The Politics of Swidden farming: Environment and Development in Eastern India - Hardcover

Das, Debojyoti

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783087757 ISBN 13: 9781783087754

Publisher: Anthem Press, 2018

Synopsis

The Politics of Swidden Farming offers a new explanation for the changes taking place in swidden farming practised in the highlands of eastern India through an ethnographic case study. The book traces the story of agroecological change and state intervention to colonial times, and helps understand contemporary agrarian change by contextualizing farming not just in terms of the science and technology of agriculture or conservation and biodiversity but also in terms of technologies of rule. The Politics of Swidden Farming adds a new dimension to the underdeveloped literature on shifting cultivation in South Asia by focusing on the social ecology of farming and agrarian change in the hills. It provides a comparative viewpoint to state-centred and donor-driven development in the frontier region by bringing in different actors and institutions that become the actants and agents of social change.

About this title

About the Author

Debojyoti Das is an AHRC-GCRF postdoctoral associate at Bristol University, UK. He received his PhD in social anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and has held several prestigious fellowships and consultancies at Yale, Sussex and the University of London. Das has published widely in journals such as the European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, Journal of Borderland Studies, Journal of the Indian Ocean Region and Economic and Political Weekly besides contributing to blogs.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Politics of Swidden Farming: Environment and Development in Eastern India

By Debojyoti Das

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2018 Debojyoti Das
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78308-775-4

Contents

List of Illustrations, ix, 
Foreword, xi, 
Acknowledgements, xv, 
List of Abbreviations, xix, 
1. Introduction, 1, 
2. Methodology and Fieldwork: Negotiating Hazardous Fields, 25, 
3. Ethnography, Violence and Memory: Telling Violence in the Naga Hills, 47, 
4. Jhum and the 'Science of Empire': Ecological Discourse, Ethnographic Knowledge and Colonial Mediation, 83, 
5. Land and Land-Based Relations in a Yimchunger Naga Village: From Book View to Field View, 119, 
6. The Politics of Time: The Missionary Calendar, the Protestant Ethic and Labour Relations among the Eastern Nagas, 145, 
7. Micro-Politics of Development Intervention: Village Patrons, Community Participation and the NEPED Project, 177, 
8. Conclusion, 199, 
Notes, 219, 
Bibliography, 229, 
Index, 243, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Both colonial technical staff and farmers in the plains show little consideration for and even despise swidden practices all over their colonies in Southeast Asia. Yet one hears little of the centuries during which the Mayan civilization ruled over Central America, which is strewn with their masterpieces. The colonial administration did not know, for example, that swidden had played a major role in the demographic expansion of the twelfth century in France: it transformed vast areas into cultivated fields of cereals. It was also the case that swidden was widespread in Europe during the nineteenth century, and it is also mentioned as existing in Austria during the 1960s. If you walk through the forest of Fontainebleau you will come across many sites or hamlets with the name 'I'Essart' or 'Essart' (swidden) on the survey maps.

(Condominas 2009, 267)

The seed of this book dates back, at least in part, to 2006, when I attended a seminar on 'shifting cultivation' – swidden farming, pejoratively known as 'slash-and-burn', and in northeast India as jhum. This seminar, delivered by P. S. Ramakrishnan, inspired me to undertake my research among the hill farmers of Eastern India. This manuscript is a labour of love, written through years of commitment working with jhum farmers in Nagaland. Ramakrishnan was, at that time, a member of the advisory committee in a transnationally funded jhum regeneration project. The project, entitled Nagaland Empowerment of People through Economic Development (NEPED), was funded by the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the India–Canada Environmental Facility (ICEF) primarily to implement 'carbon sink' and target global warming and climate change– induced environmental risks through the regeneration of forest land and by incentivizing farmers to grow horticultural and plantation cash crops in the eastern Himalayas. This region is a major biodiversity hot spot in South Asia and has grasped the attention of biologists, geographers, climate scientists and ecologists who see jhum as a hazardous and unproductive form of farming, threatening local biodiversity. The appraisal of the project's success and research funding from the Felix Scholarship, UK, to pursue my work at the Anthropology Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies drove me to hike the Saramati mountain range across the India– Myanmar borderland. I lived among the Yimchungers to develop my field-based knowledge, which informs the ethnography in the book.

In this book, I trace the story of agroecological change and state intervention back to colonial times when the Naga Hills were seen as the frontier of state and 'civilization'. We need to understand contemporary agrarian change by contextualizing farming, not just in terms of the science and technology of agriculture or conservation and biodiversity, but also in terms of 'technologies of rule'. For the colonial administrators of the Naga Hills – who saw their role partially in terms of rescue-and-record ethnography – jhum practices were part of backward Naga customs and traditions. 'Improving' farming practices was bound up with indirect rule as a distinct process of governance involving forms of knowledge and intervention. It was political expediency rather than 'imperial science' that changed local agroecologies and put pressure on the practice of shifting cultivation. Crucially, neighbouring Naga terrace rice cultivators were promoted as offering a more civilized – yet local – alternative.

Here I propose to deliver anthropological insights into the social ecology of farming that may help to understand how swidden has been framed within statist and epistemic discourses that have informed both policy and practice on agriculture development in upland South Asia. Besides developing an ethnography of jhumland development in the hills, the work has other objectives that originate from my engaged and collaborative ethnographic fieldwork and from my use of multiple sources and methods of data collection in a sensitive field site (particularly colonial photographs, archival records and policy dossiers). This work also demonstrates how contemporary agrarian development reflects this complex colonial heritage, including linkages between the state and village elites. Evangelical missionaries in the post-independence period also contributed by appropriating local institutions and incorporating them into a Protestant (Baptist) ethic of work. Reinforcing the colonial state's favouring of rice as the 'crop of civilization', the missionaries' moral discourse installed new time disciplines geared to settled agriculture.

Methodologically, I engage with the many voices that shaped my field research, providing evidence from in-depth, household-based participant observation and life histories and a household survey, while also drawing extensively on original archival research and colonial photography to provide documentation of colonial representations of the swidden landscape. This research was undertaken in a milieu of fear and violence, which raises further methodological and ethical issues in the book that are relevant for ethnographies carried out in dangerous field sites (see Chapter 2).

Global Discourses: An Overview of Swidden

To begin with I provide an overview of jhum, northeast India's swidden farming. Swidden agriculture is a technique of rotational farming in which land is cleared for cultivation (normally by fire) and then left to regenerate after a few years. This is followed in a cycle. However, in northeast India, as elsewhere in the tropics, various factors – such as demographic changes, the introduction of new cash and plantation crops, the building of big dams and the submergence of forest land in catchment areas – have reduced the land use needed for swidden farming. Simultaneously, governments worldwide have long sought to eradicate swidden agriculture, terming it 'slash and burn' because of an erroneous belief that it is the sole driver of deforestation and soil erosion in the hills.

Swidden is today increasingly understood in national and transnational agroecological discourse as an obsolete form of land use that not only puts pressure on land and its dwellers, but also destabilizes forests, soil and biodiversity in highland ecosystems. The environmental narratives of shifting cultivation that induced damages to ecology were produced, and scientifically deliberated, during the early nineteenth century and later reaffirmed in colonial forest policy during the British empire's scientific conferences held between 1921 and 1951 (Rajan 2006). Since the 1950s, soil erosion and desiccation narratives have joined neo-Malthusian discourse on the 'carrying capacity of land' to discourage swidden farming. More recently, revisionist scholars have critiqued scientific claims about the negative impact of swidden by looking at national programmes of territorialization that historically marginalized the forest-dependent swiddeners and separated them from their livelihood. Among the revisionist school, neo-indigenistas argue that swidden farming is sustainable when practised under long cycles of field rotation (Agrawal 1995). They cite the cultural attributes of swidden that make it impossible to be abandoned completely, leading to the failure of many jhum improvement schemes of national governments and transnational conservation organizations that deny this reality. Agriculture, as the neo-indigenistas claim, is inherently a cultural practice, and if communities are alienated from it, the process of institutional intervention through new technologies and incentives for improvement will fail. On the other side of the political scale, the radical camp of 'political ecologists' base their critique on the economic and political circumscription of swidden populations by national policies that favour big capital and transnational timber cartels (Dove 1983). Taking into account the points of view and contemporary critiques on jhum, I argue for a 'cultural ecology of conservation effort'. I will explain through a village-level case study the less-understood histories of state territorialization of swidden landscapes, ideas of modernization brought in by missionaries, changing land use and labour relations and shifting values towards access and rights to land under 'community ownership', along with the rhetoric of population implosion in swidden villages. Jointly, these developments have transformed swidden landscapes from their ideal beginnings as self-sustaining 'little insular-barter economies' into timber and cash-crop plantations that sustain export to urban and regional markets on the plains. In a rapidly changing globalized rural situation, swidden farming is hybridized with the introduction of agro-forestry, silviculture and timber-plantation economies overlaid by traditional land-use systems. Villages are vertically integrated to the market and to transnational capital. Equally, swidden farming performed under state surveillance is territorialized, fragmented, settled and regulated by forest and wildlife protection laws as well as by new schemes of permanent husbandry. The modern swidden economy has to be understood as an agroecological and cultural system under transition and shaped by epistemic discourses, state and transnational development promises and programmes of conservation as well as the swidden communities' 'will to improve' (Li 2007) – a desire to catch up with the outside world.

This book is based on my ethnographic case study of the Yimchunger Naga tribal group, a minority within the pan-Naga and Indian identity. They remain one of the least documented of the Naga tribes bordering India and Myanmar. Their marginality is evident both in their geographical and political relationships with the lowland (plains caste) population and with the Indian state: theirs is a region that rarely figures in Indian Studies (Kejariwal 1987, Maaker and Joshi 2007, Kumar and Zou 2011). The region's farming and landscape can best be compared with the mountain in Southeast Asia that James C. Scott has generalized as 'Zomia' (2009: ix).2 The central purpose here is to test the simplifying discourses of swidden agriculture as 'underdeveloped, backward, waste and marginal' which, after being initially established in the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries within colonial rescue-and-record evolutionist Naga ethnography (Lotha 2007), later became incorporated in the process of state planning. By contrast, I hope to demonstrate the dynamic nature of swidden agriculture among the Yimchunger Nagas, while also tracing the historically specific social and political factors that shape this land-use practice.

I narrate here, in brief, my entry to the field, which will serve as a vignette to the perceptions on swidden, or shifting cultivation. In February 2009, I made a trip to Tuensang town via Mokokchung with a friend who worked as the principal in a government college. The journey to Tuensang was memorable, and in the coming months it became more regular once I established my fieldwork base among the Yimchunger Nagas (a Naga subtribe inhabiting the Tuensang and Kiphire districts of Nagaland; see Map 1.1). The tribe's members offered insights into their agricultural methods, my subject of enquiry. During the journey, I encountered the natural beauty of the landscape, spotted with dark, charred hills that appeared regularly as we ascended the Saramati peak. This landscape serves as a natural watershed between India and Burma. Here there were newly opened jhum plots prepared for the coming season. A tribe member was quick to present his views of the jhummed landscape amid dense subtropic greenery. 'Look at these jhum plots, people here are mostly dependent on slash and burn. They make much bigger jhum fallow than in other parts of Nagaland. They are still backward in their agriculture. The landscape will soon be robbed of fertile soil by the monsoon showers.' My interlocutor soon followed with the remark, 'We Nagas still appreciate it as a way of life.' The practice of jhum, despite being embedded in people's culture, brings immeasurable stress to life and landscape in the region. These remarks come from every government official, nongovernmental organization (NGO) worker, missionary, schoolgoing teenager and often from farmers themselves (see Image 1.1). Jhum is presented as a bane, and the farmers express their helplessness in light of limited opportunities to transform their agrarian livelihood, which is dependent on slash and burn. In this book I take these perceptions of jhum, based on 'received wisdom' (Fairhead and Leach 1996), and situate them within a wider historical and ethnographic context of colonial and missionary contact that framed the jhum -based Naga livelihood as part of the frontier wildness and as being ignorant and savage-like. This anthropological–historical lens, focused on the changing life and times in Naga society, will help understand how we imagine agrarian change and farming in Nagaland, on the one hand, and state– Naga relations on the other.

The points are crucial to unveil the nature of our contemporary knowledge about swidden cultivators and their lived world. During my field research in Nagaland (2008–9), I recorded several accounts of how outsiders (town people, plains people, project staff, government officials) who no longer practice jhum described it as bad, wasteful, primitive and at the same time intrinsic to local culture, traditions and local knowledge. The dual perception of jhum as a cultural practice, a way of life and a marker of backwardness led me to ask what is involved in shifting cultivation and why it is backward, wasteful, primitive – all negative connotations attached to a way of life that is quickly changing, along with changing food choices, culture, customs, accessibility to markets and increasing mobility to towns and cities.

Since the decolonization phase of the 1950s, there has been active engagement by scholars in defining jhum cultivation, as it became a systematic focus of institutional intervention carried out by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). The FAO staff, in their attempt to replace swidden with more civilized forms of settled agriculture, presented a narrow and straightforward definition: 'Shifting Cultivation is the custom of cultivating, clearings scattered in the reservoir of natural forest (forest or grass woodland) and of abandoning them as soon as the soil is exhausted' (FAO staff 1957). A negative stereotype of swidden agriculture was developed that would shape policies by national governments in order to 'emancipate' swiddeners of their 'backwardness'. Following this FAO definition, geographers, anthropologists, sociologists and cultural-studies academics working on highland agronomy and indigenous cultures have tried to define this complex farming practice by combining various aspects of jhum rotation, burning and fallow management.

However, the definition of swidden is still partial, and no universal categorization can be made of the diverse practices involved. Both Conklin (1961) and Spencer (1966) have proposed a very detailed classification of shifting cultivation from their study among swidden cultivators in Southeast Asia. They have made distinctions, such as coining the term 'linear shift' as opposed to 'cyclic shift', and have pioneered and established categories. In practice, however, these distinctions partly explain the dynamic nature of swidden systems. In fact, Mertz et al. observe that 'swiddeners in Southeast Asia have been engaged in a long-term transition from pioneer to established systems as their livelihoods are transformed' (2009: 261). The increasing speed of change in recent decades has given rise to a diverse array of land use and livelihood systems that defy simple definition.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783087757
• ISBN 13: 9781783087754
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272