What’s our perspective on farming?
Published in the October issue of Raibar, a periodic magazine brought out by SIDH, Mussoorie.
A search for ‘farmer crisis in India’ fetches,
1,82,00,000 results in 0.87 seconds. A search for ‘solutions for farmer crisis
in India’ fetches, 2,11,00,000 results in 0.70 seconds. So, what is there to
write on farming situation today which has not been already written? This is a
question that anyone today having to put a pen on a paper (or more like opening
a file in a computer) needs to ask of himself / herself.
So, at the cost of repeating someone else, I
need to write something that I feel like worthy of repeating. I seek to share some thoughts on the one area
of farming that bothers me as a society and as a nation, our perspective on
farming.
As a nation or society with one of the longest
continuing histories in the world, we have always had farming as an activity in
this land in some form or another all through a thousand years and more. What
did people do farming for? What was their perspective with farming? What do we
do differently? What has been the farming perspective in this land since
independence and the new State formation?
Our ancient scriptures talk of farming with
much reverence as it does every other human vocation. The act of farming and
generating food in plentitude and sharing it with all species has been highly
praised in several scriptures of this land. “annam bahu kurvita tat vritam”
says the Taitreya Upanisad defining producing and making available food in
plentitude to all as a sacred act, and the Tamil scripture Thirukkural goes a
step further on this stating, “paguththundu palluyir ombudal melor
vaguthavatrul ellaam thalai”, meaning, that to produce and share in
plentitude and thereby conserve diversity is the supreme value practiced by our
ancestors. This is one perspective that has prevailed in India since centuries.
Food has always been produced in plentitude and diverse and has been shared
with benevolence with all. Sharing of food has been codified in every ritual in
this land, all celebration has been a sharing of food. Indeed as an agrarian
society every form of ritual and celebration has been centered on the act of
food production and consumption. So, many our celebrations even today are
centered on the act of farming, the beginning of the farming cycle, the arrival
of the first water in the canal, the seeds germination testing festival, the
festival for harvest of course culminating the entire season. There are also
festivals to thank the cattle, the sun god, the earth goddess, etc., coded into
every community and their rituals and celebrations. All resources related to
farming too were seen as sacred and revered. Water of course was seen as an
integral component of the food production (“unavenappaduvadhu nilothudu neerae”
says Tholkappiyam, a 5000 year old Tamil scripture which should rank among the
oldest scriptures around) and seeds were seen as divine incorporations (Lord
Naryana was celebrated as, “muzhu mudhal vitheyo” or the first grand
seed to the world).
The perspective through several millennia seems
to have been to produce, share, express gratitude and celebrate. A value not
uncommon to all the indigenous communities across the world, perhaps with
regional variations.
What did it imply in terms of the daily practices
and life?
The resources such as water, seeds, etc., were
never considered as commercial and were seen as commons. We
would be stupid to assume that in a civilization of several millennia we must
be the first one to consider the taxing and pricing on seeds and water, the
thought must have occurred earlier and discarded as it did not fit the
perspective towards food and farming overall.
Special institutions were designed to conserve these and principles of
their usage were recorded as governing ones for such institutions. Poets and Seers were encouraged to codify
these into literature and scripture in their own ways respectively.
The farmer was considered someone special in
society to be respected and supported in all possible manner by the rulers and the
rest of the society. This particularly
made a difference in difficult times such as drought or famine, we learn from
early British archival records, for instance, that when the British enquired
regarding how was tax levied during the pre-British times, farmers confessed
that the earlier Raja’s would never tax the farmers during drought years and
instead would share the food from their granaries with the farmers instead.
This also defined the way roles of the farmer and the ruler were sustained
based on the changing situations in the Indian context, it was not something
that was structural and rigid, but, dynamic and changing, with each adopting
and supporting the other as and when the need arose.
Farmers sustained many public service
institutions through their sharing – farmers shared the produce first with all the service providers and
labourers before they took their share of the produce. The number of service
providers with whom the farmer shared his produce is still prevalent in some
parts of the country and it had people such as the traditional irrigation
manager, the crematorium worker, the priest, the ironsmith, the story teller, etc.,
these were services by certain communities, but, more importantly, these were
codified into community roles by a custom that saw the relevance of sustaining
these as a role and the farmers role in supporting them. These were the
institutions considered important for the village habitat system.
Celebrations were centered on farming calendar
and whenever there was a need to gather and share / exchange goods and
commodities.
Farmers got together to plan and look at the prediction for the year when the
family calendar starts, they again met with each other to celebrate and
exchange seeds during the beginning of the farming cycle, the observed the
auspicious month in the last month before harvest as that was the time to
protect the crop from invading animals and stay in the farm mostly, they
celebrated the harvest festival and gathered, because that was the time to say
thanks to all those who contributed to their vocation. Rituals - according the
noted tribal historian and custodian of several tribal cultures today, Guruji
Ravindra Sharma – were a medium invented by the priest class to ensure that the
local economy functioned smoothly and every vocation was supported. So, farmers
supported the potters during the harvest season, they supported the weaver in other
times and vice versa. In fact, the eco-system for such farming to be practiced
includes a role of other vocations dependent on land to be strongly supported
and sustained in the vicinity. Perhaps, this is why Vinobha, when talking of
need for India to think about some farmers quitting farming in the post
Independence situation, opined that such re-organization has to create other
vocations dependent on land in the vicinity and not wean them away into cities.
Science and Technology research and practice,
were activity pursued alongside the farming activity in the field and is
dependent on local resources. Pawan Gupta and myself have written on this at different times (and
other perhaps earlier), that there are perhaps 20 recorded ways in which the
amount of rainfall is predicted accurately by the farming community using
traditional scientific methods even today and perhaps there are several
thousand more that we are not aware of. Similarly technological innovations
were (and are) regularly refreshed through a process of trial and error that is
very local and the same are adopted and practiced by the farmers in the region.
There is no copy right claimed by any farmer for such an innovation, nor any
scientific practice known by the name of its first practitioner.
Most farmers didn’t see farming as a vocation
or livelihood alone, but, as a sacred responsibility towards the society at
large. A farmer was
(and even today evokes an emotional response because of) considered the primary
bread winner to the society. This role
gave him much dignity and respect and also a sense of responsibility towards
the rest of society. He never had to look at his practice of farming only on
the economic prism because economy was an aspect of life and didn’t define life
and roles of people altogether in this perspective and world view.
If you have read this far, you might wonder
what happened to this perspective to farming and farm work in a society? This
looks so well and sophisticatedly organized, this was a system rooted in a ethical
behavior and Dharmic in its roots. So, why should this not be seen today? If it
was strong, why didn’t it survive the onslaught of the colonials? etc., these
questions are of academic nature at some level today if only we still don’t see
farmers and farming practice in many parts adhere to this perspective and
ethos. Over the last 2 decades of travelling and working with rural communities
never have I visited a farmers house in any part of the country and not be sent
empty handed. The farmer, even the poorest one, has always something to offer,
because sharing is his creed. Never have I encountered a proud farmer who does
not think despite all the troubles of farming, he has to do farming because
that is his responsibility. There are
villages and communities in which the service providers are still supported the
way they were supported in an earlier era.
The residue of the perspective on farming remains in several practices,
principles and shared ethos even today.
Do we have a perspective on farming today? What
does the Indian State Policy on Farming convey? Does it provide a world view?
Often it is reduced to number game and accounting practices. We have had
generations of political leaders who talk of ‘green revolution’ and ‘ever green
revolution’, etc., Why would a country that has had ‘plentitude of producing
and sharing food’ as a vision reduce it merely a colour coding and an act of
revolution? Perhaps it helped to sell urea that brought in more green colour to
the farming activity and the word ‘revolution’ also could be introduced as some
kind of a persistent mirage for Indian farmers. Revolutions are such counter
idea to sharing of plentitude. Revolutions have occurred in societies that had
enormous inequalities and revolutions were a way of breaking free of these. So,
the genealogy of such terms brought in values of inequality into the food
production and distribution and society theories that suited the same had to be
academically constructed and facts and figures that were selectively chosen to fit
this narrative.
No State relates to the farmer dynamically
today, the structures of the State are constructed through the department of
agriculture, revenue and development into meaningless silos of dead social
science narratives produced, promoted and guarded by institutions propped
during colonial rule.
All resources have been reduced to a global
dictated commercial value and a farmer has to wake up one day to see his
ancestral bequeath of a water body being given a new title, name and commercial
value. Seeds are usurped, commercially priced, resold at higher costs to
farmers with impunity. Scientists and technocrats have been given a higher
pedestal in society and the farmer often has to adhere to their whims and fancy
flights of ideas.
Many of the compensations for the farmers are
actually to the scientific and technological products rather than the farmers
themselves.
And finally, the farmers festivals are been
unified into celebration of spending and greed like all other festivals across
the world to suit a global commercial market that can only survive with
uncontained greed.
When a civilization, society or community
inherits such a grand perspective in food production and consumption as we have
done, then human intelligence is left with a challenge. What ‘improvement’ can
one do? While in other societies, people have embarked on long journeys to
conquer farther lands, relatively peace loving people of this land had set for
themselves generation of more and more sophisticated and complex structures,
works of art and literature, etc., as a way of expressing while not losing out
on the primary task of conserving and further enhancing the eternal values and
the perspectives handed down.
The globalized world destroys all local
perspectives and instead replaces it with homogenized values such as ‘food
safety’, ‘food security’, etc., All these formulations reduce the act of food
production to be a source of the final act of consumption and consumption and
consumer is the primary object of both control and choice. This is primarily
driven by the globalized market and commerce. The conflict in perspectives
today is between the eternal dharmic one of the Indian civilization and the
modernized and globalized one that suits the commercial interest of a few. In
recent times, even after achieving Independence, we had a choice to adopt the
grand old perspective in a newer conceptualization that fitted very much within
the older framework but also submitted to the economic challenge of those
times, these were formulated as Swaraj and Swadeshi by Bapu for the new country
about to be born. These would have achieved the economic needs of communities
while also reviving the older perspective of growing in plentitude and sharing
as fundamentally, Swedeshi insisted on utilizing local resources optimally and
Swaraj spoke of ways and means of taking care of oneself and ones one, these
were and are conceptual tools available for us for our times.
Time and again, in the post-Independent India,
a meet political establishment has tried
to articulate the older perspective through several enactments as a feeble
attempt to articulate Swadeshi and Swarajya. Swarjya is enshrined through the
Panchayat Raj system in the constitution and policies such as ‘Make in India’
have come about. However, the political will bereft of conviction and courage
of the older perspective cannot survive in the modern commercial system of
global kind that has as its strong arms the bureaucracy and the markets.
Ven. Samdhong Rinpoche once said that modernity
has had its origin and expanse to the current level of domination happen over a
500 year period and perhaps the rooting out of the same will take an equal
amount of time. Perhaps so, one only hopes that in the meanwhile, India does
not lose the memory and the capacity to bring back to play, its ancient wisdom
and practice of producing food in plentitude and sharing for the benefit of all
living species.
Ramasubramanian
14th
Oct 2017
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