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The British Empire and the making of the "Other"
As a village girl growing up, I spent a portion of my life in a small mountainous tribe (lower Himalayas) with my paternal grandmother at her ancestral home. It was one of the most sustainable and thriving phases of my life- where most of my social skills were developed. My grandmother, well aware of the colonial hangover, would narrate folk tales of the Indian Partition in her native language Pahari (language of mountains). She lived all her life in a remote village, working in fields, had never been to a school, though she was a powerhouse of knowledge, a pious devotee of Islam, and an intelligent woman to understand the intricacies of ‘divide and rule’ projects by the British Empire. In South Asia, particularly India and Pakistan, village people are often referred as paindu - culturally backward and those who belong to a pind (village). In many elitist universities in Pakistan, students even celebrate a ‘paindu day’- a cultural appropriation of the village people where they dress up as paindus- a symbolic disdain for rural life. The “other”, now, takes the form of our own people through internalizing such patterns. It took me years to fully embrace my identity as a village and native girl. This account of self-reflection is an attempt to unpack how the early British anthropologists and officers framed and otherized nomadic tribes, cultures and village communities in India for the continuation of their colonial project.
As I was about to embark my journey as a native anthropologist, certain questions were asked with surprising and disturbing frequency- do all anthropologists look for far flung exotic tribes and cultures in Africa and Asia as a data for their research? As a native anthropologist, my position often becomes blurred, as certain anthropologists argues, there have never been such things as ‘natives’, and how even the ‘native’ was created was for the imaginary divide to rule. Mannan Ahmed Asif who is a professor of South and West Asia at Columbia University further adds, “how the politics of binaries identifies the natives as anonymous masses instead of individual beings”. However, it became a rite of passage for early twentieth-century anthropologists to make the familiar strange and strange familiar, and to create a safe world for human differences.