We are as Flexible as Rubber!: Livelihood Strategies, Diversity and the Local Institutional Setting of Rubber Small Holders in Kerala, South India

We are as Flexible as Rubber!: Livelihood Strategies, Diversity and the Local Institutional Setting of Rubber Small Holders in Kerala, South India

By- Balz Strasser


Since the beginning of the 1990s, the Indian natural rubber sector has been affected by trends toward trade liberalization, a reduced role of the State, and organizational reforms. Rubber cultivators in Kerala - around 1 million holders cultivating an average 0.5 ha of rubber plantation - have been affected by these processes in different ways. It is hypothesized that growers - especially the ones located in agro-ecologically marginal rubber areas- are coping with these changes with diversified income-generating strategies. This book suggests a new perspective on these coping processes with the development of a typology of rubber growers based on their income-generating strategies. The book shows that the different types of holdings have specific management strategies and ways of dealing with risks. Furthermore, there is evidence that specific local institutions and organizations can hinder and/or support the income generation of these different types of holdings.




Balz Strasser is an agro-economist combining scientific knowledge with hands-on experience on farming systems, market development and policy frameworks for improving rural livelihoods in developing countries. This book is based on his PhD thesis written at the Human Geography Department of the University of Zurich. Since 2008 he is working as Managing Director of Pakka Trade in Switzerland.




ISBN  978-81-7304-803-6    2009   276p.   Rs.695/ pounds 50

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Water and State in Europe and Asia

Water and State in Europe and Asia

By- Peter Borschberg and Martin Krieger (eds)

Water is indispensable for all life on earth. Since ancient times, the control of fresh-water resources and also the sea facilitated the rise of communal structures and administrative institutions across Europe and Asia. Many states tightened their authority by creaming off agriculutral surpluses from irrigated lands. The more effective the irrigational systems, the higher state revenues tended to be. For much of the twentieth century, research on such community-based irrigation was dominated by Karl August Wittfogel’s discourse on ‘Hydraulic Despotism’.

Seaborne empires could flourish as a result of their commercial success and naval strength. For such maritime polities indispensable facets of statehood included military power at sea, successful control of marketplaces and domination of maritime trading routes. The control of waterways and channels was of great strategic importance, such as notably the Danish Sound or the Malacca Straits.

Water and State in Europe and Asia brings together established as well as younger experts from Asia and Europe to explore the interdependence of water and state formation on both continents. Hermann Kulke, Peter Borschberg, Ranabir Chakravarti, S. Jeyaseela Stephen, Martin Krieger and Maitrii Aung-Thwin contribute case-studies on Asia to the volume such as on the Bay of Bengal, North and South India and South-East Asia. Investigating the European perspective. Horst Wernicks, Jens E. Olesen, Karel Davids, Allan I. Macinnes, Salvatore Ciriacono and Andreas Klinger exhaustively study the Hanseatic League the North and Baltic Sea regions the Mediterranean as well as waterways within continental Europe. The individual papers contribute to shaping a virtual global image of water being a major stimulus of the emergence of state-power.

  

Peter Borschberg is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the National Univesity of Singapore. He has published on trade, diplomacy and colonial politics in early modern South-East Asia.

Martin Krieger is Lecturer of early modern history at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University Greifswald (Germany). His major areas of interest are economic cultural and environmental history. He has published on North German and North European as well as on Indian
colonial history.

ISBN  81-7304-776-6    2008   290p.   Rs.875/ pounds 45

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Village Communities and Land Tenures in Western India Under Colonial Rule

Village Communities and Land Tenures in Western India Under Colonial Rule

By- Brahma Nand (ed.)

The two documents Report on the Village Communities of the Deccan by R.N. Gooddine (1852) and Character of Land Tenures and System of Survey and Settlement in the Bombay Presidency by J. Moneteath (1914) presented in this volume explore the nature of village communities and land tenures under British rule in western India. The portrayal of village communities in the existing writings as static and unchanging institutions and as tax-gathering tools for the state or redistributive agencies of social surplus is extremely inadequate and unsatisfactory for the correct understanding of the functioning of these institutions.

Originating in deep antiquity, they have to be seen as a complex and dynamic ensemble of social relations. Unlike Russian obschina, Indian village communities were not premised upon the principles of egalitarianism but arose to cope with the competing and conflicting claims of various groups and classes to the social surplus.

Village communities were grounded in the hierarchical foundations of the rural societies and tried to institutionalize the existing social disparities. They began to crumble under the impetus of market economy and the increasing intervention of the colonial state when the process of class polarization went beyond this institutionalized limit. Also, the continuous restructuring of social relationships reflected in the changing tenurial patterns accumulating by slow degrees resulted in the long-run in ultimately dislocating the existing social structure. The historical records show that the central contention of the neo-imperialist writings regarding the fundamental continuity between the pre-colonial and colonial social structure is not sustainable.

Brahma Nand has worked for more than quarter of a century on the problems relating to the agrarian economy and society in western India under colonial rule.

ISBN  978-81-7304-820-3    2009   250p.   Rs.750/ pounds 45

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Tribal Crop-Livestock Systems in South-East India

Tribal Crop-Livestock Systems in South-East India

Das Kornel

The book, Tribal Crop-Livestock Systems in South-East India, as the title implies describes the related practices followed in undivided Koraput district, in Orissa. There are 51 different communities who live here. They survive largely on marginal farming and animal husbandry.

The study covers communities living in different territories, hills and plains, some very primitive and some slightly advanced. The tribal groups studied are Bhattra, Kondh, Bondo, Dongria Kondh, Koya, Sabara, Bodo Poraja, Sano Poraja and Bhumia. A short enthnographic note and agriculture practices of each of these tribes has also been included. The magico-religious rites associated with agriculture, as well as the tribal cooperative agriculture labour, where still it exists, have been described.

The tribal crop-livestock farming system has been classified and described under sections, such as Backyard Farming System, Life Support Crop Farming System, Scarcity Period and Food Resources, Famine Saviour Plant System, Slash and Burn (Podu) Cultivation System and Mixed Species Animal Husbandry System. The successful intensive agriculture system
followed by Kondh under rain fed condition and the vegetable grower Mali under limited land and irrigation facilities have been described. The understanding of the existing system can be utilized to build sustainable food production system for those who are in a transitional stage of development.

The author has tried to present the book, as a practical manual through many interesting photographs and sketches and changes observed during the last three decades in agriculture and animal husbandry in the area has been documented carefully.

Das Kornel, presently Programme Coordinator to Indo-Swiss NRM Project in Orissa, had served for ten years as DANIDA Advisor for Integrated Livestock Development Project, working in tribal villages of Koraput district in Orissa.

ISBN  81-7304-668-9    2009   288p.   Rs.725/ pounds 45

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Diplomatic Channels

Diplomatic Channels

By- Krishnan Srinivasan

Krishnan Srinivasan’s exceptionally frank memoir of his tenure as Foreign Secretary narrates his impressions of the personalities he encouraged, and of the topics in foreign policy that arose in the early 1990s and which would remain on India’s agenda for the subsequent two decades. The volume also offers an analysis of the origin, hey-day and decline of the practice of non-alignment, along with penetrating short takes on contemporary events from as far afield as in the United States of America in the West to Japan in the East; and for the general reader, reflections on caste, charity and competitiveness. The volume closes with a short story about the reminiscences of a colourful retired diplomat.

Krishnan Srinivasan is a diplomat and scholar, who served as Foreign Secretary and Commonwealth Deputy Secretary- General, and as a Fellow at Cambridge, Leiden and Uppsala. He is an Azad Fellow at the Institute of Asian Studies at Kolkata and an honorary professor at ASCI Hyderabad. This is his fifth book on world politics.

ISBN  978-81-7304-968-2    2012   264p.   Rs.750/ pounds 45

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Trade and Traders in Early Indian Society

Trade and Traders in Early Indian Society

By- Ranabir Chakravarti

Situating trade and traders in the overall agrarian milieu of early India, this book highlights the diversities of merchants and market places, which are not viewed as an undifferentiated category. Chakravarti strongly argues against the perception of declining trade in India during the period AD 500-1000, and demonstrates the linkages of trade at the locality level during this period. The author questions the stereotyped account of early Indian commerce merely in terms of trade in luxuries and draws our attention to transactions in daily necessities. In-depth analysis of maritime commerce in the Bengal coast (c. 200 BC to AD 1300) is a major feature of the book.

The author also explores different, if not sometimes conflicting, attitudes of early Indian society to merchants, who were lauded as patrons to cultural activities and also branded as ‘open thieves’; yet the presence of non-indigenous merchants was always favoured. The settlements of foreign merchants especially in coastal tracts witnessed in different ages remarkable cultural synthesis and coexistence among diverse trading communities. Most significantly, the social and cultural accommodation of several non-indigenous minority groups is inseparably associated with the history of early Indian commerce. The author also examines the role of trading communities in the making of a plural and complex society like India.

Ranabir Chakravarti, Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi specializes in the social and economic history of early India, with a thrust particularly on the maritime trade of India in the Indian Ocean (c. AD 700-1500).

ISBN  81-7304-695-6    2007   300p.   Rs.295/ pounds 19.99

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Tools and Ideas: The Beginnings of Local Industrialization in South Gujarat, 1970-2000

Tools and Ideas: The Beginnings of Local Industrialization in South Gujarat, 1970-2000

By- Hein Streefkerk

This book is a study of industrial development and labour relations in south Gujarat, western India. The empirical findings presented are based on long-term intensive anthropological fieldwork covering a period of 30 years, from 1970 to 2000.

The book provides an in-depth analysis of the different phases of industrialization in one of the most industrialized regions of India, covering both the period of planned development and that of the more recent phase of economic liberalization. It describes the transformation of a predominantly rural area into an industrial belt by giving a detailed account of the owners and workers in small scale factories. Economic success in this part of India has been accompanied by structural poverty among a large part of the population. Entrepreneurial spirit has gone together with a worsening of labour conditions, among them erosion of the rights of the labour force. In various respects, developments in south Gujarat, as described in this book, illustrates the contradictory model of development and deprivation in India.

Providing a long-term perspective on industrial development, this book will be essential reading for those engaged in the study of rural development, entrepreneurship, labour relations, and social change in India.

Until his retirement in 2004, Hein Streefkerk was Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

ISBN  81-7304-693-X    2006   188p.   Rs.475/ pounds 35

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