The Agrarian Question in a Maoist Guerrilla Zone: Land, Labour and Capital in the Forests and Hills of Jharkhand, India

Abstract

Keywords: Maoist or Naxalite, agrarian question, modes of production, Jharkhand, India, land, labour, capital, class differentiation INTRODUCTION To many anthropologists, the question of how to analyse modes of production might seem a preoccupation of the past. The evolutionist premises of the debates (from slavery to feudalism to capitalism etc.) were overtaken by Althusser in the 1960s and moved forward through ideas of the articulation of different modes. Attempts, inspired by Althusser, were made by many anthropologists to transcend what they saw as Eurocentric models (through lineage, kinship or domestic modes of production in stateless societies; the Asiatic mode of production in China Alpa Shah, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK E-mail: a.m.shah@lse.ac.uk. This paper is part of a much bigger project on understanding social transformations in rural Jharkhand that I have been exploring for the past decade. The field data used here are a result of field research conducted over twenty months with the anthropologist George Kunnath to whom I am deeply grateful for all that we have shared. The questions of this paper were led by respondents in the field who I hope will one day read it.

Mapping historical and contemporary agrarian transformations and capitalist infiltration in a complex upland environment: A case from eastern Nepal

“…Regardless of where one sits in these debates, what does seem apparent is that research on “semi‐feudalism” has traditionally been focused on plains regions with a history of hierarchical state formations. Shah () notes, with regard to the central Indian uplands, that in contrast to the lowlands, where many of these debates were centred, the economic formation is neither capitalist nor semi‐feudal in the traditional sense.…”

“…While there has been considerable research on adivasi communities, there are only a few studies that have engaged in depth with the contemporary mode of production. Shah's () study seeks to understand the mode of production amongst adivasi communities in India's Jharkhand state, set against the context of the long‐running Maoist insurrection. It tracks the evolution from an economy based upon shifting cultivation, with limited private property for land, to one based upon smallholder peasant farming, following enclosure of forest lands and in‐migration of settled agriculturalists.…”

Between the Plough and the Pick: Informal, artisanal and small-scale mining in the contemporary world

“…The broader issue in these adivasi lands in Jharkhand, identified by researchers such as Alpa Shah (2013), is that of a stalled agrarian transition. Historic Jharkhand witnessed neither an agricultural consolidation by a landlord class, nor a capitalist transition to commercial agrarian commodity production.…”

“…In Jharkhand state in India, I argue that formalisation as basic regularisation would represent a necessary first step for supporting miners' livelihoods, lifting the burden of restrictive state control and promoting the basic right of the poor to access and extract minerals. In practice, the political ecology of informal mining in Jharkhand is framed through distinctive federal, state and local-adivasi 1 resource politics and contested social struggles (Shah 2013). In Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, there is potential to progress with ongoing state formalisation reforms, in a context where mechanised 'medium-scale' gold dredging, on both land and rivers, can represent a profitable rural enterprise.…”

“…To be sure, in Jharkhand, forests have been logged and liquidated, major mineral resources are controlled by private or state-owned corporations, including Coal India, and large-scale state development projects, such as the SMP, have produced significant enclosures and dispossessions. Yet, Shah (2013) argues that the majority of the region's rural population has been situated outside of the primary circuits of capital, assembling a multifocal livelihood through lowproductivity family-based agriculture, and non-market based access to increasingly marginal natural resources, including gold and forest products. In response to this rural crisis, there is widespread engagement in regional labour migration under highly precarious circumstances, while demographic pressures contribute to increasing levels of rural landlessness and pauperisation (ibid.).…”