Abstract
In the midst of reading this book, I watched Mr Kailish Satyarthi, the crusader against child labour in India receiving the joint Nobel Peace Award with the Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai at Oslo, Norway on 10 December 2014. Through his NGO, Bachpan Bachao Aandolan (BBA) or Save the Childhood Movement, Mr Satyarthi has so far rescued about 80,000 children from the shackles of slavery, bonded labour and trafficking. Both this book and Mr Satyrathi’s work deal with children’s work (kaam, labour) but the contexts are somewhat different. This book, based on ethnographic research conducted in 2004 on children and young people aged 10–18, and organized into seven chapters, is a contribution to the new generation of work on the lives of children and youths of South Asia (Chapter 1).
The narratives of the children’s lives begin in Bemni, a village located in the ‘high’ Himalayan region of Chamoli district, far north of Uttarakhand in the Nandakini Valley. Indeed, the stories of children’s hard labour (mostly unpaid) are a testimony of nuanced scholarship. Devoid of electricity and running water in their homes, the children remain detached from the increasingly globalized world. Dyson compares this point with David Harvey’s (1989) ‘time-space compression’ (Chapter 2). This phenomenon, however, is not unique to Bemni alone. It is evident that in rural India, 72,056,350 and 37,015,515 households respectively fetch water from near the premises or from distant places; 72,435,303 households use kerosene as the key source of lighting, while 897,760 households continue to remain in the dark with no lighting facilities (Census of India, 2011). The new Indian government under the leadership of honourable Prime Minister Mr Narendra Modi commits to redress and aims to deliver these basic needs for every household by 2022.
While Mr Satyarthi’s award has induced through BBA the impetus for a global movement, Dyson’s book ensures that children’s work in Bemni receives an international platform. Through the portrayal of everyday mundane work practices of children and younger people, Dyson foregrounds the work experiences of these young people, which otherwise would have remained ‘hidden’ or sidelined by the society in general or socio-geographic research in particular. In doing so, Dyson shows that the children are not only ‘active agents’, but that ‘this agency… is tied up with notions of interdependence that are crucial to children’s own sense of themselves as competent young people’ (p. 12).
Shaped by social inequalities of gender, class and caste, the research unveils how the children and young people are the products of the village environment, their rich relationships with the fields, forests and are ‘knowledgeable agents’ of the local resources. The crux of the rural economy, these children’s multiple work spans from washing dishes, cooking, sweeping courtyard, changing livestock bedding, looking after younger sibling(s), through to backbreaking and gruelling works across the rugged mountainous landscape such as herding cattle, collecting wood, fodder, leaves (suttoor), lichen (mukku), weeding potatoes and fetching water. At the same time, these children also attend school but knit tangled meshes while juggling multiple household workloads to complete their school-related works. Consequently, these children enjoyed very little leisure time, albeit they sometimes used school-work and mukku collection (like Saka and her higher caste friends) as excuses and fun opportunities to escape the brunt of household chores (Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6). Nevertheless, through their work, the children cultivate gendered identities and gain ‘skills useful in later life’ (p. 61). For instance, the children obtained creative skills of improvisation (juggad) to manage works in agricultural fields or harvest forest resources (mukku collection). Similarly, children’s practices of herding puja, leaf collection, etc. are not only sources of fun, these activities act as vehicles that help them develop gendered ideas of ‘self’ and acquire skills of friendship and ‘social capital’. While for Saka and her friends, mukku collection is a source fun, ‘in which to mischievously invert notions of proper femininity’ (p. 131), a way to unsettle village norms of gender inequality, for boys like Manoj and Rakesh, mukku collection offers an income-generating asset, which they compared with salaried jobs (naukri)—a medium to develop ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (p. 131)—a road to obtaining money, power and dignity (Chapter 6).
In parallel, it is worth mentioning that despite BBA’s effort, India’s menace of paid child labour continues to be rampant. The employment and vulnerability indicator of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report for India reveals that 11.5 per cent children (aged 5–14) are engaged in precarious and high-risk environments to eke out a living, but the book makes two significant contributions. First, it sheds light on the ‘strength of young people’s agency… [by] pointing [to their] active and creative engagement’ with (un)paid labour and second, it draws on the significance of the children’s everyday work practices and the environment as sites of socio-cultural reproduction (Chapter 7, p. 144). Dyson also includes an epilogue (p. 146) that sketches the gradual educational and infrastructural changes in Bemni since 2004.
Fairly priced, the book offers an excellent read for human geographers, sociologists, development practitioners or scholars interested in understanding childhood, youth and the environment within India and beyond.