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Labouring Histories: Agrarian Labour and Colonialism

Naladri Bhattacharya

(Neeladri Bhattacharya is with Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)

Preface

The essay, 'Labouring Histories: Agrarian Labour and Colonialism', by Neeladri Bhattacharya, forms part of a specially commissioned series, Writing Labour History, initiated under the Integrated Labour History Research Programme (ILHRP), of the V.VGiri National Labour Institute. This research programme, established in collaboration with the Association of Indian Labour Historians (AILH), aims at establishing and maintaining an apex repository of labour history documents, an Archive of Indian Labour History, with special emphasis on digital storage and retrieval. It is envisaged that all research projects designed and commissioned by the ILHRP will add to the continuous process of Writing Labour History of India, covering neglected areas of labour history research.

The concern towards constructing a rich and complex history of working people in India has emanated due to the recognition of three interrelated propositions. Firstly, there has been a growing consensus among the scholars that for too long the history of labour in India has been fixated on the industrial factory labour that emerged in the late colonial period. This has led to serious neglect of the overwhelming bulk of the working people who labour outside the pale of the factories and formal regulations. Secondly, scholarly research in labour history has focused exclusively in the colonial period, thus in some sense, neglecting the much more important post independence period developments. This may be one reason why labour history research has been seen as lacking contemporary relevance and has been deprived of the invigorating influence of engagement with the enormous social transformations in the labour scenario in the recent past. Thirdly, the history of the labour movement has been too easily equated with its organised and institutionalised aspects. This has led to the neglect and some times erasure of the rich experience of struggles in the unorganised sector by countless anonymous workers.

In the present essay, the author critically reviews some of the seminal research works on agrarian labour in colonial India and discusses the transformations within the frameworks. While focusing on the changing structure of arguments, the author probes into some of the problems in*conceptualising agrarian labour. The author highlights the nded for understanding agricultural labour as a relationship that sustains agrarian societies and cautions the danger in attaching greater importance to its 'personal' element. Further, the author argues that in analysing agrarian labour there is a need to move beyond the standard binary oppositions such as forced labour and free labour; voluntary labour and involuntary labour and so on. It is emphasized in the discussion that though there is a discernable trend of blurring of the boundaries between these neat categories, one could also see a continuity of erstwhile distinctions, forms of coercions and unfreedom.

On the whole, the author invites the attention of scholars and practitioners into certain hitherto unattended aspects of labour historiography. I hope that labour historians and students of labour studies would find this essay thought providing and useful.

(Uday Kumar Varma)

Director

This essay first looks at some of the important studies on agrarian labour in colonial India (Part-I), discussing the shifts within the frameworks, the structure of the arguments, and some of the problems with the framing ideas. Then (Part-II) it explores some of the themes raised in Part I, by drawing on recent researches on agrarian history.

PART I

The question of numbers

The early studies of agrarian labour in India focussed on the question of numbers. In a book that was to become a nationalist Marxist canonical text, SJ Patel argued with force that agricultural labourers had increased dramatically under British rule: from a mere one-seventh of the agricultural population at the end of the nineteenth century to over one-third by 1931. In the society before British rule, argued Patel, there was little room for the existence of an independent and distinct class of agricultural labourers. Within the traditional self-sufficient village communities, cultivators and artisans lived together, exchanging their products with each other; and peasants produced with the assistance of family labour. British rule saw the dissolution of the old order, the collapse of traditional social relations, a process of immeserization, and the emergence of a substantial class of landless agricultural labourers.

Patel's study clearly was not simply about agricultural labourers. Through a calculation of their numbers Patel was reflecting on the dynamic of colonialism, specifying an empirical index through which to unravel this logic. The dramatic increase in the number of agricultural labourers was seen as clear evidence of impoverishment and pauperization under British rule. In the 1950s, the study of agricultural labour in India was not yet framed within narratives of transition from feudalism to capitalism, the growth of agriculture labour was not yet read as a sign of agrarian capitalism.

Patel's text is pervaded by a sense of loss: the loss of the old world, the loss of self-sufficiency, the breakdown of village community. This story of loss was inevitably linked to a story of great rupture, of dramatic change, 'the most thoroughgoing transformation in India's long history'. Such narratives of dramatic break always schematize the contrast between two times, before and after the moment of rupture, between the time of concord and discord, harmony and conflict, prosperity and poverty. And Patel did just that. But Patel was writing at a time when colonial stereotypes about Indian past were not yet opened up for critical scrutiny, when the theories of self-sufficient village community and jajmani system were not yet critiqued. If Patel built his argument through an uncritical reading of colonial sources, and accepted colonial representations without questioning them, if he was using Census data unproblematically, then he was doing what most academics did in the early 1950s.

Patel's text quickly became a classic. For the first time census figures were being used to study the emergence of agricultural labourers and to map a picture of depeasantization, not only at the national level but with all its regional variations. It was a study that gave the old nationalist thesis of impoverishment under colonialism a new empirical basis, concretizing the picture, establishing it with seemingly reliable data. In the 1950s and 60s, numbers had a seductive power.

By the early 1960s the Patel thesis was under attack. In 1962 Dharma Kumar published her classic essay 'Caste and landlessness in South India', and her book on the subject appeared three years later. Kumar argued with polemical vigour that the proportion of agricultural labourers to the total labour force did not change in the nineteenth century: it fluctuated between 17 to 25 percent. She showed that Patel's thesis of dramatic change under colonialism was based on an uncritical reading of colonial sources, and that landlessness and agrestic serfdom were common in pre-British Madras; they were characteristic of a rural landscape structured by the hierarchical caste order. The increase in the number of agricultural labourers was a phenomenon of the twentieth century and not the long nineteenth century. And if indeed the number of agricultural labourers did not substantially increase over a century of British rule then the nationalist thesis that Patel sought to affirm was itself under question. The social existence of agricultural labourers in the nineteenth century could not reveal a history of impoverishment, depeasantization, and increasing landlessness consequent on high levels of land revenue demand. It revealed rather the persistence of inequality structured and reproduced by the caste order. In 1900 as in 1800 most of the agricultural labourers were untouchables.

Within the Marxist nationalist circle in India, Kumar's thesis was received with unease. She was quickly identified as presenting an optimistic picture of British rule, dissociating the link between impoverishment and colonialism, projecting a simple continuity between the pre-colonial and colonial periods. By the mid-sixties Marxists had re-conceptualized the image of pre-colonial Indian economy, rejected the romanticized picture of self-sufficient village societies; but a rethinking about the colonial economy was yet to begin. For a long time every argument on the colonial economy remained firmly locked in the stultifying poverty / prosperity paradigm. Against every questioning of the old nationalist thesis, Marxist nationalists reacted by reasserting the truth of old canons. There was a refusal to see that many of those simple propositions needed to be rethought and problematized. The terms in which Kumar questioned the nationalist thesis were problematic, but the act of questioning was not.

Kumar's exercise in quantitative measures focussed on the nineteenth century: comparing the census estimates of 1900 with rough estimates for1800. She did not fundamentally question the Census figures that Patel was using, or his interpretation of those figures. In fact her contention that agricultural labourers undoubtedly increased in the twentieth century, though not in the nineteenth, was premised on an unproblematized acceptance of the Census data. In an important essay published in 1972, J Krishnamurty returned to the Census figures that Patel had used, subjected them to a close scrutiny and rejected the conclusions that Patel had drawn. By now it was generally accepted that the occupational data in the Census were suspect (Daniel and Alice Thorner1962). But Krishnamurty showed how the problems with the figures affected Patel's conclusions. Not only were the figures non-comparable but they had a consistent bias. First: the 1871-2 estimates related to 'adult males', the 1881 to 'males' and the subsequent one's to 'persons' (males and females) Second: the area covered by the Census expanded over time. Third: in the early censuses the concept of 'worker' is used while in the later decades the concept of 'population supported' (workers plus dependents). So a comparison of the later figures with the early Census estimates inevitably exaggerated the increase of agricultural labour. Krishnamurty's recalculations, after eliminating the biases, reaffirmed the picture of stasis: between 1901 and 1961 the share of agricultural labourers in agricultural workforce in the Indian Union fluctuated around 25 per cent for males though for females it declined from 31 per cent to 26 per cent. (Krishnamurty 1972)

Can this picture of changelessness be sustained? I will return to this question in later sections of the essay. For the moment I wish to make only two points. First: the thesis of continuity that emerges in Kumar's study flowed from her methodological approach. Since she limited her study to the estimation of lower castes, assuming that they constituted the bulk of the labour force, she excluded from her estimates those impoverished peasants who turned to agriculture labour to supplement their living. The evidence in her book itself suggests that this exclusion is problematic. In the 1890s, according to Kumar, 65 per cent of the ryotwari  pattas in Madras Presidency were too small to support a family; in Ramnad, 75 per cent of the ryots worked as agricultural labourers in the 1890s; in  Anantpur, two-thirds of the pattas were for plots which yielded only about three months of food for one man (pp. 171-72). Consider this evidence in relation to the agrarian context described in the book. Kumar shows how the extension of cultivation and increase in productivity failed to keep up with the growth in population, and high levels of revenue demand and repeated scarcities and famines led to emigration. Impoverishment may not have lead to total landlessness, but the pauperized peasants undoubtedly depended on agricultural labour for their subsistence. The composition of the people who laboured on the fields clearly changed over time, even if their numbers are difficult to capture through census statistics. The harvesters who cut the crop were not all lower caste Malas and Madigas.

Second: even if Kumar is right in saying that most agricultural labourers in 1900 as in 1800 were from lower castes, does this imply that there was no profound change in the social form of labour?  In reacting against Patel's simplified picture of dramatic transformation, we need not throw over board the very idea of change itself? Kumar is right in pointing to the resilience of native institutions and the durability of caste as an institution: embedded structures are not easily washed away under the pressure of external forces. But are they not refigured in significant ways? To track such changes we cannot simply look at figures. We need to re-evaluate the evidence of change, relocate the sites at which they occur. And instead of the binary between continuity and change, the long duree and the event, we need to see how they are intimately connected, how they constitute each other. This is a theme I will return to in the second part of the essay.

 Narratives of transition:

By the 1970s reflections on agricultural labour got linked to the prevailing debate on modes of production. Economists and historians began to identify the specific stage of transition from feudalism to capitalism, and searched for indices through which the transition could be measured.  Agricultural labour inevitably became a point of focus, and discussions on it were all framed within meta-narratives of transition.

One site of the debate was around the question of hired labour. What did it signify? For some, the increased use of hired labour and the expansion of commodity economy in the post-Independence period were evidence of the growth of capitalism (Kotovsky, Gupta 1962, Chattopadhyay 1972a, 1972 b). Others saw the relationship between capitalism and hired labour as more complicated. In a set of important essays Utsa Patnaik argued that hired labour was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the operation of capitalism (Patnaik 1971; 1972). It existed in earlier social forms. Only when integrated to a system oriented towards an expanded production of surplus value, did hired labour embody capitalist relations of production, only then could it be considered as surplus value producing wage labour. Under colonialism, she argued, capital expanded in the sphere of circulation without entering production, landowners employed hired labour without reinvesting the income back into cultivation; technological growth was aborted and agriculture stagnated. While the pressure of revenue, rent and interest pauperized the peasantry, there was no simultaneous rise of modern industry that could absorb the landless, and help create an internal market (Patnaik 1971)

While Marxist economists differed on whether hired labour signified capitalism, there was a seeming unanimity about non-wage labour. Everyone seemed to agree that attached labour  - whether sustained through traditional customary ties or through debt-peonage - was necessarily pre-capitalist, and ought to be described as feudal or semi-feudal. It is an argument premised on a set of analogous binaries: force and freedom, coercion and consent, involuntary and voluntary, personal and contractual, feudalism and capitalism. If force and coercion was by definition pre-capitalist, and free wage labour the signifier of capitalism, the evidence of coercive labour could then be identified without a problem as feudal and semi-feudal. And the shift from coerced to free wage labour could be seen as marking the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Till the seventies, these reductive assumptions shaped the transition debate not only in India, but also in Europe (Hilton 1978, Brenner 1977) Even critics who set out to question these assumptions, operated in many ways within its terms. Consider the essay by Jairus Banaji on the Deccan peasantry (Banaji 1977). Drawing upon Marx's newly published Appendix to Capital, Banaji developed a powerful critique of the thesis of semi-feudalism. Marx had distinguished two stages within the historic process of subordination of small producers to capital. One was the stage formal subsumption when merchant capital invaded the process of production and took it over. It was a stage in which the labour process was still technically fragmented and decentralized, but producers lost control of their means of subsistence, and their capacity to reconstitute the process of production from one cycle to another without the intervention of merchant capital. The stage of real subsumption entailed the production of relative surplus value - a form that was more adequate to the process of specifically capitalist production.  In this stage the process of production was reconstituted, the means of production and labour power were centralized, and capital lost its individual character and became social capital. Building on this conceptual separation, Banaji suggested that systems of advances and share cropping in late-nineteenth century Deccan, the region of his study, were not semi-feudal relations; they were mechanisms through which small producers were subordinated to the sway of capital.

This was an important argument that led to a conceptual rethinking of the idea of capitalist domination of labour. Yet even this argument remained firmly embedded in the teleology of transition. Instead of a shift form forced to free wage labour, the transformation was now visualized through intermediate stages: from pre-capitalist modes of labour, through pre-formal and formal subsumption of labour, to real subsumption of labour. The 'real subsumption' was the telos towards which the history of labour moved, through tortured steps: capital first took over earlier forms of labour, subjecting them to the power of capital, without transforming them, without entering them, but controlling them from the outside. This formal subsumption expressed capitalist relations of production, surplus value production; but it did not presuppose the bourgeois mode of production in its advanced form; it was based on a labour process that was continuous with earlier modes of labour. In this argument, the true bourgeois form was co-terminus with the real subsumption-process, when the relations of production would emerge purged of the inherited pre-capitalist remains alien to the pure motion of capital. Banaji's thesis begins with the argument that coerced labour, in its multifarious forms, is compatible with capitalism - capitalism in fact develops through these forms - but it ends by arguing that these forms of coerced labour are in fact anomalous to the real logic of capital. Formal subsumption can only be a stage within a linear move towards a purer capitalism, untainted by force and coercion, based on the logic of relative surplus value production through technological innovation - the real subsumption of capital.

The transition debate of the 1970s was, at one level, productive. It opened up a range of conceptual issues for debate, and revealed the problems of categorizing labour forms. But after a point the interest in theoretical classification became semantic exercises in labelling. As if to label and classify was to gain visibility, to know. As if to designate a relation as free wage labour or forced labour, semi-feudal or capitalist, was to understnad the relation, its attributes, its characteristics. The project of classification often obscures and homogenizes, flattens and essentializes. Diverse social forms are made intelligible by fitting them into categories, their differences are repressed in order to discover their social essence, an essence that could be captured through the framing category. When these framing categories form a part of narratives of transition, different social forms of labour are allocated different spaces within the linear flow time, as so many evolutionary stages from one pure form to another, forms whose essences are pre-given. Inevitably these evolutionary forms are then seen as embroynic manifestations of supposed later forms, or dissolving remnants/residues of earlier forms.  What such exercises often block are historical explorations of the formation of specific labour forms, the logic of different labour regimes, enquiries into the processes of their production and re-production, legitimation and de-legitimation.

Patronage and exploitation

Jan Breman’s  Patronage and Exploitation (1974) was such an effort to explore the working of a specific labour regime. Building on anthropological insights, he looked at the cultural constitution of the relationship between landlords and labourers in south Gujrat, analyzing the framework of norms that bound them vertically through ties of mutual duties and obligations. In developing his argument, he also reworked the terms within which sociologists in India had conceptualized such systems of relationships. Till Breman, the debate on jajmani system had been largely framed within the binary opposition of reciprocity and exploitation. The argument of reciprocity emphasized the organizing ideals of the system: mutualities, equivalent exchanges of services, co-operation and interdependence, all operating within an insulated autarchic world, insulated from the market and money economy (Wiser 1936, 1946, Neale 1957). It was as if reciprocity excluded exploitation, expression of emotion and affection was incompatible with the pursuit of interest, gift giving was unmediated by power, and exchange of services against grain was devoid of market calculus. The focus on exploitation inverted the terms, looking at the under lying relations as essentially exploitative and oppressive, unequal and conflict ridden, and driven by market rationality (Biedelman 1959, Hjelje 1967; Gough 1960).  Within this frame, the norms of reciprocity appeared as a mask, the language of mutualities was seen as a deception that cloaked the reality of exploitation and oppression, caste was an expression of class. Distancing himself from the exclusivist terms of these oppositions, Breman looked at the inter-articulation of patronage and exploitation. The relations of patronage and gestures of generosity allowed and lubricated a system that was exploitative and unequal. If the system of patronage made exploitation possible, it also defined the limits of oppression. Halipratha was a system of unfree labour mediated by patronage.

Within the halipratha system that Breman discussed, halis were mostly Dubla tribals, and the masters were predominantly Anavil Brahamins. The hali bound not only himself but also his wife and children. He worked on the land, did odd jobs and ran errands. It was a relationship of beck and call, with working hours never well defined. The wife ground the grain, fetched water, swept the floor, washed utensils, cleaned the stable, did housework and field labor. The master was a patron with obligation and duties. He provided food, allotted a site to build a hut, gave clothing, some firewood, toddy, and medicines. Beyond the basic means of subsistence, he helped the hali tidy over periods of subsistence crisis – in the lean seasons every year, and during scarcities and famines. The Anavil’s loans made it possible for the hali to meet the expenses of life cycle rituals, of marriage, death and birth.

This, according to Breman, was not a system of forced labour: 'The initiative to begin the relationship was taken by both parties and it was in the interest of both to maintain it.’ Within an economy of high seasonality of labour demand and possible shortage of supply in the peak season, Anavils found it necessary to ensure a secure supply for the peak season through the halipratha. Halis on their part preferred servitude to free labour since regular employment was scarce, labour demand was seasonal, and the alternative to attachment was starvation. Even if the remuneration of the halis was low, they were entitled to credit, care and protection. Dublas, in fact, desired permanent attachment: termination of the relationship was the last thing they wanted. Servitude within this system was therefore voluntary.

The Dublas accepted dependence in lieu of protection and care. If the Anavil gave the hali security, he expected the hali to be loyal, submissive, timid, and devoted. The Dubla could not openly express dissatisfaction, or show himself to be disobedient and disloyal. Through loyalty he could ensure rewards, special care, and an access to the intimate details of the household, an access that signified trust. The submission of the hali accentuated the power of the master, while at the same time the ideology of patronage defined the limits of tyranny and exploitation.

In the end, halipratha disintegrated primarily because Anavils and halis, for different reasons, saw the system as no longer serving their interests. With the expansion of industries and railroads, Dublas found alternative employment and were unwilling to enter into agreements that bound them. At the same time the interests of Anavils shifted, and the ideology of patronage lost its function. With the decline of sugarcane cultivation the demand for labour contracted, and Anavils increasingly considered urban occupations as the source of status and prestige. Now agriculture was not valued to the same extent and the command over a retinue of halis was no more perceived as the foundation of power and influence.

Breman’s fascinating study thus explored the ideology of patronage that both expressed and sustained the relations of domination and exploitation in South Gujrat.  To engage with the argument we need to locate it within the larger literature on patron-client bonds. In the 1970s, studies of patron-client relations developed in opposition to earlier functionalist frameworks of looking at social and political formations.  In developing the argument, these new studies borrowed from a longer tradition of works on the subject, but reworked the meaning of the key concepts. Earlier studies of patronage, conceptualized the relation in opposition to democratic, bureaucratic and modern structures.  Framed within a narrative of modernization, patron-client relations were seen as a pre-modern phenomenon that would disappear with the growth of democratic or class-consciousness. Departing from these assumptions, the new studies saw patron client relations as integral and central to the growth of modern economic and political structures ( Wolf 1966; Scott, 1972, 1977; Gellner 1977; Hall 1974;  Weingrod 1972; Eisenstadt and Roniger 1980)

These new studies had certain recurrent themes. They explored the way hierarchy, inequality and asymmetry was structured within a system of interpersonal relations, the way power was constituted symbolically through notions of honour and shame, relations of friendship and kinship. They showed that a system of patron-client relations was characterized by a simultaneous exchange of resources: support and loyalty against duties, long-term credit, and obligations.  This exchange was simultaneous, and was sustained by a two-way flow. The system could not work if the flow stopped from any one side. Within the system, solidarities were forged through the language of inter-personal loyalty, attachment, personal honour, and obligation. The relations were not contractual, but were based on informal understanding. Ties were established voluntarily and abandoned voluntarily. Since they forged vertical bonds, these ties undermined horizontal group organizations. Premised on the patron’s access to means of production, markets and resources, these were relations of inequality and power, which appeared as relations sustained through inter-personal sentiments and emotions.

Breman’s study belonged to this new genre of writings that explored the inner working of the patron-client system. He developed, elaborated, and worked out themes that resonated with other writings on Southeast Asia. Reacting to the notion of forced labour, the argument of patronage, emphasized the voluntary nature of the pact. Patrons and clients both appear complicit in establishing a relationship that served the interests of both simultaneously; and hence both patrons and clients wanted its continuance. Breman’s argument, thus, redefined the field of agrarian labour studies, deepening and enriching it, forcing historians and anthropologists to look not only at structures and their inner functioning, but persuading them to explore the perceptions of those involved in the relations, their calculations, their strategies of survival.

While Breman inflects the notions of patronage and exploitation, his use of the concept  ‘voluntary’ remains rather unproblematic.  How does one define what is voluntary and what is forced? Are the two so distinct and opposed? Did not force underlie what appeared as voluntary? In any case, were the attitudes of the Dubla so unambiguous, particularly when choices are made under such severe constraints, when rupture of the relationship is so difficult, when Anavils brought run-away halis back to work?  Can we conceptualize such relationships through the usual binaries: freedom/ unfreedom, voluntary/ forced?

The focus on mutual consent as the necessary premise of the working of the system also leads Breman to under-theorize the role of contestation in the constitution of the system. The halis may not have risen in revolt, but they did question their master, sought redressal of grievances, and held out the threat of flight. The idealization of dubla loyalty by the Anavils was underwritten by the unstated fear of disloyalty; generosity and beneficence was sustained by the threat of flight; the experience of insubordination in the present led to a nostalgic return to a mythic past of harmony and order. The public script of loyalty and deference can, as Scott as argued, coexist with a hidden script of every day resistance. This resistance may not subvert the system, but it does alter its contours.

Breman's text, it appears to me, is pervaded by an inner tension. It oscillates between description of the system as model and the system as practice. He is acutely aware of the difference, frequently reminding the reader of this, and yet he often moves from a discussion of one to the other rather unproblematically - a move that creates an impression that the world of the halipratha in someway corresponded to the model, if not in the present, sometime in the past. This inner tension of the text is related possibly to another, one that has to do with questions of representation. Breman's work is wonderfully evocative, he takes the readers into the world of halipratha, makes them listen to the anavils and dublas, understand their calculations, perceptions, and experiences. In the process however, the reader begins to see the system through the idealized projections of the informants, the past begins to appear as a time when the model worked in its ideal form, the present was a time of breakdown. The distinction between the model and the practice is temporalized: it becomes analogous to the difference between the past and the present.

The discourse of bondage

Gyan Prakash, in his finely crafted study of the kamauti system in South Bihar, emphasizes the need to understand the power of colonial discourse in re-figuring the kamia-malik relationship in Bihar. The discourse of freedom figured the kamia as a bonded slave, as a person who had lost his natural right to liberty. It was in opposition to the notion of free labour that the term kamia was translated  as un-free labour, and seen as bondage. The progress from unfreedom to freedom, from bonded to free labour was seen as a progress towards modernity, a process of restoring the natural rights of liberty. Within this narrative of progress, bondage had to be seen as a legacy of pre-British, pre-modern past, and the movement against slavery a feature of colonial rule. Prakash shows how the conceptions of the British conflicted with the perceptions of the kamia’s in constituting the relationship.

In their own oral epics, the Bhuinyas located the origin of their historical status as a ritually polluted group engaged in agricultural labour, through a narrative return to a world inhabited by birs and Gods, a world in which the Gods appear mean and deceitful, and the lowly appear divine. The stories develop through a series of reversals. Tulsi bir, the original ancestor, is represented as a warrior, as one with an elevated status, someone who employs labour and confronts Gods. Yet he has at the same time marks of dependence: his father had worked for Bhabanas. Tulsi’s loss of power is explained through a series of pollution themes. Through divine trickery he comes into contact with and consumes some polluting substance, beef in some tales and placenta in others. This story of pollution reveals the bir’s inner purity and the meanness of the Brahmanical gods.

Prakash suggests that the oral tales show how important the question of power and caste was within the imagination of the kamias. On the one hand, the ancestors are seen as birs, as heroes who could confront Gods, as raja like figures. On the other, the kamia category existed only in so far as it related to and was signified by the caste order. The origin of their lowly status was in an originary polluting act, a fact that acquires meaning only within the terms of caste norms. From these oral traditions and other written texts, concludes Prakash, the Kamias in the pre-colonial period, emerge not as unfree labourers, but as dependent servants of dominant landlords. It is in the colonial texts, and through colonial practices, that dependence was re-conceptualized as unfreedom.

As maliks consolidated their power through their command over money and produce,  kamias were subjected to a variety of practices that defined and documented them as persons who had lost their natural rights to freedom because of the power of loans - of things, money, land and grain. Identified as the essence of humanity, freedom was projected as a natural object of desire, an inspiration behind the anti-slavery movement. The kamias who had lost this freedom through debt and loans, lived in a world of suspended rights. Debt bondage freed the kamia from association with caste that earlier characterized his relation with the malik, and tied him anew with loans.

Building on Bourdieu's ideas, Prakash re-conceptualizes the relationship of patronage and exploitation as an economy of gentleness and violence. The life of the kamia was crucially dependent on this economy of gentleness. Since their wages sustained them only for ten months in a year, their needs in other months could only be met through the master’s assistance. The master’s help and loans in times of crisis appeared as acts of generosity and paternal care, binding the kamin in structures of dependence. But if the kamia refused his labour seeking to work elsewhere, then the malik ensured submission through a variety of forms of physical violence. If the kamia fled to other villages, contesting the limits of malik oppression, then the malik fell back on the policy of violence and gentleness. When Keso Bhuinya disappeared to his wife’s village for four days during the time of transplantation, Birji Babu beat him unconscious on his return. Reacting to the violence, Keso Bhuinya disappeared again to his wife’s village for three and a half years. Birji Babu could now re-establish the relation only through a display of gentleness and symbolic power. He arrived on his elephant and showered Keso with gifts.

Unlike Breman’s framework, contestation has an important space in Prakash’s narrative. Kamia-malik relations were defined by a process in which kamias both  contested the relations and were complicit in their elaboration. They continued with every day acts of resistance – working for others, stealing time, and pretending to be sick when the malik expected him to work. Such daily acts of resistance, carried through under pretence of acquiescence, limited the malik’s exercise of power. ‘But in so far as resistance was disguised as acquiescence, such acts also acknowledged the malik’s dominance.’

Prakash demonstrates with great effect the importance of the discourse of freedom in both defining the kamia-malik relationship and narrativizing its history. But, I think, there are a few problems with the argument. First: the use of the concept of freedom, and the notion of bondage does not necessarily imply that we operate within the liberal teleology of progress, and see capitalism and modernity as inevitably liberating. Debates on bondage, forced labour and slavery have shown how bondage not only co-exists with but also is consolidated within the framework of capitalism and an expansive market economy. (see Steinfeld 1991, 2001; Brass and Linden 1977; Banaji 2003) These studies do not necessarily see the move towards free wage labour as a logical corollary to the expansion of market, or the unfolding of legal constitutional system (Steinfeld1991; 2001). The move is defined by the nature of struggles, structured by co-relation of forces and the politics of a time.

Second: the use of the notion of freedom is not as problematic as Prakash suggests. If liberals have discovered in freedom, the essence of human nature, and seen freedom as a natural right, which needs to be recovered whenever and wherever it is lost, we need not operate within the terms set by them, giving the term over to liberal essentialists. Concepts can be deconstructed, as Prakash does, but also refigured, emptied of sedimented meanings and refilled with new meanings.  It is possible to see freedom as specifically defined by societies, in particular locations and times; its meaning constituted through social practices and negotiation. Steinfeld for instance shows how the idea of 'free labour' and 'free contract' had continuously shifting meanings in nineteenth century Britain. Agricultural workers imagine their own idea of freedom, imaginings that sustain their lives and inspire their struggles. What we need to see is not whether 'freedom' and 'coercion' existed, in some hypostatized form, but how particular ideas and structures of coercion/freedom are defined and historically shaped. We need to differentiate determinate notions of freedom and coercion.

Third:  Prakash’s shift from the idea of 'bondage' and 'un-freedom' to the notion of 'dependence' has the same conceptual problems that he seeks to criticize. Dependence can only be defined in opposition to the idea of independence, and the notion of the free individual subject. It is a notion firmly rooted within the liberal discourse of self: the Enlightenment notion that independence from pre-given societal constraints is crucial to the making of an autonomous, self-constituting, meaning attributing individual, someone who can exercise his free will, free agency, private volition. How then does the use of this category help us transcend the limits of Enlightenment discourse? To me it appears that the need is not so much to invent new terms (this too is undoubtedly important), untainted by the burden of the past; but to rework each term, by exploring its assumed essence and by unpacking the frameworks of thought that saturate it with specific meanings. And this Prakash has done with great effect. If elements are plucked out of a paradigm or a structure of discourse and reintegrated to another, then their original essence is ruptured, their meanings are re-figured. We need not be so anxious, so stricken with the guilt of complicity, in using terms seemingly tainted by Enlightenment thought.

Fourth: Prakash tends to overstate the codifying power of discourse.  Clearly we need to understand the nature of the framing discourses of labour, but we must equally recognize the limits of their shaping power, and look at the ways in which framing categories themselves were questioned and reworked. In any case, was there only one source of this framing discourse? Did not colonial conceptions of village society and official descriptions of patron-client relations within rural areas, draw upon anti-Enlightenment ideas of community and  'folk', affective ties and emotional links, as much as Enlightenment ideas of freedom and bondage? The finest accounts of these relations often were penned by conservative paternalists officials who had a complicated and tortured relationship with Enlightenment ideas.

To recapitulate the discussion in Part  I: in the last four decades the field of agrarian labour studies in India has continuously broadened and mutated. The framing questions have changed, the operating assumptions have been rethought, and the conceptual terms of discussions have shifted. The earliest studies focused on the question of numbers. The nationalist assumption that agricultural labourers were absent in pre-colonial period, and that they dramatically increased under British rule, was effectively and powerfully questioned by Dharma Kumar. While scholars debated the picture of stasis that Kumar presented, and Marxists reflected on the problem of conceptualizing labour forms, Breman began to explore the world which labourers and employers inhabited. Historians now began looking at the cultural categories through which social relations were ordered, the perceptual frames through which the labourers and employers looked at each other, and the duties and obligations that tied them together. Recent studies of Gyan Prakash and others have shown how our notions of labour are also structured by the discourses of freedom and bondage that dominate the post-enlightenment world.

But to assess our knowledge about agricultural labour in the colonial period, we need to return to many of the old issues, synthesizing the existing evidence and re-thinking our answers. New historiographical insights do not condemn old questions into oblivion; they force us to re-look at them in new ways.  We need to reassess the question of numbers, discuss the forms of labour force, and reflect on the nature of the labour market. This I seek to do in the next part of the essay.

Part II

Persistences: numbers

First we return to the question of numbers. A look at the calculations may not tell us the exact number of labourers, but they do inform us of the limits of codification – what could and could not be classified, what the census makes visible and what it erases. Behind the numbers we need to look at the politics of the record that shapes our notion of the labour force.

The number of agricultural labourers is difficult to calculate with any degree of precision. But in general census figures show an amazing stability in the percentage of agricultural population to total work force, in most provinces of India. Apart from Punjab there was no substantial increase in any other region. Krishnamurty’s recalculation of the all India Census figures shows that that the proportion of male agricultural labourers to the total workforce fluctuated around 25 per cent (Table I). This also meant that the spatial distribution of agricultural labourers did not change substantially. The inter-regional variation in the incidence of labour force did not narrow. In 1881, as in 1951, Bengal, Bihar, Central Provinces, Madras, Kerala, had a larger incidence of agricultural labourers than provinces like Punjab, UP, Rajasthan.

Table 1

THE SHARE OF AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS IN THE

AGRICULTURAL WORKFORCE IN INDIA: 1881-1931