Friday, January 18th, 2013 Water, Adivasi Protests and a People’s Resistance Movement: Some Thoughts on Translation and Justice

Description

In this presentation I examine the processes and practices of translation across multiple accounts of a dispute that began with Adivasi (original inhabitants) protests against Hindustan Coca‐Cola Beverages Private Ltd. in a village in Kerala in South India. The sit‐in agitation started by Adivasi residents of the area soon after the company set up a beverage bottling plant and began to extract large amounts of groundwater is now in its tenth year. The dispute has been widely reported and has attracted much analysis. Drawing on scholarship on literal and conceptual translation I examine the ways in which meanings change as claims originating in contested, layered histories and in narratives of displacement and exclusion are
translated into the stronger languages of social movements and the formal legal system. I suggest that a meaningful resolution of the dispute for those whose lives have been most affected by it requires a closer look at the processes and practices of translation through which the Adivasis’ experience of injustice and their opposition to Coca‐Cola, have been eclipsed, more often than not, in pursuit of justice for them.

Dr. Pooja Parmar is the inaugural Catalyst Fellow and a visiting professor at the Osgoode Hall Law School. She completed an LLM and PhD at the UBC Faculty of Law. She received her Bachelor of Laws degree from Panjab University in India and practiced law in New Delhi for several years. Her research addresses issues of legal pluralism, intersections of law and colonialism, indigeneity, human rights, development and displacement. Her most recent article entitled “Undoing Historical Wrongs: Law and Indigeneity in India” will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Osgoode Hall Law Journal.