Economic History Review, XLV, I(I992), pp.

97-1 19

Peasants’ choices? Indian

agriculture and the limits of
.w. .w

commerczalzzatzon zn nzneteenth-
century Bihar’
By PETER ROBB

T his essay discusses agricultural decision making in one part of India, in

Bihar, which was socio-economically ‘backward’ yet deeply involved in
commercial production during the nineteenth century. The combination
of allegedly discordant characteristics is usually attributed to ‘forced
commercialization’, the presumption being that the norm is free entry into
the market. The term does not disturb the sway of most economic theories,
which assume that capitalism was exported, and closed systems were opened
out, as international trade expanded-a model which fits poorly with an
agricultural system previously but still incompletely market-involved, as in
much of India. Intellectually and in reality, we find here the imperialism of
western economics, if ‘empire’ be understood as rule over diverse ‘nations’.
An enormous growth in trade obviously had major consequences, but not
just from western influence driven by western demand and power. Generally,
India modified British ideas and institutions, and allowed their adoption by
Indians. Hence the essay will question the idea that economic change has
comprised a one-way traffic to a single destination, and turned subsistence
peasants into capitalist farmers or landless agricultural workers under the
influence of the market, a picture now rejected by some economic historians
of India. It will place a marker limiting the depth of commercialization, and
of capitalist development.

I
The approach is encouraged by current interpretations of eighteenth-
century India which seek to replace the notions of political anarchy and
economic decline with (at least for some areas) a picture of growing trade,
developing merchant culture, and the involvement in agricultural production
of territorial magnate-traders. The economy was characterized by a high

Several of the discussions of the London Third World Economic History Group at the School of
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, have contributed to the ideas presented in this essay;
Kaoru Sugihara’s comments have been invaluable. A version of the paper was read to the Economic
History Society at Exeter in 1989; it is an abridgement of part of the argument of a book in preparation
on the British and nineteenth-century Bihar. See the Footnote references below for general sources on
the eighteenth century and commercialization outside Bihar, and for works by authors mentioned without
footnoting.

97
98 P E T E R ROBB

degree of political and fiscal intervention.2 Trade had given rise to various
family firms and castes, and to communities cutting across caste, which
exchanged, insured, and transported money and goods. The pillar of
indigenous mercantilism was the command of labour, of landed peasantry
through rent, and more directly of large numbers of landless and dependent
smallholders. To extract produce or stimulate production, in order to match
demand, the elites invested directly in irrigation or provided incentives to
break in new land. But, most characteristically, they lent money or seed at
the time of ploughing and sowing, recovering the investment at the harvest.
In the same way they used food loans to secure seasonal labour. By such
means, too, a merchant could readily introduce a new cash crop or even
bring new areas under the plough.
In describing this society, one should not expect a precise and exclusive
functional definition for such words as ‘landlord’, ‘tenant’, ‘peasant’, ‘banker’,
‘merchant’, or ‘ ~ t a t e ’In
. ~ Bihar in the early I ~ O O S ,mixed occupations were
common, and perhaps the norm among artisans, so that (splitting actual and
ritual concepts of labour) most of those whose caste names implied they
would be working at a craft may have been engaged in agriculture. This
suggests that demand was low and cultivation relatively more profitable than
most trades, and also that labour would be available to the elite^.^
Conceptually, merchants, moneylenders, and cultivators and so on existed,
but roles were often multiple, ambiguous, or overlapping. Even at the village
level, though a few cultivators, artisans, and labourers followed their
occupation exclusively, many dabbled in several roles. The typical eighteenth-
century merchant house, too, financed agriculture, farmed land revenue,
lent out money, traded locally and at a distance, probably managed money
transfers, and possibly took in deposits. But there was also, paradoxically,
an unusually strong tendency for economic functions to be subdivided. The
land- or revenue-focused power set up and taxed markets, placed tolls upon
roads, fords, ferries, landings, and gateways, but also provided a host of
specialized agents who exacted the taxes and fees, and acted as go-betweens,
adjudicators, weighers and measurers, operating between the principals in
commercial and financial transactions. The typical creature of the age was
the dulul, the broker, who was not of one character but of many. Even in
a small market such apparently inseparable operations as introducing the
parties to a bargain, setting a price, weighing or assessing the produce,
verifying the payment, accepting it, and recording the deal, might each be
entrusted (even product by product) to a specialist intermediary who enjoyed
a local monopoly backed by political power and paid for in cesses.

Bayly, ‘Indian merchants’, p. 178. Various papers read at SOAS by G. D. Sharma and Madhavi
Bajkewal also contributed to this account.
See Robb, ‘Ideas’, pp. 18-23. Clearly, these theoretical objections apply also to terms such as
‘market’, ‘economic’, ‘social’, and ‘political’, which are used here as analytical categories within which
‘real’ complexities are confined. By contrast Ludden, ‘Productive power’, seems to hope for greater
certainty of terminology. The fact that such problems are not confined to the past is illustrated trenchantly
by Polly Hill’s writings.
See Buchanan, Shahabad. This volume is used here, but see also his volumes on Behar and Purnea
districts.
 AGRICULTURE I N NINETEENTH-CENTURY BIHAR 99
Generally, too, even without the impact of warfare, there was quite a lot
of mobility between villages during the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries; the countryside was not full of neat, fixed settlements, with
measured fields and estates. Some areas were densely settled and carefully
marked out; but in others there were scattered or temporary dwellings and
plots. Often people, especially the poor, were bonded to other people rather
than to land, so that all would move together; others would escape from
such ties and try to search out favourable terms for their labour. Many areas
had traditions of military recruitment, especially among the poorer members
of higher classes, and, where families remained behind in the village, they
could be supported on army pay and booty. In the north, as the central
authority of the Mughal empire weakened, migrant clans of military tribes
or pastoralists moved from the hill lands across the plains and river valleys,
setting up military kingdoms, settling in villages, and ousting or depressing
some of the earlier elites. In south India, though the rich irrigated lands
tended to be held by numerous share-holders who organized revenue
payments and controlled labour for irrigation and agriculture, the drier lands
were controlled by headmen and their followers (often of military origin and
occupation) who were ready to move whole communities from season to
season in search of land or water. And everywhere there were migrant traders
and moneylenders.
This was not a peasant society in the sense of being typified by household
production on smallholdings under strong but external political control.
Above the village level there were chiefs, landlords, military leaders, and
officials, who claimed rights and dues from the villages. But also most villages
contained dominant high status groups with above average landholdings;
subservient groups, with smaller holdings or no land, provided labour.
Before the arrival of the British in the eighteenth century, there
were distinctions between ‘residents’ and ‘non-residents’, ‘permanent’ and
‘temporary’ cultivators, shareholders and sharecroppers. The dominant
groups usually held village office, managed most of the local resources, and
controlled the village’s contact with the outside world. Generally they took
part in establishing or maintaining irrigation, in collecting land taxes, and
in encouraging, managing, and taxing trade and markets. In many places
sizeable proportions of the land were controlled by such groups either
without paying land revenue to the state, or on very favourable terms. They
employed others to cultivate their land whenever possible, as sharecroppers,
tenants, labourers, or slaves, but would work in their own fields if necessary,
for example if they were relatively numerous and each family’s holdings
were small. For example, in Tirunelvelli at the tip of India, a moderately
rich area with a large export trade, where peasant cultivators were supposed
to be the norm, 5 5 per cent of landholders in 1817 reportedly cultivated
their own land (using slaves and other labour), while 38 per cent let their
holdings to non-resident (unprivileged) tenants. In poorer, dry, inland Salem,
the great majority of holdings were said to be cultivated using family labour;
little produce was exported; but still there were to be found ‘rich’ families
I00 P E T E R ROBB

with ‘five ploughs’, and hence some tenancy, hired labour, and agrarian
servitude.’
Exchanges of food, land, and labour, and a degree of interdependence
characterized the ‘villages’; this could extend to the allocation of the land,
the use of cattle, ploughs, and water, and the choice and harvesting of crops.
Entrenched or customary rights existed for different social levels, and
dominance relied on office, wealth, stores of grain, social prestige, or force
of arms, as well as on possession of land. The elites ‘managed’ village life,
paying labourers in food and small plots of land, and lending to poorer
cultivators. Independent producers would sell directly to traders, and also
take a share of some of the crops of poorer farmers to whom they had given
seed and food. They might take up and encourage the spread of particular
crops. They were often associated with petty state building, or with revenue-
collecting rights, especially during the eighteenth century. Since land revenue
dues were calculated in money terms, and, even if collected in kind, were
paid in cash into the state’s coffers, the produce of the countryside was
naturally attracted to towns and over substantial distances, from both farmers
and artisans. The revenues came not only from rich irrigated tracts, those
most closely controlled and taxed by outsiders, but in varying degrees from
all regions where there were revenue demands and rents. Most areas therefore
had some experience of the complex and extensive trading networks, which
dealt in all the necessities of life-food-grains, oilseeds, salt, cloth, utensils,
timber, and livestock-and with their local representatives in the form of
specialist traders or moneylenders. Thus three production strategies could
exist together: crops were grown for use, they were sold for subsistence
(including payments to others), and they were sold for gain.
But, in so far as agricultural production was directed towards markets, it
operated under close control and within constraints. The travelling merchants,
who reached villages at harvest time, seldom set their prices competitively.
Buyers attempted to monopolize access to the villages and to employ coercion
in various forms in order to secure the crop: advance payments provided
the weapon of debt, but the revenue and rent demands usually ensured that
a sale would be agreed promptly at the harvest. One finds arrangements of
these kinds all over India, across a long timespan. From the seventeenth
century, for example, most villages in western India contained a trader who
advanced seed and food (but rarely cash) and later took a share of the
harvest. And a more extreme version was described in Ferozepur district in
the Punjab in 1832: ‘The Hindu merchants, from the command which they
have of money, exercise a preponderating influence . . . . The ryuts
[cultivators], from their extreme poverty, are forced to mortgage their crops
to provide themselves with seed and the necessary implements of husbandry.
Money is advanced at an enormous rate of interest . . . . The cattle and
even the ploughs are the property of the merchants’.6 Such systems spread
commodity production thinly, limiting the influence of the market even in

Kumar, Land and caste, pp. 19, 20, 22-3; see also Ludden, Peasant histoy.
Roseberry, Imperial rule, p. 234, quoting from Mackeson’s, ‘Journal of a voyage from Lodiana to
Mithankot by the Satraj river’.
 AGRICULTURE I N NINETEENTH-CENTURY BIHAR I01

the most commercially oriented regions, and reducing the effective monetiz-
ation of transactions at village level. Payments of land or grain secured
produce at minimal cost, but at the expense of a sub-contracting system
which isolated the long-distance trader and the producer from each other,
and did not necessarily involve the capitalist in actual production. Such
systems have sometimes been identified with a specific stage of economic
development. The present discussion asks if this was so, or, to put it another
way, what changed in the nineteenth century?
On the one hand is the picture of vigorous local trade. To Chaudhuri,
Bengal’s post-I 770 recession seemed so deep that commercial agriculture
could develop only in response to international demand. Now, instead, we
have Datta’s account of the region’s rice trade.’ And even in poor, overtaxed
south Bihar early in the nineteenth century, rice (and in smaller quantities
barley, other grains, and pulses) were exported and imported. Wheat was
exported in large quantities, as were various amounts of spices, oilseeds,
oils, cotton cloth, blankets, paper, timber products, and some locally-bred
buffaloes. Tobacco, sugar, most culinary salt, cotton and cotton thread,
iron, brass and other metal utensils, and most oxen, were imported.’ On
the other hand, this is not to imply, as Datta does, a well-integrated
monetized economy at all social levels, given the evidence of diverse weights
and measures, transportation difficulties, payments and credit in kind, and
other market imperfections. There was still much payment through land,
and a relatively small proportion of the cultivated area devoted to marketed
crops. Datta shows that rice, opium, and indigo were all extracted largely
in association with advances to cultivators, but overlooks the fact that such
crops occupied a part of very many holdings, necessitating intermediaries
and social control over labour and poor cultivator^.^ Moreover, a similar
situation obtained in late nineteenth-century Bihar, which was not thereby
less commercialized; money was then more rather than less generally
available. l o How do we define change, while explaining these continuities?
A possible answer is that cultivators had been ‘using’ merchants in order to
spread risk by exploiting the system of advance payments; later problems,
revealed in famines, represent ‘teething troubles’ from incomplete changes
in modes of production.’’ But, from a Bihari perspective, it is difficult to
endorse this analysis. The moneylender was often regarded as a social
inferior, but most advance payments subordinated the borrower, because he
could at best shift only to another patron, and seldom possessed the resources
to operate independently. Even those in dominant positions, who lent to
’ Chaudhuri, Commercial agriculture, and idem, ‘Agricultural growth’; Datta, ‘Merchants and peasants’.
Buchanan, Shahabad.
Datta, ‘Rural Bengal’, esp. pp. 329-38.
l o Buchanan, Shahabad. Demonetization is suggested in Perlin, ‘Proto-industrialisation’; but in
Shahabad in the early I ~ O O S ,though money was exchanged in several places, including at some cloth
dealers, bank notes could be changed for cash only at Arrah, the main town. Revenue had to be paid
in the Company’s silver coinage, but most instalments were managed by large moneylenders (much land
revenue by just one banker in Arrah) who encouraged circulation of the less reliable and cheaper Banares
silver. The Company’s copper coinage was found only in Arrah, though other debased coins and cowrees
were more widely used.
I owe this argument to Burton Stein. It recalls the meliorist explanations of McAlpin, Subject to
famine.
I02 PETER ROBB

others, often needed to employ intermediaries, and were kept afloat with
help from moneylenders.

I1
Over most of the century the British gradually regulated and bureaucratized
the fiscal apparatus. By adding some real security and a clearer definition to
landed property, they reduced the need for elites to extract surplus as
revenue agents as well as landowners or creditors. The British state also
withdrew progressively from most of the attempts to control markets or
monopolize trade. At the same time, India generally became more involved
in external markets. Yet, paradoxically, at the level of the agricultural
producer and the immediate relations of production, almost all of the features
just described for the eighteenth century apply perfectly well (at least in
Bihar) at the end of the nineteenth. Some, including advance payments as
a restriction of the producers’ options, were encouraged by the expansion
of trading opportunities. The central image remains one of dispersed or
fragmented commercial production, and of intermixed social and political
controls (which the advance payments may exemplify). The agriculture of
commerce was far from commercial, yet the ‘peasant farm’ was not an
autonomous unit of production and decision making. Pursuing these points,
we will discover mutual or intrinsic as well as superordinate controls defining
the orbit of peasants’ choices, and indeed that commercial and political
influences were themselves restricted to particular, appropriate means of
managing production and securing surplus.
An excellent example of a surviving rent-based production system was the
irrigated cultivation in Gaya district, south Bihar, where the supply of water
supposedly justified produce sharing rents ( bhaoli), to ensure and remunerate
the input of the landlords.’* Their ‘earth-moving’ (gilandazi), as it was
called, was a capital investment in a technical sense, and richly rewarding
in those terms. But in large part the ‘capital’ comprised social prestige and
organization, to enlist an unpaid or low-paid local labour force, to strike
and enforce agreements between villages, and so on. A consequence of bhaoli
rents, in the nineteenth century as in the eighteenth, was that the landlord
or intermediary leaseholder (thikadar) was obliged to endorse a small army
of village officials. On any estate, in addition to several kinds of cash rent,
there were at least two forms of produce collection: actual crop division
(batai ) and appraisal (danabandi). The landlord needed an agent, watchmen
to prevent pilferage before and during the harvest, an accountant (patwarn’),
an assessor, a measurer, an arbitrator, a recording clerk or writer, and a
headman. As with the dalali system in the local markets, and for the same
reasons (fragmentation of function and of points of ‘taxation’), this rental
system was highly interventionist. It not only extracted rent but redistributed
produce within the village: almost three-quarters of the population, whether
as village servants, artisans, or labourers, received some perquisites from

l 2 Among many sources relating to this system and agriculture in Gaya, the most useful, from which
the present account is mainly drawn, is Grierson, Gaya. See also Sengupta, ‘Indigenous irrigation’.
 AGRICULTURE I N NINETEENTH-CENTURY BIHAR 103
the harvests of others, under a collective supervision, and mostly before
division-that is, before any allocation of the produce into the private store
of zamindar and raz$at (landlord and cultivator).
Hence ‘peasant choices’ about cropping and work depended upon a wide
range of controls related mainly to the extraction of rent, but also to
interdependence within the local community. Each cultivator’s responsibility,
even for his day-to-day activities, was circumscribed in various ways, because
neither his holding nor his methods of production existed in isolation from
the political structures which surrounded him. He might be bound to provide
labour for others; he hardly had a free market in which to obtain labour
himself. His choice of cash crops would depend not only on his own
judgment but on patterns of land use and water supply beyond his immediate
control. Nor could he always decide the methods or timing of his cultivation.
Agricultural equipment was frequently shared, and labour bonded. In north
Bihar, for example, the usual word for ploughman (hamaha) meant one
who worked after taking advance payments; a different word (uttha) was
used for a ploughman who worked without them.13
This was still very much the system as described early in the century by
Buchanan, when on a typical estate he found many small local intermediaries
of the zamindar, who were permitted to collect rents and supposed to keep
up reservoirs and other irrigation works, and many holders of rent-free lands
and other privileged tenants, including some who claimed descent from
former proprietors, as well as village clerks, crop assessors, messengers, and
watchmen. Most villages did not have headmen as such, but the term (here
jeth raiyat) was used generally for wealthy tenants, who (in Buchanan’s
words) ‘commonly assist their poor and ignorant neighbours in settling their
accompts’. Of the villagers who controlled land and agriculture, he
distinguished gentry (people of high caste or social status), artisans or traders
who rented land, and ‘ploughmen’, a class which ranged from wage labourers
and sharecroppers to rich cultivators who had sufficient surplus to be able
to act as village ‘traders’. The local name for the latter, gzrhashta beopar,
meant ‘householder-trader’; Buchanan called them ‘trading farmers’. Such
‘cultivators’ had some capital and might keep bullocks to transport grain to
market, but they dealt chiefly with their poorer neighbours, supporting them
between harvests. Advances were made ‘at a very usurious rate’ of interest,
and repaid from the crop. Cultivation was carried on individually or
sometimes by large bands working each other’s fields in turn. A few ‘slaves’
were employed, and ploughmen and day labourers, again bonded through
small advances in money or by land-grants for sharecropping. The local
grain trade was in the hands of travelling merchants, and other products
were exported or imported mainly by boatmen.14 In most respects, these

l 3 Grierson, Behar peasant life, pp. 177-9, 197-201 & 313-20; and Proceedings of the Government of
India, Revenue and Agriculture Department, Agriculture Branch, C series, no. 2, May 1898 (National
Archives of India, New Delhi; hereafter R . & A . Agric.), C2 October 1898, and C7 & 9 December
1898.
l4 Buchanan, Shahabad. Compare the volumes on these districts, in Hunter, Statistical account, and
the report of the Bihar and Orissa Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee, 1929-30, 3 vols. (Patna,
1930).
I04 P E T E R ROBB

conditions survived the arrival both of the British and of the railway, and
were still in evidence 80 years later.

I11
However, by late in the nineteenth century there were complaints that
absentee landlords no longer ensured the irrigation works which had
supported south Bihar throughout the ages, even though the evidence from
government estates is that it remained in the interests of the landlord and
his local representatives to maintain them. There was a strong tendency
towards the commutation of produce rents.I5 It might be concluded that the
old regime was being broken down by the influence of changing law and
markets. Certainly, alongside the old and extensive trade in rice and oilseeds,
three crops-sugar, opium, and i n d i g e w e r e grown and sold in Bihar to a
greatly increased extent during the nineteenth century. In the second and
third of these, Bihari output was of global significance, managed in one case
by the British state, and in the other by European planters and export
houses. Yet the most striking feature of the cultivation of these new crops
was not new relations of production, but the persistence of indirect and
intermixed (socio-political) methods of control. l 6 In opium, for example,
there was a huge increase in the value of the crop, while crude prices to the
cultivator remained stable; but at the same time, between 1840 and 1880,
the area under cultivation was extended by more than two-and-a-half times.
The key to production was an advance payments system already established
in its essentials during the eighteenth century, and later embodied in
Regulation VI of I 799. Its administration comprised three distinct levels
above the cultivators. At the top was the Collector as Deputy Opium Agent
and, in Bihar, his 1 1 sub-deputies. Next were minor officials, the gomashtas
who received the opium and were paid a salary and commission, and the
ziladars, on salary only, who were responsible for groups of 20 or 30 villages.
An important part of their function was to prevent the growers from retaining
any of the opium or disposing of it privately. At the third level were the
khatadars-2fi,ooo in the 1880s with an average of 32 cultivators each, whom
they allegedly represented. The khatadar recruited the cultivators, or assamis,
signed the agreement which they supposedly made, arranged with the ziladar
to receive and distribute cash advances on up to three occasions, organized
irrigation loans and their repayment, in practice (though not in regulations)
made the taidad or estimate of the crop which the gomashta presented in

I s On the other hand complaints of decay may have been perennial; they appear still in Singh and
Kumar, Monograph, pp: 62-3.
l6 See R . & A . Agrtc., A17-8 Jan. 1891; Kling, Blue Mutiny; Mishra, Agrarian problems; Fisher,
‘Planters and peasants’; and especially Pouchepadass, Planteurs et puysans. The case of indigo will also
be discussed at length in my forthcoming book (see note I). For opium see especially Wright, Economic
problems, pp. 106-65; Selections from the records of the Government of Bengal, I; Report of a Commission
appointed by the Government of India to enquire into the working of the Opium Department in Bengal and
the North-Western Provinces; Colebrooke, Husbandry, p. I 17; Ram Chand Pandit, joint opium contractor,
in Selections from the Duncan records 11, p. 166; A. C. Mangles (Opium Agent, Patna) to the Commissioner
of Patna Division, 18 March 1883, Records of the Commissioner of Patna Division, Bihar State Archives,
basta (bundle) 338, collection 7, file 84, 10 (1883-4) (hereafter PCR), and the Collector of Gaya to the
Commissioner, ibid., 7/91, For the evidence before the opium commission see PCR 364 29i8 (1895-6).
 AGRICULTURE I N NINETEENTH-CENTURY BIHAR 105
February or March to determine the amount of the second advance payment,
and finally brought the assamis to the ziladar and gomashta, and distributed
the final payment for the opium. The khatadar was a relatively powerful and
prosperous intermediary or ‘principal cultivator’, a village official or rich
peasant.
Despite the criticisms from the time of Burke, it was sometimes said that
the cultivators welcomed opium advances in preference to the exactions of
landlords; a century later in the 1880s zamindars were still allegedly hostile
to opium cultivation because it promoted independence. An opium cultivator
was closely involved with agents of government. By the later nineteenth
century, he tended to pay money rents on all his land, at a time when some
zamindars were trying to extend their zerat (demesne land) and the arena of
informal, unregulated rents, so as to return to produce-sharing or sharecrop-
ping arrangements. Moreover, in many parts of Bihar only limited areas
were cropped with cereals of a quality suitable for marketing, and local
prices were very responsive to harvest yield, greatly reducing the return to
the cultivator from good harvests. Much of the rice, wheat, barley, and
maize was poor, and the majority of the millets and pulses were ‘not much
superior to the seeds of wild grasses’ so that even in the dearest seasons they
had little market value. l7 By contrast, opium, though brought cheaply in
relation to the price obtained by government, was very valuable locally, not
least for being paid for at a fixed rate. It could provide a source of capital
or credit for the development of other crops. Opium advances and
improvement loans provided money for investment or expenditure, on
relatively favourable terms.
But it is plain that benefits were not evenly shared. Opium cultivation
exhausted the soil, and the cultivator. It was grown on the best land, and
was extravagant of manure; the poppies had to be watered continually until
they were two or three inches high, and then thinned two or three times.
The harvest began with the removal of the petals, and involved the repeated
lancing of the opium pods, a process lasting over several weeks. The drug
had to be dried in cloth; both the cloth and the liquid residue were collected
by the opium agents. The flowers were made into opium cakes, packed in
the leaves and stalks of the plant. There were petitions against opium
cultivation as early as 1818; by the 1880s, as the crop became less and less
attractive, it was said that unwilling growers were being coerced with the
assistance of the native police and trumped-up charges. Officials would admit
only that there were grievances, but the most compelling testimony is to the
petty tyranny of the opium department’s local subordinates. The khatadars
were paid a small commission, so little, it was admitted, that they had to
derive illegal income from their office; but no opium agent was ever
successfully prosecuted in Bihar.
The claim that opium cultivation deepened the subjection of most
cultivators is therefore justified. Yet, firstly, this subjection was not absolute;
secondly, it was not directly to the opium department; and thirdly, it was
not uniform among a body of cultivators. Later in the century, some shifted

D. N. Reid (indigo planter of Saran) to Mangles, 30 Dec. 1881, R. & A . Agn’c., B3 May 1899.
I 06 PETER ROBB

from opium to indigo, or (near towns and railways) took to tobacco, potatoes,
or other vegetables, either independently or at the behest of patrons and
local magnates. Mounting protests chiefly reflected the extent to which
opium was less advantageous to the khatadar than other crops. Similar
arguments can be made about opposition to indigo, culminating in Gandhi’s
intervention in 1917.Finally, the subjection did not occur, in the form that
it did, entirely because it was convenient and profitable for the British. As
early as 1831,and several times thereafter, officials proposed to abandon
advance payments and hence to bypass the local intermediary and his socio-
political power. All these schemes were ruled impracticable. The same
system, the British found, was used not just by mahajans (bankers), but
‘even in private matters such as hiring a palky’ (carriage).18 Similarly from
the I 880s indigo planters, under government pressure to introduce more
‘commercial’ methods, made various experiments in direct purchasing but
fell back mainly upon varieties of advance payments, indirect management,
and landlord-style coercion. The opium agents were obviously monopolists
and creditors but also allied with rent-collectors, great landlords, and
dominant villagers; the planters were leaseholders as well. But all were
buyers who failed to establish a direct contact with their suppliers.
Unlike opium, sugar was not a monopoly, nor was it a product
manufactured wholly by modern factory methods and for export, like indigo
in Bihar. But it, too, was grown in a small way on a large number of
holdings, ‘within a complex system of indebtedness and dependence’, to
benefit the profits of intermediaries, especially the processors and traders of
refined sugar, ‘a pretty wealthy class of people’.’’ Once again, the system
was resilient. In Shahabad, south Bihar, the sugar manufacturers Thomson
and Mylne concluded that it was impossible to institute a central factory
system, based on steam-driven machinery, partly because of the refusal of
the raiyats to grow cane for them or sell their standing crops at a ‘fair
valuation’. The obstacle was the price paid under existing local arrangements,
and the obligations between the cultivators and the landlords or sugar
factors.20In north Bihar, by contrast, European sugar factories expanded in
the early twentieth century, even though the natural conditions for cane
were not as good as in the south, simply because the planters transferred
their capital and hence their raiyats’ cultivation from indigo to sugar. The
factories acted as their own brokers, advancing seed and sometimes money
short-term.2’ In the late 1930scane was still purchased through contractors,
who prevented the establishment of cooperative sugarcane societies.22
IX Report on opium cultivation by Forbes, Commissioner of Patna Division, PCR 364 2918 (189516).
l9 The quotations on sugar in this paragraph are from the Commissioner’s report in PCR 364 2918
(1895-6). The fullest modern account of the sugar industry is Amin, Sugarcane, and see also Whitcombe,
Agrarian conditions. This essay draws on Watt, Economic products, VI, pp. 3-380; Grierson, Bihar peasant
life, pp. 50-60 and 232-7; B. C . Basu, ‘Note on the manufacture of sugar and its probable improvements’,
R. t3 A . Agric., A9-11 July 1892; the proceedings of the Agricultural Conference. Oct. 1893, R. & A .
Agric. A9-10 Feb. 1894; and the Report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India (I927), VIII
(hereafter R C A ) . See also R . t3 A . Agric., Azz, A27 & Azg-30 Feb. and AIO July 1890, and A9-11
July 1892.
*O R. & A. Land Revenue Branch B5z-3 June 1895.
2 1 See especially, in R C A , the evidence of J. Henry, Lohat Sugar Works, Darbhanga; C. G. Atkins,
Dowlatpore Agricultural Concern; and N. Meyrick, Bihar Planters’ Association, Motihari.
zz Director of Agriculture’s letter, 28 April 1937, Bihar Development Department (Industries), nos.
1-18, Jan., file 181218 (1938), Bihar State Archives, Patna.
 AGRICULTURE I N N I N E T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y BIHAR 107
IV
Fisher makes an interesting but perhaps overstated distinction between
dedicated and general trade. In the case of indigo, or opium, or oilseeds,
trade was carried on between known dealers at specific places, but in the
case of rice by cartmen in numerous short-range transactions. Only in this
context could . raiyats hope to participate themselves, cutting out the
middlemen, and they sought to do so, from the 1860s at least, by owning
their own carts and carrying on their own marketing. The missing element
in this analysis is fuller information about the raiyats who were thus involved
in trade: some were becoming traders just as some were becoming
moneylenders or rent-receivers. Such opportunities almost certainly widened,
as also did the gap between rich and poor, but none of the changes-neither
dedicated trade, nor peasant-traders-constituted a sharp break with the
past. Commercial agriculture in Bihar, far from overturning an antique style,
adopted many features of eighteenth-century agrarian relations, and of the
rent-based model still found in nineteenth-century Gaya. And yet elites
entered the market to dispose of produce they had themselves produced, or
which they had acquired from their control over others. Why did more
cultivators not respond to the market directly? To do so required capital,
independence, access to transport, and awareness-in a situation in which
many were poor, dependent, and isolated. As a result, the cultivator was
not necessarily an economic man, making agricultural decisions within
parameters of need and opportunity determined by the state and merchants.
This point has often been remarked. It is less common to remark that the
traders also were not wholly free agents.
A more pertinent form of the question is this: why did government,
planters, and merchants alike continue (over such a very long period, in
such different trading conditions) to adopt these ‘pre-’ or ‘proto-capitalist’
relations of production? Why do many of their successors continue to do so
today? One obvious answer is profit. Socio-political and credit-based controls
were devices for securing labour at artificially low cost, whether for the
landlord who paid his field-workers in land as well as food, or for the indigo
planter or opium agent who largely avoided having to compete in order to
attract cultivators. Concentration not on production but on credit and
distribution, on processing and retailing, is a situation analogous to that
observed in other areas of smallholding (or dispersed m an~facturing).~~
Certainly there was coercion. Yet the lack of either direct production control,
or a wholesale market, complicated supply and arguably diverted profits to
middlemen. Thus, if on one hand this was a pocket ‘command’ economy,
on the other it was a costly and incomplete commercialization impeded from
‘inside’. The cultivator was unable to break out of his subordination, but
also the external market or the state was unable to prevail against the
intermediary-and he in turn chose or was constrained to secure produce
through intermixed control. Perhaps the system persisted because of specific

23 Friedman, ‘World market’, and Harriss, Rural development. The system was not at all confined to
the nineteenth century; Raj, Commercialization, passim.
I 08 PETER ROBB

features affecting agricultural decisions: hence the need to locate the choices
concerning production.
Chief among these features were the differentiation of the society, the
intricacies of landholding, the complexities of land-use and agriculture, and
the resilience of custom. In villages the most common exchanges of labour
and goods were between patrons and clients. Also, well before any European
involvement, commerce had had to accommodate itself to all these conditions;
by the nineteenth century, therefore, habits or institutions were already long
established. There were independent producers in Bihar-landlords and
planters using hired labour on their ‘own’ lands, small market-gardeners,
and so on-but characteristically ‘commercial’ farming was widely dispersed
and indirectly controlled. Institutional impediments explain why there were
so many producers: landholding patterns, dense population, government
interference. Imperfections in the market-onsiderable self-sufficiency among
agriculturists, relatively low volumes, still difficult transportation, the
communications block of differing cultures and illiteracy-these account for
the difficulties for buyers of obtaining produce from the multitudes of
cultivators. Interposed powers (landlords, village elites, and long-established
traders) also made it hard to penetrate to the individual seller of crops. The
answer was at hand: to use intermediaries, and rental and debt bondage; to
work with the social and political conditions, rather than across them.
Commercial agriculture had to be carried on in a small proportion of a large
number of smallholdings; produce extraction relied on complex, even parallel
systems of control; it was no wonder that the ‘eighteenth-century’ way,
command of manpower, should have commended itself to later entrepreneurs.
We cannot go into all these features in detail here. The continuing
existence of hierarchies of control, and the minute subdivisions of landed
holdings, are familiar aspects, and their great importance in this analysis
may be accepted without further ado, as may that of habits produced by
earlier involvement in trade. Other factors, such as fertility of soil, customs
over land use, and village institutions could also be influential. A distinction
may be drawn, for example, between high-value, marketable production and
poorer food grains, despite ‘command’ through debt, landholding or social
prestige. Above all, it mattered that agricultural decision making was
fragmented, that various levels and areas of autonomy persisted. Even the
lowliest cultivator made some of his own decisions; the ruiyat might be left
alone to decide on techniques, and even to choose the crop on most of his
lands. Subject to caste restrictions and the demands of superiors, he could
manage his labour too. But then, for all the other resources which he
needed-credit, land, water, even implements and animals-he was more
likely to depend on others. Even within each basic production unit, the
allocation of tasks among family members or between them and employees
or patrons might be subject to restrictions and agreements.
The typical sponsor of cash crops could seldom overturn this collective
decision making, which enabled villages or groups to observe distinctions in
land use or decide on methods of cultivation. Hence, traders and planters
chiefly influenced production decisions only on a small part of the best land.
 AGRICULTURE I N NINETEENTH-CENTURY BIHAR I09
In Saran district, fields could be classified generally in six ways; the pattern
was more or less repeated everywhere under different names. There was
korur, land adjacent to the basti or settlement, and used for the main cash
crops (poppy, indigo, and sugar-cane); then the much larger area of general
farmland or chour, cultivated with bhadoi and rabi (autumn and spring) crops
(maize, barley, pulses) in ordinary years or with paddy when there was
abundant rain; then bharsz, similar land even further from the village; then
choum, low-lying land used only for the main winter rice crop (almost
35 per cent of the total acreage); and finally bagh lands containing fruit and
other trees, and parti (waste or pasture). Hence the planter competed mainly
over the allocation of korur, but did not introduce its links with the market,
nor otherwise fundamentally alter land use.24 Moreover we can distinguish
the sponsorship of cash crops from that of methods of cultivation.
Intermediaries tried, but usually unsuccessfully, to prevent practices whereby
different crops were sown together, often to avert risk or to produce home
supplies alongside cash crops: such partnerships allowed gradual adjustments
from year to year and also rapid changes of tactic within each season. For
example, cotton was generally grown with rahar (a pulse), linseed in rows
with gram (chick-pea) or as a border to mixed plots of wheat and barley,
and the latter broadcast with rapeseed. The rather tender oilseed, sesamum
or til, was universally grown as a border or mixed crop, to provide houshold
supplies of Nor could commercial pressures immediately unravel the
many agreements over labour and implements, which persisted throughout
the century and beyond. Labour sharing was called budlaiyu, palta, or painch;
agreement to plough fields in turn was generally called bhanj. These systems,
usually regarded as reciprocal, were also strongly hierarchical. 26 Thus
interdependence and subordination wove a web in which agricultural
decisions were caught.
So-called commercialization differs case by case, therefore, because modes
of production evolve within specific cultural and technical parameters. The
system in Gaya, for example, depended on interrelated physical and political
conditions. First, stiff clayey soils and the undulation of a succession of
broad river valleys allowed the building of banks across the drainage lines,
and longer channels to divert water from rivers. Flow irrigation, necessarily
preferred, implied high-level reservoirs, so that, as the river beds were
usually 8 or 10feet below the gradually sloping countryside, most channels
were several miles long and fed a number of reservoirs in turn. Such
conditions demanded the close involvement of landlords and their agents.
Secondly, by contrast, the lands on which cash rather than produce rents
prevailed, included poor plots which received no irrigation, and cultivable
waste when first brought under the plough, but also lands irrigated from

zJ G. Roy, Dpty. Collector, to Saran Collector, 30 Sep.iOct. 1889, PCR 350, 21472 (1889-90).
z5 See D. N. Mukherjee, ‘Wheat survey of Bengal’, R . & A. Agnr., A45-7 Feb. 1908; R . & A .
Agric., A7 May 1890; R. & A . Agric., A20-2 Jan. 1891; R. & A . Agrir.. C35 Sept. 1893 (experimental
cultivation of Buxar and other wheats); R . & A. Agric., C5 Feb. 1899 (on cotton).
2h Grierson, Behar peasant life, p p . 177-8.
II 0 P E T E R ROBB

wells, often near rivers.27 Similarly, different crops or combinations of crops

might also impose particular agricultural regimes. The imperatives of oilseeds
grown incidentally as a border to other crops and processed simply, locally,
and at any time during the year, were clearly very different from those of
sugarcane, tying up land over several harvests, demanding irrigation, having
to be guarded, needing complex processing as soon as possible, and producing
high returns per acre.** There was a bewildering array of factors at work:
ecology, location, soil type, technology, tenures, rentals, cropping patterns,
and economic considerations-the field within which ‘choices’ were made in
agriculture.

V
The findings of this paper modify some of the more sweeping interpretations
of ‘capitalism’ and of ‘development’. First, they contradict the idea that
poorer, ‘less commercial’ areas took little part in commerce and experienced
little occupational diversity, and the opposite idea that commercialization
necessarily implies economic advance. We may note the very wide range of
productive, artistic, ceremonial, and religious professions, and the various
and extensive trade, even in rather depressed areas of Bihar in the early
nineteenth century. Equally, the range of activities cited to indicate the
dynamism of a small Punjabi centre in the 1920s and I ~ ~ O Scould , be
replicated in a similar large village in moribund Bihar in the 1870s.~~ This
is not to say that all economies are the same; in Buchanan’s Bihar the high
proportion of ‘service’ occupations tells us of the large local expenditure on
manpower, rather than commodities, for display and ceremonies. Nor should
the economic upheavals which (by contrast) occurred in India later in the
nineteenth century be underestimated. The changes included new crops,
enlarged cultivation, new agriculturists (from military, service, pastoral,
‘tribal’ people, and artisans), new routes and management for trade, reduced
transactional costs (better communications and fewer local tolls and duties),
new urban centres, increased and re-directed exports, and changing
organization and deployments of capital. Most of these raise problems of
interpretation; some were economically beneficial, some favoured certain
areas or people, some had immediate or delayed ill-effects. In agriculture,
despite massive investment and rising returns (and applying the anachronistic
notion of a ‘national economy’), the issues to be considered include the loss
of a particular sort of compact between state capital, agricultural development

L7 The reservoirs (ahars) were three-sided areas (some very large and on average covering about 100
acres), built out from a high point of land, and fed by a channel (pain). Well water was usually raised
by hand from shallow, temporary wells, and was applied particularly to poppy cultivation but also to
wheat and sugarcane. See n. 12 above.
’’ Accordingly, in Gaya, areas devoted to particular crops, most notably sugarcane, under a system
of rotation, were customarily divided in each village into three parts, shared between the different
holdings. When sugarcane was cultivated, often followed by opium, the tenant paid a cash rent. In the
third year, provided rice was grown and hence pain and ahara irrigation applied, a bhaoli rent was paid;
the system was called paran.
29 Compare Dewey, ‘Consequences’ and Robb, Evolution; see also Datta, ‘Merchants and peasants’.
Presumably economic advance derived more from level and rapidity of exchange, and profitability, than
from the range or type of activity.
 AGRICULTURE I N NINETEENTH-CENTURY BIHAR I11

and trade; the deflationary effects of some East India Company policies; the
subsequent limits on state investment and the weakness of public institutions
of capital; the diversion of investment into agriculture and away from
manufacture (though not all processing); the concentration on low-value
production in bulk; the discouragement of certain established local patterns
of demand; the emphasis upon export trade (a model of economic advance
perhaps less than apt for India) whenever state intervention and the
development of the infrastructure took place; and the capture of large parts
of the export trade by European investors and managers. But it is precisely
because change was so marked in many respects that the lack of change at
the lower levels of commercial production is of such interest.
Secondly, therefore, one can see that the oppressive social conditions in
some regions were not, in any simple sense, the result of recent commercial
expansion. They existed because of a colloquy amongst a range of conditions,
including trade. The capitalist was often the chief beneficiary of the system
of production, but he alone did not invent it, and nor could he change it at
will. One is reminded of Chayanov’s pluralism, his reference to the inhibition
of proletarianization in nineteenth-century Russia: ‘while in a production sense
concentration in agriculture is scarcely reflected in the foundation of new
large-scale undertakings, in an economic sense capitalism as a general economic
system makes great headway in agriculture.’ The difference is that Chayanov
shared with much marxist and developmentalist thought the idea of
rural non-capitalist production as essentially passive-family farm sectors
subordinated to the ‘hegemony’ of capitalist relations3’-and also transitional,
following from the assumption by Marx that there must be a dominant mode
to provide the ‘law of motion’ and ‘a general illumination’, whereby, for
example, in the feudal middle ages all capital, including artisans’ tools, had
a ‘landed-property character’, and in bourgeois society agriculture is more
and more ‘a branch of industry. . . entirely dominated by capital’. But in
Bihar, it is far from clear that the localized command economy was
subordinated to capitalism, as a determinant of the mode of production,
remaking it in its own image; almost the reverse was true. The elites did
not newly become capitalist, and their commercial dominance was mediated
through pre-capitalist relations. This is a ‘firm historical location’, as called
for by Byres, but an uncomfortable
It will be noticed that these arguments also offer a critique of entrenched
attitudes to ‘pre-modern’ production and the ‘village community’. They
accord with many of the descriptions by Indian anthropologists, which
(though concentrated, to a misleading degree, on the village as an isolate
or exemplum) nonetheless repeatedly record its wider involvement, its
interdependence and its hierarchies as they influence agricultural pro-
d ~ c t i o n .The
~ ~ assumption has been that these conditions are ‘modern’,
3oChayanov, ‘Peasant farm organization’, pp. 257, 225.
” Marx, Grundisse, pp. 106-7; Byres, ‘Modes of production’, to which this paragraph is indebted.
Compare Dobb, Capitalzsm, p. I I , on ‘the preponderating influence of a single, more or less homogeneous
economic form’.
3* See, for example, Mandelbaum, Society in India, pp. 327-45 and ch. 22; Beteille, Caste, class and
power; Srinivas, Remembered village, esp. pp. 128-9; Mayer, Caste and kinship, p. 8 6 , and chs. V , VI, and
VII .
II2 P E T E R ROBB

largely because such recent observations contrast with assertions, from

Aristotle to Polanyi, that subsistence and market cultivation are different in
kind, even though the former may predominate in different units of
production (feudal estate or peasant smallholding), and also survive peripheral
contact with the market. Subsistence agriculture developed as household or
family farm production-for-use; supposedly, the peasant was self-sufficient
both in labour and in consumption, and naturally his activities could not be
described in terms of capital or profit. The same features are central to
Chayanov’s definitions: it is the fact that the peasant farm ordinarily employs
no labour which above all singles it out as a category, an enterprise making
‘non-capitalist’ decisions. It may indeed be found in some parts of India, or
at some social levels. But the idea of a society of egalitarian villages is now
mostly abandoned, for the more distant as well as the recent past, even for
its fons et origo, the Punjab. In the canal colonies, the most favourable
conditions, peasant family farming extended at best only over about half the
cultivated area.33
When we talk of peasants it is hard not to think of a community which
is undifferentiated, little involved in trade, and controlled from outside. We
tend to assume that peasants change by becoming stratified or beginning to
produce for the market. Yet there are no agrarian societies that are wholly
egalitarian and isolated, with no experience of exchange. We do not need to
deal in absolutes: degrees of self-sufficiency exist within families, within
villages, within regions, and at each level some exchange is implied. Similarly
among many degrees of market orientation, even the strongest need not rule
out some subsistence production. The important differences between
economies are found in forms and structures of connection and hierarchy,
and in the manner as well as the degree of trade.
The experience of Indian peasants under colonial rule illustrates these
points. The farmers of north India had been involved in commerce for
millenia. Rural producers and (to a lesser extent) consumers took part in
lively and various regional trade. By the eighteenth and in the nineteenth
century the cultivators’ produce was entering the market in two main ways,
through relationships of either rent or debt. And, we have found, the
autonomy of the Indian village was inherently hierarchical; the concomitant
barriers paradoxically the occasion for a tyranny made all the sterner by the
accommodation they demanded. For a majority of the peasantry in Bihar,
family farm independence was not possible; indeed, since the social hierarchy
developed from military, caste and state-based structures, it is difficult to
imagine when the golden age of peasant production could have been. Only
the rich were their own masters and their production drew on the labour of
the poor. Commercialization increased this interdependence. It was easiest
to supplement a certain amount of direct production using wage labour with
a larger amount of what amounted to contracting out. Though more dramatic
changes of production methods occurred at the margins of established Indian
agriculture, with the central plantation and migrant wage labour systems
adopted in the production of such important crops as tea and coffee (and

” Ah, Pzinjah, p. 204; also Bhattacharva, ‘Agricultural labour’, but contrast Kessinger, Vdvarpur.
 AGRICULTURE I N NINETEENTH-CENTURY BIHAR 113
though other large-scale and apparently disruptive investments were made
in irrigation and transportation) most of the agricultural growth resulted
from quasi- or ‘forced’ commercialization, within prevailing norms, rather
than from a capitalist tran~formation.~~
The result has been said to be a mixed form of production, a ‘coexistence
of multiple modes’, and attributed to the differentiation of the peasantry
and consequent market imperfections. The idea seems traceable to a seminal
article by Bagchi which observed the ‘symbiotic relationship between
precapitalist and capitalist modes of production’ with reference to the use
of ‘non-market coercion’ by European planters and government opium
agents.35 Subsequently Bhaduri theorized on the growing importance of
forced commercial production in comparison with rent as a means of
extracting surplus, on the fact that primitive accumulation relies on
‘compulsions such as that created by the mechanism of debt’ rather than
competition on the basis of the relative efficiency of large and small farms,
and on the detrimental developmental consequences of ‘involuntary market
involvement’. 36 Such analyses usually contain some connected assumptions.
(I) The direction of economic development is universal and linear, by means
of changes in a unitary or predominant mode of production, and towards
or through ‘capitalism’ and ‘industrialization’ ; this despite Althusser’s
revisionism. 37 ( 2 ) India’s economic misfortunes result particularly from
economic reversal, chiefly a failure to continue to i n d u s t r i a l i ~ e (3)
. ~ ~Indian
agricultural production and producers were therefore subordinated to foreign
capitalists, and a rural proletariat was created. (4) The colonial state and its
laws were largely responsible. Thus Das, distinguishing between structures
of work and exploitation, with the latter changing from rack-renting to usury
and wage-labour, describes ‘a distorted economy based on a distorted
commercialisation’;39 and Mishra, seeing the permanent revenue settlement
of 1793 as a crucial divide in the agrarian history of Bihar, argues that
marketing was stimulated because cash rents were demanded to meet the
higher tax, and because the new status for zamindars damaged non-zamindari
land rights, and permitted intermediary tenures (which in Champaran
explained the success of the indigo planters).
The present essay, without necessarily challenging all these conclusions,
begins outside the prescriptions about history and social structures which
underlie them. It suggests a more fundamental revision. Clearly, by the early
I 800s or even earlier, some local producers already experienced competition
from imported commodities; others suffered from a paucity of local demand
when so many goods and services were exchanged through credit transactions,
reflecting social prestige or in accordance with village custom. Moreover, on
the one hand free peasant production was possible, but only for some, and
its incidence had little to do with markets; while, on the other, commercial

34 But contrast Dewey, ‘Consequences’ and Epstein, Earthy soil.

3s Bharadwaj, ‘Commercialisation’, pp. 10-1quoting Bagchi.
36 Bhaduri, Backward ap’culture, pp. 8-9, 26-7, 100.
37 Thorner, ‘Semi-feudalism or capitalism’.
iR For a recent summary of the debate, see Krishnamurty, ‘Deindustrialization’.
39 Das, Agrarian unrest, pp. 1-78; Chaudhuri, ‘Depeasantization’.
114 P E T E R ROBB

agriculture was in large part controlled by intermediaries, or by ‘peasants’

acting instead of capitalists. When we examine the experience of Bihar, we
find areas of rural self-sufficiency and areas of commerce which were only
part of a complex array of forces which influenced the modes of production,
and which preclude any easy typologies. As a result, we abandon any attempt
to resolve the heated and irreconcilable confusions among those trying to
explain India in theoretical or marxist terms, and understand why they tend
to produce hybrid terms (such as quasi-feudal, trans-class or ‘false’
consciousness).

VI
What model of village autonomy are we left with, if the old village
community of family farm producers is unacceptable, and yet the capitalist
cannot wholly transform it through trade? One repository of village autonomy
is custom and belief, which delineate local traditions. They represent not a
fixed agenda but an orbit for subjective negotiations and choices. In that
sense, a Bihari cultivator’s decisions were hedged in by his own experience
and customs. He operated, as revealed in a contemporary linguistic record,
within a rich tapestry of distinctions, which imply standards of behaviour
as well as ecological norms. The many hundreds of names of soils were not
just descriptive, but pre~criptive;~’agricultural processes too had a clear
framework in language, for example in the distinct words for first, second,
third, and fourth ploughings, for several kinds of re-ploughing after sowing,
and for styles of ploughing (straight, diagonal, circular, cross, and so on).
Such terminology seems not only to describe but almost to generate actions:
thus the same word might generally be used for hoeing and for weeding,
but there was a range of words for particular kinds of both a c t i v i t i e ~ . ~ ~
Conversely a restriction of vocabulary would mark a greater control over the
environment. The Bihari lexicon seems more than technical; it is like
snapshots of an attitude of mind.
In proverbs too one finds, more directly, a set of perceptions and value
judgments. Many sayings recorded agricultural information, and behind such
popular wisdom lay a broader corpus of belief. The agricultural calendar
embodied memories which circumscribed practice, not simply that winter
rice should be sown after the first fall of rain in Jeth (May-June), but that
transplanting should begin after a special festival, on the fifth day of Sawan
(July-August). Religious observations and sacred texts added to the sense of
an unavoidable rhythm shared by the heavens, by time, in the seasons, in
the cycle of crops, and hence by man. The divisions of time were imagined
as so many rajas bestowing gifts. The recipient-or sufferer-was defined
by his part in this transaction; a cultivator was not just one who grew crops,
but one who performed certain agricultural functions according to the norms.
In a host of customs and rhymes the cultivator was reminded of the expected

The following discussion is based on Grierson, Behar peasanr [ife, esp. division I I I .
For example, for deep or superficial weeding, or for the first hoeing given to sugarcane in January-
-(I
February or the special one given in June-July.
 AGRICULTURE I N N I N E T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y BIHAR 115

character of the season; he was provided with a timetable according to which

he could anticipate heat or rainfall, and should carry out particular tasks,
at once social, religious, and a g r i ~ u l t u r a l He
. ~ ~was offered the impression
of predictability in, and hence ability to respond to, the environment, amid
variable seasons. For this reason also agricultural decisions must be seen as
taking place within a value system. Even crops were perceived as existing
in a social as well as an economic hierarchy. Rice was a power in the land,
its numerous varieties compared with the clans of the Rajputs or the Babhans,
the dominant castes, but the millets were associated with poverty and
lowliness.43 If food were a major and visible illustration of status, cropping
decisions could hardly be socially neutral, or easily imposed by outsiders.
Despite these very different conditions, nineteenth-century tenancy
debates, pleas for state intervention, and popular protest were (and are) all
sustained on European models such as industrialization’s defeat of ‘com-
munity’ or the exploitation of ‘workers’ by individual property and capital.
Such arguments distorted India’s past and its present. An imposed economic
change did not need a Weberian reform of custom, marxian classes, or
suppression of skill (1. la Andrew Ure. Hence specialist intermediaries still
had to operate various coercive levers, and at village level were not dislodged;
indeed tenancy or contract laws and trade increased their hold. Produce for
marketing outside the locality was still secured almost entirely by itinerants
(beparis), by general or specialist traders and agents, who dealt on the one
hand in the villages with cultivators or local controllers, and on the other
hand in the towns with merchants. Direct links between village and exporter
were still rare, though reported to be increasing late in the century. Usually
any increase in marketing from within villages may be presumed to have
represented a few villagers, including banias, expanding their mercantile
activities. The expansion was not so great as to suggest that it was undertaken
by ordinary raiyats. Moreover, the bepari as an institution was still alive and
well in the 1920s; while the growing number of carts, given the increasing
scale of trade, roads, and population, does not prove a widening of direct
popular access to the market, even in rice.
Scholars are understandably uncertain about classes in rural Bihar. Bhaduri
compounds intermediaries and long-distance traders, and concentrates on
‘direct agricultural producers, mostly small peasants ’ with a right of
occupancy .44 But Pouchepadass notes in north Bihar
des districts . . . qui sont . . . presqu’entierement la propriktk d’un ou de quelques
tres grands zamindar, et ou il n’existe pratiquement pas de paysans proprietaires.
On y trouve, certes, une abondante population de tenanciers de rang moyen.
Mais comment dire de ces paysans moyens qu’ils jouisssent [sic] d’une securitk
particuliere, alors qu’il [sic] sont soumis en permanence aux menaces et aux
formes tres diverses de contrainte extra-economique liees a leur situation semi-
fk~dale?~~
Here, too, the labels were complex and precise; the year was divided not only into 1 2 months, each
with a light and a dark half, but also into 27 lunar asterisms, each associated with some important
agricultural activity: Grierson, Behar peasant l$e, division VI.
J3 Ibid., p. 216.
J4 Bhaduri, Backward agriculrure, pp. 17-8.
45 Pouchepadass, Caste et classe, p. 84.
I 16 PETER KOBB

‘Middle peasants’ may be expected by theory, but empirically further

disaggregations are needed. As village autonomy was inherently hierarchical,
this is a tale not only of capitalists-or even kulaks-and peasants. At
different levels people repeatedly gained control over others. There was no
one distinct class lording it over a depressed peasantry or rural proletariat.
Rent- and credit-based controls were repeated in small ways throughout the
society, in village-wide arrangements and between even slightly richer and
slightly poorer villagers. Thus, central to the argument, are the pre-existence
of mutual dependence, the chains of command, and a fragmentation of
decision-making. Authorities at different levels successively controlled
elements of tenurial and economic power. Labour too was variously
controlled; even so-called harvest shares-for agricultural, religious and other
village services, or for artisans-were as much expressions of finely-graded
hierarchy as of community. The intermediary was therefore not one category
of individual but many. The sugar factor, the opium agent, the village
headman, the richer cultivator represent together a multiplicity of brokers,
all of them within as well as outside the village. They link different parts
of the picture, but they also penetrate them, deconstructing the elements
(peasant, lord, village, trader) which we tend to reify as exclusive categories.
Over the long term, it has been argued, north Indian elites became more
~ ~the nineteenth century, of the usual
directly involved in a g r i c ~ l t u r e .In
routes to dominance, only military coercion was being inhibited; land control
and economic power were on the whole encouraged. On the other hand,
local environment and custom remained as guerilla bands swimming among
the people, and thwarting the heavy armaments of capitalism. Hence
‘commercial’ production was dispersed; command over men and women
remained the core. Workers were still captured through social and economic
power, for the profits from their semi-independent production. The
prerequisite and the legacy were layers of intermediaries, of distinct character
and position. Their capital did not newly subject and dispossess agrarian
labour; it reinforced subservience. Their role was both political (from land
control, legal structures, and the exercise of physical power) and social
(vested in status, value systems, and beliefs). They did not merely occupy
a space left for local trade by a weak colonial power or by limited market
encroachment; they maintained their position despite massive interventions
by the state and by long-distance trade. Nor were they merely the local arm
of the state or of international capital; they sought, in Bihar, to isolate these
external forces from actual cultivators. There is nothing immutable about
the situations described, but they are not especially or necessarily transitional.
Their origins, nature, and strength need proper description, if we are to
understand change. In this case it should be no surprise that, later, when
population and property values rose, and even petty holdings were seized,
these mostly went to rural elites.

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

-Ih See Bayly, Rulers, merchants.

 AGRICULTURE I N NINETEENTH-CENTURY BIHAR 1I7
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