“'We Earn Less Than We Eat:' Food, Farming, and The

“‘WE EARN LESS THAN WE EAT:’ FOOD, FARMING, AND THE CARING FAMILY IN BIHAR, INDIA” A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Hayden Seth Kantor May 2016 © 2016 Hayden Seth Kantor “‘WE EARN LESS THAN WE EAT:’ FOOD, FARMING, AND THE CARING FAMILY IN BIHAR, INDIA” Hayden Seth Kantor , Ph.D. Cornell University 2016 This dissertation examines food and farming practices in rural Bihar, India. Given changes in the agrarian economy and rapid food inflation, rural Biharis feel their livelihoods under threat. The title quote – “we earn less than we eat” – points to a shifting calculus for rural households in which well-being is framed in terms of off-far m income rather than agricultural output. Although the recent intensification of Green Revolution agricultural practices has boosted rural incomes, farmers grapple with the accelerated capitalization of rural life in which land, seed, and labor are increasingly commodified. As a result, farmers who depend on the land for their subsistence must prepare for a future beyond agriculture. I argue that food and farming practices provide a lens onto how small-scale farming families articulate an ethics of care in the face of precarious rural conditions. In rural Bihar, people’s aspirations and anxieties center on the family and are often expressed through the idiom of food. Given local histories of food insecurity, I frame care primarily in terms of food practices—the daily work of farming, feeding, and commensal eating that sustains the family. The forms that care assumes vary according to gender, caste, and role in the family. Attending to the logics of care thus points to neglect – whose interests can be ignored, which bodies can be put at risk – and the ways that violence is not separate from care but often mingled with it. This ethnography attends to Biharis’ embodied experiences as a means of conjuring their sense of insecurity and enactments of care. The sensuous body – with all its hungers, labors, and vulnerabilities – sheds light on the intimate ways that people experience larger political economic formations. This project challenges the surplus/scarcity dichotomy that often frames scholarship on the larger global food economy. I complicate this binary by showing how sensations of poverty and abundance, pleasure and dissatisfaction, coexist within a single community, household, and even a single person. In turning to the sensations and appetites of the body, I show how people strive to sustain the family and refuse the logics of scarcity that govern their lives. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Hayden Seth Kantor is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. He received a M.A. from the University of Chicago in 2008 and a B.A. from Duke University in 2005. iii For Roanne iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In writing this dissertation, I have accumulated many debts. Several scholarly institutions provided crucial material support for this research. I benefited from an American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Research Fellowship, a Wenner- Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, and a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Graduate Travel Grant. A Cornell Graduate School Research Travel Grant and a Cornell Department of Anthropology Bernd Lambert Award supported preliminary research for this project. In addition, several scholarly institutions in India facilitated this project. Purnima Mehta and the staff of the American Institute of Indian Studies provided essential logistical support. I benefited from a research affiliation with the Institute of Economic Growth at Delhi University, and conversations with my faculty supervisor there, Amita Baviskar. Alakh N. Sharma and his team at the Institute for Human Development in Delhi helped me find my place in Nalanda district. I also recognize the support of the A. N. Sinha Institute for Social Sciences, the Asian Development Research Institute, the Bihar State Archives, the Gandhi Sangrahalaya, and the Sinha Library, all in Patna, and the National Archives of India in Delhi. I am filled with abiding gratitude to the people of Bihar who shared their lives with me. They welcomed me into their world and made this project possible. In particular, I thank the members of the joint family households headed by Rakesh Kumar and Dinesh Kumar, who cared for me during my stay. At Cornell, I was privileged to work with a truly supportive and careful committee. My chair, Stacey Langwick, asked penetrating questions and provided wise guidance since this v project’s inception. Durba Ghosh fostered a rich intellectual community and helped me to situate my work. Andrew Willford and Ann Gold each engaged me in an exciting conversation about what it means to write an ethnography of rural India and read my work with an empathetic eye. As I’ve completed this journey, I’ve enjoyed the fellowship of friends and colleagues with whom I have shared in many stimulating conversations. They helped me to conceptualize this project and commented on these chapters as they developed. Special thanks to Andrew Amstutz, Charis Boke, Can Dalyan, Anaar Desai-Stephens, Sean Dowdy, Alexander Gordon, Adi Grabiner, Carter Higgins, Brinda Kumar, Zhying Ma, Beth Reddy, Ender Ricart, Monica Salas Landa, Ashley Smith, and Nishita Trisal. I am grateful to my family for their unstinting support throughout this process. For as long as I can remember, my parents, Alan and Patricia Kantor, have nurtured my curiosity about the world. They have encouraged me every step of the way. My sister, Danielle Kantor, lives with a grace and discernment that inspires me. Most of all, I’m thankful for the support of my wife, Roanne Kantor. She provided valuable research assistance during the months she spent in Bihar, shared her insights into what we experienced together, and made numerous sacrifices that allowed me to bring this project to fruition. More than that, she has given me the joy, care, and love that sustain me each day. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Note on Orthography viii Chapter 1 1 Introduction Chapter 2 33 Growing Ambivalence: Pressure, Pleasure, and Agrarian Futures in Bihar Chapter 3 77 Tenuous Livelihoods, Temporary Schemes: Articulations of Precarity and Resourcefulness Chapter 4 104 Intimate Rivals: Women’s Labor in the Joint Family Household Chapter 5 133 Masculine Appetites: Alcohol, Meat, and the Figure of the Badmash Chapter 6 160 Refusing Scarcity: Affiliation and Abundance in a Regional Festival Chapter 7 184 Building Beyond the Bypass Road: Urbanization, Ritual Eating, and the Fate of the Joint Family in Patna Chapter 8 221 Conclusion Bibliography 227 vii NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY I have followed the IAST system for transliterating Hindi and Magahi words in the Devanagari script into English. To denote pluralizations of South Asian words, I have added an unitalicized s to these words. Where a Hindi word has a widely recognized spelling in English – such as bazaar, chai, or sari – I have followed the popular convention. Italicized English words – such as government, labor, tension – denote English loanwords adopted by South Asian speakers. viii Chapter 1 Introduction There was a knock at the door. I got up from my desk and opened it. Anjali Kumari stood on the top step. She was a tall, bright 11-year-old girl. Her father, Rakesh Kumar, was my host in the village of Amalpur, in the North Indian state of Bihar’s Nalanda district.1 It was a cold December day. The sun had failed to penetrate the clouds that hung low and heavy in the sky. This was a busy agricultural period, during which farmers rushed to complete the paddy harvest and sow the winter crops—wheat, lentils, and mustard seed. But on such an overcast, chilly day, farmers typically paused their work rather than tempt sickness. So the road in front of my house was quiet, with fewer trucks, bicyclists, and pedestrians passing from the villages beyond Amalpur to the shops on the main road. Behind Anjali, a neighbor’s buffalo bellowed, loud and long. Just out of view, the communal hand pump screeched as another neighbor filled her bucket. “Hayden uncle,” Anjali said, “Can you give us some newspaper? Ma is making something.” I nodded and turned to my shelf behind me. Upon my arrival in the village, I had subscribed to the Hindi newspaper, Dainik Jagran (The Daily Awakening). Each morning, a bicycle deliveryman dropped the paper at my door. My neighbors passed it around, surveying the local news bulletins and announcements for government jobs. Instead of discarding it when I was 1 Following standard anthropological practice, I have used pseudonyms for the names of the villages and neighborhoods in this study. 1 finished, my hosts had advised me to save the newspaper, which I might sell by the bundle to a scavenger, or put to some other use. The newspaper headlines recorded the machinations of party politics and the rollout of new government programs. However, these state initiatives and party squabbles often seemed remote from life in this small farming village. For instance, the much-heralded “Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project,” known locally as JEEViKA, featured a US $70 million commitment from the World Bank. The project aimed to improve rural livelihoods for women and empower the poor in the project area, a broad swath covering almost three million people in 4,000 villages, including Amalpur. But despite the fanfare and good intentions, the project did not seem to have much lasting impact on the economic circumstances of the village. Life in Amalpur continued much as it had before. Given the inadequacies of development programs, if not outright state neglect, I had become interested in a different sort of politics and economics.

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