This article also shows that the poor (even in Bihar) are not all together politically excluded.
anthony xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Anthony P. D'Costa, Professor Comparative International Development University of Washington 1900 Commerce Street Tacoma, WA 98402, USA Phone: (253) 692-4462 Fax : (253) 692-5718 http://tinyurl.com/yhjzrm xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx On Tue, 17 Apr 2007, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3680/is_200304/ai_n9206073/print> Pacific Affairs, Spring 2003 Social Power and Everyday Class Relations: Agrarian Transformation in North Bihar Wilson, Kalpana SOCIAL POWER AND EVERYDAY CLASS RELATIONS: Agrarian Transformation in North Bihar. By Anand Chakravarti. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks (California), London: Sage Publications. 2001. 311 pp. (Tables.) US$59.95, cloth. ISBN 0-7619-9502-1. The nexus between social power and state power is frequently referred to in accounts of the eastern Indian state of Bihar, but gains real substance in Anand Chakravarti's micro-level portrait of everyday class relations in the village of Aghanbigha in Purnea district, as the author documents the day-to-day dealings of Aghanbigha's most powerful landowner, Mahanand Babu. Similarly, through his detailed observations of interactions between employers, labourers, supervisors and labour contractors, Chakravarti portrays with unusual effectiveness the rigid control maintained by the employer over the labour process, a central aspect of capitalist production. But the book's significance goes beyond its value as an empirical record: Chakravarti uses the experiences of Aghanbigha in the late 1970s to intervene in some of the key debates surrounding agrarian transition in general, and class relations in rural India in particular. Drawing upon earlier work in this field, he argues that capitalism does not necessarily require the existence of 'free' labour in the sense used by Marx. In fact, the persistence of 'traditional' relations of dominance and dependence actually facilitates the process of capitalist accumulation in agriculture, by making intensified exploitation of labour possible: "It was precisely the overwhelming power of the maliks -- economic, coercive, and social -- that gave them the ability to impose extremely rigorous working conditions on their labourers. A labour force that was subject to the arbitrary power of the dominant class was perhaps the most expedient means of accomplishing the required schedules" (p. 283). This brings us to what for Chakravarti is the central question: that of power in rural Bihar. Rejecting the view that caste should be regarded as purely 'superstructural,' he notes that "caste is crucially concerned with determining access to the means of production, control over the labour process, and forms of exploitation" (p. 106). The dominance exercised by Bihar's upper-caste landowners is thus derived from a combination of economic power, social (caste) power and coercive power, and reinforced by the power of the state. It would have been illuminating had Chakravarti incorporated more recent developments into this framework. In parts of Bihar, new dominant classes drawn from intermediate castes have -- in their competition for resources with older powerful landed groups -- adopted earlier patterns of coercion based on the notion of caste superiority to control their relationships with the exploited classes (see for example Kalpana Wilson, "Patterns of Accumulation and Struggles of Rural Labour: Some Aspects of Agrarian Change in Central Bihar, " Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 26, nos. 1 and 2, January/April 1999). Moreover, strategies and practices of dominance imply the potential for -- and fear of -- resistance by the dominated. Bihar has been the site of an organized left-led movement of the rural poor for the last two decades, in the course of which it has expanded both spatially and in terms of its agenda. A recent report from West Champaran district in North Bihar describes how in one village, an agitation in which the labourers succeeded in getting their daily wages increased -- although they remained abysmally low -- immediately preceded Panchayat (village council) elections: "Agrarian labourers led by the Party (the Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist) fielded Yogendra Majhi, the landlord started propaganda against him as a member of the dalit Mushahar caste. 'How can a Mushahar, having no home to reside in, not a chair to sit in, be made mukhiya? Even to drink water at a Mushahar's house is forbidden. No Mushahar has ever become a mukhiya, nor can he ever do so.' When this failed, the landlord got him implicated in a false case and sent to jail before the election. But the agrarian labourers had made it a matter of honour. Comrade Yogendra won the elections even from jailEAfter this victory, the agrarian labourers' confidence got a powerful boost" (Harendra Prasad Yadav, "Agrarian Labourers Rise in Champaran," Liberation, Central Organ of CPI(ML), 26 August 2002). As this illustrates, the experiences of this movement underline the multi-dimensional nature of agrarian power -- combining class, caste and state power -- which Chakravarti conveys with such clarity, while also suggesting that the power is not impregnable. School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, U.K. -- Yoshie
