How to Be a Barbarian in India English V

8/16/2019 How to Be a Barbarian in India English V

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English version of: Comment être barbare en Inde (Marseille: MuCem, 2015). 2

surrounded late one evening by a vigilante mob, which accused them summarily

of acts of drug-dealing and prostitution. What was particularly astonishing was

that mob was led by none other than the Law Minister of the Delhi government,

and Aam Aadmi Party member, a controversial lawyer by the name of Somnath

Bharti, with some previous charges of the subornment of witnesses against him.

Bharti stridently claimed that he was acting on complaints from other residents

against the Africans, and demanded of some policemen present on the scene to

raid the Africans’ houses to check on their alleged possession of drugs. When

the policemen refused to do so, as they did not have a proper search warrant,

Bharti apparently took the law into his own hands, forced his way into the

houses, and also physically obliged several of the African female students to

move out on to the street. What followed has been contested, but some of the

students claimed that they were then physically roughed up, verbally insulted,

and also obliged while on the street to provide urine samples into containers to

be tested for their alleged use of drugs. It was announced a day or two later that

these tests showed nothing incriminating at all. Terrorized, many of the Africans

then began moving out of the area over the next few days, while meanwhile other

residents declared that Bharti was nothing short of a “hero” for his actions as a

vigilante chief. Eventually, a legal investigation was launched against him, which

is still underway.

The negative publicity surrounding the event, which was quite widely

reported in the Indian print and electronic media, caused some dismay in the

ranks of the Aam Aadmi Party. Nevertheless, the higher echelons of the

leadership, including its notoriously sanctimonious leader Arvind Kejriwal,

insisted that Somnath Bharti’s actions had been perfectly proper. However, one

of the founders of the party, a former senior diplomat named Madhu Bhaduri,

was sufficiently agitated that she then asked at a meeting of the party’s council

about two weeks later that the following resolution be passed.

“The National Council of the Aam Aadmi Party unanimously resolves to

tender an apology to the Women from Uganda and Nigeria living in Khirki

Extension who, were forced to submit themselves to narcotic tests at the




behest of some members and supporters of Aam Aadmi Party on the night

of 15/16 Jan. 2014. The Party deeply regrets the humiliation caused to the

women. The Aam Aadmi Party disassociates itself, with any racist

comments made by the party’s members and supporters. It apologises for

them. It is not a racist party”.

To her surprise, not only was this resolution not passed, but she herself was

shouted down at the meeting, and forced off the podium. In her later remarks to

the press, the former diplomat in question noted that one of those who heckled

her was himself a prominent academic and self-proclaimed activist for the rights

of the backward castes in India. She argued that even if the African women in

question were engaged in illegal activities, they neverthless had the right to due

process. But evidently this was not what many in the party of the “common man”

thought. The conclusion that it was “not a racist party” may thus have been both

too hasty and too optimistic.

This episode is only one in a series, that has been going on for some

years, and which also involves other cities such as Pune and Bangalore that

have visible populations of African students. The most recent statistics that are

available, from 2012, show that from a relatively small total foreign student

population in India of about 77,000, about 10,000 (or just under 13 %) were from

Africa, and more particularly Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and

Somalia, in that order. These students frequently complain of difficulties in

persuading landlords to rent to them, as also of regular verbal abuse on the

streets. Most recently, a violent crowd in the Delhi Metro attempted to lynch three

young Africans, after accusing them of sexually harassing women; the police had

to intervene to save them, as one sees from harrowing video footage available

through the social media. As a student from Chad living in Bangalore stated to

the Hindu newspaper (in a report dated 22nd July 2013, and entitled “African

students allege racial discrimination in Bangalore”): “We feel that people do not

want us to stay here. I will catch a flight back to my country the day I finish my

course”.




But recent years have also brought to the fore episodes of other forms of

exclusion, and consequent violent behaviour in Indian cities. Just two weeks after

the episode in Khirki Extension, a student from the northeastern Indian state of

Arunachal Pradesh, Nido Taniam, was abused and violently attacked in broad

daylight in a busy market area of South Delhi. He died as a consequence of the

attack. Taniam was the son of a fairly prominent politician, and his death sparked

considerable protests by other students from his area of origin. It emerged in

subsequent public discussions that these students were often treated as

“foreigners”, as their appearance was markedly different from that of people from

northern India. Rental discrimination was again regularly practised against them.

But some of the fallout of the incident in late January was unexpected. In the

area of Munirka, not far from the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, an

association of resident-owners decided in mid February 2014, a bare two weeks

after Taniam’s death, to exclude many potential renters from the northeast of the

country as they were seen as “dirty people (gande log)”. They accused them to

the media of having a pattern of drunken and disorderly behaviour. On the other

hand, a perusal of newspaper reports instead points to a long series of attacks

on single women students from the northeast by local residents precisely in the

Munirka area, including several that resulted in cases of rape and murder. Then

again, in May 2014, a student from Nagaland and her small legal team which had

gone to file a case at the Tis Hazari court in Delhi against a lawyer, who had

sexually harassed her in a nearby Metro station, were publicly chased and

attacked by other lawyers (friends and associates of the accused) in the very

premises of the court.

Several distinct conclusions can no doubt be drawn from these incidents,

which are only a selection of those that have appeared recently in the Indian

newspapers. Besides there are surely others, concerning which formal

complaints have not been filed or which are seen as too unimportant to merit a

newspaper story. In the first place, it should be clear that these incidents are

largely concentrated in urban areas, and especially the larger cities. This is for

the obvious reason that these centres play the role of “melting-pots”, both for




foreigners visiting India, and for Indians coming together from different parts of

the country. Since many of those concerned in these incidents are students, it

would also appear that it is in those cities that have thriving universities that a

greater number of such violent attacks take place. But beyond that, it is obvious

that the city of Delhi is a particular flashpoint, both in respect of these incidents

and more generally as a scene of urban violence, often visited on working

women. A second conclusion to be drawn is that this violence is directed both at

those from the geographical margins of the national culture, those who are thus

“insufficiently Indian” in the imagination of others, and at those foreigners who

are seen as racially inferior. Though there is undoubtedly some systematic

violence and discrimination directed at visiting white Americans and Europeans,

who are in fact more numerous in India than Africans, it is in reality far more

limited. In short, there is more to the issue than a simple expression of “nativism”

or “xenophobia”. Third, it is strikingly obvious that some of the violence is

sexually charged, either through the use of accusations of prostitution or in other

more direct ways.

As one moves from the urban to the rural situation, the logic of alterity and

the associated violence changes in contemporary India. Roughly 30 % of the

Indian population lived in urban areas according to the National Census of 2011.

For the remaining 70 %, the most important line of fracture may be thought to

work in relation to caste. A great deal of rural violence is directed at the so-called

dalits (once termed the “untouchables”), who are themselves actually an

agglomeration of over individual 1,200 castes of somewhat varying status,

function, and levels of prosperity. In rural areas, the dalits nevertheless represent

roughly a third of agricultural labour, and it is in this context that they face the

greatest frictions, and consequently the most organized violence. In the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these labouring castes were often

required to perform corvée for the superior castes, but in the past some decades

they have begun increasingly to resist such demands. Further, though once

largely excluded from owning land, dalits have gradually made inroads into this

area in the years since Indian independence. This in turn has led to “land wars”




between them and various superior castes. Finally, as in the urban case, a

certain part of the violence appears to be organized on a sexual logic, with males

from superior landowning castes demanding that dalit women be made available

to them by their families for sexual purposes, and committing acts of violence

when such access is denied. There are statistics available on such violence, but

it is obvious that they are far from reliable, as many such cases in fact go

unreported.

Contemporary observers, activists and analysts tend to take different

approaches to these largely undeniable facts. Some argue that violence against

dalits is specific, and therefore comparable for example to the violence directed

in the past century against African-Americans in the United States. In other

words, they propose that in this case at least, radical caste differences can

analytically be assimilated to questions of race and racial discrimination. Others

tend to disagree, suggesting instead that these forms of violence should be

considered within the context of a rural Indian society pervaded by many modes

of violence, characteristic of a society in the throes of a radical social and

economic transformation. Not only dalits, but many other upwardly mobile groups

– so it is argued – are the victims of the vengeful acts of the groups that once

dominated rural society, and who now resent the loss of that dominance.

Besides, violent clashes are not entirely unknown even within groups at the lower

end of the caste hierarchy, what in the official language might be termed “other

backward castes” and dalits.

There are thus clearly various axes along which alterity and exclusion

could be considered in contemporary India. One of these would be the classic,

and notionally “vertical” one, of caste, opposing the upper and notionally more

pure castes to the lower and more impure ones, and schematically running the

entire gamut between Brahmins, traders, landowners, pastoralists, agricultural

workers, and dalits, but also including potentially confusing modern categories

such as industrialists, factory hands, and petty professionals. A second way of

looking of matters would be within the space of the nation-state itself, where

those who belong to “exotic” areas, inhabited by the so-called “tribal groups”




beloved of later colonial anthropolgists like Verrier Elwin, are particularly

discriminated against when they move outside these spaces. In point of fact,

relatively few of the ādivāsis, the so-called “aboriginal” groups largely made up of

erstwhile hunter-gatherers that the Indian Constitution claims normally to protect,

have moved into the major metropolitan spaces. Rather, it is members of the

well-educated, and often quite westernized, groups from the Indian northeast –

states such as Assam, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Arunachal, Manipur, Mizoram and

Tripura – who are caught in this particular crossfire, together with others from

north Bengal and Sikkim, as well as long-term refugees from Tibet. A third axis

would oppose Indians and foreigners, in the sense of apparently simple ideas of

citizenship. But despite the discussion above in regard of African students, it

turns out that nothing in fact is all that simple. An ongoing political argument in

India concerns persons from the country’s neighbourhood, who cannot easily be

distinguished by mere visual inspection from “real” Indians. A claim is often made

that there is an ongoing “infiltration” of India by Bangladeshis, against whom

political campaigns are now regularly carried out by Hindu nationalist parties. A

lesser, but still palpable, tension may be found in North Bengal with regard to

Nepalis, who have for a very long time moved about pretty freely in the area and

played a major social role there. Equally, the presence of ethnically-based

political movements, such as that demanding a space for “Gurkhaland” inside the

Indian nation-state, tend at times to further exacerbate these tensions, even if

their demands for autonomy are based on real evidence of discrimination and

lack of political representation.

However, no consideration of the nature of alterity in contemporary India,

can avoid a further fourth axis which turns out to be crucial: that organised

around religion, and in particular in regard to the place of Muslims in the

contemporary Indian nation-state. Official statistical data from 2001 suggest that,

at that time, Muslims accounted for some 13.4 % of the Indian population,

Christians for a further 2.3 %, and Sikhs for around 1.9 %. In contrast, in 1941,

the last census before Partition, Muslims accounted for around 24 % of the

population of undivided India. The creation of Pakistan in two segments – west




and east – thus had significantly reduced the number of Muslims in India, but not

down to negligible proportions. However, the problem was that many in the

political class in India considered this to be unfinished business. Although the

Indian National Congress, the principal political formation that led India in the

decades after independence, claimed to be “secularist” in orientation, the

question of whether India should not in effect become a state representing the

“Hindus” – just as Pakistan represented the Muslims – remained a major

question. Initially, the political spokesmen for a Hindu India were unable to gain

much traction in the parliamentary system that emerged in the 1950s. For

example, in the 1952 general elections, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which overtly

represented this ideological position, was only able to win three parliamentary

seats. However, the existence of anti-Muslim political sentiment was expressed

in other ways, notably in terms of local and regional violence and riots. Some

parts and prominent members of the Congress itself were not averse to the pro-

Hindu position, which effectively posed the Muslims as “barbarians” who had

once conquered India, but who were in reality no longer welcome there. The

eventual dissolution of the Jana Sangh, and the formation of its successor the

Bharatiya Janata Party (or BJP) in 1980, brought this position a great deal more

respectability, and eventually made it a political movement that was able two

decades later to capture political power for a time.

A series of linked ideas lay behind this movement, sometimes termed

hindutva, after a term coined by one of its early ideologues, V.D. Savarkar. One

of these was that Hindu pride had been emasculated during centuries of Muslim

rule in India, and thus urgently needed to be reasserted. A second notion was

that, contrary to what academic analysts and others claimed, “Hinduism” was in

fact a highly coherent and ancient religion and ideology, with a set of canonical

texts and strong moral positions. A third tenet was that the principal threat to

Hindu identity lay in Islam, in the form of the Muslim neighbours of India, but also

in terms of the Muslims who lived within the space of the Indian nation. Finally, a

fourth idea, relatively late to emerge, was that the emergent “Hindu polity” in

India could make allies elsewhere in the world, through the logic of a “clash of




civilizations” in which other major nations and civilizations too would see that

Islam was their primary opponent. As in Europe, demographic fear-mongering

was one of the favoured tactics. One of the chief websites of the so-called Sangh

Parivar (the agglomeration of organisations that includes the BJP) has thus

stated that “in 2035, Muslims will become absolute majority in India”, and

suggests that this will be the consequence of polygamy and unbridled

reproduction on the one hand, and conversion and terrorism on the other. The

barbarians are thus portrayed as being not just at the gates, but also a Trojan

Horse within the city itself.

History has a central role to play in all these claims, and so it is to the

historical record that we must turn. This is not on account of some happy illusion

that historical research somehow resolves contemporary political disputes, for

which there is very little support. Rather it is because we need to lay bare the

complexities of the problem in the Indian case. We have described four obvious

categories of alterity in which some notion of the “barbarian” has been deployed

in India; these are, respectively, the outcaste or untouchable; the spatially

separated “tribal” and “aboriginal” other; the “inferior” foreigner, often coming

from a distance; and the religiously identified other, frequently the Muslim

opposed to the Hindu. In the section that follows, I will attempt to show somewhat

schematically how each of these categories evolved over Indian history, with

different time-frames as well as spatial contexts. To begin with, however, we may

begin with a relatively classic exercise, which we can term one of “naming the

barbarian”.

II.

The earliest textual materials that are accessible to historians regarding

South Asia, namely those which come to us from after the (still rather obscure)

phase of the Indus Valley urban civilization, suggest the existence of an already

differentiated society, with a number of social categories that are used to

hierarchize and to distinguish in the early version of the Sanskrit language that

had come into use at this time. The Sanskrit-speakers were linked in turn to other




peoples in Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, and they established a society

characterised by new rituals, liturgic texts and material practices. This is in the

so-called Vedic age, whose beginning in conventional dating now lies between

around 1500 and 1200 BCE in northern India. From this time on, the normative

vision of society tends to divide the “normal” and largely pastorally-oriented

society of the Sanskrit-using āryas into four major strata (or varna),

corresponding to social function: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras.

Sometimes, the first three of these were then classified together as dvija (twice-

born), and separated from the fourth and probably more numerous stratum,

which was treated as distinctly inferior to them, and excluded from the use of

certain ritual materials in Sanskrit. But beyond these four lie more debated terms,

which are often used with a distinctly negative connotation, such as dāsa and

dasyu. It has been argued that the dāsa, while being treated as the inferior entity

in a master-servant relationship with his or her ārya counterpart, did not in fact

refer to persons of a single ethnicity or origin. Further, they are often conceived

as sharing the same language and value-system as the āryas. It has been

customary in many historical circles to translate this term then as “slave”, while

neverthelesss noting that no exact equivalence should be made with slavery in

classical Greece and Rome. The dasyu, on the other hand, seems initially to

refer to people living outside the boundaries of ārya society and its values, with a

distinctive physical appearance, but also possessing considerable wealth,

resources, and even fortresses. The relatively early text, the Rg Veda, refers to

them moreover as characterized by their harsh and incorrect speech

(mrdhravāc ), thus bringing them close to the notion of the “barbarian”. However,

as the American Indologist Wendy Doniger notes, the term dasyu itself

undergoes an evolution: “The dasyu was in Vedic times a non-Aryan or a

barbarian, often a demon; later the dasyu was a slave, and still later a robber or

man fallen from caste. The term [eventually] came to be used as a general term

of opprobrium, denoting (…) a murderer, a bad-tempered man, or a low-caste

man. In Manu, it usually designates a person of no caste at all, somehow outside

of the entire caste system”.




To the non-specialist like myself, debates concerning social categories

and their use in the logic of alterity and exclusion in this early period of Indian

history are very frequently nearly impenetrable, as they descend into narrow

philological concerns. Nevertheless, several important general points are

available for us to retain, with regard to the period before the emergence of the

so-called “religions of renunciation” somewhere in the middle of the first

millennium BCE. The most important is the notion that we are in a society

characterised by at least three types of division: first, a horizontal and broadly

territorial segmentation into “tribes” ( jana), of which one of the most prominent

are the Kuru-Panchala of what is today the Delhi region; second, a division

between masters with a proper varna status and their slaves; and third, a further

division between the āryas as a whole and their principal “other”, who would

often have been the descendants of peoples who inhabited the Indo-Gangetic

plain earlier, perhaps speaking other “barbarian” languages that were not Indo-

European. While the “tribes” themselves would have often had endemic

internecine conflict, as appears above all in an epic like the Mahābhārata, they

appear nevertheless to have participated in a shared vocabulary of hierarchy,

ritual and sacrifice, as the very same epic demonstrates. There is reason to

believe that these were not yet highly rule-bound societies, and that social

mobility across the normative categories was still a distinct possibility. A further

general point concerns the creeping process of urbanisation, which seems to

have transformed this society from its initial pastoralist and simple agriculturist

origins, to one where small kingdoms coalesced around the “tribal” identities set

out above. Though the wealth and glitter of these kingdoms is much exaggerated

no doubt in the imaginative vision of the epics, it is evident that they eventually

produced significant court-societies along the Gangetic basin, in centres such as

Koshala, Kashi, Videha, and eventually the easterly node of Magadha. But we

must equally note that the nascent urban settings would have generated fresh

forms of social interaction, and thus also made for tensions that a pastoralist

society would have been quite unfamiliar with.




Our central difficulty with this early phase of Indian history (running from

the composition of the early Vedas through to the time of the epics), is that we

know far more about its norms and ideals, than about its concrete realities. A

further difficulty is that it has provided a powerful template for thinking about

difference, by creating a complex but also ambiguous vocabulary that remained

in place for centuries, and even millennia afterwards. The scheme of the fours

varnas that emerged in this time still persists in some form into the vocabulary of

contemporary India, though the ground realities have shifted beyond

comprehension. It may also be that the idea of “ritually impure” activities comes

to us from this time, and that in turn it marks certain social categories as outside

the sphere of “normal” society by demanding of them such social functions and

occupations as the more elevated varnas would not perform, notably those

dealing with the disposal of certain types of dead animals, or human excrement.

Terms such as dasyu have no doubt largely disappeared from contemporary

vocabulary in anything resembling their ancient sense, but the same cannot be

said for another crucial term, mleccha, which also emerged at this time to

designate a “barbarian”, and which was at times used interchangeably with

dasyu.

The question of alterity and exclusion at the time when the religions of

renunciation (and particularly Buddhism) emerged around 500-400 BCE is thorny

and contested, and cannot be dealt with in detail here. Clearly the fact that

Buddhism came to have a proselytising vocation is not a matter that can be

ignored, and suggests that even its relatively early proponents had a certain

rather broad notion of inclusiveness rather than an insistent conceptual

preoccupation with ethnicity and its limits. Let us instead consider a subsequent

period, when the term mleccha came to take on a new and expansive meaning.

This is the moment of the arrival of the Greeks in north-western India around 330

BCE, which follows a frontier struggle (the nature of which remains disputed),

with the expanding Achaemenid polity. If the Indians posed a conceptual

challenge to the Greeks, in the sense of representing a different yet complex

society that could not simply be denigrated and thus dismissed, the same was




equally true in the opposite sense. The new arrivals came to be designated soon

enough, even in the celebrated inscriptions of the Mauryan ruler Ashoka (3 rd

century BCE), as yavanas or yonas, a version of the term “Ionian” used for

eastern Greeks in the Hellenistic world. But they were also treated as belonging

to the larger category of the mleccha, or “barbarians”, because of their use of a

strange and initially incomprehensible language. Later, some texts and

commentators extended matters further by suggesting that the strange character

of the Greeks also derived from the fact that they did not accept a society based

on a scheme of four varnas.

In the centuries that immediately followed the Greek invasions, and the

setting up of important Indo-Greek polities along the north-western frontier

regions of India, the term mleccha proved its utility and flexibility. After the

decline of the Mauryas, late in the 2nd century BCE, there followed a complex

period of four or five centuries in which northern India came to be closely linked

to the expanding polities of Central Asia. This period, which had long been

relegated to a secondary status by historians, has recently been the object of a

significant and ongoing reconsideration. It is now increasingly clear that a great

deal of social mobility, as well as turmoil, accompanied the political changes of

the period. The establishment of new dynasties in northern India such as the

Kushanas and the Sakas, was evidently the occasion for a process by which

invaders (in the case of the Kushanas, possibly a branch of the large structure of

the Yuezhi) were initially held at arm’s length as mlecchas, but then progressively

incorporated into the ruling strata of northern India. At the same time, artistic,

architectural and other evidence points to the notion that these Central Asian

rulers and their elites also acculturated as a consquence of their ongoing

presence in northern and even central India. In other words, the concept of

mleccha in these centuries “between the empires” (that is between the rule of the

Mauryas and Guptas), was perhaps not so much a category of absolute

exclusion as a “holding” term, or a point of transition. Peoples and dynasties

whose origins lay amongst the Scythians or in regions of western China

eventually settled, though their numbers naturally remain unknown, in the Indo-




Gangetic plain and were incorporated into the populations there, even in high-

status roles. In all probability, many of them were not taken into the lower strata

of society but rather into the locations that corresponded with their established

social roles, namely as warriors and political elites, that is to say broadly as

Kshatriyas.

In a highly ambitious and schematic essay that describes the formation of

this northern Indian society of the first centuries CE, the German Indologist Harry

Falk has argued that it alternated between the control of two sorts of polities,

those that were “foreign or foreign-inspired” on the one hand, and those that

were dominated by “dynasties with rather indigenous values” on the other. This is

an intriguing, but perhaps deliberately somewhat anachronistic conception. Falk

suggests furthermore that the former set of dynasties were “extroverted” in their

values, tolerant, exuberantly polytheistic, allowing women a prominent role in

public life, and interested in external trade; on the other hand, the “indigenous

dynasties” were in his view not merely “introverted”, but severe and Brahmanical

in their attitudes, withdrew women from public life, retreated into a Vedic

conception of time, and turned from an interest in foreign trade to a

preoccupation with the management of a localized economy. This schematic

conceptualization may be useful as a provocation, say in relation to some

straightforward narrative of the historical emergence of “Indian feudalism” in the

period. But Falk’s essay also opens up a series of difficult conceptual problems,

most notably regarding how such a violent alternation was possible when the

same set of actors often remained in play across these political transitions. There

seems to be a real danger here too of confusing assertive ideological statements

with realities on the ground.

This is all the more important to bear in mind, considering that many of the

relatively conservative normative texts, that claim to speak for an “introverted”

Brahmanical tradition seem to come from precisely this period. Thus, Patrick

Olivelle has recently defended the view that the Mānava Dharmasāstra,

“undoubtedly the most celebrated and best known legal text from ancient India”,

can probably be dated to a time from “between the first century BCE and the




second century CE”, and closer to the latter than the former date. This text shows

a notable anxiety regarding mixing between social groups, and also classifies

“elephants, horses, Sūdras, despised foreigners, lions, tigers and boars” all

together in the category of those who possess “darkness”, as distinct from those

who possess “vigour” and “goodness”. It would appear in fact that for a period of

six or seven centuries, northern India was the scene of vigorous contestation

between different groups and ideologies, ranging from the Buddhism that was

still often favoured by dynasties such as the Kushanas, to a neo-Brahmanism,

reflected for example in the wave of impressive temples that the emergent Gupta

dynasty built once it had consolidated its rule in the first part of the 4 th century

CE. There could be no greater error than to assume that the rigidly stratified

society imagined by the author (or authors) of the Mānava Dharmasāstra could in

fact be found in any Indian region. A group such as the Rajputs, which first

appears mentioned in the 6th century CE, and then plays an enormous role in

western India in the millennium that follows, is precisely the product of such

social upheaval.

In the later centuries of the first millennium CE, we can thus see the

consolidation and elaboration of a vocabulary with regard to alterity, where the

objects that are addressed also change. To the terms mleccha, and yavana,

were added another term that would soon become generic, namely huna (or

Hun, in reference to the invasions of the Hephthalites in the later fifth and early

sixth centuries). The earliest Muslim conquerors who appeared on the Indian

subcontinent in eighth century were also referred to as tājika and pārasīka (the

latter a term deriving from “Pars” or Persia). The term turushka (loosely “Turk”)

which had been employed at times in a fleeting manner for the earlier Indo-

Scythians, was now given a new turn, and gradually spread in its usage in India

to become virtuously synonymous with the notion of “Muslim” in many parts of

the subcontinent. This expansion of vocabulary with regard to an external other

or “foreigner” parallelled a proliferation in the terms used to distinguish social

strata. Within the normative frame of the four-varna system, a vast number of

other collective names emerged, as groups began to identify themselves as jātis




using occupational, regional, and other references. But the relationship with

those outside this varna frame was also altered, for at least two distinct reasons.

One was the shifting frontier between the sphere of sedentary agriculture and

urbanization on the one hand, and forest-folk and hunter-gatherers on the other.

Some of the latter came to be treated now not as vague and practically nameless

threats, but rather as distinct interlocutors, who could be asked for tribute, or

even be used as allies in certain contexts. Further, it is in the course of the first

millennium that we gain a clearer sense of the emergence of a fifth,

complementary category, what would come later generically to be called

“untouchables”.

To be sure, the term candāla had long existed, referring above all to those

responsible for disposing off corpses. We have also noted the status of dāsa,

namely of bonded or enserfed persons, who were usually excluded from entry

into the four-varna system. But what appears equally clear is that there was no

fixed situation for those outside this frame, beyond the fact of their exclusion. In a

recent and major work of synthesis, the doyenne of ancient Indian historians

Romila Thapar has claimed that during the first millennium CE, the untouchables,

who she depicts by this time as essentially rural landless labour and urban

scavengers, “had little possibility of improving their status”. She even goes so far

as to assert that “the status of untouchables was … immutable”. It seems to me

unclear how such an assertion can be sustained, either empirically or

conceptually. After all, the broad group outside the four-fold varna scheme must

itself have been made up of a large number of smaller groups, that were all

occupationally, functionally, and geographically distinct. Their position relative to

one another must undoubtedly have evolved over the centuries. Nor can we rule

out the possibility that some of these groups might even, periodically, have

entered the varna system, just as the Central Asians or other migrants did.

Further, given the constant proximity between landless labour and the landed

groups, there is every reason to suspect that forms of sexual mixing would have

existed, even if they were not necessarily the rule. Our difficulty is that the written

sources for demonstrating such promiscuity are obviously very few, but it seems




hard to believe that a wholly-efficient system of caste endogamy is anything other

than a self-serving myth.

The arrival of Muslims into South Asia, which began already with their

early conquests in Sind in the eighth century CE, was consolidated from about

1200 onwards, with the formation of vast conquering polities in northern India.

These polities dominated much of northern India, and also a part of the

peninsula, in the six centuries that followed. This period has important

consequences for the logics of alterity in South Asia, in more ways than one.

First, it is primarily on account of Muslim observations and classifications that the

term hindū (plural, hunūd ) came into common usage, in order to designate those

inhabitants of India who were not Muslims. Thus, even as the Muslims were

being made the objects of classification as turushkas, yavanas, mlecchas, and so

on, they were engaged in the same exercise themselves. If some observers like

the celebrated Abu Raihan al-Biruni (973-1048 CE), looked at the natives of al-

Hind with some sympathy and informed erudition, others also referred to them,

both at the moment of conquest, and even much later, quite summarily as kuffār

(or “unbelievers”). Does this mean, however, that either group thought of the

other in some sense as “barbarians” ? This is a matter of long-standing debate,

which has been revived in recent times. Several points need to be stressed,

some more obvious than others. In the first place, it is worth remarking that in

contrast to their policies of mass conversion in the first areas of expansion of the

Caliphate, such as Syria, Egypt, and then Sassanid Iran, the Muslim polities in

northern India never attempted to ensure that the great mass of its conquered

subjects were converted to Islam. This was in spite of the fact that they were

certainly not “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitāb), and were thus not legally entitled

to protection according to the standard prescriptions of the sharī‘a. This suggests

a certain wariness at two levels. First, there was the view – allegedly articulated

by Sultan Iltutmish of Delhi in the thirteenth century – that even if a formal

conquest had occurred, the balance of force still lay with the non-Muslims, who

would thus have to be placated rather than further provoked. Second, at least

some of the conquering Muslims appear to have been genuinely puzzled by the




nature and complexity of the culture they encountered, and not necessarily

inclined simply to dismiss it. While frequently speaking in aggressive terms

regarding the “idol-worship (but-parasti)” of their interlocutors, they appear

already by the end of the thirteenth or the early fourteenth century to seek some

form of common ground. The fact that a relatively small number of the “Hindus”

converted to Islam in this early period may also have impressed them. The figure

of the “Brahman” or the “thread-wearer (zunnārdār )” thus comes to assume

somewhat formidable dimensions in Indo-Muslim writings not as a military

opponent but as a social and intellectual one.

Who precisely converted to Islam in the different regions of India between

1200 and 1800 CE remains a matter of some mystery. Some communities do

have oral narratives recalling their identities before conversion, often because

becoming Muslim did not efface the idea of belonging to some form of jātī group,

such as weavers, of metal-workers. There is currently no clear evidence

suggesting that converts came disproportionately from the ranks of either the

lowest varna, or the “untouchables”. In other words, if there was any intuition to

suggest that the encounter between a more “egalitarian” Islam, and the more

hierarchically-structured world of the “Hindus” would lead to generalized

conversion as a means of social mobility, the historical record does not support it.

Further, it is clear that amongst the Muslims, ethnic identity – however loosely

defined it might have been – continued to play a major role. Those of Central

Asian Turkish origin knew that they were not the same as migrants from the

Caspian Sea littoral area, and even less did they confound themselves with the

“Indian converts”. A particularly interesting case is that of the Africans from the

Horn of Africa (Habash, that is notionally Abyssinia, but including Sudan), and

the Swahili coast (or Zanj), who were brought to India from at least the fourteenth

century onwards, to serve as elite slaves. By the later fifteenth century, and

especially in the two hundred years that followed, several of these Muslim African

notables exercised considerable power in states such as the Bengal Sultanate,

or the Deccan polities. One of the best known instances is that of the a certain

Malik ‘Ambar (ca. 1548-1626) who was enslaved in eastern Africa, and




eventually reached the western Deccan via the Red Sea and Baghdad. For

roughly three decades, until his death, this habashī notable was recognized not

only as a powerful and magnetic political figure, but as a pious patron of Sunni

Muslim scholars in the Deccan. Other important figures from roughly the same

period include a certain Abhang Khan Zangi (or Zanji), also in the western

Deccan kingdom of Ahmadnagar, and a sometime ally and patron of ‘Ambar.

These men were often lavishly praised by other Muslim writers and chroniclers,

who might themselves be Iranians or Central Asians, though the extent of

intermixing (let alone inter-marriage) amongst various ethnic groups of Muslims

remains an issue to be explored. Certainly political factions within these

kingdoms, and even in the far larger Mughal empire (that was formed around

1530), frequently followed lines of ethnicity, or a combination of ethnicity and

sectarian Muslim identification.

What is certain is that by around 1600, the question of the “barbarian” in

India had become an immensely tangled one. The circulation of elites from

Central and West Asia had become a regular phenomenon, even if the numbers

could not have exceeded a few thousands each year. On arriving in India, at

least some of these migrants could express dismay at the extent to which the

cultural boundaries had become blurred over the course of centuries of Muslim

rule. Few of them were capable of a deep ethnographic understanding of the

society of the “Hindus”, and remarkably few in fact remarked on the nuances of

jātī divisions, which they often translated using the term tā’ifat (“tribe”), or more

rarely as qaum (“community”). Indeed, their interest in religious and sectarian

divisions, both between Muslims and non-Muslims and amongst Muslims

themelves, seems to have far exceeded their desire to learn about these other

questions. By the seventeenth century, as the number of “Hindus” in the middle

and upper echelons Mughal military and secretarial service increased apace, it

was simply impossible to dismiss them as uncultured, or claim that they were

people who babbled in some incomprehensible way. Conversely, increasing

familiarity with the Persian language, its literature, and the elaborate arts and

etiquette of the Indo-Muslim courts, also made it difficult for at least some of the




non-Muslims (including groups like the Marathas, many of whom opposed

Mughal rule), to see the Muslims as mere barbarians either. This cohabitation

thus produced what is sometimes termed a “composite culture”, the obvious

opposite of a model of radical alterity. Evidence of this can be found, for example

in the monumental architecture of the period, in literature which emerged in

Persian as well as the Indian vernaculars (and eventually also in a “composite

language”, namely Urdu), in the painting of both the Mughal and the Rajput

courts, and above all in the spectacular tradition of what is termed “Hindustani”

classical music, which blended elements such as the instruments and forms (like

the maqām) from West and Central Asia, with the devotional and popular

vernacular songs (termed dhurpad and bishnupad) of northern India.

But it would be futile to deny that the centuries from 1200 and 1800 were

also characterized in India by various forms of conflict, accompanied sometimes

by a radical rhetorical violence denigrating the cultural level and attainments of

one’s opponents. In the later years of Mughal rule, it was not unusual for

members of their Muslim elite to grumble that they had gone much too far in their

compromise with their “Hindu” subjects. The relentless pace of Mughal territorial

expansion between 1560 and 1700 also brought them into contact with new

peoples, many of whom they did not quite know how to deal with. In the east and

northeast, they encountered peoples who they claimed were cannibals (ādam-

khwār ), and whom they therefore treated as barely human. Within the notional

limits of the empire, the Mughal policy of encouraging agrarian expansion in

order to have a larger tax-base, pushed back the limits of forested lands and

brought peasants into conflict with forest-dwellers. Some of these forest-dwelling

groups, such as the Bhils and Gonds of Central India, were organized into

political forms that the Mughals recognised, treating their heads as rulers (or

rājas). In some instances, on the fringes of the Bengal province, we are even

aware of forest rājas who used the occasion of Mughal expansion to claim a

place within the four-varna framework, attributing to themselves a location in the

capacious category of Rajput warriors. Other groups, such as the Bedas and

Boyas in the Deccan, were periodically mobilised as troops, though their precise




status remained uncertain and they were often referred to in disparaging terms

such as “eaters of lizards”. This then was the complex situation which confronted

the British when, in 1800, they had consolidated their conquest over a good part

of eastern and southern India.

III.

The question of the “barbarian” took on a very different complexion over

the course of British colonial rule, and its consequences are very much with us

today. In the first instance, we must note that the Europeans were themselves

treated as “barbarians” in the centuries between 1500 and 1800, when they first

arrived in numbers and set up their establishments on the coast. Very familiar

terms were initially used to describe them: hunas, yavanas, mlecchas, or

pārasīkas, besides two newer ones: “white-faces” or “white-skins”, and “Franks”,

the last a term that Muslim writers in the sixteenth century already used in

respect of the Portuguese. Many observers saw them as unclean in their

practices and inadequate in the most elementary rules of personal hygiene, ideas

that continued in some form through the whole period of colonial rule. The first

Indo-Muslims to visit Europe and leave written accounts of their experiences, in

the second half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, elaborated at

some length on this characterization. But by this time, the balance of power was

quite different than it had been in around 1600, when Tahir Muhammad Sabzwari

had declared authoritatively that “the community of Franks wear very fine clothes

but they are often very dirty and pimply. They don’t like to use water. They bathe

very rarely (…). They are very good at using firearms, and they are particularly

brave on ships and in the water. But in contrast to this, they are not so brave on

land”. An intellectual such as Mirza Abu Talib Isfahani (1752-1806) on the other

hand saw the English nation in a rather different light, as a power which had

harnessed technology and unusual forms of social organization to build a

formidable and expansive empire.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, therefore, the English (and the

British somewhat more generally) were able to shake off the perception in India




that they were “barbarians” by the simple fact of their political and military

dominance. This dominance was perfectly efficient in creating a class of

Anglophile elites in India, who admired much about the new rulers and their

culture, though many scatological jokes about them continued to circulate. The

colonial Indian elites accepted the idea that not only their society and its culture,

but their technological competence, as well as their aesthetic sensibility was

inferior to that of the British. Pockets of resistance to this view naturally existed,

notably among the Indo-Muslim elites, who had doubts about the alleged

“debasement” of their own aesthetic and literary conceptions, but even they

largely collapsed after the great peasant and princely rebellion of 1857-58 had

been put down. The second half of the nineteenth century thus witnesses a

massive cultural cleansing on the part of the colonial rulers, to the point that even

the nationalist movement that emerged subsequently often expressed itself in

precisely the same cultural language as that of colonial rule. It is only the

relatively exceptional intellectual of the period, such as the irreverent Telugu

writer Gurajada Apparao (1862-1915), who dared to mock the pretensions of the

British to total cultural and epistemological dominance.

The colonial intervention in the matter of social categories and perceptions

is undoubtedly a curious mix of intended and unintended consequences. To be

sure, from at least the time of the rule of Governor-General Lord William Bentinck

(1828-35), the British (in the form of the East India Company’s government) had

launched an ambitious project for the “reform” of Indian society, and its allegedly

degenerate practices. Some of this focused on the upper echelons of Bengali

Hindu society, but other projects also attacked such phenomena as organized

banditry. What emerged as central by this time was the notion that the central

organising category to understand India was “caste”, which the British

administrators took to be a term that stood for a total and encompassing system

involving a combination of ideas of varna and jātī . They posited that already in

the ancient Indian past, perhaps as early as the Vedic age, a five-fold “caste

system” had emerged in India, made up of the four varnas, and the

“untouchables”. Over the centuries, they argued, Indian society had largely




reproduced itself again and again within this framework, which carried within it

two forms of rejection: that of the “outcaste” on the one hand, and that of the

mleccha, or foreigner, on the other. Therefore, it was the progressive destiny of

British rule to liberate India from this iron cage, by producing at last the

possibility of genuine social mobility. The power of this conceptualization can be

grasped by reading its recycling in Karl Marx’s formulation of the “Asiatic Mode of

Production”, which perceives India as held in thrall during long centuries in a

village society, whose immobile logic is precisely that of the “caste system” as we

have seen it defined above.

The intended consequences were obviously to provide a liberal alibi for

British rule, which was in fact seen as freeing India not only from an earlier, and

tyrannical, Muslim government, but also from an entrenched social framework

which working peasants and untouchables could only be too glad to see the end

of. The unintended consequences were far more delicate. As Bernard Cohn and

others have pointed out, the colonial census and other related machinery,

became powerful tools for identity-making. Castes became numbers, and

numbers became possible identity-claims. A entirely new category emerged into

existence of the pañcama, or “fifth” group, claiming to be the entirety of those

excluded by the four-varna system (but in turn usually excluding forest-peoples,

and those at the geographical fringes of the space of what was thought of as

“Indian civilization”). These were the people who had been classified by the

British as the “untouchables”, using a notion that early Portuguese visitors to

Kerala in the sixteenth century had in turn made use of. Such groups were able

by the late nineteenth century to strike out for forms of political representation by

creatively using the colonial framework, in an important phenomenon that has

consequences until today. Gandhi and the nationalist movement eventually

attempted, somewhat sanctimoniously, to collectively rename them harijan (or

“God’s people”); subsequently, the more common term that has been chosen for

them is dalit (or the “crushed”). Yet, what must be understood is that the coming

together into one category of what are effectively many disparate groups, with a

vast variety of social and occupational locations, is itself a significant political




process of identity-making, and one of the unintended consequences of British

colonial policies.

In a somewhat distinct vein, it may be said that the colonial period also

had a significant effect on broad trends of xenology and xenophobia in India. If

Europeans emerged as the objects of a certain admiration, however reluctant it

may sometimes have been, nineteenth-century Indians came to acquire a rather

different view of the rest of the world than they might have had in the sixteenth or

seventeenth centuries. Relations wih peoples in Southeast and East Asia often

remained tense, as we know from the histories of the Indian presence in these

regions. But the most difficult was undoubtedly the relationship with Africa, which

was largely mediated now by the presence of Indians in the British colonies on

that continent, in areas such as Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The economic

and social roles of these Indian mercantile and clerical groups were such that

they created tensions, and eventually led to periodic violence and in some case

mass expulsions, as was the case in Uganda in 1972. The counterpart of this

was that Indians, whether in Africa or in India, now frequently saw Africans

through European eyes, placing themselves as it were in the role of the colonizer

rather than the colonized. The days of Malik ‘Ambar are now clearly of no great

relevance for the greater part of urban Indians, when a “barbarian” African

student knocks on their door as a potential renter.

As for the religious divide, its long trajectory has of course been to

produce the partition of the sub-continent into various nation-states, which are

each more or less attached to a religious identity. In the aftermath of 1857-58, a

colonial bourgeois politics was slowly allowed to emerge in British India, in which

members of various Anglophone Indian groups made an appearance. By the

early twentieth century, it was increasingly clear that this space would be heavily

contested, and at the same time, that the role which elite Muslims would have in

it remained ambiguous. In the next half-century, it is hardly the case that

“primordial” loyalties or divisions played a significant role. Rather, much

manoeuvring occurred, and several significant political leaders moved both their

positions and their public postures. Yet, by the 1940s, what had emerged was a




politics of endemic violence, in which communities that had coexisted and locally

jousted for centuries now claimed to hardly recognize each other any longer. The

savage bloodbaths of the late 1940s made something of a mockery of any ideas

of “composite culture” in the preceding centuries. This is a legacy with which one

still lives in contemporary India, as one does in contemporary Pakistan. Rather

than seeing the Partition of 1947 as a tragic, but still final, act, groups on either

side of the border see it as a wound that must be picked at, unfinished business

that must be settled.

How to be a barbarian in India? It seems that there are only too many

ways. In his brilliant long essay, La peur des barbares, Tzvetan Todorov divides

the world today into four sorts of national cultures. There are those “where

resentment place an essential rôle”, by which he means largely countries in the

Muslim world “from Morocco to Pakistan”, but also perhaps elsewhere. A second

group is made up of those which “are set apart by the place that the sentiment of

fear has in them”. Here, he places the western nations, and particularly those of

western Europe: “they fear physical attacks (…), terrorist attacks, explosions of

violence”; a third then are the “residual group”, characterised by “indecision”, in

which one guesses he largely means certain sub-Saharan African, and Latin

American nations. Fourth and finally, Todorov notes the existence of a significant

group of countries where “the dominant passion [is one of] appetite”. Here, he

places countries that are catching up with the West, and where “the inhabitants

want to profit from globalization, from [the expansion of] consumption, from

leisure”. In this category, he places not only China, Brazil, South Africa, and

Mexico, but India. India, he writes, along with Brazil and a few other countries,

“today illustrate other routes of access to a more prosperous and more

democratic existence”. If only this were so ! What I have hoped to demonstrate,

however briefly in the preceding pages, is that India today is, for historical and

other reasons, as much a country of fear and resentment as anything else. It is

perhaps for this very reason that it has such a great appetite for inventing

barbarians.




Essential Bibliography

Apparao, Gurajada, Girls for Sale: ‘Kanyasulkam’, a Play from Colonial India,trad. Velcheru Narayana Rao (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

Cohn, Bernard S., An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Doniger, Wendy and B.K. Smith, ed. et trad., The Laws of Manu (New Delhi:Penguin Books, 1991).

Falk, Harry, “The Tidal Waves of Indian History: Between the Empires and

Beyond”, in Patrick Olivelle, ed., Between the Empires: Society in India, 300 BCEto 400 CE (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 145-166.

Landy, Frédéric, ed., Dictionnaire de l’Inde contemporaine (Paris: Armand Colin,2010).

Olivelle, Patrick, ed. et trad., The Law Code of Manu (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2004).

Parasher-Sen, Aloka, “Naming and Social Exclusion: The Outcast and theOutsider”, in Patrick Olivelle, ed., Between the Empires: Society in India, 300

BCE to 400 CE (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 415-455.

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Violence and Identities in South Asia: Grievance andMemory in Community-Formation”, in Jean Racine, ed., La question identitaireen Asie du Sud (Collection Purusârtha 22) (Paris: EHESS, 2001), pp. 47-70.

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Taking Stock of the Franks: South Asian Views ofEuropeans and Europe, 1500-1800”, The Indian Economic and Social HistoryReview, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2005, pp. 69-100.

Thapar, Romila, Early India: From The Origins to AD 1300 (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 2004).

Todorov, Tzvetan, La peur des barbares: Au-delà du choc des civilisations (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2008).

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