Politics of Other(ing): 'Remembering' and 'Forgetting' the Indigenous | Arpit Gaind

In 2019, during a webinar on Decolonization, Eve Tuck remarked that if she had to write "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor," - her seminal essay with co-author K. Wayne Yang - she may decide to change its title to "Decolonization Is Not Only a Metaphor." (cited in Post 45, July 2021). The reason for this, she said, is the realization of how "metaphors are actually really important to how we understand and describe colonialism and decolonization."(YouTube, May 9, 2019). This makes one think and examine the reinforcement (often contradictions too) and incommensurability produced by colonialism and capitalism?

Though Tuck and Yang's concern for how Decolonization operates in the context of the Americas, it’s a striking relevance to its operationalization in the Southeast Asian context, particularly India, and the latter’s relationship with the indigenous communities - historically shaped by colonization itself. Like in the context of the US, in India too, the Indigenous question has been left to the academy and corporate culture, meaning vaguely little more than its in intellectual conversation, and designing syllabuses for the classroom. As Tuck explained, "when it is used only as a figure of speech, decolonization as a discourse recenters whiteness, resettles theory that is yearning to break the mold, extends innocence to settlers, and entertains a settler future."(Post 45, July 2021).1

Tuck and Yang’s theorization helps articulate the question of Indigeneity in India’s context and the use of media to frame these communities in terms of being outside to the idea of “Modern-Urban India.” If one looks at the disruption caused in the ways of living of Adivasi2 (indigenous) communities in India, its operationalization in the context of their cultural representation is historically a complicated one. This paves the way to critically understand what constitutes the indigenous ‘subject’ in relation to both past and contemporary practices engaged in ‘capturing’ them, thus informing notions of time and memory. Tuck and Yang argue how “settler-colonization” is not the same as another colonization in understanding the specificity of Decolonization as a process of reparation. In this colonization, settlers come intending to make a new home. The land is remade into the property, and human relationships to land are restricted to the owner's relationship to their property. Externally, all things natural that are critical to the life-world of indigenous communities became commodities; internally, settlers “manage” all people and “resources” within structures bio- and geo-politically.

The authors discuss six strategies or positioning the settlers (not necessarily white) use to absorb Decolonization into narratives that, based on the colonial framework, are “settler move to innocence” (Tuck and Yang, 2012, 3). And they argue that these are attempts to “relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege.” Tuck and Yang leave a narrow path to follow, unyielding to any but one direction in conceptualizing Decolonization. I find myself intrigued yet unsettled. However, what is discomforting for me is Tuck and Yang’s version of Decolonization and raises immediate questions: What will this even look like? Tuck and Yang reject Freire’s notion of liberating the oppressed and the oppressor3. While they are conscious that Decolonization itself can reproduce the indigenous-settler-slave triad and reject the simple shuffling of who occupies which role, it is unclear how turning the clock back by hundreds of years will not reproduce a new class of the oppressed? 

The Indigenous Other and the project of Development

Drawing upon ideas of Tuck & Yang’s work on Decolonization and Nancy Godoy’s work on archives provides us a great canon to empirically examine the role they play in governance and the representation of the ‘primitive’ in both the colonial and the post-colonial contexts. The conceptualization of the “uncivilized” Indigenous Other directly affects how we understand the primitive and how they are rationalized ideologically4as a subject. In the Indian context, for instance, ‘Primitive’ becomes a temporal category without any analytical value, and unchanging primitive culture – even though spatially distant as we saw – could still be known and studied (Fabian, p. 18). This Johannes Fabian calls “writing history without time, of people without history” (ibid). 

In this logic - as Nancy Liliana Godoy (2021) rightly critiques - the traditional notion of the archive is a project of knowing the object could be accomplished through fieldwork. Moreover, with the typological classifications of time Modern/Literate, Rural/Urban, Hot, and cold societies, the qualitative inscription of societies reached its completion. The ‘primitive savage’ thus was not yet ready for civilization and needed an external force, assistance to civilize and progress, paving the way for both – first, colonization and industrialization and second, development. The latter was a product of the post-1950s world of Decolonization, where the modern post-colonial state in the way that we see today was geared towards unhinging capitalist modernity. In fact, the efforts at decolonization post World War II in the 1950s and 1960s defined how the project of Modernity and its natural by-product, Industrial Development, came to take place in post-colonial societies like India. This framing of Development created a typological split of a kind Fabian also refers to in his analysis – the categories of the Rural versus Urban, Modern versus Pre-Modern, the Forest versus the City Dweller. It means that the same logic of ‘Archived Other’ was applied within the frame of the nation itself, relocating the Adivasi to the category of pre-modern, a ‘living dead,’ who didn’t serve many purposes to either the project of nationalism and later to that of the modern nation (Chakrabarti and Dhar, 2009). 

In line with Godoy, Prathama Banerjee argues how in the backdrop of colonization, 18th century onwards, the idea of nationalism in India made the Adivasi subject the left-over of the nation and in constant subtraction to the capitalist modernity (Banerjee, 2006). The disruption caused by this in the ways of being and living of Adivasi communities in Central-Eastern India by their typologizing as Developed versus under-Developed and Urban-Modern India versus Rural India. Banerjee argues that the question of Adivasi culture is tied to the critical evaluation of notions of Progress and Development which leads to dual othering of the Adivasi subject – first, as the ‘primitive other’ at the hands of the colonizer, and second, as the ‘pre-modern other’ at the hands of the post-colonial nation. The fundamental paradigm under which the idea of Progress and Development has worked is a teleological understanding of the world, reducing the indigenous to the pre-modern and unknown objects of analysis. These objects can then be ‘archived at will’ and recorded at convenience – first by the colonizer and then by the modern developing nation-state.

Community archives as self-healing 

To think about this question is articulate the role community-driven archives play in articulating themes of self-healing and self-creation (Godoy, 2021) and in the community’s coping mechanism. Godoy’s work challenges the ideas that view archives as a neutral site of production and Indigenous people as exotic objects. By appraising the way Nancy Godoy does, letting the Indigenous self-create their narratives and want to represent themselves allows us to explore the archive as a site of ‘positive’ cultural production. This site could provide both the analytical framework and the substance needed to comprehend the larger question of culture. Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd (2009, p. 75) argue that community archives are a way to counter the already existing stereotypes and misrepresentations of history and lives by mainstream media and popular culture. 

By imagining archives as a place for dialogue and production rather than just preservation, Godoy marks an essential departure from the role archive plays in preserving history from the outside. Similarly, Michelle Caswell’s (2016) argues about the significance of community archives while drawing upon a feminist critique of “symbolic annihilation” from the 1970s to “describe the absence, under-representation, maligning and trivialization” of marginalized voices impacting the meta-historical narratives around them (Caswell et al., p. 4).  

Works Cited

Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization 1:1 (2012), http://www.decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/18630. 

Nancy Liliana Godoy, “Community-Driven Archives: Conocimiento, Healing, and Justice,” Journal of Critical LIS 3 (2021): https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/136. 

“Beyond the Trend of Decolonizing Science,” Webinar, Union of Concerned Scientists https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/beyond-trend-decolonizing-science 

Johannes Fabian, ‘Time and the Emerging Other’; in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. (2014 [1983]). New York: Columbia University Press. 

Scott Challener. “Introduction: ‘Not Only a Metaphor’” from Decolonize X, Post 45. (July 30, 2021). https://post45.org/2021/07/introduction-not-only-a-metaphor/  

End Notes

[1] Tuck here rehearses several key claims of her co-authored essay, which appeared in the inaugural issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. See Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor," Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-40.

[2] In Hindi vernacular Adivasi means “Original Inhabitants” where Adi means beginning or first and vasi means dweller. It is also a term used in collective reference to indigenous people in some parts Indian subcontinent – mostly the central and eastern belt of India. Henceforth, I will be using “Adivasi” in reference to the indigenous communities in India. However, Adivasi is not the only linguistic referent when it comes to indigenous groups in India (there are others too) and I use Adivasi in the context of the specific historical location my research is working under.

[3] Paulo Freire in his seminal text Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000) argues at length how any kind of social and political transformation is elusive till there is no change in the psyche of the subject position of the oppressor. In Freire’s thesis, the Oppressor needs to play an important role in the whole act of liberation of the oppressed, otherwise, the cycle will continue, and every revolutionary act will follow a new cycle of oppression.  For Tuck and Yang though, Freire’s argument is part of the same problem of “mutuality based on sympathy and suffering”. 

[4] Louis Althusser in his 1971 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation)” unpacks in detail the role of ideology in subject formation (in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays). Even though outside the scope of this essay, Althusser’s theorization plays an important role in understanding how the subject gets rationalized within the fold of the nation-state.