Towards a relational conception of subalternity
Perspectives on State-Society Relations in India
The study of subaltern political cultures in India has long been dominated by a dichotomic conception in which the political cultures of subaltern groups are conceived of as being wholly separate from the political cultures of the elites (Sarkar, 1997; Nilsen, 2009a). This is in no small measure related to the heuristic that guided the insurgent historiography of the Subaltern Studies collective, launched in the early 1980s with Ranajit Guha’s famous statement:
... parallel to the domain of elite politics there existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial societies but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country - that is, the people. This was an autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics, nor did its existence depend on the latter (1982: 4).
This heuristic has also shaped much radical criticism of Indian democracy, which posits a profound disconnect between, on the one hand, the modernist ethos of the postcolonial state, and, on the other hand, the everyday lifeworlds of India’s popular classes (Fuller and Harriss, 2001).
This disconnect is often seen as historically engendered by the colonial imposition of an alien political culture. Ranajit Guha (1989) has argued that colonial rule in India was characterized by ‘dominance without hegemony’. Rather than a hegemonic bourgeois culture, which incorporates subaltern groups into its domain and gains their consent to the rule of a liberal-democratic state, the colonial state and its political culture was characterized above all by ‘a series of inequalities between the rulers and the ruled as well as between classes, strata and individuals among the latter themselves’ (ibid.: 229).1 Elite dominance was secured above all by coercion, rather than persuasion, and only a small indigenous elite was incorporated into this political domain. In this context, Guha argues, ‘the life of civil society can never be fully absorbed into the activity of the state’ (ibid.: 231). Hence the state is present in subaltern lifeworlds only as a threat of violent coercion.
A similar analysis can be found in the work of Sudipta Kaviraj (2010a/b). For Kaviraj too, the modern Indian state bears the imprint of its colonial origins. In pre-colonial India, he maintains, the state was simultaneously despotic and marginal: in a ‘two-layered’ form of sovereignty, ‘a distant, formally all-encompassing empire’ commanded ceremonial deference from its subjects, but had little capacity to intervene in the regulation of their everyday lives (2010a: 12). With the advent of colonial rule, the marginality of the state was sought to be overcome, both economically, through attempts to restructure economic production, and politically, through a graded introduction of modernist political discourse, centred on ‘the idea of the state as an impersonal regime of relations, the idea of an individual subject ... the equality of rights or rightlessness ... and, finally, a state which ... pretended to represent the collective interest of society, and whose legitimate interference in society was morally immune’ (ibid.: 12). Education served as a means to induct a small Indian elite into the running of this new political apparatus and, more generally, into the public sphere that, despite its exclusions and inequalities, was constituted by and through the colonial project. The imperial polity thus ‘provided a discursive space on which nationalist ideas could eventually be formed’ (Kaviraj, 2010b: 50).
Mobilization around the precepts of the modernist discourse of political liberalism of course yielded dividends, eventually, in the form of independence, and the nationalist elite emerged at the helm of the newly sovereign nation-state. However, in the newborn postcolonial nation, Kaviraj argues, the dominant position of indigenous elites in the freedom movement was ‘written as the state-society relation’ (ibid.: 23). The commanding heights of the state came to be dominated by an elite that ‘did not try to create or re-constitute popular common sense around the political world, taking the new conceptual vocabulary of rights, institutions, and impersonal power into the vernacular discourse of rural or small-town Indian society’ (ibid.: 29). Guha and Kaviraj are only two of many radical critics who posit a deep disconnect between the vernacular lifeworlds of subaltern groups and the modern Indian state as a domain of elite politics. Similar arguments are found in Inden (1995), Madan (1987), Nandy (1989), and, of course, Chatterjee (1993), to name but a few.
In recent years, these perspectives on Indian state-society relations have come in for a substantial challenge. The work of scholars such as Jaffrelot (2003), Fuller and Harriss (2001), Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava and Véron (2005), Sharma (2007), Gupta (1995, 1998), Shah (2010), and Corbridge and Harriss (2000) has shown how exploited and oppressed groups utilize the state in a myriad of ways, ranging from quotidian manipulations of the local state to the seizure of state power through participation in electoral politics, to challenge their adverse incorporation in the structures of power that constitute the political economy of contemporary India. Indeed, it should be noticed that even scholars like Chatterjee and Kaviraj seem to be gradually moving away from the dichotomic conceptualizations that they once brought to bear on their study of Indian politics.
Chatterjee (2004: 40) has recently argued that the administrative categories and practices that constitute the interface between state and population in India society is a terrain of contention between, on the one hand, subaltern groups - groups targeted as objects of government policies - who ‘transgress the strict lines of legality in their struggle to live and work’, and, on the other hand, state agencies and NGOs responsible for the implementation of governmental policies. The exchanges that take place in this interface - referred to by Chatterjee as ‘political society’ - constitute ‘a constantly shifting compromise between the normative values of modernity and the moral assertion of popular demands’ (ibid.: 41).3 Referring to lower-caste assertion and the new agrarian politics of the rich peasantry, Kaviraj also concedes that the disconnect between the modern state and the popular classes has been gradually overcome:
From an agency which was spectacular, mysterious and distant, the state has become something vast, overextended, extremely familiar at least in its sordid everyday structures ... There is no doubt that great numbers of Indians have responded to the historic invitation to political participation, occasionally in ways which liberal purists would not approve (1999: 246).
Kaviraj’s observation in turn resonates with Lucia Michelutti’s (2007, 2008) analysis of the cultural politics of lower-caste assertion among Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh. Michelutti’s (2007: 641) research demonstrates that as lower caste groups come to participate directly in democratic politics, democracy itself ‘becomes vernacularized, and through vernacularization it produces new social relations and values which in turn shape political rhetoric and political culture’.
These processes, of course, suggest that there is a significant potential for subaltern empowerment and democratic deepening within the parameters of the Indian polity. However, in this essay, I want to push the terms of the discussion about Indian state-society relations and the future of Indian democracy in the direction of a critical probing of both the enablements and the constraints that subaltern groups encounter when they challenge structures of power that are entrenched in institutional complexes such as the state. The point of departure for doing so will have to be a relational understanding of subalternity.
A Relational Conception of Subalternity
A relational conception of subalternity takes its point of departure in the constitution and contestation of historical relationships - that is, subalternity is understood as being constituted in and through relations between social groups that are differentially positioned and endowed in terms of ‘the extent of their control of social relations and ... the scope of their transformative powers’ (Sewell, 1992: 20). Dominant and subaltern groups, then, are "opposites in unity" that structure a social ‘field of force’ and its historically determinate power differentials (Thompson, 1978: 50; Roseberry, 1994: 356-7).
These historical relations are in turn dynamic: they transmogrify as a consequence of contestation between dominant and subaltern groups. Two aspects of this dynamic are of particular importance here.
Firstly, the hegemony of a dominant social group is never an achieved state of affairs. As Gramsci (1998: 181-2) understood so well, the constitution, reproduction, and extension of hegemony is a complex process of negotiation in which ‘the dominant group is co-ordinated with the general interests of the subordinate groups ... [in] a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria ... between the fundamental group and those of their subordinate groups ...’. In other words, dominant groups have to gain the consent of subaltern groups, and this is, in no small part, achieved through concessions made by the former to the demands and concerns of the latter, without eroding the structural foundations of hegemony as such (Williams, 1977; Nilsen, 2009b).
Secondly, the ‘local rationalities’ (Cox, 1999; Nilsen, 2009b) that subaltern groups develop in order to ameliorate or oppose their adverse incorporation into unequal power relations, and their oppositional projects in the form of social movements, are never wholly ‘autonomous expressions of a subaltern politics and culture’ (Roseberry, 1994: 360). Rather, these rationalities are shaped in and through learning processes that unfold as subaltern groups engage with and contest the hegemonic projects of dominant groups and the institutional complexes and discursive formations in which this hegemony is entrenched. Local rationalities are never either entirely autonomous of or totally encapsulated by dominant ideologies, but tend to be expressive of what Gramsci (1998: 333) called a ‘contradictory consciousness’.
If we relate this broad-brushed conception of subalternity to ‘the political power that is pre-eminently ascribed to the state’ (Poulantzas, 1978: 147), it is necessary to make two basic points.
Firstly, our focus should be state power understood as ‘a complex social relation that reflects the changing balance of social forces in a determinate conjuncture’ (Jessop, 1982: 221) - manifest, of course, in an ensemble of institutions that these social forces act in and through. The state, then, is not ‘a fixed sum of resources which can be appropriated by one social force to the exclusion of others’ (ibid.: 225) so as to make it function as a monolithic vehicle for the execution of the designs of dominant groups.
Secondly, the fact that there are ‘conjunctural opportunities’ for enhancing the access of subaltern groups to state power, and, through this, to modify the form of the state, should not render us blind to the fact that there are also ‘structural constraints’ to the extent to which the state can be harnessed to oppositional projects from below (Jessop, 1982: 253). A given state will be embedded in and central to the reproduction of a determinate latticework of social processes and relations that constitute a structured whole, and as such it will be endowed with what Jessop calls ‘strategic selectivity’: a particular form of state ‘will be more accessible to some forces than others according to the strategies they adopt to gain state power’ and more conducive to ‘some types of economic and political strategy than others because of the modes of intervention and resources which characterize the system’ (Jessop, 1990: 260).
In this essay, I am primarily concerned with how subaltern groups encounter both enablements and constraints as they engage with and appropriate the ‘universalizing vocabularies’ (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985: 7) of democratic rights, citizenship, and constitutional entitlements promulgated by the modern Indian state. Such vocabularies are of course central to the hegemonic projects that animate state formation, but they also tend to become ‘sites of protracted social struggle as to what they mean and for whom’ as subaltern groups initiate and pursue emancipatory struggles (ibid.: 6).
In what follows, I shall discuss these questions in relation to grassroots resistance by Adivasis to the ‘everyday tyranny’ of the local state in western Madhya Pradesh (see Nilsen, 2010). As Ramachandra Guha (2010: 1) has noted, Adivasis are, as a whole and broadly speaking, the people that ‘have gained least and lost most from six decades of democracy and development in India’. This is also true of the Bhil, Bhilala, and Barela communities of western Madhya Pradesh. The districts in which they constitute the dominant part of the population - Jhabua, Alirajpur, Khargone, and Badwani - figure in the lowest rung of the Madhya Pradesh Human Development Index, with Jhabua and Badwani as the two bottom districts (GoMP, 2007).4
The impact of rampant poverty and exploitation on Adivasi communities has been compounded by political disenfranchisement. Until recently, making a rights-based claim on the state was unthinkable for most Adivasis in this region; the state and its officials were dangerous figures that one avoided or appeased, and under no circumstance challenged. In the following, I will show how Adivasis have sought to turn this particular aspect of their world upside down through collective mobilization. Furthermore, I will show how these democratic struggles have encountered its limits when it has gathered such momentum as to threaten regional elites and their hold on the state. I conclude with a brief discussion of the strategic ramifications that follow from these experiences.
Democratic struggles in the adivasi heartland
The Anatomy of Everyday Tyranny5
"We learned how to speak" - this is how activists of the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath (KMCS), an independent trade union working in Bhil and Bhilala Communities in the southern part of what is now Alirajpur district in western Madhya Pradesh, would explain how the process of mobilization that they had participated in had affected their lives. As will become clear, they had learned how to speak a democratic vernacular that asserted basic constitutional rights and entitlements against the workings of a profoundly oppressive local state.
For most of the Adivasis in the region, an encounter with ‘the everyday state’ (Fuller and Harriss, 2001) was not an encounter with an agency and with officials who provided services and were accountable to citizens and attuned to their rights and demands.6 On the contrary, Adivasis encountered an ‘everyday tyranny’ (Nilsen, 2010) in the form of state officials - forest guards, police constables, revenue officials - that imposed a cruel and coercive regime of extortionate exactions on people who were in effect rightless subjects.
One activist, from a village on the banks of the Narmada River, explained how officials of the state were a constant source of terror in the villagers’ lives:
The officials working for the forest department and the revenue department, as well as the local police, harassed and extorted the villagers very badly. The fear of the officials was such that, if two brothers were caught working on a field in the forest, one of them would do the ploughing, and the other would stand guard to look out for the forest rangers. If they were caught ploughing their field, they risked being beaten up, or having their hand nailed to the trunk of a tree. Invariably, villagers that were caught cultivating their plots in the forest would be taken to the local police station. A savage beating would follow, and a case would be filed against them for encroaching on reserved forests. This would in turn be used as a means to extort money from the villagers: a handsome bribe would make the charges disappear. If officials ran into a villager on the road, they would often demand that he or she carry their bags for them. If this was refused - and even if people failed to greet the officials politely - they would be given a heavy bashing.
(Ratan, interview, March 2003)
This account of violence, coercion and extortion at the hands of local state officials is only one of many that I came across among activists from the Adivasi communities of Alirajpur. In one case, villagers recounted how, if they were caught walking along the road carrying a sickle, they would be accused of going to collect fodder from the forest and beaten up; the officials would invariably demand money from them if they wanted to avoid criminal charges. Similarly, if people were caught with an axe, or if they were carrying firewood, they would risk beatings and extortion. If someone needed to cut down trees to get building materials for a house, the forest guards demanded a bribe of up to 2,500 rupees, chickens, and home-made liquor.
The reason why the forest and its resources were at the heart of the machinations of everyday tyranny is to be found in how Adivasi livelihoods clashed with the formal laws of the land.7 For the Bhils and Bhilalas of Alirajpur, clearing and cultivating patches of land in the forest - a practice known as nevad - is integral to survival. Nevad fields complement the yields from revenue land that borders the houses in the village. In addition, the forest provides fodder for livestock, building materials and firewood, and a wide range of minor forest produce that is often sold in the haat (market) in nearby towns (Baviskar, 1995). However, when Adivasis make use of the forest in these ways, they are effectively in breach of the law. Indian forest legislation, as Gadgil and Guha (1993: 185) point out, establishes ‘the right of the state to exclusive control over forest protection, production and management’. The lineage of this legislation can in turn be traced to the commodification of India’s forests by the British colonial state. To secure the supply of timber for ship-building and railway expansion, the colonial state resorted to a series of legislations, culminating in the Indian Forest Acts of 1878 and 1927, which established ‘the absolute proprietary right of the state’ to India’s forests, and thus abrogated ‘by one stroke of the executive pen ... centuries of customary use by rural populations all over India’ (ibid.: 134).
The establishment of state ownership of forests, which carried over into the postcolonial era, was a key aspect of the historical subordination of Adivasi communities in the western Indian region to centralized state power: the political economy of shared sovereignty in which Bhil forest polities had claimed a stake in the Maratha period disintegrated, and in the process ‘the kings of the forest and their subjects alike became the largely acquiescent serfs of the Forest Department’ (Guha, 1999; 167; Skaria, 1999). In terms of everyday life, the abrogation of customary use rights in turn entailed that clearing and cultivating fields in the forest - one of the key dimensions of adivasi livelihoods - as well as other customary uses of forest resources came to be designated as "encroachments" on state property (Prasad 2004: 32). It is this criminalization of Adivasi livelihoods that undergirds everyday tyranny in western Madhya Pradesh, and which provides to forest guards and other officials the pretext for conducting themselves as tyrannical overlords.
Two mutually reinforcing factors underpinned the reproduction of everyday tyranny in Alirajpur. Firstly, the criminalization of Adivasi livelihoods did not result in a concerted attempt by the state to put a stop to practices such as nevad. Rather, the illegality of these livelihoods was simply used as a lever for the continuous extraction of money and services from the communities in the region (Baviskar, 1995; Banerjee, 2003). Secondly, local communities never challenged the extraction of bribes and the violence that was so regularly meted out. Rather, they complied with it as ‘the constant transactions between the forest officials and the people made it apparent to the adivasis that the intention of the fines was not to stop nevad but, on the contrary, to make it possible by appeasing the state’ (Baviskar 1995: 178).
In other words, the giving and taking of bribes had been woven into the fabric of daily life to such an extent that it had become a guiding principle of how relations and interactions between Adivasis and the state were supposed to be structured. Indeed, the local rationality bred by everyday tyranny was one in which the fear of violent reprisal ruled out defiance and opposition to the state and its officials. Whatever kind of resentment may have bubbled beneath the surface, a ‘public transcript’ (Scott, 1990) of deference and appeasement was adopted as a survival strategy in the hills of Alirajpur.8
Challenging Everyday Tyranny9
However, the power equations upon which everyday tyranny rested came to be challenged when, in the early 1980s, two "middle-class activists"10 - Khemraj and Amit - intent on mobilizing Adivasis arrived in the region. Khemraj, a first-generation literate from a family of poor Jat farmers in southern Rajasthan and a former student activist, was the first of the two to land up in Alirajpur town. He quickly struck up a friendship with Khemla, a young Bhil Adivasi who had received a modicum of education at a residential school in the market village Umrali. The son of a participant in a socialist movement active in the region in the 1960s11, Khemla was known for his rebellious attitudes, and his readiness to take effective action against misbehaving state officials. As such he was a natural ally for Khemraj, who settled with Khemla and his family in the village of Badi Vaigalgaon.
An opportunity for the two to cut their teeth on the everyday tyranny of the state soon arose when they learned that close to Khemla’s village, the irrigation department was having a pond constructed. Khemla and Khemraj signed on to work on the project, and quickly discovered that the contractor - a non-adivasi sahukar from Alirajpur town - was paying the workers far less than the minimum wage stipulated by the state government. Khemla and Khemraj explained to their fellow workers that this was the case and calculated for them what they would be earning if the contractor paid them the minimum wage. If they made a collective demand on the contractor, they said, he would have no choice but to pay the minimum wage. Under the leadership of Khemla and Khemraj, the workers went on strike and demanded that they be paid the wages that were due to them. The contractor responded by having his goons beat up Khemla, but this did not deter the strikers. Ultimately, the Sub-Divisional Magistrate intervened and settled the matter in favour of the striking workers.
The news of the successful confrontation spread quickly in the area, serving the ‘dual function of informing and mobilizing at the same time’ (Guha, 2002: 227). From nearby villages, people called the activists to come and stay. Joined now by Amit, a middle-class activist who had left his studies at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, Khemraj and Khemla travelled from village to village, where people would share with them their experiences of the everyday tyranny of the local state and its officials. In this way, the foundation for collective mobilization was gradually established.
A particularly important chain of events were triggered when news reached Khemraj that several people from the village of Gondwani had been picked up by forest guards and taken to the Range Office in the neighbouring village of Attha. Khemraj and some of the villagers went to the Forest Department bungalow to intervene in the situation. When he approached the forest guards, Khemraj was invited inside the bungalow. However, as soon as the doors shut behind him, the forest guards proceeded to beat him to a pulp; using lit beedies (country-made cigarettes) they burned his arms. After they were satisfied that they had taught the insolent activist a lesson, they released him to his companions outside the bungalow. While Khemraj was taken to hospital, Amit and Khemla organized a march to Alirajpur town where they and a group of villagers proceeded to sit on dharna in front of the tehsil offices. A complaint was submitted to the police, press notes were circulated, and the incident became news. The Chief Minister (CM) - Arjun Singh of the Congress party - felt compelled to intervene: several of the forest guards that had been involved in beating up Khemraj were suspended. The activists proceeded to take the matter to Bhopal, the state capital, where they met with Digvijay Singh, who at this point was state president of the Congress party, and the CM. The CM dispatched the Conservator of Forests - the highest-ranking official of the Forest Department - to Mathvad, a small town not far from Alirajpur, to consult with people from the communities. Prior to this event, the villagers’ experience of the forest guards had been that of perpetrators of violence who demanded bribes with impunity. Consequently, they asked the Conservator whether this was legal or not. When the Conservator replied that it was illegal, the villagers argued that the forest guards were clearly not following his orders. In response, the Conservator implored the villagers to file complaints if such incidents took place again.
On the basis of these confrontations and the concessions exacted from the state, mobilization started to spread throughout the southern part of Alirajpur, extending, at its height, to approximately 100 villages. Eventually, a formal organization was put in place and registered as an independent trade union under the name Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath. Based in the village of Attha, the KMCS gradually expanded its array of activities from combating the brutality and exactions of petty state officials to implementing anti-corruption campaigns, constructive work in health, education, and agriculture, participation in local politics, and, perhaps most significantly, a protracted struggle for the recognition of Adivasi forest rights.
The decision to centre their mobilization on the issue of forest rights came naturally to the activists. Of all the state agencies that preyed on the Adivasi communities, it was the Forest Department that was responsible for the worst depredations:
When we went into this forest area, Mathvad, then the main problem of people there was the misbehaviour of forest guards ... They were living in the forest, basically; they had revenue land, but surrounded by forest; it was reserved forest. So it was said that "you cannot break even a twig from the forest, you can only bring fuel and firewood that is lying on the ground. You cannot even graze your cattle there" ... So people were under this impression that their whole lives were bound by the forest guards: "if we do anything, we are breaking the law" ... And the forest issue was not just asking for land, hain na, or complaining against the beating by forest guard. It was a whole idea, instilling an idea in the minds of the people that "whose forest is this; did we come here first or did the Forest Department come here first?" ... So basically we were trying to say that this is our forest and we have to look after it, and we have to decide the rules and laws for its use.
(Amit Bhatnagar, interview, August 2009)
In 1988, the Sangath was successful in forcing the Forest Department to conduct a survey of nevad cultivation in the block of Mathvad. This showed that all cultivators in the surveyed area had several small plots of nevad to complement their legal holdings. The survey, however, did not result in anything like a concerted move by the authorities to recognize nevad lands as the lawful property of the cultivators. The struggle for forest rights continued, and at times it escalated to violent confrontations, such as in the early 1990s, when protests against the digging of Cattle Proof Trenches (CPTs) that would block access to the forests for several villages that were actively involved with the Sangathan ultimately resulted in a police firing (Baviskar, 1994, 1995).
In 1994, the Government of Madhya Pradesh announced that it would recognize land that had been encroached prior to 1980. Announced in response to stipulations from the Ministry of Environment and Forests, and in large part as an attempt to appease the KMCS, the measure was met with enthusiasm in Sondwa block in Alirajpur tehsil:
More than a thousand Bhil and Bhilala adivasis crowded the block headquarters in this small town to submit claims for the regularization of their encroachments on forest land, locally known as nevad ... The turnout, several times larger than that for any election, took the administration completely by surprise. The sub-tehsil office ran out of receipt books and had to extend its working to the next day, a Sunday (Baviskar, 1994: 2493).
However, the eventual yields were actually very meagre. Baviskar points out that the stringent conditions laid down by the Ministry of Environment and Forests for recognizing encroachments in state-owned forests meant that the odds were stacked against the claimants from the start. Moreover, evidence had to be submitted that the lands in question had actually been tilled before 1980, and in most cases this consisted of receipts given by forest guards for fines paid for so-called "forest-crimes". However, such receipts were often non-existent: ‘Most people ... were never given receipts because the fines that they paid went directly into the pockets of the forest guards, nakedars and deputy rangers. When receipts were given in exceptional cases, very often they were small bits of paper that were easily lost or destroyed’ (ibid.: 2493).
What was ultimately achieved, however, was a kind of modus vivendi between the KMCS and the villages mobilized it on the one hand, and the state authorities and the Forest Department on the other, in which the Forest Department would, by and large, allow nevad to proceed in villages that were known to be Sangath strongholds. Thus, the KMCS carved out a space for nevad as a livelihood practice, despite the lack of formal recognition by the state. Importantly, within the parameters of this space, the Sangath also started experimenting with community-based conservation and improvement of agriculture. Collective labour was mobilized to improve nevad fields by bunding and gully-plugging. Nurseries were started in order to grow saplings to regenerate forests, experimentation in crop-mixing were conducted, and collective decisions were made on which parts of the forest to protect and which to use for cultivation. These experiments have in many cases stood the village communities in good stead: many of the communities that were most actively involved in the KMCS still today practise and benefit from community-based forest and soil conservation.
What these processes of contention ultimately achieved was to fundamentally alter the way in which subaltern groups in Alirajpur conceived of and related to the state. Whereas the Bhil and Bhilala Adivasis of the region had once seen state officials as all-powerful figures, they came to see public servants whose powers were legally circumscribed and who were accountable to them as citizens; where the villagers had once seen a state apparatus whose activities centred on the forceful exaction of bribes, they came to see an institution that was supposed to provide services and safeguard rights, an institution upon which they could make rights-based claims and demands, and an institution which they could participate in the running of. It was, then, a process through which formerly subjugated communities emerged as agents who could and would ‘seek to engage with the state as citizens, or as members of populations with legally defined or politically inspired expectations’ (Corbridge et al. 2005: 13) in a competent and assertive way.
Through this process, local rationalities were transformed. When I asked KMCS activists what they had learned from their participation in the mobilization, three themes stood out: first, that of losing their fear of the officials; second, that of learning that officials were not entitled to extort them; third, that of acquiring the skills that allowed them to challenge everyday tyranny. In sum, then, the transformation of local rationalities revolved around effecting changes in emotional dispositions, cognitive resources, and practical skills. A central aspect of this transformation was the fact that the Sangath created a democratic vernacular where before there was none. It was precisely through an appropriation of the ‘universalizing vocabularies’ of the Indian state - notably, vocabularies of democracy and development - that the KMCS was capable of doing this. Crucially, this vocabulary was infused with forms of meaning - above all centred on the legitimacy of customary use rights - that reflected subaltern experiences of oppression and hopes for change. By deploying this vocabulary in a way that exposed the ‘radical disjuncture between ritual language and social action’ (Nugent, 1997: 20) in the workings of the state in Alirajpur, the KMCS was able to effect a significant democratization of local state-society relationships in Alirajpur.
This process is significant not just because of the way in which it generates demotic imaginaries of democratic rights, citizenship, and constitutional entitlements, but also because of the way in which it alters the balance of power between dominant and subaltern groups in a historically determinate field of force: through collective action, subaltern groups expanded their control over social relations and the scope of their transformative powers. However, it is also necessary to take cognizance of the limits to such processes of empowerment.
Quelling Subaltern Resistance12
The local state, which was the immediate target of the subaltern politics of the KMCS, is of course criss-crossed by social power relations, and the local state in turn constitutes a significant modality in the reproduction of these power relations (see Harriss-White, 2003: Chapter 4). As Jeffrey and Lerche (2000) have shown, regional elites in India have colonized the local state apparatus through extensive networks of contact and influence. Combined with their substantial purchasing power in the informal market for government jobs, the state system serves as an important modality in the reproduction of class advantage. And crucially, challenges to elite hegemony tend to provoke ‘reactionary upper caste violence and intimidation’ (ibid.: 873). In the remainder of this essay, I want to focus on this latter aspect of local state-society relations - the reaction of dominant groups democratic challenges from below (see also Sundar, 2010).
In the remainder of this essay, I want to focus on this latter aspect of local state/society relations - the reaction of dominant groups who have previously consolidated their hegemony through their access to and control over the state to democratic challenges from below, and the questions that this raises about vernacular democracy. In particular I want to highlight how these dominant groups make use of their superior access to the state to channel their reaction to subaltern resistance via its coercive arm, and in this way regain the ground that has been conceded to the vernacularization of democracy.
In the early 1990s, in what was then Khargone district13, an adivasi-dominated area to the south of Alirajpur, a new grassroots movement started to crystallize. Driven by the initiative of two middle-class activists with a background from the Communist Party of India, the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan (AMS) emerged from a process very similar to that which gave rise to the KMCS. Vijay Panda, one of the founders of the AMS described the scenario he found when he arrived in Sendwha tehsil to mobilize among the Bhil, Bhilala and Barela Adivasis there:
There were so many problems - economic, political. But we underlined the most critical problem as the fear factor among the natives of this area, the tribals. That means, they were exploited, suppressed, brutally killed. And even if they were cheated, and all these things ... they were not able to open their voice. They were really voiceless. So our initial strategy was to create a situation where people can have their own voice before anything. So that was the motive behind the organization.
(Bijoy Panda, interview, November 2009)
Mukesh, a seasoned AMS activist from Warla block, described the relationship between the Adivasi communities and the Forest Department as follows:
The jungle and the Adivasi cannot exist without the other. Without the jungles, the Adivasi cannot survive. We have to pay money if we want to take our cattle grazing. They would beat up women who go to get wood from the jungles to cook food. One had to give money for the wood also. And if any of our farming tools broke, like a plough etc, then also we had to give money. If because of the rain or the wind, our houses get damaged and we need to repair them, we still needed to give money. One log of wood would cost one thousand rupees. So if you use two or three logs to repair your house, you generally have to pay at least three to five thousand rupees. If a person refuses to pay, the forest guards would beat him up and make false cases in his name. They had many ways.
"The forest guards", Mukesh added, "treated the people’s property - their hens and their goats and so on - as their own". In the villages, he argued, people knew very little of their rights in relation to the state:
Nobody knew anything. They didn’t know a thing about rights. The people thought it was a alright to get robbed. If the forest guards beat us up, the people said they had a right to do so. If the policemen would forcefully enter someone’s house and catch them with 2-5 litres of alchohol, the people still said its their right to do so. Nobody knew anything about rights.
(Mukesh, interview, November 2009).
In other words, the everyday tyranny that defined local state-society relations in the hills of Alirajpur was also operative in the plains of Khargone.
In its initial years of operation, the AMS made significant achievements in challenging local elites’ grip on the state and generating a sense of self-confidence and a capacity for assertion in local Adivasi communities. Through large-scale demonstrations, the government had been forced to restore land that had been alienated from Advasis by moneylenders; the Forest Department had been made to suspend several officers who engaged in corrupt practices, and others were made to return money they had extorted; in the local markets, AMS interventions led to the installation of electronic weighing machines and fair prices in order to put an end to the unequal terms of trade that Adivasis had normally faced; the AMS drastically reduced atrocities against Adivasis in the region, and effected several transfers and suspensions of government officers who had committed violent offences. However, by the middle of the 1990s, two developments converged in such a way as to spark a virulent reaction to the AMS from the dominant groups of the region.
Firstly, the AMS had dramatically extended its reach across Khargone. By 1996, it was active in more than 500 villages in three blocks of the district, and linked its activities to several other Adivasi organizations in the region. At this point, the organizational capacity started to make a real dent in the illegal trade with timber, and in the liquor trade in the Adivasi villages. In Bhagwanpura block, the AMS pursued a campaign against the liquour trade that eventually led to the closure of some 250 outlets. This was a direct blow to the incomes of the powerful group of vendors, as well as to local police and Adivasi dalals. In particular, it hurt the interests of Jhagadia Patel, president of Bhagwanpura Congress Committee and hereditary headman of Kabri village, who had profited from illegal trading for a long time. Similarly, the timber mafia similarly suffered a substantial blow when AMS activists stopped a truck carrying a huge load of illegally felled timber, and reported the matter to the police and to the media. The capture of the truck enraged local politicians, whose pockets until then had been comfortably lined with bribes from the timber mafia.
Secondly, at this point that the oppositional project articulated by the AMS was decisively radicalized, as the organization adopted village self-rule as a key demand and ambition:
We liberated them, the communities, from the oppression of the local officials, traders, and dominant class there, but we were not successful to challenge the government policies, in order to control the natural resources ... It started in the nineties, in the early nineties, when people ... thought we should take control over this forest, land, water because even though we are free from this local exploitative system, but we still get these eviction notices.
(Nikunj Bhatia, interview, April 2010).
In order to pursue this objective, the AMS linked its activities to the Bharat Jan Andolan - a national network of people’s movements spearheaded by the erstwhile Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, Dr. B. D. Sharma - and its campaign for the implementation of the Bhuriya Committee Report, which had been submitted to the Government of India in 1995, arguing for the implementation of tribal self-rule in Scheduled Areas. In 1996, the central government enacted the Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996. Not only did this give recognition to the demand for tribal self-rule, it also put a potentially effective weapon in the hands of a dynamic organization such as the AMS, who by this time had managed to gather more than 100,000 people for a national rally championing Adivasi self-rule in the district headquarters of Khargone. The challenge that the AMS had levelled at the local state with considerable success, thus undermining the power base of local Adivasi netas (leaders) with Congress affiliations, such as Jhagdia Patel, gained a wider dimension that was bound to make regional political elites sit up and take notice.
One person who did sit up and take notice was Subhash Yadav, Deptuty Chief Minister in Digvijay Singh’s Congress government, and MLA from the constituency of Kasaravad in Khargone district. In response to a mounting challenge to his position, Yadav moved swiftly. He struck an alliance with the beleaguered Jhagdia Patel, and in 1996, orchestrated the formation of the Adivasi Samaj Sudhar Shanti Sena (ASSSS) in order to counter the further rise of the AMS by instigating a series of violent conflict. What followed was an unprecedented campaign of terror and repression in the AMS strongholds.
In the early months of 1996, AMS activists in the village of Kabri declared that during the Indal festival - the most important annual festival for Adivasis in the region - no liquor would be sold in the village. Jhagdia Patel did not take kindly to this, and in response he and his men abducted one of the anti-liquor activists. After they had seized the activist, they proceeded to torture him: they broke one of his legs and one of his arms; when he begged for a drink of water, they pissed in his mouth.
A few days later, Rem Singh, sarpanch (elected head) of Kabri and the leader of the anti-liquor campaign in the village, was called to the local police station to negotiate the dispute with Jhagdia Patel. When he was on his way to the police station with two fellow activists, Rem Singh was ambushed by Jhagdia Patel’s men, who were in the company of police. In making their escape, one of Rem Singh’s companions shot and killed one of Jhagdia’s men with his bow and arrow. When the police arrived in Kabri for investigations the next day, they beat up the women who had stayed behind in the village after the men had sought refuge in the forest. Following this, Jhagdia Patel’s men went on the rampage: the houses of Rem Singh and other anti-liquor activists affiliated with the AMS were looted, vandalized, and burnt.
The following year witnessed an escalation of the conflict between the AMS and the Shanti Sena. In June 1997, the Forest Department organized a meeting in the village of Pepaljhopa to inaugurate a so-called "eco-development centre". Subhash Yadav turned up at the meeting in his capacity as Deputy Chief Minister and made a speech in which he accused the AMS of being a Naxalite organization involved in sabotaging the government’s development projects. If he were Home Minister, he proclaimed, the AMS would have been driven out not just of Madhya Pradesh, but of India. The next month witnessed a spate of attacks on AMS activists. In one case, men from the Shanti Sena opened fire on AMS activists in the village of Bondarimal. When the activists turned up at a nearby thana, the Sub-Inspector of Police refused to accept their complaint. Instead, the activists were charged with a variety of offences under the Indian Penal Code, such as attempt to murder, house trespass, and rioting with a deadly weapon. They were held in prison and denied bail until the end of August, when the court dismissed the case against them for a lack of evidence.
Several cases of arrests on trumped-up charges followed. In one case, four AMS activists and two supporters were arrested on the charge of gang rape of two Adivasi women; one of the women later testified that the AMS activists were not responsible for the rape. In another case, more than 30 AMS supporters had cases lodged against them after they refused to bribe officials of the Forest Department to overlook their nevad cultivation.
The brunt of the repression, however, occurred after Kaliabhai, an AMS activist, intervened in the negotiation of a property dispute in the village of Julwania. A panchayat consisting of the patels of several villages had been called to adjudicate on a case where two brothers were locked in a conflict over land: one man, Bhimsingh, was accused of having dispossessed his brother Dongarsingh. The panchayat fined Bhimsingh Rs. 35,000 for his offence. Bhimsingh then turned to Kaliabhai for help, who in turn negotiated a reduction of the fine to Rs. 13,000. Upset with the outcome, Bhimsingh directed his anger at Kaliabhai, and when prodded by local police, filed charges of extortion against him and some 29 other AMS activists (none of whom had been involved in the settlement of the dispute).
This was a golden opportunity for Jhagdia Patel to launch an attack on the AMS. In a meeting in Kabri village, he exhorted his followers to teach Kaliabhai a lesson. Concerned about the safety of its activists, the AMS approached the District Superintendent of Police several times to draw his attention to the threats being levelled against Kaliabhai, but no action was taken. However, when Jhagdia Patel sought police protection in late August, it was granted on the spot, and the stage was set for a violent campaign against the AMS.
On 25 August, the day after he had been granted protection, Jhagdia Patel and a posse of 25 men and a police escort, set out for Kaliabhai’s house in Julwania. When they found that he was not at home, they stripped his wife naked and raped her. Five other women from the neighbouring houses suffered the same fate; two young women had their infants snatched from them at gunpoint. The Shanti Sena posse threw the babies in a nearby stream, and their bodies were never recovered. Unsurprisingly, the police failed to register a case against the perpetrators.
The next day, a group of 150 men led by Kaliabhai caught up with Jhagadia Patel, his men, and their police escort as they were trying to cross over a small river. The group surrounded the Shanti Sena outfit, who, along with the police, fled into a nearby house and barricaded themselves there. Kaliabhai and his men gathered outside the house and demanded that Jhagdia be handed over. The police officers pushed Jhagdia out the door; he was killed with an arrow, and the group of angry men then stoned his dead body.
In stark contrast to their response to the gang rape of Kaliabhai’s wife, the police registered cases against more than 80 people for the murder of Jhagdia Patel on 27 August, and offered a reward of 10,000 rupees for information about Kaliabhai’s whereabouts. In a high-level meeting of the state government, ministers discussed possible ways in which to outlaw the AMS, and on 31 August, Subhash Yadav arrived in Kabri and announced that the state government would give Rs. 100,000 to Jhagdia Patel’s family as compensation for his death. The next day, Yadav gave a public speech in which he urged the Shanti Sena to recruit more members, and instructed the police to provide five people in each village with guns so as to enable them to counter the AMS. The police set up camp in Kabri, and the Shanti Sena started touring the area, forcing villagers to pay the membership fee of Rs. 25, and then demanding that they pay an additional Rs. 11 for issuing a receipt for the payment of the membership fee! In the village of Mandav, in Nepangar block of Khandwa district, some 400 forest guards accompanied by a team of 20 men from the Special Action Force, and led by the Divisional Forest Officer, descended upon villagers who had refused to pay bribes in order for the guards to ignore their nevad fields, and started to uproot the standing crop of sorghum. When the villagers responded by hurling stones, the forest guards and Special Action Force men opened fire. Two Adivasis were shot dead, and six were injured. Altogether nine farmers had their entire crop - and, therefore, a crucial part of their food supply - razed to the ground.
In the month of September, a string of arrests followed. In the early days of the month, police from Nangalwadi arrested Motiram, an AMS activist from Ojhar village. He was assaulted and detained for five days, and then implicated in false charges. Six days later, Madhuri Krishnaswamy, a female middle class activist who had been a driving force in the AMS’ anti-liquor campaign, was arrested in Bhopal in connection with the charges of extortion made by Bhimsingh Patel against several activists in the organization. On 12 September, Shivnath, an AMS supporter from Chacharia village in Sendwha block, was assaulted by local police who demanded that he tell them where Jhagdia Patel’s murderers could be found, and to corroborate the allegations of extortion that had been brought against the activists of the Sangathan. When Shivnath refused to comply with their orders, the police threatened to take his life before they proceeded to the villages of Sorani where, after nightfall, they assaulted several AMS supporters.
In a bid to stave off the pressure from above, leading activists of the AMS convinced Kaliabhai and sixteen other activists to surrender to the Deputy Inspector General of Police in Indore. The court remanded the group to police custody for two days on 15 September. Two days later, in a fateful move, an armed escort of 15 policemen brought Kaliabhai with them on an expedition to identify firearms that were supposed to have been used in the killing of Jhagdia Patel. On their way back to the police station, the team passed through Kabri - Jhagdia Patel’s village - and found themselves surrounded by some 200 people who demanded that Kaliabhai be handed over to them. Kaliabhai, who was handcuffed and had his legs chained, was released to the angry crowd. He was killed with an axe, and his body was hacked into small pieces.
As Baviskar (2001: 16) notes, there was no good reason for taking Kaliabhai on this expedition: firstly, Jhagdia Patel had been murdered with a bow and arrow, not a firearm; secondly, there was no need to return via Kabri village. As the report issued by the PUCL in the wake of the killing dryly stated, it was evident that ‘there [was] complicity of the police in the custodial death of Kalia’ (cited in Baviskar, 2001: 16).
Kaliabhai’s death did not mark the end of the repression of the AMS. Attacks continued into 1998, and the leaders of the Sangathan fled the state due to rumours that police authorities were planning to have them killed in fake encounters. The repression proved to be a dramatic setback for the AMS. Bijoybhai summed it up as follows: "In the heydays, we were having more than 60 full-timers; and after that repression, after two years of that repression we slid down to six" (interview, November 2009).
The AMS was not the only movement in the region to suffer the repressive excesses of the state.14 Some years later, in the neighbouring district of Dewas, a similar fate befell the Adivasi Morcha Sangathan, a grassroots organization that emerged under the guidance of Rahul Banerjee, a former activist of the KMCS.15
The Adivasi Morcha Sangathan crystallized out of work that Rahul and his wife Subhadra carried out in Barwah and Bagli tehsils from the middle of the 1990s onwards, focusing on reproductive health among Adivasi women. The two soon realized that the issue of reproductive health was intimately linked to wider structures of power that shaped gender relations in the Adivasi communities, and that in order to make headway a collective mobilization of both men and women was needed. Two organizations were formed - the Adivasi Shakti Sangathan in Barwah tehsil, and the Adivasi Morcha Sangathan in Bagli tehsil. As in the case of the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan in Khargone district, the ASS/AMS couplet, in its initial phase, was able to successfully challenge the everyday tyranny of the local state; in particular, the movement was successful in shutting down liquor outlets in their areas of operation and in winning elections to the district panchayat and several village panchayats.
In 1997, the Madhya Pradesh Panchayati Raj Act was amended in order to bring it into line with the Panchayat Provisions Extension to Scheduled Areas Act, which had been passed in the Lok Sabha the previous year. This created a new terrain of mobilization for the ASS/AMS. On the one hand, the PESA initiative was recognized as being potentially very significant - as Rahul put it: "PESA is so powerful, it makes the Gram Sabha the main institution, so we can bypass the state also" (interview, 2010) - but, on the other hand, and due to gerrymandering of the tehsil boundaries, Bagli, where the Adivasi Morcha Sangathan was active, was not an Adivasi majority area, and therefore did not fall under the purview of PESA. Realizing that they would miss out on the potential advantages of the Act, the activists of the Adivasi Morcha Sangathan made a decision to implement the provision of PESA regardless of the fact that Bagli tehsil was not a Scheduled area.
With this as their platform, the communities in the area extended and deepened their challenge of the state by declaring that they and not the Forest Department would control the forests that fell within the boundaries of their villages. The response from the state was immediate: teams of forest guards began touring the area and arresting a large number of villagers on the charge of forest crime. On 23 September 1999, early in the morning, a team of forest officials arrived in the village of Katukya, to arrest a person whom they claimed had cut timber illegally. Confronted by a group of angry activists from the Adivasi Morcha Sangathan, the team beat a hasty retreat. As they were fleeing, one of the forest guards let off a shot and killed one of the villagers. Protesting the murder, thousands of activists then gathered outside the nearby police station in Udainagar, and ultimately, after a case of murder had been registered, the forest officials who were involved in the shooting were sent to jail.16
This was a show of strength for the Adivasi Morcha Sangathan, and during the next two years it continued its efforts to develop the Gram Sabha as the chief decision-making body in the communities in the region. The efforts to take control of the forests was extended to a challenge against the World Bank-funded Madhya Pradesh Forestry Project, which sought to promote joint forest management in the state. The first phase of the 67.3 million dollar project was completed in 1999, when Van Suraksha Samitis (forest protection committees) were established. A state-wide campaign against the project and the way in which it had been implemented was organized by several Adivasi organizations. Their campaign would eventually lead to the conduct of a very critical review of the project, and the cancellation of World Bank funding for the second phase of the project.
At this point, the Madhya Pradesh government sat up and took notice of the Adivasi Morcha Sangathan and the challenge it levelled at its authority. In a high-level meeting on 19 February 2001, chaired by the Chief Secretary of the state, and with officials of the Forest, Revenue, and Police departments present, a strategy - referred to as "Operation Clean" - was devised to suppress the consolidation of Adivasi mobilization in Bagli tehsil.
Following this meeting, the MLAs from the region, accompanied by high-ranking police officers and prominent bureaucrats, started holding meetings in the area, in which they made it clear that the Adivasi Morcha Sangathan should be disbanded, and that the villagers should join the forest protection committees organized by the state. On at least two occasions, the Collector of Dewas made public speeches declaring that he would wipe out the Adivasi organizations in the district.
In late March, "Operation Clean" entered a more confrontational phase: large convoys of armed police, forest guards, and members of the forest protection committees formed under the aegis of the World Bank-sponsored forestry project started touring the area under the direction of the District Collector, the Superintendent of Police, and the Divisional Forest Officer. The village of Kadoriya was the first to be attacked: houses were demolished and the timber used to construct them was taken away; utensils and other belongings were stolen; poisonous chemicals were poured into wells and grain stores to destroy the village supplies of food and drinking water. When they were done, the police and the forest guards settled down to feast on the villagers’ chickens. Over the next four days, police and forest guards raided four more villagers, repeating the pattern of destruction and looting that had been unleashed initially in Kadoriya. A fact-finding team that investigated the attacks found that the destruction of dwellings was orchestrated in a particular way: it was houses belonging to prominent activists that were specifically targeted for destruction.
On the morning of 2 April, the convoy carrying police and forest guards entered the village of Mehendikheda and started demolishing houses and carrying away timber that they alleged had been taken illegally from the forest. Nearby, activists of the Adivasi Morcha Sangathan had gathered in a protest against "Operation Clean". When the news of the raiding reached them, they marched towards Mehendikheda. Confronted by villagers pelting stones, the police and forest guards launched a volley of warning shots. The villagers pressed on, and pelted stones in the direction of the raiders. Another volley of shots from the police and forest guards left four Adivasis dead and three injured. The next day, Rahul Banerjee, who had not been in the area since the police action begun, was arrested from a hospital in Indore where the Morcha activists had brought the injured men. Charged with criminal conspiracy, and accused of being a Naxalite, he was imprisoned for several months. Leading activists faced false charges, and many of them went underground; the residents of entire villages hid in the forest for a long time after the crack-down, which continued into the next month. In Bagli and Barwah, the ASS/AMS were devastated in the wake of the repression, and, much like the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan in Khargone, has not managed to rebuild its organizational structure and mobilizational capacities in the wake of repression.
Furthermore, beyond eroding the local social bases of the organization, the repression also chastened the political ambitions of the leading activists. Speaking of how the experience of the ASS/AMS had impacted on his approach to mobilization, Rahul reasoned as follows:
... after the experience of all these years ... we are progressing very carefully. Making sure that we don’t go to a point where we bring on repression. And so whatever little bit we can get without going to that kind of situation, we are going through that ... we are not going beyond that. Because that’s extremely costly ... That means that you are basically limiting your perspective. To try and get whatever you can out of the system (Rahul Banerjee, interview, March 2010).
Activism is now consciously contained within the parameters of legality laid down by the state; the counter-hegemonic call for Adivasi self-rule has receded to the background.
Conjunctural Opportunities/Structural Constraints
There is, I believe, sufficient grounds for claiming that there is a distinct pattern in these instances of repression against social movements in the Adivasi communities of Madhya Pradesh, and, furthermore, for arguing that this pattern tells us something about the equations of conjunctural opportunity and structural constraint that social movements are faced with when pursuing their oppositional projects in relation to the state.
As in the case of the KMCS, the AMS and the ASS/AMS were initiated through a series of showdowns that eventually brought an end to the violent excesses and corrupt exactions of low-ranking state officials. Like the KMCS, the AMS and the ASS/AMS fostered a spirit of assertiveness in relation to non-Adivasis, and forced money-lenders, traders and liquor-dealers to loosen their grip on the Adivasi communities in the Nimad plains. In the process, they created an awareness of and a working knowledge about the state and the formal democratic principles upon which it is founded, which were put to good use in the mobilizing processes. However, both the AMS and the ASS/AMS took this process further than did the KMCS. In strictly quantitative terms, the AMS constituted a challenge of greater proportions than the KMCS by covering five times as many villages, and its organizational reach alone made it a force to be reckoned with in the area.
Beyond the purely quantitative aspect, the AMS emerged at a conjuncture in which activist campaigns for Adivasi self-rule had made a significant advance through the extension of Panchayati Raj to Scheduled Areas. Emblematic of the ways in which social movements from below can modify the form of the state and its modes of intervention, PESA provided the AMS with something that the KMCS never had: a means of institutionalizing Adivasi empowerment that was sanctified by legislative powers of the highest authority in the land. The fact that the movement was able to rally more than 100,000 people in support of tribal self-rule in the district headquarters cannot but have driven home the point that the AMS was well on its way to building up the capacity to reverse, in a quite fundamental way, the thrust of extant regional power structures.
Much the same can be said about the ASS/AMS. Within a short period of time, the ASS/AMS had not only driven the Forest Department and the liquor dealers on the defensive, but had also managed to field candidates that were capable of routing Congress and BJP in the elections for the Zilla Parishad and the tehsil market committees. The ASS/AMS had also successfully installed its activists as sarpanches in three villages. Again, a movement from below had developed significant political muscle and had put it to use within the institutional structure of the state. Bagli tehsil, where the Adivasi Morcha Sangathan was active, was not a Scheduled Area, but the movement nevertheless appropriated the provisions of PESA and made it the foundation of a substantial oppositional claim for Adivasi sovereignty in the region. This unsettled not merely regional elites, but also jolted relations between the state government and the World Bank. In effect, the writ of the state no longer ran in the areas mobilized by the ASS-AMS.
In comparison, the KMCS, albeit by no means insignificant in its impact, registered more moderate victories against the everyday tyranny of the local state. In terms of entrenching subaltern power in its area of operation, the Sangathan could not proceed further than reaching an informal understanding with the state that, within certain limits, nevad cultivation would proceed without state interference. Correspondingly, the repression unleashed by the state against the AMS and the ASS/AMS was also of a qualitatively different kind than that faced by the KMCS. In the case of the latter, there were two cases of police firing, one of which left a young boy injured, numerous beatings at the hands of police and forest guards, some of which have impaired activists’ health for good, and countless false cases, which it has taken years to settle for the people involved. However, when the KMCS disbanded in the mid-1990s, it was not due to repression. Rather, it was due to the fact that the middle-class activists, for various reasons, left Alirajpur, and the movement was not capable of replacing the skills and leadership they had provided to the mobilizing process. The AMS and the ASS/AMS faced sustained and co-ordinated campaigns of coercion, violence, and murder, orchestrated in, through, and by the state, with approval from its upper political and bureaucratic echelons.
What these vulgar displays of power reveal is of course the ability of dominant groups to access certain forms of state power, and to put it to efficient use in bringing an end to the advance of radical subaltern opposition. Whereas it would not be correct to say that state repression drove the AMS and the ASS-AMS entirely out of existence, it did, as I pointed out above, lead to a taming of activist ambitions to such an extent as to bring their activity within the bounds of what is acceptable for elite groups, at least for the foreseeable future. And this takes me back to the sketch of a relational conception of subalternity from which I started out. The ability of dominant groups to deploy the coercive apparatus of the state with such devastating efficiency is expressive precisely of how ‘the structures of political representation and state intervention involve differential access to the state apparatuses and differential opportunities to realize specific effects in the course of state intervention’ (Jessop, 1982: 224).
Moreover, and importantly, it is also expressive of how such differential access to state apparatuses and differential opportunities to pursue political projects via the state comes into play when challenges from below have assumed a form which militates against ‘the permanence of existing structures and relations’ (Kamat, 2002: 158). This, in turn, should prompt a critical debate about the limits that might exist to the extent to which subaltern appropriations of and engagements with India’s democratic polity will succeed in producing ‘new social relations and values’ (Michelutti, 2007: 639) that are genuinely and substantially emancipatory.
4: Concluding Remarks
What this essay has sought to demonstrate is that, on the one hand, vernacularization of democracy propelled by social movements does have the potential to challenge the adverse incorporation of subaltern groups in historically determinate power relations, and in this sense, such processes testify to ‘the possibilities for empowerment that might exist within India’s polity’ (Corbridge and Harriss, 2000: 238).
On the other hand, the essay has also sought to demonstrate that when the subaltern learns how to speak (the pun is intended) such democratic vernaculars, the response from above may come in the form of repression that imposes a limit on the subaltern advance. Needless to say, the question that then confronts us, if we are interested in discussing the possibilities for a radical deepening of Indian democracy, is how social movements should respond to this equation in strategic terms.
One approach - and a possible response - can be found in Sangeeta Kamat’s (2002) analysis of the politics of grassroots organizations in Adivasi communities in Maharashtra. In her study, Kamat presents a scenario similar to that found in western Madhya Pradesh:
The immobilizing fear of the tribals was identified by the activists as caused by their ignorance of their own powers (rights) as citizens within a democratic nation, and the legally circumscribed powers of political institutions ... This ... translates into a pedagogy directed at demystifying the state, empowering the adivasis with knowledge of the laws of the nation and their own rights so as to not only challenge the arbitrary nature of power exercised at the local level, but also to challenge those laws which are unjust and sustain domination (ibid.: 122).
The pedagogy of demystifying the state is a strategy which Kamat finds fault with, as it implies that ‘politics (power relations) emanates from the state agents as it were, and not from the state structures’. Therefore, the ‘juridico-legal’ rules of the state ‘are seen as binding on everyone equally, or ideally should be’ and the praxis of social movements thus becomes centred on making ‘the latter possible’ without subjecting those very rules ‘which represent the formal discourse of the state’ to critique (ibid.:124). In such a form of praxis ‘a distinction is maintained between state as practice and the state as structure, where the former is vigorously attacked and the latter is left untouched’, which in effect means that movements from below end up promoting ‘the ‘illusion’ of a state which exists for the interests of all people, including that of the poor’ (ibid.: 125-6).
There is nothing substantially wrong, of course, with the theoretical cogency of Kamat’s analysis. It is problematic, however, in that it constitutes a retreat into ‘the simplistic notions of anti-institutional purity’ (Poulantzas, 1978: 153). This is so first of all in the sense that her critique lacks sensitivity to how a strategy of empowering subaltern social groups in relation to the state can in fact be radical relative to the context in which that kind of strategy is adopted. When we are dealing with the mobilization of subaltern social groups in the context of everyday tyranny - i.e. a context in which domination is in large part underpinned by the absence of democratic principles and citizens’ rights - then the strategy of claiming citizenship is not only very likely to be a necessary starting point for activism, but also a genuinely radical point of departure for oppositional collective action. Furthermore, I am less than convinced that her assertion that the pedagogy of demystifying the state necessarily entails a form of political action that is incapable of going beyond the parameters of liberal democracy. Here we do well to recall that social movements are, in essence, collective processes of learning, that first ‘mobilize people who were not necessarily previously active’ and second ‘radicalize people who were previously content with a view of the world designed for situations of relative quiescence’ (Barker and Cox 2002: 21-2). Seen in this light, the argument that mobilizing around the ability to make claims on the state locks in place activism in a form that underpins the status quo loses, if not its theoretical cogency, at least a substantial part of its analytical and strategic purchase. Put slightly differently, in cases where subaltern mobilization takes place in a context of everyday tyranny, the very possibility of the development of a radical form of political agency that transcends the parameters of liberal democracy might well be predicated upon an initial rupturing of local rationalities of submission and deference effected through claims for democratic rights and constitutional entitlement.
But what is the alternative to a politics marred by the dogma of anti-institutional purity? My suggestion is this: a politics that is sensitive to context, and that avoids translating awareness of the limits to the changes that can be achieved via the institutions, procedures and discourses of the state into a principled rejection of any engagement with the state. Such a politics would push as far as possible to effect empowering transformations within the state-as-practice, whilst simultaneously developing a counter-hegemonic project to challenge the state-as-structure. In other words, if social movements are thought of as developing relationally and historically vis-à-vis the hegemonic projects of dominant social groups, then the trajectory of those movements will quite naturally tend to involve some kind of recourse to state-centred practices, institutions and ideational representations. Given the relational nature of state power, such recourse might also bear fruits. This, however, does not entail positing interaction and negotiation with the state as ‘the be-all and end-all of movement activity’ (Geoghegan and Cox, 2001: 7). Rather, it entails the advocacy of a position that explicitly seeks to take account of both the potential and limits of political action within the state system. Thus, what is advocated is an instrumental rather than a committed engagement with the state - that is, an approach to interaction with the state based on limited expectations of what can be gained and a clear perception of what is risked in pursuing this avenue.
Evidently, Adivasis and other subaltern groups in contemporary India will have to move in and against the state at the same time in order to further their emancipation.
Notes
1- Here, Guha is arguably operating with a slightly caricatured view of the development of the bourgeois state in the metropolitan context, in which the popular classes are seen as always-already incorporated into its ambit as citizens with democratic rights. This, of course, is not the case. The 100-year period from 1815 to 1914, as Halperin (2004) has pointed out, was a period when European states were more or less continually at war with their popular classes, brutally repressing the social movements that challenged elite control of the polity. The advance of political citizenship - not to mention social citizenship - for subaltern groups was a far more protracted, torturous, and conflictual process in Europe than Guha seems willing to concede in this essay (see also Silver and Slater, 1999).
2- This should of course not be read as an argument that the colonial state was founded on liberal principles. As Kaviraj (2010b: 60) notes, the colonial state was ‘far more powerful (in the sense of the sanctioned or possible use of force in having its way) than the state in the mother country, it was entirely uncircumscribed by the democratic rules and demands which inconveniently restricted elite politics in the metropolis’. Although Kaviraj is of course right to point out the despotism of the colonial state, he is, like Guha, operating with a somewhat caricatured view of the democratization of European society. What is disregarded is of course that universal franchise was won in the west only in the twentieth century, and, correspondingly, that the nineteenth century, particularly in the wake of the repression of 1848, was defined in political terms by a reactionary alliance between emergent bourgeoisies and entrenched aristocratic classes in a concerted effort to exclude the popular classes from the domain of liberal democracy (Halperin, 2004).
3- The subaltern/elite dichotomy is still not entirely exorcised from Chatterjee’s work. Whilst recognizing that subaltern groups, in and through their struggles, appropriate the administrative categories that the state imposes on its population, he contrasts this to the domain of civil society as an elite domain where people are constituted as free and equal rights-bearing citizens. Subaltern groups forge their relationship to the state in political society. This contention has been criticized by Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava and Véron (2005: 255-6), who argue that the distinction is ‘instructive ... But like all binary distinctions, this one is also overdrawn’. Their criticism points out that the separation of the domains that in Chatterjee’s work constitutes civil and political society is not so easily made, and that subaltern engagements with the state often straddles whatever boundary might exist between them.
4- In 2007, when this report was published, Alirajpur was still a tehsil in Jhabua district.
5- This section is based on interviews with KMCS activists carried out in 2003 and 2009-2010, as well as Baviskar’s (1995) analysis of the KMCS. See Nilsen (2010) for an extended account of everyday tyranny.
6- The experience of encountering the state would be different for a small elite among the Adivasis, namely the Patels (the village headmen) and the Patwaris (the revenue officers). These men were normally the nodes that linked the local state to the villages, and they often partook in the coercion and extortion that state officials imposed on the village communities (fieldnotes and interviews, 2009-10; see also Baviskar, 2001: 11).
7- This is not to say that breach of forest law was the only source of state tyranny in the region. See Nilsen (2010) for a more detailed account of the manifold ways in which the local state imposed its regime of extortion on the Alirajpur communities.
8- This should not be read as an argument to the effect that a lack of a capacity for and propensity towards resistance has been a constant feature of Adivasi relations to external social groups and forces. Rather, the history of Bhil and Bhilala Adivasis in western India ‘has been a chronicle of incorporation and resistance’ (Baviskar 1995: 85) from the nineteenth century onwards (see Hardiman, 1987 and Skaria, 1999). The British policy of pacification of the Adivasi areas encountered large-scale adivasi resistance in the 1840s, and in defiance of the repression of the great rebellion of 1857, Adivasi resistance continued for several years under the leadership of figures such as Nimlia Rutina, Bheema Naik and Khajya Naik. Immediately after Independence in 1947, the region witnessed the rise of the Lal Topi Andolan under socialist leadership. The Lal Topi Andolan made substantial headway in challenging the oppression of adivasis by usurers and championing the rights of Adivasis to forest resources. However, the movement was brutally repressed in the 1960s, and the living memory of this repression seems to have acted as a barrier to open defiance of and resistance to the state (Nilsen, 2010).
9- I base the following account on interviews with KMCS activists that were carried out in 2003 and 2009/2010, as well as Banerjee (n.d.) and Baviskar (1995: Chapter 8).
10- This is the common terms used to describe activists who come from an urban background, who tend to be highly educated, and who have grown up in families engaged in white-collar work. The following account of the KMCS is based on interviews carried out in 2003 and 2009-10, as well as Baviskar (1995: Chapter 8) and Banerjee (n.d.: Chapters 3 and 4).
11- This was the Lal Topi Andolan. See footnote 8 above.
12- I base this account of the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan on interviews with AMS activists carried out in 2009/10, Baviskar (2001), Amnesty International (n.d.), and Adivasi Mukti Sangathan (1997).13- Khargone was divided into Badwani and Khargone districts in 1998.
14- In fact, in early 1998, in Betul district, 17 farmers who were activists of the Kisan Sangharsh Morcha, were shot dead during a protest at Multai. Four years later, a Special Commission appointed by the Madhya Pradesh government concluded that the district administration was not to blame for the incident, and that the leader of the KSM - Dr. Sunilam, a PhD from Delhi University and a leading member of Janata Dal - had used the situation to advance his political agenda (Keswani, 1998; The Hindu, 10 March, 2002).
15- I base this account of the trajectory of the Adivasi Morcha Sangathan on several interviews with Rahul Banerjee, carried out in 2010, as well as the following written sources: Banerjee (n.d.), Bavadam (2001), Subramaniam (2001), Jan Sangharsh Morcha (2001), and Swaminathan (2001).
16- Actual compensation to the widow of Roopsingh, the villager who was shot dead, took a long time to materialize. After a long and protracted court battle, which went as far as the Supreme Court, compensation was finally paid to Sagarbai, a mother of four, on 19 September 2009, precisely ten years after her husband was killed. See Banerjee (2005) for an account of first six years of the process.
References
Abrams, P. (1988): ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 1/1
Banerjee, R. (2005): "Pillar to Post in the Quest for Justice", in Economic and Political Weekly, 40/31
Barker, C. (2002): ‘A Modern Moral Economy? Edward Thompson and Valentin Volosinov Meet in North Manchester’, paper presented at the conference Making Social Movements: The British Marxist Historians and the Study of Social Movements, Edge Hill College of Higher Education, England, 26-28 June, 2002.
Barker, C. and Cox, L. (2002): "What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us? Academic and Activist Forms of Movement Theorizing", paper available at the website www.iol.ie/mazzoldi/toolsforchange
Bavadam, L. (2001): "Fear in the Forests", Frontline 18/13
Baviskar, A. (1994): "Fate of the Forest: Conservation and Tribal Rights", in Economic and Political Weekly, 29/38.
Baviskar, A. (1995) In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Water in the Narmada Valley, Delhi, Oxford University Press
Baviskar, A. (2001): "Written on the Body, Written on the Land: Violence and Environmental Struggles in Central India", WP 02-10, Institute of International Studies, University of California
Baviskar, A. (2008): "Contract Killings: Silicosis among Adivasi Migrant Workers", in Economic and Political Weekly, June 21, 2008.
Breman, J. (1996): Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Sector, Cambridge: Cambridge
Chatterjee, P. (1982): "Agrarian Relations and Communalism in Bengal, 1926-1935", in Ranajit Guha (ed.): Subaltern Studies I: Writings on Indian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press
Chatterjee, P. (1983): "More on Modes of Power and the Peasantry", in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies II: Writings on Indian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press
Chatterjee, P. (1993): The Nation and its Fragments, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Chatterjee, P. (2004): Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, New York: Columbia University Press
Corbridge, S, and Harris, J. (2000): Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press
Corbridge, S., Williams, G., Srivastava, M., and Véron, R. (2005): Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Corrigan, P. and Sayer, D. (1985): The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Cox, L. (1999): Building Counter Culture: The Radical Praxis of Social Movement Milieux, unpublished PhD dissertation, Trinity College, Dublin
Dutta, A. (2010): "Starvation Deaths of Kids Haunt Rural MP", in India Today, March 10, 2010
Fuller, C. J. and Harriss, J. (2001): ‘For an Anthropology of the Modern Indian State’, in Fuller, C. J. and Béneï, V. (eds.): The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, London: Hurst and Company
Geoghegan, M. and Cox, L. (2001): "Outside the Whale: (Re)thinking Social Movements and the Voluntary Sector", paper available at from www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange
Gramsci, A. (1998): Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart
Green, M. (2002): "Gramsci Cannot Speak: Presentations and Interpretations of Gramsci’s Concept of the Subaltern", in Rethinking Marxism, 14/3.
Guha, Ranajit (1982): "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India", in Ranajit Guha (ed.): Subaltern Studies I: Writings on Indian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Guha, Ranajit (1983a): "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency", in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies II: Writings on Indian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Guha, Ranajit (1983b): Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Guha, Ranajit (1989): "Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography", in Guha, R. (ed.): Subaltern Studies VI: Writings on Indian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Guha, Ramchandra (1985): "Forestry and Social Protest in British Kumaun, c. 1893-1921", in Ranajit Guha (ed.): Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on Indian History and Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Guha, Ramchandra (1999): The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, Berkeley: University of California Press
Guha, Ramchandra (2010): "Adivasis: Unacknowledged Victims", in Outlook, April 14
Guha, S. (1999): Environment and Ethnicity in India (1200-1991), Delhi: Cambridge University Press
Gupta, A. (1995): ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist, 22/2
Gupta, A. (1998): Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India, Durham: Duke
Hall, S. (1983): ‘Notes on Deconstructing "the Popular"’, in Samuel, R. (ed.): People’s History and Socialist Theory, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
Halperin, S. (2004): War and Social Change in Modern Europe: The Great Transformation Revisited, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Hardiman, D. (1987): The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India, Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Hardiman, D. (2006): "Farming in the Forest: The Dangs 1830-1992", in Hardiman, D.: Histories for the Subordinated, Calcutta: Seagull Books
Harriss-White, B. (2003): India Working: Essays on Society and Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Hilton, R. (2003): Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381, London: Routledge
Inden, R. (1995): "Embodying God: From Imperial Progresses to National Progresses in India", in Economy and Society 24/2
Jan Sangharsh Morcha (2001): "Macabre Dance of State Atrocities against Adivasis in Dewas, Madhya Pradesh", report available on www.narmada.org
Jeffrey, C. Lerche, J. (2000): "Stating the Difference: State, Discourse and Class Reproduction in Uttar Pradesh, India", in Development and Change 31
Jessop, B. (1982): The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods (Oxford, Martin Robertson).
Jessop, B. (1990): State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place (Cambridge, Polity Press).
Jessop, B. (2008): State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach (Cambridge, Polity Press).
Joseph, G. M. and Nugent, D. (1994): "Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico", in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (eds.), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Everyday Mexico, Durham: Duke University Press 1994
Kala, P. (2001): ‘In the Spaces of Erasure: Globalisation, Resistance and Narmada River’, Economic and Political Weekly, 36/ 22
Kamat, S. (2002): Development Hegemony: NGOs and the State in India (New Delhi, Oxford University Press).
Kaviraj, S. (1999): "The Modern State in India", in Martin Doornbos and Sudipta Kaviraj (eds.): Dynamics of State Formation: India and Europe Compared, Delhi: Sage Publications.
Kaviraj, S. (2010a): "On State, Society and Discourse in India", in Kaviraj, S.: The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas, Delhi: Permanent Black
Kaviraj, S. (2010b): "On the Construction of Colonial Power: Structure, Discourse, Hegemony", in Kaviraj, S.: The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas, Delhi: Permanent Black
Madan, T. N. (1987): "Secularism in its Place", The Journal of Asian Studies, 46/4
Mahaprashasta, A. A. (2009): "Stifling a Revolt", Frontline 26/22
McNally, D. (1995): ‘Language, History and Class Struggle’, pp. 13-40 in Monthly Review, Vol. 47, No. 3
Michelutti, L. (2008): The Vernacularisation of Democracy: Politics, Caste and Religion in India, New Delhi: Routledge
Michelutti. L. (2007): "The Vernacularization of Democracy: Political Participation and Popular Politics in North India", in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (N. S.) 13
Mies, M. and Shiva, V. (1987): Ecofeminism (London, Verso).
Moore, D. S. (1998): ‘Subaltern Struggles and the Politics of Place: Remapping Resistance in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1-38.
Moore, D. S. (2000): ‘The Crucible of Cultural Politics: Reworking "Development" in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands’, in American Ethnologist, Vol. 26, No. 3, 654-689.
Mosse, D. (2007) ‘Power and the Durability of Poverty: A Critical Exploration of the Links between Culture, Marginality and Power’, CPRC Working Paper 107, available at the Chronic Poverty Research Centre website
Mosse, D., Gupta, S. and Shah, V. (2005) ‘On the Margins in the City: Adivasi Seasonal Labour Migration in Western India’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 40, No. 28
Nandy, A. (1989): The Political Culture of the Indian State, Daedalus, 118/4
Nilsen, A. G. (2007): ‘On New Social Movements and ‘the Reinvention of India’’, Forum for Development Studies, No. 2, 271-93.
Nilsen, A. G. (2008): ‘Political Economy, Social Movements and State Power: A Marxian Perspective on Two Decades of Resistance to the Narmada Dam Projects’, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 21, No. 2-3, 303-30.
Nilsen, A. G. (2009a): ‘Autonome Domener eller Relasjonelle Praksiser: Makt og Motstand i Indisk Historie og Samtid’, Agora, No. 1
Nilsen, A. G. (2009b): ‘The Authors and the Actors of Their Own Drama: Towards a Marxist Theory of Social Movements’, in Capital and Class 33
Nilsen, A. G. (2010): Dispossession and Resistance in India: The River and the Rage (London, Routledge).
Nugent, D. (1997): Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885-1935, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press
O’Hanlon, R. (1988): "Recovering the Subject Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia", in Modern Asian Studies, 22/1
O’Hanlon, R. and Washbrook, D. (1992): "After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism and Politics in the Third World", in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34/1
Parajuli, P. (1991): ‘Power and Knowledge in Development Discourse: New Social Movements and the State in India’, International Social Science Journal, No. 127, 173-90.
Parajuli, P. (1996): ‘Ecological Ethnicity in the Making: Developmentalist Hegemonies and Emergent Identities in India’, Identities, 3, 15-59.
Poulantzas, N. (1978): State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso Books
PUDR (2010): Unkept Promises: The Struggle for Forests, Land and Wages in Harda, Delhi: People’s Union for Democratic Rights
Rangan, H. (2000): Of Myths and Movements: Rewriting Chipko into Himalayan History, New Delhi (Oxford University Press).
Roseberry, W. (1994): "Hegemony and the Languages of Contention», i Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (eds.), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Everyday Mexico, Durham: Duke University Press 1994.
Sarkar, S. (1998): Writing Social History (New Delhi, Oxford University Press).
Scott, J. C. (1998): Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press
Scott, J. C. (2009): The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Delhi: Permanent Black
Scott, J. C. (1990): Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, Yale University Press Sewell, W. H. (1992) ‘A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 98, No. 1, 1-29.
Sewell, W. H. (1996): ‘Historical Events as Transformation of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille’, Theory and Society, Volume 25, No 6, 841-881.
Shah, A. (2010): In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India, Durham: Duke University Press
Sharma, A. (2008): Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender and Governance in India (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press).
Silver, B. and Slater, D. (1999): "The Social Origins of World Hegemonies", in Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver (eds.): Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Singh, M. P. (2009a): "Jhabua on its Way to Becoming Vidarbha II?", in The Hindu, 25.08.2009
Singh, M. P. (2009b): "Madhya Pradesh Clueless as Children Die of Malnutrition", in The Hindu, 01.08.2009
Singh, M. P. (2009c): "Malnutrition Reaches Epidemic Proportions in M.P.", in The Hindu, 27.11.2009
Sinha, S. (2003): ‘Development Counter-Narratives: Taking Social Movements Seriously’, in Sivaramakrishnan, K. and Agrawal, A. (eds.): Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India (Stanford, Stanford University Press).
Skaria, A. (1999): Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India, Delhi: Oxford University Press
Smith, N. (1990): Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Steinberg, M. W. (1999): ‘The Talk and Back Talk of Collective Action: A Dialogic Analysis of Repertoires of Discourse Among Nineteenth-Century English Cotton Spinners’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 105, No. 3, 736-80.
Subramaniam, C. N. (2001): "Mehendikheda Firing: Repression Against a Tribal Movement", in Revolutionary Democracy, 7/2
Sundar, N. (2010): "Vigilantism, Culpability and Moral Dilemmas", Critique of Anthropology, 30/1
Swaminathan, S. (2001): "A Tale of Continued Oppression: Government Atrocities of Tribals in Dewas", in Economic and Political Weekly, 36/18
Thompson, E. P. (1966): The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Vintage
Thompson, E. P. (1978): "Eighteenth Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class", in Social History, 3/2
Varghese, S. (1993): "Women, Resistance and Development: A Case Study from Dangs, India", in Development in Practice 3/1
Volosinov, V. N. (1973): Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, London, Seminar Press.
Williams, R. (1977): Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
This essay is part of a forthcoming free collection of Alf’s writings on power, resistance and development, that will be published later this year by Into-eBooks.
|
Check Twaweza books, No Nonsense Guides to various topics and new PM Press titles!
