Exploring Concerns of the Poorest: The Relevance of Life-Histories

This chapter focuses on the “process-dimension” of poverty using qualitative and life-history methods.

In total, 47 in-depth life-histories on the chronic and extreme poor were carried out in different parts of the country focusing on their experiences, aspirations, and strategies of survival, coping and escape from poverty. All the interviews used in the present chapter were taken during May 2002-April 2003.

Each of these interviews represents an incomplete and partial account of the ordinary life of an ordinary person. Each of these protagonists, in effect, narrates what Chekhov once termed “the story of a Nobody” and leaves a strange taste in the mouth, to be sure. One cannot read the interviews in a single sitting for reading the tales of chronic and extreme poverty in first persons can be a painful experience:

as a reader you almost feel the helplessness of a researcher, any researcher, in the face of cluster of misfortunes within which these narrators announce their presence. Helplessness, because almost nothing can be done even individually for these peoples, although they illuminate our lost and retrieved selves, respond to our inner thoughts, appeal to our conscience, or even help us to strategise better in the global conquest of modernity, or for that matter, growth, democracy and anti-poverty. Nothing can be done, because as they help to clarify our research issues, as they illuminate the ignorant corners of the policy mind-sets, they fade away like the long-burning stars or fire-flies in the paddy-fields who continue to give light as they die. Many of them would have already faded away as one reads these lines, a few might be already dead, and those among the living in most likelihood have slipped even further down the poverty ladder, displaced and dislocated, like an uprooted migratory bird that left its home in search of better livelihood but ending up all the same in even greater distress, more “insulted and humiliated”

than ever before, to use the words of Dostoevsky.

In selecting the interviewees we have given focus on those who have been left-out or left-behind in the severe competition for scarce resources, including those who were pushed to the margins, and those who find themselves increasingly trapped in social and spatial conditions that encourage little upward mobility. Three broad categories can be identified. The first group consists of people located in the remote rural areas such as distant charlands, haor areas, and borderlands, especially in the North. This group also includes people affected by unfavourable environments such as river erosion (a number of interviewees continue to live for months, even years, in the distressed, uncared for, conditions by taking refuge on the embankment constructed by Water Board). The second group focuses on the socially

Poverty in Bangladesh

heterogeneous category of the income poorest such as abandoned old-age woman, handicapped adolescent girl, rural beggar, people whose livelihood is dependent primarily on agricultural wage labour, especially as migratory labour (earning, typically, lower wages than the resident labour), “the lowliest and the lost”, to use the words of Rabindranath Tagore. The third group includes marginalised identities though not necessarily from the poorest of the poor from the income point of view. This category relates to the socially excluded and/or adversely incorporated ethnic minorities, low-income religious minorities with a heightened sense of alienation, specific disadvantaged communities such as the hermaphrodites (hijras), people engaged in low-productivity and declining occupations and activities because of changing market demand, people operating in activities with very long work-hours, people taking up manual labour intensive jobs that are unsustainable all the same in the long-run physically or otherwise. The group also includes street-children with troubled childhood, the self-excluded mystics, and the stateless subjects of the borderlands (Chitmahal). This categorisation, however, does not exhaust the list of the possible social differences within the chronic and extreme poor group.

The case studies did not only document the various phases of life-trajectories of the poorest and the most subaltern, they also tried to understand the causes and triggers of slide into greater poverty in the broader social (family and community) context. At times they touched themes that go beyond just life-histories such as the soliciting of their opinions about other peoples, about the embedded class and power relations, and about the role of state and public bodies, even (ambitiously) tried to assess the hidden transcripts underlying their arts of resistance, complicity and individual plans for the future. At some point in conducting these interviews there was an instrumental attempt to understand what meanings they attach to such grand themes as development, social justice, quality of life and poverty reduction. In all of these attempts what strikes out is the sharp presence of an active, perceptive, and self-reflective mind of the poor quietly analysing the causes of personal or familial downfall with characteristic matter-of-fact narration of memorable events of a life passed in endemic deprivation punctuated by a series of shocks, traumas, and missed opportunities.

To provide glimpses of the presence of a critical and self-interrogating mind two examples (one from the field, while the other from the street) may be invoked here. As a 68-year old woman of the Mogolbasha Union of Kurigram in the North-West, who was abandoned by her three grown-up sons amidst pressures to survive under extreme conditions, remarked at the end of interview (this time by addressing the interviewer: the time was December with the period of seasonal distress—known as the Monga months—nearing the end, but a cold and bitter winter of January with the risks of new deaths still lied ahead): “The fact that you have come here to find out how I am doing, even the fact that you have come and sat beside me and asked me questions about my life is itself remarkable. I am grateful for that, for nobody came to me before and asked me how I am surviving. Even my sons do not come to this part for many months and ask about my whereabouts. I do not ask for any help; so long I shall live I want to live on my work ability alone. I understand that I have grown very old, but I can’t complaint. A daily wage of just half kg of rice, with one to two meals, after a day’s work at other people’s house may appear low but I understand why it is so. Work of an old woman like me cannot fetch higher price. After all, a human being is priced according to the type of his work.” The other example relates to the sharp remarks made by a number of street children in Dhaka city: “We don’t want any assistance. We want

Social Marginalisation and Chronic Poverty: Voices and Silences

77 police not to obstruct us if we want to sleep in some corner of the station before the mid-night and not to wake us up before 5 in the morning. Perhaps it can tell the police not to round us up for no reason every now and then, and take us to the correction centre (Bhovoghure Kendra). Both the food and the treatment are extremely poor there.”

A range of issues of development, modernisation, and livelihood strategy emerges from the close reading of these life-histories. The present discussion offered in this chapter is, however, limited to three main analytical objectives.⁵⁵ First, the preceding analysis of ascent and descent based on quantitative survey data has pointed to the importance of several factors. A reality-check through life-histories was an important motivation behind this exercise. In particular, we were interested to cross-check the validity of the thesis that the factors underlying descent were not, in most cases, the mirror-image of the factors that promote ascent from poverty. This can be assessed by examining the role of factors such as occurrence of and vulnerability to anticipated and unanticipated risks and shocks, demographic events, networking and social support mobilisation capacity (often, rather controversially, viewed as “social capital”), and political, economic and cultural factors underlying alienation of the chronic and extreme poor.

Second, deprivations are not only economic; they take place in non-economic spheres as well. Analysis of chronic and extreme income-poverty is still confined to the income space. What is, in addition, important is to explore why chronic social disadvantage persists even for people who are not otherwise rated among the income poorest. The probing can take us to a better formulation of what Gayatri Spivak defined as “the chronic marginality”, which distinguishes systemic and severe deprivations as the priority concern even within the general progressive discourse on “otherness” (Harasym 1990). A special sub-set of issues arises when there is multiple and overlapping vulnerabilities due to both income and non-income deprivations. Third, many of the respondents voiced their expectations (though quite “minimalist” when it comes to expecting any favour from the state) about what needs to be done to help them in their fight against hunger, familial disintegration, and different types of shocks. This points to the possible avenues of policy interventions, extending social support and care, and institutional governance issues. Although most of the interviewees are from the chronic poor and descending poor categories (with few exceptions belonging to the category of ascending poor) the perspective on policy and institutional priorities from the perspective of “lowliest and lost” may provide as important perspective as may be extracted from the analysis of the ascending poor households.

55 A fuller version of the analysis presented here is under preparation as a separate methodological exercise jointly with Naila Kabeer, who has provided key inputs in the preparation of this chapter. Very useful discussions with David Hulme, Colin Murrey and Deepa Narayan are also gratefully acknowledged. The analysis presented here is based on the “de-construction”

of texts of life-histories collected through the enormous efforts of Rabbani and Manoj Bagchi, who actually tracked the respondents and took the interviews. At the outset permission was sought from the interviewees for the recording of the subsequent conversation. All the references to the interviewees made in the text have been suitably modified for the sake of maintaining privacy and anonymity.

Chronic Poverty in Bangladesh