A Companion to the Anthropology of India

Isabelle Clark-Decès

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405198929
• eBook ISBN: 9781444390582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A Companion to the Anthropology of India

A Companion to the Anthropology of India offers a broad overview of the rapidly evolving scholarship on Indian society from the earliest area studies to views of India's globalization in the twenty-first century. Contributions by leading experts present up-to-date, comprehensive coverage of key topics that include developments in population and life expectancy, caste and communalism, politics and law, public and religious cultures, youth and consumerism, the new urban middle class, civil society, social-moral relationships, environment and health.

The broad variety of topics on Indian society is balanced with the larger global issues – demographic, economic, social, cultural, political, religious, and others – that have transformed the country since the end of colonization. Illuminating the continuity and diversity of Indian culture, A Companion to the Anthropology of India offers important insights into the myriad ways social scientists describe and analyze Indian society and its unique brand of modernity.

PART I Caste and Class in Liberal India

CHAPTER 1 Demography for Anthropologists: Populations, Castes, and Classes

Christophe Z. Guilmoto

The profusion of data that statistical agencies routinely disseminate about India is expected to conveniently sum up the behaviors and whereabouts of more than a billion people.¹ But this wealth of information may also hide India’s diversity behind a long list of national or regional indicators that do not accurately reflect the changing circumstances of individuals and local communities. While survey and data collection processes are notoriously partial, and at times unreliable, the seemingly awkward statistical categories of India’s massive datasets – weird caste and tribe nomenclatures, “census villages,” erratic age distributions, elastic administrative units, etc. – offer precious tools by which to describe and explore India’s demographic diversity, tools that anthropologists have, much to their detriment, by and large avoided. Despite the prevalence in India of overly positivist narratives based on such statistics (the kind of which most humanistic social scientists are wary), anthropologists have much to learn from demography. Just as demographers are coming to better understand the importance of contextualizing the social conditions under which survey research is conducted, anthropologists may yet find innovative ways of using such research for more elaborate interpretations of contemporary Indian life.

This chapter reviews some of the key sources and monitoring tools available for describing India’s population and its rapid demographic and socioeconomic transformations. It starts with two sections devoted to the nature of geographical and social categories, followed by a more detailed examination of the major dimensions of the current revolution in family structures, marriage patterns, and reproduction. The last two sections explore gender and socioeconomic inequality. However, an inventory of statistical resources documenting social change in India would be incomplete without a brief history of India’s population statistics, which accounts for part of their apparent opacity.

In countries with long statistical histories, social groupings tend to coincide with statistical categories. In contrast, India’s statistical history is much younger, and many defining sociopolitical concepts such as age or caste membership are still being renegotiated within the statistical realm by actors and institutions. The wide distance that often exists between local categories and official nomenclatures is a legacy of this short history that began only during the colonial era. The establishment of solid and stable relationships between the state and its subjects is indeed relatively recent in India. While the Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft, economic policy and military strategy dating from the Mauryan period (fourth century BCE) clearly encouraged rulers to engage in head counts and other measurements for tax purposes (Boesche 2002), no record has survived of these proto-statistical enquiries, and we are left with no quantitative assessment of India’s demographic experience until the period of Mughal rule, during which a few administrative surveys were conducted in North India, such as the sixteenth-century Ain-i-Akbari. During this period, pivotal life events in village communities such as births, unions, and deaths often went unrecorded and oral genealogies passed down through the generations, too, have rarely offered the detailed information necessary to reconstruct historical population change.

It is only with the arrival of the Portuguese that some localities started recording baptisms or funerals. From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, British forays into India’s power structures were gradually accompanied by the introduction of new monitoring tools such as local surveys, head counts and a growing number of thematic reports. In the nineteenth century, Manuals and Gazetteers, for instance, produced long lists of quantitative and qualitative information, incorporating caste distribution, population figures, land areas and revenues, as well as cattle, into the summary of colonial resources. By the end of the nineteenth century, civil registration and modern census-taking (starting from 1871–2) provided the first reliable sets of population statistics. The exhaustive survey of the whole population, including the forgotten poor and the low-status groups, was in itself a breakthrough in India’s statistical history. These were later complemented by a growing list of various surveys covering agriculture, famine conditions, socioeconomic behavior, and health practices, which became standard after Independence. The census itself hardly changed after the end of colonial rule, even if data tabulation gave a larger priority to economic circumstances and followed new official categories (new administrative units, “scheduled” groups, etc.). However, the coupling of the 2011 census with the establishment of a centralized national population register, which combines demographic and biometric information for all individuals aged 15 years or more, inaugurates a new biopolitical era in India’s bureaucratic history with as yet unpredictable consequences for statistical reliability.

Along with the relatively modest penetration of government apparatuses into people’s lives that characterizes India’s “soft state” approach, the recent and somewhat exogenous origin of its statistical institutions goes a long way toward explaining why the resulting statistics appear still incomplete and, at times, depressingly unreliable today. Take the central notion of age introduced during the first census rounds of the nineteenth century, which makes age still widely misreported today, or consider the huge number of unreported births and deaths missing from statistical tables in spite of a civil registration act introduced in 1866.² Similarly, we should not expect a reliable estimate of average income levels from available statistical agencies, nor could we try to guess the number of Brahmans in the country without resorting to now infamous colonial surveys taken more than 70 years ago. The truth is that in the absence of in-depth anthropological studies of survey conditions in India, the process of data gathering still remains something of a mystery. We have no description of the specific social interactions between populations and surveyors that lead to the creation of “statistical data” during a census or a survey, leaving mostly to statisticians the responsibility to assess data quality and to document so-called survey errors or response biases.

These apparent flaws in the dominant statistical narrative stem from both a generous dose of indifference to official questioning and an equally large semantic gap between statistical nomenclatures and relevant social categories. The indifference stems especially from the restricted capacity of government agencies to concretely influence individual circumstances. In addition, the gap between the formal statistical categories and local notions of social coding is a further cause for the statistical infelicities regularly reported by statisticians and demographers. The rumination on alien and supposedly context-free categories by surveyors and surveyees alike has often led to random meaning and unpredictable survey results (Guilmoto 1992). Moreover, sensitive categories such as religion or mother tongue have at times generated their own controversies and disputes (Brass 1979; Jones 1990), forcing statisticians to shed their veil of ignorance to recognize the independent role of social mobilization in the process of information production.

Two divergent attitudes toward statistical information have developed among scholars, in which we recognize on the one side a somewhat spontaneously positivist orientation that easily degenerates into a blind faith in empirical data, and on the other a de rigueur postmodern mistrust fueled by the colonial filiation of the statistical enterprise. For all their respective convenience, these two positions lead to frustrating results. Many data can, in fact, be fruitfully extracted from India’s information bases, but only after a proper filtering. Data bear some of the marks of the complex social interactions that accompanied their production, and what follows is an attempt to listen to their convoluted “voices.” The statistical narrative in India is probably less hegemonic than usually thought. Reports and tabulations resemble, on the contrary, a formidable palimpsest in which the imprints of opinions, norms, and behaviors need to be carefully sorted out.

REGIONS: SOCIOLOGICAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE DEFINITIONS

India’s external boundaries are stable, but they also remain contested, and all maps published in India are obliged to include several border areas that have been outside of Indian control for decades and peopled by Chinese or Pakistani nationals. Within India, large inner tracts have also temporarily slipped from full administrative control (Naxalite presence is estimated to affect a quarter of Indian districts). The country is officially divided into 28 states, 6 union territories and 1 national capital territory. These units of various sizes (the largest state, Uttar Pradesh, would be the world’s fifth most populous country) are further divided into 626 districts (zila). Further down the administrative scale, the political grid becomes far more heterogeneous. The 5,463 smaller administrative units of 2001 correspond mostly to tehsils and taluks, but several states have their own units such as mandals – circles – or communes. These units are probably the most appropriate for comparing with data collected during fieldwork.³

Cultural geographers will find it difficult to use administrative toponyms as an indicator of real regions. Almost no state carries the name of a historical Indian region, and most use convenient geographical neologisms or resurrected Sanskrit toponyms introduced since Independence.⁴ Almost no famous cultural region name commonly used by individuals and communities to identify their origin has found its way into the administrative grid. No map would bear mentions of Doab, Kathiawar, Kongu Nadu, Malwa, Konkan, or Malnad. As a result, toponyms that are crucial to regional identities are poorly known outside their region of origin, and people have often adopted the new acronyms (“UP-walla” for inhabitants of the Uttar Pradesh). It is, however, interesting to note that some of these forgotten historical appellations figure prominently among the newly proposed “postlinguistic” divisions such as Vidarbha, Bundelkhand, or Telengana states. This suggests the inception of a new regional assertiveness going beyond the linguistic division fought for during the 1950s and the further adjustments later conceded for political reasons. At a lower level of the administrative structure, local politics has often disrupted the mainly technocratic enterprise of dividing districts into viable administrative units. Tamil Nadu provides an eloquent example, with intense redistricting operations since the 1950s that have seen the emergence of 32 new units out of the original 13 districts. During the 1980s and 1990s, its districts were also often rechristened, using names of persons with specific political connotations, from the little-known politician Pasumpon Muthuramalinga Thevar (Sivaganga district) to the outsider figure of Ambedkar (Vellore district). Uttar Pradesh has recently entered the name game by creating new districts bearing names of distinct dalit flavor, such as Kanshiram Nagar, Gautam Buddha Nagar or Jyotiba Phule Nagar – with some districts being renamed after each election. The huge majority of Indian districts, however, bear the name of their urban headquarters. In itself, this single trait perfectly encapsulates the typical urban bias of the local administration of a predominantly rural country such as India.

Areas are further divided into urban and rural areas, and India’s urbanization level stood at 27.8 percent in 2001. The definition of urban areas is the object of bureaucratic and political considerations, with rural localities regularly being absorbed into town areas and simultaneously some small towns being reclassified as rural units (Ramachandran 1989). Within towns, a process of reclassification has turned traditional urban mohalla (neighborhoods) into new statistical wards or renamed Nagar (subdivision). This overall urban percentage, rather low by international standards, is a feature common to all of South Asia, where urbanization is still an incomplete process. While labor-intensive agriculture and nonagricultural activities have helped to retain the local workforce in spite of wide land inequalities, the caste-based and regional segmentation of the urban labor market acts as a further brake on migration streams toward cities.⁵ Rural population density in the Indo-Gangetic plains reaches extremely high levels above 1,000 persons per square kilometer, comparable to levels observed elsewhere in deltaic Asia or Western Europe. Moderate urbanization rates also conceal the existence of the highly densely populated “rural areas” in Punjab and Kerala that have most characteristics of the peri-urban landscape desakota observed from Indonesia to East China: density, proximity to towns, intensive agriculture, industrial activities, and strong growth potential. Within cities, the same classificatory problem also plagues the more recent “slum” category, aimed at identifying neighborhoods or tenements lacking basic urban amenities (“poorly built,” “congested,” “unhygienic”, “lacking in proper sanitary and drinking water facilities”), but to which are also added areas “notified” (i.e. registered as slums) by local authorities. While the 2001 census counted more than 40 million people living in urban slums, the official proportions of the slum population ranged in 2001 from a record high 50 percent in Mumbai to less than 10 percent in cities like Patna, Bhopal, and Lucknow, a discrepancy that suggests variations in slum nomenclature that are primarily the result of local administrative decisions.

The variety of rural settlements across the country is not easy to classify, given the differing political histories and ecological characteristics of those zones. The classification of villages as political units, used for tax purposes by local rulers and by the colonial administration, was recently reinforced by the local devolution of power (Panchayati Raj) introduced during the 1990s. However, census villages are more numerous and heterogeneous units than political units (gram panchayat). The sizes and shapes of villages vary greatly across the country, ranging from dense and spread-out populations in lowland Kerala to sparse and isolated settlements in Western Rajasthan. As a result, the average size of 593,643 populated “census villages” recorded in 2001 – India’s administrative structure also includes a large number of “uninhabited villages” – ranges from fewer than 400 inhabitants in Uttarakhand to more than 10,000 in Kerala.⁶ Villages are usually multicaste, but often with one socially or numerically dominant jati (subcaste). In fact, the caste composition of neighboring villages often appears rather heterogeneous. Moreover, the intense geographical segregation within the village means that castes and groups at the top and the bottom of the local hierarchy are clearly demarcated in space. Lower status groups are at times relegated to a distant satellite hamlet such as the Tamil “cheri”, and they therefore share very little of the central village’s amenities and infrastructures such as schools, drinking water facilities, or places of worship. Consequently, an individual village rarely reflects accurately the actual diversity of its cultural micro-regions, making it difficult for anthropologists to claim that one given locality is representative of its region in some statistical sense.

SOCIAL BOUNDARIES: PLURALITY, FLUIDITY, AND AMBIGUITY

Ever since the colonial period, statistics in India have been replete with social and cultural markers that help to define and classify subpopulations.⁷ No country in the world, in fact, can pride itself on a similar multilayer classification of its population into language groups, castes and tribal groups, and religion – not to mention region and country of birth – which also serve as indirect markers of social identity. These data are duly collected by census and other statistical organizations and tabulated in scores of official publications. However, they rarely fail to cause academic frustration and perplexity. This section cannot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Halftitle page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Caste and Class in Liberal India
• Part II Cities, Cosmopolitan Styles, and Urban Critics
• Part III Cultures and Religion in the Making
• Part IV Communalism, Nationalism, and Terrorism
• Part V Law, Governance, and Civil Society
• Part VI From Global India to the Ethnography of Change
• Index