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We Were Adivasis
Aspiration in an Indian Scheduled Tribe
By Megan Moodie The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-25318-3
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
If you study the picture closely, take your time, you will see it: the low hut, with its exposed brick and unfinished planks and corrugated iron roof, was once where Ram Lal's three-story cement house now stands. The photo is from the early 1980s, on cheap paper, now with a subaqueous cast between its white borders. It is precious as a relic of an earlier time, a small proof that it is past, built over. This is what it used to be like here in the neighborhood, Ram Lal tells me. You can see that things have changed, Meghna-bai. There are still many of us who are poor and backwards. But things have gotten better for some. This is what Ram Lal sees, the vision he wants me to share. It is irresistible. If you compare the hardscrabble shack of the photo, all opportunism and impermanence, with the planned security of the basti today — the electricity and always-functioning household water taps, the uniformity and pride — you cannot help but see perseverance, resilience, a line of flight. Change.
And it is not just the house in the photo. Ram Lal Solanki's personal biography, tied as it is to a history of building, is also such a tale. He has lived in Shiv Nagar Basti — a "slum" just outside the walls of the city of Jaipur, capital of the Indian state of Rajasthan — for his entire life. Having been born just after Indian independence, he has seen firsthand the rapid expansion of the city from three hundred thousand residents in 1951 to 2.3 million as of the 2001 census. Like many other Dhanka men of his generation, Ram Lal took a job in the Public Health and Engineering Department (PHED) working to maintain water and sewer lines for colony after colony that grew up in ever-denser rings around Jaipur's original walled city. As a member of one of India's recognized tribal communities, the Dhanka, he had no caste proscription against dealing with human waste. A strong affirmative action program guaranteed postings in government jobs for men of his community. Unlike many other men, however, he rose up to a position of some authority in the Jaipur office and at the time of his retirement in the early 2000s was making around Rs. 10,000 per month. His daughter is well settled. His sons will inherit his large house, which he owns outright. He is a respected elder in the neighborhood and in his community at large. Ram Lal often reminds me, with a wide grin, that, as an "ST" (member of a Scheduled Tribe) or "nich log" ("low man") who also failed the third grade, he has made quite a good life for himself. This is progress. Things are getting better.
Since 2002 I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Ram Lal's neighborhood, populated almost entirely by members of one of India's Scheduled Tribes (STs), the Dhanka. He was one of the first people I met in the community and has been a supporter, informant, friend, and concerned uncle ever since. His story, and the story of his extended family, figures largely in what will follow here. Even as this story is personal and specific, Ram Lal's photo also captures something important about the daily life of upward mobility in contemporary India. Here is a home, a symbol whose change over time stands for something — makes a stand, even; it cements improvement and new possible futures. But it is a dwelling, with an inside, a set of relationships between old and young, between women and men. For better or worse, it is an intimate space where the pleasures and struggles — the joy and violence — of much of life happen.
For Ram Lal, as for many Dhanka men, it is a point of pride that women in his family stay home as housewives and do not have to go out to work. This transition to domestic respectability is part of what it means to rise above a historically low status that required women to work (especially as agricultural laborers). Such a status also meant that Dhanka women were accessible to men outside the family. Indeed, what it means when things get better is a highly gendered question even when men and women seemingly agree that they are, indeed, better. For the most part, Dhanka women I know, especially those who are able to stay home and do not have to labor for wages, agree with Ram Lal's narrative of improvement and success. The ability to be a housewife, to be married and protected, is highly valued among women. For many of Ram Lal's female relatives, the proof of Dhanka uplift is to be found as much in this realm as in the concrete of individual houses.
It is also to be found in the annual samuhik vivaha ("collective wedding") held by the Dhanka each year. In this large-scale event, which convenes many of Rajasthan's estimated seventy-seven thousand Dhanka as well as participants from the neighboring state of Gujarat, women and men are matched by community elders and married off as couples in one large ceremony. The ideology of the samuhik vivaha is that it is undertaken for the uplift of the Dhanka as a whole, a social project that is intimately tied to the well-being of girls and women. The oft-repeated rationale for the expenditure of money and energy on the annual sammelan ("gathering or conference"), as it is known colloquially, is that samuhik vivaha protects girls from the kinds of exorbitant dowry demands that plague the poor in north (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, south) India. As these group weddings do not entail — indeed, do not permit — the giving and receiving of dahej ("dowry") and because they are conducted under the watchful eye of the community at large, Dhanka girls are more protected than other young women in Rajasthan today. In contrast to upper-caste Rajputs who harm and mistreat women, or other lower-caste groups not interested in undertaking efforts toward their own betterment, the Dhanka are able to link the protection of girls, group identity, and collective aspiration. When asking Dhanka women about what it means to be a woman in the samaj ("community"), one is very likely to hear reference to samuhik vivaha as proof that life is good for women.
But no story about upward mobility is simple. Like other tribal groups in India often referred to as adivasis (adi: "original"; vasi: "one who dwells"), the Dhanka are considered and consider themselves to be descendants of the subcontinent's earliest inhabitants — its aboriginals or autochthones; however, they cannot point to a homeland. The Dhanka identity narrative is that, as historically jungli ("wild" or "from the jungle") people who did not possess a defined occupation and were subjected to oppression and cruelty, they have done what it takes to get by: moving, taking up different kinds of work, persevering. It is this doing what it takes to get by, this willingness, that does the work of "culture" for the Dhanka and makes them both unique and indigenous; that is, original inhabitants and outside the Hindu-Muslim fold. The Dhanka do not embrace the term "adivasi," however. In fact, one is more likely to hear them refer to themselves as "ST" or "chhote-nich" ("little" or "low") than "adivasi," except in the past tense, as in the statement "Hum adivasi te" ("We were adivasis"). I have used their assertion "We were adivasis" as a theoretical jumping-off point and literary refrain in what follows.
Before we turn to the story of a research project, let's imagine for a moment other pictures, about as old as that of the rough slum shack. Ram Lal's sister-in-law, Bharati, mother of five and grandmother of five, draws them from a tin box kept in her locked trunk. In the first, she is a young woman. She wears trousers and a button-front shirt, with a towel wrapped around her hair to disguise her braid. Bharati is dressed as a man, for fun. She shows it with a sly smile. See it's not that hard to be like them. The second photo depicts her favorite hero, the actor Dharmendra, with one of his leading ladies. The black-and-white image, torn now from ogling devotion, shows them in a passionate conversation, possibly singing to one another. Dharmendra is really, really good. A bigger smile. He's my children's real father. We giggle. Things could have been otherwise.
Concrete and Otherwise
This is an ethnography of the gendered effects of upward mobility among an urban Scheduled Tribe and an exploration of the relationship between intimacy — as both a scale of analysis and quality of sociality — and what I think of as constitutionally-based collective projects of aspiration. It takes an in-depth look at how one small tribal group has availed itself of the possibilities opened up by India's twinned commitments to democratic freedom and social uplift, both in a literal, material way, as affirmative action quotas, and in a more imaginative way as the horizons of hope and possibility for making a better life for oneself and one's children. Without romanticizing the "otherwise" captured in Lakshmi's photos, I think that when they are taken together with Ram Lal's pictures they begin to tell an important story about the relationship between gender and social uplift in contemporary India as well as raise a number of questions that I will try to address: What is the relationship between the public, concrete success of Dhanka upward mobility and the quieter, intimate hopes and disappointments of Dhanka girls, women, boys, and men? What does upward mobility look like from inside an aspiring, yet still marginalized, group?
While there have been studies that try to assess the efficacy of affirmative action in India in terms of household income (see, for instance Borooah, Dubey, and Iyer's important 2007 study), or that look at its role in bolstering the political claims of Dalit and other subaltern groups (Ciotti 2006; Corbridge 2000; Michelutti 2008; Prasad 2001), the literature on affirmative action tends to focus on groups that have been either extremely successful or left out completely, with little attention to the complex positioning of those, like the Dhanka, situated in the lowest rungs of government service and urban society. This kind of ethnographic attention highlights collective aspiration as a lived, daily project. It considers uplift as a cultural process, not simply as an economic transition, and therefore asks us to take a new approach to Indian affirmative action, one that neither reduces the social complexities involved in uplift to the isolated quantitative indicators of the success or failure of affirmative action, nor takes a cynical approach to aspiration. I ask, rather, what is it that Dhanka women and men hope for when they hope? How are their aspirations articulated and lived? What happens when they are thwarted or disappointed?
In order to get at these questions, I argue, we must consider the complexity within as well as assertions of Dhanka identity. Though they are officially recognized as a tribe, a designation that may conjure notions of egalitarianism, the Dhanka are not homogenous but differentiated and stratified by gender, geography, education, employment, piety, and many other social factors. While I certainly write about "the Dhanka" or "Dhanka identity," the ethnographic task is to simultaneously destabilize their taken-for-grantedness by showing when and how these formations appear, and what work they do for different groups of Dhanka. As Gyanendra Pandey argues, "we have to ask how questions of power and privilege, subalterneity and difference, are navigated within subalternized constituencies and assemblages themselves" (2013, 33).
Inequalities of all kinds shape interactions between people; yet, at the same time, aspiration can be a collective project even when its material and imaginative contours vary widely. Thus, what it means to be Dhanka maychange according to context. As we will see throughout this ethnography, sometimes Dhanka-ness is equated with a kind of autochthony or historical oppression. At other times, the Dhanka articulate a position that is very similar to that of their non-tribal neighbors and might seem more "Dalit" than indigenous. Tracking this variation is part of the task of grappling with sociality within the tribe, or janjati (roughly "tribal caste"; see A Short Glossary), and between the tribe and the broader political sphere.
I focus especially on gender as the site of difference within Dhanka social life because gender is structurally central to the legal-political projects of social uplift and upward mobility in contemporary India. Marriage and family are privileged sites for the articulation of community identity and for the performance of social reform. From the quasi-legal definition of "tribe," which relies on the cultural "difference" of indigenous marriage practices (whether or not these exist), to the continued struggles over separate, religiously based personal laws for the management of marriage, divorce, and inheritance, to the ongoing preference for endogamy among almost all caste and tribe groups, communities often point to marriage and family practices to assert their shared history and beliefs. This is especially the case in Rajasthan, where the "right" of upper castes to cultural practices that harm women, such as Rajput claims about the religious validity of the immolation of a woman on the funeral pyre of her husband, often called sati, has been repeatedly asserted and contested since the 1980s.
This book is thus informed by and in conversation with much of the scholarship of gender and social reform in South Asia that has emerged in history, anthropology, and women's studies over the last twenty-five years. Indeed, studies of social reform, whether state, community, or organization based, have been among the most productive for seeing the ways that gender works as an enabling condition and a generative constraint across a variety of domains and social groupings that may not immediately seem to be about gender (Uberoi 1996). Challenging the conventional progress narrative of social reform in India, in which things are seen to improve for women and Dalits in a steady and predictable fashion over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century (with today being the "most free" moment), feminist scholars have long insisted that we see social reform as a process through which distinctions of class and caste are made (Sangari and Vaid 1989; Chakravarti 1989). Topics given extended consideration include child marriage and age of consent (Sarkar 1993, 2000), widow immolation (Yang 1989; Mani 1998), dress practices and codes (Devika 2005), and marriage practices (Chowdhry 1994; Arunima 1996), among others (see Sarkar and Sarkar 2008 for a sampling).
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider, however, that adivasi women are rarely the subject of such studies and that they have largely focused on colonial and postcolonial reform efforts in areas under direct British rule. As Andrea Major has recently shown, the images and discourses circulating in mid-nineteenth-century Rajasthan, where widow immolation was being practiced with royal sanction, were quite different from those in Bengal; explanatory models with their provenance in one culturally and historically specific location may obscure as much as illuminate (2006; see also Unnithan-Kumar 2000). Perhaps more to the point, however, the literature sometimes treats the ways that Dalit, lower-caste, and adivasi women (and men, to a certain extent) are constructed as the outer limit and discursive foil for upper-caste women's behavior as a conclusion to, rather than incitement for, research. Despite repeated references to the adivasi woman as a limit figure, there are few studies that engage directly with adivasi women's lives today or in earlier historical moments, particularly as agentive political actors.
A promising direction is suggested by those who have investigated the social reforms proposed by socialist, left wing, and Dalit political projects. While we do not want to romanticize the gender politics of such movements — J. Devika shows, for instance, how late-nineteenth-century scriptings of womanhood in Kerala played out in twentieth-century communist rhetoric (2005) — we should note that there have been other visions of what good women and the proper arrangement of marriage might look like. It seems important that non-elite leaders such as B. R. Ambedkar, Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker, and Jyotirao Phule all sought to remake marriage practices in quite a different way than those proposed by the upper castes or middle and upper classes, to include inter-caste, widow, and consent marriages free from Hindu ritual or priestly sanction (S. 1991; Chakravarti 2006). Studies that deal specifically with communities caught up in Ambedkarite internal reforms are useful here, particularly if we read them as being gendered in the sense that they track the emergence of a kind of marked masculinity, because they describe gender norms and processes that are constructed in direct opposition to the very ones proposed by upper-caste reform movements (for two very different examples, see Lynch 1969 and Ambedkar 2013).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from We Were Adivasis by Megan Moodie. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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