Abstract
In his latest book, Jan Breman observes that the most pervasive and continuous phenomenon in India have been ‘Pauperism and Pauperization’. The book is the outcome of his anthropological and empirical studies conducted between 2009 and 2014 in various rural and urban locations in the state of Gujarat. He examines whether and how the processes of economic growth and diversification have been helpful in improving conditions of the rural proletariat. The data collection relates to the present but is subsequently built into an analytical frame that encompasses a much longer period. This book attempts a historical overview, connecting the present to the past and the reverse, vital for contextualising findings consolidated in the observation of locales on a longer temporal and a wider spatial scale, even in a globalised context.
Starting from the first chapter based on expanded village fieldwork, he describes how a considerable number of households at the bottom of the rural economy have remained stuck in destitution. Extending findings to subsequent chapters, he gives an account of the impoverishment and destitution of the huge mass of paupers in India who form more than 20 per cent of the country’s population. He makes a difference between poverty and pauperism. In poverty, people find it hard to meet their basic needs. The coping mechanism for poor people is possibly to generate the most income and to bring their wives and children along to destination sites, possibly also to work. To him, poverty does not adequately address the regime of exploitation and marginalisation to which people have been subjected to for a long period and a similar situation is replicated for the likes of them in the urban landscape to which they have arrived in pursuit of better lives. He elaborates pauperism as a state of destitution and utter deprivation under which it is difficult to even survive or able to cope. In order to distinguish between degrees of destitution, outside support is still treated as a necessary criterion from preventing the debility of paupers reaching in premature death. However, the point is that such support or charitable assistance may come from the private rather than the public sphere, showing the character of informality driven by neoliberal capitalism. In this context, he also challenges an unduly optimistic notion of an informal economy as an adequate social safety net for the poor. The debates on poverty in India among economists and statisticians have more or less been appropriated by overlooking its social or political dimensions. Hence, a classification of ‘pauperism’ is needed to cover these non-economic aspects as well.
Breman’s starting point of this discussion is based on the expulsion of India’s labouring poor from the countryside due to shrinking livelihoods in the agrarian economy. The entry of these poor and landless people into the urban space in search of employment opportunities and their settlement questions into the new slums are dealt within chapters which focus on the forging ahead of Ahmedabad as a major growth pole of the neoliberal political economy. Breman says, ‘The trajectory towards a shining future has been marred for the casualized workforce in the slums of towns, cities and metropoles by pauperization’ (p. 3).
While referring from Mike Davis’s stark portrait (2006) about the rise of the informal urban proletariat and slums in the process of urbanisation, Breman broadens his area of enquiry to locations in western India that have been sites of his recurrent field investigation on the ongoing flight from the rural economy and discusses their future prospects in the destination city. His series of essays explain in detail the downtrodden drift of the hierarchy of labour. A concise thematic analysis of the loosened social fabric at the beginning of the twenty-first century is pursued in the second chapter, which discusses the pauperised condition of the non-labouring poor who have no capacity or have lost their labour power to earn a living. These include the aged, the sick, the disabled or women living alone, along with a huge and still swelling reserve army of labour who are restricted from enjoying citizenship rights.
Pauperism in the city is the central theme of his last round of anthropological research carried out in 2013–14 in the suburbs of Ahmedabad. He discusses how the crisis in the textile industry in Ahmedabad, the erstwhile Manchester of India (Breman, 2004) dismissed a huge workforce in the last decades of the twentieth century, pushed them to search for distressed living as casual labour in the informal economy and trapped them into illegal slums. In the third chapter, Breman describes how the drastic change in the socio-economic profile of Ahmedabad in the last few decades has driven the transition from the formal to an informal economy by evicting a majority of unskilled and dispossessed working population in the name of a beautification of the city. Breman notes, ‘The improvement in the quality of urban life of the bourgeoisie occurred at the expense of the working-class inhabitants’ (p. 80).
Breman’s narrative and analysis on the plight of the dispossessed masses in the periphery of Ahmedabad city is discussed from the third to the sixth chapters. He highlights the hardship of slum-dwellers displaced from the Sabarmati River front in Ahmedabad in these chapters. After the forced departure from their dwellings, the slum inhabitants who have been relocated in places like Ganeshnagar had no opportunities to earn when they were near their workplaces. In both the third and fourth chapters, he demonstrates the marginality and isolation in which the residents of Ganeshnagar regard them as outcasts living at the edges of Ahmedabad. How the dynamics of segregation and dislocation affects people pushed out from their abode is the focal point of these chapters. ‘The displacement of slum dwellers is a brutal intervention in the work and life of this proletarianzed segment perpetrated not only with the cognizance but also the solid approval of its middle class citizenship’ (p. 18).
While highlighting the politics of urban exclusion, Breman criticises the mechanisms taken by state machineries and market forces, which are obstructing the migrant’s claims to citizenship rights exercised by their urban counterparts. The function of channelling of cheap labour to the booming industrial city like Ahmedabad is a denial of urban citizenship. He advocates the need of inclusive citizenship, which not only provides employment opportunities from an economic point of view but also creates an atmosphere for generating social security benefits for migrant paupers and slum dwellers. The basic argument this book provides is the complex relationships that associate pauperism with exclusionary urbanisation, power relations and public policy making.
The fifth chapter covers the magnitude and character of labour circulation and relates with the present structure of urbanisation, the informalisation of the economy, the social identities of migrants and the government’s role in the shifting balance between cities and villages, the employment modalities in the booming building industry and the presence of the state regulation of labour practices. Breman has not denied the presence of the government authorities in the labour discipline of the informal economy. However, the problem lies in their interventions, which ‘are not intended to enhance protection and security but to maintain or even further exacerbate the excessively weak bargaining position of this footloose workforce’ (p. 167). Like Hirway, Shah and Shah (2014), Breman also criticises the label, the ‘Gujarat model of development’. But he adds a significant point that Hindutva ideology and its majoritarian politics are a part and parcel of such a model of growth. In this context, he points out that the electoral victory of the BJP, under the leadership of Narendra Modi, in 2014, is the outcome of a public–private collusion driven by a free market economy. The absence of pre-conditionalties such as social activism, pro-poor policies and so on in the state of Gujarat make it ranks dismally low in the Human Development Index which clearly manifests the failure of social welfare policies in the state which has a misleadingly proud stance on economic development.
The sixth chapter narrates the living and working experiences of those migrants hanging around on the fringes of the urban economy of Ahmedabad but get pushed back when jobs on the construction sectors dwindle with the onset of the monsoon. The dilemma of this circulating workforce is destined to remain footloose in their working lives for the sheer survival. In this and the next chapter, Breman argues that dispossession in village sites has been turned into displacement, forcing the landless and land poor to leave and search for work outside. These agrarian underclasses are compelled to sell their labour in advance at a comparatively low wage, mobilised in a state of immobility and recruited into time-bound contracts which ultimately locks them into neo-bondage.
In the last two chapters, the author presents an interpretation of his fieldwork findings with comparative and historical perspectives that attempt to understand present-day politics and policies of contemporary India by relating them to the conditions suffered by the ultra-poor in Victorian England. It delineates a disturbing common factor—a deeply ingrained standpoint of social inequality reminding one 19th Century Social Darwinism. In the seventh chapter, he discusses how the city of London was cleaned up of ‘the undeserving poor’ in the second half of the nineteenth century and, in against that background, he asks what would be the best policy to tackle the problem of a redundant underclass. The eighth chapter emphasises the notion that pauperism is basically a brand of capitalism run by state control in the past and present. The phenomenon is discussed as a denial of inclusion that seems to be the characteristic in its both rural and urban settings. The foregoing ideology of discrimination and exclusion is retreated vigorously all over the world.
In the Epilogue, Breman emphasises the urgent need to raise the social questions in the state of abeyance once again but now transcending the boundaries of the national state, at the global level. He refers to Sassen’s analysis on expulsions (2014) and Harvey’s reconceptualisation on primitive accumulation (2003) as new forms of capitalist dispossession. For instance, the move on the Land Acquisition Bill, under the NDA regime, threatens to dispossess large number of farmers of their land. ‘The transition to a more authoritarian regime rightist in nature, marked by a loss of civil rights, is the predictable outcome of the widening gap between inclusion and exclusion which exceeds the elasticity of a democratic ordering of state and society’ (p. 256).
This book critically analyses poverty, inequality and exclusion through a sociological anthropological lens that is not restricted with the quantitative and unfolds the gloomy landscape of the informal economy by filling the gap in the available literature on the casual workforce.