Indigenity

I finished my first chapter 2 weeks ago and it was beautiful. Seriously in disbelief that I wrote something I actually enjoy reading so much, afterwards. 

The discovery of this ridiculousness pulled me.

  My silly humble blog (which is only read by a cluster of friends on facebook) has around 3000 views, in 2 years. The Indian Government's Department of Tribal Affairs website has at current count, 128 000. That's like only 40 fold more... what the fuck. Also, it describes Adivasis as characterised by the following:

Primitive Traits

SERIOUSLY, RUDE.

Geographical isolation 

True

Distinct culture

Could you find a more vapid, vague descriptor? Greek people have a distinct culture, people in Liverpool have a distinct culture. Knitting society on campus has a distinct culture.

Shy of contact with community at large

Wrong. They have always been in contact with "mainstream" India, always.

Economically backward

This is as paternalistic and myopic as claiming them to be 'primitive'. It implies a bizarre logic of human welfare where growing your own veggies and eating them is not productive, but buying them off someone else is. And oh god, the word "backward"... I don't even.

Since last Friday, I've been through a bit of a whirlwind.

Kevin Rudd announced his announcement. Something exploded inside me and I spent the night pacing up and down, then venting on my laptop. I changed my profile picture to "seeking asylum is a human right" like everyone else. I changed my cover photo and I made a status on the issue. I liked every other relevant status and profile picture. I wrote a tumblr post. I usually find all of that rather tacky online behaviour but in my overexcited state it seemed like the only thing I could do! I even decided to write for Honi Soit. In my email pitching the article, I apologised that I hadn't written all year because I forgot I was a reporter. I hadn't forgotten, of course. Since they accepted my application last year, I've been too scared to write in a paper which many read from cover to cover. But, I was so emotionally overwhelmed that all my hesitations dissolved in that moment.

The next morning, we went to the beautiful Helensburgh temple for a family thing. I was incredibly sleep-deprived but it was lovely. Helensburgh temple is the only temple in Australia that I really approve of. The best, of course, are all in India.

I went to the State library to study on Sunday, after some petty tiffs with my mum about my room. I thought, it wasn't the best environment to concentrate in. I wasn't so great at the library either... my cousin sent me a message to join her at the Aroma festival in Circular Quay and of course I couldn't resist. It was great: scabbing free coffee (never mind that I hate coffee- it was free!), eating good food, spoiling my three-year old nephew to bits when his mother wasn't around and cooing at his six-month old brother. I walked off with the older nephew at one point on a mission to locate a babyccino. He took every opportunity to climb any tree in sight, no matter how scrawny they were (like, saplings a foot taller than him). When I came back, it turned out that we had bumped into another cousin, his wife and six-month old baby. And my uncle and aunt. CHRIST. On my way back to the library, some Georgian guy asked for my number teeheehee

Monday I bummed.

On Tuesday I went to a protest to support Jonathon Moylan (google him- he's a political prisoner of big banks trying to destroy Leard State Forest). I heard all the exciting news from my friends who got on TV calling the Prime Minister a racist coward to his face and then we went to a meeting of activists for asylum seekers (not the RAC! eugh). That was heartening too, and I met some great people. I had to leave early to and watch Bhaag Milkha Bhaag with my cousin. It's the story of a refugee (yup...) from Pakistan who saw his entire family being slaughtered alive during partition- he escaped to India, joined the army, through which he became one of the greatest athletes of his time. Based on the true, inspiring (apart from the army glorifying bit... ugh) story of Milkha Singh. I stayed over at my cousin's place til the next morning, running around with her boys. I love them so much. 

I studied at the library after that and went to a party in Newtown. Went back home, bummed the next few days and had another fiery exchange with my supervisor. A thesis is an exercise in ego-management.

Still reading this? Good. Now I actually get to the point.

I spent Friday morning with a pair of young refugee girls. Their story is just awful: one of the worst I've ever heard, but they requested me not to repeat it to anyone. Just trust me, it's bad. I spent the morning showing them how to get to the rally on Sunday.

It was the first time they had been out in public since they lived in Indonesia, a year ago (relatively short stay in detention, thank God). It was the first time they had seen any of Australia beyond the four walls of their home/detention centre and the first time they had even caught public transport! For me it was a strange experience, like interacting with a very intelligent pair of toddlers; in the sense that they were so raw, innocent and clueless about the mechanics of society. They didn't even know anything about Sydney, except that it's a city in Australia and it has an Opera House (?).

The girls weren't particularly impressed with Granville: "it's very quiet". When we got on the bus they were watching me very closely. "You must give the money to the driver?" "Do you have to tell him where you're going?" "There are many Muslims in Australia?" I could feel them surreptitiously eye every person who crossed our path. Sometimes their innocent curiosity got a little awkward: "There are so many Chinese people!" We arrived in the city, walked through Wynyard, Pitt Street, George Street and Hyde Park. They loved it.

I felt (Because they've had a shitty past? Because they're new? Because they're wearing hijabs?) like I needed to guard them the whole time. I really, really, really didn't. These girls have seen and done ten times more that I ever will in my life. They can take on a stroll through Sydney City. By the end of our excursion, their quiet strength left me dumbfounded. At 17 and 18, these girls are essentially in charge of fending for their family of 10. They are nearly fluent in English, despite having learnt it for less than a year. The older one isn't allowed to do, literally, anything for the foreseeable future but she's striving so hard to acquire skills that can help her get a job or assist her family. She was very insistent on learning how to drive. 

I was incredibly impressed that they found their way home, alone. That involves finding the right platform, getting on the right train, getting off at the right station, finding the right terminus at the bus stop, negotiating bus tickets, getting off at the right stop and walking a few streets home. This might all sound a little silly but each of those steps is a HUGE deal, if you have absolutely no familiarity with the concept of public transport. It took me 2 months to sort it out when I started Uni. I met them at the rally (which they travelled to and from alone, no fuss) on Sunday and they had even made plans to travel to Silverwater.

They were on Manus Island. I tried to ask experience was like but they wouldn't say much beyond "it is such a very terrible place". I tried again later, they could only tell me that it was really "so terrible".

On Saturday, I went to Villawood with the express purpose of doing interviews for my article. It started off really awkward. I was getting sick so I was pretty well, zonked out. They were hungry (Ramadan). Also, I had no idea what to say or how to start. This is literally how it went:

"so uh, this is what my article is about... do you have something to say?" 

"the Australian image of us is not correct"

"yeah uhh, can you say why?"

"we are not like that!"

More than a decade has passed since the problem of boat people came to the fore of national attention yet the debate still remains rather confused. As we veer between "solutions", asylum seekers are ping-ponged from island to island across the Southern Hemisphere. This is foregrounded by a debate that is largely fueled by histrionic yet vague catchphrases, regurgitated in increasingly screeching tones. 

Amidst the fracas, it seems to pass largely unnoticed that the images conjured of asylum seekers often completely contradict each other- even from the same side. Sometimes, it’s in the very same sentence: Kevin Rudd claimed that that his Pacific solution version 3.0 addresses needs for “border security and orderly migration” (protecting us from them) but also “fulfilling our legal and compassionate obligations under the refugees convention” (we need to protect them). In any case, that is a sick, strange fulfilment of compassionate obligation… politicians say the darnedest things!

In this vein, the threat asylum seekers pose oscillates dizzyingly between xenophobic concerns of national security, to making us “too full”, to what must be an attempt at human compassion: the threat invited into their own lives when venturing across the Indian Ocean. Jessica Watson did the same thing in 2011 for leisure but she was youthful and blonde so… Kevin Rudd made her Young Australian of the Year. Narratives which nonetheless do acknowledge the incredible challenges asylum seekers must overcome, sit comfortably alongside portrayals of opportunistic, dole-bludging leeches. In any case, it all points to one unshakeable conclusion: don’t let them in. They jumped the (generally unspecified) queue.

Mari Marcel Thekaekara supports a new Survival International campaign to change Indias opinion of tribal people.

life is so fucking weird.

I woke up this morning feeling crap and stressed about the day ahead of me because I wouldn't be able to work on my thesis. I went to paint with my toddler nephew, felt better. My cousin mentioned something about Papua New Guinea and I freaked out a little bit but I figured the LABOR PARTY (merely by virtue of not being the alternative) wouldn't do something a sick as that and brushed it under he carpet. I came home, hurriedly got ready for a 21st and ran there (it was just a few streets away). I had an amazing time and I am pretty drunk. I got home at 3:00 am to a pair of fuming parents. eh

Then I read about this. Fuck them all I am so angry. Australian politics is the very worst; this belies the most basic human decency. I can't believe I actually want the conservative, slimy, fuckwitted Liberal party to win this election now.

I want to understand whether justice for Adivasis can/should be pursued through the establishment, by employing feminist state theory.

This is very vaguely based on a workshop at a shitty student conference that I was going to run. I didn't because the conference was too shitty and I pulled out.

I started at university nearly four years ago, at 17. I was an idiot. If I could go back in time, I'd slap myself really hard: I regularly used the word "gay", I thought feminism was "retarded", I wanted a nice boy to come and save me so we could build a cottage on a hill with muslin curtains. Thankfully, I was at least anti-capitalist and green.

That's changed. I still want the cottage on a hill... but I don't need to be saved. It's an incredibly tired cliché but university has opened the world up to me. I'm involved in radical student politics and I guess, I am now everything that 'leftism' typically represents. But there's one thing about it that will forever get on my nerves.

Let's rewind to the point when I got involved in activism. One of the colleges at my university decided to have a British colonialism themed party. Exclusively sub-continental waiters, dressed in Indian clothes served some of the most elite white kids in the country. I was livid. And the blood was going to boil out of my skin when I realised how fucking poorly it was being addressed by the university, which wanted to cover it up from the media. I felt powerless behind a facebook screen (where I was venting all my anger to a friend), and that's what prompted me to join student politics. Fun.

One of the first things I did was attend a meeting of the anti-racism collective. It was awful- with the exception of two people they were all self-important white kids. Maybe I'm being a little uncharitable here, but at the time I was quite angry and that was exactly what they struck me as. They weren't discussing the Raj party at all, but focused solely on two issues- the NT intervention and refugees. That's because, the anti-racism collective on campus only focuses on the NT intervention and refugees. Both of these are issues I feel very strongly about, but racism in Australia is NOT isolated to these instances!

In essence, there is nobody on campus actually addressing racial injustice (properly) and as far as I'm concerned, to ignore injustice is the same as perpetuating it. The university is a very important site of political activism so this sucks :-( Even the political left only pay lip-service to the endemic problem of racism.

I think this is a part of a larger cultural problem in Australia. We've all been fed with ideals, since school of being the land of the "fair go" and to contest this image is taboo. I've been watching a few of the videos of racist bus rants and reading about racism in the news. Despite the increasing frequency, there is never acknowledgement of a systemic problem that underlies every incident: it's always fobbed off as one raving lunatic.

Additionally, it needs to be noted that racism is not perpetrated by white people alone, just as sexism isn't just the fault of men. In my experience, most explicit racism is horizontal. There's this idiotic idea that being a PoC legitimates bigotry against other PoC. I have never heard a white person use the term "fob" and it's other Indians, not white people, who have made me feel the need to "edit" my ethnic-ness. Also, the Anti-Racism Collective is just a bunch of people who just meet on the grass once a week, why aren't there more PoC involved? The white kids can't entirely be blamed for their white-ness.

I'm not entirely blameless. I spent a long time actively avoiding India as a case study for le thesis.

I think there’s another important site of racism that’s regularly overlooked: (drumroll………) academia. In the late 1960s, a number of women realised that there was a huge vacuum in the political and academic left that hadn’t engaged with the position of women. The other, more prolific ideology of oppression at the time was Marxism and so they tried to position women somewhere with relation to class structures. This led to some of them trying to subsume patriarchal relations within Marxist class, others to see it entirely outside capitalism, and yet others to consider the relationship in a much more fluid sense (ok this is incredibly crude version but that’s the essence of it). In any case, the fight to bring feminism within the purview of academia, as a legitimate subject of discussion was not easy, but it eventually carved its own niche in the social sciences. Feminist analysis today is incredibly nuanced, diverse and well-theorised. No such struggle happened for academic racism, except, like some vague consciousness which started to seep in by the 80’s: "iz bad, omg dun do it".

This year, one of my courses for Honours required us to delve into The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen. Many of the anecdotes he uses and many of the philosophers he quotes are Indian. To my own horror, I caught myself scoffing at this fact. My first reaction was to assume that they wouldn’t be legit.

After I noticed this thought process, I started to think about my overall experience at university. It’s a common topic of debate that the mass media sucks at representing ethnic people. Well, academia is shit too. In all these years of study, almost everything I’ve read has been the story told by dead, white guys. They are the Protectors and Producers of Important Ideas, for all the world to follow. Philosophy is Kant, Hobbes, Locke. Economics is Smith, Marx and Keynes, though I guess, we did once touch on some Latin authors. In all the units of Government and International Relations I did, I don’t even think a single major theorist was non-white (except maybe in the Politics of China). This made me start to think about my own ideas of  The more I think about it, the more frustrating it is, because I’ve always heralded academia as a kind of enlightened bubble outside the drudgery and ignorance of the "real world": it ain’t.

I don't know why this is the case but tumblr is far less intimidating than the blank, unflinching gaze of an empty Microsoft Word document (which actually only gets worse when I start adding words). Here goes! If you're out there and you have ANYTHING insightful about what I write, PLEASE don't hesitate to let me know! I will love you to the end of my days. I really need some help on the state theory bits.

In the Indian imagination, the Adivasi has historically represented "backwardness", resulting in exclusion from broader society in no small measure. Adivasi communities typically occupy rather limited space in public debate, despite the fact that they constitute nearly 8% of the population, numbering over 84.3 million (Ambagudia, 2011). In the cases where Adivasi communities are addressed by the mass media, discourse rarely progresses beyond themes of exoticised Adivasi art, fringe Maoist insurgencies, or land dispossession in the Narmada region. It may also be said, to an extent, that this marginalisation even persists in academia. Despite constituting the greatest number of indigenous peoples within the confines of a nation state, engagement with the Adivasi predicament has been somewhat sidelined in the global scholarship on indigeneity. In light of all this, it is unsurprising that historically, the Indian state has systematically disempowered Adivasi communities: their languages are unrecognised, their lands forcibly excised, their customs demeaned. This is despite a constitutional recognition of ‘differentiated citizenship’ (Young, 1989) whereby the state has explicitly recognised that Adivasis are persecuted and have been historically excluded).  Indeed, the particular rights of Adivasis, who are framed as “scheduled tribes” are addressed by as many as 209 Articles and 2 special schedules of the Constitution (In Bijoy, 2003; pp.1). The existing literature engages with the relationship between the state and Adivasis in various ways: however, there has been a marked absence of rigorous theorisation of the nature of the state itself, which has contributed to this.