Debt, Time, and Extravagance

This chapter illustrates how Santals and Paharias were physically and territorially fenced in by the colonial rulers, so that they could no longer interact directly with the rest of the indigenous society. It also investigates the emergence of indebtedness as the definitional sign of the ‘primitive’ in colonial Bengal. The colonial authorities argued that Paharias did not exhibit the intrinsic ‘primordiality’ of the Santals. Santals qualified to a ‘primitive’ status in a way in which the Paharias, organically entrenched in their lands, could never have. The nineteenth-century Santal experience of money was primarily an experience of indebtedness. Their indebtedness was not just an economic indebtedness of the ‘backward’ to the ‘advanced’, but a non-dischargeable and total debt that the non-present owed to the re-presenting authority, for bringing it forward, against nature, to appear in a time not its own.

Archaeology · BENGAL · Colonialism · Debt · Economics · Indigenous · Macroeconomics · Political economy · Political science · Rest (music) · Sign (mathematics) · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies · History · Law · Mathematics · Social and Economic Development in India