1 Introduction

Since the early 1990s, the globalisation of farming has ensured that the interests of agribusiness are premised on a highly contested neoliberal approach to development, one that naturalises food scarcity imaginaries as the justification for the expansion of global agricultural value chains.¹ This agenda is also premised on a framing of “smallholder farmers like shifting cultivators, as ‘backwards,, inefficient and non-productive which, in turn, renders these farmers and their practices as obstacles to development.”² In the context of British India, development programmes targeted at rural agrarian improvement were initiated during the late 1940s by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (fao) and the Ford Foundation. These organisations attempted to discredit shifting cultivation, describing it as unproductive, backward, harmful and bad for the mountain environment, as they rolled out the Grow More Food Programme.³

In the Naga Hills, slash-and-burn farming, a way of life and a technique integral to the reciprocal redistributive village economy, was disrupted by the promotion of plantation cash crops and wet terrace rice cultivation, beginning in the late 1950s. Today, land use in the slash-and-burn landscape is complicated by the interplanting of cash crops with plantations in the hills and wet paddy cultivation in the foothills. These changes reflect a relentless effort made by external actors to transform people’s food habits, land use, land relation and priorities of crop cultivation. This is not only unique to Nagaland per se, but has happened in swidden cultivation landscapes across South and Southeast Asia.⁴

In this chapter, I will engage with the question of power and the characteristic ways it operates in upland settings to bring into being the notion of a simple, powerless people who are engaged with the state and the market. The territorialisation process and informal, personalised lines of patronage are two forms of power that hinge on the real and supposed ignorance and isolation of uplanders. The definition of uplanders as a “backward” people has legitimated both harsh measures such as land expropriation and forced settlement as well as benevolent forms of paternalism and control through subsidies, grants and micro-credit.⁵ The questions I try to answer in this chapter are, first, do farmers who belong to a particular mode of production adapt to changes immediately when they are introduced under state-sponsored schemes and programmes? And, second, how does agrarian change take shape?

Theories of agricultural change and social stratification among highland communities in the Global South have been offered since the early 1930s, with considerable emphasis on an evolutionary model that places paddy peasantry or settled irrigated farming at the top of the pyramid in primary production. Edmund Leach proposed a model in the early 1940s that posited the Shans and the Kachins as two social systems determined by geographical barriers. The relations between Shan paddy farming and Kachin swiddeners were, in the first place, ecological, and reflected two distinct political orders, one democratic and the other, authoritarian.⁶ This functionalist framework finds reflection in Audrey Richards’ work on Bemba swidden cultivation in Africa.⁷ Richards makes a connection between labour supply, nutrition and diet to show that the shortage of male labour in the north province of Zambia caused Bemba swidden agriculture to break down under population pressure and migration. Henrietta Moore and Megan Vaughan, while revisiting Richards’ work on swidden farming in Zambia, argue that her claims were more culturised and linked ethnic identity with their mode of livelihood. Thus, both were co-constituent in producing Bemba identity as savage, vulnerable and wild. While the natural scientists pointed to the physical limits of the viability of citemene (swidden), Richards pointed to the social limits by looking at labour migration and, chiefly, power. Richards reinscribed a standard understanding of swidden as a single process of “cutting and burning trees” that was on the verge of “breakdown.”⁸

Similarly, unlike the standard use of “involution” that dominated for a decade to distinguish between “swidden and swahi”⁹ – that is, hill farming and valley agriculture – “plain emulation” was largely presented as a factor of sociocultural change in a number of case studies on Southeast Asian agriculture.¹⁰ All these studies present a synchronic social history of highland agriculture based on the teleology of “evolution.” These explanations of agricultural intensification ignored the colonial practice of constructing “social and ethnic hierarchy” and diachronic interventions¹¹ that produce difference and identities, characterising the people who inhabited the forest landscape as jangly (wild) food gatherers and semi-nomadic settlers, as opposed to the settled agriculturists on the plains.

Agrarian intensification in the Naga Hills is today defined by growing market demand for long beans and people changing their taste towards rice, as the “crop of civilisation.” Its easy accessibility and increasing popularity in farmers’ cuisines has replaced the traditional food crop from farmers’ culinary habits. Although farmers still grow millet as a supplement to the dominant rice cultivation in the area, it is no longer the staple food crop. Simultaneously, cultural values and state policies concerning the popularisation of horticulture and settled wet terrace rice cultivation have been mediated by village elites and the Baptist Church to produce land use changes and land relations that make agricultural intensification and social differentiation in a Naga village more complex than when explained from a standard evolutionary model. Here, I find Sturgeon’s use of the term “landscape plasticity” useful to understanding how land use changes in the Southeast Asia highlands are influenced by local factors in different socio-political contexts that reflect the negotiating role of human agency and the global and national state agendas that aim to territorialise the landscape and the people. Sturgeon goes on to show how Akha land use in China and Thailand is influenced both by state policies and the negotiating role played by the Akha community leaders themselves.¹²

Similarly, other works in recent years have given alternative explanations to the practices of social differentiation in highland swidden farming, claiming that there can be no uniform evolutionary model that explains how farming systems have developed and intensified. The changes in farming and land use practices are determined by the local history of migration, settlement, state policies and institutional interference, which are mediated by the changing attitudes and perceptions of farmers.¹³ They are also determined by the networks of patronage that link the global and the local by integrating the village economy with the discourses of regional, local and global markets. I will focus on the practices of articulation that rural elites and intermediaries adopt in the study village, in order to examine emerging inequalities based on class relations and property rights that define access to and control over land and forest resources.¹⁴ Hence, resource access and control is not determined by neat class relations but, rather, by the power of individuals to control labour relations. This power is not codified under common laws but defined by customary practices.

I will use life histories and the case studies of individual farmers and then bring into context the overall argument of my paper. Life histories help in explaining the underlying complexity of farming that occupies much of the jhum¹⁵ farming landscape, where quantified data analysis does not produce satisfactory results because of the complexity involved in people’s use of and dependence on the land.

2 A backdrop to Jhum in Leangkangru and the Shamator Region

The diffusion of rice agriculture was formally undertaken by the Agriculture Department in the newly formed Indian state of Nagaland during the 1970s through the Wet Terrace Rice Intensification Programme in the Tuensang and Mon districts. In the post-independence period, tour reports confirm that in the unadministered Naga Hill areas that were placed under nefa (North Eastern Frontier Area) administration, the encouragement for jhummias to adopt terrace cultivation had already begun. Man Bahadur Rai, the Assistant Political Officer of the nefa, gives insightful references in his tour diary to state interventions taking shape in that area as early as 1956: “At 0700 hrs we left for Pangsha village. On the way villagers were seen working in their cultivations. They are now burning jhooms. I met one Noklak Agricultural Demonstrator who was going to Pangsha to start his wtc [Wet Terrace Cultivation] project. Along the bank of river Lang Pangsha, people have started wtc in quite a number of plots.” (emphasis added).¹⁶

In other tour reports produced by the nefa administration, touring officials were often accompanied by Agricultural Department Village Level Workers (vlw), who would train local jhum farmers in the art of paddy cultivation and willing headmen and village chiefs in the art of terrace farming. Irrigation incentives were also proposed to intensify paddy cultivation in the flatlands, provided that villagers promised to work these fields year after year. In his 1951 tour diary, the Additional Deputy Commissioner (adc) of Tuensang Frontier Division writes that one of the Pangsha men requested that he open a terrace rice cultivation plot in their area. In return, he promised that he would ask the government to grant subsidies, provided that the villagers give him their word that the fields, once opened, would be continuously cultivated.¹⁷ Since the mid-1950s, the postcolonial Indian frontier administration had started the diffusion of modern ideas of farming on a small scale, under the five-year plans for the development of tribal and backward areas. These policies were broadly framed under a policy of paternalism advanced by Verrier Elwin, who was appointed as Special Adviser for Tribal Affairs in the North Eastern Frontier Agency (nefa). In 1956, Elwin submitted his policy dossier, which contained a “new deal” for the economic upliftment and development of the tribal areas of the North Eastern Frontier of India.¹⁸ His assignment in the nefa sanctioned Nehru’s principle of “unity in diversity” and the idea of panchsheel – the five strategies for tribal development.¹⁹ The Yimchunger jhummias were, once again, classified as a “backward and isolated hill people.” The “new deal” also endorsed the popularisation of highland wet terrace rice farming among jhummias. As a result of this policy initiative, two kinds of paddy farms developed among the upland Yimchunger jhummia settlements: paddy farms in lowland marshy swamps and terraces on steep mountain slopes. The former were more productive, yet vulnerable to flooding. The latter were protected from floods but were often damaged by landslides before they stabilised. The success of farming in these landscapes was often an individual achievement, depending on the resource mobilisation done by a farmer with government officials through networks of patronage, unlike in jhum fields, where we see collective action and participation from entire villages and clans. The rice intensification programme among Yimchunger jhummias developed in three phases. The first phase was under the nefa administration (1950–1960) and the second phase began in the 1970s, after the Yimchunger area was separated from the nefa administration. The third phase started in the 1990s, when all farmers started to take an active interest in paddy farming, as a result of their increasing interest in the consumption of rice, as a superior and tastier food crop, and because of incentives coming from the Baptist Church. Here, I will reflect on individual life histories of farmers and on how pani kheti (wet terrace rice cultivation) has evolved through agricultural demonstrators locally known as kelu babu. The growth of pani kheti has remarkably changed the agrarian land use, as it sustains the plantations and orchards that squats jhum fallows (uncultivated land). Farmers are increasingly dependent on government subsidies and schemes that target the popularisation of agroforestry and horticultural crops. Since the late 1980s, the Agriculture Department has reduced terrace wetland subsidies and has focused on promoting horticulture and plantation farming. The policy is also endorsed in recent changes in forest rights and regulation passed by the state legislature. The Nagaland Tree Felling Regulation 2002, which is an amendment of earlier jhumland regulation, states that: “All horticulture species will not require permission for felling, from non-forested areas including plantation of such species, excluding the following species: (a) aam (Magnifera indica) and (b) wild apple.”²⁰

In Yimchunger paddy farms, aam (mango) co-evolved after seeds were supplied by the Agricultural Department and privately procured by farmers from nurseries in Dimapur town. Nurseries have boomed in Dimapur over the last decade, as they find a ready market in jhum farmers in the uplands. The State Agricultural Department procures pullies (saplings) from plains nursery planters and supplies them at a subsidised price to promote horticultural crops among jhum cultivators. The intensification of agroforestry has led to the scarcity of free land (commons) in the uplands, which is pushing farmers to choose more commercial crops. However, intensification does not reflect a substantial increase in farm productivity, as many farmers responded that their output is far less than the inputs in agriculture. Rice cultivation is not gaining popularity because of productivity. Rather, it is the vicious cycle of patronage created by state officials, development programmes and political party workers in the village that sustains this practice. Similarly, the popularity of rice over other crops in recent years is attached to prestige and linked to social capital, as recognised by Baptist Church deacons and pastors, who promote rice over other crops in their Sunday prayer sermons as the crop of the civilised people. In addition to this, the symbolic capital that rice consumption provides to famers has added to its consumption value as the “food grain of civilisation.” Despite this, villagers still depend on millet, buckwheat, maize and long beans as substitutes for rice during times of scarcity at the end of the agricultural cycle. For many families, cash income from government jobs has promoted the reliance on imported market rice, commonly known in the village as “ration rice” also ocasionally supplied by government’s Public Distribution System (PDS) under Priority Household (PHH) and Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) programme. While, in traditional Yimchunger society, millet and buckwheat were combined, the demise of buckwheat and millet cultivation has come with the popularisation of rice. This keeps poor and landless farmers in Yimchunger villages dependent on coarser grains such as maize and long beans, which are generally meant for fattening animals.

3 Diversifying Slash-and-Burn Land Use in Leangkangru: Ethnographic Evidence

Far away from the state capital Kohima (approximately 290 kilometres) lies the village of the Yimchunger Nagas, Leangkangru. I explored the village with a Yimchunger resident of Shamator town who was working as a facilitator of community conservation in the Nagaland Environment Protection and Economic Development (neped) project. He described Leangkangru as the most successful village in the whole Shamator area, as they had delivered results by successfully participating in government- and community-driven development programmes. Leangkangru, I soon realised, represents the promised land for immigrants, who migrated to this village from neighbouring villages. This resulted in its composite identity as a “collection village”: a village that has grown with migrants coming in search of their clan members and relatives and as refugees from their natal villages and clans.

The settlement became a refuge for people who had been orphaned by colonial raids and the practice of headhunting in their native village. Some came to take shelter in the homes of their kin, while others migrated because they had lost all family members in their own villages. In addition, a good number of people migrated from faraway places, changed villages and, finally, settled in Leangkangru. The first settlers of this new village came from the surrounding villages. Shiponger was the biggest donor of land. For this act of generosity, the village elders explained that their parents and first settlers offered mithuns, chicken and pigs in exchange for land to Shiponger village headmen. In the initial years, the settlement was located at a much lower altitude: around 1100 metres. That later changed as raids and headhunting diminished. The first settlers were frequently challenged by other tribes. Villagers narrate tales of many heads being taken in the headhunting raids and heads taken by truce and by men camouflaged in the bridal paths (footpaths create by Nagas over hill slopes), as villagers crossed over from one village territory to another. Head-taking declined in the late 1940s as the evangelists came through Shiponger to Shamator and Sikur village, which had a significant Sema population. The Assam Rifles established its camp in Shamator town in 1952. At that time, Leangkangru was a small, new settlement near Sangpurr and Shamator, more prominent and numerically larger Yimchunger villages.

The village where I undertook research to understand land relations was originally a small village that came into existence as a collection of villages in 1938. The year of settlement is engraved in the village “Citizen pillar” that was set up by the village headman in the centre of the village to commemorative the fifty years of its existence. My host, Nikon, was also an immigrant who had come from Shiponger village after the raid of 1942 by troops led by a British officer, whose name, he recalled from popular tales in the village, was “Adam Saho.” We do get a reference to a Colonel Adams in official colonial correspondences, who toured the region and carried out punitive raids on head-hunting villages. A significant proportion of the villagers who now inhabited the upper Khel²¹ were from that village. Nineteen families from Sangpurr had migrated to join Leangkangru. The affiliation that brought them together was their clan patronage and reciprocity. Most of the migrants belonged to the Jangra clan. The Jangra clan is not the numerically most dominant in Sangpurr village, but it was in Leangkangru. When Nikon first came to the village, his father had taken shelter in the lower khel with another Jangra clan household. They provided them with shelter and a jhum plot. During the 1980s, my host had moved to the upper khel to make his own khel. His brother had also become a gau burah (village headman) and another of his brothers had joined the Nagaland police. His elder brother became a village guard in the late 1970s and today he works as the vg commander. His own upbringing was meagre. However, he had the fortune to study in an Ao Baptist missionary school. His sister was married to the head dobashi (people who can speak two languages: the official language of administration and their native tongue and acted as go-between in village disputes) in the town, and he himself enjoys a commanding position among his clansmen. In 2000, he separated his khel from that of his brother, who acts as one of the village headmen in the area. His social mobility in the village is reflective of the shifting power relations in the village and represents the changing dynamics of land relations in the village.

A narration of his life story shows how farming that was once based on the power of the chief’s command and control over labour power was dissolved with the emergence of the Baptist Church and the entry of development programmes through political party workers and government intermediaries in the village. New land relations have emerged, and these are reflected in the nature of “access control” over resources, particularly land and labour,²² exercised by patrons in the village through different community-driven development schemes. In contemporary Naga villages, the village development board and village council are the most important legislative bodies: they implement and oversee externally funded development programmes through the selection of beneficiaries, mediating claims and village disputes and by setting up rules and regulation in the village. The village council is composed of both gau buras and nominated village council members (vcm).

In addition to this, land alienation has occurred because of customary rules that allow ancestorial property to be inherited only by male members in Naga society; females have no right.²⁶ While interacting with villagers, I realised that these three kinds of land arrangement were prevalent in the hilly swidden fields but not in wet terrace rice fields. Fixed private landownership had emerged since the government had started popularising wet terrace rice cultivation during the 1950s. Before that period, these lands were not cultivated, as they were not suitable for jhum cultivation, due to the annual inundation. In the initial years, as tour diaries suggest, the promotion of wet terrace rice cultivation was contested by some village headmen. The government was keen to settle jhum cultivators as this was seen as the first step towards containing jhum fellow and bringing about improvement.²⁷ It was very difficult to get labourers to do pani kheti, as their chiefly loyalty was attached to the jhum fields.

The instructions from the Assistant Deputy Commissioner were directed towards the opening up of pani kheti and suited the interests of village headmen and village patrons, who were now going to gain from settled terrace cultivation. With the rise of plantation farming and terrace rice cultivation and the proliferation of cartos (ammunition) in the hands of the village guards, the degraded forest had depleted the abundance of wild animals. The proliferation of guns also meant a decline in bushmeat. In addition, the decline in mithun has facilitated the proliferation of pani kneti. Correspondingly, since the 1990s, changes in farmers’ crop choices and land use have affected household cattle supply. This land use and these cropping changes are linked to a host of other factors that link people’s belief system and the changes brought on by institutional intervention. These changes, though subtle, are mediated by human agency.

Leangkangru presents a characteristic case study of agricultural intensification that shows a complex history of how land relations and land use changes have been affected by migration, changing landownership patterns and clan dynamics in the village, which are based on lineage history and mother village affiliation. Comparably, villagers’ association with government intermediaries, political party patrons and the church has played an important role in establishing patron-client relations within the village among clan households.

4 The Case of Nikon: The Second Settler

Here, I present the case study of one farmer to illustrate how, despite their late arrival in the village, farmers have achieved high social mobility and have become important decision makers and landed elite in the village through brokerage in development programmes.

Nikon was my host and I had spent considerable time with him in the village. He was a latecomer – the second person to come to the village from Sangpurr village. His father first came to Leangkangru after the 1942 Sangpurr raid. When I asked Nikon why he had migrated to the upper khel, he smiled and said he intended to live close to the church and moved with the plan to establish his own khel, where he could establish his own patron-client relations with his clan members and kin. His children defended his relocation by observing that, although they were the second settlers, not a single villager can benefit without their father’s role as broker in development programmes. Nikon’s brother had also become a village headman by the time they relocated. Many other villagers who lived surrounding his settlement claimed through hearsay that, until the late 1980s, Nikon’s family was very modest. His father had given him two plots of land for cultivation and his other brother did not get any. One of his brothers joined the Nagaland police. His other brothers worked as village guard commandants. Nikon was the political intermediary in the village and benefitted from his political patrons’ successive election victories from 1989 to 2009. During this phase, he, along with his brothers, consolidated assets and bought multiple plots of land in all parts of the village, with the consent of the village headmen. Today, he owns more than fourteen plots of land in the village.

During our stay in the village, he light-heartedly remarked that, whenever a villager needed money, he gave them cash in return for mortgaging their land. He was also well-connected with the public servants and Agriculture Department staff, who would bring schemes and programmes of improvement to the village in return for electoral support during general elections. During my stay in the village, the Flood and Irrigation Department officials visited the village to conduct a prospective survey for irrigation. Nikon welcomed the guests and introduced the village headman to the officials. In the previous years, he had established irrigation, fisheries and other household assets by diverting resources through the formation of a self-help group with his daughter as chairman. In 1978, he got married in the village church. In those days, “holy marriages” were unheard of in Yimchunger villages. During that year, he also became the Sunday school master in the village church. Since then, he has held many positions in the village, including secretary of the village development board, which he occupied from 1990–1999. He was also the planning committee chairman of the church’s Golden Jubilee celebrations. Over the years, he has amassed enormous support among his kinsmen. He was the owner of the largest khel and had nineteen families under his direct influence. In 1978, the same year he got married, he bought one plot of land. At the time, he was the president of the village student union. The crops that he grew were millet, buckwheat corn and long beans. In 1980, he bought a pani kheti (paddy plot) by paying a little cash to a distressed seller. That year, he cultivated paddy for the first time. In 1989, one of the clansmen from his village of origin won the legislative assembly elections and appointed him as his chief political liaison in the village. From then on, he started buying many plots of land. He then became the vice president of the All India Congress Committee of the Shamator area. His political links with the legislative assembly member and later minister brought him many incentives to expand his land holdings in the village. In 1986, he experimented with planting pine trees in one of his jhum fields for the first time. In subsequent years, he planted gamoria and teak. In 1999, he experimented with running orange plantations and became the de facto officer in charge of sapling redistribution for beneficiary households. Since 2003, he has diversified his upland farming through hollock, jatropha, banana, pineapple and increased long bean cultivation.

Over the past fourty-four years, he has consolidated his land holding in the village from one plot of land to fourteen and has diversified his cropping with state support and the patronage he received from his political patron. Land is unequally distributed in the village, with 60 per cent of households owning over ten plots of land, as opposed to the 18 per cent of the households that are landless. During this period, many other farmers lost their land. This has been the consequence of privatised land holding, which has helped influential clan members to consolidate land, while others have been left behind. State support has helped those farmers who network effectively and have the social capital to negotiate with the political actors that form the patron-client relations in contemporary Naga villages. Due to Nikon’s political influence and his close ties with the village church, one of his sons joined the Assam Rifles, while his daughter started the theology programme in Kohima town. In the 1990s, when long bean cultivation became a major source of income for Leangkangru farmers, he worked as a go-between for town merchants in the supply chain. During his two terms as village development board secretary, his wife recalls he was always running between the village and the administrative headquarters, negotiating seed supplies and procuring subsidies for the village.

In the late 1990s, upland agricultural intensification on a large scale had started with schemes provided by various government departments. These schemes were implemented in highland villages through their village councils, village development board and, on a more informal level, through the khel heads that have control over their clan members. The labour supply is controlled by the church, student bodies, Citizen (village headman), the family and, within the khel, through reciprocity between families. Nikon’s success comes from his rise in the village as a political actor and a patron. From a simple party foot soldier, he rose to the post of vice president. His fluency in the Ao Naga dialect also made him popular among Ao officers and district administrators (75 per cent of all top government jobs in Nagaland are held by Ao Nagas, who are also responsible for distributing development money). He has used these skills to act as a contact point and intermediary for various projects and programmes implemented in the village. He once explained to me in passing that, although the first founders still own the village, they could not bring development, as they were uneducated and were unacquainted with modern-day patronage politics. Joseph’s agricultural success closely corresponded to land consolidation in every post-election season during the last three decades. During an election, a huge amount of cash passes through the village economy, and he is assigned the role to consolidate votes for his party. Because the majority of the public in the village belong to the Jangra clan, Nikon’s political leadership in the village mattered.

Nikon’s agricultural success also comes from the patronage he has built within his clan members. In the last decade, when his party’s legislative assembly member and former minister were in power, his lineage members became beneficiaries. Besides plantation seeds, agricultural subsidies went to members of his clan. While his farm benefitted from the subsidised seed supplies, landless farmers benefitted from cash subsidies. This made him a prominent plantation landlord in the village. During the 2009 cropping season, he cultivated five plots of land: three upland jhum fields and two lowland paddy fields. Only in one farm had he done mixed cropping of chillies, tubers, white oats and other vegetables along with millet. In other agricultural fields, he planted jatropha curcas (a diesel crop), maize, long beans, Naga chillies and rice in his wet paddy field. His paddy field, located in the Nyaporo side of the village, was one of the largest, with two fishery ponds. One was functional while the other lay barren, as the self-help group (shg) did not work as well as intended. He explained that when a shg is formed, people are very enthusiastic. However, after some time, public participation fades away, as people take less interest in the fields. He was sharing one portion of his land with a clan member, the Public Works Department driver and one landless relative. In return, these people were helping him with free labour. His other pani kheti was offered to the former church pastor on similar terms. These lands were all provided free of rent. In lieu of rent, help was expected during the sowing and harvesting season in addition to building huts and farm rest houses. In 2009, Joseph had built a new two-storeyed rest shed in his pani kheti. He charged rent on none of them. Rather, all tenants contributed family labour to his field.

Nikon strongly believed that land relations among the Nagas were not the same as in the caste-based society of the plains. He explained that there is no sharecropping among Yimchunger Nagas and, hence, there is no exploitation of labour among jhummias. Land relations cannot be understood in pure class-caste binaries in the upland Naga Hills. Many authors have tried to see land relation in idiosyncratic class-caste terms, and they have failed to demonstrate how labour relations are mediated by kinship ties and clan patronage politics. The web of power in jhummed landscapes is exerted through the “bundle of rights” that community members hold over resources achieved by controlling labour relations. The changes in land relation reflect the shifts in labour relations within khels and clans, now determined by the new patronage links established by the village headman with government intermediaries and their schemes and programmes of jhumland development.

Reciprocal inter-household exchange of land in return for labour brought success to individual families who were working just like the chiefs, but reciprocity was now based on patronage that linked state schemes and programmes with the villagers, who participated in programmes in the hope of getting loans and subsidies. Resource access was thus facilitated by people in the village who could attract subsidies, seed supplies, loans and cash payments. In the past, before the establishment of the village church and the rise of newcomers such as Nikon, the village headman was the most powerful person in the village. Nikon’s father had originally taken shelter in the house of one the chief’s brothers. Slowly, through his association with the church, formal education and his association with the political party, he had emerged as the public leader in the village. He had been responsible for bringing development projects and schemes to the village. The political parties developed a link with the people by supporting them by means of agricultural subsidies, tree crops, tree saplings and promises of development, roads and horticultural plants before elections.

For Nikon, plantations were important, as these were assets for the future, while his landless kin depended on subsidies for their immediate household needs. These subsidies helped in building patronage between the landless and the landed, and helped produce tangible assets. Farmers such as Nikon had built their access and control over village resources through the expansion of their farms. In 2008, when the Village Council ordered a neelam (auction) of all cattle in the village, the decision had not come as a surprise. Cattle that had been introduced in the village under the Animal Husbandry programme were destroying and eating away the saplings of new plantations, damaging crops that were now growing close to the village boundary and grazing in areas that were now settled as reserve and private forest. At a much earlier date, mithun had vanished from Leangkangru forest because of the opening of new paddy fields.

For Nikon, these patronage affiliations were important, as they sustained modern agroforestry promoted by state schemes intended to shift cultivation. Class formation between households in swidden cultivation landscapes is thus produced by the practice through which development subsidies are appropriated by key village patrons. During my interviews, I could only gather data from individual households on the amount of subsidies each farmer got; I was unable to obtain information on the seed supplied to promote tree plantation and horticulture crops. I later solved this conundrum after interviewing a slightly aged man who explained that landless farmers could also become the beneficiaries of plantation programmes by demonstrating their de facto ownership over land that was not formally their own. In such cases, the landless farmers became the beneficiaries of financial assistance while their landed kinsman appropriated the seed supplies. In this way, both parties benefitted from the programme through the mutual exchange of subsidies. Thus, access to resources was not determined by property rights but by knowledge of how to capitalise on claims to development assistance and free seed supplies. Forest reserves were also claimed by people who were not part of the village. In such cases, large tracts of forest were reserved by outsiders and local politicians. Here, again, subsidies were used to bring about afforestation in the village. There was an extreme shortage of firewood in Leangkangru, as plantation reserves that were coming up in the village did not allow households to collect minor forest products, as these reserve forests were no longer part of the village commons. Trees were fenced and fines were imposed on trespassers and illegal woodcutters. In the past, access had been free, as the trees had little economic value. Now, however, women and children had to walk a long distance to collect firewood from the forest, as the commons were shrinking with the growing agroforestry programme. Even Nikon’s family had problems in collecting firewood, as they had reserved their private forest for timber. Wild trees that produced excellent fuel wood were never replanted, as they were seen as wild and non-economical. Subsequently, some people started selling fuel wood to outsiders, as the townspeople needed cash for their children’s education.

As my study shows, the consolidation and privatisation of land holding leads to rural class formation. Consolidation is linked to cash inflow, patronage and state support, which are utilised by farmers according to their affiliation to their lineage and clan. Jhum farming landscapes in Nagaland are evolving as sites of agricultural transformation. Conventional studies of lowland agriculture were based on technological changes; however, neither the notion that the green revolution induced social differentiation in predominantly rice-growing lowlands nor the classic model of agricultural involution, as proposed by Geertz,²⁹ explain the historical specificity and cultural dimensions of highland societies which are based on lineage and clan affiliation, as opposed to the caste- and class-based societies in the plains. In recent years, many studies have investigated these questions by refocusing on local-level case studies and on the power structures within which agrarian change occurs.³⁰ Thus, the focus has shifted from studies of agrarian changes based on the social and political structure of society to processes that bring about inequalities in society. Studies also examine how lineages, institutional interventions and clan structures allow patronage politics to shape affiliation and difference.

Class relations are not well defined in lineage-based societies, nor does an evolutionary model fit the nature of agricultural change. Agrarian change is influenced by interactions that are built through patronage and kinship ties, in which the relations of power are defined by personal networks and contacts. Many farmers in Yimchunger villages have articulated that “there is no inequality in Naga society, as it is class-less and caste-less.” This statement, at face value, stands true. Despite this belief, however, disparate inequalities are rapidly emerging. Social dynamics and agrarian change in the highlands must be understood in relation to both these changing dynamics and the bundle of rights and access to resources articulated under customary laws and age-old traditions.

In Leangkangru village today, eighteen households (nearly 16 per cent) are reported to be landless, while the Nagaland Environment Protection through Economic Development (neped) survey has placed this at 30 per cent. Landlessness is quite unusual in communities that have village forests, clan forests and community forests. However, in Leangkangru village, every land holding is private. Reserve forests belong to individuals, headmen, first settlers and project beneficiaries. Out of the 106 households surveyed during my fieldwork, excepting the eighteen households who are landless, every farmer has a plantation in his jhum fields. A few farmers have large reserves that contain teak, gamoria, orange, pineapple, banana, cardamom, ginger and many other crops introduced through government schemes. Paddy farming has already individualised landholding in the valleys. A similar phase is building up in the hills through afforestation and agroforestry, where access and control over resources are highly individualised. Although farmers in Leangkangru always claimed to have established private landholdings, “access control” over private jhum land was communal and flexible. Every farmer in the village had the right to take minor forest products from the fields of another farmer. With the establishment of plantation timber trees and orchards, access to forest resources in fallow jhum plots began to be restricted. These changes must be understood as part of the state’s panoptic control over unruly spaces. The local colonial officials accomplished their dual objectives of “conservation” and “fixity” by promoting wet terrace cultivation, as, inherently, this process produced a fixed assessment of tenure, which was easier to control than jhum fields, which were constantly mobile.

In traditional Yimchunger society, khels were an area of land defined by a khel boundary and a murung house with a village chief or first settler, who claimed to be the owner of the village and who was the de jure custodian of land and forest resources. Today, the khels have been fragmented by new settlers, existing families and by people acting as political intermediaries and government servants, including people who have been appointed as Village Council members and the politically appointed village headman. As one of the headmen remarked, “it is leadership that is counted in the village; the traditional first settlers are illiterate, they don’t know the government procedures to write applications, meet government officials and explain them about their needs. An educated, literate person is more important and wiser to bring about development.”³¹

The relationship between the paddy fields and the jhum plots are thus a reflection of the social networks that have been built between the patrons and their clients in the village. Landlessness fosters patronage and dependence; government subsidies and the distribution of seedlings and loans under the capacity-building and communitisation programmes have a similar effect. For example, some farmers expressed that landlessness was no issue in getting agricultural subsidies for tree plantation under various agriculture department schemes. The landless farmers enjoyed the subsidies by becoming beneficiaries, as they showed their landed kin’s property as their own while applying for subsidies. Landowners parted with their share of subsidies but became the long-term beneficiaries of orchards. This way, they could make multiple claims to subsidies and seed supplies under different government programmes for agricultural development over time.

These narratives were based on the specific success stories of “influential men” who were part of the colonial patronage politics. In the decolonisation phase, we see that wet terrace rice boomed and was diffused through these networks of intermediaries, who were the educated men of the village, party workers and government servants attached to the district and circle/block administration. The village church record clearly confirms the popularity of rice over other traditional jhum crops, which have slowly come to decline in production with changing land use and Yimchunger Naga society’s preference of rice over other jhum crops. Likewise, there has been an expansion of plantation and non-traditional food crops in the region.

5 Conclusion

With the coming of state-backed subsidies and new legislation that formally recognised the village council, relations of power and reciprocity as well as land relations were rearranged, meaning that new landholding arrangements were produced. New categories of people (second settlers) rose to positions of influence within the existing social institutions in the village, as they gained access to new forms of wealth and capital, as reflected in Nikon’s life history. This also had an impact on land relations and is reflected in the landholding pattern in the study village. Before the advent of colonial administration, usufruct rights over land were stronger and more established, as they defined the land relations between families. During my field study, these were shrinking, as more and more upland farms were brought under permanent cultivation through agroforestry programmes. The establishment of permanent rights over jhum land gradually destroyed the land entitlements formally established as a bundle of rights, based on reciprocity between the chiefs and his subjects, the second settlers. The introduction of new crops, such as wet rice, led to permanent rights being established over lowland fields, which once had been barren forestland.

In analysing the shifting land relations in Leangkangru, with the access of power transferring from the first settlers to the second settlers, I was inspired by studies that focused on control over the access to and use of land and resources. For African or Southeast Asian highland societies, where land relations cannot be understood using the Western nomenclature of rights over land or tenure, several studies have defined the unique land relations and the customary tradition of access to land.³³

By contrast, for Northeast India, there are limited sets of studies that engages with the critical debate on land, tenure and rights in the upland areas inhabited by the “Scheduled Tribes.”³⁴ The understanding of land relations in Nagaland are based on Western notions of property and colonial classifications that were documented in colonial tour diaries and monographs. Even – and especially – where legislation sought to recognise and protect “customary” land rights, these Western, colonial notions were already modifying their nature and paved the way for further changes. These standard classifications in the present land-tenure context misrepresent the complex power structure and labour relations exercised through land-based property relations. The egalitarian nomenclature used to understand land relations is clearly not applicable to the contemporary social context, where the village headmanship has been institutionalised in Nagaland. Customary land relations and principles of justice based on tradition are mediated by the district administration. The local dobashi courts do not operate within the mainstream judicial framework that compartmentalises the judiciary and the executive. In fact, under the guise of “customs,” decisions are made by executives who interpret customs based on the knowledge of dobashis. Faith-based institutions such as the church also exercise enormous control over land-based social relations, as they control labour distribution through age sets which are organised in the village to provide free labour for these religious organisations. Similarly, land relations are increasingly being defined by the growing commercial value of the land and the growing trend of establishing rights to control access to it.

In this chapter, I have discussed the ways in which land and property relations have altered over time in the Yimchunger Naga shifting cultivation village, with a shift towards private property. The colonial interpretation of land relations and the recognition of village headmen as village patrons gave the headmen (chiefs) both the legal and customary writ to make decisions on community land. With the upsurge of the money economy and state assistance for permanent settlement through the promotion of terrace cultivation, the value attached to land has changed, as it has become alienable: land has become a “commodity” that can easily be exchanged, mortgaged and permanently developed. The institutionalisation of private property has led to increasing landlessness and to control over community land by those villagers who can establish that they have the resources to develop the land permanently by cultivating wet rice in irrigated terraces or by establishing tree plantations and horticultural programmes. In other words, it was via the promotion and adoption of wet terrace rice cultivation and tree plantations that permanent individual rights were established and that the new regime of alienable proprietorship, in which the value of land is determined through exchange and sale, was put in place.