“Do you eat piglets?” he asked as our car moved through the long road from Lucknow, via Barabanki, Faizabad, Akbarpur towards Azamgarh. “We can have roast piglets and whiskey when we end our day’s work” This was our ‘tour sponsor’, Chandra Bhan Prasad, well known now as the maverick intellectual who celebrates capitalism, consumption and globalization and who was the first to advocate a Dalit-Brahmin alliance against the Sudra (OBC) castes. Thus it was to be. We were to spend our first night in the poorvanchal on 4 June 2008, eating and drinking.
When we arrived at his village at about 8 pm, it was dark. All of Uttar Pradesh only has electricity for about seven or eight hours every day. And this was a village. That too, the dakkhin tola (the generic name for the Dalit settlement, given that, by and large, it is supposed to be situated at the southern end of the village). But true to the line that Prasad has been trying to convince us of for sometime now – and which actually occasioned this trip – within minutes, the generator started purring and the place lit up. We were in front of a fairly large pucca building that happens to be Prasad’s family house. The preparations were soon made for the feast that was awaiting us – the cooler was put on and other arrangements were made. Prasad has been at pains to underline to us, over and over again, that over the last twenty years, hunger and humiliation have disappeared from the lives of the Dalits in this area. Not that they are not poor and oppressed any more. But their lives have changed decisively.
Early next morning we were to go out on a full and proper, daylight trip around the village. We did. It was unlike anything I or any of us had imagined. There were four of us – journalist S. Anand, photojournalist Nilotpal, and Dr Tej Singh who teaches in the Hindi department in Delhi University and edits a Dalit magazine, Apeksha, and myself. The settlement was anything but a dirty, smelly place where one would find the worst of India’s poverty and hunger. After all, this area would count among the poorer or ‘backward’ areas of the country. The village – and as we were to see in all the other villages that we visited – was immaculately clean. Signs of destitution and hunger were really few and far between. Some of the residents had also some land and had purchased a tractor some time ago.
We were out to see these villages for ourselves and assess how ‘globalization’ had transformed lives of ordinary Dalits in the last twenty years or so. This is after all, Prasad’s central thesis in many ways: Liberation through entry into the market and the world of consumption – and through it, the Brave New World of Capital. Travelling through these villages of Eastern UP thus, was a unique experience. We were based in Chandra Bhan’s own village, Bhadaun in Bilariaganj block in Azamgarh district and spent some time going around some of the neighbouring villages – Kandrapur, Paliya and Khatecha, the last mentioned being a Brahmin dominated village.
Two things stand out from the detailed conversations that we had with people in these villages. First, in the last twenty-odd years, the halvaha system has given way to motorized (‘tractorized’) cultivation. Prasad calls this system the ‘key link’ in the multifarious relations of domination that existed in the village. It was a kind of bondage where the Dalit families were bonded to upper caste families. If the male members ploughed the land, the women and children did sundry work around the house of the ‘masters’. There was no other option. This was their world. On the few occasions that some Dalit men did try to run away to the city, as Ramphal Chamar of Paliya village told us, the landowners caught them and brought them back from Azamgarh railway station. In the last fifteen years, bullocks have disappeared from these villages as most of the upper caste people also confirmed. And with it has disappeared the halvaha system. The key link of domination was thus broken.
This change is a direct consequence, many residents tell us [and the study being conducted by Prasad and his team (for Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania) confirms], of people migrating to the cities. The massive expansion of economic activities all around – from Lucknow to Delhi – has enabled many Dalit youth to finally ‘flee’ to the city. In every village, anything from sixty to a hundred and twenty youth from as many families have moved to the city. They send in cash and with cash flows came a new wave of consumption. Where earlier attempts to migrate were individual and isolated, now with overall expansion of activities, it is veritable torrent of out-migration, creating in the event, labour shortages. Upper castes do not and cannot till their own land with ploughs, as it is considered demeaning. Thus the shift to tractors.
Second, an interesting aside in all this: We came across some Dalit families who owned some land who told us that now it was they who hired the tractors from the upper caste owners and paid them for tilling their land! An unimaginable transformation! The presence in the background, of the BSP government also undoubtedly inflects the way the upper castes now respond to the Dalits.
As a rule though, since Dalits neither have land nor cattle to look after (those who do are rapidly giving it up), they are freer to move to the cities. In comparison, says Prasad, OBCs are tied to the village and their imagination does not go beyond it. They have cattle and fields to look after and that holds them back.
One need not buy into Prasad’s entire discourse in order to appreciate the immense significance of these transformations. One must understand these developments, however, by giving due weight to the evidence that he has, if somewhat exaggeratedly, piled up before us. The expansion of economic activity over the last two decades is clearly linked to ‘globalization’ and ‘liberalization’ and could not have been imagined earlier. The series of processes unleashed by globalization are extremely complex and it is not quite clear that all of them can be clubbed under the rubric of ‘capitalism’ and ‘free market’. It has for instance unlocked a whole range of creative energies that involve entrepreneurship, simply by making available a market and cash flows in a scenario where both were extremely limited. In the days of the halvaha system, cash hardly passed through the hands of the Dalit labourers. Entrepreneurship, commerce, markets and fairs – all these have been around since antiquity and we need to be a bit more careful in assigning all these to some innate capitalist instinct. They become part of capitalism only when tied to the logic of accumulation. So far as we can see, a lot of enterprise that has emerged is a simple extension of a logic of need and the pleasure of consumption – none of which need lead to accumulation in the capitalist sense.
In an interesting way, this development is reminiscent of the first round of decline of serfdom in Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. This decline seems to have been directly linked to the emergence of mercantile towns and trading centers – centuries before the rise of capitalism, as serfs in large numbers fled to these towns. It is also interesting that these transformations are taking place not out of the logic of resistance but the abandoning of the ascribed status. For, the logic of resistance requires a definition of the Self, a fixation of identity – something that flight from an oppressive relationship abandons. A peasants’ or workers’ resistance can only emerge by reifying the category of the peasant or the worker, freezing it so to speak. So a marxist can only see a worker abandoning that subject-position as ‘betrayal’ or ‘embourgeoisment’ (Lenin’s ‘labour aristocracy). Real life however, shows many other instances where it is precisely by abandoning given subject-positions that social power structures undergo transformation.
The picture in this case is considerably more complicated. For, while at the individual level, there is a flight to the city – abandoning the ascribded position – this flight is taking place against the background of a larger articulation of a Dalit identity (as opposed to say, a Pasi or Chamar) in the state as a whole. It is the complex interplay of these different dynamics that enables the relative freedom of the Dalits in UP.
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
Aditya, who else has supported the argument?
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Hmmm…Interesting question Shivam. Well, an entire party, which in those days used to have the slogan ‘Tilak Tarazu aur Talwar, Inko Maaro Joote Chaar’ has now started building this alliance seriously. This was 1997/98 remember.
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I think it is unfair to say that the shift from tilak-tarazu to sarvajan-hitay-sarvajan-sukhay necessarily means dalit + brahmin – OBC. That equation is simplistic and even incorrect.
40% of Mayawati’s ministers are OBC, mostly lower OBCs but OBCs nonetheless. And two Yadavs even! In fact the MBCs were won much before the Brahmins were wooed. The BSP’s political achievement in UP does not bear out CBP’s theory. At the same time, there’s no dearth of Brahmin-Dalit animosity post-Sarvajan Samaj alliance. This idea of seeing whether landowning OBCs are the ‘principal enemy’ or the benevolent pandit the ‘natural ally’ – it doesn’t work like that. Different castes and even sub-castes look for power through electoral representation and try to find the party where they think they can be best represented. The BSP thus emphasises on giving umbrella representation to everyone – everyone – and has as a result of this logic even been trying to woo even Yadavs and Thakurs.
Some more points about your post:
But I have heard another version from Dalits in Jaunpur – that tractorisation has meant Dalits don’t have work in the villages, that farming has become less labour-intensive, and as a result fewer farmworkers are required. This means greater supply than demand of labour, and thus lower wages.
The argument made here, that villages have been emptied out because of migration and thus labour is not available – it will have to be established by a broad-based, representative sample survey rather than field visit to one village. So long as we don’t have it established, I raise my hand as one of the sceptics.
For a lot of dalit discourse that tries to take dalit agendas and politics in new directions, any talk of atrocities on dalits or untouchability is taboo. But having listened to countless ‘cases’ of atrocities from rural Dalit activists in places like Jaunpur and Banda, I can tell you that most of these are related to either land or untouchability/caste hierarchy-related dalit assertion. Dalits are still routinely assaulted, raped, murdered in Poorvanchal for just demanding the wage they were promised. If at all these experiences of one village are to be taken as generalisations, they would be truer in western UP than Poorvanchal.
While many Dalits have small amounts of land, many don’t. Once again, I need statistics. Many were given pattas in the ’70s but haven’t been able to get possesion thanks to, well, OBCs but also often savarnas.
That is indeed very significant, but I wonder how that has been changing with the Sarvajan alliance. I have heard that the Brahmins now have the It’s-my-government-too and dalit assertion as a result of Mayawati being CM is thus being compromised. Of course this may not be the whole truth.
I wonder if the team spoke to the OBCs of the village? Prima facie I don’t believe this. There’s no dearth of OBC autowallahs in Delhi who have migrated from UP. I use their services every day. The OBC family also faces the crisis of having too many people to feed. Sub-division of land leads them to migrate. One brother tills the land, the other drives me from Jangpura to Noida every morning. I find it disconcerting that OBC-bashing has been taken for granted.
If a Dalit (or for that matter and OBC) migrates to a city to work as a construction labourer, then one could connect it to the post-liberalisation real-estate boom and thanks globalisation. Construction opportunities in cities would have been fewer without liberalisation, to make a plausible assumption, and thus the number of Dalits (and OBCs) who could have been able to flee would have been less than what it is.
But if a Dalit (or OBC) migrates to pull a rickshaw or drive an auto, perhaps the link with globalisation would be a little more strenuous.
That is not to assume that those who have not migrated, or those who have not benefited from the remittance economy, have not experienced any transformation in the power structures. So much else has happened, after all, than just globalisation: the power of the ballot came much before.
That articulation is not necessarily complete. I wonder if the team specifically met any of the other 54 Dalit sub-castes who are present in UP? Meeting a “Dome” could change many of the conclusions drawn by the visit.
Oh, and even Pasi-Chamar unity is incomplete, the former still seeing the latter as dominating the BSP.
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Aditya, another reason I am sceptical of the assumption that migration has caused shortage of dalit labour, is that Poorvanchal has amongst the highest fertility rates in the country; UP’s average is second only to Bihar and Poorvanchal’s would be close to Bihar, which is 3.9.
I have met dalit activists forced to work on health because of NGO funding, who themselves have as many as six children!
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Sorry to go on, but another point about globalisation. To know the extent of changes caused by globalisation, one will have to be sure about what transformations took place between 1947 and 1991. For example, what did the green revolution do to the Dalits of Poorvanchal? Unless we ask and seek answers for the pre-liberalisatiion decades, the post-liberalisation impressions will rather be like fitting the painting in a frame of presumed conclusions.
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Dear Shivam,
I think you read too much into my post and set up a straw man to knock it down. Possibly your straw man is CBP himself – and you seem to have not noticed that I have explicitly said (telegraphically, of course, because this is not an academic paper) that one need not buy into CBP’s entire discourse. You choose to ignore that.
However, some responses are in order to your long comments.
1. I have not claimed (and I speak only for what I say) that the Brahmin-Dalit alliance is responsible for BSP’s victory. In fact, I have not mentioned elections even once. Simply to point out that a new social phenomenon of a Dalit Brahmin alliance is emerging sounds ‘unfair’ to you? After all, Mayawati has held melas to woo the Brahmins and they have been attended by lakhs of Brahmins – that is an important phenomenon that no amount of statistical electoral jugglery practised by pundits can falsify. The question is to probe into its logic.
2. I am tired – maybe its my age – of hearing (and for many decades making fire-spouting speeches in political meetings) of tales of poverty, hunger, rape and violence. Not that these things do not happend anymore. Nor even that these are marginal experiences. I have not claimed that. I think all kind of Lefties (liberal, communist, bla bla) are still stuck in a kind of old rhetoric that fails to see what is new and emerging. They would much rather consign caste to soem other place. And ‘globalization’ ( a very unhappy catch-all term the meaning of which is highly elusive) is to them a conspiracy of some all powerful forces (capitalism, empire etc all of whom function with a single will) to ensure that poor people all over the world are screwed. Even if one were to accept this completely nonsensical understanding, I can say that life always escapes the intentions of the most powerful. Flight, escape, abandonment…that is the primary mode in which life confronts attempts to control it. BUt let us leave that discussion for some other time.
3. I am really not interested in statistical data. Just a small methodological point: The more representative a sample, the more it must focus on the mainstream. It must mirror the dominant trend/s – unless it is a full census, which incorproates everything, family, household. Else, even very large samples are too small to give more that a few heads to the new but important trends. They can easily be dismissed as ‘statistically insignificant.’ Whether labour shortages are a general trend all across UP or not, I do not know. I have said this on the basis of the impressions and conversations in these three-four villages. As a qualitative piece of information, I think it is of far greater significance that all the stories of poverty and violence put together, for they point to new possibilities that are opening up now.
4. What happened between 1947 and 1991: I look forward to studies that will illuminate that. From all accounts, the Dalits were not allowed to vote, continued to face the same oppressions that have for centuries, and have been fixed to place, unable to escape. But will want to be enlightened on this.
cheers,
A
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Fair enough Aditya.
I was mindful of your disclaimer that one needn’t agree with everything CBP says, but my first response was to “and who was the first to advocate a Dalit-Brahmin alliance against the Sudra (OBC) castes”.
Firstly, that seems to uncritically agree with that theory, and, secondly, that others have since then agreed with it and followed it. On my asking for this clarification, you pointed out the BSP journey from tilak-tarazu to what it has come to know, which is the Sarvajan Samaj idea.
I’m not contesting that something new, fascinating and worthy of in-depth study is happening between Western UP Brahmins and Dalits (though the Saryupari Brahmins of east UP are less enthusiastic because Satish Chandra Mishra is a Kanyakubja Brahmin and so are most other Brahmin faces in the BSP apparatus).
I’m merely saying that to use the Dalit Brahmin alliance, whatever its nature and status be, to say that it is an alliance “against the Sudra” is incorrect. The Brahmin sammelans and bhaichara committees of the BSP are amongst countless such sammelans and bhaichara committees with other castes, including OBCs. That is not to say I am denying the importance of the Dalit-Brahmin phenomenon. I am merely saying that Brahmins haven’t joined the BJP in droves to get the air rid of landowning, buffalo-happy OBCs but only because they felt deprived of political power via representation in both the BJP and the Congress.
I agree that this has taken off from a casual aside that was not amongst the points you were making in the post. Nevertheless, it was an important point by way of introducing your host. I didn’t mean to say that this is your argument, but was commenting on the argument cited to introduce your host.
May be I am wrong on the labour point, will keep it in mind for the future. But as for the point about most narratives ignoring the new and emerging for convenient, old poverty, violence and discrimination: let me say that these seem like two extremes and perhaps a balanced perspective might be most suited.
The point about 1947-1991 (and that is a very long time) was intended more about the study that CBP is anchoring than about your post.
I do wish I was not travelling elsewhere and had been able to take up CBP’s generous offer to join the team.
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I think we need to be a bit careful not to miss the wood because of the trees! Frankly, I found Aditya’s experiences on the Chandra Bhan Prasad picnic to his home turf in Eastern UP fascinating and no amount of nit-picking by Shivam subtracts a whit from the wider revelations emerging from the trip. Of course, it is Shivam who pointed me via personal email to this particular post and I am most grateful to him for this! I would like to make the following points:
1. While Shivam is right that the Dalit-Brahmin alliance forms only a part of the BSP’s electoral strategy, it would be naive to minimize the impact of the growing perception across UP of Brahmins accepting the leadership of a Dalit ki Beti. This has raised the stock of Mayawati and her party across the caste spectrum and further consolidated her hold on Dalits and poorer backward castes. Individual Brahmin leaders and bureaucrats in private conversations may pose and preen about how they are ruling the roost but the fact of the matter is that it is the lady who at the moment has everybody by the short hairs!! It would be also wrong to ignore the emerging electoral battle lines in civil society across UP that pits two main hegemonic upwardly mobile protagonists Dalits and middle-upper OBCs. There is also little doubt that despite individual exceptions (both BSP and SP are bound to tempt and attract defectors from each other), the Brahmins and Banias along with poorer Muslims and backward castes will back Mayawati whereas the Thakurs, Kurmis, Jats and a host of middle castes will pitch their lot with Mulayam.
2. As for Shivam’s lament about the continuing misery on the security and economic front afflicting Dalits in UP, while their lives remain still pretty shitty like most their peers amongst poorer Muslims and backwards it would be silly not to acknowledge the huge strides made by the community over the past few decades because of the spread of urbanization and the market. CBP’s village is an example of this. This has been further boosted by the periodic spells of power wielded by Mayawati that has given the Dalits a feeling of political empowerment. In fact, it is this new truimphalist mood among Dalits and the reciprocal rage among their erstwhile superiors among the middle-upper OBCs that may well be behind the spurt in violence against Dalits. But make no mistake, the mood in UP is that ultimately, it is the Dalits with help from marginalized upper castes like Brahmins and Banias who will truimph.
3. Finally, Aditya’s post just underlines the Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde nature of capitalism, which on the one hand, systematically subverts age old feudal institutions including caste hierarchies even as it introduces fresh exploitative mechanisms. CBP celebrating and indeed showing off the gains of capitalism accruing to Dalits that is quite similar to his eulogy of Macaulay and British colonialism must be therefore placed in context and not just dismissed as false consciousness as Leftists tend to do with this maverick Dalit intellectual.
Let me end by noting that this is my first post to Kafila – a great forum that has been most useful to people like me starved off any kind of meaningful debate in the electronic and print media.
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Dear Ajoy,
Many thanks for your first comment on Kafila. I don’t disagree with anything you are saying above. Crucially, you are making the important distinction between middle-upper OBCs and the MBCs.
As for the social and political experience of the Dalit-Brahmin alliance since the government was formed, may I say that the jury is still out and the picture might be complex.
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Just a quick point on migration, labour shortage and statistics. i’m not sure of the UP-dalit statistics, but an examination of census 2001 stats suggests that women account for 71 per cent, or 216.7 million out 307 million cases of total migration reported by place of birth. The census does add that 65 per cent state marriage as their primary reason for migration, but a lot of new work suggests that this figure might reflect a certain methodology bias of women and work.
Certainly, my conversation with friends working in other parts of the country (Yes Shivam, there are other parts) suggests that Jharkhand, for example, has a huge number of women migrating to cities for work in the domestic work sector among others.
It would also be interesting to examine the extent to which “globalization” (I am consciously using this term loosely as a catch-all phrase) has actually increased female work force participation (in terms of paid employment) and to what extent this contributes to the transformation one sees in the villages. Though I dont have the figures – it would be interesting to compare the workforce participation among women of different castes/ tribes. This might lead us to uncover another facet of this debate.
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Dear Aman,
Thanks for pointing this out, this may indeed provide a sharper perspective of looking at the consequences of migration of labour from the village to the city. However, once again what I have heard from people is that those migrating are predominantly men, thus leading to “feminisation of agriculture”.
But there’s no doubt that this needs much thinking, and one is grateful to Aditya’s post, CBP’s tour and indeed, the point you raise.
Whatever that means.
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