Dynamic duos: On partnership and the possibilities of postcolonial ethnography

Can the research assistant speak?

The question of who speaks and how has been a central preoccupation of postcolonial critique (Bhaba, 1987; Fanon, 1967; Said, 1985; Scott, 1999; Young, 2001: 58). In India, this conjoined intellectual and political project has been taken up by various camps – none more renowned than the Subaltern Studies Collective. The collective argued that to fashion a more authentic and inclusive future, history must be rewritten from the vantage point of those subjects left out of colonial historiography (Guha, 1982). Recuperating the voice of the subaltern became accordingly a means to interrogate the colonial knowledge regime and chart alternative, postcolonial futures.

The politics of subaltern studies notwithstanding, the project proved conceptually fraught. Gyatri Spivak, for instance, argued the ‘subaltern’ (a notion borrowed from Gramsci, 1971: 52) to be a theoretical construct, predicated on an essentialized alterity vis-à-vis the dominant class. Spivak’s essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988), questioned how a figure doomed to historical and now conceptual subordination might ever speak for themselves. The critiques challenged scholars to think of subalternity beyond a singular and rigid dichotomy of subordination versus domination (see also Sivaramakrishnan, 1995). The subaltern has subsequently re-emerged as a figure of multifaceted difference – at once dynamically situated and agentive, but hitherto unseen, unheard, and under-represented (Pandey, 2011).

The contours of this argument have a special bearing on anthropology and the ethnographic method. On the one hand, anthropology has historically (though often problematically) studied and celebrated communities left out of the historical record. On the other, it has tended to obviate the figures who enabled these investigations. In terms of method and representation, ethnography certainly has its subalterns. Foremost among these is the research assistant. Deployed at the frontlines of fieldwork, yet conveniently erased thereafter, the research assistant has suffered varying degrees of subalternity throughout the history of the method. Roger Sanjek has gone so far as to term these exploitative dynamics ‘Anthropology’s Hidden Colonialism’ (1993). But what if these fieldworkers were to speak? What would they have to tell us about the people and processes of ethnography today? How would they articulate the power dynamics – and extant colonialisms – of the researcher–assistant relationship? How might their voice rebalance the conspicuously academic debates over reflexivity that have attended the method since the 1980s?

My research assistant, Eklavya Pradhan, ¹ can and does speak – often with a charm and bite that could unnerve even the most open-minded anthropologist. Since our earliest days of fieldwork in Darjeeling, India, Eklavya has challenged my understandings of what ethnography should and could be. I have done the same for him. Our partnership has forced both of us to rethink the problems, possibilities, and impossibilities of the method. Throughout, we have sought to work with and, where possible, overcome the colonial legacy of anthropology in India in order to forge our own kind of ethnography – one uniquely suited to our field and our characteristics as fieldworkers. Our encounter with anthropology’s coloniality has been two-fold. First, it has involved direct research engagements with the residues of colonial anthropology in the lives and politics of the communities we have worked with. Second, it has involved a coming to terms with inequalities endemic to the researcher–assistant relationship. In the exchanges that follow, Eklavya and I enter into mutually critical dialogue on our relationship, the conditions of fieldwork in India, and the transformative potential of the researcher–assistant partnership more generally. Interleaving our voices in this way, we argue for a postcolonial ethnography that works with – and through – the residual colonialities of the method to explore new forms of ethnographic engagement and reflection.

In 2006, I hired Eklavya to assist me with my dissertational research. His presence forever changed my work. Originally, I had intended to study two ethnic groups vying for recognition as Scheduled Tribes of India – a coveted affirmative action designation. With Eklavya involved, my project transformed into a multi-pronged foray into subnationalist politics. During this time, nearly all of Darjeeling’s minorities were competing for Scheduled Tribe status. Local political parties, meanwhile, were fighting over whether to make Darjeeling a ‘tribal area’ as per the Sixth Schedule of the Indian constitution (thus granting it limited autonomy), or to seek a fully separate state of Gorkhaland. Having failed to achieve a separate state during a violent agitation in the 1980s, becoming ‘tribal’ had now emerged as an alternate means to rights, recognition, and autonomy. This was a political arena shot through with contending interests, loyalties, and desires (Middleton, 2013). Originally, I had no intentions of getting too involved in these volatile subnationalist dynamics. Eklavya had other designs. Within weeks of hiring him, I would find myself at the fore of these politics, working not only with the strong-arm politicians, ethnic associations, and communities vying for ‘tribal’ status, but also with the government anthropologists tasked with certifying their ‘tribal’ identities. Rights, recognition, and autonomy hung in the balance – and both Eklavya and I were directly implicated.

In this article, Eklavya and I reflect upon fieldwork in these charged circumstances. Unpacking the dynamics of our duo, we explore the possibilities and impossibilities of postcolonial ethnography. As will become clear, our fieldwork was postcolonial in both its objects and modes of analysis. But much of what we have to say pertains to ethnography more generally. In this regard, our exchanges flesh out and exceed the frameworks of postcoloniality to make broader statements about the conditions of contemporary ethnography writ large.

We begin by discussing how research assistants open new fields of study. The assistant figures here as an interlocutor and ‘fixer’ of ethnographic relations – not merely a worker of the field, but rather constitutive of the field itself. These exchanges underscore the field’s negotiated, socially contingent, and emergent nature (Amit, 2000; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Marcus, 2009; Reddy, 2009). Second, we train attention to the forms of agency enabled by such partnerships. Particularly in unstable contexts, combining forces may prove logistically and epistemologically expedient, as well as vital to the safety of all parties (see Hoffman and Tarawalley, this issue; also Gupta and Ferguson, 1997: 23; Radin, 1975 [1935]; Hannerz, 2004). Third, we discuss how fieldwork recalibrates the differentials of insider/outsider knowledge, difference, and power among fieldworkers. Eklavya resisted the role of subservient assistant and instead took an influential role in shaping the direction of research. I likewise slowly transformed from a naïve outsider into a resident expert with privileged access and knowledge often surpassing Eklavya’s own. These shifts triggered tensions between the two of us, as well as breakthroughs. The latter would prove instrumental in realizing the potentials of our partnership.

Having a research assistant assume such a pivotal role in my project was not something I planned. I arrived to the field with professionally imparted ideals of the individuated ethnographic self, which I clung to stubbornly. Eklavya’s understandings of the method were no less problematic. Prior to meeting me, he had worked with other anthropologists and social scientists. His role in these projects, which were markedly orientalist in their designs and subject matters, ² had done little to challenge his received understandings of anthropology. Replete with shamans, bows and arrows, and what Eklavya termed other ‘mumbo-jumbos’, these research experiences only confirmed for him ethnography’s enduring coloniality. Preconceptions notwithstanding, our fieldwork would force both of us to confront anthropology’s ghosts – and ultimately work with and through their troubling presence.

We were subsequently able to develop new objects of analysis, new tactics, and a new kind of field. What emerged was a postcolonial ethnography, wherein anthropologist and assistant assumed seemingly old yet veritably new forms and functions. Despite our modest successes in achieving a more inclusive and equitable mode of ethnographic engagement, we can make no claims to fully transcending the coloniality of the researcher–assistant relationship. Structural inequality and difference remained (and remain) integral to our relationship. We acknowledge as much. Our story is accordingly as much a testament to the possibilities of ethnographic partnership as it is a case study in the endemic impossibilities and inequalities of the method itself.

If the subaltern can speak, s/he needn’t write. When invited to contribute prose to this article, Eklavya declined. Academic writing is not his medium of choice, so we decided against interleaving his prose and mine. A literary exchange of this kind suited neither him nor the dynamics of our relationship. We have instead chosen to present actual conversations between the two of us. These conversations were conducted in English, videoed, and edited for the purposes of the Fieldwork(ers) project. Inflected with humor, insight, and shame, they capture the personal nature of our relationship as fieldworkers and friends. I took the responsibility of writing the passages that surround these conversations (hence, the predominant first-person ‘I’). Eklavya has since reviewed all of these. And while I played a leading role in developing and writing out the analytical points, the arguments have emerged through years of conversation and reflection between the two of us (hence, the ‘We’). Literary authorship, in this case, has proven much easier to parse than analytical authorship. That is, while the words may be easily attributed to him or me, the ideas themselves have come from a complex history of interaction, negotiation, and exchange between us. In this way, these exchanges reflect upon and largely reproduce the dialogics of our partnership so as to cast some mutually telling light on the conditions and characters of contemporary ethnography – postcolonial and otherwise.

Contentious beginnings

Entering my second month of fieldwork, research was progressing steadily. I had established contact with two prominent ethnic groups, the Gurungs and the Tamangs, working with their ethnic associations in Darjeeling Town, while living in a Gurung-Tamang village. I designed this two-tiered approach to provide a multi-perspectival look into their respective movements for Scheduled Tribe recognition. Still, I wondered if a research assistant might be beneficial. At the time, I was still gaining proficiency in the language, so at the very least, I needed help transcribing and translating the interviews filling up my hard-drive. A journalist friend suggested Eklavya as someone who had experience in this ‘kind of thing’, so I put in a call to arrange a meeting.

When I first met Eklavya, he struck me as sly and cunning. He showed up late to the café, wearing jeans, black boots, and a black t-shirt – a cool customer so it seemed. He sat down, scanning the restaurant with edgy eyes. With neither introduction nor apology, he then leaned in and asked in a hushed tone, ‘So what can I do for you? What do you want from me?’

I suddenly felt part of a covert meeting. Feeling the need to return to the above-board professionalism for which I had been trained, I explained my project in the well-worn terms of the various proposals that had marked my academic journey to date. But as I spoke, Eklavya stared distractedly out the window at the happenings in the street below. He appeared so disinterested I wondered if he was even listening. Only once I had finished my spiel did he turn to me and say:

Well, you see, there is all this other stuff going on that you might want to think about. If you wanted, I could put you in touch with some of the other groups. Actually, a while back we put together an umbrella organization to represent all of the groups struggling for ‘tribal’ status. I could get you involved with all of that, put you in touch with all the leaders, get you into their meetings, whatever you want.

Eklavya’s leads were notable – especially that he was active in Darjeeling’s ‘tribal’ movements. But they were delivered with an air of dismissal that bothered me. By suggesting an immediate departure from my research design, was he not making a comment about the validity of my interests? Who did this guy think he was? This was a job interview after all. What I was looking for was an assistant to help me with the quotidian tasks of transcription and perhaps some networking, not someone to critique or highjack my project. With as much confidence as I could muster, I told him that while I appreciated his ideas, I would be sticking to my original design. Thankfully, Eklavya didn’t push any further, and we agreed to meet in the coming days to do some transcription. He then left, leaving me with serious doubts about us working together.

Just who was this character? The answers to that question grew more complicated in the months ahead when Eklavya revealed himself to be, among other things, an ethnic activist, an insurance salesman, the chief of logistics for a cross-continental rickshaw rally for charity, a Bollywood actor, a family man, a closet intellectual, and one of Darjeeling’s most well-connected men. But for now, this sly, intriguing figure was only tenuously my employee and certainly not yet a colleague or friend.

These were my first impressions of Eklavya. His first impressions of me are more interesting. Here we are reflecting on our first meeting:

Eklavya: Basically, what first hit me was: What are you here for? Oh, you are working with Tamangs and Gurungs. I was like, oh this is just another guy who calls himself a scholar, but basically he is just like most westerners doing projects on Buddhism and monasteries. So here is just another guy interested in the Buddhist thing. And they don’t need that kind of thing. Because there are more important things happening here. Very interesting things happening here.

Towns: I think what is interesting is that I had certain things that I wanted to look at. I didn’t want to do the classic thing like study Tamang Buddhism or Gurung Buddhism.

Eklavya: Yes, but that’s the impression I got. Because that is what you said: ‘I am studying the Tamangs and the Gurungs.’ And where are you staying? ‘The Gurung-Tamang village of Bidhuwā Busti.’ Oh cool, here’s another one! (mutual laughter)

Towns: So did you have experience with people along these lines?

Eklavya: Yeah, of course. Because I have seen anthropologists come here. I have worked for them. And they are just interested in monasteries, lamas, shamans. I have done projects for them. They come here, they probably heard somewhere about some shaman doing some mumbo-jumbo. So they would like to meet them, interview them, capture everything they do on tape, video tape their mumbo-jumbo. So I thought you were just another white guy interested in some mumbo-jumbo. I thought you were more interested in the culture and the Buddhist aspects. These are the very glamorous subjects for white people and scholars from the West – on peoples with bows and arrows.

Towns: Well that is largely the history of ethnology.

Eklavya: For me, these things have been done to death man!

Certainly, I had not come to India to research bows, arrows, and other mumbo-jumbos. I explained as much at the café. Nevertheless, that was the impression he got. Somehow those orientalist predilections preceded me. One needn’t wonder why: I am indeed a white male who from time to time ‘calls himself a scholar’. I arrived to Darjeeling with elite ‘western’ credentials – and all the symbolic and material capital they afforded. Per my subject position alone, I fit ethnology’s mold in India to a ‘T’.

Importantly, when Eklavya pegged me as just ‘another white guy interested in some mumbo-jumbo’, he indexed not only ethnology’s past but also its contemporary salience in Darjeeling (Middleton, 2011). At the time of our first meeting (2006), Darjeeling was steeped in ethnological paradigms. Movements for ‘tribal’ recognition and autonomy dominated local politics. Ethnic associations and politicians were researching and propagating ‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ ‘tribal culture’, knowing that any day government anthropologists might turn up to affirm or deny their claims. Eklavya’s ethnic community, the Newars, were themselves seeking Scheduled Tribe status. Ethnological paradigms may have ‘been done to death’, but the political reality was that they remained conduits to rights and recognition in India. The paradoxes of the situation were not lost upon Eklavya. In time, I would come to welcome Eklavya’s thoughts on these conditions. But not at the start. His critiques of ethnography were too brash and off-putting for an anthropologist with his own pretenses about the method.

If Eklavya mapped onto me the stereotypes of colonial ethnology, I projected onto him the expectations of a dutiful research assistant hired to do the grunt work of ethnography and little more. Hence my rejection of his leads and critiques. Hence my perceptions of his affront to my project. Looking back, our relationship appears over-determined from the start. Ethnology was there, in the field, waiting for us with its prescriptions of subjects, objects, and modes of study – themselves organized around particular configurations of power, race, expertise, and insider-outsider locationality (cf. Borneman and Hammoudi, 2009: 271). Such was the extant legacy – the precession, if you will – of the discipline in India. ³

Unthinking these paradigms would prove difficult, but necessary. Engaging anthropology’s lingering past and being frank about the inequalities of our relationship became, for us, an important means for discovering our own forms of ethnography. We discuss these transformations next. For now, our contentious beginnings signal the ways that received understandings of the method prefigure the relations of assistants and researchers in the field – not to mention the conversations that academics do and do not have about these partnerships before and after fieldwork.

Co-constituting the ‘field’

Transcription was a visibly painful operation for Eklavya. Smoking cigarettes fitfully, he frequently suggested putting me in touch with such and such organization or politician. I steadfastly declined his offers, citing the need to stick to the plan – my plan. My obstinacy roiled Eklavya. Across Darjeeling, the movements for ‘tribal’ recognition were heating up. To focus only on the Tamangs and Gurungs was to miss the scope, controversy, and complex politics of this now pan-ethnic phenomenon. The escalation was undeniable, but to keep my project tidy, I bracketed out this complexity – much to the dismay of my newly hired assistant.

As an activist, Eklavya had access to the politicians, parties, and ethnic organizations shaping these ‘tribal’ movements. He reminded me as much on a daily basis. His persistence chipped away at my resolve until eventually he made me an offer I could not refuse. Prior to meeting me, Eklavya had helped establish the Gorkha Janjati Manyata Samity (Gorkha Tribal Recognition Committee, hereafter GJMS), an umbrella organization representing all the minorities seeking Scheduled Tribes status. Among the founders was Ram Bahadur Kholi, ⁴ a controversial public intellectual known for his newspaper essays on the ‘tribal’ character of Darjeeling. Kholi, Eklavya, and other civil society leaders convened the GJMS in response to the possibility of Darjeeling becoming a ‘tribal-area’ as per the Sixth Schedule of the Indian constitution. As of 2005, the ruling Gorkhaland National Liberation Front (GNLF) was pushing hard for this form of ‘tribal’ autonomy. Non-ST communities subsequently feared being ‘left out’ of a newly ‘tribal’ Darjeeling.

Representing these ‘left out’ groups, the GJMS had taken a more militant stand. The multi-ethnic organization promised ‘inevitable unrest’ and ‘chaos’ were a ‘just decision and action on this burning and seriously sensitive matter’ not arrived at by the government (GJMS, 2006). Their incendiary remarks meant that the GJMS was under public scrutiny – and likely government surveillance. Rumors also suggested Kholi was being courted by the GNLF to help advance the movement for ‘tribal’ autonomy. Meeting Kholi would therefore be risky. As an anthropologist, there was no telling how this connection might suck me into the ‘tribal’ politics at hand. Nevertheless, I agreed to a meeting, which Eklavya promptly arranged in a discrete location, away from the watching eyes of the government and the public.

It went splendidly. Kholi was eager to hear about my work and to share his insider’s perspective. While there seemed to be a persistent misunderstanding on his part about my interests in culture, rather than the politics thereof (more on this later), we connected on multiple registers. By the end of our two-hour discussion, I had agreed to share writings that we thought might benefit his community’s quest for ST status. In return, Kholi promised me access to his organization and whatever help he could offer.

Days later, the government of West Bengal announced it was sending a team of government anthropologists to certify the ‘tribal’ identities of Darjeeling’s ‘left out’ minorities. Kholi insisted I attend the ethnographic survey, telling me, ‘Everything will be served up on a platter.’ With Kholi’s invite and Eklavya assuaging my entry, I found my way into the GJMS’s emergency meetings, where these aspiring minorities developed their strategies for being studied. I then attended the ethnographic survey, where these minorities tried to prove their ‘tribal’ identities to the Indian government (Middleton, 2011). Importantly, the survey put me in touch with the government anthropologists themselves. Unbeknownst to everyone in Darjeeling (save Eklavya), I subsequently began an extended ethnographic study of these civil servant anthropologists, working with them in the field and in their offices back in Kolkata. Carried out concurrently with my work with Darjeeling’s aspiring ‘tribes’, this new direction allowed me to study ‘tribal’ recognition from inside and outside India’s ethnographic state (Dirks, 2001).

The field continued to emerge in fortuitous ways. The same week of the ethnographic survey, Kholi was recruited into the local administration, where he assumed the role of Chief Officer of the Department of Information and Cultural Affairs. His primary assignment was to propagate the region’s ‘tribal’ identity. Kholi welcomed me and Eklavya into his office as ‘old friends’, and there we observed the political engineering of ‘tribal’ culture. Between this inside access to the local administration, my deepening relations with the government anthropologists in Kolkata, and our continued work with the aspiring ‘tribes’ of Darjeeling, we were now at the cutting-edge of ‘tribal’ politics.

The stakes rose proportionately. As a western anthropologist, people wanted things from me – namely, materials and endorsements to support their ‘tribal’ claims. Aspiring ‘tribes’ and government anthropologists invited me into their inner-sanctums, believing it was a coup to have a western anthropologist on their side. The information I gleaned on either side would be of great value to the other. For safety and ethical reasons, I therefore had secrets to keep. Unwilling to be a double agent, I stayed mum, sharing neither with ethic leaders nor the government anthropologists my findings from the other side. Even with Eklavya, my most trusted partner, I could not share everything.

Access became an asset and a liability. This was tricky terrain, crosscut by political interests and affiliations beyond my knowledge. One false step could place me in one camp or another – or worse yet, blow my cover as an ethnographer with his feet in multiple camps. Navigating this field, I relied on Eklavya more and more. Given his class position, intellect, and activist orientation, Eklavya had exceptional awareness of the inter-party and inter-personal politics at hand. Throughout his life, his cunning, awareness, and charm had allowed him to transcend the sharp political lines that divided Darjeeling. He seemed to know everyone, everywhere. Ironically, the personality traits that I first distrusted in Eklavya were now proving instrumental to our emerging field. And so I reaped the rewards of his slippery yet utterly likeable character. Eklavya also had well-honed strategies for avoiding political implications. As a research assistant, he rolled these skills over into our work, effectively keeping both of us out of trouble and in the action. Together, we were co-constituting a field.

Recent theorizations of the ‘field’ have argued for its socially emergent ontology (Amit, 2000; Bourdieu, 1987; Hirabayashi, 1999: 165; Schumaker, 2001). Deepa Reddy has referred to the field as ‘an almost random assemblage of sites that come into coherence through processes of fieldwork itself: the field as deterritorialized and reterritorialized, as it were, by the questions brought to bear on it in the course of research’ (2009: 90). In our case, the field was not an a priori thing to be studied, nor a place to go and do ethnography. It was a network of connectivity forged through interest, effort, and contingency. As a thoroughly social network, the field could not be broken down into isolated causalities or agencies. Eklavya and I were clearly its primary animators but, experientially, the field often seemed to take on a life of its own. It emerged before us and incorporated us into its protean contours. It became, in Lyn Schumaker’s terms, ‘a knowledge making machine’ (2001: 255).

Here we may decouple the field from the workers that bring it into being. In retrospect, my meeting with Kholi might appear our field’s origination point, but this would not be a deep enough reading. The serendipitous chain of events that spawned this field did not begin when I met Kholi. Rather, it was birthed from the contentious struggle between Eklavya (the insider assistant) and me (the outsider anthropologist) over the direction and validity of ethnographic study. Read accordingly, the contingent, negotiated nature of ethnographic knowledge production is to be located not only in the field, but also – and often first – among fieldworkers themselves. For Eklavya and me, negotiating our differences precipitated the field and constantly attended our working of it. It is to the latter that we now turn.

The fixer

Darjeeling’s ‘tribal’ politics intensified throughout 2006. These were exciting times. Eklavya and I were learning on the fly about each other and about political issues that really mattered. Friendship and fieldwork grew in concert (cf. Casagrande, 1960; Dumont, 1978; Gujar and Gold, 1992; Gold and Gujjar, 2002). Individually, I continued my work in the village and amongst the government anthropologists in Kolkata. These were domains where Eklavya didn’t belong. As a different kind of outsider, his presence would have severely compromised my access. Darjeeling’s political sphere was another matter. Mobilizing his vast network of contacts, Eklavya had an uncanny ability to get me everywhere I wanted to be. When we did work side-by-side, Eklavya did not serve as an interpreter, translator, or mediator. Instead, he took on the role of a fixer, establishing meetings, providing short introductions, and then often vanishing from the scene.

Ulf Hannerz has noted similar dynamics in foreign news journalism, calling the fixer a ‘multipurpose local resource person who so often is essential to the work, and at times even survival, of a correspondent in a new setting’ (2004: 47). Eklavya-as-fixer served two purposes. First, it allowed me to cultivate my own ethnographic relationships. Second, by simply ‘putting people together’, Eklavya mitigated his implication in my controversial work. Especially when investigating politically dangerous subjects, getting in also requires getting out. This is especially the case for the native assistant, who cannot leave the field once the research is done.

As a civil society leader, activist, and member of an aspiring ‘tribe’, Eklavya had his own relations (and distances) to maintain with the ethnic groups and powerful political parties we were engaging. The ambiguities of his location – neither perfectly inside nor outside the context of study – both enabled and complicated our collaboration (Borneman and Hammoudi, 2009: 237, 271). His positionality became especially difficult when engaging leaders of other ethnic groups:

Eklavya: Yes, that was a position that was a bit risky for me. Especially being from the community next to theirs, they would look at my involvement from a personal point of view and also as between two ethnic groups: the rivalry between their ethnic group and my own group.

Towns: What would they say to you when they were questioning you about who I was and what my intentions were? It sounds like you were caught between these ethnic leaders and me. We had our agenda and they had theirs. And you kind of had to be the middleman. How was it navigating that situation?

Eklavya: At times it would be difficult with people. Like if there were leaders, the big guys, when you were interviewing leaders. So sometimes I would just leave you on your own or just send you there on your own. That was a strategy. And it worked better because if you and I are together, and then I am easily accessible, and people can start calling me up and asking, ‘What’s happening?’ and ‘You tell this guy this is what it is and not this’. I almost always made it a point to put across to the people that I was not working for you, just setting you up, because I have connections, friends, whoever. I just set you up. But beyond that, I have no other interest. Nothing! Because as soon as they know we are working on something together, I have had it. I would be under immense pressure.

Eklavya-the-fixer stands out in this case not for his mediating capacities, but rather his eschewing thereof. By only ‘putting people together’, he operated in stark contrast to famous research assistants like George Hunt (Boas), Ishi (Kroeber), and Muchona the Hornet (V. Turner), who were conspicuous mediators of ethnographic understanding. Behind the scenes, Eklavya was proving an astute interlocutor. We frequently exchanged ideas on the critical arguments to be made from what we were seeing on the ground. He moved from empirics to analytics with ease. In fact, I would go so far as to say that his effectiveness as a research assistant hinged precisely in his abilities to negotiate peoples and paradigms of different orders. In this sense, Eklavya was a true ‘epistemic partner’ (Marcus, 2009: 30). But in the field, he pretended otherwise. There, he played a fixer – a catalyst of ethnographic relations who, when and where necessary, could absolve himself of apparent involvement in the research. Anything more was simply too risky.

This was a foil, but a necessary one. In the latter years of our research, Darjeeling would undergo a violent rejection of the very ‘tribal’ politics we were so involved in throughout 2006/7. Many of my informants (set up through Eklavya) were assaulted and banished from the region – Kholi included. In the aftermath of this violent turn, neither Eklavya nor I would like to imagine the outcomes had we (and especially he) not been so savvy. For me, the research-assistant-as-fixer might have been ethnographically expedient. For Eklavya, it was vital to his long-term safety.

Shifting differentials

Fieldwork recalibrated the differentials of expertise, difference, and insider versus outsider knowledge that subtended our relationship from the start. As I began synthesizing ethnographic findings from Darjeeling with archival materials from Delhi, Kolkata, and London, Eklavya recognized that I was developing my own kind of expertise. As we moved deeper into the politics of Darjeeling, I likewise came to recognize Eklavya’s exceptional abilities as a fieldworker. His cunning, sociability, and charm were perfectly suited to this kind of work. Of course, this was not coincidental. His personality and personal history were constitutive of the field we were now navigating. With the differentials of insider-outsider knowledge shifting in this way, we had little choice but to abandon our pre-conceptions of the researcher–assistant relationship. Personally, I was forced to relinquish any delusions of the individuated ethnographic self. Eklavya likewise rethought anthropology’s methods and subject matters. This was no mumbo-jumbo.

Our roles recalibrated, we found we could learn far more as a team than as individuals. This went beyond a mere aggregation of ethnographic agency. That is, it wasn’t just that we could cover more ground with two of us working the field. Rather, teamwork enabled new forms of ethnographic agency that exceeded the sum of their parts. Working together, we ‘played off of each other’, ‘opened doors for one another’, and ‘watched each other’s backs’. Before meetings, we would huddle to devise strategies for setting up the crucial connection, the telling observation, or the bridge into the controversial discussion. Linguistically, we would rehearse our deliveries, with Eklavya fine-tuning my Nepali to ensure the key questions were delivered with the nuance needed. Rarely would things go to plan, but by this point we welcomed the opportunity to improvise together. The experimentation, excitement, and risk suited our comportments. And together, we thrived in the art of ethnographic teamwork. Indeed, many of the tactics we arrived at were artful in their own right.

Coloniality repurposed

Given who we were, there were things I could do that Eklavya could not. Midway through fieldwork, Eklavya began referring to me as ‘white mischief’ – seemingly an allusion to a brand of cheap Indian vodka. In reality, this new handle connoted my ability (and willingness) to stick myself into the middle of controversial, potentially dangerous subject matters. My nose for trouble was only half the story, however. ‘White mischief’ also evoked a colonial, racial, ethnological past, here repurposed for contemporary ethnography:

Towns: If you had to explain the term ‘white mischief’, where the term came from, what would you say?

Eklavya: Well, because white people, because of their skin color, do have a license in India to do things which normally the locals would find outrageous, right? Even if you climb up on the dais or try and sit next to the biggest leader being felicitated, you would still be ok. Someone would show you the way out (laughter). Or if you just shoved the camera in front of [political supremo] Subash Ghisingh or somebody, you could still get away with it … if you did it ignorantly. But here some of the things we were doing, we were doing it deliberately to get around, right? We were doing it deliberately. Trying to get people to talk. Talking to opposite parties and, you know, just trying to egg them on to say things about each other and stuff.

Towns: Well, we were definitely on the prowl for trouble. I think that was the mischief aspect of it. And that was kind of a strategy we had. At one point I remember in the research, I felt like we were really in this together, navigating this very protean field that was constantly changing. And we were right at the fore of it. We had our hands in so many different things. What are you getting? What am I getting?

Eklavya: Yeah, I think we did really well. I think our strategy was best. Or maybe we were lucky. I am not too sure.

Towns: We were definitely lucky! (mutual laughter). It’s interesting to think how you were such an interesting source of access to me, but with the whole ‘white mischief’ aspect, you probably got into certain situations because I was with you.

Eklavya: Yeah, because I know with you around, it will be easier. And also to get away. Because if I have to get away, suddenly we put ourselves at great risk, it would be easier to get away. Right? Instead of me going alone and snooping around, if I have you around, it’s much more convenient to get away. That risk factor is slightly reduced.

Towns: Right. You know the saying ‘good cop-bad cop’? Well, it was kind of like ‘brown cop-white cop’! (mutual laughter)

That this exchange began and ended in racial jest was not unusual. We – and particularly Eklavya – often riffed on our racial differences. This provided comic relief and, paradoxically, reaffirmed our brotherly bond. That said, the racial underpinnings of our relationship had a history that could not be ignored. White/brown dynamics have colored South Asian anthropology since the days of colonial phrenology, ethnology, and the like. Particularly in Darjeeling, where becoming ‘tribal’ was the order of the day, those histories are not as far off as one might think. Whiteness had its enabling effects, as did the local assumptions that anthropology and ethnology were one and the same. Whether it was Eklavya’s initial impression of me being ‘just another white guy studying mumbo-jumbo’, his coining me ‘white mischief’, or the ‘white cop-brown cop’ techniques we deployed in the field, racial difference and ethnology’s legacy were operative conditions of fieldwork. We accordingly put this coloniality to new uses.

Doing so, however, often cast us into compromising situations and ethical gray zones:

Eklavya: So what would happen was: they we would see me with you. And everybody was trying to prove themselves ‘tribal’. So a lot of them were scared about what you would do, what you would write, and how this would impact their applications with the government. So I would be under pressure in certain times that you would put things in a proper manner. Because you are the guy who [the government] is going to listen to. So you really have to put things in the right perspective according to them. And I am sure you have seen and experienced so many of those sessions where they have tried to infuse things and put things in your head. ‘This is how things are and not this.’

Towns: Yes, I was feeling pressure because they were asking me for materials to submit to the government. And it was clear to me explicitly and implicitly all during my research that they wanted my endorsement of their ‘tribal’ applications. No matter how much I tried to explain that I was less interested in culture and more interested in their politics, no one could wrap their head around that. To them, I was there to study culture and thus they wanted to make sure that I had the correct orthodox view of what their culture was. No matter what I told them, everyone had these expectations that I was there to study ritual and dance and all of these classical ethnological tropes.

Eklavya: Because that is what we were telling people. ‘He is just here to study songs, dances, and culture.’

Towns: I wasn’t really telling people that!

Eklavya: I had to tell people that because the ordinary members wouldn’t give a damn, but the office bearers and the big leaders would.

During fieldwork, I had at times suspected Eklavya of manipulating the presentation of our research for his and my benefit. But hearing it so directly, even years after the fact, stung me. It was one thing to tacitly accept and reap the advantage of the ethnological stereotypes projected onto our work. It was another to deceptively mobilize them for ethnographic gain.

Upon further reflection, I see now that Eklavya’s tact was not just about getting me where I needed to be. Using ethnology as a foil also helped to protect his own subject position as a native researcher studying other ethnic groups. For many of the same reasons that he took on the role of the fixer, Eklavya chose to frame our project via the established ethnological tropes of culture, ritual, identity, etc., rather than the politics thereof. This was the altogether safer, more expedient narrative. I would not have condoned such deception. But neither did I interrogate Eklavya too deeply on his behind-the-scenes tactics. How much due diligence was really due? In this ethnologically affected contemporary, how hard should I have pushed to avail our subjects of the new kind of anthropological inquiry at hand? And what of Eklavya? To what extent can this ethical onus be transferred onto the research assistant when even he, until very recently, harbored his own orientalist views of anthropology and ethnography? These are questions for which we lack clear answers.

In the end, there was only so much one (or two) could do to overcome the colonial legacies at hand. My whiteness, professional credentials, and focus on ‘tribes’ fit all too comfortably into the historical profile of Indian ethnology. How easy it was then to remove the sanitizing quotation marks from ‘tribes’, ‘culture’, and the like to announce an anthropologist there to verify their positivist existence. I have no doubt that this is why so many politicians, ethnic leaders, and government anthropologists invited me into their inner-sanctums. For better and for worse, my presence was to be an affirmation of their ethnological predilections. Eklavya, being the cunning ethnographer he is, saw this and used the foil of ethnology to both of our advantages. Troubling though they may be, these admissions underscore the ethical complications that attend the researcher–assistant dynamic. Spanning not just social but also moral subjects, such partnerships may entail their own shades of gray.

If fieldwork pushed us to give up the ghosts of anthropology’s past, we did not do so fully. The truth is that the discipline’s precession often got us into places where we had no business being. More often than not, that was precisely where it got interesting. We thus continued to ply the possibilities of postcolonial ethnography – at once working with, off of, and beyond the disciplinary legacies at hand. Whether it was examining the socio-political life of ethnology, repurposing ethnological paradigms to our advantage, or experimenting with new modes of inquiry via the dynamics of our duo, our project grew from the imperial ruins (Stoler, 2008) of anthropology in South Asia. It was a seemingly old yet recognizably new kind of anthropological engagement. In this sense, the uncanny emerged as an operative trope of our postcolonial ethnography.

Postcolonial reckonings

But as Freud reminds us, the uncanny is haunting (2003 [1919]). When Roger Sanjek argued the use of research assistants to be ‘Anthropology’s Hidden Colonialism’ (1993), he located researcher–assistant inequality at the heart of anthropology’s historical development. In the spirit of Sanjek (and Freud), it is worth considering what was old – even colonial – about the dynamics of our duo. At issue are the enduring limits, inequalities, and impossibilities of such partnerships. In this final exchange, Eklavya broaches these issues by taking a sobering look back at some of the harder realities of our relationship:

Eklavya: You also begin to feel that ... well, sometimes you get this feeling that, you know, it’s about like prostituting yourself. There is some white guy you are giving all this access to, all this information, and how he is going to deal with it? Because we have had a lot of that in the past. And then I am here and someone can easily point a finger at me, or even the government can pull me and say, ‘Hey dude, what are you trying to do?’ So yes, at a certain stage I did have thoughts and feelings about: Hey, was I doing the right thing? Giving all this inside access, and getting you everywhere. Was I carried away?

In mentioning ‘prostitution’, Eklavya evokes exploitation in the starkest of terms. Hiring Eklavya as a paid worker of the field – a wage laborer, if you will – I certainly extracted value from him beyond what he was initially paid for (Marx, 1978: 362). To this day, with me continuing to write articles and manuscripts based on our fieldwork, this extraction of surplus value remains an ongoing process. But Eklavya also inflects the specter of exploitation with national, racial, and state-oriented concerns. Tellingly, he yokes our research to anthropology’s troubled, racialized history in India (viz. his mention of a ‘white guy’ extracting information and doing with it what he pleases; India has ‘had a lot of that in the past’). He not only objectifies this problematic legacy, he recognizes his own implication in it. As he notes, he would have to live with his involvement in our project and its connections to the past, long after our fieldwork was complete.

As other essays in this collection illustrate (see Holmberg and Gold et al.), longitudinal reflection among fieldworkers offers particular insight into the dynamics of ethnography. For Eklavya and me, post-field life has underscored the inequalities of our relationship. Those moments of transcendence and equality we were able to find during fieldwork now appear more fleeting than before. The impossibilities of an authentically postcolonial and/or equitable ethnography have shown themselves in undeniable terms. On the one hand, the strictures of academic knowledge production have made it impossible for us to reap equal rewards and recognition for our work together. On the other, life has thrust us into different relations with academic knowledge. For me, it has become a career – for Eklavya, an occasional form of employment and intellectual engagement. We have subsequently come to ‘carry’ our research experience in different ways and in different directions. Still, significant questions remain: Was Eklavya prostituting himself? Was I exploiting him? Were we ‘doing the right thing’? With inflections of guilt, shame, and second-guessing, here Eklavya, the research assistant, charts for us his postcolonial quandary in especially compelling terms.

Had we gotten ‘carried away’? Had we allowed the excitement of fieldwork to blind us to the structures of power and difference that put us together in the first place? Perhaps. But here one might also ask: since when has immersion and ‘losing oneself’ not been part of the ethnographic experience? For us, this was a shared experience that opened new understandings of ethnography itself. Admittedly, there was an intoxicating effect to working the field together that often obviated the inequalities of our relationship. There were nevertheless services to be rendered and debts to be paid by both parties. Each of us bought into this exchange knowing full well that the balance was never to be equal. In even our most transcendent moments, the working conditions of difference and inequality remained:

Towns: You said, ‘Was I prostituting myself?’ How does it feel for you to know that we did this work together, that I took all this material back to the states and I am now making a career being an academic and you are here doing other things.

Eklavya: I am still here doing rickshaws! (laughter). Well, I didn’t really have any serious thoughts, it was just a few instances of whether it was right to have this person, especially an American, because you know what America is like these days. So hey, sometimes you have these pangs of conscience. Was it right? But then I probably read a few of your writings and found that you weren’t doing any kind of backhanded thing and using it for other means, so yeah, then I felt pretty safe that I did a pretty good job. And you also have got your degree from this work. And in the anthropological circle, this scholarly world also, I think it will make a good impact and study for future scholars. And I left it at that. But at some point I did have serious concerns that I probably got carried away or whatever I might call it. Should I also [do this]? Because I also got very interested in the kind of work you were doing. I thought, ‘Hey man, this could work for me. Should I also study this?’ In fact, I did enroll myself in a masters in sociology, because they didn’t have anthropology. And it’s still on, but I have not been able to work at all, because I got so involved with my other job [running a rickshaw rally across the Indian subcontinent for international charity]. Because I had to earn a living. So the sociology degree is still on hold. But at one point I took it very seriously. ‘Hey this is really good. And this is something that I would like to do and I am probably a little bit good at it.’

Eklavya was more than ‘a little good’ at being a social scientist. Since our project, he has worked for other ethnographers – many by way of my recommendation. The sociology degree meanwhile remains on hold, as he continues to pursue a litany of other interests. Per these logics, we could continue to take an inventory of how our partnership has benefitted us (cf. Boelen, 1992; Whyte, 1993). But tallied through the register of exploitation or ‘anthropology’s hidden colonialism’, the balance sheets will never be balanced. Both of us know this. And at this point in our lives, neither of us is interested in doing this kind of ethical math. We see it as reductive of who we are as partners, friends, and individuals. Such a tallying, it may be argued, carries its own conceits. As Schumaker notes, ‘The model of exploitation fails to capture the assistant’s own motives and goals in taking on anthropological work’ (2001: 12). What is more, we will add, it runs the risk of drastically over-assuming the importance of ethnography to its subjects.

Not unlike ethnography’s subjects writ large, Eklavya’s life has always been much bigger than our fieldwork. Our project was never the end-all-be-all for him that it was for me. For Eklavya, our project was but one facet of a patently multifaceted life. From his work as a co-producer, fixer, and interlocutor of the field, to his most recent engagements in child trafficking activism, international charity work, and Bollywood acting, Eklavya was, and remains, an extraordinary navigator of the contemporary – ethnographic and otherwise (Westbrook, 2008). To reduce him to only a worker of the field would be both wrong and an injustice with eerie subaltern connotations.

At the end of the day, teasing out Eklavya’s influence on my work remains an impossible task. As fieldworkers, the lines between us remain intermittently stark and blurred. For us, that blurriness serves as the starting point – not the end – of a discussion about researchers, assistants, and the conditions of postcolonial ethnography. Ethnographically experienced, analytically deft, and reflexive in their own right, Eklavya and research assistants like him deserve their place in our collective reckonings of the method. Incorporating their voice marks a definitive step in recognizing and perhaps getting beyond the ‘hidden colonialisms’ at hand so as to chart a more inclusive and innovative ethnography for the future.