2 - Eastern India

Summary

The exact impact of British rule on the Indian rural society continues to be a debatable issue. The traditional view postulating a qualitative transformation of the rural society has recently been questioned, the opposing point of view being that what looked like a transformation was really largely a continuation of the pre-British system. The main point of disagreement relates to what may be called the ‘social fabric of Indian agriculture’, since both the views agreed that ‘the basic process of production and the level of technique’ were nearly everywhere left ‘virtually unaffected’, with the small peasant economy largely persisting as the basis of the organization of agriculture and with capitalistic farming affecting the rural economy only in isolated pockets. Even with regard to the view that ‘the net effect of British rule was to change drastically the social fabric’, one notices a shift in the arguments over the years. For instance, the nationalists who assumed an increasing rural impoverishment blamed it mainly on certain aspects of the British land revenue administration, such as the high pitch of land revenue demand, the insistence on its payment in money and its relative inflexibility which, by preventing accumulation of agricultural capital, inevitably impoverished agriculture. Later writers, thinking in terms of a structural change in the rural society, emphasized other factors, such as the establishment of private property in land, the creation and proliferation of a class of ‘parasitic’ landlords, the increasing burden of rent and rural indebtedness. All these, it is argued in the context of the growth of a cash economy and of an increasing commercialization of agriculture, caused large-scale alienations of peasant holdings, with the result that peasants ceased to be ‘self-possessing, self-working and self-sufficient’ producers and increasingly depended for their subsistence on agricultural wage labour and sharecropping.