Bhrigupati Singh. 2015. Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. xiii + 335 pp. Tables, notes, references, index. ₹795 (hardback).
This book, an ethnographic foray into questions of rural poverty, is a large canvas miniaturisation of the splendour of ‘life’in Shahabad, Rajasthan. This deliberate refraction is made evident to the reader innumerable times and is painstakingly qualified when claimed by the author. A rather classical object of study in the subcontinent, the village and its poorest Sahariya jati get an ethnographic and anthropological re-adaptation in Singh’s hands. Without attempting the detailed texture of the book, the following is a fragmentary snapshot of the divergent themes assessed in the richly woven text: Sahariya identity, thresholds of life, cross-caste domestic deities, ‘bipolar’ Mitra–Varuna, the dying staple of millet roti(bread), cow affects, fragile caste–tribe–governmental–divine solidarities, Holi erotics and agnostics, the ‘active aggressor’ woman subject, many gods and jinns, all find mention. And then, these combine with an interdisciplinary theoretical engagement with a dizzying range of scholars. The marvel among other praiseworthy facets of the book is that it successfully evokes a latent spiritual and material history of anthropology through its telling.
The narrative order of the chapters mirrors the chronology of entering the field, a participative understanding of deeper than ‘deep’ play (p. 136) at work vis-à-vis the people and the place and, finally, an immersed exit from the field. This narrative coherence remains in place even as one progressively gets immersed in the author’s Shahabad with ever-dense theoretical and descriptive moves. Furthermore, Singh’s narration of his own presence in the field adds another layer of textual density. Without delving too deep into the discussions of the 11 chapters that make the book, I will only draw out a brief discursive surface of the ethnographic accounts.
In the introductory chapter, Singh lays out the profile of Shahabad as reported in the news media wherein the Sahariyas were a picture of acute poverty and starvation, their condition said to be accentuated by massive state-wide drought during the years 2001–03. This representation and a certain economistic projection of what life is or must be and how the poor remain or fall out of that alpha-numeric register is what the author seeks to contest in this book. In his borrowing of the question of life from economics, it is not econometrics so much that he is moving away from as much as an economic-centricity. Equally, he is critical of certain depictions of ‘bare life’ that according to him are life negating. He instead proposes a different theoretical appropriation of both sovereignty and political theology within the plural potentialities inhere in the lives of Sahariyas. In a skilful borrowing, from Dumézil through Foucault, and in the auspicious presence of Deleuze and Nietzsche, Singh puts forth what he calls the ‘bipolar’ conception of sovereignty through the twin idioms of Mitra–Varuna (p. 44). He further adopts a contractual understanding of the theological to underscore that it invariably involves the dual presence of ‘instability’ and ‘possibility of renegotiation’ (p. 46). This reliance on a dual organisation, in fact, finds a theoretical continuity through the text. For example, sovereignty is made accessible through the twain Mitra–Varuna, the theopolitical is hinged on ‘instability’ and ‘renegotiation’ and finally life and becoming are recorded through the duet of erotics and agnostics.
In substantive terms, the author grapples with long-standing anthropological questions exhibiting great dexterity. Right in the beginning of the text is the riddle: Is Sahariyas caste or tribe? And the answer, made difficult by ethnographic evidence for both, settles on a mixed double under the singularity of jati (species-becoming). Moving from this riddle, Singh discusses the ‘number one problem’ afflicting the said community (p. 103). Ironically enough, it is not starvation; rather, it is the Sahariyas along with other global inheritors of green revolution, moving to the water guzzling crop of fine grain wheat at the cost of dropping the moderately thirsty coarse grain millet crop. On the heels of this agrarian mapping comes the question: how does one think of Sahariyas as ex-bonded labourers? It is in opening of this discussion that a complex network of affect emerges, emplotted on the double registers of erotics and agnostics. It is also here that the horizontality of human and divine solidarities is brought together with another site, that of the animals, cow and parrot included. This substantive discussion is the ground on which Singh formulates neighbourly ‘ethics’ as ‘agnostic intimacy’ (p. 196). A yet another descriptive strand involves an ethnographic and conceptual portrait of two cross-caste deities, Thakur Baba and Tejaji. From these divine renderings, Singh moves on to two persons, Kalli, the ‘active aggressive’ female Sahariya worker at the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Sankalp, and Bansi Mahatmaya, an exceptionally gifted Sahariya holy man who is invested in maintaining an equipoise between the ordinary and the divine. These two portraits, he suggests, should be seen within the ambit of subjectivity as ‘attentiveness to particular intensities, passages in a field of forces’ (p. 222). This Deleuzian phrasing ominously resonates in the penultimate chapter, where the passage is actualised in moving through the throes of death and rapture. Finally, as a double of him and his doubts, the last chapter stages a dialogue between Yaksha and Singh. This conversation is interspersed with Yaksha’s laughter, perhaps as homage to Singh’s deceased father, who had started on the translation of the Nietzschean happy double, Zarathustra, in Hindi, titled as Evam Uvach Zarathustra (p. 2).
In conclusion, what I learnt most from Singh’s ethnography is how one may begin to think about the constancy of the rural and urban when some of the affects that are circulating in both have such a common ring to them. Having said that, one would have liked if the ‘bipolarity’ aspect of Mitra–Varuna was theoretically teased out more than it is presently done. In fact, there are occasions when one forgets in the text that Mitra–Varuna are indeed bipolar, and that is when the discussion slips into a ‘consensus-conflict’ lineage of thought. Lastly, in my opinion, the author’s relentless pursuit to carve a different theoretical insight as against the received writing on any given subject matter is also precisely what draws us into thinking of Singh’s book again and again, in alibi, as a material and spiritual history of social anthropology.