Landless in God’s own country: development and perpetual struggles in Kerala
Keywords: The state
Development
Labour
Land
Welfare
Indigenous Peoples
Caste
Agrarian change

Landless Adivasis (officially categorised as Scheduled Tribes) of the southern Indian province of Kerala face insecure lives and livelihoods despite the presence of apparently generous welfare provisions. Historical curtailment of access to land and contemporary livelihood expulsions have pushed them to demand cultivable land, which is seen by the claimants as representing asset, autonomy, social justice, and identity. Their struggles for land and decent work continue perpetually over generations in spite of several decades of development intervention at the sub-national level. In recent times, the demand for cultivable land has coexisted with the scenario of an agrarian crisis. The thesis explores why the struggles of Kerala’s landless Adivasis continue perpetually despite the presence of welfare, and why their demands for cultivable land exist despite the agrarian crisis. It makes three interrelated arguments, pertaining to the position of landless labourers in local growth trajectories, the claims on the state generated by this position, and the state’s responses to these claims.
First, the thesis demonstrates that a localised understanding of how landless labourers become “surplus” to capitalist growth trajectories provides a closer picture of their precariousness. Scholarship on relative surplus populations shows their variegated forms, ranging from labourers in constant migration in search of wage work under capitalist relations to people argued as being totally disconnected from the uneven expansion of capitalism. Illustrating seven different sectors from which livelihood expulsions are underway in the lives of landless Adivasis in Kerala, the thesis argues that their position in the local growth trajectory can be understood as an “in-between” one, wherein their wage labour is becoming less and less relevant to the local growth path, although they remain embedded in capitalist relations. Meanwhile, they have been dissuaded from turning into labourers in constant migration by virtue of welfare provisions and political mobilisation. Delving deeper into their expulsion from one of the livelihood sectors – farming ginger as a cash crop undertaken by their upper-caste neighbours – the thesis demonstrates how the Adivasis’ political resistance to oppression contributed to their becoming superfluous from this capitalist enterprise. These discussions provide a clearer picture of why their demands for land for cultivation coexist with the agrarian crisis, as the thesis argues.
Second, the thesis demonstrates that exploring the tension between the land claims made on the state and the state’s responses is crucial to understanding the perpetual struggles of the landless. The state in Kerala responds to the land claims through an array of mechanisms related to the provision of land. Departing from the trend of classifying land provision measures in specific countries/regions into neat categories, such as distribution and redistribution, I argue for the consideration of the state’s use of myriad permutations of land-related policies, which I collectively call “landfare.” Landfare is shown to work in Kerala through the reduction of the complex social problem of landlessness into a target figure for elimination, through the “projectisation” of land distribution, and through the non-distribution of available land. In addition, landfare is combined with the injection of welfare into the Adivasi settlements and resettlement sites. This scenario exhibits a shift from the idea of land provision that transfers social and political control over land to the provision of land and welfare that merely subsidises the cost of reproduction of labour power. The shift perpetuates the struggles of the landless Adivasis even after they receive land.
Third, the thesis demonstrates that the efforts of the state to address land claims can betray the assumptions that it holds about the claimants, a scenario that can result in the land recipients living “state life” – the life envisaged by the state for the claimants – rather than the life they wish to lead. The lens of state life brings out how the state in Kerala manages its Adivasi surplus populations that break out into agitations for land. The assumption that the close relationship Adivasis hold with land will get them out of poverty is rejected by the land recipients. While the land struggles place a clear demand for cultivable land that provides them with substantive control over the resource, the state’s landfare measures are directed at putting out the land struggles. The occasional compromises reached with Adivasi leaders and land recipients’ own observation that they feel “disposed of” in the resettlement sites attest to this argument. However, their persistent land struggles make sure that these strategies of the state are exposed and resisted.