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    Plan

    Plan détaillé Texte intégral Precursors : Sulekh Chand Gupta, G. G. Kotovsky, Daniel Thorner The original protagonists : Ashok Rudra and Utsa Patnaik Semi-feudalism, an Eastern India syndrome : Amit Bhaduri, Pradhan Prasad, Nirmal Chandra, Ranjit Sau and once again Rudra Rural class structure : Joan Mencher, Nirmal Chandra, Utsa Patnaik, Ashok Rudra, Pranab Bardhan, Pradhan Prasad, John Harriss Mode of production in colonial India : Hamza Alavi, Ashok Rudra, Gail Omvedt, Jairus Banaji, Kathleen Gough, Amiya K. Bagchi Direction and pace of change in Independent India : Utsa Patnaik, Nirmal Sen Gupta, Paresh Chattopadhyay, Sharad Lin, Dipankar Gupta, Aparajita Chakraborty, Ashok Rudra, Atyachar Virodh Samiti Balance sheet Bibliographie Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Caste et classe en Asie du sud

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    Semi-feodalism or capitalism: The contemporary debate on classes and modes of production in India

    Semi-féodalisme ou capitalisme : Le débat contemporain sur les classes et le mode de production en Inde

    Alice Thorner

    p. 19-72

    Résumés

    After a dozen years of heated discussion, Indian Marxist intellectuals have come explicitly or implicitly to acknowledge the increasing importance on the rural scene of a new class of capitalist farmers who utilise scientific methods, invest in equipment, employ wage labourer, produce primarily for the market, and aim above all at realising profits. Various features which have been put forward as criteria of semi-feudalism – concentration of landholding, share-cropping, exorbitant rents, usurious advances to tenants and labourers, the persistence of extra-economic constraints – appear to be compatible with, or at least not to have stood in the way of, the development of capitalism in Indian agriculture. On questions of rural class structure and its implications for political action, opinions still differ sharply.

    Après une douzaine d’années d’un débat animé, les intellectuels marxistes indiens admettent implicitement ou explicitement l’importance toujours croissante sur la scène rurale d’une nouvelle classe d’exploitants agricoles capitalistes, exploitants qui suivent des méthodes scientifiques, qui investissent dans l’équipement, qui emploient une main-d’œuvre salariée, qui produisent essentiellement pour le marché, et qui cherchent surtout à obtenir des bénéfices. Divers traits tenus comme des critères de semi-féodalisme – concentration de la propriété, métayage, loyers fonciers exorbitants, avances octroyées aux tenanciers et aux ouvriers agricoles à des conditions usuraires, recours à la contrainte extra-économique – se révèlent compatibles avec, ou du moins n’ont pas empêché, le développement du capitalisme dans l’agriculture indienne. Sur les questions de structure des classes rurales et les implications pour l’action politique, les opinions restent largement divergentes.

    Texte intégral Bibliographie Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Texte intégral

    1For more than a dozen years Indian and foreign Marxists have been arguing with passion, subtlety and an abundance of statistics about the existing mode of production in Indian agriculture or, more broadly, in India. There have been proponents of capitalism, pre-capitalism, semi-feudalism, colonial and post-colonial modes, and recently, a dual mode. Authors of important contributions to this debate include economists : Ashok Rudra of Visvabharati University in Shantiniketan, West Bengal ; Utsa Patnaik, Amit Bhaduri and Dipankar Gupta, all now of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi ; Nirmal Chandra and Ranjit Sau of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta ; Amiya Bagchi of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta ; Pradhan Prasad and Nirmal Sen Gupta of the A. N. Sinha Institute of Social Studies in Patna ; Jairus Banaji of Bombay ; Paresh Chattopadhyay and Sharad G. Lin, both teaching in Canada ; and John Harriss of the University of East Anglia ; social anthropologists : Kathleen Gough of Vancouver who began work in South India in 1947 ; and Joan P. Mencher of the University of the City of New York ; sociologists : Hamza Alavi of the University of Manchester and Gail Omvedt, an American who has adopted residence in Maharashtra. But this listing is not exhaustive.

    2In very large part, the successive formulations, presentations of data, critiques and rebuttals have appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly of Bombay. Two other journals which have published substantial contributions are Frontier (Calcutta), and Social Scientist (Trivandrum). Although a handful of relevant books have been published in India and elsewhere during the period, the cut and thrust of the argument has been carried almost exclusively in the periodicals.

    3The framework and terminology of the discussion are explicitly Marxist. References to classics by Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin and Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) abound. Our authors are also familiar with the current international Marxist literature. They cite European and Latin American writers including Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Charles Bettelheim, Samir Amin, Ciro Cardoso, André Gunder Frank, Michael Kalecki, Jean-Loup Herbert, Martinez-Alier, Ernest Mandel, Nicos Poulantzas, Pierre-Philippe Rey, Claude Meillassoux, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, some of whose works have not been translated into English.

    4Gunder Frank actually intervenes briefly in the debate. But the focus remains Indian, and the concrete evidence brought forward in support of the various theses is drawn primarily from Indian experience. Thus the different participants in the debate deal with the same body of subject matter, and they share a common theoretical commitment to Marxism. But they are very far from agreement as to how Marxist methodology should be applied to the Indian case. It is taken for granted that Marxist historical models exist ; there is no consensus as to the nature of these models. In fact, questions of the Marxist legitimacy of this or that position are very elaborately argued, and with considerable vehemence. Despite the intrinsic interest of these strictures, we shall leave them to one side and concentrate on the substantive agreements and disagreements with regard to the nature of Indian reality.

    5What then are the main issues at stake ?

    • Is there capitalism in Indian agriculture ? To a significant degree ? In some parts of the country only ? Is it a recent phenomenon ? Is it spreading ? Is it the dominant tendency ? Is it a guarantee of agricultural progress ? By what criteria can the existence of capitalism in agriculture be proved or disproved ?

    • On the contrary, is the dominant form of production relations in agriculture not capitalist but pre-capitalist or semi-feudal ? What are the salient features of semi-feudal relations ? Are they a brake on the productive forces ? Do they resist change ?

    • Can India today be characterised with one or another of Marx’s well-known modes of production : slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and the Asiatic mode ? Is it necessary to modify one of Marx’s original concepts or to bring in a new mode (or modes) to take account of Indian (or more largely, colonial) specificity ? Can there be more than one mode of production in the same country at the same time ? If so, are these modes necessarily in conflict, or may they be articulated in some fashion ?

    • What was the mode of production or the prevailing form of production relations in India during the colonial period ? At the moment of Independance in 1947 ?

    • What are the principal rural classes ? The basis for their demarcation ? Their respective shares of the rural population ?

    • What are the main lines of conflict, the contradictions in rural India today ? In India as a whole ? What is the role of Government ?

    • What implications for political action by Left parties follow from the answers given to the above questions ?

    • We shall return to this checklist when we eventually draw up the balance sheet of the debate. But we shall present the controversy in rough chronological order, as it has actually taken place. We shall see the original protagonists take up their positions, attract supporters and opponents ; freebooters will enter the fray and enlarge the area of discussion ; a key figure will change sides ; others will regroup. In the end, the defenders of semi-feudalism will scatter, the champions of the colonial mode will slip away, and the standard-bearers of capitalism will occupy the field, although by no means obedient to a single command.

    6From the beginning, the debate is carried on simultaneously at several levels : that of the individual cultivating unit, that of the agricultural sector of a particular region (e.g. Punjab-Haryana or Eastern India) or of India as a whole, that of the entire economy of a region or of India as a whole ; that of the colony-metropole relationship or of the imbrication of India in the world economy. A number of authors (Rudra, Patnaik, Bhaduri, Prasad, Nirmal Chandra, Mencher, Harriss) bring in freshly gathered field data at the first and second levels to buttress their arguments. Others (Sulekh Chand Gupta, Kotovsky, Omvedt, Gough, as well as some of those who also conducted their own rural enquiries) draw upon the vast stock available from official sources such as the Farm Management Studies, the National Sample Survey, the Rural Credit Surveys, the Censuses and Agricultural Censuses, the Rural Labour Surveys. Banaji and Bagchi use historical sources to document their analyses of the nineteenth century. Several of the economists (Patnaik, Rudra, Bhaduri, Nirmal Chandra, Sau and Lin) employ mathematical models. A handful (Sen Gupta, Dipankar Gupta, and Lin) restrict themselves to purely theoretical exercises.

    7On the edges and over the years the discussion tends to veer off into the terrain of other familiar controversies : the Dobb-Sweezy-Takahashi debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe and Japan ; the question of the existence of the Asiatic Mode of Production in ancient, medieval and/or pre-colonial India ; problems of agricultural efficiency such as return to scale (i.e., the relation between farm size and product per acre) or differences in productivity of owner — as opposed to tenant — cultivation ; assessments of the role in recent Indian politics of landlord or peasant lobbies, or of the degree to which the different parties represent different economic interest groups.

    8We shall try to steer clear of such temptations to digress. In so far as possible we shall limit ourselves to the already very wide field embracing modes, forces and relations of production ; modes of exploitation ; agrarian classes ; social formations, contradictions and articulations ; moments and dominant tendencies ; effects of imperialism and of centre-periphery links ; recommendations for praxis.

    Precursors : Sulekh Chand Gupta, G. G. Kotovsky, Daniel Thorner

    9As early as 1962 Sulekh Chand Gupta, then on the staff of the Agricultural Economics Research Centre of the Delhi University, offered an estimate of capitalist farming as of 1953-1954. Taking as his point of departure the concentration of hired labourers on larger-acreage units shown in the Farm Management Studies, he noted that in the state of Uttar Pradesh the element of hired labour exceeded that of family labour on farms with 20 or more acres. Extrapolating in a conservative fashion to India as a whole, in parts of which the size of holding operated mainly with year-round farm servants was as low as 7.5 acres, he proposed to take the number of households operating 20 acres or more as a rough approximation of the number of capitalist farms. Applying this procedure to the figures from the 1953-1954 Census of Landholding, he came up with an estimate of less than 6 or 7 percent of all operational holdings, amounting to about one-third of the total area under cultivation (Gupta 1962 a and b).

    10A similarly constructed estimate was proposed by G. G. Kotovsky of the Institute of the Peoples of Asia, Moscow. In Kotovsky’s judgment the area cultivated wholly or mainly by hired labour in 1953-1954 amounted to 25 or 30 percent of the total for India. His conclusion was that the capitalist sector represented the leading tendency in Indian agriculture, but that it did not yet dominate (Kotovsky 1964).

    11Neither of these estimates appears to have provoked any wide discussion. Quite the contrary was the case with the series of four articles published in The Statesman (Calcutta and Delhi), on four successive days in November, 1967, by Daniel Thorner. In these lively journalistic pieces Thorner related what he had just seen in a village tour which had taken him through seven states in the Northwest, North, West, South and East of India. Whereas fifteen years previously he had been impressed by rural stagnation (Thorner 1956), this time he found alert, entreprising cultivators, eager to experiment with new scientific methods ; quick to switch to power for traction and pumping ; ready to invest in improvements ; preferring to cultivate with hired labour rather than, or in addition to, giving out their land on rent in small parcels ; and able to obtain substantial increases in output. He wrote : What we are witnessing in India is the emergence of an advanced sector in agriculture that is broadly comparable to the advanced sector in modern industry. This new agriculture has been tested, has proved profitable, and is rapidly expanding (Thorner 1980).

    12Some of the new-style cultivators whom Thorner came across on his rural swing turned out to be present or former industrialists, merchants, moneylenders, civil servants, army officers, doctors, lawyers and similar persons of high economic status and caste. Thorner dubbed these agriculturists “gentleman farmers”, and pointed out that their command over funds, their education and their connections in the right places all facilitated their farming activities. He concluded that the unprecedented wave of capitalist farming foreshadowed new social and political as well as economic developments :

    Before the 1960’s there used to be in the plains of India only a few pockets of genuinely capitalistic agriculture — parts of the Punjab and Western U. P., Central Gujarat, Coimbatore, and Coastal Andhra. Now for the first time there has come into being in all parts of the countryside in India, a layer, thick in some regions, thinner in others, of agricultural capitalists. […] These capitalistic farmers seem to be the most rapidly growing group in rural India ; they may already be the most powerful element. The implications of this are far-reaching, not only in the economic field, but for the structure of society and the future shape of politics. (Thorner 1980)

    13Thorner’s positive, almost gleeful, description of the capitalist farmers disconcerted his left-wing Indian colleagues. They felt they had been betrayed by someone on whom they had come to count for sharp criticisms of official policies. Neglecting to read his explicit warnings of the long-run dangers, inherent in the new business-like agriculture with respect to food production, drainage, dry farming and, above all, failure to solve the underlying agrarian problem, some of them assimilated him quite unjustly to the defenders of the so-called “green revolution,” a term which Thorner himself never employed.

    The original protagonists : Ashok Rudra and Utsa Patnaik

    14The debate proper opens with a report on a sample survey of big farmers in the Punjab by Ashok Rudra and two of his colleagues in the same Agro-Economic Research Centre of the University of Delhi where S. C. Gupta had earlier worked. Rudra explained that the study was undertaken to find out what was really happening in Indian agriculture, particularly in the Punjab,

    where it is being widely claimed that a veritable revolution has taken place or is taking place […]. One has been talking a great deal and over a long time about a certain green revolution and the emergence of a new type or even a new class of farmers […]. Typical of this sort of investigation are the ones reported upon by Wolf Ladejinsky and Daniel Thorner. The investigation consisted of no more than stray visits to the countryside and conversations with some farmers and other persons knowing about agricultural conditions in given areas. These reports have been extremely influential in our country […]. But quantitative ideas can be formed only on the basis of surveys based on random sampling.

    The sample chosen through a three-stage process included 261 farms above 20 acres in size in all eleven districts of the Punjab ; and the survey was carried out in 1968-1969. Why 20 acres ? Rudra tells us :

    What we have been after, being more interested in the Red Revolution than the Green one, is really to get at what may be called the “capitalist farmers.” […] Most of the capitalist farmers, we have presumed, would have at least 20 acres of cultivated land. The rationale […] was merely to enclose in it a very large portion of what may eventually qualify as being capitalist farms.

    15With regard to gentleman farmers, Rudra’s initial findings were negative. Lurid pictures, he informs us, have been painted of farm households with air conditioners and motor cars, of farmers’ sons in drain-pipe trousers ! True enough, says Rudra, such phenomena are blatantly present in the countryside. But their very conspicuousness blinds the observer to the surrounding, very different, reality. In his sample 92 % of the large-farmer respondents claimed that cultivation was the only occupation they ever had. As many as 97 % denied pursuing any subsidiary calling. A bare 3 % were former government servants or military men. Only 1 % could boast of college-level education, while 69 % had remained illiterate.

    16So far as their agriculture was concerned, the land owned by these big farmers had increased by 9.5 % over twelve years, with those in the largest size-group registering the most substantial increases. Rapid rates of capital formation were evident from the substantial rise in value of tractors, pumping-sets and tube-wells, draft cattle, agricultural implemements etc.

    17Warmly welcoming Rudra’s report, Thorner observed that if his own impressionistic account had helped to stimulate the Punjab study, it had achieved one of its principal aims (Thorner 1969). With regard to the “intriguing but secondary question” of gentleman farmers, whose significance lies “not in their absolute numbers but in the dynamism which they have brought to the countryside,” Thorner enquired about the occupations followed by the fathers, brothers and adult sons of the respondents. As to revolutions of different hues, he wrote :

    The colour of the revolution which I have seen in one area after another of India in the 1960’s is steel-grey. I call it an industrial revolution. Since Independence, hundreds of new industrial centres have sprung up. Thousands of plants using advanced technology […] have been put into operation. Millions of men have gone to work in the new factories and the auxiliary workshops […]. Construction contracts and new jobs have showered purchasing power on households in city and countryside. The resulting demand for raw materials and foodstuffs has sent agricultural prices soaring […] investment in farm production has become unprecedentedly profitable. To the lure of great gain from actual farming (rather than from rural rents and usury) has responded the rise of a class of enterprising agriculturists […] their emergence as a significant group in every State is one of the facets of the industrial revolution which is today changing the face of India. (Thorner 1969)

    18Thorner’s query about the occupations of family members is, in fact, answered in the second instalment of Rudra’s survey report in the very same issue of the Economic and Political Weekly (Rudra 1969). It turns out that, as Thorner had suspected, in 39 % of the cases one or more adult males other than the head of the household are indeed involved in work outside of agriculture. This figure gives a clear notion of the extent to which the big-farm families had, in Thorner’s words, “diversified their interests either from urban activities to agriculture or vice versa” (Thorner 1969).

    19It is also in this instalment that Rudra takes up the subject of classes among the peasantry. He does so in the context of whether or not he finds continuities in the values for each variable (e.g. ratio between land owned and land rented out, or percentage of sales to production) when distributed according to size-groups of land owned. Farm economists as well as rural sociologists, Rudra remarks, have the habit of referring to “three categories of farmers : small peasants, middle peasants and big farmers.” But he is not at all sure this categorisation is warranted. He continues : “Marxists in particular are wont to talk in terms of there being such subclasses among the peasantry. Now if all the important variables relating to farm economies are representable by continuous functions of size, then these concepts of big, small and middle must be quite vacuous […]” (Rudra 1969).

    20In his third and final instalment, Rudra at last sets forth his criteria for identifying capitalist, as distinguished from merely big, farmers. These are similar to Thorner’s earlier descriptions. Rudra expects that the capitalist in Punjab would :

    1. tend to cultivate his land himself rather than to give it out on lease ;

    2. tend to use hired labour in a much greater proportion than family labour ;

    3. tend to use farm machinery ;

    4. market an important share of his produce ; and

    5. so organise his production as to yield a high rate of return on his investments (Rudra 1970).

    As surrogates for these five characteristics Rudra uses data thrown up by his field enquiry with respect of five variables :

    1. percentage of land rented out to total land owned ;

    2. wage payment in cash per acre of farm size (X2) ;

    3. value of modern capital equipment per acre of farm size (X3) ;

    4. percentage of produce marketed to total produce (X4) ;

    5. cash profit per acre (X5).

    He explains that X1 is productivity defined as value of output per acre of farm size.

    21Rudra then argues that if indeed there existed a category of farmers who were capitalists, that is, who filled all of the listed conditions, then there should be strong positive correlations between each pair of Xs (i.e., between X2 and X3, X2 and X4 etc.). His field data, however, “ fail to indicate any strong association between any of the pairs. ” Hence, he concludes, there is no evidence that such a category exists.

    22A year later Utsa Patnaik demolishes Rudra’s statistical argument in a hard-hitting article which raises a great many of the points central to the subsequent discussion. She terms Rudra’s method of analysis of his data “unhistorical.” His criterion of high positive association between pairs of variable, she pronounces, “ would make sense only in an unreal idealised world in which different classes existed only in their purest form ; it could be satisfied only if the process of capitalist development has been carried out to its limit so that capitalism is already the dominant mode of production [...]” (Patnaik 1971a). Historically, she contends, the capitalist is a former landlord or rich peasant : “ He does not suddenly appear out of the blue as a clearly-defined ‘pure’ socio-economic type : he develops within the pre-existing non-capitalist economic structure.”

    23She prefers the term ‘non-capitalist’ to ‘pre-capitalist’ since it does not imply that capitalism has made no headway at all. On the contrary, Patnaik believes, “ex-colonial countries like India are characterised precisely by a limited and distorted development of capitalism which does not revolutionise the mode of production. ” In what sense, she asks, is there today a tendency toward capitalist development which was not present earlier ? The answer, she suggests, is to be found neither in the employment of hired labourers nor in production for the market. Each of these, she states, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of capitalist organisation. Both were widely prevalent in India during the colonial period. The large force of rural wage labourers arose from the pauperisation and proletarianisation of the “poorer majority of the peasantry ” under the impact of imperialism. The choice of operating with this cheap hired labour or of leasing out to tenants represented for landowners “a purely contingent, reversible decision taken on the basis of current circumstances,” that is, the comparative terms on which labourers and tenants were available in the particular locality at a particular time. Similarly the colonial period saw a growing commercialisation of agriculture with increasing regional specialisation in cotton, sugarcane etc. But this also was not capitalist production.

    24The characteristic of the genuine capitalist, Patnaik proposes, is not merely appropriation of surplus value generated by wage labour nor the sale on the market of a high proportion of produce, but also — and indispensably — accumulation and reinvestment of surplus value in order to generate more surplus value on an ever-expanding scale. The capitalist in agriculture can be recognised by the “ degree of capital intensification : ” i.e., growth of outlay on both constant and variable capital with respect to a given land area and, over time, a tendency towards a higher than average organic composition of capital, leading to higher productivity of land and labour.

    25This process was under way in India from the mid-1950’s onward, in Patnaik’s view, because of the expanding domestic market created by the large governmental outlays under the five-year plans. In a clear break with the situation in the colonial past, it had become profitable to invest in irrigation, to turn off tenants so as to operate with hired labour, to go in for double and triple cropping rather than simply to continue with the classical precapitalist uses of surplus value such as trade, usury and purchase of more land to let out on tenancy.

    26Citing the results of her own field survey carried out in 1969 and covering 66 big farmers in five states — Orissa, Andhra, Mysore, Madras and Gujarat, Patnaik reported her conviction that a new class of capitalist farmers was indeed emerging. Whereas she started her enquiry with an extreme skepticism about the existence of any significant new trend outside of the Punjab, she was persuaded after going through her data that capitalist development was on the way, albeit in varying degrees, throughout the regions which she had studied.

    27Since Patnaik is not satisfied with wage labour alone as a criterion of capitalist production, she rejects S. C. Gupta’s and G. G. Kotovsky’ s calculations. Despite Rudra’s own negative conclusion, she suggests that his results show clearly the process of capitalist development in the Punjab.

    28She deals severely with Rudra’s attempt to define peasant classes in terms of statistical discontinuities, as incompatible with a Marxist analysis :

    The Marxist distinction between classes within the peasantry is not derived from such a superficial statistical criterion but is a structural one based on the relations of production. The rich peasant is distinguished from the poor peasant by the fact that the former hires wage-labour to a considerable extent apart from engaging himself along with family members in cultivation, while the latter is forced to hire himself out as a labourer or lease in land on onerous terms in addition to working with family labour on his own land. The middle peasant operates mainly with family labour, neither exploiting much wage labour, nor being exploited himself […]. (Patnaik 1971a)

    29In his reply, Rudra defends strongly his skepticism about the existence of peasant classes and his insistence on their being statistically separable within a Marxist framework :

    I suggest that the concept of discontinuities is the direct translation of the Marxian concept of “quantities into qualities.” […] If one has to undertake measurements and test hypotheses arising from Marxian analyses, one will have to undertake such translations as I have done. And for me, the Marxian concept of three classes in agriculture remains a hypothesis to be tested. (Rudra 1971)

    30He also stands firm on his position that the failure of his variables taken in pairs to show strong positive association indicates that there has not yet appeared a “ readily identifiable group ” of capitalist farmers in the Punjab. He brings in at this point a new term : polarisation. His data, states Rudra, indicate that :

    There has not yet been among the farmers of Punjab any strong polarisation and I have expressed doubt whether it serves any important purpose to talk about capitalist development before polarisation has reached a sufficiently high degree […]. In a situation of capitalist development one should expect to find a polarisation developing such that not only would the values of the variables tend to increase among the farmers undergoing the transformation but increase conjointly. As long as such conjoint movement has not taken place to a considerable extent — that is, as long as there is no polarisation — we cannot say that capitalist development has taken place. (Rudra 1971 ; italics in the original)

    31In a rapid riposte Patnaik returns to her charge that Rudra has hopelessly confused two quite different propositions : 1) that there exists within the prevailing noncapitalist economy a small but growing class of capitalists, and 2) that Indian agriculture is characterised by sharp polarisation into two main classes, capitalists and wage-labourers. In disproving the second one, she says, he thinks he has disproved the first since “ he treats proposition 2 as a necessary condition for proposition 1. ” This, she declares, “ is certainly not Marxist theory ” (Patnaik 1971b).

    32With regard to indications of peasant classes, Patnaik insists that size of holding is not a satisfactory guide. Since the available Farm Management Studies data, which are grouped by size, show that above a certain level of acres owned, hired labour predominates over family labour, with regional variations (e.g. 10 acres in Bengal, 40 in Punjab), it has seemed reasonable to take the farms above these limits as roughly corresponding to rich peasant holdings. But this is a very crude procedure.

    My argument is that size of farm even as a rough indicator of rich peasant status is no longer good enough in the present situation when techniques are changing and intensive cultivation by some groups is taking place. If production techniques are intensified (more irrigation, triple cropping, mechanisation) then a farm may get smaller in terms of area, and at the same time get bigger as an economic unit, expand in terms of output and the extent of use of hired relative to family labour. (Patnaik 1971b ; italics in the original)

    33At this point Paresh Chattopadhyay enters the debate in the role of a self-appointed arbiter of Marxist orthodoxy, distributing plaudits and blames to Sulekh Chand Gupta, Ashok Rudra and Utsa Patnaik. Gupta’s analysis was “ on the whole in the right direction, ” but he “ overestimated the development of capitalism in India ” and underestimated “ the strength of the pre-capitalist modes of production still prevalent in our agriculture. ” As for Rudra, his work “ is full of interesting empirical data ” but theoretically weak. “ Most of his theoretical shortcomings have been fairly ably pointed out by Utsa Patnaik (though perhaps not in the most desirable manner). ” Patnaik is criticised for offering “ a new notion of capitalism […] not in the spirit of Marxism. ’’ Here Chattopadhyay cites Lenin’s definition of capitalism as “ the highest stage of commodity production where labour-power itself becomes a commodity. ” There is no need, pontificates Chattopadhyay, to specify separately accumulation and re-investment of surplus value since they already “fall within this definition.” Elaborating this argument, he writes, reproaching Rudra as well as Patnaik : “The existence of a sophisticated instrument of production is not necessary for identifying a capitalist. Given the capitalist mode of production, for which capital as a relation is only required, the existence of ‘modern equipment’ would only indicate a higher level of capitalism” (Chattopadhyay 1972a)

    34Answering Chattopadhyay, Utsa Patnaik restates her objection to taking wage labour as a sufficient condition for establishing the existence of capitalism in Indian agriculture. The bourgeoisie which battened upon the surplus value produced by agricultural labour in India, she argues, was not Indian but British. She suggests that Chattopadhyay’s proposal “ of regarding generalised commodity production as necessarily implying capitalist production relations (regardless of the uniqueness of the colonial situation) ” would lead, carried to its logical conclusion, to an extreme position like that of André Gunder Frank, with whom, she assumes, Chattopadhyay is not in agreement :

    Namely, all countries dominated by imperialism entered the network of world capitalist exchange relationships (and also thereby experienced generalised commodity production to a greater or lesser degree). Therefore all these countries are ‘ capitalist. ’ Therefore the only possible immediate programme of a revolutionary political party in each of these countries must be socialist revolution. I believe the fallacy in this chain of reasoning lies at the starting point, in the failure to distinguish between capital in the sphere of exchange and capital in the sphere of production […]. I am sure P C will not choose to draw the extreme conclusion which Gunder Frank has done ; but his theoretical premise does seem to be quite close to Frank’s. (Patnaik 1972a ; italics in the original)

    35Jairus Banaji comes in as a professed supporter of Patnaik “ in her brilliant polemics with A. Rudra, particularly concerning the identification of capitalist development, and with P. Chattopadhyay, concerning the ‘specificity’ of the colonial economy. ” It is this second aspect, the search for a “ Marxist characterisation of the colonial economies prior to the growth of a local industrial bourgeoisie ” which particularly interests Banaji. He rejects both the thesis that conditions in the colonial world were feudal, a thesis “ once maintained by most of the Communist parties of the colonial world who used the struggle against ‘feudalism’ as a means of postponing the struggle for a socialist programme, ” and the more recent position arising from the work of Gunder Frank to the effect that all the colonies were capitalist because of their “ umbilical ties to a world market dominated by the capitalist mode of production. ” The most striking aspect of the colonial period, according to Banaji, was precisely the “ absence of a process of capitalist expansion, for some six decades at least in manufacturing, and for about a century in agriculture. ” Banaji’s own proposal is to “ accept the reality of colonial modes of production with their own coherence and laws of development, ” with, however, the proviso that they could not have come into being except within the sphere of capitalist production. Their chief historical function was to finance primary accumulation outside the colonial world. They served as “ the circuits through which capital was drained out of the colonies in the form of bullion, consumption goods, raw materials and so on. ” They transmitted to the colonies “ the pressures of the accumulation process in the metropolis without unleashing any corresponding expansion in the forces of production ” (Banaji 1972).

    36Paresh Chattopadhyay returns to his disagreements with Utsa Patnaik in a substantive article published at the end of 1972. He takes issue with her treatment of the role of imperialism as exclusively “ destructive ” and “ negative ”. In his view, “ the British preserved as well as destroyed the conditions of India’s pre-capitalist economy, accelerated as well as retarded the development of capitalism in India ”. On the one hand Chattopadhyay cites evidence to the effect that the essential aspects of capitalism : generalized production for sale and a predominantly free class of wage labourers, were not present in Indian agriculture in colonial times. On the other, he holds that agricultural production “ did increasingly show its commodity character at least since the last quarter of the nineteenth century ”. As proof he brings to bear statistics of the growth of non-foodgrains, the degree of differentiation among the peasantry, the percentage of cultivators engaged in money-wage relationships and the expansion of capital stock in agriculture in the years preceding Independence. “ Capitalist development, ” he concludes, “ was a reality in India during the British period. ” But he insists upon “ all the ups and downs, advances and retreats of this development ”, as well as “ the contradictions engendered by capitalism’s co-existence and co-presence with the still dominating pre-capitalist relations ” (Chattopadhyay 1972b). Not so far, after all, from Patnaik.

    37Apparently piqued by Patnaik’s reference to his position as a logical extreme, Gunder Frank attacks her “ far-out definition of capitalism in agriculture. ” While taking no exception to her statement that “ extended reproduction and accumulation is a criterion of capitalism, ” he argues that she is incorrect in defining capitalism so narrowly as to require that surplus value be invested on the very spot where it is produced, i.e., in agriculture itself, and in the same geographical area. He charges Patnaik with confusion of levels of analysis : “ UP looks for the criterion of the mode of production on the individual farm ! […]. No wonder, if the UP method is to “ extend ” the criterion of extended reproduction, accumulation and reinvestment of them in each of the impoverished farms of India, that she is hard put to recognise the capitalist mode of production when she sees it ” (Frank 1973a). With regard to the political implications of Patnaik’s method of analysis, Frank asks how long she is prepared to put off the socialist revolution: “ Well, what conclusion will UP choose to draw from her other extreme method ? That socialist revolution will not become the programmatic order of the day until capitalism by her criterion — reinvestment of surplus value produced by farm labourers on the same farm itself — has penetrated each and every one of her individual farms ? ” (Frank 1973a).

    Semi-feudalism, an Eastern India syndrome : Amit Bhaduri, Pradhan Prasad, Nirmal Chandra, Ranjit Sau and once again Rudra

    38The first standard-bearer for semi-feudalism in the framework of the debate — the concept, of course, being much older — is Amit Bhaduri, who published articles in 1973 in both Frontier and the British Economic Journal. On the basis of a survey which he had conducted in 26 West Bengal villages in 1970 Bhaduri concluded that the “ dominant character of existing production relations ” could best be described as semi-feudal in that they “ have more in common with classic feudalism of the master-serf type than with industrial capitalism. ” He listed four prominent features of these semi-feudal relations: share-cropping ; perpetual indebtedness of the small tenants ; concentration of two modes of exploitation, namely usury and land ownership in the hands of the same economic class ; and lack of accessibility to the market for the small tenant. Indebtedness arises from the continual need for consumption loans. In the typical situation the creditor is the landlord locally known as the jotedār. The tenant cannot move away without settling his debt, and he has no alternative source of credit. The rate of interest on these consumption loans is extraordinarily high : Bhaduri cites figures of from 25 to 200 percent for a period of about four months. Usury is thus an important additional source of income to the semi-feudal landowner. The continuation of the double exploitation requires that the available balance of pady with the kishan, share-cropper, must always fall short of his family’s consumption requirements. Therefore, technological improvements which might raise the productivity level of the kishan are undesirable to the landowner, since they would weaken the political and economic power of the landlord, which is based on his being able to keep his tenant constantly indebted. In this way “ semi-feudal production relations operate as a barrier to the introduction of improved technology ” (Bhaduri 1973a).

    39Bhaduri envisages four possible developments for the future : continued stagnation, adoption of new technology together with rent increases, gradual development of capitalistic relations, or even a peasant revolt :

    1. low productivity and stagnation in agriculture will continue to maintain the existing power structure at the village level in eastern India,

    2. the semi-feudal production relations themselves will be modified to accommodate profitable use of improved technology,

    3. and 4. It is also possible that semi-feudal production relations will gradually give way to capitalistic production relations based on wage labour or will be simply overthrown by the desperate poor unless a radical land reform is carried out by the State. (Bhaduri 1973a)

    40Pradhan Prasad furnishes support for Bhaduri’s thesis with data from another area of Eastern India : Purnea, Saharsa and Monghyr districts of Bihar, in which he surveyed over 2,000 households in a couple of dozen villages in 1970 and 1972. In these villages utilisation of available irrigation facilities declines with increase in the size of holdings, larger landowners (10 acres and above) who cultivate with hired labourers prefer “ attached ” workers, indebtedness is widespread, sharecropping is a common feature, and daily wages are so low that even households with two workers employed throughout the year are forced to take consumption loans at exorbitant rates of interest. These debts run on indefinitely since the creditors “ do not expect ever to get the stipulated interest and principal from such rural poor ” (Prasad 1963). Usury, Prasad continues, “ is thus practised mainly to perpetuate the indissoluble bond between the direct producer and his overlord […]. ” Low utilisation of resources such as irrigation and low demand for labour by big landowners are essentially directed towards “ preventing the strengthening of the economic condition of the direct producer rather than maximisation of their rate of profit or rate of return. ” In the same way as Bhaduri, Pradhan insists that big landowners fear that the introduction of new agricultural practices might serve eventually to free their tenants from their semi-feudal bondage.

    The essential feature of the model is thus reflected in the big landowning classes […] approaching the whole process of production and distribution with a view to strengthening their control over land and their hold on the rural masses, resulting in a set-up (which we may call semi-feudal) […] essentially characterised by the two modes of appropriation, namely the sharecropping and usury. This results in semi-servile condition of living and a low level of consumption […] low productivity of land and labour (which is understood mainly in terms of disguised unemployment), under-utilisation of resources and almost negligible net investment in the agricultural sector. (Prasad 1973)

    41In a subsequent article Prasad argues from the evidence of various sample surveys conducted from 1951 through 1971 that his “ semi-feudal model (but for variations in details), is, by and large, valid for the most part of rural India ” (Prasad 1974).

    42Another partisan of the semi-feudal thesis, Nirmal Chandra, makes use of official data for West Bengal and explicitly links agricultural development with industrial development at the national level. He recalls the laws of motion for agriculture formulated by Kautsky and Lenin in the context of a national economy undergoing capitalist transformation : increasing returns to scale, increasing concentration of landholding, increasing proportion of agricultural labourers, decreasing extent of share-cropping, increasing orientation of agricultural production toward the market rather than toward self-consumption by the cultivator. On the basis of data for 250 farms in five districts of West Bengal for each of the six years from 1962-1963 through 1967-1968 published by the State Government, Nirmal Chandra finds no unmistakable trends along these lines. He is led to suspect that “ our country has not been going through a capitalist transformation at all, and that there are important socio-economic forces impeding such a transformation ” (Chandra 1974). He assigns a large share of blame for the stifling of incipient capitalism to imperialism : “ During the British Raj colonial rule undoubtedly constituted the biggest single obstacle. As a natural ally it greatly strengthened feudal or semi-feudal elements in the countryside that are primarily responsible for the indifferent progress in the post-colonial era even though the imperial yoke has been lifted ” (Chandra 1974).

    43The basic features of semi-feudalism in the West Bengal countryside, in Nirmal Chandra’s view, have been most lucidly and cogently set forth by Bhaduri. But Nirmal Chandra offers two emendations. First, he feels that Bhaduri has exaggerated the effect of semi-feudal relations in holding back the productive forces :

    For, technological improvements have taken place on share-tenanted land in different parts of West Bengal with working capital often provided by the landowner. If one allows for a variable share-cropping ratio, then semi-feudal relations of production can persist even after the new high-yielding varieties of crops have been introduced. By lowering the tenant’s share, the landowner can keep him as poor as he always was. (Chandra 1974)

    44Even more important, according to Nirmal Chandra, is Bhaduri’s omission of the effect of “ massive underemployment in our countryside. ” In several ways this critical un- and underemployment factor helps to explain the stability of semi-feudalism :

    1. The value of labour power is pegged at the lowest possible levels so that the real income of a share-tenant is no greater than that of a hired agricultural worker […]. Conversely, from the landowner’s point of view the net surplus to be extracted is the same under the one or the other system.

    2. Given the weak bargaining position of labour, the landowners can arbitrarily alter the share-ratio in their own favour in case new production possibilities appear. (Chandra 1974)

    45Moving to the national scale, Nirmal Chandra argues that large-scale rural unemployment “ greatly delimits the market for industrial products. ” After the saturation of export markets, military demand, and the consumption requirements of an urban ‘middle-class, ’ stagnation becomes inevitable.

    We may then infer that labour surplus on a scale that is probably unparalleled in human history is perpetuating the semi-feudal set-up. Limited progress along the road to modernisation cannot be ruled out. Without vigorous measures to reduce considerably that surplus, we fail to see how one can get out of the vicious circle or how capitalism can strike deep root. (Chandra 1974)

    46Nirmal Chandra does not have much faith in the ability of industrial capital in India to break out of the shackles of semi-feudalism :

    Industrial capitalism in this country, including the forces of State capitalism, is extremely weak in the relative sense. It seems to have no option but to rely on foreign capital and foreign technology which themselves create almost insuperable barriers to industrialisation on a wide front […]. Since we cannot envisage how (within the confines of the present socio-economic formation) things might radically improve either on the industrial front or in respect of surplus labour we cannot visualise when productive capital will dominate over usury capital in our agriculture or when the pre-capitalist cropsharing system will disappear. (Chandra 1974)

    47Accordingly he believes it would be more useful to characterise agrarian production relations in India as ‘semi-feudal’ rather than ‘lumpen-bourgeois’ or ‘rickety capitalist.’ However he takes a guarded position as to proper designation of the mode of production : “ But one needs to explore many more facets of history, economics, politics etc. before one can positively assert that semi-feudalism is the dominant mode of production in Indian or West Bengal agriculture ” (Chandra 1974).

    48Ignoring this nuance, Ranjit Sau expresses agreement with Nirmal Chandra’s “ characterisation of the mode of production in Indian agriculture as semi-feudal ” as also with the argument that “ the presence of enormous unemployment weakens the impulse of capitalist growth in agriculture. ” He adds another explanatory factor to account for the stubborn persistence of semi-feudalism : the determination of small peasants to continue cultivation, no matter how meagre the returns, because of the lack of other possibilities :

    Why does not urban industrial capital penetrate agriculture and transform the semi-feudal mode ? There are certain early signs of such a shift. The celebrated ‘ gentleman-farmers ’ are indeed descending upon the countryside […] this trend also would not go very far […]. In the absence of alternative job opportunities in industry, the small peasants would hold on to their land by reducing consumption to an unbelievable minimum. Increasing returns to scale or no increasing returns to scale, the capitalist farmers would face insuperable barriers in ousting the small farms. (Sau 1975)

    49Returning to the subject in a series of three articles in Frontier, Nirmal Chandra brings in evidence from his own study of three villages in a rice-producing tract in Burdwan district, the most advanced area of West Bengal outside of the Calcutta conurbation, which had been chosen in the 1960’s as one of the 16 districts in the country to benefit from the Intensive Area Development. He found production relations in these villages had undergone some changes since Independence. One old zamīndār (non-cultivating landlord, often absentee) family was still on the scene and still affluent although not at the top of the economic pyramid. Otherwise the villages were dominated by jotedār (formerly occupancy right tenants holding large blocks of land which they either leased out or got cultivated by agricultural labourers ; to a varying degree involved in moneylending and trading in agricultural commodities), a class which for over a hundred years before the formal abolition of the zamīndārī system in Bengal in 1953 had been slowly replacing the zamīndār as the leading group in the countryside.

    50Land ownership Nirmal Chandra found to be highly skewed ; tenancy arrangements were predominantly of a traditional kind, with tenants taking one-half of the gross output when they bore the costs of production but only one-third to one-fourth otherwise ; “ the corresponding legal ratios are three-fourths and one-half respectively. ” In social terms “ most lessors come from the upper classes. ” Except for one village, “ the vast majority of tenants came from the poorer sections, belonged to the backward castes and were personally dependent on their landlords. Individual landlords had up to eight tenants under them. ” One of the methods through which control is exercised is the threat of eviction : “ In the ten years prior to our survey in 1974 the number of households evicted was as high as one-fifth of the total or nearly two thirds of the tenant households […]. Nearly every one of the poor tenants was evicted at one time or another over this period ” (Chandra 1975b). The overall economic status of the poor peasants, Nirmal Chandra calculated, was no better than that of the agricultural labourers for whom wages were the only source of livelihood. Most workers were employed on a daily basis. Only about a quarter of the total number (from both agricultural labour and poor peasant households) had annual contracts with their masters. The casual workers were employed on an average for only 126 days in the year. Landlords almost invariably charged high interest on loans given to their tenants ; this exaction is not always apparent :

    Sometimes, formally speaking, the interest rate is zero. But since paddy loans are usually made in monsoon months when the price is double the post-harvest level, in effect the tenant repays a great deal more in kind. Similarly, workers for their wage advances have to repay with labour services. Taking into account both the wage cut as well as the seasonal price variations, the employer may make up to 300 % profit on his wage advance. (Chandra 1975b)

    51Landlords are also able to extract various types of begār (un-or under-paid labour services), often taking the form of non-productive work in the landlord’s house. Workers are typically afraid of their landlords, some of whom do not hesitate to assault them physically for slackening in their work.

    52In sum, Nirmal Chandra argues that because of their “ activity-pattern, ” it is the top eight to ten families in each of his villages which constitute “ the main bottlenecks to the development of productive forces, ” in effect, the chief obstacles to the growth of capitalism. Specifically, he charges, these families hold land in excess of legal ceilings, contribute little to paddy levies, crowd out the small farmers by obtaining an unfair proportion of institutional credit, engage in usury or usurious wage advances, and funnel their savings into the tertiary sector (Chandra 1975b).

    53Meanwhile, in a dramatic reversal of his previous position, Ashok Rudra announces his conviction that there are increasing manifestations of characteristic features of capitalism in the agriculture of Eastern India. Turning on the proponents of semi-feudalism, Rudra centres his attack on Pradhan Prasad and Nirmal Chandra. As against Prasad’s claim of “ intimate contact with some of the rural areas of Bihar ” (cited from Prasad 1973), Rudra, who had shifted from Delhi to Shantiniketan, puts forward his own “ direct first hand knowledge of conditions prevailing in West Bengal ” (Rudra 1974). In particular, he asserts, he has carried out during the past year an enquiry into agrarian relations in the different districts of the state.

    54Nowhere in these districts, Rudra reports, has he encountered the landowners whom Prasad and Nirmal Chandra describe — a class “ that finds it more in its economic and social-power interest to resort to usury rather than to capital investment. ” On the contrary, he has found in many parts of the state landowners “ who are very much engaged in capital investments in the form of irrigation, fertilisers and high-yielding variety seeds. ” This is equally true of “ landowners who give their land out on lease to sharecroppers and those who cultivate it themselves with the help of hired labour. ” The practice has become almost universal in Bengal, Rudra discovered, “ of owners paying for the irrigation costs and advancing the tenant’s share of the costs of seed and fertilisers. ” These advances are repaid “ by the tenant in terms of crops at the time of the harvest. No interest is charged ” (Rudra 1974).

    55Similarly, although poor tenants, farm servants and casual labourers are typically bound to landlords by consumption loans, such loans “ when taken by a tenant from the landowner from whom he has leased in land or by a farm servant from the landowner for whom he works ” are free of interest. They are usually repaid not in cash but in labour at the time when the lender calls for it, the amount of labour “ being calculated at a wage rate somewhat lower than the ruling wage rate ” (Rudra 1974).

    56Interest at ten percent or more per month is charged whenever a loan is taken from a landowner or moneylender “ other than the one with whom the borrower has an attachment relation as tenant or farm servant. ” Thus usury does exist, and may serve as “ the subsidiary source of income of the landowning class. ” But it does not appear to Rudra that “ the landowning class in West Bengal is primarily dependent on usury ” (Rudra 1974, italics in the original).

    57Against Nirmal Chandra, who questioned the development of capitalist relations in West Bengal because he found no clear trend toward concentration of landholding, Rudra uses Utsa Patnaik’s argument that concentration should be measured not in acres but in the value of land held. In this sense he is sure that it has been increasing sharply “ as a result of investments on land carried out by the large landowners ” (Rudra 1974).

    58Criticising also Chandra’s insistence on labour surplus, Rudra asserts that although there is indeed a great deal of unemployment during the lean seasons, there exists in many parts of West Bengal “ a scarcity of actual labour supply in relation to labour demand during the peak periods. ” It is this high-season labour shortage, argues Rudra, which “ provides the economic incentive to the landowners to go in for arrangments that guarantee supply of labour during periods when they need it most ” (Rudra 1974).

    59From the labourer’s or tenant’s point of view, his being bound by debt and other obligations to a particular landowner means that he cannot sell his labour-power freely. If this is a characteristic of feudalism, opines Rudra, “ then such feudalistic features continue to exist in various forms both in farms cultivated by tenants and farms cultivated by hired labourers. ” Rudra announces cautiously that he prefers to postpone until after he presents his new survey findings any full-dress discussion of “ the concepts that have been used by Prasad and Chandra, e.g., ‘capitalism, ’ ‘semi-feudalism’. ” But in the balance it is clear that his 1974 intervention weighs heavily on the side of capitalism as against semi-feudalism (Rudra 1974). Although he had earlier failed to discern capitalism among big farmers in the Punjab, he now strongly suspected it in wide areas of West Bengal.

    Rural class structure : Joan Mencher, Nirmal Chandra, Utsa Patnaik, Ashok Rudra, Pranab Bardhan, Pradhan Prasad, John Harriss

    60An important reason put forward by Joan Mencher for trying to understand the nature of socio-economic classes in rural areas is to try to find an explanation of why peasant organisations have developed in certain regions of India, but not elsewhere, “ why people in one area are involved in continual revolt, while those in another area are relatively quiescent ” (Mencher 1974). Looking at village India (i.e., ruling out tribal tracts such as Naxalbari) in recent years, Mencher concludes that movements have occurred “ where there is a strong polarisation between landless and all others. ” In effect, these are areas with a large agricultural labour class, although peasant organisations are not strong in all such areas. In the South Indian context, Mencher asserts, Eric Wolf’s hypothesis that it is middle peasants who constitue the pivotal groups for peasant uprisings does not hold. Rather it has been the landless labourers “ unconstrained by possible ties to the land ” who have been the main agitators or strikers.

    61Mencher contrasts developments in two regions known for successful organisation of landless labourers and sharp agrarian conflicts — Thanjavur in Tamilnadu and Kuttunad in Kerala — with Chingleput district, also in Tamilnadu. In Chingleput, Mencher points out, there is a large proportion of agricultural labourers, but in any given year a handful of these landless families may become share-croppers “ on a 50/50 basis if they have bullocks ; if not, on a 1-to-6 basis. ” Competition for obtaining land on crop-share acts to inhibit unity among the landless, as also among peasants with small plots of their own who equally hope to rent in additional fields from the same land-owners. The rural bigwigs, for their part, are quite capable of juggling tenancies not only to prevent the actual cultivators from being able to claim customary rights but precisely to keep the poor divided and leaderless. “ Thus, one way of handling a potential organiser of the landless or of the small peasants has consistently been to threaten that he might not get any share-cropping land for the next season or for the next year ” (Mencher 1974).

    62Mencher calls attention to the use of caste allegiances “ by people in the system, as well as by outside observers, to mask class differences. ” For exemple, well-to-do members of middleranking castes may give land preferentially to their own poor caste-mates, who are thus led to identify with the village landed.

    63On the basis of detailed information which she gathered in 10 villages studied in 1966-1967 and 1970-1971, Mencher proposes “ a very rough socio-economic classification of the rural population of Chingleput District. ” Her roster of six classes among “ the population which derives its main subsistence from land, in one way or another ” begins at the bottom. She characterises in order :

    1. The landless — “ those who primarily derive their livelihood from working in agriculture either as day-labourers, as attached permanent labourers for particular landlords, or as […] a kind of share-cropper, receiving one portion for every six retained by the landowner. ”

    2. Poor peasants — “ those who own small pieces of land, between i and 2.5 acres, small enough to require that on occasion some of the members of a household do day-labour. ”

    3. Middle peasants — “ those who are clearly self-sufficient and able to sustain themselves without ever doing coolie-work […]. Households with over 2.5 acres of land are employers of labour, and rarely go out as manual labourers themselves. ”

    4. Rich farmers — “ those having between about 7.5 and 15 [acres], not only self-sufficient, they are also able to store surplus for a bad year, and still have enough grain to sell to obtain cash for the purchase of consumer goods. (Most have a transistor set or a regular radio, and if possible, electricity). ”

    5. Rich farmers, capitalist farmers, and traditional landlords — “ households owning between 15 acres and approximately 30 acres of land. In this category there are three types of agriculturists. ”
      a) “ rich farmers who, apart from giving small parcels of land to sharecroppers, cultivate most of the land themselves with the help of coolies and actually go into the fields and do some of their manual work […] ”
      b) “ capitalist farmers […] who do not do physical labour themselves […] ”
      c) “ traditional landlords of the old school. I hesitate to call them ‘ feudal ’ because this is an area that has been subjected to capitalist penetration for a long period... Mostly this category consists of landowners who give their land on various kinds of tenancy to labourers who look after their land for them. ”

    6. Indeterminate class of large landholders — “ a few households in the over- 30-acre category […]. I frankly question whether it would even be useful to decide if they are ‘ capitalist farmers ’ or ‘ feudal landlords ” (Mencher 1974)

    64Putting together Census of 1971 figures for Chingleput District and her own survey data, Mencher provides an idea of the relative strength of the six classes. According to the Census, 43 % of all working males in the rural population of the district were recorded as agricultural labourers. Another 32 % were returned as cultivators. The vast majority of these latter, Mencher judges on the basis of her survey, belong to her categories 2 and 3. So far as concerns the three upper classes, “ Those owning more than 7.5 acres, even of dry land, are quite rare […]. ” It is these same well-to-do households in which more family members tend to be employed outside of the village or to have additional sources of income “ which add to the households’ resource base and serve to raise them further in the socio-economic sphere ” (Mencher 1974).

    65In the Chingleput villages studied by Mencher, class and caste hierarchies overlap to a considerable degree. Landless households (those owning less than one acre) were mostly Vanniyar (low-caste) and Paraiyan (untouchables). Proportionately fewer untouchables were to be found in the second, poor peasant, category. Large landowners (over 30 acres) belonged almost exclusively to Brahman, Reddiar and Mudaliar castes (these last two considered locally to be agriculturalist castes), although the majority of households in each of these castes had smaller holdings.

    66Caste loyalties tend to blur class boundaries, as does the fact that owners of even tiny plots become employers of labour at peak moments for transplanting and harvesting rice. Thus “ on the whole the well-to-do Vanniyar have managed to keep the Vanniyar poor politically isolated and segregated from the untouchable poor. ” On the other hand, “ families in category 3 (middle peasants), and even many in category 2 (poor peasants), do not see a commonality of interest with the landless — not even with their own landless relatives ” (Mencher 1974).

    67Nirmal Chandra, in the Frontier articles to which we have already referred, delineates the rural classes in his Burdwan (West Bengal) villages in somewhat different fashion, and also considers the implications of the class structure for political action. He defines as “ upper classes ” landed families which do not depend to any significant extent on income from agricultural wage-labour. These classes include landlords “ who depend mainly on their rental income, ” jotedār “ those functioning in a capitalist manner, ” rich peasants who are dependent upon non-family labour although engaging personally in some major field operations, and middle peasants who cultivate with only marginal help from workers outside of the family. He proposes two separate estimates of class strengths, which we can set out in tabular form.

    Table 1. Percentages of households in different rural classes in Burdwan villages (Chandra 1975 b)

    Agricultural income only

    Income from all sources

    Landlords

    3.5

    2.4

    Jotedars

    19.2

    10.8

    Rich peasants

    16.0

    19.8

    Middle peasants

    9.0

    15.0

    Total upper classes

    47.7

    48. 0

    Poor peasants

    19.9

    Agricultural labour

    30.3

    Others

    2.1

    68In other words, the villages are split into almost equal halves between those with unearned incomes, i.e., all who lease land or hire in workers on the one side, and the poor peasants and agricultural labourers on the other. Given this quasi-equality, a struggle launched by the exploited half against the exploiting half “would never get off the ground” (Chandra 1975 b).

    69An alternative political approach implicit in the two giant waves of peasant struggle, for the reform of the tenancy system in undivided Bengal in 1946-1947, and for the recovery and distribution among the poor of surplus land in West Bengal in 1967- 1970, was to concentrate on a struggle against “ one particular feudal remnant. ” The difficulty encountered was that in both cases “ the exploiters were sometimes men with very small means, and had close friends and supporters among sections of the middle and poorer peasantry. ” Too many enemies were created. This enabled the “ most powerful sections in rural society ” to create divisions among the ranks of the militants and their followers, and eventually to defeat the movements. Nirmal Chandra proposes instead a two-stage approach with left-wing political hegemony as the first goal. Once this has been achieved, the main task becomes the elimination of all forms of exploitation. He foresees the possibility of a number of sub-stages in the course of the movement “ when the lines between ‘friendly’ and ‘hostile’ elements may have to be redrawn ” (Chandra 1975 b).

    70Utsa Patnaik returns to the centre of the debate in 1966 with an article on class differentiation among the peasantry. Citing evidence from successive censuses of landholdings in 1953-1954 and 1977-1978, she emphasizes the extent of “ concentration of the means of production. ” This high degree of concentration, Patnaik reasons, implies “ a correspondingly high degree of economic differentiation within the cultivating population. ” Thus, there is no single ‘representative’ type of holding, but rather a series of qualitatively distinct types, “ which differ in the way their production activity is organised ” (Patnaik 1976).

    71At one end of the scale, Patnaik continues, a small minority of households have resources so great in relation to family size that they must rely primarily on labour from outside the family. At the other pole, a large proportion of households “ which may be the majority ” have so few resources that in order to meet their family consumption needs they must rely primarily on working for others whether as labourers or as tenants. In between these extremes we may expect to find a middle category of petty producers neither employing others nor employed by others. Taking together the National Sample Survey figures on landholding and the results of various Farm Management Surveys, Patnaik finds that “ the majority of holdings in most regions do not fall into this category. ” The bulk of agricultural holdings, she argues, are so small that peasant families must hire themselves out or take in land at high rents in order to make ends meet (Patnaik 1976).

    72Reiterating her earlier contention that the size of landholding is insufficient as an indicator of class status among the peasantry (see Patnaik 1971 b), Patnaik elaborates a composite “ labour-exploitation criterion. ” This ratio, to which she assigns the letter E, takes into account for each household hiring in, hiring out, renting in, renting out, and use of family labour. Her E ratio, Patnaik stresses, “ has been formulated as an empirical, and there fore descriptive approximation to the analytical concept of eco nomic class. ” In much the same manner as Nirmal Chandra, Patnaik distinguishes between the exploiting classes — landlords and rich peasants, and the exploited classes — poor peasants and labourers (Patnaik 1976, italics in the original). Within each of the first three categories she further specifies two different strata or divisions on the basis of the predominant form of exploitation, whether wages or rent. The resulting array of classes and divisions is shown in tabular form as follows :

    Table 2. Agricultural classes according to land ownership and labour relations (Patnaik 1976)

    Economic Class

    Characteristics

    1. Landlord Capitalist Feudal

    Labour hiring greater than rent
    Labour hiring at most as high as rent

    2. Rich peasant Proto-bourgeois Proto-feudal

    Labour hiring greater than rent
    Labour hiring at most as high as rent

    3. Poor peasant Agricultural labourer operating land Petty tenant

    Hiring out greater than rent payment
    Hiring out at most as high as rent payment

    4. Full-time labourer

    Hiring out only form, no rent payment

    73Distinctions among the four main classes are those familiar to the Marxist classics. Thus in the case of big landowners, whether feudal or capitalist, family members do not perform manual labour in major farm operations. Supervision or operating machinery, Patnaik specifies, is not considered manual labour. Rich peasants do participate in manual work ; however their resource position is such that appropriation of others’ labour is at least as important as use of family labour. The middle peasantry is primarily self-employed since on the average the resources per capita just suffice to employ adequately the supply of family labour and to provide a living “ at a customary subsistence level. ” The poor peasant family must hire out its members for wages or lease in land no matter how high the rent, or combine these two expedients. Typically these families “ cannot make ends meet and have to depress consumption standards below customary levels. ” The same is true of full-time labour families ; some of these may own small strips of land which they do not cultivate, but lease out. But the labour equivalent of the rent received is not large enough to balance, let alone outweigh, the amount of family labour hired out (Patnaik 1976).

    74Patnaik explains that her labour-exploitation criterion is designed to bring out the necessity for the different classes within the peasantry to enter into relations with each other in the process of production. Ashok Rudra makes a very similar point in the first of three 1978 articles on class relations in Indian agriculture. Classes, he understands, “ are defined by class contradictions. ” The relations between classes are relations of production, but (here Rudra diverges) “ not all relations of production define classes. ” They define various “social groups, ” but “ only some social groups are classes ” (Rudra 1978a).

    75Having thus ruled out any theoretical obligation to fit the whole of the agricultural population into one or another class category, Rudra proceeds to argue that there exist in Indian agriculture today two, and only two, classes. These are “ a class of big landowners and a class of agricultural labourers. ” The latter include landless labourers, landed labourers, and poor tenants who do not hire any labourers (Rudra 1978c).

    76So far as the big landowners are concerned, Rudra can discover no contradictions between those with capitalistic features and those who operate along feudal lines. There may be coexistence of more or less feudal and more or less capitalist farmers “ in the same region, or in the same village, or even in the same family. ” There may in fact be coexistence of “ some traits typical of capitalists and some other traits typical of feudal landowners in the same farmer. ” Rudra also rejects the classical distinction between “ landlords ” and “rich peasants ” on the basis of participation in the manual work of cultivation. In India, he maintains, this criterion is negated by the caste factor. In some cases even very small and impoverished landholders will not take to the plough because they belong to upper castes. On the other hand, with the introduction of mechanisation, one may find, for example in the Punjab, women members of families owning several hundreds of acres who do not hesitate to drive their own tractors. The class of big landowners, in Rudra’s view, is “ a single class ” and also “ a hybrid class : part feudal, part capitalist. ” He refers to it as the “ruling class in Indian agriculture.” Apart from the big landowners and the agricultural labourers, the rest of the population may be disregarded : “ they do not constitute or belong to any class or classes. ” This classlessness results from the fact that, while they have contradictions among themselves, they do not have clear contradictions with the two principal classes. Or such contradictions “ are of a subsidiary nature. ” Only the struggle between the two main classes “ can provide the motive force for any changes in the agrarian structure ” (Rudra 1978c).

    77In his conclusion Rudra spells out the political implications of his class analysis. Since he lumps together landlords revealing a preponderance of “ capitalistic traits ” and those displaying a more " feudalistic ” profile, Rudra sees no justification for “ those who believe in progress ” to support “ the assumed capitalist forces against the assumed feudal forces in an assumed struggle between the two. ” He rejects scornfully the concept of “ an alliance of the entire peasantry from landless labourers up to capitalist farmers against the feudal landlords. ” Such a political line, he pronounces, “ cannot but objectively betray the interests of the peasantry not belonging to the ruling class, ” and in particular the interests of the agricultural labourers. In point of fact, Rudra tells us, this is what has happened in previous peasant movements, “ led by the political parties of the country ” which have “ by and large benefited the middle and rich peasants, but not the landless or the landed labourers. ” By contrast, the line of political action which would follow from Rudra’s thesis “ is one of struggle by the class of agricultural labourers against the class of big landowners, without making any reservation on account of some members of the ruling class revealing more capitalistic traits than some others ” (Rudra 1978c).

    78Rudra’s rather drastic disposal of commonly held notions of class structure draws a comment from Pranab Bardhan, who had previously worked together with him in a large-scale survey of land, labour and credit relations in West Bengal, Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh (Bardhan and Rudra 1978). While listing five main points on which he wishes to state his agreement with Rudra, he specifies two major disagreements. Essentially, Bardhan approves Rudra’s proposition that the most important contradiction in Indian agriculture is that between big landowners (including rich peasants) and labourers (landed or landless), and Rudra’s criticism of the political line adopted by Left parties. But he takes Rudra to task for denying the significance of the middle peasants — who do not hire themselves out very often, or hire in much labour of others, as a separate class. For this purpose he cites data compiled by his wife, Kalpana Bardhan, from Farm Management Surveys carried out during the years from 1967 to 1972 in four states: Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. Observing that the numerical strength of the middle peasantry varies sharply from one part of India to another, he calls for a more extensive investigation of the phenomenon. Bardhan also takes exception to Rudra’s assertion that within the hybrid class of big landowners the feudal elements do not have any contradictions with the capitalist elements (Bardhan 1979).

    79Pradhan Prasad, writing in 1979 and 1980 about Bihar in particular and, by extension, practically the whole of the North-Indian Hindi-speaking belt (Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh), provides yet another array of agrarian classes. As Mencher did for South India, but with less precision, Prasad indicates which castes tend to be found in which classes. His three categories are as follows :

    • Top peasantry, including landlords, who deem physical labour even on their own lands below their dignity — upper castes

    • Middle and poor-middle peasantry, who do manual work on their own farms but do not labour for others. The middle peasants hire in agricultural labourers ; the poor-middle do not — these are essentially “ middle-caste Hindus (i.e. backward castes other than scheduled castes and scheduled tribes). ”

    • Agricultural labourers, “ a sizeable number of whom have small operational holdings ; ” these are drawn “ mostly from scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and some middle caste Hindus. ”

    80Prasad points to sharp contradictions between the middle peasants, whose landholdings have increased and whose overall economic position has become stronger over the past thirty years, and the top peasants — doubled and made more acute by conflict between the “ rising ” middle castes and the “ traditionally dominant ” upper castes. He also speaks of an “ emergent contradiction ” between the “ landlords, cultivators and big peasantry on the one side and the poor peasantry on the other. ” This antagonistic relationship arises “ out of semi-feudal bondage, ” and is destined to become less important “ as the semi-feudal set-up disintegrates. ” It will be replaced by “ another contradiction between new upper caste Hindu kulaks and the poor peasantry.” At this stage, Prasad predicts, the landlords and big peasants will forswear their earlier resistance to modernisation and “ will take steps to dynamicise their cultivation. ” In his words, “ the fanning of caste passions which at one time led to a diffusion of class contradictions, and thwarted agricultural growth, now turns out to be a factor which may sharpen the contradiction and cause the disintegration of ‘semi-feudal’ production relations in Bihar (Prasad 1979).

    81At the other end of the subcontinent, John Harriss provides a version of the rural class structure on the basis of his field work in the dry districts of Tamil Nadu. He defines his classes according to two criteria — size of production resources (including land) in relation to household livelihood requirements, and labour relations. This gives four categories as follows :

    • Capitalist farmers, with assets capable of realising more than 4 times basic livelihood requirements, employing a permanent labour force, not contributing personally more than a very little family labour ;

    • Rich peasants, with assets yielding 2-4 times household requirements, possibly employing permanent labourers but substantially dependent upon family labour ;
      ○ Independent middle peasants, whose assets yield 1-2 times household needs, employing principally family labour, may sometimes do wage labour for others ;

    • Poor peasants, whose assets do not cover their livelihood requirements, so that they must depend primarily upon wage labour ; this group includes ‘marginal farmers’ and agricultural labourers.

    82In the North Arcot village which Harriss studied intensively, he found evidence of all the features of a well-established capitalist mode of production. He emphasizes the dominant position, consolidated since the end of the last century, of a class of “ landowning moneylender merchants, ” belonging preponderantly in this region to the Agamudaiyan Mudaliar caste. These landholders operate in classical capitalist fashion. “ Money has been invested in agricultural production and profits reinvested ; and farmers sold a large portion of their output ; and farmers employ wage labour […] ” (Harriss 1979a).

    83Despite the fact that some 80 % of the households of the village may be indebted, Harriss insists that the “dominant mode of appropriation of surplus in Randam is capitalist” (Harriss 1979a). The distinctive element in Harriss’s contribution to the debate is his characterisation of the local dominant class as merchants as well as landowners and moneylenders.

    Mode of production in colonial India : Hamza Alavi, Ashok Rudra, Gail Omvedt, Jairus Banaji, Kathleen Gough, Amiya K. Bagchi

    84Starting in the middle of the 1970’s, a number of authors take up again a topic first mooted by Utsa Patnaik, “ the specificity of the colonial system ” (Patnaik 1972). Hamza Alavi, in his influential article on the colonial mode of production, begins by postulating that neither ‘feudalism’ in colonial India nor contemporary rural ‘capitalism’ can be theoretically grasped except in the context of the world-wide structure of imperialism into which India was, and is, articulated. This consideration, he continues, “ should lead us toward a conception of a colonial mode of production” distinct from “ both feudalism and capitalism in the metropolis ” (Alavi 1975). If ‘feudal’ and ‘capitalist’ modes coexist in India, Alavi insists, Marxist theory requires that they must be in contradiction : one emergent, the other disintegrating. In that case there is a necessity at each historical stage to specify which mode is dominant and which are the principal contradictions in the class struggle, “ as has been elaborated and explained by Mao Tse-tung. ” Yet, for India, Alavi writes, no one has been able to demonstrate “ any conflict between the new rural ‘capitalist’ class and the ‘feudal’ landlords, if they can be structurally distinguished at all ” (Alavi 1975).

    85Further Alavi finds it impossible to postulate any contradiction between “ colonial ‘feudalism’ and metropolitan ‘capitalism’, for it is precisely the latter which generates and supports the former. ” The specific structures of the colonial agrarian economy result directly from the action of imperial capital which “ disarticulates the internal economy of the colony (to use Amin’s fruitful concept) ” and integrates these disarticulated segments into the metropolitan economy. Alavi cites approvingly Chattopadhyay with regard to the preservation/destruction of the older Indian economy by imperialism (Chattopadhyay 1972b). He also refers favorably to Jairus Banaji’s concept of a colonial mode of production “ neither feudal nor capitalist, though resembling both at different levels ” (Banaji 1972).

    86Arguing that the colonial impact wrought fundamental transformations in the subject economies, Alavi attacks the “ excessive and misleading emphasis on the form of the relationship between the producer and his master ” (Alavi 1975, italics in the original). It is wrong, he declares, “ to describe colonial economies as those in which ‘pre-capitalist’ relationships ‘co-exist’ with ‘capitalist’ relations, ” since such traditional relations, e.g., share-cropping, “ are no longer ‘pre-capitalist’. ” They do not retain “ apart from their superficial form, the essential nature of the feudal relationships. ” Whereas the feudal economy was a system of ‘simple reproduction’ geared to the conspicuous consumption of the lords, as contrasted with the “ expanded reproduction ” of capitalism, in which much of the surplus is invested to bring about a rise in the organic composition of capital, the colonial mode shares neither of these characteristics. Recent heavy investment in the colonial agrarian economy has taken place only because of its “ encapsulation ” within the highly industrialised world economy, and also on account of the “ subordinated industrial development that has taken place within the colony itself under the aegis of the metropolitan bourgeoisie. ” There is accordingly, in the colonial mode, a system of expanded reproduction “ but of a deformed nature. ” More precisely, “ a substantial part of the surplus generated in the colonial agrarian economy (as well as that generated in colonial industry) is appropriated by the imperialist bourgeoisie and enters into expanded reproduction not directly within the colonial economy but rather at the imperialist centre ” (Alavi 1975, cf. Patnaik 1972a). Again, with regard to generalised commodity production, regarded as a criterion of capitalism, in the colonial world, this also is created by, and at the service of, the imperial economy. Whereas feudalism implied localised production, localised appropriation and a localised power structure, the colonial regime “ subordinated the power of the local lords ” to its own framework of the “ colonial bourgeois state ” (Alavi 1975).

    87A particular feature of the colonial mode in India has been the creation of a “ large number of destitute small holders — 75 per cent of all farms in modern India. ” Since these holdings are too small to assure even a bare subsistence, they serve as a “ valued supplier of cheap labour ” both for agriculture and for urban industry. In this way the class of small-holders is integrated into the colonial mode of production, and cannot be described as a “ pre-capitalist ” survival (Alavi 1975).

    88With regard to class contradictions as well, the colonial mode has its own pattern. There is no conflict of interest between the so-called “ feudal ” or “ semi-feudal ” class of landlords on the one hand, and the bourgeoisie (urban or rural) on the other. Nor is there a conflict in which the “ wage labourers (the rural proletariat) are aligned differently from the other subordinate classes in the countryside, viz., the sharecroppers and the smallholding ‘middle peasants’ ; ” rather the picture is that of “ a great increase in peasant militancy. ” This is due to the “ widespread destitution of all the subordinate classes ” brought about by “ the development of ‘capitalism’ in Indian agriculture, insofar as it has gone and in areas where it has progressed ” (Alavi 1975).

    89In the body of the article it is never quite clear to which period in India’s recent history Alavi’s colonial mode is supposed to apply. At the end he suggests that there is “ by and large, some degree of correspondance in time between the transition from the colonial to the post-colonial mode of production, and the achievement of political independence. ” He also takes the precaution of indicating that the “ structural formation ” which he has designated as a “ colonial mode of production ” does not constitute “ a self-contained entity, ” since it cannot be conceptualised except as part of a larger whole. The search for an alternative terminology, he opines, “ may be a profitable semantic enterprise ” (Alavi 1975).

    90Swift reactions from Ashok Rudra and Gail Omvedt were largely favorable to Alavi. Both suggest the use of the term “social formation ” for the constellation of traits characterising the economy of colonial India. Rudra raises the problem of Alavi’s vagueness with regard to the post-colonial phase. Omvedt holds that conflicts between capitalist and feudal elements do exist. “ The expanding thrust of the capitalist sector, ” she writes, “ is continually frustrated by agrarian stagnation. ” This stagnation together with the lack of development of the internal market result “ in the ultimate analysis from continuing semi-feudal relations. ” But these contradictions “ are muted by their integration in an imperialist system. ” Omvedt criticises as too simplistic Alavi’s proposition that the basic conflict is between “ the workers and the rural poor (including sharecroppers and middle peasants) ” on the one hand, and the landowners plus the bourgeoisie on the other. In her words this analysis “ hardly seems to do justice to the developing complexities of contradictions in a colonial society ” (Rudra 1975, Omvedt 1975).

    91A. K. Bagchi portrays the colonial period as a time of de-industrialisation and possibly even de-commercialisation of agriculture. Reviewing the evidence, he judges that in the period up to 1900 “ the share of the secondary sector in national income would on balance have been declining. ” Similarly, the share of the secondary sector in the working force fell until about the middle of the 1920’s. In agriculture share tenancy was prevalent in the nineteenth century, and in some areas may have increased. There may well, Bagchi esteems, have been a net movement from cash rents to kind rents.

    92Bagchi speaks of “ a symbiotic relationship between precapitalist and capitalist modes of exploitation, ” and gives examples : “ Most European ‘capitalist’ planters (including the Government as cultivator of opium) used non-market coercion to exploit the labourers and the peasantry […] many (in fact most) sugar factories found that it was more costly to cultivate sugar on their own with large-scale ‘scientific’ methods than to rent out land to tenants on a share-cropping basis ” (Bagchi 1975).

    93Even after Independence, Bagchi holds, “ this continual interchange between capitalist and pre-capitalist relations has not ceased. ” Partly this continuity is due to the low rate of capital accumulation and to a permanent state of relative overpopulation in the countryside. It is also the case that “ capitalist profit-making itself uses precapitalist methods, ” and capitalist farmers “ depend on other property-owning strata for maintaining their political and social power ” (Bagchi 1975).

    94Bagchi is cautious about how to label the “ amalgam of usury, bondage, wage-labour, and tenancy prevailing in the Indian countryside. ” He lists ‘semi-feudalism, ’ ‘semi-capitalism, ’ ‘neither feudalism nor capitalism, ’ and ‘ both capitalism and feudalism’ as possibilities, but does not mention a ‘colonial mode of production.’ He announces that he would accept any of the listed terms “ so long as the basic laws of motion of such a society are correctly understood ” (Bagchi 1975).

    95Britain’s position as the first country to industrialise did not lead it to carry through a similar revolution in its Indian colony, Bagchi observes. In fact, he is not sure “ that the ‘transition’ to capitalism can ever be complete in the countries of South Asia. ” It is not the least of the harmful legacies of colonialism, Bagchi avers, “ that while it modified the precapitalist relations to suit its purpose, it also preserved them ” (Bagchi 1975).

    96Another study dealing primarily with the British period, in particular with the late nineteenth century, is contributed by Jairus Banaji. But this time he also eschews any reference to a colonial mode of production. Arguing that, “ in the absence of a specifically capitalist mode of production on the national scale, capitalist relations of exploitation may nonetheless be widespread and dominant, ” Banaji takes up the case of the Deccan from 1850 to 1890. He cites evidence for the expansion of commodity production during those years : cotton and groundnuts for export ; sugar, foodgrains and garden crops for the growing population of Bombay and Poona cities. The process of commodity expansion implied an increasing conversion of labour-power into a commodity, by means of proletarianisation. Immediate causes such as drought, scarcity and famine appeared to play a major role in reducing the small producers to this state, but this was possible “ only because of the already exhausted and decrepit condition of the Deccan small-production economy. ” A system of capitalist exploitation operated through the advances of merchant-moneylenders for the subsistence of the small peasants. The “ purely capitalist nature of the relationship between the peasant and moneylender ” was concealed by the fact that the “ surplus-value extorted from the small producer would be called ‘interest’ ” (Banaji 1977, italics in the original).

    97The capitalist relations “ which at their limit formed the system of the formal subordination of labour to capital ” existed in the Deccan economy of the nineteenth century in various stages of crystallisation. The same form of capitalist exploitation through debt which prevailed in the countryside could also be found in the towns in the case of the “ smaller artisans ” (Banaji 1977).

    98Where Banaji had earlier intervened as a supporter of Utsa Patnaik, he now classes her with Bhaduri as a practitioner of “ extreme formalism. ” He argues that they incorrectly identify “ forms of organisation of the labour-process ” such as sharecropping or other types of tenancy with particular “ relations of production ” which they label “ pre-capitalist ” or “ semi-feudal. ” On the contrary, he insists, the particular form of wage-labour or of tenant labour which a big peasant or landowner chooses to employ for technical or personal reasons does not affect the “ social character or content of the production-relations that these labour-arrangements embody ” (Banaji 1977, italics in the original).

    99Distinguishing among the regional, national and international levels, Banaji concludes that in the late nineteenth century Deccan “ capitalist relations of exploitation signifying the less developed forms of capitalist production had emerged […] and were widespread and in some districts dominant. ” But for India as a whole “ the bourgeois mode of production in its developed or ‘adequate’ structure was neither dominant nor widespread. ” The specific form of capitalist production which evolved in the Deccan constituted “ a subordinate and transitional system within the bourgeois mode of production in its world extension. ” Banaji sets himself off sharply from Gunder Frank, whom he criticises for supposing “ that it is sufficient to point to the dominance of the specifically bourgeois mode of production on the world scale in order to establish the prevalence of bourgeois relations in India. ” Yet the political lesson which he draws for present-day India is the same as Frank’s. Banaji judges that in the Indian countryside “ the struggle against capitalist forms of exploitation has already begun. ” He urges that it be conducted “ with a clear understanding of its own character, ” that is, “ on the basis of a programme for the abolition of the system of wage-slavery ” (Banaji 1977, italics in the original).

    100In a paper prepared for a Workshop on “ African and Asian Societies in Confrontation with Western European Colonialism ” held in Berlin in 1979, Hamza Alavi modifies considerably his earlier position. He restates, however, his objections to characterising as feudal Indian agriculture in recent years, prior to the current wave of large investment in farm mechanisation. Referring to Utsa Patnaik, he writes : “ To prove that there has been, in recent years, a decisive movement toward capitalism in Indian agriculture, her problem, paradoxically, was to prove that what went before was in fact ‘feudal’. ” In Alavi’s view, “ social relations of production in Indian society were altered in the course of the colonial transformation. ” The result was the creation of what, having abandoned the colonial mode of production, Alavi now calls “ peripheral capitalism. ” In India, this development took a long time. Agriculture turned progressively toward the production of crops for metropolitan markets, such as cotton, jute and indigo. Elsewhere peasants produced food crops as cash crops to feed the colonial towns and also peasants in other areas who had shifted to export crops. This constituted “ a form of generalised commodity production ” specific to peripheral capitalism, in which the circulation of commodities was completed via the export-import link with the metropolis (Alavi 1981).

    101Although peasant farming continued on the basis of largely unchanged techniques, it was nonetheless subject to formal subsumption by capital, a condition which, in Marx’s definition, “ does not by itself imply a fundamental modification of the nature of the labour process. ” In a later phase of capitalist transformation, the real subsumption of labour under capital, the process of production is subject to continual transformation, “ concomitantly with rise in organic composition of capital ” (Alavi 1981).

    102Alavi takes up cudgels against the conservation/dissolution formula put forward by Charles Bettelheim and used by Claude Meillassoux “ which views the persistence of peasant production in colonised societies as a case of ‘conservation/dissolution’ of pre-capitalist modes of production by colonial capital. ” In Alavi’s view this concept obscures rather than clarifying the underlying theoretical problem of explaining why peasants do not disappear in the course of the transition to capitalism. Alavi argues that peasants are more resilient than urban petty commodity producers because they do not need to pass through the market for their food and shelter, they receive some of the earnings of family members who have migrated in search of employment, and their being physically displaced by large-scale farms is impeded precisely because they hang on desperately to whatever tiny holdings they may have — preventing the formation of the substantial contiguous blocks of land required for modern cultivation. Nevertheless, Alavi believes, the conditions of the peasants’ existence are being “ progressively undermined ” by the “ dynamics of peripheral capitalist development ” (Alavi 1981).

    103Kathleen Gough’s contribution to the debate is a major article tracing the political economy of Thanjavur district in Tamil Nadu from about 850 A. D. to the present. When she comes to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gough characterises this period in much the same way as Alavi and Banaji. During these years, she writes, “ the capitalist mode of production was dominant in Thanjavur ; ” most of the actual relations of production “ although of a colonial character, became essentially those of what Marx called the ‘formal subsumption of labour under capital.’ ” They were not yet the relations of “ real subsumption of labour under capital ” (Gough 1980).

    104Gough gives six reasons for dubbing the relations obtaining in Thanjavur in the imperialist period capitalist :

    • With the abolition of slavery the labourers all became free of political forms of bondage.

    • Tenants, artisans, village servants and labourers had already in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth been “ freed ” from the means of production and forced to sell their labour power.
      ○ Landlords became private owners of the means of production, which they could sell ; they marketed more than half of their crops.

    • Extended reproduction in agriculture took the form of greatly increasing the area of land under cultivation, especially in the case of rice, the chief export crop ; there was also some investment in irrigation.

    • Extended reproduction as well as a rise in the organic composition of capital occurred in the mills and in industrial transport. In these areas the “ real subsumption of labour under capital ” developed.

    • On the world scale Thanjavur became a specialised producer of rice and a few other exports as a part of the increased international division of labour.

    105Gough nonetheless acknowledges the persistence of certain pre-capitalist features in production relations in agriculture : “ traditional gifts of clothing and other perquisites by masters to their labourers at festivals and life-crises ; ” the formally subservient behaviour “ prescribed by caste ” of labourers to masters ; the admissibility of masters’ inflicting corporal punishment on labourers. She maintains that despite these practices, relations of production were enforced “ primarily by economic and not extra-economic coercion. ” She is not prepared to accept Alavi’s earlier formulation of a ‘colonial mode of production’ separate from the capitalist mode. Rather, she proposes that : “ India did not develop along the same path as Britain, as Marx expected it to do, that it developed along a complementary and specifically colonial trajectory, yet that it developed within the (single) capitalist mode ” (Gough 1980, italics in the original).

    106The period from 1947 to 1980 Gough characterises as neo-imperialism. Thanjavur, she tells us, has continued to be “ an agricultural hinterland within the world capitalist mode of production. ” There has been some crop diversification but the proportion grown for export has actually risen. Farming has been transformed through the use of chemical fertilisers, hybrid high-yielding seeds, pesticides, tractors, tube-wells and electric irrigation pumps. Especially on the larger farms “ there is a continuing rise in the organic composition of capital. ” Correspondingly, “ the extraction of relative surplus value has greatly increased. ” The profits of increased production, Gough asserts, have gone mainly to metropolitan capital which supplies much of the new machinery and chemical inputs, to Indian big business, and locally to the bigger landlords and merchants. These households “ now enjoy such accessories as radios, mopeds, cars, airconditioning, a range of electrical appliances, and other luxury consumer goods. ” At the other end of the social and economic scale, Gough found that the standard of living has remained stationary or declined. In two villages at opposite ends of the delta she discovered that half of the inhabitants could afford only one cooked meal a day during most of the year. Since they were unable to buy meat or milk, “ large numbers in the general population had adopted the Harijan custom of eating field rats ” (Gough 1980).

    107Gough reviews briefly the history of the Communist movement in Thanjavur, which arose in the 1930’s and has been strong “ among agricultural labourers, most notably Harijan who form 22 % of the population. ” In recent years the demands have concentrated on raising the level of daily wages, and when that failed because of the declining number of days of work per year, on “ jobs or dole. ” Gough opines that struggles of this kind “ though temporarily palliative, cannot solve the structural contradictions of the capitalist mode of production in Thanjavur ” (Gough 1980).

    108An opposite point of view with regard to the colonial period is voiced by Gail Omvedt, who states that “ imperialism essentially maintained feudalism — though in a subjugated and modified form – as the dominant mode of production in agriculture. ” She argues that the “ specificity of the feudal mode of production in India was largely related to caste. ” Here she refers in particular to the role of the jajmānī-balutedārī system and to the relations between high caste landlords and low-caste serfs or tenants (Omvedt 1978).

    Direction and pace of change in Independent India : Utsa Patnaik, Nirmal Sen Gupta, Paresh Chattopadhyay, Sharad Lin, Dipankar Gupta, Aparajita Chakraborty, Ashok Rudra, Atyachar Virodh Samiti

    109In the same article on class differentiation which we have already cited, Utsa Patnaik also takes up the question of the “ trend ” and “ moment ” in the development of Indian agrarian relations. At Independence, she writes, differentiation and exploitative relations among the layers within the peasantry, while already existing, were overshadowed in importance by the burden of landlordism on the peasantry as a whole. The principal contradiction at that moment of time, placing all other contradictions in a secondary role, was that between landlords on the one side and the peasantry on the other. The trend since Independence is toward capitalist production, but this tendency is narrowly based since landlordism has not been abolished and there has been no substantial redistribution of land. However, the development of capitalist production, although limited, “ means that the content of landlordism today is not, and cannot be, exactly the same as at Independence ” (Patnaik 1976).

    110Definite limits, Patnaik argues, are set to the further development of the capitalist tendency by the high levels of “ precapitalist ground rent. ” Small peasants are prepared to pay “ hunger rents ” not because of high productivity, but because if they cannot rent in land, they will have no means of subsistence. Under these circumstances, the type of capitalist investment which has been taking place over the past 10-15 years is that which “ raises output and surplus per unit of land area, ” such as in irrigation, double-cropping, fertilisers, high-yielding seeds. Only in this way can the gains from capitalist-style production surmount “ the rent barrier. ” Mechanisation and labour-replacement have been undertaken primarily when required to raise the surplus per acre, i.e., so as to allow double cropping. For this reason, capitalist investment and output expansion have shown a “ crop-wise and region-wise concentration ” (Patnaik 1976).

    111For the future we can expect a levelling off and even decline of productive capital investment once the potential of a given complex of technical changes has been realised “ The level of precapitalist rent itself will not remain static but will tend to rise though with a lag, ” Patnaik predicts. Renewed capital investment will only be undertaken if it can embody a change in production techniques that will provide a “ substantial, discrete increase ” in output and surplus per unit of land area (Patnaik 1976).

    112The feudal mode is still prevalent, according to Nirmal Sen Gupta, who also believes in the “continued deterministic role of imperialism even in post-independence India.” The fact that India continues to be an integral part of the world capitalist system indicates the continuation of the same trend essentially as in the colonial days. This is a “capitalist trend” which manifests itself “in a colonial or semi-colonial society,” where the “feudal mode of production and feudal social formation” survive in an “assimilative form, running over a variety of proportionality between feudal mode and capitalist mode. ’’ The agrarian formation which was “colonial semi-feudal” in the colonial period can be labelled “semi-colonial semi-feudal” in the post-independence period. “Though capitalism has come, pre-capitalist mode is still prevalent, and capitalist development is arrested primarily by the influence of imperialism,” Sen Gupta concludes. The task immediately ahead, he urges, “is fundamentally one of fullscale capitalist development ” (Sen Gupta 1977).

    113Re-entering the discussion to sharpen some of his original formulations and to comment on positions taken by Ashok Rudra, Ranj it Sau and Hamza Alavi, Paresh Chattopadhyay insists notably on the “ dual role of capitalism with regard to pre-capitalism. ” That it seeks both the destruction and the preservation of older forms, Chattopadhyay holds, “ is a universal phenomenon and not confined to what is usually considered as ‘colonies’ or ‘semi-colonies’ ” (Chattopadhyay 1980).

    114A two-part article by Sharat G. Lin puts forward a new term, “ a dual mode of production ” for post-colonial India. Citing Banaji, Sen Gupta and Brian Davey, Lin finds overall agreement that there is a superposition of more than one mode of production. In Lin’s formulation “ the two primary modes (pre-capitalist and capitalist) interpenetrate ” generating “ a single mode with dual character having, at once, both accommodating and conflicting internal dynamics. ” State power “ must be shared by two historically opposed ruling classes ” since it is “ based on two historically opposed primary modes ; ” hence it cannot remain forever stable. Yet, Lin opines, it may last longer “ than has been the case elsewhere in the world. ” This is because the precapitalist mode is so well-entrenched, because of wide regional variation in the strength of capitalist forces, because of the social inertia of sheer size, and because of the role of cultural factors (Lin 1980).

    115With regard to the possibilities for revolutionary action, the oppressed classes must struggle against whichever of the two modes and elements of state power “ holds trend-dominance in the process of transition to holding status-dominance. ” The enemy must be carefully chosen since a struggle against the feudal aspect which does not take into account the bourgeois aspect will lead by default to strengthening the position of the latter and “ to the type of class collaboration exercised by various left parties. ” However, it is not yet the moment for “ a stage of struggle for the socialist revolution since the Indian bourgeoisie has not completed and cannot complete the bourgeois democratic revolution. ” This democratic revolution can only “ be completed through an alliance of the proletariat and impoverished peasantry who together constitute some 90 per cent of the population ” (Lin 1980).

    116Two recent articles concentrate on elements of the current rural scene which have been identified as “ feudal. ” Dipankar Gupta considers the nature of share-cropping, and contends that it is “ not a feudal institution but rather appears only in formations where feudal institutions have been undermined by capitalism and where capitalism has not yet appeared in all its virility. ” He prefers to view the Indian economy as “ a capitalist one where capitalism has not developed uniformly. ” Although “ capitalism is the main enemy, ” a revolutionary takeover “ is not yet in the offing ” so that the prospect is of a “ long period of struggle ahead. ” The Left should not rush to raise the cry of “ immediate socialisation of the land ” since slogans such as “ land to the tiller ” can still motivate the majority of the peasants (Gupta 1980).

    117Similarly Aparajita Chakraborty attacks the idea “ that tenancy as an institution is necessarily a feature of precapitalist modes of production, in particular the feudal mode ” and that “ capitalist development necessarily calls for its disappearance. ” She names Utsa Patnaik, Nirmal Chandra and Amit Bhaduri as having subscribed to this erroneous and, in her opinion, un-Marxist notion. On the contrary, Chakraborty presents the view that tenancy is a flexible arrangement which “ takes different forms and embodies different mixtures of capitalist and precapitalist relations under different historical conditions. ” In India until very recent times tenancy has been characterised by “ very regressive features, ” and even today in many cases peasants are subject to “ exploitative rents ” and “ exorbitant rates of interest. ” In this way agricultural surplus is being diverted into non-productive channels, and the development of capitalism in agriculture is held back. The relations of production embodied in this process, Chakraborty concedes, “ are no doubt precapitalist in nature. ” But this does not mean that tenancy itself is feudal or semi-feudal : “ In India, until recently, tenancy was an institution which was very much a part of the precapitalist relations of production that characterised agriculture. But it is getting changed along with changing conditions to the point of becoming compatible with emerging capitalist relations ” (Chakraborty 1981).

    118For his part, Ashok Rudra denies the usefulness of feudalism as a concept for analysing any period at all in Indian history. He points out that while political economists who use the term ‘semi-feudal’ presumably believe that the mode of production in India during some previous period was feudal, much influential opinion among historians rejects the thesis that there was ever feudalism in Indian history. After reviewing the historical debate, Rudra castigates the participants for paying insufficient attention to “ social, cultural and religious institutions. ” Whereas the “ European genius ” forged the features and rituals of feudalism (such as commendation, homage and fealty), the “ Indian genius ” invented the caste system, the Hindu ethos. He advances the hypothesis that whereas in the Western world, the hierarchic structure of society is maintained, in the ultimate analysis by violence, “ this particular role in Indian history was played not by violence but by ideology ’’ (Rudra 1981, italics in the original).

    119This thesis, Rudra insists, “has extremely important implication for practice. ” The political lesson that he draws is that “ the struggle against the reactionary elements of the Brahmanic ideology ” should constitute an important element “ in any struggle for progress in this country ” (Rudra 1981).

    120This proposal of Rudra’s is very close to the recommendations of a leftwing Maharashtrian organisation, the Atyachar Virodh Samiti, at the end of a report on riots in Marathwada in which caste Hindus wreaked violence upon members of scheduled castes. The Samiti contends that the caste system functions as “ an extremely effective method of economic exploitation. ” Caste hierarchies reflect economic power and ownership of land. As bourgeois relations develop, the argument continues, the institution of caste starts to disintegrate, but the process is not smooth. It is at this point that caste riots, reflecting conflict of class interests, take place. In the “ mixed capitalist economy ” of today, caste persists “ as a part of feudal ideology. ” But it also serves the bourgeois system since one of its functions has been “ to prevent formation of consciousness and struggles on class lines. ” The Samiti calls upon all progressives and Leftists to take up issues around specific caste questions, and to support unconditionally autonomous dalit (literally, oppressed, an appellation recently assumed by Left-wing untouchable activists) movements with democratic demands against caste discrimination. “ To establish a link between fights against caste-oppression and class exploitation, ” the report concludes, “ is the need of the hour ” (Atyachar Virod Samiti 1979).

    121In a major review of the evidence which has become available during the 1970’s, Gail Omvedt gives an unequivocally affirmative answer to the question as to whether India’s agriculture is now dominantly capitalist. Harking back to Daniel Thorner’s 1969 formulation that the emergence of capitalist farming represented one facet of the industrial revolution which was transforming India, she stresses “ the links between agriculture and industry, city and countryside ” (Omvedt 1981).

    122At the time of Independence, Omvedt believes, Indian agriculture was “ predominantly feudal in character though important elements of capitalism had risen. ” This was a “ caste-structured ” form of feudalism which existed before the British period. When the colonial state no longer officially enforced the caste system, ‘caste’ and ‘class’ began to represent separate social phenomena, “ but there was still a near-absolute correlation between them. ” Because of the particular caste aspect of Indian feudalism, Omvedt affirms, “ the anti-feudal movement was expressed not only through peasant revolts but also in the radical anti-caste movements of Phule, Ambedkar and Periyar ” (Omvedt 1981).

    123For the present, Omvedt’s arguments for the dominance of capitalism can be summed up as follows :

    • over half of the rural population depend upon wages ;

    • all cultivators are forced to sell to some extent in the market, and their production is governed by the laws of the market ;

    • the means of production in agriculture are now, to a large extent, produced industrially and acquired through the market ;

    • there has been a substantial growth in the use of capital inputs such as fertilisers and oil engines ;

    • there has been a genuine, if halting, growth in agricultural production ;

    • generalised commodity production, including the sale of labour power, prevails ;

    • the primary aspect of the relationship of the rural rich with the rural poor is as exploiters of labour power ;

    • the rural semi-proletariat is, by and large, an increasingly mobile, migrant and free class, whose differences with the urban working class “ seem more those of quantity than of quality ” (Omvedt 1981).

    124But Omvedt does not equate the spread of capitalism in agriculture with the progress of social justice. On the contrary, she judges that this development “ is not leading to any increased overall welfare for the rural (or urban) masses. ” She rejects the assumption of some authors that “ immiserisation, pauperisation, growing landlessness etc. are themselves signs of ‘semi-feudalism’ or the lack capitalist development ” (Omvedt 1981).

    125Omvedt’s prescription for political action rests upon her faith in the revolutionary potential of the rural proletariat. She is persuaded that the agricultural labourers and poor peasants are capable “ of forming a centre around which middle peasants and other oppressed sections can be united. ” Accordingly, she deplores the tendency of the “ major parliamentary left parties to call for alliances including the rich peasants, ” who, she contends, are in effect “ the village rulers and capitalist farmers. ” The apparent weakness of the rural semi-proletariat, Omvedt tells us, is belied by “ vast numbers of diverse and unreported or underreported clashes ” involving “ agricultural labourers and other labourers as well as poor and middle peasants. ” Since “ class exploitation is compounded with caste and national oppression ” many struggles assume forms which are difficult to identify as class conflicts, as for example those of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha in the tribal area of Bihar or the Dalit Panthers in Maharashtra. Although up to now the “rural toiling masses have not yet found their own revolutionary party,” Omvedt confidently foresees for the future “tumultuous political developments.” (Omvedt 1981).

    Balance sheet

    126What, we may now ask, has been clarified in the course of the past dozen years of debate, and what remains controversial ? First of all, there would no longer appear to be any doubt that capitalism today dominates Indian agriculture as it already was generally seen to dominate industry at the time the discussion began. Does this mean that the mode of production which prevails in contemporary India is capitalist, and subject to the Marxist laws of motion of capitalist development ? Here, the answer is less evident, since India’s capitalism has emerged in a particular colonial setting, markedly different from the conditions in the metropolitan countries where capitalism was born.

    127By what criteria has the prevalence of capitalism been established ? It has been abundantly shown that the existence of widespread tenancy and/or share-cropping does not necessarily indicate the presence of feudal relations of production ; nor does the concentration of landholding together with cultivation of small units by large numbers of peasants. By the same token, the use of wage labour cannot by itself be taken as a sure sign of capitalist relations. Yet the shift from exploitation through tenants to large-scale or intensive farming by means of hired labour is significant.

    128The growth of capitalist farming in India has been accompanied by, in fact amounts to, a transformation of relations of production and forms of exploitation. Servile, debt-bonded, and/or traditionally tied labour has been largely supplanted by free, relatively mobile, wage labour, paid (if meagrely) for the most part in cash. Investment in modern, scientific agriculture has enormously expanded, and has resulted, on the whole, in enhanced production, at least of certain crops in certain areas. Tenancy and sharecropping arrangements have in many regions been adapted to the new economic and technical requirements.

    129Yet master-servant types of behaviour, extra-economic constraints, rack-renting and usury have by no means disappeared. A particular feature of the Indian scene is the vast mass of un-or under-employed who, if they cannot emigrate and find jobs outside of agriculture, exercise upward pressure on the rental price of land, and downward pressure on wage rates. The school of thought which tried to take account of these aspects by labelling Indian agriculture semi-feudal has withdrawn from the debate after about the middle of the 1970’s, but there is still talk of the persistence of feudal and semi-feudal relations of production. Similarly, the original proponents of a colonial mode have themselves dropped the term, while the term ‘dual mode’ has, to my knowledge, attracted no followers. But the concepts of the preservation/destruction of earlier modes of production by capitalism, and of the articulation of different modes within a single social formation continue to figure in the discussion.1

    130Several authors who accept the leading role of capitalism nonetheless express grave doubts as to the likelihood of its further and full development. They point out obstacles to capitalist progress on the national scale such as the relative narrowness of India’s industrial base in terms of the size of the country, the dependence of this industry on foreign technology, the very limited amount of employment provided by the secondary sector, and the extreme modesty of the economic demand for consumers’ goods. There is agreement that capitalism in agriculture cannot be depended upon to solve the crucial problems of access to land and to food of the whole rural population.2

    131The set of rural classes proposed by the various authors ranges from Ashok Rudra’s drastic duality to Chandra’s six-fold grouping, and the even larger number of categories used by Joan Mencher and Utsa Patnaik. This lack of accord on the array of rural classes should not surprise us. Apart from marked regional differences, it would seem that the class configuration which one discovers depends primarily on one’s purpose. Researchers trying variously to explain why a land reform has or has not actually been implemented ; when agricultural development programs work and when they don’t ; why particular candidates or parties receive the votes of specific village groups ; where reform or revolutionary movements arise and spread, and where they are nipped in the bud ; should obviously not be expected to come up with identical lists of classes. Under the circumstances, efforts to attach numerical values to particular classes are even less comparable. There is not even a consensus as to the identity of the typical producer : is he an independent middle peasant or, on the contrary, is he an improverished tenant, share-cropper or agricultural labourer3

    132Cut-off points in size of landholding terms are clearly inadequate for marking off agricultural classes. Combinations of landholding categories with other characteristics (such as labour relations) become unwieldy in practice. In the course of preparing the present article I tried to make up a table showing the relative shares of the rural population attributed to each class by the different authors who have attempted this exercise (Bhaduri, Nirmal Chandra, Prasad, Mencher, Rudra, Omvedt) and to include the one-shot estimates of this or that class by other writers (e.g., Alavi and Lin). But the rubrics utilised by these writers proved so disparate that I had to give up the attempt.4

    133The various discussions of colonial India have all emphasized the baneful effect upon the older Indian economy (whether characterised as Asiatic, feudal or precapitalist) of its involuntary integration into the world capitalist circuit. For some authors, British transformation of its Indian colony into a market for manufactures and a source of primary products such as wheat, cotton and jute, served to establish dominant capitalist relations in late nineteenth century India, or in certain regions of the country. For others, imperialism in its own interest shored up feudal elements in Indian economy and society. All agree that India is still tributary in large degree to the international market : some refer to this as semi-colonial status. Others prefer to speak of India’s peripheral capitalism in relation to metropolitan centres.

    134Early interventions in the debate were largely limited to economic issues. Later papers have paid increasing attention to elements of consciousness and culture, with special reference to caste. One of the weaknesses of Marxist studies on India has been precisely a failure, perhaps even an unwillingness, to deal adequately with this basic facet of Indian society. This is one of the directions which future debate can most fruitfully explore. Another is the more detailed analysis of the role of the state.

    135Although the arguments have sometimes been couched in highly abstract language, the mode of production debate cannot be dismissed as a scholastic quarrel over definitions. The participants are, without exception, engaged or concerned scholars, who hope through their research and writing to contribute to leftwing political action. As Omvedt has observed, the polemics began at a critical moment in Indian agricultural development, “expressed politically in the Naxalbari revolt” as also in a new upsurge of agitation by agricultural labourers which, in turn, called forth a wave of repression by the rural elite “symbolised in the 1968 Kilvenmani massacre, first in a long series of atrocities on Harijans” (Omvedt 1981).

    136For this reason I have taken trouble to spell out in considerable detail the precise political implications drawn by each author on the basis of his own analysis. As we have seen, these range from calls for completion of the capitalist transformation of agriculture and the bourgeois revolution to demands for immediate organisation under the banner of socialist revolution and the abolition of wage slavery. Many of our contributors castigate the Left political parties for having preached class collaboration with rich peasants or capitalist farmers against ‘feudal elements’. Very few consider the odds for success of movements uniting only labourers and poor peasants, or the problems of persuading members of respectable castes in the categories to join with Untouchables for long-range as well as immediate ends. If someone with no personal experience of mass leadership may be permitted to pass comment on her fellow academics, I would say that most of the political prescriptions smack of the armchair and the scholar’s candle. This is not to disparage the value of scientific and theoretical discussions for revolutionary practice, but rather to suggest that they be combined with practical lessons learned from actual struggles.

    Bibliographie

    Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.

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    Banaji, Jairus. “Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History”. Capital &Amp; Class. SAGE Publications, October 1977. https://doi.org/10.1177/030981687700300102.
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    McEachern, Doug. “The Mode of Production in India”. Journal of Contemporary Asia. Informa UK Limited, January 1976. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472337685390601.
    Omvedt, Gail. “Capitalist Agriculture and Rural Classes in India”. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. Informa UK Limited, August 1983. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.1983.10404881.
    Patnaik, Utsa. “Development of Capitalism in Agriculture: II”. Social Scientist. JSTOR, October 1972. https://doi.org/10.2307/3516394.
    Malamoud, Charles, ed. “La Dette”. []. Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1980. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsehess.19402.
    Banaji, Jairus. Theory As History. [], BRILL, 22 Mar. 2010. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004183681.i-406.
    Banaji, Jairus. “Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History”. Capital &Amp; Class, vol. 1, no. 3, SAGE Publications, Oct. 1977, pp. 1-44. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1177/030981687700300102.
    Frank, Andre Gunder. Critique and Anti-Critique. [], Macmillan Education UK, 1984. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86027-2.
    McEachern, Doug. “The Mode of Production in India”. Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. 6, no. 4, Informa UK Limited, Jan. 1976, pp. 444-57. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1080/00472337685390601.
    Omvedt, Gail. “Capitalist Agriculture and Rural Classes in India”. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 15, no. 3, Informa UK Limited, Aug. 1983, pp. 30-54. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.1983.10404881.
    Patnaik, Utsa. “Development of Capitalism in Agriculture: II”. Social Scientist, vol. 1, no. 3, JSTOR, Oct. 1972, p. 3. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.2307/3516394.
    Malamoud, Charles, editor. La Dette. [], Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1980. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsehess.19402.

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    Frank, André Gunder, On ‘ Feudal ’ Modes, Models and Methods of Escaping Capitalist Reality, EPW, VIII (1973 a) 1, 36-37.

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    Gupta, Dipankar, Formal and Real Subsumption of Labour under Capital : The Instance of Share-Cropping, EPW, XV (1980) 39, Review of Agriculture, 98-106.

    Gupta, Sulekh Chand, Some Aspects of Indian Agriculture, Enquiry, Delhi, (1962 a) cited by Thorner 1980, pp. 251-252.

    Gupta, Sulekh Chand, New Trends of Growth, Seminar, Delhi, (1962 b), cited by Patnaik 1971 a.

    Harriss, John. Capitalism and Peasant Farming : A Study of Agricultural Change and Agrarian Structure in Northern Tamil Nadu. Doctoral thesis (University of East Anglia, 1977) cited by Westergaard 1979.

    Harriss, John, Why Poor People Remain Poor in Rural South India, Social Scientist, Trivandrum, VIII (1979 a) 1, 20-47.

    Harriss, John, The Mode of Production Controversy : Themes and Problems of the Debate. Working Paper (Madras Institute of Development Studies, 1979 b).

    Kotovsky, G., Agrarian Reform in India (Moscow, Progress, 1964).

    Lin, Sharat G., Theory of a Dual Mode of Production in Post-Colonial India, in two parts, EPW, XV (1980) 10 and 11, 516-529, 565-573.

    Mencher, Joan P., Problems in Analyzing Rural Class Structure, EPW, IX (1974) 35. 1495-1503.

    Mencher, Joan P., Agriculture and Social Structure in Tamil Nadu : Past Origins, Present Transformation, and Future Prospects (New Delhi, Allied, 1977).

    Mencher, Joan P., Agrarian Relations in Two Rice Regions of Kerala, EPW, XIII (1978) 6 and 7, 349-366.

    McEachern, D., The Mode of Production in India, Journal of Contemporary Asia, VI (1976) 4. 444-457.

    10.1080/00472337685390601 :

    Omvedt, Gail, India and the Colonial Mode of Production : Comment, EPW, X (1975) 42, 1669-1670.

    Omvedt, Gail, Towards a Marxist Analysis of Caste, Social Scientist, VI (1978) 11, 70-76.

    Omvedt, Gail, Migration in Colonial India : The Articulation of Feudalism and Capitalism by the Colonial State, Journal of Peasant Studies, VII (1980) 2, 185-212.

    Omvedt, Gail, Capitalist Agriculture and Rural Classes in India, EPW, XVI (1981) 52, Review of Agriculture, 140-159.

    10.1080/14672715.1983.10404881 :

    Patnaik, Utsa, Capitalist Development in Agriculture, EPW, VI (1971 a) 39, Review of Agriculture, 123-130.

    Patnaik, Utsa, Capitalist Development in Agriculture : A Note, EPW, VI (1971 b) 39, Review of Agriculture, 123-130.

    Patnaik, Utsa, Capitalist Development in Agriculture : Further Comment, EPW, VI (1971 c) 52, Review of Agriculture, 190-194.

    Patnaik, Utsa, On the Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture : a Reply, EPW, VII (1972 a) 40, Review of Agriculture, 145-151.

    Patnaik, Utsa, Development of Capitalism in Agriculture, Social Scientist, (sept. 1972 b) 2, 15-31.

    10.2307/3516394 :

    Patnaik, Utsa, Class Differentiation within the Peasantry : An Approach to Analysis of Indian Agriculture, EPW, XI (1976) 39, Review of Agriculture, 82-101.

    Patnaik, Utsa, The Process of Commercialisation under Colonial Conditions. Unpublished paper for Seminar on Commercialisation in Indian Agriculture (Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, 1981), 79 p.

    Pouchepadass, J., L’endettement paysan dans le Bihar colonial, Puruṣārtha 4, « La Dette », (1980), 165-205.

    10.4000/books.editionsehess.19402 :

    Prasad, Pradhan, Production Relations : Achilles’ Heel of Indian Planning, EPW, VIII (1973) 19, 869-872.

    Prasad, Pradhan, Reactionary Role of Usurers’ Capital in Rural India, EPW, IX (1974) 32. 33 and 34, 1305-1308.

    Prasad, Pradhan, Caste and Class in Bihar, EPW, XIV (1979) 7 and 8, 481-484.

    Prasad, Pradhan, Rising Middle Peasantry in North India, EPW, XV (1980) 5, 6 and 7, 215-219.

    Rao, R. S., In search of the capitalist farmer. A Comment, EPW, V (1970) 51, 2055-2056.

    Rudra, Askok, Majid, A., Talib, B. D., Big Farmers of the Punjab, Some Preliminary Findings of a Sample Survey, EPW, IV (1960) 39. Review of Agriculture, 143-146.

    Rudra, Ashok, Big Farmers of Punjab: Second Instalment of Results, EPW, IV (1969) 52, Review of Agriculture, 213-219.

    Rudra, Ashok, In Search of the Capitalist Farmer, EPW, V (1970) 26, Review of Agriculture, 85-87.

    Rudra, Ashok, Capitalist Development in Agriculture: Reply, EPW, VI (1971) 45, 2291-2292.

    Rudra, Ashok, Semi-Feudalism, Usury Capita, Etcetera, EPW, IX (1974) 48, 1996-1997.

    Rudra, Ashok, India and the Colonial Mode of Production: Comment, EPW, IX (1975) 48, 1668-1669.

    Rudra, Ashok, Class Relations in Indian Agriculture, EPW, XII (1978 a b c) 22, 23 and 24, 916-923. 963-968, 899-1003.

    Rudra, Ashok, Against Feudalism, EPW, XVI (1981) 52, 2133-2146.

    Saith, A., Tankha, A., Agrarian Transition and the Differentiation of the Peasantry: a Study of a West U. P. Village, EPW, VII (1972) 14, 707-723.

    Sau, Ranjit, On the Essence and Manifestation of Capitalism in Indian Agriculture, EPW, VIII (1973) 13, Review of Agriculture, 27-30.

    Sau, Ranjit, Farm Efficiency under Semi-Feudalism: A Critique of Marginalist Theories and Some Marxist Formulations, A Comment, EPW, X (1975) 13, Review of Agriculture, 18-21.

    Sau, Ranjit, Can Capitalism Develop in Indian Agriculture ?, EPW, XI (1976) 52, Review of Agriculture, 126-136.

    Shah, Mihir, On the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture. Working Paper (Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, 1980), 54 p.

    Sen, Sunil, Agrarian Relations in India (1793-1947) (New Delhi, People’s Publishing House, 1979).

    Sen gupta, Nirmal, Further on the Mode of Production in Agriculture, EPW, XII (1977) 26, Review of Agriculture, 55-63.

    Sen gupta, Nirmal, Further from the Mode of Production. Working Paper (A. N. Sinha Institute of Social Studies, Patna, 1981), 63 p.

    Thorner, Daniel, The Agrarian Prospect in India, (Delhi, 1956 ; New Delhi, Allied, 1976).

    Thorner, Daniel, Capitalist Stirrings in Rural India, The Statesman (Calcutta, Nov. 1, 2, 3, and 4, 1967) repr. in Thorner, Daniel, The Shaping of Modern India (New Delhi, Allied, 1980).

    Westergaard, Kirsten, Mode of Production in Bangladesh, Journal of Social Studies, Dacca, (1978) 3, 1-28.

    Westergaard, Kirsten, The Relationship between the State and Rural Society in Bangladesh. Doctoral thesis (Institute of Political Studies, University of Copenhagen 1979), 280 p.

    Wood, Geoffrey D., Rural Class Formation in Bangladesh, 1940-1980, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, XIII (1981) 4, 2-15.

    Notes de bas de page

    1 Elements of this study were originally presented in two seminar papers in the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (Centre of South Asia Studies) in Paris in 1978 and 1979. I subsequently reworked the material several times as a basis for talks in 1981 and 1982 to groups in the Kerala University, Trivandrum ; the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore ; the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta ; the A. N. Sinha Institute for Social Studies, Patna ; the Political Science Department, University of Delhi ; the Sardar Patel Institute, Ahmedabad ; the Institute of South Asian Studies of the Peking University ; and the London School of Economics. I should like to express my gratitude to all of the friends and colleagues who commented on these talks ; I learned a great deal from them. Particular thanks are due to Kirsten Westergaard, who came from Copenhagen to Paris to help me work through some of the more difficult theoretical aspects.

    2 Most of the items in the bibliography which follows have appeared in Indian journals from 1969 to the end of 1981. Most of the authors are themselves Indians, some of them working abroad. A few titles to which there is no specific reference in the text have been included, for the most part articles which are not centred on India, but which may nonetheless be interesting for readers who wish to pursue the subject further, e.g. Foster-Carter, Westergaard. For the benefit of readers with limited access to journals and library facilities, I have deliberately included as many versions as I could find of articles with more or less the same purport published by the same author in different periodicals.

    3 To judge from the citations in the papers which form the base of my survey, books have played only a minor role in the discussion. I have nonetheless listed a few volumes, once again for the convenience of scholars, which are relevant to the subject even though I have not referred directly to them. One book which several colleagues have mentioned to me, but which I have not been able to lay hands on, is described as a pirated collection of articles from the Economic and Political Weekly of Bombay on the mode of production debate. It was published in 1979 or 1980 by Vanguard Books Limited in Lahore. The name of the editor has been given to me as Najam Sethi. Another book which may have by now come out, but which I have also not seen, is mentioned by Paresh Chattopadhyay in his 1980 article. He notes that it was originally written for publication in the proposed volume on the mode of production debate, to be edited by Hamza Alavi, A. Gunder Frank and John Harriss.

    4 I have aimed at listing every significant contribution to the debate. There are certainly, nevertheless, omissions which I regret ; I shall welcome any additional citation. I have also tried earnestly to give a fair, though inevitably highly condensed, version of the arguments of each participant. Here again, where I have failed, I must ask for forbearance and corrections.

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    1 Elements of this study were originally presented in two seminar papers in the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (Centre of South Asia Studies) in Paris in 1978 and 1979. I subsequently reworked the material several times as a basis for talks in 1981 and 1982 to groups in the Kerala University, Trivandrum ; the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore ; the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta ; the A. N. Sinha Institute for Social Studies, Patna ; the Political Science Department, University of Delhi ; the Sardar Patel Institute, Ahmedabad ; the Institute of South Asian Studies of the Peking University ; and the London School of Economics. I should like to express my gratitude to all of the friends and colleagues who commented on these talks ; I learned a great deal from them. Particular thanks are due to Kirsten Westergaard, who came from Copenhagen to Paris to help me work through some of the more difficult theoretical aspects.

    2 Most of the items in the bibliography which follows have appeared in Indian journals from 1969 to the end of 1981. Most of the authors are themselves Indians, some of them working abroad. A few titles to which there is no specific reference in the text have been included, for the most part articles which are not centred on India, but which may nonetheless be interesting for readers who wish to pursue the subject further, e.g. Foster-Carter, Westergaard. For the benefit of readers with limited access to journals and library facilities, I have deliberately included as many versions as I could find of articles with more or less the same purport published by the same author in different periodicals.

    3 To judge from the citations in the papers which form the base of my survey, books have played only a minor role in the discussion. I have nonetheless listed a few volumes, once again for the convenience of scholars, which are relevant to the subject even though I have not referred directly to them. One book which several colleagues have mentioned to me, but which I have not been able to lay hands on, is described as a pirated collection of articles from the Economic and Political Weekly of Bombay on the mode of production debate. It was published in 1979 or 1980 by Vanguard Books Limited in Lahore. The name of the editor has been given to me as Najam Sethi. Another book which may have by now come out, but which I have also not seen, is mentioned by Paresh Chattopadhyay in his 1980 article. He notes that it was originally written for publication in the proposed volume on the mode of production debate, to be edited by Hamza Alavi, A. Gunder Frank and John Harriss.

    4 I have aimed at listing every significant contribution to the debate. There are certainly, nevertheless, omissions which I regret ; I shall welcome any additional citation. I have also tried earnestly to give a fair, though inevitably highly condensed, version of the arguments of each participant. Here again, where I have failed, I must ask for forbearance and corrections.

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    Thorner, A. (1982). Semi-feodalism or capitalism: The contemporary debate on classes and modes of production in India. In J. Pouchepadass (éd.), Caste et classe en Asie du sud (1‑). Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsehess.24742
    Thorner, Alice. « Semi-Feodalism or Capitalism: The Contemporary Debate on Classes and Modes of Production in India ». In Caste Et Classe En Asie Du Sud, édité par Jacques Pouchepadass. Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1982. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsehess.24742.
    Thorner, Alice. « Semi-Feodalism or Capitalism: The Contemporary Debate on Classes and Modes of Production in India ». Caste Et Classe En Asie Du Sud, édité par Jacques Pouchepadass, Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1982, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsehess.24742.

    Référence numérique du livre

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    Pouchepadass, J. (éd.). (1982). Caste et classe en Asie du sud (1‑). Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsehess.24712
    Pouchepadass, Jacques, éd. Caste et classe en Asie du sud. Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1982. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsehess.24712.
    Pouchepadass, Jacques, éditeur. Caste et classe en Asie du sud. Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1982, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsehess.24712.
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