Abstract
In the volume under review, both authors have attempted to draw up trajectories of their respective careers as sociologist/social anthropologist. They do so by blending their autobiographical narratives with their fieldwork experiences. Both Baviskar and Attwood confess that they have landed in the sociology profession by accident. Nonetheless that accident led both of them to their laudable achievements. Baviskar is known for his pioneering work: Politics of Development (1980), which was the first ever study of a sugar cooperative factory in Maharashtra. It provided us with an authentic as well as insightful understanding of intriguing political manoeuvres of various factions that practically controlled state politics in Maharashtra between 1950 and 1990. Attwood did his first major fieldwork in two villages—Malegaon and Supe in Pune district—and tried to compare them in terms of the difference irrigation facilities make to land control and social structure in rural Maharashtra.
Both authors began their journey in sociology with some preconceived notions about ‘joint family’, caste hierarchy, jajmani (patron–client) relations and self-sufficient village social system in India. Their fieldwork experiences, however, revealed to them that these have been myths systematically built by colonial administrators, travelogues and even some historians (pp. 15, 257–58). In explaining why the institution of the joint family has been declining, Baviskar has emphasised the fact that sociologists have so far ignored certain demographic changes and facts. The number of brothers in a household and the size of landholding they inherit from their parents are inversely related. In the third generation, the status of the two branches would differ, since some cousins will own more land than others, depending on the number of brothers each has. These observations have also been endorsed by Attwood. Further, Attwood found that a widow’s share of a family’s agricultural land was generally usurped by male members in her family, although in very rare cases, she succeeded in getting her land rights restored to her through court litigation (pp. 257–70).
While planning a study of village, family, caste, tribe, factory or any such type of social reality, researchers often face the dilemma of whether to choose the method of survey research (that involves questionnaires and analysis of quantitative data) or adopt an intensive study of selected cases for an in-depth analysis. In either method, a researcher requires access to the field of study, rapport with respondents and patience to listen to them without any haste to note down what is being said. Baviskar and Attwood opted for the latter more appropriately. Invariably, a researcher manages to get entry to the fieldwork area through an acquaintance, friend or relative or some well-known politically influential personality. Baviskar secured access to the Kopargaon sugar factory through some of the shareholders–sugarcane growing farmers (from his own Mali caste) from his village Pilkhod. He has admitted that he was treated as a guest at the guest house of the sugar factory and whether that influenced Baviskar’s favourable and empathic attitude towards politicians he knew remains an open question, because some of them were deeply involved in factional intrigues in that factory; this often made Baviskar uneasy (pp. 213–14). In this respect, Attwood has also admitted that he was introduced to the people from the two villages he studied by Sharad Pawar (former Chief Minister of Maharashtra and Union Minister for agriculture). Therefore, he was identified as Pawar’s ally (p. 245). In this context, many readers will find Attwood’s observation, ‘Sharad Pawar as a leader was above petty politics,’ quite amusing! This raises the question as to whether researchers in the social sciences could remain free from any biases and whether any claims to objective analysis could be made in absolute or in relative terms. Neither of the authors addressed this basic problematic in methodology.
The description of Pilkhod village by Baviskar (published earlier in Sociological Bulletin and reproduced in this volume) has certain similarities (pp. 21–33) with the portrayal of villages we find in Aatre (1995) and Chapekar (1934) that are legendary works in Marathi, unfailingly read by students of rural sociology in Maharashtra. However, being an insider, Baviskar has added valuable insights while bringing out the most distinguishing feature of Pilkhod, as his village has two, not one, dominant castes, namely Marathas and Malis. He has further clarified that unlike in other villages, Malis are economically wealthier in Pilkhod, while the Marathas have been politically stronger (p. 27). In this respect, Pilkhod is far from an atypical village; rather many villages in south Maharashtra, not just north Maharashtra, Vidarbha and Marathwada do show a similar pattern of shared dominance by landowning castes.
Unlike Baviskar, Donald Attwood came from a highly disciplinarian upper middle class family from Oak Park (near Chicago) where attending symphony orchestra was an unmistakable symptom of one’s belonging to an enlightened community; it also reflected a high level of consciousness about class distinctions and hierarchy within (pp. 91–105). With his shy temperament though, Attwood got involved with the militant Black movement and also in the anti-Vietnam war movement in the United States (pp. 137–47). Although a science (Geology) graduate, he drifted towards anthropology primarily to escape getting drafted into the US army for the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s (pp. 148–57). His interest was always in studying Indian villages and rural development in particular. But his initial placement at the Rural Institute at Bichpuri (near Agra, in Uttar Pradesh), where he spent a year, was to teach spoken English. According to him, it turned out to be a futile exercise (pp. 158–62). He has confessed that having been raised in a culture that always exalted individualism, he had to repeatedly go through cultural shock, anger and moral confusion during the initial year (pp. 179–83).
For researchers, it is always a challenge to get over stereotypes about an alien society they study and Attwood was obviously no exception. But then a sociological researcher has a tendency to get excited and jump to conclusions from simple micro-level observations. For instance, any discussion of class and class politics in the Delhi School of Economics, where Srinivas’s legacy has been a dominant orientation, was taken as a Marxist obsession. Baviskar believed that it was not always necessary for a researcher to start sociological investigation with any theory or hypothesis. In contrast, initially Attwood was practically hypnotised by the dependency theory that until recently was making rounds in sociology, especially after he came across writings of Andre Gunder Frank. But he has hardly made use of that perspective consciously in his writings or even in his autobiographical narrative in this book. However, Attwood found that in rural Maharashtra, there are cases like the Khomne family that display the truth contained in the ‘rags to riches’ idiom.
Attwood also attempted to refute Lenin’s premise (law or prophecy) that ‘under capitalism, rich get richer and poor get poorer’ on the basis of his micro-level data obtained from in-depth interviews with families in his villages, like Khomne, Chawre and Jadhavrao. Attwood argues that the tendency of the structure to remain stubborn is countered by anti-structure (pp. 257–78). Here, Attwood definitely has a point; however, if this assertion is used to refute Lenin’s theory of agrarian capitalism, then his argument sounds too naive because ‘exceptions prove only the rule’ as goes the adage. Now one does not have to refer back to Lenin’s law. Even recently, Angus Deaton, Nobel laureate in economics (for 2015), who surveyed village households near Udaipur, partly using anthropological methods of intensive interviews with people on health, consumption and poverty-related issues, confirmed that in any system where productive assets are controlled by a handful of people, the gap between rich and poor widens at an incredible rate. It is only in exceptional circumstances that such a trend is seen reversed.1 In a sense, Deaton’s finding reiterates Lenin’s view and has further explicated it.
Both Baviskar and Attwood seem to argue that the Green Revolution does not seem to have unleashed forces igniting major protest and rebellion against rich peasants who have primarily benefitted from it. Rich farmers took the initiative to set up cooperative societies that made rural credit available to everyone, undertook sugarcane production and set up sugar factories, consequently leading to increased irrigation, rural electrification, roads and other infrastructure developments from which everyone, including poor peasants and the landless, was benefitted (pp. 364–82). Such observations amount to refutation of Marx’s views on peasantry, tacitly reinforcing a status-quoist position that might invite some criticism from a section of Indian sociologists.
Nevertheless, the authors’ autobiographical narratives and fieldwork experiences are pointers to the sensitive and sensible issues that young researchers in agrarian sociology and development studies must attend to. The book is full of insightful observations and hence it will be quite useful not only for those who look forward to follow the path the two authors have traversed but also for all students and faculty of sociology and social anthropology.