Indian Peasants Research Articles

Precarious Migrancy, Community, and Resilience in Debendranath Acharya’s <i>Jangam </i>

Literary narrative provides a new perspective of looking at the historical past, often questioning the credibility of representation. Interrogating what Hayden White calls history’s tropic prefiguration, the prominence given to key historical figures, the erasure of subaltern individuals or communities, literature foregrounds the role of narrative in constructing the way one understands the world, meaning, and truth. A postcolonial writer, in their critical re-interpretation of the historical archive, creates a hybrid text that combines historical evidences and imaginative reconstructions, and historical as well as invented characters. With this interplay, history is stripped of its objective quality. This article seeks to explore how Debendranath Acharya’s Jangam presents the precarious condition of the migrant Burmese Indian peasants during World War II and the manner in which they establish a community during their historically forgotten long march to Assam. What Acharya attempts to reconcile in Jangam are the “analytical” histories through utilising the rational categories of modern historical thought and the “affective” histories which account for the plural ways of being-in-the-world.

Farmers’ suicides as an indicator of the agrarian transformation in rural India

The article is a review of the book by the Associate Professor of the Center for Political Studies of the Institute of Social Sciences of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi, India) Sudhir Kumar Sutar Dilapidation of the Rural: Development, Politics and Farmer Suicides in India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). The book considers the problems which the Indian peasants face under the state-driven transition from traditional rural community to agrarian capitalism. The book combines philosophical, sociological and political analysis of the causes and factors of the high number of suicides among medium-sized and small Indian farmers in recent decades. Suicides are the most striking manifestation of the social consequences of the capitalist development in the traditional communal peasant village. Among other consequences, the author considers rural social differentiation, growth of individualism and disunity, destruction of community institutions of support and social control, political protests up to riots, alcoholism, drug addiction, and rising crime rate. Thus, the inevitable economic reforms require compensatory measures of social policy.

Miserable Condition of Indian Peasants during Second World War in So Many Hungers By Bhabani Bhattacharya

Miserable Condition of Indian Peasants during Second World War in So Many Hungers By Bhabani Bhattacharya

Miserable Condition of Indian Peasants during Second World War in So Many Hungers By Bhabani Bhattacharya

Miserable Condition of Indian Peasants during Second World War in So Many Hungers By Bhabani Bhattacharya

Naukari, Networks, and Knowledge: Views of Indenture in Nineteenth-Century North India

This paper explores ideas about the colonial indentured labour system from the perspective of the rural Bihari communities from which many migrants came. In particular, it seeks to position indenture within a longer history of labour migration amongst North Indian peasants and workers, linking socio-cultural awareness of pre-colonial migratory behaviour to nineteenth-century understandings of indenture. Humanitarians, anti-slavery groups, Indian nationalists, and traditional historiographies have all argued that Indian labour migrants were ill-informed about the system of indenture and the locations to which workers were transported, presenting them as passive victims of colonial labour exploitation. More recently, revisionist scholars have challenged this long-held perspective, arguing that indentured workers were able to exercise considerable agency and benefit economically from the system. This paper contributes to ongoing efforts to view indenture from the migrants’ perspective by exploring the complex ways in which potential recruits engaged with and experienced the idea of indenture. In the process, it will demonstrate the varied sources of information (and misinformation) that helped to shape decisions about whether to engage in indentured labour migration.

Forgetting the Revolution and Remembering the War: Memory and Violence in Highland Bolivia

PREFACE The events that led to the inauguration of Evo Morales as President of Bolivia in January 2006 were heralded by journalists (foreign and national), academics and the President himself as nothing less than a revolution, to be compared to the indigenous uprising of 1781, Independence in 1825 and the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. I shall leave it to others to debate whether this is genuinely a revolution, 1 but certainly agree with James Dunkerley that is it is widely perceived as being one. 2 Whether or not recent events hark back to the eighteenth-century revolt of Tupak Katari, the primary reference is undoubtedly 1952, when miners and peasants overthrew the government, nationalized the mines and enacted a far-reaching agrarian reform. The election of Morales, hailed as the first indigenous president, can be seen as completing that mid twentieth-century overthrow of white oligarchic rule and its unfinished business. It also raises questions about how that Revolution is remembered. The mid-century events loom large for politicians, journalists and historians in their understanding of Bolivian history; as James Dunkerley has noted, they form a watershed where the ‘before’ of monolingual indian peasants ruled by feudal oligarchs is contrasted with the ‘after’ of a modern, increasingly mestizo and much more urban nation. That the Revolution may not have the same significance for ordinary Bolivians is rarely considered. In this paper I examine what the people of the Aymara village of Pocobaya remember – and forget – about the 1952 Bolivian Revolution; and how not only the fact but the very process of memory and amnesia is key to their understanding of who they are today.

Labouring to Choose, Choosing to Labour: Coercion and Choice in the Potosi Mita

The Spanish colonial labour regime in Latin America was known as the mita, and provided the Indian workers needed for numerous Spanish enterprises. The best known of the mita institutions was the Potosi mita, which lasted from 1573 to 1825. It drafted male Indians from the Viceroyalty of Peru to work in the huge Spanish silver mines at Potosi. The mita placed a heavy burden on the backs of Indian peasants, and adversely affected village life, since many Indians migrated to escape the harsh conditions of the mines. Yet while the Indians suffered as a result of Spanish colonial oppression, it would be a mistake to see them simply as passive victims; in fact, they exercised personal agency in a number of significant ways. One of these hots was by choosing whether to go to the mines or to migrate. Another way was by deciding either to leave Potosi after serving their time of forced labour or to stay on as voluntary workers, which had considerable economic benefits; and indeed, many of them elected to stay. Ironically, in giving the Indians this latter choice, the coercion of the Potosi mita ended up creating the voluntary long-term labour force that the Spanish had hoped for from the start.

Bakhtinian Approaches to the Indigenous World of Manuel Scorza

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY BAKHTINIAN APPROACHES TO THE INDIGENOUS WORLD OF MANUEL SCORZA OSWALDO ESTRADA RELYING on the novel as the optimum medium to represent the dialogic encounter of various social languages, the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin recreated in the first part of the twentieth century a hybrid world of intertwining ideological systems. He conceived the novelistic whole as a puzzle of compositional-stylistic unities, made up of unique dialects, authorial literary-artistic narration, different forms of oral or semiliterate discourse, and the personalized speech of characters. As literary critics of today, we can still draw on his theorizations regarding the ambiguous nature of the novel, a heterogeneous genre that allows individual voices to have some degree of autonomy while they remain subordinated to a leading language that controls the course of the narrative. By virtue of this novelistic conflict between multiple discourses, also known as heteroglossia, the reader can observe how opposing languages – centrifugal and centripetal, official and unofficial – encounter each other dialogically to reflect “the interaction among different attitudes and opinions of a society” (Booker 479). This sort of societal representation is achieved in Manuel Scorza’s Redoble por Rancas,1 a neoindigenist novel that confronts various social languages.2 Divided in two intermingling parts, one that delineates the 1 Although I cite from the Penguin edition of 1997, the novel was originally published in 1970. 2 I apply the term “neoindigenist” to Scorza’s text taking into account Antonio Cornejo Polar’s study of this subgenre within the context of the Indigenist literary movement. In short, the Peruvian critic differentiates a “neoindigenist” novel from an “indigenist” text because the first one portrays: a) a perspective under the influence of magical realism that reveals the mythical dimensions of the indigenous universe; b) the intensification of YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 153 conflict between the comuneros of Yanacocha and the town of Yanahuanca , and another one that portrays the silent battle between the village of Rancas and the International Cerro de Pasco Mining Corporation, the novel takes us to the center of a heteroglossic world. Scorza’s “account of the transition from a semifeudal system of land tenure (‘gamonalismo ’) to more ‘modern’ forms of imperialist and capitalist exploitation” (Larsen 137) embraces the orality of the Peruvian Central Andes and delineates its social dialects. Loaded with autochthonous sounds from the highlands, the language of the extremely poor and unprotected peasants , the authorial voices of the gamonales, and the standard Spanish dialect of those individuals from the Peruvian capital who reside in the Andes, the text highlights the language of the Indian, one that relies on “traditional oral stories, proverbs, prayers, formulaic expressions, or other oral productions” to perpetuate its existence (Ong 11).3 From its opening sentences, Redoble por Rancas confirms the validity of Bakhtin’s postulates in regards to the “living words in a novel,” since every utterance of the indigenous or mestizo individual is “charged with value . . . entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents” (276). This is obvious throughout the novel, but particularly when the leader of the Indian peasants, Héctor Chacón, reassures the people of his village that they will lose all their pastures and communal lands, due to their failure to combat the semifeudal landowner of Junín. As this revolutionary confirms what seems to be a perennial state of Indian servitude, Héctor tells them, full of rage and irony, that they will have access to a better world “cuando vuelen los chanchos” (45). The presence of this deterministic proverb explicitly engraves in the text not only the agonistic situation of the subaltern but also the seemingly impossibility of his survival in the pres154 ROMANCE NOTES the lyric quality of the text; c) the enlargement, complexity and mastery of technical devices, through a process of novelistic experimentation; and d) the expansion of the proper space for a narrative representation of the indigenous, with the real transformations of his world (“Neoindigenismo” 549). I analyze Scorza’s novel under these parameters and other postulates regarding neoindigenism in my article “Diglosia neoindigenista .” 3 In defense of orality, Raúl Dorra reminds us that, although our contemporary world is reducing the survival of oral production, “la identidad...

Nuestros años diez: La Asociación Pro-Indígena, el levantamiento de Rumi Maqui y el incaísmo modernista

Nuestros años diez: La Asociación Pro-Indígena, el levantamiento de Rumi Maqui y el incaísmo modernista

Settling the Convict

The social history of convicts is an area of study which has hitherto remained an uncharted territory. The muted convict voice makes an ephemeral appearance in most colonial histories as ‘convict resistance’, which is seen as the sum total of the convict's life experience. On the other hand, colonial records and monographs oscillate between two extremes in the categorization of the convict's social life. There is either a romanticization of the idyllic penal colonies where the convicts have the appearance of reformed savages, peacefully going about their daily chores, no different from the Indian peasants; or the convicts are seen as conniving brutes obsessed with the idea of ‘escape’, where the state of unfreedom that they are subjected to is seen as the most defining characteristic of their life in the penal settlement. Breaking out of these moulds, this essay has used the colonial project of settling the convict in the penal colony on the Andaman Islands as an entry point into the social life of the convict. The convict, when he arrived in the Andamans was akin to a shipwrecked vessel, severed from all ties and floating without an anchor. The doors of the social world he had inhabited before he set foot on the Andamans were supposed to be closed to him forever. The essay examines the attempt of the state to rebuild the life of such a dispossessed and beleaguered social being. The main denominators of the domestication of the convict were matrimony and setting up of a household. The essay explores the different notions held by the convicts and the state with regard to ‘family’ and ‘marriage’, and the fissures and tensions created in the system thereby. It draws upon government records, colonial monographs, interviews with descendants of convicts, and leaflets out of the lives of the convicts to narrate a social history of the Settlement.

Produktionssysteme im Wettstreit: Wissensorganisation im Kampf um den Weltmarkt für Indigo, 1880-1910

Competing Systems of Production. The Organisation of Knowledge in the Contest for the Indigo World Market, 1880-1910 In 1 897, the BASF launched an artificial version of the single most important textile dye, indigo. Soon it ousted its natural counterpart, which was mainly produced in British India. This success, however, cannot be explained by cost advantages. Rather, the key is to be found in a superior organisation of knowledge. The fragmented and poorly organised production system in British India consisting of thousands of Indian peasants, hundreds oi independent processing facilities and dozens oi independent merchants indeed attempted to develop modern means of distribution and to initiate research in order to improve the comparatively low efficiency of the production process. Yet this «scientification of production» proved to be inferior to that in the German chemical industry. Then again, also the BASF had to learn its lessons. With the rise of chemistry as an university subject, expert systems which were formerly closely intertwined with business increasingly withdrew from the economic sphere. Cooperation bet een universities and companies did only work temporarily, so the establishment of internal expert systems, i.e. RD Ernst Baumler, Farben, Formeln, Forscher. Hoechst und die industrielle Chemie in Deutschland, Munchen 1989; Anne Nieberding, Unternehmenskultur im Kaiserreich. Die Gieserei J. M . Voith und die Farbenfabriken vorm. Friedr. Bayer & Co., Munchen 2003. 3 Die beste Darstellung der Geschichte der industriellen Farbstoffbranche, daruber hinaus im internationalen Vergleich, bietet Johann Peter Murmann, Knowledge and Competitive This content downloaded from 207.46.13.11 on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 05:46:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Reclaiming Space on a Transforming Plantocratic Chequerboard: Pierre Boulle's Sacrilege in Malaya

Reclaiming space on a transforming plantocratic chequerboard: Pierre Boulle’s Sacrilege in Malaya Shanthini Pillai In their introduction to Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997), Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler write, “[t]he colonies of France, England and the Netherlands—more ambivalently, of Spain and Portugal—did more than reflect the bounded universality of metropolitan culture: they constituted an imaginary and physical space in which the inclusions and exclusions built into the notions of citizenship, sovereignty and participation were worked out”(3). However, the writers also point out that the working out of this space was not totally within their control for “what Europeans encountered in the colonies was not open terrain of economic domination, but people capable of circumventing and undermining the principles and practices on which extraction or capitalist development was based”(5). Malaya, through her status as a protectorate of the imperial governance of England, was one of these spaces upon which the rites of inclusion and exclusion were exercised. The colonialists present in the protected States clearly built upon codes of conduct that ensured that their governing space remained inaccessible to those they ruled over. Colonialist literature on Malaya provides glimpses into the enactment of such stratagem of empire. Yet they do also demonstrate the points of disruption to the colonialist stranglehold. This paper is concerned with the ways in which the rules of that very space were resisted by the colonised and chooses to look specifically at Indian plantation labourers in Malaya and the changing nature of their relationship with their colonial managers. Instead of the usual British planter, I have chosen instead a text by a French planter. Pierre Boulle’s Sacrilege in Malaya demonstrates interesting perspectives on dominance and subalternity, not only with the Indian labour force but also with France’s rival and far more dominant imperial power in Malaya, Britain. Shridath Ramphal once referred to the Indian peasants who were transported to work on the various colonial plantations in the nineteenth century as “mute pieces on the chequerboard of worldwide colonialism”(63). The argument that follows reverses this image of the muted figurines of labour while retaining the metaphor of the chequerboard as it demonstrates that the effort to keep the labourers well within the boundaries of the squares was not without its problems. Time and again, the planters found their coolies crossing over the boundary lines, thus claiming more space than they were entitled to on the colonial board and these were neither noiseless nor reticent performances. Boulle’s novel enacts the dynamics of such manoeuvres. The text opens with the image of a French financier and his cobbler, the former entertaining visions of an enterprise in rubber in British Malaya: You sing, therefore you act. I am and I think. I’ve tried to stop you acting and singing. I’ve been wrong, From now on we’re going to act together. You sing, therefore you act; you can work in wood just as well as leather. We shall extract latex from the trees of the equatorial forests. I shall move you there. You will tap the rubber trees. I shall give you the necessary tools. I shall plant more trees. I shall build you a house. I shall sell the rubber. All you need do is sing and tap the trees.” (4) His words depict a confidence of deftly controlling every movement of his labour force, manoeuvring each and every one of them on the chequerboard that he has devised for himself and ensuring that he stays well within the boundaries of the checks he is placed within. Yet, the dynamics of the plantation world is not as easily contained as he imagines it to be. The Indian labourer demonstrates remarkable agility in intermittently disrupting the manoeuvres of the colonial hand that is intent on working out and maintaining the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion within the coveted colonial space. The text proceeds with the arrival of Maille, newly recruited as assistant manager to one of the plantations in Malaya owned by the financier’s company, the Society for the Overseas Promotion of Horticulture, Industry and Agriculture or SOPHIA for short. His subsequent...

Popular Liberalism and Indian Servitude: The Making and Unmaking of Ecuador’s Antilandlord State, 1845–1868

Popular Liberalism and Indian Servitude: The Making and Unmaking of Ecuador’s Antilandlord State, 1845–1868

The Creation of a Human Rights Movement

This article discusses the role that social psychology can play in the face of violence problems and describes the process followed by an NGO (Non Governmental Organization) and a group of Indian peasants in the creation of a human rights movement in the Northern Highlands of Puebla. The narrative presents the most significant events that started the movement, the initial training, organizational and expansion phases. It describes the progress in observation, perception and reflection skills, as well as how the peasant group gradually comes to assume decision making. There have been successes and failures, yet the movement definitely tends toward self-reliance.

The IMF, the World Bank, and U.S. Foreign Policy in Ecuador, 1956-1966

Ecuador is rich in natural resources, but since its independence it has remained one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Historically dominated by a few wealthy landowning families, Ecuador's Indian peasants and mestizo workers were excluded from mainstream political, military, economic, and social institutions. Class divisions were paralleled by the regional schism between the agriculturally dependent indigenous people of the temperate highlands and the coastal population, whose livelihood emanated from plantation crops, light manufacturing, commerce, finance, and service industries (Hurtado, 1977:191; Schodt, 1987: 1-15; Blanksten, 1964: 28-31; Public Record Office, Foreign Office Archives [hereafter F.O.] 371148002, AS 2182/1, 18 February 1960). With almost 80 percent ownership of land, the oligarchy, which had investments in light industry, finance, and commerce and made up a tiny percentage of the 4.2 million people in 1960, dominated politics and determined the country's economic destiny. Because the state pursued policies that perpetuated the upper classes' privileged economic status, which is reflected in the grossly unequal income distribution of the second half of the twentieth century, workers have not experienced upward socioeconomic mobility comparable to that in Europe, Canada, or the United States. Foreign development and stabilization loans that the United States and the multilateral banks granted to Ecuador during the cold war perpetuated the uneven income distribution and dependency on foreign capital (Cardoso and Helwege, 1992; Pyne, 1973: 17). During the export-oriented growth period of 1948-1960 while the banana boom lasted, Ecuador enjoyed relative political and monetary stability. In the mid1950s, however, the prices of raw-material exports declined relative to prices of manufactured imports, forcing Ecuador to rely on foreign loans to

Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780-1840

In Smoldering Ashes Charles F. Walker interprets the end of Spanish domination in Peru and that country’s shaky transition to an autonomous republican state. Placing the indigenous population at the center of his analysis, Walker shows how the Indian peasants played a crucial and previously unacknowledged role in the battle against colonialism and in the political clashes of the early republican period. With its focus on Cuzco, the former capital of the Inca Empire, Smoldering Ashes highlights the promises and frustrations of a critical period whose long shadow remains cast on modern Peru. Peru’s Indian majority and non-Indian elite were both opposed to Spanish rule, and both groups participated in uprisings during the late colonial period. But, at the same time, seething tensions between the two groups were evident, and non-Indians feared a mass uprising. As Walker shows, this internal conflict shaped the many struggles to come, including the Tupac Amaru uprising and other Indian-based rebellions, the long War of Independence, the caudillo civil wars, and the Peru-Bolivian Confederation. Smoldering Ashes not only reinterprets these conflicts but also examines the debates that took place—in the courts, in the press, in taverns, and even during public festivities—over the place of Indians in the republic. In clear and elegant prose, Walker explores why the fate of the indigenous population, despite its participation in decades of anticolonial battles, was little improved by republican rule, as Indians were denied citizenship in the new nation—an unhappy legacy with which Peru still grapples. Informed by the notion of political culture and grounded in Walker’s archival research and knowledge of Peruvian and Latin American history, Smoldering Ashes will be essential reading for experts in Andean history, as well as scholars and students in the fields of nationalism, peasant and Native American studies, colonialism and postcolonialism, and state formation.

Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780-1950

Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780-1950

Liberals, the Church, and Indian Peasants: Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America. Jackson Robert H., ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. Index. Pp. 228. $47.50.)

Liberals, the Church, and Indian Peasants: Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America. Jackson Robert H., ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. Index. Pp. 228. $47.50.)

Robert H. Jackson (ed.), Liberals, the Church, and Indian Peasants: Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), pp. 228, $47.50 hb.

Robert H. Jackson (ed.), <i>Liberals, the Church, and Indian Peasants: Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America</i> (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), pp. 228, $47.50 hb.

The Countryside in Colonial Latin America

Our ideas about colonial Latin America are often tied to urban scenes. But this collection of eleven original essays, the first overview of rural life in colonial Latin America, shows the many ways in which the countryside rather than the city dominated colonial life in Brazil and throughout Spanish America. Over 80 percent of the population lived in rural areas, earning their livelihood from raising crops and livestock. Most were labourers, with Indian peasants or black slaves. Land owners and church officials comprised a tiny elite that enforced social control, provided capital and linked haciendas to city markets. The racial and occupational characteristics of each of these social groups are carefully delineated in individual essays. These essays also examine the rural economy, material culture and ecosystems of the countryside.