Dispossession through tourism, and resistance through sound: an ethnographic perspective
Dispossession through tourism, and resistance through sound: an ethnographic perspective
by Ishani Milward-Bose
The housing crisis in London today has catapulted questions of ownership over land into the foreground of public debate. For someone who lives in this city, it’s never been clearer that processes of property accumulation are occurring – right under our noses – as we see cycles of demolition and construction happening on our doorsteps, while poverty worsens and millions struggle to afford to pay for the fundamental right for secure and safe housing. Yet framing this issue in terms of rights is myopic: access to land is a hotly debated topic that Marx and Engels had a lot to say about. Arguably, privatisation of land is one of the most fundamental processes that underlies our economic system today: it has shaped the economic relations essential to capitalism by allowing the material world (and thus labour) to be commodified and exchanged.
David Harvey (2004) in his book ‘The New Imperialism’ coined the term ‘accumulation by dispossession’ – a contemporary form of the primitive accumulation Marx argued was the process by which capitalist relations of production were able to emerge. Harvey criticises the idea of ‘original’ accumulation, arguing instead that this process is ongoing and diverse. Today, capitalism’s inability to continually expand has led instead to the development of new mechanisms of dispossession, for example through intellectual property rights, biopiracy, commodification of cultural forms, privatisation of public assets, and environmental degradation among others.
These processes seem to be global, but I want to focus on one example where particularly interesting forms of dispossession are occurring. There has been a booming (domestic) tourism industry emerging Shantiniketan, a small town in West-Bengal, India. I spent most of my childhood in the vicinity of the town and continue to visit, so have the opportunity to observe this process with insider knowledge of interactions across class and caste lines, and of the local bureaucracy. It is clear that the material benefits of tourism here are distributed hugely unequally, with upper-caste urban elites profiting from the vast industry borne in the construction of villas, ‘guest-houses’, hotels and second homes. The land transacted to enable this often bypasses regulations and protections, illegally appropriated from protected indigenous lands. Although constitutionally illicit, the local government is often complicit in these transactions, as businessmen, bureaucrats and land brokers tied up in these processes. For example, in my last visit to the town I discovered that a plot of land just outside town that used to be forested, and was used by local communities to forage, graze and gather firewood, had now been bulldozed and was in the early stages of being built up into second homes for West-Bengal's growing urban elites. Shockingly, this land was widely known to be ‘khash jomi’ - government protected communal land, so the transaction of this public land into private hands must have had some dodgy deals involved.
Children going to forage for berries in a plot of protected land near Shantiniketan
Although my evidence for these processes of dispossession in Shantiniketan is experiential and anecdotal, these processes have been documented in South Asia at large by a range of authors. Akram-Lodhi (2007) suggests the rate of land dispossession in India is so high that this period could be coined the neoliberal era of enclosure, which is part of what has been called a ‘global land grab’ (Scoones, Hall, Borras, White & Wolford 2011). Gardner and Gerharz refer to the chronic involvement of state officials in land deals across South Asia as ‘crony capitalism’ (2016: 2). Moreover, it has been documented that those losing out the most from industrialisation and land enclosure are marginalised indigenous communities – referred to in India as ‘Adivasi’ - in various ways (Shah 2010). Adivasi Santal communities in and around Shantiniketan similarly seem to be facing the brunt of these processes.
Adivasi relationships with the state and bureaucracies across India have been characterized by dispossession. An increasing need for interactions with the state has led to Adivasis seeking formal recognition, which necessitates processes of becoming legible to the Indian state. Often, the documents needed to officiate Adivasis identity and access the protections that come with this just don’t exist. In India this process has worsened with the introduction of the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) and NRC (National Register of Citizens) in 2019, with one of the effects being that families who have lived for generations on protected land have been forced to leave in a wave of displacement, unable to provide any legal documents proving their rights to access. In other places, evicting Adivasis from their land is not as legally straightforward. This is where the daily interactions of ‘crony capitalism’ take place.
Santals have been systematically marginalised through such processes of dispossession but also through other tools including (but not restricted to) language, culture, and outright discrimination. The effects of these are material, with analyses of data accessed from India’s national statistics showing deprivation across multiple spheres. For Adivasi populations, the national literacy rate lies at merely 59% compared to the national average of 73% (Census of India, 2011). In West-Bengal, this figure is even more starkly unequal. Another figure useful for highlighting economic deprivation is that the proportion of agricultural labourers among Adivasis is double that of the national average (24% compared to 12%). Contracted agricultural labour is notoriously informal and casual, with extremely low pay and few benefits.
It is in this context of Adivasi precarity and of capitalist dispossession that I examine the booming (domestic) tourism industry Shantiniketan. Tourism in Shantiniketan has been hugely successful partly because Santals play an important role in the national imaginary. In West-Bengal, indigenous communities represent a nostalgic vision of rural Bengal’s past, with narratives of dependency on land and rich cultural expertise in music and dance widespread. The West-Bengal state capitalises off this imaginary, developing a rural tourism littered with images perpetuating these visions. During my last visit to Shantiniketan, it was evident that the boom in tourism has been directed towards cultivating this image. I captured some manifestations of this project in the following images:
The visual elements of these are striking. The bottom two pictures depict Santal women dancing and cooking on a traditional wood-burning stove; the top two, the ‘guest houses’ they were displayed on. I spoke to the owners of both small-scale ‘hotels’: neither were of indigenous descent (both came from urban areas outside of Shantiniketan), and no Santals were consulted or benefitted in the making and painting of the murals on their walls.
Santals here are simultaneously visible and invisible. The aspects of their identity deemed ‘traditional’ are visible everywhere – on walls, souvenirs, ads, clothing – yet they are invisible when they provide the land and precarious, back-breaking labour needed to prop up the tourism industry. Often, land is sold out of desperation; after years of neoliberalisation of the agricultural industry, small-scale petty farming is no longer profitable for local farmers. This tourism industry disguises accumulation by dispossession in its shadows by painting its face in Adivasi words, patterns and crafts. Certain aspects of Santals are frequently commodified, with womens’ unique clothing, picturesque mud villages, apparent harmony with nature, and depictions of song and dance being frequent themes. This plays into the ancient narrative of what Alpa Shah describes as the ‘Edenic bliss associated with tribal populations who were considered both as savages and as protectors of nature, living in harmony and even worshiping it’ (2010: 107). Tourism in West-Bengal has commodified this image and manifested it in exchangeable goods sold in many souvenir shops across Shantiniketan:
‘Tribal’ patterns reproduced on bags and masks sold in souvenir shops in Shantiniketan
It seems clear from these brief images that the ‘image’ of Santals has been appropriated, with Santal individuals having little instrumentality in the decision-making processes leading the project of rural tourism. Tourism here thus has been used as a tool for material and cultural dispossession of the Santal Adivasi communities.
Despite this context of exclusion, it’s important to acknowledge spheres of life in which marginalised individuals make decisions, create spaces for themselves and thus resist. It’s easy to pigeonhole a group of people as oppressed and without agency, a common feature especially since the decades of ‘dark anthropology’ (Ortner, 2016). In recent years, anthropology has taken a turn to the personal, utilizing first-person narratives to show agency in a field often concerned with revealing structures of hierarchy and domination (ibid). Cheryl Mattingly, in her study of African Americans struggling for a ‘good life’ under structures of oppression, gives attention to the particularities of experience over ‘public personhood’ (Mattingly 2014: 18), attempting to transform the debates on freedom. In my reflections on Shantiniketan, I utilize her approach to highlight Santal expressions of agency through the medium of sound. Giving attention to the senses as a sphere of expression helps us see ways in which people ‘dub’ (Boellstorff 2003) imported knowledge to create knowledge of their own. More widely, I explore how the sonic world can be utilized by bringing attention to what is heard or unheard, through Brendon LaBelle’s ideas about sonic agency (2018).
So although a visual aspect is commodified (and maybe precisely because of this), many Santal individuals express agency through different sonic means. A commodified image has resulted in people turning to sound and music-making for the self-expression of their identity, as opposed to the West-Bengal state’s image of them. Through my experience growing up in Shantiniketan and participating in the youth culture of various Santal communities, I have seen ways in which Santals use sound to express their visions of modernity. Dr. Boro Baski, social worker and activist, writes songs in Santali fusing traditional sounds with modern instruments such as synthesizers. A translation of his song ‘Dungri Latar Khadanre’ is as follows:
At the foothills, in a stone-quarry
Muni, I feel pity to see you carrying stone chips.
For the greed of money,
In exuberance of youthfulness
You are neglecting your supple body.
What could I say brother,
It's a disgrace to even talk about it.
I carry stones after shunning my self-respect.
My father is a drunkard,
My mother is debilitated
I do carry stones to satiate my hunger.
(Baski: 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQgP68HTIzk)
The lyrics to this song clearly depict issues Dr. Baski feels are relevant to Santal modernity, and sound has provided a successful medium of agency in expression. In his informal introduction to this song, Dr.Baski writes that the song refers to a girl ‘Muni’ he met at a mining quarry that supplies West-Bengal with stone chips for the rapidly growing construction industries across the state. He writes ‘Muni is one of the many Santal girls who are trapped in a system which is controlled by local mafia and political leaders’ (Baski 2021). The video for this song is comprised of a medley of footage from the quarry and daily village life and pose striking contrast to the idyllic image of Santal life presented through tourism:
As Brandon LaBelle suggests in his 2018 book ‘Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance’, ‘the ways in which speech and action are orchestrated as volumes and rhythmed as durations, along with intensities of silence and noise, these form a critical base by which to approach questions of political struggle’ (2018: 2). In this context, sound is used to exceed spheres of visibility by acknowledging the unseen – the Santals. Steven Feld refers to the linguistics of voice (2006), suggesting that a voice points towards meaning (in its separation of the signifier and signified); it is ascribed with inner intentionality and thus is a tool for agency. Seeing sound as a means of agency in a context where the visible realm is appropriated and manipulated is key in this context of seeing people holistically; as structuring their daily lives creatively and through resistance. Young Santals more specifically use sound as a medium for agency through ‘biswarjan’ parties, where gigantic speakers are hired during religious festivals, and youth from the local communities dance to Santali base-heavy music. These moments of freedom in the everyday; the ‘banal’, exemplify the moral decision-making visible in daily reality.
Tourism, then, has its problems. In Shantiniketan it has come with appropriation, displacement and the centralisation of profit – all parts of the modern tools of capitalist dispossession as described by David Harvey. Despite this, we must continue to acknowledge that those who are typically hurt by processes of industrial tourism and capitalist expansion find ways to express and create their own realities through varied means. As highlighted, many members of the Santal community in West-Bengal seem to be coping with late-stage capitalism’s flux of identities, and with its more material consequences, through engaging with the sonic realm. This focus is especially important in engaging with debates on freedom and agency. Just as the processes of dispossession are frequently slow, mundane and unexceptional, my interlocutors highlight that they were not just using sound to affect their lives in moments of rupture, but in their daily lives through voice, song and the outdoor ‘parties’ young people throw during festive times. Resistance here and elsewhere thus often happens in the most banal ways.
Bibliography
Akram-Lodhi & Haroon 2007 ‘Land, Markets and Neoliberal Enclosure: An Agrarian Political Economy Perspective’, Third World Quarterly, 28(8), pp. 1437–56.
Baski, B, 2021. Dungri Latar Khadanre. Ghosaldanga and Bisnubati Adivasi Trust, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQgP68HTIzk
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