Enchantment of the State?: Experiences of ‘Adivasi’ ex-cadets of the Student Police Cadet project in Kerala, India

• In Event: Strenghening global competencies and transformative practices

Proposal

The relationship between the tribal populations of Kerala and the state is, within academic literature and in popular imagination, pitched in a predominantly antagonistic manner. When I told a relative of mine, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) Officer, of my plans to go to Mananthavadi in Wayanad District in northern Kerala for my fieldwork, he exhorted me not to be too adventurous as I move about the place. He told me that a day or two ago Maoists has attacked and damaged the property of a hotel run by the Kerala Tourism Development Corporation (KTDC) in a nearby town. If this government official portrayed Wayanad as a place overrun by Maoists, there is, as Luisa Steur (2009) points out, a liberal cultralist consensus regarding the adivasis, not just as ‘outliers’ but as victims of the Kerala model of development (p.29). In fact, it is this narrative of the tribal populations’ disenchantment with the state that I drew upon when I decided to choose Wayanad as an ethnographic site for my research, I choose Wayanad primarily because it is the district with the highest tribal population in Kerala, with a history of tribal unrest stemming from unmet demands for productive land. Wayanad has hence been the subject of sustained state surveillance, which, not only included state repression of tribal struggles but also developmental efforts such as increasing connectivity and accessibility to integrate the “troubled” area into the logic of the state (Jacob, 2006).

In this paper I am in no way denying the “militant political assertion of Adivasi people” or the “continuation of material deprivation among them” (Devika, 2013, pp. 2-3). However, through a close analysis of a focus group discussion with a group of higher secondary school girls belonging to various tribal/adivasi communities, I argue for the need within research on ‘adivasis’ to acknowledge less belligerent and in fact, amicable ways of adivasi engagements with the state, an aspect to which much of the extant research seems closed off. These students are ex-cadets of the Student Police Cadet (SPC) which was the focus of my doctoral dissertation. In this paper I argue that the exposure they gained through SPC such as friendly contact with the police, interactions with high ranking government officials, field visits, indoor classes on a wide range of topics such as child rights, and the respect they gained through the SPC uniform that so closely resembled the police uniform that people often mistook them for the police, developed in them an enchantment with the state as a site of promise--resources, opportunities, and new partnerships, including the possibility of a job in the police force. In other words, what they were describing were the ways in which they were actively producing their lives through their interaction with the state. Apart from the focus group discussion with ex-cadets, I also examine the representation of the adivasis in institutional narratives, specifically those of the police in my study.

“Enchantment of the state” in the title of this paper is drawn from the work of Sudipta Kaviraj (2010) who examines the transformations in the idea of the state from pre-colonial to postcolonial India, from the subsidiary nature of pre-colonial kingship to the idea of the receding state associated with liberalization. Kaviraj, however, argues that despite all inhibitions about the state and its authority, the enchantment with the state as a moral force “capable of knowing everything, doing everything, removing all obstacles…” persists unabated. He further adds that while the state in academic discourse might comprise the army, the bureaucracy and the government, in Indian popular imagination, it is made strangely distinct from all these institutions and hence “spectral” and difficult to locate. Apart from Kaviraj’s formulation, the word enchantment is also important for my analysis because as Michael Saler (2012) points out enchantment was “associated with the cognitive outlooks of groups traditionally seen as inferior by Western elites: children, women, and the lower classes” (p. 9)
I conducted a multi-sited ethnographic study of a school-based cadet programme designed by Kerala police called the Student Police Cadet programme. I examined the cadet program over the span of one academic year in three primary ethnographic sites—three government high schools each located in a different administrative district of Kerala: Ernakulam, Malapurram, and Wayanad. Launched in 2010, SPC is a voluntary, extracurricular citizenship training programme offered to male and female students of grades 8 and 9 in government, government aided and private high schools across Kerala. With the tagline ‘We Learn to Serve’, SPC is described as a ‘youth development initiative that trains high school students to evolve as future leaders of a democratic society by inculcating within them respect for the law, discipline, civic sense, empathy for vulnerable sections of society and resistance to social evils’. Through my research I wanted to, among other things, understand, how the cadet programme produced the child-student as a citizen and I chose multi-sited ethnography as my method because I was curious about if and how the discursive and material practices of this production is shaped by the contextual specificities of different sites. In other words I wanted to understand if and how the governmentality of this cadet programme was shaped by regional histories and preexisting governmentalities in those sites.

Author

• Mary Ann Chacko, Ahmedabad University