Feminist and Anti-caste Activism in the Bodhgaya Land Movement of Rural Bihar: “We Achieved Great Feats!”

Feminist and Anti-caste Activism in the Bodhgaya Land Movement of Rural Bihar examines the long-term social, spatial, and material impacts of the Bodhgaya Land Movement (BGLM) of the 1970s and 1980s on its participants and beneficiaries. This book presents an ethnography and oral history of radical feminist and anti-caste activism based on interviews with the urban, educated Vahini activists who instigated the movement and oral narratives of the rural Bhuiyan Dalit women and men who led the protests. It also analyses the maps drawn by formerly enslaved Dalit laborers to document the social changes that resulted, as well as those that failed to materialize, from the land movement. In doing so, this book theorizes the multiple oppressions and forms of resistance with which these activists engaged to bring forth their rich experiences and analyses of social conditions in Bihar. By centering caste and gender within its examination of the social movement, this book makes multiple contributions to feminist scholarship that will be of use to social scientists and advanced undergraduate and graduate students in Gender Studies, Asian Studies and other interdisciplinary fields.

Table of Contents:
Introd­­uction: Locating Land, Caste, and Feminist Activism in Bihar 1. “Earlier, Babaji Ruled”: Collective Memories of Dalit Bondage under the Bodhgaya Math 2. “Now We have to Stage a New Struggle”: Foundations of Total Revolution 3. “Ours was a Kranti Ladai”: Activist Praxis of the Bodhgaya Land Movement 4. “We Took Our Struggle to New Areas”: Spatial Transformations and Other Material Legacies of the Bodhgaya Land Movement 5. “Our Struggle is Far from Over”: Intangible Legacies of the Feminist Bodhgaya Land Movement in Bihar

About the Author :
Indulata Prasad, PhD (Anthropology), is an Assistant Professor in Women and Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Recent publications include Towards Dalit Ecologies (2022) and Caste-ing Space: Mapping the Dynamics of Untouchability in Rural Bihar, India (2021), for which she received the Bluestone Rising Scholar Award.

Review :
"This volume rescues the great Bodhgaya land movement from turning into pure legend. It is truly pioneering not only because it provides the first ever systematic account of the movement, but also very importantly locates it in Jayaprakash Narayan’s ideology. The volume is also path-breaking in its complex treatment of gender and caste relations when it comes to the land question in India. Anyone interested in social and economic justice will have their perspectives refined from reading this book." Awanish Kumar, Azim Premji University "Indulata Prasad tells a gripping story of the Bodhgaya Land Movement in 1970s Bihar. In this movement, members of a high-caste, middle-class, urban-based socialist youth organization moblized Dalit and other marginalized agricultural laborers, mostly women, who worked as slaves for a wealthy monastery that owned large amounts of land. Unlike many other such movements, this one succeeded: the agricultural workers threw off the system of slavery and won rights to the land on which they labored. Besides explaining the background to this struggle in earlier socialist movements for land rights for agricultural workers, Prasad also, most tellingly, investigates the longer-term results of the Bodhgaya Movement after the young, urban activists had mostly withdrawn. Pointing out the difference between having title to land and actually gaining control over it, she shows how the formerly landless laborers, now mobilized, continued the struggle to gain actual control of the land to which they had won titles. Most remarkably, by employing a combination of patient, sensitive ethnographic methods, Prasad is able to tell the story of the Bodhgaya Land Movement from the point of view of its Dalit participants. The result is a careful, nuanced account of an important chapter in the history of social and economic justice in India." Anne Feldhaus, Arizona State University "How is it possible to revisit the victories of an almost forgotten land struggle of rural Dalit women in Bihar? In this ambitious, beautifully written ethnography, Indulata Prasad ushers readers into the communities at the center of the Bodhgaya Land Movement (BGLM) to reveal hidden histories of unimaginable oppression and resistance that are more relevant than ever. In a context where conventional interviews have limited traction for uncovering embodied memory, Prasad sensitively complements narratives of memory with songs, mapping and storytelling from the giants of the land struggle. Pioneering in its methodology, unique in its focus and stark in its presentation of a recent local struggle with global implications, Feminist and Anti-caste Activism in the Bodhgaya Land Movement of Rural Bihar connects the present to the past and uplifts Dalit resistance." Smitha Radhakrishnan, Wellesley College