Hostname: page-component-66d9dcfd78-nm4xk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-08-09T13:59:35.988Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

An ‘Expanded’ Class Perspective: Bringing capitalism down to earth in the changing political lives of Adivasi workers in Kerala

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2014

LUISA STEUR
LUISA STEUR*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Email: Luisa.Steur@anthro.ku.dk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Following the police raid on the ‘Muthanga’ land occupation by Adivasi (‘indigenous’) activists in Kerala, India, in February 2003, intense public debate erupted about the fate of Adivasis in this ‘model’ development state. Most commentators saw the land occupation either as the fight-back of Adivasis against their age-old colonization or the work of ‘external’ agitators. Capitalist restructuring and ‘globalization’ was generally seen as simply the latest chapter in the suffering of these Adivasis. Little focused attention was paid to the recent class trajectory of their lives under changing capitalist relations, the exact social processes under which they were having to make a living, and what had only recently—and still largely ambiguously—made them ready to identify themselves politically as ‘Adivasi’. Demonstrating the usefulness of ethnographic curiosity driven by an ‘expanded’ class analysis, as elaborated in Marxian anthropology, this article provides an alternative to the liberal-culturalist explanation of indigenism in Kerala. It argues instead that contemporary class processes—as experienced close to the skin by the people who decided to participate in the Muthanga struggle—were what shaped their decision to embrace indigenism.

Information

Type
FORUM: Class Matters: New Ethnographic Perspectives on the Politics of Indian Labour
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 5 , September 2014 , pp. 1334 - 1357
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 Chakrabarty, Dipesh. (1989). Rethinking working class history: Bengal 1890–1940. Princeton: Princeton University PressGoogle Scholar.

2 Basu, Subho. (2004). Does class matter? Colonial capital and workers’ resistance in Bengal, 1890–1937. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 283Google Scholar.

3 Wolf, Eric. (1982). Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 23Google Scholar.

4 Smith, Neil. [1984] (2010). Uneven development: Nature, capital and the production of space. London: VersoGoogle Scholar.

5 Kalb, Don. (1997). ‘Introduction’ in Expanding class: Power and everyday politics in industrial communities, the Netherlands, 1850–1950. Durham: Duke University PressGoogle Scholar.

6 These rural ghettoes are the outcome of the policy of resettling Adivasis as a group in government colonies—their ‘colonization’, as C. K. Janu calls it. See Janu, C K. (2011). ‘We need to build huts all over Kerala, again and again’ in Satyanarayana, K. and Tharu, Susie (eds), No alphabet in sight. London: Penguin Books, pp. 431–451 (p. 432)Google Scholar.

7 I follow Jan Breman in using the notion of ‘tribal caste’ to describe this category of people, who are legally and historically associated with the notion of the ‘tribe’ but in fact are part of the caste system as it functions in Kerala today. The notion also fits with how some of my informants referred to themselves at times as a ‘ST [Scheduled Tribe] jati’. For the most elaborate (rather encyclopedic) ethnography of ‘the Paniya’ to date see Aiyappan, A. (1992). The Paniyas—an ex-slave tribe of South India. Calcutta: Institute of Social Research and AnthropologyGoogle Scholar.

8 The role of ‘travelling models’ (see Tsing, Anna. (2007). ‘Indigenous voice’ in Cadena, Marisol de la and Start, Orin (eds), Indigenous experience today. Oxford: BergGoogle Scholar), of indigenism, and the agency of NGOs is often given major importance in academic studies as well, be it in a celebratory light (e.g. Niezen, Ronald. (2003). The origins of indigenism. Berkeley: University of California PressGoogle Scholar) or in a more critical evaluation (e.g. Shah, Alpa. (2010). In the shadows of the state: Indigenous politics, environmentalistm, and insurgency in Jharkhand, India. Durham: Duke University PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar).

9 Steur, Luisa. (2005). ‘“On the correct handling of contradictions”: liberal-culturalism in indigenous studies’. Focaal—European Journal of Anthropology 46, pp. 169–176Google Scholar.

10 Thompson, E. P. (1965). ‘Peculiarities of the English’ in Miliband, R. and Saville, J. (eds), The socialist register. London: Merlin PressGoogle Scholar.

11 Kalb, Expanding class, p. 2.

12 Roseberry, William. (1994). Anthropologies and histories: Essays in culture, history and political economy. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, p. 30ffGoogle Scholar.

13 Smith, Uneven development.

14 Peck, Jamie. (2010). Constructions of neoliberal reason. Oxford: Oxford University PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Sider, Gerald. (2003). Living Indian histories: The Lumbee and Tuscarora people in North Carolina. Hill, Chapel; London: University of North Carolina PressGoogle Scholar.

16 As Ananthakrishnan Aiyer argues, the Coca-Cola struggle at Plachimada is therefore more usefully analysed not so much as yet another example of neoliberalism or for the impact of transnational companies but rather as one that is developing within the ongoing capitalist crisis of Indian agriculture. See Aiyer, Ananthakrishnan. (2007). ‘The allure of the transnational: Notes on some aspects of the political economy of water in India’. Cultural Anthropology 22 (4), pp. 640–658CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Heller, Patrick. (2000). The labor of development: Workers and the transformation of capitalism in Kerala, India. Ithaca: Cornell University PressGoogle Scholar.

18 Mannnathukkaren, Nissim. (2013). ‘The rise of the national-popular and its limits: Communism and the cultural in Kerala’. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 1–25, p. 3ffGoogle Scholar.

19 Steur, Luisa. (2011). ‘Adivasis, communists and the rise of indigenism in Kerala’. Dialectical Anthropology 35 (1), pp. 59–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Kapikkad, Sunny M. (2011). ‘Kerala model: A Dalit critique’ in Satyanarayana and Tharu (eds), No alphabet in sight, pp. 464–474 (p. 465).

21 Kasmir, Sharryn and Carbonella, August. (2008). ‘Dispossession and the anthropology of labor’. Critique of Anthropology 28 (1), pp. 5–25 (p.6)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 At present, as the indigenist momentum passes its peak, there seems to be a Naxal revival in the area: ‘[t]hough advocates of identity politics claimed that the strength of Adivasi movements . . . indicated the irrelevance of Maoism in Kerala’, there are indications that Maoism is on the rise again in the Western Ghats. See Cooper, Jaison. (2013). ‘Adivasis of Kerala: citizens or cannon fodder?’ in Devika, J. (ed.), Kafila 20 November 2013Google Scholar.

23 As Raj demonstrates, since many of these plantation workers are Dalits or Adivasis, forms of caste discrimination that had been kept at bay in the boom period of the plantation belt now came back to haunt these workers, exacerbating their economic distress. Raj, Jayaseelan. (2013). ‘Alienated enclaves: Economic crisis and neo-bondage in a South Indian plantation belt’. Forum for Development Studies 40 (3), pp. 465–490CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Kannan, K. P. (1999). ‘Rural labour relations and development dilemmas in Kerala: Reflections on the dilemmas of a socially transforming labour force in a slowly growing economy’. Journal of Peasant Studies 26 (2), pp. 140–181CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Kannan, ‘Rural labour relations and development dilemmas in Kerala’, p. 163.

26 Aerthayil, Mathew. (2008). Impact of globalization on tribals in the context of Kerala. New Delhi: Rawat Publications, p. 69 ffGoogle Scholar.

27 See Muenster, Daniel. (2011). ‘From farming to speculation: A neoliberal mode of production in hill produce agriculture?’. Paper presented at the ‘Agrarian Transformation in India’ seminar, 13 July, Oxford University.

28 Sreekumar, K. K. and Parayil, Govindan. (2002). ‘Contention and contradictions of tourism as development option: The case of Kerala, India’. Third World Quarterly 23 (3), pp. 529–548CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 See: <http://www.jungleretreatwayanad.com/mind.htm, [accessed 2 June 2014].

30 Breman, Jan. (1996). Footloose labour: Working in India's informal economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mosse, David. (2005). ‘On the margins of the city: Adivasi seasonal labour migration in Western India’. Economic and Political Weekly 9 July, pp. 3025–3038.

31 See Shah, In the shadows of the state.

32 Aiyappan, The Paniyas, p. 80.

33 See Osella, Filippo and Osella, Caroline. (2000). Social mobility in Kerala: Modernity and identity in conflict. London: Pluto PressGoogle Scholar.

34 Throughout this article, I use pseudonyms for the names of the people from Kottamurade.

35 Presented as an emancipatory policy to provide women with the necessary funds to pay for education, the policy is popularly known to help families save up for the rising costs of dowries, one of the main institutions undermining the modest emancipatory progress made by the previous generation. See Lindberg, Anna. (2004). Modernization and effeminization in India: Kerala cashew workers since 1930, 1st edition. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian StudiesGoogle Scholar.

36 I talked to some of these ‘local tribal people’—Paniyas living near Muthanga—and found they indeed felt threatened: not directly by the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha, but rather by how the policing of the situation might spill over and affect them.

37 They ignored the fact that the occupation actually took place in an area that was far from ‘biodiverse’ to begin with, since it had been depleted by industrial paper production. See Bijoy, C. R. and Ravi Raman. (2003). ‘Muthanga: The real story—Adivasi movement to recover land’, Economic and Political Weekly 17 May, pp. 1975–1982.

38 See Bijoy and Raman ‘Muthanga: The real story’.

39 Iyer, Krishna V. R. (2003). ‘Atrocities on adivasis—I’. Opinion pages of The Hindu, 16 June 2003.

40 A local joke has it that CPI(M) now stands for the ‘Confused Party of India’ (Marxist).

41 Standing, Guy. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. London: BloomsburyGoogle Scholar.

42 Thachil, Tariq. (2008). ‘Poor choices: De-alignment, development and Dalit/Adivasi voting patterns in Indian states’. Contemporary South Asia 16 (4), pp. 441–464CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Chatterjee, Partha. (2008). ‘Democracy and economic transformation in India’. Economic and Political Weekly 19 April, pp. 53–62

44 Lerche, Jens. (2008). ‘Transnational advocacy networks and affirmative action for Dalits in India’. Development and Change 39 (2), pp. 239–261CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 In a chapter in Parry, the importance of reservations for Dalit emancipation in a state like Chattisgarh has been demonstrated powerfully, yet (though not the focus of the chapter—nor of public debate) the ethnographic material equally powerfully demonstrates the importance of public employment (and of putting employment over profit in planning priorities), without which reservations become largely irrelevant. See Parry, Jonathan. (1999). ‘Two cheers for reservation: The Satnamis and the steel plant’ in Guha, Ramachandra and Parry, Jonathan (eds), Institutions and inequalities: Essays in honour of Andre Beteille. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 128–169Google Scholar.

46 Smith, Gavin. (2006). ‘When “the logic of capital is the real which lurks in the background”: Programme and practice in European “regional economies”’. Current Anthropology 47 (4), pp. 621–639CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Chibber, Vivek. (2009). ‘On the decline of class analysis in South Asian studies’ in Agarwala, Rina and Herring, Ronald, Whatever happened to class? Reflections from South Asia. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, p. 32Google Scholar.

48 See Bates, Crispin. (1995). ‘“Lost innocents and the loss of innocence”: Interpreting Adivasi movements in South Asia’ in Barnes, R. H., Gray, A. and Kingsbury, B. (eds), Indigenous peoples of Asia. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Association for Asian Studies Inc., pp. 103–119Google Scholar. Guha, Sumit. (1999). Environment and ethnicity in India, 1200–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society, Cambridge University PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bindu, K. C. (2009). ‘Constructing the Adivasi identity: Reading the dominant, reading the Adivasi’. PhD thesis, University of Hyderabad, School of HumanitiesGoogle Scholar.

49 Shah, Alpa. (2007). ‘The dark side of indigeneity? Indigenous people, rights and development in India’. History Compass 5/6, pp. 1806–1832CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Baviskar, Amita. (2007). ‘Indian indigeneities: Adivasi engagements with Hindu nationalism in India’ in de la Cadena, Marisol and Starn, Orin, Indigenous experience today. Oxford: Berg Publishers, pp. 275–303Google Scholar.

51 Xaxa, Virginius. (1999). ‘Tribes as indigenous people of India’. Economic and Political Weekly 34 (51), pp. 3589–3596Google Scholar.

52 Harvey, David. (2005). The new imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar.

53 Breman, Footloose labour.

54 Breman, Jan. (2007). The poverty regime in village India. London: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar.