Title Pages Shifting Landscapes: The Making and Remaking of Village Commons in India Rita Brara Print publication date: 2006 Print ISBN-13: 9780195673012 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195673012.001.0001 Title Pages (p.i) Shifting Landscapes (p.iii) Shifting Landscapes (p.iv) YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in India Page 1 of 2 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Title Pages By Oxford University Press, New Delhi © Oxford University Press 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN-13: 978-0-19-567301-2 ISBN-10: 0-19-567301-8 Typeset in Agaramond 11/13 By Guru Typograph Technology, Dwarka, New Delhi 110 075 Printed in India at De Unique, New Delhi 110 018 Published by Manzar Khan, Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001 Access brought to you by: Page 2 of 2 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. List of Tables Shifting Landscapes: The Making and Remaking of Village Commons in India Rita Brara Print publication date: 2006 Print ISBN-13: 9780195673012 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195673012.001.0001 (p.vi) List of Tables 3.1 Decadal change in human population (1901–41) 63 3.2 Composition of statutory village councils (gram panchayats) 67 3.3 Population size of gram panchayat headquarters and associated villages 70 3.4 Which was the sarpanch's village? 71 3.5 Village-wise distribution of grazing lands 73 3.6 Composition of the informal committee of mukhias: Khedi Dookiya 79 3.7 Caste composition of members of the informal village committee: Khedi Dookiya 79 3.8 Caste and land ownership: Khedi Dookiya 80 3.9 Stratified ratio of ‘big men’ to number of households: Khedi Dookiya 82 3.10 Households that kept cows in Khedi Dookiya 83 3.11 Households with school-going children in Khedi Dookiya 84 3.12 Caste affiliation of heads (sarpanches) of statutory village councils 85 3.13 Declared and actual income from grazing lands: 1985/86 97 4.1 Village-wise distribution of pasture-land (johada) lands: Lachhmangarh tehsil 118 4.2 Extent of grazing land in former khalsa and jagir/muafi villages: Lachhmangarh tehsil 119 4.3. Re-classification of pasture-land (johadas): Lachhmangarh tehsil 120 4.4 Reduction of grazing lands: Lachhmangarh tehsil 121 (p.vii) 4.5 Encroachment reports: Lachhmangarh tehsil 125 4.6 Landholding size of ‘regularized’ trespassers: Banai 129 4.7 Landholding size of allottees: Banai 131 4.8 Comparing official reports and survey findings on charagah and siwai- chak lands: Khedi Dookiya 144 Page 1 of 2 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. List of Tables 4.9 Landholding size of officially reported trespassers on charagah lands: Khedi Dookiya 145 5.1 Selected villages: salient characteristics (1986) 152 5.2 Livestock composition: Khedi and Banai 156 5.3 Correspondence between land-holding and herd size 158 5.4 Distribution of households with irrigation facilities (1985) 159 5.5 Livestock numbers in irrigated-farm households (1985) 159 5.6 Age and sex ratios: cows and buffaloes 161 5.7 Average number of livestock in irrigated-farm households 163 5.8 Age and sex ratios: sheep and goats 167 5.9 The sale and purchase of dry fodder 174 6.1 Uses of principal plant types 200–1 6.2 Seasonal sources of green fodder: rainy season, winter, summer 203–4 6.3 Diminution of indigenous vegetation 213–14 6.4 Consumption pattern of green fodder by different livestock species 215–16 6.5 Tree types on grazing and private lands 216 Access brought to you by: Page 2 of 2 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Acknowledgements Shifting Landscapes: The Making and Remaking of Village Commons in India Rita Brara Print publication date: 2006 Print ISBN-13: 9780195673012 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195673012.001.0001 (p.viii) Acknowledgements The time and indulgence of many people have contributed to the making of this book. I particularly want to thank: – the villagers of Khedi and Banai and other residents of Lachhmangarh tehsil, Sanno, Ruga Ram, and Nemichand, who shared their knowledge, hopes, and fears; – P.R. Sharmaji who handled the manual tabulation competently; – Sharmaji, Vijay Kumar, Pradeep, Nand Kishore, Sanjay Mahrishi, Sanjay Rathore, Shobha, Karnika, Harry and Narinder whose bonhomie contributed to the quality of our interaction with villagers; – S.C. Sharma for drawing attention to the laws bearing on the commons and discussing his experiences as an administrator in the field; – the S.W.R.C. communication team at Tilonia for their efforts at broaching the issue of the commons through the medium of puppetry and group discussions; – O.P. Kulheri who contributed as a botanist and a villager from similar environs; – Madanlal Amin who took stock of the encroachments at Khedi and Banai; – Ram Deo, ex-patwari, who expeditiously produced copies of village and tehsil-level records in the absence of photo-copiers and P.K. Sharma for preparing the maps; – Piyush and Mala for locating relevant literature in libraries at Avikanagar and the Planning Commission; – Pushpa, Ravi, Nand Sanwalani, and Umesh for typing from untidy first drafts; Rafia for cross-checking the references and the ISID for formatting the final version; Page 1 of 2 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Acknowledgements (p.ix) – Professor Narula, Deepak, Kanchan, Kanta, Kavita, Pradeep, Prahlad, Purnendu, Rakesh, Rathore, and Sharada—the IDS biradiri— who through both direct comments on this study and by discussing aspects of their own work imperceptibly influenced its course; – N.S. Jodha for his pioneering studies of common property resources in Rajasthan and for his comments on this inquiry; – Ford Foundation for the opportunity of pursuing the earlier monograph tided Shifting Sands: A Study of Rights in Common Pastures; – Amita, Deepak, Rabindra, Radhika, Rajni, Roma, Tulsi, and Virginius for animated discussions, especially after the Friday seminars; – Professor A. Béteille, T.N. Madan, and Professor J.P.S. Uberoi for nurturing me in the discipline of sociology/social anthropology; – Veena Das who always inspires me by the standard she sets for her own work and for the warmth of her encouragement; – Ram Guha for first suggesting that a revised version of the monograph would be worth the effort; – a family that is indulgent toward what I define as work that never seems to end; especially, Amitabh who in his unofficial capacity as social scientist alternates between critic and supporter and Prashant who wonders about the meaning of sociology. My responsibility for the limitations, however, cannot be disclaimed. RITA BRARA MAY 2005 DELHI Access brought to you by: Page 2 of 2 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Dedication Shifting Landscapes: The Making and Remaking of Village Commons in India Rita Brara Print publication date: 2006 Print ISBN-13: 9780195673012 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195673012.001.0001 Dedication (p.ii) This one's for Amitabh Access brought to you by: Page 1 of 1 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Introduction Shifting Landscapes: The Making and Remaking of Village Commons in India Rita Brara Print publication date: 2006 Print ISBN-13: 9780195673012 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195673012.001.0001 Introduction Rita Brara DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195673012.003.0001 Abstract and Keywords This chapter attempts to understand the representations of the village and village commons as the ongoing social production of residents and outsiders. There are two types of ownership in relation to land in India: (i) ownership that arose from the conquest of territory; and (ii) ownership that developed from the first clearance of land. It reviews the emergence of agricultural organization in the village and investigates that which is subjugated or marginalized—namely, the discourse and practices in relation to the commons, taking ‘practice’ to be ‘a temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings’. Common pastoral resources and watering points enabled the inhabitants of rainfall-scarce regions in Rajasthan to engage a mix of animal-rearing and crop husbandry. The tracts of land identified as village common pastures have multiple uses that co-exist with grazing. These aspects underlie the understanding of village commons right through this book. Keywords: village, ownership, land, Rajasthan, agricultural organization, pastures, crop husbandry ‘Between property and common ownership I could construct a whole world.’ Proudhon (1897) This book invites the reader to journey into the realm of villagers who rely upon a combination of private farms and common grazing lands for a livelihood. The rural inhabitants with whom we shall travel are not equals in the private resources that they command. Those with more private lands depend less upon Page 1 of 21 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Introduction the pastoral commons for animal husbandry. Yet, it is by espousing a social representation of the commons as village common pastures in the present that villagers who own less private lands are afforded the means of their sustenance. Village commons are made and remade, defined and reconfigured from diverse positions and at multiple sites within the village and beyond. Social practices, constructions, and representations of village commons unfold in varied spaces that make for spatio-temporal flows which contour the construction of the social in the village. My intention here is to document, share, and reflect upon a fragment of the discourse about village commons by traversing the zig-zag course of the social as it moves from the space of the village to the province and beyond and back again engaging villagers, judges, administrators, and techno- scientists in the dryland terrain of the Lachhmangarh region in the state of Rajasthan. In putting together this story of village commons from relational and partial points of view in the post-Independence period, I focus both upon the social framing of village commons and its coexistence with divergent practices and constructions. Everywhere, the village as a form of human settlement comprising dwellings, fields, and the commons is a feature of the agrarian landscape. Yet, the commons are often eclipsed in writings about the village (p.2) as an object and an institution. If I look at how the village has been constructed as an object of study in the discipline of sociology, the village takes the form of the other in an industrial age. Here, the emphasis lies, as with Tonnies (1887/1955), in contrasting the gemeinschaft of the village and the gesellschaft of industrial organization. The study of the non-industrialized world has, by and large, been the province of social anthropologists. The village often appears in the writings of social anthropologists as the site of settled agriculture in contradistinction to the seasonal camps of nomads and hunter-gatherers. Conceiving the village in its formal difference from mobile modes of livelihood, however, leads to the overlooking of the combinations of settled agriculture with other modes of subsistence that utilize the village commons, for activities such as animal husbandry, gathering firewood, and snaring prey, for instance, besides enabling agriculture. The typologizing of villages by social anthropologists has yielded a few contrasts—such as nucleated or dispersed, regular and irregular—but there has been scarce enquiry into a patterning of villages that entails the co-presence of private lands and village commons. Geertz (1968) takes the view that while anthropologists often locate themselves in villages, the village per se is not the object of their interest. The question I ask myself is what if I turn this proposition around and look upon a village and village commons, as significant and socially constructed objects of practical and symbolic concern to residents. These are presently viewed as objects produced Page 2 of 21 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Introduction by the livelihood practices of inhabitants in interaction with statutory processes and practices. I accept the argument that villages were encompassed by a feudal state in the past. But my concern here is with the history of the encompassment of village commons by a modern state and its implications for villagers who recreate this object in the course of their individual and collective livelihood practices. As an ideological and material object, moreover, village commons can be viewed from different subject positions and are thus of immense sociological interest. By contrast with the representation of a village as the finished product of settled cultivation, the unfinished business of practice reveals how village commons afford its inhabitants modalities of life and livelihood outside agriculture. On the one hand, the village supplies the scaffolding of a life-order that enables villagers to distinguish (p.3) themselves from other villagers, nomads, shifting cultivators, and hunter-gatherers. On the other, the village provides a frame that enables its residents to draw upon pastoral commons within its territorial boundaries for gathering vegetative produce and the practice of animal husbandry, in short, for subsistence outside settled agriculture. The effects of a representation of the village that primarily attends to agriculture and the hierarchies and distribution of private arable land eclipses the claims of villagers on what they identify as their commons. This observation dims the struggles over its meanings and the practical pursuits which engage them as they eke out their livelihoods. Where agrarian livelihoods continue to be significant and non-industrialized, in the main, the contemporary constitution and reconstitution of villages and village commons invite reflection on the discourse and practices of villagers and states. In the course of this monograph, I explore the shifting landscape of village commons and focus on the discourses and practices of rural residents, civil administrators, judges, and natural scientists. Through-out, I recognize that village common pastures partake of the natural environment and allow for the apprehension of practices that are simultaneously ecological and social. Further, I must emphasize that I do not seek to reify or fetishize village commons such that the commons acquire a life ‘independently of human consciousness and wills’ (Bourdieu 1977). Rather, I try to understand representations of the village and village commons as the ongoing social production of residents and outsiders who impart the diverse meanings that are associated with these objects in their discourses and practices. I. What is property? The social construct of property has been the subject matter of controversy over the ages settled as it is for practical purposes at different historical junctures only to be resumed when social forces precipitate new circumstances. The range Page 3 of 21 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.