Sociology and the Vagrant: Beggars, Welfare and Tradition in Writing about the New Citizen in 1950s India

Abstract

Exploring the work of M.S. Gore and the Delhi School of Social Work on Delhi’s ‘Beggar Problem’, which was published in 1959, this article shows how the ostensibly ‘secular’ solutions to the phenomenon were premised on a series of assumptions about caste-oriented mores and traditions of religious gifting, suggesting normative categories of citizenship based around these forms of identity. The article explores, in depth, the sociological approaches of Gore’s (and others’) study of beggary and argues that the emergent social policy on vagrancy connected to emergent concepts of social citizenship and rights to welfare. In the body of the reformable beggar receiving indiscriminate religious charity lay one of the core symbols of India’s drive towards a modern citizenry. This position on the sociology of beggars was also the product of two larger processes at work in mid twentieth century social sciences: firstly, the development of interdisciplinary approaches by anthropologists and sociologists as they came to terms with new research challenges in democratic India, and secondly, the move to consider new forms of direct social policy applications for research, via government sponsorship. Using Gore’s study, the article looks in detail at researchers’ concerns with labour productivity, religious charity and the possible secular forms of beggar rehabilitation. But ultimately, the School of Social Work’s study, in its apparent critique of draconian colonial controls, did not overturn the continued application of Indian anti-beggary laws in subsequent decades. This article argues that this was a product too of its configuration of social welfare as an outcome of longer-term societal change rather than state policy.