Abstract
This essay is written in a style inspired by autoethnography. It is based on a conversation with Mr. Ravindra Sharma, a Gandhian artisanal thinker. It brings forth an Indian indigenous view on “worker” and “marginalisation”. It takes seriously the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s call for appreciating the other’s ontology as likely one of merographic connections. The essay suggests that in the Indian indigenous worldview a worker is a whole being, not just labour power and marginalization is the tearing up a wholistic ontological existence in society and the constitution of economy, society, market etc., as autonomous spheres with their distinctive means of governance through processes of development. This process by eliminating countervailing power leaves open sections of society to exploitation and marginalization. This reduces the individual, his/her family and community to mere anonymous workers lacking in skills.
R. Sharma—Passed away in 2018.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See Rajni Bakshi’s Bapu Kuti for a biographic profile of Sharma.
- 2.
Sukraniti is a centuries old text, which describes some of the common practices and makes suggestions for following a life of dharma.
- 3.
He invoked the idea of the curse of food (ann ka shrap) that has afflicted the Brahmins, because they after having survived for centuries on the alms of society, resorted to selling food when it was their turn to give. The earliest restaurants in India were set up by dislocated Brahmins as a consequence of their displacement from traditional occupations and geographies.
- 4.
References
Bakshi, Rajni. 1998. Bhut To: Journeys in Rediscovery of Gandhi. New York: Penguin Books.
Birla, Ritu. 2009. Stages of Capital: Law Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India. Durham. Duke University Press.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. 1908. The Village Community and Modern Progress. Colombo: Colombo Apothecaries Company.
Dirks, Nicholas B. 2011. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. In Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gouldner, Alvin W. 1960. The Norm of Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement. American Sociological Review 25: 161–178.
Gupta, Swarupa. 2007. Samaj, Jati and Desh: Reflections on Nationhood in Late Colonial Bengal. Studies in History 23 (2): 177–203.
Huen, Chi W. 2009. What is Context? An Ethnophilosophical Account. Anthropological Theory 9 (2): 149–169.
Jago, Barbara J. 2002. Chronicling an Academic Depression. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 31 (6): 729–757.
Jammulamadaka, N. 2018. Indian Business: Notions and Practices of Responsibility. New Delhi: Routledge.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. 2009. The Post-colonial State: The Special Case of India. In Critical Encounters: A Forum of Critical Thought from the Global South.
Lowe, T. L. 1989. Refractories in High-Carbon Iron Processing: A Preliminary Study of the Deccani Wootz-Making Crucibles, vol. 4, 237–251. Westerville, OH: American Ceramic Society.
Mathur, Arpita. 2017. Corruption in Local Governance as Resistance: A Post-colonial Reading of the Indian State. In Governance, Resistance and the Post-colonial State: Management and State Building, ed. J. Murphy and N. Jammulamadaka. Singapore: Routledge.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mookerji, R. 1919. Local Government in Ancient India. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Nandy, Ashis. 1987. Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Pettit, Phillip. 1996. Freedom as Antipower. Ethics 106 (3): 576–604.
Prakash, Gyan. 2003. Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India, vol. 44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Prasad, Anshuman. 2015. Toward Decolonizing Modern Western Structures of Knowledge. In The Routledge Companion to Critical Management Studies, ed. Prasad Anshuman et al., 161. London: Routledge.
Srinivasan, S. and Ranganathan, S., 2004. Wootz Steel–Legendary Material of the Orient. Bangalore: Indian Institute of Science.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, vol. 6. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century, vol. 1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thornton, Patricia, William Ocasio, and Michael Lounsbury. 2012. The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Venkatesan, Soumya. 2009. Craft Matters: Artisans, Development and the Indian Nation. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.
Young, Iris Marion. 2013. The Five Faces of Oppression. In The Community Development Reader, ed. James Defillippis and Susan Saegert, 346–355. Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jammulamadaka, N., Sharma, R. (2019). Death of the Artisan: An Indigenous View on Marginalization. In: Jammulamadaka, N. (eds) Workers and Margins. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7876-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7876-8_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-13-7875-1
Online ISBN: 978-981-13-7876-8
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)