The State of Bodo Peasantry in Modern-Day Assam: Evidence from Majrabari Village in the Bodoland Territorial Area Districts

Mizinksa Daimari () and Rajshree Bedamatta ()
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Mizinksa Daimari: Indian Institute of Technology
Rajshree Bedamatta: Indian Institute of Technology

The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 2021, vol. 64, issue 3, No 9, 705-730

Abstract: Abstract Indian agriculture is under crisis. However, the degree of distress is experienced differently by the various agrarian classes across different regions. This paper studies the state of Bodo peasantry in modern-day Assam. Having been shifting cultivators with community ownership of land at a certain point in history, we find a differentiated Bodo peasantry with private land ownership in the present, mainly due to extraneous interventions. However, in conceptualizing the transformation of tribes into a peasant production stage, scholars collapse the tribes into the dominant community of the region they cohabit. We maintain that peasantization does not lead to the collapse of tribes into other regionally dominant communities; that they are a society in their own right. In contrast to scholarship that reports the prevalence of an egalitarian social structure among tribes, we maintain that, at least among the plains tribe, such a view is far from the truth. In this paper, we first locate the Bodo tribe in India's peasant economy and then situate them to fit the prevailing agrarian classes. We deal with two questions in this paper: (a) Is there evidence of differentiation among the Bodo peasantry? (b) In an environment of increasing market integration, are the Bodo peasantry undergoing agrarian distress and proletarianization like the rest of the country?

Keywords: Agrarian transition; Tribe as peasants; Peasantization; Landlessness; Marginalization of land; Agrarian distress; Proletarianization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1007/s41027-021-00328-8

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