The Beggar as a Political Symbol: An Interactionist Reading of the Endurance of Anti-Begging Laws in India

Abstract

In 2018, the Delhi High Court held that certain provisions of the state’s anti-begging law were unconstitutional. Nevertheless, such laws continue to operate in at least 20 other Indian states and union territories even today. Begging as a social phenomenon remains an under-researched subject within the social sciences, especially in India where the rare mention that the subject finds often gets subsumed within larger debates on chronic poverty or organised crime. This article begins by tracing the history of regulations around begging, followed by a discussion on the persistence of both begging and anti-begging laws prevalent today. By examining the justification underlying the criminalisation of begging, it contends that such an approach fails to provide insight into the lived experiences of individuals engaged in this activity. It therefore proposes that the analyses of begging in the Indian context adopt symbolic interactionism that lends its rich theoretical framework to enable an interpretation of the act as one of agency; a survival strategy among those living on the margins of the neoliberal urban experience. In doing so, it posits a view of the beggar as a powerful political symbol with the potential to subvert and interrogate the rules of the game in a globalised world.

Keywords

Begging crime anti-begging laws symbolic interactionism urban India

In August 2018, the Delhi High Court held that certain provisions of the anti-begging law that penalised begging in the state were unconstitutional. Similar laws continue to be in force, however, in at least 20 other states and union territories of India. This article engages with the phenomenon of begging and how anti-begging laws have played a crucial role in shaping public perceptions that form the mainstream discourse surrounding it. Begging is a complex and contested category. It is an ancient practice associated with all kinds of traditions, myths and imageries. Described variously as a vagrant, mendicant, panhandler, vagabond, itinerant, and even an ascetic, the beggar of our contemporary world occupies an ambiguous position in relation to the post-modern neoliberal state that seeks to govern them.

While some view begging as a residual culture (Williams, 1977) reminiscent of religious alms-giving common to all major faiths (Dumont, 1980; Munzer, 1999), others attribute its persistence to the failures of social policy in the Western world or its inability to address intrinsic linkages to questions of housing and homelessness, social security and mental health (Dean, 1999). Yet it is not unusual to find insipid reproductions of unsubstantiated views on begging as an organised criminal activity. Being acutely aware of the irony that he points out, Dean (1999, p. 1) says, ‘If one so much as scratched the surface of begging as a distinctive phenomenon, it reveals a seam of symbolic meanings and moral conundrums that is as perplexing as it is rich [emphasis added]’.

It is also necessary to address begging as a distinctive form of informal pecuniary activity reflective of fundamental changes in the economic environment of welfare states (Dean, 1999). According to McIntosh and Erskine (2000), there is always a certain degree of ambivalence and contradiction involved in people’s attitude towards begging. The common perceptions regarding a beggar often swing between extremes of portraying them as ‘an ascetic pilgrim or a lawless wanderer, a deserving object of pity or an undeserving scrounger, a hapless victim of welfare state or a venal representative of an emergent modern underclass’ (Dean, 1999, p. 13). This article begins with a discussion on how begging has traditionally been perceived and regulated in societies around the world, leading to the origin of the anti-begging laws in the global context and its relevance more specifically in India. Such a conversation hopes to provide a deeper conceptual understanding of various aspects of begging—religio-cultural, legal and sociological—allowing the reader to interpret the beggar as a political symbol and begging itself as an act of agency deserving of independent scrutiny.

Begging and Its Embeddedness in Major World Religions

The cultural context of begging, as common in the previous centuries for all advanced economies, was one of alms-giving as the predominant form of poor relief, and one that was embedded in systems of faith-based interactions and duty of fellow members of the greater religious faiths (Jordan, 1999). All through Christendom in the Middle Ages, begging was an accepted and vital practice for many (Baker, 2009); that is, the church–state took responsibility of providing relief to the impoverished. In early Saxon times, such alms-giving was considered self-sacrificing, saintly and noble. Holy days even today provide an occasion for liberal alms-giving. The motivation for such acts of charity was understood as an aspect of a god-fearing Christian’s commitment to the cause of alleviating the sufferings of ‘God’s poor’. Moreover, Christian monastic traditions included mendicant friars who travelled in the pursuit of their mission of education or healing. Surviving on voluntary begging has further been interpreted as a ‘Christian ideal’ achieved through an ‘imitation of Christ’ (Munzer, 1999, p. 308).

According to Jordan (1999), in medieval Europe, as in the Orient and the Middle East, the faithful were exhorted to give alms not merely to relieve the poor, but also to support travellers and pilgrims to religious sites and shrines, something similar to what Muslims did for pilgrims to Mecca. Obligatory alms-giving or zakat is considered to be one of the five pillars of Islam, a private practice of piety by the Muslims that is believed to narrow the gap between the wealthy and the poor, and rehabilitate the poor (Massey et al., 2010). Similarly, within the Jewish tradition, alms-giving was represented by tzedakah or justice, entitling the poor to charity as a matter of right rather than benevolence (Massey et al., 2010). Within the Buddhist tradition too, begging, when practiced appropriately, is considered to be the reverse of a shameful activity; that is, it denotes a spiritualistic calling or an evangelistic task (Jordan, 1999). Alms-giving, or more generally ‘giving’, is referred to as dana in Buddhist texts and marks the beginning of one’s journey to faith (Massey et al., 2010).

In Hinduism, bhiksha is a devotional offering made at a temple or to a priest, and there is traditional symbolic significance attached to spiritualism and leading a humble life. In traditional Shaivite Hinduism, old men, having lived a full life as householders in the world, give up materialistic possessions and resort to becoming wandering ascetic mendicants or sadhus, dedicating their last few months of years to the cause of spiritual enlightenment. According to Dumont (1980, p. 270), ‘the secret of Hinduism maybe found in the dialogue between the renouncer and the man-in-the-world’, and that only the renouncer or sanyasi is a true individual. Similarly, there exists a tradition of the svetambar murtipujak, mendicants within Jainism who renounce their worldly life and take initiation or diksa into mendicancy, usually between the ages of 15 to 30, as a ‘life-long vocational decision, not a retirement option’ (Cort, 1991, p. 653).

Thus, it is seen that almost all major religious orders adhere to a certain mendicant way of life as an act of spiritual seeking and gaining religious merit, and thereby, hold alms-givers of worthy beggars in high regard. It has hardly ever occurred to canonists that the law should seek to deter or punish men for being afflicted with poverty any more than we would think of punishing a man from being afflicted with tuberculosis (Quigley, 1996, p. 80).

However, with the advent of the Poor Law, there emerged a notion of the ‘undeserving’ poor; vagrants and beggars also numbered among them (Massey et al., 2010). Begging was eventually regulated and then generally forbidden.

Beginning of Anti-Begging Laws and Shaming of Poverty

The Greeks in the classical period made a distinction between a poor person (penes) and a beggar (ptochos to mean ‘one who crouches or cowers’). In Rome, beggars or landless wage earners were described by Cicero as ‘the poverty stricken scum of the city’ who should be ‘drained off to the colonies’, but they did not represent a serious social problem in the minds of the Greek and Roman city leaders; the unemployed were merely lazy (Beier & Ocobock, 2008, p. 4). Many countries, such as Finland and Portugal, are more tolerant towards begging––that is, a national ban on begging is considered unconstitutional––while some others regard it as undesirable behaviour and continue to treat begging as a punishable offence. The indiscriminate alms-giving of the medieval era has been rapidly replaced in industrial societies by developing more or less elaborate social security systems. Dean (1999, p. 2) observes, ‘The transition has involved a relational inversion: social redistribution is no longer associated with the gaze of the multitudinous poor upon the spectacle of their masters’ riches, so much as the gaze of the state upon its multitudinous administrative subjects’.

Recent psychosocial studies on the lived experiences of poverty seem to suggest that such transition––disparities in material circumstances between what constitutes absolute poor in various countries, notwithstanding––is marked by the feeling of shame associated with poverty. Thus, far from the spiritual ideal for the pious to aspire for, poverty resulted in shame from failing to achieve their aspirations or meet social expectations (Walker et al., 2013). Though it is highly doubtful that an enlightened answer to poverty-shame and other hardships associated with widespread socioeconomic deprivation and inequality of access could be found in criminal law, an examination of the historical trajectory of older statutes that were put in place to regulate the activities of the poor would nonetheless aid our understanding of anti-begging laws in contemporary societies.

Regulation of the ‘Undeserving’ Poor in England

Feudalism and church institutions have had a major influence in the development of English poor laws and the context out of which poor laws grew at large. According to Quigley (1996, p. 77) work and poverty went hand in hand under feudalism, and peasants practically lived in a state of slavery. However, at least in theory, there could be no uncared for distress. Feudal lords provided a form a ‘social insurance’ against unemployment, illness and infirmity; in that, the people who we today would consider most vulnerable were presumably protected by their masters from acute economic suffering. A number of factors including the phasing out of slavery–serfdom, the outbreak of the Black Death, the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of factories and growth of the wool industry led to changes in this system with wage labour becoming a popular option. Vagrancy thus came to be a consequence of increased freedom of workers as feudalism was on the wane.

The Statute of Labourers of 1349 was the first Act to criminalise vagrancy, and it aimed at providing the feudal lord with a sufficient supply of agriculture labourers after the Black Death which had created grave labour shortage. It functioned by restraining the labouring population from moving outside designated areas, to fix wages at pre-plague rates and to check the vice of idleness amongst the able-bodied (Baker, 2009; Boyer, 2010; Quigley, 1996). Along with the stated economic justification, these laws also made accompanying reference to the maintenance of public order and crime prevention, outlawing alms-giving to able-bodied beggars in the process. Scholars have however noted that the laws and the crimes of this period were mutually reinforcing:

Such severe and persistent oppression, enforced by cruel punishments and the exercise of tyranny by landowners and employers, led naturally to every kind of evasion of the laws…accompanied by no small amount of crimes and violence and breaking out repeatedly into organized insurrections on a large scale. (Webb & Webb, 1963, cited in Baker, 2009, p. 216)

This altered the traditional employment relationship by introducing a new penalty of imprisonment for workers for changing employers or quitting work prior to the end of their term. While legislation dealing with vagrants and beggars dates back to the fourteenth century, perhaps the first English Poor Law legislation was enacted in 1536 as the first comprehensive system of poor relief (Boyer, 2010). However, these laws also continued and expanded the previous system of punishments for able-bodied beggars and vagrants. The first state regulation of relief was found in the 1531 statute ‘Concerning Punishment of Beggars and Vagabonds’. Baker (2009) observed that the justification of retaining vagrancy offences during the welfare period (1547–1824) was premised on the belief that those without a consistent means of support were a dangerous class more likely to engage in criminal activity. By this time, the focus had shifted significantly from merely motivating idle members of society to working to prevent crime. The vagrant came to be regarded as a real threat to national security, and soon, the infamous Slavery Act was passed in 1547 which repealed all other statutes on the subject because they came to be considered as being too lenient. The preamble of this Act recognised the vagrant as a probable criminal.¹

According to Beier and Ocobock (2008), by the end of the seventeenth century, despite European efforts to relieve poverty and compel the idle to work the continent still faced a large number of paupers: government officials and wealthy elites continued to panic, producing accounts of wandering criminal gangs terrorising ‘respectable’ classes. It was believed that great bands of vagabonds pillaged the northern French countryside and that England was flooded with Irish and Scottish indigents. Vagrants became increasingly connected to organised crimes and violence, and were perceived as a dangerous and subversive subculture flourishing in the slums of European cities. European cities increasingly resorted to institutionalisation and incarceration in response.

In the United States, the same vagrancy laws used in England as they stood in the mid-eighteenth century were adopted (Chambliss, 1964). However, it was the Black Americans who were the primary targets of these laws.² With reference to the era of imperialist expansion, Ocobock (2008) explains, ‘The expansion of European economic interests and overseas territories had profound implications for the uses of vagrancy laws and the indigenous peoples who would come to be known as vagabonds’ (Beier & Ocobock, 2008, p. 12). In the British Empire, these laws were quickly employed to rid port cities of drunken or disorderly Europeans. Besides, these laws were not confined merely to deporting European paupers, but soon came to be rigorously implemented to shape the labour discipline for indigenous communities in these colonies. Vagrancy laws also played a major role in colonies, where slave economies did not exist, but rich natural resources were found.

In the Indian context, Ocobock (2008) contends that the East India Company and later the British state played a marginal role in poverty relief in colonial India. He further argues that though vagrancy laws of the European law books were essentially identical to those of the colonies, their application often diverged dramatically due to factors such as strong racism, financial and logistical shortcomings, colonial notions of indigenous social structure, and a genuine lack of interest in relieving the suffering of indigent subjects of the empire.

In the twentieth century, the world wars and the rise of welfare-oriented states had a profound impact on the nature of dealing with vagrancy and homelessness. In Europe and the United States, the governments moved away from their previous approach of compulsory labour of the idle to violent repression of the homeless. Furthermore, the mechanisation of industry had also visibly impacted the demand for unskilled labour, influencing the changing perceptions of the poor and personal freedom. Poverty rather than laziness came to be recognised as the root cause of vagrancy. Yet not all states abandoned the notion of institutionalising and reforming them.

The Anti-Begging Law in Contemporary India

Fear of the disorderly and the element of potential criminality associated with beggars and the homeless continue to hold sway over much of the elite and middle class imagination, and so do the coercive exercises by criminal justice systems the world over to process, institutionalise, re-educate and reform their most marginalised citizens. India is one such nation where these regressive views regarding the most underprivileged citizens persist allowing for the state’s inherent class bias and public attitude to mutually reinforce each other resulting in an absolute travesty of justice. Examining the historical roots of legislations designed to tackle vagrancy crimes as done above provides us scope to first measure the extent of transformation these laws have undergone over time, and second, to better investigate the rationale behind their continued existence and usage in their current form. It would also be worth noting that the imprisonment of the idlers and itinerant poor marks the very origin of the modern prison system in the form of bridewells and house of correction in mid-sixteenth-century England (Gibson, 2011; Pollock, 2005; Sellin, 1931).

Since the socio-economic conditions that led to beggars being regarded as a major threat to the community during the Middle Ages have changed almost in their entirety, the likelihood of begging causing the same social problems and thereby the presumption of them presenting the same kind of threat also needs re-examining (Baker, 2009). Moreover, begging being an extremely visible urban phenomenon in India also needs to be analysed for its political symbolism––that is, as an act of resistance from the margins of the city against the exclusionary politics of a neoliberal state. The beggar thus represents an everyday protest against the privileged citizens’ aspiration for ‘sanitised’ world-class urban spaces.

The Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, 1959

The first legal measure against begging and vagrancy in India was the European Vagrancy Act, 1874 which was meant to deal with vagrants of European descent (Mukherjee, 2008). Ever since there have been various legal provisions to outlaw begging in different parts of the country.³ The current legal definition of a beggar in India could be traced backed to the BPBA, 1959 (Bombay Prevention of Begging Act) which defines it as anyone ‘having no visible means of subsistence, and wandering about or remaining in any public place in such condition or manner, as makes it likely that the person doing so exists by soliciting or receiving alms’.⁴ The Act also includes ‘soliciting or receiving alms in a public place, whether or not under any pretense of singing, dancing, fortune-telling, performing or offering any article for sale’.⁵ Anti-begging laws persist in Indian jurisprudence to date despite evidence of abuse and the disproportionate use of state power to tackle visible forms of marginalisation.

Ramanathan (2008, p. 33) observes,

In the law’s rendering…it is ostensible poverty, in and of itself, that could be the crime. Ostensible poverty may require no specific, or even general act or conduct to acquire the attributes of criminality; dire poverty that is visible, and witnessed in public spaces, could attract the exercise of the authority of law.

These individuals who are the intended subjects of such a law are thereby identified as ‘status offenders’; that is, they offend by being who they are and not necessarily by doing what they do (Ramanathan, 2008). The provisions of the BPBA, 1959 invest enormous amount of power in law enforcing agencies, as can be seen by the arrests without warrant of people found begging, detention in certified institutions (beggars’ homes) for a period of not less than one year, and extendable up to a period of ten years in case of second-time offenders.

The enforcement mechanisms are arbitrary, disproportionate and discriminatory, which can make poverty coupled with disability and ill health a basis for arrest under this Act (Goel, 2010). Accordingly, there are three other categories which the court may order detention of under the net of the BPBA, 1959: persons wholly dependent on beggars, incurably helpless beggars (who might be detained indefinitely even after the expiry of the period of detention), and persons found employing or causing persons to beg or using them for the purposes of begging.⁶ The persistence of this Act signals towards an ever depleting obligation of the state, where poverty and welfare needs continue to be on the rise, but the onus is cast on the structurally disadvantaged lot to be gainfully employed or at least keep their ‘deplorable’ living conditions out of sight.

The inherently unconstitutional nature of these laws in how they violate the fundamental rights to life and of livelihood and dignity of the poor is glaring. Furthermore as Goel (2010, p. 25) states, ‘such laws tend to unreasonably restrict and regulate the right to freedom of expression in the absence of any compelling state interest’. Why and on what grounds do these laws then continue to survive in various parts of the world even in the twenty-first century? The past decade has seen an upsurge in regulations relating to the public poor (Blomley, 2010). According to Baker (2009), the contemporary justifications of outlawing begging and vagrancy centre around two main perspectives. The first view presupposes that begging and vagrancy are a precursor to more serious crime which is also referred to as the ‘broken windows’ justification (Kelling & Wilson, 1982).⁷

The second focusses on the general offence, disturbance or nuisance caused to passers-by as a result of the presence of beggars and vagrants, which is also referred to as the ‘public nuisance/deservedness/intimidation’ justification. In operation, however, these views often overlap or one logically leads to the other when considered from the angles of social control and crime prevention. According to the broken windows thesis, neighbourhoods that neglect or overlook or under-report minor signs of decay and incivilities, such as begging, open the door for more grievous crimes. This theory is followed by order maintenance policing strategies which aim at creating public order by aggressively enforcing laws against nuisance offences such as public drunkenness, begging, vandalism, loitering, prostitution and other minor delinquency. Thus, the focus of the police is that of public order maintenance rather than mere law enforcement.

Police action is justified on the basis of the assumption that inaction and complacency, at times even towards certain non-criminal behaviours, would ultimately lead to the proliferation of criminal activities and higher crime rates. However, a landmark study undertaken by Sampson and Raudenbush (1999) crucially challenged the broken windows thesis. Instead, it suggests that most major crimes are linked with two other neighbourhood variables––concentrated poverty or structural disadvantage and ‘collective efficacy’.⁸ Collective efficacy here refers to social cohesion among neighbours and their willingness to intervene on grounds of common good, thus indicating that crime is deterred by community presence.

According to the second perspective, these laws are maintained due to the nuisance and umbrage caused to passers-by due to the presence of beggars and vagrants in public spaces. According to Ellickson (1996), the sight of idle and allegedly unproductive beggars is enough to cause annoyance and offence to so-called productive people. It is an outrage to the ‘market economy’ work ethic. He argues that the public is also offended by begging since it involved a predetermined judgment on their part regarding a high probability of fraudulence in the beggar’s soliciting, besides the commonly stated reason of passers-by being fearful of their aggressive panhandling behaviour (cf. Walsh, 2004).⁹ According to Erskine and McIntosh (1999), since poverty is usually understood as being a passive state, the creation of an interaction by the suppliant in a begging encounter raises a question mark over their claims to be poor trapping them in double binds: ‘If you make a living begging, then you may be condemned as a professional. If you beg to supplement your income you are not really in need’ (cited in Dean, 1999, p. 38).

The portrayal of beggars either as wealthy cheats or as free from societal constraints is not uncommon, and this image of them leading a ‘merry life’ is another reason why begging offends. One can almost sense an element of envy by members of the middle class who must heed the imperatives of productivity and success in their everyday lives. As noted by Smith (2005, p. 553), ‘The more the citizens attribute poverty to personal failings, rather than to social injustices or the economic structure, the less tolerant they will be of beggars. Consequently, the more politically conservative citizens are the more likely they are to demand anti-begging regulations’. Moreover, even the mere sight of homeless beggars in urban centres of various developing countries has increasingly come to be recognised as embarrassing and detrimental to the nations’ aspirations towards creating prosperous global cities. Concern over the negative monetary consequences of begging is heightened in economies relying heavily on tourism (Bauman, 1998; Dean, 1999), even though in reality the opposite in the form of slum tourism has also attracted a considerable amount of attention as well as criticism in recent times.¹⁰

According to Wardhaugh and Jones (1999), street homelessness and marginal street occupations become conflated with dangerousness when they become visible, and it is this visibility that represents a threat to the security and sense of place enjoyed by settled citizens. Thus, it seems that it is not marginality per se that is dangerous, rather it is the visible presence of marginalised people within the prime spaces that represent a threat to the sense of public safety and orderliness. The homeless must, therefore, relegate themselves to spaces where they may remain hidden from the bourgeois psyche. This kind of social distancing and exclusion has implications in terms of social justice. According to Hodgetts et al. (2011, p. 1750), ‘Distancing homeless people as not residing within one’s own moral universe, or as being strangers, allow for policies and practices of discrimination’.

Inadequacies of the Criminalisation Model

For many scholars, the question of begging and its criminalisation becomes morally perplexing because it denies beggars their fundamental right to expressive liberty (Schafer, 2007). Begging as an area of study has largely remained under-researched which is partly the reason as to why a comprehensive operational definition for it is absent. A review of related literature reveals that there has been a lack of interest within the social sciences to address the subject in an adequate and systematic manner. This is especially true for the Indian context where the little mention that the subject finds is often smothered by debates around issues of chronic poverty and crime. It is generally understood within a reductive construction in which it is identified as a stigmatised activity (Dean, 1999) situated outside the gift-exchange theory (Mauss, 1966; Swanson, 2007b), and relying on plain appeals for money, food or other goods, with little or nothing of value given in return (Lankenau, 1999a, 1999b; Snow & Anderson, 1993).

It is also quite difficult to analyse begging in the sense that the boundaries between work, informal street activity, religious charity, and begging often become quite fluid and indistinguishable (Baumol, 2004; Mukherjee, 2008). There is an understandable tendency, for instance, to view begging increasingly as an urban phenomenon, and as one of the most stigmatised and ostensible manifestations of poverty in cities around the globe. However, such a view of begging does little to inform the sciences of the deeply relational nature of poverty as experienced by the beggar or to give voice to the subjective experiences of ‘being’ poor. There is a need therefore to further investigate the practice of begging in its entirety, without stripping it off its nuances and complexities.

A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Begging

The current discourse on begging seems to function in a complete policy vacuum created by decades of inaction by state and civil society actors alike. There has been a tendency to align with the dominant narrative based on elite and middle classes’ stereotypical assessments and anxieties about the lower socio-economic sections. As such, it is not only that the lived realities of begging individuals that remain unaddressed, but also the lack of dialogue between research and policy that has contributed to unsubstantiated myths, and consequent neglect of begging populations by the state. While it is true that begging is an age-old practice, and as described above, can be found across major world religions, the relationship that urban begging has with religion is more utilitarian rather than fundamental to religious beliefs. Despite apparent linkages with religious alms-giving in its very urban manifestation, begging is essentially a dynamic and secular practice. It is a form of economic activity that involves mobilising diverse survival strategies by disparate sets of individuals living at the very fringes of the globalised urban experience.

The reason why begging is often conflated with religion is that begging as a social phenomenon does not find a legitimate expression within the existing secular discourse. In religion, therefore, begging finds the sort of refuge that it is denied by the contemporary framework of the modern secular state which, for all its practical purposes, treats it as an organised criminal activity, though sans credible evidence (Rahman, 2018). From the above discussion, it is apparent that a society’s response to ‘deviant’ elements is rarely linked in a direct way to any actual or credible threat; the threat is one of perception rather than reality. Such threats often originate from within the dominant culture itself, but find concrete expression in some abject, less powerful elements of society. By thus ‘othering’ the begging and homeless individuals, and normalising the social exclusion and discrimination meted out to them through the mechanism of law, what does one make of the exact nature of the threat that a beggar ought to represent?

Recent studies on begging have increasingly sensed the deficiencies of the legal discourse and critiqued the reductive nature of the criminalisation approach to understand this practice. This article proposes the use of symbolic interactionism to analyse the phenomenon of begging. By making the beggar’s lived experience the primary focus––the interactive element of begging encounters in public places, the tact with which beggars engage with public attitude towards them and their stigmatised identities, and the creative manner in which they negotiate with the various structures of power to navigate their everyday lives—it is possible to contend that there is much more to be said about begging and what it represents as a slice of the underbelly of an otherwise seemingly mundane urban street-life. The macro-narratives of crime and chronic poverty which tend to ascribe indiscriminate passivity to the existence of these individuals at the margins of the state and civil society, though not irrelevant, do not do justice to their acts of agency in asserting and organising themselves in a way that challenges the complacency of a callous neoliberal system. This is where symbolic interactionism enables us to posit an alternate view of the beggar.

The Beggar as a Political Symbol

In recent studies, the beggar has come to be addressed as a powerful symbol in the globalised post-modern world. According to Dean (1999), the rise of begging as a global phenomenon has been associated not with some state of stasis into which the poor descend, but with a highly dynamic processes of disruption and displacement in time and space which uproot individuals and/or entire communities from self-sustaining social networks. The practice of begging exposes them to new environments and alien rhythms of living and functioning that may as well be referred to as ‘hostile’ marked by experiences of routinised marginalisation, exclusion, and more often than not, violence in their everyday lives. Bauman (1998) explaining this symbolism in the context of restructured time and space in the process of globalisation speaks of the schism between the two worlds: the world symbolised by the ‘tourist’, representing the cosmopolitan elite that may move freely across geographical and electronic boundaries, and the world symbolised by the ‘vagabond’ or beggar, representing the socially excluded that are bound to an apparently immobile and monotonous street existence.

Dean (1999, p. 4) further argues that ‘the current moral panic over begging coincides with a political process of welfare reform and an ideological realignment which, though concerned to ensure social cohesion, is clearly tolerant of social inequality’. According to Amster (2003, p. 196), ‘Once domains of private property began to dominate the cultural and physical landscape, vagrancy began to be seen as a threat to the order of things’; later, as urban centres began to develop and market economies took hold, ‘vagrancy was perceived as a threat to capitalism’. Referring to the enactment of these legislations in Canadian and American cities, Schafer (2007, p. 5) states that criminalising of panhandling has become a kind of battleground: ‘On this battleground, a clash is occurring between competing values of social “hygiene” vs. freedom of expression; middle class discomfort vs. underclass economic need; commercial interest of downtown business owners vs. beggars’ right to plead for subsistence’. Furthermore, as noted by Baker (2009, p. 232), ‘The right not to be arbitrarily criminalized or subjected to disproportionate punishment also contains a general right not to be criminalized’. These rights are different from specific constitutional rights because they protect the autonomy of the individuals generally (Hershkoff & Cohen, 1991).

With reference to the BPBA, 1959 in the Indian context, Ramanathan (2008, p. 36) asks,

How is it that a law can lay claim to constitutionality even when its very existence can be the basis of mass action against the ostensibly poor, set off by fears and perceptions of threat, while the persons under attack get objectified and become completely ‘right-less’?

Thus, a run through the trajectory of socio-legal discourses surrounding begging indicates that the beggar has historically been an ambiguous figure, evoking a range of responses from anyone who has cared to engage with one. The justifications provided for the processing of beggars through the criminal justice system in current times also capitalise on these ambiguities, often to the extent of denying them their basic minimum rights and human dignity. Passive begging in contemporary societies would in fact be a glaring indicator of a number of other social problems such as homelessness, poverty, drug addiction, alcoholism, mental illness, a lack of education and vocational training, towards the responsibility of which governments continue to wash their hands off.

A constructive beginning would really be in realising that a genuine solution to the lack of equal access and employment opportunities could not be found in the criminal law. In contrast, these laws only help give rise to social distancing by converting public opinion further to stigmatise the lower socio-economic sections of a society for being ‘the ostensibly poor’, and therefore, offenders or criminals. Having been labelled thus, their identities are mired in stigma and suspicion making it all the more difficult for them to find any other source of employment in order to sustain themselves resulting in a vicious cycle of poverty and criminalisation.

Dramaturgy in Begging Encounters for Status Enhancement

As already discussed above, the traditional view of begging has a tendency to objectify beggars, denying them basic dignity or recognition for exercising their agency in constantly navigating a system the odds of which are clearly stacked against them. However, focussing on the expressive and interactive element of begging, Erskine and McIntosh (1999) point out that no one, no matter how poor, is a passive victim incapable of instigating social interactions: ‘The supplicant initiates the interaction with the donor and thus creates an encounter…And begging is a deliberate action, which involves [a] conscious [decision] by the person seeking alms’ (Erskine & McIntosh cited in Dean, 1999, p. 39). Begging strategies are dismissed and misconstrued as involving guile primarily because they involve an interaction deliberately initiated by the supplicant, that is, an apparent ‘unequal’. Begging, thus understood, involves the kind of expressive communication between people that a free and democratic society should seek to protect rather than infringe. A liberal democratic society that values the rational autonomy of its members must strive to preserve norms of mutual recognition and respect for communication. Schafer (2007) emphasises that even the poorest of the poor in any society have a significant potential contribution to make in the marketplace of ideas as fellow citizens. He says:

If the members of the underclass, including the unemployed, the homeless, and the poorest of the poor are not recognized as having [an] important contribution to make to the formation of public opinion, then not only are they robbed of a basic right of citizenship but everyone else in the society is robbed of the opportunity to make up their own minds based on full information and rational reflection. (Schafer, 2007, p. 6)

Despite being at the receiving end of society, the process of interaction provides beggars and panhandlers a means to enhance their sense of self-regard and status by forging meaningful relationships with alms-givers who become a regular source of support over a period of time. According to Lankenau (1999b), beggars combine strategies of emotional management, identity and appearance management and storytelling to endure everyday rejection and humiliations associated with panhandling, and strive towards status-enhancing relationships among regular contributors:

Many panhandlers derive much more from their interactions with donors than money or other types of material goods. Rather, the relationships developed with regulars cause panhandlers to regard many as friends…The relationships formed between panhandlers and donors serve to emotionally stabilize an otherwise precarious existence. (Lankenau, 1999b, p. 303)

Similarly according to Nyseth (2008), the manner in which beggars present themselves to passers-by is also an important aspect of stigma management. These encounters must also therefore be appreciated as begging individuals soliciting not just alms, but also understanding as they attempt to disrupt non-person treatment (Goffman, 1963) and change negative public perceptions by engaging in begging repertoires.¹¹ Thus, begging offers an interesting space for direct and face-to-face encounters of the solicitor of alms, an individual belonging to the lower- or working-class background with individuals of a higher class who, given different circumstances and context, probably might never have met or engaged with each other. Lankenau (1999a) proposes that panhandlers devise a ‘repertoire of panhandling routines to break out of the role of stranger or to awaken pedestrians from the blasé state’; the dramaturgy involved in this process minimises the non-person treatment or strangeness that they are usually greeted with and paves the way for interaction between two sets of actors with dissimilar material resources, different interactional objectives and even contracting viewpoints. Proceeding on similar grounds in the context of modern urban China, Henry (2009) talks about how begging is much like a street theatre performance, playing upon key cultural scripts and anxieties, aimed at unsettling and disturbing potential donors, and thereby negotiating and increasing the size of the gift––rather than a simple sign of poverty.

Begging as a ‘Practice of Resilience’

Besides what has already been discussed above, there is evidence that more and more studies seek to understand begging as a ‘vibrant economic activity’ in various countries, and also try to explore in begging a form of resistance or subversion to citizenship, while others look at begging as a choice and try to locate its social, political and cultural significance in the light of symbolic interactionism. The study of inequality has largely been defined as the study of its measurable extent, degree, and consequences. However, Schwalbe et al. (2000) point out that it is no less important to understand the interactive processes through which inequalities are created and reproduced in concrete settings. They argue that it is essential to consider generic processes such as othering, subordinate adaptation, boundary maintenance and emotional management, and conceive the reproduction of inequality in terms of these. This could help in resolving the theoretical problems concerning the gap between local action and extra-local inequalities, and re-conceptualise the nature of inequality itself.

Furthermore, as pointed out by Schafer (2007), a panhandler is constantly communicating to members of the public with whom he or she contacts, about what society is like for those at the very bottom of the heap. He says, ‘A panhandler communicates––whether through speech or via an outstretched hand and raggedy appearance––a message of dire poverty, unemployment, substance abuse, mental illness and homelessness’ (Schafer, 2007, p. 9). According to him, panhandling represents a ‘political speech’ about social inequality and disorder, both for beggars and fellow citizens to whom they appeal. It is an uncomfortable reminder of the costs of development and modernisation for urban residents (Henry, 2009). Although some scholars interpret begging as a possible form of rejection or subversion of the very norms of citizenship, something of the likes of mendicant friars of medieval times, or ‘worldly’ ascetics (Briggs, 1985; Jordan, 1996, cited in Dean, 1999), what is more clearly implied through their continual interaction with other members of the society is rather an aspiration to ordinary citizenship within alternative communities.¹²

According to Swanson (2007a), as seen in the context of rural indigenous women and children migrating from the Andes to Ecuadorian cities, beggars are not passive victims in the face of oppressive socio-economic conditions, but rather begging represents initiatives of reworking and resilience on the part of individuals to actively engage with the forces that affect their everyday lives (Abebe, 2008; Swanson, 2010). Begging is also found to be a vibrant form of informal economic activity in many cities in Ghana, especially, among people with mobility difficulties who view begging as ‘work’ (Kassah, 2008). Another study that views begging as a livelihood strategy amongst Bangladeshi migrants in rural West Bengal in India suggests that it could be a precursor to another more permanent way of making a living, or it might be an enduring phenomenon (Massey et al., 2010).

However, it is important to mention here that the view of begging as a deliberate choice of economic activity is confined to extreme cases of deprivation among already marginalised categories, such as women, children, the aged and disabled, and migrants. This too raises doubt about begging being a ‘deliberate’ or enthusiastic choice, and homelessness, as a preferred ‘lifestyle’. In fact, even more studies indicate that begging is not a choice in terms of alternatives to career or profession but rather a lack thereof (cf. Borchard, 2009; Foscarinis, 1996; Lee & Farrell, 2003). While it may appear that beggars might have the benefits of flexible hours, many panhandlers need to maintain a consistent schedule of time and place in order to develop ongoing relationships with residents or commuters who contribute on a routine basis.¹³

In their study, Dean and Melrose (1999) found that ‘Many wanted work very badly, though few were employable in their present conditions. Some of these were even engaged in entirely unassisted and self-evidently futile attempts at job search’ (cited in Dean, 1999, p. 97). The nature of begging as a stigmatised activity makes it an economic activity of the last resort. Besides, begging confers low prestige, low income, no fringe benefits, no opportunity for advancement, and working conditions that vary with weather which makes it all the more doubtful that beggars would personally find their job satisfying or enjoyable (Smith, 2005). Therefore, it is both productive and more interesting to intensify the symbolic interactionist reading of begging and recognise the message that it relays to society at large.

Conclusion

This article has examined the origin and history of anti-begging laws and the way begging plays out in the Indian context. Despite clear evidences of abuse and being incoherent with the basic principles of human rights, these laws continue to exist in various parts of India, as in many other countries, mostly as an aid to revanchist policies in the urban landscape that only seem to function by displacing the most marginalised individuals from their sites of subsistence, arresting and incarcerating them, and rendering them even more vulnerable in the process. Furthermore, this article summarises the various justifications provided by the state for continuing to criminalise begging and the ways in which such an approach is gravely inadequate and often counterproductive in the understanding of begging as a social phenomenon. The article then proposes symbolic interactionism as an alternative framework to engage with the subject which enables one to interpret the beggar as a powerful political symbol of our times, and the act of begging as one that of exercising agency by the most excluded members of our society.

When observed closely in the light of studies that have highlight the lived experiences of begging individuals, the activity reveals itself to be a dynamic livelihood strategy that holds within itself a plethora of contradictory meanings that cannot be adequately understood using traditional frameworks of poverty and organised crime. Here, symbolic interactionism comes to one’s rescue as it foregrounds the importance of interaction among unequal social classes as the key to inform citizens’ political philosophies and everyday resistance. Begging must also be tolerated in unequal societies like ours because besides the extremely dehumanising and unconstitutional nature of anti-begging laws, these laws inhibit the inherent potential that begging as a practice constitutes to challenge social distancing for reasons of caste and class through powerful begging encounters. By attempting to freeze interactions, in which are embedded meanings and codes of conducts for members of any society, anti-begging laws deprive human beings of their fundamental human right to express themselves––even if it were to solicit alms––or assert themselves to claim space within urban and cognitive landscapes that are designed to exclude them.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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