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This excerpt is extracted from the article The Conceits of Representation by Neera Chandhoke which appeared in the opinion section of The Hindu on 7th February, 2001, accessible here.
" And yet this feast of words leaves at least me with a feeling of profound irritation. Certainly both Guha and Roy have the right to argue their own positions on who represents the voice of the marginalized better. Should, as Roy puts it, concern or empathy guide the voices of those who are doing the representing? Should passion or cool and careful scholarship dictate the project, as Guha argues? These questions are legitimate, but I cannot help feeling that somewhere in all these polemics, the wider questions have been left out. Surely the issue is not only one of who does the representing better, for the issue is and should be: why do the tribals need to be represented at all? Why do they need the vocabularies of those who possess power over words, or scholarship, as the case may be, to translate their aspirations, their desires, their passions, into the language of the translator?
Is it because they lack voice inasmuch as they are unfamiliar with the terms of the dominant language? I am by no means suggesting that the marginalised lack agential capacity when I say that they "lack voice". Nor am I indicating that the marginalised cannot represent themselves, or that they are incapable of self-representation. To "lack voice", is to lack linguistic authority in the domain of civil society simply because both the sphere and the state happens to be governed by a specialised set of languages.
For the languages that govern the Indian state and civil society are those of modernity: of legal entitlements, of rehabilitation and resettlement, of compensation. The tribal simply does not possess, for structural reasons, access to these languages, and both the state and civil society refuse to recognize the language of the tribal. This is the tragedy of modern India. There is an apocryphal story about the Narmada valley that may illustrate what I am trying to say. Incidentally, I use the term "tribal" in a dual though not unrelated sense. First, the term literally indicates the inhabitants of the valley who have been subjected to massive displacement, but the term can also be used as a metaphor for those inhabitants of civil society who have been marginalised from the politics of dominant languages. To return to the story: a revenue official surveying land holdings in the valley for the purposes of addressing the amount of compensation asked a tribal about his land holdings. The tribal pointing towards an area of land claimed proprietorship of that land. Expectedly he was asked to show the relevant papers that establish land ownership - the patta. Equally expectedly, the tribal did not possess any such patta. "How do you know in this case that the land is yours," asked the revenue official. "The bones of my forefathers are buried along the boundaries of the land," answered the tribal. "No compensation," stated the revenue official as he walked away, condemning the tribal who had been cultivating the land under usufructuary rights to landlessness, without any hope for compensation even as his land fell under the submergence zone of the gigantic Narmada valley project. (This story of course predates the movement to recognize the landless cultivator as legitimate claimant for compensation).
This story can be read in many ways. Let me read it this way: the impossibility of translation between two languages, simply because they express different understandings and social worlds. For the revenue officer, ownership of land holding can only be established through legal entitlements. Our tribal, on the other hand, speaks an entirely different language: that of tilling land that his ancestors had cultivated. And since the former language belongs to the genre of modern political vocabularies, which govern our public life, other languages are sidelined, their historical understanding is denied, their meanings are ignored, and in the process, their perfectly legitimate claims are disregarded. The language of the patta has already set the boundaries of the discussion; the terms of the deliberation have been pre-ordained, pre-formed, and pre-validated. The conversation has ended before it even began. In effect, the more powerful language in civil society does not even have to practice savageness - to bludgeon, club, or hammer, the less powerful language into insensibility. For our space has been already colonised, already saturated with power that privileges certain ideas of land proprietorship; it has already set in place the mechanics of exclusion and those of monitoring, it has already institutionalised "procedures of exclusion". It has done so because the more powerful language, which reflects power structures of our society, has set the terms of the deliberation."
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