gupta - everyday resistence or routine repression

7/30/2019 Gupta - Everyday Resistence or Routine Repression

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Everyday Resistance or Routine

Repression? Exaggeration as

Stratagem in Agrarian Conflict

DIPANKAR GUPTA

In a deeply stratified rural society a good stratagem on the part of

those in power is to exaggerate the shortcomings of the lower

classes. Such exaggerations justify domination over, and the

curtailment of respect for, the rural poor. James Scott

misunderstands the disempowering nature of this stratagem and

believes the exaggerated tales related by the rich about the poor.

This is what leads Scott to romanticize these stories as everydayforms of resistance by an empowered rural poor, and thus to

ignore what such tales really are: sources of routine repression by

the rich. Drawing on fieldwork in rural Uttar Pradesh, this article

demonstrates how propertied classes systematically exaggerate the

failings of poor peasants in order to justify the routine repression

exercised over them.

EVERYDAY FORMS OF RESISTANCE OR DOMINATION?

There can be no doubt that peasants steal, lie and cheat like everybody else.But my fieldwork among the peasants of India leads me to the view thatthey indulge in these petty acts of larceny and theft very rarely and with

hardly any cumulative effect. In fact, stories of peasant thefts andinsubordination abound in rural India, and most of these tales can be heardin the homes of landlords and rural capitalists. The latter advise outsideresearchers never to trust the lower orders because they are congenitalthieves, liars and worse. The question one often asks is: why do thepropertied classes find it necessary to circulate such exaggerated tales about

Dipankar Gupta, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, NewDelhi- 110067, India. The author is grateful to Professor S.J. Tambiah for arranging a seminar atHarvard University in 1998, where he read an earlier version of this paper. He benefited greatlyfrom the discussions that followed. Subsequent inputs from Gavin Smith of the University ofToronto and from N.J. Demerath of the University of Massachusetts helped refine the argument.

The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.29, No.1, October 2001, pp.89108PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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peasant lawlessness? Why do they have to magnify small misdemeanours tosuch gigantic proportions? Why do they often also fabricate stories aboutpeasant mischief for no apparent reason?

On the basis of my own research conducted in the western Uttar Pradeshvillages of India, I have now come to the conclusion that exaggeration is a

political stratagem, and everyday exaggeration is one of the important waysin which the dominating propertied classes justify their routine repression ofpoor peasants and agricultural labourers. It is with this in mind that Irevisited James Scotts influential work, Weapons of the Weak[1985], andfound to my surprise that Scott had uncritically fallen for these stratagemsof the rich. This is what leads Scott to conclude, on the basis of theseexaggerated stories (which he believes completely), that peasants are indeedalways and everywhere poachers and thieves. That he gives petty theft apositive valuation is what separates Scott from his privileged informants.Where the landlords saw a host of shifty Fagins, Scott sees a homegrownvariety of Robin Hoods unobtrusively emptying out upper-class wallets.

Although James Scotts work has had an enormous theoretical impact atmany different levels, it has left its most telling impression on the study of

rural uprisings.1 It is undeniable that in the recent past, scholarship onpeasant movements has tended to exhibit a certain left-wing partiality. Itwas not that analysts of agrarian movements idealized peasants as upholdersof leftist purity; rather, there has been a tendency to view rural uprisingsonly through a revolutionary optic. Consequently, some peasant movementswere perceived as sell-outs to the rich and propertied classes, others wereseen as having been betrayed by dubious class allies, yet others wereregarded as having achieved a measure of success, though largely in termsof unintended consequences, and finally there were the successful ones thathad a huge impact. In all these instances, however, the trajectory of eachpeasant mobilization was plotted along a graph that had as its coordinatesthe class character and stages of history. One way or another, thesemovements were seen as being part of a larger struggle to which the Leftcould contribute meaningfully, both in theory and in practice.

It is precisely with this kind of approach that the framework associatedwith James Scott everyday forms of peasant resistance has broken. Hisfocus has shifted the analysis of agrarian mobilization away from overtrevolutionary action undertaken on a large scale by mass movements to thedomain of small-scale individual acts of resistance carried out usuallyclandestinely on a daily basis. Not the least important claim he has madein this connection is that, in the end, the latter agency is not just as effectiveas the former in terms of transforming the existing system but actually moreso. It is this claim that is subjected to scrutiny in the analysis which follows.

90 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

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REBELS WITHOUT A CAUSE?

James Scotts seminal work, Weapons of the Weak[1985], makes much ofthe earlier style of scholarship in which peasant agency and revolutionarychange were perceived as synonymous appear tired and repetitive. Thereis in his book a strongly stated sympathy for peasants, but this time devoidof any pronounced, or even surreptitious, partisanship with the Left. Fromnow on peasants are to be seen as rebels without an ideology, and this inScotts opinion is not just ground reality, but is also empowering for them.For Scott, therefore, it is important to understand peasant unrest not in termsof grand revolutionary uprisings sweeping governments in or out of powerbut rather as less dramatic, almost imperceptible forms of action: that is,atomized and isolated acts of crime, larceny, gossip and slander. Peasantssteal apples and chickens from the landlord, commit acts of petty sabotage,indulge in rumour-mongering and make off when they can with grain fromthe threshing floor.2 The very daring among them even steal motorcycles.Yet all these small acts of crime are not wasted. History gathers them up inits sweep and, over time, consolidates these petty acts of theft to form a reef.

It is from such apparently insignificant emplacements, then, that the moredetermined and effective peasant assaults on landlordism are launched[Scott, 1985: 36]. This outcome is not an empirically derived or verifiableone, moreover, but rather something that is posited as an inevitable effect ofthe longue dure. In any event, this aspect does not detain Scott for long.His main emphasis is on how little things done on an everyday basis can goa long way to alleviating the overall plight of peasants.

Peasant agency, in other words, needs no ideology from the outside,least of all a left-wing one. There is a kind of mothers-milk ideology thatis endogenously secreted every time a peasant steals and pilfers. All thisconsolidates over time to create large-scale peasant uprisings. And evenwhen they do not make for such grand episodic events, these petty acts ofeveryday resistance multiplied manifold make utter shambles of policy

[Scott, 1985: 35]. It is to these petty acts of insubordination that we mustthen turn our attention if we want to understand how peasants resist on aroutine basis the oppression of the superior classes. If there are not too manyrecorded instances of peasant rebellions, therefore, it is precisely becausethese peasants are constantly setting aright the indignities from which theysuffer by recourse to routine, small-scale and everyday acts of rebellion[Scott, 1985: 243]. So the landlords and rich rural capitalists are right afterall: peasants are not to be trusted. James Scott accepts this upper-classcharacterization, yet manages in true Hollywood fashion to provide a happyending. For Scott, therefore, peasants may indeed be thieves and poachers(pace the allegations by the rich), but all this only goes to show that a

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dynamic heart still beats inside those rude gunny-sacks. The peasants stillhave some stuffing left in them after all.

Quite clearly, Scott has fallen victim to tendentious exaggerations in hisconceptualizing of the everyday resistance of the poor.3 There is everyreason why the propertied and the dominant classes should exaggerate. It is

by exaggerating the flawed features of the oppressed that ideologicaljustification for domination is constructed and secured. In ancient Indiansacerdotal texts, for example, women were portrayed as being inherentlypromiscuous and brimming over with unbridled sexuality. They had to betamed and domesticated, therefore, or else they would run wild. This

justified both the oppression of females and child marriage in traditionalIndia [Chakravarti, 1995]. Marina Carter [1995: 107] also notes howindentured labourers who migrated to Mauritius were characterized asrogues, whores, and vagabonds. David Souden [1978: 24] finds thatindentured migrant labour to the West Indies and North America was alsoviewed in the same way. Such workers were considered to be rogues,vagabonds, cheats and rabble of all descriptions, raked from the gutter andkicked out of the country. Carter, however, goes further, and correctly sees

such exaggerated characterizations of the dominated as part of a strategywhich defended the deprivation of rights and comforts to a community[Carter, 1995: 107]. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that many of Scottspropertied respondents should routinely exaggerate the criminaltendencies among the poorer people. This helps to consolidate andperpetuate their domination over the labouring classes.

To substantiate the point that Scott has been taken in by tales woven bythe superior classes we need to pay careful attention to the details of Scottsmaterial. First, we must examine who is making the claim about everydaypeasant theft and sabotage. Second, we must also enquire as to the extentofthis so-called everyday resistance. Do these many acts of petty theft androbbery really add up to make what Scott [1985: 35] calls an utter shamblesof policy? I find that these two very critical aspects of Scotts argumentshave generally been accepted at face value, and thus have not beenscrutinized closely enough. Failing such an examination, Scotts analyticalframework based on the notion of everyday resistance has gained culticdimensions in the academy. Even those who find an unsatisfactoryideological tone in Scotts work can do no better than sneer from thesidelines about how Scott transforms every glance and every stolen chickeninto acts of rebellion. Yet, because there is very little methodologicalengagement with Scotts basic data, such criticisms remain unconvincing. Itis accordingly necessary to enquire whether the facts of the case merit theconclusions that Scott draws from them.


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WHO COMPLAINS AND HOW MUCH GOES MISSING?

Let us return then to the two substantive issues that have just beenhighlighted. It is important to ask two crucial questions. First, who isrelating these multiple tales of peasant insubordination? And second, whatreally is the gross tally in material terms of the items said to go missing asa result of such forms of everyday resistance?

It is quite clear that no poor peasant himself or herself ever came up toJames Scott and claimed to be engaged in everyday resistance. Accounts ofsurreptitious pilfering from the threshing-floor, tales of poaching, and eventhe theft of motorcycles, all came not from the poor but rather from thepropertied classes in the village that Scott studied. There is no mystery as towhy this should be so. While no one minds being thought of as a RobinHood, and is quite happy to boast about exploits linked to this identity, it isquite a different matter to confess to being a small-time cheat andpickpocket. Who in a village would admit to committing a theft of an apple,a chicken and a few grains from the landlords bins? 4 Stories of risk-takingin the form of social banditry and of large-scale heroism have an altogether

different kind of cachet. These kinds of tales, about involvement in selflessescapades and showdowns with authority, reflect well on the teller, andcarry none of the opprobrium usually associated with petty theft simply forpersonal gain. They not only enhance reputation but also add to thecharisma of the storyteller.

Unlike petty thieves, Robin Hoods not only rob the rich on the openhighways, poach on the landlords domains in broad daylight and thumbtheir nose at the elite in a calculatedly insulting manner but, in doing all this,uphold the moral economy which has about it a nice, warm and comfortingambiance. No one wants to admit being a selfish petty thief, but most of uswould have no trouble in identifying with selfless Robin Hoods who defythe rich while undertaking many acts of personal valour and heroism.5 TheseRobin Hoods thus become role models for others who, while fantasizing

about their feats, are otherwise quite content to lead their lives withoutrocking the boat. Indeed this is exactly the case with Scotts peasantrespondents as well [Scott, 1985: 41]. It is not at all clear from a reading ofScotts work [1985: 304] if the poor in his field area accept the charges oftheft and petty larceny that are levelled against them. And if, perchance, theless adventurous pilfer and steal small amounts on the sly, they are not aboutto draw attention to themselves. They would rather do their jobs incognito.

It is worth asking why pilfering and petty larceny are looked down uponby all classes universally. Nobody is proud of being a Fagin but one canvicariously identify with a Robin Hood. It is, of course, the scale ofoperation that differentiates the two, but there is a lot more to it as well. A


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Robin Hood is someone whose image is that of a hero who steals from therich and gives to the poor, an image which overlaps rather neatly with theconcerns expressed by moral economy. Against a background of universaldistaste for petty theft, therefore, it is difficult to imagine how even a largenumber of such acts can add up to a sufficiently powerful challenge to

existing property relations that culminates in mass rebellion.Turning to the second question, it is necessary to ask just how much has

actually been lost in material terms in Sedaka, Scotts study village, due toacts of everyday resistance. Are the losses significant enough to make anutter shambles of policy, as he claims? In fact, after building a case foreveryday resistance and the damage it causes, Scott [1985: 256] is forced toadmit that the actual instances of theft are very few, and accounts of themvastly over-inflated. There were three motorcycle thefts in 12 years, and thetotal value of paddy stolen in the years 197980 came to only M$532. 6 Ifone were to accept the accounts of the propertied classes in Sedaka village,moreover, the total amount of paddy stolen is only about one-hundredth ofthe paddy harvested [Scott, 1985: 268]. Even mice could have done better.

When it comes to the question of sabotage and arson, Scott was unable

to get a solid piece of evidence in support of his argument. He thereforeconcludes, rather cautiously, by admitting that actual instances of arson cannever realistically be determined [Scott, 1985: 249]. Similarly, accounts ofsabotage turn out to be nothing more than idle boasts or landlordexaggerations. Eventually such tales of peasant excesses or transgressionscome to be seen for what they are, just so many tales.

EXAGGERATION AND REPRESSION IN WESTERN UTTAR PRADESH

That routine exaggeration is a stratagem for rural elite control is anargument that can be substantiated by means of reference to material frommy study of villages in Meerut and Muzaffarnagar districts of western UttarPradesh. The villages where I conducted my fieldwork were dominatedeither by Jats or by Gujars. It is necessary to add at this point that only invery rare circumstances will a Jat live in a Gujar dominated village, and viceversa. But Jat- and Gujar-dominated villages have their usual complementof lower castes, including the members of the Scheduled Castes, who wereearlier considered to be untouchables. The Scheduled Castes in thesevillages belong largely to the Harijan and Valmiki communities.

Crops, Land and Labour in Western Uttar Pradesh

A little more background information is necessary in order to contextualizemy material and argument about exaggeration as stratagem in rural India.The villages studied were also green-revolution villages (much like Scotts


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Sedaka). The Jat or Gujar landowners in these villages usually own small tomedium-sized holdings, ranging from two to eight acres in the main. Jatsand Gujars are both agrarian castes and are, therefore, quite proud of beingcultivators and working with their hands. As land holdings are not verylarge, family labour is very common in these villages.7 Even women help

outdoors with some agriculturally related activities.Sugar cane and wheat are the two major crops of this region. Land-

owning cultivators require the services of landless (predominantlyScheduled Caste) workers intermittently for short durations. During themonsoons they need them to tie supports round sugarcane stalks to preventthem from falling over. They also hire agricultural labourers during thewheat harvesting season, as this operation has to be concluded rather swiftlyand family labour is often not enough. Sugar cane harvesting can, however,be spread over months. The cane is felled and its leafy portion lopped off ata point in the agricultural cycle that is generally determined by the sugarfactories nearby.

The demand for outside labour for sugar cane harvesting is consequentlynot very pressing. Family labour is usually sufficient, as the harvesting

period is determined neither by the weather nor by the maturity of the canebut by the demands imposed on farmers by sugar factories in the vicinity.The severing of the leafy part of the sugar cane is known locally as cholna.Even when labour is employed from outside, cholna is rarely done formoney. Payment is in kind, and takes the form of the gola, or the leafy partof the cane, that the labourers take back home to feed their cattle. Roughly,ten quintals ofcholna yield one quintal ofgola, and a single able-bodiedlabourer can harvest about 78 quintals ofcholna a day. Only in the summermonths do labourers want money for cholna. The reason for this is that theleafy portion, which is usually succulent and green, turns hard, dry andsharp in summer, rendering it unfit as cattle feed. During these monthslabourers demand instead cash payment of about Rs3 per quintal ofcholnaharvested (this was the rate in 1992).

There is a rough correlation between land owned and demand foragricultural labourers. In villages such as Niloha (in Muzaffarnagar district)or Incholi (in Meerut district), where landholdings are generally larger thanin other villages in western Uttar Pradesh, there is a greater demand foragricultural labour. In such villages Harijans can be found in large numbersduring wheat harvesting, but they would generally avoid cholna, as theyfind that a difficult occupation to negotiate in terms of wages. Consequently,cholna is usually done by the still poorer Valmikis.

In a large village like Nirpura, where the population is approximately30,000, there are about 550 Harijan households. Of these, about 55 per centwork in brick kilns, and only about 25 per cent work as agricultural


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labourers, sometimes on a daily wage basis. The Valmikis, whom Jatsconsider to be lower than Harijans, find jobs in Jat homes as permanentagricultural servants. As Jats do not strictly observe caste untouchability,these Valmiki servants can be found in the courtyards of Jat dwellingshelping out with the machinery, or performing other domestic chores, which

includes pulling out charpoys (string cots) and arranging seating for guests.In villages like Niloha there are many Jat landowners who have more than20 acres of land. Land reform measures in the past have given ScheduledCastes in this village a share of the redistributed surplus land. For example,one Harijan the main beneficiary of this redistribution process has fivebighas (approximately one acre) of land, on which he grows both wheat andsugar cane. But his real income is from his skills as a radio mechanic. Hehas clients both in his village as well as in neighbouring ones.

At the time of my fieldwork in these villages, the wheat harvestingpayment was around Rs18 to Rs20 per day. According to Harijan andValmiki labourers, however, wage payments due were held back anddelayed (see below). For this reason, labourers usually prefer not to be paidin cash: they believe that payment in kind is usually more reliable, and

certainly more prompt. For harvesting an acre, which yields between 22 and24 quintals of wheat, a labourer can expect to receive about two quintals ofwheat and two quintals of husk as payment. But the payment in kind rate isnot uniform: while the above rate applies in Nirpura (Meerut district), alower rate seems prevalent in Binra (Muzaffarnagar district). In the lattercontext, a labourer gets roughly 1.3 quintals of wheat for harvesting an acre.The average yield in Binra is only about 14 quintals per acre, and thussignificantly lower than the per-acre yield in Nirpura. Broadly speaking, asafe assumption is that in western Uttar Pradesh at the time in question,wages in kind for harvesting wheat were roughly one-tenth of the per-acreyield for that crop.

Scheduled Caste Occupations

There are also status and economic distinctions between Harijan and Valmikicastes. While both belong to the Scheduled Castes, the Harijans are ingeneral better off and better educated than Valmikis. The traditionaloccupation of most Harijan used to be tanning and leather work, though evenin the past a significant number of them worked as agricultural labourers.The traditional occupation of a Valmiki was scavenging, which puts thiscaste lower than the Harijans in terms of the orthodox ranking system. Itmust be remembered that, in general, the correlation between caste andoccupation hardly holds today, and this is as true for the poorer castes as well.

This status distinction between these two ex-untouchable castes can beseen in contemporary western Uttar Pradesh villages in terms of the kinds


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of jobs they perform in the rural sector. While Valmikis do what work theycan get in villages, Harijan males, by and large, do not want to work in thefields [Gupta, 1997]. They would rather find jobs outside agriculture, forthey believe that Jats pay very low wages and are generally unreliablepeople to work for. In addition to abusing them and treating them with

complete contempt, therefore, Jats are notoriously slow in paying theirlabourers the wages due them. Most Harijans thus prefer to work in brickkilns, because the rate there is fixed at Rs70 for a thousand bricks. Althoughemployment in brick kilns is highly prized, as they are often situated in andaround the villages where the labourers reside, this is not the only non-agricultural occupational outlet available. Many Scheduled Caste membersalso work as masons and bricklayers, and some have built quite a reputationin these occupations. Those without these skills undertake other kinds oftasks in this connection: for example, whitewashing residential buildingsand providing assistance with plastering during the construction process.

CONTRASTING VERSIONS AND INCOMMENSURABLE TRUTHS

When it comes to paying money for work done Jat landowners are usuallyvery slow. They tend to put off the paying of wages on one pretext or theother. Many Jats argue that the labourers are so greedy that they want theirmoney right away. After all, a Jat landowner told me, we are not goingto run away. Irregular wage payment is, therefore, a major cause of frictionbetween landless Scheduled Caste workers and landowners. It must also besaid that Jat landowners are not very rich either, and are often severelystrapped for cash themselves. But even during good months, when theyhave some money to hand, Jat landowners are usually very reluctant to paywages on time, and even when they do, it is often not the full amount theirworkers are owed. Several labourers complained that before they actuallyget paid for the job they were contracted to do, the landowners often makethem do work, like cutting grass in the fields, weeding or some other tasksthey urgently want completed. Sometimes, as a Valmiki labourer in Nirpuravillage complained, Jat landowners flagrantly violate the cholna agreementin the monsoon months, and keep half of the gola for themselves. In suchcases, labourers inferred, it is just not worth ones while to do any cholna atall. Regardless of the frequency with which Jat and Gujar employers didsuch things, withholding or non-payment of wages due were perceived as arisk by many agricultural labourers in the region.

For their part, however, Jat landowners stoutly deny the charge that theywithhold wages, and argue that this is yet another instance of how Harijanand Valmiki castes will cheat and lie at the slightest opportunity. Accordingto Jat peasant farmers in western Uttar Pradesh, it is impossible to trust


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these Scheduled Caste people, as they are incapable of either telling thetruth or keeping their hands off anything that comes in their way. As one Jatinterviewed by me put it: The mazdoors (labourers) leave the fieldmunching on sugar cane, and god knows how many they chew on whilethey are actually working. The labouring castes deny this allegation, and

say that Jat landowners are always around them, supervising their workminutely. There is, therefore, no question of helping themselves to sugarcane while they are working. In fact even when they accidentally crush acane underfoot, a string of abuse is hurled at them.

The perception of how many Harijans and Valmikis work in the villages,and how many work outside, also differs vastly in the accounts of Jats andthe Scheduled Castes. The Jats of Niloha state that all Harijans work outsidethe village, and that it is difficult to hire them to do any agricultural work.This, Jats argue, is why Harijans are so haughty and demand such highwages. On the other hand, the Harijans of Niloha point out that they aremainly agricultural labourers, and that consequently they are always on thelook-out for this kind of employment: these jobs in agriculture are either notavailable, or the Jat employers cheat them out of a just wage. Harijans allege

that, even when they actually get paid, it is rarely more than Rs20 for a dayswork: sometimes, it is as little as Rs15. Jats deny this, and say that the wagesare very high in the village, at the very least between Rs25 and Rs30 perday. Furthermore, there is no question, Jats argue, of not paying Harijans thefull wage rate on time. According to Jat versions, Harijans are far frombeing subservient: in fact, democracy and the adult franchise have madethem most aggressive and unreasonable.

On the political front, too, the perceptions of Harijans and Valmikis varygreatly from those of Jat landowners. Harijans and Valmikis believe that thegovernment does not listen to them, and pays no attention to their problems.In Nirpura village, where there are about 550 Harijan households, there isnot a single lamp-post in the area where members of this caste live. In thissection of the village there is only one government-installed hand-pump forwater, on account of which long lines form queues for water every day.This, it is pointed out, leads to tensions and quarrels between Harijans allthe time. They further charge that although the government had allotted 50electrical connections to the Harijan hamlet, so far nothing has happened.

Jat peasant farmers, on the other hand, argue that the states reservationpolicy granting preferences to Scheduled Castes in jobs and educationalopportunities has made these communities very obnoxious and difficult.When Harijans find work outside the village, they become particularlyaggressive and ill-mannered. This, according to Jats, can be easily made outfrom the fact that Scheduled Castes neither stand up nor bow in salutationin the presence of a Jat. The latter believe that the activism of Ms Mayawati


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(who was Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, albeit for a short while) of theBahujan Samaj Party is largely responsible for this. Jats have often told mehow in the past if a Harijan or a Valmiki was caught stealing, he would beterrified and contrite. But now, Jats allege, with the support of thegovernment the Harijans and Valmikis lie and cheat with impunity. Even

their womenfolk are no better.Jats are generally quite unambiguous about the fact that, in their opinion,

members of the Scheduled Castes should acknowledge their superiority. Fortheir part, the poorer castes say that as long as they do not actually opposethe wishes of Jats, then there are no problems; but if they do, then they arephysically threatened, and sometimes these threats are carried out. Valmikisand Harijans also complain that very often Jats do not let them defecate inthe fields nearby, and chase them far away. I have also heard Jats reactingto this by saying that, when they allow these other castes to pass throughtheir fields, they invariably pull out sugar cane or quite deliberately damagecrops.

From my experience of western Uttar Pradesh, the tendency among Jatsto exaggerate the instances of theft and contumacy on the part of the

Scheduled Castes is quite pronounced. In three different, but adjacent,villages, I heard the same story from Jat peasant farmers, all telling of thesame incident, when a Harijan allegedly picked Rs60 from the pocket of ashirt that was hanging on the window to dry. The shirt, it was said,obviously belonged to an unsuspecting and trusting Jat. It is surprising justhow widespread this single incident was relayed in Jat discourse. Bycontrast, the Scheduled Castes in that region had no knowledge of thisincident, nor indeed had they heard this story as told by the Jats. This isanother instance of how insulated the landowning castes and the ScheduledCastes are from each other. Jats also accuse Harijans of stooping so low asto add water to the milk they sell in and around the villages. It must bementioned in this connection that Jats generally look down upon thepractice of selling milk. According to the Jat code, milk is to be consumedonly by family and friends, and it should never be sold. In the eyes of Jats,therefore, Scheduled Caste milk-sellers stand doubly accused: not just ofselling milk (as if this were not bad enough), but also of making mattersworse by adulterating it.

RICH LABOURERS, POOR LANDOWNERS: TALES OF ECONOMIC

INVERSION

As far as Jats are concerned, the Scheduled Castes are not just cheats andthieves, they are also good-for-nothing lazy workers, fattened by the hugewages they get. According to Jats the cholna operation alone increases a


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labourers income by approximately 7000 rupees a year. According to theScheduled Castes, however, this claim is pure fantasy: since they would beunable to realize such an annual income even if they were fortunate enoughto obtain a regular job, how much less likely is it that they could earn 7000rupees for seasonal and casual employment such as cholna work? In any

event, they go on to say, there is no market price as such for the gola thatthey get as payment in kind for cholna work: while it can be used to feedcattle, it cannot be sold in the market. The gola that they bring back homeprobably saves them at best about 2000 rupees per year, a far cry fromthe 7000 claimed by Jat employers.

Jats have convinced themselves that Harijans and Valmikis (particularlyHarijans) have really made good in this world, with the help of politicians.Though as agricultural labourers they are a lazy, shirking and untrustworthylot, they must still be paid at least between Rs25 and Rs30 for a days work.They are thieves, the Jats aver, but they have to be suffered because theyhave political leaders at their beck and call. They now earn enough moneyto wear fancy clothes which even Jat landowners cannot afford. On oneoccasion in village Nirpura, while I was listening to a Jat complaining about

how offensive Harijans had become, a young Harijan walked past us. TheJat caught hold of him and pulled him over. Pointing to the clothes theHarijan youth was wearing he said: Look at him. Look at his shirt.Terylene. Look at his trousers. Terylene. Look at his shoes. Factory made,probably Bata. These are children of cobblers and leather-workers, and nowthey are wearing machine-made shoes by Bata. Even I cannot afford suchclothes. According to Jats, therefore, the Scheduled Castes are not poor atall. In their opinion, the notion that Harijans and Valmikis are poor is anurban myth. If they had really been poor, would they not readily work hardand uncomplainingly and in the fields of the Jats?

James Scott [1985: 150] also relates similar kinds of stories. The rich inSedaka believe that the peasants are making a lot of money, shirking workand yet riding motorcycles. If it is motorcycles in Sedaka, it is Terylene inUttar Pradesh. All these tales of theft, demonstrations of consumerism andsullen refusal to work for an honest days wages together provide Jats andGujar landowners of western Uttar Pradesh with the required ideological

justification to threaten and terrorize Scheduled Castes whenever they findthe need to do so. It hardly needs to be said that the kind of political andeconomic dominance Jats and Gujars enjoy in this context cannot even beapproximated by the poorer castes. And yet the landowning castes complainof how unruly the Scheduled Castes have become. It is true that Harijansand Valmikis enjoy a measure of freedom that they never did in the past, butthey are still far from being able to threaten Jats in any significant way.


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Weapons of the Strong

My own fieldwork experience in western Uttar Pradesh does not lead me tolend credence to the Jat version of how Scheduled Castes behave. I wouldrather go along with Valmikis and Harijans when they complain that Jatstreat them contemptuously, underpay them, and often even physically beat

them up. I have found them to be fearful of landowning castes, and theygenerally tend to slip away if they are in the presence of Jats. Jats, however,have no compunctions about loudly broadcasting to me their views onScheduled Castes. On occasions they even made sure that Harijans andValmikis heard what was being said about them. Members of the ScheduledCastes, on the other hand, only whisper their complaints against Jats. Theywould immediately fall silent if a Jat were to wander in while such aconversation was going on.

So the powerful in both Sedaka and west Uttar Pradesh villagescomplain about how the labouring classes cheat and steal, hence justifyingthe need both to keep them under careful surveillance and to exerciserepressive measures against them, so as to prevent them from becoming toodisruptive and unruly. Thus far Scott and I seem to be walking down thesame path, raking up the same leaves. And yet, the epistemologicaldifference between Scott and me is really quite fundamental. While Scottseems to believe upper-class stories about the poor and gives them aromantic gloss, I by contrast see instead so many stratagems inspired by theimperatives of power. For Scott theft and petty crime are instances ofeveryday resistance, but for me it is because such petty crimes take placeoccasionally that the ruling classes not only exercise but justify their routinerepression of the poorer people in the village. The way superior castesoverreact to petty incidents of suspected theft is indicative of this veryprocess. Scott himself [1985: 269] narrates an instance when a landlord inSedaka was so incensed by the fact that a small amount of paddy was stolenthat he took out his shotgun in order to teach that poor thief a lesson.

The simple fact is that neither in western Uttar Pradesh nor in Sedaka arethe poor capable of making what Scott terms an utter shambles of policy,even if they are occasionally forced to steal a sugar cane or two. Even inSedaka, peasants who have been difficult and uncooperative in the past haveas a consequence been dealt with very harshly by the landlords. Children ofsuch people are struck off the school aids list, or charged with theft, or arenot hired by the rich for agricultural work [Scott, 1985: 278, 279]. Thecapacity of these poor peasants to make an utter shambles of policy is,therefore, very limited indeed, not to say remote. The sad truth is that poorpeasants and agricultural labourers do not have the necessary staying powerto conduct a daily guerrilla resistance against the rich. They are generally


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very submissive, but even in their utter subjugation they reject theircharacterization by the rich as being thieves and cheats [Scott, 1985: 304].Their rare, infrequent, and often pathetic attempts to make ends meet bytaking recourse to stealing can be more realistically described as ways ofclaiming a certain moral economy on their side, and a defence of customary

perquisites at best.8

Any thought of revolt, or everyday resistance, is farfrom their minds, nor do these acts objectively amount to creating a reef forlaunching grand historical transformations.

If the Scheduled Castes today are able to mount some kind of pressureagainst Jats in rural western Uttar Pradesh, then it is not so much in termsof everyday resistance by stealing a chicken here and a sugar cane there but by a frontal attack, in the form of an aggressive politics headed by theBahujan Samaj Party. This political party is uniformly hated by Jats in everyvillage I visited. The Bahujan Samaj Party is led by members of theScheduled Castes, and its manifesto clearly declares its partisanship withthe ex-untouchables of India. If Jats feel threatened today, it is not becauseof petty thefts by the Harijans and Valmikis, but rather by the declaredpolitics of defiance that the Bahujan Samaj Party has inaugurated in what

they hitherto perceived as their unchallenged domain. Jat peasant farmersfind this very difficult to accept.

That a large number of Harijans are supporters of the Bahujan SamajParty also indicates that they have been able effectively to sever their tieswith the village. To begin with, there are few jobs in the villages, as most ofthe farms are generally cultivated by means of family labour. Secondly, asmentioned earlier, urban opportunities and non-agricultural jobs havebecome available in and around the villages, making it possible for manyHarijans to work outside agriculture. This has also had a liberating effect onthem. Not that they have become much richer on account of this, but theyare no longer under the daily humiliating domination of Jat landowners.This is why, in objective terms, Jats would opt for the continuation of theoccasional case of a frustrated poor peasant stealing from them some smallarticle for consumption in preference to the open politics of mass defiancethrust at them by the Bahujan Samaj Party. The former helps to rechargetheir ideological batteries, while the latter challenges the ideological basisof their power.

MOCK EMULATION AND ROLE REVERSAL: CARNIVAL

REEXAMINED

One of the reasons that some of the objections that have been made in thispaper have not surfaced in other commentaries on James Scotts work isprobably because Scott skilfully draws justification for his position by


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hearkening back to Rabelaiss notion of the carnival. In this connection itis important to set the record straight as far as the carnivalesque goes. It istrue that carnivals occasionally spin out of control and become quitesubversive and seditious, but it must also be noted that for such uprisings tooccur the rules of the carnival have to be deliberately broken. It is not as if

carnivals by themselves sanction revolt: the latter occurs because thecoming together of large numbers of discontented people can at times set offa rebellious wave. The Jewish Passover, which is no carnival at all, was,however, considered by the Romans to be dangerous because the Jewishpopulation was particularly restive during the Roman occupation ofJerusalem. Pontius Pilate was among the many Roman officials whosurrounded himself with extra detachments of armed personnel wheneverhe came to Jerusalem to oversee such occasions. So it is not the MiddleAges alone that were prone to such potentially destabilizing episodes atcertain times of the year. An aggregation of discontented people can bequite unpredictable in any historical period. Perhaps it is necessary to alsorecall in this connection Georges Sorel [1916] and his exhortationsregarding the myth of the proletarian strike.

In short, and because he conflates the prefiguring social context(discontent) with a particular institution (the carnival), Scott misrecognizesthe locus of determination: accordingly, any revolt which transpires occursnot because of something intrinsic to the carnivalesque itself, but ratherbecause of the possibilities afforded by a mass gathering. Bob Scribner[1978: 3034] has described several instances of carnivals turning intoriotous assemblies. In many of these cases the gathered masses were alreadypredisposed to mass agency, discontent taking the form of anti-papalsentiments which helped spark violence in favour of the Lutheran ledreformists: all they lacked was the opportunity, and it was carnival whichoffered just this. When a putative communion is struck among thedisgruntled and disaffected, there could be trouble in the offing. But surelysuch situations are out of the ordinary: nor is it the case that every carnivalis laden with subversive potential. It is not the carnival as such that makespeople rebel: rather, it is their initial condition of estrangement that makesthem combustible when they congregate in large numbers.

Otherwise, as Scribner outlines, the boundaries between play and non-play were carefully policed at a carnival. He relates an interesting anecdoteto make this point: the 1526 English collection A Hundred Mery Talys tells us of a player who did not remove his devils costume after the play.He caused a panic on his way home among folks who mistook him for thedevil himself. [Scribner, 1978: 318] In other words, parody and satirewere permitted in the world of carnival because their implications were setapart from the mundane world [Scribner, 1978: 319]. Even Bakhtin


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[1984:74] notes that carnivals had to be performed in an area near thechurch which had to be first authorized. Medieval folk culture, of whichthe carnival was a part, limited feasts, gaiety, and laughter to these smallislands of feasts and recreations [Bakhtin, 1984: 96]. Like Erasmus, whowrote against theologians in the Praise of Folly but was really a very

establishment person, Rabelais too was never a foe of royal power [Bakhtin,1984: 119]. This was true in spite of his many irreverent renditions of themedieval carnival.

In fact, when things tended to get out of hand the ruling classes oftenclosed down carnivals. The town council of Ulm, for example, prohibitedcarnivals after 1526 [Bakhtin, 1984: 313]. This is not surprising at all: asErving Goffman [1961: 4581] once pointed out, ruling classes put an endto festivities the moment euphoria gave way to dysphoria. We need to staywith Goffman for a while longer because of his extraordinary insightregarding backstaging, which is relevant here.9 According to Goffman, asone goes higher up the social scale there are fewer and fewer people one canbackstage with. Extrapolating from this it is fair to argue that in communityfestivals, when the rich and the poor are thrown together, however

temporarily, it is up to the poor to be ingratiating, to take the first step andreach out to the well-to-do classes. But the only way the poorer classesknow how to do this is to effect a mockemulation of how the upper classesbehave towards them. They are not normally privy to the ways upper classesreally interact when backstaging among themselves. The social barriermakes sure that the rabble does not get the opportunity of observing whatgoes on behind closed doors and high walls. All they know is what happensbetween them and their masters in the open, and it is this aspect that theyparody. But, again, if it strays beyond limits, the show is called off.

Mock emulations of this kind parody upper-class behaviour, but it isimportant to understand that this is not the same thing as role reversals. Thelower classes imitate, parody and satirize upper-class behaviour, but theupper classes do not pretend to be lower classes, however fleetingly. Theymay tolerate the parody, even the coarse humour, up to a point, but willnever stoop to actual role reversals. When they do take place, such as duringthe Indian festival of Holi, role reversal is between sexes, within the family,or between those who are traditionally involved in a joking relationship. Inother words, only where social equality between participants exists are rolereversals permitted. By contrast, between those who are clear unequals suchfamiliarity is nearly always explicitly forbidden.

Neither in western Uttar Pradesh, nor in Scotts Sedaka, is there any rolereversal in the true sense of the term. There might have been the occasionalmock emulation during Holi in the past, but there is no sign of even that inrural Uttar Pradesh today. The Scheduled Castes and the landed castes lead


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discrete lives, separated from each other by many barriers of communityand class. This undermines the notion of mock emulations. Further, sincelanded and landless castes do not come together in any village-levelfestivity, the scope for enacting mock emulations is correspondingly absent.Consequently, mock emulations lack both platform and format. In fact there

is greater social interaction and bonhomie involving landowning Muslimsand Hindus than between landed castes and the landless ones. Whether it isa Muslim-minority village like Sisauli or Chaprauli in Muzaffarnagardistrict, or a Muslim-dominant village like Incholi in Meerut district, thereare several festivals, both Hindu and Muslim, when the two communitiesget together on a social basis with a fair degree of fraternal warmth. This isnot found where landed castes and the Scheduled Castes are concerned, nomatter what the occasion.

The belief that carnivals can jostle the crowds and churn up, quiteindependently, a second life is to read too much into medieval festivities.10

If, on occasion, such gatherings set off violent social movements, then thecause for such uprisings should be sought not in the carnival itself, butrather in what happens outside and before it. As has been noted, anti-clerical

sentiments gave rise to many riotous carnivals in the Middle Ages,principally because the participants were already angry with the clergy, andthe Reformation had not only shown a way out but had important supportersand allies as well. Further, it is important to separate, for both analytical andempirical purposes, mock emulations from role reversals, for it is only theformer that is sometimes played out during carnivals. It must also be kept inmind that more often than not such festivities can be called off by theauthorities if they find that matters are getting out of hand. In other words,carnivals by themselves rarely set off major mobilizations. They may,however, occasionally spark one off, provided that the social setting isalready in a highly inflammable and volatile state.

CONCLUSION: EXAGGERATE TO REPRESS

Whereas others have criticized Scott for overestimating the politicalsignificance of individual small-scale acts, the occurrence of which neitherScott nor his critics challenge, this article by contrast has questioned thewidespread existence of the small-scale acts themselves. The argument herehas been that, outside the discourse of the rural rich, these small-scale acts characterized by Scott as individual and quotidian acts of defiance on thepart of the rural poor do not in the majority of instances actually takeplace. Rather than accept their existence and then lionize them, as Scottdoes, the case argued here has been that the purpose behind the circulationby the rural rich of a discourse about (largely non-existent) theft, arson,


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pilfering, etc., is both to justify and at the same time to exercise what isactually a form of repression over the rural poor.

It is necessary, then, to revisit peasant mobilizations so as to recognizeunder what conditions the poor in the countryside effectively organizeprotest and resistance. While doing this, it is most important not to be taken

in by exaggerated tales that the superior classes routinely put out to justifytheir domination over others. Lord Cornwalliss statement Every nativeof Hindustan I verily believe is corrupt provided good ideological

justification for the Raj in India.11 No doubt, Cornwallis verily believedthis to be true. There is also little doubt that such a point of view helped himto play more resolutely the role of a conquering and civilizing hero. It is,however, another matter when James Scott the scholar is taken in by theseexaggerated references to the criminal proclivities of the dominated classes.He does not appear to be aware either of the fact of exaggeration, or of thepowerful ideological role it plays in justifying the routine repressionconducted by the rich on an everyday basis.

In fact, routine repression and the stratagem of exaggeration form a pair.Those who exaggerate in this manner rarely think that this is what is being

done. Rather, they believe deeply in the veracity of these exaggerations,often without any recognition that their utterances are fabricated. Such is thepower of socialization. As has been argued here, these exaggerationsperform a useful discursive role in everyday life in that they helpconsolidate an ideological construct which in turn justifies and lubricateseconomic and political domination. At the same time, those against whomsuch charges are levelled resent these accusations and refuse them anylegitimacy. Yet, every now and again an incident occurs, a petty theft, a rudeword, that generates another round of exaggerations and reproduces theexisting barriers between classes (along the lines of they are like this; weare not like them).

These exaggerations thus possess a strategic significance. Once thisbecomes clear, then an alternative interpretation becomes possible. If thesmall-scale everyday acts are identified as exaggerations, they cannot beperceived any longer as from below acts of liberation or emancipation butmuch rather as from above forms of repression. Equally obviously, small-scale individual acts of petty theft certainly do not enable the poorer ruralclasses to build a protective barrier of any kind, let alone make an uttershambles of policy. In fact, they have just the opposite effect. Consequently,there is little chance that the occasional act of theft can ever lead, byinsinuation, imagination or imitation, to a peasant revolt. Given this, the wayforward for poor peasants and agricultural labourers is not the individual,covert or clandestine small-scale acts (arson, petty theft) that form what Scottcalls hidden transcripts, but mass, large-scale and overt revolt.12


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Indeed, this is the direction that rural anger seems to be taking incontemporary Uttar Pradesh. The Bahujan Samaj Party, as mentioned earlier,has successfully rallied the Scheduled Castes poor to its side. Admittedly,much of this partys appeal is based on caste, but it has succeeded in givingthe Scheduled Castes a voice they did not possess in the past. This is largely

because the Bahujan Samaj Party addresses the crucial question of dignity andpride, or that very aspect which the upper castes constantly undermine withtheir everyday exaggerations and routine repression. The ideology of theBahujan Samaj Party is, moreover, out in the open, and not surreptitiouslypropagated. Its active supporters are composed of Scheduled Caste membersfound not just in urban contexts: it is also popular among those who still livein the villages. This is especially true at election time, when Bahujan SamajParty activists swarm everywhere, reinforcing the sense of power, evendefiance, among members of the Scheduled Castes. The landowning castes,naturally, resent the growth and spread of the Bahujan Samaj Party, but thereis nothing they can do on a sustained basis to stem its appeal among the pooragrarian castes. They cannot even threaten them with an economic boycott,for there is little that small landowning castes can do anyway to alleviate rural

unemployment. Today the Bahujan Samaj Party is a major presence in UttarPradesh, and for a while it was able to form the government in the province.This form of overt, mass, large-scale revolt on the part of the rural poor haswithout question proved to be a much more effective kind of action thanstealing three motorcycles in 12 years, or taking Rs60 from somebodys shirt,or stealing paddy whose total value is only M$532. Scotts everydayresistance simply has not lived up to its billing.

NOTES

1. See, for example, the collections edited by Scott and Kerkvliet [1986], Colburn [1989], Haynesand Prakash [1991], and Joseph and Nugent [1994].

2. For the methodological complexity in determining the origin and object of a process as

apparently simple as rumour mongering, see Kumar [2000].3. I was reminded of nothing so much as Dumonts idealized version of the Indian caste system, toldhim (as Berreman subsequently found out) by the Brahmins and reflecting their own politico-ideological and economic interests. See Dumont [1970] and Berreman [1979:155-63].

4. There is an obvious risk attached to telling such stories, particularly to an outside researcher, inthat they may get back to the rich peasant or landlord from whom items were taken in the firstplace, with rather obvious consequences for the poor peasant informant.

5. It is important to qualify even this Robin Hood agency as a form of from below resistance.Just as caste was romanticized by Dumont (see above), so rural banditry has been idealized byHobsbawm [1969] as a systemically redistributive mechanism (= Robin Hood activity). Thishas been strongly criticized in turn by Blok [1972] and Li Causi [1975], both of whom pointout that bandits were invariably the enforcers of landlord power in the countryside, and notredistributors of landlord-owned assets.

6. On these points, see Scott [1985: 266, 267].7. For a fuller description see Gupta [1997: 2046].8. On this point, see Thompson [1978: 150].


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9. There are two possible interpretations of the concept backstaging, each of which hasrelevance to the carnivalesque. The first concerns the privilege inherent in being able to gobackstage and mingle with the actors, a procedure that historically has been the preserve ofroyalty, the rich and the aristocratic. It is from this that the Goffmanesque interpretation derives:namely, the idea of in-group rituals of exclusivity being reproduced and reaffirmed out of sight(and thus beyond the gaze) of the common or plebeian mass. The second involves the conceptof crossing boundaries that define otherwise separate realities. As its theatrical derivation hints,

the concept backstaging implies a capacity to cross otherwise rigidly defined and imposedboundaries. For a member of the audience to go backstage and mingle with actors, therefore,is to dissolve the artifice inherent in theatrical performance: the same is true of the reversesituation, in which the actor becomes part of the audience, a specifically Brechtian deviceaimed at revealing and thus dispelling the artificiality of (or normalizing) theatricalperformance. The relevance of this particular aspect of backstaging to carnival lies, of course,in the suspension it permits of otherwise impermeable social boundaries.

10. On this point, see Bakhtin [1984: 9]11. This statement is cited in Metcalfe [1995: 24].12. See Scott [1990] for the concept hidden transcripts as applied by him to clandestine and

small-scale everyday acts of peasant resistance.

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1984,Rabelais and His World, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Berreman, Gerald D., 1979, Caste and Other Inequalities, New Delhi: Manohar Books.Blok, Anton, 1972, The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered, Comparative

Studies in Society and History, Vol.14, No.4.Carter, Marina, 1995, Servants, Sirdars, and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press.

Chakravarti, Uma, 1995, Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery: Surveillance of the State in 18thCentury Maharashtra, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol.20, Nos.12.

Colburn, F.D. (ed.), 1989,Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New York: M.E. Sharpe.Dumont, Louis, 1970, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, London:

Weidenfeld & Nicolson.Goffman, Erving, 1961, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , Harmondsworth: Penguin.Gupta, Dipankar, 1997,Rivalry and Brotherhood: Politics in the Life of Farmers of Northern India,

Delhi: Oxford University Press.Haynes, Douglas, and Gyan Prakash (eds.), 1991 Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday

Social Relations in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press.Hobsbawm, E.J., 1969,Bandits, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.Joseph, Gilbert M., and Daniel Nugent (eds.), 1994,Everyday Forms of State Formation, London

and Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Kumar, Arun, 2000, Beyond Muffled Murmurs of Dissent? Kisan Rumour in Colonial Bihar, The

Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.28, No.1.

Li Causi, Luciano, 1975, Anthropology and Ideology: The Case of Patronage in MediterraneanSocieties, Critique of Anthropology, Nos.45.Metcalfe, Thomas, 1995,Ideology of the Raj, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Scott, James, 1985, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press.Scott, James, 1990,Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press.Scott, James, and B.J. Tria Kerkvliet (eds.), 1986, Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance in

Southeast Asia, London and Portland, OH: Frank Cass.Scribner, Bob, 1978, Reformation, Carnival and the World Turned Upside Down, Social History,

Vol.3, No.3.Sorel, George, 1916,Reflections on Violence, London: George Allen & Unwin.Souden, David, 1978, Rogues, Whores and Vagabonds? Indentured Servant Emigrants to North

America and the Case of Mid-Seventeenth Century Bristol, Social History, Vol.3, No.1.Thompson, E.P., 1978, Eighteenth Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class, Social

History, Vol.3, No.2.


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