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Reading Indigenous Australian Literature Transnationally: Juxtaposing Dark Emu and Kocharethi

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Reading Indigenous Australian Literature Transnationally: Juxtaposing Dark Emu and Kocharethi Reading Indigenous Australian Literature Transnationally: Juxtaposing Dark Emu and Kocharethi PRIYANKA SHIVADAS UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES, CANBERRA When the British East India Company won the Battle of Plassey (1757) against the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies, it marked the beginning of the consolidation of British power over the Indian subcontinent. In the century that followed, key legislation was passed by the British to enable the management and governance of India’s land. The colony was considered the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, abundant in resources and not devoid of ‘civilisation’ even as it lay in wait to be civilised further and modernised by the British rule. The existing caste system which stratified Indian society along the lines of occupation played a pivotal role not only in the mapping of its Indian subjects by the colonial power but also of land. The categorisation of the colonised populace had gone hand-in-hand with the systemic sorting of landscapes into fields and forests, arable and wastelands. Thus, when land laws were enacted, productive plains and fields were generally associated with and assigned to castes, while tribes were relegated to forests and wastelands. Judy Whitehead in ‘John Locke and the Governance of India’s Landscapes: The Category of Wasteland in Colonial Revenue and Forest Legislation,’ has proposed: ‘While all subjects in India were colonised, they were not homogenously governed, but were differentiated in terms of essentialised subject positions. In particular, castes were differentiated from tribes as a foundational binary opposition that influenced policies regarding land-settlement and land-use’ (50). The Lockean influence on British colonial policies in the New World is only too well-known. In his Two Treatises of Government (1690), Locke records his dismay at the capture of land already inhabited at the time of settlement, but he seeks to circumvent the obstruction such an edict might place in the way of colonisation by classifying land itself dichotomously, into that which has been tilled and fenced and that which hasn’t been. Land can only be considered occupied by one who has rightfully laid claim to it by cultivating it and erecting fences to the exclusion of others. ‘The transition from holding lands in common to private possessions occurred through the application of labour to land and was visually marked by the spatial enclosure of individually-worked land’ (Whitehead 84). When James Cook, British explorer and navigator often credited with the ‘discovery’ of Australia, received the letterbook titled Secret Instructions for Lieutenant James Cook Appointed to Command His Majesty’s Bark the Endeavour 30 July 1768, he found in it directions to chart the coasts of Terra Australis Incognita or the ‘unknown land of the south’ in the event it was located. He was originally on a voyage to observe Venus moving across the face of the sun from Tahiti. With the letterbook, not only was the existence of a great southern continent presumed but also the possibility of its pre-occupation by Aboriginal inhabitants, for it further instructs Cook to develop cordial relations with the natives and annex in the King’s name any trading posts that might be considered convenient. Cook, when he first set foot in Australia in 1770, recognised it to be not an unknown land but New Holland as the Dutch called it, who are recorded to be the first Europeans JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 21.2 to have encountered Australia. During his voyage north from present-day New South Wales to the tip of Queensland, Cook noticed many fires on the mainland and the surrounding islands, signalling the presence of natives. It was against a backdrop of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that Australia was declared terra nullius or ‘nobody’s land’ upon its annexation by early colonial settlers. This was achieved on the pretext that the inhabitants of the newly annexed continent did not exercise territorial sovereignty over its land. The Indigenous inhabitants of Australia, it was concluded, existed without a unifying structure of authority or a political consciousness. This conclusion was based on the observations of early explorers, including Cook, about the inhabitants, who were described as possessing neither fixed habitation nor a practice of land cultivation; they lived by means of fishing and hunting on par with wild beasts. In a Lockean sense, they existed in a state of nature. At the time of writing Two Treatises, Locke’s comments were directed at America of the 1600s, which in his characterisation had enough unoccupied land to suffice each settler. He proposed that the vast stretches of land that had not been worked upon by the natives of America existed in a state of nature and were ready to be claimed. Furthermore, the distinction between a state of nature and state of culture directly translated into the difference between savagery and civilisation (Whitehead 85). People living in a state of nature did not form societies, own land, or produce labour indispensable to wealth production. If an Englishman took over the same land and brought it under intensive cultivation, it would benefit not just the Englishman but everyone else around by creating surplus wealth for trade. The same Lockean theory of property was superimposed on various sites of British colonial conquest, including Australia and India. To support this claim, Whitehead uses as examples the two chief land revenue systems—the Permanent Settlement of Bengal and the Ryotwari system—introduced by the British in India to demonstrate the implications of Locke’s theory. The Permanent Settlement of Bengal, brought into effect in 1793, vested in a class of native landowners called zamindars the power to fix revenue to be collected from local farmers, above all upholding the right of private property in land. As an act of law, it remained in force for 160 years over Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, constituting extensive regions of eastern India (Guha 11). In A Rule of Property for Bengal, Ranajit Guha stresses that even though the principal architects of the revenue system did not see eye to eye on the reasoning behind the policy or every detail laid down in it, ‘the recognition of property as the basic principle of government was the greatest common measure of their agreement’ (18). Retaining the principle of private property ownership but eliminating the intermediary function served by the zamindars, the Ryotwari system was introduced in 1820 in western and southern India. Ownership of the land was handed over to peasants by the state, and revenue was to be collected directly from them. Unlike the system of Permanent Settlement, Whitehead adds: ‘… land revenue was not to be permanently fixed but was to be raised periodically given differential capital investments in land, differences in soil fertility and even differences in the castes who cultivated the land’ (87). Specific castes who were believed to possess inherent skills that lend themselves to settled agriculture were enabled in this process. People of lower castes and tribal peoples whose traditional occupations did not include farming on enclosed lands were thus essentialised as non-productive, and any land they maintained became wasteland and vulnerable to state appropriation. SHIVADAS: Reading Australian Indigenous 2 Editor: Roger Osborne Literature Transnationally JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 21.2 While the zamindari and ryotwari systems were predominantly concerned with agricultural lands, forest laws were drafted with a view to ensure a sustainable supply of timber such as for the railways and the navy (Whitehead 88). Tribes that inhabited forests and hilly areas, and there were several of them, were targeted by these forest laws. Whitehead explains that when the first India Forest Act was passed in 1865, one of the most important propositions was that to keep the misuse of forests in check, it was crucial to curtail the rights of customary forest users. Thus, traditional means of living for hill and forest tribes (which sometimes involved techniques evolved over thousands of years such as slash-and-burn farming and at other times activities as absolutely necessary as collection of leaves for medicines, fallen branches for bedding or huts, firewood for cooking) were rendered illegal by the state. As a sign of the severity of these measures, even entry into forests was strictly regulated or prohibited. Forests became reserved or protected and forest officers were installed to oversee their administration. The successor of the 1865 Act passed in 1878 (amended in 1890, 1894, 1904, 1927) reinforced the categories of reserved and protected forests, intensifying state monopoly over forest management.i Prominent historian Prathama Banerjee has noted that in India, ‘those who came to be classified as tribes in modern times were precisely communities who were not fully identifiable as sedentary cultivators, though many communities were indeed agriculturists of various sorts, and therefore could not be mobilised simply in the name of labour and productivity’ (11–12). In Australia, as explained earlier, the Indigenous peoples were en masse labelled as hunter-gatherers or nomads as opposed to the colonial settlers who laid claim to the land. This paper is an inquiry into literary subversions of the colonial myth that civilisation began with recognisable forms of labour practised under sedentary agriculture and that land rights rest with those who built complex systems of farming on fixed territory year after year. In a revisionist mode, Bunurong, Yuin, Tasmanian historian and author Bruce Pascoe has unveiled Dark Emu (2014) and Malayarayar writer Narayan has written Kocharethi (2011), which urge us to rethink concepts of land-right, ownership, wasteland versus agricultural land, and human labour. This essay argues that Dark Emu and Kocharethi are grounded in descriptions of Indigenous farming practices and technologies—their productiveness and antiquity—to controvert the colonial myth that forms of agricultural labour practiced by Indigenous communities were non-productive.
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