Narrating Nomadism

Tales of Recovery and Resistance

G. N. Devy, Geoffrey V. Davis, K. K. Chakravarty

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000084375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Narrating Nomadism provides an unflinching account of ethnic groups and nomadic communities across the world that were branded as 'criminal' during colonial times. It explores the tragic effect of the new identity imposed on them, the traumatic survival of these communities and cultures, and the creative expression of this experience in their arts and literature in the form of resistance.

Presenting specific contexts and locations of cultural devastation in history, the volume traces colonial social imagination as such, showing how the grossly misperceived non-sedentary communities in the colonies were subjected to the mission of 'settling' them. The essays presented here document these alternative histories from perspectives ranging from literary criticism and art history to ethnography and socio-linguistics, highlighting in what ways different nomadic communities negotiate discrimination and challenge in contemporary times, while finding remarkable convergence in their local histories and collective testimonies.

This anthology opens up a new area in postcolonial studies as well as cultural anthropology by bringing the viewpoint of marginalized communities and their cultural rights to bear upon history, society and culture. It places an activist's 'view from below' at the centre of literary interpretation, engages with oral history more substantially than folklore studies usually do, and brings together several historical narratives hitherto unexplored. This will be essential for students of anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history, linguistics, post-colonial studies, literature and tribal studies, as well as the general reader.

I
Identity, History and Protest

CT/DNT in Literary and Social Texts in India

Vibha S. Chauhan

I

The year 1871 … The English laughed … Criminals by birth … The Act was implemented — The professions of groups like Kabootara, Moghiya, Kalander, Sansi, Pardi, Mampat, Auidya began to be treated as crime … They were tied down by the pen of the British government … Yet they smiled fearlessly and said to each other — we are not lone twigs but bound together in bundles impossible to break. We will endure the penalty of being the companions of Maharani of Chittor as well as Rani of Jhansi. Yes, we shall endure everything. We have become slaves of the register in the police station and cannot go anywhere without putting our thumb marks there. We are especially watched during nights, with the village headman and the police daroga becoming incarnations of the omniscient God … Naked bodies, severe cold, scorching heat and rains that cracked the skies were their companions. Who bothered about how many of them died or how many survived? The police registers turned into records of Yamaraj, the God of death. These are the people — like ghosts and spirits — whose feet leave behind no marks, their footprints disappearing from the footpaths (Pushpa 2004: 130–33).

Thus goes the narration in Maitreyi Pushpa’s Hindi novel Alma Kabootari about a group of nomadic people — known as ‘Kabootaras’ — branded as criminals at birth (ibid.)! Tribes like the Kabootaras were notified as criminals at birth by the infamous ‘Criminal Tribes Act’ (CTA) formulated by the colonial British government in India in 1871. This was accompanied with the preparation of a list of communities that were primarily nomadic and/or inhabited the forest. The British government had by then already legitimized its authority on forest land by passing the Indian Forest Act of 1865 that granted it control over forest land and produce. This led to a loss of grazing land as well as forest produce for a number of communities. Several nomadic communities that were not tied to the forest were traders who carried goods to remote corners of the country.¹ These communities too were adversely affected by the introduction of the road and rail network in the country during the 1950s that made the transport of goods much easier even in far-flung corners of the country. Bereft of sources of livelihood many of these forest-based and nomadic communities resisted the British policies that weighed heavily in favour of the settled and agricultural communities. This preference of the British government for the settled communities was to be expected, for the coffers of the British government were filled by the tax paid by them on land. Nomadic communities on the other hand, fell outside the net of tax collection. Moreover, the colonial powers found it difficult to administer groups of people who were always on the move. It was with the intention of tightening their noose over the nomadic communities that kept slipping out of their control, that the British passed the CTA. The Act stipulated that the members of the communities ‘notified’ under the Act register themselves with the police. Restrictions were imposed on their movement and place of residence. A large number of these communities were forced to live in ‘settlements’ where they laboured like low-paid slaves. It was in 1952 that the Indian state repealed the CTA and ‘denotified’ the communities listed under it. The story of shame and pain, however, did not finish here. The government passed another piece of legislation in 1959, known as the Habitual Offenders Act (HOA) which continued with several features similar to the CTA and was often used to repress the Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

¹ Refer to the discussion about Koravars — the community trading mainly in salt — in Radhakrishna (2001).

The novel Alma Kabootari describes the travails of the group of the Kabootara men and women living in the Kabootara basti (poor neighbourhood) with its makeshift shacks precariously existing on the margins of a village with its own dynamics of familial and caste morality (Pushpa 2004). Despite the apparently unbridgeable social divide between the village and the Kabootara basti, the lives of people from these two conglomerations are intertwined in a web of complex personal and group relationships. These were further embedded within the political and historical context representative of the unequal power relations that continue to exist in contemporary Indian society with its contradictory trends of liberal democratic framework coexisting with categories like caste, creed and community. The narrative of Alma Kabootari explores the tensions generated through the presence of a domineering state and police and various strategies through which the Kabootara men and women negotiate with the state to eventually unsettle the existing social order and generate a trajectory facilitating their movement from the periphery of society towards the centre of social and political control.

Such transformation in personal and social relations is worked out in the novel through various means that the Kabootara community adopts in an attempt to adjust and accommodate with their extreme degradation (ibid.). At an imaginative level they continue to hold on to the memory of a glorious past that is often a stark contrast to their lived experience. This aspect of preservation and continuation of a srishtitatva (creation myths) generally rooted in divinity or narratives of a lost magnificence, is a common feature of a large number of marginalized communities. These become significant for providing these communities with a perspective through which they look at their past as well as their present; the presence and absence of social status; their duties and rights; their values and ethics. Though existing in the realm of imagination, these memories and myths do not exist as mere fancies but often play a dynamic role in the creation of individual and community identity. While some scholars consider the continuation of community identity as a major deterrent in the growth and evolution of an egalitarian democratic system in India, others perceive it as holding the possibility of engendering politically active pressure groups within parliamentary democracy, with community identity getting to play an important role in the democratic process of Indian polity. The debate goes on but what gets established in the process is the extremely volatile inter-connectedness between mythical community identities and the social, cultural and political assertion of marginalized groups.

The nomadic communities — with their proverbial ‘homes on their backs’ — make up as much as 7 per cent of the population in India and probably belong to the lowest rung of the deprivation ladder even amongst the impoverished communities. The DNT — approximately six crore in number (Devy 2006: 21) — within this group of nomadic communities are even more vulnerable than others due to their stigmatized past that continues to haunt them. However, their imaginative resources and a talent to tell stories is something that neither the sedentary society nor the state and the police could seize from them. Many of these apparently whimsical stories are actually articulations of identity assertions and protests against the hegemonic social order that has kept these communities tied to their depressed status. Imaginative constructs have often become agents of social and political transformation with boundaries between myth, fiction and reality often getting blurred, making it impossible to distinguish one from the other. The concepts of truth being stranger than reality and fiction being more real than fact really hold true for the DNT whose lives, characters and livelihood have been controlled and constructed by a bizarre piece of legislation rooted in the irrational dogma of their being born as criminals. Swaddled in a phantasmagoria since birth, existing as ‘ghosts and spirits’ — ‘whose feet leave behind no marks’ (Pushpa 2004: 133) — the DNT have been living in a physical and emotional no-man’s land. They are, however, not phantoms but flesh- and blood-creatures sensitive to pain and humiliation. Their repressed existence over generations may create the impression of an absence of change or protest, yet these communities, like all human beings, are not immune to their oppression. The necessity to assert their self-respect and identity has found expression sometimes through their cultural constructs like narratives of the past, myths and rituals, creation of iconic figures, and in recent times through the creation of a political space in the political realm of parliamentary democracy.

This chapter will attempt to discuss the various forms of protests, through which the nomadic communities and especially the DNT have used their cultural resources and political potential to challenge the hegemony of socially powerful classes and castes. This will be based on a close study of literary as well as social texts that are inextricably mixed to create personal and social histories that have been denied to these groups. History provides a way of looking at one’s own location within the social network, and an absence of history, or having a history generated by groups that seek to reproduce repressive relations, is bound to reinforce marginalization. A search for identity and dignity often begins with a search for history. This may happen through a reinterpretation of myths and stories of origins that provide the deprived and repressed communities with imaginative constructs like myths. History and the creation of histories through myths and stories of origins are often as much an articulation of degradation as an attempt to make sense of the irrationality of extremes of deprivation that seems to be the irrevocable fate of these communities. Many scholars, however, interpret the myths of repressed communities as being the only mode of protest and subversion available to them. It is within the mythical time and situation that these communities can challenge the order of the dominant social groups that is difficult, if not impossible, to challenge in their lived experience.

While it is true that myths are complex social creations that sometimes assist individuals to adjust with their deprivation by reinforcing community ethics and norms, it is equally true that they may also possess elements of defiance. Resistance, however, needs to transcend the mythical universe and dialectically impact socio-political structures of power to bring in any change in lived relations. A strong sense of shared history and myth can result in a reinforcement of identities that may become the cohesive force for constituting pressure groups within a democracy. This creation of a political space, in turn, can then lead to a further strengthening of the community identity.

This chapter will try to investigate these various forms of protest. Starting from the protest inherent in imaginative constructs of some of the DNT communities, the chapter will move on to examine the various strategies that these communities — along with some other deprived communities — adopt to create new histories and new mythologies resulting in the creation of new structures of political power with a substantial space for themselves. The analysis of these issues will be based on literary sources, historical records, autobiographies, and political movements occurring in the past as well as in contemporary India.

II

Ranajit Guha (1985) sees myths of marginalized groups as an expression of subversion and protest against myths of the socially dominant groups. An appropriate entry point into the discussion would be the enquiry regarding what constitutes marginality and what factors determine the marginality of specific groups of people or narratives. Guha in ‘The Small Voice of History’ (1996), which discusses the concepts of ‘marginalization’ and ‘hegemonic’, says that ‘some discrimination is quite clearly at work here — some unspecified values and unstated criteria’ (ibid.: 1) are used to determine what is dominant/mainstream as well as its opposite, the marginalized. He goes on to suggest that, ‘the nominating authority is none other than an ideology for which the life of the state is all there is to history [substitute the term ‘history’ with dominance/hegemonic/mainstream]. This creates a place for itself through its availability and appeals to “a reading public, progeny of the printing technology”’ (Guha 1996: 2). Guha goes on to say that the marginalized groups have ‘small voices which are drowned in the noise of statist commands … They have many stories to tell — stories, which for their complexities are unequalled by statist discourse and indeed opposed to its abstract and oversimplified modes’ (ibid: 2–3; for parts of the discussion, see Chauhan 2005).

It is such a story of a ‘small’ community with a ‘small’ voice that the Bangla novel Nagini Kanya (Bandopadhyay 1992) tells about the community of the Santhali snake-charmers, a forest-based nomadic community of about 30 huts ‘in the grasslands on the banks of Bhagirathi’ (ibid.: 22) in Bengal.

Their journey begins soon after the festival of naag panchami … Their clans and families have traveled around for ages. After crossing spots like Hangarmukhi, Magarkhali and Hanskhali, the boats of the snake charmers form rows and float on the waters of Mother Ganga. The boats carry baskets with snakes, clay pots for cooking, and monkeys, goats and humans for street shows. Not just the Santhali snake charmers, there are many other groups of snake charmers too who travel around. Some on boats and others on foot carrying the bahangi² on their shoulders. This wandering is the law of their community — their dharma, the rule of their caste … They travel from village to village, putting up shows like the snake dance, and games of the monkey and the goat for the householders. They keep moving from one area to another. Months pass by and then one day, they return back home (ibid.: 37).

² A bahangi is a bamboo pole with two baskets hanging at both ends to carry material.

However, even after they return ‘home’, the Santhali snake-charmers cannot cultivate land because of their community ban against cultivation. Whether at ‘home’ or while travelling, the Santhali snake-charmers are dependent on the forest produce and the settled community for survival. The men and especially the women hold shows even during their travels.

After tying their boats to the shore, the women leave their group and come away. They take the snakes, monkeys and goats and playing on their drum, go from door to door calling, ‘Oh! ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Identity, History and Protest: CT/DNT in Literary and Social Texts in India
• 2. The Lost World of Chernovicz: Memories and Revisitations
• 3. (Re-)configuring the Soloist as a ‘Nomadic’ Modernity Trickster: The Case of ‘Composer’ in Bukusu Circumcision Folklore
• 4. Rabbit-Proof Fence: Surviving Loss and Trauma through Testimony and Narration
• 5. Collective Chronicles: (Fictional) Life Histories of Australia’s Stolen Generations
• 6. Enforced Migration and Other Journeys in Aboriginal Experience: Sally Morgan’s Stories of Becoming Disinherited and Dispossessed
• 7. Contemporary Nomads, or Can the Slum-Dweller Speak?
• 8. Understanding the Narratives of Peripatetic Communities: The Kinnari Jogi Version of the Mahabharata
• 9. The Gullah of South Carolina and Georgia: Retention of Cultural Expression
• 10. Nomadic Writing: The ‘Blind Spot’ of Caribbean Fiction
• 11. From Migrancy to Malignancy: What Ails the Yaaku?
• 12. The Story of an African Enlightenment: A Cameroonian Myth of Separation and its Relevance for Human Autonomy
• 13. The Dasse’s Story and The Crow’s Story: The Interdiscursivity of /Xam Bushman Literature
• 14. The Adverse Effect of Migrant Fishing on Students’ Competence in English in the Niger Delta of Nigeria
• 15. Gender Relations in Marginalized Communities: A Case Study of Women in Maasai Oral Literature
• 16. Experiential History vs Objective History: A Literary Study of Lambada Aphorisms
• 17. Shabar Kharia: An Ethnolinguistic Study
• 18. Narratives of Home: The Contemporary North-East Experience of (Un)belonging
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Index