Vol V Issue 1-4.Pmd

A Quarterly Journal for Kerala Studies Adn-bm\pw Xm]kw in Malayalam - English Adn-bn-°m\pw TAPTAPASAMASAM History, Representation Vol: V / Issue 1-4 / July 2009- April 2010/ Reg. No: M2 11257/ 05 and Ambivalence V. J. Varghese History, Representation and Ambivalence 1 All histories are textured with representations and all K. T. Rammohan Drawing the Absences, 1 Erasing the Stereotypes representations are historical. The modernist obsession with Bara Bhaskaran’s Visual History of Kerala 10 objectivity and its firm conviction in the ability of the histo- rian to find and expose truths in a sense represented an age Sujith Kumar Parayil Visuality of Ethnography: of innocence in historical research. As historical sources can Texts and Contexts 22 never represent a reality devoid of prevalent politics, research- Amruth M. Logic of Extraction and Spatiality of Exclusion: ers of history acknowledged the need to read such sources Constitution of a Game Sanctuary with an irreverent and rational mind. At the same time they in Colonial Travancore 82 often refuse to acknowledge the fact that the very act of writing the past is itself a political activity. ‘Reading against the Santhosh Abraham Making of the Jungle Mappilas: grain’ in an effort to resurrect the hitherto subjugated Colonial Law and the Construction of Native Criminality in Early British Malabar 118 knowledges is also not free from the impasses of representation and narratology even though the endeavour is visibly Sabitha T. P. Darkness Invisible: enfranchising. It is thus apparent that the means and forms of Difference and Indifference in Pottekkat’s representation while ‘emplotting’ history render the transfer- 141 Travelogues on Africa ability of reality an extremely mediated phenomenon. Repre- Sharmila Sreekumar Pennezhuthu as Women Reading, sentation becomes a mode of meaning production rather as Women Re-reading 153 than an attempt at a true ‘re-enactment of the past’. While past reality is re-enacted into representations, the referentiality Filippo Osella ‘Globalisation is ruining us’: T of representations would have to rely on historians and their AP Caroline Osella Neo-liberal Capitalism, Islamic Reform and spatio-temporal enmeshes. All efforts at writing the past are ASAM, Business in Kozhikode (Calicut), South India 176 bound to confront this dilemma, this inherent ambivalence of capturing the reality and its impossibility—a neither-nor. The Rajesh Komath Shaping the Life: 2009 July- 2010 April Rakkee Thimothy Kerala Youth in a Changing contemporary writers of academic history write the past with Socio-economic Order 204 an increasing realisation of this inherent tension, often find- Complementing the Books ing justifications for their individual endeavour in the politics 2009 July- 2010 April they stand for. kvIdnbm k°-dnb {^m≥kokv C´n-t°m-c/Sn. Un. cma-Ir-jvW≥.............. 224 1 The framework of this short introduction is informed by the ideas of ASAM, AP Hayden White, Homi Bhabha, Bernard Cohn and Nicholas Dirks. T THE ASSOCIATION FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES TAPASAM, KARIKKAMPALLY, PERUNNA - 686 102, CHANGANASSERY, KERALA, 1 INDIA The textual raw materials of history, devoid of academic their own fellow beings. The textual/representational strate- compulsions of accuracy, are creations of diverse regimes of gies of the empire often find resonance in those of the nation knowledge production and hence are always excess-repre- in their multiple manifestations. The fixing and unsettling of sentations. The immediate case that leaps to mind would be representations of the past and the present and their inher- the colonial strategies of producing new forms of knowledge ent ambivalence hold the articles of this issue of TAPASAM to serve the empire. The colonial ‘cultural project of control’ together. The intersecting concerns of History, Representation through diverse ‘investigative modalities’ produced huge and Ambivalence inform these essays, less or more, but often quantities of texts, which subsequently became the single most from the minority position against the glory and idolization of important resource used for construing ‘colonial histories’. dominant fixations. These sources became central in the ‘objectification’ of the colony by producing ‘fixed’ knowledge, resulting in fabrica- Kerala’s representation as a development model to the tion of otherness and thereby ensuring subjugation. Such rep- third world due to its remarkable social development is being resentations fixed India as ‘static, timeless and exotic’, a place contested from various quarters nowadays, particularly by needing and longing for colonisation and correction. Social bringing to the foreground the shades and flipsides of the ac- and cultural categories created and formalised in the course claimed distinction. K.T. Rammohan’s essay reads the popu- of this knowledge construction became the foundations of lar drawings of Bara Bhaskaran, Ente Keralam Rekhakal, and new and renewed identities, mobilisations and subjugations. explicates how they unsettle the dominant representation of However, as different from essentialist renderings, it is pointed the state in an effort to envisage a new visual history of Kerala. out that colonial discourse was not free from inherent con- Through a unique visual language of strokes and letters Bara tradictions as exhibited by the coloniser’s ambivalence in re- offers possibilities of exceeding the predominantly ‘lock-in’ situ- spect to his position towards the colonised ‘other’. At the ation and derivative demeanour of Kerala historiography. The same time, it should be acknowledged that the attempt at con- present is a conspicuous presence in the frames of the past of structing colonial knowledge was to formalise knowledge in Bara and it retrieves Kerala as a differently peopled space, with order to ensure control with consent, and articulate the co- heterogeneous human and social environments. Rammohan lonial difference in an attempt to establish an authentic self argues that Bara’s visual reconstruction of Kerala, upsetting and consciousness. The colonial discourse also generated stereotypes and visualising absences, de-totalises history and desire among the native elite to emerge ‘authentic’ through advances its plurality and discontinuity. Through a careful ‘mimicry’ and white imitation became the right conduit to deployment of conventional and alternative resources of his- authority. In the attempt of the ‘black skin/white masks’ or tory and by privileging ordinary lives, the visuals re-enact the T ‘mimic men’ to re-present or mimic, in search of ‘a reformed past from its minority locations and re-draw representations AP ASAM, and recognizable other’, originality is lost and centrality de- of modernity as progress in disagreement by taking a ‘step centred. Reiterating the ‘the inner compatibility of empire and back’. The article of Sujith Kumar Parayil, on the other hand, nation’ the mimic man translated the colonial discourse of examines the way in which photography was used as a tool 2009 July- 2010 April domination into their own life and relations. At the same time, by the colonial anthropology to formalise native social groups this mimicry or re-presentation is mired in in-determinacy, a into essential categories. As an objective tool of representa- 2009 July- 2010 April neither nor, an ambivalence. The liminality and ambivalence tion in the ‘regime of truth’, photographs were deployed to of the ‘native modern’ on the one hand allowed the manu- distinguish individual castes and tribes on the basis of their facture of new authorities in native society and on the other physiognomy, traditional practices and performances/rituals ASAM, AP hand, articulated difference from the colonial masters and and occupation. In the process, the body became a cultural T 2 3 sign, a performer’s ‘transcendent self’ became the artefact of a new order itself could be seen to be ensnared in ambiva- identity and many communities who were engaged in the lence as it aimed at extracting timber uninterrupted on the same occupation were collapsed into single categories. Read- one hand and sought to preserve the forests for the benefit ing the photographs, Sujith also finds that the visual frame of of the present as well as the future on the other. Further, the the lower caste photographs were created by the colonial an- sustained yield principle was not seen as antithetical to hunt- thropologist by deploying their occupational tools and were ing for amusement and as Amruth emphasises preservation shot in their subaltern physical environment. The camera al- in that sense is just extraction postponed. The instituting of lowed no space for the lower castes to ‘imagine the image’ game sanctuaries as a sanctified wild space represented an and they confronted the new technology of representation attempt to ensure a sustained supply of animals for sport hunt- in bewilderment, frozen with fear and wonder. The photo- ing by elites, by proscribing native subsistence hunting. In- graphs of the elite, on the other hand, were less determined formed by the hunting narratives from across the empire and by superimposed visual frames; allowing them to confidently under pressure from colonial planters, the Travancore gov- pose for the camera. Framed by established social knowledge, ernment established game sanctuaries and reconstituted wil- the colonial camera also opened its eye to native women with derness as a space for white and masculine conquest. Con- its sexual fantasies as the ‘objects’,

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