Marriage and the crisis of peasant society in Gujarat, India

ABSTRACT

This contribution takes marriage as the example of a crisis of production and reproduction in rural India. Through the juxtaposition of ethnography separated by six decades, we detail a shift away from land and agriculture as the primary markers of status among the Patidars of central Gujarat, western India, in favour of a hierarchical understanding of international migration. The paper discusses the disconnect between a cultural revolution in favour of migration, and the failure of many to live up to their own cultural standards. More broadly, we reflect on the forces that simultaneously strengthen and dissolve caste inequality in the context of India's uneven growth.

KEYWORDS:

• Agrarian transformation
• migration
• marriage

Acknowledgements

The research for this contribution was part of the project ‘Rural change and anthropological knowledge in post-colonial India: a comparative “restudy” of F.G. Bailey, Adrian C. Mayer and David F. Pocock’ (ESRC, ES/I02123X/1). Alice Tilche conducted the fieldwork with the generous assistance of Pinakin Patel and Chandrika Patel; Edward Simpson was the principal investigator. Patricia Jeffery, Tina Otten, Tommaso Sbriccoli and Adrian Mayer helped develop some of our ideas. The thinking and writing for this piece were further developed with the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust. We also thank Jonathan Parry and Henrike Donner who commented generously on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We have retained the relative approach to hierarchy deployed by Pocock rather than conventional terms of class distinction. Pocock’s use of terms such as ‘lower-middleness’ was inspired by his ethnographic encounters and the sociological precision of literature (he read English at Cambridge), in particular George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss: ‘The religion of the Dodsons consisted in revering whatever was customary and respectable’ – equally the necessity of being buried in a churchyard and having well-cured hams at one’s funeral. ‘A most conspicuous quality in the Dodson character was its genuineness … [its] proud, honest egoism, which had hearty dislike of whatever made against its own credit and interest’, its harshness to ‘inconvenient “kin”’ whom they would never forsake or let want for bread ‘but only require them to eat it with bitter herbs’. As a description of many respectable Patidar, Pocock comments, it could not be bettered (1973, 165).

2 The survey was conducted in 2012–2013 by Alice Tilche, Pinakin Patel and Chandrika Patel.

3 In this region one bhiga equals 0.57 acres.

4 Survey conducted by Pinakin Patel and Alice Tilche.

5 Sonal Rathava, personal communication, 08 January 2017.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/I02123X/1, Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship].

Notes on contributors

Alice Tilche

Alice Tilche is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has worked extensively in rural India. Her work combines an interest in migration, art and the cultures and politics of indigeneity. Alice is also a filmmaker and her film Sundarana further explores some of the themes discussed in this paper.

Edward Simpson

Edward Simpson is a professor of social anthropology and Director of the South Asia Institute at SOAS University of London. He is the author of The political biography of an earthquake: aftermath and amnesia in Gujarat, India (2013) and the principal investigator on a European Research Council grant looking at the everyday thought processes that allow infrastructure to come into existence.