The Malignant Borders of Empire: The Malignant Borders of Empire: The Aldhani and the Act of Cultural Erasure

Sejuti Bala

If there’s one thing to be said about the political geography of the Empire in Star Wars, it is that its presence is arguably onerous, and its reach near-omniscient. Ever since the inception of Star Wars, the looming threat of the Empire has served as the intimidating backdrop to the hero’s journey, a near-constant villain whose presence is the amalgamation of a great evil that the hero must defeat at all costs at the end of the story. To this end, Star Wars has never been subtle; from the very beginning it has outfitted its soldiers in the style of Hitler’s Germany during World War II, as admitted by George Lucas himself and seen furthermore in the Ewoks battling the Empire with guerilla tactics and winning was a response to American imperialism in Vietnam. We are told that the Empire in Star Wars is evil, that it is cruel and unyielding, and to drive home the point, it is tied either aesthetically or allegorically to real-life examples of Empire that history has documented on our side of reality. However, central to the fact is that Star Wars is a space opera—  and the Empire, as metaphorical as it may be, merely acts as the backdrop to situate our hero against the story’s apparent antagonist, Darth Vader, who becomes the face of the Empire. 

While the Emperor Palpatine pulls strings in the shadows, Darth Vader is presented as the formidable and fearsome figurehead on whose capabilities as a force-user the entire might of the Empire seems to hinge. The defeat of the Empire altogether becomes synonymous with the defeat of Darth Vader alone. Since then, Star Wars has had several off-shoots and spin-offs wherein different components of said galaxy far, far away have been explored through various mediums such as The Mandaloriian, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Ahsoka to name a few – and yet, the borders of the Empire have never been quite as terrifyingly regulated and heavily reinforced as they have been in Andor. 

So what is it about Andor that sets it apart in its depiction of the Empire? What is it that makes the Empire of Andor not just a backdrop to the Jedi-Sith conflict of a dying Republic, but a character in itself? What is it about the Empire in Andor that is so sinister and tangible that it evokes dread without ever calling on any all-powerful force-user figurehead of its own? The answer, of course, is bureaucracy — the iron fist that holds the Empire together — and its tedious but tenacious method of homogenising the galaxy in the name of “liberation” and “eradicating terrorism”, one outer ring planet at a time. 

When we are first introduced to Cassian Andor, we learn that he is a survivor and a refugee, on a quest to find the sister he lost when he was separated from her on Kenari at the age of six. The narrative makes it a point to note that Kenari is not a word without weight, and asking about Kenari is not without consequences. Flashbacks tell us that it was the location of a hushed-up Republic mining disaster, and adults are notably absent or presumed dead from the same, forcing the older children to raise the younger ones. Their language is not translated for us, and we must gather what the children are saying through context clues — which is an effective tactic employed by the story to make sure that the audience understands that they are intruders here in Kenari, just the Separatist plane that crash-lands, like Maarva and Clem, and the children have not yet been infected with the Imperial tongue. 

The wordplay of 'Kenari' as 'canary' - backed up by depictions of a mining disaster that poisoned the air and shades of yellow in the children's clothes - evokes the prototypical warning: a canary in a coal mine. As if on cue, the children’s lives are endangered the second a Separatist ship crash-lands on Kenari, and acts as the harbinger of doom for whatever life these children have managed to carve here for themselves. Depending on how you look at it, Cassian is either rescued or kidnapped by Maarva, who happened to be at the crash site with her husband Clem to salvage equipment, and upon seeing Cassian and realising the urgency of time, she makes the decision for him. She takes this boy with her to save him from whatever she assumes the Republic would do to him, would do to the other kids. Would it assimilate them? Kill them? Integrate them into reinforcing the same atrocities on other people that were done to them? Regardless, Maarva fears it, and strives to keep him away from it. It is hard to imagine what life would’ve awaited Cassian had Maarva not severed him from his family, what this abrupt separation from the other children of his community gave him as much as it robbed him of — and he dedicates quite some time into imagining it, but the lack of leads is not for the lack of trying. 

The otherness of communities against the homogenous rule  of the Empire is further highlighted when the camera shifts its focus to Ferrix, and the picture Ferrix paints is of red and rust, of working-class grit and grime — there is a flow to things. We are shown how a day begins in Ferrix with a routine awakening, the sounds of a bell being rung in a rhythmic tune, a call that signals both the start of a day as well as the end of one. To the Time Grappler, who does the ringing of the bell, it is almost a ritualistic process, and it conveys both poise and a sense of purpose. This is something he has been doing his entire life, and the community trusts him to honestly designate the duration of their day and the time they spend working. This intercommunal trust is further baked into how the workers of Ferrix’s scrapyard leave the gloves of their workday on the walls because there is no worry of them being stolen. It paints the picture of security, of communal fraternity, a place that likes to keep its head down, keep out of trouble, and diligently gets its work done. It does its best to survive under Imperial rule and possesses a sense of tight-knit togetherness and unity. 

Against his superior's direction, Syril Karn attempts to hunt down Cassian on Ferrix but is told at the communication hub that despite being under Pre-Mor jurisdiction, asking questions would yield no results. It's no secret that law enforcement aren't welcome on Ferrix, and the Ferrixians would collectively hinder any corporate officer's attempt to shake them down. “They have their own way of doing things,” a Pre-Mor employee warns Karn, who doesn't understand why a display of badged authority wouldn't make a people willing and compliant, due to his rigid wannabe-Imperial ways. Karn’s self-proclaimed pride in asserting that “Corporate Tactical Forces are the Empire's first line of defense” comes to an ironic conclusion when he attempts to violently enforce the laws and it results in a massive failure. Karn and his team of corporate henchmen are left stranded and afraid of Ferrix as people around them do not engage with them directly, but start sounding out a call to each other by banging on everyday metal objects around them in a consistent rhythm; a call that seems to pick up pace and gain intensity with every consequent person who hurries to join in on the signal the closing of shops and hunkering down. It builds anticipation and seems to suggest a method of wordless yet communal communication, be it for danger or wariness or simply as an intimidation tactic — it achieves all three, leading Karn’s deputy to panic and claim that “we are under siege” as he continues to lose men and the noose around corporate control seems to tighten with every successive beat. It is a failed mission for corporate officers, and in the chaos of it all, Andor slips out from under Karn’s fingers. Syril Karn’s inability to gauge the extent of a people’s loyalty to their home and kinship to each other not only costs Karn his job, but also the loss of corporate control over Morlana One altogether, succeeded by the Empire using Karn’s epic failure to reinforce its borders and do away with corporate jurisdiction altogether in the Morlana sector. 

Our first introduction to Aldhani is through Luthen Rael, who assists in Cassian’s escape from Ferrix right under Karn's nose, and who informs us that Cassian’s expertise is needed on Aldhani for the theft of an Imperial fortune kept there — the quarterly payroll of an entire Imperial sector. We learn from Luthen that the Rebellion desperately needs this money, and the place to get it from best would be the Empire’s own reserves. The currency of the Empire still reigns supreme,  and one needs to partake in said currency even as they’re attempting to do away with said system altogether — its riches is how the Empire maintains control. Afterall, the central compelling thesis of Andor is that while ‘the Empire’ is an abstract concept in the name of which several atrocities are committed, one must not forget those who are instrumental, willing and proactive even, in committing those atrocities. Andor strives to give faces and names to the beating heart of bureaucratic oppression so the responsibility of Empire’s cruelty is not simply handed over to an abstraction of evil but to those who commit those acts and uphold the pillars of imperialism with their very own hands. 

It is hard not to think of  the Highland Clearances,where Scottish clans were evicted from their homes in the 18th century and other atrocities committed upon the Gaelic population by the British Empire when one is introduced to Aldhani through vast expanses of rolling green fields. With its lush mountain terrain of the Scottish Highlands, one must remember that the tribes of the Highlands were seen as “backwards” and more “Irish,” and considered a spillover from Gaelic Ireland by those who lived in the lowlands. In Andor, we are informed that for centuries, the entire expanse of the land used to be populated by forty thousand native people who were forcibly cleared out when the Empire moved in a little over a decade ago. When Cassian asks in horror if those people were killed, Vel clarifies that no, they had been displaced, forced to move south into “Enterprise Zones” located in the lowlands – which adds to the Highland Clearance parallel, wherein the clansmen had their land taken from them and were forced to become crofters, until those resettlements became overpopulated and they were forced to move again. Centuries upon centuries of lives spent on this same land that was lived on and cared for by their ancestors, and their ancestors and their ancestors in turn — uprooted by a single stroke of Imperial control. Displacement is one of the oldest tricks in the book for colonialism. It is the act of seeing a people as inferior and preemptively deciding that the place would be better off without them interfering in whatever grand endeavours one has for said place. It is the uprooting of history and a loss of culture under duress, for displacement comes hand in hand with racism and capitalism, as seen with the Empire’s treatment of native Aldhani. 

Vel, who is leading the mission, further tells us about how The Valley of Caves called Akti Amaugh, the location where they’ll carry out the heist, used to be the Aldhani’s sacred valley. She tells us that it is not far from there that thirteen years ago the Empire “liberated” an air base called Alkenzi, and upon discovering the storage properties of the caverns, they decided they had better use for it, irrespective of what it means for the people of Aldhani and what value it might hold to the natural biodiversity of the place. In just thirteen years they not only managed to displace the people whose ancestors had spent centuries on the land that used to be their ancestral home, but also dammed up their sacred river, Nasma Klain, a once mighty river now reduced to a faint trickle. Seeing the Empire deprive the indigenous population of water and other natural resources on Aldhani surely makes the audience wonder what else the Empire did to push the Dhanis to the lowlands. The act of threatening the native population’s water supply is, and always has been, an effective tool of colonisation. 

The Imperial Commandant Jayhold, who detests Aldhani as a backwater planet that he cannot wait to get off of, remarks to his superior that:

the Dhanis, they're simple people. They breed a sad combination of traits that make them particularly vulnerable to manipulation. On a practical level, they have a great difficulty holding multiple ideas in their heads simultaneously.

The prejudice of presumed racial superiority is integral to colonialism, as is the act of reinforcing boundaries on the native population. Much like how the Gaelic were dehumanised by the English and described as savages to make the displacement of the population more justified, the same is seen done to the Aldhani people. The argument made by colonialists is that the native population is barbaric, savage and incapable of intellect and therefore it is by their own inferior status, of being “less than” human, that they’re naturalistically deserving of subjugation simply because of the way they are. When in reality, the Empire hardly honours treaties made with the native population and is adamant in treating them as second-class citizens, depriving them of rights, depriving them of their personhood and making an example of them. It is also the prejudice of “unclean” and “uncivilised” when Corporal Kimzy is looking out over the valley where the Aldhani are supposed to arrive, and remarks with disgust to the undercover Gorn, “still enough to smell ’em right? could you imagine this place with a couple of thousand Dhanis?” to which Gorn, the defected official who is instrumental to the heist and whose Aldhani wife was killed by the Empire, face carefully hidden away towards the horizon says “Yes. Yes I can.” 

Much is the same when noting the North American recounting of its own history of colonialism, where the dominant narrative is not only the complete erasure of Native Americans but also hardly any acknowledgment of their existence at all. In some rare cases, subsets of American colonialism argue that it won parts of land from the Native Americans in the exchange of goods and trades, buying land from them for the price of animal hides and pelt. Native Americans are presented as not intellectual enough to know the value of what they were trading; ergo they gave up the land for tricks and pennies, which North America claimed was fair negotiation tactics on its part. It is a false accounting by every means, not only did the colonising government refuse to uphold their end of signed treaties, but they also threatened the Native American civilisations with guns and armadas, where the choice was to either forfeit your claim to a place that is intrinsic to your culture and your identity, or die. “Tell him our ghosts have strong hands and long memories,” the Aldhani elder tells Gorn, and later throws the Empire’s exchanged pelt into the fire. The Dhanis are aware of the Empire's atrocities against and exploitation of them because, despite what the Empire believes, the Dhanis aren't slow or dimwitted. The contempt and hatred they have for their oppressors is behind a thinly veiled defiance of refusing to talk to the oppressor in their tongue, even as they understand the language the Empire speaks –  which is shown when the Aldhani Elder picks up on Gorn’s mistranslation to the Commandant, but the Elder doesn’t protest it vocally. It brings to mind Nemik: “the pace of repression outpaces our ability to understand it…It’s easier to hide behind forty atrocities than a single incident" 

It is always the insistence of the Empire to frame colonisation like it won something by the virtue of its very right-brained cleverness and intellectual prowess, ignoring the roles racism and class struggles play in the acquisition of its “assets” and the people it tramples on in the pursuit of doing so. The act of brutality and the threat of violence hardly make for a situation where a choice is present. “We found the best way to steer them… is to offer alternatives.” Jayhold continues, “You put a number of options on the table, and they’re so wrapped up in choosing, they fail to notice you’ve given them nothing they wanted at the start.” The Empire employs tactics of handing the colonised several bad deals to choose from — all while non-compliance equals a death sentence. It is always easier to claim it as ‘negotiation’ when the other person is offered a superficial choice, held at gunpoint to make an almost-meaningless decision. Such a choice is no choice at all. He goes on to state that, “Their deeper problem is pride. The dhanis would rather lose, rather suffer than accept [the deal they’re given].” Here it is made abundantly clear that prejudice runs deep, and the Empire interprets any form of resistance as obstinate arrogance and communal identity as nothing but a hindrance to its own ends.

It is here that the story lets us know that this is the last time the Aldhanis will be allowed to travel up to the valley to witness the holy event they have been witnessing for centuries, the Mak-ani bray Dhani (the Eye of Aldhani). It is a cosmic event that occurs every three years, and the people of Aldhani hike up all the way to the old stones of Nasma Brani, the last remains of their holy temple upon the sacred river in the sacred valley. It is stressed that the Aldhanis consider it an act of pilgrimage and ever since the Empire came down here, they have set up viewing galleries down in the designated “Enterprise Zone,” and lined the path up to the holy temple with “Comfort Units'' to discourage the Aldhanis from completing their sacred trek. This emphasises that the strength of the Empire also lies in its slow, calculated patience:  “We spent an entire decade promoting an Imperial Viewing Festival down in the Enterprise Zone.” Jayhold states proudly, “They’ll have that going forward.”  The Empire chips away until there’s nothing left, and one has ceased to be. Not only does the Empire colonise land, but also its people and their way of life; their traditions and customs are replaced by the Empire at the centre. It puppeteers the colonised with the lure of capital and comfort, ultimately nothing but loose pocket change to a galaxy-spanning civilization. When thes lures are taken, the Empire converts the colonised into cheap labour that further annihilates what indigenous culture remains.

“It is their sacred valley is it not?” Jayhold is asked by his supervisor, to which he replies, “Well ultimately they will return won’t they Colonel. When you need plenty of arms and legs to build what you’ve got planned.” Slowly, the Empire has not only carved away at Aldhani customs and traditions by restricting movement, it plans to further desecrate sacred sites by building an airbase using the labour of the very people already being marginalised. As such, the Aldhani cease to be human. They cease to be people and become disposable, cheap labour. Bodies that serve at the pleasure of the Empire and as remarked on by Cassian Andor later in the show, “cheaper than droids and easier to replace.”

The use of the Eye as the cover for the heist is a mark of the rebels working in tandem with the nature of a place to get a leg-up over the Empire who seek to subjugate it alongside its people. Nemik’s sentence rings true: “But they have a fight on their hands, don’t they? Our elemental rights are such a simple thing to hold, they will have to shake the galaxy hard to loosen our grip.” The treatment of a place with the understanding of it, not with the subjugation of it. 

Before the Empire’s iron fist clamped down on Ferrix, it showed a heavy population of working-class people, whose personhood however was not reduced to simply their labour. It was the coalition of the community, and even under the Empire’s duress, it continued to foster that sense of care towards the people who inhabit said community but were no longer able to participate in financially benefiting said community. The Empire would see these people as disposable, but we need to learn to see people beyond the labour they provide, which is seen in how Ferrix treats its elders, and even though B2EMO is a droid, Brasso stays with it after Maarva has died, to offer it emotional support. Even on Narkina 5, the glimpse we get of the native people has them remarking that by setting up the factory of prison slave labour, the Empire has poisoned their water, therefore stripping them of their elemental rights. In turn, they help Cassian and Melshi escape, showing that displaced people will always sympathise with others who, like them, have been stripped of their rights and dehumanised by the oppressors.

The Empire thus employs different methods of wiping out a culture, ranging from the obvious murder and genocide to more subtle stealing of land and destruction of traditions. Any of these actions benefit the Empire, resulting in the assimilation of homes and minds into its borders and forcing people to pick a side: cooperation via Imperial labour or resistance via rebellion. It is no surprise that it brings the industrial revolution to Aldhani, for the notion of Empire always goes hand in hand with capitalism, the benefactors of which take pleasure in removing personhood and replacing it instead with imperial productivity. The borders of Empire are like a plague, rotting everything it touches in an attempt to assimilate them into itself. As a byproduct, it creates a milquetoast version of whichever cultural tradition people were forced to give up to save their lives and calls it liberation. Andor draws focus to the faces of those instrumental in reinforcing the malignant borders of the Empire (or just empire), explicitly holding them responsible for hurt and bloodshed without any need for lightsaber-wielding, larger-than-life villains.