Like a shepherd who knows his herd…we know the laborers.
—Aanan (Interviewee 39)
WHO WILL HELP THE LABORER?
Aadi is a self-made man.
1 He speaks of coming to Karnataka with nothing and building himself up from scratch. I believe him because of the way he clambers up a coconut tree to recover the fruit for us to enjoy before our conversation begins. No multigeneration landholder from a “respectable” caste would do such a thing. That is, after all, what laborers are for. As he climbs I turn to his fields, ready for planting. Mulberry bushes. Acres of them. It has taken some time to pin him down, and here he is, in the coconut canopy, securing refreshments for our interview. I’m relieved as he slides down the trunk, notches the fruit, and settles into our conversation. It is near sundown, but we are finally here, drinking coconut water and watching a summer storm overtake the sunset and rush over his fields.
The fields are laden with plantation crops—coconut and betel—but the lion’s share of the land is dedicated to the mulberry bushes that feed the voracious silkworms that have brought him such success. Silkworms mature in just over one week, and they spend the entirety of their short lives devouring mulberry leaves by the bushel. The worms—which grow from a speck the size of a hair to a taut, wiggling mass the girth of your pinkie finger—eat around the clock. Around-the-clock hunger requires around-the-clock supervision, and these are exactly the working hours of a bonded laborer. The tour of Aadi’s property finishes just as the rains set in for the evening. He describes his operation:
I have two laborers, I paid 73,000 [1,300 USD] for one family and 42,000 [770 USD] for the other one, and those are the laborers who are working for me now. One is named Kadamb, with his family, and Pruthivi is only himself. The Kadamb family has two wives and five children. The first wife’s kids are married, and the second wife’s kids are lazy. When it comes time to harvest the cocoons, which is easy work, [the children] will come and work. Their contract is for one year. They’re working for the cocoon.
The daily labor people come today, but they drink; there is no guarantee whether or not they come back tomorrow. But these people [i.e., bonded laborers], since I have already paid them, if I make one call they will come anytime. And they stay here on the property, here in a family house. Yes, yes. To keep them happy I give them mutton, and some drinks. It’s a kind of attraction, when you do something nice for them they are attracted. Daily laborers come at 10am and leave at 5pm, but [bonded laborers] will stretch the time a bit to work later.
If they’re doing well, then I don’t want them to go, so I may go to them and offer them a larger advance to stay here, and then keep them like that. Usually they need money for a daughter’s wedding…. I feel that I have to do it, because if they don’t come, then I won’t even be able to speak to you now, as I’d have to go and tend to things myself.
When I ask who needs the other more, he answers:
The same! I have these acres of land, so I need them to help do this work. In the same way they may have made a plan. That they need to go to market and get some food and these items, and they need some help for that, so it’s kind of equal.
Bonded labor isn’t used much around here. I only use it because of this sericulture, and I need workers to be here nights. But normally folks don’t need this kind of work. If you’re paying a daily-wage person, you have to pay for beedis, and all these other things.
While saving money on local cigarettes (beedis), he admits that having bonded laborers involves a certain amount of risk. When I mention the threat of runaway workers, he replies:
Something like this is happening here too! It’s like, “let the [debt] amount go, but the person should stay, since I’ve had that person working for such a long time, and know he’s a very good [worker] so I’ll give any amount to keep him.” This happened to me…. Even I faced this.
When that person left I went to the panchayet [local government body], but I couldn’t go to the police station because we’re not supposed to keep people in these conditions. But later I heard more about the worker who ran away, and he’s in even worse condition. His parents can’t earn money. He’s not earning money. So I thought, “what can be done now?” So I just left the money. This is the problem I mentioned earlier, who will help the laborer?
The laborer he was describing was Tarun,
2 whom I had interviewed a few days prior. Tarun’s story is hardly unusual—as a teenager he had taken a loan at his brother’s behest. Educated to the second standard, he was a kindly and earnest young man, clearly guided by his older and better-educated brother. He found the debt compounding and remained in this cycle for the next five years. His indebtedness came to an end only when his brother—perhaps identifying the 20,000 rupees in rehabilitation funds from the government as an opportunity to gain another advance from his younger, pliable brother—pressured Tarun to self-identify as a victim of bonded labor. Tarun agreed, approaching one of the groups in this study at his brother’s prodding.
Tarun reported to me that Aadi had kept a record of his debts in a notebook, but he was unable to recall ever seeing what was inside or indeed ever seeing the notebook itself. When I asked, he indicated that he did not feel forced to take the debt, but he made it clear that he felt unable to leave sericulture work. It required his constant attention.
3 When I asked Tarun if he would ever employ anyone under the same conditions he shook his head, explaining he could not, “because I also went through it; I also know the pain…. Being in a very poor family, not having enough food to eat, and no clothes to wear—and we have to go out and ask for a huge amount of money.”
This chapter, and the two that follow, are the empirical heart of the book. Here we are introduced to the way slaveholders feel about slavery, setting the stage for the following chapter, which presents data on how they feel about the freedom of their bonded laborers. International law on contemporary slavery is clear that the abuse of a position of vulnerability, whether it is poverty or culturally mediated dependency, is one of several means by which individuals enter exploitation (Gallagher 2012). Sympathetic economists have also weighed in, arguing that broader cultural contexts and decisions made by elites close off access to reasonable alternatives to indebtedness and thereby negate what appears to be the voluntary entrance into unfree labor agreements (Kara 2012). The absence of any reasonable alternative combines with the abuse of a position of vulnerability, effectively guaranteeing that the bonded-labor agreement is the entry point into contemporary slavery.
Understanding vulnerability is important to explaining how laborers enter debt bondage, but it also explains the way a year-to-year contract telescopes into five. Aadi suggests that workers always have needs and that a key mechanism in securing their ongoing labor is to identify the next opportunity to loan them money. Laborers repeatedly mentioned, as Tarun does here, the need for a lump sum of cash, often to pay the dowry and marriage costs for a sister or daughter. Landlords, like Aadi, are constantly on the lookout for vulnerabilities in potential new laborers as well as emerging vulnerabilities among existing bonded laborers.
By all accounts, such strategies are important, since some employers’ ability to coerce laborers through outright violence may be on the decline. One quarry contractor explained that people in his line of work are increasingly afraid to beat workers because of the fear that workers will leave the work, debts and all. Perhaps this explains Aadi’s and others’ insistence that they treat workers well despite their bonded status. While it is safest to assume these claims are made for my benefit, and interviews with bonded laborers often contradict these statements, persistent concerns of labor mobility suggests there might be some truth to these claims. Sericulture is difficult to mechanize, so the cheapest possible manual labor—i.e., bonded labor—is preferred. Brick kilns may be mechanized, but only at a significant cost.
In the next chapter, I use cases like Tarun’s to refute the argument that debt bondage has been replaced by year-to-year contracts that secure an advance against a year’s worth of work. This approach overlooks duty and obligation and thus assumes that a year’s obligation ends with the year’s end. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that there is no such “reset.” Rather, the lack of realistic alternatives, a lack of credit, and the need to pay for schooling and marriages effectively guarantee that there is no single contractual debt between the landlord and laborer but rather a string of connected loans. These loans have the effect of increasing economic dependency as well as increasing a sense of obligation and gratitude. The result is that a year of work, rather than being a discrete event, is better thought of as a single link in a larger chain of debt and duty that keeps laborers bound to the creditor-landlord for the foreseeable future. Attempts to understand these patterns using only resources provided by economic theories will miss the deeper relational fabric used to stitch together this socioeconomic tapestry.
This point is emphasized by the director of one of the organizations involved in this study, who explains that employers may not intentionally seek out untouchable labor; rather, “Dalits themselves will go seeking relationships under bondage when they require money. The only way to mitigate the reality of their hardship is to approach the landlord, get the money, and agree to bonded conditions.” His point is that the individual level of analysis is fundamentally rooted in broader and older caste dynamics, since “for ages Dalits have been rendering free service. They see it as the only alternative to mitigate their hardship…. Ultimately, this is how the system is maintained, by providing cheap and unquestioned labor.”
4 In other words, the economics of vulnerability are stark, but economics alone is insufficient to describe the complex interplay of debt and duty at work in the relationship between Tarun and Aadi. Ideal social relations involve a fusing of debt and duty under the aegis of caste.
IDEAL SOCIAL RELATIONS
While Aadi was more gregarious and talkative than many of my interviewees, this conversation was by no means unique. Often, interviewees wanted to talk about, and we sometimes connected over, simple things—a desire for our children to do well in school, concerns about the rising cost of everything everywhere, frustration with our own employees. Their social conditions and status varied significantly—some were rich, some were poor. Some received loans from the Grameen Bank; others were secure as village leaders, industry representatives, and white-collar professionals. Some had family in Europe and America; others asked me if I could help them to emigrate to East Africa, where I was living during the course of this fieldwork and which has a large and powerful Indian community. Some were bitter; others were resigned. Some were nostalgic for the past; others were hopeful for the future. One thing they all shared, however, was an assessment of the ideal social relations between bonded laborers and their work and between bonded laborer and their landlord. Ideal social relations are rooted in the caste system’s legitimizing myths, which give rise to a culture of servitude and paternalistic expectations.
I spoke to these men at the moment their caste-based social position and control is being challenged by low-intensity social movements and by tectonic shifts in India’s economic landscape. For some of them, the loss is present and palpable; for others it is a burden they have been carrying for some time. Thus, their observations are just as likely to refer to the past as they are the present. Some of their reflections contrast the present with nostalgia for the better times of their forefathers. Others remember their own relationships with their laborers before the bonded relationship. Across the board, however, whether respondents were speaking of the past or the present, their animating vision for (and memory of) the ideal social relation between employer and employee is that of a family.
When I asked Goral,
5 an older man whose bonded laborer no longer worked for him, whether there had been any change in relationships between bonded laborers and masters, he replied: “there is no such change. We are like family.” He explained that the bonded laborer who worked for him came to them as a boy in order to repay a debt assumed by the boy’s father in a nearby village. Over time, Goral obtained the debt and the boy along with it. When I asked how their relationship began, he declared:
There was debt—that is why we kept him as a bonded laborer! After repaying the debt also he worked as a bonded laborer for a few more years. His debt was 1,000 [rupees; around 20 USD], and he worked for four or five years. He remained with me because I had a shortage of labor, and the bonded laborer had some problems at home, so I requested that he continue for a few more years, and the bonded laborer continued as a bonded laborer.
Goral was proud of the extent to which he had been able to care for this boy as he grew into a young man. The legal fact that the boy worked for almost five years to pay off a twenty-dollar debt obscures the deeper social reality, which is that Goral cared for someone who “had problems at home.” This win-win was, in Goral’s retelling, an ideal form of mutual aid. It is what families do for one another. It is also perhaps this family-feeling—along with the lack of awareness of other options, no doubt—that motivates a worker to stay beyond the repayment of the debt. It may instead be some sense of obligation or some unnamed coercion. Whether it is family-feeling, obligation, or a form of coercion, the effects are the same: expectations for labor extend well beyond the original agreement, both in terms of time and emotion.
For Goral, the situation was ideal: “when bonded labor was high, society was strong and good. In the olden days, everything in society was strong—people were going to work and getting their work done. But now things are weaker; even our children won’t listen to us!” This present state of affairs is a far cry from the past, when ideal social relations prevailed, requiring an employer to “clothe and give respect to bonded laborers. If you treat the bonded laborer like this, it is respectful. This is according to Hinduism. And whatever work is dictated by the master, it should be done by the bonded laborer without question or delay.” Reciprocity is rooted in shared moral commitments, as both do their duty to one another, according to the precepts of Hinduism.
Goral is not alone in this perspective. As another landlord
6 explained to me: “The relationship between a daily-wage person and the landlord is simple: he comes to work in the morning, and he takes his money in the evening and he goes off. But in the case of a bonded laborer, he is like a son. We take care of him like a son itself. Daily laborers call me
Farmer, but bonded laborers call me
My Farmer, and
My Owner.” The familial model, of course, allows for the presence of a patriarch, a role that interviewees referenced consistently. I was told that, in better times, their fathers had ruled “with fear and respect.”
7 In interview after interview, these paternalistic lines were easy to trace; respect was expected in exchange for care: “We served the people. If someone was lacking something, we would give it to them. It’s like that; we helped them.”
8 In the retelling, the laborer was always the net beneficiary. On only the rarest of occasions would a landlord suggest that it was they who needed the laborer. Strategies for control are thus framed as acts of compassion. How else may we explain Aadi’s rhetorical sympathy:
who will help the laborer? In this light, emancipation is the worst possible threat, a precipitous ledge suspended over the unknown.
Of course, respect was owed to a “master” for a whole host of reasons: culturally, because of caste status, but also interpersonally, because of the laborer’s actual role as a beneficiary of the landlord’s generosity in extending credit and allowing one to survive as a bonded laborer. These relational and economic dynamics weave together to form a set of expectations about worker’s attitudes and behaviors. In the past, workers were motivated by a commitment to doing a good job, rather than by money.
9 “It was all about honesty,” remembers one interviewee,
10 and “the relationship between the landlord and the bonded laborer…was full of respect for the elders,” reflects another.
11 Laborers, in this nostalgic reckoning, were hard working, grateful, and honest. They held up their end of the cosmic bargain so central to caste.
Nowhere can we more clearly see the relevance of Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum’s (2009, 25) argument that the rhetoric of love “functions as a discourse that encompasses employer claims of affection and familial relationships that bind servants and employers to each other.” While Ray and Qayum’s work is discussed at greater length in
chapter 6, they emphasize the emotional work that comes alongside the staple provisioning of laborers within the household, noting it is part of a complex social relationship. As Bales has observed: “The right of the slave to fulfill basic human needs for food, clothing, and shelter are met though their bondage” (qtd. in Ray and Qayum 2009, 33). This approach allows the slaveholder to perceive the laborer as receiving the benefit and the landlord himself as providing for a vulnerable community member. A regular feature of my interviews with current and former slaveholders has been their insistence that they had been approached by landless laborers in dire need of money or food for survival. In one landlord’s narrative, the bonded-labor arrangement was not intentional, and it certainly was not coerced. Rather, “I don’t know, by mistake, or however, laborers approached our family for food and things, because they were in such a helpless condition. So we gave them food, clothes, shelter, even looked after them by giving them money here and there. And it went on in this way, and we haven’t harassed our laborers too much.”
12 The ideal relationship is that of a family, and talking about this requires a rhetoric of love that both masks and hides exploitation in a culture of servitude in which servants are often depicted as “part of the family.” What slaveholders find hard to accept is the fact that the rhetoric of love is being replaced by what could be called the rhetoric of contract.
Ideal social relations are typified by obligation, duty, and respect, whose foundation stones were laid in a far earlier era and cemented by caste. In ideal social relations, the landlord provides protection to the bonded laborer, something he does not owe to daily laborers, as they have no such relationship. The bonded laborer, in turn, provides fealty to the landlord. This arrangement works so long as there is a collective commitment to the larger social order and to the caste relations in which these interpersonal relationships are embedded. Put simply, ideal social relations involve roles and responsibilities in relationship. The cultural practice of caste is the overarching, if unspoken, structure that holds this cluster of relational dynamics together. These relationships forestall mobilization. But mastery does not just exist organically; it must be managed and maintained. In the case of bonded labor, a particular set of preemptive tactics and strategies are used.
CO-OPTING IS PASSIVE, ACTIVE, AND RELATIONAL
This intentionality came through in my conversations with Aanan, the employer of seventy bonded laborers, who we met in the first chapter. He provided an excellent account of the relational strategies that are used to attract and secure bonded laborers and preempt collective action:
You have to understand the mentality of laborers, and you should know how to make them work. You have to know why the laborer won’t work, is it because of money?…To manage a group of laborers is like managing a group of primary-school children. They have to be provided with food or clothes, and they are taught how to behave and act in that environment. We have to apply the same tactic with laborers…. Sometimes they start drinking alcohol; sometimes they indulge in feasts. So we have to pay them with caution. We divide them into small groups because larger numbers of workers tend to form a union and sometimes engage in mass holidays or strikes.
This explanation makes clear that a number of strategies are required if one is to obtain and retain bonded labor. While the existence of these strategies has been documented by others, much might be learned from the ways perpetrators themselves articulate this important part of their activity. Aanan has managed workers through the use of particular cultural resources and engages direct and indirect tactics as needed. Indeed, his approach is not unique.
Perpetrators prey on marginalized populations. Knowing when a laborer is particularly vulnerable to debt bondage or is susceptible to the leveraging or increasing of debts requires some sort of relationship. The perpetrators I spoke with did not simply stumble across vulnerable laborers. Rather, they often have their eye on particular workers and know when the time is right to approach them for work, knowing what the laborers need and which tactics might be most effective. This is also true for recruiters who conscript laborers into national and international trafficking systems.
Another contractor described his approach as “an investment.”
13 His tactic, he explained, is to “visit the area and identify those people who need money, who are preparing for weddings, or have some kind of illness or chronic disease. So, we invest in them and give them 10,000 or 20,000 rupees, and then bring them here to work for seven or eight months to repay the money. Then we send them back.” Of course, the reality for many workers is that these seven to eight months are stretched out for years, as laborers work to repay new debts incurred either in the course of work, as a result of new financial pressures, or a combination of both factors. The contractor explained this as a simple process in which the laborers also take money for food and medicine, and that if they cannot repay that amount “they will return to continue repaying it again.” When I asked who tends to need his services as a lender of last resort, he replied: “Poor people with needs, who often have too many children, and don’t have any land, and therefore lack any sort of food security. Those are the ones who take loans, because everyone else knows it’s not good to take loans and advances!”
Another direct preemptive tactic involves the fixing of wages. One landlord explained a coordinated approach to daily laborers: “What we normally do is to speak amongst ourselves in order to decide how much we have to pay the workers or laborers. Then, we give the same payment to all of them.”
14 It stands to reason that employers interested in coordinating their approach to bonded laborers might also adopt this same coordinated approach. A final direct tactic is the use of the company store. This tactic involves providing laborers with exclusive access to basic resources—food, clothes, hygienic supplies, tools, and equipment—at exorbitant prices. This approach has the effect of either siphoning cash from workers’ pockets or driving workers into debt. Both tactics are designed to increase vulnerability and ensure managerial control. As one former slaveholder explained: “Contractors don’t want these people to earn more. If they earn 150 rupees in one day and their expenditure is 100 rupees, then they will just make them drink, invite them to feast together on expensive food in order to ensure that the workers spend each and every penny, so they have to return and continue working for these contractors.”
15More indirect preemptive tactics may be seen in the use of relationships and emotional vulnerability, both nested in shared perceptions of reality. Landlords are clear in their conviction that the model for ideal social relations between landlord and laborer is the family. This fact creates additional tactical resources for addressing recalcitrant workers. One landlord told me that while daily laborers come and go, relationships with bonded laborers “should be like a friendship. If you treat him in a proper way, then he will do all of the work for us, and he will treat us properly. [It’s] more like family.”
16 He went on to explain that “misunderstanding comes if the farmer doesn’t pay the money properly, or if the worker doesn’t come to work very often.” Those misunderstandings are resolved, he explains, by the community: “Ten people sit together in the village and say
If you don’t want to work under him, that’s okay, just pay [
the farmer]
back the money and you all can separate.” Freedom is readily available to those ready and able to repay their debt in a lump sum. Another landlord detailed his strategy for the same problem, explaining:
These [bonded laborers] are hereditary…even if a bonded laborer is absent for two days of work, we send a middleman to the bonded laborer and ask “Okay, why are you not coming to work? What’s happened? What has the landlord not taken care of?” So in this way, with small discussions between people, we sort out our problems, and then they continue their work as it is.
17In both cases, the recalcitrant laborer’s own community is drawn into the problem-solving exercise of applying relational and reputational norms. Countless bonded laborers over the years have asked me, rhetorically, how can I refuse to repay a debt when I know it will ruin my name in my community? This is all the more true when the landlord’s rhetorical position is to ask what have I not taken care of? These tactics are widespread, effective, and, as seen above, quite intentional.
Another indirect tactic involves making up for lost labor by pressuring family members to work together with, or instead of, the bonded laborer. In an interview with one lower-caste farmer,
18 he responded to my question about laborers refusing to repay their debts in the following way: “This happens to everyone, and has happened to me also. I lend to them whenever they require money. But after that, I didn’t force them to repay forcefully, because I understand their situation. So whenever these things happened, I made more of their family workers work in the field, so in that way I could get back their debt.” Having never been faced with an explicit boycott, this landlord in particular has found ways to continue exploiting the laborer despite the explicit challenge of laborers refusing to work. Perhaps the muted nature of his response has more to do with his lower-caste status—he is a member of the same caste as most bonded laborers in his community—or perhaps it is a frank recognition of the limited range of motion for all farmers in his position. When I asked if bonded laborers were able to seek employment elsewhere, he expressed shock, declaring, “He can’t sustain himself on his own! That’s why he’s linking himself to someone as a bonded laborer!”
The greatest preemptive tactic, as it turns out, is to not need any tactic at all because one simply knows what they need and when to help them.
19 This relational approach—rooted in individual need and operationalized through a particular set of cultural norms—need not be intentional and might not even be recognizable. While I am not in a position to parse motives, it is fair to assume that in at least some of these cases, such tactics may be rooted in something other than a pure profit motive. What I am calling “tactics” are perhaps more authentically described as
socially acceptable commitments. Slaveholder tactics and ideal social relations are mutually constituted in a slave society. One former slaveholder observes that his recently deceased father was obeyed because of mutual respect. Until recently, his family did not have trouble with their bonded laborers. He notes:
Before, people used to listen to us. They would listen to us when we would pressure them. We would pressure them and they would accept it. They accepted it because it was the right thing. [My father] was respected. He respected them and they respected him. Now they have pride and think that they are bigger than us, that
we will do all of this work. But they keep going lower. They always thought
Pandeyji is a big person, and he is right. He does justice and he is right. No one could speak in front of him. They feared him or respected him…. He did whatever he wanted to do. He scolded people, and no one could speak against him. He did good. If he could he came to a compromise. He didn’t fight, he stood up!
20When I asked what would have happened had someone refused to repay their debt to his father, the compromiser, he replied, “they would have to repay. He gave them the money, so why wouldn’t they give it back? He will ask why they are doing this, and then three or four people from the laborer’s community will explain the situation to him and say, Look, don’t do this…. What will you eat?”
With this statement, the power dynamics that underpin the paternalistic employer’s worldview are laid bare. It is survival that lies beneath the obligation. Bonded laborers must work to repay debts because it is their duty; it is also their only path to survival. Once again, we see the tangle of cultural norms as employers’ tactics play out in personal relations and expectations of duty, respect, and obligation. The employer may mobilize the laborer’s own community against emancipatory efforts and urges.
PATERNALISM
Conversations about ideal social relations between employers and their employees served as important opportunities to discuss bonded labor, how it differs from informal daily labor, and what sorts of attitudes and behaviors are expected from respective parties. Conversations about what makes a good employer and how employees are expected to behave indicate a rhetoric of love and pervasive paternalism that elides altogether the exploitative nature of these relations. Five years paying off a paltry debt are seen in light of the shelter they provided rather than in terms of wages denied. An ideological commitment to caste hierarchy guaranteed that, across the board, employers who currently employed bonded laborers were clear in their conviction that landlords should treat those in their care as if they were family members and that laborers should reciprocate with humble service.
Even in conversations about daily laborers, it was clear that the gold standard for landlord-laborer relations holds for laborers under either status yet may only be reliably expected from bonded laborers. The landlord agrees to take care of everything for the laborer, and the laborer agrees to do anything for the master. While the next chapter addresses landlords’ responses when this bond has been broken, it is important to emphasize the deep resonance this old standard has with each of the interviewees. But it is the expectation, not the reality.
All this talk of idealized paternalistic relations only takes employers so far. Conversations about tactics demonstrate that, at some point, this passive sense of obligation must be structured and enforced more deliberately. The identification of vulnerability, the process of price fixing, the exploitation of relational dynamics, and a heavy reliance on a culturally rooted sense of paternalistic caste obligation are passive strategies that slaveholders identified in our conversations. In the final analysis, these strategies and tactics are mutually constitutive of the broader social, caste, and class relations typified by paternalism.
Perpetrators of bonded labor are not pathological rights violators. It is instead more likely they have a socially constructed preference for inequality. The sociologist Mary Jackman (1994, 8) has argued that this preference is engrained in the legitimizing myth of paternalism:
Because individuals in the dominant group do not feel personally accountable for the expropriated benefits of their existence, there is no impetus for them to contrive knowingly to manufacture such an ideology. Instead, out of the pressures created by their collective relationship with subordinates, there evolves naturally an interpretation of social reality that is consistent with the dominant group’s experience. That ideology is a collective property. It permeates the main institutions and communications networks of organized social life and is propagated with an easy vehemence that can come only from uncontrived sincerity. The individuals who comprise the dominant group are caught in the prevailing current: without any exercise of personal guile, they learn to defend their interests with aplomb.
A paternalistic worldview serves to insulate perpetrators from the economic and ethical reality of abuse while bolstering a sense of civic and religious duty. Within India, caste serves as the overarching framework for these social relations: it provides an infrastructure, however subconscious, for the establishment and maintenance of interpersonal and intergroup inequality. There is every reason to believe paternalism or similar frameworks perform this same function in other cultural contexts. Paternalism is but one manifestation of the incumbency described in the previous chapter.
The employer-employee relationship, therefore, is not simply one of economic supply and demand but is an important and constitutive part of the moral order. For this reason, the act of challenging an employer’s control is a challenge to the moral order itself. When I asked one employer, Kshantu,
21 what sort of offense bonded labor represented, he replied: “Legally it is an offense, but culturally it’s not. Culturally, so many thousands of people are doing this—taking money and working one year, and when the period is over, going back. Some people are working for twenty years in the same house, in the same place. They don’t ever complain.” Indeed, the relationship between social norms and Indian law is dynamic. For this reason, new laws, new political will in its enforcement, or new challenges and demands from laborers are seen as cracks in the moral universe, as the erosion of ethics and morality rather than as the expansion of individual rights. I am using the term “moral universe” to imply a highly spiritually laden moral order that reflects the belief that human society exists within a larger spiritual universe, and more specifically that human relations are infused with moral imperatives.
22 Paternalism, morality, family: what does all of this have to do with social movement theory?
INTERPRETIVE PROCESSES
The paternalistic expectations these rights violators have for social relations are manifested in the rhetoric of love introduced earlier. These expectations are perhaps best explained by social movement theory’s attention to the way certain social actors perceive their world, movement claims, and the relationship and resonance between the two. Social expectations rooted in duty and obligation shape the way social movement targets interpret their own rights-violating behavior as well as subsequent challenges to their authority.
By interpretation, I mean to capture two important movement concepts: perceived grievances and framing. By perceived grievances I mean a sense of being wronged, and by framing I mean an assessment of why the grievance has occurred. Grievances are rooted in a perceived reality, and frames help provide a causal explanation of this reality. I have taken the liberty of dealing with both grievances and framing under a single broader rubric because both are rooted in culturally mediated interpretation. Incumbents’ interpretations of reality are filtered through cognitive barriers that often limit—through the mechanisms of ignorance, anger, or privilege—their ability to perceive the broader range of options available to them at any point in time.
Of course, attribution issues abound. The qualitative data presented here provide solid empirical support for Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam’s (2012, 107) observation that “all actors have a certain stake in social order” and that while the current status quo might not be fixed—indeed Fligstein and McAdam call them “existing settlements,” implying they are not fixed into perpetuity—it is perceived to be sufficiently real as to impose a “cognitive barrier to contentious action.” It is widely recognized that this cognitive barrier, false consciousness according to some, is experienced by the powerless, i.e., the prospective challengers (Gaventa 1982). Less recognized, certainly since 1968, is the fact that the same phenomena, the same cognitive barriers to adaptation and innovation, affect incumbents. Cognitive barriers—along with precedents, emotions, and norms—shape the sort of tactics available to a movement’s targets. Perceptions and emotions are very real, but they often eventually face the cold reality imposed by resource scarcity—the declining value of land or caste, for example. Some targets who want to respond with repression are simply unable to do so.
The construction of interpretive frames helps individuals recognize grievances and interpret them as worthy of collective action (Snow et al. 1986). At its broadest level, framing is the process of making sense of everyday life, and thus it relies on cultural schemata, namely, the “shared meanings created through sustained interaction” (Fitzgerald 2009). Shared meanings are best found in schemas that lie at what the sociologist Hank Johnston calls the “epistemological rock bottom” of any framing activity (Johnston 1995).
Framing, therefore, is a profoundly intimate cultural practice drawing on shared systems of norms and values. When effectively deployed, interpretive frames perform a range of functions: they help diagnose the problem (workers have forsaken their most fundamental obligations), they offer a prognosis of the problem (new laws and ideas are to blame for this change), and they influence whether people will take action (here, a sense that the paternalist past can never be restored, leading to resignation) (Snow et al. 1986).
Importantly, the oppressor’s worldview is self-reinforcing. Dominant institutions, cultural patterns, and practices—through laws, jokes, language, educational systems, social norms, and so forth, the stuff of life—support and naturalize status quo dominance and normalize inequality. The more oppressed people are, the easier it is for an oppressor or a class of oppressors to sustain dominance. While the conditions of inequality may be constant, interpretations of these as grievances are not. Rather, they must be socially constructed. Cognitive liberation—the proper interpretation of grievances—is a critical component of mobilization and is the primary objective of most framing efforts (McAdam [1982] 1999, Snow et al. 1986).
Cognitive liberation is a broad notion of human emancipation that is often reduced to the more empirically verifiable concept of an injustice frame by which marginalized individuals properly consider their interests. It is the injustice frame that helps establish an interpretation of grievances, creating a legible wrong in the first place. Movement claims, like human rights, are socially constructed. Interpretations of problems and solutions need not be strategic and instrumental. They may be, and often are, emotional, spiritual, and deeply personal. Injustice frames are not just movement tactics; they are a way of seeing the world that is mapped onto deeper schemata—here, caste hierarchy is the epistemological bedrock. A sense of injustice is not limited to the victims of injustice.
Cultural frames are not the only sense-making devices or triggers for increased awareness. Scholarship on events that disrupt the everyday routines of social or communal life has emphasized the extent to which suddenly imposed grievances may trigger collective action (Jasper 1997). The causal importance of disruptive events, violations of community space, challenges to routines, and the disruption of social control in explaining the emergence of nonroutine collective action has prompted some to argue that grievances deserve renewed and sustained attention (Buechler 2007, Useem 1998, McVeigh 2009). For example, this renewed attention to grievances may be seen in a fresh reconceptualization of the Montgomery bus boycott in the United States, a signature moment in the civil rights movement. New scholarship suggests the boycott was rooted in localized grievances stemming from changes in the functioning of the public bus network: humiliation and a sense of abuse generated by a surplus of inaccessible seating was a significant causal factor in the boycott (Shultziner 2013). Furthermore, it may be that many of the structural threats and opportunities identified by movement scholars over the past two decades are causally similar to the structural strains and breakdowns of an earlier generation (Buechler 2007, 61–63). Strains and breakdowns in systems of control (as seen from the point of view of those who favor order and control) may also be interpreted as opportunities for marginalized challengers (as seen from the perspective of those who favor such change).
The application of these lessons to targets is fairly straightforward. Movement targets have worldviews and must adapt to change. The social mechanism of cultural framing and personal grievances apply equally to targets. Disruption to the quotidian lives of everyday human rights violators, of the type emphasized in this study, trigger a sense of being wronged (Snow et al. 1998). Targets’ assessments, whether emotional or tactical, and whether diagnostic or action oriented, are rooted in deep, shared, and cultural understandings of how the world should be. As we will see in the next chapter, slaveholders have injustice frames and develop plans of action from existing cultural repertoires.
SUMMARY
The notion of ideal social relations is rooted in broadly held notions of duty and obligation framed by the caste system. While the caste system has been greatly challenged over the past few decades and is a large and complex system that should not be reified, it remains the dominant factor by which individuals are differentiated in contemporary Indian society. The caste system represents a significant and broadly distributed set of advantages available to most landlords I spoke with. While individual upper-caste interviewees complained to me about the reservation system, whereby educational opportunities and jobs are reserved for underrepresented communities, in fact caste-based discrimination is pervasive in Indian society.
Opportunities remain open for the employer so long as the laborer shares this understanding of the intertwined nature of debt and duty. Opportunities are closed to the bonded laborer for the same reason—so long as the laborer also believes the legitimizing myths and buys into the dominant frames that make subordination possible. Movement challengers undermine this consensus view through the introduction of new ideas—individual rights, fair pay, children’s education, access to benefits—but also through the experience, however small, of accessing or attempting to access those rights. These new challenges and new ideas may create new social, political, and economic opportunities, as well as new cognitive and collective perspectives for oppressed laborers, while creating new threats and obstacles for movement targets.
As will be seen in the next chapter, the mobilization of oppressed laborers sheds new light on these social relations, calling into question how ideal they really were and are. Previously, it was paternalism that had justified domination and exploitation on the grounds that they benefitted the laborers. Movement efforts threaten both individual livelihood as well as the collective moral order. How seriously movement adversaries take the threat often depends on how stable they are and how secure they feel about the other forms of power supporting them. Perceived threats in the form of newly disruptive ideas, attitudes, and behavior are taken not as specific challenges to particular sets of market-mediated interpersonal relations but as a fundamental and fatal challenge to what had been the reliable and abiding foundation of a good society.