Chhattisgarh: An Anthropologist In A Police State
Is there no limit to the state’s paranoia? Why is it so scared of those who do nothing more dangerous than teach and write that it feels they should be denied lodging, detained, provided ‘protection’, intimidated, ‘escorted’ out of the state?
Nandini Sundar, authored: Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar (1854-2006).OUP 1998; 2d ed., 2008.
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You’re missing Kerim’s point. He is trying to show you that a system where the individual’s freedom of action is held to be sacrosanct is better than the British colonial system. Let me explain this. The concept of a ‘criminal tribe’ is inherently unjust. It is completely incompatible with the liberal principle of freedom and responsibility for all individuals, because it entails control over some individuals based on circumstances out of their control (their birth).

Therefore, the question of whether or not the ‘criminal tribes’ were actually criminal is strictly irrelevant, because it is not a legitimate basis on which to make any judgments.

If you disagree with that whole framework, say so. It will give us a better picture of where you are coming from (particularly since the website you linked to doesn’t load). But right now, you are talking straight over our heads.

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I assume that your assumption of innocence on the part of the tribes in question is based on their race, rather than an investigation of their involvement in criminal activity? As a matter of fact my ancestors were placed in forced labour camps during the industrial holocaust of Victorian Britain, and were consigned to a form of subsistence slavery until well into the nineteen forties, but obviously none of my ancestors felt the pain of enslavement in the mines and saltpans of East Lothian, because their insensitive White skin protected them against the humiliation and pain of de facto slavery.

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I assume you live in a society where you are “innocent until proven guilty” and are free from from having to worry that you will be placed in a force-labor camp for life purely on the basis of your ethnicity? Nor do I know of any contemporary society where such practices would be condoned.

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In other words social protection against criminals will differ in modality dependent upon the degree of organization of the society in question. The fact that there is no attempt made to explore to what extent these measures were justified by the behaviour of the tribes in question is indicative of your all pervasive Occidentalism.

Your position is that any non-European group, or entity single out for suspicion by any European, or European inspired authoritative body is to be accorded the mantle of victimhood without any examination of the behaviour of the non-European subject. One must assume that your presumed innocence of brown skinned people and presumed guilt of white skinned people is informed by cultural resentment and unconscious anti-White racism.

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There is also a difference between “prejudices” and theories of genetic criminality. The British imported eugenic theories of criminality which had informed England’s poor laws. These did not have simple parallels in the Indian context.

I think a good example is the process of creating the modern caste system as described by Nick Dirks in his excellent book Casts of Mind. The British certainly worked with the Brahmin elite in doing this, but the process of institutionalization radically altered the system and imposed it upon the population in ways completely unlike what had existed before. Nick Dirks argues that the the vast majority of Indians had been outside the caste system before the colonial era. He also shows how the process of institutionalizing it led to various groups petitioning the colonial government to be listed in a more advantageous way in the census records.

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