The Adivasi victim (right) in Guwahati on Saturday. Picture by Eastern Projections

Cultural symbols sullied

The anguish of the young Adivasi girl who was disrobed on November 24 last year can never be fully understood by anyone other than the sufferer herself. That she is nauseated by the very thought of having to depose before the R.K. Manisena Singh Commission and reliving those horrifyingly shameful moments, and that she threw up bitter gall on the way is enough to tell us that the wound is still gaping. The mental trauma might take a lifetime to heal. From the girl’s own accounts, her appeals for help went unheard even by other women. Finally, it was a kind man who covered her shame.

This ghoulish incident has become the topic of many a scholarly discourse at seminars where the usual suspects either take a position that questions the very nature of dominant politics and where others dismiss the incident as being blown out of proportion with the media being squarely blamed for taking photographs they should not have. In India’s Northeast, the propensity of dominant groups to subsume smaller political and cultural aspirations is not a new brainwave. It happens with repeated frequency. Although it would be patently unfair to paint every person within the dominant group as being insensitive to the angst of the various subaltern voices, the fact remains that those few are a silent constituency.

It does take some courage to be openly critical of one’s own people and society. Swimming against the tide of dominant discourse immediately makes one a pariah. That is a price very few would want to pay. Yet, scholarship is all about demolishing the expected, the predictable and the comfortable domains of human thinking. This is what makes scholarship a tough call. You do not expect cliques and vested interests in the academia. You expect scholarly rigour and truth distilled out of the harum-scarum of gossip, careless statements and ordinary conversations.

Similar history

The history of the Adivasis in Assam is similar to that of the “reservations” of native Americans. The only difference is that native Americans receive grants from the state, much of which their administrative system is unable to absorb. Today, it is common to see the White man entering those reservations and collaborating with the natives in running casinos. Obviously the native is not in a bargaining position because the system conspires to keep him forever diffident and happy with his lot. For decades, the Adivasis were kept out of the political establishment because it was believed that as tea garden labourers they “belonged” to the tea companies. At first, they served the gora sahibs and now the brown sahibs.

Managers of tea estates believe they do a great favour to their workers by providing them a livelihood. Young men and women working in tea factories from Monday to Saturday earn Rs 150 a week. Their parents who work in the gardens earn Rs 50 per day. This is not even the minimum wage they are supposed to be getting. This income is barely enough to keep body and soul together. How can they ever educate their children and give them a childhood they deserve? Adivasis, therefore, live on patronage as citizens of a different socio-economic and political arrangement. With those meagre emoluments, how can they ever move out of the rut of poverty?

Perhaps the only time Adivasis realise they are citizens is when they are asked to cast their votes, as they did this time during the panchayat polls. Even then it is unlikely that they vote with free, prior and informed consent. A few leaders tell them if they choose candidate A over B, they can expect to improve their lot. Since hope is the only thing they have left, Adivasis continue to take keen interest in the exercise of voting.

Unfortunately, those who do get elected or climb the political ladder like Pawan Singh Ghatowar and Prithibi Majhi seldom want to identify with the larger causes of the “tea tribes”. There are some who object to the term “tea tribe” as a pejorative label, but there is politics even in the naming of categories.

In any case, the objection to the naming bit would sound better if it came from those who carry the label. Otherwise, it is yet again an elite benefaction.

A renowned scholar of the Northeast shared with this writer that he never knew how much discontent was simmering among the tea tribes until he heard them vehemently oppose the idea of having their school primers written in the dominant language. The good professor said that was a problem since the tea tribes spoke a language called “Bagania”, which evidently had no script. This was something that the tribes perhaps did not reckon with. But the issue throws up yet again the dynamics of the politics of language. When language transcends from being a form of cultural expression to a tool of political discourse then surely some things have changed. This change is often perceived by others as a threat since it means sharing the already shrinking political pie.

The other contention that tea tribes have been assimilated into the histories and literatures of the dominant culture, and that therefore they are inherently one people but with slightly different avocations is nothing but elite chauvinism raising its ugly head.

Politics of poverty

Others speciously argue that there are poor people even among the dominant groups. This argument is simplistic to say the least. When a category is kept at subsistence level to continue to serve the ambitions of a corporate entity; when even after decades they remain out of the profit-sharing arrangement, then surely both the economics and politics of poverty need to be analysed with greater sensitivity.

Coming to the point of identifying women as cultural symbols and the concurrent logic that brutality inflicted on women is equivalent to brutalising the entire society, one must say that this savagery will persist as long as society places the burden on women to be the transmitters of culture by defining the dresses they wear etc. Sadly, women themselves take pride in identifying their bodies as the repository of the future of the species, giving credence to the logic of Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1992), who locate women as central to the reproduction of national collectivities, not simply in the biological sense of giving birth to future members of collectivities, but also in symbolic and boundary constructing terms.

Even in situations of conflict, women have been used to sharpen the contours of the conflict and to raise the pitch of belligerence whenever an issue fades from the memory of the state. When society is in turmoil, women themselves carry a sense of guilt about not doing enough for the cause. Hence they are roped in not merely to pep up the numbers but also to dare the state to do what it does with impunity to the male of the species.

In the case of the Beltola incident, one arm of the state, in the form of policemen, did take up that challenge. The naked young lady was asked to prostrate herself, perhaps for daring to protest.

Savagery is part of the human psyche but that it should display itself with such vehemence in an apparently enlightened society and in a city dotted with malls and multiplexes — all signs of modernity — is truly reprehensible.

It only reinforces the Freudian principle of polite culture having nothing to do with external expressions of modernity.

The writer can be contacted at patricia17@rediffmail.com