Ravindran Sriramachandran: Dominant Community, Incommensurability and the Tamil Plantation Laborer
The controversies concerning incommensurability have challenged and raised serious doubts about the belief that there is – or must be – a determinate, universal, neutral, ahistorical framework in which all languages or “vocabularies” can be adequately translated which can enable us to evaluate rationally the validity claims made within these disparate languages. Every identity, as Connolly argues, whether individual or social, presents us with a fundamental and troubling paradox: an identity establishes itself in relation to a set of differences, and it operates under powerful pressures to fix, regulate, or exclude some of these differences as otherness. The point, for Connolly, is to get ourselves out of arguments that want to fix the self and the world once and for all. Is this possible? This paper will look at Planter diaries, reports, memoirs from Sri Lanka and Tamil laborer narratives (mainly from reports, songs, ballads) from the 19th and early 20th centuries and explore how incommensurability establishes itself as the norm. It will trace the establishment of this incommensurability by looking closely at colonial sources and epistemologies. Further it will attempt to see the impact of such an idea in our world by exploring how this idea replicates itself in the lives of present day plantation labor repatriates living in India in their relationship with the local dominant community (personal interviews done with repatriates and members of the dominant communities) and explore how both sides could never escape the real practical possibility that one may fail to understand “alien” traditions and the ways in which they were incommensurable with the tradition that one belonged to.
Biographial Statement
Ravindran Sriramachandran (Ravi) did my PhD at Columbia University in Anthropology and presently teaches at the American University in Sharjah.
