The May 13 Group Podcast

Those of you who know me may know that my ancestors were among those who administered British rule. Of course there were exceptions, and certainly not all were necessarily highly placed. But as a general lot—because of their status as members of the oppressive caste, and subsequent levels of literacy in both the local language and colonial language—the role that they played in colonial and neocolonial India is that of the intermediary: They strengthened the (neo)colonial infrastructure through their roles in higher education, public health, transportation, etc.

Because we are so often essentialized as somehow inherently (almost genetically) “complicit“ and “complacent,“ I have to note that this ancestry does not necessarily apply to all South Asians in the diaspora. Many South Asians were displaced through indentured servitude (whose “voluntary” characterization is misleading when we consider that their current or former colonizers owned their countries of origin as well as the countries of their servitude). And many were displaced as refugees of climate shocks and war, including wars of U.S. imperial aggression. Still others were displaced as a result of other forces, including voluntary migration, but with very different fallback positions than that of my parents thanks to their caste, class, or religious classification. Plus, some brahmins did fight both British rule and caste simultaneously. (The majority who fought “foreign“ or “European“ rule, however, did so without necessarily fighting the idea of stratification, hierarchy, exploitation, and social/ cultural/ spiritual imperialism/ hegemony, etc.).

This often-reductively simplified story is too long and complex to do justice in writing on social media. I bring it up only to point out the similarity of my ancestors’ role—as a buffer between India’s colonizers and the majority of India’s population, whose labor and land the British exploited and extracted to sell cotton, silk, indigo, sugar, salt, tea, and opium around the world (and whose labor and land my ancestors exploited to manage their households, etc. domestically)—relative to my own role as a current member of the professional/ managerial class. After all, I am still administering the (neo)colonial infrastructure of an illegitimate state, except in North America instead of South Asia. This is especially true if I consider my specific role as an evaluator, where I have prided myself on being a go-between that truly listens to and translates the work of grassroots organizers and community members to the ruling/ owning class, and translates government and philanthropic funders’ jargon about “evidence” and scientific methods, etc. back to current and potential grantees.

As much as I, like the best of my ancestors (presumably), have tried to bridge these worlds in a sincere effort to honor and bring poor people’s analysis to the capital class/ decision-makers’ attention, and to deconstruct and bring current decision-makers’ capital to poor people, I’m increasingly convinced—after 30 years in the nonprofit/ nongovernmental industrial complex, a Master’s in Nonprofit Management, a PhD in Evaluation Studies, and the student loan debt and gray hairs to prove all of it—that even thinking that this would ever actually work is evidence of my indoctrination into the fallacy of positivism and technocratic, scientific management, as well as related logics of merit and “capacity-building”. Participating in the logic of “if only…” will never topple the material asymmetry that forces poor people to make themselves legible to wealth and suggests that being able to do so may one day result in them getting the owning/ ruling class to fund their liberation.

The logic of “if only” says that if only communities knew how to articulate their theory of change, they could get funding. It also says that if only funders knew that communities have their own standards of evidence, based on their own experience, logics, and beliefs about what they’re experiencing and how the world operates and should operate, they would jettison their ridiculous funding and evaluation requirements and “trust“ grantees. It says if only folx knew better, they would do better. If only I had the necessary writing skills, data visualization skills, presentation skills…. If only I had the right relationships, “executive presence,” or some magic, “decolonized” research method or evaluation approach…. If only, if only, if only….

What if—a hundred years ago—there was an entire industry that peddled ways of making British rule more “culturally competent“ (anthropology, anyone?)? What if they said, “continue extracting from the laborers, but when you evaluate the ’social reform’ programs that you have established for them, hire one of them (inclusion)—or maybe someone from an entirely different colonized group that looks kind of like them (diversity)—to collect data from them.” What if they said, “have someone who looks like them create the tools for data collection, too, so that you can be sure to get the answers you need (multicultural validity)?” What if they said that, “amid your ongoing violence, starvation, and exploitation of the population, the evaluation that you conduct of the social programs you’ve established should be equitable.”

What if—instead—more of my ancestors risked their individual physical and financial security, and also their position of relative power, by refusing to play the role of the intermediary? What if they refused to legitimize an inherently illegitimate state by not cooperating with it? What if they cared for sick people, taught people, and transported people outside the colonial apparatus? Of course, many Indians did do just this (”how did they sustain their families in the meanwhile?,” I always wonder). And some argue—while others contest—that this, en masse, is what led to India’s independence. I don’t have the expertise to say which is true, but I have learned that there were plenty of warnings even at the time of India’s independence struggle about the pitfalls of uncritically and ethno-nationalistically adopting the idea of the modern nation-state, assuming that achieving India's political freedom from Britain would necessarily also mean achieving political, social, economic, cultural, religious, gender, and sexual freedom for all Indians.

When my child sometimes expresses shame that the bulk of her ancestors were just regular people doing respectable jobs and not necessarily revolutionaries, I remind her that we can’t control the circumstances of our birth. Nor can we change our history. But we can learn from it and make amends for it to help change the future. What do the lessons of my ancestors mean for whether and how I continue serving an intermediary role, as an evaluator, within philanthro-capitalism and the nonprofit/ nongovernmental industrial complex? Rather than attempting to make individual organizations’ cases to funders or individually answer philanthropy’s questions (which are largely irrelevant and already answered many times over), how can I put the skills I’ve gained over the last 30 years to better use—en masse?

These are some of the kinds of topics that Carolina De La Rosa Mateo and I discuss in The May 13 Group Podcast, thanks to Nayantara Premakumar ’s production support. If you enjoyed reading this post, you may enjoy listening to it, too. It launches Monday (May 13!) and we would certainly enjoy engaging in dialogue with you, both through and around it.