Manifestations of History

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.