 Well thank you very much for your comment. It's good to see you all. I know you're someone of your four years, someone I'm waiting for you to learn about at some of the rest of you. I'm at the Unution, I'm in the Centre for Development and Development Policy, I also convene the SOAS Seed Group, which is the Centre for Ecology and Primes and Development's network. So I'm chairing tonight. We've got lots of really exciting lectures coming up in the Seed Terminal series and kicking us off this evening is our very own Richard Axelby, who I'm sure you're familiar with. I don't know if you all knew that the human and anthropologist whose research has found three interlinked areas, poverty and inequality, and identity, and suicide, and suicide and citizenship, and the very change in natural resources, and the violence, and a bit more. There's three of them in each one. Yeah, four there. Three broad areas, yes. Which has been looking at a lot at raising the issue of the layers and issues around the matter, responding to changes in property rights systems, and the sense of access to pasture. And more recently, of course, you might have come across a book that he came up with, an opinion, yes, on the anthropology and development. And he's going to speak to us today. More in line with the work that he's been conducting since his doctoral thesis. And so back to the issues of grazing pasture and the wildlife access to the layers. It's tightly separate now and really not, and they make identity politics and research for poverty and raising resources in the Indian states of India, and India, and on that, the expansion of the entity, which is thinking about 40, 45 minutes, is that so? Maybe. Okay, thanks Andy. Yes, so three broad areas of which I think I'm probably going to talk at various points about all three of those areas today. In September 2014, I commenced a year of field work in the, in Chamba district in the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh. There we can see there's Somar Chalma, there's India, and Chamba is in the top left corner, the northwest of the state. Himachal Pradesh is a mountainous state. It's predominantly rural. Within that Chamba, it's classified as one of the most backwards districts in the state, but also one of the most backward districts in the whole of India on a variety of developmental measures. From this map of the districts of Himachal Pradesh, this is a slightly more attractive image of what it actually looks like on the ground. This is where I did my field work and have been doing field work for some time. So I went there in 2014 as part of an LSE project to look at the forms and causes of entrenched poverty amongst Dalits and Adivasis in different parts of India. There were five different researchers going to five different districts in India. Just to explain, when I say Dalits, that's former untouchables. So these are now classified as scheduled CAS and Adivasis are tribal people or scheduled tribe, ST. The LSE project was looking at systematic inequality. The focus was on land ownership, on the agricultural dissemination efforts, education, affirmative action, access to new forms of work, things like government jobs, private service and so on. My focus in Chamba was on two scheduled tribe groups, the Gadis and the Gujis. My research showed that in all aspects education, assets, livelihoods, these Gadis and Gujis, these scheduled tribe people lost out to the dominant majority caste Hindu population. This isn't particularly relevant or immediately relevant to a seed seminar, this is much more I guess with an agrarian change one in some ways. However, Chamba was also the site of my earlier PhD field work and this looked at changes in the way in which, in property regimes and changes in the way in which a group of nomadic shepherds, the Gadis negotiate access to grazing resources. So over the years since my PhD I've kept in touch, I've kept an ear open for what's happening on the pastures and I made several visits to the group I travelled with and talked to them. But this extended period of field work in 2014 going into 2015 gave me the chance to more systematically follow up on these sorts of changes. So today in this talk what I want to do is to update the story of what these nomadic people, these nomadic shepherds and buffalo herders are doing now. And look at change in access to grazing resources in free ways. Well first of all thinking about changing economics and organisation of pastoral production and also the fodder and grazing resources that pastoral production depends upon. Secondly to look at state acts of territorialisation. So revenue settlement, land settlement settlement of forest rights and the fixing of ideas about property under these bureaucratic administrative systems and how that relates to a broader sort of politics. And thirdly looking at ideas around cultural identification and how people relate to particular landscapes and their place. How their sense of self connects to a sense of place and why this matters. Another map, there's quite a few maps I like maps. So Himachal Pradesh it rises up from the flat plains of the Punjab. It's a series of valleys and mountain ranges that run parallel from the north west to the southeast and you can sort of see that on this map. Each of these mountain ranges is higher than the last one. So within this mountain estate, land suited to agriculture is fairly scarce. It's poor in quality, it's difficult to till. This was one of the things I learnt when I was living there last year was how to plow. So I know how difficult it is. The steep slopes make any sort of irrigation over the main fed irrigation impossible. Altitude also limits the possibilities of agriculture. The winter wheat crop is imperiled by the possibility of late snow and frost. The summer maize is dependent on the quality and the timing of the monsoon. And this is particularly true in the remote Chamba valley where I do my field work. Agriculture alone is insufficient to secure household reproduction. So tribal groups like the Gadis and the Gujis have customarily opted to combine very small scale agriculture with nomadic pastoralism. And it's primarily for this pastoralism that they know. Their movement with herds of buffalo and flocks of sheep and goats is what these two groups are famous for. So this geography of the western Himalayas of Himalaya Pradesh provides an ecological niche that's ideally suited to these forms of mountain pastoralism. The two groups Gadis and Gujis exploit variations in climate also in altitude by moving from winter grazing grounds close to the border with the Punjab. So these lower rooms in the bottom area here. And then just moving up through this series of valleys, crossing two mountain ranges, passing through their home villages in Chamba district but also on that first sort of the low slopes of the Dauladar range to the south of Chamba. And then moving on to the arid district at the moment which is towards the top of this map of Himalaya Pradesh. They described the system to me. They said we chase the snow into the mountains and then in winter the snow chases us back down and that's the second map which nicely illustrates how that worked. So by moving in this way they're able to maintain herds and flocks of a size greater than they could if they were confined to a single location around. Traditionally this combination of pastoralism with small-scale agriculture allowed Gadis and Gujis to scrape together enough wheat and maize and cook and meat and wool to get by. It was a rough existence but it was an existence. In the past these systems of nomadism were dependent on combinations of collective and segmentive property rights. So the normal sort of historical picture of grazing in the western Himalayas about shared access arrangements allow users to adjust spatially but also temporally so they can go to different places and they can delay or speed up the migration according to the climatic conditions or the state of the pastures in any one place. Disease also plays a part in that. In some places a disease is likely to mouth our endemic. So this ensures access to adequate grazing in an environment that's marginal and also unpredictable. Users are able to share risks and thereby minimize uncertainty through these systems of common property and shared property rights. This also minimizes transaction and policing costs on the pastures. The historian Neil Batticharia describes pastoralists in free colonial Punjab as enjoying a relatively uninhibited movement in their search for pasture and unrestricted rights of access in grasslands and forests. Importantly these arrangements were resolutely local. Chakravartikul writes of pre-19th century transhumanist grazing arrangements being untouched by local influences. However the standard sort of environmental histories of India suggest that with the arrival of British rule in the midpoint of the 19th century this was a watershed in India's environmental history. New forms of administration specifically for rolling programme of land and forest settlement marked the beginning of an existential challenge to traditional systems of shared resource use and management. And this had particular impacts on nomadic people and mobile populations such as pastoralists. Land settlement saw pastures brought under village ownership in this area varied in different places but in the Punjab which Himachal was past of at that point the pastures adjoining villages were brought under the control of the local village. Other ways which was a term used for grazing land were brought under direct government control and controls on movement were also introduced with an official system of grazing permits, taxes and quotas governed by the forest department and these further restricted access or further defined rigidly defined access to grazing. Bhattacharya describes a colonial state as having sought to redefine the temporal rhythm to pastoral activity. Through the latter half of the 19th century the Gaddies and Budgets of the Hills found their access to forest clothes, their rights redefined, the rhythms of their movement controlled, their spatial movement restricted. These new rules and regulations had the effect of literally curtailing movement of manoeuvre. All along the route their halts and use of forest were monitored and sanctioned. Their flexibility was reduced to a minimum. So Chakravati calls phrases is to say with this scope temporarily and spatially severely constrained pastures were literally frozen, not literally, figuratively frozen in their tracks. Some people, including perhaps myself, relate this process to the great project of legibility making as described by Scott in his scene like in State. Nomads are hard to pin down, they're hard to control, they're also difficult to tax and I don't think that's coincidental. So this also applies to the systems of common property that nomads often are dependent upon. The argument is that the state does not like nomads and nomads like land must be settled. So this is a big story. This is the story of the privatisation of land, the intensification of agricultural production, the orientation of production towards markets. And the way the story is told it sort of suggests first of all a state that's unified in attention and capacity of the state whose aim is to render people and places legible to bureaucracy and an administration that's actually able to do that. It's sort of forward to a linear notion of development and the ability to fix and control and ultimately therefore to transcend the natural world. It suggests that nomadism is simultaneously timeless as Older Sir Hills is one phrase that's used, but also doomed that nomads are without agency, without the capacity to adapt to change. And I suppose in a way it also suggests that an idea of the landscape or the environment is essentially neutral, a passive variable that's acted upon unilaterally that does not have an actual role in this. So that's the background, that's the back story and it's sort of an important story, but within it there's many smaller stories. And in the rest of this talk I'm going to try and introduce some of these smaller stories about how changes have affected these two groups I look at, how they affect them differently, how there are differences within these two groups, within the Gaddis and Ganges as well as between them, and suggest reasons for the variation of this grand narrative of environmental change and the freezing of nomadic movement. Looking at changes in nomadism I argue that identity and its articulation with ideas of place shape access to grazing and fodder resources. But in closing down traditional paths we see new ones opening up in their place. So I'm going to start with the Gaddis, these are the shepherds. These two groups, Gaddis and Ganges were both classified as being put on the list of scheduled tribes in 1950. So this ST, scheduled tribe classification is an administrative classification, it's based on a set of criteria including primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact with the community at large, and backwardness. And I think in the case of the Gaddis and Ganges, their nomadic livelihood contributed to this. So the classification gives the two groups access to affirmative action programs so there's education, provision, there's reservation of government jobs, which is very important. The intention here was to lift the backward state and integrate them all fully into the Indian economic and political mainstream, that was the idea. It hasn't necessarily worked out like that. Both Gaddis and Ganges are ST, they're both scheduled tribes, but it's the Gaddis who are the strongest claim to being indigenous, to being Adi Bhasi, and I think that matters. There's this notion of an area they describe as Gaduram, this is the Gaddi heartland. It's a fairly loose and flexible idea, and it's described in different ways. Sometimes it means they use it to mean a place where Gaddis are in a majority. This is basically the area around Brahmur and Holi in the upper parts of the valley. So this is the green part from that. But it can also extend much wider to encompass the Kangra district, the Kangra valley which is to the south, and also to the lower parts of the left hand side of this map of Chamba district, where Gaddis also live. So it can mean where Gaddis are in a majority, but it can also mean where Gaddis reside, including the parts of lower Chamba where I do my field work. This landscape, this idea of Gaduram, and these two mountain ranges that border the Chamba valley, are dotted with sacred lakes and holy peaks. Passes associated with particular deities and forests inhabited by a range of sprites, ghosts and demons. It's a landscape that's rich in association with shepherding. The Gaddis tell a story about how they were given a shepherding vocation by Lord Shiva. He was trying to cross a pass and he couldn't get through the snow, so he created some sheep out of a bit of snow, and they were able to plow through them and make a pass. And then he had to create some to look after the sheep, because he couldn't leave them alone. So he took a bit of dirt from his skin and created the first Gaddi in the first Gaddam female Gaddi. And that was sort of the beginning of the Gaddis. There's a holy mountain in this upper part of Gaduram, this heartland, which also could be seen in some ways as defining this idea of what it is. It's called Manimahesh Kailash, so it's Shiva's peak. This is where he resides for six months of the year and then he moves down to an underworld for the other six months of the year. This mirrors this idea of the migration cycle of the Gaddis. So shepherding is important. It's bound up with the landscape, it's bound up with the ritual calendar. When I initially went to do my PhD fieldwork, I was sort of quite surprised to find initially that, you know, shepherding was actually improving fairly tenacious as an occupation. Official records, and I was able to get from forest department offices, I was able to get the figures for a number of sheep and goats passing through, which came from the grazing permits that were issued and the amount of tax that people paid on them. I was able to get these for most of the forest offices around Canberra and Chamba. And while they showed in Canberra a decline in the number of sheep and goats, in Chamba especially, in Chamba District especially, the number of sheep and sizes of flocks had held up well, and not just in the remotest area. So I wanted to find answers to these questions of how Gaddis were able to continue to find pasture in the face of state efforts to restrict access. The forest department's claim of ownership over forest, it soon became apparent, were actually simply the basis from which negotiations over access would proceed. Another factor here worth mentioning, first of all that state authority declines with altitude. The further you move away from the district's headquarters, Chamba Town, the less the state is present, the less it sees, the less it intrudes. Secondly, there's an incredibly blurred blurring of boundaries between states and society. The lower levels of the forest department are filled by people who got jobs through their ST reservation quota. Gaddis, and especially Gaddis, are often employed as beat guards in the forest, or low level forest department workers. These are the people that are supposed to be policing the forest against their brothers and cousins who are shepherds. It also became apparent that these shepherds are able to employ a range of measures to avoid and to deceive the forest department, and to adjust its rules and regulations to this borrowing and lending of animals that go against the quota numbers that are allowed. Traveling under other people's permits is quite happy to trespass into areas they shouldn't, thriving of officials and so on. There is a system of permits and quotas, and these are assigned to individuals, but in reality these permit holders, the individual permit holders, are subject to a range of social obligations and group pressures that expose the simplicity of this official definition of how the system should work. Shifting from notions of property to ideas of access, you can see a nuanced account in which the who and how of alienation and dispossession is not as simple as those historians that I mentioned before might think. So in some ways nomadism hasn't changed, it's very visible, you can still see it going on. It hasn't changed, or at least it hasn't changed in the way as much as has been suggested. The state hasn't been able to restrict movement completely. But while this external form appears unchanged there's an internal economic structure to pastoral production that has been transformed in many ways. The nomadic way of life, this was the second great understanding that came about through my PhD research. The nomadic way of life is not only surviving, but it's also quite profitable. I don't want to overplay this, but in the early 1990s the liberalisation of India's economy opened up markets to foreign investments. With that change in economic growth and urbanisation, especially in areas like Punjab, and a rise in living standards. This growing middle class was very keen to eat meat, meat prices go up. Gaddies are happy because they're selling meat. Butchers will come from Punjab, from Haryana to buy animals from meat, and also from wool. Changes in the demand in the nature of the demand for meat and wool has seen the monetisation of shepherding. But the benefits of this change haven't been equally shared. Where in the past, every family virtually would have a flock. One male family member would travel with that flock, other male family members, and the rest of the family would stay and have a village and work on the fields. So while that happened in the past, now there's fewer flock owners. So not every family has a flock anymore. Shepherding has become a specialised activity. And there's also the sense of class differentiation of shepherding. So these big flock owners are now employing what they call Chutapahals, which are like small-scale shepherds. Labours, basically, to mine the flock year round. So only the very rich and the very poor these days are involved in shepherding. I've mentioned that some shepherds are doing better than others, and often these big flock owners come from the tribal sub-district around for more. And I think this sort of brings me onto this idea of state acts of territorialisation and their effects. So state takeover of forests has been much written about, but there's other kinds of administrative territorialisation that have received less attention, but maybe are equally important. So this map here actually shows some reserve political constituency of Barmore. Not only are STP people entitled to these, the benefits of affirmative action and job reservations, but in this case there's also a restricted electorate. So within this particular area, the member of the legislative state assembly must come from within the ST community. As Gaddies make up 90% of the population in that reserve constituency, it's always a Gaddie in other words. Except for a very short break in the early 20th century. So in this constituency, MLA for the last 40 years has been a guy called Tako Singh Ramouri. He's the chairman of the Wall Federation. He's also, I think for the last eight or nine years, been the minister for forests and fisheries in Himachal Pradesh. He's a very powerful man. And a friend to shepherds. As a boy, he migrated with a flock. He has relatives that's also still involved in shepherding. To bear on the work of the forest department. I interviewed him once and, you know, they're fairly senior forest officials who have come in and he was able to sort of dispense patronage in various ways to them. He's both about providing for his friends and relatives and supporters how he can get a grazing permit for shepherds if they need them. These are supposed to be inherited, but he can arrange for one to be newly created. Importantly, this constituency, this legislative constituency also overlaps with a tribal sub-district. Not quite, it's not perfect overlap, it's more or less. The tribal sub-district has an enhanced budget, which is considerably larger than other districts or other areas of the district. And this has led to the expansion of village schooling, massive program of road building, dam building, programs of affirmative action. And that these all designed to sort of encourage shepherds supposedly to encourage shepherds to settle down. Tacklesing for more redistributed patronage in the form of jobs and education and contracts. So this is to explain that the people living in this tribal sub-district, the Gaddies living in this tribal sub-district, where tribal identity is firmly rooted in a sense of place, are advantaged both as nomadic pastoralists and in the new economy represented by government jobs, private service and business. Earlier I'd mentioned the strong cultural ties of Gaddies to Gadirn, this Gaddy homeland, these are marked by pilgrimage and villages to visits to ancestral villages to see relatives. But as we see these ties to a sense of place are political as well as cultural. And this sort of leads me to argue that the descentralisation form for Dictapie, Chakrabati Kaur and Bhattacharya and others hasn't occurred. But even while carrying on as pastoralists, Gaddies can be seen to have been settled in a different way, in a sense of being bound by a prescribed sense of identity, which is realised through projects of development that are limited to particular administrative territories. In other words, you can move around in that area but not outside of it. Well, the formal flexible notion of Gadirn is now fixed within administrative boundaries. Gaddies are bound to and in a particular types of place. And I want to draw a contrast here to the situation with the second group, the The Goodges. Because for The Goodges, the story is somewhat different and offers a nice contrast. As an aside, I must tell you about this, these four buffalo died about a week after I took this photo. The story was that a bolt, not a bolt of lighting, a ball of lightning in the night came into the coats of these rough summer houses that the The Goodger families live in. Killed every single buffalo in there, but spared all the people. So the people all lived and then it exited through the wall. So that was, yeah, an interesting story that I quite like. Right, for The Goodges The Goodges, like the Gaddies, take advantage of an ecological niche that allows them to practice transhumance, pastoralism. But while the Gaddies own sheep and goats, the Goodges herd buffalo. As a result, their migration cycle is a little bit different. It's based on variations on altitude, but they don't travel so far and they don't travel so high. For six months of the year, the Goodges that I do, my research amongst them, lower chamber, they feed their buffalo with grass that's cut from fodder reserves on local hillsides called Ghassni. They store this and it lasts them through the winter and they can feed their animals through the winter based on this. Then in late April or early May, they take their animals from their valley homes and move up to alpine grazing pastures like this one, which are 2,000 meters higher than the valley below. Here the buffalo graze and freedom leaves are cut for them from the forest. The journey between these two locations from the valley bottoms to the alpine pastures are not two days normally and there's a lot of back and forth going on between pastures, home villages and chamber town to which milk is taken daily to be sold. While in the Gaddy case it's only some men that work as shepherds with other family members of the state at home. Goodges move as a family group. Men, women and children spend their summers at these alpine grazing pastures. Goodges, like the Gaddies, were classified as a scheduled tribe in 1950, but unlike Gaddies, the goodges can't claim to be indigenous at least to this area. The story is that three goodger families arrived from Kashmir around about 120 years ago. They were invited by the Raja of Chamba, who having tasted their milk on a visit to the Raja of Kashmir, invited the goodges to come and stay in his state and along the way brought the regular supply of buffalo milk to his palace. So when these goodger families arrived in Chamba, the Raja allowed them to reside at certain alpine grazing darts. Now administered by the Forest Department of Himachal Pradesh, these traditional rites were asserted in named individuals and they're retained today these traditional rites. These allow a named individual to graze at a particular place and to graze a fixed number of animals which is deemed to be the carrying capacity of the pasture. But being passed down from father to son and goodger families being quite large, it follows that permits have been split and split again over the generations. Pasture size is of course limited and the initial three families arrived from Kashmir have multiplied so that each pasture now has over 100 potential claimants. The goodges are a minority who have less political influence than the Gaddies. There's no benefit from the patronage of powerful politicians like Sarkozyn Vrmori nor penetration of the lower levels of the Forest Department with forgiving relatives as the Gaddies benefit from. So this sort of situation, the picture of nomadic decline seems inevitable. All these sort of tropes about overuse of pastures and the need to sort of give up nomadism would seem appropriate in the case of the goodges at least. Many goodger men have become wage laborers so noticeably they tend to work in private rather than state sector. Others have had success in business and when they do they tend to sell their buffalo which leaves only the very poorest to continue with herding. However what became apparent as I started off my year of research it became apparent I was collecting genealogies and it became apparent there is a counter narrative to the story of sedentarisation because I learned that in the last decade or at least since the late 1990s a significant number of families had left chamber behind to give up their grazing darts and had gone to live in Punjab year round. One informant told me that if there are four brothers in a family then two of them will go to Punjab and two will stay in chamber. This might have been an exaggeration but it was very clear that there were several hundred families that had moved out of chamber and were now living in Punjab. So for these goodges the last 20 years have seen an expansion of nomadism both in terms of the number of animals they keep but also in terms of the geographical extents. Goodges in chamber maybe keep one, two, three, four, five buffalo and combine these with agriculture and other income earning activities typically daily wage labouring. In contrast those that leave for Punjab are able to devote themselves almost fully to their animals and are dependent on the sale of milk for livelihood. Of the goodges I met in Punjab they would have 10 animals, 15, 20, say in some cases 40 or 50. These are unimaginable numbers to people living in chamber. Between December 2014 and July 2015 a number of visits to these newly established goodjo colonies in Punjab and I sought to understand the forces driven goodger families to leave chamber and how migration had evolved and the forms of this migration took in Punjab. So the first question obviously is why did the goodges choose to leave chamber? So you'd think that the goodges would quite like living in chamber, they're entitled to the same benefits as the good is. Leaving for another state would mean losing these benefits. But for most of these families as the LSE project showed these benefits were merely theoretical. Chambers, goodges even less than the goodies have not benefited from enhanced education provision and affirmative action schemes from government employment. Secondly, and this is a very big difference which I haven't mentioned, the goodies are Hindu and the goodges are Muslim. In the past this might not have mattered so much. Goodges' tribal identity took precedence over their identity as Muslims. Goodges practiced I guess what you might call a form of folk Islam. They'd say to me we were the goodges in name only. They might pray but they wouldn't fast in Ramadan, they wouldn't go to the mosque. They were not considered proper Muslims by the more refined and educated people of the town. So they weren't part of that Muslim community of the town which is a very hierarchical Muslim community. And also the Hindus didn't particularly see them I don't think as Muslim. They saw them as goodges and they separated Muslims from goodges. However in recent decades religion has come much more to the you can see this in the sort of the Hindut for agendas and the rise of the BJP. And identity, religious identity is articulated increasingly in terms of belonging to a particular place whether that be the Hindu Barat rather than the secular India whether it be Himachal's Dhev Bhoomi or the Gadar and Shiv Bhoomi. And this has consequences for how citizenship is framed and the ability of Muslims and goodges to make claims on the state. So why go to it? Two a newcomer from the hills, the flat landscape of Punjab appears wholly alien. The countryside here is regulated into seemingly endless expanse of rectangular fields filled with verdant well watered paddy, irrigation canals everywhere, abundant vegetable crops these long straight roads and the four square concrete houses of jackfarmers hidden behind high walls. Compared to a chamber it's much hotter in summer. But oddly it also seems colder in winter these freezing fogs that really just sit around which compare quite unfavorably with the crisp freshness you get in the hills. So there's these big differences from mountainous chamber but there's also opportunity to be found here and it's the area around Malerkotla in Sangor district in south Punjab that's particularly popular with the goodges from the area of chamber that I do my field work in. So why might this be? I'll just quickly take you through the economics of buffalo herding in Punjab. Freya, as Freya I owe this to you, the importance of milk drinking to Punjabis. We spent a few days together looking at the agriculture and sociology of this area and I'm visiting various jackfarmers but also I'll introduce you to some of my good friends briefly. So a lot of this comes from Freya, I should credit you with that. The importance of milk drinking to Punjabis. Villages and village people in Punjab are able to source milk directly from neighbours and relatives that have cows and buffalo. But the rural sociology of Punjab is changing. The smaller jackfarmers are selling up and moving away. They're not keeping cows and buffalo anymore. With urbanisation there's this new source of demand which can't be met by what's called the packet milk that's produced in the large super-dareys that now adopt the area. Desi milk, especially buffalo milk, is a premium product and it attracts a premium price. This is a picture of one of the goodger colonies in the area around Malerkotla where I stayed for a few days and this guy is a milk man who's come to buy milk from the grudges and take it to a sale in the town. So the economics of buffalo herding. If you have a herd of 15 buffalo, any one time five or six of them will be producing milk. And each of these females will give two or three litres of milk per day. So two or three litres per day per animal. A family might keep three or four litres for themselves but the rest will be sold. So interviewing both sellers and buyers, I was given a fairly consistent rate of between 30 and 36 rupees per litre of buffalo milk. This depended on fat content. And this, you do the calculations, it suggested a daily income on a fairly average herd size of about 150 rupees more if you are also the dodie, if you're also the person selling directly to buyers in the town. So that's a good income. That compares very favourably to the daily wage labour rates which might be 150, 160, 170 you get back in Himachal. But for the grudges living in Punjab, the sale of milk is only half of the equation. To get the full picture of the economics of buffalo herding, we need to calculate the cost of feeding these animals. An adult buffalo needs to eat 10 to 15 kg of fodder each day. In Chamba there's these two sources, it's either the grass cut from the hillsides and also the grazing pastures and these are becoming increasingly difficult to feed buffalo without having to buy in extra supplies. But if fodder was in short supply in mountainous Himachal the question is how to herd as fair in the more intensively farmed landscape to the southern Punjab and the answer is they fare much better. I spent a few days walking with a grudger friend of mine called Jan Muhammad and walking about 5-10 km per day slowly slowly with the buffalo and it just illustrates the diverse range of means by which Jan Muhammad and other grudges liking were able to feed their animals. He taught me through the different sources of feed which are seasonal. There's a winter crop of mustard and rapeseed which after it's been pressed, after the oil has been extracted leaves the leftover product which can be sold to the grudges at a fairly cheap price about 5 rupees per kilo which can be then fed to the buffalo. Some are crops of maize and millet also a major source of animal feed. Maze is a set of staple crop in Chamba and there it fills multiple needs. It's eaten on the cob, it's turned to flour which can be turned to maize bread. It's burned as fuel on cold winter nights, it's sold for cash but also they take and store the stalks from the maize and feed these to the cattle through the winter. So one of these haystacks maize stalks are a familiar feature of Chamba. In Punjab on the other hand with the specialisation of agriculture they're only interested in the rat cobs, they're not interested in the stalks. So they just leave these stalks standing. So in the month of August, grudges are able to cut these stalks and take them back to their buffalo to eat. Sometimes a farmer might ask for money but more often they're just grateful that someone will come along and rid them of this waste product, this byproduct. Another major source of winter feed is parli, rice straw so paddy cultivation began in this area of Punjab in the late 1970s and expanded through the 1980s. The rice growing season is from May to October and it tends to be milled in October. When it's harvested generally the upper part of the paddy is removed the range of the shoot remains in the field and in the past the shoot that was left would be burned by farmers who want to get on with planting the winter wheat crop. The burning of paddy straw was recently banned by the government of Punjab on environmental grounds and therefore farmers are delighted that grudges again will clear the fields and take this rice straw away. So in some grudges came to Punjab because the argument is in Himachal Pradesh milk is cheap and parli is expensive but in Punjab milk is expensive and parli this rice straw is cheap. Another source on that site of grazing and this came as something of a surprise compared to other areas of Punjab I'll just go back to that map the area to the south of Malakot the town is the edge of town is at the top there and the little red dot is where the good economy is the several other good economies there. You know walkie-talkie I realized all these sort of empty sites of agricultural plots that were not being farmed and this came as a bit of a surprise because you know you think there's so much money in agriculture and it turned out that this area to south of Malakot was declared an industrial zone is being provided with upgraded electricity, road and rail connections so you're seeing this sort of expansion of factory development out of the city and into the countryside and especially along the Malakotla and Malakotla Sangua roads the good economy is very close to with land values increasingly rising incentivize farmers to leave their fields uncultivated the hope is that someone will come along and either want to rent the field or they'll want to buy it so long as these plots remained unfarmed and empty there were spaces that could be exploited by the good years and the good years were just coming along and spending a few hours there letting the animals graze so good years we moved from chamber to Punjab to Malakotla applying their traditional profession of buffalo herding in a very new context while fodder was obtained from chambers thick forest riverside meadows and grassy hillsides in Punjab animals fed from crop residues and by-products before being taken to graze on land that's opened up by urban spread and industrialization as agriculture in Punjab has become increasingly commercialized and specialized and mechanized it's created new forms of waste from the rice fodder, mustard leaves, maize stalks and these are of no value to farmers that they would have been in the past at the same time new forms of grazing waste have formed out of speculation over land that's been promoted by industrialization around Malakotla the good years that left chamber before Punjab have done so because they identified a new niche into which they could insert their traditional buffalo herding buffalo herding has grown out of these changes which have created waste land but also waste product so this idea of the good years there being again reliant on waste and in the same way they also might be considered marginal to the wider economy and society. There's is if you like a return to classic nomadism operating on the margins exploiting niches that no one else has claimed or wants to claim and trying in a way to also avoid the oppressive relationship, relationships they see as coming with settlement. I want to just finish quickly with a few observations on social and religious changes amongst us in Punjab. There's a further reason explaining why chambers, good years have chosen to make the area around Malakotla their new home. It's the only place in the Indian Punjab that has a majority Muslim population and not just that it has majority Muslim population but also it's a form of Islam because Malakotla is a major centre for activity by Tablighi Jamat Tablighi Jamat is a global anti-Islamic missionary movement. It began in the 1920s in northern India as a response to perceived deteriorating moral values and a supposed negligence of aspects of Islam amongst Muslims in India. The feeling was that Islam in India was under attack both from Westernising influences but also from Hindu nationalism. Tablighi teaching seeks to purify South Asian Islam as what they see as a pollution of indigenous South Asian elements. They reject the celebration of saints the celebration of saints birthdays and the worship at local shrines. They instead place much more emphasis on the written word of Allah as revealed in the Quran. And in doing so this teaching removes this South Asian Islam's close association with ideas of place. It's created new ideas about identity which transcend place and seek connections with a modern and international dilemma, a modern community of Muslims and putting a lot of emphasis as well on the idea of an equal community of Muslims, not hierarchical one. As I said in Chamber we're very familiar with ideas about religious hierarchies rooted in local shrines and dagas and these they feel are undermined by Tablighi Jamat practices of Nawaz which are these education and study tours where members of the Tablighi Jamat visit different places. In this way Gujas from Chamber gain familiarity with Delhi, with Mumbai, with Bangalore, with Bhopal and of course with Malakotla. So it might seem something of a contradiction with this idea that no Buddhism is expanding but there's a sense amongst the Gujas that in leaving Chamber behind and moving to Punjab they're shedding their tribal identity in favour of a more modern religious Muslim identity. And this new identity may still be marginally many ways but they feel it's preferable to the minority tribal one that they've left behind. Okay I think I'll leave it there. That's about 50 minutes. Thank you very much. Thank you. That's awesome. That's really interesting. Looking at questions of agrarian change and the complexity of what you might think of as de-agrarialisation or re-agrarialisation going on at the same time, isn't it? I'd love to just open the floor to your questions from the audience at this point. At this point it's very much for me it's very much a story that a description of things that I found out is taking on this story of what's happened but I haven't had the chance really to think it through or to analyse it or to really theorise it so I would welcome suggestions or ideas about how I might do that. Thank you. How sustainable is migration? This was one of the questions we had as part of the LSE project because you know are they giving up the benefits they get from state assistance in hard shell and therefore doing worse as a result of moving to Punjab and in some ways I think they're not but they're not exploited or oppressed in the same way so there's no sort of, because they're not being employed by other people they're selling directly to these buyers in town there's no employer so they're not losing out in that way but I think their position has become more precarious as a result of moving to Punjab and one of the things I did notice was one of my visits down, a guy that I'd spent some time with on an earlier visit had actually taken off with his family's buffaloes and several families had clubbed together and they were sort of going on an extended migration to an area to the west around Patiala so you do wonder and it wasn't an instant move to Malayakal it was sort of a gradual shift so first people were moving to Jalanda and Udhiana and then Houshia and then they sort of were moving south and you could almost see this as part of this longer process of having started out in J&K or Jammu and then moved to Canberra and then you know just gradually moving south and I wonder if the next obvious place is to move towards Patiala and Haryana and eventually they'll end up in Delhi at some point so yeah I think there's a sort of a precariousity amongst these once the factories are built you know that disappears I mean you told me about the capacity of the land to keep on growing rice you know maybe diminishing and again that would mean this new niche that they discovered could potentially disappear higher wages for goodgers yeah and it's interesting because people that have got rich and there are some guys especially the people that went first the initial wave who were able to buy land when it was cheap-ish in Punjab have done really well and they're exporting a lot of these sort of to bleakage about ideas back to Chamba now and building mosques and building madrasas there and paying for these and getting a lot of sort of kudos in the you know within the Koji community there's a lot of back and forth between the two locations there's a lot of intermarriage between them there's a bus service which runs from this tiny village called Sahu all the way down to Malayaka that you know it just seems you know it's quite a strange idea but there's a bus that goes once a week between the two so there's a lot of moving back and forth but yeah I think generally they do see the life has been better and there's some quite a lot of kudos to being now a Punjab quidion but how long that's going to last for I'm not sure what's going on yeah thanks um anyway to the two long spectrum of attention of course is the idea of the Koji community so you want to expand a little bit more on that on the other hand so we see the more aggressive part of the capitalization of resource education so I can recommend that and the other aspect is this idea around encounters between the two groups and what are the resources as far as the whole plan and the normal to this time in Africa especially around the area as well as the tension and the other is the single scene in normal as I have more interaction with the states and the sort of interaction like structuring the decisions so in India there's more interaction between these formats and what are the resources and the conflict around the access what are the areas of risk and also how do you have access to things like cultural risks on the economic differentiation I think partly that's driven by this tribal sub-district if your brother is a teacher and you haven't got a job the family wealth will accumulate what do you spend it on and one very nice way of investing wealth is in a flock and there is more profit to be made out of these now in the past the flocks were pretty much for wool and for eating meat and now it's much more likely to be sold as meat it's upper chamber it seems to be where these big shepherds are in lower chamber where I am for a number of reasons one they got decent land there was a land redistribution scheme in the 1970s and some people benefited from that it's not a lot of land but it's some there was also some movement into government jobs but though that's come to an end now and that's a problem land redistribution took place a lot of them sold their flocks because they had to buy the new land it was a very cheap price they were given but they had to buy it now that land is being divided between suns no one is getting government jobs anymore so some of these people that were banking on getting jobs with the government or making living from agriculture are now going back to work as shepherds for the big landholders up in upper chamber where agriculture was never so important but you probably spend all your spare cash on family herd encounters between the two groups I've written about encounters between gaddys and gudges on pastures and conflicts over pastures which sometimes take place I'm not saying they don't and those conflicts might be in times where there's a shortage of water or particularly dry years but there's also other influences on those so it tends to take place as well when there's some height to the communal tensions in India that seems to be my experience and I think the two feed into each other but generally they go on it depends sometimes they live in the same villages and then they'll get on fine but sometimes when it's someone from a different village or these newcomers these guys are coming in from outside from Varmour from the upper chamber they don't get on so well and there can be more tension there with the gaddys and the gudges but taking on the idea about farmers in Himachal there's this long established symbiotic relationship between farmers and nomads and the grazing cycle took the nomads and the sheep to the fields exactly the time when they were between crops and they needed fertilising so you would actually pay for someone to come and stay in your field and fertilise the field and people still prefer that to organic fertilisers to chemical ones it doesn't work the same in Punjab and especially with the new forms of fertilisers that are used there and there's a massive scale of agricultural production there it doesn't work quite the same way but I think Sharia you sort of said these big chat farms just basically can ignore the gudges they're not important they don't impinge on them in any way they're so minor that they're not bothered I was amazed by the wealth in Punjab and some of these places we visited these big homes and super-dareys and chicken kings and musk melon kings and in that sense I think it's less of a problem but for different reasons in other areas of India if you go to Rajasthan they almost report the movement of nomads as if it's a bad spell of weather coming in farmers guard your fields and there can be some of that with gudges I've travelled with they have ways of getting into fields but generally relations are pretty good so I think it's like forgive me if there were details that I didn't quite capture about but something around the implications of I guess the arrival of a good celebration to capitalism sort of social relations and the extent to which they are present and sort of quarterly related and some of the changes to kind of where there is where there are nomadic resistance isn't it to me the whole selling of the milk and the eggs and you were talking about some people being able to buy land for example and although there is this very useful ability to negotiate access through the state your brother works for the government and he's going to let you go away you won't have too much in the way of enforcement by a state which as you say being in issues without the tuitions so I'm just wondering if that is a sort of DOS book for you to look at capitalism from the low in a tannierly sense might be some way for you to look at another I don't want to be a sort of walking out of a tannierly but another idea that she has in the context is that of the surplus population of people who are you know surplus of the requirements of capitalism and what's actually happening to them I don't know to what extent that's the flip side of what's happening here and whether these nomadic practices span and to some extent they are changed by increasing relations of capitalism and to some extent they remain in use and if you think of some of the like of people like coming back from the lonely in Christalakje on these groups of people who somehow live outside of a sort of market system to some extent on the edge of it I just wonder if with a bit of both of some of those things going on and if you might look towards those kinds of literature to help you look at some of the broader patterns and see whether they have an assayence or relevance or utility in this context Can I take that as a comments to the question because that's really how we look at it that would be one way that this could be a good way I was also going to return your question I think what I missed in the first part of my way of setting but on the scale of Punjab are we talking about just a very small group so is there a big story to tell at all or is it just like in every there is always strange things happening so to speak and not strange in any normative sense the idea that we get from theories that things are homogenous and can be explained in a more narrative of course that's not true I think that they made a useful simplification for them that I never described in empirical realities the theory you started haven't you set up a problem for yourself in a way ok we can disqualify simplifying theoretical narratives it's fine but that's probably not the other story you want to tell or is it and in terms of the the hurdles themselves is it a simple differentiation narrative where finally some very large hurdles will remain in the migration area and the rest of the it's slowly absorbed by factories, by cities, by whatever is that the story in a way it's the start of the story that goes on I mean this was sort of looking at what happens to Nomadism and what's happened over the last 20, 30 years to Nomadism really connects to that bigger LSE project about what's happening to which was much more concentrating on what's happened to the people that were formerly Nomads so these are the people that have solved their blocks and herds and there maybe you can make connections to the sorts of work they're doing now and how people are migrating to Delhi and Punjab to find work in industry and so on so in a way this is a starting point for this other narrative about taking that idea of Nomadism but also moving beyond Nomadism which would be another chapter if you like in the story and this is showing how Nomadism changes but also how people move beyond Nomadism and do different films Why would you want to call the people in South Punjab Nomads? Why would you want to use the term Nomadism? They're shifting they're not they're camping out and staying out they're not using that sort of transhumance Nomadism for six months in one location this is more genuine sort of wandering fully around and looking for new sources of feed and you could also see what you know sort of workers are doing when they leave Chamba and leave Canberra and look for jobs in these cities or in rural areas of Punjab they're doing something very similar they're looking for these niches and they're trying to find new opportunities I think Nomads may be different in different ways from the people they've employed in factories but yeah it's a similar idea that I wanted to sort of bring in I mean in a way they're agro pastures before and they combine the two yeah so I mean it's so many different ideas of what Nomadism is you know in some ways the goodies you could say are not Nomadism when they're in Chamba because it's six months to six months but there's other goodies in Chamba that do move in a way that's more like the Gaddies in that they're on the move quite a lot and shifting to different locations and again it's about you know how we define Nomadism, how we think about Nomadism I really want to know about the Islamic aspect especially and I have a lot with the parts of Ethiopia so when we see in our study when we see their Brazilians has been claimed from time to time which is consistent with the drought so how do you see in this part of the world there are the nomadic Brazilians on shops to decline them or how is the religion among these kind of tribes, another one just in Ethiopia for example is social protection a program that helps these nomadic people when they play some kind of cataclysm for any kind of tribe is a permanent population and the government of other as well as trying to intervene in such kind of situation. I think that this combination of small scale agriculture and pastoralism in the hills is very much about form of risk avoidance so if one the monsoon is bad then you've still got your sheep and goats if your goats are stampeded over a cliff by a bear which happens you've still got your crops and of course things have massively changed with the public distribution system where cheap food is available in rural areas so that's another sort of your guaranteed cheap rice and other basic necessities I think you could say, you could argue that in moving to the Punjab and going back to the point I made earlier about precariousness that they arguably are going to be less resilient because they are putting all their eggs in this one basket of buffalo herding they are not particularly looking for other options there not looking to spread risks amongst different activities so I'm honestly not sure it's not something I looked at too much. There is help from Government but that will be stronger I think those buffalo, those four buffalo that got killed in the lightning strike they did get insurance for those. There was compensation Government vet had to visit and certify the death of the animals but they were given some compensation not the full amount but at least something and similarly for things like animals eaten by leopards somehow with that. Though it can be a pain to get often not be really worth it but yeah I think the situation could be different in Punjab which is maybe something I should go back and investigate a little more Sure I really like the point about identity whether that means to come to be found and for the good ends they come to be found and out to be saved and I'm thinking like how important is this identity for you in your conceptualisation on the matter and that's not the point I think why is identity important in your story I think that's what I'm trying to understand is the identity and identity to the two groups and one of the things I came across into counties just do not have a sense of much of a sense of history the village that I live in, the highest of where they came from, we said well originally three or four generations back we came from a village near Brahmore and we moved down because the king invited us to settle down here because he wanted food from his town that's a story but nothing more than that and the only of us hands are massively interested in history and we'll give you these long tales about where they originally came from and these will always be told in very different ways so the headmaster who you've read the other paper that I've written about he'll tell me these stories about how the budges originally came from Maharashtra and Rajputs converted from Hinduism to Islam other people, there's another guy who's trained as a Malvi, he runs a Madrasa and he will say no, we're better, we came from Saudi Arabia this is what we are, I saw a program on National Geographic about it, so that was definitely us so they use history in particular ways which is really interesting I think under Chamba State the ideas around history and identity just weren't important the goodges were Ben Swallows and the Gadis were sort of these sheep, and that was all it was the idea of being a Gaddi or being a goodger only became important when there was some either political or administrative benefit from being able to define yourselves in those ways so I think that sense of moving from being a subject of the Chamba Raja to being a citizen of independent India has been important in the way people themselves conceptualise their identities and that obviously has also changed over time with Mandel's commission and the forms of... The move to Punjab is people will know about the heat and they'll know about mosquitos but they will also like the fact that there's a lot of wealth there and they feel it's a more modern form of identity the hills have always been seen as being backwards there's this distinction between the plains and the hills in India where the hill people, the Baharis are a bit jungly, a bit wild really, so there's a sense that it's a more modern form of life and the Gadis very much play on this they see themselves and talk about themselves as being quite ignorant of modern ways and left behind in the hills they don't seek really to challenge that in the way that the goodgers have done they almost celebrate it but you also use it as a resource by being very humble and forgiving when your goats have gone into someone's field and are raising farmers say get your fucking goats out of my field I'm so sorry so we'll get them out straight away sir this will go on for several minutes while the goats are still nibbling on that I can't believe this has happened it's terrible isn't it, look at this I think the big frustration for the Gadis is how to get into business, they just don't understand how business works whereas I think the goodgers have been very canny about that and I think partly that can be through organisations like Toblique and Jamaat that have taken off to different places in India they go on these 40 day study tours and they come back and they follow these ideas it's not supposed to be about business, it's supposed to be quite a reflection but there's a definite combination between those who have done one in business and those who have got into Toblique and Jamaat early and you can trace their business networks and they work through the place of Bhopal, Bangalore, Mumbai they work through the places they went to so yeah actually first of all I'm going to study the subject from tomorrow so I'm going to have a lot of fun but as I mentioned the league is a system and the percentage of the education system do they have and if they have they have a lot of problems on the education system so it's a little bit different for the communities so it's an education it's entirely vainfed in Chamba though recently the caste Hindu village here where I work so either there this is caste Hindu village and here there's a powerhouse that was built a few years ago when they built the powerhouse supply to the powerhouse channeled to that once over here which cut off some of the natural streams that ran down and irrigated these fields but they've arranged now for the states providing them with a pipe that's coming up from the river and will compensate for the losses they had because they don't need to have decent jobs but they still get the benefits of irrigation Canberra is different the valley to the south and I think there's a more developed system of irrigation there Mark Baker's written about the calls of Canberra but it doesn't really involve Gaddys it's more again it's caste Hindu that organise those and again those are changing but yeah no it's entirely vainfed and so dependent on the monsoon My question was about caste politics and whether that has been mentioned quite a few times about caste Hindu villages and the big feature in the research in terms of implementing a migration I think with the Gaddys being Hindu this obviously is continual between tribe and caste and how they can become more caste like they've always been slightly integrated into more of a Hindu caste system where they're a caste of small scale farmers in fact some people will say we're not Gaddys with Gaddys Rajputs or one friend of mine recently he's a teacher, one Gaddys that got a decent education mainly because his dad lives in the town, he described himself as an ST Rajput so he's totally given that Gaddys idea he's now an ST Rajput I know Jack Rajputs as well so all these contradictory ideas about caste and how it works obviously you can't do that if you were being Muslim they're not able to do that and that's in which the religious landscape of Himalaya Pradesh and Kanga has been integrated into the mainstream of Hindu pilgrimage so people coming from outside local Gaddys has sort of been renamed, this is Kali this clearly is Shiva even though it might be a different name so there's a sort of steady accumulation of ideas they've come from outside that are displacing a local sense yeah, caste politics caste politics in Himachal is dominated by Rajputs Rajputs are dominant in numerically so the chief minister is Rajputs most of the MLA's and so on the one tribal MLA is this guy Tappat Singh Brahmavi and that's because of the reserve constituency but he presents himself very much like Rajputs, he's right in there but funnily enough, scheduled caste politicians seem to do, to punch above their weight and that's one of the things I was considering as how did they manage that, how have they done better scheduled caste people, the Dalits form Untouchables seem to do better than Gaddys and Gujjus in terms of accessing new forms of work and business, that was one of the questions I've been looking at as to how they were able to do this and I put it down to the fact that they've had longer term connections to the town, they've always had to work for towns people in their sort of unique caste niche whatever that was and that sort of allowed them to move on to different forms of specialized service which might not be their traditional caste occupation whether it be a clown or a musician or whatever but they've now become say drivers which is more of a prestige job than a small farmer Right, well on that question I need to make sure that I have the go for Brighton now so I was thinking that we might end it there if there was a strong desire to carry on in the conversation then I guess I could just shoot off and you could continue but if not I would say that this is probably a good point to end on as well with that question from pretty much everyone thank you very much for really fascinating and very clean, delivered, very followable, very intriguing really succumbing to the story of the various forms of movement and migration that are going on and yeah I believe in myself so thank you very much for that another round of applause I think just to say finally that next week we have Matt Barthes, am I saying that? I'm not Swedish or Danish, he lives in Copenhagen and he studies at Lund which is just a proper water and he works on Burma and fisheries and coastal development Yes, extraction conservation in Delay, mind you are exploring a mosaic of the soil scraps, so that part of the water left so that can be cared for but thanks for coming, I hope to see some of you next week if you'd like to come up and