The word ‘development’ as we understand it today mostly in the form of state-sponsored development has always been a matter of academic concern for me as a scholar of Sociology. How do we tackle the questions concerning what is development, whose development are we talking about and at what costs? Bitopi Dutta’s book makes for an interesting perusal raising questions related to the impact of neo-liberal development on an indigenous community and reflecting upon its gendered impact from a feminist perspective. Almost a decade back in 2013, I remember presenting a paper on ‘Development Versus Chronic Poverty: The Coal ‘Minors’ (children engaged in rat-hole mining) of Meghalaya’ at a seminar. The title of Bitopi Dutta’s book Mining, Displacement and Matriliny in Meghalaya: Gendered Transitions (published by Routledge in 2022) evoked enough curiosity in my mind to have readily accepted the opportunity to review her work.
In 2014, I interviewed Hasina Kharbhih, Founder and Chairperson of Impulse NGO Network, for my research on the implications of rat-hole mining in Meghalaya. Dutta presents data by Impulse Social Enterprises (pp. 65) that highlights the total number of deaths caused by traditional rat-hole mining from 10,000 to 15,000 between 2007 to 2014. The plight of coal miners of Meghalaya has been in news for more than a decade now. However, it has not translated into any meaningful legal provisions at the policy-making level. Rather it has increasingly disturbed the dynamics of the matrilineal society of Meghalaya which makes this book both timely and significant. Dutta takes the case of Meghalaya to contextualise the functioning of a multi-dimensional social reality where historical factors such as state formation, cross-border migration, socio-cultural factors such as matriliny and religion, and economic factors such as growing commercialisation of mining, all come together in peculiar ways to produce continuity and change.
Her book, a part of the Transition in North-eastern India series, is organized into seven chapters, apart from a separate introduction and conclusion. At the very outset, Dutta mentions that it is an in-depth case study of the Indian state of Meghalaya, one of the few matrilineal societies of the world, ironically caught up in a flux of changing societal fabric where women now struggle to claim their agency and men increasingly demand patriarchal structuring of the society. It is alarming to take note of the processes that breed gendered ramifications of industrialisation-based modernisation in a traditional agricultural society. As highlighted by the author, local indigenous people are both complicit in the mining project and victims of the same (pp 1). In the words of an eighty-six-year-old indigenous woman – “Nobody resisted. Everyone wanted money. That greed only destroyed Lumshlong” (pp 93). These testimonials are reflective of the changes witnessed by an erstwhile ecologically rich Meghalaya to the present state of economic hardship and environmental degradation.
The first chapter provides the background and scope of research elaborating on the need for studying development-induced displacement (DID) from the perspective of indigenous women’s narratives. The second and third chapters delineate the methodological concerns and history of Meghalaya including the rationale for using life history as the primary method of data collection and that of selecting Meghalaya as the field of study respectively. Dutta manages to put forward a comprehensive account of the gendered transitions through sub-themes such as men’s worldview on matriliny (pp.71-78), women’s voices of resistance (pp. 79), changing materiality and land ownership (pp. 90), changes in occupational pattern (pp. 94), gendered labour, leisure and mobility (pp. 101), women in mining work (pp. 106), domestic violence (pp. 117), sex work and changing sexual moralities (pp. 123-130), the role of religion across generations (pp 135), gendering love, marriage, divorce and reproductive health (132-147). The following is an excerpt from the book about the stigma of abortion and contraception- A twenty-five-year-old indigenous woman speaks:
“Giving birth to a lot of children has been a problem here…even my sister has 5 children you know. That has been a problem for us. I am the only person working now. Since the mining ban, my mother also has not been able to find much work. My mother was not the youngest daughter of my grandma, so she did not inherit any land. But she did buy some with her own money. But now after the mining ban, the family’s income has gone down. I have always advised my sister to use contraception, but she would not. She thinks using contraception is against God. On top of that, she had a bad husband who never cared. He left her recently. And now she is taking care of all the children alone. I pay for their school fee and clothes and other maintenance costs. But the funds fall short to maintain the house”.
The book thus comes to life with Clifford Geertz style thick description-based ethnography, drawing in from narratives of indigenous people, mostly women but also men, collected during fieldwork conducted primarily in Jaintia hills and also occasionally in the Khasi hills. The fourth, fifth and sixth chapters engage in the main theme of the book, reflecting upon the relationship between mining and matriliny, producing differential impacts across different categories of people. Dutta reveals serious consequences of market-based commercialisation, urbanisation and modernisation on these indigenous communities, re-shaping their identities, and affecting their quotidian lives defined by the intersections of age, gender, and insider-outsider, tribal-migrant and class-based divisions.
The proliferation of the male-dominated mining industry synced with alterations in society’s value systems influenced by Missionary backed Christianisation to produce multiple disadvantages for women over the last three to four decades mostly so since the mining boom of the 1970s-80s. Dutta also pinpoints the nature of matriliny in Meghalaya independent of the mining boom, being tilted towards what she calls ‘patriarchal matriliny’, (pp.60) not just because a woman is traditionally subjected to the control of her brother and maternal uncle but also by dint of gendered division of labour that essentialises her role as a care-giver inside the house in addition to her responsibilities as an economic care-taker while she performs her tasks outside the house. These insights help the readers to understand the differential experience of women belonging to different age groups as the author traces the trajectory of transition from a state of ‘comparative advantage’ enjoyed by the women of older generations vis-a-vis the ‘comparative disadvantage’ faced by the contemporary women.
The last chapter i.e., (chapter seven) along with the conclusion captures the micro-politics of gender and regional development embedded in macro social realities, questioning the ambiguity in the modern notion of women’s empowerment gaining momentum in Meghalaya (pp.157). The shift in traditional matrilineal culture demands a layered understanding of internalised Western patriarchy in a globalised neoliberal world. For instance, Dutta highlights the pros and cons of the bloom in the sex work business vis-à-vis the mining industry that exposed women to a range of possibilities of negotiating their sexualities which were both empowering and dehumanising at the same time (pp.130).
This book also makes use of secondary data reflecting upon women’s lived-in experiences in different mining settlements across the globe to offer a comparative perspective. Meghalaya despite its Constitutional status as a sixth-schedule state struggles to preserve and protect its indigenous culture and land (pp. 154).
My only concern is that the segments of the book dealing directly with the core theme ‘gendered mining and displacement’ seem to fall short of enough theoretical and empirical construct, leaving the readers, wanting for more, which may not be a bad thing at all. What appears to be a grounded theory approach paves way for more research in the area. Also, it would be interesting to further explore the occasional paradoxes in women’s narratives related to increasing disempowerment vis-à-vis the notion of comfort and luxury in the modern lifestyle. Dutta’s work in its totality serves as an important reading not just in development discourse but also in terms of learning the methodological rigour in qualitative research. Whereas most of the literature on Development induced Displacement (DID) focuses on matters relating to physical displacement and rehabilitation of indigenous communities, Dutta’s book critically engages with the hitherto lesser-explored domain of socio-cultural displacement.
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Jyoti Das is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Cotton University, Guwahati.