FROM BONDAGE TO WELFARE CAPITALISM: LIFE, LABOUR AND LANDLESSNESS OF ADIVASIS IN THE DISTRICT OF WAYANAD, KERALA, INDIA

Abstract

This article examines the historical formation, socio-cultural differentiation, labour regimes, and welfare politics of Adivasi communities in Wayanad, situating the district as the central site of Scheduled Tribe governance and historical dispossession in the state of Kerala. Drawing upon government reports, policy documents, planning board records, KIRTADS evaluations, census data, and institutional studies, the article argues that the condition of Wayanad’s Adivasi communities cannot be understood through homogenising narratives of “tribal backwardness.” Instead, the district contains historically differentiated social formations shaped by agrarian hierarchy, bonded labour, forest dependence, settler colonial migration, and uneven incorporation into modern developmental structures. Particular attention is given to communities such as the Paniyan, Adiyan, Kurichiyan, Kurumar/Mullakurumar, and Kattunayakan, whose contrasting relationships to land, labour, and political representation reveal the internal stratification of Adivasi society in Wayanad.

The study further demonstrates that slavery and bonded labour were not peripheral historical anomalies but foundational institutions of Wayanad’s agrarian economy. Through systems such as kundalpani, communities like the Paniyan and Adiyan were historically tied to janmi landlords through coercive labour relations that survived juridical abolition in transformed economic forms. Contemporary precarity—manifest in landlessness, seasonal labour dependence, nutritional insecurity, migration, and welfare dependency—is analysed as the afterlife of these older structures of bondage. Simultaneously, the article critically evaluates Kerala’s Tribal Sub-Plan architecture, rehabilitation schemes, food-security programmes, microplans, land redistribution initiatives, and welfare convergence strategies. While Kerala possesses one of India’s most elaborate tribal welfare systems, the article argues that state intervention often remains compensatory rather than transformative because structural inequalities rooted in dispossession and labour unfreedom persist. Ultimately, the article conceptualises Wayanad as a crucial site where the historical memory of agrarian slavery intersects with contemporary welfare capitalism, revealing the unresolved contradictions of development, justice, and tribal citizenship in modern India.