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Hello, everyone. Welcome. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good late night. Welcome to today's talk from Sisa, the Center for India and South Asia at UCLA. My name is Anna morcom. I'm currently interim co director of Sisa working with Atul Gupta. Before I introduce our speaker, I'd like to acknowledge the indigenous people who have lived on the land on which UCLA is is built for 1000s of years and taken good sustainable care of it.
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The Center for India and South Asia Ceaser at UCLA acknowledges the Gabrielino Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Vanga, the Los Angeles basin and Southern Channel Islands. As a land grant institution, we pay our respects to the Hunnic vetem, the ancestors, a Hyrum, the elders, an AU income or relatives relations past, present and emerging.
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So
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it's absolute pleasure to welcome Aditya without they're here. And thank you so much for being here. And to give this talk, I also want to say a big thank you to Genmaicha Villegas, who has been doing all the admin for this very smoothly. So I'll just briefly introduce our speaker and then and then hand over
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diplotop They are teaches history at St. Stephen's college Delhi, in India, and he is zooming in from Delhi right now. He has his early degrees in history from the University of Delhi, and a PhD in history from Emory University at Emory University in the USA, Atlanta.
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His areas of academic interest and research and modern South Asian history with special focus on tribal worlds state formations, and Chattisgarh, or central India, and philosophies have a critical theory in history and anthropological history. And he's published on all of these themes. And he's going to be talking about well, giving a talk based on on his new book, which relates to all of these things. So he will speak for some 45 minutes, and then we'll have a q&a. There's a q&a box you can put questions in. Or you can just say I have a I have a question. So we'll do with that. Then we have a lovely audience 56 participants, I'm sure from across the world. So over to you. I declare, and thank you so much for being here.
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Thank you so much, Anna,
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thank you very much. Good Day to everybody. Since all of us are from different parts of the world, I will
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not say a greeting for each part of the day. But I'm really grateful that all of you could join us for this talk.
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One of my former students friends was telling me how this is such a wonderful opportunity. The webinars now allow people from across the continents to come together in academic meetings and assemblies and gatherings in a way that was not possible before. So of course, the cost of the pandemic is very high. And nothing can really, you know, compensate. But if something good has come out of it, I think it is one of these things. But it also comes with its own problem.
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That since all of us are joined. So I'm really grateful to UCLA, and Sisa for inviting me for this talk to Anna to Jamaica, to Akil and to the entire community, scholarly community at UCLA. I'm also grateful to all my colleagues and students and friends have joined from different parts of the world, especially those in India, for whom it is quite late in the night, actually.
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So
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also, I didn't want to sort of start before gesturing a little too and recognizing the fact that all of us have gone through such a difficult time. And having lived in the United States, I've always talked about volleyed about my friends in Atlanta and elsewhere. So I hope that you know, we are getting out of this blight, which seems to have, you know, completely derailed life as well and cost so much in all sorts of ways in these last two years. So, hopefully, you know, this seminar is part of that step.
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out and forward
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and away and out of this terrible, terrible time.
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So let me get to the talk them. And if I may have your indulgence, I'll quickly pull out a presentation, just in order that we be somewhat sort of
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grounded as it were in something
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that one can use as a template, a grid, I suppose that. So can you see the screen?
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Yes.
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Right. I can.
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Set full screen. Yes, it's looking perfect. Right, excellent. Let me also just see if it moves, because yeah, so there it is. So this is the cover of the book, as I was telling Anna, of the South Asia edition, which is what I like, because the cover is actually done by a friend of mine. And as you see, it's much more evocative than, of course, the cover here, which is a standard template that Rutledge Tailem Francis offers. So
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the trick is that, at the moment, the South Asia edition is not yet out. But I hope that it will in the next one month or so. So we'll probably have this with us.
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In the background, you can see the palace and tankier, about which this book is and I will soon tell you a little bit about it. And in the front, you have the ancestor deities of the mixed typecast communities of concrete, who are in fact the subject of this book.
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Now, this book is an attempt to explore the historical quality of county, a colonial princely state in central India, through oral accounts given in the course of the ancestral data practices of the mixed typecast communities of the region. So what I've done is that I have
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delved into the vast store of accounts given by these communities in the course of the ancestral 80 practices, which are about the polity of countries the historical polity of country.
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Now, just to explain a few things, those of you might not be aware, where is concave, as you can see now on the map of India KanCare is that black area, in the middle of the present Indian state of Chhattisgarh, it's not quite central central India, as you can see, but it's quite central. And historically, it's been part of various central sort of called things like say, the central provinces, or the Central States Agency or things like that. So it's fairly sort of central.
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The typography of concrete is very interesting. It lies as you can see, between various the different important geographical landmarks of this continent, most importantly, the venti and the sakura hills here in the top, just above wherever to concrete here, underneath, you have the Eastern carts. So it's kind of area in between these two hilly, mountainous regions and very thickly forested one of the most densely forested areas of the Indian subcontinent and historically also quite always like that. So even if when you look at say, a foreigner weeds map of Mughal India, what you will find here is basically a blank area where he is published in something like timber elephants. So it's actually a very densely forested area of the country. And it is also the catchment of the river Mahanadi, one of the major rivers of India, which actually emerges in a place called C Hava in the territories of the old princely state of country, and then flows not eastwards into waters modern day Orissa until it finally meets the Bay of Bengal in Orissa itself. So what you have here is really in Chattisgarh, hills and mountains on the top hills and mountains in the bottom here, and the River Rhine plain in the center, and crankcase straddles the area of transition between the lower hills and mountains and the plains areas of the river manatee to the north. So it lies in some ways in the Shatter zone between the hills
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And the mountains of the South and the river valley in the dot. This is a map drawn by me of the princely state of countries.
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And of course, it locates donkey within the peasant, the District of what is called Kuta duster calcaire, or not Buster country, the princely state of Buster, the better known and larger part of this area was to the south of coal to the south of concrete, and the territories of these two regions were contiguous. So what you can see here at the bottom are areas of the former princely state of Buster which are now part of the district of concrete. And the upper smaller area, but more densely populated in relation to the northern areas cluster is what used to be the princely state of country. As you can see, it very much lies in this region of transition between the hills here in the south, and of course, the basin and value of river Mahanadi. To the north.
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Most of the geography of concrete then is Hill and forest, but also
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the plains areas in between. This is typically what kind of open area in the region might look like. And there are lots of these very interesting sort of rock formations that dot the entire area. And the background, you can see the gently rolling hills, in the foreground you have the forests.
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These are this is one view of the forest, these are the trees of the area. The forests are mixed, the city was semi tropical, and are never quite dry and without leaves, at any point of the year. There is always something or the other flowering fruiting, blooming at some point of the year
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interspersing this area of hills and forests are these plains. And in the south, of course, these are few and far between and the hill and forests topography predominates. But as you go northwards, there is more of the Plains area and less of the hill and the forest areas.
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These rock formations that dot the topography of Tonkin often have, or hide these prehistoric rock shelters, as the one that you can see here on the picture, where you can actually find prehistoric rock art, there are many, many such sites all around the town of Concord and the country. In fact, my joke is that one of the favorite pastimes of the people of country is to go looking for these sites, the hills are easy to climb, and you can always get on top, the bears and the leopards are not visible in the mornings. And so you can actually quite get to many of these and find and discover your own site. Unfortunately, increasing visits of peoples to these spaces is actually leading to degradation and spoiling, but I hope that good sense prevails. And so we managed to just find it also preserve, conserve these areas, this again one such reduction. So basically country has had a very long history of human habitation.
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The river Manatee and its tributaries cut across the entire landscape and created create these beautiful as you can see reels and streams and, and water and forests and Hill range topography, which is really lovely actually, this is the river 100 Very close to town here, just after it originate Sahara and before it has become anything substantial like like water does actually, as it moves along. This is the Santa Rosa the ceremonial gate of for the procession of the old princely state of country behind which one of the major palaces of the rulers is housed now it has been converted into a cache kind of courthouse. Although the main courthouse has now moved out into a new context further outside the town. This is the most recent palace of concrete where the rulers of concave have lived. There are three or four extend Polish palaces and this is the most recent it is to actually be the house of the British resident. And then later on of course, it was given away to the last ruler of KanCare
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pinata
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These are the ancestors, deities whose practices and the accounts in which practices I have looked at. As you can see, they have an interesting shape. Most of them are in the form of two rounded logs of wood joined in the middle by another part two. And they can be lifted up like this, or hoisted up like this on the shoulders of their carriers. Of course, the belief is that once so high stood up, they actually
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walk and move on their own. So this is not the standard type of ancestral data. This is the highest form of it called the anger day. And there is a small discussion in the book about what really this anger the literally also means and could actually represent. And I won't go into the details of that as yet. But there are all manners of ancestral deities, and they take a variety of forms, from very simple, small ancestor deities of particular persons, and particular families to those of entire communities in their highest and most superior form, they are the underdogs are what you can see in front of you.
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Now, like anybody else, I wanted to write the history of the place that I had
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come from where I am from Kentucky.
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And it is when I wanted to do this, that I actually had to recognize that it was not possible for me to do justice to my project until I actually looked at the ancestral data practices of the peoples of country. Because usually when one is writing a history of a place, one is looking for documents, written records. Here, what I was trying to access is a set of moving leaving practices and accounts that were given in the course of those. So one needs to explain a little bit about why this sort of came along. And here, I just put out a set of postulates which helped me get there they are somewhat simplified. So please bear with me in that.
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Now, I believe that how we think of our
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past is greatly determined by what we want to do with our future, in the same way as how we think about an imagined future, actually determines the ways in which we look at our past. This is what I call vision. By vision, I mean, the way in which we look at our world, and
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things that we want of this might look like two different things, you know, how you understand your world, and what you want your world to be. But actually, these are the same thing, in the sense in which how you understand your world determines or decides really what you think your future should be like. And similarly, what you want your society to be often determines your understanding of where you are, in some senses, this is the same formulation that I put out, you know, first, and vision actually contains past present and future or to get in that interesting sort of an inextricable executable in a compact.
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Now, when one so
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you know,
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when you
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advocate, and you attempt to make possible, what you want your society to be, or what you think your society is, then what you do is
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an act of politics. Politics is about wanting to make the world as you want it to be. And then of course, to understand the world, in the way in which you want. Now history as a knowledge practice that deals with the way in which we see our past. And I've already said how they are related, I feel to the present and the future, is a kind of advocates of evasion of the past and therefore it is intrinsically political.
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We all have histories. And this is different from our
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understanding of the past once we get to the point of advocating
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or trying to make possible, then we enter the realm of the political. So and that is the realm of history. So there are past and then there is history, history is that point when we move from just, you know, sort of having an thinking about and sensing a path to a point of meaningfully ordering it, in order to be able to understand how we are and what we should be. So, you know, history is essentially the,
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the political
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understanding of the past, they are very, very closely I feel connected. Of course, all of us want to see ourselves in different kinds of ways, and we want our futures to be of different kinds, and therefore, there is always a large number of histories in defeat. And, of course, because we all make our lives together, as society societies, these pasts, and these advocacies of the past, these histories are very, very deeply connected. So we live in a world in which there are a large number of histories, or a large number of our understandings of who we are, and what we want to be. And all of these are very, very closely connected. Now, over time, and especially in the modern period, I believe that one kind of history, or discipline in history, has come to take pride of place, and actually has established itself as the dominant way of envisioning ourselves, our presence, our past, and our futures. This is very closely connected to a large number of developments. Now, I won't belabor the point, you're all familiar with it. The usual suspects are capitalism, colonialism, modernity, etc, etc. It's very closely connected to these developments, which Mark and compose our times. And it's a companies and advocates that vision of the world. And it is an extremely powerful vision, which has come to dominate
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most of the organized, actually organized practice of history, because there are a lot of times of histories within that also, I'm not for a moment suggesting that this is a monolith, and there is no conversation within, but on the hole, a certain parameter has been set. And it works within that there are certain protocols, certain gatekeeping concepts, that mind what kinds of histories will be practiced within this corpus, the system the set this complex and what kind will not. So, for example, this kind of history admits of only that which is written, then it is also a history that moves time in a linear fashion from the past to the present. And then to the future, of course, you will ask, as to what are the different kinds of combinations of these?
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You know, temporalities? Can they be? Or can there be other ways of thinking about time, apart from of course, the idea of the past the present in the future? And you will be surprised? And you probably already know that? Yes, there are many other ways of looking at time, but history looks at time in this particular fashion. Reason is this cynic one on the indispensable condition of being of history. If there's something that is not reasonable, then of course, it cannot be historical, in this disciplinary, mainstream dominant historical sense. It is very secular, it doesn't admit of what is faith and what is religion. It also considers an autonomous individual as its subject, and of course, in proceeds from that.
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It does not think about this distinct about communities, but doesn't admit subjectivities that don't at least begin as autonomous subjectivities. Therefore, it is unity. It doesn't admit of sort of flowing fluid intermixed and multiple plural and other such iterations. You can think about description
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of subjectivities and it assumes then that this autonomous written linear, reasonable, secular unitary subjectivity is everybody's subjectivity that everybody
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Slide that. So it doesn't admit of those children and interconnected histories that I was just referring to.
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Now,
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of course, historians have protested against this and therefore, you have of course, a large number of what you are referred to as the histories of the marginalized, the subalterns of the minoritized and so on, so forth. And tribal peoples form part of one on one such group form part of this conspectus, as it were of the subalterns. And the larger population of concrete is what has been recognized historically as tribal or related. And that is where, actually the problem comes. Because when I wanted to write a history of concrete, I, of course, wanted to write the histories of these people. But since these people did not think of time, in a way that conformed to the protocols of history, as in their time was not,
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you know, linear time, it was not a time of an autonomous sort of unitary individual. It was not a time of the secular, it was definitely not the time of the reasonable and their histories were not written. I found it difficult to write a history of disciplinary history or history that would be accepted within the disciplinary formations by most of us historians work and it's a huge and well entrenched, you know, complex.
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What was available to me to write the history of Tonkin, which would have been admissible within the historical protocol, where, of course, the records of the colonial princely states have conquered colonial methodologies of the peoples of this area. And, interestingly, another set of documents not quite here, not quite their documents are referred to as semi archival documents, and I mentioned the tight Accra, I'll come to that soon enough. But the primary two kinds of archives open to me were the first records of the colonial princely state and colonial acknowledges both of which either
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did not represent the communities that I am talking about at all or in a way that did not give them agency within the making of their own lives or refer to them in a way that placated and subordinated them to the vision of the modern state. So, their histories will not really count. So, the records of the princely state perform the function of producing
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a relationship between an all active all knowing all powerful state and supine passive, completely non essential subject populations. So there was this modern state trying to
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govern, to administer to rule and it did so quite easily because the other side of it, subjects over Mattoon had no place really no function, no possibility of acting within that relationship. It was a simple system of rule and of being rude.
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Colonial ecologies wrote about these people, the tribal and religious peoples, but they
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they thought of the lives of these people as consisting entirely of religious sensibilities, not sensibilities that could envision a world in the real sense of the term, not political sensibilities that allowed these kinds of invasions. They could think about their words, but they could not meaningfully think of who they were and what it is that they wanted. What I pointed out, missing as vision or as envision. So the two primary kinds of archives I was looking at didn't quite provide me with the wherewithal with the wherewithal to be able to write the history of the peoples of ganky there was a third document, the semi archival Chrono, which held interesting possible
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it has never been properly find archived, and this was found actually in the chunks of the palace in country stashed away and put out of you
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not properly organized and sequenced and filed in the official Ark. So when I was looking at it, I found that these grandmas were essentially
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undertakings by groups of villagers who promised to take an ancestral deity of the kind that I was talking about in their possession of the royal family have come to the villages for purposes of what we would call government and administration.
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Now, in the records of the princely state, we do not come across a dimension of any such activity. And one would understand why, and that is because these activities dealt with, and sister deities or spirits in the possession of the rulers of country were trying to be modern, and governed in a modern way with the modern administration. How could they admit that they actually had spirits of their own, who they actually sent out to the villages to administer and govern the villages, when in the administrative records, they actually also admit that modern administration is not quite making the headway that it was supposed to. In fact, you often find the colonial government,
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admonishing the princely states about how most of the policies that they were supposed to implement that fall within the idea of modern government Talty, not quite being implemented. And you wonder why that was happening. Until, of course, you come across these documents, and you find that there was a parallel administration, where the princely state was actually transacting in spirits and gods, and administering people through these, but not admitting them in public, and not really putting them out, put in this documentary,
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evidence for it out in the public realm. So, you know, there is mention of the people of country and they seem to be active, but it is really not present in the main archive of the
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state of Ghana. So I wondered, whereas one might be able to get more information about because in these practices, the villages come alive,
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names are mentioned of people, Gods deities problems, this and that. They're not reduced as they are in the case of the archives of the state, interest, statistics, data DOL descriptions, and numbers and, and flat sort of
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organizational details of this and that, the officially is sort of suddenly melts and dissipates into this thriving sort of troubling world of activity and excitement, of, you know, tests of diseases, of misfortunes of
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your conflicts within the villages are murderers of this, that, and here you find the administration actually getting its hand dirty in that way. But of course, through these ancestral spirits, which it will not own up to, and which it is silent about in its apex, and which are presented in the colonial acknowledges, but only as religion at one removed from the political, nothing to do with the state of the rulers, just beliefs that are carried on and practiced on the site. So here, what happens is that these practices come center state, and they become the very stuff of politics. So when I said where do I find this, the only choice for me then was to look at
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the practices of these deities, if they existed at this time, and they did, although they're fast time and to try and read them to kind of mine them for evidence of a political of a vision of a history of country.
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And this is one view of it, the lush green forest areas of concrete, you have a person hoisting the ancestral data up and is actually responding to a set of questions being asked by people sitting in front of him, they are not in view over here. And it is through this that they are trying to divine the causes for why it has not rained that particularly.
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So the very fundamentals of life.
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You know, that is where these ancestor deities took, in some senses
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That is where I found really stuff that then I thought would comprise a proper history as it were of the peoples of my country.
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Now, mining alternate archives is something that has been done by many
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Fellow Scholars and I have learned a lot from
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the way in which my work is different is that I am
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actually tipping over into the other side, which is that the question when we recover these other sort of voices, these are the terms in which we speak about them, when we recover these other voice is, how far can we really bring them into the domain of mainstream disciplinary history, God's Spirit unreason, as it were nonlinear time, ancestors and their descendants existing in the same place, the past and the present, all mixed up, all accounts nothing written, really subjectivities of a kind, where God's human beings spirits, communities, move into each other become this or that and change, very protein sort of subjectivities as it were, you can see that these are all violative of those protocols that I pointed out, are so fundamental for the maintenance of the dominant discipline, disciplinary history that has become,
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you know, the kind of reigning historical exercise of our times. So, how much of that can we bring? Can we maintain a language of intelligibility? Once we bring these things into focus, or will all this then dissipate into something that and scattered into something we will never be able to properly to understand the language that is intelligible to us, we'll be then be
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entering a realm whose language we do not sort of understand and which does not belong to our times. And here of course, the tribal subaltern is perhaps a very, very complex about John. So of course, all simultaneity or marginalization has its own peculiar sort of aspects. But in the case of the tribal subversion, there is a double trouble which is that
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in if history is a damaged practice about time, then it is really the tribal, represented as the primitive provides that grid of movement from the past to the present to the future on which history is linear time is based. So the tribal is a true subaltern within historical exercise in a very formal and specific sense, in that
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the tribal actually, is the prehistory of our society, the tribal has come to pass, and therefore we are the table, even if the table exists in our time is actually a vestige of a past we have left behind. So the task of recovering this figure within historical enterprise disciplinary historical enterprise is fraught, because you have to then deal with what is called unreason, with spirits with Gods with time in all this mixed up way, in which it appears in the accounts with orality, which is called which they flew it, and constantly, sort of in flux, and so on, so forth a variety of different kinds of, of things. So what historians usually do is to gesture to them, to gesture to these other words, and bring them in conversation with our own, but not quite go the full way. What I have tried to do in this book, and that's where perhaps it isn't different from other books. And I don't know what really the full purchase of this is, because I might be going into a blind alley.
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Because after the covering this world of, you know, of spirits and gods, what does one do with it? That is the question. So, but nevertheless, I have done because I feel that the whole drive to make history more sustainable.
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You know, that requires that we really get up our discomfort with this because what modernity seems to have
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brought us to this crisis of proportions, which require now imagining things really beyond what is given. And for that, of course, we have to imagine that which has never been imagined before. But also perhaps, look at and delve into imaginations of the past that we have dismissed quite is, especially since sometimes when we are talking about communities that say, for questions of environmental ecology, have managed better than our own societies, so, but we very quickly passed them over because they don't quite sort of speak in the language that we do. And often, as I said, transact and things that we have given. So but these communities think of the world as sentience of forests, rivers and hills of sank, Surely there is something there, they think of communities in ways that don't necessarily divide and categorize them, as we do. So try caste. These are two problems I deal with because my communities, and neither sort of tribal communities no caste,
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there are all kinds of other things in between, they produce their own sense of community, which, you know, just goes beyond and is in excess of anything that we are used to understanding and classifying world. So what I've done really is to go now, here, I'm using the word, the term non modern, innovative limited such a way because modernity literally describes a here and now. And that here now is really, truly that included. It is very irreducible also. And it is hugely interconnected and inextricably entwined. But of course, we separate a certain model as being the prior model, and other kinds of here, and now as non model. So in that sense, I'm using the term non model. And what this non modern, what I'm doing then is to go into this norm. So what I've done is to
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not say the tribal was and I'm not even saying these are tribal, but I'm saying these are typecast words or words that need a different vocabulary to think them through and imagine these words, have a connected to our words, we live, as the picture quality says many instances by principles that we often other, and think as belonging or need to them, but whose center of gravity actually lies away and apart from the historical protocols, and the principles of historical protocols that are open. So it's a very different cosmos, the center of the cosmos is very different. Our kind of modern is part of that Cosmos, it intersects, infiltrates and engages with this cosmos, but the center of gravity ism, so it is very different. So when you read this book, I will try and move you to a different language. And
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we'll start with things that we apprehended. But we'll gradually keep those up to use a very different set of words and towns, where a different kind of world and Cosmos will be brought to life. And we.
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So that's one very important thing. And here, what then I find is that there are ways of Envision world that are visions of the world, which we need to take note of these visions are not panaceas for our time, they don't resolve everything that we have,
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you know, as problems of our of our time, in fact, some of these are things that, you know, we should just like be, but there are many other things that perhaps instructive and might at least at least, help us imagine sort of things beyond what we are used, and beyond the disciplinary history, and it's political and its vision, and its particular understanding of time of past, present, and future. So I won't tell you exactly what what that is because I would love you to read that book. What kind of a political does this produce? This Cosmos suggests? What kind of a world does it bring into view? What kind of state is there a state at all? What kind of politics what kind of political, but Bannerjee his new book on the elementary aspects of the political is forcing many of us to rethink and deepen our investigation of the political at the moment, I'm not quite gone there. I haven't quite fully understood also what she's saying. But I'm in the process of doing that at the moment and
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just putting it out there that the political might be, as I think she's also trying to say, be very different from what we think can be a set that is all that we have, and nothing beyond can we think of envision other kinds of societies and other kinds of ways of being and other kinds of future?
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Then, the second thing that his work does somewhat differently is on the question of voice, as you can see.
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Fundamental to all this exercise will be this question of, can I speak for these people? I'm already thinking to myself as being us, without modern, in that limited sense way of thinking about the world envision world, and so on so forth, can I ever represent that voice, so the voices of those people, and here there is a twist in the tail? And this might actually be out the diamond in the sense that this might further disqualify him from speaking about these people. But actually, I leave at that point, because I say that, you know, where do I then put myself really, and you will immediately see what I mean, when I will tell you that I am from the old princely family of tankage. And so when the communities of concrete are talking about the king and about the state, and so on, so forth in the accounts and giving a very different account of it, from how the state records will be about the ecologies, they actually talking about my ancestors. So when I was talking to them, they were talking to me about data and systems and about my ancestors. And then I were actually part of the store, because it was our society that we were talking about. So as the king do, I have no right to write about these people?
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Who are, you know, which is my community, who are my people, and they embraced, and they spoke to me about their, and my ancestors, as completely intermixed, separated, those who but also hugely intermix, just as I became part of their communities and their rituals and their practices, because there was already a role for me, there, there were so many things that will not happen without,
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or somebody from my family in my place. And so, you know, I'm suggesting that, yes, of course, you know, I am the villain of the piece, in some ways, they will be writing and talking against me, against the king. They are my ancestors as
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but
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there is a different view of the polity that comes into play. It's not the same kind of Kings subject relationship that we are used to, you know, which is coming to us, I feel from a certain set kind of past that we actually have a variety of different kinds of experiences of rulership and subject to the probably relationships that can't even be described always in terms of rulership and subject.
Unknown Speaker
And the say, the very set of terms that we used, we use to speak about kings in the Indian subcontinent, in South Asia are so many, that each of those are probably clues to many, many different histories of, of relationships between what we would call rulers and subjects that can't really be exhausted, in the simple understanding of rulers and subject as separated out, hermetically sealed off with from each other one, you know, ruling the other, passively accepted rule. Here, the vision that they produce is one in which they themselves become rules, they pull the king out, drag the king out, and then mesh the king in relationships from which the king cannot escape, and which are of turns, which do not belong to and are not determined by the king or the state, the colonial or the princely administration. So as Bakhtin argues, subjectivities are essentially interconnected, that we always live with the subjective spaces. And that is a thing that I leveraged that I cannot but be part of all this and I will write about it because
Unknown Speaker
As I am possible, and I sometimes feel that this sort of hesitation in actually writing about and stepping back from it might not be part of this subconscious desire actually to continue to maintain these barriers as well. You know, if historically we have thought of two entities as being opposition,
Unknown Speaker
you know, the way out of the situation now is not a politics as I would say, of revenge, but, you know, politics of conversation. And I enact multiple subjects, which is as a teacher, at St. Stephen's and Delhi University as a member of the royal family and country, as this as that so many different things as part of the cosmos that they construct, for me and for the world to see, in which I'm planning to King that I claim, or my family claims to the world. So there are so many things going on there that don't quite register when we work with the kinds of standards with languages with tropes with paradigms and, and principles that we have too often easily taken for granted. So that is the book really, in some sense. It does many other things, too. But I will leave it there and leave you to read the book and to find out more about it. And perhaps we can have a larger, more deeper conversation there. So apologies again, for that small hiccup at the beginning. And thank you, so
Unknown Speaker
thank you so much, Aditya. That was fascinating. Um, I'm sure we're gonna have plenty of questions.
Unknown Speaker
I was, I was just wanting to ask you, you said you were not going to talk about what kind of policy it was, what kind of politics this was. And we would have to read the book. But would you? Would you share a little bit with us?
Unknown Speaker
I'm very curious. Tell us a little bit you sort of enticed us in? And I would just love to hear a little bit about that. Yes, sort of teaser, a preview, before we will have the chance to read the book. So, let me just quickly if you will allow read from the book. And
Unknown Speaker
if that is all what?
Unknown Speaker
Sure. So right.
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So here it is, this is from a section called the afterword,
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which is actually enough to work because my copy editor suggested that I drop it complete. And you will see is I'm attempting attempting something rather fantastic and probably
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problematic in politically correct sort of world. But nevertheless, I said finally, and so instead of a pillow, we converted this into an afterword. So I write the archives of the colonial princely state of tankette produces its polity, as a historical one, very much in the language of power of mainstream disciplinary history, which works along with singular unitary secular rational status and progressive his sense of time, critical to the narratives of civilization and development. Within this absolutely synchronized temporality of state and history is structured polity which is uni century, vertical, dichotomous, fixed and closed, where political power, authority and sovereignty or in other words political capacity, are vested in the state and legitimated by its history.
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When the ancestral accounts anchored in their own language of power, transgress the temporal protocol of history, they articulate the idea of a polity that is truly century has done to non dichotomous fluid and open in comparison to that of the state, where political power, authority and sovereignty are divided, contested and shared between the Raja and the state, and Dipankar are the people and its ancestral forces in pursuit of the balance of the land, which is always a work in progress. The ancestral polity is pretty central. The regimes of the Raja and that of the many clan heads and other ancestral and non ancestral forces of the land comprise multiple forces of power, giving rise to a political landscape of many distinct, sometimes competing and sometimes collaborate
Unknown Speaker
rating centres located in the communities and the cosmos of the land, the unit central claim of the Rogers State are contested and broken up quite emphatically in this vision. The various centers of power and their relationship with each other, are also considerably differentiated in terms of the tone and texture of negotiations they comprise in distinction to the uniform sway attempted and claimed by the Rogers ratio. This policy is also horizontal, constituted through a field of forces, when either the Roger and state know the communities and their land have a clear superiority over the other. The vertical unidirectional flow of power from the state to the subjects is fundamentally disrupted and dispersed by the idea of the balance of the land. The ancestral political system is also not dichotomous, the boundaries between the entities, larger state ruler, and the communities and their land are porous, and the regimes they create overlap with each other so that the subjectivities are not exclusive, but as they should be, that is inter relation. This relationship is premised on a state of things in which the Raja, his ancestors, the ancestral deities, the land constitute a continuum of being an experience that cuts across the conception of discrete domains of rulership and subject to created by the state's idea of equality. The local polity in the ancestral accounts is also more fluid
Unknown Speaker
and ever improvised
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and has unpredictable outcomes in the interaction between the Rajah state, the ancestor in centers on the land. This is in sharp contrast to the fixed pre given regimes of routine and regulation, as in the case of the state, no force is infallible. No arrangement undoable.
Unknown Speaker
Constant reconfiguration is the operating principle with the balance and Union forces being as precarious as they are designed.
Unknown Speaker
Thank you just Yeah,
Unknown Speaker
I will, I will read fully. Thank you. This is really fascinating. I could ask more, but I want to hand it over to other people. We've got quite a few questions now. I can look that as a question, but perhaps we should start with one of our audience. Srikant Chandan,
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can you see in the q&a, perhaps I will just read it out. The economic ikura nama shows the people with agency enjoying a thriving relationship relation with the king, unlike the State Archives, I wonder about the duel lines of the kings of KanCare, who negotiated between the two worlds of colonial modernity in the rich underworld of their people in spirit. In what ways such negotiations change the quotidian practices of the kings or princely states?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, interesting. Srikanta thank you for that question,
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too.
Unknown Speaker
And what I would say is that, when I think about my grandfather, he seems on the one hand to have been
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modernizing the state,
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and its apparatuses and administrations and personnel and policies in a way that had not been seen before. All this while the colonial government had been complaining that concrete was not quite implementing the forest policy monument is not doing that. Suddenly, you have this young ruler who comes into
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the majority he ruled for most of his time as a miner. In 1943 44, just a few years before, he had to give up power. And he launches
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many, many important policies for a complete overhaul of administration, how modern hospitals, modern veterinary centers, schools, colleges,
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agrarian exhibitions,
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green banks, new technology, sort of for farming, etc, all kinds of things that you would consider the hallmark of a modern administration. And at the same time, when I visited these villages and talk to these people, my interlocutors they would speak about how he would come hunting. And they had stories. For example, in one village, there was a story of how he killed in man eating tiger on account which the villages had been suffering for a long time, and a local set set of leaders and he collaborated to kill the tiger. And then the tiger was
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paraded around the village with a coin, representing the Kings administration kept on top of the tiger's body. And many other such sort of stories like one where he was called for rain, divination.
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Sort of conversation, where the king and the communities joined together
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to ask the ancestors, why it was not trained, and what the future would be like, and why he was there, they say that it started raining. So having that the elephant that he had actually read, sort of written into the village him
Unknown Speaker
or had rode the elephant into the village across the river, now couldn't cross the river back to the other side, because the river was suddenly in speed because of the flash flood caused by incessant rain started immediately after this rain, divination conversation. So, you know, he seems to have been present in both these words, and quite
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easily so without there being any sort of, you know, anything that could sow show discomfort or difficulty of aligning of getting these words together. So I don't know probably, but something like this might suggest, you know, what might have been happening at that time.
Unknown Speaker
Now, we have another question from Ananya Chakrabarti, can you see this Aditya? Perhaps you'd like to read it out rather than me? Right? Thank you in the new rights facet, the solid under modernity, which rejects and renders obsolete, obsolete the other non modern words, how far can we push our limits?
Unknown Speaker
Are you not failing in falling into the same kind of words and vocabularies which you choose to critique? When you put the modern world as a referential plain? Talk about the non modern tribal world? How far are we able to transcend the boundary of disciplinary history? So yes, an onion, there is a problem there that I, you know, can't quite in the sense that I start out with this language, I return again, to this language, my book is meant for you. It was meant for my colleagues, my students, scholars across the world, working within this academia, the space that we call our own. And so of course, I am tied to that, and I can't quite escaped. But the point is that I'm saying that there's this division that we are actually creating between this world and that world is what I feel does not quite emerge in these accounts, which are so closely entwined with what we would understand as our so a British official, kind of
Unknown Speaker
rifle shooting competition, co exist with miracles with magic with ancestral deities, and they don't feel the need to, to pit these against each other. So I think what I'm trying to do in a case, most of the chapters in between, is take you into that world where the distinctions between these kinds of worlds are actually sort of broken down. And I'm not saying that they lose all sense of their particular sensibilities, but these sensibilities are always inter relational. So I use the word inter temporal inter temporality. I'm not sure whether that works. But kind of that we always already in the interstates in some senses.
Unknown Speaker
I think we should go to a kill got this question now. I kill
Unknown Speaker
Hi, guys, a really interesting talk. I'm actually building on an erroneous question. And I, my question had to do with the income answer and income visibilities between indigenous colleges and, and state colleges. And
Unknown Speaker
since you didn't really tell us much about the substance of these different these nudges, I would be interested in knowing if you're taught that there are moments when they were simply such different logics that inform them that they were not able to
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be translatable in the way in which you say people been able to coexist with
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They still once, right. So
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not as resistance not, but as woman's moments of this Chancellor are moments where they were simply
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like you couldn't crossover from one type of logic to the other instead of blending them together in some,
Unknown Speaker
you know, contradictory fashion. So I wonder if you can think of examples of that or to begin with that is going to be something that would make sense in the way in which you're thinking about these questions.
Unknown Speaker
Right, thank you.
Unknown Speaker
Very good question. And I have
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dealt with this
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fairly continuously throughout the book.
Unknown Speaker
So let me take one example of communities like what we think of communities, so typically, I would have gone in thinking about the tribal community. And then I found in the middle of all that, that there were large numbers of what we would call Other Backward caste peoples. You're living intermixed in ways that at least in many of the majority instances of these ancestral practices, which actually don't ancestor deities or tribal ancestors
Unknown Speaker
did not really, you know, stand as two separate communities, so that I could just speak about a tribal community or you know, awkwardly speak about some OBC groups coming in at certain points of time as a token sort of gesture or as token certain aspects.
Unknown Speaker
But, and then I as I kind of heard them further, I heard about the pumpkin, which is the people of the land. And that idea of the Chromecast seemed not to recognize these castes and try and other
Unknown Speaker
possible classificatory community descriptions that I had at my disposal, disposal. But once in a while, I would come across experiences that were true within that seemingly sort of easily held idea of Dipankar or the people of Tibet, which is like for example, this region has recently seen mobilization and polarization also on account of that, on caste and tribal lands, on tribal lines both
Unknown Speaker
along of course, narratives of indigeneity Adivasi rights and so on, so forth, and of course, on the other side of animasi, Hindus and so on and so forth on the other side in which we are familiar with now.
Unknown Speaker
And similarly, there is also mobilization of Other Backward castes, because there is a possibility and a demand that the sixth shedule be implemented in this area. So, if you look at the population of the old princely state of country, tribals are a minority and The Other Backward castes are a majority, but adding parts of the erstwhile northern parts of the West when buses state the new district has a majority tribal population. So, that becomes the basis for our scheme for the implementation of six the six shedule. So, in response to that, and reaction to that, there is considerable OBC mobilization.
Unknown Speaker
So, the tashera
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event which would otherwise be done by the punker. Now, in many places I see, gets divided into two or three kinds of the shadow one being done by this group and other by that, and so on so forth, organize along these modern sort of lights.
Unknown Speaker
And so, there is a lot of tension and thrown into the mix are these migrant Bengali communities that were relocated into this region after the Bangladesh War. And so, there are debates in the shadows about the worship of Durga and the demonization of Mesa, which in this largely tribal area acquires a very different kind of problematic sexual overtones. So that comes into the mix as well. So modern the governmentality and emergent classificatory sort of descriptions from there seem to be impinging on my my kind of understanding of
Unknown Speaker
which I feel is actually the traditional way in which they have imagined themselves as community at least in relation to the king. So what I would say is that perhaps there are many different ways of being community. And the boom Karl is one of them, and probably historically must have been or would have had greater purchase or salience. But now of course, it stock is kind of plummeting. And you
Unknown Speaker
so that that's one example if I if I have attended to some of what tools
Unknown Speaker
so back to our q&a, we have a question from Manish provoq. Can you see this? Yes. Since you are talking of tribe castes, we understand that there were tribes which interacting with Hindu practices over time, we can try PCAST. In that context, what does the ancestral deity fit in the hierarchy of Hindu deities? Again, very interesting, and an important question, and I deal with it substantially. So what I'm doing is not quite
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starting with that idea of the typecast continuing, which has been written about in books from the time of people like pseudogene, send her all the way down to see Nivas and beyond, and so on, so forth. So what I'm doing is that rather than already, in some senses, marking out something as Hindu, or tribal, what I'm describing is what seems to be a very complex set of practices coming from what we will now understand is Hinduism and time. And I'm taking that mixture as a kind of organic
Unknown Speaker
sort of integrated cohering sort of complex in its own right, which does not make these distinctions and not necessarily looks for an originally kind of point of reference, whether it is Hindu,
Unknown Speaker
or Thai. Because I'm also to some extent, therefore questioning the idea of the Hindu and of the tribal, what I'm saying is, there are a variety of different times of very, very mixed from our point of view, practices, experiences, references, figures, etc, etc.
Unknown Speaker
That we are other centralizing narratives and power complexes have sought to simplify into the Hindu and the tribal, or other things. But it is possible to not see them as
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always having to be referenced like that.
Unknown Speaker
Because they don't seem to be working along those lines.
Unknown Speaker
And next question,
Unknown Speaker
Sita mamedi, pootie. Right. Thank you, Manish for that question, Sita, to your question and try and read it. anthropologists and historians who have worked with other tribals about oral histories also find non linearity of time as a very distinctive feature of tribal histories, but they usually also find a kind of logic that underlies that non linearity. I just got here, for instance, writes about histories and finds that two epochs of mendini and vommuli, which are defined by freedom and oppression, their chronological they are chronological in the sense that they are pre and during colonialism, or sometimes even refer to post colonial Indian government as the oppressor and freedom as its opposite. Shell Maya RAM who works with Neo communities finds a similar anti Imperial mobile and colonial serenity as a logic of narrative time. Do you think there is a kind of logic here to for the non linearity of time in recording and returning histories? Also, do you think your own positionality in the community might give you access to narratives of serenity that might not otherwise be accessed? Thank you so much suitable app? Yes, I'm familiar with both Scalia and my husband's work. And have I thought about non linearity. Actually, now that you asked, and I should have talked a bit more deeply and substantial before.
Unknown Speaker
I don't accept that. I flagged it at the beginning, saying that in historical time disciplinary historical time, this non linearity
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would not work as something that I could write with. Or I could write the history of it.
Unknown Speaker
But I'm nevertheless going to do that,
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even though time does not always occur in a linear way.
Unknown Speaker
But after that, I abandoned that question of linearity and non linearity. And don't quite think of it in terms of these things that Scalia and Byron seem to have suggested as possible templates at all.
Unknown Speaker
And I do actually get troubled by the question of chronology at one point of time, when I am saying that, I'm going to focus on the colonial princely state. So somebody had actually asked me how, if I was actually talking about nonlinear time, I would still want to stick with some idea of the colonial principle.
Unknown Speaker
And so I say that, well, I'm using the colonial transfere as a kind of holding point,
Unknown Speaker
not really something that I seriously, which I find seriously taken up in these accounts. So they often spoke to me, as if they were speaking to my ancestors, just as they sometimes spoke to me, as
Unknown Speaker
their ancestors would speak to me and my ancestors. So my past and my present and their past, and their present, got mixed up in ways that so somebody was talking to me about how, in one journey that he had been
Unknown Speaker
going on, he saw a leopard. And then there was this point where he had to engage with the leopard and then suddenly started talking about his ancestor, and the leopard. And so I stopped him then to try it, was it you? Or was it your ancestor? This at all, okay, so he came back to himself. But then again, several other points, he would lapse into his ancestor. And I found that when I was talking to them about various things, once I've got a fairly substantial store of these accounts, is that I to began to often reference my ancestors, almost, subconsciously, unconsciously.
Unknown Speaker
You know, as
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myself, as something that I, I wanted to ask them, I wanted myself represented deaths.
Unknown Speaker
So the interesting things happening during that time. And so this question of time, I'm just using this concept of time. Without any rubrics, what I'm saying that is that there are many kinds of time, we might choose and pick out certain kinds of times are temporalities, within this mix, that we might call colonial post colonial or this or that,
Unknown Speaker
but I'm not going to be doing for me, it is the time of the spirit, it is the time of the race, it is the time of the Rajah of the state as well as the spirit on the God. And those are the times that so in some ways, what I've done is I've displaced that colonial post colonial
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except I thought I could end with some
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accounts about the ancestral deities and the post colonial state. At that time, what I found is that there was considerable
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recognition of an In fact, cute sort of sense of dissent that of times that were forcing themselves into fixity and into concreteness and into definition. And in a way that was being very awkward. We felt and not quite being well dealt by them at all. So I don't know if I answered your question, but I did go somewhere with that. And about oh, yeah, I think so many times I found themselves asserting
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things against previous orders or against.
Unknown Speaker
And I think I brought that on. They said they were quite fun about making points about their relationship with the raja one in which their versions prevailed. Their sort of cosmic principles. Were sort of in some senses, weighing the balance or tilting the balance on that side. So I think my my position played a very important part of it.
Unknown Speaker
I must have infected their accounts and the narratives in many different ways. Which somebody else who might do an ethnography there might experience very, very differently. So I probably lost all that. But what can I do? So what I'm seeing is a time just giving you one moment one perspective. And what I do say is that there is plurality of ways of looking at things which we must bring into view. for whatever purposes.
Unknown Speaker
Thank you.
Unknown Speaker
Now we have a question from Aditi. Rao.
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Yes.
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So
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thank you.
Unknown Speaker
Now that how much of the worldviews that were constructed by indigenous peoples centuries ago can still be said to be well understood by the modern data center says those connections? In other words, how do the influences of the modern world muddy the waters and lead to a misunderstanding of both what was originally intended, as well as of how these practices should be understood within the context of modern living, so thanks for that, I am actually not working with the categories indigenous and related set of values.
Unknown Speaker
And I'm trying to kind of displace also the binary of modern and, and pre modern. And so in some ways, what I'm again saying is that our experience of time is always true and intertwined, and intertwined quite inextricably. And we can't always reduce things to what and how we actually do reduce them to reduce them. And that we must actually understand and recognize these
Unknown Speaker
flows as it were these interstices where exactly the woman were actually editing, in some senses on this happens, you know, kind of Polly glossier as
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a family use that
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kind of very, very heterogeneous field of forces, where it is very difficult to separate out the modern, pre modern, the Hindu and the tribal, and the Sanskritic. And the indigenous days that can there be other kinds of subjectivities that do not fall into these traps? Is my my question. And so, it is always muddy, what I'm saying is that it's not a question of, do I, how do they muddy the waters, we always live from our rather restrictive point of view in a very muddy and messy place. And we think of it as mess because we've separated out ourselves purely and sublimated ourselves out categories this. So, this mess is law. In some senses, it is extremely messy. And that is the the I think, the normal condition of being.
Unknown Speaker
Can I take the next one?
Unknown Speaker
says yes. Yeah. So if to what extent would you say the outlook and approach of your own personality has formed as a result of your shared past with the people of conflict? And has there been a significant point in your life, it changed the way you perceive the situation initially? Yeah, there is, in fact, a long, early chapter, which is called the King OSI, which goes into the details of this set of dilemmas that I experienced, and how it took me a long time to come to terms with what I was doing, and what I found in the field or what I was seeing in the field. And it was not at all easy in some senses. And I feel that, you know, I have changed considerably as a result of that. And that is precisely what I think also this point about voice is that the, the conceit of the geographer, as somebody who might tamper with and spoil the poor is a huge problem, because that disallows you from going in there and getting your hands dirty. And that is when you will find what you will find, really, in some sense. So
Unknown Speaker
you know, I you
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by position very, very forcefully, without shying away from that at all, showing all the complexities and the many different worlds that I, and I think everybody else inhabits, and how we constantly reduce them to just one standard, or just one piece of positionality.
Unknown Speaker
And so, there is a lot going on there, and I would love you to read it and to tell me if you think I have
Unknown Speaker
managed to, you know, reconcile myself to some of the discomfort as you will understand, I would have felt him actually doing this project.
Unknown Speaker
And being who I was, you know, and so on, so forth. So, but I think many different people, I also get transformed in the process. Am I inside mine outside? Am I an outsider who's trying to be an insider? Am I an insider who has had become an outsider, but is coming back home? Who am I? Who are all of us, in some sense? And I think the answer lies in finding that there are always all these times that we have to almost all kinds of things,
Unknown Speaker
you know, and we just kind of put ourselves into our
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boxes and, and then, you know, jump over each other.
Unknown Speaker
Just go on to the next question. I did that there are a lot of questions, they seem to be sort of growing as fast as you're answering them. So we might have, I think we will probably have to draw a line under the questions fairly soon. And I did see maybe you're able to be a bit a little bit faster with these remaining ones, just so we could get through them.
Unknown Speaker
All though, sorry. So this the GF Taylor, thank you so much for your question.
Unknown Speaker
Who were the authors of the Kannamma? What language is it written in? And are the elements of the story, you're just covering the chunk that you care to share? Yeah, okay. So the economist is written by
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a category of judicial officials called back enemies, these were
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sort of scribes, basically, judicial strides attempted on a judicial court, there would be a set of small workers, you know, they can notary and scribe would would know the language of doing it. So this is written in Hindustani. And in, in the devnagri. And,
Unknown Speaker
yes, so, this practice of sending the deities under the control of the royal family, to the villages for solving the problems of the villages, everything from, as I said, from theft, to illnesses, to famine, and drought, to conflict, etc, everything that comprise the stuff of life.
Unknown Speaker
So, this practice of sending the ancestral deities under the control or in the possession of the royal family to the villages, has continued till date. In fact, the other day I got, we got a request for that once again. And
Unknown Speaker
so what we do at that time, of course, the Accra nama was basically something that the colonial princely state was getting these people to write out and a test in order
Unknown Speaker
to sanitize its own sort of transactions with I feel the supernatural, because you see, the colonial officials were sitting over the head and telling them that they should reduce
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involvement in these things, but they knew how the villages functioned, and how so much of their,
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their position actually depended on that. And so, you know, this was I think, we have legitimating, a practice which otherwise would have been quite
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difficult to accept by the modernizing.
Unknown Speaker
colonial officials, we're always giving these tutorials to them about how they were not quite doing what they wanted to. And
Unknown Speaker
now, it is a different thing. It is we are not the state at all, as in my family is not the state we are not the rulers. So this is actually a document
Unknown Speaker
of agreement between us and the people who take the data to their villages or to their homes, where we asked them not to do anything that breaks the law.
Unknown Speaker
So it's a different thing altogether. And I found lots of chunks in the attic, like it would be in. So typically, the kids
Unknown Speaker
stashed away somewhere, lots and lots of these, I wasn't able to read all of them, read some, but I have sort of digitized most of
Unknown Speaker
very interesting. And I could write reams and reams about just those things about all kinds of things they do. There's one point where they write about what is to be done, in case they have found a witch in the village. That opens a whole new question about witches. Recently, there's been this lovely book by Helen Macdonald, about witchcraft accusations and settings.
Unknown Speaker
And she writes about how witchcraft positions actually more numerous and shatters governance. So these pose important questions for my kind of work. It's one thing for me to set this up as a kind of alternate vision of the state and polity. And other thing to actually see the power dynamics, operating in which Hanson is accusations of witchcraft. That's a whole different thing in itself.
Unknown Speaker
All kinds of things are there, these are actually treasured tools, literally, their treasure trove of things that one can.
Unknown Speaker
So sorry, sorry, I took longer than
Unknown Speaker
no worries, not easy. So I think we should probably aim to wrap up in five in five minutes, and that you got addicted because it's the middle of the night. But
Unknown Speaker
so we have we have three more questions, because one we've had already.
Unknown Speaker
Quite a bit of your research will rely on interaction with members of the community, often via the interlocutors. To what extent would their conception of relationship between the community and the state in the modern sense influence the perception about the past that you have been trying to unwrap? To what extent would their conception of the relationship between the community and the state in the modern sense? So I do quite understand that. So perhaps I could talk to you separately about this?
Unknown Speaker
Maybe just go on and yes, perhaps Avinash, you could you could always email Aditya.
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themself, that will leave.
Unknown Speaker
It came up again, for some reasons, such intense.
Unknown Speaker
You mentioned the ambivalence and fluidity of the politic cacay, visibly, the colonial state and the home car.
Unknown Speaker
How was the emergence of the post colonial state of India, negotiated within this polity? In other words, who were the stakeholders in the process of integration of the princely state of concrete to the Republic of India, not sure if it falls within the framework. So in other words, who are the stakeholders in the process of integration? So my grandfather was the last student of tank, he was a nationalist. All his friends were Congress,
Unknown Speaker
leaders in the central provinces, like also the later President of India, SD Shabaab is a close friend.
Unknown Speaker
And my grandfather is supposed to have been one of the first to have signed the instrumental vac session, especially in the light of the fight. This becomes important in the light of the fact that the ruler of the neighboring state of Buster was taking much longer. Buster is contiguous with hydro dams. And so something from there was rubbing off on to buster. And there's of course, a whole history of Buster and state states colonial and postcolonial that you must be familiar with. So my grandfather was rather, we acted with great alacrity. I've seen document signed by him for the people of countries where he says that he is merging KanCare into the union of India because he feels that this is the best course for them, and that they must not resist him anyway. And they must accept his decision because it is for everybody's betterment. And he then went on to participate in the elections following
Unknown Speaker
the merger, and he was twice MA from concrete and his sister was Emily once, and he continued to perform his role. I think later on, he got a little dejected. But so he was, I think, the primary stakeholder in some senses. There was a group of nationalist leaders, local leaders around him whom he had groomed and nurtured and he had introduced limited representation
Unknown Speaker
In the local government in the can't get down. So again, one of the first instances of local representative government in central India. And so he was very much of that mindset and, and the group of people. So after he, after the Seaton country become became just after the elections, those that he had groomed became the people who fought elections and one for a long time. So there was a whole group of people who were nationalist and, and formed a circle around him, and who were also connected to the anti Imperial struggle at the center with the National Congress especially, and then who would have been sort of interested in invested in the merger.
Unknown Speaker
But it's very interesting. There's a section that I have put in about
Unknown Speaker
how the ancestral dirty practices take a rather gloomy view
Unknown Speaker
in their interaction with the post colonial garden,
Unknown Speaker
because that government is not as accepting of the principles through which the cosmos
Unknown Speaker
as so one of these ancestral deities was actually put behind bars, he was jailed for disturbing public peace.
Unknown Speaker
So it's very interesting.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah.
Unknown Speaker
So Sadie says, since we are short of time, we will talk later and I will definitely
Unknown Speaker
talk to you about the question that you've asked in Avinash also, definitely. Just one last question digestion. What are the presente practices associated with Panda view? What is the importance and the context are under the View in present day tribal communities? Do they view it as divine power? So
Unknown Speaker
in some ways, many aspects of the practice are being reinvented around new
Unknown Speaker
new references, as it were derived out of the post colonial state and its processes and practices.
Unknown Speaker
There are a few that remain that still are deterred to the old colonial princely state. So the Sherif and the annual fair events, for example. And so in some ways, the negative practices are somewhere in between, of either being reworked,
Unknown Speaker
into, you know, interesting new forms and substances, you know, aligned to and directed towards the requirements of the present day, and a kind of memory of the past.
Unknown Speaker
I think strategically, in order to key
Unknown Speaker
alternatives, alternative points of references go. So in the duchateau celebration that is centered around the old princely family, like our family, I feel that the author's raise questions about how modern state approaches are not responsive to the daily requirements and their demo.
Unknown Speaker
So you know, there is that interplay,
Unknown Speaker
that the dynamic that has been set in place, but a lot of the form in which these practices exist, probably dying out.
Unknown Speaker
And I don't think anybody has the ladies communities also fast transform.
Unknown Speaker
So, thank you.
Unknown Speaker
Thank you so much, Aditya,
Unknown Speaker
for really fantastic talk. I just started your book. And I'm definitely going to read it. And I'm sure many of us who've listened to this talk as well. And and thank you for fielding so many questions as well.
Unknown Speaker
And it sounds like you got, you know, several the material for several more books.
Unknown Speaker
We look forward to Yeah.
Unknown Speaker
Thank you so much for having me. And I'm really grateful for everybody who attended and stayed back. And thanks to Jamaica and Akhil as well. And everybody, as you said,
Unknown Speaker
Thank you so much. Bye bye, everyone. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you so much. Good Night, and Good Morning.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai