Abstract
Michael Youngblood has written a fine study of the ways in which some Indian farmers have mobilized on a political platform broad enough to accommodate both economic and cultural needs. The movement under consideration is the Shetkari Sanghatana. Youngblood translates shetkari into agriculturalist, a term that includes a farmer, a peasant and even an agricultural labourer (p. 32). All are bound to the land as agriculturalists or cultivators. Youngblood redeploys this translation in the title of the book, Cultivating Community. This can be read as a straight rendering of the words Shetkari Sanghatana, but it may also be read as if this community of cultivators is specifically concerned with fostering the community spirit.
So called ‘New Farmers’ Movements’ have emerged across India. Youngblood is well aware of the other movements, but his focus remains on the ingenious ways in which the Shetkari Sanghatana has managed to carve for itself a niche in the political landscape of the state of Maharashtra. His study is based on fieldwork carried out between 1996 and 1999. During this period, he travelled across the various ecological zones of the state to meet and interact with the workers and leaders of the movement as well as with people, who stood outside the movement. Already an adept journeyman in things Indian, Youngblood seems to have been welcomed in most places that he visited as people disarmingly encouraged him to adopt a critical stance as part of his learning process (p. xviii). His journey is reflected in the way he has structured the book. Instead of portraying the movement as a single-purpose economistic group fixated on the agricultural price issue, Youngblood places the movement in its geographical and historical contexts. In this manner, the Shetkari Sanghatana emerges as a well-designed loom cleverly structured so as to bring together rural Maharashtrians of (almost) all hues on a platform that addresses day-to-day issues of market prices and (negative!) agricultural subsidies in the language of liberal economics even as the movement spins such discussions into the realm of history and mythology.
The founder and leader of the movement was Sharad Joshi who, as observers rarely have failed to notice, was the very antithesis of the rural toiler that he set out to lead. Caste-wise he was a Brahmin, that is, he embodied the caste that the rural majority has most often scorned as responsible for its woes. Until he retired from the Indian Postal Union and the International Postal Union in Switzerland and bought a farm near Pune, he had little experience of rural India. By appearance, he was an urbanite sporting ‘crisp blue jeans, golf shirts, and tennis shoes’ (p. 242) even as he juggled to theorize the misfit between the lifeworld of the agriculturalists and the surrounding system world.
Youngblood is an American cultural anthropologist and, as such, unlikely to have been reared on the canons of classical economy, but the centrality of the price issue to the movement forced him to take economics seriously. Chapters 3 and 4 are his attempts to ‘peel the onion’ of what at first appears to be a single-issue economistic movement. By contrast, Chapter 5 entitled ‘Bali Will Rise’ takes Youngblood on a pilgrimage to the 700-year-old Vithoba cult centred on the pilgrim town of Pandharpur. The Pandharpur pilgrimage, he finds, fosters a pan-agrarian identity that goes well with the ideology of the Shetkaris (p. 69). Therefore, it made sense for the Shetkari Sanghatana to stage its first major demonstration in 1983 as a procession of Shetkaris moving to Pandharpur (pp. 86–87).
Other farmers’ movements also draw sustenance from the religious lifeworld of its followers. Thus, supporters of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) in and around Uttar Pradesh may lean on the nineteenth-century revivalist Arya Samaj movement to unite agriculturalists of various middling castes. However, the Maharashtrian agriculturalists seem able to draw on an older and more nuanced fellowship to bridge the gap between high-caste Kshatriyas and lower caste Sudras further down along the Maratha–Kunbi caste cluster (pp. 61, 64).
The myth about the ‘demon king’ Bali provides an even deeper substratum for the Shetkaris. In the times of yore, according to the Vamana Purana, Bali ruled the world justly. Angered by his popularity, the gods and Brahmins teamed together to reassert their hegemony. Vishnu changed his form into Vamana, a dwarflike Brahmin, who then approached Bali asking for a piece of land. Bali generously allowed Vamana to take all the land he could in three strides. Vamana transformed himself back to Vishnu and in two steps covered the whole of the world. In the third step, he banished Bali to the netherworld. Bali, however, insisted he would come back to restore the happiness of his subjects (pp. 209–210). In Kerala, the myth is associated with a major festival, Onam, which allows people to comment on the amorality of everyday life in a language shared by most Keralites (Osella & Osella, 2000). In Maharashtra, there is no similar festival, but, according to Youngblood, Bali’s significance here is ‘unparalleled in any other part of India’ (pp. 83, 205). In North India, the myth of Bali may not have the same traction, but there, too, ‘demon kings’ sometimes come to raise millenarian hopes of the reversals of fortune. The rise and fall of Gurmeet Ram Raheem Singh may illustrate this (Vishvanathan, 2017).
Youngblood did fieldwork between 1996 and 1999. By 2006, he had largely completed the manuscript for the book. He states that the book is ‘a product of its time’ (p. xiii), but he also admits that his fieldwork experience has been at the back of his mind for the past two decades. This relatively long gestation period has probably contributed to a mellowing of his work. It also means he has been able to get the details right, except for the fact that he confuses Tom Brass with Paul Brass (pp. 20, 268–269). As Ronald Herring sums it up on the back cover of the book: ‘The analysis is subtle, wonderfully sophisticated and grounded in close ethnography even as Youngblood reaches out judiciously to grand theory.’ In fact, Youngblood mostly desists from clouding his narrative with theoretical debates. When he reaches out to general theory derived from material across the globe, he does so mostly to indicate to the reader that others have arrived at the same conclusion as himself on a particular point, or he does so in order to ‘greet’ other writers engaged in a shared endeavour for having coined a certain felicitous phrase. The author does leave some avenues unexplored. Thus, the index does not include the word ‘democracy’. It would have been easy for the author to refer to the ongoing discussion of the vernacularization of Indian democracy.
There seems to be only one theoretical stand from which Youngblood repeatedly distances himself, that is, the postulate that movements must progressively ‘solidify’ in order to be successful. The proposition holds that mature movements formalize and bureaucratize to manage internal contradictions (pp. 16, 193). In Youngblood’s view, the Shetkari Sanghatana is perfectly able to tolerate apparent internal contradictions. This ambiguity is the central part of its subtle and fluid identity. Youngblood refrains from shaming particular subscribers to the premise of progressive solidification (p. 15). He could have mentioned me for having argued that BKU’s hazy organizational structure, its ‘braggadocio’, its factionalism and its fruitless excursions into parliamentary party politics did weaken the movement in Uttar Pradesh (Lindberg & Madsen, 2003). Joshi died in 2015. Currently, both the Shetkari Sanghatana and the BKU play only marginal roles. No movement is perfect, but the Shetkaris may count themselves lucky to have had as clear-headed, articulate, empathic and sincere a leader as Sharad Joshi.
Altogether, there is something soothing about Youngblood’s book. It is nice for once to listen to an anthropologist giving a sympathetic hearing to an economist. The portrayal of the Shetkaris is almost too good to be true. Unlike most of humanity, the Shetkaris are able to be both zweckrational and wertrational as they argue for remunerative prices in agriculture while they bridge and bond across caste and class in the certain expectation of the return to Bali Raj. One almost envies them this gift. Would not everyone wish to live in such a tightly woven near-homogenous cultural setting—or will the book make some readers ponder the need to call on Vamana?