Relational approaches to poverty in rural India: social, ecological and technical dynamics

Poverty is now widely recognised as multidimensional, with indicators including healthcare, housing and sanitation. Yet, relational approaches that foreground political-cultural processes remain marginalised in policy discourses. Focusing on India, we review a wide range of relational approaches to rural poverty. Beginning with early approaches that focus on structural reproduction of class, caste and to a lesser extent gender inequality, we examine new relational approaches developed in the last two decades. The new approaches examine diverse ways in which poverty is experienced and shapes mobilisations against deprivation. They draw attention to poor people’s own articulations of deprivation and alternate conceptions of well-being. They also show how intersecting inequalities of class, caste and gender shape governance practices and political movements. Despite these important contributions, the new relational approaches pay limited attention to technologies and ecologies in shaping the experience of poverty. Reviewing studies on the Green Revolution and wider agrarian transformations in India, we then sketch the outlines of a hybrid relational approach to poverty that combines socio-technical and -ecological dynamics. We argue that such an approach is crucial to challenge narrow economising discourses on poverty and to bridge the policy silos of poverty alleviation and (environmentally) sustainable development

Mobilizing Against GM Crops in India, South Africa and Brazil

This paper explores the national and transnational character of mobilization against GM crops in India, South Africa and Brazil in the ten-year period to 2005. By examining the contexts and practices of mobilization across the three countries, and in particular the complex, often fraught, local and global connections, the paper examines the diverse mobilizations that have occurred. The paper argues that to understand these processes, particular national political and economic contexts must be appreciated, alongside how the GM debates articulate with other foci for activism and the complex and often fragile nature of alliances that make up activist networks. The paper shows how the debate about GM crops has become a much wider one: about the future of agriculture and small-scale farmers, about corporate control and property rights and about the rules of global trade. In sum, a debate not just about the pros and cons of a particular set of technologies, but about politics and values and the future of agrarian society.ESR

Merchants of knowledge: Petty retail and differentiation without consolidation among farmers in Maharashtra, India

This article focuses on the intermediary figure of the village‐level petty retailer of chemical inputs, providing an account of the everyday relationships of farmers with transnational and domestic agribusiness capital. Retailers are figures from whom farmers purchase seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemicals. The article traces the rise of village‐level retailers in western Maharashtra, India, since the 1990s, and finds that Maratha (a dominant landholding cultivator caste) households have ventured into retailing. Further, farmers depend on retailers for credit, technical knowledge, and for the sale of their harvest. By analysing the pressures and risks of petty retail, visible in interactions with farmers, the article argues that even as retailing provides avenues for upward mobility to petty agricultural commodity producers, the trade is too volatile for the gains to sustain. Thus, the entry of Marathas into petty retail is akin to an attempt at class differentiation but without consolidation.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144696/1/joac12249.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144696/2/joac12249_am.pd

Defining Secularism in the Particular: Caste and Citizenship in India, 1909-1950

Drawing on recent debates on secularism, this article addresses the methodological problem of writing histories of secularism in context. It considers the experience of India. I argue that a study of the issues from which secularism emerged historically offers a way out of the secularism-religion binary which, in India, has obscured contemporary problems related to democracy. These issues had to do with ensuring the public representation of minorities, both religious and caste, regardless of their relative size or social power. Scholarship on the minority question has begun with the constituent assembly and that on secularism centered on the category of religion. In contrast, this article argues that caste was central to the formulation of Indian secularism and requires a longer historical perspective. It maintains that secularism reified the religious minority and, in so doing, denied both its potential to overcome marginality and the legitimacy of the community in the nation

Buddhism in India challenging brahmanism and caste.

New Delhixiii, 314 p.; 22 cm