by Manisha Basu, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
While there is a clear history of human migratory patterns having resulted in acts of extreme violence, including genocide, and what Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called “epistemicide”, or the erasure of entire worldviews, there is also an alternate, more life-affirming possibility that could emerge from experiences of migration. If, in the course of migrant experiences, diverse realities continually touch upon one another, then in the best scenarios, migrant subjects and their hosts could become practiced in making and unmaking themselves to live in relation to one another in the new conditions produced by their independent, yet still linked, ways of knowing and being. There is a strong line of inquiry in classical Indian thinking that speaks to an understanding of such an interconnectedness through the concept of maitri. The word comes from the root mitr which loosely translates as ‘friend’ or entity bearing ‘goodwill’. As Bhikhu Parekh has shown, when classical Indian thinkers asked themselves the metaphysical question of how human beings should orient themselves not only toward each other, but toward all orders of being in the world, the answers they variously came up with involved a ‘spirit of goodwill and friendliness’, one that treated all entities as co-tenants living together in the world in a way such as to mutually benefit one another. A strain of this kind of thinking is also discernible in the worldviews of central Indian indigenous tribes, particularly the Gond peoples, as they appear in the anthropologies of Verrier Elwin, an Englishman who ‘went native’ among the Gond in the middle of the twentieth century. The epistemological stance of the Gond emphasized ‘liking’ rather than ‘loving’ each other. Presumably, the idea was that the gentler affect of likability was more widely available to most and more widely apportionable to the many than the forceful emotion of love, which by virtue of its very forcefulness had to be restricted to a few. Friendship as a product of such likability is a unique relationality that comes neither with the burden of biology (as in familial relations) nor with the weight of legal sanctions (as in conjugal partnerships). The formation is entirely voluntary, and it is potentially transgressive, since it often cuts across social boundaries of caste, class, religion, gender etc. and it has reference to nothing outside of itself, only being founded in acts of reciprocity between the parties involved.
It is precisely this kind of reciprocity—delinked from biological, social, and legal sanctions—that is the best outcome of migrants and host communities encountering one another. This is not to say that such a path would be laden with roses and that the spirit of friendliness will, in absolute terms, overcome the variety of inhuman violences, epistemic and otherwise, that have historically plagued experiences of and with migration. Critics like Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Amitav Ghosh have variously argued that ever since the migrations of the colonial modern period we are trapped in a structure of knowledge formations that requires the erasure of any alterities to a modern western epistemology. Such a structure requires us to ignore the fact that what today is privileged as western European modernity was not an autochthonous or localized emergence without any ecological links to other ways of knowing, other practices of being, and other peoples. Given that we are so entrenched in this mindset, the first step then is to try to unlearn this seemingly inescapable cognitive stance. What I call in my work the pedagogy of unlearning is thus a first step, and it is far more difficult than learning anew and cumulatively adding to what one knows—instead, it refers to shedding what one already knows to encourage openness to other epistemological and cognitive stances. This would mean a willingness to cultivate the self in relation to strangers, to treat selfhood as a praxis that involves continually departing from the familiar and teleological, one that is, in the sense that Gramsci gave the word ‘praxis’, not deterministically oriented. Such an exercise would lead to inhabiting time differently than as a leaden developmentalist teleology; it would involve a heterotemporality of continually becoming in relation to others.
My optimism comes from the fact that it is not as if there are no historical precedents for politics of knowing at an angle to that we have inherited from the European modern. For instance, Amitav Ghosh shows how what he calls the ‘partitioned thinking’ of the modern epistemology (between human and non-human, between nature and culture, and a host of other binaries) is offset by the thinking of ecosystem people who have long endowed animals with intelligence and agency, rivers with moods and feelings, likes and dislikes. In fact, even the eminent scientist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose gave elements of consciousness to vegetables and metals. This history is not confined to the Indian Subcontinent. Like the classical Indian thinkers and indigenous tribes, the people of ancient Greece too believed, as Michel Foucault has shown, in a relationality of obligation between different human communities (even though they did not comment as overtly on the relationality between humans and nonhuman agents). The examples and precedents are there in the archives, and my argument is that it is in the migrant experience that we are most likely to be able to access those other epistemologies and cognitive stances that, though faint, are still available to us. In this regard, it is as important to pay attention to migrations within the territorial boundaries of the nation state as it is to movements across state borders, because in the Indian context in particular, such attention would probably expose caste as a vector for mobilities (or immobilities), just as on the global stage, we can talk about the racialization of patterns of migration.
References:
Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self: Vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. Pantheon Books, 1986.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Guha, Ramachandra. Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, his Tribals, and India. University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Mignolo, Walter. “The Global South and World Dis/Order.” Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 67, no. 2, 2011, pp. 165-188.
—Local History/Global Designs. Princeton UP, 2000.
Parekh, Bhiku. “Friendship in Classical Indian Thought.” India International Centre Quarterly,vol. 35, no. 2, 2008, pp. 152-167.
Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South, vol. 1, no. 3, 2000, pp. 533-580.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Paradigm Publishers, 2014.
Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. Columbia UP, 2014.
Further Reading:
Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality. Routledge, 2000.
Basu, Manisha. Migrant Epistemologies in Indian Nonfiction of the Long Twentieth Century. Forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press, May 2025.
Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Routledge, 2004.
Marotta, Vince. Theories of the Stranger: Debates on Cosmopolitanism, Identity, and Cross-Cultural Encounters. Routledge, 2017.
Ricci, Matteo. On Friendship. Trans. Timothy Billings. Columbia UP, 2009.
MeMiRe - A Discursive Glossary 