This is a true labor of love, rendered mostly in Adobe Flash, by the artist and cartoonist Nina Paley. Paley has made the complete feature available for free under a Creative Commons license. Now that the music rights have cleared for Annette Hanshaw’s soundtrack the film is also available on DVD and if you like what you see there’s merchandise for sale so appreciative audiences can support the artist.

The story unfolds in multiple layers, each taking place at divergent moments in history and represented with its own animated style. We begin in present-day San Francisco, portrayed here in squigglevision, with the couple, Nina and Dave, in domestic bliss. Dave’s sudden departure for a new job in India foreshadows the impending end of their relationship. Paley juxtaposes this with the epic myth of Sita and Rama, presented as gouache paintings come alive. Interrupting or narrating the story is a third form, a trio of shadow puppets commenting on the myth. These characters exist out of time. Finally the signature sequences are done with computer animation as a cartoonish Rama and Sita act out their story with Sita singing the words of Annete Hanshaw’s blues. Although visually set in the myth the audience is experiencing creative expressions from the early twentieth century America and encouraged to note the similarities between the two.

“I never knew how good it was to be a slave to one who means the world to me,” she sings.

We learn from the mythic segments that Rama is noble and good, the embodiement of righteousness. The ideal man. The shadow puppets explain to us that Rama’s father, Dasharatha, had planned on crowning him king until one of his scheming wives, Keikeyi, invokes an old debt to force him to banish Rama to the forest instead. Sita, his devoted and beautiful wife follows him. Meanwhile the evil king of Lanka, Ravana, is persuaded by his sister, Suruphanaka, to steal Sita away.

Even with her husband gone Ravana cannot violate Sita’s chastity. Later, aided by his half monkey sidekick Hanuman, Rama finally discovers Ravana’s castle, slaughters his demons and wins Sita back. However Sita has now lived in another man’s house and Rama, having avenged the insult of having his wife stolen, no longer desires her. She must prove her purity to him first in a trial by fire, but before the pyre can harm her gods descend and spirit her away.

With her purity beyond dispute Rama returns to his kingdom to accept his rightful position as king. Then in a chance encounter, Rama observes one of his subjects, a laundryman beating his unfaithful wife. He scolds her: “Do you think I am like Rama?” Now the king feels his wife’s reputation is costing him the loyalty of his subjects, so he banishes her even while she is pregnant with his sons.

Back in the real world Nina follows Dave to India, but the passion of their romance is gone. When she receives an invitation to attend a conference in New York City Dave dumps her by email. In an utterly humiliating scene Nina tearfully begs Dave to take her back when obvious he’s the one doing her wrong.

As Wynton Marsalis describes it, the blues is down home sophistication and it shows in Hanshaw’s numbers. This is a truly adult musical form. “What wouldn’t I do for that man,” she croons as the cartoon Rama literally walks on Sita or sits on her back to drink tea so devoted she is to him. While held captive by Ravana she sings, “Daddy won’t you please come home.” And when Rama rejects Sita after the rescue its, “You love to see me cryin’. I’m left alone singing the blues and sighin’.”

Annette Hanshaw in her vocal performances is really like another character in the story, one which shares with Sita certain idealized qualities of womanhood – a point hammered home by the Betty Boop like proportions of Sita the blues singer with huge bosoms, a tiny waist, and flirty eyelashes. They are both women who define themselves through their romantic relationships with men, in particular men who are blameless. Through all the hardships Rama puts Sita through her devotion to him remains unwavering just as the woman portrayed by Hanshaw’s lyrics continues to love her man no matter how mean he might treat her. Paley clearly identifies with both of these characters. Even as Dave treats her like dirt, she can’t bare to let him go. “Am I blue? You’d be too.”

It is only through the shadow puppets that Paley can bring herself to criticize her own behavior. These characters are really my favorite part of the movie. Depicted in royal or mythological garb the shadow puppets are voiced to sound like modern South Asian Americans and they comment on the myth of Rama and Sita from an alienated, “born confused” perspective. Throughout the feature they interrupt the proceedings to explain the myth but just as often they bicker among themselves, offer competing versions of the story, screw up, questioning the characters’ motivations and cracking jokes at the authority of myths and the powers they hold over our lives.

Late in the movie, Nina calls Dave to beg him, “Please take me back.” This time the puppets stop the action in the modern world outside of mythic time. They explain how as unfair as it might seem that Rama is remembered as a benevolent king while he treats Sita so badly it cannot be that Sita is without fault. After all she’s the one who keeps putting up with his behavior. They make her unquestioning devotion, a virtue under patriarchy, into a character flaw. “Listen he doesn’t like you! You’ve got to move on. C’mon!” That’s her mistake. You shouldn’t love someone who treats you so badly. As Hanshaw sings, “Love had its day. That day has passed. You’ve gone away,” Sita the cartoon character literally cries a river.

Sita Sings the Blues makes clever use of irony, crossing over between multiple timelines to give us a portrait of women – across cultures and through time – being mistreated by men and not having the sense to do anything but put up with it. While the patriarchy of ancient Hindu myth may be readily apparent to us and their congruence with early American popular culture unsettling, Paley urges women to be cognizant of its unconscious internalization. Our romantic proclivities are part of tacit culture.

In the fairy tales we all know so well and which Disney re-presents for our children time and again the man comes to the rescue of the fair maidens whose only aspirations, like Sita, is to be the perfect mother and wife. Such stories contribute to our socialization and enculturation, reflecting the values of the societies that reproduce and repeat them like a broken record playing the blues. This time around, Paley seems to be saying, women need to save themselves.

There are a couple of issues dominating the discussion. The first is whether the protesters who supported Hazare are dupes of right-wing parties — a claim which echoes similar debates about the Tea Party Movement in the US? The second is whether the bill being proposed by Hazare will make India more democratic by cutting down on corruption, or less democratic by creating a government body with too much power over elected representatives of the people? And the third issue is whether or not ridding the nation of corruption will make for a more just society, or whether corruption offers the disenfranchised important wiggle-room in dealing with state power, wiggle-room usually preserved for the elite?

I don’t have much insight into the first two questions, although I’ll admit that my sympathies usually lie with writers like Arundhati Roy who has been very critical of Hazare and his supporters. I do, however, have some small insight into the issue of corruption in India, having recently completed a documentary film in which corruption was one of the central themes. My wife, Shashwati Talukdar, and I have spent the past five years making frequent trips to an urban ghetto in Ahmedabad, in Western India, where we filmed a troupe of young actors who use street theater to protest against police brutality and corruption. I have also published two academic articles about the history and ethnography of the community.

The Chhara are one of 198 communities throughout India, an estimated 60 million people in India today, who were labeled “born criminals” by the British under the “Criminal Tribes Act,” first passed in 1871. Even though the act was abolished, the stigma of criminality still remains, and it is difficult for the Chhara to find legitimate work. As a result, many turn to brewing liquor, which is illegal in the dry state of Gujarat. It is this home-brewed liquor that is the focus of much of the day-to-day corruption which pervades the community. The police turn a blind eye to the strong-smelling alcohol stills bubbling away in nearly two thirds of the homes, while simultaneously taking a cut of the profits in the form of bribes. Costumers come to Chharanagar from all over the city to get a drink.

While this seems like a win-win situation, one which might support the claim by some of the Kafila bloggers that corruption is empowering for the poor, the truth is both darker and more complicated. In fact, both the police and the Chhara are trapped in a vicious circle with no way of getting out. The police refused to be interviewed for the film, so we didn’t get tell their story as fully as we would have liked, but we’ve been able to piece together bits and pieces over the years.

In short, applicants to the police force have to pay bribes to get into the police academy, but they can’t afford the bribes, so they have to borrow the money at exorbitant rates from money-lenders. To pay off the interest on the loans they then need to collect bribes, and because the Chhara community generates a fair amount of illegal revenue, they all wish to be assigned to the local police station which oversees the Chhara community, but getting assigned there requires another hefty bribe… Because the Police depend on the illegal activities of the Chhara for their livelihood they will even resort to force to keep Chhara from “going straight.” They also administer beatings and torture to ensure that the bribes are paid in a regular and timely manner.

Nor did bribery seem to significantly protect the Chhara from arbitrary detention and torture. Instead, what worked for the community was the ability to organize around street theater. While problems persist, the existence of Budhan Theatre (the name of the street theater movement) has helped temper the worst excesses of police violence. On the other hand, in Bhavnagar, a coastal town with a Chhara community that also brews liquor, the situation was much worse. We also saw significant class differences in both communities. It is often the most vulnerable (i.e. poor widows) who were subject to the worst violence.

Having said all that, if corruption were magically eliminated, I’m not sure it would be a good thing for the Chhara – at least not in the short term. While there are new opportunities emerging for the more educated sections of the community, a significant number of Chhara still depend on illegal activities for their income.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta argues that corruption offers wiggle-room to those who fail to easily fit within the four corners of the law:

For the vast majorities who face the glare of documents, the demand for transparency, the imperative to come clean and be visible – corruption offers an occasional patch of friendly shade. Corruption, at least as a certain looseness with the law and with the regulatory power of the legal apparatus, is what keeps this society humane at its deeper, darker recesses.

I’m sympathetic to this argument. Certainly corruption helps the less fortunate Chhara make ends meet when they can’t find more legitimate employment; but the corruption we observed in Chharangar cannot be described as “humane” by any stretch of the imagination. Corruption keeps the Chhara (as well as the police) trapped in a cycle of violence, and the only way out has been the grassroots political organizing of Budhan Theatre. Gramsci said that “between coercion and consent lies corruption and fraud” which I think aptly describes the situation in Chharangar, where “common sense” is very much determined by the logic of corruption which pervades daily life. I worry about those who would romanticize petty corruption as liberating, even as I acknowledge that the absence of corruption may very well be worse…

For just about as long as I’ve known him, Kerim has been working on PDBMS, about a stigmatized Indian tribal group who try to forge a future for themselves be performing street theater dramatizing their plight and other social justice issues. He’s been going on about the project for years, and most of the time I nodded my head politely and was like: yeah whatever street theater blah blah South Asia blah blah. I mean: some guy get a perfectly good Ph.D. from a respected university, moves to job in the ass-end of Taiwan, and then spends most of this time ranting on the Internet about Gramsci and editorials in the New York Times — and now he’s got some ‘documentary film’ he’s making. Really, what’s the chances of it being any good?

Except a few months ago I managed to get a sneak peak of the film and was pleasantly surprised that it is not just good, but actually very very good — which made me feel a lot better about asking my students to sit through the thing for extra credit. I repeat: it’s good. By any standards. To me the greatest part of the film is that it managed to convey on screen the immediacy and power of live theater, something that it is almost impossible to do. The ethics of the film making project are equally fascinating: it’s a film about Chharas not by them, except that they are performers so in a sense it is by them. It’s something less than ‘collaborative anthropology’ of the Lassiter mold, but also something more in its willingness to experiment with a form that goes beyond the usual cliches of sharing and caring with your host community.

Plus also there is a point at which someone puts a hand over the camera and you get to hear Kerim go all Michael Moore on people and demand in his New York accent “no you tell us why we have to stop filming.” So, you know, it has that going for it.

If you go to the movie home page and donate US$35 you can get to watch the film. But really, if you’ve ever appreciated all the work Kerim has done for Savage Minds, I think the donation site will accept way less than thirty five bucks. The money will be used to burnish up the final edit so that it can be shown in prime time at the Busan film festival.

As a policy we don’t make announcements of this sort on SM but I wanted to make an exception in this case so that Kerim can feel some of the SM love that he’s accrued over the past couple of years and his excellent film gets the support it deserves.

Wendy Doniger, Paul Courtright and David White have also been among those academics who have been targeted by the Hindu right because of their intellectual work on the religion. Doniger, a senior scholar of the Hindu tradition, regularly receives death threats; a letter-writing campaign tried to prevent another young scholar’s tenure at Rice University.

Certainly India needs to do more to preserve academic freedom, including ensuring that “that other actors [besides the state and the university], including the media, political parties and the citizenry do not by their actions undermine academic freedom.” And, as the example from Rice University shows, this issue is not confined to India. The US needs to protect academics from coordinated attacks of the sort William I. Robinson is facing from the ADL.

So I’m not surprised to read about the uproar surrounding Slumdog Millionaire. I happened to like this film, for many of the same reasons David Bordwell does; namely, its creative re-imagining of tried-and-true movie clichés. He also provides an interesting historical view:

Indian criticisms of the image of poverty in Slumdog remind me of reactions to Italian Neorealism from authorities concerned about Italy’s image abroad. The government undersecretary Giulio Andreotti claimed that films by Rossellini, De Sica, and others were “washing Italy’s dirty linen in public.” Andreotti wrote that De Sica’s Umberto D had rendered “wretched service to his fatherland, which is also the fatherland of . . . progressive social legislation.”

I would be much more sympathetic to such complaints if the Indian middle class was more concerned about the actual poverty surrounding them than the appearance of that poverty to Western eyes.

The one criticism I am more sympathetic to is one that is endemic to the Hollywood clichés upon which the film relies: that it represents poverty in a way which denies the poor their own agency. This is a criticism which has been made not just in lefty journals like CounterPunch, but also in the pages of the New York Times. Although, as my wife pointed out, the film gets the kids out of the slum pretty quickly, with anti-Muslim riots as a pretext. Based on her reading of Atreyee Sen’s ethnography Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum, it’s not just a convienent plot device, it’s documentary. (She’s writing a blog post on the book which I’ll link to when its up.)

This hyper-sensitivity to representations is also something we ourselves have struggled with as documentary filmmakers. The community documented in our film is more aptly described as a “ghetto” than a “slum.” It is the stigma of criminality rather than abject poverty which sets it apart. There are some members of the community who are quite wealthy and many more who totter on the edge between legitimate careers as lawyers (one of the few careers open to them, since lawyers in India are often self-employed) and the need to bootleg liquor to make ends meet. We are in a bit of a Catch-22 situation since even talking about the stigma of criminality runs the risk of further reinforcing that stigma. Understandably, many members of the community are very concerned about how we handle this. We have taken this concern very seriously, showing rushes and rough cuts to the film’s subjects every time we return. We have had meetings to discuss the problem itself and will likely be including some of those discussions in the film itself. But ultimately, our solution is to try to do exactly what the above mentioned criticisms say Slumdog fails to do: to highlight the community’s own strength and agency. Our emphasis in the film is on what the community has done – not just for themselves, but also for other less fortunate communities as well.

In making this choice we realized that we will probably loose some of our audience. American film industry conventions say that a film should have a white character who acts as a mediator between the audience and “the other” if you want to reach a wide audience. But we feel strongly that doing the film in this way would undermine the voices of the Chhara themselves. And here is where Slumdog gives us hope. Who would have thought that the leading contender for this year’s Academy Awards would be a film devoid of a white male lead?

I have not been able to figure out the reason for the silence on this topic. One possibility is that it is simply too complicated for newspapers to explain the category of DNTs – a category which is not well known by most Indians. Another is that the Gujjars are themselves resistant to being thought of as DNTs. The “Gurjar’s Community Online” website refers to the Gujjars as upper caste Kshatriyas, which they may have been in Rajasthan, although many Gujjars are Muslims and Sikhs as well. In fact, it seems they specifically rejected a move by the Rajasthan government to have them listed as DNTs.

The question of categorization lies at the heart of the current conflict. The Gujjars are agitating to have their official status changed from “Other Backward Classes” (OBC) to “Scheduled Tribe” (ST). These are two broad categories in India’s complex system of “reservations.” As the BBC explains:

The communities listed as the Scheduled Castes (SCs) are essentially the lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy locally referred to as Dalits.

The Scheduled Tribes (STs) are the people living in the forests or on the hills, physically isolated from modern life, but are not necessarily socially backward.

The Other Backward Classes (OBCs) comprise the castes – in the middle of the Hindu caste hierarchy – who do not face so much exclusion or isolation in society but are educationally and economically backward.

The identification of communities in the three categories is based on a data prepared in 1935 by the British when they ruled India.

The current situation was provoked by the electoral politics of the right-wing BJP party, who won the support of the prosperous Jat community in the 1999 elections by promising to have them listed as OBCs. The Jats make up nearly 15% of Rajasthan’s population.

“Once Jats were identified as OBCs , the Gujjars who were already placed in the OBC category felt threatened. They felt the better-off Jats would corner the benefits of reservation,” said Professor Sheth.

Their move has also brought the Gujjars into conflict with the Meenas, another DNT community who are listed as a Scheduled Tribe in Rajasthan. Last year fighting broke out between the two communities as the Meenas fought to prevent any expansion of the ST category.

This situation is typical of a problem faced by the DNT activists we’ve been working with in India. In each state DNTs are listed under different categories: OBC, ST, SC, DNT, or nothing at all. And, as we see with the Meenas and the Gujjars, sometimes different DNT communities are listed differently within the same state. The result is that it is very difficult for DNT communities to come together over their commonalities in order to forge a nation-wide DNT movement.

Parama Roy does just that in the chapter on thuggees in her book Indian Traffic:

The lack of independent witnesses, the unavailability in many cases of both bodies and booty—the sheer paucity of positivist evidence, in other words—could only be resolved in one way. The most important criminal conspiracy of the century (of all time, some of the authors claimed) could be adequately engaged only by a new conception of law. … Since the law as currently defined made the complicity of individuals in particular crimes almost impossible to establish, specific criminal acts were no longer punishable as such. Instead, it was … enough to be a thug, without actually being convicted of a specific act of thuggee, to be liable to the exorbitant measures of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department. … It permitted the arrest of entire families, including women and children, as legitimate means of entrapping active (male) thugs; since thuggee was supposed to be a family affair anyway, transmitted in the genes and passed on from father to son, wives and children were also fit targets for the colonial state’s punitive and corrective measures. The act admitted the testimony of approvers [convicts who confessed in exchange for a pardon] in lieu of the testimony of independent witnesses (which had been disallowed under Islamic law), a move which created a remarkable mechanics of truth production and conviction.

… All those identified as thugs by approvers’ testimony were automatically guilty, even if no specific crimes could be proved against them and even if there was no (other) evidence of their ever having associated with other thugs.

Of course, the British where themselves a little worried about the quality of such evidence:

The fact that approvers’ testimony was “tainted” and that they might either wittingly or unwittingly implicate the innocent was undeniably an issue, though anxiety on the score was aired only to be promptly shown up as unfounded. … These testimonies were not required, under Act XXX, to be matched against the reports of independent witnesses or against the weight of circumstantial evidence; and none of the accused had the benefit of counsel, so the approvers were never cross-examined by anyone other than the officers of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department.

As reported by Kim Wagner, at one point “the government went as far as removing a judge from his post because he claimed thuggee did not exist and refused to cooperate in the operations against them.”

The anti-thuggee campaign undertaken by Sleeman and his successors was quite extensive, eventually stretching across the continent, and marked a significant change in the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Mike Dash’s book states that between 1826 and 1848 4,500 men were tried for being a thuggee. (Dash actually says for “thug crimes,” but as we’ve learned from Roy it was not necessary to prove involvement in specific criminal acts.) Of these 4,500, 504 (one in nine) were hanged, and “three thousand more were sentenced to life in prison,” with “most of the rest” either serving between seven and fourteen years’ hard labour, or dying in prison awaiting trial. That’s a lot of executions and prison sentences on very questionable legal practices, although, to be fair, our current system still executes a lot of people on pretty flimsy evidence.

So, did the British invent thuggees?

I suppose that really depends on what you mean by “invent.” Certainly there were highway bandits in India before the British. Many of these used the Thuggee trademark method of strangulation. It is even very likely that these murderers practiced some rituals in connection with their activities. All these are confirmed by Kim Wagner’s carefully researched paper on the subject, which stands out in its careful exploration of pre-Sleeman sources. He argues that while after 1830 the British very likely compelled or encouraged prisoners to adopt their own narrative to a pre-defined script, the earlier sources did not.

But what did Wagner find? For one thing, he found absolutely no evidence that thuggees were part of a wide-spread cult engaging in Kali-worship. As he says, even ordinary criminals,

who were never assumed to be motivated by religious fervor, would also hold a ceremony or puja after a successful robbery and make votive offerings to a deity. Yet nobody would suggest that they were religious fanatics who robbed and plundered as a means of worship to the Goddess.

He points out that the confessions never mentioned Kali (although Sleeman did in his notes). Wagner attributes the focus on Kali to later Orientalists who had a very limited grasp of Hindu goddess-worship. He even suggests that some informants emphasized the religious aspects of their crimes in the face of the “extreme interest in the subject exhibited by the British” as well as the desire to be absolved of responsibility for their purported actions.

Even the supposed signature methods of the thuggees turns out, upon further examination, to be quite varied, often involving swords or poison rather than just strangulation. Moreover, when we explore the political economic context, rather than an ancient ritual cult stretching back centuries, we find thuggees emerging in the context of regional power struggles, often being supported by local landlords.

Wagner wants to reclaim thuggees from the dustbin of history, arguing that “travellers were strangled and plundered by bands of robbers in early 19th century India if not earlier.” And while he makes some important correctives to the revisionist accounts, I think he misses the point being made by Roy and others. They are not claiming that the British actions were completely divorced from local realities. They are arguing that the British conception of these local practices tell us more about the fears and interests of the colonial rulers than they do about the local reality. Wagner has told us something valuable about that local reality, but not about how and why that reality came to be what it was under Sleeman.

I see an analogous situation over the use of the term “‘al-Qaida’ fighters” to refer to the enemy in Iraq. Sure, there is a group in Iraq which calls itself al-Qaida, but if we want to understand how that term is being used we have to understand the dominant narratives surrounding the War on Terror. And, indeed, part of that narrative is framed by movies like The Deceivers and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, both of which draw on Sleeman in their depiction of thuggees. Indeed, it may not be a coincidence that Mike Dash’s 2005 book became a best seller.

Related: Colonial Ethnography

UPDATE: Seems that Kim Wagner has a new book out on the topic: Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India

UPDATE: I wrote this post primarily as a preparation for challenging the Wikipedia page on the subject, and was overly harsh on Mike Dash because I hold his book responsible for that page, even though he specifically distances himself from the myth of the Thuggee in several places. Mike Dash left some comments on my Wikipedia talk page, and I feel it is worth reprinting them here and addressing them:

Hi Kerim

Thanks for your note on the Thuggee talk page, which I try to monitor even though I’ve sworn off actually contributing to the article.

I’ve had a look at your blog post and have to wonder if you’ve actually had a chance to read my book? If you have, I’m rather puzzled as to why you present my point of view as being that of a believer in the old colonialist view of Thugs as members of a religious cult. In fact the book features a whole chapter which discusses the issue and concludes there’s absolutely no evidence that Thugs were anything other than especially unpleasant and ruthless robbers, whose worship of Kali was entirely typical of Indian criminals of that period.

The meaning of my subtitle is a subtle one: that the “true story” is that there was no cult. Sadly, the fact that the chapter discussing religious beliefs falls starts on page 219 of the book has fooled more than one lazy reviewer who’s not bothered to read that far into assuming my views are of the old-fashioned sort.

In fact I spent three years doing primary research in the archives in the UK and India perfectly aware of the revisionist perspective and on the lookout for evidence for and against the reality of Thuggee. Again, if you’ve read my book you’ll know there are lengthy discussions of the reliability of the evidence presented at the various trials.

In case you haven’t, my position is this:

[i] The alleged modus operandi of the Thug gangs – ”invariably” seeking to murder their victims before robbing them – is highly distinctive and apparently unique. As such it should be possible to distnguish alleged Thugs from other sorts of criminals, and Thug crimes from other robberies

[ii]  Close reading of thousands and thousands of pages of the MS material in London and Delhi shows that the British used “approvers” to exhume a minimum of 1,100 corpses from spots identified by the informants, which has to imply they had knowledge of at least that number of murders

[iii]   While Sleeman’s legal processes were far from displaying modern concern for the rights of the accused, he and his associates did go to considerable lengths to separate informants at the time of their arrest and cross-check their stories. No one was executed on the word of a single informant. I don’t say no alleged Thugs were innocent – almost certainly some innocent men were executed – and I do feel standards of evidence clearly became considerably more lax when new laws were passed in the mid 1830s to make it easier to convict alleged Thugs who were only peripheral members of their gangs. However, it would be wrong to suggest that the East India Company was uniquely biased or racist in the way it organised its trials. In fact many accused murderers in the US, UK and independent Indian states experienced trials that were at least as weighted in favour of the prosecution in the 1830s. This too is clearly laid out in my book

[iv]   In some cases, though certainly not all, there was a good deal of corroborative evidence in the shape of recovered loot, and even the testimony of survivors, which suggests at least some approver testimony was pretty reliable

[v]   Roy and other revisionists have, so far as I can tell from their writings, not bothered to consult primary sources to check or verify any of this; their writings are based on secondary material, which is much less satisfactory.

In short, I agree almost entirely with Wagner, whose views I note you cite with approval, and who believes in the existence of Thuggee as a distinct form of crime, but not as a religious cult of any sort.

If you’ve read my book I’m rather surprised that you misrepresent my views so badly. If you haven’t then I do think it might be an idea to pick it up!

All of this said, I do think it would be an idea for the article to be rewritten to include a section setting out the arguments in the dispute between Roy and Wagner, say. (Wagner is actually pretty critical of Roy, certainly much more so than he has been of me.) I think the debate breaks down more as one between historians and anthropologists, which means it’s certainly an interesting one.

Best

Mike

First of all, I want to thank Mike Dash for taking the time to respond. Secondly, I thank him for helping to improve the Wikipedia article, which was a major motivation behind my writing this post. I’m sure it will be better as a result. (Dash seems to be very active on Wikipedia.) Third, I have read Mike’s book – very carefully. Fourth, I want to remove the unstated impression that Mike Dash supports the notion of a Kali cult. His chapter on this regard is very clear that this was largely Sleeman’s invention. As he says: “The emphasis placed by Sleeman … on the role of religion in Thug life was thus enormously exaggerated.”

However, I do stand by my comments about Dash, even if I regret the tone. Namely, I believe he is wrong to present the “Thuggee as a distinct form of crime,” and I think this view comes from his placing too much reliance on the Sleeman archive and the testimony of convicts in an enormously unfair system. Here is what Dash says in his “Notes on Sources”:

Ramaseeana is far from an ideal source; the ‘Conversations’ have been translated and perhaps edited, losing nuance in the process, and the Thug prisoners answer only the questions Sleeman saw fit to pose, which are not always those we might wish to ask today. Nonetheless, the material – containing as it does numerous repetitions, contradictions and even statements that fly directly in the face of opinions that Sleeman himself put in print – does seem to have been published in a more or less raw state. The ‘Conversations’ offer the most fascinating and compelling insight into the thoughts and motives of the Thugs themselves.”

This reads to me like the story about the person who looks for their keys under the lamppost because the light is better there. Although I have not spent the time with the primary material that Dash has, I have looked through the archives from that period and I wouldn’t want to have to write a book which relied so heavily on such sources (see my previous posts on this topic). While the Wagner article (I have not yet read the book) does give lip-service to the view that Thuggee is a “distinct form of crime,” his own account seems to share more in common with the revisionists, highlighting as it does the importance of local politics, the varied methods of killings, etc. In the end, the only thing that Wagner proves in this regard is that it is likely the word “Thuggee” was used to describe crimes before the British became obsessed with the topic. See my comments above about al-Qaida in Iraq.

Reading Dash’s book, and even Wagner, one can not help but feel a strange tension. They attack the revisionists, and yet are themselves revising the history. They point out the unreliability of the archive, but then fault the revisionists for not placing more credence in it. They distance themselves from the myth of the Thuggee even as they seemingly trade in this myth. In the end it seems to be a matter of emphasis. Does one emphasize the unreliability of the archive and the political economic context, or does one dig through the archive to find the molehill of truth upon which the mountain was built?

When doing research last summer in the British colonial archives I read numerous colonial ethnographies of the so-called “Criminal Tribes” (as DNTs were then known). Many were written by policemen, and the information in them was written for the express purpose of identifying such criminals. Gunthorpe’s 1882. Notes on Criminal Tribes Residing in, or Frequenting the Bombay Presidency, Berar and the Central Provinces, Lemarchand’s 1915, A Guide to Criminal Tribes, and, also from 1915, Naidu’s The History of Railway Thieves : With Illustrations & Hints on Detection are all in many ways the same book with slight variations. They freely stole from each other and the style was essentially the same. Numerous other such guides were circulated among the various colonial agencies.

They are like bird watching guides, identifying common habits and markings which will help you spot a criminal among the crowds. From Lemarchand:

Bhampta: Working in lots of three. Often disguise themselves as Marwadi or Hindu traiders, Lingayats, Jangam, Brahmans or shepherds. They are sometimes seen as minstrels, Sanadikorwas or Dakkhani Bhats. They are most commonly met with as Marathas. When posing as Gosains they add the suffix “das” to their names.

Barwar: Accompanied by women who pose as Brahmains and keep their faces veiled.

Sanoria: Gang consists of 2 to 15 or 20. Never accompanied by women.

Chandravedi: Gang comprises 10 or 20 half men, half boys. They alwasys work with a boy between 8 and 12 years of age called the “Chawa”, the man being styled Upaidar. They work by signs and secret vocabulary.

Some of the information was gathered from the confessions of convicts, but much of it seems to have been the result of embellishments and variations of previous works (“remixing” might be a polite way of describing it). A fair amount has been written about such colonial practices, but it wasn’t until I immersed myself in descriptions of which tribe ate jackal meat and which did not and which community’s women were faithful to their men (with each book contradicting the previous one) that I became aware of the true absurdity of this literature.

What is really shocking is just how little has changed a hundred years later. I was motivated to write this post when I stumbled upon this 1999 article from the Indian Express News Service:

The Modus Operandi branch of the police force, which works under the DCB, based on the evidence and eyewitness accounts can thus exactly point out the gang involved in the crime, sometimes even making it possible to identify gang members based on information provided and previous records.

Among the main gangs active in South Gujarat are the Chaddi Banian Dhari, Dafer, Kevat, Waghris, Bawaris, Nats, Sansis, Shikliyar, Jhaver Thutho, Chharras and other gangs. Police records made available to Express Newsline list distinguishing features of various gangs that help the police identify and track them down.

For example, the Bawari gang is known to camp at railway stations before striking. They use the `rumali’ method, where they bend grills of houses to force their way inside. Other gangs like the Dafers and Chaddi Banian Dharis survey possible targets by posing as beggars, vendors and the like. Dafers are known to possess firearms but use these only when challenged. The Chaddi Banian Dhari gang, as the name suggests, are dressed in shorts and banians and have their faces masked. They strike only on highways and of late, have been known to raid houses on the outskirts of cities and towns. The Shikliyars are known to manufacture country made firearms and sell these to gangs with whom they are connected.

Of course, the continuation of these practices requires explanation. There is no reason the past must necessarily burden the present. A proper critique cannot be content at simply pointing out the crimes of the past, but must also ask why colonial practices are still so prevalent in modern India. (It would also be interesting to compare this to other forms of “racial profiling.”) Still, pointing to these continuities is at least a start.

Previously:

• Fingerprinting, Thievery, and Bob Marley
• Anthropometry: Alive and Kicking
• Hidden World: Visiting The British Colonial Archives

The first of these is Xiang Biao’s Global Body Shopping: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007 (I’ll tell you the other one in the next post). Xiang’s book is phenomenal in the way that Chauncey Gardener was phenomenal in Being There; it has that naive charisma and perfect timing born of simpleness. Of course the genius behind Gardener was Peter Sellers, and I think Xiang might have some of the same going on: it is an honest book, and the introduction (which is worth the price of the book alone) lays out the author’s own tortured attempt to make concepts like “diaspora” and globalization work before realizing that a bizarre, un-explored phenomenon was right under his nose.

I’ve been waiting for a good book on bodyshopping since I did my own work in India in 2000-1; at the time the word was relatively unknown outside of the IT industry. There were a few good journalistic articles here and there (Wired, especially, in its heyday, occasionally paid people to do creative international investigation) and over time a few cultural studies critiques of the inherent racism and colonial blabla of the system. But no one had really spent anytime figuring it out and explaining it (which in my opinion is infinitely more damning than the sharpest toungued accusation of neo-this or that). Xiang’s book is, at base, an explanation of the phenomenon. Why is this so important? Well, in a world of anthropologists never-ending anxiety over the loss of cultures, the loss of their own ability to explain cultures, and the problem of finding new things to study, Xiang’s book offers a way out: it shows how one can study a structure within a larger system and explain both how that structure works and how it illuminates the function of the larger system. In this case the structure is the bodyshopping system, with all of its peculiarities, and the system is the Global IT market as it is embedded in the US, EU and Indian contexts.

Because bodyshopping takes unfamiliar forms–more complicated than simple models of digital divides or global/local would allow one to see–it necessitates an unfamiliar form of analysis. Xiang’s book matches the difficult-to-track details of bodyshopping on the ground (with fieldwork in both Coastal Andra Pradeshi villages and Urban Sydney IT neighborhoods, including the stopover in Kuala Lumpur that represents a standard IT worker’s peregrination) with a theorization of the transformation of the IT economy through the social relations of south Indians. Perhaps the most shocking and fascinating aspect of the book is its explanation of how the bodyshopping system is complexly intertwined with the system of dowry in India (a system that is itself a creature of colonialism). Given the complicated practices of investing in the education abroad of young grooms-to-be, their solitary lives living together in urban locales, and the politics of social nicety, the betrayals and lies, it has all the elements of a latter-day Henry James novel. One might not expect this in a book about the IT industry.

Although many readers might not see this feature of it, Xiang’s book is in fact one of the best examples of “reflexive ethnography” in the last twenty years of experimentation in anthropology. It is not theory-saturated, carefully self-regarding or textually clever (as refelxivity is often interpereted), but reflexive in the precise sense that his understanding of his involvement in the lives of South Indian IT workers, as a Chinese-born, Oxford-trained anthropologist is on view precisely where it matters. He recognizes how being Chinese and male provides certain kinds of access that being white and female would forbid (e.g. sleeping five to a room with “benched” IT workers in Sydney), or how his Oxford credentials are mobilized by his friends to improve their own status amongst family in India.

Xiang’s reflexivity helps him understand, with a partially distanced eye, how it is that the practice of bodyshopping is a “uniquely Indian practice” (4). “Ethnicization” is thus a key aspect of Xiang’s analysis, but he resists the rush to cultural explanations that are such a common feature of journalistic accounts (e.g. that Indian society is naturally suited to mathematical and computational thinking or that the combination of English language training and poverty makes them the easiest for transnational firms to exploit). The “ethnic” component of IT labor is less about distinctions of background or religion, and more about a kind of national solidarity that can be mobilized in particular ways in the Indian IT market itself.

Ironically the “ethnic” character of bodyshopping leads not to enhanced or transformed perceptions of collectivity (and most certainly not to self perception as a working class) but to enhanced “individualization” which Biang nicely describes as “less about ‘self’ and essentially about the perception of society–particularly how one should apprehend uncertainty.(9)” Uncertainty in the marketplace turns individual “merit” into the key to success, rather than being seen as the failure of the bodyshoppers themselves, or problems inherent in the global labor market at large. A result of this combination of ethnicization and individualization is that workers were encouraged to move up– such successes worked in favor of bodyshoppers who gained prestige by marketing “talented” individuals, and against the “collective” identity of workers as having shared interests. The final piece of the puzzle is the “transnationalization” of bodyshopping: the hierarchical ordering of particular nations into a chain of possible movements (e.g. from Andhra Pradesh to Malaysia to Australia to Canada to the US). Transnationalization keeps IT workers on the move, is perceived as the confirmation of “individual merit” and in turn reflects success at home in India–both for families connected to the circulating workers and to the reproduction of IT workers through training institutes.

The combination of a simple explanation (hard-won through fieldwork) of a complex technical and economic system, with the exploration of its effects on social and personal lives of an extended network of families, villages, and corporations scattered around the globe is what makes this the perfect “Intro to Cultural Anthropology” book in my estimation… I’d be very interested to hear where others think it might fit in their own map of the discipline.

(A longer version of this review, along with the book Virtual Migration is slated to appear in Political and Legal Anthropology ).

If you can prove that something isn’t novel, that it has been known and used for a long time, then it can’t be patented.

To defend traditional knowledge from exploitative patenting, then, there are two basic and fundamentally opposed choices under existing law: define it as a trade secret or protect it in plain view. The goal of the latter is to establish that patent applicants who make use of this information fail to meet the novelty standard.

Although the trade-secrets approach sounds promising, and some legal scholars argue that it’s the way to go for the protection of traditional IPR, it has certain problems. For one thing, a lot of TK isn’t especially secret. It is, almost by definition, in wide circulation within a society. Trade-secrets laws typically say that anyone who can duplicate trade secrets independently–say, through reverse engineering–is free to use them. Still, one can argue that the Aboriginal “keeping-places” emerging in Australia, repositories for TK that have strict rules of access, follow something like a trade-secrets approach. To a more limited extent, protocols for the use of Native American TK in American archives are moving in a similar direction.

The plain-view approach has been adopted in a few important cases–notably, that of Ayurveda, which is documented by the Indian government in the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library. (Site is publicly accessible but requires a simple registration.) The idea is to establish “prior art” and therefore refute claims of novelty.

Yet as the sociologist Sita Reddy has argued in a provocative essay, “Making Heritage Legible,” just published in the International Journal of Cultural Property, the conversion of Ayurvedic tradition into a database generates all manner of contradictions and conflicts.

(A PDF of Reddy’s paper can be found here, the website of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.) What Reddy calls “state-based cultural documentation” has the effect of producing “new cultural objects that transform the nature of knowledge, and new cultural subjects–or ‘biological citizens’–who transform the politics of knowedge through contested claims of ownership.” She doesn’t claim that all the effects of the TKDL are negative, only that in the course of protecting Ayurveda from predation they also change it in complex ways. This echoes the assertion of Madhavi Sunder, the legal scholar, that “the concept of traditional knowledge, too, is a modern invention.”

What about the broader implications of reinventing TK and cultural heritage as a resource that should be subject to rational, bureaucratic management, much like energy or water? That’s the subject of my next post.

Chatterjee’s book is divided into two parts. The first part consists of three lectures delivered at Columbia University in 2001. This is the tightest part of the book, in which he develops the arguments I mentioned in the first part of my review and which I will continue to focus upon below. The second half consists of a series of other lectures on a variety of issues, including globalization, the war on terror, and India’s urban development. Because of the fragmentary nature of this book, we really only get a hint as to the nature of “political society” and its utility as a concept. There is certainly more depth to the discussion that the brief account I’ve laid out so far, but it is frustrating that many of the most difficult questions are avoided. The first, would be the applicability of the concept to the developed world; but the second is even more pressing: Chatterjee shies away from tackling the history of communal violence in India and the alliances which marginalized political societies often make with the most reactionary political groups. I understand why, he does this. He is intent on showing the democratic potential of political society and wishes to challenge India’s left-leaning middle classes to actively work with political societies rather than shunning them. In this sense the history of communal violence forms the context in which such a book is written. Nonetheless, if we we want to really demonstrate the analytical usefulness of the category it can’t just be presented as a progressive phenomena.

Another question I like to ask whenever I see an author introduce a new analytic term is whether or not the concepts can’t already be handled by existing terms, specifically Gramsci’s term “civil society.” Chatterjee’s main criticism is that civil society is elitist:

Civil society as an ideal continues to energize an interventionist political project, but as an actually existing form it is demographically limited. (39)

One of the best articles written on the concept of civil society in Gramsci’s work is Joseph Buttigieg’s 1995 Boundary 2 article, “Gramsci on Civil Society” (JSTOR link). (Buttigieg was the other discussant on that 1996 AAA session I mentioned.) In that article Buttigieg makes it clear that, contrary to how many people use the term today, Gramsci never intended for civil society to be thought of as a realm of freedom and democracy exiting in opposition to the state; rather, for Gramsci “civil society as an integral part of the state” (424). As such, it is incorrect to view civil society as the realm of freedom it is often conceived of today (especially as used by neoconservatives who are really interested in little more than expanding markets). As Buttigieg puts it:

for Gramsci, civil society is best described not as the sphere of freedom but of hegemony. Hegemony, to be sure, depends on consent (as opposed to coercion), but consent is not the spontaneous outcome of “free choice”; consent is manufactured, albeit through extremely complex mediums, diverse institutions, and constantly changing processes. Furthermore, the power to manufacture consent is not evenly distributed in society … (427, emphasis added)

So, even in Gramsci’s writings civil society is already portrayed “demographically limited”! It was because of this that Gramsci sought to forge an Italian “national-popular” culture. Gramsci hoped that such a culture, forged by “organic intellectuals” in cooperation with Italy’s workers and peasants would counterbalance the existing civil society maintained by “traditional intellectuals” working in universities, churches, and for the state. I’ve always seen the distinction between these two kinds of intellectuals as essentially Weberian, reflecting the degree that intellectuals have been incorporated into the institutions of civil society. This creates problems because the definition of an organic intellectual is essentially negative. Although Chatterjee does not engage with Gramsci’s theory of the intellectual, the concept of political society suggests a positive definition of such intellectuals by defining them in terms of the unique structures of political society as opposed to civil society.

One might argue that Gramsci’s entire conception of subaltern society is largely framed in negative terms. In this sense Chatterjee’s concept of political society opens up a potential space for developing Gramsci’s model in a more anthropological direction. Chatterjee’s anthropological approach comes to the distinction between political and civil society by inductively generalizing from the experience of the rural poor in India. This gives his term weight, but it also means that he is unable to live up to the grand theoretical ambitions implied in this work. He claims to speak to “politics in most of the world,” but doing so would require him to abandon some of his empirical caution and propose a general model of political society applicable to more than the few cases presented here. Hopefully he is working on just such a project. If not, I think that there are enough tantalizing hints here that I’m sure we will see others testing the range and applicability of the term to vastly different contexts.

I chose to review Partha Chatterjee’s The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world. As someone interested in subaltern studies and Gramsci I’ve long been interested in Chatterjee’s work, Chatterjee was a discussant on my first AAA panel in 1996 (Jason Greenberg and myself were co-organizers). At the same time, I’ve always had reservations about Chatterjee’s work. In my thesis I criticized Chatterjee’s book on nationalism for falling into the standard trap of equating hegemony with elite discourse (the main source of data used in the book) and over-generalizing from the Indian case (a fault he himself acknowledges).

The Politics of the Governed still takes India to stand for “most of the world,” but it makes important strides in rectifying the focus on elite discourses. In fact, it does much more than that. It radically challenges our understanding of the term “civil society” by highlighting how the politics of civil society marginalizes the politics of poor people and offers up an alternative term, “political society” as a framework for understanding the popular politics of marginalized groups. In doing so he draws heavily upon the Foucauldian tradition of governmentality studies to argue that there is a gap “between the lofty political imaginary of popular sovereignty and the mundane administrative reality of governmentality” (36).

Central to his argument is a distinction between “citizens” and “populations.” Populations are the object of the welfare state, but Chatterjee crucially distinguishes between the different history of the welfare state in the developed world and the post-colonial world.

postcolonial states deployed the latest governmental technologies to promote the well-being of their populations, often prompted and aided by international and nongovernmental organizations. In adopting these technical strategies of modernization and development, older ethnographic concepts often entered the field of knowledge about populations – as convenient descriptive categories for classifying groups of people into suitable targets for administrative, legal, economic, or electoral policy … Thus caste and religion in India, ethnic groups in Southeast Asia, and tribes in Africa remained the dominant criteria for identifying communities among the populations as objects of policy. (37)

These populations cannot be treated the same way as citizens because it is impossible to generalize their needs to those of the entire population. There are two reasons for this. First is their status as minority populations, and the second is caused by the constraints of limited state resources. The first argument draws on the questions posed in Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question,” regarding the ways in which the “universal” values of the modern state presuppose the cultural values of the dominant population. Chatterjee recasts (no pun intended) this problematic in terms of the role of untouchability in the creation of modern India:

The colonial government, for all its homilies about the need to uplift those oppressed by the religious tyranny of traditional Hinduism, could only look after the untouchables as its subjects. It could never give them citizenship. Only under an independent national constitution was citizenship conceivable for the untouchables. yet, if independence meant the rule of the upper casts, how could the untouchables expect equal citizenship and the end of teh social tyranny from which they had suffered for centuries? Ambedkar’s position was clear: the untouchables must support national independence, in the full knowledge that it would lead to teh political dominance of the upper casts, but they must press on with the struggle for equality within the framework of the new constitution. (14-15)

The second problem with treating the rights of populations the same as the rights of citizens is that doing so would strain the state’s capacity to “deliver those benefits to the entire population” and would “only invite further violation of public property and civic laws” (40). As a result, there is a catch-22 whereby the need of marginalized populations to engage in illegal activities in order to secure their livelihood reinforces the state’s inability to legitimate those illegal activities, thus ensuring that the relationship of these marginal groups to the state remains purely instrumental. It is within this space that Chatterjee’s “political society” emerges. It is a space where “the demands of electoral mobilization, on the one hand, and the logic of welfare distribution, on the other, overlapped and came together” (135).

The engagement of poor people in electoral politics is precisely one of the areas that sets India apart from the United States, as such it is fair to ask how relevant the concept of “political society” is to the “West.” And Chatterjee himself argues that the history of Governmentality in the global “South” is quite different as a result of the colonial encounter. In the West “the story of citizenship … moves from the institution of civic rights in civil society to political rights in the fully developed nation-state,” only then developing the techniques of governmentality discussed by Foucault. But that order was reversed in the colonies, where the “technologies of governmentality often predate the nation-state” (36) (e.g. anthropometry in India).

Having said that, I do find the concept of “political society” tremendously useful in the Indian context. My own limited experience in India comes from making a film about a community long-associated with illegal activity and we observed first hand the tensions that were created by civil society institutions treating the community as “subjects,” and the birth of a new political society intended to negotiate entitlement claims with the state. The discourses of “reform” through education and labor used by Indian NGOs conflicted with community desires to be treated as citizens with rights. The community then faced difficulty establishing these rights because of their own marginal status. For instance, how do you get the government to improve the sewage when the community has not been paying taxes? You could start paying taxes, except that this would require the state to collect those taxes, which it hasn’t been doing (collecting bribes on the other hand …), and even if they could get the state to collect the taxes, the community doesn’t want to have to pay all its back taxes all at once. A similar farce ensued when the community recently sought to file a “right to information” petition. I just learned that it has been impossible to do so because there is no government officer appointed to the community who is able to receive the petition. In this Becketesque context, it makes sense that politics should take the form of a group of young people engaged in Brechtian street theatre.

Chatterjee cites numerous similar examples from West Bengal, even including theater troupes! “The People’s Welfare Association” created by a squatter settlement along the railroad tracks cannot receive the same recognition as other civic societies because its goal is to establish the legitimacy of an illegal community.

The squatters, on their part, admit that their occupation of public land is both illegal and contrary to good civic life. But they make the claim to a habitation and a livelihood as a matter of right and use their association as the principal collective instrument to pursue that claim. (59)

In framing their petition they define themselves in terms of the very categories of governmentality, a laundry list of subject “populations”: “Refugees, landless people, day laborers, homestead, below the poverty line …” and yet they insist that they form a “single family.” This move is crucial in order “to give the empirical form of a population group the moral attributes of a community” (57). Population groups are made up of subjects, whereas communities are made up of citizens. “Political society” is the politics of subjects who wish to have the same rights as citizens, but are excluded (by dint of their very marginalization) from civil society.

[This is the end of Part 1. In part two I look more closely at how the term "political society" relates to existing theories of "civil society."]

One answer is that this was simply the last gasp of a colonial legacy. The anthropometric data was collected in the 1960s. No new data was collected for this survey. In an article explaining the survey, Singh explains that the survey was set up during the last days of British rule:

The Anthropological Survey of India was set up in December 1945, barely 20 months before the transfer of power. The reason for this has to be sought in the intensive lobbying by administrator-anthropologists – including J.P. Mills, J.H. Hutton, W.V. Grigson, W.G. Archer with anthropologists like Verrier Elwin and C. von Furer-Haimendorf – over 15 years to create a special dispensation for the tribes under the Government of India Act of 1935 and through various suggestions and proposals including those for the creation of a Crown Colony in the North East and a protectorate for the tribals.

Their special interest in the tribes derived from a romantic tradition that presented the tribes in pleasant contrast to castes, the ‘unravished’ hills and plateau where they lived which reminded the colonial rulers of their homeland, and from their appreciation of the strategic location of the tribes and the enormous resources that their lands contained. However, these proposals were shot down by the home office which felt that the British regime would be much too impoverished after the Second World War to commit its meagre resources to such ventures.

But I’m not sure Singh can get off the hook so easily. In the last chapter of her excellent book Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia Clare Anderson points out several ways in which the survey relied upon unreliable colonial ethnography in its analysis. Indeed, Singh’s more recent Peoples of India from 1995 seems to rely almost entirely upon highly questionable colonial sources for its chapters on the various Denotified Tribes (former “Criminal Tribes”).

There is a significant literature on the tremendous confusion (and corresponding need to maintain the illusion of certitude) that pervades colonial ethnography in India. In later posts I will write more about this (as I begin to read through this literature myself), suffice to say that much of what we read in these documents seemed more akin to cheap detective fiction than to ethnography. One document would say that a particular group ate jackal and that their women tended to be faithful to their husbands, whereas another would say the opposite about the same group (even when seemingly relying on the former document). We never learn on what basis this information is gleaned. But more than simply inaccurate, I would not even consider a listing of ethnic “traits” as ethnography in the first place.

So why was the Indian government still giving credence to such materials as late as the 1990s? Is it simply colonial ethnography on auto-pilot, or might it be that such forms of knowledge production are still seen as a useful means of legitimating certain kinds of state interventions amongst indigenous populations, many of which remain “troublesome“?

The Digital Himalaya project was conceived of by Professor Alan Macfarlane and Mark Turin as a strategy for archiving and making available valuable ethnographic materials from the Himalayan region. Based jointly at the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University and the Anthropology Department at Cornell University, the project began in December 2000.

Of particular interest to Savage Minders is the Fürer-Haimendorf Film Collection:

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf lived and worked as an anthropologist throughout the Himalayas from the 1930s through the 1980s. Fürer-Haimendorf’s specific interests included the Naga ethnic groups of the North Eastern Frontier Area of India and the Sherpa ethnic group of north-eastern Nepal. However, he travelled far and wide throughout the entire region, taking over 100 hours of film throughout his career. Extraordinary in both its breadth and its depth, the Fürer-Haimendorf collection is one of the finest extant ethnographic film collections that document Himalayan cultures. The collection includes both archival footage from Fürer-Haimendorf’s lengthy research career in the Himalayas, as well as interviews with the Professor himself recorded on video. Samples of both appear below. The Fürer-Haimendorf film collection is currently located in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University. DART (Digital Anthropology Resources for Teaching) has compiled a selected set of Haimendorf’s fieldwork notes on the Sherpas of Nepal which will appeal to scholars interested in his ethnographic field techniques.

The DART web site has this short biography of Haimendorf:

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf was born on June 22, 1909, in Vienna, Austria. He studied anthropology in Vienna under the tutelage of scholars of the Kulturkreis school. He was a prolific fieldworker, amassing an impressive archive of material on South Asian groups, with a particular focus on Nepal and northeastern India.

While conducting postdoctoral research at the London School of Economics, Fürer-Haimendorf became well acquainted with many of the leading lights of British anthropology, including Bronislaw Malinowski, Raymond Firth, Meyer Fortes, and Audrey Richards. World War II broke out while he was on his second field trip in India, and like Malinowski before him, Fürer-Haimendorf was arrested as an enemy alien. Confined to Hyderabad State for the duration of the war, he undertook extensive fieldwork among the inhabitants of that region. Upon returning to Europe in 1949, he began his fruitful tenure at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, where he served as chair of a growing anthropology department between 1950 and 1975. After a long and influential career, Fürer-Haimendorf died on June 11, 1995.

Much like the western Superman who has been read as an embodiment of national myths and ideals, there is much which speaks to the specifically Indian origins of this particular story.

For one thing, the early signs that young Krishna may have superpowers come when he turns out to be a protégé at sketching and then confounds the teachers at his local school with a spectacular performance on his I.Q. exam. The American counterpart would have led off with his strength, his speed, or maybe even his X-ray vision but having a superior intellect has rarely been a prerequisite for becoming a superpower in the western sense of the term. Throughout the film, in fact, the other characters consistently cite his “talents” but rarely his “powers” as if he were destined to become an extremely gifted knowledge worker (and indeed, it turns out that the ethics of knowledge work for hire are at the center of this epic saga.)

…

Westerners are going to be tempted to read the film as a symptom of cultural imperialism — taking a strongly western genre and trying to sell it back to the American market. But that’s too simple — especially given all of the ways I’ve identified above that the superhero genre gets reworked to speak to specifically Asian values and concerns and the ways it gets mixed with other genre elements which are more closely associated with the Bollywood tradition.

Krrish isn’t playing anywhere even close to Las Vegas (despite a growing Indian population here, I might add) so I’ll have to take Jenkins at his word, but it sounds like a Superman Returns/Krrish double-feature would be a great way to spend an afternoon. [Via BoingBoing]