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- Policy <http://kafila.org/policy/> - About <http://kafila.org/about/> Posted by: *Aditya Nigam* | 10 June 2008 http://kafila.org/2008/06/10/flight-to-freedom-travels-through-dalit-villages/ Flight to Freedom: Travel Through Dalit Villages "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. -- Ranjit --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
