https://doi.org/10.37050/ci- 19_06
RASHMI VARMA
Extracting Indigeneity
Revaluing the Work of World Literature in These
Times
CITE AS:
Rashmi Varma, ‘Extracting Indigeneity: Revaluing the Work of
World Literature in These Times ’, in The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson,
Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 127–
47 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_06>
RIGHTS STATEMENT:
The Work of World Literature, ed. by
Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis
Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI
Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 127–47
© by the author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This essay examines extractivism as both a project and a
process that is bolstering new forms of imperialism on a world scale.
It argues that extractivism is as much grounded in material accumulation as it is in cultural extraction to create new forms of value. The
writings of indigenous writers such as Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar
offer an important key to understanding the work of the literary in
making visible and resistant that which extractivism seeks to exploit
for profit.
ABSTRACT:
KEYWORDS:
allegory; extractivism; indigeneity; world literature
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Extracting Indigeneity
Revaluing the Work of World Literature in
These Times
RASHMI VARMA
Extractivism has emerged as a new form of ecological imperialism truly graspable only on a world scale. Some go
further to argue that it is ‘a constitutive feature of the current operations of capital’.1 In its delimited sense it involves
the extraction of ‘huge volumes of natural resources, which
are not at all or only very partially processed and are mainly
for export according to the demand of central countries’.2
*
1
2
I would like to thank Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson
for inviting me to Berlin for their symposium on the Work of World
Literature in June 2019, for their thoughtful comments on my paper
and for all the practical help I have needed in getting this ready for
publication.
Verónica Gago and Sandro Mezzadra, ‘A Critique of the Extractive
Operations of Capital: Toward an Expanded Concept of Extractivism’,
Rethinking Marxism, 29.4 (2017), pp. 574–59 (p. 579).
Alberto Acosta, ‘Después del saqueo: Caminos hacia el posextractivismo’, Perspectivas, Análisis y Comentarios Políticos América Latina, 1
(2015), pp. 12–15 (p. 12), cited in Gago and Mezzadra, ‘A Critique of
the Extractive Operations of Capital’, p. 576.
128
EXTRACTING INDIGENEITY
This definition points to the ways in which extractivism
feeds on and extends pre-existing centre-periphery relations in the contemporary world order. For although colonial regimes relied heavily on extracting raw materials from
the colonies, extractivism now forms a crucial element of
many postcolonial economies, and is often carried out in
the name of development. As Verónica Gago and Sandro
Mezzadra argue about the Latin American case, ‘the intensification of extractive activities primarily linked to nonrenewable resources […] have returned Latin American
economies to their classical role as the providers of raw
materials, except that now raw materials are mainly directed to China.’3 Equally, it is important to point out that
the contemporary phase of capitalist accumulation consists of not only the increasing power of extractivism as
an ‘economic model’ that fuels development in neo-liberal
conditions but also that it coincides with, or even that it is
currently being produced by, a global turn to authoritarian
populism, from Latin America to India. This of course has
far-reaching implications for the depletion of democracy
as such and for the instrumentalization of democratic processes to smooth the flows of extraction.
My essay draws on extractivism as a political and economic project to argue that it is always already also a cultural project. Extractivism as a project that has its own specific process focalizes critical questions of cultural value,
for what is being extracted on a global scale is not just the
bauxite from the Niyamgiri mountains of Odisha or coal
from the fields of Jharkhand in India, copper from Zambia, or gold and silver from Patagonia, but also memory,
history, art, as well as ‘cultural values that are tied to entire
3
Gago and Mezzadra, ‘A Critique of the Extractive Operations of Capital’, p. 576.
RASHMI VARMA
129
ecosystems of survival and existence’.4 Heterodox economists such as Joan Martinez-Alier have contributed their
scholarship towards developing theories of the domain
of ‘non-economic epistemes’ that produce values that are
incommensurable with those of the utilitarian economic
realm.5 In a different vein I argue that extractivism draws
in the conflicts and collisions between different kinds of
value in ways that may help us work out the tenuousness
of those divisions, beyond the classic base-superstructure
framework that plots the relations between culture and
economy.
The concept of incommensurability presupposes a
problematic exteriority of culture, especially primitive or
indigenous culture, to the operations of global capitalism.
But Marxist theorists like Rosa Luxemburg, David Harvey,
and others have pointed out that capitalism requires and
depends on a non-capitalist outside to serve as resource to
be extracted for its development.6 From this perspective,
the outside (or the commons, as in the history of primitive
accumulation), far from constituting some kind of natural
external domain, is produced by capital itself.
In the context of such a conceptualization of extractivism as pertaining to both economic and non-economic
4
5
6
Ibid., p. 580.
See, for instance, Joan Martinez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the
Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003). See also Martin P. A. Craig, Hayley Stevenson, and
James Meadowcroft, ‘Debating Nature’s Value: Epistemic Strategy and
Struggle in the Story of “Ecosystem Services”’, Journal of Environmental
Policy & Planning, 21.6 (2019), pp. 811–25.
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), trans. by Agnes Schwarzschild (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951); David
Harvey, ‘The New Imperialism: Accumulation as Dispossession’, The
Socialist Register, 40 (2009), pp. 63–87. See also Rashmi Varma, ‘Primitive Accumulation: The Political Economy of Indigenous Art in Postcolonial India’, Third Text, 27.6 (2013), pp. 748–61.
130
EXTRACTING INDIGENEITY
realms and constituting the intertwining of the two within
the always emergent logic of capital, literary theory must
then also attend to the problem of representation that attaches to the projects and processes of extraction. Within
dominant postcolonial theory, one way of approaching this
issue of representation has been via a theorization of an
unassimilable subaltern otherness that is relentlessly exploited but cannot ever be adequately represented within
elite frames of representation such as literature. This has
in fact led to a wholesale scepticism towards, if not outright rejection of, representation itself in some quarters.7
This is in sharp distinction to the materialist modes of
conceptualizing the constitutive outside as also the materially submerged or the ideologically invisibilized within
canonical literary frames. After all, the coal underneath our
fields or the bauxite in the belly of our mountains offer not
only material value that is subjected to relentless extraction
within the neoliberal world order, but also signify the domain of cultural difference in a world that thirsts for the
invisible and the other to be corralled for extracting value.
Macarena Gómez-Barris in her work on extractivism has
called out the ‘Eurocentric, high modernist, and totalizing
visions of differentiated planetary life that rendered natives
invisible and illegible’.8 Literature that is written either as
a registration of the depleting life-worlds of the extractive
zones or as resistance to the ongoing onslaught mounted
7
8
See Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), especially pp. 114–60. See also Rashmi
Varma, ‘Beyond the Politics of Representation’, in New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualising Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India,
ed. by Srila Roy and Alf Nilsen (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015)
for a more detailed explication of the point that I am making here.
Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), p.
16.
RASHMI VARMA
131
on the poor and the indigenous communities can be read
then as mediating global regimes of extraction that rely on
conditions of invisibility. In this same vein, Achille Mbembe has pointed to extractivism as a historically racialized
mode of accumulation. He writes:
Extraction was first and foremost the tearing or
separation of human beings from their origins
and birthplaces. The next step involved removal
or extirpation, the condition that makes possible
the act of pressing and without which extraction
remains incomplete. Human beings became objects as slaves passed through the mill and were
squeezed to extract maximum profit. Extraction
not only branded them with an indelible stamp
but also produced the Black Man, or […] the subject of race, the very figure of what could be held
at a certain distance from oneself, of a thing that
could be discarded once it was no longer useful.9
What anti-extractivist literary theory asks us to do is to go
beyond the call for the search for a radical otherness that
resides outside the bounds of capitalism. It calls instead
for the embrace of what Gómez-Barris calls a ‘cognitive
and embodied mode of seeing’ that can help us apprehend
‘submerged modes’ of existence in the lifeworlds of the
peripheries.10 Like the lining of coal dust on the lungs of
miners.
In the following sections I analyse two short stories of
Indian indigeneity where extractivism provides ‘the formal
literary condition’ of indigenous writings. Through these
readings I hope to illustrate the ways in which the liter9
10
Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. by Laurent Dubois
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 40
Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone, pp. xiii and xvi.
132
EXTRACTING INDIGENEITY
ary work of resisting extractivism can find formal shape.11
Extractivism in the South Asian region has been central
both to the unfolding of the European colonial project
and to the subsequent postcolonial state formation. As
Sharae Deckard puts it: ‘The subcontinent has functioned
as a testing-ground for large-scale environmental engineering, from the tea plantations, cash crop monocultures,
and mass hydraulic schemes and river diversions of the
colonial period, to the modernization schemes and Green
Revolution in the twentieth-century, to transnational extractivism and bio-piracy in the neoliberal era’.12 For India,
in particular, extractive industries have been viewed as
providing ‘shortcuts to progress’, with masses of people
rendered landless and pushed into precarious labour in cities. Deckard rightly points out that this has continued well
into the twenty-first century, triggering ‘a wide spectrum
of resource conflicts over pasture, fish, forest, the siting
of hydro-electric mega-dams, and open-cast mining’.13 As
the project of extractivism reshapes and ravages the countryside’s material and social composition, the indigenous
community is subjected to both spectacular moments of
displacement (as when dams are constructed and millions
are rendered homeless) as also to what Rob Nixon has
termed ‘slow violence’.14 This involves disrupting what
11
12
13
14
Christine Okoth, ‘Extraction and Race, Then and Now: Ecology and
the Literary Form of the Contemporary Black Atlantic’, forthcoming
in special issue of Textual Practice.
Sharae Deckard, ‘Land, Water, Waste: Environment and Ecology in
South Asian Fiction’, in The Oxford History of the Novel in English, 11
vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010–19), x: The Novel in South
and South East Asia since 1945, ed. by Alex Tickell (2019), pp. 172–86
(p. 172).
Ibid., 176.
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
RASHMI VARMA
133
Sudhir Puttnaik has called the ‘ecological collectives’15 of
indigenous communities. Virginius Xaxa has pointed out
that the common predicament of these communities is
‘characterised by steady erosion of their control and access
to land, forest and other resources’.16
Two short stories from the collection titled The Adivasi Will Not Dance by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar provide
illustrative sites where the full force of extractivism is registered and worked through the frame of the literary.17
Shekhar, who is a medical officer in the small town of Pakur
in Jharkhand in eastern India, has been hailed as a pioneering adivasi (from the Santhal tribe) writer writing in
English, even as that nomination does grave injustice to his
stature as an emergent writer of considerable heft writing
in English.18 Given the troubled history of how adivasis
have been represented in mainstream literary and cultural
narratives, one would think that he would be carrying a
heavy burden of this representational history. After all, he
is writing not only against the dominant representational
frameworks of the colonial archive but also against postcolonial perspectives in which adivasis are seen as savage,
backward, primitive, dangerous, and criminal. Or, inno15
16
17
18
Sudhir Puttnaik, ‘Tribal Rights and Big Capital’, in Adivasi Rights and
Exclusion in India, ed. by V. Srinivasa Rao (Delhi: Routledge India,
2019), pp. 142–152 (p. 148).
Virginius Xaxa, ‘Isolation, Inclusion and Exclusion: The Case of Adivasis in India’, Adivasi Rights and Exclusion in India, ed. by V. Srinivasa
Rao (Delhi: Routledge India, 2019), pp. 27–40 (p. 29).
Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, The Adivasi Will Not Dance (New Delhi:
Speaking Tiger, 2015). Subsequent citations in-text.
Santhals are the largest group of adivasis in Jharkhand. Adivasi is the
Hindi word referring to India’s indigenous people (about 8 percent of
the population, and among the most marginalized and exploited). In
neoliberal India, their lands are under constant threat by capitalists,
both national and global, as the forests and mountains where many
adivasis still live are sources of rich raw materials.
134
EXTRACTING INDIGENEITY
cent, naïve, simple, pristine, liberated. In either case, they
are the quintessential Other of modern India.
But Shekhar bears this burden critically and unsentimentally, and with a sharp eye on possibilities of imagining
it otherwise, as freedom, in fiction. In his writing, adivasiness is re-signified from its essential outsider status as an
undefinable difference, as an object that is barely glimpsed
in the rear-view mirror of the vehicle of development.
Rather, it is patiently registered through words, names,
turns of phrase, and cultural allusions that are woven into
the narratives whose unevenness registers the stark disparities and concurrent inequalities within the time-space of
being adivasi. In these stories, humour, parody, and satire
carry as much weight as gritty realism committed to representing the lives of India’s most marginalized citizens. In
other words, these stories are not ‘about adivasis’ as much
as they are stories in which adivasis are the protagonists
and the story-tellers.
Shekhar narrates the everyday lives of adivasis who
work as bank clerks, performance artists, migrant workers, sex workers, and landless peasants. The stories narrate
the loves, fears, desires, intimacy, aspirations, as well as
greed and prejudices of these ordinary adivasis. They are
marked by a profound unsentimentality that in itself constitutes the political stakes of fictionalizing adivasi lives
today. These are tales of dispossession in the context of
the collapse of adivasi agrarian society and adivasi culture.
Adivasis have been turned into unskilled labourers, seeking migratory jobs, eking out a precarious existence or
have been forced to perform their adivasi-ness for mainstream society whether as dancers or craftspersons. In so
many ways, they are the quintessential victims of the development logic that renders modernity as trauma. They
RASHMI VARMA
135
endure multiple forms of violence on land (‘they turn
our land upside down, inside out, with their heavy machines […]. They sell the stones from our earth in faraway
places’, p. 172), culture (‘we are becoming people from
nowhere’, p. 173), body (‘we cough blood and remain
forever bare bones’, p. 172), environment. But what characterizes Shekhar’s fiction that seems to take in the totality
of adivasi life through the fragment of the short story is
a dialectical method in which a worldly narratorial consciousness becomes critically aware of the depleted material but culturally rich worlds of adivasi lives.
Although many of the stories are set in rural India’s
tribal heartland of Jharkhand, the ‘mineral-rich core of the
Indian subcontinent’ (p. 114), Shekhar’s characters live in
spaces that span from remote villages to urbanized mining
towns and large, populous cities. What unites their disparate locations and situations is the fact that their experiences
are enmeshed in a complex web of structural and everyday
oppression that operates at several scales all at once, from
the local networks of societal taboos and prohibitions to
the depredations of national and multinational capital that
have been given a free hand to extract raw materials in
places where adivasis reside, regions rich in mineral wealth
and forest cover. As Xaxa points out, tribal communities
in India have been subjected to ‘twin colonialism’. Having suffered at the hands of British attempts to control
them, they are now subjected to the newly imposed atrocities of the postcolonial neoliberal order.19 As Hari Charan
Behera states: ‘The tribal territories were annexed, their
resources were exploited, and the people were forcefully
evicted from their territory in the name of development
since colonial administration’. But now the ‘LA (Land Ac19
Xaxa, ‘Isolation, Inclusion and Exclusion’, p. 29.
136
EXTRACTING INDIGENEITY
quisition) Act has been introduced for acquisition of land’,
in the name of a ‘so-called public purpose’.20
The appropriation of resources by corporations and
the postcolonial state certainly recalls colonial relations in
Shekhar’s stories, particularly in the title story ‘The Adivasi
Will Not Dance’ where the protagonist laments: ‘They turn
our land upside down, inside out, with their heavy machines […]. They sell the stones from our earth in faraway
places’ (p. 172). The gap between the (post)colonial capitalist world and tribal India shapes the sense of ‘they’ —
the agents and beneficiaries of global capital — wreaking
havoc on ‘our’ — Santhal — lands. The writing is imbued
with an enduring sense of alienation from the ‘faraway
places’ and shadowy figures who profit and who are estranged from the lives of the characters in the stories.
‘The Adivasi Will Not Dance’ is narrated as a monologue by the 60-year old Mangal Murmu who speaks as ‘a
foolish Santhal’. That of course is just a ruse, as the story
reveals a highly politicized consciousness of the different
geo-political scales — the region, the nation (Dilli) as well
as the world — and the layered historical memories of revolutions past impinging on the lives of the adivasis. Set
in Matiajore, near the mining towns of Pakur, Sahebganj,
Godda, Ranchi, and Dumka, Mangal and his community
of share-croppers have been displaced by mining. As he
says poetically, ‘we are becoming people from nowhere’ (p.
173) — losing our roots, faith and identities.
The story uses a first person voice that lends a diegetic
mode to the narration which is nevertheless constantly
broken up by the intrusive worldly consciousness that
20
Hari Charan Behera, ‘Land, Property Rights and Management Issues
in Tribal Areas of Jharkhand: An Overview’, in Shifting Perspectives
in Tribal Studies, ed. by Maguni Charan Behera (Singapore: Springer,
2019), pp. 251–71 (pp. 254–55).
RASHMI VARMA
137
bears on the story and exceeds what the displaced farmer
actually ‘knows’ and can comprehend within the limits of
his experience. The story of Mangal Murmu is closely interwoven with that of the materials of extraction.21 The
narrative is infused by an anti-extractivist aesthetic at the
level of both form and content, as characterized by the dry
dust of coal that envelops the entire world and forms a
film through which the narrative eye perceives it. The coal’s
blackness ‘is deep, indelible’ (p. 174) and seeps into both
material space and consciousness:
The trees and shrubs in our village bear black
leaves. Our ochre earth has become black. The
stones, the rocks, the sand, all black. The tiles on
the roofs of our huts have lost their fire-burnt red.
The vines and flowers and peacocks we Santhals
draw on the outer walls of our houses are black.
Our children — dark-skinned as they are — are
forever covered with fine black dust […]. (pp.
174–75).
The black coal dust that envelops everything, from the
earth to the trees and stones to art and the body is draining out the blood (embodied in the ochre earth, the red
tiles, and flowers) from adivasi life. But extractivism does
not operate on an economy of exchange. Accumulation
and dispossession are its currency. As Mangal Murmu asks
rhetorically, for there is no one responsible for responding:
‘What do we Santhals get in return? Tatters to wear. Barely
21
Citing Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Sharae Deckard writes: ‘Environment, as a web of relations between both human and non-human
agents, is not only a prominent thematic presence in the content of
South Asian fiction, but “a formal and stylistic presence” mediating uneven development, ecological imperialism, and environmental
degradation’, Deckard, ‘Land, Water, Waste: Environment and Extractivism in South Asian Fiction’, p. 172.
138
EXTRACTING INDIGENEITY
enough food. Such diseases that we can’t breathe properly,
we cough blood and forever remain bare bones’ (p. 172).
However, these same adivasis whose very blood is
blackened by the dust of extraction are recruited to showcase the nation’s diversity through cultural performance
— dance, music, craft. Mangal asks poignantly: ‘What has
our art given us? Displacement, tuberculosis’ (p. 178).
The purportedly sacred and ritualistic nature of adivasi art
is opportunistically commodified, as adivasis are made to
dance on land from which they have been evicted for a
thermal plant whose benefits are most likely to be siphoned
off elsewhere.
In the end, Mangal Murmu’s impassioned monologue
and his courageous refusal to perform his indigeneity, collapses in defeat as the government’s henchmen descend
on him for his impertinence in speaking to the President
of India. The spectacle of a landless adivasi addressing the
highest office holder in the nation is one that can only
be conjured through and in fiction. It also doubles up on
the meaning of representation that Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak had written about in her famous essay ‘Can the
Subaltern Speak?’.22 In staging a powerful confrontation
between the adivasi and the state, the narrative suggests
that power also lies in refusal. The eloquent address of the
protagonist simultaneously expresses the anguish of the
dehumanized, proletarianized, and commoditized people,
while giving literal voice to the communities that are submerged beneath the radar of global social justice movements.
22
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Can the
Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. by Rosalind
C. Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 21–78.
RASHMI VARMA
139
The story ‘Baso-jhi’ operates on a different register
and narrates the story of a character who is the classic figure of a scapegoat for the traumas of modernity that her
community undergoes. It is told almost entirely from the
perspective of a narrator who has the worldly knowledge of
the long history of adivasi exploitation. In Baso-jhi’s story
the private, communal, and public worlds of exploitation
collide in such a way that the story is best read and understood as an allegory. It is the allegorical form that reveals
the gaps that are left unrevealed in the narration of the
private trauma of an adivasi woman.
The story is set in the village of Sarjomdih in
Jharkhand, on the large forested plateau known as
Chhotanagpur. It is the quintessentially in-between
kind of place, the kind of borderland that extractivism
produces and thrives on. A predominantly Santhal village
that worships Sarna, deity of the ‘aboriginal faith’ of the
area, it has grown into a semi-urban conurbation with
the establishment of a mine and a copper factory on
its southern outskirts. This ‘Copper Town’, which was
forever ‘illuminated and throbbing with life’, was ‘now
gradually threatening to swallow all of Sarjomdih’ (pp.
114–15). As it turns out, it becomes the epicentre for
a chain of events that are to destroy the community in
the village. Since its establishment ‘few people farmed
in Sarjomdih anymore’ (p. 115). Having been forced
to give up their ‘fecund land’ for the building of roads
and factories, the villagers had turned into ‘coolie’ and
‘reja’, wage labourers in the factory and mines. Those who
succeeded in garnering some measure of upward mobility
gratefully accepted low level jobs in banks, the army, and
government offices, exercising power in a community now
riddled with class hierarchies.The narrative’s unevenness
140
EXTRACTING INDIGENEITY
is brought to the fore when in parts it reads like a litany
of opposition to development as an elite ideology, in
part as sociological discourse: the village, we are told, is
‘standing testimony to the collapse of an agrarian Adivasi
society and the dilution of Adivasi culture, the twin gifts of
industrialisation and progress’ (p. 115). For ‘Sarjomdih,
which bore the repercussions of development’ had now
acquired ‘all the signs of urbanity’ — concrete houses,
cable tv, two-wheelers, hand pump, a primary school,
and a narrow winding tarmac road called the ‘main road’
(p. 115). In spite of these ragged signs and ‘gifts’ of an
unevenly distributed modernity, the narrator concedes:
‘Still, this was progress, considering how the Adivasis had
lived so far’ (p. 115).
But as much as the outer frame of the story is narrated
by an urbane adivasi who is critical of the depredations
of development, the story belongs to its eponymous protagonist. It privileges her consciousness, her feelings, the
ways in which she perceives things and the social relationships that she forges and that are in the process of
tumultuous change. It is in the gap between the two frames
that we can read how this story operates as an allegory of
extractivism itself, narrating the multiple levels at which
extractivism functions to create alienation both of adivasi
society from the dominant, mainstream society and within
adivasi society itself whose ravaged condition is held in
place by the production of internal boundaries between inside and outside, with catastrophic consequences for both
the individual and her community.
The story paints an idyllic scene at the outset at the
centre of which is the figure of Basanti, or Baso-jhi. Dressed
in a white cotton saree, she cuts an impressive figure as
the narrative eye zooms in on her tall, strong, dusky figure
RASHMI VARMA
141
standing among a group of women who seem to have some
sort of social bond. The description of her physical features
is accompanied by the declaration that she had become
‘an integral part of the day to day life of the village’ (p.
114). She seems to possess a reservoir of stories of Bidu,
the Santhal hero who slayed demons ‘a long, long time
ago’, that she narrates to the children around her (p. 113).
But it is precisely in the way in which the narrative draws
attention to the process of becoming ‘integral’ that we first
note the presence of an outsiderliness that haunts the ideal
of community in this village.
As the narrative sweeps away from Baso-jhi to take
in the broader rural topography, it brings into view all
the contradictions of industrialization and progress as they
strike roots in a place like Sarjomdih. The very basic infrastructure of water delivered through hand pumps, a main
road built to connect the village to Copper Town and a
primary school combines unevenly with the Cartoon Network playing on cable television and the increasing availability of chowmein as a desired culinary option, producing
a deeply uneven experience of modernity in the village.23
But what is obviously simmering just below the surface of these tantalizing slivers of progress are the ravages
of dispossession through mining that are evident not only
at the level of the political and economic dispossession of
adivasi land and rights, but in the sphere of social reproduction. For it is through a process grounded in the labour
of unremunerated care work that Baso-jhi had become ‘an
integral part’ of life in the village. And it is through a tearing of that fabric of care and community that she becomes
23
See Warwick Research Collective (WReC), Combined and Uneven
Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2015) for a proper explication of this point.
142
EXTRACTING INDIGENEITY
doubly dispossessed. As the narrative backtracks to fill us
in on her life story we learn that Baso-jhi had been brought
into the household by Soren-babu, a bank clerk who lives
in the village with his wife and children on a salary that
does not afford him paid household help. He had found her
destitute at a railway station, and his memory of having met
her at a family wedding years prior ignited his sympathy for
her. So it is that through a process grounded in the work of
social reproduction that Baso-jhi becomes ‘an integral part’
of life in both the household and in the village. She sets
about making herself useful — cleaning, washing, looking
after the children: ‘In Baso-jhi, Pushpa [Soren-babu’s wife]
found a baby-sitter, a house-keeper, a laundrywoman, a
vegetable-chopper, a masala-grinder, a fish-scaler, a backscrubber, a scalp-masseuse, a confidante and a companion’
(p. 117). The complex work of social care allows for the
creation of a different kind of family that traditionally made
space for ‘surplus women’ like Baso-jhi who takes care of
the household in return for shelter and participation in
family life, albeit from its margins.
This precariously carved out social world is shaken to
the core when Baso-jhi is accused of possessing witch-like
powers that are causing deaths in the village. It is then
that we get the first glimpse of her inner consciousness:
‘When Basanti had first heard of the accusation, she had
been shocked. A long-buried, agonizing recollection had
assaulted her, like a thin rubber band which snaps as one
is tying a chignon, and stings the fingers’ (p. 119). The
narrative voice claims access to Baso-jhi’s inner consciousness and her ‘agonizing recollection’. It now shifts gears and
moves alongside her memories that connect this moment
of expulsion from the social network of Sarjomdih to what
had occurred just before she had arrived. Back then she had
RASHMI VARMA
143
been blamed for her grandson’s death that was followed by
a brutal eviction by her sons that left her a destitute widow.
These two linked catastrophic events open up space in the
narrative for the reader to glimpse her back story through
memories mediated by the narrative voice. Married off at
age 14 to a farmer twice her age from the village of Chapri
in Bengal, Baso-jhi had stepped out for the first time into
the world. Boarding the train that is a foreign object to
her, she is transported to Salbani, his village. There she
gives birth to two sons and leads what we understand to
be a happy life, visiting the weekly market to buy things for
herself and her family and enjoying consuming the small
luxuries of life. When she tragically loses her husband and
becomes a young widow, she is cheated of her farmland.
Left with a small but fertile piece of land on which she
grows vegetables to sell at the market, she finds work in
construction sites and rice-mills, and gathers maha and
tendu leaves to supplement her income. She becomes the
quintessential ‘gritty Santhal widow’. Alas her sons’ greed
and selfish disregard for her ‘lifetime of struggle’ (p. 126)
renders it without value. When her grandson dies due to
diarrhoea, Baso-jhi is held responsible. She is seen to be
sacrificing children for evil gods and is brutally evicted
from the family home. It is then that she arrives at the Copper Town railway station, spending nights on the platform
until she catches Soren-babu’s eye. What is evidenced in
both moments of eviction is the pressure placed on the
formation of the nuclear adivasi family that is coming into
being. The non-productive widow who is now an economic
and social burden becomes the scapegoat in the face of
death, illnesses, and conditions of precarity shaping adivasi
lives caught in the maelstrom of desiring a modernity that
144
EXTRACTING INDIGENEITY
is held up by a still backward infrastructure of health and
education.
When her friend Maino’s grandson dies in Sarjomdih,
it is the third death in the village in the two years since
Baso-jhi’s arrival (the other two were old men). The child
had been to Copper Town in the days before to celebrate
a festival. With his death, the narrator points to an unexpected rupture in the fabric of village life: ‘All of a sudden,
Basanti’s presence began to matter’ (p. 121). Chorus-like
voices of villagers now proclaim: ‘She was a dahni — a
witch. She’d killed her own grandson and, for that, her
sons had disowned her. How could she expect strangers to
accept her? She truly was a witch’ (p. 122). This time she
leaves Soren-babu’s home before she is asked to vacate the
small room she occupies outside the main homestead.
The narrative registers a simmering sense of unease
as Baso-jhi’s plight comes to represent the wider situation
of women — widowed as well as educated young women
— who are decried as sorceresses and witches. They are
the scapegoats for an emergent modernization of adivasi
life under extractive capitalism. The dominant modes of
capitalist exploitation extract every last grain of value from
reproduction, making outcast all those who threaten the
structures of the emergent nuclear family and normative
heterosexuality that harbours Brahmanical notions of female beauty (light complexion) and female subservience.
These go against long-standing adivasi traditions where
women historically held freedoms unimaginable in mainstream Hindu society. Thus Baso-jhi feels empathy for
Bijoya, a young woman in the village who is a graduate in
history and aspires to be a teacher. But she has ‘the wrong
sort of complexion’, in addition to being burdened with
a degree such that ‘she didn’t have too many chances’ in
RASHMI VARMA
145
finding a suitor. Although Bijoya could cook, clean, sew,
take care of the elderly, ‘even clean cowsheds and split firewood when required’ (p. 119), her economic value is purportedly overshadowed by her social burden in a society
that hopes to mimic dominant social formations such as
the nuclear Hindu family. In reality, however, she is needed
to perform unremunerated care. For although rumours of
her power of sorcery persist, smeared with accusations
of how she had contributed to ‘her mother’s death, her
brother’s disability, her father’s failed paddy crop’ (p. 119),
her marriage would leave the men in her family without her
double labour of economic and social care.
Shekhar’s stories attest to the ways in which modernity
ushers in new social relations and economic arrangements
that emerge alongside pre-existing modes of domination.
A depleted adivasi society is the object of both economic
and cultural extractivism, and older forms of community
and resistance are eroded in the process. Baso-jhi as the village witch and Mangal Murmu, the mad, hysterical Santhal
who refuses to dance are symptoms of a deeply traumatized society as a whole. In his 1986 essay on third-world
literature as national allegory, Fredric Jameson had written
of the combined and uneven spatio-temporal conjunctures
of third-world literature in which ‘archaic customs’ are
‘radically transformed and denatured by the superposition
of capitalist relations’, contributing to significant generic
discontinuities that are the hallmark of such literature.24
When Jameson writes that ‘the primordial crime of capitalism is exposed: not so much wage labour as such, or
the ravages of the money form, of the remorseless and
24
Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism’, Social Text, 15 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 65–88; reprinted in
Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2019), pp. 159–86 (p. 182).
146
EXTRACTING INDIGENEITY
impersonal rhythms of the market but rather this primal
displacement of the older forms of collective life from a
land now seized and privatized’, the power of his theorization is borne out in Shekhar’s fiction.25
To recall Jameson’s famous essay on third-world literature as national allegory in the era of world literature
is also to recall Jameson’s pronouncement that ‘the allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of
breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of
the dream rather than the homogeneous representation of
the symbol’.26 This then points to the necessity of a more
materialist conceptualization of the crisis of representation
that my essay alluded to before. But what does a crisis of
representation mean in an era in which world literature has
come to stand in for the world-system as a whole? This
is where the work of world literature comes into play, especially when the task is to represent extractivism as the
ongoing colonial dimension of our times.
Jameson himself recalls the fury that his earlier essay
had generated even among Marxists who saw him moving
away from the classical Marxist position in his pointing out
‘that the international class situation of the period could be
mapped as an insurrection of the international peasantry of
Third World countries surrounding the international city
bourgeoisie of the rich countries’.27 Always preoccupied
with the project of cognitive mapping in times of late capitalism, he goes on to point out that class struggles within
nation-states are now displaced on to a global scale, creating a new ‘representational dilemma’.28 He writes: ‘Its two
25
26
27
28
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 184.
Fredric Jameson, ‘Political: National Allegory B. Commentary’, in Allegory and Ideology, pp. 187–216 (p. 188).
Ibid., p. 189.
RASHMI VARMA
147
dimensions — class struggle with a given national situation
and the globalized forces at work outside it on a world scale
— are at least for the moment incommensurable: which
is to say that it is their very disparity and the difficulty of
finding mediations between them that is the fundamental
political problem for the Left today’.29 Allegory in this situation can serve as ‘a diagnostic instrument to reveal this
disjunction’.30 That precisely is the work of world literature in our times when extractivism provides the dominant
framework for accessing the world’s resources that are material and cultural at the same time.
29
30
Ibid., p. 190.
Ibid.
Rashmi Varma, ‘Extracting Indigeneity: Revaluing
the Work of World Literature in These Times ’, in The
Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti
and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19
(Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 127–47 <https:
//doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_06>
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