Epistemic violence and our heritages

As Guyana commemorates “Amerindian Heritage Month”, I reflected on the ironies in that name and the theme chosen: “Guyana’s first peoples; sustaining a rich cultural environment”. When the Spaniards “discovered” the “New World”, they found peoples with numerous cultures, each with its own perspectives, practices, and products – ways of life, if you will – histories, languages etc: but they were all dubbed “Indians”. Red Indians, Indios, Amerindians but all, still “Indians” – a name they had originally imposed on the peoples of the land they were seeking – India.
“India”, was not so incidentally the name used originally by the ancient Greeks to label the land to the East of the river “Indus”, which is Sanskrit, the language of the peoples was actually, “Sindhu”. Hindu is its Persian cognate but modern Europeans chose the Greek variant.  Just as the present “Amerindian” leaders accepted being labelled as such and as “Guyana’s first peoples” (note the stubborn use of the lower case in “first peoples), India equivocated in their constitution: “India that is Bharat”!
And that act of naming is but one seemingly innocuous instance of the hegemony imposed on all of us in the non-European world through the epistemic violence inflicted by the Europeans after their violent conquests of our lands. Epistemic, of course, refers to knowledge and its measure of validation.  Whose name? “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.” And that’s all: they were the masters and their words through the ages since the encounter has served to define us so completely that we have internalised them to believe whatever they are posited to mean. The European experience was now the measure of all things.
The power of naming is an aspect of the power to “other” us within Europe’s epistemic territory and means we have no say as to what aspect of our being or lives fits and is allowed to be incorporated into “modernity” and which is to be erased as “backward”. For instance, today, “Amerindian” land is being demarcated to define “ownership”, but under whose definition? When most Indigenous peoples refer to land, as one writer notes, “they do not mean a measurable or quantifiable extension of land, an object of geography and even less a commodity. (Land for them) exceeds the modern limit of reality in presence, it implies the past, heritage, memory. (It) has to be defended not for the sake of property but for the sake of protecting the ancestors, of preserving an origin that is both “past” and always already “present”. So today, the Indigenous Peoples’ claim to land can be dismissed by some people of African origin, who have been hegemonised like all of us were to a greater or lesser degree, under the European notion of ownership as “greedy”.
What is rather poignant is that the epistemic violence inflicted on peoples from Africa who were dragged from Africa to slave in the “New World” was the paradigmatic case of erasure in which the category called “race’ was invented by Europe during a period they called “the Enlightenment”. Africa was deemed a “dark Continent” from which nothing positive was ever created.  In India, Macaulay explicitly presented a “Minute” to the Indian Parliament (run by Englishmen, of course) in which he declared Indians had also produced nothing of value and henceforth, all “knowledge” was to be disseminated in English and in English-run schools. This, was in 1832, when the abolition of African slavery was being debated, and just in time for schools such as Queens College could be established to inflict the epistemic violence across the Empire.
Over the last month, I have been alluding to the attempt of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya to break out of the walls of the hegemony imposed by England in Indian politics. Because Deen Dayal recuperated part of the “traditional” world view of India, his work from 1965 was derided by most “educated Indians”. “Modernity” could only encompass the European experience, even if it was Greek “democracy” from 500 BC.