Shifting Landscapes: The Making and Remaking of Village Commons in India

356 Pages·2006·2.824 MB·English

by  Rita Brara

Title Pages
Shifting Landscapes: The Making and Remaking
of Village Commons in India
Rita Brara
Print publication date: 2006
Print ISBN-13: 9780195673012
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195673012.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Shifting Landscapes
(p.iii) Shifting Landscapes
(p.iv)
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List of Tables
Shifting Landscapes: The Making and Remaking
of Village Commons in India
Rita Brara
Print publication date: 2006
Print ISBN-13: 9780195673012
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195673012.001.0001
(p.vi) List of Tables
3.1 Decadal change in human population (1901–41) 63
3.2 Composition of statutory village councils (gram panchayats) 67
3.3 Population size of gram panchayat headquarters and associated
villages 70
3.4 Which was the sarpanch's village? 71
3.5 Village-wise distribution of grazing lands 73
3.6 Composition of the informal committee of mukhias: Khedi Dookiya 79
3.7 Caste composition of members of the informal village committee:
Khedi Dookiya 79
3.8 Caste and land ownership: Khedi Dookiya 80
3.9 Stratified ratio of ‘big men’ to number of households: Khedi Dookiya
82
3.10 Households that kept cows in Khedi Dookiya 83
3.11 Households with school-going children in Khedi Dookiya 84
3.12 Caste affiliation of heads (sarpanches) of statutory village councils
85
3.13 Declared and actual income from grazing lands: 1985/86 97
4.1 Village-wise distribution of pasture-land (johada) lands:
Lachhmangarh tehsil 118
4.2 Extent of grazing land in former khalsa and jagir/muafi villages:
Lachhmangarh tehsil 119
4.3. Re-classification of pasture-land (johadas): Lachhmangarh tehsil 120
4.4 Reduction of grazing lands: Lachhmangarh tehsil 121
(p.vii) 4.5 Encroachment reports: Lachhmangarh tehsil 125
4.6 Landholding size of ‘regularized’ trespassers: Banai 129
4.7 Landholding size of allottees: Banai 131
4.8 Comparing official reports and survey findings on charagah and siwai-
chak lands: Khedi Dookiya 144
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List of Tables
4.9 Landholding size of officially reported trespassers on charagah lands:
Khedi Dookiya 145
5.1 Selected villages: salient characteristics (1986) 152
5.2 Livestock composition: Khedi and Banai 156
5.3 Correspondence between land-holding and herd size 158
5.4 Distribution of households with irrigation facilities (1985) 159
5.5 Livestock numbers in irrigated-farm households (1985) 159
5.6 Age and sex ratios: cows and buffaloes 161
5.7 Average number of livestock in irrigated-farm households 163
5.8 Age and sex ratios: sheep and goats 167
5.9 The sale and purchase of dry fodder 174
6.1 Uses of principal plant types 200–1
6.2 Seasonal sources of green fodder: rainy season, winter, summer 203–4
6.3 Diminution of indigenous vegetation 213–14
6.4 Consumption pattern of green fodder by different livestock species
215–16
6.5 Tree types on grazing and private lands 216
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Acknowledgements
Shifting Landscapes: The Making and Remaking
of Village Commons in India
Rita Brara
Print publication date: 2006
Print ISBN-13: 9780195673012
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195673012.001.0001
(p.viii) Acknowledgements
The time and indulgence of many people have contributed to the making of this
book. I particularly want to thank:
– the villagers of Khedi and Banai and other residents of
Lachhmangarh tehsil, Sanno, Ruga Ram, and Nemichand, who shared
their knowledge, hopes, and fears;
– P.R. Sharmaji who handled the manual tabulation competently;
– Sharmaji, Vijay Kumar, Pradeep, Nand Kishore, Sanjay Mahrishi,
Sanjay Rathore, Shobha, Karnika, Harry and Narinder whose
bonhomie contributed to the quality of our interaction with villagers;
– S.C. Sharma for drawing attention to the laws bearing on the
commons and discussing his experiences as an administrator in the
field;
– the S.W.R.C. communication team at Tilonia for their efforts at
broaching the issue of the commons through the medium of puppetry
and group discussions;
– O.P. Kulheri who contributed as a botanist and a villager from
similar environs;
– Madanlal Amin who took stock of the encroachments at Khedi and
Banai;
– Ram Deo, ex-patwari, who expeditiously produced copies of village
and tehsil-level records in the absence of photo-copiers and P.K.
Sharma for preparing the maps;
– Piyush and Mala for locating relevant literature in libraries at
Avikanagar and the Planning Commission;
– Pushpa, Ravi, Nand Sanwalani, and Umesh for typing from untidy
first drafts; Rafia for cross-checking the references and the ISID for
formatting the final version;
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Acknowledgements
(p.ix) – Professor Narula, Deepak, Kanchan, Kanta, Kavita, Pradeep,
Prahlad, Purnendu, Rakesh, Rathore, and Sharada—the IDS biradiri—
who through both direct comments on this study and by discussing
aspects of their own work imperceptibly influenced its course;
– N.S. Jodha for his pioneering studies of common property resources
in Rajasthan and for his comments on this inquiry;
– Ford Foundation for the opportunity of pursuing the earlier
monograph tided Shifting Sands: A Study of Rights in Common
Pastures;
– Amita, Deepak, Rabindra, Radhika, Rajni, Roma, Tulsi, and Virginius
for animated discussions, especially after the Friday seminars;
– Professor A. Béteille, T.N. Madan, and Professor J.P.S. Uberoi for
nurturing me in the discipline of sociology/social anthropology;
– Veena Das who always inspires me by the standard she sets for her
own work and for the warmth of her encouragement;
– Ram Guha for first suggesting that a revised version of the
monograph would be worth the effort;
– a family that is indulgent toward what I define as work that never
seems to end; especially, Amitabh who in his unofficial capacity as
social scientist alternates between critic and supporter and Prashant
who wonders about the meaning of sociology.
My responsibility for the limitations, however, cannot be disclaimed.
RITA BRARA
MAY 2005
DELHI
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Dedication
Shifting Landscapes: The Making and Remaking
of Village Commons in India
Rita Brara
Print publication date: 2006
Print ISBN-13: 9780195673012
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195673012.001.0001
Dedication
(p.ii) This one's for Amitabh
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Introduction
Shifting Landscapes: The Making and Remaking
of Village Commons in India
Rita Brara
Print publication date: 2006
Print ISBN-13: 9780195673012
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195673012.001.0001
Introduction
Rita Brara
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195673012.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter attempts to understand the representations of the village and
village commons as the ongoing social production of residents and outsiders.
There are two types of ownership in relation to land in India: (i) ownership that
arose from the conquest of territory; and (ii) ownership that developed from the
first clearance of land. It reviews the emergence of agricultural organization in
the village and investigates that which is subjugated or marginalized—namely,
the discourse and practices in relation to the commons, taking ‘practice’ to be ‘a
temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings’.
Common pastoral resources and watering points enabled the inhabitants of
rainfall-scarce regions in Rajasthan to engage a mix of animal-rearing and crop
husbandry. The tracts of land identified as village common pastures have
multiple uses that co-exist with grazing. These aspects underlie the
understanding of village commons right through this book.
Keywords:   village, ownership, land, Rajasthan, agricultural organization, pastures, crop husbandry
‘Between property and common ownership I could construct a whole
world.’
Proudhon (1897)
This book invites the reader to journey into the realm of villagers who rely upon
a combination of private farms and common grazing lands for a livelihood. The
rural inhabitants with whom we shall travel are not equals in the private
resources that they command. Those with more private lands depend less upon
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Introduction
the pastoral commons for animal husbandry. Yet, it is by espousing a social
representation of the commons as village common pastures in the present that
villagers who own less private lands are afforded the means of their sustenance.
Village commons are made and remade, defined and reconfigured from diverse
positions and at multiple sites within the village and beyond. Social practices,
constructions, and representations of village commons unfold in varied spaces
that make for spatio-temporal flows which contour the construction of the social
in the village. My intention here is to document, share, and reflect upon a
fragment of the discourse about village commons by traversing the zig-zag
course of the social as it moves from the space of the village to the province and
beyond and back again engaging villagers, judges, administrators, and techno-
scientists in the dryland terrain of the Lachhmangarh region in the state of
Rajasthan. In putting together this story of village commons from relational and
partial points of view in the post-Independence period, I focus both upon the
social framing of village commons and its coexistence with divergent practices
and constructions.
Everywhere, the village as a form of human settlement comprising dwellings,
fields, and the commons is a feature of the agrarian landscape. Yet, the
commons are often eclipsed in writings about the village (p.2) as an object and
an institution. If I look at how the village has been constructed as an object of
study in the discipline of sociology, the village takes the form of the other in an
industrial age. Here, the emphasis lies, as with Tonnies (1887/1955), in
contrasting the gemeinschaft of the village and the gesellschaft of industrial
organization.
The study of the non-industrialized world has, by and large, been the province of
social anthropologists. The village often appears in the writings of social
anthropologists as the site of settled agriculture in contradistinction to the
seasonal camps of nomads and hunter-gatherers. Conceiving the village in its
formal difference from mobile modes of livelihood, however, leads to the
overlooking of the combinations of settled agriculture with other modes of
subsistence that utilize the village commons, for activities such as animal
husbandry, gathering firewood, and snaring prey, for instance, besides enabling
agriculture. The typologizing of villages by social anthropologists has yielded a
few contrasts—such as nucleated or dispersed, regular and irregular—but there
has been scarce enquiry into a patterning of villages that entails the co-presence
of private lands and village commons.
Geertz (1968) takes the view that while anthropologists often locate themselves
in villages, the village per se is not the object of their interest. The question I ask
myself is what if I turn this proposition around and look upon a village and
village commons, as significant and socially constructed objects of practical and
symbolic concern to residents. These are presently viewed as objects produced
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Introduction
by the livelihood practices of inhabitants in interaction with statutory processes
and practices.
I accept the argument that villages were encompassed by a feudal state in the
past. But my concern here is with the history of the encompassment of village
commons by a modern state and its implications for villagers who recreate this
object in the course of their individual and collective livelihood practices. As an
ideological and material object, moreover, village commons can be viewed from
different subject positions and are thus of immense sociological interest.
By contrast with the representation of a village as the finished product of settled
cultivation, the unfinished business of practice reveals how village commons
afford its inhabitants modalities of life and livelihood outside agriculture. On the
one hand, the village supplies the scaffolding of a life-order that enables
villagers to distinguish (p.3) themselves from other villagers, nomads, shifting
cultivators, and hunter-gatherers. On the other, the village provides a frame that
enables its residents to draw upon pastoral commons within its territorial
boundaries for gathering vegetative produce and the practice of animal
husbandry, in short, for subsistence outside settled agriculture.
The effects of a representation of the village that primarily attends to agriculture
and the hierarchies and distribution of private arable land eclipses the claims of
villagers on what they identify as their commons. This observation dims the
struggles over its meanings and the practical pursuits which engage them as
they eke out their livelihoods. Where agrarian livelihoods continue to be
significant and non-industrialized, in the main, the contemporary constitution
and reconstitution of villages and village commons invite reflection on the
discourse and practices of villagers and states.
In the course of this monograph, I explore the shifting landscape of village
commons and focus on the discourses and practices of rural residents, civil
administrators, judges, and natural scientists. Through-out, I recognize that
village common pastures partake of the natural environment and allow for the
apprehension of practices that are simultaneously ecological and social.
Further, I must emphasize that I do not seek to reify or fetishize village
commons such that the commons acquire a life ‘independently of human
consciousness and wills’ (Bourdieu 1977). Rather, I try to understand
representations of the village and village commons as the ongoing social
production of residents and outsiders who impart the diverse meanings that are
associated with these objects in their discourses and practices.
I. What is property?
The social construct of property has been the subject matter of controversy over
the ages settled as it is for practical purposes at different historical junctures
only to be resumed when social forces precipitate new circumstances. The range
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