7.1 INTRODUCTION
This chapter is about the language of time. I confront the continuum that exists between the theory and practice of the logics of time within archaeology as practised in India. I present some of the strategies utilized in that practice through a postcolonial lens, drawing out the longstanding ramifications of classifications, and illustrating how the contemporary state continues to replicate otherness with indigenous/Adivasi populations—a consequence of a past and continued controlling and ordering of time through labels. Through these discussions, this chapter specifically draws attention to the incommensurability of different, yet simultaneous types of time in India and how that relates to archaeological and contemporary discourses. I argue that there is a clear connection between the continued uncritical use of archaeological labels to describe populations of people, such as prehistoric, and contemporary indigenous politics in India. It is only through the deconstruction of such labels that change (political, social, and cultural) may occur.
The replication of often invisible (or rendered invisible via bureaucracy) systemic injustices in governance is exemplified by the unchanging nature of vocabularies of control over forms of knowledge. Power that emerges from the control of history is no different, particularly in the ways in which the nation establishes hegemonic narratives for its own benefit to maintain the status quo. This is not a new statement
Within archaeological scholarship; we have been contending with the machinations of the state and its control over historical discourses (e. g., Abdi 2001; Diaz-Andreu 2007; Kohl 1998; Kohl and Fawcett 1996); promoting alternative histories (e. g., Benavides 2005; Meskell and Weiss 2006; Schmidt and Patterson 1995b); recognizing the past as a political present (e. g., McGuire 2008; Meskell 1998, 2005; Shepherd 2002a); and applying various critiques to better deal with the systemic injustices, whether through feminist critique (e. g., Geller and Stockett 2007; Gero and Conkey 1991), Marxist theories (e. g., McGuire 1992; Patterson 1997; Patterson and Gailey 1987; Saitta 1989), or, more recently, postcolonial ones (e. g., Gosden 2001; Liebmann and Rizvi 2008; Lydon and Rizvi 2010; Schmidt 2009b; Shepherd 2002b).
Within the larger context of that scholarship, this chapter locates the epistemological signification of labels, categories, and forms of historic meaning and value within specific sectors of the state. Such investigation makes a direct intervention into the ways in which archaeologists create or reuse vocabulary specific to our discipline, including, but not limited to terms such as prehistoric, tribe, primitive, indigenous, and civilizations. The creation of these terms and associated meanings have very specific histories and contexts within colonial and postcolonial India (Cohen 1986). Within the larger discussion of the structures of prehistory and issues of representation, this chapter finds its place as providing an epistemic dismantling of power structures that instantiate modes and vocabularies of time making (as many of the chapters in this volume have addressed). In the case of India, the pragmatic infrastructure of colonial language that dealt with the normalization of conventions of time and discourses of time has had severe effects on the politics of representation of particular communities in the contemporary world (see Cohen 1986; Cremo 1999; Fabian 1983), thus linking knowledge about the past to very specific forms of the present.
Scholarship on the relationship between archaeology and time has a robust history of theory building within the discipline, whether in relation to foundational and philosophical notions of time (McCullough 1991); time as a lived and memory-based experience (Hughes and Trautmann 1995; Rowlands 1993; Aguilar and Preucel, Lane, this volume); or time as linked to identity and landscape (Ingold 1993; Aguilar and Preucel, this volume). The study of time in archaeology moves beyond the logics of time and includes scholarship on ancient notions of time, for example, the ideas of time in Assyria and Babylonia (Robson 2004), or ideas of spacetime in early Chinese thought (Pankenier 2004). Many of these studies create dichotomies between science time and social time. In a shift away from such categorizations, archaeologists have struggled to bridge that divide on a philosophical level desiring some reconciliation between the various models (e. g., Lucas 2010; Murray 1999; Schmidt 1996).
The form of time under investigation in this chapter continues to be colonial in its logic and is one of the main crutches that supports the structure of linear, evolutionary-based thinking, its placement within modernity, and the formation of what we call archaeology and all the permutations of that word/concept, including but not limited to prehistory or protohistory (see Gonzalez-Ruibal 2010; Murray 1999; Thomas 2004; Lane, Mrozowski, Schmidt, Walz, this volume). Time becomes a cultural artefact that reflects standpoints and thus has a very specific history depending on where it is applied and how. ‘Time is always implicated in the comprehension of order’ (Lucas 2010: 352), order being precisely the mainstay of colonial power over knowledge. The assumption that theories of time are both objective and quantifiable is one of the key naturalizations of conventions of time that take place in the colonial time period in India. Those qualities of time allow for large spans of time and complex past experiences to be homogenized and compressed into moments between carbon-14 dates. The attribution of absolute time, when recording carbon-14 dates, leaves the archaeologist very little space to negotiate any non-linear or alternative reading of time.
This desire for absolute time, specifically within the history of archaeological methodology in South Asia, is best explained in two points by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, a key figure in the history of archaeological practice in South Asia as he was the last director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India in British India and subsequently (post-1947) an early adviser to newly independent Pakistan:
First, without an absolute chronology cultures of different regions cannot accurately be compared, their interrelationship cannot be assessed: in other words, the vital causative factors of human ‘progress’ cannot be authoritatively reconstructed and may be widely misunderstood. Secondly, the fluctuating tempo of human achievement—itself an integral quality of that achievement—cannot be estimated. (2004 [1954]: 24)
Following a similar line of thought and linking the ways in which time has a direct relationship to the evolution of philosophical thought and progress, archaeologists in India following the generation of Wheeler continue to operate within that tradition. When it comes to contending with alternative forms of time, scholars such as D. P. Agrawal (1994) have argued that earlier societies necessarily had cyclical notions of time and technological advancement had a more linear progression of time. This evolutionary model of society seems to contradict cultural and religious ideologies of time, such as theories of cyclical time in some Brahmanical, Buddhist, Jain, or Muslim philosophies (all significant religions in modern-day India). The fact that all of these modalities of time exist simultaneously in a contemporary moment in India is important to consider when trying to understand how they might relate to one another, if at all. What is even more interesting is that this issue of incommensurability between these modalities of time, with some people considering time to be cyclical and others linear in a contemporary society, is not brought up in the archaeological scholarship.
Discussions on chronology and time in archaeology are precisely linear in their application. Perhaps there is no reason for the scientific, social, and cultural to align in order to be used effectively in the contemporary world, suggesting an allowance for plurality of modes of time. I would argue that this provision within Indian society to accept and allow such a plurality of time has particular precolonial and colonial roots. Of course, this also affects the manner in which chronologies and labels are created and replicated, permitting a simultaneous variety of times, labels, and histories to be constructed for the archaeological pasts in India—providing both confusion for those working with linear chronologies and opening possibilities for alternative histories.
7.2 CREATING CATEGORIES OF TIME AND IMAGINING AN INDIAN PAST
There are two prefixes that emerge from Indian scholarship that deal with the time periods roughly categorized as between the Lower Paleolithic and the Megalithic-Iron Age (the latter overlapping with Early Historic periods): prehistory and protohistory (for a discussion about these conventions, see Lane, this volume). Both honour history by fixing time; that is, text and narratives of these times are located within evolutionary patterns in which human societies develop and progress through technological advancement, which is human development alongside tool technology. Both labels are overlapping in absolute time, and yet describe, within the Indian scholarship, two seemingly distinct pasts. Prehistory refers to archaeological time which includes discussions and investigations of sites of the Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic, Early, Middle and Late Stone Age, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Megalithic phases (for critiques of such nomenclature, see Gonzalez-Ruibal 2010; Thomas 2004). Protohistory, on the other hand, primarily deals with sites or phases related to the Harappan or Indus civilization; an urban civilization that, significant for our purposes, has text. This separation suggests that the scholarship on ancient India categorizes time and technology based on the occurrence of ‘text’. Text is not limited to historical narrative but any text. Although the Indus text remains undeciphered, the mere fact that text exists allows it to be connected to history. In this manner, the labels of antiquity are intertwined with time, technology, and text.
The technology of writing, the very materiality of history formation, and the capturing of narratives all contribute to our understandings of the ways in which writing is also considered to be a form of progress, specifically technological progress that is viewed as a criterion of what is considered urban (Childe 1950). In such a formulation, there is a privileging of text that has a very specific history unto itself. In India, as Thomas Trautmann and Carla Sinopoli argue, privileging text derives from:
An idea that is expressed by the early Orientalists of British India, about the texts as giving access to the inward meaning of the South Asian past, as against the authority of sight which delivers only the outward and material side of South Asia. The privileging of the texts by Orientalists, tinged with Protestant Christian ideas of the inner and the outer, spirit and matter, coincided considerably with the views of the pandits and munshis who taught them Sanskrit, Persian and Hindustani. (Trautmann and Sinopoli 2002: 517)
The colonial implications of the introduction of Protestant Christian ideologies as the textual logic and documentation of histories in South Asia are particularly significant. However, it is also important to keep in mind that Western historical scholarship and archaeology are not solely responsible for the emergence of an Indian past (Boivin and Fuller 2002). Rather than perpetuating the perception that the precolonial time periods in India were ahistorical (something Cohen 1986 warns us against) or dominated by only spiritual and metaphysical notions of history (as Agrawal 1994 or Rocher 2004 among many others suggest), it is important to recognize the many forms of historical accounting (see Raczek et al. 2011). For example, linearity was utilized for the retelling of histories within cyclical calendars of time such as in Puranic history, where there is discussion of the circular motions of time and simultaneously a clear accounting of the dynasties and kings in very precise terms and numbers of years (Chatterjee 1995: 232-3). Although different scales of time were utilized (i. e., the individual and society), the coexistence of
Both within the same narrative suggests an acceptance of plural notions of time.
Many of the early writers, for example, the Bengali early historian Mrityunjay, wrote histories at the request of colonial masters, but as Partha Chatterjee (1995) argues, the historical allegiances were entirely precolonial based on the historical memory of the elite Bengali society in 1808. As such, these retellings linked forms of history and the contemporary as part of the same chronological sequence (this is not unique to Indian history; see Aguilar and Preucel, this volume). Early precolonial texts also had much influence in the development of scientific understandings of time in South Asia, such as Ibn Sina’s work from the Book of Healing, the eleventh-century discussion about mountains developing through the slow deposition of clay to reveal strata—what we know today as the geological laws of superposition. His work, written in Persian, was a foundational text for schooling in the subcontinent within the developing sciences, providing a historical precedent for linking linear time to science, and in this specific case to geological strata, which later then would be utilized to study cultural strata.
This connection between time, science, and archaeology continues in contemporary archaeological practice in South Asia—specifically the desire for scientific authority within archaeological discourses and state politics in India (Chadha 2010). In fact, the central government archaeological office in India, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), in 1984 was recommended by the Mirdha Committee Report, to be considered a scientific institution based on the kind of work conducted by the ASI (Chadha 2010: 229). This mandate, Ashish Chadha argues, ‘was the outcome of decades of aspiration on the part of ASI bureaucrat-archaeologists to be considered scientists. The ASI considered itself scientific on the basis of its disciplinary intervention with regard to protecting the heritage of ancient India and, more importantly, its knowledge production capabilities’ (2010: 229). This was a key shift from earlier colonial connections between the ASI and the fields of art and architectural history (see Guha-Thakurta 2004). In the contemporary moment, the link between science and archaeological knowledge production is very strong as a concept within archaeological scholarship in India (Paddayya 1990; Pratap 2009).
It is often within the discourses of science that technology as a mode of production, craft or agricultural, is discussed within archaeology and used for chronological development illustrating increased complexity (e. g., Kenoyer 1989; Possehl and Rissman 1992). For example, the continued use and discussions about the chronologies of the Mesolithic and ‘microlithic’ revolve around the technology and economics of food production (Possehl and Rissman 1992). Depending on the researcher, the term ‘Mesolithic’ takes on various meanings emphasizing one of three interrelated concepts: chronology (or absolute dating), technology, or subsistence (Raczek and Sugandhi 2004), thus lacking a standard definition. This lack of definition allows for aceramic microlithic scatters to be labelled as Mesolithic even though the absolute date of the site is unknown. Those utilizing subsistence strategies to define the Mesolithic argue that the term refers to non-food-producing post-Palaeolithic periods. However, as Teresa Raczek and Namita Sugandhi (2004) point out, what makes that separation between food-producing communities and non-food-producing communities difficult is that there exist site reports that note domesticated faunal remains at Mesolithic sites, even though domestication is usually regarded within Indian scholarship as a defining feature of the Neolithic (see Misra 2002). Moreover, they point out that in their review of site reports, ‘it becomes apparent that two adjacent archaeological sites that were contemporaneously occupied have occasionally been given different chronological designations. . . in general, time periods are frequently locally defined and intricately connected to culture histories’ (Raczek and Sugandhi 2004: 2). The two sites that Raczek and Sughandhi are referring to in this specific case were designated as culturally distinct—one being labelled Mesolithic, due to a visible lithic scatter and the other Chalcolithic, based on evidence of both architecture and agriculture. Their argument about contemporary communities being given two different designations is a significant one (for a similar history of debates and current work on the Mesolithic and Neolithic in Europe, see Pinhasi and Pluciennik 2004). This locally based definition illustrates the vernacular nature of multiple time frames within the Indian past.
Given that time becomes a pivotal concept on which archaeological interpretation balances itself, and the slippage between time practice (i. e., the manner in which time and chronological markers are established in site reports) and time theory (i. e., the manner in which the conceptual notion of time is addressed within the meta-discursive spaces), specifically arguing for time to be absolute causes confusions and internal inconsistencies that are contrary to the manner in which science is thought to link with time. On the one hand, Indian archaeologists, as scientists, demand time as absolute; on the other hand, the site reports utilize very local understandings and researcher-specific decisions about what sort of chronological marker to assign. Thus, labels of time, such as Mesolithic, have three different definitions and time spans that are slightly overlapping but are also predominantly mutually exclusive. The mutual unintelligibility of the vernacular of time creates multiple dialects of time within the same region. The existence of these poly-registers of time again points to the ability for a plurality of time concepts to exist contemporaneously in South Asia.
Such a pluralistic framework of the time concept allows for cyclical, linear, absolute, and locally determined chronologies to coexist contemporaneously. Some of these notions emerge from more religious underpinnings, such as the cyclical nature of time, and others from a more scientific epistemology, such as the absolute nature of time. This plurality suggests, within a South Asian context at least, the possibility of an ideological break from the Western epistemological underpinnings of time and text that do not permit such simultaneity of difference. One of the effects of such an epistemology is evident in the histories written by the British officers in which that incongruity resulted in the utilization of labels for chronology that were based on religious or ethnic categories, such as the Hindu and Muslim periods (c.1000 bc to ad 1750), which continue to be used in history textbooks even today (Chakrabarti 1988: 72-3), creating the labels’ simultaneity to reference both person and time. This continued practice has had very specific effects on contemporary indigenous populations.
7.3 THE POLITICS OF CONSTRUCTED AND CONTINUED OTHERNESS: INDIGENOUS/ADIVASI COMMUNITIES IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA
Within the discourse about indigenous/Adivasi populations, the notion of speaking of contemporaneity is contingent. Adivasi communities live at the same time as us, but they are placed into times that are not of our time. They are placed outside of time (scientific, cultural, and social) through the terms, labels, and categories that the state places on them. They are thus completely rejected from the possibility of belonging to civil or political society. These labels and categories used to describe the indigenous communities emerge from colonial archaeological frameworks (for discussion on indigenous communities and colonialism in other contexts, see Aguilar and Preucel, Gould, Mrozowski, this volume). These include categories and labels such as ‘tribal’, ‘primitive’, and particularly the concept of ‘backward’. There is a certain geography to the terrain of indigeneity that this section will map out to better situate the radial alterity of the political cartographies that many tribal groups are claiming in contemporary India. Through the discussion of the history and contemporary politics of disenfranchised groups in India, the next section interrogates the formation of types of groups and categorizations that become labels and stereotypes to investigate the sources of epistemic injustice (see Beteille 1965, 1977; Fricker 2009).
7.4 SCHEDULED TRIBES, ADIVASI, AND INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES
Although the Government of India refers to communities of indigenous peoples as Scheduled Tribes (STs), Adivasi has become the popular term for these groups. Adivasi is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘original people’. Some scholars caution against its uncritical use and linking it specifically to a land per se, as it does not allow for indigenous histories to include any movement over landscapes (Singh 1994). As with all identity-based categories, this one has mixed resonance. There are some groups, for example, in the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra, in which STs use Adivasi as a self-referent term that evokes a shared history of relative freedom in precolonial times (Hardiman 1987; Waite 2006). That period of freedom was followed by one of subjugation in the nineteenth century from a variety of sources, leading to the development of an Adivasi consciousness formed against ‘the outsider’, to which many Adivasi feel deeply connected. Other indigenous or tribal peoples of India’s northeastern region (the seven states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura) do not call themselves, nor are they normally referred to in literature, as Adivasi. Yet, when referring to pan-indigenous movements, these populations are referred to as Adivasi in public discourse and culture. It is important to note that representatives of these latter (northeastern) groups, primarily in international forums, prefer to use the English term ‘indigenous peoples’ (for additional discussion, see Pratap 2009).
Three labels of community utilized most often are STs, Adivasi, and indigenous people, who rightfully should claim heterogeneity and yet, for political purposes, and what Gayatri Spivak (1987) has called strategic essentialism, are categorized as the same. The Constitution of India, Article 366 (25), defines STs as ‘such tribes or tribal communities or part of or groups within such tribes or tribal communities as are deemed under Article 342 to the Scheduled Tribes [STs] for the purposes of this Constitution’. In Article 342, the procedure to be followed for specification of a Scheduled Tribe is prescribed but does not provide a criterion for the specification of any community as Scheduled Tribe. According to a 2006-7 report about the socio-economic conditions of labour provided by Scheduled Tribes at Vapi, Valsad, Navsari, and Sachin in the State of Gujarat, criteria used to identify Scheduled Tribes by the government officers listed the following:
• Geographical isolation: they live in cloistered, exclusive, remote, and inhospitable areas such as hills and forests.
• Backwardness: their livelihood is based on primitive agriculture, a low-value closed economy with a low level of technology that leads to their poverty. They have low levels of literacy and health.
• Distinctive culture, language and religion: communities have developed their own distinctive culture, language, and religion.
• Shyness of contact: they have a marginal degree of contact with other cultures and people (Government of India 2007: 6)
The manner in which technology (as craft or agriculture) and the lack of human progress or primitiveness is documented, utilizing similar language as archaeologists do in their discussions of the Mesolithic, suggests the reuse of vocabularies that are linked to the control of time. Recalling the quote from Sir Mortimer Wheeler earlier in this chapter, human progress is linked to the movement of time. If these communities have not progressed, that suggests, in his framework and epistemology, that time for these communities has stood still. This list demonstrates the ambiguous formation of these categories that have their history outlined in colonial documents (Hardiman 1994).
Although used in such a government report, historian David Hardiman (1987) points out that the term ‘tribe’ is rather contrived in the Indian context, as it has no historical equivalent in Indian languages (along with carrying undesirable evolutionary connotations). That evolutionary connotation, however, is precisely what is key: their primacy, origin-ality, or tribal-ness emerges from a connection to a low level of technology, which in its most gracious stance is articulated as ‘backwardness’. This term ‘backward’ is very significant because it shows up again in the categorization of OBCs—or Other Backward Classes—and backwardness continues to be linked to primitive, low technology, and low education, which are socially constituted and not constituted through the law. It should be noted, however, that various government quotas and affirmative action provide legal recourse for disenfranchised communities such as the STs, SCs (Scheduled Castes), and OBCs. Even so, the notion of primitive continues to be reiterated, not just in government documents but also in academic publications, such as one as recent as 2006 entitled The
Anthropology of Primitive Tribes in India. The case studies in this volume refer to ST groups, who were
Identified as more backward communities among the tribal population groups have been categorised as ‘Primitive Tribal Groups’ (PTGs) by the Government at the Centre in 1975. So far seventy-five tribal communities have been identified as ‘primitive tribal groups’ in different States of India. These hunting, food-gathering, and some agricultural communities, who have been identified as more backward communities among the tribal population groups need special programmes for their sustainable development. (Sharma 2006)
To be fair, the authors in this volume are using their studies to promote the rights of the indigenous populations and demanding that the government use their data to help promote livelihoods for these groups. Yet the reiteration by reuse of the labels and categories to denote populations of people suggests deeper, epistemic issues that promote forms of injustice.
The injustice is at the level of epistemic structuring and in Miranda Fricker’s terminology (2009), a ‘hermeneutic injustice’ that is not transmitted by individuals but rather is a discursive phenomenon. It has to do with the manner in which theories and interpretations are devised and replicated to maintain certain assumptions and arrangements of power. For example, as Adivasi communities continue to be framed and understood within the theories of primitivism, it becomes uniquely difficult to break out of those systems of understanding to allow for social mobility for individuals of those communities. Moreover, any form of knowledge or the value of their work in society will continuously be understood within the framework of primitive behaviour or forever in contrast to it. The language utilized, as seen in the above example of the Labour Bureau, continues to revert back to colonial archaeological terminology that statically locates these communities in prehistory (not protohistory due to the lack of text) through the examples of low-level technology and primitive agricultural techniques. Such epistemic injustice has very direct and drastic effects upon the individuals living in these communities and fighting for social justice (see also Gould, this volume).
Before moving ahead in this analysis, there is one more label that is necessary to discuss due to its significance in contemporary archaeological discourses, as well as the political connotations of the term in India, specifically its appropriation by the Hindu Right since the 1980s— the category of indigenous.
7.5 WHO IS INDIGENOUS TO INDIA?
There is a peculiar and particular simultaneity to the use of the category indigenous in India. Following similar frameworks of the plurality of time expanded on at the start of this chapter, the term ‘indigenous’ is utilized in different time periods to refer to different types of communities. The plurality of the use of the term, however, also allows for uncritical appropriations of power by those already in power. On the one hand, scholars of colonial history will often replace the colonial native with indigenous; at other times, the word indigenous is used to gloss Hindu, particularly in nationalist Hindutva rhetoric (see Bhatt 2007; Bhattacharya 2003; Nanda 2003; Trautmann 2008); and at still others, indigenous can refer to Adivasi populations in contemporary India (see Pratap 2009 for additional discussion).
Directly relevant to the latter population, the state continues a systematic military domination of indigenous Adivasi communities that demand separation and independence, such as the Naga in the northeast. The discourses of the state continued to reiterate the claims that these populations were of backward and primitive people, in an effort to reinstate how the beneficent state should be patron over these communities. All research and writing on these communities was and is highly regulated. And most research within the state is not political or historical in content, but are investigations of these communities as signifiers of natural caretakers of biodiversity that must be preserved (a key exception to this is ethnoarchaeological work conducted in Rajmahal Hills, Santhal Parganas, Jharkhand [see Pratap 2009]). This situates the human agent as part of a natural ecological system in a way that strips the body of citizenship but leaves it able to nurture nature (Rai and Nath 2003; see also Agamben 1998).
Such categorizations of people render a certain fixity to these representations, which shift the labels, such as primitive and backward, from state policy documents to stereotypes that continue in social realms. Such reiteration of these labels creates a certain Otherness that Adivasi communities continue to represent ‘as a sign of cultural/historical/racial difference’ (Bhabha 1983: 18). By othering the indigenous, the Adivasis, and the STs of India, the contemporary state uses the difference to solidify static stereotypes, in some cases to push nationalist agendas, and in others to maintain caste and class divisions and separations in political society. The static nature of stereotypes emerges primarily from similarly static, albeit plural, frameworks of time.
7.6 INCOMMENSURABILITY, AMBIVALENCE, AND REPETITION: A POSTCOLONIAL LENS
Within the discourses of time and its logics, a key point is the plurality of notions of time within India’s construction of the past and within contemporary times. Broadly speaking, there seem to be two systems of time at work: one coded as being scientific and thus rational, secular, modern, and civilized; and the second cultural/social, indexing something irrational, religious, premodern, and uncivilized. Of course, these categories are not static either. That time(s) might have layers of incommensurability (i. e., the multiple forms of time that might be activated at an archaeological site [refer to the Mesolithic example from an earlier section]), may not be comparable, with differences arising from deep epistemological roots, provides a new lens through which one might think about time and its effect both on the past and on contemporary communities.
It is important to note here that the incommensurability being discussed in this chapter is not only a cultural one; that is, if one believes or operates in one system of time, the same individual may also operate in the other. Incommensurability is not entirely located in the methodology of the practitioner but with the logics of time being utilized. This is a very important distinction, as cultural incommensurability as has been used within postcolonial scholarship (see Bhabha 1994) is loosely understood as a mode in which internal cultures share no values or projects with each other and where differences cannot be totalized as they exist in the same space (Bhabha 1993).
A similar argument has been appropriated by the right-wing, fundamentalist discourse of Hindutva (political and cultural movements in India and abroad advocating Hindu nationalism), claiming that people who are not of the tradition (i. e., Hindu tradition) cannot understand the traditions of the nation (see Bhatt 2007). My point is precisely the opposite of the Hindutva claim, arguing that the incommensurable nature of the logics of time creates a fluency in various vocabularies and labels of time within the population. This fluency developed most strongly during the colonial time period as a strategy of survival and resistance.
During the colonial period, this fluency of the incommensurable emerges within the cracks and fissures that were created through ambivalence, which marks not only the trauma of the colonial subject but also the characteristics of the colonial authorities, all within the larger possibility and potential of resistance. Colonial authority that struggles and strives to replicate its own order and perceived perfection undermines itself as it fails to replicate precisely. Thus, as Homi Bhabha argues, the colonial authority is in a state of ambivalence where at once it is ‘split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference’ (1985: 150).
Within the discourses of time in the construction of the past in India, the ordering of time also created new vocabularies that controlled the spans of those times and their characteristics, which in turn, came to define human populations. For example, with contemporary Adivasi/ indigenous populations in India, there is a direct connection made in scholarly and civic documents to communities living in some form of ancient time period and manner, labelling these communities as primitive and backward. This idea can be traced back to early accounts of how populations were understood within India. For example, Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay, an early Bengali historian provides this account from 1878:
In very ancient times, there lived in India two very distinct communities (sampraday) of people. Of them, one resembled us in heights and other aspects of physical appearance. The descendants of this community are now called Hindu. The people of the other community were short, dark, and extremely uncivilized. Their descendants are now known as Khas, Bhilla, Pulinda, Saontal, and other primitive (jangla ‘of the bush’) jati. (Chattopadhyay 1878: 2; translation from Chatterjee 1995: 238)
This view of indigenous communities in India as being primitive and linking them to racial phenotypes still prevails and can be found in contemporary textbooks, government documents, and state policy. The significance of such labels of time and person has deep structural and political implications with reference to the continued insistence on reinstating the same vocabularies to describe populations of people in India.
This is important because the key pedagogical impulse in schools and colleges in South Asia is repetition. The veneration of text continues and students repeat the hegemonic narratives linking time to progress and technology, which, in turn, is linked to people. Unless directly questioned, stereotypes based on these concepts of progress and capital (or the lack thereof) of indigenous groups in India continue to be repeated, referring to those communities as living in the Stone Age (see also Morrison 2002).
Repetition has its own history, a history of millions of people who could not read and were yet imparted the sound of the text, the articulation of the text, with or without comprehension. In South Asia, repetition is a prevalent mode of knowledge consumption and retention. How one knows what one knows about one’s past is not always based on the text alone. How the text is or is not understood is contextual; stories that annotate the recitations of the text are comprehended, negotiated, adjusted, and changed. They are contingent vehicles of knowledgesharing between people based on the current needs of the society or people listening to the oral tradition. Thus, the way one values history may not be the linguistic meaning of the text or a specific interpretation; rather, what is valued is the materiality of the text, the veneration of the book itself. It is this tradition that linked the outlooks of the pundits and the munshis (the learned men/scribes/secretary) to the privileging of texts by Orientalists (Trautmann and Sinopoli 2002).
The histories that have ramifications for how contemporary communities understand themselves in a broader world, in relation to one another, or for their self-awareness and identity may come from stories woven around those texts and the oral traditions that emerge from the telling and retelling of those stories over generations. These oral traditions have their own logics and are narratives in which there exist multiple possibilities for the epistemological underpinnings of time and thus are able to exist simultaneously to hegemonic oral traditions due to the plurality of temporal frameworks (see Poitevin 2001). Often these oral traditions as histories allow for the transcendence of time and space, such as human transformations into other beings, yet somehow maintain the feeling of stability of time and can also be utilized as forms of resistance and identity reinstantiation in the face of dominant forces. For example, a myth from the Vadar (indigenous) community in Ahmednagar (Maharashtra), is an annotated oral tradition to the Brah-manical story of Ram and Sita as per the Ramayana, and has to do specifically with how the Vadars are rewarded with solar lineage for sharing in Ram’s grief when Sita is abducted by Ravan:
Once mother Sita was sitting in the cottage. Brother Laksmana was sitting just in front of her. Mother Sita saw a beautiful golden doe. Mother Sita stubbornly told Laksmana that she wanted a blouse made out of the skin of that doe. To comply with Sita’s insistence, Laksmana took bow and arrow and followed the doe, and went far away. Here in the cottage, Ravana came in the form of a Gosavi and carried Sita away. When Rama-Laksmana came back to the cottage and looked around, they did not see Sita. Rama-Laksmana searched for Sita, with Rama desperately crying: ‘Sita! Sita!’ Rama was so aggrieved that he started embracing the trees, embracing the creepers, embracing the rocks. At that moment, a Vadar was somewhere in the forest breaking a huge rock. When the noise of the strikes on the rock reached Rama, he requested the Vadar to stop striking that rock with his sledgehammer because ‘My Sita is in it.’ Rama narrated to the Vadar the whole story. The Vadar was very saddened. Since the sorry plight of Rama was due to Sita’s wish to have a blouse made of the skin of the doe, the Vadar decided that ‘our women too would not put on a blouse as long as the search for Sita is on’. In the whole society, only our community made and kept this pledge. This is the reason why Rama himself agreed upon the Vadar descending from the Sun (suryavamsi: solar lineage). (Poitevin 2001: 105)
It is clear through this story that there is a placing of self within the larger hegemonic narrative, that is, the placement of this indigenous community as having a significant identity within the larger narratives of Hindu history. Importantly, it also provides grounding for certain clothing choices made by the communities (albeit the male in the story made the choice for all the women of his community)—the bare-chestedness of the women in indigenous communities in India is often cited as a signifier of uncivilized behaviour, and this sort of story provides the reason why, making it not an index of incivility, but rather of religious fervour. It also provides claim to an ancient history and placement within history of this community by the coexistence of Ram and the Vadar. Such an annotation (the Vadar story of solar lineage) of text (the Ramayana) is repeated within the communities for whom these stories are singularly significant (for examples from African contexts, see Schmidt, Walz, this volume). The mainstream Hindu storytelling may not include this version of the story, thus an underrepresented history and oral tradition is absent within civil/political society.
7.7 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
As mentioned at the start of this chapter, archaeologists have contended for some time now that our discipline is not apolitical and has significant political ramifications in the contemporary world. In investigating the ways in which the Indian past has been and is known (i. e., the epistemic framework of an Indian past), this chapter points to some faults in that framework which are rendered visible as inequalities in contemporary society. This epistemological framework was created partly through precolonial allowances of plurality of time and partly through the continued use of that incommensurability of time through the colonial periods, which allowed the colonized to simultaneously work with the colonial powers but retain some sense of identity. Whereas a pluralistic model of time may on some level cause confusion for those attempting to conduct archaeological investigations purely on an absolute chronological level, it also leaves open the possibility for alternative narratives.
However, in that very framework, the one that establishes what pre-and protohistory are and how they are defined in a pluralistic manner, there is also the establishment of vocabulary such as primitive and backwardness that link progression of time to progression of technology to human beings—and in that formulation of theory, there is inherent injustice and othering when addressing contemporary Adivasi populations. As the Indian state continues to utilize the characteristics of prehistoric populations through the vocabulary of primitive and backward, archaeologists should take a more active role to reclaim those words, or better yet, take them out of our discourses by decolonizing and dismantling the epistemic framework that continues to reinstantiate such vocabulary. As long as those words continue to be used within archaeological discourses, they will be repeated in school textbooks, and then replicated in state policy, rendering indigenous/Adivasi communities static, othered, and without histories. Their alternative narratives will continue to be silenced in the larger discourses of the histories of India.
There are few moments within which there are direct ramifications of scholarly actions by archaeologists that may provide space for social change. I focus on time as one of the devices that continues to be used through its labels, categorizations, and typologies to systemically oppress people. In trying to excavate the modes and logics of time that are used in the archaeology of India, I confront the slippage between the theories and practices of time, provide a postcolonial critique of those categories and their effects, and demonstrate the manner in which such a past and its descriptive vocabulary directly affects present populations. This is not the last word on this topic, nor does it intend to be; the aim is to begin to ask questions about the effects of time and the language of time, not just for our own constructions of chronology, but rather as venues for social change.38
Perspectives Arising Out of the Americas
World History
