The Labouring Poor and their Notion of Poverty: Late 19th and Early 20th Century Bengal

*Prof. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya 

PREFACE 

Professor Bhattacharya's erudite paper illustrates the power of history to infuse with understanding and empathy our intellectual, effectual and practical approaches to eradication of poverty. To see the experience of poverty through the eyes of the poor will enable us to perceive and internalise that poverty is a misfortune and not a crime. The poor are not and cannot be held responsible and subjected to punitive measures for their poverty.

The paper is a searching critique of the Benthamite utilitarian policies towards the poor, which, gifted to us by our colonial rulers, stayed with us though these rulers are supposedly absent from our midst. The power of that critique derives in no small measure from an examination of the songs of the poor in 19th century Bengal. These songs celebrate the collectivist ethos of the poor, in stark contrast to the individualistic ethos that informed in the colonial poor laws which prescribed antiseptic segregation for and required humiliating physical proofs of destitution in exchange for some pathetically inadequate relief measures. Prof. Bhattacharya attempts to bridge analysis of the sociological context of poverty with language and discourse analysis. He argues that knowledge of the oral culture, which shapes and expresses the consciousness of the poor, facilitates departure from the stereotypes about the consciousness of the poor. He also supports the analytical legitimacy and empirical relevance of the category 'labouring poor' in the context of the so-called third world countries as compared to categories like 'proletariat' etc. The reasons for this are several. For one, there is the simultaneous existence of plural forms of labour, the boundaries between which are highly permeable and flexible so that agricultural wage workers would become railway workers and household servants. One cannot also restrict labour history to the study of the archetypal industrial proletariat' on account of: a) the expansion of the informal sector labour force and dissipation of the formal sector; b) a substantial proportion of the poor lives on the realisation of the value of labour by means other than the sale oflabour power for wages. He argues that the term labouring poor makes space for other forms of socio-economic subordination. This term would prove more useful in our permanently transitional post-colonial economy than 'proletariat'. The focus on the oral culture of the labouring poor will help us to go beyond sterile intellectual abstraction and pragmatic policies, which are blind to the lesson history. They will help us to create policies fusing intellectual animation and compassion. The songs and tales about famine from Bengal reveal that for peasants famine disrupts their moral universe. This disruption is as, if not more, feared than the subsistence crisis. Hence ideas of charity at times of disaster are intimately and inextricably connected to a collectivist ethos which holds that all the community must be together in poverty and in plenty. How refreshingly different is this from the colonial laws which decried charity as encouraging sloth and poverty-part of the individualism which holds that all men must face their destinies alone, survive or perish without any assistance from their fellows.

 Dr. L. Mishra Secretary (Labour)

 Government of India

THE LABOURING POOR AND THEIR NOTION OF POVERTY : LATE 19TH AND EARLY 20TH CENTURY BENGAL 

How do the labouring poor perceive poverty? Perhaps an enquiry into the poor people's notion of poverty exposes, more than any other enquiry, the poverty of our notions about the labouring poor. This applies with greater force to the pre-industrial labour force in * India. That is why such an enquiry may be worthwhile. There is scarcely any historical writing on this question and the conventional sources are sparse and unyielding. This paper can do no more than pose a few questions and suggest some tentative answers. 

To focus upon the cultural constructs around the experience of poverty, upon the idea of poverty and its linguistic expression, does not, of course, mean the abandonment of the study of the context in favour of language and discourse analysis. I propose that we try and understand how the rural poor and the peasant thought of poverty. Echoes in India of the debate on post-modernism, the 'linguistic turn', etc. generated, for example, in the pages of Social History, Past and Present and the History Workshop Journal, by Lawrence Stone [1991], Joyce and Kelly [1991], Mayfield and Thome [1992], and Gareth Stedman Jones [1996], Patrick Joyce [1993, 1995] et. al. will begin to be relevant in the area of Indian studies only when we have some knowledge of the 'language of class' and the oral culture shaping and expressing the consciousness of the 'labouring poor'. To some extent, an attempt to access that consciousness might lead to a departure from the stereotype of the consciousness attributed to the poor and dispossessed in the more simplistic teleological schemes. To concede that is not the same thing as joining the battle against what Stedman Jones perceives as the demon of 'determinist fix', nor does it mean the abstraction of the discourse of poverty from its class context. Before proceeding to elaborate on the labouring poor's perception of poverty in late 19th and early 20th century Bengal in section ii, in section i of this paper I will discuss the analytical legitimacy of the category 'labouring poor' in terms of its empirical relevance to the developing or so called third world countries. In using this concept, I have departed from the more scientific precision that at one time I - along with many labour historians- thought was attainable by using categories such as the 'proletariat', the 'agricultural wage workers', rural menial worker, 'share-cropper' etc. Why have I made this departure? There is, I think, more than one ground to sustain this departure. There is, first, the historically observed tendency of the simultaneous existence of plural forms of labour, whose boundaries were not only so permeable as to permit periodic migrations between these forms, but were also so elastic that workers could be drawn into more than one labouring form at the same time. Thus, the movement from the porously bound forms e.g. poor peasant and share cropper and agricultural wage worker and migrant or static labour force in the countryside occasionally employed in households, railway building, earth moving and construction work etc. to wage work in the cities (e.g. in Bengal the jute mills, the town municipalities, household service, as porters and transport workers in the informal sector, etc.) was only a short haul. The historical description of such phenomena cannot be achieved by the categories currently in use. There is, further, the contemporary trend of manufacturing capital pursuing more 'flexible' production arrangements, which has led to both an erosion of the organised workforce and a steady expansion of labouring activity in hitherto atypical forms. A departure from narrow categories and the introduction of a more inclusive category is called for to obviate the difficulties posed by the former and to accommodate the consequences of the latter.

Given the extraordinary expansion of the informal sector labour force due to the dissipation of the formal sector, restricting labour history to the study of the archetypal industrial proletariat is inadequate, especially in relation to the less developed countries such as India. This practice privileges, unduly, the category of wage work in the formal sector even as a substantial proportion lives on the realisation of the value of labour by many means other than the sale of labour power for wages. The sale of labour power in the non-wage form is not a part of the strictly formal definition of capitalist wage work. These other forms include phenomena such as debt bondage, which could be to the land owner, or to the owner of some sort of capital, tools, machines and so on. It takes the form of non-wage labour in the informal sector of the secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy as well. It takes the form of labour rent for the use of land or other means of production not owned by the users, and, to use Marx's phrase, it also takes the form of formal subsumption of labour. There is a convergence of many forms of socio-economic subordination other than wage slavery keeping the labouring poor, labouring and poor. Now this conglomeration of categories demands a concept which will enable us to talk about them. That vast portion of the poor, whose chief means of sustenance is the realisation of the value of labour power in these various forms, may be called the labouring poor. Hence, I propose the category 'labouring poor' as being more relevant and appropriate to the wide range and the porousness of the boundaries between conventional class categories, the fluidity of the individual particles in those categories, and the transformations in the mode of labour utilisation in the sphere of industrial production. The use of the concept 'the labouring poor' to cover a wide range - in place of a finer classificatory scheme - also raises another question of a general nature. Is labour history to be confined to the archetype of the industrial proletariat? This practice appears to privilege the category unduly. It preserves a convention or habit of mind which might be inadequate to the demands of a critique and renewal of labour history which is needed now. Is this convention one of the reasons why some observers have noted a decline of interest in labour history, e.g. Marcel Van der Linden or Ira Katznelson in the International Review of Social History [1993] and International Labour and Working-Class History [1994] ? Is this self-imposed limitation among the majority of labour historians one of the factors leading to questions about the 'end of labour history' or 'what next for labour and working-class history'? Unless the answer is decisively in the negative, labour historians' concern with the 'labouring poor', far beyond the boundaries of the 'proletariat', seems to be amply justifiable.

The labouring poor is a fuzzy concept without sharp edges at the boundaries and hence suits the fuzziness of the reality of 'transitional' economies where gradations shade into each other, class boundaries are porous, and individuals and families are simultaneously located in more than one of the conventional class categories (i.e. categories contraposing wage labour and non-wage labour). Due to the hindrances peculiar to the colonial economies, the transition (to capitalist/wage-labour relationships) in a sufficiently generalized form is seldom complete, so that, you have an almost 'permanently transitional' situation. This calls for concepts other than the clear-cut ones of advanced metropolitan economies.

The many forms of non-wage socio-economic subordination keeping the labouring poor, labouring and poor are due to the status of some lower castes and tribes, subjection to bondage due to social/power relationships, lack of access to literacy and knowledge systems with a liberating potential, etc. none of which is due to economic class stratification directly. The Subaltern historians have a point when they talk in terms of the non-class category, subaltern. The term 'labouring poor' serves a similar purpose. 

There is a commonality in cultural terms among the labouring poor cutting across the wage/non-wage labour boundary. (I leave aside segmentation of a vertical kind along lines of caste, religions, community, language, etc. which applies to all sections, from the top layer, the industrial proletariat, to the bottom of the subproletariat and labouring poor). The reference point in this culture is not 'wage slavery' under capital, but poverty and the life of labour in everyday experience. In the language of this culture the significance attached to poverty, indigence, destitution and hunger is far greater than to wage work or non-wage work, to proletarianness or its absence. 

This culture of the labouring poor binding diverse groups from factories to farms, from informal sector workers to those employed by multi-national corporations, from plantation coolies to share­croppers and farm labourers and marginal farmers, etc., is autonomous and distinct from the culture that arises from the socialisation process of a small part of it, the industrial proletariat.

Following Marx, it is the social position of a category of people which has been used as the differentia specified. And the differentia specifica is the compulsion to realise the value of one's labour power for reasons of poverty. People sell their labour power or the value of the labour power because of their being poor. They are labouring because they are poor. So it is in this sense, I think, the term 'labouring poor' could be justifiable theoretically. But I do have a problem with one section of the poor, the 'dangerous classes' and the people Marx called lumpen proletariat. Admittedly, not all who are poor perform labour, though all who mainly live by labour are presumably poor. Those who do not labour in the same sense as wage-workers include criminals, beggars and prostitutes etc., but surely they labour in a different way? Perhaps one can say that the poor who have no material resource except their person, can be said to be performing labour in some form, or using their body to produce goods or services, of which the evidence is their income and survival.

The larger than life image of the industrial proletariat, as compared to the rest of the labourng poor, is due to the attribution to it of a historical role in a highly teleological view of 'things to come'. This teleology elevates the industrial proletariat to a higher position than the rest of the labouring poor. Whatever our view of its validity in the light of experience on the world scale, so far as the third world or ex-colonial countries are concerned, Frantz Fanon raised a very pertinent issue. Writing almost forty years ago about the industrial proletariat in colonial territories he said, "The embryonic proletariat of the towns is in a comparatively privileged position"; they represent a very small proportion of the colonial population, they are town dwellers, and they are "a comfortably off fraction of the population" compared to the people in the 'interior', who depend on their labour power to make a living. [Fanon, 1967] 

In recent times the bourgeoisification (in terms of consumption habits, aspirations, political consciousness) of the 'labour aristocracy' has made Fanon's statement more valid then it was in his times. Throughout the last century and a half in India, the position of the urban industrial working class in the scale of relative poverty was high enough to allow their steady recruitment from the more deprived masses in the rural catchment areas and the urban subproletariat. The conventional representation of the proletariat and the exaggeration of its revolutionary role is due to an instrumentalist view of the 'vanguard party' leading this section to effect a social transformation through the capture of state power. This is no reason to analytically privilege that category now. A continuing tendency to do so has imprisoned labour history in an obsolete paradigm. If one were to look for alternatives to the category 'labouring poor' what do we have? 'Informal sector workers'? Or, 'another kind' of proletariat? Or the 'other proletariat' as discussed in Lucassen's essay. [Lucassen, 1994] Or, one could use the compound term 'destitute fanner cum share-cropper cum landed labourer cum informal sector wage worker cum proletariat'? In their recent work Engermann, Tom Brass, Jan Lucasen, Marcel Van der Linden have wrestled with this problem in the book Free and Unfree Labour, but they posited no category though they point to the need for it. Why not 'the labouring poor'? The term proletariat or its alter ego, the working class, will remain a useful concept for analytical purposes, but for historical descriptive purposes, I think, the more inclusive concept labouring poor serves very well in many societies over long periods of time. Labouring poor lacks the precision of the term proletariat but sometimes it is better to be roughly right than to be precisely wrong. 

In the context of the evident inadequacy of the category 'proletariat' an interesting question poses itself: how did Marx look at the question of the labouring poor beyond the limit of the archetype of the industrial proletariat and the agricultural wage labour? He casts his eyes, in a more historical vein, in that direction when he talks of the 'reserve army of the unemployed' [Capital, Vol. I, Part VII, Section III and IV]. Here he talks of the 'labourer' sui generis, compounding wage workers with the non-wage workers, and describes some of the labouring classes as 'floating, latent and stagnant' types of surplus supply of labour power. He notices labour in 'domestic industry' and, more important, the 'sphere of pauperism'. This is where he talks of the 'dangerous classes' (ibid, section 4) and says, 'pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production'. He also notes incidentally that poverty seems to increase birth rate, quoting Adam Smith, "Poverty seems favourable to generation." Elsewhere in Capital (Vol. I, Part VII, Section V) he definitely includes not only people who are sometimes wage workers, but even the paupers, e.g. his remark on 'official pauperism', or on that part of the working class which has forfeited its conditions of existence (the sale of labour power), and vegetates upon public alms (ibid., Section V A). In Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx is keenly aware of the location of the proletariat in a productive and social system, not merely their defining characteristics. Thus, in the preface he quotes, approvingly, Sismondi to the effect that the Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat. This should warn us against precisely that tendency today which equates proletariat in all societies (ignoring the kind of difference Frantz Fanon talked about). In Gundrisse, Notebooks II to VII, the chapter on capital, Marx is only analytically looking at the proletariat, emphasising that exchange or sale of labour rests on the workers' propertylessness. While talking of 'objectified labour' and 'living labour', he argues that there is no inconsistency between labour being 'absolute poverty as object' and 'general possibility of wealth as subject', and so on. But he makes it absolutely clear that he is focusing on this poverty as 'an abstraction from moments of actual reality'. Thus his approach is different in the analytical exercise in Grundrisse (and the early chapters of Capital), compared to his historical excursus in some parts of Capital or Eighteenth Brumaire or Class Struggle in France. When the discourse was in the historical mode, Marx often discarded an excessively narrow definition of the working class. 

Basically the crisis in labour history which Marcel van der Linden or Ira Katznelson refer to, arises from a failure to respond to (a) the signals in the academia - e.g. fall off in interest in conventional working class history, the uncritical acceptance of the anti-Marxian Subaltern line, the post-modernist anti-teleological critique, etc. and (b) changes in the real world, - e.g. the change and decomposition of the working class in the capitalist system, the impact of the fall of the socialist states on the perception of the historical role of the proletariat, the failure of proletarian internationalism. Marcel van der Linden [IRSH, 1993], Ira Katznalson [International Labour and Working Class History, 1994], Jan Lucassen [IRSH, 1994], Jurgen Kocka [IRSH, 1997] or, in a perverse way, Stedman Jones [History Workshop Journal, 1996], Patrick Joyce [Social History, 1993] and many others have been talking about this problem from various angles.

The size of the informal sector and the subproletariat category demands attention in many other developing economies. Alejandro Fortes and others, in a pioneering work on the informal economy [Fortes, et. al., 1989], showed that in Latin American countries the average proportion of informal sector workers to the total economically active population was 42.2 per cent in 1980; if we take only the urban population, the ratio to EAR was 30.3 per cent . (Even in the USA the number of workers in the VSE or very small establishments employing less than 10, was 15.2 per cent in 1980). A recent special number of the Indian Journal of Labour Economics [1997] on 'Labour Market Flexibility' underlines the importance of the informal sector in terms of the formal sector wage policies. In India there is no doubt that the weight of the informal sector is far greater. That apart, in the historical study of the colonial period the informal sector demands attention within the industrial sector, not to speak of other ones. Whether or not the industrial and skilled workers are indeed to be seen as a privileged section, to privilege that category in analysis, to the exclusion of the urban informal workers, the subproletariat and the rural labouring poor, appears to be a doctrinaire habit of mind in the area of labour history. To redress the consequent imbalance may help towards a critique and renewal of labour history.

That apart, I am personally more concerned with the Indian reality [e.g. the UN World Economic Report of 1997: 52.5 per cent of the Indian population are below the poverty line, defined as US $ 1 per diem income, almost all of them being non-factory workers]. A myopic fixation on the industrial proletariat, (or at best the wage worker employed by capital) privileges that category to the detriment of a more comprehensive understanding of the larger entity of which it is a part. The 'proletariat' continues to be a useful analytical concept. But we have to address that larger entity, the labouring poor, and understand the 'human condition' at that level as a totality. Unless labour historians make that an integral part of their agenda, they are likely to be marginalised either as an idiosyncratic sect of believers in a paradigm never to be regained, or as mere academic specialists in a self-imposed exile from reality. If the labouring poor is a valid category of historical enquiry and if their poverty is a defining crieterion of their social existence, then the study of the way they perceive their poverty becomes imperative for us. How does one go about it? I think one of the ways would be to look at the notions that inform the narrative poems and folk songs or incantatory poems, including work songs, calendric songs or songs and rhyme connected with harvest and other agricultural operations. These contain reflections of the labouring poor on their existential condition. I will particularly use a narrative poem [unpublished, in the MS collection of Calcutta University] by a rural poet called Nafar on the theme of the famine of 1866. To contrast the notion of poverty in such a tradition with the basic digits of discourse used by the colonial government may help us identify the specificities of the idea of poverty in the perception of the labouring poor.

In this paper the people we are looking at were those who could be described in the late 19th or early 20th century as chhotolok (roughly translatable as the lower orders) in contraposition to the bhadralok. Today the term chhotolok is rarely used as a social category but it was part of common parlance even thirty years ago. In 1969 the anthropologists Surajit C. Sinha and R.K.Bhattacharya reported that the people commonly perceived in West Bengal as chhotolok (Muslims apparently used the term garib oftener) were the mahindar (agricultural labourers and household servants), begal (cowherd), munish (farm labourers on daily wage), kisan (agricultural workers on seasonal contract), and kamin (women labourer on daily wage) etc.1 In the manuscript I have used, Akal Charitra (1867), the rural poet talks of the same kind of people: 'Para anne je palita/para karme prabirtata' (those who are given their sustenance by others/ those who work for others). This stratum included 'jana lok' (common men and/or employed men) who get dina mahina (daily wage). The rural poet also refers to women kamins (janer betan katnin nilo/tobu tar khanta noila chitta, that is to say, the wages of men workers were claimed by women , and yet they were not satisfied). The farm owner says, the village poet, tried to get the most out of the wage worker but the latter 'minded only the engagement' (tar man thikar nimitta).2 

A word about my sources

The work Akal Charitra which I have cited earlier is a narrative poem on the famine of 1866 in Midnapore (West Bengal) and Orissa. The colophon of this unpublished manuscript helps us to date it as the work of one Dwija Nafar in the Bengal Era 1274, i.e. 1867 A.|D. (M.S. NO. 4870, Calcutta University MSS collection, which Dr. Tushar K.Mohapatra and I plan to edit and publish soon). Written in colloquial Bengali and full of linguistic lapses, the poem depicts the famine as akal avatar (famine as the messenger or instrument of the gods). It is a 'biography of the famine' (akal charitra) written in the stylistic convention of Pur ana Kavya (narrative poems): however, comparison with British administrative reports shows that the village poet's description of the famine is accurate. I have also used oral literature recorded in the early decades of the twentieth century.3 

Broadly the rural oral tradition in India has been divided into two streams, incantatory and narrative.4The narrative poems were vitally important in rural cultural life. More than forty years ago the anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose observed that "the traditional culture of the locality is handed down through the medium of songs" and he pointed to the recent decay of this mode of cultural transmission due to "personalisation of leisure" (i.e. the tendency to spend less leisure time in collective cultural activities) and cultural "secularisation".5 Fortunately, at the turn of the century many Bengali intellectuals turned towards collection of folk songs before that part of rural culture began to atrophy. Chung-Tai Hung has recently shown how a similar attempt on that part of intellectuals to recover and record folk literature occurred in China in the early 20th century.6 For the present we confine ourselves to the folk songs current in the late 19th and early 20th century Bengal. This element is only one in the vast corpus of folk literature of Bengal.7 The early folklorical.investigators collected mainly proverbs, riddles, omens, legends etc., e.g. Rev. James Long, Rev. Lalbehari De, A.S.Damant, George Grierson, J.D.Anderson, et. al. in the last three decades of the 19th century. Collection and publication of folk songs commenced in a systematic way since 1913 under the auspices of the literary society, Bangyia Sahitya Parishad, through its journal and a band of amateur enthusiasts of whom the leaders were Dinesh Chandra Sen, the poet Tagore, and Guru Sadaya Dutt of the I.C.S. There were also anthropological collection of folk songs etc. of tribal origins in the neighbourhood of Bengal, e.g. the works of V. Elwin, and W.G. and Mildred Archer: such tribal songs we have excluded from our present discussion. The most comprehensive collection, including songs earlier collected in the early 20th century, is that of Asutosh Bhattacharya in four volumes.8 

The use of such folk lore is often questioned on the ground of authenticity of events.9 But we are indifferent to that because our aim is to look at folk perspective, i.e. what people thought rather than what might or might not have happened. A more important problem in using the material is that of chronology. The songs collected in the first five decades of the 20th century may go back very far in time. There are specific references in some songs which help us date them from the text (e.g. reference to a flood in Damodar in 1823, or the Swadeshi agitation of 1905, etc.). However, most of the songs undoubtedly were current from the last decades of the 19th century to the 1940's; but we cannot know how old they are. An examination of such songs can take us towards understanding the cognitive map of the peasant

Poverty in the Bureaucratic Discourse

First let us look at the idea of poverty in the colonial bureaucratic discourse. Perhaps the vantage point of entry into that question is to look at the official pronouncements on the developing art of management of poverty and distress in the famine periods. What were the basic ideas concerning poverty behind the so-called famine policy of the British Indian Government? I will argue that an ideological lineage can be traced through the Poor Laws of 19th century England to Bentham. This connection may appear remote and implausible at first sight. Eric Stokes in his highly perceptive analysis of the impact of utilitarianism on Indian policies failed to look into this aspect for he concentrated on the connections between utilitarianism and Indian policies which were more overt.10 The historians of famines in India have been equally silent on the question of the idea of poverty and the impact of Benthamite "Panopticism" (Foucault's phrase) in British India." Yet when one reads the Poor Laws of 19th century England and the Famine Codes and the Famine Commission Reports of 19th century India the continuities and parallels become obvious. That is not the least surprising for the English new Poor Law (1934) owed much to Bentham and the Poor Laws and Bentham likewise influenced the famine policy makers in British India (e.g. Strachey, the Chairman of the 1880 Famine Commission which framed the Famine Code). Once you discover this ideological lineage, working out the genealogy is not too difficult.

Gertrude Himmelfarb has shown in her recent work how Bentham's Pauper Management Improvement (1798) offered the blue print for disciplining the poor.12 Elsewhere, in the more well-known Panopticon Bentham claimed to have "the Gordion Knot of Poor Laws not cut but untied". The tract of 1798 was a fuller plan for "the burdensome poor", including a "national charity company" on the model of the East India Company, "Industry houses" or poor houses, a Commissioner or Governor to administer all poor relief, etc. This tract on pauper management was reprinted several times upto 1831. In 1832 the Royal Commission on Poor Laws was appointed.13 This was a decision made by Lord Grey's Cabinet before the passage of 1832 Reform Act. However, it was not wholly unconnected with the political reorientation signaled by parliamentary reforms, and certainly connected in a direct way with the recent experience of unrest of the rural poor in the form of the "Captain Swing Riots" of 1830.14 As for the outcome of the efforts of the Poor Law Commissioners, the Act of 1834, there is a great deal of literature that need not concern us here. What we are interested in is the Benthamite core of the poor law, which is transmuted in the Indian Famine Code. Of this utilitarian core of the new poor law R.H.Tawney had talked about with admirable wrath in a section on "new medicine for poverty" in Religion and the rise of Capitalism. "Advanced by men of religion as a tonic for the soul, the doctrine of the danger of pampering poverty was hailed by the rising School of Political 

Arithmeticians as a sovereign cure for the ills of society.... The grand discovery of the commercial age, that relief might be so administered as not merely to relieve, but also to deter, still remained to be made by utilitarian philosopher".15 This task of the utilitarian was completed in the 1830's through the revision of the Poor Law. It appears that the carrier of the Benthamite lymph in the Poor Law Commission of 1832-34 was Sir Edwin Chadwyck, the former Secretary to Bentham.16 While Chadwyck and the economist, Senior in the Commission rejected the Malthusian prescriptions, having made that concession, they brought into existence a regime of poor relief which applied eligibility conditions that would deter the poor from drawing relief, confine the pauper in work houses, and systematize a state controlled machinery in place of charity. 

Some of these basic concepts are in evidence in the famine Code in India from 1880 till the end of the Raj and even beyond. This is where new research needs to be done to connect the colonial discourse on poverty and distress, with the thinking in England on Poor Law. First, consider the concept of "test" of relief-worthiness of those in distress. Forms of relief other than gratuitous relief "are appropriately regulated by a self-acting test (italics in original), a labour test, a distance test, a residence test".17 This meant that any person starving in famine affected area would have to perform a certain amount of labour in the public works and/or travel a certain distance (upto 15 miles), or accept compulsory residence in a special area away from the home village. This was expected to deter those who did not really need the wages in government works programmes famine affected. This idea was first put forward in 1877 by Lord Lytton during the famine in South India: "The obligation to do a full day's work at a low rate of wages, and to go some distance to work, keeps from seeking relief those who can support themselves otherwise".18 The idea was to distinguish the poor from the really destitute, in the same manner as the English Poor Law of 1834 distinguished "the indigent" entitled to relief from the ranks of the poor. The Secretary of State endorsed this principle of discouraging "relief of applicants not in want" and the requirement of a distance test which can "without undue hardship be used as a test of destitution".19 The Famine Commission of 1880, under the utilitarian Strachey, devised a famine code in which "the fact of his (i.e. relief seeker) submitting to the test of giving a reasonable amount of work in return for a subsistence wage is considered to be sufficient proof of his necessity".20 However, the labour test was preferred to the distance test in 1880, the Commission of 1898 was prepared to allow distance test upto 15 miles and the Commission of 1901 was prepared to retain distance test in situations where the government relief works were "unduly attractive".21 

These discussions about eligibility were a re-run of what England witnessed in connection with Poor Law. The Commission of 1832-34 spent a great deal of its time distinguishing the common poor from the "indigent". "Those who work, though receiving good wages, being called poor, are classed with the really indigent and think themselves entitled to a share of the poor funds".22 Indigence was defined as "the state of a person unable to obtain a return for his labour, the means of subsistence".23 This was the concept that the famine commissioners in India extended to those who under famine conditions were unable to find subsistence and thus became entitled to subsistence wages in government public works. As for the mechanism for enforcing this principle the English Poor Law Commission used a "self-acting test of the claim of the applicant" - the very same words the Famine Commissioners used in India; public works in India was the mechanism in place of the work houses in England and the "work house test" in England was replaced by various relief tests in India relating to distance, work test etc. mentioned earlier. "Since the work house was by definition, less eligible than any other mode of life, only the most severe destitution would induce a man to enter it".24 Thus compliance with work house terms of relief was itself a test of entitlement, just as the severity of Indian famine-works employment would filter out those not truly in distress.25 As regards the "poor houses" in India these were not meant to be permanent institutions like the English "work house". They were really temporary institutions to "collect and relieve paupers sent adrift by the contraction of private charity".26 They were also used at a late stage in the famine "for contumacious idlers", i.e. "contumacious persons fit to work who refused to labour".27 The condition in the poor house being unattractive to say the least, "a certain amount of pressure may be required to induce people to remain in poor houses", or else they revert to vagrancy.28 It was the Commission of 1880 which suggested that supplicants for relief "in case of doubt as to eligibility" could be sent to the poor houses.29 The centuries old English laws against vagrancy have an obvious relevance to the policy of the British India administrators, going well beyond Bentham to Tudor times. The third form of famine relief in India, gratuitous relief in village, corresponds to "out-door relief under the old Poor Law in England. According to Benthamite principles such relief was undesirable and the Poor Law Commission of 1832-34 disrecommended it. However, in view of the public outcry and local level opposition to the abolition of outdoor relief, it was retained on a reduced scale in England. In India this form of relief was totally unavoidable under famine conditions though the famine officers were uncomfortable with it. They were uncomfortable because of their awareness of "that most dangerous popular vice - the disposition to force the government to grant public charity".30 The famine officers were expected to play by ear and "hit the happy mean" in the absence of a self-acting test of the kind the Poor Law and Famine Code envisaged. Richard Strachey who headed the Famine Commission of 1880 was well-know utilitarian sympathies along with his brother Sir John Strachey. The authority the Stracheys relied on was John Stuart Mill. They quoted with approbation Mill on the need to resort to active state interventionism in backward economies.31 Mill was also a strong supporter of the Poor Law of 1834.32 To sum it up, through the medium of Mill's writings and the experience of the Poor Laws in England, Bentham's ideas left a clear impress upon the thought and action of the upper echelon of Indian colonial bureaucracy. Some of the basic categories of thought, I have argued, are common in the Indian famine code, the Poor Laws in England, and Bentham's original blue-print. Apart from the specific terms and notions, it was the approach towards management of poverty which is Benthamite. 

Poverty as Perceived by the Peasant and the Poor 

In so far as one can identify peasant notions about poverty, some broad contra-distinctions vis-a-vis the ideas in the colonial discourse can be suggested. First, for he peasant poverty may be considered a misfortune but not a crime. There are peasant songs which in fact clothe poverty with divine dignity in that the God Shiva is often likened to a poor householder. The worship of Shiva (Gajan) is the occasion for such songs and the most well-know of this type is the class of Gambhira songs of Malda district in North Bengal Shiva is addressed as "son of gypsy, the ill clad one, the poor old man: etc. The description of the poverty of Shiva is of course an old tradition, but in the peasant songs there is also an element of intimacy with the deity as if putting him on par with the peasant devotees. Dinesh Chandra Sen had commented on this in the beginning of this century.331 do not read in this type of material a disregard for material wealth in the manner "spiritual" Indians are supposed to display. But it seems, that Shiva' fabled poverty humanises him in the peasant songs in his praise and confers dignity on the real poverty of his worshippers. This contrasts with the treatment of poverty as if it was a crime in the Poor Laws and in the dominant ideology of post-industrial revolution England. (That remained the predominant trend, though the moral imagination one sees in Carlyle and Dickens and Mayhew rejected the dehumanising management of poverty in 19th century England.) Another feature of the peasant attitudes as reflected in songs, is what may be called collective as distinct from individualistic view of prosperity and poverty. By collective I mean the tendency to hold as indivisible the fate of the family or the clan in good and bad times. The songs sung on occasions of harvest and the nuptial songs profusely illustrate this tendency of the rural mind in frequent references to all conceivable relations: apart from the sisters and brothers- in-law etc.34 These songs are also replete with references to gift exchanges between family members. Likewise the Tushu songs of districts of Bankura, Purulia, Midnapore had similar features. These songs are also replete with references to gift exchanges between family members. Likewise the Tushu songs of districts of Bankura, Purulia, Midnapore had similar features. These songs include, of course, tensions within the family e.g., stereotypically, wife versus sister-in-law, or rivalry between co-wives. Since the Tushu is a harvest festival there is frequent depiction of peasant ideals of wealth - "ghee of 32 cows, rice of fine paddy", "pots of ghee and gur" etc. And along with the prayer to Tushu for prosperity a running theme is the celebration of the family's fecundity: "We ask mother Tushu for a boon/Let my House overflow with our wealth and our sons".35 In contrast to the aggregative family-centered view of the peasant, the colonial discourse is based on an individualistic ethos and contains a taxonomic approach to poverty. To the peasant, given his concept of a family as consisting of co-sharers in prosperity and poverty, a famine was a threat to a moral order; it was more than a subsistence crisis.36 

Thirdly there is a striking contrast about the notions of charity. The Government of India from 1877 to 1898 took a definite position that private charity had no role to play in the famine relief activities and that it was the duty of the government to arrange all relief measures. Lord Lytton and Strachey were of this view. However, by 1989 and more so in the Famine Commission reports of 1901 a marginal role was assigned to charity along with government measures. At the same time the Famine Commissions repeatedly stressed the salient role of charity in the rural moral orders. In fact many of the peasant songs are occasioned by Mangan or a kind of collection/begging towards funding rituals or village celebrations.37 Finally, the peasant songs do not display any fatalistic acceptance of crises like famine, contrary to the tendency ascribed to them by officials. "A main trait in Oriental character is proneness to succumb to difficulties and to accept them as inevitable" said the Famine Commission of 1901.38 It is true that many of the peasant songs about agricultural distress are addressed to the Gods, for example, a song of 1908 on the failure of the mango crop in Malda, a song of 1823 on the impact of the flood on agriculture in the Damodar valley in 1823, songs on droughts etc. "What a famine has come upon us, paddy costs one rupee for 16 seers/ the fire of hunger consumes us, what to do"(1931).39 The peasant certainly has an acceptance of lean seasons along with good seasons, and he also has a cyclical notion of time. In fact the cycle of seasons provide the theme for a large number of calendric peasant songs known as Baramasya or 12 monthly songs. But there is no evidence of a concept of a cycle of fate that would inevitably bring disaster. One could characterise vulgar Malthusain prognostications of some colonial officials more correctly as fatalistic. "The peasant plans for the round of time. He allocates resources as if he held the assumption that with minor variations and barring accidents next year will be this year over again".40 This has often been contrasted with the notion of time as an arrow when you plan a future state of affairs different from the present. For whatever it is worth, this well-known contrast between the cyclical and arrow like notions of time, made by Bourdieau and Bailey, appears to represent roughly the differing notions prevailing in the peasant and bureaucratic discourses. I see no intrinsic superiority in either of these notions, nor can I be too confident of such generalisations, but perhaps it is a useful contrast between two different patterns of thinking. It is not my intention to exclude the possibility of conceptions of poverty among the poor, in late 19th or early 20th century Bengal, other than the pattern outlined above. That would be the kind of reductionism which lack of access to local language sources gives rise to. But it is possible that this was the dominant pattern of thought. There are contrary tendencies in times of acute distress, famines, insurgency etc. For example, at times of famine the departures from the normative values were depicted - and that in itself was an assertion of the norm. Thus Tripura Rajmala (a court chronicle of the Tripura Raj family written around 1825) describes the dissolution of the family under the stress of famine conditions: "The miserably poor forsake affections/ They soon abandon their well-wishers and their sons and daughters."41 Or again rani firindeshwaree of Kuchbihar in her history of that State (written and published in 1858) laments the disintegration of the family during the crisis caused by famine.42 Dwija Nafar in Akal charitra condemns the decline of the habit of charity: "The guru (preceptor/elder/ respected recipient of gift) is spurned/The thief comes with ready cash/And he buys rice at high price'.43 He sums up the moral crisis under the stress of famine: "Tormented by hunger/men of the kali age/Abandon all that dharma prescribes".44 Thus, actions contrary to the norms of the community are perceived as reprehensible and depicted in manner that valorizes those norms. 

NOTES 

1. Apart from the economic position, the caste factor was important to distinguish the Hindu chhotolok from the bhadralok; this applies with less force to the Muslim community, although there too there was caste-like hierarchisation: hence the term garib more in use among Muslims. Surajit C.Sinha and R.K.Bhattacharya, 'Bhadralok and chhotolok in a rural area in Bengal', Sociological Bulletin, vol. 18, 1,, 1969, pp.50-66; R.K.Bhattarcharya, Moslems in Rural Bengal: Socio-cultural boundary maintenance (Calcutta, 1991), pp. 31-36. In the urban context the garib or chhotolok category might have been applied in the early twentieth century to the informal sector workers, die menial and domestic servants, and of course the subproletariat (I prefer this Latin American terms to the conventional lumpen-proletariat), i.e the vagrants, beggars, prostitutes and the criminal fringe of the urban poor. 

2. Nafar, Akal Charitra, 1867 (Unpublished), MS no.4870, MS Collection, Calcutta University.

3. Paul Greenough's very perceptive work on Famine 1943 (he attempts to get at the "culturally specific version of prosperity in Bengal'" inferentially addresses the question of poverty'; Prosperity and misery in Bengal, (1982), and David Arnold on 'Famine in peasant consciousness and peasant action: Madras 1876-78' (Subaltern Studies, III, Delhi, 1984) have used sources in the English language mainly; the Bengali language sources need to be explored much more than they have been yet.

 4. R. Doctor 'Sindhi folklore" in Folklore, London, Vol. 96, no. 2, 1985, p.223 

5. N.K.Bose, Man in India, vol. 37, no. 1, 1957 

6. Chung-Tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese intellectuals and folk literature, 1918-37 (Harvard University, 1985).

 7. S. Sen Gupta, Journal of Folklore Study in Bengal, Calcutta, 1967; Ashraf Siddiqui, 'Bengal folklore and its Survey', Folklore, Calcutta, vol. XVI, No. 7, 1975. 

8. A. Bhattacharya, Banglar Lokasangeet (Calcutta, 1965), Vols. I-IV 

9. M. Kaur, 'Folklore and history', Folklore, Calcutta, July 1981, p.59. 

10. Eric Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, OUP, New Delhi. 

11. Panopticism, derived from Bentham's Panipticon, owes its fame today to Foucault. 

12. G. Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty (London, 1984), p.79 

13. Mark Blaug, "The myth of the old poor law', Journal of Economic History, 1963. 

14. E.J. Hobsbawm and G. Rude, Captain Swing, (N.Y., 1968). 

15. R.H.Tawney, Religion and the rise of Capitalism (1938, p. 242) 

16. Himmelfarb, ibid., pp. 155-56. 17. Famine Commission Report, 1901, p. 45 (hereafter FCR). 

18. Lytton's minute, dt. 12 Aug. 1877, cited in FCR, 1898, p.239. 

19. Despatch from Secretary of State to GOI, 10 Jan. 1878, cited in FCR, 1898, p. 240.

 20. FCR, 1898, p. 284. 

21. FCR, 1901, p.24 

22. Report from His Majesty's Commissioners (Poor Law), London, 1834, p.29, cited in Himmelfarb, p. 139. 

23. ibid., p. 161 

24. ibid., p.165.

 25. 'Entitlement' was yet to acquire its more recent connotations, as in Amartya Sen's writing in the 1980's. 

26. FCR, 1901, p. 18.

 27. ibid. 

28. FCR, 1901., p.46. 

29. FCR, 1898. p.288. 

31. J.S. Mill, Principles of political economy, cited by J. and R. Strachey, Finances and Public Works in India (London, 1881), p. 408. 

32. J.S. Mill, Principles, (London, 1848, 1902), p.584. 

33. Dinesh Chandra Sen, Brihat Banga, (Calcutta, n.d.)

 34. Song nos.1-45, pp. 361 et seq, vol. Ill, A.Bhattacharya, op.cit. (hereafter cited as A.B.). 

35. A.B., III, pp. 86-8, et. Seq. 

36. A.B., vol,. Ill, on Tushu collection pp. 656, 658, 655, 559, 544. 

37. Cf. Paul Greenough, ibid, p. 11. 38. A.B., vol.. Ill, on Tushu Collection

. 

39. Famine Commission Report, 1901, p. II. 

40. A.B.,Vol. III. 

41. F.G. Bailey, "The peasant view of bad life' in T.Shanin, Peasants and peasant societies, 1971, p. 317. 

42. Suprasanna Bandhyopadhyay, Itihasasrita Bangala Kabita 1751-1855 (Calcutta, BS 1361 = 1954 AD), p. 161; his MS seems to be different from text in Kaliprasanna Sen (ed), Srirajmala (Agartala Tripura State, 1934). An Interesting comparison: Steve King 'Restructuring lives', Social History, VoL 22,3, Oct 1997, pp. 318-338 shows family and kinship ties mattered more than state aid in relieving poverty. 

43. This famine may have occurred around 1850. The author, wife of Raja of Tripura, wrote this history cum memoirs in 1858 in verse; Bandyopadhyay, op.cit., pp. 139-141.

 44. Akal charitra MS no. 4870, Calcutta University. The next quotation in text reads: "paiya jathar kashta/kalir manab rashta/dharma karma sab parihari", ibid. REFERENCES Alejandro Fortes, M.Castells, L.A. Benton, The Informal Economy: Studies in advanced and less developed countries (Baltimore, 1989), pp. 17, 22. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (Eng. Tr. C. Farrington, London, 1967), pp.86,97. Gareth Stedman Jones, 'The determinist fix: some obstacles to the further development of the linguistic approach to history in the 1990V, History Workshop Journal, vol. 42, 1996, pp. 19-36. Indian Journal of Labour Economics, vol. 15, no. 3, Part 2, Special Number, July 1997. Jan Lucassen, 'The other proletarians', International Review of Social History, 39, 1994, p.171-194. Lawrence Stone, 'History and Post-Modernism', Past and Present, 131, 1991, pp217-18. Mayfied and Tnome, 'Social history and its discontents', Social History, vol.17., 1992,pp.l65-188. Patrick Joyce 'The end of Social history?' Social History, vol. 20,1995, pp.32-54. -------- 'The imaginary discontents of social history', Social History, vol. 18, 1993, pp.81-85. Patrick Joyce and Catriona Kelly in Past and Present, 131, 1991, pp.204-13.