Room 004, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
This talk is concerned with the complexities of rural and agrarian life in India. Drawing on all-India data and case studies it argues that rural-urban livelihoods have become the new norm as seasonal and longer-term migration has become commonplace. This has led to a decrease in purity-pollution related caste discrimination. However, modernity and capitalism have not done away with oppression based on caste and tribe. Livelihoods are still structured along lines of class, caste, tribe and gender. Old divides have transformed but their structural boundaries are maintained, build into modernity and capitalism. Discrimination still structures the labour market and maintains Dalit and Adivasis at the bottom, now also in the modern economy. This not only calls for changes to our thinking about class, it also points to lessons to be learned from global discussions on racial capitalism.
Jens Lerche is Professor Emeritus in the Development Studies Department, SOAS University of London. He works on caste, racial discrimination and oppression, and agrarian and labour relations, primarily in India where he has done extensive fieldwork since 1990. Publications include Ground down by growth: tribe, caste, class and inequality in 21st century India (A. Shah, J. Lerche, R. Axelby, D. Benbabaali, B. Donegan, J. Raj and V. Thakur, 2018); and Migration and the Invisible Economies of Care: Production, Social Reproduction and Seasonal Migrant Labour in India’ (2023, with Alpa Shah). He was editor of Journal of Agrarian Change 2008-2023.
