Ambedkartimes.com congratulates Prof. T.C. Ghai for his great efforts in translating entire poetry of Avtar Pash, one of the pioneer revolutionary Punjabi poets who in his very young age became a house-hold name not only in his home state but also in the entire India. In addition, he is equally popular among the wide Punjabi Diasporas. Prof. Ghai’s translation (Pash: A Poet of Impossible Dreams) was released at the Martyrdom day remembrance ceremony at Pash’s native village (Talwandi Salem). At the ceremony, Prof. Ghai dedicated his book to Bha Ji Gursharn, a noted revolutionary activist in the domain of theatre art in the region. Among other recipients of the book at the ceremony were Prof. K.K. Pathak, Dr. Ronki Ram, Prof Tarsem Sagar, Sh. Sant Sandhu and Dr. Amolak Singh. The book is published by Pash Memorial International Trust.Prof. T.C. Ghai (Born 1937) retired from DelhiUniversity as an Associate Professor of English in 2002. He has published two short novels and a Hindi translation of his short stories, Adamboo, originally written in English. He has translated a Punjabi poet, late Dr. Puran Singh Kanwar’s collection of poems, Rattan Di Rut (1984), into Hindi in 2000 and English in 2006.
While speaking at Martyrdom day remembrance ceremony at Pash’ village, Prof Ghai said that “in the premature violent death of Pash the Punjabi poetry has perhaps missed its own Pablo Neruda, or may be someone even greater”. Dr. Ronki Ram said that in contemporary times, the poetry of Pash has become rather more relevant and crucial in dealing with general myopia of free market economy led consumerism, and electronic media’s persistent campaign for festivities and glamour! Dr. Amolak reiterated on the need for pro-people policies which he lamented are nowhere to be seen in the present regime at the state and centre level. On the occasion different theater groups staged revolutionary plays including the famous play Aeh Lahoo Kis da Hai by Bha Ji Gursharn theater group.
In the winter months of 1996-97 we in AZERC (Arid Zone Environment Research Centre) planned a reconnaissance that crisscrossed the districts of Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Barmer and the area known as Shekhawati, in the Churu and Jhunjhunun districts where the discontinuous splinters of the 609 km Aravali range mark the eastern limits of the Thar. The region traversed is the eastern extension of the vast persio- arabian desert which joins the great Sahara on the west. It can also be seen as the eastern limit of the great chain of hot deserts stretching across the entire width of the Ancient World.
While planning the itineraries with the road map of Rajasthan and India spread out in front of us, eyes were scanning the western sections of the maps and fingers touching names of places located in regions, with annual average rainfall of less than 50 cms which is erratically distributed; temperatures ranging between 4548 degrees in summer and below freezing points in winters; low humidity and high wind velocity, even during the monsoon months, making the area moisture deficient. Prospects of a journey through the desert excited our imaginations about the illustrious gallery of travelers who had traversed portions of the region in different historical periods. From Huen Thsang, who came in the 7th century A.D. to James Tod, the father of modern travel in the desert, all of them have talked about the adventures, hardships of the passage through this stalking ground of droughts and famines, the marusthali or the region of death.
Our reconnaissance over a period of one and a half months consisted of sixteen itineraries crisscrossing the three most arid districts of Rajasthan. At the end of it we had traveled a little over 5000 km on highways, link roads, sandy trails and rail tracks. An abstract desert like feeling accompanied by long desolate distances and vast stretches of emptiness enveloped us in the course of our journey through the landscape (rather a dreamscape), even though the transport revolution of the last quarter century has completely altered the meaning of time and travel here.
Before the 20th century i.e. prior to the early phase of the recent transport revolution, the devouring landscape must have been like the ‘unharvested’ sea of Homer where men can pas through as a pilgrim and a sojourner and can halt there for a brief moment. We were particularly reminded of a folk saying about drought which must have been composed many years ago but is still popular. It can be roughly translated as:
“Feet in Pugal (Bikaner), head in Umarkot (Sind), limbs in Barmer, keeps wandering in Jodhpur and resides in Jaisalmer”.
This couplet describing the omnipresent expanse of drought in the Thar more closely represents the base reality of Thar and seems more apt as a metaphor. During these excursions through settlements, archaeological sites, grasslands and along the IGNP canal, the eye was in search of images which capture moments from the contemporary life and the state of the biosphere of the Thar. The journeys became a series of discussions a patchwork of sorts constituted by the micro regions within the Thar.
The sense of history which guided us one which was attentive to the longer time scales, the longee duree, that prodigious mass as F. Braudel described it, that bears within it an unconscious heritage. In other words we were interested in the history of the human and livestock communities of the Thar and the physical territory in which they were inscribed, the deciphering of the relations, multiple, intertwined and elusive, between man and biosphere in Thar. Many settlements and the places we visited were living testimonies of rich historical as well as pre historical tradition and sensibility. The conversations with people afforded ample opportunities for reflections on the longee duree of the Thar. In particular this meandering into the past was impelled by the need to situate the historical rationality of nomadism and pastoralism as a way of life and as a resource use strategy more firmly into our existence. This was considered necessary as a historical rationality is often found lacking in the numerous prophecies (like nomadic pastoralism will / must / should disappear) on the future of pastoralism and the pastoral communities in the Thar.
The Indian Thar is a region with a fabulously rich prehistory and history where a range of cultures have coexisted and interacted with one another. We get ample evidence on the transition from the Lower to the Upper Paleolithic phase of industry. This transition to a microlithic material culture was facilitated by a dramatic increase in bio mass and human population mainly due increased rainfall as becomes evident from lake sediments and buried soil in the sand dunes in western Rajasthan. Consequently, pastoralism and nomadism, the mainstay of the culture and the moral economy of contemporary western Rajasthan, originated in the Mesolithic age that began in 9000 B.C., with the site at Bagor providing the earliest evidence of domesticiation of animals around the 5000 B.C.
Further development of Neolithic, Chalcolithic and the urban Harrapan sites from 6000 to 2000 BC, was a simultaneous occurrence. Simultaneous developmental and stylistic differences among sites, incorporating Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Harrapan cultures make up a mosaic that is basic to South Asian prehistory. Archaeological reconstruction implies the existence of similar but distinct groups of people in a common region, possibly interacting yet maintaining different forms of economic adaptation (i.e. farmers, hunter gatherers and pastoralists as well as groups following a combinatory of subsistence strategies. After all is time not both continuous as well as discontinuous and history does not stand for progress and meaning all the time. We were asking such questions when the sun was setting on a mature pre Harappan site of Kalibangan, which is surrounded by irrigated fields and double cropped areas in the Ghaggar river bed, as it was even five thousand years ago. What was the nature and consequence of the interaction over time between food gathering, pastoral nomadic cultures and urban sites / complexes which controlled
large tracts of domesticated food producing areas by means of an evolved hierarchical social structure and ‘hydro-managerialism’? Given the apparent openness of the settlement grid fore the Harrapan Urban phase the noted archaeologist Gregory Posshel argues that “extensive pastoralism may have been the predominant subsistence practice of these times as well”. Why should it be that so many of the Early Harrapan settlements like Kalibangan were abandoned at that point of time when there seems to be evidence of the development of an internally differentiated, structurally specialized society in this region? What was the nature of this abandonment process? Was it a shift to nomadic pastoralism as the biotic and non biotic costs of the transition to a settled agricultural life proved too overbearing!
Musing on this question ever since we came across evidence which shows that during the mature well developed Harrapan phase, food gathering and nomadic pastoral communities from Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Punjab and other contiguous areas did indeed migrate en masse to urban centres, and / or to the double cropped areas surrounding them. This was a meaningful process whereby prehistory made a transition to the planeof History, i.e. civilization. However this process lasted for about four hundred years and, by 2000 B.C. all the major Harappan cities were abandoned and a process of dispersal set in. The twin phases of maturation and dispersal into the night of history of Harappan civilization has been admirably mapped on the Pakistan side of the Thar called Cholistan by M. Rafique Mughal. According to him, the hydrological deterioration (e.g. the drying of the Hakra river bed and the westward shift of the Indus system) forced most people to abandon the flood plains. In a more general sense it is argued that the desert had engulfed many settlements, as attested by the history of sand dune formation in the area. This is quite plausible if we recollect that sand dunes elsewhere have buried capital c
ities, its houses, streets and aqueducts.
After Harappan civilizations’s possible conflicts and interactions with nomadism, the next high point in the history of the Thar is represented by the orgin and consolidation of Rajput polity. The origin of Rajputs is inexorably bound with the upsurge in nomadic conquests and expansion from the 6th century A.D. The Chinese chronicler Huen Thsang was the first to make this observation when writing about the Gurjara Pratihara kingdom of western India in the 7th century A.D. British colonial annalists and geographers such as James Tod and A. Cunningham have elaborated on the same point. More detailed research by the eminent contemporary historians like Prof. R.S. Sharma, Prof. B.D. Chattopadhaya has sought to explain this phase of nomadic conquests in terms of ‘an imposition of clan aristocracies on old settled villages’.
However the nomadic origins of Rajputs became a thing of the past once they had come to terms with civilization. In the process it so tempered and transformed itself that the Rajputs soon became the ruling ideologues of supra local and supra regional State form which articulated its power interms of Brahmanical injunctions, mythical genealogies and initiatives taken in the construction of wells and reservoirs. This process of inversion from nomadism was made possible by the ideological hegemony of High Brahmanism, then the dominant civilization of the subcontinent. Such a pattern of consolidation was unlike what had happened in northern Sahara and east Africa where nomadic States sprang up from nowhere, adapted to a sedentary form of life only for a brief moment before vanishing again into darkness. The stabilization of the rajput polity was guaranteed, albeit paradoxically by an upsurge of the main aspects of nomadism i.e. long distance transhumance and the movement of long caravans along nomadic trails. A rejuvenation of these routes linked the Indian Thar to the silk route, Persia, Arabia, and beyond. Capital accumulation in Marwar (western Rajasthan) also starts from this period when we hear Arab geographers talk about the widespread circulation of Indo Sassanian silver coinage in this region in the 10th century A.D.
Supra regional Rajput states were based on feudalism with a method of quartering or garrisoning of
a conquering warrior aristocracy and its followers (= army) on the land. These fortifications weresecured by a fief system that was mostly distributed along clan lines. Certain nomadic aspects were in built in the distribution of fiefs suchas communal land / tribal ownership and the duo decimal pattern of distribution.
These numerous fortifications could not withstand what was possibly the greatest wave of nomadic expansion in World History, signaled by the advent of early Islam. For ‘Islam is the desert, it is the emptiness, the ascetic rigor, the inherent mysticism, the devotion to the implacable sun, unifying principles on which myths are founded, and the thousand consequences of this human vacuum. Founders of all the dynasties of the four empires of theOrient, the Ottomans (from Seliq), the Uzbeks (from the Mongols of the Goldern Horde), and the Mughals (from the Chagtai Horde) and the Saffavids had their initial following among the nomads. The hordes from Ghazni and the region of Ghor that devoured the Rajput supra regional states were driven by a fundamental nomadic impulse.
However we need not belabor and oversimplify this point. Islam cannot be equated with nomadism for Islam is a civilization. But the point is that its world was this vast waterless band with deserts and grasslands which contained the largest reservoir of nomadic peoples. The history of the core area of the Islamic world was patterned around the nomad city syndrome; and it is the particular virtue of Ibn Khaldun, the great historian of the 14th century to have built a theory of historical development on this basis. The nomadic base of early Islam needs to be separated from its urbanism, monotheistic ideology and a highly evolved political and ruling class infrastructure. Islamic civilization thereby offered a mechanism for co opting and settling the nomad. Marco Polo observed this in Anatolia where the Turkish nomads wee adapting themselves to a sedentary way of life. A similar story is repeated in Morocco and Tunisia. Similarly in the arid regions of western India, formal institutions of Islamic polity offered immense advantages to the Rajpout states, e’g. the indigenous land grant system- the patta- became a replica of the Mughal land grant system- the iqta and the jagir system.
The remarkably detailed census by Mohnot Nainsi, the 17th century chronicler of the Jodhpur state enables to infer that the pastoral economy was a flourishing autonomous sector of considerable importance size in the seventeenth century. The colonial state symbolizing the new civilization had to come to terms with this predominantly pastoral and nomadic Thar in the nineteenth century. The British involvement in the early decades of the nineteenth century explored the possibilities of using the Thar as a ‘corridor zone’ for connecting the ports of Gujarat and Bombay with the regions on and across the Indus. The still flourishing periodic fairs, markets in Kabul and Afghanistan were marked out as having lucrative prospects for selling English goods especially woolens. The colonial regime concentrated on the ways to monopolize and broad base this ‘passage through the desert’. The later part of the nineteenth century imposed its own imprint on this already existing network of the lines of communication. The laying of around 600 miles of railway network in this period and the resultant brisk traffic by rail worked to the marginalization of pedlars and traditional carriers (banjaras and baldias) whose populations declined all over Marwar in the later part of the nineteenth century. They either disappeared altogether or were confined to local networks of exchange. Livelihood strategies related to or dependent upon livestock products like the prolific production of woolens in the countryside crumbled under the growing weight of exports of raw wool and the process of deindustrialization.
The greater penetration of the market in late colonial times through newer modes of carriage ironically also provided the material context for the growing economic importance of sheep rearing in western Rajasthan. The British records all through the nineteenth century single out animal wealth and livestock products like wool and ghee (clarified butter) as the major resources of the arid regions of Rajaputana. Livestock fairs, main source of income of native states, still proliferated all over the almost all the major micro regions of Thar. The bigger regions like Marwar continued to supply animals to as far as United and Central Provinces. The British tried to extract a share in this importance source of income of the Rajput states by trying to levy its own export duties, tariffs or even at places jointly organizing new fairs like the Trevor fair in Jodhpur which was to compete with the Tilwara fair. This expansion of commerce was made possible by the colonial structures of dominance and control. These were deployed right through the nineteenth century, which was described by the British in disquieting terms, to coerce and regulate the mobility of several nomadic communities who were perpetually on the move.
By selectively narrating sections out of the prehistory and history of Thar the ideas is not to present any synoptic account of the mere occurrence of nomadism and pastoralism in the long history of human settlement in the Thar. Rather, the point we are raising pertains to a more complex order of observation, i.e. the multifarious interactions including conflicts between nomadism and civilization. This was among the most important contradictions of the Ancient world and though the significance of this interaction is not as great as it was in the past, yet the terms of the conflict are still opposed to one another in western Rajasthan as in the Sahara and the cold deserts of Central Asia. We have tried to show in the preceding paragraphs that the peak points in the history of Thar have had something to do with a heightened and dramatic rise of this conflict. In other words what we are suggesting is that the longee duree of the Thar is basically structured by as conflict between nomadism and civilization.
So too in contemporary western Rajasthan, the dialectic between pastoral nomadism and civilization is far from being resolved despite the latter’s overall hegemony and dominance. That semi nomadic pastoralism is still one of the most popular livelihoods practiced by the people of Thar was quite apparent to us during our travels. By the tuime we had traveled a few hundred kilometers the eyes were quite used to seeing flocks and sheep and goat grazing on grasslands, scrubby landscape, agricultural fields spread both sides of the roads. Novel attractions to the eye in the beginning they soon became permanent fixtures inscribed as if they were in the sandy landscape of the Thar.
Even with the coming of canals in the north and west Rajasthan a process of arable expansion and sedentary processes have brought large part of the vast sprawling grasslands and open spaces into agricultural fields. But even here, ‘contrary to what might have been expected, the expansion of agriculture and the broader assault on pastoral resources in the home ranges of sheep pastoralists has not led to the abandoning of sheep pastoralism but rather to a transformation and increasing emphasis on a migratory means of resource use: an intensification of the pastoral practice…” so writes Prof. Purnendu Kavoori in 1999.
Our deep seated prejudices as civilized human beings have not only made us greedy, aggressive and atomized creatures involved in the fundamental war of all against all. It has also made us tragically oblivious of our common links with the nomads, besides much else.
In his meditation on the Australian aborigines, Bruce Chatwin writes:
“…psychiatrists, politicians, tyrants are forever assuring us that wandering life is an aberrant form of behaviour; a neurosis, a form of unfulfilled sexual longing, a sickness, which in the interests of civilization must be suppressed.”
(With fond remembrance of ecstatic journeys with Uttam Singh, Mukesh Sharma, Guman Singh, Chatar Singh)
Technically you could pick up a lightweight plexiglass boat, with detachable battery driven motors, from somewhere northwest of Jaisalmer, say Ramgarh, and journey upstream the Nachna-Mohangarh feeder to meet the IGNP at zero head and then literally lift your boat into IGNP and travel upstream through other ‘heads’ till you reach ‘Masitalwali Head’; after that you would meet up with the RCP which would take you upstream all the way to the barrage, situated precisely at the confluence of Sutlej and Beas. From Harikke Barrage or Headworks you could optionally travel upstream along steeper gradients along Sutlej or Beas, both of which would anyway end up in gigantic dams, Pong or Bhakhra, in the middle Himalayas. If you still want to go upstream it is advised that you travel with a back pack, preferably along the Sutlej because that would lead you to the highest freshwater lake in the world, the Mansarovar. For such has become the pattern of water courses in modern India; such has been the scale and magnitude of river course re-direction in the modern including the colonial and post colonial times.
We went by jeep, keeping saner counsels in mind, and tracked the main course of the IGNP in the command area towards the naali and Stage I area, coinciding with significant transhumant trails, then through Bhakra minors and the 75 year old Gang canal with its degraded command and minors into the Eastern canal, Sirhind, and the RCP surrounded by lush greenery, before reaching the barrage that get its name from the Harikke patan in Punjab. Whether or not you marvel at the amazing architectural layout on pure deset areas running on hydraulic principles, the reasons for the construction are pretty straightforward. The Harikke Barrage was mainly conceived in the 1940s in the Rorkee School of Civil Engineering by the then Chief Engineer of the erstwhile Bikaner state, Kanwar Sain. He was also involved in the construction of the Gang Canal which flowed from the pre- Harikke time from the Husainiwala Barrage in Ferozpur, Punjab, constructed in the early 1920;’;s across the Sutlej. The main reason for the need for the construction of the Harikke Barrage, as he proffered to Nehru, was that since the Indo-Pak boundary / frontier line cut longitudinally cut through the river Sutlej, this provided scope for the Pakistan for cutting canals from their end of the river bank, thereby reducing the water level discharge and depriving the Gang Canal of much needed water. Apart from this pure geo political consideration he added a good deal of moral missionary zeal to ‘green the desert’ without taking into consideration any of its possible impacts and its ecological assessments. ‘Greening the desert’ was a moral missionary slogan, under the guise of which systematic and irreversible assaults on various ecosystems were carried out. Nehru, to be fair, was skeptical of the RCP project. But when World Bank pressure was brought to bear on his government, he yielded and then eventually joined the moral missionary bandwagon, bombastically talking about ‘temples of modern India’.
As India and Pakistan started developing new uses of waters of the Indus river basins tensions mounted between the two countries. The matter was discussed at various levels and it was in March, 1952 that Indian and Pakistan finally agreed to accept the good offices of the World Bank for resolution of the dispute on sharing the Indus waters. The World Bank while considering distribution took into account the various possibilities of uses of this water in India and Paksitan. While the work on the project was in progress, thanks to the good offices of the World Bank, the Indus Water Treaty was signed at Karachi on September 19, 1960, between India and Pakistan, after eight years of torturous negotiations. All through the deleibeartions , the rajasthan canakl was the kingpin of India’s case. Emphasizing the crucial importance of the rajasthan Canal in India’s economy….Nehru wrote to the president of the World bank in a letter dated July 11, 1960 that:
“Rajasthan canal is of vital importance to us and that our planning is based on it (italics mine). There is a yearning all over the area served by the rajasthan Canal for water and any delay in providing adequate supplies of water to this canal would create very difficult political social and economic problems for us…”
Viewing the canal as the kingpin of state planning was an ideological difference Nehru wanted to posit against the colonial / WB gaze. Nehru did not live long enough to do a reality check. In fact, more than 40 years after, even the World Bank has not bothered to carry out any reality check of its own either, their main interests having withered by the end of eighties when the writing got too big o the wall to be ignored.
We are not here to lament or indulge in counter sloganeering against big dams, barrages, etc. For the World Bank, what is clear is the incredible size of the increasing ‘wastelands’, measurable in terms of degraded commons, produced as a consequence of its own interventions; but what is astounding, for any branch of disinterested scholarship is the rapidity of degradation, in this case a real tragedy of the commons, through large scale privatization, the sheer speed of eco-catastrophies and the resulting chaos that has already occurred. This can only be seen once we are in the intricate canal network, the delivery points of the main canal, or the end use hardware points so to speak. Other than private transformation of public resources (mostly in concrete and cement), everything else, minors, sub minors the end use channels many lie in ruins. But besides the ruination that it has produced upon itself, through methodologies designed for yielding, escalating yet exact calculations in the beautiful language of mathematics, what is really tragic is the waste that the canal has wrought upon commons, pastures, rangelands, their bio diversity, traditional dry land farming practices combined with intricate use of rain water harvesting structures, and so on. Increasing desertification is not the nightmare; it is the increasing laying waste of nature that is.
Finally, let us come to the crux of the matter, the string that holds together all the pieces that is, water. Everything that we have been talking about everything that happens on the region stretching from river valleys of Punjab to the snowlines of Himalayas to the rainshadow area and the extreme arid western zone of Rajasthan is related to a specific spread and districution of ewater. It is more with regard to this resource rather than land that makes the difference between the nature of real capitalist intervention and those undertaken only in the previous historical epochs. Because water canniot be produced and like fossil fuel is a finite resource, it is at the point of its origins and crucial conduits- such as the Sutlej-beas confluence- that capital takes control.
In the 1990’s a period characterized by an exponential rise increase in the commodification of water and the emergence of water markets, we witness a dramatic shift in water distribution patterns globally. Nowhere was any other decade comparable to this in terms of prevailing water scarcities and pure thirst driving human beings like cattle. As capitalism further takes over managing the scarcities in terms of commodity values, what is referred to as ‘Conquest of Water’ (J Goubert) will remain a recurring them nightmare shaking human societies to their roots.
Our visit to Harikke made us acknowledge and understand the significance and importance of the singular position of water, the power vested in its control and ownership in the irrigated green revolution tracts of the ‘canal colonies’ of Punjab and the IGNP command areas of Rajasthan. It made us understand the growing importance of water, per se, in the shaping the strategies for interventions from above; its determining and defining nature vis-à-vis land and crops and it role in managing the economies of scarcity and waste. It is therefore in the interests of the producers and cultivators in these areas that alternative strategies that reduce dependence and overuse of this critical resource be devised. For that is the only way to keep the struggles being fought at meaningful levels as well as continue with the resistance through democratic formats. Otherwise, to pre-empt democratic debates and formats or not attempt to produce rival future scenarios would contribute to leave things the workings of the market (which reflects the needs of those living but not the future generations) a suicidal prospect which many already face.
By Dr. Debabrata Banerjee
This article first appeared in Bulletin, July 2001, Vol 1. Bulletin was a newsletter of Chak Samities of the IGNP Stage II supported by AZERC, URMUL Trust and Oxfam
6 PM in the evening as our jeep sped towards Tanot, 55 km west of ramgarh in Jaialmer, we were in the open country, in a vast pasture land. Lines of Cows, camels, sheep and goats returning from pastures could be noticed on the vast sprawling horizons.
In Rajasthan, the IndiraGandhiCanal has adversely affected the sewan grasslands, which have provided highly nutritious fodder for the cattle in the Thar for centuries. There is nothing but sand interspersed with rocks, reflecting sunlight in all its resplendence. Traveling north-west of Jaisalmer in Rajasthan suddenly one come across a hutment surrounded by a carpet of yellow-gray shrubs clothing the surface. In the heart of Thar desert, where eking out a livijg is as difficult as anywhere else in the world, have provided vital nutritious fodder for the cattle of the pastoral inhabitants of the area.
Not so long back, vast stretches of rolling sewan grasslands could be seen extending into the horizon. Not any more. Sewan is difficult to find in Bikaner district of Rajasthan. The IGNP, which has brought water and water intensive agriculture from Punjab to Rajasthan, is to be blamed largely. The main canal and its network of channels as you drive through Bikaner to Jaisalmer along the canal pass through some of the most important sewan pastures of the region, slicing them into individual agricultural holdings. Here land is being cleared for agriculture. Flood irrigation has greatly increased soil moisture, threatening the survival of the remaining sewan grasslands. The grass is not adaptive to high soil moisture regimes.
Sewan grasslands are spread in the low rainfall zone of Bikaner, Jaisalmer and Barmer districts. Popularly known as the golden grass or the king of the desert, sewan (Lasirius Sindicus) is remarkably adapted to the desert. Extremely finicky about timing and the amount of rainfall, sewan’s roots can however lie low and wait for years at stretch, despite recurring periods of drought. A couple of showers are all it takes for the grasss to maximize its production. The locals swear that the butter and milk fro cattle fed with this grass is a distinctly of a darker shade of yellow and highly enriched. Sewan is cut and stored by the villagers for use in times of scarcity that are not infrequent. The grass can be stored for about ten years without getting spoilt.
The villages of Ranau and Ghantiyali are actually small hamlets of cattle herders. They are situated on the extreme west of Rajasthan on the International border with Pakistan. The entire area is dry, sandy with very little water. A few hills and many sand dunes punctuate this flat scrubby landscape. The klands slope towards the Indus valley and rann of Kutch.
The topograpohy is undulating, as far as the eye can see, the landscape is covered with sand dunes. The ridges usually are parallel to the prevailing direction of the wind. The blown sand hills in the west are covered with small bushes and those in the east with tuffs of long grass. There is an endless strudggle for survival which is reflected in all aspects of life forms of the inhabitants whether man or animals.
In these villages, livestock rearing is the predominant occupation of the population. It is a way of life that the pastoralists have adopted with the environment. As grazing resources decline, the pastoralists find themselves pushed against the wall. Migrating along with their livestock, in the plains as well as in the hills, pastoral nomads are being forced to give up their traditional practices. Their groups have typically delineated routes and usufruct agreements with agricultural communities, many of which have endured over time. A progressive and rapid decline of the common lands is forcing them to join the rural and urban poor.
Pastoralists of Ramgarh region do have a permanent home, while their herds shift around in the pastureland managed by herdsmen. Symbiotic relationships between the settled non-pastoralist and the pastoralist nomadic population have changed considerably. Settled population no longer welcomes the pastoralist as they also believe (like the State, NGO, policy makers…) those pastoralists are associated with destructive activities pertaining to soil erosion.
Increasing cultivation is also contributing to the destruction of grasslands in this region, with the demand for cultivable land rising all the time. So far as the demands of people and animals compete for land resources, the grasslands would continue to be razed. If these grasslands are lost, along with them would go the immense bio diversity they sustain. Grasses have both biological and economic value, providing food and habitat to a great variety of organisms: insects, reptiles, amphibians. The bird, lesser Florican, is purely a grasslands species. The survival of animals such as wild buffalo, hardground barasingha, blackbuck, chinkara, wild ass are intimately linked to the health of the grasslands.
The last time India’s grasslands were surveyed was thirty years ago. I think if one were to go back to the areas that were surveyed earlier, the chances of finding grasslands are extremely remote. If something substantial is not done at the administrative level and at the local level or by the people themselves (and fast), there may never be need for another survey.
Degradation of grasslands is a countrywide phenomenon. All states possessing grasslands are witnessing the results of a total absence of management efforts, alienation of the people who have natural stakes in the conservation of grasslands. In the districts of Jaisalmner, Barmer and Bikaner are found some of the finest grasslands. These grasslands are depleting with time. Optimum cover is now confined to inaccessible areas beyond Ramgarh.
Government of Rajasthan and scientists of Agricultural Universities complain that over grazing does not give the grasslands a chance to recover. Consequently the perennial grasses are fast getting replaced by seasonal varsities that have a low nutritional value.
But I think it is just the livestock that is to be blamed. I feel that land grabbing (conversion of grazing land to other use) is more to be blamed than the overgrazing cattle. Besides it needs to be remembered that the dung and the urine from the livestock help in regenerating the grasslands. Goats, the government and most of the people believe, pose th greatest threat to grasslands. But the importance of goats lies in cash returns it gives to its owner but also in its role in raising sheep. As locals were saying, goats often act as foster mothers to lambs as well as assist the shepherd in grazing and herding sheep flocks. Also, in the case of any attack by wild animals, it is goats who bleat giving warning sounds of the danger. The rate of mortality among the sheep is much higher than goats in a scarcity period. It is a common saying that during scarcity the camel will eat everything but the Toomba (Caloptropis) but the goat eat that as well and leave only pebbles. This implies that the goats can survive on the scantiest of vegetation. Blaming the goat for the vast destruction of the grasslands may not be very realistic.
There is no grasslands policy. As things stand the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests is quibbling over whose baby grazing really is. Existing policies for pastoral areas fail to appreciate the practical or valuable implications of traditional resource use and regeneration practices. These practices should be researched objectively and improved upon to meet the contemporary requirements. Many of the core assumptions that provide the basis for grasslands use and appropriation in the region of Ramgarh should be challenged.
Manmohan Kumar is a PhD student from Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, SSS, JNU, Delhi
Photo Credits: Swasti Singh
This article was first publisehed in Drishitikon[1], Vol. 2, 2002
[1]Drishtikon was a newsletter on Livelihoods and Advocacy in Thar, AZERC URMUL Trust & Oxfam
Swasti Singh explains how embroidery is transforming the lives of Indian women
The article first appeared in Quilter’s Review, 32, Winter 2001, UK
In the arid regions of Gujarat and Rajasthan in western India there is a wide diversity of embroidery traditions. This is related to the ethnic differences of the population and the region’s strategic location at the cross roads of the great trade routes to the Arabian peninsula. Embroidery here is referred to as bharat, literally meaning ‘to fill’. It has traditionally enjoyed the status of hobby or pastime for women as a coveted and precious display in the dowry package. Groups such as Rabaris, Ahirs, Rajputs, Meghwals / Harijan, Mutwas have rich and diversified embroidery traditions, though many of these groups have a marginal status in the rigid caste based society. This article will explain how embroidery has developed from a leisure activity destined for the dowry into a positive livelihood option, with the help of various Government and Non-Government agencies (NGOs). In the process the self confidence of the women has improved and their status increased.
This process has to be set against the reality of life in these desert and semi-desert areas. The persistent droughts of the last three years and the earthquake in Bhuj in 2001 have been testing times, in particular. The desert and its fringes bear a fragile eco-system, which have lately suffered from the pressures of the growing population and exploitative government policies. Traditionally, some form of semi nomadic animal husbandry has been the most popular livelihood. Many communities are at various stages of adopting to a more settled lifestyle, but drought conditions make it impossible to rely on agriculture which depends on rainfall. The men are thus mostly unemployed. Marginal groups, including the women, often migrate seasonally away from their homes looking for labour. In these grim conditions, embroidery emerges as one of the most promising livelihood options, especially for the poor.
This has been helped by a growing market for handicrafts and ethnic items, nationally and internationally. The ‘hippie culture’ from the west has been particularly influential. In India itself, the emerging second generation middle class is looking to it roots and has initiated a wave of revival of all that is ‘traditional’.
In the 1970s, following the 1971 Indo-Pak war there was a mass exodus of people from Pakistan to Kutch and Barmer and Jaisalmer in western Rajasthan. This settlement of the Pak Osutees contributed to a dissemination of embroidery traditions among the local population. However, opportunists cashed in on the destitute situation of the refugees by buying their embroidered articles in distress sales and then selling them in cities for much higher profits. Market practices led to the formulation of this practice as ‘trade’. Production centres spread laterally to the nook and corners of the interiors of Thar to cater to this rising demand. The lack of any other promising source of income, the insecurity of settling into a new region, the pressures of raising a large family, the chronic unemployment of all the men led the women to succumb to the exploitative offers of the middlemen.
The middlemen were members of local communities who graduated to the status of big traders. The wages of women however remained the same year after year. They were merely casual wage labourers. They had to work all day and by lamplight in the night to earn the bare minimum for their households. Often they had to put up with payments in kind from the middlemen’s grocery shop in the village. Working conditions were so poor that very soon bharat became known as dukhi bharat, embroidery impregnated with sorrow. Though the women, and the men too, were aware of the exploitative nature of the trade, they never tried to demand more for the fear of loosing this only means of livelihood. A major portion of Kutch in Gujarat and Barmer, Jaisalmer and Bikaner in Rajasthan were active grass root centres of this chain of mass production.
Mass production meant that everything from raw materials to design motifs was decided for the craftswomen, reducing their status from a creator to a mere producer of labour intensive embroidery. This had a devastating effect on traditional embroidery skills. Often the quakity of raw materials used to be poor- untwisted silk floss and mirror instead of glass. Embroidery patterns were crudely printed. A selected few designs were used repeatedly and quality work was not appreciated. The women did mange to continue thewir own traditional embroidery, but at a mucxh lower scale and intensity.
The intervention of different NGOs like SEWA, URMUL, SURE, Kalarakasa aimed to improve their lives and status of women in these areas. Some also addressed the basic issues of health, education and others sought to initiate a process of social empowerment through bharat. The aim was to lift the status of craftswomen from casual wage labourers to dignified artisans. The middlemen had been interested in the ‘traditionally’ embroidered product. In contrast to that the NGOs focused on the lives of woen with traditional skills. Their income generation programmes set out to preserve and continue locals craft traditions and maximize the wages of women allowing them to be creators rather than being mere producers. Women were facilitated to form groups as independent entrepreneurs. Through this enhanced ability at income generation the owmen also were regarded with more dignity, they felt socially empowered.
The NGOs earned the trust of local people by aiming to improve their quality of life, rather than making money out of them. They seek to promote self sufficiency, beginning with intensive training to improve skills and help them understand the quality required by the market. Groups are taught to save money and they can access capital loans at minimal interest rates to initiate and mange their own production. The NGOs assist with design and marketing and encourage women to make their own design and finance decisions. They are invited to directly participate in lot of exhibitions in different cities in India and even abroad. This gives them a better idea of the market, and of consumer tastes and lifestyle.
The NGOs aim to achieve a balance between the market driven strategy of a business initiative and the free expression of a women embroiderer. They have largely succeeded in upgrading skills, improving quality and workmanship and keeping production closer to tradition. The women have the self confidence to realize their worth as contributors to their family incomes and as bearers of a rich embroidery tradition. Faith in their won tradition has grown deeper.
The NGOs plan to phase out in 8-10 years, by which time it is hoped that the women group is self sufficient. Some have achieved this. However, continued success depends up in keeping up with changing conditions. Some NGOs have been sluggish in adapting to fast changing market trends, leading to large quantities of dump stocks and the continued for outside funds for support. May be the system need a restructuring to cope with the new challenges of a liberalized market environment.
In an interview given to the Bulletin, Sheopat Singh has talked about the numerous struggles for settlements and resettlements in Stage I of the Command Area of IGNP fought mainly between 1969-1972. In the project implementation of Stage II, however, the World Bank seemed to have adopted several welfare measures in paper at least.
According to a Report [No 447-IN] dated 1974, it says :
"The entire RCP area is being settled by landless farmers from nearby areas. The area has been divided into 6.32 ha farm units [=1 Moraba]. Each settler purchases one farm unit from GOR at an average cost of Rs 15755/-, payable over 15 years without interest. Pre-1955 tenent farmers living in the project area recieve one farm unit free and have the option of purchasing one additional unit."
Actually this was a recipe for the growth of a full blown land market replicated from experiences from Stage I, where " more than half of original allotees have sold off their lands[mostly to rent-seeking officials and politicians], much of it now being sharecropped' [ Micheal Goldman, The Fate Of the Desert: A Study of the Indira Gandhi Canal, Feb.1992]
But for Stage II this recipe was topped with concern for landless farmers. So what did he really get? According to the experiences narrated to M.Goldman [p.11,Ibid]
“In 1978, we applied for allotments on the Govt. land set aside for local landless in Bikaner Distt. We didn`t get the land, so we captured it. At that time I was active in a number of local struggles, and we thought this was very important. We were all canal workers and local landless. I kept my own plot for 5-6 years; then I was jailed.
Even so, they knew we were not prepared to leave the land; many finally received official allotments; they
gave me uncommand land, so I fought for seven years for water (only command land gets canal water). My case in
the High Court is still going on; one of my colleagues threatened to immolate himself if he didn`t get water. We did
n`t want him to die, so we all took over the CAD office and gheraoed the executive engineer and forced him to call up the Chief Engineer to tell him things would get bad unless he gave the farmer water. The second day, the official notice came. We built kuccha watercourses ourselves, because the canal people refused to, though it`s their job. But we wanted land and we wanted water.
Many peoples’ land is high on sand dunes and cannot be irrigated; we received the worst possible land. Those who are part of official chak plan receive water; at the start the engineers came around demanding money to put peoples’ land into the official plan; we all refused to pay bribes, and none of us got water.”
This is the kind of testimony which puts in a nutshell most of the themes and issues that are not merely abstract and fleeting, reflecting just the concerns of the time but going beyond that, driven by a dominant historical logic. This is a qualitative document on struggles being waged in the IGNP area based on its specific agenda and the mandate that goes with it.
The Origins of ‘Chaks’
The emergence of chaks at a certain moment on the historical horizon has much to do with land settlement issues in the arid zones of western Rajasthan. It was a certain form of resolution by the colonial administration to the vexed issue of maximizing revenues from cultivable lands in the desert. In a region where only 10-15 % of the total land area was under the plough, the remaining vast stretches of land in the arid ecosystem, lying even beyond the confines of village commons, came to be regarded as `wastelands` under the purely colonial `gaze`. Yet under the same gaze, these wastelands were not seen for what they were, i.e., areas ofregional transhumance, even though pastoralism was seen to be a reality, because "these unoccupied wastes" fell under the "State`s landlord rights" which it was determined "to exercise" by "bringing under cultivation " [Bikaner Survey & Settlement Report,P.J.Fagan,1893]
There was a two pronged policy followed by the state; one to privilege the chaudhuries/jats as the mainstay of landowning and cultivating castes while downplaying or totally ignoring the claims of nomads/pastoralists on land per se and two, to increase the extent to cultivated land through deployment of limited ownership/lessee rights through summary settlements in the wastelands , now redefined as a chaks. Special inducements were provided through giving the girinda or the lessee of the chak a semblance of land rights in order to develop cultivation at the expense of pasture and grazing. Under the colonial `gaze`, the "pastoral tribes" made up of Joiyas, Bhatis, Lobana, Mohammadan Raths, etc., were viewed with deep suspicion, akin to ruthless marauders engaged in theft and looting.
Such has been the efficacy of this `gaze` that it has left a deep rooted prejudice vis-a-vis pastoralists/nomads in the official perception. So much so that even in post-colonial India, such attitudes have been further cultivated and rationalized through western anthropological `theories` such as the `tragedy of commons`
The RCP Deptt. in a important Report in 1984 states the bias thus :
This part of the desert is, therefore, a man-made desert caused by grazing leading to lack of vegetation and aridity. The extreme heat and coldness of the areas coupled with wind action over ages have caused desert through rock disintegration. Lack of water and vegetation due to over-grazing has turned this once fine land of abundance into desolate arid lands.
Way back in the 1890`s it was thought that the way to integrate pastoralism into an agrarian economy was possible through the chak patterns of settlement :
In order to provide for an increase in the cultivated area it was determined in exercise of State`s landlord right to the unoccupied waste to exclude from the boundaries of any village. Such waste area as was in excess of the requirements of that village for pasture and extension of cultivation. The areas so excluded which in many cases, owing to the scattered nature of cultivation, included greater or smaller number of occupied and cultivated fields were formed into blocks or chaks. Progressive assessments were fixed for these chaks, much in the same way as was done in the original villages, and it was determined to settle them with substantial cultivators from the adjacent districts of Hissar and Ferozepur and the cis-Sutlaj states.
[BSSR, P.J.Fagan, op. cit., 1893,p26]
The colonial state played to the hilt the `peasant instinct to colonize land` at the cost of, and even opposed to, other forms of land use such as prevailing in forests[ slash-`n-burn cultivation], rangelands, deserts, etc.; i.e., one pattern of land use has been made to prevail upon others as a matter of policy and subsequently, this has become the dominant form of land use along with its social relations. This has served an important additional purpose other than maximizing revenues, serving as a resource base for recruitment into the army.
The reasons of the state [raison d`etat] have not changed since the previous century and the display of subsequent moral-missionary zeal displayed during canal construction, after independence. They converged with World Bank policies and funding to extend the area under cultivation and zealously pursue the ideal of `the greening of the desert`. Chaks have continued to remain an efficient unit and index of such policies.
Why Collective Bargaining?
The resettlement policies of the Govt. backed by legislation and regulations [Colonization Act, Irrigation & Drainage Act, etc] for the IGNP areas induced a rapid growth of the land-market. This was also in the interest of the state, as the sole proprietor of land, established during the colonial period, to collect revenues from the `price of land`. Once a certain sum was fixed per unit [moraba] by the World Bank, the original allotees, the pre-1955 residents were virtually made to sell off their lands by corrupt means to state officials [from irrigation and colonization departments, CAD officials,etc.], thekedars , big landlords from the north and the land mafia [bhumafia]. Given the nature of the land most of the deals were speculative and coerced. Those for whom land was meant to be alloted turned out at the receiving end once they showed no inclination to part with it. Either they were subject to endless delays in their re-settlements [e.g. Pak Oustees] or they were cheated by allotment of `uncommand land`[ unirrigated land, mostly atop dunes] whose agricultural productivity was next to zero. As a result of all this, numerous conflicts erupted over the mode of payment in installments, the state`s right to collect kishts [installments] at whatever time and on the basis of a vaguely defined kishtbandi.
In fact, during the last quarter of 20th c., commodity-money economy around land markets operated in full swing with meager productive outlays and that too in the sphere of mechanized and chemical agriculture based on various forms of tenancies and share-cropping. This dynamic impacted very severely on traditional water harvesting and storage systems, gochars and orans [ traditional commons, pastures and forests], transhumant and migratory routes, khadins and other pre-industrial types of land use and farming and most importantly, communities based on specific activities[ e.g., pastoralists].Today their dwindling size, degraded status and neglected state tell a sad story.
The abandonment of traditional wisdom and knowledge without any alternative other than market driven chaos forces us to be in a position to kindle and generate a new consciousness for charting a future course. We also need to ask ourselves whether we are in a position to do so. What will be our measure of efficacy for the tasks set forth? We must take a hard look at ourselves as ask : what constitutes the we ?
The severe drought of 1999-2001 has inadvertently sharpened the focus onto the main problems in the region, as if it needed a severe crisis of this magnitude for things to come out in the open. What has primarily occurred in this period with unseen rapidity is what is known as the process of `de-peasantization` or, `proletarianization`, to put it in Marxist terms. Suddenly the ranks of wage-earners as well as demand for wage based employment has swelled beyond compare.
The main issue before us is the quantitative transformation and enlargement of rural wage employment. This sectoral expansion has introduced a new element, amounting to aqualitative transformation in social relations. There is tremendous pressure to bring the reserve `army of labour` or the huge unemployed sector into the ambit of wage relations. There is a considerable overlap now between the production relations in the rural areas and Industrial Relations. There is considerable scope therefore for the germination and expansion of the form and procedures of Collective Bargaining. IGNP areas are ideally situated to start a process in this direction. Having come to the fag end of internecine quarrelling, whether over water rights or the right demarcation of land boundaries, it is time now to leave them behind, as useless judicial baggage, and join hands in the form of Federation of Chak Samities. These Federations can be organized by a conglomeration of a number of Chak Samities which can further amalgamate at a higher level in the form of a Confederation. This form of organization will also strike deep roots of democracy and organize popular will which would be in a position to take on its adversaries at the local level. Each Federation can be the sole bargaining agency at the CAD level and they can seek mandates from the Panchayats at a more general level to take up a broader range of issues relating to common natural resources, gender issues, public health , education and so on. Such a mandate can be further used by the Confederation of Chak Samities at the highest level of negotiations, both with the World Bank and the Government of Rajasthan as well as the Government of India.
In the Bulletin we can only pose the question to start with. We are not here with ready made answers. Only a process of a deepening of understanding, organizing and struggles can lead us further along the path.
[1] Bulletin was a bi monthly newsletter of the Farmer Chak Samities of IGNP Stage II, supported by AZERC, URMUL Trust and OXFAM.
