Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings, Pooja Parmar
One challenge for outsiders is the ability to communicate with research subjects or to understand their language(s) in writing or in conversation. Parmar was an outsider in the Indian region where the Coca-Cola plant dispute was located (Legal Mobilization, Chapter 5).
The challenge of lanÂguage communication arose as she was contemplating a project that would involve not only textual analysis of court records and media reports, but also interviews and participant observations. In the excerpt below, she shares her insights on this common challenge and how she compensated for her shortÂcomings by making herself more relatable to the interviewees.From the time I first conceived of this project as one involving long interviews with protestors and others connected to the dispute, I was concerned about issues that might arise in translation of Adivasi accounts that are central to this project. I do not speak any of the languages of the Adivasis and other residents of the area, and they do not speak any of mine. The interviews in the village had to be (and were) conducted through an interpreter. What added to my concern was that most ethnographic accounts I studied to prepare for this research did not offer any advice in this regard. In fact for a long time I believed that researchers, especially anthropologists, never went into “the field” without learning local languages. I was convinced about the importance of speaking with the protestors in order to better understand the dispute, but I agonized over my inability to converse with them directly. I may have given up had it not been for some very helpful conversations with other more experienced researchers.
In Kerala I learned about interpreters who had assisted other researchers during visits to Plachimada, but I had some concerns about working with them given the different focus and approach of the other projects.
I also wanted to avoid working with anyone who had a fixed idea about what the dispute in Plachimada is about. That, I realized quickly, was not going to be easy, as most people I met in Kerala “knew” what “Plachimada” was all about, even though opinions varied. As I considered my options, I met Shiny while visiting a friend. Even before I knew she was fluent in both Malayalam and Tamil, loved to travel, and would never complain about long bone-rattling bus rides, I knew I wanted to work with her because she had many questions about my project and about Plachimada. I was thrilled when she agreed to work with me. Like me, Shiny too brought to our conversations her prior knowledge, beliefs, ways of thinking about the world, and about people and events. But she was also open to listening, being questioned, and revising her opinions. That was most helpful as we constantly discussed our conversations and experiences in the hamlets, and transcribed the interviews together. Although the transcription took much longer because of this, it allowed me to understand not only what was said but also why she translated certain words and phrases differently at different times.It was during one of these conversations that I learned that she translated the word “samaram” as “struggle” during our first few conversations in the village because I had been using the word. She had believed that was how my research required it to be translated. Had she not heard me use the English word repeatedly, she would have also translated the word as “strike” or “protest,” which was a more suitable translation in some contexts. This and other such insights into the practices of translation thus became an unexÂpected reward for the many long hours we spent transcribing the interviews.
In order to further minimize the loss of meaning and attain a deeper understanding, I have also tried to combine care in translation and transcripÂtion of narratives with attention to particular stories people choose to tell, the words they use to narrate their experiences and articulate their claims, the willingness to share certain fears and hopes, and decisions to not speak about certain things.
Translation of unfamiliar stories narrated in unfamiliar languages into a familiar language does not, however, automatically lead to comprehension of lifeworlds. As Piya, a character in Amitav Ghosh's novel The Hungry Tide, observes, speech “was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being.” Humans, Ghosh tells us through his characters, have to make an effort to communicate in “our translated world.” Here Ghosh's reference is not simply to barriers posed by the existence of multiple languages in the human world, but our inability to see and experience the world as does another human being, living a different life. Ghosh's story is however, not merely about barriers to communication but also about communications that are possible between humans, and between humans and nonhumans, despite the limitations of language, translation, and understanding.
Acutely aware of my linguistic limitations, I also tried to be attentive to nonverbal modes of communication - a smile, a twinkle in the eyes, a shrug, a straightening of the back, a frown, a cautious glance in a particular direction, lowering of voices, and the silences. When understood in the context of all these, translated words can convey a lot more. But sometimes, we do not actually need words to communicate. I had an opportunity to reflect on this on a quiet afternoon in the samara pandal (protest hut) when Maya, a young Adivasi woman, suddenly asked me if I had spoken to my daughter the night before. She asked if my daughter cries when I call. On another afternoon, as I watched some toddlers playing nearby, she asked to see again a picture of my daughter she had seen before. It was passed around to other women present and many remarks were made and questions asked.
Both times I had in fact been thinking about my daughter when Maya mentioned her. I was stunned because I had not said anything. How could Maya have known that I was missing my child at that moment? Her response to the question in my eyes was a smile.
I could have spoken out the question, but I did not. At the time that communication had seemed enough to me. I have often wondered if she knew because perhaps she too thought about her two little children on quiet afternoons when they were away at school.It may not always be possible to “see” the world as the other does or to represent accurately what one does manage to see. But it is always possible to try. Sometimes communication across difference is also made possible by honest commitments to translate. According to Spivak, an ethical translation is an “act of hearing-to-respond.” It involves “listening with care and patience.” What we need therefore are “thick translations,” attentive to reasons, motives, and histories of speakers and translators, and to the contexts of translation. It is in this spirit of “trying to be faithful to the original” that I listened intently to all that was shared with me. I have also reminded myself repeatedly of my own role as a translator even as I wrote about similar roles of others.
Parmar's relationship with her translators resonates with Chua (2°19), who also worked closely with research assistants in Myanmar and had to try out a few before settling on two assistants who were not biased against sexual or gender minorities. The experience led Chua to consider the position of insider and outsider:
[M]y experiences in the field eventually made me realize the blurry lines between so-called insider and outsider. One can be an insider and outsider, or shades of them at the same time perhaps echoing the study's findings on the plurality of personhood. An encounter early in my fieldwork was particularly poignant. The first assistant, whom I let go after the first week of research in September 2°12, was a Burmese person, but when I asked her to interpret the conversations at the workshop, she kept insisting to me that she could not understand what they were saying. When I asked her to simply give me the literal translation of the words, she told me they were talking about going to the monastery to “eat oranges” (queer slang for having sex with monks).
She was either truly ignorant of queer slang, which is rather unique, or she was using naivete to shield her discomfort. However, when I heard the literal translation, I understood the meaning right away, and I was not uncomfortable about the subject matter. Perhaps it is because I had conducted research on LGBT activism in other contexts and was used to the cultural subversions of queer slang. Looking back, I often wondered: In that moment, who was more of the outsider - the Burmese translator or me?The insider-outsider status is blurry for my assistants too. Moora and Khine Khine, the two assistants whom I eventually hired, are Burmese, but they are outsiders in relation to the movement by several counts. Moora is Karen Christian, and Khine Khine is Burmese Chinese (recall that the movement is predominantly Burman). Both are heterosexual, cisgender women. In addition, they are university educated, speak English fluently, and originate from urban Yangon, unlike many of the LGBT activists.
(147)
9.7