Violent Histories of Indigeneity and International Relations: Tales from the Indian State

Western Canons of Knowledge Production: Making of the Tribal as Primitive

The section explores how indigenous populations have been ensconced in the discourse on global modernity within the discipline of IR. There is a need to simultaneously aver and avert the institutions of money, debt and property that have been constitutive in producing silences about indigenous peoples. Modernity has been associated with the ubiquitous presence of the nation-state along with global capitalism and enlightenment humanism (Chandler & Reid, 2018). In this section, I discuss the three harbingers of modernity: debt, property and money which are closely intertwined in creating notions of progress. Debt is closely tied to slavery, interest and poverty creating self-perpetuating systems of oppression. The concept of property can be attributed to Hobbesian individualism and Lockean privatization (Cattelino, 2018). Indigenous populations are often coupled with distant colonial pasts where they were displaced (a euphemism used for slavery, mass genocide and rape) with insufficient attention given to the colonial presence/present through which epistemic and structural violence is carried out against indigenous populations. The slow violence (Nelms & Maurer, 2014) of the colonial past has its remnants in the contemporary neoliberal state with violent fault lines and callous neglect towards indigenous populations. The tripartite structures of money, property and government form the foundational exclusionary structure constitutive in unpacking indigenous citizenship. This complex perpetuates the eliminatory logic and everyday violence against indigenous peoples. This section facilitates reflection on the exclusion of indigenous people from political processes predicated on money and its concomitant market exchange. By answering such questions with theories that relied on stages of development, modern theorists presupposed and then enacted the disappearance of their indigenous object, at least in scholarship.

The history of Western political philosophy has defined indigenous subjectivity through the notion of dispossession as a mode of existence. The condition of dispossession has been the basis for theorizing political subjectivity as illustrated in the liberal right to property, which was fundamental to the colonial project whereby indigenous populations were subjected to the processes of expropriation. John Locke’s theory laid the bedrock foundation for legitimizing colonial control over indigenous lands. He advocated a distinction between those who cultivated the land and developed it and those who merely lived off it, providing the rationale for dispossessing indigenous populations of their right to land. This distinction is crucial in understanding man’s relationship with nature, wherein developing the soil grants him mastery over the same. Lokean theory provided the basis for the dispossession of the lands as well as the rights of the indigenous populations. The distinction between colonizers and colonized subjects was the former transcending nature accompanied by the normative gesture signaling towards possessive individualism, thus systematically jettisoning populations from collective belonging. The idea of rights within the liberal framework expresses the positionality of the unitary subject, and it dispossesses people of their lands for development while simultaneously constituting people as subjects with claims to property claims.

For Locke, the state of nature was not only relegated to the temporal past but also was seen as different from the advanced stages of development (Locke, 1988, p. 165). This temporal distancing often alluded to as ‘in the beginning’ has been a recurrent feature of modern settler colonialism. The epistemological foundation was laid by Locke indicating the absence of money in the state of nature. There were dual implications of the usage of money: (a) it represented and strengthened certain kinds of social organization while attenuating others and (b) it defined individuals as having refined qualities of being modern (Locke, 1988, pp. 167–168). It was these two underlying implications of the use of money that were deeply political. In Locke’s writings, he mentions the importance of ‘yellow metal’ whose durability and commensurability allowed people to have foresight allowing individuals to extend the temporality of their desires. This extension in terms of temporality opened new avenues including money, debt, investment and credit systems that were equated with the cultivation of individual sensibility and sober assessment. For Adam Smith, money was central to providing distinction and status and providing freedom, something that was seen as lacking in the ‘primitive society’ (Smith, 1976, p. 32). John Millar made similar linkages drawing on colonial writings asserting that ‘savages’ were preoccupied with fulfilling their immediate needs and had no capacity for refinement (Millar, 2006, p. 28). It is important to note that society’s advancement toward civilization was attributed to the shift in economic organization. The trajectory of modernity excluded indigenous people both from the economic practice as well as the civilizational traits accompanied by the use of money. Thus, writings of Western political philosophers coalesced in marking money as the primary referent for social organization and upending the kinship-based networks of indigenous peoples. It was not just social organization that became tied to money but also individual attributes including capacity for abstraction and development of foresight. The picture of indigenous peoples as savages who were easily satisfied, lacking foresight and curiosity with no scope for self-improvement reinforced their inferior status. The indigenous people did not only belong to a different time but also lacked the skills to manage time, a capacity associated with modern forms of exchange. Money became a cognitive marker for abstraction and an index for a superior form of signification. Money was key in the reconciliation of differences between objects and since indigenous people based their relationships on the lack of differentiation, this attribution became a self-fulfilling prophecy for colonial dispossession. Money was seen as a semiotic sign of the capacity for abstraction and a force of civilizational order, something that was lacking in the indigenous peoples. Money was theorized in dual terms: as an indicator of indigenous-civilized difference and also responsible for corroding this difference as humanity moved towards civilization. Money thus differentiated people on their trajectory of development and tracing this relationship produces specters of indigeneity.

Theories of property further contributed to the dispossession of indigenous peoples. Locke’s theory declared that land not structured by private property is wasteful thus rendering indigenous lifestyles as wasteful and outside the domain of a civilized productive economy. He also justifies indigenous dispossession through the logic of replacing waste with productivity. Thus, Locke justified settler colonialism and the cultivation of land to avoid waste against the consent of indigenous people. The establishment of the private property regime produced rank and distinction that was seen as a progression from savage desires and movement towards civilization. The qualities attributed to money became the valued characteristics in social relations. The recursive importance of money power to the colonial project produced narratives by substituting indigenous difference for indigenous absence. Locke’s analysis linked the realization of liberty with money and provided a powerful incentive for entering into a political organization that marked a shift from kinship-based structures (Locke, 1988, p. 172). The theories of money, property and exclusion created a constitutive exclusion that defined the inside and the outside of modernity. The connections between the nexus of money/property/government shaped struggles around indigeneity. As savages, the indigenous people stand as the site of lack, and this is reinforced not through invisibility and ignorance but by repetitive iterations regarding this lack.

Modernity is not only associated with a particular historical chronology, that is the last stage of historical development and a specific geographical location, that is the West but more significantly is considered to be the guardian of universal truth. It proposed a transcendental unveiling of the world by abandoning the epistemologies associated with marginal cultures. The modern subject can render the world as an object, stripped of its particularities and ambiguities (Bhambra, 2016, p. 962). The discursive deployments of money and development shape the narratives of indigenous citizenship and how it is negotiated with the state. To understand the systems of recognition and citizenship deployed in the indigenous context, one needs to move the focus from juridical and political understandings of ‘liberal citizenship’ to scripts of money, value and exchange.

The Western notions of enlightenment and progress have documented the emergence of an autonomous and self-possessed individual but have often sidelined through the shadows of silences that it was indebtedness that reconfigured temporality itself. The notion of money and indebtedness has been normalized in modern societies as a legitimate and reasonable way of living. Colonial rule marked the coming of age of indebtedness, which replaced rent-seeking as the primary mechanism of surplus extraction (Bose, 1994, p. 248). This economic turn historically is often viewed through the lens of inevitability, the proof of irreversible commercialization and progress of societies concomitant to the rise of capitalism. This analysis offers a dual intervention to this historical reading: it challenges the economic historicism that is associated with colonial modernity reflected in the advent of indebtedness and reveals how it marginalized other forms of being in society on the other hand also seeks to understand the politics of indigeneity, which affected the status of indigenous populations as being eternally in debt. It is through this indebtedness, the subjecthood of indigenous populations was shaped, debt became the symbol of ‘systemic lack’, of being primitive/backward in an advanced world.

Thought, Money and Temporality: Exchange as Representation

The appearance of money made exchange the ‘most virtuous and highest kind’ of interaction, which became the foundation for all human interaction (Cattelino, 2018, p. 278). The mastery of money was seen equated to the psychological transformation including the inculcation of a ready disposition to individualism associated with market exchange along with the imposition of impersonal, rational, instrumental and calculative modes of thinking. George Simmel characterized the money as transforming the world into an arithmetic problem, linking money with the development of quantitative means-end calculation of self-interest (Simmel 1990, p. 82). The tribals perceived failure to engage in market exchange is viewed as a marker of their inability to cultivate psycho-cultural traits to become worthy recipients of state patronage. Thus, money allowed for two incommensurable sections to enter into a plausible relationship when the chances of any other mediated relationship between the two sides were bleak. Most colonial officials in India shared the view that ‘trade was humanizing and recommended it as a solution to pacify the Santal rebellion in 1856. Colonial modernity uniformly enforced these monetary exchanges among unequal entities that have remnants in modern-day (development) state interactions with its (indigenous) peoples. This universalization of exchange was based on a priori segregation of people as non-contemporaneous, inhabiting separate temporalities, even as they appeared together. Representation of the non-moderns in the modern, temporally hierarchized world as primitives was an act of knowledge production, whereby they were viewed as ‘present survivals’ of past centuries (Appadurai, 1986). The money along with reason as a sign of abstraction seemed to resist the contamination of time. Thus, no one existed as an ‘authentic primitive’ until they were colonized and deprived of political relations to mainstream society. Money thus no longer was only a medium of exchange but as economic anthropologists have pointed out it acquired meaning through different social contexts and interactions. However, to be a pure sign, money had to be proven as indifferent to spatio-temporal contexts. Money became the metaphor and measure of time, having the ability to travel across different non-contemporary times while still maintaining its value. The temporal hierarchization of indigenous communities was marked by monetary contiguity. In the discourse on colonial modernity, exchange became the first act of representation, which was later elaborated upon through acts of knowledge.

Georg Simmel (1990) argued that ‘primitives’ instead of trading and working preferred ‘plunder’. These indigenous populations believed in unregulated and immediate fulfillment of desires as opposed to exchange characterized via money, which was indicative of normative regulation. Thus, money was seen more than ‘object of desire’ and came to represent a civilized temporal distance between the subject and the object. The civilizing intent of money translated into money being the universal symbol of exchange. The ‘indigenous populations’ had no sense of regulated exchange via money, no value for temporal deferment and thus only engaged in unpremeditated and immediate subsistence acts (Guha, 1999, p. 12). This distinction was furthered by classifying two kinds of productive time: the primordial was marked by sporadic and bodily labor and the contiguous time inhabited the sedentary culture. The bounding of these indigenous communities produced three effects: first, the primitives could no longer escape the state, they were transformed from being identified through collective biography to permanent settlers in spatially marked locations. The significance of the colonial conflation between primitive indebtedness and the absence of capacity for abstract thinking is quite evident in colonial texts. The indigenous people ‘naively projected’ themselves onto the objects of desire, thus disavowing the subject–object distinction, impeding in their development of abstract consciousness. The modern ‘teleological’ practice emphasized the distinction highlighting that the only way of achieving the object was through money and the state. In discourses on colonial modernity, the lack of money was seen as a state of unproductive plenitude with the indigenous people placed under an infinite debt to the meta temporality of the universal and the abstract categorization (Banerjee, 2000, p. 434).

The two dominant narratives surrounding indigenous people are either ‘noble savages’ or anarcho-primitivists who rejected technological advancement and scientific development. These communities epitomized ‘grounded normativity’ with embodied morality and generative land-based attachments rather than positing against nature (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2003, p. 149). The tribal communities were subjects of colonial authority and their colonial masters produced knowledge about appropriate forms of governing them. It was this notion of protectionism that doubly impacted the tribals by marginalizing them within the national citizenry and marking them as ‘backward others’ about to the modern citizen (Chandra, 2013, p. 142). The primitive, savage subjects were deprived of their subjectivity and were thought of incapable of pursuing their self-interests. The epistemic violence constituting the subaltern is deeply embedded in the hegemonic knowledge system that silences and eliminates the subaltern’s ability to speak and be heard. The mainstream discourse creates the indigenous communities as primitive, savage and inherently volatile and irrational attributing their innate aversion to modernity and its institutions including the welfare measures by the state. The next section seeks to explore the history of indebtedness and associative marginalization of indigenous populations as primitive in colonial India. By drawing attention to narratives around money and indigeneity rooted in colonial imaginaries and adapted to local indigenous populations, the analysis demonstrates the methodological necessity to do IR by paying attention to locally salient histories and acknowledging the circulation of political and economic processes beyond the local site for understanding articulations of indigenous citizenship.

Indigeneity and Violence: The Indian Case Study

India has the second-largest indigenous population in the world (Registrar General of India, 2011). There have been extensive debates around indigeneity as an analytic category in the Indian context with scholars emphasizing the exclusionary implications for other minority communities (Maurer, 2006, p. 23). The category of Scheduled Tribes is the de facto juridical marker of indigenous identification in India (Ghosh, 2006, p. 510). The term Adivasis (original settlers) as a self-referent marker of their claims as autochthons predates the formation of the modern Indian state. The indigenous communities ranked low in the sociopolitical-economic hierarchy because of their fundamental lack of capacity to become ‘worldly’ by deploying money as a symbol of exchange in exhibiting means-ends rationality. The historical reading of these relations elaborates on how indigeneity was constructed as an ontologically and temporally unruly category through exclusionary discourses. The Indian case highlights the patterned construction of indigeneity transcending geographies in unanticipated ways to unpack neoliberal configurations in contemporary times. It is necessary to reanimate the historical constructions of the indigenous populations to understand quotidian state discourses and practices on competing bids for recognition and rights.

The term Adivasi is an embodiment of ‘temporal other’ with a visible political aesthetic that distinguishes it from the ‘modern’. The romanticized imagery of the ‘primordial rebel’ lying outside the realm of socioeconomic and political administration reinforced their exclusion from the modern. Scholars have punctured the myth of ‘Adivasi exceptionalism’ by reinstating that these communities were fully involved in kingships, commerce and even maintained relationships with other groups (Guha, 2013, p. 18). The term had different connotations in terms of the people and land relationships, and as Sumit Guha’s work highlights that the pre-colonial Indian society was not divided on caste or tribe but a more complicated range of categories such as jat, quam, khum and kabilah, which denoted lineages, occupational profession and religious denomination (Guha, 2013, p. 23). With the coming of the British empire, Adivasi was produced as a category of ‘difference’.

The contested nature of tribal status dates back to the colonial anthropological scripts with the trope of primitive tribes. The need for order was the main focus of colonial anthropological pursuits in the country with the kaleidoscopic diversity presenting a challenge for determining a hierarchical arrangement (Chandra, 2015, p. 128). Racial and cultural differences were the broad parameters for categorizing and classifying India’s tribal populations. H. H. Risley, one of the foremost colonial administrators, responsible for the 1890 ethnographic survey of Bengal and the 1901 Census inscribed physical features as a defining marker for categorizing Indian bodies. In particular, was the ‘nasal structure’ as a guide to status in society. The ones with light complexions and fine noses were thought of as descendants of the Aryans (mostly upper caste) and dark complexion and snub noses were categorized as backward tribes the lowest within the societal strata, mostly occupying forests and hills.

The imposition of attributes of tribalism such as primitivity and child-like innocence by British colonizers resulted in infantilizing the indigenous people divesting them of their agency and constituting epistemic violence, oppression and displacement. These interactions evidence the evolution of indigeneity in response to modernity, which marked a definitive turn towards the market and money as means of exchange. In India, the British colonial administrators invented the category of ‘tribal’, which was separate from the caste-based distinctions in Hindu society by transporting the Enlightenment framework based on notions of primitivity. British colonialists employed the tropes of money and indigeneity to frame the tribal as the ‘other’ in the temporal framework of modernity. There were often references to the lack of knowledge about money and the inability to comprehend the value of private property that marked the indigenous populations as inferior (Beteille, 1992). The Scottish Enlightment had a deep impact on administrators in colonial Bengal including Augustus Cleveland who viewed money as a civilizing influence for the primitives (Rath, 2006). Tribals were condemned for ‘plundering’ which meant indulging in the instant gratification of their desires instead of trading and working which meant rational deferral and impersonal and regulated exchange. The primitive tribal thus was judged for having little comprehension of mediatory entities such as the state and money as a system of exchange. The colonizers placed tribals as existing in a primitive and unpremeditated condition ‘already outside’ the exchange governed by money and at the same time highlighted that money could serve as a civilizational force, ‘taming’ the naturally violent proclivities of indigenous people. The lack of temporal deferment along with the absence of money became instrumental in crafting the figure of the sensuous, corporeal archetypal primitive. The primitive viewed money as a thing in itself rather than a means to an end in the future. The use of money for satiating immediate desires, particularly alcoholism indicated the predilection for succumbing to sensuous yearnings rather than investing in a productive future thus demonstrating a lack of understanding about the value of money.

An important dimension of colonial rule was producing ‘zones of anomaly’ thus marking space as political and relegating certain areas to distinctive administrative regimes because of their impenetrability and cultural geography, creating distinctions between mainland and peripheral zones (Bates, 1994, p. 19). The populations in these peripheral zones were lowest in the civilizational ranks, parallels often drawn to evolutionary development. Another marker for colonial domination was attributing child-like qualities to these tribes in comparison to the masculine project of colonization which guaranteed protection. The ‘invention of the primitive’ was accompanied by an influx of exploitative state machinery often referred to as the trinity of ‘sarkar, sahukar and the zamindar’ (Bates, 1995, p. 219). This was to counter the narratives of freedom associated with wilderness, as wilderness became associated with a difference but also subalternity: the category of Adivasis pointed to this subalternity. One of the responses to the development of Adivasi consciousness was the reliance on religion, as David Hardman outlines in his work on Western India in the 1920s (Baviskar, 2005). It is this religious conviction that is now being usurped by neo-Hindutva forces to engage with the indigenous populations.

The codification of this colonial cultural hegemony through the processes of law created Institutional hierarchy and discrimination against the indigenous others. The category of ‘savage slot’ asserting the primitivity of the tribals was ascribed by colonial ethnographers and administrators making them distinctly separate from the Hindu society (Parry & Bloch, 1989). This classification was passed on from the colonial to the modern Indian state becoming firmly encoded in the epistemological and juridical categories of state recognition, rendering tribals as the marginal others of the Indian liberal state.

The Post-colonial Indian State: Protection Versus Assimilation

The section outlines the genealogy of the political selves of Adivasis about to the statist discourses on primitivism in post-colonial India. The examination of indigeneity through Avery Gordon’s notion of haunting helps in tracing the genealogical relationship between indigeneity and governance (Gordon, 2008). The hermeneutic device of haunting can be used to analyze the modern forms of dispossession and exploitation with concrete impact on the indigenous people. Haunting is a state where repressed or unresolved violence expresses itself, where the blind spot comes to view and when the experience of time is altered in the way we separate the past from the present and future. Haunting helps us understand how the histories are tied to current biographies, how land was dispossessed and how institutions maintain an order of things. The categorical and civilizational exclusion through theories of money, property and government haunt the specter of Indian politics.

The hedge-monologue constituting the Western universalist knowledge regarding state practices/mechanisms of representation excluded indigenous voices in independent India. Either viewed as primitives trapped within the modern state imaginaries that need to be civilized or victims in need of protection, Adivasis have been interpreted through the lens of tragedy or triumphalism of the post-colonial Indian state. These opposing tropes place Adivasis in an irresoluble double bind, whereby they seek sympathy from bureaucracy and media to represent their demands and at the same time seek to negotiate their self-hood in ways that cannot be neatly defined by subalternity (Maurer, 2006, p. 33). There were two positions most neatly outlined in the Constituent Assembly debates one advocated by G. S. Ghurye, a nationalist, who described these Adivasis as practicing animism as backward Hindus and advocated for incorporating them within the mainstream of Indian society. The other position of protectionism was advocated by Verrier Elvin who sought to protect these tribals from the onslaught of modernity and influenced the Nehruvian tribal protection policies. The exclusion in the economic realm was co-produced with the juridical marginalization in the liberal Indian state. The category of tribal structured the Indian state’s paternalistic approach from its inception. The Nehruvian model of development aspired for aggressive development pursued by the state; however, Verrier Elwin the architect of Nehru’s tribal policy advocated for gradualism and simplicity pointing out that the developmental paradigm and the metric of economic advancement would be not well suited for the tribals. Thus, differing temporalities of development and constitution of the Tribals as the nation’s other was passed on from colonial to the modern Indian state. The non-assimilationist paradigm of tribal governmentality is instrumental in the interventionist practices of the modern state. The Indian constitution carried forward some of the provisions of the colonial government acts and provided for 7.5 percent reservations for Scheduled tribes. The notion of the tribal as the ‘primitive other’ has implicit evolutionist connotations and the Indian constitution under the fifth and sixth schedules offers protective legislation in the form of certain guarantees including reservations in employment and education and central and state legislative assemblies. These policies are a continuation of colonial policies of protectionism premised on the notion of primitivity and vulnerability. The notions of ‘backwardness’ and ‘lack of rational thought’ were appropriated by the post-colonial state that took upon itself the role of provider/liberator for the Adivasi communities. The dual tropes of representation led to the configuration of the indigenous identity either as a threat to national security or as backward minority that hindered the development of the nation-state. This further perpetuated form of ‘banal’ violence’ that dispossessed these communities and placed them a in precarious existence. The national/popular gaze towards the Adivasis is often a by-product of violence, and it is often moments of disjunction that accord visibility to these ‘invisibilized’ communities. The Scheduled tribes have thus been exoticized and patronized by the government through the creation of separate administrative categories and affirmative policies. However, neoliberal state policies often come in conflict with these protectionist claims as the state has deep-rooted alliances with corporate interests to formulate Special Economic Zones, which allows for tribal land open to private companies. ⁴ The debates between protectionism and assimilation lead to two broader projects of nationalism: one seeking to reassert the tribal identity and reclaim rights over their resources and the second associated with Hindu right-wing nationalism whereby Adivasis are seen as backward people who need to be brought within the fold of Hindu society. The Adivasi resistance in the form of various popular rebellions also encouraged the institutionalization of tribal autonomy and the reinforcement of their perception as threats to the ‘national interest’ (Chakravorty, 2013).

The historical discourses on money and indigeneity have informed contemporary claims to citizenship with an increasingly blurring distinction between the state and the market in the contemporary Indian state. The shifting contours of modernity have influenced mandates for entitlements as well as a political agency within the state. The state-led narratives of development are generically pejorative of the tribals often eluding to their simplicity, slating them as anachronisms to the raison d’état of state development initiatives yet finding it ‘impossible’ to develop them. The rise of the neoliberal Indian state hinges upon two colluding logics: development and market exchange. The ideology valuing market exchange promotes the idea that the market is capable of being a guide to all human action thus substituting previously held ethical beliefs of exchange and embracing the self-regulating free market and its concomitant values of competition and self-interest as the key to effective governance. The state’s logic of development made navigating the market economy a precursor for state patronage, thus reconfiguring the status of indigenous populations.

It would be erroneous to equate the relative material absence of money with the symbolic absence of money as the organizing discourse on indigeneity (Nilse, 2015, p. 206). There have been various accounts referencing the economic exploitation of the tribals but undergird discourses on money and market exchange have rarely been theorized. This has led to the uncritical reproduction of the colonial lens viewing tribals as untainted by the worldly processes of market exchange and thus exposed to being persistently exploited by those in positions of power. This section builds of fiscal politics on indigeneity focusing on the intersection between state, economy and culture to illustrate how historical discourses on money and indigeneity have informed contemporary claims of indigenous citizenship often blurring the distinction between the state and logic of the market. The political iconicity associated with indigenous identity and its relationship to money enforces certain social scripts leading to the Indian state capitalizing on developmental logic and market exchange. The analysis highlights how scripts of money, value and indigeneity gesture in understanding established structures of meaning including informing definitions of work, social relations and material interactions. It helps in theorizing political entitlements and the meaning of economic rights for indigenous communities. Money and market exchange became a site of disenfranchisement for the indigenous citizens in India.