Sengupta, Sohini (2012) Being Hungry, Becoming Free: Marginality, Identity and Livelihoods in Rural Western Orissa
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Sengupta, Sohini (2012) Being hungry, becoming free: marginality, identity and livelihoods in rural Western Orissa. PhD Thesis. SOAS, University of London http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/15641 Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non‐commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this thesis, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full thesis title", name of the School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination. Being Hungry, Becoming Free: Marginality, Identity and Livelihoods in Rural Western Orissa SOHINI SENGUPTA Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in Anthropology 2012 Department of Anthropology and Sociology School of Oriental and African Studies University of London 1 2 Abstract This thesis is a description of lives from a remote area of India. It is based in a village and its neighbourhood, in a place called Borasambar in western Orissa. Here, in the not so distant past there existed a network of interconnected kingdoms, stretching outwards from the valleys of the Mahanadi River into the dense forests of Central India. People who live in these rural, erstwhile forest areas suffered great poverty and deprivation after a brief period of agrarian expansion and prosperity in the late nineteenth century and before state welfare expenditure arrived to provide a new perspective towards poverty. This thesis looks at the structural roots of poverty and tries to trace historically, its changing definitions, manifestations and consequences. The attempt is to understand the phenomenon from the accounts, memories and representations of village people, as they increasingly describe wellbeing through the physical and metaphoric distance from their forest dwelling pasts. Transcending the objective-subjective divide in poverty research, this thesis aims to analyze poverty, as a social and economic reality that needs to be understood in terms of the meanings it has to the people concerned and as an effect of objective mechanisms and structural conditions. Drawing insight from Bourdieu’s social theory of practice and symbolic power, this thesis demonstrates how cultural discourses of poverty are social and historical knowledge sustained by the continuous making and remaking of the relations of dominance and dependence in the local society, while experienced poverty emerges through the effects of broader processes within which the local society has taken shape and remains embedded. The main contribution of this thesis is towards a historical-anthropology that provides understanding of processes and mechanisms through which power and agency constitute social memories and perpetuate subordination in long-term conditions of poverty. Based on detailed ethnographic fieldwork of a village and archival research guided by recollections and family stories, this thesis traces changing patterns of living conditions of rural people through the social trajectories of a forest dwelling group, the Binjhals, beginning with the political and economic changes associated with the establishment of British colonial rule in the late nineteenth century. 3 Acknowledgements I am grateful to many people who helped me to complete this research. My first thanks would be to the people of Borasambar, who allowed me to live with them and share their homes, lives and memories. They sheltered and cared for me in a difficult drought year, when crisis was always at their doorstep. Through the long conversations I had with women and men, as they reflected upon their lives and perceived the changes in the world around them, emerged the backbone and the substance of this research. I thank my research supervisor, Prof. David Mosse for his incisive comments at the early stages and patience and encouragement, later. The PhD was made possible through the generous grant provided by the Felix Scholarship. I am indebted to my village friends, Geetanjali and Neela, for their friendship and the great efforts they put in ‘training’ me to appear less strange and become more knowledgeable in the ways of Borasambar. Also to Hemanta Barik for his support and Pitambar Bariha for his help in many aspects of the fieldwork. Thanks are also due to Jagadish Pradhan for sharing precious nuggets from his long experience of working in Western Orissa. A word of gratitude is reserved for my family members, especially, Ira and Avijit, for their tolerance, understanding and valuable inputs. My parents deserve a special mention for teaching me how to overcome adversity and my brother for his encouragement. I remember and thank my late grandmother who shared with me her memories of rural Bengal and Burma and instilled in me an early interest to understand the pasts of rural India and my late grandfather for sharing his insights and experiences of British colonial rule and the nationalist movement. I also thank my friend Bubu Saha at Concern and my teachers, Dr. Padma Velaskar and Prof. S. Parasuraman at TISS, for their help, support and belief in the project. 4 Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………...3 Acknowledgement ………………………………………………………………………...4 Chapter 1…................................................................…………………………………..8 Conceptions, Experiences and Conditions of Poverty…………………………….10 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Research Objectives Description of the Problem…………………………………………………………......14 1.3 A village in Western Orissa 1.4 Binjhals of Borasambar Theoretical Framework of the Thesis and Related Literature……………...........36 1.5 Contested Meanings in the Poverty debate 1.6 Remembering and Reframing: Memories, Histories and the Past 1.7 Debates about the Adivasi/Tribal Communities in India 1.8 Social Production of Marginality: Farming, Labouring and Gender Methodological Approaches……………………………………………………………46 1.12 Selection of the Area and the position of the Researcher 1.13 Fieldwork method: Participant – Observation and Interviews 1.14Doing History: Archival Work 1.15 Summary 1.16 Chapter Outlines Chapter 2…………………………………………………………………………………...47 Clearing forests, carrying Earth: social Identity in Mahulkonda 2.1 Description of Fieldwork village 2.2 The Social Structure of Mahulkonda 2.3 Being Adivasi: Binjhals of Mahulkonda 2.4 Binjhal Narratives of Decline and Renewal…………………………………….......74 Chapter 3………………………………………………………………………………….. 75 The glorious pasts of forest dwellers: historical incidents and narratives of kingship 3.1 The Gift of Twelve Villages 3.2 ‘Daring bandits and Savage Hill men’ 3.3 Dissidence and Forest Areas 3.4 Conflict over Road routes 3.5 A Dispute between Borasambar and Patna 3.6 Rural Battles and Restoring Balance 3.7 Zamindari Rebellions and Accommodation 3.8 Gazetteer Myths and Tribal Stories: Competing narratives of Kingship 3.9 Rulers to Bandits?.............................................................................................104 5 Chapter 4………………………………………………………………………………….105 ‘He sold land that was not his to sell’: Idioms of rights in land dispute 4.1 Land Disputes and Claims of Kinship 4.2 Stories about old Headman families 4.2.1Kaushilya Barihen’s istafa 4.2.2 Processes and consequences of losing Headmanship 4.3 Village Headman-ship in Colonial Discourses and Policies 4.5 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….132 Chapter 5………………………………………………………………………………….133 Cultivating forest fields: ‘In the past we could not farm’ 5.1 Agricultural Cycle in Mahulkonda 5.2 Ecological Constraints to Cultivation 5.3 Colonial Discourse and ‘Aboriginal Farming’ 5.4 Farmers and Sahukars 5.5‘Too Poor to Farm’: Marginal Farmers 5.6 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….166 Chapter 6………………………………………………………………………………….167 ‘Being hungry’: memories and the politics of doing with less 6.1 Hunger was in the Past 6.2 Forest Fruit and Cultivated Crops: Shifting assumptions about Food 6.3 Unremarked Seasonal distress 6.4 Death from Hunger 6.5 Conclusion: Coping Strategies or Doing with Less?..........................................190 Chapter 7………………………………………………………………………………….191 ‘Becoming free’: dependence, mobility and rural wage work 7.1 Wage work in Mahulkonda village 7.2 Being a Haliya 7.3 Mutuality out of necessity 7.4 The Drought decades: Flight and Return 7.5 A Trip to the Brick kilns 7.6 Ambivalent interpretation of Migration 7.7 Government Wage work 7.8 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….222 Chapter 8………………………………………………………………………………….223 ‘Birth of girls foretells better times’: gender and poverty 8.1 A Working Woman from Mahulkonda 8.2 Women Land Owners: Transgressing Rights 8.3 Captured Brides 6 8.4 Can Educated girls sing and dance? 8.5 Conclusion: Modes of Subjection…………………………………………………..248 Chapter 9………………………………………………………………………………….249 Concluding Arguments………………………………………………………………......260 10.Bibliography…………………………………………………………………............261 11.Maps…………………………………………………………………………………...283 12.Appendix……………………………………………………………………………...287 13.Glossary………………………………………………………………………………292 7 Chapter 1: Conceptions, Experiences and Conditions of Poverty in Rural Western Orissa1 1.1 Introduction ‘No, I don’t think we are poor, since no one likes to think