Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

44 SAGARI R. RAMDAS AND NITYA S. GHOTGE
use of grazing grounds by pastoralists and forests by shifting cultivators.
The colonial state used these means to settle the shifting cultivators and
pastoralists once and for all. As Bhattacharya (1995: 84) describes it:
‘Nomads, vagabonds and wanderers were thus to be disciplined and settled.
… . They had to belong to a marked territory —a village, a district,
a province’. Pastoralists could graze cattle on a village common only ‘by
becoming a proprietor and an agriculturist’. It was repeatedly emphasised
in official discussions that ‘It is to be distinctly understood that the Government
of India do not desire that grazing should be looked upon primarily
as a source of income’ (Cited in ibid.: 169). Further, Murali says:
Colonial scientific conservation policy denied the needs of local communities
at two levels. At one level, it denied the tribals their traditional
subsistence living by banning shifting cultivation and the collection of
minor forest produce … . At a second level, the peasantry in the settled
agriculture regions—both wet and dry ecological zones were deprived of
their traditional grazing facilities. By encroaching on small forests, the
government stripped many peasants of their grazing facilities. (1995: 101)
Among both communities there was silent resistance against these restrictions,
as well as open forms of rebellion against the state. None of the
restrictions succeeded in wiping out these forms of livelihoods and land
use, which persisted.
A salient feature of all these discourses is their almost universal silence
on the women within these communities and the impact such dramatic
restrictions had on them. Based on our own knowledge of the pivotal
role of women in these production systems, we hypothesise that women
must have both borne the brunt of violence and been in the forefront of
the resistance to the state.
POST-INDEPENDENCE: SHIFTING CULTIVATORS
AND PASTORALISTS
Post-Independence the attitude of the Indian state to these forms of livelihood
has been no different from that of the colonial state. Indeed, struggles
between the pastoralists/shifting cultivators and the state have only
heightened and sharpened, with the state continuing to view these