Law and Social Sciences Research Network
LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN SOUTH ASIA
Inaugural Conference
January 8-11, 2009
Gender, Law and Agrarian Relations: Panel in Honour of Jayoti Gupta
Session #6: Sunday, 11 January, 10.00 - 11.45 (CSLG)
Panel coordinator(s): Brenna Bhandar, Law, Kent University, UK (b.bhandar@kent.ac.uk)
Chair/discussant: Rajni Palriwala, Professor and Head of Department, Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi (rajnip@gmail.com)
Panel description
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
- Utsa Patnaik, A Comment On Jayoti's Early Work
- Anand Chakravarti, The State, the Law, and the Agrarian Underclass In India
- Kumkum Sangari, The gendered economies of law and labour
- Manjira Datta, Glimpses of Jayoti Gupta's work: video extracts
- Brenna Bhandar, Comment on Seeds Of Plenty, Seeds Of Sorrow
Panel description
Dr. Jayoti Gupta was a scholar with a profound commitment to socially grounded research inspired by a vision of a society free from exploitation. Her lifelong intellectual pursuits encompassed the fields of agrarian relations, land reform, rural labour, and gender relations. Jayoti’s work reveals the interstices of relations of power, gender, labour and land reform in a nuanced and highly interdisciplinary framework of research. Jayoti’s commitment to fieldwork as one of her prime research methodologies is reflected in several films produced in close collaboration with filmmaker and friend Manjira Datta, which explore the interconnections between land rights, institutions such as dowry and marriage, and their impacts on the lived realities of rural women. Her research on the topic of alternative dispute resolution led to close and meaningful collaboration with Canadian and Aboriginal scholars and activists in various parts of Canada. Jayoti was an internationally recognised scholar-activist whose untimely death in November 2007 left her colleagues, friends, and students with a tremendous loss to bear. Her warmth, openness, incisive wit and tremendous capacities for generating critical questions and new ideas about a wide range of crucial political and theoretical issues was deeply influential on many of us. This panel commemorates the rich complexity of her work, and the spirit with which it was unfolded throughout her life.
This presentation recalls some of the dialogues between Jayoti and me concerning the impact of agrarian reform on the status of the underclass in West Bengal and Bihar. In the light of these conversations, my main concern is to examine why the principal segments of the underclass in India as a whole -- comprising insecure tenants-at-will and landless agricultural labourers -- have failed to benefit from laws intended to improve their material conditions. I argue that the attribution of this failure to the subversion of the relevant laws does not get to the root of the problem, which is located in the character of the post-Independence state. In fundamental respects the contemporary Indian state is a legacy of the failure of the national movement to resolve the deep-seated contradictions in India’s social structure, for instance, those based on caste and class. For the leaders of the national movement, belonging to dominant castes and classes, the main concern was ending colonial domination, which was regarded as the primary contradiction. All other contradictions were conveniently deemed to be secondary, and their resolution was left as a promise for the future. State power in Independent India continues to be wielded overwhelmingly by dominant castes and classes, and it is antithetical to their interests that there should be a radical change in the structures of domination in rural India. For this reason, even the few laws that are supposed to benefit the agrarian underclass are not only deeply flawed but get lost in a black hole.