Understanding Race and Labour in Plantation Economies in Jamaica

Notes Toward Understanding Plantation Economies Barry Unsworth: Sacred Hunger Penguin Books, London 1992 and James A Delle: The Colonial Caribbean, Cambridge University Press:2014 “In later times, when commercial enterprise came to be a virtue in itself, and a good return on capital was blessing enough the need to invoke legitimacy was not so much felt, but the men around the table still felt it strongly.” ( Unsworth 1992:16) Kemp looked smilingly round the table. “And look what is happening to sugar,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you gentlemen what raw sugar is worth on the home market nowadays.’ He raised a hand and made a rapid sketch of a triangle in the air before him. “Three separate profits’, he said. “One in Africa, one in Jamaica, one back here. And each one better than the last.” (17) “…these were all Liverpool men. There could scarcely have been one of them who had not a full understanding of the Triangular Trade as it was called –cheap trade goods to Africa for the purchase of Negroes, these then carried to America or the West Indies and sold there; rum and tobacco and sugar bought with the proceeds and resold in England. Most of them were involved in the trade to some degree, as manufacturers, brokers or wholesalers.’ (17) Barry Unsworth was a coal miner’s son, from Durham, who went on to study in Manchester and taught in Cambridge. He won the Booker Prize in 1992, with the Sri Lankan diaspora writer living in Canade, Michael Ondatje, who won it for his novel, later made into a film called the English Patient, which is about a love that destroys the protagonists. It looks at British colonialism from the point of view of the inflammable loves and lives of expatriates caught in the tropics and imprisoned by their passion. Sacred Hunger is about the way in which slavery is the bases of plantation economies rendered volatile by the emotions of those caught in the warp and weft of greed and an accompanying servitude. The same themes, with parallel renderings of theatre and commercial calumny, are to be found in Marina Warner’s Indigo. For the purposes of understanding the repertoire of writers seeking to describe the history of exploitation and greed, we need to look at the self reflexivity of these authors. They are carriers of that huge warren of memory that allows us to negotiate with civilizational guilt, a record keeping of the brutality of British adventurers and traders before the administrators took over, before civil rights awareness about slavery took hold of the public imagination. It must be remembered that mission history begins around the same period, because the missionaries did not find a ready listening public in England. The abolition of slavery was part and parcel of missionary enterprise. Their countrymen were busy in taverns and did not heed the call to frugality and reform, so the missionary congress moved abroad attaching themselves to company servants and administrators who were not willing to give them the status that they had as members of the ruling class. The missionary movements thus first congregated around the pietist missionaries from Denmarkk and Germany in seeking to travel to India. Dennis Hudson’s monumental work on the Tranquebar Mission deals with questions of caste and language to help us understand the manner in which at a later time, Church Missionary Society in the early 19th century, had a baseline from which to work with in Serampore or in Kottayam. Unsworth, much in the style of the Ancient Mariner demands our attention of a ship journey through the Atlantic to Jamaica from Liverpool. He uses 630 pages to tell us a story of the late 18th century, before slavery was abolished. He describes the fate of these ‘negroes’ or ‘blacks’ who are captured by slave drivers from their homes and locked in the underbelly of the ship. These quarters cramp hundreds of them together, all manacled and half starved. They are separated by gender, with children being enclosed with their mothers. For half an hour a day they are brought on to the deck, where they are told to dance with their shackles on. The noise they make, the clanking of their chains, their collective misery is so terrible, that the fiddler deputized to play Irish songs for their dancing, complains to the ship’s captain that he cannot hear his tunes, and that affects his performance. These terms of continuous misery, to which the galley crew, as well as the slaves from Africa kidnapped for commercial reasons, become the subject of this literary work of immense magnitude. Barry Unsworth provides for us a valuable text for understanding questions of colour and hierarchy, the manner in which the dialects of the Scots and Irish is posed against the English spoken by Liverpool inhabitants as sailors and carpenters, and later the pidgin devised to access conversation between the different groups. The omnipresent narrator, who is the ship’s doctor, is the central figure in the book. The emotions, the conversations, the details of windcrossings and ocean tides, the manner in which people connect to one another through their personal dialects and forms of speech are all reflected through the log kept by the doctor in a free flowing hand, which does not limit itself to events but also to the dialectic of past and present as an ever arising confluence of contradictions. The Doctor has an interest in evolution, it is more than a scientific preoccupation, it is a passion. He used fossil remains to show that the earth is older than 6000 years, given in biblical lore, and he is so profoundly affected by his discovery and the corresponding literature that is emerging at that time, that he is thrown into jail. His ‘sin’ is that he has opposed the evolutionary principles outlined in the book of Genesis. Because of an idea that he is convinced about, he loses all his prosperity and the domestic spaces of tender conjugal love and the child his wife carries in her womb. Both die, he is freed from prison, because his uncle pays for his release. However, the tax is to accompany his uncle’s ship to Jamaica, where the commerce in slavery can be supported by the Doctor confirming for the commercial company owned by his uncle of the health of slaves bought and sold and resold. The Doctor carries with him the terrible guilt of his past, the loss of his lovely and tender wife Ruth and their first born child aborted by the horror of his imprisonment, and his mutilation in the stocks to which he was chained for a night before being jailed. He can never forget that it was ideas to which he held so passionately, in which he believed in as a geological and scientific truth which rent his life apart. When his uncle rescued him, and then bartered his future to the cause of slavery and commerce he felt that inviting his nephew to enter the family business was a logical consequence. The Doctor never imagined that the days in the company of run away thieves, captive drunkards and the ceaseless ranting in the holds of those who saw their lives not just as exploited but who fought among themselves would have such a deleterious impact on him. He notes everything carefully, keeping his log in a box, lacquered and precious which his aunt had given him before he sailed. It survives ship wreck, and later becomes the bases of the novel. Unsworth writes that there was a mulatto in the 1830s. who was a relic from the North Carolina plantations, who would roam in the pubs and taverns talking about his father, a white doctor. A journalist recorded his story, the collation was seen by Unsworth, but then it was lost, disappeared or crumbled as old papers do. Fiction represented itself as the way a real story, (that of a mulatto talking about Paradise) could reappear. So, in the ship’s hold was a beautiful slave, who helps to heal the Doctor. He sees her, and in his descriptions, she is the archetypically loose limbed, strong, exquisite of face and form. She recognizes his ardour. And among these slaves and free men all entangled in the torpor of a stinking ship, where the wind has stopped, but when they reach Florida, instead of Jamaica, there is retribution. The ship’s captain is killed, and a motley crew with slaves reaches the shore. There they invent for themselves a ‘free society’, a kind of primitive communism, where women are polyandrous, (or atleast bigamous) and bear children of slave fathers as well as white crew and the doctor recognizes his son among those born by his lover. The management of emotions in a free love society operated by consent and rules is the subject of the last sections of the book. They spend ten years in this situation, hidden away from the world, swearing to the rights of being human and equal. But into this paradise, comes the Doctor’s cousin, a merchant, who has had to face the calamities of his youth, including his father’s suicide. The ship lost at sea turns them into paupers, and he climbs the ladder by marrying a rich trader’s daughter and gives up his first love. This cousin has come to punish the sailors who jumped ship, and reclaim the slaves and their children, for they are to him property. The abhorrent situations in which the slaves find themselves in, when captured once again, is to place them back on the ship that their proprietor’s son has brought, and the Doctor dies in the mishap following being shot in his leg. He knows that the Paradise he had been a part of, where all were equal in the face of abundance was a fluke of nature. It was the way in which his sorrowful past had been brushed aside, and new possibilities of love and life had come to fruition. Death brings with it the end of a life, and yet, the jagged remembrance of a child sold to slavery, who grows old in the taverns of North Carolina becomes the fleeting way by which a life is retold almost 60 years after the Doctor was killed by the soldiers his cousin had brought for his capture. Unsworth suddenly closes the tale, by setting two men, who are not allied emotionally, but yet the tenderness of a childhood act of lifting a younger cousin above the waves becomes the nucleus of a passionate hatred that informs the betrayal and the shooting of the older cousin decades later. Life with its twists and turns only betrays the reader because Unsworth shows us that emotions are palimsests which we must continually unravel. Till such time, the narrator, like a playwright weaves the actors in different contexts, with different resolutions, the events remain opaque to us. The slaves were sold in North Carolina, and did not reach Jamaica. The plantation economies were dependent on slaves, and the mortality rate was huge, and they were quickly replaced by new ones. According to James A. Delle, in The Colonial Caribbean (2014) the African resource in the labour needed for plantations was replaced by labour from the basin of the Indian Ocean. This was because slavery had been abolished by parliament in 1807. From here, we can understand the rise of Indian indentured labour. ( Delle 2014: 55) “Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of African people had been brought to Jamaica to work the plantations, throughout the eighteenth century, Jamaica had experienced the incessant re-population of the plantations made possible by the African slave trade.” (55) The importation of slaves from Africa was no longer possible after 1807. The plantations were also dependent on the political connotations of the environment, as we know from the American Revolution and the Boston Tea Party. Taxes, costs and the profit motives were interdependent. Coffee had never had the popularity of tea, the British grew coffee in the highlands of Jamaica with access to the sea being variable. With the Napoleonic wars and the embargos on export to Europe they lost a major market.(55) Plantation owners saved money on slaves by encouraging them to grow their own food, and become subsistence farmers, (56). Farmers with small landholdings grew cocoa, indigo and food for themselves, but after their death, their land was usually usurped by wealthy planters who focused mono agriculture, namely sugar (59) The highlands became reserved for coffee, as sugar could not be grown there, and the famous Blue Mountain coffee developed under these plantation owners. The term plantation or mono agriculture became identified with colonialism(62). In the 16th century Ulster planters were settled in Jamaica, and the Protestant dissenters in America.(62). By the beginning of the 18th century, in the Carribean and SouthEastern America, plantations took on a new meaning. They referred to “a privately held agricultural estate, consisting of capitalized land and social labour harnessed for the material gain of the owners of the estates, the plantation proprietors’ (62). David Eltis and Martin Halbert have an important cyber data base in ‘slavevoyages’ (63). Eltis argues in a video interview, sponsored by Emory University, that in locating the places that slaves came from becomes difficult when personal names are lost by renaming on being purchased. Delle brings to our attention to the differences between the metropolitan elite who are buyers and consumers in cities like London, and the regional elites who are administrators and peripheral producers and managers in the colonies. They would include clerks, accountants, lawyers, doctors and other types of managers(65) The plantation system brought out a “racialised hierarchy” where labour could be fettered and not paid. To achieve planter status required purchase of land. “The planter class was subdivided by social ranking, particularly as that ranking applied to an individual’s relationship to the means of production. Heuristically, the planters can be divided into three overlapping groups. The most powerful was comprised of the proprietor who held legal title to plantations, as well as the attorneys who managed financial affairs of their own. A second group included overseers, who ran the daily operation of the estates, and their assistants (often called ‘bookkeepers’). The final groups included artisans, merchants doctors and other professions who lived in the urban centers but owned plantations (67). Till 1834, when slavery was legally abolished, the slaves were seen as mere commodities, and did not have the right to sell their labour power (68). The book keeper, or record keeper, was the man hired to keep day to day accounts of events,and often like Thomas Thistlewood put himself in the text giving an archival resource to the economic, domestic and sexual customs of plantation managerial staff (71). In the occupational mobility system book keepers sought to become overseers, as this allowed them privileges of keeping watch over slaves and controlling them, in the name of safe guarding the produce for the owners, who were often absentee landlords. (71) The overseer found it easy to classify slaves according to birth antecedents, so white, black and mulatto could be defined according to color (111). Delle writes, “In creating a “negro” or “black” race, the planters created simultaneously a “white” race. In the context of early 19th century Jamaica, this process of racialization not only created systems of symbolic definition of self, defined by physical characteristics, but used that system to maintain a class-based social structure in which access to the control of the forces of production was mediated by the definition of legal “whiteness” (111) .In between colonizing British and slaves were Jews, Indians and mulattoes all of whom were guarded by restrictions either against owning property or office, of having control over certain occupations. (111) There were ‘free black’ or ‘free colour’ but the British used sanctions to curtail their freedoms or access to civil rights which were seen as privileges. The planter class defined differences amongst themselves in terms of very structured rules of hospitality and social mobility, access to goods and services, and finally consent about how order between themselves would be maintained. (114) They created ‘colonial enclaves’ which were important to them in terms of shared understanding of consumption and leisure, and networking (115). There was a leveling principle which helped whites of all classes to bond in terms of their acceptance of duties, and involved rejection of the rights of slaves to freedom or equal worth. (115). To survive in the isolation of their plantations, networking was the most important feature. They had to meet and establish relations of reciprocity. Plantation houses became the grandest symbol of what they had achieved. The forms of socialization into the hierarchy and intimacy of slavery was necessary for the continuation of the system. In Jamaica, shared wharves became along with the shared hospitality of homes and sponsored tavern feasts became the major point of unity among the Blue Mountain planters, who had to descend to the sea coast to send off their produce (117). There were also the road managers, or ‘waywardens’ who were in charge of the roads from mountains to the beaches. They had to see to the pliability of the roads for which they were dependent on slave labour (124). This labour was procured through rotation from each plantation labour, and was responsible for moving boulders and clearing mud from the roads. By placing the work of a literary writer and an archaeologist of spatial uses in colonialism I have tried to show the weaving of two kinds of specialized narrative. Literature seeks to embolden the sensory aspect of historical reality. It brings to life those very people who walked the earth, and who are now long dead. It uses the embellishments of language to help us understand the cross cutting trajectories of a received memory, either from archives, early socialization in working class contexts, or the murmuring of memory as it rises in specialized study in a foreign university. Unsworth chose to study in Manchester, though he had the possibility equally of receiving a scholarship in Cambridge. That choice was integral to the way in which the intimacies of Cockney speaking Englishmen moves on to an understanding of Scottish and Irish dialects, and the animosities among themselves. In the end, in Paradise, the Doctor reverts suddenly to speak in the Queen’s English, and his comrades round on him in pidgin for betraying their community.

Genealogy as Time

Genealogy as Time Abstract This paper attempts to understand time as a concept in Sociology. Raimundo Pannikar in his Mantramanjari showed us the beauty of the Vedas as an act of poetry. It was his belief that we imagine the past as much as we imagine the future. To think in terms of the categories of “Primitive” and “Modern” was seen to be racial and hegemonic by the end of the last century (Visvanathan 2012). How, then, can we understand the co existence of time? Methodologically, this is the central trope of Indian Sociology or Social Anthropology. When politicalised it reads as ‘caste histories’ and concomitant theories of domination and exclusion, including the consensus theories of the 1960s, and Dalit theoreticalised interventions. Race and Varna, linear evolution and lateral readings of geographical similarity become infused by the need to know who one is descended from. DNA testing for political purposes for reasons of state craft and petty bullying makes people ever conscious of their status as "insiders" or "outsiders". Yet, evolutionary biology places Lucy, an ancient ancestor, a museumised assemblage of bones, not 200,00 years ago but 3 million years ago. Both popular writing, or science journalism, work with the idea that this past is redeemable through the histrionics of the moment of discovery, till another evolutionary theory comes along. Keywords time coexistence genealogy evolution dispersion migration trails race caste feminism Striations of Time The general opinion which calls the “Human Race” as a manifestation of time differs on two concepts: linearity and coexistence. Sociology has always worked with these as representations. Totemism is the best example of how symbols, objects and humans converge. Representations of large swathes of time are enclosed in the stuff of legend. Time coalesces events, and with self identification with the warrior hero or his cohort, legend becomes sacred history or myth. In this complex web of narrative, which links the often unknown time of production of the epic, with its context and use, ‘time’ becomes like a banjo that can expand or contract according to need. It is the web of assurance of the continuity of time and meaning that allows metaphor to function as a link. Time as an ‘epoch’, whether in science or in religion, serves as a ‘model’ of time. It allows people to classify events such that certain categories of similitude whether of flora, fauna or bipedal mammals are placed in a comprehensible slot (Sinha Kapur 2011). In this paper I review the work of Frederique Marglin and Donna Haraway to show how they construct alternative ways of thinking about the epiphenomena of feminist logic to dismantle theories of domination and power. While working closely with their texts, and those of younger feminists, I reconstruct the manner in which lineages and their grammar undergo a transformation conducive to understanding nature and nurturing. The confrontation of monolithic scientific systems and the trails left behind them is contested by those who believe that the accidents of history have to be met appropriately according to specific historical and dynamic contexts. I use Chomsky’s “innateness” theory of language to say that the potentialities of language learning and use are confirmed and clarified according to their existential location. Haraway suggests that science is a language that has to be learned, and aptitude and capability will depend on the cultural parameters that are provided for equal access to men, women and third gender representatives. Within this, the revoking of citizen rights and the return to tradition and orthodoxies may well make the task of equal access doubly hard. Qualitative time is represented as value systems. Genealogy is thus a form of social fabrication, whether it is of the human race, or vested interests in property, or the ownership of appropriate customs and concomitant emotions. How we feel, and what we are allowed to express are delineated through these interdictions of whom we may eat with, work with or marry. Between Biology. Race and the Reproduction of Memory lies social prescription and all its contradictions. The parallel of theories of evolution which have time scales which within a few decades have shifted from 45,000 years to 200,000 years are the book ends of evolutionism and diffusionism. Donaldson’s work on Afarensis and Lucy takes the evolutionary history back to three and a half million years! (Donaldson 1982: 286). The map keeps changing, as the concomitant theories define migration trails as the point of departure from out of Africa, across aeons, to specific nodal points of human emergence ( Angela Saini 2019). Caste and Race Caste emerges along three concomitantly disputed prongs of Hierachy, Caste and Race. It embraces questions of occupation, endogamy and commensality, and complicates questions of jyati and varna across a vast arena of social relations encompassing countless variations. These embrace the simple questions of “Who do you marry? Who do you eat with? What work do you do?” These questions are open ended questions regarding life choices, mobility and reproduction. When they become inscribed, then new/old problems arise. Is mobility possible? The old debates focussed on how we think about Anthropology itself. Colonial ethnography, so called “colonial maps of discovery” and the inherent race relations embodied in the narratives of description of the ‘Other’ are embedded in pedagogic practices. By the 1970s and 1980s, these hierarchies were dismissed. The new preoccupation was with what Levi Strauss called the “Unity of the Human Mind” (Levi Strauss 1976). Here, variability was compressed by the search for meaning in comparative societies. All over the world, since the time of Carl Jung, people have searched for the collective unconscious, and found similarities in patterns of thought. Accompanying this was the Weberian preoccupation of verstehen or subjective interpretation. Tristes Tropiques (1976) became the symbol of the need to place oneself in the text, to write ‘auto-ethnography’ as if it was Anthropology. To put yourself in the place of the ‘other’ compelled empathy and persuasiveness. It was an engaging method, which allowed the bleakness of the monotone of textual recording, and the lack of diachronic impulse in the Levi Straussean reproduction of myth, to have a new context. If varna presumed a four fold model of pan Indian Hinduism, jyati liberated it. Variations in food practices and sexual mores could be explained easily, such as regional tendencies to bigamy or non vegetarianism. In a detailed discussion Morris Carstairs showed that the non vegetarianism, use of alcohol and warrior occupations of the Kshatriyas was vehemently different from the vegetarianism and cereberal proclivities of the Brahmins ( Carstairs 1957). If bipedalism had resulted in exploration and food gathering, long journeys were explained. How to explain divergence then? Survival of the fittest was explained by the terms of all those who survive. Therefore variability could also mean exclusion (Peter Bowler 1989:324). The idea of a dominant race had been the problem for Sociological analyses, and racism had manifested itself as a response to activist success in humanitarian movements. Bowler writes: The theory of evolution allowed races to be considered strongly marked varieties, descended from a common stock but with widely different characteristics acquired in the course of their later separation. Grouping the races into a single species seemed necessary, because they still could interbreed. It was, nevertheless, widely held that hybrids from such a union possessed weak constitutions, confirming just how far the races have diverged (Bowler1989: 300). Kane’s edition of the Dharmashastra is also a good representation of how caste genealogies prefigured the breaking of prescribed marriage rules (Kane 1962). The punishments thereof were only an introduction to the birth of new family trees, and hence by proliferation of subcastes, caste ties. Inclusion by birth, marriage or persuasion became the key to homogenization of certain traits of cultural practice. It was about choice, but also about the accidents of history (Cybil in Visvanathan ed 2019.) MSS Pandian (2019) in the The Strangeness of Tamil Nadu: Contemporary History and the Political Culture of South India invokes Michel De Certeau’s description of habitable places. “Haunted places invert the panopticon” (Pandian 2019: 51). What is it that people leave behind? How is heritage understood? Why is there mass destruction? What is the time span of conservation? How do we understand nature? Why do want to view the past? These questions concern all of us as we look at the relation between past and present. The new concepts of hybridization in third gender studies defend the right to be different, and the necessity for recognition. Pandian argues, What spirals from the past are resurrected, what memories are evoked – these are as important to the future of a city as the fact that memories are diverse and will usually contest singular visions of the city (ibid 52). Pandian refers to reasons of conversion. In 1981, Muslims of Rahmatpuram were the Dalits of Meenaskhipuram (ibid 76). They gave up all the privileges which did not reach them. He believes that the death of history is the beginning of politics: It is for the Dalits to decide whether they wish to be Hindus, Christians, Muslims or atheists. It is not the business of the State to guide them towards any one of these, or other options, or close them completely. Education is meant to expand human choices rather than restrict them (ibid 162). In the next section I will look at the way in which the stereotyping of models of development led to the establishment of alternative voices both in activist as well as theory construction domains. Anthropology as self reflexive The rejection of Anthropology, by activists from tribal communities was the authoritative voice that set up Pratec, the Andean group that spoke on behalf of local farmers in Peru ( Marglin1998). There was a terminological shift from syncretism to hybrid, and then to “conversations”. Andean thinkers thought of themselves as digesting cultural processes, keeping some elements and throwing out others. They were significantly concerned with the role of choice. They described it as rearing cows instead of Llamas, wearing western clothes, driving fast cars, using modern technology. Rengifor from Pratec says that barley, cows, wooden ploughs, Jesus, Mary, Saints have all been incorporated - they are venerated but not worshipped- one reciprocates, but they are not set apart. The charges of essentialism or reductionism comes from seeing boundaries as non porous. Domination as in Western Science was not applicable. Pratec speaks of interculturalism where conversation or two ways flows between different collectivites are understood. Diversity is nurtured by inter cultural cross pollination (ibid 12) Marglin asks whether ethnography cannibalized people’s lives without furthering their livelihood chances (ibid 14). Does segmentalised work, the alienation of scientific and technological production really help in the production and reproduction of human life? Its real purpose is to control the worker. Plantations, or industrial agriculture, has proved that like the factory, the manager and the worker are at two levels – dispassionate knowledge and the actual context of work (ibid 15). Frederique Marglin engages with Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties to show that Factory, Engineering, Administration/ Theology/Law/Medicine are under the control of the State, but Philosophy, Literature and the Arts are left free from surveillance (ibid 16). Academic freedom was linked to value neutrality, and the principle of verstehen. The birth of the University was in the monastery, communicating solitude and a vocation. However, Arts and Pure Sciences were to function as critics of the State ( ibid 16). Frederique Marglin is preoccupied with the question of power. How do experts appropriate power from their participants in any project? If such hierarchy is established what are our responsibilities as participants/observers in the field, and in our professions (ibid 20). She demarcates this as cognitive authority, the right to know, which can also be a form of domination. In short, the Andean agriculture scientists gave up that authority, their official places in state bureaucracies, and privileges therein, in order to work with people (ibid 21). They networked with their families, kin groups, other peasants. They abandoned the right to know from disciplinary concepts and put their trust in bonding with peasant groups. De-professionalisation meant giving up dual positions in the world they once shared with other specialists. Enrique Mayer, an American anthropologist found fault with Pratec (Andean Project for Peasant Technologies) because he said that its “harmony” with coexistence was not scientifically evaluated, quantifiable or ecologically consistent with their world view and scientific cognition of existential situations (ibid 22). The term “informant” is by itself hierarchical. Yet, Pratek argues that wisdom arises from mutual conversation, and is not directed only at empirical knowledge production (ibid 23). This jump is articulated by Rengfo of Pratec who argues that the word is not merely representation, it is. This presence of the word means that everything speaks, conversation involves total participation of the body - it is not merely speech. Representation is verbal and conceptual but conversation is participation. Frederique Marglin offers us Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees to say that virtue is a non-entity in the face of competition and conflict, because people anyway use the material benefits accruing from exploitation ( ibid 36.) in the terms of development ideologies pushed world over by a corporate elite, everything has to be changed, transformed, everything must push forward. Of this, genocide is a natural part. This involves getting rid of the adversary so that the end must be achieved. Thus, modern genocide is the movement to a particular society (ibid 39). Fiction as translating repressed histories In Decolonising Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in the Pacific, Susan Y Najita argues that there is a powerful subconscious at work in the authors who claim ‘native’ descent. Through their art and literature they allow orality to emerge. Their songs, poetry and fiction speak of their sorrow and rage at having their land taken away from them by colonizing races. These then assert their capitalist and commercial stakes in land as being legitimating globally the right to divest native people of traditional lands (Najita 2006). What arises is a particular kind of biculturalism, as local communities are either put to work as cheap labour in plantations with colonial masters, or are rendered impoverished and displaced when labourers from other countries are brought in (ibid 10). Literary fiction thus promotes the idea of magical realism as represented through the translation of trauma by vivid dream imagery. This is a kind of historical representation of all that could not be found in official histories (ibid 21). The intention here is to use an escape route for repressed histories by fictionalizing contexts and oppressive manipulations of the past by using people’s knowledge(s) and dialects. Pidgin/Creole becomes one of the essential ways, by which the transposition of formulaic language of diasporas appearing as enslaved labour, synthesizes. Najita writes, Genealogy is a living entity, enacted and transformed in everyday life. In contrast to western notions of genealogy which privilege linear descent and pedigree, Polynesian genealogies are structured loosely along the metaphor of a fishing net, invoked strategically depending on context and audience. Genealogical recounting records direct descent from parents or even multiple parentage, historical connection to specific places, as well as less formal practices invoking distant ancestral connections, relations of adoption and fostering, or even non-familial, non-biological linkages. In this context, how is western literate and linear genealogy – that emphasizes biological descent – function as colonial technologies of racialization? How do indigenous genealogical practices function as alternative to these colonial technologies? How are the effects of colonization – disease, dispossession, or death – registered in genealogical discontinuity? Conversely, how do these genealogical gaps function within anti-colonial nationalism? (ibid 23) Assimilation and unification in a global scenario allows domination to surface as people are assigned their status by occupation, race or caste. In a return to totemic lineages, and fantastic tales, contemporary literature which contextualizes through art and verse tries to evade the cosmopolitan predatory eye which seeks to universalize. In the inter-relatedness of tribal communities with subsistence agriculture lies the innovative puzzle of cross cultural manifestations. Fiction becomes one way by which comparative anthropologists actually decode the continuous appearance of maps. The Imaginary of the Past While alighting from an aeroplane in Kochi airport, in March 2022, the North Indian tourist was overheard saying to his son in Hindi, “Hum Aleppey jaa rahein hain. Voh Passific Ocean ke pass hai” (We are travelling to Aleppey. It lies near the Pacific Ocean). I was baffled by the map presented verbally to a child of eight years. Then I realized that just as there is an inter-relatedness of the islands of Hawai, Tahiti, French New Guinea and New Zealand wich appear in migration trails, so also the arrival of the coconut and boat in Kerala from the Pacific is part of that legendary and dramatic past of our coastal communities. Are the Irula similar to the Maori? As Levi Strauss would say, “similar” is not “same”. Speculative histories are essentially problematic, but are like sign posts of map making even in contemporary times. They feed documentary films and travelogues, where adventure lies in the recreation of possible archaic routes. It sustains the challenges of proving courage, tenacity and the solidarity of adventure tourism or scientific forays. Susan Najita speaks of the claim to a common ancestry, lying for the Maori in different canoes, and different cultures. (ibid 125). In this struggle to place clan loyalties within the grammar of diversity, she argues that local communities were able to represent themselves through the corporality of survival, and understanding the earth. They could keep records through poetry and literature of the statistics of native genocide and also of resistance. Marginalised or “peripheralised” communities could offer their stance vis a vis their impoverishment and imprisonment. ( ibid 142). The threat of extinction and the response of native communities is what she calls the oral/aural logic of “talking stink” (ibid 150). In the following section, I will look at the contexts in which working class populations understand their location within corporate industrialization. Manifestations of Current Reality in a Post Covid World Kerala has 168 engineering colleges, as the Gulf is a known back yard for continuous employment, interrupted only by wars between the West and Islamic countries. However, for Indians generally, love of the earth is a form of mysticism. Inspite of the mining contracts to diaspora Indians, the local communities have continually asserted their rights to land and agriculture. During Covid lockdown, lasting two years, the manual and contract workers returned to their family farms. Unemployment in cities, and fear of death, never the less, propelled them to return to agriculture. The number is believed to be 87 percent of the country. Land and agriculture are traditional legacies, inspite of partition of property and continuous out migration. People depend on their family farm produce to live in the city, taking cereals and edible oils, whenever they return to metropolitan hubs for work, in the service and industrial labour sector. In Peru, Pratec, the scientist bureaucrats gave up their jobs and privileges in government to join the people. They believed the time of agriculture to be sacred. There were familiar rituals. Techniques were passed on from generation to generation. This relation between magic/sciences/religions has often been discussed and is a concurrent debate. The distinctions are seen to be linear, and in the sociological models, they were evolutionary encompassing the ancient/medieval/modern typologies. There were therefore animistic practices/ theistic practices/rational principles all in some mosaic of juxtaposition. This is how time coalesces in a variety of livelihoods. These boundaries can also be blurred or abbreviated. The boundaries often collapse. Given this fluidity, how can we understand everyday practice? In some societies, religion may foreground the metaphors of science, where instrumentation is practical and technical but myth sacralises it across aeons. These narrative hues are myriad, and are acceptable to the believing subject, who perceives non duality between the icon and the actual production of work or skill. The hierarchy between sacred and profane is diminished by the passage of time, the process of adaptation, and the return to the real world where the liminal phase diminishes. It is here that the place of science fiction is paramount, because it helps people to adjust their received sensibilities to the possibilities of dramatic change. Here Time is a continuum across civilizational history, and myths and legends can converge. Sacred histories foreclose enquiry. ‘It is because it is.’ Ramayana uses the idea of the yantra (machine) to explain air travel, medical attention and warfare. Dalit experience of this ‘foreknowledge’ of sacred history is to understand Time as exploitation. Someone must do the work. Who then will do this work? Hannah Arendt called it The Human Condition, where women, slaves and animals did the work that was corporeally suited to their status (Arendt 1958). Karma theory was, therefore, in the caste system, the logistics of seeking and adaptation. Herein was the theory of relativity, where transmigration philosophically promoted the idea of belonging to many places or people at the same time. The many worlds were everpresent. The theological dictum was to understand birth as a never ceasing process, carrying on the baggage of the past. The theory of social relationships was ingrained in this narrative, where forgetting was embedded in the chance to begin anew. Yet, one had to pay for the errors of the past, and bestow blessings of work and vocation as dedicated, a never changing duty, in this life time. Here, the linguistic shifter, the I, is always in a relation with past, present and future. From this past nebula of social memory, the caste system created a fortress of lost opportunities and gainful chance. Kinship charts, affectual/fictive kinship roles all became imbued with the local legends, the parallels and naming of local places. Through forms of socialization, cohesive solidarity was formed through assimilation. On one side, there was Rule of Law (now culturally defined as ‘human rights’ and a consequence of westernization) and on the other the Charter of moral conduct, received knowledges, oral histories and transmission of texts. Digitalisation as the Consequence of Post Modern Intermeshing of Technology and Narrative Dissemination In this context, we have the digital revolution. What is fiction? What is identification? How are some texts rendered invisible? What happens with what Barthes called The Death of the Author (Barthes 1977: 142) How many authors are there in the compilation of a text, whether it is sacred literature, or the collaboration of scientists writing a paper for learned journals? Can Science and Rationality pursue the question of the direction of relearning, assimilation, exclusion, marginalization and forms of association? This brings us to the question of legitimization. Can Dalit intellectuals accept non dalits writing about their existential situation? Digitalisation creates new platforms but can also make retrieval problematic by the continuous problems of disappearance. It could be virus, the surveillance nanny or power circuit breakdowns (Visvanathan 2012). How much can we learn from local practitioners by the utilization of oral testimony? Traditional knowledge is retained in many societies by the work of “hearing”. Work with fisherpeople in the 1990s defined how they were masters of the sea and could read the stars, clouds, waves and the behaviour of strains of fish across the different currents of the sea (Visvanathan 2022). Julip Valdedid Rivera describes how Andean peasants read the stars and clouds, the generosity of plants in flowering seasons, or their scarcity, to examine and prophecy about the season. Reading signs extend to behavior of the animals and to birds and insects, as well as deciphering dreams. The peasant/farmer when looking at seeds finds new ones, uses them, moving onward when some don’t seem to grow (‘The seed is not following me’, he thinks). Peru has the greatest genetic variety. The number of strains in the Andean world is equal to the number of strains found in the rest of the world. The issue is not about origins, but about conservation (Marglin 1998:67). Music, food, congregation are joyous accompaniments to work – there are songs for everything (ibid 76). The neighbourhood and the body, referred to as the aylu and the chakra are the sites of a complex intermeshing where everything becomes manifested as organic work and sacred. Much of migration for work in India, too, has as its reference point the alliance between family and kin networks as points of harbor and sustenance. It is here that we understand the ideological assumptions of caste as an umbrella of dispositions and obligations. Myths and their Political Significance Irawati Karve takes the question of caste, assimilation and political identity to its extreme in Yuganta. Kinship charts are expanded with reference to affectual kinship, friendship, fictive kinship. Parallels and legends are explored (Karve 1993). Naming of local places, processes of socialization, and the cohesive solidarity formed through interaction, antagonistic or complementary are examined. This analysis of narrative as a play of real life theologies, and social norms, brings us to the contestation between the Indian Constitution which appears as a charter of moral conduct in opposition to, or in compatible relation with Received Knowledge, Tradition, Oral Histories and Transmission of Texts. What follows from this is the problem posed by the Digital Revolution. It is not just about how many authors are there to a given text, many of whom may be apocryphal. The Barthesian phrase death of the author famously represents the unaccompanied text, it must stand the test of time alone, on its own worth. The central problem is to ascertain that science and rationality can pursue the question of relearning: Assimilation vs Exclusion and Marginalisation. There are different forms of Association which present the nature of legitimation. How much can we learn from the intelligentsia of the people. Are we willing to learn from farmers, fishers, and local communities? Varieties of discursive knowledge are after all about dissemination of information, a metalanguage of conceptual productivity. The Debate on Innateness as Intrinsic to Learning Noam Chomsky (2003) argues that generative grammar is the ability to learn a language. There exist representations of meaning, representations of form, and between the two there are dynamic relations. The relations are arbitrary. The relation between grammatical structure and its validation is the link between Truth, Reality and Factuality. The linguistic validity of “I persuaded him it was Tuesday” is a case in point, linguistically correct and ideologically manipulative. So current right wing (Hindutva) positions on science and medicine such as cosmetic surgery, warfare and aeronautics, are persuasively placed as originating in sacred histories. In Science, concepts change continually. In Social Sciences, positions are personalized, and appear as perspectives, biases and ideologies. These can become homogeneous. It becomes, for those ideologically placed, a question of honour not to change. To modify one’s position is unthinkable: accusations of ‘You are refuting yourself’ follow any change in a give situation. Chomsky’s argument that human learning is cumulative is result of conditioning, instinct, habit which are the reasons that knowledge grows. Animals can convey received imprints of learning. (Chomsky 2003: 9)The grammar of vision is neurological and retinal imprints, but humans have language. Learning from seeing is a form of conditioning but for Science and Social science – seeing is not always believing for cognitive state will depend on stimulus, and this in turn on conditions of behavior. (ibid: 34) With regard to behavior, Chomsky says rats have better proficiency with regard to learned history, as has been seen in their ability to approach mazes, and sometimes, they are better than college students(ibid 17). With regard to language, however the comparison is ofcourse, more difficult. Knowledge is dependent on understanding, and belief is larger than capacity. Capacity is a skill – learning English is a capacity. Cognitive structures distinguish it from concepts of capacity and skills. (ibid 22) Universal grammar is dependent on cognitive capacity. That ability is incorporated into experience, stimulus, conditions, behavior. Linguistic theory is an aspect of human biology (ibid 34). The innateness hypothesis will specify a cognitive capacity, the faculty of mind, the relations between faculty, modes of maturation, interventions among them which are set in time (ibid 54). Through this there is the common sense understanding, which is also always questioned by science (ibid 35). The chief units for analyses here are Belief, Expectation, Knowledge concerning nature and behavior of objects, their place in a system of natural kinds, the organization of these categories, and analyses of events. Innateness will include place and role of people’s nature and conditions of work, the structure of human action, will and choice. There will exist empirical facts which are qualitative or descriptive. Chomsky confirms that institutional facts are dependent on social relations. Discovery is the bases of understanding change. The purpose of language is to communicate as the heart’s purpose is to pump blood, by which he returns to the uniqueness of individual representation and collective forms of ideation. We communicate primarily with other people, but we also talk to ourselves (ibid 55). So for us there is a propensity to use language. These however are each compounded by rules. There has to be consent to use these rules. This extends to the shared understanding of meanings. What is the non verbal action such as a slammed door, silence, an art installation? Choice of rules, and consent to them, depend on current cognitive status. Language can be used to communicate, to distance, to intend to deceive, to avoid an embarrassing silence (ibid 76) The rules that a person “accepts” do not tell him/her/they what to say (ibid 77). Fiction as Metalanguage Fiction then can be read as a parallel narrative. It is directed to an audience, expecting a response shift from meaning to intention. This is different from mastering a language. It involves interaction with other faculties: to amuse, divert, exasperate involving the study of emotions. Acquiring a language and learning its rules is thus different from innate grammar. The ability to use and speak a language has large connotations. It is not only about what rules are constituted or accepted, but under what conditions these rules are accepted (ibid 144). A mystery would arise if we were to attempt to account for the development of rules in terms of practices and customs. The caste system, for instance, is an inheritance of rules, prescriptions and proscriptions. As one man in Palakkad, Kerala said to me, “Every caste has a different culture. No need for interactions between them in relation to food, marriage customs, presentations.” This forecloses the possibility of equality. It is for this reason that caste society based on status ascription is seen to be a closed system. Lateral solidarities and hierarchical interactions are played out as set rules for which there is a known vocabulary. Hierarchy and service are defined in terms of given relationships where rules are paramount. A particular cognitive state allows for the acceptance of rules. It does not tell him/her what to say. Under what circumstances do we violate these rules? Chomsky suggests that cognitive structures are given generally by specialized knowledge like physics or biology which are learned over time. Knowledge in physics is learned painfully over time, selectively through careful instruction transmitted and modified continually. Grammar and commonsense are organized in the same way as bipedalism. The brain has a speech centre, and it is specifically located. The child having the cognitive capacity for universal grammar will also have the ability to evaluate (ibid 144). Chomsky asks, Is commonsense or language learning equivalent to learning physics?(ibid 157). The debate between Piaget and Chomsky over innate and socialized knowledge has been masterfully chronicled by Piatteli-Palmarini (1983) who shows us that prioritizing nature or culture are problematic, since they are interlocked in dialogic ways. The Cultural Language of Power This is where Donna J Haraway discusses the notion of hierarchy. She refers to male primal domination. Women as foragers and food gatherers and gardeners are in charge of every day needs. However, masculine activities such as war and hunting were noticeable, the rest was seen to be the insignificant work of women based on love and responsibility. Sexuality, docility and subjugation were the recognized grammar. She writes, “Often the future is given by the possibility of a past. Sciences also act by legitimating metalanguages that produce homologies between social and symbolic systems.” (Haraway 1992: 42) The terrain of primatology (our link with the past) is the contested zone. The future is the issue. The contested zone is marked by capitalism and male domination (ibid). Biopolitics is organized around genetics. The code is lexical, it is to use the grammar of genes as a meaning system using signs, punctuation, semiotics, directional informational flow. Statistical control of the mass through sophisticated communication systems becomes a global phenomenon (ibid 46). Sociobiology and engineering are the key genetic principle. This leads to the formulaic language of Brain/Mind/ Sex/ Instinct as a given, which altruism mitigates. For Chimps it was male dominance and aggression, with favouritism to specific females during the fertile period. For humans there were coded cultural rules pertaining to marriage and prostitution. Dominance as a drive, according to Haraway was not sex specific. It was the organism’s basic hunger for social status ( ibid 53). Cultural parameters such as inheritance and gender meant that men tended to dominate. Inclusive fitness meant that women were absent in genealogies, naming tended to be patrilineal. At what level does selection occur? One would have to take into account kin selection, sexual selection, parental investment. For sociobiology, the gene is the greatest replicator (ibid 60). According to this argument, Nature provides for asexual selection to cast forth structured insect societies with only one reproductive pair, to role diversified societies with many reproducing members. Sociobiology analyses all behavior in terms of the great genetic market place (ibid 60). Sex is an evolutionary mover, which brings about competition and individualization, therefore plurality (ibid 62). This is not about group selection but for the genetic condition of continued system persistence (ibid 103). In the process of analyzing Labour vs Alienated Labour, the Feminist Question becomes the right of/to sexuality. Countering appropriation of sexual labour by men, women asserted their rights to autonomy of choice (ibid 138). The argument goes that if kinship vested rights in women, slavery abolished kinship for one group: whole groups were produced as alienable property( ibid 145). Prominent white feminists were married to well known white citizens but black women were owned by them. Race and sexuality are both social constructions, they are imaginary locations of the body. Jung’s assertion that men and women equally participated in the relation of anima and animus became a window towards freedom: a breaking away from stereotypes. The grammar of slavery, the lexical imagery was about free and unfree offspring (ibid 146). Slave mothers could not transmit a name, they could not be wives, they were outside the system of marriage exchange. Slaves were unpositioned, unfixed in a system of names; they were specifically unlocated and so disposable. In these discursive frames, white women were not legally or symbolically fully human; slaves were not legally or symbolically human at all. To give birth unfreely to the heirs of property is not the same as to give birth unfreely to property. To be subject in the Western sense meant reconstituting women outside the relations of objectification (as gift, commodity, object of desire) an appropriation ( of babies, sex, services) (ibid 146). For slaves – procuring freedom meant freedom from destruction through lynching, imprisonment, forced pregnancy, coercive sterilisation, inadequate housing, racial education, drug addiction (ibid). For white women, the concept of property in the self, the ownership of one’s own body in relation to reproductive freedom has more readily focused on the field of events around conception, pregnancy, abortion and birth. The divisibility of women’s writing is obscured by questions of marginality, altereity and difference. You have to be adopted by capitalist hegemonies to appear in the established scenario of success. The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity:the personal is political. It is both utopian while completely without innocence. No distinctions are made between the public and the private, the polarity dissolves. The cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household (ibid 151). Sexual objectification is to be defined by another’s desire. The result is illusion and desire. To be constituted by another’s desire is not the same as to be alienated from another’s labour, or from the product one makes (ibid 162). In the informatics of Domination the entry into cyberspace means two things: Homogeneity and Exclusion, Diversity and Variation. Successor Science with its known choreographies is replaced with partial knowledge, post modernist accounts of difference, leading to the material semiotic actor ( ibid 162).This fragmentation is simultaneously tragic and creative, leading to volatile emotions and starkly honest projections. Camaflouge is disowned. Angela Saini argues that Ashley Montagu showed logically that race was a myth to propogate hierarchization. It was the blurring of categories that made human life possible. Following this, the UNESCO took out a charter defining common human origins in species classification. (Saini 2019 18, 19).However the Covid epidemic in 2020 where media showed how deeply ingrained the difference in treatment was for differently coloured people in America.It brought back questions of racial segregation, as did the Black Lives Matter movement. Sarah Ahmed compels us to believe that any focus on difference and personal choice leads to both individuation and selection. We must understand the discomfort that arises from not fitting in, but speaking out…what then happens to the killjoy who will not be silenced? Feminism’s radical movements often arise from not looking back, from accepting class and gender locations, and asking questions about race and conventions. Inter racial meeting points allow for evolutionary histories of colour coding, where white feminisms self congratulatory moments depended on passing on labour and household tasks to others. Liberation of a few depended on the subjugation and control of many. The problem never went away. The moment that forced labour, leading to forced migration, sets up hierarchies of human placement, the problem returns, classically posed as questions of class and occupation in the developed and ‘undeveloped world.’ Much of the questions of the right to life and justice arose from third world ghettoization in the first world. 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Language and Learning: The Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Saini, Angela 2019: Race: The Return of Race Science. New Delhi: Harper Collins. Sinha Kapur, Nandini. 2011. Environmental History of Early India Delhi: Oxford University Press Visvanathan, Susan. 2012 Reading Marx, Weber and Durkheim Today. Delhi: Winshield Press 2019 Art, Politics, Symbols, Religion. Delhi: Winshield Press Acknowledgements: IISER Bhopal where this paper was read to Humanities and Social Science students on 16th January 2023. I’m grateful to K.V Cybil, Anandita Pan, Renny Thomas, Vinita Gowda and to Siva Umapathy for opportunities for interdisciplinary interaction. I am also grateful to Sowmya Dechamma, University of Hyderabad, and her team for their invitation to me, to give a keynote address at the Researchers at Work Conference, on “Communities in Context: Contesting Histories and Cultures”, at Centre for Comparitive Literature, 27th to 29th March 2023.