Violent Histories of Indigeneity and International Relations: Tales from the Indian State
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00208817231162466 |
| Author | Ananya Sharma |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00208817231162466
International Studies
60(2) 139 –154, 2023
© 2023 Jawaharlal Nehru University
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DOI: 10.1177/00208817231162466
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Research Article
Violent Histories
of Indigeneity and
International Relations:
Tales from the
Indian State
Ananya Sharma1
Abstract
The discipline of International Relations (IR) has been complicit in its representation
of indigenous populations, often producing teleological narratives underpinning
the superiority of the West and legitimizing colonial domination. The historical
lived experiences of the indigenous peoples and their knowledge have been
silenced and sidelined enabling the anchoring of discussions on political subjectivity
and development from the vantage point of western modernity. The crisis of
understanding modern statist practices of development plays out in the domain
of ‘onto politics’—the politics of being whereby current governing practices
are merely reflective of the colonial past. The practice of finance and the use of
capital during the colonial era contributed to the embedding and actualization
of colonial enlightenment thought on the inferiority of non-Europeans, while
corollaries of money (property, trade) helped to produce implement hierarchies
even amongst the indigenous colonized communities. The article is exploring a
double relationship between knowledge production and practice: the first is how
enlightenment scholars provided the rubric for racial hierarchies, and the second is
the way money reified and reproduced those racist classifications through practice
by looking at the colonial and post-colonial Indian state. In doing so, it advances the
case to examine the relationship between indigeneity and knowledge production
as constitutive to the modern Indian state.
Keywords
Indigeneity, post-colonial violence, modernity, India
Introduction
The discipline of International Relations (IR) has witnessed an increasing
engagement with its colonial origins and legacies. However, the epistemic edifices
1Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana, India
Corresponding author:
Ananya Sharma, Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana 131029, India.
E-mail: ananya.sharma@ashoka.edu.in
140 International Studies 60(2)
of IR are inextricably racialized, having contributed to exclusionary modes of
theorizing that have shaped the genealogy of the discipline. The ‘epistemic
imperialism’ is manifested through the reconfiguration of coloniality by relying
on dichotomous binarizations including rationality–irrationality, modernity–
traditional and civilized–barbarian. The modern episteme is anchored onto three
hegemonic, interrelated and co-constitutive features: first, the division between
nature and culture, which is reflected through the belief in the idea of universal
reality accessible through science, second, the marking of cultural differences in
hierarchical and temporal terms with a teleological spread from the west to the
rest of the globe and third a linear conception of time with development and
modernity seen as integral to the story of progress, leaving behind non-moderns
without any historical subjectivity. There have been significant efforts to
problematize, unsettle and re-evaluate these ‘hierarchic, west-central’ knowledge
structures by provincializing the canon through pluralizing the epistemic sources
of legitimate knowledge originating outside of the West (Bhambra, 2020; Bilgin,
2008; Escobar, 2004; Seth, 2007). Colonial modernity1 and geocentric
parochialism have shaped much of the discursive debate with scholars actively
negating the monolithic and orientalist connotations associated with the non-west.
There has been an Indian contribution to alternative theorizing and decentring IR
by recovering indigenous thinkers2 and texts (Acharya, 2016; Behera, 2007; Shahi
& Ascione, 2014). However, this article aims to expose the colonial political
imaginaries and corollary subjectivities that have shaped interactions between the
state and the Adivasis3 beyond the West and use them as metaphors for ‘worlding’
differently. The article challenges the essentialist binarization of west/non-west
and north/south and emphasizes the highly fractalized loci of enunciation that are
shaped by a multiplicity of interpellation and displacements within the Global
South itself. The aim of engaging with the ‘periphery’ is not instrumental in terms
of contributing to the core by ‘adding’ indigenous knowledge or filling pieces of
a larger global puzzle but as an endeavor in itself to question the dominant meta-
geographies in the global discourse on IR. Indigenous thinking with its multiple
ethnic-political orientations entails an ‘unfinished project of decolonization’ that
encourages disruptive potential by rejecting mainstream narratives that occlude
their past connections of violence and racial exclusions. The importance of
engagement with indigenous thought highlights the immanent contradictions
within the modern discourse and highlights the ‘silences’, ‘discriminations’ and
‘forgetting’ by challenging given social scripts. The article seeks to contribute to
‘worlds without center’ by cultivating sensitivity to criticality and the emergence
of possibilities within indigenous thought. The article explores three suggestive
prolegomena for indigenizing IR: first, it engages with the lineages that privilege
coloniality of power and displaces other forms of claim-making, second it
highlights the complexities of modernity within the ‘global’ theorizing in the
discipline and third it excavates the functioning of cognitive empire through
reliance on western epistemologies and abstractions including the reliance on
money and the erasure/violence perpetrated against the indigenous people. The
first section discusses how the shift towards global effaces certain categories of
identities in representing the global south. The next section builds on how theories
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