The dialectics of field and archive - by Abhijit Guha
The dialectics of field and archive
Abhijit Guha
International scenario
Bernard
Cohn in his seminal essays published first in 1962 and then in the 1980s
developed ideas about the relationship between the ‘field’ of the
anthropologist and the ‘archive’ of the historian. (Cohn, 1987a). Cohn wrote in
one of his important paper in the collection An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays:
The diagnostic work place of the historians
and anthropologists, the field and the archive, contrast with respect to the
differing modes of comprehension each represents…. The past exists not only in
records of the past, but survives in buildings, objects and landscapes of the
present day, the observation of which assist the historian in constructing the
context. The anthropological historian therefore should have the working experience
of both the field and the archive. (Cohn, 1987b).
Cohn
viewed archives as ‘cultural artifacts’, which were created by none other than
human beings and accordingly, historians and anthropologists often
interpenetrate archive and the field in many interesting ways, and he mainly
studied the colonial archives in India. In contrast to Cohn, I have made an
attempt to use archives of the post colonial period, which for me were not only
cultural artifacts of the past but also enlightened my findings in the ethnographic
present. I have juxtaposed archival data
on my field observations of practice of the people in some villages of the
Paschim (west) Medinipur district of West Bengal. But before I move to the
specific field sites and the corresponding archives, a discussion on the
contributions of the subaltern school of thought initiated by Ranajit Guha and
his associates is needed. Ranajit Guha
in the ‘Introduction’ to Cohn’s aforementioned book located anthropological
research within the post Second World War period:
Since
the end of the Second World War it is anthropology, rather than history, which
has led the revolt against the mutual segregation of the two disciplines within
the domain of South Asian Studies. Cohn was not the only rebel; he was one of a
number of scholars whose writings showed unmistakable signs of a rapprochement
in this respect. (Guha, 1987: vii-xxvi).
Apart
from the important contributions of ‘writing history from below’ which
corresponded with the ethnographer’s attempt ‘to grasp the native’s point of
view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world’ (Malinowski,
(1922:25), the subaltern approach signaled a closer connection between anthropologists and the
archive, the latter itself becoming increasingly understood as a valid
ethnographic site (Mathur, 2000:89-106; Comaroff & Comaroff 1992; Ortner
1984:126-166). The subaltern advance, however, suffered its setback
within thirty years, which of course was not a very short period of longevity
for a school of thought. Among others, one of the reasons for the setback was
its lack of touch with real people on the ground. Subaltern theorists were moving from one
interesting archive to another, from one set of text to another set to
construct their meta-narratives of anti-elitist historiography and finally
losing the practice of the people in their day-to-day world-of-everyday-life.
Partha Chatterjee, one of the core contributors of this genre admitted:
As an intellectual project, Subaltern Studies was
perhaps over determined by its times. Given today’s changed contexts the tasks
set out by it cannot be taken forward within the framework and methods mobilised for it. Subaltern Studies was a
product of its time; another time calls for other projects. (Chatterjee,
2012:44-49).
What
were the new projects visualized by Chatterjee? Interestingly, he observed that
a more recent trend in the social science disciplines was to study the practice
of the people rather than the texts which recorded the past or the present
practice. In his words again:
We must also note the more recent trend in
several disciplines to move away from texts to the study of practices. Led by
anthropologists, this move highlights the autonomous status of embodied or
institutional practices whose significance cannot simply be read off texts
describing the underlying concepts. Thus, religious ritual is not necessarily
an instantiation of a theological concept or dogma; the practice may be
performed without the subject subscribing to, or perhaps even being aware of,
the underlying religious concept. (Chatterjee, 2012:49).
More
than a decade ago, in an extensive review of subaltern studies and the
relationship between History and Anthropology, K.Sivaramakrishnan noted the
importance of anthropological methodology of putting texts in their specific
spatial contexts:
Therefore, the subaltemist contribution to the
convergence of history and anthropology is important. Resorting to anthropology
and history from below can recover
partial and hidden histories but it is not enough to juxtapose these fugitive
accounts with master narratives and their exalted claims to total knowledge.
The subaltern story may lose its punch if not situated in context.
(Sivaramakrishnan, 1995:395-429).[i]
Interestingly, around mid-1990s,anthropologists on
the other hand who being too much engaged to record and
interpret the practice of the people through the single site, lone
anthropologist and ahistorical model of fieldwork tradition developed by
Malinowski and his successors were already searching for new methods of writing
ethnography. This new method involved moving from one field site to another and
also from the field to archive and back. In the same year, Sivaramakrishnan
pronounced his anthropological critique of the subaltern, George Marcus in his
seminal article published in the Annual
Review of Anthropology narrated the emergence of multi-sited ethnography,
in which the ethnographer moved from one field site to another as ‘reflexive’
and ‘circumstantial activist’(Marcus, 1995:95-117). In this perceptive article,
Marcus noted that one of the methodological anxieties of the anthropologists
towards multi-sited ethnography is a ‘concern about the loss of the subaltern’
since movement from one site to another might not presuppose a fixed
involvement with the dominated and subjugated subjects (tribes, aborigines,
women, proletariats) but also one step closer with who dominate or are in a
superior position in the social hierarchy (elites, politicians and
administrators).
In
recent years the conjunction between history and anthropology became more
pronounced in the writings of Brian Axel and Saurabh Dube. (Axel, 2002 &
Dube, 2004 & 2007). Both Axel and Dube envisioned new unities between
history and anthropology, archive and ethnography, synchronic and diachronic in
their historical anthropology and more importantly, both have viewed power
relations in colonial and post-colonial times as key elements in their project.
It is this concern of the new historical anthropology with politics and power
that I addressed in my case studies on land acquisition and forest management
by the post-colonial state in West Bengal.
Therefore,
keeping Cohn, Dube and Axel in the background and following the strategies of
Marcus, I look at in this article, the questions which are empirical as well as
theoretical. What happens when the anthropologist participates in more than one
site, like villages and government offices to track post colonial events and
phenomena belonging to the universe of policy making? Does this switching over
from one site to another bring any new understanding? Significantly, following
the trails of Cohn and the subalterns, some of the anthropologists who utilized
the archives as cultural artifacts in India have put their major thrust on the
annals created by the British colonialists, rather than the practices of the
people in any specific locale. Notable examples of the archive genre are the
series of works done by Nicholas Dirks on the colonial times of India. (Dirks,
1987; 2001; 2006 & 2015).Important anthropological studies which juxtaposed
field and governmental archives on post-colonial state in India however have
also emerged in the recent years. (Baviskar, 1995; Fuller & Benei, 2000:
1-30; Tarlo, 2000: 68-90; Agrawal, 2006).
Field and archive
My
point of departure in this paper lies in using the contemporary post-colonial
archives as cultural artifacts with specific governmental policies and actions
in the fields of land acquisition for industrialisation and joint forest
management. The revelations from the anthropological fieldworks conducted by me
were a kind of deconstruction of the governmental archives. Field and archive
in these cases stood in a kind of
dialectical relationship in which one not only negated the other but also
helped to understand the policy issues in a more critical framework, that would
not have been possible had I engaged my understandings only with either of the
two. Governmental records were treated not only as storehouse of knowledge but
also as man-made technologies of governance which often posed apparent
contradictions with my field data. These contradictions became meaningful when
I viewed them in a diachronic and policy framework and following Stoler I could
move from ‘archive-as-source’ to ‘archive-as-subject’ (Stoler, 2002:93). Consequently,
I took hints from the pioneering works of Derrida and Foucault and viewed
archives as ‘subversive’ and powerful to control citizens. (Zeitlyn, 2012:463).
The imaginations of Axel and Dube are related to my work because I made a
counter-reading of the governmental records through my own fieldwork by
listening to the voices of the subaltern in the ethnographic present.
A report in the archive and resistance of the
subalterns in the field
Reading a report
The area of my first case lay on the bank of the
river Kasai, the largest river of West Medinipur district. Cultivation of paddy
(staple of the district) in the villages under study depended primarily upon
rainfall and no systematic irrigation facilities had been developed by the
Government. The villagers residing on the south eastern bank of the river
cultivated a variety of vegetables on the land adjoining their homesteads,
owing to sufficient supply of groundwater tapped through traditional dug wells.
But just within half a kilometer on west of the South Eastern Railway track the
groundwater level was not very congenial for cultivation of vegetables. The
main agricultural activity on this side of the railway track was rain-fed paddy
cultivation for about four to six months of the year.
Land for the two big private industrial units (one
owned by the Tata and the other by the Birla group) had been acquired by the
state government on the western side of the railway track during 1991-1996, the
period during which the communist led government of West Bengal adopted its New
Industrial Policy in the era of economic liberalisation taken up by the central
government.[ii] Protest by peasants affected by the
governmental land grab took place although it did not last for a long period,
as happened recently in Singur in the Hooghly district of West Bengal. Several
peasants took up the statutorily available means/instruments to put up their
objections against land acquisition under section 5A of the Land Acquisition
Act during December 1995.
A government
report dated 21.06.96 vividly recorded the objections of these peasants during
the acquisition of land for the Century Textiles Company and described in
detail how the latter were overruled by the District Collector. The objections
submitted by 342 land losers contained the following points: (i) The
acquisition of agricultural land would affect the farmers seriously by throwing
them out of employment, (ii) the land losers will not get compensation at the
rate they expected and (iii) the proposed acquisition is against public
interest and is beyond the purview of the Act.
It is interesting to observe how the concerned
officials of the Land Acquisition Department overruled all the objections
raised by the farmers. Before rejecting the objections, the officials, however,
recognized the severity and magnitude of the acquisition. The unpublished
departmental report stated
It is a fact that since large quantum of land is
being acquired and the people chiefly subsist on agriculture many people will
be seriously affected in earning their livelihood and avocation. (Unpublished Departmental Report, 1996,
District Land Acquisition Department: Midnapore).
This was the only sentence in the whole report which
upheld the interests of the peasants. The rest of the three-page report was
devoted to justifying the acquisition. The arguments of the officials centered
on the low agricultural yield of the mono-crop land. It never mentioned about
the possibilities of any kind of irrigation in future in this area despite the
fact that irrigation from the nearby river could be made feasible. On the
contrary, the report mentioned the merits of the location of the land, which
could provide important infrastructure facilities for the industry like the
nearby railway line and the national highway. It was learnt from the report
that during the hearing of the objections as per legal provisions, the
cultivators could not ‘specify their individual difficulty in parting with the
land’ although in the same report it was said that ‘most of the objectors
submitted that they have no objection if employment is assured to them, in the
company in favour of whom acquisition is being done.’ It is not clear from the
report why its authors could not understand the nature of ‘individual
difficulty’ in parting with the land, which is their main source of livelihood.
Three points raised in the report were significant
and showed the insensitive way of dealing with such an action on the part of
the Government which was going to have a severe impact on the subsistence
pattern of a group of rural cultivators in a monocropping region. First, at one
place the report mentioned: ‘It is worthwhile to point out that objections have
been received only from 342 landowners for the acquisition of 526.71 acre which
will affect at least 3000 landowners, if not more.’ It seems the official
position rested on the logic that as the overwhelming majority of the peasants
would not face any difficulty there was no need to record any objection against
this acquisition.
Second, after citing the locational advantages of
the land, the officials overruled objections regarding the question of earning
a livelihood by saying that the proposal had been approved both by the
screening committee and by the state after considering all aspects.
Incidentally, the screening committee for the approval of any project comprises
the Sabhadhipati of the Panchayat Samity(the second tier of the statutory local
self-government) and the Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) of the
locality. Obviously, at that time these
people’s representatives who were members of political parties of the Left
Front Government (LFG) did not object to a proposal which had already been
approved by the cabinet and the concerned ministries of their own Government.
Third, the report dealt with the point ‘job for
land’ simply by saying that the Land Acquisition Act does not provide for any
relief except monetary compensation. But the Government may take up the matter
with the company particularly for those peasants who would become landless and
would be devoid of any source of earning a livelihood. After having overruled all the objections,
the procedure for land acquisition made headway.
Observing the resistance in the field
If the
report, which I read in the land acquisition department, cleared and justified
acquisition, then the events I observed in the villages negated those
justifications wherein resistance and bargain by the peasants became overt and
took many forms involving legal, political.(Levien, 2013:351- 394). Let me describe the events from the
ethnographic vantage point.
The vast rural area which lay between Medinipur and
Kharagpur townships was dominated by the two left political parties of the
state, namely, the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Party of
India (Marxist) [CPI (M)], the major partners of the Left Front Government. The
Congress Party, which was the opposition in the state, had some followers in
the area. Congress being the major supporter of economic liberalisation did not
raise any objection when the news of industrialisation in this area came to be
known. In fact, the Congress welcomed this decision of the Left Government.
They only raised doubts about whether the industrialists would at all choose
West Bengal as a suitable site for industrialisation.
In the study area, Tata Metaliks (a pig iron
manufacturing company) was established on nearly 200 acres of agricultural land
during 1991-1992. Before the establishment of Tata Metaliks the leaders and
cadres of the CPI (M) and CPI organised meetings and continued individual level
campaigns on the ‘bright possibility’ of getting jobs by the land losers in the
industry. But when the Tata Metaliks started production, the promise for
providing jobs did not materialize, and the peasants also experienced a lengthy
as well as tedious process of getting compensation from the district
administration.
All the aforementioned events caused sufficient
disillusionment among the peasants who were once hopeful of positive effects of
industrialisation in this region. The decision of the state government to
acquire agricultural land in the same area for Century Textiles Company
(another pig iron company owned by the Birla group of industries) was taken
under this background. The pessimism created among the peasants owing to the
establishment of Tata Metaliks inspired some of the inhabitants of this
locality to agitate against the acquisition of land for another pig-iron unit.
Besides recording objections within the legal framework of the Land Acquisition
Act, the peasants of this area also had recourse to extra-legal means to fight
against the acquisition of their agricultural land.[iii]
The movement gained popularity under the leadership
of Trilochan Rana (a former Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)[CPI(ML]
leader) during 1995-1996 who joined the trade union wing of the Congress Party
and put considerable pressure on the district administration.[iv]
Two interesting incidents may be mentioned in this
regard which would throw some light on the grounds behind the popularity of
this movement among the local peasantry.
The first incident took place in the month of May
1995 when Trilochan Rana organised a good number of peasants to put a
deputation to the Tata Metaliks Company authorities demanding some compensation
for the peasants owing to the damage caused by movement of trucks carrying
construction materials for the company through the agricultural fields, which
were not acquired. At that time, there was no standing crop in the fields, so the
company management could not foresee any resistance. The trucks damaged the
dykes of the fields (ails) and the
soil and protest by the peasants began. Under the pressure of the peasants the
company had to pay compensation in kind to 75 peasant families in the presence
of the pradhan (elected head of the lowest tier, i.e. gram panchayat of the
statutory local self-government) of Kalaikunda GP. Some amount of fertilizer
was given to those peasants whose lands were damaged by the trucks.
In the second incident, Trilochan Rana organised a
deputation to the district administration about the damage caused to the
unacquired agricultural fields of some peasants for putting pillars to
demarcate acquired lands for Century Textiles and Industries Limited (CTIL) Company
in Kantapal, Mollachak and other adjoining villages. Those cement pillars were
erected by digging at about 4 sq.ft. of land to a depth of 3-4 ft. and became
permanent structures right on the agricultural fields of the peasants whose
lands were not acquired. These pillars served as the boundary of the acquired
land for CTIL. About 24 to 25 such pillars were constructed in early 1996. The
peasants argued that cultivation of fields over a much wider area around those
pillars was not possible owing to physical obstruction. The district
administration had to agree with this demand of the peasants and arranged for
payment of Rs. 420/- as monetary compensation to those families affected by the
construction of those pillars. This compensation payment continued for 2 years
but with the decline of the movement, the administration discontinued this
compensation .Both these incidents reveal that under the pressure of an
intelligent and organized peasant movement, the company authority as well as
the Land Acquisition Department had arranged compensation for peasant families
having no provision under the existing legal and administrative framework. The
movement reached its peak from the later part of 1995 up to April 1996 during
which the farmers even resorted to violent means. In the first week of January
1996 hundreds of farmers in the Kalaikunda area stormed into the tent of the
engineer who was conducting soil testing and land survey on behalf of Century
Textiles Ltd. A leading national daily reported on 10January 1996
Land Survey and soil testing work in Mathurakismat
Mouza in the Kalaikunda gram panchayat area of Kharagpur rural police station
undertaken by Century Textiles – a Birla group of Industries – had to
beabandoned following stiff resistance from villagers last week….The farmers
also blocked Sahachak for nine hours yesterday…They also lodged a complaint
with the police against the firm” (The
Statesman, 10 January1996).
On 22 March 1996, the same national daily reported
about a mass deputation by a group of peasants of the Kharagpur region before
the district administration (The
Statesman 22 March1996). In this deputation, the peasants demanded land for
land or a job for the members of the land loser families. They also demanded a
compensation of 3 lakh rupees per acre of agricultural land. After this
deputation, about 100 peasants came to Medinipur District administrative
Headquarters on 10 April 1996 and submitted a memorandum to the District
Magistrate declaring that they would boycott the ensuing parliamentary election
to protest against the acquisition of fertile agricultural land for industrial
projects. The peasants stated in their letter that this acquisition would
disturb the local economy and destabilise the environmental balance of the region
and this event was also reported in The
Statesman on 2 May 1996.
It is
important to note in this connection that neither the state nor district level
Congress leadership, or any Member of the Legislative Assembly of this party
showed any interest in supporting this movement of the peasants in Kharagpur
region. The local CPI (M) leadership and the elected panchayat members of this
area not only remained silent on this spontaneous movement of the peasants but
they also made every attempt to smother this agitation by labeling it as a
‘disturbance created by Congress to stall the progress of industrialisation
under the Left Front Government’.
Without getting support from any opposition party
and facing stiff resistance from the ruling left parties and lacking a coherent
organisation, this localised peasant movement against land acquisition
gradually lost its intensity and did not last long and finally, lost its vigor
and one may recall that this peasant resistance in West Bengal took place about
a decade before the Singur and Nandigram movements by the peasants against land
acquisition. (Guha, 2007a: 3706-3711& 2007b).
In lieu of a conclusion
The
peasant movement against large-scale land acquisition under state patronage for
industries in Kharagpur provided me a unique arena for studying the
contradictions of the land policy of the Left Front Government in West Bengal.
The policy-oriented approach of this study led me to deal with field level data
in the village as well as archival texts in the district land acquisition
office So, the reading of a report in the dual contexts of my field level
observation on peasant resistance and archives of the LA Office provided
insights to contradictions in the policy changes of a pro-peasant government
around industrialisation.
In sum,
the archive as a cultural artefact negated the justifications of the peasant
resistance and in this case illustrated the contradictions between the field
and the archive, which stood in a dialectical relationship with one another
inasmuch as the reading of the texts and figures in the archive through time
and the ethnography of the subalterns in the space are synthesized within a the
broader framework of policies around land and forest of the Left Government
undergoing processes of transformation in the era of globalization.
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Notes
[i] Surajit Sinha in a significant paper written as early as 1959 studied the social
movements among the Bhumij community in the then Bihar(presently Jharkhand) by
using colonial as well as post-colonial archival data along with his own field
observations.(Sinha 1956: 9-32).
[ii] In West Bengal, a pro-peasant Left Front Government (
LFG) began its career in 1978 through distribution of land to the landless by
post Independence land reform laws but since 1990s the same government
gradually became more interested in acquiring land (including agricultural
land) for big industrial projects. particularly after the liberalization policy
adopted by the central government in 1991. The Leninist slogan ‘Land to the
tillers’ was transformed by the
[iii] The information on this part of the peasant protest has been collected
from interviews with the leaders and participants of this movement as well as
from press reports and the various written memoranda submitted by the villagers
to the district and state administration. About a decade later the farmers in
Singur also took recourse to courts as well as mass mobilization against
governmental land grab (Nielsen, 2009:121-144).
[iv] Through my close relationship with late Trilochan Rana, I came to
know that he was a former Naxalite. He has recently passed away and he always
supported my research and inspired me to write on their protest movement and
never wanted to keep his name undisclosed in my publications.
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