Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: Distinguished with a bagful of national and professional honours,1 Jan Breman occupies a preeminent position in the top echelon of academe; but he was not born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. ‘I happened to grow up in a milieu bothered by material deprivation and as a young boy, I came to know what it meant to belong to a social class having to cope with indigence’ (Breman, 2010a: 79). Each morning, his parents carried a bucket downstairs to the street to wait for ‘the lavender cart’ that collected the night soil; ‘on Friday evening all of us would go to the public bathhouse to take a shower, and on that day mother would give us a fresh set of clothes and underwear to last for the next half-week’ (ibid.: 81); ‘when I was nine, I was treated for scabies, a poverty-related affliction’ (ibid.: 82); ‘my grown-up neighbours worked as waiters, mill hands, lorry drivers, tram conductors, linesmen, construction workers, rent collectors, coal heavers, travelling salesmen, seamstresses, etc.’ (ibid.: 81). Both parents had belonged to families of boatmen carrying assorted freight; with industrial restructuring they found themselves seeking urban waged employments, with Jan's mother taking up as domestic help, and his father, eventually, becoming a postman; ‘steady work but steady poverty was how he summed up to me his assessment of those difficult years’ (ibid.: 82). The only way up and out was through education, and Jan yearned to learn more than some prescribed craft, at which he wasn't deemed good anyway. Propelled by teachers who ‘tended to project on their pupils aspirations which they had failed to realize for themselves’ (ibid.: 85), Jan contended with bureaucracy's carefully constructed obstacle course of entry restrictions, regulatory devices and financial hurdles, all designed to limit the upward mobility of children from the lower classes and restrict their entry into the properly educated elite. Rejecting an offer to train to become a postal clerk, Jan fought his way through in 1955 to the University of Amsterdam, where he had to divide his time and energies between pursuing his studies and earning some pennies to lessen the financial burden on his parents. Exclusions persisted: law, medicine, humanities including history, which Jan wished most to study, were out of bounds because his educational stream did not teach the mandated classical languages, and so he entered ‘social science’. ‘As an altogether new discipline, it happened to be an open field, a domain not already occupied by the right of heritage from which sons and daughters of the more well-to-do classes stood to benefit’ (ibid.: 86). And at the gates of the young discipline in the old university stood his mentor-to-be, Wim Wertheim, who shifted the framing of the study of ‘non-Western societies’ away from its orientalist bias and colonial civilizing mission to a programme of teaching and research that ‘revolved around the idea that the freedom struggles that had led to national independence were primarily the result of internally determined dynamics and expressed the craving for further social emancipation which had been ruthlessly suppressed under colonial rule’ (Breman, 2000: 2–3). As if pre-ordained, Johannes Cornelis Breman, all of nineteen, had arrived at the right destination: ‘I have absolutely no reason to regret the academic path that I followed’ (Breman, 2010a: 86). The University of Amsterdam became his true intellectual home; after all the buffeting, Jan the apprentice had come upon his chosen craft, registered in its guild, and met his ustad. ‘When I came to India, the theme of my research in the early 1960s, the fortitudes of a landless agrarian underclass and their dependency on landowners, brought back memories of my own past. For sure, however, these reminiscences were not coloured by the heart-rending, debilitating misery that I encountered in the landless colonies of rural Gujarat’ (Breman, 2010a: 90). Was this encounter ‘a stroke of irony’ as Jan says; perhaps, but it was certainly no stroke of chance: ‘focusing my fieldwork on the landless class of agricultural labour in south Gujarat was not a decision taken on the spur of the moment, a random choice picked out of many, but inspired by my own background and life history’ (ibid.). Less, one might wonder, by capricious chance, than an inexorable, subliminal pull towards a mass of humanity for which an existential affinity seemed to be stamped on his genetic code. Another twist of irony perhaps was that Jan's engagement with rural Gujarat for his doctoral fieldwork emerged from a conversation between the venerable Wim Wertheim and M.N. Srinivas, who facilitated the entry into village India. Jan's original work indeed focused on a caste — caste being the research frame that Srinivas willy-nilly foisted on the young discipline of sociology in India — but, in sharp contrast, the group Jan selected were the socially oppressed halpatis, at the other end of the spectrum from the Brahmins whose hegemonic perspectives Srinivas's sociological framing was sometimes alleged to ideate, if not propagate. His first book, Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India (University of California Press, 1974), based on this doctoral dissertation, constituted a significant intervention in Indian rural sociology, breaking away from the standard template of traditional village studies dominated by the complex matrix and convoluted social grammar of inter-caste relations. Jan Breman has been a rather busy man ever since: roughly in the past three decades, he has produced over 20 single-authored books,2 and about a dozen jointly authored or edited volumes3 — at the rate of about a tome a year — this in addition to the myriad articles and shorter academic pieces in professional journals or written as an engaged intellectual in public media.4 (Some of his earliest, as well as most recent, academic articles5 appeared in the pages of Development and Change, one of the journals of which he is an advisory editor.) While he has done significant research on West Java, and also written on Xiamen, China and Sindh, Pakistan, the overwhelming part of the cumulative body of work has been on south Gujarat. It would be difficult to find another contemporary scholar with such an intense and continuous engagement with anthropological fieldwork-based research and publication stretching beyond half a century; with metronomic consistency, he has been back in the fields and factories of Gujarat every year, building up an archive of personal research that is probably unrivalled in the sociology of India. Peter Waterman, the lifelong advocate and activist of labour internationalism, and no slouch himself, describes Jan aptly as ‘that one-man industry of Indian labour studies’ (Waterman, 2002: 1). Alongside this on a parallel track, Breman has supervised 25 PhDs, including many Indian scholars and scholars of India to be justly proud of, starting significantly with K.P. Kannan, the very first, now of 150, PhDs awarded by the International Institute of Social Studies (where Jan is an Honorary Fellow and was for long an extra-ordinary professor); followed there and in Amsterdam by Ashesh Ambasta, Amrita Chhachhi, Rohini Hensman, Rachel Kurian, Mona Mehta, Gudavarthy Vijay, and the two sadly deceased Jos Mooij (at the Institute of Social Studies), and Mario Rutten (who, at Amsterdam, stepped into the Chair held earlier by Jan Breman and Wim Wertheim). No less significant has been his contribution as an institution builder, as a pioneer and long-running Dean of the famous Centre for Asian Studies, Amsterdam (CASA) that was the home and hub of a buzzing bee-hive of researchers on and from Asian countries, importantly including India.6 CASA merged subsequently with the Amsterdam School (later Institute) for Social Science Research, co-founded by Jan Breman with Abram de Swaan. Breman's own statement of his research interests is modest, almost mundane: ‘work, employment and labour relations in contemporary Asia, history of colonialism, labour migration, conditions of poverty and the social question in a global perspective’. In truth, however, Jan Breman is the indefatigable scribe of the labouring underclasses and has devoted a lifetime to an empathetic comprehension, recording and analysis of their precarious lives and livelihoods, their perennial struggles for survival in economic, social and political environments imbued with apathy, suspicion and hostility from capital, bureaucracy and the state, and civil society and uncivil elites; above all, he has provided sensitively nuanced and profoundly evocative narratives of the fate of the pauperized, the unrelenting churning and crunching of the wheels of property and capital that devalues their labour, degrades their bodies and lives, and eventually excludes and expels them from any productive absorption into a world of dignified and decent work, albeit still one of alienation and exploitation. When all these favourable conditions taken together produce nothing more than the intensification of the pauperization process, we need to have no illusion about the fate to be expected by the urban poor under regimes of a more authoritarian character. When appropriation of the surplus value is no longer feasible, the minus value attributed to large sections of the population becomes even more pronounced. And such a situation easily gives rise to an ideology which affirms that it is not poverty but the poor themselves who constitute the problem from which society must free itself. (Breman, 1983a: 182) The fight against poverty seems to have been transformed into a fight against the poor. A point of no return is reached when a reserve army waiting to be incorporated into the labour process becomes stigmatized as a permanently redundant mass, an excessive burden that cannot be included now or in the future, in economy and society. This metamorphosis is, in my opinion at least, the real crisis of world capitalism. (Quoted in Benanav, 2010: 232) Subsequent development processes and policies have tended to confirm the strength of the structural scaffolding of his cumulative work on exclusion, expulsion, pauperization, and indeed violence against the poor. More recently he sounded an alarm again, in a newly developing context, with his cautionary observations on the dangers of divisions within the working classes as too many would-be workers chase too little employment. He warns: ‘there is a strong correlation to be traced between market and religious fundamentalism’ (Breman, 2013a: 138). Where there is acute competition amongst the poor for scarce jobs, ‘there is much danger that, rather than teaming up, the reserve armies will give in to the temptation to see each other as rivals and fight for whatever employment opportunity comes up. No longer mobilized on the basis of occupational identity, they see no alternative but to rely on their first-order loyalties of ethnicity, caste, race and creed’; he cites the ‘pogrom in which the Muslim minority, with state and Hindutva complicity, was hunted and massacred in the streets. Those who managed to escape were forced to vacate their mixed neighbourhoods and seek refuge in a ghetto’ (ibid.: 137–8). In his riposte to Standing's depiction of ‘the precariat’ as a ‘dangerous class’, Breman asks: ‘dangerous, or endangered species of labour?’ (ibid.: 138). In his own life experience, Jan saw tremendous improvements in the standards of living and access to social goods within the rubric of the complex evolution of the rising welfare regime in The Netherlands, and more widely in Europe. The extreme contrast with the realities of poverty and pauperization in Asia, and especially India, induces Breman to interrogate the various missing elements in the Asian jigsaw of socio-economic change: the persistence, if not accentuation, of the hostile attitudes of the elite; the complex economic and technological configurations that undermine job creation; extreme levels of unaddressed inequalities in income, wealth and power; an apathetic, self-serving bureaucracy; and a state that thinks of the poor as a vote bank to be manipulated periodically — all threads that are woven into his larger fabric of explanation. In this sense, Jan transgresses the conventional disciplinary boundaries and transacts and trades across its borders with economists of various ilks and historians of all persuasions; indeed, he reaches and extends the contours of the wide remit of his original discipline, all-embracing ‘social science’. It should come as no surprise that Jan Breman does not take kindly to hegemonic ideological forays, whether of the colonial-apologist variety, or those that euphemistically mystify the raw realities of poverty, or others that tend to undermine and dismantle the collective identity and solidarity of the labouring classes. Variously: he has slapped uncomfortable facts in the face of sections of Dutch academe and society still steeped, and asleep, in the soma of imperial nostalgia, causing quite an outcry and backlash, and punctured many a neo-colonial hot-air balloon. He refers to the quiet mid-process name change by an international development agency of an Asian research project from ‘mass poverty’ to ‘social participation’ as follows: ‘those entrusted with the rules of the game in international organizations know that this kind of Orwellian “newspeak” is very useful’ (Breman, 1983a: 181–2). He shows his disdain for interventions of Hernando de Soto who would offer a universal panacea for the mass of working poor by redefining them, in the words of Mike Davis (2006: 179), as ‘a frenzied beehive of proto-capitalists’ whose profit-making talents could be unleashed simply by giving them formal property rights and by the state getting out of the way: ‘myth inspired by wishful thinking’ was the least impolite of his several critical reactions to this reductionist and diversionary political tactic. He challenges the misleading distortions implicit in the Indian National Sample Survey's statistical definitions of different categories of labour, and has been scathingly dismissive of the Planning Commission's laughably, or tragically, low poverty thresholds, labelling them not as poverty lines but destitution lines that reflect the more extreme state of pauperization matched by the depth of apathy of the bureaucratic elite (Breman, 2016a). In 2013, he expressed annoyance with what he perceives as Guy Standing's hostility towards organized labour, such as still remains, picking especially on his ‘bogus’ concepts, in particular ‘the precariat’ à la Standing, and definitions that drive a divisive wedge within the different sections of the working classes not just in terms of theorization but also of policy design and political praxis. Dismissively noting ‘Standing's penchant for lists — seven of of that (Breman, 2013a: Breman that ‘the political is not to the various of the in a from to as but rather to that their — to between organized and not to them against each (ibid.: between different of the working class is not the this its for collective (ibid.: 138). A more any or that Breman might be to that are to the global in the of work and the structural between the of the West of the past and the of of collective are these are still at an it is, time to the of the working class and the in which it further its and The one is his the of living In this of the the of the seems to have the of written indeed has as a well beyond the early of colonial or The of the is and by Breman, as an to his written work, in two the first provided of the of labour Breman, and and Amsterdam University Press, the was a and depiction of the and of the of jointly with in the No Amsterdam University Press, Jan's and are almost and what past are the of the of labour by the of are several parallel and of there is the of in the realities of the lives of workers on the of the there is the of the of a and work, is devoted and to the of the most and as labour and as in his of the and in in — that the of Jan Breman's cumulative body of work was a he through a and up He describes his work as Jan Breman's is his own and well might one his as a of are many definitions of what or who might constitute a and it would of the many would easily on any one a of an university would not so no how much work might be in one sense, Jan Breman could be such a of whether he it Breman the working classes with a from not as an of study for a professional a and social of are and for a of where and solidarity with the becomes not a of bias but the basis of a which he and to to the and to such from working class almost as many as as to this part of their social and their and it be they had some in the first an intellectual also and of of of to a larger and cannot be in any reductionist that it with class it has more to with the and realities that are subsequently and constructed by the In this sense, Jan Breman's perspectives have been those that are to the lives of the labouring classes and within a global frame of He has written about their and lives as if he were about his own as indeed they to have become through over half a The identity of the is of in what to and how to I find as a is to to own and on the basis of that in the to to against the to question own set of and and in that to for a of this it not only to and to but to engaged in with and in that, the to the (Breman, 2010a: And it as see no have been rural labour in over the past half In the how has the world around Where in I a of the welfare state, to have been born when social became a in the restructuring of Dutch society. process was by a working class which brought for as well as terms and conditions of employment and social to against in and old The from an to an economy which in the saw the of a for the for mass and also for and The mixed and still capital economy that emerged many and steady of the social was of in the of labour agency and Social and were in the of welfare public to Social mobility was in an upward and as the of working class parents with a I happened to be the first one in my to for within my own this and of has been Social have the welfare state the to them and other in what in is as a society. The of the Dutch and who was the top of the has other as well as followed as did of many public who the to The now is that have to take of their own in their work and life have become rights fought for by earlier of workers and a public economy The course of and is in with the policy of which has been economy and society in the global than the the which to be as the of the development in the the of change is and the have now back to a past they they had While the is still on and us on the it is that the earlier divide between and or will have to be by a different way of in the world In the of global we how capital to as in on the first industrial this time it is an escape the Social which to have capital in a frame of welfare are to free from public No longer the of between capital and labour, the state is in with to away with market as to and is the of the chosen course of has provided to this for the global in in his and study is that the to of capital should be with poverty is not a that be in but must be as in a The as it already was at the national and has become further in social in a than ever The away of public agency and of a public economy and a of has much to these divisive The drive towards rules out of collective solidarity and alienation is the of the end of between is the of the day even in the of and The or of political by in the economic and social fabric of society in different of the world is a have been as much a as a own work, have history almost in of in the of the lives of workers over half a have also the to and some long of Social about and is a of on the part of and classes that a mission and have and at this and such of as did with on (Breman, A theme in my research has been to the or of the and that has led me to on the of The Indian has quite out the of how at that in their history when they were a more to the and of in their an early of there was no need to be about the surplus to be away was meant for the of the the were to belong to the of the world who held over of The was in an ideology of The was subsequently as the still in but as a civilizing mission of and early of The that value had to be where it was was by a social in question to my study on how from various of were into and held in on and in to produce for on the world for waged work in in a state of in a which could not be was and by the colonial I well the hostile the in Dutch intellectual and some an it seemed as if had a collective of about the of Dutch colonial an this was a such a of has been in other and not such of social on the of those still in a of over ‘the colonial Dutch colonial in this In a new study on the recently in an — the earlier Dutch one was by colonial historians in The — I have traced the of the in colonial (Breman, in a the were by and at from those at the very there was no to in a of In the early the Dutch the of economic that to did not have the of the He in this but the of the was by as well as an for which stood in the way of and It is a of not by which are and in As a of the
Source: Development and Change
DOI: 10.1111/dech.12252
Author: Ashwani Saith
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,870
OpenAlex ID: W2463340568