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- Convenors:
-
Alpa Shah
(LSE)
Jens Lerche (SOAS)
- Discussants:
-
Sangeeta Dasgupta
(Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Dennis Rodgers (Graduate Institute, Geneva)
- Location:
- Room 205
- Start time:
- 29 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
- Session slots:
- 4
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to explore how and why Adivasis and Dalits remain at the bottom of the Indian social and economic hierarchy.
Long Abstract:
The redistribution of the fruits of Indian economic growth has been negligible for vast swathes of India's population, most of whom live in the countryside. The demographics of the poor are starkly socially marked. Dalit and Adivasi communities, who account for 25% of the country's population and were historically seen as 'untouchable' and 'savage', suffer from disproportionate levels of poverty, remaining worse off than other groups almost everywhere across the country. This panel seeks to explore why and how Adivasis and Dalits remain at the bottom of India's social and economic hierarchy. One of the key foci is the kind of livelihoods they depend on, and how access to them is shaped by the processes of inequality involving the powerlessness of Dalits and Adivasis in relation to the power of dominant social groups and institutions such as major landowners, industrialists, traders, moneylenders and power brokers, as well as the state. We invite papers that investigate livelihoods and inequality and that address the complex relations between Adivasis and Dalits, as well as between the different groups of Adivasis and Dalits, to reach a comparative understanding. We encourage papers to also pay attention to the developmental cycle of the household, and transforming intra-household relationships - especially gender and generation. We hope that the papers will help theorise the relationship between class and caste discrimination in contemporary India.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Jens Lerche (SOAS) Alpa Shah (LSE)
Paper short abstract:
As social discrimination continues to mark the contours of poverty, we investigate how and why Adivasis and Dalits remain at the bottom of the Indian social and economic hierarchy, drawing on fine-grained field research from across the length and breadth of the country.
Paper long abstract:
Economists have shown that the Indian economic boom has had little positive impact on those at the very bottom of India's social and economic hierarchies. Here we place the historically grounded social relations between Adivasis/ Dalits and other groups at the centre of an analysis of why and how this is the case under today's global neo-liberalism. We will introduce the findings of a major research programme that is detailed in some of the papers of this panel. Analysing the differences and specific material contexts, social relations and imaginations of Dalits and Adivasis, we suggest that village based oppression is being transformed into India-wide informalisation, that local inequality and power relations today are part of global processes while being shaped locally by historically hegemonic groups, and that while these processes affect both Adivasis and Dalits, there are significant differences between them which are important to consider. We argue that class as a social and economic relation of exploitation and surplus appropriation is central to caste discrimination and that individual social mobility - for instance through education or affirmative action - has definite limits as has, for now, collective social action.
Dalel Benbabaali (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at how Adivasi and Dalit lives have been differently impacted by industrialisation in a village located in the Bhadrachalam scheduled area of Telangana to understand the processes of dispossession and proletarianisation that led to the marginalisation of already vulnerable groups.
Paper long abstract:
The Bhadrachalam tribal belt in Telangana is a scheduled area where Adivasi land and forest rights are protected by the Constitution. Regulation 1 of 1970 Act, which prohibits transfer of immovable property situated in the Agency tracts to non-tribals, is one of the most stringent pieces of legislation in the country protecting Adivasi territory. However, innumerable violations of this Act have taken place, in the form of development projects displacing Adivasis, industries exploiting local resources, or non-Adivasi settlers occupying tribal land. The natural wealth and fertile soils of the Godavari valley around Bhadrachalam have attracted farmers, industrialists, contractors and businessmen whose activities led to tribal land alienation and proletarianisation of the indigenous populations. To study these processes of dispossession and marginalisation of already vulnerable groups, fieldwork has been conducted in a village located less than 10 km away from Bhadrachalam and from ITC paper factory, a private company that started exploiting the abundant coal, water and forests available in that area in the 1970s. The presence of the factory intensified in-migration of outside labour, be it non-Adivasi employees or Lambadas who were given ST status by the Andhra Pradesh government and who came to Bhadrachalam for work or to benefit from various advantages offered by the Integrated Tribal Development Agency. The village study that provides the empirical material for this paper looks at the way ITC factory affected Adivasi and Dalit lives and livelihoods, by focusing on three groups (Koyas, Lambadas and Madigas) who have been differently impacted by industrialisation.
Jayaseelan Raj (Centre for Development Studies)
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on how traditional forms of caste hierarchy and other categories of workers’ identity are engaged as a mode of control and discipline to reproduce casualised plantation labour.
Paper long abstract:
Indian tea production has been in severe crisis since the mid-nineties largely due to neo-liberal structural adjustments in the Indian economy. The crisis punctured the isolated environments of the plantations and precipitated neoliberal reforms that closed down production in many areas either partially or completely. While many families remained on the plantations, large numbers of Tamils who had lived there for more than five generations were now compelled to seek work outside.
As the crisis-ridden plantations are taken over by new companies, they have recruited Adivasi migrant workers from Eastern India to replace the Tamil workers. The new workers from Jharkhand were denied temporary and permanent work status as they were illegally maintained as casual laborers. This casualization of work consequently denied them rights and welfare measures guaranteed under the plantation labour act of 1951. This casualization coupled with discrimination based on ethnic stereotypes not only reproduces this community as casual laborers, but also normalizes their marginality. In a similar manner, the Tamil Dalits who left the plantations for Coimbotore-Tirupur industrial belt are also maintained as casual workforce where they work for twelve hours a day to meet the deadline provided by large contractors. These workers, fear of being discriminated for being Dalits, attempts to hide their caste identity to make way through the caste ridden industrial township of Coimbotore-Tirupur. This paper explores how the presumed identities of Dalits and Adivasis are used in reproducing the class order in the fields and factories.
Brendan Donegan (LSE)
Paper short abstract:
The ethnographic material explored in this paper shows how Adivasis and Dalits tend to remain at the bottom of India’s social and economic hierarchy when industry provides new livelihood options in a rural area, but also shows the deeply ambivalent relationship local Dalits have the factories.
Paper long abstract:
The world over, developers buying land for industrial development appease villagers by promising that local people will get jobs in the factories. Do local people get factory jobs? The ethnographic material explored in this paper suggests that this is the wrong question, and shows why and how Adivasis and Dalits tend to remain at the bottom of India's social and economic hierarchy even where a new industrial estate provides new livelihood options. In 'village X' in Tamil Nadu, local Adivasis are excluded from all but the very worst factory jobs, local Dalits have a somewhat preferable and yet highly complex and ambivalent relationship with factory employment, and Eastern Indian migrant labourers (mostly Adivasi and Dalit) have been brought in as a cheaper, more hard-working, and more docile workforce than the local Dalits. Local Dalits feel that a generation of their men and women have benefited from opportunities to work in the factories as low-paid, contract manual labourers, and that in many senses these jobs are preferable to the work they did before as agricultural daily wage labourers for higher caste landlords. At the same time, these local Dalits recognise that they continue to be pushed into highly-exploitative contract labour in the factory because opportunities to pursue better working conditions or alternative employment are limited by the complex interaction of relationships between the Dalit community and the local big landowners, the numerically-dominant Vanniyar community, the high caste factory managers and permanent employees, trade unionists, anti-pollution activists, moneylenders, and the police.
Richard Axelby (SOAS University of London)
Paper short abstract:
Against a backdrop of booming India, this paper will provide what is perhaps the first comparison of Muslim STs with Hindu STs as Gaddis and Gujjars in Chamba District (Himachal Pradesh) struggle to negotiate the obstacles which block paths to social mobility.
Paper long abstract:
Gaddi shepherds and Gujjar herdsmen have driven their goats and buffalo along the mountains trails of Himachal Pradesh for generations. But migratory pastoralism is no longer viable. Returning to settle in their home villages in the Chamba valley these two Scheduled Tribe communities now have to seek new opportunities in the mountainous terrain of one of India's officially most backward districts. This paper will show how the Gaddis have, in the past, been the beneficiaries of land redistribution policies but have been unable to leverage this into the good government jobs that they aspire to. Although for many Muslim Gujjars, the circumstances are perhaps even worse - forced to scratch a living from steeply terraced fields, irregular employment as wage labourers is for many the only way to earn a living - there is also significant class differentiation as enterprising individuals have had some success at business. Against a backdrop of booming India, this paper will provide what is perhaps the first comparison of Muslim STs with Hindu STs as Gaddis and Gujjars in Chamba District struggle to negotiate the obstacles which block paths to social mobility.
Clarinda Still (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
The student protests surrounding the suicide of Rohith Vemula have raised serious questions about caste discrimination in higher education in India. This paper looks examines the experience of Dalit students in elite institutions and comments on the changing nature of caste discrimination.
Paper long abstract:
The student protests surrounding the suspension and subsequent suicide of Dalit leader and PhD student, Rohith Vemula, at the University of Hyderabad have raised fresh questions about caste discrimination in higher education in India. This paper looks takes a broad look at caste on campus and the experience of Dalit students in elite institutions. The conflict in which Rohith was involved was in many ways unique but he was not the first Dalit student either to have experienced discrimination or committed suicide at university. Indeed, there appears to be a pattern. Bearing in mind the idiosyncracies of Rohith's case, I seek to examine some of the factors that make life for many Dalit students difficult, and occasionally untenable. I do this using two sets of data: interviews with Dalit students undertaken in 2005, just after another incident of caste conflict had taken place around that time, and secondly, conversions with Dalit students in March this year in the midst of the protests surrounding Rohith's death. The analysis of students' experiences will be made with a view to making a broader comment about the nature of contemporary caste discrimination more generally.
David Picherit (CNRS)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the ways Dalit livelihood and modes of mobilisation have been affected by the transformations of the political factions and their modes of accumulation in Andhra Pradesh, India.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to map the tensions between the multiple forms of Dalit assertion and mobilisation and the politico-economic transformations in Andhra Pradesh, India. It looks at the ways Dalit livelihood and modes of mobilisation - from Dalit unions, movements, NGOs and networks to Dalit goondaism and bossism - have been affected by the transformations of the political factions and their modes of accumulation sustained by new economic "opportunities".
The research is based on ethnographical fieldwork conducted in the district of Chittoor, Rayalaseema. This region is marked by a long history of violent political factions (led by Reddys and Kammas) which have "successfully" transformed with the reconfigurations of capitalism in India and beyond: land grabbing, mining, quarries, construction, forest but also private clinics and colleges are now their main rural and urban activities. The wealth accumulated over the last twenty years goes along with a close control over state and its resources. This process happened in a context of decline of most of collective forms of Dalit mobilisation. Once very lively in the 1990s, Dalit organisations have collapsed in the mid-2000s. How does this context shape the access of Dalit labourers to state resources, employment and livelihood? What are the emerging forms of (individual) assertion?
Nisha Srivastava (University of Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India)
Paper short abstract:
Decent work opportunities are critical for women, but in India, women’s participation in work has been declining. Dalit women are particularly disadvantaged in the labour market. This study examines the work profile of dalit and non-dalit women in India’s recent period of rapid growth.
Paper long abstract:
In the period since the early 1990s, when the Indian economy has grown by close to seven percent annually, the percentage of women engaged in earning activities has declined. This is paradoxical, since globally women's employment has grown with economic development. Some view this decline to rising household incomes and shift to education. However, this explanation may not be adequate since the precipitous decline is principally in rural areas and in self-employment that are associated with the operation of agricultural and other assets.
Dalit women are less likely to own and operate agricultural or non-agricultural assets, their households earn less than other households, and their participation in higher education continues to lag behind non-Dalit women. Socially, Dalit women are considered to be less constrained by restrictions on mobility and patriarchal norms. So what are the changes that have taken place in the profile of work by Dalit women compared to non-Dalit women?
We note that women's work is neatly divided between work that is associated with remunerative activities and other types of work, including those that support household subsistence but not counted as remunerative, and work solely associated with social reproduction. Shift from one type of work to another may reflect different types of economic and social constraints.
We use results from the employment-unemployment surveys by the National Sample Survey (1993-94 and 2011-12) to analyse the differences between participation in work by rural dalit and non-dalit women over India's period of fairly sustained high growth.
Ravi Srivastava (Jawharlal Nehru University)
Paper short abstract:
Based of field studies, this paper explores how dalit and non-dalit workers are incorporated intp construction labour market of the Delhi region and their differences in terms of work profile, recruitment conditions, working conditions, wages, skill acquisition, and conditions of social reproduction.
Paper long abstract:
The construction industry in India has emerged as a major boom industry, employing nearly 50 million workers in 2011-12. Forty-three percent of these workers were from the deprived social groups (Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes or dalits) who otherwise form only 30.2 percent of the workforce. The total numbers of these workers increased from 4.95 million in 1993-94 to 21.42 million in 2011-12, growing at an annual rate of 8.5 percent a year, while the total construction workforce expanded at an annual rate of 8.2 percent a year. Outside agriculture, the construction industry absorbed 18 percent of the non-agricultural dalit workforce in 1993-94 and 35 percent of this workforce in 2011-12.
Although this growth has propelled a large number of dalit workers out of agriculture and into the construction industry, these workers remain at the bottom of the workforce, due to their adverse incorporation in the labour market and labour market segmentation, confining them principally in low skilled manual tasks.
This paper analyses data from field studies in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) to explore how dalit and non-dalit workers are incorporated into the construction labour market and the differences that exist between these groups in terms of work profile, recruitment conditions, working conditions, wages, skill acquisition, and conditions of social reproduction. It also examines whether the differences in work profiles of dalits and non-dalits leads to differences in working ages and working span with further life cycle implications for the different groups of workers.
Nicolas Jaoul (CNRS)
Paper short abstract:
The presentation will rely on a documentary movie produced by a local Dalit activist in Nagpur in the aftermath of the Khairlanji massacre. The images of the exhumation of dead bodies show how shining India’s underlying violence and the popular response against it were staged by the local movement.
Paper long abstract:
In 2006, the massacre in Khairlanji and the name Khairlanji itself became a symbol of continuing caste violence. Thanks to the work of the Dalit intellectual Anand Teltumbde, the name Khairlanji also started being associated with the idea that caste violence was not merely an archaism that the developmental work of the Indian state would gradually overcome, but a structural reality of the Indian state and the Indian economy itself.
The presentation will rely mainly on a documentary movie produced by a local Dalit activist in Nagpur in the aftermath of the Khairlanji massacre, where a Dalit family was brutally massacred by a crowd with the implicit support of the local authorities. The Marathi documentary film “Khairlanji” was circulated in Nagpur among protestors on CDs and never circulated elsewhere. I got hold of it while doing fieldwork in Nagpur on the protests. It denounces caste violence and emphasizes the betrayal of constitutional values by the state itself, thus showing rebellion as a necessary democratic vigilance. Through images of the exhumation of dead bodies of the victims, I will show how shining India’s underlying violence and the popular response against it were staged by the local movement.