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Neo-Bondage: A Fieldwork-Based Account

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2010

Jan Breman
Jan Breman
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam
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Abstract

On the basis of anthropological fieldwork carried out in South Gujarat in the early 1960s, I described and analyzed a system of bonded labor that dominated the relationship between low-caste farm servants and high-caste landowners (Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India, 1974). More recently, I have gone back to the study of agrarian bondage of the past in order to explore in greater detail the emergence of unfree labor in the precolonial era and comment on its demise as a result of efforts made by the colonial state, the nationalist movement, and peasant activists (Labour Bondage in West India from Past to Present, 2007). A recurrent research theme during my fieldwork in the last few decades has been drawing attention to practices of neo-bondage (neo because the relationship between bosses and workers is less personalized, of shorter duration, more contractual, and monetized) at the bottom of India's informal-sector economy. Additionally, the elements of patronage that offered a modicum of protection and security to bonded clients in the past have disappeared while the transition to a capitalist mode of production accelerated.

Type
Shifting Boundaries between Free and Unfree Labor
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , Fall 2010 , pp. 48 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2010

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References

NOTES

1. My Ph.D. thesis, written in Dutch and published as Meester en Knecht [Master and Servant] came out in an English edition as Breman, Jan, Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India (Berkeley, 1974)Google Scholar. An Indian edition was published by Manohar, Delhi, 1979.

2. Breman, Jan, Labour Bondage in West India: From Past to Present (Delhi, 2007)Google Scholar.

3. See, e.g., Prakash, Gyan, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ramachandran, V.K., Wage Labour and Unfreedom in Indian Agriculture: An Indian Case Study (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar; Breman, Jan, Guérin, Isabelle, and Prakash, A., India's Unfree Workforce: Of Bondage Old and New (New Delhi, 2009)Google Scholar.

4. Breman, Jan, Footloose Labour: Working in India's Informal Economy (Cambridge, 1996), 135CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Ibid., 99.

6. Ibid., 97–98.

7. Ibid., 107.

8. Koytas were the long knives used to cut the cane. The knives were owned by the factory, issued at the start of the campaign and collected again at the end. If one broke, the user had to pay for a replacement.

9. Breman, Jan, Wage Hunters and Gatherers: Search for Work in the Urban and Rural Economy of South Gujarat (Delhi, 1994), 152Google Scholar.

10. Ibid., 163.

11. Ibid., 259.

12. Ibid., 166.

13. The original version was published in the Economic and Political Weekly 13 (1978): 1307–60.

14. Breman, Wage Hunters and Gatherers, 175.

15. Ibid., 246.

16. International Labour Organization, The Cost of Coercion: Global Report under the Follow-Up to the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (Geneva, 2009); Breman, Jan, Guerin, Isabelle, and Prakash, Aseem, India's Unfree Workforce: Of Bondage Old and New (New Delhi, 2009)Google Scholar.