converting to Christianity) in Spain. While Weaver’s essay is not about examining this relationship between Europe’s encounters with Muslims and Columbus’ voyage that led to the ‘Discovery’ of land already densely populated by tens of

76 L.P. Harvey (2005) also draws our attention to the fact that the term Morisco is not a word which Muslims used for themselves. It's a sub-Christian identity with which Muslims did not agree and it was definitely a term identifying Muslim converts in the 16th century. Moreover, Harvey notes that the term Morisco came into common use only after 1550 AD. Until then, the more common term used to refer to Muslim converts was "nuevos cristianos convertidos de moros," that is, "new converts from Moors". See chapter 1 of Harvey.

158 thousands of nations indigenous to the ‘New World,’ I want to hold onto the connections among the Moors, white colonizing Europeans and the “Indians" Columbus gave birth to as colonial caricatures of hundreds of sovereign Indigenous nations living in the Americas for tens of thousands of years already. Rather than attempting to map out a linear or clearly drawn out history of these encounters, I have a very limited but crucial goal: That of introducing the figure of the Muslim/Moor in discussions of history of conquest of the New World. Muslims had already lived in Europe for eight centuries by the end of the 15th century. Anouar Majid, a leading scholar of Islam in the West notes that "without Islam, there would be no European identity to speak of...Even before the Renaissance, especially during the fifteenth century, when the Moor emerged as the foil against which Europe would define itself, the vexed relationship (or confrontation) with Islam had been the primordial element in the constitution of an unconscious form of Europeanness" (p.4). For Majid, the term Moor is a metonym for Otherness, as emblematic of all exclusions. This Moor was the "archetypical Other of Europe before 1492" (p.5, emphasis in original). For Majid, the Moor did not need to be Muslim. Moor was any and all people who were the expellable Others of European purity but also, as he notes, all the world's non-European people and religions were "stamped with the taint of Muslim impurity" (p.5). Engaging with what Michael Neill (1998) calls the "notorious indeterminacy" of the term Moor is difficult because it was an umbrella term for so many non-European Others. As Neill notes, "insofar as it was a term of racial description, it could refer quite specifically to the Berber-Arab people of the part of North Africa then rather vaguely dominated as 'Morocco,' 'Mauritania,' or 'Barbary'; or it could be used to embrace the inhabitants of the whole North African littoral ; or it might be extended to refer to Africans generally (whether 'white,' 'black,' or 'tawny' Moors); or, by an even more promiscuous extension, it might be applied (like 'Indian') to almost any darker-skinned peoples --even, on occasion, those of the New World" (p.364). The term Moor was also used to describe the Muslims on the Indian Subcontinent under the East India Company, and also used for Arab traders and Indigenous Malays (p.365). As Neill further notes, Moor could be about "color, religion, or a vague amalgam of the two" (p.365). For Majid, Moors could also be the Jews of 15th century Europe. For my purposes here, while accepting this broad and expansive historical context in which the term Moor made appearances, I still mobilize the

159 term as primarily referring to Muslims in medieval and Renaissance Europe.

Producing the Muslim Enemy The year 1492 was apocalyptical and the beginning of genocide and dispossession for Indigenous peoples of the Americas Columbus found by chance, but it was also the year of loss, death, and mourning for Muslims in Europe. It was the year when the last Muslim kingdom in Al-Andalus, or Muslim Spain, in present day Southern Spain, was defeated by a Christian army, thus bringing the end of what is known as the cultural golden age of Islam. Muslims had lived in the Al-Andalus since 711 and their reign finally ended in 1492 when Abu Abdellah Mohammed XI, more commonly known as Boabdil in Western history, surrendered the keys to Granada and his magnificent palace of Alhambra, thus giving the allusion that the Reconquista was complete (or at least it was portrayed as complete according to European historical sources). On 6th January 1492, -the Catholic monarchs, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castille who were partnered through marriage, made their entry into Granada (Elliott, 2002). Nine centuries after Muslims came to Spain, they would be mass-expelled so that L.P. Harvey (2005) could assert that Muslims currently living in Spain bear no genealogical traces to Muslims who lived there from 8th to 17th century (p.1). 77 After the fall of Muslim Granada, the religious (and, as Deborah Root (1988) notes, social and even genealogical) category of infidel came into being through Christian conquerors' affirmation of religious and political sovereignty which marked the Muslims and Jews as outsiders to the communities they had belonged to for generations. The religious categorization of infidel, as Root examines, was extended to socio-cultural levels as religion, culture and law all became entangled in the way heresy came to function. The shift from infidel to heretic came with the forced conversion of Muslims and Jews to Christianity, followed by the last phase, impenitente negativo, or expulsion of these 'heretics' (Root,

77 As Unangax feminist scholar Eve Tuck reminded me in personal communication, no genocide or expulsion is ever complete. Such accounts often do not take into account the agency of the colonized, of the targeted people. For example, Karoline P. Cook’s (2016) explains how Moriscos found ways to travel and settle in the Americas in 16th and 17th centuries despite Spanish Crown’s strict rules allowing only those who could prove they had been Catholic for at least three generations. So I reference Harvey here only to emphasize the massive scale of the expulsion rather than to assert, as he does, that the expulsion of Muslims from Spain was indeed ever total or complete.

160 p.119). Infidels, now as heretics and internal to the Christian community began to be seen as even more dangerous for Christian sovereignty. The practice of marking these unwilling converts as heretic gave rise to a whole "inquisitorial bureaucracy" which encouraged the "Old Christians" to police the new converts. Heresy thus made hitherto private religious practices public where everyday common and banal things such as speaking Arabic, using henna, veiling, not drinking wine, sitting on the floor rather than at the table while eating, or eating couscous by hands, all came to be used as evidence of heresy, and subject to law (p.126). In Spain, the juridical correlation between heresy and hitherto traditional customs (of Moors but also of Old Christians) were worked out on a case-by-case level by the Inquisition's lawyers rather than the Church. By the third and last phase of the Inquisition, Moriscos, as animalistic and infectious beings, came to be defined more in terms of their genealogy and bloodline than cultural or religious beliefs and their performance. They began to be referred to in bestial terms, as things that "increase and multiply like evil weeds" and as diseases and vermin (Root, p.126-31). From religious, there was a shift to defining the difference in terms of "ethnic" or bodily difference. As Root writes: The construction of royal and religious sovereignty in Spain was precisely the production and interpretation of cultural and ethnic differences as something to be delineated and controlled, as well as the institution of communal recognition of those differences. This recognition ultimately produced and relied upon categories of blood: we see a movement from "They eat couscous because they are Moriscos" to "They are dangerous and heretical because they are Moriscos and eat couscous" to, finally, "They are Moriscos," which becomes all that needs to be said to indicate radical difference, now defined as the absence of limpieza de sangre, or "purity of blood." (p.131)

The Catholic Church began issuing certificates of blood purity to those who were originally (and hence 'authentically') Christians to mark them as untainted (from the influences of Judaism and Islam). There is thus a shift from religious Others to racial Others --those Others whose blood is not pure regardless of their religiosity, and therefore, can never be trusted even when they professed their allegiance to the same Church and sovereign. Once the colonized people of the Americas began to be converted to Christianity, making them the ‘co-religionists’ of their European colonizers and Masters, legitimizing colonialism under the guise of divine law for ruling the ‘heathens’ became increasingly difficult (Thobani, 2007). The solution was secularization of colonial laws which then

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‘enabled colonial hierarchies to be justified on the basis of scientific theories of race and on the basis of the cultural practices and rituals of colonized populations’ (p. 44). But the precursor to such transitions can be found in Christian Spain’s confrontation with Moriscos. Here we see the beginnings of marking the Christian converts as Other through bloodline, which went hand-in-hand with decisions about who could be subjects of Spain and Portugal and who must be killed or expelled. It is, therefore, not a stretch to claim that the discourse of blood purity signalled a first shift to more secular formations of race in modernity. Arjana holds onto the figure of Muslim monsters because it was the most recurring image she finds in her research on Muslims in medieval Europe. The monstrosity of Muslims, she observes, was accompanied by that of Jews and Africans. Without suggesting that the self-other binary was ubiquitous, it is fair to say that there was a way of registering hierarchical difference, by representing non-Christians, especially "Ethiopians" (used to refer to all Africans) as non-human or hybrid, male and painted with black skin. At a time when neither the idea of whiteness as understood in modernity existed nor did Europe exist as a coherent enclosed construct, the language of identity was strongly structured by the Church and “the medieval Christian Church’s practices of exclusion and punitive discipline as a matter of theological doctrine resulted in the emergence of Muslim monsters and other fantastic creatures” (p.23). Blue and purple colours were repeatedly used to show black skin. “As early as the fifth century, black skin functions as a symbol of the devil and other menacing religious frights, ” notes Arjana (p.28). Dark skin, as she further notes, was understood as a “theological consequence of sin” (p.28). For her, nowhere is the monstrosity and otherness captured better than in images of Black Saracens.78 In this figure the fantastical notions attached to Africans and Muslims were combined. In fact, it was more elaborate than that. Arjana writes: the monster that encapsulated all three of these entities –Saracen, Jew, and black African –is the Black Saracen. This is a hybrid monster, an African (implicated as Satan by his dark skin), Jewish (depicted executing a saint), and Muslim (by

78 The term Saracen was used to refer to Arabs even before the advent of Islam. The term Moor was mostly used to refer to Berbers, Muslims and Africans living in Spain and parts of Italy during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Barthelemy notes that because these words –Saracens, Moors, Turks, Oriental, and Indian –were used so imprecisely, they are difficult to trace in terms of their origins, but all meant to signify non-Christian people. Saracens, Moors and Turks were all used to refer to Muslims and all Arabs during this period. Also, please see Akbari's text for a detailed discussion on system of knowledge and categories specific to medieval Orientalism.

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the moniker “Saracen” as well as by the turban he often wears). With his black, purple, or brown skin, large lips, and curly hair, this monster is clearly meant to represent an Ethiopian, that is, a non-Egyptian African. Satan often masqueraded as a serpent, a dragon, or a human with blackened skin. The Black Saracen is but one of the many forms that Satan took, a symbol of evil walking the earth” (p.49)

Since Blackness itself was understood to occur as a consequence of sin, its origins were also placed in mythological origins. For instance, each of the three continents were associated with the three sons of Noah. Shem associated with Asia, Ham with Africa, and Japheth with Europe. While such distributions were not consistent, “many medieval texts do baldly assert the standard distribution of the three continents among the sons of Noah,” and in fact, on medieval maps the three continents are interchangeably referred to by names of Noah’s sons (Akbari, 2009, p.40). Of the three sons, the descendants of Ham understood to be closest to sun were also seen as having the weakest of spirit. As Suzanne Conklin Akbari (2009), drawing upon a rather illustrative of colorism passage by Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ thirteenth century account of divisions of the three continents observes, “The visible signs of cowardice and boldness are dark skin and white skin, for the heat of the sun makes men ‘blacke of face,’ while coldness is the ‘modir of whiteness’” (p.42). Both Arjana and Akbari note in their study of medieval texts that religious conversion of the Saracen was accompanied by bodily metamorphosis, ranging from a dramatic black-white color change to more subtle physiological shifts. Moriscos came to be defined in ways that presented their bodies as monstrous, as weeds that were out of control, as diseases from which Spain needed to be cleansed. The problem was in them, in their very bodies and blood, making them incapable of true allegiance to both the Church and the Christian state. The figure of the Saracen was produced at the nexus of religion and geography. As Akbari notes, “irascible Saracen was as much a product of the Oriental climate that was natural to him as of the deviant ‘law of Muhammad to which he was obedient” (p.3). Saracens, depicted as monstrous, were located in distant lands and frightening landscapes forgotten by God (Akbari; Arjana). Like the figure of the Jew, the Saracen was thought to differ from his Western Christian counterpart not only in religious terms but also in racial or ethnic terms. Of course, at that point race was not mobilized in the same way we understand it to work today. Drawing upon theorizing of race by a number of scholars of medieval studies, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2001) notes that

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race is a phenomenon of multiple category overlap rather than a distinctly reifiable or measurable “thing” (that is, race has no independent ontology), and that race is therefore always written on and produced through the body (race is nonetheless biological). These conclusions, it is worth noting, are wholly consonant with recent work in contemporary critical race theory. (p.116)

Race, as we understand it today, was not yet made available to thought. But what seems to hold is that there were epistemic conditions in place that enabled the thinking and representing of difference. Seth argues that reference to “proto-racism” in the antiquity or medieval preoccupation with lineage as well as the biblical tale of Ham as beginning of racial thinking in the modern period “risks imposing a particularly modern form of reasoning to bear on pre-modern and early modern traditions of thought” (4). So without arguing that race today worked the same way as it did it medieval ages, what can be claimed is that Europe’s interactions with its colonial ‘non-West’ and its Muslim others did inform the particular traditions of reasoning that allowed for racial thinking to emerge in later centuries.

Moors and "Indians" and Crusades and Conquest Whereas little was known about inhabitants of the New World in Europe following the so-called Discovery, Europeans knew more intimately (about) the Muslims who had lived amidst them for centuries. They were the infidels and the heretics through whom the figure of the so-called savage "Indian" of the New World was made sense of. I am not arguing that both were same but that these internal and external infidel Others in the form of Moors, Indians, and Ethiopians (referring to all Black people) were brought into constant encounters as Europe came to be, and as it began to get a sense of itself as a colonizing world power with continuously expanding frontiers. All these people were part of Europe's internal or external Others who had to be contained, defeated, colonized, killed or expelled. And often, one set of Others came to stand in for the Other. For example, in a 1570 pageant in Cuzco, Peru, As Viceroy Francisco de Toledo makes his formal entrance into the city, he is greeted with elaborate pageantry. In the main square, once site of the Inca festivals, a Moorish castle and an enchanted wood have been erected for the celebration. The mock-Moors emerge from the castle to capture young women at a fountain, only to be pursued by valiant Christian knights, who engage them in fierce mock combat. The conquistadors play ‘‘themselves." The Moors are

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played by the Indians. (Account by Stephen Clissold, cited in Fuchs, 2003, p.1, emphasis added).

As Barbara Fuchs discusses in her remarkable study of New World and European identities, the "Islamic bogeyman" of the Old World is enacted by the "Indian" of the New World (p.1), showing not only how deep Europe's fascination with its Moors and newly discovered "Indians" was but also how they were, to some degree, interchangeable. This is not to argue that there wasn't any heterogeneity to Europe's discourse of difference. But this gives us a clue on how the figure of the "Indian" was imbued with all the anxieties of Spaniards (and later other Europeans) coming to the New World. The Moors were also the exotic Others of Europe, especially at a time when they were being expelled from Spain. The ("almost certainly baptized Christian" (Fuchs, p.1)) playing Moor was therefore nothing out of the ordinary. Casting the conquest of America as a reiteration of the reconquista was important for Spanish identity. It allowed the Spaniards to exercise an illusion, a fantasy, that indeed reconquista had happened and was successful in Spain while in reality Moriscos were rebelling as late as late-16th century Spain (p.8). Enacting a scene from the Old World in the New was important to "encourage Spanish efforts at expansion and cultural homogenization on both the American and the Mediterranean fronts" (p.8). Therefore, we can say that these stories of Moors and "Indians" of the New World are not as unfamiliar or unconnected with each other as the colonial and settler archives present to us. In his book, Imperial Spain, JH Elliott (1963, 2002) writes:

The conquest of Granada and the discovery of America represented at once an end and a beginning. While the fall of Granada brought to an end the Reconquista of Spanish territory, it also opened a new phase in Castile's long crusade against the Moor – a phase in which the Christian banners were borne across the straits and planted on the inhospitable shores of Africa. The discovery of the New World also marked the opening of a new phase – the great epoch of overseas colonization – but at the same time it was a natural culmination of a dynamic and expansionist period in Castilian history which had begun long before. Both reconquest and discovery, which seemed miraculous events to contemporary Spaniards, were in reality a logical outcome of the traditions and aspirations of an earlier age, on which the seal of success was now firmly placed. This success helped to perpetuate at home, and project overseas, the ideals, the values and the institutions of medieval Castile.

The cleansing of Muslims from Europe and expansion of colonial missions went hand in

165 hand. The voyage Columbus undertook was part of the same Crusades that had a Muslim enemy and resulted in the beginning of their expulsion from Europe at the dawn of the 17th century. It was the "intense religious excitement" at the fall of Granada which gave these conquistadors the motivation to set sail on imperial missions. Seven months after Ferdinand and Isabella marched into Granada, Columbus, funded by these same Catholic monarchs, set sail to look for the Indies, and we know that he landed in the Caribbean and died believing it was India. Majid notes that Columbus took with him Luis de Torres, a Jewish person who spoke Arabic, the "imperial language of high culture" at the time, so that they could converse with the Grand Khan of Cathay he expected to find on his voyage (p.29). This introduced Arabic to the Americas as Weaver points out above. As Elliott notes, Columbus' voyage was a "thank-offering and an act of renewed dedication by Castile to the still unfinished task of war against the infidels" (p.61). The conquistadores of the New World were the same men or from the same Christian families who had just rid Spain of Muslims and Jews, Europe's 'internal others'. In late 16th century, when plans were being drawn out to get rid of the Moriscos from Iberian Peninsula, various but all cruel options such as massacring them all, castrating the male Moriscos, drowning them at the sea were considered (Lea, 1901). One such option, as Henry Charles Lea notes, was shipping the Moriscos of Valencia to "fisheries of Newfoundland, under the guard of soldiers, who should receive grants of land and allotments of vassals, as did the conquistadores in the Indies" (p.301). The New World, as the land of savages, was already noted as an option for deporting the Muslims to. There were also other such connections, such as the one among England, Newfoundland and Christian and Muslim lands in Africa beginning mid-16th century (Matar, 1999, p.83). Britons fished in Newfoundland and then sailed to the Mediterranean to sell their harvest before returning home. Nabil Matar's (1999) remarkable book, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery presents a new paradigm for envisioning Britons’ encounter with the “Other” during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, and postulates a triangular relationship between Britons, North Africa and the Americas during the period of the Renaissance. Drawing upon a variety of writings including legal, travel, religious, and literary works, he argues that Britons were not only traveling to a Roanoke, Virginia, the Somer Islands and

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Plymouth, but that more Britons at that time were traveling to the Levant and North Africa and living there than in the New World. While they were crossing the Atlantic, more Europeans were apparently crossing the Mediterranean as well. Matar sheds new light on the emergence and the evolution of the Orientalist discourse about Islam that established the ideological context in which the colonization of Muslim lands took place, and analyzes the dynamics of Muslim representation that identified Muslims with Native Americans. Matar writes: Finding themselves operating within the Europe-North Africa-North America triangle, the English turned to the example of Spaniards, who had pushed their reconquista of the fifteenth century into a holy war of occupation of North Africa in the sixteenth century, while pursuing the colonization of the Americas…The Spaniards had partly defined their national identity through their encounter with the Moors and then the American natives. Because they had been well-informed about the Muslims and their history, if only because they had been fighting them for centuries, once they began the conquest of America they applied their constructions of Muslim Otherness on the American Indians. Although Amerigo Vespucci at the end of the fifteenth century was not inclined to compare the Indians with either the Jews or the Moors –they were far worse than these two groups –subsequent Spanish writers did not hesitate to link the "Moors" and the "Saracens" with the Americans, as can be seen in the writings of Da Verrazano, whose work was available to English readers in Hakluyt. Joseph d’Acosta compared the nomadic life of the Central Plains Indians with the "wilde Moores of Barbarie called Alarbes," while de Coronado repeatedly allied the Indian with the Turk in his account of his expedition of 1541 and 1542. (p.98)79

Matar argues that both Muslims (as Turks, Moors and/or Saracens) and “Indians” (of Americas) were constantly in the imagination of the English (and other Europeans). He notes that as the conquest of Americas was enlarging Christendom in the West, the thrust of the Ottomans was diminishing it in the East. So, for example, Thomas More, a Renaissance

79 Matar notes that Muslims were demonized because they were feared as supreme political and military power, especially the Ottomans, and it was because of that fear rather than any empirical evidence that they were demonized. I am very critical of the civilizational (religious, political and socio-economic) superiority which Matar seems to grant Muslims in relation to Indigenous peoples of Americas. While he does understand that Indigenous peoples of Americas were also demonized, his critique is still imbued with the colonial logic that native peoples of the New World were indeed defeatable, morally weak and conquerable people, unlike the Muslims. Nevertheless, I draw upon Matar’s text because it is still a remarkable analysis of British understanding of their Others comprising of Muslims and the ‘New World’ peoples and for holding onto Europe’s westward and eastward movements in his framework. His study is important in that it examines how it was the body of the Moor which provided a map of caricatures to then be imprinted on the newly discovered Indigenous peoples.

167 philosopher, humanist and author of Utopia, argued for dispossessing and subduing Indigenous peoples of the Americas but two decades later, while awaiting his execution, he was worried about the success of Ottomans in conquering parts of the Christian Europe (Matar, p.8-9). It is important to note that it was during the period of the Crusades that Europe developed extensive protocols related to colonizing the lands of people they knew as non- Christians and therefore recognized as not fully human like themselves. The four crusades spanning eleventh to late thirteenth centuries made it necessary for Christian Europe to develop extensive and systematic legal protocols on colonization of lands of non-Christians. As the historian Robert Bartlett (1993) has shown, the practices, grammar/vocabulary, law, and cultures of conquest were constitutive of the expansion and consolidation of Latin Christianity throughout Southern Italy and Sicily, the Iberian peninsula, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, the Baltic, and the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, as he notes, the outward expansion of Europe allowed the Crusaders to anticipate an "expansionary future" and develop an "expansionary mentality" (p.90). This expansionary future and mentality allowed Latin Christendom to see their conquests as a "process with a future," (p.91) with anticipations of expanding the frontiers of Europe to all 'habitable' lands. Bartlett illustrates this well with the following: A strong awareness of the conquest as a rupture naturally implied the image of a time before the conquest, before the arrival of the conqueror, when the land had other possessors and occupants. This consciousness of dispossessed precursors is reflected in the use in charters of such phrases as “in the time of the Irish” in Ireland, “in the time of the Moors” and “in the time of the Saracens” in Spain or “in the time of the Greeks” in Venetian Crete. On at least one dizzying occasion, the phrase “in the time of the Saracens” was used in a prospective grant: after its conquest from the Muslims, the count of Barcelona was to hold the city of Denia (south of Valencia) “with all its appurtenances and with all that demesne that the Saracens might have in the time of the Saracens”. Here the men who drafted the charter not only looked to the future but saw themselves in the future looking back at the past –which was, of course, their own present. (p.95)

Europe learned and developed protocols related to colonialism from Crusades raged against the Muslim Others in an effort to win back the Holy Land. These Crusades, often relegated by students of settler colonial studies as something that happened even before the conquest of the New World and therefore as not important, actually laid the ground work for later

168 conquests that produced the world order as we know and recognize it today. As the notable Lumbee legal scholar Robert A. Williams Jr. notes, there are numerous Church documents linking the Crusades of 11th to 13th centuries to conquests and genocide in the Renaissance period of 'discovery'. Williams gives example of Pope Innocent IV of 13th century who was the first medieval legal theorist who systematically addressed questions that came from contact between the Crusaders and the Saracens from non-Christian lands, and his work, among work of others writing on these questions during the Crusades, inspired numerous legal theorists who wrote on protocols of colonization of the New World during the Renaissance Age of Discovery and colonial conquest (Williams, p.44). According to Pope Innocent, "If the infidels do not obey, they ought to be compelled by the secular arm and war may be declared against them by the pope and not by anybody else” (cited in Williams, p.14). The Church's missionaries were to accompany these Crusading secular armies into infidel lands, and even when Columbus set sail, even though there were no missionaries on his vessel, one of his goals was to spread Christianity to the Indies. Yves Winter writes that "According to Bartlett, medieval Europe developed not only an “expansionary mentality” but an entire “terminology and rhetoric of expansionary violence” that celebrates the heroism and mythologizes the violence and brutality of conquest. Most importantly, the conquerors—whether it was the Norman conquerors of Sicily or the crusaders in the eastern Mediterranean—derived their political rights and authority directly and explicitly from the fact of conquest" (emphasis in original).80 The conquerors and settlers of Europe engaged with questions related to its exact legal significance, and these expansionary incursions, cruelties and anxieties are what would come towards these conquerors manifold after 1492. It was from these Crusades that Europe, as the originator of colonialism and the so-called discoverer of the New World and establisher of trans-Atlantic slavery that created a whole race of Blacks out of stolen Africans on stolen lands, derived its notion of "frontierless jurisdiction"(Williams, 1983) that could then be extended to the ends of the medieval Europeans' world and beyond. These connections are historical, material, institutional, and familial with people also related to each other through marriage and ancestry, so that the "conquerors of Mexico knew the problem of the Mudejars [and] the planters of Virginia had already been planters of

80Yves Winter. http://www.politicalconcepts.org/issue1/conquest/

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Ireland" (Bartlett, p.313). The Moors, the Jews, the Africans, the 'Indians', all stood as Europe's enemy in its quest to expand its frontiers. I am not making an overarching or ahistorical claim that these were the same kind of enemies or even same kind of human (or non-human) beings for Europe. My attention to these connections is not supposed to take away from the range of violence(s) that were specific to various colonial missions and settlements. White settler colonialism in the Americas was not the same as the violence invested in expulsion of Muslims from Spain. What I am drawing to attention here is the fact that those European Christians who wrote the colonial script of the ‘New World’ and trans- Atlantic slavery came from a society that was already a colonizing one. Conquest has never been not about land and other resources, whether it was the Crusades, the expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula, or much later invasions of Africa and Asia in the name of freedom and democracy. Thus, Europe's crusading, conquistador and settler cultures and practices are all intimately tied and inspired by the same ideas of European and Christian superiority that made it confront the Saracens and later the Moors of Iberian Peninsula. Placing the white settler of the New World as progeny of the Crusader of Latin Europe also poses a challenge to scholars who want to conceptualize white settler colonialism as something novel or a completely different kind of colonialism. Conquest has never been not about the land and other resources, whether it was the Crusades, the expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula, and other invasions in Africa and Asia in the name of freedom and democracy.

Which Orient? In the sections above, I have shown how for Europeans of the medieval world, “Indians” and Moors were people they encountered in the same lifetime or era, and not as unconnected from each other’s lives as modern organization of the archives would have us believe. Medieval ideas of the Indian (of India) were also shaped by regular encounters with Europe’s internal Others, that is, its Muslims. And these ideas of the Oriental Other (formed at the nexus of both, remote encounters with Indians circulated through fantastical tales, and Muslims inside Europe) also tailored European invaders’ conception of the Indigenous peoples they met in the Americas in late 15th century. Discussing the use of the term “Indian” in “American Indian” as a misnomer, Byrd (2011) writes:

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The question about where Columbus thought he was when he reached land is not important necessarily—the reality here is that the ‘new world’ Columbus entered in 1492 had already been settled for tens of thousands of years. What is important is that the unquestioning dismissal of the term ‘Indian’ when it is used to signify indigenous peoples in the Americas at some level breaks modern US imperialism away from the legacy established by Columbus. There was violence embedded in the naming. And slavery. And genocide. It is today a marker of that legacy. Clarifying the use of ‘Indian’ and ‘Indies’ in the old world and new suggest that these words were not merely a misnaming or a factual error on the part of a deluded latecomer. They already involved and evoked the narratives of Orientalism that were circulating by the time Columbus set sail. It is an ‘Orientalism’ transplanted and remapped onto the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and it carries with it all the discursive attempts to control and to narrate the place of peoples into an already established world. (p.72-3)

Byrd’s argument that the Indian Columbus found was produced through Orientalist ideas already in circulation at the time is important. The figures and histories under the metonym of ‘Indian,’ as Byrd notes, were ‘flexible and indiscriminant,’ and ‘signified non-Western or anything that was “East’’ (p.73). Just like the Moor was a referent for everything expellable from European purity and referred to a vast number of people, ‘Indian’ too was a fluid categorization of Europe’s Others. Inspired by Seth’s reminder about Michel Foucault’s argument that knowledge is situated within historically located epistemic traditions, I want to ask what implications did the antagonistic presence of Moors for centuries have on how Europeans understood the ‘Orient’ and its heterogeneous ‘Indians’? As Seth (p. 12) notes, “confronting the “newness” of the New World did not shake the foundations of Renaissance epistemology. Rather, the Americas were simply woven into the lining of existing knowledge.” The ‘New World’ was decoded and made malleable through knowing the Moors, one of Europe’s internal (always expellable) Others whose presence was mediated through biblical scripture and other ancient texts. It is equally important to remind ourselves, as Seth does, that the self-Other is a particular "grammatical feature of colonial representations" (p.22). Race was not available to thought in medieval Europe in the same way as we understand it today, and I have been careful in not asserting that there is a trans- historicity to race. I have only tried to make a very small claim that religious difference mattered and as Arjana, cited above, has argued, it often took form of bodily difference. The binaries of the East/West were not solidified in the medieval era. Akbari argues that medieval Orientalism was not the same as the modern one charted by Edward Said in his

171 now-classic book, Orientalism (1979) which studies European representation of its eastern Others produced after 1750. Medieval notions of the “East” or the “Orient,” she argues, were very different, and shaped by a “very specific discourse of religious alterity centered on the relationship to Christianity to Islam” (p.11). This difference was also manifested in form of bodily diversity and this "diversity included among its ranks wild men and women, ghosts, witches, and a complex array of divine prodigies and portents that came in the form of human monstrosities" (Seth, p.176). The Orient was not simply about geography like we understand it today. Even the maps were not set like contemporary ones; for example, the "east" appeared at the top rather than "north", and was understood as closest to the sun. The Orient of medieval Europe "was the place of origins and of mankind's beginning; it was also, however, a place of enigma and mystery, including strange marvels and monstrous chimeras, peculiarities generated by the extraordinary climate" (p.3). The "history of Orientalism," according to Robert Bartlett (2001, p.46) begins with this geography-climate determinism. The Saracen, for medieval Europe, was also a product of "Oriental climate" and deviant and devious. His bodily diversity was understood to be an extension of his "inward spiritual deviancy" (Akbari, p.4). My intent here is not to claim that Said was simply wrong, or even to critique Said’s brilliant and truly ground-breaking book, but indeed to pause and think about the ahistoric overreach, temporal transcendence, and circulation of his arguments, which, of course, is not necessarily his doing. In “Traveling Theory,” one of Said’s most influential essays on literary theory, he argues that “theories develop in response to specific historical and social reasons, but when they move from their points of origin, the power and rebelliousness attached to them dissipates as they become domesticated, dehistoricized, and assimilated (often by an academic orthodoxy) into their new location” (195). The “transplantation, transference, circulation, and commerce of theories and ideas” (Said, p.196) need to be carefully studied so that scholar do not reproduce the imprecise associations and ‘creative’ transfer of meanings and symbols that constitute the transit and violence of empire. Theoretical formulations are connected to real historical circumstances and Said urges us to exercise our critical consciousness which he defines as a “sort of spatial sense, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory” to examine how we use certain sets of theories. He further notes:

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The critical consciousness is awareness of the differences between situations, awareness too of the fact that no system or theory exhausts the situation out of which it emerges or to which it is transported. And, above all, critical consciousness is awareness of the resistances to the theory, reactions to it elicited by those concrete experiences or interpretations with which it is in conflict. Indeed I would go as far as saying that it is the critic’s job to provide resistance to theory, to open it up toward historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and interests, to point up those concrete instances drawn from everyday reality that lie outside or just beyond the interpretive area necessarily designated in advance and thereafter circumscribed by every theory. (p.211)

Said’s Orientalism, as we know, is based in a particular historical time of high imperialism post 1750. As Barbour (2003) also argues, “to project his [Said’s] findings backward, to read precolonial ethnography as if its rhetoric bespoke European dominance of the world, or its defensive tropes necessarily foretold aggressive expansion, is anachronistic” (p.3). Lowe (1991) agrees with these critiques of the ways in which Orientalism as an idea and Said’s text are mobilized. In her study comparing and contrasting British and French attitudes toward different Orients from the eighteenth century to the present, Lowe challenges the “assumption that orientalism monolithically constructs the Orient as the Other of the Occident” (p.ix). She argues that “orientalism consists of an uneven matrix of orientalist situations across different cultural and historical sites” and that “each of these orientalisms is internally complex and unstable” (p.5). While Lowe’s study is also concerned with modern iterations of Orientalizing, her critiques hold for my purpose here because I have argued above that it was the figure of the Moor and a different logic of Orientalism that was more immediate to Columbus’ context. As my discussion of Indians foreshadowed by the figure of the Moor shows, there was no readily available or coherent Orientalism that was simply lifted and mapped onto the new “Indians” on whose lands Columbus arrived. Commenting on Said’s text, Akbari notes that it is important to focus on the “relationship of religious and geographical alterity, and on the ways in which the discourse of Islamic religious difference both reinforced and was reinforced by the discourse of bodily, ethnic Oriental difference” (p.11-12). It cannot plainly be assumed that the Orientalism of 15th century was mapped onto Indigenous peoples of Americas because the story of encounter of English, Spanish and other Europeans with Muslim was different than what happened in encounters with Indigenous peoples. For

173 example, the Christian Spaniards had lived with Muslims for centuries and knew them intimately as their internal Others before they encountered the "Indians" of the New World. For the English, Muslims were unknown and they made sense of them primarily in relation to their encounters with "Indians" of the New World. Where English settlers 'went native' and "played Indian" (Deloria), a great many always 'went Moor'/"turned Turk": "Robert Marcum, who lived among the Indians, came to be known by his Indian name “Moutapass” in the same way that Richard Clarke, for instance, who joined the Muslims, was known as Jafar" (Matar, p.95). The Orientalist and colonialist obsessions with the "dying Indian" also had a counterpart: Europeans playing Turk who was understood as taking over Christian lands. I note this here only to further point out how complicated the Orientalism of medieval Europe (and Americas) was and what this means for how racial distinctions and hierarchies have been consolidated through intersecting processes of colonization, war, enslavement, Orientalism, and European and American imperialisms.

Conclusion The theatricality of Columbus’ ‘errancy’ is not simply about one man's mistake, or even just a historical fact. Rather, 1492 and Columbus' voyage gave birth to a whole new epistemology of the Human. This epistemology of seeing the world is very limited and limiting in terms of affording a life and futurity to non-Europeans, to those who remain colonized, racialized, and enslaved (Wynter, 1992). 1492 ushered in a genre of human that was first and foremost articulated in terms of race even as race was, in the contemporary sense, unavailable to thought at the time. Challenging the 1492 epistemology through which our lives and deaths continue to be structured requires that we keep critiquing and denaturalizing the order of knowledge production which has been presented to us as the only possibility through which we can trace the worth of our lives, and imagine (the lack of) a future. Such a task also requires examining the colonial western archives as sites of knowledge production and not merely of knowledge retrieval (Stoler, 2002). Lowe (2015) also warns us against treating archives as "stable, transparent collection of facts" (p.4). She encourages us to pay attention to how knowledge is produced and organized by treating the archives and subsequent narrative histories as sites through which the "forgetting of violent encounter is naturalized" (p.2). Contextualizing my intervention through the figure of the

174

"Indian Queen," I have attempted to treat 1492 not only as a year that marked the beginning of violent, colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and expanded the business of stealing African people, but also as a year that had eight centuries of past marked by the making of Muslims as Europe's infidel Other. 1492 is a year of collisions --a year that brought not only the Europeans into encounter with inhabitants of the New World, but also the centuries old enemy of the former in the form of Muslims. I want to introduce a more expansive set of relations for thinking about white settler colonialism and the figure of the “Indian,” and bring Muslims of the Old World into a constitutive understanding of conquest of the New World. This drawing out of connections recognize how “Indian” interpellates the four continents but also other histories and figures produced through violence that are not necessarily seen as co-ordinates for studying antiblackness and white settler colonialism. Such readings would allow us to hold onto all structures of violence in our critiques so that we can make a case for how Islamophobia and white settler colonialism in North America must be held together in our analysis. Such an analysis would ask scholars like me who critique Islamophobia to not continually erase the presence of Black Muslims. These complex and historical readings are urgently needed in our current moment. Reading for the multiplicity of the logics informing "Indian Queen" offers an alternative vernacular of anticoloniality for thinking about the "complex dynamics of colonial discourses that exist horizontally among histories of oppression and inform continued complicities as historical narratives vie for ascendancy as the primary and originary oppression within lands shaped by competing histories of slavery, colonialism, arrival, and indigeneity" (Byrd, p.xxxvi). Through holding onto a reading of power that is distributed (or fought for) horizontally among differently racialized and colonized peoples (Byrd), I attempted to engage with the Queen as a practice of confronting the modalities through which Otherness is (re)produced. For me, reading the Queen as an “act of confrontation” (Da Silva, 2015) is an anticolonial intervention that refuses to represent the Other in all its reductiveness which makes it available to the spectator or the reader for devouring whole.

Chapter V

Complicating the Tale of “Two Indians”: Mapping ‘South Asian’ Complicity in White Settler Colonialism Along the Axis of Caste and Anti-Blackness

Introduction I am writing this chapter a week after my return from the 2014 Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) meeting held in San Francisco. One of the most notable parts of the trip, however, was an event that was not officially part of the conference but attended by several of us. It was the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour, hosted by very passionate activist/community historians living in Berkeley.81 Through visits to some landmark sites of South Asian history, stories and powerful performances and poetry reading by the community historian-guides, this tour maps over 100 years of radical histories of South Asians in the Bay Area. It travels from anti-colonial organizing by the Ghadarites to post 9/11 anti-racist and anti-xenophobic resistance movements of desis.82 While the entire tour was very informative, and taught me so much about my own histories, a particular pedagogical moment came when I approached one of the historian-guides about the question of land we were on. "Whose land is it," I asked? "I am not sure what you mean". "I mean who are the Indigenous peoples on whose lands we are on?" She replied, "This area has more of a history of Black Panther party”. "Wait until the end of the tour and see if you still have the same question," she said. I did. And I still did not receive an answer. Of course I wasn’t only asking for names of the Indigenous nations whose lands we were on. I was trying to find out if they knew of any histories of interactions among South Asians and Indigenous peoples in that particular area.

81 For more about the tour, please see http://www.berkeleysouthasian.org/ 82 Desi is a term used/embraced by North Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to refer to ourselves in diaspora. The word desi comes from desh, meaning country. Often this term is invoked out of solidarity against whiteness and racism.

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I open my chapter with this anecdote not to mark the tour or those genuinely inspiring historian-guides as more complicit in white settler colonialism or particularly evasive about the question, histories and presents of Indigenous peoples' struggles than those of us racialized and immigrant people who think about it and write about it. I begin with this anecdote because it is not an isolated incident, mistake or simply an oversight. There is a long history of South Asians here in North America who have been great anti-colonial revolutionaries, Ghadarites, resisters, fighters against imperial powers, and allies in all struggles against oppressions, but histories of encounters with Indigenous peoples of North America have not been pervasively documented or part of conversations in spaces I expect them to appear in.83 This lack of analysis was quite apparent among South Asian scholars who constituted a very small group of faculty and graduate students at the Conference.84 At the roundtable for South Asian Studies, titled, "The pasts, presents and futures of South Asian American Studies," where South Asian scholars working in different fields and sites were invited to talk about their scholarship, once again questions of land and Indigeneity were absent in all the discussions on struggles of past, present and future of South Asian Studies and people in America, even when, and rightly so, intimate relations and solidarities between South Asian Americans and African-Americans were discussed. My question about the place of South Asians within white settler colonial context in relation to the land and Indigenous peoples at the end of the panel were addressed by one panelist who asked me if I have read this one South Asian scholar who draws connections between Guantanamo Bay and Fort Marion to argue that the latter space of violence against Indigenous peoples of white settler colonies set a precedent for these spaces of torture against people of colour today.85 In fact, only four panels at the Conference facilitated any discussions of the ongoing white settler colonial context by any of the panelists, including the panel by me and my two Canadian racialized immigrant-identified co-panelists. My concern is not simply that

83 Nayan Shah (2011),Kamala Nayar’s (2012) and some other exceptions are there. My point is that serious documentation of different kinds of historical encounters between South Asians and Indigenous peoples needs to continue happening. 84 On the politics of placing of South Asian studies and scholars at the AAAS, see Shilpa Dave et. al.'s article, "De-privileging positions: Indian-Americans, South-Asian Americans, and the Politics of Asian American Studies," Journal of Asian American Studies, 3 (1), 67-100. 85 The work being referred to here is a chapter by Manu Vimalassery (2013), titled, “Antecedents of Imperial incarceration: Fort Marion to Guantanamo,” (350-374) In The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (Eds.) Bald, Vivek, Chatterji, Miabi, Reddy, Susan, & Vimalassary, Manu.

177 indigeneity here was not ‘included,’ but that the terms of talking about belonging and fighting for justice in a white settler colonial nation-state needs a radical rethinking that centers Indigeneity. To continue with the discussion above, in this chapter, I examine a part of photographic series called An "Indian" from India (2001-07) by Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, an Indian-American identified photographer based in Rhode Island, NY. Matthew, an Indian Syrian Christian, was born in England, raised in India, and is now a Professor of Arts (Photography) at Rhode Island. Her exhibitions in North America, Europe and Asia have been written about in numerous online and print "Indian"-American diaspora magazines and newspapers, and have received patronage from around the world. I treat An Indian from India as an important site of inquiry to raise questions about complicity of non-Black people of colour in particular South Asians, in processes of white settler colonialism. I consider my discussion to be in conversation with Matthew’s work, but also other scholars, artists and activists of colour, all those of us who are invested in (un)learning our place as non-Black people of colour in white settler colonial context(s) in particular. There are two "Indians" juxtaposed in Matthew’s sepia coloured photographic series. In her interview with an online magazine for photography, Matthew (2015) states: “Through my portfolio of self-portraits paired with portraits from the 19th century, I join hands with the Native Americans to reverse the gaze and to expand the viewer’s assumptions, definition and stereotypes of who is different” (emphasis added). This metaphorical joining of hands between two Indians with markedly different historical trajectories and presents happens because she wants to “draw parallels between the imaging of Indians and the imaging of American Indians.” She employs vintage colonial photographs by 19th and 20th century photographers such as Edward S. Curtis, John N. Coate, Frank Rinehart among others, and pairs them with those of her own mimicry of the poses of Indigenous subjects. Several scholars of postcolonial studies such as Edward Said (1978, 1993), Malek Alloula (1986) and Bernard Cohn (1996) have noted that colonial authority has been enforced not only through military, economic and legal means, but significantly through various technologies of knowledge production in which colonial and imperial cultural photography has played an integral role in (re) producing the colonial and racial Other in their ‘savagery’ in order to legitimize colonizers’ narratives of gently (or not so gently)

178 assisting the colonized into (colonial) modernity, and in fact, to save them from themselves. In case of North America, these colonial photographs were an important Empire-building and consolidating site, reflective of white settler anxiety about the disappearing "Indian," and the quest for pure authentic "Indian" who had to be out in teepees while wearing headdresses for the photographer to capture them as dying “real” (reel) "Indians" while simultaneously legitimizing the white settlers as modern settler citizen subjects who had to keep doing the hard work of managing the geopolitics and biopolitics of settler nation’s life. As the Comanche cultural critic, Paul Chaat Smith argues, most of what settler North Americans know about their "Indians" comes from photographs: "if one machine [the repeating pistol] nearly wiped us out ... another gave us immortality ... Without movies, the Comanches would be an obscure chapter in Texas history. With them, we live forever" (Smith, cited in Francis, 2011, p. 5). This living forever, however, happens only through circulation as dead or dying "Indian". There was a quest to possess them in their death even as they were continually being killed off and dispossessed from their lands. There was a need for the authentic "Indian" even as there was a refusal to see them as surviving and resilient peoples. As Dakota historian, Philip J. Deloria (1998) argues, "The ethnographer saw Indians as primal, distant Others; their premodern character could, nonetheless, be possessed intellectually through ethnographic detail and perceptually through the photograph" (p. 119). As Marcia Crosby (1991), the Tsimshian-Haida art historian also notes: [The] interest in First Nations people by Western civilization is not such a recent phenomenon: it dates back hundreds of years, and has been manifest in many ways: collecting and displaying "Indian" objects and collecting and displaying "Indians" as objects or human specimens, constructing pseudo-Indians in literature and the visual arts. This interest extended to dominating or colonizing First Nations people, our cultural images and our land, as well as salvaging, preserving and reinterpreting material fragments of a supposedly dying native culture for Western "art and culture" collections.

The settler obsession with dying "Indian" is the groundwork needed for the process of settling. The imaginary "Indian" of settlers is always dying because thriving Indigenous peoples in real life constantly remind the settler that the project of colonialism is failing. This figure of the dying "Indian" consistently inflects all settler ventures including but not limited to law, politics, arts and education. In her book, Firsting and Lasting, Jean O’Brien (2010), a White Earth Ojibwe scholar of history examines the strategies through which Indigenous

179 peoples of New England were written out of existence in various white settler narratives. She argues that imagining "Indians" as extinct took insurmountable conviction and work by white settlers: Even though non-Indians had Indian neighbors throughout the region, and even when they acknowledged that these neighbors were of Indian descent, they still denied that they were authentic Indians. A toxic brew of racial thinking—steeped in their understanding of history and culture—led them to deny the Indianness of Indians. (p. xv)

Mired in ideas of 19th century racism dictated along the lines of blood purity and racial superiority of Europeans, Indigenous peoples who had been inter-marrying with settlers and lived among them were disavowed as impure and inauthentic, and hence not really "Indian" enough to challenge settler narratives of dying "Indian". O’Brien brilliantly points out the strategy of firsting through which political and cultural settler narratives emplaced these white settlers as native to "Indian" territory, and legitimized the New English (white colonial) social order as the only sensible way of reading life. In this socio-political world order, settlers’ "Indian" had to keep dying for the colonizers to keep settling and indigenizing themselves. British Raj in India too was underpinned by ideas of European racial superiority and uninhibited quest for land, resources and labour of the natives. While there is a difference between white settler colonialism of the New World and that of the British Raj, what remains true for both colonialisms is that colonial knowledge production has always facilitated the making of colonized into childlike people and savages, and therefore, always in need of the colonizers’ benevolence and modernity.86 In this, colonial photography has consistently captured the natives as ethnographic objects to be probed at as objects of study. For instance, where Edward Curtis was commissioned to take over 40,000 photographs of Indigenous peoples of over 80 nations in a period spanning over 30 years in North America, an 8 volume photographic ethnographic survey of the “"Indian" types,” edited by John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye was also produced between 1868 to 1875 to record “the peculiarities of Indian life" in British subcontinent.87 And, just like Curtis photographed his subjects in all

86 See Bernard Cohn (1996) for discussion on production of colonial knowledge in India. 87 J. Forbes Watson and John William Kaye, ed., The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations, with Descriptive Letterpress, of The Races and Tribes of Hindustan, Originally Prepared Under the Authority of the Government of India, and Reproduced I? J Order of the Secretary of State for

180 their abstractness in studios, the people of India too were constructed in abstraction, through Orientalist generalizations of race, caste, class, and other social factors.88 The goal was “to represent the different varieties of the "Indian" races” for the imperialists to take back to England as souvenirs as well as for presenting to Queen Victoria, the so-called Empress of India who never set her foot in the colony.89 Therefore, a comparison between the two colonized peoples appears to be logical and important for making connections between two seemingly disconnected colonized territories and different kinds of colonialisms even when Matthew does not present or include the work of colonial photographers of the British Raj. The second contrasting photograph in every pair of Matthew’s series is that of her replicating the poses of Indigenous subjects in the colonial photographs. 90 In a statement accompanying the photographs, Matthew notes: As an immigrant, I am often questioned about where I am “really from.” When I say that I am Indian, I often have to clarify that I am an Indian from India. It seems strange that all this confusion started because Christopher Columbus thought he had found the Indies and called the native people of America collectively as Indians. In this portfolio, I look at the other "Indian.” I play on my own “otherness,” using photographs of Native Americans from the Nineteenth and early Twentieth century that perpetuated and reinforced stereotypes. I find similarities in how Nineteenth and early Twentieth century photographers of Native Americans looked at what they called the primitive natives, similar to the colonial gaze of the Nineteenth Century British photographers working in India. 91

Columbus’ colonial encounter with First Peoples of the New World was a “multicultural encounter” that brought some notion of India and the Caribbean together with Europe, even if Columbus never actually set foot in neither India nor America (Weaver, 2005, p. 2). However, underlying this “multicultural encounter” was colonial power, the power of conquest and colonial violence through which peoples of sovereign Indigenous nations became culturally and racially homogenized as "Indians” in order to be managed into death-

India In Council, vol. 1 (London: India Museum, 1868), preface. 88 In labelling Curtis' photographs as produced through colonial gaze, I do not wish to dismiss his work as simply colonial. The gaze was colonial but the work produced exceeded that gaze. Margot Francis warns against such a move for, as she notes, " For the people who sat for Curtis were not themselves simply passive victims caught unawares by the camera that 'steals the soul'"(12). 89 See Sarah Stanners (2004). “The People of India: A Document of Colonial Abstraction,” Contrapposto, http://groups.chass.utoronto.ca/gradart/journal/2004/2004_4_Stanners.pdf 90 http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/vexhibit/_PHOTOGRAPHER_Annu_Palakunnathu__Matthew_01/2/0/0/ 91 Annu Matthew, http://www.annumatthew.com/gallery/an-"Indian"-from-india/

181 making governance, while simultaneously indigenizing white colonizers. But this also raises the question of how the figure of the “"Indian" American” now allows Matthew to play on her own otherness as an “American "Indian".” Given my investment in examining how non- Black people of colour become complicit (whether through situational complicity or more actively) in workings of white settler colonialism, some questions guiding my analysis include: What needs to be imagined in order for us to conceptualize the two "Indians” as coming together in the series? What does this replication of poses do in terms of disrupting the colonial ideologies across temporal and spatial boundaries? And finally, what are the co- ordinates along which questions about South Asian complicity in systems of domination, including settler colonialism, need to be traced? At the outset, I also want to point out that writing this chapter and presenting it to Indigenous audiences at conferences has been difficult because the photographs which Matthew has produced, the juxtapositions she has made exceed the violence that I can possibly critique here in words. In presenting works such as these, often racialized and settler scholars like myself forget that Indigenous peoples are here, as our teachers, critics and audience members. This realization for me, despite my politics and my work, came only when Dr. Eve Tuck pointed it out to me. I am still not comfortable about how to do this work, or engage with these photographs in an ethical manner that does not repeat the colonial script of dying Indians.

Reading for Empire(s) and Complicity As I have consistently maintained in this Dissertation, we need to attend to the multiplicities, incoherencies, inconsistencies, constellations, overlaps and instabilities underlining the workings of Empire(s). European and American colonies were not some discrete and enclosed units. There were intimate connections, continuities and overlaps, bringing the colonizers, the colonized and colonizing spaces of the Old World into constant encounters with that of the New World. Comparisons made between the two “Indians” as Matthew sets out to do, therefore, is a conceivable project. However, the problem arises when methodology guiding such projects adopt a linear reading of time-space, and of these Empires as bounded and comparable units instead of one underpinned by colonial continuities marked by flow of bodies, commodities, ideas, and exchange of techniques of governance that have always underlined the workings of Empires. What should be the unit

182 of such comparisons between two Empires? If it is simply comparison of two colonized bodies, the two “Indians” from different Empires, then how does one begin to attend to the presence of "Indians" like Matthew in white settler colonies and consider the difference between racialized and colonized bodies in this context? The issue with comparative colonialism projects like Matthew’s is that it eschews the complexities that brought the Indians from India into encounter with Indigenous peoples of Americas and other people such as the slaves brought in chains to the New World. The term encounter, rather than a meeting or joining of hands, is reflective of the asymmetrical relations of power that brought these different people into contact with each other. These hierarchies of power were cemented by how the colonized were “differently racialized” and how the “racialized distribution of freedom and humanity” were an integral aspect of these processes of racialization (Lowe, 2015, p. 36). In her ground-breaking examination of colonial intimacies among Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas and how these connections were crucial to ideologies of modern liberalism including the notions of freedoms, rights and humanity, Lowe stresses the need to focus on “relation across differences rather than equivalence, on the convergence of asymmetries rather than the imperatives of identity” in our reading for understanding the connections that were formed all across the world with the advent of New World colonialism (p. 11). This is a difficult project especially when white settler colonialism is reduced to binaries of white settler/native, and presence of people of colour written as always-immigrants, indicating a late arrival or newness to their relationship with lands of Indigenous Peoples in North America, and regardless of our long presence and histories of both, complicity and resistances here. One difficulty with holding onto these connections across the four continents is certainly because of how the colonial archives are arranged in a way to discourage making links between different people(s), histories and systems of domination which inform/ed the rise of white supremacy globally. But, these connections are also difficult to trace because “the selection of a single historical actor may be precisely a modality of “forgetting” these crucial connections” (38). And, as I have indicated in my chapter on Methodology, I find Byrd’s instructions to read for horizontal relations of power really helpful in beginning to grapple with the complexities that marked these colonial and racial situations. A cacophonous reading, with attention paid to horizontal relations of power, helps us understand that the white settler state underlined by genocide of

183 its Indigenous peoples is simultaneously a plantation and police state, a large prison for Black people, the state where Asians were brought under conditions of unfreedom as indentured labourers, but also a state that poses as a benevolent multicultural haven where people of colour (always under strict policing at the border and beyond) can now come in search for better lives (or a life at all) from other destroyed and/or occupied lands. Uncovering connections and relations among the differently racialized, differently colonized peoples, and their colonizers is a difficult project, and especially difficult to firmly outline with a single photographic series as data. Despite this limitation, I believe it is productive to think through Matthew’s photographs for what is being actively forgotten, buried, suppressed, and more so for what is actively at work in terms of complicity of South Asians in white supremacy and its logics of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness and casteism. Whereas caste is not usually theorized as one of the logics of white supremacy, like other chapters, this one will also argue that in reading for the settling of South Asians in North America, caste must be critically centered and read alongside other logics such as gender and class that allowed South Asians to come to this land and later make it our home.

A Tale of Two “Indians” In this section I will discuss three photographs from Matthew's series to think about what the juxtaposition of the two “Indians” are doing. While I do not analyze every single photograph in her series, my reading of the few I will focus on is reflective of my analysis of the entire series. The first photograph I study is from her Portfolio I, titled “Red "Indian"/Brown "Indian",” 92 in which Matthew juxtaposes a photograph by Curtis of an elderly Indigenous man looking sideways with that of her own mimicry of the pose.93

The sepia-coloured photograph shows the date stamp of the photograph as 1914. The exhibit photo is labeled “Red Indian". The Indigenous man, in his side shot, face showing the struggles of time, is looking at something outside the focus of the camera. Next to it is Matthew’s much taut and younger face looking sideways, with the date 2001 stamped on it, and labeled “Brown Indian”. Both are dressed in what appear to be dark-coloured shirts. In

92 http://www.annumatthew.com/PortfolioAn_"Indian"_from_Indiapercent201/index.html#_self 93 http://www.annumatthew.com/gallery/an-indian-from-india/

184 all of the other photographs as well, there are various juxtapositions of the two figures, variously titled as “Noble Savage-Savage Noble,” “Navajo smile-Malayalee smile,” “American Indian" with Dot on Face-Indian American with Dot on Face,” and “Feather Indian-Dot Indian” among others.94 In her commendatory reading of this particular pair in the series, Gita Rajan (2005) writes: ...[B]y placing them [the two photographs] side by side, Matthew provokes the viewer to think about two questions: one, if the name Red "Indian" is a misnomer, how meaningful is the history of America? And, two if the Red "Indian" as the original inhabitant still bears the mark of violent oppressions, what is the hope for the Brown "Indian" as a new immigrant? By placing the two faces next to each other, Matthew uses the implied authenticity of the photographic medium to mediate between her own body and the body politic of the nation. The image stands in for history, just as history banks upon the represented image. Consequently, in putting herself into the picture, that is working her face into that of the Brown "Indian", Matthew dialogically connects old racisms with new ones, links past injustices with contemporary atrocities, and makes her viewer bear witness to the ongoing systemic and systematic violence in the nation. (p.259, emphasis added)

There is a lot to discuss in the making of Indigenous peoples into "Indians" and so-called misnomers that do productive (always genocidal) work as I discuss in my previous chapter on the "Indian Queen". Nevertheless, while I sincerely appreciate Rajan's questioning of the validity of the history of America, it does not challenge the legitimacy of an America that is primarily a white settler and plantation police nation state. Misnaming colonial violence, both past and present as "racisms" acts as an erasure of violence against Indigenous peoples. Rajan's critique seems to perform a critique of the racial state and the violence done to racialized people (represented by Matthew). The figure of the “Brown Indian” seems to occupy the position of the victim of “contemporary atrocities” with a vague sense that the “Red Indian” too remains the subject of some “past injustices.” What remains profoundly troubling about both, Matthew’s photograph and Rajan’s generous reading of it, is that while questioning the term “Red Indian” as a misnomer, the focus is still on question of the place and futurity of the “Brown Indian”. The disruption to the idea of “Red Indian” as an authentic historical figure happens through thinking about the constructedness of the racial imagination invested in the making of the "Brown Indian". What is the significance of

94To examine other photographs, see http://www.annumatthew.com/gallery/an-"Indian"-from-india/

185 primarily challenging the “colonial gaze” on “Brown Indian” when they are racialized and not the colonized subjects here in North America? While Matthew seemingly centers colonial gaze in her disruptions, it is British colonial rule over the Indian subcontinent that ultimately gets centered, and what should have been a critique of colonialism in America is subsumed by a critique of racialization. Rajan’s comment on race as an essential foundation of America, rather than colonialism and genocide of Indigenous peoples and enslavement of Black people, perfectly puts into words the logic upholding Matthew’s project. These analogies and comparisons happen at the expense of retiring Curtis' "Indians" to the same logic of Manifest Destiny which white settler colonizers used as the basis of legitimizing their presence here. How do we examine the processes of racialization in America without ethically foregrounding the actual grounds upon which these racial hierarchies have been established and upheld? The old and withered face of the “Red Indian” next to Matthew’s face makes his death seem imminent and inevitable. There is nothing that can be done to prevent the nature from taking its course, while the younger face of the "Brown Indian" woman (with the potentiality to reproduce) can still hold onto some hope. Rajan also points to that hope very clearly even if it is in form of a question. Hope can only ever exist only for the living. As Sherene Razack notes in her study on inquests and inquiries into Indigenous deaths in police custody in Canada, “Indigenous death, when it comes, is only ever timely” (23, emphasis added) even if this death comes in the mother’s womb. There is no hope attached to Indigenous lives but much hope invested in settler and even non-Black arrivant futurities through continual Indigenous death.

Multicultural Engulfment of Indigeneity

Another very clear example of photographs making sense only through a collaboration between Manifest Destiny's Darwinian rationality, underpinned by the twin logics of Indigenous disappearance and settler futurity is titled, “Traditional American Indian Mother and Child” paired with “Contemporary Indian American Mother and Stepchild". The first photograph in the pair is from early 20th century showing an Indigenous woman sitting

186 in a chair, with a little Indigenous girl, referred to as her daughter, sitting on one side, with both looking straight into the camera. The mother seems to be wearing a shirtwaist dress –a two-piece blouse and skirt ensemble. The mother is also wearing layers of a bead necklace. The little girl on her side appears in what I assume is a calico dress. Calicoes refer to a weight of cotton fabric that was cheap and often had printed patterns on it. This cotton material was really popular in 18th and 19th century and was imported from India. The juxtaposed photograph has Matthew posing as the “contemporary” Indian American mother with her real-life white stepchild who is attired in a Banarasi sari, bangles and anklet, sitting on her side, with both mother and daughter staring into the camera. Banarasi sarees are expensive and known for their finely woven silk and opulent embroidery. Matthew is dressed in clothes similar to the Indigenous mother in the picture, but the pattern and layers are different. The choker around her neck is more contemporary, made of elongated metal beads. Looking at this juxtaposition, I argue that the distance from “traditional” to “contemporary” here can only be traversed through marking colonialism as a past with a present of liberal multicultural democracy in which racial, colonial, spatial and temporal boundaries are made to seem obsolete even if it is through racial reduction of Indigenous peoples that Matthew can have her juxtaposing "Indians". How else are we to understand a non-Indigenous, non-Black woman of colour and a white child sitting, posing as “contemporary,” sitting in place of, and replacing the so-called “traditional” Indigenous mother and child? Have Indigenous peoples in North America died out so that Matthew and her white stepchild had to literally step into their place? Such a move of replacing a colonized mother- daughter with racialized mother-white child naturalizes colonial violence against Indigenous peoples and reconfirms the logic of Manifest Destiny which hinges upon the belief that Indigenous peoples of the ‘New World’ were always supposed to die out because they are a primitive people in an earlier stage of civilization than Europeans, and not resilient enough to survive the New World Order which the white settlers were destined to bring and impose. The replacing of Indigenous mother and child by a racialized woman and her white stepdaughter also erases the reality that conquest literally took place on the bodies of Indigenous women of the land. As Sarah Deer (2005), a Mvskoke attorney and scholar, reminds us, we must never fail to “acknowledge that the United States was founded, in part,

187 through the use of sexual violence as a tool, that were it not for the widespread rape of Native American women, many of our towns, counties, and states might not exist” (p.459). What began with Christopher Columbus raping a Carib woman to mark his ‘Discovery’ of what was already a well-organized world order of hundreds of Indigenous nations, continues as white men continue to rape and pillage Native women’s bodies and lands (Deer, p.457). 95 These rapes while carried out by individual (white or not) men need to be seen as systemic form of colonial violence as they increase the power of the white settler state, which, in one of her recent articles, Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson (2016) characterizes as a man. She writes, “The state that I seek to name has a character, it has a male character, it is more than likely white, or aspiring to an unmarked center of whiteness, and definitely heteropatriarchal” (n.p). Simpson is concerned with Canadian white settler state in her article, but without any doubt, all white settler states can be characterized as heteropatriarchal and not only as man, but misogynist states that are continually active in dispossession of Indigenous peoples through engulfing/’disappearing’/murdering Indigenous women. The presence of Indigenous women’s bodies in 21st century cannot be tolerated, and in fact are an “anomaly” (Simpson, n.p) for it reminds the white settler state that the project of settler colonialism, hinged upon genocide of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous world orders is not a completed and successful project. The hatred is also hinged in the threat which Indigenous women’s bodies signify. As several Indigenous scholars have shown, Indigenous women carried political sovereignty in their bodies; unlike European women, they had control over their bodies, their land and their lives and the men in their community were bound to listen to them. These women-centered, matriarchal or at least non-antagonistic towards their women political orders posed a challenge to the world order which the white settlers brought with them to these lands and therefore it was urgent for settler possession that Indigenous dispossession first happen through targeting the women. Simpson notes: An Indian woman’s body in settler regimes such as the US, in Canada is loaded with meaning – signifying other political orders, land itself, of the dangerous possibility of reproducing Indian life and most dangerously, other political orders. Other life forms, other sovereignties, other forms of political will. (n.p)

As Indigenous women were killed or dispossessed through other technologies of violence

95 Sarah Deer reports that while most of the rapes are intra-racial, in 70 percent of the cases, white men rape Indigenous women.

188 such as the Indian Act which remains active and governs Indigenous peoples’ lives today too in Canada, settler governance was instated and its and power continually increasing. The danger of reproducing more "Indian life” is always a threat to settler sovereignty. Ines Hernandez-Avila (1993), a Tejana and Nimipu (Nez Perce) feminist scholar of Native American Studies, also notes that “it is because of a Native American woman’s sex that she is hunted down and slaughtered –in fact, singled out –because she has the potential through childbirth to assure the continuance of the people” (p. 335). In fact, she argues through being raped by the colonizers and forced to give birth to their rapists’ children, Indigenous women have been made to go through an “ethnic cleansing [of] themselves” (p.333). When Indigenous women continue to live and thrive, it is an act of resurgent and resilient Indigenous political sovereignty, hence the deeply racist, heteropatriarchal misogynist reactions of the white settler (man) state. Since bodies of Indigenous women are threatening for their wombs and their potentiality to give birth, literally and symbolically disappearing Indigenous women is a project of “settler futurity” (Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández , 2013) where Indigeneity and Indigenous peoples must continually be retired to a different temporal horizon: to a past that once was. The settler and Indigenous can never occupy the same time zone and writing Indigenous peoples in present or future tense in itself threatens the process of settling. Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) notes that the time of narration and the event narrated are grammatically marked: This division of tense within the social fabric of emerging settler nationalism bifurcated the sources and grounds of social belonging in such a way that the relationship between settler and Native/Indigenous was transformed from a mutual implication in the problem of prior occupation to a hierarchical relationship between two modes of prior occupation, one oriented to the future, the other to the past. (p.33)

The Indigenous, mobilized as settler state’s "Indian", left forever to live in the genealogical mode of social belonging, lives in the past perfect social order regardless of its struggles for (and in) life. This subject is understood as permanently attached to the pre-modern, to the cultural and even anti-modern because its life can never be reconciled within a white-settler- now-multicultural liberal nation-state. Therefore, the "Indian" cannot be afforded any place in present or future, so it stays as a ghostly presence, and even when actual Indigenous

189 people continue to live and thrive in some cases, this ghost is revoked again and again by the autological settler subject in its own imagining of present and future. Any struggles for justice that are race-based with no reflection on lives, lands and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples of the land we live on is ultimately a move that strengthens the settler state which is also an Empire and actively engaged in war and death making in lands racialized migrants are often escaping from. Tuck and Gaztambide- Fernandez rightly note that “Anything that seeks to recuperate and not interrupt settler colonialism, to reform the settlement and incorporate Indigenous peoples into the multicultural settler colonial nation state is fettered to settler futurity” (p.80). And this settler futurity is no longer white but seemingly open to embracing non-Black people of colour, even if only in appearance, so that Matthew too can hope for a future along with the white child sitting next to her. In a classic space-clearing act, the white girl child seemingly engulfs not only Indigenous bodies of “traditional” mother and child, their hopes and futurity (re/displacing the ‘withered’ Indigenous womb by the womb that will conceive the next generation of (white or “mixed-race” settlers) and signals that their genocide is complete, but also marks the complete assimilation of Matthew’s body and future. The white child can show some aspects like sari and anklet representing Matthew’s ‘culture’ but not the unruliness of her own racialized body.

The White Girl-Child, Sari, And Caste Here, I want to take a brief detour to also comment on the very important caste work happening in the second picture of the pair. It is difficult for me to read the little white girl’s sari outside of a futurity entrenched in not only racist and genocidal logic of elimination of Indigenous peoples’ bodies, but also colonial (in context of British Raj) and caste hierarchy. In his now-classic book, Colonialism and its forms of knowledge, Bernard Cohn, the late American anthropologist of British colonialism in India notes, the “two most enduring representations” of Indians in iconography of colonial India were that of “naked fakir” or beggar, or “graceful sari-clad women” (p.136). Cohn goes on to discuss how the Hindu/Indian woman was Orientalized in literature and paintings of the British. The sari excited Europeans and they considered it sensual despite their quest to liberate the Indian woman from tyranny of Indian male patriarch, which the sari also seemingly symbolized to

190 them. While women’s clothing in colonial and anticolonial India became a site of patriarchal control of women’s bodies by both British and anticolonial Indian men, and symbolized tropes of Indian femininity, tradition, spirituality, sari has also been about signifying caste on bodies of these women. As Nandi Bhatia (2003) notes, “Identified as existing in the ancient period, the sari through the centuries has emerged as the dominant piece of clothing for Hindu women with varying degrees of modification depending upon the caste, religious sect, regional affiliation or social status of the wearer as well as ongoing changes in fashion” (p.331). Even though we cannot tell the colour of the sari in these sepia-coloured photographs, it is important to note that the colour of the saris and caste have an intimate link so that only Brahmin women wore white, while Kshatriya women wore red, and blue and black colours, considered to bring forth an ill omen, were worn by lower caste women only. But more than that, it is the sari blouse that signified caste relations. For instance, in 19th century Travancore, a kingdom covering present day central and south Kerala and some parts of Tamil Nadu in India, women from Nadar caste were prohibited from covering their upper bodies. People of Nadar caste were placed somewhere between Shudra and Dalit people (N.V., 2015, p.299). The body of low-caste people had to be exhibited as a semiotic entity carrying signs and symbols announcing its caste affiliation and clothes were an important technology of casteist violence. Chanar (also known as Shanar) Revolt from 1822-1859 was a popular anti-caste revolt by Nadar people of which women’s revolt to cover their upper bodies was an important site. Sheeju N.V. (2015), professor of South Asian Studies in Kerala, notes that most of these women were Christian by then. They, like other lower-caste and Dalit people, converted to Christianity to try and escape the tyranny of casteism in Hinduism. When Nadar women began to appear with their breasts covered in public, caste Hindus were angry and launched a series of attacks on these women, including tearing off their clothes (N.V., p.304, Cohen, p.140). Though the colonial government announced that Nadars who had converted to Christianity could cover their bodies, “this order was quickly rescinded when the pidakakars, members of the raja's ruling council, complained that such an order would eliminate the differences among castes and everything would become polluted in the state” (Cohen, p.140, emphasis added). The government then modified its orders by forbidding the Nadar women to wear the Nair, upper caste Hindu women's loose scarf, but

191 allowing them to wear the kuppayam, the jacket worn by Syrian Christians and Moplahs (Muslim merchants who also supplied troops). Though Nadar women were eventually granted the right to cover their upper bodies, the rapes and killings that became attached to a blouse or cover for upper bodies makes it difficult to not see casteist violence against low caste people attached to a piece of clothing such as a sari blouse. Moreover, as Kuffir Nalgundwar (2013), a Dalit theorist from the hugely popular anti-casteist online forum, Round Table India, notes, sari, while seen as a symbol of revolutionary Indian women's reclamation of their bodies during the anticolonial resistance to the British in Gandhi's India, or the contemporary association of sari with (no caste) Indian culture, there is no attention paid to how the women weaving these saris, the caste-oppressed women, themselves could not afford these saris and have a life expectancy for 50 years.96 Despite industrial revolution and means to provide better machinery to these OBC sari weaving women, caste hierarchies have to be maintained along with other professions (passed down through generations through caste based hierarchy) such as manual scavenging, toddy trapping etc. Nalgundwar states that the Indian weavers' average incomes rank lower than average Indian's national income, and their average daily earnings are much lower than minimum wages most times, and the average suicide rate much higher than among average Indians. And yet, the sari is held as an emblem of some pure, authentic India; an India that is caste-less, benevolent and all-embracing of its DBA people. Matthew identifies as Syrian Christian, and they occupy the top of the Christian caste hierarchy (Shobhana, 2014). Her sari-clad white child not only maintains the markers of her ‘culture’ but also of her caste. In that way, in my reading, I am arguing that this picture of the sari-clad white girl with a womb and potentiality to give birth, signifies that both caste and whiteness and white settlerness have a formidable future (Chandra, p.127). Even where Matthew’s racialized skin might be devoured by the whiteness of the child in her lap, the caste relations and whiteness, as deeply imbricate, will stay.97 Matthew along with her white stepchild represents that melting-pot American picture of racial harmony, cleansed of any histories and presents of genocide, slavery, casteist, racial and other forms of violence.

96 Kuffir, https://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7138:caste-in-a- sari&catid=119:feature&Itemid=132, accessed September 2016. 97 I discuss the relationship between caste hierarchies and whiteness in my chapter on Neel Darpan.

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Carlisle, Residential Schools and Indian Emplacement

Another couple photographs which clearly illustrate Matthew’s problematic reduction of colonized space into a racialized one only is her mimicry of images of Tom Torlino, a Navajo youth from late 19th century. One set of juxtapositions is Torlino’s photograph upon his entry into Carlisle, with Matthew’s photograph titled, “On entry into the United States.”98 Torlino, with his long hair and rough coarse clothing appears dishevelled and darker in skin colour than his after-Carlisle picture. Matthew's image juxtaposed with his shows her in what appears to be an essentialized "traditional" Indian attire: A shirt with mirror work, brass necklace to contrast with Torlino's necklace that appears to have Pueblo dragonfly crosses, a symbol considered sacred by the Pueblo peoples. 99 Matthew, on the other hand, appears in an amalgamation of symbols and histories that make an appearance as "Indian" but without recounting for the specific Indigenous/tribal or religious and caste-based histories of those symbols and practices, such as of the dots/bindi design on her forehead. The shirt she is wearing appears to be contextualized in some indigenous people from India but we cannot be certain. The question about why Matthew collapses different tribal and caste histories into her mimicry of Torlino remains unanswered. Why does Matthew need to appropriate the cultures of other castes and indigenous peoples of India to perform a certain kind of primitivism is never considered by her. The next photograph shows Tom Torlino’s after-Carlisle image with Matthew's. The caption on Torlino’s image reads: “Tom Torlino, Navajo, Three years later, Carlisle.” Matthew’s photograph reads, “Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Indian, Nine years later, Providence.” Both Torlino and Matthew are wearing coat and shirt in this image. Torlino’s hair is cut shirt and parted sideways like men’s in 19th century. Matthew who was wearing her natural hair loose in the first image has her hair pulled back into a bun at the back for this shot. Both of them have the same post of looking at something or someone to their side.

98 http://www.annumatthew.com/PortfolioAn_"Indian"_from_Indiapercent201/index.html#_self. 99 I have had a difficult time placing all the clothing of the Indigenous peoples in these photographs. My information about things I do specify comes from people's comments and short articles on the internet.

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These iconic photographs of Torlino are by John N. Choate, taken in 1885, three years after Torlino was brought to Carlisle. His before Carlisle, and therefore before assimilation, photograph locates him in ‘savagery’, as he looks morbidly sad and forlorn in his long ‘unruly’ hair and tribal clothes. The after-Carlisle image presents looking like a perfect ‘gentleman’: short hair, clean face, Western/white man clothes; in short, as finally rescued from his degeneracy and with the "Indian" inside him happily killed. As Barbara Landis and Richard Tritt from the Cumberland County Historical Society state, his photographer, John Choate manipulated the lighting to help make his after-Carlisle images lighter, to show that with the Western education, these Indigenous children and youth could blend into the larger society.100 His before and after Carlisle Indian Industrial School photographs are two of the most widely circulated images to show both, the assimilation of Indigenous children into (Western) civilization, but also of the violence committed against these Indigenous children in boarding/residential schools. These before and after pictures were a common practice in residential schools, and are included in Torlino’s school file, and in the souvenir book celebrating 23 years of the school.101 The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was established in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879. It was the first official effort in the United States at establishing boarding schools which forcibly removed Indigenous children from their homes in order to teach them English and to ‘civilize’ them by killing the "Indian" in them, even if the children themselves died in the process. Richard Henry Pratt, who served as the second lieutenant in the 10th Cavalry, established the Carlisle Residential School. Being assigned the charge of looking after 72 Native American prisoners in Florida allowed Pratt to strengthen his desire for civilizing the ‘savages’. The strict military-like ruling at Carlisle is only a small part of the violence that happened to Indigenous children there. Not all were fortunate enough to make it through the school. At least192 children from different Indigenous nations are estimated to have been buried there. Carlisle and other residential schools were an integral site of genocide of Indigenous peoples where both culture and life were beaten out of Indigenous children and youth. Matthew’s coming to America was not under the same conditions constituted by

100 Brenna Farrell, “Photos: Before and After Carlisle,” http://www.radiolab.org/story/photos-before-and-after- carlisle/ 101 Archived in Dickinson. Can be accessed online at http://carlisle"Indian".dickinson.edu/sites/all/files/docs- ephemera/NARA_1327_b018_f0872.pdf

194 genocide. In particular, modern day immigration of privileged, educated, Western passport bearing Indians like Matthew did not happen under coercive conditions that could be compared to any act of colonial violence. While the histories of migration of South Asians to North America varies and South Asians often came to the New World through histories of occupation, displacement, war, and as indentured labourers and refugees, the act of making America into a Carlisle, a prison for non-Indigenous non-Black people of colour is nevertheless a colonial narrative that makes sense only through placing Matthew’s racialized body over Torlino’s and thousands of other Indigenous peoples. Indigenous and Black peoples continue to be one of most incarcerated people in America, and given this history and present of violence, Matthew’s recalling of Torlino is steeped in the colonial logic where the "Indian" can only be lamented (but never grieved and hence remains irremediable) while racialized immigrants can become subjects who can legislate their grief and hope for a better future (Byrd, p.37). The postcolonial white settler nation-state presents the facade of being post-racial which it does under the aegis of multiculturalism, allowing some bodies of colour to make claims for justice as long as they fit within the narrative of the progressive and post- racial state. Unfortunately, Mathew’s intent to challenge these colonial narratives actually ends up doing the work of reinstating them.

Over Black-Indigenous People

In another photograph in Portfolio II of the series, Matthew juxtaposes a 19th century photograph of a Black-Indigenous man, “Ho-tul-ko-micco AKA Silas Jefferson,” acknowledged as “African American and Indian” in the photograph, with herself dressed up in a three-piece suit resembling Jefferson’s suit in the original, and titled as, “English, American and Indian.”102 Both sit looking into the camera, with their hands placed in their laps. It is important to note that Jefferson was Black and Muscogee and was from the Creek Freedmen from former slaves of the Muscogee nation and formed at the interstices of several complex histories. He claimed Creek citizenship by blood through his Creek Indian mother

102 http://www.annumatthew.com/PortfolioAn_"Indian"_from_Indiapercent202/index.html#_self See Figure 5.

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Betsey McNac, a member of the influential Wind Clan (Zellar, 2007, p.108).103 In this section of my chapter, I ask: what logic holds the replacement of “African American and Indian” by “English, American and Indian? The white settler state of the United States is simultaneously a state for enslaving Black people. It is a plantation and police state. Frank Wilderson (2010) theorizes the ontological category of the Settler-Master to remind us that the white settler is also the white Master of the slaves and uses White, Human, Master and Settler as synonyms. The three structural positions in the U.S, according to Wilderson, are that of the Settler/Master, the Savage and the Slave. Underpinning these structural positions are three kinds of demands: The White Human/Slave/Master’s demand for expansion, the ‘Savage’/Indigenous demands for sovereignty and return of the land and the Slave’s demand for what, drawing upon Hortense Spillers, he calls, “flesh reparation” (p.29). The ‘Savage’ exists as an object of genocide and the Slave as an object of captivity and fungibility but only in relation to the Settler-Master who exists as a subject of exploitation and alienation (p.32). In her ground- breaking study on the making of Black women’s bodies into units of (white) settlement, Tiffany King (2013) writes: “When we think about the Settler-Master as parasitic we can also begin to think about their process of settlement as one that also requires the making of ontological categories occupied by the dead. The process of settlement allows the Settler- Master to become a human with spatial coordinates because the Native dies and the Black becomes a non-being (a settled-slave)” (p.91). White settlement needs both: Indigenous bodies, lands and Black flesh.104 Both ‘Savage’ and the slave then exist in relation to each other if we understand the Master and the Settler to be one and the same person. It is through narratives of the disappearing "Indian" and the hollow nothingness of Jefferson’s Blackness then that Matthew is able to pose in place of Jefferson. Matthew can

103 For an important scholarly contribution discussing the history and politics of Choctaw and Cherokee African freed slaves, see Barbara Krauthamer's (2013) book, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South. Krauthamer notes that Indian territory is not simply “the West” but “a site of slavery, emancipation, and struggles for meaningful freedom and citizenship” (p.153). Her book highlights the complexity of slavery by "Indian" masters within a context of white supremacy, ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples and also the violent processes through which stolen (sovereign) African people were made into slaves. 104 This is not to deny the value of Indigenous labour, or to claim that settlement happened in the same way everywhere. Indigenous labour was also needed, but for white people to narrate themselves as the rightful owners of the land, Indigenous people had to keep disappearing and be seen as dying out. Also, see Shona Jackson's book, Creole Indigeneity for a critique of Black people's labour as a modality of humanizing them as (subordinate) citizen subject.

196 claim her Englishness and American identity (presumably granted through the colonial and racist institution of citizenship) through a relationship to Black non-humanness. It is the violence of conquest, ongoing ‘disappearances,’ murders, and dispossession of Indigenous peoples, slavery and ongoing incarceration of Black people and their fungibility and social and actual acts of killing them that allow Matthew to claim herself as being the transnational citizen from England, America and India. While Blackness becomes displaced from the body, with Black and Indigenous lives offered no place, hope or futures, Matthew stakes her claims of belonging, and (recovers) her firmly emplaced settler subjecthood. Her mimicry here is an erasure of the histories of intimacies, confrontations and alliances between Indigenous peoples and African people in the Americas. There is, however, more to Matthew’s erasures that we must consider for understanding a South Asian woman’s genealogical imprint of her histories and movements onto a figure formed at the nexus of violence(s) of conquest and slavery. Anti-Blackness is structural, and it is global because Black people are everywhere in this world. However, how anti-Blackness is cemented and mobilized is different. In case of South Asian complicity in anti-Blackness, caste must be centered in my analysis as I have been arguing in this Dissertation. Anti-Blackness has a longstanding and complex legacy in the Indian Subcontinent, and manifested in relation to questions of Indigeneity and caste.

South Asians in Anti-Blackness and Casteism The history of anti-Blackness of caste South Asians is as old as the history of presence of Black people in South Asia. This presence is marked by long and complex histories and it is difficult to account for that presence in a paragraph. Pakistan probably has the largest number of Black people in South Asia but it is difficult to quote an exact numerical figure given the lack of clear census and the varied and vast geographies of South Asia. According to The South Asia African Diaspora Project, Pakistan has the largest people of African descent living in Asia, an estimated 50,000 individuals who live in the province of Sindh. At least ¼ or 250,000 people, along the Makran coast in Baluchistan, Pakistan are of African descent. These hundreds of thousands of Afro-Pakistanis are known as Siddi. Most live in poverty with very little access to jobs and schools. Historical accounts on how African

197 people first came to area known as Pakistan today varies but their histories of having to do with slavery remains uncontested (Chatterjee,2006). Many of the African people were brought under coercive conditions to provinces of Sindh and Baluchistan in Pakistan to work as “domestic slaves” and perform other manual labour. Many Africans also traded with Baluchis and other Pakistanis and intermarried. Pakistani culture, especially music is a witness to these rich histories, while anti-Black violence, both at the level of the government (law and policing) but also ordinary brown-skinned citizens continues unabated. In India the Siddi people in the state of Gujarat are listed in the Government Schedule for Tribes. Black people in India are either looked down upon as not Indian or, seen in caste terms as people of low caste (Hawley, 2008, p.4). Other Indigenous Black people in India have been there for centuries, and have attracted many camera-carrying anthropologists. For example, widely photographed Andaman peoples are one of the Indigenous peoples of India, and have several Black-skinned tribes. Many have not made much contact with outsiders but that does not mean that extreme violence against them, and encroachment upon their lands and lives isn’t an everyday reality for them.105 Indian cities have also seen a flourish in recent immigration or arrival of Black students and workers from different parts of Africa. Their presence is often a cause of concern for Black and anti-Black upper and middle caste Indians.106 For South Asians, it is much easier to parade our ‘radicality’ and talk about Anti- Blackness, especially in diaspora, than to think about how every detailed aspect of our lives is underpinned by casteist violence. As the New York and California based Dalit feminist, Thenmozhi Soundarajan astutely notes:

I think sometimes South Asian organizers use black organizing as a release valve for their caste privilege. ...For most South Asians in the diaspora, it’s a lot easier

105 For a short report on violence against the Black-skinned Jarawa tribe of Andaman peoples, see Deborshi Chaki (2014, 4 Jan), “Time ticking for India’s Jarawa tribe,” Aljazeera, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/01/time-ticking-india-jarawa-tribes-20141314281424904.html (accessed Jan 18, 2015). 106 To read more about the treatment of Africans in India, see Sinthujan Varatharaja (2015, 14 April), “Blackness in Brown Spaces,” Himal Magazine, http://himalmag.com/black-brown-space/ (accessed May 2015). See Varatharaja also for a discussion on presence of Black people in Sri Lanka. Recently, there has been a rise in series of attacks on African students studying in Delhi. Some of the articles covering the stories include: Sandip Roy (March 29, 2017), " Why Indians Need An Urgent Lesson In Identifying Their Racism At Home As They Come Under Attack Abroad," Huffpost, http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2017/03/29/why-Indians- need-an-urgent-lesson-in-identifying-its-racism-at-h_a_22016438/; and Aletta Andre (26 June, 2016), " Being African in India: 'We are seen as demons'" http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/06/african-india- demons-160620101135164.html

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to talk about Blackness because then the people at the top of the race hierarchy are the white supremacists and you don’t have to look at the caste privilege that exists not just for your own identity but in your family as well. ...It’s [easy] to say “Ferguson matters” even as [you] ignore all of the massacres that their Savarna [upper caste] infrastructure has unleashed onto [Dalit] communities. 107

Because South Asians cannot imagine our lives outside of casteist structures when we are caste privileged and understand our humanity on basis of our caste and dehumanizing of the lower caste and Dalit peoples, it is much easier for us to talk about complicity in other structures of violence when it does not disrupt our lives, genealogies and violent, casteist traditions. Caste as a social category and form of life is very active in South Asian diaspora.108 Caste violence is systemic, it is structural and marks every single day of our lives whether in diaspora or ‘at home’.109 Just like multicultural liberal democracy invites white settler citizens to imagine themselves as invested in notions of diversity, tolerance and understand themselves as less racist and colonial than their forefathers, South Asians understand the diaspora to be more progressive from communities back home, and therefore de-casted. But South Asians who settled here and in other Western nation-states have also brought with them their own social habits, norms and religious customs, such as the institution of caste. Caste boundaries continue to be sacredly policed (pun intended) and caste violence actively exercised but continues to be one of the best-kept secrets of South Asian diaspora. Dalit feminists have time and again called out upper caste/caste privileged Indian feminists for not taking into account the lives and deaths of Dalit women and this critique stands true in South Asian diaspora. If systems of oppression are all interconnected and none of us can be liberated until all of us are free, then caste, race, anti-Blackness, Indigeneity must all be considered to understand South Asians’ situational complicity here and to affirm that our narratives of resistance are not resting on other forms of violence(s).

107 See Thenmozhi Soundarajan in conversation with Asam Ahmed (2015, April 21), “How to Fight a Deadly Caste System,” Colourlines, http://www.colourlines.com/articles/how-fight-deadly-caste-system 108 Dalit diaspora can be divided in to two major streams - the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. The ‘old’ comprises indentured labourers who were taken by the colonial powers and the contractors to different countries in south Asia and Africa but also the Caribbean once slavery was officially ended and Asian and South Asian “coolies” took their place. See Lisa Lowe (2015) The other stream of Dalit diaspora includes more recent migrations from 1970s onwards of semi-literate, industrial labourers, technicians and professional Dalits, especially to the UK and North America. For my attention to caste in the Caribbean, see my chapter on the Indian Arrival. 109 India is easily and conveniently claimed as home while Indigenous nations there continue their struggles to keep surviving.

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When South Asian discussions about anti-Blackness does not critically center caste violence, it becomes depoliticized and circulates as rhetoric only.110 For example, Vijay Prashad (2001), among other South Asians scholars, has hailed Bhangra as a site of resistance and pro-Black solidarity. Bhangra is a Punjabi (in both present-day Pakistan and India) dance and is one of the more famous dances in Indian and Pakistani diaspora. Discussing resistance to the figure of model minority, Prashad notes that second generations of South Asians, especially those from working class backgrounds understand just how far the myth of model minority is from their everyday lives. In such cases, he notes, the youth identify with “black culture,” with Hip-Hop (179). “Many young desis in England and North America have fashioned their cultural politics around several of the icons of black diaspora culture,” (p.179) notes Prashad. From bhangra to ragga and music of Asian Dub Foundation, Apache India to Bally Sagoo among many, many other popular musicians and singers which young South Asians have a cult following of. Understanding that such fusions do not lead to automatic solidarity with Black people, and also noting that sometimes it is more to do with rebellion against parents and conscious of the hyper-masculine culture of Bhangra and Hip- Hop, he nevertheless notes it as a site of hope, of political coalitions and consequently a breakaway from model minority expectations (p.181). However, what is problematic is that Bhangra lyrics are often about the Jat (upper caste) identity as being radical and anti-racist, while firmly entrenched in caste politics and violence. Jat people are upper caste and mired

110 At the time of writing this chapter, the hashtag of #UnfairAndLovely was launched by a group of South Asians protesting the rampant shadeism/colourism dominant in our homes and lives. See Kenrya Rankin, “South Asians Are Celebrating Their Melanin with #UnfairAndLovely and It’s Beautiful,” Colourlines (10 March 2016), http://www.colourlines.com/articles/south-asians-are-celebrating-their-melanin- unfairandlovely-and-its-beautiful The beauty industry, with its bleaching creams is massive in South Asia and in all walks of life in South Asia but also in diaspora, there is a constant equating of fair skin with beauty and respectability and hence we keep these companies flourishing. Claiming pride in our shades of brown skins is admirable, and urgently needed and I admire people who are working against shadeism/colourism, and openly calling out our families, our elders, media and all sectors of our society for our/their complicity in these ideals of whiteness as beauty standards. However, we have to center the fact that lower caste and Dalits, associated with impurity, dirt and inhumanity have informed our fear of Blackness and Black or dark brown skin in South Asia. So people participating in this Twitter hashtag began posting their selfies to show their pride in their skin colour. However, often these pictures were taken inside or in front of temples and other place of worship, all spaces where to this day Dalits do not have access. Nowhere in this pride in skin colour was any reflection on how shadeism won’t end without a serious disruption to caste hierarchies for us. I want to also note here the complexity of the way in which caste works in this: Dark skin does not necessarily mean lower caste, even if it is often (mistakenly) read as such, especially by non-South Asians.

200 in some of the most caste-based violence against the DBA people in north India. As Soundarajan (2012) argues in her article, “The Black Indians”:

For second-generation NRIs [Non-resident Indians], flashing caste becomes a part of their cultural street cred with other communities. Some do it intentionally to elevate their identity while others operate from a misunderstanding of their own roots and blindly accept the symbols of their culture. Punjabi rappers throw down lyrics about being proud Jats. Tam- Brahms show off their sacred thread, recreate Thiruvayur in Cleveland, and learn Bharatanatyam while using their powerful networks to connect and succeed in the diaspora. Ultimately, we trade and calcify what is seen as proper Indian culture. But hidden within that idea of ‘proper’ lies the code for what is aspirational and ultimately upper caste.

Soundarajan’s critique of Bhangra as a site of radicality reveals how something we might consider as alternative, and oppositional to domination and white supremacy can very actively be upholding systems of violence that require labour and deaths of other marginalized people. Solidarity with Black people means nothing while standing on bodies of Dalits and those constructed as lower caste. Just like for white people making friends with Black people does not erase their continually benefitting from slavery, for South Asians talking about Anti-Blackness is empty if we do not understand that for us, that conversation must begin with caste hierarchy and our investment in it. Looking at Matthew’s diptych where she stands in for a Black-Muscogee man, it is important to hold onto caste as well. Matthew’s Syrian Christian identity has always afforded her caste privileges. Whose hands should be joining (in solidarity) with those of Indigenous and Black-Indigenous peoples who were objects of colonial photography? Occupation, tribe and caste were a major principle of organizing the natives in the ethnographic photo series, The People of India I had mentioned above. Eventually though, caste alone became the main category for mapping the people of India.111 If British ethnographers and photographers categorised the natives in India based on their caste and occupation, then it is casteist too to erase that colonial reality and questions of your own caste privilege in this proverbial joining of hands. Moreover, there is a long history of Dalit-African American relations of solidarity. To consider but one important example, the South Asian American Digital Archives houses a

111 Christopher Pinney, “Classification and fantasy in the photographic construction of caste and tribe,” Visual Anthropology, 3:2-3(1990), 259-288.

201 letter written by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the most prominent and intellectual Dalit leaders of 20th century India to W.E.B DuBois in 1940 identifying himself as a "student of the Negro problem" and asserting that " "[t]here is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary."112 Matthew’s mimicry here is deeply problematic for its erasure of so many histories of violence(s), but also solidarities. The presence of South Asians in white settler colonies, therefore, needs an analysis at the interstices of race, anti-Blackness, settler colonialism but also caste. If the diaspora is always, already casted, how can one begin to think about the question of complicity in other structures of violence without considering caste? If diasporas are not outside of the field of complicity, and caste in South Asian diasporas is a central organizing feature, then it becomes important for South Asians to hold on tight to the question of caste while discussing questions of racism, settler colonialism and/or our place here. If upper and mid-caste South Asians cannot examine caste for fear of how much of our participation in this violence will be revealed, then how can we have serious conversations about why Black lives matter, what Indigenous sovereignty is, and what is being asked from immigrant and settler people for decolonization in white settler colonies?

“Indians” Staging Refusal113

The issue, as I have already stated above, is not simply one of comparisons and there are better, ethical examples of such a project. I want to briefly discuss one model that I consider to be a more commendable example of artistic production of forging solidarity with Indigenous peoples that is multilayered, complex, and does not stage another uprooting or further displacement of Indigenous peoples. Indo-Canadian filmmaker, Ali Kazimi's 1997 documentary, Shooting Indians follows the work of Haudenosaunee photographer, Jeffrey Thomas who examines Edward Curtis' work and recreates his iconic images but in a way that

112 Manan Desai, "What B.R.Ambedkar wrote to W.E.B DuBois," April 22, 2014, http://www.saadigitalarchive.org/tides/article/20140422-3553

113 Drawing upon the works of various Indigenous scholars such as Audra Simpson and Eve Tuck, I have already discussed refusal as a strategy of upholding Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Please see my chapter on Theoretical Framework for details.

202 disrupts Curtis' colonial gaze, and reclaims Indigenous peoples as living, thriving people who are not the "Indians" the settlers and non-Black racialized people of colour are educated into believing. Thomas notes that as a young boy in grade school, when he first saw a painting of a 19th century Plains Indian man in a history book, he immediately thought about the man's "facial resemblance to men in my [Thomas'] family."114 There was a certain familiarity there for him as an Indigenous man. For Thomas, the stereotypical images of Indigenous peoples, along with more careful and complicated but nevertheless colonial ones like Curtis', were about the people he knew, and who looked like the people in his family and community. In his viewing of these photographs, there was always and already a decolonial refusal (Simpson, 2007) to accept the staged images as anything beyond the gaze of the lens. Thomas also introduces Curtis' "Indians" as citizens of their sovereign nations and humanizes them through using geographical, cultural and spatial modalities of identification. He notes that he "wondered what the indigenous sitters [for Curtis] were thinking about. How did they see their world in comparison to how their world was being represented?"115. Matthew, in trying to confront Edward Curtis, the lens and gaze of the camera, somewhere seems to get go of this subjects of Curtis' and other colonial photographers' subjects. Where Thomas is invested in lives of these subjects, Matthew keeps them confined to death by somehow assuming that her emplacement is any more humane than what these colonial/colonizer photographers did. Why was there a need to introduce her own body as a comparative site for challenging these old photographs? There is another problematic which I have been thinking through. In noting earlier that Curtis' photographs were produced through colonial gaze, I do not wish to dismiss his work as simply colonial because while the gaze was indeed colonial and Indigenous peoples of sovereign nations reduced to the racial category of “"Indian",” the work produced exceeded that colonial gaze. Margot Francis (2002) warns against the move to simply dismissal of Curtis’ work, and notes, "[T]he people who sat for Curtis were not themselves simply passive victims caught unawares by the camera that 'steals the soul'"(p.12). She then discusses his subjects as agents who given the colonial constraints of their era and place, still

114 Jeffrey Thomas, "The Conversation," http://jeff-thomas.ca/about-the-conversation/ 115 Jeffrey Thomas, "My North American "Indian", v.2," http://jeff-thomas.ca/2014/04/my-north-american- "Indian"-v21/

203 challenged their colonizers. Thomas agrees. In one of the notes discussing his work, he writes:

Although Curtis’s work is often vilified, I wanted to find a way to engage with historical images without either romanticizing or dismissing them. His images make me long to hear the subjects’ voices. I search for these “outtakes” and use my own work to suggest what they may have looked like.

What happens in Matthew's representation of herself as emplaced through displacement of these subjects of Curtis (and other photographers) is that the viewers see only Matthew as the agentic subject, as the one who dares to defy the colonial constraints through which their bodies are (re)produced for consumption of the colonizer. Indigenous photographers such as Thomas have responded to such photographs carefully and ethically, without reproducing colonial logic of “disappearing Indian”. This is not simply because Thomas is Indigenous (Haudenosaunee) himself.116 No place of identity is self-evidently pure but his work is grounded in the anticolonial logic of Indigenous self-determination.117 By placing his photographs alongside those of Curtis, Thomas respectfully humanizes the unknown subjects of Curtis, and stages a decolonial refusal to die; he puts forth a protest against not just Curtis but present day ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous peoples. Where Matthew's intervention can only be seen as damage-centered, Thomas' refusal is grounded in a desire to tell other, complex stories of survival; of life. In their article presenting a glossary of haunting (of white settlers), Eve Tuck and C. Ree (2013) present a much-needed and critical distinction between damage and desire. Whereas narratives like Matthew’s present living resilient Indigenous peoples as damaged, as 'irredeemable' from (imaginary and real) deaths, desire, the authors argue is a refusal to trade in damage; desire is an antidote, a medicine to damage narratives. Desire, however, is not just living in the looking glass; it isn’t a trip to opposite world. Desire is not a light switch, not a nescient turn to focus on the positive. It is a recognition of suffering, the costs of settler colonialism and capitalism, and how we still thrive in the face of loss anyway; the parts of us that

116Thomas identifies as an "urban-Iroquios". He writes: You won't find a definition for 'urban Iroquois' in any dictionary or anthropological publication - it is this absence that informs my work as a photo-based artist, researcher, independent curator, cultural analyst and public speaker. My study of "Indian"-ness seeks to create an image bank of my urban-Iroquois experience, as well as re-contextualize historical images of First Nations people for a contemporary audience. See http://jeff-thomas.ca/2014/04/my-north-american-"Indian"-v21/ 117 To examine Jeff Thomas' work, see http://jeff-thomas.ca/about-the-conversation/ (accessed July 2017).

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won’t be destroyed. When I write or speak about desire, I am trying to get out from underneath the ways that my communities and I are always depicted. I insist on telling stories of desire, of complexity, of variegation, of promising myself one thing at night, and doing another in the morning. Desire is what we know about ourselves, and damage is what is attributed to us by those who wish to contain us. Desire is complex and complicated. It is constantly reformulating, and does so by extinguishing itself, breaking apart, reconfiguring, recasting. Desire licks its own fingers, bites its own nails, swallows its own fist. Desire makes itself its own ghost, creates itself from its own remnants. Desire, in its making and remaking, bounds into the past as it stretches into the future. It is productive, it makes itself, and in making itself, it makes reality. (p. 648, emphasis added)

Desire to tell other stories is present in Thomas' identification as "urban Iroquis," and when he writes that "You won't find a definition for 'urban Iroquois' in any dictionary or anthropological publication - it is this absence that informs my work as a photo-based artist, researcher, independent curator, cultural analyst and public speaker". The absence is a refusal to mould himself, his genealogies and even his future in the mould of "Indian" filled by settler' (and all non-Black people of colour) expectations and assumptions about him and that of other Indigenous peoples. Like Matthew, Kazimi also challenges the notion of objectivity or Truth in ethnographic making of "Indians". Also, like Matthew's photographic series, Kazimi's documentary, to an extent, is also grounded in the "Indian from India" logic but he very clearly articulates the difference between him and "Indians" of white settlers. His work is auto-ethnographic in that he talks about his complicity playing with (bad) Indian and (good, heroic) cowboy toys as a child growing up in early 1960s India, thus disrupting the idea of his innocence as a racialized newcomer to Canada. Like many of us people of colour immigrating to North America or other white settler colonies, he came with ideas about the "Indians" here. Kazimi is also transparent about getting his colonial assumptions challenged. In one scene, both Thomas and him go to a Six Nations (acknowledged) territory where Kazimi begins looking for totem poles and is quickly embarrassed when Thomas patiently explains that those are indigenous to West Coast Indigenous nations. In one voice-over narration, Kazimi states that "these [other] Indians do exist, but they have no India to return to!" This, to me, shows an awareness and an understanding on Kazimi's part that he and other 'Indians' are not the same kind, that possessing an insatiable quest for more land is an integral modality for ongoing white settler violence against Indigenous peoples in Canada,

205 and that it is only through grounding his journey in Thomas' work that he can talk about the two very different "Indians". In one powerful scene in the film, both Kazimi and Thomas are crossing the border into the US in order to visit some of Thomas' people on the other side of the colonial border in Buffalo where Thomas was born. The immigration officer asks both about their nationality while looking at their documents of identification. The scene narrated by Kazimi with a voice over reads: "Nationality?" asks the American border guard.

"Six Nations," says Jeff showing him his identity card.

I hand him my passport and say, "Indian".

Again, in my reading of the scene, Kazimi had no other way of getting to cross the border except for identifying himself with two settler nation states occupying Thomas' people and land. This was a scene where his acknowledgment of the complicity was grounded in the structural. No matter how much he befriends Thomas, or becomes invested in the project of decolonization, he was forced to acknowledge and identify with colonial boundary making practices. In some other beautiful and powerful scenes in the film, we see Kazimi talking to Thomas, where both discuss about the set of violence(s) that embed their presence in white Canada, without Kazimi trying to take on the skin of Thomas. There is a limit to his protest and his refusal to become complicit with the colonial project. There are contradictions and power differentials in this meeting, or rather, encounter of the two "Indians". Both Kazimi and Thomas know and recognize the limits of refusals to the colonial (and racial) state.

Conclusion Palestinian scholar, Dana Olwan (2015) writes that “assumptive solidarities” where we assume some kind of a level playing field with no attention to structures of violence is dangerous:

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This form of solidarity is comfortable; it is felt affectively but never experienced materially, situationally, or historically. While enticing, this form of solidarity does not move us closer to those whom we wish to be in alliance with, nor does it directly confront of transform the conditions under which we come to encounter one another. (p.100)

How we frame the subject and limits of our solidarity work is of critical importance. In this ongoing project of “settling” that continues to fail despite ongoing and brutal attacks on bodies and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, now enter racialized people coming into white settler multicultural nation states. To maintain the façade of multiculturalism and the promise of the American Dream, hope now must be also offered to some racialized people, even if their place here remains precarious despite citizenship status.118 People of colour, seen as latecomers, and therefore not entitled to the state and its resources like the white settlers, are disciplined/educated into understanding that their lives and futurity are tied with that of the white settler state. The racism against them often coerces them into supporting the white settler state agenda always grounded in anti-Indigeneity and anti-Blackness. This is not to deny their willingness to participate in state agendas for their own monetary, cultural, or citizenship security. As Sunera Thobani (2007) argues within the context of Canada: In the settler colony-cum-liberal democracy, the status of the immigrant remains ambivalent, fraught within the dynamics of the structural forces that propel their migration and their subsequent relocation between indigenous peoples and nationals. Addressing the polyvalent role of immigrants requires confronting the enormity of the crimes perpetrated against Aboriginal populations, crimes immigrants have often colluded with. It requires highlighting of the complex racial hierarchy developed by colonizing powers that introduced and sustained force relations not only among settlers and Aboriginal peoples but also among the other racialized groups ranked in the Canadian hierarchy as lower than whites but higher than Aboriginal peoples. In other words, it requires examination of the specific roles played by all non-indigenous populations in the ongoing colonial project, even as the force relations among these various populations are taken into consideration. Keeping their sights fixed firmly on gaining equality with nationals, immigrants have thus far, with few exceptions, ignored the interrogation of their own positionality with regard to Aboriginal peoples. Most have largely forsaken the possibilities for building alliances with Aboriginal peoples, failing to imagine a future of sovereignty for them and what their location within such a future might be. (p.17)

118 Of course, only certain kinds of racialized people can be offered this hope to life in a white settler nation state. For example, in the contemporary moment, no promise or hope of life can be extended to brown-skinned Muslims in America. Or to caste and class oppressed South Asians. I would say the same for all Black people.

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While Thobani does not explicitly name anti-Blackness here and seemingly collapses Black people into the category of immigrants, her analysis of the ways in which non-Black immigrants of colour have positioned ourselves as antagonistic to Indigeneity (and I would add, Blackness) within the white settler nation-state is still important to hold onto as a guide for deeper reflection and doing solidarity work. Being complicit does not rule out the dissent or indicate in any uncomplicated ways that we do not offer resistance within the structures they are bound within. What needs reflecting upon is that fact that our futurity is tied with that of settlers forecloses the possibility of spaces for solidarity that needs to exist among colonized peoples and racialized people in America. White settler colonialism is a project of dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and their replacement and emplacement by white settlers. If white settlers treated "Indians" as dying and ghostly, and their hauntedness could not even be exorcised by the very much living Indigenous peoples in their midst, then what could be achieved from showcasing the dead "Indian" once again to register a racial grievance for and by Matthew? In Matthew’s work, Indigenous peoples, as white man’s dying "Indian", become a rite de passage for registering our non-Indigenous, non-Black people of colour's racial grievance. The "Indian" becomes the "ontological prior" (Byrd, p. xxxv) through which non-Black people of colour grievances are registered. The silent "Indians" are needed again for settlers, through which Matthew is able to emplace herself as the racialized subject whose injury must be attended to, while the ‘other "Indians' remain without any agency, and in fact, without any lives beyond their need to allow her to show her humanity. Why did Matthew need these pictures, I ask again? In Matthew’s photographic series, what is interesting is that the work of displacement of one “Indian" and simultaneous replacement is performed by emplacement of another Indian, a racialized artist coming from India. The replacement that happens is grounded in a particular logic: that of race. Here, race comes to stand in for coloniality, the latter becoming a mere rhetoric, and Matthew, in her critique of Columbus, reproduces the logic of making sovereign peoples of the Americas into another racialized and homogenized category of "Indians". Byrd has warned us again this grounding of racial critiques in same old tropes of conquest. As she writes, "to reframe colonization as racialization at the site of radical critique leaves those very colonial structures intact on the one hand and allowing all

208 experiences of oppression within settler colonialism to step forward as colonized on the other" (p. 54). Matthew is doing exactly that. She registers her grievances as a racialized subject under the guise of a brand of anticoloniality that is elite, casteist, anti-Black, spatially displaced, and not a present in her life like it is in generations of Indigenous peoples she replaces in her mimicry of poses. Through Matthew’s photographs, I also attempted to raise questions about the co- ordinates along which South Asian diasporic subjects must trace our complicity in systems of domination. South Asians protesting anti-Blackness and joining movements for Indigenous solidarity here must account for how we are actively upholding an apartheid and violent system of caste in our everyday lives in diaspora. For settler colonialism to end here, anti- Blackness but also caste structures in our communities back home and in diaspora need to be urgently challenged. In Pedagogies of Crossing, Caribbean feminist scholar, M. Jacqui Alexander (2005) writes, “neither complicity (usually cathected onto someone else) nor vigilance (usually reserved for ourselves) is given to any of us before the fact of our living” (p. 272). Complicity is a multi-headed hydra with all heads raised at the same time. The urgent task is to try and account for all the raised heads in our demands for our liberation and justice, while continually examining the work that our questions and critiques are performing. I end with words from Tuck and C. Ree's article presenting a glossary of haunting. They write: "I don’t trust you very much. You are not always aware of how you can be dangerous to me, and this makes me dangerous to you. I am using my arm to determine the length of the gaze" (p.640, emphasis added). Therefore, “staying away” at an arm's length, understanding how I am actively and structurally causing harm is more important than this metaphorical joining of hands which Matthew does. Without a doubt, it is more important than playing "Indian" (of any kind).

Chapter VI

Histories out of the Blue: From Blue Hands, and Lands to Blue Destinies

The fields flame with it, endless, blue as cobra poison. It has entered our blood and pulses up our veins like night. There is no other colour. The planter’s whip splits open the flesh of our faces, a blue liquid light trickles through the fingers. Blue dyes the lungs when we breathe... (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, 1997)

"Our hands, scarred blue with the poisonous indigo dye that built up all those plantations from swampland" (Nana Peazant in The Daughters of the Dust, 1992)

“Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two canonly b separated by force: peanuts in candy, indigo in glass, Africans in irons” (Aminata in The Book of Negroes, 2007).

Taka taka taka gaer rokto pani karao hater muthi phaka

[Trans: Money, money, money! Even if you work till your Body sweats blood, Your fist remains empty]

(Bengali proverbs from the unpublished collection of Dr. Mazharul Islam, cited in Blair Kling, 1966)

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Introduction

What remains of bodies once they turn blue? In life, not in death. When the colour of the blood running through your veins is no longer red but blue. When you breathe out blue? When the stench of cruelty of your masters in the form of your sweat and blood in indigo vats might be the only familiar smells to you; the vats the only land you know, as you continue to inhale and exhale more blue. When these rancid, claustrophobic, incarcerating vats are the land you are coerced to feel familiar with? When the limits of your body blurred with those of vats so that you no longer know where your body ends and where the vats begin? Or where the blue begins and ends? How do we begin to theorize blue blood, blue lungs, blue fingers, the blue stuck underneath the nails, the blue breath that stretched Black and brown bodies across the four continents? I want to think about how we can read for extensions of these bodies in Divakaruni's poem about blue lungs and breaths of Bengali peasants to the already-always blue hands of the unborn, already enslaved child (Sharpe, 2016; Dash, 1991) to land that too turned blue (and red) from the indigo seeds that were unethically and forcefully thrust deep into its heart? The blue was grown on all four continents with European masters and colonisers raping the land, the women, enslaving Black people, and starving Black and brown colonized people into (strategic) submission. In this chapter, I argue that the legacy of colour blue needs to attend to racial, colonial and imperial violence which produced it. I argue that attending to the violence of blue means thinking about colonialism from British Raj to the Americas; that it means thinking about slavery and the hierarchy of labour conditions produced through transnational travels of blue. Once again, this means bringing unlikely, seemingly unconnected spaces together in a conversation. Blue coloured the four continents. And in this chapter, I try to hold onto its trace to understand the intimacies of the four continents produced through colour. In order to make clear why I stopped at blue lungs and fingers, I need to take a brief detour and talk about

211 some critical Black feminist and decolonial works that read marks on bodies within a context of systems of domination. For instance, in her book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Black American feminist scholar, Christina Sharpe (2016) argues an extended meditation on slavery and its afterlife which she calls "wake work". I have engaged with wake work as an analytic, method and ethics of engaging with resilient Black life in my chapter on Theoretical Framework.119 Some of the key constellations of the text include the ship, the hold, and the weather through which she maps the co-ordinates of Black life despite death, as Sharpe puts it (p.20). I have found myself pausing on her discussion of the ship several times, and write about it here not to (perhaps once again) present Black life as one that is always slipping, always on the ebb of (normative) life, but to think through a mark, a taped piece of paper that becomes a site, or rather, a modality, of imprinting on Black flesh through which Black life is often made visible (to non-Black people like myself). I also discuss this to illustrate that these markings have a history. Sharpe discusses a photograph she comes upon in her archival work looking through images of a catastrophic earthquake, of a little Haitian girl who, injured, with a wound on her face, is lying on a stretcher with an ice pack under her head. What struck Sharpe (and the readers) about this photograph is a piece of transparent tape on her forehead, with the word "Ship" written on it. Sharpe contextualizes her discussion of this photograph, and the 'mark,' within a "semiotics of the slave ship" (p. 21). She discusses Zong, a slave ship which brought enslaved African people from the West coast of Africa to Jamaica in 1781, and deliberately drowned 132 people (or 140 or 142, as Sharpe points out) en route due to lack of water on board, and for filing insurance claims since no insurance money would have been paid had these African people died of "natural death".120 When Sharpe comes upon that photograph of the little Black girl, she cannot look at that image outside the history of slavery and present of Black incarceration in a police-plantation state of Haiti; she could not analyze the word Ship on the girl's forehead outside of the marks that were burnt into flesh of abducted Africans before they were huddled onto slave ships (48- 49); she could not analyze it outside Zong, outside of other slave ships and the Middle

119 As I have said in my Theoretical Framework as well, wake work is more than just an analytic. Sharpe argue for it as an ontology of Black life as well, something which I have respectfully stayed away from employing in my work as a non-Black scholar. 120 As Sharpe

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Passage, and the Atlantic on whose bed are buried uncountable African people in the 400 years of slavery. Sharpe writes:

Is Ship a proper name? A destination? An imperative? A signifier of the im/possibility of Black life under the conditions of what, Stephanie Smallwood tells us, "would become an enduring project in the modern Western world 'of] probing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within" (Smallwood 2008, 35-36)? Is Ship a reminder and/or remainder of the Middle Passage, of the difference between life and death? Of those other Haitians in crisis sometimes called boat people? Or is Ship a reminder and/or remainder of the ongoing migrant and refugee crisis unfolding in the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian and Atlantic Oceans? Given how visual and literary culture evoke and invoke the Middle Passage with such deliberate and reflexive dysgraphic unseeing, I cannot help but extrapolate. (p. 46)

Sharpe also highlights the other ways in which Blackness circulates through the figures of the captive, migrant, and refugee in her reading of the word Ship. Living Black life is performing wake work, always in an intimate relationship with death in the world because Blackness and Black people are constantly denied life. Once again, it is important for me to reiterate that I do not discuss this image to resign Black life to terror and death. Taking cues from Sharpe's scholarship, I want to question how we can make sense of the blue lungs, blue fingers/nails, blue unborness (Dash, 1991), blue blood and blue breaths that marked the lands of Indigenous peoples as coerced into settlement by Black and brown hands across the Empire, and flesh and skins of Black and brown people as it spanned the whole of European and American Empires. As a non-Black and non-Indigenous person looking at the image in Sharpe’s book I am trying to actively think about the "ethical demands on the viewer," (Sharpe, p. 51) and I would add, of the reader here. The question of how to be ethical and responsible when encountering the little Black girl, about whom we know nothing more, none of the humanizing co-ordinates outside of the narrative of earthquake (that always seemingly happen by force of nature and devour Black and brown people) and aids agency, in the archive continues to stay with me. It is a struggle to even become aware of my orientation to Black lives in these moments. I am working with the ethic that we non-Black people have a responsibility of treating with care (and attention to complicity in anti-Blackness) this becoming of the Haitian girl into a ship.

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I write this with an understanding that Black fungibility is not the same as the multitude of labouring Bengali peasants I write about here. Black fungibility, as Tiffany King (2014) argues drawing upon Black feminist scholars like Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers, is a “key analytic for thinking about Blackness and settler colonialism in White settler nation-states”. She writes: The space making practices of settler colonialism require the production of Black flesh as a fungible form of property, not just as a form of labor. In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman argues that the enslaved embody the abstract “interchangeability and replaceability” that is endemic to the commodity (Hartman, 1997, p. 21). Beyond, the captive body’s use as labor, the Black body has a figurative and metaphorical value that extends into the realm of the discursive and symbolic. (n.p)

In pointing out some instances of how imperial, colonial and racial processes undergirding the life of natural indigo entangled the lives of enslaved Africans and colonized Bengali peasants, I am not looking for drawing any comparisons for there are no one-dimensional, easily graspable, readily available units that can be compared here.121 I am also trying to be careful that I do not make the argument that their labour is what made them similar or even comparable to each other. What I want to pay attention to in this chapter is how the blue moved around the globe, marking bodies and consolidating vertical and horizontal hierarchies of the human. I attended to Black fungibility because Blackness was and remains the most dehumanized as Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman and other Black scholars I have discussed in my Theoretical Framework have noted. In order to talk about dehumanizing of Bengali peasants, to take into account the resistance against this dehumanizing, I wanted to signal Black fungibility as the first and core site of historical and ongoing practices of dehumanizing. Colour has been an important site for how we can "approach anew the question of cultural exchange, violence and resistance," notes Natasha Eaton (2013), a scholar of Art History. This is certainly true for indigo for it has generated so much fascination, hatred, oppression, but also, revolutions. The politics of indigo has made it into a malevolent colour, making Empire stick together through the blood of variously colonized peoples, and those enslaved and brought to continental America, to the Caribbean, to South America, and to the

121 Please see my Theoretical Framework on discussion of politics of Black flesh.

214 ryots (small land-owning peasants) of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa and everywhere else where Europeans went in search of land, labour and other resources. I follow this trajectory of indigo to reflect upon how white settler colonialism, enslavement of Africans and colonial/imperial domination across Asia and Africa constituted the global power through which indigo was made into such an important actant on world stage and integral to relations of white domination and Black and brown subordination everywhere until early 20th century when synthetic indigo in Germany and elsewhere finally ended this coercion to grow indigo. In this chapter, I hold onto blue to make sense of seemingly disjointed spaces, temporalities and people which indigo brought into often intimate, and always asymmetrical encounters. I bring together two differently colonized spatial sites of enactment of racial violence, South Carolina and Bengal by analysing two important cultural texts of resistance. The first one is a mid-19th century Bengali protest play that explicated the violence of colonizing indigo planters and the resistance of the peasants, called Neel Darpan. The title of the Bengali play means, “Indigo mirror” in its English translation, the mirror being a “magic mirror which reflects two faces: the face of the tyrant, and the face of the aggrieved victim of tyranny” (Pradhan, date unknown). It reflects the harsh reality of the ordinariness and everydayness of cruelty of the East India Company and the accompanying British Raj, and also makes an attempt at capturing the violence against but also the resistance of the colonized (though more so of the coerced Bengali landlords rather than that of ryots or the peasants themselves). This play is the focus of my analysis and I examine it to think about anticolonial resistance of colonized Bengali people, but also, and more importantly, to pause on how these discourses of resistance could also work toward strengthening colonial and native elites in power, and in turn supporting the rule of white masters. I discuss the play in more detail later on in this chapter, but want to point out here too that Neel Darpan is not an infallible example of a radical anticolonial play that should be emulated in designing discourses of resistance and freedom. The play is problematic in how it centers the bodies of class and caste privileged landowning (zamindar) men rather than the ryots and those landless peasants who were Muslims and/or Dalit and had lived under the tyranny of these landlords even before British colonial relations were consolidated in Bengal. I have come to believe that it is precisely the problematic nature of the play that makes it more important to analyze if our goal is to think about questions of complicity in colonialism

215 here and there even as injured colonized subjects of history. What can be perceived as failure, I believe and argue, is pedagogically more important for learning to resist better than trying to live or emulate some previous example of resistance that left the landless/low caste/Dalit/Muslim subaltern people as silent and vestigial. In this chapter, I also want to reflect upon the conversation that can be facilitated between Neel Darpan and Daughters of the Dust, a 1991 independent film by Black filmmaker and novelist, Julie Dash. The film is set in early 20th century Dawtuh Island, located on the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast where thousands of Africans had been enslaved during the last three quarters of 18th century. Set in 1902, the film is a story of three generation of Gullah women whose hands were stained blue from growing indigo on plantations. Just as in Neel Darpan, indigo is the impetus for the entire film, but centers enslaved (and free) Black women of past, present and future instead of landlords and relatively class and caste privileged ryots. It’s also a woman-centered narrative that disrupts the linearity of time by indicating a future for previously enslaved Black people (through the figure of the unborn daughter). My choice to stage and facilitate a discussion between two literal and textual spaces that do not make any obvious references to each other might beget the question of why this should and can be done. To begin to answer this question, I note that I have known of Neel Darpan for much longer than I have known about Indigenous peoples and enslaved Black people in the New World who were also coerced into growing indigo. My earliest knowledge about indigo came from stories told by my Bengali Muslim mother who probably knows (of) indigo more intimately than I ever will. She has heard more stories and have seen indigo fields and grew up playing in and around neel kuthi, or blue walled houses built by European planters during initial days of indigo trade in a small city of Narayanganj, outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she lived with her large working-class family and was one of the nine children of factory workers. Neither of us are certain about who in our families grew indigo but considering the fact that my mother’s family comes from the Nadia district of East Bengal (in present-day India) and Bangladesh (part of India until 1947 and then Pakistan until 1971), and were among the poorest of Hindu peasants who converted to Ismailism122 in

122 Ismailism is a branch of Shi'i Islam. While scholarly studies into conversion of Hindus to Ismailism in South Asia have yet to be carried out systematically in terms of caste, hearing some stories from 100s of years ago

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17th- to 18th centuries to escape caste relations under Hinduism that were intimately tied to their depressed class and caste positions, it is likely that they saw themselves reflected in the anticolonial struggles of which Neel Darpan is a part. We grew up hearing stories from my mother, grandparents and aunties about brave men and women who spent their lives struggling against the brutal realities of the East India Company rule in India. From stories of getting tortured and killed by British sahibs to a fable of an old woman who fed those “evil sahibs” of the East India Company poisoned roti (bread), tales of revolutionaries who fought the sahibs who would beat us for land, for labour, and our women; in fact, for our very souls. And for colours, which, in these stories, grew by 'magic' in the soil. This magic sent blue poison deep into the veins and blood of my ancestors. They grew poison and died in the process and all of this so that Europeans and Americans could wear blue clothes! I have been very angry thinking about the millions of deaths of Black and brown people and their futures around the world just so there can be blue uniforms, gowns and drapes. Initially, I planned to only write about European planters and the East India Company’s violence against the Bengali peasants, and focus on colonizer-colonized, but also the hierarchical relations amongst the colonized. However, once I began to read up more widely on the history of indigo –the transnationality of its reach, and the poison it infused not only in brown bodies but also how it stained Black flesh –it became increasingly difficult to not contextualize indigo within the context of enslavement and deaths of Black people. Without thinking about the blue-stained hands of women in Nana Peazant’s family in Dash’s film –presented as both, a poetics of slavery and resistance –thinking about indigo in Bengal (only) seemed to be just a small piece of the story. Living in North America, talking about colonial violence unleashed by the British planters on Bengalis prompted me to unforget how I live where I now live, and how integral it is to my narratives to pay attention to the colour now surviving in Gujarati language, and from knowledge passed down in family and the larger community, I know that most of us converted to Ismailism to escape caste tyranny. I understand my ancestors as belonging to Chamar caste of Dalit people. However, it is a subject position which I do not claim today given that among Ismailis, caste hierarchies are disavowed and for generations now we have grown up without knowing casteist violence. I now understand myself to be a privileged caste person in diaspora and hold myself complicit in upholding caste hierarchies. This is despite the fact that caste definitely shows in our surnames, whether it be my adopted mid-caste surname of Patel or my extended family's surname of Kachra which means garbage in Hindi/Urdu. It was a surname which they think marked their means of living as generations of garbage collectors at the time of conversion to Islam/Ismailism. I, however, do not know how or why we changed our paternal last name or what it actually was before Patel or even how this name change was possible in a very casteist South Asia. I have yet to examine my own family histories and of caste relations among Ismailis of earlier centuries.

217 which marked bodies of other colonized and enslaved peoples of the New World. For a long time now, because of the stories I grew up with, I have known that blue killed. What I realize only more recently is that blue is an archive in itself. So much has happened out of the blue; so much violence has come out of the blue. Indigo blue is an archive that has brought the peasants whose stories I grew up hearing together with enslaved and Indigenous peoples in the New World. This chapter is a small attempt at reading that vast, transnational archive of blue through the play and the film. Bringing these texts and spaces into conversation has been difficult for me because my academic training, as I have stated in my introductory chapter, has prepared me to hold onto mostly clear-cut boundaries of fields, theories, temporalities, and geographies. Attempting to draw these connections when there is no linear narrative to present in easily consumable bits is a daunting task. Again and again I would give up on writing this chapter because tracing the legacies and connections left in the wake of blue has been difficult since the boundaries around different archives have been kept strictly segregated.123 But labour exploitation, imperialism, colonialism and slavery are all encoded in the sign of indigo but so is the resistance of the ryots, of the enslaved and of other colonized peoples coerced into growing indigo for Europe and later, America. The colonized people in Neel Darpan and Nana Peazant's family in Daughter of the Dust are already in conversation with each other even if the conversations are placed in different spatio-temporal coordinates. Linking imperialism in India with colonial and racial violence of the New World despite the vast geographical and chronological divide is actually needed because as I have argued in another chapter, the colonizers of the New World who were also the Master of the stolen and enslaved people, later came to India as East India Company officials, as planters, as private business holders, adventurers and soldiers. Reading these texts in relation to each other provides an analytical framework that decolonizes the kinds of archival and representational separations that constitute and reproduce present-day colonial discontinuities and “afterlives of slavery” (Hartman, 1997). Moreover, I take heed from Gyandera Pandey’s (2008) instruction in his editorial on bringing changing modes of disenfranchisement in South Asia and the US into conversation with each other. He writes:

123 I have discussed this in more detail in my chapter on methodology. I am also very grateful to Lisa Lowe’s (2006, 2015) work for encouraging me to think through the archival boundaries.

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The juxtaposition of different bodies of scholarship and differing debates should help to bring about a new awareness, not only of shared histories and shared struggles in the making of the modern world, but of particularities and facets of our different histories and societal conditions that we have simply assumed as being well understood, and hence taken for granted. (p. 272)

From India to Arabia to Europe and Africa and back to India, indigo moved along trade routes, solidifying human hierarchies of colonizers, colonized, Masters, slaves, planters/colonizers, and the colonized/peasants. This chapter is not an effort at writing a better or more complete story of indigo. However, it is an effort at expanding the analytical frames within which scholars of South Asia and British Empire have looked at indigo production in Bengal. I want to place the stories of indigo I know with the ones I am beginning to learn about. I try to do that without losing the specificities of the forms of violence indigo travels took in different continents and time periods. In her truly remarkable doctoral project titled, In the Clearing: Black Female Bodies, Space and Settler Colonial Landscapes, Tiffany Lethabo-King (2013) argues for development of what she calls, “simultaneous vision” (p. 32) in order to “see” how slavery and settler colonialism structure one another. Indebted to her work, in this chapter, I argue for bringing in the journey of indigo in South Asia too to help us better "see" how colonialism in one place was entangled with so many other stories of violence and people(s), and to “see” how the indigo which stained the hands of the women in Daughters of the Dust also structured the lives and death of colonized people in India. This has been important for me as I continue to think about the question of interconnectedness of white settler colonialism, slavery, and other imperial and colonial enterprises of British and American empires. In the next section, I give a brief summary of the transnational travels of indigo. I will then discuss the play, paying attention to the question of radicality of the play and discussing my reasons for choosing it in more detail. I will analyze the play by holding onto the social formations of caste, coloniality, and whiteness in order to understand how anticolonial resistance of peasants was co-opted by elite native perceptions of the 1860 Blue Mutiny. I then look into the debates on “slavery” in East India and West India with a focus on the question of freedom. It was in these debates that the colonizers/Master/planters/EIC officials

219 brought the ryots from “East India” into conversation with slaves on plantations of “West India”. Alluding to these debates, I insist on holding together both these figures conventionally held apart by disciplinarily-separated archives. I will end this chapter by analyzing Dash's film to reflect on what I have learned about resistance from it.

Transnational Travels of Indigo

As David McCreery (2006) notes, “At the same time that Portugal’s caravels were opening Asia to European seaborne commerce, the Spanish were settling the New World, and among the first agricultural exports of these new colonies was indigo” (p. 53). Lines of influence, if not direct continuity, constellated prior cultures of peasant indigo in India with the emergent plantation system in the Western hemisphere. Prakash Kumar (2014), a specialist in South Asian history and histories of science, carefully documents the heterogeneity of knowledge production attached to the practice of indigo manufacture around the Empire, bringing people, cultures, as well as formations of white settler colonialism and slavery in Americas with British Raj in India. He argues that we must pay attention to the “multilateral knowledge flows” which gave rise to the plantation life of indigo in 18th and 19th centuries Bengal (p. 722). Paying attention to the “fluidity and multi-directionality” (p. 723) of knowledge flows accompanying the travels of indigo brings the Caribbean, Americas, islands in the Indian Ocean and colonial South Asia into conversation that engages with fragmented, seemingly unconnected histories without looking to complete the picture, so to say but with the goal of reading for how “Indigo moved along trade routes and through human hierarchies, marking status while it coloured material” (Feeser, 2013, p. 5) is what I attempt to do in this section. The practice or art of manufacturing blue dye from indigo was an ancient one and its origins probably lie in India (Prakash; Kling, 1966). The Hindu, Urdu and Bengali word for indigo is nil/neel. The word indigo itself comes from the Greek indikon (“from India”) because ancient Greeks imported their blue form there (van Schendel, 2008, p. 31). Before indigo was introduced to Europe in large marketable quantities, the continent relied on woad, Europe’s indigenous blue extracting plant. But, with indigo turning out to be of better quality than woad, and with plantation economy introduced on newly stolen/colonized lands,

220 indigo began to take hold of the market. Initially there was a strong resistance to importing indigo as a replacement of woad. As Padmini Tolat Balaram (2012) notes, for economic reasons, woad cultivators began an anti-indigo smear campaign and branded it as a “fugitive” dye that was “a pernicious, deceitful, eating and corrosive dye” (p. 143) in order to discourage its import. Also known as “devil’s dye,” its use became prohibited in several parts of Europe. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, England banned importation of indigo and inspectors burned any contraband indigo they found, and in fact, by early 17th century, its use became a capital offence punishable by death in France. Indigo was one of the rare tropical products that first brought Europeans to India. As Kling (1966) notes, as soon as Portuguese discovered a trade route to India, they began to supply it to the whole of Europe, and were later joined by the Dutch, followed by the British, and by the time British East India Company was established, indigo was one of the most profitable imports of England (p.16). But by 1724, East India Company could not compete with indigo production in the Caribbean, and abandoned the trade for a while (p.17). The emergence of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation economies in 17th century saw indigo production shifted primarily to the Caribbean and other parts of the New World because stolen Africans were being coerced into growing it, and also because of proximity of these plantations to the Western markets. But once the West Indian planters gave up Indigo for crops such as sugar and coffee, British market became reliant on middle quality indigo from slave-grown Spanish-occupied Guatemala and French occupied Santo Domingo (present day Haiti). With American Revolution, when the British lost their sources of dye, the attention shifted back to India and by the end of the 18th century, with support from the East India Company and the colonial governorship of Bengal, a major plantation industry in Lower Bengal was firmly established (Kling, p.18). As the preface to the Report of the Indigo Commission of 1860, re-published in 1992 notes, since 1777 when Louis Bonnaud, a French plantation Master established two indigo factories in Bengal, until the Blue Mutiny of 1859- 60, indigo plantations were more important to British economy than importing any other crops such as rice, jute, tobacco or even sugar. East India Company encouraged indigo growth under the supervision of the Company so that the indigo grown could match the quality of the plant from West Indies. Knowledge of indigo growing was integral to not only the East India Company in its re-launching of indigo in India, but in its entire plantation life.

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When indigo was first planted in the New World, its knowledge came from centuries old planting practices in India, written down by French naturalists and colonizers, and through captured West Africans to work on plantations in the Caribbean and other parts of Americas. While the globalization of indigo production was a great commercial success, it was also a labour-intensive process. Indian indigo was sold as cakes made by extracting the dye from the plant. It was, therefore, more concentrated and pure and could be preserved for decades, thus making these cakes easier to be transported to America and Europe. The process of manufacturing Indian indigo was long and tedious and was closely supervised at each stage by the European planters. Indigo had to be sown immediately before the spring rains and reaped at the moment of perfect maturity before autumn rains. It had to be immediately taken to the factory for processing where coolies then carried it to vats and through extremely laborious work including jumping into the vats with sticky indigo extracts and water up to their hips which they would then stir and beat with bamboo paddles for hours (Kling, p. 33). After more swirling, pumping and boiling, the liquid finally gave sediments that were then compressed into cakes. According to Kling, about 2,000 square feet of land were required to produce a mere 8 ounce cake of indigo. Whether in India with labour of ryots and coolies or in the New World with slave labour, indigo cultivation was extremely labour a nd land intensive. Between 16th to 19th centuries, at different points in time and in different but not always unconnected geographical spaces, ryots, Indigenous peoples of Americans and enslaved people were growing indigo. For example, Spain did not have ready access to India like the Portuguese had. Therefore, it was the Indigenous peoples of Nicaragua in Central America who were coerced into collecting the leaves from wild bushes and processed it to make the colour (MacLeod, 2008, p. 177-78). This was part of the taxes which they had to give to the Spanish crown. Seeing the capital which indigo generated, soon Spaniards set up plantations and by 1600, indigo was one of the major exports of Central America. Here it was grown by both, Indigenous peoples and the Africans brought to the continent (McCreary, p.61). The indigo exported by Spanish in mid-16th century was grown by Indigenous peoples in Central America, while indigo became one of the major causes of further dispossession of Cherokees and other Indigenous peoples of South Carolina as planter/colonizers’ greed thrust the seeds of indigo deeper and further on stolen lands.

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The blood and stained skins of Indian peasants, those enslaved, and Indigenous peoples of Americas became entangled as more and more blue was produced for European markets. Indigo growing practices thus also reflected various techniques of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, of the Indian peasants, and of the Africans who were also b(r)ought for their knowledge of growing indigo in Africa. Europe's quest for blue brought several different Empires including the Spanish, Dutch French and British into death-making encounters with indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa and South and South Asia:

Four-cornered trade brought indigo-dyed textiles to Europe for re-export to West Africa as essential barter for slaves. These slaves provided much of the labour on the European indigo-plantations in the West Indies and America, and the end product crossed the Atlantic for consumption in Europe […] Workers, whether slaves or local peasantry, paid a high price, often with their lives, to satisfy the European appetite for blue. For this reason, indigo’s history is tainted by the associated evil of human exploitation (Balfour-Paul, 1998, p. 60).

Slaves grew indigo, produced the dye and also coloured cloth. That vicious cycle, where enslaved Black people were made to work on indigo plantations to produce materials which were then sold for buying more Black people, thus strengthening the slavery system. By the end of the First World War, synthetic indigo from German factories dominated the market, effectively ending planters’ hope to continue benefitting from indigo growth in the province of Bengal. By 1920, production of natural indigo in the colony effectively came to an end (Kumar, 2012, p.7).

Reading Neel Darpan

Setting the context Neel Darpan (trans. Indigo Mirror) was a "protest play," (Banerjee, 2016, p. 214) written by dramatist and government official, Dinabandu Mitra in Lower Bengal of 1860. This play offers a testimony to the horrors of indigo cultivation, and the resolve of those coerced into growing indigo at the hands of the English planters to refuse to accede anymore

223 to the wills of their cruel masters.124 The play reflected the banality of violence in indigo- growing districts: The torture, kidnappings, rape, murder, burning of houses, plunder of their homes, and starvation encouraged five million peasants to rise in revolt against the planters and the colonial government from 1859-62 in Lower Bengal which was the pivot of indigo manufacturing on the subcontinent. “Blue Mutiny,” as it came to be called, however, did not end indigo industry and the center of growing indigo shifted to north Bihar still within the Bengal Presidency, because of the peasant revolt in Bengal. Neel Darpan written while the revolt was ongoing, astutely reflects the greed and atrocities of their white colonizer-planters. The atrocities of the English and the daily kidnappings, torture, rape of peasant women and starving off their families were not unknown to anybody who was in or knew of these indigo growing districts. Neel Darpan is set in a fictional village called Swarpur, in the district of Nadia, one of the centers of indigo growth in 19th century Bengal. The story unfolds from the viewpoint of a small landowner, Golak Chandra Basu and his sons, Nabinmadhab Basu, and younger son, Bindumadhab Basu, Golak's wife, Sabitri, and two daughters-in-law, Sairindhri and Saralata are also part of the Basu family. There's also a peasant family in the drama: Sadhu Charan Ghosh, Basu's neighbour. Sadhu Charan has a brother named Ray Charan, wife Rebati and a daughter Kshetromoni. Other important characters are that of Torap, a Muslim peasant and tenant of the Basu family, two planters, I.I. Wood, P.P. Rogue, and Gopinath Das, the native manager of the two planters' estates and the village prostitute, known as Podi Moryani.125 There are other minor or supporting characters such as the milkman, housemaid and numerous peasants who all remain unnamed except for the ones I have already

124 Blair Kling notes that European planters were usually English or Scoth and occasionally French or Eurasian with no Indian ever holding the position of a manager or assistant. The Indian employees of an indigo concern usually made the administration, production, and police. Top positions in administration and production departments were occupied by men of upper castes such as Brahmins and Kayastha castes. The police consisted of lathiyals which were “bands of professional warriors armed with lathis or sticks”. During the peak season, buna coolies made up of Adivasi tribes from jungles of Manbhum, Singhbu and Midnapur were also employed. See Kling, pp.28-29. 125 She is consistently referred to as Podi Moryani in the play. Podi probably refers to her Pod caste. However, since there are no critical anti-casteist readings of the play, and with barely any reference to the figure of Podi Moryani, I am unable to say with certainty what I suspect, that is, Podi refers to Moryani’s Pod or Poundra caste. Pod caste, at present, is the fourth largest Scheduled Caste (low caste) of West Bengal. While not all Pods were poor, they certainly were not considered a respectable caste in Bengal’s casteist community. For more on Poundras in colonial Bengal, see Rup Kumar Barman (2014), “From Pods to Poundra: A Study on the Poundra Kshatriya Movement for Social Justice 1891-1956”.

224 mentioned here. The story is about the violence of the planters towards the peasants and these landlords coerced into growing indigo instead of investing even a small area of land needed to grow crops for their survival. The play opens with a scene where Golak Chandra and Sadhu Charan are discussing planters' demands to grow more indigo on their lands. They are lamenting the days when they had freedom to grow food on their lands and when there was enough food to feed everybody in Golak Chandra's household, even enough for people stopping by. It was Golak Chandra Basu’s “golden Swarpur” until indigo plantations were brought. Golak Chadra soon loses all his property to the planters, and when his elder son, Nabinmadhab goes to corrupt colonial court to fight against the planter, Golak Chandra is arrested and in prison, from humiliation and despair, he commits suicide. His death is followed by Wood, the planter, breaking Nabinmadhab's skull into two when he goes to plead with the planter to give him few more days after his father's funeral before he has to sow indigo in the leftover private property of his. Golak Chandra's wife, Sabitri, who was just widowed is told of her older son's murder and in a fit of rage, she strangles her younger daughter-in-law, Saralata. Upon regaining consciousness, she realizes what she has done and dies of a broken heart. The play ends with Bindhumadhab's monologue lamenting indigo’s arrival to their land with sahibs. This short and raw narration does not capture the fate of all the characters, and neither of the peasants or of the sheer violence which is the principal actant in the play. There are beatings, kidnappings, rape, and tears of the Basu family and of the peasants.

The Response

Some newspapers, such as the Hindoo Patriot, were anti-planter and pro- independence of India from British Rule, would regularly report on the colonial violence. This violence of the planters was no secret. And yet, the play caught the imagination of Bengalis (peasants, soldiers and gentlemen alike) to such an extent that the British magistrate cancelled the show and the troupe performing were asked to leave town (Rao & Rao, 1992, p. 3). Protest plays like Neel Darpan were indeed threatening to the colonial authorities and

225 their upper caste allies. These ruling families had witnessed the power of theater in mobilizing anticolonial public responses in ordinary colonized subjects and that was threatening for the stability of the rule. As Nandi Bhatia, scholar of nationalism, literary, and theatrical practices, (2004) notes, by the time of Indian mutiny of 1857 and the Indigo Revolt of 1859-60, “theater in India had indeed become an expression of political struggle against colonial rule and a space for staging scathing critiques of the oppression and atrocities inflicted upon colonial subjects by rulers on the indigo plantations and tea estates” (p.1). 126 Neel Darpan was the first play at that inauguration in December 1872 of the Calcutta National Theatrical Society, the first ever-Bengali public theater that introduced the concept of people paying money to watch a play. Yet, Neel Darpan at the inauguration guaranteed that the play opened to a full theater room. One incident in response to the play is commonly narrated about the play, even if the truth or authenticity of the narrative cannot be ascertained. Apparently, while watching the play, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, --a renowned Bengali scholar, reformer, and a key figure of anti-colonial movement of 19th century Bengal--was so moved by the play that he took off his shoe and hurled it at the actor performing the role of Rob Rogue, an Indian planter (Rao & Rao, 1992; Guha, 1974; Banerjee, 2016). According to the autobiography of Binodini Dasi, an actress in the play, in a scene where an actor playing a British planter was attacked by an Indian character for attempting rape on the daughter of a ryot, European spectators rose from their seats to stop the play: “some of the red-faced goras unsheathed their swords and jumped on the stage” (qtd in Bhatia, n.3, p.125, emphasis in original).127 Both Indians and their colonizers were distressed (albeit in different ways) by the play. As another prominent nineteenth century social reformer Shibnath Shastri commented, "We shall never forget the great upheaval which it [Neel Durpan] caused in Bengalee society. All of us children, old men and women became almost mad. It was the talk in every home and in every lodging was its representation" (qtd. in Mitra, p.82).

On Caste, Whiteness, and Anticoloniality of the Play

126 The Censorship Act of 1876 authorized local government of British India to prohibit or shut down any play/performance “’likely to excite feelings of disaffection to the Government established by law in British India,’ or ‘likely to deprave and corrupt persons present at the performance,’ or was ‘otherwise prejudicial to the interests of the public’” (Bhatia, p.19). 127 Gora and gori refer to white man and woman respectively in both colloquial Hindi and Urdu.

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The play’s main narrator and protagonists are zamindars or landlords as if these were the main oppressed subjects of the planters. As James Forlong, a liberal planter who live din Bengal for 30 years before his testimony in front of the Indigo Commission of 1860 said, “I have never yet found a zamindar hesitate in handing over his ryots to the planter as soon as his terms are complied with” (cited in Guha, p.25). Neel Darpan has been written from the point of view of Golak Chandra Basu and his family who were landholders and employers of peasants, rather than the peasants, most of whom were landless, poor and even before colonial rule, victims of these greedy landholders and caste system. In his influential assessment of the play in The Journal of Peasant Studies, historian of Subaltern Studies of South Asian, Ranajit Guha (1974) asserts that the play is an exemplar par excellence of liberal Bengalis differentiating between the good colonizer and the bad colonizer, while never questioning their loyalty to the colonial British Raj. He asserts that this distinction was common among rich peasants and landlords who were benefitting from the British Raj. The “’bhadra Englishmen of good character’ who never took up the indigo trade and ‘the cruel, abhadra men’ among them who did” (14). This can be seen even in the play where Mitra, expressed tremendous faith in the rationality and impartiality of English law and the good intentions of the colonial administrators with his whole “good sahibs” versus “bad sahibs” binary. A passage from the preface of the play displays Mitra’s faith in British (colonial) justice: The most kindhearted Queen Victoria, the mother of the people, thinking it unadvisable to suckle her children through maid-servants, has now taken them on her own lap to nourish them. The most learned, intelligent, brave, and open- hearted Lord Canning is now the Governor- general of India; Mr. Grant, who always suffers in the sufferings of this people, and is happy when they are happy, who punishes the wicked and supports the good, has taken charge of the Lieutenant-Governorship, and other persons, as Messrs. Eden, Herschel, etc., are all well known for their love of truth, for their great experience and strict impartiality, Or continually expanding themselves lotus-like on the surface of the lake of the Civil Service. Therefore, it is becoming fully evident that these great men will very soon take hold of the rod of justice in order to stop the sufferings which the ryots are enduring from the great giant Rahu, the Indigo Planter. (n.p)

Bhatia (2004) notes that the play also exhibited faith in Christianity, and consequently, in the missionaries working in India, leaving the planters as the only evil group of people in colonial India. There is a considerably large scholarship on the role of Christian missionaries

227 in stabilizing the work of colonialism by converting the colonized, so the play’s acceptance of colonial relations is clear just from that aspect as well. Moreover, the play, narrated from the point of view of the local zamindars or landlords who even before the British Raj ruled the peasants and literally stood on ground that was made from these peasants’ sweat and tears, displays a liberal bourgeois consciousness and is aimed more at reforming the planters and therefore establishes Mitra’s loyalty to his employer, the colonial state rather than challenge the Raj itself. Even though this play is historic, it does not pose a challenge to the British Raj, and is therefore, at best, a liberal humanitarian effort at outlining the plight of petty landholders and the almost absent present peasants. Furthermore, it reinforces the binary of good colonizer and the bad colonizer. However, I am still focusing on this play because in Indian historiography, Neel Darpan is considered as an important site for studying the resistance of Indians to indigo and colonial rule. Moreover, Bhatia argues that theatre is an important site for studying the heterogeneity of the subaltern. She writes: The project of recuperating alternative histories through cultural texts also necessitate discussion off modes of representation of those histories as well as the ideological function of form, a context in which the representational apparatus of theater acquires special relevance. Theater’s visual focus, emphasis on collective participation and representation of shared histories, mobility, potential for public disruption, and spatial maneuverability important yet another layer to the cultural investments of colonial and postcolonial texts in framing, organizing, and presenting alternative stories… And the now burgeoning attention to theater movements in colonized societies further attests to the key role of theater as a powerful tool of political engagement. To ignore theater, therefore, is to ignore a large beast of subaltern history. (p.3)

In addition, given the fact that colonial India’s literacy rates were extremely low, Bhatia argues for the centrality of theatre in the world of resistance to colonial rule. She argues this despite being in agreement with Guha that Neel Darpan was indeed a loyalist play that became embroiled in power struggles among the three colonial groups of the British Indian government, the missionaries and the indigo planters (p.22). I also argue that it is important to think about the vernaculars used to articulate anticolonial resistance and to think about who were these anticolonial subjects in the play so that we can be careful about the language used to pose resistance to racism for us, those of us

228 here who are part of South Asian diaspora in western nation-states.128 This care is needed so that, for example, an upper caste Bengali or some other South Asian subject who cries about racism in white settler states, is asked fro accountability when they argue for solidarity with Indigenous peoples and Black people while being in denial about caste or how caste has allowed them to claim their radicality against racism and colonialism here. I, therefore, suggest that we do a critical reading for caste hierarchies in the play. In my theoretical framework, I have already discussed the significance of attending to caste hierarchies in South Asia and in diaspora(s) where South Asians are settled. For me, this play still offers an important site for thinking about the heterogeneity of the subaltern. As I began thinking about this question of how does one read for the subaltern, and what is it that we are reading when analyzing the figure of the South Asian as subaltern, I became interested in questions of the complexities and the systems of domination and subordination that frame the figure of the subaltern in the Indian context. The figure of the subaltern, understood as a colonized subject resisting British Raj and colonial forces has dominated the study of South Asia since the 1980s when the field came into existence in Western academia. This archetypical figure of the Subaltern Studies has been the Third World peasant (Pandey, 2008, p. 273). As Gyan Pandey notes, " The task of subaltern historiography was to recover this underdeveloped figure for history, to restore the agency of the yokel, recognize that the peasant mass was contemporaneous with the modern --a part of modernity -- and establish the peasant as (in substantial part) the maker of his/her own destiny" (p.273). These peasants were not a mass of undifferentiated bodies who could not think or speak for themselves. Moreover, just because these peasants were colonized, and under capitalist patriarchal hegemony of their landlords, planters and East India Company officials, that does not mean that they could not and did not participate in upholding systems of domination as well. Subaltern historiography by upper caste historians has more than often presented this peasant figure as castless except for some brief interventions such as Chatterjee’s (1989) engagement with this central social formation of organizing life in India and other parts of South Asia. Dalit scholars Rawat and Satyanarayanas’ (2016) argument that caste is often evacuated in subaltern and postcolonial theorizing of anti-colonial resistance movements has

128 See my Introduction to this Dissertation.

229 provided me with an extremely important caution in my own understanding of postcolonial and subaltern studies. They argue:

Questions of caste discrimination were (and are) a crucial part of everyday life in modern India, but they remained on the margins because of the way the category of the subaltern subject was formulated. The unqualified use of the term ‘subaltern’ to mean peasant has tended to ignore the world of Dalit peasants and labourers within agrarian society and their exploitation and subjugation by the landlords and the subaltern peasants. In the subaltern studies project, the subaltern was an unmarked subject, and caste inequity was not the core feature of its cultural and political formation. The subaltern peasant in most cases belonged to “lower caste’ groups (but not to the untouchable castes), who were culturally committed to forms of Hinduism and values of caste inequality. (p. 14, emphasis added)

Yet, while the markers of caste are everywhere in the play, but they go without comment by the play’s characters. the undifferentiated by caste figure of the peasant stands in denial of both indigeneity and caste hierarchies among peasants in the play. As Uday Chandra (2015) notes, 19th century Bengal has a “hidden” history of one such labouring group: the Kols, who were the “coolies” for indigo and tea plantations of Bengal. Constructed as both, the “labouring caste par excellence” (p.20) and a tribal/indigenous group to Bengal, Kols were tasked with doing the most difficult work on indigo plantations. In colonial archives, Kols are referred to as “the lowest kind of Hindoos,” (S.T. Cuthbert, cited in Chandra, p. 21) and also in romanticized terms which was how colonized peoples in Americas were constructed by Europeans: as savage, wild, free people who were independent. Despite the nebulousness in colonial archives about whether to situate Kols in terms of caste or indigeneity, what holds true is that they were seen as industrious and hard working people without whose labour indigo plantations would not have flourished in India. Recruited by men of higher caste from their lands in rural West Bengal, Kol labourers were brought to the plantations to perform the most difficult tasks in the indigo production process, such as physically entering a tank full of water and indigo to stomp out impurities. This work was carried out by “jungli Kols”129 because” no one else would do it and the Kols were seen as ideally suited for such tasks” (25,

129 The word jungli means dwellers of jungle; uncivilized and savage. Obviously the colonial connotations of such a phrase are obvious. Indigenous peoples are often seen as being part of the landscape and the forest dwellers become subhumans.

230 emphasis in original). Therefore, Chandra continues, “So, in the caste hierarchy of the indigo plantation, Kols effectively stood below the raiyats or rent-paying peasants who were forced to cultivate indigo on their lands, the landless farm workers who were dependents of zamindars or indigo contractors, the upwardly mobile labour recruiters, the zamindars who leased out their lands to European contractors, and the contractors themselves.” (p. 25, emphasis in original) But it was the landlord family members who were the protagonists, the main speaking subjects in the play, with another caste ryot family as secondary protagonists. The so-called radicality of the play and its anti-colonial potential is effectively annihilated by the fact that it had no mention or place for Kol or other Dalit and indigenous laborers as speaking subjects in the play. A critical anti-casteist reading of the play therefore proves that the subaltern can also be a casteist, anti-indigenous subject who colludes with the British Raj even it its refusal of the (bad or even all) colonizers. As Rao and Rao (1992) note, the village of Swarpur is a replica of the larger society it belongs to and the people there are aware of their caste status (p. 131). As they note: “There is a distinct division of labour. Even among the Brahmins, the highest caste, some are priests, some teach in colleges, some in the village school where only Sanskrit is taught; but all are aware of their superior caste status” (p.131). It is there in Brahmin priests’ condescending acceptance of hospitality offered by the Basu family who were also Brahmin but of a lower (Kayastha) subcaste. Caste is there in insults hurled by the planters at the Indian employers. For instance, Gopinath, the overseer of plantations to Wood (the planter) says, "My lord, true, your slave is a kayastha by caste but in his work he's a keot... Even a chamar, or a keot would have refused to do what I've done --but my luck's bad, so I get no credit even for doing all this" (First Act, Third Scene). Keot and Chamar are sub-castes of Dalits. Gopinath in order to pledge his allegiance to the Planter-Master mobilizes Dalit-ness because he claims that so great is his loyalty and desire to serve his Master that he has become even that which was impossible and unimaginable for him. Of course, it is mobilizing a proximity to Dalit, a disembodied Dalitness which comes without any experience or history of caste violence. Wood also brings in caste when insulting Nabinmadhab: "Shut up, you swine, sister-fucker, bastard, beef-eater." A dreary insult to upper-caste Hindus is to call them "beef eaters" because they consider the cow sacred and worship it as “gau maata”, or cow-mother. This has also been a major site of continually enacting casteist violence against Dalit Bahujans

231 because they eat beef.130 Even today, with a right wing Hindu nationalist government in power in India, there are daily stories of Dalit-Bahujans beaten, tortured and lynched when suspected of eating beef. Caste and its attendant formation of anti-Muslimness is there even in moments of trying to resist extreme violence unleashed by the planters. For instance, when some of the peasants are kidnapped and kept in the basement of one of the factories, and are trying to look up the high wall to see who is on the other end, Torap, the Muslim peasant has to bend down to let a Hindu peasant stand on his back because a Muslim cannot put his feet on a Hindu (Second Act, First Scene). Caste is also there in resistance/anticolonial songs of the peasants:

The Missionaries have destroyed the caste The Factory monkeys have destroyed the rice (Second Act, First Scene)

Caste is there in peasants and landlord families’ mention of taking bath given their obsession with rituals of purity, in references to Hindu gods, in demarcating the boundaries between Hindu women (of certain castes) and the seemingly fallen women such as Podi, and white women. Rao and Rao note that these patriarchal relations in the village reflected the “existing norms” of (Indian) society. They write: “Shy and self-effacing, with their saris covering their heads and drawn over their faces, women stay inside their homes, attending to the needs of their elders and the menfolk” (131). In establishing as the norm from time immemorial, these authors do not pay attention to the simultaneous consolidation of caste hierarchies and patriarchal norms. In her article, “Whiteness on the margins of native patriarchy,” Shefali Chandra (2011) argues for the need to move beyond the simplistic binaries of colonizer/colonized and read for the ways in which whiteness (and the subsequent racial difference) was engineered to consolidate caste hierarchies in colonized India. This consolidation, she argues, happened primarily through sexual difference between (caste) Hindu women, Indian prostitutes (rendered outside Brahmin and other upper caste system) and white women (constructed as even more licentious than the prostitutes). As an example, Podi Moryani, a sweetmeat maker in the village, was also known as the village prostitute.

130 Every single day there is news from India about lower caste or Dalit Muslims lynched or burnt for eating beef. Even a faint suspicion that they have eaten beef can and does get them killed by right wing, upper caste Hindu nationalists. This is but one example of ongoing casteist and Islamophobic violence against Muslims in India.

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She takes Khetromani, who is Rebati and Sadhu Charan’s daughter to the Planter, Mr. Rose, who rapes her. In one of her dialogues where she’s talking to herself, Moryani laments: “How detestable is this, that for the sake of money, I have given up my caste and my life; and also am obliged to touch the bed of a Buno” (Second Act, Scene III). Though Moryani was perhaps herself a Poundra (see footnote n.6), that is low caste, her caste consciousness made it reprehensible that some of the men who paid her for sex were Buno. Buno people are descendants of Santal labourers who are scheduled tribe found in India and Nepal. They are mostly non-Hindus and follow their indigenous tribal religions. Prostitution was seen as an act that deprived women of their caste status, as can be seen from Podi’s dialogue (written by an upper caste Hindu man). Caste hierarchies are a deep investment in maintaining the purity of one’s community and women are the necessary boundary-markers of these violently heteropatriarchal standards of purity. Increasingly, women whose sexual activities were outside the realm of monogamous conjugal relations were labeled as prostitutes, punishable by exclusion from upper castes and relegated to lower or subcastes of Hinduism. As Kunal M. Parker (1998) analyzing Anglo-Indian law and its commensurability with casteist Hindu patriarchal norms notes: Over the course of the nineteenth century, the textual Hindu law instantiated changing ideologies of marriage without ever abandoning the basic premise that marriage was absolutely indispensable for Hindu women. Under the ‘old patriarchy’ of the first half of the nineteenth century, marriage was the source of all legal status, rights and disabilities for Hindu women; their sexual activity outside marriage was severely punished as ‘incontinence’, ‘unchastity’ or ‘prostitution’. Under the ‘new patriarchy’ of the second half of the nineteenth century, the appropriated ideal of Victorian companionate marriage instantiated itself in law. Although the sexual activity of women outside marriage continued to be regarded disapprovingly as ‘incontinence’, ‘unchastity’ or ‘prostitution’, the severity of its legal consequences was mitigated. At the same time, however, there was a vigorous legal drive to construct a cohesive Hindu community organized around this new notion of marriage. (p.562)

Podi’s nonreproductive sexuality that couldn’t be defined under caste Hindu laws of monogamous marriage and reproduction socially excluded her from caste hierarchy. That she has caste, and is remorseful about being excluded from her caste is clear from her dialogue where she says that she now even sleeps with men from Buno, a low caste. Caste is endogamous and caste hierarchies are maintained through endogamy. Who goes to bed with

233 whom is always already political and casteist matter everywhere, and so also in South Asia and its diasporas. As Babasahib Ambedkar (1917) noted: Caste in India means an artificial chopping off of the population into fixed and definite units, each one prevented from fusing into another through the custom of endogamy. Thus the conclusion is inevitable that endogamy is the only characteristic that is peculiar to caste. (n.p)

Sexuality of upper caste women, in particular, is strictly policed to maintain the power of caste hierarchies. And when these boundaries are crossed, like in the form of inter-caste marriages, eviction from caste and ultimately from humanity, are carried out. And often this eviction means literally putting the one daring to cross these boundaries to her death. That Podi has been evicted from normative of Hindu sacred, and therefore from caste is clear. Now her body available to men of all castes and white sahibs. No security, no dignity could be afforded to her now. On the other hand, there were the wives of the planters and of the sahibs. European wives who ride on horsebacks through the village are constructed as having no shame, as declared by Aduri, the old maid of the Basu family (First Act, Fourth Scene). In that same setting, Khetromani, upon asked by Sarolata on why she cut off her curls, notes: “the elder brother off my husband much displeased at seeing the curls in my hair. Our mistress said, that curls agree best with prostitutes and women of rich families. I was so ashamed at hearing his words that from that very day I cut off my curls”. There is, thus, a certain link established between prostitutes and European women in contrast to the wives and daughters of landlords and even those of Hindu ryots who are constructed as virtuous women. However, the the virtuosity of the low caste, Dalit an Muslim ryot means nothing, and these women can be sacrificed to further protect the innocence of Brahmin women. The examples of Khetromani, a pious caste woman’s cutting off her curls, or Podi’s saying that she “lost” her caste, cannot be presented as result of some existing patriarchal norm only. Through representations of white female sexuality as abject, and as Chandra notes, even worse than that of Indian prostitutes, “Brahman men sought to distinguish themselves from people of other castes as well as those of other Indian religions” (Chandra, p.128). The histories of consolidation of white power go hand in hand with further consolidating the tyranny of caste hierarchies and the power of Brahminical Hindu patriarchy. The non-Brahmin caste Hindu woman is still available and put to work to secure the

234 norms of Brahminical Hindu Indian society and importantly, the place of the Brahmin man as the patriarch of the household, village and consequently of the larger society. For instance, Mitra shows the rape of Khetromani, to bring attention to the crimes of these Indigo planters, but still she was not a Kayastha Brahmin woman like women of Golak Chandra Basu’s family, all of whom die within the (Hindu) sanctity of the four walls of their own homes. He could not show a Brahmin woman assaulted by a planter which also reflected the reality of colonial rule. Whose women were being kidnapped, raped, and killed by the colonizers? Khetromani’s rape further consolidates the situation of Brahmin women in Basu Chandra’s family as pious, ideal Hindu women kind of women who must be protected against the sahibs (but also their wives and from women like podi) at all costs, thus installing the (Brahmin) man as the powerful patriarch and guardian of the family. Both colonial authority of the sahibs and anticolonial movement of the peasants was co-opted by Mitra not only through showing his firm belief in the authority (and kind heartedness and justice) of British Raj, but also through indexing whiteness to further consolidate hegemonic forms of sexuality and racial difference that established the Brahmin man as the patriarch whose anticolonialism can save the (caste) women and consequently, a (casteist) Indian nation. As Chandra argues: patriarchal Brahman culture was locked in a supportive relationship with white power. Upper caste power emerged as universal and exceptional; normative and particular: monogamous conjugality was the fulcrum for this exchange. The construction of whiteness is constituted by its sexual practice fueled the upper cast privileges of Indian petrol patriarchy. In foregrounding the role of white female sexuality in the constitution of Indian patriarchy, I stress continually that the refashioning of whiteness by colonized subjects was invested less in speaking back to colonial power and more insistently attuned to the institutionalization of new differentiations internal to Indian society. (p.132-33, emphasis in original)

Mitra’s play normalizes the caste hierarchies and religious differences because it fails to problematize these differences. Instead, like the rest of upper caste Hindu patriarchy, his investments were also in further solidifying Hindu caste hierarchies in the name of anticolonialism. Whiteness and coloniality, therefore, were never in antagonistic relations with the goals of these brown sahibs. So Rao and Rao are correct in noting that caste is everywhere in Neel Darpan. Yet, there has not been any systematic study of the work which caste did in fashioning the gender

235 relations in the play. By paying attention to caste and gender, we can extend Guha’s argument by noting that the play was not only a liberal bourgeois consciousness but also a liberal bourgeois consciousness that is inherently steeped in Brahminical Hindu patriarchy. The subaltern subject in the play is also this Brahmin patriarch who comes to stand in as the ultimate anticolonial subject, as the victim and yet the only one who is still standing resisting. The play ends with his (and not lower caste or Muslim peasants’ or any of the women’s) lamenting on the coming of indigo. A critical anti-casteist and gendered reading of the play allows me to understand how seemingly anticolonial projects by colonized people of colour have also participate in further strengthening of the power of whiteness. Chandra’s work allowed me to note how caste and whiteness fashioned each other in the play and also how people of colour (who are formed through other social formations of caste, religion, gender, and sexuality) can and have participated in white supremacy. Chandra notes that “a range of nonwhite actors deployed whiteness to cement a range of social inequities beyond the purview of colonizer/colonized, white/nonwhite, Europe/Other” (p. 132-33). Neel Darpan was undoubtedly a play that endorsed imperial government’s “civilizing mission” while mobilizing the idea or good sahibs versus the bad sahib. Before I turn to a reading of the Daughters of the Dust, I want to pause for a bit to look at how India and the Caribbean were brought into a conversation in 19th century by British imperialists and colonizers. These debates about labour conditions in India being better and the colonial system there being more benevolent were put forth by abolitionists in Britain who were invested in ending slavery in the Caribbean while still wanting their blue clothes, and their tea sweet with sugar. The labour conditions in the East were presented as more benevolent than that of slavery in the Caribbean. While not attempting any comparisons between Indian labour conditions and slavery in the Caribbean, what I want to draw attention to is the logic of these Masters, colonizers and imperialists, as well as briefly discuss how the binary of free versus unfree labour could not account for caste relations and hierarchies in Brahminical Hindu India.

Caste, Enslavement, and Question of ‘Free Labour’

Slavery here is a ghost, both the past and the living presents; and the problem of

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historical representation is how to represent the ghost. —Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past

In his 1829 pamphlet entitled “East India Slavery,” George Saintsbury writes, "throughout India slavery prevails; India is therefore a slave territory, as Jamaica is a slave colony" (n.p). An apologist for and supporter of West Indian slavery, Saintsbury, challenged the British Parliament’s moral argument that somehow sugar from India was the product of “free labour”. For him, the sugar coming from Bengal and other parts of India was no less covered in blood and unfree labour" than that produced in the West Indies. His report came at a time when voracious debates were happening in the Parliament about replacing the West Indian slavery system with what they assumed to be a gentler "free labour" alternative available in the East Indies. Of course the assumption that crops grown in India were “free grown” were problematic as I have disussed above in the case of indigo. As Saintsbury rightly points out in his pamphlet, if East India’s so-called free labour system is also not crushed along with slavery in the West Indies, "it will only crush the evil in one hemisphere to cherish it in the other". Saintsbury’s argument that British homes depended on foreign commodities, and hence, on labour from the colonies whether they were in West Indies or in the East Indies was an important one, but also one ignored by British abolitionists who still wanted their tea sweetened, and their cotton clothes and drapes soft and blue. These proponents of slavery in the Caribbean were a prominent group of people who brought up labour conditions in India into debates on ending slavery in the Caribbean. However, of course, they were no enemies of enslaved Black people and somehow friends of colonized people of19th century India who were coerced into growing indigo. The only goal of the proponents was to protect their investments in plantation slavery. In her study of abolitionist treatment of “East India slavery” in 19th century, Andrea Major (2012) argues that debates between abolitionists and proponents of slavery in England often brought in the question of “East India slavery”. The figure of Indian peasants and slaves in the Caribbean were often compared within the binary of free versus unfree labour. Because India did not have a systemic plantation system like the Caribbean did, it was assumed that peasants were free agents and the sugar and indigo and other crops they grew came from more benign and gentle labour system.

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The patronage from Indian Brahmin elites like Dwarkanath Tagore and Raja Rammohun Roy further helped the British to strengthen their argument that “slavery in India was not like plantation slavery in the Caribbean and Americas and it would be dangerous to conflate the two” (Major, P. 4). Sir Robert Inglis, the member for Oxford University, reminded the Commons: “There is [sic] no two things in the world more different from each other than East-Indian and West Indian-slavery” (qtd in Major, p.4). In an 1834 questionnaire circulated by the Law Commissioners as part of a report by Indian law commissioners relating to slavery in the East Indies, G. Myers, a “Principal Sudder” or Magistrate noted:

That slavery, however modified or restricted by law, is a crying evil, is unquestionable, and this sooner abolished The better for mankind. From all, however, that I have seen, or heard, or read, I have no hesitation in declaring that the East India slaves are, in every particular, better treated than their unfortunate brethren of the west. The slaves in this country form, in fact, a class of cheap, and are treated by their owners as, domestic servants. More confidence is often reposed in, and greater consideration sometimes shown to persons of this class by their owners, as being their property and “khair khas”, than to hired free servants, who are often termed “ghair” and “begana”… the redeeming feature of this country [sic] slavery is, that the slaves are not so systematically worked up, nor so cruelly equipped and punished as in the American slaveholding districts. The rising and resistance of slaves against their owners have occurred in America and elsewhere; not so in India. (1841, p. 281)

For the East India officials and the British public, slavery in India was a very soft version of what was happening in North America, and therefore, not real slavery at all. This was a way of assuaging the mounting pressure to address the violence of Black slavery, while not making any compromises on their need for commodities and their investments in colonies. In the process the continued resistance of the colonized was consistently ignored and refuted. Indian forms of bondage were not considered particularly oppressive, and as some EIC officials like Myers argued, slavery apparently was in the best interest of the destitute Indians who found their place and kin among their colonizer masters and mistresses. In this, of course, upper caste land-holding Bengali men and their families, who were (metaphorically or not) in bed with these sahibs, were also complicit. For example, Dwarkanath Tagore (1830), a major indigo planter and Bengali Brahmin entrepreneur, was an avid supporter of

238 colonialism and moved a major resolution for abolishing the restrictions on the residence of Europeans in India. He wrote: “…I have found that the cultivation of indigo and residence of Europeans have considerably benefitted the country and the community at large; the zamindars becoming wealthy and prosperous, the ryots materially improved in their condition, and possessing many more comforts than the generality of my countrymen where indigo cultivation and manufacture is not carried on, the value of land in the vicinity to be considerably enhanced, and cultivation rapidly progressing” (p.69). Of course Tagore, the grandfather of Nobel Laureate Bengali poet and philosopher among many other things, became richer with indigo plantations. Known as a merchant-prince, his fate was tied to that of the East India Company. His friend and fellow Bengali Brahmin reformer and modernizer, Raja Rammohun Roy, for example, following his arguments claimed that peasants living in the indigo districts were better clothed than others because of the income from sowing indigo (cited in Kumar, 2012, p. 77). They argued that colonialism was actually helping the peasants thrive and improve India’s economy, thus assuaging any faint guilt or sense of hypocrisy British might have felt in arguing for ending slavery in the Caribbean while collecting blue and sugar from colonized India. Of course, Brahminical patriarchal India was built precisely on the labour of Dalit and OBC and Muslims. So converging the caste hierarchy with colonial one for their economic and caste power was completely logical and desirable to these Brahmin and other upper and mid-caste landlords and merchants. There were several EIC reports since 1772 which were published as parliamentary papers describing the condition of labour in India even if they were largely ignored, especially until 1833 when slavery was abolished in West Indies (Major, p.10). This, Major argues, was happening at precisely the same time as transatlantic slave trade of Africans and their treatment in Britain and its colonies was getting deeply engraved into the national conscience of British people: “Even when colonial officials addressed slavery directly there was huge diversity in the quality off the material they collected, and few provided detailed information about their sources or the context of their knowledge production” (p.25). British metropolitan opinion was “eventually to believe in the good intentions of the East India Company’s servants towards the improvement of their Indian subjects, but to remain profoundly unconvinced about those of the planters towards the slaves” (Marshall, 2003, p.10).

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The ambiguity that met the issue of “slavery” in 19th century South Asia was also complicated by the fact that a variety of domestic relations that could or could not be classified as slavery existed. In a seminal volume edited by Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Eaton (2006) called Slavery and South Asian History, Eaton argues that there is “no single story of slavery in South Asian history. There is no overarching master narrative, no tidy sequence of evolutionary ‘stages’ of the sort that theorists like Condorcet, Marx, or Toynbee envisioned for other historical phenomena” (p.1). Eaton defines slavery in South Asian context as “the conditions of uprooted outsiders, impoverished insiders –or the descendants of either –serving persons or institutions on which they are wholly dependent” (2, emphasis in original). As Chatterjee concurs, “domestic slavery,” for instance, in South Asia could also not be seen as slavery because it was assumed that this labour was “unproductive” because “the ‘productive’ labour such historians have on their minds is that which is extracted as surplus in the commoditized form of sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton” (1999, p.5). In such stories, argues Chatterjee, what is also ignored are the particular ways in which slavery thrived in India and how caste, community, lineage, and religion facilitated the establishment of this institution. As Gyan Prakash (1990) also notes, the case of heterogeneous forms of labour could not be reduced to a simple case of free versus unfree labour: “Documenting freedom’s unsuccessful struggle against bondage, these records establish the free-unfree opposition as the privileged instrument for writing the history of social relations” (p.3). The binary of freedom versus unfreedom could not astutely engage with the fact that caste played an important role in how slavery was perceived in the Indian subcontinent. There was a belief among Europeans that caste slavery in India was ancient and that they should not interfere in how households of these upper caste people who were also the allies of the British were run. Of course, the ways in which colonial rule helped legally legitimize and further shore up caste hierarchies was a discussion that was never had because it was harmful to colonial and Brahminical patriarchal rule. Chatterjee (1999) argues that “Evidently, the way historians conceptualize slavery immediately calls into question their conceptualization of caste itself. If slavery is thought of as coerced and owned, permanently immobilized labour, then only the lower jatis of the Indian caste system appear as ‘slave-castes’” (p. 5-6). The British settlers in India exploited it to their benefit, while simultaneously systematizing the caste hierarchies. Prakash notes

240 how the EIC officials constantly attempted to regulate slavery while situating it in “indigenous” basis for the suppression of freedom. British judges and Orientalist scholars, equating slavery with unfreedom, attributed this absence of freedom to Indian religions and customs while refusing to examine how colonialism and caste worked together to further oppress Dalit-Bahujan people. Working from the position that slavery in India was from ancient times and mandated by both Islamic and Hindu scriptures, the East India Company officials preferred not to interfere with the domestic and agricultural labour arrangements of the Indian elite unless it very prominently impinged in colonial stability and rule of the British Raj (Major; Prakash; Chatterjee). This policy of noninterference, however, was a façade for colonialism in India was also a civilizing mission. The colonial authorities had the power to decide what could actually circulate as customs and traditions and what must be contained so as to not offend British sensibilities or pose a challenge to East India Company’s rule (Dirks, p.151). In the process, as Dirks discusses, Brahminical supremacy also got further strengthened as it was the upper caste elites among the natives whom the British were afraid of offending. Howard Temperley (2000) notes, along with the belief that Western ideals of freedom were at odds with prevailing norms of Indian society, there was real fear that with only a small army, the continuance of British Raj relied on the patronage of slaveholding Indian elites. It was, outright, articulated more as the benevolence of British Raj where they had to reform the sunk low in slavery, barbarity and superstitions natives. But the Empire needed to do this with caution, being respect to “feelings generated by differences of religion, of nation, of caste” (Macaulay, cited in Temperley, p.171). This belief in caste as static social and economic formation from ancient India is simplistic and Orientalist. As I have already shown above in my reading of Neel Darpan, caste and colonialism consolidated each other. The history in which caste has been constituted as the principal modality of colonized Indian society draws as much from the role of British Orientalists, administrators, and missionaries as it does from Indian reformers, social thinkers, and political actors. Nicholas Dirks (2001) notes that "it was under the British that ‘caste’ became a single term capable of expressing, organizing, and above all 'systematizing' India’s diverse forms of social identity, community, and organization" (p. 5). This is not to deny the fact that both, South Asia and South Asian diasporas, are organized by casteist logics and that caste hierarchies precede the arrival of the British in India. Casteist

241 violence has been and continues to kill Dalit and Bahujan people every single day in so- called postcolonial India (and Pakistan and other parts of South Asia). But I want to challenge the idea of some static traditions of the colonized, and to think about how caste functioned as a major site of colonial power/knowledge. Vanita Seth has argued in her brilliant book titled, Europe's Other Indians (2010), that India could be "lauded for its antiquity, be recognized for its ancient traditions, and scoured for its ancient literature, while simultaneously failing to have a history" (p.127). The British (pretended not to) did not interfere with the ‘ancient’ as much they sought to transform ‘the ancient’: as in land relations for example. It is important here to pause and briefly discuss the consolidating of caste hierarchies and colonialism in Bengal through the 1793 Permanent Settlement Act. The Permanent Settlement was formulated and enforced by Lord Cornwallis, the governor general of the Fort William of Calcutta. The Permanent Settlement was a landmark towards Company’s political domination over the economy of Bengal by which the land revenue or land-rent to be paid by the “revenue farmers” or land-rent collectors was permanently fixed and the peasant economy of Bengal was directly affected by the political change for the first time during the colonial period. The Permanent Settlement helped establish the land rent collecting agents or zamindars as the permanent pillar of the British political supremacy in Bengal, and Mohammad Golam Rabbani (2013) notes, "As history attests, the sycophant ‘revenue farmers’ were devoted for holding up the British domination until the eventual years" (p.2). These zamindars were different body of people than the pre-British landed authorities which also included local Muslims and low-caste Hindus. These new zamindars were bhadraloks or educated-in-British-ways local elites and supporters of the East Indian Company for economic reasons. In 1833, the EIC did delegalize slavery in Indian territories, but that came as a “direct result of abolitionist pressure from Britain after 1833; not as a result of any EIC commitment to anti-slavery reform” (Major, p.124). In fact, there was major opposition in Parliament to delegalization of slavery because it was feared that this would interfere with the somewhat vulnerable position of British Raj there. I wanted to very briefly point to the debates which exist and which are getting more traction in recent and upcoming scholarship on Indian Ocean slaveries. My investment is not in figuring out whether or not it was slavery or servitude with entanglements of caste and colonialism in case of South Asia. Instead, as

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Major notes, it is important to think about “how various real and imagined slaveries were encountered and constructed in colonial and metropolitan discourses, both in Britain and India, and how these acted simultaneously both to reinforce colonial domination and to delineate British colonialism in the East from that in the West Indies,” (14) and thereby generating the kinds of legacies and presumptions of incommensurable archives and politics among colonized people across space. The figures of peasants in India and enslaved people in the New World have been brought together for decades by the British colonizers and Masters and yet, the scholarship studying these two figures together is only recent. I am attempting to facilitate a conversation between two cultural texts of resistance that hold these figures and their histories even as Neel Darpan is problematic on several counts as I have discussed above. But I was inspired by Sudipta Sen’s (2002) argument that “The questions of freedom and unfreedom of subjects were crucial at this time when the contradiction between liberty and servitude was becoming sharper, particularly in the debates surrounding the whole institution and enterprise of chattel slavery” (p.15). The people who seem to be worlds apart because of spatio-temporal ‘breaks’ in the global story of colonial and racial violence(s) have been held together by the colonizers who have stood over the bodies and lands of these people. Neel Darpan is an important protest play/text in Indian postcolonial studies. Despite its co-optation of whiteness in ways that worked towards establishing upper caste patriarchy in 19th century, the play generated massive response from both, the colonized people and their colonizers and cannot be simply dismissed as not radical or not important enough for South Asians who want to understand the complexity of our anticolonial movements against the British Raj, while also paying close attention to religion, caste and gendered heterogeneity of the subaltern (anticolonial) subject. It is important to understand on what terms and under what conditions is the resistance work happening even if to understand the limits of the resistance posed. The play allowed me to see multiple truths; and most importantly, to not romanticize resistance and to understand the complexities of anticolonial resistance. Here I am looking at Daughters of the Dust because both the film and the scholarly work engaging with it has helped me so much to learn about resistance.

Learning from Daughters of the Dust

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Indigo stretched beyond the geographic and national borders as indicated in the brief summary of the travels of indigo I have highlighted above. For me, indigo was about the British Raj, but ever since I first watched Dash’s film a few years ago, indigo came to mean the multiplicity of bodies, violence(s), spaces and times. Dash’s film is set in 1902, when indigo growing in colonized India was in its very last stages. Across the seven oceans, the Peazant family had been emancipated only 50 years before but, of course, bore the deep marks of slavery and indigo tells the story of that attempt to ‘move on’ with life that was made unliveable for Africans stolen and made into Black people. Toni Cade Bambara (1992) characterizes Daughters of the Dust as “oppositional cinema” that is meant to “heal our imperialized eyes” (xii). The decolonizing viewpoint and intentions of Dash and cinematographer Arthur Jafa is clear from the fact that the emphasis is on shared space (wide-angled and deep-focus shots in which no one becomes backdrop to anyone else’s drama) rather than dominated space (foregrounded hero in sharp focus, others Othered in background blur); on social space rather than idealized space (as in westerns); on delineated space that encourages a contiguous-reality reading rather than on masked space in which, through closeups and framing, the spectator is encouraged to believe that conflicts are solely psychological not, say systemic, hence, can be resolved, by a shrink, a lawyer, or a gun, but not say, through social transformation. (p.xiii)

The film challenges us to familiarize our gaze with its multiple point of view camera shots. The story is not narrated in clear linear bits that move from a backstory to present day; it is multilayered, with several stories that do not necessarily become ‘reconciled’ in the end or presented in ways that makes it easily consumable. It refuses us a hero in the way those of us used to watching Hollywood films might be used to. The depth and complexity of the ‘plot’, of the histories being narrated and the complexity of characters get me every time I watch it. The film manages to do the very hard work of “defamiliarizing”(Victor Slosky’s term employed by bell hooks (cite) to describe the film) as a form of critique. That is, it takes an ordinary image but presents it in a way that makes the viewers think about depth and complexity which we might not have before. The film refuses to present linear stories or one- dimensional characters, As bell hooks says to film maker Julie Dash, “I would say that the challenge for the audience is to be able to see and see again this film until they acquire the apparatus to embrace it” (p.42). As a non-Black viewer, I know that there is a lot this film

244 refuses me and perhaps my sight remains voyeuristic despite my intentions and effort at engaging with it as a classic of Black feminist cinema. I accept this failure and so the holes in my analysis spring from that lack of understanding of the film. Dash’s film is visually spectacular, and what kept my attention the most were the montages of blue in it. In her conversation with bell hooks, Dash states: I worked with Dr. Margaret Washington Creek, who is an expert on the Gullah. She was my historical adviser on the project, and she reminded me that, of course, indigo was very poisonous and all that, but that the indigo stain, the blue stain, would not have remained on the hands of the old folks who had worked the indigo processing plant. And I explained to her, that yes, I did understand that fully, but I was using this as a symbol of slavery, to create a new kind of icon around slavery rather than the traditional showing of the whip marks or the chains. Because we’ve seen all those things before and we’ve become very calloused about them. I wanted to show it in a new way. (31, emphasis added)

Scenes of whipping enslaved bodies and seeing dead Black and brown people, especially with casual, callous and increasing mobilization of such images on social media has worked at increasing the tolerance level for witnessing such violence.131 As Saidiya Hartman astutely notes in Scenes of Subjection, in witnessing the violence done to Black people, it is always the white (and other non-Black bodies) that become a “proxy and the other’s pain is acknowledged to the degree that it can be imagined, yet by virtue of this substitution the object of identification threatens to disappear” (p.19). Dash is not invested in asking for this selective recognition of humanity. Showing indigo stains instead of whip marks is a refusal to let us (the non-Black people) into that slipperiness where we can imagine ourselves as victims of the lashes in order to empathize. It’s not empathy but resilience in the face of ongoing violence of slavery post-Emancipation that she seems invested in portraying The blue stained hands unmoored something in me, and made me look at those stains and take note every time these hands came into view as they performed mundane everyday tasks from holding soil, braiding hair to making gumbo. Reading Divakaruni’s poem and the play was one thing and visually beholding the sight of these cracked rough blue inked hands was another.

131 As Eve Tuck (2017) reminded me, the scenes of whipping and torture of Black people were not as familiar a sight in very early 1990s when Dash first made the film. Though American audiences were familiar with Roots (1977) television series, and the scenes of torture of Black bodies on television were familiar, still they were not in public domain to the same extent as in later years.

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The indigo codified history and people at Ibo Landing of Dash’s film teach its viewers a lot about the gendered workings of indigo and also about the resistance to it. Michael Taussig has asked if can colour be sacred “as that which is at odds with the normal, as that which strikes a bizarre note and makes the normal come alive and have transformative power?” Dash’s film shows us the ongoing transformative power of indigo through the enactment of the spiritual throughout the film. Colour is sacred, and colour is poison, but also life -affirming. In most West African societies, indigo has a “profound and sartorial significance” (McKinley, 2011, p.10). This spiritual work is also heavily gendered as can be seen from stains on hands of Peazant women but also from the fact that, for instance, in Yoruba societies of which both McKinley and Byfield (2002) speak, the work of dyeing fabric is carried out by women: In Yoruba, everything in life has a spiritual significance. Even the most rudimentary work is guided by the realm of the spirits, and so as one works, one pays tribute. The goddess Iya Mapo is the patroness of all exclusive women’s work, trades like dyeing, pottery, and soap-making. She is the deity of sex. She guides all things erotic. She guides conception and birth. She guides the tricky realm of the indigo dye pot, and the hands of the women and girls who design cloths, perform the intense preparation for dyeing, and undertake the many steps to a finished cloth. So important is Iya Mapo on the fourth day of each week, on her ose, or day of worship, women bring sacrifices of food to her shines and spend the day celebrating and worshiping her. (p.173)

The Iya Mapo is shown in the film through the women and the spirit of the Unborn Child. The women of the Peazant family, as Angeletta Gourdine (2004) argues, “carry the film’s politics on their bodies; indeed, they wear their relationship to the political body’s blackwoman narratives” (p.500). Gourdine argues that indigo work was gendered work, represented in the film through blue on four generations of Peazant family’s women. Signifying a history of conquest, enslavement, lynching, and rape, but also resistance (by being alive, by performing daily work for the family, for the children) the collage of indigo stained women’s hands revealed “contrary figures of triumph and terror, overexposure and invisibility” (500). The film’s first shot is that of a young Nana Peazant cupping soil in her hands. Her rough, indigo stained hands match her indigo-coloured dress. Her hands wear her histories: Nana’s dyed hands emblematize blackwomen’s labour under the yoke of slavery, their active participation in the consumer world, as most black women on slave

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plantations were experts spinners, weavers, knitters, and dressmakers...This stain is particularly female, for women not only planted the cotton but also crafted the cloth from which they crafted their clothing. Nana’s hands, then, reveal blackwomen’s participation in the consumer cloth economy, partially enabled by the abundance of trees used for dying cloth on the coastal Sea Islands. (p.503)

In a way, these indigo-stained hands of formerly enslaved women now living under the violence of Jim Crow era of early 20th century are about the past but also connected to the future: “When history anticipates the future, it is politics” (Mellencamp, 1993). Blue connected the stories of the past to that which the Unborn Child has yet to live. The scene where the Unborn Child, as a spirit, among other errant spirits, is playing in one of the indigo vats while other Peazant family members were peddling blue out from steaming fabric was breathtaking. The blue ribbon in the Unborn Child’s hair mirrors Nana Peazant’s indigo dress, her one blue finger from playing in the vat which she then points at a toy in a Sears catalogue, rupturing the idea of South as unconnected from the North where the family was about to migrate and also of time as linear, and showing a continuation between the era of slavery and 20th century capitalism. Indexing secular notions of spatio-temporal separations among generations of Peazant women, the film ruptures the idea of time that is “constrictively linear and resolutely hierarchical” (Alexander, 2005, p.189). Bringing Nana Peazant’s blue hands to match the indigo bow in unborn Child’s hair presented me with a complex conceptualization of time that was “scrambled and palimpsestic, in all the Worlds, with the premodern, the modern, the postmodern and the paramodern coexisting globally” (Shohat, qtd in Alexander, p.190). The spirit worldiness and the mythic tonality along which indigo moved from hands to dresses to bows presented a complex assemblage of time and spaces. It presents the ongoing life of slavery but also the resistance of Black women that is beyond the notion of Western, colonial time-space continuum. Daughters is haunted by death given that it is set at Ibo Landing, where it is said that captured African people of Ibo tribe when brought to the New World, refused to live in slavery and shackled in chains, they all walked into the water and drowned themselves in front of their captors. In some variations of the story, they walked back to Africa. As Dash notes in her conversation with bell hooks, this might only be a myth but it is a narrative that is “so strong, so powerful, so sustaining to the tradition of resistance,” that it teaches us that “myth is very important in the struggle to maintain a sense of self and to move forward into

247 the future” (p.30). Eula, who has been raped by an unnamed white man, has to tell her Unborn Child (in her womb) this story and the child remembers it from her mother’s womb. She comes into the world with knowledge of her people who walked on water and refused to live the lives their Masters demanded. She came into the world knowing what violence was, but also what refusal was. This move to the future is the central plotline in Daughters where the Peazant family, all except Nana, is migrating north in search of better life, opportunities, and a future. If there is death given where the film is set, there is also birth. In fact, the film is equally haunted by birth embodied by Eula Peazant’s Unborn Child who narrates the story to us: “My story begins on the eve of my family’s migration North. My story begins before I was born. My great, great grandmother, Nana Peazant, saw her family coming apart. Her flowers to bloom in a distant frontier.” “The ancestors and the womb…they’re one, they’re the same,” says Nana Peazant to her angry grandson, Eli who is struggling to accept the upcoming arrival of Unborn Child. As Dash states in her notes on the making of the film, the figure of the Unborn Child in the film is inspired by the birth of her own daughter, N’zinga while she was writing the script, and she had to show how the past is always connected to future: “The story had to show hope, as well as the promise that tradition and family and life would always sustain us, even in the middle of dramatic change” (p.6). Through the spectral figure of the Child that indicates a future rather than a past, Dash not only links the past of slavery to a future but also the spirit to the physical world. According to Anthony Cascardi, the Unborn Child “presents the possibility of a relationship to the past that is predicated on something other than resentment or revenge”. That was not necessarily my reading, because as Dene scholar, Glen Coulthard (2014) who draws upon Frantz Fanon’s understanding of resentment as potentially transformative, argues, it is “a politicized expression of Indigenous anger and outrage directed at a structural and symbolic violence that still structures our lives, our relations with others, and our relationships with land” (p.109). Resentment, in this theorizing, is not negative or immobilizing but an instance of anticolonial resistance. As Coulthard further notes, Fanon has, in fact, argued that anger and resentment “be understood, and their transformative potential be harnessed, and that their structural referent be identified and uprooted” (p.112, emphasis in original). I brought in Cascardi’s reading not simply to reject it but because it allowed me to think more deeply

248 about the work which emotions are doing in the film. There is pain, anger, and resentment given the overarching context of what Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery” and the search for a more hopeful future than the one the present can afford or the one that past wrote as non-existent. The resentment is clearly there in words and actions of Eli who finds it difficult to reconcile himself with the thought of Unborn Child conceived through Eula’s rape by an unknown man. The man remains unknown because Eula refuses to name him lest Eli takes revenge and is then lynched in the Jim Crow South. At one point in the film, Eula says, “Our past owns us. We wear our scars like armor, for protection. Our mother’s scars, our sister’s scars, our daughter’s scars. Thick, hard, ugly scars that no one can pass through to ever hurt us again. Let’s live our lives without living in the fold of old wounds”. Yet, she, of course, knows the history brought the Unborn Child to her womb. The resentment here is not deathly or immobilizing. It does not stand as rejection of the past, or as dwelling in the past, or as denial of life. In fact, more than resentment, what was more visible in the film was grief; Nana Peazant’s grief at her children leaving their home to move north, Eli’s grief, Eula’s grief, Yellow Mary’s grief, Viola’s grief, the grief of other men, women and child(ren). As Alexander notes: “Not only humans made the Crossing, traveling only in one direction to Ocean given the name Atlantic. Grief traveled as well” (p.289). One of the things I appreciated the most about the film is that it moves beyond the “conflicting hermeneutical approaches regarding the relationship between secular and non- secular notions of agency, time and space” (Kolia, 2016, p.4). The spirit world is central in Dash’s film and is a modality through which we are invited to understand the violence of slavery but also the sacredness of holding onto the (enslaved) ancestors of the Peazants, and of the land itself. A land taken from Cherokees and numerous other nations of Indigenous peoples of South Carolina, but which has Black people too on land and deep within the Atlantic. There is an invoking of the ancestors through speech, and the spirit of the unborn child and both invoking(s) are important. The memories are sacred too and provide roadmaps that lead from past to the future. Nana continues to Eli:

There’s a thought…a recollection…something somebody remembers. We carry these memories inside of us. Do you believe that hundreds of Africans brought here on this other side would forget everything they once knew? We don’t know

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where the recollections come from. Sometimes we dream them. But we carry these memories inside of us.

These memories are sacred and exercised as non-secular forms of agency that allowed the Gullah people, living in the remotest part of South Carolina to remember their ancestors and to hold onto hope even during centuries of intense violence. The spiritual of formerly enslaved people who were coerced into developing the stolen land stood as antagonistic to the settler colonial forces too. As Alexander tells us: The pantheon of inheritance in what would come to be called the African diaspora collected itself on new soil through a combination of conditions: the terrain from which the trade drew its ambit; the specific and already transformed spiritual sensibility –the African provenance of belief structures and practices; the local pantheons that were encountered and transformed with successive waves of people; the degree of spatial autonomy that enslaved populations fought for an retained; and Osanyin, the ecology, a flora and fauna already inhabited by the Sacred. (p. 291, emphasis in original)

Daughter of the Dust sparkles with symbols of Yoruba culture, which, given who I am, I was not always able to pick up on except where it was explicitly laid out in the film for viewers like myself. For example, I was intrigued by the colourful jars and bottles on the trees outside Nana Peazant’s shanty. The bottles were for “protection –protection from malevolent or evil spirits” (Dash, In conversation with bell hooks, 43). I would not have known had I not read Dash’s interview that each bottle represented a deceased family member or ancestor. These bottles and jars also held Black women’s secrets, medicines and other “scraps of memories” (Frazier, cited in Dash In conversation with bell hooks, p. 43). Dash has stated that the research for the film also involved learning oral histories from family members, friends and others in her community. As Dash tells us in her notes on the making of the film, little things in the film such as hand signals given by two men of the Peazant family were part of the heritage of ancient African secret societies which was passed down “across so that the enslaved people could talk in a ‘language’ unfamiliar to their Masters. These actions were sacred and often a tool of survivance for enslaved people. The dreams are also a guide, as in when Eula writes her dead mother’s name and keeps it under her pillow to ask her for guidance and support when her husband Eli is struggling to accept her pregnancy. These are forms of agency that confound secular, exercised within material structures and systems,

250 notions of agency we are used to reading (for). Nana calls upon the spirits to help guide her family; we see the Unborn Child running around in spirit form before she enters her mother’s womb, disrupting Mr. Snead’s attempt to take photograph of the elder(ly) Peazant men. The Unborn Child, as an agentic force spanning the present and the future disrupts the voyeuristic attempt of Mr. Snead’s imperial mission of capturing the authentic last presence of Gullah men on the remote island; she disrupts the coloniality represented through Mr. Snead’s quest for historical record but also the maleness of the moment by appearing where she was not allowed or expected. The blue ribbon “marks her as an image of blackwomen’s blues memory, and it portends her continuation of the family legacy into future…” (Gourdine, p. 502). She had much to teach Mr. Snead (and us, the audience) through appearing in places that seemingly had finality, an end to them. But, so much in the film is not for me. I discussed here the spiritual in the film because it is not possible to talk about the characters without it. The agentic forces in the film from the Ibo Landing, the dreams, the spirits, the ancestors, stained fingers, and the colourful jars and bottles of Peazant family, they all do decolonizing work by offering meanings of the spiritual as epistemological, something which I know I am neither ethically, nor politically or intellectually able to understand given my position to this film, and to the work of Black scholars engaging with it.132 Pointing the work done by the sacred was important though just to counter the project of colonialism and enslavement which has been invested in erasing the specificity of sovereign nations and peoples. Both colonialism and enslavement have worked by either erasing that which is sacred for the colonized and enslaved, or by exoticizing it and filling it with its own meanings. As Frantz Fanon has said, “For the colonist, the Negro was neither an Angolan nor a Nigerian, for he simply spoke of ‘the Negro’” (Fanon, cited in Grayson, 2000, p. 45). Sandra Grayson offers a powerful decolonizing reading of the spiritual in Daughters of the Dust, which, she argues, gives counters the negation of sovereign African peoples by offering specificity through the signs of Yoruba, Igbo, Kongo, and more (45). So I only, even if superficially, point to that which I observed, and/or tried to understand as long as it seemed ethical to do so.

132 Black scholars such as Tiffany King, drawing upon Audre Lorde, discusses the erotic-spiritual of the Peazant women in the film, something which I cannot engage with. Please see, In the Clearing (2013) to learn more. See Grayson (2000) to understand the deeply spiritual as resistance to enslavement pedagogy offered in Daughters of the Dust.

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Given the story and the way it is shot, Dash’s film has been deeply instructive for how it encourages us to understand land through white settler colonialism and slavery. King (2013), who analyzes the film to theorize white settler colonialism and slavery as a mutual settlement/plantation construct, holds the “Black female slave body as a site of spatial possibility and impossibility on the settlement/plantation. The Black female body functions as a site where the spatial order of the master and settler is realized as well as where it unravels” (p.38). In Nana Peazant’s indigo stained hands, King not only sees the “bone- soaking violence” of slavery, but also the functionality of her Black body in establishing the settlement/plantation of the New World. She argues: “Nana Peazant’s body makes the violent transformation of Native space, the land and the transformation of the body of the slave into non-human flesh visible. Nana’s body, stained with the chemical components of the indican plant is a hybrid body produced at the intersections of two violent forms of power, settler colonialism and slavery. Nana’s hands and body are also a spatial conundrum” (p.40). The capacity of Black flesh to become an extension of the land, a space where plants, nature and Black flesh merged to make them property, made it a “scale of settlement/plantation,” linking Blackness to white settler colonialism and other forms of power not disconnected with what took form as colonialism in India. Moreover, Dash and Black feminist readings of the film also allows me to think about bodies and land in ways that are generative of horizontal relations with human, spirits, and non-human relatives.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have tried to show what came out of the blue was intense colonial and racial violence. Blue transformed the relation of colonized and enslaved people to each other and to their lands. Blue in the form of indigo has circulated across time and spaces, erasing but also producing differences of the human. Given my interest and investment in thinking about horizontal relations among differently colonized and enslaved people, both Neel Darpan and Daughters of the Dust, while seemingly disconnected sites, allowed me to hold onto specificities of violence through texts that while situated in the local, were also global, also always transimperial. Caste, whiteness, colonialism and enslavement created

252 hierarchies of human that had blue underlining them. The asymmetries, tensions and collaborations that came out of blue proffers a methodology that demands we read these archives together. I began the chapter with British Raj in Bengal and ended up with a film on slavery- settlement in South Carolina not to argue that colonialism has been the same everywhere, or that Bengali peasants and enslaved Africans are a comparable ‘unit’. That, as I have already stated a few times in this chapter, is not my intent. This chapter, like the rest of my Dissertation, has been an attempt to make sense of the different(ly) colonized and enslaved peoples who were all connected in the minds of colonizer-Master-planters-EIC Officials but have been ‘passed down’ to us as people who never encountered one another and who had nothing to do with each other. What has come out of the blue have been deeply complex, entangled histories that showcase European and American demeaning cruelty, greed and violence but also the complicity of upper caste native elites of Bengal.

Chapter VII Indian Arrival Day: On Question of Caste, Anti-Blackness and Indigeneity

Through the kalapani During that long journey Thinking

A new land A new home A new destiny

With little, Hoping, dreaming Now stand a people, Proud and prospering.

(Indian Arrival Day magazine, 2004/2005)133

Introduction In their paper titled, "Indians came to the Caribbean before Columbus," geneticist Chris Mahadeo and anthropologist Kumar Mahabir (2005) argue that South Asian [Indian] people (specifically Hindu) first came to what is today the Caribbean by crossing the narrow ice bridge of Bering Strait, some 13,000 years ago. According to them, “Hindus were mighty navigators and pioneers of cultures centuries before Columbus was born” (p.9). It was the encounter with Aryan civilization, argue the authors, which helped shape Indigenous

133 There is no author listed for the poem. It appears on a colorful page of a tourism advertisement for the port of Spain. In the background is a picture of the sea facing a beautiful scattering colours of sunset. One the shore, are four figures standing and looking at the sea. They are shadowed such that you can only make out their borders. One appears to be figure of a woman clad in a business suit, wearing heels and holding a briefcase. The second is side pose a man wearing Punjabi/Indian suit and playing a dhol (drum) which he is wearing around his neck. The third figure appears to be of an Indian woman wearing ghagra choli, giving a dance pose of bharatnatyam, a classical (caste) Hindu dance and the last figure is of a man wearing a suit and holding a briefcase, with his body turned towards the woman in the dance pose.

253 254 civilizations of South and Central Americas in particular. They even claim that Indigenous peoples of the Island actually hail from these Asian sojourners, but all evidence proving these origins were destroyed by European colonizers beginning 15th century. Drawing upon (right wing) Hindu nationalists and European Orientalists, they make a case for how everything indigenous to Mexico and South America has been inspired by ancient Hindu (read Brahmin) civilization, including Indigenous peoples' architecture, religion, gods, entertainment, metallurgy, food practices and clothing. According to them, Indigenous peoples such as the Maya, the Aztecs and others owe everything to their early encounters with these South Asian explorers. While one can dismiss Mahadeo and Mabir’s claims as Hindu nationalist, and also simply preposterous, the coloniality of these claims, anchored in dangerous anti-Indigenous rhetoric, demands attention. Their article is a clear effort at placing Hindus in the Caribbean as the original, resilient and now rightful owners of the land where they came “for the second time” (p.1) as indentured labourers in 19th century when the period of indenturesip began. Their rhetoric almost reads like that of Manifest Destiny where the land is remapped as a terra nullius, that is, empty of its (Indigenous) peoples, and awaiting hardworking agricultural settlers to come dig and settle the land. Unlike white conquerors, however, the difference is that Indo-Caribbean people claim legitimacy through having overcome racial violence at the hand of their masters in the New World. Having survived that violence, and over hundred years of indentured labour, is how they legitimize their presence and also ownership of Caribbean identities and land. And while Hindu Indians are narrated as present (and future) in the authors’ argument, Amerindians remain part of the past which is visible only through mythological creatures such as Ho Huizilopochtli-Tlaloc , an Aztec diety of sun and war, and tortillas of Mexicans. Mahadeo and Mahabir’s claims about the superiority of Indian (Brahmin) civilization and Hindu explorers in the New World before even Columbus ‘discovered’ it need to be read within the context of claims made by Indo-Caribbean people about their place in the Caribbean. In this chapter, I will argue that in the mainstream (Hindu) Indo-Caribbean people’s imaginary, the land belongs to the hardworking, self-sacrificing, able-bodied caste Hindu (but secular) cis-man because it was his labour which developed and continued settling the land. It is through modalities of his suffering and labour that he legitimizes his possession of

255 the land whose Indigenous people are read in past tense, as dead, and Black people, while acknowledged, are seen as people who “fled” the plantation post Emancipation,134 thus leaving the hardworking Hindu man to take care of the land and its people. In discussing the settler imaginary, texts and other practices of the Indo-Caribbean people, I will also pay particular attention to caste in order to argue that caste always matters in South Asian diaspora in the Caribbean. In the first section of this paper, I will examine some of the discourse around "Indian Arrival Day" a national holiday in the Caribbean celebrating the first arrival of Indians as indentured labourers. I examine this holiday as one of the sites that has helped me analyze the settler narrative of progress underlining the claims of belonging and ownership advanced by descendants of Indian indentured labourers. I then transition into examining Peter Ruhomon’s book, Centenary History of the East Indians in British Guiana, 1838-1938 which was originally published in 1947. This text has been reprinted several times since then, and stands as an important documentation of Indo-Guyanese people’s transition into “colonizers” (Ruhomon) and owners of the land they once came to under destitute condition. In the last section of the paper, I will turn to a close reading Cyril Dabydeen, a popular Indo-Guyanese writer’s short novel from 1989, the Dark Swirl. His novel presents an interesting site of conflation between the protagonist’s Hindu self-identity with an initial sense of Caribbeanness as exterior to himself. Eventually though, by encountering the supernatural mediated through a vestigial mode of indigeneity, the protagonist and consequently other characters around him in the novel come into their sense of being from and belonging to the Caribbean. I will keep paying attention to the way(s) in which anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity work in these Indo-Caribbean people legitimizing place as the rightful owners (not as colonizers anymore, but as new natives) of the land. Indian diaspora is divided into two spatial and temporal phases. The “old diaspora” which primarily began with arrival of South Asians as part of British imperial movements for labour consisted of South Asians moving/brought to the Caribbean, different parts of Africa, and to South East Asia. They were taken under the various exploitative and colonial labour systems like indentureship, kangani and maistry. Their arrival to the Caribbean was situated

134 I use the term Emancipation and Emancipated with capital ‘E’ and always in quotes to highlight the fact that this so-called emancipation was only an event and not the actual condition of the formerly enslaved Black people in the Caribbean or everywhere where slavery existed or exists.

256 with the end of slavery (at least officially) in British colonies which produced a massive demand for labour in the sugar plantations in Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, Mauritius, Fiji and South Africa to name a few of the places worldwide. There were also movements of labour to East Africa, Sri Lanka and Malaya to work on the railways, tea and rubber plantations respectively. The "new" or modern diaspora, what Vijay Mishra (2007) calls, the “border diasporas" began forming in late Twentieth century and within postcolonial and transnational movements of late capitalism. My primary focus in this dissertation has been on South Asians in the "new diaspora". The distinction between the old and the new diaspora, however, does not mean that these two formations have nothing in common. Both are situated in power relations organized by capitalism (whether classic in case of 19th century arrival or late capitalism that formed the new diaspora), religion, caste, gender, sexuality, and race. Also, immigration of South Asians from so-called old to new diasporas makes studying the seemingly exclusive formations of these diasporas problematic. As Mishra writes, there is an urgent need to disrupt the perceived exclusivity of these archives spanning the old and the new and to counter the narratives of writers situated in new South Asian diaspora who "have also tended to presume that the ‘new’ presents itself as the dominant (and indeed the more exciting) site for purposes of diasporic comment" (p.3). I, therefore, see the two diasporas and therefore, the two archives connected, while recognizing the specificity of indentureship versus immigration that either has been, or can be more or less voluntary in an increasingly global world that is also increasingly stricter about border control and movement of racialized and colonized people. Writing this chapter has posed some ethical questions for me. I do not come from a history of indentureship in the Caribbean. Since I write against homogenizing power of categories such as people of colour and South Asians, I have struggled with ways of finding a place for examining the complicity of descendants of indentured labourers in this research study. Indian labourers survived under brutal sub-humane conditions during the period of indentureship. Without this history in my family or my larger Shi’i Ismaili Muslim community, writing about descendants of these labourers as the (new) colonial and anti- Black people has been difficult because of questions that can be asked about cleaning my own proverbial backyard first. While I have written about my own complicity, I have tried to

257 find a rationale for this chapter by holding onto the intimate connections between seemingly disparate places such as the Caribbean, Bengal, South Carolina and all other places where Europeans and later Americans went under the tutelage of expanding empires. Complicities are complicated and need to be studied transnationally and I believe that placing this chapter within my broader question about the place of people of colour (caste South Asians) in systems of domination is a good rationale for writing this chapter as part of my study. My theoretical and methodological frameworks have already discussed the significance of bringing unlikely archives, spatialities and temporalities into a conversation with each other. In my chapter on the “Indian Queen,” I have argued that crusaders of medieval era were later the settlers and Masters in the New World. Similarly, the borders between British Raj and colonialism and slavery in the New World were connected. The plantation owners of the Caribbean, for example, were also intimately involved with the working of the East India Company under the British Raj. Chris Jeppesen (2013), who worked on an innovative project titled, "East meets West: Caribbean and Asian colonial cultures in British domestic contexts," writes in his research:

It is striking how many of those who claimed compensation in 1834 also had personal or family connections across the British Empire. Many of these directly linked the East India Company (EIC) – traders and conquerors in India – with the Caribbean slave economy. Historians have frequently treated these spheres in isolation, arguing that the evolution of British imperial power in the Caribbean and India had little in common either in character or personnel. Yet, the database seems to reveal a very different story, with these connections widespread and intricate. (n.p, emphasis added)

The flow of money and people defied the kind of colonialisms (settler colonialism versus independent colonialism, British Raj versus settlement in the Caribbean) and also between slavery in the West and labour and other resource necessities in the East. Families who owned plantations in the Caribbean, for example, bought positions for their sons and sons-in- law in the East India Company. One of the largest non-church cemeteries in the world outside of Europe and America in the 19th century, South Park Street's Burial Ground in Calcutta, Bengal, India, has a memorial that reads, "Sacred to the memory of John Rycroft Best, H.C. Civil Service who departed this life 23rd December 1829, aged 29 years and 7 months". John Rycroft Best was a Bengal Civil Service official in the East India Company.

258

His father, who was his namesake, was a plantation owner and a militia commander in Barbados. Father Rycroft played a key role in the suppression of the 1816 slave rebellion and was also a leading opponent of abolition of slavery. Rycroft’s other sons (besides his namesake) and grandsons were all employed by the East India Company in the tenure of their careers as colonizers and masters. This family was in Barbados as Masters of slaves and plantation owners since at least the mid 17th century (Butler, 1995, 86). Some of John Rycroft Best's sons later went and 'settled' in Australia.135 As Chris Jeppesen writes, “By the mid-nineteenth century memorials had been erected in Barbados and India commemorating the family’s presence across the empire” (n.p). These connections are real, joining together the fates of the East India Company, plantations and other ventures of the empire. The fates of British Raj, slavery and later indentureship in the New World are also intimately connected. It was one of the owners of a large plantation, Sir John Gladstone, and father of future Prime Minister William Gladstone, who was the progenitor of Indian indentureship in the Caribbean. Beginning as a shopkeeper in Scotland, all his fortunes were made in the New World on the backs of slave labour.136 He initially traded in Calcutta in Bengal after East Indies trade became open, and with that money, he acquired plantations in the Demerara. After the official end of slavery, Gladstone was desperate for labourers to work on his large plantations in Guyana and Trinidad. After lobbying the government to approve his plan of importing labourers from India, Gladstone formed a partnership with John Moss, his friend and fellow absentee planter, and they hired Gladstone’s nephew’s company, Messrs. Gillanders, Arbuthnot & Co., to transport Indians from Calcutta to Georgetown, Demerara. What has come to be notoriously known as the “Gladstone Experiment” in history was the beginning of indentureship of Indian labourers to Demerara. As Madhavi Kale (1995) writes: As planters like Gladstone saw it, Indian workers were recruited and introduced into British Guiana and Trinidad for the “benefit” of Afro-Caribbean workers: to alarm, but also to “educate” and inspire them. As the latter’s performance and potential as “free” workers were devalued, Indian working men were extolled for their docility, industriousness, and respect for the sanctity of contracts. Planters and other supporters of indentured behaviour immigration piously and pointedly

135 I found this bit through personal communication with one of John Rycroft Best's descendants whom I was able to find on Facebook but I do not have any details on the Australian connection as yet. 136 See Richard B. Sheridan’s (2002) brief biography on Gladstone. Retrieved fro, http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/docserver/22134360/76/3-4/13822373_076_03- 04_s03_text.pdf?expires=1523559702&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=3AEEE0E5C1CDA6EE8B52F073 550A7E48

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wished that Afro-Caribbean men would follow Indian working men’s example. (p.77)

From the beginning of the arrival of indentured labourers, they were pitted against the newly ‘Emancipated’ Afro-Caribbean people in the colony. But what I want to draw attention to, especially in a study examining questions about complicity of various non-Black people of colour such as racialized immigrants, Muslims in the case of the Iberian Peninsula, descendants of indentured labourers, colonized caste Hindu people, that Brahminism and all other oppressions I think through, are all strengthening white supremacy in their particular contexts. In paying attention to people of colour complicity, I cannot let go of the power of whiteness, of white supremacy. These complicities of people of colour were produced or co- constituted by the power of whiteness. The forming of colonial and imperial relations produced subject positions of these variously racialized and colonized Black, Indigenous and non-Black people in relation to production of crusaders, conquerors, settlers, planters, and masters.

Indian Arrival In 19th century Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, other parts of the Caribbean and other colonies of South America, Indians were brought as indentured labourers once slavery was officially abolished in these colonies in 1834.137 It is estimated that anywhere between just under half a million to just over half a million indentured labourers were brought to the Caribbean between 1838 and 1917, during the period of indenture. 138 139 According to Dabydeen and Samaroo (1996, p.1), 238,909 men and women from what was then India were brought to what was then British Guiana and 143,939 were shipped to Trinidad.140 It is also important to note that the British imagined the presence of Indians as temporary, and therefore, few women were initially brought so that permanent settlement could be

137 Indian indentured labourers were also sent to other places such as Fiji, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Malaya, Uganda, Kenya, Reunion and the Seychelles. 138The dates for period of indenture vary in the different sources I have consulted. For example, in some cases, the date of the first arrival (Guyana) is listed as 1837 whereas 1838 is the most common date. Similarly, the end date for indentureship is listed as either 1917 or 1920. The latter date, as Shona Jackson (2013, p.261) notes, might refer to the year of actual cessation of contracts. 139 In this chapter, I am primarily referring to data and secondary literature and scholarship focused on Guyana and Trinidad. 140 The postcolonial India of that time now comprises of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir (currently under occupation of Pakistan and India).

260 discouraged. As Faith Smith (2002) notes, “Female immigrants, who are mostly single, are imported in low numbers, an indication that planters did not want a permanent community of Indians-women being conceptualized as key to the permanence of any community, as well as the maintenance of certain standards, in this case those of caste” (p.18-19). Indo-Caribbean people commemorate the first arrival of ships bringing their ancestors to the New World by a national public holiday known as the "Indian Arrival Day," celebrated on May 5 in Guyana when two ships Hesperus and S.S. Whitby arrived in 1838, and May 30 in Trinidad and Tobago when Fath al Razack (commonly known as Fatel Razack) arrived in 1845.141 According to historian and activist for the recognition of Indian Arrival Day, Ramdath Jagessar, in Guyana there was a celebration in 1938 to mark the centennial of Indian arrival and was one of the largest gatherings of Indians to date, attended by religious, plantation and business leaders and members of government offices.142 Seven years later, in 1945, Trinidad also celebrated large gathering of Indians and dignitaries in Skinner Park, San Fernando and the event, which attracted national attraction led to publication of a book, Indian Centenary Review which reviewed the achievements of the Indians.143 In both Guyana and Trinidad, the holiday was officially approved not as “Indian Arrival Day,” but as “Arrival Day” to widen the significance of the day for other arrivants in the colony, including the Portuguese and the Chinese.144 As Lindsey Harlan (2013), Professor of South-Asian religions notes, "Indo-Trinidadians who were concerned about the new holiday's name believed that it would tend to cause the Indian presence to merge with and even be diminished by the constellation of arrivals in a multiethnic crowd" (p.362). The fight was to have specifically Indians' labour and sacrifices recognized. While some protested such a move, others welcomed this as emblematic of celebration of labor and sacrifices of multi- racial groups in settlement of the Caribbean. One of the illustrations done for print media advertisements of Arrival Day shows a man from each dominant group that was brought to the Caribbean.145 It is a black and white

141 According to Sean Lokaisingh-Meighoo (2001), the term Indo-Caribbean itself is rather new, and its earliest appearance in print and systematic use dates from mid-eighties in community newspapers and books published in Toronto (180). I use this term to refer to present day settlers of Indian ancestry in the Caribbean. 142 Ramdath Jagesar, 2006, http://tabaquiteconstituency.com/history-of-indian-arrival-day/ (n.p). 143 Ibid. 144 In Trinidad, Arrival Day was later changed to Indian Arrival Day. 145 “An Arrival Day Reflection,” (May4, 2017). http://guyanachronicle.com/2017/05/04/an-arrival-day- reflection

261 poster with a centered title reading, “Commemorating the Period of Indenture-ship”. The poster has four illustrations drawn in black and white pencil ink: Looking sideways towards the left of the reader is a bearded African man followed by a Chinese man looking in that same direction with a laughter on his face. The next two faces are of Portuguese man and the last one of an Indian man with a long moustache and turban, and with both men looking straight at the reader. Dates of “indenture-ship” for each group are written under the portrait of each man: 1841-1856 for Africans, 1853-56 for Chinese, 1838-1841 for Portuguese and finally 1838-1917 for “East Indians”. The words “East Indians” and their duration of indentureship are in bolded letters, probably to bring attention to the seemingly longest period of indentureship compared to the other groups represented.

The artist, who is not named anywhere and cannot be identified in terms of their race or gender, wrote about the image under the title of the “admin”. They note that after putting out their illustration of the “Arrival Day,” they received several phone calls from Afro- Guyanese people asking whether or not they (the artist) knew about the presence of Africans long before this period of indentureship. The artist was also called by Indo-Guyanese clients who were unhappy that the specificity of the celebration was diluted by bringing “everybody else” into the image and broader discourse.146 On one hand, the poster equates years of enslavement of stolen Africans in the Caribbean with indentureship of Indians, Portuguese, and Chinese laborers who were brought to the plantations after the official end of slavery, by erasing those years and making Africans into simply indentured laborers post ‘Emancipation’. Africans, as the critiques levelled at the author by Afro-Guyanese people suggest, were not the same as indentured labourers brought to the region and highlighting their presence since 1841 only erased their presence as enslaved people since 16th century in the Caribbean. While it does stand that up until the 1870s indentureship was a multi-racial practice, even though Indians comprised the majority, the inclusion of Africans in this line- up necessarily works through an erasure of the long history of enslavement of Black people in the colonies of the Caribbean. This illustration is definitely problematic but emblematic of the whole discourse of “Arrival Day,” a multicultural celebration that erases particular histories of violence including that of almost 300 years of African enslavement and genocide

146 Ibid.

262 of Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. There are several issues with erasure of Indian from Indian Arrival Day but in both cases, that is whether the day is commemorated as Indian Arrival Day or as Arrival Day only, what is true is that the rationale for this holiday came from descendants of indentured labourers’ vying for recognition of their labour and investments from a seemingly postcolonial nation-state's empty celebration of so-called Emancipation Day. In this fight for recognition of their presence and hence rights as citizenship and nativity, the actual Indigenous peoples of the land are erased. Indigenous peoples, as people who are resilient in the face of constant dispossession have also invested their labour in building their lives and the land especially in the face of constant colonial encroachment upon their lands. As I discuss below in this chapter, there is a constant comparison between Africans and Indians brought to the Caribbean and the category of labor is deployed to make such comparisons. If Black people get Emancipation Day, Indians who replaced them and worked just as hard should also be celebrated. Or so the popular opinion in Guyana and Trinidad is. The slavery versus indentureship arguments also frame the celebration of (Indian) Arrival Day. Drawing upon key theoretical texts from the Caribbean, I will argue that instead of either/or debates, we need to hold onto the relationality between the two systems of violence. Before I get into that discussion, I will begin with a very brief history of the holiday itself.

Indian Arrival Day According to Harlan, the trope of arrival functions as a “metonym linking the Indian presence to the citizenry” (p.356). Serious activist and educational work was invested in securing national recognition of the day of first arrival of Indians to the Caribbean. After the end of World War II in 1945 the memory of the May 5 arrival of Indians in Guyana slowly faded away over the next 40 years. In Trinidad there were sporadic, small-scale celebrations of the day known as “Indian Emigration Day” for some years, but the May 30 arrival of the Fath-al-Razak gradually disappeared from the public memory. By the early seventies only the Hindu group called the Divine Life Society of Chaguanas was staging an annual procession and service for Indian Emigration Day. But by 1977 when that annual march was discontinued, an Indian activist group known as the Indian Revival and Reform Association (IRRA) took up the challenge and set up a small committee to revive the commemoration.

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According to Rajnie Ramlakhan (1998), a community activist, academic and journalist who fought tirelessly for rights of Indo-Caribbean people and was the only woman involved in Indian Day revival with the IRRA, “This group was founded on the premise that there was an urgent need to defend "Indianness" and proclaim its relevance to multiethnic Trinidad. Members had observed that there was a growing tendency to put down everything Indian”.147148 By 1979, the IRRA committee had contacted existing Indian/Hindu organizations for support and the largest Hindu group, the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha (SDMS), agreed to host a large public celebration on May 30, 1979,at its headquarters, with the committee providing publicity and promotion. As Ramdath notes:

During discussions between the committee and the Maha Sabha the point was made that Indians were no longer emigrants to Trinidad, and the name Indian Emigration Day was no longer valid. It was changed to Indian Arrival Day to show that it referred to the anniversary date of the coming of Indians to Trinidad. The committee changed its name to the Indian Arrival Day committee.

It is important to note the very orthodox, casteist and Brahman nature of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha that was a catalyst in revival of Indian Arrival Day. I will discuss caste and Hindu symbols and metaphors mobilized as sites of belonging to the Caribbean a bit later in this chapter but it is important to point out here that Indian Arrival Day here primarily was about celebrating the progression of Hindus. Sanatana Dharma was established in 1932 as response to arrival of Arya Samaji missionaries in early 20th century Trinidad (Vertowec, p.69). 149Arya Samaj was anti-Brahmin and anti-idolatory, but not any less casteist than the Sanatanist Brahmin-dominated school of ideology. This movement was founded in 1875 by a Gujarati Brahmin man called Mool Shankar, more popularly known as Dayanand Saraswati. As Masood Alam Falahi (2012) writes, Arya Samaj was one of the Hindu revivalist movements that came into being in response to the mass conversion of Shudras, particularly Dalits, to Christianity and Islam in mid nineteenth century India (n.p). Dayanand presented to

147 Rajnie Ramlakhan, 1998, “The Origins of the Indian Arrival Day,” LINK, (n.p) 148 To read about constructions of diasporic Indianness in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Caribbean, please see Lisa Outar’s (2012) chapter, “Tropical longing: the quest for India in the early twentieth century Caribbean”. 149 Sanatan is Sanskrit and means eternal and Dharma means cosmic order, sacred duty, or more simply, religion.

264 people targeted for everyday violence the "illusion of upward social mobility within the Hindu fold". Making the straw man argument that caste was to be based on worth rather than birth, he "firmly upheld the caste system and 'upper' caste hegemony" (Falahi, n.p). Arya Samaj held popular public forums on greatness of Indian civilization , the importance of Vedas (which is Sanskrit word meaning knowledge, and specifically refers to old Sanskrit scriptures of Hinduism), and education of women. Hindus in the Caribbean became polarized, going with either Arya Samaj that at least on its face value, was against casteism, or with Sanatana Dharma that later also launched other offshoot organizations such as the Hindu Jawan Sangha (Hindu Youth Organization). In late 1970s when Sanatana Dharma was intensely involved with getting Indian Arrival Day recognized, Jawan Sangha called a regional Hindu Conference, on the theme of 'The Caribbean Challenge to Sanatan Dharma'. Its purpose was to discuss perceived problems and to initiate plans for action. I quote below from the letter of invitation:

Over one hundred and forty years ago our forefathers were uprooted from Bharat Desha and transplanted in an alien environment to supply labour for the sugar plantations in the West Indies. They brought with them their religion, their culture, their songs, music, dances, their food, their dress - in fact, they brought a way of life, the Hindu way of life! Today this way of life is being threatened, its values are being questioned, its forms of expression are being frowned upon and pronounced irrelevant to the society in which we live.

Let us never forget one thing. WE HINDUS HAVE NEVER FAILED HINDUISM IN A CRISIS!

We Hindus must wake up and commence our march for unity, peace and progress. For too long we have been living in isolation. 'We have been committing religious and cultural suicide.' We must unite the scattered, disorganised and demoralized Hindus throughout the Caribbean. We must mobilise ALL HINDUS in the Caribbean and instil (sic) in them pride and dignity in our priceless cultural heritage. Then and only then can we proclaim the glory of Shri Sanatan Dharma. (cited in Vertovec, 76, emphasis in original)

This Hindu nationalist pride that was also Brahminical was also seen in arguments made for recognition of Indian Arrival Day, even though Muslims and Christian minority were on ships carrying indentured labourers, and therefore part of diaspora. There is an emphasis on how well these Hindus have progressed thanks to their labour and hard work. The figure

265 replacing the so-called emancipated slave who abandoned the plantations is therefore, a particularly sturdy caste Hindu masculine figure. I discuss this in more detail in the next section but what is important to remember here is that the struggle for achieving recognition for Indian Arrival Day is strictly enmeshed with casteist Hindu organizations and it is important to pay attention to that.

Slavery, Indentureship and Colonialism One of the most common discussions deployed for securing recognition of Indian Arrival Day is that Emancipation Day, a day commemorating the (supposed) emancipation of enslaved Black people in the Caribbean, was already a national holiday. In a May 6, 2017 letter to the Editor of Guyanese Times, Vishnu Bisram writes:

But it took decades after independence to convince national politicians that the tremendous contribution and sacrifices of Indians to the nation must be recognised with a national holiday similar to the honour (Emancipation Day) given to enslaved Africans, whom the Indians replaced on the plantations under some similar conditions of abuse. Emancipation Day was recognized as a holiday early in the nation, but it was a long struggle before the Indians were given recognition of a national day, just over a decade ago.150

This was not the first time Bisram had made such a comparison. His 11th May 2009 letter also sparked a series of debates when he wrote: "But one should not forget that Indians and Africans had a similar experience and a common history. Their recruitment, the journey, and the conditions on the colonies bore many similarities to those experienced by our African brethren" (emphasis added).151 Bisram further makes a careless and dangerously (anti-Black) generalization by using the term "recruitment" for slavery. "Both groups of labourers," he argues, "were severely ill treated from the time of recruitment all through the periods of enslavement (indenturedship) and liberation". 152 Collapsing histories of slavery into indentureship, erasing the differences between histories of commodification of Black peoples' bodies versus that of Indians and other indentured labourers' bodies, he makes a case

150 See the letter in Guyana Times, http://guyanatimesgy.com/struggle-for-indian-arrival-recognition/ (2017, May 6). 151 See the letter in Sabroek News, https://www.stabroeknews.com/2009/opinion/letters/05/11/the-indian-and- african-experience-has-been-similar/ (2009, May 11). 152 Ibid., emphasis added. ( n.p)

266 for equivalence between the two systems of 'labour'. Nalini Mohabir (2010) takes an in-depth look at the responses in media that were critical of Bisram's move to establish equivalence between slavery and indentureship. Summarizing these responses, she notes: Individual perspectives in the letters point to contested and/or fractured narratives that lie beneath the surface of an elusive shared Guyanese national history and raise questions about how experiences of slavery and indenture are understood, in convergence and conflict with one another. The debate followed three major fault lines: 1) politics constructing the veracity and thus power of history; 2) questions over the qualitative nature of suffering implied in contested victimhood; and 3) accusations of epistemic violence in relation to characterizations of the voluntary/involuntary nature of labor There appears to be a drive to position discourse as either for or against such comparisons, rather than negotiating the space in between. (p. 232)

Mohabir argues that what is needed is attention to the "fluid framework of complex interrelatedness" of slavery and indentureship (p.232) and the need to move beyond these either/or binaries when it comes to voluntary versus coercive, free labour versus unfree labour. These constant binaries are visible in how enslavement and Black people are talked about in popular and critical discourses of Indo-Caribbean people. For instance, in their book, Across the Dark Waters: Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the Caribbean, Indo- Guyanese post, novelist and academic, David Dabydeen and professor of history of the Caribbean, Brinsley Samaroo write, "After the abolition of slavery, there was the large-scale abandonment of the plantations by ex-slaves" (p.1, emphasis added). Therefore, when the West Indian sugar lobby learned about the "successful use of Indians as indentured labourers on the island of Mauritius," and hearing about the "favourable reports of the supposedly tractable nature of the Indian labourer and of his dedication to agricultural work," (p.3, emphasis added) Indians were brought to the Caribbean as replacement labour. In his article titled, "Indian Labour in British Guiana," Indo-Guyanese scholar of history in New York, Basdeo Mangru (1986) writes, "emancipation in British Guiana brought an influx of indentured labourers from India, whose working and living conditions were destructive of caste and culture, and often as harsh as those of the slaves they replaced" (p.43). This, as Shona Jackson (2013) argues, is the "colonial logic of indenture" (p.190). The myth of “lazy and dangerous” Black people running amuck, leaving the plantations that had once kept them incarcerated, and now being free to control their own labour are all

267 colonial myths that are steeped in anti-Blackness and mobilized as a rationale for introducing another coercive system of control of people, lives, and their futures, known as indentureship in the region. In such discourses, Indians are constantly pitted as a superior race to formerly enslaved Black people in the region. Whereas on one hand there is the argument that Indians were ‘just like slaves’ and indentureship and enslavement were just like each other, on the other hand, there was also another kind of argument: one focused on choice and agency of Indian indentured labourers. As Harlan writes: Representation of indenture as slavery identified, to a greater or lesser extent, the experiences of African and Indian laborers. If Indian Arrival Day commemorated Indian slavery, then, it would certainly seem, Indian slavery, whose inception was the reason for recognition of an Arrival Day, served in this context as a metonym for all enforced servitude in Trinidad. Hence, those Indo- Trinidadians who accepted the representation of indenture as slavery but who had rejected the initial (generic) “Arrival Day” holiday could be seen as replacing one arrival day’s metonymic structure (the Arrival off one group indexing arrivals off all) for another closely associated but more restrictive one (the slavery of one group –Indians –standing on that day, paradoxically and uncomfortably, for the slavery of all). In the context of Indian Arrival Day, however, the arrival of Indian “slaves” marks clearly the particular ancestors worthy of commemoration on that day as Indians whose (temporarily imposed) slave labor was to be distinguished from and to be substituted for that enslavement whose termination was celebrated by Emancipation Day. (p. 363)

Viranjini Munasinghe (2001) has also notes that "in their attempts to separate themselves from Afro-Trinidadians, Indo-Trinidadians ironically rest their claims to superiority on the contention that they chose a status of servitude, a privilege not accorded Afro-Trinidadians" (p.279, emphasis in original). They see their ancestors' lack of shackles as demonstrating not only self-determination, but also superiority over those who were forced on board under conditions of enslavement (p.279). Talking about the 'likeness' between slavery and indentureship secures Indo-Caribbean people’s claim that Trinidad or Guyana is as much theirs as that of Black people; that their ancestors lived in conditions similar to that of enslaved Africans and that they worked just as hard.153 On the other hand, through claiming

153 The stories of Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean people’s animosity are many. They were pitted against each other by their white masters who benefitted from the competition. However, there are also stories of solidarity. While I do discuss them in this study, and mark it as something to closely examine as a future study, I know that the celebration of Hosay or Muharram brought Indo-Caribbean Muslims, Black people and even Hindus together. Muharram [or Hosay as it came to be known in the British Caribbean] was well established in Trinidad from the outset of Indian indentured immigration as a religious and cultural festival that bridged so

268 that these ancestors exercised their agency, their choice in boarding the ship and working on plantations, and that their labour saved the plantations abandoned by Black people once emancipated, they also establish themselves as people who made their own destiny, as people more in control, and through exercising choice, as modern people rational enough to make calculated decisions about life, unlike the Black people brought under conditions of enslavement. In The Intimacies of the Four Continents, Lowe (2015) examines the introduction of Chinese indentured labourers to the Caribbean post-emancipation. Drawing upon colonial archive, she notes that the British introduced Chinese workers as "free" labourers and yet these men suffered and died as much as those "they were designed to replace" (24). The import of Asian labour post emancipation of enslaved people was portrayed as a progressive move from "primitive slavery" to "free labor" but this was a "modern utilitarian move, in which abolition proved an expedient, and only coincidentally ‘‘enlightened,’’ solution" (p.24). She further argues: The representations of indentured labor as 'freely' contracted buttressed liberal promises of freedom for former slaves, while enabling planters to derive benefits from the so-called transition from slavery to free labor that in effect included a range of intermediate forms of coercive labor, from rented slaves, sharecroppers, and convicts, to day laborers, dept peonage, workers paid by task, and indentureship. The Chinese were instrumentally used in this political discourse as a figure, a fantasy of "free" yet racialized and coerced labor, at a time when the possession of body, work, life, and death was foreclosed to the enslaved and indentured alike. (p.24, emphasis in original)

Moving us away from slavery versus indentureship, free versus unfree or coercive labour, Lowe insists that we focus on dialectical interweaving of "global intimacies" from which emerged not only modern humanism but also modern racialized division of labour.154 Lowe

many differences. Muharram is observed by Shi’i Muslims and it is a re-enactment of the events that led to the death of Imams Hassan and Hussein, the Prophet Muhammed’s (PBUH) grandsons in 7th century. Kelvin Singh, author of Bloodstained Tombs: The Muharram Massacre 1884 (1988) documents how both Indo and Afro- Caribbean people came together in the days of the plantation to observe the day and also strategize against their masters.

154 Lowe writes: "By ‘‘modern humanism’ ’I mean the secular European tradition of liberal philosophy that narrates political emancipation through citizenship in the state, that declares economic freedom in the development of wage labor and an exchange market, and that confers civilization to the human person educated

269 argues that introduction of Chinese and Indian coolies were more than about labour or labour shortages only. Through these figures, introduced as a "free race," racial division of labour and even more important and expansively, a hierarchy of racial classiﬁcations were instituted. The Asian labourer was seen as a "racial barrier between [the British] and the Negroes" and their addition was to "produce a new division of labor in which the Black slaves would continue to perform fieldwork, and imagined the Chinese as 'a free race of cultivators' who could grind, refine, and crystallize the cane" (p.24). Post emancipation, writes Iyko Day (2016), "race became amplified with the downfall of slavery because racial domination was an implicit feature of slavery" (p.28). If we are to hold onto the understanding of race, slavery, and the (empty) liberal promises of freedom and free labour, the argument that Asian indentured workers came to replace the emancipated Africans would meet its logical end. As Lowe makes clear, the issue of labour control was more than about labour shortage and definitely not one of Black people "abandoning" the plantations and hardworking Asian indentured labourers coming in to replace them. These ideas of emancipation and progress to indentured labour, 'emancipated' African apprentices, and free trade are all steeped in logics of racial capitalism that interpellated the four continents, albeit in different ways, of course. Mohabir puts it succinctly when she writes, "Guyana yielded 'virgin' land, African and Asian bodies provided expendable labor, and Europe administered the technology and markets" (p.234). In his account of race and gender relations on sugar plantations in Guyana, Randolph B. Persaud (2015) argues that the social and political relations governing accumulation were restructured so as to maintain violent control over the new indentured labour force. As such, “The importation of ‘Coolie’ labour in British Guiana resulted from a complex mixture of economic, political and ideological circumstances. It should be stated forthwith that the decision to turn to indentured labourers was not simply a matter of the shortage of labour” (p.123). Madhavi Kale's (1998) excellent study, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean, also offers a critique of mobilizing the category of labour as a co-ordinate for claiming respectability and humanity.

in aesthetic and national culture, in each case unifying particularity, diﬀerence, or locality through universal concepts of reason and community". (p.192)

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Indo-Caribbean People and their Casteist Colonizing Labour

An important classic/historical text on presence of Indians in Guyana is by Peter Ruhomon, an amateur historian and civil servant, titled, Centenary History of the East Indians in British Guiana, 1838-1938, originally published in 1947, the year of Indian independence from the British and the formation of Pakistan (divided from India). His book was later reprinted in 1988 on the occasion of 150th anniversary of the arrivals of Indians to Guyana. In his preface to the book, Yesu Persaud who was the Chairman of the East Indians’ 150th Anniversary Committee, noted that the reprinting of the book was being "done at a time when we are engaged in the search for what is usable in the past to assist us in the task of working together in building our nation". I am going to look at parts of his book to understand how Indians were imagining their presence in 20th century Guyana. Ruhomon's historical take presents Indian indentured labourers as being the rightful owners of the land and belonging to it because of the labour they have invested in building the land. In his introductory chapter, he writes: It will be the Author's main purpose to prove by the incontestable evidence of facts that Indian immigration has not only been the salvation of the Colony, at a most critical juncture in its history, when, after the abolition of Negro slavery, there was a general trek away from the plantations, resulting in the economic structure of the Colony being shaken to its very foundation, through the lack of a dependable labour supply, but that the Indians, themselves, have proved to be the most valuable assets to the industrial welfare of the Colony, as is evidence by the development, through their unaided efforts, of the rice and cattle industries. (p.5)

According to Ruhomon’s logic then, the industrious, hardworking Indian labourer actually rescued the colony through his labour because the plantations were apparently “abandoned” by Black people. Indian labourers worked through this chaos, and gave order and life to the Colony. For Ruhomon, "in the reclaiming of waste lands and abandoned plantations the Indians stands [sic] unrivalled, and we have before our very eyes sterling examples of his initiative and enterprise in this direction, which prove his indisputable worth as a colonist, par excellence" (p.169, emphasis in original). Giving several examples of the "colonizing zeal of Indians" (p.169) in settling lands that laid abandoned and in need of settling, Ruhomon's narrative presents the Indian indentured labourer as the settler par excellence.

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Here, his logic is not any different than that of white settlers who claim that they own the land because they transformed it into productive agricultural lands from wilderness before conquest. Indian labourers too, by similar logic, were then "slowly and surely advancing to the conquest of the waste lands which lay around them in abundance" (p.165). In Ruhomon's narrative, land as terra nullius, as empty land without any (significant) trace of Indigenous peoples of the land is a given. The wastage of the land comes from Black people fleeing and abandoning these lands, a move that erases the fact that Caribbean settler economy was developed through Indigenous and Black peoples' labour and lives. Indian in the Caribbean, in Ruhomon's narrative, were also better than Indians in India and fit for settling. Encountering the hardships in the Caribbean attracted the better stock of Indians who became sturdy through conquering over the harshness of their new environment. Ruhomon draws upon a variety of British colonial officials who all remarked on the seeming improvement of Indian indentured labourers in the colony. Coming to the colonies, and through hardships, through giving his labour and blood to the once in-chaos colony, the Indian not only acquires land but also his manhood and humanity: [T]he character of the Indian in his native home, the condition of poverty and employment in which he found himself, with the possibilities opened up before him in the Colonies --not necessarily under the indenture system but after his indenture had expired --of amassing a competence and rising to a full consciousness of his manhood and individual worth, as a member of the general community; and had, conceded to him, all the rights and privileges to which he became entitled, as a citizen and a member of the genus homo (emphasis in original)...As was natural, therefore, and to be expected, it was the land that first claimed the attention of the immigrants, when the shackles of indenture fell clanking at their feet, at the close of their 5 years' period...Diwan Bahadur Pillai has said, in reference to the Guianese East Indians that "the meek shall possess the land." It might, with no exaggeration be added, from what they have already achieved in the conquest of the land, that the Colony is theirs and "the fullness thereof". (p.285-6, emphasis added)

It is not only labour, but the aftereffects of that labour that installs the once-labouring Indian as now the full “colonizer,” as the rightful owner of the land. It is a classic settler liberal progress narrative. The Indian, oppressed at home, came to the Colony, established it and now has the civility to settle it unlike, what remains unsaid, the Black formerly enslaved people who only laboured but did not have the sense or civility to keep at it and attain the status of civilized colonizer. In all of this, of course, the Indigenous peoples of the land

272 remain absent, or more likely as in all such narratives of settlers’ progress, as dead and long gone. Indians are superior to Black people but also to Indigenous peoples who loud absence nevertheless structures every bit of Ruhomon's narrative. I do not refer to Rhomon's settler narrative to argue the one-dimensional problematic argument that Indians in the Caribbean have been or are simply settlers like white people are in North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Palestine. Unlike the white settlers who came looking for adventure or land, Indians mostly entered the indenture contract because of poverty that was a consequence of casteist British Raj. Some of the earliest people recruited were lower caste and/or tribal peoples of India. In a mid-nineteenth century book titled, Hill Coolies: A Brief Exposure of the Deplorable Condition of the Hill Coolies in British Guinana and Mauritius, and the Nefarious Means by Which They Were Induced to Resort to These Colonies, John Scoble (1840) notes that the "Dhangur"155 or "hill coolies" brought to the West Indies have no idea about where they are being taken, and that they have "no religion, no education, and, in their present state, no wants, beyond eating, drinking, and sleeping" (p.5). These were the tribal people from Chotanagpur, Santhal and Paraganas who were mostly kidnapped and sold to recruiters who put them on ships heading overseas (Sen, 2012). Mohabir cautions us against making "sweeping generalizations across time" (p.238). She writes: "To view indenture as analogous to white-settler migration not only amputates it from the context of the Caribbean, but also fails to acknowledge the intricacies of power relations operating at the time" (p.244-45). But, what is important, and what I am arguing is that even though Indian indentured labourers did not arrive in Trinidad, Guyana and other parts of the Caribbean as colonizers, even though these were mostly lower caste, poor, landless-in-India peasants, their orientation towards enslaved people and towards indentured people was the same as how white settlers viewed Black and Indigenous peoples. They were not anti-Black, for example, because they themselves were oppressed but because they too had the same orientation, and adopted the same racist narratives about Black people, and assumed that Indigenous people were no longer there. This is a point I discuss more later in this chapter through Cyril Dabydeen’s work.

155 More common spelling is Dhangar. At the time when tribal people from Chota Nagpur and surrounding areas were being seduced or stolen into indentureship in the Caribbean, they were also actively recruited for work on colonial tea plantations in Assam and indigo plantations in Bengal.

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Throughout this study, I have been arguing that complicity is multi-dimensional but also situational. In discussing Ruhomon's text that is an important historical document in analysis of Indo-Guyanese people, I want to draw attention to how multiplicity of socioeconomic , casteist and other factors design complicity and what happens to questions of responsibility in such instances. The binaries of (white) colonizer-colonized which characterizes contemporary white settler colonial nation-states such as the United States or Canada are insufficient to theorize the presence of Black, Indians, Chinese and other people of colour in the Caribbean. Are they settlers in the classic term of the word? In Creole Indigeneity, Jackson argues that she "deliberately employs the loaded term settler to describe formerly enslaved and indentured peoples in order to recast the struggle among indigenous, black, and Indo-Caribbean peoples in the region" (3-4, emphasis added). Caribbean society, Jackson argues in her book, is constituted through the "real and figurative displacement" of its Indigenous peoples. This happens so that "creole settlers" (by which Jackson means both, descendants of enslaved Black people and indentured Indian people) claim belonging. She writes: I suggest that the introduction of new natives, or the extent to which Creoles are able to imagine and institute themselves as natives both politically and culturally, rests upon the management of this radical difference [of continuing to identify Indigenous peoples in colonialist terms] through discursive repetition of native extinction. It is a phenomenon that complexly reflects what Canadian-based anthropologist Maximilian Forte has identified as a "historical trope of anti- indigeneity" in the bulk of wider Caribbean historiography. Guyana's relation to its indigenous groups allows us to see what Forte identifies as a regional, historiographic trope is central to discourse, political economy, and Creole subjectivity. In other words, the idea of native disappearance, either sociolinguistically or historically, emerges as central to a broad range of Caribbean discourse and to the introduction of new natives...The repetition of the "fact" of their extinction effects a second expropriation of Indigenous Peoples, especially to the extent that the repetition is taken for granted as regional reality, where archipelagic social and cultural history doubles for that of the entire Caribbean...It reflects the production of indigeneity through a teleological relation to labor intrinsic to understandings of New World humanity in which labor (via the plantation) is what indigeneizes modern subjects. (p.25-6)

Jackson’s argument that it is the “teleological relation to labor” which indigeneizes modern (while the Indigenous remains pre-modern) subject perfectly analyzes Ruhomon’s narrative

274 above. The constant and endless land grabbing by the settler state has coerced Indigenous peoples there to move more inwards. But the erasures from settler narratives are not only about this physical absence from mainland. It is about the tactics employed to disappear the natives again and again through language, through other actions. In Guyana, the relations are not of the classic colonizer-colonized type is characteristic of white settler colonialism. The uneven horizontal relations of power and violence are derived from (formerly) vertical ones in relation to formerly enslaved and formerly indentured peoples, and what does hold true is that the "involuntary colonials" (Jackson, 38) are "now, collectively, in positions of power over Indigenous Peoples on whose land they have built homes of wood, concrete, culture, and nation" (p.38). For Jackson, Indigenous peoples of Guyana must be centered in writings and all claims for justice made by the descendants of formerly enslaved and indentured people(s) and "Creole indigeneity" is a settler colonial project. In tandem with this reading of the presence of Black and Byrd asks in The Transit of Empire: "How might one redress such histories where dislocated arrivals facilitated dislocated removals? How might one imagine radical justice that addresses the cacophonies of colonialism?" (p.83, emphasis added) Taking cue from Jackson and Byrd's critical interventions in thinking about complicity in historical and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, I discuss below, in context of Indo-Caribbean novelist and poet, Cyril Dabydeen's work, what it means to orient toward, and engage with "contrapuntal responsibilities" (85) as non- Indigenous non-Black people of colour. I do so by paying attention to the work which race, caste and gender are doing.

Indo-Caribbean Encounters (with) Indigeneity

In this section, I engage with a novel by Indo-Guyanese novelist, Cyril Dabydeen. While the origins of Indo-Caribbean literature lies in V.S. Naipaul’s work, I am choosing Dabydeen’s work because his work is unique in the Indo-Caribbean literature in that, unlike the general theme of postcolonial Caribbean literature that engages with the theme of plantations or the ships crossing the Kālā Pānī from India to the New World, his work is situated more in the landscape of Guyana itself, in its jungles, rivers, savannahs in the

275 tradition of Afro-Guyanese and Creole literature of Wilson Harris and others (Khan, 2012, 2015). Moreover, rather than a negotiation of belonging to the Caribbean in relation to the Afro-Guyanese, the negotiation required for figuring out the mode of belonging is located in encounters with Indigeneity. Cyril Dabydeen was born in Berbice County, Guyana. His parents were the descendants of indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent brought to the British colonies in the aftermath of Emancipation. Dabydeen was raised in the village of Adelphi, in the Canjie, Berbice, home to Rose Hall, one of the largest sugar plantations in Guyana, as well as the major township of New Amsterdam, and birthplace of some famous novelists such as Wilson Harris and Edgar Mittleholzer. Dabydeen’s experiences and impressions of Rose Hall on the bank of Canje river, one of the largest sugar plantations in the East Canje river, amidst the smell of rotten sugar cane, the aroma of molasses, the sight of molluse, crab and shrimp along the Guyana coast, and the throbbing of the gigantic cane factory became an inseparable part of his early life and also poetic imagination. In 1970s, Dabydeen migrated to Canada and is recognized as one of Canada's most celebrated Caribbean Canadian writers today. As Jameela Begum (2000), one his biographers notes, "Surprisingly, he was the only writer who seemed to speak without bitterness, without anger and frustration about his predicament as a creative writer in a white-dominated society" (p.21). She later adds, "His imagination embraces the angst of settlement in a new country, the nostalgia for the home country and the forlornness that characterizes such an exile" (p.22). Dabydeen’s novel, Dark Swirl was released in 1988. As far as the story goes, it is this: The novel is set in the period around Guyanese independence from Britain in 1966 in a rural, unnamed Canje River village bordering the Amazonian jungle.156 The novel begins with the protagonist Josh, a sensitive, quiet, aloof ten year old boy of Indian origins, staring outside the window where he often sat for hours, looking at a creek a small distance away from his house. This creek, he imagines but also suspects, harbours some malevolent force. Josh is particularly sensitive to the possibility that the creek in the middle of the village holds some monsters in its heart, but his parents and the other villagers are also well attuned to the possibility that any freshwater lake or creek might be home to the reptilian massacouraman, a

156 I did not get the temporal context from reading the novel, but Aliyah Khan (2015) notes that it was set around the time of independence of Guyana from British. This observation makes sense given the presence of the lone stranger (white man) and how the villagers perceive him as not belonging to that spaces.

276 creature once believed to have existed by Indigenous peoples who apparently no longer dwell in the area. This creature, the massacouraman, Josh’s parents and later the villagers come to believe was back because the stranger, the white scientist, who remains unnamed throughout the novel had come to the village to in the last days of empire to catalogue and collect specimens of the local flora and fauna. He is a collector of specimens and is an arrogant man who is amused and sometimes horrified by the villagers’ superstitions. The villagers try making sense of him, while fearing that “he could wuk obeah,” (p.15) or black magic, and bring forth a creature such as the massacouraman. Josh becomes consumed with vivid, feverish dreams of drowning and being pulled under the surface by a creature with “large emerald eyes” and “a mighty board-stiff tail,” and he refuses to eat (p.23). His parents, Savitri and Ghulam, and eventually the entire village begin blaming his “sickness” both on the ostensibly haunted creek and on the white stranger, whose collecting of animals and plants in little jars in his hut is so foreign and unfathomable that they quickly accuse him of being a “bad man” who “wuk obeah wid snake an’ cracadile” (p.27). The villagers too become consumed by the idea of the massacouraman, though no one ever catches more than a glimpse of the creature, and it is more often seen in their dreams than in their waking life. Eventually, Ghulam comes to believe that the advent of the massacouraman is a symbol of Indo-Guyanese migration, a reminder of what the villagers were in India (which he remembers, as I discuss below, through ‘returning’ to caste Hinduism) and all that they might become in the Caribbean. This realization is linked to Josh’s recovery and in the end, the massacouraman disappears, even though it has awakened in them the idea that they are now of the land, and that they belong. This, while the British naturalist, for his part, is symbolically burned brown by the sun and begins to believe in the existence of the massacouraman, but in the end he refuses Josh’s invitation to live with and become one of the villagers, disappears into the jungle, and is never heard from again. There is a lot to investigate and unpack in the novel in relation to the motif of land, Indigeneity and the forms in which Indo-Guyanese encounters occur with Indigeneity. The land (and water) is always there as an actant, a character that acts as an important repository of Indigeneity. As Aliyah Khan (2015) writes: Cyril Dabydeen’s oeuvre is also difficult to quantify as postcolonial Indo- Caribbean literature because it does not always engage with the characteristic settings of the plantation and the ship of indentured labourers crossing the kala

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pani (“black water”) from India, instead showing more of an affinity for the Guyanese jungles, rivers, and savannahs that feature prominently in the Afro- Guyanese and Creole literary tradition established by Harris and others. (p.5)

The land is haunted land and the villagers are also haunted people even as some of the ghosts are of their ancestors brought to the New World under conditions of either enslavement or indentureship for the most part. The characters are not only the land/water and the humans. Massacouraman could be hailed as the central character even if it never speaks and its intentions, if it does indeed exist, remain unknown and mediated only through the thoughts of Ghulam and the fear of Josh and other unidentified villagers. As Jeremy Poynting (1996) says, in Dark Swirl, Dabydeen “very explicitly confronts animal-human relations at relations at manifold levels: actual, epistemological, and mythical” (p. 222). As I argue below that this animal-human relation is not grounded in Indigenous epistemologies of reading the world where animals and humans are in a cordial and harmonious, balanced relationship, but one that gestures towards a deep crisis of settlement (on the part of Indo-Guyanese) belonging to the land at the expense of the ‘dead Indian’. That epistemological confrontation is a deeply creole settler one where hope can never be extended to Indigenous peoples who do not make an appearance as living, present people despite the fact that in Guyana’s hinterlands, there is a substantial presence of Indigenous peoples. Shona Jackson (2005) writes: “In the struggle to possess the land, both literally and figuratively, one sees the pattern of resistance that informs within the discourses of power. The inability to contain the land as a singular object of desire inside any colonial or postcolonial discourse is its most consistent feature” (p.86). In fact, as I will argue below, the land exceeds the framework and perhaps, even intentions, which Dabydeen has for the villagers and the sea reptile. DeLoghrey et al. (2005) write that “in the battle against amnesia induced by colonialism’s erasures, the deterritorialization and transplantation of peoples, and even natural disasters, the Caribbean writer often seeks nature as an ally” (p.3). Dabydeen also notes in a 2001 interview with Judith Mizrahi-Barak that he is invested in learning and presenting a “sense of the original landscape in mythopoetic terms” (p.111). Land, as he notes, is “important” to him. As Edouard Glissant writes:

The relationship with the land, one that is even more threatened because the

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community is alienated from that land, becomes so fundamental in this discourse that landscape in the work stop being merely decorative or supportive and emerges as a full character. Describing the landscape is not enough. The individual, the community, the land are inextricably in the process of creating history. Landscape is a character in this process. Its deepest meaning need to be understood. (p.105-6)

This process of writing of history occurs in Dabydeen’s work too. In several of his stories, whether placed in Guyana, or Canada, land is a character in and of itself. For instance, in his short story titled Amerindians, the protagonist, a young Indo-Guyanese man, Roy who goes into the interior, into the “looming thickness of the forest” (64) as a land surveyor is constantly scared and haunted by a jaguar. Roy constantly tries to make sense of the animal through negotiating with some Orientalist and seemingly Amerindian mythologies about the animal. Dabydeen himself worked as a tree-planter in northwestern Ontario in early 1970s when he first moved to Canada. During that time, as he notes, he lived with in bush camps with the Ojibwe and the Cree peoples. That experience translates into his stories including but not limited to Amerindians Landscape is never devoid of power relations. Caribbean is firstly Indigenous peoples’ land and the massacouraman makes an appearance to remind the villagers of that. The massacouraman, as Indigenous spirit of the land, as a mythology no matter how significant, however, still does not symbolize living resilient Indigenous peoples of Guyana. Indigeneity remains spectral. It stays ghostly. The creature makes an appearance only to allow the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese villagers that the land is now theirs.157 It is another example of postcolonial literature where the subjects of the text in settler colonies are not its Indigenous peoples but rather, those settled on the land now. The white scientist is gone, perhaps devoured by the landscape that will not forgive him as its initial colonizer, while the massacouraman appears to give legitimacy to descendants of the enslaved and indentured people. Dark Swirl, then, is about becoming indigenous to the land. This is clear in the exchange about the land belonging to all (meaning Josh’s family and other villagers) when Ghulam tries to encourage his son, Josh, to go swimming in the lake. He says, “Memba, the creek belongs to we too, not only to the fish an alligata” (p.17)

157 While the village had Afro-Guyanese people too, Josh’s family was Indian in origins and since they are centered in the narrative, my arguments are more attentive to Indo-Guyanese claims of belonging than those made by the Afro-Guyanese.

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The water dwellers here also includes the massacouraman which was mentioned a second before that by Ghulam who teases his son about his fear of an imaginary creature. Throughout the novel, in villagers’ verbal or latent exchanges with the scientist and between Ghulam and the stranger, and between the stranger and Josh, there is a constant struggle to confirm that the land does indeed belong to the villagers even if it remains as a “hostile place” until Ghulam finally makes sense of the massacouraman at the end of the novel. This making sense is achieved through affirming that the massacouraman will not return –that was might have been once “indigenous” to the land has welcomed the new people and left. In that moment, the villagers who up until then knew the land was “haunted” feel at ease. The massacouraman was there to remind them that this land has witnessed and been altered by the violence of conquest; that its shores have seen slave ships and ships from India docked there. That it had plantations where Indigenous, Black and later brown people had and continue to work. Dabydeen captures the complexities of violence and the memory of it through Ghulam’s silent thoughts in the following short passage: Now they [the villagers searching for the white stranger] felt more confident as they walked away from the village, along the creek. But when they turned and saw how far away they were from their houses and how close they were to the place where the silk cotton trees grew, when they heard them swish funereally in the hurl of the wind, once more the huddle together to dispel their superstition and fear. They could here in the wind echoes of been ancestral past of indigenous men and women fleeing into the bushes; of sugar plantation owners, white-white, who buried slaves alive under silk cotton trees with their own dead so they’re kind would be served even in the underworld; of voodoo brought from Africa to these shores; of jumbies manifesting from smelly hovels, of backoos, who worked in the sugarcane fields in the darkness of the night with an efficiency no man could match; of a plantation owner riding on a majestic white horse, dragging a heavy chain behind; of Moongazer straddling the road, head a pillar in the sky, silently watching. The wind sang too of indenture people, brown and black faces, small-framed, clutching at the Bhagwad Gita and reciting remnant words from the Ramayana in the flicker of light from the wall lamps in narrow logies as they clung to their faith in this hostile place… (p.24, emphasis in original)158

These words are a reminder that, as Wilson Harris notes, the Caribbean is a “landscape saturated by traumas of conquest”. The trauma is informed by a cacophony of violence(s) of

158 Logies are barracks in which enslaved Black people lived during the days of slavery, and afterwards, Indians who worked the plantations lived in these lodgings.

280 conquest, slavery and indentureship that imprint on the land and its inhabitants. The land is hostile, as Dabydeen says, but land that nevertheless is where these villagers have to live even if they know that several different ghosts, stories, and histories haunt it. What I want to stop, however, and think about is the way indigeneity makes an appearance and does its work in the paragraph from the novel which I quoted above. There is a remembrance of Indigenous men and women running into the bushes (for escaping the white settlers and for survival), but the words “ancestral past” gives the impression that their descendants are all gone especially since in the present, the villagers are represented only by Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese people. This assumption is also manifested in the villagers fearing what lies in the heart of the creek. The massacouraman, an imaginary reptile (since nobody ever sees it), also seems emblematic of Dabydeen’s erasure of indigeneity by confining it to some fictitious presence only. The appearance of the massacouraman is not a break from the founding mythology of Guyana as a space discovered by white settlers and later taken over by resilient Black people and hardworking brown people, or that of the of the El Dorado, a foundational mythology of the Caribbean. The appearance of the massacouraman ‘blessing’ the villagers is meant to indicate an acceptance of them. As Jackson writes, “Black and East Indians who were formerly integral to the myth’s enactment as colonial subjects, as laborers, suddenly inherited the myth as their own narrative of progress at the same time that Amerindians sought to challenge it through a discourse of ‘prior rights’ that, to date, only the United Nations has fully acknowledged” (p.88, emphasis in original). But in Dark Swirl, there are just no Indigenous peoples alive and hence no challenge can be posed to the villagers coming into an understanding of themselves as the rightful inheritors of the land. Massacouraman might have come to surface as a symbol of Amerinidianness but when it leaves, it leaves as a vestigial emblem of postcolonial Caribbean where all those left now live in mostly harmonious relations on a free land. An interesting juxtaposition in the novel is between the white scientist (colonizer) and the massacouraman (Indigenous). The villagers believe that the massacouraman had to return to the creek to counter the “obeah” of the stranger. In the end, the scientist though slowly accepted by the villagers, is absorbed by the jungle and could not be found anywhere. The villagers on the other hand, register an acceptance by the Indigenous spirit and are eventually left alone. Where the stranger, by the end of the novel feels alienated from himself, and is

281 overwhelmed by “feelings of sickness and mortality,” (p.88) the village gets a new life; it is “astir with voices; laughter; a child’s boisterous cry followed a few seconds later by a mother’s cuddling sounds” (p.90). The stranger’s arrival not only brings the massacouraman as representative of indigeneity that still guards the land (albeit through a mythical water creature) but also ignites in villagers a sense of belonging; of having found a destination like this was their own Manifest destiny. They become possessive of the land, of the creek, and of the water reptile in its heart. Josh’s father, Ghulam, for instance, feels insecure and threatened by the prospect of the scientist taking something that is theirs. When the stranger teasingly tells Ghulam that “the thing in the creek” is dead, Ghulam enters an almost frenzy- like state for “outside he knew he wanted the creature to be alive. The feeling made him quiver like a man demented. He clutched at his throat as he felt an intense pain there.” (p.73) He could not imagine the creature of the creek to be dead or captured by the scientist. It is what proved that they belonged to the land they now lived on: He wanted those who came from outside, those from far, to see that this thing was theirs; that it stemmed from them and in a way defined them; massacouraman or whatever name it was known by; that it was a part of their identity on this Guyana coastland; part of what made them appear odd but recognisable. (p.72, emphasis added)

The creek, becomes part of Ghulam. He feels and he believes that "it was inside his bloodstream...hot, burning, rioting in his veins" (Dabydeen, p.40). In that moment, he could not discern the difference between the edges of his body and that of the massacouraman. It’s like his body engulfs the creature as a whole. In The National Uncanny, Renee Bergland (2000) argues that Indian ghosts are deployed for nationalist purposes. The ghosts are mobilized to make the (European) settlers feel at (stolen) ‘home’ in America. In the process of becoming proper (white) settler citizen subjects, Americans must continue to be haunted by these Indian ghosts. Drawing upon Myra Jehlen, Etienne Balibar, and Johan Fichte, Bergland argues that ghosting, is a “technique of removal” and requires that Americans internalize the external frontiers of the land, and become the Americas themselves. This internalization of “Indians” represents a territorialisation of the white imagination, whereby the nation literally becomes the imagination She writes: The discursive removal of Indians from American physical territory and the

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Americanization of the imaginative territory into which Indians are removed are two good explanations for the ideological power of the figure of the Indian ghost. The image also draws ideological power from the sense of fait accompli (the Indians are already gone), and from rein- forcing the intractable otherness of Indians (they are so other that they are otherworldly). (p.5, emphasis in original)

Dark Swirl is as an example par excellence of Bergland’s argument. But here it is not white American settlers but an Indo-Guyanese man who becomes the proper settler citizen subject through his encounters with ghostly, “otherworldly indigeneity”. Unlike the confident conquering white settler, there is hesitance at first in the novel’s characters. They do not assertively know their place in the village until the white man makes Ghulam feel like the creek and whatever is in it is him, his very skin.. Khan (2012) argues that These former slaves and indentured laborers must be judged by the massacouraman, a river spirit—do they deserve to replace the Amerindians who have disappeared from their part of the country? Can they be integrated into the landscape? Their status is complicated— and they get a chance to prove their case—because as forced migrants, they are victims of colonization just as the Patamona, Wai Wai, Arecuna and other indigenous Amerindian residents of that area were. (p.170, emphasis added)

She draws lines of clear separation between the white scientist and Ghulam and other villagers. My argument, throughout this dissertation and perhaps in every single chapter has never been that non-Black, non-Indigenous people of colour are the same kind of settlers as white people or that we must theorize the presence of non-Black people of colour in the Americas only within the binary of colonizer and Indigenous. I have tried to hold onto complexities of place, of investigating our place here and asking what violence(s) do we actively and unwittingly participate in as citizens of nation-states founded upon dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples, and enslavement of Black people. In Dark Swirl, we never hear from Afro-Guyanese villagers so all the critiques I make, I have limited to primarily Josh, Ghulam and other Indo-Guyanese people. Both Indo and Afro- Guyanese people forged their identities anew in response to slavery and indentureship, and defined through their relationship to land through these violence(s). But in Dark Swirl, while Dabydeen mentions Afro-Guyanese are among the villagers, we only get the perspectives of the scientist or Josh's family. The other villagers remain unnamed and unidentified.

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Khan’s question though about whether the enslaved and indentured people deserve to replace the Amerindians who have disappeared from their part of the country is a completely colonial move. Indentured labourers are not colonized people in the Caribbean. Collapsing the difference between the violence(s) of colonization, slavery, and indentureship cannot be read outside of ongoing efforts at disappearing Indigenous peoples materially and discursively, and refusing to acknowledge them as people who live, are resilient and continuing to fight the fight which seemingly postcolonial Guyanese state considers to be a past. In The Transit of Empire, Byrd writes that to "reframe colonization as racialization at the site of radical critique risks leaving those very colonial structures intact on the one hand and allowing all experiences of oppression within settler colonialism to step forward as colonized on the other" (p.54). While there is disdain for the white scientist man, the villagers are presented as people who are completely innocent and who can offer no accountability for the (ongoing) dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Dabydeen is an Indo- Guyanese man who brings in indigeneity only to stage a negotiation of belonging for his people. There are possibilities for some kind of redress in this (post)colony for non-Black people of colour, but no justice can ever be fought for by those who have been rendered as monstrous, as other-worldly. Similarly, no justice can ever be extended to those who are presumably still here but never the speaking subjects. Black villagers have no name, and never speak in the novel. Whatever negotiations they make with the creature happen through Josh and Ghulam. Josh and Ghulam become the blessed subjects of massacouraman who leaves content. If Dabydeen had Indigenous people as characters in the novel, I argue, the plot of the story would not be able to hold. The massacouraman would not have made an appearance to bless the non-Indigenous, formerly indentured people and even if it had, the negotiation through Indigenous people's existence would have looked very difference in that it would have foremost address the politics of the land and place of the Original peoples first. It is, therefore, not an oversight or a failure to understand the 'nuances' when I claim that Dabydeen's novel works along the logic of Manifest Destiny. By the end of the novel, the villagers are given a

memory like an ancient, primordial imagining that surpassed the places where they had come from—Africa, India, Europe—or where they secretly yearned to return when the soil no longer seemed to

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accept them; memory of a nether place, like the massacouraman itself, merely reflecting the phases of the moon where all else was vanquished or simply disappeared. (Dabydeen, p.92)

The massacouraman takes them to a place of "primordial imagining" where they can fashion themselves anew, as new people who were properly Guyanese. As Guyanese, if not more so, than the massacouraman and the Indians who had vanished. This land is their land now which anyways is the primary understanding in these postcolonial settler colonies anyways. And the land too had seemingly accepted them. Khan (2012) further sums up the logic of Manifest Destiny which unfortunately (though not as an aberration) also underlines her reading of the novel when she says: "what I wish to suggest here is that, even though there are still native persons left in Guyana and the rest of the South American continent, the true indigenous are not human beings" (p.173). She rightly characterizes Dark Swirl as an example of Guyana's postcolonial literature. A postcoloniality of a settler-plantation colony where the 'Indian' has to remain dead and buried in all its monstrosity in the village creek. I also want to briefly discuss the interesting work which religion is doing in the novel. I was first struck by the names of the characters from the same family. Josh, a Christian name, his father is Ghulam, a Muslim name, and mother's name is Savitri, a Hindu name even though the family is nominally Hindu. This is not because Dabydeen haphazardly chose the names. Rather, this is to show that the family lives in isolation in the hinterlands, with probably no direct connections to India anymore and in an environment where religion and caste have only become more about ethnicity. Their culture (read Hinduism), however, is not 'lost'. When Ghulam envisions his ancestors in their new "hostile place," he sees them holding their Ramayana and Bhagvad Gita, which are caste Hindu scriptures. Fionna Darroch (2009) argues that the transition from India to the Caribbean must be discussed within the framework of religion (p.138). She focuses on the work of David Dabydeen, an important literary figure in Guyana and also a cousin of Cyril Dabydeen. Darroch's analysis of D. Dabydeen's work can also be useful to extend to C. Dabydeen's work where "religion as remembrance manifests itself" (p.139). Darroch argues that the response to the "sense of dispossession felt by East Indians and African labourers is a question of religion as well as ownership" (149). In case of Indo-Guyanese in Dark Swirl, that can be clearly seen. One night, when Ghulam walks into the forest in search of the reptile

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he felt himself to be most truly Hindu and yet something else. Most times he scarcely thought about his people's origins in that distant subcontinent. Here, in this isolated part of the Guyanese coastland, almost cut off from the rest of the population, they --Indians, Africans --lived in a strange harmony, eking out a meagre living. Whatever they had been, he sensed they were becoming something else... (p.39)

The search for the reptile almost becomes a meditation where Ghulam begins to feel spiritual. It is through wandering in the forest, in search of a mythical figure part of folklore of the Warrau people that he becomes reconciled with his (hitherto suppressed) Hindu identity. The becoming something else, or rather, a proper settler citizen of Guyana by the end of the novel also happens through reconciling with Hinduism. It could be that the search for the reptile reminds Ghulam of one of the most popular sacred reptiles in Hinduism: a snake or naga. Brinsley Samaroo (1996) writes that "It appears that the Caribbean Hindus found the subcontinent's ordering of people into caste and subcaste too cumbersome, particularly when one could elevate oneself from a lower to a higher caste in the New World, where everybody was starting afresh" (p.190, emphasis added). The enslaved people who were brought as commodities to the New World and even the indentured labourers who while not chained still saw accelerated death and violence on the ship and in their new world probably did not think of their lives as starting fresh. But, what is interesting is that through encountering indigeneity, it seems like Ghulam found Hinduism but in a secular, casteless, embracing of all, and sanitized of violence Hinduism which does not exist in reality. Also, Samaroo, a descendant of the indentured labourers himself could imagine that the New World was a terra nullius where caste hierarchies could be negotiated especially as racial hierarchies were born in which they and Black and Indigenous people were fixed by the white colonizers and masters. It appears that Dabydeen's Ghulam is also written following this same script. The Amazonian forest offers him that space for finding himself and getting his bearings, which he achieves through remembering his religious identity. It reconciles him to the land his ancestors came to, but the encounter with mythical reptile also allows him to claim Guyana as his home now. This (rather ongoing) (re)claiming reconciles his own indigeneity with his Hindu identity. The descendants of the Indian indentured labourers are now the rightful owners of the land and in this, they have been accepted (if not heartily welcomed), by some vestigial signs of indigeneity that cannot be granted any place in the

286 modern world. The (Hindu) Indo-Caribbean people have arrived to replace Black people and Indigenous peoples, but as civilized, hardworking, robust people who worked the land and started from nothing but a cutlass in their hands.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have discussed how the formerly indentured Indian labourers and their descendants now claim ownership of the land through various anti-Black and anti- Indigenous strategies. I also wanted to be careful and pay attention to how indentured labourers were brought to the colony as people who were pitted by white masters as ‘more civilized’ and ‘hard working’ that the formerly enslaved people after ‘Emancipation’ in nineteenth century. These labourers lived with intense violence and under conditions that often were not any better than those afforded to Black people under slavery. So, it is not the case that they were treated any more humanely than enslaved people. However, their reality of life and death did not mean that there was any automatic solidarity by these labourers with Black people. Also, Cyril Dabydeen and Peter Ruhomon are not the same people. They belong to different walks of life, different generations, contexts and temporalities. While Ruhomon openly claimed Indo-Guyanese people as the new colonizers, Dabydeen’s characters were working class Indo-Caribbean people of a village who did not have the confidence of Ruhomon, Yet, both their work is structured by anti-Indigeneity in ways that needed to be pointed out. Dabydeen’s text engages with certain vestigial form of indigeneity only to establish Ghulam’s family as the rightful inhabitants of Guyana. These strategies of claiming land, celebrating the arrival of people who won ‘in the end’ where Black people simply do not matter and Indigenous people have disappeared over time need ongoing examining.

Chapter VIII Conclusion: Writing in the Absence of Justice

The desire to teach for justice can only come from a place of hunger, un hambe de justicia, a desire to enunciate a mode of being that we live, analyze, and practice in our teaching and undertake in our research, in as many ways and in as many places as possible, from a passion we are simply not willing to concede, from a passion that moves beyond the temporary comfort of demystification to anchor teaching practices that are at once theoretically informed, agile, and accountable. Teaching for justice must come, as well, from understandings of history, which are not ineluctably circumscribed by the academy, since our sojourn here is not only partial but also temporary…Thinking justice, teaching for justice and living justice means that we continually challenge each other to enunciate our vision of justice. Unlike the new world order with elite ownership for members only, we all have ownership in this new vision; no single one of us stands in a proprietary relationship to it, for it is to be collectively imagined, collectively guarded, collectively worked out. -M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing p. 115-6

How does one write for justice in times of war? What is my vision of justice? What is yours? What if we, and our ancestors, are all people who too have never witnessed justice? How do we articulate the meaning of justice? And how do we who have always lived in our current geopolitical moment even recognize justice? How do we write as Black and brown people not only in a post 9-11 world, the moment when the world experienced seismic imperial shifts, but in a post 1492 world that scripted our lives on the terms of European conquistadors and masters? How do those of us whose bodies have been marked for either annihilation, slavery, labour, assimilation and simply as an excess or waste, disposable, thereby removing us from the realm of those who could speak or hope for justice, hope for that which we perhaps no longer remember, write for justice? How do we write towards justice? Why should a piece of long writing that began with thinking about complicity and the place of non-black people of colour in white settler states conclude (for now) with thinking and talking about justice? When I first began to think about complicity and my place here, I did not have the vocabulary to articulate the complexities. At that point I had not even started

287 288 on my research, but what drove me to continue thinking about this project were questions of justice. Even though I began with first thinking about justice for myself and other Muslims who looked like me, this question of what does it mean to ask for justice for myself as a Pakistani Muslim woman and a citizen of a white settler state where I was situated in a myriad of vertical and horizontal relations of power and violence compelled me to think beyond my own South Asian Muslimness. I have since then been thinking about the kinds of interdisciplinary, cross-border and trans-historical conversations that need to continue happening in order to begin to understand what justice or its vicinity can be. And this study is an example of that thinking. In their introduction to an issue of the journal Critical Ethnic Studies, editors Tuck and Yang (2016) also question what justice is. They warn us against using the term as one of those “stalwart terms that can quickly come to dominate the terms of the radical agenda” (p. 3). Theorizing justice as comprised of “limits and inherent wants,” they situate “justice as a colonial temporality— limited actions within a colonial moment against colonial structures” (p. 5-6). Justice is “always desired and deferred, and delimited by the timeframes of modern colonizing states as well as the self- historicizing, self-perpetuating futurities of their nations” (p. 6). If the only vision of justice we have is attached to colonial murderous nation- states, then that is a failure of our imagination, of our vision. Tuck and Yang caution us against adopting settler and plantation states’ colonial and racial governmentality tactics of justice in our work. They draw upon Saidiya Hartman’s notion of justice as “redress discourse” which can reclaim “the [Black] body as human flesh, not beast of burden” (Hartman, cited in Tuck & Yang, p. 12), and present several beautiful and powerful commiserations on the desires and limits of justice. However, here I am mentioning only one of those for now: They write about justice as a political interval (p.9). That signals justice as “desired, deferred, haunting, always past and promised but never delivered. It is a set of political possibilities for limited relief, for continual resistance, until” (p. 9, emphasis in original). This “until” is important for me, especially because even though I am unable to articulate what justice is or could be, I do know that it cannot happen within the context of white settler colonialism, anti-blackness, ongoing imperial and colonial invasions and occupations, Islamophobia, casteism, heteropatriarchy and other violence(s). This writing

289 about justice is in itself that search for that until which I have tried to envision by drawing upon Indigenous, Black, transnational and anti-caste theoretical frameworks. In this research study, I have brought together different time frames, spaces, lives, lands, and stories. I hope that has posed a challenge to the organization of colonial archives, temporalities, and all transnational empire sanctioned frameworks in place for making sense of our lives and for asking for justice. For example, in my challenge to Neel Darpan, I argued that the play’s anti-coloniality worked only through re-inscribing the violence of gendered casteism and anti-Muslimness. I asked what kinds of liberation or justice, could such a challenge to British Empire have produced and for whom? The question of what kind of justice should we fight for and whether that take on justice stands in antagonism with Indigenous feminist visions of decolonization, Black feminist scholars’ theorizing of abolition and Dalit and other anti-caste feminist understandings of centuries old casteist violence has been crucial in my work. Rather than providing answers, I have tried to be a good student still learning to pose critical questions. And posing meaningful questions has required refusing national and disciplinary and archival boundaries, all the while being attentive to historical specificity of my tracings. While in this moment, I am still struggling to even understand what justice might want, what it can look like for somebody like me coming from a postcolony and now living in diaspora in North America, I have opened my concluding chapter with powerful, inspiring and beautiful words from Jacqui Alexander’s (2005) ground-breaking book, Pedagogies of Crossing because it teaches us how to think, how to write, how to imagine a world that is different from the new world order we all inhabit. She encourages us to remain suspicious of the given world order, of academic knowledge and of our place in it. She argues that we must take on projects that are important to us even if they come with no guarantees of success measured in capitalist modes of reward. The work of reconciling desire to do differently with practice “places a great demand on the imagination, on practice, on reconfiguring the relationship between practice and theory and on building solidarity with different communities, while remaining aware of the suspicion that academic knowledge bears” (p. 112). There is an emphasis on relationality. To think about success not only as moving forward in academia, in the world, but to sometimes sit with the gaps, with the failures. To sit within them. That is a good ethical move towards justice even if it remains outside that which can be envisioned. Alexander argues that justice is not simply a goal, but also a

290 practice, “for it is through practice that we come to envision new modes of living and new modes of being that support these visions” (p. 93). This practice for justice is a quest for a world that can offer something more, something different to live by and for, asks that we read across archives, across spaces, across times, to think about our place in this moment, but also to refute the borders of the colonial and racial state and of academic disciplines. For me, hope has also been an important ethic and practice of justice. I know that I have written this dissertation from a place of hope. In a study where I write myself in relation to systems of domination and subordination, to write carelessly, to write from a place of despair, to write from a place of innocence –those would have been unethical moves on my part. I have written this dissertation from a place of privilege at a leading Canadian university when my parents and grandparents could not access higher education. And, if they tirelessly worked to allow us access to good education and a more comfortable life, how could I dare to be hopeless? This hope is not grounded in some neoliberal white narrative of all of us progressing towards a better future. Far from it. It is precisely because I know how limited that space of futurity is for Black, Indigenous, and people of colour that I hold onto hope. This is hope as an ethic and politics rooted in Indigenous, Black, Dalit, Muslim, queer and other marginalized peoples’ resistance and thriving. Especially in times of Idle No More and Black Lives Matter movements. In times of the first massive Aurat March (women’s march) for reproductive, economic, and environmental rights in the city of my birth, Karachi, Pakistan; in times of such strong continuing resistance by Kashmiris, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Baluchi; in times of intense violence but magnificent resistance against the settler and other colonial and postcolonial modern nation states and transnational empire. If all these colonized, racialized, and marginalized people are resisting, fighting, and thriving, I have no place to give up hope. So I had no choice but to keep the faith, and to keep hoping. I have also written with the hope that a conversation is possible. Hope that conversations among people kept as unconnected from each other in the colonial archives could bring about a better world order and a sharper challenge to all oppressions which are interconnected at every level even when their edges are not clear to us. Hope that this study expands the space for us to continue thinking about how our lives as colonized and racialized people in North America are interdependent. My hope is that my study, as part of emerging scholarship thinking about connections between people, empires, violence(s) and histories

291 allows us to pose a stronger challenge to the heteropatriarchal white settler state; that we can better grasp why white settler colonialism can never end until anti-Blackness is also thoroughly challenged; so that we think about how white settler colonialism was and is intimately connected to transnational invasions around the world, for example. Thinking through the questions I have raised, harbouring hope, understanding justice as some form of colonial temporality, and yet continuing to write towards it, these are all examples of the practice for justice for me. I have also hoped that you are raising questions which I cannot imagine forming at this point. As I see it, my study, therefore, poses the following challenges to normative understandings of anti-coloniality in a move towards justice: Chapter IV on the “Indian Queen” places Columbus’s travels to the New World within a much older history of eight centuries of Muslim/Moor presence on the Iberian Peninsula. It argues that the Orientalist logics underlining the creation of the ‘New World Indian’ has a long history interpellated through figures of the Moor and Africans whom Europeans knew for centuries before they encountered the Indigenous peoples of the ‘New World.’ This chapter argues for the need to get methodologically undisciplined; to look for the hitherto suppressed genealogies of the “Indian” of the new World to better plan a challenge to anti-Indigeneity and its attendant violence(s). Chapter V on Annu Matthew’s photographs argued that South Asians in North American diaspora must pay attention to how our questions and critiques of racial injustice are often steeped in white-settler colonial, anti-Black and casteist logics. This, and my Chapter VI on analyzing the 19th century Bengali anti-colonial play, Neel Darpan, in particular, raised questions about what happens when anti-colonial responses to empire and extension of solidarity to colonized people is steeped in otherwise violent relations of patriarchy, anti-Blackness, casteism and even anti-Indigeneity (as I showed in case of Annu Matthew’s work). My last data chapter on Indian Arrival Day studied how South Asians who arrived to the Caribbean as indentured labourers continue to make claims on Indigenous lands through claiming indigeneity for themselves and through continual erasures of Black people who were coerced into working the stolen land for hundreds of years. This has been the central thematic of my study: Examining how our (and this our is not homogenous as I have repeatedly shown in my study) claims for liberation, for justice can, and often are, embedded in other dangerous forms of historical and ongoing relations of violence is

292 important to attend to in our teaching, writing and other forms of political actions. I know that there are failings in this dissertation. Failure of imagination which must have translated into constricted terms for articulating complexities of systems of violence. Perhaps there are several failures in terms of the challenges I have posed to systems of violence. This study has perhaps reified so many other categories and possibilities of violence. There are so many failures and some that I see more clearly now but because every writing project has an end date at least in terms of logistics, in terms of deadlines, I have not been able to address those shortcomings here. Dissertations, like so many activities in academia, demand that students claim expertise in their subject area. But I believe that I am only now beginning to unravel some of the terms attached to the complexities I set out to study. I am only now learning to sit in gaps and silences without trying to fill in those silences with answers I do not have. But, even though there are all these failures, I hope that both I, and other BIPoC scholars tomorrow can engage with this project, build upon it, critique it, and shred it to pieces and make something new from some of its pieces. However, I hope I have still been able to raise critical intellectual and otherwise political questions about the limits of our anti-racist and anti-colonial critiques and my lack of discipline in terms of my archive, grammar, analysis and flow of writing encourages others to become really undisciplined too. Because how often has such discipline brought any urgently needed change? Discipline of the kind imposed upon us by the state, by colonial institutions such as academia, and by settler and other colonial archives will never let Black, Indigenous and people of colour live. They will never give us Black, Indigenous, Muslim and other variously situated caste, class and citizenship marginalized people of colour any dignity of life or even life. The question of what kind of work I am leaving behind is important to me because the archive of women of colour scholarship is an important place of hope to those who will come after us. Even though I began on this dissertation thinking about questions of complicity, I hope that this work adds to the Black, Indigenous and people of colour scholarship that moves us towards thinking about responsibility, and towards accountability. Perhaps I have dwelled too long on questions of complicity and on the failures of solidarity building. But this is one way in which I have been answerable (Patel, 2016) to my immediate context, to my questions and to the complexities, multiplicities and contingencies of my life.

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That does not mean that others after me will take up the same questions. I hope that they are able to move beyond diagnostics and present us with their imaginaries of different ways of being here. This is all part of the effort to enunciate our own visions of justice to keep having urgently needed conversations. I write this even as I come to the conclusion that there is no ethical place in colonialism. There is no ethical place in caste. But the hope is that our scholarship can challenge and disrupt these systems of violence. Until then, people like me have to sit uncomfortably with our complicity.

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