History of people without history

V Suryanarayan *

James Scott, the well­known anthropologist associated with the Agrarian Studies Programme in Yale University, has adopted a novel approach to the study of the history of modern Southeast Asia, and he calls it anarchist.

He cites with approval this statement of French anthropplogist and ethnographer, Pierre Clastres, known for his field work among Guayaki in Paraguay and his off-beat theory of Stateless societies : "It is said that the history of peoples who have a history is the history of class struggle. It might be said, with at least as much truthfulness, that the history of peoples without history is a history to their struggle against the State."

Struggle

The people without history on whom Scott has focussed in this book reside in Zomia, a region as big as Europe that straddles southern China and several mainland Southeast Asian countries. Their habitat is spread over four provinces of Southern China—Yunnan, Guizhow, Gwangxi and (parts of) Sichuan—and parts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, extending up to Northeastern India.

The area covers 25 million square kilometers and is populated by 100 million people belonging to minority groups. They represent a bewildering ethinic and linguistic diversity. For social scientists brought up in State-centric traditions, these people are yet to be fully incorporated into nation States; they are yet to be governed, taxed and "civilised''. From a long-term perspective, their days may be numbered.

However, if one looks from the "other side", the people of Zomia have been relentlessly struggling against the tyranny of the nation State. They are fugitives. The strong arm of the State reaches out to them in the form of enslavement, conscription, taxes, corvee labour, and so on. Scott calls their settlements "shatter zones" and "zones of refuge."

The people of Zomia to their ways of life with passion and fervour. Their livelihood patterns, social organisation, ideologies, and oral traditions are intended to keep the State at arm's length. Their physical dispersal over rugged terrains, their mobility, kinship structures, changing ethnic identities, and devotion to prophetic millenarian leaders militate against their incorporation into the State system. For the upholders of the State system, those outside the political orbit are all barbarians.

The history of China testifies that, under the Ming and Qing dynasties, there were continuous forcible attempts to 'sinicise' the barbarians. Millions of them were rendered fugitives. The hill people have also been resisting, unsuccessfully though, the military expeditions of the Thai and the Burmese rulers. The people who want to escape the State system use the mountains as a refuge.

Universal

James Scott develops the idea of "friction of terrain, which is a new way of understanding political space and the difficulties of State-making in pre-modern societies." The encounter between "expanding State" and "self-governing peoples" is not restricted to southern China and mainland Southeast Asia. It is a universal phenomenon and the history of the world is replete with several such instances.

The histories of Rome, of Han China, of British imperialism, and of white settlers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa are full of annihilation and absorption of indigenous people into the modern state system.

The author characterises this phenomenon as an encounter between "the raw and the cooked, the wild and the tamed, the hill/forest people and the valley/cleared land peoples, upstream and downstream, the barbarian and the civilised, the backward and the modern, the free and the bound, the people without history and the people with history."

This creative, compassionate, and sensitive book is the outcome of years of painstaking research. It provides a lucid account, imbued with humanity, and is full of cultural insights. There is hardly any work that looks at history from the victim's viewpoint. This book deserves to be read and understood by all students of contemporary Southeast Asia.

(*** This article appeared in The Hindu sometime back. We are reproducing this as it is relevant to the people of Manipur and Nagaland
- The Sangai Express Editorial Team).