DISCOURSE OF ETHNICITY - CULTURE AND PROTEST IN JHARKHAND Susana B C Devalle Publisher: Sage Publications, New Delhi Price: Rs 260
Susana Devalle's monograph, with culture and protest in Jharkhand as the backdrop and not the main focus, is a welcome departure from run-of-the-mill accounts of ethnic movements. Her attempt to conceptualise ethnicity is a rough journey, full of pitfalls, not all of which she escapes. In the realm of ideas she discovers two cardinal realities -- the myth of the tribe and the poverty of development. This revelation takes her to the political domain where her analysis centres round the tradition of protest.
Devalle presents separately the dynamics of cultural struggle, with culture of oppression and culture of protest as two sides of history's fulcrum, which really falls in the realm of politics. Finally, she reverts to a sublimated perception of the system of meaning built around ethnicity and culture.
Devalle discusses the emergence of the differentiation between the indigenous and the ethnic as a social phenomenon in developing countries, and links it to Western colonialism, which fostered racism and ethnic differences as strategies of domination. But she can be criticised for ignoring both the subdued presence of ethnicity in the West during the heyday of colonialism and its recent resurgence. Also, clubbing of the ethnic with the indigenous seems a Western bias.
Devalle rightly rejects primordial sentiment as the basis of ethnicity and sees it as a historical phenomenon, subordinated to existing class and centre-periphery contradictions. But one dimension of ethnicity is missing in the entire argument -- the yearning to be "rooted" in the contemporary world.
A search for roots is not necessarily confined to the past - it spans the present and anticipates the future. Devalle is aware of this as she herself states, "Not being an ahistorical subject as it is usually portrayed in liberal sociological writings - ethnicity should be conceived as a process evolving through time". Many Indian scholars, including myself, have taken this position since the late 1960s. Surprisingly, Devalle overlooks this and quotes from a paper of mine published in 1960, which I later disclaimed. And this is not a solitary example. By an eclectic selection from their works, Devalle concludes that Indian scholars have a negative orientation to disadvantaged ethnic communities. She proceeds to dish out veiled sermons rather than make attempts to promote authentic debate.
It is true that Indian scholars were under the spell of warped Western theories thanks to their colonial legacy. But by ignoring their changing perceptions, Devalle actually ignores the dialectics of the relationship between socially concerned intellectuals and the state in India.
More importantly, she fails to recognise that what is happening in India -- contradiction between social activists/intellectuals and the state as an institution -- is a global phenomenon.
On Jharkhand, Devalle has given a neat and comprehensive collection of facts. But there is a major lapse. As Devalle puts it, "The reformist ethnicists' conception of a Jharkhand community takes as its starting point an ideological colonial legacy perpetuated by the indigenous intelligentsia: the tribal construct. Government and academic advocates of the 'tribe' in India have thus found an unwilling ally in the adivasi elite. This elite has repeated the official 'tribal' discourse, finally legitimating the tribal construct as a social reality. The word 'tribe' and 'tribal' and more importantly references to attributes associated with the 'tribals','backwardness', 'weakness' and 'ignorance' - were frequently used by members of this social sector during interviews."
Devalle is only partially right here. What is wrong in the presentation reveals a great truth. In Jharkhand, the Scheduled Tribes today are about 30 per cent of the population. Since 1946, the earlier justification of tribal composition in demanding a separate political entity has been replaced by arguments of a composite regional culture and socio-economic disparity. It is true that in off-the-record communications the presence of the tribal core is often projected. And here lies a social fact at two levels. The historical prerogative of the social formations traditionally associated with a given space is considered to be more valid than the demographic shifts caused by exogenous forces. At the tactical level, many of the interviewees would consider it more fruitful to project the tribal factor with the concomitant stereotypes to a relatively uninformed foreigner. If Devalle accepts the explanatory validity of these two sociological facts, she will have to slightly turn the radar of her anthropological quest.
B K Royburman is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre For Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
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