The New Locations of Extreme Poverty

In an important collation of essays dedicated to Jayati Ghosh, Development, Transformation and The Human Condition Gerry Rodgers suggests that with regard to access to Health, Culture and Food Security, 10 percent of the population at the top level receives 40 percent of the total income, 10 percent of the population at the bottom receive 2 percent. Poverty is defined in terms of not having access to land or assets which are productive. Further to this argument, Surajit Majumdar suggests that industrialization does not happen because the lowest income group provides a huge population which can be hired as cheap labour. Caste rules, tradition and authoritarianism makes people tied to commerce as viable for mobility. The vested interests in family firms allows industry to support niche cultures of mining and manufacture. Questions of hierarchy and labour go back to an understanding of plantation economies, and colonialism. As the questions of slavery and linguistic monopoly of oligarchies are involved, local communities of farming, mining, and industrial economies emphasise the ineptitude of. The working class. Following the work of Ngugi wa Thiong O in his book “Decolonizing the Mind”, the authors De Groot and Maya Sharma et al, quote him, in the section of Historical Theory and Practice in their collaborative work, “Race, Genetics and History” (2025:8) “The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves, for instance, with other peoples’ languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces that would stop their own springs of life. It even plants serious doubts about the moral righteousness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph or victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency and a collective death-wish” Modernity is thus juxtaposed in relation to continuing traditional practises and norms, which are ensconsed within embodied notions of hierarchy and exploitation. To refuse people education by limiting their life chances and denying them access to educational opportunities linked with upward mobility, is the first step in fixing people within their received ascriptive status. Ofcourse, people who are landless, unemployed and hungry with no visible avenue for progress, are mandatorily provided doles or low wages to have a passive ready made populace who will agree to dictatorship without creating obstacles. Freedom of speech or literacy mean little to those who are constantly under surveillance and only earn enough to keep breath and body together. Contempt for labour, and substitution of every dying or dead labourer is what this means in real terms. It can mean the substitutability of women either in the work force or in the debt ridden cycles of the family, where women have least worth. Silence is what accompanies this form of civilisational tyranny, no one speaks either against the oppression of women, or of the absence of right to life as a basic human right amongst the poorest of the poor. By rendering them invisible, their voice is taken away, and whether they live or die is immaterial. Maya Sharma, speaking on behalf of ethnic minorities in UK suggests that it is important that the ghetto imagination is replaced with dialogue and the possibility for hidden or neglected communities, for entering public spaces such as museums and exhibition spaces. Unless material culture in the context of colonialism is represented back in terms of working class identities, it would not be possible to imagine (or manage) the past. The very act of record keeping comes with enforced biases, and thus communities have the task of engaging with memory in a different way. Museums tend to overlook their role in the construction of modernity, working class struggles of plantation histories or factory work are not pictorially or materially represented. Narratives are a very important way in constructing this history, and ethnic communities need to enter this ground very actively. They have to tell their stories, directly to the listeners, and must have ways of representing themselves in collaboration with those who hold power in the institutions they seek to enter, or independently of them. Sharma seems to believe that genetic memory as in dna, recording genealogies biologically through a process of time travel (migrations and the classification of similar cultures), or what is material culture carrying its own symbols of work and reproduction have certain connections. It is important to note that human transmission is therefore a way of passing on knowledge, not just biological reproduction, but social reproduction. The idea that nations have cultural DNA embodied in their institutions in terms of ideas passed on from one generation to another is untenable in times of rapid social change catalyzed by revolution or the standardization brought on by revolution. For this reason, we know that dna provides us trajectories outlining the unique, and yet, the transmission of diseases or ideas, go through the same processes. It brings us back to the old Durkheimian problem, which is how do we understand the statistic. Is the individual statistic significant, and how do we understand the unique, as in the problem of Anthropos. To this question we must apply ourselves. We know that the statistics for suicide in the 19th century were available because social change was so dramatic and compelling that the governments of different European countries compiled the numbers of suicides, and Durkheim then categorised it by social distinctions: anomic, egoistic, altruistic, fatalistic. Today, we encounter the ways in which political ideologies can be repressive and demand a certain compliance. There is no solution, and because people feel there is no answer to the problem of ill health after Covid, and the demands of family and occupational obligations, they commit suicide. The suicide of teachers and farmers in India who were occupied as electoral officers communicates the inability of the right wing political party, currently at the Centre, to understand the distinction between wage labour and compulsorily assigned assistance for bureaucratic work. The fact that Prime Minister Modi posted the individual pictures of teachers receiving awards for their excellence outside lavatories was not met with anything but surprise. Why did he do that? It clearly meant that since only men used those public lavatories they would be inspired to respect men and women teachers when they went into these concrete urea pits to urinate. The further devaluation as school teachers came with the running down of the Aap party whose political representative Manish Sisodia and his team were accused with Kejriwal of corruption, and government schools were as a consequence brought hurtling down. Many of the questions of upliftment depend on schooling and education. By downgrading Government schools, the task of educationists to provide the possibilities of upward mobility was restricted. These measures are in place, to reinstate caste as the ideology of the believing subject, and works to ensure that the master race (defined by Hindutva as citizens of a religious order from which Muslims, Christians, tribal communities and lower caste communities have to constantly prove their citizenship through identity cards) is able to dominate with presumptions of power which may not be constitutionally permitted. Slavery as religiously enjoined in the Dharmashastras, where shudras and Dalits are promoted as hierarchically lower, and assimilated by their consent to their hierarchical placement as a cheap labour force is thus emphasised. Rene Girard’s classic work on the scapegoat is an interesting analyses of how individuals or communities may take on the role of the sacrificial victim. In an interview with interlocutors, he mentions that both kingship and servitude have to be understood in terms of the existence of hierarchy and the menacing quality of what is expected of them. Ritual reaffirms the repetitiveness of the giving up of a life in order to protect solidarity. Whether its voluntary (sacrifice) or an act of murder, the representative form is both recollection, and an impetus to repeat, and also to re-appear. Thus, the very basis of the assimilation of the working class into types of known slavery is the act of forcing recognition of the King who demands the sacrifice of the hierarchically lower working class communities. The reification of the caste system made by invoking the Dharmashastras as ascriptive duty, and enforcing it either by ritual sanctions, or by the authority of the gun and state violence, bureaucratically imposed by legal contract is the way by which cheap labour is organised. Through the process of treating the commons as land which can be sold to mercenary capitalists as invoking profit as the ultimate good, the state then enforces this saleability of forest and agricultural land as property of the state which can be utilised for commerce. The loss of people’s rights is then inadmissible in court, as the very bases of private property once legally endorsed in the name of development is that it is inalienable. The scapegoat then becomes the holder of virtue, and his/her sublimation is endorsed by the absorption into the very axis of a rapidly moving industrialisation which is the ideological spine of the development thesis. Against this is a policy of wastefulness, and the very aggrandisement of an oligarchy. As it is their profits then which became operationalised as the collective index for a nation’s development, the seeming prosperity is translated into a potlatch of very obvious wasteful extravagance. This is the visible commercial index that is presented as urban hedonism (malls, supermarkets, luxury items, cars and roadways, tourism, and endless exhibitionism). In contrast is the life of the poor, where economic indexes are absent. Sure enough, the effect of climate change is to bring about entropy and its consequences such as droughts, floods, famine and death. The statistics of these are not compiled, though mass media provides documentary evidence. The most evident cause of global warming is war. Conflict begins to be coded in terms of the terrain, and the political linkages of those who see themselves to be the ‘master race’. Because hierarchy is premised, the very terms of the discourse is located around the concepts of higher and lower, powerful and the lesser. Human rights are seen to be redundant, and the motive is essentially to promote capitalist development and profit. Competitiveness, rivalry and assimilation are the key words. (Girard 2016: 89).The impact on the environment is deadly,and people see themselves as gun fodder, with psychological costs for both the victims and the predators. It is with this moral lacunae, where violence is the suppressed grammar and the search for the scapegoat continual, that the aspect of building up war torn landscapes for the victors, that India’s work force is compulsorily requisitioned. They thus become mercenaries employed by the states who have colluded in genocide, and support the ostentatious way in which land is utilised for purposes of tourism and an economy sustained by the denial of the rights of local communities who are forced to flee. Poverty is a form of enforced slavery.The idea of good government entails both the notion of freedom and human rights. To deny these on the bases of racism or endorsement of caste ideology is unacceptable in terms of the freedom rights and citizenship rights movements of the 20th century. Cultures of war produce sequential losses of all that was held to be precious.The master race presumes that the accident of birth creates rights which are preordained or the loss of these is by virtue of one’s fate having been born a woman, lower caste, tribal community or transgender. This becomes unresolvable in the legitimation of hierarchy as a common good. To carry out the dictates of the oligarchy who is invested in tradition, becomes implicit in habit. Acceptance becomes a form of etiquette, assimilation a lull in the nature of the striving for equality and freedom. The tacit assumption that one has accepted the hegemony of the oppressor’s institutional arrangement becomes the reason for silence and compliance. One has no rights, one must not try to escape the structures of such slavery, one becomes a slave. It is easier to take orders than break superimposed rules. The slave drivers receive respect from their closeness to the master race, the passive subjects are accepting of their fate and can say nothing. The pleasures of belonging are replayed through the very production and reproduction of the etiquette, cultural customs including ritual, aesthetics and musical and poetic traditions. It has taken millennia to produce these, and in no time at all the taking away of food or employment returns people to the drudgery of their subsistence existence, with festivity and cheer substituting for days of hunger and loss. One of the important inflexions of the caste-class-race debate is the unanimity of the genus as representative across these categories.While hierarchy seeks to discriminate for the convenience of the master race, those who cannot fall into relations of subjugation clearly understand that substitutability and replacement are the logic by which long standing hierarchies are sustained. Evading this only leads to the loss of identity and the priviliges associated with identity fixation. If one accepts ascription as the criteria of location and selfhood, then war climate change,displacement, disasters and death all lead to the loss of certitude. The new conditions may be entirely different from that which one is accustomed to. How does one fit into the new spaces demarcated as belonging to the fluid occupational identity of those who survive a disaster? Webs of influence and affluence suddenly vanish. Migrants who reach new lands then must figure out ways to learn new languages, and recover their sense of the wholeness of personality.Here, then, nostalgia becomes a deterrent, and all that was most valuable become lost in space and time and the memory of a habitat that is no longer accessible. The tension that exists between quantitative analyses and qualitative analyses is caught in the word “anecdotal” accounts, which is disparagingly used by theorists. However, while quantitative data is essential for understanding trends and social change, it is individual data which makes the statistic. It is only now that suicide is not a capital crime, but abetment to suicide is viewed very seriously. If biography is such a dynamic reservoir of subjectivities, choices and memories, how do we analyse the generalising principle when reading them? What are the selective uses of subjectivity in the very choice of topics that we highlight when gleaning data in the reading of biographies. Toward this end, it is essential that biographies and autobiographies which are collated with the intention of showing the linking between tradition, post modernity, and the alleged preoccupation with the very distant, prehistorical past that allies itself with the telling of time and event. The entry of dna materials in the collation of community history has been outlined as fulfilling individual curiosity but attending to classification and categorisation with ideological emphases on purity. Race then becomes an operative symbol of being set apart, or being assimilated, as has happened with the Judaic seed in Kerala, Mumbai and now Manipur. This need to be categorised with a dominant other who might numerically be a minority is one of the puzzles of how classification and biology have catapulted into the arena of global stratification. References Alberda, Alexandra P, Njabulo Chipangura, Lara Choksey, Jerome De Groot, Maya Sharma: 2025. Race, Genetics, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Damodaran, Sumangla, Smita Gupta, Sona Gupta, Dipa Sinha. 2024. Development, Transformation and The Human Condition: Essays in Honour of Jayati Ghosh. New Delhi: Routledge India Girard, Rene. 1979. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore. John Hopkins University Press ..............2016. Things Hidden From the Foundations of the Universe. London: Bloomsbury Gupta, Smita. 2025. Does India’s Postcolonial Land Acquisitons Act Safeguard Farmer Interests in Development, Transformations and the Human Condition, ed. Sumangala Damodaran, Smita Gupta, Sona Mitra and Dipa Sinha. New Delhi: Routledge Mazumdar, Surajit. 2025. The Underdevelopment Trap of Indian Capitalism in Development, Transformations and the Human Condition, ed. Sumangala Damodaran, Smita Gupta, Sona Mitra and Dipa Sinha. New Delhi: Routledge Rodgers, Gerry. 2025. A Time of Darkness: The Pursuit of Collective Well-being in an Unequal World in Development, Transformations and the Human Condition, ed. Sumangala Damodaran, Smita Gupta, Sona Mitra and Dipa Sinha. New Delhi: Routledge Saini, Angela. 2019. Superior: The Return of Race Science. Delhi: Harper Collins Thampi, Anan. 2025. School Meals and Child Undernutrition in India in Development, Transformations and the Human Condition, ed. Sumangala Damodaran, Smita Gupta, Sona Mitra and Dipa Sinha. New Delhi: Routledge.