Chapter 4 highlights how, as a consequence of migration and place-making processes, the discourses of locality, nation, and community came to be equated with the term ‘Mini-India’. Here, three intersecting meanings of the notion of Mini-India are discussed: The first section describes how the term ‘Mini-India’ is appropriated by the state to encompass diverse ethnic and religious identifications under the nationalist slogan ‘unity in diversity’ and to declare the pluralist Andaman society as a secular example of communal harmony. The second part considers Mini-India as a subaltern consciousness, which the author calls the ‘island mentality’. From this perspective, Mini-India refers to a localized sense of belonging that can also be termed a ‘rural cosmopolitanism’. Thirdly, it is argued that the notion of Mini-India must, at the same time, be regarded as an arena of politics in which ethnic communities compete with each other for funds and recognition by the state.
Chapter 5 analyses manifestations of history, that is, concrete historical legacies of power and knowledge in present-day Andaman society. The first section discusses the impact of hegemonic nationalist rhetoric—highlighting the role of bourgeois nationalist freedom fighters incarcerated in the Andamans—on the local sense and perception of history. The first section aims to show how politics of recognition influence the ways in which community actors constitute their present by narrating the subaltern past. The second section focuses on the manifestation of criminality as a crucial relation between the state and the population in the here and now. It shows that Andaman actors construct contemporary identities by referring to the criminal past of convicts deported to the islands; moreover, the institutionalization of criminality within the economic system of the Andaman divides the population into elite actors profiting from the black-market sector and subalterns whose participation in the same system brings them into continuous conflict with the law.
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