In the fringe

Shame, Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, is revolutionary. It makes you want to challenge established wisdom and force change. In Known Turf, a collection of Mumbai journalist Annie Zaidi's previous writings, it is not the children of India sleeping on pavement that induce shame – in that situation, the more pertinent emotion is guilt or anger – but rather the proud artisans, farmers and nomads who are constantly being pushed to the margins while new technologies increasingly hold sway over minds and imaginations. According to Zaidi, it would be easy to save, say, the weavers of Benares from their quiet misery, easy to accord Adivasi peoples the right to maintain their way of life if they so choose. All this requires, she suggests, is a quantum change in perspective: away from purely profitable concerns about 'catching up' to the West in terms of industrial output to recognising that many current lifestyles are not sustainable. In this, she says, Southasia is particularly well placed to begin to develop more-sustainable models of existence – but we need first to rework out definition of the 'mainstream' and the 'periphery'.

In 1969, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm published Bandits, a history of people on the fringes of society and an attempt to fit them into the broader social scheme. In the Southasian context, it is important point out that a bandit can be anyone excluded from society, while dacoits (from the Urdu dakaiti, referring to armed pillage) are unambiguously violent repeat offenders. During the colonial era, the British latched onto dakaiti in a concerted move to criminalise broad swathes of peoples of the Subcontinent, albeit without any sense of their roles in society. For the past few centuries, then, one simply needed to label an individual or group as 'known dacoits' to strip them of respectability – a taint that has been able to endure for centuries in several countries of the region. Traditionally, dakaiti was used in the sense of activity rather than identity; but over time, the two meanings were conflated. Thus, bandits are by now default dacoits, outlaws subsisting at the fringes of society. Known Turf is an attempt to add nuance to this discussion. In one section, the author skilfully uses a Hobsbawm-derived idea of 'social banditry' to write about homegrown bandits from the ravines of the Chambal River in central India. Zaidi's analysis retains much of the original spirit in which Bandits was written: to explain how and when people who are pushed to margins choose to push back.