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Power on the Move
Adivasi and Roma Accessing Social Justice
Cristina-Ioana Dragomir
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eBook - ePub
Power on the Move
Adivasi and Roma Accessing Social Justice
Cristina-Ioana Dragomir
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About This Book
Based on intensive ethnographic work in Romania and India conducted over six years, this book traces the struggle for social justice in Roma and Adivasi communities. Throughout centuries of persecution and marginalization, the Roma and Adivasi have been viewed as both victims and fighters, as royals and paupers, beasts and gods, and lately have been challenging the political and social order by defying the status quo. Different from commonly held suppositions that assume most marginalized and mobile communities typically resist the state and engage in hostile acts to undermine its authority, Power on the Move shows how these groups are willing to become full members. By utilizing different means, such as protests, sit-ins and grass roots organizing, they aim to gain the attention of the state (national and international), hoping to reach inclusion and access social justice.
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1
Introduction
During one of my field visits in Ormeniș, Romania, I was walking the streets of the village with Doru, my key informant. Doru is in his early forties, tall, stout, with black hair and kind black eyes, who self-identifies as Roma. He is a teacher in the nearby village, mainly counselling Roma children. He is also completing a PhD in Sociology at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, looking at the neo-Protestant religions’ impact on Romanian Roma communities. His manner is soft, compassionate and gentle. He is married to one of the most achieved Romani language teachers, a beautiful tall woman, whose smile and candour are only suppressed by her calm and intelligent demeanor. They have a daughter, who was attending one of the best high schools in the country. Doru is always very busy with his work, his family and community life. In spite of his demanding schedule, he always has time to address with me matters that are pertinent in his community.
This summer day in 2016, we went to visit his uncle’s house, situated next on the main village road. The house is big and imposing, with a large iron gate. His uncle and aunt received us well, and his uncle was eager to share with me his life story, a story of migration, of fleeing communism, of living in Italy and making a good life for himself and his family, and now retiring back in his home country. As he says it all in a charming and captivating manner, he refers to himself as ‘Ţigan’ or ‘Gypsy’. Not pejoratively – he just drops the name in conversation. After listening to him for a few minutes, Doru politely intervened: ‘Uncle, but why do you say “Ţigan”, maybe Roma?’ he softly suggested. His uncle turned around and with a loving, but dismissing gesture says: ‘Eh … Roma … I am Ţigan!’ Doru does not quit: ‘But uncle, this is a term that was given to us. It is not ours. And it is bad.’ Doru’s uncle continued unmoved: ‘Well … I was born Ţigan, this is who I am. Why change this name now? And I am proud to be “Ţigan”.’
I kept walking in the street listening to both of them. Their encounter brought to the fore the tender issues of today’s ethnic politics: naming, self-identifying and labelling others. It is difficult to firmly take one side or the other without crossing ethical lines. Doru and his uncle represent two categories of identification of communities within Romania: Roma and ‘Ţigan’/‘Gypsy’. In my fieldwork, I noticed that while the elites tend to predominantly identify as Roma, in communities the term ‘Ţigan’/‘Gypsy’ is still a prevalent form of self-identification. Moreover, this divide often follows both generational and educational lines. Put simply (while overlooking complexities on the ground), the more educated and younger a person is, the more likely they are to identify and publicly claim their identity as Roma. Thus, the identity debate between Doru and his uncle is neither surprising nor unknown, but one I often heard during my fieldwork, from Roma villages to city coffee shops and university venues.
Oceans away, in 2012, when I started my fieldwork in Tamil Nadu, south India, with the Narikuravar community, I was often asked how come I was there. Through translators, I tried to explain to the people greeting me that I was looking into how people who are nomadic fight for equality. To this, they asked how did I find out about them. I said that outsiders of the community told me that they are ‘Gypsies’ and I should talk to them. Whenever the word ‘Gypsy’ came into the conversation it produced a reaction from a few people. They pointed to themselves and proudly said: ‘Gypsy’. The first time when I was visiting the community, one of the elderly men jumped up with joy, and he brought from his house a business-card and a stationery paper that were engraved (in English) with his name and title: ‘President of the Gipsy’. The man neither spoke English, nor did he know how to read and write. His identity was one of prestige. ‘Gypsy’ is in Tamil Nadu an English term, and is a reference to a colonial hierarchy of power, in which the ones closer to the oppressor are in advantageous (hierarchical) positions. Thus, the self-identification as a ‘Gypsy’ (with various spellings) came from the powerful in the community, or from the young, educated people who usually speak and write in English, and who make use of this label when reaching outside of their community, and when claiming recognition internationally.
For example, one of my main participants, Rajasekaran, a Narikuravar man in his thirties, highly educated with two Masters degrees, speaking Vagriboli (his community’s language), Tamil and English, posted on social media several photos of his community receiving supplies to help them overcome the COVID-19 crisis, saying: ‘In order to meet our food and family requirement of Tamil Nadu Gypsies who lost their income due to this pandemic and lockdown we have been supporting them’ (social media, 7 October 2020). Rajasekaran often posts on social media about the Narikuravar community, in English, using the ‘Gypsy’ label and hashtag, aiming to garner support and to receive donations for the Narikuravars in need.
Naming as a political endeavour: ‘Gypsy’, Roma, nomad or Adivasi/ Dalit
This book traces how people who find themselves in historically marginalized positions empower themselves to access social justice today. I showcase the fight of historically excluded communities, whose activism – when judged against that of mainstream communities – appears as minimal, negligible or completely absent. In other words, if struggle for justice is seen as lobbying, registering to vote, organizing boycotts and petition drives, etc., communities like the Narikuravar and the Roma might look passive or politically inarticulate. This book challenges this paradigm and offers a different perspective, a holistic understanding of the fight for justice, by looking at both formal and informal practices that expand in various areas of life and society.
In doing so, I reveal how structural violence and resistance manifests to address power inequality, while working through legacies and practices of mobility. In this process, following Rao (2018), I suggest we see resistance practices that Adivasi and Roma communities exhibit not as destructive forms of engagement, but as forms of social mobilization, as mechanisms aimed at ‘ensuing changes in the society or asserting identity’ (Rao, 2018: 19). These practices might not necessarily be fully developed into resistance movements, but are employed in various settings, at different levels of organization. They are tools of recognition in the eyes of power, ways to draw the state’s attention towards their precarity, and as Mitchell (2012) says, ways to ‘hail the state’. Thus, different from understanding these forms of struggle of the Roma and Adivasi/Narikuravars as forms of resistance to the state, we should see them as forms of trying to access the state, in their own terms, in their own voices.1
Neither of the instances presented above were isolated occurrences, but ones that happened rather often, challenging the way I was to approach my research on access to justice. They revealed, the underpinnings of the politics of naming.2 Naming creates a hierarchical taxonomy of power, where the terms of ‘Gypsy’, ‘Roma’, ‘Adivasi’ and ‘Indigenous’ place (and often lock) people in hierarchical positions that have reverberating economic, social and political consequences. Thus, while thousands of miles apart, my examples come together and bring to view how labels are changing depending on contexts, how they are transformed and re-invented by some users, and how naming can support the dignity of people and communities, or conversely infringe on their human rights. Following Iris Zavalla, Mignolo (2018: 22) argues that ‘the heuristic code of naming is a form of political cartography or mapmaking that fixes the cultural image, subordinates differences, and radically destroys identities’. Mignolo, referring to Aimé Césaire, continues by explaining how naming was ‘intended to annihilate all that existed before’: ‘I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out, I am talking about millions of men [sic] torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life—from life, from the dance, from wisdom’ (Ibid.).
Naming and defining communities are not ahistorical, apolitical and amoral endeavours. Definitions presuppose impositions, self-identifications, hierarchies of power (i.e., on who does the naming of whom), and in doing so they impose a system of values. As such, the ‘Gypsy’ label has often been imposed as a synonym for mobile people, for those who are identified as nomadic. And because nomadism is perceived as a negative (even illegal) community and an individual characteristic, ‘anti-nomadism contributes to explaining and justifying Roma [and other mobile communities’] exclusion’ (Lauritzen, 2018: 59).
Referring to those often labelled (and at times self-labelling) as ‘Gypsy’ in a manner that is respectful, promoting a dignified approach is a political process. But to date, there is no consensus on the politics of naming, neither on the ground, nor among the elites. Many scholars and activists argue in favour of the use of the term Roma, because the names ‘Gypsy’ or ‘Ţigan’ are loaded with negative connotations. For instance:
The T-word holds heavy historical weight, along with its illegal and offensive nature. The ‘Ţigan’ category connoted ‘slave’ for 500 years. There has been evidence that Romani leaders have demanded to replace the name Ţigani with Roma since 1919, and there have been political efforts to officially recognize Roma as the umbrella term for Romani groups across the world since 1971 and even prior to that.
Matache, 20173
Alternatively, other scholars, like Yaron Matras, engage in historical analysis of the label, and conclude that:
A confusion of terms has thus arisen in almost all European languages, on the one hand, ‘Gypsy’ refers to a very specific population – the people who call themselves, in their own language, Rom and who were referred to as ‘Egyptians’ in earlier documents; on the other hand, ‘Gypsy’ (and its various equivalent terms in other languages) is taken as a way of describing certain social characteristics that were associated with Roms, but also with other populations: slaves, foreigners, and especially travelers and migrant nomads.
Matras: 2004: 19–204
Furthermore, Matras, in I Met Lucky People: The Story of the Romani Gypsies (2014), still advocates for using the term ‘Romani gypsies’. Similarly, the same name is used today to address diverse mobile Indian communities:
The gypsies are indigenous people whose main occupation were hunting but are also considered as one of the greatest bandit communities in south India. The word gypsies is derived from Europe, which means nomadic people. Tamilnadu is a home to various categories of gypsies, and among them the nomadic tribes or gypsy named as Koravar (or) Narikoravan (or) Kuruvikaran stands in the forefront. The occupation of Narikoravar community is mostly hunting jackals and other wild animals.
Chandru and Thrimalaisamy, 2019
Differently, Matache draws our attention to the underpinnings of this designation: ‘Gypsy is a racialized and fixed construction that has fed Roma oppression through their steady representations as thieves, uneducated, nomads, and uncivilized’ (Matache, 2017).5 Matache further argues for using the name Roma as an alternative to the pejorative ‘Gypsy’ – and using the label of ‘Gypsy’ only in particular cases. Additionally, Matras’ perspective that differentiates between the label ‘Gypsy’ and the Roma allows us to distinguish between communities named under the same definition (i.e., ‘Gypsy’) because of their social or economic traits, and ethnic communities (like the Roma or Adivasi) ...