Jan Breman | Photo Credit: Monique Kooijmans
For many people, the COVID lockdown first made visible the reality and scale of what is called “circular migration” in India. I remember a newspaper report about a bus accident involving migrant workers from Rajasthan who were travelling back to their home in West Bengal’s Purulia district. The bus hit a truck somewhere in Uttar Pradesh. Several migrant workers died. The next morning, I got a phone call from an NGO at Anekal, near Bengaluru. A migrant worker had approached them for help. He urgently needed help to get a seat on a Shramik train to West Bengal, because his father-in-law had been one of those who had died in the accident in Uttar Pradesh.
Hard labour. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
It was hard to imagine: two men travelling to the far-flung corners of the country, one in Rajasthan and another in Karnataka, working in poorly-paid, insecure jobs as migrant labourers while the rest of the family who depended on their paltry wages remained in West Bengal. It brought alive the acute reality of what is called circular migration in India: a phenomenon far removed from what is generally meant by migration, or the long-term relocation of people. Circular migration is a never-ending treadmill of movement, usually beyond the control of those who are forced to move along its trajectories.
Grim reality
Over decades, Dutch sociologist Jan Breman’s work has focused on the lives of the working poor in India. He combines detailed field notes about the real, lived lives of people, with analysis of the broader social and economic context. In this new book, he shows how the old pre-colonial and colonial period practice of patronage and servitude in rural agriculture has given way to a new form of “neo-bondage” in which the landless labourers are nominally free, but continue to be trapped in exploitative, insecure work.
Indeed, Breman uses the unforgettable phrase “hunters and gatherers of work.” In the modern day, the landless poor, left behind both by land reforms and by other trajectories of what is referred to as “development,” are forced to take up whatever work they can get: sugarcane harvesting, salt pans, road construction, brick kilns, stone quarries, or anything else. And for this, they are forced to accept whatever wages they can get, under difficult if not appalling work conditions. Usually, the cycle begins with a monetary advance paid to them not by an employer but by a ‘jobber’ or an intermediary during the agricultural lean season. After taking this advance, the labourer becomes effectively contracted to work at the behest of and on terms dictated by the ‘jobber’, and unfree, in that sense, to take on any other work. Piece work, deferred payments, unpredictable hours, and seasonal rather than permanent engagement, further keep the worker trapped in this form of dependence.
Vicious cycle
When rural workers migrate from the village on such work, other poorly-paid migrant workers come into the space created in their absence, often from even more impoverished or drought-stricken regions, thus keeping wages low and working conditions poor for all. All these factors leave little or no scope for workers to organise or for their collective bargaining for better conditions.
Breman’s parents | Photo Credit: special arrangement
Growing up in Depression-era and wartime Europe, Breman was the son of a postman and a domestic maid who had grown up on a barge. He was the first in his family to attend college; even the cost of a college education was at first a barrier, until the welfare state offered a path to social mobility.
Unlike Europe, the growth of industry in India did not result in the poor becoming free to sell their labour and emerge from the condition of perpetual indebtedness. In the contemporary condition of neo-bondage, the relationship between employer and servant is short-duration, impersonal, monetised, and contractual.
Breman powerfully visualises the widening inequality between the lives of landowners, who kept becoming better off, and the landless poor, who had so little: “The misery and poverty in which the Halpati lived were visible in their decrepit shelter – a mud hut with a thatched roof, an opening but no door and no windows. Inside, when my eyes could see again in the dark, there was nothing to see.”
Breman notes that neither the colonial British state nor the nationalist movement paid close attention to the struggles of the landless poor. On the contrary, the way of life of the poorest agricultural workers was often criticised as indolent, and they were blamed for their problems. “‘Defective’ behaviour remained the standard explanation in the mindset,” he remarks.
Failure of laws
The advent of political suffrage with independence, and the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1976, did not bring in sufficient measure the hoped-for transformation in the lives of the poor. Regulations that limited the validity of ration cards to the place of household domicile made workers even more vulnerable. Quality education was less accessible for the children of the landless poor than for the children of the well-off landed gentry.
At a garment factory. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Breman estimates that up to a fifth of the urban and rural workforce in South Asia is trapped in this form of exploitative and insecure work: unable to choose where, when, to whom, and for how much they will sell their labour. Forced migration and instability are a defining feature of their lives. Unfree labour, he remarks, is not inimical to capitalism.
Fighting Free to Become Unfree Again: The Social History of Bondage and Neo-Bondage of Labour in India; Jan Breman, Tulika Books, ₹950.
The reviewer is in the IAS.
Published - September 22, 2023 09:02 am IST
