1 - Introduction

Summary

Micro-research within a macro-framework

This book is about wage labour in the lower echelons of the non-agrarian economy of south Gujarat towards the end of the twentieth century. I have been privileged to make a local level study of the process of economic diversification in this part of west India over a period of more than thirty years. The village research which I started in the early 1960s was dominated by changes that were taking place in the relationship between high caste landowners and low caste agricultural workers (Breman 1974). In my account of this fieldwork carried out more than thirty years ago I already mentioned the growing significance of the nonagrarian economy for employment of the local proletariat. Several visits thereafter showed that this trend accelerated during subsequent years. What was the destination of those workers who left or who were pushed out of agriculture?

Debates on the social transformation process that India has experienced since Independence in 1947 were at first dominated by the concept of an economic dualism between village and town which coincided with the distinction between agriculture and industry. While cultivation of the land had traditionally been the principal source of livelihood in rural areas, and even the sole source for most of the population, the economic dualism concept considered the urban environment to be the natural location for the country's new industries.