Organizer: Vinay Gidwani, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University
Discussant: Sugata Bose, Tufts University
How do local politics influence social relations of production as well the adoption of productive technologies within agriculture? Conversely, what is the impact of agricultural development on political mobilization by local groups? Both questions engage the micro-politics of agrarian change, but without conceding either the autonomy of political practices or their rigid determination by structural factors. Local politics may reinforce or subvert established modes of domination, and hence re-align trajectories of agrarian development. Since political contests within local arenas are often partial reflections of regional and national politics, inter-spatial analyses of political currents becomes necessary. The deepening influence of regional and national politics on the formation of collective identities (along caste, class, ethnic, and geographic axes) merits particularly close examination.
Keeping these issues in mind, panelists will engage a variety of theoretical and empirical debates that have loomed large within the Asian agrarian studies literature. These will include the semi-feudalism thesis; the issue of unequal accumulation; consequences of segmentation and interlocking in factor and output markets; prevalence and forms of gender exploitation; effectiveness of state interventions; and finally, the cultural landscape of domination over and resistance by 'underclasses.' We will suggest that despite considerable attention by scholars to these issues, nuanced analyses of the micro-politics of agriculture remain scant.
The papers will combine perspectives from anthropology and economics, and case materials from Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat to illustrate the innovative, often indeterminate, ways in which agrarian change and local politics interact.
Resisting Enclaves: Ritual, History, and Politics on an Indian Plantation
Piya Chatterjee, University of California, Riverside
Tea plantations in North Bengal and Assam have long dominated the political and cultural economies of Eastern India. A vast agro-industrial complex whose foreign exchange revenues augment a depleted national exchequer, plantation enclaves are protected, in moments of rupture, by the military apparatus of local and national governments. Within regional policies of the ruling communist party in West Bengal, a tacit support of the plantocracy and an explicit "underdevelopment" of plantation areas has resulted in ossified trade union politics.
This paper will argue that new social movements within plantations are beginning to challenge stagnant local union politics and the enclave economy it continues to enable. It will begin by tracing the historical-structural parameters through which local and national government politics have sustained an enclave economy. Through careful ethnographic description, it will demonstrate both how contemporary union politics are seen as compromised by local working-class communities, and how structural compulsions necessitate a stagnant union movement, political rhetoric notwithstanding.
The paper will conclude by demonstrating how local communities invoke, through public ritual and songs, an oppositional consciousness: one which reaches beyond the structural constraints of the "enclave" into the places of history and memory in which colonial and post/neo-colonial "pasts" are inextricably meshed. These markers of "new" social movements can expand our epistemic understandings of spatial and temporal "locales" that configure the boundaries of grass-roots agrarian politics in contemporary India.
The Politics of Identity, Domination, and Accumulation: Agrarian Change in Kheda
District, Gujarat
Vinay Gidwani, University of California, Berkeley
Over the past 250 years, the Leva Patels of Kheda District have exercised controlling influence over the society, economy, and polity of central Gujarat. Through judicious mix of collaboration and resistance they have been effective in preventing successive state regimes from corroding their power. Monopolization of local government institutions (milk and credit cooperatives) and enterprising use of accumulated capital has allowed Patels to consolidate their dominance. Although riven by factionalism and fiercely hierarchical in attitude Patels have consistently managed to display corporate solidarity in face of threats from rival caste groups. Historically, their subordination of other groups has been achieved through a deft combination of patronage, force, debt bondage, and politicking.
Lately, Kolis and Baraiyas-sub-castes of disputed origin, who have borne the brunt of Patel exploitation-have federated politically under the title of "kshatriyas" in an effort to displace Patels from positions of local authority, to resist further economic subjugation by them, as well as affirm upper caste-but, in order to reap government benefits, backward class-status. Patel domination has also been challenged by Bharwads, who, as pastoralists, have profited enormously from the cooperative dairy movement. Some previously landless bharwads have become the largest landowners in their villages, thereby underlining the indeterminacy of agrarian change.
Using archival and ethnographic information, the paper will examine the micro-politics of agrarian change in Kheda District from 1862 to the present.
Work and the Politics of Identity in the Forests of Southwest Bengal
K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University
This paper will examine the conditions of, and opportunities for, rural labor in the rain-fed agricultural and scrub forest tracts of southwest Bengal. Tracking important agrarian changes in the region over the last hundred years, in particular the impact of land reforms and other rural development programs impinging on rural labor, it will document shifting circumstances of work in farms and forests. Firmly linking the organization of rural work, the structure of opportunities and their negotiation to questions of local power, politics and the construction of ethnic identities, this contribution will proceed through a comparison of labor mobilization for seasonal farm work and forestry operations.
In one case the consolidation of good paddy lands in the hands of a middle peasantry, strengthened in part by land reforms in the last two decades, has caused a caste, class and ethnicity convergence in the formation of different groups involved in agrarian production. These changes in agricultural land control have generated new varieties of local politics while themselves being a product of earlier rural politics. The case of farm work then reveals the divisions and tensions within villages and regions, across classes and ethnicities at one level. In the other case, changes in the structure of forest management, notably the introduction of participatory forestry in southwest Bengal in the last decade, have meant a shift in labor requirements for forestry and significant alterations in modes of labor mobilization. Forestry settings reveal a different pattern of alliances and coalitions within villages and regions, across classes and ethnicities. Most importantly, outcomes in both cases are influenced by each other. Exploring these comparisons and contradictions, this paper will argue that agrarian changes are related in complex ways to multiple and shifting identities of groups in agrarian society.
Labor Relations and Agricultural Development in Tamil Nadu
Jenny Springer, University of Chicago
This paper examines changing orders of social relations in an agricultural district in Tamil Nadu. Since the "Green Revolution" of the 1960s, a series of state and international development programs have sought to transform the economic and technological practice of agriculture, with a particular focus on rice production. The resulting changes in land tenure and agricultural technologies have engaged with ongoing social contestation to produce profound changes in work-related identities and local relations of production.
Questions explored in the paper include: What assumptions about the nature and ideal forms of labor have been implicit in development planners' constructions of rural problems and solutions? How does agricultural work contribute to the formation of gender, caste and class identities, and how are these identities changing? How are terms of mutuality and opposition deployed by landowners, tenants and laborers in their relations with one another? What scope do laborers have for resisting the terms of employment set by landowners, and how is this resistance expressed? These questions are pursued in the context of the displacements, constraints and potential opportunities entailed by transformations in Tamil Nadu's agricultural economy from the 1960s to the present.