The ‘Problem’ of Shifting Cultivation in the Garo Hills.

The ‘Problem’ of Shifting Cultivation in the Garo Hills.

Although several alternative critical perspectives on shifting cultivation have been elaborated, the practice of this form of agriculture continues to be viewed in north-east India in a deprecatory manner. This pervasive attitude has now come to affect the cultivators themselves. While the calculations and compulsions of the electoral process do confer some space for shifting cultivation, it survives in extremely sub-optimal circumstances. The gap between what could be done and what has been done has worked to the disadvantage of shifting cultivators. This essay studies the historical processes that gave rise to this situation and is part of a larger study based on extensive written records and fieldwork in the Garo hills region.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

SINCE THE 1950S, shifting cultivation in north-east India has been trapped in a low-level and unstable equilibrium owing to two equally unviable paradigms that operate at the policy and institutional levels. The dominant perspective is that shifting cultivation is a wasteful and ecologically dysfunctional system, detrimental to forests and soil, and hence needs to be eradicated by inducing cultivators to adopt other forms of livelihood. When such efforts meet with failure, the other paradigm comes into play, according to which shifting cultivation is a legitimate practice that ensures the survival of people living on marginal lands and hence should be allowed to carry on as it is without external influence. As a result, shifting cultivators fall through the crack between marginalization and traditionalism.

The reality is that shifting cultivation, in an increasingly intrusive market environment, is on a downward spiral of production and regeneration, and both approaches preclude the need of interventions necessary to make it a feasible basis of livelihood for cultivators without practicable options. If shifting cultivation is accepted as one more type of agrarian practice that, like with other forms of ‘permanent’ cultivation, needs the services of agronomical study and agricultural extension, it can be transformed into an occupation whose detrimental effects can be mitigated and productivity increased.

This essay traces the historical trajectory that made shifting cultivation, still a widely prevalent agricultural practice in the Garo hills, Meghalaya in north-east India, a victim of two imprudent policy choices that prevail despite the existence of critical literature pointing to the third option. The government’s efforts to eradicate shifting cultivation by changing the subsistence basis of cultivators have often met with failure, as the last part of this essay shows. In the absence of practical alternatives and a stoic aversion by the state to steping and improve shifting cultivation from within, shifting cultivators are increasingly vulnerable, and their lands are progressively being degraded. The dominant official ideologies and policies relating to shifting cultivation have been instilled and reproduced over a period of time. These ideologies and policies in turn, directly or indirectly, have influenced the corpus of knowledge (techniques, practical skills and know-how) of shifting cultivation communities.

HISTORICAL PROFILE OF SHIFTING CULTIVATION IN THE GARO HILLS, MEGHALAYA

In the Garo hills shifting cultivation, jhum kheti or aba-oa, has historically been the principal mode of agricultural production. It is difficult to estimate the population/ area figures for shifting agriculture in the north-east as a whole. Even today, figures are an approximation and do not include land degraded and subsequently abandoned by shifting cultivators. The practice is carried out in semi-evergreen forest in the upper reaches and moist deciduous forest at lower elevations. The flora includes a wide variety of tree species, bamboos and an arrested succession of weeds. The soils on which cultivation is carried out are red and lateritic, they are acidic, and low in phosphorous and potassium. Nitrogen availability is irregular due to steepslopes that cause cation losses and due to depletion during the burning activities accompanying grazing and agriculture.

The climate is subtropical at lower elevations and sub-temperate in the hills. Rainfall averages are higher than in other Indian regions where shifting cultivation is practised, ranging from 2,000 mm per year to over 9,000 mm in Cherrapunji. Maximum temperatures do not exceed 33°C. Climatic factors make for quick regeneration of vegetative cover in contrast with the hotter and drier tracts of central and south-eastern India. Hence, jhum cycles of even just over seven years may be viable under certain conditions (Singh 1996). Other areas, by contrast, have a twelve-year rotation.

Historically, the Garos of the plains were under a zamindari system of land tenure of the Mughal empire. Under this system, land was allotted by the Mughal state to a zamindar who was given a land revenue title. In 1765 the region, which formed part of Rangpur district of Bengal, came under the East India Company. By 1826, when Assam too came under British rule, a separate district consisting of Goalpara, Dhubri, Kariabari and the Garo hills was created out of Rangpur. At the time British power extended mainly to the plains. David Scott was made the commissioner of the new district and he concluded several agreements with the a∙king nokmas (heads of clans or machongs) of the region, extending the control of the British into the hills. Administratively, the Garo hills were a district under an Assam commissioner within the division of Bengal. Between 1905 and 1911 Assam was added to Eastern Bengal and formed into the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, under a lieutenant-governor. It became a separate governor’s province in 1912. The Garo hills were first deemed an excluded area (as per the provisions of the Montague-Chelmsford reform proposal of 1917) and subsequently a backward area (following the Government of India Act 1919) with the nomination of a member representing the area in the Legislative Council. In 1935, according to Schedule VI of the Government of India Act 1935, the area was again declared a partially excluded area with limited franchise given to the headmen. In 1947 the Garo hills were included within the union of India as a part of Assam. By the provisions of Schedule VI of the Constitution of India, in 1952 the District was declared autonomous, under an elected district council, and universal Adult franchise was introduced for the first time. In1971, after the North Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act, the state of Meghalaya was carved out of Assam. The Garo hills became part of this new state.

The region forms a large, complex ecosystem in which various forms of production coexist with each other and with the forests as a whole. These activities include shifting cultivation, terrace agriculture, wet-rice cultivation, fishing, grazing, And hunting and gathering. Orchard and plantation cultivation are relatively recent additions. Over 80 per cent of Meghalaya’s population is tribal.

Shifting cultivation systems exhibit continuities despite transformations attendant on a still circumscribed capitalism, expanding market economy and demographic pressures. While more land-intensive systems also relate organically to forests, shifting cultivation is more closely integrated with forests and has been called an agro-forestry system. Here, the agricultural system is characterised by continuous fields, which witness long fallow periods interspersed with shorter periods of cultivation, rotation of fields rather than of crops, mixed cropping, almost exclusive reliance on human labour, absence of artificial irrigation and, most characteristically, firing of the fields before sowing. Long fallows and firing before cultivation are the two hallmarks of the system. Most shifting cultivators domesticate animals, tend tree crops, and gather and hunt. As with grazing, there are common misconceptions of the practice, where it is called ‘roving’ and ‘nomadic’ in a sense that erroneously implies that shifting cultivators have no notions of usufruct rights. Like elsewhere, there are varieties of shifting cultivation practices in the region, employing different techniques and varied fallow lengths depending on the locale and its circumstances.

The dominant perspective precluded policy makers from viewing jhum as a legitimate form of resource use. Jhum has at various points been the concern of the forest department, the tribal areas department and, since 1955, of the soil conservation department, whose primary concern has been to limit and control the practice, as a prelude to ‘weaning cultivators’ away from it. At no point has it been on par with wet-rice cultivation, terrace, plantation or horticultural systems, nor has it come under the direct purview of the state agricultural department. Officially, wellintothe1990s, shifting cultivation has been regarded as a menace to be done away with, at best tolerated. The enduring image of the practice as inferior and wasteful, supporting an economy on the brink of impending collapse, became the justification for interventionism, particularly in post-independence India.

The earliest accounts of jhum fall in either of two frameworks:

 1. Shifting cultivation was a primitive and inferior system of cultivation that needed to be changed, even done away with. Baden-Powell’s views expressed at a forest conference held in Allahabad in 1874 are a sample:

The fact is that the system is so wasteful that somehow or the other it must be put as top to, just like ‘suttee’ or any other great evil. It consists in destroying a large and valuable capital to produce a miserable and temporary return. To put as top to it, is only to anticipate by a few years, the natural determination of the system which will happen if the system continues long enough, because there will be no more forest to cut down and burn. The way out is to reserve large areas and prohibit jhum. Efforts should be made to change people to permanent agriculture.

2. Shifting cultivation was seen as the response of a marginalised people to natural conditions, the termination of which would mean starvation.

Both these generalised approaches were strong enough to preclude the need for, or the desirability of, distinguishing between the different systems of jhum or studying the principles of the system in earnest. On the one hand, if jhum was as much of an evil as sati, the question of ‘improving jhum’ did not arise, since by definition there could be no reformed version of either. On the other hand was the view that jhum should be left alone since it was a matter of survival for those dependent on it. Neither approaches actually tried to look beyond the phenomenological, and so jhum was not really understood by policy makers in the colonial period, a lacuna compounded by the absence of a land revenue levy in the upland regions of north-east India. Empirical surveys on land use practices, productivity, soil types and cropping patterns were never undertaken in areas under jhum. Consequently, jhum as a practice tended to be captured through superficial and impressionistic categories.

Forest Department To begin with, the department’s only concern with shifting cultivation was to control and limit the practice in the areas directly under its control (forest reserves). The official policy of forest use and the practice of shifting cultivation seemed systemically at odds. The department, determined to impose scientific and ‘rational’ forest management, banned shifting cultivation wherever possible.  The justification of reservations was on the ground of arresting degradation of forests. In Assam, as elsewhere, the department viewed fire in the forest with some horror. Jhuming, along with grazing and burning the forest, remained the bane of the forest department. In the annual progress reports of the forest department, firing due to jhum and grazing ranked on par with insects, pests and disease, which caused ‘injuries to the forest’.

While settling forests, the department proceeded on the assumption that shifting cultivators were migratory and nomadic, and lacked defined notions of territoriality.

In the early years of state forestry there are few recorded instances of organised protests on the part of the cultivators, perhaps be cause productivity crises, arising from demographic pressure on shrinking arable, had not begun to manifest themselves on any significant scale. Subsequently, protests of surprising intensity were expressed through different modes, ranging from outright refusal to surrender lands for the creation of further reserves even after being compensated, petitions, organised movements (Sonaram Sangma’s agitation, 1904 to 1912)8 and requests for the dereservation of some forest tracts. These protests led to an official examination and recording of existing rights over land in the Garohills, and the enthusiasm for demarcating ‘reserves’ waned in the region.

‘Primitive’, ‘irrational’ and ‘short-sighted’ jhum was contrasted with rational, scientific, long-term state management of forests. The non-reserved areas were designated unclassed forests’ where shifting cultivation was permitted.

On the subject of highlands in the Jaintia lands I have the Honour to bring to your notice that although the Chief Commissioner permits Syntengs to carry on shifting cultivation in its high lands without payment, it would not permit any permanent occupation of such land or admit the growth of private rights in them, or pay compensation if such land was taken up for any purpose.

Shifting cultivators vigorously contested the proprietary claim of the government. The sub-divisional officer of Jowai was surprised by the flood of petitions from Shifting cultivators claiming private proprietary rights:

It does not appear from the sub-divisional office records that any special notice or proclamation of any kind has been issued to the people on this point . . . .

In 1887, certain inhabitants of Satunga who had been jhumming on the borders of the Saipung reserve forest were ordered by the then SDO to cease further operations until the boundaries of the reserve forest were demarcated. Upon this a number of petitions were filed by the people of Satunga claiming private rights in the land where they jhummed.

The people of the affected area produced sale deeds claiming rights to the land dated before 1885, the year the order claiming all high land belonged to the government came into being.

The government’s claim to proprietary right over such land arguably redefined to some extent the notions of rights to land among the cultivators in Satunga. They also began using the coloniser’s language of proprietary right.

By the turn of the century ideas related to ‘ecology’ and management were incorporated into the rhetoric of the forest department. The colonial administration gained in political confidence in the upland regions of the north-east. The importance of timber and commercial forest produce in the imperial war effort lent an aggressive thrust to state forest operations. Finally, in a parallel movement, there was the subtle but emphatic shift away from the forest department’s pursuit of purely exploitative and commercial interests (albeit in a utilitarian sense: the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest period). The new emphasis on the role of forest management was in the prevention of deforestation, deemed to be the single greatest cause of floods, soil erosion and disturbance of the watershed system. This lent an immediate and practical aspect to state forest operations and undoubtedly gave it credence. Influenced by the concept of climax vegetation in biology, state forestry aimed at minimizing irrational interference (usually by human actions), which would arrest the development of species. Forest management

was simply to aid natural processes. However, this rhetoric did not seem to interfere with the plantation of purely commercially valuable species. In fact the rhetoric was deployed to justify commercial plantation on the grounds that these operations afforested lands that might otherwise have remained unforested. Commercial forestry of this nature required labour. Both due to local protests and international outcry, the existing regimes of labour such as begar or impressed labour were no longer feasible on the same scale. Therefore, a new system of labour management had to be devised. The fact that prior to 1900 the negative attitude to firing in the forests had changed to a recognition of its benefits, proved to be handy in securing the necessary labour. This was done by assigning jhum plots to cultivators in forest reserves on condition that they planted and tended commercially valuable trees on these plots. Thus, jhum from having been an unequivocal vice became a tolerable practice, particularly so under controlled and modified forms that would also meet the labour requirements of commercial forestry in an overall climate where the scientific forestry community had come to revise its views on the effects of firing on forests. People who had once been ousted from the forest when reserved areas were demarcated were brought back into these policed reserved areas as cultivators labouring for the forest department.

The conversion to the merits of controlled firing came about with the successful incorporation of shifting cultivation in British colonial forestry in Burma. This was known as the taungya system and was extended to parts of British India, including Assam, where it continued until 1969 and was actively used for forest ‘regeneration’. It seemed to solve several problems all at once: management and control of labour, and the need for regulated firing, supervised planting and careful tending of tree saplings, especially in the first few crucial years. In the north-east it could only beat tempted in the reserved forests. The department could not extend the ban on jhum to the unclassed forests, the other category of forests, mainly for political reasons. Too many people depended on this form of agriculture (Stebbing 1926: 218). Taungya rendered shifting cultivation a supervised caricature of its former self. The point is that people often confuse taungya and jhum: while taungya, as used by the department, entailed shifting cultivation procedures, it was vastly different from shifting cultivation as jhum.