Jan Breman
At the time of Independence, in the middle of the twentieth century, India could firmly be classified as a peasant society. The rural-based mode of existence had remained dominant from generation to generation, and the large majority of the population continued to live in the countryside and work in agriculture. A series of village monographs, most of which were published between the 1950s and 1970s as the outcome of anthropological research, showed that the habitat of peasants included a wide variety of non-agrarian households and that, moreover, the peasantry was highly differentiated. A major point of departure in the populist course steered by the nationalist leadership was the restoration of a social order which had been eroded under colonial rule. The owner–cultivator, reported to have steadily lost ground in the transition to a market economy, was to be shored up as the backbone of agricultural production. Solving the agrarian question stood high on the political agenda of the Congress movement, which came to power at both central and state level. In preparation for the takeover of government a national planning committee (NPC) was set up under the chairmanship of Jawaharlal Nehru, with the task to frame the main outlines of economic policy after decolonization. Radhakamal Mukerjee drafted a paper on the land issue which was first discussed in his working group on agriculture and then endorsed by experts and politicians in a plenary meeting of the NPC at the end of June 1940. Landlordism was to be abolished and ownership rights transferred to the actual tillers of the soil. The family farm would remain the main unit of cultivation and its size should be neither larger nor smaller than an economic holding. It should provide adequate employment and income for the family without making use, at least not permanently, of outside labour.
The architects of the postcolonial era clearly envisaged an agricultural economy of self-cultivating owners. In their directives the planners seemed to have ignored the existence, in most parts of the subcontinent, of a vast agrarian underclass completely bereft of landownership.Their disregard for this landless mass was operationalized in the decision not to include them in the redistribution of the surplus land that would become available with the fixation of a ceiling on land ownership and the abolition of absentee ownership. By way of consolation, the planning document suggested that agricultural labourers be allowed access to land not yet under cultivation, village commons and other wasteland waiting to be taken into production. Perhaps not by the straightforward handing out of individualized ownership rights but indirectly, through the establishment of land-tilling cooperatives in which various agrarian classes would join and collaborate.
The cooperative model was one of the vaguely phrased socialist ideas which appealed to some sections of the Congress movement but which were never taken seriously in the execution of mainstream policies firmly heading in a capitalist direction. Of similar symbolic value was the promise that agricultural laborers would be released from bondage when they had been indebted to landowners for more than five years. A large-scale, nationwide survey of agricultural labor conducted a few years after Independence showed that a substantial segment worked in a state of attachment that took away their freedom of employment.1 The land reform operation was closely monitored.Thorner was one of many observers who came to the conclusion that the redistribution of property rights, both in making the design for a new agrarian blueprint and in the subsequent stage of implementation, fell short of what had been promised in the decades leading up to Independence by Congress leadership.2 Myrdal minced no words when he concluded halfway in his three-volume Asian Drama (1968) that the opportune moment for a radical reshaping of the agrarian structure had passed. The land reforms, he wrote, have bolstered the political, social, and economic position of the rural better-off segments on which the postcolonial government depended for crucial support.The policy was not merely tilted in favor of the more well to do but had an anti-poor bias as well.
Measures that would deprive the upper strata in the villages of land and power, and would genuinely confer dignity and status on the underprivileged and the landless, are among the last that those in power would find acceptable.3
What was the shape and outcome of the agrarian question in the villages of south Gujarat where I started my fieldwork in the early 1960s? Under the provisions of the Bombay Tenancy and Agricultural Lands Act of 1948 the Maratha inamdar (landholder), who lived in Baroda, lost most of the agrarian property which his family had held in Gandevigam village for many generations.The Anavil Brahmans, who were already the dominant landowners, received the title deeds for the plots which they used to cultivate as his tenants. Bania moneylenders and urban traders forfeited whatever land they had taken over from farmers indebted to them. The same happened in Chikhligam, the second site of my fieldwork. For the Brahmans, Tillers’ Day— April 1957—heralded their consolidation as the landed elite in the region. By the same token, the subaltern castes—in Gandevigam, the Kolis, and in Chikhligam, the tribal Dhodhias—lost out in the land transfer deals. In the past, local Anavil farmers had leased out plots to them on a sharecropping basis and, under the new legislation, the low-caste cultivators could lay a claim to these fields. To avoid losing property, the main landowners decided to discontinue most sharecropping arrangements even though their clients swore that they would never dare to register their names in the local record of rights.The land-poor were only beneficiaries if the land they worked belonged to owners not residing in the village. A land ceiling, fixed in 1960 and scaled down in 1974, could have threatened the privileged position of the Anavil Brahmans, but because of the many exemptions and loopholes in the act, the members of this dominant caste—which to the present day average no more than 15 percent of the village population—managed to appropriate two-thirds to three-quarters of the total arable land in the locality.
The landless were, of course, excluded from the reallocation of the meager amount of surplus land which became available. One of the reasons given for their non-qualification was that they had never been, even in their own memory, owner–cultivators. Their huts used to be built on land owned by the Anavil landlords who had tied them as farm servants in a relationship of bondage, which was passed on from father to son. In the years between Independence and the enactment of the land reform, they were thrown out of the plots they inhabited in their masters’ fields.When I came for the first round of my research nearly half a century ago, I found them living on the outskirts of the village, occupying homesteads for which they had not been issued title deeds. The withholding of a legal status, either as owners or tenants, meant that the landless could be blamed for having invaded as squatters the public domain kept as a reserve open to the local community at large for grazing cattle, cutting grass, collecting firewood, and, not least, for defecation.The promise made by the national planning committee that members of the agrarian underclass be given access to the still undivided land under the control of the village panchayat was more often broken than honored.
On the contrary, in a subsequent round of land reform, the commons were privatized, surreptitiously and in collusion with the local bureaucracy, resulting in the registration of ownership rights for what had always been communal property in the names of the dominant caste. As one of my informants in Chikhligam caustically commented: “Even when I go for shitting to the field where I always have been doing that in the morning I stand accused of trespassing.” And when the agricultural laborers went on strike in Gandevigam in their fight for higher wages, the landowners retaliated with the threat that they would stop the landless women and children gathering firewood on “their” land. One last effort was made to hand out land to the landless for self-cultivation.Acharya Vinoba Bhave started the Bhoodan (land gift) campaign in the 1950s to deradicalize agrarian struggles such as the agitation that had been going on in Telangana. In his opinion the Gandhian approach would persuade the well-endowed elite to part with their surplus land.The movement turned out to be a failure,4 although it was quite popular for some time in south Gujarat where a network of Gandhian institutions had become firmly entrenched in the late colonial era. Social activists were told that agricultural laborers lacked the wherewithal and discipline to work the land on their own account. There was, however, a more genuine argument why the landless segment should not benefit from restructuring of the agrarian order.The widely held verdict was that it made no sense to burden households with a tiny piece of land, which would, in any case, be inadequate for them to make a decent living. It would simply act as an obstacle to their mobility.
Swami Sahajanand, the national leader of the kisan sabha, the peasant union, had come to the same conclusion. He pointed out that the agricultural economy was unable to provide enough employment for the mass of agricultural labor.5 At least half of them would have to get out and seek a better future in the urban industries that were going to emerge after independence.This was also the destiny which the national planning committee had in mind for the large number of households at the bottom of the village economy.6 It was in line with what Sardar Patel had advised the Dublas of south Gujarat to do towards the end of the 1930s if they wanted to be free: to go elsewhere.7 All those who said that they were guided by what would be best for the rural underclass suggested that a more dignified life was awaiting these hapless people outside agriculture. Migration to the cities and factory employment were thus highlighted as an end to the misery of the landless and the final solution for the agrarian question.
The large majority of the agricultural laborers in south Gujarat are Dublas (or Halpatis, as they came to be called later).Their earlier name had been given a derogatory meaning and sala Dubla8 is still a common curse.The denigration resonated in the suggestion that the word Dubla was to be understood as weakling, a reference to the inferior character ascribed to the members of this community. Classified as a scheduled tribe in the colonial bookkeeping, the Dublas had been tied to high-caste landowners such as the anavil Brahmans for many generations.Their work as farm servants included using the plow, which their employers had to avoid to retain their purity. Although they were bonded, the Dublas were not ranked as unclean and both men and women performed household chores, releasing their masters from having to do such demeaning work themselves. In my initial fieldwork, I still found traces of the earlier bondage. My investigations focused on the changes that had come about in the relations between these landowning and landless castes-cum-classes at opposing ends of the social hierarchy. In my opinion, the fading away of bondage in the preceding decades was more the result of internal dynamics—on one side, landowners shedding clients whom they no longer wished to grant full employment and, on the other side, agricultural laborers refusing to consider themselves debt bonded to masters who impinged on their freedom of movement— than outside intervention.The external forces at work were either the state unwilling to condone any longer practices of unfree labor or civil agencies, Gandhian activists in particular, attempting in the late colonial era to uplift the Dublas.9 There is no doubt that Mahatma Gandhi himself had tried to elevate their social standing by renaming them Halpatis, lords of the plow, to try to eradicate their dismal history as Dublas. Summing up my findings, I reported in my fieldwork account that while features of patronage had disappeared over time the dimension of exploitation had remained as strong as ever.10
The agricultural laborers continued to live in deep poverty because of the extremely low wages they received for their work: less than a rupee a day in the early 1960s. It was far less than they needed to meet their basic needs. Outside agriculture, there was hardly any work available in the village. In the slack season their already low food intake declined further and many families could not still their hunger for days on end. Undernourishment, a lack of clothes to cover the bodies of adults and children, and inadequate shelter in huts that gave no protection against cold and rain made them vulnerable to health risks, leading to high morbidity, particularly for the youngest and oldest age groups. Only a handful of children would attend school for a few standards, but illiteracy was the general state of affairs. The Minimum Wage Act, announced in 1948, was not put into effect and this did not change when the first and second Agricultural Labour Enquiries, held in 1950–51 and 1955–56 respectively, provided abundant evidence of the deprivation of the lowest class in the rural economy. In 1966 a panel of experts urged the government of Gujarat to fix a floor price for agricultural labor to prevent tensions which had been building up in several parts of the state from boiling over into open clashes. A better deal could not wait for much longer, the committee’s report warned, in order to preempt organized political radicalism from surfacing.11 It took six more years of deliberation and consultation before a legal minimum rate was finally introduced, later and lower than the downright conservative advisors had deemed both wise and fair. Further delay would have risked losing a major vote bank of the Congress party: the landless electorate that made up more than half (55 percent in 1982) of the agrarian workforce in south Gujarat. Gandhian activists had begun to mobilize the Halpatis in the late colonial era and remained active as political agents who delivered the votes of these downtrodden people to the Congress party in the early decades after Independence. The well-established landowners who had rallied behind Congress in the struggle for independence did not appreciate the mainstream party voicing and articulating the interests of the rural poor.This was one of the major reasons why Mahatma Gandhi never became a popular figure in his own home state, in contrast to the strong-handed Sardar Patel who became idolized as the hero of the Bardoli satyagraha.12 Already at this early stage, the elite formations in the countryside began to distance themselves from Congress stalwarts and backed candidates who canvassed for Jan Sangh and Swatantra. My informants among the dominant caste insisted that giving Halpatis the right to vote, as ordained by the principle of universal suffrage, had been a grave blunder. Such lowly people had fewer needs than full citizens—a major argument why their wages should not be fixed above reproduction level— and should have remained excluded from participating in the regular political process. While the New Congress “high command” did not go beyond paying mere lip service to the garibi hatao (ban poverty) slogan when it was coined after the split in the party, it was good enough reason for the landed interests to side with veterans such as Morarji Desai who established their leadership of the old Congress party (Congress-O) in opposition to Indira Gandhi, whose new Congress party came to be called Congress (I) (I for Indira). The rupture between the rural rich and poor further escalated when the main landowners transferred their allegiance first to Janata and, after the failure of that intermezzo at central and state level, to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which appealed to the rapidly spreading mood of Hindu fundamentalism in the 1980s and 1990s. Extending their power base to the upwardly mobile castes helped the BJP and its front organizations to tackle and defeat the political strategy of new congress which had formed the KHAM alignment, carrying for some time the vote banks of Kshatriyas, Harijans, Adivasis, and Muslims.
In the shifting political constellation during the last quarter of the twentieth century the Halpatis by and large remained faithful to the Congress party. Their voting behavior was more inspired by confronting the successive choices made by their caste-cum-class opponents, who cast their votes for candidates belonging to opposition parties. The Halpatis never wavered from their loyalty to Congress, although not out of gratitude for concrete material gains.The minimum wage legislation came too late and offered too little to be hailed as clear proof of successful representation. In a violent incident which took place in 1976 in a village close to the sites of my research, two Halpatis were killed by zim rakhas, private guards hired by the landlords to protect their fields against crop theft. A committee of inquiry reported that the agricultural laborers had become restive because they were paid much less than the prescribed legal wage. Heeding these signals, the government of Gujarat set up a rural labor inspectorate in 1981 with the mandate to check whether farmers paid for the labor they utilized in accordance with the law. But, during their rounds, the government labor inspectors collected bribes rather than fines, so that employers could buy off prosecution for noncompliance.13 Nevertheless, Indira Gandhi has remained a cult figure in the Halpati milieu until the present day. If Mataji could not deliver what she promised, freedom from exploitation and oppression, it was because of the collusion between the vested interests at local level and the officials in charge of the district and subdistrict bureaucracies. This political– bureaucratic front of high caste domination had prevented the rural landless from making their numerical weight felt. There was the famous statement made by one congress minister who, when gheraoed (surrounded) by angry farmers protesting against a rise in the minimum wage rate for agricultural labor, went on public record saying: “Some laws are not meant to be implemented.” However, when I came back in the late 1980s for a restudy of my initial fieldwork villages, I noticed some signs of progress in the landless quarters. Huts had become houses, and although they were not pakka (well-made of brick), they were definitely better than the shacks in which I had found them before. Floor space had not increased much but the walls were higher and the thatched roofs were now tiled or covered with asbestos or corrugated iron sheets. Not having to bend down low in order to pass through the opening and to be able to stand erect once inside testified to an increase in dignity.
Housing programs were a major instrument with which congress bought the support of the rural poor. The Halpatis required public subsidies to build their accommodation in the new colonies because they needed at least four-fifths of their daily income for food intake. What helped in that respect was the public distribution system, which provided a monthly ration of low-price grain to households officially declared as living below the poverty line. As a consequence, the number of days without at least one meal decreased. More children had started going to school, to some extent motivated by the introduction of a noon meal scheme.Although the dropout rate remained high, a small minority managed to complete their basic education. Disease and debilitation were still rampant, but access to public health care helped to moderate the impact of chronic or recurrent illness. The primary health centers opened in subdistrict towns played an important role in bringing down morbidity.
The Halpati Seva Sangh (HSS), founded in 1946 by Gandhian activists and led by them ever since, became a useful instrument for spreading the public welfare benefits among the landless of south Gujarat.The staff of social workers belonging to the ujliparaj, the higher castes, considered themselves to be engaged in a mission to civilize the tribal communities. Acting as a front organization for congress, the HSS was rewarded for its mobilizing role in election campaigns with large grants spent on a network of boarding schools and social welfare schemes. Propagating vegetarianism and abstinence from drinking country liquor, a favorite pastime among the landless, the HSS leadership tried to convert its clientele to a Hinduized way of life and, by strengthening communal sentiments, to instill in the Halpatis a sense of caste identity. The leaders of this social movement firmly refused to turn it into a trade union fighting for freedom from bondage and higher wages for agricultural laborers. Its ideological stance was based on preaching harmony. Whenever conflicts broke out, caused by the antagonistic relationship between landowners and landless, the Gandhian missionaries rushed to the scene and appealed to what they considered to be their flock to abstain from militant confrontation. The aim of their mediation was to reach a compromise, which invariably meant systematically understating and misrepresenting the interests of the dominated class.14 This leads me to conclude that the role played by civil society in raising the visibility of the landless mass and in helping them to acquire better political representation has been more negative than positive.
Equally important as the efforts made by various state agencies in the 1970s and 1980s to alleviate poverty somewhat was the accelerated diversification of the rural economy arising on account of road building and motorized transport. Distances could be bridged much easier than before and new modes of communication resulted in more information about what was going on beyond the local boundaries. I have never endorsed the view that, in the past, there had been a closed labor market at the village level, but it would be difficult to deny that agricultural laborers became more mobile than they had been before.They started to operate in a wider and more fluid labor market and moved around both in spatial terms, going to sites of employment which had been beyond their reach in the past, and in finding access to other economic sectors than agriculture. Not only did seasonal migration increase, but also daily commuting to the industrial estates that had sprung up in most district towns. Gaining access to these new employment niches was only possible for those who owned a bicycle, which thus became a major asset also for the younger generation of landless who continued to work as agricultural laborers.What I found quite striking was that only a few Halpatis left the village to settle down in the urban localities alongside the railway line, which rapidly expanded from the 1980s onwards. Migration became circulatory, with laborers leaving home to work, but coming back at the end of the day, every few weeks or at the onset of the monsoon. Urbanization, in the sense of staying on more indefinitely in the town or city, required, apart from access to low-cost housing, a modicum of educational qualifications and proper skills, a network of contacts to find shelter, and a regular job. That kind of social capital was rare in the bottom of the rural milieu. Consequently, the Halpatis had no other option but to remain footloose, hired and fired according to the needs of the moment at a wage level which was not much higher than that paid by the farmers. Leaving the village had become easier, but in and outside their home base the landless mass turned into a reserve army of labor dependent for irregular work and low income on the steadily expanding informal sector of the economy.15 Their hopes for a better future lay in the prospect that a process of formalization would eventually take place that would absorb the surplus labor redundant in agriculture into the better paid and more skilled jobs that were bound to become available, if not in the village then elsewhere.
In the second half of the twentieth century, agricultural production became less dependent on rainfall. The construction of, first, the Kakrapar Dam and then the Ukai Dam in the Tapti River led to a significant extension of the irrigated area in the central plain of south Gujarat. Crops could now be cultivated throughout the year. The lengthening of the agrarian cycle resulted in a growing demand for labor, although this was somewhat lessened by the mechanization of farming operations and transport—the introduction of tractors and power tillers. More damaging for the local landless, however, was the influx of seasonal labor from the remote hinterland.Throughout the region, sugarcane became the major cash crop and the agro-industry managing its production and processing recruited harvesting gangs from far off destinations for the duration of the season. Elaborating on the political economy of labor migration, I pointed out that the decision to bring in these outsiders was not caused by a local shortage of labor but was conditioned by an employment strategy that reduced the cost of the brutal work regime to the lowest possible level.16 Labor migrants are easy to discipline, are not allowed to bring dependants along, can be put to work day and night, and have to leave the region again when their presence is no longer required.While the local landless have to remain at home idle, an army of more than 100,000 men, women, and children camp along the roadside or in the open fields from October to June to cut the cane and take it to the cooperative sugar mills that have been set up in nearly every taluka (subdivision of a district).
As I was able to observe in Bardoligam, which became the third village of my fieldwork at the end of the 1970s, growing sugarcane has been a very profitable business for the landowners whose prosperity has significantly increased in the last half century. The houses in which they used to live have been replaced by havelis mansions two or even three storeys high, with well-furnished interiors designed to demonstrate the wealth of the inhabitants.They no longer use mopeds or scooters to get around, but are the proud owners of motor cars, preferably expensive foreign models.The members of the dominant castes had already given up working in the fields one or two generations ago, and their growing detachment from agriculture is expressed in an unwillingness to invest time and money in farming. In recent decades, milk cattle have followed draught animals in disappearing from the high-caste neighborhoods. When I asked why, I was told that keeping them was too much of a nuisance, despite the fact that looking after the animals and cleaning the stables were chores done by the farm servants and maids anyway. Anavil Brahmans and Kanbi patidars have dissociated themselves from the agrarian lifestyle of their ancestors. Settling down in towns and cities has become increasingly popular among the younger generations and attending college in a nearby town helps them to prepare for a life oriented more towards the world beyond the village. Sons and, more particularly, daughters do not see a future for themselves living in the village and working in agriculture.They really want to become embedded in an urban environment, but because of the soaring prices of real estate—the cost of even a small and rather mundane apartment in the municipalities of Valsad, Navsari, Bardoli, or Surat runs to more than four lakh (hundred thousand) rupees—not all can afford it. Fathers complain that they find it difficult to get suitable girls to marry their sons because coming to the village inevitably implies having to take up the role of the dutiful daughter-in-law. For the rich, their rural lifestyle has become sufficiently urbanized, with all the modern gadgets and conveniences until recently only available in the town. The infrastructure has been upgraded and distances can be easily bridged by scooter or motor car. It is, therefore, nowadays acceptable to continue to live in the village, also for the younger generation, but it is important to have a proper urban job, i.e., white collar and in the managerial ranks or, preferably, having your own business so as to be your own boss. It is interesting to note that the trend away from agriculture at the higher end of the village hierarchy rarely leads to land being sold off. A new class of “absentee” landlords has emerged who own most of the land but desist from plowing their earnings back to raise production. They manage their property by remote control and in a leisurely fashion— having fruit orchards and growing sugarcane— rather than as active, let alone innovative, agrarian entrepreneurs.
The members of the village elite are, however, not content to just shed their rurality.Their real ambition is to settle abroad and join their caste mates as NRIs (non-resident Indians). Leaving for other shores is not a new phenomenon in south Gujarat, but the number of migrants going overseas has increased enormously in the last quarter century. An earlier generation went to East Africa and later on to the UK, but nowadays the US is the favored destination. Getting hold of a green card to send a son or daughter to America is a high priority in many well-established households. What they do there depends on the educational qualifications of the migrants. Running your own business is the dream of every patidar youngster and the popular saying hotel-motel-patel, in which the community at large takes pride, illustrates the strength of their presence in this branch of trade. Much less widely known is that at least part of the money spent on buying a motel somewhere in the US comes from the profits reaped from agriculture at home. Sugarcane, in particular, has been a real moneyspinner, and the Rs 500 shares which a farmer had to buy many years ago to register himself as member of the cooperative agro-industry processing the cane are now sold for not less than Rs 150,000–250,000 on the open market. The landowners not only indulge in conspicuous consumption but also help to provide the cash their sons need to buy the overseas property which has made them such successful emigrants. If it comes to the crunch they are even willing to sell a piece of land because they see it as an investment in the future well-being of their children and grandchildren abroad.To that extent the NRIs regard themselves as frontrunners in building up a globalized identity, not afraid to move themselves and their capital around in the pursuit of happiness. They come home to relax, to charge their religious batteries, to find marriage partners, to check on the family property, to seek medical care (the cost of which is much lower than in the US) or to spend their retirement, but not to engage in business. The dominant castes are strong, even vehement, supporters of the BJP. Narendra Modi, the Hindutva supremo and prime minister of Gujarat, is their hero. They affectionately call him chhote sardar, the little lion, who has stepped into the shoes of his famous namesake, Sardar Patel. Patel was a close associate of Gandhi in the struggle for independence, but was strongly opposed to the doctrine of piety preached by the Father of the Nation and his steadfast concern for upliftment of the poor.17 So far, however, Modi has not been successful in his appeal to the NRIs to bring their overseas profits back to the state where they were born and bred. It has been made clear to him that a precondition to their willingness to build and run hotels and motels in Gandhi’s homeland would be the repeal of prohibition. Given the huge illegal intake of alcohol in all quarters, that moment may actually not be far off.
In the ongoing discussion on the shape and magnitude of the current stagnation in agrarian investment and production, most if not all attention has usually been given to economic factors. I have argued already that an important feature of the crisis is that the main owners of agrarian property are distancing themselves from active farming, a way of life with which they no longer feel comfortable. For totally different reasons the class of agricultural laborers is also turning away from what has been, until now, the primary economic sector. They are being pushed out from cultivating the land because they get neither enough work nor a wage that enables them to satisfy their basic needs. Lack of sufficient employment has reached the point at which the rural landless in south Gujarat cannot be occupationally classified any longer as spending most of their working days in agriculture. What have conventionally been registered as subsidiary sources of income in other sectors of the economy have become the main ones. It boils down to a wide assortment of unskilled jobs, such as digging, hauling, and lifting work, which taxes their bodily strength and stamina and for which they get a wage not much higher than that paid by the farmers: in 2005–06, that was Rs 30–40 for eight hours, and less even than that if their presence was required for only half a day.
Have the poor become poorer since my investigations in Gandevigam and Chikhligam nearly half a century ago? That statement would be difficult to substantiate if only because their condition then could hardly have been worse than the intense misery in which I found them: steeped in hunger, prone to illness, having only one set of clothes, without adequate shelter.As I have already pointed out, in all these respects some progress has been made. But today, with a few exceptions, the Halpatis are still stuck firmly below the poverty line. It seems that more progress was made in the 1970s and 1980s than since. The annual income of most households does not rise above Rs 15,000–20,000.That means that an average household of four to five members can spend at best Rs 50–60 a day on their basic needs, which is less than 40¢ a day for each of them. My informants in the landless colonies are not impressed when I tell them that their parents and grandparents were even poorer than they are now. “How does that help us today?” they reply. “We know it was very bad then but that does not mean that our condition is much better now.” They are right of course; they should not be compared with the indigence of an earlier generation, but with the highly visible comfort, if not luxury, in which their employers live.What they experience is relative deprivation, an acute awareness that those who were already much better off in the past have appropriated most of the fruits of economic growth.All stakeholders acknowledge that the cake has become bigger, but the way it is cut up shows even greater inequity than before. And why not, is the widely held opinion in the milieu of those who have become much better off. They have no problem arguing that the poor masses are non-deserving because of their defective way of life.
While in the past the landless used to live in the shadow of the landowners, who kept a close check on their bonded servants, the demise of the beck-and-call relationship meant that having a permanent and abundant supply of agricultural labor had become more of a nuisance than a comfort. In all the sites of my fieldwork the Halpatis were thrown off their master’s land and became squatters on the waste land at the outskirts of the village. As already noted, the houses in which they live— although an improvement on the earlier huts— are small, jerry-built and lack the basic amenities, such as drinking water and drainage, which have upgraded the accommodation of the non-poor. Electricity lines reach the landless colonies but many households cannot afford to have a meter installed and pay the price of the two-monthly subscription. The uneven terrain on which the colonies are built makes them difficult to access and the kachha (rough) roads leading to the outskirts are not properly maintained, making them difficult to walk or ride on, particularly in the monsoon. What I am describing are nothing less than slums. For no good reason at all, this term is reserved for labeling the settlements in which the urban poor congregate. Such quarters in the countryside may be smaller and somewhat less congested, but they are otherwise similar to the deficient habitat of those who live a down-and-out existence in the urban milieu. The inhabitants buy their daily provisions in small shops or gallas, roadside cabins in their own neighborhood which sell a narrow range of commodities, since in terms of both quantity and quality the customers have to be modest in their purchases.Also in this respect, the contrast with mainstream society stands out because the non-poor are not shy in demonstrating their ability to consume more and better. All this contributes to making the gap in material wellbeing more visible than ever.
Living in slums and being constantly exposed to the deprivations that are inherent to such a dire existence is only part of a more comprehensive policy of exclusion that has turned the landless into a new class of untouchables. The deterioration of public health care over the last two decades, in the wake of the drive towards privatization, has made the Halpatis more vulnerable to disease. Because of the prohibitive cost, they delay seeking medical help. Only if the problem becomes unbearable do they consult professionals with lower qualifications than the doctors, clinics and hospitals frequented by the non-poor. Finally, segregation is a prominent feature in seeking access to education. Although the percentage of Halpati children going to school has steadily increased, still only half of them at best complete primary school. A small minority go on to secondary school, but they too tend to drop out after the first few standards. If they have become literate, their ability to read and write soon wanes again because of lack of practice. By and large, the children belonging to the higher castes continue their education for much longer. Moreover, the route they follow is different from the very beginning. The school in the village is nowadays only attended by the local poor. The high-caste parents send their children to private schools in town, which are considered to offer better quality. Apart from better teachers, the return on the investment is also growing up in the company of peers who share a similar elevated caste–class identity. The growing apartheid of the rural underclass is the inevitable outcome of a policy of exclusion in all walks of life.
To cope with deprivation is a full-time occupation and most people living precariously do not have much energy left for engaging in joint activities leading to redemption from their indigence. I am not suggesting that the Halpatis’ way of life comes close to, or actually is, a culture of poverty.Their behavior is indeed marked by improvidence but this is mainly because the demand for their labor power is intermittent and the employment for which they qualify as unskilled or self-skilled workers is casual rather than regular, and is invariably paid on piece rates at the lowest possible level. Due to a chronic shortage of income many Halpatis have no other option than to ask for payment in advance. They refuse, however, to consider themselves subservient to one or more employers who have bought a claim on their labor power at some later stage. Nevertheless, using debt as an instrument for what I have called practices of neo-bondage adds to the dependency that is a major feature of poverty itself. Resistance against oppression and exploitation is difficult to organize when the supply of labor is structurally so much higher than the demand for it. The vested interests, by way of contrast, face fewer problems in taking a united stand when their domination is challenged.This does not mean that the Halpatis accept with docility the harsh treatment meted out to them. Agrarian relations are fragile as well as tense, and what begins as a quarrel may escalate into a regular fight. I reported on one such incident which began when an agricultural worker was beaten to death to punish him for his impudence.18 Strikes do break out every now and then to articulate claims for a higher wage. But they tend to be spontaneous, rather then well planned, usually remain localized instead of spreading to other villages, and are short in duration because the landless have no reserves to live on. Lack of food brings them back to work after only a couple of days, and if this does not happen, the landowners back up their refusal to bargain by bringing in outside labor. It is true that the opening up of the rural economy has made the landless more mobile, but going out of the village or trying to gain access to regular work outside agriculture is not so easy.A proper job is difficult to come by since the eagerly awaited formalization of informal sector employment has not taken place. On the contrary, labor has become firmly informalized in all sectors of the economy.19 Instead of changing their occupational profile from agricultural to industrial workers the landless masses remain footloose, but in a fluid and already saturated labor market. It is a workforce without skills, social capital and political leverage, a reserve army stuck in their rural slums, pushed out for some time and then pushed back again. They are fragmented over a wide range of short-term work niches and continually rotate among them. The pretension that they are self-employed in whatever they do at any moment needs to be addressed critically.Their mode of employment is a contractualized and casualized waged labor relationship, but one which makes it difficult to unite them in solidarity for concerted action.
Of the many problems I have with the great debate on poverty, as it is complacently called by a closed shop of number-crunching economists,20 the major one is the fixing of a highly debatable poverty line and then clustering together all those who live beneath it as if they constitute a more or less homogeneous segment.21 This kind of incomprehension shows the lack of insight concerning the various layers of deprivation, ranging below and above a decent livelihood, and of the differences among them. The households inhabiting the rural slums are differentiated from each other in composition and size as well as in levels of consumption. Reducing these variations to average figures would ignore a range of lifestyles, running from coping with adversities without being overwhelmed by them to having lost even minimal control over the circumstances conditioning one’s life and giving up the fight for a better existence.
In contrast to the vast amount of literature on poverty, not much has been written on pauperism, but this is what strikes the eye when going around the landless colonies in the villages of my fieldwork: Gandevigam, Chikhligam and Bardoligam. It is expressed in symptoms suggesting that planning for today or tomorrow, let alone investment in future well-being, is impossible. Income from work is haphazardly spent without giving priority to the most basic needs, in particular a sufficient and adequate intake of food. Addiction to drink means that up to a quarter or even half of the wages earned is set aside for the purchase of illegally distilled alcohol. Quarrels with neighbors or within the household are a frequent occurrence. Husband and wife fall out with each other, unable to handle the misery in which they find themselves, and because of desertion or neglect children already have to fend for themselves at a very young age. Sometimes, the men are unable or unwilling to be the main providers for their households, but in other cases it is the women who default on their role as caretakers. Outside intervention to avoid the situation getting worse is rare. Neighbors or relatives are often too much bothered by their own problems to spend time on mediation or giving support to the victims. “We can’t afford to live and act in solidarity,” one of my halpati informants remarked. Communal institutions, such as the panch, which used to play an important role in maintaining social mores, arranging the celebration of religious festivals and settling internal disputes, have disappeared and have not been replaced by new conventions cementing togetherness in the landless milieu. Certainly, there is a section aspiring to achieve more respectability, to gain in dignity by demonstrating behavior expressive of the desire to belong to mainstream society. Women seem more than men to be at the forefront of that endeavor. Their ambition is to run a self-contained, well-ordered and sober household, to avoid abuse or being abused, to live within one’s means and not to indulge in consumerism, to encourage their children to get educated beyond primary school, to economize on the inevitable rites de passage,to consolidate what they have and to reach out for more.Their presence is significant because it shows that not all the inhabitants of the landless colonies can be classed as lumpen. Having said that, I also want to emphasize that, among the Halpatis, the “deserving poor” are a minority segment.They swim against the tide of deprivation and discrimination, and reaching where they want to be, out of indigence, is a long haul. Sliding back proves to be easier than moving up.
Mass poverty tends to be seen as a political risk to the established order. In this line of thinking the reserve army of labor does not remain sunk in apathy but can be mobilized for all kinds of subversive activities which put the security and comfort of well-established citizens at risk. It has been argued that the threat the restive and unwieldy lumpenproletariat posed to political stability was a major reason for giving this underclass access to mainstream society. To defuse their nuisance value, the poor had to be given a fair deal and be co-opted into the social security and other benefits which became available.This is why and how, according to de Swaan, the welfare state came into being during the restructuring of western economies from a rural–agrarian to an urban–industrial mode of production.22 Is it possible to discern such a sobering reappraisal in the code of conduct of those who are better off and who see themselves not only as the driving force of “Shining India” but also as its natural beneficiaries? Are they genuinely making an effort to divide the spoils of economic progress between the haves and the have-nots a in a more balanced way than has been done so far? In the context of my fieldwork in south Gujarat I observe a trend in the opposite direction: not a narrowing but a widening of the gap between the people at the top from those at the bottom of the heap.
The landowning elite feel neither compassion nor anxiety about the misery in which the Halpatis live. Incidents do occur, when the local landless from the colonies on the outskirts attack members of the dominant caste and their property in the village, but these are irregular mishaps which do not escalate into a kind of class war, spilling over into neighboring localities. Moreover, the district police can be relied on to deal firmly with the mischief makers. How could the landless in their slums challenge the social fabric from which they have been excluded? Or rather, from which they are said to have excluded themselves. Because that is how Anavil Brahmans and Kanbi patidars tend to qualify the subhuman existence of Halpatis. Among those who are better off, the received wisdom is that poverty is the result of a defective way of life. In this view the landless have themselves to blame for remaining stuck in misery. This particular instance of blaming the victims is justified by various kinds of rationalizations, which elaborate on the indolence, irresponsibility, deceit, and malevolence of the Halpatis. These are all traits typically associated with criminality-prone lumpen behavior. I ventured to conclude a short essay on the relevance of the doctrine of social Darwinism with the remark that the relatively low level of technology which characterized the early phase of industrialization in the west ultimately enabled the laboring masses, until then written off as superfluous, to demand to become gainfully and decently employed:
The industrial reserve army proved to be much more than useless ballast. Schooling put an end to the combination of hidden employment and too low wages. Around the turn of the [nineteenth] century and in the early years of the twentieth century, the poor succeeded in becoming full-fledged participants in the labour process of Western societies and contributed to growth in prosperity. Greater political representation was a logical outcome of this development.23
That same transformation does not appear to be the course giving shape and direction to the process of change that is currently under way in large parts of the world. Globalization is not for all those subjected to it a path towards more and better inclusion.
Mine is a dismal account, one which I need to qualify on two scores. In the first place, I have not discussed what has happened to the middle ranks in the countryside of south Gujarat. My experience, based on recurrent fieldwork, is that many of these people, holding some land or other productive assets, have been able to find somewhat more room for manoeuver. Having said that I would like to point out that the trend of change is set by the two classes at the poles of village society: the main landowners and the landless.They are at the forefront when it comes to finding out who has won and who has lost. Besides, as I have argued, in figuring out the sum total, the interdependency of the component parts needs to be stressed. The misery of the Halpatis can be understood only by tracing the dynamics of their subordination to the village elite. A second qualification which is required concerns the tricky issue of generalization. I immediately grant that landless labor elsewhere in the South Asian subcontinent may have fared better than the segment of this class in south Gujarat. There are reliable reports showing that where members of the rural proletariat were able to increase their bargaining strength by finding regular employment in the new industrial workshops or as construction workers in urban localities, farmers had no other choice but to raise agricultural wages in order to motivate at least part of the workforce to stay on. However, such success stories must also be seen in a wider perspective.They cannot be held up either as a disclaimer to the outcome of my research or as confirmation that the regional variation is so enormous that any generalizations are untenable. My findings are not unique; they have a relevance which goes beyond the villages I have closely investigated over a long period of time.24 Moreover, the condition of poverty on which I have focused is not caused by backwardness. Gujarat is one of the fastest-growing states in the country and the landless I have been talking about belong to the heartland of the capitalism that has come to maturation here. In a new and vibrant stage, yes, but also ferocious and predatory in its impact.
An understated feature in my analysis of the political economy of agrarian change so far has been the role of the state. In propelling market fundamentalism, which has become the cornerstone of economic policy, the state surrendered the agency it earlier claimed as a balancing force between the interests of capital and of labor. “Inspection raj has gone,” proclaimed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the head of what is misleadingly called the National Progressive Alliance. His rallying cry ended all pretension to insist on a minimum wage rate. The market would realize what the state failed to achieve: to raise more and more people above the poverty line. Statistics are being produced to vindicate the righteous choice made in favor of this most dogmatic brand of free enterprise. In Gujarat, the number of people below the poverty line has—in state-produced statistics—plummeted from 41.9 percent in 1983 to 14.2 percent in 2004–05. But on the Human Development Index, Gujarat ranks much lower than its official economic record would suggest. Traveling around urban and rural Gujarat it takes more than mere wishful thinking to accept the government’s claim that the problem of indigence is on the verge of being solved. It requires the observer not to look behind the Potemkin façade that has been erected. The statistical tally is engineered by sending instructions from the commanding heights in the state to the district and subdistrict authorities not to issue new BPL (below poverty line) identity cards and to unregister households owning some durable assets, thus taking away their right to buy a monthly food ration at a subsidized price. Poverty has become a phenomenon which needs to be kept out of sight and out of the government’s bookkeeping. Scaling down the size and intensity of misery, if not in reality then at least on paper, is part of the “Shining India” operation.
The retreat of the state in keeping a check on how the economy is run has not only resulted in a policy of deregulation aimed at repealing a host of restrictions on the free interplay of the forces of production, but has also led to an erosion of the public domain. The proponents of this approach maintain that privatization is the ultimate solution and that the state has no business in poverty alleviation. People living in that condition have to avail themselves of economic incentives which give a higher return to their labor power. In this perception, appealing to self-interest is the best route to upward mobility and the reward for heeding that message is crossing the poverty line. Nevertheless, in the face of immense misery due to underemployment, low wages, failing health or old age, by no means everyone is convinced by the logic of the free market and its supposed benevolence. In the National Alliance which is currently (2008) in power at the central level, Congress has been put under pressure to generate employment by carrying out public works, introducing social security benefits for the more than 90 percent of the total labor force working in the informal sector of the economy, and upgrading labor standards in order to safeguard workers against hazards to health and well-being. One of the measures suggested under the latter scheme put forward in a report of the National Commission of Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS), is the introduction of a minimum wage.25 The proposal seems to acknowledge that the unbridled working of the market needs to be tamed by public action. It is rather naive, to put it mildly—after having given in to the strong pressure for a thorough informalization of the economy and endorsing the verdict that the formalization of employment is the root cause of sustained poverty—to suggest that the consequences of this policy can be repaired with state-sponsored regulations that are in stark contrast to the spirit of market fundamentalism. Paying lip service to the rights of workers and the promise to provide security for them at times of illness or old age may very well be an electoral ploy. One wonders if the political will does exist to restore the public domain and bring the state back into the promotion of social welfare. My strong reservations about such an emancipatory course of action taking place in south Gujarat are in the last instance based on the fact that the devolution of political power has not been able to break through the closed front of vested interests. In my longstanding fieldwork experience it has remained an exercise in pseudo-democratization.The landowning elite, working hand in glove with the local state bureaucracy, has consistently frustrated attempts to include the rural poor. In a report on one of my field trips a quarter of a century ago, I described what had become of the gram majur kalyan kendra (rural workers’ welfare center) set up by the government a few years before.26 These centers are still there, as ineffective as before, and the new welfare schemes are meant to be launched from these nodal points of social action for poverty alleviation. Going by their past performance, it is not so difficult to predict that the outcome will again be negative.
My conclusion is that, if space is not provided for political empowerment of the rural poor, their inclusion in mainstream society is bound to remain a mere figment of the imagination, nothing but an illusion which may well turn into a fascist nightmare. The doctrine of market fundamentalism and an ingrained ideology of social inequality are a deadly combination. The upshot of that reactionary regime is that the landless caste–class should not be included. From the vantage point of the well-to-do, they get no less and no more than what they deserve: exclusion from a decent existence, leading their lives on the village outskirts and on the margins of the economy. In this chapter, I have expressed my skepticism that a reversal in the trend towards exclusion is in the offing. But what about the long-term perspective for emancipation of the rural underclass? One needs a historicizing mindset to remain hopeful. A definite step forward was when the Halpatis managed to find redemption from age old bondage half a century ago. Mere blinking at an egalitarian mirage was how D.A. Low summed up the outcome of the populist interlude in India and other third world countries during the second half of the twentieth century.27 Indeed, for large parts of mankind living in decency and dignity is a faraway dream. But have the landless in south Gujarat lost all hope that such a day will come? Monitoring the milieu at the bottom of the village economy in the past decades at close quarters, I have found no symptoms of an internalization of subordination and a passive acceptance of the doctrine of inequality. The mood in the rural slums is sultry, inspired more by sullenness, resentment, and anguish than by docility. To be sure, those feelings are not converted into concerted action. But is it not only after the event, in retrospect, that the turning point from disguised resistance to open and more sustained revolt can be identified?
1 Government of India, All India Agricultural Labour Enquiry Report on Intensive Survey of Agricultural Labour…, 1950–51, Vol. 1 (Delhi: Manager of Publications [MOP], 1955).
2 Daniel Thorner, The Agrarian Prospect in India: Five Lectures on Land Reform Delivered in 1955 at the Delhi School of Economics, 2nd edn (Bombay: Allied, 1976).
3 Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Enquiry into the Poverty of Nations, Vol. II (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1968), p. 1,375.
4 See Thorner, 1976, pp. 70–71.
5 Walter Hauser , Sahajanand on Agricultural Labour and the Rural Poor (Delhi: Manohar, 1994).Also Walter Hauser, Culture,Vernacular Politics and the Peasants ( Delhi: Manohar, 2006).
6 See Jan Breman, “The Study of Indian Industrial Labour in Post-Colonial India,” in Jonathan Parry et al. (eds), The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour (New Delhi: Sage, 2002).
7 Jan Breman, Labour Bondage in West India: From Past to Present (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 168.
8 Sala, literally brother-in-law, is very commonly used also as a term of abuse, so the meaning here is, more or less, “miserable weakling,” but is really much stronger than that in Hindi and Gujarati.
9 I have elaborated on these issues in Breman, Labour Bondage.
10 Jan Breman, Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974).
11 Government of Gujarat, Report of the Minimum Wages Advisory Committee for Employment in Agriculture (Ahmedabad: Government of Gujarat, 1966).
12 See “The Agrarian Question in the Struggle for National Independence,” in Breman, Labour Bondage.
13 See Jan Breman,“I am the Government Labour Officer,” Economic and Political Weekly [EPW], Vol. 20, No. 24 (15 June, 1985), pp. 1,043–55. Reprinted in Jan Breman, Wage Hunters and Gatherers (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), ch. iv.
14 I have seen no reason to change my assessment on the role played by the HSS after my first critical report in Jan Breman, “Mobilisation of Landless Labourers; Halpatis of South Gujarat,” EPW, Vol. 9, No. 12 (23 March, 1974), pp. 489–96.
15 This was the theme of my fieldwork in south Gujarat during the last decade of the twentieth century; see Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy (Cambridge: University Press, 1996).
16 Jan Breman, Peasants, Migrants and Paupers: Capitalist Production and Labour Circulation in West India (Oxford: Clarendon Press and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985).
17 See chapters 3 and 4 in Breman, Labour Bondage.
18 Jan Breman,“Silencing the Voice of Agricultural Labourers,” in The Labouring Poor in India (Delhi and Oxford: University Press, 2003), ch. ii.
19 See Jan Breman, “A Question of Poverty,” in Breman, The Labouring Poor, ch. vi.
20 See Angus Deaton and Valerie Kozel (eds), The Great Indian Poverty Debate (Delhi: Macmillan, 2005).
21 The only concession made in part of the literature is to separate the poor from the very poor or destitute, a distinction in which the latter category is identified as having less than three-quarters of the amount of the cutoff point for the poverty line.
22 Abram de Swaan, In Care of the State: Health Care, Education and Welfare in Europe and the USA in the Modern Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
23 Jan Breman, “Return of Social Inequality: A Fashionable Doctrine,” EPW, Vol. 39, No. 35 (28 August, 2004), p. 3,872.
24 See Jan Breman, The Poverty Regime in Village India: Half a Century of Work and Life at the Bottom of the Rural Economy in South Gujarat (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007). Factual evidence backing up my reading of rural dynamics can be found in a large number of empirical studies. To name but a few: Government of India, Ministry of Labour, New Delhi, Report of the National Commission on Rural Labour,Vols I and II (1991). See also Stuart Corbridge et al., Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India, Part III The Poor and the State, pp. 219–74; and Barbara Harriss-White, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy (Cambridge: University Press, 2003), ch. ii; Arun Sinha, Against the Few; Struggles of India’s Rural Poor (London: Zed Books, 1991); P. Sainath, Everybody Loves a Good Drought; Stories from India’s Poorest Districts (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1996). Specifically on rural labor, see the Special Issue on Rural Labour published by the Journal of Peasant Studies, Terrence Byres et al. (eds), Vol. 26, Nos 2–3 (1999).
25 National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector, Report on Social Security for Unorganized Workers (New Delhi, 2006); see also Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector (New Delhi, 2007).
26 See Jan Breman,“State Protection for the Rural Proletariat,” in Wage Hunters and Gatherers, ch iv. When I recently paid a visit to one of these centers located close to Chikhligam I found that nothing had changed at all.Window dressing is the best way to explain why they have not been closed down.
27 D. Anthony Low, The Egalitarian Moment: Asia and Africa 1950–1980 (Cambridge: University Press, 1996).