SURINDER S JODHKA

S

Social anthropologists working on the village during 1940s and 1950s emphasised the communitarian character of social life in a typical Indian village. Even when they recognised the existence of caste hierarchies and social inequalities, they emphasised the vertical unity and functional interdependence among caste groups.2 While social anthropologists collected detailed information on the normative framework of caste society and social order of kinship, they gave lesser importance to realities of social relations of production and the prevailing structures of dependency/exploitation in the rural/agrarian society. Though the perpetual misery of the Indian peasantry and the labouring poor had become an important issue during the freedom movement, it was only in the 1960s and 1970s that social scientists work ing on India began to do serious research on these questions. Right from the beginning “agrarian studies” focused on the political economy of the rural social order and the manner in which relations of power and domi nation were reproduced or sustained.

Though the “agrarian question” had become a very important issue during the Indian freedom movement and was on the priority list of the government soon after independence, it largely remained focused around the “land question”, which in turn implied its preoccupation was mostly with problems of the cultivating peasants. However, unlike in many other parts of the world, the Indian village has always had a large proportion of landless labouring poor who had been part of the agrarian economy as a subjugated category. Notwithstanding the enormous diversity of agrarian ecologies and social/economic histories, there were remarkable similarities in the manner in which their subjugation was institutionalised in different regions of the subcontinent.

The typical story of this subjugation was something like this: a young male from a landless family began to work with a substantial landowner fairly early in life, and helped in grazing cattle or with other odd jobs. As he grew older, and attained marriageable age, he needed money to finance his own wedding. There could also be other sources that generated the need for money, such as the wedding of a sister or any other kin, ill-health in the family, or need for construction or repair of the house.

Given his economic status and near complete lack of any assets, the only way he could mobilise money was through mortgaging his labour power to a landowner. Low wage rates and lack of any alternative sources of employment or income meant perpetual indebtedness, which in turn led to a prolonged relation of dependency and bondage, often lasting for life and beyond, to the next generation and would invariably suck in the entire family of the labourer. While the bonded labourer worked on the land, his wife and children helped with domestic chores and looked after the cattle. As I have mentioned above, these kinds of arrangements evolved in different parts of the sub continent, with a variety of local names and regional specificities. For example in the north-west of India, in Punjab, it was known as the ‘sepadari’ or ‘sajhi’ system. In the Haryana region it was called ‘siri’ system. In western India, in Rajasthan and Gujarat, it was locally named as ‘halipratha’. In parts of south India, it was known as the ‘jitu’ system. In Bihar and some other parts of eastern India, it was called ‘goti’ or ‘gotia’ system.

Historians of labour relations in India do not agree on the origins of this system. While some see it as a typical feudal system of patronage, others tend to see it as an offshoot of the changes introduced by the British colonial rulers in Indian agriculture [Mundle 1979, Prakash 1992]. They argue that it was only with the intensification of monetary transactions in the agrarian economy that traditional structures of caste and patronage were turned into slave like system of bonded labour. While this may simply be a question of interpretation, subordination of the landless and labouring population was indeed real and had been in existence for a fairly long time.

The available evidence also tends to point to the fact that this system of bonded labour began to weaken, at least in some parts of India during the later years of colonial rule.3 However, it was only after independence, with growing tendency towards capitalist agriculture that the forms and substance of labour dependency and attachment began to change rapidly. It is this history of changes and continuities in the agrarian social structure of south Gujarat, documented primarily through his own fieldwork that Jan Breman presents in these two volumes.

The region where Breman conducted his fieldwork during 1960s had already seen a decline of the old form of bonded labour, accompanied by a process he described as “depatronisation” and “casualisation” of labour relations. The labourers were no longer bonded to a particular master. The change was primarily a consequence of the withdra wal of patronage by the erstwhile masters.

What implications did this process of formalisation of social relations have for the labouring poor? Did it reduce their vulnerability or made it even more acute?

While we know a great deal about the nature and extent of poverty in India, we do not know much about the relational or structural contexts that produce and reproduce poverty and vulnerability. This, according to Breman, is because the discourse on the poor and poverty has virtually become an exclusive domain of the economist. However, the economists’ perspectives and their preoccupation with numbers fail to capture the complex reality of social relations and the larger value frames within which the poor live and struggle for survival. Breman thus advocates for village level micro-studies to capture the complex realities on ground, something that he has been involved with himself for the last four decades.

In the second book he brings together his recent work in four villages of south Gujarat, two of which are the ones where he first went to do fieldwork in late 1960s. Even though the process of change was quite visible during his first fieldwork, the rural scenes in the region has transformed much more radically since then and as expected implications of these changes have been different for different categories of the rural population. For example in the first village of his fieldwork, he identified three categories of rural populations responding differently to changing times.

The traditionally rich and upper caste families had been slowly moving away from the village. Though not many of them had sold off their lands, their interest in agriculture was certainly declining. However, this did not necessarily result in dec line of their influence. In fact politically their power grew with new found urban networks. They were now part of the regional elite, and this extension of their sphere of influence did not in any way reduce their hold over the village level politics.

The koli patel, who had traditionally been poor peasants continued to be attached to the land and the village. Though they were not a locally “dominant caste”, their political-orientation was not very different from the anavil brahmins. Their limited experience of mobility made them conscious of their Hindu identity and in their quest to become good Hindus, they invariably joined the anavils in their support for Hindutva politics.

The story of landless dublas has understandably been quite different. As mentioned above, the old structure of “patronage and exploitation” had given way to more formalised and casual labour relations. Though the old type of halipratha had declined, not every labourer worked as a casual labourer. Some of them still worked as attached labourers, albeit on different terms, as farm servants on annual contract. They also moved out of farmers’ homestead and the contract no longer required labourers’ wife to work with the employer farmer.

The numbers of those working as attached labourers have been consistently declining over the years. For example, in 1962-63 as many as 81 per cent of all the labourers were attached and this came down to 42 per cent in 1986-87 and further to 30 per cent in 2004-05. Even in absolute terms the number of attached labourers declined from 50 in 1962-63 to 36 in 2004-05 and the number of casual labourers during the same time went up from 12 to 88. This shows a significant increase in the supply of casual labourers. In absence of any increase in the demand for labour locally, finding employment becomes a difficult proposition. The only option left with them was to migrate out of agriculture. However, the nature of employment available to them in urban and non-agricultural sector is not very different from the employment in agricultural sector. The wage rates are low with no certainty or permanence of employment. Breman describes them as footloose proletariat engaged either with the urban “informal sector” or who travel to other agrarian settings for seasonal employment. Only rarely do some of them manage to find employment in the formal or organised sector of the economy.

The net result: a vicious and unending cycle of poverty. Poverty however does not simply mean low levels of income. It also produces vulnerability, which binds them into a structure of social relations marked by their perpetual dependence on the rich and the dominant. Interestingly, the mechanism through which their dependency and vulnerability is institutionalised today is not really new. The only mode of filling the gap between income and the requirements of survival for a large majority of the landless in south Gujarat is through borrowing money from wherever they can get it and given their economic status the only way they can avail it is from the substantial landowners or the labour contractors on the promise to work for them as and when they require. For the landowners and the labour contractors, this is a good way of not only ensuring labour supply, but also getting labour at a price of their choice. The indebted labourer has no option but to work for whatever wage that is offered to him by the creditor employer.

While the mechanism of bonding labour seems old, the value-frame within which this arrangement is institutionalised is very different. The employer has no obligations towards the labourer and the labourer has no sense of security either of subsistence or of employment. It is for these reasons that Breman chooses to call it “neo-bondage”. Unlike the old system of halipratha, neobondage can also take a variety of different forms, ranging from annual contract as farm servant to seasonal casual labour. Its’ elements can be found in the manner in which the regimes of labour migrations work in the region. The core element of the relationship is the power and domi nation of the creditor over the poor labourer, which eventually translates into depressed wages and disciplined labour power.

Domination is invariably accompanied by resistance. However, the nature of much of the resistance that Breman mention in the book seems to resemble what James Scott describes as “everyday forms of resistance” [Scott 1990]. As has been pointed by the critiques of Scott, the political effects of such resistance are not of much consequence and rarely lead to empowerment of the poor, or any kind of meaningful social and economic transformation [Gupta 2001], something that seems quite obvious in the context Breman is located in. Yet, he often seems to romanticise such instances of resistance.

The experience of the dublas of south Gujarat has also been a test case for the Gandhians, perhaps the only mainstream political formation that has been actively working with the tribals in the region. Not only has the effect of their work been negligible on the economic life of the dublas, over the years the Gandhian movement has also dissipated. In their effort at making them civilised and a part of national mainstream, the Gandhian activists only helped in the process of their integration into the Hindu fold, thereby also making them available for the spread of right wing Hindutva politics.