It was the 6th February when I watched Avatar and also read about the extinction of the Bo tribe in the Andaman Islands. The last remaining member of the Bo tribe was a woman (Senior Boa), in dying she took along with her a language, a culture, history and whatever else transforms individuals into a family, community and a tribe. The piece hovered between an obituary (to a person and a tribe) and a crime report.
As shown in Avatar the process of colonisation is filled with good intentions. Avatar has an anthropologist studying the Na’avi indigenous of the planet Pandora because their existence is being threatened by a mining company. She uses technology to gain their trust and to understand their culture, learn their language and become one with The People. She hopes to communicate the danger that surrounds them. She wants to tell them of their predicament - to survive they need to give up what they hold sacred. Her intentions are commendable - to keep the collateral damage to a minimum, while recording the culture of a race soon to be decimated. Much like other movies being churned out by Hollywood the hero begins his day with ulterior motives. However, by evening he transforms into a rebel with a cause saving The People he initially cheated and getting the girl.
The movie is not about the ‘we are the world, we are its children’ rhetoric, it also goes beyond the regular feminist cliché here the heroine kills the villain. It is also not promoting a Luddite principle because Pandora is a non-threatening, non-polluting industrial complex which not only sustains life but also produces a material similar to carbon fibre used by the Na’avi in their weapons.
The movie speaks about the process of colonisation and the manner in which this occurs.
Colonisation has many layers to it; it does not happen over night. History is replete with examples be it in the America’s, Australia or India. What begins as a challenge for an adventurer or a vocation for the religious or a small business venture grows into an enterprise based on usurpation. Riding tandem with the appropriation of wealth is the subjugation of people, culture and language, the introduction of disease and new ways of life. This is a common baggage that all colonisers carry, something depicted in Avatar and that finds reality in the extinction of the Bo. Survival International puts it succinctly in its report of Senior Boa’s death and the extinction of the tribe ‘Most were killed or died of diseases brought by the colonizers. The report adds “Having failed to ‘pacify’ the tribes through violence, the British tried to ‘civilize’ them by capturing many and keeping them in an ‘Andaman Home’. Of the 150 children born in the home, none lived beyond the age of two.”
As seen in Avatar, colonisation brings out the best and the worst in people. The battle between good and evil fought in such new territories has little to do with questioning the presence of colonisers but with the method of arrogation. The means differ, but the ends are the same. The dilemma is whether the process of dislocation/assimilation/seizure should begin with education or would education be a natural corollary of forced eviction? Colonisation is sold as emancipation, as a form of civilising the ‘savages’. Colonialists refuse to accept that the colonised have a culture, a language and a history.
The question that rises from a sci-fi film like Avatar and the extinction of the Bo is whether there should be limits to our search for knowledge. The idea of ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake’ has never found resonance because ‘progress’ is an outcome of knowledge. Astronomy helped adventurers plot navigational charts, making it easy to reach the New World and colonise it. The very concept of ‘knowledge is power’ stems from what can be done with it. For all the good it has done technology has been used as a weapon both literally and figuratively.
It can be argued that there is a good side and a bad side to science. We know this because today there is a repository of events that show science can jeopardise our existence. It has been said that the road to development is littered with good intentions, the same goes for science. The good intentions with which scientists look into their microscopes in their sterile world gets morphed in the real world. Pesticides kill and maim people besides the bugs they target; nuclear energy finds itself in hot water because of nuclear waste and radiation leaks that go along with it. Besides this, good intentions transform into political machination and business interests in the real world.
Today the saga of colonisation continues with the need to save the world by venturing into new frontiers of science. One may ask how? Colonisation through science occurs when technologies like Genetic Engineering are packaged in terms like ‘fighting hunger’, ‘green revolution’; ‘drought resistance’ which exclude reasons that caused hunger, drought and the need for a ‘green revolution’ in the first place. These are terms of the modern colonists who see the need to ‘civilise’ and ‘modernise’ agriculture using modern technology. Like the Lost Generation of Australia who were forcibly relocated and taught or the American Indians who were put in reservations or like the Bo who are extinct, technologies like Genetic Engineering have the potential of subjugating many, destroying diversity and cultivating homogeneity all in the garb of good intentions.
There is need to pause and question how much more science do we need and if we do need science then what kind of science? The villains in Spiderman movies evolve from the failures of technologies they conceive and develop to save the world. The reason for science is because it is assumed that it can be transferred from a laboratory Petri dish to a real world cauldron.
There is another set of movies that deal with the thirst to understand our past. Most Indiana Jones movies see ancient relics being sacrificed at the temple of knowledge or to save the world. There is an ongoing debate whether anthropology actually begins the end of a tribe under study because in effect the baggage brought by the anthropologist is no different from that of the coloniser. There was a raging debate in 2000 about anthropologists studying the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon because of the kind of research done and the manner of interactions between the tribe and the anthropologists.
Colonisation in any form is an unnatural process of evolution. It does not give the evolutionary process time and opportunity to create checks and balances necessary for a species to adapt and survive. Put colloquially it’s similar to putting a gun in the hands of a child or contaminating a sterile laboratory.
We need to see what technology has done to us and what we are doing in the name of technology advancement. Once this is done then there is need to put in measures to ensure that there is no recidivism. However even as we wait for this to happen technology is being used to stem this new-age colonial onslaught.
The Surui tribe living in the forests of Brazil are using Google Earth and GPS to fight illegal logging. More recently the Dongria Kondh, an ancient tribe in Orissa fighting a steel conglomerate, invited James Cameron to make a movie on them and their struggle.
Foresight may not come naturally to us, but we have a lot to learn from the past - learn of what we did right and wrong when we used technology. This gives us scope to choose the kind of science and technology required. It gives us enough material to chart a course into the future where technology does not become a tool for colonisation but one of the choices at hand for improving our life’s if we so desire.
