Terms of Trade: Come and hear the boom boxes in the street

These few weeks are a nightmare for anybody living in the national capital, its suburbs or the entire area on what is now called the Kanwar route

For a few weeks in the monsoon season, or the Hindu month of Shrawan, highways and urban thoroughfares in north Indian cities witness complete chaos as millions of (mostly) young men undertake the human and religious equivalent of the great wildebeest migration in Masai Mara in Africa. Anybody, no matter who, who comes in their way, is likely to be crushed like anything coming in the way of the marching wildebeests. Crushed here could mean being beaten up, lynched, having your vehicle or shop burnt down or many other things. Some Kanwariyas perish too, some in road accidents, some from electrocution, some falling out of trains and some out of the sheer exhaustion the journey entails.

Anybody, no matter who, who comes in their way, is likely to be crushed like anything coming in the way of the marching wildebeests (Hindustan Times)

These few weeks are a nightmare for anybody living in the national capital, its suburbs or the entire area on what is now called the Kanwar route. The economic costs and inconvenience are huge. Schools are shut. Heavy vehicle traffic is suspended. Commute time increases significantly. There are multiple instances of arson and destruction of private property targeting anything from cars to roadside restaurants. People on the roads which the kanwariyas take, cannot sleep even with the best sound proofing in their houses. The law-and-order machinery, which is otherwise quite pro-active in preserving discipline in this region – think of the draconian restrictions imposed during the farmers’ protests or even benign political gatherings in various parts of the national capital – remains a mute and also a deaf (given the noise pollution from the so-called boom boxes) spectator to the entire act. What explains this growing – the rise of the Kanwariyas in this form is a relatively recent development – menace and the official non-response to it?

The easiest answer is to ascribe this to the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its larger ecosystem of the Hindu right in India. But this is at best a half truth. Political parties in power are powerful and often exert this power in terms of their acts of omission or commission. But their ability to shape social realities and developments is at best dialectical, rather than linear, which is what a principal-agent attribution of the ‘growth in kanwariya is a result of the rise of the BJP’ theory would suggest. If one really wants to understand the social factors which have led to a proliferation and mutation of such religiosity, a willingness to engage with larger realities and processes is necessary.

Religiosity in India, including among Hindus, is not a new thing. Nor are pilgrimages. But this does not mean that they are cast in stone and do not change. Kanwariyas are among the best proof of this changing nature of how religiosity is practiced. Not only have the numbers of those undertaking the journey increased, so has its form. The journey is not about small groups of people walking quietly along the road anymore. It is now accompanied by loud, intimidating and if need be, violent behaviour. This change in behaviour, according to some social scientists, who have bothered to engage with it and try and find answers, is part of a new form of religiosity taking roots in India.

One of the best explanations of this process has been given by anthropologist Satendra Kumar in his book Badalte Gaon, Badalta Dehat: Nayi Samajikta ka Uday. Kumar’s monograph – unfortunately it has not been translated into English yet – has a chapter called Bahujan Dharmikta: Dharm ka Naya Swaroop (loosely translated as bahujan religiosity: the new form of religion) and has a separate section on Kanwariyas along with things such as Deras, Jagrans etc.

The crux of Kumar’s argument is the following. One, the rise in the number of people partaking in such acts is a result of more people from the so-called subaltern castes, especially lower OBCs and Dalits joining the ranks. This increase is organically linked to two simultaneous developments: decline of the cultivation economy which is exposing more and more people to the life outside of the traditional boundaries of the village and the persisting economic precarity which has only changed the life of this underclass from one facing feudal exploitation to capitalist exploitation. While religiosity does play a part in these young men undertaking the journey, what is as important as the religious angle is the sense of power, even if only temporary, the participants draw from such activities.

Kumar’s book, based on field interviews, says that for the otherwise poor, often unemployed or exploited young men, the days of kanwar yatra are the only window of time where the tables turn and the entire system bows to them. Everyone from the police to the businessmen to their villages celebrates their acts and personas. Political parties and politicians, especially the BJP and its affiliates, have jumped in to celebrate this new form of religiosity, lest they lose on the political goodwill it can generate.

Kumar’s findings are not very different from an excellent report by Singdha Poonam published in HT in 2017. Poonam traveled with the Kanwariyas on a truck, wrote how these extremely poor men -- some vegetable sellers, some construction workers and some just struggling to find a job -- squeeze themselves through the year to raise the money needed to take the journey with the necessary paraphernalia from hockey sticks to customized uniforms to trucks mounted with speakers.

Kumar’s and Poonam’s narration of the problem is not very different from how Karl Marx described religion in his introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right published in 1844. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”, Marx wrote in what is perhaps one of the most famous quotes attributed to him.

What is (rightfully) seen as a nuisance by a lot of people during the kanwariya season is also millions of poor, hopeless and angry young men blowing off their proverbial steam by subverting the system for a couple of weeks. Unlike the wildebeests in Masai Mara who undertake the journey as a means to an end (they are following the rains to find greener pastures for food), the journey is an end in itself for the underclass kanwariya. The Indian state knows better than to prevent this pent-up anger from blowing off and exploding the pressure cooker itself in the process. Of course, for the state, some (religious) safety valves are more tolerable than others.

None of this is to justify or equivocate on what goes on in the kanwariya season. It is just to underline the hypocrisy, or may be gullibility of the powers that be and their fellow travelers who, it seems, have come to believe that India is among the most equal countries in the world. To paraphrase Pablo Neruda, they should come and hear the boomboxes in the streets.

Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa