A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly getting erased. By now agriculturists are ready to accept that their future lies elsewhere, perhaps in cities and towns, perhaps also in household and informal industries. If they cannot make it to those places, at least their children should.
Dipankar Gupta (dipankargupta@hotmail. com) teaches at the Shiv Nadar University, Noida, Uttar Pradesh.
This is the text of my V K R V Rao lecture delivered in May 2014 in Bengaluru. A fellowship in Teen Murti Memorial Museum and Library got me started on this subject. I subsequently benefi ted from discussions with a number of scholars at the National University for Education Planning and Administration, New Delhi, and Shiv Nadar University.
Hard To Be Rural
India may not yet be quite urban, but neither is it rural. Perhaps, the clumsy term “rurban” might suffice for the time being; for time being it is, given the rapid transformation that is taking place in Village India.
When India became independent, almost 50% of the economy was rural; the latest figures tell us it is barely 14% now. The rate of growth in agriculture hovers around 2.5% to 3.5% per annum. This, as we can easily tell, is well below the gross domestic product (GDP) growth figures for the country as a whole. True, big farmers are now a rare sight in villages, but this blight does not affect big farms alone, but the agricultural sector in general. This should be seen alongside that the area leased in has fallen, according to the 59th round of the National Sample Survey (NSS 2006: Table 3.2). Sharecropping is more or less a thing of the past. Area under food crops came down between 1950–51 and 2009–10 from 80.7% to 73.5% (Red Book 2008: 35). Naturally, and it is almost predictable, between 1994 and 2001, real investment in agriculture declined by as much as 20% (Acharya et al 2004: 216). That this has been happening steadily over the years does not reduce the effect of its cumulative impact on agriculture. Quantity does yield to quality sooner rather than later.
Today, roughly 80% of landholdings in India are below five acres, and about 66% below three acres. Some of this must be credited to land reforms, for they have made the acquisition of large holdings legally suspect, but, in a great measure, one has to hand it to demography. What the abolition of zamindari (big landlords) set out to do was accomplished most comprehensively by population growth and subdivision of holdings. Where villages were once dominated by powerful landlords, today they are home to thousands of small, family farms. Family farms, by definition, have very little scope for hiring labour, except perhaps during the peak harvesting season. Large and medium farms are finding it hard to survive on land, which is why the ranks of small and marginal farmers keep growing (DACNET 2013; Chand et al 2011: 7; NSS 2006).
By now agriculturists are ready to accept that their future lies elsewhere, perhaps in cities and towns, perhaps also in household and informal industries. If they cannot make it to those places, at least their children should. Thus, while cultivators, in general, constitute about 44.0% of the rural population, this number rises to 63.6% if we take only those among them who are over 60 years of age (IAMR 2008: 233). Most small family farms are clearly being tended to by the older generation so that their young can go out into the big, wide world.
Agriculture is not outside market forces, nor do farmers want it that way. This is because almost all villagers are tied to the market for their needs and are not self-sufficient, as many peasant myths go. Not only is there now an increased dependence on cash crops, but also, as a consequence, a greater reliance on chemical inputs and pump sets. From 1981–82 to 2009–10, the percentage of cropped area to cereals and millets went down by more than 9%. The markets for jowar (sorghum) and bajra (millet) are nowhere near that for wheat or rice, and hence they are not favoured by farmers, who are looking for monetary returns.
When we come to non-food crops, a similar trend is seen. Between 1955–56 and 2011–12, oilseed production went up six times—cotton lint by about eight times, and sugar cane by more than six times. As with coarse cereals, jute, the poor person’s cash crop, only doubled in production in the same period. All this tells us where the money lies (RBI 2012a, 2012b). This increase in cash crop cultivation also meant a 25-time hike in the use of fertilisers and a threefold increase in multiple cropping. The number of pump sets went up from 2,00,000 to 25 million between 1960 and 2009, and so many of them are from China (Biggs and Justice 2011: 6). And why should they not?
It is for reasons such as these that another categorical distinction is facing rough weather—that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in, not just as external markets, but as external inputs. This is the biggest difference from the past. Further, many of our villages would barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. All too often people continue to live and work in villages but are almost urban in terms of their work profile. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker is slowly getting erased. This is why a labourer will seek work outside agriculture, for when he returns home after a day’s toil, say as a rickshaw puller, there will be money jingling in his pocket. Small change, one might say, but big money from the worker’s point of view. This is what prompts the poor villager to leave every morning for the bus stop or the village square in the hope that he will catch a contractor’s eye and his day will be made.
Rural Non-farm Income
As a result, there has been a tremendous increase in rural non-farm employment (RNFE) all over the country. What was once a secondary occupation for most villagers is often the primary one today. The NSS shows that the percentage of non-agricultural households increased from a pre-existing high of 31.9% in 1993–94 to 42.5% in 2009–10.
In 2009–10 the contribution of non-farm sector to the rural net domestic product was 65% (Reddy et al 2014: 10; Table 5; for an earlier estimate see Chaddha 2003: 55). Nor is this a story of the developed regions in India. The more backward the districts, the higher the proportion of men in household industries. In Uttar Pradesh (UP), for example, six times more men than women work in these manufactories and in Rajasthan the figure jumps to an unbelievable 10 times (Census of India 2001). When we examine the census data, we find that factories and workshops have quite a strong presence in rural areas. They dominate rural regions in states as disparate as Kerala, Punjab, Odisha, and Gujarat (Census of India 2001: Table H-1). A recent census of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) confirms the lively presence of enterprise in villages. When it is about registered units, rural India houses 45.2% of them, but in unregistered ones, there are as many as 60.2% in the countryside (MSME Annual Report 2012–13: statement 2.1; p 21).
This probably also explains why rural to rural migration is quite active. This is an area we do not pay sufficient attention to because the move to cities is much more dramatic in its outcome and numbers. After all, figures show that 29% of rural migrant households migrate from rural India and that 55% of them do so for economic reasons, with self-employment playing a major role in this (Press Information Bureau 2010). The rural rate of migration too is a respectable 26% (Press Information Bureau 2010), with nearly 91% of the movement coming in from other villages (NSS 2007–08 estimates it at 70%). We might as well underline that these migrants primarily fill the ranks of units that are categorised as “self-employed,” and in which, on an average, between two to five people work (MSME Annual Report 2012–13: statement 2.1, p 21). So, rural India is not just agricultural anymore and caters to the international as well as national urban market in terms of manufacturing. A large number of products—from bric-a-brac to clothing, to gems and jewellery, and now even to machine parts—which have a rural provenance are now available in urban households and markets.
Thus, while we have family farms that are proliferating in villages, we also have the rapid multiplication of self-employed enterprises. These outfits are the closest one can come to family farms in a non-agricultural setting. Therefore, there is an urban aspect in the village, much as there are rural aspects in cities, brought about primarily by migration from villages. We would be better off with the term “rural–urban nexus,” rather than “rural–urban continuum,” for one penetrates the other in such a fashion that a slide rule-like concept seems inadequate. Further, the very fact that there is a rural–urban nexus forces us to see the effect of the city on the village in ways other than that of acquisition (telephones, scooters, motor cars, coffee shops, and so on), and also in terms of the economy.
We cannot talk of rural India without calling out to the urban world. In the past, village field studies usually saw the town and country relationship as a one-dimensional phenomenon. For example, even in the works of Epstein (1973), it is the city that is influencing the village, but there is no word of the movement the other way. There are detailed descriptions in accounts of this sort that document how many motorcycles, TV sets, and coffee shops are in villages. But what they fail to point out is that villagers are not sleeping at the switch. They too are active agents who are keen to exchange their mud huts for urban shanties.
Nor can we really think of energising small farmers without radically addressing their felt needs and where they earn their real incomes from. This is because their economic and aspirational horizon is no longer confined to the village perimeter. As a result, there has been a diminution in the status of agriculture as an occupation. Family farms have, consequently, lost some of their esteem as a precious gift to be harvested in perpetuity. As needs have escalated, as scales of operations have increased, as inputs are getting costlier, the family farm is no longer what it was earlier cut out to be.
In the fitness of things, should we then not call the villager of today a “rurbanite”? Such a person has left much of tradition behind, though a fair amount is palpably present in a number of interactions. This makes the rurbanite a complex, multi-faceted, ambitious, and yet somewhat handicapped individual. There are a number of features that express this variegated term, but none better than the desire to get educated (Desai et al 2010: 80–81) and leave agriculture, and if possible, the village altogether. This is another reason why a greater number of literates tend to migrate from country to town (NSS 2008–09: H-ii). There has also been a steady rise in the migration of male workers from rural to urban India. In less than 10 years, from 1999–2000 to 2007–08, the number went up from 36.5% in 1999–2000 to 41.6% in 2007–08 (Kundu and Saraswati 2012: 221). In just one year, between 1999 and 2000, the proportion of people migrating for jobs jumped by as much as 15% (IAMR 2005: 303, Table 6.12).
All this goes to show that we need to check if the diacritics that once served so well in separating town from country are relevant any longer. It should not be surprising that over five billion railway tickets are sold every year in India. As anyone who knows this country will vouch, even this figure is an understatement, for most people travel ticketless on Indian Railways.
To understand the nature of rural dynamics, one must perforce look at the village as a part of a larger society. In traditional sociology, for instance, there was a great degree of attention to villages and village studies, but they suffered, in the main, from one serious flaw. For most of the scholars who worked on this subject it was their village that mattered most and India was a distant reality. There were, of course, many exceptions to the rule, but that was the rule. Even when some village experts looked at change, the overall orientation was one where the urban was impinging on certain aspects of rural life and changing it in cosmetic ways. There were tea shops, more motorcycles, more radios, and so on, but the village itself seemed more or less undisturbed. Fortunately, scholars today see little purchase in studying an isolated village—they would rather examine villages around themes that engage the country.
When examining this issue, it is impossible to ignore three major aspects that tumble out. The first is the emergence of small towns, and with it the enormous growth of the informal sector, particularly in terms of its contribution to the formal sector and to manufacturing. Second, we need to look at the growth of education, which is a necessary corollary to the first. Finally, an issue that cannot be overlooked is interesting changes that have taken place in inter-caste relations that upset most of our traditional views on the Hindu hierarchical system. Put all these together, stir it, and what you get is the rurbanite in more than one dimension.
Small Towns and the Informal Sector
That a large number of rural migrants find jobs in urban India as unskilled labour, working at things that many of their counterparts do in rural units, draws the village closer to the city in pure economic terms. As a corollary, it might be mentioned that small towns are growing at a very fast rate because real estate prices are lower there than in large metropolitan centres. The rural impact is very high in new million-plus and yet-to-be-million-plus towns. So when we talk about the nexus, we are really highlighting the interpenetration of rural and the urban, and not just a loose chain of relations (Bhagat 2011).
If we take enterprises that employ less than 10 workers, rural India follows close on the heels of urban India (IAMR 2009: 167). These are also units that service the export sector, both directly and indirectly. So our shabby manufacturing urban outposts with poor “rural” employees are actually integral parts of a global economy. It should also be noted that it is not as if only women work in such units, and in places like Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan, the census records more men than women in household industries (Census of India 2001).
Unlike what we see in old Bollywood films, rural migrants generally do not come alone. They have a network that brings them to urban jobs and it is this network that supports them in between jobs. A network of this kind is nearly always community or region specific, which is why there are multiple networks criss-crossing one another in an urban site. Villagers long to belong to such networks, but I have also seen villages that are bereft of these long-distance ties. It is hard to explain why some villages are well endowed with such connections and others lack them. The distribution appears very idiosyncratic for a lot depends on chance, and chance alone.
In the last 20 years, a large number of cities have joined the million-plus club. In the Greater Mumbai urban agglomeration (UA), the 2001 census recorded a population increase of 30.47%, but it is now down to 12.05%. Likewise, growth in the Delhi UA slowed from 52.4% to 26.69%, and the Kolkata UA from 19.6% to 6.87% during the same time. What is, however, stunning is that between 2001 and 2011, small towns continued forming and growing rapidly. This is a fact that not many fully appreciate. The Census of India shows that 18 new cities with over a million people have emerged, but that is just a tiny part of the story. Besides the emergence of these big urban centres, there are 72 new class I towns and about 2,770 census towns (Census of India 2011). The last might look like a village at first sight, but has already developed enduring urban traits and that is where many rurbanites live.
Not only are the cities that have barely touched the million mark, such as Ludhiana, Varanasi, Bhopal and Kochi, growing in number, they are also assuming serious urban characteristics. In these aspiring big cities, a proportionately higher number of white-collar jobs are coming up than in full-blown megalopolises. According to a Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI)–Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) survey, in contrast to the older established metros such as Delhi, Mumbai, or Chennai, new managerial positions are opening up in smaller tier-2 cities. In Hoshiarpur and Meerut, for example, the increase is 100% and 133.3% respectively (Nayyar and Jain 2012: 21) This is probably why more than 50% of rural graduates prefer small towns to metros (Kundu and Mohanan: 13). This also explains why Surat, Patna, Pune, Jaipur, and Indore have growth rates exceeding 40%, much higher than that of Kolkata, or even Mumbai.
Small towns also manufacture a number of products that may not attract the eyes of those who live in metros, but these are serious money-spinners. Ghari Detergents, for one, is an extremely popular brand that few people in Delhi or Mumbai might know about. It is produced and packaged in a factory not far from Kanpur and its turnover is higher than all the Godrej fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), including Cinthol, put together. Then there is Sanjay Ghodawat, who runs a Rs 1,000-crore empire in Manakpur, which is a nondescript town about 160 kilometres from Kolhapur, another small town. In this connection, how can we overlook Tirupur in Tamil Nadu, which is the hosiery capital of India and has experienced enormous growth over the last 20 years (TNUIFCL 2011: 10)? Likewise, Agra, Bhiwani, Panipat and a host of other small towns are bustling centres of manufacturing activity, but almost always on the back of informal labour.
Many of these small towns were villages till yesterday and have broken with their official status as “rural” only recently. This makes a large number of “rurbanites” autochthones and they are joined by a large number of migrants from villages. This is simply because most growth is taking place there, which can be gauged from the massive increase in slums. In Pune, once a small town that was even looked at as a kind of “resort,” the slum population increased six times between 1971 and 2011 (DNA 2011). Delhi, Nagpur, Kolkata and Chennai have a lower percentage of slum dwellers than either Meerut and Pune, which have now taken second and third place respectively after Mumbai (Times of India2011; Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation 2011). Ludhiana, for example, has a slum population that touches 50% (Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry 1993: 6.10). Many small towns with a population of about 1,00,000 have beauty parlours and gymnasiums, Pizza Hut outlets and ATM machines. They also have a number of English-medium schools and management and technical institutes. As a matter of fact, it is hard not to find them even in slightly larger villages. This explains why graduates from rural areas tend to prefer small towns to the metros.
Is it surprising then that nearly 20% of India’s billionaires live outside metros?
There are probably many reasons for this shift to small towns. The most widely acknowledged is that of lower real estate costs. Equally important is that the kind of enterprises that are coming up there require low level skills, which freshly recruited villagers and resident rurbanites can easily muster. This explains the continuation of informal labour in our industrial workforce today, an issue to which we shall soon return. Also the smaller the urban area, the greater the proportion of land given to industry and mercantile activities. Cities with over 1,00,000 people have about 1.8% of its developed land devoted to commercial use, whereas in smaller urban areas, the proportion is almost 3.2% (Venkateswaralu 1998: 23). When we come to industrial use, we find again that while 6.8% of all land is devoted to that purpose in all states, it is only 5.1% in metros but as high as 14% in towns with populations between 5,00,000 and 1,000,000 (Venkateswaralu 1998: 23).
Take away a handful of companies in information technology (IT), telecommunications, and financial services, and it is hard to overlook that informal labour comprises about 93% of our workforce. This is a gold mine for small investors, looking for quick returns, with very little skill at both ends—management and labour. Not only is cheap labour pouring out of every vein, there is also no pressure to maintain proper records—if this means paying off a labour inspector, that is small change.
It is then to be expected that the dependence of the formal sector on informal/unorganised workers will grow over time in India. In 1999–2000, it was 37.8%, but it went up to 46.6% in 2004–05, and is still climbing (NCEUS 2007). When labour is ready to be hired for a song, it is tempting for business houses to rely on the informal sector. Besides, as everybody else is doing just that, it would be ruinous to play fair. If truth be told, this scruffy underclass contributes as much as 43% of our export earnings (Planning Commission 2002; Tata Services 2007: 35). Finally, consider this: The vocationally trained labour force is a stagnant 5% in India, but a staggering 95% in South Korea.
Education-Seeking Rurbanite
However, an important and necessary qualification for being a “rurbanite” is education. Notwithstanding the general ruination of the village economy, what stands out is the emphasis rural people place on education. That this is so strikingly close to what urban people do gives us another reason to classify the bulk of those who live in Village India as “rurbanites.” Whereas only 2% of Indian children went to private schools in 1980, today as many as 21% of rural children go to such institutions (Desai et al 2010). Clearly, the poor in the countryside are spending way above what they can actually afford to make sure their children get a better future.
True, rural literacy today is only 67.8% compared to 84.1% in urban India. Yet if one looks at the rate of growth of literacy, a different picture emerges. Literacy shot up in rural India at the rate of 14.75% between 1991 and 2001. This is nearly double the figure for urban India. Given the agrarian crisis that has lasted for decades, villagers believe that one of the most reliable ways of getting out of their rural confines is to seek an alternative in cities.
Small towns are also establishing educational institutes and technical schools and colleges. Obviously, there is a great desire among those who live there to better their lives. Moradabad has many such institutions and among them there is the Teerthankar Mahaveer University, the Moradabad Institute of Technology, Wilsonia Degree College, and English-medium schools such as Delhi Public School and St Jude. Hanamkonda in Andhra Pradesh has many colleges too, as well as institutes that specialise in pharmacy, technology, and business. In Kazipet, there is a Mary Convent School as well as a National Institute of Technology. Kuppam, another small Andhra town, is a kind of educational hub with engineering and medical colleges.
The above are only examples; almost every small town has an English-medium school as well as a technology and management institute of some kind. This is significant as it demonstrates a strong desire for upward mobility among small-town residents. The question still remains—is there a demand for skilled labour yet? Second, how good is the quality of these educational institutions?
There are two trends that should be placed next to each other—the increase in the literacy level of migrants and, at the same time, the overwhelming numbers of unskilled labourers that come in large numbers to cities in search of jobs. Shaw found both these tendencies in the making of Navi Mumbai. What was most striking in her presentation is the sheer number of unskilled labourers who were flooding into the city, increasing the density and number of unauthorised settlements (Shaw 2004: 122).
Interestingly, all-India figures show that a larger percentage (nearly 50%) of rural graduates migrate to small and medium-sized towns, but the total migration of this category to all urban centres is lower, at 44% (Kundu and Mohanan 2009). That the rate of literacy is increasing faster in rural India than it is in urban India indicates how serious villagers are about getting educated and leaving villages for urban jobs.
Once the ambition arises to leave the village to seek a better life, its natural cohort is the drive towards education. This explains why so many children are today going to private schools. When the family is small, parents can think of sending their children to more expensive private schools. Consequently, their dependence on government schools declines. When a poor family sends its children to private schools, it is a big strain on its finances. But private education in India has yet to reveal its hand and demonstrate its efficacy in employment and industry. The promise is there and a lot of hopes ride on it. So far the results have not been very encouraging, as even the organised sector is employing more informal labour than what it did 10 years ago. Yet, one might make allowances for all that and say it is still early days and the good times are round the corner.
New Caste Relations
Inter-caste relations too were bound to be affected by the changes in the rural economy. As big landlords are largely creatures of the past, their sway over village people has diminished almost entirely. The village oligarchs of old who ruled and terrorised the poor folk are not to be seen. Instead, we find a mass of small cultivators of nearly every caste, including the Scheduled Castes (SCs). As most agricultural holdings are now really family farms, there is hardly any scope to act as village patrons, or as despots.
That being the case, the hierarchy that dominated caste interactions had to undergo a major modification. The most important being that no caste today can actually guarantee a vote bank, nor compel other castes to do its bidding. While this was possible in the past, it is not so today. One can get a clear indication of this from that the once subjugated castes are no longer afraid of loudly expressing their heritage and identities. Doing this would have been dangerous business a few decades ago, for it would have brought physical humiliation by rural oligarchs, and a denial of favours and jobs. That the earlier poorer castes are willing and able to express pride in their heritage shows how far we have come from traditional conceptions of hierarchy.
Not only did Brahmins get undermined in villages—that was easy—but also the traditional Kshatriya communities that dominated rural India. Now, every peasant and many artisan castes claim Kshatriya status and get away with it. Naturally, this has had the greatest effect at the political level, even as caste considerations continue to stay uppermost when people think of marriages and rites of passage. In this matter again, the rural Indian is thinking and acting much as an urban person would. This once again justifies the term “rurbanite,” and we now explain at some length why such a case should be considered.
Thinking beyond Caste
There are several reasons why a rurbanite is usually forced to think beyond just caste. The principal reason why such a person can act this way is because the weight of rural oligarchy is off. It is now possible for a villager to think politically like an urban person would and act on his or her own judgment. Just as in the case of the fragmentation of landholding, demography plays an important role, albeit from a different perspective.
Except for Maharashtra, where Marathas, of one kind or another, constitute about 33% of the population, nowhere else in the country does any one caste dominate any constituency. Many journalists, academics, and other assorted experts go by popular impressions and believe that Jats, or Gujjars, or whatever, dominate certain regions of India. They then link this preconceived notion to electoral outcomes, which is why they are, more often than not, proved wrong when the votes are counted.
West UP, for example, is hastily assumed to be a Jat stronghold, but this caste only comprises between 8% and 10% of the population. Likewise, while the Yadavs are said to dominate in the rest of UP, their numbers barely cross 12% to 15% in most parliamentary constituencies. In Bihar’s Madhepura region, which is supposed to be an impregnable Yadav bastion, only 23% to 25% of the people there are from this caste. Even so, the refrain that caste numbers determine elections keeps surfacing. This is probably because it is easy to comment, write, and appear knowledgeable if an exotic explanatory variable is used. Castes as vote banks may have held at a time when some castes ruled over others as the nature of landholdings were tilted seriously in their favour. All of these are things of the past and to talk of vote banks today belies a certain alienation from reality.
Under the existing demographic conditions, where no caste has a clear numerical advantage, most voters are forced to look at candidates outside their castes. The big reason for this is that nobody wants to waste a vote. In any constituency there are usually two viable candidates, and about five to six castes of equal population strength. Even die-hard casteists would find it difficult to vote for a fellow caste politician because that contender may not be a likely winner. Such people are often forced to opt for somebody who does not belong to their caste so that their vote does not go in vain. This is the logic of demographic numbers, and it has little to do with caste sentiments.
To complete this story, one must also add that political leaders are the ones who think along caste lines most of the time. This is especially true when distributing election tickets, appointing their election agents, and firming up their goon squads. These are the people who will do all the dirty work for their leaders—the walling, postering, and bullying. It is this tie between caste and political leaders that gets represented most often by journalists and sundry academics because they spend most of their time with the supposed newsmakers of the day. Naturally, they are quick to conclude that voting takes place on caste lines, for this is how leaders operate. If they pay attention to the empirical fact of caste numbers in electoral constituencies, they may not come up with such an easy correlation.
From a distance, especially from an urban perch, or from the courtyard of a political bigwig, all SCs and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) tend to look and think alike, as if an organic bond compels them in that direction. This myth needs to be exposed. During the Marathwada riots in 1979, when the Mahars were the object of Maratha wrath but not other SCs, many Mang and leather workers chalked their caste names on their huts to escape Maratha raids.
Mayawati is, by popular consent, a leader of the Jatavs, but there are huge tracts of UP such as Kanpur, Lucknow, Allahabad, Gonda, Rae Bareilly, Pratapgarh, and Sonbhadra where SCs, other than Jatavs, are numerically stronger. So it is not as if all SCs happily jostle together when they set out from their homes to the polling booth. Only this can explain why in 2002 the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) did not win a single seat in Sonbhadra district of UP, one of the districts where Jatavs are fewer in number. But then again, Mayawati won every seat there in 2007, only to lose half of them in 2012. Therefore, even at the level of SCs in UP, there is no clear caste correlation (Gupta 2007: 3388–96).
The other factor that creates an optical illusion, leading to the conclusion that the relation between caste and politics is unproblematic, is social capital. In West UP, the Jats, and in East UP, the Yadavs, had for long dominated in terms of being the most literate, best connected, and politically most active. This is why other castes lined up in front of their doors for favours, even for something as minor as writing a petition to a government department. This naturally magnified the presence of Jats and Yadavs, giving the impression that they were everywhere, but that was some time ago. Now most peasant castes (the so-called OBCs) are getting connected on their own to the outside world, in more ways than one. Consequently, other OBCs now have their own virtuosos, their own literati, and their own connections. They no longer need a Jat or Yadav to forward their demands and push for their claims. So, if one were to visit UP and Bihar today, it is not difficult to spot tensions between OBCs up and down what was once a clear hierarchy of power and privilege. They are no longer the leading elite of the peasant communities, which is why the caste calculus falters even more when we use it to understand elections (Gupta 2000: 148–76).
What holds for the OBCs applies to the SCs as well. Over a period of time, just as in the case of the peasant castes, individual SCs have generated their own social capital and produced their own clutch of literati, schoolteachers, police inspectors, businessmen, and so on. They do not need the Mahars or the Jatavs to help them through as they did earlier.
On account of this elite rivalry, or the competition between social capital at different levels, no caste can be said to represent a broad swath of jatis (social groups) in an area as big as a parliamentary constituency. This has further loosened the stranglehold of ritual hierarchy in villages, allowing even ordinary humble folk to aspire to “rurbanite” status. This is clearly a transitory stage, as even the term suggests. Even so, by looking at transformations in India through this optic, our resistance to accepting important social changes in our country is lowered. At the same time, certain myths, misconceptions, and blind intellectual positions, whose base has long since drifted away, come under the scanner.
The “rurbanite” will yet teach the urbanite a lesson or two in social change.
