Logo

The Indian subdistrict of Shahabad, located in the dwindling forests of the southeastern tip of Rajasthan, is an area of extreme poverty. Beset by droughts and food shortages in recent years, it is the home of the Sahariyas, former bonded laborers, officially classified as Rajasthan's only "primitive tribe". From afar, we might consider this the bleakest of the bleak, but in Poverty and the Quest for Life, Bhrigupati Singh asks us to reconsider just what quality of life means. He shows how the Sahariyas conceive of aspiration, advancement, and vitality in both material and spiritual terms and how such bridging can engender new possibilities of life.

Singh organizes his study around two themes: power and ethics, through which he explores a complex terrain of material and spiritual forces. Authority remains contested, whether in divine or human forms; the state is both despised and desired; high and low castes negotiate new ways of living together, in conflict but also cooperation; new gods move across rival social groups; animals and plants leave their tracks on human subjectivity and religiosity; and the potential for vitality persists even as natural resources steadily disappear. Studying this milieu, Singh offers new ways of thinking beyond the religion-secularism and nature-culture dichotomies, juxtaposing questions about quality of life with political theologies of sovereignty, neighborliness and ethics, in the process painting a rich portrait of perseverance and fragility in contemporary rural India.

Contents: 1. First impressions and further. 2. The headless horseman of central India: sovereignty at varying thresholds of life. 3. Mitra Varuna: state power and powerlessness. a. Who ate up the forests? b. Mitra, the caregiving state. 4. The coarse and the fine: contours of a slow-moving crisis. 5. Contracts, bonds and bonded labor. 6. Erotics and agonistics: intensities deeper than deep play. 7. Divine migrations: neighborliness between humans, animals and gods. 8. The Waxing and waning life of Kalli. 9. Bansi Mahatmaya (The greatness of Bansi), an erotic ascetic. 10. Departure, and marriages and deaths. 11. The quality of life: a daemonic view. Notes. References. Index.