The Measure of Time in the Appraisal of Social Reality [1 ed.] 9781443811385, 9781443805766

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The Measure of Time in the Appraisal of Social Reality

The Measure of Time in the Appraisal of Social Reality

By

Ramkrishna Mukherjee

The Measure of Time in the Appraisal of Social Reality, by Ramkrishna Mukherjee This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by Ramkrishna Mukherjee All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-0576-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0576-6

To PRABHATI

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface ........................................................................................................ ix CONTEMPORARY Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 West Bengal, India, in 2008: The Land Issue Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23 India in 2008: The Caste Issue Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 45 Women in World Society: The Gender Issue CONTEMPORANEOUS Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 57 The Analytic Significance of Time Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 73 The Synoptic Appreciation of Time Index of Names.......................................................................................... 85 Subject Index ............................................................................................. 87

PREFACE

Society in being and society becoming are two facets of society as entity that are necessary for our appraisal of social reality. These two facets always meet at a particular point in time. Society in being is considered contemporary (time at a particular moment), society becoming is considered as contemporaneous (time flowing towards a particular point). In both cases, the measure of time is indispensable for comprehending society: in the former case, from the past to the present; in the latter, from the past to the present and then to the foreseeable future. I illustrate the case for the indispensability of time in our reckoning of social reality in this volume with reference to three place situations in contemporary times: 1) the land issue in a local setting, West Bengal, which is a component state of the Indian republic; 2) the caste issue in a national context, the nation-state of India; and 3) the gender issue in the global context. I examine the contemporaneous perspective in measuring time with reference to a) the analytic significance of time and b) the synoptic appreciation of time. Among the divisions in Social Science it is History which is, most visibly, concerned with time; its entire knowledge corpus being organized around a temporal framework. I argue here that the measure of time is no less relevant for the other divisions within Social Science, if we are to comprehend social reality in all its richness. The organization of this volume reflects not only our engagement with time but also with space, seen here as space-in-time. It glides from the local (regional) to the national and then to the global. From a particular situation (the land issue) in a specific place (West Bengal) today, it moves on to the general state of affairs driving Indian political and social change, namely the caste question in all its fullness and quirky manifestations. The volume ends with a global case for gender, which can, and does sometimes, cut across caste and class lines. Ramkrishna Mukherjee, Kolkata, India, March 2009.

CHAPTER ONE WEST BENGAL, INDIA, IN 2008: THE LAND ISSUE Arboreal, Rural, Urban = Forestry-Agriculture-Industry In 2006 a slogan was raised: First Food Then Industry, just when the government of West Bengal was planning for the industrialization of the State on a massive scale. This cry was similar to the outcry of the forest dwellers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries: First Forest Then Civilization, at a time when intensive village settlements based on an agrarian economy were in the process of formation in the early days of the British East India Company’s rule in the subah (province) of Bengal. Maps of the large province (subah) of Bengal (at that time comprising the present states of West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in India and present Bangladesh) at the time of its acquisition by the East India Company show that large tracts of the districts of present West Bengal were arboreal regions. Villages in the map were scattered, towns were sparse, and cities were few and far between. Yet the ruralisation of West Bengal did take place, feeding emergent towns and growing cities, despite the cry: Save the Forest from the onslaught of Civilization. This was the chief demand of many of the local revolts that occurred in the subah of Bengal in the early part of the 19th century: such as those of the Santhals and Mundaris. But according to Government statistics, “forests” claimed only 9.1 per cent of the total surveyed area of Bengal in 1939-40 (Mukherjee 1957: 36 n 2). Cultivated lands became the norm. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Bande Mataram, which became the national anthem of pre-independent India, portrayed Bengal as dazzling in agricultural prosperity: Sujalang Sufalang, Shasyashyamalang. Until the 1940s, villages in Bengal, and indeed in the whole of India, subsisted overwhelmingly on agriculture, and agriculture was engrossed in producing one crop a year. Inputs to agricultural production were from the locally available primary sources : water from nearby rivers, canals, tanks

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and ponds; cow dung as fertilizer, black-soil from dried-up tanks and ponds, etc. to provide fertile soil input; implements like self- or locallymade wooden ploughs, harrows, levellers, huskers (dhenki), etc.; seeds— the stored grains from last year’s production; and so on. In sum, rural West Bengal lived at an elementary stage of agriculture as the mode of production, characterized by the primeval state of the productive forces; and thus, entirely dependent upon the employment of kinetic energy of human and animal labour, namely, that of the peasants tilling the land and that of the draught cattle employed for the task. Land, therefore, was the principal (and virtually the sole) means of production for agriculture – the backbone of the rural economy-culturepolity of West Bengal. Intrinsically, it was also the backbone of the whole of Bengal because an independent urban economy (i.e., by means of industry) was at a rudimentary state of development. Consequently, Land to Tillers (langal jar jami tar) – a slogan raised in 1930s along with the publication of the journal Langal became an allBengal issue, although it was centered in the rural areas. It led, at the first stage, to the Tebhaga Andolan (the demand for a one third share of the crop to the landholder= the jotdar and two-thirds to the sharecropper = the bargadar) and, later, to the revolutionary phase of the Naxalbari (Maoist) movement, on the one side, and Operation Barga of the left oriented Government of West Bengal, on the other. By the 1970s, the land-hunger of the West Bengal peasants was satisfied to a significant extent; and the Naxalbari movement thrives until today elsewhere in India under various denominations (such as, in Bihar, in present-day Jharkhand, in Chattisgarh, in Orissa and in Andhra Pradesh) by transforming itself into predatory bands or variants of the Left Radicals. Meanwhile from the 1950s and particularly since the 1970s, various inputs to agricultural production were increasingly available from the following: irrigation projects leading to abundant water supply to the peasants’ land by means of electricity-driven mechanical motor pumps, fertilizer production – both organic and chemical, high-yielding seeds for diverse kinds of crops, portable husking machines reaching individual households, etc. over and above the previously accessible natural and local sources. Energy in mechanical and electrical forms had therefore reached farm lands and farmer’s households, and was being harnessed for agricultural production beyond the manual labour of human and animals. As a result, on the one hand, land-holdings began to yield 2-3 crops a year in place of only one in most cases; on the other, the input of largescale irrigation works brought previously fallow land under cultivation. The aforementioned Government statistics had recorded that until 1940,

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9.4 per cent of land in rural Bengal was categorized fallow ; from the onset of the 21st century hardly 1 per cent of land in rural West Bengal remains fallow, and that also in small pieces strewn sparsely over the state in most cases. Pursuant to these incipient but discernible changes in the rural scenario, land in West Bengal has ceased to be the principal means of production. Presently it is rated third or even fourth in order of importance because of the attained changes in the mode of agricultural production. The trend now is cultivation by means of (a) an adequate supply of irrigated water, (b) an efficient drainage system, (c) the availability of suitable manure with respect to soil conditions, and (d) facilities for growing high-yielding 2-3 crops per year on the same piece of land by procuring appropriate seeds as well as technical advice from experts at affordable prices, and such other means and techniques of production. Contemporarily these are the peasants’ pressing social demands. The result is that the relative importance of the means of production is rated in accordance with the stage of transformation of conventional agriculture from the state of the only living-energy consuming traditional set-up. Inanimate forms of energy are in the course of being harnessed in or for agricultural production; albeit, the course of change is at an early stage. However, it has broken the shell of the rural-urban dichotomy since the second half of the 20th century (Mukherjee 1965: 15-102) and has clearly established a rural-urban continuum in present times. The course is not unique to West Bengal among world societies : it has been seen in Brittany (France) from the 1940s (Mukherjee 1949, 1950) ; in Scania in south Sweden as recorded in the studies of Professor Borje Hansen of Stockholm University ; in rural Japan after World War II as studied by Professor Tadashi Fukutake of Tokyo University ; and so on. In sum, the rural and urban folk of West Bengal are becoming less and less identifiable as distinctive entities –culturally and politically, just like the obliteration of the earlier distinction between gramya (the rural folk) and banya (the forest dwellers). However, there is a difference: the rural people could extend land by pushing back the forest to the periphery of the state and, thereby, through this action, agriculture reduced forestry into a marginal activity and lifestyle; whereas now, presently, agriculture needs industry to survive and prosper and, therefore, the rural pulls the urban toward it. Simultaneously, the urban can survive and prosper only by evermore industrialization – from small to heavy industry without limits so long as the ecological balance is maintained. Therefore industry too needs to move endlessly into rural areas to expand.

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But the dual course of the rural pulling the urban for industrialization of agriculture (and ancillary activities which are economic, cultural and political in nature) and the urban surviving and prospering by means of ever greater spatial industrialization, has an indispensable common ground: both courses require land – obviously agriculture is based on land no less obviously, industry is established on land. And, in West Bengal, land has become a scarce commodity either for agricultural or industrial growth; that is, for both rural and urban development. Therefore, the 2006 slogan of First Food then Industry is now passé: it will only nurture political, economic and cultural decadence and thereby lead to societal decay in West Bengal — both rural and urban. On the other hand, the populist slogan of 2007: Save Land for Agriculture would acquire a fruitful meaning only in consonance with the slogan of Save Land for Industry. This creates a seemingly enigmatic situation which could have been resolved by activating the slogan: Industry for Food and Prosperity. But the slogan is quixotic in appearance because of the contemporary media sponsored political and cultural resistance of the people “en masse” against it. The move seems spontaneous but may be largely well engineered; anyhow, enforcing the slogan of Industry for Food and Prosperity in present-day economy of West Bengal would not be an easy task. Even so, the situation is not unique to West Bengal with respect to the space-time dimension of world societies. For example: 1. During World War II food imports to Britain were heavily restricted while a substantial portion of the land was utilized for war industries. The Grow More Food campaign in Britain– initiated contemporaneously – was upheld after the war, leading to intensive farming along with sustaining the spurt in industrialization. This was clearly noticeable between the late 1940s and the early 1990s. Moreover, around 1946, scientists like J.B.S. Haldane exhorted the British government and people through the national press to exploit sea resources as food supplies. 2. When the concept of the European Union was mooted the French farmers – especially from Normandy – resented the move, fearing that the union would adversely affect their parochial interests. But eventually France joined the European Union, the functioning of which has not been detrimental to the prospect of her farmers. Instead, farming all over France has become more and more industrialized along with the growth of industry.

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Professor Borje Hansen (mentioned earlier) gave up his professorship and started poultry-farming in mid-Sweden from the early 1970s. When I visited Borje in the late 1970s I found that his farm involved only a portion of his residential estate where in a 3-storied hermetically-sealed air conditioned building trained girls operated the farm. A vet visited the farm regularly. On enquiry Hansen stated that his income from farming was higher than that from his earlier professorship and by virtue of this increased income he could be engaged virtually whole time with his sociological research. 4. In the 1980s it was found that while north Italy was bustling with industry, the south had remained largely rural and agricultural. The latter was the region reflected in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, in the famous novel Fontamara by Ignazio Silone, and also for depicting the Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958) by E.C. Banfield—a disciple of Max Weber. The region was so afflicted by poverty that pot bellied, malnourished children played in open drains; a region so steeped in obscurantism that, in its noteworthy town Cosenza, local women covered their faces for averting any spell which the “witch” might have cast when seeing a black-haired black-eyed Indian woman. Yet, this was also the region where the University of Calabria was located; the university alleged to have been the breeding ground of the Red Brigade, a group mostly operating in Italy’s industrialized north. Perhaps this is a good example of decadence in a social organism nurturing moribund agriculture and adventurist radicalism at the same time. 5. Converse to the situation in the southern region of Italy, Japan has become more and more prosperous with rapid industrial growth and industrialized farming – both augmented very significantly in Japanese life by large-scale industrial exploitation of the sea for food supplies and various marine products such as pearls. 6. Over time it was noticed that despite diverse instances over space as cited above, in 1972 the Club of Rome painted a gloomy picture for the future of humankind, predicated by the Limits to Growth which would be reached in 100 years unless industrial and population growth were stopped by means of “great moral resources [yielding] a totally new form of human society in equilibrium” (Meadows et al 1972). Less pessimistically than the Club of Rome, a Readers Digest forum posed Mankind at the Turning Point because a world crisis was developing due to

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“regional resource catastrophes [which] could spread world wide and paralyze future orderly developments [unless] organic growth coordinated global economic cooperation [with] five per cent investment aid in LDCs [and] a conservationist global ethic and harmony with nature” were programmed for averting the crisis (Messarovic and Pestel 1974). A more optimistic forecast for world society was recorded in The Bariloche Report which posed that while “catastrophe is an everyday reality in LDCs, scarcity is not due to physical limits – population growth is not the major factor [because] technology grows faster than consumption [and] if LDCs had technology production would outstrip population”; but this required “new patterns of self-reliant socialist development world wide [through] fundamental socio-political reforms and an end to the ideology of growth” (Herrera et. al 1976). Traversing the spectrum from doom to a rosy prospect for humankind, Leontief and his colleagues made the forecast that as “dramatic developments bring new land into production and double or treble yields,…..tremendous growth in consumption [is] not a problem of absolute scarcity [but of] how to exploit more costly resources”, so that technological growth is the call of the hour (Leontief et al 1977).

These vignettes of human society over space and time can be replicated for enforcing the point that industrialization of agriculture and industrial growth per se for the prosperity of society cannot but be the perspective of the future of humankind. Nonetheless, their implementation at a given point of place-time-people, such as in West Bengal at present, requires neither rabid economism nor internecine political confrontation, with culture backing this or that side. What is required, instead, is a symbiotic appreciation of culture, economy and polity of the people concerned. Culture, defined as the valorisation of capital in human achievement and perception, has two sequential aspects of traditional inheritance and acquirement in life- time—both of which operate by selective rejection and acquisition of their traits for holding society in being, that is, as a social product at a point in time. Correspondingly, economy – defined as the relation among human beings with respect to material goods and services – displays the kinetic energy of humans to move society over time for becoming, that is, as the vehicle of social process for satisfactorily meeting evermore the cardinal issues of humankind: survival of the species, security in the life-span of individuals, material prosperity for

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meeting the above two demands, as well as for leading a wholesome life, mental progress for ensuring the last three issues and, in pursuance thereof, meeting the role of evolution of life as its best manifestation so far. And, polity, as the embodiment of power in situ, holds the potential energy for facilitating, obstructing, or even turning the social process toward the status quo ante; namely, leading the contemporary social product to decadence. Viewed in this manner, the question that commands immediate attention for West Bengal is: why is an appreciable segment of rural folk not spontaneously amenable to what is good for them in the short and long perspectives for the future, in case the contextual proposal of the government is appropriate? The question cannot be dismissed by passing a judgement on the concerned mass as being not “rational”. Nor can the opposition claim, pari passu, to be the repository of “rationality”. Any such stance from either side would subscribe to the distinction drawn by V. Pareto (1963: 1915-18) between the elite in society as being “rational” and the masses as being governed by “instincts, sentiments”. That would confer an innate quality to the meaning “rationale” as embodying Rationality with the value for maximising the relation between the end and the means. This standpoint, clearly stated by L. Robbins (1932: 4-6), has been diligently followed – if not making explicit the ideology and action – by neoliberal economists. Political scientists – even though disowning their adherence to realpolitik and being presently concerned with the flow of power between the rulers and the ruled – tend to subsume the innate characteristic of rationality, such as, for Building States and Nations (e.g. Eisenstadt and Rokkan [ed.] 1973). And the general run of sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists – who are followers of Weberianism, if not entirely subscribing to the viewpoint of Max Weber – does the same by supporting, for example, the role of the Protestant Ethic for ensuring Capitalism in the West by upholding its Spirit (Weber 1930) and, contrarily, irrationality, stagnation and the overpowering role of caste in India. Yet, the last is imputed to be a creation of “Brahminical theodicy – plainly the construction of rational ethical thought” (Weber 1958 : 131) In sum, “neoliberalism” in any garb conceives rationality as a given constant and thus perseveres to mould reality by assuming the stance of unified social sciences from the second half of the 20th century. The venture has promoted programmes, one after another, but not very successfully: first, for lifting the “traditional” Third World toward the U.S.A., the pinnacle of “modernity”, as per W.W. Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1962); next, for

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“developing the undeveloped”—reformulated from “developing the underdeveloped” to “developing toward being developed”; and, finally, for “globalizing” world societies with its epicenter situated in the U.S.A. The successive programmes have stimulated anti systemic movements all over the world, which do not require any citation because they have become signposts of contemporary history. Nevertheless it is noteworthy that, insidiously, the unacknowledged failure of these programmes points toward the debacle of the nomothetic version of rationality for maximizing the relation between the end and the means. Correspondingly, it beckons the consideration of rationality as a variable in place of being a constant manifestation of the mental process, and as being applicable to the elite and the masses alike. From this standpoint rationality for the appraisal of social reality becomes a proposition for optimizing (not maximizing) the relation between the end and the means, on the axis of socialization of the concerned individual or people at a point in place-time coordinates. This conception of rationality being a variable cutting across the distinction of the elite and the masses involves the corollary of variability within the respective categories of the elite and the masses, that is, between their identifiable segments. So that, the probable congruence of the same rationality of a particular segment of the elite and of a specific segment of the masses – due to the immanent course of socialization in a given society – may attain a critical magnitude for generating a formidable social force by their amalgam. This, in the perspective of social development epitomizing the aforementioned cardinal valuations for humankind (viz. survival, security, material progress, and mental upliftment), may be categorized progressive, conservative, or regressive; nonetheless, it has to be reckoned with in the given context. A relatively simple context may be cited, as noticed by me in the early 1950s in the British Protectorate of Uganda and the British colony of Kenya, being rather intimately aware of the social situation in colonial Bengal during 1941 to 1946. The three-tier social structure of Uganda and Kenya – namely, of the British “masters” (bwana) at the top, the Asians (mainly the sub continental Indian businessman in the middle), and the Africans (Ugandans and Kenyans) at the bottom – was familiar to all those living in the Protectorate and the Colony; overtly in the latter, covertly in the former. I had to live surreptitiously as a guest of an Irish family residing on the Kenya Highlands in the capital Nairobi, an area which was reserved for the whites. I found that on the plains of Nairobi the browns (mainly the sub continental Indians) occupied a better residential area than the blacks (mainly the Kenyans), as I also found in the coastal town of

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Mombassa. Moreover, the “racial” segregation was so clearly manifest that the public urinals on the streets of Nairobi had three sub-blocs labelled accordingly for the use of Europeans, Asians, and the Africans. Apparently, the three communities had optimized respectively their rationality in the given social situation. The British, except for a microscopic minority disliking the state of affairs, enjoyed the political power and behaved like colonial masters; a motivation underscored by Tagore (1961) for the British in India as “chhoto” (narrow minded ) and at Home as “boro” (broad minded). The Indians, for benefits accruing from the colonial economy, had in bulk accepted their intermediacy between the British and the Africans and were making money from business enterprises even though as hotel-owners, for instance, they were not allowed to go into the premises beyond the office-rooms (with the residence reserved for Europeans). The Africans were employed as the serving staff. The Black Kenyans brewed their discontent against colonial rule except for the “native chiefs” and other African functionaries who enjoyed the colonial bounty. Even so, academically white-washing this dismal social situation and giving colonialism an ideological boost, the famous functionalistanthropologist B. Malinowski declared that “as a Pole born and bred, I may be allowed to say here that in my opinion the British colonial system is second to none in its capacity to learn from experience; its adaptability and tolerance, and above all, in its genuine interest in the welfare of the natives”. He also announced that pre-colonial history was to be regarded as “history dead and buried”; and he prescribed the practice of providing extra incentives to the loyal native chiefs for upholding colonial rule in East Africa (Malinowski 1945: 152ff). But, discarding this variant in the rendition of rationality, and disregarding the consequent praxis, Malinowski’s erstwhile student Jomo Kenyatta noted, in his monograph Facing Mount Kenya (1962), a Kikuya saying: “Before the missionaries [as emissaries of imperial powers] came we had the land, they had the Bible, and now we have the Bible and they have the land”. Kenyatta organized the “infamous” mau mau movement against the European settlers and later became the first President of the Republic of Kenya. The dominant rationality-differential of Black Kenyans in optimizing the relation between the end and the means thus overrode intra- mass distinctions and, while benefiting a little from the British and Indian intra-elite distinction, ushered in a better quality of life for Kenyans – the people of the soil. Uganda in the 1950s encountered an apparently tranquil situation with the British, Indians, and Africans subtly segregated, not only in the town

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of Kampala – the gateway to the Protectorate in those days – but also even in the remotest town of Gulu situated in Acholi Province at the border of the Congo and the Sudan. But this calm was deceptive. I resided for a while in Gulu with an English colleague in order to help him design and conduct a sample survey of the Acholi people. The Acholis had barely given up hunting over a generation and now were growing the main cashcrops which were cotton and some sweet peas. To the resident British administrators I was deemed non existent as compared with my English colleague, but to the Australian missionary posted in Gulu I was acknowledged enough to be told by him how arduous was his task to “civilize” natives who practiced polygyny and many other heathen customs. I was welcomed by the few Indians residing in the town as traders, and to the Acholis I was accepted but not with any enthusiasm. Nevertheless, I was accurately rated by the Acholis in their social milieu and they expressed this during the survey by explaining the driving reason behind their practice of polygyny. One of them who had become rather friendly with me said that as both my English colleague (bwana) and I had no wives, wives could be procured for us at the bride price of 1000 shillings for my colleague and for 500 shillings for me. When asked about the price-difference he clarified that my colleague as bwana belonged to the ruling class while I, as an Indian, belonged to that of intermediaries such as traders. When further asked what would be the bride price for an Acholi, he blandly stated it as 100 shillings ; and on inquiry as to why an Acholi should pay so much he explained that a bride was not only a cultural asset but also (and the more so) an economic acquisition as a source of human labour. Cotton production in a previously arboreal region provided land in plenty but, as the process of production depended on hoe-cultivation, the relation of production was such that the more human power (in one of the forms as wives) employed to wield the hoe, the more would be the economic returns. The symbiosis of culture, economy, and polity was thus simply expounded, denoting optimization of the relation between the end and the means in the given social situation. However, differential rationality was emerging under the tranquil surface of the Uganda Africans. A segment of the native elite – different from that of the contended chiefs and such other ancillaries of colonial rule – was in the process of growth (found also in Kenya); first within the welldeveloped ethnic community of Baganda, and also across the inter-ethnic distinctions of Banyoro, Banyankole, Batoro, etc., to the less and the least developed ethnic communities of Lango, Acholi, Karamajong, etc. A British Africanist had forecast: “If you teach them to read the Bible they

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may also read the Communist Manifesto, eventually”. Whether or not that proscribed pamphlet was read by the growing African elite in Uganda (as also in Kenya), a short-lived revolt against the Protectorate rule took place in 1949 – centering in Kampala but also spreading inside Uganda; which may or may not have been tacitly supported by tiny segments of the resident British and Indian intelligentsia (as it was in Kenya, too). At this crisis in the British Protectorate, Elspeth Huxley – a disciple of Malinowski – described the Acholi as simple folk but warned, at the same time, that they could become “the Sorcerer’s Apprentice” for destroying the well-knit social fabric. Therefore, she mentioned that “politics was banned” in the Youth Club at Gulu and that in the “last sitting” the topic for discussion was: “Where does the Rainbow come from?” (Huxley 1948). Yet, in real terms, the “rainbow” spread across inter-ethnic and inter-class distinctions of the Uganda Africans, and Uganda – a nomenclature chosen by the British rulers for a territory brought under their “protection” – became independent in due course (Mukherjee 1985). Such variability in the display of rationality by the elite and the masses respectively, — as rudimentarily exposed within the category of the elite and incipiently within that of the masses in British East Africa in the 1950s – was far less simple for Bengal even in the 1930-40 decades. It was evident, from the onset of the 1930s, that a new category of landlords was emerging in the rural areas which were different from the statutory landlords, viz., the zemindars. Established from 1793 under the laws of the Permanent Settlement of Land, the former landlords = the Zemindars, settled the rural folk as peasants (ryot) on their land in return for a share of crop-return which was lately measured in cash; in the early 1940s the share varied from 4 to 9 per cent in present-day Bangladesh and West Bengal (Mukherjee 1957: 48-49 n 1). Meanwhile, from the 1920s, land transfer was accelerating from the impoverished to the prosperous peasants, but the nouveau riche who had turned into landlords did not settle the dispossessed peasantry as “new” peasants, as usually happened in earlier times. For agriculture was no more a mere source for subsistence: the market for crops was growing at a rapid rate, turning land into a commodity like crops. Therefore, the new landlords became landholders = jotedars (not Zemindars) – who employed the impoverished peasantry as sharecroppers (bargadars) on the usual condition of a half-half share of the crop grown on the land. The rationale of the dispossessed peasantry prompted it to accept such terms because there was no other avenue for employment except going further down the “social ladder” – materially and mentally – and to

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become agricultural wage-earners (kisan) for uncertain employment, in place of retaining the façade of a ryot as well as a somewhat ensured living. This is how the peasantry in Bengal in the early 1940s optimized its role in the rural set-up (ibid. 48-58). The urban milieu of Bengal in those days, and especially among the elite, was characterized by the dominant trend to overlook the qualitative shift in the rural scenario. Culturally, economically, and politically, their refrain was to concentrate solely on the colonial exploitation aided by the Zemindars (e.g. Huque 1939). The academia rejected a contemporaneous study of the dynamics of the rural society as “politically motivated” despite the fact that The Land Revenue Commission of Bengal and the Indian Statistical Institute had recorded from previous documents and sample surveys that while 5 acres of land was at that time the minimum size of an economic holding under ideal conditions, the average size of cultivated acres per peasant was 3.1 in 1921 and 2.2 in 1931 ; and 74.6 per cent of rural households had holdings below 5 acres in 1938 – the figure rising to 88.5 per cent in 1945 (Mukherjee 1957: 47n1) So a band of urbanites and ruralites – aware of the gloomy prospect for Bengal in case the situation was allowed to drift sine die – intervened for rousing the awareness of the masses in respect of the future. Also, the rural population en masse was now encountering and envisaging its bleak future as consequent to the inexorable process of de-peasantisation: by turning the bargadars into kisan, the marginal peasants into bargadars, and a sizeable segment of subsistent peasants (ryot-stithiban) into marginal peasants, the juggernaut was rolling on. Therefore, for its survival, security, and any prospect of prosperity, the rationale of the rural mass was ripe for change. This was also a need for the complementary urban milieu, as evident from the 1943 famine in Bengal – the ravages of which were not confined to the rural region (vide, Mahalanobis et al 1946). But any dialectical intervention in the historical process was to be neither short in time nor a bed of roses. By means of sustained rural-urban interactions of the corresponding segments of the elite and the mass, attempts were afoot to demolish the myth of the jotedar as a mere variant of Zemindar. The latter had emerged through the subinfeudation system operating under the auspices of the Permanent Settlement of Land from 1793. It was declared, from another motivated perception, particularly in the context of north and east of undivided Bengal, that the overwhelming bulk of the jotedars was Hindu (like that of the Zemindars) while the bulk of the peasants were Muslims. Moreover, both these perceptions castigated the “dreaded” intervention as a sinister attempt of the “left extremists” to disturb the peace and destabilize society by disrupting social harmony.

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These “national” and “communal” moves bewildered the rural mass to an extent but more relevant was its apprehension of how much more bleak would be its future in case the proposed Tebhaga Andolan failed because of the jotedars’ machinations, those of the right-wingers and the manipulation of the communalists, as well as the state’s action to smash any revolt against the rural status quo. Ultimately, however, the wheel of history turned in favour of the Andolan (movement); the 1946 Dinajpur Congress of the Bangiya Pradeshik Krishak Sabha was attended by at least 100, 000 bargadars, marginal peasants, and an appreciable number of subsistent peasants. As noted, the Tebhaga Andolan – emerging from concerted action consequent to an amalgam of contextually rational appraisal of reality by a segment of the elite and the bulk of the masses – was the harbinger of the first Naxal movement as well as of Operation Barga (which redistributed land between 1978 to 1982) after a Left Front came to power in West Bengal; and presently, while the same Left Front is still in power in West Bengal, Bengal is at the crossroads of a leap forward or a step backward toward oblivion. But the social scenario is now different, calling for an appropriate assessment of the contemporarily relevant rationale to induce development and to resist regression. This difference over time operates within the global scene of ever mounting and graded inequalities among income-recipients in the process of wealth-accumulation, and in the modus operandi for the acquisition of material resources. As a result, the previously flourishing jotedars – more in a low key since the tebhaga andolan and the first phase of the Naxalbari movement – have found new recruits into their charmed circle from those peasant-farmers who have prospered at the expense of abject immiseration of the lower echelons of the peasantry. It is worthy of note that even the newly assigned pattadars and bargadars during Operation Barga were not exempt from it. By the beginning of the 21st century, land was alienated from 13 per cent of these pattadars and 14 per cent of bargadars (Chakraborti 2003: 53, 57). The new recruits are operating as “middlemen” between the big landowners and small-middle peasantry. Accordingly, a segment of the rural elite has crystallized itself to back up the erstwhile jotedars. Correspondingly, the peasants en masse are segmented even though they are successively going down the social ladder, despite real and/or propagandized measures for uplifting their condition; and, at any rate, for resisting the onslaught of unipolar globalization. The rural elite and the rural masses have thus undergone newer segmentation and newer alignments: a course of change which signifies a

14

Chapter One

qualitative transformation in conformity with the alterations in the ruralurban nexus and the social structural alignments of the elite and the masses within a more and more diffused distinction of the social space. As a result, the rural-urban distinction regarding both the elite and the masses is not only steadily but also being ruled out rapidly in the last 2-3 decades. The process is spontaneously noticeable in the context of culture; namely, by a similar rejection of the traditional culture-traits and a similar acquisition of the “modern” ones in a person’s life-time – just as it was seen between forest-dwellers and the villagers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Equally it is found that the ruralites are keeping more and more one foot on the rural soil and the other in urban settlements by way of livelihood activities related to trade in agricultural and other produce from rural to urban areas, and through the extension of urban amenities to rural areas, as also by way of various kinds of employment of the rural peoples in nearby rurban centres, towns and cities. The immanent social process – enforced by the economy and upheld by culture – has thus assumed the stance of social transformation, affecting the polity profoundly by forging alliances of the respective segments of the urban and rural elite. Differences among political parties in West Bengal – as also their bloc-formations on policy, strategy, or tactical grounds – are now revealed on the social surface regarding the apposite mode of transition in West Bengal society; principally, by means of resolving the contradictions on the way to industrialization while sustaining the agrarian economy or stressing the role of agriculture primarily while acknowledging the need for industrialization formally. Analogous to this course of social transformation, an alteration between forestry and agriculture took place in the southern fringe of West Bengal during the early 20th century. The District Gazetteers, studies sponsored by the Indian Statistical Institute and later undertaken by its Sociological Research Unit, etc., recorded the fact that the marginal peasants from the eastern part of Medinipur had ventured to move seasonally to their nearest portions of the mangrove forest known as the Sunderbans. They cleared areas under forest, and cultivated the fertile virgin land. There they set up families by procuring wives locally while retaining the traditional family in Medinipur. Over a generation or so, the family-strains separated with the respective residences of the localized offspring while, in due course, permanent villages were established in the previous forest lands as also rurban centers and towns. Furthermore, with the encroachment of the rural economy and culture on the previously arboreal regions, rural polity thrived here.

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The District Gazetteers and other government publications recorded similar happenings in all regions of West Bengal, with the transformation of culture, economy and polity of the arboreal to those of the rural. However, an earlier account is available for the northern fringe of West Bengal from the writings of Francis Buchanan-Hamilton who was commissioned by the East India Company in the first decades of the 19th century for exploring possibilities of growing cash crops in the territory occupied by the company. Buchanan- Hamilton traveled from the Madras Presidency to Nepal via the subah of Bengal and Assam, and recommended the cultivation of tea in the sub-Himalayan region (1819, 1833, and 1917). Tea plantations developed in the Dooars region by clearing forestry. Until the 1940s, while traveling to Darjeeling from Calcutta and stepping on to the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway carriages at Siliguri, one passed through denuded forestry, flourishing tea-plantations, and sparse village settlements. In the second half of the twentieth century the village settlements were found to have become denser, and at the beginning of the 21st century, towns and cities have become prominent in the region, along with the situated villages, while plantations have been rather done away with – following the vanished forestry. Some attention is paid in recent times to the cry of Save Forestry for Survival, along with the slogan of Save Land for Agriculture or Save Land for Industry and Agriculture. Notice is taken of restoring the ecological balance since the Kyoto Protocol; but the issue of enforcing a balance among the arboreal, rural, and urban sectors of West Bengal seems to have lacked a precise attention from a very vocal section of the milieu and the media. The calls for optimizing the share of land among forestry, agriculture, and industry is, in theory, accepted by all while, in practice, they sharply differ on how to meet this basic social need. In this context, the slogan First Food then Industry is passé as mentioned, because it would promote both decadence and the eventual decay of West Bengal. Also, at the contemporary state of society, the slogan Save Land for Agriculture seems tantamount to an infantile tantrum “to have the cake and eat it too”; yet this slogan deserves a critical appraisal in the light of the oft-mentioned “land consciousness” attributed to the peasants en masse. The peasants are equated to the contemporary ruralites. This mental construct should be attended to because it has been imputedly immortalized in Leo Tolstoy’s tragic story of a serf in Tsarist Russia who was asked to traverse a feudal lord’s land from sunrise to sunset, having been assured that the traversed area would be owned by him, and who fell dead after having covered a substantial area.

16

Chapter One

But changes in society over time and space, due to the immanent mastery of process on product, can never be bypassed. The tragedy so pithily portrayed by Leo Tolstoy would have been pre-contextual (or out of context) to the time of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in France when the peasantry was aptly characterized as a “sack of potatoes”; and it is post-contextual (and thus irrelevant) to the sharp structural alignments of the farmers in contemporary France or “free” Russia. So without replicating instances from other lands and of other people, some paramount questions may be posed in the context of present-day West Bengal: are the ruralites in the same stage contemporarily as they were at the time Lal Behari Dey wrote Peasant Life in Bengal (1892) or even when Dey’s “village”, viz. Kanchanpur, was revisited more than half a century later (Basu 1962)? Are not the peasants moulded by the real life situations they encounter? How much land does an average peasant own today, merely with reference to the production of children along the generational growth of a family, as compared to what his father did in his prime; how much land his father’s father owned in his life-time; and so on back in history? In reference to the above-mentioned questions and all issues important to the life of a peasant, the preamble to a scathing commentary of Rabindranath Tagore on the machinations of Zemindars (and not the later jotedars and contemporary “middlemen”) in his poem dui bigha jami (Two Bighas of Land), written a century earlier, is instructive: only two bighas (approximately, 0.75 acre) of land was left to the hapless “peasant” because “all other lands were alienated in [the guise of] debt-repayment” – obviously underscoring his inability to subsist on land. The point then is: land-consciousness may linger on as a wishful imagery but it is nothing but false consciousness ; the peasant cannot circumvent the real situation of successively less inheritance of owned land and the prospect of a moribund (if not deteriorating) economy and population growth unless society is rapidly industrialized. It follows that stoking fuel to the imagery of an idyllic but unreal consciousness – bereft of an impossibly practicable plan for ensuring a better future and to implement it – would be cruel and tantamount to a crime. And, that crime would be committed by the elitist-rendering of the Paratean definition of rationality under the motivated slogan of Save Land for Agriculture for the promotion of political mileage by a consortium of allegedly right and left radicals. Correspondingly, sponsoring the slogan Save Land for Industry and Agriculture would be an ill-begotten rendering of the Paratean definition of the elite’s rationality in case of economism, implemented by means of

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mighty political power and thereby forced on the masses, involving the urban elite and the rural elite. The miserable resultant of such a strategy has been witnessed in contemporary history; albeit, the locale was heavily contaminated by various virus promoting retrogressions in the name of freedom and prosperity. Also, the lesson is not lost of the consequences of forced economism and constipated politicisation – coupled with the recalcitrant role of capital – in the Howrah-Hugli belt of West Bengal as well as in the Dooars region of north Bengal. In the 1960s, the former was thriving on industrialization; the latter was thriving on industrial plantations. But, since the 1970s, deindustrialization and/or devitalization of respective regions have yielded unbearable loads of urban or rurban marginals on to the rurals – leading to a chronic crisis in the civil life in these two regions of West Bengal in particular. However, all over West Bengal as elsewhere, checks and balances are seen to be operated by the masses in terms of their rationality for comprehending reality. A few instances are noted below: 1.

In 1980, while conducting an UNESCO-sponsored quality of life study in West Bengal, in a sampled village in the Belpahari region of Medinipur, a somewhat well-to-do peasant candidly outlined his plans for his family of three sons, his wife, and one daughter, the last of who would leave the family after marriage. Of the three sons, the senior most would be groomed to look after the family occupation of agriculture, the second would be trained to liaise with the “unseen” wood-cutters for augmenting the family income, and the third would become a “sympathizer” of the locally mightiest political party for ensuring family security and prosperity.

2.

During the 1980s, while guiding a study of forestdwellers and visiting some villages in Medinipur, West Bengal, it was found that in several villages the relatively better-off families abided by the government rule of receiving the commission due when trees were felled officially but the heads of several families also encouraged stealthy woodcutting for sums substantial to them while being fully aware that the action was not “good”. On

Chapter One

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being asked the reason for this unlawful and “bad” activity, they brazenly stated that the family had to survive in lieu of any “legal” and better sources of livelihood available to them other than conventional agriculture in a region under forestry. 3.

In the mid-1980s, when advising on a study of empowerment of rural women in the southern region of the district of South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, the study was geared to the definition of empowerment as exogenous generation and/or endogenous arousal of the awareness of deprivation in view of a better quality of life and transformation of awareness to achievement-orientation. From the surveys for this study, stratified by the location of the villages far to near an urban center and finally near Kolkata, West Bengal, India, it was immediately visible in the entire region that the bulk of the women were obliged by economic compulsion to discard Manu’s dictum grihini griham uchate (woman as housewife equals home and hearth) and take to work in and around the dwelling village. They also worked by commuting to urban centers – Kolkata being the ultimate destination.

4.

Furthermore it was found that : (a) at the far end of aforementioned spectrum were located those women to whom daily transport facilities for commuting to work in urban locations (such as, by the railways) were not available and they wanted such facilities as well as education of their children (including girls) ; (b) non-manual jobs for their children (including girls) and therefore, their education at home were the wishes of those daily commuting to urban centers for doing manual work in houses ; and (c) the women engaged in nonmanual but low-grade jobs in urban areas wanted their children (including girls) to be so educated that they may ultimately obtain better non-manual jobs.

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5.

In 1990, in a village about ten kilometers away from the town of Bishnupur in Bankura District, West Bengal, a farmer – who grew 2-3 crops a year by using high-grade seeds and appropriate fertilizers, and irrigating his fields with water drawn by electricity-driven motor-pumps from the nearby canal (designated a river) – stated that he would educate his sons to at least the secondary school level and, if any or all of them did well, the son(s) would be sent to the Technical School in the town so that he (they) would have the choice to remain either as farmers or take to lucrative urban employment; while the daughters would be given in marriage after educating them up to the primary school level. But this farmer’s wife was firm that the daughters should be educated as much as the sons according to their abilities, and should be given the option to work, if they so desired.

6.

In another village away from the town of Bishnupur in a different direction, the peasants could not obtain the means of production available in and around the village noted under 5. There the bulk of the peasantry was impoverished, awaiting government-intervention for improving their agriculture and/or providing other means of livelihood.

Such instances in contemporary West Bengal – sporadic, no doubt – are neither exceptional nor universal. Instead, they indicate that rationality for optimizing the relation between the end and the means is not the monopoly of the elite; in point of fact, rationality within the elite is not a monolith, it varies from person to person and from group to group depending on the specific congruence of polity, economy and culture. Correspondingly, the rationality of the rural (and urban) masses would not present a monolithic display of polity, economy, and culture. Amidst these complementary and contradictory displays of rationality on the axis of the rural-urban continuum, a notably amalgamated sector has raised the slogan of Save Land for Industry and Agriculture, an analogous sector shouts the slogan of Save Land for Agriculture, and a possibly small minority sector

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Chapter One

clings to the image of agriculture in itself, by itself, and for itself while chanting the consequent slogan of First Food Then Industry. Thus “land” becomes the center of contention facing contemporary West Bengal: a formidable issue awaiting resolution, a rather vacuous symbol of “freedom”, or the shibboleth of a dwindling coterie of “The Last of the Mohicans”. Doubtless, history will resolve the quandary by means of the inexorable social process operating along with the cardinal valuations for humankind. But what will be the dialectic of human intervention into the contemporary state of West Bengal: continuation of these skirmishes within and between the elite and the masses – rural and urban – leading to the eventual demise of West Bengal or a realization of that unwelcome possibility and therefore a judicious intervention for ushering in a ‘prosperous’ West Bengal without a fringe of arboreal and rural marginals around the urban – created by a hastily programmed rapid industrialization?

References Cited Banfeld, E.C., 1958, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Glencoe (Ill.), The Free Press. Basu, T.P., 1962, Bengal Peasant From Time to Time. Calcutta, Statistical Publishing Society; Calcutta, Asia Publishing House. Buchanan-Hamilton, F.,1819, An Account of the Kingdom of Nepal and of the Territories Annexed to this Dominion by the House of Gorkha. Edinburgh, Archibold Constable & Co.; London, Longman, Hurst & Orm Brown. —. 1833, Geographical, Statistical and Historical Description of the Zilla of Dinajpur, in the Province or Subah of Bengal. Calcutta, Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal. —. 1917, An Account of Assam First Compiled in 1807-1814. Gauhati, (ed.) S.K. Bhuyan. Chakraborti, A.K., 2003, Beneficiaries of Land Reforms : The West Bengal Scenario. Kolkata, Spandan. Dey, L.B., 1892, Peasant Life in Bengal. London, Macmillan. Eisenstadt, S.N. and S.Rokkon (eds.), 1973, Building States and Nations (2 vols.) London, Sage Publication. Herrera, A., et al., 1976, Catastrophe or New Society? The Bariloche Report. Ottawa, IDRC. Huque, M.A., 1939, The Man Behind the Plough. Calcutta, The Book Company.

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Huxley, E., 1948, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: a Journey through East Africa. London, Chatto and Windus. Kenyatta, J., 1962, Facing Mount Kenya. New York, Random Press. Leontief, W., et al., 1977, The Future of the World Economy. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Mahalanobis, P.C., et al., 1946, “A Sample Survey of the After-Effects of the Bengal Famine of 1943”, Sankhya 7 (4). Malinowski, B.,1945, The Dynamics of Culture Change. U.S.A., Yale University. Meadows, D. et al., 1972, The Limits to Growth. New York, Universe Books. Messarovic, M. and E. Pestel, 1974, Mankind at the Turning Point. New York, Dutton/Readers Digest Press. Mukherjee, R., 1957, The Dynamics of a Rural Society. Berlin, AkademieVerlag. —. 1965, The Sociologist and Social Change in India Today. (Chapters 2 and 3). New Delhi, Prentice-Hall. —. 1985, Uganda : An Historical Accident ? Class, Nation, State Formation. Trenton, N.J., Africa World Press. Mukherjee, R. and F.K. Girling, 1949, “Economic Structure in Two Breton Villages”, Rural Sociology 14(4) : 295-305. —. 1950, “Breton Family and Economic Structure”, Rural Sociology 15(1): 49-62. Pareto, V., 1963, The Mind and Society : A Treatise on General Sociology. New York, Dover Publication. Robbins, L., 1932, The Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London, Macmillan. Rostow, W.W., 1962, The Stages of Economic Growth : A NonCommunist Manifesto.Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Tagore, R., 1961, “Chhoto o Baro” (Narrow and Broad) in: Kalantar (The Changing Era), Rabindra Rachanabali (Collected Works of Rabindranath), Vol.13, pp.248-264, Calcutta, West Bengal Government Publication. Weber, M., 1930, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York, Charles Scribner’s & Sons. —. 1958,The Religion of India. Glencoe (Ill.), The Free Press.

CHAPTER TWO INDIA IN 2008: THE CASTE ISSUE Ambedkar Outmanoeuvred: satyameba noh jayate (Truth does Not Triumph) Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who framed the Indian Constitution, is known to be someone who had devoted his life to the upliftment of the untouchables of India and to bring them to par with other citizens of India. This led eventually to the emergence and tangibility of the category of dalit, from which a few have fared very well, some reasonably well; but en masse the dalit exist as miserably deprived from the amenities of life, both material and mental. Meanwhile, when Ambedkar was representing a not-to–be ignored social force, a canard was circulated that he was a British spy; but the imputed source of this was later found to have been somewhat partisan. After Ambedkar’s death, I happened to ask the doyen of Indian anthropology cum sociology of what was good in Ambedkar and was told in reply that no one was better than he in knotting the necktie. This was an excellent British colonial upper class way of de personalizing someone. Nevertheless, I was aware of the vitriolic statement that Ambedkar had made (quoted in Mathai 1978: 25): The Hindus wanted the Vedas, and they sent for Vedavyasa who was not Caste Hindu. The Hindus wanted an epic, and they sent for Valmiki who was an Untouchable. The Hindus want a Constitution, and they sent for me.

I had also read the following from his concluding remarks in Constituent Assembly (CAD III): On the 26th January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man, one vote and one vote, one value. In social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our economic and social structure, continue to deny the principle of one man, one value. How long shall we

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Chapter Two continue to live this life of contradictions? How long should we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?

Furthermore, I had learned that, at the very end of his life, Ambedkar – who was acutely aware of the prevailing inequality in Indian society – pointed out (BAWS 1989; 402): [The] administration in India is completely in the hands of the Hindus, it is their monopoly. The result is that the untouchables are placed between the Hindu population and the Hindu-ridden administration, the one committing wrongs and the other protecting the wrong-doer, instead of helping the victim.

Later on, in August 1990, the social atmosphere was to change – at any rate, ameliorate – with the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations by V.P. Singh, a high-ranking Caste Hindu and the Prime Minister of India. At last, Ambedkar would have thus been posthumously vindicated. But, has the Mandal Commission turned out to be really a genuine body for the up liftment of the lower castes or is it a mirage? I wish to examine this in light of the commission’s identification of caste as the criterion for recognizing the backwardness of Indian society, and its consequent recommendations to remove this evil. The question has antecedence in viewing caste as a phenomenon peculiar to India – from ancient times to date. Firstly, therefore, I shall briefly recapitulate this antecedence as a prelude to the vindication of Ambedkar; for it has brewed two distinctive standpoints on appraising reality vis-à-vis the phenomenon of caste and class. Max Weber had declared in his treatise entitled The Religion of India (1958: 131) that the caste system was the outcome of “Brahmanical theodicy” of the invaders and conquerors of India who imposed it by evolving the doctrine of Karma and the theory of reincarnation of souls in order to build a culturally secured economic hierarchy of hereditary dimensions. Elaborating this viewpoint, that the Indian caste system “plainly is the construction of rational ethical thought and not the production of any economic condition” (ibid: 131), Weber had further noted in The Sociology of Religion (1965: 43): “Among Hindus, the Biblical emphasis echoed in Luther’s injunction, ‘Remain steadfast in your vocation’, was elevated into a cardinal religious obligation and was fortified by powerful religious sanctions”. Weber thus reacted to the views of Karl Marx who had stated in The German Ideology (1942: 30) : “When the crude form in which the division of labour appears with the Indians and Egyptians calls forth the caste system in their state and religion, the historian believes that the caste

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system is the power which has produced the crude social form [and] when the French and the English at least hold by the political illusion, which is moderately close to reality, the Germans move in the realm of ‘pure spirit’, and make religious illusion the driving force of history”. Elaborating his viewpoint in Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie (Rohentwurf) 1857-1858, which was published posthumously in 1953 and later translated into English (1964 : 101-102), Marx wrote : “[Where] the particular kind of labour – i.e. its craft mastery and consequent property in the instrument of labour – equals property in the conditions of production, …. it may lead to … development in the form of a caste system”. Marx had also stated in 1853 in his well known article entitled “British Rule in India” (New York Daily Tribune. 25 June ) that the Hindus have left “to the central government the care of the great public works, the prime condition of his agriculture and commerce”, and living in decentralized autonomous villages “by the domestic union of agriculture and manufacturing pursuits” had brought out caste distinctions which “transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny”. The Marx-Weber controversy is clearly seen to be based on priorityrating of matter or mind, as expressed by (a) a material occupational hierarchy ossified by spiritual tenets or (b) spiritual tenets yielding an immutable occupational hierarchy. Looking at the issue from the perspective of the systemic relations of culture, economy, and polity to hold society in being at a point in time and to change society for becoming over successive points in time, Marx postulated the Indian economy to have had instituted the caste system in alliance with the polity but, under the same alliance, culture – in so far as its spiritual aspect was concerned — had ossified the role of the economy; whereas Weber countered Marx by posing the caveat that it was the spirit of culture – supported by the polity – which had produced the immutable occupational hierarchy in the caste system. However, reputable indologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians contemporary to Marx or Weber as well as later researchers may not have been aware of their viewpoints or were not concerned with the Marx-Weber controversy; nevertheless, their researches tended to support the contention of Marx rather than that of Weber: such as, of Christian Lassen in 1882, Julius Jolly in 1896, Herman Oldenberg in 1897, S.V. Ketkar in 1909 and 1911, Emile Senart in 1927, K.P. Chattopadhyay in 1935, P.V. Kane in 1941, B.N. Dutt in 1944, A.S. Altekar in 1949, and D.D. Kosambi in 1956.

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All these authors record that the spiritual edict operated through the varna-wise stratification of society, which as a form of social ranking was not unique to India. Instead, the caste system operated through the jatistructure of Indian society, which presented a proliferating (and not immutable) occupational structure of society within and across the four varnas. It also spread beyond to the panchama which was a vague nomenclature of the fifth varna comprising the antyaja, mlechcha, yabana, etc. (vide, Mukherjee, P. 2002) Of course, the spiritual edict percolated into the ever expanding and stretching jati-structure, as denoted by the culture traits and complexes of practicing untouchability, prescription and prohibition of inter dining and intermarriages, etc.; nevertheless, jati-mobility contravened the Lutherian injunction: “Remain steadfast in your vocation”. From fleeting references in the Rgveda to more unambiguous references in the epics Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the puranas like the Brahmabaibartapurana and the Brihaddharmapurana, tales like kathasaritsagara, etc., pointers are detected of jati-wise mobility within and across the varna-structure of society. Later, the products of this social process are found codified in Kautilya’s Arthasastra and in the widely accepted dictum of Manu entitled the Manusmriti. The leitmotif of this course of immanent social change is seen to be four-fold: 1.

2.

3.

The division of labour expressed by occupational specialization of jatis ; for example, in Bengal, the jati of halia kaibartta – cultivators of land as clearly distinguished from the jati of jalia kaibartta – fishermen. The need of society for ever new occupations and, therefore, the emergence of distinctive jatis; such as, for diverse kinds of horticulture (e.g., betel-leaf farming or mulberry-growing) and agriculture, for varieties of handicraft production (e.g. making earthenware or bell metal utensils and carpentry), for the peddling trade and for wholesale trade in bulk merchandize by the whole sale merchant or saudagar. The further proliferation of jatis because of better skills in pursuing the same occupation; this led to a further splitting off of the jati concerned, for example, in the domain of weaving in Bengal silk/cotton weaving was undertaken by the jati of tanti while the jati of kapali engaged in jute-fibre weaving.

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4.

The economic distress of some jatis however high their varna-affiliation may be: as for instance, the depressed category of agradani brahmanas (poor brahmans) vis-à-vis other categories in the same varna. Thus, the highest varna of the brahmanas yielded to the lower jatis: of the srotriya (exponent of Vedas), the grahavipra (family preceptor and priest), the ganaka (astrologer), the bhat (bard), the agradani (one who eats the offerings to the departed [pinda] in the sradh [funeral] ceremony), and so on. These jatis, distinguished by specified occupations enshrined in society, also exhibit the culture attributes of prescription or prohibition of intermarriage, first and foremost, and that of inter dining next. The other usurping varna of kshatriya, similarly, produced successively downgraded jatis in accordance with specific occupations and the skills involved in homologous occupations, and enjoined consequent interdictions of intermarriage and interdining. Thus emerged the hierarchy of rulers from the monarch to fief-holder, that of administrative and revenue officials as minister to village tax-gatherer; that of the powerinvested defender and extender of the state from the general to the fortsoldier. The producing and distributing varna of vaishya comprised occupationally-identified jatis – divided further by the skill of the job performed, as noted. Moreover, the varna incorporated jatis from the serving varna of the sudras in light of their highly specialized skills in particular occupations. Lastly, the jatis composing the serving varna of the sudras were not only distinguished in accordance with their specific jobs and jobperforming skills but, in course of time, also brought within their fold more and more ethnic communities located at the pale of Hindu society and denoted as belonging to the amorphous category of panchama – the fifth (varna). From the reservoir of the panchama, those brought into the fourfold varna structure of the society were like-wise identified as jatis; such as, the nishada (fisherman), the pukkasa (hunter), the paundrika (the contemporary paundrakshatriya? (this identification is not certain) i.e. tribals morphed into kshatriyas), etc. Simultaneously, across varna, the downward mobility of jatis was recorded by the renowned lawgiver Manu in the Manusmrti on account of economic stress (vide, Buhler 1886: Chapter X, sloka 83-100). From all such information-items two findings emerge clearly: 1.

Jatis proliferated and were amenable to mobility – upwards and downwards –from age-old times, and this

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form of “social change” was not exclusive to the spread of Rule Britannica over India –as declared from the second half of the 20th century (e.g., Srinivas 1966). However, the nature of caste mobility changed with the spread of a commodity economy from the last days of the East India Company’s rule in India; previously the mobility was as jati en bloc, like the mutation of cells within a biological organism by following the principle of mitosis; later it became, more and more, a familywise mobility but still by referring to the jati-affiliation of the family (vide, Mukherjee 1957: 59ff ). 2.

The motivating force behind this social process – withstanding the role of proto-capitalism under British rule – was not “culture” as representing a spiritual edict.

While culture expresses the gravitational energy for holding a society in being at a point in time, it is the economy which represents the kinetic energy for changing a society in conformity with the potential energy of the polity to facilitate or thwart any social process; and it is this kinetic energy which operated within the Indian social organism in place of being imposed or facilitated from above by whichever external agency. Therefore, in the context of the present discussion, an apt characterization of the caste system in the pre-and proto-capitalist stage of Indian society, and particularly in the pre-British phase of India’s history, would be given by the formulation “caste in itself”. For, the system comprised jatis operating on the axis of an indigenous economy and polity but was being stabilized as culture-unities; culture defined here as the valorization of capital in human achievement and perception – which in a succinct form denotes the same characteristics as enumerated by Tylor more than a century ago (Tylor 1898: I. 1). This process of an indigenous economy operating within a precapitalist polity and the consequent product of culture-unities was endorsed by social scientists until the first half of the 20th century, as noted earlier. Also, several administrators transformed into social scientists during early British rule in India recorded the same viewpoint with pertinent examples; such as, Alfred Lyall (1882) with respect to what he designated as aryanisation, Herbert Risley (1891: I. Introduction ) with respect to what he described as brahmanisation, E.A. Gait in the report on the Census of India of 1901 in an overall perspective as well as L.S.S. O’Malley in the report on the Bengal Census of 1910. In the overall perspective these described the same process as recorded by their

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predecessors but concerned both the Hindu and the Muslim communities (Gait 1902, 1911; O’Malley 1913, 1932). But the analytic distinction and interrelation thus drawn between culture and economy for the formulation of “caste in itself” was not acceptable to the bulk of the social scientists – and especially the anthropologists and sociologists – who have dominated Indian academia from the second half of the 20th century. This has a history which should be considered, however briefly, because it is relevant to the present discussion. Within a few years after the Second World War, socialism in the stateform had spread over one-third of the globe and the spectre of socialism haunted the “free” world. The bastion of freedom and democracy, the U.S., undertook formidable material measures to check this ominous onslaught; and academia did not lag behind. As the forerunner of these changes, Max Weber had been engaged, throughout his life ending in 1920, in polemics against the dialectical-materialist interpretation of social life by Karl Marx, albeit, seldom mentioning him and his followers by name. Weber had centered his thesis on viewing “Rationality, the ‘intervention’ against which social behaviour is judged, is attributed to the subjects, and is no longer interpreted from the objective constellation of the historical social processes” (Mans 1971:74). In 1904 Max Weber had promulgated this viewpoint in his magnumopus entitled Die Protentantische Ethik und der Geist der Kapitalismus and the Die ‘Objektivitat’ sozialwissenscaftler und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis, but had failed to motivate academia formally toward his view. Talcott Parsons translated and published the magnum opus in 1930 under the title The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but it too did not receive an enthusiastic reception from academia. That it did hereafter was after a qualitative change took place in the social scenario of the “free” world. An academic transference took place with Parson’s republication of the monograph in 1958 with the following “introductory” comment (Weber 1958: XV): “He has been one main architect of what is perhaps the most important alternative to the strict or loose Marxist type of emphasis”. Max Weber was resurrected and the coterie of Weberians entered the academic orbit – preaching Weberianism as the appropriate antidote to Marxism. Weberianism became the umbrella for all varieties of anti-Marxists to assemble under. The immediate programme of Weberianism was to supplant the Marxist concept of social dynamism – which was concerned with the resolution of class contradictions – by developing a consensus among “social classes”. It was formulated in the Weberian terms of a

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value-specific subjectivity of social action-behaviour-relationship. The formulation followed from Weber’s standpoint of Wertbeziehung in the context of Wissenscaft als Berf and his oft-quoted admonition for Verstehen. Therefore, in the 1950s, studies of social change were sponsored worldwide in order to contravene the Marxist concept of change by the resolution of class contradictions. The study, concerned with mobility along a Weberian social class hierarchy, was first undertaken in the U.S.A. (vide, Rogoff 1951), next in Britain (vide, Glass 1954), and then spread to France and elsewhere. In India, M.N. Srinivas – a self-declared structural-functionalist – assumed the leadership of Weberianism. Modelling the study of social change according to Weberian maxims but also incorporating Weber’s dictum on caste as analogous to “social class” in the West, Srinivas detected Social Change in Modern India (1966) after the advent of British rule – not earlier. He depicted the course of change as a cultural change in the form of caste mobility on the axis of sanskritisation which then moved on to the axis of exhibiting the cultural traits of westernisation. As a corollary to Srinivas’s formulation, Louis Dumont – a devout disciple of Max Weber – envisaged a static Indian society because of the overwhelming domination of caste-ideology. Accordingly, in 1966, he baptized the envisaged species of Indians as Homo Hierarchicus – with the obvious Weberian implications that Indian society would be dynamic as and when it adopted Western “cultural values” (Weber 1958 : 113-114, 123) and Indians would then, accordingly, be transformed into Homo Rationalis and Homo Equalis. However, reality could not thus be obfuscated by the erudite manouvres of these savants to denigrate and even denounce the endemic role of class in society. In fact, the role of class was so formidable during the decades from 1950-70 – as expressed by the movements of the peasants, workers, and the middle class all over India – that it had become a matter of great concern to the Indian polity irrespective of intra-class dissensions of the bourgeoisie at its helm for one or another period of time. This assertion of class was not envisaged when India became independent in 1947. In 1942, India’s prospective Prime Minister, J.L. Nehru, had declared: “Our principal problem is the planned growth of Industry, greater production, more just distribution, higher standard of living, and thus the elimination of the appalling poverty that crushes our people” (Nehru 1942:10). Accordingly, economic planning became India’s mantra from 1950, which was particularly inscribed in the Plan Frame designed by P.C. Mahalanobis for the Second Five Year Plan 1956-61 (Mahalanobis

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1955). But the execution of the Plan went astray because of the antiplanning machinations of vested interests of both traditional and modern vintage, which defended their status under the slogan of “upholding” India’s culture, economy and polity (vide, Sen 1962: 4ff; Gadgil 1966: 10ff). As a result, the designer of the Plan, Mahalanobis, declared in 1964 that the rich had become richer, the poor poorer (vide, Planning Commission 1964). The rulers also had second thoughts on their premature exuberance of “wiping out” caste from Indian society; this was evinced by a pulling out from the collection of data on caste during the decennial census of population from 1950. But neither the academics indulging in the “cultural sociology” of Weberianism nor the polity of insidiously upholding vested interests could bypass the ever strengthening role of class; nor could they ignore the fact that class contradictions were gathering momentum in Indian society. Polity was in consternation; the stout followers of Weberianism were in a dilemma. The Weberians swallowed their principles against pronouncing the dirty word “class”, leading to its transference into “social class”; and the Indian ruling class set-up the Mandal Commission to find a way out of the crisis but by, of course, enrolling members of the Commission from the Weberian segment of the academia. Academia, meanwhile, had found the formulation of “caste in itself” to be obsolete, although its stalwarts had endowed the formulation with the exclusive facet of culture and not by the symbiosis of culture, economy, and polity for appraising social reality. The formulation was replaced by that of “caste and class”, although the two social entities were not analogous but homologous and, contemporaneously, caste operated as subservient to class. Srinivas was reluctant to espouse the dual regime of caste and class; he therefore circumvented it by introducing the concept of Dominant Caste. Ironically, his concept depicts the properties of class formation under the prevailing capitalist economy and polity. A scrutiny of the six attributes of the Dominant Caste, which Srinivas enumerated (Srinivas 1966: 10-11), clearly explicates this (Mukherjee 1979: 51-54). Thus, despite his will, Srinivas came closer to the true formulation of the phenomenon “caste in class” but called it “class in caste”, thereby subverting the intended meaning (vide, Mukherjee 1957:80-127; 1979: 5154). Doubtless, the formulation of caste in class was unacceptable to the “modernizers” in India – both in academia and in polity – even though the formidable role of class was coming to the forefront of social issues. Therefore, the exclusively culture-based formulation “caste in itself” –

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metamorphosed into “caste and class” – going through another reincarnation due to the inexorable process of social change caused by the kinetic energy of the economy. “Class in Caste” was formulated as the slogan of the hour; and, with this ingrained “truth”, the members of the Mandal Commission were baptized. Assuredly, satyameba jayate (truth shall triumph), is the cherished logo of India since independence; however, in the context of practical politics – where and when parochial ideas and interests prevail – satyameba noh jayate (truth does not triumph) is the norm. It was, therefore, pre-evident that from the moment “class in caste” became the bedrock on which deliberations within the Mandal Commission were made by “eminent” social scientists and administrators that its recommendation would be to identify caste as the criterion for recognizing backwardness of post-Ambedkar contemporary Indian society. Perhaps the solitary yet loud protest against this recommendation of the Mandal Commission came from a sociologist named I.P. Desai. He stated (Desai 1964: 1106-1116) that the weakest segment of society should be identified not through the caste-hierarchy but in terms of those who are placed at the bottom of the class structure and presently failing to subsist as social beings. But those at the helm of Indian polity – irrespective of changes in parties and personalities in governance – vociferously proclaimed (and still continue to do so evermore vehemently) their adherence to the recommendation of the Commission. This has now become a cornerstone of Indian polity and seemingly, the life-long mission of Ambedkar seems to have been successfully met. But is that real or a reversal? This is the subject matter of the present discussion. The primary task concerning the implementation of the Mandal Commission’s recommendation was to structure the caste-hierarchy in terms of the presumed weakest stratum at the bottom, the assumed weaker stratum positioned above it, the imagined weak stratum at the sequentially higher place in the hierarchy, and in this way reaching finally the top layer as comprising what was considered to be the non-weak stratum. The form of the caste-hierarchy thus composed deserves scrutiny of its ordered categories from the bottom upwards. There were the ethnic communities nomenclatured “tribes” because of academic inertia or the meta academic design to denigrate them (vide, Mukherjee 1985: 48-54). In India, by the first half of the 20th century, the overwhelming bulk of these communities had outstripped the historical relevance of depicting themselves at the primary stage of social formulation of humankind; namely, of an undifferentiated or rudimentarily differentiated culture, economy, and polity. At the time of putting the

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recommendations of the Mandal Commission into practice, that is in August 1990, they might have been reckoned to present atavistic cultural unities in so far as the traditional aspects of culture were concerned; otherwise, in terms of the acquired aspect of culture as well as of traditional economy and polity, they were certainly detribalized. Yet, in light of their largely imagined social characteristics at this point in time, these ethnic communities were legally bundled together to be designated the Scheduled Tribes (briefly, ST). They constituted the bottom category of the structured hierarchy. Above the “tribes”, there were the age-old castes traditionally identified as Untouchables and, following the modern fashion, later labeled the Depressed Classes. The British, naturally motivated to uphold the Raj, legislated and put them under the category labeled the Scheduled Castes (briefly, SC). At that time, in the 1930s, the “patriots” protested against this divisive move of the colonial rulers, to the point of describing some Indians (including Ambedkar) as a “British spy” for conniving at thus “fragmenting” the monolithic unity of Indians. Nonetheless, at the behest of the recommendations of the Mandal Commission, the rulers of independent India placed SC on the next higher stratum of the social hierarchy. Then began the search for constituting the still higher stratum in the caste-hierarchy. This was accomplished by putting together an assortment of left-over “not so impure” castes which took the legislated form of “Other Backward Castes” (briefly, OBC). This was not a genuine social necessity but it was of strategic importance to the domineering polity. The architects of the caste-hierarchy could now place the “pure” Caste Hindus exclusively on the top stratum for structuring the hierarchy elegantly. This category usually goes by the appellation of Forward Castes (briefly FC), but this term is now extended to castes within the other categories as well. The issue that follows from the constituted form of the caste hierarchy by means of both the accepted and the abstruse ingredients on the puritypollution axis is whether the form substantiates the professed objective of recognizing backwardness in contemporary society. The issue begets three sequential questions on the context of the form: 1.

What is the substance for defining and demarcating the strata of the caste-hierarchy? In other words, what are the features, the operational characteristics and the boundaries?

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2.

3.

How does the substance – in its relevant details – percolate less and less from the top to the bottom of the caste-hierarchy, in order that the form of the caste-hierarchy is substantiated content-wise? Why does the substance, in reference to its accepted ingredients, accentuate intra-stratum inequality of its constituents along with inter-stratum unequal appreciation of the same ingredients?

To consider the first question, concerning the substance for identifying the content of the caste-hierarchy, this varied from the metaphysical to the mental view of life and then, to the material aspect of individuals as social beings. Any formulation of the substance from, say, the Bergsonian concept of élan vital would generate intense heat among the philosophers but is not likely to shed light on it by consensus. On the mental considerations, hierarchical distinctions of the “tribes” and castes have been recorded by ancient lawgivers and empirically ascertained by the anthropologists on the purity-pollution scale, but these traditional attributes present the cultural consequences and not the cause of backwardness in Indian society with reference to structured hierarchy. Resorting to material considerations eventually, the content of the castehierarchy requires translation of the four cardinal valuations for humankind: ever longer survival, ever durable security, ever increasing material prosperity, and ever expanding mental progress. However, the translation of these valuations, even though restricted to the material sphere, are seen to vary regarding the selection of items for studying the standard of living – later raised to analyzing the levels of living, and presently to decipher the quality of life (vide, Mukherjee 1989: 23-64). In the end, the consensus seems to be on what was announced as the basic needs of the people: food, shelter, health, education, job, and security. These, then, may comprise the substance for defining and demarcating the strata of the caste-hierarchy. The second question – concerned with the operation of the substance with reference to the structural hierarchy – is involved with assigning relative importance to the ingredients of the substance by the people in accordance with what they want. For dynamism in society is enforced by the conjunction of what the elites’ conceive as the need of the masses and what the masses decide is their absolute necessity (what they want). On this count it is found that the priority-ratings of the elites and the masses of the enumerated items differ sharply and, thereby, adversely affect the

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assumed reason for the backwardness of Indian society along the structured hierarchy. For example, from as far back as in the third quarter of the 20th century, collated data from all-India surveys (vide, Mukherjee 1976) have shown that about 10 per cent of the Indian population produce as many children as they can because, to them, child labour is an essential commodity for sale in the quest for mere survival. It is not that they are unaware of the biological implications of reproduction, which was surmised by Ford Foundation experts in India in the 1950s (ibid.). Nor are they so steeped in the “otherworldly” outlook of the Max Weber-Robert Redfield vintage, and therefore so vigorously pursued through “modernization” to uplift them from traditionalism, that they do not much care about living beyond a subhuman existence in shanties and slums, bereft of sound health and good education. But jobs for food is their foremost priority and, next, better jobs for all family members in order that they may not be perennially famished and frequently fall ill in the absence of adequate and hygienic shelter. Therefore, education and security are their cherished dreams, but not to be realized in actual existence. The same survey records that at the other pole of social existence are located about 10 per cent of the Indian population to whom the production of a boy or a girl (or a boy and a girl) is a matter of the personal choice of the couple, not dictated by the need for survival. They rear the child (or the two children) in security with proper nutrition, housing, and maximal education in order that the child(ren) can obtain highly remunerative occupations and, thus, may continue– if not further enhance – their prosperity. And, in between these two extremes, there is the vast mass of Indians who, graded by their income and wealth, appropriate unequally the available social resources for better or worse living. Also, as is known to all contemporary Indians, the situation becomes evermore grim to them as time passes. The outcome is that to an appreciable number of Indians – as one proceeds down the economic ladder – child education is a choice which has a low priority among the enumerated “basic needs” for them, despite the current sop of “mid-day” meals for the children at school. This has resulted in large-scale drop-outs of children – especially from the secondary schools, if not also from the primary schools – while the rulers are particularly concerned with higher education of students. Studies conducted from the second half of the 20th century substantiate this state of affairs as also the obsolete objectives of the reigning authorities – both

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of which have been hinted at (vide, Damle 1966; Desai 1953, 1965; Gore et al 1970; etc.) However, what is the relevance of the graded economic deprivation of the mass of the Indian population to the second question posed with reference to the structural caste hierarchy? The relevance lies in the closeness of the graded construct of India’s caste hierarchy with the economic structure of Indian society graded by income and wealth. But, because of the aforementioned injunction against the collection of caste-data, precise all-India information on this vital issue is lacking. Nevertheless, a multitude of local and regional studies spread over the republic point to a close association between the two hierarchies; and it also underscores the fact that class-distinctions cut across castedistinctions: a fact that locates the Achilles’ heel of the recommendations of the Mandal Commission. The significance of the second finding will be examined in due course. For the present, the first finding denotes the following associations between the class and the caste structure of society: 1.

2.

3. 4.

A substantive bulk of the detribalized “tribals” –while being graded from economically better off to the worst off within the respective ethnic communities but mostly at the marginal level of existence – are located en bloc in the category of ST. Although perhaps less acute than for the ST, the graded volume of the economically deprived mass within the respective castes categorized under the bloc entitled SC is very large. The same gradation may be lesser than for the SC bloc but is yet appreciably large within the respective castes enshrined by the freshly evolved category of OBC. The graded course of economic deprivation is not less visible within the respective castes of the Caste Hindus than those within the other blocs of the structured caste-hierarchy.

Even so, any ambivalence in the subsumed association between the economic and caste hierarchies, as well as in the domineering role of class over caste, seems to be ruled out by the new form assumed by the “traditional” caste-leaders and the emergence of fresh “caste leaders” on the social landscape of India. All of them are viably competing with the ruling Caste-Hindu elite on an equal footing for wielding economic and political power. This is such a noticeable phenomenon in contemporary India that it does not require any statistical confirmation. Instead, this

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manifestation answers the third question posed earlier, with the caveat that it also resolves the quandary of “class in caste” or “caste in class” in favour of the latter. The resolution of the quandary leads to the perplexing question: why are caste-identities reinforced in recent times and beyond, remaining as respective culture-unities? The answer to this question lies in the historicity of the Indian social system from the pre-capitalist to the present era. This path passes through the phase of colonial capitalism to that of independent India; with the latter, in the context of our present discussion, setting up the ground-breaking Mandal Commission and implementing its recommendations with evermore gusto. Before capitalism in the pan-Indian sphere finally reduced the presentday detribalized tribes and castes into culture-unities, class relations within the tribes and castes emerged and were consolidated accordingly. This strain of indigenously developed class relations did, of course, enrich the customarily evolved tribal and caste leaders, but until the first half of the 20th century the role of these leaders seldom cut across inter-caste perimeters; and that was so in spite of the Caste Disabilities Removal Act of 1850 or the consolidation of the “impure” castes by the Scheduled Castes Order of 1936. This fact was recorded by the British administrators in their own way; such as , by Elphinstone on Western India in 1819, Sherring for the Hindu tribes and castes between 1872 to 1881, Ibbetson on Punjub and Haryana in 1883, Nesfield on Uttar Pradesh and present Uttaranchal in 1885, Crooks covering territories analogous to Nesfield’s areas in 1896, Risley on Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in 1898, Thurston and Rangachari on South India in 1909, Enthoven on the Bombay Presidency in 1920-22, O’Malley on India as a whole in 1932, and so on. Until then, the leaders of the tribes and castes were customarily recognized as of the people, by the people, and for the people. This state of affairs changed drastically from the second half of the 20th century. At one end of the social ladder – the term “social’ correctly connoting the symbiosis of culture, economy and polity – the tribes had been definitely detribalized; at the other end of that ladder, mainly composed by the creamy layer of the Caste Hindus, Hindus wielded economic and political power; and the culture traits associated with the Caste Hindus flowed from them to the lower castes. For the multitude of castes located in-between the two extreme poles of the ladder – as also for the detribalized “tribal” communities and the Caste Hindus – their customary leaders had to remodel themselves into statutory leaders or give way to parvenu leaders, in order to conform to the mandate of the Constitution: one person, one vote. All leaders, therefore, wielded power

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drawn from the localized economy and polity – while invoking also their cultural affinity – in order that they may be elected by the people (aam admi) to the hierarchically ordered statutory organizations – from the panchayats to the loftiest bodies for ruling the country and the people en masse (aam janta). Naturally, the allegiance of these “people’s leaders” would be for the state and central polity rather than for their indigenous “people”. However, they were quite conscious of the fact that their very existence rested upon being acknowledged as leaders of their “people”. The dilemma was resolved to an appreciable extent by the welfare measures undertaken by the government from the second half of the 20th century; for those measures passed through the “leaders” to their “people” – albeit, with sizeable cuts retained by the former and their associates, thereby augmenting their not inconsiderable wealth. Yet the benefits trickling down to the aam admi (our own people) were not negligible; and the process gathered momentum with announcements of schemes and their implementation such as garibi hatao (Drive out Poverty) to Development with Justice. Thus, whichever privileges the “peoples” received in their “tribal” and caste environments were siphoned through these “leaders”, and this modus operandi stabilized the position of the leaders vis-à-vis the people, despite the transference of these leaders’ position from the customary to the statutory form in society. Securing anew their hold on the respective “tribes” and castes, the leaders retained their role as of the people. The social situation – comprising culture, economy, and polity – underwent further change, and this time it was a qualitative transformation engineered through activating the recommendations of the Mandal Commission by successive ruling coteries. All of them, henceforth, administered a booster dose to the ongoing process of the rejuvenation of caste identities and the detribalized ethnic identities beyond mere cultureunities. Caste as the criterion of backwardness roused the aspirations of their respectively affiliated communities for wielding economic and political power in a period of capitalism. The concepts of dalit, scheduli, anti-manuvadi, etc., blossomed with a view to inducing the awareness of not only caste in itself but also of caste for itself for ushering in a qualitative change in society. Accordingly, the architects of the deprived “tribes” and castes have now moved beyond the customary boundaries in order to peregrinate within and across the blocs of caste-hierarchies which had been structured for activating the recommendations of the Mandal Commission. Furthermore, wherever possible, they traverse the state and the national

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levels in order to represent the dalits of India as an amalgam of the SC-ST caste-blocks; or these leaders of the dalits – as also of the OBCs – in alliance with the manuvadis (=the Caste Hindus) enter the leadership coterie of the Indian people en masse (i.e., the aam janta). For thus attaining these successive targets and finally on reaching their goal, it is imperative to these tribe-caste leaders to hold on to their respective constituencies for conforming to India’s emblazoned political achievement of one person, one vote. Vote-banks are, therefore, indispensable to them and these must grow perpetually so as to enlarge and extend the sphere of influence of these leaders by the momentum in political and economic power. The strategy adopted in pursuance is twofold: one of bestowing material gifts to the masses and the other of transforming the aam admi to aam janta, i. e., from denizen to citizen. The material gifts take the forms of solemn promises, and occasionally actual action, according not only to the elite’s formulation of the basic needs of the people, but also in consonance with what the people want on a priority basis. The exhortations are concerned with generating the tribalcaste consciousness of the apposite “tribes” and castes or of the blocs of ST, SC and OBC, or of the amalgamated category of dalit. So pernicious has been the power and spread of this illusion of caste for itself, in place of the mere caste in itself, that a demand was put forward in 2001 by the deprived segment of the Caste Hindus from Rajasthan for the recognition of another caste-bloc in the structural hierarchy in the name of “Economically Backward Forward Castes”. Thus, by way of the Mandal Commission, this deprived segment of caste Hindus used the Mandal Commission to meet their wants in place of resorting to arduous struggle enjoined by the consciousness of class for itself! This gives us a glimpse of the miserable state of existence of the deprived mass of India which is caught in a double jeopardy: one with respect to the leaders of the aam admi and the other with reference to the leaders of the aam janta; for the two kinds of leadership coincide only infrequently. Both the leaderships induce and accelerate – directly and indirectly – the phenomena of unequal exchange in society in respect of material goods and services, and this enhances the prosperity of the class to which they have belonged from earlier times or are presently affiliated with as parvenu leaders. However, this state of affairs, engineered by the creation of a false caste-consciousness for attaining economic and political targets en masse, is more and more revealed to be illusive to the people and pernicious for Indian society as a whole, as time passes. This is noticeable from the classinduced cracks within the respective caste-blocs as well as from the

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fragmentation of the structured hierarchy across caste-blocs. Two indications in this respect are worthy of note. In 2006 the rulers at the Centre (i.e. New Delhi) announced their pious wish to do more good to those in the OBC-bloc of the caste-hierarchy that do not belong to its “creamy layer”. The established political power wished to shower the fruits of higher education on the “non creamy layer” rather than on those who belonged to the “creamy layer”. Subsequently, the scions of the unacknowledged “creamy layer” formed within the OBC bloc were exhorted to detect the “non-creamy layer”; and a similar search was encouraged for the SC and ST blocs. But, not surprisingly, none of the personalities entrusted with this noble mission could identify the “noncreamy layer” in these blocs. All wanted to come into the “creamy layer” but those already in the “creamy layer” wished to retain it for themselves. In the event, the search was given up. Seemingly, all are equal within a bloc of the structured caste-hierarchy. That some could be “more equal” than others was not acknowledged! Satyameba noh jayate! Truth does not prevail as far as the Indian ruling class is concerned! In 2007 the leaders of the Gujjar community of Rajasthan were found to be refusing to retain their higher position, the caste-bloc of OBC, in the structured caste-hierarchy. For they were failing to compete favourably with their confreres in the bloc for sharing the spoils of the economy and the polity. The community leaders wanted their ethnic community to be demoted in the ordered caste-hierarchy and to be located in the SC/ST bloc! But the leaders of such communities already located in the SC/ST blocs – like the Minna community – refused to accommodate the Gujjars for fear of sharing their apportioned economic and political gains. The turmoil that ensued from the cross-bloc consensual rivalry created a crisis for Rajasthan and the repercussions spread to the Centre. Evidently, class contradictions are shattering the illusory caste-consciousness, slowly but relentlessly. The future will be shaped by the immanent social processes governed by dialectical interventions into the history of time. This is a matter for objective peregrination, not of subjective speculations and conjectures. However, this lies beyond the scope of the present discussion. Nonetheless, it is clear that Ambedkar’s cherished dream of removing, in his words, the “social” (meaning, the cultural) and economic inequalities from Indian society, after having established political equality by the Constitution of 1950, remains a mirage. That particular strain of Indian society which had invited him for drafting the Constitution – which has erected his statue in front of the Lok Sabha and continues to garland yearly his portrait inside the premises – has out manoeuvred him by playing a

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googly in the garb of facilitating his life-long mission for uplifting the untouchables to the mainstream of Indian life by appointing the Mandal Commission and devoutly implementing its recommendations. A national tragedy is thus enacted by a collective embodiment of Tartuffe – the character of a sanctimonious hypocrite created by Moliere for staging a social satire.

References Cited Ambedkar, B., 1949, Writings and Speeches of Babasaheb Ambedkar. Vol. II, Bombay, Maharashtra Governement Publication. —. 1950, “Speech” in Constituent Assembly Debates. Vol.VII. New Delhi, Government of India Publication. Altekar, A.S., 1949, State and Government in Ancient India, Benaras, Motilal Banarsidass. Buhler, G., 1886, The Laws of Manu. Sacred Books of the East. XXV. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Chattopadhyay, K.P., 1936, “History of Indian Social Organisation”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal 3(1): 377-95. Crooke, W., 1896, The Tribes and Castes of N.W. Provinces and Oudh. Calcutta, Government Publication. Damle, Y.B., 1966, College Youth in India : A Study of Elite in the Making. Poona, Deccan College. Desai, I.P., 1953, High School Students in Poona. Poona, Deccan College. —. 1965, “The New Elite”, pp. 150-55 in : Unnithan, T.K.N.; Deva, I.; Singh, Y. (eds.). Towards a Sociology of Culture. New Delhi, PrenticeHall. —. 1984, “Should ‘Caste’ be the Basis for Recognizing Backwardness ?”, Economic and Political Weekly 19(28) : 1106-16. Dumont, L., 1966, Homo Hierarchicus : Essai sur le Systeme des Castes. Paris, Gallimard. Dutt, B.N., 1944, Studies in Indian Social Polity. Calcutta, Purabi Publishers. Elphinstone, M., 1819, Report on the Territories Conquered from the Peswa, Submitted to the Governor-General of India in October. Enthoven, R.E., 1920-22, Tribes and Castes of Bombay. Bombay, Government Publication. Gadgil, D.R.., 1966, “The Importance of Evaluation for Development Planning with Special Reference to Land Reform”, Foreword to Jacoby, E.H., Evaluation of Agrarian Structures and Agrarian Reforms. Rome, FAO.

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Gait, E.A., 1902, Census of India, 1901. Vol. VII. Government of India Publication. —. 1911, “Caste”, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. (ed.) J. Hastings and J.A. Selbie, New York. Gore, M.S.; Desai, I.P.; Chitnis, S., 1970 , Field Studies in the Sociology of Education in India : All India Report. New Delhi, National Council of Educational Research and Training. Ibbetson, D.C.J., 1883, Outlines of Punjab Ethnography, being extracts from the Punjab Census Report of 1881, treating of Religion, Language, and Caste. Calcutta, Government Publication. Jolly, J., 1896, “Beitrage Zur indischen Rechtgeschichte”, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellscaft. Band 50. Kane, P.V., 1941, History of Dharmasastra. Vol.II. Part 1, Chapter III-IV. Poona, Bhandarker Oriental Research Institute. Ketkar, S.V., 1909, History of Caste in India. Ithaca (New York), Taylor & Carpenter. —. 1911, An Essay on Hinduism. London, Luzac and Company Limited. Kosambi, D.D., 1956, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History. Bombay, Popular Book Depot. Lassen, C., 1882, Indische Alterthumskunde, Bonn, Verlag von H.B. Koenig. Lyall. A., 1882, Asiatic Studies. London, John Murray. Marx, K., 1853, “British Rule in India”, New York Daily Tribune. 25 June. —. 1942, The German Ideology. London, Lawrence & Wishart. —. 1953, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie (Rowentwarf) 1857-1858. Berlin, Dietz Verlag. Mathai, M.O., 1978, Reminiscences of the Nehru Age. New Delhi, Vikas Publishing House. Maus, H., 1962, A Short History of Sociology. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mukherjee. P., 2002, Beyond the Four Varnas : The Untouchables in India. Shimla, Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Mukherjee, R., 1957, The Dynamics of a Rural Society. Berlin, AkademieVerlag. —. 1974, The Rise and Fall of the East India Company. New York, Monthly Review Press. —. 1976, Family and Planning in India. New Delhi, Orient Longman. —. 1979, What Will It Be ? Explorations in Inductive Sociology. New Delhi, Allied. —. 1985, Uganda : An Historical Accident ? Class, Nation, State Formation. Trenton (N.J.), Africa World Press.

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—. 1989, The Quality of Life : Valuation in Social Research. New Delhi, Sage. Nesfield, J.C., 1885, Brief View of the Caste System of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh. Allahabad. Government Publication. Oldernberg, H., 1897, “Zur Geschichte des indischen Kastenwessens”, Zeitscrift der Deutschan Morgenlandischan Gesellshaft. Band 51. O’Malley, L.S.S., 1913, Report of Bengal, Census of India 1910. Calcutta, Government Publication. —. 1932, Indian Caste Customs. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Risley, H.H., 1891, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal. (2 volumes). Calcutta, Bengal Secretariat Press. Sen, S.R., 1962, The Strategy for Agricultural Development and Other Essays on Economic Policy and Planning. Bombay, Asia Publishing House. Senart, E., 1927, Les Castes dans l’ Inde. Paris, Librairie Orientaliste, Paul Genthner. Sherring, M.A. 1872-81, Hindu Tribes and Castes. Calcutta, Thacker Spink and Co. Srinivas, M.N., 1966, Social Change in Modern India. Bombay, Allied Publishers. Thurston, E. and K. Rangachari, 1909, Castes and Tribes of South India. Madras, Government Publication. Tylor, E.B., 1898, Primitive Culture. Vol. I. London, John Murray. Weber, M., 1930, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York, C. Scribner & Sons. (republished 1958). —. 1958, The Religion of India. Glencoe (Ill), The Free Press. —. 1965, The Sociology of Religion. London, Methuen & Co.

CHAPTER THREE WOMEN IN WORLD SOCIETY: THE GENDER ISSUE Woman subservient/equal/superior to Man: Conjectures, Facts and Speculations on the Issue of Gender In light of the proposition that, amidst all media for securing knowledge sciencing reveals reality the most precisely, unequivocally, and comprehensively, the following viewpoints may be useful as a preamble to discussing the gender issue. For gender denotes contention and consensus on the existence and evolution of life, on the play of inherited and acquired characteristics in the course of evolution, on the relationship between matter and mind, on the interaction of genetic and social attributes, and, finally, on the need for discussing the gender issue in the context of perennially developing complex situations in human existence: (a) “The existence of life must be considered as a starting point in biology, in a similar way as the quantum of action, which appears as an irrational element from the view of classical physics [but] taken together with the existence of the elementary particles, forms the foundation of quantum mechanics.” (Niels Bohr quoted by Gunther Stent in The Coming of the Golden Age. 1969; 19). (b) Life on earth does not evolve toward anything, rather it moves away from something; and paradigms (i.e., the collation of ideas and procedures which imbibe scientists to implicitly assume what to believe and have to work) continue changing as human culture changes. (Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962). (c) “The architects of the evolutionary synthesis have been accused by some critics of claiming that they had solved all the remaining problems of evolution. This accusation is quite absurd; I do not

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(d)

(e)

(f)

(g) (h) (i)

know of a single evolutionist who would make such a claim. All that was claimed by the supporters of synthesis was that they had arrived at an elaboration of the Darwinian paradigm sufficiently robust not to be endangered by remaining puzzles.”(Ernst Mayer, One Long Argument.1991: 149) One of the mysteries in evolutionary biology lies in the prokaryotic cell – which lacks a nucleus – absorbing another such but smaller cell, which then becomes the nucleus to form the enkaryotic cell; and this symbiosis in cell evolution may denote the evolution of life – at any rate, the sudden appearance of new species which, in its turn, persists for long without changing. (Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution. 1981). The idea of symbiosis in cell evolution, leading to the propagation of the Gaia concept by Lynn Margulis, points toward life in earth being in symbiotic relationship with the environment – the atmosphere, the sea, and other aspects of earth; and this relationship allows for entry of Lamarckianism into the genetic inheritance of acquired characteristics. (P. Bunyard and E. Goldsmith (eds.), Gaia: The Thesis, The Mechanisms, and the Implications. 1988). “Francis Bacon urged society to lay aside the idea of evolving the universe from a thought, and to try evolving thought from the universe.” (Henry Adams, 1961: 484 in The Education of Henry Adams, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, Massachusetts Historical Society, Reprint of 1918 edition). Bacon’s dictum: plus ultra – ever beyond. Since mind is a property of matter, it is only by tracing the intricate meanderings of matter in the brain that consciousness can be explained. (Gilbert Ryle, 1949, The Concept of Mind). “Just as in genetics it is imperative to know the structure and function of genes, so for appraising consciousness it is necessary to explore the structure of molecules and their role in reference to consciousness. This follows from the fact that consciousness is synonymous with awareness of worldly objects as well as abstract and mental concepts, and thus it is a subject for empirical investigation. For this purpose the brain should not be regarded as a black box of unknown or even irrelevant structure. Instead, the neurons and the interactions between them need examining for constructing a model of consciousness like models constructed for explaining heredity in terms of DNA.” (Francis Crick and Christof Koch, “Towards a Neorobiological Theory of

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Consciousness” in: Seminar in the Neurosciencies. 1990: vol. 2, pp. 263-275). (j) “The sheer difficulty of creating an accurate portrayal of genetic and cultural interactions” and the way to cope with it is to create a “rigorous mathematical theory of the interaction between genes and culture”, so that, the theory “would contain a system of linked abstract processes expressed as far as possible in the form of mathematical structures that translate the process back to the real world of sensory experience”. (Edward Wilson and Charles Lumsden, Promethean Era. 1983: 48-9). (k) “To maintain the [human] species indefinitely, we are compelled to drive toward total knowledge, right down to the level of the neurons and the gene. When we have progressed enough to explain ourselves in these mechanistic terms, and the social sciences come to full flower, the result might be hard to accept.” (Edward Wilson, Sociobiology. 1980: 300-1). (l) Social inheritance is Lamarckian, and the world is full of alternatives; men and women are alternative states of gender in Homo Sapiens. (Stephen Jay Gould and N. Eldrege, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phylectic Gradualism” in: Schoph, T.J.M. (ed.), 1972, Models in Paleobiology). (m) “Humans also need to increase their complexity if biological systems are to keep ahead of electronic ones.” (Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell. 2001: 165). This is a running thread of consensus, and more like this may be collated. The consensus among the contending views can be noted in the following manner, which, in its turn, sponsors certain questions: 1. While the evolution of life is not unilineal and the speciation of living organizations is by a quantum jump (vide, quotes and extracts a – d), commonality in the enduring evolutionary process is indicated by evermore manifestations of biological organs for the transformation of potential energy within the living into kinetic energy (vide, quote and extracts e – g). This way the species register ever better adjustments with nature, in an optimal manner, for the benefit of the species. The result is that the species of homo sapiens has emerged with such useful organs as an erect posture, binocular vision, prehensile thumbs, well-developed mechanisms of speech, and so far the best development of the brain.

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Correspondingly, does the pre-human separation of the uro-genital system in women portend the potentiality of a distinctive role for woman to play in society vis-à-vis men besides the biological role of reproduction? 2.

Somatically women seem to display less kinetic energy than men because of their “weaker” body-building in an apparent context to osteological and musculature differences between men and women. But is enough known about the display of kinetic energy with reference to gender differences in various other aspects of living: such as, glandular (viz. hormonal) secretions, neurobiology, psychology in the context of the build of the brain concerning its internal structuration (vide, quote and extracts h – j), etc.; and the distinctive symbiosis of all these properties of matter and mind? If, then, the brain is not to be regarded as an aforementioned “black box” but as composed of a distinguished integration of neurons (as well as sets of neurons), do women operate in society merely biologically as superior to men in view of the basic principle of evolution of life briefly noted under 1 above?

3.

The potentiality of women suggested under 2 may have remained dormant so long because of the nature of social evolution thus far. The history of human society from dawn to date points towards life in a symbiotic relationship with the environment. Accordingly, whether or not their relationship allows for the entry of Lamarckianism into the genetic inheritance of acquired characteristics, social inheritance is seen to be Lamarckian in the sense of being conditioned by actual possibilities for restricted or more and more universalized displays of mental energy (vide, quotes and extract k- m). So that, would an overview of human history in the context of the gender issue be useful for examining the sequential position of women as subservient, equal, and superior to men in the light of ever better possibilities for a gender wise display of kinetic energy in society?

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Doubtless the perspective proposed under 3 is at the incipient stage of its formulation. Nonetheless, would it be valid at the present state of knowledge on the “women question” to demolish some of the assumptions in light of available facts and to search for an eventual formulation of a precise hypothesis on the gender issue in place of mere emotive assertions?

Nostalgia lingers in the minds of many that there was a golden era of the mother’s right in inheritance in the evolutionary sequence from matriarchy to patriarchy when the status of women was superior to that of men. Myths and anecdotes all over the world speak of women rulers, warriors, chiefs of local settlements, and heads of family-units. However, ethnographic studies, as distinct from folk tales and travellers’ accounts, show that this has now virtually vanished. Matrifocal ethnic communities record that: (a) lineage was traced through the actual mother in place of the putative father, (b) the residence of the offspring was with the mother and not the “father”, and (c) the inheritance was through the mother. In sum, women were the titular heads of the ethnic community in contrast to the putative father. But with time, while women remained titular heads in actual fact it was the “mother’s brother” (or other stipulated male(s) in the women’s lineage, clan, and other structurations of the community) who actually wielded power and assumed the responsibility for linking the family to the ethnic community. The hold of men over women was clearly manifest in the patrifocal ethnic communities, as also in the less stable matripatrilocal and bilocal communities, whether or not there was an evolutionary sequence from the matrifocal to the patrifocal organization of human society. Anyhow, women’s subservience to men was effected in the hunting, fishing, pastoral, and pre-plough epochs of social organization; and the patripotestal human society was decisively established with the advent of plough cultivation for production. Two inputs ensured this manner of the qualitative transformation of society. One, henceforth male animal labour enjoined with male human labour was used for ancillary pre-ploughing and post-ploughing activities. Two, this development of the productive forces not only yielded crops for consumption but also generated a durable surplus for accumulation — the harbinger of property formation. Surplus accumulation may have been present earlier, especially in pastoral communities and in those agricultural communities practicing slash and burn forms of cultivation (e.g. jhum in

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northeastern India) and even in the scraped-land form of cultivation (e.g., in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent). However, now, surplus accumulation emerged as a crucial aspect of production. Thus establishing social stability in place of uncertain hunting-fishing livelihoods and nomadic pastoral lives, and also by augmenting social prosperity, the change effected by this stage of social evolution had a profound consequence on gender discrimination in favour of men. The history of humankind in Asia and Europe bears this out. This change was not found in sub-Saharan Africa, in the America of the “AmericanIndians”, in the Pacific comprising the “Philippine Pagans”, among the South Sea Islanders, etc. – where plough cultivation (with irrigational facilities, if required) had not yet been introduced and human energy did not require a gender based discrimination in production. In more recent history, the induction of mechanical energy for production too did not ameliorate the situation prima-facie, because male manual energy was crucial to running the machines while female manual energy was of subsidiary relevance to industrial production. Women again undertook supplementary tasks to industry as they had done when plough cultivation had been introduced into agriculture. On the other hand, industrial production accelerated the rate and volume of property formation and accumulation. In consequence, the gendered mentality already manifest in developed agricultural societies, such as in India and China, flowered in the early phase of industrial society. Women were unhesitatingly declared properties of men; to be cherished and adored; nonetheless, they remained an object in possession of chivalrous and chauvinist males – an object that could be cast aside if not tameable, and thrown away if not faithful. Epitomized by Victorian England, this gendered thinking was subsequently diffused all over the “civilized” world. However, the industrial revolution also opened a window for voicing women’s freedom from bondage. Albeit resting upon a thin segment of the upper middle class, women clamoured for an alternative social status to men. Isolated examples of notable women in earlier times –Gargi in India, Sappho in Greece, or Jeanne d’ Arc in France – now became more numerous all over the world from the latter half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries in the fields of art, literature, education, science and politics. And women’s labour had always been a factor to be reckoned with in particular productive processes. Yet the call for women’s equality to men did not muster crucial support in society at large as long as women’s labour was not reckoned as a desirable commodity in production.

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However, the new productive factors emerging from the second half of the twentieth century, incipiently from the 1960s and visibly from the 1980s, along with the application of electrical and afterwards electronic energy for production, made women’s labour once again a desirable commodity. Two things happened, almost simultaneously, at this phase of human history which is noteworthy in the context of the present presentation. One, conforming to the engulfing role of capital in all spheres of life during the course of social evolution, mental labour was reckoned henceforth as a marketable commodity like manual labour for the economy. The concept extended to all forms of social transactions embracing art, literature, education, law, science, and even polity. It was no more regarded as of use value only, such as, in the cultural aspect of society. This is exemplified by the evermore frequent formation of unions, associations, federations, and so on of non-manual activities in all spheres of life and living. Two, the somatic features of women – so long considered inferior to men and of only aesthetic value of beauty to the beholder – was now found to be particularly useful for the production of material goods and services in the context of applying electrical and especially electronic energy for that purpose. Emphasis was laid on women’s nimble fingers and superior agility compared to men’s for handling and producing electrical and later electronic goods. Historically, too, in the tea gardens of Assam and Darjeeling in India, their labour was in demand. There the use of their delicate finger tips was coveted for picking the small tea leaves responsible for producing the “first flush”. The efficiency with which women can appraise the totality of a nonmanual producing organization and resolve the incongruities it occasionally faces during operation was also duly noted by the owners and supreme managers of capital. This trait has now made women’s labour a covetable commodity in software production in India and elsewhere. Reportedly therefore, the multinational and transnational organizations were alleged to have encouraged tacitly the mounting movement for women’s equality which had sprung up in North America and West Europe from the late 1960s and spread all over the “civilized” world by the 1970s from behind, silently. This point, posited by the controversial social scientist Claude Meillassoux for example, has seldom been admitted by the leaders of women’s movements. However, in an international seminar in Mexico City in 1998, anticipating the World Congress of Sociology in 2000, a reputable sociologist, narrating the success of the women’s movement in the U.S.A and Canada, was asked to react to this

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allegation and she remained diplomatically silent. Even so, equal wages to men and women for the same kind of job performed is not yet universalized. For example, in the U.S.A. – as recent newspapers report – except in a few areas such as New York State – wage inequality persists detrimentally to women. In sum, culturally, economically and politically, woman as social alternate to man, at home and at work, has yet to be realized in depth as well as in extent and particularly so in less electrified and less electronized world societies. Doubtless, this is the call of the hour to all those who are concerned with the “Women’s Question”. However, how many of them are interested in investigating the biological and social potentiality of women to be superior to men, especially in the present era of electronic and atomic revolution that humankind is passing through? Presently, the emotional outbursts of the 1970s, which even produced such graffiti in New York City like “we have clitoris, we do not have penis” may not be in an upswing. Neither visible is the astounding proclamation that two lesbians can produce a child. The role of women and men as biological alternate is duly recognized by the sober leaders of woman’s movements and they rightly decry women’s role being relegated to the production of children and to being socially confined to the home. Nonetheless, the perspective of gender inequality is usually found rooted in physiological distinctions which interprets women as the “weaker sex” and traces its repercussions on her life in cultural, economic, and political terms. The point to realize is that such a configuration in a gender based distinction of life and living evolved from the decisive role of manual labour for production and its manifestations and legacies in a society’s culture, economy and polity. But all these are now passé. Howsoever the image may persist in the contemporary era of production by means of electrical, electronic and atomic energies, those terms of gender inequality present contemporarily a declining phenomenon because all societies are increasingly geared to the nonmanual mode of production. Furthermore, with respect to the non-manual mode of production, biologically engineered gender inequality tends to cast the dice in favour of woman over man. This perspective encourages a look into gender differentials with respect to certain aspects of biology, such as endocrinology, and calls particularly for the entry of neuroscience in order to unravel the intricacies of gender relationship while not losing sight of both biological and social distinctions between men and women. The task is offset by the confounding of the biological and social aspects of all humans. From an overview it is difficult to distinguish between the intrinsic character of gender difference and its expression due

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to what is labelled Lamarckianism, imbibing of prevalent social mores. Such as, child psychologists found that children developed the concept of colour discrimination of black and white people at a later age while being aware from a much earlier age of colour distinction between black and white in the U.S.A. (vide, Lewin 1963: 156ff). In reverse mode, child psychologists reportedly found in the USSR in the 1920s that up to the primary school standard the girls learnt their lessons quicker than the boys of the same age but by the time the boys and girls arrived at the secondary level of schooling the girls had regressed to a uniform inter-gender level. Similarly, studies in neuroscience (SFN, 2007) indicate that women feel more pain than men whereas in the erstwhile Third World, at any rate, women are found to bear more pain than men; a point not unnoticed in the First and Second Worlds as well. Are these contrary findings the expression of a set of neural traits of gender distinction or of the acquired traits of social suppression of women by men or of a confounding of the two issues? Not very rigorously designed studies and/or hasty conclusions drawn on their basis may denote genetic inheritance while the distinction may be of life-time acquired characteristics, or vice-versa. Such as, in a paper published in a recent issue of Current Biology two scientists, A. C. Hurlbert and Y. Ling of Newcastle University have concluded from a 2026 age-group sample of 208 persons – of whom 37 were born and broughtup in China – that women prefer the colour pink more than men. But such a conclusion on a gender wise genetic difference may have overridden the course of socialization of the Chinese and the British samples and/or incorporated cross-cultural bias within respective societies, such as by depicting the upper middle class of China as akin to the British middle class and therefore, perhaps, neither sample represents the two societies en bloc. This point of gender wise distinctive or confounded roles of biological and social mores of life was underscored in a conference on “Man, Woman, and Medicine : A New View of the Biology of Sex/Gender Differences and Aging”, which was held in Berlin during 24-26 February 2006 (vide, Gender and Medicine 2006). The conference recalled that the concept of gender mainstreaming, originally established in 1997 (vide, OSAGI) and later adopted by the World Health Organization, aims at ensuring the recognition and understanding of gender in the social process and thereby counteracts gender discrimination. However, the conference also stressed the fact that the distinct concepts of sex and gender usually remain unaccepted as precise scientific categories in medical research and practice, despite their substantive relevance noted earlier (vide, Rieder and

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Lohff [eds.], 2004: 438-42). Furthermore, the conference drew attention to what it labelled the feminist viewpoint which criticizes an oppositional conceptualization of sex contra gender, and nature as opposed to nurture where the first term is privileged. Thereby these define traits as solely biological, as a “universal given” (Franklin 1997) because the move results in politically and economically discriminatory cultural and medical practices. And the ultimate consensus of the conference was that biological influences precede the social influences even though Thomas Laqueur’s (1970) comment could not be ignored that “everything one wants to say about sex – however sex is understood – already has in it a claim about gender”, i.e., it is grounded in the environment or culture. Thus it is seen that the gender issue is presently at a crossroads. The relative role of its biological and social attributes has yet to be analytically assessed and comprehended. Mere nimble hands for production, greater dexterity for organization, and better efficiency of coordination are neither exclusive somatic attributes of women nor their rarefied mental characteristics. These should denote a higher level of symbiosis of the physiological and neural characters. It would be relevant, therefore, to examine internal traits and their articulations in the brain box of women and men, from infancy – when the effects of environment and cultural practices are at their lowest ebb – to the rising tide of these effects as registered along the growth process of individuals as social beings. Only in this way may the proposition be substantiated, reformulated, or rejected: that, in the contemporary perspective of human society, woman is surely not subservient to man or holds a mere alternate role, but is superior to man. Attempts are on for deciphering these possibilities: such as, Cahill 2006; Bartok 2007; and Eby 2007. All these attempts are predicated by the point made in a recent report of the medical branch of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (vide, Wizemann 2001): “Sex does matter. It matters in ways that we did not expect. Undoubtedly, it matters in ways that we have not yet begun to imagine”.

References Cited Adams, H., 1961 in The Education of Henry Adams. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Houghton Mifflin (reprint 1918 edition). Bartek, M., 2007, Neural Masculization and Feminization : Biology 202, 1999 Final Web Reports on Serendip. C:\Documents and Settings\My documents\Gender\Neural Masculization and Fe, 9/10/2007.

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Bunyard, P. and E. Goldsmith (eds.), Gaia: The Thesis, The Mechanisms, and the Implications. Cornwall (U.K.), Wadebridge Ecological Centre. Cahill, L., 2006, “Why Sex Matters for Neuroscience”. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7: 477-84 (June). Eby, D., 2007, Gender and Brain Imaging. C:\Documents and Settings\Concept\My documents\Gender\Gender and Brain Imaging, 9/10/2007. Franklin, S., 1997, Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception. London. Gender and Medicine, 2006, vol. 3, Supplement A. Gould, S.J. and N. Eldrege, 1972, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phylectic Gradualism” in: Schopf, T.J.M. (ed.), Models in Paleobiology. San Francisco, W.H. Freeman. Hawking, S., 2001, The Universe in a Nutshell. London, Bantam Press. Kuhn, T., 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Laqueur, T., 1990, Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge. Lewin, K., 1963, Field Theory in Social Science. London, Tavistock Publishing Limited. Margulis, L., 1981, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution. New York, W.H. Freeman. Mayr, E., 1991. One Long Argument. Cambridge (Mass.) Harvard University Press. OSAGI (http://www.UN.org/womenwatch/osagi/gendermainstreaming.htm) Rieder, A. and B. Lohff (eds.), 2004, Gender Medizin: Geschlechts spezifische Aspekte fur die Klinische Praxis. Vienna and New York. Ryle, G., 1949, The Concept of Mind. London, Hutchinson. SFN (Society for Neuroscience), 2007, Brain Briefings. Washington, DC, May Issue. Stent, G., 1969, The Coming of the Golden Age. New York, Natural History Press. Wilson, E., 1980, Sociobiology. Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press (Abridged Edition, Original 1975). Wilson, E. and C. Lumsden, 1983, Promethean Era. Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press. Wizemann, T.M. 2001, Exploring Biological Contributions to Health : Does Sex Matter? (ed. M.L. Purdue), Washington DC, National Academy.

CHAPTER FOUR THE ANALYTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF TIME

Herman Minkowski, a teacher of Albert Einstein at the Zurich Polytechnic, stated in a lecture in 1908 (vide, Einstein et al 1923): “Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of unity between the two will preserve an independent reality”. This formulation is inherent to the appraisal of social reality because society as an entity is always in being and becoming. Therefore, it may appear that since the time element is built into the inevitable course of social change, which is a matter of alteration over time in the position, contour, or content of an entity, time is of no analytic significance to the appraisal of social reality. But as time is to be monitored with reference to a place and a people denoted by any societal configuration, it is only in a given place-people context that the validity of the observed or assumed course of change can be tested. Time thus attains an analytic significance even though it may appear to be obvious and therefore subsumed. It is found in this respect that social research is not always in tune with the course of interactions among place-time-people: the three dimensions of variation noted by the Sankhya school of Hindu philosophy for the appraisal of reality; namely, sthana (place), kala (time), patra (people). This is in agreement with the 4-dimensional variation of space-time in nature as mentioned at the beginning of this volume. The result is that social prognosis may be fallacious because of theories that are formulated without taking notice of the time element for characterizing society in being and becoming, and the result is ineffective, hazardous, or harmful to the appraisal of social reality. This point will be briefly examined here by referring to cases concerning India and South Asia in particular and world society in general. There are social theories which refer to a community of people at a place, or a boundary less world community, and both of these are conceived as timeless. Such a theory is contemporarily propagated in the world context against the specter of the clash of civilizations (e.g.,

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Huntington, 1996) or by preaching the gospel of hindutva in the Indian context. As is true in many other cases, these two theories are seen to emerge from an assumption of the innate separatism of the Muslim community which, contemporaneously, has been dispelled in the placetime-people perspective by scholars concerned with the historicity of Islam in that context, like A. Hourani (1991) and R.A. Abou-el- Haj (1991). Scholars like Nesar Ahmed (1991) have researched in the same vein with regard to subcontinental Indian Muslims. The assumption of the inherent separatism of South Asian Muslims is a misreading of (a) an awareness of their identity, (b) their aspirations for a better quality of life, and (c) their orientation toward expecting it from the power in situ and, failing that, acting toward achieving it by surpassing that power. This is borne out by the fact that from their advent in the subcontinent to about the 1930s, the Muslims en bloc identified themselves no less as Indians than the corresponding communities of Hindus, Parsis, etc., while they also identified themselves as Muslims as did the (analogous) communities of Hindus and others. Doubtless over time, one or another of these communities reacted adversely when grossly treated unequally, as evidenced by the emergence of the Sikh (Khalsa) community at one phase of India’s history. On the whole, however, it cannot be overlooked that like the aryas, dravidas, and other immigrant or indigenous communities (e.g., the Bhilla, Sonthal, and Mundari-speaking people), the Muslims settling down in India became Indians. The historians of Turko-Afgan and Mughal rule in India point this out in respect of the agrarian, trading, and emerging industrial systems in those days, as also of cultural (including religious) liberalization and political amity among religious communities which were encouraged by the rulers (such as, Akbar’s proclamation of a “Divine Faith” and barring exceptions like Aurangzeb) and which was enforced by the Indian people – Hindus and Muslims in the main –by means such as the Bhakti movement. Noteworthy for this period are that: (a) the spearhead of these events were the Hindu-Muslim artisans and traders with the peasantry as allies at a particular time of social change when artisanal production was making great strides, trade was rapidly expanding across and beyond the subcontinent, and the peasantry was encouraged to produce more commodity crops; and (b) the support they received for their efforts from the rulers in Delhi and the provinces. A panoramic sketch of those bright days was drawn by the present writer in 1957 (reprint, Mukherjee 1974: 174-212) and many specialized studies have been published since then. The point to underscore is that, irrespective of their affiliation to Hinduism, Islam, or any other religious faith, the “Indian” people en masse

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aligned themselves for ushering in a better quality of their life and, in this endeavour, they were encouraged and truly supported by the powers in situ. Thus, time in conjunction with the place and the people rejects the validity of the thesis of the innate separatism of the Muslim community and points toward the need for a systematic examination of the relevant processes of social change in pre-British India. During the Raj, also, the Hindus and the Muslims mainly organized the movement for freedom from British rule while the policy of the rulers was divide et impera: first by nurturing, to an extent, the aspirations of the Hindus for a better quality of life until the 1920s and then, from the 1930s onwards somewhat supporting the same aspirations of the Muslims; but invidiously for both. This fact needs no documentation. Nor is it necessary to elaborate on the fact that from the 1930s schisms were noticeable; a growing segment of the Muslim community doubted the intentions and might of the Hindu power envisaged to rule free India in the near future. It is noteworthy, however, that the workers’ and peasants’ movement for a better quality of life under the power in situ had emerged from the 1930s, and it registered the solidarity of the Hindus and the Muslims alike. Yet the overall concern regarding the unequal exchange between the two communities, flowing from the Hindus’ decisive control over the subcontinent’s economy, polity and culture, overruled amity between a substantial segment of the Hindu and Muslim middle class as well as the communal unity at the worker–peasant level. Secession from the power in offing and the formation of a Muslim Pakistan became the dominant note by the end of the first half of the 1940s, so much so that while the HinduMuslim united workers and peasants movement was particularly noticeable in Bengal and in the Punjab, the Muslims in these two regions of the subcontinent also assumed the leadership of the Muslim separatist movement away from any future Indian government that was to be formed. Pakistan, with its western and eastern wings, was thus formed in 1947 with the expectation of a better quality of life of her people at a point in time. Hereby a reverse effect in the temporal context is seen to be registered at the same place and on the same people as in pre-British India. It substantiates further the analytic significance of time and not the utility of any timeless theory. This point is buttressed by the disappearance of the east wing of Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh in 1971 after less than three decades of the formation of Pakistan as a political entity. This was engineered by an ongoing unequal exchange between the two wings of Pakistan in respect to culture, economy and polity; the west wing .

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exploiting the east (vide, Mukherjee 1973; Ahmed, E. 1983; Karim 1984; etc.). It was thus established once again in India that, instead of timeless identity as Muslims per se, its time-specific identity is real and relevant to the appraisal of contextual reality. The time-specific Muslim-identity in contemporary India elicits new forms of interaction between the Muslims and the Hindus. For example, since the 1960s, time is consolidating the Muslims and the Hindus in the social environ in such a manner as is paradoxically manifest in the form of Hindu-Muslim conflicts and clashes. A class of Muslim entrepreneurs has emerged from the circle of Muslim craftsmen, and this new class is opposed to the age-old Muslim aristocracies on one side and the rival Hindu entrepreneurs on the other. As a result, what appeared as “communal tensions” were, in fact, analogous to other forms of civil strife associated with secular economic changes and pointed to the deeper social processes at work in Indian society from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from Dispur to Dwarka (vide, Ahmed, I. 1984 and several later studies). To this economic resurgence have been added cultural and political upsurges from the concerted propagation of the slogan of hindutva, its praxis as exemplified by the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the genocide in Gujarat (Godhra) in recent times. So far, however, these changes over time are not indicative of Muslim separatism, despite discontent in Kashmir; rather they are indicative of assertions of a minority community in Indian society. Another such false theory was in vogue in the last quarter of the twentieth century, viz. Sikh separatism. As mentioned earlier, the Sikh identity emerged as a social product (i.e., a symbiosis of cultural, religious, economic and political manifestations) in Mughal India but denoted only a culture product during and after the Raj. However, it turned again into a social product in a different social setting because of “communalising” the Punjab during the 1980s and the consequent emergence of a new minority consciousness with a heavy slant toward the politicisation of the Sikh community (vide, Gupta 1985). Next may be examined the social situation where the timeless theories may not as such be invalid but are surely not relevant to the people and the place at the time of reference. A case in point is the growth of population from the 1950s which has drawn the attention of social scientists particularly from the 1970s along with the Club of Rome’s proclamation of “Limits to Growth” (Meadows et al 1972). Theories of this kind are usually based on the assumed domination of the people’s “cultural” perception and behaviour; that is, only the traditional aspect of culture– excluding its acquired aspect in one’s life time, as clearly defined by E.B.

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Tylor (1898:I.1). The former aspect has lost its contemporary relevance. The alleged motivation of erstwhile Third World people to produce large families may be a fair example in this context. A number of theories, mooted since the 1950s in order to explain the rapid growth of population in the Third World, are derived from such timeless “cultural” anchors which decisively govern the craving for sons in “traditional” societies: for spiritual solace of the Hindus after death, for social prestige and pride of the Muslims, and various other motivations for the production of “large families” (vide, Clarke and Kizer 1951; Goode 1963; Chandrasekhar 1961; etc.). Some of these theories may not be invalidated as unreal, for they embody a lurking, “culturally” conditioned desire of many in the Third World and beyond that perimeter of world society at large. But the point is that most of these people do not irrationally translate their muted desire into practice: that is, into rationality defined as a mental artifice to optimize (and not necessarily maximize) the relation between the ends and the means in a given situation. Thus, surveys in the erstwhile Third World showed that the median number of children desired by a couple was 3, as is also found contemporarily. Furthermore, intensive surveys in India elicited that the vast majority of people wanted 2 sons, as also in vogue contemporarily. And the course of begetting 2 sons yields, on an average, 3-4 children, producing couples of 2 sons and 1-2 daughters, purely because of the binomial probability of such an occurrence. The reason for wanting 2 sons by the bulk of the population is also ascertained from researches with particular reference to Indian society (vide, Mukherjee 1976) of which a synopsis may be of interest in the context of the issue discussed here. The production of only 1 son and / or 1 daughter is a matter of personal choice of the couples belonging to a thin stratum of the economically secured upper middle class. Family planning is practiced by this social stratum from long before any action and propaganda scheme was mooted in India to that effect. Contrariwise, the affluent but conservative section of Indian society – characterized particularly by the landed gentry, the big merchants, the “industrial” families, etc. – have continued to produce many children by disregarding family action and propaganda. The members of this social stratum require large progeny in order to manage their enterprise within the family circle. Another stratum of appreciable magnitude is also motivated to producing many children, but not for the accumulation of wealth. For this stratum, which is constituted of the poorest of the poor, production of many children is a necessity for survival because their young ones – boys

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and girls – also earn for the family to procure two square meals a day and, if possible, to live beyond hovels; education for them may be a cherished dream, not to be realized in reality. Lastly, there is the bulk of the population which is composed of those who are neither in a marginal/sub marginal state of existence, nor are they economically secured or affluent. In lieu of guaranteed employment for survival and for the lack of an institutionalized social security system, they require a son to maintain each old couple or the surviving partners; and because one son may not outlive the latter ones, they desire another as insurance. Rationality, in the true meaning of the term, thus makes a valid theory irrelevant in the inexorable course of time while the couples acknowledge their inability to maintain large families. This rationale of the survival and security of the majority of the people ––not to mention their latent desire for prosperity and mental progress, which are in a sequential relation in the scheme of the quality of life embodied in humankind in the course of the evolution of living species –– sets certain limits. An example of one such limit to the course of social change is the introduction of family planning action and propaganda from the 1950s; by putting a timeless theory into practice under this label social change has not been very marked in this respect. By the decade of the 1970s it was noticed in India and elsewhere that it was usually men or women with more than 4 children who flocked to the local family planning centres for advice on contraception or sterilization. Therefore, the clientele for these centres tended to dry up after a few years. But this observation did not appear to induce the “traditional” social scientists to formulate appropriate time-specific theories for the reduction of population growth at or below the replacement level. On the other hand, the organizers and the administrators who had not lost touch with ground realities, even though unable or disinclined to formulate it in the language of theory, sponsored mobile family planning centres which registered a greater success than the stationary ones by effectively covering more than the 4+ children producing couples. Yet the goal of family planning is yet not reached, as pointed out by experts on the world’s future, from the last quarter of the twentieth century (e.g., Cole, Gershuny, Miles 1978; Brandt 1980). Noteworthy in this context is that a valid theory which had been relevant in the past, becomes, in the inexorable course of time, irrelevant today, and both become invalid and irrelevant in the not too distant future. Such as, when Hindus adopted plough cultivation by harnessing animal energy along with that of the male human’s, and when, consequently, their prosperity was contingent upon the many males in the family for bringing in reasonably unlimited fields under cultivation, the foremost lawgiver

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Manu had dictated: putrate kriyate bharya (procure a wife for begetting sons). The dictum was embellished with the stipulation of the number of sons required for oblation to dead ancestors. Such material needs, buttressed by formulated spiritual demands, provided the incentive to producing “large” families which were idealized and were, at the same time, commensurate with the contemporaneous quest for a better quality of life. Likewise, when Islam was spreading over Arabia and beyond that perimeter to Eastern Europe, and coastal North Africa to Spain, as also east into Eastern Asia (including the subcontinent of India), men for warfare and subsequent military and civil administration, etc., denoted a social need which was to be met by producing many sons. Consequently, sons were valued as enhancing a man’s social prestige, leading to the production of “large” families. In such situations, a rapid growth of population was valid and relevant to meeting specific social needs in earlier times. Conversely, as the present glides toward the future, the economy, as well as the symbiotically related polity and culture, is more and more clearly found to be contingent upon the use of non-manual forms of labour for utilizing energy from mechanical, electrical and electronic sources. In accordance thereof, the material and mental valuations of life are now changing rapidly and couples (wedded or not) are showing less and less incentive to produce large families. Among them, the thin social stratum of well-to-do couples of the 1970s is the harbinger of the new social configurations. However, these newer couples are also supporting the growing demand of the masses for guaranteed employment, old age security for maintaining a high standard of living, and for an ever better quality of life. The consequence is that they tend to produce less than two children per couple en masse and may indeed prefer just one child or none at all. Although this perspective has not yet attained maturity, it is steadily operating with the American whites, the Scandinavians, the Japanese, and other affluent societies or notable social segments which record a decline in their population. This portends a situation where conventional family planning would require reversing its gears for producing more (and not less) children while the presently valid but irrelevant theories become both invalid and irrelevant. The analytic significance of time, thus underlined, is further substantiated by the propagation of such social theories which may be contemporaneously valid and relevant but are not necessary for the appraisal of contextual social reality. Flawed theories of this genre can be cited with reference to the land-man relation in the erstwhile Third World

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which is still a vital issue to people because of their colonial or semi colonial past. India is a classic example. Until the decade of the 1920s rural poverty in India was naturally attributed to the Raj. The foreign rulers and their allies, the landlords (zemindars) who were also, in many instances, the moneylenders, were identified by the national movement as the three props of exploitation and thus responsible for the consequent misery of the masses. Based on this theoretical standpoint, “village studies” were encouraged by Gandhiji and initially undertaken by stalwarts such as J.C. Kumarappa (1931). The focus of such studies, spread over the subcontinent, remained valid and relevant until the demise of the Raj but then became less and less indispensable for appraising contextual social reality. For, a qualitative change took place in India’s rural economy from the 1930s, when peasants revolted, with its repercussions on polity and culture. Rack-rented by landlords enjoying the patronage of the Raj, the peasantry was steadily indebted and ultimately impoverished and landless. However, so long as (that is, until about the first two decades of the twentieth century) arable land was still available and sub infeudation under landlordism had not yet reached a critical limit, the impoverished ryots (peasants) were settled by the zemindars on such land, albeit, with less and less tenancy rights on these holdings. Both ways, however, the limits were reached by the 1930s. On one side, low returns from fragmented landlordism (with even more than thirty hierarchic vested interests on the same piece of land, as noted for Bengal by the Land Revenue Commission [1940] for instance) in spite of added taxes on the revenues to the state, forbade revitalizing the zemindar-ryot form of land-man relationship. On the other, under the then state of the productive forces, cultivable land could not extend further for sustaining that relationship (vide, for example, Mukherjee 1957: 27-58). Subsistent farmers, therefore, diminished in number at a rapid rate but they still had to depend on the prevailing agrarian economy because commerce and industry were growing at a very slow tempo. The result was that the disintegrated peasantry could survive only by becoming sharecroppers or agricultural labourers. Culturally, as the aforementioned Land Revenue Commission pointed out, these “unpeasantized peasants” could still retain the status of being a chasi (cultivator) if they were to become sharecroppers, which they would lose and be down-graded from if they were to become kisan (agricultural labourer). Also their possibility of regular employment as farm labourers was doubtful because large-scale farming was a scarce phenomenon in Indian society in those days. However, the decision rested with the new landowners –– the nouveau riche landlords–– who had bought and who

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continued buying the holdings of these hapless peasants. They found it viable to settle the devitalized peasantry as sharecroppers at usually a half and half share of the crops grown on these holdings rather than to employ them as farm labourers because under the contemporaneous state of productive forces large-scale farming was not going to be a more profitable concern. Moreover, such farming required supervision; this was not practicable to this new class of landlords. For example, studies in undivided Bengal in the late 1930s and the early 1940s showed that the state received 0.5 to 1 per cent of the price of the yielded crop from an acre of land, the landlord (zemindar) 1.3 to 3 per cent, the big landowner (jotedar) 14 per cent, the supervisory farmer 11 to 13 per cent, the self-sufficient farmer 15-20 per cent, the sharecropper 5-8 per cent, and farm labourer 8-9 per cent for the districts of Birbhum (presently in West Bengal), Bogra and Rajshahi (the last two presently in Bangladesh, Mukherjee 1957:47n). Evidently, a qualitative change in the land-man relationship was in process from the 1930s, which called for apposite social theories even as it was consolidating over time. This became obvious from the second half of the decade of the 1940s. The predominant sector of the national movement pursued the aforementioned old theory which was still valid and relevant but did not meet the necessary conditions for a contemporaneous appraisal of social reality, whereas a minority sector of the national movement, which was primarily engaged in the mobilization of peasants and workers, adopted a theory based on the contemporaneously new land-man relationship. The latter proved crucial to this sector, gaining support in society and from the State Government of Bengal (vide, Das Gupta 1984) where the Left Front ruled state undertook extensive land reforms from 1977 to 1982, while the formerly predominant sector of national movement appeared to have lost its eminence for several reasons among which the presently discussed issue is no less important, even though it had pioneered the peoples’ movement and brought to the fore the distress of the Indian peasantry by launching the Champaran Satyagraha of Gandhiji and others way back in history. The validity and relevance of the landlord-peasant form of land-man relationship, on the wane from the 1930s, was announced by the colonial administration in 1940 as having lost its relevance to Indian society (vide, The Report of the Land Revenue Commission). After 1950 landlordism was abolished by the Indian Government but the big landownersharecropper relationship still thrived. However, changes were taking place in the state of productive forces with rapidly spreading irrigation facilities, large-scale fertilizer production, supply of improved quality

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seeds, promotion of agro techniques, and so on. The result was that largescale farming began to loom large as a viable proposition on the horizon of the agrarian economy and seemed more profitable than employing the impoverished peasantry as sharecroppers. More and more, agriculture used mechanical, electrical, and even electronic energy for production; thereby transforming itself toward becoming an industrial concern, as it is in those societies labelled developed. Acclaimed as the Green Revolution in some regions of India and spreading into others without any such label, it meant that the supervisory farmer and farm labourer relationship was being established from the 1960s onwards in rural India. Accordingly, the necessary conditions for appraising the contextual reality shifted by becoming focussed on this form of land-man relationship (vide, Mukherjee 1981; van Schendel and Faraizi 1984; Rudra 1985). Indicators of this change in the social scene were two. Capital was flowing for large-scale and/or intensive, diversified farming (like orchard farming, specialized horticulture) not only from the entrenched vested interests in rural India but also from urban India: these were the upcoming moneyed people, the city entrepreneurs and the nouveau riche– including a new brand of politicians, mega stars of the film industry, who were interested in investing in land for stable and substantial gains. On the other side, the Naxalite Movement emerged in the 1960s in West Bengal with the slogan of “Land to the Tillers”. This had been first voiced in the 1930s in undivided Bengal but had so far been contained there by the overwhelming success of Operation Barga (viz. sharecropping) with the demand of two-third share of the crop produced by sharecroppers. By the 1990s the Naxalites had spread all over India. At first confronting the big landowners in behalf of the sharecroppers in places like Bihar to Andhra Pradesh, they are now facing the capitalist farmers even in such previously inaccessible places as Chattisgarh and Jharkhand. Thus, as time goes on, not only does the validity and relevance of uncritically pursued social theories change, the nuances or even the totality of their necessity in one form or another change as well. Lastly, it would be pertinent to consider that the analytic significance of time would be jeopardized by noting temporal change within a valid, relevant and necessarily envisaged spectrum, but by implying the spectrum to be timeless at its polar ends. A case in point is the schema of tradition to modernity formulated by W.W. Rostow in The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non- Communist Manifesto (1960), sponsored by the dominant sector of social scientists in the U.S.A. and Western Europe, and diligently applied to Third World societies in the decades from 1960 to 1970 for transforming these “traditional” societies into “modern” ones. The bulk of

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Third World social scientists also supported enthusiastically the social theory incorporating this schema – not merely with a submissive orientation to their mentors but also because the schema contained valid and relevant ingredients of what were characterized as “traditional” and “modern”, and the necessity of such theories was apparent in the context of appraising reality of contemporaneous Third World nation-states. Nonetheless, the formulation and application of inert, timeless concepts of both tradition and modernity contained unreal ideas. The point may deserve some elaboration. E. B. Tylor’s definition of culture, widely accepted by social scientists, is: “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor 1898: I. 1). The contemporary version of culture is succinct but not different from the earlier one, namely, valorization of capital in human achievement and perception. From both definitions it is seen that culture contains two components: (1) what is handed down from the past, that is, tradition; and (2) what is contemporarily acquired by the members of society. Obviously perennial rejection of some traits of tradition and the acceptance of the remaining ones, as well as a selected adoption of some traits from all that would be contemporarily available for acquirement, are the mot juste of an optimally ongoing society in commensuration with the evolution of life and in the manifestation of its processes. Otherwise, society would suffer, on the one hand, from dropsy like ailment by veering toward traditionalism and would eventually be reduced to a dead society or, on the other hand, society would ultimately be atomized by pursuing a rootless culture as portended by the hippie cult of the 1960s, for instance. Indicatively, the inclination toward traditionalism was the sign of the Third World societies because of their stunted growth, in small or large measure. This was due to the historicity of their asymmetrical colonial (or semi colonial) heritage. This forbade the incorporation of a freely developing progressive economy, polity and culture in these societies unlike in the metropolitan societies which had held them in subjugation for so long. Nevertheless, the Third World (or those labelled the “Traditional Societies” by Rostow in his Non-Communist Manifesto) did not indulge in timeless vegetative reproduction: in Rostow’s words (1960:4), “both in the longer past and in recent times the story of traditional societies was thus a story of endless change”. Nor did they qualify to be timelessly “inert” societies, as imputed by T. Mende (1959) concerning Southeast Asia and Japan. In short, the assumption of timelessness in purveying tradition in the context of representation of one terminal of the tradition – modernity

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schema makes it inefficient for the appraisal of social reality while the inputs of tradition with respect to all societies past and present – including of course the erstwhile Third World societies– are valid, relevant, and necessary in the same context. Unlike conceiving tradition to be timeless for the tradition–modernity schema, its latter terminal was traced over time. G. Myrdal aptly stated (1956:3): “The major task is first to forge economic development in the underdeveloped countries to the point where a more unified world system can be built”. However, what was thus conceived as an appropriate social process with reference to two temporally apposite structural points was reckoned by the proponents of the tradition – modernity schema as if “modernity” attained the end of the journey for the progress of humankind. Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth terminates at that point which the eminent historian C.E. Black amplified as (1966:17): “The revolutionary change in man’s way of life in modern times, which for several centuries was confined principally to the Western peoples, has in our lifetime come to affect all of mankind”. Black further declared in continuation of the above: “For the first time in history, a universal pattern of modernity is emerging from the wide diversity of traditions and institutions, and people of all nations are confronted with the challenge of defining their attitudes toward fundamental changes that are world-wide in scope.” The well known sociologist E. Shils pushed the point hard into untutored minds by stating (1962:10): “Modern means being Western without the onus of dependence on the West”; and the reputed political scientist R. Bendix not only equated clearly the concept of ‘modernity’ with the flowering of capitalism in the North Atlantic region but also enjoined that nationbuilding meant “the orderly exercise of a nation-wide public authority” (Bendix 1964: 5-6,18). ‘Modernity’–conceived as the end-point in human progress– was thus construed to be the Eurocentric (or, more accurately, Euro-American centric) version of world capitalism which emerged as a social phenomenon in the immanent course of human development. The modality of its monopolization by the North Atlantic region of world society may have lingered in the caption of I. Wallerstein’s praiseworthy volume entitled The Modern World-System (V.1, 1974). Nonetheless, other regions of the world have exhibited the same kind of social formation and from about the same time; such as, the Chinese and the Indian (vide, for example, Frank 2005: 73-114, 135-192; Mukherjee 1974:174-212; Mukherjee, Rila 2005; 10-64; Mukherjee, Rila 2006). Nor is capitalism (equated to ‘modernity’) the end- all of growth and development of humankind, as has been put forward modestly (e.g., Desai

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1971 but peremptorily brushed aside by the mighty upholders of contemporaneous social science). However, this timeless version of “modernity” was criticized by positing the imminent social process between the two structural points of “traditional” and “modern”, such as by Rudolph and Rudolph in The Modernity of Tradition (1967) and Y. Singh in Modernization of Indian Tradition (1973); or by merely castigating the concept of “modernity” because, in the words of Nettl and Robertson (1968 : 42-43) : “many discussions of modernity have not been genuinely conceptual or theoretical, but mere word-juggling”. Thus, the immanent process of human life for ever longer survival, evermore security in life, ever greater material prosperity, and ever expanding mental progress is circumscribed by any imminent process of change between two structural points. This, in respect of the cases cited, denotes the illusory schema of timeless tradition to timeless modernity, and the schema leads to futile polemics. Yet, by themselves, tradition and modernity present, respectively, valid, relevant, and necessary entities for the purpose of undertaking the arduous but essential task of appraising social reality. The point then is to free them from meta scientific (or decadent scientific) considerations and to posit the issue of appraising reality in a truly objective manner. In this context, J. Lyotard – one of the pioneers of postmodernism – stated (1984:82): “Postmodernism would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (mode)”. In the context of the present discussion, Lyotard’s statement may be paraphrased as: that during the inexorable course of time the immanent social processes produce structural points which, as “modern” at a point becomes “traditional” at a succeeding point, which then locates the “modern”; and, in this manner of succession and synchronization concerning all aspects of life, the perennial quest of humanity proceeds sine die. All told, therefore, the appraisal of social reality would not be valid, relevant, necessary and efficient unless it is geared to the analytic significance of time. And the procedure for achieving this aim would be hindered or obscured by resorting to any imminent structure–process– structure syndrome, which is the prevailing concern in social science since the second half of the twentieth century, in place of an unfettered immanent process ––structure–process syndrome.

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Gupta, D., 1985, “The Communalising of Punjab, 1980-85”, Economic and Political Weekly 20 (28): 1185-90. Hourani, A., 1991, A History of the Arab Peoples. London, Faber and Faber. Huntington, S.P., 1996, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York, Simon and Schuster. Karim, A.K.N., 1984, “The Role of Middle Class in Bangladesh”, Bangladesh Journal of Sociology 2(1): 1-7. Kumarappa, J.C., 1931, An Economic Survey of Matar Taluka. Ahmedabad, Gujarat Vidyapith. Land Revenue Commission, 1941, The Report (6 vols.). Calcutta, Bengal Government. Lyotard, J., 1984, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press (Theory and History of Literature, Vol.10). Meadows, D., et al, 1972, The Limits to Growth. New York, Universe Books. Mende, T., 1959, “Southeast Asia and Japan”, Bulletin of the International House of Japan, Inc., Winter, No. 3. Mukherjee, R. (Ramkrishna), 1957, The Dynamics of A Rural Society. Berlin, Akademie - Verlag. —. 1973, “The Social Background of Bangladesh”, pp. 399-418 in: Gough. K. and H.P. Sharma (eds.), Inperialism and Revolution in South Asia. New York and London, Monthly Review Press. —. 1974, The Rise and Fall of the East India Company. New York and London, Monthly Review Press. —. 1976, Family and Planning in India. New Delhi, Orient Longman. —. 1981, “Realities of Agrarian Relations in India”, Economic and Political Weekly 16(4) : 109-16. Mukherjee, Rila, 2005, “History, Memory and ‘Being There’ in ‘Europe’ from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries”, pp.10-64 in: Mukherjee Rila and Kunal Chattopadhyay (eds.), Europe in the Second Millennium : A Hegemony Achieved?, Kolkata, Progressive Publishers. —. 2006, Strange Riches: Bengal in the Mercantile Map of South Asia. Delhi, Foundation. Myrdal, G., 1956, An International Economy. New York, Harper. Nettl, J.P. and R. Robertson, 1968, International Systems and the Modernization of Societies. London, Faber and Faber. Rostow, W.W., 1960, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non Communist Manifesto. Cambridge (Mass.), Cambridge University Press.

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Rudolph, L.I. and S.H. Rudolph, 1967, The Modernity of Tradition : Political Development in India. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Rudra, A., 1985, “Agrarian Policies of Left-Front Government in West Bengal”, Economic and Political Weekly 20 (23): 1015-6. Shils, E., 1962, Political Development in the New States.’ The Hague, Mouton. Singh, Y., 1973, Modernization of Indian Tradition: A Systemic Study of Social Change. Delhi, Thompson Press (India) Ltd. Tylor, E.B., 1898, Primitive Culture, Vol. I, London, John Murray. Van Schendel, W. and A.H. Faraizi, 1984, Rural Labourers in Bengal, 1880 to 1980. Rotterdam, Erasmus University (CASP 12).

CHAPTER FIVE THE SYNOPTIC APPRECIATION OF TIME

Aseptically defined, any social structure is a construct of interrelated components of a social organism; a social entity is a thing which has definite individual existence in the organism; and a social institution is an established law, custom, practice, etc., in a society. Changes in a social entity, institution and similar components of a society are usually considered over time but frequently with reference to a familiar structure (say, si) at a proximal time-point ti which terminates at a distal time-point tk into another familiar structure (say sk). Noticeably, at an intermediate time-point tj the course of change had delineated another familiar structure (say, sj). This means that in-between and over time ti to tj and then from tj to tk, the structures were subject to social processes (say, pij, pjk). Process is thus defined as a course toward “being done” which is to involve the change from one structure to another. As a result, the structure si changed to sj and sj to sk. A syndrome si–pij–sj–pjk–sk is delineated accordingly, which may be generalized as the syndrome s–p–s, standing for the ongoing syndrome of structure–process–structure. As per this syndrome, the etymology of the most proximal s1 and the most distant sn structures are subsumed to be delineated, but that happens very seldom; for s1 is usually located in the hoary past and sn is in the womb of the future. Therefore, failing to discern the terminal structures, the social processes preceding si and following sk are not usually considered for fear of being criticized as indulging in conjectures on the former count and speculation on the latter. The result is that failing to circumvent such premonitions, the appraisal of reality is confined to the immediately noticeable si–sk syndrome. That presents a distorted or truncated appraisal of social reality because of the failure of strictly adhering to a synoptic appreciation of time. A case in point, referring to a social entity, is researches on Indian villages, called sometimes “Village India”. The village is conceived as exhibiting an intertwining of agriculture and handicraft production and thus operates as the repository of the primary production of material goods and their elementary secondary production by means of human manual labour and by harnessing animal labour. The structure si is characterized in

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this manner, which the social scientists categorize as denoting rural-urban dictotomy because the latter is concerned with production beyond primary and rudimentary secondary material goods and the corresponding way of life in the material and mental manifestations of the people concerned. Changes are then examined, over time, within the village structure with reference to its urban counterpart. Changes in the light of the entry of urban lifestyles and the consequent acculturation of the rural with respect to the material culture are also examined, as are those resulting from the extension of the rural sphere of Weltanchauung in the context of the metamaterial aspect of life and living. The process of change is recorded as producing the product labelled rural-urban continuum which denotes the structure sj. Social scientists may proceed further to indicate the process of ruralurban assimilation which has happened or is happening in West Europe and North America since the middle of the 20th century and which is in prospect for the erstwhile Third World since the beginning of the 21st century. This changing process is due to the introduction of non-manual forms of human labour as well as the introduction of mechanical, electric and electronic energies into what was regarded as primary production undertaken by the manual form of human labour with the accessory of animal labour for drawing the plough, etc. The result is that agriculture as a mode of production is being transformed into a wing of the industrial mode of production. But, in that case, the s-p-s (structure-process-structure) syndrome is extended as si-pij-sj–pjk syndrome; in view of what is forthcoming as a new structure sk. This manner of the synoptic appreciation of time for the appraisal of social reality would be commonly regarded as speculative. Correspondingly, as for the transformation of si to sj and then to sk with reference to the rural-urban dichotomy to the rural-urban continuum and, then, toward rural-urban assimilation, the presentation of “Village India” by the s–p–s syndrome deserves attention at its proximal status si because of the emergence of agrarian villages from arboreal villages (viz. sh) by way of food collection and rudimentary production by means of cultivation in the yard of a hut. The epic Ramayana (as also the Mahabharata to a significant extent) describes villages which are essentially, if not exclusively, arboreal in character. Indeed, the first tangible evidence of “Village India” (which represents the intertwining of agriculture and handicraft production) comes from Kautilya’s Arthasastra which devotes a chapter entitled gramasthapana (that is, establishment of a village). Yet, as suggested from the chapter here that deals with the land problem in West Bengal, up to the first half of the 18th century large tracts of India was covered by forest; agrarian villages, assumed to represent India as presenting “Village India” postulated by a host of writers and

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politicians from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to M.K. Gandhi, emerged thereafter. However, even if these cursory evidences are found acceptable by the academia and the s–p–s syndrome of si–pij–sj–pjk–sk is extended as sh– phi–si–pij–sj–pjk–sk, the question still remains: what were the social processes preceding, and leading to, the formation of sh and succeeding and moving beyond sk. This calls for an alternate syndrome of process– structure– process, briefly, p–s–p, in place of s–p–s. But that would likely be denounced as conjectural and speculative. Nevertheless, as will be discussed later here, such tempting flights into conjectures and speculations can be subjected to the rigour of sciencing by the application of the probability concept in the field of social science. This is imperative to the progress of sciencing any aspect of reality and therefore has been employed for the categories of natural, earth and biological science of Science per se. Meanwhile, an example with reference to an assumed primordial social institution, namely, marriage, may be examined like the previous one of social entity. Among the Hindus only one form of marriage is viewed to be prevalent since a long time, which is named prajapatya. Its structure may be designated si because it involves essentially two social components subject to following obligations and consequential privileges between the counterparts. It stipulates the obligation of the bride’s father to offer his daughter to the bridegroom while it is the privilege of the bridegroom’s father to procure a wife for his son. The bride is adorned with ornaments (salankara) by the father and she brings a dowry (jautaka) to the bridegroom’s family. Previously, giving ornaments and paying a brideprice (in place of dowry) for marriage by the groom was the custom among the tribals, even though these tribals may declare themselves Hindus (Hindu Scheduled Castes); but, in course of detribalization of the professed Hindu and non-Hindu tribals and their upliftment [sic] along with that of the traditional “lower classes”, the prajapatya form of marriage prevailed among them. However, for some time now, a couple is occasionally found to contract a civil marriage under the Civil Marriage Registration Act even though such a marriage receives “acceptance” in their families and the Hindu society only after performing, post hoc, the prajapatya form of marriage. Nonetheless, an exclusive performance of the civil marriage is not of a negligible occurrence these days, as the modern state demands increasingly a civil ceremony as a prerequisite for the granting of papers of citizenship-such as passport etc. Therefore, as a succeeding structure to si, the structure denoting the civil form of marriage, viz, sj, has to be reckoned with.

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Correspondingly it should be noted at the other end of the spectrum of marriage–forms that the prajapatya form of marriage, although inclusive of a conglomerate, did not present the unique structure as si in the past. Kautilya in Arthasastra enumerated the practice of 8 forms of marriage, among which 5 (including prajapatya) were recorded as “sacred” (dharmabibhaya) and 3 as “secular”. Manu in Manusmrti enumerated the same number and categorization of the 8 forms of marriage but demoted 2 forms (not, of course, the prajapatya) from the sacred to the secular category (vide, Mukherjee, P., 1994: 52-61). The structures involved in all these forms of marriage may be denoted as a conglomerate (sh) which is distinct from and antecedent to the exclusivity of the prajapatya form (vide si). Now, notice has also to be taken of a union beyond marriage, viz. “living together”, at the distal time-point as presenting the structure sk. Although the incidence of this form of union is as yet scarce in Indian society, the process pjk should not be left out of the schema of changes in marriage forms as denoting, at any rate, the social process in view. Correspondingly, the structure of any form of group marriage or promiscuity (say, sf) prior to the proximal time-point recording (sh) should not be lost sight of because evidence is there of antecedent promiscuity or group (= clan, i.e., gotra) marriage in ancient India– the latter embracing the brahmanas as well. Such as, in Adi Parba of the Mahabharata is noted the Svetaketu Upakhyanam in sloka 113, as narrated by King Pandu to Queen Kunti (obtained from the translation by H.J. Resnick – vide, online edition). Long ago women were not at all restricted. Women were self reliant. They were not faithful to their husbands, and yet their behaviour was not irreligious. For that was the religious principle of those former days. ... It is Svetaketu, according to Vedic authority, who established relations on human sexuality. He did so out of anger... Once a brahmana grabbed the hand of Svetaketu’s mother in the presence of her husband and ordered her, ‘Come, let us go, just the two of us!’ Svetaketu happened to arrive on the scene and when he saw his mother being led away as if by force, he exploded with rage. Seeing his son so furious Uddalaka told him, ‘My dear son, don’t become angry. This brahmana is acting according to the principles of religion. Women of all social orders are unrestricted on the earth. Just as cows and bulls mix freely, so do the creatures of all species and social groups.’ But the sage’s son could not tolerate this principle, and he established a moral law for male and female among human beings, but not the other creatures ....Since then that law has been in effect.

Svetaketu thereby established marital morality. It follows that while the Svetaketu anecdote is unique to ancient India or was indicative of a pre-marital/ marital structure sf , the process pf(h) should not be rejected

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except at the peril of failure to collect knowledge on society and people systematically. Thus, the p-s-p syndrome looms larger for a comprehensive appraisal of social reality before the social scientists than the s-p-s syndrome unless their empiricism is flawed. This once threatened the growth of physical science, too, in the name of positivism (vide, Max Planck 1933: 67-199). What is required in this respect is to provide the context for human existence and the fulfillment of potentials of humankind in the course of the evolution of life. Next, briefly, will be narrated the cardinal (not ordinal) valuations for the survival and realization of the inherent potentiality of the human species, the manner in which the two objectives can be met, and how in that perspective the open-ended p–s–p syndrome of social processes and structures overrides the basic limitation of the closed s–p–s syndrome of social structures and the social processes inbetween. Obviously, the issue is fundamentally related to the synoptic appreciation of time. Viewed from this perspective, individuals in group formations are seen, since the advent of humanity, to have experimented with themselves to devise ways and means for the realization of four cardinal values for humankind: survival of the species; security in the life-span of individuals; material prosperity in order to ensure survival, security and the continual expansion of the range for wholesome living; and mental progress for unfolding the potential of each and every individual –these are fundamental for the evolution of life through successive speciation. These values were made explicit in the period of the Enlightenment in Europe, but they may be found as well in eastern (Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and other philosophies. Indeed, the cardinal valuation is endemic to all configurations of human society identified by their place-timepeople characteristics. Even those idealist philosophers who take the extreme position that this world is unreal or unimportant are unable to bypass this cardinal (not ordinal) valuation because it is human specific and, therefore, refers to all societies and people. The Indian philosopher Shankara, to whom the world was maya (illusion), established monasteries at the four corners of his world (for him this was India, i.e. Bharat, as it was known in his time) to preach his doctrine of mental progress and, thus, could not avoid the issues of survival, security and wholesome living. Another Indian philosopher, Yagnavalkya, who inductively proclaimed neti neti (neither this nor that) concerning the physical and the material universe in order to establish the reality of God (iti), amassed considerable wealth and desired to distribute it between his two wives in order to ensure their survival, security and wholesome living. Similar examples may be cited in the context of other

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brands of idealist philosophies that refer to various spiritual (religious) explanations of reality. The inescapable cardinal valuation for humankind suggests that social reality should be appraised in particular reference to three basic dimensions of human society: culture, economy and polity for monitoring its status in any place-time-people bound configuration of human society. The three dimensions must also be treated symbiotically for the following reasons regarding this proposition. 1. Culture is succinctly defined as valorization of capital in human achievement and perception: a definition which is in consonance with Tylor’s classic elaboration of culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man (sic) as a member of society” (Tylor 1898, I;1). However, the individual’s Weltanchauung (which is literally but not quite substantively translated as the “world view”) does not form a space of random variations. If it did, culture would have lost its meaning for society. This means that there must be one or another kind of commonality among individuals in their Weltanchauung. These commonalities formed in the context of appraising social reality, and behaving accordingly, identify human groups as mutually distinct but interrelated culture products. The culture products, in their turn, not only identify different and interrelated configurations of human society but also the mutually distinct and interrelated components of respective configurations. Thus, at a point in time, the culture products define the social structure because they operate as its articulated segments and, in that way, hold a configuration of human society in being. Further, at that time-point and by the extension of their properties in the same manner as noted, the culture products hold the world society at large in a state of inertia. It follows that all these products do not change by themselves because, by definition, culture is not capable of self-revision or self- production: it registers the world-view which may or may not change over time. In short, culture denotes the gravitational force to hold a configuration, as well as the world society in assemblage of the former ones, together at a time-point ti. 2. Corresponding to and contemporaneously with the static role of culture in a state of inertia in society, dynamism is introduced in society by the kinetic force of the economy for evermore realization of the aforementioned cardinal values for humankind. The economy deals with relations among concerned humans in material goods and services and their mental synchronization in the context of the apposite mores of culture.

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3. Simultaneous to the static role of culture and the dynamic role of economy, polity portends the potential force to facilitate that change in society that is ushered in by the economy and is acceptable by culture or to thwart the course of change by invoking specific cultural traits and complexes or even revert the course of change enforced by the economy to the status quo ante by harping on some innate and immutable cultural “values”. Society thus operates at a point in time ti as in being of a specific structure and over the time period tij as becoming by means of some process(es) toward another structure sj. The appreciation of time in this manner signifies that the mechanics of society would be unrestrictedly delineated by the syndrome of initial process (= carrier of cause) – resulting structure (= effect of cause) – subsequent process (=carrier of another cause), and so on; that is, by noting the already cited notations phi before si , pij , after si to sj , pjk after sj to sk, and so on. Alternatively and restrictedly, the mechanics of society will be delineated by the syndrome depicting a structure (= given effect of some un deciphered cause)– process (= deduced and thus known carrier of cause)– structure (= discerned effect of that cause); that is, by reckoning si, pij, sj , where the three notations present known objects and the processual condition for their existence but not pgh to sh, phi to si, and so on, presenting not yet known but knowable objects and conditions for their presence at and near the proximal terminal of the time spectrum and, correspondingly, pjk to sk, pkl to pl, and so on at and near the time-spectrum’s distal terminal. Obviously, the structure – process – structure syndrome is readily comprehensible because culture products are matters of observation and the social structure, which is composed by a selection of culture products in light of their rated supremacy to depict it, is a matter of deduction. Also, when the existence of the structures is known, as in the illustrated case of si–pij–sj, the process–which results from the actions of the economy and polity against the background of culture–would be deducible from the two deduced structures. But when the processes are concerned with not yet discerned structures at or near the proximal and the distal terminals of the time-spectrum, the processes would have to be a matter of inductive inference to be drawn from whatever information is available from researches into so far not fully known but knowable fields of unchartered structures and processes. The latter procedure regarding the never-ending quest for knowledge is the imprint of Article 10 of the Kenopanishad, as translated by P.C. Mahalanobis by emphasizing the letter “k” in “Know” to refer to “Knowledge” per se (Mahalanobis – posthumous, unpublished): I do not think that I Know very well,

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However, for the reason stated earlier, the spontaneous reaction is to adjudge and accept the s–p–s syndrome which is regarded to be demonstratably valid; such as, in the case of the example cited of si–pij–sj. Correspondingly, the p–s–p syndrome, which takes note of the cited example of phi and pjk, where sh and sk are not deciphered as yet, is declared conjectural at and near the proximal terminal of the timespectrum and speculative at and near the distal terminal of the same spectrum. Doubtless, evidences are there of treating the unchartered proximal and distal regions of the time-spectrum, in lieu of clearly ascertained structures and processes they are composed of, as, for example, the space for wild flights of imagination in order to account for them. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that science cannot make any progress without imagination while the latter can be geared to the rigour of the former. Otherwise, the causality of a phenomenon will remain unexplored to its fullest possible extent and predictability in its context will be zero, even though exploring these two aspects of a phenomenon constitutes the bedrock of sciencing. This motivation of scientists is noticeable from the days of the earlier pioneers in sciencing in China, India, Arabia and Greece to those in the medieval times, the early modern era and the modern age; such as, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, Marie Curie, Lewis Henry Morgan, etc. It has also been clearly stated from the early twentieth century, at any rate; such as in the famous 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britanica (Whethan 1911: 396), by Max Planck in Where is Science Going? (1933), and Stephen Hawking in The Universe in a Nutshell (2001). Richard Feynman’s comment on “uncertainty” and “indeterminacy” in the arena of physical science, and also in reference to Newtonian physics which was reputed to be nomothetic, would be of interest to quote below because these two matters are commonly believed to be specific to ideographic “social studies” elevated to the status of social science (Feynman et al 1963: 38–9, 10): Today we say that the law of relativity is supposed to be true at all energies, but someday somebody may come along and say how stupid we were. We do not know where we are “stupid” until we “stick our neck out”, and so the whole idea is to put our neck out. And the only way to find out that we are wrong is to find out what our predictions are. It is absolutely necessary to make constructs.

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. . . [W]e cannot predict the future exactly. This has given rise to all kinds of nonsense and questions on the meaning of freedom of will, and of the idea that the world is uncertain. Of course we must emphasize that classical physics is also indeterminate, in a sense. It is usually thought that this indeterminacy, that we cannot predict the future, is an important quantum – mechanical thing, and this is said to explain the behaviour of the mind, feelings of frequent will, etc. But if the world were classical – if the laws of mechanics were classical – it is not quite obvious that the mind would not feel more or less the same. It is true classically that if we knew the position and the velocity of every particle in the world, or in a box of gas, we could predict exactly what would happen. And therefore the classical world is deterministic. Suppose, however, that we have a finite accuracy and do not know exactly where just one atom is, say to one part in a billion. Then as it goes along it hits another atom, and because we did not know the position better than to one part in a billion, we find an even larger error in the position after the collision. And that is amplified, of course, in the next collision, so that if we start with only a tiny error it rapidly magnifies to a very great uncertainty . . . Speaking more precisely, given an arbitrary accuracy, no matter how precise, one can find a time long enough that we cannot make predictions valid for that long a time. It is therefore not fair to say that from the apparent freedom and indeterminacy of the human mind, we should have realized that classical “deterministic physics could not ever hope to understand it, and to welcome quantum mechanics as a release from a “completely mechanistic” universe. For already in classical mechanics there was indeterminability from a practical point of view.

Thus it is that the solution to the quandary lies in removing all shades of imaginary distinctions between nomothetic and ideographic appraisals of reality and no more regarding the former as the prerogative of natural (and, succeedingly, of earth and biological) science while the latter was the basic characteristic of social science. P.C. Mahalanobis made this point in 1956 (unpublished): “Statistics is the universal tool of inductive inference, research in natural and social sciences, and technological applications”. Stephen Hawking reiterated the same in 1988 (pp. 59-60): The uncertainty principle had profound implications for the way in which we view the world. In general, quantum mechanics does not predict a single definite result for an observation. Instead, it predicts a number of different possible outcomes and tells us how likely each of these are. (Emphasis added – RM). However, controversies persist on the efficacy of the inductiveinferential vis-a-vis the deductive-positivist approach towards the appraisal of social reality. In that context, Karl Popper is often cited in

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support of the latter viewpoint. But Popper applied his “falsification” tenet for denouncing the pursuit of “logical positivists” as well as for circumscribing any exclusive scope to the inductive method of observation and conclusion (Popper 1985). Nevertheless, this “falsification” tenet of Popper is a part and parcel of the inductive method for rejecting false notions and accumulating true knowledge by means of rigorously designed, scrupulously executed, and thus verified observations and conclusions –– such as, the earth is spherical and not flat. Moreover, Popper had underscored earlier the point “to use any method in searching for truth” (Popper 1968: 15) while his more recent writing on the “World of Propensities” (1990) is akin to the probability approach on which rests the proliferation of post-Newtonian ventures for acquiring knowledge. Similar evidence may be adduced to emphasize the point that all categories of science in the family of Science per se should be treated as probability sciences and not some of them as nomothetic and others as ideographic. Even so, the contemporaneous situation is such that the appraisal of social reality may be reduced to an ideational undertaking. In that case, a synoptic appreciation of time is irrelevant. Alternatively, the contemporary move is there to undertake the appraisal of reality on a base of mathematically conceived rigour of probability. In that case, the undertaking rests upon an unhindered synoptic appreciation of time.

References Cited Feynman, R.P.; Leighton, R.B.; Sands, M., 1963, The Feynman Lectures in Physics, Vol. I, Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. Hawking, S., 1988, A Brief History of Time. Great Britain, Bantam Press. —. 2001, The Universe in a Nutshell. London, Bantam Press. Mahalanobis, P.C., 1956, unpublished note written in Tokyo, Japan. —. posthumous, unpublished manuscript. Mukherjee, P., 1994, Hindu Women : Normative Models. Calcutta–Delhi– Hyderabad, Orient Longman. Planck, M., 1993, Where is Science Going? London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Popper, K., 1968, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York and Evanston, Hougton Mifflin. —. 1985, Unended Quest. La Salle (Ill.), Open Court. —. 1990, A World of Propensities. London, Routledge. Resnik, H.J, (accessed 29 May 2008), Online @ w.w.w.philosophy ru/library/asiatica/indica/itihasa/mahabharata/eng/01_adi. html.

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Tylor, E.B., 1898, Primitive Culture. Vol.I, London, John Murray. Whethan, W.C.D., 1911, “Science”, Encyclopaedia Britanica 24: 396-404, Cambridge, (U.K.), Cambridge University Press.

INDEX OF NAMES

Abou-el-Haj, R.A. 58, 70 Adams, H. 46, 54 Ahmed, N. 58 Akbar 58 Altekar, A.S. 25, 41 Ambedkar, B.R. 23, 24, 41 Aurangzeb 58 Bacon, F. 46 Banfield, E.C. 5 Bartok, M. 54 Basu, T.P. 16 Bendix, R. 68 Black, C.E. 68 Bohr, N. 45 Brandt, W. 62 Buchanan-Hamilton, F. 15 Buhler, G. 27 Bunyard, P. 46 Cahill, L. 54 Chakraborti, A.K. 13 Chandrasekhar, S. 61 Chatterjee, B.C. 1, 74 Chattopadhyay, K.P. 25 Clarke, J.E. 61 Cole, S. 62 Copernicus, N. 80 Crick, F. 46 Damle, Y.B. 35 Das Gupta, B. 65 Desai, I.P. 32, 35 Dey, L. B. 16 Dumont, L. 30 Dutt, B.N. 25 Eby, D. 54 Einstein, A. 57

Eisenstadt, S.N. 7 Elphinstone, M.S. 37 Enthoven, R.E. 37 Faraizi, A.H. 66 Feynman, R.P. 80 Frank, A.G. 68 Franklin, S. 54 Gadgil, D.R. 30 Gait, E.A. 28 Galileo, G. 80 Gandhi, M.K. 64, 74 Gargi 50 Gershuny, J. 62 Glass, D.V. 30 Goldsmith, E. 46 Goode, W.J. 61 Gore, M.S. 35 Gould, S.J. 47 Gupta, D. 60 Haldane, J.B.S. 4 Hansen, B. 3, 5 Hawking, S. 80 Herrera, A. 6 Hourani, H. 58 Huntington, S.P. 57 Huque, A. 12 Hurlbert, A.C. 53 Huxley, E. 11 Ibbetson, D.C.J. 37 Jeanne d’Arc 50 Jolly, J. 25 Kane, P.V. 25 Karim, A. K.N. 59

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Index of Names

Kautilya 26, 76 Kenyatta, J. 9 Ketkar, S.V. 25 Kuhn, T. 45 Kumarappa, J.C. 64 Lassen, C. 25 Leontief, W. 6 Lewin, K. 53 Ling, Y. 53 Lohff, B. 53 Lumsden, C. 47 Lyall, A. 28 Lyotard, J.F. 69 Mahalanobis, P.C. 12, 30, 79, 81 Malinowski, B. 9 Manu 27, 62, 76 Margulis, L. 46 Marx, K. 24, 25 Mathai, M.O. 23 Meadows, D. 5, 60 Meillassoux, C. 51 Mende, T. 67 Mendel, G. 80 Messarovic, M. 6 Miles, I. 62 Moliere 41 Mukherjee, P. 26, 76 Mukherjee, Ramkrishna 1, 28, 31, 32, 34, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 66, 68, 76 Mukherjee, Rila 68 Myrdal, G. 68

Planck, M. 77, 80 Popper, K. 81, 82 Rangachari, K. 37 Redfield, R. 35 Resnick, H.J. 76 Rieder, A. 53 Risley, H.H. 28,37 Robbins, L. 7 Robertson, R. 69 Rogoff, N. 30 Rokkan, S. 7 Rostow, W.W. 7, 66, 67, 68 Rudolph, L.I. 69 Rudolph, S.A. 69 Rudra, A. 66 Ryle, G. 46 Sen, S.R. 30 Senart, E. 25 Shankara 77 Shils, E. 68 Silone, I. 5 Singh, V.P. 24 Singh, Y. 69 Srinivas, M.N. 27, 30, 31 Stent, G. 45 Svetaketu 76 Tagore, R. 9, 16 Thurston, E. 37 Tylor, E.B. 28, 60, 67, 78 Uddalaka 76

Nehru, J.L. 30 Nesfield, J.C. 37 Nettl, J.P. 69 Newton, I. 80, 82 Oldenberg, H. 25 Pareto, V. 7 Parsons, T. 29 Pestel, E. 6

Valmiki 23 Van Schendel, W. 66 Vedavyasa 23 Wallerstein, I. 68 Weber, M. 5, 7, 24, 25, 29, 30, 35 Whethan, W.C.D. 80 Wilson, E. 47 Wizemann, T.M. 54

SUBJECT INDEX

Bariloche Report 6, 20 Caste 7, 24, 25, 27, 28. 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 75 x In itself 28, 31, 38 Class 10, 40, 53, 59, 60, 65 x Class in caste 31, 32, 36 x Caste in class 31, 36 x Class for itself 39 Caste categories x Caste Hindu 23, 24, 33, 36, 37, 38, 39 x Untouchable 23, 33, 40, 42 x Varna 25, 26, 27, 42 x Jati 25, 26, 27, 28 x Panchama 26, 27 x Aam admi (ordinary people) 37, 38, 39 x Aam janta (same, but referring to the masses in this case) 37, 38, 39 x Dalit 23, 38, 39 x OBC (other backward classes) 33, 40 x Scheduled caste 33, 37, 75 x Scheduled tribe 33 x Forward caste 33, 39 x Social class 29, 30, 31 x Mandal Commission 24, 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40 x Economically backward forward caste 39 x Creamy layer (OBC, SC, ST) 37, 40 x Gujjar 40 x Minna 40

Club of Rome 5, 60 Culture 74, 78, 79, 82 Energy 2, 3, 6, 7, 28, 31, 47, 48, 50, 51, 62, 63, 66 x Electric 51, 52, 63, 66, 74 x Electronic 51, 52, 66, 74 x Kinetic 2, 6, 28, 31, 47, 48, 78 x Manual 50 x Mechanical 50 Gender 45, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55 Growth 4, 5, 6, 10, 16, 21, 30, 54, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 71, 77 x Limits to growth 5, 71 Grow more food campaign in Britain 4 Industrial Revolution 50 Labour 2, 10, 24, 25, 26, 35, 49, 50, 51, 52, 63, 73, 74 x Male animal 49 x Male manual 50 x Female manual 50 Lamarckianism 46, 48, 52 Land and landed hierarchies 1, 2, 74 x Arboreal-rural dichotomy 14, 20 x Land consciousness 15 x Land-hunger 2 x Rural urban assimilation 74 x Rural-urban dichotomy 3, 73, 74 x Rural-urban continuum 3, 74 x Bargadar (share cropper in Bengal) 2, 11, 12, 13 x Jotedar (big landholder in Bengal) 11, 12, 16, 65

88

Subject Index

x Kisan (agricultural labourer in India) 11, 12, 64 x Zemindar (landlord in Southasia) 11, 12, 16, 64, 65 x Ryot (settled peasant in India) 11, 12, 64 Land wise priorities x First food then industry 1, 4, 15, 19 x Industry for food and prosperity 4 x Save forest(ry) from onslaught of civilization 15 x Save land for agriculture 4, 15, 16, 19 x Save land for industry 4 x Save land for industry and agriculture 15, 16, 19 Marriage 17, 26, 75, 76 x Group or clan (gotra) marriage 76 x Prajapatya 75, 76 x Civil marriage 75 Mau Mau movement 9 x Acholi province and people 9, 10, 11 Muslim separatism 60

Place-time-people 6, 57, 58, 77, 78 Postmodern(ism) 69 Rationality 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 19, 29, 61, 62 Sanskritisation 30, x Westernisation 30 x Dominant caste 31 x Homo Hierarchicus 30, 41 Sexuality 76 Space-time 4, 57 Social structure 8, 77, 78, 79 Social institution 73, 75 Syndrome 69, 80 x S-P-S or structure-processstructure 74, 77 x P-S-P or process-structure-process 80 Tebhaga Andolan 2, 13 Time 57, 73, 80, 81, 82 Tradition 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72 x Tradition-modernity 66, 67, 68, 69