The Politics of Caste in West Bengal by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317414759
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Caste and class in everyday life: the chasi and the khet majur

Shantipara had, at the time I conducted my survey, a total of 158 households with a population of 838. In total, 127 households who had lost land to the Tata project had joined the anti-land acquisition movement, while 21 households had collected the compensation. The remaining 10 households had not been directly affected by the land acquisition, either because they were already landless or because their land fell outside the area acquired. 148 households belonged to the Mahishya caste. Seven households were made up of members of the Chakrabarty family of Brahmans, while three belonged to the SC Bagdi caste.

Literacy among the chasi inhabitants of Shantipara stood well above the state average at nearly 90 per cent, slightly lower among women than among the men. Newspapers were widely read, and the village club had a small library of books in Bengali. Most families reported that they considered their life to have been good and improving, in material terms, in the years preceding the land acquisition. Although the distinctive and highly diversified agricultural region in which Singur is located has a very long history of commercialised agriculture (Kelly 1981), most Mahishya families told me that it was only with the transformations brought about by the modernisation and diversification of agriculture over the past three or four decades that their quality of life had improved dramatically. Agricultural transformation was, in turn, routinely narrated to me as the key driver of a range of other desirable local social transformations that had come about within the span of just a few generations. As agricultural techniques and input had developed from traditional to modern, and cultivation gone from monocrop to multicrop, the Mahishya of Shantipara had gone from ‘walking barefoot’ to ‘wearing shoes’; from living in mud huts to building concrete houses; from dreaming of one day owning a bicycle to actually driving a two-wheeler; from crowding around a battery-driven transistor radio to watching Bollywood films on colour TV; and from being illiterate to pursuing higher education in the town or city.

Nearly all the families who owned land had been self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs and had generated a marketable surplus. While monthly incomes are notoriously difficult to assess in a semi-agricultural and semi-informal economy, and underreporting in surveys is common, a surveyed household (comprised by an average of 5.3 persons) had an average monthly income of just over INR 4,100. Just over 85 per cent of the houses were of bricks, with roofs of concrete or tiles. On average, a house in Shantipara would have approximately three rooms. Nearly two-thirds of the households had Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards, but nearly half of the households also reported having some savings. Given that the survey was conducted more than two years after the de facto land acquisition, and that many families had had to live off their savings during this interval, it is likely that both the prevalence and size of savings would have been even greater prior to 2006.

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