From hada to sistam

Reading Land and People in Bijapur

Sailen Routray 

There has been an academic division of labour in India regarding agriculture as a field of study. The study of agriculture has primarily received the attention of economists. Much of it has been framed within the mode of production debate in the context of the capitalist transformation of Indian agriculture. The anthropological study of rural India has left issues of political economy unattended.

This has been reflected in the neglect of agriculture as a field of study by the discipline and the relatively marginal presence of the subfield of sociology/social anthropology of agriculture in India. The book Harbingers of Rain (HoR), by social anthropologist A. R. Vasavi, therefore, fills in an important gap in literature.

It provides an anthropological critique of the economism implicit in the academic discourse about agriculture by exploring the agricultural cosmology of the people in Bijapur in North Karnataka. It looks at the history of droughts and famines in the region and the ways in which traditional provisioning systems had tried to respond to such periods of ecological and human stress.

HoR also maps the official discourse that constructs Bijapur as ‘drought-prone’ and therefore, in need of ‘development’ and state intervention. The book then locates the interface of the ‘development regime’ with the life world of people in Bijapur, and tries to frame the emergent cultural forms based on the Geertzian premise of the necessity of analytical disjunction between culture and social structure.

HoR can be located within a web of interlinked academic discourses. It can be framed within the discourse of post-coloniality, especially surrounding the theorization of hybridity and can be retrospectively seen as foreshadowing Akhil Gupta’s work on hybridity of agricultural practices. Since it counter-posits  local, context specific, ‘appropriate’ knowledge of the ‘agro-cultural’ systems against the uniform, ‘scientific’ knowledge of the agricultural extension bureaucracy, it can also be located in the contemporary discourse surrounding local/indigenous knowledge.

HoR also takes certain methodological debates forward. There has been a long-standing debate in Indian social anthropology about the validity, or otherwise, of ‘the village’ as an object of study and as a unit of analysis. By explicating the common (although rapidly modifying) ideological contours of the life world of the villagers, it makes a case for redefining ‘the village’ as a valid site for anthropological work. By locating the village within the large ‘field’ of the region (Bijapur), the author attempts to historicize the cosmology and life-world of the people.

This volume frames the agricultural cosmology of the region of Bijapur in terms of three underlying precepts. They are bhumi guna (soil characteristics), hada (appropriateness), and hulige (bestowed abundance).  These precepts give primacy to ‘a homological and analogical relationship between natural and social contexts, objects and processes.'

The principles of substantialism and context-specificity underlie these percepts. The principle of substantialism posits the existence of essences as the substratum of phenomena. These concepts make for a larger cosmological complex that links the land, the crops, the seasons and the rains, with the people and their actions and their social transactions. These precepts also link up the various communities of the region (‘low-caste’ pastoralists, Lingayat agriculturists and Muslims) into one coherent, communal matrix of rainmaking.

According to the precept of bhumi guna (soil characteristics), particular kinds of land in Bijapur have particular kinds of properties, and they lend themselves for particular practices. The land is divided into principally three categories, yere, maadi and thota based on the kind of crops they support and the climatic periods they are best suited for.

The precept of bhumi guna is intimately linked with that of hada or appropriateness. Hada governs the matrix of agricultural practices through the formulation of appropriateness regarding the proper period of time, condition etc. This precept links the quality of the soil, rains and that of the crops in a web of context-specific agricultural interventions that must be learnt and creatively used.

Although hulige has the connotations of productivity, it is not economic in nature; rather it is a sacralized notion of abundance. Hulige is encoded into the socio-agricultural landscape by the various rituals that link the natural with the social in one large cosmic complex. This cosmology is posited as having undergone erosion in the recent past.

But it is not very clear from the book, whether there have been any significant markers in such a process of erosion. There is also the absence of the pastoralists’ cosmologies surrounding agriculture. The book thus buys into the dominant paradigm of looking into agriculture through the lens of settled cultivation.

But the discourse surrounding the socio-agricultural region of Bijapur is a contested terrain. By the ‘outsiders’ it has always been perceived, and discursively created, as a marginal area. But until very recently, the people of the region saw the region as karinadu, the land of fertile black soil and of virtuous, hardworking agriculturists.

A. R. Vasavi 

After the British conquest of Bijapur, the region saw a series of droughts and famines the memory of which have seeped into folk memory. The culture and the social structure of the region have been shaped through a process of adjustment to such climatic events. The provisioning in times of ecological stress like droughts was embedded in the social structure and the instruments of statecraft that had grown in response to them.

The local elites consolidated their power through a process of resource augmentation for the poor in times of stress. The British drastically transformed such systems by changing the local balance of power. As a result, people started losing their coping abilities. The British provisioning of relief was not very successful because it did not take into account factors like caste taboos, general social sanctions related to accepting relief regarding loss of status etc.

But by the beginning of the last century (incidentally the time when the seeds of the developmental state were being sown) relief started becoming culturally more acceptable. Now it is seen as a right that the state has to guarantee. But this is not conceptualized in the book in the context of the growth of the developmental state in India.

Linked to these processes of transformation, have been changes in the provisioning system. Contemporary communal provisioning mechanisms in this context include the systems of dasoha, aya and dana. Dasoha stems from the religious practices of Virasaiva sect as practiced by the Lingayats, the dominant caste in the region. It involves communal partaking of food after it has been offered to the various village deities in the month of Shravana (July-Aug). People across caste groups are involved.

Aya is like the baluta system in Maharashtra. In the aya system families receive food and land for cultivation from the landed families for services rendered to the village. Dana involves voluntary gifts of grain to the laboring and service castes during the times of harvest. Both dana and aya transactions take place during harvest time.

Therefore, it is only dasoha that seems to mitigate resource stress during times of recurrent and periodic scarcity to any significant extent. These systems are also not geared towards tiding over times of ecological stress and moreover ‘are premised on cultural codes’. Thus, these provisioning systems cannot be said to constitute a ‘moral economy’.

Because of the hierarchy implicit in aya and dana transactions, they are being substantively challenged by the ‘lower’ castes now. This challenge by the ‘lower’ castes is not articulated properly in the volume. The impact of the changing caste dynamics, and the ways in which the changing patterns of migration of the ‘lower’ castes influence agricultural practices, are not explored thoroughly by the book.

The relief apparatus of the state has taken over the earlier provisioning systems. This has been linked to the discursive creation of Bijapur as a backward, drought-prone district that needs the interventions of the developmentalist state. The growth and the acceptance of the relief dispensing apparatus have been accompanied by the growth and acceptance of the ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’ of the Agricultural Extension Service.

The acceptance of green revolution technology by farmers in the region has not been a simple matter of technological appropriation. This has involved significant changes in the agricultural cosmology as well. Utpati or increase in production has begun to supplant hulige, and sistam (or being systematic according to the canons of ‘modern’ and ‘scientific’ agriculture) has begun to replace the precept of appropriateness – or hada.

This has been linked to two parallel processes. On the one hand it has meant the growing capitalist penetration of agriculture in Bijapur and a set of attendant structural changes contingent upon local factors. On the other hand, it has meant the creation of subjectivities that are being shaped by the developmentalist state and the market characterized by being sistam for the creation of utpati.

But the challenge to local cosmologies has not gone unchallenged. The ‘sistamized’ state subjects of Bijapur have been part of a process of creation of a discourse of ‘hybridity’ that comments, and discursively challenges, the politico-cultural changes sweeping the countryside. The older folk of the region characterizes the contemporary period as ‘hybrid times’, and the contemporaneous people as ‘hybrid people’ who have lost their former wholeness.

This is symbolized, for example, by the non-usage of hybrid seeds for ritual purposes. But it might be inappropriate to characterize this discourse as resistance, as there is growing disjunction between these rituals and the social structure in which they are embedded. It is in contexts like this that the book’s emphasis on the need to have an analytical disjuncture between social structure and culture stands validated.

HoR does not substantiate the supposed capitalist transformation of the countryside of Bijapur with substantive quantitative data and analysis. Despite attempts to be inclusive in the representation of the voices of various communities, it gives prominence to the life-world of the landowning communities.  Moreover the ecological context of agriculture is treated as a given and the conceptual difficulties of positing a clear-cut distinction between the cultivated and the wild in the Indian context are not explored satisfactorily.

Despite these limitations, the book marked a definite methodological advance when it was first published 22 years back. It has also created a disciplinary space for the study of agriculture in Indian social anthropology. It explores aspects of Indian society that very few social anthropologists have explored even now. It has become a classic sociological/anthropological study of rural India, and is a must read for anyone interested in the classic questions related to continuity and change in Indian society.

Bibliographic Details: A. R. Vasavi. Harbingers of Rain: Land and Life in South India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1999.  178 pp. Notes, appendices, glossary, bibliography, index.