South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal

7 | 2013 The Ethics of Self-Making in Postcolonial India

Uday Chandra et Atreyee Majumder (dir.)

Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/3599 DOI : 10.4000/samaj.3599 ISSN : 1960-6060

Éditeur Association pour la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)

Référence électronique Uday Chandra et Atreyee Majumder (dir.), South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 7 | 2013, « The Ethics of Self-Making in Postcolonial India » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 14 octobre 2013, consulté le 28 mars 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/3599 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj. 3599

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SOMMAIRE

Introduction. Selves and Society in Postcolonial India Uday Chandra et Atreyee Majumder

Calling out to the Faraway: Accessing History through Public Gestures in Howrah, West Bengal Atreyee Majumder

Self-Making through Self-Writing: Non-Sovereign Agency in Women's Memoirs from the Naxalite Movement Lipika Kamra

Going Primitive: The Ethics of Indigenous Rights Activism in Contemporary Jharkhand Uday Chandra

The Practice of Custom in India’s Recognition of Forest Right’s Act: Case Studies from Kalahandi, Odisha Matthew B. Shutzer

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Introduction. Selves and Society in Postcolonial India

Uday Chandra and Atreyee Majumder

1 On 16 December 2012, a twenty-three year old physiotherapist was gangraped in Munirka, New Delhi by six men in a bus. Thirteen days later, she passed away in Singapore, having suffered serious brain and gastrointestinal injuries. This case snowballed into a nationwide wave of protests on not only the heinousness of this particular incident, but the widespread public patriarchy that afflicts the right of Indian women to freely access public domains. On the days following her death, angry mobs and teargassing police clashed at India Gate in New Delhi. Multiple social imaginaries around gender, public sphere, state-responsibility and civicness collided. Some defended the victim as their mother or sister, who could potentially have been in that same situation. Others disagreed fervently, and invoked the modern female citizen, whose rights to dignity, safety and security mandated defense without recasting her as the fragile beneficiary of patriarchal protection. The RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, analyzed the situation as telling of crucial Indian cultural divide—‘Such crimes hardly take place in ‘Bharat’, but they occur frequently in ‘India’ (Times of India 2013). The India-Bharat divide was refashioned in this moment, as the product of conflict between the post-liberalization onslaught of transnational capital flows and the resilience of ‘traditional’ communitarian social structures. Moreover, a vast, cacophonous, polarized democratic field revealed itself in the aftermath of the December 16 rape. A variegated collective, comprising feminists, college-student liberals, right-wing patriarchs, and cynics, inhabited this cacophonous stage and its virtual counterpart. Just as the stage for 19th century social reform came to pivot itself around the figure of the sati (Mani 1998), a number of political selves crystallized earlier this year around competing representations of the rape victim who was described by the media as Nirbhaya (‘fearless one’), Damini (‘lightning’), Amaanat (‘treasured possession’), and Delhi’s braveheart (Roy 2012).

2 This interrogation of Indian state and society by the protesting publics on India gate illuminates commonplace binaries of state/society, tradition/modern, and liberal/ illiberal. Media narratives presented the Indian state as if it were under siege from

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society at large, thereby accentuating a reified opposition between ‘state’ and ‘society’. The forces that claim to represent ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, or different traditions and modernities, fought pitched battles in newsrooms, public spaces, and cyberspace. Liberalism and its opposite, too, came to be redefined in terms of one’s response to the rapists and the victim, one’s preferred form of punishment, and one’s suggestions to overhaul the judicial system alongside ruling on the case at hand. As such, the events following the December 16 rape also throw light on the peculiar tropes by which postcolonial selves have typically been expressed in India, whether in the early postcolonial decades or the post-liberalization years. By ‘self’, as we explain later, we mean the subjective being of human existence, a kind of screen mediating continually between inner psychological impulses and the demands of the external environment. As the Delhi rape case shows, these selves emerge against the backdrop of particular events and processes, and even when we are tempted to rely on timeworn binaries to interpret what unfolds before us, the dominant rubrics through which Indian politics and society are understood fall short. The rubrics of ‘identity’, interest-group politics, and patronage networks, for example, often speak to a deeply instrumentalist perspective, which reduces politics in India to a basic calculus of costs versus benefits. According to this perspective, the modern state, as the locus of formal institutionalized power, is seen as fostering modern forms of ‘identity politics’ that propel individual selves to jockey for power and privilege in the public sphere (Brass 1965, 1985, Bailey 1969, Pocock 1973, Gallagher et al. 1973, Wilkinson 2004, Chandra 2004). By contrast, non-instrumental or inner versions of the self, apparently manifest in notions of ‘community’ and ‘culture’, are typically imagined as existing outside the formal domains of politics and economy (Nandy 1983, Chatterjee 1993, Chakrabarty 2008). These lifeworlds, whether elite or subaltern, are typically believed to be somehow severed from the rough and tumble of modern democratic politics (see, for example, Nandy 2007). This binary view of state and society, the external and the internal, the instrumental and the non-instrumental, the political and the sociocultural, pervades both academic and lay discourse on politics in postcolonial India. One observes the entrenchment in everyday discourse of these academic binaries, which are subsequently engaged, interrogated, maneuvered, and appropriated by actors in various fields.

Beyond binaries

3 In this special issue, we seek to acknowledge the analytic role of binaries in understanding politics and society in modern India, yet we seek to build on recent ethnographic work to unsettle these binaries and propose a new framework for studying postcolonial India. For us, the ‘political’ is an emergent phenomenon that undergirds everyday practices and institutions of popular democracy and associational life. It is emergent because it does not simply follow from what preceded it temporally; a radical contingency is thus built into this conception of the ‘political’. As in Chantal Mouffe’s (2000) conception of ‘agonistic democracy’, in which competing interests and allegiances contest each other rather than deliberate and seek consensual arrangements, the ‘political’ for us is a shifting arena marked by both conflict and cooperation, which makes available myriad routes for individuals to act and express themselves in society. The emergent, shifting nature of political life prevents us from fixing subjectivities to individuals and/or groups in, say, the recent anti-rape protests

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in metropolitan India. Not only is the terrain of politics shifting constantly, but so too are postcolonial selves and their ethical notions. This is partly on account of global geopolitics and neoliberal governance today, but also partly on account of social transformations in postcolonial India and beyond that destabilize the inherited categories used to study democratic politics. As states, markets, social movements, and even schools and families provide contexts in which the self-making processes of different subjects unfold at a given historical juncture, a range of ethical notions from gender equality to communitarian justice are accommodated within the emergent ‘political’ arena of agonistic democracy. As the old binaries fall by the wayside, we argue, the ‘political’ in postcolonial India increasingly embraces not only key loci of self-making, but also arrangements within which new ethical codes get crafted.

4 To contextualize our contribution to longstanding debates on Indian politics and society, we do not believe it is necessary to limit ourselves temporally to the early postcolonial decades or the contemporary post-liberalization period. Our task of transcending theoretical binaries and offering a new theoretical framework to study postcolonial politics and society in India does not depend on any particular account of the rise of Hindu nationalism or the unraveling of Nehruvian socialism. In this section, we seek to establish an intellectual-historical context for our theoretical intervention in this special issue. To do so, we begin by acknowledging older modes of conceptualizing what we call ‘self-making’. To our mind, self-making in postcolonial India has been studied primarily through the lens of intellectual frameworks that posit an inner/outer distinction in politics and society. The origins of this tendency may be traced arguably to M.K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1997 [1909]), an anti-colonial tract that consciously demarcates the inner domains of the colonized from the external world of the colonizers. Gandhi’s political aim of swaraj or self-rule was, of course, a project of ethical self-making above all based on non-violence (ahimsa), neighborliness (mitrata), service (seva) (Skaria 2002). Even as Gandhi (1997 [1909]) expressed his abhorrence for markers of modernity such as courts, railways, and machines, and urged both colonizer and colonized to a natural idyllic state in which individuals tamed their desires and needs, his solution to the violence of capitalist modernity lay not in class struggle but in the fashioning of disciplined selves in mutual harmony with each other in the emerging postcolony (Mantena 2012). Whereas the wealthy would assume trusteeship to care for their poorer brethren, the subaltern classes would, by the same token, abandon revelry and rioting to join in the service of the nation-in-the-making. 5 Although much contemporary political thinking parts ways with Gandhian thought and practice, it is striking how much Indian postcolonial theorists have drawn on the basic binaries that guided Gandhi’s vision of social change. Consider, for instance, the writings of Partha Chatterjee (1993) and Sudipta Kaviraj (2005), whose conceptions of postcolonial modernity rest on a shared critique of Eurocentric theories and concepts. Chatterjee (1990), in his critique of Charles Taylor’s celebration of ‘civil society’ (1990), explains that classical liberal oppositions between civil society and the state or between capital and community are immanent to Western modernity, and hence, they cannot simply be replicated in postcolonial contexts. In a similar vein, Sudipta Kaviraj (2001: 309) has argued that ‘civil society’ in the postcolonial context refers to the formation of a certain kind of liberal-democratic subject after decolonization, a process characterized necessarily by ‘imitative enthusiasm’ by nationalist elites in India and elsewhere. Claims of universality on behalf of ‘civil society’ are thus belied by

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historically contingent categories that arose in Enlightenment Europe and their postcolonial variants after the end of five centuries of imperial domination. 6 In elaborating this comparison between ‘our’ and ‘their’ modernity, another binary that dominates postcolonial theory in India is the Gramscian one between civil and political society (Chatterjee 2004, 2011, Srivastava & Bhattacharya 2012). For Partha Chatterjee, a large section of political consciousness in postcolonial India does not snugly fit into the descriptions of the parlor, market, guild, and church in European narratives of the emergence of modern civil society and the democratic public sphere. Chatterjee argues that the category of ‘civil society’ emerged through the nationalist elite’s engagement since the 19th century with colonial modernity, whereas ‘political society’ emerged through the engagement of the rest of postcolonial society to ‘democracy’ after decolonization. ‘Civil society’ in the postcolony is, for Chatterjee, thus quite different than what has been valorized by liberals and communitarians in the North Atlantic world. He writes (2011: 172): An important consideration in thinking about the relation between civil society and the state in the modern history of countries such as India is the fact that whereas the legal-bureaucratic apparatus of the state has been able, by the late colonial and certainly in the post-colonial period, to reach as the target of many of its activities virtually all of the population that inhabits its territory, the domain of civil social institutions as conceived above is still restricted to a fairly small section of ‘citizens’. This hiatus is extremely significant because it is the mark of non-Western modernity as an always incomplete project of ‘modernization’ and of the role of an enlightened elite engaged in a pedagogical mission in relation to the rest of society. 7 It is this ‘pedagogical mission’ that Chatterjee believes sets postcolonial civil society apart from its Euroamerican counterpart. Postcolonial civil society coexists with ‘political society’, a shadowy presence beyond modern bourgeois life and the rule of law, albeit with its own distinctive forms of associational life and engagements with the modern state. Political society, a peculiarity of postcolonial life, has four features according to Chatterjee (ibid. 177): 1. Its ‘demands on the state are founded on a violation of the law’; 2. It demands governmental welfare as a matter of ‘right’, not on the basis of a liberal register of civil rights; 3. It demands welfare as ‘collective rights’ of a ‘community’, even if this community ‘is only the product of a recent coming together through the illegal occupation of a particular piece of public land or collective illegal consumption of a public utility’; and 4. State agencies and NGOs deal with it as ‘populations’ deserving of welfare rather than as a section of the citizenry as defined by the constitution.

8 Political society may be said to exist in uncertain institutional forms because its members, despite their structural position of marginality, are attuned to the power, practices and logics of the postcolonial state in order to strategically manipulate the promises of the state and capital to their own advantage (Chatterjee 2004). Accordingly, rural protest movements, urban squatting practices, and street vendors’ campaigns against zoning laws are three examples of the protean institutional forms that characterize political society. These and other examples of contemporary popular politics in India enable Chatterjee to map out a zone of illegal and paralegal contestations by those who live at the economic and political margins of postcolonial society and grapple with state and non-state agencies as they seek to influence their ways. In these postcolonial contestations, ‘civil society’ appears incapable of extending its hegemony over the subaltern classes in the manner suggested by the Italian Marxist

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thinker Antonio Gramsci (1971). Instead, ‘political society’, as it is constituted by the postcolonial subaltern classes, generates its own ways of being and political grammars, which often clash with those of its well-meaning patrons in the state, NGOs, and even academia.

9 In these theoretical discussions, Chatterjee and Kaviraj are keen to characterize postcolonial selves in ways that are distinct from their Euroamerican counterparts. Postcolonial selves are thus constantly described as traversing the boundaries between capital and community, public and private spheres, and civil and political society. The four papers in this special issue also explore postcolonial self-making in terms of traversing these conceptual boundaries as defined in Western political thought, albeit in a granular and processual manner through ethnographic lenses. These papers show, for instance, the ambivalent pursuits of bourgeois activists and women revolutionaries, the yearnings for and rejection of modern pedagogies of civicness, and strategic conduct by marginal populations who speak back to the postcolonial state in its own language. Yet these papers also reveal the limits of postcolonial theoretical binaries between, say, civil and political society. There is much more to postcolonial self-making than battles for control over the democratic state and the public goods it commands, alignment with or opposition to civil society and corporatized capital, and contrasts with Euroamerican analogues. As recent anthropological studies of politics in India show, democratic statemaking processes and welfarist policies bring about different subject-positions that merit study on their own terms (Sharma 2008, Michelutti 2008, Pandian 2009, Shah 2010, Price & Ruud 2010, Madsen et al. 2011). Moreover, as other anthropological studies explain, contemporary politics in India cannot be reduced solely to the long-term effects of colonial domination to the extent that regimes such as nationalism, regionalism, neoliberalism, and socialism foster the fashioning of selves in postcolonial India (Bate 2009, Da Costa 2010, Gellner 2010, Nilsen 2010, Baviskar & Ray 2011, Kunnath 2012). In other words, the study of postcolonial self-making opens up new ways to thinking about Indian politics and society in a fine-grained, close-to-the- ground manner, beyond existing conceptual binaries that overstate the explanatory role of colonialism in explaining postcolonial politics. 10 Through their reliance on the ethnographic method rather than textual criticism or introspection, the papers in this issue cut across familiar binaries between the West and non-West, civil and political society, and even elite and subaltern. An analytical focus on the self-making process is valuable, we argue, insofar as it opens up diverse and counter-intuitive modalities of postcolonial being to be studied in their own terms. Such an analytical move offers at least three distinct advantages: firstly, it guards against a kind of ‘methodological holism’ that simply reads the content of postcolonial selves off macro-structural categories or sociocultural units of belonging; secondly, it avoids reproducing colonial tropes of non-Western Otherness as cultural symbols of postcolonial difference today, especially in the light of growing evidence of the ‘modernity of tradition’ in postcolonial contexts (Rudolph & Rudolph 1967, Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983, Mamdani 1996, Dirks 2001, Mantena 2010); thirdly, it reveals the difficulties inherent in presupposing a watertight separation between bourgeois and subaltern lifeworlds when, in fact, urban middle-class individuals and their subaltern counterparts may actually share much in common when it comes to perspectives, aspirations, strategies for negotiating different regimes of power, interests, and ideology. Attention to both creative forms of individuation as well as the sublimation of

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social anxieties can, therefore, help us navigate a complex terrain in which identities, ideologies, and structures shape and are, in turn, shaped by emergent selves. In this regard, this special issue intends to be theoretically suggestive and, hence, ineluctably preliminary in its formulations. Far from being the final word on this subject, it endeavors to initiate a new conversation on postcolonial politics and society in India and beyond.

Self-making and ethics: What, why, how?

11 In this special issue, the ‘self’ denotes the subjective being or lived human existence. It is, in other words, mediating continually between inner psychological impulses and the demands of the external environment. As such, the ‘self’ is neither wholly intrinsic nor extrinsic to individuals, that is, it straddles any binary opposition between the inner and outer worlds of individuals. The notion of the ‘self’ thus cannot simply be substituted by those of the ‘individual’ or the ‘subject’, because an individual or subject is typically constituted by multiple ‘selves’, each of which connects him or her to different sociocultural milieus or collectives. Moreover, by emphasizing ‘self-making’, the papers in this issue commit to a processual understanding of the ‘self’ as an object of study that is constantly in flux. Accordingly, the making and remaking of the ‘self’ is an ongoing process, and what we observe before us at present ought to be understood as no more than a fleeting glimpse of an object in motion. To the extent that the papers in this issue concern themselves with postcolonial self-making in India, they attend to particular sites and contexts that define as well as circumscribe their analytical frames. However, the overarching theoretical focus of this issue should interest scholars of other postcolonial and even metropolitan contexts insofar as the self and self-making are emerging objects of study worldwide today.

12 The social scientific literature on the ‘self’ and ‘self-making’ is vast enough to prohibit a comprehensive survey of psychological, sociological, anthropological, and philosophical understandings of these terms. Nonetheless, this section briefly sketches the principal intellectual influences on the papers in this issue. Firstly, cognitive and social psychological notions of the ‘self’ and ‘self-making’ serve as a baseline understanding of these terms. Psychologists identify the ‘self’ at the confluence of cognitive (‘internalist’) and interpersonal (‘externalist’) aspects of one’s being (Baumeister 1999, Baumeister & Bushman 2013). At the same time, the ‘self’ is neither the sum total of our neurological reactions to external stimuli nor merely a set of mindless responses to others in society (Kohut 1971, Hewitt & Shulman 2010). It may be further said, following developmental psychologists, that the ‘self’ and one’s awareness of it evolve over one’s lifetime and in particular sociocultural contexts in which one is embedded (Nowak et al. 2000, Spencer & Sedikides 2007). These insights from psychology are complemented by those from sociology, which offer ways to ground the trajectories of individual selves in what Pierre Bourdieu (1993) famously called social ‘fields’. Moreover, these socially grounded selves are engaged in meaning-making activities that bridge the gap between consciousness and action (Yanow & Schwartz- Shea 2006). Social structures certainly impinge on the self and self-making processes, but the latter cannot simply be read off the former. Indeed, as all four papers in this issue demonstrate, the making of individual selves contributes to the process of ‘structuration’ (Giddens 1984, Sewell 1992) or the emergence of structures. The making

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of selves is, in other words, not simply a matter of exercising individual agency, but a micro-process by which new structures replace older ones; by the same token, social change is not simply a structural matter, but one in which changes produced at the micro-level of individuals are visible. 13 Anthropological and philosophical accounts of the ‘self’ and ‘self-making’ also strongly influence the papers in this issue. In particular, we heed Aihwa Ong’s (1996: 737) suggestion to take ‘self-making’ seriously instead of treating subjectivities as if they are determined wholly by macro-social forces. Equally, we follow recent anthropological works in specifying the precise relationship between the ‘self’ and citizenship in postcolonial and transnational contexts (Ong 1999, Cruikshank 1999, Lazar 2008, Holston 2008). From the vantage point of this emerging body of anthropological scholarship on India (Sharma 2008, Cody 2009, Pandian 2009, Lukose 2009, Madhok 2013), ‘civil society’ and ‘political society’ are much too broad and vague to capture the empirical particularities and nuances of self-making in postcolonial India. It is always necessary to inquire into particular selves in particular spatio-temporal contexts and to locate these selves in a wider sociopolitical canvas. Such detailed empirical inquires do not, however, imply a loss of philosophical rigor. After all, the intimate micro-practices that constitute modern ‘technologies of the self’ are ultimately linked to macro- structural processes of state formation and social discipline (Michel Foucault 1988, 1997). Hence, anthropological studies of these micro-practices cannot simply be read via narrow empiricist lenses as simply individuation or monolithically as subject- formation, but as emblems of wider social transformations in India and beyond. Indeed, the social performance of these micro-practices of the ‘self’ and ‘self-making’ are key sites to study the workings of theoretical abstractions such as power, capital, culture, and gender (Goffman 1959, Butler 1990). The nature of the ‘self’ and the processes of its making are, therefore, critical to understand what Julia Kristeva (1982) has termed ‘abjection’, that is, how boundaries between individuals and groups in society come to acquire a salience on both affective and instrumental registers of political life. 14 These transdisciplinary influences on papers in this special issue sharpen their theoretical focus even as they dwell on subjects as different as middle-class revolutionary women and forest-dwelling Kondh adivasis. In either case, one encounters the limits of old binaries between the inner and outer domains of subcontinental politics, affective and instrumental action, and civil and political society. For middle-class women revolutionaries, one finds how the articulation of gendered political concerns within a class-based social movement leads to peculiar ambivalences and ambiguities for the women themselves. For the Kondhs in highland Orissa, one witnesses how processes of self-making today are surprisingly tied to recent forest rights legislation that offers ways of re-mapping adivasi territories and moulding subjectivities in neoliberal times. In this manner, we urge readers to rethink questions of personality, leadership, calculation, affect, and performativity in terms of postcolonial self-making processes. By focusing on how individuals fashion, perform, and maneuver ideas of community, civicness and citizenship, the papers in this issue interrogate the politics of self-making in postcolonial India. These processes of self- making are made explicit in, for example, the forging of political allegiances and affective stances. Yet these processes are also manifest implicitly in the crafting of political subjectivities through creative acts of individuation and the framing of difference, both of which generate scripts of the self. In this manner, a range of transdisciplinary concerns are brought to bear in this special issue to show how the

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analytic of ‘self-making’ can help us move beyond the conventional binaries of postcolonial theory. 15 The politics of self-making are, of course, inseparable from its ethics. Selves are always grounded in sociopolitical contexts with distinctive ethical terrains, in which debates and choices of right and wrong become meaningful. For instance, even the usage of ‘self’ or ‘selves’ is modern insofar as it connotes a ‘radical reflexivity’, by which one reflects on one’s actions as well as one’s subjective experiences (Taylor 1995: 57). More generally, ‘selfhood’ and ‘morality’ are, in the philosopher Charles Taylor’s (1989: 3) words, ‘inextricably intertwined’. Both make sense in tandem with each other against particular ‘frameworks’ that provide ‘backgrounds…for our moral judgments, intuitions, or reactions’ (Taylor 1989: 26). The collapse of these ‘frameworks’ and ‘backgrounds’ produces the kind of moral crisis that Alasdair MacIntyre (1981:1-22) alleges is peculiar to modern civilization. Whether or to what extent this allegation is true does not concern us here. Our focus is on what MacIntyre (1981: 146-225) understands to be the ethical underpinnings of human selves, whether his Aristotelian ‘virtue ethics’ or some other moral framework that provides a background to think and act politically in the world. 16 Whereas philosophers such as Taylor and MacIntyre tend to equate morality with ethics, the anthropologist Douglas Rogers (2011) has recently proposed a distinction that is useful for our purposes here. For Rogers (2011: 11-12), ‘morality’ refers to ‘lawlike codes, formal systems or conventions’, whereas ‘ethics’ denotes: A field of socially located and culturally informed practices that are undertaken with at least somewhat conscious orientation towards conceptions of what is good, proper, or virtuous. These practices are historically situated and play out in an often-competitive arena of partially shared, partially discordant sensibilities. They may be directed at oneself or toward others. They may succeed or fail. 17 Morality thus concerns frameworks and backgrounds in Taylor’s terms; by contrast, ethics is the domain of practices by which human selves become apparent against moral frameworks and backgrounds. As Taylor (1989: 28) puts it: [t]o know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary. 18 Self-making processes must be understood in terms of these moral spaces inhabited by individuals and the frameworks and backgrounds against which they think and act. At the same time, self-making processes reflect as well as shape ethical practices of human selves in a given space and time. The relationship is an intimate one, especially as far as self-making processes go, yet there is a vital distinction between ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ that is worth emphasizing here.

19 To speak of the politics and ethics of self-making in postcolonial India is to anchor these concepts in a sociohistorical context that is outside the conventional domain of modern social theory, namely, Europe. This is, of course, a matter of ‘provincializing Europe’ (Chakrabarty 2008): understanding the nature of self-making processes outside Europe, and deploying such understandings to revise existing theories of self and society. Two recent efforts of this kind are noteworthy here. The first is an effort by Anand Pandian and Daud Ali (2010) to map historical and contemporary responses to the fundamental question, ‘How ought one to live?’ The second is a volume of essays on the ubiquitous yet elusive figure of the ‘guru’ in South Asia, edited by Jacob Copeman and Aya Ikegama (2012). Both volumes span vast stretches of time and space in South

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Asia, and both are interested in explaining how ethical ideas and practices in this part of the world are similar to and different from elsewhere, especially Europe. On the surface, the papers in this special issue seem to share much in common with these two volumes. Yet the differences are, arguably, more instructive. Firstly, all of the essays in Pandian and Ali (2010) proceed from an unstated assumption of methodological holism. In other words, they assume that ‘ethics’ is, above all, a cultural affair, and hence, they proceed to characterize entire milieus with broad brushstrokes sans the focus on self- making in this issue. Secondly, Copeman and Ikegama (2012), albeit closer to our focus here, are more concerned with the idiosyncrasies of individual gurus and the diversity of guru-ship in South Asia than with the relationship between self-making processes and social change. From our perspective, questions of ‘identity’ and ‘orientation’ cannot be reduced to either cultural norms or individual idiosyncrasies. A focus on the politics and ethics of self-making in postcolonial India allows us to navigate the co- constitution of self and society without falling prey to methodological individualism or holism.

Studying selves ethnographically

20 In studying selves and self-making processes ethnographically, the papers in this special issue seek to emphasize the processual, interpretive, and fragmentary nature of ethnography as a research method as well as a mode of writing. By ‘processual’, we mean that the local actors, narratives, and ‘social dramas’ observed by ethnographers cannot simply be regarded as micro-sociological data, because they are always in conversation with higher social scales and embedded in larger sociohistorical processes (Turner 1957, Moore 1987). A ‘grain of sand’ may thus be said to offer a glimpse into macro-social processes that are otherwise difficult to study or explain (Wolf 1982, Pachirat 2006). By ‘interpretive’, we mean that ethnographic data are never merely given but need to be understood via intellectual frames and strategies that continually translate what is observed in terms of what is already known. For Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963), such acts of interpretation presented a challenge of uncovering deep structures of human thought in cultural symbols and patterns. For Clifford Geertz (1973), these interpretive acts were geared towards unpacking layer upon layer of meaning embedded in particular sociocultural contexts. Regardless of one’s preferred interpretive lens, there can be little dispute that ethnographic data are subject to researchers’ interpretations rather than existing as ‘objective’ descriptions of social reality. Lastly, by ‘fragmentary’, we mean that ethnographers cannot claim to describe the social reality of their fieldsites in their entirety, because their position as researchers necessarily leads them to produce partial, contingent knowledge (Clifford 1983, Gupta & Ferguson 1997). Yet, ethnographic interpretations of social fragments can yield valid social-scientific knowledge of a kind that cannot be generated by more positivistic methods of inquiry (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006, Schatz 2009). By setting forth our epistemic priors thus, we now intend to highlight the value of ethnography in studying selves and self-making across different scales and sites in postcolonial India.

21 There is already a rich body of ethnographic knowledge on postcolonial selves and self- making, to which we seek to contribute in this issue. Well-known works exist, for instance, on colonial legacies in the making of postcolonial selves (Mamdani 1996, Dirks

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2001, Mbembe 2001), on remaking postcolonial selves and societies under conditions of ‘millennial capitalism’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 2001, Li 2007), on violence and suffering as sites of reorganizing the everyday worlds in which postcolonial self-making processes unfold (Daniel 1996, Kleinman et al. 1997, Das 2007), and on the production of postcolonial selves around a politics of piety, moral virtue, bureaucratic indifference or the cultivation of ‘traditional’ arts (Herzfeld 1997, Mahmood 2005, Weidman 2006, Pandian 2009). These selves emerge in the play of insides and outsides, distances and proximities, modernities and traditions. As in the abovementioned works, the protagonists of the ethnographic narratives in this special issue straddle the conventional binaries of postcolonial theory in India. The maneuvers and stances of these protagonists enable them to negotiate disparate domains of politics and society creatively and contingently. The dominant analytics of ‘our’ and ‘their’ modernity or ‘political society’ versus ‘civil society’ are rather blunt in apprehending the nuanced and emergent nature of the ‘political’ as postcolonial Indian selves are made and remade. This is why we plead the case for ethnographic exploration here and place ourselves in a wider intellectual context of ethnographic scholarship on postcolonial politics. 22 In studying postcolonial Indian selves ethnographically, the papers in this issue claim kinship with older and more recent classics of South Asian anthropology, though they do not necessarily use our conceptual vocabulary of ‘self’ and ‘self-making’. Among older works, we draw inspiration, in particular, from the pioneering work of fieldworkers such as F.G. Bailey (1957) and David Pocock (1973), who carefully sifted through the local meanings of caste, tribe, and social power in Orissa and Gujarat respectively. Among recent works, we align ourselves with critical ethnographic studies of bureaucratic and police officials (Gupta 2012, Jauregui 2013), women and development (Karim 2011, Madhok 2013), misdirected activism and advocacy (Jalais 2010, Shah 2010), and youth politics (Lukose 2009, Jeffrey 2010). In these works, we encounter postcolonial selves grappling with the disparate pulls of state and capital, tradition and modernity, and self-interestedness and selflessness. Their responses vary from narrating oral histories from the margins of the nation to adopting the languages of governmentality, and from organized resistance to the forces of modernization to staking claim to postcolonial democracy as political entrepreneurs on the stage of electoral politics. Taken together, these older and more recent classics of South Asian anthropology suggest new ways to theorize postcolonial politics in this region beyond the conventional binaries that dominate social scientific thinking on India. We, too, venture on this path beyond the outmoded oppositions between individuals and collectives, state and community, and politics and ethics, in order to develop a new conceptual vocabulary as well as lenses for ethnographers studying postcolonial South Asia. 23 The four papers in this special issue examine the politics and ethics of self-making making in a range of unconventional settings in postcolonial India. Atreyee Majumder describes her encounters with prominent figures on a rural-urban corridor of Howrah, West Bengal who appropriate and rework the past to craft their public selves. These figures present themselves as individuals in pursuit of ‘civic humanism’, a modern ideal that seeks to transcend the mundane, even profane, everyday worlds of democratic politics. Lipika Kamra introduces us to the writings of Naxalite women from West Bengal and Kerala to discuss how the party-led quest for revolutionary social change shapes and is, in turn, shaped by the emergent political subjectivities of female

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comrades. At the same time, these Naxalite women seek to articulate notions of womanhood and autonomy, sometimes in line with party directives and sometimes in opposition to them. Uday Chandra bridges the apparently separate lifeworlds of middle-class and subaltern selves by showing how activists championing ‘indigenous’ peoples’ rights struggle to articulate radical bourgeois selves in the face of rejection by those they claim to represent. The myriad aspirations of these well-intentioned activists coalesce around local meanings of ‘indigeneity’ in contemporary Jharkhand even as the intended beneficiaries of their work seek out new modes of self-expression. Matthew Shutzer turns to the sociocultural worlds of Kondh adivasis in rural western Orissa, and counter-intuitively, finds that adivasi ‘identity’ is defined there in dialogue with new legal regimes inaugurated by the Forest Rights Act (2005). Exercises in mapping forests turns out to be key sites of self-making in these margins of modern India. In all of the papers, selves and self-making are delineated in complex geographies involving the welfare state, revolutionary politics, social ecology, and democratic ideas and institutions. In this manner, these papers speak to the theoretical framework developed in this outline by transcending the usual binaries that dominate the study of South Asian politics and society and outlining more textured understandings of the everyday lives of individuals and collectives in postcolonial India. If readers find in these efforts the kernel of a new approach to studying postcolonial politics in India and beyond, we shall deem our aims fulfilled.

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AUTHORS

UDAY CHANDRA

Research fellow, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen

ATREYEE MAJUMDER

PhD candidate in political and historical anthropology at Yale University

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Calling out to the Faraway: Accessing History through Public Gestures in Howrah, West Bengal

Atreyee Majumder

Introduction

1 Public figures emerge in Indian history of colonialism and nationalism, variously through Chris Bayly’s ‘townsmen’ (1983)—men of influence in north Indian towns, who come to mediate the spread of nationalist ideas, or Sumit Sarkar’s portraits of young men expressing the swadeshi vision in marketplaces and through newspapers. 1 Big men creating and harnessing networks of patronage and influence over caste groups, political parties and other associations (see Bailey 1956, Ruud 2003, Hansen 2001, Ruud & Price 2010, Mines 1994), figures who influence spheres of ethical and idealistic expression (Da Costa 2009, Bate 2009, Pandian & Daud Ali 2010) are part of the repertoire of public figures that emerge in the postcolonial era. In this article, I show public figures in the performance and fulfillment of public roles beyond those of support-garnering, patronage, or political mobilization. A range of locally influential figures are spoken of, here, who animate public life in domains like literary festivals, commemoration of births and deaths of historically important persons and public gatherings on the occasion of religious events. The purpose of this article is to show, using ethnographic data, the accessing of history and shaping of historical sensibilities, through public gestures by public figures in the district of Howrah. Referents of history —nationalism, colonialism—are appropriated from wider canvases of history and linked, through such public gestures and rhetoric, to being in an immediate, proximate ‘place’, Howrah.

2 Between 2011 and 2012, I spent eighteen months in Howrah, conducting ethnographic research on the networks of social and political alliance that spread across the district. My subjects were youth politics enthusiasts, intellectuals, poets, unionists, sports organizers, historians, school-teachers and a range of lettered citizens who exercised

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social and political influence in their neighborhood, town, village, and some across the district. Public life flourished through footballs clubs, literary society, charity institutions, fairs, carnivals and religious festivals. Such public events focalized around influential persons of the area—public figures. These figures could be local intellectuals, teachers, philanthropists or politicians with clear alignments in the system of parties. These figures targeted their spoken and written gestures towards larger entities that extended beyond the spatial limits of Howrah. They linked local events and histories to entities far removed in time and space. I increasingly came to see public gestures as being intricately linked to the material experience of space— being in the rural-urban continuum, and having hosted manufacturing entities for over a century. This article investigates the nature of such gestures. 3 Historical sensibility in Howrah emerges in response to a century-long exposure to many cycles of manufacture, trade and commerce that struck roots on this industrial riverfront for more than a century. In unpacking this weave of public performance, gesture and rhetoric, I focus on three such figures and their surroundings—Narayan Ghosal, a folk historian and veteran communist, Majid Molla, a mathematician-turned- social-activist, and Hemendro Bandyopadhyay, a one-time journalist and school teacher, who has now taken up historical research and history-writing. These three figures are well-known in their town/village, and are immersed in the networks of intellectual and aesthetic production in the district. They also profess leanings towards political ideologies—one being a communist whose leanings have changed in recent years, one remains a communist enthusiast and one a nationalist who has taken to writing of local histories after retiring as a school teacher.

Rural-Urban Corridor

4 Howrah, a district as well as a city—its headquarters, some of whose area comes within the Greater Calcutta region, is organized as a series of towns, villages, and inchoate spaces on the rural-urban continuum connected to the metropolis of Kolkata by two bridges, surface transport (buses and taxis) and ferries on the river. The district grew as part of the hinterland of Calcutta, which provided significant riverside economies for the growth of industries like jute, ship-repair and engineering.2 Engineering companies like Burn and Jessop struck roots here as part of the colonial economic program on the lower Hooghly belt, which had the advantageous condition of being close to the port. The Howrah-Panskura trainline, the Amta line (known as the Martin light railway) and roads like the National Highway 6, the Kona Expressway grew in this region, across the 20th century, as part of this landscape’s propensity for connection with the wider world through the logic of manufacture. An urban region—Howrah is not clearly mappable in terms of ‘town’ or ‘country’. The national highway, expressways and feeder roads, which connect the region to broader networks of manufacture and market, breathe into connected spatial pockets a sense of speed and associated connections with wider, outer worlds. Such proximity to trade, manufacture, fast-paced conveyance, makes an ‘urban horizon’3 available to many seemingly non-urban, even agrarian spaces here. Colonial urban and industrial initiatives are remembered and reconstructed in the public domain—in speech, gesture and writing. These historical motifs are marked as dispensers of speed, energy and

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rhythm of public activity. Public activity progresses as a mirror of history, as charged movement in time.

5 A city of 50 wards, previously designed as an amalgam of five boroughs, Howrah city connected with Calcutta through the pontoon bridge (built in 1874), which was to become the Howrah bridge in the 1940s, and with the Second Hooghly bridge of the 1990s.4 A range of public authorities have influence over the design of its urban character. While the city is governed by the Howrah Municipal Corporation, the areas around the bridges and their connecting roads into the district are under the jurisdiction of the Hooghly River Bridge Commission. The Howrah Improvement Trust, established in 1956, plays the role of an implementing agency for many of the urban infrastructure projects—building of roads, expressways, sewer canals—envisaged by the KMDA (Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority) and other bodies. Some lands are under the Port Authority, as some in Bally, whereas other pockets are under the Railways, I was told as I repeatedly asked about the division of responsibilities of urban planning bodies at the Howrah Municipal Corporation.5 The Draft Development Plan of Howrah (2007) describes the district’s spread thus: There are 14 community Development Blocks/Panchayat Samities/157 Gram Panchayets and 763 Mauzas in the District consisting of two sub-divisions i.e. Howrah Sadar and Uluberia having 5 blocks under Sadar sub-division and 9 blocks under Uluberia Sub-division. 6 The city is eulogized as well as lamented for its large, unwieldy, organic, unplanned body. Its governance proceeds according to the larger planning agenda of the KMDA,6 which oversees urbanization of Urban Local Bodies (ULB) in the greater Calcutta region. As an ULB in the greater Calcutta region, Howrah receives funds and delivers the benefits of programs under the Kolkata Urban Services for the Poor Program, as well as central urbanization schemes like Swarna Gram Swarozgar Yojna, Rajiv Awas Yojna and so on.

7 Howrah—city, hinterland and district—is a geography replete with wagon- manufacturing units, dockyards, jute mills, narrow alleys, decrepit libraries. In its economic and political battles as town, village, district, rural-urban corridor, suburb, the traces of energy and pace of a time of busy commerce and attendant urbanity of the early 20th century are showcased through public performance at public events. The dockyards are dormant as the silted riverbed does not permit ships to come upstream to these repair yards.7 Jute mills, having endured many turns of the postcolonial industrial vision from private owners and the state, and in response to the global obsolescence of jute as a product, are but tired vehicles of manufacture today. The National Highway 6 cuts through the district’s east-west stretch, dispensing some of its speed and urgency to the adjoining landscapes—much of which are completely agrarian in land use. Technological material like cell-phones and outdated desktop computers emerge as significant markers of urban performance on this spatial complex. Cell- phone models from the early 1990s, that do not merit advertisement in cities anymore, are bought, sold and coveted. An economy of obsolete technology thrives on these landscapes, embraced by its residents as key ingredients of their urbanity. In this embrace, urban outcry about the alienating damages of the technological life and the frenzied pace and rhythm of urbanity are narrated in public events. The cell-phone and the computer are objects of wonder and disdain. Young generations are cautioned about their naïve excitement about these objects. Mobility is made possible between towns, villages, Howrah city and across the river to Kolkata by a network of buses,

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trains plying the main towns, aided by trekkers—jeep-like vehicles—that connect villages and less-connected areas to the major towns.

Public Sphere

8 In this geography, public life thrives in literary associations, sports clubs, unions, memorial and commemorative services, fairs and such events. A public figure addresses a gathering at such events, in these public domains, and brings home, through the spoken word and gestures, connections with entities far removed in time and space.

9 Much has been written around the bourgeois ‘public sphere’8 (Habermas 1989, Calhoun 1992, Warner 2002, Fraser 1992, Benhabib 1992) and its variants in the democratic and postcolonial contexts. In the widely read text Provincializing Europe (2000), Chakrabarty shows an ambivalent alignment with relic-forms of subaltern pasts as urban public cultures emerged and were shaped in the teahouses, magazines and chatting practices of 19th century Calcutta. Chakrabarty provides many examples from 19 th century Bengali literary and social production—especially, as demonstrated in the practice of spontaneous talk in public places, adda. Adda was a practice in which many anxieties of a newly formed urban self were reflected. These were lives of ambivalence to as well as alignment with the colonial pedagogy of enlightenment and associated values. An ambiguous feeling around new social alignments as well as the condition of being urban influenced tropes of talk and writing, Chakrabarty shows. There are many descriptions of social and spatial formations of civil society in the 19th and early 20th century Bengal (Raychaudhuri 1999, Chattopadhyay 2005). Subho Basu (2004) especially shows the emergence of a peculiar mill-town gentry who maintain ambiguous relations with the colonial officials, while participating in the project of industrial discipline. 10 Sudipta Kaviraj draws out a home-world motif through which, he argues, Calcutta publics had interpreted the public-private colonial pedagogy. It’s the lower-strata, beggar or less-respectable citizen, who marks membership over places of pablik9 nature. This determines an ambivalent and profane public habitation. It is a similar membership of public domains, and the resistance of the pedagogy of Western public- private divides, to which Chakrabarty (1992), in his older essay on urban space in Calcutta, draws our attention in the vignette of a boy urinating on the street as a deliberate mockery of colonial pedagogy of urban civility and economy. All public habitation is not towards the cultivation of an urban public. The urinating boy and the angry mob are not akin to the adda. Public spaces, in Kaviraj’s description, carry potential for the weaving of a baroque, unstable, contingent, possibly combative repertoire of spatial habitation as ‘public’ being. Unruly crowds, mobs, big men, protest groups, moving processions—these entities are painted as carving a different sphere of democratic politics, separate from ‘civil society’—to constitute what Partha Chatterjee (2004) would call ‘political society’. I wish to show the affective folds that the worlds of public figures assume as these figures use public performance as a tool for establishing historical connection, to expand Howrah and their own location in scale. 11 The nation’s entrenchment in deep time is variously spoken about. Manu Goswami revisits the question of production of temporality. Deep entrenchment of the ‘nation’ form spread with imperial global economy and constituted the ‘hierarchically organized global space-time’ (Goswami 2002: 788). It is the 20th century fragmentation of the nation form that gave way to ‘multi-form global space-time’ (Goswami 2002: 789).

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Whereas Goswami shows national time being woven in a grid of trade, commerce and political ties that produce a global spatiotemporal frame, I show such global arrangements intimately experienced and narrated by a grade of locally influential figures. 12 These figures craft and target their public rhetoric and stances at immediate and imaginary audiences, even as they grapple with economic decline and historical anonymity of their surroundings. They lament their current anonymity on the historical stage, where a certain concatenation of actors and events—emperors, colonial officials, nationalist leaders, entities that enact the more urgent stories of power and rule—find luminosity at center stage. They target their public performances at a wider audience in space and time, linking immediate narratives to those of actors who enjoy greater historical luminosity. Such linking aids a scalar expansion, that makes the sensation of being in and narrating Howrah seem a larger enterprise, linked to entities of wider temporal and spatial scale. They invest emotion and moral force in a landscape that is demarcated by the administrative markings of a district within the state of West Bengal within the Indian nation-state—a marking that goes back not further than the 1930s.10

Typical Public event

13 A good part of my time in Howrah was spent at public gatherings dedicated to the celebration of the deaths and births of the Bengali nationalist canon. In these gatherings, the local order of wise men as well as more distant ones like Tagore and Subhas Bose were remembered in their connections to Howrah. These events would include celebrations of the occasion of the death anniversary of Tagore, the conclusion of the Durga Puja festivities with Vijaya Dashami, birth anniversaries of Swami Vivekananda, Subhash Bose and so forth. The year 2011—the 150th year of Tagore’s birth—was observed by a range of events. Such celebration usually included the welcoming of or felicitation of the newly elected local Trinamool11 leader.

14 The prominent figures at such events were loosely in each other’s horizon across and beyond the Howrah district. They attended each other’s felicitation ceremonies and literary festivals. The first half of my stay in Howrah, progressed in the course of a year of regime change12 and the Trinamool’s accession to power in the state of West Bengal. Many local power alignments had recently witnessed or were witnessing a shift of coordinates of political power. Some associations and clubs were flush with funds. Many events, structured around cultural and religious festivity, affirmed friendship with the newly elected MLA of the Trinamool Congress. The regime change also set in motion a range of narratives around changing relationships with ideology, ethics and membership in history and polity through the rubric of socialism. 15 The best-attended literary events I went to were at the hundred-year-old Uluberia Institute in Uluberia town. The Dashami gathering was used to declare the publication of Puja13 issues of two magazines—Ebong Ma Mati Manush,14 published from neighboring block Bagnan, and Shomoy Shakkhor 15—one from the home turf. A local literary elite appeared as the evening progressed, in starched white dhotis, starchy tangail16 saris, thick glasses and embroidered jeans. Speeches followed—some effusive, some acerbic. The dingy room in which old men play cards by daylight, was now lined with plastic chairs with the library bookshelves having been pushed against the back wall.

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Aluminium-foiled roses and samosa-sandesh 17 packs were given out to the guests. An expert of folk culture took the podium and invited the attention of the audience to the elitism of academic enterprise, emphasizing the role of magazines such as these, in encouraging those who did not operate inside exclusionary academic institutions, to take on the enterprise of intellection. 16 On another occasion of a literary event of release of an issue of a magazine called Shotta,18 also at the Uluberia Institute, Bhaskar, a veteran of literary circles of Uluberia, one of the editors of the magazine, and a communist from the days of yore, rendered a rather acerbic speech. He spoke about the needlessness of all this fanfare, given how simple and humble the effort of the magazine was. He also pointed out several mistakes in the text, which showed editorial neglect and dramatically accepted for himself all blame for the errors. Tapan, a journalist working with a Calcutta-based newspaper, and compere at the event, rued to me about his stories being routinely, brutally edited by ruthless Calcutta editors. He was also annoyed at the refusal of the newspaper to give him bylines, whereas the more-flamboyant motorcycle-riding photographer of the area, was always celebrated. 17 The local MLA was often present at these occasions. He usually made a short speech of congratulation to the organizers and participants. Some would link the energy of the event to the higher energy of the new government and its tireless elder sister—Didi19 (Mamata Banerjee, the Chief Minister)—who needed the cooperation and allegiance of the members of such noble congregations. The speeches and stances rehearsed at these events embraced and attacked many distant actors who were brought into the fold of the lives of those present at the event, despite their real distance, and assumable unawareness of these invocations by Howrah publics. Literary tropes served as vehicles to display one’s larger dispositions—humanism, socialism, the sensibilities of an aesthete, even as these occasions provided platforms to meet and greet the MLA and other officials of local state. Nationalist heroes, dead poets, London-America (popular parlance for the West, a node of superior existence and civilization), colonial officials, Kolkata intellectuals—were the more regular interlocutors invoked at these events. Over time, the ethical and aesthetic folds of public life made itself legible to me insofar as I saw Howrah suturing itself to a larger canvas of space and time at each of these events. Allies were sought from among nationalist heroes, humanist poets and Western handles of development and progress, to hold Howrah above the economic and political abyss in which it was otherwise structurally located. A pristine register of ‘socialism’, a high benchmark of humanism, and a pure, authentic human consciousness were the prerogatives of the members of these gatherings. When I asked them to specifically enumerate the ‘ills of this time’, they rarely spoke about the more widely recognized ills of the contemporary global time i.e., globalization, finance capital crises, terrorism, Maoism in the Indian red belt, farmers’ suicides or agrarian crises. They cited an inchoate crisis, very often couched in socialist rhetoric—poor people being exploited, youth going astray, corruption, general and widespread moral decay.

Claiming Historical Place

18 The Ghosals are an eminent family of the Maju village, in the Jogotbollobhpur block in north Howrah. Their father was an educationist and writer. Theirs is a well-regarded Brahmin family in Maju. The elder Ghosal, Narayan Ghosal, has written a book on the

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history of Maju. He writes in many magazines and journals, mostly on folk culture and history of Howrah. These things are getting wiped out, and need to recorded and circulated, he tells me. He gives me copies of his own writing, as well as copies of his newspaper Kaushikir Totorekha.20 His family has been based in Maju for many generations, and he has resisted the lures of the city.

19 His brother, Debu, joins in the discussion. He says he was a jatra21 personality as also an active member of cricket in Maju. He had coached many boys and had been a player himself. Because, the middle-classes had less children now and were more ambitious for their children, people were less keen to send their kids to participate in contact sports. Football had given way to cricket. The sports field was the platform for youth to become organized. This energy bred fraternity, community spirit and nationalism. It later translated into social and political service. People are currently more invested in individualistic pursuits than they were in days of yore. Today’s youth have woven insular worlds with cell-phones and television and Hindi movies—the corrupting elements of current version of modernity, and do not seem interested in taking part in civic life of the village. Many of these practices begin in the cities, and are replicated in the village. Women turn out to be the best anchors of social traditions. ‘Rokkhonsheel holo matrijati’—the mother race is the most conservative, they hold onto whatever is valuable. Time will move forward and things will change on their course, but one must preserve things of the past as they do in museums. If they don't, then people will lose their roots, their sense of self. The ethos of sacrifice has gone. Persons who have done well economically and gained affluence and recognition have left Maju for the city. But Maju itself is also feeling the vibrations of the city—many forms of transport like auto, trekker, two-wheelers have made spaces more connected, hence, the phenomena of the city can easily find its way into the village. Many of the lower castes—Ontyojo—are able to feed themselves, their children earn from a range of sources. Many migrate to Maharashtra and Gujarat to work in jewelry-making and zari.22 Middle-classes are suffering because the only way for them to earn is through application of school and college education and such jobs are often too competitive, so many middle-class youth are unemployed. Kids often go to cricket camps, but will not spontaneously play with other boys of the village on the field. 20 The Ghosals’ account of social change in Maju invokes an inside-outside divide. They do not criticize youth who migrate to western India on the trail of the zari (embellishment of textile, especially saris—an artisanal trade widely practiced in Howrah) economy. They congratulate the lower castes for having pulled up, and lament the impasse in which the village middle-classes find themselves. Economic upliftment must not be at the cost of discarding one’s role in society and community, they argue. The voluntaristic traits are disappearing. The public domain of an economically fragile village is used to garner moral strength. The educated class that has remained in the village provides such moral vocabulary of self-sacrifice. Maju has been a nerve-center of cultural life as also nationalist activity, assert the Ghosals. In a space that is beginning to feel the impact of inroads of agents of economic change, the Ghosals published the nitty-gritties of forgotten folk culture in their magazine Kaushikir Totorekha named after a local river, which was proudly pointed out to me from the main walkway—a dried rivulet lined with waste. The speaking subjects of Maju were using the river’s metaphorical force to reinforce walls of pride and value around them.

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21 It is to this Kaushiki waterway that Ghosal links the history of Maju modernity, in an essay:23 Kaushiki nodi o kana damodorer teereei jonopoder kono aek sthhane jogodbollobhimatar mondir chhilo. Oi mondirer namanushaare oi oncholer naam hoy jogodbollobhpur. Ditiyiototoh sholo shotoker sheshpode moghole shomrat akbarer (1556-1606 AD) shenapoti maansingh, rajoshyo adayer shutre barojone omatyo shoho gourigaang (odhunolupto) probahopothhe borgachhia onchole haantal onnontobati- bohariyar kono ak sthhane chhouni phaelen. Shenapoti Maansingher namanushaare shrishti hoy Maansinghopur, shontoshsingher naame shonstoshpur ebong Maansingher putro Jogotsingher naame praacheen mamdanipurer naam rakha hoy jogotbollobhpur. Sholo shotoke Jogotbollobhpurer shomridhhir onnotomo kaaron ei jonopode, Kaushikir teere, gore uthhechhillo ‘maajher gaa bondore’. 22 Translated: … on the banks of the Kaushiki river or the Kana Damodar, there was a temple of the Jogotbollobhi goddess. It was after this temple and its deity that the area got its name Jogotbollobhpur. The general of Mughal Emperor Akbar (1556-1606 AD), Mansingh went down the Gourigaang (now non-existent) riverway in the sixteenth century, with a few associates, collecting revenue, and camped in the Borgachhia area. After Mansingh, the village was named Mansingpur, after Santosh Singh was named village Santoshpur and the ancient village Mamdanipur was named Jogotbollobhpur after the son of Mansingh, Jagatsingh. In the sixteenth century, the village acquired the epithet of ‘mid-village port’ on account of this riverway along the Kaushiki. 23 The centrality of Maju is framed in the geography of commerce and state power of the Mughal empire and its emperor Akbar, in this short essay that Narayan Ghosal has written about the history of Jogotbollobhpur, the administrative block area in which his home village Maju is ensconced. He writes to reorient the reader towards Maju, pointing out its links with larger motifs of history. He casts a lens in his historical writing that is quite the opposite of the history that champions the small voice and recovers it as separate cosmology from those of larger enclaves of power—imperial or national. Rather Ghosal affirms the closeness and implicit alliance with forces that are the main protagonists of a wider canvas of history—an emperor and his revenue collector. Evoking the Mughal general’s walk along the riverway brings a river of meager historical significance to historical focus, and liberates a place from the shroud of anonymity and forgotten-ness into the luminous frame of historical recognition. Instead of recovering a ‘small place’ from the discursive violence of colonial records, Ghosal makes Jogotbollobhpur pose in the mainframe of history, proximate to Akbar and his official. Ghosal is attuned to the fact that luminosity granted by historical treatment is available only to a few—usually Mughal revenue collectors and the like. The historical proximity to the emperor’s official is not only an ingredient in constructing a historical narrative, but reframes Ghosal’s and Maju’s current political place. The ‘place’ of a dried rivulet rises to historical luminosity24 claiming the attention of current actors of history on the canvases of nation, region and globe.

24 ***

25 Hemendro Bandyopadhyay, now in his seventies, has written many books recording things, people, places, texts that can be linked to the landscape administratively chalked as Howrah in the current map of West Bengal. He is a resident of Salkia in north Howrah. He was a schoolteacher and a journalist. Bandyopadhyay begins his historical accounts of Salkia and of Howrah—Salikhar Itibritto25 (1982) and Paachsho

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Bochhorer Howrah26 (1992)—with a tone of lament. This was a place that housed much political intrigue and administrative action, and now had unfairly been shoved into a shadowy backstage for the main stage of modernity—the metropolis of Kolkata. Bandyopadhyay, in his extensive volume on Howrah (1992), accords some officials and missionaries more respect than others for their efforts in engaging with civic life and bringing about improvements (especially, in the domain of education)—going beyond simply furthering the foremost colonial agenda of spread of the imperial rule and consolidation of markets for imperial commerce. The developmental agenda of colonialism spells for Bandyopadhyay a relationship of care and concern that the colonist at times extended towards his subjects, deviating from the broad agenda of control, accumulation and exploitation. He takes great pains to provide a modernist account of Howrah showing the co-existence of different linguistic, ethnic and religious communities and their mutual respect for each other. He assumes a voice of a recorder, historian, a cultural sociologist, as also a neighbor. In his neighborly voice, he garners empathy and fraternity in a collective lament about ‘our Howrah’. He takes great care to lend some completion to this socio-geography, listing exhaustively the events through which urban modernity came to the area—the laying of railway lines, the building of the Howrah Bridge, the establishment of missionary schools, the spread of cultural forms otherwise associated with life in the colonial capital Kolkata (theater, art appreciation, traditions of spoken poetry, classical music, sports and so on). Some well- known actors and film personalities originated in Howrah, he records, as did professionals and academics who found recognitions in major urban centers of India and the world beyond. Life in Howrah in the 19th century and early 20th century was abuzz with cultural and political activity, Hemendro Bandyopadhyay shows his readership. It was a worthy twin of Kolkata in its claim to colonial attention. The colonial developmentalist project is approached with camaraderie and empathy by Bandyopadhyay—as they who thought about us too, not simply their own power and profits. The spread of education, railways and urban infrastructure is remembered as the good things done by the colonial ruler. Bandyopadhyay assumes a voice of a peer in his remarks towards the colonizer—evaluating him, chiding when appropriate, applauding him at apt moments. Bandyopadhyay has published a new version of the Salikha (traditional word for ‘Salkia’) history—titled Salikhar Shekal o Ekal (Now and Then of Salikha), which was published in December 2011. Entities ranging from the dead river Saraswati to cinema actors, businessmen, doctors of the neighborhood, who had gained recognition in the wider world, are listed and celebrated in the book. 26 The current volume (2011) of the journal published by the Salikha Itishash Pronoyone Shomiti27—Ancholik is dedicated to Tagore and scientist Prafulla Chandra Roy. I ask about the focus of their work—is it solely to document lives of significant characters who have been associated with Salkia? No, he says, not only them, but anyone else whose story can have some historical importance—like a businessman who mastered umbrella-making techniques from Japan, and started a roaring business here. We continue talking about the nature of this historical project—of doing ‘zonal’ or ‘regional’ history, especially on the theme of striking a relationship between macro and micro. He says, the ‘micro’ has very little place in the ‘macro’. Hence, in encouraging the project of regional history, we can emphasize these little characters and the great things they did without any historical recognition. He too, speaks in the language of seeking historical luminosity for the actors and events of Salkia, his hometown. Who is your target audience? I ask. Shadharone Pathhoke—the ordinary reader, he says, and

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those who want to do historical research in the future, like MA students. I ask about the overlap of industrial and residential space in Howrah. He says it wasn't so before, Ghusuri was a designated industrial area. Now many jute mills have shut. Those laborers have become petty traders. Bengalis were never good at manual labor, now they have to do it because they are desperate. Why are they not good at it? I ask. There was a rumor that one would get tuberculosis if one worked at a jute mill, but of course, precautionary measures were prescribed—like masks and eating bananas. Earlier, Brahmin boys would not work in Bata,28 now they do. These days you might see that a janitor will be Bihari, but his supervisor Bengali. 27 A few months after this interview, I attended a Bijoya Shommeloni programme (celebration of Vijaya Dashami) organized by the Salikha Itihash Pronoyone Shomiti. There was a discussion of the event they were planning in April 2012, in commemoration of the 150th birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda. They discussed the names of local citizens who would be honored in the event. The suggestion of the name of Shankar, a well-known Bengali novelist, who was born in Howrah but now lives in South Kolkata, triggered some debate. A member of the audience stood up and said he was a high- handed man and did not care for Howrah at all, others said he was ill and a recluse and might not accept. In the end, they decided to keep for their list Howrah residents and folks who were most likely to accept the honor. 28 Through the colonial official and Mughal revenue collector, Ghosal and Bandyopadhyay suture the ‘local history’ of an industrially decadent hinterland district to frames of history that enjoy wider recognition and illumination. Their interest is not in telling the story of Howrah in its peculiarity and separateness from mainstream histories of nation, region and globe. Their attempt is one of suturing this ‘place’ and its narrative onto a larger historical tapestry, in which Howrah is linked to important Bengali figures of the 19th century, as also colonial officials framed in familiarity and friendship. In doing so, they narrate a place that is exonerated from the confines of here and now, and linked to events of wider historical importance.

World in my pocket

29 Majid Molla is a known figure in Uluberia town. I was introduced to him at an event at the Uluberia Institute where he spoke about how Uluberia Shundori (comparing Uluberia to a beautiful woman) had become hyper-modern—there were schools, colleges, shops, vehicles and roads here now. He lamented the decay that the institute’s library had fallen into. He urged the general public and the political representatives of the Uluberia citizenry to take cognizance of this. He asked me to meet him at his office at Red Cross office in Uluberia Town, close to the station. In his seventies and always clad in the classic white dhoti-kurta, Molla holds a PhD in mathematics that was adjudged externally at the University of Wisconsin. He has now retired from many years of being a professor of mathematics at the Uluberia College. As a CPI(M) member, he has been Vice-President of the District Council, part of the District Red Cross, part of Shorbo Shikhsha Obhijan (Universal Adult Education scheme) and many other social welfare and development initiatives. He expresses cynicism over the poor effects of postcolonial governance, as a basic lack of humanity among the ‘backward’ people of the country. He points to the absolute lack of fellow-feeling and the prevalence of cruelty in society as something that cannot be explained by Marxist structural explanations of class

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struggle and so on. He cites oppression by religious leaders, innate conservatism and lack of progressive thinking, the tendency to take to the immediate pleasures of money, as the main factors influencing the poor condition of Muslim communities.

30 I accompanied Molla on several of his appearances at public functions, a number of which were in Muslim-dominates villages or town, where his appearance was that of communitarian pride as also the icon of a Muslim modernist imaginary. At an Eid event on a fairground in Bauria, in the vicinity of a labor settlement attached to the Bowreah Jute Mill (popularly known as North Mill), Majid Molla spoke passionately about the relevance of Islamic good conduct, in consonance with the ideals of secular modernity. He repeatedly compared the virtues of cleansing through Ramzan with fasts in other faiths (presumably popular Hinduism). 31 I accompanied Molla to a number of blood donation camps, organized generally by village or town clubs. Molla’s speech at a blood donation camp in Gongarampur, Uluberia conveyed a range of opinions between cautious embrace and celebration of technological modernity. He traced debates on blood from the sixteenth century lore of Dracula procuring young women to suck their blood and find youth and longevity, to western science of today. It is western science that has taught us, he said, that the injection of blood can revive the sick. He argued for the need to donate blood to assist thalassemia patients, and need for greater awareness about this. Blood, he said, was an indicator of human equivalence—regardless of ethnicity, gender, class, blood of humans can save the lives of other humans. Hence, the project of blood donation could be seen necessarily as one of unifying humanity. 32 On the strangeness of current times, he said, ‘gota prithibi aekhone amar pockete’ (the world is in my pocket) because we can connect to ‘London-America’ through cellular phones in two minutes. For this, he said, we must remember the indelible contribution of the magician of computers, Steve Jobs, who died recently at the age of fifty-six. It is thanks to him that we have cellphones, he says. These motifs—commercialization of women’s bodies, need for conservation of natural resources, blood as the great equalizer of humanity and eulogy of Steve Jobs—recur in Molla’s speeches. He urges a Muslim community to embrace the fruits of the welfare state in terms of medical and educational services, and practice their faith in consideration of its equivalence and resonance with other faiths. In his speeches were repeated allusions to examples of urbane-ness—technology, commercialization, speed, urgency, chaos. His rhetoric, of familiarity and skepticism about hyper-modernity and technoscience, acts as a bridge between an inchoate wider world and his parochial, usually Muslim audience of Uluberia and surrounding areas. 33 Molla’s gestures are not primarily aimed at historical actors (unlike Ghosal and Bandyopadhyay) but to those of global importance in the contemporary world. He is especially keen to establish links between himself and his surroundings, on one hand, and actors of the western world, on the other; modern science, Steve Jobs, University of Wisconsin, appear repeatedly in his narrative. He too, like Ghosal and Bandyopadhay, tailors his public performance towards linking the immediate with the faraway, the anonymous with the significant, thus appropriating for his surroundings of Uluberia, a bit of presence in current history that cellphones, computers and Steve Jobs enjoy.

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Calling out to the Faraway

34 Francis Cody, in his study of newspaper-reading practices at the teashop bench in rural Tamil Nadu, argues that a ‘nostalgia for the present’ is invoked at these reading rituals. Cody writes (2011: 253): The Teashop Bench produces an effect of being both of this time (they are discussing contemporary events, closely calibrated to very news being reported that day in the rest of the paper) and not (they belong to the time of villages and small towns, that can be experienced as something of the past). 35 The teashop grows into a locus of an ambiguous spacetime—accessing divergent temporalities in the same move. Bernard Bate (2011) shows how the ritualized public meeting (often on behalf of a political party or another) shared spacetimes that far transcended the contexts of ‘local’ culture and history, and aligned its architecture to a larger and far-removed Dravidian pasts. Bate writes (2011: 87): Processions move through architectural spaces in which images of the power of the foreign and of the power of the great kings of the Tamil literary canon and history seem to suggest a fantastic potentiality, a qualisign of desire for a coming polity in which the current leaders stand on par with (literal) giants of the past and giants of other lands. 36 Bandyopadhyay, Ghosal and Molla locate their modernist personae in suturing their immediate narratives of ‘place’ to those of larger canvases of time and space. Steve Jobs and high-modern commercialized sexualities are brought within a range of speaking proximity. Proximity to a 16th century emperor’s general and his son are cited in these renditions of being in a longer frame of time. Molla’s approach is a more direct attempt at bringing home a distant conversation—collapsing the distance between Uluberia and the world of western techno-modernity, and developing a vocabulary of friendly familiarity with the current concerns of the metropolitan world, the world of Apple computers and social dislocation due to technological advancement. Thus, he tries to bridge—through rhetoric—the abyss between Uluberia, an administrative block within Howrah and an urban center in a largely agrarian hinterland, and the wider world of current modernity that operates from distant metropolitan centers. His words of criticism, reprimand and lament bring these faraway phenomena into the fold of familiarity. In doing so, he manages to appropriate some of their centrality and historical significance for Uluberia.

37 Bandyopadhyay constructs a history for the administratively drawn entity Howrah itself. In his writing, the landscape comes to share the steps of the nationalist or the colonist whose large-frame actions and attendant historical location is then appropriated for Howrah. In all of these rhetorical moves, the actor/speaker/writer never frames the interlocutor (Jobs, Mughal subedar or Job Charnock) in a tone of unbridled admiration or disavowal—fitting of a disempowered, native subject, but more as a friend for whom they have mixed feelings, who is chided as also embraced in familiarity. A larger frame of historical time is available to Howrah through the narration of place and history by public figures such as Molla, Ghosal and Bandyopadhyay. Thus Howrah’s public domains, where such public gestures are performed, turn into vehicles of history much like Cody’s teashop and Bate’s political meeting. The publicly emitted spoken word becomes a turgid carrier of historical connection, through which Howrah grows in scale—both in time and space.

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Conclusion

38 In this article, I read a series of spoken and written works to ferret out the relationship with history, as performed in public gestures, by public figures of Howrah. Public figures of Howrah use public performance to suture individuated sentiment and place- related reflection to the sensibilities of being in a wider world, along a longer time span. The emergence of the public figure, endowed with emotion, moral and political charge, and historical orientation serves as a key instrument for cultivation of historical sensibility. They align somewhat with the classic figure of the bourgeois public sphere—affirming ideals of reason, humanism and the ideological architecture for liberal democracy to be instituted. They fashion selves quite differently from the irreverent, confrontation urban subject whose occupation of public space is part of longer battle to wrench resource and opportunity from state mechanisms. These figures do not shape themselves as ‘political society’ of Chatterjee’s description, neither the nonchalant pablik of Kaviraj’s description. They could be likened to the members of adda and the other forms of urban expression that Chakrabarty delineates in Provincializing Europe. As this article shows, in accessing history through speech and writing, these public figures share a sharp historical sensibility of the main stages of history and their marginal location in it, being a decadent industrial hinterland on the borders of an erstwhile colonial capital. The historical luminosity available to a Mughal subedar, a colonial official or an American technology-innovator is sharply felt by Howrah public figures. They try to access and appropriate such historical charge through a range of public gestures. They engineer their words and gestures towards such appropriation, in showing a feigned familiarity with sophisticated technology of a distant world, in fond chiding of a colonial official who had come to their shores, in framing sentiments of everyday life of Howrah in the larger frame of the charged movement of time into the current worlds of techno-modernity. In doing so, they try to access scale of temporal and spatial worlds that they address, and link such scale to their immediate environs. Through public gestures, Howrah comes to inhabit, if in structurally tenuous ways (as trade and commerce, of an older register of economic modernity, are indeed in a state of decay here), worlds of historical importance. Public gestures, thus, form an important vestibule with which to link the immediate to the distant, as a means of everyday historical access in Howrah.

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Raychaudhuri, Tapan (1999) Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities: Essays on India's Colonial and Post- Colonial Experiences, New Delhi & New York: Oxford University Press.

Ruud, A. E. & Price, P.G. (2010) Power and Influence in India: Bosses, Lords and Captains, New York: Routledge.

Ruud, Arild Engelsen (2003) Poetics of Village Politics: the Making of West Bengal's Rural Communism, New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press.

Sarkar, Sumit (1973) The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908, New Delhi: People's Pub. House.

Sarkar, Sumit; Sarkar, Tanika (2009) ‘Notes on a Dying People’, Economic and Political Weekly, 44 (26-27), pp. 10-14.

NOTES

1. The author is indebted to Prof. K. Sivaramakrishnan, Aniket Aga, Uday Chandra, Debjani Bhattacharyya, Prof. Manas Ray whose insights aided the shaping of this article. This article derives from ethnographic research she conducted in Howrah in 2011-12. The author has chosen, with express permission of the persons concerned, to use the real identities of the three main protagonists, whose published writing is referenced in the article, as also the names of places which are referenced in these works and feature in the ethnography. All other identities have been anonymized. 2. For detailed histories of the economic rise and fall in Howrah, and the larger lower Hooghly belt, through industries like jute, engineering and railways, see Bagchi (1992) and Ray (1992). 3. The term ‘urban horizon’ comes to me from Prof. K. Sivaramakrishnan, who used it in his inaugural address at the ‘Social Dynamics of the Urban’ workshop at IIAS, Shimla, May 10, 2013. 4. These details are laid out in Socio-Economic Survey of Howrah (1994) conducted and published by the Howrah Chamber of Commerce and Industry. 5. The jurisdictional divisions and overlaps were mentioned to me in interviews by officials at the Howrah Municipal Corporation. The only documentary corroboration I can find for this in the Howrah Development Plans (1962 and 2007) is that the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority has general planning jurisdiction over the Howrah city region, which is part of Greater Calcutta. 6. The KMDA has planning jurisdiction over the Urban Local Bodies that are in proximity to the boundaries of Kolkata. 7. Chakrabarti (1995) mentions the silting of the port waters. But I have not found ecological documentation of the river’s silting history, around the Howrah channel. Historian Shibendu Manna and others have mentioned this as a cause of Howrah’s decline in conversations with me.

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8. Habermas’ ‘public sphere’ generated a theory of institutions, outside the state, through which a tradition of critical-rational debate among citizens grew. The earlier traditions of reflection in critical-rational debate give way to production and consumption of ‘culture’ and ‘politics’ in the public sphere. The entry of unpropertied collectivities into the public sphere to articulate their ‘publicly relevant’ claims before state agencies, Habermas claims, strips the public sphere of its original raison d’être, without bringing in a new one (Habermas 1989: 177). Craig Calhoun unpacks various trajectories that the Habermasian ‘public sphere’ has taken, in his rich introductory essay in Habermas and the Public Sphere. He specifically points out the key moments in Habermas’ text that show the gradual delinking of the public sphere from actual state apparatus and its configuration into a space and a complex of relationships that are in continuous conversation with state institutions, in the language of critical-rational debate (Calhoun 1992: 8). Habermas’ argument is pushed forward by Nancy Fraser, on the lines that recognition in the ‘public sphere’ as a means to bring about ‘redistribution’ of resources in the democratic sphere. Seyla Benhabib discusses the formation of new ‘private’ spheres that speak of and are spoken to by the democratic welfare state (Benhabib 1992: 91-2). Both Fraser and Benhabib hint at the various ‘privates’ that are demarcated, cordoned off, as well as reproduced as handles in the tussles with the state, in the late capitalist democratic public sphere. Fraser envisages a post-bourgeois public sphere, which is transformed from a ‘collection of self-seeking, private individuals into a public- spirited collectivity, capable of acting together in the common interest.’ (Fraser 1992: 130). Michael Warner shows, through the example of emergence of ‘queer publics’, the appropriation and inversion of logics of the public sphere and the making of counterpublics. 9. Bengali appropriation of the English word ‘public’. Kaviraj uses it to index the vernacularisation of the notion of ‘public’, as well as the fall-out of the ‘public’ from ritual hierarchies prevalent otherwise. 10. Amiya Banerji details the many change of hands that rule over the present-day administrative unit of Howrah has undergone in the West Bengal District Gazetteer: Howrah. This District Gazetteer for Howrah (1972) is a revised edition of the earlier Gazetteer (O' Malley & Chakravarti 1912). In 1760, Howrah and Burdwan were ceded to the East India Company by Mir Kasim. In 1843, the government appointed a Magistrate for the territory comprising of Sulkea, Oolooberia, Ampta and a few other places, which remained attached to the 24 pergunnah district. Not until December 8, 1937 did Howrah become a full-fledged, independent district (Banerji 1972: 6-7). 11. See the next footnote. 12. In May 2011, the three-decade Left Front regime (headed by the CPI(M)) was voted out of power. Mamata Banerjee, who had started a new party—the Trinamool Congress—having defected from the Congress, espoused a program of ‘poriborton’ (Bengali for ‘change’) against the moods of abyss and deadlock that prevailed in public cultures of West Bengal in response to the Left Front’s inability to access the routes of progress as other states did, in post-liberalisation India. The Singur and Nandigram land conflicts in the years preceding the fall of the Left Front were triggers in shifting the balance of public opinion against the Left Front in the mainstream media as also the left intelligentsia (see especially, Chatterjee 2008; Sarkar & Sarkar 2009). 13. Durga Puja, the main festival of Bengalis, usually observed in October, also held as important for the proliferation of cultural and literary initiatives like little magazines, release of music albums, annual issues of magazines during or immediately after the Pujas. Dashami, or Vijaya Dashami, is the last day of the five-day celebrations—the day that marks the goddess’ annihiliation of the demon Ashura. 14. The magazine had to add an ‘ebong’ (Bengali for ‘and’) to its name, as the mouthpiece of the ruling party Trinamool Congress carries the name Ma, Mati, Manush (translated: Mother, Land, Man). 15. Title of a magazine. It literally translates as ‘time literate’.

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16. A Bengal handloom, with which saris are made. The name derives from a place in East Bengal (now Bangladesh). 17. Bengali sweets and savory snacks served at social events. 18. The word Shotta translates approximately in English as ‘self’. 19. Popular epithet for the new Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, who also heads the Trinamool Congress Party. 20. The title of the newspaper would translate in English as ‘The Banks of Kaushiki’. 21. A rural theater tradition prevalent in Bengal, usually known for its tradition of baroque and melodramatic theater. 22. Traditional textile used to embellish garments like saris. The zari economy was widely present in the Uluberia- Bagnan stretch, and to a large extent, among Muslim communities. Young men often traveled to western India or to the Gulf countries on jobs concerning zari commerce. Zari, it was said, had made many young men suddenly rich. Many told me that zari was worked on at home by women and men over long hours, through which they played music on radio or stereos to alleviate monotony, and that this was a cause of social decline. 23. Ghosal, Narayan. 2010. Jogotbollobhpurer Shobhyota o Shongoshkriti. Jogotbollobhpur, Howrah. 24. The term ‘historical luminosity’ comes to me from Prof. Manas Ray in personal conversations in 2012. 25. A Synopsis of Salikha. 26. Five hundred years of Howrah. 27. The history-writing group, based in Salkia, headed by Hemendro Bandyopadhyay. 28. A well-known shoemaking company—the reference here, being working in Bata would equal working with leather, a profane activity.

ABSTRACTS

This article narrates events, performances and gestures from public life on the rural-urban corridors of Howrah District, on the west bank of the river Hooghly, in southern West Bengal. Howrah is a place of decadent industrial activity, owing much of its spatial organization to colonial manufacture and trade on the edges of the colonial capital of Calcutta. Public figures in Howrah attempt to lift a place and an associated public out of its current political and historical anonymity. Each uses public gesture to appropriate distant phenomena, quite far-fetched and tenuously linked to their immediate existence. Such public gesture emerges as a key tool for gaining historical luminosity. Their words, gestures and stances are used to access history and historical significance, linking the historical charge of distant entities to immediate worlds, and aiding access to larger scale in space and time.

INDEX

Keywords: public figure, public, urban, history, space, scale, economy, memory

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AUTHOR

ATREYEE MAJUMDER

PhD candidate in political and historical anthropology, Yale University

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Self-Making through Self-Writing: Non-Sovereign Agency in Women's Memoirs from the Naxalite Movement

Lipika Kamra

1 A large number of tribal, peasant and urban middle class women participated in the Naxalite movement of the 1960s and 1970s in postcolonial India. However, the academic historiography of the movement for the longest time, maintained a silence on these women participants as well as gender issues (Mohanty 1977, Banerjee 1984, Duyker 1987, Ray 1988). Memoirs and autobiographies of women participants were therefore important in throwing some light on women’s experiences of the movement (see Tyler 1978, Mitra 2004, Ajitha 2008, Bandyopadhya 2008). Sophisticated studies of women’s participation and agency in the movement have begun to emerge only recently (Sinha Roy 2011, Roy 2012). These works foreground the lens of gender to analyse not just women’s participation, but also issues of gender relations, patriarchies, violence, love and sexuality within the movement.

2 In this paper, I try to address three questions. Firstly, are women’s memoirs an important source of history, especially from a feminist point of view, in the context of the gender indifferent historiography of the Naxalite movement? Secondly, can these narratives be seen as a significant way in which revolutionary women construct their subjectivity and agency? Thirdly, how do we theorise this agency? 3 I address these questions through the memoirs of two women participants of the Naxalite movement. The first is that of K. Ajitha, a woman participant of the movement in Kerala. Her memoirs were published in 1979 in a serialized form in the Malayalam magazine, Kala Kamudi, later also being published as a book. The English translation of the book came out in 2008. The second memoir that I take up is that of Krishna Bandyopadhyay, who was active within the movement in West Bengal. Her memoir was first published in the Bangla magazine, Khoj Akhon in 2002. I use the translation of her memoir published in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2008. Both women come from

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two different regions within India and participated in the movement in their regional contexts. Both women had very different political backgrounds. While Ajitha’s parents were communist activists themselves and encouraged her participation in the armed revolution, Bandopadhyay had to leave behind her middle-class family home in order to participate. Both these women were from middle-class backgrounds and their position in society shapes their gendered experience within the movement. It needs to be remembered that their experiences might be very different from those women participants who belonged to peasant, tribal and lower caste groups. There is also a difference in terms of how life stories of middle class participants and subaltern participants come forth. More opportunities are available to urban middle class women to publish their memoirs, and as a result, a whole body of Naxal women’s writings has emerged (Tyler 1978, Mitra 2004, Ajitha 2008, Bandyopadhyay 2008). As for rural, tribal and Dalit women, their stories have been brought forward by other scholars through oral histories (Kannabiran & Lalitha 1989, Stree Shakti Sangathan 1989, Sinha Roy 2009a, 2009b, 2011).

Personal narratives, historiography and agency

4 Life histories have often been used to uncover life experiences that are obscured by dominant academic historiography. To challenge meta-narratives, marginal groups such as Dalits in India have found them helpful in breaking the silences imposed by society and history (Arnold & Blackburn 2004: 5-6). Feminist scholars have been drawn to women’s life histories in building their theory and practice for the same reasons. Women’s experiences are primary sources for feminists to analyse the role and meaning of gender in individual lives and society (Personal Narratives Group 1989: 4). Personal narratives in the form of oral histories and autobiographies serve as sources through which one can interpret gendered constructions of self-identity, self- perceptions and self-representations of women within the gendered structures of power in society (Personal Narratives Group 1989: 5, Sinha Roy 2011: 40). Additionally, oral histories and autobiographies draw attention to the gaps and silences of gender indifferent histories. For instance, in the context of radical movements like Telengana, Tebhaga and Naxalbari in postcolonial India, accounts of women’s participation have been delineated through interviews with the participants (Custers 1987, Kannabiran & Lalitha 1989, Stree Shakti Sangathan 1989, Singha Roy 1992, Panjabi 2012, Roy 2007, 2012, Sinha Roy 2009b, 2011). These accounts were absent in the dominant histories of the movement. While oral narratives usually require the researcher to present the narratives in the public domain, autobiographical writings reach the audience directly. A strong feminist interest in the autobiographical form began with ‘the attempt to connect the personal with the political’ (Cosslett et al. 2000: 2).

5 I look at the autobiographical form of personal narrative in reading memoirs of two women from the Naxalite movement. Memoirs written by women reveal stories of everyday life and oppression (Lixl-Purcell 1994) that are unlikely to be a part of academic history. Therefore, I treat these texts as important sources of history, written against the history which successfully veils the role of gender on its subjects’ lives, on the pretext of focusing on larger questions. Autobiographical writings and memoirs do not just tell us about individual lives and experiences, but also throw light on the

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context and social settings that those individuals are part of (Arnold & Blackburn 2004, Lanzona 2009). 6 Of course, autobiographical narratives cannot be treated as unproblematic texts, and are by no means self-evident statements or historical truth (Arnold & Blackburn 2004, Sinha Roy 2011: 40). The texts, therefore, need to be interpreted in such a way that we focus not just on the individual alone but also the network of identities, relationships and structures within which the narrator is embedded (Personal Narratives Group 1989: 5-7, Cosslett et al. 2000: 3, Arnold & Blackburn 2004: 21). Thus, women’s experience in written form cannot be treated as a given (Cosslett et al. 2000: 2) or as representing an autonomous subject. Subjects are produced by the intersection of myriad discourses and structures of power (Foucault 1995 [1975]). Consequently, the agency of a subject must necessarily emerge within these structures of power that produce her and can never be independent of them (Abu-Lughod 1990, Haynes & Prakash 1991, O’Hanlon 2000). The subjectivities of women as agents need to be understood in terms of everyday negotiations with their existential situations, that is, different forms of subject-making (Sunder Rajan 1993, Sangari 1993, Mahmood 2005). For instance, women who participate in rebel movements may be engaged in acts of resistance even as their subjectivities are shaped by power-laden structures of patriarchy, class, ethnicity, and/or armed group dynamics. Their agency, therefore, needs to be theorized as ‘non-sovereign’ (Krause 2011) I argue for a non sovereign idea of agency. This differs from the liberal idea of agency that identifies agency only in autonomous terms and as resulting from sovereign and rational individuals. Non- sovereign agency as a concept gives us the framework through which we can identify certain acts as agentive even when they are not undertaken through an autonomous consciousness, and are shaped by structures and discourse of power. It helps us in doing away with the binaries of agent-structure, resistance-domination, and agency- victimhood. 7 The agency of an ex-revolutionary woman writing her memoir, I argue, is exhibited in the very act of self-making through self-writing. What constitutes an agentive act has often been a difficult question. The futility of looking for agency only in acts of resistance has been pointed out (Abu-Lughod1990, Mahmood 2005). Agency is articulated in the very construction of the self (Butler 1990), and needs to be seen as tied up to the process of subject formation in relation to power (Foucault 1995 [1975]). The construction of self through writing occurs within discourses of power while attempting to subvert them, and is hence reflective of non-sovereign agency. Further, since the memoirs work to counter the silencing of women’s voices in the gender indifferent historiography of the Naxalite movement, articulating insensitivities and discrimination, self-writing also becomes an act of resistance. Even this resisting agency is shaped by the very structures that it challenges, sometimes even reinforcing them, hence it is conceptualized as non-sovereign agency.

Gender and left-wing movements

8 The Naxalbari movement promised women a chance to redefine gender relations in Indian society. Women from the middle class as well as peasant and tribal communities were drawn into this radical left movement, despite the lack of a formal space for women in the CPI(M-L) and the absence of gender in the Naxalite class analysis (Sinha

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Roy 2011: 53-9). As I will show later, while women Naxalites had understood their involvement in the movement as empowering, they soon realised the patriarchal workings of the party and its leaders (Ajitha 2008, Bandyopadhyay 2008, Sinha Roy 2011, Roy 2012). The Naxalite ‘revolution’ produced its particular notion of masculinity and femininity, where an idealized ‘male revolutionary subjectivity’ was idealised, and women participants ‘struggled to inhabit’ this subjectivity (Roy 2012: 72-3). Middle- class women’s participation was acceptable to men, but only a few of these women moved beyond doing secondary tasks (Bandyopadhyay 2008, Roy 2012: 77). This also ties up with the ways in which communist masculinity has been constructed within left parties in India. Rajarshi Dasgupta (2003) argues that the communist definition of masculinity in Bengal emphasized upon bhadralok ideals of modesty, humility, sober reasoning, genuine social concern and self-reflection. In the Naxalite movement, this masculinity was manifested through a tolerance of women in the movement but it nevertheless relegated them to supportive roles. There was an effort to romanticize women as mothers, wives and widows of revolutionary men. Further, sexual ascetism came to be recognised as one of the qualities of an ideal communist. Middle-class sexual mores on marriage and sexuality were not questioned by the Bengali Naxalites, and in fact, there was an effort to suppress one’s sexual desires in order to be a virtuous revolutionary (Sinha Roy 2011: 69). The communist attitudes towards sexuality had a bearing on their perceptions of women within the movement. Henrike Donner (2009) talks about how certain kinds of relationships between men in a specific environment of patriarchy produced the subjectivities of male Naxal activists in the 1970s and shaped their participation in the movement. In fact, it could be argued that the bhadralok character of the Naxalite movement was one of the reasons for the Naxalite unwillingness to engage with questions of gender and sexuality.

9 In this regard, the Indian Naxalite movement differs from other, later, radical left-wing movements in Asia that have, over time, embraced the woman question and related questions of love, marriage, and sexuality. For instance the Huk rebellion of the Philippines addressed the ‘sex problem’ very early on (Goodwin 1997). However, they concerned themselves only with men’s sexual needs, and often did nothing to challenge the gendered division of roles and women’s place within the movement and society (Goodwin 1997, Lanzona 2009). The Maoist movement in Nepal made gender an important part of revolutionary life, and developed a ‘scientific method’ for the regulation of its activists’ sexuality (Yami 2006) but that did not lead to a dismantling of patriarchal practices (Schneiderman & Pettigrew 2004). The Indian Maoist movement,1 too, in its contemporary phase, engages much more with the woman question in its official ideology. Years of women’s participation and the presence of women leaders made this change possible. For instance, in Bastar, a senior Maoist leader, Comrade Narmada (cited in Pandita 2011: 96), recalled how it took time to make the male comrades realise that women were not meant only to cook and perform other domestic chores in the squad. She also talks about how another senior woman comrade, called Nirmala, pushed for women guerrillas to wear a shirt and trousers like their male counterparts, instead of saris. These and similar critiques reveal that the party itself is not free from patriarchal biases—several leaders admit to the prevalent patriarchal biases within the party structure and are willing to address the problem (Pandita 2011). In the case of Andhra Pradesh, women cadres and feminist groups pressurised the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War (PW) to discuss and address the patriarchal issues of the party and the movement (Vindhya 1990, Kannabiran et al.

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2010). PW became one of the first Maoist groups to deeply engage with the gender question, and this is visible from its document, ‘Our Approach to the Women’s Question’. Anuradha Ghandy, a woman intellectual,2 was made a member of the Central Committee at the 9th Congress of the CPI (Maoist) in 2007. One can say that her presence as within the party (first within the CPI(M-L) PW and then the unified CPI(Maoist), and her writings (Ghandy 2012) were contributing factors to the way in which the party has framed and reframed its views on gender, patriarchy and women’s role in the revolution. 10 As we see, the Maoist engagement with the woman question has evolved from the Naxalite period of the 1960s and 1970s to now, at least at the discursive level. Such detailed engagement was absent in the first phase, when Ajitha and Bandyopadhyay participated in the movement.

The memoirs: K. Ajitha and Krishna Bandyopadhyay

11 Ajitha says that her motive behind writing her memoir was to reiterate her commitment to her ideology through an open declaration, and make known to the public many unknown facets of the movement (Ajitha 2008). It is obvious that she had no outwardly declared feminist aim. Bandyopadhyay, on the other hand, says that she is trying to explain why middle class women like her joined the movement (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 53). The title of the English translation of her memoir is Naxalbari Politics: A Feminist Narrative. So, they differ in the purpose of writing their memoirs and this comes across in the narratives too. Both Ajitha and Bandyopadhyay belonged to middle class backgrounds. However, both of Ajitha’s parents had been involved in left-wing activism for years before and encouraged her participation. Bandyopadhyay, on the other hand, had to leave home to involve herself in radical politics. She describes how she was angered and saddened at the discrimination she faced at home while growing up. She writes: Since my childhood I have seen several festivals being observed and celebrated in our house. And the center of attention during these festivals would always be my brothers, uncles and other prominent male ‘human beings’. Even later in life I would cringe at the discrimination in every aspect of life—be it eating habits, education, freedom of movement. In my own way I protested once in a while, but not a brick on the wall of ‘don’ts’ was affected by it. I always thought that something needed to be done about this (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 53). 12 Ajitha too says that she never believed in ‘our tradition’ where women were ‘playthings’ for men. She expresses disapproval of Manu’s views on women and quotes a sentence from him: ‘A woman should obey her parents in her childhood, her husband in her youth, and her sons when old’. Other than this, Ajitha does not mention instances where she was discriminated as a girl.

13 Instead what Ajitha focuses on, while discussing her motivation to participate in the movement, are the texts she read and got influenced by. Most of these books were about Communist China, like Maria Roper’s China: The Surprising Country, and Edgar Snow’s The Other Side of the River. She also read Mao’s writings and discussed them with other comrades. She had already started getting attracted to Mao’s ideas and took to the radical struggles that started in Kozhikode against the Communist Party of India (Marxist), in the aftermath of the peasant uprising in Naxalbari in 1967. However, she does mention that she had been thinking for a long time whether she should get

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involved in radical politics or not. She started by participating in demonstrations and distributing pamphlets and books with Mao’s ideas. 14 Unlike Ajitha, Bandyopadhyay does not develop so much on how her transformation occurred. But she describes how she and other middle class women were assigned small roles by the party. She writes: ‘When it comes to revolution, no contribution is too negligible’; therefore, we were asked to offer shelter to revolutionaries, give them tea, and carry letters and documents from one place to another. And we had one more responsibility. This was to undergo training as nurses, so that we could tend to our injured male comrades and nurse them back to health (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 54). 15 As a result, they started feeling insignificant. Bandyopadhyay started to feel as marginalized and discriminated against as she had felt in her family home. This made her question her decision. It seemed to her that she had moved from one patriarchal set-up to another.

16 However, when a party leader, Dronacharya Ghosh, asked her and other women comrades to go to a village and work amongst women peasants, she says all her resentment towards the party vanished. Ajitha, too, had wanted to go and work in the villages like other male comrades, but had to initially face disappointment. She writes: I was raring to go in the field of action. When would my time come to meet these comrades brimming with revolutionary fervour, to see those villagers and to urge them on about the truth that I believed in? But the comrades wanted me to wait for some more time. I felt depressed and disappointed that I was pulled back because I was a woman. I was fully aware of what tales people would tell about girls who freely moved around with men. I hated this inequity and was determined to fight it (Ajitha 2008: 43). 17 Ajitha does not pursue this point in great detail and moves on to describing the course of events. She later talks about how she went to the village Pulpally with her mother to be a part of the armed revolt that had been planned. They spent some days among ‘forgotten people, inspiring them with the ideas of revolution’ (Ajitha 2008: 62). Bandyopadhyay and other women from the party would also hold meeting and political discussions with women in the village. She ‘read out the writings of Mao Ze Dong and Charu Majumdar, told them stories about Russia and China and sang them songs’ (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 54).

18 Living with the peasants and tribals in the villages was considered an essential element in the process of becoming a revolutionary during the Naxalite movement. Following Mao, it had been advocated that bourgeois intellectuals from the middle-class should go and live in the villages in order to awaken the revolutionary consciousness of the peasantry. Through this, they would also integrate themselves with these people and de-class themselves. So, women obviously had a problem if they were left out of this very important component of the revolution. Since Ajitha and Bandyopadhyay were sent to the villages, they saw themselves as capable of making a significant contribution. Bandyopadhyay writes: I was involved in the process of becoming ‘one with the masses’, of losing ‘one’s class identity’ just as Mao Ze Dong had said to be ‘like fishes in water’. I was noticing that the women also had begun to trust me. They were sharing their joys and sorrows with me. Internally, I felt extremely happy. Dron had gone away from the village on some party work. When he returned, I would say to him, ‘Look, how I have progressed’ (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 55).

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19 However, there was a lack of serious discussion about problems and constraints faced by women activists working in villages, such as safety, threat of sexual violence, not being taken seriously, and being stereotyped as sacrificing wives and mothers.

20 Both Bandyopadhyay and Ajitha faced dilemmas regarding the strategies of violence and annihilation of class enemies advocated by the leadership. Bandyopadhyay says that she was always opposed to the idea of annihilation but could not voice it when she became a part of the movement. She writes: I couldn’t tell him (Dronacharya Ghosh), ‘This idea of annihilation has been forcibly imposed on me as well’. A 19-year-old girl brimming with love received a massive jolt on that day. There was no option but to shed tears of shame and hurt. After so many years, I feel if I had courageously gone against this idea of ‘annihilation’, we would not have had to suffer the untimely loss of people such as Dron (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 54). 21 Later, even when she was in the village she couldn’t strongly advocate the idea to the people whose political education she was responsible for. I was never comfortable with the idea of such annihilation action. That’s why it was not proving possible for me to set an example (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 55). 22 However, she does not attribute her opposition to violence to her being a woman. She does not conform to the idea that women are inherently peace loving. Ajitha, on the other hand, does that to some extent. She looks at violence as necessary for the revolution, but as a woman, it was hard for her to come to terms with this. I don’t mean to say that I am a spokesperson of violence. On the contrary, I despise violence. I love to lead a peaceful life. But the world around me, and my life experiences taught me that no one can distance oneself from violence. It prevails in every realm of human life, in one form or the other. Even as one tries to avoid it, it makes itself felt like an omnipresent power. I realized that it could only be dealt with in the same coin. I decided never to be part of today’s inhuman social set up. Being a woman, it would not be easy for me. But I refuse to give up (Ajitha 2008: 49). 23 Through this, one can see how she wants to repress some of her ‘womanly’ feelings through ideology and participation in armed revolt. She says that all that mattered to her was the revolution, and there was no place ‘for trivial gender differences’ (Ajitha 2008: 74). Through instances like these, it is evident that while Ajitha resists traditional gender roles in general, her views sometimes also reinforce certain patriarchal stereotypes and norms.

24 Despite such introspection, Ajitha takes a largely uncritical view of the Maoist ideology that was being propagated and practiced at that point. She even cites from some books to convey the point that this ideology had done good things for women in China. Mallarika Sinha Roy (2011: 71) points out how the women Red Guards of China became a symbol of emancipation and women’s solidarity for Naxalite women despite these Red Guards failing to actually attend to deeper women’s issues. In her jail years, ‘reading books of great masters of Marxism’ and the writings of Mao gave her strength (Ajitha 2008: 225). Bandyopadhyay states that she does not want to examine the theory and practice of the movement and so does not celebrate the ideology, even though she accepts that her involvement in Naxalite politics shaped what she is today and she does not regret the past (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 52). 25 Here, I want to point out a key difference in the structure of resistance that Ajitha and Bandyopadhyay were located in. Bandyopadhyay joined the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in 1970, a year after it was formed. Ajitha, on the other hand,

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participated in the armed revolt in Kerala in 1968, before the party had been formed. Although these activities were acknowledged and appreciated by both Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal, the founders of the CPI(ML), Ajitha and her comrades later started having differences with the practices of those who were the representatives of CPI(M-L) in Kerala, criticizing their opportunism. Thus Bandyopadhyay’s activities were largely within the party structure while Ajitha’s were somewhat independent of the party. 26 Bandyopadhyay critiques the patriarchal leadership structure of the party and how she was told to put class before gender on some occasions. She says: So if a woman, even while taking shelter with a peasant or a worker, was forced to keep awake night after night by his lecherous behaviour, one could not complain. We would be told, ‘You are losing your capacity to view things from the class perspective, comrade’. This is from my personal experience. It will demonstrate very clearly what an extremely mechanical response there was from the comrades in the face of a heartrending experience (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 57). 27 But she also goes on to emphasize that most, if not all, male comrades were quite ‘gender-sensitive’ (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 58). Ajitha, too, writes about her comrades as supportive and helpful towards her (Ajitha 2008:81).

28 It might be interesting here to think about Naxalites’ views on love and sexuality. Mallarika Sinha Roy (2012) suggests that there were two kinds of love that are said to have motivated women to participate in the movement. One was love for the person, whereby women joined the movement only because the man they loved was involved. The second kind of love is the love for people or humanity in general. One of the reasons why Ajitha and Bandyopadhyay joined the movement was this second kind of love, but in the course of the movement they fell in love with a person. Naxalites usually tried to sexually restrain themselves. It was felt that love, marriage and sexuality distract from the path of revolution. So one sees Bandyopadhyay asking herself, ‘Does one really have to stifle one’s natural sexual desires in order to effect a revolution?’ when talking about the love between her and Dronacharya Ghosh. She adds, ‘Dron had managed to control his desire; and I had thought of Dron as great and myself as ‘petit bourgeois’—quite unworthy of the revolution’ (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 56). Ajitha (2008: 281-2) says that her father discouraged her from getting married since that would have meant harm to the movement. She mentions how she was in love with another comrade, Varghese, but her father told her, ‘You’ll ruin not only yourself but also comrade Varghese, who is very important for the cause.’ There were also cases where the party tried to look for partners for unmarried women comrades3. Varghese was captured and killed by the police. After her release from jail, the party started looking for a life partner for Ajitha. But she says: I couldn’t accept their advice. I was against arranged marriages whether arranged by families or the party. Then one day I asked Yakoob (another comrade) if he would marry me. He was eight years younger to me. Moreover, he came from a Muslim family. He had many doubts and anxieties. But I was adamant. Finally, we got married with the help of comrades, friends and relatives. No garlands were exchanged, but we were declared man and wife. Later we registered our marriage under Special Marriage Act (Ajitha 2008: 282-3). 29 She tries to present herself as resisting tradition here, demonstrating her agency in choosing her life partner as well as the form of marriage. The party’s reaction in Bandyopadhyay’s case was very different. After the killing of Dronacharya Ghosh by the

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police, she was considered as a martyr’s widow and was expected to live up to that status, which she resented and resisted. My role at that time was to inspire others as a martyr’s wife. Dron’s death had apparently given me a new ‘status’ within the party. And their vibes made it obvious that I was to have no other relationship in my life. No one was able to accept my second relationship. All sorts of comments were passed, even specific excerpts from Dron’s letters were quoted by some who said, ‘This is why he had said such-and-such thing’ (I don’t enjoy talking about all this; yet, I am writing about it to show the kind of mindset they had). I got very upset and said, ‘Do you want to hark back to the pre-Vidyasagar era?’ I realised after such a long time why Vidyasagar’s statues had been destroyed. My comrades were livid at this. But after that outburst, no one tried to harass me by bringing up the topic (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 57). 30 This account demonstrates how despite the encouragement to transgressive practices like inter-caste and inter-class marriages, most of the male leadership continued to stick to ideals of monogamous relationships and female chastity. Srila Roy (2006) has argued that ‘the Party became the social self-consciousness of the collective, substituting for the morality and legality of middle-class society in the underground’. Ajitha and Bandyopadhyay in their different ways tried to challenge these diktats of the Party.

31 It is through subversive acts such as these that they might identify themselves as feminist.4 It is quite interesting to note how the term feminism gets employed in the accounts of these two women. Bandyopadyay’s memoir when translated in English is titled Naxalbari Politics: A Feminist Narrative. It is very clear that the term has been added by the translator since the Bangla version of the article was titled Abirta Larai, which translates into ‘Relentless Struggle’. Of course, there is no doubt that Bandyopadhyay’s narrative raises feminist concerns and critiques of Naxalite politics. She ends the memoir in this way: The Naxalites left the older parties in order to come together and set up the CPI-ML with a new outlook. They aroused trust and hope in the minds of the people. Women, too, came forward to join a movement that was so full of promise. Taken up with fighting against a system, I never realised when I entered the realm of a completely different struggle. At that time I did not appreciate how necessary this struggle was. But today I feel that if all of us had continued and sustained it, we women would have stood side by side with the men and had an equal say in decision making. Perhaps the history of the Naxalbari movement would have been written differently then (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 59). 32 Later in her life, Bandyopadhyay involved herself in feminist activism and edited Khoj Ekhon, a feminist little magazine. She says: ‘The point is that the women’s liberation movement or the movement for national identity are not divorced from the struggle to reform society; both must continue simultaneously’. Therefore, she argues that the women’s question should have formed an integral part of the politics itself. Women do not ‘automatically become free when society is liberated’ (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 53).

33 It seems to me that it is only over time that such critical reflections emerge. Bandyopadhyay’s memoirs were first published in 2002, so she had several years to reflect. Ajitha’s memoirs came out in 1979, and we see that she is less critical of the gender dimensions of the movement. However, as her translator (Ramachandran 2008) points out, in the preface to the second edition of her book in 1993, Ajitha declared that she was no longer part of the Naxalite movement and was a Marxian feminist now.

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Even in the epilogue that she has written for the English translation of her memoirs, Ajitha explains: I knew very well how the movement regarded its women. Those days I couldn’t have related with feminist ideas, though in my memoirs I had pointed out many instances when I felt discriminated against for being a woman. The male comrades considered women as slaves and sex objects. Women were never involved in the decision making process. Usually, their opinions were scoffed at and rejected. Yet, those days I considered feminist movements as a means for sexual promiscuity for vain women (Ajitha 2008: 284-5). 34 Ajitha admitted that while generally accepting class struggle, there was a need to move away from left movements since they completely ignored gender paradoxes. Since the late 1980s, she got involved with several groups which raised issues of women’s oppression and later founded a women’s counselling centre as well as an umbrella organization of various women’s groups in Kerala.

Conclusion

35 Life histories are often used to uncover the silences of dominant academic scholarship. The memoirs of women from the Naxalite movement are valuable sources from a feminist perspective that seeks to overcome the silences surrounding women participants of the movement as well as the gender dynamics of the movement. Contrary to what one would expect, neither of the two memoirs paint a unified heroic figure of a woman revolutionary. The women not only recount the instances where they committed acts of resistance and subversion, but also how they felt limited, disappointed, marginalized, discriminated against, and victimized in several ways. Instead of dismissing the possibility of any agency, I see it as simultaneously existing with domination and conceptualize it as non-sovereign. I argued that agency emerges through the act of constructing one’s subjectivity through the memoir. Self-making in negotiation with structures and discourses of power is in itself an agentive act, and these women demonstrate a non-sovereign agency in constructing their subjectivities through self-writing.

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Bandopadhyay, Krishna (2008) ‘Naxalbari Politics: A Feminist Narrative’, Economic and Political Weekly, 43(14), April 5, pp. 52-59.

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Dasgupta, Rajarshi (2003) Marxism and the Middle Class Intelligentsia: Culture and Politics in Bengal 1920s-1950s, D.Phil dissertation, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford.

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Haynes, Douglas; Prakash, Gyan (1991) ‘Introduction: The Entanglement of Power and Resistance’, in Douglas Haynes & Gyan Prakash (eds.), Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-22.

Kannabiran, Vasantha; Lalitha, K. (1989) ‘That Magic Time: Women in the Telengana People’s Struggle’, in Kumkum Sangari & Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, Delhi: Kali for Women, pp. 1-26.

Krause, Sharon (2011) ‘Non-sovereign Freedom’, paper presented at the Political Theory Workshop, Yale University, 2/03/2011.

Lanzona, Vina A. (2009) Amazons of the Huk Rebellion: Gender, Sex, and Revolution in the Philippines, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Lixl-Purcell, Andreas (1994) ‘Memoirs as History’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 39(1), pp. 227-88.

Mahmood, Saba (2005) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.

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O’Hanlon, Rosalind (2000) ‘Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and the Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia’, in Vinayak Chaturvedi (ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, London: Verso, pp. 72-115.

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Sunder Rajan, Rajeshwari (1993) Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism, Routledge: London.

Pandita, Rahul (2011) Hello, Bastar: The Untold Story of India's Maoist Movement, Chennai: Tranquebar.

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Ray, Rabindra (1988) The Naxalites and their Ideology, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Roy, Srila (2012) Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Roy, Srila (2007) ‘The Everyday Life of the Revolution: Gender, Violence and Memory’, South Asia Research, 27(2), pp. 187-204.

Roy, Srila (2006) ‘Revolutionary Marriage: On the Politics of Sexual Stories in Naxalbari’, Feminist Review, 83, pp. 99-118.

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NOTES

1. The Naxalite movement is said to have begun in May 1967, when a confrontation broke out between peasants and the police in the Naxalbari area of West Bengal. Naxalbari awakened the dream of a people’s war in India among some leaders of the CPI(M), particularly in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. Revolutionary ideologues started to see merit in Mao’s concepts of ‘semi-feudal’ and ‘semi-colonial’ to describe and analyse the Indian countryside. The time was seen as ripe for India to follow China’s path of struggle towards a ‘New Democratic Revolution’. In this context, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI(M-L)) was formed in 1969 with the aim of truly following Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideology. It was repressed by the state by the mid-1970s but groups following Maoist ideology continued to operate in many states. The CPI(ML) split into several factions, key among them the CPI(ML) Party Unity and CPI(ML) People’s War. In addition, the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) had been working separately in Bihar and Jharkhand since its formation in 1969. In 2004 MCC and CPI(ML) People’s War (Andhra and Chhattisgarh) merged to form the CPI(Maoist). As of today, the movement led by the CPI(Maoist) is active in the states of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar and Maharashtra. 2. Anuradha Ghandy came from a middle-class family, had completed an M.Phil degree, and had been working among Dalits in different parts of Maharashtra in the eighties. She and her husband Kobad Ghandy came into contact with Naxal leaders in Gadchiroli, Maharashtra. They were instrumental in the formation of the People’s War Group. She passed away in 2008. Anuradha Ghandy can be described as a Maoist feminist intellectual, the first of her kind in India, who wrote extensively on Marxism, and caste and gender issues. The party’s position on caste and women draws a great deal from her thoughts. 3. Mallarika Sinha Roy (2012) conducted interview with a woman named Shefali, who was encouraged to marry another comrade while working in the villages, because her unmarried status was proving to be a problem. 4. I do not want to go into a discussion about forms of feminism, and the different things it might mean.

ABSTRACTS

Women were active participants in the Naxalite movement of the 1960s and 1970s in India but were made invisible in the mainstream historiography of the movement. However, memoirs and autobiographies of women Naxalites bring out their experiences of participation in the movement. This paper engages with the memoirs of two of them, K. Ajitha and Krishna Bandyopadhyay, and argues that these women demonstrate a non-sovereign agency in self- making through these autobiographical narratives.

INDEX

Keywords: women, autobiography, left extremist movements, agency, India, Naxalite movement

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AUTHOR

LIPIKA KAMRA

DPhil Student, Department of International Development, University of Oxford

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Going Primitive: The Ethics of Indigenous Rights Activism in Contemporary Jharkhand

Uday Chandra

Introduction

The Aryans came to India from Central Asia. The civilization of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, which preceded the Aryan invasion, did not have fire altars. Their inhabitants would bury the dead. That is, they were non-Aryans. The Vedas also contain references to this. The war between the gods and the demons is, in fact, the tale of wars against the adivasis. The description of the demons is that of adivasis. The demons were dark and wore horns. Even today, adivasis are swarthy in complexion and they wear horns and dance. Hitesh Ranjan,1 Gandhian activist from Bastar 1 How and why did a labor union organizer from Goa, a former Naxalite student cadre from West Bengal, and a Jesuit priest from Tamil Nadu end up as spokespersons for adivasi rights in contemporary Jharkhand? What caused their political discourse to shift from tribal/adivasi2 to indigeneity? Might indigeneity be an ideology for these activists? Might the epigram above be a legitimation tool for this ideology?

2 To answer these interrelated questions, this paper analyzes the oral histories of three leading indigenous rights activists in Jharkhand, formerly south Bihar. In these self- narratives, I focus on the ways in which these middle-class3 activists have crafted their political ethics with reference to ‘indigenous communities’ in India and beyond. I argue that ‘indigeneity’ functions in Jharkhandi activist discourses as a marker of a distinctive post-materialist4 turn in bourgeois politics. The defense of the indigenous or

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primitive speaks to deep-seated existential crises for what I term the ‘radical bourgeois self’, which seeks to simultaneously transcend the modern domains of state and capital as well as locate an authentic space of political ethics and critique in imagined adivasi collectivities. 3 The radical bourgeois self may be seen as a Weberian ideal type akin to the ‘renouncer’ in South Asian civilizations. As Louis Dumont (1986: 25) puts it: The man who is after ultimate truth forgoes social life and its constraints to devote himself to his own progress and destiny. When he looks back at the social world, he sees it from a distance, as something devoid of reality, and the discovery of the self is for him coterminous, not with salvation in the Christian sense, but with liberation from the fetters of life as commonly experienced in this world. 4 The radical bourgeois self, much like Dumont’s renouncer, sacrifices the ordinary householder’s existence to pursue a distinctively Indian kind of individualism and freedom. Yet, unlike the renouncer of yore, the radical bourgeois self is a vital part of modern bourgeois society in India. Bourgeois or middle-class society in modern India, even when it is invested in reactionary or racist ideologies, sees itself as ‘open-minded and egalitarian’, ‘fiscally prudent’, ‘embracing science and rationality’, and ‘setting aside the primordial ties of caste and kinship’; it has, since the late colonial period, expressed a ‘deep ambivalence about popular politics, ….seeking to discipline and mobilize subordinate social groups’ even as it sought to be ‘an enlightened representative of public opinion’ (Baviskar & Ray 2011: 5-7). The radical bourgeois self largely fits this ideal-typical description of middle-class Indian society, but insofar as it draws on an older tradition of world renouncers as radical individualists, it also distinguishes itself as a critic of Indian middle class mores and habits. As member as well as critic, the radical bourgeois self enjoys the privileges of bourgeois citizenship in a deeply hierarchical society even as it defines itself by contrast by pursuing the path of political radicalism. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1993), this paper argues that the radical bourgeois self relies on an exchange of economic capital in the form of material privileges for symbolic capital in the form of status and rank. In other words, what comes across straightforwardly as ascetic renunciation or Marxian ‘de- classing’ may, in fact, be a matter of striving for sociocultural distinction in the modern bourgeois ‘field’ in India today. This is hardly a new phenomenon in modern India: the ‘ascetic masculinity’ of well-known historical figures from Vivekananda to Gandhi has defined radical bourgeois selves in precisely the manner I suggest for indigeneity activists in contemporary Jharkhand (Chakraborty 2011).

5 As indigeneity activists who act as patrons of ‘primitive’ peoples,5 who purportedly avoid lying, the state, and the money economy, radical bourgeois selves assume vanguardist roles in ways that satisfy, firstly, the bourgeois critique of electoral democracy in post-Mandal India (Corbridge & Harriss 2000, Deshpande 2003), and, secondly, the post-Naxalbari desire for an independent left outside the existing communist party alternatives6 (Sitapati 2011). These twin sources of the Jharkhand activist’s self may be often complementary, but, at the same time, there are very real tensions between them. As the three activist tales7 in this paper demonstrate, independent left activists, for example, often takes bourgeois politics in contemporary India as their ideological point of departure; the bourgeois celebration of the individual is, similarly, at odds with the leftist quest for post-capitalist collectivities. Nonetheless, these tensions come to the fore most clearly when we consider the limited popular

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support enjoyed by these activists, especially when ordinary adivasi men and women refuse to assume what Michel Rolph-Trouillot (2003) famously called the ‘savage slot’. 6 This kind of rejection, in fact, further fuels the existential crises that propel indigeneity activism in Jharkhand today insofar as it prompts the unending bourgeois search for a ‘purer’, more ethical self that claims to be the antithesis of politics yet, paradoxically, aspires to a total politics that suffuses every individual belief, act, and idiosyncrasy. In invoking ‘total politics’, I draw on the philosopher Carl Schmitt’s (2007) notion of ‘the political’ as an all-encompassing sphere of human existence that incorporates the economic, social, religious and other spheres. This notion of the ‘political’, for the indigeneity activists, stands in contrast to the rough and tumble of democratic ‘politics’ (Marchart 2007: 35-60). In this sense, their quest for the radical bourgeois self is strikingly akin to that of theorists of the ‘political’ from Schmitt to Laclau (Laclau 2005, Mouffe 2006). This paper thus sheds light not only on the process of making radical bourgeois selves, but also on the politics of the apparently anti-political and anti- modern in contemporary India.

From Goa to Gua: a labor activist’s tale

7 Oscar Fernandes was born in 1951 in what he calls a ‘Roman Catholic ghetto’ in a working-class Mumbai neighborhood. Although he firmly believes that the Church was ‘linked with modernism and capitalism’ worldwide and ‘alienate[d] him from [his] cultural roots’ in India, he also thinks it played an immense role in shaping him as a young man insofar as the ‘idea of social justice…in theory, if not in practice, entered into [his] mind’ through Christian theological teachings. Arguably, what made his middle-class Goan family different was that his father stood as an exception to the usual ‘Christian trend to be mere servants of imperialism’ by teaching adult working- class men to read and write every evening. When Oscar was four or five years old in the mid-1950s, he, too, would sit with the workers and ‘learn A, B, C.’ It struck him then that ‘people much older than [him] were struggling to learn the language as much as [he] did’. This, he adds, led to ‘a profound realization that there were many in society who were less privileged than [him]’ and whose intellectual capacities had been ‘stunted’ due to the ‘violent workings of a hierarchical society such as India’. The importance of this episode and the awareness it spawned, Oscar explains, ‘only became clear to [him] much later in life, after forty years of work as an activist’.

8 Such clarity is, of course, apparent only in retrospect, and is commonplace in the construction of autobiographical memory or discourse. We may justifiably ask here why Oscar began his tale from the very beginning of his life. One explanation is that this is a standard genre of autobiography narrated along a linear calendrical notion of time (Freeman 1998, Brockmeier 1995). However, another explanation, by no means incompatible with the first, is that this is a narrative that Oscar has crafted carefully after sustained reflection over various episodes of his life (Singer and Blagov 2004). As Jens Brockmeier (2000: 51) puts it: […] autobiographical discourse is the form par excellence in which we give shape to the time of our life—and this, I believe, can be said equally from a narrative, philosophical, psychological, and anthropological point of view.

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9 But I would go further to argue that this constructionist view of autobiographical discourse must be linked to a more radical constructionist notion of the self itself. In the words of Jerome Bruner (1987: 31): The ways of telling and the ways of conceptualizing that go with them become so habitual that they finally become recipes for structuring experience itself, for laying down routes into memory, for not only guiding the life narrative up to the present but directing it into the future…a life as led is inseparable from a life as told—or more bluntly, a life is not ‘how it was’ but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold. 10 In other words, Oscar’s calendrical ordering of autobiographical time is inseparable from his ongoing process of self-making as an activist. In this, as we shall see later, he is far more exceptional. Indeed, my argument in this paper is that the Jharkhandi indigeneity activist’s self-narrative is a kind of autobiographical discourse that accompanies a particular process of making and remaking the radical bourgeois self in postcolonial India.

11 To return to Oscar’s tale, he discusses his desperate need as a young man to break out of his bourgeois background. ‘Most Goan Christians in Bombay had limited aspirations: to be a steno[grapher]-typist, secretary, railway clerk and so on’. Oscar did not want to fit the mold and though he got better-paying jobs in IBM and Larsen & Toubro, he says he chose not to work for those companies. He adds, ‘I would try very hard not to get selected during the interview process, but I always ended up with a job offer’. There is more than a hint of bravado here: Oscar believes he was good enough for the jobs that his middle-class peers in Bombay craved for in the 1960s, but he chose not to go their way. This is a heroic self-narrative that valorizes denial rather than conventional notions of achievement. Denial as a way to stymy the bourgeois self does not, however, imply Gandhian-style ascetic masculinity (Alter 2000, see Chakraborty 2011) for Oscar. Ascetic self-denial, whether Gandhian or otherwise, is, for him, merely a kind of puritanism that is essentially about sexual repression. He explains: ‘The puritanical ideal, so popular among Indian Christians, ingrains the thought that we don’t have any genitals, babies come from heaven, and any sexual feelings are sinful’. In 1969, therefore, at the height of the Naxalite movement, Oscar went to St. Joseph’s College in Bangalore. In this part of the self-narrative, calendrical time has been clearly abandoned: job offers precede college, which Oscar presents as the avenue for breaking free from his Christian bourgeois background. 12 College, in Oscar’s self-narrative, is where the radical self gets forged after leaving behind its bourgeois baggage. In college, he found ‘a group of seniors who were already reading about Marxism and communism’. For someone raised Catholic in postcolonial India, ‘praying for people suffering persecution in communist countries’, talking about Marx, Mao, Vietnam, and Charu Mazumdar was ‘liberating’. These seniors were from Christian backgrounds too, and brought in some amount of moral [or] ethical elements into debates’. Their first challenge, as individuals and as a group, was to accept that ‘only five per cent of India consisted of graduates then’ and that ‘the country spent one lakh rupees to educate each of them’. Whereas the typical bourgeois citizen would have moved on to a job after college, Oscar and his comrades hesitated. He received ‘an opportunity to go to XLRI (Xaviers Labor Relations Institute in Jamshedpur) to study labor relations’. This was appealing because, as he says, ‘labor studies was exactly what [he] wanted to do’. But then he ‘got to know that studying labor relations actually

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meant learning about how to control labor’. In other words, ‘joining XLRI would make [him] into a dalaal [broker or pimp] basically’. Around the same time, Oscar joined the All India Catholic University Federation (AICUF), a nationwide network of progressive Catholic students seeking social change. As its national secretary, Oscar had a ‘full-time job headquartered in Madras’, but he also ‘got a chance to travel all around the country, organizing training programmes and getting to see the real India’. This is how he first came to Jharkhand, then south Bihar, and became acquainted with adivasi youth activists in Chaibasa. The upshot was, in his words, that ‘[his] worldview completely changed’. The radical self had, by now, well and truly taken shape. 13 After a brief stint on scholarship to study Marxism in France, Oscar returned to India at the height of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975-77. When he came to learn his comrades at Chaibasa had been arrested by the Bihar government for participating in the JP movement, he ‘went there and never left Jharkhand for the next thirty years’. Oscar explains that ‘[he] did not know a single word of Hindi then, leave alone Ho’.8 Nonetheless, he campaigned with other activists for their release, and wrote in local newspapers to rally support for their cause. Learning Hindi was, seemingly, a by-product of this process. Eventually, the Emergency ended, and the adivasi activists were released. From 1978 onwards, the Chaibasa troupe, including Oscar, took up issues concerning Ho workers in the Gua, Noamundi and Chidiya mines of Singhbhum district. Initially, Oscar stayed in a village deep inside the Saranda forest named Koda (name changed) and ‘learned the Ho language and culture, trying to understand their ways of life and approach to the world’. He tried to instruct them in the essentials of ‘Marxist historical materialist thinking’. Pointing to the iron ore mines in the western fringe of Singhbhum, he would tell adivasi workers ‘to see how iron and steel made by Tata and others from these mines would create trucks, enriches mine owners, steel companies, truck owners and so on, and proletarianizes the rest of us’. Oscar then adds, with a twist of irony: ‘Five or six, I was able to indoctrinate…[guffaws]…and they were able to spread my Marxist message’. 14 Thereafter, Oscar’s radical activist self, having shaken off its bourgeois moorings, was now beginning to see the limitations of ‘Marxism in translation’ in India (Kaviraj 2009). By the time of the infamous Gua massacre on 8 September 1980, when a band of peaceful adivasi demonstrators were fired upon by the Bihar Military Police in the mining town, Oscar was firmly behind the adivasi mine workers in Singhbhum. When leftists from Calcutta assailed him for limiting himself to adivasi labor problems in the mines, they told him ‘that to bring in the revolution, [he] needed to go to Jamshedpur [the location of Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO)], where the labor was better developed’. What, he wondered, did it mean for labor to be ‘better developed’? Also, ‘if only the most developed labor could be revolutionary, then why didn’t the revolution begin in Detroit?’ These questions made him question the ‘elite vanguardism of the Calcutta dadas and their brand of Marxism’. The dadas gave them ‘plans to surround Chaibasa town after building bases around the mines in Saranda forest and other stupid stuff’. Oscar was keener to adapt Marxist theory with the concrete specificities of adivasi struggles in Jharkhand. He pondered the possibility that the ends of Marxism may in fact be to ‘remake society as the Hos and other adivasis of Jharkhand had known for millennia’. This was not the ‘primitive communism’ of classical Marxist theory, but a healthy, ecologically sustainable, post-materialist vision for the future in India and beyond.

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15 Oscar’s turn to worldwide discourses of indigenous peoples’ rights in the mid-1980s must be seen in this light. ‘Indigeneity’ here ought to be seen less as a kind of ‘identity politics’ for subaltern groups as a post-materialist ideological orientation that permits bourgeois activists to articulate a radical vision of the future. This kind of radicalism challenged not only the confident developmentalist idea of progress in Nehruvian India, but also the vanguardism that characterized Indian Marxism in its different avatars. When he was accused by a senior labor leader of ‘drinking hanria [rice beer] with adivasis and sleeping with women in the villages’, he retorted, ‘If you don’t have a penis, does that mean others don’t have feelings either?’ He adds, ‘You can’t take hanria out of adivasi culture any more than you can take wine out of French culture’. But, Oscar continues: The comrades don’t understand all this. They are in the shoes of books, but we must be in the shoes of the adivasis. It was their mistake, and I hope future activists will realize all this. 16 After parting ways with his former Marxist comrades, Oscar organized his own unregistered union of adivasi workers, Saranda Theka Mazdoor Sangh (‘Saranda Contract Workers’ Collective’). They avoided ‘all this reservation business that was coming in then’ after Prime Minister V.P. Singh’s implementation of the Mandal Commission report in 1989. The union was, in his words, ‘very successful’ in ‘implementing minimum wages and maternity, crèche, medical benefits’. But he found that the male adivasi workers wanted to claim all employment benefits for themselves and to keep their wives at home. After this schism, Oscar ‘grew tired of union politics’, and saw it as ‘more of an adivasi issue than anything else’.

17 By the early 1990s, Oscar had moved out of labor activism and identified increasingly with the cultural politics of the Jharkhand movement. He ‘got to know the movement’s cultural leadership’, and supported their ‘homeland movement and their demand for autonomy’. This kind of politics went beyond the basic demand for a separate state of Jharkhand. ‘Without political and cultural autonomy for adivasis,’ Oscar explains, ‘the demand for Jharkhand was pointless’. This is why he refused to side with those who ‘got into power politics and became thekedars (contractors), netas (politicians), etc.’. He went on to write one of the earliest manifestoes on indigenous peoples’ rights in India, and reflected in a series of popular writings on how indigeneity was a cultural condition as much as a political project. This manifesto, which ‘has been translated into German, Spanish, Bangla…many languages’, builds on conversations with ‘Naga human rights activists in Delhi’ as well as ‘international recognition for Rigoberta Menchu and the legal battles of Australian aboriginals and Native Americans in the United States and Canada’. In this manner, it has been possible for Oscar to emerge over the past two decades as a ‘Jharkhandi activist for adivasi rights’, simultaneously criticizing modern bourgeois lifestyles, left activism, and electoral politics in postcolonial India. Indigeneity neatly resolves multiple crises of modernity for the bourgeois self by remaking it as the authentic voice of the ‘original inhabitants of India’. This kind of political ventriloquism, anything but rare in South Asia as the epigram of this paper shows, thus becomes the basis for a new bourgeois politics of purity sans the ideological contradictions experienced by older, discarded activist selves.

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Indigeneity as extreme left politics

18 Sourav Sanyal is arguably one of the most well-known faces of the Jharkhand movement after the late Ram Dayal Munda. Yet few know about the personal background of this Bengali modhobittyo (middle class) activist from Howrah. He was born into a well-to-do bhadralok family, and was expected to emulate his father and join ‘some government service after school’. Public service was an ideal that had remained in his family from the days of the Congress-led nationalist movement, and there seemed no reason why he would abandon it. As a teenager during the late 1960s, however, ‘one of [his] uncles [mamas] became a Naxal [revolutionary left activist inspired by Mao Tse-tung] and started telling [him] about peasant uprisings in northern and other parts of Bengal’. These stories, ‘full of bravery and heroism’, made him consider joining his mama and becoming a Naxal. When he informed his mother of his intention, she was ‘horrified’ and ‘tried to talk [him] out of it’. At this point, he ‘ran away from [his] house’ with the help of his mama’.

19 Initially, Naxalite politics introduced Sourav to a subterranean world of primarily male comradeship that underpinned everyday political thought and action in Calcutta. As Henrike Donner (2009: 332) has argued: In the Naxal movement, young men formed very strong bonds with comrades their own age, both male and female, but also with older men. Younger activists were often recruited by a teacher or professor, and they turned their back on their families when they entered into close relationships with these figures of authority. 20 These bonds of comradeship within the party were, as she writes elsewhere, shaped by ‘the debates and dialectics of a movement largely dominated by middle-class men’ (Donner 2011: 26). In Sourav’s case, notions of kinship melded rather easily with the affective ties on which the party’s underground organization rested, though the latter also served as a substitute for and critique of modhobittyo domestic relationships in Bengali society. What he learned in the movement, he says, ‘remained with [him] lifelong’. This was, above all, a ‘commitment to truth and justice, even at the cost of death’. Fighting for truth and justice imbued the young Sourav with a deep sense of moral purpose early in his political life. In Donner’s (2009: 340) words: ‘With reference to the masculinities embodied here, two related traits attributed to Naxalites more generally are highlighted: personal integrity and unpretentious behaviour, an ideal distinctly associated with the morality of these comrades’. 21 When repressive police actions under the United Front government of West Bengal began in 1970, he ‘could not imagine why anyone would not understand his cause’ and, in fact, seek to put him and his comrades in jail.

22 State repression pushed Sourav into the forests of West Midnapore district, where he first encountered adivasi life in the forest villages on the Bengal-Jharkhand border. What he saw as an underground Naxalite-on-the-run astounded him: These were people who were living without the kind of violence that we were using to bring revolution in mainstream Indian society. They were poor, but they lived with dignity. They did not steal or tell lies. Men and women were equal among the tribals. They respected Nature and all forms of life. Their ways of life were much superior to ours, I thought.

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23 Cut off from Calcutta bhadralok culture and society for weeks, Sourav tried to understand a lifeworld he had never encountered before. Although he did not learn their language, he spoke to ‘the tribals who knew Bengali’, and learned their ‘histories, legends, religious and cultural values from them’. Sourav, it must be noted, did not have a college degree at this time, because he had left his home abrupt after finishing his schooling. Experiential learning in the forests of Midnapore, therefore, became his ‘first lessons in anthropology, history, environmental science, and so much more’. Above all, he says, ‘[he] was attracted to the tribal’s mind and his way of thinking, which was so different from our own’. ‘The philosophical question for me even today’, he elaborates, ‘is what tribals have to teach us modern men and women who have gone so far away from our roots’.

24 After a couple of years in the Lalgarh area, Sourav moved in with relatives in Ranchi. Here, in the largest urban center in south Bihar, he believed that ‘the West Bengal police wouldn’t find him and [he] could start a new life’. In Ranchi, he met Nirmal Minz, then principal of Gossner College and the Lutheran Bishop of Ranchi. When Minz heard Sourav’s story, he asked him to start teaching at the college immediately. Sourav ‘told him that he didn’t even have a Bachelor’s degree, and did not know any of the books that college students were required to read’. Minz was, however, adamant. ‘A man of your experience of the world’, he reportedly said, ‘can read books with the students and teach them a lot’. Teaching at Gossner College also allowed Sourav to know the primarily Munda student body well. Often, he ‘would take trips to their homes in the villages, participate in their traditional ceremonies, [and] learn their culture’. In the villages, he was also ‘invited to speak to people about his political experiences, and [he] told them whatever [he] knew then’. At Gossner College, he had also ‘started reading Marx and Engels, Lenin, Mao, dependency theory from Latin America’, and discussing it with Minz and his students. As he confessed: ‘In the Naxalite days, where was the time to read and study for us? We never read Marx or Mao, but simply listened to what the dadas told us they had written about bringing revolution in a backward society’. 25 Rajarshi Dasgupta (2005: 81) has explored, in an earlier period, ‘how the discourse of revolution and Marxist identity converged with a radical vision of the bhadralok self’. In this sense, Sourav’s self-making process shows how modhobittyo Marxism could become the foundations on which an appreciation of adivasi culture and history could develop.

26 But what kind of radical self would develop remained an open question. Sourav’s interactions with two key Munda figures were critical to his subsequent political trajectory. First, he became ‘very close to Moses Gudia’, a prominent Munda activist from Lohajimi village in Torpa, who founded the radical Birsa Seva Dal (BSD) at the time of the Naxalite movement in neighboring Bihar, Orissa, and West Bengal. Moses ‘took pride in being an adivasi’ and he believed, like the Naxalites, in the need for subaltern militancy to ‘make adivasis heard in mainstream society’. In its heyday, until the Emergency, the young men who formed the BSD picketed shops owned by dikus (undesirable non-tribals), kidnapped the more notorious ones among them, and threatened others with severe consequences when they erred. Sourav never joined the BSD, but his friendship with Moses Gudia acquainted him with the materiality of ‘exploitation and loot in tribal areas by traders, timber contractors, industrialists, and

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[Bihari] politicians’. He began to ‘understand the anger that led Moses and others to take a militant approach’. 27 A second significant influence on Sourav was the arrival of the renowned linguist Ram Dayal Munda after his doctoral research on Mundari in Chicago and a brief teaching stint in Australia. ‘Munda ji’, explains Sourav, ‘brought in the idea of indigenous peoples’ rights to us in Jharkhand. He explained how the tribals in America and Australia were using their shared experience of oppression to combat their white rulers’. Sourav wondered whether Munda’s intellectual prowess and his later position as Vice-Chancellor, Ranchi University could be used to leverage the cause of indigeneity during the Jharkhand movement in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on the ‘materialist approach of [his] Marxist days’, he focused on ‘forests and [the] environment in which Jharkhand’s adivasis lived’. If Munda focused on the erosion of tribal languages and cultures, Sourav began ‘making a connection between cultural and environmental degradation’. With the ‘loss of forests’, he explains, ‘adivasis’ habitats are disappearing and they will soon disappear themselves’. On asking him what he meant by adivasis disappearing, he replied: They will become proletarianized in the capitalist system. They will become servants in the houses of upper-caste people in Delhi and Bombay. They will not be adivasis anymore. They will be ashamed to call themselves adivasi. Extreme alienation and destruction will follow. 28 Today, Sourav is able to join hands with comrades in Latin America and Europe to fight for indigenous peoples’ rights worldwide.

29 More than anyone else in contemporary Jharkhand, Sourav has domesticated discourses of indigeneity in the region’s political landscape. Indigeneity, for him as for Oscar, is a way to articulate an ecological and cultural politics that is simultaneously grounded in the material realities of Jharkhand and India as well as in solidarity with other indigenous peoples’ activism worldwide. ‘Indigeneity is like class’, Sourav tells me at the end, ‘it is a universal concept’. It is, in other words, a language of solidarity across activist networks that opens up new political resources for bourgeois leadership in Jharkhand and other scheduled areas. At the same time, it is also a framework within which the radical bourgeois self can pursue a pure politics without what Sourav calls the ‘compromises that politicians and NGO people have to make’. Yet he himself, unlike the other two activists9 in this paper, receives international funds from Europe to finance his non-profit organization. Moreover, if ‘indigeneity is like class’, why not just stick to class? Sourav chuckles and says: This is what my Marxist friends always say. But I tell them: ‘you are wrong. Class analysis always treats adivasis as backward people who need to be modernized into a revolutionary class that will overthrow capitalism. But adivasis are our history and our future’…They remind us of what we have become today, and also what we must to do to live peacefully and sustainably again. 30 In Sourav’s view, therefore, indigeneity is farther left than mainstream Marxism, and it is this extreme left ideological position that he has articulated more clearly over his life from the days of the Naxalite movement to his gradual conversion to the cause of indigeneity in Jharkhand.

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A pastor to his flocks

31 Michael Muthuraman was born to a wealthy Christian upper-caste household in Salem district of northern Tamil Nadu. As ‘the youngest of nine children’ in the Muthuraman household, he was ‘much loved and spoilt by everyone’. The family owned ‘plenty of land’, and it was commonplace to see ‘dalit laborers toiling away on the farm’. For Michael, this was jarring because ‘it seemed to go completely against Christian teachings’. He says, ‘in church, we were told that all men are created equal in the eyes of God, but my family elders were, literally, slave owners in our ancestral village’. Michael was a ‘contemplative boy’, and he ‘did well on exams’. But since he did not wish to remain tied to the land, he joined the Jesuit church to train to become a priest. Michael never tells me what he studied during his Jesuit training or how it shaped him later. His only comment on those formative years was that ‘the Jesuits were as conservative as my family, upper caste in their outlook and opposed to any progressive social change’. This comment dovetails nicely with David Mosse’s (2012) recent assessment of the conservative, upper-caste character of the Catholic Church in 20th century Tamil Nadu, and how progressive young priests such as Michael were critical to the shift in church politics over the past half century. In sum, it is against his family and church background that we must seek to understand Michael’s self-making process.

32 At the end of his Jesuit training, in the early 1970s, Michael came to a village one hour away from Chaibasa town in Singhbhum district. A Tamil-speaker in an alien land, he struggled at first to cope with the linguistic demands of his pastoral duties. Yet, as a teacher of schoolchildren, he was curious about his wards, ‘their cultural backgrounds, their villages’. Over summer vacations, he ‘went to their homes in the villages and learned about Ho culture and religion’. The Jesuits, much like the Lutherans and Anglicans in Jharkhand, had made inroads into the Ho community near Chaibasa since the late 19th century, and there existed a significant Ho Christian population in rural Singhbhum. Michael was particularly interested in how Christianity came to be ‘inculturated’ or adapted by converts to their own cultural sensibilities.10 The ‘use of sal [Shorea robusta] leaves’ and ‘traditional dance’ in adivasi Christian rituals fascinated him. He contrasts his interest in adivasi culture with the relative apathy of the ‘American and Australian fathers’, who ‘received large packages from their families with tinned food, chocolates, clothes’. As he learned the Ho language, the distance between him and his superiors and peers grew apace. ‘They did not want to learn. They were happy in their own lives. They couldn’t understand why I wanted to do all this’. 33 Michael’s rebellion within the church had only just begun. He began ‘reading about liberation theology in Latin America, and how the church was working there among indigenous peoples to bring social change’. Around this time, Michael decided to ‘take a break’ from his pastoral work and ‘study human rights and Marxism at ISI (Indian Social Institute), Bangalore’. This move marked the beginning of his new life as a ‘defender of human rights in Jharkhand’. This redefinition of the self, against the inherited and imbibed tendencies of family and church, took place vis-à-vis prevailing ‘Indian hierarchies’ and bourgeois notions of ‘self-interest and selfishness’. Returning to southern India after almost a decade, a radicalized Michael came face to face again with upper-caste prejudices within the church. In one instance, he recalls, he complained to his superiors about a Jesuit priest in rural Karnataka, who was also ‘the

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largest landowner in his village’, for employing bonded labor on his fields. His superiors did not take kindly to this kind of activism, and he was ‘almost asked to leave the church if he wanted to pursue these issues’. After this episode, Michael drifted away from the church and decided to take part in ‘the activities of PUCL and the few organizations that worked for human rights then in India’. By the mid-1980s, his estrangement with the Catholic Church was complete, and though he ‘has not left it formally’, he began ‘working more outside it than inside’. 34 Thereafter, ‘fighting for the rights of indigenous peoples’ seemed a logical step during the Jharkhand movement. Michael acquainted himself with the movement’s leaders, especially Ram Dayal Munda, Nirmal Minz, Sourav, and Oscar, and learned the new activist language of indigeneity from them. ‘We agreed’, he says, ‘that adivasi peoples’ struggles are not only limited to Jharkhand or India, but global’. Accordingly, he believes that ‘their rights can be defended by activists across borders’. In a manner reminiscent of recent scholarship on transnational activism (Keck & Sikkink 1998, Escobar 2008), Michael explains to me the need for ‘all-India and international networks of human rights activists who can publicize and campaign against exploitation and violence directed at marginalized peoples’ such as adivasis in India. Since the formation of a separate state of Jharkhand in 2000, Michael has been one of the most visible activists in the state. He regularly hosts Delhi-based intellectuals and activists such as Arundhati Roy, Harsh Mander, and Gautam Navlakha when they visit Ranchi. Like them, he deploys the language of indigeneity to criticize ‘the Indian state and corporations who are dispossessing adivasis of their land today’. Unlike Oscar and Sourav, however, Michael has not turned to indigeneity as an extension of left activism. For him, it is a more straightforward case of ‘finding a way to fight against different kinds of oppression, social, economic, and cultural’. It is quite easy, under the circumstances, to mistake Michael for an American-style liberal fighting for civil liberties within a legalistic framework. But, when I say so to him, he laughs and responds: I would like to change this society and the world root-and-branch. But one has to walk in small steps to achieve large goals. Indigenous peoples are at the bottom of Indian and global society. By making their freedom our cause, we can purify ourselves of the sins we and our ancestors have committed. 35 This politics of purification is, I argue in this paper, crucial to the making indigeneity activist selves in Jharkhand and beyond. By disavowing their privileges of birth and the ordinary temptations of bourgeois life in this manner, a distinctive kind of ‘authentic’11 radical politics emerges outside the ambit of the institutionalized left.

36 This independent left is, of course, hostile to the postcolonial state and the rough and tumble of modern democratic politics, particularly as these have evolved in India after the Emergency of 1975. Vinay Sitapati (2011: 43) has argued recently, 'civil libertarians on the [independent] left… unite in their suspicion of the State, sympathy for a variety of “consciousness’’ other than class, and sharp criticism of party Marxism’. Michael, too, seeks such a politics ‘untainted by the compromises of electoral politics and catering more directly to contemporary middle class anxieties’ (Sitapati 2011: 43). Yet the redemption of the radical bourgeois self in contemporary India sits uneasily with the aspiration for post-materialist adivasi collectives. Consider, for instance, the recent debate on Maoism in India. Michael, like other members of the independent left,12 has criticized the Maoists for ‘forcing poor adivasis to become foot soldiers in their fight

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against the state’. This kind of moral-political positioning permits the indigeneity activist, a special sub-type of the independent left in contemporary India, to claim to be authentic voices of adivasis as they criticize both the state and the Maoists for their predatory ways. But the truth is that the imagined adivasi collectives are non-existent: as Michael says himself, ‘whether it is politicians, Maoists, NGOs, whoever, the adivasis are now divided and fight each other’. The indigeneity activist thus ends up in an unfortunate double bind: seeking a pure, authentic radical self, he—and it is invariably a ‘he’—liberates himself from the mores of bourgeois society even as his futuristic vision of adivasi collectives crashes and burns around him. ‘They must’, as Michael notes wistfully in the end, ‘liberate themselves’.

Activist simplifications and subaltern rejoinders

37 It is commonplace today, following James Scott (1995), to speak of ‘state simplifications’. Yet the evidence presented in this essay points to another kind of ideological politics at work in our world, namely, activist simplifications. As we have seen from the self-narratives of three leading indigeneity activists in contemporary Jharkhand, activist simplifications tend to posit utopian social collectives and visions of the future that serve to justify a particular process of radical bourgeois self-making in postcolonial India. The simplifications, it is asserted in each self-narrative, draw on a lifetime of close observation and activism among those who are being represented. Nonetheless, this kind of heroic representational politics may be confronted, on the one hand, by evidence that ‘the local appropriation and experiences of global discourses of indigeneity can maintain a class system that marginalizes the poorest people’ in Jharkhand (Shah 2010: 32), and on the other hand, by subaltern rejoinders to radical bourgeois representations of them as noble savages. As I have argued elsewhere (Chandra 2013b: 59), it is ‘easy for activists and scholars, forever searching for the coherent primitive subject in modern India, [to] miss out on how…subject communities negotiate their subjecthood’. Despite their best intentions, therefore, indigeneity activists seeking a pure politics, sans the agonizing compromises and contradictions of modern bourgeois existence, may end up as ventriloquists who deny agency and voice to those whose interests they claim to represent (Spivak 1988).

38 As a consequence, subaltern rejoinders to activist simplifications deserve our attention. In rural Jharkhand, Alpa Shah (2010) has pointed to the ways in which these simplifications in the realm of adivasi ritual life, human-animal relations, and migration are upset by everyday socio-material realities that do not fit the ‘savage slot’ well.13 Additionally, we must now come to terms with adivasi youth critiques of the ‘traditional’ gerontocratic order, underwritten by the state in alliance with village elders in rural Jharkhand (Chandra 2013b). Yet what is, arguably, most revealing are contemporary adivasi responses to indigeneity per se. Consider, for example, a recent occasion when Subuddhi, a young Ho engineer based in Chaibasa, tagged me and others on an article that he had posted on Facebook by the sociologist B.K. Roy Burman (2009). Roy Burman argues that ‘[i]t will perhaps be always better to avoid using the… nomenclature ‘Adivasi’ in the tenors of serious academic discourse when dealing with the notion of indigenous groups in the Indian context’. In response, another young Ho man, who goes by the name ‘Roi Raj’ on Facebook, wrote:

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All indian groups are based on linguistic identity no matter how minor that group is in no of population---each language should be honored in referencing n identifying a race--Hi I am a Munda sounds much better and respectful than hi i am a tribal adivasi i live in the wilderness with no clothes i have no internet... 39 When asked about his views, Subuddhi explained himself soon after: ‎ Uday Chandra well as i know there is no such term Adiwasi or Tribe in our dictionary, these terms are given by some outsiders of our society and we are feeling proud without knowing whats its real meaning. Ya i am agree what Roi Raj is saying we should call ourselves as I am a Ho---I am a Munda. …They have termed us as tribes. We have accepted this without questioning and without shame. The term tribal or tribe is humiliating and insulting. We are not challenging social theories evolved by others. This is nothing but social construction. It seems to be sometimes we so called educated people are merely literate. It is a clear manifestation of mental slavery on our part. How long will it take for us. Or i must assume that we do not want to come out from this psychological slavery (italics added). 40 I urge the reader to re-read this block quotation, especially the italicized sections. It is as much a critique of ‘primitivism’ in academic and activist circles, which draws on Roy Burman’s own anthropological critique of indigeneity, as it is a critique of those adivasis whose ‘mental slavery’ causes them to fall prey to a ‘social construction’ such as tribe or indigeneity.14

41 Needless to say, it would surprise Oscar, Sourav, and Michael to know that their reliance on the notions of tribe and indigeneity is ‘humiliating and insulting’ to young, educated Ho men. Indeed, this surprise is, in and of itself, a measure of the vast political gulf that separates activist simplifications from their subjects of representation. The radical bourgeois self’s post-materialist quest for personal authenticity and salvation thus comes directly into conflict with the aspirations and opinions of postcolonial adivasi subjects in Jharkhand today. In this manner, the neat alignment between activist self-making and adivasi futures goes awry. To go beyond Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) well-known thesis on representing subalternity, the speaking subaltern rends asunder the web of activist simplifications that entrap him/her and deepen the existential crisis that produced those simplifications in the first place. 42 However, indigeneity activists’ simplifications constitute an ideology that must attempt to explain everything from the vantage point of the radical bourgeois self. So, if my argument is to be taken to its logical conclusion, challenges to activist simplifications, which heighten the crises of the radical bourgeois self, will lead to a renewed commitment to those very simplifications and reinforce the ideological workings of this variety of primitivism. Recall how Oscar’s failure at mobilizing an unregistered adivasi mineworkers’ union led him to plunge into indigenous politics wholeheartedly. Or how Sourav’s commitment to ecological and cultural conservation has redoubled after the Jharkhand movement became, in his words, ‘co-opted by the state for its own purposes’. It is, therefore, time for us to now acknowledge the irresoluble tensions between the post-materialist agendas of indigeneity activists and the ‘authentic’ victims for whom they speak in contemporary Jharkhand and beyond. After all, ‘authenticity is only an issue for those who yearn for it to complete their own imagined loss’ (Tsing 1999: 8). Just as Thomas Hobbes wrote in Chapter XI of Leviathan of the ‘restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death’, we may justifiably

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speak today of the radical bourgeois quest for ideological purity, inflected here by Christian theological teachings and/or Marxist doctrines, as restless and endless.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Doyle, Dennis M. (2012) ‘The Concept of Inculturation in Roman Catholicism: A Theological.

Consideration’, U.S. Catholic Historian, 30(1), pp. 1-13.

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Escobar, Arturo (2008) Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes, Durham & North Carolina: Duke University Press.

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Gellner, David N. (ed.) (2010) Varieties of Activist Experience: Civil Society in South Asia, New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Gellner, David N. (ed.) (2009) Ethnic Activism and Civil Society in South Asia, New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Ghosh, Kaushik (2006) The Modernity of Primitive India: Adivasi Ethnicity in Jharkhand and the Formation of a National Modern, Ph.D dissertation, Princeton University.

Golomb, Jacob (1995) In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus, London: Routledge.

Inglehart, Ronald F. (2008) ‘Changing Values among Western Publics from 1970 to 2006’, West European Politics, 31(1-2), pp. 130-46.

Kaviraj, Sudipta (2009) ‘Marxism in Translation: Critical Reflections on Indian Radical Thought’, in Richard Bourke & Raymond Geuss (eds.), Political Judgment: Essays for John Dunn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 172-200.

Kuper, Adam (1988) The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion. London: Routledge.

Keck, Margaret E.; Sikkink, Kathryn (1998) Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Laclau, Ernesto (2005) On Populist Reason, London: Verso.

Marchart, Oliver (2007) Post-foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Mosse, David (2012) The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mouffe, Chanta (2006) The Return of the Political, London: Verso.

Nigam, Aditya (2010) ‘The Rumour of Maoism,’ Seminar 607, URL: http://www.indiaseminar.com/ 2010/ 607/607_aditya_nigam.htm.

Rolph-Trouillot, Michel (2003) ‘Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness’, in Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 7-28.

Roy Burman, B.K. (2009) ‘‘Adivasi’—A Contentious Term to Denote Tribes as Indigenous Peoples of India’, South Asia Citizens Web (27 July), URL: http://www.sacw.net/article1066.html.

Rycroft, Daniel; Dasgupta, Sangeeta (2011) ‘Introduction’, The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 1-14.

Schmitt, Carl (2007) The Concept of the Political, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1927].

Scott, James C. (1995) ‘State Simplifications: Nature, Space and People’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 3(3), pp. 191-233.

Shah, Alpa (2010) In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India, Durham: Duke University Press.

Shorter, Aylward (1988) Toward a Theology of Inculturation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.

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Simeon, Dilip (2010) ‘Permanent Spring’, Seminar 607, URL: http://www.indiaseminar.com/ 2010/607/ 607_dilip_simeon.htm.

Singer, Jefferson A.; Blagov, Pavel (2004) ‘The Integrative Function of Narrative Processing: Autobiographical Memory, Self-Defining Memories, and the Life Story of Identity’, in Denise R. Beike, James M. Lampinen, Douglas A. Behrend (eds.), The Self and Memory: Studies in Self and Identity, New York: Psychology Press, pp. 117-38.

Sitapati, Vinay (2011) ‘What Anna Hazare’s Movement and India’s New Middle Classes Say about Each Other’, Economic and Political Weekly, 46(30), pp. 39-44.

Spivak, Gayatri.C. (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London: Macmillan, pp. 271-316.

Taylor, Charles (1992) The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press.

Tsing, Anna L. (1999) ‘Notes on culture and natural resource management’, Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics, Working Paper 99-4, URL: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/92f9h7ct.

NOTES

1. This and every other name in this paper has been changed to protect the identities of my interlocutors. I do not believe that naming them publicly is necessary to articulate my argument here. Moreover, naming them runs the risk of threatening their activist careers, which is, of course, very far from my intentions in writing this paper. 2. In this paper, I use the terms ‘tribal’ and ‘adivasi’ interchangeably, but consistently prefer the latter since this is a self-description. For a succinct discussion of the politics of these terms as well as ‘indigenous’, see Rycroft and Dasgupta 2011. 3. I use ‘middle class’ and ‘bourgeois’ as synonyms in this paper. This is not only standard lay usage, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, but also the academic consensus from the days of Marx and Tocqueville. 4. On post-materialism as a political-cultural tendency among middle classes worldwide to seek fulfillment beyond physical security and basic consumption needs, see Inglehart 2008. 5. On ‘primitivism’ in Indian law and society, see Chandra 2013a; for a global context, see Kuper 1988. 6. At the same time, much like Narmada anti-dam activists, their ‘middle-class leadership [was] packaged into the familiar narrative of sacrifice where a privileged, elite person ‘gives up’ his or her privileges and goes to awaken and mobilize the oppressed masses. This narrative form has direct continuity with the form of the Indian nationalist biography of the nation’s leaders: the unconscious, pre-political phase of life, the coming into awareness and the eventual assumption of leadership in mobilizing the people against the state’ (Ghosh 2006: 69). 7. These oral histories were collected by me over several meetings with these and other indigeneity activists in Ranchi. I have chosen three oral histories that, I believe, represent a wide range of activist backgrounds in Jharkhand. Besides, these are the stories of the three best- known activists who were not born in the state. I have known all of them personally since I began fieldwork in Jharkhand in 2008. Indeed, I have worked—and continue to work—closely with them on a range of political and intellectual matters. When published online, I shall certainly share this critique of their work much as I share my other published articles with them. 8. Ho is the adivasi language spoken in Chaibasa and adjoining parts of what was then a unified Singhbhum district.

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9. Of the other two activists, one is a priest and continues to live on church premises, whereas the other writes professionally and applies for domestic and international grants to sustain himself. 10. On ‘inculturation’, see Shorter 1988 and Doyle 2012. As Pope John Paul II himself put it in the Redemptoris Missio of 1990, inculturation for the Catholic church meant ‘[t]he intimate transformation of authentic cultural values through their integration in Christianity and the insertion of Christianity in the various human cultures’. 11. By ‘authenticity’, I am drawing on European existentialist philosophers’ notion of a true inner self that can realize its innate needs and desires by overcoming the sociocultural and historical obstacles placed before it. A politics of purism is necessarily built into the existentialist search for authenticity, and hence, the relationship to indigeneity as the basis for a purer, more ethical politics of the self. On authenticity as a philosophical and ethical ideal, see Taylor 1992 and Golomb 1995. 12. See, for example, Simeon 2010 and Nigam 2010. The latter writes of ‘[Maoists] vicariously playing out their revolutionary fantasies through the lives of adivasis, while the people actually dying in battle are almost all adivasis’. 13. Alpa Shah (2010) has not, however, identified any indigeneity activists as this paper does. In this sense, the paper may be profitably read as complementing, indeed supporting, the thesis advanced by Shah in her book. 14. It is patronizing to ask, as some readers may, whether these young adivasi men are authentic representatives of their communities. To ask such a question is to yield once again to the dubious politics of authenticity in which indigenous activism is mired. I have, nonetheless, written elsewhere on the wider social context of youth critiques of ‘traditional’ adivasi society, and how these are silenced or ignored by middle-class academics in India (Chandra 2013b).

ABSTRACTS

How and why did a labor union organizer from Goa, a former Naxalite student cadre from West Bengal and a Jesuit priest from Tamil Nadu end up as spokespersons for adivasi rights in contemporary Jharkhand? What caused their discourse to shift from tribal/adivasi to indigeneity? Might indigeneity be an ideology for them? To answer these questions, this paper analyzes the oral histories of three leading indigenous rights activists in Jharkhand. In these self- narratives, I focus on how these middle-class activists have crafted their political ethics with reference to ‘indigenous peoples’ in India and beyond. I argue that ‘indigeneity’ functions in Jharkhandi activist discourses as a marker of a distinctive post-materialist turn in bourgeois politics. The defense of the indigenous speaks to deep-seated existential crises for these activists, who seek to transcend the modern domains of state and capital and to locate an authentic space of critique in imagined adivasi collectivities.

INDEX

Keywords: indigeneity, tribes in India, social activism, cultural capital, bourgeois politics, radical politics

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AUTHOR

UDAY CHANDRA

Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen

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The Practice of Custom in India’s Recognition of Forest Right’s Act: Case Studies from Kalahandi, Odisha

Matthew B. Shutzer

Introduction

1 This article investigates the category ‘custom’ as it is defined in the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers Act, 2006, also known as the Indian Forest Rights Act (hereafter FRA) and the manner in which this particular concept of custom is used as a mode of developmental argumentation in Kalahandi, Odisha. By custom the FRA refers to a legal notification of customary entitlements to forest land claimed by members of Scheduled Tribe (ST), Scheduled Caste and Other Backward Caste (OBC) communities, though ST petitioners predominate as the FRA’s practical beneficiaries. 1 Custom is here understood as proprietary and usufruct rights previously unrecognized by the Government of India. This retroactive recognition of rights assigns forest land and forest resources on the basis of a claim to a particular political community, thereby redefining forest land that had been previously governed under regional variants of administrative stewardship. As the preamble to the FRA explains: The forest rights on their (Scheduled Tribe and Other Traditional Forest Dweller) ancestral lands and habitats were not adequately recorded in the consolidation of state forests in the colonial as well as in independent India resulting in historical injustices to the forest dwelling scheduled tribes and other forest dwellers who are integral to the very sustainability and survival of the forest ecosystem.2 2 The sense of ‘custom’ described here denotes a political economic category strongly associated with both historical recognition and redistributive justice. Yet significantly, the final line in the above passage refers to a specific contemporary concern, the state of the environment, largely absent from previous movements to provide proprietary security to peasant households. The forest, as an agroecological space of diverse livelihood practices,3 represents an important comparative divergence from ‘land to

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the tiller’ movements which earlier engaged with problems of landlordism and the rents of settled agriculture.4 Instead of solely articulating concerns over the social relations embedded within the distribution of agricultural rents, as ‘land to the tiller’ movements did for settled agricultural spaces, the FRA describes a form of both economic and social reproduction that is contingent upon the reproduction of the ‘forest ecosystem’, which the framers of the FRA assert in fact depends on the use of the forest by forest dwelling communities. The significance here lies in the legal articulation of a co-constructed sense of ecological spaces (Agrawal & Sivaramakrishnan 2000, Latour 1993), pushing back against conservationist claims of forest resources as necessarily external to social interaction and therefore in need of reservation by the state. Yet as a caveat to this human centered vision of forest ecology, and as the primary site of conflict in the interpretation of the FRA which I wish to describe in this essay, customary entitlements to the forest and the environmental responsibilities that these entitlements imply are not construed merely in terms of the recognition of a previously unrecognized version of these properties and practices, but reify and reassemble a conception of customary indigenous practices 5 that define the criteria for how indigenous communities are intended to act upon their environment. The conceptual problem I will repeatedly return to in the following pages is how the normative use of community, embedded within the language of the FRA, seeks to represent forest dwelling communities as environmental stewards dependent, in largely equal measure across households, on the land.6

3 Leaving the redistributive claims of the FRA for the time being, I would like to briefly consider what the constitution of indigenous custom, and therefore a particular reading of indigenous identity, entails. In Partha Chatterjee’s dichotomous formulation of populations and citizens, the heterogeneous spaces and identities of ‘populations’ are codified through developmental strategies that permit members of these groups recourse to individual rights premised on collective identification. Heterogeneity here gains a semblance of political-legal legibility (Sivaramakrishnan 2012) anchored in a set of social relations between fixed communities. By applying Chatterjee’s concept of ‘populations,’ I understand the project of custom under the FRA as a codification of indigenous communities in relation to an abstract space of forest resources, to other communities living within these spaces that are defined as non-indigenous, and to legal reservations that provide the basis for developmental claims made to the state (Ahuja 2009). The ‘indigenous slot’ (Karlsson 2003), which can be read alongside Chatterjee as utilizing custom to enumerate indigenous actors as a condition for resource entitlement to indigenous groups, maintains its salience beyond local or regional politics. Claims to indigeneity of course today are also interpenetrated by a set of global understandings forwarded by activists, non-governmental organizations and states for constituting the historical parameters of indigeneity in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America (Hale 2002). Though the category of indigeneity has a complex history particular to India,7 there are multiple discursive convergences between regional instantiations mobilized by activists and developmental strategists concerned with the protection of these groups. The FRA is a site of discursive confluence for both the national and global trajectories by which indigeneity is represented in the present.8 In a general sense, these forms of discourse submit histories of agricultural subsistence, foraging and non-industrial livelihood practices, land alienation, and ecologically ‘low- impact’ consumption as signs of how indigenous groups labor in the forest. While I do not mean to diminish the specific historical processes that have established

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comparatives between distinct indigenous groups throughout India and the world, my work intends to highlight what this identity comes to signify in a particular social context. The case studies that I submit from Kalahandi, I argue, begin to suggest how political horizons formed through the legal practices of the FRA might be studied more locally, and the manner in which a concept such as ‘indigenous custom’ forms a type of political articulation for indigenous groups, their advocates and government officials that both constructs and redeploys enumerative categories in dynamic ways. Here, my method is to not presume a primary relationship between communities and the state, or communities and civil society activists; but to understand how the law intervenes within the intersections of political economy and political representation and what this might tell us about the forces that construct communities within developmental practices.

The Spatial Distribution of Indigenous Claims

4 In Lanjigarh, the district of Kalahandi where I conducted my fieldwork from 2008 to 2012, Khondadivasis represent 55% of the population, and members of various Scheduled Caste communities represent 25%. Within these two groups, there are significant differences in landholding and livelihoods dependent upon factors such as cultivable land areas, access to wage labor opportunities, household size, relationships to panchayat members, and the type of forest administration in a given village. Long standing relationships to regional non-governmental organizations and the Orissa Tribal Empowerment and Livelihoods Programme (OTELP) also assists in this differentiation across and within villages. Between communities, Khonds typically practice a form of shifting cultivation in the forested hills that run through the district, while Scheduled Caste groups tend to cultivate in medium and lower-lying areas, and have historically engaged in commercial activities like distilling. These distinctions, both ecological and social, shed light on the ‘community’ based logic used for mapping forest spaces, a practice I attempt to assess in this section.

5 Under the FRA, both individuals and villages are allowed to claim tracts of forest land for either homestead (meaning deeds to houses on land formerly administered by the Forest or Revenue Department) or cultivable plots if they are able to prove three generations or seventy-five year sustained occupancy. Evidence that can be used to substantiate these claims include voting records, ration cards, oral histories, and any tangible improvements to the land in question, such as permanent residential structures or irrigation catchments. In addition to the oral interviews that comprise my ethnographic evidence, for this study I have reviewed FRA applications, lists of approved pattas (land deeds) returned to villages, and patta lists kept by district government offices. These documents demonstrate that approximately 50% of FRA applications were approved for settlement in Lanjigarh, though not all of those approved ever received official settlement records or had their settlements duly recorded by local officials. At the time of my research in 2012, and as testimonies below will demonstrate, the three largest non-governmental organizations working in Lanjigarh to register FRA pattas had assisted only Khond communities to file applications, even though members of SC communities would have been eligible to do so. This was largely justified by a sense among NGO field workers that the district government, and in particular representatives from the Forest Department who help

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review FRA applications, would not approve requests from SC communities as they were viewed to have a lesser customary claim to forest resources than Khond applicants, and would also be less likely to observe conservation strictures given their presumed historical inclination towards commercial rather than agricultural livelihoods.9 6 The social distribution of eligibility also has a spatial referent within groups that identify themselves as Khonds. One of my first experiences working in Lanjigarh highlighted how distinctions between Khond households could not only be read as differential access to resources, but, in light of the implementation of the FRA, differential access to an ‘authoritative’indigenous claim. These differences were particularly visible when unexpected ecological problems, such as monsoon flooding, exposed how nominally similar agroecological areas were comprised of multiple and often overlapping productive interests. In the village of Taliguda in September of 2008, for instance, an infrastructure project inaugurated under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) to build an approach road had been halted due to heavy monsoon flooding. Even by October, construction had not picked up again and villagers in Taliguda were unsure when contractors would return from the district capital to hire laborers for the work. During early September, flooding from the hills that ring the village had washed away crops and paddy bunds from medium and low-lying fields, a threat that is often averted through a system of small check-dams and diligent bund repairing labored over in the winter and early summer months. This season the flooding had been particularly strong. Surveying the damage, Jubrash Majhi, a Khond elder in Taliguda whose family farms ten acres of irrigated lowland paddy, explained to me that the increased frequency of the flooding was due to the irresponsible felling of sal trees by villagers in the upland hamlet of Carnomunda. Even though he had family in Carnomunda, Jubrash told, the community there was not thinking of how their actions affected the village in the valley below them. Taliguda Khonds had access to forest land for shifting cultivation too, though the hills in which they practiced dongar, the local name for the swidden plantation of small pulses and millets, were at a greater distance from the village and were more closely monitored by the Forest Department. Carnomunda, on the other hand, was not connected by road to the block and the hills that they cleared for dongar were codified as Village Forest, giving the village greater say over how to utilize the land. 7 Like Taliguda, Carnomunda is an all Khond village without a Scheduled Caste or Other Backward Caste minority. Taliguda is a much larger village, comprising over forty households, while Carnomunda has only 18. Taliguda also has large swathes of flat land long used for paddy cultivation, and it receives the bulk of the runoff from the hills, making even land of a medium elevation fertile for multiple harvest cycles. Carnomunda, on the other hand, is the archetypal image of the forested adivasi village. Narrow muddy trails through thick jungle convey day laborers, traders, and sometimes school children to and from the village. The only livestock raised here are goats and chickens, as villagers have no use for bullocks to plough their steep and stony dongar plots. Only six households cultivate small plots of paddy in upland areas that are relatively flat, while the majority of households primarily rely on three to four acres of dongar. At the time of my research in the village in 2008, the hills that press against Carnomunda’s boundary were stripped bare of shrub and tree growth on the south side and yet were green and cultivated on the eastern. The southern areas look down on Taliguda. Carnomunda villagers told me that in three or four years the barren slopes

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would be green again. It was unfair therefore, I was told in a village meeting regarding the settlement of FRA pattas, for Taliguda villagers to complain of deforestation when their village benefitted not only from irrigation but from government subsidies for paddy. Carnomunda, they told me, received none of these benefits, not only because of the topography of the land surrounding the village but because the government had no schemes for improving or assisting dongar cultivation. Indeed, the Forest Department did everything they could to suggest to the villagers that their practices were illegal, even if they fell under the nominal sanctuary of the Village Forest designation.10 If water run-off increased due to intensified shifting cultivation on the southern slopes of the hills, this was merely a consequence of Taliguda’s geographical position relative to its smaller and more economically insecure upland neighbor. 8 In a similar meeting I observed in Taliguda, however, villagers there told a different story. Gungura Majhi, another relatively large landholder from Taliguda, explained to the NGO employee facilitating FRA claims there that Carnomunda was technically a settlement of Taliguda and therefore meetings regarding forest settlement should, in his view, be conducted with both villages considered as one. Since the watershed was linked by irrigation channels and because many Carnomunda villagers depended on seasonal wage work in Taliguda’s rice fields, it only made sense to look at the watershed as a single area of mutually agreed upon tenurial claims. Villagers in Carnomunda resisted these overtures, however, arguing that if forest recognition was coming to the watershed it was important for Carnomunda villagers to secure the ten acres guaranteed to individual claimants under the FRA, rather than to openly compete with Taliguda for prized dongar land that could be claimed just as easily by outsiders with similarly vague appeals to customary occupancy. One villager in Carnomunda raised the point that since areas of the village dongar remain uncultivated during the fallow cycle, what would stop a villager in Taliguda from claiming a plot of that land as his or her own? Surely there were no marks upon the soil that would denote the low- growth shrub and sal as necessarily the property of a Carnomunda claimant. 9 This particularly acrimonious dispute was made all the worse by the conservation minded NGO facilitator siding with Taliguda, resulting in a delay of the patta applications for the entire watershed and an ultimate rejection of all dongar land, for which both villages had applied, by the District Level Committee (DLC) convened to review FRA applications. Yet this event points us towards a broader history of mapping claims in Kalahandi and the relationship between development and territorial demarcation. Although further work on this subject is needed to grasp how earlier developmental schemes under the Indian Forest Department have altered patterns of resource use by developing unique tenurial arrangements, a few general examples can demonstrate how Lanjigarh’s local history of unmapped forest land fits into a larger regional history of Kalahandi. 10 Kalahandi has long been subject to varying representations as a marginal agricultural space. Its boundaries have been re-mapped three times since 1947. New districts have been carved out of ‘greater Kalahandi’ in order to reflect long-standing revenue arrangements based on older zamindari structures and to re-channel development funding into regional based projects with targeted demographics (NABCONS Orissa Regional Office, 2007: 8-14). More generally, the map of western Odisha was significantly redrawn in the territorial disputes of the 1930s and 1940s between estate holders and tributary princes to reflect new demands for mineral resources and timber

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in the late colonial economy (Prasad 2009). An early 20th century British geologist surveying Kalahandi’s soil types wrote an op-ed piece in the Times of India deriding the district’s lack of infrastructure and condemning it to an ‘obscurity’ from which only geological prospecting could save it (1903). As late as the 1990s, Indian journalists used the term ‘Kalahandi Syndrome’ to describe the regressive incomes and periodic food shortages that continued within the district despite significant developmental intervention.11 11 As a former princely state, Kalahandi’s Maharaja, in the district capital of Bhawanipatna, administered over five major zamindaris, or revenue estates. Over the course of the 19th century many of the tenures under the estate holders were reorganized to reflect patterns of arable land holding in the deltaic regions of Odisha and southern Bengal (Pati 1999a). Many Khonds, who at one point participated in plains agriculture, adopted new structures of caste hierarchy while others were pushed further into the forests. The British delineated two major types of Khonds: KutiaKhonds who lived in garjhats or jungle villages, and plains-dwelling Khonds who, according to one ethnologist, had over time acquired a ‘tincture of Hinduism’ (Hunter 1909: 280). Much of the conflict over settled agrarian spaces during this period, particularly in Kalahandi’s lowlands along the present day Rayagada border, can be attributed to the migration of Sambalpuri cultivating classes, known as Kultas, who were able to use lineage networks, land grants and mercantile credit to establish themselves in arable parts of the Central Provinces and southwestern Odisha (Senapati 1980: 35-52). 12 At the time of independence, Kalahandi was connected to Raipur in the west and Puri in the east by a single rail line completed in 1883 (Pati 1999a: 348). Beginning in the 1930s, the last Maharaja of Kalahandi attempted to establish an independent province by joining the former territories of the princely Central Provinces; yet in 1948 the district joined the Congress government in Odisha. The estate system, by which the Maharaja had ruled, was left structurally intact many years thereafter, despite legislation and political pressure to dismantle it. As the postcolonial state inherited many of the revenue structures of the British administration, the problem of titling forest land to forest cultivators, who had now presumably been living in these much smaller and estate bounded forests for over a century, was left largely unaddressed. Revenue maps from the early 20th century show Kalahandi’s interior forests and hills under singular groupings of Reserve Forest, Village Forest or zamindari. Khond settlements and their agricultural plots were administered for revenue purposes by local collectors who often assessed lands based on approximated seed capacity (Senapati 1980). Long-term ownership was tenuous and rates of out-mortgaging, or land sale to non-Khond communities, were high (Deo 2011, Pati 2007b). In the case of forest enclosures, communities were regarded as encroachers of state-owned resources rather than property owners with customary entitlements to forest resources. The often politicized bureaucratic distinctions between Forest Department administered areas and Revenue Department administered areas further complicated attempts at surveying forest land well into the 1960s.

The Legal Basis of Custom

13 The non-recognition of customary tenures under revenue settlement in Kalahandi are further illustrated by colonial precedents of forest reservation. This is not to say that

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the category of customary occupancy was absent from the political economic thought of colonial administrators, but that the priority given to reserving forest land as public domain dominated early forest policy making. In his brief history of the 1878 Indian Forest Rights Act, Ramachandra Guha outlines the legal-theoretical bases for distinguishing forms of forest property within the emergent discipline of ‘scientific’ forestry. One of the chief aims of this discipline was the rational management of forest ecosystems through a prioritization of the marketable value of forest biomass (Guha 1990, Rangaranjan 1996). Usufruct land rights within forested areas, championed as they were by the Revenue Department, were fought against by Forest Department interests concerned with the scientific management of specific tree species and the revenue needs articulated in the legal architecture for department sponsored resource extraction.12 In princely states like Kalahandi, these resources were further opened to the discretion of ruling families and decisions taken by the Court of Wards. Legal regard for forest dwelling communities was further influenced by powerful local branches of the Imperial Forest Service, the precursor of the Indian Forest Service, whose capacity to protect the forest was, according to some critiques, undermined by foresters’ own participation in illicit logging.13

14 Contrary to state directed natural resource management, the category of customary entitlements presents a distinct set of arguments concerning past labor or sustained occupancy as conditions for entitlements that states should not justly expropriate.14 In his study of colonial Bengal for instance, Andrew Sartori has shown how the Bengal government developed administrative procedures for recognizing customary land entitlements based on the principle of initial clearing (Sartori 2011). Sartori’s case looks at the Sunderbans and the extension of wetland cultivation brought about by state sponsored land tenure for cultivators willing to settle on the arable ‘frontier.’ This legal articulation of custom was premised on a Lockean relationship between property ownership and labored improvements to land. Custom did not relate to group notions of territorial identity or homeland, but to a productivist relation between property ownership and labor that was seen to benefit both the government and the cultivator. The legal recognition of custom, as envisioned by the Bengal government in Sartori’s case, demonstrates the relationship between a productivisit logic of property and forms of liberal governance as a means of meeting developmental ends. 15 For the purposes of this study, institutional theory regarding proprietary holdings represents perhaps the most influential reformulation of liberal property rights for indigenous claims to custom.15 Institutional approaches that emphasize local knowledge and decentralized property ownership have argued that local people are, within specific contexts of property security, potentially more responsible resource managers than government administrators. These approaches have also shown how extra-local disciplining systems, such as the market-based cooperative sale of forest biomass, as earlier attempted under the Joint Forest Management Program (JFM), fail to to adequately conserve forest resources because they do not necessarily strengthen community decision making capacities. Property centered interventions, however, are said to put the power back into the hands of the community, requiring users to deal directly with conservation and allocation issues through collective problem solving. Although under programs like JFM the market is seen as a way to rationalize local resource use, under campaigns for property security the market is localized in the sense that user groups with a direct stake in the ‘sustainability’ of a given resource are

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viewed as more likely to respond to resource pressures by making positive adjustments to extraction. Decentralization, in this sense, is an argument for community resources, like forests, to be transferred to the control of community institutions, though with ownership often conceived of at the level of the household or the individual. Property is here both a title to livelihood security and a guarantee of sound resource management (Agrawal & Ostrom 2001b).16 In much of the literature from the institutional economists writing on agrarian communities, these dual ends are legitimated through appeals to decentralization’s efficacy in improving sustainable resource use (conceptualized in terms of partial conservation and multi-generational utility) and economic solvency, meaning access to the material means of livelihood reproduction. 16 This theoretical position lends support to instrumentalist notions of indigenous community based institutions, articulating a particular developmentalist vision of labor organization, ‘scientific’ cultivation methods, and liberal property relations. Because these ideal-typical models of a community based institution cannot be said to be historically located in any particular context, the institutional theory described here suggests that local institutions need to be provided with the ‘scientific’ tools in order to respond positively to the aforementioned resource pressures (even if, for indigenous communities, it is claimed that these ‘scientific’ tools did exist at some point though they are now unable to properly function for a variety of reasons). The perceived ‘productive’ role of community based institutions is therefore conceived before the institutions themselves can be said to exist. This conception of a community based institution articulates a relationship between agriculturalists and natural resources which subsumes other determining relationships, such as local markets for firewood or rises in wages for day construction work, that may significantly impact so-called collective priorities of maintaining or stabilizing a resource pool. The entitlements argued for by proponents of the FRA frequently invoke this dual productivist logic of the imagined community institution: improvements to the natural resource pool as a condition of developmental improvement. 17 As a corrective of land based historical injustices committed against forest dwelling groups, the FRA reflects institutional theory backwards to suggest that unrecognized community resource use in the past legitimates official translations of customary rights in the present. Indigenous communities are depicted as legitimate bearers of these rights because of a presupposed commitment to subsistence forms of responsible ecological stewardship, reflecting, though in an apparently positive light, one of the many 19th century colonial ethnological tropes depicting adivasis as inherent conservationists.17 District officials and non-governmental organizations charged with verifying FRA claims are thereby engaged in a type of forensic cartography to re-map indigenous spaces: reclaiming invisible borders by examining dusty voter registration records and ration cards, collecting oral histories, searching for water catchments buried in the forest. These items are the relevant signifiers for legal projections of territorial identification which FRA claimants can use to demonstrate their sustained occupancy on a given tract of forest land. In searching for and ultimately presenting such territorial markers, adivasi communities and their advocates project a stable form of agricultural reproduction centered on land ownership and suggestive of a uniform sharing of a given resource pool.

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Identifying Differences in the Forest Economy: Case Studies

18 The spatial distribution of agricultural settlement in Lanjigarh’s forests demonstrates the diversity of socio-economic relationships that determine the context in which land based politics occur. The community institutional approach I have described above pays little attention to the social contexts within which claims to custom are made by primarily focusing on the relationship between insecure property holders and the forest. Here, I attempt to explain how these dynamics function in relation to social and spatial attributes of Kalahandi.

19 Spread throughout the Lanjigarh block in upland settlements, Khond villages typically range from twenty to forty households, though two villages in the block have over one hundred households within their official village boundaries. Villages with larger populations are typically closer to the road, while smaller hamlets demonstrate more socioeconomic homogeneity and are often located in higher elevations or areas with more intensive forest cover. Larger villages are demographically heterogeneous, using small footpaths or tributary streams to internally demark the living arrangements of Khond adivasis and the Scheduled Caste (SC) or Other Backward Caste (OBC) communities that share these spaces. 20 Rindho Majhi, a member of the Scheduled Caste community upland Sindhibata, described to me his fears concerning new FRA land deeds that were given to individual adivasi households in the village. As I was working in Sindhibata with an NGO on registering FRA applications, Rindho expressed a sense of alienation towards our project. He explained that although his family does not cultivate in the forest, they do gather timber and forest produce that can be sold at monthly markets. He feared that the new property regime would exclude him from this vital economic activity. 21 Rindho is a sharecropper, spending most of his year re-bunding, tilling and harvesting a neighbor’s paddy land. The neighbor owns eight acres of paddy in the village, a substantial amount, and is an influential member of Rindho’s own community, the sunddhis. Lanjigarhi sunddhis are often scorned by indigenous activists for trading country liquor, a source of widespread debt amongst Khonds. NGO workers in Lanjigarh frequently describe members of the sunddhi community as outsiders. Yet Khonds and sunddhis move within each other’s social practices when sharing harvest festivals in the same ritually demarcated spaces and by participating in the joint marketing of goods like sal leaf plates. Although the uneven distribution of resources between Khonds and sunddhis predates the introduction of the FRA in Sindhibata, an interpretation of the Act that would restrict patta claims to Khond households threatened to institutionalize this inequity in novel ways. According to how the District Forest Department had interpreted the Act in other villages, technically landless groups like the sunddhis were expected to be denied proprietary claims. Under the new mandate, sunndhis would potentially be restricted from cultivating on forest plots or accessing the newly mapped village forest without obtaining consent from the Khond community. What would this consent entail? By identifying an equivalence between indigeneity and custom, FRA implementation was thought to effectively remake social access to natural resources according to a communitarian logic. Whether or not this would actually hold for Sindhibata, Rindho’s case demonstrates how the political utility of the Act was understood by those individuals who were shut out from its benefits. Further, it allows

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us to see how plans to decentralize resource governance are foundationally contingent upon the processes that facilitate decentralization. Howsoever democratic community controls over resources may appear to be, it is clear that the state is defining resource distribution selectively. Within a context of unequal beneficiaries with variable facilities for contesting the role of FRA implementers, the facilitator or the implementing agency ultimately holds the tools for how that power is distributed. 22 In Lanjigarh’s villages, government officials and non-governmental organizations count three, and sometimes four, land types based on gradation. These roughly correspond to low, medium and high lands. Low lands are paddy growing lands. These areas are stacked against waterways, or are terraced or bunded with mud and sand which typically hold out water for approximately two harvest cycles.18 Medium land is land that is naturally irrigated by run-off from the hills and where grains like mandia or ragi are often grown. High lands are also called dongar lands and sometimes podu lands. Dongar lands are areas on Lanjigarh’shills where the forest has been cut or burned away and in its place Khonds now grow staple crops likes mandia or ragi. Dongar lands are where shifting cultivation occurs. Here, in plots of one to three acres typically, Khond households cultivate for approximately three years before moving to another area of the forest contained within the recognized limits of the village’s customary boundary. In the new location, the forest growth is burned away so that the ash from sal and other non fruit-bearing trees fertilize the soil. In the old plot, the forest is expected to regenerate. Depending on distribution between forest space and a cultivating population, this cycle can conceivably consist of up to four plots per family, though in Lanjigarh, most families have only one or two. For Khonds, dongar cultivation is a complex investment. Natural predators and pests require cultivating families to build make-shift shelters high up in the hills to watch their ripening crops as harvest cycles approach. They must also compete with neighboring villages, official foresters and illegal timber contractors that have competing visions of how dongar land ought to be valued and used. 23 Khonds are mostly subsistence agriculturalists, though agricultural wage labor also occupies significant labor time during planting and harvesting cycles for many households.19 In my study of twenty-five villages in Lanjigarh, I found that 80% of surveyed households felt confident that they could secure enough food production, either through harvesting their own crops or through agricultural wage labor, to feed their families for at least six months of the year. Of the 80%, approximately 60% are landholding, cultivating one to two acres of mostly non-irrigated land. The remaining months of necessary wages are made-up through non-agricultural wage labor, migratory labor, small commercial activity in regional markets, government rations or food subsidies and credit.20 Families also depend on larger landholders within the village for grain loans and gifts. In villages at lower elevations, and thus geographically closer to upper caste villages and semi-urban commercial centers, there are greater opportunities for year-round sharecropping, as better irrigated paddy fields owned by upper caste families permit multiple harvests in a single year. Khonds are also more closely linked to labor contractors in the low-land and generally more aware of block infrastructural development projects from which they or another family member might derive a wage. While land ownership is lower here than in more remote, upland villages, there is more arable land overall and thus more dependable sources of income. For Khond villages where arable land is much scarcer, regional migration is routinized. Young Khond men travel west to Raipur, farther west to Delhi and south to Kerala,

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where contractors have promised construction work, decent wages, housing and phone cards. Men travel these longer distances while women find coolie work at home building bridges across flooded roadways and digging intake wells for internationally funded water projects. 24 These dynamics are captured in a short story of the forest narrated to me during a harvest festival in Talbora, Lanjigarh’s largest village. An older member of the village explained that two Forest Department officials had come to the village during the recent wedding of his son. They had demanded money from him for his family’s illegal cultivation in the forest. According to the officials, the money would be used to regenerate the bamboo coppices that Talbora Khonds had cut down, and also to protect his family from potential eviction from their dongar lands. The man said he refused to pay and that he scolded the officials for not understanding the futility of conservation in Talbora. The population had grown twice in his lifetime, with Talbora absorbing two neighboring villages during a failed land terracing project sponsored by a Swiss NGO in the 1980s. He said the soil for dongar cultivation had become weak due to shortened fallow periods and that, during heavy rains, crops and sediment washed down from the hills and into the village. Now, his son earned more from sharecropping near the district capital than from cultivating his own one acre plot of dongar. 25 When speaking of the new FRA land titles approved by the Block Office, the older man explained that neither he nor the government officials even knew where the newly titled plots were, as no one from the government had ever come to map the village forest with the FRA applicants. This was a widespread problem throughout Lanjigarh. Responding to my focus on FRA land, he laughed and said he would just as soon sell his land back to the government or to a private mining company if he could, as he had heard Khonds living closer to Rayagada had done in 2004.21 After all, if his son could make more money in wages as a farmhand outside Talbora, his proprietary right in forest land proved less important than other opportunities for wage work. 26 As we can see from this brief example, forests, while existing as a generalized site of laboring activity, are valued in relation to other income generating opportunities available to specific actors. Maintenance of common resources is, I would argue, as dependent on preexisting social institutions and government oversight as the market forces which shape how and when a common resource is used. For example, in a lower lying village like Punjam, where year round wage labor is available on upper-caste paddy land, forests figure prominently in discourses of adivasi identity but not in terms of their centrality to household income. In more interior, heterogeneous villages where SC and OBC communities want greater access to forests for foraging or even cultivating activities, forests serve as both a discourse of identity and as a central site of livelihood reproduction for Khond communities. 27 In a similar sense, resource pressures within village watersheds can be seen to undergird differential conceptions of what it means to qualify as a member of a Khond community and also, in regard to developmental schemes that are enumeration based like the FRA, the relative importance of legal recognition. For instance, on the far western side of Sindhibata there is a small hamlet of five Khond households cornered between two reserve forests. The five households are made up of five brothers and their families. They live next to what appears to be the most heavily cultivated part of Sindhibata’s watershed and are divided from the larger villages of Sahajpada to the east and Sindhibhata to the south by a small river and dense jungle. Although they are

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secluded and their village is often overlooked by the local NGO working in the area, the brothers explain that they prefer it that way. 28 In a meeting with the NGO facilitating FRA claims in the watershed, the brothers told me that they try not to practice shifting cultivation because it brings trouble from the Forest Department and that they harvest enough from cultivating paddy and ragi in low and medium land by the river. One brother raises goats and sets them out to graze on land near the Sahajpada border. Sometimes, he said, people from Sahajpada bring bullocks onto his grazing land that break apart the soil and eat up all the small grasses. 29 When I asked if they were going to apply for the FRA when the forest activists came back to the village the following season, the eldest brother told me that they would only apply if they had to. I asked him what he meant by this and why it was not important to him to seek out the activists for recognition of his land. He explained that they would only apply if people in Sindhibata applied for forest land that did not belong to them. He said that once villagers in Sindhibata get forest land they destroy the forest for dongar and that his family depended on the forest for tubers, fruits and other plants. Because the forest had been denuded in the areas directly surrounding Sindhibata, he told me, the Sindhibata villagers now came to his section of the forest to look for the mahua flower to prepare the alcohol that is central to Khond ritual life. If forest land was given to Sindhibata for agricultural plots, no one would have any control over which forests were left ‘wild’ and which were burned for dongar. Even their ability to ferment mahua would suffer. As a result he advised his brothers that they should apply for the FRA only to make counterclaims against Sindhibata’s Khonds. The law would then serve the purpose of demarcating territory between the Khonds; denying one community’s livelihood claims to promote another community’s vision of forest conservation.

Conclusion

30 The brief case studies I have submitted for this essay have been intended to convey a sense of the diversified forms of livelihood reproduction and resource use in the Lanjigarh block. I have used this notion of diversification, or heterogeneity, to think about ‘custom’ as a political economic category with a distinctive local trajectory in the lives of cultivators for whom the FRA offers potential benefits. These case studies, of course, omit much in regard to popular politics in Lanjigarh, though I have proceeded in this way in order to focus specifically on disjunctures between how the FRA envisions customary practices of Khond groups and the present state of livelihood practices that I have witnessed through my research.

31 While more work will be needed to develop a comprehensive picture of how Lanjigarh’s agrarian economy fits within a wider world of migratory labor practices and informal wage labor, this essay has begun to consider how the diversification of livelihoods in Lanjigarh destabilize notions of a static ‘custom.’ Available scholarship on the FRA, by focusing primarily on the relationship between pre-defined ‘forest dwelling communities’ and the state, often uncritically reproduces the economic and social categories presented in the law. While this is frequently a strategic concern, that is to highlight the economic vulnerability of these communities and to pose a critique to expropriatory state-led industrial development, there are significant problems with the representation of this relationship as a primordial struggle concerning indigenous

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communities, their land and the state. At an analytical level, this depiction of the relationship between the state and adivasis presents a historical narrative that takes a rather simplified view of land use and resource pressures. Culturalist tropes of indigenous communities have, as Alpa Shah has shown elsewhere, presented indigenous groups as collectivities outside of historical and economic change, when abundant evidence in fact points to the highly complex participation of indigenous groups in both markets and state politics Shah (2012). 32 By embedding the practice of custom in the social contexts in which this ideology gains salience, the implementation of the FRA can be understood as it is integrated into local struggles over resources. In Lanjigarh, these struggles highlight longer histories of mapping and codifying indigenous space which, as the weak progress of the FRA partially signifies, remains a highly contested space of both mobile and fixed agrarian communities vying for different forms of livelihood and state sanctioned entitlements. In this context, one can observe a legally mediated relationship developing between land, history and identity, thereby tying access to resources to the accessibility of historical artifacts that legitimate Khonds as forest agriculturalists. Here, custom frames an argument, admittedly often strategic, for looking at forest agroecological spaces in a particularly homogenizing way. Yet rather than demonstrating a coherent sense of communal needs in Lanjigarh, the flagging legal codification of these unstable land tenures under the FRA reveals in part the diversification of livelihood opportunities and ecological constraints,and poses further analytical questions of how to represent the communities actively engaged in the land politics of India’s Scheduled Areas.

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NOTES

1. For the purposes of this study, all FRA claims analyzed here concern individual rather than community claims. Although the FRA calls for the recognition of both types of claims, in Lanjigarh, as in most other Scheduled Areas of India where the Act has been implemented, local government has largely only been willing to settle with individual claimants. 2. India. Preamble of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act. 2007.

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3. Agrawal & Sivaramakrishnan (2000), particularly the introduction and the article by Vinay Gidwani. 4. See Herring (1983) and Iqbal (2010), particularly Chapter 8. 5. My use of the word ‘indigenous’ in this essay does not proceed unaware of its problematic applications. I do think, however, that the term ‘indigenous’ does reflect the global discursive categories of indigeneity used by advocacy organizations to promote a particular historical vision of indigenous rights, which I see reflected in the FRA. In practice, that is in the regional politics of Kalahandi in which Khond adivasis are engaged, the terms indigenous and adivasi both intersect and diverge from one another, depending on the types of political articulations and developmental claims individuals and groups strive to make. These words and their identitarian implications articulate with particular logics and goals and therefore should not be simplistically conflated with one another. If I have collapsed these terms into one another for the purposes of this introduction, it is not that I am unaware of these dynamics, but that I am attempting to think about the FRA as a document that mobilizes discourses of ‘indigeneity’ in local, national and global contexts. 6. Conspicuously absent from this paper is any attention paid to thinking through problems of social differentiation and resource access in relation to gender. Because the FRA requires both husbands and wives (where applicable) for granting FRA patta, an analysis of women’s experiences is fundamental to any critical reading of the FRA. This shortcoming is rendered in an expanded version of this article that is currently under revision. 7. The classic outline of this history can be found in the outline to Hardiman (1987). See also Shah (2012). 8. I do not have the space here to map the history of CSD and its influence within adivasi advocacy circles, however many of the sources I cite here have been written by individuals closely connected to the group. Suffice it to note that although the FRA as passed in 2006 does not reflect the entirety of CSD’s concerns over adivasi forest settlement, the group can be credited with steering many of the chief concerns promoted by the FRA. See the important article by CSD convener Pradip Prabhu (2010). 9. It is important to add here that these developments have been actively noted and contested by advocacy groups. During the National Forum for Forest People and Forest Workers national conference in November 2011 these were a few of the chief concerns raised to the Minister of Tribal Affairs. These concerns are also found in Prabhu (2010). 10. Village Forest is a settlement term determining the rights, boundaries and vested control over the resources of the forest. Reserve Forest denotes a similar set of privileges vested with the Forest Department, typically manifesting as large area of conservation land where agriculture and home construction cannot occur. These denominations are frequently contested and difficult to map, particularly in areas with large village settlements. In the Taliguda and Carnomunda watershed, as in many other parts of Lanjigarh, the Forest Department tolerates a certain degree of forest encroachment, though most often for home construction rather than dongar. It is important to note that the actual village boundaries of both Taliguda and Carnomunda are recognized as encroachments on Reserve Forest. Therefore, FRA pattas for these villages would include homestead pattas in addition to agricultural plot pattas, thereby giving the villages legal recognition in the block. 11. See The Times of India News Service 1985. 12. The story of Indian railway sleepers is perhaps the best known. For an important review of these tensions in eastern India, please see Sivaramakrishnan (2012). 13. For an example see Dash & Sahu (2011). 14. For a sustained study of this subject see Engerman & Metzger (2004). 15. Without over simplifying the significant interventions of these two authors, I am specifically thinking of Elinor Ostrom (2000a), and Arun Agrawal’s and Ostrom’s (2001b) co-authored work on

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new institutional theory. The co-authored paper effectively details the pitfalls of decentralization from an administrative perspective, making the case (one which I think applies for FRA implementation) that complex and multi-interested bureaucratic systems often prevent decentralization from occurring by working against the social institutions which will replace external administration. My critique here of decentralization as outlined by the FRA questions the modularity of social institutions across diverse ecological and social fields, and also the centrality of property in theorizing subsistence agriculture in Kalahandi. Mitchell (2005) for instance presents a case-study of the neoliberal presuppositions that underlie new institutional theory, particularly in the work of Douglas North. As found in Mitchell, my research also suggests that prior economic relationships are unduly bracketed out of studies concerned with the functioning of community based institutions when surveying for the suitability of FRA implementation. 16. Skinner (1991) offers an historical analysis of this point. 17. For discourses of indigeneity in the Indian context see Bannerjee (2006), Skaria (1999), and Ghose (1999). 18. There is variation through Lanjigarh regarding when land is re-bunded and the materials used to do so. Higher elevation areas typically correspond to less fortified bunding structures, though there are exceptions. The time period of ‘two harvest cycles’ is calculated from field interviews. 19. Madheswaran et al. (2009) present an econometric analysis of this trend focusing on monopsonic grain markets and credit rationing. Hariss-White and Shah (2011) have presented an historic overview of these transitions at the national level. 20. For a block level comparison, Madheswaran et al. (2009: 225-229). 21. His reference here is the Niyamgiri mining project by Vedanta.

ABSTRACTS

The Indian Recognition of Forest Right’s Act defines a category of land tenure that is premised upon the recognition of customary entitlements to forest resources entitled to forest dwelling groups. In this paper I examine how the concept of custom is defined by livelihood practices and proprietary rights. I argue that ‘custom’ presents an understanding of agrarian practices that is both a claim to political rights and a normative description of livelihood practices. I analyze the implementation of the Forest Rights Act in the Lanjigarh block of Kalahandi, Odisha, in order to understand what this concept of custom signifies within the political economic setting it is meant to describe.

INDEX

Keywords: Forest Rights, Kalahandi, Kondhs, Community Forestry, Custom, Odisha

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AUTHOR

MATTHEW B. SHUTZER

PhD Candidate, New York University, Department of History

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 7 | 2013