Literature on pastoral mobility has shown how it is a resilience mechanism rooted in the need for accessing forage and water, both varying by time and space. As a strategy, mobility propelled the pastoral economy, ensuring that the temporal production of wool, milk, meat, dung and leather met market demands that were spatially spread out. Pastoral communities in India have undergone numerous transitions in response to changing social, political and economic uncertainties. Presently, the expansion of markets, changing climate, exclusion from conservation areas and encroachment of human activities on pastoral lands have significantly altered traditional patterns of animal mobility. This paper focuses on the experiences of pastoralists from Kachchh, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand in India, drawing on research focused on pastoral mobility and economics to propose an alternate theory– hybrid sedentarisation.
The last three decades have seen communities, specifically certain pastoralists, sedentarise while maintaining large herds of animals. Though, at first glance, sedentarisation implies exactly the opposite of mobility, a non-mobile strategy of managing herds. Our research suggests that this is not necessarily an exit from pastoralism. A hybrid sedentarisation–a combination of absentee herding (Little, P., 1985; Fernandez-Gimenez, 1999), mobile phone social networks (Butt, 2015) and economic opportunities–has allowed certain pastoralists to take on greater social and economic risk outside of strategic mobility. Such responses, which have not been recorded before, present a peculiar irony wherein pastoralism continues but the culture and heritage of herding is on the decline. Herd owners retain tenurial rights and historical grazing routes while being based entirely in urban areas accessing healthcare, education and other civic amenities. The paper argues that while a sedentary state may intend to settle pastoral communities, hybrid sedentarisation presents new opportunities to a few, where their livestock continues to be on the move.
