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Mint
3 days ago
- Politics
- Mint
Jaipal Singh's memoir reveals the legacy of an outspoken Adivasi leader
On 19 December 1946, Jaipal Singh, who was one of the six Adivasi members of the Constituent Assembly (out of a total strength of 389), rose to address his colleagues on the 'Objective Resolution". The latter had been introduced by Jawaharlal Nehru five days earlier and dealt with the soon-to-be-independent India's status as a sovereign democratic republic. 'This Resolution is not going to teach Adibasis (sic) democracy. You cannot teach democracy to the tribal people; you have to learn democratic ways from them. They are the most democratic people on earth," he said to B.R. Ambedkar, chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution, and the others gathered. 'What my people require… is not adequate safeguards as Pandit Jawahar Lal (sic) Nehru has put it. They require protection from Ministers… We do not ask for any special protection. We want to be treated like every other Indian." The foresight, as well as prescience, in his statement induces goosebumps 80-odd years later. This incident appears in Lo Bir Sendra: A Hunter in the Burning Forest, a memoir of sorts that Singh wrote in 1969, a year before his sudden death. The handwritten manuscript—which remained in the custody of an Italian anthropologist for several decades—was discovered and published in 2004 by the late Jesuit priest and tribal rights activist, Stan Swamy. Recently, editors at Navayana, the Delhi-based indie publishing house, retraced the original text back to a student of the Italian scholar. Comparing the copy of the handwritten manuscript with the first edition, they corrected any errors and inconsistencies, added back the missing passages, and came up with a new, revised and annotated edition in consultation with Rashmi Katyayan, the Singh family lawyer. The intellectual sleuthing behind the making of this book is itself a feat of patient editing in the otherwise rushed landscape of trade publishing in India. Although Lo Bir Sendra is more like a series of episodic reminiscences rather than a structured memoir, the reader gets a strong sense from it of the extraordinary man Singh was. Born in 1903 in Takra Pathantoli, a village near Ranchi (then in Bihar and now in Jharkhand), to a Munda family, he was lucky to be the beneficiary of a progressive education. Recognising his potential, W.F. Cosgrave, the principal of his school, arranged for Singh to study in England. Once there, he not only shone for his academic merit at Oxford but also received a prestigious 'Blue" for his excellence in hockey. Eventually, Singh would lead the hockey team (which included stars like Dhyan Chand and Shaukat Ali) to victory in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. The first Adivasi to qualify for the Indian Civil Service, Singh would also be the first to quit the profession. He married Tara Majumdar, granddaughter of W.C. Bonnerjee, the first president of the Indian National Congress. Later, he became a Member of Parliament and led the Adivasi Mahasabha party. His second marriage to Jahanara Jeyaratnam (also a politician) in 1952 was widely noted, too. Singh started with a corporate job, then taught at Achimota College in former Gold Coast (now Ghana), founded a magazine for Adivasi issues (published in Mundari, among other languages) and was the principal of a college for Indian princes, before entering politics. A staunch opponent of Congress elitism, he was forced to accept an alliance with the party later in life. Yet Singh never hesitated to air his opinions. He objected to the constitutional provision that advocated prohibition, arguing that alcoholic drinks like rice beer, consumed widely by Adivasis, is an intrinsic part of their culture. He spoke up against Article 13(1)(b), which defined peaceful assembly as one 'without arms". For the Adivasi, Singh argued, the bow and arrow are part of their attire and identity—not necessarily seen as arms and weapons. For all his anti-establishment politics, Singh knew how to have a good time. Equally popular among Indian and British glitterati, he always managed to land on his feet. He was a victim of intrigue and envy fuelled by Indian babudom or the petty outrage of racist sahibs but made short work of these conspirators. For instance, in 1953, in a typical act of bravado, he organised a two-day cricket match between the Prime Minister's XI, led by Nehru, and the Vice-President's XI, led by S. Radhakrishnan, for the PM's National Relief Fund for flood victims in Bihar, Andhra State and Uttar Pradesh. Nehru scored 1, and the match ended up in a draw. As The Hindu reported, 'Jaipal Singh threatens that Parliamentary sporting activity has come to stay. He thinks that sporting events would bring all groups and parties much closer and enable them to consider national problems from a broader rather than narrow sectional viewpoint." Half a century after his death, Singh must be turning in his grave, considering the state his country is in.
The Wire
30-07-2025
- Politics
- The Wire
In Pursuit of Peasant Histories and Futures
Navyug Gill The narrative of a benevolent colonialism championing a stalwart peasantry in Punjab is belied when examined through the prism of how caste, labor, and capital transformed the equation of rural power. An excerpt from Navyug Gill, Labors of Division: The Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab (New Delhi: Navayana, 2025). How did the peasant become dominant in Panjab? This book investigates the history and politics of the emergence of the peasant and its implications for a new form of hierarchy in northwest colonial India and the globe. British officials regarded Panjab as a quintessential agrarian province inhabited by a uniquely diligent, prosperous, and 'martial race' of cultivators. They understood the peasant to be 'the predominant unit of society,' insisting that the 'most important consideration of all' was to implement policies designed to bring about agrarian improvement and uplift. This discourse of what I term 'colonial benevolence' was underpinned by an ostensibly moderate land revenue demand and protective legislation in favor of those deemed to be peasants coupled with the massive expansion of canal irrigation and extensive recruitment into the military. Such a claim can be found in other contexts too where select forms of patronage and infrastructure are still hauled out as ironclad signs of progress regardless of their authoritarian conceptualization, implementation, and deleterious long-term impact. At its center is the enduring notion that this peasantry experienced nearly a century of unparalleled prosperity. Rather than the immiseration, displacements, and insurgencies that mark other regions of British India, Panjab is seen in much of the popular and even scholarly literature as a bastion of loyalty enjoying an unrivaled period of stability and growth. Yet the narrative of a benevolent colonialism championing a stalwart peasantry is belied when examined through the prism of how caste, labor, and capital transformed the equation of rural power. The claim that peasants remained largely unscathed if not deliberately empowered under British rule takes for granted both the category of 'peasant' and the nature of agricultural production, as well the intent and operations of the colonial state. At a deeper level, it normalizes particular class and caste hierarchies by presupposing a continuity of social and economic relations from the pre- to the postcolonial. Navyug Gill Labors of Division: The Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab Navayana, 2025 One indication of this process is the dominant interpretation of caste-based land ownership in contemporary east Panjab. According to the 2011 census, over 30 percent of the population are Dalits mainly of the Chamar and Mazhabi castes, the highest proportion in all of India. Despite mostly engaging in the labors of cultivation, however, they own less than 4 percent of the total cultivated area. Instead, the vast bulk of land is held by members of the Jatt caste, which accounts for around a third of the population. A similar situation exists in the rest of pre-1947 Panjab, in Haryana, and to a lesser extent in Himachal Pradesh (India) and in west Panjab (Pakistan). Such disparities are usually explained through the ahistorical alignment of identity with occupation: Jatts are peasants while Chamars and Mazhabis have been landless laborers since antiquity. The postcolonial distribution of economic and political power in the countryside is thus reinforced by colonial assumptions about the inherent and timeless qualities of rural Panjabis. I challenge the givenness of this agrarian order and the surreptitious denial of its modern transformation by asking three interrelated questions: How did colonial racial, fiscal, and legal policies align the category of 'peasant' with hereditary caste identity? What kinds of contestations over collective status, access to credit, and land ownership did this generate among different groups of Panjabis? And what did this mean for the ways that global capitalist processes became implicated in local forms of knowledge and power? In the following chapters, I de-familiarize the idea of the division of labor through an examination of the labors involved in creating and sustaining a series of ideological and material divisions: from the colonial separation of agricultural and non-agricultural tribes to the dissonance between Panjabi, Urdu, and English meanings for various aspects of cultivation, the antagonism between so-called upper- and lower-caste Panjabis, the actual division of crops between landholder and laborer, and the global conceptual split between peasant and proletarian. This book uncovers the tangled politics of how and why colonial officials and ascendant Panjabis together disrupted existing conceptions of identity and occupation to generate a new form of hierarchy in the countryside masked as traditional. The result was the creation of a modern group of hereditary landowning peasants alongside other groups engaged in cultivation yet relegated to the status of landless laborers. Writing a history of the division of labor opens up possibilities for rethinking the conventions of at least three avenues of historical research. The first is that this book questions the very category of 'peasant.' Perhaps the most prominent and durable figure in modern history, peasants have long been a fount for a vast assortment of global arguments in virtually every discipline in the humanities and social sciences. All manner of colonialist, nationalist, socialist, developmentalist, and now environmentalist discourses have sought to analyze, condemn, extol, corral, and improve peasants at each position along the political spectrum. Dedicated publications such as The Journal of Peasant Studies and later the Journal of Agrarian Change rose in prominence in the 1970s due to the increasing importance of their object of inquiry. After a brief intellectual interregnum, the peasant dramatically reappeared in the global public imagination in late 2020 with the massive farmer and laborer protests against a proposed set of neoliberal laws in India, leading to an outpouring of new thinking and writings. Still, underlying much of this literature is the notion that the peasant simply exists everywhere, a general if not generic figure traced backward from the contested origins of modernity to the recesses of primordial times. Yet these two claims—ubiquity and antiquity—at the very least ought to provoke a pause. The obviousness of the peasant is precisely what demands reexamination in terms of what this category meant in different historical contexts, which groups came to occupy it, and how it shaped not only rural political economy but what we think we know about the past. It also means that contemporary calls for sympathy or solidarity relying on supposedly ancient pedigrees need to be critically assessed and, where appropriate, established on another basis altogether. The taken-for-granted status of the peasant is itself an element in its historical emergence. This book also calls into question the centrality of the colonizer-colonized divide for histories of the colonial world. Such a stark, totalizing binary was in fact generated by the racial logic accompanying European conquests from the late fifteenth century onward that regarded societies in Africa, Asia, and America as inherently inferior. While anticolonial movements inverted this logic as part of their struggle to resist and expel foreign domination, generations of thinkers and writers drew on this inheritance to contest the justificatory discourses of colonialism by demonstrating the opposite, that colonized peoples were rational, accomplished, dynamic, civilized, and worthy of freedom. Indeed, postcolonial critique can be seen as an attempt to challenge the obvious as well as insidious arguments, values, and narratives that emerged through the prolonged colonial encounter. Yet, as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire trenchantly remind us, there have always been doubts about the presumed unity and coherence of those deemed 'colonized.' Not only did certain elite local actors ally with European powers, but others partially benefited in limited ways from colonial rule, while internal fissures over class, caste, religion, ethnicity, and language were fitfully subsumed (though never silenced) as part of most mainstream anticolonial nationalisms. This book confronts the chimera of the colonized by foregrounding the competition and contradictions that developed within Panjabi society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is therefore not another account of colonized versus colonizer, a repeated instance of heroic peasants fighting against the British Empire. Instead, I explore how colonialism generated a sustained, multifaceted, and unpredictable societal conflict from which certain groups identified as peasants emerged atop a new agrarian hierarchy to the exclusion and exploitation of others who were consigned to a fate of landless laboring. Racial unity might be every bit as hollow as racial inferiority. Lastly, this book offers an alternative genealogy of the emergence and operations of global capital. If the transformative quality of the bourgeois mode of production is indisputable, the debate over its provenance, essential features, and trajectory has been equally inconclusive. Over a hundred years of intense political and scholarly writings have in various ways explored what actually constituted capitalism proper, how and where it began, and what it meant for people in different parts of the world. Much of this revolved around competing interpretations of key texts from the oeuvre of Karl Marx alongside the supposedly exemplary experience of western Europe. Rather than attempt to settle this debate or dismiss it out of hand, I take inspiration from the diversity of perspectives and embrace the contingency it suggests as inherent to all forms of radical change. This requires drawing on Marx differently, not as an authoritative means to adjudicate the truth of capitalism, but as a historical figure offering profound and penetrating yet inescapably elliptical insights into the changing world he was able to witness. 'Marx foresaw the foreseeable,' remarked Antonio Gramsci, and not everything, everywhere, and for all time. The burden of expectations—of capital to behave in universal ways and of Marx to provide universalist answers—is called into question by attending to the specificity of the transformation of Panjabi society under colonial rule. This book traces how the domains of economy and culture were in fact constituted and intertwined to generate a new, unusual, and variable form of capitalist accumulation and social hierarchy. Its point of departure is to engage in the temptation of comparison without smuggling in a modern version of the scale of civilizations. Far from a simple criticism, Labors of Division tries to think with as well as across and through Marx to make sense of a distinctive global context. Perhaps a final contribution of this book lies in the scope as well as approach toward historical sources. At first glance, much of what I rely on will appear familiar to historians of colonialism and agriculture: settlement reports, government circulars, famine commissions, census data, and legislative acts. I also make use of less common materials such as nineteenth-century dictionaries, statistical surveys, Christian missionary texts, local newspapers, and Panjabi proverbs. The old adage about interpretation—that two scholars can reach different conclusions from the same piece of evidence—should be conspicuous. My aim has been to critically engage this conventional archive by contrasting it with other kinds of sources and posing different kinds of questions. On the one hand, in the course of research I have uncovered certain untapped materials, from vernacular petitions for changing status and a contract between a landholder and laborer to intimate details about rural family consumption patterns. On the other hand, I draw on Sikh and Bhakti sacred verses as well as insights from a range of twentieth-century individuals such as Bhimrao Ambedkar, Mangoo Ram, Harnam Singh Ahluwalia, Muhammad Hayat Khan, and Kapur Singh. In this way, juridical rulings and quantified data are put alongside poetic supplications and personal recollections from archives in Chandigarh and New Delhi to London and beyond. Near the end of the book, I analyze the writings of Marx along with Adam Smith, Vladimir Lenin, and Karl Kautsky as theory rather than history. A non-Europeanist engaging with ostensibly European thinkers is a deliberate gesture of refusing the boundaries of both discipline and geography, especially when those ideas have so profoundly shaped the material perception of regions such as South Asia. Indeed, their concepts have an import beyond mere accuracy; they circulate the globe through the very grammar of political economy. In this way, I confront the fundamental questions of access—Who reads whom, and writes about what?—in order to defy a hierarchy of knowledge that masquerades as neutral expertise. Monopoly has no place in historical inquiry. I therefore claim neither an entirely novel archive nor an entirely novel method. Rather, this book is an attempt to critically read across diverse genres to produce a narrative—empirically grounded and theoretically apt—that reinterprets major issues in modern Panjabi society in conversation with larger themes in global history. The tension between what constitutes the particular and the general remains abundantly indivisible. Navyug Gill is a professor of history at William Paterson University, USA. His first book, Labors of Division: The Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab, was published in South Asia by Navayana in 2025. He tweets at @navyuggill. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
The Hindu
05-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Homeland security is a global mission, says author Rhys Machold
The concept of 'homeland security' came to the fore after the 9/11 attacks in New York. Rhys Machold, a senior lecturer with the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow, has been studying a government's response to terrorism for a decade, including India's after the terror attacks of 26/11 in Mumbai in 2008. He travelled across countries and met arms manufacturers, dealers, police trainers, politicians for his new book, After 26/11: India, Palestine/Israel, and the Fabrication of Homeland Security (published by Navayana). Edited excerpts from an interview. Question: From 26/11 to Pahalgam, how has homeland security evolved in India as a response to terror attacks? How has the public perception about the importance of homeland security as a priority area changed? Answer: As I detail at length in the book, in 26/11's aftermath, the term 'homeland security' and institutions and practices associated with it, not least of all the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, went from the peripheries of public and strategic debates in India to centre-stage. In the weeks and months that followed 26/11, a new kind of common sense emerged, namely that India lacked homeland security and needed to urgently replicate the alleged successes of other states in developing a modern and robust homeland security approach, with the U.S. and Israel being cited as some of the most notable examples. In the years thereafter this apparent new consensus did produce some tangible developments, including new institutions and reforms to internal security and policing in many parts of India, often styled in a language of police and security modernisation. Overall, I would say that in the aftermath of terror attacks in India, the public tend to make demands for greater domestic security preparedness, and since 26/11 these are often styled in a language of homeland security. Yet, some attacks provoke such demands in quite uneven or inconsistent ways. For instance, the 2011 bombings at Dadar West, Zaveri Bazaar, and the Opera House in Mumbai killed 26 people and wounded another 130, but produced limited public outcry and political responses in terms of improving domestic security infrastructure. The recent attacks on Pahalgam have provoked broad public outcry over various security lapses or failures of the Indian state and unleashed a media-driven jingoistic fervour, which has in turn been used to rationalise the Indian state's subsequent mass arrests of individuals in Jammu and Kashmir as well as housing demolitions there and most recently military attacks against Pakistan. Q: Though your book elaborates on the homeland security journey of India till 2014, several terror attacks have taken place thereafter as well. How do you perceive India's response to them? A: The general trend is that although such events are most commonly blamed by state officials and media outlets on Muslims and Islamist groups and sometimes on Pakistan-based authorities or the Pakistani state itself, the tendency in state responses to terror attacks across India is to treat them as relatively exceptional breakdowns of social order rather than routine events. Long-term and systematic planning, both at the State-level in places like Maharashtra but also at the Union-level, has been more difficult to sustain after the occasional political backlash in the wake of terror attacks wanes. For instance, while 26/11 gave rise to discussions about the need for basic reforms of general policing across India, this imperative never really materialised. At the same time, it is important to stress that the jingoistic fervour that events like 26/11 and the Pahalgam attack produces, particularly against Muslims in India and in Kashmir as well as in relation to Pakistan, have been steadily building since 2014 and I see no sign of this abating anytime soon. Q: You have disrupted the conventional idea of homeland security. Could you elaborate on why you say that homeland security is not a universal concept? A: What I mean by this is to say that although 'homeland security' claims to be a new way of organising domestic policing and security that can in principle be put into practice anywhere and work in a similar fashion across different parts of the world, the post-26/11 experience belies this claim substantially. Despite the considerable and ongoing efforts to reproduce the American and Israeli homeland security states in the Indian context, the ways in whichinstitutions ofinternal security continue to operate in India are in certain respects radically unlike those in the U.S. or Palestine/Israel. Indeed, my book helps to elaborate the ways in which efforts to reproduce the homeland security state in India since 2008 have been centrally concerned with mediating and attempting to overcome various forms of difference, whether historical, cultural, institutional or political. But as I show, these efforts aimed at overcoming difference have generally come up short. That being said, I also emphasise in different ways that the mission of homeland security as a governing regime and political project has never been contained within national borders. Instead, it has always been understood by its architects as a global mission that seeks to remake much of the world in its image. Thus, homeland security is universalist even though not being universal in the sense of being the same everywhere.
