Republic of India Livelihoods in intermediate towns

2.2. Traditional Occupations

2.2.1 Bangle making and selling, Lehri community, Bhagwatipur: Manju, a 40 years old mother of four girls and two boys, belongs to the Lehri community of Bhagwatipur. The Lehris are traditional bangle makers and sellers who make bangles out of lac. Manju Devi is married to a man, 6 years older than her who sells bangles on his bicycle at the local haat (market) and from door to door within the village. According to Manju Devi,

We have no idea of how to do agriculture. We inherited the business of selling bangles from our ancestors and have been landless over many generations.

Some of the Lehri families continue to make bangles, however most of them only sell them. A large number of the families among the Lehris has given up making bangles, they merely sell them. They usually take the bangles from wholesalers on credit and pay them back at a later date, after the sales. Manju Devi informed us that she and her family purchased bangles from Darbangha, Muzaffarpur and Ferozabad and then sold them within the local market. Some of them also sell at the weekly haat (market). But she was also wary of the prospects of such a trade and asked, rhetorically,
Who wears bangles any more? Glass bangles are cheaper to buy and wear, they come in more colours that the lac ones. We only do good business on occasions of weddings and festivals when people buy from us, else it is hopeless.
Out of her two sons, neither has gone to school. She was anxious about the fact that the younger one, who is sixteen years old, wants to go out of Bihar to make some money but knows no skill or trade. According to her, it would be better if he had the opportunity of learning something within the settlement without having to leave the home and family, ‘cities are a bad influence on young men’, she said, ‘and its hard to shake off that influence’. Her elder son, who is twenty years old works as an apprentice in the collar making unit of a textile factory in Mumbai and now that one of her sons has already left, she doesn’t want the other one to leave too.
All of Manju Devi’s daughters have studies until high school. She got the educated with the motive of finding suitable grooms for them, but in the absence of her capacity to be able to pay the kind of dowry that would find her daughters a suitable groom, she is anxious. ‘We don’t want to incur a loan for our daughter’s dowry, we don’t have the capacity to pay it off’. She hopes that her daughters will be married into ‘good’ families and that their being educated is an advantage that can get them there.
Most of these families are also landless. According to one of the respondents, they neither have the promise of agriculture nor prospects for their current trade. They’d rather not have their children (especially boys) enter the trade. Badrinath Shah, an eighty year old member of the Lehri community, whose family has been engaged in the trade for at least six generations said –
If the children feel like discontinuing this line of work, they may do so. But we are confronted by a lack of capital. We only try that they are able to do something else.

2.2.2. Madhubani Paintings: Named after the region where it is practiced, Madhubani is a folk style of painting that draws from local stories and legends about gods and goddesses, both vernacular and universal to Hinduism. Communities and villages, which practice it are dispersed across the Madhubani district and the one that our research team had a chance to visit was the Mahapatra Tola in the Satghara area. The Mahapatras are a Brahmin community of the region, traditionally ordained to perform rituals at funerals and at shraddhas (remembrance ceremonies for ancestors). Compared with men, a higher number of women are involved in learning and doing the artform.

According to Basuki Nath Jha, a thirty year old male resident of the Mahapatra Tola in Satghara, there are nearly 350 Madhubani artists in the Satghara and neighbouring panchayat of Chichadi. In the Mahapatra tola alone, there are approximately 150 households, all of which are involved in producing Madhubani paintings. Most of these artists are recognized by the Government of India by the way of an identity card issued by the Ministry of Textiles. Various support projects in the form of the Planning Commission, international organizations and non-governmental organizations have been extended to the community of artists. Meera Devi, Basuki’s mother and the leading artist in the area told us that she has had the opportunity to go to various cities – Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Ranchi, Jaipur and Singapore to attend exhibitions with her own paintings and also to train people in the art of Madhubani at institutes like the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and the Srishti School of Art, Bangalore. She also trained women in her own village and they often hold training workshops, with the support of organizations like Bangla Natak and they have website www.banglanatak.com.

The business of painting is highly feminized whereas the business of marketing and linkages has a high male participation. Among the men of the village, there was great anxiety about their importance and requirement as rite performing Brahmins.
Young men have moved out in search of jobs. The respect and requirement for Brahmins is not like what it used to be. Out of the 150 households in our tola, at least 50 households have sent one man out for work. My own son did a B.A. but he has no job. But what is the point? We have managed to buy a taxi for him, he now takes care of that. We are poor Brahmins, one day we will die poor
All of the households in the Mahapatra tola are landed, they cultivate it under a sharecropping system. However, their diminished ritual importance is a source of anxiety for the community and its patriarchs. Some young men have acquired the knowledge and skills to be ritual performing Brahmins, however most of the others have moved towards more secular jobs in the city and within the settlement.
As far as the skill of Madhubani painting is concerned, it is passed along generations within the family and caste community, mostly to women but also to men. Families, which have been able to link up to market networks of exhibition and distribution, have made the form of painting a family business and aim to cultivate it to a more profitable venture. Under the Jeevika program of the World Bank in Bihar, in collaboration with the state government, women artists have also formed a self-help group, which they can make use of to buy raw materials and tools needed for their paintings. According to Meera Devi, it can only become lucrative as a source of income, once it is well marketed and has more chance to be showcased at exhibitions and fairs.

2.2.3: Jewelry and Money Lending: Jewelry shops are a common sight in the Satghara market area. In the narrow market streets that run parallel and meet frequently at intersections, jewelry shops are the most commonly sighted. Large boards advertising the name of the shop and the owner mount the entrance of the fairly large shops, compared to other establishments. Flyers and posters advertising the most popular and big shops announce themselves right from the exit at the railway station and accompany one through the market. The first impression that one carries from these sights is that of jewelry making and selling being a big business in town.

The jewelry shops in Satghara range from small outlets for jewelry makers-cum-sellers (traditionally of the Sonar caste) to medium scale shops with more than one jewelry maker (Sonar) and owner-cum-seller (Baniya) to large ones, which have jewelry making workshops and material they get from elsewhere. The largest shop in the town of Satghara is that of a jeweler. Mahadev Shah Baidyanath Prasad Jewelers belies its presence and location. Set amidst the narrow market lanes, the shop dwarfs the other establishments nearby. Flashing contemporary architecture, design and interiors and a large board in golden letters on the outside, announcing its name, Mahadev Shah, jewelers could well have been in one of the metropolitan centers. The shop belongs to one of the sons of Mahadev Shah Amarnath Jewellers, one of the biggest jewelers that contemporary Satghara has seen. After his death, his business was distributed among his sons, who have now opened up their own jewelry shops in various parts of the settlement, bearing the prefix of Mahadev Shah. While walking around the Satghara market, therefore, it is not surprising to come across nearly half a dozen shops that bear the prefix ‘Mahadev Shah’ for a jewelry business.

Bhagwatipur, too, has its share of such jewelry shops, though perhaps not as densely distributed. However it is interesting to note the combined function that these jewelry shops perform, doubling up as centers for moneylending too. One of the biggest buildings in Bhagwatipur is one that doubles up as a jewelry and moneylending center. The structure wears a serene look, each time that one passes it by, one wonders what is actually happening behind the doors? All activities are hushed up, curtains drawn tight as people queue up outside the main room giving it the impression of a local dispensary. A peep through the window reveals serious negotiations over items of jewelry between the moneylender and the customer. Some men stand guard at the door and don’t appreciate the prying about. Neighbouring shops and local shopkeepers will tell you that it is the largest money lending business within Bhagwatipur and in areas nearby. The owner is a man from the Suri sub caste of Baniyas and is also a jewelry seller.
Therefore, both in Bhagwatipur and in Satghara, a large part of the money lending business is controlled by the jewelry shop owners. Unlike the Sonar caste group, i.e. the goldsmiths, which is an artisan caste group – those who make items of jewelry, these shops and business is controlled by the Baniya sub castes of Suri and Teli both in Bhagwatipur and in Satghara. These moneylenders provide loans at high rates of interest - anything between 3 to 10 percent per month, depending upon the duration and nature of the loan. They also act as the financiers for the newly established businesses in the towns, a significant percentage of the new business reported having taken a loan from the local money lenders towards the investment costs.
It is also interesting to note that our fieldwork coincided with a robbery scandal in Gurgaon that had connections to a jewelry shop in Bhagwatipur. In September 2014, the house of a jeweler was robbed by the domestic help, a man whose family lives in Andhathari, a bloc near Bhagwatipur. He was eventually nabbed by the Haryana Police in December 2014, during the same time that our fieldwork was being conducted, from his home in Andhathari. The accused had sold some of the jewels and jewelry to a jewelry shop in Bhagwatipur, Nancy Jewelers, which was the first commercial establishment we listed and interviewed in Bhagwatipur.
Sanjay Soni, the proprietor of Nancy Jewelers, who was taken away by the police for interrogation regarding the purchase of stolen jewels is a twenty eight year old man of the Suri sub caste of Baniyas in Bhagwatipur. He is a graduate from the R. N. College in Madhubani town and has been married for a few years. It was his elder brother, who works as an accountant in a jewelry shop in Darbangha who suggested that he open a jewelry shop and helped him establish one. Prior to the jewelry business, Sanjay worked as sales agent in the ICICI credit card wing in Saket, as he reported. According to Sanjay, his brother had opened up the shop for him and he merely managed it. He’d rather do ‘multi level marketing’ as he likes to call it, which he could not explain further but insisted that it was better than a business in jewelry as there was no black money in ‘multi level marketing’.
The family associated with Nancy Jewelers, including Sanjay’s aged father is also the group of people who are devotees of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a neo religious movement with origins in Punjab. According to Sanjay’s father, whom we spoke to at a later date, he was introduced to the group by Sanjay, who in turn was introduced to it during his stay in Delhi. ‘He was a very restless person, he could not put his mind at one place but the influence of Radha Soami was good for him, he is better now and is handling the business’, he stated. He now organizes a weekly Satsang in town, every Sunday and makes an annual trip to Punjab to visit the ashram. Nearly hundred people gather in the local temple in the town every week for a satsang, and the numbers have grown gradually, according to Sanjay’s father.
In Satghara, most of the commercial activities and operators have organized themselves into trading associations. The jewelers too have done so. According to most of the respondents, from across trading groups and caste groups, doing so is meant to assure to things- firstly, a near uniformity in pricing and of selecting a day off per week.
2.2.4. Carpenter (Badhai): As a skill, of working with wood and related material to fashion it into items of daily use and convenience, carpentry is the traditional occupation of the badhai caste group. However unlike most of the other traditional caste based occupations, which have either been displaced by newer forms of material and processing or by diminished requirement, furniture continues to be a significant requirement. Even though it may now have disintegrated from the jajmani system, it exists among other market activities in a contemporary-commercial fashion. Therefore, those who continue to learn and practice carpentry skills have opened up furniture shops in the market, which require higher investments and labour.

2.2.5: Tailoring (Darzi): The Idris caste group among the Muslims in the region have been tailors traditionally. All of the tailoring establishments in both settlements are run by Muslim tailors. They are usually small establishments, constituting a Master tailor, with a few apprentice tailors, all male. The business of tailoring is a skill that is learnt through apprenticeship. Like a young tailor in the Bhagwatipur market told us

My maternal uncle had trained us how to do this, since then I began doing my own thing. Now I shall continue doing this, it seems appropriate to me. Now it is the time for readymade garments, the demand for stitching seems to have declined.

The skill of tailoring is hence acquired from a young age. Fifty-year-old Mohammad Zakir told us that he had run his tailor shop for thirty years and now his 16 year old son was also training as an apprentice under him and would take over the shop from him. Fifty-five years old Abdul Mazeed has managed his tailoring shop for nearly twenty-two years and presently his son also helps him. Among other items, he also stitches bags and seat covers for motorcycles. Abdul’s uncle had taken him to Kolkata when he was a young boy and he had trained under him.
Some of the tailors also use their skills when they migrate, especially in garment export factories in Delhi and NCR. Even in the textile power looms of Bhiwandi, near Mumbai, there is a high presence of Muslim migrants from Bihar and from Madhubani. The apprentice tailors who work in these establishments are paid on a piece rate basis. Mohammad Raza used to work as a tailor in Badarpur, near Delhi but did not earn much and decided to come back to Satghara and set shop.
Lack of capital –and lack of access to networks to procure capital – banks are also not willing to give loans.
They ask for papers, and they ask for land, to give a loan. I don’t have any l and, how will I ever provide them any papers?
2.2.6. Barbers (Nai): Among the remnants of the jajmani system, one of the services that has sustained itself, albeit in a substantively transformed fashion, is that of the barber, called Nai in Hindi. One only has to walk the length of the markets in both the settlements to notice the frequency with which they appear. Signboards announcing their names are mounted at the entrance of the shops, listing all the services they provide. Both the owners and the customers are exclusively male and all the shop owners, without an exception are from the Nai caste group. It is also interesting to note that apart from the regular nai services – haircut, beard trimming and shaving – these ‘saloons’ as they are locally advertised also provide contemporary meterosexual grooming services like eyebrow shaping and facial massages for men. Though they are targeted at the dulha (groom) for his wedding day, they seem to have a ready market among the young male population.
Among those who have now set up commercial shops, there is an understanding that the jajmani system of services could not be a support for their livelihood. Kundan, a young man from the Nai caste who runs a ‘saloon’ in Bhagwatipur apprised us –
It is not economically viable to go from home to home, that can’t sustain me. That is why I set up a shop.
Even though the barber services have now become commercialized to a great extent, some of our respondents also informed us how they went to the badaa jaat (upper caste) households on occasions where the services of the nai are required traditionally, for example upon the death of a family member. These have however diminished. Chedi Thakur, thirty year old barber who has been doing the business for nearly 15 years described to us how he still performed his jajmani services as a nai –
I go to the jajmaan’s house each week, for shaving. He gives me money once in a year.
But that is also not the only way they support themselves and their family. Not only have the nais set up shop in the market, they are also members of the All India Nai Association (see photo for Hindi name). According to Vinod Kumar Thakur, Prakhand (Block) Secretary of the Nai Sangh in Satghara, mobilizing and organizing people into an association wasn’t an easy task. There are currently 31 members, according to him but previously
Everybody had scattered, it was very difficult to organize everybody into a body. The organization was running in nearly all villages, albeit by different names, now, since 2004, we are running under one banner – All India Nai Mahasabha.
Upon the need for sangh (association), Vinod Kumar Thakur described to us why the needs for an association was felt in the first place –
Our caste (nai) had no place in the society. We worked as labour but wouldn’t get our dues, everybody used to suppress us. Anybody would come and hit one of the nai shopkeepers for no apparent reason. Nothing was organized – we were pressurized into working for low wages. Under the practice of landlordism, the jajmaans would bother us.
However, having organized themselves into an association now, Vinod listed to us the benefits of having one:
First of all, we emphasized upon internal unity. We also emphasize on education – we’d like that the forthcoming generation pay attention towards their education. Then rates for work, if we both have to work in the same market, and one of us works for 5 rupees and the other for two, then it will be a bad market for everybody. So we decided to fix a rate and make it enforceable. Once it is fixed, how can anyone not follow it?
However, the increasing number of barber -shops and saloons is also a source of anxiety for the existing ones.
2.2.7: Butcher (Kasai): Muslims have traditionally held the occupation of a butcher in both the settlements; meat butchering shops are exclusively owned and managed by Muslims. During the course of our visit in and around Satghara, which was nearly a month, Mohammad Irfan had already shut his butcher shop for business. During a discussion with him, he had previously told us that he had invested in this business out of his own savings as a migrant worker in Delhi. However his business was now running into a loss and he soon saw himself shut shop.
Some of the butchers also have their own poultry farms. Mohammad Ishrafil of the Fakir sect among Muslims started a poultry farm as recently as two years ago, where most of his family and an additional employee are engaged. Mohammad Ishrafil sold two katthas of his roadside land to be able to raise Rs. 100,000 for his establishment – he has taken the land on lease for which he pays Rs. 8,000 annually. Two of his sons are currently studying and one of Mohammad Ishrafil’s primary motivation to start this venture was to be able to support his son’s education. However he now feels that this business is ‘risky’, it depends upon the season and if the poultry is able to remain disease free. He already feels that he will be unable to make it run successfully and would need more capital to do something with it, which he currently does not have.

2.2.8. Cobbler (Mochi): One of the other traditional occupations that continue to operate in the contemporary context along caste-community lines is that of a cobbler (mochi). It involves the repair and mending, polishing and cleaning of footwear. Currently designated as an SC group, cobblers were traditionally integrated in the jajmani system. In the contemporary market however, they operate commercially and have small units from which they operate in the market place, mostly by the road, at turns without a formal physical structure. Such arrangements require low investments and therefore seem do-able for many. Bittu Mochi, fifty years old, has recently returned from New Delhi, having worked in Mumbai and Nepal before that –

I stay at home, didn’t have anything worthwhile to do, thought that I might as well start this. It requires the least amount of investment.

Shatrudhan Ram, a forty year old cobbler in the Satghara markey also spoke of the limitation that the unavailability of capital posed for his business.
There is a lack of capital, if I had it, I would have either expanded this work or taken up a new one.

2.2.9 Paan Sellers (Barai): Among the occupation based distribution of caste and sub-castes, the group that identifies itself as ‘barai’ is the one associated with the sale of paan leaves in wholesale to paan-shops as well as those operating their own. Designated among the Extremely Backward Castes (EBCs), the barai caste is traditionally involved in the growing and selling of paan leaves in the region. A typical paan-shop is a small and informal arrangement in the market, usually by the road, selling items like cigarettes, bidis, tobacco, sweets other than paan. Some of these are owned by those who had migrated out of the settlement and are now back.

2.2.10. Washerman (Dhobi): Like most other traditional occupations, the practice of being a dhobi has also been feminized to a large extent, i.e. it is practiced mostly by women of the sub-caste with which it has been traditionally associated. According to Datta’s research (2011) on the impact of male migration on women’s lives in rural Bihar, women of the dhobi community, ‘in addition to washing and ironing clothes all by themselves, (they) were also involved in delivering clothes to their jajmans, an activity, which was only done by men earlier’. Similar to Datta’s (2011) findings in the district of Gopalganj, the practice of jajmani among the dhobis in both Satghara and Bhagwatipur in Madhubani district no longer exists.

Karu Devi is a fifty-year-old Dhobi woman who was widowed a few years ago. All of her three sons have been working petty jobs in a hotel in Jaipur for the last three years. She had to sell whatever land they had for cash, which was required for a court case that her husband was party to. She and her sons had to also incur debt to start working as a laundry, from the bank, which they have managed to pay off. However, they are still indebted to the local moneylender for the expenditure for the court case. According to her, her sons would rather not work as a dhobi in the village and chose to go to Jaipur instead.

2.2.11: Puffed Rice and Sattu (Bhuja and Sattu: Halwai): ‘Bhuja’ i.e. puffed rice and sattu (mixture of ground pulses and cereal) are items of staple diet in the Bihar region. Traditionally, women of the Kanu sub caste among the Halwai would procure rice from the fields in return for labour, which she would then roast and puff for sale. The activity has now become commercialized and even ingenuously mechanized (photo of jugaad) and there are a significant number of shops that make and sell both bhuja and sattu. These are exclusively owned by those of the Halwai caste and among them, by the sub-caste of Kanus.

2.2.12: Bidi Makers: One of the other traditional occupations one could come across in the market settlemt in Satghara was that of didi making. On further enquiry, we gathered there were between 600 and 800 bidi makers in the Satghara panchayat. However, there has been a sharp decline in the number of bidi makers in recent time. Given the fact that none of the current generation has joined the craft of making bidis coupled with the fact that many of the bidi makers have aged and died or shifted to daily wage labourers, they are fast diminishing. Numerically, there are more number of individuals from Muslim community working in bidi making. Among Hindus, landless labourers such as Chamar, Dhanuk and others have been working in bidi making.

According to an elderly bidi maker in the Satghara market settlement,

There are no longer many bidi makers here… the ones who used to, only some of them continue to do this…there is no profit in this work anymore. How will we make any profit? We are only able to earn between Rs. 75 and Rs. 100 per day, how shall we carry on? We are only doing this because we have no other choice. We don’t want our children to continue in this profession, when it can’t provide for our subsistence, why should they do it?