Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in Twenty-First-Century India (Anthropology, Culture and Society) - Softcover

Shah, Alpa; Lerche, Jens; Axelby, Richard; Benbabaali, Dalel; Donegan, Brendan; Raj, Jayaseelan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745337686 ISBN 13: 9780745337685

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Why has India’s astonishing economic growth not reached the people at the bottom of its social and economic hierarchy? Travelling the length and breadth of the subcontinent, this book shows how India’s ‘untouchables' and ‘tribals' fit into the global economy. India’s Dalit and Adivasi communities make up a staggering one in twenty-five people across the globe and yet they remain amongst the most oppressed. Conceived in dialogue with economists, Ground Down by Growth reveals the impact of global capitalism on their lives. It shows how capitalism entrenches, rather than erases, social difference and has transformed traditional forms of identity-based discrimination into new mechanisms of exploitation and oppression. Through studies of the working poor, migrant labour and the conjugated oppression of caste, tribe, region, gender and class relations, the social inequalities generated by capitalism are exposed.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alpa Shah is associate professor in anthropology at the London School of Economics, and the author of In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India. Jens Lerche is reader in labor and agrarian studies at SOAS, University of London. Richard Axelby is lecturer in development studies at SOAS, University of London. Dalel Benbabaali is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in area studies at the University of Oxford. Brendan Donegan is visiting fellow in anthropology at the London School of Economics. Jayaseelan Raj is assistant professor at the Centre for Development Studies in Kerala, India. Vikramaditya Thakur is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware. 
 

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Ground Down by Growth

Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in Twenty-First Century India

By Alpa Shah, Jens Lerche, Richard Axelby, Dalel Benbabaali, Brendan Donegan, Jayaseelan Raj, Vikramaditya Thakur

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2018 Alpa Shah, Jens Lerche, Richard Axelby, Dalel Benbabaali, Brendan Donegan, Jayaseelan Raj and Vikramaditya Thakur
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-3768-5

Contents

List of Illustrations, vi, 
Series Preface, ix, 
Preface Alpa Shah and Jens Lerche, x, 
1 Tribe, Caste and Class – New Mechanisms of Exploitation and Oppression Alpa Shah and Jens Lerche, 1, 
2 Macro-Economic Aspects of Inequality and Poverty in India K.P. Kannan, 32, 
3 Tea Belts of the Western Ghats, Kerala Jayaseelan Raj, 49, 
4 Cuddalore, Chemical Industrial Estate, Tamil Nadu Brendan Donegan, 82, 
5 Bhadrachalam Scheduled Area, Telangana Dalel Benbabaali, 115, 
6 Chamba Valley, Himalaya, Himachal Pradesh Richard Axelby, 143, 
7 Narmada Valley and Adjoining Plains, Maharashtra Vikramaditya Thakur, 176, 
8 The Struggles Ahead Alpa Shah and Jens Lerche, 203, 
Appendix: Tables and Figures, 216, 
Notes, 235, 
Bibliography, 253, 
Acknowledgements, 272, 
Index, 273, 

CHAPTER 1

Tribe, Caste and Class – New Mechanisms of Exploitation and Oppression

Alpa Shah and Jens Lerche

Capitalist modernity across the world was expected to diminish the salience of older forms of identity-based relations. In India, differences based on caste and tribe were to disappear. But, despite economic growth, the conditions of India's Adivasis and Dalits have flouted these rosy expectations. Ground Down by Growth travels the length and breadth of the country to explore how and why Adivasis and Dalits (also known as Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes), remain at the bottom of Indian society.

One of the first collective efforts by a team of anthropologists working on the same questions across different sites, Ground Down by Growth brings to light the real-life stories of the struggles of India's low castes and tribes across the country. The fate of India's Adivasis and Dalits is globally important for many reasons, not least that together they make up 1 in 25 people in the world. Most importantly, as we argue here, their stories show us the ways in which economic globalisation has re-entrenched identity-based social oppression (by which we mean here, tribe, caste, gender and region, but which could include race, ethnicity, sexuality), making it inseparable from class relations, a process we conceptualise as 'conjugated oppression'. This book's potential significance, then, derives not simply from the number of people its analyses address directly, but also from the more general theoretical argument it makes about how the spread of capitalism today is enlisting and intensifying previously existing relations of domination based on inherited and indelible social identities. In exploring the relation between inherited social identities and the often-observed divergence between haves and have-nots, the book adds weight to the argument that the failure of 'trickle-down' models of growth and the persistence of social disparities under contemporary capitalism are two sides of the same coin.

Ground Down by Growth explores the changing historical processes through which Adivasis and Dalits across the country remain worse off than all other groups. It poses a challenge to proponents of India's economic growth as it shows that neoliberal capitalism, far from enabling the benefits of its growth rates to trickle down to all groups, has further entrenched inequalities based on pre-existing unequal social divisions. Ground Down by Growth shows the ways in which inequalities of caste and tribe (and region and gender) take shape through class relations across the country, morphing older forms of identity-based discrimination and marginalisation into new mechanisms of exploitation, oppression and subjugation. Specifically, we propose that the entrenchment of social difference in the expansion of capitalism takes place through at least three interrelated processes: inherited inequalities of power; super-exploitation based on casual migrant labour; and conjugated oppression (that is the intertwined multiple oppressions based on caste, tribe, class, gender and region). The book also explores the struggles Adivasis and Dalits wage to cope with the situation they find themselves in.

OUR FIELD SITES

The long history of marginalisation of India's Adivasis and Dalits is reflected across our sites. In the past, the Indian caste system kept the Dalits as 'Untouchables', firmly below and outside a hierarchy of endogamous kinship groups. There, they constituted a class of unfree agricultural labourers and other manual occupational groups working for the dominant classes who were higher than them in the caste hierarchy. The dominant classes controlled the land and appropriated the surplus value of the Dalits, preventing them from cultivating land on their own. Compelled to act at the behest of the landlord, they constituted what scholars have called, 'agrestic slaves' (Kumar 1965, Vishwanath 2014). An oppressive discourse of purity–pollution, permeating religious, cultural, social and economic interactions, was part of the means of their domination and subordination.

There were of course regional variations. Bondage and oppression was harshest in the intensively cultivated, irrigated river plains and delta regions, from the Gangetic Plains to parts of coastal Kerala and Tamil Nadu. In the dryer regions, where labour was at a premium but land less so, they might even have had some plots of land. There were also differences between Dalit castes; village servants, for example, were more likely to have access to a small plot of land.

The Adivasi or tribal groups of the hills and forests of India, in comparison, lived in relatively independent communities, with much more direct access to the means of their social reproduction because many were able to cultivate land and access forest resources without interference in, or domination or mediation of this access by caste groups. Often they sought to keep away from outsiders, and were stereotyped as wild and savage, but Adivasis' autonomy regarding land and forests enabled them to be somewhat independent of the Hindu caste system. As Frederick Bailey (1961) argued, there was a tribe–caste continuum, with some groups more autonomous than others. The closer the interaction of Adivasi groups with Hindu societies of the plains, the more likely it was that their domination and exploitation became more like that of the 'Untouchables', so that some scholars have even called them 'tribal castes'. Indeed, some scholars have argued that sections of Dalits came from tribal backgrounds, sometimes as subjugated hunters and gatherers of the lands conquered by warrior peasant groups.

The colonial powers officially abolished slavery in India in 1843, but this simply led to its transformation into bondage through relations of debt; what has been called debt bondage by scholars. Colonialism also reinforced the stigmas of caste and tribe. There is a well-known history of high caste collusion with the colonial administrators which reinforced the caste system and kept Dalits at the bottom of the social hierarchy. There is also a less well-known history of the appropriation of Adivasi forest and land resources that led both to their persistent dispossession but also to their...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745337686
• ISBN 13: 9780745337685
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland