Dear friends,

The question is not of denying tribals electricity or fruits of development but
the manner in which
they are sought to be 'civilised'. Even George Bush is convinced about his
'civilising mission' for
Iraq. There is ample empirical proof world over of botched attempts at
'mainstreaming primitive
cultures' - attempts that have only brought grief to those it was meant to do
'good' for. We need
to caution ourselves and reflect historically on what the minister and his govt.
is attempting to
do.

The point I am raising here is peculiar to the present political dispensation
that Oram represents
and supports. It is the question of ethinic (tribal) identity and I am a bit
wary on this count as
it has brought tragic consequences. I think it is central to this debate here.

It is ironical that this idea of 'civilising & mainstreaming' comes from a
minister who has tribal
origins himself. But this is not surprising given that the most vociferous
support for a 'cultural
nationalism' comes from a section of the tribal communities themselves - the
latest recruits of the
Hindutva Brigade. We have seen this in the Gujarat carnage and in the recent VHP
Ayodhya fiasco.

The minister is taking help from 'NGOs' like the Ramakrishna Mission in his
civilising missionary
task. With due respect to the founders of these reformist movements (not NGOs!),
I fear that even
these organisations have been overtaken by a monolithic view of the Indian and
Hindu identity that
shares the view of a militant Hindu Nationalistic State of those in politics. I
have seen this
'missionary zeal' amongst NGOs too, working with tribals in the western ghats
also.

Here is a link of an article I found interesting in this context of 'indentity
crisis'. It is
central to a lot of us middle class Indians who are right now living in denial
while the post
liberalisation conspicuous consumption party lasts:

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~critmass/v5n2/arora3.html

" How does the concept of transcendence function historically in colonial India
for Ramakrishna?
The Mission in Calcutta under the tutelage of Ramakrishna stayed clear of
nationalist politics in
its construction of a modern, universal, religious selfhood. And yet, as Partha
Chatterjee argues
in the essay "A Religion of Urban Domesticity: Sri Ramakrishna and the Calcutta
Middle Class," the
nationalist agenda and the cultural work of the Ramakrishna Mission have to be
seen in relation to
each other. Partha Chatterjee has written on the central role that religion
played in the
nineteenth-century Bengali middle class's construction of its role as the agents
of moral
leadership. The Ramakrishna Movement in Bengal is the entry point into this
discussion for
Chatterjee, as he says, because it is from here that the discursive domain of
'middleness' can be
discussed and problematized. "Middleness" is used to connote the experience of a
simultaneous
subordination and domination (in which the Bengali middle class found itself)
from which hegemonic
ruling ideologies emerged. Thus, a cultural leadership of the indigenous
colonized people was
constituted in a relation of subordination to the British colonial elite, which
was also in
contestation to that subordination. Chatterjee suggests that the middle class
found itself in the
middle of a sense of intellectual confusion and spiritual crisis in which
neither the traditional
prescriptions of ritual practice nor the unconcretized principles of enlightened
rationality could
provide adequate grounds in regulating one's daily life situation which, after
all, was
unprecedented in 'tradition.' It becomes evident that the cultural work of the
Mission was useful
for the nationalist agenda for its simplistic reconciliation of the traditional
within the Modern
in positing Hinduism as a philosophy which could incorporate and manage all
differences."

I see this identity and nationalism issue as central to how our state and
constitution treats
indeginous people like the Onges and Jarawas. The devil is within us.

Regards,

Rustam



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