Refusal, Romanticism and Ground Realities in Northeast India
[Editors note: Questions on how theory can relate to everyday lives and realities have resurfaced with a force in the current context of a global pandemic and the multiple crises accompanying it. Our present global health crisis has fore-fronted matters of public health, the nature of the economy, ideas of the common good, and rapidly expanding surveillance states. It has also called for the reconsideration of concepts regarding politics, law, membership, and maintenance of borders that have been widely accepted in the last hundred years or so.
In India, many of these questions were being raised and reconfigured in the political context immediately preceding this global pandemic. This context was contoured by the formation and implementation of two laws, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019, and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), that drastically changed the country's constitutional set up of citizenship, rights, and imaginaries of the Indian nation. The CAA grants citizenship to select non-Islamic minorities from certain neighboring countries – Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh; while the NRC is the legalization of an ambiguously outlined set of processes to deem those without substantial documentation as illegal migrants. Both the laws explicitly enable the structural exclusion of minority membership within India, threatening, in particular, the citizenship of the country’s vast Muslim populations. Following nation-wide protests and counter-protests that have been sustained in myriads of ways even after the imposition of a brutal lockdown, the different branches of the Indian state have continued to defend the exclusive criteria and implications of these laws.
In this article Suraj Gogoi, a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the National University of Singapore examines the tension between ‘theory’ and ‘ground realities’ in writing on the completed yet contested NRC process in India’s North-Eastern state of Assam.]
by Suraj Gogoi
I
‘Your views are devoid of ground realities’, they ‘lack in-depth ground realities’, your social theory is ‘inadequate and muddles the discourse on the ground’, and it is ‘too theoretical’, among others. These are some of the usual allegations academics and writers encounter from various quarters. Why are academics and writers alleged of not knowing the ground, particularly during a political crisis?
Academics are constantly told that they need to pay attention to ground realities. What are these grounds? If some academics see their task as formulating theoretical concepts to best represent the grounds they observe, what are the distinct ways in which theory relates and reflects these grounds? Are theories constructed before looking at the ground or do we build theories from ground realities? Finally, are academics the only humans who use theory? This article is an attempt to address some of these questions.
Academics and writers must take these questions seriously, particularly with the coronavirus pandemic. The virus changes each molecule of our existence and the grounds we tread on now are different and infected. Maintaining social distance has been turned in to a vocation to save lives and feel safe or remain safe. Everything normal is an exception now and we live on exceptional grounds under the shadow of panic and anxiety.
Somewhere in a char (sand-bar) in Boitamari, Bongaigaon, a few men carry a bamboo wall of a house to be re-built in a different place, as the previous location of the house near a river was eroding very fast. This is a typical sight in char-chapori scapes in Assam and a symbol of liminal life. Source: Suraj Gogoi
The intent of the article is two-fold. First, the article seeks to uncover the ecology of academic work on the background of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process in contemporary Assam, which aims to identify 'illegal' citizens in the Northeast Indian state. In the process, it seeks to critique the non-intellectual role of sections of intellectuals amidst the inhumanity and cruelty of the NRC process, and the hegemony of Assamese nationalism. Secondly, in addressing these criticisms, the various grounds of such critique —underground, overground, background, foreground, groundlessness—will also be explored. It does so in order to demonstrate the limitation of critique which resorts to questions of 'ground' and 'theory' in order to de-legitimize critical intellectual work. Finally, this analysis is brought to bear on the refusal and de-legitimization of knowledge, experience, and history in Northeast India.
II. Non-intellectual intelligentsia
Intellectual and academic work is hard. It is work after all. Like any labor process, we enter into a market and devote our labor to it. This market entails the entire field of academics which may include teaching and research of various kinds both inside and outside of the university. We are certainly responsible for our work, like any worker ought to be, and are judged based on the product (ideas too) that we produce. Intellectual work is also constantly under scrutiny, as it should be. In our current environment, and not for the first time in history, there are widespread misconceptions about the background of an intellectual. They are thought to be those who only teach in universities, are formally educated in one, and as sitting in arm-chairs and passing judgments on society. On the contrary, there are many kinds of intellectuals. For me, an intellectual is one who is committed to human freedom and establishing the sameness of humanity over differences. Intellectuals speak truth to power. Voltaire, Zola, Luxemburg, and Ambedkar are shining examples of such a tradition.
An intellectual, for me, is someone who is linked to the ethics and justice of a victim, real or perceived - it could be a person or a social category. They engage in ethico-political, and not purely political but ‘mixed’, acts in mounting an a priori defense of individuals, groups and communities, expressed through speech and writing. Intellectual writing may include testimonies, petition signing, etc. The intellectual is the witness of the victim, one who writes about the victim’s suffering and defends their rights. One can be both a victim and an intellectual. The works of Primo Levy lives among us as a testimony of that which is the most direct democratic representation of the victim, as with any testimony. Along with the perpetrator, the victim and the intellectual form a ‘triad of inseparables’, and in this relationship we see the whole intellectual canvas.
There is a difference between the intellectual and the intelligentsia. In 19th century Russia, the intelligentsia was used for the first time and it designated someone who was a recipient of university education making them eligible for 'professional occupation'. This class of people was equated to the new middle class and for many writers included everyone who was not engaged in all non-manual occupations. Intellectuals, as Tom Bottomore tells us, were a much smaller class who contributed directly to the 'creation, transmission, and criticism of cultural products and ideas. Intellectuals could be writers, artists, scientists, technologists, philosophers, religious thinkers, lawyers, social and political commentators. Bottomore further adds that in ‘non-literate’ societies intellectuals also surface in the form of “magicians and priests, poets and minstrels, or genealogists.” Even translators function as intellectuals.
Ali Shariati saw intellectuals of his time as those ‘who were the farm owners of Ta'if, or importers of goods from Iran, Byzantium, Yemen, and Syria. They were also those who were comparatively more exposed to other cultures and religions which was made possible through commerce. He also warned that free thinkers should not become leaders.
The Chinese literati came close to becoming a governing elite, however, a statistical account of the literati from 1600-1900 indicates that 30% of them came from commoner backgrounds. In India, the Brahmins functioned as the intellectual caste, a position given to them by the violent and oppressive form of division of labor, endorsed by religion. However, the social origins of the modern intellectuals can be placed in the humanistic teachings in the universities of Medieval Europe. A large section of them opposed the ruling class and church. Modern intellectuals as we know are understood in that historical context as critics of society. They are also considered as an elite, but one which is different from the traditional elite.
Intellectuals can also be inheritors of the earlier ruling class. They can come to support or represent the interest of the present ruling class. A non-intellectual intelligentsia always existed in Assam and with the NRC process we saw its convergence with and their loud support to the process. Syed Hussein Alatas, a renowned de-colonial thinker, qualified the non-intellectual as someone who supports the ideas of a dominant group. A non-intellectual in Assam mirrors the dominant position in Assamese society, driven by their class and caste interest. For instance, Udayon Mishra notes in his article ‘Why Many in Assam See the National Register of Citizens as a Lifeline,’ that the NRC is the ‘Ayush Rekha’ or lifeline of the Assamese people. Such a view outright erases and ignores the pain and suffering of lakhs of people who have undergone material impoverishment trying to prove their citizenship. Such an attitude towards the politically debilitating NRC is also visible among loyalists of Assamese nationalism who want everyone who is not ‘ethnic Assamese’ to assimilate into Assamese culture. Non-intellectuals have always supported this kind of assimilation.
The Goalpara detention centre under construction in Matia village, Goalpara district, Assam. Detention Centres are being built to detain ‘illegal immigrants’ across India under the NRC process. With a capacity of 3000 inmates, the detention centre at Goalpara is the largest detention centre in India. Soure: Suraj Gogoi.
We witnessed most public intellectuals in Assam fall into the non-intellectual type of intelligentsia that Alatas identifies, in extending their support to NRC. This is an example of intellectuals behaving like non-intellectuals. The non-intellectual intelligentsia in Assam is also the anti-intellectual who sings the chorus of Assamese nationalism and plays it safe, safer than an Efren Reyes play at the pool table. In his article ‘non-citizens and history’, Sanjib Baruah concedes: 'the efforts made by the two-person Supreme Court bench and those in charge of the process to make the final NRC complete and accurate are impressive, and they are likely to pay off.'
The intellectual work of these public intellectuals is now limited to opposing fascists forces, and speaking of how the mainstream in India fails to understand the region of Northeast India. This vision is not just deficient but faulty because it offers a limited understanding of how people from North East India have been misrepresented. The misunderstanding about the region and people is not only performed by ‘mainland people’, but also by the ‘indigenous’ and ‘local people’ about their own culture and internal differences. In doing so, they have conveniently ignored the internal dominance and differences of one’s own culture and the power structure that runs through the veins of its culture. At once, the limited public intellectual has devoted his vocation to serve the ruling class which hopes to ground its hegemonic culture.
Their words are carefully crafted to appeal to the gallery, and it signals a failure to do responsible intellectual work, which is to be critical of the NRC process and one's society. In other words, they failed to represent the victim and critique the process that created the victim. At the federal level in India, such a position is seen in someone like Yogendra Yadav who refuses to oppose NRC in total by suggesting the exception of the Assam case.
III. The multiple grounds of ‘ground realities’
Anthropologists like Sherry B. Ortner have shown us how multiple identities are to be found in one individual and that multiplicity is achieved through fragmented and shifting selves. This fragmentation and shifting of one’s identity or the multiplicity of identities in one person can be read as moving between different grounds from where we position ourselves as individuals. In other words, as individuals we are pulled in different directions and we are never in one ground. Intellectual work is not just an act of being on a static ground.
Overground and underground are two other zones where an academic must venture. An intellectual ought to speak from the grounds of the anti-hero, in ways similar to how Dostoevsky paints suffering and self-punishment from the underground. As Ludwig Wittgenstein would say, philosophy is an activity that should reside above or below natural sciences, not besides it in terms of how philosophical intellectuals offer our understanding in clarifying propositions logically. For him, only by scratching below the surface can we come to think differently and find new directions. He writes: “It (difficulty) has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way.” When we think of identities, background also becomes an important reference point, both for academics in particular, and society at large. Phenomenologically speaking, pre-suppositions, and backgrounds provide the basis of any culture, its life-world.
Violence creates chaos and groundlessness for the victims. In the face of violence not only do history and myth collapse into each other, but our references in life also undergo erosion, in parts or entirely. Seemingly, our life which is filled with gestures, memory, and metaphors also undergo tremendous stress. Say for instance, in a state of communal violence, when adjacent families start to kill each other, the idea of neighborhood, which is built out of reciprocity, trust, respect, exchange, and maybe even safety or keeping safe, breaks down. What happens when the man next door, starts shooting, breaking down, or burning houses? Most likely, until the moment of recovery arrives, there is a suspension of meanings and reasons. Under such suspension, there is a serious rupture in the modalities through which life is experienced. In essence, we find ourselves in chaos, a kind of groundlessness. The NRC process has created such a groundlessness for the ‘illegal’ citizen, left out in the cold to face the might of bureaucracy alone as the burden of proof lay on their flesh.
This groundlessness or a break with the quotidian activities of life establishes a ‘non-philosophical’ ground from where we re-articulate our everyday life. It is, in essence, the ‘collapse of the referent’ and our existing background of life. Under such circumstances, common sense becomes insensible, invalid, and uncommon, which provides the ground for groundlessness.
Family members of Kharka Bahadur Gurung in Sadiya, Tinsukia district, Assam. Gurung was among the many people who committed suicide in 2018, unable to live with the humiliation of being called a foreigner or an illegal migrant. In the photo his wife Sashi Kala Gurung and son Ranjan Gurung. Source: Suraj Gogoi
Clearing one's ground is a useful exercise that shows us other things on the ground. It means overcoming one's xenophobia and hidden hegemonies on the ground. In fact, it is an act of 'clearing the ground'. Being ‘on the ground’ at all times might dangerously make the ground itself static. By being on a static ground, one might be trapped in the hegemonic discourse of dominant groups. One can only cultivate a critical faculty by moving between and across different grounds.
IV. ‘Ground realities’
When intellectuals and writers are accused of being ‘too theoretical’, it does not mean that ones who accuse them of such a thing are not theoretical themselves. Rather, this is a matter of ‘competing theories’. People who dub any analysis as theoretical often back up their claim with alternate explanations of ‘ground realities’. So, they too have a competing theory which they use to dismiss another theory or explanation of the what, why, and how of an event or society. What is theory if not also the what, why, and how of things?
Bimal Akoijam lays out four possibilities of engaging with the critiques of ‘ground reality’. First, these critiques might indicate a discord or a disjunction between theory and the explanation of that theory or analysis. Second, it might mean that one cannot comprehend the language or the analysis used. Third, ‘one knows the analysis, but does not want to face the responsibility which knowing entails’. Fourth, one sees it as a matter of self-preservation where one understands that the analysis is knowable but rejects/refuses it based on fear of violence or oppressive situation.
I want to add a fifth possibility. An objection or refusal to analyze could be to preserve social capital and an existing body of dominant scholarship, which explains and dominantly understands the ground and seeks to establish a monopoly of that understanding. Here, opposition to dominant power is resisted by scholars who are the intellectual leaders of the scholarship which finds itself being questioned. Such scholarships enjoys the solidarity of an army of loyal supporters who believe and promote such a scholarship. Seemingly, such solidarity creates the boundaries of in-groups, a kind of endogamy (of all kinds of social, political, economic, academic). The membership of such an endogamous group cuts across social classes and locations.
V. Social Honour and Ethnographic Refusal
Solidarities can create a sense of ‘social order’ shaped around a network that grants social capital to its members and allows for power to be distributed among limited group members. Social honor gained from this can become the basis of power because people form in-groups based on such honor. That social order is eventually presented as a social consensus. This myth of consensus generates social power which is imposed on dissenters in a particular field. Hence, we see the formation of a specific type of class that is invested in marking boundaries based on these grounds of solidarity.
This resultant honor by supporting such a group within the class, upon assessment within the group or its leaders, allows for a certain status or stand, as Max Weber puts it. The assessment of this honor is also tied to certain performance and adherence of characteristics and mannerism of its group members in the public (think how academic capital might function). Hence, one can locate how honor and status is a matter of preference and performance, and not linked to class or caste situation alone. A new class that lives in strict endogamy is possible by adhering to certain lifestyles.
A wall inscription in Guwahati, Assam during the CAA protest . Wall art/graffiti were extensively used in the city as a site to express hate for migrants. The text in the image reads as follows: āche hengdāngloānāi lole hengdāngrakhyānāi (the hengdāng/sword is there but hasn’t been taken up/if it’s taken up there’s no respite).
In contemporary Assam, solidarity is seen among the nationalist on the grounds of exploitation of the indigenous by 'foreigners', exploitation and ignorance by 'mainlanders', and a faulty critique which states that anyone who isn't from Assam cannot know what the reality is (in other words grounds). They are also the ones demanding a 'free and fair' NRC process. The way the discourse of consensus has unfolded in Assam with respect to the NRC fits the 10th Thesis on Politics outlined by Rancière, where 'consensus is the reduction of politics to police' and is never associated with peace. He adds: the 'essence (of consensus) lies in the annulment of dissensus…in the nullification of surplus subjects'.
Such solidarity created around consensus also gives way to a network, a social capital, whose members share the honor equally. This explains the positions of some intellectuals like Hiren Gohain, who justified his outright support for the NRC process, despite the procedural violence and biases inherent in the process, in the name of consensus of the majority. Gohain has argued that it is the lack of consensus in Assam's history which has caused it to be so bloody and ‘Muslims bore the full brunt of it’. However, it is evident that a consensus about the NRC in Assam has also led to structural violence, suicides, and impoverishment.
Leading the discourse of assimilation in the early decades of the 20th century in Assam were intellectuals such as Ambikagiri Raychoudhury and Nilmani Phukan. In the eyes of these intellectuals, the Na-Asamiyas or the earlier migrants from East Bengal to Assam had to be assimilated into Assamese society on grounds that they speak ‘our tongue’ (Assamese), attend Assamese schools, and share/practice ‘our culture’ as their primary culture. The same came to hold true for the Nepalis. Here, we see the emergence of stratification, cultivated through practice and belief in a particular kind of social honor and ideology which was arrived at by practicing a particular culture. The consensus manufactured by intellectuals in Assam around NRC, produced damaging effects on how social life came to be organized and shared among communities.
There is an inherent problem with assimilation in general. First, assimilation assumes that the culture to which one assimilates into is a priori respectable. In Assam, assimilation of migrants into Assamese culture carried with it an air of consensus. Slowly but surely both the assimilated and the one who asks the 'other' to assimilate begin to consider the culture of the former to be inferior, unwanted, hidden, and devalued. Secondly, as Albert Memmi noted, assimilation is the opposite of colonization. It eliminates the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, between the dominated and the dominant. Assimilation is seen as a peace building entity and it remains a dominant ideology among the intellectuals of Assam when it comes to the question of migration in Assam. This ideology eventually helps draw and redraw the boundaries of concerns and commitments that allow one to refuse the grounds of history that bring about the discourse of assimilation.
We have gatekeepers everywhere, both in academics and society. These gatekeepers often draw the measurements of a discipline or culture. Such gatekeepers, primarily the elites within any class, discipline, or society, regulate the boundaries and performances that come to be considered in-group within that particular class or culture. Assamese nationalism has always defined the measurements of belonging in and to Assam. The same definition also includes a careful handpicking of historical time and nature of assimilation which distinguishes a set of migrants to be part of Assamese society and the rest to be ‘foreigners and aliens’. One can see how a debate on detention camps, NRC, or Miyah poetry in Assam sends public opinions into a never-ending cycle of defending assimilation, even attacking those who don’t.
Ethnonationalism in Assam wants the detection, deportation, and deletion of names from the National Registry of Citizens of 'foreigners’ in Assam. In the official Register, anyone who entered Assam as a state of domicile after 24th March 1971 is a foreigner. The NRC process in Assam aimed to document ‘illegal’ people in Assam so that they could be identified and deported. Ethno-nationalists have demonstrated political blindness to not just the victims of the NRC process, about also to those who commit suicide and languish in detention camps created to sustain the protests. This blindness has been justified by ethnonationalists who argue that the victims of the NRC and its detention camps are outsiders and add negatively to the status of being Assamese. When solidarity towards the life and rights of the victims of NRC surface we find a strong counter-expression of regressive Assamese regional politics and a naked display of social honor and endogamy of dominant groups in the state. This includes intellectuals, questioning the grounds of history, culture, and belonging. Such ethnonationalism is so deep in our bones that ‘hating’ the 'Bangladeshi’ in Assam has become a socially respectable thing, opposing such a view is seen as a deviant and anti-cultural. That is the ethnonationalist ground where the victim either has to grow accustomed to not having the support of an intellectual or is forced to make peace with the intellectuals misrepresenting them. The best deals recognized intellectuals have given victims are in the form of assimilation and the NRC, unleashing severe kinds of violence and humiliation in their lives.
Such rejection of grounds besides those that provide social honor in the current environment can also be read as ‘ethnographic refusal’. Ethnographic refusal operates through a rejection of the distribution of sensible politics. This refusal involves the ignorance of internal differences and contradictions such as one’s hegemony and dominance. People who support the NRC process do not want their intentions to be questioned nor do they want to discuss the production, extermination, and the experience of the NRC victims. Even wanting a ‘free and fair’ NRC is a romantic idea because it believes that collateral damage is necessary for removing the stigma attached to the ‘illegal’ body in Assam. Free and fair NRC discourse is no different from the martyr discourse. The cost of ethnographic refusal is the production of sanitized indigenous politics as flawless, pure, and one that is capable of only becoming a victim and not a perpetrator.
Ethnographic refusal of multiple, fragmented, fluid, plural, and split subjectivities and cultures give way to Assamese hegemony which not only narrows its own identity but erases the multiple ‘tribal’ and ‘indigenous’ identities that inevitably are contained within it. In other words, it refuses inter-subjectivity, multiple subjectivities, and the changing self too. In the process, it presents a sanitized culture and politics of the indigenous which is incapable of looking inside and remains romanticized both from inside and the outside. We need to find a way to write the history and culture of the indigenous which is devoid of such purity and romanticism, and not lose sight of any dominance and resistance. Ethnographic refusal of the indigenous in the Northeast makes it impossible to write such accounts.
VI. The standing ground
In other words, people who dismiss academics of not being aware of the ground do so because either they don’t know of these multiple grounds outlined above, or know them but don’t want to be read on those grounds for they adhere to an army that defends a different framing of grounds. The latter ground is where the dominant ideas/ideologies and ruling class interest rest. It is a ground where caste and other traditional hierarchies are given shelter. It is a ground from where support for NRC also emerges. It is from the same ground they perceive the instruments of harassment of NRC and engage in a tongue in cheek persuasion of foreigner free Assam. The NRC process has changed the ground we tread on and turned many intellectuals into non-intellectuals and theorists into anti-theorists.
Public gathering in a CAA protest organized in January, 2020 by the artist collective of Assam in Sadiya. Source: Suraj Gogoi
Questions relating to grounds is also a way of making a claim to knowledge of a society and culture. Similarly, we also hear another set of complaints such as 'you won't understand our sentiments' or 'if you are not an Assamese you won't understand us'. Such a view asserts that it is impossible for someone who is not a part of Assamese society to understand the concerns of the Assamese. Such a statement is as good as saying that if you are not a Hindu you won't understand Hindu nationalism. To limit the knowledge of Assamese culture and history to just its members is nothing but a desperate attempt to hide xenophobia, caste character, and chauvinism that remains essential to Assamese nationalism and its sympathizers. This boundary-making around knowledge shows how Assamese is a language with an army, navy, and a hengdang (sword) that seeks to protect its grounds.
Moreover, the work of people who dismiss critical work, as Akoijam notes, is to de-legitimize a particular kind of intellectual work because, by invoking ground realities, one refrains from evaluating and engaging with the analysis offered of social realities. Those who dismiss social theory in the name of ground realities do so to appeal to a certain status and earn honor by the mere act of opposing a counter-view.
*Suraj Gogoi is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the National University of Singapore.