History of People without History

The Art of not being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by James C. Scott; Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd. Hyderabad-500029. Rs.799.

Reviewed by V. Suryanarayan, “History of People without History,” The Hindu, 29 June 2010.

James Scott, the well-known anthropologist associated with the Agrarian Studies Programme in Yale University, has adopted a novel approach to the study of the history of modern Southeast Asia, and he calls it anarchist. He cites with approval this statement of French anthropologist and ethnographer, Pierre Clastres, known for his field work among Guayaki in Paraguay and his off-beat theory of stateless societies: “It is said that the history of peoples who have a history is the history of class struggle. It might be said, with at least as much truthfulness, that the history of peoples without history is a history of their struggle against the state.”

Struggle

The people without history on whom Scott has focussed in this book reside in Zomia, a region as big as Europe that straddles southern China and several mainland Southeast Asian countries. Their habitat is spread over four provinces of southern China — Yunnan, Guizhow, Gwangxi and (parts of) Sichuan — and parts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, extending up to Northeastern India. The area covers 25 million square kilometres and is populated by 100 million people belonging to minority groups. They represent a bewildering ethnic and linguistic diversity. For social scientists brought up in state-centric traditions, these people are yet to be fully incorporated into nation states; they are yet to be governed, taxed and “civilised”. From a long-term perspective, their days may be numbered.

However, if one looks from the “other side”, the people of Zomia have been relentlessly struggling against the tyranny of the nation state. They are fugitives. The strong arm of the state reaches out to them in the form of enslavement, conscription, taxes, corvee labour, and so on. Scott calls their settlements “shatter zones” and “zones of refuge.”

The people of Zomia cling to their ways of life with passion and fervour. Their livelihood patterns, social organisation, ideologies, and oral traditions are intended to keep the state at arm's length. Their physical dispersal over rugged terrains, their mobility, kinship structures, changing ethnic identities, and devotion to prophetic millenarian leaders militate against their incorporation into the state system. For the upholders of the state system, those outside the political orbit are all barbarians.

The history of China testifies that, under the Ming and Qing dynasties, there were continuous forcible attempts to ‘sinicise' the barbarians. Millions of them were rendered fugitives. The hill people have also been resisting, unsuccessfully though, the military expeditions of the Thai and the Burmese rulers. The people who want to escape the state system use the mountains as a refuge.

Universal

James Scott develops the idea of “friction of terrain, which is a new way of understanding political space and the difficulties of state-making in pre-modern societies.” The encounter between “expanding state” and “self-governing peoples” is not restricted to southern China and mainland Southeast Asia. It is a universal phenomenon and the history of the world is replete with several such instances.

The histories of Rome, of Han China, of British imperialism, and of white settlers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa are full of annihilation and absorption of indigenous people into the modern state system. The author characterises this phenomenon as an encounter between “the raw and the cooked, the wild and the tamed, the hill/forest people and the valley/cleared land peoples, upstream and downstream, the barbarian and the civilised, the backward and the modern, the free and the bound, the people without history and the people with history.”

This creative, compassionate, and sensitive book is the outcome of years of painstaking research. It provides a lucid account, imbued with humanity, and is full of cultural insights. There is hardly any work that looks at history from the victim's viewpoint. This book deserves to be read and understood by all students of contemporary Southeast Asia.

Manipur Song

The documentary film “Manipur Song” set in Manipur is directed by Pankaj Butalia. The film seeks to foreground a state that exists on the periphery of the Indian imagination. As with other North Eastern states, culturally and ethnically Manipur has remained estranged from the dominant Indian culture and has repeatedly sought to assert its identity through insurgency.

The Armed Forces Special Powers Act 1958 gives complete immunity to the army and led to killings and rapes. The situation got so bad that in August 2004 a group of women disrobed in front of the army barracks holding banners saying “Indian Army Rape Us”.

Irom Chanu Sharmila, also known as the Iron Lady of Manipur is on fast since 2 November 2000 for the removal of AFSPA 1958. Deepti Priya Mehrotra has written a book titled Burning Bright: Irom Sharmila and the Struggle for Peace in Manipur on the Iron lady. It was published by Penguin Books, India in July 2009.

The land of Gandhi is mute to his principle. The Indian Government no longer understands the Mahatmas way of struggle. Until people pick up a Klasnikov, the Indian Government does not dare to listen to its own citizen.

The Manipuris have contributed to the Indian state enough when it comes to sports.There are many footballers who have and is representing the national team. Or for that matter, name any game, you find a Manipuri. Until someone is good in cricket, who cares...This is the greatness of Indian democracy. It is nothing better than a totalitarian state. The film looks at the consequences of this violence on ordinary people.

Watch the documentary at NDTV

http://www.ndtv.com/news/videos/video_player.php?id=1090323

James Cameron’s "Avatar" relates to the exploitation of Indigenous People of the world and India

How James Cameron’s Avatar relates to the exploitation of Indigenous People of the world and India
By Rohini Hensman

With forced expulsion and violence on their homeland, persecuted outsider-advocates, and commercial mining interest driving it all, James Cameron’s Avatar has striking parallels to events on the ground in India.

The plot of Avatar is relatively simple. In the year 2154, a colony of humans has been set up by RDA corporation on Pandora, an exotic planet inhospitable to humans but rich in a rare and incredibly valuable mineral, ironically named unobtanium. RDA is keen on exploiting this natural resource but the indigenous inhabitants, the Na’vi, are an obstacle to this goal, since the unobtanium lies beneath the forest they inhabit, with the biggest deposit beneath their ancestral Hometree. In a science fiction flourish, the humans interact with the natives through the Avatar programme, which blends the DNA of individual human beings with that of the Na’vi to create Na’vi avatars which can be controlled by the mind of the human. Through this, they can establish contact with the Na’vi, find out about them and their habitat, and try to persuade them to cooperate with the company. But should they fail, the military wing is poised to remove them by force. Our heroes, including Jake, a paraplegic ex-marine, who adopts his deceased twin brother’s avatar (which represents a sizable investment by the corporation) connect with the natives and learn to appreciate their culture. When the powers-that-be get impatient and give Jake and his colleagues an hour to convince the Na’vi to vacate their habitat, they rebel against their paymasters in an attempt to protect the Na’vi from ecological ruin and genocide.

The contemporary relevance of this film derives from the fact that, as the recent UN Report on the State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (United Nations 2010) reminds us, there are still 370 million indigenous people in the world. Many are still being subjected to displacement and dispossession, and suffer physical abuse, imprisonment, torture and even death if they try to assert their rights. Nowhere is this more true than in India’s forest belt, where the Adivasis are being displaced from their traditional habitats by the pursuit of ‘development’, of late driven mainly by commercial interests including mining. As an official report notes, ‘As tribal areas are also rich in mineral resources, the mining projects proposed such as in Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh threaten the very existence of tribal people’ (Government of India 2008).

Indeed, the heart-breaking moment in Avatar when the ancestral Hometree of the Na’vi is destroyed, and many are killed while the rest are displaced, could well be a metaphor for what is happening in the state of Chhattisgarh in Central India, where the security forces of a fascist state government, together with a state-sponsored, largely tribal militia (Salwa Judum), have driven tens of thousands of Adivasis out of their villages and destroyed them. In the process, many have been injured, tortured, raped and killed. One non-tribal activist fighting against these injustices, renowned Dr Binayak Sen, was arrested and kept behind bars for over two years on false charges; another, Himanshu Kumar, had his Gandhian ashram destroyed, and has suffered continuous harassment. Journalists and human rights activists trying to investigate and report on the situation have been assaulted physically and kept out. Inordinate effort was needed to get Sodhi Sambho, a young Adivasi woman who was witness to a massacre, the medical treatment she needed for her bullet-shattered leg; yet even in hospital she remained a virtual captive of the state police, effectively cut off from journalists and even from her lawyer in the case pertaining to the massacre. Three other witnesses were detained by the police, who are the alleged perpetrators: the very opposite of a witness-protection programme (Jha 2010; Iqbal 2010;Sethi 2010).

Some Adivasis have joined the Communist Party of India (Maoist) (also known as ‘Maoists’ or ‘Naxalites’) in order to fight the state security forces, even though the goal of the CPI(Maoist) (capturing state power) and its methods (destruction of schools and infrastructure, recruitment of child soldiers, summary execution of those labelled as informers, etc.) are inimical to the welfare of the Adivasis and their own demands (Human Rights Watch 2008). The central government is supporting a military attack on the Maoists, despite the fact that many unaffiliated Adivasis will be caught in the crossfire, even though its own report makes it clear that so long as unchecked violations of the legal and constitutional rights of Adivasis continue, they will continue to be pushed into the ranks of the Maoists. It is probably in recognition of this fact that the government is considering legislation that will restrict mining by private sector companies in tribal areas, and take into consideration constitutional provisions for the protection of tribal communities and their rights. Mining companies are already lobbyingagainst this proposed restriction of their access to our earthly equivalents of unobtanium. Unless there is even stronger counter-lobbying by tribal rights, human rights and environmentalist groups, it is unlikely that this legislation will ever make it to the statute books. Poor implementation of the otherwise laudable Forest Rights Act (2007) demonstrates that pressure for implementation is equally important.

The bows and arrows of the Adivasis are as ineffective against the firepower of the invaders as they are in Avatar. Yet they do have weapons that were not available to the Na’vi: legal and constitutional rights, environmental laws, international law, greater knowledge of the devastating environmental impact of deforestation and militarism, and modern information and communication technologies. Struggles in the real world are more complicated and messy than the clearcut fight between good and evil in the world of Avatar: the invaders are not necessarily White; some of the indigenous people may collaborate with them while others may join groups like the Maoists whose interests clash with their own; indigenous people belonging to different tribes may fight each other for control over the same territory; some tribal customs may be extremely oppressive, especially to women; for many indigenous people, their biggest problem may be the discrimination and exclusion they face in mainstream society; and all these actors have to share the same planet, in some cases the same country. But despite these over-simplifications, the happy ending of Avatarencourages us to hope that the surviving indigenous people of the world, including the Adivasis of India, can win sufficient control over their lives and habitats to secure freedom from poverty, indignity and violent abuse.

Rohini Hensman is a researcher and writer active in the women’s liberation, trade union, human-rights and anti-war movements in India and Sri Lanka.

Source: http://himalmag.com/blogs/blog/2010/01/28/of-avatar-and-adivasis/

Seperate Time Zone for India's Northeast

Staff Reporter, “Stress on separate time zone for region”, The Assam Tribune, 23 January 2010.

GUWAHATI, Jan 23 – The Northeast has for long been held hostage by adherence to a standard time that has adversely affected its people. It is imperative that a separate time zone was created for the region so that both quality of life and economic productivity could take off after decades of economic doldrums.

This was underlined in speeches delivered by noted filmmaker Jahnu Baruah and some others in an open discussion on ‘Separate Time Zone for Northeast’ organised by KC Das Commerce College in the city’s ITA Centre for Performing Arts.

Baruah pointed out that residents of the region, especially office-goers, had a bad deal when it came to use of daylight hours as they had to follow a standard time based on a longitude much to their west. While in summer they had to start their days rather late, in winter they had to work till dark.

Consequently, apart from the people having to work against the biological clock, much daylight and time was wasted every day. Loss of daylight hours also resulted in a cascading effect in productivity, energy use, and social behaviour and attitudes, he mentioned.

He reasoned that the Northeast has lost a “minimum average of 2 to 3 hours of productivity every day” by sticking to the Indian Standard Time, which in 62 years after Independence amounted to nearly 55,800 hours. In the area of energy use costs combining homes, establishments and offices, the total wastage could be as high as Rs 94,900 crore.

In order to alter the situation he favoured a new standard time based on the longitude 105 degree East and seven hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time.

The award winning filmmaker who had for two decades studied the situation in Northeast made a comparative study of lifestyles in Kohima and Mumbai stating that in a range of daily activities, people in Kohima or any other North-eastern settlement were disadvantaged for following a standard time that was actually much behind.

Referring to Bangladesh, Singapore, and several other countries Baruah asserted that all those have advanced their standard times so that people and productivity could both gain from having more daylight hours at their disposal. While productivity in Singapore has been very high, it has also gone up in Bangladesh after it adopted the new time standard.

It was also pointed out that countries with wide longitudinal extent had several time zones for the benefit of the population. The US has six time zones, Canada has seven, while Russia is divided into 11 time zones.

The impact of abiding by the Indian Standard time was felt in different spheres in the Northeast, and according to Baruah, it could be linked to some social problems like alcoholism as in the present situation youths could find ample time to indulge in drinking.

Speaking on the occasion, BM Saikia, an engineer with the Assam State Electricity Board highlighted the issue of Daylight Saving Time with regard to energy consumption in the Northeast. He quoted Benjamin Franklin who advocated DST with the adage ‘early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’.

He was of the opinion that changes in the standard time were affected with two motives – to shift human activity and to make better use of daylight.

Today’s discussions resulted in adoption of two resolutions – submission of a memorandum to the Union Government and all MPs of Northeast, and holding similar discussions across the region to create public opinion.