Componentes del sistema Agroalimentario de Ziparadó

The region that is now called India, and ‘Indian’ society, both pre and post colonisation has been marked, since at least the 4^th century, by sharp, visceral inequality on the basis of caste and class (Habib, 2011, 2013; Thapar, 2010). While there is scant evidence on the matter, it is reasonable to state that culture and communication have mirrored hierarchies in society (Banaji, 2017; Sainath, 1996). Writing a history of media and communications cannot elide and in fact must begin with the historical conditions under which a vast majority of oppressed castes and indigenous peoples have been kept out of those

information and knowledge making systems that were linked to the dominant institutions of society.

The practice of writing history must also inevitably grapple with the politics of

historiography as a reflexive attempt to unpack the presuppositions that go into what gets included and what gets excluded from the supposedly scientific enterprise of knowledge production, including the production of history (de Certeau, 1988). One way of reflecting on historiography is by tracing the genealogy of Indian history which has ‘spoken’ under varying conditions of production – always privileging some narratives while yet others are consigned to the ‘waiting room of history’ (Chakrabarty, 2000). The acknowledgement of epistemic violence (Spivak, 1988) and its intimate linkages with historiography provides a sobering caution to not treat ‘the archive’ as the sole repository of known knowledge about society.

There have been attempts to address this epistemic violence by writing histories from below, or subaltern studies (Guha & Spivak, 1988). Even as critical historiography has been around for several decades now, it is also true that such scholarship is unfortunately primarily oriented towards provincialising Europe rather than speak on its own terms or to the structures and forms of violence ‘back home’. The latter task requires the recognition that the subcontinent had a pre-colonial existence with its own archives, its own silences and forms of violence. This pre-colonial space is structured by violent caste-based hierarchy and discrimination which are necessarily intertwined with the production of vicious

hierarchies and discrimination in terms of gender and class (since caste as a durable system of social reproduction depends on endogamy and is based not only on unequal division of labour but also on the division of labourers as Dr. Ambedkar has pointed out). Coloniality

and post-colonial societies have only transformed how caste works. Given the durability of the caste system in the face of drastically different political, economic and cultural contexts, the structuring work of the caste system is indispensable to the analysis of every institution and every type of knowledge production including history.

For over 2000 years, the caste system has been a system of punishment and penalties with legal and social sanction. The ancient repositories of knowledge and tradition for the Hindus are full of references to explicit violence to be perpetrated against the castes lowest in the hierarchy – the ‘Shudras’²⁰. Dr. Ambedkar (1990 [1947], pp. 49–50) painstakingly collected evidence; striking examples include:

According to the Brihaspati Smriti (Chapter XII, Verse 12): A Shudra teaching the precepts of religion or uttering the words of the Veda, or insulting a Brahmin shall be punished by cutting out his tongue

According to the Gautama Dharma Sutra (Chapter XX, sutras 4-6): Now if he

[Shudra] listens intentionally to (a recitation of) the Veda, his ears shall be filled with (molten) tin or lac. If he recites (Vedic texts), his tongue shall be cut out. If he

remembers them, his body shall be split in twain

According to the Manu Smriti (Chapter III, Verse 156): One may not teach him [Shudra] the law or enjoin upon him religious observances

As Dr. Ambedkar succinctly argues, these ‘Vedic’ texts are cosmogonies but absolutely unique compared to other cosmogonies, in the sense that the ‘Vedic’ texts not only imagine a caste-based social formation not just as an ideal but rather as a diktat – an immutable set of injunctions for the constitution of the social. Within the constitution of the social, the texts prescribe permanent punishment for one class of people – the ‘Shudras’ – without any social, legal or economic route for overcoming this punishment. Within the general matrix

20 The caste system has four major divisions ranked hierarchically: the priestly class (Brahmins) at the top; the warrior class (Kshatriyas); the trader class (Vaishyas); and the menial class (Shudras) at the bottom. There is a fifth group known as Ati-Shudra or the Untouchables who are considered out of the caste system. More details on the caste system is provided in Chapter 3.

of punishment and penalties, participation in communicative practices²¹ such as the ones mentioned above – learning, reading, teaching knowledge – were to be met with swift and brutal violence, meted directly upon the body of the ‘Shudra’. The oppressed castes have consistently waged a determined struggle to end the caste system through alternative cosmogonies, myths, songs and various other cultural forms. Many of these counter-hegemonic forms survive in the popular imagination, in memory, in song and verse, although the anti-caste perspectives and struggles have not entered academic or mainstream historiography. This is unsurprising because the practitioners of theoretical knowledge, including historical knowledge, like any other position of power in modern India, are overwhelmingly from the dominant castes (Guru, 2002; Pathania & Tierney, 2018).

With the entry of Islam from the seventh century onwards, there were large scale conversions by oppressed castes to Islam. Until then the only mainstream mode of the social was structured by the injunctions of the caste system. Power was centralised and in the hands of various kings. Thus, news carriers and spies reported to the king, and

information was conveyed by people on horses or on foot. Written information was for the elite and usually stored at places of worship or with the rulers. Information was usually about political or military intelligence concerned with maintaining power and/or gaining an upper hand against another kingdom (Deloche, 1993; Fisher, 1993; Manucci, 2010;

Schimmel & Waghmar, 2004). So-called ‘sacred’ or ‘Vedic’ texts since the fourth century have played a role in documenting detailed rituals of worship but more importantly, identifying the nuanced caste hierarchies, how they should be maintained, occupations for each caste, and punishments to be handed out against oppressed castes if they tried to break these boundaries (Habib, 2011, 2013; Kosambi, 1985; Thapar, 2010).

Mongol rulers (they were subsequently called Mughal) invaded the Indian subcontinent²² in the late 13^th and 14^th centuries and brought with them a range of new technologies – notably the spinning wheel, paper, iron horse-shoes and use of lime cement (Kosambi, 1985). These technologies created the need for a new population of artisans who could

21 I owe thanks to Dr. Murali Shanmughavelan for pointing out (private conversation) that violence in Vedic texts includes punishments related to communicative practices.

22 Currently comprising the countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan

undertake specialised labour for specific tasks. It is interesting to note that this new artisanal population laboured as slaves to the Islamic rulers but the rulers did not disturb existing caste hierarchies. Since the Arab conquest of Sind region in North India in 711-14, the Islamic rulers’ opposition to Hinduism was focused on opposition to polytheism and idol worship. While Islamic culture and governance failed to remove caste, eventually, it was the caste system that seeped into Islamic culture and society (Teltumbde, 2017). In his essay on technology in the Mughal period (from the mid-16^th century onwards), Habib (1980) notes that the printing press failed to take off at a mass scale in spite of the availability of the technology. He speculates that the prosperity of the merchant class deterred them from investments in capital expenditure and, in the absence of competition or challenge in the printing industry, this lack of capital might have contributed to the failure of mass-scale printing in India. In Europe, however, by the 15^th century, the printing press (starting with Gutenberg’s press) made available millions of copies of religious literature that was widely circulated, read and subsequently paved the way for print capitalism (Anderson, 1983), thus contributing towards a nascent ‘public sphere’ (Bürger, Lawrence & Habermas, 1992) .

Until colonial rule technological innovation did not bring about or correspond to drastic societal change – especially in terms of class and caste. Mukhia (1985, pp. 181–182) while challenging the ‘Asiatic’ mode of production²³, argues:

Changes in India are long drawn and gradual; they have the effect of modifying the existing production techniques and social organisation of production; but they rarely overthrow an existing social and economic structure and replace it by a new one, by a new mode of production…It was thus that even when crises created by such momentous events, as the collapse of the Mughal empire, occurred during the early eighteenth century, the empire was succeeded by the resurgence of the class of zamindars [landlords] everywhere; the crisis in other words, led to the resurgence of an old property form rather than the emergence of a new one

23 The Asiatic Mode of Production refers to a specific mode of production developed by Karl Marx during his writings on India (based on secondary colonial resources) between 1852 to 1858. This mode of production is based on some peculiar features such as the absence of private ownership of land, absence of commodity exchange and the stable or durable social structure that has withstood the test of time.

However, it appears to me that Mukhia glosses over the transition from Mughal rule to British rule too quickly. The emergence of a landlord class did not just happen

thaumaturgically with the disappearance of the Mughal empire. From the 1600s until the mid-1700s, the British East India Company was involved in a complex set of relationships with the British government ‘back home’ (the Company was in debt to the British

government), maintaining business competition with other international trading companies – notably French and Dutch – and finally establishing military dominance in multiple Indian kingdoms (Markovits, 2004). Through a series of strategic battles in the middle and late 1700s the East India Company gained political control over much of what is today north Indian territory. Even though the East India Company gained political control over Mughal territory, the problem was it had no institutional infrastructure to ensure the continuation of revenue efficiently. Thus, initially, the East India company sought to collect revenues through the old Mughal system of rent extraction, which deprived Indian populations of food grains while ensuring that individuals within the East India Company became rich at the expense of the mostly poor, mostly rural, Indian population.

In 1773, Pitt the Younger, the then Prime Minister of Britain, initiated the Regulating Act.

This Act laid the foundations for a centralised administration of India and placed British government officials on the board of the East India Company, along with an obligation to limit company dividends to 6% until a loan of 1.5 million pounds was repaid by the Company to the British government (Muir, 2010; Wolpert, 2009).

In 1776, the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith was eventually published, to great acclaim, especially by the British government and press. Notably a few years later, William Pitt the Prime Minister, remarked in Parliament, ‘…[Smith’s] extensive knowledge of detail, and depth of philosophical research will, I believe, furnish the best solution to every question connected with the history of commerce, or with the systems of political economy’

(Ehrman, 1996, p. 267). This shift is indicative of a change in the power relations between industry and government. Until the late 1700s the East India Company had practiced a form of mercantilism where bullion (gold and silver) were exported to India for commodities like silks and tea which in turn were exported from Britain to other countries in Europe at a much higher price, thereby in net terms, increasing the stock of gold and silver in Britain.

From Britain’s perspective, a government with a mercantilist orientation was running the state like a set of enterprises (Weber, 1927). The political economy of Adam Smith signified a change of relations between knowledge and government, anticipated by the Regulating Act of 1773. The invisible hand of the market – i.e. invisible both to Man and to the State, worked precisely because it was invisible (Smith, 1976, p. 477), thereby setting limits to what the State could know and not know about those it governed. By 1784, the East India Company and large parts of the Indian sub-continent, now controlled indirectly by the British government, was subject to the India Act of 1784 (Travers, 2007).

By 1793, the Permanent Settlement or the more commonly known ‘Cornwallis Code’ was in effect – a system that transformed the old sovereign system’s tax collectors as government agents of tax collection - zameendars (landlords), land owners in perpetuity (Peers, 2006;

Wolpert, 2009). The creation of a new landed class loyal to the colonial government was accompanied by the creation of judicial, revenue and commercial services as part of the East India Company operations (Cohn, 1960; Guha, 1981). The period, approximately from the end of the 18^th century to the early 19^th century marked a radical shift in governmentality for both coloniser and the colonised – and although each experienced the shifts differently, they were materially, discursively and ideologically intertwined. Spurred by the Industrial Revolution which began in the late 1700s (Hobsbawm, 1962), Britain transformed from a mercantilist economy to an industrial capitalist one. It was precisely this transformation that was financed by revenues extracted from India – although the ways in which revenue was collected and Indians were governed had changed dramatically by the beginning of the 19^th century. By then, India had ceased to be an exporter of commodities and an importer of gold; it had become an exporter of raw commodities (for the factories of industrial Britain) and had become an importer of British manufactured goods (Chandra, 1987; Habib, 1975).

Foucault has theorised the emergence of the modern state in the West with the emergence of Adam Smith’s political economy that provides the invisible hand of the market. In

Foucault’s argument, we see that the Christian ‘pastoral’ form of government that was concerned with the ‘flock’ as a whole, transformed into a modern secular state that at once practiced both individualisation and totalisation of the governed (Burchell, Gordon, Miller, &

Foucault, 1991; Foucault, 1988b, 2008). Foucault’s theorisation of how regimes of governing

changed have fundamental implications for the ways in which subject positions were produced as well. However, what Foucault has illustrated may adequately account for Europe whereas in the countries of the global South or the tri-continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Foucault’s timeline did not correspond to the empirical reality.

Partha Chatterjee (2004, p. 36) has correctly observed that, in the colonies, the bio-political connection, i.e. the basis of an emergent ‘population’, came before political representation.

The bio-political connection can be imagined as a sort of state penetration into areas of life that had previously been private or addressed singularly by monarchs. From the late 1700s onwards, the colonised were administratively reorganised – for instance as taxable and juridical subjects. The word ‘India’ then, was not just a physical territory for the British – it became a domain where a range of interests converged and clashed. India was a captive buyers-market for British manufacturers, a source of labour, a seller of ‘cheap’ raw

materials, a source of fixed land revenue and yet having a ‘population’ whose welfare was now the moral responsibility of the British government. The bio-political connection that Chatterjee refers to contained contradictions – of colonialist extraction to fund industrial capitalism in Britain, and yet the beginnings of a new governmentality that hinted at welfare and the well-being of the ‘natives’. It is no coincidence that a number of prominent

Orientalists began scholarly work on India and ancient Indian culture at the beginning of the 19^th century – a strategy that once elevated a caricature of pure ancient civilisation at the same time as power was exerted over Indians through various veridical forms (Said, 1978;

Banaji, 2018).

By the early 1800s, the East India Company had lost its monopoly in trading rights which decreased its political influence both in Britain and in India. The institutional remunerations for British military ‘protection’ provided to Indian princely states and kingdoms, revenue, commercial and juridical services, and the more mundane localised strategies to extract revenues from poor Indians on a continuing basis were the primary source of revenue to a company on the verge of closure and an empire struggling to maintain its hegemony across the globe.

Why is this important for a history of internet infrastructure? Consider for example, the debate that has emerged in critical political economy of media and communications,

specifically regarding the role of communications in building empire. Jill Hills (2002, 2007) emphasises the nationalities of private firms that nonetheless furthered strategic interests of their respective nation-states towards empire building. Winseck and Pike (2007, p. 6) argue that multinational cartels were well entrenched well before the economic recessions and pressures of the early 20^th century and that their role goes beyond foreign policy objectives of nation-states. An understanding of the complex relations between private companies (such as the East India Company) and nation-states (such as Britain) enables us to appreciate the shifts of power and subsequent change of governmentality for the colonised – regardless of which entity (cartels or nation-states) occupies ‘centre stage’ at a given time and place. The focus changes from who occupies power in empire to how power is applied and how power flows through which mechanisms in the context of empire

building.

Without commenting on the intentions of specific actors, it is possible to argue that the pre-colonial and early pre-colonial phases consisted of communicative practices in the context of caste-structured subjectivation. Early colonialist intervention took the form of mercantilism mediated by the East India Company where individuals were produced as administrative subjects – facing the law, paying taxes and so on. In this period, infrastructural relations were primarily extractive and wealth was drained from the subcontinent, indirectly

producing the conditions within which the industrial revolution began, thenceforth further transforming the development of infrastructure.