Ganesh Devy
Somaiya Vidyavihar University
Abstract:
This paper offers reflections on the global crisis arising out of climate emergency. Within that context the question of the indigenous is examined, which is rather a solution than a problem for the modern world. The phenomenon of ‘missing women’ articulated by economist Amartya Sen in relation to food-insecurity and health-insecurity, is stated in the current context to argue that all species will be facing rapid extinction unless we take Amartya Sen’s analysis to understanding the relation between the indigenous and the non-indigenous. The New Education Policy in India valorising obscure anti-women texts is commented upon to show its irrelevance. The paper argues in favour of cosmocracy in politics.
Ce texte propose des réflexions sur la crise mondiale résultant de l’urgence climatique. Dans ce contexte, la problématique de l’indigène est examinée, d’ordre plutôt de résolution que du côté problème pour le monde moderne. Le phénomène des “femmes disparues” articulé par l’économiste Amartya Sen en relation avec l’insécurité alimentaire et l’insécurité sanitaire est présenté dans le contexte actuel pour soutenir que toutes les espèces seront confrontées à une extinction rapide si nous n’adoptons pas l’analyse d’Amartya Sen pour comprendre la relation entre les indigènes et les non-indigènes. La nouvelle politique de l’éducation en Inde, qui valorise d’obscurs textes anti-femmes, est commentée pour montrer son manque de pertinence. L’article plaide en faveur de la cosmocratie en politique.
Key Words: Missing Women, Indigenous, Anthropocene
Mots clés : Femmes manquantes, indigènes, Anthropocene
The Missing Women
In the abnormal COVID epidemic context, the present is overwhelming for us at this juncture and reflecting on the future or the past may be somewhat out of context. However, I will take up in this paper the question of ‘the missing women,’ the absent, the denied, the rejected, the forced out, pushed out women. The term came into circulation following the work of the Nobel Prize winning economist Dr. Amartya Sen (1992). He had earlier published in The New York Times Book Review (1990) a very serious article about ‘the missing women’. His focus at that time was countries like Iran, Iraq, India, China, Korea, the Middle East, Southeast Asia. His argument was that if humans follow the order of nature, the natural order of regeneration of procreation, then there is normally a set male-female reproduction ratio of approximately 104 men to 100 women. He had based this ratio on the fact that women have a slightly longer life-span than men; and given the same amount of source of energy, the same amount of food, women tend to live longer. By now we’re all used to this the statistics of gender ratio published in government statistics as a result of the census exercise in every country all over the world. At the time Amartya Sen flagged the issue stating that about 10 million women were fewer than men in populations of the countries that he was discussing. His question was, where did these women go? What is it in the process of natural evolution that forced these women out? His analysis showed that they were not naturally born fewer in number. It was the economic conditions and particularly the inadequate food-security and health-security that was reducing the proportion of women in various countries. Three decades later, all this may sound to one like a lesson one learns in school days or during teenage years; but the question is getting even more serious than before. However, it needs to be presented somewhat differently within the framework that brings together environmental concerns and humanistic concerns, in terms of eco-feminism.
The New Education Policy
There were debates about the statistics that Dr. Amartya Sen had employed for his analysis. After elaborate modifications in the parameters and data-mining, concerned international agencies have arrived in 2017 at a staggering figure of 150 million globally missing women. Culturally, there have been different patterns of this elimination in different countries. In some countries, women are eliminated after they are born, while in some countries they get eliminated before they are born. In India, gender testing of foetus, though made illegal, is a rampant practice. To speak just of the present Indian context, the regime that is governing India today believes in an ancient text named Manusmruti (2nd century BCE), which proposed that being a woman is a fruit of sins in one’s previous birth. The regime is actively endorsing this attitude by introducing what it calls a New Education Policy which explicitly mentions the name of this text and other texts ideologically close to it and stipulates in the second paragraph of the policy document that the traditional Indian knowledge and knowledge traditions be given primacy. The plan, as officially stated, is to produce a generation of students in 2040, which will be completely familiar with these ideas as ideas of cultural essence of India. The Right wing all over the world is famously anti-women, the current regime in India is no exception.
Indigeneity
I will now turn to the question of the indigenous in the context of the missing women. Using the term indigenous in all national contexts is somewhat problematic. It is relatively easy for people in Guatemala or Ecuador to answer what the indigenous is. It is probably not so difficult for Canadians, New Zealanders and Australians to say who the indigenous are, because they are markedly different. However, when one thinks of a country like South Africa, the question of the indigenous becomes complicated, though the recent history of South Africa revolves around that question. For India and for other countries with a similar past, it is an equally difficult question to settle. At one extreme of the debate, there are those who take the position that the Indigenous have been there from the very beginning. At the other extreme of the debate, there are ideologies that deny many people the right of citizenship and claim that only those who subscribe to Hindutva are the indigenous. The question becomes difficult to answer because these historical formulations are usually erroneous and riddled with inconsistencies, unscientific assumptions, and entirely irrational methods of reading the past and its continuation from one era to another. I will for the moment stay away from what the contemporary arguments in Africa, India, Indonesia and Malaysia think about indigeneity. Rather, I will I will briefly venture into the area of genetics.
Genetic studies of ancient ‘modern humans’ indicate that humans have moved across continents from the times much before Holocene. The ‘Out of Africa’ Homo sapiens arrived in South Asia 65,000 years before present. Later, they also reached Australia, causing the first genocide of the species in that continent; now they are recognized as indigenous there. This is not to challenge the claim; the intention is to imagine the complexities in the question of indigeneity. For India, I can say with some certainty, after having studied many of the indigenous communities over the last 30 years that about 45,000 years before our time, there have been people in South India and they appear to have moved from Andaman to South India, and then also from South India to other parts of South Asia. Then three and half thousand years ago, the early Indo-Aryan speaking people came from the Eurasian Steppes. These were not the only migrations. There have been other large-scale migrations within the sub-continent. The movements have been so many, that nobody in India can be indigenous and being mixed, alone, is the characteristic of indigeneity in India. A laboratory in Hyderabad examined about 10,000 DNA samples and came up with the conclusion that the question of indigeneity in India is inconclusive (Reich, 2018).
When I started work with the Adivasis, the indigenous people, I had moved out of the Department of English Literature and my mind was full of ideas of colonialism. I used to ascribe the indigeneity status only to the impact of colonialism as I was in the habit of blaming colonialism for everything terrible happening all over the world. I am now aware that this question needs to be looked at with greater clarity by bringing an interdisciplinary perspective from genetics, history, archaeology, maritime ocean movements, literature and language. One thing is certain though, that the indigenous in all continents have been facing fairly similar challenges in our time. The resistance movements in South Africa as in South America, and the resistance movement by women in Kerala had almost a similar trajectory. It is almost as if the national boundaries do not matter when it comes to the situation of the indigenous, though histories of the indigenous are not identical in all countries. What could be the reason for this apparent similarity in conflicts, stress, tensions, understanding and larger assumptions about life of the indigenous peoples in different continents? All of them seem to have a life style appearing to state that “we belong to the Earth, the Earth does not belong to us”. What is the source of the nature-oriented life-style? One may even wonder if the stated sentiment of the indigenous is genuinely so or whether it is a stance of the marginalized as a political discourse. I must confess that I was guilty of that myself when I started to work with the Adivasis three decades ago. Now I look at the question differently, from the perspective of the missing women.
The Advent of Anthropocene
The indigenous need not be looked at as remnants of some ancient history, or as a dire consequence of colonialism, or even only as victims of State policies. In most countries, the State is impervious to the condition of the indigenous and they have to wage struggles for their rights to land, livelihood, water, health, education and dignity. One need not pin down the question only to that single axis. The question that needs to be raised is whether something is deeply wrong in the entire human advent. Have we taken a wrong direction somewhere? Human societies have organized themselves in terms of what they call civilization and intellectual capabilities. I am not talking just of industrial progress and the arrogance arising out of it, or the use of power by the State and the hubris emerging out of it. All of that is known to us, and we must fight them with all the power that we have. But I am talking about progressive ideas including Left ideas, democratic ideas, socialistic ideas, humanistic ideas: is there something missing in them? My answer to that rather disturbing question is that probably we have not yet thought fully of what could be a Cosmocracy, that we have kept ourselves grooved within the democracy, based on demos, but have ignored our responsibility to the Cosmos. There is in no parliament a specially designated representative, for instance, who will argue on behalf of the animal species who make our world: elephants, tigers, camels, dogs, goats, snakes, birds, fish, etc. In which parliament in the world are there responsible members designated to speak on behalf of the visible and the invisible life systems, on behalf of all species? It is indeed time that we change politics radically. It is then that we can safeguard the indigenous view of life. I will bring in one more consideration here. Earlier I mentioned the term Holocene: it is that time of our history, of our evolution when the Earth started becoming a little warmer, allowing life to grow and flourish in very many ways. As a result, societies, languages came into being and cultures and civilizations came up. Scientists tell us, that we have crossed all the tipping points in climate stability and gone over into destruction of the environment. Let me now add another related term, Anthropocene, which is the new climate era in which the human footprint on nature will be irreversible and reductive. To save ourselves from this disaster, some of us have taken to an increased use of artificial intelligence and machine memory. I want to ask you a simple question. It is true that ‘the missing women’ phenomenon has increased all over the world. When Dr. Sen started his work, he was talking of Central and South Asia and the Middle East. But even in the Western countries, the gender-ratios are today not very good. We know that this is cause for worry. We also know that the indigenous communities are being annihilated. There is a genocidal imposition of what we term as ‘development’ on indigenous communities. That also needs to be fought. However, we who think that we can fight on the side of the indigenous or the missing women ourselves are in exactly the same situation today. Unless we learn to fight the regime of machine memory and artificial intelligence that are governing every sphere of human activity, and unless we rescue the world from the Anthropocene, we shall not have anything more than a theoretical construct or mere intellectual understanding of ‘the missing women’ and the indigenous communities.
CONCLUSION
The question of the indigenous, their dignity and their survival is no longer the question of the indigenous alone. It is also not the question of what we could learn from the indigenous so that we change the rest of the world. It is really the question of understanding the entire cosmos where humans are but a tiny a part of it. Once we have that clarity and learn the humility of belonging to nature, then alone we can have humane political systems capable of providing greater legal protection to every human and non-human, food and health security to all species and social justice to all communities, including the indigenous. So my take on this question is what is confronting us today is the question of the entire evolutionary process. The question is of a cosmic dimension, and it pervades each one of us. We just have no escape from this question. I think each one of us today is ‘a missing woman’, and we will have to resurface, raise our voice in a united way, for action, knowledge, love, courage and intuition. It is then that we might survive this terrible, terrible era, which is close to annihilation of the world.
Bibliography
Devy, Ganesh, A Nomad Called Thief : Reflections on Adivasi Silence, New Delhi, Orient Blackswan, 2006.
Hassan, Riaz, “The ‘Missing Women’ in India”, ISAS Working Paper, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, No. 195, 19 September 2014, Last accessed on 10th May 2023: https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/184037/ISAS_Working_Paper_No__195_-_The_%27Missing_Women%27_in_India_19092014174104.pdf
Reich, David, Who we are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2018.
Sen, Amartya, “Missing Women: Social inequality outweighs women’s survival advantage in Asia and north Africa”, British Medical Journal, Vol. 304, No. 6827, 7 March 1992, p. 587.
Sen, Amartya, “More Than 100 Million Women are Missing”, The New York Review of Books, December 20, 1990 issue. Last accessed on 10th May 2023: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/12/20/more-than-100-million-women-are-missing/
[1] Presented as the “Indigenous People, Ecofeminism and the Human Future” for the SARI 2021 Conference on Ecofeminism in India: History, Struggles and Perspectives.