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The Journal of Peasant Studies

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Everyday Resistance or Routine Repression? Exaggeration as a Statagem in Agrarian Conflict

D. Gupta Version of record first published: 08 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: D. Gupta (2001): Everyday Resistance or Routine Repression? Exaggeration as a Statagem in Agrarian Conflict, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 29:1, 89-108 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/714003934

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Everyday Resistance or Routine Repression? Exaggeration as Stratagem in Agrarian Conflict

D I PA N K A R G U P TA

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In a deeply stratified rural society a good stratagem on the part of those in power is to exaggerate the shortcomings of the lower classes. Such exaggerations justify domination over, and the curtailment of respect for, the rural poor. James Scott misunderstands the disempowering nature of this stratagem and believes the exaggerated tales related by the rich about the poor. This is what leads Scott to romanticize these stories as everyday forms of resistance by an empowered rural poor, and thus to ignore what such tales really are: sources of routine repression by the rich. Drawing on fieldwork in rural Uttar Pradesh, this article demonstrates how propertied classes systematically exaggerate the failings of poor peasants in order to justify the routine repression exercised over them.
E V E RY D AY F O R M S O F R E S I S TA N C E O R D O M I N AT I O N ?

There can be no doubt that peasants steal, lie and cheat like everybody else. But my fieldwork among the peasants of India leads me to the view that they indulge in these petty acts of larceny and theft very rarely and with hardly any cumulative effect. In fact, stories of peasant thefts and insubordination abound in rural India, and most of these tales can be heard in the homes of landlords and rural capitalists. The latter advise outside researchers never to trust the lower orders because they are congenital thieves, liars and worse. The question one often asks is: why do the propertied classes find it necessary to circulate such exaggerated tales about
Dipankar Gupta, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi- 110067, India. The author is grateful to Professor S.J. Tambiah for arranging a seminar at Harvard University in 1998, where he read an earlier version of this paper. He benefited greatly from the discussions that followed. Subsequent inputs from Gavin Smith of the University of Toronto and from N.J. Demerath of the University of Massachusetts helped refine the argument. The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.29, No.1, October 2001, pp.89108
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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peasant lawlessness? Why do they have to magnify small misdemeanours to such gigantic proportions? Why do they often also fabricate stories about peasant mischief for no apparent reason? On the basis of my own research conducted in the western Uttar Pradesh villages of India, I have now come to the conclusion that exaggeration is a political stratagem, and everyday exaggeration is one of the important ways in which the dominating propertied classes justify their routine repression of poor peasants and agricultural labourers. It is with this in mind that I revisited James Scotts influential work, Weapons of the Weak [1985], and found to my surprise that Scott had uncritically fallen for these stratagems of the rich. This is what leads Scott to conclude, on the basis of these exaggerated stories (which he believes completely), that peasants are indeed always and everywhere poachers and thieves. That he gives petty theft a positive valuation is what separates Scott from his privileged informants. Where the landlords saw a host of shifty Fagins, Scott sees a homegrown variety of Robin Hoods unobtrusively emptying out upper-class wallets. Although James Scotts work has had an enormous theoretical impact at many different levels, it has left its most telling impression on the study of rural uprisings.1 It is undeniable that in the recent past, scholarship on peasant movements has tended to exhibit a certain left-wing partiality. It was not that analysts of agrarian movements idealized peasants as upholders of leftist purity; rather, there has been a tendency to view rural uprisings only through a revolutionary optic. Consequently, some peasant movements were perceived as sell-outs to the rich and propertied classes, others were seen as having been betrayed by dubious class allies, yet others were regarded as having achieved a measure of success, though largely in terms of unintended consequences, and finally there were the successful ones that had a huge impact. In all these instances, however, the trajectory of each peasant mobilization was plotted along a graph that had as its coordinates the class character and stages of history. One way or another, these movements were seen as being part of a larger struggle to which the Left could contribute meaningfully, both in theory and in practice. It is precisely with this kind of approach that the framework associated with James Scott everyday forms of peasant resistance has broken. His focus has shifted the analysis of agrarian mobilization away from overt revolutionary action undertaken on a large scale by mass movements to the domain of small-scale individual acts of resistance carried out usually clandestinely on a daily basis. Not the least important claim he has made in this connection is that, in the end, the latter agency is not just as effective as the former in terms of transforming the existing system but actually more so. It is this claim that is subjected to scrutiny in the analysis which follows.

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REBELS WITHOUT A CAUSE?

James Scotts seminal work, Weapons of the Weak [1985], makes much of the earlier style of scholarship in which peasant agency and revolutionary change were perceived as synonymous appear tired and repetitive. There is in his book a strongly stated sympathy for peasants, but this time devoid of any pronounced, or even surreptitious, partisanship with the Left. From now on peasants are to be seen as rebels without an ideology, and this in Scotts opinion is not just ground reality, but is also empowering for them. For Scott, therefore, it is important to understand peasant unrest not in terms of grand revolutionary uprisings sweeping governments in or out of power but rather as less dramatic, almost imperceptible forms of action: that is, atomized and isolated acts of crime, larceny, gossip and slander. Peasants steal apples and chickens from the landlord, commit acts of petty sabotage, indulge in rumour-mongering and make off when they can with grain from the threshing floor.2 The very daring among them even steal motorcycles. Yet all these small acts of crime are not wasted. History gathers them up in its sweep and, over time, consolidates these petty acts of theft to form a reef. It is from such apparently insignificant emplacements, then, that the more determined and effective peasant assaults on landlordism are launched [Scott, 1985: 36]. This outcome is not an empirically derived or verifiable one, moreover, but rather something that is posited as an inevitable effect of the longue dure. In any event, this aspect does not detain Scott for long. His main emphasis is on how little things done on an everyday basis can go a long way to alleviating the overall plight of peasants. Peasant agency, in other words, needs no ideology from the outside, least of all a left-wing one. There is a kind of mothers-milk ideology that is endogenously secreted every time a peasant steals and pilfers. All this consolidates over time to create large-scale peasant uprisings. And even when they do not make for such grand episodic events, these petty acts of everyday resistance multiplied manifold make utter shambles of policy [Scott, 1985: 35]. It is to these petty acts of insubordination that we must then turn our attention if we want to understand how peasants resist on a routine basis the oppression of the superior classes. If there are not too many recorded instances of peasant rebellions, therefore, it is precisely because these peasants are constantly setting aright the indignities from which they suffer by recourse to routine, small-scale and everyday acts of rebellion [Scott, 1985: 243]. So the landlords and rich rural capitalists are right after all: peasants are not to be trusted. James Scott accepts this upper-class characterization, yet manages in true Hollywood fashion to provide a happy ending. For Scott, therefore, peasants may indeed be thieves and poachers (pace the allegations by the rich), but all this only goes to show that a

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dynamic heart still beats inside those rude gunny-sacks. The peasants still have some stuffing left in them after all. Quite clearly, Scott has fallen victim to tendentious exaggerations in his conceptualizing of the everyday resistance of the poor.3 There is every reason why the propertied and the dominant classes should exaggerate. It is by exaggerating the flawed features of the oppressed that ideological justification for domination is constructed and secured. In ancient Indian sacerdotal texts, for example, women were portrayed as being inherently promiscuous and brimming over with unbridled sexuality. They had to be tamed and domesticated, therefore, or else they would run wild. This justified both the oppression of females and child marriage in traditional India [Chakravarti, 1995]. Marina Carter [1995: 107] also notes how indentured labourers who migrated to Mauritius were characterized as rogues, whores, and vagabonds. David Souden [1978: 24] finds that indentured migrant labour to the West Indies and North America was also viewed in the same way. Such workers were considered to be rogues, vagabonds, cheats and rabble of all descriptions, raked from the gutter and kicked out of the country. Carter, however, goes further, and correctly sees such exaggerated characterizations of the dominated as part of a strategy which defended the deprivation of rights and comforts to a community [Carter, 1995: 107]. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that many of Scotts propertied respondents should routinely exaggerate the criminal tendencies among the poorer people. This helps to consolidate and perpetuate their domination over the labouring classes. To substantiate the point that Scott has been taken in by tales woven by the superior classes we need to pay careful attention to the details of Scotts material. First, we must examine who is making the claim about everyday peasant theft and sabotage. Second, we must also enquire as to the extent of this so-called everyday resistance. Do these many acts of petty theft and robbery really add up to make what Scott [1985: 35] calls an utter shambles of policy? I find that these two very critical aspects of Scotts arguments have generally been accepted at face value, and thus have not been scrutinized closely enough. Failing such an examination, Scotts analytical framework based on the notion of everyday resistance has gained cultic dimensions in the academy. Even those who find an unsatisfactory ideological tone in Scotts work can do no better than sneer from the sidelines about how Scott transforms every glance and every stolen chicken into acts of rebellion. Yet, because there is very little methodological engagement with Scotts basic data, such criticisms remain unconvincing. It is accordingly necessary to enquire whether the facts of the case merit the conclusions that Scott draws from them.

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WHO COMPLAINS AND HOW MUCH GOES MISSING?

Let us return then to the two substantive issues that have just been highlighted. It is important to ask two crucial questions. First, who is relating these multiple tales of peasant insubordination? And second, what really is the gross tally in material terms of the items said to go missing as a result of such forms of everyday resistance? It is quite clear that no poor peasant himself or herself ever came up to James Scott and claimed to be engaged in everyday resistance. Accounts of surreptitious pilfering from the threshing-floor, tales of poaching, and even the theft of motorcycles, all came not from the poor but rather from the propertied classes in the village that Scott studied. There is no mystery as to why this should be so. While no one minds being thought of as a Robin Hood, and is quite happy to boast about exploits linked to this identity, it is quite a different matter to confess to being a small-time cheat and pickpocket. Who in a village would admit to committing a theft of an apple, a chicken and a few grains from the landlords bins?4 Stories of risk-taking in the form of social banditry and of large-scale heroism have an altogether different kind of cachet. These kinds of tales, about involvement in selfless escapades and showdowns with authority, reflect well on the teller, and carry none of the opprobrium usually associated with petty theft simply for personal gain. They not only enhance reputation but also add to the charisma of the storyteller. Unlike petty thieves, Robin Hoods not only rob the rich on the open highways, poach on the landlords domains in broad daylight and thumb their nose at the elite in a calculatedly insulting manner but, in doing all this, uphold the moral economy which has about it a nice, warm and comforting ambiance. No one wants to admit being a selfish petty thief, but most of us would have no trouble in identifying with selfless Robin Hoods who defy the rich while undertaking many acts of personal valour and heroism.5 These Robin Hoods thus become role models for others who, while fantasizing about their feats, are otherwise quite content to lead their lives without rocking the boat. Indeed this is exactly the case with Scotts peasant respondents as well [Scott, 1985: 41]. It is not at all clear from a reading of Scotts work [1985: 304] if the poor in his field area accept the charges of theft and petty larceny that are levelled against them. And if, perchance, the less adventurous pilfer and steal small amounts on the sly, they are not about to draw attention to themselves. They would rather do their jobs incognito. It is worth asking why pilfering and petty larceny are looked down upon by all classes universally. Nobody is proud of being a Fagin but one can vicariously identify with a Robin Hood. It is, of course, the scale of operation that differentiates the two, but there is a lot more to it as well. A

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Robin Hood is someone whose image is that of a hero who steals from the rich and gives to the poor, an image which overlaps rather neatly with the concerns expressed by moral economy. Against a background of universal distaste for petty theft, therefore, it is difficult to imagine how even a large number of such acts can add up to a sufficiently powerful challenge to existing property relations that culminates in mass rebellion. Turning to the second question, it is necessary to ask just how much has actually been lost in material terms in Sedaka, Scotts study village, due to acts of everyday resistance. Are the losses significant enough to make an utter shambles of policy, as he claims? In fact, after building a case for everyday resistance and the damage it causes, Scott [1985: 256] is forced to admit that the actual instances of theft are very few, and accounts of them vastly over-inflated. There were three motorcycle thefts in 12 years, and the total value of paddy stolen in the years 197980 came to only M$532.6 If one were to accept the accounts of the propertied classes in Sedaka village, moreover, the total amount of paddy stolen is only about one-hundredth of the paddy harvested [Scott, 1985: 268]. Even mice could have done better. When it comes to the question of sabotage and arson, Scott was unable to get a solid piece of evidence in support of his argument. He therefore concludes, rather cautiously, by admitting that actual instances of arson can never realistically be determined [Scott, 1985: 249]. Similarly, accounts of sabotage turn out to be nothing more than idle boasts or landlord exaggerations. Eventually such tales of peasant excesses or transgressions come to be seen for what they are, just so many tales.
EXAGGERATION AND REPRESSION IN WESTERN UTTAR PRADESH

That routine exaggeration is a stratagem for rural elite control is an argument that can be substantiated by means of reference to material from my study of villages in Meerut and Muzaffarnagar districts of western Uttar Pradesh. The villages where I conducted my fieldwork were dominated either by Jats or by Gujars. It is necessary to add at this point that only in very rare circumstances will a Jat live in a Gujar dominated village, and vice versa. But Jat- and Gujar-dominated villages have their usual complement of lower castes, including the members of the Scheduled Castes, who were earlier considered to be untouchables. The Scheduled Castes in these villages belong largely to the Harijan and Valmiki communities. Crops, Land and Labour in Western Uttar Pradesh A little more background information is necessary in order to contextualize my material and argument about exaggeration as stratagem in rural India. The villages studied were also green-revolution villages (much like Scotts

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Sedaka). The Jat or Gujar landowners in these villages usually own small to medium-sized holdings, ranging from two to eight acres in the main. Jats and Gujars are both agrarian castes and are, therefore, quite proud of being cultivators and working with their hands. As land holdings are not very large, family labour is very common in these villages.7 Even women help outdoors with some agriculturally related activities. Sugar cane and wheat are the two major crops of this region. Landowning cultivators require the services of landless (predominantly Scheduled Caste) workers intermittently for short durations. During the monsoons they need them to tie supports round sugarcane stalks to prevent them from falling over. They also hire agricultural labourers during the wheat harvesting season, as this operation has to be concluded rather swiftly and family labour is often not enough. Sugar cane harvesting can, however, be spread over months. The cane is felled and its leafy portion lopped off at a point in the agricultural cycle that is generally determined by the sugar factories nearby. The demand for outside labour for sugar cane harvesting is consequently not very pressing. Family labour is usually sufficient, as the harvesting period is determined neither by the weather nor by the maturity of the cane but by the demands imposed on farmers by sugar factories in the vicinity. The severing of the leafy part of the sugar cane is known locally as cholna. Even when labour is employed from outside, cholna is rarely done for money. Payment is in kind, and takes the form of the gola, or the leafy part of the cane, that the labourers take back home to feed their cattle. Roughly, ten quintals of cholna yield one quintal of gola, and a single able-bodied labourer can harvest about 78 quintals of cholna a day. Only in the summer months do labourers want money for cholna. The reason for this is that the leafy portion, which is usually succulent and green, turns hard, dry and sharp in summer, rendering it unfit as cattle feed. During these months labourers demand instead cash payment of about Rs3 per quintal of cholna harvested (this was the rate in 1992). There is a rough correlation between land owned and demand for agricultural labourers. In villages such as Niloha (in Muzaffarnagar district) or Incholi (in Meerut district), where landholdings are generally larger than in other villages in western Uttar Pradesh, there is a greater demand for agricultural labour. In such villages Harijans can be found in large numbers during wheat harvesting, but they would generally avoid cholna, as they find that a difficult occupation to negotiate in terms of wages. Consequently, cholna is usually done by the still poorer Valmikis. In a large village like Nirpura, where the population is approximately 30,000, there are about 550 Harijan households. Of these, about 55 per cent work in brick kilns, and only about 25 per cent work as agricultural

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labourers, sometimes on a daily wage basis. The Valmikis, whom Jats consider to be lower than Harijans, find jobs in Jat homes as permanent agricultural servants. As Jats do not strictly observe caste untouchability, these Valmiki servants can be found in the courtyards of Jat dwellings helping out with the machinery, or performing other domestic chores, which includes pulling out charpoys (string cots) and arranging seating for guests. In villages like Niloha there are many Jat landowners who have more than 20 acres of land. Land reform measures in the past have given Scheduled Castes in this village a share of the redistributed surplus land. For example, one Harijan the main beneficiary of this redistribution process has five bighas (approximately one acre) of land, on which he grows both wheat and sugar cane. But his real income is from his skills as a radio mechanic. He has clients both in his village as well as in neighbouring ones. At the time of my fieldwork in these villages, the wheat harvesting payment was around Rs18 to Rs20 per day. According to Harijan and Valmiki labourers, however, wage payments due were held back and delayed (see below). For this reason, labourers usually prefer not to be paid in cash: they believe that payment in kind is usually more reliable, and certainly more prompt. For harvesting an acre, which yields between 22 and 24 quintals of wheat, a labourer can expect to receive about two quintals of wheat and two quintals of husk as payment. But the payment in kind rate is not uniform: while the above rate applies in Nirpura (Meerut district), a lower rate seems prevalent in Binra (Muzaffarnagar district). In the latter context, a labourer gets roughly 1.3 quintals of wheat for harvesting an acre. The average yield in Binra is only about 14 quintals per acre, and thus significantly lower than the per-acre yield in Nirpura. Broadly speaking, a safe assumption is that in western Uttar Pradesh at the time in question, wages in kind for harvesting wheat were roughly one-tenth of the per-acre yield for that crop. Scheduled Caste Occupations There are also status and economic distinctions between Harijan and Valmiki castes. While both belong to the Scheduled Castes, the Harijans are in general better off and better educated than Valmikis. The traditional occupation of most Harijan used to be tanning and leather work, though even in the past a significant number of them worked as agricultural labourers. The traditional occupation of a Valmiki was scavenging, which puts this caste lower than the Harijans in terms of the orthodox ranking system. It must be remembered that, in general, the correlation between caste and occupation hardly holds today, and this is as true for the poorer castes as well. This status distinction between these two ex-untouchable castes can be seen in contemporary western Uttar Pradesh villages in terms of the kinds

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of jobs they perform in the rural sector. While Valmikis do what work they can get in villages, Harijan males, by and large, do not want to work in the fields [Gupta, 1997]. They would rather find jobs outside agriculture, for they believe that Jats pay very low wages and are generally unreliable people to work for. In addition to abusing them and treating them with complete contempt, therefore, Jats are notoriously slow in paying their labourers the wages due them. Most Harijans thus prefer to work in brick kilns, because the rate there is fixed at Rs70 for a thousand bricks. Although employment in brick kilns is highly prized, as they are often situated in and around the villages where the labourers reside, this is not the only nonagricultural occupational outlet available. Many Scheduled Caste members also work as masons and bricklayers, and some have built quite a reputation in these occupations. Those without these skills undertake other kinds of tasks in this connection: for example, whitewashing residential buildings and providing assistance with plastering during the construction process.
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CONTRASTING VERSIONS AND INCOMMENSURABLE TRUTHS

When it comes to paying money for work done Jat landowners are usually very slow. They tend to put off the paying of wages on one pretext or the other. Many Jats argue that the labourers are so greedy that they want their money right away. After all, a Jat landowner told me, we are not going to run away. Irregular wage payment is, therefore, a major cause of friction between landless Scheduled Caste workers and landowners. It must also be said that Jat landowners are not very rich either, and are often severely strapped for cash themselves. But even during good months, when they have some money to hand, Jat landowners are usually very reluctant to pay wages on time, and even when they do, it is often not the full amount their workers are owed. Several labourers complained that before they actually get paid for the job they were contracted to do, the landowners often make them do work, like cutting grass in the fields, weeding or some other tasks they urgently want completed. Sometimes, as a Valmiki labourer in Nirpura village complained, Jat landowners flagrantly violate the cholna agreement in the monsoon months, and keep half of the gola for themselves. In such cases, labourers inferred, it is just not worth ones while to do any cholna at all. Regardless of the frequency with which Jat and Gujar employers did such things, withholding or non-payment of wages due were perceived as a risk by many agricultural labourers in the region. For their part, however, Jat landowners stoutly deny the charge that they withhold wages, and argue that this is yet another instance of how Harijan and Valmiki castes will cheat and lie at the slightest opportunity. According to Jat peasant farmers in western Uttar Pradesh, it is impossible to trust

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these Scheduled Caste people, as they are incapable of either telling the truth or keeping their hands off anything that comes in their way. As one Jat interviewed by me put it: The mazdoors (labourers) leave the field munching on sugar cane, and god knows how many they chew on while they are actually working. The labouring castes deny this allegation, and say that Jat landowners are always around them, supervising their work minutely. There is, therefore, no question of helping themselves to sugar cane while they are working. In fact even when they accidentally crush a cane underfoot, a string of abuse is hurled at them. The perception of how many Harijans and Valmikis work in the villages, and how many work outside, also differs vastly in the accounts of Jats and the Scheduled Castes. The Jats of Niloha state that all Harijans work outside the village, and that it is difficult to hire them to do any agricultural work. This, Jats argue, is why Harijans are so haughty and demand such high wages. On the other hand, the Harijans of Niloha point out that they are mainly agricultural labourers, and that consequently they are always on the look-out for this kind of employment: these jobs in agriculture are either not available, or the Jat employers cheat them out of a just wage. Harijans allege that, even when they actually get paid, it is rarely more than Rs20 for a days work: sometimes, it is as little as Rs15. Jats deny this, and say that the wages are very high in the village, at the very least between Rs25 and Rs30 per day. Furthermore, there is no question, Jats argue, of not paying Harijans the full wage rate on time. According to Jat versions, Harijans are far from being subservient: in fact, democracy and the adult franchise have made them most aggressive and unreasonable. On the political front, too, the perceptions of Harijans and Valmikis vary greatly from those of Jat landowners. Harijans and Valmikis believe that the government does not listen to them, and pays no attention to their problems. In Nirpura village, where there are about 550 Harijan households, there is not a single lamp-post in the area where members of this caste live. In this section of the village there is only one government-installed hand-pump for water, on account of which long lines form queues for water every day. This, it is pointed out, leads to tensions and quarrels between Harijans all the time. They further charge that although the government had allotted 50 electrical connections to the Harijan hamlet, so far nothing has happened. Jat peasant farmers, on the other hand, argue that the states reservation policy granting preferences to Scheduled Castes in jobs and educational opportunities has made these communities very obnoxious and difficult. When Harijans find work outside the village, they become particularly aggressive and ill-mannered. This, according to Jats, can be easily made out from the fact that Scheduled Castes neither stand up nor bow in salutation in the presence of a Jat. The latter believe that the activism of Ms Mayawati

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(who was Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, albeit for a short while) of the Bahujan Samaj Party is largely responsible for this. Jats have often told me how in the past if a Harijan or a Valmiki was caught stealing, he would be terrified and contrite. But now, Jats allege, with the support of the government the Harijans and Valmikis lie and cheat with impunity. Even their womenfolk are no better. Jats are generally quite unambiguous about the fact that, in their opinion, members of the Scheduled Castes should acknowledge their superiority. For their part, the poorer castes say that as long as they do not actually oppose the wishes of Jats, then there are no problems; but if they do, then they are physically threatened, and sometimes these threats are carried out. Valmikis and Harijans also complain that very often Jats do not let them defecate in the fields nearby, and chase them far away. I have also heard Jats reacting to this by saying that, when they allow these other castes to pass through their fields, they invariably pull out sugar cane or quite deliberately damage crops. From my experience of western Uttar Pradesh, the tendency among Jats to exaggerate the instances of theft and contumacy on the part of the Scheduled Castes is quite pronounced. In three different, but adjacent, villages, I heard the same story from Jat peasant farmers, all telling of the same incident, when a Harijan allegedly picked Rs60 from the pocket of a shirt that was hanging on the window to dry. The shirt, it was said, obviously belonged to an unsuspecting and trusting Jat. It is surprising just how widespread this single incident was relayed in Jat discourse. By contrast, the Scheduled Castes in that region had no knowledge of this incident, nor indeed had they heard this story as told by the Jats. This is another instance of how insulated the landowning castes and the Scheduled Castes are from each other. Jats also accuse Harijans of stooping so low as to add water to the milk they sell in and around the villages. It must be mentioned in this connection that Jats generally look down upon the practice of selling milk. According to the Jat code, milk is to be consumed only by family and friends, and it should never be sold. In the eyes of Jats, therefore, Scheduled Caste milk-sellers stand doubly accused: not just of selling milk (as if this were not bad enough), but also of making matters worse by adulterating it.
RICH LABOURERS, POOR LANDOWNERS : TA L E S O F ECO N O MI C INVERSION

As far as Jats are concerned, the Scheduled Castes are not just cheats and thieves, they are also good-for-nothing lazy workers, fattened by the huge wages they get. According to Jats the cholna operation alone increases a

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labourers income by approximately 7000 rupees a year. According to the Scheduled Castes, however, this claim is pure fantasy: since they would be unable to realize such an annual income even if they were fortunate enough to obtain a regular job, how much less likely is it that they could earn 7000 rupees for seasonal and casual employment such as cholna work? In any event, they go on to say, there is no market price as such for the gola that they get as payment in kind for cholna work: while it can be used to feed cattle, it cannot be sold in the market. The gola that they bring back home probably saves them at best about 2000 rupees per year, a far cry from the 7000 claimed by Jat employers. Jats have convinced themselves that Harijans and Valmikis (particularly Harijans) have really made good in this world, with the help of politicians. Though as agricultural labourers they are a lazy, shirking and untrustworthy lot, they must still be paid at least between Rs25 and Rs30 for a days work. They are thieves, the Jats aver, but they have to be suffered because they have political leaders at their beck and call. They now earn enough money to wear fancy clothes which even Jat landowners cannot afford. On one occasion in village Nirpura, while I was listening to a Jat complaining about how offensive Harijans had become, a young Harijan walked past us. The Jat caught hold of him and pulled him over. Pointing to the clothes the Harijan youth was wearing he said: Look at him. Look at his shirt. Terylene. Look at his trousers. Terylene. Look at his shoes. Factory made, probably Bata. These are children of cobblers and leather-workers, and now they are wearing machine-made shoes by Bata. Even I cannot afford such clothes. According to Jats, therefore, the Scheduled Castes are not poor at all. In their opinion, the notion that Harijans and Valmikis are poor is an urban myth. If they had really been poor, would they not readily work hard and uncomplainingly and in the fields of the Jats? James Scott [1985: 150] also relates similar kinds of stories. The rich in Sedaka believe that the peasants are making a lot of money, shirking work and yet riding motorcycles. If it is motorcycles in Sedaka, it is Terylene in Uttar Pradesh. All these tales of theft, demonstrations of consumerism and sullen refusal to work for an honest days wages together provide Jats and Gujar landowners of western Uttar Pradesh with the required ideological justification to threaten and terrorize Scheduled Castes whenever they find the need to do so. It hardly needs to be said that the kind of political and economic dominance Jats and Gujars enjoy in this context cannot even be approximated by the poorer castes. And yet the landowning castes complain of how unruly the Scheduled Castes have become. It is true that Harijans and Valmikis enjoy a measure of freedom that they never did in the past, but they are still far from being able to threaten Jats in any significant way.

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Weapons of the Strong My own fieldwork experience in western Uttar Pradesh does not lead me to lend credence to the Jat version of how Scheduled Castes behave. I would rather go along with Valmikis and Harijans when they complain that Jats treat them contemptuously, underpay them, and often even physically beat them up. I have found them to be fearful of landowning castes, and they generally tend to slip away if they are in the presence of Jats. Jats, however, have no compunctions about loudly broadcasting to me their views on Scheduled Castes. On occasions they even made sure that Harijans and Valmikis heard what was being said about them. Members of the Scheduled Castes, on the other hand, only whisper their complaints against Jats. They would immediately fall silent if a Jat were to wander in while such a conversation was going on. So the powerful in both Sedaka and west Uttar Pradesh villages complain about how the labouring classes cheat and steal, hence justifying the need both to keep them under careful surveillance and to exercise repressive measures against them, so as to prevent them from becoming too disruptive and unruly. Thus far Scott and I seem to be walking down the same path, raking up the same leaves. And yet, the epistemological difference between Scott and me is really quite fundamental. While Scott seems to believe upper-class stories about the poor and gives them a romantic gloss, I by contrast see instead so many stratagems inspired by the imperatives of power. For Scott theft and petty crime are instances of everyday resistance, but for me it is because such petty crimes take place occasionally that the ruling classes not only exercise but justify their routine repression of the poorer people in the village. The way superior castes overreact to petty incidents of suspected theft is indicative of this very process. Scott himself [1985: 269] narrates an instance when a landlord in Sedaka was so incensed by the fact that a small amount of paddy was stolen that he took out his shotgun in order to teach that poor thief a lesson. The simple fact is that neither in western Uttar Pradesh nor in Sedaka are the poor capable of making what Scott terms an utter shambles of policy, even if they are occasionally forced to steal a sugar cane or two. Even in Sedaka, peasants who have been difficult and uncooperative in the past have as a consequence been dealt with very harshly by the landlords. Children of such people are struck off the school aids list, or charged with theft, or are not hired by the rich for agricultural work [Scott, 1985: 278, 279]. The capacity of these poor peasants to make an utter shambles of policy is, therefore, very limited indeed, not to say remote. The sad truth is that poor peasants and agricultural labourers do not have the necessary staying power to conduct a daily guerrilla resistance against the rich. They are generally

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very submissive, but even in their utter subjugation they reject their characterization by the rich as being thieves and cheats [Scott, 1985: 304]. Their rare, infrequent, and often pathetic attempts to make ends meet by taking recourse to stealing can be more realistically described as ways of claiming a certain moral economy on their side, and a defence of customary perquisites at best.8 Any thought of revolt, or everyday resistance, is far from their minds, nor do these acts objectively amount to creating a reef for launching grand historical transformations. If the Scheduled Castes today are able to mount some kind of pressure against Jats in rural western Uttar Pradesh, then it is not so much in terms of everyday resistance by stealing a chicken here and a sugar cane there but by a frontal attack, in the form of an aggressive politics headed by the Bahujan Samaj Party. This political party is uniformly hated by Jats in every village I visited. The Bahujan Samaj Party is led by members of the Scheduled Castes, and its manifesto clearly declares its partisanship with the ex-untouchables of India. If Jats feel threatened today, it is not because of petty thefts by the Harijans and Valmikis, but rather by the declared politics of defiance that the Bahujan Samaj Party has inaugurated in what they hitherto perceived as their unchallenged domain. Jat peasant farmers find this very difficult to accept. That a large number of Harijans are supporters of the Bahujan Samaj Party also indicates that they have been able effectively to sever their ties with the village. To begin with, there are few jobs in the villages, as most of the farms are generally cultivated by means of family labour. Secondly, as mentioned earlier, urban opportunities and non-agricultural jobs have become available in and around the villages, making it possible for many Harijans to work outside agriculture. This has also had a liberating effect on them. Not that they have become much richer on account of this, but they are no longer under the daily humiliating domination of Jat landowners. This is why, in objective terms, Jats would opt for the continuation of the occasional case of a frustrated poor peasant stealing from them some small article for consumption in preference to the open politics of mass defiance thrust at them by the Bahujan Samaj Party. The former helps to recharge their ideological batteries, while the latter challenges the ideological basis of their power.
MOCK EMULATION AND ROLE REVE R S A L: CA R N I VA L REEXAMINED

One of the reasons that some of the objections that have been made in this paper have not surfaced in other commentaries on James Scotts work is probably because Scott skilfully draws justification for his position by

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hearkening back to Rabelaiss notion of the carnival. In this connection it is important to set the record straight as far as the carnivalesque goes. It is true that carnivals occasionally spin out of control and become quite subversive and seditious, but it must also be noted that for such uprisings to occur the rules of the carnival have to be deliberately broken. It is not as if carnivals by themselves sanction revolt: the latter occurs because the coming together of large numbers of discontented people can at times set off a rebellious wave. The Jewish Passover, which is no carnival at all, was, however, considered by the Romans to be dangerous because the Jewish population was particularly restive during the Roman occupation of Jerusalem. Pontius Pilate was among the many Roman officials who surrounded himself with extra detachments of armed personnel whenever he came to Jerusalem to oversee such occasions. So it is not the Middle Ages alone that were prone to such potentially destabilizing episodes at certain times of the year. An aggregation of discontented people can be quite unpredictable in any historical period. Perhaps it is necessary to also recall in this connection Georges Sorel [1916] and his exhortations regarding the myth of the proletarian strike. In short, and because he conflates the prefiguring social context (discontent) with a particular institution (the carnival), Scott misrecognizes the locus of determination: accordingly, any revolt which transpires occurs not because of something intrinsic to the carnivalesque itself, but rather because of the possibilities afforded by a mass gathering. Bob Scribner [1978: 3034] has described several instances of carnivals turning into riotous assemblies. In many of these cases the gathered masses were already predisposed to mass agency, discontent taking the form of anti-papal sentiments which helped spark violence in favour of the Lutheran led reformists: all they lacked was the opportunity, and it was carnival which offered just this. When a putative communion is struck among the disgruntled and disaffected, there could be trouble in the offing. But surely such situations are out of the ordinary: nor is it the case that every carnival is laden with subversive potential. It is not the carnival as such that makes people rebel: rather, it is their initial condition of estrangement that makes them combustible when they congregate in large numbers. Otherwise, as Scribner outlines, the boundaries between play and nonplay were carefully policed at a carnival. He relates an interesting anecdote to make this point: the 1526 English collection A Hundred Mery Talys tells us of a player who did not remove his devils costume after the play. He caused a panic on his way home among folks who mistook him for the devil himself. [Scribner, 1978: 318] In other words, parody and satire were permitted in the world of carnival because their implications were set apart from the mundane world [Scribner, 1978: 319]. Even Bakhtin

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[1984:74] notes that carnivals had to be performed in an area near the church which had to be first authorized. Medieval folk culture, of which the carnival was a part, limited feasts, gaiety, and laughter to these small islands of feasts and recreations [Bakhtin, 1984: 96]. Like Erasmus, who wrote against theologians in the Praise of Folly but was really a very establishment person, Rabelais too was never a foe of royal power [Bakhtin, 1984: 119]. This was true in spite of his many irreverent renditions of the medieval carnival. In fact, when things tended to get out of hand the ruling classes often closed down carnivals. The town council of Ulm, for example, prohibited carnivals after 1526 [Bakhtin, 1984: 313]. This is not surprising at all: as Erving Goffman [1961: 4581] once pointed out, ruling classes put an end to festivities the moment euphoria gave way to dysphoria. We need to stay with Goffman for a while longer because of his extraordinary insight regarding backstaging, which is relevant here.9 According to Goffman, as one goes higher up the social scale there are fewer and fewer people one can backstage with. Extrapolating from this it is fair to argue that in community festivals, when the rich and the poor are thrown together, however temporarily, it is up to the poor to be ingratiating, to take the first step and reach out to the well-to-do classes. But the only way the poorer classes know how to do this is to effect a mock emulation of how the upper classes behave towards them. They are not normally privy to the ways upper classes really interact when backstaging among themselves. The social barrier makes sure that the rabble does not get the opportunity of observing what goes on behind closed doors and high walls. All they know is what happens between them and their masters in the open, and it is this aspect that they parody. But, again, if it strays beyond limits, the show is called off. Mock emulations of this kind parody upper-class behaviour, but it is important to understand that this is not the same thing as role reversals. The lower classes imitate, parody and satirize upper-class behaviour, but the upper classes do not pretend to be lower classes, however fleetingly. They may tolerate the parody, even the coarse humour, up to a point, but will never stoop to actual role reversals. When they do take place, such as during the Indian festival of Holi, role reversal is between sexes, within the family, or between those who are traditionally involved in a joking relationship. In other words, only where social equality between participants exists are role reversals permitted. By contrast, between those who are clear unequals such familiarity is nearly always explicitly forbidden. Neither in western Uttar Pradesh, nor in Scotts Sedaka, is there any role reversal in the true sense of the term. There might have been the occasional mock emulation during Holi in the past, but there is no sign of even that in rural Uttar Pradesh today. The Scheduled Castes and the landed castes lead

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discrete lives, separated from each other by many barriers of community and class. This undermines the notion of mock emulations. Further, since landed and landless castes do not come together in any village-level festivity, the scope for enacting mock emulations is correspondingly absent. Consequently, mock emulations lack both platform and format. In fact there is greater social interaction and bonhomie involving landowning Muslims and Hindus than between landed castes and the landless ones. Whether it is a Muslim-minority village like Sisauli or Chaprauli in Muzaffarnagar district, or a Muslim-dominant village like Incholi in Meerut district, there are several festivals, both Hindu and Muslim, when the two communities get together on a social basis with a fair degree of fraternal warmth. This is not found where landed castes and the Scheduled Castes are concerned, no matter what the occasion. The belief that carnivals can jostle the crowds and churn up, quite independently, a second life is to read too much into medieval festivities.10 If, on occasion, such gatherings set off violent social movements, then the cause for such uprisings should be sought not in the carnival itself, but rather in what happens outside and before it. As has been noted, anti-clerical sentiments gave rise to many riotous carnivals in the Middle Ages, principally because the participants were already angry with the clergy, and the Reformation had not only shown a way out but had important supporters and allies as well. Further, it is important to separate, for both analytical and empirical purposes, mock emulations from role reversals, for it is only the former that is sometimes played out during carnivals. It must also be kept in mind that more often than not such festivities can be called off by the authorities if they find that matters are getting out of hand. In other words, carnivals by themselves rarely set off major mobilizations. They may, however, occasionally spark one off, provided that the social setting is already in a highly inflammable and volatile state.
CONCLUSION: EXAGGERATE TO REP R E S S

Whereas others have criticized Scott for overestimating the political significance of individual small-scale acts, the occurrence of which neither Scott nor his critics challenge, this article by contrast has questioned the widespread existence of the small-scale acts themselves. The argument here has been that, outside the discourse of the rural rich, these small-scale acts characterized by Scott as individual and quotidian acts of defiance on the part of the rural poor do not in the majority of instances actually take place. Rather than accept their existence and then lionize them, as Scott does, the case argued here has been that the purpose behind the circulation by the rural rich of a discourse about (largely non-existent) theft, arson,

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pilfering, etc., is both to justify and at the same time to exercise what is actually a form of repression over the rural poor. It is necessary, then, to revisit peasant mobilizations so as to recognize under what conditions the poor in the countryside effectively organize protest and resistance. While doing this, it is most important not to be taken in by exaggerated tales that the superior classes routinely put out to justify their domination over others. Lord Cornwalliss statement Every native of Hindustan I verily believe is corrupt provided good ideological justification for the Raj in India.11 No doubt, Cornwallis verily believed this to be true. There is also little doubt that such a point of view helped him to play more resolutely the role of a conquering and civilizing hero. It is, however, another matter when James Scott the scholar is taken in by these exaggerated references to the criminal proclivities of the dominated classes. He does not appear to be aware either of the fact of exaggeration, or of the powerful ideological role it plays in justifying the routine repression conducted by the rich on an everyday basis. In fact, routine repression and the stratagem of exaggeration form a pair. Those who exaggerate in this manner rarely think that this is what is being done. Rather, they believe deeply in the veracity of these exaggerations, often without any recognition that their utterances are fabricated. Such is the power of socialization. As has been argued here, these exaggerations perform a useful discursive role in everyday life in that they help consolidate an ideological construct which in turn justifies and lubricates economic and political domination. At the same time, those against whom such charges are levelled resent these accusations and refuse them any legitimacy. Yet, every now and again an incident occurs, a petty theft, a rude word, that generates another round of exaggerations and reproduces the existing barriers between classes (along the lines of they are like this; we are not like them). These exaggerations thus possess a strategic significance. Once this becomes clear, then an alternative interpretation becomes possible. If the small-scale everyday acts are identified as exaggerations, they cannot be perceived any longer as from below acts of liberation or emancipation but much rather as from above forms of repression. Equally obviously, smallscale individual acts of petty theft certainly do not enable the poorer rural classes to build a protective barrier of any kind, let alone make an utter shambles of policy. In fact, they have just the opposite effect. Consequently, there is little chance that the occasional act of theft can ever lead, by insinuation, imagination or imitation, to a peasant revolt. Given this, the way forward for poor peasants and agricultural labourers is not the individual, covert or clandestine small-scale acts (arson, petty theft) that form what Scott calls hidden transcripts, but mass, large-scale and overt revolt.12

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Indeed, this is the direction that rural anger seems to be taking in contemporary Uttar Pradesh. The Bahujan Samaj Party, as mentioned earlier, has successfully rallied the Scheduled Castes poor to its side. Admittedly, much of this partys appeal is based on caste, but it has succeeded in giving the Scheduled Castes a voice they did not possess in the past. This is largely because the Bahujan Samaj Party addresses the crucial question of dignity and pride, or that very aspect which the upper castes constantly undermine with their everyday exaggerations and routine repression. The ideology of the Bahujan Samaj Party is, moreover, out in the open, and not surreptitiously propagated. Its active supporters are composed of Scheduled Caste members found not just in urban contexts: it is also popular among those who still live in the villages. This is especially true at election time, when Bahujan Samaj Party activists swarm everywhere, reinforcing the sense of power, even defiance, among members of the Scheduled Castes. The landowning castes, naturally, resent the growth and spread of the Bahujan Samaj Party, but there is nothing they can do on a sustained basis to stem its appeal among the poor agrarian castes. They cannot even threaten them with an economic boycott, for there is little that small landowning castes can do anyway to alleviate rural unemployment. Today the Bahujan Samaj Party is a major presence in Uttar Pradesh, and for a while it was able to form the government in the province. This form of overt, mass, large-scale revolt on the part of the rural poor has without question proved to be a much more effective kind of action than stealing three motorcycles in 12 years, or taking Rs60 from somebodys shirt, or stealing paddy whose total value is only M$532. Scotts everyday resistance simply has not lived up to its billing.
NOTES 1. See, for example, the collections edited by Scott and Kerkvliet [1986], Colburn [1989], Haynes and Prakash [1991], and Joseph and Nugent [1994]. 2. For the methodological complexity in determining the origin and object of a process as apparently simple as rumour mongering, see Kumar [2000]. 3. I was reminded of nothing so much as Dumonts idealized version of the Indian caste system, told him (as Berreman subsequently found out) by the Brahmins and reflecting their own politicoideological and economic interests. See Dumont [1970] and Berreman [1979:155-63]. 4. There is an obvious risk attached to telling such stories, particularly to an outside researcher, in that they may get back to the rich peasant or landlord from whom items were taken in the first place, with rather obvious consequences for the poor peasant informant. 5. It is important to qualify even this Robin Hood agency as a form of from below resistance. Just as caste was romanticized by Dumont (see above), so rural banditry has been idealized by Hobsbawm [1969] as a systemically redistributive mechanism (= Robin Hood activity). This has been strongly criticized in turn by Blok [1972] and Li Causi [1975], both of whom point out that bandits were invariably the enforcers of landlord power in the countryside, and not redistributors of landlord-owned assets. 6. On these points, see Scott [1985: 266, 267]. 7. For a fuller description see Gupta [1997: 2046]. 8. On this point, see Thompson [1978: 150].

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9. There are two possible interpretations of the concept backstaging, each of which has relevance to the carnivalesque. The first concerns the privilege inherent in being able to go backstage and mingle with the actors, a procedure that historically has been the preserve of royalty, the rich and the aristocratic. It is from this that the Goffmanesque interpretation derives: namely, the idea of in-group rituals of exclusivity being reproduced and reaffirmed out of sight (and thus beyond the gaze) of the common or plebeian mass. The second involves the concept of crossing boundaries that define otherwise separate realities. As its theatrical derivation hints, the concept backstaging implies a capacity to cross otherwise rigidly defined and imposed boundaries. For a member of the audience to go backstage and mingle with actors, therefore, is to dissolve the artifice inherent in theatrical performance: the same is true of the reverse situation, in which the actor becomes part of the audience, a specifically Brechtian device aimed at revealing and thus dispelling the artificiality of (or normalizing) theatrical performance. The relevance of this particular aspect of backstaging to carnival lies, of course, in the suspension it permits of otherwise impermeable social boundaries. 10. On this point, see Bakhtin [1984: 9] 11. This statement is cited in Metcalfe [1995: 24]. 12. See Scott [1990] for the concept hidden transcripts as applied by him to clandestine and small-scale everyday acts of peasant resistance. REFERENCES Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1984, Rabelais and His World, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Berreman, Gerald D., 1979, Caste and Other Inequalities, New Delhi: Manohar Books. Blok, Anton, 1972, The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.14, No.4. Carter, Marina, 1995, Servants, Sirdars, and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chakravarti, Uma, 1995, Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery: Surveillance of the State in 18th Century Maharashtra, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol.20, Nos.12. Colburn, F.D. (ed.), 1989, Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New York: M.E. Sharpe. Dumont, Louis, 1970, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Goffman, Erving, 1961, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gupta, Dipankar, 1997, Rivalry and Brotherhood: Politics in the Life of Farmers of Northern India, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Haynes, Douglas, and Gyan Prakash (eds.), 1991 Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hobsbawm, E.J., 1969, Bandits, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Joseph, Gilbert M., and Daniel Nugent (eds.), 1994, Everyday Forms of State Formation, London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kumar, Arun, 2000, Beyond Muffled Murmurs of Dissent? Kisan Rumour in Colonial Bihar, The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.28, No.1. Li Causi, Luciano, 1975, Anthropology and Ideology: The Case of Patronage in Mediterranean Societies, Critique of Anthropology, Nos.45. Metcalfe, Thomas, 1995, Ideology of the Raj, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, James, 1985, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, James, 1990, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, James, and B.J. Tria Kerkvliet (eds.), 1986, Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance in Southeast Asia, London and Portland, OH: Frank Cass. Scribner, Bob, 1978, Reformation, Carnival and the World Turned Upside Down, Social History, Vol.3, No.3. Sorel, George, 1916, Reflections on Violence, London: George Allen & Unwin. Souden, David, 1978, Rogues, Whores and Vagabonds? Indentured Servant Emigrants to North America and the Case of Mid-Seventeenth Century Bristol, Social History, Vol.3, No.1. Thompson, E.P., 1978, Eighteenth Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class, Social History, Vol.3, No.2.

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