Question

mention the various means of livelihood of the baigas

Answer 1

One of the reputed English writers from India, Nirad C. Chaudhary, wrote a book of essays, named The Continent of Circe, in 1965, wherein he predicted the utter dehumanizing destruction of the indigenous people from India. He wrote: "In an industrialized India the destruction of the aboriginal's life is as inevitable as the submergence of the Egyptian temples caused by the dams of the Nile... As things are going there can be no grandeur in the primitive's end. It will not be even simple extinction, which is not the worst of human destinies. It is to be feared that the aboriginal's last act will be squalid, instead of being tragic. What will be seen with most regret will be, not his disappearance, but his enslavement and degradation."

While Nirad C. Chaudhuri was still in India, during the final phase of the second World War and was probably thinking about repatriating to England, in case Churchill lost elections after the war and the new British labor government freed India, an Austro-Hungarian social scientist, Karl Polanyi, wrote a book entitled The Great Transformation, based on his experience of the US economy and followed this book with another book called The Livelihood of Man, which appeared 13 years after Polanyi's death, in 1977. It is the thought and substance contained in these two books by Polanyi that effectively answers the doom's day forecast of Nirad C. Chaudhari for the Indian aboriginals. Karl Polanyi, the father of economic sociology, writes, "There has been a great transformation in modern, post industrial society; whereas, the tribal community that still lives in a pre industrial era, but in the modern and post industrial times, will not have uniform market and demand-supply driven people." He says that there will be a great divide between the forces of barter and subsistence economy that govern the tribal community and the exchange and profit maximization-led market economy. Hence such a tribal community will constantly be adapting to mainstream itself with the larger society. A subsistence economy, to which the tribal community has historically been embedded and adjusted, like forest produce gathering, fishing, hunting and peasantry-based production of food, are based on the kinship-like well-known institutions and norms of using local natural resources for meeting basic needs. However, the market economy pushes them constantly towards such diverse institutions and monetary wants that are neither well-known nor well-understood by the tribal community. Therefore, the tribal community will always be choosing diverse livelihoods. Some of these shall be local resource based and others will be money, exchange and market-driven. Polanyi showed that there has always been contradiction between the market theory and how the people behaved. He said that the market's substantive features, particularly its institutions, included patterns for organizing man's livelihood that were quite different from the market ideal that had been prescribed by Adam Smith. These patterns included the reciprocity networks that dominated economic life among tribal and kinship groups; they also included channels of redistribution characteristic of ancient empires and — one might add parenthetically — of modern welfare states.