Neeladri Bhattacharya’s monograph, The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2018; New York, SUNY Press, 2019) has had an electrifying effect among South Asia’s historians, sociologists, and those more broadly interested in colonialism and historical method. The first hardback printing sold out in less than six months – an extremely rare occurrence in Indian monograph publishing. A paperback has just appeared, and to celebrate its arrival we are delighted to reproduce below a conversation between Neeladri and Joya Chatterji, Professor of South Asian History at Cambridge University and Fellow of Trinity College, and until recently Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge. (Her own next book, titled Partition’s Legacies, has just been published (Permanent Black and SUNY)
JC (introductory remarks):
I am not given to hyperbole, but having
read your book twice now, I cannot but conclude that it is a masterpiece. Every
sentence, every paragraph and every section conveys years of research of the
deepest, most sensitive, and most acute kind. Your work with sources is a
master class in – to use a tired phrase – “reading against the grain”. The
reader can also watch you grapple with wave upon wave of historiography –
apparently hostile and irreconcilable trends locked for years in shrill debate
– which you deftly knit together into a new coherence. No historian of
South Asia can ever use the word “agrarian” unreflexively again after reading
this book; and I am confident its impact will be felt beyond the remit of South
Asian history.
So, my questions here come from a place of deep admiration and collegiality.
The first question has to do with historiography. While you acknowledge
the impact of Marxisms and the post-colonial turn upon the shaping of this
book, it seems to me that shades of the so-called “Cambridge School” emerge
again and again. There is the large theme of the “sedenterisation” of
mobile peoples, which both Christopher Bayly and David Washbrook have written
about; there is also the image of the colonial state’s policies being “buckled,
fractured or broken” in the face of overt or covert resistance. A very early
work of the “School” described how the local knowledges that had accrued were
flattened out by policy-makers at higher levels – a theme you also pursue.
Admittedly you are adding rich and complex detail to these themes, and you add
layers by regarding the “accrual of knowledge” as a project imbricated in
power, but these strands nonetheless appear recurrently through the
book. Could you elaborate on whether, and to what extent, the “School” has
been an influence?
NB:
Thanks Joya for your appreciative
words and probing questions. There is something peculiarly interesting about a
Cambridge historian interrogating a JNU historian. When I was a student at JNU
in the 1970s, such a conversation would have been difficult to imagine.
Historians of Cambridge and JNU, at that time, represented two hostile camps,
each defining its identity in opposition to the other. So I am really happy
that we are having this dialogue.
You ask me about my relationship to the “Cambridge School”. I do not think
there is any longer a set of internally coherent ideas that now defines “the
Cambridge School”. The homogeneity that could be attributed to the school
in the 1970s slowly crumbled over the subsequent decades. Historians of
Cambridge now working on South Asia think in different ways, frame their
arguments diversely.
So in talking of the Cambridge School we can only refer to the early phase
inaugurated by its foundational text, Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics 1870 to 1940, edited by John Gallagher, Gordon Johnson, and Anil
Seal. I have always
thought that the historians associated with the Cambridge School of that time
raised many important questions but framed their arguments in problematic ways.
And framing does matter. Seemingly similar questions posed within different
frames have distinct meanings. The arguments that flow from such posing of
questions are not the same. They may in fact be radically opposed.
For instance, the notion of an all-powerful imperial state carrying through its
policies with irresistible ease has been widely critiqued, but within different
frames. Cambridge historians, as you say, spoke of imperial power being
“hobbled at every turn”, of imperial policies being “buckled continuously by
local conditions”, fractured and broken. There were others, beyond Cambridge,
like Robert Eric Frykenberg in the US, who similarly referred to imperial power
confronting processes of fragmentation and disintegration, with local power
holders in villages resisting centralisation, silently corroding the imperial
structure. In such formulations there is a shared notion of imperial power
being internally hollow, diminished from inside, and therefore ineffective in
implementing its will. It is almost as if the category imperial is empty. This
is an argument suggesting a weak state, feeble power. In it the heterogeneity
of voices within officialdom and inner tensions between officials are read as
signs of an absent authority, or crippled authority. My exploration of the
inner tensions and conflicts within colonial discourse is different. My
argument is, in fact, about a strong state. We should not assume that strong
power is necessarily monological, free of inner conflicts or self-doubt; or
that a multivocal discourse is feeble.
In developing my argument I was carrying on a conversation not so much with the
Cambridge School but with one influential strand in post-colonial studies on
power and discourse that developed in the 1980s and ’90s. Reacting against the
Foucauldian notion of an all-pervasive panoptican power – one that governs and
shapes all thought and action within society – many historians at that time
went on to explore the internal tensions and conflicts within imperial
discourse, its inner ambiguities and ambivalences. At one level, this move was
immensely productive, opening up new fields of research, encouraging
wide-ranging studies on colonial discourse and power. But at another level this
turn became tendentious, fetishising the idea of “ambivalence” and “ambiguity”.
My effort has been to build on what I have found productive within this
particular discursive turn, and to critique what I thought was
problematic.
The conceptual underpinning of my argument about discourses of colonial power
in the book is twofold. First, to quote a couple of sentences in the book, I
suggest that “Dissonance does not mean paralysing discord, ambiguities do not
freeze decision and conflicts of opinion do not block the possibility of confident
action.” So the point to explore is “how such differences are articulated,
negotiated, and transcended, and [how] the authority of imperium is expressed.”
Second, I see these confrontations of conflicting ideas, such negotiations of
difference, as productive. They provide the inner dynamic of discourse; they
explain mutations in thinking, modifications in policy, and changes in the way
power is exercised. To explore this dialogic is to discover the inner vitality
of power.
JC:
What about
the argument of sedentarisation?
NB:
As you know,
sedentarisation is not a theme that is new in Indian history. Neither Chris
Bayly, nor David Washbrook – whose works I greatly admire – nor I, are the
first to talk about it. The question is, how do we frame this argument and see
its spatial and temporal logic. Many historians of ancient Indian history –
framing their argument within Marxist teleologies – have traced the history of
the settling of nomads to the later Vedic period, when peasant agriculture
expanded in the river valleys and plains, iron technology was discovered,
agrarian surplus produced, caste order established, and states founded.
Subsequent history was read as an unfolding of this settled agrarian economy.
Within this transition narrative, as I argue in my book, history moves
inexorably forward towards settled peasant society. Pastoralists and forest
dwellers appear as vestiges of the past – as not worth the historian’s concern.
Only in recent decades do we find the focus turning to pastoralists and nomads.
My effort in the book has been to critique this linear teleology, to suggest
that the early expansion of settled peasant agriculture happened primarily
within the deltaic regions, in riverine belts, and on alluvial soils. Over the
vast rural landscape beyond this zone of settled agriculture we see the
pastoralists with their herds, “tribal” communities living on forest produce,
shifting agriculturists engaged in slash and burn, and communities engaged
simultaneously in a diverse range of livelihood forms. We can discover
the inner logic of these forms, and their intertwined lives, only when we stop
seeing them as vestiges of the past.
Chris Bayly wrote of the process of sedentarisation of nomads in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His thesis is important and I have
engaged with it elsewhere. But I have a difficulty with his framing narrative.
He counterposed his argument of the peasantisation of nomads to the nationalist
argument about proletarianisation of peasants under colonial rule. This framing
may be interestingly provocative but it is also problematic. We cannot replace
one universalist argument by another. Not all peasants were proletarianised
under colonialism, nor all nomads settled. I have argued elsewhere that Bayly
shares the premises of the argument he opposes. Both these opposed theses share
the common assumption that vulnerable social groups succumb to the irresistible
and all-powerful forces of commercialisation and agrarian expansion. Unable to
resist, peasants, according to one thesis, become paupers; according to the
other, nomads become peasants. What I have tried to explore – not so much in
this book but elsewhere – are the diverse ways in which pastoralists and
nomads negotiate their ways through changing times, creating spaces of
resistance and manoeuvre, even as they feel the pressures of the agrarian
conquest.
The purpose of my study in this book is not so much the objective processes of
sedentarisation as the creation of an agrarian imaginary, by which I mean the
constitution of a regime of categories within which settled peasant cultivation
is normalised and the agrarian comes to be seen as the universal rural. Such an
imagination, and the categories and terms that constitute it, delegitimate
alternative forms of livelihood and ways of being. It is in this sense, I
suggest, that the agrarian conquest is a deep conquest: it transforms the way
in which we look at the rural, it refigures the frames that structure our
vision of all that lies beyond the city. This wide-ranging conquest, this
radical delegitimation of plural ways of life, this normalisation of the
settled agrarian, has implications that the category “sedentarisation” cannot
capture.
JC:
You describe the
colonial state as an anxious and internally divided entity that was able, on
occasion, to work authoritatively and aggressively from above, at other
times working “by stealth”: apparently changing nothing, but, by “preserving”
the past, in fact changing everything. This is another brilliant insight
which uses historical anthropology to great effect. You mention the
consolidation by that state of patriarchy and caste in “villages” – yet,
changing trends in women’s work and status, and the fate of the lower castes,
are not analysed with the same deep attention you devote to other
subjects. I wonder why.
NB:
In this book I
don’t focus on rural work – whether of women or men, or of the various caste
groups. Here my focus is slightly different.
As for women, I explore how the great agrarian conquest impinges on their lives
in several distinct ways. I suggest that colonial classificatory practices
strengthened the power of male brotherhoods in the villages: tenurial
categorisation recognised only males as proprietors, the codification of custom
reaffirmed the power of male lineages and the rights of agnates, and the
constitution of village panchayats consolidated the juridical power of the male
proprietary body. But I also show the ways in which wives and daughters, widows
and lovers, did not inhabit a pre-scripted legal habitus whose lines they had
to follow unquestioningly. They questioned the new definition of rights, filed
suits, and fought cases. When we move from the practices of codification to the
activities of courtrooms, we see how judges had to continuously reinterpret
codes and rework custom. So, my focus in this book is on the changing
regime of categories and codes, customs and laws, which impacted the lives of
rural women. Their working lives have to be the subject of a different book.
The changes I track had profound implication for the “lower castes”. Tenurial
classification, premised on evolutionary theories of society, traced the
lineage of proprietary brotherhoods, displacing the rights of those seen as
non-proprietors. Rights to soil were believed to be defined by relationships of
blood, with descendants of the original founder constituting the coparcenary
community. Those who failed to assert such a mythical ancestry could not be
members of the brotherhood – their claims could not be recognised in the
record-of-rights. The Land Alienation Act of 1900 went further, debarring the
sale of land to non-agricultural castes. Categorised as non-agriculturist, denied
the right to land, excluded from the coparcenary community, the position of the
“lower castes” became even more precarious as common lands disappeared, in part
taken over by the colonial state, in part partitioned and appropriated by the
khewatdars of villages. In this sense, the story of the consolidation of the
village coparcenary communities that I track through several chapters is
intimately connected to the fate of the “lower castes”. I agree that their
everyday lives need to be explored in depth, but that again means writing a
different book.
JC:
The conquest of
the commons, the scrubs, and pastoral land is a central theme of the book, and
one of its great contributions is its analysis of how rights (and communities)
in these regions often agglomerated around the construction of wells, the
building of bunds, and the ownership of cattle. (Here, your shifting
of the gaze from the forest to the scrub is very welcome.) But again, I
wonder about the relations of power within communities you describe as
“nomadic” or “tribal” – particularly the role of women and girls – in
societies structured around the training of boys and men to loot and
steal. You mention the violence of nomadic groups on neighbouring
habitations but say little about their internal fractures and violence. I
wonder if I could push you a little on that issue?
NB:
Well yes, I do
not say much about the internal fractures within nomadic societies. That again
is to do with the way I define the object of my study in the ninth chapter,
which is the one you are referring to. As you know, the central focus of
my discussion there is not so much the nomads as the spaces they inhabited. I
am looking at grasslands and scrublands – the bãrs in particular – that
the British wanted to colonise. They saw these as wild and open spaces
belonging to nature, unexplored and unexploited, waiting to be cultivated. But
no project of colonisation could proceed without an encounter with the history
of the place and the people who inhabited it. For this reason I discuss
the nomads who inhabited the bãrs – the vast highlands of western Punjab
– and the politics of raids and counter-raids through which nomadic zones were
demarcated; and I then explore how pastoral landscapes were reterritorialised
in the second half of the nineteenth century. Colonial officials went around
surveying the bãrs, mapping the terrain, settling the nomads, regulating their
movements, enumerating them, subjecting them to a new fiscal regime, and
finally creating the canal colonies. I explore the history of diverse micro
encounters – between nomads and officials, villagers and surveyors – that
shaped the way colonisation could proceed.
I fully recognise the importance of exploring the internal structure of nomadic
societies, but, once again, I’d say that that is a slightly different project.
I have written earlier on pastoralists in a colonial world and hope to publish
more on nomadic pastoral societies, on the diversity of their social forms and
life experiences.
JC:
Turning away from the book, you are
celebrated as an inspirational, dedicated, and unselfish teacher. What animated
your drive to teach? How did your methods of pedagogy evolve over your forty
years at JNU? What insights could you impart to others striving to do their
very best for their students?
NB:
Yes teaching has been a passion, and I
have always felt that meaningful research has to go along with engaged
teaching. I love the dynamic communicative context of the classroom, I find it energising
and enormously stimulating.
JNU has been a very special institution. The admission policy we had devised –
unfortunately it is being dismantled now – enabled students from diverse
backgrounds – social, cultural, economic – to join the university. We had an
amazing mix of students from different classes, castes, genders, and regions.
They came with enormously varying linguistic and academic competencies. So
teaching was challenging.
To teach in JNU I had to learn quickly that it was not enough to be eloquent
and knowledgeable – it was important to get across to all the very diverse
kinds of students we had there. It was necessary for me to try making sure that
every level of student understood what I was saying. Also, there isn’t
much point if students find a lecture impressive but are unclear about the
argument and remain untouched by what is said. As a teacher, one needs to be
sensitive to what they cannot understand and why. This requires empathy: a
desire to know the problems of different students and recognise that everyone
learns in dissimilar ways; they have different proficiencies. When students
come armed with vastly different levels of knowledge, and with linguistic and
analytic competencies that differ widely, the critical challenge is to try
reaching them all – neither making some feel you are talking above them, nor
allowing the attention of others to flag. Over the years I felt it necessary to
articulate ideas in different ways, at different levels of simplicity and
complexity, building arguments in a form where the most complex idea becomes
comprehensible to all: so that what is difficult does not appear to be so. As an aside, I might add that in
writing this book I was conscious of the need to move at these different levels
and was grateful that my editor, an old friend, at times demanded that I
explain myself, at other times wanted me to tighten an argument that was
over-elaborate.
In conducting discussions – whether over tutorials or in seminars or with an
editor – every teacher and writer develops a preferred personal style. I can
only mention some of the pedagogic problems I have tried to grapple with. Some
of them are general pedagogic issues: How best to draw out the ideas a student
is attempting to formulate – ideas that are at times inchoate, waiting to be
developed; how to help a student think through his or her ideas, see the
possible problems within them, the criticisms they may be subject to – that is,
how to encourage students to critically engage with the arguments not only of
others but their own.
Given the social diversity of JNU’s students that I mentioned earlier, the
question for me was: how do I critique without demoralising, how do I discover
what is worth appreciating even in presentations that are initially not clearly
formulated; how do I nurture a dialogic context in which the self-confident and
the articulate do not silence those who are reticent and full of self-doubt.
JC:
Finally, I note your poignant dedication
of the book “to JNU, as it was”. You have had an uninterrupted view of JNU from
within, over forty years. It would be marvellous if you could write at some
length about JNU “as it was”, to produce one kind of fragmentary source for a
future generation of historians seeking to research the history of India’s
universities in the late twentieth century.
NB:
I do not think I can speak in any
detail about JNU within the space of this interview. But let me explain the
dedication.
My dedication is part celebration, part nostalgia. It is a celebration of what
JNU had come to embody, what it stood for. It is nostalgia for that
intellectually and politically vibrant space that is now under attack.
Part of this nostalgia is to do with my own personal connection with JNU. The
MA courses in JNU started in 1972, I joined as a student a year later, and
between 1976 and 2017 I was teaching there. I have seen an arid landscape – a
scrubland of the lower Aravallis – being transformed into one of the greenest
belts of New Delhi. I have seen the university structures come up: the school
buildings, the hostels, the dhabas, the shopping complexes, the stadium, the
auditoriums, the nurseries and gardens. As students we worked till late in the
library, moved to the dhabas for tea, spent long hours discussing the state of
the world or the inner logic of different theories, and walked up the rocks
romancing and socialising. We attended political meetings, heard great lectures,
organised study groups, and participated in intense discussions on diverse
issues. JNU was a fun place where learning was joyous, and where the academic
and the political fused seamlessly, where to be intellectual was not to be
anti-political. Learning to reflect was also to think about the world
politically. Knowledge had to open up a vision of the future, make us
aware of the world we inhabit. We learnt from our great teachers, but we also
learnt a lot outside the classrooms.
The institutional structures of JNU developed over the years through debates
and discussions, struggles and negotiations. These structures were to
fecilitate collective discussion between different departments and schools, and
between teachers, students, and administrators. Courses were discussed and
norms of functioning debated within these institutional structures. Within them
teachers and students had a voice in defining the shape of intellectual and
institutional life in the campus. The unique admissions policy that was
developed was the product of students’ struggles and prolonged discussions at
different levels.
It is the admissions policy, as I said, that defined one of the most remarkable
characteristics of JNU. Since 20 per cent weightage was given for economic and
regional backwardness, we could draw students from different social, regional,
and linguistic backgrounds, even before the statutory reservation policy came
into effect. JNU became a polyglot, multicultural, and socially diverse space.
For students, living within such a space was itself a learning experience. In
interacting with each other they learnt about cultural and social diversity,
and about the meaning of deprivation. For most teachers, teaching this diverse
social body was both exciting and challenging.
It takes long to build an institution and very little time to destroy one. Over
the last few years, democratic structures established through discussion and
struggle have been rapidly dismantled. Meetings of statutory bodies – Boards of
Studies and Academic Councils – are not regularly held, and when held
discussions are disallowed and minutes manipulated. Selection boards to appoint
teachers are now packed with people who are not part of approved panels of
experts. All the established norms and conventions are being violated,
teaching is being policed, political discussions disallowed, and students and
teachers who protest are being targeted. Spaces of social and intellectual
interaction – the iconic dhabas of JNU – are being closed down.
With all its problems, JNU was a happy and exciting place over the time I lived
and learned and taught there. It has been now transformed into a sort of war
zone. Teachers and students are engaged in an everyday battle to save the
university, staging demonstrations, holding protest meetings, filing court
cases. Even those who have never directly participated in politics in the past
now see the need to speak up, write, protest. I hope something of the past will
survive because of this amazing struggle that is now going on, and that
something positive will emerge from the current chaos. I am an optimist, but
for the moment I cannot envisage, leave alone write, a script entitled JNU “as
it will be”.
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