Abstract
India’s Constitution, drafted chiefly by Dalit leader B.R. Ambedkar and ratified in 1949, contains some radical promises. The postcolonial Indian state, it declared, should “strike to minimise inequalities in income, and endeavor to eliminate inequalities in status,” raise “the level of nutrition and the standard of living of its people,” and ensure that “the citizens, men and women equally, have the right to an adequate means of livelihood.” Not only should it ensure “that the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment,” but it should undertake specific measures on behalf of oppressed tribes and castes to “protect them from social injustice and all forms of exploitation.” Examining the lives of one of the most oppressed and exploited groups in contemporary India—Dalit agricultural laborers in the state of Bihar—Anand Chakravarti asks how well these promises hold up after more than a half-century of independence. The short answer is not very well.
Chakravarti is a retired professor of sociology at Delhi University and a seasoned ethnographer of rural India. A student of M.N. Srinivas in the 1960s, his first book (Chakravarti, 1975) examined changing patterns of authority in a Rajasthan village. Like much research from the period, it tracked significant transformations in post-Independence rural India—land reforms, electoral democracy, and village-level government—that provided some reasons for optimism. Yet, it also showed that many of the Constitution’s promises were already wearing thin. Land reform had significantly undercut landlordism but largely benefited dominant agrarian castes while redistributing precious little to Dalit laborers and tenants; and caste remained the central organizing principle of village life. Empirically rich, resolutely local and not explicitly critical, the book was an exemplar of village studies in the Srinivas mold.
After 25 years, Chakravarti had produced a series of studies on rural Bihar but, by his own account, became dissatisfied with the ability of his previous sociology to do justice to the interaction of class and caste in oppressing Dalits laborers. With the help of a student activist from the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation (Liberation for short), he identified a village called Muktidih as the fieldsite for a study that would focus specifically on landless Dalit laborers. Located in southwest Bihar, the village contained two large Dalit subcastes—Paswans and Bhuiyas—who were almost entirely landless agricultural laborers and tenants. Based on 5 research trips to Muktidih spanning 14 years—2001 to 2015—Is this Azadi (Freedom)? chronicles the lives and livelihoods of those at the bottom of India’s social structure and offers a searing critique of the Indian state.
After four decades of state-led development and almost three decades of neoliberalism, Chakravarti shows how Dalits in Muktidih remain in abject poverty. This is the case even though the village is situated on fertile canal-irrigated land. While constituting more than 30% of the village population, Dalits owned almost none of the land. Land reforms had merely changed the composition of their exploiters with middle-caste Yadavs displacing the traditionally dominant Brahmins. Until the 1990s, most Dalits were bonded laborers for dominant caste farmers. Remarkably, as late as the early 2000s, half of the Bhuiya men and four of the Paswan men in Muktidih were still trapped in this form of debt bondage even if it was slowly giving way to “free” wage labor (and several Bhuiyas, who were generally worse off than Paswans, were still in this condition as of 2015). While valued for its freedom and dignity compared to servitude, wage labor on the same fields, Chakravarti calculates, hardly left agricultural laborers better off in monetary terms; they earned paltry wages that were a small fraction of the statutory minimum. Working as tenants on a sharecropping basis was prized for its autonomy, but actually translated into lower earnings than wage labor with significantly more insecurity. Better wages could be had as a skilled worker—a bricklayer or tubewell mechanic—or as a migrant laborer in construction or industry, though few had these skills, the supply of non-farm work was erratic and living conditions at worksites deplorable.
Almost all of Muktidih’s Dalits were deeply in debt, with medical expenses, weddings, or deaths forcing them into the clutches of landowner-moneylenders who charged exorbitant interest. Although a significant source of debt, medical care was horrendous: the public clinics and hospitals in the region were so poor that most were forced to turn to expensive (and also poor) private providers in emergencies. Most of Chakravarti’s informants had multiple loved ones, especially young children and women, die early due to entirely preventable diseases (like diarrhea or jaundice). Diets were poor, with little dal (lentil) and much rice gruel. Most families lived in dilapidated houses and did not have their own hand pump. Schools were pitiful and most Dalit informants were too preoccupied with survival to prioritize education: less than 15 percent of Bhuiya men and 3 percent of Bhuiya women were literate, extremely low even by the standards of rural India.
Government welfare programs, like the Public Distribution System, were deeply corrupt. The private ration shop owner provided a fraction of the entitlement at above the mandated price, and many Dalit families were forced to hand over a share of their ration to shopkeepers in return for loans to pay the minimum price. Many poor families were arbitrarily declared “Above Poverty Line” and cut from the list of beneficiares, while rich upper-caste villagers were included. The Indira Awas Yojna, a central government scheme for building housing for the rural poor, required like many other welfare programs the intervention of middlemen whose cut ensured that beneficiaries received a fraction of their legal “entitlement,” resulting in small and poorly constructed one-room houses. Rather than contributing to local development, politicians were criminals catering to their own dominant caste. Cutting across these depressing conditions was a deeply patriarchal social order that Chakravarti’s Dalit informants adhered to, and that clearly made Dalit women’s lives even more precarious.
Chakravarti did observe some positive changes between his first and last rounds of fieldwork. Most Dalits were no longer bonded laborers, and a number of Paswan men had moved from agricultural laborers to tenants as upper-caste farmers turned to urban occupations. There seems to have been a slight uptick in non-agricultural work, especially among the Paswans, though almost entirely in the informal sector. The most significant change, however, came from buffalo-rearing. Many Dalits in the village received loans to purchase buffalo; in addition to producing milk, raising and selling one was sufficiently remunerative to allow some Dalits to pay off their debts. Diets had more vegetables and milk products (thanks to the buffalo), though dal was still a luxury. Attitudes toward education were changing, though schools remained poorly staffed, most Dalits still dropped out at an early age and expectations for women’s education were minimal. The Bhuiya hamlet finally got electricity in 2011. But Muktidih’s Dalits remained extremely poor by any standard. Moreover, many of the positive changes appear to have come only through the efforts of Liberation party activists in the village.
Liberation is an above-ground splinter from the original Naxalites of the 1960s and has long had a base in several regions of Bihar. The party became active in Muktidih in the late 1980s when one of the only educated Paswan youth heard about the party’s struggles against violent Yadav landowners elsewhere in the district. He and a small band of activists organized against the violent Yadav youth who terrorized Dalits in the village; they were largely successful in eliminating lampatvad (“lumpenism”) after years of violent clashes. They also took on the institution of banihaari through the indirect route of encouraging cattle breeding as a way to lessen dependency on upper-caste landlords. They pressured a rural development bank, which had historically discriminated against Dalits, to provide them loans for buffalo purchase, which allowed a number of (largely Paswan) Dalits to move from bonded to wage labor. Through the party’s agricultural laborers’ union, they pressured farmers to increase agricultural wages. They also facilitated the resettlement of Bhuiyas, who had been living on a landlord’s land, onto government land that had been encroached by the upper caste. Finally, they took on some of the most egregious forms of casteism, becoming one of the only villages in the regions to allow Dalit temple entry (p. 133–137). While acknowledging these accomplishments, Chakravarti is not uncritical of the party; he observes that they represented the slightly better-off Paswans more than the Bhuiyas, have not prioritized gender inequality, and that its activists subscribe to—rather than challenge—the oppressive and patriarchal aspects of Hindu ritual (like dowry). His account nevertheless shows that Dalit political agency, through the medium of the party, has done more to transform local caste relations than macroeconomic changes or state policy.
How did the promises of India’s Independence get so badly derailed? Central, for Chakravarti, is the unresolved land question. Agricultural wages, even if increased, could only improve the life chances of landless laborers so much. And the power of dominant castes over Dalits in the countryside rests on their control of the means of production. As one of Chakravarti’s informants puts it, “If we had land, we would be human” (p. 238). But Dalits were betrayed by post-Independence land reform, and Bihar’s present government—headed by Nitish Kumar, heralded by some as an honest technocrat—squashed the recommendations of a government panel to revive tenancy reforms and redistributive land ceilings. This, in Chakravarti’s estimation, is “a resounding example of the capacity of the wielders of social power to trample upon the needs of the marginalized” (p. 243). In the meantime, the Indian state at all levels continues its abysmal record of (not) investing in the health and education of India’s rural poor even amid high economic growth. This structural hostility toward the needs of Dalit laborers, Chakravarti concludes, arises from the “the organic linkage between caste power, class power, and state power” (p. 243). While some see hope in India’s electoral democracy, Chakravarti observes that electoral politics reflects more than challenges this linkage. The promises of Independence stand travestied, and the agents of its resurrection are—small pockets of left mobilization notwithstanding—difficult to discern. It is a dark conclusion but, as the results of India’s 2019 election underscore, one that is difficult to argue against.
As a serious village ethnographer, Chakravarti knows the limitations of a study based on short episodic field visits. Without long-term residence in the village, it is hard to hold people’s narratives from interviews against practices in everyday life; and one senses in several places that Chakravarti is not getting the whole story. As with most village studies, micro-level dynamics could be better related to macro-social forces. And there are some notable gaps: rising food price inflation, the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, how his informants voted in the 2014 election, and, despite Chakravarti’s critical statements about gender inequality, the perspectives of women in general. Nevertheless, Chakravarti’s insightful and humane book is a powerful indictment of the Indian state’s failure, through both its developmentalist and neoliberal phases, to significantly improve the lives of its most oppressed and exploited citizens.