Poverty and the Quest for Life

Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India

Bhrigupati Singh

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226194684
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

The Indian subdistrict of Shahabad, located in the dwindling forests of the southeastern tip of Rajasthan, is an area of extreme poverty. Beset by droughts and food shortages in recent years, it is the home of the Sahariyas, former bonded laborers, officially classified as Rajasthan's only "primitive tribe." From afar, we might consider this the bleakest of the bleak, but in Poverty and the Quest for Life, Bhrigupati Singh asks us to reconsider just what quality of life means. He shows how the Sahariyas conceive of aspiration, advancement, and vitality in both material and spiritual terms, and how such bridging can engender new possibilities of life.Singh organizes his study around two themes: power and ethics, through which he explores a complex terrain of material and spiritual forces. Authority remains contested, whether in divine or human forms; the state is both despised and desired; high and low castes negotiate new ways of living together, in conflict but also cooperation; new gods move across rival social groups; animals and plants leave their tracks on human subjectivity and religiosity; and the potential for vitality persists even as natural resources steadily disappear. Studying this milieu, Singh offers new ways of thinking beyond the religion-secularism and nature-culture dichotomies, juxtaposing questions about quality of life with political theologies of sovereignty, neighborliness, and ethics, in the process painting a rich portrait of perseverance and fragility in contemporary rural India.

ONE

First Impressions, and Further

In October 2005, I made my first visit to Shahabad. I took a train from Delhi to Kota, a city in southeastern Rajasthan, and from there I boarded a bus. Shahabad, settled on low hills and sparsely forested plains adjoining the central Indian Malwa Plateau, is a five-hour bus journey from Kota. I jostled with fellow travelers for elbow room, finally claiming a seat as the sun set. As our bus neared the village of Mamoni, my destination for now, I was startled by a luminous orb hovering close by, atop a low hill. I had seen it before. Nonetheless, this was the first time the moon chose to reveal itself to me, so blatantly round and brilliant and near. No wonder dogs howl and tides stir. Ours are water bodies too. Nearer still, just outside our window, were trees, a few of which seemed to be twisted with distress. Others stood swollen and proud. These were typical postures, I was told, in a dry deciduous forest area such as Shahabad. The trees, like other inhabitants of the region, were recovering from a trauma, two successive droughts between 2001 and 2003, a period of crisis, the tremors of which had brought a number of visitors to Shahabad.

Briefly Newsworthy

All of Rajasthan was declared drought affected in early 2002. Prompted by sporadic reports in local newspapers of hunger deaths in Baran (the district that includes the subdistrict of Shahabad), a five-member team from the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL, Rajasthan) visited Shahabad in October 2002, hosted by the NGO Sankalp (Khera 2006: 5165). The team reported eighteen starvation deaths among the Sahariya tribe in Shahabad and the neighboring subdistrict of Kishanganj. Some Sahariya families had resorted to eating “wild grass,” called sama, in the face of the famine (Right to Food 2002a: 2). PUCL filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court of India, claiming state negligence with regard to famine relief: “The country’s food stocks reached unprecedented levels while hunger intensified in drought-affected areas” (Right to Food 2002b: 1). NGOs across six Indian states joined the litigation, describing situations comparable to Shahabad even areas unaffected by drought and beginning the national Right to Food campaign (Khera and Burra 2003).

A flurry of news reports on the Sahariyas appeared in national and international media, with headlines such as “Death, Disease Stalk Rajasthan Villages” and “Hunger Deaths in Baran.” An article in the New York Times titled “India’s Poor Starve as Wheat Rots” was said to be a global embarrassment for the Indian government. A controversy flared up between rival political parties—the Congress, in power at the Rajasthan state government level, and the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), the central government at the time—over the misuse of funds. These controversies, fueled by upcoming state elections in 2003, led to a significant increase in governmental efforts in the second drought year, with the number of people employed in famine relief work rising from 400,000 in 2000–2001 to nearly 1 million in 2002–3 (Khera 2006: 5165).

In November 2002, a disaster response team from the global NGO Doctors without Borders assessed eight villages in Shahabad and Kishanganj, and detected “pockets of malnutrition” (Quinn 2003: 2). Following a reassessment three months later, the End of Mission Report stated that the crisis was over: “The huge influx of relief programs undertaken through government bodies has effectively reduced the prevalence of malnutrition” (8). Journalists continued to trickle in occasionally to count deaths and to write about rural poverty in articles such as “Death’s Welcome Here, At Least It Gets Us Attention and Some Food” (Nagaraj 2004) and “Sahariyas Need the Right to Living” (Saxena 2004), but Shahabad’s moment in the limelight had passed.

Temporalities of Crisis

When does a crisis begin and end? Anthropological reporters like myself inhabit a temporality different from journalists and disaster relief professionals. I first heard about Shahabad as its share of newsworthy excitement was ending. Was there anything left to report? I happened to read a poem on rural hunger that a niece of mine had written for a school project in Bangalore. What spirit possessed her to write that? Maybe her poem compelled me to continue.

I gradually covered the degrees of separation to a potential host in Shahabad. Part of the PUCL team in 2002 was a young economist I knew, Reetika Khera, a student of Jean Dreze, the coauthor of Hunger and Public Action (1989) with Amartya Sen. Among Dreze and Sen’s central theses is that governments, in conjunction with vigilant media and civil society groups, may succeed in at least temporarily addressing newsworthy crises such as famines. In contrast, because of the lack of newsworthy drama, it is more difficult to analyze and to generate public sentiment around endemic scarcity and inequality. I wanted to understand what was endemic in such a milieu. An anthropologist can hardly compete in the high-stakes arena of disaster relief. Those hungry for news may get bored with life after a disaster, although the stakes are no less high. I followed my initial impulses in part, to understand the scarcity of forests, land, water, and grain. Gradually, though, I realized that to be true to those I came to know in Shahabad, I could not talk only about lack, even in a milieu of poverty. And then gods and spirits beckoned me, since they, too, were part of this landscape. Maybe I got distracted from “real” material issues as a result. Or let’s say I had time to look around. It was not only a distraction. I began to define the quality of life somewhat differently from economists.

Hosts and Patrons

After a brief introduction by Dreze’s student, I called on Moti, a founding member of Sankalp,1 the NGO that hosted the PUCL team in 2002. Moti and his partner Charu, both in their early forties, ran Sankalp at the time. Moti was from the nearby city of Kota, although “nearby” is a relative term. “Kota felt much further away till even ten years ago,” he said, describing how Shahabad used to be called a jungli (wild) area. Charu was from Ajmer in western Rajasthan. Sankalp’s other employees, around ninety in all, were men and women from the surrounding villages.

On our first evening together, Moti asked me for a definition of truth. I said I was still looking, an answer that met his approval. “What will be the use of your research?” Charu would joke, but then she would reply patiently to every question I asked. “This is all andhavishwas [blind faith/superstition],” she would say as I began to get interested in the deities around us. But then she added that her first-ever Google search was for the word God, and told me stories of her grandmother, a renowned healer in Kota, whose memorial shrine is still visited by those once healed. Charu was intermittently ill during my fieldwork, and doctors offered varying and unclear diagnoses. A year after I left Shahabad, she died.

Early on I asked Moti and Charu, uncomfortably, “How much may I pay Sankalp?” “No question of it!” they replied. “We built this place for education.” It was their prerogative to refuse—and mine to at least cover the resources on which I drew. I calculated the financial aspect of my stay with Chanda, next in command at Sankalp after Moti and Charu. In his midfifties, he was a Brahmin from the neighboring village of Mundiar. It was said that Chanda knew every lever of the government machinery in Shahabad. “We are the grassroots,” he would bellow, using the English word to stress the gravitas of the matter, and adding a couplet from the Ramayana as a flourish. Others lower down in the chain of command nodded appreciatively, and mocked him later on. No one ever got the whole amount of a labor payment from him at one go. “Otherwise they’ll take you for granted,” he insisted.

My own patrons could afford to be more generous. They were not kings, yet neither were they entirely unknown. I received a research grant funded by the estate of Andrew Mellon, a Philadelphia financier who died in 1937. The higher education I sought was hosted and funded by Johns Hopkins University, begun by another such financier. What interest did these patrons have in me? Knowledge for the World was my university’s motto, and I was glad to comply. I am grateful to these American philanthropists, whose capital enabled my relative freedom. Ours was an ideological transaction.

Some say that our economic base determines our opinions. Should I have been more self-reliant? “One cannot begin without borrowing,” the American thinker Thoreau tells us. The land on which he lived during his now famous period of spiritual research at Walden Pond belonged to his mentor, Emerson, and Thoreau borrowed an axe to build his house. Borrowing in itself is not a sign of servitude. The crucial question is how we use the tools and return the capital. “I returned the axe sharper than I borrowed it” is Thoreau’s report.

Early and Belated Trails

I studied a map of Shahabad and wondered how I might plot the intensities of life that compose this landmass.

Moti explained the lay of the land. “Shahabad is divided into two halves, upreti [upland] and talheti [lowland], separated by the steep descent of the Shahabad ghati [valley]. Kailash will show you around initially.” Kailash was in his midthirties. He had studied until class 9 and been part of Sankalp ever since. He lived in Mamoni, a few minutes away from the Sankalp campus. Initially, he rarely spoke. He had seen many visiting researchers before me and showed me their reports, which lay piled in the Sankalp storeroom. Governments and NGOs had repeatedly surveyed the area in the last few years. I, too, selected a few villages in which to conduct some initial household surveys.

Among the first villages I visited with Kailash were the ones I remembered from news reports. By the time I began research in Shahabad in October 2005, the drought was a somewhat distant albeit still contested memory. “No one dies of starvation in this day and age,” Chanda emphasized, when I asked about his village of Mundiar, which had appeared often in the news. “That was just a cooked-up political khichdi [stew]. Our area got defamed.” The term starvation deaths was disputed by many in Shahabad. I asked Moti about this. “The debate is whether it was kuposhan [malnutrition] or bhookhmari [starvation],”2 he replied. “Some people don’t like the term starvation, because it hurts their self-respect. What can’t be disputed is that everyone faced difficulties at the time.”

Another common postmortem contention was that the akaal (drought) had turned into a sukaal (time of plenty) for the Sahariyas. Before 2002, only 25% of Sahariya families had official Below Poverty Line (BPL) status. As a result of the starvation deaths controversy, all Sahariya families were declared BPL, which entitled them to 35 kilograms of government-subsidized wheat every month, to be bought from the local Public Distribution System shop at the rate of 2 rupees (Rs.)/kg. According to state budgetary announcements, Rs. 4,766.34 hundred thousand had been sanctioned for the generation of one hundred days of employment for each Sahariya family (GoR 2006a: 80). Scores of new NGOs had mushroomed in the area. The precise number of NGOs now serving Shahabad was disputed, but the most popular figure was 217. Most of them are just “shops for profit,” people added.

My first field visit with Kailash was to Lal Kankri, a village mentioned in many news reports. “The part of a village where Sahariyas live is called a sehrana,” Kailash explained. Every “in-depth” news story began by mentioning this, taken as indicative of the Sahariyas’ separateness from the village mainstream. We arrived to find the entire sehrana, two long rows of mud huts, empty but for one young blind man sporting a surprisingly stylish haircut and dark glasses. His sole companions were a geriatric and two or three babies who were conducting some research of their own on the ground. It was blazing hot. Our motorcycle ride had been tiring. “Where is everyone?” I asked the young man.

“It’s soybean-cutting season,” he informed me. “Everyone has gone to work in nearby villages.”

“Why are all the houses locked?” I asked, noticing hefty padlocks on the wood doors of the huts.

“Children sometimes run away with fistfuls of wheat and sell it to the baniya [merchant] in exchange for gutka [flavored betel-nut powder]. So we lock the doors to protect the wheat.” In recent months, local newspapers had been carrying outraged articles about how government-subsidized wheat provided to Sahariyas was on sale in local markets at higher prices.

“I like your haircut,” I told the blind young man.

He grinned. “It is a Mithun cutting [a hairstyle named for Mithun Chakraborty, an aging film star]. It is in fashion these days.”

Our next stop was Mundiar. The village school was in session. We stopped to greet a circle of male schoolteachers. I introduced myself: “I have come to do research on the Sahariyas.”

The teachers laughed. “I have an idea for you to write about,” one of them declaimed. “The peacock is our national bird. The tiger is our national animal. Like that, the government should make Sahariyas the national human.”

The school principal chuckled, and added his view: “So much is being done for Sahariyas. No one can calculate how many crores [millions] the government has spent in the last forty years. And still, they’re vahin ke vahin [where they were]. Nothing can be done to help them.”

I soon learned that this was an oft-repeated “commonsense” view in the area. Kailash uncomfortably attempted a rejoinder, “Who does the most labor in this area?” but his question drifted away as a one-off rhetorical salvo. As we left, he told me, “That teacher who said that Sahariyas should be national humans is himself a Sahariya, Jeevan Lal. Motiji helped him get a job as a government schoolteacher [among the best-paid professions in this milieu].” I met Jeevan Lal many times after that, and he did indeed acknowledge his gratitude to Moti.

After a short walk from the school, we reached Mundiar village and looked for Murari Sahariya. In 2002, he had appeared in numerous news reports that described how he lost his father, mother, wife, and a twenty-day-old child in the space of a few days. We learned that Murari had remarried and moved away. “Let’s go further into the lowlands,” Kailash said. The main road through Shahabad was being transformed into an eight-lane superhighway. A few byways perpendicular to this main road lead to village settlements. Most villages, though, are located further off these byways, reachable only through forestland. We drove to Sandri, one such village.

As we passed desolate shrubs and trees, I wasn’t sure where the forest began. Kailash told me the names of different trees as we passed them. Not a single animal was in sight. Kailash seemed to have overheard my thoughts. “I used to feel scared passing through the forest. There were tigers, bears, boars, deer; now there are only jackals left; you hear them at night. Some say there is still one tiger left in the Shahabad valley.” As we descended through the valley into the lowlands, I looked around, wondering where that lone tiger might be hiding. Black-faced langurs sat in formation along the main road, randomly attacking passing motorcyclists. I was better acquainted with their smaller cousins, the red-faced monkeys, who began to make incursions into Delhi after the patches of dry deciduous forest at the edges of our city had disappeared.

Sitting behind Kailash, I felt full of thoughts. The day so far could have left me disappointed and cynical. Instead, I felt a sense of relief. I was not searching for a newsworthy catastrophe. Something about the air of Shahabad left me in a state of nervous excitement.

I noticed a small platform shrine decorated with colorful flags. Kailash saw me looking curiously at it, and explained, “That is Tejaji. He is the main god of the Sahariyas. I, too, keep a fast for him.”

We approached the village of Sandri, settled on a hill. Our motorcycle rattled along a rocky upward path. A group of old women spotted us from a distance. By the time we were nearing the hilltop, one of them had appeared at the helm of the group. “Have you come to see our condition?” she yelled, in a dialect I only half understood. “Come to my house and see if you can find even a handful of grain.” Kailash introduced me: “This is Bhriguji. He is going to be here for a year and a half.” The old woman relaxed somewhat and introduced herself as Chingo, a part-time employee of Sankalp. We walked through her village. Groups of men were playing cards. My stock of questions had begun to sound inadequate to me. I decided against taking out my survey form for now, until I had gone through the piles of reports at Sankalp and had a chance to think of better questions.

As we headed back, Kailash explained, “What Chingo was speaking was the dang ki bhasha [the language of the forest].”

“Oh, is that the language of the Sahariyas?”

“No, saaton jaat [all ‘seven castes’] in Shahabad speak that language.”

“What do you mean, all ‘seven castes’?” I had never heard the term before, despite having read a fair amount of the Indian anthropological literature on caste.

“Meaning...