Welcome to India, the land of opportunities… where money grows’ boast posters from this year’s Vibrant Gujarat summit, photos of which greet visitors to London’s School of Oriental and African Studies’ new exhibition: ‘Behind The Indian Boom’.
The images — a reminder of the narrative propounded by the government, and which is gaining ever-increasing traction in the West — are a fitting start to an exhibition focused on an India that is far removed from this picture of progress.
The exhibition, which focuses on the “inequality and resistance” at the heart of India’s economic development as told through the experiences of Dalit and Adivasi communities, is curated by Alpa Shah, professor of anthropology at London School of Economics (LSE), and documentary maker Simon Chambers. It brings together research conducted by the LSE anthropology department’s Inequality and Poverty Research Programme, which carried out fieldwork in Dalit and Adivasi communities across India between 2014 and 2015, and draws on images and footage captured by researchers, journalists and activists over many years.
It persists
Their research has also been brought out as a book, Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India , published last month. The book, a compilation
A sculpture of Eklavya’s hand by anonymous artists
of research essays from Kerala’s tea belt to Himachal’s Chamba Valley, points to the fact that alongside income inequality, “social inequality has become entrenched rather than erased in India”.
Adivasi and Dalit communities remain the most vulnerable and exploited sections of society, with little social security or any form of protection, and forced to turn to other means of livelihood, “doing the jobs no one else wants”.
The research concludes thatinstead of breaking down these divisions, as was once the apparent aspiration of governments, the existing divisions have simply been replicated and reinforced in the ‘new economy’. “Locally dominant caste groups have now become major or auxiliary players in the new economy, controlling access to jobs, resources and the state, thus shaping the process of inequality beyond the village context and in the new economy, leading to the continued powerlessness and oppression of Adivasis and Dalits,” say Shah and SOAS professor Jens Lerche in the book’s conclusion.
Shah has spent years conducting field research in Telengana and Jharkand. “It is peculiar that despite all the radical efforts to deal with historic inequality, it persists… caste and tribe are not disappearing as hoped… you are simply getting a re-entrenchment of inequality in new ways.”
The exhibition highlights the sharp rise in violent caste atrocities, documented cases of which have risen by 74% between 2006 and 2014, when over 47,000 attacks were registered.
Terrible emotions
The exhibition’s scope is wide and candid: protests in Rajasthan’s Jhunjhunu district against a series of rapes against Dalit women earlier this year, the life of Sunderbans’ crab catchers and iron slag pickers in Jharkhand.
A Tamil Dalit tea worker in Kerala
It captures the challenging lives of communities, such as that of Tamil Nadu’s Irulas, the waste-pickers. There’s one particularly powerful image of a young child on the burning surface of a municipal dumping yard.
There is an extract from This Filthy Life , a 2015 documentary film on Dalit women involved in manual scavenging. One woman’s description of the terrible emotions she went through when starting to do the work, including the inability to eat for days after, while knowing she had no option but to continue, is particularly haunting.
The exhibition also highlights resistance movements and moments of empowerment. The powerful protest movement, for instance, by 5,000 women tea workers in Kerala against the slashing of their bonuses, or the sculpture of Eklavya’s mutilated hand created by Hyderabad Central University students after the suicide of Dalit fellow scholar Rohith Vemula.
Moments of celebration
The use of seasonal migration labour leads to the “cheapening and controlling” of the overall workforce, argues Shah, highlighting the example of Kerala’s Dalit women tea pickers. And attempts to undermine
Workers from Jharkhand and Bihar build roads in the Himalayas
their protests were made by replacing them with an even cheaper migrant Adivasi workforce from eastern India, a strategy that has been replicated up and down the country, she says.
There are also moments of celebration, which document the everyday lives and scenes of communities. Men and women enjoying hadia beer and mahua wine “openly and together”, images that belie the negative portrayal of alcohol use in the media, as Shah points out. Some of the stories in the exhibition might be familiar to audiences, particularly in India, but the weaving together of the experiences of different communities into a coherent pan-nation narrative provides an essential but largely overlooked snapshot of the processes that have left so many behind in the pursuit of economic growth and reform.
