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ABSTRACT
India's adivasi, or tribal, communities have most often been depicted as homogeneous and egalitarian, at least compared to the entrenched social hierarchies that characterise rural caste society. This article draws on fieldwork in a mining-affected adivasi village in Jharkhand, eastern India, to consider how compensatory public sector employment for mining-induced land dispossession has contributed to new processes of stratification within adivasi society. On the one hand, compensatory employment allowed those who attained it to pursue increasingly common middle-class aspirations, and a considerable degree of class mobility. But on the other hand, it fostered new, enhanced forms of intra-adivasi differentiation – not only in terms of income but also consumption and lifestyle, education and children's life chances, and household and gender dynamics. New internal disparities, in turn, have acted to erode pre-existing elements of adivasi society that revolve around values of egalitarianism.
Acknowledgements
I'd like to thank Alpa Shah, Laura Bear, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions of the article; Sandhya Fuchs for co-convening our 2019 BASAS conference panel; and Juhi Tyagi for participating in it. The research on which the article is based was funded by an LSE PhD Studentship, a Wenner-Gren Fieldwork Grant, and an ERC Starting Grant 313664, project UNDERINDIA, PI Alpa Shah.
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Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Most place and personal names have been changed.
2 Exceptions include Higham and Shah (Citation2013), Shah (Citation1979), and Shah (Citation2010).
3 My use of ‘class’ here and subsequently is in the Weberian (Citation1968 [Citation1922]) sense of lifestyle, consumption, and life chances.
4 Adivasis generally display high rates of poverty and underemployment, and engage in the lowliest types of work (see for example Breman and Guérin Citation2009; Levien Citation2007; Shah and Harriss-White Citation2011).
5 The threshold for eligibility for compensatory employment has since then been lowered to two acres.
6 On the dreams of development and particularly employment sparked by industrial projects, see Cross (Citation2014, Citation2015) and Vijayabaskar (Citation2010).
7 About a dozen households from Dharutar, who were not able to provide the money required for land registration, have been left without jobs. In this article, however, I focus mostly on those who did manage to obtain jobs.
8 This is at variance, for example, with findings about the jobs of adivasis who have entered state employment in the education sector, which were not only ‘relatively badly paid’ but ‘insecure and dispensable’ (Higham and Shah Citation2013, 4).
9 For workers with duties for attending machine breakdowns at a short notice.
10 This has largely been the result of the liberalisation of higher education by the central government in the mid-2000s.
11 Among coal-peddling Santals, by comparison, I know of only one child who is studying away in a college, through a special scholarship for adivasi students.
12 Similarly to consumption, investment in higher-quality education is more typical of the younger generations of Santal employees. Among the children of older-generation employees, education levels are in fact not all that different from those of the children in coal-peddling households. There are arguably two reasons for this. The first is a lower awareness of education in the older generation; the second is the lower lucrativeness of CCL wages in the past, compared to today. Wages at that time, Kamal told me, had not always sufficed to cover the fees of a good private school or college, not to mention student accommodation in a hostel or apartment.
13 Similarly to Higham and Shah (Citation2013), I use 'emulation' rather than sanskritisation (Srinivas Citation1956), which is defined as the rejection of low-caste customs and rituals to achieve upward caste mobility. This is because CCL-employed Santals are not relinquishing their Santal identity – say, through shunning local Santal festivals. Rather, they seek to add to this identity practices that are associated with higher castes and classes – which in their minds (and to an extent empirically) mostly overlap.
14 On similar socialising between different castes in the Bhilai Steel Plant, see Parry (Citation1999, Citation2013a, Citation2013b) and Parry and Strümpell (Citation2008, 54).
15 While women working outside the house is common among dalit communities and the elite, it is rare among all those in between (Singh Citation1994).
16 Shah (Citation1968) has long ago suggested that sanskritisation among adivasis tends to increase their proclivity towards joint householding.
17 While a sense of moral responsibility towards one’s kin is also present in coal-peddling families, my point is that such a sense can become amplified in a context of differentiation within the family, i.e., when there is one employed sibling who earns considerably more than the others.
18 Like with cases of tension within CCL-employed households, I do not mean to suggest that instances of envy had previously been absent in Karampot. I believe, however, that enhanced differentiation and the emergence of middle-class consumption patterns among employed Santals are likely to have made such instances more common and pronounced.
19 Based on household survey data and interviews.
20 Some CCL-employed Santals still have a small amount of 'leftover' family land in the vicinity; others, as I have mentioned above, have purchased new plots. Busy with their own CCL jobs, Santal employees usually do very little, if any, cultivation themselves, and instead hire agricultural labourers from either Karampot or outside of it.
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Itay Noy
Itay Noy is a social anthropologist with an interest in the political economy of resource extraction. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has carried out long-term fieldwork in Jharkhand, India, exploring the variegated effects of coal mining operations – and, in particular, mining-induced land acquisition – on lives and livelihoods in an adivasi (indigenous) community.