Political science iconoclast James C Scott, who died on June 19 at 87, helped us understand subaltern silence or the ostensible passivity of the powerless. Peasant rebellions are evidence of class conflict. But Scott emphasised that the absence of protest does not mean the acceptance of oppression. There is, he noted, a richness to everyday ways in which peasants resist.
Scott’s famed contribution to the social sciences was bestowing agency to peasants, who Marxists worried were not becoming a “class for themselves” to organise and rise. His sociological analysis of why state schemes fail is another.
If I can borrow a word from Scott’s works that summarises his fascinating knowledge contributions, it is “seeing”. How the powerless see the state. How the state sees society. Scott helped me see my PhD field – Gudalur in Wayanad, in the Nilgiris.
As a PhD student at Madras University in the late 1990s, I first encountered Scott in Ramachandra Guha’s The Unquiet Woods. Guha’s historical sociology of the Chipko movement drew on Scott to explain prosaic forms that peasant protest and resistance assumed in Uttarakhand.
In his Weapons of the Weak, Scott suggested that the “emphasis on peasant rebellion” was misplaced. They are rare and usually crushed. Even when peasant revolutions succeed, a more coercive and hegemonic state follows.
More important and interesting are the everyday forms through which peasants resisted labour extraction, taxes and rents – slander, feigning ignorance, arson, foot-dragging and pilferage. Not needing coordination and organisation, these were for Scott a “form of individual self-help”. In today’s social media parlance, do-it-yourself techniques. They stop short of open confrontation with elites.
But DIY does not cut it for a PhD. Theories and methods other researchers used become yours to adopt. You test a theory in your field of choice or allow the field to choose a theory that illuminates it. Inspired by Guha’s call to academics to study natural resource conflicts, and his novel use of Scott’s everyday resistance, I set out to study peasant conflicts and ecological change.
My research problem was why Gudalur’s forests were getting denuded, and conflicts arose, after the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s government in 1969 passed an agrarian reform law, the Janmam Abolition Act. Janmam was a form of zamindari in feudal Kerala, where chieftains had hereditary land rights. A large, forested area of Gudalur was the Janmam property of the Nilambur Kovilakam, a princely family.
The Janmam Act sought to give ryotwari patta or land title to the small peasants who were sharecroppers, nullify large forest leases the Janmi made to planters, and notify the remaining area as reserve forests.
Seeing like a state
At first, I was lost in Gudalur. The anomaly was not a feudal Kerala system of land tenure making its way into Dravidian territory but the fact that what seemed like green biodiverse spaces were actually peasant home gardens. Lands reserved for forest notification or notified as reserve forests were degraded eucalyptus patches. On bigger plantation leases, I saw small panchayats.
The resistance by peasants and planters to the Janmam and Indian Forest Acts was institutional. The place was litigious and how! Land cases were filed in the Munsif Court, Magistrates Court, High Court and the Supreme Courts.
I had to see Gudalur differently. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) became my bedside book and field manual. I asked, like Scott, why do well-intended state schemes like the Janmam Act fail? Some of its provisions were still in operation the 55 years since.
The settler peasants are at once powerless and powerful – an untitled tenurial constituency, but an empowered vote bank. Forests have disappeared and the place is now a hotspot for human-elephant conflict. From a forested space, Gudalur has become a fiscal space. Local Adivasi groups like the Paniyas and Kattu Nayakas are collateral. Their lands have been occupied or transferred to settler peasants. They now work as wage labour on settler farms.
For Scott, state schemes to improve human welfare fail a lot. Authoritarian and well-intended state projects have been derailed. His reasons were, besides political hubris, the very methods of statecraft – “simplification” and “legibility”.
“Simplification” is the state’s creation of a standard grid to record and monitor “illegible” local systems like land tenure customs.
Legibility then is the invention of units, whether individuals or their environments. Think cadastral surveys, freehold tenure, reserve forest, kilometre or acre. Society, Scott wrote, has the capacity “to modify, subvert, block, and even overturn the categories imposed upon it”. But sometimes, society’s capacities can confound scholar and administrators. It can subvert one category like a reserve forest but embrace another state category like a ryotwari patta.
In Gudalur, peasants and planters seek legibility as revenue units – but on their own terms. The Janmam Act’s failure is not the futility of the simplification of illegible tenure and custom. Instead, state simplification has made forests and peasants “illegible”. Today, there are many more peasant “units” seeking “legibility” as subjects. Along with planters, they desperately wanted to be tax and revenue subjects to legalise their land holdings. And forests have emerged as “illegible”.
Seeing like the subaltern
I was sad that my thesis was not the definitive South Indian edition of Scottian everyday peasant resistance. There was some evidence of everyday resistance in Gudalur like arson in forest plantations. Peasants preferred organised direct action and litigation. But I was happy that Scott’s definitive work on statecraft and its tragedies became relevant to my field.
Thesis bound and defended, I started a post-doc in 2005. During my field work then and later as faculty at ATREE, an organsation concerned with environmental conservation and sustainable, socially just development, Scott’s everyday resistance became relevant in several ways. The subaltern, it became clear, also resisted nonprofit experts and their perceived interests.
I travelled with T Ganesh, my ecologist senior, to the Ascot Wildlife Sanctuary in Uttarakhand. We wanted to understand competition over summer and winter pastures between livestock and ungulates such as musk deer and goral. We met with an old Bhotia woman from a sub-alpine village in the Johar Valley. She had descended with kith and cattle to the lower reaches at Munsiari.
Bemused by our queries on ungulate competition with livestock for pasture, she said, “All of them graze on our pastures…. why do you differentiate?” I realised this cultural disinclination to differentiate livestock from wildlife was both a representation of pastoral reality and resistance to the interest of wildlife conservation experts.
This cultural ecology from the Himalayas is substituted by more political ones in the Western Ghats. Such political ecologies go beyond an unwillingness to differentiate between species: they invisibilise and diminish large mammals. For instance, the Kani, a tribal community within the Kalakad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve, in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, said, contrary to much evidence, that there were no tigers.
Though insecurity over possible displacement or relocation explains this claim, an ideological basis prevails. I got an acute political sense of why the Kanis claimed tiger absence when I heard that an official board at the entrance of the reserve had a forest map in which the Kani villages found no mention. This was symbolic resistance that the Kanis were mounting against the object of the sarkar and scientist’s attention – the tiger.
In my many human and wildlife conflict related conversations with the Toda pastoralists of the Nilgiris, they told me things about tigers that are unbecoming of this feted and fearless large cat. A certain “cultural politics”, or symbolic contestation of tiger presence and behavior is palpable.
“The forest department has released the tigers into our pastures,” they say. I ask, how do you know and why are they doing this? “Because they want to control the forests and force us out.” “We know the tiger is from the zoo. Authorities there couldn’t afford to feed them and so they were released here.” “Wild tigers will kill if they attack. But our buffaloes manage to return injured. Which self-respecting tiger will attack and not kill?”
Tigers are represented here as weak weapons of the state; their wildness is contested.
The repudiation by the Bhotia of what they pastorally perceived to be an inappropriate differentiation and discrimination between livestock and ungulates and the invisibilisation and diminishing of tigers by the Kani and Todas, I realised, were casual subversions of elite wildlife conservation interests and agendas. They were a form of resistance indigenous people unceremoniously injected into everyday conversations with conservation nonprofit experts.
Scott and seeing
In Gudalur, settler peasants want the state to see them as legitimate subjects, but the state is unable to because of the Janmam Act’s own dated provisions of entitling original farmers – a novel policy consequence. In Uttarakhand, indigenous peasants dismissed what we environmental nonprofits see as wild and worthy of protection – a consequence of exclusive and unjust conservation policy.
How differently or more does Scott want us to see? In what was probably his last article published earlier this year, Scott has invaluable advice relevant not just to political scientists, but also interdisciplinary environmental researchers. He urges us to go beyond conventional nation-state boundaries.
His main point is that there are “many different constructions of space that are more meaningful and powerful than the mere division between nation states. Some of these constructions are essentially environmental: for example, a watershed, a highland area, a delta, or a swamp. They are more likely as geographical distinctions to exercise a good deal of power over the livelihoods and subsistence of the people who live in these settings.”
Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2010) resulted from such an ecological and expansive configuration of a research universe. He explored self-governance in Zomia, the highlands that stretch from Central Vietnam to northeastern India. Had Scott written this book 10 years earlier, I may have seen Gudalur differently – as the southeastern reaches of an ecological zone called Wayanad, the land of swamps and rainforests. The whole of Wayanad would have been my field geography. The Kerala and Tamil Nadu portions would have lent themselves to comparative research.
Siddhartha Krishna is Lead, Ecosystems and Human Well-Being Programme, ATREE.
