Understanding livelihood diversification: A case study of Kaibartas of Assam

Abstract

The Kaibartas are a traditional fishing community from Assam, who have been conferred Scheduled Caste (SC) status. Residing alongside rivers and flood-plain wetlands or beels of Assam, this community has shared a close relationship with water systems since time immemorial. However, this community has also been navigating livelihood change, as can be seen from the existing scholarship on Kaibartas. Insights from ethnographic fieldwork carried out in two districts of Assam, Nagaon and Nalbari, between October 2023 and September 2024 concur with this trend as Kaibarta fishers are either supplementing fishing with unskilled, casual work like agricultural and casual labour work or exiting fishing altogether. The plight of the Kaibartas is similar to other small-scale fishers around the world who face significant material, ecological, social and political challenges. Environmental factors loom large over the everyday life of the Kaibarta fishers, as they are threatened by degradation of rivers and wetlands, increased episodes of floods and riverbank erosion, gradual decline of fish stock in the water bodies in addition to facing competition over natural resources from migrant and non-traditional fishing groups and restrictions set by governance regimes. Moreover, the influence of the religious cult of neo-Vaishnavism on the Kaibartas has fuelled their aspiration to seek upward mobility, with a fissure among the Kaibartas identified in one of the field sites, as one group has completely departed from their traditional fisher identity. To unpack the myriad ways in which the Kaibarta fishers of Assam re-negotiate their identity in the face of social, environmental and cultural flux, the paper will borrow from Bourdieu's concept of habitus or embodied history to investigate the socially embedded nature of relations and interactions. Additionally the changing role of Kaibarta women is interesting to note, as their identity as fishers is complicated by the occurrence of natural hazards, along with bearing the brunt of social transition of the community that puts greater restrictions on women's mobility and autonomy, which will be examined through the lens of gendered cultural capital demonstrating how rising social status curbs women's agency, as discussed by scholars like Zumbyte (2021). Therefore, through the case study of the Kaibartas of Assam, this paper aims to depict the varied ways in which marginalisation and poverty propel small-scale fishers to re-examine their identity and livelihoods.

Bio

Vaishali Kashyap is a research scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani K.K. Birla Goa Campus. Her doctoral work explores the factors behind livelihood change in a traditional riverine fishing group of Assam (India). She holds a Masters' degree in Water Policy and Governance from TISS, Mumbai. Her research interests lie in the arena of rural livelihoods, gender and wetlands. She has completed two guided research projects previously, one on flood-coping strategies of the wetland-dependant population of Assam, which fetched her the Best Research Project Prize at TISS, Mumbai in 2019 and another on the impact of anthropogenic factors on urban wetlands of Guwahati city. She also has professional exposure of working with the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India for implementing the National Nutrition Mission on a Tata Trusts fellowship and the Government of Rajasthan for designing policies around arresting fluoride and arsenic contamination, funded by UNICEF and EU.