In this doctoral dissertation, Philipp Zehmisch takes us to the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, and deconstructs colonial and postcolonial myths about the subaltern groups that have come to inhabit these islands. These myths, much...
moreIn this doctoral dissertation, Philipp Zehmisch takes us to the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, and deconstructs colonial and postcolonial myths about the subaltern groups that have come to inhabit these islands. These myths, much like the groups that inhabit the Andamans, are varied, ranging from colonial anthropological assumptions about the " primitive " lifestyles of forest-dwellers to recent nationalist folktales about the socio-cultural mosaic on these islands mirroring the diversity of the Indian mainland. The inhabitants of the islands too are a varied lot that reflects the layered and chequered history of the place: descendants of convicts in the infamous jail there, partition refugees from eastern Bengal, Adivasis from the Chotanagpur region, and Telugu-and Tamil-speaking migrants from southern India. In deconstructing myths about the Andamans, Zehmisch relies on a mix of historical and ethnographic research. He reads secondary historical sources closely and fills in crucial gaps with his own oral-historical research. He also pursues in-depth, multi-sited ethnographic research among different segments of Andamans society in order to present a complex portrait of everyday life and politics on these islands. In Zehmisch's work, the past and the present are braided together in richly textured narratives, which vividly capture the social conflicts and divisions in his fieldsites as well as the ways in which ordinary people struggle to impart meaning to their lives. His long engagement with individuals and communities living in the Andamans has enabled him to take advantage of a wide network of friends and informants who have made fieldwork not only possible, but insightful and enjoyable. By candidly describing his interactions with his interlocutors, Zehmisch offers a personal account of what it is like to do research in the islands, what challenges and rewards it brings, and how the data we generate as fieldworkers is inevitably entangled with the social ties we forge in the field of study. Central to Zehmisch's dissertation is the claim that subaltern agency ought to be placed at the centre of our understanding of Andaman history, society, and politics. The agency of subaltern actors may be seen, firstly, in the human mobilities that settled the Andamans in response to modern state policies over successive phases, during the past century and a half. These settlers from various parts of South Asia crafted new lives for themselves on these islands, often transforming both the landscape and themselves in order to generate new notions of belonging and community in relation to each other. Subaltern agency, Zehmisch shows, may also be seen in the forging of an " island mentality, " a kind of hybrid popular consciousness that reflects the processes of cultural creolization that successive waves of migration have generated in the Andamans.
