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Hot issues of Today Mar 13, 2007 Mar 12, 2007 Mar 11, 2007 Mar 10, 2007 Mar 09, 2007 Mar 08, 2007 Mar 07, 2007 Mar 06, 2007 Mar 05, 2007 Mar 04, 2007 Bokaro Chaibasa Chatra Deoghar Dhanbad Dumka Garhwa Giridih Godda Gumla Hazaribag Jamshedpur Jamtara Koderma Latehar Lohardaga Pakur Palamu Ramgarh Ranchi Sahibganj Seraikela Simdega Bokaro Chaibasa Chatra Deoghar Dhanbad Dumka Garhwa Giridih Godda Gumla Hazaribag Jamshedpur Jamtara Khunti Koderma Latehar Lohardaga Pakur Palamu Ranchi Sahibganj Seraikela Simdega Mar 14, 2007 Jharkhand tribals protest near Parliament EXPRESSING SOLIDARITY: CPI (M) MP Brinda Karat with tribals from Jharkhand during a protest march at Parliament Street on Wednesday. NEW DELHI: Representatives of the Scheduled Tribes from Jharkhand held a protest demonstration at Parliament Street here on Wednesday demanding that the number of seats in the Assembly be increased and also that the present proportion of the Scheduled Tribes reserved seats be maintained. Protester claimed The protesters claimed that villagers in the area were being illegally dispossessed of their lands by the defence establishment, the Airports Authority of India and the Steel Authority of India. Addressing the gathering, Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat said a petition listing the problems of the people had been submitted to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and he had promised that the matter would be looked into. "What the people here are demanding are their rights. A letter from the Defence Ministry states that the land in and around Ranchi airport belongs to the defence establishment and that the villagers have no legal right over it and that members of the Scheduled Tribes have encroached on it. We are asking for a re-look into the matter," said Ms. Karat. As for their demand for increasing the number of seats in the Legislative Assembly, Ms. Karat said: "We spoke about the problem to the Prime Minister and he said that a committee will be constituted to look into the matter. We also want the Government to provide rice and wheat at competitive prices to the villagers. We will continue to raise our voice till the Government addresses the needs of the villagers." The demonstration was also addressed by several tribal representatives including Ramnika Gupta, Sukhnath Lohra and Surjeet Sinha who spoke about the "sufferings of the people of Jharkhand." "People are being deprived of their democratic rights and are not being allowed to participate in developmental activities as the Government is not holding panchayat elections in the State. We want to know why the Government has not yet looked into our problems?'' said Ramnika Gupta. CPI (M) leader J.S. Majumdar was present. http://www.hindu.com/2007/03/15/stories/2007031502531300.htm Not just a leaf Parallel Lines Sitting on a raised pedestal, the paanwala or the tobacco or betel-leaf seller had donned a multi-coloured cap and was offering tobacco leaf in the most theatrical style to amuse all high-profile guests. The list was impressive and included senior ministers, IAS officers, high court judges and legal luminaries. The venue was a reception party thrown by a notable Patna High Court lawyer to celebrate his son's wedding. The wakil sahib had engaged the paanwala's, as he is an indispensable factor in an Indian wedding, especially in this part of India. One may offer delicious dishes, regal pandals and a rosy ambience to guests at a marriage party, but atithi seva (service to guests) is not complete till one offers mukh suddhi (another name for the betel-leaf) at the end of the meal. If one does not offer paan in a marriage party let's just say the party remains incomplete. Historically, it is said Kushana ruler Kanishka introduced the betel-leaf in India. But undoubtedly, it was the Muslim nawabs, who popularised it, making it a symbol of royalty. As a paan lover, yours truly, too, loves the cities and people, who offer quality stuff. I like Patna, Benaras and Luknow for the cities have high-quality paan shops, and people, who make it a point to offer it in parties and have "special" ways to making that right concoction — bless them. In that way, Jharkhand cities like Ranchi and Bokaro are not really very conducive places for paan connoisseurs. Perhaps, the people, particularly the elite sections in UP and Bihar who had been under the rule of Mughals and nawabs for a long time, tend to savour it more . Perhaps, Tribals, who offer hadia in honour of guests, do not harbour much love for the leaf. That's perhaps why Ranchi, Bokaro and Hazaribagh does not have paan shops or at least not in such abundance as Lucknow, Benaras or Patna. However, despite my love for the legendary leaf, I would not dream of justifying the nuisance that paan-eaters cause at public places. Despite the Nitish Kumar government going the whole hog to clean his city and government offices, the Bihar Secretariat is spotted with red and back stains left by uncivil people. Similar is the condition in other government offices and even hospitals. Jharkhand cities are relatively cleaner. The love for paan is less pronounced at every public place, as it is in Bihar. Moreover, the shops at city centres of Patna become meeting places of all kinds of people in different stages of inebriation. As a true lover of this magic leaf, my suggestion would be to maintain the sanctity of eating paan at public areas. If we wish to glorify the leaf and the tradition behind it, then it should not be associated with uncivil behaviour. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070226/asp/jamshedpur/story_7441920.asp Ayo Aidari Trust - Jharkhand A team of seven Santhal tribal women got together and started working with their own community to improve the lives of the women in 1996. They formed a trust called 'Ayo Aidari' which in Santhal language means "women's rights". They have been getting financial support on and off from different sources but they lack the capacity and skills to run the organization. The team's vision is to empower the Santhal women in a specific area become literate, improve their health and socioeconomic status. The team has organized women and mobilized the focus groups to form themselves into self- help groups, reaches out some minimal healthcare and conducts awareness programs. The area the team works in is where poverty, deprivation and exploitation are most steep. The villages in Dumka are almost inaccessible by road and the mainstay of the community in the area is agriculture where the men are paid Rs.25/- for a day's work and the women Rs.20/-. During the time when they don't have this work, the women collect 'kendu' leaves and make leaf plates where they are paid Rs.1.50 for 20 leaf plates. The life situation of the community needs no elaboration. It is these lives that Agatha Avasti, Munni Hembrom and Agnes Murmu, the leaders of Ayo Aidari decided to change. Aware of their limitations in terms of skills these women are committed and open to learn the strategies, which will work in the difficult terrain. As program volunteers of Nirnaya, they have chalked out an action plan and their quiet determination should yield results. http://www.nirnaya.org/jharkand.htm The view from top It's a 3D visual effect Naveen Gupta, COO MAAC, can't get enough of Three-D animation and visual effects is his passion and making his company the number one brand is his goal. Here's Naveen Gupta, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Maya Academy of Advanced Cinematics (MAAC), which has spread its roots globally over the past four years. "We have more than 50 centers pan India and we plan to go on an expansion spree abroad this year," says he. Hailing from a small town of Dhanbad (now a part of Jharkhand), Naveen did his schooling there for 15 years before moving to Chandigarh and continued with his studies from DAV College, Sector 10. Then he went to Delhi to do his mechanical engineering. He shares, "I joined Electrolux as a management trainee in '93 and served for seven years there. I was heading the purchase department of the company but then my desire to be an independent entrepreneur made me explore new avenues. So I invested in an IT training company in the 2000, but it didn't fair well. That was a very depressing period of my life as I was forced to resign from my previous company and lose Rs 25 lakh in the IT company; it was very difficult for me to strike back. Even though I was professionally low, yet I was determined and my hard work paid in the long run. I am thankful to my family for supporting me in those depressing times." But as luck would have it, Naveen met Ketan Mehta during that phase, who was running Maya Entertainment Ltd which provided 3D animation and visual effects for the Bollywood movies. "The biggest challenge for the animation industry was crunch of skilled manpower and lack of studio-ready professionals. So Ketan and Deepa thought of starting an in-house training academy. That's how MAAC came into being. I was one of the founding members and at first I took up the franchise and in 2003, I was made the Vice President of the education division of the Academy. Then I moved on to the next level and took charge as the COO of MAAC. It's an interesting example where a franchisee became the head of a company," quips Naveen. A workaholic, Naveen believes in working 15-16 hours a day and loves traveling. "I am traveling almost 20 days of the month and as far as I remember I haven't taken any off since the last two years or so. I love spending time with my team and growth of the business gives me the maximum pleasure," he chuckles. Naveen follows a simple philosophy in life that there's nothing unachievable. "If a person evaluates himself properly and sets a target with proper milestones looking at one's strengths and weaknesses then the right efforts will bring in success with them," he shares. http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=226632 Threat from `Red Brigade' A brutal murder made the headlines on a lazy Monday morning. A JMM MP and Party General Secretary Sunil Mahato, two of his bodyguards and a party colleague were brutally murdered at point-blank range during a football match at Bakuria, near Jamshedpur. Two days later three vehicles deployed for the zilla parishad elections were set on fire in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra. Followed by a murder most foul in Pannuar district in Kerala. Next, killings in Dantewad, Chattisgarh, Koneru, Andhra Pradesh, Jehanabad, Bihar and Kalinganagar, Orissa. There were no leads and no arrests. As if the felonies were mere figments of imagination. No, it was the harsh reality of the spate of attacks by the "Red Brigade". The message was loud and clear: We can strike anywhere, any time, when we want! Scary? You can say that again. Forget Kashmir or the North East. Those seem minor compared to the Naxalite threat. Primarily because there the contours of insurgency are defined, the insurgents identified and the geographical area limited. Whereas the Naxal problem is spreading rapidly across various states with hardly any effort to curb its growth. Think. Fifteen States, 170 out of 583 districts and 40 per cent of terrain. Statistics of areas where strategically the Government's writ no longer runs. 'Liberated zones' created by Naxalites. A "Red Brigade's" terrorist corridor not only runs through the entire length of the country from Nepal's Maoists to Sri Lanka's LTTE, but also encompasses ULFA, Pakistan's ISI and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT). Examples of a State within a State. And the latest. The Defence Minister AK Antony's disclosure: Jehadi threat from the sea. A danger once again underscored by former Home Minister and Leader of the Opposition LK Advani during the debate on the Motion of Thanks to the President in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday last. In his reply to the debate the next day, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh candidly confessed that the Naxalite problem was the "most widespread and biggest internal security threat faced by our country." Asserting that their designs would be dealt with firmness "without waxing eloquent with words," he went ahead and reeled out measures of how his Government was serious in addressing the problem. "We are following a two-pronged strategy," he grandiosely stated. Plainly, more of the same--increased police force, training, better intelligence and more money et al. And the lollipop of enticing schemes which have yet to percolate down to the aam aadmi. The Backward District Initiative Scheme, National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme etc. Ditto his Home Minister Shivraj Patil the day earlier. Hold it. Great pep talk. Been there and heard it all before. Isn't this what he said last April while addressing a Chief Ministers Conference, specially called for the purpose. Questionably, merely mouthing platitudes about the urgency of being pro-active will no longer do. What is needed is for the Centre to think beyond the headlines and translate words into action and schemes to combat the Naxal scourge. A well thought-out vision and long-term planning. Sadly, instead of addressing the issue in all seriousness, the Prime Minister reduced the Naxal menace into an academic comparative study of the Naxal situations during the NDA and UPA regimes. A sample: "The UPA's record is better than that of the previous NDA regime. Whether it is the North-East, Jammu and Kashmir or Naxalite-affected areas, the overall internal situation is far better under us," he stated. Typically, New Delhi continues to betray a grave lack of comprehension, vision and long-term planning. It is happy fire fighting without any overall plan to deal with the threat. Myopic in its introspection, the Centre seldom, if ever, looks ahead and acts. It invariably stays laid-back and merely reacts. Never mind that the Naxalites have exposed how nearly the entire country is in its tenuous grip. In Bihar, for instance, there is 20.9 per cent rise in Naxal activities. Jharkhand has recorded 23.9 per cent rise in violence and 32.6 per cent rise in the killings since 2002. Worse, it continues to treat it as merely a law and order problem, which in reality is much more than that. There is no gainsaying that the Red brigade has capitalized on internal schisms that divide India's highly inequitable social order through catchy slogans and beguiling rhetoric. Look at the dichotomy. With a majority of India's population engaged in agricultural pursuits, one would imagine the tillers would be rich. But it is the opposite. The peasants are not only poor but are at the mercy of the rich landlords. Providing the Naxals the perfect opening to wean the agricultural labourers with the promise of getting them their rightful dues in terms of not only wages but also give them confiscated surplus land from the landlords and distribute it among the landless labourers. Thereby laying the seeds of running a parallel government in remote areas, conduct people's court, extort money from "landlords" and distribute the booty among the poor. Simplistically, the Naxals USP is that they have sold the poor the pipe-dream of implementing land reforms by breaking up large feudal landholdings and dividing the surplus land among the poor a la Robin Hood. Something which successive governments at the Centre and in the States have lacked the political courage to do. Today, the downtrodden are saying no to oppression and exploitation. Asserted a senior intelligence officer: "We are in serious danger because of the rise of the Naxal movement in the last four-five years... it has really developed into a danger point and if we fail to take note of the danger, I am afraid the consequences would be fatal." Interestingly, the Union Home Ministry conceded a few years ago that this was one of the root causes of this menace. It also prophesized in a report that inequalities of economics would breed internal unrest and upset peace. Yet it let this socio-economic cancer fester in its backyard. With the result that today it has assumed gigantic proportions that threaten to devour the country in its tentacles. Is the Government really serious about defusing this powder keg? Merely acknowledging that the situation is India's biggest-ever security challenge will no longer do. It has do some honest soul searching. Clearly, the Centre needs to hammer out a long-term strategy to cry a halt to Naxalism. The Government would have to fight this threat simultaneously on many fronts. One way for it is to expose the lacunae in the Naxal's ideological framework and simultaneously launch a political offensive with a humanistic vision. Two, tackle the distortions in the social system on a war footing, take measures to alleviate poverty, ensure speedy development and enforce law and order strictly. Three, take up land reforms with a fresh revolutionary zeal. There is urgent need for the badly-affected States to undertake joint operations and set up joint unified commands for continuous monitoring of the arms profile of various Naxal groups, Along with this, the identification of sources and networks, coordinated intelligence gathering, and a well-equipped police force are needed, if this grave security threat is to be contained and neutralized. Specially against the backdrop of the growing professionalism in Naxal ranks, which is now characterised by growing militarization, superior army style organization, better trained cadres and coordination. Add to this the increasing sophistication of their arsenal and New Delhi is sitting on explosive dynamite. Not only that. The police force as a whole needs to be increased and increased fast. Look at one absurdity. The national average of the police-public ratio is about 1.3 policemen per 10,000 citizens. Yet in Bihar, a Naxal-prone State, the ratio of policemen to the public per 10,000 is a meagre 0.9 i.e. hardly one policeman for 10,000 people. With the result that times out of number, the police and civil administration are missing in the Naxal areas. Thus, there is need to strengthen the local police on all fronts--and ensure that it is better-trained and equipped, with improved weapons and greater mobility. Simultaneously, each State should set up a dedicated anti-Naxal force under capable officers with fixed tenures of 2-3 years, on the pattern of the 'Greyhounds' of Andhra Pradesh. The DGPs of the Naxal-affected States should share information. Backed by a liberal surrender and rehabilitation policy. Measures to safeguard pro-active policemen against Naxalite harassment should be enforced. The police should avail of air-surveillance of Naxal areas through helicopters. In the ultimate analysis, the Naxalites will continue to breed internal unrest and upset peace till such time as the Centre does not address the inequalities of economics. The basic needs of the people cannot be ignored. Poor governance or its collapse leads to anarchy. The Centre needs to have an integrated all-India approach. It may even have to launch a series of major offensives to drive home the message to the Naxalites. Or else New Delhi alone has to carry the cross. For few years down the line the Naxals could even split the country into half, where one won't be able to go from Ahmedabad to Kolkatta. Can any self-respecting country allow insurgents to play ducks and drakes with national unity? Can the authorities confine itself merely to a volley of words? http://www.centralchronicle.com/20070314/1403301.htm 'Maoist tourism' for the adventurous? Patna, March 14 (IANS) Move over Buddhist tourism. If a Bihar cop has his way, there will soon be a Maoist circuit - though this one may strictly be for the brave hearts. Additional Director General of Police (Headquarters) Abhyanand wants to turn the Maoist-dominated areas of Bihar into a tourism zone, which he says will lead to job opportunities and development in such areas. 'If Chief Minister Nitish Kumar gives us the go-ahead, the police will launch Maoist tourism, the first of its kind in the country, to fight the terror unleashed by these Naxalite forces,' Abhyanand said. 'What I mean by 'Maoist tourism' is to set up tourist spots in Maoist-hit areas. We will develop some of the rebel hideouts and places of massacres in different villages as tourist spots and the police will provide foolproof security to visitors,' he said. 'If unemployed supporters and sympathisers of Maoists taste the fruit of development, they will desert their dreaded masters,' Abhyanand said. The strength of the Maoists in their rural stronghold lies with jobless and frustrated youths who opt to work for them in the absence of any other work. To begin with a few areas under the south Bihar districts of Gaya, Jehanabad, Arwal and Aurangabad will be developed as Maoist tourist spots. Abhyanand said Maoist tourism would attract adventurous tourists, both domestic and foreign. 'Those who want to experience adventure will visit these places,' he said. 'Maoist tourism may sound like a funny idea as promoting tourism under the shadow of Maoists is something odd, but sometimes negative ideas lead to positive outcomes,' he said. Abhyanand earlier got recognition for his innovative Super-30 idea, under which poor students were given free training, food and shelter to crack prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Super-30 is a huge success story as last year 28 of 30 students chosen by him got selected for IIT. The cop himself hails from a village under the Amas police station in the Maoist violence-hit Gaya district. In some rural pockets of Bihar, the outlawed Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) is more feared than the state machinery. Maoist guerrillas, claiming to fight for the landless and poor, have a strong presence in over two dozen districts in the state and are spreading their network in districts bordering Nepal. http://www.andhracafe.com/index.php?m=show&id=20130 Govt on slippery turf over move to cap SC/ST scholarships NEW DELHI: Spurred by government scholarships, SC/ST students have been switching to private/professional institutions, causing the government to seek to cap the outgo. The move, however, has attracted strong resistance from within. Social justice ministry has taken strong exception to the pressure to freeze tuition fees under post-matric scholarship for reimbursement to SCs, with minister Meira Kumar terming it "unacceptable" in a letter to PMO. It has found support from the Planning Commission, which has even taken the initiative to push tribal welfare minister P R Kyndiah to reverse the ministry's instant acquiescence in the cost-cutting measure. The social justice ministry and the Planning Commission are sure to get support from the SC/ST advocacy groups, besides Congressmen, who fear the government, could be treading on a slippery turf with political costs. The issue, now in the PM's court, is significant in that it brings out how government assistance can help SC/STs overcome their dependence on decrepit government educational institutions. While the two communities, frequently taunted for lacking the will to do well, have grabbed the opportunity, it is the government which now seems to dragging its feet. In a strong protest, Kumar minced few words. She said that the "move will prevent poor among SCs to obtain quality education, particularly technical education". B L Mungekar, Plan panel member incharge of social justice and education, has sought Kyndiah's intervention for withdrawal of the order. The move revolves around the rising education bill in the wake of increasing privatisation and higher fees. While the post-matric scholarships were devised as a central scheme to fund education for SC/STs, the demands have marked a sharp jump as fast-declining standards of government institutions force SC/ST students to move to private institutions. Social justice ministry in 2006-07 needs Rs 656.47 cr over the budgeted amount for the purpose, and the demand is still growing. Both the ministry and Plan panel hold that the expenditure is justified as the cap would force students from the twin communities to languish in government institutions. In a rare display of activism, Plan panel has, in fact, exhorted ministry of tribal affairs to join the protest. "ST students cannot afford higher fees being charged by private unaided educational institutions," it said. Kumar, in the letter to the PM for release of outstanding Rs 656.47 crore and to protest any freezing of fees, said it was causing "undue hardships" to students. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS/India/Govt_on_slippery_turf_over_move_to_ cap_SCST_scholarships/articleshow/1759513.cms Poverty stricken villager kills children, self Patna, March 11: Facing acute poverty and hunger, a tribal man in Bihar committed suicide by jumping into a gushing river after first throwing his four children into the water. Only one child survived. Triloki Uraon, 45, a landless farm worker, plunged into the river near the Sulaihiyadah waterfall in Rohtas district Friday after pushing his children off a cliff, the police said. The eldest of the four kids, Manoj, 10, swam to Lutura village and saved himself. Uraon was depressed because he was not able to get any employment, his distraught wife said. She and the children lived at her parents' house due to differences with Uraon. "We used to quarrel because of poverty and hunger. He was upset because the children always demanded food," she said. Uraon's father added: "The family was forced to go to bed without food at night as my son was unable to earn enough. He was worried over this." The local administration denied that hunger drove the man to death. The three children whose bodies were taken out of the river were identified as Priyanka Kumari, 11, Pappu Chairo, 6 and Rinki, 8. Uraon's body is yet to be recovered. In the last 15 months, nearly half a dozen similar incidents have been reported in Bihar. Like hundreds of poor people across Bihar, Uraon was not provided a job card under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). The scheme sponsored by the central government was launched over a year ago. According to a World Bank report, nearly 40 percent of Bihar's population lives below the poverty line and hundreds of thousands of poor people migrate to other states to earn a livelihood. The job card scheme was expected to check the migration as it promises to ensure at least 100 days of work in a year. IANS http://mangalorean.com/news.php?newstype=local&newsid=40303 Mushrooming her way out of poverty! Lal Muni Devi, a landless woman from Azad Nagar Village in Bihar, has proved what millions like her could not hope for in their wildest dreams. Her monthly production of oyster mushrooms gives her around 45,00 rupees, much more than what countless others earn in the poverty-ridden region. Her efforts have won the appreciation of not only the disbelieving village folk, but also people abroad. 45-year-old Devi was recently nominated among Asia's top 25 farmers by a Mexican website, engaged in the research of wheat crop. She hopes to spread her happiness to others, but rues the fact that poverty prevents her from expanding the scope of her activities. "I will take my skill to other women and to anybody else, who wants to learn. But as of now, I don't have any money left to plough back as an investment. I had asked for assistance from the government, but it doesn't seem to coming," Devi said. Devi reluctantly entered the business of mushroom farming, which was promoted by the government for women during lean farming periods. Seeds were provided free-of-cost by the state-run Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in Patna for two years initially, though women now have to pay for them. " There are many ladies who are working, but Lal Muni Devi is very enterprising. And then, we constituted five SHG (Self Help Groups) over there," said Dr. A.R. Khan, Principal Scientist of Indian Council of Agricultural Research. The mushroom crop takes nearly three months to get ready and can be grown through the year with little effort. Devi's success with an alternate livelihood support system has inspired many others, promising to change the landscape with hope and inspiration. http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=359146&ssid=204&sid=LIF Students leave Orissa hostel over poor food Phulbani (Orissa): Dozens of students of a state-run school in Orissa have left their hostel, protesting the poor and substandard food provided to them, officials said Tuesday. Around 30-40 students of the government primary school at Munigarh in the tribal district of Phulbani, 200 km from Bhubaneswar, vacated their hostel Monday. They alleged that they have not been given any non-vegetarian food for the past six months by the teacher in-charge of the mess. Though the government has sanctioned Rs.300 every month for each boy's food, the mess in-charge had misappropriated the money and provided substandard food, one of the boys who left the hostel alleged. The school's headmaster Abhimanyu Baral, however, denied the allegation. "The students have left the hostel but I don't know why. The food quality was never bad. We are trying to bring the children back to the hostel," Baral told IANS. The school, which has 28 girls and 12 boys from Classes 1-5, is run by the Integrated Tribal Development Agency (ITDA) under the state tribal department. "I have asked two senior ITDA officials to visit the spot and investigate the incident," said Biswanath Mallik, the project administrator. "We will take strong action if we find any of the school officials involved in the alleged irregularities," he added. (IANS) http://www.indiaedunews.net/Orissa/Students%5Fleave%5FOrissa%5Fhostel%5Fover%5Fpoor%5Ffood%5F620/ Beyond the Ring Kolkata, March 13: Meera escaped. A day came when she finally decided to free herself from the demands of the circus and ring in a new life with her paramour, the young man who came to watch the circus and ended up falling in love with Meera, one of the performers. But parting was difficult, as Saibal Das' photograph shows. Within the confines of the travelling circus for which Meera worked, where unmarried men and women lived in separate quarters and were not allowed to mingle, where the youngest girls are known as 'Company Girls' and where the stories of everybody began with poverty, relationships bloom. With it comes a sense of family, where all the performing girls are connected by a shared pitiful past. Das, camera in hand, was there as Meera was ready to leave behind the circus, when, as the photograph shows, the girls, their faces betraying a gamut of conflicting emotions, had lined up to see her off while Meera hugged and kissed a middle-aged lady member of the circus. When Das last met her, Meera was well-ensconced into family life in Bengal's Durgapur, housewife and mother of a child, but someone who occasionally missed the beguiling call of the circus orchestra announcing the next show. Unlike Meera, most circus girls, feels Das, are condemned to a life of penury once the little subsistence provided by the circus ends with advancing age. A veteran photo-journalist, Das worked on the series of the women in circuses as part of a fellowship, spending a couple of months in 1997 with circuses like Samrat, Olympic, Gemini, Great Bombay and even the smaller 'two-pole' (so called because their tents are supported by a couple of poles) that did the rounds of villages. The peep he was allowed to take into the world of the circus girls, after overcoming the suspicions of the owners, have resulted in the exhibition. Somewhat inappropriately titled as Mera Naam Joker, considering that the series mostly focusses on the girls and have only a couple of frames of the 'joker', the exhibition is currently on at the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre and is part of the Tasveer project. Not a single girl enters the circus business by choice, says Das, for the decision is almost inevitably made by their abject destitution. While Tellicherry in Kerala was a place from where earlier most of the girls came, these days, Das notes, Bangladesh and Nepal work as the hubs from where the 'agents' secure the girls for the circuses with salaries ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand rupees. A salary but at what price? That's a question that runs like a leitmotif through the exhibition, as Das goes behind the world of entertainment, glitz, festoon and fun. Through telling black and white blowups, we find a former lady of the circus lying forsaken and starving on a bed, a lifetime spent in the circus business not enough to feed her during old age. Or, from Das, we hear about the girl from West Bengal's Serampore who used to cycle inside a revolving globe, emerging as a blob of blood and flesh one day. "It's significant that these women hardly ever get life insurance cover since insurance companies know the risk potential," adds Das. While documentation of the stark reality of circuses is quite obviously the moving force behind Das' initiative, it hasn't come at the cost of the creative intent. The photographer chooses his frames painstakingly, putting the onus on his compositional skills and the vivid use of light, which has gone on to heighten the sense of drama of those backstage, behind-the-scene moments. And, even within the defined parameter of his area of documentation, each frame comes across as strikingly different from the next, perspectives achieved possibly from Das' keen involvement with the subject. Thus while there are photographs that can be disconcerting, like the one that has the young showgirl lying a breath away from the brutish roar of a full-bodied tiger, Das mixes it up with ones that offer solace, like the beautifully blissful moment the lady shares with her god, the incense smoke delicately decorating the frame. Yet what remains, finally, and once the show at the circus or at Seagull is over, is the sad reality of life at the circus. The sense of bleakness can be felt in the eyes of the joker. Or it can be understood from the heavy boots of a father stamping on the chest and thigh of his little girl child, who is lying on the ground and supporting the weight of five adult men — just another of the many 'tricks' employed in the circus to keep home fires burning and audiences entertained. http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=226622 My journey of discovery with mother Ganges Our journey begins with a prayer, a deep "om" that emanates from a Brahmin Hindu priest who dips his hand into a small copper pot and three times sprinkles the holy waters of the Ganges over our bowed heads. In our cupped hands we hold rose petals, a nut and a thin strand of sacred red thread which, in a few moments, we shall cast upon the emerald-green waters of the river that is running quick and clean at our feet. We chant the mantra. "Oh Mother Ganga, cleanse us of our sins and bring peace to our souls. Help our dreams come true and give us long lives. We salute you, oh Mother Ganga and bestow upon you this gift of flowers." With that our 1,500-mile journey along the spiritual artery of India has begun, a voyage that will take us to the parts of India that live beyond the booming stock markets and gleaming IT parks of Bangalore or Mumbai. From the pristine foothills of the Himalayas we shall descend on to the Gangetic Plain and into the poverty-stricken villages of Uttar Pradesh, tracing the river's course through the holy city of Varanasi into the new industrial boom town of Calcutta in communist-run West Bengal and into the Bay of Bengal. At this point, the pilgrim site of Devprayag where the river's two tributaries, the Bhagirathi and the Alakananda meet to form the Ganges proper, the water is icy cold as it flows off the Gangotri Glacier high in the Himalayas. In the hours after dawn, pilgrims stoop to worship at the head of a river which devout Hindus must bathe in at least once in their lifetime, to wash away their sins. For those unable to make the trip, plastic cartons are filled with Ganges water to take home, perhaps for when a member of the family falls sick and can be given the water in a Hindu version of Christianity's last rites. After paying the priest 1,000 rupees (£12) for his services, there is time to reflect on the state of the Ganges which is the life-support of some 300 million people, or one in 12 of the world's population. At Devprayag the Ganges seems in rude health. When we cast rose petals into the river, shoals of tiger-striped fish come swarming up to investigate, but prefer instead to feast on the milky sweets which a newly-married couple have just offered "Ma Ganga". However, surveys have shown signs that the Gangotri Glacier, where Mother Ganges, a celestial-bound god, is said to have descended to earth, is rapidly receding. Government research last year found that the average rate of retreat has leapt, from 20 yards per year in 1971 to 37 per year today. Scientists say the glacial melting in the Himalayas - India's other major rivers, the Indus and the Brahmaputra, are also at risk - could bring catastrophe for millions. There are too many variables to put a date on when the Ganges might become seasonal, but in the temple to Lord Vishnu, which sits high above the sacred confluence, the prognosis for Mother Ganga is gloomy. Sitting under a pagoda, J P Pandit, 61, a retired school principal who is devoting the last phase of his life to spiritual concerns, sees the ailing of the Ganges as a metaphor for modern corruption. He points to the one billion litres of raw sewage and industrial effluent that are pumped daily into the lower Ganges, as a signal that the new, industrialising India has turned against all that is good and righteous. "Ganga is the spiritual motivator of India. If you call on Ganga Ma, from 1,200 miles away, she will cleanse your sins. But see how we treat her?" According to Hindu tradition, the world will have entered its final phase when the era of Kalyug - not unlike biblical Armageddon - brings darkness to the world, polluting and destroying the earth that still nourishes 60 per cent of India's population. Mr Pandit cited a story that shocked New Delhi, in which two men sexually abused, murdered and then dismembered up to 40 children, as further evidence of a "victory of sinners" in India, 2007. "We have entered the era of Kalyug," he continued. "The Gangotri Glacier from which Mother Ganga comes down to earth is melting day by day and the flow of water will become less and less. "It will become difficult for people to irrigate their land to grow crops. If the water is less, their animals will die. If Ganga dies, then the whole universe - and for us India is the whole universe - will die with her." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/12/wganges12.xml Research Paper ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ANKALU'S ERRANT WIFE: SEX, MARRIAGE AND INDUSTRY IN CONTEMPORARY CHHATTISGARH. *Jonathan P. Parry: London School of Economics and Political Science "Ankalu¹s errant wife sex, marriage and industry in contemporary Chhattisgarh"¹ Modern Asian Studies, 35 (4): 783-820. The man with the brief-case once met a man with a brief case on a train …. I forget between where and where. If you have travelled by train in India you may have met him too. He is conscious of cultural difference and wishes you to understand that Indians have family values - on account of which they don't go in for divorce or extra-marital sex. It was possibly he who first told me (though I have read it somewhere since) that actuarial calculations reveal that one in three marriages in Britain, and one in two in the United States, is destined to end in divorce. I find his contrast confirmed in a scholarly study of the subject. By comparison with its 'alarming rate' in the West, 'divorce was unknown to the Hindu institution of marriage. Husband and wife were bound to each other not only in this life, but even in lives to follow' (Pothen 1986:ix). But though contemporary Englishmen may well seem faithless by Smartha Brahman standards, it was not ever thus. Except by act of Parliament, legal divorce with the right to remarry was not an option before 1857; and up to that date the largest number of Parliamentary petitions in any one year was twelve (Stone 1990:325). Admittedly, this very low figure may have owed as much to cost as to widespread marital contentment. And admittedly, the less affluent took recourse to various forms of separation and customary procedures of divorce, while an incalculably larger number deserted their spouse (Thompson 1991; Gillis 1985). But even so, there is fairly wide consensus that England was 'basically a non-divorcing and non-separating society', prompting Stone to suggest that the ever-spiralling divorce rate since has been 'perhaps the most profound and far-reaching social change to have occurred in the last five hundred years' (Stone 1990:28; 422). The man with the brief case was, I sensed, apprehensive lest India put an unwary foot on the same escalator, and will not have been reassured by the LSE Director's recent assessment of global trends (Giddens 1999). Not just in Islington, but the wide world over, personal life is undergoing a revolutionary transformation in the direction of a new ideological stress on intimacy, on the quality and equality of the relationship between the couple, and hence on the possibility of de-coupling when that relationship is no longer fulfilling (cf. Giddens 1992). Coming to us courtesy of BBC. Dot. Com this goes as 'globalization', though I fancy an ancestry in old-style 'modernization'. By comparison my canvas is extremely limited - one small part of India over one small chunk of time, in which context I want to address my travelling companion's concern with the changing stability of marriage. What he may perhaps have overlooked is that it is possible to be legally married to somebody one has not seen for years. We therefore need to distinguish between jural and conjugal stability (Schneider 1953). And if we are interested in the latter, in whether the couple actually remain together, it is obvious that in contemporary India the legal divorce rate is an extremely poor guide. Though in much of the 'traditional' high-caste Hindu world the jural relations of marriage have indeed been very stable, it is unlikely that conjugal relations were ever equally so. Lower down the social hierarchy, customary forms of divorce and remarriage were widely accepted. For south India in the mid-twentieth century, Gough (1956), Mandelbaum (1970:1:78) and Dumont (1986[1957]: 199-200) drew attention to very high rates of marital breakdown; while from the other end of the country, Berreman (1963:161-2) reported that in the Garhwal hills divorce was 'taken as a matter of course', and that adultery was not a ground for it and was in fact 'expected'. Two surveys in neighbouring Jaunsar-Bawar showed that around one half of all ever-married women had had two or more spouses, and that a large proportion of those who had not were still at an age at which remarriage was likely (Jain 1948; cf. Majumdar 1955:172). The recent literature has largely lost sight of the issue, though Unnithan-Kumar's study (1997) of the Girasias of Rajasthan is a valuable exception. Girasia women have a reputation for sexual freedom and can initiate divorce. Approximately 50 per cent of current household heads have had at least one previous spouse (ibid. p 139). Another important exception is Simeran Gell's remarkable re-study of the Murias. Her ethnography -which comes from the same general region - has many resonances with the data I will come to shortly. In the village studied, only 20 per cent had the partners to whom they were originally betrothed, and more than half of all completed first marriages had ended in divorce (1992:142, 129). Though in terms of India as a whole it is difficult to assess the demographic significance of these high-divorce populations, it is clear that certain pockets of the country sustain divorce rates quite comparable to contemporary California. This has significant implications for my second theme - the reproduction of caste through endogamous marriage. Endogamy is conventionally seen as the last and most impregnable bastion of caste in contemporary India. True, several observers have reported some expansion of endogamous boundaries to unite formerly separate units of equivalent status (e.g. Kolenda 1978:151; Mandelbaum 1970:2:653; Vatuk 1982). But the wider picture is held to be one in which, while the hierarchical ordering and interdependence of castes has been greatly eroded, the stress on their separation remains. The most important manifestation of this, and its ultimate foundation, is the continued vitality of endogamy ( e.g. Kolenda 1978:151; Mayer 1996; DeliËge 1997: 102, 167 and 1999:173). In fact, Choudhury (1994, 1997) charts a marked declinein the toleration of intercaste marriage over the past century. For Patterson (1958) endogamy is 'the hard core' of caste and her Maharashtrian informants regarded 'intercaste marriage' as a contradiction in terms. For the Pallars and Paraiyars in an exclusively Untouchable Tamilnad village it is 'unthinkable' (DeliËge 1997:112); while Mayer (1996) reports in his recent re-study of Ramkheri that marriage outside the caste is not even regarded as a theoretical possibility and that caste membership remains as unambiguous as ever. Though BÈteille (1996) has questioned the plausibility of this picture for the urban middle classes, he is forced - for want of hard data - to do so on largely a priorigrounds. For the working class, I posit a close correlation between the stability of marriage and the grip of endogamy. Though the situation is subtly transformed in the modern industrial milieu, the basic logic is already present in Dumont's distinction between primary and secondary marriage. The primary marriage is 'the marriage par excellence', more strictly regulated, more expensive and prestigious (1964:83). Where the conjugal bond is indissoluble, it is a woman's onlymarriage. But even when remarriage is possible, a woman (though not a man) may go through only one primarymarriage which is a prerequisite for subsequent inferior, less elaborately ritualised, marriages. While the children may sometimes be hierarchised, they are equally legitimate. Legitimacy distinguishes marriage from concubinage, which - though socially condoned - is not a ritualised union. It is a matter of individual choice to which the consent of kin is irrelevant, and which may therefore involve partners of different caste. Thus Good (1991:85) reports that though intercaste marriage remains rare in the Tirunelveli villages he studied, 'many men' have concubines of different caste and most important ones have at leastone such liaison. In other parts of India the lines are differently drawn. Being freer, secondary marriages may also cross caste boundaries (e.g. Berreman 1963:154). In general, 'the higher the type, the stricter the regulation'; the lower, the greater the scope for individual choice - and hence for inter-caste unions. I argue that under modern conditions this correlation between marital instability and intercaste marriage is strengthened. Secondary unions are increasingly likely to breach endogamous boundaries. But I also show that the marital practices of the local working class in what was pre-industrially a high divorce area are progressively polarised. For those with informal sector industrial jobs, divorce remains as frequent as formerly and remarriage more commonly crosses caste boundaries. For those with public sector employment, a new companionate ideology of marriage and stress on intimacy is accompanied by a declinein divorce (hence a lesser likelihood of intercaste marriage), and by a growth in gender inequality. While the first of these trends is in line with Giddens' predictions, the second and third run counter to them. In explaining all three the role of state institutions is crucial.Ankalu's errant wifeOn the 23rd March 1994, the Hindustan Timesreported a familiarly ghastly story. Two teenage lovers - an Ahir boy and a Saini girl - had been axed to death in a Haryana village. Called into a closed room by her uncles, the girl had been judicially dispatched while the women looked on through the windows. Her corpse was dumped at the entrance gate. Witnessed -according to police sources - by over a hundred people, the boy was cut down in the fields. No isolated case, said the investigating officer; but what really struck the reporter was that the village appeared to be united behind the 'executioners' and conspired to keep the state at arm's length. On the day I read this story I was still near the start of new fieldwork; and that evening Somvaru dropped by at my house, full of a scandal closer to hand. As it unfolded, I became aware that the distance that separates his world from this atrocity is more than geographical. Somvaru is a Satnami, the largest untouchable caste of the area. He lives in the ex-village-cum-labour colony I call Girvi, which is located on the periphery of the modern purpose-built Company Township of Bhilai in the Chhattisgarh region of Madhya Pradesh. The company is the Bhilai Steel Plant (BSP for short), a public sector undertaking which was constructed with Soviet collaboration, began production in 1959, and - with an area of seventeen square kilometres and around 50,000 workers on its direct pay-roll - is now one of the largest steel plants in Asia. A little removed from it is the more recently built industrial estate with some 200 smaller-scale private sector factories. Immediately fringing the plant's perimeter walls is its spacious and orderly township. Elsewhere the perimeter fence abuts onto what still look like rural villages; while at other points the plant and the township are surrounded by a sea of unregulated urban sprawl which envelops old villages like Girvi and Patripar in which much of my fieldwork was done. In the mid-1950s, both were small rural settlements in which a bicycle was still a wonder. Since that time many migrant workers from other corners of the country have moved in, the erstwhile peasants and landless labourers are now better described as proletarians, and the lucky ones have jobs in the steel plant. Lucky because the BSP workforce is the local aristocracy of labour, enjoying pay, perks and benefits that make them the envy of every other working class family in the area (Parry 1999a, 2000). The principal characters in the drama of which Somvaru told me the start that evening were Ankalu, Ankalu's wife and their neighbour, Kedarnath. Its narrator is really Somvaru, my source of almost daily briefings. Of Somvaru more later; though it helps to know that he is the bhandariof the Girvi Satnami Para - the functionary who presides at Satnami life-cycle rituals and has the role of first amongst equals in their quarter's panchayat. A few years his junior, and thus in his mid-fifties, Ankalu looked older having lost most of his teeth, and one of his eyes in an accident in the BSP Coke Ovens. Before BSP the family were landless. But from his compensation money and the Provident Fund payout he received on retirement, Ankalu had purchased two and a half acres of paddy land and had a deposit account in the bank. With soaring real estate values in the area around Girvi, that made him a man of property who could indulge his appetite for chicken and country liquor. His much younger, and stunningly attractive wife, was his third. The first had born him a daughter and three sons who were now young adults. Still childless, the latest wife had had three or four husbands before him. Kedarnath is another BSP Coke Oven worker and another Satnami. On the night in question Ankalu and Kedarnath were sleeping out in the street. Around 2.0am Kedarnath got up and climbed over Ankalu's compound wall to join the latter's wife. Coming back, his silhouette was spotted by Dakshin, who went to investigate. Kedarnath pleaded his discretion, to which Dakshin was disinclined by the circumstance that his own brother's wife had previously run off with Kedarnath. An enormous hullabaloo ensued. The whole para(quarter) was woken; Ankalu's sons manhandled the wife, confiscated her jewellery and turned her out of the house; and the kotvalwas summoned - the village watchman whose duties include reporting misdemeanours to the police. A couple of evenings later, a panchayat meeting was called but broke up in inconclusive chaos. It would have to meet again. In the interim I encountered the errant wife on two occasions in Somvaru's house. On the first, he informed her that Ankalu refused to have her back. She seemed philosophical. The second was more emotionally charged. Her mother had died when she was young. She could not get on with her stepmother and was not welcome in her father's house. Perhaps she should move in with Kedarnath? Somvaru was discouraging. Was she really prepared to live as a co-wife? In that case, suicide. Somvaru told her not to be silly. She could always work as a contract labourer and 'make' a new man. In the meantime, Ankalu was at one moment saying that he would take her back; at the next that he would never do so. The day after the first panchayat meeting, his wife's mother's brother and father's father arrived in the village, ostensibly in ignorance of their kinswoman's shame which they learnt about in a tea-shop up the road. They were about to turn home when Ankalu, who had heard of their arrival, sent word that there was no reason for themto fall out over a loose woman, and that they should join him in chicken and daru(liquor). For his part, Somvaru was advising Ankalu to condone his wife's conduct, put her up for a time in Bhata Para (a new hamlet on the periphery of the village inhabited mainly by outsider contract labourers) and then take her back when things had blown over. Meanwhile again, Ankalu's sons were stomping about the village threatening to bathe in Kedarnaths blood next time he crossed their path. Somvaru was scathing. 'They always say that. But we Chhattisgarhis don't have the courage for that kind of thing'. And a good job too, he would often imply - the capacity to keep a 'cold brain' (thanda dimag), over women especially, being a positive value for old-timers like him. In any event, he was right. Within a couple of days of the scandal breaking I would see Kedarnath sitting shunned, but unmolested, at his door. By the second panchayat, his sons had stiffened Ankalu's resolve. His wife was sent away. Mounted on powerful motorbikes, next morning Ankalu roared off with five friends around the peripheral villages in search of a new one. In each a fortifying drink and the party would call on the bhandarito ask if koi rarhi-chharve baithi hai, kya?('Is there any widow or abandoned woman sitting here?'). But as Somvaruhad warned, it was not that easy and these sorties continued for several weeks. Sometimes the search was combined with one for a bride for his son and nephew, enquiries about which were hopefully concluded with: Aur mere laik koi hai? ('And is there anyone suitable for me?'). Several times the posse was directed to a temporarily husbandless woman 'sitting' in her maike (her natal home) only for her to declare she would consider the proposition if Ankalu would register some land in her name, for where would she be if he died or divorced her? Once he sought out his second wife to ask if she would return, but was angrily sent packing. Once, when Somvaru's alcoholic eldest son went along, the prospective bride said that she would have him but not the one-eyed old fellow(dokra). And indeed the errant wife had already put it about that she would never have come had she realised which of the group she was getting. Despondent, Ankalu told his sons that since it was at their insistence that he turned his wife out, it was now up to them to find him a replacement. If they wouldn't he would have the old one back. By mid-May he had resolved to do so. He found her at her father's house, gave her money and sent her to stay with the brother of his first wife, the mother's brother of his sons. The plan was that if hebrought her back and begged them to accept her, they would not be able to refuse. But as it transpired, they were. The one who was shortly to marry led the opposition. There was no way he would bring a new bride to live with thatwoman. If his father insisted on keeping her, he must do so away from home. Somvaru claimed to be puzzled. Why was Ankalu so abject? Who had the bank balance and who owned the land? Part of the answer, as we shall see, is that these upwardly mobile modern young men with new-fangled ideas about marriage increasingly occupy the moral high ground. But to conclude the story, the errant wife was put to lodge with a family in Bhata Para. Within a couple of weeks she had rented a place of her own in the hamlet and started work as a contract labourer. The outraged husband was now a wooer, going to the neighbouring house of a hunchback dwarf where the two of them would drink and cook chicken to send her. But soon the gossip got back to Anaklu. Kedarnath was paying her visits. She was complaining that Ankalu's sons were eating the fruits of her labour on his land 'like it was shit'. When sympathetic neighbours suggested she beat Ankalu for his drunken disorderliness, she said "If you kill a fish, your hand stinks". Fired up by all this, Ankalu was back on his motorbike. But by July, the wife had returned to live in an empty house in the main village which Ankalu would visit at night. Eighteen months later she ran off with her very first husband. Ankalu took Prithvi on one of his trips to persuade her to return. They had been drinking; their motorbike came off the road and Ankalu sustained injuries from which he later died. The contrasting reactions in these two episodes, you might reasonably suppose, is explained by the fact that in the Haryana atrocity the caste status of those involved was more elevated and the affair was between an unmarried girl and a boy of different- and lower- caste. But I think that is only a part of the picture. Certainly, Chhattisgarhis areless tolerant of pre-marital affairs, especially of those that cut across caste; and the higher castes claimto be more sexually straight-laced than Satnamis. Even so, the moral outrage and ready recourse to violent sanctions against sexual impropriety seem much more muted. A second contrast concerns the state - in the one case a sullen determination to prevent it from poking its nose into matters of village honour, in the other an immediate summons to the government-appointed village constable. More striking still is the different role of the generations: in the one case the judges and executioners were the family gerontocrats; in the other the champions of morality were lads barely out of their teens. Divorce and remarriage in ChhattisgarhTwo major fissures run through the social order of the ex-villages-cum-labour colonies in which I worked. The first is between the local Chhattisgarhis and immigrants from outside the region. The second is within Chhattisgarhi society, between the so-called 'Hindu' castes and the Satnamis, who are descendants of Chamar untouchable converts to the sectarian following of a saint called Ghasi Das. Though most Satnami belief and ritual is shared with the other castes, and though people concede that Satnamis are Hindus 'by religion', they say that 'by caste' they are not. The 'Hindu' castes to whom they are opposed account for more or less every other in the village hierarchy, including some also regarded as untouchables in the past. The exclusion to which they were subject was, however, considerably less rigorous than that applied to Satnamis. The category 'Hindu' thus covers an extremely broad spectrum, and the separation between castes within it was in the days before the steel plant unusually stringent. In many instances the only people with whom one would inter-dine were those of one's own caste. Today, in places like Girvi and Patripar, members of all 'Hindu' castes eat together in a single unbroken line (pangat ) on occasions like marriage. But still no Satnami is ever invited. So while the barriers that once separated the 'Hindu' castes from each other appear increasingly permeable, the one which divides 'Hindus' from Satnamis remains substantially intact and is thrown into sharper relief (Parry 1999b). Something of the same shift, as I will later show, is repeated in marriage.While it is true that Satnami marriages are less stable, the gap is exaggerated by high caste discourse. Almost all castes traditionally tolerate divorce and remarriage.There is, however, one now distinctively Satnami practice which signals a difference in ideological emphasis. Brahmanical theory constructs marriage as kanya dan- 'the gift of a virgin'. The 'virgin' (kanya) is given as dan, a unilateral prestation whichthe donor alienates absolutely and for which noreturn can be accepted. In flat contradiction, the Satnamis take bride-price (sukh dam- 'the price of happiness'). As a concession to Brahmanical norms, the sum is now fixed at a trifling level and propriety requires that most of it is handed back. But the crucial point is that, however trivial the amount, something is retained. Were it not, the girl would be kanya dan. Members of her household would not be able to accept food in her married home and she would not be able to return to her natal home if the marriage turned out badly - for danmust never come back to the donor. In short, the Satnamis explicitly repudiate the theory which objectifies women as alienable gifts. But though the 'Hindu' castes paylip-service to that theory, it is whispered that they too took bride-price in the past, while today they regularly subvert the ideology of kanya dan by divorce, and by exchange marriages (guravat) in which a sister is given for a wife and the need for dowry is obviated. For Chhattisgarhis, however, dowry has yet to become the drain on family resources that it is elsewhere - though amongst BSP workers, the emulation of outsiders has considerably inflated the outlay required. But it is still the case that a Chhattisgarhi with a regular job in the plant would spend on a daughter's marriage no more than half, and could possibly get away with as little as a quarter, of what would be de rigeurfor his Malayali, Punjabi or Bihari colleague. In the urban areas today, at the time of marriage a boy is likely to be between twenty and thirty, a girl between fifteen and twenty-five. By contrast, many people over forty were first married as children - often so young that they do not remember the event. The child-bride would subsequently remain with her parents until she was ready for gauna- at which she was ritually given into the custody of her husband and the marriage consummated. These days, shadi(the wedding proper) and gauna are usually run together. Child marriage is plainly intended to ensure that a girl is married before she is sexually active. Marriage, as Somvaru put it, is 'for lifting the weight of virginity' (kunvar bhar utarne ke liye) -which bears principally on the parents, who must make reparation to the caste panchayat if their daughter elopes. It is a 'liberation from (the) bondage' (bandhan se mukti) of parental responsibility. In parts of 'traditional' Chhattisgarh a pre-pubescent girl was married to an arrow or rice-pounder. Only after maturity was she given to a human husband. The token pre-puberty marriage was essential to 'ripen' and 'de-sacralise' her body. If she menstruated or had sex before it she was permanently defiled, and was unable to marry with full rites or participate fully in community ritual. But after the mock marriage, her sexual lapses were treated 'as those of a married woman' - that is, as peccadilloes (Dube 1953; cf. Hira Lal 1926).While in the Bhilai area a girl was (generally) married to a real groom, he might just as well have been a token in that they would not consummate their union for years. In the meantime one or both might embark on a secret liaison. Such affairs were almost expected, and it was common to abscond before gauna. Though some people say that the parents of a girl who eloped at this stage were still responsible, others deny this on the grounds that while 'the kunvari('virgin' or 'unmarried girl') is the property (sanpatti) of her father, the married woman is that of her in-laws'. Provided that he is also of their caste, the latter can claim divorce-compensation from her lover. But either way, there is unanimity that after her shadihas been celebrated, a girl is no longer a kunvari, and her affairs did not occasion the scandal they would if she were. The'weight of virginity', in other words, seems to have borne on her parents principally up to the point of shadirather than gauna, and to have had little to do with delivering a physically intact bride to a husband for life. Rather than manifesting an obsession with controlling the sexual purity of women in a world in which it is primarily through women that caste status is preserved - as Yalman (1963) and more recently Good (1991:231-2) and Dube (1996) have argued -pre-puberty marriage in Chhattisgarh (whether real or token) appears to have permitted a liberationof female sexuality. In any event it seems a little perverse to argue that a chronic anxiety about caste purity forces fathers to marry off their five year-olds if they then allow their fifteen year-olds so much scope for fun. In fact, as we shall see, caste is not principally transmitted through women; and the apparently self-evident hypothesis, which associates pre-puberty marriage with an overwhelming preoccupation with the perpetuation of caste status, seems somewhat unconvincing.As all this suggests, the collapsing of shadiand gauna into one has considerably added to 'the weight of virginity'. The bride is now a young woman by the time of her shadi and will join her husband immediately. Husbands therefore expect to get virgins; and fathers find responsibility for a daughter's virtue more burdensome. It is one thing to guarantee that of a toddler; another that of a girl of twenty. This was brought home to me when Bhushan Satnami's daughter wasabout to get married, a magnificent match and a triumph of Somvaru's diplomacy. But it all came close to grief when the prospective groom's father's sister's husband approached Somvaru to suggest a medical test of virginity. 'When', as he put it, 'the rahar(dal) grows big, the cow will sometimes mount the embankment. The girl has been big for some time'. Though by comparison with marital desertion, pre-marital elopement is both rare and disgraceful, it is certainly not unknown. Madan Lal is another Girvi Satnami and another BSP worker. When he learned that his daughter was five months pregnant by a Mahar who pushes a hand-cart around the neighbourhood streets selling cosmetics and female trinkets (maniyari saman ), his reaction was one of blind rage. Somebody should take the girl out, cut her throat and dump her body in the jungle. Nobody did. Next day the girl eloped with her lover, and her father announced that for him she was dead. Kanhaiya, the lover and the sister's son of Girvi's kotval(who himself made an intercaste marriage), has a mother's sister who lives in the company township and is married to a Muslim. She gave the girl refuge. Kanhaiya remained in the village, and three days after the elopement I passed him pushing his handcart - rather provocatively I thought - through the Satnami Para, wearing his dark glasses and trilby hat, the loudspeakers mounted on his barrow blaring out a Bollywood song. Four months later, both Madan's sons were unproblematically married within the caste, and his daughter gave birth to a daughter outside it. When I went back the next year, it was clear that Kanhaiya was tiring of the relationship. He had found mother and baby somewhere to live in an outlying village to which he was now an increasingly infrequent visitor. By the following year, both he and the girl had been conventionally married within their own caste. Kanhaiya had enlisted the aid of a Satnami roadside bicycle repairman who had found Madan's daughter an impoverished husband from his distant village to whom Kanhaiya had paid a substantial inducement. She now has a child by this man; and the young family have come to live in Girvi's Bhata Para from where she can walk within minutes to her father's house - which she regularly does. As the saying is, 'If a child shits on your feet, you do not cut them off'. The Patripar Barber introduced me to another useful adage which brings out the sexually liberating nature of shadi, and the contrast between primary and secondary marriage: kunvari beti panch ke, chharve beti man ke('the virgin daughter belongs to the caste panchayat, the abandoned daughter follows her owndisposition'). 'After making the seven circumambulations (of the marriage fire)', he elaborated, 'a girl is free.' The difference is marked in everyday speech. Primary marriage is something which is 'done' to one and in which a girl is 'given'. But in talking about secondary unions the voice changes. The woman 'makes' a new man, and he makes her his wife by 'putting on bangles' (churi pehnana).As with the Muria (Gell 1992:126f), a young bride is expected to run - and keep running -away from her husband; and he is expected to show his commitment by fetching her back. But if she does it too often, or if he does not like her, he may just let her moulder in her maike. And if she does not like him, she will refuse to return. In either event, it is time to find someone new. As this suggests, a woman retains rights of refuge in her natal home, her relationship with which is much more durable than the marriage bond. But although her right of return is unquestioned, it is not expected to be permanent, and her parents will encourage her to make a new husband lest she shame them by conceiving without one. Her first husband (her bihata) should then go to demand of her new one a payment (bihat) which is handed over 'to break the marriage bond' (bihati torna). But today many men are ashamed to claim such compensation, the proper use of which is to fund a feast known as marti-jiti bhat('the rice meal of the living-dead') which signifies that for him that wife is now dead. No relationship between them remains, and a woman is widowed only after the death of the husband with whom she currently lives. There is no distinction of status between the children of a primary and secondary marriage. Both are equally the product of their father's seed, which is why it is to him that they theoretically belong in the event of divorce. In practice, however, small children frequently go with their mother to her maike, and when she remarries are subsequently brought up in the house of a stepfather or are left with maternal grandparents. While girls are commonly written-off by their fathers, boys are likely to return eventually to claim their share of the paternal property. But muchdepends on individual circumstance.Some 'quantitative gossip'. Among the Satnamis of Girvi and Patripar, almost half of all primarymarriages have been terminated by divorce. The vast majority remarry, often more than once (and in one case eight times). My aggregate estimate for the 'Hindu' castes is that between one-quarter and one-third of all primary marriages end in divorce. What these gross estimates conceal, however, is a generational variation. 61 per cent of Satnamis aged 45 or over had been divorced. For those under 45, the figure is 39 per cent. Since marriage is most fragile in its earliest years, I think it unlikely that this difference is simply an artefact of age. Marriage isbecoming more stable - in a certain segment of the working class. Amongst those with casual informal sector employment, divorce is as common in the younger as in the older cohort; and is associated with a high proportion of female-headed households and a small amount of casual prostitution. But amongst the aristocracy of labour there is a significant shift. Of 98 Satnami BSP workers and retired workers from Girvi and Patripar, almost exactly two-thirds (67 per cent) of those aged over 45 had divorced and remarried (slightly more than this group as a whole). But of those under 45, only one-quarter (26 per cent) have done so (which is appreciably fewer than their informal sector peers). Though these figures are only suggestive, they square with the general perception that 'educated' youngsters have learned more 'civilised' ways. By high caste north Indian standards, Chhattisgarhi women display a shocking want of submissiveness, and often take the initiative in the break-up of marriage. A Muslim woman in late middle age, now married to a Maharashtrian neo-Buddhist, explained that a new husband keeps a woman feeling young, and it is only when she gets old and tired that she settles for what she has got. An excessively independent and assertive wife, however, risks being labelled a witch (tonhi) and on that account turned out. Sometimes the poverty of her husband's household prompts a woman to leave. As a reason for divorce, however, childlessness is undoubtedly the most important. Patience is limited if a bride does not conceive in the first couple of years, or if she bears only girls. It is above all sons who stabilise marriages. Though male informants concede the theoretical possibility that the absence of children may result from the infertility of the man, in practice the woman is blamed. But women know otherwise, and it is this - I strongly suspect - which precipitates a number of extra-marital affairs, undertaken in a search for more potent seed.In Chhattisgarh, wrote Russell at the beginning of this century,……. marriage ties are of the loosest description, and adultery is scarcely recognised as an offence. A woman may go and live openly with another man and her husband will take her back afterwards. Sometimes, when two men are in the relation of Mahaprasad or nearest friend to each other ……. they will each place his wife at the other's disposal. The Chamars (now Satnamis) justify this carelessness of the fidelity of their wives by the saying, 'If my cow wanders and comes home again, shall I not let her into the stall?' (Russell 1916:2:412). Though today adultery is certainly not treated so lightly, I believe that there is more to Russell's report than the hyperbole of an outraged Victorian sensibility. Amongst the new aristocracy of labour at least, there has been a genuine shift in values.Polygynous marriages are increasingly at odds with these values, and even if a man may intend to supplement, rather than substitute, a wife, wives are increasingly reluctant to tolerate the addition and increasingly likely to leave - which is possible because they can generally support themselves by contract labour. What would in the past have become a polygynous union is now more probably serial monogamy. A significant proportion of secondary marriages cross caste boundaries. For Girvi and Patripar I know of 116 intercaste marriages (and more were doubtless concealed from me). Of these, nearly 90 per cent are secondary unions. Of all such marriages I estimate that 1:5 or 1:6 contravene the rule of endogamy. As a proportion of all current couples, the number of intercaste unions is not dramatic - about 7 per cent. But if I include wives, sisters and daughters who have run away with a man of different caste and now reside elsewhere, we find that ten to fifteen per cent of all households in these neighbourhoods have present or previous members who have married outside their caste. But more significant than the figures is the form that these unions take. My estimates excludeinstances of marriage between two formerly endogamous units which now recognise the possibility of a primary marriage between them - as is the case, for example, between the Coppersmiths (Tamers/Tamrakars) and Bronzesmiths (Kasers), and between various subcastes of Kurmi. Nor are we dealing with a pattern of women marrying 'up' - 'with the grain' - in the approved hypergamous manner sanctioned by the shastras. Where both partners are Chhattisgarhis, they are often from widely separated rungs of the hierarchy. The number of instances in which the woman married 'against the grain' to a man of inferior status almost exactly matches the number in which she married 'up'. The confusion of castes is further compounded by the fact that a significant proportion of these unions involve partners who were born and raised in the same ex-village neighbourhood. A woman who has broken up with her first husband comes back to 'sit' in her maike, where she forms a liaison with a man who lives nearby. Though they may not recognise each other as such, it is consequently difficult for the in-laws to avoid all contact with each other or to pretend that the union does not exist. 38 per cent (N = 43) of these intercaste marriages are between partners who are both Chhattisgarhis; 52 per cent (N = 60) between a Chhattisgarhi and an outsider, and 10 per cent (N = 13) between two outsiders. While, with regard to the first of these categories, the scale may be new the occurrence is not. In the past the couple were boycotted, but - provided that the difference in status between the two castes was not great - they and their children would be eventually accepted into the caste of the husband after appropriate penance. This characteristically took the form of a feast known as bharri bhat, at which any member of the caste from the surrounding villages had a right to be present and to demand the food oftheir choice. It was therefore financially crippling and in effect amounted to a caste admission fee that enabled the wealthy to legitimate their irregular unions (cf. Leach 1961:72). But as the rate of intercaste marriage rapidly grew in the area around BSP, the caste councils tried to stem the tide by taking a tougher line. One strategy was to admit the man and his children, but not his wife. Sometimes he was allowed to keep her as his concubine (rakhel, lauthi rakhi). Sometimes he was required to renounce her; and sometimes the children as well. Faced with more and more cases, however, some councils vainly tried for a time to impose a permanent ban on a man who married outside. With the exception of the Satnamis, such a ban always applied to a woman who took a husband of different caste. While a woman might acquire the caste of her husband, a man - however superior - could never join that of his wife (unless she were a Satnami). The transmission of caste status is, in effect, patrilineal. Even if he has married improperly, a son - people say - 'is a bit of our liver, isn't he? How can we cut him off and throw him away? But a girl is a parai(an 'alien'). If she does not do what we say ….she will have to suffer the consequences.' While the prodigal son 'has given his blood and semen and that is why his children are ours,' such a girl is likened to a cracked earthenware pot - the only thing to do is chuck it away. The consequence is that an increasing number of people have maternal half-siblings and cousins of different caste to their own. This reluctance to 'throw away' sons is one reason why the de factotolerance of intercaste unions is rather wide. Another is that the sanctions against them are now rather weak. Goods and services are easily available in the town and there is now no question of the once all-powerful malguzar of the village (its erstwhile landlord and revenue collector) being able to order the Barber or Blacksmith to refuse one work. Today, all a boycott really amounts to is exclusion from the life-cycle rituals of one's caste fellows. Even so, I know cases where a daughter's primary marriage was arranged with a BSP groom whose family were boycotted. The caste panchayat may huff and puff, but can no longer blow down houses. The net result is that with regard to marriage the pattern of change has partially replicated the re-ordering of commensal relations. As the Hindu castes now publicly interdine, so they increasingly intermarry. And in both spheres the Satnamis are excluded. But the fact that marriages across this divide are never condoned does not mean they do not occur. Of the 43 intercaste unions from Girvi and Patripar in which both partners are Chhattisgarhis, 7 were between Satnami women and men of 'Hindu' caste and five between a Satnami man and a 'Hindu' woman. The largest category of irregular unions, however, cross not only caste boundaries but also those of regional ethnicity between Chhattisgarhis and outsiders (60 out of the 116 cases). All but five involve a Chhattisgarhiwomanand a man from outside. Of these latter an absolute majority are 'Biharis'. Chhattisgarhis put this down to defects in the Bihari character, the violence of which explains the asymmetry. No sensible Chhattisgarhi exposes his throat by taking one of theirwomen. A less prejudicial assessment would include demography and migration patterns. Before BSP, this area had an excess population of women, and it was only in the vicinity of the steel plant that this trend was reversed with the influx of migrant workers in the 1960s (Verma 1972:101). By contrast with the south Indian pattern of familymigration to the industrial areas, that of the 'Biharis' is predominantly one of single men who only much later, if at all, bring their wives and children to join them (Holmstrom 1984:68-9). Not uncommonly these Bihari husbands have a family back home, which is why colloquially their Chhattisgarhi wives are 'stepneys' - 'spare wheels'. And as this suggests, there is sometimes something exploitative about these relationships - as in the case of two Patripar shopkeepers ('Biharis' both) who are alleged to have acquired Chhattisgarhi girls in settlement of debts. Moreover, Chhattisgarhi men have a reputation for indolence; the women for industry. 'Here', said the Patripar Barber, 'women are the slaves of men. We sit at home and they go out to work. But in UP-Bihar the men are the slaves of women and have to work for them. That is why they catch hold of our daughters.' But however this may be, many of these unions seem quite as stable as the general run of marriages.Sex, marriage and industryAnd in a sense the Barber is right - women's work outside the home iscrucial. Chhattisgarhi women provide by far the greater part of the casual unskilled female labour force employed on construction sites and in the steel plant, where they sort scrap, shift slag, clear up coal spillages and the like. They work in mixed gangs under a male supervisor who is often an outsider, as is the mason for whom they carry bricks. As I have described elsewhere (Parry 1999a), one reason why contract labour is preferred to work in the fields is that it holds out the promise of sexual adventure - a significant proportion of illicit affairs and secondary unions being initiated in such apparently unpromising settings as the BSP slag-dump. At the time of a strike there, a Malayali union leader told me, he had despaired to discover how many of his pickets by day were massaging the backs of blackleg Biharis by night. Within the gang, the foreplay - so to speak - is legitimised by the system of fictive kinship into which all its members are incorporated. Kashi, for example, classifies Kamla as his nani(maternal grandmother) because Kamla is the name of his real grandmother. Phirantin is his bhabhi(eBW) because she comes from the same village as the wife of one of his classificatory brothers. Other links might easily have been traced and his choice of terms is motivated. Both of these relationships permit joking, and with one's bhabhiin particular the joking is expected to take an explicitly sexual form and may even extend to horseplay. Kashi is fancy free, Phirantin is pretty, the outcome predictable. And if Phirantin is married, her husband's sense of humour is put to the test - which is why most couples avoid work on the same site. It is also why contractors are reluctant to employ them. Joking leads to jealousy, jealousy leads to rows and rows ruin schedules. Here, then, is one clue to the greater instability of marriage amongst this segment of the working class. Legitimised flirtatious joking lets both sexes explore the possibilities of a more serious liaison. And if contract labour makes marriages, it also breaks them by putting temptation in the way, provoking jealousy and providing an unhappy young wife with a realistic means of doing without her husband and a promising means of finding a new one. Not surprisingly, BSP workers - who can well afford the luxury of keeping their wives and daughters at home - regard contract labour for their women as not only shameful but threatening. For their part, the women are probably happy enough to be relieved of what (despite its romantic possibilities) is such arduous, unpleasant and low status toil. For both sexes, then, female domesticity has certain advantages; while for relations between them it plainly has consequences. One, I suggest, is the greater longevity of marriage; and another is a significant increment in women's dependence on men. A further clue to the contrast is BSP itself. In the politics of kinship and marriage, the power of the state is regularly enlisted. Disputes between in-laws unrelated to dowry often escalate into police cases of dowry harassment. Consensual love affairs result in charges of rape at the instigation of rivals. Not that rape and dowry harassment do not occur (though the latter is principally a non-Chhattisgarhi problem). It is rather that many of the cases that get reported are not the ones that do. So routine is this recourse to the police and the courts that it is perhaps surprising that legal divorce remains a rarity. There is not a single instance in Girvi or Patripar. It is rather through the steel plant that the state most significantly impinges on the regulation of marriage. It does so in both direct and indirect ways. Indirectly, the most important impact is through BSP recruitment procedures (described in more detail in Parry 1999b and 2000). A BSP berth is the acme of almost all working class ambitions. With a view to obtaining one, most young men who have managed to achieve the minimum educational qualifications lodge their cards with the district employment exchange as soon as they are eligible. But the queue of qualified candidates would stretch all the way from Raipur to Durg, and in 1994 BSP was processing applications for the lowliest post of Plant Attendant from candidates who had registered in 1983. The result of the log-jam is that most aspirants will not know their fate much before they are thirty, and some (who are eligible for posts reserved for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes) need not give up hope until they have reached thirty-five. Because the quality of the match that he can make -in terms of the complexion and educational attainments of the bride and the standing of her family - critically depends on their son's employment prospects, many fathers try to delay his marriage until he is settled in a job. Moreover, a boy who can realistically aspire to a BSP job wants an educated girl, while one who is actually taken on by the plant very soon learns from his non-Chhattisgarhi work-mates that he ought to command a significant dowry. In short, while the divorce rate falls in response to BSP employment, the age of marriage and the expectations of dowry rise. The fall in the divorce rate notwithstanding, a young BSP worker will not find it difficult to marry another virgin-bride if his first marriage ends, and - unlike a low status chharve - a higher rated kunvariwill come with a dowry. This at least partly explains what is, I am assured, a new phenomenon in Girvi and Patripar - a group of youthful 'abandoned women' from BSP families who have been 'sitting' interminably in their maike, because 'nobody (at least nobody of the right status) now comes to ask for them'. Their plight is plainly a warning to any daughter from the better-off segments of village society who is contemplating the disappointments of her own marriage. It also gives pause for thought to her father and brothers, who must now face the prospect of having to provide for her and her children on a semi-permanent basis if she leaves her husband. And they also of course run an enhanced risk of her bringing shame upon them by conceiving child in their house and out of wedlock. At least for a woman and her family, these new barriers to remarriage in the upper echelons of the working class are an obvious disincentive to divorce. Directly, BSP intervenes in the regulation of marriage by invoking the majesty of the law and the weight of the company rule book. By law, bigamy is a criminal offence punishable by a fine and up to seven years rigorous imprisonment. By BSP rules, a worker who wishes to remarry must get permission from the company. Both provide management with a good deal of leverage over a good many workers - particularly because very few know the legal definition of bigamy and are easily persuaded that 'putting bangles' on a new wife without a court divorce could land them in jail. The vast majority, moreover, will have defrauded the company by claiming medical benefits, free travel and other perks on her and her children's behalf. BSP is not the DHSS, with snoopers on orange boxes at rear windows. But it does have a Vigilance Department which the routine skirmishing of neighbourhood politics keeps supplied with anonymous tip-offs, and which receives a regular flow of petitions from deserted wives. These are forwarded for further investigation to the Personnel Department in the worker's shop. Though only a small fraction of disciplinary cases are related to marriage, their demonstration effect is significant. The standard strategy is to admit guilt and throw oneself on 'the kind mercy' of the enquiry in a letter drafted by one of the clerks. At the hearing one humbly submits that one is a poor illiterate fellow who has merely conformed to custom without knowing the company rules, and if possible claims that one's motive in remarrying was to beget a son to perform one's funeral rites. This plays well to a management audience and the chances are that you get off quite lightly.But some cases are less tractable. As the result of a complaint from his first wife who wanted maintenance, Bharat was charged with having remarried without company permission. His version was that it was his wife who had run out on him and their daughter, Budhvantin. At the time he was making a precarious living as an itinerant hawker, could not look after the girl and had persuaded her now remarried mother - whom he had met at a fair - to take her. His luck then turned, he got a BSP job, remarried and now has three other children. But in the meantime his previous wife had left her second husband, had got pregnant (by whom he could not say), and had given birth to a second girl. While he was willing to give Budhvantin a home, he was damned if he would support the mother and second child. The wife of Ranjit, a Punjabi Sikh, complained that he had exchanged garlands with another bride in a local temple (photo enclosed), maintained two other women as his mistresses, and physically abused her in order to extort additional dowry payments from her parents. By dint of strategically-timed absenteeism, Ranjit span out the enquiry interminably, and was eventually sent a registered letter instructing him to report to the BSP Family Counselling Centre, Police Control Room, Sector 6. The next instalment I heard on a subsequent visit when I spent some days with Counselling. Not in the Police Control Room, but in the old administrative complex, down a dark corridor past an exhibition centre with posters illustrating the comparative effects of alcohol and yoga on the brain. From the Section's senior manager I learned about stresso-graphs, the contribution of Sai Baba to counselling, and - 'you won't mind it' - about the similarity of Chhattisgarhis to Europeans in the matter of marriage. The solution is education and counselling; the objective is reconciliation through love and understanding. In practice, however, these are sometimes supplemented by a certain amount of well-motivated arm-twisting. Marital problems are their largest single category of cases - of which they have handled more than 2,500 since the service was started in 1986. In the vast majority, marital breakdown is accepted as a fait accompliand the issue is maintenance. In fact, BSP management has no legalstanding in such matters - only leverage. Though it is in nobody's interest that the BSP 'bigamist' should be sent to jail - least of all the jilted wife's since her husband would then be unable to support her - heavy hints about criminal cases and disciplinary proceedings generally ensure that love and understanding prevail. The worker signs an instruction to the Salaries Section to pay a proportion of his wage into an account set up for his wife. Sometimes the complainantis transparently trying their luck- like the Girvi wife who had run off twenty years earlier and was now petitioning for a slice of her about-to-retire ex-husband's Provident Fund. Sometimes the husband regrets his generosity. Until Counselling was given control of their credit to close the loophole, some took loans so large from the company that the monthly repayments left nothing for maintenance. Others - like Ranjit - find other ways of subverting the agreement. Counselling affected a 'reconciliation'. His wife agreed to go back to him, and he to make her a monthly allowance. But into the standard document Ranjit inserted an extra clause, which specified that he would only pay while she remained in his house. He made that impossible, and she soon was back to say that she would now go to court. In the majority of cases, however, the agreements stick. It is a remarkable phenomenon: a large-scale public sector enterprise takes upon itself the task of defending the interests of the deserted wives of its own employees, and thereby incurs the ireof their union. What motivates management? Part of the answer lies in the Nehruvian modernising vision to which BSP owes its foundation, and according to which its purpose was as much to forge a new kind of man in a new kind of society as to forge steel. And if these socialengineers are middle-class high caste managers from more 'civilised' regions, it is hardly surprising if the authentic expression of the family values of the modern Indian nation are their own more 'orthodox' norms. For them, I suspect, it is as much a matter of reforming the morals of men, who must be encouraged to become new model citizens, as it is of providing succour to women and children. Their power to encourage stems of course from the fact that most BSP employees are very well aware of how privileged they are by comparison with other workers in the area, and are consequently reluctant to jeopardise their jobs. The reformist instincts of management are further reinforced by the fact that regular BSP jobs have always been regarded as jobs for life. Even with the greatest missionary zeal, no employer has either the incentive or the capacity to exercise much influence over the private lives of labour which is here today and gone tomorrow. What is more, a large proportion of the BSP workforce lives in the Company Township, and in the same Sectors as the managers. They should live there respectably. Economic liberalisation provides a further - and equally significant - ingredient in the form of a globalised market discipline, which increasingly constrains the Company to cut labour costs by stamping on welfare scams. Thus paternalistic Nehruvian modernism, Brahmanical values and 'bottom-line' accountancy combine to uphold the sanctity of marriage. But just as important, I believe, is the way in which the work group mediates these new marital values. BSP work groups are socially very heterogeneous, being made up of both Chhattisgarhis and outsiders, and of high and low castes. In the 'hard' shops, where the work is often dangerous and involves close co-operation, but where there is plenty of time to socialise, they are also highly solidary - which makes them an important channel for the dissemination of the 'modern' and 'civilised' values of their most 'educated' members. What that means in terms of marriage should already be clear, though the paradox it entails requires a little elaboration. I have argued elsewhere (Parry 1999a) that the cohesiveness of the work group makes the BSP shopfloor a kind of melting pot which dissolves the 'primordial' loyalties of caste, regional ethnicity and religious identity. But the implication of what I am saying here is that there is a kind of undertow that pulls against this tide. The instability of marriage is closely associated with the prevalence of intercaste unions. To the extent that BSP culture curbs that instability, it also reinforces the rule of endogamy and the separation of castes. Back in Patripar, however, caste as an institution is becoming increasingly incoherent for increasing numbers of informal sector families. It is true that, if castes perpetuate themselves patrilineally, the problem of intercaste marriage is in principle limited since the progeny are unambiguously assigned to the caste of their father. But limited is not erased. Kinship remains bilateral, and more and more individuals have close kin who belong to different castes. While in the past there were powerful sanctions which would have precluded the meaningful recognition of such kinship ties, that is no longer true. The separation of castes is subverted. Consider moreover the case of the young Patripar man whose father is a Sindhi refugee, whose mother is a local Satnami, and who has married a girl from the neighbourhood with a Maharashtrian father and a Chhattisgarhi Mahar mother. With grandparents of four different castes from three different regions, it is not easy to imagine what sense caste will make to their children. And though the numbers of such children is still limited, it is certainly growing. On intimacy and the meaning of marriageAt least for the labour aristocracy, marriage by contrast is changing - rather than losing - its meaning. Take Somvaru's family. Somvaru himself is illiterate, started life as a carter and bullock trader, became a forklift truck-driver in the steel plant and has been married five times. His first wife put him off, he claims, by chewing tobacco. The second ran away with a lover after a couple of childless years, and the third was a witch. By the fourth he had four children; and when she died he took his present partner by whom he has three. Both of the latter brought with them an infant daughter by a previous husband, whom Somvaru raised and got married. Janaki is his eldest child. Bright, ambitious and determined, she got herself educated and is now a teacher in a BSP school, is married to the Vice-Principal of another and lives in a comfortable modern house in a middle-class housing colony on the edge of Girvi. Janaki was fourteen when she married, and obviously put education to the same use as Penelope put tapestry. No gaunauntil it was done. Her first husband was uneducated, unlovable and impatient. And meanwhile Janaki had fallen for a senior student, her present husband. Tongues wagged and Somvaru was forced to fix her gauna. Janaki absconded, and only came home after her father had promised that he would not send her until she had all the degrees she desired. Her father-in-law then took Somvaru to court for depriving his son of a wife. And later, when Janaki had started to earn but was still an absentee spouse, he again went to court to make her pay maintenance to her unemployed husband. Pramod - now a god-like engineer - is Janaki's husband's brother's son, but she brought him up. An eminently suitable boy. So suitable that it proved extraordinarily difficult to find a Satnami girl who was good enough. But when he was eventually married, his bride turned out to have a lover. Pramod filed divorce proceedings; the girl's family retaliated by registering a case of 'dowry torture'. Divorce still pending, the family decided that Pramod should remarry. The first wife's father got to hear of it and the police were tipped off that a bigamous marriage was about to be performed. But Janaki and her husband were also tipped-off about the police tip-off, and the new wife's parents filed a case against the first wife's father for criminal defamation. Enough said to signal the way in which the state and the law have come to dominate the politics of marriage, and in which marriage has increasingly become an arena for status competition within the caste. More interesting is the shift in its meaning. For Somvaru, I judge it has little to do with intimate companionship, emotional empathy or shared tastes. It is above all an institutional arrangement for the bearing and raising of children, and for the management of the household economy. It is perhaps to be expected that Somvaru should after so many years look back on his own previous marriages with philosophical detachment. But the calm neutrality -almost indifference - with which many younger people from the bottom of the working class heap also talk about marital break-up is striking. Somvaru has a favourite story - of a relative who one day returned from his shift to find that his wife had left him and gone to live with his closest friend. A couple of days later he came home to find that his friend's wife had moved in with him. Nothing was ever said about it between the two men and they continued their friendship as though nothing had happened. That, says Somvaru, is how one should be in such matters - 'cold-brained'. One reason perhaps why this exemplary tale is so close to his heart is that it has some resonance with another, about which Somvaru himself is more reticent - though village gossip is not. He is reported to have had a long-standing liaison with a divorced - but for him unmarriageable - affinal relative. With equally 'cold-brained' phlegmatism, he after some time arranged her marriage to a close friend and neighbour, a childless man whose fourth wife she became. Their relationship continued, to the apparent satisfaction of both men - until, that is, the affair became a scandal. The lovers remained lovers, and the husband acquired a longed-for son. 'Cold-brained' is not, however, remotely the way in which either Janaki or Pramod talk of their marital tribulations. For them the conjugal relationship clearly carries a much heavier emotional freight, and the psychological costs of marital breakdown have increased accordingly. No longer merely a matter of the satisfactory discharge of marital duties, that relationship is now a bond between two intimate selves. It is, I concede, likely that the desire for intimacy in marriage was always to some extent present - on the part of womenespecially. That at least is what is suggested by Kakar's discussion of the hankering which Delhi slum women express with their dream being 'a couple' (jori) (1990: chapter 5); and by Raheja and Gold's analysis of the oral traditions of rural women, which emphasise the ideal closeness of husband-wife at the expense of inter-generational hierarchy within the household (1994: chapter 4). What seems to me new, however, is that what had formerly existed in a semi-submerged form, as an 'alternative discourse', has - in the upper echelons of the industrial working class - now moved more centre stage, and been progressively appropriated by men. Prof. Giddens is right. There isa new ideological stress on the couple and their relationship. In upwardly mobile BSP families in Girvi and Patripar, suicides triggered by frustrated romantic attachments are now almost an epidemic. In Somvaru's old-style village house there is no separate space for the couple. Janaki and her husband have a private bedroom, dominated by what in village eyes is almost a pornographic object - a large double bed. When they are finally assigned a Company quarter, a significant number of young BSP couples move out of these peri-urban neighbourhoods, and away from the husband's parents, to live in the Township. There they are forced on each other's society with a new intensity, and even if their decision to move was not directly born of a desire for greater intimacy, their changed circumstances are likely to encourage its development. I recently saw Subhash Ghai's Coca-Cola-sponsored blockbuster Taalat the Venkateshvar Talkies. 'Marriage,' says the heroine's first love, 'is not a contract or a festivity (utsav) ….. It is the mingling of two souls'. And as he magnanimously renounces her, his rival reflects that: 'an Indian girl does not become English by putting on English clothes. Her heart remains Indian and shecan never leave her first love'. With the moist-eyed young steelworkers who filed out of the cinema with me this plainly struck a chord. I invoke it here because this pre-eminently globalised product seems to capture something which Giddens' trajectory does not. The new ideological stress on the couple is accompanied, not by a new acknowledgement of the possibility of de-coupling, but by a new stress on the indissolubility of their relationship. Far from inspiring sexual emancipation, Coca-Cola and competition with Korean steel on the global market, which makes BSP increasingly conscious of its welfare costs, collude in promoting that message. And nor, of course, does the modern concern with the quality of the conjugal relationship imply its greater equality. Withdrawn from the labour force, BSP wives pay a price in individual autonomy for the greater stability of their marriages. That stability, moreover, arguably represents for both sexes (but particularly for women), a reduction in freedom of choice - not only about whether to stay married, but also about who to be married to. Despite the conventional sociological wisdom, a significant rise in the age of marriage has not been accompanied by any significant enhancement of the younger generation's 'right to choose' their (primary) marriage partners. Though it is true that 'modern' fathers now seek their child's acquiescence(it can generally be put no higher than that) to the spouse he has selected for them, it is in secondary marriages that individuals have 'traditionally' been permitted a more meaningful autonomy. But these are now increasingly discountenanced. Given all this, and given that with regard to divorce the most globalised segment of Chhattisgarh's industrial working class has caught the downwardescalator, next time I meet him I must remember to reassure the man with the brief-case that he does not need to be rattled by all that he reads on the World Wide Web. References: Barnes, J.A. 1967. The frequency of divorce. In A.L. Epstein (ed), The craft of social anthropology, pp. 47-99. 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Ethnology, 36 (3):191-212. *Acknowledgements: The ethnographic data discussed in this essay were collected over a period of approximately seventeen months field research, undertaken at various intervals between September 1993 and April 2000. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Nuffield Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council and the London School of Economics which made this fieldwork possible.Special thanks are also due to Ajay T.G. for invaluable research assistance; to Lucia Michelutti and Ed Simpson for help with references; and to AndrÈ BÈteille, Maurice Bloch, Gaby vm Bruck, Saurabh Dube, Peggy Froerer, Chris Fuller, Peter Loizos, and Caroline and Filippo Osella for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the text. A somewhat shorter version was delivered as the Kingsley Martin Memorial Lecture for 1999, and I would like to record my thanks to Gordon Johnson and his colleagues at the Camb ridge Centre of South Asian Studies for their invitation and generous hospitality. http://www.fieldtofactory.lse.ac.uk/parry/reading1-Ankalu.pdf. Hot issues of Today Mar 13, 2007 Mar 12, 2007 Mar 11, 2007 Mar 10, 2007 Mar 09, 2007 Mar 08, 2007 Mar 07, 2007 Mar 06, 2007 Mar 05, 2007 Mar 04, 2007 Bokaro Chaibasa Chatra Deoghar Dhanbad Dumka Garhwa Giridih Godda Gumla Hazaribag Jamshedpur Jamtara Koderma Latehar Lohardaga Pakur Palamu Ramgarh Ranchi Sahibganj Seraikela Simdega Bokaro Chaibasa Chatra Deoghar Dhanbad Dumka Garhwa Giridih Godda Gumla Hazaribag Jamshedpur Jamtara Khunti Koderma Latehar Lohardaga Pakur Palamu Ranchi Sahibganj Seraikela Simdega

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