Translating at the Margins: Colonial Ethnography and Revival of Ethnic Questions (original) (raw)

Abstract

Colonial administrators in India have had a long standing tradition of writing rich ethnographic texts primarily translating local people and their cultures for administrative purposes. But these Euro-centric translations of Asian cultures were not limited to the colonial administrators alone but transgressed to the local people in terms of how they, the local people, decoded and recoded the translations of their own cultures and made sense of themselves. Ethnographic texts, as Clifford argues, emphasizes the literariness of Anthropology, which being situated between powerful systems of meaning affect the ways cultural phenomenon are registered, translated and questioned at the boundaries of civilizations, cultures and races. Colonial ethnographic texts were also sites of contestations and resistances among local Indian communities that from time to time transformed into social and cultural movements. One such occasion was Rajbanshi Kshatriya movement in eastern India in the late nineteenth century to early half of twentieth century when the Rajbanshi people of upper Bengal protested against the colonial categorization and translation of Rajbanshis as a semi-Mongoloid Hinduised tribe and them being equated with another neighbouring semi-mongoloid indigenous community called Koch. The translation of the colonial ethnographic texts has had a different political connotation as this region, the northern part of Bengal, lies at an intersection of different indigenous communities and cultures spread over eastern Nepal, north-east India, Bhutan and Bangladesh where multiple borders – social, cultural and political overlap. However, by the turn of the century, the translation and interpretation of the colonial ethnographic literature changed its meaning in the post-colonial society and politics of India with the Rajbanshis re-claiming themselves as semi-Mongoloid by referring to the colonial ethnographies which eventually initiated a large ongoing political and linguistic movement in north Bengal and Assam.

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