1.1 Introduction
āWe are not poor. Poor means unable to afford food, clothing, and shelter. We have all that, but we are Majboor (vulnerable),ā says Aditya , a Sur Gond in the village of Mahalapur, cautioning me not to judge him and his village by their constrained choices of doing precarious forms of work. Aditya is young and unemployed. Despite being a graduate with qualifications and hoping to get a teaching job in his village school, he does casual, unskilled wage work in the stone quarries nearby in order to make a decent wage. The Gonds (who are spread all over the country and speak different regional dialects) have historically been a predominantly forest-based community. However, in 1994 the Panna Tiger Reserve restricted their access to the forests by imposing sanctions, including fines and imprisonment. Today, such villages with predominantly tribal populations are being rooted out of their forests to build dams or for wildlife conservation projects, reducing them to wage labourers . But the Gonds seek to be autonomous, control their own welfare and meet their needs by diversifying their livelihoods even as they battle the state against displacement and resettlement from the forests. Some households engage in multiple occupations, while others survive on a single source of income. Seasonal migration is taken up to work in construction and stone quarries both in-state and out-of-state of Madhya Pradesh. Mahalapur is one amongst many grams in India that have been reduced to labour colony for the wider ādevelopmentā of the region.
More than half of the older generation in Mahalapur has perished to silicosis because it was incorrectly diagnosed as tuberculosis. Improper diagnosis and treatment of silicosis often led to premature death, typically around the age of 40 (Baviskar 2008). The 27 out of the 71 households that I covered in surveys (table in Chapter 2) are widowed households. The technology, from Switzerland, to detect and diagnose the disease arrived only in 2011 when I started my fieldwork. The stone-quarry workers are being X-rayed for their free medical treatment by the government. Gond children from a young age are found helping family members earn a living in the region. The closure of stone quarries , a crucial source of income for everyone in the region including the Gonds, inside the forest and growing restrictions on forest access affect everyone in the district of Panna. These changes, however, raise particular challenges for Gond households, especially for widowed households who faced greater constraints as they are completely forest depended unlike other marginalised communities. Schooling is the only time children can take a break from various household chores such as preparing dinner or storing water as there is no running water in most houses and modern amenities to keep the cost of living low through woods used for heating and cooking.
Precarious lives coupled with illiteracy make the Gonds unable to articulate their needs and choose to labour and migrate to cities and escape bondage and starvation. Their relations with the forests and state are growing more weaker by the day. Most see integration with the wider Hindu community as the best way forward at the moment. This book therefore makes a strong case for urgent anthropology before the Gonds completely integrate and loose their unique cultural heritage and identity. The Gonds are Ć Schedule Tribe (ST) community in the Panna district of Madhya Pradesh. The book aims to document how changing political economy in the region, such as the closure of quarries and restrictions on forest access, has led Gonds to engage in a wide range of livelihood activities. Gond migration within the state of Madhya Pradesh and to the major cities of India has intensified since 2011 as they have been banned from collecting wood from the forests. This has had significant effects on their traditional ways of livelihood that was coming from the forests. Finally, the book pays particular attention to differences in household types, namely gender, landholding, age, strategies to secure work and the role of children in householdsā income generation activities. While new livelihood activities,1 such as road construction work and seasonal migration , have led to enhanced income streams for some households, this income is largely consumed by marriage expenses and the pursuit of upward mobility but at the cost of pooling in resources for households from children who have to skip schooling to make their contribution. The readers should note that the Gondsā account in the book is specifically referring to the Sur Gonds and not the Raj Gonds who are the privileged Gond community.
1.2 Plan of the Book: Politics of Labour, Methodology and Urgent Anthropology
The chapters are based around the themes of politics, anarchy , statelessness and autonomy experienced by Gonds. For this, several Gond households have been empirically described in terms of division of labour and access to income sources. The book shares the contention that freedom is an immeasurable virtue experienced through work. The overall aim is to explain the normative and subjective experiences of morals, ethical and virtues out of making a living from precarious and informal kinds of work from multiple sources and sites. Empirical ethnographic account is used to describe the practice of dignity, autonomy and freedoms in the contexts of scant material possessions, especially amongst low-income groups. The Gonds challenge how anthropology of work, family and economy is still Eurocentric. Such approaches to work have focused too much on material aspects of labour such as wages , working conditions and tenuousness of work measured in terms of markets and state but not enough on the household which are the main subjective and ideological focus for agrarian and tribal people such as theirs. The fieldwork revealed that despite modern and postcolonial state in the region, the social institutions of family and kinship are being reinvented and adapted to the changing market forces. In that sense, the Gondsā lives contribute to the anthropology of postcolonial lives in villages across India and how they differ from the unitary and nuclear bureaucratic definitions of households as defined by the social schemes of state . There is also the concern with urgent anthropology raised here using an empirical description and documentation of the Sur Gonds as they are facing a threat to their cultural identity due to forest conservation policies which are driving them out of the forests. Empirical accounts of Gond livelihood profiles have allowed me to cover more diverse and a range of case studies as in Chapters 4ā6. Also, empirical accounts have allowed to compare not only Gonds with other Gonds, but also Gonds with other non-tribal communities with whom they coexist like the Dalit communities who are also economically marginalised by the Tiger Reserve in the region. The differences are both subjective and material; however, recently due to integration with the cash economy, the differences between the communities and within the Gonds have become more materialistic with clear empirical differences amongst them.
In Chapter 1, I open the chapter with how a very young Gond expresses his communityās current situation. The chapter engages with major current ethnographic framework on social capital, social institutions, state and cash-based transfer. There are not many scholarly works that can show precarious workers in triumphant over the state despite the precarious working conditions such as temporariness, irregularity and insecure forms of work. It shows how Gonds make a choice, even if not always easy and desirable to choose to labour precarious economies so that they can have one foot in the farm which secures their food security and another in the informal economy and supplemental income. The aim of this chapter is to empirically layout the current politicalāeconomic situation and a brief discussion of the Gondsā relations with the state and the forest department. I use Tania Li ās work on how governmentalities and rationalities run into various problems in postcolonial governance followed by Scottās studies of the Zomia community in Burma that also resist the state control through their agrarian practices. I also engage with Sahlinsās work on primitive tribal societies that transform at the material level due to cash economy.
I also refer to the work of Bhrigupati Singh amongst Sahariya tribal communities useful due to his work on the symbolic ādeath of the forestā as the Sahariyas are forced to deal with the modern state and the forest department. Later, I also refer to Fergusonās work on the impact of social assistance schemes in the form of cash transfer, especially on the poor households in Namibia and how to conceive of the basic income framework when a nationās natural resources are contributed towards global wealth production. I compare that with the Gondsā experience who are bearing the brunt of economic and conservation development projects in the form of displacement without any compensation. Also, the chapter makes it clear that the Gonds described in the book are not all homogenous. Hindu-style caste system is present and leads to three types of Gonds, and the book focusses on Sur Gonds that are residing inside the Tiger Reserve . Lastly, this chapter describes in detail the methodology and the experience of my initial immersion in the field and my own position as an Indian doing an ethnography on other Indians. I also describe how the town people and Gonds interpreted my daily presence differently and how that influenced my fieldwork.
Chapter 2 is an empirical descriptive account of the region and then moves to the description of the Gonds. It first begins by describing the various conquests the region has experienced starting from the Mughals, the Rajputs and then the British. Itās not based on archival research but upon the oral accounts from the townspeople as well as the Gonds. All the oral accounts of the forests are all oral narratives from the Gonds that are the main focus of the book. Gonds have been practising subsistence farming for over a century in this region long before the recent cash-based integration, and remnants of the past feudal structure and bondage are still present in the surrounding remote and isolated tribal hamlets. The difference is, as compared to the past that Gondsā practice of subsistence farming was using a bullock as compared to today where they use tractors and an electric water pump. This has radically commercialised their farming even at a small scale. Another difference is that the markets did exist in the past but the Gonds were paid in shells or grains in exchange for their labour and were previously part of a feudal order and bondage/slavery system to the local prince or the big landlords up until 1975 when Indira Gandhi abolished all bonded labourers and redeemed the poor of all previous debts. This chapter locates the Gonds in the local regional history and ethnographically evaluates their current experiences with the state and the forests. The purpose of these oral narratives is also to understand the chronological account of Gondsā relations with different rulers in the region and how it has changed gradually over the years. I believe these are fundamental and evolutionary questions of how the state has treated the Gonds in this region before moving forward to current market and economic conditions in which the Gonds labour. The assumption here is that there is a traceable historical continuity in the ideologies of work and labour, especially based on the observation that Gond women labour as equally as Gond men which is only to practise in the Gond community and not others who are also equally affected by the Tiger Reserve . The chapter also observes how the Gonds are adapting to Hindu and Rajput cultures. This is reflected in their everyday attire and in gender relations where womenās bodies and movements are regulated by the wider patriarchal norms. This helps to explain the changing ideologies of family and kinship further in Chapters 4ā6.
These empirical accounts of the past life of the Gonds also allow us to compare present Gond lives as they are quickly integrating. What aspects of their lives are changing and which are adapting and which have still been untouched so more future research on their community can be done.
In Chapter 3, I describe the subjectivities arising out of labouring in precarious forms of work in the informal economy. I introduce the subjective concept of roji (source of livelihood ) and majoori (labour) which are the everyday reality of their lives. I ask here what do current observations like alcohol drinking practices (even amongst younger boys), spirit possession, interactions with the labour market and migration help to explain the changing practices of family and kinship ideologies at the household level as they labour for their families. How is the market transforming the household? This is further explained upon in various empirical case studies that are described in Chapters 4 and 5. What institutions of discipline and punishment have Gonds put in their village to resist their integration while also trying to strive for autonomy and freedom from bondage which is always a real threat. It shows the dichotomous but also selective choices that Gonds make in order to remain independent of the state that cannot anymore assure forest-based livelihoods which is a huge blow to their identity, self-preservation and morality coming from the forests. I foc...