Jan Breman analyses labour bondage in India's changing political economy from 1962 to 2017. Focusing on what has happened since Independence, he argues that colonial rule changed the country's agrarian economy. Capitalism has led to progressive inequality, lack of welfare and the exclusion of the dispossessed from mainstream society.
Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India
Rural sociology field study on production relations between landowners and landless agricultural workers in South Gujarat, India - looks at historical background of bonded labour and landowner patronage; describes the traditional hali system of servitude founded on caste; based on data collected from 1962 to 1963, describes agrarian structure and social structure in two villages. Bibliography.
Labor bondage is discussed as a major feature of the peasant economies which have dominated the subcontinent of South Asia from an unrecorded precolonial past until the postcolonial present. Discussing when, why and how servitude originated on the tribal-peasant frontier in West India, the research undertaken moved on from a historical perspective to investigating the collapse of bondageby engagement in anthropological fieldwork from the 1960s onwards. Thecapitalist economy which has taken shape does not allow for the transition tofree labour. Because of lack of employment and income the workforce at thebottom of the pile remains stuck in neo-bondage.
Pauperism and pauperization are two of the most persistent and widespread phenomena in India. While a fierce debate rages on the line separating the poor from the non-poor, there is scant discussion on the huge mass of paupersnot less than one-fifth of the countrys populationliving in destitution. Rural and urban case studies conducted in the state of Gujarat highlight the ordeal of these paupersthe non-labouring poor unable to take care of themselves, the migrant labour driven away from the village and back for lack of work, and an urban underclass redundant to demand, often experienced by the better-off as a nuisance. A comparative study of the politics and policies in present-day India in relation to the condition of the ultra-poor in Victorian England reveals a disturbing common factora deeply ingrained mindset of social inequality resembling the spirit of nineteenth-century social Darwinism. That ideology of discrimination and exclusion is back with a vengeance the world all over and not least in India. This book examines poverty and inequality through a sociologicalanthropological lens that goes beyond the quantitative and unravels the fuzzy landscape of the informal economy. It fills a conspicuous gap in the literature on casual labourthat on the floating and footloose transient labour.