Rebels From the Mud Houses

Dalits and the Making of the Maoist Revolution in Bihar

George Kunnath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138099555
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351418744
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book examines Dalit mobilization and the transformation of rural power relations in the context of intense agrarian violence involving Maoist guerrillas and upper caste militias backed by state forces in Bihar in the 1980s. The book investigates why thousands of Dalits took up arms and highlights the specificities of Dalit participation in the Maoist Movement  and develops an anthropology of the Maoist Revolution in India.

1

Introduction

Maoist Revolution in Perspective

ONE EVENING IN JANUARY 2003, AS I WAS WALKING THROUGH A NARROW alley amidst the mud houses of Dalit labourers in a village I shall call Dumari, Munari Das,¹ a 60-year-old Dalit labourer, called out to me from his doorway. He led me inside his house, which was typical of most other Dalit houses in Dumari. In stark contrast to the two-storied pukka (brick walls and concrete roof) houses of the Kurmis—the landowning Backward Castes²—Dalit houses have mud walls and thatched roofs, and stand less than 10 feet tall, with no more than two rooms. The rooms have no windows, but each has a small hole carved in the mud wall to let in air and light and which, during winter months, can be plugged with rags or hay. While my eyes were still adjusting to the darkness inside the room, Munari Das said:

This is the matti ka ghar [mud house] in which I fed and sheltered the comrades for more than 15 years. They would come to my house at midnight. I would then go around different houses and shops in the village to collect rice, wheat, potato, spices and other provisions to prepare food for them. Once, a shop owner refused to oblige. So immediately I put up a notice in the village telling the labourers not to buy anything from his shop. The boycott was total. It was our party and we cared for and sheltered the comrades in our houses. It was from here that the kranti [revolution] spread to the whole of Bihar.³

Munari Das, a Dalit labourer of Dumari village in Jehanabad district, Bihar was referring to the Naxalite guerrillas as ‘comrades’. Since its inception in the 1960s, the Naxalite Movement—a Maoist-inspired peasant struggle—has been a platform for militant Dalit assertions against caste and class oppression in many states of India. In Bihar, especially in the Bhojpur and Magadh regions, landless Dalit labourers and poor peasants took up arms against the upper and Backward Caste landowners. In retaliation, the landlords formed their own private armies and the state unleashed a repressive police regime, creating in Bihar, and especially in Jehanabad district, a climate of violence which has led to the region becoming known as ‘the killing fields’. I lived among landless Dalit families in Dumari village for 16 months in 2002–03. In this book I examine the everyday world of Dalits—their articulations of self and community—shaped in the midst of the Maoist armed struggle and the ever increasing violence in Bihar.

Central to this work is the analysis of Dalit experiences and encounters—‘Untouchability’, landlessness, sexual abuse of Dalit women by upper caste landowners and Dalit participation in the Maoist Movement. And, in giving centrality to ‘Dalitness’ in this book, I choose to position the term ‘Dalit’ as a central concept of analysis. Categories such as landless peasants, labouring classes, rural proletariat, for instance, despite providing a concise portrait of Dalit existence, potentially exclude their caste-specific experience of subordination. In making a distinction between proletarian and Dalit consciousness, Oommen writes: ‘If proletarian consciousness is essentially rooted in material deprivations, the Dalit consciousness is a complex and compound consciousness which encapsulates deprivations stemming from inhuman conditions of material existence, powerlessness and ideological hegemony’ (1990: 256). The book will explore this very specificity of Dalit consciousness and political action stemming from such consciousness.

Map 1.1:Magadh Region in Bihar

The term Dalit in this book, then, refers to the former ‘Untouchable’ castes, which in administrative parlance are termed the Scheduled Castes (SCs).⁴ The term Scheduled Caste was first used by the British in the Government of India Act, 1935. Prior to this, Depressed Classes was a collective term for those castes, which were placed at the bottom of the Hindu social order and considered avarna (outside the varna System) and achchut or ‘Untouchable’ (Shah 2001: 18). Mahatma Gandhi introduced the word harijan—people of God—to refer to this category of people. The Congress Party popularized this term and many people from the SC communities also referred to themselves as harijans (ibid.: 20). However, the adoption of this term in no way raised their social status; rather it carried a pejorative meaning.⁵

In contrast, Dalit is a term Dalit activists themselves adopted as an expression of their rising political awareness and activism. The word mirrors their experience of being deliberately ‘broken and ground down’ by those above them in the social hierarchy. The term conveys an inherent denial of pollution, karma and caste hierarchy (Zelliot 2001: 267). Although the word came to be used in the 1930s as a Marathi translation of ‘Depressed Classes’, it gained political meaning and popularity in the 1970s through the campaigns of the Dalit Panthers in Maharashtra.⁶ In the 1973 manifesto of the Dalit Panthers, the referents of this term included SCs, Scheduled Tribes (STs), landless labourers, poor peasant women and exploited minorities (Omvedt 1995: 72). Thus the term encompassed a broader category of people who were economically and socially marginalized. However, in common parlance, the term has come to be associated with the former ‘Untouchables’. The specific meanings—‘crushed’, ‘split open’, ‘trampled upon’ as given in many dictionaries—echo their experience more than that of any other social group. In this work, by Dalit I refer to the people of the SC communities who had been (and in some sense, still are) treated as ‘Untouchables’ by caste Hindus. However, the term Dalit is not treated here as an undifferentiated category. Reference will be made to various Dalit castes highlighting the specificities of their exploitation and their responses and strategies in the context of the Maoist Movement.

Before entering into a discussion on the specificities of this research, my use of the concept of revolution needs some explanation here. I draw on Tilly’s (1978) conceptualization of revolution in order to illustrate the use of the term in relation to the Maoist Movement. Tilly insists that any conceptualization of revolution must look for two basic criteria. First, revolutionary ‘actors and actions’ should be ‘based on an oppressed class’, and the revolutionary organization must have ‘a comprehensive programme of social transformation in view’. Second, revolution should involve a ‘transfer of power’ (1978: 189). For Tilly, this represents a transfer of state power specifically, achieved through ‘armed struggle in the course of which at least two distinct power blocs make incompatible claims to control the state, and some significant portion of the population subject to the state’s jurisdiction acquiesces in the claims of each bloc’ (Tilly 1989: 3).⁷ How does this conceptualization apply in relation to the discussion of the Maoist revolution in Bihar? The Maoist programme given in the constitution of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) might put the discussion into perspective:

The Communist Party of India (Maoist) is the consolidated political vanguard of the Indian proletariat. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is the ideological basis guiding its thinking in all the spheres of its activities. Immediate aim or programme of the Communist Party is to carry on and complete the new democratic revolution in India as a part of the world proletarian revolution by overthrowing the semi-colonial, semi-feudal system under neo-colonial form of indirect rule, exploitation and control and the three targets of our revolution—imperialism, feudalism and comprador big bourgeoisie. The ultimate aim or maximum programme of the party is the establishment of communist society. This New Democratic Revolution will be carried out and completed through armed agrarian revolutionary war i.e. the Protracted People’sWar with area wise seizure of power remaining as its central task. The Protracted People’s War will be carried out by encircling the cities from the countryside and thereby finally capturing them (CPI (Maoist) 2004: 5).

Thus, consistent with Tilly’s definition of a revolution, the Maoist programme and the revolution discussed in this book involves a comprehensive programme of social transformation, seizure of state power through armed struggle and the participation of a significant segment of marginalized population in this struggle. I present the Maoist Movement as an ongoing revolution, as the key elements—seizure of state power and social transformation—remain to be accomplished. However, Tilly’s broader conception of the outcome of revolution, as ‘a displacement of one set of power holders by another’ (1978: 193) may be applied to the Maoist ‘base areas’ where the Movement has displaced the entrenched classes and set up its own parallel state. I shall discuss such revolutionary outcomes in later chapters.

This study of the everyday world of the landless Dalit labourers in the context of armed violence raises a number of significant questions that resonate with the concerns raised by anthropologists investigating peasant revolutions elsewhere in the world.⁸ Are Dalits, for instance, caught ‘between two fires’; trapped between ‘revolutionary and counter-revolutionary’ violence? This is a theme that, following the publication of David Stoll’s Between Two Armies: In the Ixil Towns of Guatemala (1993), has gained currency in some anthropological literature on peasant revolutions. Stoll argues that the peasants in revolutionary contexts are ‘rebels against their will […] coerced by the guerrillas as well as the army’ (1993: xi). Hence he refers to them as victims of ‘dual violence’ (ibid.: 20). This conceptualization of peasants and revolution calls for serious research and reassessment in the context of the ‘killing fields’ of Bihar. Evidence collected in the form of Munari Das’s statement just quoted and many such testimonies, which form the core of the book, implies that Dalits are not the victims of ‘dual violence’. I argue that if we categorize them as people caught between ‘two fires’ we deprive them of the voice to which they are entitled, and undermine the numerous ways in which they resist oppression and create political spaces for themselves. In this work, therefore, I explore the multiple voices, memories and practices of Dalits who live and fight in the ‘fields under fire’.

I contend that in the context of the Maoist Revolution, there is a movement among Dalits from relative quiescence to a mobilization and armed resistance, and to demobilization and a cautious management of agrarian tensions. Munari Das and scores of other Dalit labourers in Dumari are not ‘rebels against their will’; they engage in the Maoist Movement in a variety of ways—as party cadres, guerrilla fighters, loyal suppliers of food and shelter, and as both active and passive members of a host of revolutionary organizations. Moving beyond the ‘two fires’ theme, this book, therefore, raises and attempts to answer several key questions: Why did Dalits join the Maoist Movement? Did all Dalit castes support the Maoists? Was there any particular Dalit caste(s) at the forefront of the struggle? Did they rebel against the landlords because of the external assistance given by the Maoist party? How did Dalits in Dumari (compared to Dalits from other villages) become catalysts in this mobilization? What did they achieve through the struggle? What reasons do they give for their current state of demobilization? In examining these questions, I will engage with various studies on peasant revolutions,⁹ some of which highlight the nuances of peasants and revolution that Stoll’s work fails to acknowledge. As such, I will draw on some of the more salient theoretical insights of these studies to explore the position of Dalits in relation to the Maoist Movement in Bihar.

Asking which peasants are most prone to rebel and why, Wolf (1969) argues that the peasants who are likely to initiate a rebellion are smallholders or tenants who live in communal villages outside direct control of the landlords. The poor and the landless peasants, he maintains, who depend on the landlords for their livelihood are unlikely initiators of rebellion, unless they receive external help. Their poverty and vulnerability to repression hinder their involvement in revolutionary activities. According to Wolf, therefore, ‘the decisive factor in making a peasant rebellion possible lies in the relation of the peasantry to the field of power which surrounds it’ (1969: 290).

Scott, like Wolf, identifies the category of peasants who are most prone to revolt as small time landholders in the villages. But while Wolf argues that it is the material and organizational advantages of the small holders that underlie their insurrectionary capacities, Scott emphasizes the cultural and social autonomy that makes them capable of resisting ‘the impact of hegemony [that the] ruling elite normally exercise’ (1977a: 271). This autonomy is made possible by their village and kin-based social networks, which promote local, communal solidarity. Peasants are likely to rebel, Scott argues, when they experience the impact of capitalist market relations in the countryside, for those relations tend to breakdown age-old systems of patron-client relations of reciprocity, which protect them from market risks.¹⁰ He thinks that the situation of immigrant workers and landless day labourers, ‘may well seem more appropriate to strictly socialist ideas, but their social organization makes them less culturally cohesive and hence less resistant to hegemony’ (ibid.: 289).

In contrast to the position taken by Wolf and Scott, Paige (1975) argues that smallholding peasants are normally conservative and quiescent. He claims that landless wage earners and sharecroppers are more likely to become revolutionaries. He reasons that hired labourers, working on farms under more-or-less uniform contracts, are able to make common cause against landlords. Moreover, they risk no significant assets in a rebellion. In contrast, landholding peasants are less likely to rebel as they are isolated and mutually competitive over land and water rights. They are less likely to take risks as many of them are dependent on large landowners for marketing or other services and, therefore, do not want to turn against them.

Wolf, Scott and Paige ‘alike tend to envisage revolutions as “made by” class forces’ (Skocpol 1982: 369). They do not pay much attention to the role of revolutionary organizations and their analysis seems to claim that agrarian class relations themselves give birth to revolutionary movements. Perhaps even more than Wolf and Paige, Scott emphasizes the ‘spontaneous’ and ‘autonomous’ actions of the peasantry that ‘created revolutionary situations’ and ‘mobilized its would-be leadership’ (1977a: 295–6).¹¹ Migdal’s (1974) work, contrastingly, highlights another component of peasant revolution—the centrality of political organizations. He argues that peasant participation in revolution is made possible by a revolutionary leadership and organization which are ‘capable of absorbing peasants and then expanding power through their recruitment’ (1974: 232). Unlike Scott, Migdal claims that: ‘Revolutionary movements are created by the impetus of those from outside the peasant class’ (ibid.). He thinks that since the peasants possess relatively few of the resources, such as expertise and education, associated with organization building, their participation in ‘revolutionary organizations is preceded by the development of an organizational superstructure by students, intellectuals, and disaffected members of the middle class’ (ibid.).

Popkin (1979), meanwhile, introduces a different perspective on peasant rebellion. He criticizes the moral economy interpretation, best represented in the writings of Scott and also to some extent in Wolf (1969), and counters it with a political economy argument. His contention is that whether peasants choose to rebel or join in any form of collective action revolves largely around individual cost-benefit assessments of what will most improve their minimum subsistence level—action or inaction. Popkin writes that the ‘peasant is primarily concerned with the welfare and security of self and family’ (1979: 31), and consequently, ‘whether a self-interested peasant will or will not contribute to a collective action depends on individual—not group—benefits’ (ibid.: 251–2). In Popkin’s analysis peasants are best understood as individuals ‘seeking to stabilize and secure their own existence’ (ibid.: 88). Therefore, he claims, rebellions are positive efforts spurred by the ‘cost benefit calculat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Tables and Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Glossary
• 1. Introduction: Maoist Revolution in Perspective
• 2. Submerged Violences: Dalits, Landlessness, and Subordination in Bihar
• 3. From the Mud Houses of Dumari: Revolutionary Murmurings and Dalit Militancy
• 4. Bonded Labourer to Maoist Guerrilla: Life Story of a Dalit Revolutionary
• 5. Negotiating Powers: Dalits and Shifting Mobilizations
• 6. Production and Reproduction of Violence: State, Senas and Maoists
• 7. Conclusions: An Anthropology of Revolution
• Bibliography
• Index