INDIA is truly an amazing place: it is both a graveyard of concepts that flourish happily elsewhere, and a breeding ground for those that survive only in our conditions. Terms such as class, status, nation state, and community have already undergone significant modifications in the Indian setting. These changes have no doubt helped broaden the appeal of universal concepts and made them more versatile, but still, India is a difficult place for theorists to live in.

Now the hammer falls on the hitherto unquestioned understanding of a village. What is a village? And with that, Who is a villager?

The most important criterion for an area to be officially declared rural is that at least 75% of its economy should be agricultural. If not, India’s claim to be a rural society falls flat. If we calculate what these so-called villages produce nation-wide, then we find that as much as 45.5% of their Net Domestic Product is actually non-agricultural. In which case we need to re-think what is a village, and who is a villager. The village economy is split almost down the middle: one half agricultural and the other half anything but. In which case, what happens to the popular notion that India is a land of villages, and that 70% of our population live in rural India?

There are some other add-ons to the official understanding of what makes for a village, such as population density and so on. But they are not worth the candle if the economic criterion is not satisfied. Given this objective reality regarding rural India, we can no longer talk of the Indian villager in the old fashioned way. Instead, we need to understand and underline the country-town nexus in which the villager operates. The relationship between the rural and urban is so dense and reiterative that it makes little sense to discuss one without calling out to its ‘other’.

Even if we were to play along, for the time being, with the accepted, though misplaced, distinction between rural and urban, we cannot help but notice the huge push forces that are working on our villagers. The latest figures on migration show that the search for jobs has outstripped even the search for marriage partners as the principal reason for leaving one’s home. Till quite recently, women leaving home to join their husbands after marriage was the most frequent cause of migration, but not any longer. This shift is more clearly visible now, but has been building up for a long time.

Interestingly, there are many who live in these villages, but do not work there. They get up in the morning and head for a town, or sometimes a manufactory in the vicinity, but by nightfall are back in their rural homes. If one were to go to a village during the day there would be far fewer people than at night, or early in the morning. Around the time most of us are wiping the sleep from our eyes, many villagers are either heading to their fields or to the nearest bus stop, or collection point, in order to earn their living. The villager mingles town with country even before the day has properly begun.

Not everybody comes back home with anything to show for a day badly spent. Rural Indians are fated to face the luck of the draw no matter what they do. If engaged in agriculture, they are hostage to monsoonal vagaries, and if they congregate at market squares they are not always noticed by contractors foraging for cheap labour. Even when they make eye contact, the village hand loses out; his skills don’t have a standard price. Consequently, they are always left holding the shorter end of the stick in any wage negotiations.

 

Though such people lack high levels of specialization, they are usually half competent at a host of things. They can work today as a labourer, tomorrow as a bricklayer, the next day as a part-time carpenter, or an earthmover, and so on. Now comes the sadder part. No matter how many years these workers may have spent in these scratchy jobs, their skill levels never go up. They remain boxed in all their lives in non-remunerative occupations, or in looking for them. Consequently, their entire biographies hover around poverty levels.

But how different is that from those who work in the fields? Another all-India statistic might help. At a conservative estimate, about 80% of landowning cultivators have holdings that are less than five acres. On digging a little deeper we find that in fact as many as 66% have three acres or less. My own experience in different parts of India suggests that the picture may be somewhat more grim. Apart from some areas in Northwest India, in large parts of the country it is hard to find anybody who actually owns five acres of land and has only a wife and little children to support. A farmer who is blessed in this respect is accorded the status of a substantial farmer by other villagers. This is why when we get the impression that there are a fair number of substantial farmers in a village, we need to check the generational depth. When it comes down to the measuring tape, 15 acres divided between a father and his three married sons actually gives each nuclear family less than four acres apiece.

Clearly, the village is not what it used to be. When one reads accounts of rural India of the fifties and sixties, it almost appears as if we are describing another country. Where are all those landlords? Those agrestic serfs? Those bonded labourers? They are difficult to find even in Bihar or East UP. But this should not appear very startling. If 80% of landholdings are below five acres, where is the scope to hire workers on the farm? In fact, there is an excess of family labour in most agrarian households. This is why villagers hope to send as many of their boys as they can to the cities, leaving behind just the idiot son. So if hired labourers are missing, it is because of the structure of landholding, and not so much because villagers are becoming better off.

 

Migrating out of the village has always been a major attraction in rural India, but of late it has become a compelling factor. In the first few decades after independence rural out-migration could be seen somewhat episodically as an unusual, but interesting, feature. But now the drive to leave agriculture is so pronounced that it can no longer be viewed as a side show, or as a phenomenon that peripherally relates to rural life. It is a significant aspect of village life itself.

A large number of rural migrants do not come alone. They have a network that brings them to urban jobs and it is this network that supports them in between jobs. A network of this kind is nearly always community or region specific, which is why there are multiple networks criss-crossing one another in an urban site. Villagers long to belong to such networks, but I have also seen villages that are bereft of these long distance ties. Why, I don’t know; but that is the way it is. These network circuits are very idiosyncratically connected, for so much depends on chance and a breakthrough.

 

What all of this adds up to is that between the village and the city there is a two-way traffic. The village impacts the city and the city the village, and the two are nearly one. We cannot talk of rural India without immediately calling out to the urban world. In the past, village field studies usually saw the town and country relationship as a one-dimensional phenomenon. For example, even in the works of T. Scarlett Epstein,¹ it is the city that is influencing the village, but nary a word of the movement the other way. There are detailed descriptions in accounts of this sort that document how many motorcycles, TV sets, and coffee shops are in the village. But what they fail to point out is that villagers are not sleeping at the switch. They too are active agents who are keen to exchange their mud huts for urban shanties.

Villagers know that the rural economy cannot afford the luxury of planning a lifetime devoted to agriculture. Landholdings are getting smaller; the pressure on farms is more intense; even the green revolution is now a has-been. This is why on an all-India level, there has been a 25% decline in the total land operated between 1960-61 and 2002-03.² So no matter which map one reads, there isn’t a scenic route to the village chaupal any more.

If agriculture were to grow at even two per cent per annum, that would bring joy to villagers and to wizened planners in Delhi. In fact, in 2003 agriculture actually suffered a negative growth rate. This is really quite incredible against the overall growth rate in our country. Even the total investment in agriculture as percentage of GDP has fallen between 1990-91 and 2005-06.³ There is little reason, therefore, for villagers to be even remotely romantic about their way of life. All rural classes and communities, from diverse points of departure, are busy planning strategies to ‘up and leave’ for urban India.

 

Urban manufactories are growing rapidly because there is cheap labour from the village to work in them. Undoubtedly there is the pull from the cities, but without the shove from the village it would have been impossible for these manufactories (actually sweat shops) to multiply at the rate they have. For example, units employing less than 10 workers have grown at over 100% in the last 25 years.⁴ These are also the enterprises that service the export sector, both directly and indirectly. So our shabby manufacturing urban outposts with poor ‘rural’ employees are actually integral parts of a global economy. Things have gone that far!

In the early decades after independence a number of community development schemes were envisaged, and most were given up very soon.⁵ What came in the way in those days was the great divide between rich and poor villagers which robbed the idea of the ‘community’ of any significant meaning. For the same reason the Bhoodan movement too went under as it depended heavily on men of means to display some generosity to the very poor. These illusory promises are now things of the past and so are the rural rich.

Years and years ago, right down to the early eighties, perhaps there was some purchase in the belief that land reforms would do the trick and take the poor villager out of poverty. Today, however, given the extent of sub-division of holdings, there is just no land to be reformed. What politics and the administrative machinery failed to do, sheer demography has managed. If approximately 80% of landholdings are below five acres, then land reforms obviously have no scope. It is population increase, more than anything else, which has seen to the demise of the category once called ‘landlords’. Till very recently these landlords stalked the village, killing, raping and looting at will. Their descendants have no such luck.

 

Under these conditions it would have been hard to believe that rural India could afford disparities any longer. Villages should have been one thick swathe of unhappy egalitarians, but that is still not the case. Given the massive levels of poverty, there are still many in the village who would consider a five-acre landowner to be a rich farmer, particularly if he has access to irrigational works. In real terms, this five-acre magnate is a poor man. When he has to employ labour during the peak harvesting seasons, he does not do this from a situation of advantage. His pockets are pretty shallow which is why landowner-landless labour confrontations in contemporary India are quite different from what they used to be. Today both sides confront each other from different levels of poverty.

 

The landless labourer, as one can guess by now, rarely packs a lunch pail for a full day in the fields. Even the much written about migrant workers from Bihar and East UP to Punjab spend most of their working months outside the village, pulling rickshaws and doing odd jobs. Come harvesting season they go singly or in families to the villages where they ask for proper wages. The landowner employs them because he has little option to do otherwise. But once the harvesting is done and it is pay day, there is no cash in the employer’s till. This is when problems and tensions arise. It is not as if there is this proud, pompous overbearing landlord squeezing the peasant, but a poor owner-cultivator facing off with an even poorer agricultural labourer. This is the irony of rural India.

As agricultural labourers only surface at certain calendrical moments, members of the family carry out the bulk of the work. From preparing the field, to sowing and weeding, it is the family that mostly toils on the family farm. This is why the nature of agrarian politics too has undergone significant changes. There was a time when rural India was beset by violent confrontations between big landlords or capitalist farmers and poor agricultural labourers, many of whom were dependent on their patrons. Those were the heydays of left-wing agrarian politics. But today agricultural labourers are more or less absent for the better part of the year making that kind of mobilization obsolete. It is difficult to build a movement with a cast of cameo performers who appear largely at harvest time.

The famous struggles that left and socialist parties led even after the green revolution are now history. The Naxalite movement that fought for the sharecroppers would not get off the block was it to be inaugurated today. The most vibrant rural based politics in our time now is not around marginal and poor farmers, but focused on the interests of owner-cultivators. Whether we take Nanjudaswamy in Karnataka or Mahender Singh Tikait in West UP, their support base is not the poor landless peasant or sharecropper, but the owner-cultivator. Here too it is not the rich capitalist farmer, but the operator of what can be loosely called a family farm.

 

In fact, Tikait was very firm in not letting landless peasants enter the fold of the Bharatiya Kisan Union. He consistently maintained that only a landowner could claim the status of a kisan. The issues that contemporary farmers’ movement press for have nothing to do with agricultural wages or permanency of tenure, but with support prices, inputs and subsidies. Unlike the peasant movements of the past where the enemy was right there in the village sipping tea with the local thanedar, the enemy here is the supra-local state. This is why Tikait and his band marshal their forces outside the office of the Meerut district magistrate, or in front of the legislature in Lucknow, or on Delhi’s Boat Club lawns. Except attending to their inner factional squabbles, farmers’ movements have no enemies in the village. As their target lies outside the village, town and country once again come in close contact.

This development in rural politics is also to be expected. If family farms dominate the countryside, then where is the scope for employing hired labour or putting sharecroppers to work. If anything, one sees a surge in the number of reverse tenancies. In such cases, richer farmers rent land of smaller ones to increase their area of operation and employ economies of scale. This feature can be readily found in Punjab and Haryana. The issues that arise in the village economy today have nothing to do with agricultural labour or sharecroppers. Naturally, rural politics too is only about owner-cultivators. The old world has gone and with it the old villager.

But are our intellectual commissars ready to accept such impressive transformations? We still hear calls for thoroughgoing land reforms when the need for them is practically non-existent. Where is that surplus land to be distributed? One still comes across characterizations of India as an agrarian country, while there is very little on the ground to suggest this. It is not uncommon to sit through a treatise that claims that the heart of India pounds in the fields and rests behind mud walls. Not only do gross statistics disprove such a notion, but an informal chat with villagers would quickly reveal how fed up they are with their world and how dearly they would want to move into an urban slum. In the village, tomorrow holds no excitement, but in an urban slum one can still dream.

 

Even so, there are power-wielders and decision-makers at the highest level who insist on deluding themselves that the village is still the mainstay of our society, economy and culture. What helps them prop up these utterly anachronistic views is the way the administration conducts surveys and census operations. As I discovered, census enumerators frequently put down all those who are landless in a village as agricultural labourers, without enquiring if they actually worked on land.

But the National Sample Survey takes the cake. This organization defines a farmer as anyone who has worked on land during the past 365 days. Note the emphasis is on during the past year and not for the past year. So if a person works for even a few days on land then the term ‘farmer’ becomes readily applicable. For the remaining 364 days this ‘farmer’ could be a carpenter, a welder, or a bricklayer, but because there was a lapse once for a few days, hours even, in the past year, this person is officially a farmer: or so the NSS wants us to believe.

And what about a farmer’s household? The NSS again quite simple-mindedly states that if a household has one ‘farmer’ then it becomes a farmer’s household. The others in the household may be lawyers, doctors or industrial workers, but just because of one errant relative the ‘farmer’ tag will hang on their door. This is how the figures on farmers are inflated, and this is why our policies are always off the mark.

 

Even in the fifties and sixties there was a body of opinion that argued that we should try and get the villager out of the village as India is an industrializing country, or ought to be one.⁶ This call has been ignored for all these years, but now it is difficult to dodge it. Simple villagers will readily testify that there is no future in farming, and if only they and their children found alternate occupations life would be so much better. It is important then to work at the state level to address these felt aspirations of our villagers. Initiatives like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme are only measures that keep the rural poor alive, but they do not to take them out of poverty.

If we cannot think differently of the Indian village, let us at least be mindful of the Indian villager.

 

Footnotes:

1. T. Scarlett Epstein, South India: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Macmillan, London, 1973.

2. National Sample Survey, Some Aspects of Operational Landholdings in India, 2002-3, Table 3.2, National Sample Survey Organisation, Ministry of Statistics and Implementation, Government of India, New Delhi, 2006.

3. India Key Data 2007:2008 (Incorporating Budget Analysis), The Red Book, Kal Nimay, Sumangal Press, Mumbai, 2007, p. 35.

4. Five Year Plan 2002-2007, (Vol. 1, Annexure 5.3), The Planning Commission, Government of India, New Delhi.

5. A.R. Desai, ‘Dangerous Implications’, Seminar 4, December 1959, pp. 36-40.

6. Ibid.