Joseph Tharamangalam

The paradox of age is the dogged persistence of chronic and endemic poverty in a world of unprecedented opulence. In 1973, when the World Bank, a linchpin of the Bretton Woods system and the quarterback of the world capitalist system that called its major plays, described poverty reduction and alleviation as the main goal of development and its own central mandate, two-fifths of the world's population was unable to meet their basic human needs and thus the target of the Bank's interventions. As Chossudovsky argued, poverty is a social function of economic growth, i.e. the inevitable product of the normal functioning of the capitalist system and the result of the way and how the benefits or fruits of economic growth are socially distributed. The use of standard measure of income poverty is problematic when used to make international comparisons and when income is calculated on the basis of the exchange rate of various currencies against a US dollar standard.

Anthropology, a founder of three prominent Sociology departments in Baroda, Delhi and Bengaluru, teacher and patron to more than a generation of sociologists and anthropologists, and the creator of such widely used concepts as Sankritization, Dominant Caste and Vote Banks. Indeed, Srinivas effected a paradigm change in Indian sociology in two respects. First, rejecting what he called the “book view” of society as promoted by indologists, orientalists and others (thus anticipating the later critique of orientalism, etc.) he pioneered and promoted a “field view” (developed especially during his fieldwork in South India, one that was to be obtained by intense fieldwork  using the method of  “participant observation” in local communities, especially in India’s “villages”.  The result was the rejection of an essentialized and static view of Indian society as a rigid and inflexible, chaturvarna system, governed by unchanging religious beliefs and laws, a view that had been adopted even by such western scholars as Henry Maine and Karl Marx.  Srinivas’s field view showed a dynamic social system (village and caste) that is fluid, resilient and adaptive to changing social forces; his concepts such as of Sankritization and Dominant caste were central to this new understanding. He also effected a paradigm change in another respect by aiming to transcend the dichotomy of two different yet similar social sciences, Sociology and Anthropology. The former was developed by western scholars to study “their” own society, and the latter to study “Other” societies (in effect what they saw as --the now colonized-- primitive, homogenous and undifferentiated societies devoid of history).  Twining the two into one,  Srinivas attempted to create  “a sociology we want for India”.  But in effect he adapted the approach and the ethnographic method of British Social Anthropology as the most suitable for the study of Indian society. He did not reject historical and macro-studies, but insisted that micro studies generated by intense fieldwork should be the starting point for the latter kind of inquiry if it was to avoid the pitfalls of the book view and the use of what he termed “conjectural history”.

This paper aims at some critical reflection on Srnvas’s sociological imagination and his contributions to the understanding of Indian society. It will assess his main contributions, but also the limitations imposed by both his methodology and the structural-functionalist perspective he adopted from British Social Anthropology. It will argue that while his view of the highly inegalitarian, multi-caste Indian village remained one from the top, his functionalist perspective constrained him to see the system as predominantly one of interdependence, reciprocity and harmony. The result was that both the perspectives of the subalterns and the violence underlying the system were examined inadequately. For example, despite the fact that this superb field worker did not fail to document instances of violence behind the system he failed to see a structure of violence or to theorize such a structure. Finally, the paper will suggest that even as we build on the legacy of Srinivas, we may need a new sociological imagination for the 21st century to capture the totality of the social world of the village and beyond, the rapidly changing relationship between caste and class (and power), and to understand a model of development that continues to increase the gap between the poor and the rich, the upper castes and the Dalits.  As a former student and one time colleague of Srinivas, this author has no hesitation in saying that our Guru par excellence would have been only too happy to see his legacy being revised and taken forward to engage with a rapidly changing India.

Amartya Sen, India's Nobel laureate and an architect of the UNDP's human development reports, has done more than most to highlight democratic India's worst sin: its failures in human development (HD) and poverty alleviation. While India's record here is poor in comparison with other countries of the world (134th out of 187 countries in the Human Development Index, 2011), and even worse than those of some of the world's poorest countries on measures such as the Global Hunger Index and the Multiple Poverty Index, Sen has seized on China as a country that deserves special comparison with India. He has drawn attention to the significantly higher HD gains achieved by China since 1949 when the two countries were at around the same level, and this despite some severe setbacks during the great famine and some reversals in the early post-reform period. In this paper I draw on Sen's numerous writings as well as on other sources to examine the record of the two countries and to raise some questions about the historical and social structural roots of the two records, as well as some of the political and policy dynamics behind them. I examine the social transformations that radically changed China's traditional social structure while highlighting India's failures in such areas as aborted land reforms and the country's soft approach in dealing with caste and other historically entrenched systems of inequality and exclusion. Comparing the transformative and redistributive capacities of the two states I attempt to explore the paradox of an authoritarian state's superior record in these respects. I then interrogate the nature of India's democracy examining some of the factors that make the Indian system relatively ineffective contrasting these with those that make the Chinese system more effective in delivering HD gains to their people.

Faced with an existential economic and political crisis in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba launched its own kinds of reforms aimed at putting its socialist system on a more sustainable basis. In Cuba these were, and have continued to be, accompanied by nationwide and relatively open discussions and debates, but guided by the country's policy makers and theoreticians, especially in the Communist Party (PCC). As the reforms undertook the urgent task of creating more space for forms of property outside the state (especially by transferring some state enterprises to non-state actors), cooperatives (coops) have been promoted as the "preferred instruments of the Cuban transition to 21 st century socialism ". The reformed and new coops, unlike the earlier ones, are to be self-managed and independent of state control, and extended beyond the traditional agricultural sector into the industrial and service sectors. This paper briefly examines the debates and the reforms with particular reference to the new coops. Drawing on the author's fieldwork in Cuba and on secondary material, it argues that these coops have a fair chance of success, but that there are uncertainties, especially as regards the project of "downsizing the state ". Even as the reforms begin to take hold, the Cuban state and the PCC are very cautious and slow in finalizing and implementing the long promised legal and institutional framework for the transition. While such caution is well warranted to preempt the kinds of errors in the Soviet Union and elsewhere (eg., transferring public property to "pseudo coops" controlled by mafias), it appears that the project of downsizing the state in some respects may be leading to "bringing the state back in" in other respects.

... Peasant movements in India, mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Sen, Sunil Kumar. PUBLISHER: KP Bagchi (Calcutta). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1982. PUB TYPE: Book. VOLUME/EDITION: PAGES (INTRO/BODY): xi, 275 p. ...

ABSTRACT This article examines the model of development and democracy in India under Narendra Modi’s leadership, since May 2014. Three ingredients of the model – a hard-line, pro-business economic policy promising rapid growth; authoritarian governance (purportedly for effective action); and a Hindu nationalist ideology – are assessed in theory and in practice. After considering both the development experience of Gujarat state under Modi (before 2014) and the Modi government’s record since assuming power in Delhi, this article argues that the Modi model poses serious threats to inclusive and sustainable growth, hard-won social programmes, human and environmental rights and India’s multi-religious and pluralist democracy, regardless of the growth it might deliver.

ABSTRACT This article examines the model of development and democracy in India under Narendra Modi’s leadership, since May 2014. Three ingredients of the model – a hard-line, pro-business economic policy promising rapid growth; authoritarian governance (purportedly for effective action); and a Hindu nationalist ideology – are assessed in theory and in practice. After considering both the development experience of Gujarat state under Modi (before 2014) and the Modi government’s record since assuming power in Delhi, this article argues that the Modi model poses serious threats to inclusive and sustainable growth, hard-won social programmes, human and environmental rights and India’s multi-religious and pluralist democracy, regardless of the growth it might deliver.

The loss of Kathleen Gough has created an irreparable void in anthropology and diminished humanity as a whole. A distinguished scholar, great humanist, true internationalist, valiant crusader for the rights of the oppressed and the dispossessed, visionary with abiding faith in the creative potential of humans to build a more humane and caring social order, she was also a very warmhearted friend to a large number of people across several continents. It was the critical - humanist and emancipatory motif underlying her scholarly praxis that made her creatively unconventional. In her early work on kinship, she was a structural - functionalist who, nevertheless, made extensive use of history and systematically investigated changes in relations of production. It is remarkable that she initially learnt much of her Marxism from the field, first in Kerala and then in Thanjavur and still later from activists in America. Her field work in Kerala and Thanjavur, both strongholds of the communist movement, convinced her that the communists held out the best hope for the poor and the oppressed. As she plunged into more rigorous and systematic studies of the Marxist literature she continued to test her theoretical understandings through an extensive dialogue with a variety of colleagues and, even more significantly, with grass - roots leaders and theoreticians in the field. To Kathleen Gough anthropology was always a praxis, a lived experience and an engagement with and commitment to the people she studied; a detached, value - free and disinterested anthropology held no attraction for her. Her "love affair" with the people of Vietnam is well known; it is less well known that she maintained life - long relationships and correspondence with many in the villages she studied in India as well (including one of her first cooks) and even more with a network of students and colleagues all over the world. I was one of those who had the privilege of enjoying her friendship and periodic correspondence. Kathleen Gough's Work on India During the past four decades Kathleen Gough made important contributions to Indian studies in the areas of kinship, political economy and peasant studies. These have appeared in four books (two of them co - edited with others) and over 40 papers published in a variety of journals, conventional and unconventional. Seventeen of these papers are now chapters inbooks. Leaving aside her ground - breaking work on Nayar kinship which is discussed by other writers in this volume, I suggest that her most significant contribution has been toward creating a Marxist anthropology of India. The masterly synthesis of anthropology and Marxism that she created was rooted in an implicit critique of the prevalent "neo - orientalist" metropolitan constructions of Indian and other non - Western societies -- a critique that was fully developed later in her seminal work on "Anthropology and Imperialism" (1968). She integrated into her work the best of anthropology both at the level of ethnography and at the level of theory. Her Marxism was itself a synthesis of the works of the great masters, modern political economists such as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, and the ideas of Marxists in India, China, Vietnam and other Third World countries. I wish to offer below a brief and preliminary discussion of Kathleen Gough's contribution in two related critical areas within a Marxist anthropology. These are: (1) class, caste and colonialism, and (2) peasant movements. Class, Caste and Colonialism Conventional anthropological and sociological discourse, whether evolutionary, structural - functionalist or indological, placed caste at the centre of Indian social structure. Ideology was given a certain primacy, and the different castes were seen as essentially complementary and non - antagonistic, maintaining the functional unity of the village community. Kathleen was one of the first anthropologists who attempted to understand Indian social structure in terms of class relations and class struggles that she came to see as endemic to Indian society. …

,A GROWING number of social scientists in India are joining the debate about Indian secularism.1 Mainstream social science has continued to defend secularism especially in the face of the threat posed by increasing communal politics and religious strife. But a ,small and apparently growing group of social scientists have called for a reexamination of Indian secularism, arguing that secularism may be the cause of, rather than the solution to, India's crisis. Critics such as Ashis Nandy and T N Madan reject secularism as radically alien to Indian culture and tradition and advocate aretum to genuine religion and the indigenous traditions of religious tolerance as the best means to preserve and maintain a pluralist and multirelgious Indian society. Their ranks have recently been joined by the distinguished Indian sociologist M N Srinivas, who has called for a renewal of faith in god as saviour in order to meet India's cultural crisis. The objective of this paperis to critically examine the arguments of these writers and to assess their validity as well as. their implications for the maintenance and defence of India's pluralist and multi-relgious society, culture and polity.

Page 1. Agrarian Class Conflict The Political Mobilization j of Agricultural Labourers Jr in Kuttanad, South India J* Joseph Tharamangalam Page 2. Agrarian Class Conflict The Political Mobilization j of Agricultural Labourers in Kuttanad, South India Joseph Tharamangalam ...

... Myth and Reality Joseph Tharamangalam* ... Dhana-gare's final argument against the middle peasant thesis is based on the alleged structural weaknesses of the Indian middle peasant class such as its regional specificity, weak class solidarity, internal heterogeneity, its tran-...

... Myth and Reality Joseph Tharamangalam* ... Dhana-gare's final argument against the middle peasant thesis is based on the alleged structural weaknesses of the Indian middle peasant class such as its regional specificity, weak class solidarity, internal heterogeneity, its tran-...

The current resurgence of Hindu fundamentalism in India is broadly situated in the search for a pan-Indian Hindu identity, and in the assertion of a pan-Indian "Hindutva" (Hindu-ness) that is claimed to be the true heritage of Indians. This discourse inevitably involves the demarcation of the "Hindu" from the "other" — minorities defined as less Indian, if not foreign. Historical grievances are constructed against them and used to justify attacks on them. These "others", however, have their own discourses, their own constructions of identities, and their own articulations of historical grievances; and these are not necessarily defensive, or reactions to the Hindu fundamentalist discourse. This paper discusses the nationalist discourse of Indian Christians during the anti-colonial struggles and in the post-colonial era; an era that contained not only a rejection of Western colonial domination, but also a critique of Western hegemony over Christ...