South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal

21 | 2019 Representations of the “Rural” in India from the Colonial to the Post-Colonial

Joël Cabalion and Delphine Thivet (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/5376 DOI: 10.4000/samaj.5376 ISSN: 1960-6060

Publisher Association pour la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)

Electronic reference Joël Cabalion and Delphine Thivet (dir.), South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 21 | 2019, « Representations of the “Rural” in India from the Colonial to the Post-Colonial » [Online], Online since 10 September 2019, connection on 09 May 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/5376 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.5376

This text was automatically generated on 9 May 2020.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1

EDITOR'S NOTE

SAMAJ-EASAS Series Series editors: Alessandra Consolaro, Sanjukta Das Gupta and José Mapril.

This thematic issue is the seventh in a series of issues jointly co-edited by SAMAJ and the European Association for South Asian Studies (EASAS). More on our partnership with EASAS here.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Who Speaks for the Village? Representing and Practicing the “Rural” in India from the Colonial to the Post-Colonial Joël Cabalion and Delphine Thivet

Villages in the City: The Gramastha Mandals of Mumbai Jonathan Galton

Politics of a Transformative Rural: Development, Dispossession and Changing Caste- Relations in West Bengal, India Ritanjan Das

Organized Peasant Resistance in Fiction: The Sword and The Sickle and The Lives of Others Angela Eyre

The Politics of Lineage: Caste, Kinship and Land Control in an Agrarian Frontier Girija Joshi

Learning and Leading: Resistance, Subaltern Leadership and the Making of Two Bhil Community Leaders from the Narmada Valley, Western India Vikramaditya Thakur

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Who Speaks for the Village? Representing and Practicing the “Rural” in India from the Colonial to the Post-Colonial

Joël Cabalion and Delphine Thivet

1 Building on a diverse body of research from four disciplines (anthropology, history, sociology and literary studies); this volume aims at re-opening the chapter on the Indian rural social space in relation to the category of the village in colonial and postcolonial India. This issue, “Who Speaks for the Village” would like to raise two sets of questions, both linked to representative politics as well as more disciplinary concerns with existing perimeters of research on the rural. While there existed an almost mythical field of village studies in the Indian context, mostly fed by anthropological and folklorist research, former orientations seem to have contemporaneously diverged into at least three or four streams of interest, each contributing to a growing body of work on the transformations of rural India: action— research in rural development (alternately techno-managerial or movementist—often concerned with forced displacement), agrarian and/or development studies (often embedded in various revamped Marxist economic perspectives studying regimes of dispossession), rural studies intertwining ethnographic and sociological methods combined with a renewed interest for “local social space” (Laferté 2014) and the “social resilience” (Lamont and Hall 2013) of actors in today’s neoliberal era.1 In the midst of such a differentiated literature covering vastly changing topographical and social realities, this issue claims to be only a partial attempt at finding out some of the fracturing lines in the rural today.

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Inheriting “Village Studies:” Why does the Rural Still Matter in Twenty-first Century India?

2 In the context of rapid urbanization, current urban-led economic growth and the emergence of the “global-and-smart-cities” agenda in India, there has been little space for rural and agrarian concerns—since the early 1990s—in either regional or national priorities. In the field of politics, the salience of villages has been devalued in a fashion similar to that experienced by non-communal, grassroots committees (sangharsh samiti). For example, leftist social movements which address rural issues have gradually weakened in the face of “mandal-mandir”2 politics.3 And yet, ignoring provincial areas can be perilous at a time when, despite a considerable increase in the absolute size of the urban population, about 67% of Indians still live outside the cities.

3 As it is well known, the ideal, as much as the morphological reality of villages, has been a core of Indian history and policy. Since colonial times, Indian villages have been conceived as harmonious if not sleepy “small republics” governed by moral economies4 and marshalled as relevant microcosms for understanding the greater Indian culture and society (Marriott 1955:171).5 It would be beyond the scope of this introduction to engage with a social history of the genesis of village studies as part of a larger postwar framework of development and modernization and its present academic currency or epistemological importance in the field of Indian studies. This has been amply outlined a number of times (Madan 2002; Thakur 2013; Jodhka 2016). Now, at least since the economic reforms in 1991, certain issues have largely overshadowed the village per se to privilege other analytical entries, viz. development, displacement, non-farm employment and economic diversification, intra-rural migration, local democracy, education, etc. Even if they lack the conceptual unification6 and academic patronage, and thereby legitimacy, that contributed to their success in the 1950s to the early 1970s, village, or for that matter rural, studies are far from being moribund and represent on the contrary an important field of investigation for social science researchers from India and elsewhere.7

4 In spite of the vagueness and ambiguity of contemporary geographical contours8 and social boundaries,9 of the village, it is indeed still a matter of interest for academics. We herein contend that rural studies, that is, studies on the issue of “the rural” as a site as well as an object/category of study in itself, are dynamic and may in fact capture very well the complex realities of Indian society over time and space. The village is far from being invisible, un-represented or unspoken of in academic research. Despite the obvious domination of urban studies, it is still obvious that rural studies still offer valuable information on the movement of morphological changes around the country by focusing on a few particular themes, whether in sociology, anthropology, economics, history and/or political sciences.

5 The purpose of this issue is thus to reassert that village and rural studies are a legitimate and crucial area of research through which to understand the important social, economic, political and cultural dynamics and tensions which mark the trajectory of Indian society over time. Rural India calls out for investigations into a context fraught with the disintegration of the village as “a social, economic, and cultural unit” (Jodhka and D’Souza 2009:153). Far from having a socially cohesive character, rural space in India is increasingly becoming divided, by, inter alia, religious

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fundamentalism and neoliberal onslaughts on the commons. However, the fragmentation of the village is not necessarily negative per se nor antithetical to the process of democratization at the local level; for instance, the distancing of local Dalits from the traditional agrarian economy has helped to a certain extent to weaken the traditional hierarchical structures and to allow the raising of new claims over resources that were commonly in the control of the upper/ dominant caste groups in the village (Jodhka 2007:28). Replying to the question “Who speaks for the village?” thus requires us to explore the socioeconomic, cultural and political hierarchies in local contexts and the complex recomposition over time and space of the power relationships between, but also within, castes, classes and genders. This is the reason why this issue aims to analyze the heterogeneity of Indian rural social space, its stratification and deeply entrenched economic and social divisions, varying over time and regions, from the colonial to the post-colonial era. It investigates in particular the actors, external or internal to rural society, who claim to represent the “village,” and how internal social differentiation is being addressed. Furthermore, it investigates the transformation of agrarian struggles through the lens of dispossession-related resistances. Finally, this issue examines fictional, visual and literary, representations of the village and its residents (Lagrave 1980). In a manner similar to other national contexts, one may say that Indian cultural production, such as literature and film, has tended to disseminate over time the “dominant point-of-view of the urban imaginary, anchor[ing] the village in a national text” and erasing all traces of autonomous subaltern narration and rural self-representation (Selim 2004:228). As the Indian population and diaspora become increasingly urbanized, competing visions are appearing: the countryside and its inhabitants tend to be idealized and mythologized, whereas as the same time, Bollywood movies, for instance, reflect a “dream world” ever increasingly distanced from the everyday reality of lower middle class and rural audiences (Rao 2007).10 Furthermore, Tejaswini Ganti observes that “the rural” in Indian film-makers’ discourse is merely “a trope to signify social worlds and markets that are regarded by film makers as backward, traditional, outmoded, and unprofitable” (Ganti 2012:318).

6 Overall, the ambition of this special issue is therefore to address rurality through representation. Following a constructivist approach, we propose to define rurality, in line with the words of the human geographer, Michael Woods, as “an imagined entity that is brought into being by particular discourses of rurality that are produced, reproduced and contested by academics, the media, policy-makers, rural lobby groups and ordinary individuals” (Woods 2011:9). From this angle, we seek to explore “how different communities define and ‘know’ the rural” (Heley and Jones 2012:209), but also to take into consideration this polyvocality: who does speak for/about/of/against/with the village? These different aspects of the representations and practices of the “village” and its social components, contributing to the social production of rural space, are herein studied from a range of different disciplinary perspectives, such as history, political science, sociology, anthropology, and literary studies/theory.

The “Agrarian Crisis” Narrative

7 The early 2000s sparked a new wave of interest in rural life although considered generally a “problem” and the antithesis to the “larger design and desire of a globalizing India” (Vasavi 2012:144). The Indian “village community” indeed seems to

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have been overtaken by the emergency narrative of the “agrarian crisis,” the latter resulting from the marginalization of the agrarian agenda in regional and national politics since the early 1990s. Recent efforts by the Indian government under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to give high priority to the agricultural sector11 will be challenged to reverse the bleak picture of Indian agriculture that has dominated for the last twenty to thirty years as India’s ongoing transition from a rural to urban society has been accompanied by steady decline of agriculture since the “liberalization” of the Indian economy in 1991 (Bhalla and Singh 2009). Admittedly this liberalization marked the “reinvention of India as a market economy” rather than a critical break (Cordbridge and Harriss 2000), but it nevertheless accelerated the transformation of the agricultural sector by diluting import restrictions, opening up India’s agrarian economy to international private corporations and world-market influence and gradually removing state support to agriculture. Since then, a new significant narrative of “agrarian crisis” and “rural distress” has infused public life and the media (Jodhka 2012), a narrative much less articulate when it comes to present and explain the various forms of farmer mobilization still in existence across the country.

8 A good illustration of the above is the issue of “farmers’ suicides” in India, which offers a counter-narrative to the new dominant “shining” India discourse. While it can quite justifiably appear as a co-constructed media and political issue (Establet 2012), local and regional statistics (depending upon certain methodological choices [Mishra 2014]) can yet relativize the classic Durkheimian perspective, according to which suicides are statistically more prevalent in urban areas as opposed the rural (Durkheim 1897). It is indeed a well-established, but maybe not-so-well unpacked, sociological mantra: poverty protects against suicide, particularly in close-knit communities where the social structure is implicitly posited as stable or at least more cohesive. When social transformations occur on a very large scale, as modernization theory posits, the morbidity trend of suicide reflects a convergence of rates of increase in urban areas where social agents are considered more vulnerable to the effects of modernization. Establet shows that we can confirm this effect of social evolution in the Indian case as well.12 However, the statistical apparatus used is critically debated. While suicide mortality ratios (SMR) are usually higher for urban areas, it would nonetheless be possible to propose an alternative methodology (Mishra 2014), questioning the rationale of the (former) planning commission which combined cultivators and agricultural laborers to homogenize the apprehension of rural areas. By embracing this former dichotomy to calculate the SMR between the urban and the rural, one obfuscates the possibility of disaggregating statistics by socio-professional category in the rural, a step which would confirm Halbwachs’ historical study (1930) on the causes of suicide rather than the work of Durkheim.13 Peasant suicides are the suicides of economically and socially downgraded and/or disqualified people. Halbwachs proposed the theory that suicides occur in poor segments of rich regions. This could be applied to India as well, with slight modifications. As it has often been noted, farmer suicides have mostly taken place in particular districts of five states (Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh—actually Telangana today, Chhattisgarh and Karnataka). Not all of these states are rich, and not all suicides are committed by the people defined as poor. We can reasonably ask if farmers’ suicides may not concern in priority, all things being equal, small and middle-caste peasants facing the constant impossibility to cross the threshold of economic reproduction, while being subjected more and more to a feeling of institutional abandonment. When caste barriers are stronger than solidarities,

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individual economic logics more pervasive, and state intervention a figment of peasant aspirations amongst those who are supposed to fuel agricultural production, then a certain fall in senselessness can become apparent.

9 The issue of “farmers’ suicides,” highlighted by the media, nevertheless hides other less visible aspects of the current “crisis” of the Indian countryside. The latter is actually a combination of three crises affecting rural social spaces: economic, social, and environmental, and resulting in multiple risks affecting first and foremost the most marginal within it. Far from being a crisis of peasant subsistence farming, this agrarian crisis in India is one of capitalist agriculture, dependent on world market prices, commercial crops, capital flow and chemical input. It directly affects small and medium farmers who have entered into “cash” crops cultivation, and the technological treadmill which goes with it in areas where this form of agriculture has spread and intensified. Undergoing a process of “secularization” (Vasavi 1994), agriculture is increasingly being defined as an economic enterprise. The question of “who speaks for the village” can here be replaced by the following questions: “Who is a legitimate farmer”? Who is the “good farmer”? Are the poor Adivasi cultivators and marginal peasants at all legitimate in continuing to exist vis-à-vis the current modernization of Indian agriculture? Facing disenchantment as well as multiple opportunities for exit, adult offspring are increasingly engaged in non-agricultural employment. While the agrarian crisis appears to be not only a crisis of social reproduction within the peasantry, but more durably a crisis of vocation—farming activities being increasingly looked down upon by farmers’ families themselves (Landy 2011:234)—the social resilience of the Indian farming habitus can also appear remarkable, particularly after wide-scale dispossession and displacement (Cabalion 2013). Who, then, in contemporary India does still wish to undertake farming?

10 Addressing seriously the agrarian crisis would require recognizing the long-term processes and “everyday” social structures of gender, caste and religion engendering socioeconomic deprivation, inequality in access to resources and ecological degradation. However, as Richa Kumar reminds us, short-term and quick political responses predominate: The response to indebtedness is a waiver of the current crop of loans, but what happens next year when farmers are forced to take new loans? The reaction to suicides is compensation, but does that help surviving family members to figure out a means of livelihood? Pest resistance is solved in the short term by producing more potent pesticides and more resistant varieties, but that fails to address the root cause of resistance—the monoculture paradigm itself. (Kumar 2016:104) India is indeed facing the heavy environmental and health costs of the green revolution’s techno-economic package (Harriss-White and Janakarajan 2004), which has brought monocultures, hybrid seed varieties and large quantities of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to Indian agriculture. These costs still seem to remain largely unrecognized, though everyone is affected: laborers spraying pesticides and paying for it with their health, urban consumers paying for it with cheap, poisoned food, land paying for it with soil toxicity, farmers paying for it with their lives (Kumar 2016:166). This ecological crisis is undermining the long-term social reproduction of Indian farmers; that is, their very ability to farm in the future. While Prime Ministers call for a “second” (Singh 2011) or “ever” (The Times of India, 2017) green revolution and its correlative (bio)technological package at the policy level, the necessity for an alternative trajectory, viz. an agro ecological transition, begins to arise at the

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grassroots level. Some farmers’ movements are introducing “agronomical pluralism” (Münster 2016:229) by training themselves in agroecology, experimenting with natural/organic farming methods and seeking ways to escape the chemical market treadmill. Alternative agricultures, notably the natural farming movement “Zero Budget Natural Farming” in Punjab, Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh (Brown 2013, 2018; Thivet 2014; Münster 2016; Khadse et al 2018; Dorin 2018), have emerged in response to the ecological crisis. While they try to offer an alternative to exiting agriculture and to the problem of social reproduction of farmers, their claim for an authentic and “pure India” through the revival of a cultural heritage of Indian agricultural practices (Vasavi 2012; Münster 2014) raises new sets of questions on old issues: the reproduction of power relationships and potential marginalization towards other groups and religious and ethnic minorities living in the countryside.

11 Understanding the complexity of the dynamics at play in the triple “agrarian crisis” (economic, social, environmental) consequently requires us to take into account the diversity of experience of rural inhabitants, in connection with their specific geographically and historically interrelated ecosystems, but also with the socio‐ political, cultural and economic factor shaping their existence.14

The Changing Face of Rural Capitalism

12 As evoked, the category of the rural stands disaggregated into multiple sub-fields of specialization and intervention delineating the very nature and regularity of certain phenomena traversing rural India—poverty, agrarian issues, displacement—and the fabric of public policies and knowledge configuration, particularly in the Indian field of social work, specifically designed to assess their evolution. It is therefore not surprising that studies known as “agrarian,” or falling in the larger category of “development” studies, have often been the most vital and instrumental in keeping an eye on rural existence, particularly from Marxist and Ambedkarite perspectives. In brief, after the 1970–1980s, everything happened as though studying rural India was a desirable task if it was to understand its backwardness or to herald the agency of its dominated people. In anthropology too, the scenario has long been to choose between understanding practices that had supposedly not changed, or the public and political contraptions intended to change them, in other words development programs or any public policy which would usher in social change.

13 Development has brought a new set of vulnerabilities to the countryside. Across the last few decades, struggles over land and its uses in particular received much attention from researchers. Acquisition of land today is mainly directed at nonagricultural development: urbanization, real estate development, industrialization, mining, roads, and other infrastructural projects, etc., created a new demand for rural land (Chakravorty 2013). Unlike the previous expropriations of large amounts of land for public infrastructure (such as large dams) and industries and thermal plants, land acquisition in the neoliberal era, culminating with SEZs (special economic zones), proceeds “under an expansive definition of ‘public purpose’ that becomes growingly indistinguishable from private capital accumulation. Elite housing colonies, IT parks, malls and amusement parks have joined the hydroelectric dam and steel mill as causes for expropriating the peasantry” (Levien 2012:964). The pushing up of land prices opened up new opportunities for profit and accumulation not only for the high-profile

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actors such as SEZ developers, real estate companies and the State but also for a wide and yet heterogeneous new class of village and local land brokers permeating the land economy (Levien 2012; Sud 2014). The replacement of the antiquated colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894 with the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Act in 2013,15 has certainly altered the terms and conditions by which land is to be transacted, protecting the rights of those who might be dispossessed and displaced (D’Costa and Chakrabarty 2017). In spite of its determination to make land acquisition less cumbersome, the government elected in 2014, could not, however, gather enough support to alter the 2013 LARR Act. As we are reminded by Christophe Jaffrelot (2018), amending the LARR at the central level partly failed due to the importance of the rural sector as a major voting segment, and despite the assumption that pro-business policies would necessarily prevail over rural interests. The counter-intuitive resilience of this act under the present government may be apprehended globally as a well-known historical pattern of social democracies: when a major “social advantage” is conquered —however disputed and unsurprisingly limited LARR still appears to be for many actors of the social movement industry—even the incumbent winner of the following elections finds it hard to dismantle it. We can draw an analogy between the LARR and the other major central acts that have not been requisitioned by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government: the right to information, the Forest rights act or the National food security act. It would, however, be hasty to consider that the LARR has decisively altered the process of dispossession or has been left intact. The strategy has been to dilute it at regional levels by bringing in regional amendments, a step taken by no less than eight states in the country as of the beginning of 2019.

14 In the past few decades, the village has most notably disappeared behind what we could call “social group studies,” whether Dalit or Adivasi studies. Most Dalits and Adivasi inhabit rural areas, even the ex-Mahar of Maharashtra who have converted to Buddhism under the guidance of Ambedkar and who slowly continue to migrate as though following their leader’s historic injunction to leave villages (“What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance and narrow mindedness,” [Ambedkar 1979]). Taken in the dust of the Indian agrarian transition, they alternately become minor civil servants, construction laborers in cities, or mine workers. In other words, social group studies have been the study of groups defined or displaced by/from their rural condition of existence, or who may still carry within them a strong rural form of identification. The rural can be defined today as the underside of development, that is, a crucial site of dispossession and displacement, two words that may define appropriately the Indian rural experience of subalternity. Dispossession, however, needs to be understood conceptually beyond the mere experience of land eviction and embrace social relations of domination beyond the single dimension of the land- grabbing State. The privatization of higher education, for instance, appears to be a major social stake of struggles, both conditioned by and leading to an increased state of dispossession of the subaltern rural masses. Selling one’s piece of land for an improbable trajectory of success in the educational field is, for instance, more and more common and appears to be an accelerating factor in “depeasantization,” often subservient to a social position in the formal sector though frequently at the lowest rungs.

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Rural Politics and Emerging Voices of Resistance

15 Analysis of Indian contemporary politics often fails to take into consideration rural politics, yet, the rural vote bank plays an important role in elections. It is well known that the Indian National Congress (INC) Party of the UPA consolidated its rural vote following the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) (2006). Viewed from afar, Modi’s reign may have appeared consolidated and well installed for at least a second term, crunching on urban voters almost everywhere with major infrastructure projects and wooing the Hindu masses with sage-like neatly controlled media appearances.16 It is almost as though the scenario of 2004 (the “India Shining” campaign and its result) and particularly its lessons regarding the rural-urban divide and myth of the Indian middle class had been obliterated in the BJP’s memory. 2018 had already disclosed some signs of resistance as the year of kisan marches. The gathering of more than 35,000 farmers in Mumbai in March 2018, then of 100,000 farmers in New Delhi in November 2018 (Kisan Mukti March) to demand that parliament hold a special 21 day session to address the “agrarian crisis” appears to have affected the elections to the legislative assemblies of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, leading to the BJP defeat in these states. Even though traversing India’s countryside gives a glimpse of a certain kind of diffusion of bajrang dal shakas,17 numerous dents in Indian secularism and civic liberties when it comes to cow protection and unification of Hindu sentiment, it appears the Hindu ethos still struggles to be a sufficient denominator for Bharat’s jawaan and kisaan.18 As ordinary as it may sound, the periodic re-emergence of peasant struggles and (un)employment questions in the face of Hindu mandal-mandir tactics (and despite major media black- outs on their massive protests) show a remarkable resilience which minimizes their devastating effects. Naya zamaanaa (“new times”) and acchhe din (“good days”) are still longed for by most farmers if we consider the magnitude of requests for debt-liberation (karz maaphi/mukti) across the country. Hence, beyond the various provisional relief measures carried out to appease the rural electorate, the results of the 2019 election implicitly posited that religious nationalism will continue to strive, as we see it does elsewhere in the present international context, albeit for a range of very heterogeneous reasons. However, the final results of the elections heighten certain preoccupations and require us to sharpen further our analyses regarding the rural and its representational politics in the years to come. We need in particular to go beyond the apparent unity of the Indian countryside and not restrict rural politics to agricultural interests, so as to better understand how the different “contests over the legitimate representation of ‘the rural’ [might] be articulated” (Woods 2003:323).

16 Save for electoral politics and the representation of rural interests by formally constituted unions or pressure groups, rural politics indeed also include various social movements contesting the meaning and the use of rural space. Another way to make sense of rural politics is to cast aside our “passive imagination of the rural” which “sees the rural as largely defeated, washed over and worn out, its sell-by date exceeded, with little independence as a source of change in its own right” (Bell, Lloyd, and Vatovec 2010:209). Far from mainstream spaces, less visible representatives of the “rural,” such as socialist and communist struggle committees (sangharsh samiti) for forest, water and land rights (jungle, jal aur zameen adhikar) continue to form the backbone of the rural social movement across the country, however sleepy and small

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they may sometimes be in a period much infused with cultural nationalism. The circulation of activist capital is particularly high in these three spheres, yet does not quite overlap with the actors present in struggles against direct State dispossession and displacement (Cabalion 2014). Such type of convergence between various issue-based struggles is what social leaders wish to structure more durably in the Indian social movement. After displacement, many activists themselves concerned by resettlement disengage and disconnect from social action in the movement when they begin their new life, precipitating social movements against displacement in a situation of abeyance due to their sudden lack of activist manpower and/or direct support. Peasant and/or farmer movements as well as social movements against dispossession and displacement, however, share much in common when we consider that they concern actors who have little access to wage labor but face regular threats to their basic economic and social reproduction. The deformalization as well as the commodification of their existence in the face of land evictions, water privatization, and more broadly, degradation of their environment, are important dimensions of the experience of subalternity in Indian villages.

Overview of this Special Issue

17 To tackle these different facets of the rural in India, this volume brings together multiple disciplinary perspectives and a variety of empirical studies to critically examine the place and relevance of studying the village and rurality. The articles are drawn from a panel convened at the European Conference of South Asian Studies (ECSAS) in Paris in July 2018. What we hereby attempt is not to speak for rural transformations in the subcontinent altogether, but on the contrary to assert the need to study these transformations from multiple perspectives, voices and situations: caste issues, agrarian relations, rural-urban interactions, rural development and rural politics.

18 The first article by Girija Joshi addresses the hegemonic category of the village constructed by the colonial imagination by deconstructing historically the myth of the “eternal village.” While India was imagined as a “land of villages” by colonialism, Joshi deals with the particular case of the “Delhi frontier” (rural Haryana), that is, nomadic pastoral populations in the early nineteenth century. She demonstrates that in this mobile agrarian frontier, kinship categories had historically crystallized around the control of land. By implication, kinship was a vehicle of State formation, whose boundaries were determined at least in part by the pragmatic consideration of resource consolidation. Joshi’s appreciation of the political dimension of kinship thus brings complexity to our understanding of rural politics, highlighting that the “village community” was far from being a historically stable polity.

19 In the second article, Ritanjan Das examines a two-decade old process of land acquisition and development in Rajarhat, a former rural settlement in the Indian state of West Bengal, to characterize the transformation of villages amidst rapid urbanization in neoliberal India. Originally made up of almost 50 villages and now a satellite township of the state capital Kolkata, Rajarhat offers “an intriguing window to the subtle, yet multifaceted transformation of socio-economic relations within the remnants of erstwhile rural spaces.” Ritanjan Das engages with the new expressions of caste consciousness around the processes of displacement and dispossession due to the

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Kolkata new town project. While forceful land grabbing and limited compensations reducing farming opportunities for the villagers did not lead to caste-based mobilisation, new forms of economic engagements (“syndicate-raj”) contributed to the reproduction of distinct segregations between lower and upper-caste habitations, but also between Muslims and non-Muslims, the spatiality of caste reemerging in Rajarhat “urban” villages.

20 In the third article, Vikramaditya Thakur explores subaltern agency and the changing nature of leadership in rural western India among the Bhil Scheduled Tribe or Adivasi group in the wake of the anti-dam movement initiated by urban middle-class activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA; also Save Narmada Campaign). Drawing on fieldwork data along with oral history, archival research, government records, vernacular records and dailies, Thakur analyses the politics of displacement and resettlement due to the Sardar Sarovar dam on River Narmada as a lived experience of two ordinary Bhil men from the submergence villages in Maharashtra state across three decades from 1985–2016. He shows how the NBA-led movement acts as a form of political education for the two Bhils who assume leadership, displacing both traditional Bhil leaders and external activists to guide their community deftly to the resettlement colonies by making claims on the Indian state, and help recreate life and livelihood for themselves and their fellow Bhils in the new setting.

21 In his contribution, Jonathan Galton deals with the “village in the city,” drawing on a year’s ethnographic fieldwork in a Mumbai neighborhood (the Delisle Road BDD Chawls). He reflects on how villages are represented and recreated in a contemporary urban context and how migrants themselves “speak for the village.” In particular, he examines how a “simulacrum of the village” arises from circulation migrations, through the phenomenon of Gramastha Mandals, village-run committees that buy and rent chawl (tenement) rooms to single male migrants from their own villages. Originally established in the heyday of the city’s cotton mill industry more than fifty years ago, many Gramastha Mandals’ rooms now house a third generation of migrants studying or working, mainly in the margins of the shining world of Mumbai city. They offer a window into village life and rural Maharashtra through the young men living in these rooms and perpetuate a sense of village belonging and nostalgia. Constant flows of people, money and ideas between village and chawl contribute to recreate the village in Mumbai through festivals and food practices. However, while residents claim the rooms promote an urbane egalitarianism, they are frequently exclusive spaces, created in the context of historic divisions between communities back in the village. Jonathan Galton shows that their strict eligibility criteria can have the effect of preserving and possibly reinforcing village social divisions, specifically between caste Hindus and Dalit Buddhist communities.

22 The last article by Angela Eyre explores the history of Indian novels in English representing the village, through the comparison of the setting, publication and reception of two novels. She analyses the representations of one means of radical social change: the peasants’ participation in organized rebellion. Mulk Raj Anand’s The Sword and the Sickle (1942) narrates a historical uprising in Awadh in 1921–1922. Neel Mukherjee’s book, The Lives of Others (2014), alternates between describing the story of Naxalite peasant insurgency between 1967 and 1970 and one about a bourgeois family in Calcutta. An Epilogue dated 2012 connects the historical movement to present Maoist insurgencies. In both novels an outsider to the village introduces revolutionary

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ideas and, in both, local conditions are connected to national and global ones. Whereas The Sword and The Sickle ends with limited hope for political change within a future Independent nation state, The Lives of Others ends with despair and impending violence and the reasons for this difference are explored. While both novels have voiced peasants’ grievances in different ways, Eyre shows how some reviewers almost completely focused on the expression and legitimacy of revolutionary violence, obscuring almost completely the peasant struggles. Anand’s story was subsumed by concerns about India’s role in the Second World War, while some responses to Mukherjee’s novel condemned its representation of violence. The novels therefore raise questions not only about who speaks for the village, but also about who is listening and which voices one hears. The violent suppression of peasants’ resistance and the “slow violence” that affect, for instance, rural families starving to death are most often left unheard. Ambedkar, B.R. 1979. “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development.” Pp. 131–53 in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches. Vol. I. Education Department, Government of Maharashtra.

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Jodhka, Surinder S. 2016. “Revisiting the Rural in 21st Century India.” Economic and Political Weekly 51(26–27):5–7.

Jodhka, Surinder S. 2012. “Agrarian Changes in the Times of (Neo-Liberal) ‘Crises’: Revisiting Attached Labour in Haryana.” Economic and Political Weekly 47(26–27):5–13.

Jodhka, Surinder S. 2007. Who Will Speak for the Village? Agrarian Change and Marginalizing Ruralities in Contemporary India. Presented at Department of Sociology: University of Pune.

Jodhka, Surinder S. 2006. “Caste and Democracy: Assertion and Identity Among the Dalits of Rural Punjab.” Sociological Bulletin 55(1):4–23.

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Jodhka, Surinder S. and Paul D’Souza. 2009. “Rural and Agrarian Studies.” Pp. 118–84 in Sociology and Social Anthropology in India, edited by Y. Atal. New Delhi: Pearson Education.

Khadse, Ashlesha, Peter Rosset, Helda Morales, and Bruce G. Ferguson. 2018. “Taking Agroecology to Scale: The Zero Budget Natural Farming Peasant Movement in Karnataka, India.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 45(1):192–219.

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Lerche, Jens, Alpa Shah, and Barbara Harriss-White. 2013. “Introduction: Agrarian Questions and Left Politics in India.” Journal of Agrarian Change 13(3):337–50.

Levien, Michael. 2012. “The Land Question: Special Economic Zones and the Political Economy of Dispossession in India.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 39(3–4):933–69.

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Mishra, Srijit. 2014. “Farmers’ Suicides in India, 1995–2012: Measurement and Interpretation.” LSE ARC Working Papers, Working Paper 62.

Mishra, Srijit and Narasimha D. Reddy. 2010. “Economic Reforms, Small Farmer Economy and Agrarian Crisis.” Pp. 43–69 in Agrarian Crisis and Farmer Suicides, edited by R. S. Deshpande and S. Arora. New Delhi: Sage Publications.

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Münster, Daniel. 2016. “Agro-Ecological Double Movements? Zero Budget Natural Farming and Alternative Agricultures After the Neoliberal Crisis in Kerala.” Pp. 222–44 in Critical Perspectives on Agrarian Transition: India in the Global Debate, edited by B. B. Mohanty. New Delhi: Routledge.

Münster, Daniel and Ursula Münster. 2012. “Consuming the Forest in an Environment of Crisis: Nature Tourism, Forest Conservation and Neoliberal Agriculture in South India.” Development and Change 43(1):205–27.

Münster, Daniel. 2012. “Farmers’ Suicides and the State in India: Conceptual and Ethnographic Notes from Wayanad, Kerala.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 46(1–2):181–208.

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NOTES

1. These are quite evidently not hermetic segments of research and shall be understood as broad descriptive categories. 2. With regard to the Mandal Commission, and mandir for (Hindu) temple, as referred by G. Omvedt 2005. 3. The acquisition of the OBC (Other Backward Classes) status by Marathas in Maharashtra is a recent illustration of such a “caste-social-movement” coloured by saffron ideology. 4. Such as the religious-economic jajmani system, a traditional Indian institution which institutionalized non-contractual, inter-familial and inter-generational reciprocity between upper landowning castes and other service castes in rural India (Dumont 1980; Dube 1967; for an alternative interpretation, see for instance Fuller 1993). 5. The relevance of the village as a representative unit for understanding the Indian society was contested in Dumont and Pocock (1957). 6. It may not be for the worse, as previous prevalent frameworks (notably functionalist ones) often occurred under the umbrella of harmonist, irenic if not orientalist representations of the village as small and stable coherent entities.

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7. The restudies of villages (Simpson 2016)—through longitudinal studies following the same village or set of villages over time—seems rather vivid (Breman, Kloos, and Saith 1997; Rao, Reddy 2010) such as in the case of micro-economic studies on Palanpur (Himanshu, Jha, Rodgers 2016). 8. “Rural” is often defined negatively, as “non-urban.” The 1971 Census of India defined an “urban” area as an area with (i) a minimum population of 5,000; (ii) at least 75 percent of the male working population in non-agricultural jobs; (iii) a population density of at least 400 sq. Km. 9. One has indeed to take into consideration the importance of networks, flows, connections and mobilities in constituting the rural space (Woods 2011:40). That is why Esther Gallo advocates, for instance, the merging of village ethnography within a larger “multi-sited strategy,” given that the “villages lie at the heart of increasing connections between mobile people, who engage with kinship through remittances, material exchanges and memory work” (Gallo 2015:250). 10. On the gentrification of the Indian film industry, see Ganti (2012). 11. The contribution of agriculture to GDP has declined to about 16 percent today from 50 percent in the 1950s. Trying to reverse this trend, the Finance Minister of India, Arun Jaitley, declared the Union Budget 2018–2019 to be a “farmer’ Budget” (January 2018) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced his government was working towards “ensuring that the incomes of [the Indian] hardworking farmers doubles by 2022” (June 2018). 12. “[The Indian case represents a] good occasion to inspect, data in hand, the effects of evolution without having to succumb to the lure of evolutionism” (Establet 2012:118; our translation). 13. Such a methodological choice cannot be equated with the GoI’s position which recently changed (after 2014) and now records only the suicides of legitimate landholders-cultivators, deliberately ignoring the ones of landless agricultural labourers. There is an obvious difference between fixing the figures and disaggregating them for the benefit of sociological understanding. 14. For instance, Jens Lerche, Alpa Shah and Barbara Harriss White invite us to pluralize the “agrarian question,” so as to take into account not only “the different meanings of the agrarian question,” but also the “plurality of agrarian questions in India,” that is, “a set of regionally specific agrarian questions” due to the “important regional differences in agricultural productivity, in the significance of agriculture in the economy and, not the least, a plurality of underlying class relations and processes of class formation” (2013:339). 15. The Act was introduced by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) alongside other “rights- based” legislations such as Forest Rights, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), Education, Food and Security. 16. Modi has not given a single “traditional” press conference during his term, preferring to appear and present his (non-contradicted) views on a monthly radiophonic and TV-adapted allocation called “Mann ki baat.” 17. The Bajrang Dal is a religious militant organization that forms the youth wing of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP). 18. Double meaning of youth and soldier, with reference here to an old political slogan of Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1965, former Prime Minister, “Jai jawaan, jai kisaan” (Hail the soldier, hail the farmer).

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ABSTRACTS

The idea of the village has been central throughout Indian history. Since colonial times, Indian villages have been pictured as “small republics” and as a relevant microcosm for understanding Indian society at large. Combining the issue of representation with that of rurality, this special issue investigates the actors, be they external or internal to rural society, who claim to represent the “village,” and how its internal social differentiation is being addressed: who does speak for/ about/of/against/with the village? The different aspects of the representations and practices of the “rural” and its social components, contributing to the social production of rural space, are herein studied from a range of different disciplinary perspectives, such as history, political science, sociology, anthropology, and literary studies/theory. At last, the purpose of this issue is to reassert village and rural studies as a legitimate and crucial area of research through which to understand the important social, economic, political and cultural dynamics and tensions which mark the trajectory of Indian society over time.

INDEX

Keywords: India, rural, village, agrarian crisis, farmers, representation, dispossession

AUTHORS

JOËL CABALION Université de Tours, Tours - France

DELPHINE THIVET Université de Bordeaux, Bordeaux - France

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Villages in the City: The Gramastha Mandals of Mumbai

Jonathan Galton

Tukaram’s Room

1 Several months into my fieldwork I met Tukaram.1 He was part of a small group of young men standing outside a barber shop I had just patronized, and as so often happened they asked who I was, where I was from and what I was doing. I explained that I had come to their central Mumbai neighborhood, known as the Delisle Road BDD Chawls, to conduct a year of research2 and intimated as well as I could, in a mix of Hindi and Marathi, that I was an anthropologist interested in questions of belonging and difference.

2 I learnt that they were cousins, living together in a single room that their grandfather and friends from the same village, called Katkarwadi, had bought some decades ago. Their grandfather and later their fathers had come to Mumbai3 for work and lived in the same room, as had numerous other men from the village. Since then they had retired and were now living back in Katkarwadi, a few hundred miles southeast of Mumbai in Kolhapur District. Meanwhile, a third generation from Katkarwadi, including Tukaram and his cousins, was now living and working in the city. Some of the older cousins had been there for a decade or more already, while 22-year-old Tukaram had arrived two years previously. After this encounter we began to meet regularly, and soon enough they invited me into their room.

3 Chawls are a form of tenement-like building typically associated with cramped living quarters—often no more than a single small room—shared toilets and tight-knit communities. At 180 square feet, Tukaram’s room is tiny and it is also dark for much of the day. In the afternoon, several young men will probably be stretched out on their bed sheets, sleeping or watching films on their phones. The light pink plaster walls on either side of them are largely obscured by vests, shirts and trousers hanging from a row of hooks. At the far end is a slightly raised area, the walls lined with off-white tiles, containing a large blue plastic water drum. This is called the mori and the room

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residents use it for washing—clothes and dishes, as well as bodies. There is no internal toilet, so the residents use common toilets located at the end of the corridor.

4 All round the room are signs of multiple occupancy: a shoe rack crammed with a variety of footwear; a wooden ledge piled up with trunks and suitcases; numerous stainless-steel tiffin boxes next to a spaghetti of phone chargers on a shelf above rolls of bedding. In one corner there is small wooden shrine with images of Hindu deities and in front of the balustrade is a framed picture of the Maharashtrian saint Sai Baba of Shirdi. On the door is a faded sign in Devanagari lettering that reads “Katkarwadi Gramastha Mandal”.

5 A gramastha mandal is a villagers’ association, and Katkarwadi Gramastha Mandal specifically exists for the benefit of Tukaram’s village. There are over forty such gramastha mandals in the BDD Chawls, all operating under a similar model whereby a village committee buys one or more rooms to rent out to migrants from their village. The rental rate is usually low, between Rs 100 and Rs 500 (approximately GBP 1–5.50) per person per month. Some, like Gaowadi Gramastha Mandal (linked to Gaowadi village, near Katkarwadi), own a single room. Others own multiple rooms—five in the case of Katkarwadi Gramastha Mandal.

6 The number of occupants is typically between 10 and 20, with a median age of around 25, although in many rooms there are at least a couple of much older residents. The vast majority of the gramastha mandals I encountered in the BDD Chawls are associated with villages in Kolhapur District, in the western part of Maharashtra State. Members hence speak Marathi as their mother tongue and in most cases are Hindu. Many specifically identify as Maratha, a cluster of forward castes4 that has traditionally dominated the agricultural economy of the region surrounding Mumbai. There are smaller numbers of Buddhists who are members of the Mahar caste, a Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) community that largely converted to Buddhism across Maharashtra in 1956, following the example of Mahar-born social reformer Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, in an attempt to escape the Hindu caste system. The one absolute constant across all gramastha mandal rooms is gender: they are exclusively for men.

7 The gramastha mandal system is by no means unique to the BDD Chawls, and can be found across Mumbai as attested by Neera Adarkar’s description of “rooms taken on rent by the Gaonkari5 Mandals or village committees and converted into dormitories for the single migrants from that village at affordable rents” (2011:19). Similar brief references can be found in other Mumbai studies (e.g. Adarkar and Menon 2004; Finkelstein 2011; Prakash 2011; Valunjkar 1966), alongside more general accounts of migrant cohabitation (e.g. Chandavarkar 1994:182–88; Gore 1972), but on the whole, given its apparent ubiquity in Mumbai, this system has received surprisingly little academic attention. An exception is Hemalata Dandekar’s (1986) ethnography of migration from Sugao village in western Maharashtra, which includes an account of Sugao migrants’ lives together in a single room in Mumbai. Since Dandekar completed her research in the early 1980s, however, it remains a useful but somewhat outdated resource.

8 In this paper, therefore, I examine this little-studied manifestation of urban migration through three inter-related lenses. I consider how gramastha mandals have changed since Dandekar’s study, particularly following the closure of Mumbai’s cotton mills, which for many years represented their economic mainstay. I ask how living in a gramastha mandal room impacts migrants’ relationships with their urban surroundings

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and also their villages and, significantly, how this arrangement perpetuates (in Mumbai) societal divisions that have arisen in the villages. I address these questions together in the following sections that examine the contexts of gramastha mandal living arrangements, working patterns and recreational or voluntary activities. I draw on my research into of eighteen gramastha mandals, which I undertook through a combination of participant observation and recorded interviews predominantly conducted in Hindi, with some use of Marathi and English. While in some gramastha mandals I had multiple acquaintances and became a regular visitor, in a few cases I met only one member on a handful of occasions.

9 It should be noted that while reference is paid to the families resident in the BDD Chawls and also to those former gramastha mandal members who have either retired to the village or moved elsewhere with their own families, this paper primarily considers the experiences and perspectives of young, male migrants. The conclusions I draw are therefore specifically applicable to this particular category of migrant, meaning that caution should be taken before attempting to extrapolate them to support any wider claims about migration or about Mumbai life as a whole.

Circular Migration and the BDD Chawls

10 The BDD Chawls were constructed on four sites in the 1920s by the Bombay Development Directorate (BDD) in response to a housing crisis with roots in a late nineteenth century influx of migrant labor (Caru 2011:26). Much of this migration was connected to the cotton mills that dominated Mumbai’s industrial economy until the decline that followed a year-long strike in 1982–83. Although the site in Worli is the largest of the four BDD Chawls sites by some margin, my research was solely undertaken at the site on Delisle Road (officially renamed N. M. Joshi Marg) where 32 buildings are clustered around a grid of streets. Each building comprises four stories, in which ten single-room tenements are lined up either side of a wide central corridor.

11 While many gramastha mandals own rooms in the BDD Chawls, the majority of the rooms are actually owned and occupied by families. As with gramastha mandal migrants, the biggest contingent among these families belongs to the Maratha community, while Marathi-speaking Dalit Buddhists and Dalit Hindus form significant minorities. Within these communities, many families trace their roots to Kolhapur District—indeed the surrounding Delisle Road area is known as a “mini-Kolhapur”—but a substantial number hail ancestrally from the Konkan coastal districts. Alongside these Maharashtrian families and gramastha mandals live a few families belonging to non- Maharashtrian communities, including Gujarati Hindus, Goan Catholics and North Indian Muslims.

12 Despite the preponderance of families in the BDD Chawls today, anecdotal evidence from older residents suggests that in previous decades, gramastha mandals and other forms of bachelor-migrant housing would have been the most common living arrangement.6 Several of the older family men I came to know in the BDD Chawls had themselves come to Mumbai as gramastha mandal migrants, but were now living with their children in the same or a nearby building to the one they had initially occupied. As Prasad Shetty (2011) describes in a fictionalized context, chawls that were “[o]nce primarily male labour-dormitories … began changing into housing colonies for [the

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migrants’] families. The tenement occupancy changed from a set of friends to an extended family” (p. 61).

13 For much of the twentieth century, only a minority of gramastha mandal migrants would have stayed on in the city and bought their own property. In a study of migration to Mumbai, M.S. Gore (1972) found that over half the Maharashtrian migrants he interviewed planned on retiring to their villages, with only a very small proportion opting to stay in the city (p. 146). Dandekar (1986), likewise, found in the early 1980s that “most migrants cannot save enough to buy an apartment” and hence retire to Sugao, their natal village (p. 244). Out of the six cousins, including Tukaram’s father, who came to Mumbai from Katkarwadi in a similar period to that of Dandekar’s study, two bought houses in Mumbai, while the rest returned to the village.

14 This form of life-cycle oscillation is referred to as circular migration, which Deshingkar and Farrington (2009) define as “a temporary move from, followed by a return to, the normal place of residence, for purposes of employment” (p. 1). Doug Saunders argues in Arrival City (2011) that this is actually the most common form of migration, and that the “world’s population shifts cityward in a back-and-forth oscillation of single individuals and clusters of villagers" (p. 38), while De Haan (1997) suggests that circular migration predates industrialization.

15 Circular migration simultaneously plays out on a short-term seasonal scale, and a regular flow of bodies, money and material between city and village is a noticeable element of gramastha mandal life. Almost always, in fact, one or more room members would be temporarily back in the village, perhaps attending a family wedding or a religious festival, or sometimes engaged in informal labor such as helping out in the family’s fields. Even when in Mumbai, the village seemed to be a preoccupation for many of my interlocutors, who extolled the calm pace of life, the cool climate and the superior quality of the food and entertainment on offer in their villages. They convinced me, as Dandekar (1986) had been convinced by her Sugao interviewees decades earlier, that the “village offer[ed] a healthier environment, better food, and a more congenial social life” (p. 226). In contrast, few had a good word to say about Mumbai. An appetite for shopping malls and consumer goods notwithstanding, Tukaram referred to Mumbai in distinctly unenthusiastic terms—crowded, dirty and difficult to travel across, sentiments I heard echoed by numerous other gramastha mandal migrants.

16 Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan (2003) have framed the ability of migrants to “straddle, with great facility … two different cultural words,” as “rural cosmopolitanism” (p. 341). On the other hand, where my interlocutors are concerned, living with fellow villagers in the broader surroundings of a “mini-Kolhapur” and mostly socializing as a unit, a gramastha mandal migrant can actually spend a large part of his Mumbai life in a partial simulacrum of the village itself. When I asked Ananda, from Dorli village, about his experiences in the BDD Chawls, he told me: The village-like atmosphere is great… In the room, in the whole area, it doesn’t seem like you’ve gone outside [the village] … I mean you find people from nearby villages everywhere you go round here7 In her ethnography of Sugao, Dandekar (1986) describes the way Mumbai migrants remain “psychologically and socially very much a part of village society” which exerts a “tenacious hold” over them (p. 255). Likewise, in a study of migration to Mumbai from Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, Gore (1972) suggests “the continued presence of kin

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and village friends in the city” allows these migrants to “continue to function with [their] rural frame of reference even in the metropolitan community" (p. 46–47).

Reproducing Village Divisions in the Chawls

17 How else are these rural frames of reference expressed in Mumbai through the gramastha mandal system? Adarkar (2003) argues that “[u]rbanisation generally loosens barriers,” but notes that in the specific case of the BDD Chawls, “the identities of caste and religion often got solidified” and that some chawls “were exclusively inhabited by Muslims…others by dalits and/or caste Hindus.” (p. 4,529). This pattern continues today: only one building has a sizeable Muslim population, while another is known as the “Catholic chawl,” as evidenced by the Father Christmas murals at the entrance. Thirteen buildings have a significant Dalit population and certain others are almost exclusively occupied by Maratha families. Even these buildings can be approximately divided between those with a majority from Kolhapur District and those with a majority from the Konkan. Although it is beyond the scope of this study to fully trace the historical origins of these divisions, which are in any case hardly unusual in Mumbai, I contend here that the demographic structure of the gramastha mandals themselves provides indirect evidence of a mechanism by which village spatial divisions are reproduced in the urban built environment.

18 The relatively few existing academic references to gramastha mandals are typically either silent on the issue of caste, or explicitly emphasize the “esprit de corps, even among those from different castes” (Dandekar 1986:255) found in the city, in contrast to the village. As one the interviewees in Adarkar and Menon’s oral history of the Mumbai cotton mills explains: Only people from our village are allowed to stay in those galas [bachelor rooms]. There are people from all castes. (Maruti Gyandeo Satkar in Adarkar and Menon 2004:100) Meanwhile, in a study of migration from an Uttar Pradesh village, Rowe (1973) argues that for migrants in Mumbai the “ideal of all men of a village being gaon bhai, or village brothers, has greater meaning” and “relationships among men of different castes but of the same village may be much warmer and closer [in Mumbai] than in the village” (p. 229).

19 Likewise, although the majority of the gramastha mandal residents I met belonged to the Maratha community, many initially informed me that their rooms were open to any (male) residents of their village, rather than being restricted to a specific caste or religion. Sameer from Gaowadi Gramastha Mandal, for example, told me on two separate occasions that any resident of Gaowadi would be welcome to live in his room. Alongside the Marathas there are other Hindu communities as well as Muslims, Christians and Buddhists in Gaowadi, any of whom would be allowed to join the gramastha mandal.

20 Some weeks later, however, at the birthday celebration of one of Sameer’s roommates, cracks emerged in this picture of village-wide inclusivity. After being repeatedly told, unprompted, that “ham log sab Maratha hain” (we are all Marathas), I could not resist asking the men if Dalit Buddhists would be allowed live in their room. “Nahin!” (No) came the vehement response, Sameer punching the air in mock aggression. As the ensuing discussion quietened down, one of the roommates told me that, actually, “ve log

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a sakte hain, lekin ve nahin ate hain” (those people can come, but they don’t come). Others half-agreed, suggesting that Dalits could stay for a couple of days, but could not become permanent room members.

21 This reaction to the idea of sharing living space with members of a different community was unusually visceral in tone, but hardly unique in sentiment. As far as I was able to ascertain, 11 out of the 18 gramastha mandals that I had contact with restricted eligibility to Hindus, and in some cases specifically to Marathas. Meanwhile, there were two gramastha mandals whose rooms were solely occupied by Dalit Buddhists. One of these was an association composed of four villages, including one called Amrutwadi, while the other was linked to Borgaon village. Both Amrutwadi and Borgaon also have Hindu-only gramastha mandals in the BDD Chawls.

22 In a few cases, the exclusionary policy was justified on the grounds that room places were only open to the descendants of the original residents, all of whom had been Marathas. My Katkarwadi interlocutors, on the other hand, told me that the Hindu-only demographic of their rooms was purely a reflection of the Hindu-only village population. Where other gramastha mandals were concerned, reasons for restricting entry to Hindus were more opaque. Some residents simply shrugged and said “niyam hai” (it’s the rule). Ananda, from one of the two Buddhist-only gramastha mandals, told me that he was unsure of the rules and regulations, but regarding the Hindus in his village: Their way of thinking is different from ours, so … it would be inconvenient for them to live here.8 The clearest explanation came during an interview with Abhinav, a resident of (Hindu- only) Jambhe Gramastha Mandal, when I pressed him on the issue of caste restrictions. He told me that although Christians and Muslims from Jambhe can apply to live in the room, this has never happened in practice, and in general preference is given to Hindus due to their majority in the village. For Dalit Buddhists, however, residence is prohibited due to the circumstances under which the gramastha mandal rooms had initially been purchased: Everyone was supposed to do [a] fund which, you know, will be a helping hand to us to buy a room … but [the Dalit Buddhists] they strictly refused …. At that time they said “no we are not interested in this concept, and we will not give you anything, and we will not come with you in future as well” … [So] the restrictions are being made, and due to that they are not allowed …. It has been strictly decided.9 While this appears to be a highly village-specific history, an almost identical story of Dalit Buddhists not contributing to the founding fund and being permanently excluded thereafter was described to me by residents of Kingaon Gramastha Mandal.

23 In all likelihood, these neatly rendered narratives of cause and effect mask deep historic divisions that led to the Buddhists’ refusal to support the gramastha mandal. Villages across India have traditionally been divided along caste and religious lines, a separation that is both territorial and psychological, as vividly described by Kancha Ilaiah (1996) with reference to his natal Telangana village (p. 1–19). Maharashtrian villages are no exception: Anupama Rao (2009) explains that the “residential area for Dalits, called the Maharwada or Baudhwada, is usually located at the southern end of the village, and is almost always outside the village boundary" (p. 230).10

24 One Kingaonkar told me quite bluntly that Dalit Buddhists and Hindus live in different parts of the village, and that he knew nothing about the lives of Kingaon’s Buddhist migrants in Mumbai. “They cannot come to our room. They cannot come into our area

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[in Kingaon]. I can talk to them but I don’t make friends with them. I don’t like…” Members of Borgaon Gramastha Mandal were equally blunt, informing me that no Buddhists lived in their room “because of casteism,” adding that “Gaon mein aisa rehte” (it’s like that in the village).

25 Is it any surprise that these rural divisions persist in the city? In his paean to urban living, The Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser (2011) foregrounds the possibilities cities offer for people to “connect with a broader range of friends whose interests are well matched with their own” (p. 128). Mumbai, in particular, has been celebrated as a place of “intensity, heterogeneity and … radical mixing” (Hansen and Verkaaik 2009:10), with “a relatively high degree of ethnically mixed neighbourhoods,” at least prior to the communal riots of 1992–93 (Hansen 2001:160). We might therefore expect to encounter “friendships and alliances” in Mumbai “that could never flower in the jealous village.” (Dandekar 1986:254).

26 Indeed, as already indicated in a gramastha mandal context, there is a tendency among some commentators to romanticize the historical unity of the city’s migrant workers and their ability to pull together across community lines. Sadhav Jagre, for example, a retired foreman interviewed by Adarkar and Menon, recollects his concern over proposals in the 1950s to make Mumbai a centrally-administered Union Territory: “It would not remain a working-class Bombay …. [which] was more important to us than Marathi and non-Marathi” (Adarkar and Menon 2004:232).

27 Nevertheless, Valunjkar’s (1966) observation that “the majority of Mahar migrants” from the Maharashtrian village he studied in the 1950s “were staying in the same chawl in Bombay” (p. 72) indicates a long history of caste- or kin-based migration patterns. Moreover, Pendse, Adarkar and Finkelstein (2011) highlight the role of chawl living in allowing specific sub-regional identities to flourish in Mumbai, suggesting that both “the initial single migrant and later the families imported the village or subdivision (tahsil/taluka) specificities to their neighbourhood” and that this level of specificity “would not have been possible without the concentration brought about by the chawl” (p. 3). This “concentration” is not necessarily incompatible with a general loosening of social barriers. In fact, the authors argue, chawls “brought about an amalgamation between different castes—often through romances and marriages” (Pendse, Adarkar and Finkelstein 2011:3). However, this social mixing had its limits, and Dalits were often “assiduously excluded from the buildings” in defiance of government regulations (Pendse, Adarkar and Finkelstein 2011:3).

28 Drawing together the arguments of this and the preceding section, I suggest that gramastha mandals were a numerically dominant force in the BDD Chawls in their early decades and from the outset were divided on caste and community lines that reflected the social divisions in the villages that established them. As single male migrants brought their families to live with them, often settling down in the same buildings they had previously occupied as gramastha mandal residents, these divisions became further entrenched in a mutually reinforcing system where new arrivals—whether families or new gramastha mandals—tended to buy rooms in buildings occupied by those of the same community.

29 The result in the BDD Chawls today is a noticeable correlation between the caste composition of a gramastha mandal and the chawl building it occupies. Many of the Maratha-only gramastha mandals linked to villages in Kolhapur District can be found in the same group of buildings, alongside Maratha families also from Kolhapur District

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and, in some cases, from the same villages. Similarly, the two (Dalit) Buddhist-only gramastha mandals are in buildings that are predominantly occupied by Dalit families. As I shall show in the next section but one, these living arrangements neither help to erode the communal divisions of the village, nor foster any great interaction between new migrants and resident families.

Malls, Money and MBAs: Labour and Strategy in Post- Mill Mumbai

30 Like the living space, the workplace is a sphere in which social differences have the potential to collapse or to intensify depending on the circumstances. Jan Breman (2004) has argued, in the context of mill closures in Ahmedabad, that “forms of segmentation,” such as caste and religion, once “transcended by more comprehensive collective ties, such as trade union or political party” have now become dominant among ex-millworkers in the form of “narrow primordial loyalties” (p. 221). Mill closures have had far-reaching effects in Mumbai too, and it is impossible to discuss the gramastha mandals without taking the textile industry into account.

31 By the late nineteenth century, cotton mills dominated the city’s industrial sector and attracted migrant labour from across western India. As a consequence, the Konkan region and increasingly the Ghats (including today’s Kolhapur District) were becoming dependent on financial remittances from migrant millworkers and other laborers (Adarkar and Menon 2004:92; Chandavarkar 1994:139–40).

32 By the 1930s, three quarters of the city’s population was employed in the cotton mills (D’Monte 2002:14), many living close by their places of work in the chawls that were being constructed to house them by mill owners, private developers and public bodies such as the Bombay Development Directorate. From around this time onwards, mills began to employ their workers in three shifts, meaning it was possible to accommodate 30 or more migrant workers in a single room, since only a third of them would require sleeping space simultaneously (Adarkar and Menon 2004:95–96; Chandavarkar 2004:21– 22; Dandekar 1986:233–34; Prakash 2011:293). As Sushil, a BDD Chawls resident and self- styled local historian explained, it was precisely this concentration of potential rent- payers that made gramastha mandals economically viable in the first place.

33 Unsurprisingly, therefore, many older and former gramastha mandal residents I knew or knew about had at one time worked in one of the mills. Though this included both Hindus and Buddhists, it should not be assumed that there was no caste- or religion- based stratification in this sector. Despite patchy available data, there is certainly evidence to suggest that “broad occupational clusters” were formed along community lines (Chandavarkar 1994:220) and that this was at least partly driven by casteism (Adarkar and Menon 2004:112–13). In the weaving sheds, for example, the fact that workers had to wet the yarn with their mouths led to a bias among the predominantly Maratha workforce against the ritually polluting effect of lower-caste saliva (Upadhyay 2004:32).

34 Although it has been argued that poor urban working conditions mitigate against the formation of a stable working class (e.g. Breman 2013:71–72; De Haan 1997:928), Breman’s (2004) observations on the potential of trade unions to promote cross- community ties are highly pertinent to the case of Mumbai’s mills where unions

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flourished and striking became an “integral part” of the mill-working experience (Chandavarkar 2004:34).11 Arguably, workers’ closely-maintained village connections and rural land ownership did not so much prevent their becoming “proletarianized” (De Haan 1997:944) as provide an economic back-stop that enabled them to “sustain strikes for extensive periods” (Chandavarkar 1994:400).

35 Of the many strikes throughout the industry’s history, that of 1982–83 is the most mythologized,12 partly because it is associated (symptomatically, if not causally) with the eventual decline and closure of the mills that occurred in the ensuing decades. The effects of this decline have been profound, not least on Mumbai’s urban fabric. The “feast of hidden real estate” represented by vacant mill land (Appadurai 2000:641) has been exploited by developers, resulting in a landscape where chawls and hollowed-out shells of former mills are being engulfed by the glass and steel of business parks, high- end residences and malls. The BDD Chawls themselves have long been slated for demolition and redevelopment into apartment blocks, with a promise to rehouse existing chawl residents free of cost in the new flats. Some progress was made in this direction during my year of fieldwork, but the development program has currently stalled due to protests over lack of transparency and legally-binding resettlement agreements.

36 The mills no longer offering employment, there has been a marked increase in the diversity of jobs undertaken by gramastha mandal migrants today. Maura Finkelstein (2011), who briefly encountered a gramastha mandal while conducting research in a Mumbai chawl, “marvel[s] at how … very little has changed here, aside from the industries fuelling this migration” (p. 52). While it is undeniable that, smartphones and the occasional laptop aside, there are many similarities between my observations of gramastha mandal life today and the various descriptions that exist of these institutions in the mill era, I contend that, in reality, much has changed. Many migrants now work as security guards, waiters and drivers in the malls and office complexes that occupy the former mill sites. These low-paying roles are representative of a labour market that is becoming increasingly casualized and more precarious than the mill work of earlier decades (cf. Krishnan 2000:20). A few, however, work in moderately well-paid and secure professional roles that are equally removed from the mills. These include a Civil Engineer, an Assistant IT Manager in a bank and an accountant in a hospital. Some others work in fields that are yet further from those traditionally associated with gramastha mandal migration. Among the current residents of Katkarwadi Gramastha Mandal, for example, are a web designer, a glassblower and a software engineer working on iPhone apps.

37 The remittance economy persists, and most of those I interviewed sent money home to their families, either through a monthly bank transfer or in a more ad hoc fashion. However, in addition to recent arrivals enjoying a grace period, a number were exempt from remitting money for longer periods and in several cases this was due to their undertaking education or training. Vinit, from Manewadi Gramastha Mandal, was training to be a radiographer and relied on his security guard brother—also living in the gramastha mandal room—to pay the fees. He told me that his family make sufficient income from their village farm and so do not require any money from him. Tukaram, meanwhile, was studying for an animation course and actually received help from his parents, who made money from their cashew farm in Katkarwadi.

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38 Others were working and studying simultaneously, but all these cases are suggestive of a long-term family investment strategy. When, for example, Tukaram’s uncle Datta came to Mumbai in the early 1970s, the only strategy available was to make money immediately and send most of it home to support his struggling family. For him, the cotton mills represented an obvious source of income. In today’s precarious post-mill economy, conversely, a more logical strategy for those families who have been able to accumulate some capital is to invest it in training and education for their children, with a view to securing a durable source of future support.

39 The picture is not homogenous across gramastha mandals. Compared to many others, Katkarwadi Gramastha Mandal hosts migrants with an unusually diverse range of jobs, including a substantial number in white-collar occupations. In contrast, the residents of Shiravali Gramastha Mandal are, with one or two exceptions, security guards. Among the Buddhist migrants I met several drivers, security guards and an office assistant, as well as a few working in marketing and accounts. Their occupational range therefore appears similar to that of the majority of their Hindu counterparts, with the difference that none of the Buddhist migrants work in the better-paid corporate professions. Likewise, none of them (as far as I am aware) are currently in further education, although a few have completed undergraduate degrees in small-town institutions.

40 The small overall number of Buddhist gramastha mandal residents precludes my making too strong a general claim regarding the impact of caste and religion on job prospects. Nevertheless, Mhaskar’s recent analyses (2013, 2018) of ex-millworkers’ occupational choices indicate that casteism and religious discrimination persist in the new informal sector. While these studies focus particularly on anti-Muslim discrimination, a number of the factors involved, such as upper-caste karahiyat (disgust, aversion) at Muslims’ perceived uncleanliness and beef-eating habits, are also applicable to Dalits (Mhaskar 2018:31).

41 An analysis of the differences between the conditions of the villages themselves is beyond the scope of this urban study. I suggest, however, that in certain instances, one highly educated or well-connected migrant can significantly influence the employment prospects of his peers in the gramastha mandal. I encountered numerous cases where newer migrants had been helped into their current job roles through personal recommendations from more established residents. This is a well-documented phenomenon in studies of migration to Mumbai (e.g. Chandavarkar 1994; Dandekar 1986; Gore 1972).

42 Overall, the range of jobs undertaken by gramastha mandal migrants in the post-mill era is wide, but for the most part encompasses precarious, blue-collar roles. Within my sample of interlocutors, the few who have managed to find skilled, professional work are all Hindus, although due to the small total number of Buddhist gramastha mandal residents, too firm a conclusion should not be drawn on this front. Moreover, there is little to distinguish the jobs of migrants from those of the Mumbai-born family residents of a similar age, except perhaps the number of family members in creative fields such as music, dance and the theatre.

43 Studies of migrant livelihoods in Mumbai have indicated a broad, if weak, correlation between the skill-level of a job and the level of inter-community mixing that occurs among workers (e.g. Gore 1972; Panjwani 1984).13 This does not bode particularly well for increased communal harmony among the gramastha mandal migrants today, since most work in low-skilled occupations. Indeed, despite the overarching similarities in

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job roles across migrants and family residents, my own observations indicate that few forge deep social ties at work, and when it comes to recreation, migrants are overwhelmingly thrown back on their gramastha mandals as the prime site of social activity.

Social Life and Voluntary Activity

44 It is perhaps outside the workplace that social fault-lines—between Hindus and Buddhists, and between migrants and family residents—can most clearly be observed. A large part of my interlocutors’ social lives occurs in the gramastha mandal rooms themselves. It is common to eat together, and most gramastha mandal residents patronize an institution they refer to, in both Marathi and English, as their "mess." This is a small-scale catering business that typically operates in a family-owned chawl room, presided over by a lady known as a khanavalwali, often from the same village as her customers, or one nearby. For the relatively modest sum of around two thousand rupees per month (c. GBP 20–25), she will provide her clients, mostly single male migrants, with two cooked meals a day. The food is usually vegetarian, although on some days clients are treated to “non-veg” in the form of egg, or occasionally chicken or mutton. Once a dine-in service characterized by strong ties of loyalty between the patrons and the khanavalwalis, who were “often friends and confidantes of the migrant worker” (Adarkar and Menon 2004:97), the mess has now mostly shifted to a more business-like takeaway service model where loyalty is stretched thin. Indeed, I frequently heard complaints of boredom with mess food, and several interlocutors, including Tukaram, told me that they had changed mess more than once since moving to Mumbai.

45 Beyond meal times, free time is often spent simply hanging out in the room, chatting with roommates. Where a gramastha mandal owns more than one room, it is common enough for members to visit each others’ rooms and spend time together, but it is somewhat less common, in my experience, for members of different gramastha mandals to socialize together on a regular basis. Noteworthy, here, are the interactions between the Hindu-only and Buddhist-only gramastha mandals linked to the same village. Pravin, a Buddhist from Amrutwadi, told me that Ambedkar himself had visited his room in the 1950s to broker peace following an outbreak of Mahar-Maratha rioting. Nowadays, he and his roommates assured me, relations between Amrutwadi’s Buddhist and Hindu communities are calm and trouble-free. This tallied with the impression I formed, through observations and chance remarks, that relationships between Hindu and Buddhist migrants from the same village were generally amicable, if somewhat distant. Ananda, from the same Buddhist gramastha mandal as Pravin, told me that he mixed socially with the Hindus from his village who lived in a separate building, and that he and other Buddhists from the village had attended the annual puja (ritual prayer) in the Hindu room.

46 However, the lack of animosity between the communities does not alter the structure of gramastha mandal living, in which in-group socializing is far easier than socializing between groups. When I asked members of the Hindu-only Borgaon Gramastha Mandal if they could accompany and introduce me to members of the Buddhist-only Borgaon Gramastha Mandal, they seemed bemused by my interest and told me it would be

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difficult for me to meet the Buddhists as they (the Hindus) did not know their work schedules.

47 Weeks later, Hindu Vaibhav introduced me to Anil, one of the Borgaon Buddhists, as an old school friend with whom he seemed to be on cordial terms. When I subsequently returned to the Borgaon Buddhist room alone, Anil told me that despite living close by, he and Vaibhav met infrequently because they were both so busy at work. In-group socializing is simply the everyday outcome of being in the gramastha mandal room, while a Hindu wishing to meet up with a Buddhist from the same village needs to make a conscious effort to bridge the gap between separate living spaces and uncertain schedules. Despite the proximity of the rooms in many cases, this does not appear to be an entirely trivial endeavor.

48 If the interaction between gramastha mandals is limited, that between gramastha mandals and chawl families is, in most cases, even more so. My interlocutors who lived with their families, whether Maratha or Buddhist, referred to gramastha mandals in dismissive terms and seemed to find my interest in them either puzzling or amusing. There was a perception among some of the gramastha mandal migrants that their family neighbors regarded them as drunken trouble-makers. One interlocutor from Amrutwadi even told me that when his roommates got especially rowdy, the families down the corridor would threaten to call the police. On another occasion, a middle- aged family man from the building opposite explained there were no gramastha mandals in his chawl, because "We don’t allow. We don’t like it. They keep the room dirty, chewing tobacco."

49 Rowe (1973) has observed that even after living in Mumbai for several decades, migrants’ continued investment in their villages means that they “remain at the far end of the continuum of involvement in city life,” which includes making “relatively little contact” with Mumbai’s voluntary organizations (p. 232–35). This rings true in the BDD Chawls, where gramastha mandal migrants, by and large, have very little involvement with the numerous clubs and committees that organized religious functions, sports competitions and a range of social welfare activities. These organizations, known as mitra mandals (friends’ associations), are typically linked to a specific chawl building or pair of buildings and have been described elsewhere as “a prominent feature of popular life in Bombay” and an important site of “cultural interaction, and slow integration of the newcomers.” (Heuzé 1995:219).

50 There was little evidence of “slow integration” of gramastha mandal newcomers into the mitra mandals. In Tukaram’s chawl, for instance, most of the family members belonged to an organization called the Bandya Maruti Seva Mandal which was renowned for its kabaddi14 team and its prowess in building human pyramids during the (Hindu) Dahi Handi festival. When I asked gramastha mandal members if they belonged to the organization, the usual response was a derisive laugh and an explanation that mitra mandals were for families, not bachelors like them. Just as the families I knew were baffled by my interest in gramastha mandals, Tukaram was dismissive of the Bandya Maruti Seva Mandal and appeared annoyed whenever I brought up the subject. Confident and charismatic as he was in the comfort of the gramastha mandal room, he often appeared shy in the vicinity of the young men from the mitra mandal who tended to dominate the semi-public spaces outside the building. In fact, this was entirely in keeping with the view I heard from these Bandya Maruti Seva Mandal members, who found the gramastha mandal migrants unaccountably shy despite their having been

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invited on many occasions to join the activities of the mitra mandal (or so, at least, these members claimed).

51 Migrants the world over risk being accused of a failure to integrate. What sets the case of the gramastha mandals and the mitra mandals apart from many other migration studies, including Rowe’s (1973) account of Mumbai migrants from Uttar Pradesh, is the extreme similarity between the gramastha mandal residents and their family neighbors according to most demographic yardsticks. Both groups speak Marathi, both are dominated by Hindu Marathas, and the families in Tukaram’s chawl overwhelmingly trace their roots to the same small area in the south of Kolhapur District. Most families, indeed, are living where they are as a result of an earlier gramastha mandal migration experience.

52 The only substantive differences are those of lifestyle, magnified by mutual negative perceptions, and the distinctive urban identity that has emerged among second, third or even fourth generation migrants and has been intensified through the social activities of the mitra mandals that transcend ancestral village boundaries. According to many chawl residents, in fact, the mitra mandals themselves were initially established by gramastha mandal migrants, and it was only when some of their founder members settled down with their wives and children in the chawls that the mitra mandals transformed into family-orientated organizations. These founder members, unwilling to hand over responsibility to new migrants, instead passed on the baton to their (often) Mumbai-born children. The social composition of organizations like the Bandya Maruti Seva Mandal has hence shifted over time towards a more family-dominated demographic, to the exclusion of newer gramastha mandal migrants.

53 It is not the case, however, that my gramastha mandal interlocutors did not take part in any organized social, political or voluntary activity. Few have joined the electoral register in Mumbai, but many return to the village to cast their vote. For some, the five- yearly gram panchayat (village council) elections are of much greater consequence than national or state elections, and some gramastha mandals charter a minibus to facilitate their members’ participation. Furthermore, many migrants are actively involved in welfare organizations that help to finance improvements to village schools or infrastructure. These welfare organizations are often tied directly to the gramastha mandal and their interventions sometimes have a specifically communal end in view, such as the construction of a new Hindu temple or Buddhist cultural center. In short, not only do the social and cultural structures that emerge from the gramastha mandal system help to perpetuate the communal divisions found in the village, but they also do nothing to promote the social integration of new migrants and their family neighbors.

Changes and Continuities

54 Despite his love of Katkarwadi, Tukaram has no aspirations to return there permanently. The future plans he relayed to me were characteristically fluid, but other than the flights of fancy that took him far from the BDD Chawls to Singapore, Oman or, at the very least, Bangalore, he mostly talked about buying a flat with financial support from his father in one of Mumbai’s satellite cities like Thane or Panvel. Although not many of my other interlocutors could count on parental assistance in this way, over half of them voiced similar plans to buy property in these or other suburban areas where property prices are significantly cheaper than in the central parts of the city.

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Several had, in fact, already bought a flat that they were renting out to tenants while they continued to live in the BDD Chawls, usually with a view to moving after marriage.

55 Another change that is at least in part an effect of the mill closures is a reduction in the number of those coming to live in gramastha mandals. As a result, some gramastha mandals now take in occupants from different villages, while others rent out or sell one or more of their rooms to families from their own villages. In a few instances, formerly Hindu-only gramastha mandals have opened their doors to Dalit Buddhists. Shiravali Gramastha Mandal, while still dominated by Marathas, now includes a few Dalit Hindus and Dalit Buddhists among its residents. One of the older Maratha room members explained this relaxation in eligibility criteria as a result of the more conservative men of his father’s generation having left the room and retired to the village. Given the more general decline in gramastha mandal numbers, however, I suggest that this change should also be viewed as a deliberate strategy to broaden the pool of potential rent payers. At least one of the Buddhist room members is a security guard, like the majority of the Hindu residents, and he appeared to integrate fully in the social life of the room.

56 I encountered three other gramastha mandals with similarly relaxed eligibility rules. Another, while currently restricted to Marathas, had nonetheless relaxed an even more stringent earlier policy that restricted occupation to Maratha millworkers and their descendants. A younger resident told me that he found the Maratha-only rule old- fashioned, and that he would personally have no problem opening the room to Buddhists and other communities.

57 The impact that this relaxing of eligibility rules is having on social relations back in the villages is unclear. Dipankar Gupta (2005), reflecting on the contemporary Indian village in general, argues that a "gradual diminution of status of the dominant castes” has occurred in tandem with the “assertion of [marginalised] caste identities,” meaning that aside from “pockets of upper caste intransigence … [u]ntouchability is not practiced widely” (p. 753–57). Dalit scholar Anand Teltumbde (2007) is less optimistic, arguing that the notorious 2006 anti-Dalit massacre in Khairlanji village explodes the “myths” that “economic development does away with casteism” or that “there exists a significant progressive section of non-dalits that is against the caste system” (p. 1019).

58 Back in the 1980s, Dandekar (1986) reflected that migrants typically “adopt more progressive attitudes…than those who stay behind,” meaning that if “caste and class relationships are to be jolted into the countryside, the impetus will probably have to come from the city.” (p. 254–56). My interlocutors themselves seem divided on this issue, with some painting caste relations in their village today in a rosy light, and others gloomily predicting the persistence of casteism for many years to come. There was no clear division of opinion on this matter between Hindus and Buddhists.

59 Thinking back to the limited social interaction between the Hindu and Buddhist gramastha mandal migrants in the BDD Chawls, and the caste-based organizations that channel funds from Mumbai to the village, frequently with caste-specific ends in view, Dandekar’s prognosis appears rather optimistic. Inclusivity may have taken root in a few gramastha mandals, but in the majority, the mid-twentieth century village attitudes of their founders are kept alive through exclusionary eligibility policies. The attitudes are reinforced by the demographics of the surrounding chawl buildings, themselves a result—in part, at least—of the historic tendency of bachelor migrants to settle with their families in the same or a nearby building. Work opportunities in the post-mill era

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appear to provide limited impetus for migrants to mix extensively outside their own homogenous circles and, for now, gramastha mandals are still the principle locus of social interaction.

60 It remains to be seen whether and how this situation will be impacted by the emergence of a substantial new generation of suburban homeowners. Today, however, several former gramastha mandal residents already live with their families in suburban apartments, and many of these still maintain close ties with both their gramastha mandal and their village. These links, it seems, are not easily broken.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Public Works Department. 1925. “File No 65A/10 “Petition from Messrs J.C. Gammon Ltd, Contractors, for Payment of Bills in Connection with the Construction of Chawls at Delisle Road.".”

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Teltumbde, Anand. 2009. “Reservations within Reservations: A Solution.” Economic and Political Weekly 44(41/42):16–18.

Upadhyay, Shashi Bhushan. 2004. Existence, Identity and Mobilization : The Cotton Millworkers of Bombay, 1890-1919 /. New Delhi: Manohar.

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NOTES

1. All names of individuals and villages have been altered to protect the identities of my research participants. 2. The research drawn upon in this paper was conducted between January 2017 and January 2018 with the help of funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, and a SOAS fieldwork grant. 3. For simplicity, I use the name “Mumbai” throughout this paper, even when referring to the city prior to its renaming in 1995. Where other authors have used “Bombay,” I have retained their usage. 4. Forward caste refers to Hindu communities that do not qualify for government affirmative action schemes, unlike Dalits, tribal communities, and the “Other Backward Classes” grouping. Since Marathas have recently been awarded a reserved quota in education and public sector jobs, it is unclear whether this label will continue to apply in future. 5. A vernacular Marathi equivalent of gramastha. 6. There is also a persistent rumour that the BDD Chawls were constructed by the British as jails. Although records indicate that some of the buildings in the Worli site were temporarily used for this purpose in the 1930s and ’40s (Caru 2011:30), I have found no evidence in the Maharashtra State Archives to suggest that this was also the case in Delisle Road. Original tender documentation and correspondence clearly indicates that the buildings were constructed for residential purposes (e.g. Public Works Department 1922, 1924, 1925, 1938). 7. Ananda, interview 7/1/18, my translation from Hindi. 8. Ananda, interview 7/1/18, my translation from Hindi

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9. Abhinav, interview in English, 11/12/17. 10. For specific examples of spatial divisions in Maharashtrian villages see also Valunjkar (1966:8–16), Dandekar (1986:54–62) and Dalit writer Daya Pawar’s autobiography Baluta (2009:98). 11. Chandavarkar (1994) points out that even though trade unions took care to “distinguish themselves from caste organisations,” in some cases support was derived from specific caste groups (p. 427), thus mitigating their potential to forge a unified working class. 12. Adarkar and Menon’s (2004) One hundred years, one hundred voices and Darryl D’Monte’s (2002) Ripping the fabric are noteworthy among the numerous detailed accounts of this famous strike and its aftermath respectively. 13. As Breman (2013) explains, employers often recruit migrants to fill low-paying, precarious roles in order to maintain a “pliable and vulnerable” workforce that does “not easily team up in collective action” but, rather, remains “divided along lines of caste, ethnicity, religion, and other primary loyalties” (p. 66–72). 14. Kabaddi is a popular Indian contact sport.

ABSTRACTS

Drawing on a year’s fieldwork in the Mumbai BDD Chawls neighborhood, this paper analyses an urban migration phenomenon called the gramastha mandal. Gramastha mandals are village-run committees that buy chawl (tenement) rooms and rent them to single male migrants from their own villages. Save a few studies and cursory references, gramastha mandals have received limited academic attention, especially in today’s climate of economic liberalization following the widespread closure of Mumbai’s cotton mills. Through an examination of gramastha mandal living arrangements, working patterns and social activities, I answer three broad questions. Firstly, how have the gramastha mandals been impacted by the closure of the mills that once provided a major source of employment? Secondly how does living in a gramastha mandal room impact migrants’ relationships with the city around them and, thirdly, how does this arrangement perpetuate societal divisions from the village? I suggest that most gramastha mandal residents remain more part of their villages than of Mumbai’s social structures, and that this alienation has increased since the mills closed and opportunities for forging a working-class urban solidarity correspondingly declined. Moreover, through strict eligibility criteria, gramastha mandals replicate, rather than erode, village fault-lines between caste Hindu and Dalit Buddhist communities, a phenomenon that shows only limited signs of changing.

INDEX

Keywords: Mumbai, circular migration, village, chawl, caste, Maratha, Dalits

AUTHOR

JONATHAN GALTON School of Oriental and African Studies, London

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Politics of a Transformative Rural: Development, Dispossession and Changing Caste-Relations in West Bengal, India

Ritanjan Das

1 Displacement from land and the concomitant dispossession of economic and social capital is arguably one of the biggest domains of struggle in contemporary rural and peri-urban India. It is, however, hardly a new phenomenon, as from the widely prevalent and rarely accountable land encroachment practices during colonial times through to the Nehruvian project of nation building post-independence, narratives of land acquisition and associated displacements remain all too familiar to date. There is ongoing dispossession of farmers induced by state-sponsored property speculation and business interests in many forms: SEZs (Levien 2012, 2013; Cross 2014), large scale mining projects (Padel and Das 2010), conservation (Münster and Münster 2012), agribusiness, housing, and industrialization (Nielsen 2018; Nielsen and Oskarsson 2017; Akram-Lodhi 2009). In fact, close to 100 million people are likely to have been displaced since independence (Cernea 2016).

2 The theme of struggles around land and the associated rural transformation are of course major characteristics of contemporary development politics in India, where the transition to capitalism is more entrenched today than ever before (Harriss-White and Heyer 2015:4). Continually newer, more efficient modes of resource capitalism—or, the “extraction of value from nature” at minimal costs (Woods 2011:53)—are accompanying high economic growth. The accumulation of capital through dispossession of rural lands, forests, and other raw materials (Levien 2012; Goldman 2011; Gooptu 2011, etc.) appears to have favored corporate businesses, industrial or real estate, with “city making” emerging as a key avenue for profitable investments (Levien 2012; Harriss- White and Heyer 2015:10–11). Social differentiation and precarity have also intensified correspondingly. Dispossessions have contributed to the rise of vulnerable, disenfranchised, casual labor on a significant scale. Swelled ranks of “footloose labour”

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employed in low-wages causal jobs are unmistakable across rural and urban areas today (Breman 2007; Guerin, Venkatsubramian, and Michiels 2015). Among the far reaching upshots of these transforming forces, one of the most notable has been the reconstruction of the “urban” as a crucial and strategic site for the unfolding of global and national scale projects, which in turn has not only led to a concomitant reduction of the perceived value of the rural (Roy 2002, 2005; Sassen 2006), but as this paper goes on to demonstrate, also a fundamental shift in rural socioeconomic relations.

3 The story that unfurls in this paper recounts the transformation of Rajarhat—an erstwhile rural settlement in the state of West Bengal, adjacent to state capital Kolkata —into an upmarket satellite township, comprised mostly of business/IT hubs, luxury real estate, and shopping malls. Although seen as a symbol of Kolkata’s resurgence, Rajarhat is simultaneously a story of “continuous cycle[s] of evictions, expropriations, ecological degradation, and social protest” (Bose 2013:127). Furthermore, political struggles around displacement aside, Rajarhat also provides an intriguing window into the subtle, multifaceted transformation of socio-economic relations within the remnants of erstwhile rural spaces, viewed through a lens of changing caste-relations and newer forms of economic engagement. While land struggles in West Bengal have been under extensive scrutiny in recent times, there has hardly been any attempt to understand the social conditions within which such struggles play out, and are metamorphosed in turn. The effort in this paper is therefore to demonstrate (1) the nature of rural transformation brought about the process of urbanization in Rajarhat (which is demonstrative of similar processes across the country), and (2) explore how such transformations have also led to an evolving dichotomy along caste-lines, the emergent forms of economic engagements emanating from the rural transformation giving traditional caste-dynamics new forms of expression. The scant attention towards caste-relations in West Bengal in the mainstream literature—due to a rather limited electoral aggregation of caste interests (Sinharay 2012)—makes such forms more significant. However, this long-held political myth has recently come under some serious scrutiny via a series of works demonstrating the deep-rooted embeddedness of caste hierarchies in Bengali politics (Bandyopadhyay 2012; Samaddar 2013; Chatterjee 2012; Chandra, Heierstad and Nielsen 2015). This paper adds to this literature by deconstructing the Rajarhat story—interrogating both the land struggles and the implicit caste dimensions around the rural transformation. Methodologically, the paper is based on an exploratory ethnographic field research in Rajarhat. While a number of interviews (especially with the bureaucrats and political leaders) were conducted in Kolkata, the bulk of the fieldwork was spread across 10 sample villages (out of a total of 47), chosen on the basis of an even geographic spread across the entire area of Rajarhat. The story presented below emerges out of around 50 interviews conducted with villagers and farmers, bureaucrats, politicians and local political cadres, and syndicate members. Drawing on thematic content analysis and narrative analysis of the interview data, the story demonstrates the complex and contested dynamics at the ground level that usually remain unnoticed.

4 A final point needs to be made about the unique socio-political context of the state. Historically, West Bengal was an aberration—an island of political stability—amidst a rather chaotic Indian democracy. It was ruled by the Left Front (LF) government, a coalition of Left parties spearheaded by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPIM), uninterruptedly from 1977 to 2011. The CPIM/LF regime brought significant land reforms, as well as proper democratic decentralization via the panchayati-raj (a system

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of rural self-governance), and gained unprecedented popularity as a government for the poor. However, through the 1990s and early 2000s it gradually adopted a more pro- market stance, pursuing a private-capital led industrialization agenda, which even led to the regime securing a historic majority in the 2006 state elections. However, it suffered steady electoral decline soon after, eventually capitulating to the main opposition party Trinamool Congress (TMC) in 2011. And it is precisely in the regime’s final term that West Bengal also came to feature prominently in the context rural land struggles, the well-documented Singur-Nandigram episodes being cases in point (Das 2016; Sarkar and Chowdhury 2009). Not only did Singur-Nandigram spark nationwide debates about the nature and legality of acquisition methods, but it also marked critical junctures in the state’s political fortunes. The LF, having returned to power for an unprecedented seventh consecutive term in 2006, completely collapsed under the crisis that emerged from its high-handedness in acquiring farmland for private entrepreneurs in these two hamlets. It is this dichotomous backdrop against which the Rajarhat narrative needs to be told, one where private industrialization and neo-liberal urbanism was embraced by a regime having built its political capital as pro- poor and pro-farmer, and in a state that was a bastion of Marxist political forces for over three decades.

5 The paper is organized as follows: the next section, section two, provides a brief theoretical overview of the nature of rural transformation via land acquisition induced displacement-dispossession. Section three introduces the Rajarhat story, and brings the politics, socio-economic transformation and emergence of new forms of economic arrangements in the area (low-level cartels or “syndicates”) to the fore. Section four shifts the focus to the largely overlooked aspects of caste-consciousness in Rajarhat, and examines how such consciousness found new expression in the transformative politics of the rural society.

Theorizing Rural Transformation: Land Struggles and Social Dominance

6 The structural shift in the value of land towards commodification (Akram-Lodhi 2007) and the state’s transformation from an active promoter of public industries to a land- broker for private corporations (Levien 2013) are among the most notable effects of contemporary capitalist forces of accumulation. But while such effects of capitalist accumulation remain the focus of much of the literature on land, the process of dispossession-displacement also needs to be analytically fleshed out, the “means by which changes of land use and differential access take place and … the varying forms of resistance or compliance by different groups and individuals over time” (Gardner and Gerharz 2016:2).1 In contemporary India/South Asia, for example, dispossession from land displays both a certain continuity and change in comparison to earlier periods (Adnan 2016). State-led acquisition, albeit age-old, continues to change significantly in purpose towards supplying land to private corporations. Moreover, the very notion of dispossession “implies a straightforward transfer of rights in which those that once possessed are dispossessed … [but] the local realities … are often far more nuanced, involving complex interrelationships between groups of users, legality, the state” (Gardner and Gerharz 2016:2). There is thus an evolving discussion about appropriate theoretical frameworks, especially building on Marx’s concept of primitive

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accumulation (1976) and Harvey’s (2003) conceptualization of “accumulation by dispossession” (ABD), alongside newer perspectives on market-driven processes of dispossession (Akram-Lodhi 2012), extra-economic coercion (Levien 2012), non-market transactions (Khan 2004), and voluntary processes based on persuasion, incentives, and temptation (Adnan 2016). Naturally, this discussion is often at analytical crossroads. However, such divergence only indicates the complexities involved in the local realities of land use, which in a sense is also the point of convergence amongst this varied literature, as its main aim remains to explore the nuanced and complex interrelationships between groups of users, legality, the state, and customary forms of access, cross cutting discourses of development, modernity, belonging and rights (Gardner and Gerharz 2016).

7 Most of these mechanisms are clearly at play across much of the developing nations. In India, however, what is interesting to note (but often overlooked) is how this fuzzy domain of displacement-dispossession allows traditional social forces (like caste) to reinvent/reassert themselves in newer forms. This is not necessarily a recent observation, but one that tends to get glossed over in the more procedural and legislative criticisms of land acquisition. An affirmation of this observation can, however, be found in Le Mons Walker’s (2008) seminal work on neoliberalism on the ground in rural India. As a strategy of capital accumulation, she writes, the neoliberal project has revolved crucially around the transfer of property and land use rights, and the exclusion of massive numbers of rural people from the accumulation process: To the extent that their exclusion has been achieved through expropriation and dispossession, it has formed the basis not only for the transfer of property and property rights, but also in many if not most instances for the swelling of the ranks … of a “reserve army” of cheap expendable labour—another key component of the neoliberal accumulation strategy. (Walker 2008:605) State-based land seizures, the dispossession of significant numbers of the rural poor, and the agrarian conflict they have engendered have been key features of the playing out of neoliberalism in the Indian countryside. She further observes: These conflicts reflect state policies that underpinned and contributed to agrarian deterioration and crisis. The dominant classes, including both larger higher-caste and intermediate landholders, responded by attempting to preserve their social positions and modes of accumulation by thwarting the attempts of poorer peasants and rural laborers to improve their livelihoods. The initiatives of these classes have included both economic devices and extra-economic coercion, and in many instances they have produced as well a new unity and “closing of the ranks” among the landholders. (Walker 2008:595) There are various examples of such high-caste dominance, from the use of private armies by upper-caste landlords in Bihar to caste based atrocities on agricultural laborers by landholders in Tamil Nadu. As Le Mons Walker argues further, in a neoliberal context, such new forms of violence (often in the shape of caste-based atrocities) form the political and social corollary to the economic internal colonization of the poor (Walker 2008:595). Therefore, the reconfiguration of caste relations as a result of contemporary land struggles and how such struggles themselves are being shaped through traditional caste-based hierarchies, are both important areas to explore. The Rajarhat story is a prime example of this. While theoretical constructs such as ABD, market-led forces of dispossession around land struggle, etc. give this paper its analytical grounding and connect to the wider phenomenon of capitalist accumulation, the challenge is to make sense of such associated reconfigurations of social dynamics on the ground.

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Displacement, Rural Transformation, and Rise of the Syndicate-Raj in Rajarhat

8 Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, is often characterized as “the city that got left behind” (Anon 2012). Since 1977, while the LF (and particularly the CPIM) consolidated itself politically via the twin measures of land reforms and panchayati raj—along with a series of political maneuvers that allowed the “party” to entrench itself as a hegemonic entity in every state institution—the industrial fortunes of West Bengal had continued to dwindle. Riddled with stagnant industrialization, gradual loss of urban political ground, and dire infrastructural conditions (Das and Mahmood 2015), the LF took up the mantle of urban development by early 1990, which became the primary catalyst in its attempt at an economic rejuvenation. The government aggressively sought to transform Calcutta into a world-class city, following the “predictable formula of elite enclaves of residence and leisure, economic zones … and civic campaigns to insure beauty and order” (Roy 2011:259). The Kolkata new town project, located in the Rajarhat area on the north-eastern fringes of the city, was its premier program: a self-contained, environment-friendly planned settlement to ease Kolkata’s population pressure, and also a major business and IT hub, under the aegis of the West Bengal Housing and Industrial Development Corporation or HIDCO (HIDCO 1999).

9 Geographically, the entire Rajarhat block amounted to an area of 107.87 sq. km, and had 47 inhabited villages, 54523 households, and a net population of 417192 (mostly low- caste and Muslims, see Table 4) by 2001 (District Statistical Handbook 2003). The entire block was divided into 55 mouzas,2 25 of which were initially notified for acquisition in accordance with the Land Acquisition Act of 1894.3 As per the first land use plan (HIDCO 1995), the total Rajarhat project area was 2750 hectares, allocation of land being as follows: 30.5% residential, 7.3% industrial, 5.5 percent commercial, 1.1 percent social/educational/healthcare facilities, 8.8 percent roads/transportation, and 47.6 percent open space. Following several revisions, by 2010 the allocations were: 41.77 percent residential, 0.23 percent industrial, 5 percent IT services, 11 percent commercial, 8 percent social facilities, 12 percent transportation, and 22 percent open spaces (Mukherjee 2016).4 Contrary to initial objectives, Rajarhat thus gradually emerged not as an industrial or commercial hub, but a largely residential settlement. The area is now primarily divided into Action Areas I (677 hectares), II (1310 hectares) and III (783 hectares), designed to accommodate approximately 1 million people, along with another 0.5 million from the floating population (HIDCO 2012). However, behind the story of successful urban development remained a plethora of conflicting elements, demonstrating the fuzzy terrain of development-displacement at Rajarhat. In particular, there are three issues that need elaboration.

10 The first is the issue of limited compensation and the violent nature of displacement. As per one estimate, most of the land was acquired for Rs. 300,000/acre, almost half the market price of Rs. 600,000 (Johnson and Chakravarty 2013). Another estimate is that HIDCO purchased land at Rs. 5–6,000/katha5 against the officially registered rate of Rs. 4–50,000 (Sengupta 2008), selling it within a year or two at Rs. 60,000/katha, and even at Rs. 200,000/katha (Johnson and Chakravarty 2013). What is more intriguing though, is the nature of displacement in Rajarhat. In 1999, the government published a report

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titled: “Report of the Rehabilitation and Resettlement Committee for Project Affected People (PAP) of New Town Project.” It read: A unique feature of this project [is] … a continuous dialogue between the PAP and the project authorities … Consent of the PAP was obtained through discussions and meetings. As a result the project has not been so far plagued with court cases and litigation … The pro-people attitude taken by the project authorities and the Govt. should be emulated in other projects (GoWB 1999:5). Compare this with the following excerpt from an investigative report published by The Sanhati Collective. The CPI(M) party leadership went on a land grabbing spree with the active collusion of the local police and administration. Poor people fearful for their lives were forced to sign off their land at gunpoint … the whole area was under the grip of fear and terror … Those who were unwilling to give up their land … were subject to unmentionable strong-arm tactics. Many left hearth and home because of beatings and harassment. Those who reported to the police were murdered . (Sengupta 2008:4) The two versions could not be more different. And while the second is a rather dystopian account, tales of land grab, intimidation, and violence are not uncommon in Rajarhat. A Nagarik Mancha6 publication, for example, notes that “land sharks became immediately active in the area. Forceful land grabbing and dispossession also escalated rapidly. Buying land in very low price, they later sold it at much higher rates … More than 50 people are estimated to have been murdered in Rajarhat” (Dey 2011:6–8; author’s translation from Bengali). Similar anecdotes, stories, and memories can still be heard aplenty if one enters the remnants of erstwhile rural settlements in the area, demonstrating how “land [was] looted from the local villagers … the empty fields there represent[ing] … the death of agriculture … its murder by capital, the savage commodification of land, and the resurgence of private property in the city” (Dey, Samaddar and Sen 2013:19–20; emphasis added). Once again, it is interesting that such high levels of disruption in an area with a 50 percent low-caste and Muslim population still did not lead to any direct caste based mobilization, something that would have been the expected course of events in most other states.

11 The second issue that needs to be addressed is the extent of transformation in rural livelihood. What is the condition of these villages today? They continue to exist, but in a severely constricted manner, as the development of the city required all the cultivable land around each village, with only the habitational parts left out. Engulfed within the urban sectors, remnants of these villages are euphemistically referred to as urban villages (somewhat developed with better road connectivity with the urban sections). However, irrespective of the euphemism, and despite several promises by HIDCO to undertake necessary developmental work, there remains a stark contrast between the posh urban enclaves and the sorry state of the villages, which have essentially become extremely dense living quarters with burgeoning populations, but with hardly any public spaces, along with choked sewage systems, narrow roads, and unsafe residential structures.

12 Having lost their agricultural livelihoods, the primary occupation of the villagers is to rent out low-cost accommodation to migrant workers, daily wagers, small-scale businessmen, or do odd jobs as masons, drivers, carpenters, security guards, and housemaids. This is reflected in the following tables that document the rapidly reducing farming opportunities in the area post-2000. Table 1 demonstrates the reduction in the farming population from 2001–2004 when the Rajarhat project was in

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full swing; Table 2 shows the rapid fall in the net area under cultivation from 1996 onwards; and Table 3 documents the concomitant stagnation of agricultural, manufacturing workforces and a rise in the “other’” category, which comprises of such small jobs (masons, drivers, guards, etc.). Additionally, the government had promised to rehabilitate all evicted families and to train and give employment to at least one family member. But a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report in 2007 noted that only 2691 individuals had been trained, along with 47 cooperative societies and 56 self- help groups set up with just 3073 landowners. In fact, “even after a lapse of eight years, [HIDCO] had rehabilitated only 17 percent of identified project affected families … and failed to identify the remaining erstwhile landowners” (CAG 2007:27).7

Table 1: Changes in Farming Population in Rajarhat (2001–04)

Year Small farmers Marginal farmers

2001–02 12,105 6,170

2002–03 21,417 6,232

2003–04 10 3,890

Source: District Statistical Handbooks (2002–2004)

Table 2: Land Distribution in Rajarhat (1996–2003)

Net Area Under Cultivation (in Area Under Pasture and Orchard (in Year hectares) hectares)

1997 7,964.07 183.53

1998– 3,958 453 20018

2002 3,911 453

2003 1,601.8 183.33

Source: District Statistical Handbooks (1997–2004)

Table 3: Percentage Distribution of Workforce Population (2002–2004)

Year Cultivators Agricultural Laborers Household Industrial workers Other workers

Rural Urban Rural Urban Rural Urban Rural Urban

2002 2.69 0.03 4.93 0.07 1.68 0.51 20.88 33.74

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2004 9.7 0.6 16.4 0.3 5.8 1.7 68.1 97.4

Source: District Statistical Handbooks (2003, 2005)

13 The third and final issue which needs to be explored is the emergence of new forms of economic engagement in the area: in particular, what is commonly referred to as the syndicate-raj. Rajarhat today is synonymous with “syndicates,” described in a recent news article as “Kolkata’s open secret of extortion rackets” (Anon 2016). Syndicates are essentially low-level cartels that have gradually turned into “businesses” offering “services like purchase of land, supply of building materials and engagement of laborers to builders and property developers … extort[ing] money from petty shopkeepers, owners of small and medium industrial units and others” (CAG 2007:25). Although consolidated during the TMC government, the rise of the syndicates can be traced back to the last decade of the LF rule. In the absence of industrial investment and the much promised jobs, CPIM leaders decided to award a form of political compensation to the dispossessed, allocating (informal) contracts to local youth for providing construction material in their neighborhoods. Gautam Deb (Housing Minister of the LF and the chief architect of Rajarhat) personally oversaw the proceedings. As he recalls: I made sure that the local youth got necessary financial assistance and permits for driving trucks, which I then hired back for construction/land-filling purposes. I also instructed that HIDCO gave them all the small jobs—supplying material, building walls/fences and small pathways, planting trees, and also supplying labour if required. We adjusted the system itself in order to accommodate such ventures.9 While this could have been an innovative business model to generate employment, on the ground it turned entirely into a party-mediated exercise. The CPIM local committees were in charge of deciding to whom the contracts should be awarded in their respective areas, and in most cases contracts went to party-affiliated individuals (Johnson and Chakravarty 2013). This also gave rise to a certain form of rent-seeking, as a share of the payments had to be paid back to local party elites, ensuring necessary political protection and insulation from law-enforcing agencies (Roy 2016).

14 It is, however, during the TMC rule that the syndicates have flourished, becoming an almost indispensable political force. Before the 2016 state election, the current Rajarhat TMC MLA Sabyasachi Dutta was quoted as saying that he has 20,000 people working for him, a TMC “army that keeps the syndicate machinery rolling and moonlights as the vote mafia during elections” (Banerjee and Sengupta 2016). He further claimed: If there is no syndicate, 20,000 people will die of starvation, the government will fall. If I tell 20,000 people that you have to starve to death, even if 2,000 goons die among them it would be a major crisis … Defeating me is not simply difficult, it’s impossible (Roy 2016:24). A senior TMC member, on conditions of anonymity, described the scale of the problem: Currently there are about 270 operational syndicates, with connections right up to the ministry. They broadly operate under two parallel authority umbrellas, controlled directly by two cabinet ministers. The daily collection of all the syndicates is more than half a million. The chief minister is aware of the problem, but given the money and people involved, it is an untouchable system.10

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The Reproduction of Caste Relations in Rajarhat

15 Let us now turn to the core question of the story: how did the fuzzy domain of displacement-dispossession at Rajarhat allow traditional caste dynamics in the villages to reinvent and reassert themselves in newer forms? Answering this is a challenging task, as no caste based mobilization had coalesced in Rajarhat. This is not entirely unexpected owing to the exceptionalism of West Bengal, where caste has been notoriously understudied owing to its very distinctive political history. Neither during the early decades of Congress rule or the LF was caste a strategy of electoral mobilization, nor has there been a major caste-based social movement in the state. This is particularly noteworthy in the wider context of much more direct on ground caste dynamics in most other states, where the political discourses have historically been framed along explicit caste lines. However, as Chandra and Nielsen (2012) point out, if one looks beyond aggregate election data, caste does emerge as an important indicator of popular political behavior in the state.11 But it is undeniable that a prolonged Left hegemony has led somewhat to the ideological subsumption of caste by class, ostensibly underpinned by loyalties forged “across divisions of caste and community” (Chatterjee 1997:69); and the conspicuous socio-political dominance of the self- professed “casteless” Bengali bhadralok12 (Tawa Lama-Rewal 2009).

16 Contextualizing the Rajarhat story against such a backdrop poses a dual challenge. While Rajarhat has been in news in light of the recent land acquisition strife in West Bengal, the caste question has barely received any attention. And even if this is attributed to the scant historical attention towards Bengali caste politics, the unfolding of events on the ground did not follow caste lines either. Yet, it is this challenge that also raises an intriguing dialectic. How does the salience of caste hierarchies continue to inform everyday politics and structure political action, while reproducing its own invisibility at every turn? This is probably the most intriguing outcome of the extent of the transformation witnessed in the villages of Rajarhat.

The Spatiality of Caste in Rajarhat Villages

17 Despite a conspicuous absence from political discourses, caste remains highly visible in Rajarhat. This is noticeable in the population demography of the area itself, Dalits and Muslims being the two predominant groups. In fact, they made up more than 50 per cent of the entire population in 2003, and remain at around 40 per cent according to the 2011 census data (see Table 4). Across the 10 villages where the fieldwork was conducted, Namasudra was clearly the most prominent caste, followed by Bagdi, Bhuimali, and (a few households of) Hari.

Table 4: Dalit and Muslim Population in Rajarhat (2001–2003, 2011)13

Year Total Population Schedule Castes Muslims

2001 417,192 87,907 (21.07%) 109,504 (26.24%)

2003 417,192 102,867 (24.66%) -do-

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2011 592,737 141,513 (23.87%) 100,024 (16%)

Source: District Statistical Handbooks (2002, 2004, 2013)

18 In most villages, the spatiality of caste stands out, as there are distinct segregations between lower and upper-caste habitations, a fairly common phenomenon in West Bengal villages, also noted by authors such as Roy (2012). The upper caste locations are usually referred to as Bamun-para (locality of the Brahmins), or sometimes even identified by specific surnames such as Chakrabarty-para or Ray-para (Chakrabarty and Ray being upper-caste surnames). The lower caste locations are relatively mixed, with people from Namasudras, Bhuimali, Bagdi and other low castes living side by side. Interestingly, in a number of villages these areas are commonly addressed as the purono-para (the old locality), possibly indicative of the low-castes being the original inhabitants. There are some instances of specific caste-named localities, such as Bagdi- para (locality of the Bagdi caste), Sardar-para, and so on. Another name is also quite common in several villages: notun-para (the new locality). These areas are usually located at the village peripheries and are relatively new. The caste profile is fairly mixed and the houses are mostly rented out to outsiders who work in the neighboring apartments or offices. The religious segregation is, however, even starker, as the Muslim areas are very clearly demarcated, usually known as the Molla-para (locality of the Muslims, Molla being the most common Muslim surname in Rajarhat).

19 The following conversation with an old resident of Bamun-para in Aatghora village is very clearly indicative of these segregations. Notice how the importance of the Bamun- para is projected in relation to the nearest skyscraper. My forefathers lived in this Bamun-para. My entire life has been spent here. Further down this road is Mandal-para [locality of the Mandals]. There is a small market after Mandal-para, the last shop being a butcher’s. The Molla-para starts after that. We go up to the butcher’s shop, but usually don’t go beyond. The Bamun-para is right at the centre of the village though. There’s a big tower only at a stone’s throw.14 The spatial segregation is reinforced by a clear economic stratification. There is a difference in the condition of the houses in the upper-caste hamlets and they are noticeably more affluent. A typical Bamun-para house is more spacious, brightly painted, has a courtyard, a boundary wall, and is usually two-to-three storied. Houses in the lower-caste hamlets are much smaller in comparison, mostly one-storied, sparsely painted, and the localities are a lot more congested. Another noticeable difference is in the workforce pattern. In Patharghata mouza, for example, there are only a handful of upper-caste houses in the middle of the village, with at least one member in each family with a permanent job, some being government employees as well. In contrast, the rest of the villagers are mostly doing small odd jobs or are self-employed. Anecdotes aplenty can also be heard about upper-caste families having received substantial compensation as opposed to the residents in other areas, indicating that the former owned comparatively larger quantities of land.

The Emergent Bhadralok-Borolok-Chhotolok Tripartite and the Syndicate-Raj

20 So how did such caste-consciousness play out in the context of the rural transformation? Upon conversing with the villagers, it became evident that there is a

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strong sense of frustration among large sections, having lost their permanent income source and having not received the promised benefits. Such feelings are directed both towards the government, and also a section of the local elites with close proximity to the CPIM. This, on the surface, plays out more in class terms: boro-lok (the big or rich people) vs gorib-lok (the poor people), the most common sentiment heard across villages being: The borolok had their party connections, and some made enormous profits overnight. It’s only the gorib-lok whose conditions have steadily deteriorated.15 Within a village, people are normally known to each other, and thereby the resentment towards the borolok was specifically directed: the residents of this house here, the members of that family there, or the owner of this shop or those new buildings—were clearly identified as those with party-connections or even party members. Many such conversations in the villages took the shape of expressing frustration towards the borolok for having exploited the system and for the gorib-lok being left behind, couched in the class-terms that are taken to be characteristic of common parlance in the countryside. However, in the over-usage of this typology, what often remain ignored are the multiple meanings and overlapping signaling of class as well as caste relations. It needs to be understood— and this is probably unique to West Bengal given the historic prominence of class in the political discourse and yet underlying patterns of social organization along caste lines— that there is a continuous interchange of class and caste identities in common parlance. A clear hint at this interchangeability came from a conversation with Mahesh Dhali, a dispossessed farmer running a tea-stall in Patharghata: So what they are borolok? It’s only because they were close to the party that they became borolok overnight. But that doesn’t mean they have become bhadralok. They are still the chhotolok that they always were.16 This is a rather insightful statement. Upon pursuing a similar line of questioning, several such responses were heard: a borolok for only two days can’t be a bhadralok; they might have money, but they are chhotolok like us only,17 and so on.

21 So what does this borolok-chhotolok-bhadralok tripartite imply? Here it is important to recognize that these terms are not usually taken to be indicative of caste-identities, and are in fact mostly used to indicate class-relations. The terms do not engage directly in defining what caste is (jati, varna) or used to be. Instead, as Chandra, et al. (2015:2) point out in their attempt to situate West Bengal exceptionalism, “caste implies different things to different people at different times, and that caste is used politically in different ways”. In the same vein, and in the context of socio-economic changes brought by the fuzzy domain of displacement-dispossession in Rajarhat, the terms borolok-bhadralok-chhotolok have come to assume a multitude of meanings— interchanging between class and caste lines—unpacking which can give us insights into the changing caste dynamics. The term borolok is used to indicate the economically nouveau rich (so a class-term), but is also used to indicate a degree of differentiation from the bhadralok in terms of the borolok’s lower status in the social hierarchy (so a caste-term). There is a distinction between those who became economically affluent over the course of the project but come from a lower social stratum (the overnight borolok) and the traditionally or socially affluent (the bhadralok), as the higher social status of the bhadralok cannot be replaced by economic affluence alone. Even if the borolok is economically better off than the bhadralok, the latter continues to enjoy a higher social standing (therefore caste identity is far more entrenched than class). There are of course those who are bhadralok as well as borolok, and they are usually

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well-respected. The term chhotolok, on the other hand, directly indicates a low-caste origin, and when used in conjunction with borolok, it is the caste relation that is being implied, and not class. Referring to the Bamun-para residents of his village, Mahesh Dhali made a very incisive comment that uses all these terms with the multiplicity of meanings: They are bhadralok, of course they will be borolok as well. But can the borolok become bhadralok just by having money? Family, tradition, education—where will the chhotolok get these from?18 This is a key comment, playing with the multiplicity in meanings. In the first sentence, the bhadralok (high caste) is expected to be a borolok as well. Here borolok is being used in a class sense (economic richness), as the higher social standing of the bhadralok is expected to translate into greater economic affluence as well. But in the second sentence, borolok takes on a caste-meaning. Gains made in class-terms alone are not enough to alleviate the low social status of the borolok (they cannot gain the respect of the high castes just by having money). In the third line, the distinction is made even more explicit, when it is said that the borolok is hardly any different from the chhotolok (the low-castes), as the economic gains of the former (progress made in class-terms) can hardly be a substitute for the social capital of the traditional high castes, i.e. the bhadralok.

22 This is how caste-consciousness has found new forms of expression in Rajarhat villages. Among the dispossessed, the lower-castes and the Muslims were at a particular disadvantage given their lack of economic and social capital. But the surrounding urbanization has brought certain economic opportunities for those close to the party (particularly through “syndicates”), and in almost every village there were groups of young men—largely low caste and Muslims—who did gain quick financial benefits from the urbanization process. But their rapid economic affluence could not elevate them to the bhadralok status. They became borolok (used in a class-sense, indicating economic richness), but remained chhotolok (low caste) at the same time, as their riches were not a substitute for heritage and tradition. Most villages in Rajarhat now have three groups of people: the upper-caste bhadralok (most of whom are also borolok, as they are expected to be), the ones who became borolok during the course of the project (who progressed in class terms but not caste), and the chhotolok who continue in poverty (the archetypical low-caste). The Bengali political tradition ensures that the bhadralok continues to be respected for their social/cultural capital and upper-caste heritage, and even if economically stronger, the lower-caste borolok cannot escape from their chhotolok status in the absence of that heritage.19

23 Now, this tripartite terminology has another crucial dimension if one examines the rise of the syndicate-raj in Rajarhat. Although widespread, syndicates are notoriously difficult to talk to in the villages of Rajarhat. It was only after a month in the field that access could be gained, and under conditions of strict anonymity. While reluctant to divulge information about their operational structures and political linkages, the implicit caste aspects—or more specifically, the bhadralok-borolok-chhotolok dynamics— were freely discussed. Among the syndicates that could be observed, it was fairly obvious that membership was largely drawn from lower-castes and Muslim youth. Among all the syndicates observed/interacted with, hardly any were members of the upper castes, the Namasudra and Bagdi castes being the most prominent. This is perhaps not surprising given the overall demography of Rajarhat, but the leadership was also reflective of this trend. There are two local leaders—Bhajai Sardar and Aftabuddin—

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each controlling roughly 135 syndicates, the former a low-caste Hindu, the latter a Muslim. The overall number and size of syndicates in Rajarhat have steadily risen since the CPIM days and strengthened significantly in the TMC era, but the membership character has not changed much, attracting unemployed youth (almost exclusively male) from the minorities.

24 The obvious financial opportunities aside, what else motivates a youth to join a syndicate? The leader of a small syndicate explained: Of course there’s the money. But more important is ijjat (respect). We had no ijjat in the village. We were born chhotolok, and would have remained so had it not been for the syndicate. Today I have 12 people working for me, I have political connections. Even village elders talk to me with respect.20 Similar sentiments were echoed by several syndicate members. A relatively new and young recruit of a big syndicate admitted: I have only studied till 8th standard. There was no steady income in the family. My brother drives an autorickshaw. But now I have a good lifestyle. I will also have connections and meet important people. No one will look down on me anymore.21 Alongside quick money, it is the search for ijjat that leads young men to join syndicates. The most insightful comment came, however, not from a syndicate member, but from the mother of a syndicate member. Upon asking why she allowed her son to join an illegal business, she responded: What has the law done for us? They gave us a pittance in the name of compensation, and now our land is worth millions. We can never be like those bhadralok living in our land, but if my son earns money, we can escape a chhotolok’s life.22 Thus we return to the tripartite terminology again. Besides quick money and an exciting lifestyle, the syndicate-raj (as it is referred to in the media, the syndicates being the real power-brokers locally) seems to have provided an avenue for the aspirations of the lower-castes, be it for respect, or at least to escape the entrapments of being a chhotolok. The upper-caste bhadralok heritage will remain elusive for most, but at least they can climb the social ladder to some degree and be a borolok.

Conclusion

25 The multiple narratives around Rajarhat indicate a qualitative shift in the politics of the rural. As the old politics of citizenship withers away in the villages with the increasing penetration of market forces, a new politics is being produced via the interaction of a ubiquitous neoliberal development with its collateral, the multitude of dispossessed and disenfranchised. A point can be raised about whether this politics is significantly indicative of a transforming rural, or is just a continuation of similar trends in urban/ peri-urban areas, and there are indeed linkages between the two. However, the Rajarhat story reflects traits that are both distinctive and also link to changes witnessed across rural India. On the one hand, given the West Bengal exceptionalism as far as caste- based mobilization is concerned, the shifting dynamics brought by the new town project points to the regional specificity of the story. One the other hand, first, the large scale capitalist expropriation of land is undeniably changing the rural like never before, and yet the “development” processes that engulf rural societies promising urban regeneration tend to bypass the dispossessed. As the rapidly deteriorated farming conditions in Rajarhat demonstrate, such processes create their own wasteland —the social space of a dispossessed labor force—thereby reshaping and restructuring

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rural-urban relations in post-colonial societies (Bhattacharya and Sanyal 2011). Second, there is underlying violent nature of this expropriation. The tactics used by the CPIM to capture land is symptomatic of what Le Mons Walker (2008) identifies to be a key trend in the countryside: the use of officially sanctioned criminal violence at the level of the state and by private landholders against the rural poor. In a neoliberal context, that violence forms the political and social corollary to the economic internal colonization of the poor. Third, there is the changing nature of rural proletariat. Given the continuing farmer resistance to dispossession across the country, the agrarian questions of labor and capital are, consequently, now re-joined in the land question, amplifying existing inequalities in novel ways (Levien 2012). The rise of syndicates and the renewed caste dynamics are reflective of what Levien describes as the involutionary dynamic of agrarian change that is ultimately impoverishing for the rural poor (Levin 2012; see also Agarwal and Levien 2019). In Rajarhat, the dispossessed cannot look to this new “development” with desire, but they cannot abandon it either, thereby ending up negotiating new forms of political adjustment. There remains a memory, but there is nothing in the present that one identifies with, the dispossession thus not only being from economic means, but also from identity. Ranjit Nashkar, an elderly inhabitant of Patharghata, evocatively recalled: I used to live in Patharghata, went to school in Kochpukur, and used to play in that field next to the Talpukur pond. But no one recognises these names anymore. Instead, I am a resident of Action Area II. They have erased my existence, my identity, and also that of my forefathers. Not only is my land gone, but so are my memories.23 The role of the state in enacting this transformation in the villages, the concomitant displacement, marginalization, and newer forms of socio-economic engagements also define these politics. Displacement is “constructed” by the state, its institutions, political entities, local actors and networks, a trend not only evident in Rajarhat, but across India, and indeed across the global South. The politics thus need to be looked for in this process of construction, and in the relation between what it produces and leaves behind. This paper has tried to explore this relation in the rural vestiges left behind by the urbanization process in Rajarhat, as it brought about large scale displacement- dispossession and rapid socio-economic changes in rural lives. The caste perspective, in turn, while adding to the debate on the relevance of caste consciousness in a bhadralok dominated Bengali society, also symbolizes this relationship. The paper refrains from claiming any direct causal link between the displacement narratives and the reoriented caste-dynamics. The relationship between the two is often multifaceted and is expressed differently in different parts of the country. However, at least two types of analytical linkages weave the various parts of the Rajarhat story together. First, Rajarhat is demonstrative of how processes of capitalist accumulation can lead to caste-relations being simultaneously reinvented and redeployed in a rapidly transforming rural society in newer forms. Second, the story also shows how the new economic arrangements that emerge as a result of such accumulation and transformation can both aid this reinvention, while also reinforcing new forms of stratification. The duality of this relational politics, in this sense, is in the way the modern (the transforming rural economy as a result of rapid urbanization) cohabits with the traditional (the social hierarchies), and is legitimized by it.

26 It is this cohabitation and legitimization that symbolizes not only the core conflict of Rajarhat, but also that of contemporary rural societies in India. The unique nature of

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West Bengal—the political stability of the LF as well as the domination of the casteless bhadralok—does make it a rather special case among the chaotic Indian democracy. But what the Rajarhat story also signals in a broader sense is the overwhelming transformations that Indian rural society has undergone over the last few decades, the changing power relationships and the consequences, the heterogeneity of Indian rural social space, its stratification and deeply entrenched economic and social divisions. The economic stratification induced by displacement-dispossession often reinforces the traditional social hierarchies where the upper caste with social and economic capital emerges as the primary beneficiary of “development”. In Rajarhat, the importance of achieving the bhadralok status, or at least a borolok, is rooted in an economic dispossession that has reasserted the social entrapments of being a chhotolok. Robbed of their legitimate socio-economic relations of production on the one hand and their memories and identity on the other, the chhotolok is now in a perpetual search for both sustenance and ijjat (respect). The cross-cutting themes of displacement, dispossession, identity, and social hierarchies are thereby symbolic of the heterogeneous and unequal stratification that are blatantly evident across the Indian countryside. Albeit often side- lined in the global city/urbanization discourses and the broader debates about the neoliberal onslaught, it is important to recognize and unpack—as this volume aptly demonstrates—this stratification and the transformative processes in rural societies and livelihood.

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NOTES

1. There is an emerging body of literature on this theme. See, for example, Levien (2013); Feldman and Geisler (2012); Adnan (2013); Cross (2014). 2. A mouza is an area comprising multiple settlements, taken as a revenue collection unit in a pargana (revenue district). 3. Eventually, 45 mouzas were notified for acquisition (HIDCO 2012). 4. As per HIDCO (2012), the entire planning area today stands at 9390 hectares. 6839.31 hectares had been acquired by 2012. 5. A katha (or kattha or cottah) is a unit of land measurement, approximately equal to 720 sq. feet or 66.89 sq. metres. 6. Nagarik Mancha (citizens’ platform) is a Kolkata based non-political civil society organisation. 7. It is difficult to ascertain the caste affiliations of the primary victims of the urbanisation process, as neither existing government reports nor any other study documents that level of detail. But anecdotal evidence across the villages reflects a familiar pattern of low caste groups suffering the brunt of it (particularly the Namasudra caste, which is the most prominent across Rajarhat). 8. Between 1998 and 2001, the records show no change in the data, hence it is encapsulated in one row. 9. Interview, 20th April 2017, Salt Lake, Kolkata. 10. Interview, 21st April 2017, Kolkata. 11. There is also a strong body of historical and sociological literature on caste dynamics in colonial Bengal (Bandyopadhyay 1990; Chatterjee 1979; Sen 2014), and also in contemporary West Bengal (Roy 2012). 12. Literally meaning “respectable people” or “gentlemen,” an elite class of regional intelligentsia unique to the Bengali-speaking area. The mainstay of Bengali communism, the bhadralok, had turned to Marxism as a political creed in the 1930s (Franda 1971; Chatterjee 1997). The bhadralok status was not ascribable but had to be achieved via cultural and political sophistication, where caste was supposedly not important. In reality, the bhadralok belonged overwhelmingly to the upper castes, whilst the lower castes, predominantly involved in low-paid manual jobs, were referred to as the chhotolok (low/non-respectable people). The term chhotolok can also be a term of abuse, often used by the bhadralok to denigrate one of their own caste (Roy 2012). The embedded politics of caste-hierarchy is thus not only entrenched in the upper- caste consciousness, but beneath the radar of aggregate electoral politics, continues as a key organising principle of social lives (Chandra et al. 2015). 13. The available public data from the district statistical handbooks is often not updated, as evident here (the total population and Muslim population data remains unchanged between 2001 and 2003). Subsequent handbooks until 2011 use the same 2003 data. 14. Interview, 9th April 2017, Aatghora, Rajarhat. 15. Interview, 10th April 2017, Tarulia, Rajarhat. 16. Interview, 20th April 2017, Patharghata, Rajarhat. 17. Interviews, 20th and 21st April, Patharghata, Tarulia, and Mahishbathan, Rajarhat.

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18. Interview, 20th April 2017, Patharghata, Rajarhat. 19. It is also possible to add the term gorib-lok, which means the economically poor, to this terminology. The bhadralok can be a gorib-lok as well (although rarely), but is likely to be looked upon sympathetically owing to his social/cultural capital. The borolok is not poor, but is looked upon suspiciously for having progressed in class terms despite coming from a lower social stratum. And it is almost natural for the chhotolok to also remain a gorib-lok owing to his low- caste. However, out of all the terms, gorib-lok is an expression of class-relations alone, while the rest are indicative of either caste-status (chhotolok) or both (bhadralok and borolok). Hence the focus is on the tripartite terminology. 20. Interview, 30th April 2017, Rajarhat. 21. Interview, 1st May 2017, Aatghora, Rajarhat. 22. Interview, 1st May 2017, Mahishbathan, Rajarhat. 23. Interview, 22nd April 2017, Patharghata, Rajarhat.

ABSTRACTS

This paper explores the political churnings around an almost twenty-year-old process of land acquisition and development in Rajarhat, an erstwhile rural settlement in the Indian state of West Bengal. The narrative takes shape against the backdrop of a neo-liberal state in the global South acting as a corporate facilitator, the concomitant dispossession, and particularly the transformation of the villages and rural livelihoods. The paper tries to trace the nature of this transformation by mapping the socio-economic changes on the one hand, and the reinvention of traditional caste-based social hierarchies brought about by such changes on the other, and highlights the formation of “syndicates” (low-level cartels) in the area as a unique manifestation of the latter. Such developments, the paper argues, symbolize a qualitative shift in rural social relations, brought about by rapid urbanization in neoliberal India.

INDEX

Keywords: Rajarhat, West Bengal, CPIM, caste, displacement, syndicate

AUTHOR

RITANJAN DAS Business and Law Department, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom

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Organized Peasant Resistance in Fiction: The Sword and The Sickle and The Lives of Others

Angela Eyre

1 Mulk Raj Anand’s novel The Sword and The Sickle tells the story of the rise of a peasant movement in Oudh in U.P. in 1920–21. It was published in 1942 in London while Anand was living in Britain and campaigning for India to be given independence. Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others was published in Delhi, London and New York in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize the same year. The Naxalite insurgency in Bengal in 1967–1970 forms one of its two core narratives. Both novels, therefore, brought a regional Indian peasant agitation to an English-speaking metropolitan readership. Through their literary strategies, both texts connect the local situation to broader national and international influences and also relate a story set in the past to the present in which they were written and published. These multiple layers, not surprisingly, mean that the question of “who speaks for the village?” is mediated by the reader and the framework they apply.

2 This article considers reviews of the novels written just after publication to examine the way in which they were sometimes read through their international frames; the relationship between colonial India and Britain in the case of The Sword and The Sickle and discourses around terrorism in the case of The Lives of Others. These readings obscured some aspects of the peasant narratives and this article aims to make these more visible. I use comparison as a critical approach to the novels and combine this with an examination of the historical context in order to focus on the representation of the local economic and political problems faced by the peasants. This article views these novels as part of a line of Indian fiction about agrarian problems, which I have explored in more detail elsewhere (Eyre 2005). While the problems represented in this line of fiction vary across regions (depending on the system of land tenure) and the status of the peasant (tenant-farmer, sharecropper, landless laborer and so on) debt, insecurity of tenure and exploitation by landlords are common and the novels raise questions about what can be done to improve conditions. In doing so they draw on

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discourses which Meenakshi Mukherjee has identified as being part of the nationalist movement, including “Gandhian ideology” and those associated with leftist, terrorist, and revolutionary parties (2005:42–3). In agrarian narratives, these discourses have taken the form of the Gandhian ideal of landowners having a change of heart (as happens in the surprise ending of Renu’s Maila anchal) and “leftist” legislative reform such as the abolition of the zamindari system under Nehru’s first government (which forms part of the narrative of Seth’s A Suitable Boy). What distinguishes Anand and Mukherjee’s novels is that they depict historical, organized movements of rebellion (the founding of a kisan sabha and the spread of the Naxalite movement) and place these in relation to the international context. The mobilization of subalterns in rebellion presents specific challenges of literary representation and also of interpretation and these are explored in this article.

3 Recent scholarship on Anand has advanced our understanding of the way in which he was writing in multiple contexts (Bluemel 2004; Nasta 2012; Ranasinha 2010), while Tickell’s identification of “a three-way debate” in some of Anand’s short stories “between metropolitan left-liberalism, Gandhian subaltern politics and a more pointed critique of colonial state-terror and its revolutionary nationalist counterpart” (2013:217) provides a focus which can also be used to analyze the discourses in The Sword and The Sickle. I am indebted to these approaches and draw on them to examine the intersection of the multiple contexts within which peasant resistance is represented. Reviews of Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others did not place it within the long history of agrarian novels and the range of discourses outlined above, although some reviews related it to other recent “Naxalite” novels. By comparing these two novels, the distinctiveness of the peasants’ struggles is brought to the fore, and the fictionalized voices of those speaking for the peasant are heard a little more clearly.

4 The Sword and the Sickle is the third part of a trilogy featuring the protagonist Lalu Singh who is from a Punjabi peasant family. It makes use of the account found in Nehru’s Autobiography (1936) of a movement which included the founding of a kisan sabha, or farmers’ union (Cowasjee 1977:116). In his autobiography, Nehru emphasizes the way the peasants and Congress began to work together and the way in which Congress influenced the peasants: Especially powerful was the influence of Congress in favor of peace, for the new creed of nonviolence was stressed wherever the Congress worker went…it did prevent the peasantry taking to violence. (P. 61) Anand published his own non-fiction account of the movement in Letters on India (hereafter Letters). The significant differences between the two non-fiction versions on the one hand and The Sword and The Sickle on the other illuminate the strategies used in the novel.

5 Through its characters the novel debates various means of improving the conditions of peasants. Returning home from World War I, Lalu discovers his land has been sold off to the landlord and so he joins the kisan sabha movement in U.P. which is led by an erstwhile zamindar (landlord) who has become a peasant leader. A peasant, Sukhua, has been evicted from his land and another has died while doing begar, or forced labor. Lalu becomes involved, learns to give speeches at rallies, tries to interest Gandhi and Nehru in the problems of the peasants, and is present when the kisan sabha is founded and when a court case against a peasant is thrown out after the peasants demonstrate. This apparent triumph, however, turns to disaster at the end of the novel when the zamindar

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leaves the peasants to go and plead with the authorities against his internment; the peasants follow and are shot and Lalu is imprisoned.

6 The first two chapters of the novel frame this narrative with the story of how Lalu, who fought for the British in the trenches, returns home expecting to receive a gift of land and a pension as a reward, but is dismissed without them. There are parallels with India’s position in 1939 when it was declared a belligerent by the British without consultation and with only a promise of talks on its status after the war (Chandra 1989:448–49). The broken promise to Lalu, therefore, becomes a warning of what might happen after the end of the Second World War, and the plot of land not given to Lalu becomes a symbol of the land of India.

7 Some reviews of The Sword and The Sickle written at the time it was published mention the peasant agitation, but largely ignore the injustices which have led to it. Kate O’Brien in The Spectator was sympathetic to the peasants but saw moral weaknesses as the cause of their poverty: We get a picture of desperate poverty and of its relation to…traditional spiritual states –pride, hopelessness, humour, rancor, laziness and mystical detachment. (1942:20) The review in the London Illustrated News recognized economic exploitation but did not mention the link to imperialism: The Oppressions are plain enough; the country folk are miserable beyond words, squeezed by the landlord and the money-lender, enslaved by debt, bullied and blackmailed by all the tyrants at every turn. (Kennedy 1942:562) Edwin Muir in The Listener discussed how Lalu loses his land in the opening chapters, but passed over the lack of British reward for his services in the war: Lal Singh returns to his native place at the end of the last war on being released from a German prison camp. He finds that his father’s house and property have been sold up to satisfy a money-lender and he sets out for Oudh. (1942:602)1 It is possible that reluctance to criticize Britain’s rule of India during the war led reviewers to omit to mention imperialism’s role in the novel.

8 To understand this further we need to look in more detail at Anand’s position as a public intellectual, his demands for independence, and Britain’s vulnerability during the war. Anand wrote The Sword and The Sickle between July 1940 and January 1941 (the dates are written underneath the last line of the novel). In March 1941 he declined to work on BBC propaganda broadcasts for India which encouraged participation in the British war effort. He refused because he questioned “the morality of a government which could ostensibly wage a war against fascism in Europe whilst imprisoning Congress leaders and restricting freedoms in India” (Nasta 2011:14) and was disillusioned with “the British government’s evasion of the question of India’s independence promised before the war” (Ranasinha 2010:65). By June 1941, however, as Anand states in Letters (1942), his perspective shifted after Russia joined with England in the war against Hitler (p. 6), while in January 1942 the threat to India itself increased as the Japanese reached its borders. So, in February 1942, Anand finally agreed to broadcast for the BBC alongside George Orwell (Nasta 2011:15). In early April 1942 Cripps’ offer of new terms to India was rejected and shortly afterwards The Sword and The Sickle was published. Although Anand’s position on helping the British in the war against fascism had changed, his position on independence had not and this is visible in some reactions to his new novel.

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9 Shahani, reviewing it for the Times Literary Supplement, alludes to the link made in the novel between the agrarian problems and British involvement, but finds it regrettable in the context of the War: What is really disagreeable, however, is the spirit of the novel; it tends to create bad blood between Indians and British, which is a bad thing at any time and a dangerous one at this hour [emphasis mine]. (1942:221) The review ends with anxiety about the international situation at the time of publication: it is able to focus on this because of the way the novel links the local peasants’ movement to imperialism and the narrative set in the past to the present. When George Orwell came to Anand’s defense in Horizon in July 1942 he wrote: The rest of the story deals mostly with the peasant movement and the beginnings of the Indian Communist Party…I notice that Mr. Anand has already got himself into trouble by what is wrongly described as his bitterness…though the ultimate objective is to get rid of British rule, it is almost forgotten among the weaknesses and internecine struggles of the revolutionaries themselves…while the world remains in anything like its present shape the central problem of India, its poverty is not soluble. (P. 217) The story of the peasant struggle is here connected to “the beginnings of the Indian Communist Party” (there are communists in the novel, but the beginning of the party is not part of the story). Moreover, Orwell’s prioritization sees the end of imperialism as the “ultimate objective” while the peasants’ movement is of secondary importance and obscures that objective by causing it to be “almost forgotten”. Orwell then turns to the present and the international situation: Is it the case that the Indian anti-British intelligentsia actually wishes to see… Europe a Nazi concentration camp? No, that is not fair either: it is merely that the nationalism of defeated peoples is necessarily revengeful and short-sighted. (P. 218–19) In this review, the struggle of the peasantry against the landlords is all but silenced by the national story of anti-imperialism and the international war against fascism.

10 Orwell’s review was published in July, while Anand’s first letter had been published in Fortnightly the previous month. The book of Letters followed shortly afterwards in September and contained seventeen more letters, including the one on the peasant movement. Comparing the different ways in which the narrative of the movement was mediated by the form of Letters and The Sword and The Sickle helps to clarify an issue which is raised by later critics. Critical appraisals of The Sword and The Sickle began to be published after Independence, when Britain’s reliance on India during the war was no longer an issue, and they consider the peasant movement directly. Several critics, however, see the novel as confused in its handling of its material (Naik 1973; Mukherjee 2005; Gandhi 2003; Rajan quoted in Riemenschneider 2005). Cowasjee (1977) offers one of the most in-depth studies of the representation of the ideological strands which make up the movement and he argues that “it is not Anand who is confused; through Lalu he is showing the confusion in the minds of the Indian people” (p. 124). Cowasjee does not, however, examine the differences between versions of the movement in Letters and The Sword and The Sickle.

11 The account in Letters is succinct and clear: About 1918 a man called Ram Chandra…began to organize the peasants in Oudh into Peasant Unions on the basis of various demands such as restriction of evictions, restriction of forced labor, abolition of fines and illegal exactions. (Anand 1942:60) It stresses the peacefulness of the peasants in line with the ideology of the nationalist leaders: “The peasants had to take a vow that they would remain peaceful, [my emphasis]

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that they would not pay illegal exactions” (p. 60). It also highlights the violent reaction of the Government: Of course, the Government and the landlords were perturbed at this awakening among the peasants…On January 7, 1921, the police opened fire on a crowd of peasants at Munshigang in Rai Barelli. (P. 60) The account continues beyond the police firing to show that the movement had some success: Peasant Unions forced the Government to reconsider rent-revenue legislation. Evictions by notice were stopped, and a new law was promulgated granting tenure for life to the peasants. The reason for this climb-down on the part of the bureaucracy was its fear that the peasants would be affected by Gandhi’s non-co- operation movement. (P. 60–61) In Letters, therefore, there is no conflict between the methods of non-violent Gandhian change, legislative change and the actions of peasants: the peasants adhere to Gandhi’s peaceful means while the British fear of the non-co-operation movement helps to secure legislative change for the peasants. It is possible that Anand considered the presentation of a relatively harmonious relationship between peasants and national leadership—a united front—necessary to support the stated aim of Letters which was to convince British readers of the case for India to be given independence in the middle of the war.

12 The Sword and The Sickle, on the other hand, differentiates between the interests of the nationalist leadership and the peasants and creates a distinct space for peasant concerns. In doing so it might be considered more radical in its representation of the relationship between the peasants and the nationalist leadership than the shorter, non- fiction version in Letters. Bluemel (2004), relating Anand’s writing in the 1940s to the literary context of Bloomsbury and British left wing circles, argues that the “revolutionary argument” of Anand’s novels is constrained in a way that his non- fiction is not and that the novels’ “ability to challenge the norms of dominant, hierarchical English and Indian cultures in the interests of promoting more egalitarian social relations” is partly circumscribed by Anand’s use of Modernist techniques in them (p. 81). While I agree with much of Bluemel’s argument about The Sword and The Sickle, I consider the representation of a distinct peasant struggle to be an exception to it.

13 The Sword and The Sickle includes discourses which debate the ideologies of change through legislation and non-violent resistance. The novel appears to be arguing directly with Nehru. In his autobiography Nehru comments, “[T]he Indian kisans have little staying power, little energy to resist for long” (1942:64). Lalu questions this statement using Nehru’s own vocabulary: “[T]here seemed to be a strong enough resistance, the power for ceaseless activity even through dire agony and suffering. Who said that they had no staying power?” (Anand 1942:200). No character in the novel has made this comment about “staying power,” so the question seems to be directed out beyond the covers of the novel at the nationalist leadership.

14 It also represents the peasants as having separate desires to Congress, which wanted the peasants’ help to achieve its demands, but would not back their economic demands or their fight against the zamindars (Kumar 2011:46). The first way in which the novel puts distance between the peasants and nationalist discourse is through the absence of legislative progress. The Sword and The Sickle, unlike Letters, omits to record the Oudh movement’s success in giving rise to new legislation. Nehru, in his autobiography,

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records that the British legislation which came in the wake of the movement “sounded attractive to [the peasant] but as he found out subsequently, his lot [was] in no way better” (1942:64). The Sword and The Sickle raises the question of whether legislation in an independent India will necessarily improve the lot of the peasant any more effectively. The communist character Sarshar warns Lalu that when the British go there will be “a mere change of names and labels!…I believe they will use the…same regulations by which they are put in gaols, to suppress those whom they don’t like” (p. 316). This is a vision of the future which, in The Lives of Others, has come to pass.

15 The Sword and The Sickle introduces Gandhi into the narrative in an apparently invented episode, since according to the account in Nehru’s Autobiography and in Letters, Gandhi was not part of the events in Oudh. The circumstances in which Gandhi is introduced place the involuntary suffering of the peasants against the ideology of non-violent resistance and provides a critique of Gandhi’s ideology. A young peasant, Chandra, dies after refusing to carry out forced labor while ill. In order to bring the episode to the attention of Congress leaders, Chandra’s corpse is carried to Allahabad, but the corpse is mauled by the landlord’s dogs and one of the peasants is shot dead. The descriptions emphasize the grotesque physical nature of the violence: Lalu bent down and strained to lever the dead bodies with trembling hands. A sharp odour of decomposing flesh shot up to his nostrils from Chandra’s body, while his hands were smeared with blood from Nandu’s neck. (P. 175) Coming after this episode, the words given to Gandhi in conversation with Lalu seem incongruously abstract: “even if they were ill-treated, non-violent volunteers should be able to withstand the suffering and then exert their wills by passive disobedience” (p. 196). In addition, the character of Gandhi appears to deny the peasants their own concerns when he says, “not the airing of the grievances of the ryots but the invocation of revolution against the landlords is violence” (p. 196). Later on in the narrative, the kisan sabha is launched and the peasants take the vows discussed above. In a significant change to the version in Letters, there is no vow to be non-violent (p. 254).

16 Anand’s representation of the peasant struggle does not align with the ideologies of the nationalist leaders and because of this the peasants themselves are given some agency and express ideas which are not completely in line with those of their leaders, interpreting them on their own terms. Anand thus addresses a phenomenon described fifty years later by Chatterjee (after Guha)(1995) in The Nation and Its Fragments that peasants made sense of “the hitherto unknown world of nationalist agitation” by translating “the discursive forms of modern bourgeois politics…into their own codes” (p. 160). The leaders have explained to the peasants the connection between the landlords and the British “sarkar” (government) which they aim to change in the future: Behind the manager of the Rajgarh estate stands the Court of Wards, with the head of the District as the President? Don’t you realize that behind the Deputy Collector… stands the Omnipotent Sarkar, the chief arbiter of our fates? (P. 215) The peasants interpret this by flouting the law in the present – they refuse to pay for train tickets (for which they are later rebuked for indiscipline by the leaders). One of them tells the station master, “Go, go, the old days of Sarkari Raj have gone, now it is peasant Raj, exactly as it is in Roos [Russia]” (p. 305). On the one hand the naivety of the statement that British rule has already ended and that peasants rule in its place produces comedy, but on the other it demonstrates how radical the peasants are in their vision of a truly revolutionary change: “There will be no master and servant! So

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said that Razwi Sahib. They are going to put an end to this Sarkar” (p. 308–9). The peasants do not instigate the rebellion, but they debate the ideas of its leaders and they do so in an idiom which the novel creates for them.

17 Secondly, violence as a possible means of action is discussed by the peasants: “‘When we have killed all the landlords, brother Lal Singh,’ asked Mithu, ’shall we all become landlords in our own right?’” (p. 330–31). Lalu is said to be depressed at first by this sentiment, but then realizes that “through this campaign…the peasants seemed to be throwing off their abjectness and fear and speaking their minds freely” (p. 331). This has parallels in The Lives of Others. Through Lalu’s thoughts, Anand’s novel observes a process which was theorized decades later by Fanon in the anti-colonial context: “violence … frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction” (2001:74). In the novel, the dialogue about violence creates peasant characters able to envisage their own future (as landlords) in a way which is independent of the ideology of their leaders. What adds to the sense of confusion around the issue of violence is that despite the talk, the only violent action by the peasants is the accidental death of one old peasant in a fight with another, and a slap given to a zamindar because he attacked Lalu’s wife. The dialogue and the events combined fall between Gandhi’s fears of violence on the one hand and the idea of a revolution in which Russia is mentioned as a model on the other. The fictional space created includes some tolerance of lawlessness and violence, or talk of violence, on the part of the peasantry, if that is the price for removing their passivity and enabling a truly mass movement.

18 The final image of the peasants in the novel, however, is as victims of violence when they run across the river towards Lalu, not heeding the soldiers and being shot at and killed. Unlike the account in Letters, the novel ends just after the shooting with the imprisonment of Lalu. The movement therefore ends in failure, though with Lalu vowing to carry on the struggle. Bluemel (2004) argues that none of Anand’s downtrodden heroes “is able to envision a less oppressive, post-imperial future for himself or India” (p. 71). In The Sword and The Sickle, Lalu’s vision of the future while he is in prison at the end of the novel is indeed vague: “Now is the time to change the world, to fight for Life and happiness” (Anand: 1942:366). It does not come to a conclusion about the various ideological strands in the novel. Although Lalu mentions revolution: “Revolution is a need of togetherness, Comrade, the need to curb malice among men, the need for men to stand together as brothers” (p. 367), this is not a specific program for a Russian-inspired revolution, given its description as something which aspires to “curb malice”.

19 There is some justification for critics’ comments about the novel being confusing. However, perhaps some of the sense of confusion arises because the peasants never completely align with any of the main ideological threads in the novel as some critics expected them to (Orwell elides the peasant movement with Communism, as mentioned above, and Leela Gandhi (2003) with Gandhism (p. 178)). Rather than looking for absolute ideological alignment, Tickell (2013) provides a way to think about strategies in some of Anand’s short stories which is also useful for analyzing The Sword and The Sickle. He states that “Anand’s literary project is to re-envisage the parameters of a liberal-humanism by conveying the desperate pressure of marginalization or injustice” (p. 227). The Sword and The Sickle can be read for the way its literary

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techniques “re-envisage the parameters” of colonial and nationalist discourse in the representation of local peasant demands and an embryonic movement finding its way.

20 The Lives of Others is a contrast to The Sword and The Sickle in the way it is structured. Anand’s long novel is divided into only eight chapters and the strands I have discussed are not reflected in the layout of the text. The Lives of Others, on the other hand, highlights the relationship of past to present through structural means: a prologue, main section and epilogue. Its main section is divided into two threads: one tells the story of three generations of the bourgeois Ghosh family in Calcutta; the other consists of letters from Supratik, one of the grandsons in the Ghosh family, who has become involved with the “Naxalite” insurgency. In addition, its descriptions of the degradation of the peasant and the violence of revolutionary movements are plentiful and visceral. It was published in India as well as the UK and the US and was therefore aimed at a readership knowledgeable about the Naxalites as well as one which may not have previously heard of them.

21 While Anand’s novel opens up a space for peasant interests, Mukherjee’s strategy in the Naxalite thread of The Lives of Others is, in contrast, to narrow the options of the peasant to “nothing” in order to represent a social situation in which even the hope of change has gone: In the past there was hunger in them, hunger and hope and end of hope and pain, and perhaps even a puzzled resentment, a kind of muted accusation, but now there is nothing, a slow, beyond-the-end nothing. (2014:2) This “nothing” precipitates the action in the shocking prologue: a farmer, Nitai, who is starving, begs for help from his landlord but is turned away and returns home, weakened by hunger, apparently to starve inevitably and slowly to death. On reaching his family he kills his wife and children and then himself. The killings and suicide are vividly and brutally described. As with the description of Chandra’s death in The Sword and The Sickle, this opening seems to place the reader in extreme and exceptional territory which complicates moral questions. Nitai’s actions may fit the description of mercy killings, except that the terror of each of his victims as they try to evade him is also described, suggesting these are murders. The reader may ponder how culpable Nitai is for what he does, or whether the landlord is a killer. The death of Nitai primes the reader to be open to Supratik’s views that this is moral territory in which “normal” democratic solutions are not applicable.

22 This is the first of the literary strategies employed by Mukherjee to funnel the reader into a position in which they may be willing to consider whether, in certain conditions, revolutionary violence may be legitimate. It is a position which Malreddy identifies as part of the premise of Arundhati Roy’s (2012) non-fiction account of twenty-first century Naxalites, Walking with the Comrades. He argues that in her text, “the Naxalite insurgency is legitimized as a sovereign struggle for authentic nationalism by depicting the existing sovereignty as morally illegitimate” (2016:223). Shah (2018) too, in a review of non-fiction literature on the current Naxalite conflict writes of a work whose proposition is: That under certain conditions, revolutionary violence is legitimate. The question, then, is whether revolutionary violence is justifiable in the contemporary Indian context (a question which requires an analysis of the Indian state) and, if so, whether the Naxal violence, in particular, is legitimate. (P. 265)

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Mukherjee’s novel creates a fictional experience in which the reader may be prepared to suspend a liberal humanist condemnation of violence and consider it potentially legitimate.

23 This is done in a variety of ways. In the main part of the novel, Supratik and two comrades go to live in a village to work alongside the farmers and foment revolution. Supratik’s admiration for the peasants’ work in the fields is an important part of their depiction. In a novel in which bodies are often reduced to parts (eyeballs, finger nails, blood or excrement), causing reactions of disgust or squeamishness in the reader, the bodies of the peasants as they work are at times, by contrast, presented as whole and attractive. While ploughing, Supratik finds the sun unbearable and notices his peasant host Kanu’s body: “Where did this beaten physique, as if something carved in oily dark stone, come from if all he and his kind got to eat was chhatu and rice and puffed rice once, maybe twice, a day (Mukherjee 2014:194)?”

24 Supratik and his companions work alongside the villagers during successive seasons of ploughing, sowing and harvesting. The farmers’ skill is emphasized by comparison with Supratik who is unable to manage ploughing on his own or to help transplant the rice seedlings (p. 217). They advanced with the choreographed grace and rigour of dancers, leaving me behind, standing alone, the bad student who couldn’t master the movements. How did they do it? …Even that flinging backwards of the sheaves—even that required the mastery of a trick, a particular motion of the hand and wrist so that the sticks all fell with their bases aligned to the bases of the others already harvested. (P. 144– 45) It is central to the effect of the narrative that the peasants’ labor is represented as skilled and based on knowledge beyond the grasp of the bourgeois student, and that the peasants are represented as hardworking and tough; like oily stone. The description of their work might lead the reader to expect that the fruits of the labor would produce enough food for them, but this is not the case. Supratik’s letters make clear that this is not a time of drought; there is no natural reason for their hunger. Instead the letters create a picture of the exploitative economic system: “the bullocks belong to the landlord, as the seedlings, later, will too, so Kanu will get only 20 per cent of the crop produced” (p. 195). In an interview, Mukherjee (2014a) commented on the importance of work to the novel: Work defines our loves and our place in the world. I wanted to depict this base, the triangulation of labor, capital and output/income, if you will…The lives of rice- farmers and labourers [rests on] selling their labor. (P. 3) The language used in Supratik’s letters represents him as ideologically driven in relation to the problems of farmers before he even leaves Calcutta and this may distance the reader from him. The descriptions of the farmers’ work once he arrives in the village, on the other hand, are persuasive in showing that the problem is not with their work, but in the system of “output/income” and that any hope must therefore come from economic change.

25 Early on in The Lives of Others, however, all of the methods of effecting a change in the economic system which had given rise to hope in earlier novels about agrarian relations are excluded as possible sources of transformation. The end of British rule, which was a source of hope for the future in The Sword and The Sickle, has taken place and universal suffrage and the legislative abolition of the zamindari system, which generated some optimism in Vikram Seth’s (1993) A Suitable Boy (set in 1951–52), has

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also occurred, but none of these have changed conditions for the farmers. Supratik’s third letter records a farmer telling him: We used to be told that the sahebs are sucking our blood dry, the sahebs are taking our land away…but the sahebs have long gone now, why are things still the same?… [T]he bloodsuckers are still there, their skin colour has changed. That’s the only thing that has happened. (P. 98) The same farmer says that universal suffrage has not helped, because the farmers vote for “whoever the village head man asks them to cast their vote for” (p. 97), nor has legislation to abolish zamindari and strengthen tenancy rights because landlords exploit loopholes and use threats: Under the Land Tenure Act, Mukunda was eligible for occupancy…[but] the jotedaar gave Mukunda a choice: if Mukunda wanted to register as a tenant, he would be evicted immediately.” (P. 98) When asked about his novel in relation to A Suitable Boy, Mukherjee stated, “[I]t’s 16 years after the land reform acts and nothing has changed” (Adams and Mukherjee 2014). In The Lives of Others, it is not only hope for democratic and legislative change but also disillusionment with it which lies in the past, in the novel’s pre-history. The hopes which had been placed in independence, democracy and legislative change are presented as illusory and long gone: therefore, they are no longer available as a continued source of hope in this novel.

26 The reader’s willingness to contemplate revolutionary violence is furthered by the way violence is introduced carefully into the novel through reports of its transformative results in other villages: “class uprisings were happening throughout the country, peasants were snatching their land and crops back from landowners, shaking off the yokes of their slavery” (Mukherjee 2014:174). The plot is structured so that it is not until the tenth letter that the reader encounters a description of violence carried out by the protagonist, Supratik, and his comrades. By this point in the novel, the misery of the peasants has accumulated in the reader’s mind and the reader is perhaps less likely to be alienated from Supratik by the killing, particularly as it is presented as the way to prevent the deaths of a family who have been cheated out of their land, and are close to starvation. The landlord’s role in the family’s suffering is so direct that his murder can be seen partly as a sort of pre-emptive defense. The next murder carried out by Supratik is of the man responsible for Nitai’s death and, unexpectedly, the farmers join and help with it. Murder is given added legitimacy because, in Supratik’s account, it lifts some of the despair of the farmers: “They seem more…more daring, less cowed by the people who’ve been sucking their blood for centuries” (p. 305). In The Sword and The Sickle, the peasants merely talk of violence; here they enact it. In both novels, however, the expression of violence leads to the hope that the farmers are losing their passive fatalism. This hope is short-lived because the farmers with whom Supratik and his comrades have been staying are taken to jail while Supratik escapes to the forest. The third and final action in the village sees the violence escalate as the police are armed and the Naxalites use hand grenades. After the thirteenth letter, which is Supratik’s last, he returns to Calcutta and it becomes apparent that he is involved in campaigns to bomb the city.

27 The reader’s readiness to contemplate violence as legitimate in certain circumstances is thus complicated by the plot’s intensification of violence. If the reader feels that the bombing is illegitimate but the murder of the landlord was not, this may prompt them to consider the grounds on which they can make this sort of distinction. If, on the other

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hand, they consider that all killing is illegitimate, then they are effectively taking up a position which means that the tenant whom the landlord was causing to starve to death should have been allowed to die through slow violence. The legitimacy or illegitimacy of violence is therefore not a settled question.

28 Questions around hopes for change and the legitimacy of revolution are raised again in the epilogue, dated 2012. The protagonists are a group of peasant farmers and Adivasi (tribal people) who have been evicted from their land and who join a modern day Naxalite group. The epilogue repeats some of the language of the prologue; the leader Sabita chooses “people who are nothing too, whose lives are nothing, who have nothing. No recourse to any form of redress or justice” (p. 501). This creates a bleak certainty that nothing has changed. The temporal structure of the novel and the repetitions in the prologue, main narrative and epilogue, embody the cyclical nature of the desperation and violence. The circles are ever-widening: the life of one peasant family in the prologue, several villages in the main section, and the whole of India in the epilogue. The historical narrative is connected, partly through the structure, to the present of the novel’s publication. Although the prologue is dated “May 1966,” it is told in the present tense. In addition, the manner of Nitai’s suicide, by drinking insecticide, has resonance for the twenty-first century, linking his agony to an “epidemic” of farmers committing suicide by taking pesticide in the last two decades. As a recent study suggests, this problem is partly caused by farmers being increasingly at “the mercy of global economics” (Kennedy 2014). In the epilogue farmers and Adivasi are subject to eviction because of mining; the beneficiaries of their eviction in the present decade are global mining companies. The relationship between the national and the global is questioned by Sabita. “Is it true of everywhere in the world that some people are just fodder. Or has their country taken a wrong turning. She does not know” (Mukherjee 2014:503). The Lives of Others, set 50 years ago, raises questions about the present and the effect of the liberalization of the Indian economy and globalization on Indian farmers and others who live off the land.

29 The majority of the reviews of The Lives of Others discussed the peasant narrative. However, as with reviews of The Sword and The Sickle, some more or less ignored it. For some reviewers it was the Calcutta-based bourgeois narrative which was the dominant one: Brinda Bose (2014) writes that it is “a trifle surprising to me that commentators are consistently reading The Lives of Others primarily as a tale about the ‘us’ of the novel, settling deep among its domestic paraphernalia while passing relatively lightly over the interjected epistolary sections that make up its vital ‘other’ half” (p. 8). This may be because, as several reviewers have commented, the bourgeois narrative is familiar from Indian novels in English and European domestic novels. Patrick Gale (2014) for instance, describes The Lives of Others’ depiction of a dynasty in terms of Galsworthy and Mann. (Gale argues for the importance of the Naxalite strand but does not analyze it in any detail). A.S. Byatt (2014) ignores the peasant narrative almost completely. It would seem that the attention of these reviewers is drawn to the domestic saga at the expense of the novel’s voicing of peasant grievances.

30 Discussions about the peasant half of the narrative tend to focus on the interpretation of The Lives of Others’ violence and in particular the novel’s ending and these will be the subject of the rest of this article. The violence, which has increased in severity over the duration of the novel, intensifies again in the final pages. Sabita uses a technique attributed to Supratik to remove fishplates in order to derail a train. There is little

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chance that sabotage will fail since groups are taking out many fishplates along the same stretch of track. The next train to come along the line, as we are told in the very last line of the novel, will be carrying approximately 1,500 people (p.505). While a focus on the violence is understandable given its prominence in the novel, it also obscures some parts of the novel’s representation of the peasant. Some articles expressed the view that while the novel does not shy away from representing the violence of Maoist killings, the epilogue, with its combination of sympathy for the revolutionary Sabita and the violence she is working to bring about, implicitly endorses violence in these exceptional circumstances (Ghosh 2014; Wessels 2017). Shah (2018) argues that the ending depicts the Naxalites as “ritualistic killers” (p. 279).

31 Gorman-DaRiff (2017) reads the ending through the global war on terror, partly because of the mass targeting of civilians in a train in the novel’s ending. She argues that although the novel contextualizes the violence of the Maoists, the epilogue and Mukherjee’s “decision to have Sabita target the civilian population…generates the desire and demand for police protection even in its most excessive and extra-legal forms”. She continues: Despite the work of the novel to engage with the long history of exceptional and excessive state violence, and to frame contemporary terrorism as response rather than cause, the ending demands and justifies the euphemistic “security” apparatus of state which has been normalised in the war on terror. (P. 124) Police violence, in other words, is legitimized.

32 A few reviews see the novel as ambivalent to the end: Bose (2014) writes of “the complex rendering of the youthful urban political rebel and the sometimes suicidal, sometimes genocidal movement that swallows him up in Calcutta” and ends by assessing the novel as aspiring to “a novel of the political dialectic” (p. 9). Hirsh Sawhney (2014) places Mukherjee next to Arundhati Roy and Mahasweta Devi and argues that Mukherjee “attempts to inject more complexity into these issues” than they had done (p. 12). He writes that the novel “invites sympathy for characters who embrace violent ideologies as a result of injustice without ever vindicating the horrific violence they commit” (p. 12). The idea that the ending is ambivalent is supported by the uncertain symbolism of Supratik’s name. Supratik’s comrade tells him that some of the farmers in the Maoist movement have inadvertently shortened his name to “‘Pratik:’ ‘from auspicious symbol’ to ‘symbol’ only. “Who wants to be auspicious? Bloody cant of the bourgeois ****ers!’” (Mukherjee 2014:144). In the epilogue, as Sabita gets ready to remove the fishplates, she recalls that the method has been passed down from “a man known as Pratik-da” who “lived on in his bequest” (Mukherjee 2014:504). It is up to the reader to decide what this bequest is a symbol of: resistance or terrorism.

33 Two reviews published in India engage most closely with the political implications of the structure of the novel. Bose (2014) writes that Mukherjee: Pulls the old and tested form of the bourgeois realist novel out to scrutiny, and does a dialectical turn on it. He produces…a realist domestic novel that transforms into a political novel with the help on another aged fictional form, the epistolary. (P.8) The cyclical structure produces an effect of despair, but the two contrasting geographical settings produce a dialectical effect. The chapters about the peasants are alternated with chapters about the bourgeois Ghosh family. The question of the family’s relationship to those “others” who are peasants is indirect since they are not rural landlords. Nevertheless, the structure of the novel connects them:

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The difficult harvest cycles of the landless wage-labourer Kanu…provides the counterpoint which demystifies the “big” problem of the ailing business of the Ghoshes’ Paper Mills. The Ghoshes’ world is seen for what it is precisely by making us see another world through Supratik’s “epistles.” (Katyal 2014) Although the cycle of despair described in the rural setting might create a feeling of hopeless passivity, when the rural narrative is combined with the bourgeois narrative, it has an active role in raising questions about the relationship between the two.

34 The way in which the ending is read depends partly on whether either narrative is seen as dominant and if so which one. Dominance determines who the “others” of the novel’s title are. The reader’s familiarity with the “us” of the bourgeois narrative may cause them to place themselves within the bourgeois world. From this position, the Naxalite violence is a threat and an ineffective violation of liberal values. However, it is the peasant section with which the novel begins and ends. As Katyal (2014) argues, after the prologue, “you can only hurtle forth searching for ways in which one can make sense of the world in which Nitai Das had to kill himself and his own." Seen from this perspective, the Ghosh family members are “others” whose unsympathetic depiction characterizes them as materialistic, while a reader may seek to make sense of the way in which their riches, however indirectly, are founded on the exploitation of Nitai and his fellow peasants. The peasant narrative thus acts as a critique of the bourgeois one. The combination of the cyclical structure and the dialectic one produces ambivalence.

35 One reading of The Lives of Others is that it does not take sides in the conflict between revolutionary violence and state repressions. This is in contrast to most writings on Naxalites which Shah (2018) comments: “were divided between the mass who were radically opposed to them and those who tried to counter that position” (p. 254). It is also unlike those fictions which Malreddy (2016) argues display “enchanted solidarity” and which portray the insurgency as “a redemptive, derivative yet alternative ideology to the state’s systemic violence” (p. 220). Avoiding contributing to polarized views is, however, very difficult, not only because of the divisions about Naxalites, but also because it is perhaps inevitable, as Gorman-DaRiff’s (2017) article shows, that the novel will be read in the light of post-9/11 terrorism. In an article on Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, whose protagonist may either be a terrorist, or wrongly suspected as being a terrorist, Hai (2017) argues that the ending is open and remains ambiguous and that this is, “a deliberate strategy on Hamid’s part, designed to mirror back to readers their own predispositions…In this way, the novel could work as a way for readers to see and become aware of their own preconceptions.” However, she concludes, “the novel runs the very high risk of simply reaffirming those pre-existing prejudices” (Hai 2017). It may be that Mukherjee’s novel has run the same risk and fallen foul of it. Even with the novel’s generic toolkit for creating ambivalence, the beliefs readers bring to the novel, as Hai (2017) argues, can undermine attempts to create ambiguity.

36 Read as ambiguous, however, the ending of The Lives of Others does not condone violence, but rather lays bare its escalation and removes it as a potential solution to the problems of injustice, just as the novel had earlier excluded all liberal democratic solutions. The reader is caught wriggling on a hook between the horror of what is about to happen when the train comes and the apparent lack of any alternative means of resistance. The scale of the killing involved repulses even the reader who has been prepared to contemplate the murder of an exploitative landlord as justified in exceptional circumstances. Shah’s (2018) work of anthropology avoids the polarization

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identified above by showing the sheer range of approaches, motivation, personalities, shifting relationships and membership of the Maoist movement. Mukherjee’s (2014) method is a contrast to Shah’s (2018) as he narrows his protagonists’ options. The Lives of Others does not depict collective social change: as discussed above, this has been ruled out in the early part of the novel. In contrast also to Roy’s (2012) Walking With the Comrades—which ends with a sentence about an insurgent who is, “[m]arching, not just for herself but to keep hope alive for all of us” (p. 146)—the ending of Mukherjee’s novel cannot be read as hopeful. Instead, the reader encounters a deliberate narrative blocking: neither the scale of violence nor state repression will solve the problems of the peasants. The representation of the futility of violence induces despair but also anger, which causes the reader to look outside the rural narrative and reassess the bourgeois narrative.

37 As Patrick Gale (2014) argues, the novel is, “a graphic reminder that the bourgeois Indian culture western readers so readily idealize is sustained at terrible human cost.” By connecting the Maoist movement to the global “war on terror,” the novel perhaps suggests that it is not just bourgeois Indian culture which is sustained in this way, but global culture, the culture of the reader in London and New York too. Mukherjee (2014b) commented: Could the novel have its moral imperative returned to it? Now that we have been bludgeoned into quiescence in these late-capitalist times by that most amoral of all entities, the free-market, that imperative seems more urgent, more political than ever. (P. 3) The peasants in The Lives of Others have no access to the free market, nor is it likely that by derailing a train they will affect the lives of those investing in, or indirectly benefitting from, global mining. If Mukherjee’s (2014) novel is meant to be radically ambivalent to encourage the reader to question the “triangulation of labor, capital and output/income…over which the structure of our lives, as individuals, families and social classes, are constructed” (2014a:3) then the place of the rice farmers and laborers who sell their labor within that structure is not something the majority of reviews have picked up on.

38 Like The Sword and The Sickle, The Lives of Others places the local peasant movement within a national and international economic order as part of its analysis of the causes of peasant poverty. Both novels connect a historical movement to the present in which they were written and in doing so make a local movement relevant to an international readership. In The Sword and the Sickle the peasants form part of the argument against the imperialist exploitation of India, but they are also represented as distinct from the nationalist leadership which will govern in the future, only five years after the novel is published. In The Lives of Others, the exploitation of the peasant highlights the effects of economic liberalization in India and the reach of a globalized economy. Each novel, however, uses literary strategies which allow for readings which focus on the national and international at the expense of the local, or which read the local through a polarized debate about “war”.

39 A comparison of the two novels refocuses attention on the peasants; their participation in organized rebellion and the way in which revolutionary violence or talk of it begins to remove their passivity. The Sword and The Sickle ends in hope that “a real Revolution” can be brought about, as long as colonial systems which ignore distinct peasant concerns are not replicated by an independent national government when it takes power. The Lives of Others begins and ends in despair: independence is represented as

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having changed nothing and the global economic order as equally as exploitative as the colonial one. However, in addition to generating despair in the reader it also creates feelings of anger which seeks change.

40 In the Sword and The Sickle, talk of violence and an acceptance of its possibility puts pressure on the parameters of liberal humanism set by Gandhian non-violence and legislative changes. In The Lives of Others the violence is enacted, described graphically and on a mass scale and this gives rise to more ambivalence about its use. However, when read alongside The Sword and the Sickle it is also possible to see violence in Mukherjee’s (2014) novel as neither condemned nor endorsed, but used as a strategy for putting pressure on acceptance of the national or global economic order. Like reform and legislation, independence and democracy, violent resistance has not led to change. The question spoken on behalf of the peasant in both of these novels remains: What will? What form can anger at the exploitation of the peasant take? How can hope generated by their spirit of resistance turn into something more tangible?

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Kennedy, Jonathan. 2014. “New Evidence of Suicide Epidemic Among India’s ‘Marginalised’ Farmers.” Cambridge University. April 17. Retrieved 25 June, 2018 (http://www.cam.ac.uk/ research/news/new-evidence-of-suicide-epidemic-among-indias-marginalised-farmers).

Kumar, Kapil. 2011. “Baba Ram Chandra and Peasant Upsurge in Oudh, 1920–1921.” Pp. 21–49 in Peasants Betrayed: Essay in India’s Colonial History. Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributers.

Malreddy, Pavan Kumar. 2016. “Solidarity, Suffering and ‘Divine Violence’: Fictions of the Naxalite Insurgency.” Pp. 217–33 in South Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations, edited by A. Tickell. London: Palgrave, Macmillan.

Muir, Edwin. 1942. “New Novels.” The Listener. May 7, p. 602. Retrieved July 2, 2018

(https://www.gale.com/intl/c/the-listener-historical-archive).

Mukherjee, Meenakshi. [1971] 2005. The Twice Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English. Delhi: Pencraft International.

Mukherjee, Neel. 2014. The Lives of Others. London: Chatto and Windus.

Mukherjee, Neel. (2014a). “Man Booker Prize: The Six Shortlisted Authors Reveal the Story Behind the Book.” The Guardian. October 10, p. 3.

Mukherjee, Neel. (2014b) “Neel Mukherjee Webchat—As It Happened.” The Guardian, October 13. Retrieved November 1, 2018 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2014/oct/10/booker- webchat-post-your-questions-for-neel-mukherjee).

Nasta, Susheila. 2011. “Sealing a Friendship George Orwell and Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC (1941– 43).” Wasafiri 26:14–18.

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Nasta, Susheila. 2012. “Negotiating a ‘New World Order’: Mulk Raj Anand as Public Intellectual at the Heart of Empire (1924–1945).” Pp. 140–60 in South Asian Resistances in Britain 1858–1947, edited by R. Ahmed and S. Mukherjee. London: Continuum.

Naik, M.K. 1973. Mulk Raj Anand. Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann.

Nehru, Jawaharlal. [1936] 1942. Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru. New York: The John Day Company. Retrieved July 12, 2018 (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli. 2015.98834/page/n5).

O’Brien, Kate, 1942. “Fiction.” The Spectator. April 17, p. 20. Retrieved July 2, 2018

(http://archive.spectator.co.uk).

Orwell, George. 1968. “Review of The Sword and The Sickle by Mulk Raj Anand.” Pp. 216–19 in The Collected Essays of George Orwell, vol. 2, 1940–1943, edited by S. Orwell and I. Angus. London: Secker and Warburg.

Ranasinha, Ruvani. 2010. “South Asian Broadcasters in Britain and the BBC: Talking to India (1941–1943).” South Asian Diaspora. 2(1):57–71.

Riemenschneider, Dieter. 2005. The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse 1934–2004. Jaipur: Rawat Publications.

Renu, Phanishwarnath. [1954] 1997. Maila Anchal. Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan Group.

Roy, Arundhati. 2012 “Walking With the Comrades.” Pp. 37-146 in Broken Republic: Three Essays. London: Penguin.

Sawhney, Hirsh. 2014. “Remaking the Homeland: Neel Mukherjee, The Lives of Others.” New York Times Sunday Book Review. December 28, p. 12. Retrieved June 25 2018

(https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/books/review/the-lives-of-others-by-neel- mukherjee.html).

Seth,Vikram. 1993. A Suitable Boy. London: Phoenix Publishers.

Shah, Alpa. 2018. Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerillas. London: Hurst Publishers.

Shahani, Ranjee Gurdarsing. 1942. ”Novels of the Week." Times Literary Supplement, May 2, p. 221. Retrieved 25 June, 2018 (https://www.gale.com/intl/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical- archive)

Tickell, Alex. 2013. Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830–1947. London: Routledge.

Wessels, Michael. 2017. “Representations of Revolutionary Violence in Recent Indian and South African Fiction.” Journal of Southern African Studies 43(5):1031–47.

NOTES

1. https://www.gale.com/intl/c/the-listener-historical-archive

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ABSTRACTS

Mulk Raj Anand’s The Sword and The Sickle (1942) narrates a historical uprising in Oudh in 1921– 22. Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014) alternates a story about the Naxalite peasant insurgency between 1967 and 1970 with one about a bourgeois family in Calcutta. An epilogue dated 2012 connects the historical movement to present Maoist insurgencies. Through their literary strategies, both texts connect the local situation to broader national and international influences and also relate a story set in the past to the time in which the novels were written and published. These multiple layers mean that the question of “who speaks for the village?” is mediated by the reader and the framework they apply. This article considers reviews of the novels written just after publication to examine the way in which they were sometimes read through their international frames—the relationship between colonial India and Britain in the case of The Sword and The Sickle—and discourses around terrorism in the case of The Lives of Others. These readings obscured some aspects of the narratives of the peasant. A comparison of the two novels brings to the fore the representation of the local economic and political problems faced by the peasants.

INDEX

Keywords: Mulk Raj Anand, Neel Mukherjee, peasant resistance, violence, Naxalite fiction

AUTHOR

ANGELA EYRE Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

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The Politics of Lineage: Caste, Kinship and Land Control in an Agrarian Frontier

Girija Joshi

1 The study of rural India is as old as the study of Indian society itself.1 Over the past half- century, perhaps no concept within South Asian rural history has been more criticized and more frequently revised than that of the “eternal village.” This might be summarized as the view that Indian rural communities have historically been timeless, self-contained units, whose cohesion was preserved over the centuries by rigid (religious) traditions (Srinivas and Shah 1960:1375). Once the dominant trope of rural life in the subcontinent, some fifty years of scholarship have progressively chipped away at much of its foundations. The avenues of criticism chosen by scholars have varied. Some have highlighted the enmeshment of villages in the subcontinent in wider circuits of trade and exchange (for instance, Bayly [1983] 2012; Yang 1998). Others have foregrounded the diverse modes of subsistence and ways of life that constituted the rural in pre-modern South Asia (for instance, Ludden 1994; Bhattacharya 1996; Parasher-Sen 1998; Skaria 1998; Guha 1999; Mayaram 2003). Whether through explicit engagement or by implication, each of these contributions has shown that rather than corresponding to a single, stable type that might be conveniently designated “the Indian village,” rural communities in the subcontinent have historically encompassed an impressive diversity of social, economic and political structures.

2 A third avenue of investigation has been to take a critical look at the social and cultural institutions that were once presumed to have served as the gatekeepers of the village community, to explore just how stable these in fact were. This approach has reaped rich analytical gains, bringing into relief the untenability of what might be termed a “tradition-centric” approach to the sociology of the South Asian countryside. Whereas within the “eternal village” paradigm, the social, political and economic life of rural communities is organized in accordance with supposedly timeless principles, a firmer grounding in historical context problematizes the very notion of “tradition.” The case of caste is exemplary of this tendency. Thus, while scholarship from the nineteenth and

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early twentieth centuries was apt to treat caste as a coherent institution founded upon distinct and timeless principles,2 a vast body of scholarship has undermined this conclusion. Far from conforming to any single definition, the historical manifestations of caste appear to be as varied as rural South Asia itself.

3 The diversity and mutability of caste notwithstanding, it has proved difficult to do away with concept entirely (Jodhka 2012), and there is an abundance of historically grounded theoretical scholarship on the subject. At the risk of very considerable simplification, one might divide this literature into three broad approaches. The first of these identifies caste with particular sets of values (for instance, Dumont [1970] 1980; Das [1977] 1990; Bayly 1999). Although the simple ideological tension between purity and pollution, which Louis Dumont ([1970] 1980:46–61) proposed was the driving principle of caste stratification, is no longer generally accepted as such, it remains common for caste to be defined in terms of ideas (Guha 2013:2). The history of caste is therefore the history of the growing influence of those who profit from its values. Perhaps the best-known example of this approach is Susan Bayly’s careful and nuanced classic study (1999), in which she treats the development of caste as an historical process, that is bound up with indigenous and colonial state formation.

4 The second approach divides the development of caste in South Asia into two periods, before and after colonialism. The Raj is treated as a watershed, during which caste was effectively stripped of the largely political role it had previously played, and instead assigned a purely social and religious meaning. As a colonial “technology of power” (Cohn and Dirks 1988; Dirks 2001:17)—a way for the state to order, other and understand South Asian society—it was lent a false homogeneity, and in this new avatar became a recurrent theme in both the study and governance of the subcontinent. This discursive dominance in turn reshaped reality in its image, such that a simplified, neo- traditional caste subsequently became “inscribed in ritual, familial, communal, socioeconomic, political, and public theaters of quotidian life” (Dirks 2001:15). Clearly the aforementioned approaches differ in the importance they assign to colonial rule in the historical trajectory of caste. Nonetheless, what they share in common is their treatment of caste as a discourse, sustained by certain techniques of information gathering and organization (Peabody 2001; Dirks 2001).

5 A third broad approach to the study of caste concentrates not primarily upon its discursive aspect, but rather upon the mechanism of stratification and its political and economic determinants. This approach is by no means new. As early as 1971, Richard Fox published a study demonstrating how conceptions of caste in pre-modern rural Uttar Pradesh varied with the political priorities of rural populations. David Gilmartin (1994) has shown that similarly pragmatic considerations shaped the boundaries of baradari (brotherhood) in Panjab (p. 8–9). More recently, Sumit Guha (2013) has advocated shifting our attention from the ritual expression of caste and its ideological underpinnings to the drawing of caste boundaries. The myriad systems of stratification in South Asia that have been assigned the label of “caste,” he suggests, were simply varying forms of ethnic segregation. In each instance, differentiation was driven by local and regional politics, rather than by any set of values, although the latter certainly served a rhetorical purpose. Viewed through this prism, castes are no more than “bounded ethnic groups” (Guha 2013:5) that have historically coalesced around common political interest.

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6 According to Guha, the advantages of making stratification and segmentation the focus of an enquiry into caste are at least twofold. To begin with, this liberates scholars from the need to explain the ideological diversity of practices described as “caste” (Guha 2013:1). Another corollary benefit is that it dismantles the fence of cultural peculiarity which has hitherto prevented the historical sociology of South Asia from drawing upon the same pool of methodologies that are used in the study of other world regions (Guha 2015:53). More pertinent to the overarching theme of this special issue, a focus upon boundaries and politics grounds the study of caste firmly in local context. Rather than searching for adherence to specific principles, it privileges the particular ecology and economy of the locality. Similarly, rather than having to square locally particular observations of caste with dominant principles, focusing upon the mechanism of stratification is sensitive to the ways in which local institutions like kinship and clan served as the axis of “caste” stratification.

7 This article will use these insights to explore the nature of caste and kinship categories in rural Haryana in the early nineteenth century. For want of space, it will confine its attention to dominant landholding groups. The analysis consists of four sections. The first two of these introduce respectively the geographical context and the primary sources consulted. The third explores some common social categories used in the region. One of these was the term qaum (people, community)—a malleable, multivalent concept, that appears to have designated groups defined broadly and imperfectly by occupation and geography. Another ethnic category was gota (clan, lineage), which, despite the implication of biological kinship that it carried, was defined by political pragmatism rather than by blood alone. The fourth section will therefore turn to the political context within which the boundaries of lineages took form.

Geographical Context: The Delhi frontier

8 The analysis presented in this piece pertains to the countryside west of the city of Delhi, a space enclosed by the Yamuna River on the east and the Sutlej River on the west. On the south and southwest it merges with the hills of Mewat and the Thar Desert, and to the north-east with the Siwalik mountains. This irregular strip of mostly flat and arid land today falls largely within the states of Haryana and Punjab. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as in the present, it carried no single name. It fell within the jurisdictions of a number of different states, including, from 1803, that of the East India Company. Nor was it possible to assign this area a single ethnic or linguistic character. A variety of languages and dialects were spoken here, brought by mobile populations that circulated between Central Asia, Sind, the Deccan and the Gangetic Plains. Indeed, there was even a common saying that both bani aur pani (language and water) changed every forty kilometers (Wilson 1884:120).

9 The hybridity of its ecology, political and cultural traditions mean that there are few appellations for this region that fit well. I have chosen here not to refer to it as “Panjab” or “south-eastern Panjab,” both of which seem insufficiently precise. They also carry linguistic and ethnic connotations which obscure the cultural heterogeneity of this space. “Haryana” is an equally poor match, for although it existed as a territorial category in the nineteenth century, it referred specifically to the arid prairieland that stretches west of Rohtak, merging with the desert near Hisar (Fagan 1893:3; Wilson 1884:29).3 In the absence of a fully satisfactory name, I have chosen to follow Jos

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Gommans (1998) in referring to the region as the “Delhi frontier” (p. 17–18). For Gommans, this is a tract whose specific historical unity derives foremost from its position as a hybrid frontier, or as what Bernard Cohn ([1987] 2005) has referred to as a “shatter zone” (p. 109). Gommans identifies three ways in which this region was a frontier. First, it was a climatic frontier, located between the humid Gangetic Valley to the east, and the western fringes of the vast Arid Zone that stretches across much of Central and West Asia and reaches east and south into the Indian subcontinent. Second, and relatedly, it was a subsistence frontier, where cultivation had historically overlapped with mobile pastoralism. Finally, it was a political frontier, where the control of formal states had always been limited, power resting instead in the hands of a variety of warlords and chieftains.

10 These three facets of the Delhi frontier’s “in-betweenness” in fact fed into each other. Its limited ecological suitability to sedentary cultivation as opposed to pastoralism meant that its rural populations led a mobile existence. As a consequence of its vulnerability to drought and the absence of any perennial rivers except at its extremities, the cultivated extent in this frontier fluctuated greatly from year to year. Demographic pressure in neighboring regions periodically led to a flux of cultivators taking parts of the savannah under the plough. However, these settlements were ephemeral and, in years in which the monsoons failed, they would be abandoned, to be repopulated in a more favorable season. The uncertainties of cultivation in turn meant that this region did not serve as the revenue base for states dependent upon agrarian revenues. Rather, the polities that tended to thrive in the Delhi frontier were frequently diffuse, nomadic lineages, who exploited this arid but rich country for its excellent pastures, and for its proximity to the wealthy raiding grounds of the Doab.

A Window on Rural Society

11 In order to explore the ethnic landscape of the Delhi frontier in the early nineteenth century, I have in this article relied considerably upon two historical accounts dating to the 1820s, authored by James Skinner. Skinner was one of the many elite mercenary soldiers active in the subcontinent during the Mughal “twilight.” Born in 1778, his father was a Scottish ensign in the English East India Company’s army, and his mother the daughter of a Benares landlord. Before he, too, came to fight under the Company’s flag, Skinner had led Daulat Rao Shinde’s Maratha troops in battle, working alongside English, Scottish, Irish, French and Savoyard mercenaries (Fraser [1851] 2012a:43). Despite the important role he played in the establishment of Company rule in northern India (Alavi 1993), the British were sparing in the tributes and recognition they extended to him. At least in part, this appears to have been for fear that any apparent partiality to their own compatriots—to which Skinner numbered when it so suited the Company (Alavi 1993:448)—would open them up to renewed charges of corruption (Fraser [1851] 2012b:44)

12 Short-changed by his employers and patrons, Skinner nonetheless established himself not only as a gifted military commander, but also as a patron of the arts in the countryside west of Delhi. Based at his estate in Hansi, he seems to have maintained a fully functioning manuscript workshop, as well as to have periodically commissioned different artists from the region for specific assignments (McBurney 2014:2). Part of his literary and artistic testament includes two beautifully illustrated and illuminated

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social and political histories of the region. A total of three copies of each text were produced, and Skinner gifted a pair of these mutually complementary histories to three separate British officers. One of these men was John Malcolm, whose earlier ethnographic accounts of Central India may possibly have inspired Skinner to embark upon his own literary enterprise (McBurney 2014:7). However, both Skinner’s choice of writing in Persian and the considerable expense of producing such high-quality manuscripts (McBurney 2014:2) seem equally to have been motivated by his acquisition of various Mughal titles in May 1830 (McBurney 2014:8).4

13 The first of Skinner’s histories, the Tashrih al-aqvam (An Account of the Peoples, c. 1825), provides a description of a variety of different ethnic groups, beginning with a short summary of the origins of each that is drawn from folklore and mythology. Skinner then describes the hereditary occupations of each qaum, their religion (dharam) and their rites and customs, particularly those pertaining to marriage. In addition, he pays attention to their nature (svabhava, khasiyat zati) and their karam (actions). Every account is further accompanied by a painting of a member of the concerned group that, so Skinner claims, realistically depicts its garb and craft. Although some of the groups described—such as Rajputs and Brahmanas—were found across much of South Asia, the Tashrih’s focus is broadly north Indian. It was intended, as Skinner mentions in the preface, as an account of “Hindi people of all distinctions resident in Hind.”5 Even within this circumscribed geographical context, the richest ethnographic (as opposed to mythological) portraits are those of the landholding and martial populations of the country between the Sutlej and Yamuna Rivers and northern Rajasthan. This is natural enough, given that it was here that Skinner established himself as a magnate and a man of note.

14 This geographical bias is articulated even more clearly in the Tazkirat al-umara (Biography of the Nobility, c. 1830), the companion (and likewise richly illustrated) history that Skinner wrote for the Tashrih. The Tazkira provides an account of a broad cross-section of the gentry and nobility of the Delhi frontier. A considerable chunk of its narrative appears to be drawn from lore and royal genealogies, especially in the case of the more illustrious and established royal houses. Thus, for instance, Rajput lineages such as the Chauhans of Bikaner are treated by Skinner as the descendants of the Chandravansha (lunar race). By comparison, the accounts of minor chieftains are somewhat more sober. For instance, Skinner narrates the manner in which Nawab Khan Bahadur Khan, the Bhatti chieftain of Fatahabad, began his career as a professional soldier in service of the kingdom of Bikaner, subsequently betraying his patron and giving himself up to a life of plunder (gharatgari).6 However far back its origins, each lineage’s history is traced down to Skinner’s own times, often including mentions of recent battles. Each dynastic account is concluded with a description of the precise extent of its domains and the revenues earned from these, as well as the strength and composition of its army. Together, the Tashrih and the Tazkira provide a window into rural society in the Delhi frontier in the transition to colonial rule. They are used in this analysis primarily to reconstruct ethno-political fault lines in the early nineteenth century.

15 If Skinner’s accounts indicate where ethnic tensions lay in the Delhi frontier, their focus does not extend all the way down to the grassroots and they contain little by way of material explanation for ethnic conflict. In this respect, the large body of official correspondence and reports left by the colonial state in the region is a fuller source.

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This material includes the annals of conflicts at the level of the village and thus provides a wealth of information about the political life of rural communities and their relationship with political actors outside the village walls.

Social Categories: From Qaum to Caste

16 The Tashrih al-aqvam, as its name suggests, provides a good point of departure to anyone seeking insights into the ethnic landscape of the Delhi frontier in the early nineteenth century. A half-century before the heyday of Victorian ethnography, it sheds light on those groups that colonial bureaucrats were subsequently to identify as “castes” and “tribes,” categories that have proved extremely enduring. The communities of whom we find accounts in its pages, 118 in all, are nominally organized along the principles of religion (dharam) and baran (from the Sanskrit varna; Brahmanical caste). The primary differentiation made is between Hindu and Muslim peoples. Once its religion has been specified, each community is further assigned a varna affiliation, a task rendered somewhat awkward by the fact that the number of groups mentioned in the text far exceeds the fourfold Brahmanical stratification. Skinner explains this incongruence as the product of the intermixing of varnas (baran samkara) brought on by the depravity of the times. As we shall see, however, this is only one instance of how the Tashrih’s neat façade is consistently undermined in the text by the hybridity and fluidity of its foundational categories.

17 In fact, contrary to its formal schema, the social groups identified as “communities” (aqvam) in the Tashrih do not conform to any single organizational principle.7 Rather, they are each constituted around at least one of three common traits: a shared occupation (peesheh) and more generally, actions; customs (towr, tariq), specifically related to religious observance and marriage; and finally, a common geography. Skinner, borrowing from his sources, then superimposes a single origin myth upon this foundation and seals the category with a few remarks about the temperament of those belonging to it. It is worth noting that while religion could influence marriage customs and worship, it did not necessarily undermine the category of qaum itself, as long as one of the other two strands—occupation and geographical distribution—were present. Of the camel herding Rabari community, for example, Skinner says: “Many of the original Rabaris became Muslim [and therefore] came to be called Muslim Rabaris. Their beliefs and customs are separate (but) their work is the same.”8 Given this diversity of principles, it is unsurprising that Skinner mostly uses the generic Persian qaum and the terms farq (sort, kind, division) and zat (tribe, kind) to refer to community, even while paying token deference to Brahmanical categories.

18 Not only do the communities that feature in the Tashrih appear heterogeneous, but the boundaries between different qaum are frequently hazy as well. This is largely because the traits that serve to bind each together in the text were far from unique, and were in fact common to a broad cross-section of society. This holds less true of the service and artisanal groups that appear in the Tashrih, for their respective crafts serve as clear identifiers. By contrast, social groups who earned their livelihood from the soil or by herding livestock are much less precisely defined and internally quite disparate. Skinner’s account of the Jat qaum illustrates this point well. This category is perhaps the broadest of any social group mentioned in the Tashrih, tenuously bound together by a common purpose alone. This purpose, writes Skinner, was to take the land they

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inherited from their fathers and increase it until they became rajas themselves. To achieve their goal, they engaged in both cultivation (kisan) and trade (dad-o-setad). As zamindars, they also took care of their cultivators (ra’iyats). Their occupational diversity was matched by their confessional pluralism. Jats, writes Skinner, variously revered Brahmanas, the cow, Vishnu, various Shaiva ascetic orders, Guru Nanak and the Prophet Muhammad.9

19 The Jat qaum that is portrayed by the Tashrih is not only a motley category, it also shares much in common with other landholding groups like the Ahirs, Gujars and Bhattis. Indeed, Skinner suggests that the Ahirs and the Gujars were simply a particular kind of Jat, whose distinctness as a category was rooted partly in their occupational specialization as cow- and goatherds, and partly in their geographical concentration on either bank of the Yamuna River. As such, writes Skinner, they were not recognized as a different qaum by the Jats, with whom they ate, smoked and drank without compunction.10 Meanwhile, “Bhatti” appears as another umbrella category, somewhat similar to “Jat,” although more specific in geographical focus. Skinner writes that the Bhattis were found mainly between Bhatner (now Hanumangarh) and Hisar, but half a century later, Denzil Ibbetson ([1883] 1916) observed that it was simply a common identification claimed by landholding communities from Jaisalmer to the banks of the Chenab River (p. 144). Like Jats, Bhattis too included a number of different segments, and practiced a mixture of cultivation, livestock breeding and plunder.11

20 Skinner’s Tashrih provides one more indication that ethnic categories in pre-modern South Asia, which would later be recognized by the colonial state as distinct “castes,” were often simply regionally-specific appellations for those who engaged in a particular trade. In the Delhi frontier, the use of “Jat,” “Bhatti” and “Ahir” to refer to groups whose subsistence was broadly agro-pastoral, was akin to the use of the term “Rajput” to refer to soldiers (Kolff 1990:71–72). The salient differences between these groups, therefore, did not pertain to status or religion, but to geography. For the rest, their customs and social organization were extremely similar. For instance, each of these groups was said by Skinner to practice widow marriage (karao/karewa), a practice looked down upon by respectable (ashraf) people. Jats and Ahirs ate meat and drank alcohol, while amongst the Bhattis, little distance seems to have been maintained between men and women. Each group additionally partook of the broadly syncretic religious culture of Panjab, within which the emphasis lay upon personal devotion (bhakti) to the divine. Amongst the Jats, this bhakti had a Vaishnava, Shaiva and Sikh color. Amongst the Bhattis, devotion to Baba Farid Ganjshakkar was popular. Perhaps most notably, each of these communities was further subdivided into lineages or gotas, whose relationship with each other—as we shall see below—was often contentious.

21 In light of this hybridity and overlap, it is little wonder that colonial ethnographers later in the nineteenth century struggled just as much as Skinner to place the rural populations of the Delhi frontier within a single sociological category. Amongst British administrators, the trans-Yamuna territories in general were regarded as exceptions to the rigid caste norms that were common further east in the Hindustani heartland. Although the term “caste” was still used in official reports on the region, it carried a specific connotation here, as a synonym for “tribe.” The latter, in turn, was used differently than in, for instance, central India, where communities identified as tribes were believed to be primitive peoples, as yet unexposed to the Brahmanical mainstream. By contrast, west of the Yamuna, many landholding groups identified as

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Rajputs or of Rajput origin and Brahmanical ideas about social stratification and distance were both known and observed to varying degrees. However, stratification seemed just as much to follow the lines of descent and kinship as it did those of occupation. The local apparition of caste, wrote Denzil Ibbetson, was thus of the “tribal type” (Caton 2004:44).12 Rather than seeking to resolve the tension between Brahmanical caste and local forms of stratification therefore, most colonial ethnographers simply used the term “caste” elastically, across a diversity of contexts.

Land control and lineage formation

22 Their syncretic, egalitarian and “common” religious and social practices placed each of the landholding groups in the Tashrih on roughly the same social footing. A powerful rural presence, they appear in Skinner’s works as superior in status to menial service peoples, and inferior to those martial lineages who controlled enough land that they could abstract themselves from cultivation, living instead from their agrarian rents, protecting their ra’iyats and enhancing their territorial possessions through conquest. As both the Tashrih and the Tazkira suggest, however, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the gap between middling peasant-pastoralists and martial elite landlords was narrowing. This had led to the sprouting of multiple chiefdoms and royal houses from amidst the ranks of such “ordinary” qaum as the Jats and the Bhattis, including the Sikh Jat rajas of Patiala, Nabha, Jind and Kaithal, and the Bhatti nawabs of Rania and Fatahabad.

23 In this transition from middling peasant-herdsman to local notable, the clan or lineage (gota; also referred to generally as qaum) was an important vehicle. As a military and political unit—a war band, no less—the clan established the material basis upon which charismatic opportunists from within its number could seek to establish themselves as warlords, and ultimately, as kings. Once this material foundation was in place, these arriviste rajas would emulate the customs and rituals of established elites, in an attempt to consolidate their status and thereby distance themselves from their humble origins. For instance, according to Skinner, the many Jat notables who dotted the Delhi frontier had stopped practicing widow remarriage (karao), taken to veiling their women and dressed in the elegant manner of respectable Brahmanas and Vaishyas.13 Karao had likewise been given up in the family of the Bhatti nawabs, who also claimed to be the only “true” Bhattis, related to the Bhatti Rajput lineage of Jaisalmer.14 Social status, however, followed, rather than preceded, effective political and military power. A powerful gota might not succeed in erasing its peasant provenance; however, its influence and clout could be sufficient to overshadow its social origins.

24 To establish itself as a powerful rural presence, however, a clan was dependent to varying degrees upon larger actors and entities in the local political orbit, as well as upon the rural communities that constituted its manpower as a war band. As such, it exemplified the political continuum that linked the village with the state. In order to keep itself afloat and to consolidate its power, the clan was therefore obliged to balance the interests of its members with the interests of larger polities. This balance was extraordinarily delicate and in a political frontier such as the Delhi frontier, subject to frequent change. Were, for instance, a state to show signs of complacency or frailty, were its power to decrease or its attention be diverted, this would provide an opportunity for its client lineages to consolidate their position at their patron’s

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expense. This is precisely what Skinner indicates led to the mushrooming of local landlords and magnates in the Delhi frontier. As was mentioned previously, the Bhatti nawabs began as clients and subordinates of the Bikaner raj; however, when in the eighteenth century, the kingdom began to show signs of sluggishness (sosti), Khan Bahadur Khan seized the opportunity to break away from his patron and establish himself as an independent warlord. Similarly, the Raos of Rewari, who first served as agents of the Mughal state and were appointed the title of chaudhari (generic title for a notable), subsequently took advantage of their patron’s waning strength to establish themselves as autonomous chieftains.15

25 Usurpation, however, also transformed the clan as a polity. As its star rose, the clan would itself become a patron, which might extend its support and protection to smaller political fry, in return for the payment of tribute and military manpower. Moreover, clan elites might see their growing influence as an opportunity for personal enrichment and seek to establish themselves as the leaders of their kinsmen, which could cause rifts within the clan, altering its boundaries. Once more, instances of such fission abound in the Tazkira. Not only had the Jat Sikh Khalsa ultimately splintered into twelve distinct streams (misl), but these in turn had further split into numerous sub- branches. Thus, there were four distinct states of the Phulkian misl in the Delhi frontier (Patiala, Nabha, Jind, Kaithal).

26 Similarly, an offshoot of the Karora Singh misl had, in the late eighteenth century, developed a small fiefdom at the village of Kalsian, south-west of Amritsar. This tiny raj subsequently split into two, and a second center was established nearby and christened Kalsian Khord (Little Kalsian), while the parent settlement was renamed Kalsian Kalan (Greater Kalsian). Subsequent tides of war and migration eventually carried part of the Kalsian family to the banks of the Yamuna River, where they established yet another offshoot of the Kalsian raj at Chhachrauli. 16 The relationship between different branches of a clan were tempered by pragmatism. Amongst the Bhattis, for instance, Skinner writes that it was the sustained onslaught from the rajas of Bikaner and the Mughal state that led to the reconciliation of Khan Bahadur Khan and his son Zabiteh Khan, who had previously been fighting each other.

27 While the examples so far have focused on lineages sufficiently large to receive mention in Skinner’s Tazkira, the same dynamic—of balancing the interests of smaller and larger political entities with the purpose of political aggrandizement—shaped every link in the chain that was the lineage. This dynamic operated, in other words, at the level of the village and pargana as well, molding the boundaries of rural communities at the very grassroots. In the Tazkira, Skinner provides us with a glimpse of some of these even smaller lineages and clans that still ruled as brotherhoods, from where a notable or magnate was yet to emerge, or whose elite were still too minor to be counted as nobility. These included, for instance, the Sangwan Jat gota, whose seat (sakunat) was between the towns of Jhajjar and Bhiwani, and consisted of 88 villages of which Charkhi and Jhojhu were the most important. Similarly, in Gohana near Rohtak, a block of 52 villages belonged to the Phogat Jat gota, and directly to the north, another 40 villages between Sanwar, Ranila and Bandh were held by another clan claiming to be affiliated to the Panwar Rajputs.

28 The larger a clan territory (occasionally referred to in colonial literature as a khap, although I have not yet encountered this word in Skinner’s accounts), the more intricately it would be subdivided. Even clans that were no more than a single large

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settlement, were often subdivided into segments called pannahs or tholas of individual families. Within larger territories, such as those of the Phogats, Panwars and Sangwans mentioned above, it was not uncommon for clusters of villages—variously called thambas and tappas—to be demarcated (Ibbetson [1883] 1916:74). In principle, every gota, from the lineages of large states to village-level clans, developed from migration to a single parent site (variously, called malikan deh and tappadari mauzah), followed by natural increase. In practice, however, this was not the case. The weight of political considerations, the pressure of individual ambition and the resultant brittleness of the clan meant that its boundaries were not determined by kinship or blood ties alone.

29 In principle, representatives of older settlements had a greater say over newcomers in the governance of the clan and its various segments, which included taking decisions regarding matters such as the distribution of spoils from plunder, the right to break up new land and the use of pasture. Moreover, new settlements would be compelled to pay older settlements a tribute, called a chaudhriat (the tribute due to the chaudhari or overlord). The same principle applied within the confines of a single village as well, where a distinction was made between the “original” residents (variously called maliks, pattidars, muqaddams and biswadars) and newcomers.17 The latter might have equal right to access of land, but a subordinate say in village affairs. When smaller clans were integrated within the domains of larger lineages or states, these divisions were frequently maintained, for they enabled the larger polity to govern its new possessions through the existing network of village and tappa elites. This arrangement was convenient, for established elites had an authority that state-appointees perhaps lacked; but, as the example of the Raos of Rewari mentioned above indicates, it could also prove to be dangerous for the state.

30 In the Delhi frontier, every segment of a lineage had a corresponding expression in resources. For states, the most important of these resources were men and revenues. For smaller lineages, who served at once as their own army and their own revenue base, these resources included arable land, ponds and pasture; and every thola, deh (village) and tappa had its corresponding share of these. Quarrels over the partition of such resources could lead to fragmentation and protracted feuding. This friction also indicated that, while in theory at least, the component segments of a lineage were organized hierarchically, such that the village was subordinate to the village cluster (tappa), the village cluster to the clan elders or the raja (if there was one), and the elders or the raja in turn to the state, in reality, the center of power shifted between each of these different segments. This has already been demonstrated by the examples of the Bhatti nawabs and the Rewari rajas cited above. The same dynamic was, however, also replicated closer to the grassroots.

31 The case of Abdul Samand Khan, a jagirdar (revenue-farmer) appointed by the East India Company to supervise the hinterland from Rohtak to Hisar, provides an excellent illustration of this point. When, on the force of the Company’s authority, Abdul Samand went to declare his rule in his newly acquired fiefdom, he was met with widespread hostility. As he recounted to the Company’s representative (“Resident”) at Delhi, Archibald Seton, the more intransigent villages belonging to martial Ranghars of an unspecified clan had met his declaration of overlordship with outright hostility. He had been told that “since the decline of the (Mughal) Empire no established authority had ever been acknowledged in their country, that every Governor who had come into it had been compelled to sit down like a petty Thanedar [policeman], that nearly forty

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Noblemen had at different periods arrived as Governors for the purpose of returning the province to subjection but that they had all been slain and that their graves could be pointed out.”18 Abdul Samand’s account was perhaps embellished to garner the Company’s support; but it is worth noting that he willingly relinquished his position as jagirdar and governor, because the intransigence of the rural communities under his supervision had worn down both his morale and his resources.19

32 This is, however, not to say that landlords or local notables had no recourse in the face of rebellion and dissension (fasad, fitna). Travelling through the qasbah (town) of Beri in 1808, Edward Gardner, an Assistant to the Resident of Delhi who the labor-starved Company had invested with a broad range of judicial and fiscal powers, was witness to one such conflict. The local zamindar of Beri, a notable named Faiz Talab Singh, had reportedly taken nine hostages from the people of the surrounding villages, whose revenues were in arrears.20 The conflict had become violent and Gardner had been forced to intervene, to restore the hostages to their families. Similarly, before he had conceded defeat and petitioned the Company to be relieved of his revenue farm, Abdul Samand Khan had attempted to enforce his mandate in the face of popular recalcitrance by force, an endeavor that had eventually bankrupted him. There is likewise plentiful evidence of conflicts between village and village in the colonial archive. In the largely pastoral economy of the Delhi frontier, where livestock— particularly bullocks—were a cherished possession, such conflicts often took the form of cattle theft. Indeed, cattle theft remained rife well into the twentieth century, serving as a way for rival villages and clans to score symbolic points against each other (Gilmartin 2003).

33 Against this background of frequent conflict, it is little wonder that rural settlements in the Delhi frontier were commonly fortified. Clans like Khan Bahadur Khan’s Bhattis used abandoned forts like those at Sirsa, Rania and Fatahabad as their strongholds, disappearing behind their walls after returning from a cattle raid or other plundering expeditions. However, it was common even for smaller villages to erect mud fortifications along their periphery. Watchtowers were also built outside the village walls and manned by men with matchlocks, to guard over wells and to make sure that cattle sent out to graze were not carried off (Fortescue 1911:112). In case a threat was spotted, guards would beat a large military drum called a tamak, to summon attention.21 The response to the alarm could be surprisingly rapid. One Company surveyor whose proximity to a village near Patiala caused the drums to be beaten reported that within a matter of minutes, “between 2 and 500 people appeared without the Town, stationing themselves under the protection of its walls.”22

34 Yet, if it was such apparent solidarity that led Charles Metcalfe to describe Indian rural communities as “little republics,” the village was, in fact, a far less cohesive polity than he conceded. Conflict was as common within the village walls as it was outside of them and the village itself was therefore prone to ruptures. One of the most common sources of friction pertained to the rights of individuals within the village to its land and pasture. This was a subject that the colonial state was at first unwilling to intervene in, since, as one Company servant put it, property rights were “blended with feelings of family and of ancestry.”23 Nonetheless, while conducting early revenue surveys, revenue officers found themselves repeatedly called upon to arbitrate between rival claims to the office of muqaddam (village headman). For the British, the office of headman was an important and dignified one, to be filled by a candidate of requisite

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influence and temperance. They were therefore surprised at the sheer number of persons who put themselves forward as prospective muqaddams (Edmonstone 1846:20).

35 It was only gradually that the colonial state realized that there were as many muqaddams as there were tholas (segments) in a village, and that the role of the muqaddam was primarily to ensure that the families within his thola received their fair share of the village wealth, rather than simply to serve the welfare of the village as a community. The same transactional logic pervaded every link of the lineage chain. Indeed, kinship categories in general served as a kind of political coalition, to which biological kinship offered one, but not the only, path of entry. New members entered into the clan territories through conquest, migration, and compromise, while fragments of the clan would separate due to internal disagreements.

36 The coalition-like nature of the clan is well illustrated in the account of the origins of the Dahiya Jat gota. By the 1870s, the territories of this clan extended from Karnal to Sonepat, and encompassed not only villages where Jats were in the majority, but also several that were predominantly Gujar and Chauhan Rajput. The roots of this multi- qaum lineage, according to Denzil Ibbetson, could be traced back to the days of Mughal dominance, when imperial governors had put their weight behind another Jat gota called Ghatwal, to counter the growing local influence of a recalcitrant Rajput gota called the Mandhars. Such was the success of the Ghatwals, however, that they posed a threat not only to the Mandhars, but also to other Jat clans in the area, such as the Dahiyas. In response to this threat, the Dahiyas began to consolidate their ranks, forging ties with several minor Jat, Gujar and Rajput lineages (Ibbetson [1883] 1916:82). Although the Mandhars had been politically eclipsed, the rivalry between the Ghatwal and Dahiya Jats persisted into the nineteenth century. Indeed, as one revenue officer noted, for members of both factions, the gota affiliation served as the primary identification, regardless of whether they were Hindus or Muslims, Jats, Rajputs or Gujars (Maconachie 1882:86).

37 To stress the importance of pragmatic considerations in the drawing of clan boundaries is not to say that Brahmanical norms pertaining to varna and kinship were irrelevant to social and political life. On the contrary, as has been mentioned above, honoring these codes with overt gestures—whether by refraining from widow marriage or veiling one’s wife and daughters—signaled respectability and conferred high social status. Moreover, the language of family and varna was considered a necessary window-dressing to confer legitimacy upon relationships founded upon convenience. Ibbetson noted that in Karnal district, although it was not uncommon for non-kin members to be absorbed within the village as coparceners and fellow proprietors, “the fiction of common descent” was maintained. If such a newcomer were asked to explain how he had become a coparcener, he would respond “bhai karke basaya” (by making me a brother; Ibbetson [1883] 1916:75). In other words, “traditions” sanctified pragmatic associations, but did not determine their structure or boundaries.

Conclusion: Rural Polities and the Malleable Bonds of “Kinship”

38 The preceding account has sought to demonstrate that in the Delhi frontier, rifts in rural communities from the village upward were common and that the source of these rifts had a clear material basis. The way in which communities disintegrated had

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consequences for the manner in which they were created as well, that is to say, not so much in accordance with “tradition” as with pragmatic interests. In a subsistence and political frontier, the absence of a single political center and the frequency of warfare meant these interests were regularly realigned and villages, as well as the clans or lineages that they were part of, accordingly reconstituted. The language of caste and kin would subsequently be graphed onto what were, effectively, coalitions. In this respect, then, the village as a polity was no different from the state, and kinship categories served as vehicles of political consolidation.

39 While this limited foray into village politics cannot claim to yield novel theoretical insights, it does reinforce two known maxims for the broader study of caste and society in rural South Asia. The first of these is that although larger categories, such as Jat, Rajput and Gujar have served administrative and political purposes (and continue to do so), as categories of analysis, they belie as much as they reveal. The preceding analysis has demonstrated that caste formation is a continuous, ongoing process that occurs at multiple different levels at once (Guha 2013:51). An appreciation of this dynamism ensures that we do not, by default, keep returning to static “tradition” to explain socio- political life. The second point is that some of the attention that we bestow upon the language in which caste is expressed—in other words, the practices and gestures of inclusion and exclusion—might more fruitfully be invested in an exploration of the particular material context in which such behaviors occur. This in turn fosters attention to the way in which ecologically-specific forms of community have lived on under the modern guise of “caste.”

40 I will conclude this piece with a reference to the present. A glance at the politics of caste and kin in present-day Haryana, especially the numerous honor killings that have made the news, might suggest that the contemporary weight of “tradition” is far greater than in the nineteenth century. Yet, practical considerations continue to inform how “tradition” is interpreted. Perhaps the best example of this comes from 2014, when the Satrol khap in Haryana announced that intra-khap marriages (hitherto considered incestuous) and inter-caste marriages were now acceptable to the community. The khap’s decision was rooted in pragmatism: Haryana’s skewed sex-ratio (approximately 877 women for every thousand men) means that such restrictions make many men bachelors for life. Moreover, as one of the leaders of the khap admitted, it was a way to enable men to find brides locally, women who would already be familiar with their husband’s family’s customs and would therefore adapt more easily. In this way, a first blow was struck to a marriage taboo, under the protective shroud of “guarding regional culture.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival Collections Consulted:

British Library, London, India Office Records, Board’s Collections

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Haryana State Archives, Panchkula

Digitized Collections:

Oriental Manuscripts (British Library)

Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Manuscripts/Mixed Material (Library of Congress)

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Edmonstone, George F. 1846. ‘Report on the Settlement of the District of Pergunnah Paneeput’. Pp. 1–50 in Selected Reports on the Revision of Settlement Under Regulation IX of 1833 in the Delhie Territory, No.2. Agra.

Fagan, Patrick J. 1893. Gazetteer of the Punjab: Hisar District. Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press.

Fortescue, Thomas. 1911. ‘Report on the Revenue System of the Delhi Territory, 1820’. Pp. 69–130 in Records of the Dlehi Residency and Agency. Vol. I, Punjab Government Records. Lahore: Punjab Records Office.Fox, Richard G. 1971. Kin, Clan, Raja, and Rule: State-Hinterland Relations in Preindustrial India. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Fraser, James Baillie. [1851] 2012b. Military Memoir of Lieut.-Col. James Skinner, C.B.: For Many Years a Distinguished Officer Commanding a Corps of Irregular Cavalry in the Service of the H. E. I. C. Vol. II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Gilmartin, David. 1994. “Biraderi and Bureaucracy: The Politics of Muslim Kinship Solidarity in 20th Century Punjab.” International Journal of Punjab Studies 1(1):1–29.

Gilmartin, David. 2003. “Cattle, Crime and Colonialism: Property as Negotiation in North India.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 40(1):33–56.

Gommans, Jos J. L. 1998. “The Silent Frontier of South Asia, c. A.D. 1100–1800.” Journal of World History 9(1):1–23.

Guha, Sumit. 1999. Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Ibbetson, Denzil. [1883] 1916. Report on the Revision of Settlement of the Panipat Tahsil & Karnal Parganah of the Karnal … Allahabad: Pioneer Press.

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Maconachie, R. 1882. “Delhi: Final Report on the Settlement of Land Revenue in the Delhi District, 1872–77.” Lahore: O Wood & R Maconachie.

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Wilson, James. 1884. Sirsa: Final Report on the Revision of Settlement of the Sirsa District, 1879–83. Calcutta: Calcutta Central Press.

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NOTES

1. My thanks to Delphine Thivet, Joël Cabalion and the anonymous reviewers whose comments have helped me refine this article. 2. Although there is great variety in the ethnography of this period, some of which is more sensitive to local peculiarities and divergence from “classical” scriptural principles than has been conceded by generic critiques of colonial ethnography as a whole (for instance, Dirks 2001). A good example of this is the rich settlement literature of the nineteenth century, which by virtue of genre, as well as the “ethnographic intellectualism” (Leonard 2016:187) of colonial officers at the grassroots often contains detailed accounts of the diverse permutations and combinations of “caste” practices found within a particular district. 3. In fact, “Hariana” was only one of a number of sub-regional divisions that were popularly used in the Delhi frontier. Others included the “Bagar,” or the desert tract stretching south-west from Bhiwani and Fatahabad; the “Rohi” and “Budlada” or “Jangal” which, like Hariana, referred to specific stretches of prairie; and the “Nali,” which referred to the arid bed of the Ghaggar stream. Further, in the Delhi frontier (as across much of the Indo-Gangetic Plains), it was common to distinguish between the uplands (bangar, dhaia, utar) and lowlands (khadar, bet, hitar) cut by the shifting courses of rivers. Settlement reports from the late nineteenth century provide rich information on the ethno-ecological connotations of these different terms. 4. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who urged me to reflect upon Skinner’s intended audience. 5. “Shareh-e-haqiqat-e-baramad-ye-aqvam az har farq-e-hanud ahl-e-Hind.” Library of Congress, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Manuscript/Mixed Material. James Skinner, James Watson (owner), Tashrih al-aqvam. 1825, f.16v. 6. For Skinner’s account of the Bhattis, see his Tazkirat al-umara, ff.254r-261r. British Library, Oriental Manuscripts, AD MS 27254. 7. Although the plural form of the word “qaum” is aqvam, for simplicity’s sake, I have restricted myself to the use of qaum throughout the text, regardless of class. 8. “Basiyari ke az qaum-e-rabari-ye-asli musalman shodeh-and. Musalman rabari gofteh mishovand. Dharam o tariq-e-har ek joda-st. Karam yek-ast.” Tashrih, f.312v. 9. Tashrih, ff.106v-109v. 10. “Hukka-o-nan-o-ab-e-ahir-o-jat ek-ast,” Tashrih, f.101v. 11. Tashrih, ff.422r-424v. 12. Constraints of space prevent a full treatment of the evolution of colonial ethnographic categories. For a comprehensive overview, interested readers might consult Caton (2004). 13. Tashrih, f.119v. 14. Tashrih, f.424r. 15. Tazkira, f.155r-155v. 16. Haryana State Archives, Other Records, Tarikh-i-riyasat-i-kalsia, vol. II, f.4v. 17. Muqaddam was in fact used for village headmen, but in many of the villages of the Delhi frontier, this title was simply granted to every individual who owned land in the settlement. 18. British Library (BL), India Office Records (IOR), Board’s Collections (BC), F/4/212/4735, 15 June 1807. 19. BL, IOR, BC, F/4/305/7014, 7 February 1809. 20. BL, IOR, BC, F/4/305/7015, 24 March 1809. 21. BL, IOR, BC, F/4/305/7014, draft petition, 19 March 1809. 22. BL, IOR, BC, F/4/237/5453, 18 July 1807. 23. BL, IOR, BC, F/4/274/6109, 3 April 1808.

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ABSTRACTS

This paper traces the shifting loci of community in rural Haryana (“the Delhi frontier”) in the early nineteenth century, focusing particularly upon caste and kinship. It suggests that categories later identified by bureaucrats and scholars as “caste” and “tribe” in this region were in fact simply broad ethnic labels that represented only very abstract communities. It will further demonstrate that in this mobile agrarian frontier, kinship categories (such as the clan) had historically crystallized around the control of land. By implication, kinship was a vehicle of resource consolidation, whose boundaries were determined at least in part by this pragmatic consideration. An appreciation of the political dimension of kinship brings complexity to our understanding of rural politics, highlighting that the “village community” was far from being a historically stable polity.

INDEX

Keywords: kinship, caste, gota, Delhi frontier, resource consolidation

AUTHOR

GIRIJA JOSHI Institute for History, Leiden University

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Learning and Leading: Resistance, Subaltern Leadership and the Making of Two Bhil Community Leaders from the Narmada Valley, Western India

Vikramaditya Thakur

I thank hundreds of villagers: fellow comrades from Nandurbar district who have hosted me for over 15 years, too many to be named individually, for making this research possible. I appreciate the help of my activist friends: Lok Sangharsh Morcha’s Pratibha-tai Shinde and Sanjay Mahajan, and Dr. Kantilal Tatia. I thank K. Sivaramakrishnan, Vinay Gidwani, Sierra A.J. Bell, Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Sahana Ghosh, Uday Chandra, Richard Axelby, Brendan Donegan, Jayaseelan Raj, the editors of this special issue Joel Cabalion and Delphine Thivet, and the four anonymous reviewers for their comments on the various drafts. I express my gratitude for funding my fieldwork and archival research to my parents during 2003-07, Yale Agrarian Studies Department, Yale MacMillan Center and the American Institute of Indian Studies during 2010-13, and Social Science Research Council and European Research Council during 2014-16.

1 This paper studies the changing nature of rural leadership in India among the Scheduled Tribes,1 popularly called Adivasi groups, in the wake of a long-running social movement over a period of three decades, by focusing on two community leaders and their evolution over time. It looks at the struggle of the Bhils, one of the largest ST groups of India, in the Maharashtra portion of the Narmada valley in the Nandurbar district. The Bhils from the Narmada valley have resisted their forced displacement by the Indian state due to the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) dam across the River Narmada, which began in 1985, and continued their struggle after their forced relocation from the hills to the plains’ resettlement colonies beginning in 1991 in various phases. This struggle has unfolded in the wake of a long-running and celebrated anti-dam movement of the Narmada Bachao Andolan2 led by its external middle-class upper- caste activists from urban background beginning in 1985 and continuing in the present.

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2 The SSP Dam is arguably one of the most controversial development projects globally, with over a dozen academic monographs, several edited volumes and hundreds of journal articles focusing on it. The extensive academic literature on the Narmada dam from the 1980s, largely in line with the NBA stand, framed the problem as one revolving around the issue of environment and displacement of tribal groups living in the hills that was highlighted by the external activists. Among the monographs that focus on the NBA-led movement, one set of scholars lauds the subaltern mobilization by the external middle-class activists against the powerful state. This includes the work of Sanjeev Khagram (2004) and Patrick McCully (2001) that focuses on the triumph of the NBA activists in highlighting their cause through transnational activism and protests in the urban centers; Alf G Nilsen (2010) that emphasizes the grassroots mobilization by the NBA activists in resisting the hegemonic state representing the interests of the dominant classes; and Sanjay Sangvai (2002) that is a partisan account by a founder member of the NBA focusing on the mobilization’s history and various aspects of the dam. Another set of scholars show the lack of subaltern agency in the movement and argue for a clear distinction between the urban and educated NBA activists and the suffering rural masses. This includes Amita Baviskar (2004), who focuses on development via forced displacement that serves as the postcolonial avatar of exploitation in a series of historical injustices against the Bhils over centuries (2004:228; 240). Their resistance against the dam in order to save their homes and way of life however gets assimilated by urban intellectuals and environmentalists for a critique of development (2004:228; 240). It also includes the work of Judith Whitehead (2010), who concentrates on accumulation by dispossession of “indigenous” Bhils, while taking a historical perspective. A crucial aspect missing in these works is ascribing agency to the Bhils themselves, that are either obediently standing with the external activists in facing the “state repression” (Baviskar 2004:209) against their forced displacement or surrender to the state in order to get improved compensation. Thus, when they do have agency on rare occasions, it is shown in a negative light, where they are “hustlers” delivering their fellow men to the resettlement offices for money (Baviskar 2004:263) or “give up” the resistance to get “better lands” in the relocation colony (Whitehead 2010:150).3

3 In contrast, I show the anti-SSP dam mobilization and the subsequent forced resettlement as long-drawn processes that were in large measures led, and implemented by, the Bhil leaders themselves on behalf of their kinsmen, following complex negotiations with the state, an aspect that does not appear to have been addressed in any of the prior studies. The Bhil leaders formed their own organizations and also resorted to nonviolent forms of protest prior to and after their relocation to demand basic amenities in the new setting. I show their collective struggle by focusing on the lives of two Bhil men, Fattesing Pawara and Balram Vasave, who are the leading exemplars of Bhil subaltern agency. Fattesing and Balram, who started their political careers as foot soldier and youth leader respectively under the tutelage of the external activists of the NBA-led movement, learned about the functional aspects of the modern state by being part of the protest movement. They also drew on the same techniques of protest action for making claims on the state learned from the NBA activists in order to pursue their independent agendas over time. In the dyad comprised of elite and subaltern activists, I am thus arguing for a subaltern agency that develops over time as an incidental byproduct of and due to its periodic association with elite-led mobilization but nevertheless implements its own agenda in the long run.

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4 One major reason for the failure to identify and highlight the issue of agency among the Bhils of the Narmada valley is that their community has been represented as a homogenous acephalous social formation at the village level in all the existing studies. This gap in highlighting the traditional village power centers whose origins date back to the precolonial period is evident in studies by anthropologists (Karve 1956; Naik 1956) as well as historians (Guha 1996; 1999; Skaria 1999).4 The sections below will show how those traditional leaders, with formal or informal recognition from the state authorities, operated at the village level until the coming of the SSP dam, how they were utilized by the NBA’s external urban activists to gain widespread acceptance among the Bhils in a very short period to mount an effective anti-dam campaign, and how a new set of Bhil youth leaders emerged to sideline the traditional leadership over time. I also show how the protest against the SSP dam served as a form of political education, creating leaders out of ordinary Bhils who displaced their traditional Bhil counterparts, and also charted a distinct course away from the urban NBA activists to formulate an independent discourse that they continued to develop after their move to the plains’ resettlement colonies. This narrative is preceded by the methodology, highlighting of the theoretical issues at stake as well as introducing the two Bhil protagonists of the paper in the next section.

5 Following the course of change for subaltern groups at the margins of society that are illiterate and have an oral culture is a challenging task, especially when there are scanty records to establish the progression of events. It is in this setting that biographical narrative has the capacity to illuminate the interplay between the social, historical and the personal life histories of individuals to reflect on the struggles of the wider group (Arnold and Blackburn 2004), whether it is a biography of a leader of farmers (Byres 1988) or the autobiography of a Dalit describing what it meant “growing up untouchable” (Moon 1995). The biographies of Fattesing and Balram are based on extended conversations over a 15-year period. Though the narrative below largely features the voices of the two Bhils, I have crosschecked the data in independent conversations with many other Bhils from dozens of villages both in the hills and the resettlement colonies, and also with external activists of several groups, local journalists and government officials. I also draw on written records generated by the two Bhil leaders as well as the records of social movements that worked among the Bhils. Archival work was conducted in various local Government of Maharashtra (GoM) offices dealing with the SSP dam, district record room Nandurbar, office of the Marathi-language daily Swatantra Bharat and in the Centre for Education and Documentation (CED), Bangalore for English dailies. I also draw on my experiences and field notes across 15 years, first as a fellow grassroots activist working with the Narmada valley Bhils during 2001–2003, and thereafter as a researcher living in their villages for periods ranging from one month to almost two years until 2016.

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First Meetings with Two Organic Peasant Intellectuals in 2001

6 I begin my narrative by describing the stark contrast in my first meetings with the two protagonists: Fattesing and Balram.5 I first met Fattesing on a cloudy afternoon in August 2001 in a resettlement colony of the Bhils displaced by the SSP dam. A lanky man, nearly six feet in height, unusually tall in comparison to most of his fellow men, he was about 45 years of age. He sported a pencil-thin moustache and wore a starched white kurta with two pens peeping out of its pocket. He had donned white pajamas, a Gandhi-topi (similar to a sailor cap, popularized during the anticolonial struggle by M.K. Gandhi, now donned by politicians), gold-rimmed glasses and black leather footwear. It was told to me later that he was practically illiterate though he could read and sign his name. I was a neophyte activist working with a social movement organization, Punarwasan Sangharsh Samiti (literally Resettlement Struggle Group).6 The PSS organized the Bhils displaced by the SSP dam on the Narmada River, demanding that the state fulfill the promises given to the people when they were moved to the resettlement colonies in the plains. It was run by a wife-and-husband team, Pratibha Shinde and Sanjay Mahajan, both around the age of 30, who hailed from a neighboring district and believed in socialist ideology. They were not Bhils, but came from a rural farming background and had a vernacular education. I had gone to question Fattesing’s absence from the dharna (protest rally) a few days back and gave him a long speech on the value of unity and the ideals of the movement. Speaking in chaste Marathi, the state language of Maharashtra, he cut me short rudely. “Don’t preach me Vikram. I learnt all this all while you were this small,” he said showing the length of his index finger. On my return back to the PSS office, my senior Sanjay bhau—bhau is honorific for elder brother in Marathi—remarked, “He was the one who defected from the NBA

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and got along 12 villages in one night for resettlement.” I later heard this same story from many others. As per the application submitted by Fattesing on behalf of the 12 villages of Akrani taluka (unit of a district comprising many villages) to the local GoM office, this decision to accept resettlement took place on July 26, 1991.7

7 My first interaction with the other principal character, Balram, took place less than a month later on our way to another dharna of the NBA and the PSS in Maharashtra’s capital Mumbai, incidentally on September 11 in 2001.8 A clean-shaven man with a gaunt look, he was less than five and a half feet in height, around the age of 50, sported a tattered white shirt, a pen stuck in its pocket, worn-out black trousers and cheap plastic footwear. As we talked in a passenger train moving with hundreds of other Bhils on our way to the protest rally, I found him to be a person with a ready smile and a very genial personality. He was the only Bhil in his generation across dozens of villages in the hills who was not only literate, but had also been formally schooled until grade seven. Allied with the NBA, he was still holding the fort in the hills, with most families in his own village and the neighboring ones declining to relocate even as the dam’s height continued to rise. Welcomed by several senior government officials, he later brought along the Bhils from his village and three other neighboring ones to a new resettlement colony in the summer of 2004.

8 In the South Asian context, Ranajit Guha (1988), writing about the methodology of the Subaltern Studies project, says that parallel to elite politics, there is an autonomous domain of subaltern politics that neither originates from the former nor depends on it. Arild Rudd (2003) notes a dramatic transformation among the rural population of Bengal’s agricultural plains in the postcolonial period: “A simplistic dichotomy-based model does not allow an understanding of the interplay of local to the supralocal society, or the ability of the local to change and adapt” (p. 4). Anirudh Krishna’s (2007) study of rural India finds the emergence of naye neta, i.e. new village leaders who are experienced in dealing with government officials, possess a functional knowledge of modern institutions like banks and have slowly displaced the traditional rural elites as the power centers in their villages.

9 In terms of the function they serve, these new leaders have close parallels with the brokers and fixers that the classic work of F.G. Bailey (2001) describes, who make a profession of bridging the immense gap between the villagers and administrators, getting a share for their time, trouble and expertise (p.41). Drawing on Rudd and Krishna, I show that the ascendency of Balram and Fattesing was achieved by acquiring linguistic, educational, cultural and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 2003). Whether it was for carving a political career, as in the work of Krishna, or for material benefits, as in the work of Bailey, the brokers are, however, merely providing a service for the group they represent to various state agencies in a patron-client relationship. Nor does the concept of brokers, as analyzed by David Lewis and David Mosse (2006), who do the work of “translation” (p. 2,14) adequately cover the range of activities of the two Bhil leaders I describe below.

10 The two leaders not only worked closely with state agencies and social movement organizations (or created similar structures themselves) to shape the implementation of a specific state project of resettlement, but, more crucially, gave a new worldview to fellow hill Bhils. This happened even as the two leaders refashioned themselves to adapt to a new setting, providing a model for the succeeding generation of their youths. They are like the “peasant intellectuals” that Steven Feierman (1990:18)

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describes in his study of rural northern Tanzania. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectuals (1971:4), but also differing from it in the sense that there is no place for centralism, or leadership of a working class as well a Communist Party that are crucial for the Gramscian notion, Feierman’s peasant intellectuals are ordinary men and women, little different from the others in their community, who earned their livelihood by farming and who at crucial historical moments organized political movements of the greatest long-term significance and elaborated new forms of discourse. In contrast to Feierman’s tribal intellectuals who were systematically sidelined by the independence party once the historical objective of ending colonial rule was achieved, the two Bhil leaders remained acutely aware of both the opportunities and limitations provided by the larger societal structure and the Bhils’ marginal position in it. These rural leaders consequently kept changing alliances as well as strategies in their efforts to make claims on the state for themselves and on behalf of their fellow Bhils in the hills, and later in the newly settled resettlement colonies of the plains. This awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses ensured they continued to remain relevant and kept shaping a new mode of socio-economic and political life for all the resettled Bhils, even after the initial tension and stress of the permanent relocation had been resolved and the Bhil families were putting down roots in their new but alien surroundings.

Life in the Narmada Valley before the Dam

11 The exact month and year in which Balram and Fattesing were respectively born were never recorded, as was true for most people of their generation living in Akrani taluka of Nandurbar district. Akrani, along with Akkalkuwa taluka to its west, is situated in the midst of the Satpura hills and housed a large section of the Narmada valley through which the River Narmada covers its Maharashtra portion before joining the Arabian Sea. The river forms the natural boundary of three states, with Madhya Pradesh in the east and Gujarat on the northern side. For the thousands of Bhil families living in the midst of the Satpura hills, who subsisted by practicing shifting agriculture along with hunting, gathering and fishing, the absence of familiar signs of the government: village-level administrative offices, health centers and state-run schools, obviated the need for the creation and maintenance of records that forms an essential part of the modern state. Besides, near complete illiteracy in the hill villages, along with unfamiliarity with the Gregorian calendar, made it impossible to maintain even personal notes relating on births.

12 A hilly terrain that was thickly forested until 5 decades ago and remains largely unconnected by roads even today, this malaria-prone area was closely integrated with the socio-economic processes of the region (Guha 1999), until the British took control in the middle of the nineteenth century (Deshpande 1987). The British constituted the Khandesh district in 1818 (Government of Bombay 1880).9 The colonial rulers judged the area to possess too little economic value to merit the revenue survey and land settlement that were undertaken in the neighboring plains for ensuring taxation of settled agriculture. Surveys were twice abandoned as the expenditure and time spent on subjecting the hilly tracts to revenue settlement was felt to be too high (Government of Bombay 1930:1). They instead brought the area under their forest department regime (Government of Bombay 1880:16–18). Due to the absence of land settlement

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even in the postcolonial period, the Bhils technically remained “encroachers” on government property all along, despite living in the hill villages for generations. The forest department guards annually fined the Bhils for farming on the state’s land yet harassed them regularly, a common problem across large parts of the Indian subcontinent.

13 A closer look in the hills, however, reveals that the ground reality was complex. The forest department guards and policemen, the only face of the state familiar to the hill villages, hardly ever interacted with the ordinary Bhils who were in any case too afraid of them. The personnel instead dealt only with the karbhari (manager) of the village. A traditional post that went back all the way to the pre-colonial period, the karbharis wielded immense clout in their respective villages and adjudicated on all conflicts (Gare 1997; Patil 1989:19). Another institution introduced by colonial rule was that of police patil, who were entrusted with the task of reporting any crime in their given jurisdiction. The police patils could choose to implicate a person for a crime that he/she did not commit or simply ignore and not report even a murder if they wished. When an ordinary Bhil wanted to carve a fresh patch of land to grow coarse grains by the method of shifting agriculture prevalent across the hills, they went to their karbhari who would allot them land.10 The “payment,” i.e. bribe, for clearing the fresh patch of forest was negotiated by the karbhari. They dealt with the faris khata (forest department) shipda (guard) and also entertained them in their houses with kukdi (chicken) and horo (locally brewed alcohol). These twin institutions of karbhari and police patil constituted the traditional pudhari (leaders) and had powers of life and death over the Bhils. Both the institutions of karbhari and police patil—at times, the same person in a village could hold both the positions—are hereditary posts that passed on to the sons. This also meant that certain lineages in the villages were more powerful and cornered the best farming plots. Like every other Bhil in the area, these two local hegemons were illiterate; unlike the Bhils who only spoke their hill dialects; these two could speak a smattering of Marathi, the provincial language. This state of affairs continued until the 1980s, when the postcolonial state decided to build a dam across the Narmada River and submerge large parts of the valley.

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The Dam and the Samiti

14 The SSP project, stuck in the planning stage for decades, saw ground activity from the early 1980s (Paranjype 1990), though the Bhils to be affected found about it much later. The proposed dam just inside Gujarat’s border was going to submerge hundreds of villages in the three states, including Maharashtra. In Maharashtra it was submerging 33 villages, many of them partially, involving over 4000 families comprising over 20,000 people. Fattesing, then a young man, recalled: Most of us found out about the dam only around 1985 or so as whispers started doing the rounds. Someone had heard something from some shopkeeper while on a trip to the Kavat market, Gujarat and told it to others.11 Or perhaps, it came from some other source. No one seemed to have any concrete information. A report, based on fieldwork by a team of researchers found that in many cases, those in the affected area did not even know about the proposed dam, reflecting on the callous manner of the Indian state’s bureaucracy and their indifference to the issue of forced displacement (Multiple Action Research Group Report 1987).12 For most Bhils, the definitive news came when, to cite Balram Vasave, “Medha-tai [Medha Patkar] 13 came along with Vasudha-tai [Vasudha Dhagamvar] in 1985 and later made more trips on her own.”14

15 Fattesing, describing the setting up of the Narmada Dharangrast Samiti (Narmada Dam- affected Group),15 referred to simply as “Samiti” and the external activists as “Samiti- valas,” and his own association with it, said: Medha-tai first came to Gana karbhari’s house and later got in touch with Balram. Balram, an educated person hence a rarity among us, along with one of his elder brothers soon became a leader of the Samiti in the Akrani villages. A Karbhari Samiti [council] involving the traditional village heads was setup that started meeting periodically. We all disbelieved the story of the dam initially.

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By getting the karbharis on board, Medha rapidly gained acceptance among the Maharashtra submergence villages.

16 Balram had received a formal education due to a fortuitous set of circumstances when the isolation of the Narmada valley was broken briefly by M.K. Gandhi’s successor, Vinoba Bhave, who, while working for his countrywide Bhudan Movement of land distribution (Oommen 1972; Bhave 1954), visited the remote hills. Balram recalled: As part of his mission, Vinoba visited our hills in September 1958 along with many followers (Anonymous 1958a; Anonymous 1958b).16 One of his followers stayed back to run a school for a short period. He saw potential in me and convinced my reluctant parents to send me to Alandi town in Pune district where I lived and studied till class 7. I however returned to get married and started farming in the hills. I not only got a good education but exposure to the life in the plains. As a result, though I was neither a karbhari nor a police patil, I was one of the first and most important members of the Karbhari Samiti right from the beginning. I was the only one in my community who could interpret the various state documents, read the newspaper coverage of our movement by Marathi dailies and help our Bhil leaders to analyze the developments. As part of the NDS, we presented a list of 21 demands to the district government office in the summer of 1986 asking them to recognize our land rights in the submergence village. Our third demand in the list was the release of forest department land in the neighboring plains for our resettlement within the same district.17 Balram and one of the karbharis were the only two Bhils whose names appeared in the list of supplicants in that memorandum.

17 For Fattesing, on the other hand, it was an unremarkable beginning. He recalled: It was probably in early 1986 when Medha-tai called Gana-daya—daya is honorific for aged men—for a periodic meeting of the Karbhari Samiti in Village Molgi, Akkalkuwa taluka. A day before the group from Akrani villages was to begin their daylong trek to Molgi, I begged him: ‘Man bi number lagad de daya,’ (take me along to the meeting) and the karbhari agreed. It meant a lot to me for only the big pudharis were part of that meeting. This move was the lucky break that allowed Fattesing to sneak into the circle of the traditional valley elites for the first time and also catch the attention of external activists such as Medha. Fattesing described his humble beginning as an activist: My work was to run errands and pass on messages to the pudharis (karbharis and police patils) in various faliyas (hamlets; also pada) across villages. It was a tough job given the hilly terrain and the way movements work, one had to run rat-berat (odd times) but I found it thrilling. An activist named Ramesh Patil, fluent in Marathi though not English came from Mumbai city to work with us. Along with the Samiti came new songs and slogans about the trouble caused by the forest department, and petitions to the state departments (Nilsen 2010:85–90). The Samiti led by Medha was soon holding periodic meetings of the Karbhari Samiti in the hills, besides the submission of a memorandum to various state agencies, and was later holding protests rallies in the various plains’ towns and cities. Though placed differently in the movement hierarchy, both Balram and Fattesing were learning a new set of rules for engaging the state. Given his innate ability to remember names and his talent for recognizing a face even in a big crowd, along with his willingness to run errands any time of the day, Fattesing was uniquely suited to the mobilization efforts of the Samiti, both within the hills and for activities outside, which were being organized by external activists such as Medha and Ramesh.

18 A crucial part of the way the movement functioned was that the external activists conveyed the developments related to the dam and their plan of protest-action to the

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karbhari council, who in turn conveyed it to their people. The traditional leaders thus acted as the link between the Bhils and the external activists. As the movement grew in stature and started getting the attention of outsiders, including the press, the articulate Balram became one of the faces of the affected villages to the outside world. Fate had other things in store for Fattesing.

Exile, Empowerment and Return of Fattesing

19 At some point in 1986, Fattesing picked up a fight with the powerful police patil of his village, found little support from others and was driven out. Leaving his wife and two young children with his father, he went to work as a casual laborer in the big market yard in the neighboring plains. Medha stumbled across him one day and made him an offer: was he interested in attending a workshop on agriculture lasting two years? Besides boarding and lodging, he would be paid the same wages that he got in the yard daily. Fattesing was skeptical but agreed to give it a shot. His life was about to change.

20 Agricultural experts from the city sympathetic to the Bhils conducted the workshop held in the nearby town. The chief instructor was Charudutt Dabholkar who had done pioneering experiments on agricultural techniques.18 It had been organized by the activists of another movement, Maharashtra Dharan va Prakalpgrast Shetkari Parishad (Maharashtra Dam and Project Impacted Farmers’ Council). Founded in the early 1960s, they had played a pivotal role in forcing the GoM to legislate a land-for-land resettlement policy in 1976 regarding dam-displaced people in Maharashtra, a first for any Indian state.19 This resettlement law did not apply in the case of the SSP dam as it was an inter-state project. A group of young Bhils, used to the slash-and-burn practice of shifting cultivation in the hills, was being instructed in the methods of settled agriculture. The objective was to teach them to produce grains in the plains using experimental farming techniques to ensure sufficient output to feed a family from a one-hectare field when they were moved to the plains by the state. While the other Bhils found it too complex and started dropping out, Fattesing showed a keen interest. During afternoons, while the others enjoyed their siesta, he started visiting Dinanath Manohar, a former communist activist who taught him to read and sign his name, though he never progressed to writing.20 He also learnt about police and forest department laws at the venue of the workshop, Jan Seva Mandal, a center of Jesuit priests inspired by liberation theology. Fattesing recounted to me years later how he was “amazed to know that people cannot be arrested by the police without a written complaint or an arrest warrant from a magistrate.” When I visited the old-timers at Jan Seva to collect more details of this forgotten workshop 25 years later in April 2011, I met Jayant Padvi, aged 50, a Bhil activist who worked with the clergy there. Jayant recalled, “It was James bhau [Brother James] who conducted workshops in the 1980s teaching us Bhils about the structure of the Indian state with emphasis on its laws and development schemes.” Jayant also corroborated Fattesing’s story and added in Bhili: Tiyan timeopa chyun manhan khup badli giyo (that man got transformed during that period). He came bare-bodied wearing a khosti (loin cloth), an attire typical of hill Bhils, only spoke Bhili dialects, barely understood Marathi and had little idea of the larger world. He walked out wearing a shirt-pant and armed with lots of practical knowledge that few Bhils possessed. Upon his return to the hills, Fattesing used his newly acquired skills to resolve a police- case. He ensured that the accused Bhils were freed without the payment of a bribe. He

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was now sought by all the karbharis and had become their equal in the eyes of the common Bhil.

Bhil Leaders Pursuing Independent Paths

21 Fattesing resumed his work with the Samiti, which was being reshaped. By 1988, the Samiti led by Medha had changed its stand from demanding resettlement to opposing the dam and had a new name: the NBA. Ramesh Patil had left for his hometown while other external activists from the cities of Mumbai and Pune, high caste young men and women from upper-caste middle-class background with college degrees from premier educational institutes and fluent in English, had joined the group. Using print media and by cultivating environmental NGOs in the Global North, they conducted the anti- dam campaign that soon became very prominent (Khagram 2004). Protest rallies in big cities and extended hunger strikes by Medha, and at times by a few Bhil karbharis, were undertaken. Beginning in 1988, the external activists proposed ganv bandi (village closure) for all government officials, which was whole-heartedly adopted by the Karbhari Samiti (Baviskar 2004:208). Already cut off from the plains due to the absence of road, the external activists now became the sole source of information relating to happenings outside of the hills for the Bhil leadership.

22 As the movement waged while work on the dam continued, the Government of Maharashtra took sincere steps to resolve the deadlock. It brought in a new resettlement officer in July 1990, who started to move in the villages.21 The official faced boycotts and was not allowed to enter many hill villages, though his persistent efforts ensured he could enter some of the hamlets in a few villages. Unlike the forest guards and policemen, he addressed all villagers with respect and struck up good friendships with several Bhil leaders, including Gana Karbhari and Fattesing, though the latter two still swore by the NBA movement. “For us, shasan (government) till then meant only the forest department or the police. This sahib (official here) was an unlikely sahib,” recalled Fattesing fondly. “He would visit remote hamlets on foot, talking to people. Of course, most people did not speak out as is the wont, only the pudharis shared their misgivings.”

23 The schism between the external activists and the Bhils’ leaders soon came to the fore, with Fattesing charting a new course. When Medha found out about the hobnobbing of Fattesing with the resettlement officials, she was furious and sent him a note that said he should not attend future meetings of the NBA. This infuriated Fattesing, who felt that his integrity had been questioned. The official’s sincerity struck a chord when he and the traditional Bhil pudharis found out the state had already changed its stand in June 1990 and was willing to give them the forest department land in the plains that they had demanded in 1986 (Anonymous 1990a).22 Fattesing recalled: The government had taken the decision several months earlier (Anonymous 1990b). 23 The baherche karyakarte (external activists) had however not shared this information with us.24 When the dam’s gates were closed and water started to rise, the external activists remained firm asking us Bhils to drown our houses and farms for the whole world to witness but our people got panicky. The karbharis and patils were at a loss but I had already made up my mind: we are all farmers with family and children; it was pointless to stay back and refuse the fertile agricultural land being offered by the state that we ourselves had demanded. I convinced the

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pudharis and assured them that I would be able to deal with the state if there was any problem later. Fattesing reminisced further: I now realized the need for a new set of skills to deal with the state, including a lot of drafting skills on a regular basis to compose numerous petitions to various state agencies. I closely involved my young paternal cousin, Gamirsing who had recently returned from a plains’ school and was educated till class 10. Having worked closely with the Samiti, I was aware of the format of the applications, and had learned the ability to read, so I would dictate the contents as he wrote them down. 12 of the 24 villages of Akrani taluka facing submergence, either partially or fully accepted the state’s offer to relocate them in a single day in 1991.25 With reference to this move, instead of the phrase “phut padne” meaning “to cause a split” used by the external PSS activists, Fattesing used the words, “amhi baher nighun alo” (we walked out).

24 Looking back at his move in 1991 two decades later, Fattesing shared his thoughts one evening in August 200: No outsider can ever understand what it means for a person to leave his ancestral land forever. I often see it in my dreams. But the state’s offer of this fertile agricultural land of our choice along with a housing colony was the best thing that could have happened to us. Now it is up to us to do what we make of it, cultivate well and rise or drink daru (liquor) all the time and face ruin. With increasing population and shrinking land, life in the hills is not what it used to be in my parents’ generation. Those still perched up will come down soon. His claim was backed by the ground reality as an increased population and deforestation in the Narmada valley from the middle of the twentieth century had already resulted in the beginning of seasonal migration to the plains for working in the sugarcane fields and the numbers have kept rising through the years (Thakur 2014).

25 Fattesing at that time was indirectly referring to Balram who was still holding fort in the valley with several villages, though they had to shift their houses further up in the hills as the dam’s water stood at 80 meters of the proposed 138 meters. Balram recalled the strained period of the early 1990's: Unlike the present, the ordinary Bhils followed their traditional pudharis in every decision though both understood little of the life outside the hills. In that tense moment, some of the karbharis in the low-lying villages reposed their faith in the abilities of Fattesing. In today’s times with roads, mobile phones and all the exposure that the new generation of our educated children have, it is difficult to imagine the totally different world of the hills or the peculiar situation regarding lack of information and the dilemma it created in the hill villages back then. I was however convinced that the land offered for resettlement that time would not be able to accommodate everyone. Then there were various feuds within the different clans so they would not have lived happily together. I was invited to meet the Chief Minister of Maharashtra in 1991 as the sole representative of the Bhils but did not budge despite tempting offers.

New Discourse for the Plains

26 On reaching the plains, the Bhils found that the resettlement colonies lacked basic amenities; many had been given uncultivable land while yet others received nothing. “There were many problems,” Fattesing recalled. It was in this setting that he decided to protest using the modern nonviolent methods that he had seen the external activists of the NBA resort to several times. Shunned by the NBA activists, he soon got in touch

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with two other external social activists, Pratibha and Sanjay. Fattesing asked them to help contact local Marathi-language dailies as he sat on a hunger strike to demand that the state honor its promises. He decided to organize a dharna (sit-in) of the relocated Bhils in front of the GoM taluka office at Taloda in 1995 and resort to a hunger strike himself. A keen observer, he was aware that the protest itself would have no impact on the state machinery and they would be simply ignored. The trick was to have it covered by the news media, at-least the local vernacular dailies. He recalled: I realized that if I sat on a hunger strike, activities including keeping the morale of the other protestors high, composition and distribution of periodic press releases and negotiating with the state officials could not be handled by any of the karbharis so I needed external help. Thus the PSS came into being in 1995.

27 By the time I came into the picture in 2001, Fattesing had joined the Congress political party and was dismissive of all external activists. On my return to the area in December 2003 as an independent researcher, I found he had been elected the sabhapati, i.e. chairperson of the Panchayat Samiti in the local government body.26 From an illiterate ordinary Bhil from the hills, he had managed to carve a space in the highly contested electoral political field of the plains. When I went to the office building to witness his swearing-in, I found that the police patils and karbharis who once made him run errands cheered the loudest. He had also prospered into a successful farmer growing cash crops. He achieved this with a canny mix of older social values of the Narmada valley along with his newly acquired familiarity with life in the plains. He used his extended kinship network, under the guidance of his industrious father, to grow cash crops, including cotton, combining their individual plots of land allotted by the state. He also pushed his younger brother and son to train as a doctor and an engineer respectively. He has remained the role model for the other resettled Bhils by setting to a new discourse, away from the life in the hills that was guided by the karbharis, for the plains marked by a new set of crops and push for education for their children while integrating them with the mainstream political process from a position of strength.

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28 When Fattesing chose to move out with one set of karbharis, Balram remained in the valley with the NBA-led movement. He now became the sole power-center in the hills. The Supreme Court of India suspended work on the completion of the dam for five years from 1994–1999. Beginning in 1988–1989 itself, the NBA-led movement presented Balram as a prominent face of the Bhils facing displacement to the external world. He travelled far and wide, including to European countries, accompanying Medha and giving interviews and talks about the uncertainty caused by displacement. Upon the resumption of the dam’s construction, he finally moved away from the NBA-led movement and took three villages with him to a new resettlement colony in 2004. Like the karbharis and Fattesing before him, Balram had moved his constituency along with him to a colony of his choice to maintain his power.

29 The choice of resettlement colony made by Balram was in an area that was a stronghold of the dominant peasant caste of Gujars who had a history of exploiting the plains’ Bhils as a source of cheap labor for over a century (Paranjape 1981). The resettlement colony, along with the neighboring plains’ village of the Gujars, got clubbed into one unit for local village elections with the seat being reserved for an ST person as per the government’s rules to support affirmative action. Fattesing convinced the Gujar leadership to support the candidate of the resettled Bhils instead of having a proxy Bhil candidate of the Gujars from their (Gujar) village. The resettled Bhils’ candidate was elected as the village head in each of the elections held in 2005 and 2011. When I mentioned his persuasive skills, he said self-effacingly: Based on my long experience as an activist trying to reconcile opposing views among various factions, I try to find a path that is least antagonistic yet beneficial. It is not as if Bhils from three villages housed together don’t have conflicts. My proposal was to opt for a candidate through consensus rather than contest, first to the resettlement colony and then to the Gujars with the solemn promise that the elected representative will be a capable person and work for both the villages. I am old so I pushed our next generation of educated youth to lead as they understand the plains’ life better. He did not add that he had little time for electoral politics given his involvement in experimenting with new varieties of cash crops, first cotton and later papaya from 2010 onwards, something that the other resettled Bhils then emulated (Shah, Lerche, Axelby, Benbabali, Donegan, Raj and Thakur 2018:195–200).

30 Given the slow pace of the implementation of the resettlement package that is typical of most Indian state projects, both Fattesing in the first decade from 1995–2005 and Balram from 2004 onwards continued to make repeated representations to the state along with protest rallies. The pressure from the NBA against the dam indirectly helped their cause as the state tried to show that the resettlement was getting attention. Balram, while maintaining cordial relations with the NBA to draw on their support even in the plains, also developed close ties with the external PSS activists. Both leaders also pushed their next generation of Bhils to acquire an education, with many of the youth acquiring undergraduate degrees from local colleges. This first generation of educated youth under their guidance organized themselves into yuva samitis (youth councils) in their respective resettlement colonies, which continue to make representations on behalf of the resettled families. These youth groups have been slowly moving away from the external activists of both the NBA and the PSS, while successfully resolving issues related to individual families. The process of making claims was continuing when I last visited the colonies in March 2016.

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Conclusion

31 The existing literature on the mobilization against the SSP dam on River Narmada is narrowly focused on the moment of displacement. This paper instead covered a wider stretch of time spanning three generations of the Bhils and the process of transition from their homes in the hills to their new location in the plains’ resettlement colonies, to highlight the primacy of subaltern Bhil agency. It began by showing the role of the traditional leadership of the karbharis and the police patils in the hill villages as powerful hegemons who also served as the link between the ordinary Bhils and the outside world, whether forest department officials from the colonial period or the NBA’s external urban activists from the 1980s. The coming of the SSP dam and the movement opposing it broke the isolation of the Narmada valley and the consequent turmoil led to the inadvertent rise of new Bhil youth leaders such as Fattesing and Balram. The movement initiated by the external activists along with other random encounters acted as a form of political tutorial for them. The two leaders, over the course of three decades, slowly managed to displace their traditional leaders, successfully challenged their NBA mentors in the hills, the PSS activists in the plains and, most crucially, made successful representations to the Indian state in their quest for a viable life and the reconstruction of their livelihood in a new setting. In all their actions, such as forming temporary alliances at various points with different groups of external activists, their move towards mainstream electoral politics and in their recognition and adoption of the plains’ value systems, including education and cash crops, Fattesing and Balram were the pioneers among their fellow Bhils. They reshaped the socio-economic and political values of their community across generations and ensured the successful assimilation of the hill Bhils in the plains’ villages, even as they continued their livelihood as farmers like all the other Bhils. Terms such as hustlers, brokers, agents or translators are hence inadequate to cover the range of roles they

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have played for their fellow Bhils. They are organic peasant intellectuals who have continued to shape the fate of their community at crucial historical junctures.

32 This study of the Narmada Bhils indicates that the various ST groups, arguably among the most marginal sections of Indian society, are undergoing drastic change marked by the emergence of new forms of indigenous leadership. The lives of Fattesing and Balram, however, reflect both the possibilities and limitations of the agency that an uneducated person or someone with limited education from a remote rural background and hailing from the marginal community of ST groups can realistically exercise in their efforts to make claims on the modern state in a multilingual and multiethnic setting such as South Asia. The external urban activists armed with linguistic, educational and cultural capital were familiar with the functioning of the modern state. They were conversant with the legitimate ways to challenge the state that included attracting widespread publicity for their efforts among the media (as well as academics) in organizing the subaltern Bhils. They showed that the state, from the petty forest guard all the way up to the elected heads sitting in the state capitals, could be effectively challenged. They did not, however, simply act as the facilitators in the movement or as the medium of contact between the rural populations and the outside world. They had their own agenda that was often at odds with those on behalf of whom they reached out to the external world. Even as they used the traditional power structure to establish themselves in the villages, their actions inadvertently produced new forms of leadership that Fattesing and Balram exemplified. It was the lack of educational and cultural capital that made the two new leaders either stick to one set of external activists or make alliances with another set periodically. The transitional nature of these linkages reflects the conscious attempt of these two Bhil leaders to maintain their independent course in the long run. Though empowered by the elite urban activists, it the very acts of defiance by Fattesing and Balram against their accidental mentors, as well as repeatedly charting a course that differed from the program of the various external activists, that most effectively highlights subaltern agency and makes them leaders with a will of their own. Unlike the external activists and supporters of the NBA-led anti-dam movement that have systematically generated a wealth of published material both in periodicals and academic journals, the story of the Bhils’ struggle for resettlement remained unwritten, confined to the collective memories of the community of the remote rural area. It is, however, through the biographies of Fattesing Pawara and Balram Vasave that the quest of the Narmada Bhils for land rights and viable livelihood, whether in the hills or the plains, comes across most vividly.

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NOTES

1. Henceforth, ST. 2. NBA: also called Save Narmada Campaign. 3. Other monographs include Wood (2007); Dwivedi (2006); Caldirola and Srivastava (2005). There are several edited volumes, including Fisher (1997), Mehta (2009), several books in Hindi and Marathi languages, and many film documentaries as well. 4. For a brief mention of the role of the karbharis among the Bhils of Khandesh, see Patil (1989); Gare (1997). The original books are in Marathi. All Marathi translations are mine. 5. Names of persons and villages have been changed to protect their identities. The exceptions to this rule are those external activists who are identified in prior publications or who agreed to be identified. 6. PSS henceforth. 7. Date as per the handwritten copy of the application submitted on July 26, 1991 by Fattesing, along with the karbharis of the 12 villages, which was received by the GoM. The applicants refer to their group as “Narmada Punarwasan Samiti.” Copy shared by Fattesing in August 2012. 8. For the outcome of that protest action, see Katakam 2001. 9. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency Khandesh District. Vol. XII, Henceforth GBPK. 10. For details of the various types of shifting agricultural practices in the area, see Skaria (1999:66–68).

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11. Across the two ends of the Narmada valley, Kanvat in Gujarat and Khetia in Madhya Pradesh are the traditional markets that the Bhils have frequented for shopping and the sale of agriculture and forest produce for over a century. 12. The study was carried out in neighboring Madhya Pradesh villages. It is safe to conclude that the situation would have been similar in Maharashtra given the same physical terrain, poor road network and reluctance of state officials to visit the hills. 13. Tai is an honorific for elder sister in Marathi. 14. Dhagamvar, a lawyer and activist, worked for the land rights of the Bhils in Akkalkuwa taluka during the early 1970s. See Dhagamvar (2006). For details of her visit to introduce Medha Patkar, see Dhagamvar (1997). Medha Patkar describes her work in Patkar (1997). 15. Henceforth, NDS. 16. His claim is corroborated by the now-defunct Marathi weekly Swatantra Bharat, September 9 and 30, 1958, published from Dhule town, then a weekly, which covered Vinoba’s visit. 17. A 4-page printed memorandum, in red ink and dated “April 1986,” copy provided by ARCH Vahini, also Balram Vasave, both in 2012. 18. See Dabholkar (1961) on his study of cultivating crops in arid regions. 19. For details, see the autobiography of its founder leader, Datta Deshmukh, in Deshmukh (1997). 20. Manohar was part of the Shramik Sanghatana movement that had worked among the Bhils in the plains of Nandurbar; see Basu (1992). 21. Charge Handover Report, Sardar Sarovar Project Department, GoM. 22. Centre for Education and Documentation, Record Group Narmada/Sardar Sarovar, January 1989-July 1990 E21b (C). File: Anonymous. 1990. "2500 Hectares of State Forest Land for Dam Oustees." The Independent. Mumbai ed. June 29. 23. CED, Cf. Medha Patkar’s statement in the daily Times of India (Mumbai edition), July 1,1990. “Ms Medha Patkar of the Narmada Dharangrast Samiti…told reporters here yesterday…that the oustees’ organizations had refused the land in 1987–88 itself, a fact which had been suppressed.” 24. Anil Patel’s (1997) experience in many Maharashtra villages was that the information had been held back for two years (P.86). Patel was part of a group, ARCH Vahini that had successfully fought for the resettlement of the Bhils in Gujarat since 1980, and later Maharashtra from around 1989–1995. See Nilsen (2010). 25. Cf. Ranjit Dwivedi (1998) who credits the move of the villagers to the change in the state’s policy, thus denying any agency to the local Bhil leadership. If the policy change was the only reason for the Bhils accepting resettlement, all the project-affected villages should have accepted the state’s offer. 26. India has a three-tier elected local self-government at the village, block and district level, that is elected by the people. Block is the unit of a district; district is the unit of a state.

ABSTRACTS

This paper studies subaltern agency and the changing nature of leadership in rural western India among the Bhil Scheduled Tribe or Adivasi group in the wake of the anti-dam movement initiated by urban middle-class activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA; also Save Narmada Campaign). Drawing on fieldwork data along with oral history, archival research, government

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records, vernacular records and dailies, it analyzes the politics of displacement and resettlement due to the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the River Narmada as a lived experience of two ordinary Bhil men from the submergence villages in Maharashtra state across three decades from 1985–2016. The NBA-led movement acts as a form of political education for the two Bhils who assume leadership, displacing both traditional Bhil leaders and external activists to guide their community deftly to the resettlement colonies by making claims on the Indian state, and helping to recreate life and livelihood for themselves and their fellow Bhils in the new setting.

INDEX

Keywords: Narmada, Bhils, Sardar Sarovar Dam, social movements, subaltern, displacement, resettlement, leadership

AUTHOR

VIKRAMADITYA THAKUR Department of Anthropology, University of Delaware, USA

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