Disintegration of the Moral Economy in Gopinath Mohanty’s Paraja

Abstract

This article suggests that the concept of the moral economy of the peasant, as defined by James C. Scott, in the context of Southeast Asia, provides a compelling theoretical framework through which one can examine Gopinath Mohanty’s novel Paraja (1945),2

This article takes its cue from a brilliant article written by Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay in which he usefully employs the concept of moral economy to analyse the peasant narratives of Premchand. See Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, ‘Premchand and the Moral Economy of Peasantry in Colonial North India’, Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 5 (2011): 1227–59. However, while Upadhyay equates the idea of moral economy with the traditional Indian concept of dharma, in order to explain the passivity of Premchand’s peasant protagonists, I have endeavoured to demonstrate, in this article, the disintegration of the moral economy in Gopinath Mohanty’s novel Paraja, and how such disintegration may precipitate resistance and a strong sense of moral outrage.

an unparalleled achievement in Oriya literature that narrates the predicament of the tribal peasants of the Koraput region. It demonstrates how the encroachment of the colonial state on the invaluable resources of the tribal peasants in Mohanty’s novel results in an escalating disintegration of the moral economy which in turn precipitates resistance and a strong sense of moral outrage. However, instead of collective rebellion that Scott discusses about, in his groundbreaking work, in Mohanty’s novel, we find several instances of everyday forms of resistance, a concept that Scott formulates in his subsequent works. This not only helps us to understand and make sense of the motives and intentions of the tribal peasants in the novel but also underscores the abiding relevance and timeless appeal of Mohanty’s work, even in the post-Nehruvian nation-state, where the problems confronting the tribal peasants in the wake of globalisation are increasingly acute, virtually insurmountable and even more pronounced than ever before.

Keywords

Gopinath Mohanty James Scott moral economy

Introduction

In this land of the English, how hard it is to live

how hard it is to live.

In the village sits the landlord

In the gate sits the Kotwar

In the garden sits the Patwari

In the field sits the government

In this land of the English how hard it is to live.

To pay cattle tax we have to sell cows

To pay forest tax we have to sell buffaloes

To pay land tax we have to sell bullocks

How are we to get our food?

In this land of the English….3

Cited in Verrier Elwin and Shamrao Hivale, Songs of the Maikal Hills (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1944), 316. Although a Baiga song, it represents in general ‘the manner in which the process of colonialism impacted the tribals’, Biswamoy Pati, ‘Introduction’, in Adivasis in Colonial India: Survival, Resistance and Negotiation, ed. Biswamoy Pati (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2011), 13.

The idea of the moral economy, formulated by E.P. Thompson in the context of the English crowd in the eighteenth century, serves as a useful yardstick of interpretation in so far as the direct/violent action of the multitude is concerned. According to Thompson, ‘a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community’,4

E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 50, no. 1 (1971): 79.

constitutes the moral economy of the poor. He further comments: ‘An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action.’5

Ibid.

Expanding the scope and theoretical applicability of Thompson’s postulations, James C. Scott uses the idea of the moral economy to analyse the frequent recurrence of peasant rebellions in Southeast Asia. Here colonial intervention is construed as the principal factor that precipitates the irreversible breakdown of traditionally sanctioned obligations and loyalties and which eventually contributes to the ‘relative instability of welfare levels’,6

James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (London: Yale University Press, 1976), 56.

of the peasantry. A similar kind of peasant exploitation and peasant response/resistance can also be discerned in Gopinath Mohanty’s Paraja (1945), an unparalleled, compelling and poignant achievement in Oriya literature that narrates the predicament of the tribal peasants of the Koraput region.

Dinabandhu Mitra’s play Neel-Darpan (The Indigo Planting Mirror, 1860) is perhaps one of the first major works of nineteenth-century colonial India that predominantly focuses upon the oppression and exploitation of the peasantry. Written in the immediate aftermath of the peasant uprisings that swept across nine districts in Bengal, it both enjoyed resounding success as well as became the focal point of legal and political contention between the European planters and the Indian liberals.7

For more on this, see Ranajit Guha, ‘Neel-Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt in a Liberal Mirror’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 2, no. 1 (1974): 1–46.

However, the principal relationship that the play explores is the one that exists between the indigo planters and the tenant cultivators so that the question of depeasantisation as a result of zamindari oppression still remains beyond its purview. It is only with Lal Behari Day’s novel, Bengal Peasant Life (1874), that we get the earliest glimpses of what later on became the overriding preoccupation of some of the most eminent writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, namely, the recurring and poignant theme of the peasant’s loss of land.8

The theme of depeasantisation constitutes the essential narrative fulcrum of a lion’s share of Premchand’s works, all of which remain largely unsurpassed in the canons of Urdu and Hindi literature, with Godaan (The Gift of a Cow, 1936) unanimously being regarded as the writer’s creative tour de force. It is also taken up by authors like Sarat Chandra Chatterjee in short stories such as ‘Mahesh’ (1922); see Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, ‘Mahesh’, trans. M. Asaduddin, in Image and Representation: Stories of Muslim Lives in India, ed. Mushirul Hasan and M. Asaduddin (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 17–27. However, the insidious link between zamindari oppression and sarkari exploitation was first pointed out by Rabindranath Tagore in his poem, ‘Dui Bigha Jomi’ (My Little Plot of Land): ‘In six weeks I was forced out of my ancestral land and into the road / By a court decree. Falsely, it said I had defaulted on a loan and owed / The zamindar the whole lot!’, Rabindranath Tagore, ‘My Little Plot of Land’ [translation of ‘Dui Bigha Jomi’], in The Essential Tagore, ed. Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 241.

In Oriya literature, Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Chha Mana Atha Guntha or Six Acres and a Third (1897–99) took its cue from Day’s novel and improved it further, thereby inaugurating an irreversible trend of social realism that offers a comprehensive account of depeasantisation in the wake of the emerging forces of colonial modernity.9

Fakir Mohan Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, trans. Rabi Shankar Mishra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak and Paul St. Pierre (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2006). Also see Satya P. Mohanty (ed.), Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature: A View from India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Senapati’s critique should nevertheless always be measured against the fact that he had also played an instrumental role in suppressing the Bhuyan meli (the Bhuyan agitation) of Keonjhar (1891–92), in his administrative capacity as the assistant manager of the erstwhile Princely State of Keonjhar. The meli, which was a direct consequence of the acute grievances and growing discontent of the Bhuyan tribes, evoked a distinct response from him which was at best contemptuous, derogatory and pejorative.10

In the nineteenth chapter of his autobiography, Atma Jiban Charita (Story of My Life, 1927), Senapati describes the Bhuyans as ‘born troublemakers’, who are ‘hard-drinking’, ‘ignorant savages’, ‘cruel’, ‘vicious’ and ‘stupid’. Fakir Mohan Senapati, Atma Jiban Charita [Story of My Life, 1927] (Cuttack: Jagannatha Ratha, 1965); cited in Pati, ‘Introduction’, 5–6.

Notwithstanding his limitations, ambivalence and tentativeness, Senapati however did manage to carve out a pioneering niche for the genre of the novel in the poetry-dominated domain of Oriya literature by making it ‘a viable form of art for proper depiction of atmosphere, realistic delineation of characters and authentic presentation of social situation, and that too in the language of the common masses’.11

K. Mahapatra, ‘Modern Oriya Fiction and the New Morality’, Indian Literature 21, no. 5 (1978): 62.

In the second and third decades of the twentieth century, with the impact of the nationalist movement being increasingly felt throughout the country, his particular brand of social realism also found favour with a number of other Oriya writers such as Ramaprasad Singh, Kanhucharan Mohanty, Bhagabati Charan Panigrahi, Surendra Mohanty and Sachidananda Routroy. Of these, Kanhucharan Mohanty emerged as the most prominent writer after Senapati, with novels such as Ha Anna (1934) and Sasti (1945), both of which gravitate around the catastrophic Orissa famine of 1866.

However, the scope of Oriya literature in this period of social and political ferment [something that also witnessed the establishment of The Nabajuga Sahitya Sansad (The New Age Literary Society)] was not merely restricted to themes having historical significance but also extended to incorporate those that had a direct engagement with topicality and therefore focused exclusively on the predicament of the tribals and peasants. Ramaprasad Singh’s novel Homasikha (Ordeal, 1937), Bhagabati Charan Panigrahi’s short stories ‘Hatudi O Da’ (Hammer and Sickle, 1936) and ‘Shikar’ (The Hunt, 1936) and Sachidananda Routroy’s ‘Anguthi’ (Finger, 1937) are some of the most representative works in this respect.12

See Biswamoy Pati, ‘Creativity and the Left Cultural Movement in Orissa, c. 1930–1940’, Social Scientist 40, no. 1 (2012): 31–40 and Biswamoy Pati, ‘“High”-“Low” Dialectic: Peasant in Oriya Literature’, Economic and Political Weekly 24, no. 14 (1989): 747–52.

Their significance is further underlined by the dominating influence that they had on colonial bureaucracy so that Bhagabati’s ‘Shikar’ can virtually be construed as a literary precursor to Gopinath Mohanty’s (1914–91) representative novel Paraja (1945).13

Pati, ‘Creativity and the Left Cultural Movement in Orissa’, 38.

Brother of Kanhucharan and the author of about twenty-four novels, ten collections of short stories, three plays and several other literary writings, Mohanty had the double distinction of winning both the distinguished Sahitya Akademi Award (1955) and the illustrious Jnanpith Award (1974) for Amrutara Santana (Sons of the Immortal, 1947) and Mati Matala (The Fertile Soil, 1964), respectively. Although known for his veritable diversity of themes and the compassionate outlook with which they are treated, Mohanty’s reputation outside the canon of Oriya literature is almost single-handedly ensured by the way in which he delineates the plight of the tribes/peasants in Paraja. This article is an attempt to examine Mohanty’s novel in the light of James C. Scott’s formulation of the concept of the moral economy of the peasant. It argues that the encroachment of the colonial state on the invaluable resources of the tribal peasants in Paraja results in an escalating disintegration of the moral economy which in turn precipitates resistance and a strong sense of moral outrage.

Parajas and Their Life-affirming Ethos

The Paraja tribe finds significant representation not only in the novel of the same name but also in Dadi Budha (The Ancestor, 1944), another work by Mohanty that was published a year before the former. In this novel itself, Mohanty foregrounds the essential and foremost principle around which the activities of the tribal peasants are organised, namely, their life-affirming ethos: ‘Throughout the day they worked in the mud, stones and pebbles. They were utterly indifferent to everything: joys and sorrows, pain and pleasure. They were creatures of the earth; they had no complaints.’14

Gopinath Mohanty, The Ancestor [translation of Dadi Budha, 1944], trans. Arun Kumar Mohanty (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1997), 56.

In Paraja, this life-affirming ethos is even more forcefully emphasised so that it unequivocally constitutes one of the most striking aspects of the novel. This is made explicit to the reader, through the periodical comments of the third-person omniscient narrator that serve as a rich source of socio-anthropological information about the tribe. Early on, in the narrative, we are told that ‘the young people slept every night in their dormitories, away from their parents, with no taboos or restraints imposed upon them’.15

Gopinath Mohanty, Paraja [translation of the Oriya novel Paraja, 1945], trans. Bikram K. Das (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 17.

The boys and girls in the novel have the inviolable right to elope while the indiscretions of youth are easily forgotten once the male culprit offers four annas’ worth of liquor to all the villagers. Thus, the predominant mood that characterises the everyday existence of the Parajas is one of exuberance, celebration and merrymaking.

The joie de vivre of the Parajas is also manifested through the fact that even the weekly market becomes more of a festival or a social event rather than an outlet for commerce. Mohanty particularly emphasises the pivotal role that singing, dancing and drinking occupy in the lives of these people:

Tribal life is punctuated with many festivals, but chief among them is the Festival of Spring—a fortnight of revelry, hunting and feasting. Work is forgotten and the drums throb incessantly, day and night, to the rhythm of the dance; the old year is drummed away and the cycle of back-breaking labour begins again.16

Mohanty, Paraja, 87.

The Parajas also show tremendous resilience despite their sorrows, sufferings and hardships. There is a pronounced sense of kinship and affinity among them, by the virtue of which, they are able to draw comfort and sustenance from each other’s presence in their lives.17

For more on the notion of kinship and affinity amongst the Parajas, see Soumendra Mohan Patnaik, ‘Kinship and Affinity among the Paraja of Koraput, Orissa’, Indian Anthropologist 21, no. 2 (1991): 7–25.

The relationship between the community and the individual is conspicuously foregrounded when the Paraja hunters, having resigned themselves to failure, creep wearily out of the jungle. The narrator intervenes here to inform us about the sound of a horn that rings through the forest. However, what is particularly striking is the symbolic message that it communicates: ‘Come back, brothers, wherever you may be; we are returning home.’18

Mohanty, Paraja, 165.

The narrator further comments: ‘And though the sound was sad it was full of the love which the community felt for every individual within its fold, and the five hunters followed that call.’19

Ibid.

Moreover, Mohanty reminds us, time and again, of the cyclical nature of lives that the Parajas lead so that renewal, growth, decay and loss are all accepted as part of life and endured without too much fuss or protest. It bears an unmistakable resemblance to the natural seasons that govern their agrarian patterns even as it reveals their indomitable grit and tenacity:

The forest was alive with the sounds of drums, whistling and shouting…. There were no restraints. Life renewed itself in the total abandonment of spring; old ties were revived and new bonds forged in the shade of those trees; the disappointing eyes of prudish society were a million miles away.20

Ibid., 171.

The life-affirming ethos of the Parajas also provides an instructive and philosophical insight into Mohanty’s own outlook vis-à-vis human life, something which is consistently reiterated even in his other works such as Laya Bilaya (High Tide Ebb Tide, 1956).21

Gopinath Mohanty, High Tide Ebb Tide [translation of Laya Bilaya, 1956], trans. Bikram K. Das (Bhubaneswar: Lark Books, 1999).

Writing about the figures of repetition in the novel, Kerstin Shands and Himanshu Mohapatra comment: ‘the figures of repetition point to and reinforce Mohanty’s vision of human life as a revolving wheel where humanity on individual and collective levels goes through cycles from birth to maturity to decay, death, and dissolution’.22

Kerstin W. Shands and Himanshu S. Mohapatra, ‘Reading the Figure of the Body in Gopinath Mohanty’s High Tide Ebb Tide., Wasafiri 18, no. 39 (2003): 36.

However, in Paraja, this vision of human life not only dovetails neatly with the life-affirming ethos of the tribal peasants but also becomes virtually indistinguishable from it.

The Absence of a Profit-maximising Impulse

Writing about the impact of colonialism, the expansion of markets and the formation of central states on peasant society, Samuel L. Popkin observes: ‘peasants are continuously striving not merely to protect but to raise their subsistence level through long- and short-term investments, both public and private’.23

Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 4.

This political economy approach has some significance even in the context of a writer like Premchand, in whose works Upadhyay traces the elements of moral economy. However, in order to demonstrate its relevance, it is important to quote Upadhyay’s conclusions here:

Premchand does believe that there should be reciprocity between landlord and peasant, and that the peasant should be granted the right to subsist—the two crucial concepts for the functioning of the moral economy, according to Scott. However, he goes beyond this to the traditional Indian concept of dharma where reciprocity, though desirable, is not necessary.24

Upadhyay, ‘Premchand and the Moral Economy of Peasantry in Colonial North India’, 1249.

He further comments: ‘One should go on practicing one’s dharma, as an individual, as part of the community, irrespective of the existence of reciprocity or the promise of return. This is reflected in Hori’s upholding of dharma against all odds in Godaan.’25

Ibid., 1249.

This element of moral economy is nevertheless substantially inflected by certain aspects that can only be explained through a political economy approach. For instance, Hori’s upholding of dharma coexists with his cultivation of a cash crop like sugarcane and is therefore tempered with pragmatism. So, while Premchand does underscore the traditional Indian concept of dharma, he is also representing the impact of colonialism and the expansion of markets on the peasant society in the United Provinces. Majid Hayat Siddiqi explains it as follows: ‘the driving force behind the expansion of the superior foodgrains was the “rational” choice of the peasant that was shaped by the sheer necessity of having to pay interests on loans and to pay off the debt itself’.26

Majid Hayat Siddiqi, Agrarian Unrest in North India: The United Provinces, 1918–1922 (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978), 100.

As opposed to this, in Mohanty’s novel, there is a veritable absence of either a profit-maximising impulse or a debt-minimising principle that the political economy approach argues about. This can be corroborated through Felix Padel’s observations on tribal societies: ‘A prime value in the mainstream, money is not a prime value in adivasi societies, compared with people’s relationship with each other, and the deities embedded in nature.’27

Felix Padel, ‘In Lieu of an Afterword; Mining Projects and Cultural Genocide: Colonial Roots of Present Conflicts’, in Adivasis in Colonial India: Survival, Resistance and Negotiation, ed. Biswamoy Pati (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2011), 325.

Sukru Jani, the principal protagonist of Paraja, cultivates paddy, mandia, olsi and red-gram all of which are nothing more than subsistence crops, meant for consumption for him and his family.28

Mohanty, Paraja, 278.

On the contrary, he becomes overwhelmingly anxious when he discovers that the sahukar (moneylender) plans to grow orange trees on his land. The sahukar, for his part, tries his level best to whet Sukru Jani’s appetite, by explaining to the latter, the particularly favourable prospects of getting rich because of cash crops, but Sukru Jani knows better: ‘But the orange trees will suck all the juice out of the soil, and leave my land barren.’29

Ibid., 295.

Moreover, his needs are restricted to a bare minimum: ‘a bowl of mandia gruel every morning and again in the evening, and a strip of cloth four fingers wide to wrap around his loins’.30

Ibid., 2.

This invites comparison with what James C. Scott has termed as ‘subsistence ethic’.31

Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 2.

Subsistence ethic, according to Scott, was a logical outcome of food scarcity in pre-capitalist societies. The circumstances of recurrent shortage or undersupply invariably forced peasants to privilege security of subsistence over profit maximisation. In Mohanty’s novel, Sukru Jani’s aspirations and priorities undoubtedly have a pre-colonial and pre-capitalist dimension to it. In addition to this, the unproductive nature of the soil of Koraput, irregularities in rainfall and the primitive technology of the Parajas often resulted in low levels of production and thus they were forced to live in difficult economic conditions.32

Patnaik, ‘Kinship and Affinity among the Paraja of Koraput, Orissa’, 8.

This historical fact also implies a strong possibility of food scarcity, something which is explicitly revealed even in Mohanty’s novel:

He [Sukru Jani] thought of his children, whom he and his wife Sombari had brought up with such difficulty. They had often fasted in order that the children might eat. And what rows he had had with Sombari over them! When they had built that house together, she had worked by his side in the hot sun like any man. Then there was the year when the rains had been unusually heavy and a raging storm had struggled to tear away the hatch from the wall-posts, and, as the children looked on in alarm.33

Mohanty, Paraja, 43.

Thus, through Sukru Jani’s character, Mohanty does suggest a subsistence ethic among the Parajas. By corollary, it follows that there is an unqualified absence of a profit-maximising impulse among the tribal peasants in the novel. The insistence is more on upholding family values and forging strong kinship solidarities in order to ward off, no matter howsoever unsuccessfully, the various threats that have the potential to irrevocably rupture relationships and bring about a complete degradation of values:

They closed the door on the world outside and in the darkness of their dingy shelter father, sons and daughters hung from each other’s necks and sobbed aloud while the mandia gruel remained untouched in the gourd-shell flasks… . And thus it was that in this land of hills and forests, in an unmapped corner of the wide world, luckless men and women who lived on castaway mango stones and hid their nakedness in bits of rag huddled together under the torrent of misery pouring down on their heads, and wept.34

Ibid., 37.

The disappointing eyes of prudish society, that were a million miles away, come closer in order to comprehensively jeopardise and eventually destabilise the moral economy of the Parajas.

Disintegration of the Moral Economy

Sukru Jani, like the other tribal peasants, is an independent landholder at the beginning of the novel. However, Mohanty poignantly delineates the cumulative encroachment of the forces of colonial modernity on the indispensable resources, value systems and cultural ethos of the Parajas. The first and foremost change that the colonial dispensation brought in its wake was the creation of a new class of moneylenders, who through usury consolidated their position in society, usually at the expense of the peasant. As Gunner Myrdal puts it:

By creating individual titles to land European intervention produced an environment in which another agent for change in the rural structure—the moneylender—could flourish. Once the land system had been adapted to Western concepts of private property, land became a negotiable asset. It could now be used as security for loans, and in case of default, could be forfeited and transferred. Not only did European rule provide these conditions; it cast them within a system of law that made contracts enforceable… . These circumstances alone were sufficient to produce profound changes in the traditional system, but their force was heightened by another factor—the spread of the monetary economy.35

Gunner Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1968), 1039–40. Myrdal’s conclusions for the Asian context, in general, can also be corroborated through the analyses of Hardiman and Guha, both of whom explore the reasons and nature of peasant insurgency, with specific reference to India. For instance, Hardiman observes: The British had worked towards creating a largely uniform system of landed property, in which an area of land was held to belong to an individual and to be freely saleable on the market…Under the new system introduced by the British, it became possible for moneylenders to take individual peasants to court and force them to sell their land to pay off their debts. The civil courts established by the British worked in favor of moneylenders as they favored the written evidence of the sahukar to the oral testimony of the peasants…In many cases the moneylenders…refused to make…advance (of loans) unless the land of the debtor was made over to them in mortgage. In time, after the peasant has failed to repay by a stipulated date, the moneylender became the owner of the land. David Hardiman, Peasant Resistance in India 1858–1914 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 26–27. Similarly, Guha argues: One important consequence of this revitalization of landlordism under British rule was a phenomenal growth of peasant indebtedness. For with a land market flourishing under the triple impact of agrarian legislation, demographic increase and a progressively larger money supply, many mahajans and banias bought estates by the dozen at auction from impoverished and evicted tenants. Set up as rural proprietors they brought to bear all their usurious skill on their function as rentier. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 7–8.

Similarly, for the Oriya context, Biswamoy Pati states: ‘One of the most important effects of the land settlement was the growth of a money-economy, characterised by cash rents, wages and land becoming a saleable commodity.’36

Biswamoy Pati, Resisting Domination: Peasants, Tribals and the National Movement in Orissa 1920–50 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1993), 14.

He further comments:

Although the process was uneven, moneylenders developed in different parts of Orissa. The desire for freedom from the economic burdens, eg. the rent demands and meeting price fluctuations at the market place, ironically pushed the peasants and tribals into bondage at the hands of the moneylenders who controlled their destiny…completely.37

Ibid., 14–15. The crisis was particularly unprecedented in Orissa: At the turn of the century for example, 80 per cent of the rural population in the temporarily-settled areas were ‘more or less permanently indebted to the mahajan, proprietary tenure-holder or zamindar’. This, together with the fact that the interest rates charged by the moneylenders varied from 18 3/4 percent to 75 per cent and that by the 1920’s the Orissa cultivators paid one and a half crore of rupees a year as interest demonstrate the importance moneylending assumed as well as the problem of indebtedness. This had other implications such as landlessness which resulted out of mortgages of peasants’ holdings for non-repayment of loans. Ibid., 15.

In Mohanty’s novel, the sahukar, Ramachandra Bisoi, is an inevitable product of the colonial intervention since we are told that originally he was a sundhi, or brewer, by caste. However, he switches to moneylending once the business of distillation and sale of liquor is taken over by the government. His upward social mobility is unmistakable since the sahukar also becomes a zamindar in due course. The narrator comments with a habitual touch of irony: ‘the Government took away the money-lender’s liquor shop; but the money-lender had taken all their lands. It was the old story.’38

Mohanty, Paraja, 120–21.

The victim becomes the perpetrator and the registers of exploitation increase manifold. The exploitative apparatus becomes even more vicious and uncompromising because of the spirit of camaraderie that the sahukar shares with the colonial officials in general and Garaja Sundara, the Revenue Inspector or Ribini in particular: ‘his cordial relations with the officialdom paid him rich dividends’.39

Ibid., 196.

Finally, the Forest Guard or the Garod/Jaman represents the quintessential sarkari official who not only collects the newly introduced ‘plough-tax’ from the Parajas but also prosecutes those who clear a patch of jungle or collect honey from the forests without a licence. Thus, even though Ramachandra Bisoi, very much like Ramachandra Mangaraj of Chha Mana Atha Guntha, single-handedly epitomises a convergence of mahajani and zamindari exploitation, the subjection of the Parajas to the triumvirate of sarkari (governmental), sahukari (moneylending) and zamindari (landlord) interests is complete and irrevocable.40

This political and economic nexus between the landlord, the moneylender and the official is brilliantly expounded by Ranajit Guha in his seminal work; see Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, 8.

The cultural ethos of the Parajas merits comparison with what Scott terms as the ‘moral economy’ of the peasant: ‘their notion of economic justice and their working definition of exploitation—their view of which claims on their product were tolerable and which intolerable’.41

Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 3. Not only peasant theorists, but also historians like Paul Greenough have argued about the existence of a moral economy in the Asian context: ‘there is something like a “moral economy” in most of Asia’. Paul R. Greenough, ‘Indulgence and Abundance as Asian Peasant Values: A Bengali Case in Point’, The Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (1983): 832.

In Mohanty’s novel, Sukru Jani does not mind providing provisions and supplies to the Forest Guard since by doing so, he both fulfils a customary obligation as well as brightens his prospects for more land. However, his reservations and the question of ‘how far and no further’ assume a concrete shape the moment Kau Paraja tells him about the lascivious intentions of the Forest Guard towards Jili, Sukru Jani’s elder daughter: ‘Go and tell him that our Paraja women are not for sale. He can have our chickens and our millets, but nothing more.’42

Mohanty, Paraja, 30.

The irony is both profound as well as unmistakable. This is because Sukru Jani’s refusal, which also includes a severe thrashing of Kau Paraja, antagonises the Forest Guard and sets into motion an entire sequence of undesirable events because of which Jili becomes a mistress of the sahukar. Nevertheless, it also helps us understand the ‘indignation’ and ‘rage’ which prompts peasants like Sukru Jani to ‘risk everything’ the moment their sense of moral economy is violated.43

See Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 3.

The disintegration of the moral economy occurs at several registers: (i) when Sukru Jani and Tikra are undeservedly forced to become gotis44

The practice of goti among the Parajas implies a fixed arrangement by which a man has to work instead of making cash payment for benefits received; see KumkumYadav, Tribals in Indian Narratives (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2003), 148.

or debt-bound slaves of the sahukar in order to avoid legal proceedings against the paterfamilias. The Forest Guard, who only gives his verbal consent to Sukru Jani to clear the jungle, is easily able to accuse the latter of causing a loss of four score of rupees to the Raja, once his lascivious overtures towards Jili are thwarted, (ii) when Mandia is forced to become a goti like his father and brother in order to avoid going to prison, since he is involved in illicit distillation of liquor, (iii) when Jili, despite her dogged efforts to keep the wolf from the door, is compelled to become a mistress of the supervisor (later on, she becomes the sahukar’s mistress as well) and (iv) when Sukru Jani is forced to mortgage his land in order to buy his freedom and take care of his daughters.

The fundamental needs, aspirations and priorities of the Parajas are so comprehensively undermined that sometimes nothing seems to matter at all and life is utterly divested of all meaning, order, pattern, purpose and direction. When Jili is repudiated by Bagla, the narrative conveys a poignant sense of desolation, outrage and indifference:

Life at home was without pattern or meaning to Jili. Her father seemed to live only for his lands, his work, and his thoughts. Bili was totally wrapped up in her love for Nandibali. There was nothing for Jili to share and she felt that nobody wanted her… . Jili sat alone near the hearth after the fire had gone cold, with her cheek resting on her palm, thinking of nothing except her own loneliness. She felt herself growing old without having received anything from life; she had gathered nothing, saved nothing, and there was no one to call her own…. What was there so wrong about the suggestion which Madhu Ghasi was making to her? Why must she feel lonely and miserable? .... She must cut the ropes and free herself. She had a right to be happy like anybody else.45

Mohanty, Paraja, 288.

Thus, Jili decides to become the sahukar’s mistress and the family and kinship ties are irrevocably ruptured once and for all. Similarly, when Mandia is jilted by Kajodi, nothing seems to matter to him: ‘Let it all go—the land, our home, everything! Let the Sahukar have it all! His happiness had ended, for Kajodi would never be his.’46

Ibid., 230.

Finally, we have Sukru Jani who is willing to wager everything just to make sure that the family stays together: ‘The land isn’t everything. Let the land go—let everything go, if only we can all be together in our own hut. What a relief that would be! I wouldn’t mind if we had to starve together.’47

Ibid., 227.

Here, even the subsistence ethic does not seem to matter anymore. However, this escalating disintegration of the moral economy is not merely restricted to the level of the individual or the family but also extends to that of the community, resulting in an irreversible degradation and debasement of values:

The evidence of the other villagers was recorded in order to pin the culprits down, and all who were asked swore that it was Sukru Jani who had felled the trees. For the tribals live under the constant threat of official persecution, and no existence in the jungle is possible unless one learns to play hide-and-seek with the law. Everyone wanted to save his own skin, and lies were spoken with great moral conviction. Their natural simplicity and honesty had been corroded by a lifetime of fear and insecurity.48

Ibid., 35.

Sukru Jani is betrayed by his village brethren out of sheer expediency which clearly demonstrates that community values have been supplanted by the need for self-preservation even as the disintegration of the moral economy of the Parajas is absolute and irredeemable.

Manslaughter as the Culmination of Moral Outrage

Of all these changes, the restriction of forest use was one of the most galling to peasants… . Forestry officials might be well-intentioned—though they seemed to be as much concerned with forest revenue as with conservation—but their actions deprived peasants of what seemed natural rights.49

Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 63–64.

Scott’s aforementioned comments in relation to the moral economy of the peasant unequivocally connote a sense of simmering discontent, born out of the colonial dispensation. In Mohanty’s novel, this discontent finds expression through everyday forms of resistance.50

Although Scott argues that the collapse of moral economy precipitated recurrent peasant rebellions in the colonial period, what we have in Mohanty’s novel are various instances of everyday forms of resistance, a concept that Scott develops in his subsequent works; see James C. Scott, Weapon of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). In this book, he states that ‘the symbols, the norms, the ideological forms they [everyday forms of resistance] create constitute the indispensable background to their behaviour however imperfect or partial their understanding of the situation might be’. Ibid., 38. However, even in the Indian context, there are instances of collective peasant rebellions that were a logical outcome of a crisis in the moral economy. For example, while examining the peasant revolt in Awadh (1919–22), Gyan Pandey remarks that the ‘idea of a just, or moral, struggle appears to have been fundamental to the peasants’ acceptance of the necessity of revolt’. Gyan Pandey, ‘Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism: The Peasant Movement in Awadh, 1919–1922’, in Subaltern Studies, I, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 171–74.

For instance, the narrator points out that ‘it was illegal for anyone to distil liquor in the hills without a licence from the revenue authorities, though it was well known that all the tribes distilled their own liquor’.51

Mohanty, Paraja, 97.

Similarly, we are told that

The Spring Festival is no sooner over than the entire village gets busy with axes, and when the Forest Guard comes round again on his visit, he is faced with a fresh pile of glowing charcoals; the trees are gone, and he cannot even calculate their value in order to penalise the offenders.52

Ibid., 130.

Colonial laws assume sinister proportions for the Parajas and act as a ubiquitous and intimidating presence in their lives; it almost reminds one, of Josef K.’s predicament in Kafka’s The Trial (1925). Resistance, therefore, merely becomes a product or rather a function of necessity:

A tribesman’s life is so hemmed in that he seems to be in danger of breaking the law each time he sets foot outside his home. And so he does what he regards as necessary and if he is caught he looks at you as if to say: ‘Very well, I’m beaten again. Do what you like with me.’53

Ibid., 330.

However, the situation comes to a head when Sukru Jani is deprived of what Scott calls as the peasant’s ‘right to subsistence’.54

Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 11.

The sahukar refuses to settle the matter of Sukru Jani’s land since it has already been mortgaged for a period of 30 years. Even the tribal peasant’s appeal in court, another institution of colonial modernity, turns out to be the final elaborate absurdity that is enacted in the name of justice. The subsistence crisis is unprecedented, without any easily available alternatives, and consequently precipitates a strong sense of ‘moral outrage’.55

Ibid., 167.

This is poignantly articulated through Mandia’s words: ‘We are peasants and we’ve only one way of keeping ourselves alive—by tilling the soil.’56

Mohanty, Paraja, 368.

The imminent threat of starvation looms large: ‘The land was our bowl of rice, father. What shall we eat now?’57

Ibid., 371. Regarding the tribal peasant’s loss of land, Felix Padel comments: Losing their land brings death to all they value. The sacredness of nature, respect for elders’ knowledge, ritual contact with the ancestors, growing their own food on family land and making their own houses and tools, exchanging food with neighbours with an egalitarian spirit—these aspects are swept away by corporate values, which emphasise money and financial power. Felix Padel, ‘In Lieu of an Afterword; Mining Projects and Cultural Genocide’, 331.

Still, Sukru Jani and his sons make an earnest plea to the sahukar who in turn only gloats over their misfortunes. Thus, it happens that in a moment of desperation, helplessness and extreme moral outrage, Sukru Jani and his sons kill the sahukar:

In a flash he raised his axe and brought it down on the Sahukar’s head. Immediately the other two joined in. The Sahukar fell like an axed tree, and Mandia went on dealing blow after blow… . It was only when the blood spurted into their faces and eyes that they came to their senses… . Sukru Jani exclaimed: ‘Oh!’ Mandia looked at his father; and father and sons put their arms around each other and wept, their tears mingling with the blood.58

Ibid., 373. As Sitakant Mahapatra comments: ‘What makes the novel an epic of unforgettable magnitude is the way it builds the story into its tragic finale.’ Sitakant Mahapatra, Reaching the Other Shore: The World of Gopinath Mohanty’s Fiction (New Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corporation, 1992), 35. Moreover, the death of the sahukar at the hands of Sukru Jani and his sons is not completely without its historical antecedents. In 1928, the indignant peasants of Balanga (Puri district) murdered Banamali Pati, a much-loathed intermediary appointed by the zamindar to collect taxes; see Biswamoy Pati, Resisting Domination, 58. Similarly, in terms of fictional representation, Bhagabati Charan Panigrahi’s ‘Shikar’ directly engages with tribal resistance. In this story, Ghinua, a Santhal peasant, murders Govind Sardar, a rapacious and exploitative zamindar who had not only usurped Ghinua’s land but also tried to force himself on the peasant’s wife. For the way in which this story virtually anticipates Mohanty’s novel, see Pati, ‘Creativity and the Left Cultural Movement in Orissa’, 38. However, there are critics like K. Mahapatra who contrast the dissident gesture of Sukru Jani and his sons with the refusal of the idealistic character Rabi (in Mati Matala) to reveal to the police the name of the man who had beaten him. On this account, Mahapatra concludes: ‘Thus, the morals upheld by the two heroes of the same author seem to be contradictory.’ Mahapatra, ‘Modern Oriya Fiction and the New Morality’, 66. What needs to be emphasised here though is the fact that this ostensible contradiction can be easily reconciled if one takes into consideration the nature of crisis that confronts Sukru Jani and his sons on the one hand and Rabi on the other hand. A thrashing, no matter howsoever severe, hardly merits comparison with an absolute disruption of the moral economy because of which, even the prospects of survival are at best an uncertainty.

Manslaughter, in other words, can be construed as the culmination of moral outrage in the novel. It bears a striking similarity with the murder of Ghaus Khan at the hands of Balraj in Premchand’s Premashram (1922) or with the death of the head messenger at the hands of Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Manslaughter virtually seems to be a momentary Hobson’s choice for Sukru Jani and his sons. It is neither malicious nor premeditated and yet the sense of resentment, acrimony and exasperation is quite palpable. However, the irony lies in the fact that it can only serve as a source of bewilderment for the Sub-inspector: ‘That afternoon, all three of them went just as they were, to the police station at Lachhimpur and said: “We have killed a man. Give us whatever punishment we deserve.” And the Sub-Inspector, startled, said: “Eh?”’59

Ibid., 373.

The Sub-inspector’s response is not very far removed from that of the District Commissioner in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart since both of them are at a loss to understand the motives behind such actions. Nevertheless, at a completely different register, the novel Paraja, written by a colonial administrator, can be construed as a sincere and dedicated effort on the part of Mohanty to delineate the cultural ethos of the Parajas. In that sense, he is very much like Achebe, trying to comprehend a cultural collapse in the wake of colonialism through the victim’s viewpoint. So, if it appears that Achebe has gone back to the District Commissioner’s paragraph and given it the shape of a novel that chronicles the values, beliefs and practices of the Igbo tribe, it seems that Mohanty has gone back to Bhagabati’s short story ‘Shikar’ and given it the shape of a novel that captures the needs, aspirations and priorities of the tribes in colonial India.

However, a text like Paraja easily transcends the limits of topicality, thereby demonstrating its abiding relevance and timeless appeal, even in the post-Nehruvian nation-state, where the problems confronting the tribal peasants are increasingly acute, virtually insurmountable and even more pronounced than ever before. One is invariably reminded here of the atrocious police firing that took place on 2 January 2006, at Kalinga Nagar in the Jajpur district of Orissa, resulting in the death of thirteen tribals.60

For more on this, see Ramesh C. Nayak and Joseph M. Kujur, State Aggression and Tribal Resistance: A Case of the Police Firing at Kalinga Nagar (Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 2007).

It was a blatant act of state-sponsored violence, geared towards evicting the tribals from a site where the Tatas wanted to build a steel factory in Orissa. Nevertheless, what is truly remarkable is that even this incident was not without its share of tribal resistance as a policeman was hacked to a brutal death by the adivasis. Similarly, Biswamoy Pati relates the particulars of an episode which in turn was narrated to him by an ex-freedom fighter, Nilakantha Gomango, of Kuchindi village. This incident transpired during a meeting that was being addressed by the district administrative and health authorities in an interior Khond village during the emergency. As soon as the socialist concepts of ‘Grow not one but one million trees’ and ‘Small family, happy family’ started getting discussed, an old man got up and enquired if the speakers really meant what they said. Pati explains this quite cogently: ‘He expressed this feeling because as he saw it the Khonds would perish if they did not restrict the growth of trees, which sometimes grew inside their huts.’61

Biswamoy Pati, ‘Koraput: Perceptions in a Changing Society’, Economic and Political Weekly 25, no. 18 (1990): 988.

Besides, another old man got up and exclaimed with a similar sense of surprise that if the family planning programme was really implemented, the Khonds would become extinct since out of the five or six children born to a Khond family, not more than one or two survived.62

Ibid., 988.

Pati further comments:

The two observations aptly sum up the utter irrelevance of the different plans and programmes that are supposed to uplift the tribals besides reflecting on some of their basic problems. One is reminded here, of the context portrayed by Gopinath Mohanty in his Paraja…which remains relevant in most ways even today.63

Ibid.

Moreover, Mohanty’s novel still resonates with the predicament of tribals in the post-colonial context of Orissa because most of modern-day, industrial development projects in the state themselves owe their origin to the colonial period. As Felix Padel states: ‘the[se] iron-steel plans are an actualisation of plans devised during colonial times. This is also true of the aluminium industry in Orissa, which is being imposed today against strong indigenous protest movements.’64

Felix Padel, ‘In Lieu of an Afterword; Mining Projects and Cultural Genocide’, 322. Padel further reveals: ‘A precise blueprint for the modern plan was outlined by a British geologist, Fox in the 1920s–30s, who sketched the series of dams, mines, refineries, smelters and railways linking the complex to the port at Vizag.’ Ibid. According to him: Officials such as W. W. Hunter measured the progress of British influence in the growth of ‘private property’. What is happening today is a culmination of this privatisation process, that repeats Europe’s history of the Enclosures and the Highland Clearances: an appropriation of land and resources that had been held in common by adivasis over centuries, and are now being taken away for industry or plantations in the name of ‘public interest’ and making higher profits. (ibid., 328) Even the process of land acquisition has its roots deeply entrenched in the colonial period: ‘Land is acquired using the notorious Land Acquisition Act dating back to 1894, with its concept of “eminent domain”, and the hierarchies of power in the law courts, police and administration all go back to British times.’ Ibid., 335. Also see C.S. Fox, Bauxite and Aluminous Laterite, second edition (London: Technical Press, 1932), 136 and Nick Robins, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (London: Pluto, 2006).

He also reflects: ‘Because tribal people live in and around India’s essential resources of forest, water, land, mountains and minerals, it is they who have most to lose from a process of globalisation geared to making the greatest and fastest profits out of these resources.’65

Padel, ‘In Lieu of an Afterword; Mining Projects and Cultural Genocide’, 316.

Not surprisingly then, over 68 per cent of the population in Koraput is listed below the poverty line, thereby making it one of the most disadvantaged and impoverished districts of India.66

Ibid., 327–28.

Seen in this light, Mohanty can be understood as an intellectual with an enduring moral commitment towards the downtrodden, marginalised and the underprivileged and is therefore able to communicate across the divide that exists between the elite and the subaltern. He consistently desists from making, what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls, ‘missionary claims’,67

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 310.

—that is, steers clear of ‘any assertion that the subaltern is endorsing any pre-conceived ideological position’.68

David Hardiman, ‘Knowledge of the Bhils and their Systems of Healing’, in Adivasis in Colonial India: Survival, Resistance and Negotiation, ed. Biswamoy Pati (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan), 299.

In that sense, his novel Paraja is a constant reminder of the disconcerting realities that remain concealed and obscured behind the veneer of growth, progress, development and civilisation so that every time the moral economy of the tribal peasants is breached and violated, resistance merely becomes a Hobson’s choice.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Prof. M. Asaduddin and Prof. Baran Farooqi for their comments on earlier versions of this article. I am also thankful to the editor and reviewers of History and Sociology of South Asia for their suggestions. A special thanks to Santosh Kumar Singh for engaging with successive versions. The responsibility for any error, however, remains entirely mine. This article is humbly dedicated to my late mother.