Changing the guard: The dissolution of the nationalist–Marxist orthodoxy in the agrarian and agricultural history of India

These two collections of papers seem, at first sight, to have everything in common. They deal with the two sides of the same medal: the history of peasant farming and agrarian society in the colonial period in South Asia. They have been written by teams of talented historians who stick to their overarching themes; so the two books form more coherent wholes than festschrifts and sets of conference papers have any right to do. They have been published by two commercial publishers with production values as high as many university presses: the kind of publishing houses that have sprung up in India just as they have died out in the West. As a result, no student—no scholar—interested in the history of agriculture or rural society in India can afford to neglect them.

Yet, as soon as one begins to read them, one realises that these two books belong to different intellectual universes. Agrarian and Other Histories looks back to the achievements and limitations of a golden age of agrarian history in India—to an orthodoxy driven by a political agenda legitimatising the transfer of power to a new ruling elite and massive state intervention to create a new utopia. To discredit the ancien regime, nationalist and Marxist historians looked for exploitation and resistance under every colonial bed, so exploitation and resistance is what they found. Their concentration on these twin fetishes produced classic studies of agrarian stratification and peasant revolt that changed the historiography of a subcontinent. But if they enjoyed a near-monopoly in their chosen fields, they achieved it, in Acton’s words, through ‘resolute self-limitation’. As so many intellectual coteries have done before them, they developed tunnel vision. They read one another’s works, and they saw no need to read anyone else’s. Their controls were never turned to receive; they were permanently jammed on transmit. As their manifestos proudly proclaimed, they had nothing to learn and everything to teach.

The outcome was inevitable: a consensus hardened into an orthodoxy, and the orthodoxy suppressed dissent. The pioneers had something to say, often something which was original and challenging. Their feebler followers were not in the same league. They rejected a myriad possibilities in favour of a handful of forgone conclusions; they divided the whole of humanity into predators and their prey, recycling the same small cast of stock characters—victimised peasants, usurious moneylenders, tyrannous landlords, turbulent factory workers and evil colonialists—until they degenerated into cardboard cut-out stereotypes; they arrived at such a remorselessly pessimistic vision of the past—every day, in every way, everything got a little worse—it was, at times, like reading the Death of Little Nell. As one heartbreaking saga succeeded another, you never knew whether to burst into tears or burst into laughter.

Individuals grow into caricatures of themselves as they grow older—their dominant characteristics become more dominant—and the same applies to movements. The universe that the nationalists and Marxists created, a projection of their own instincts, owed nothing to Candide. It was red in tooth and claw. The entire everyday world of give and take, of compromise and cooperation, even sentiment and sympathy, disappeared behind a mountain range of hatred and violence. Common enmity to some external enemy, some detested ‘other’, might produce a temporary show of solidarity for some limited purpose. But in every other respect, every class was embroiled in a war on multiple fronts, and every man’s hand was turned against his neighbour. The wonder is that civil society retained enough cohesion to survive in any form at all.

Tilling the Land is different from Agrarian and Other Histories. Without going to the opposite extreme—without for a moment trying to rehabilitate the Raj—it shows how the old consensus is losing its grip. A few of the most deeply embedded idees fixes slip through in fleeting references to the destruction of handicrafts or the dispossession of the peasant proprietor; but they are no more than grace notes in passing. Even if the contributors argue that the colonial state failed to promote agricultural growth, they escape the obsession with exploitation and resistance. They are not hammering home the same political agenda with the same dogmatic force, so they are free to speculate. A younger generation, travelling without doctrinaire maps, is struggling to make sense of the proverbial balance of the evidence in a discipline which is theoretically impoverished if not theoretically confused. As a result, they ask a wider range of questions and arrive at more open-minded, if more tentative, answers.

It will be interesting to see what emerges from this orgy of empiricism, now that Pandora has opened her box. A few of the authors in Tilling the Land pay subliminal lip service to the black beast of the old consensus, the free market. Their adhesion, however, never goes very deep. They do not employ the standard explanatory devices of the born-again adherents of the Chicago School—supply and demand, factors of production, comparative advantage—as little intellectual gimlets to crack open every problematic safe in the economic world. The majority fall back on something that looks suspiciously like common sense. Edward Caird said that Mandell Creighton, the great historian of the papacy, possessed ‘common sense amounting to genius’. Definitions of common sense vary drastically from one culture to another and one generation to another. One man’s sense is another man’s madness. But an instinctive grasp of reality—the historian’s greatest gift—may, in time, assimilate the economic and social history of India to the economic and social history of the developed world. In the hands of the old guard, it was an exotic anti-colonial aberration, prized for its difference.

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Agrarian and Other Histories is a celebration of the work of Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri. There are few historians who deserve a festschrift half as much. In a milieu riddled with simple-minded doctrinaires, he has accepted the complexity of things: the contradictions, the ambiguities and the qualifications, which are half the fascination of the past. And he has accepted the corollary of that complexity: the fact that all our conclusions are provisional. His 60-odd publications, extending over 50 years, are standing proof that history is a process of perpetual discovery.

The question, therefore, is: how far do the contributions to Agrarian and Other Histories reflect Professor Chaudhuri’s core values? And how far do they relapse into the dogmas of the nationalist–Marxist sump? There are 13 papers in his festschrift; it is impossible to do justice to them all. Half a dozen papers on traditional themes—exploitation, resistance, stratification and poverty—show how the old orthodoxy has run into an impasse; three papers on Tagore show how Bengali icons can only be subjected to the most muted criticism. Then the fissures start appearing. Three papers on the British penetration of Bengal—on the agrarian frontier in Sylhet, the emergence of a group of millionaire merchants and the impact of commercialisation on agriculture—start out with a critique that is implicit rather than overt and culminate in an astonishing attack on the entire nationalist–Marxist enterprise. And one paper, on the Dalits and partition, in some ways the most memorable of all, drives home the human cost of the freedom struggle for the low castes in Bengal. Decolonisation had millions of pathetic losers as well as triumphant winners: a taboo subject for many years after 1947.

The two most explicit celebrations of the Great Tradition are the papers by Utsa Patnaik on the drain and Neeladri Bhattacharya on the canal colonies in the Punjab. In a conscious return to the roots of the nationalist–Marxist school, Professor Patnaik has applied the drain theory, originally advanced more than a century ago by Dadabhai Naoroji and R.C. Dutt, to the trade statistics that had become available since their day. Her estimate of the drain of capital from India to Britain over 70 years, 1765–1836, comes to £8,227 billion; and she argues that this flow not only impoverished South Asia to a degree which defies quantification, it enriched all the countries in which Britain invested capital on a scale that can never be repaid.

There are only two things wrong with Professor Patnaik’s methodology. She consistently adopts statistical assumptions (such as compound interest at a rate of 5% per annum over centuries) that exaggerate the magnitude of the drain; and she consistently ignores research that would tend to cut the economic impact of the drain down to size, such as the work on the sources of investment during the industrial revolution (which shows that industrialisation was financed by the ploughed-back profits of industrialists) or the costs of empire school (which stresses the high price of imperial defence).

I wonder whether there is a single serious economic historian outside India who would accept her view of the centrality of India’s exploitation in the development of the global economy. There are too many rival claimants. Labour historians would say that the surplus value extracted from the proletariat was the only thing that mattered, Black historians would insist that slavery was the key, historians of Latin America would remind us of the gold and silver stolen by the Spaniards, Caribbean historians would invoke the sugar plantations, Chinese historians would never let us forget the role of opium; the list would be long. Even historians of Bengal would dispute Professor Patnaik’s assertions. Rajat Datta, in this volume, believes that the British and Dutch East India Companies sucked an immense inflow of gold and silver into Bengal, to finance their commercial revolution, just as Professor Patnaik sees the British exporting an immense amount of capital to Europe.

Neeladri Bhattacharya produces the latest diatribe against the vast irrigation projects in the central Punjab. The canal colonies have been seen as one of the great success stories of the British rule. Professor Bhattacharya is determined to prove that they were one of the great disasters. His proof is the resistance of the colonists during the Punjab Disturbances of 1907. The tales of suffering and heroism that appeared in the colonists’ newspaper, the Zamindar, set the tone of his approach. Pathetically poor peasants who cleared a barren waste at great personal sacrifice, with an endurance which was hardly human, were ripped off by a faithless and exploitative state that changed the conditions of their grants as soon as they were brought under cultivation.

The reality is a little different. The colonists were not pathetically poor: they were a privileged class of rich farmers who got valuable grants from a provincial government ideologically committed to the peasant proprietor—and set out, very successfully, to maximise their gains. Compared with their miniscule holdings in their overpopulated home villages, the settlers’ ‘squares’ in the colonies—20 acres of virgin soil with an assured supply of cheap water and easy access to markets—were assets beyond the dreams of avarice. No one walked away from a colony grant; they fought to get one. They were desperate to be oppressed.

So why on earth did the colonists attend ‘monster meetings’ in 1907? Professor Bhattacharya, rightly, makes great play with the clash of cultures. Paternalist members of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) dreamt of creating model farms and model villages on their vast estate; technocratic members of the Public Works Department dreamt of spreading the water of the Indus rivers over the largest possible area of crops. Neither objective suited the colonists. They had no interest in new standards of housing, sanitation, tree planting or stockbreeding; they preferred dividing their holdings among all their sons, rather than preserving them intact as viable farms; they were also completely averse to sharing their fluctuating supplies of water with the latecomers at the tails of the canals. All they really wanted were full proprietary rights in their squares on the easiest of easy terms, at the expense of the taxpayers, who owned the land and financed the projects, and enough water to mature the thirstiest crops in the driest seasons without supplementary well irrigation, at the expense of the cultivators further down the distributaries whose harvests failed.

The colonists’ greatest grievance, however, lay elsewhere. A scream of pain went up from the witnesses giving evidence to the committee investigating the disturbances during its secret sessions. The cause? The extortion practised by the small army of subordinate officials responsible for the demarcation of the squares, the distribution of water, the collection of water rates and land revenue, the enforcement of the rules regulating village sites and the supervision of the grants given for horse and mule breeding. Poorly paid patwaris and chainmen had the power to allocate inferior land, inflate water rates, impose fines and recommend the confiscation of holdings at a time when the colony villages, full of recently arrived immigrants, had very little solidarity; so they made hay while the sun shone. Professor Bhattacharya skates over this Indian-on-Indian exploitation: the Achilles’ heel of the colony administration. There were three parties competing for the spoils of irrigation, not two; and three contenders is one too many for the crude polarity of oppressed colonists versus oppressive colonialists.

The one thing Professor Bhattacharya does not skate over is the extent, intensity and duration of the disturbances. An innocent reader might suppose that violent conflict was the normal state of things in the canal colonies: that the colonists and the British were permanently at one another’s throats. Nothing could be further from the truth. The unrest in 1907 was a low-key, non-violent affair that only affected a part of the irrigated area and only lasted a few months. It was cut short by the Government of Punjab’s vicious repression—they deported two agitators—and the Government of India’s abject surrender. A state hypersensitive to unrest in the Indian army’s recruiting grounds gave the colonists everything they asked for: proprietary rights on their own terms, villages that were as squalid as the settlements they came from, assured supplies of water, a clean-up of the corrupt subordinates and water and revenue rates that were rapidly eroded by inflation. There were no further disturbances in the colonies, except for a brief agitation against a resettlement in the 1930s that was curtailed by concessions almost as soon as it arose.

The fact is that the colonies were a site of collaboration rather than resistance —one of the greatest sites of collaboration between the rulers and the ruled in the colonial world. For roughly 99 per cent of the time, a tiny British elite worked with millions of Indian settlers to produce an agricultural revolution. A complex of immense perennial canals forming the largest integrated irrigation system in the world transformed the productivity of 4 million acres of virtual desert. The multiplier effects of this agricultural revolution were incalculable. The colonies generated a huge surplus of grain that fed food-deficit areas all over northern India, supplied the long-staple cotton used by mills in Bombay and Ahmedabad during their crucial transition to high-quality cloth, set off a spiral of regional specialisation in agriculture by importing draught animals, milch cows, vegetables, sugar and drugs from the districts best equipped to produce them, and stimulated every agricultural-processing industry in the Punjab. After partition, the capital of the colonies, Lyallpur, became ‘the Birmingham of Pakistan’.

The effects on popular well-being were just as far-reaching. During the boom after the First World War, millions of ‘impoverished and immerised’ colonists enjoyed the highest standard of living of any substantial group of peasant farmers in South Asia. Their affluence was notorious. They were envied. They may have reached levels of consumption comparable with the poorest European peasants. Migration to the colonies relieved the pressure of population on the miniscule holdings in the densely settled line of districts lying under the foothills of the Himalayas, the surplus grain lowered the price of food for families with too little land to be self-sufficient, and the demand for labour drove up the real wages of the army of increasingly mobile labourers who worked on the colonists’ farms.

Polemics against the canal colonies that grossly exaggerate the incidence of exploitation and resistance tell us more about the historians who write them than they tell us about the colonies themselves. If the great irrigation projects in the Punjab had been designed by Indian administrators and operated by Indian engineers, the same historians who disparage them would acclaim them as stupendous accomplishments. This is not history; it is chauvinism. The vast network of inundation canals that the Muslim and Sikh rulers of Multan and Bahawalpur dug further down the Indus basin before the British annexation of Sind and the Punjab are praised as triumphs of indigenous development even if the Daudputras and the Sikhs were as much invaders as the British. The only significant difference between these distinctly colonial projects and the British schemes, besides their smaller scale and cruder technology, was the far more ruthless treatment of the colonists.

Sawan Mal, the governor of Multan for more than 20 years, was commonly considered the best governor the Sikhs ever produced. His treatment of the settlers on the canals he repaired and excavated was exacting. The whole system rested on forced labour. If a cultivator failed to turn up on the days the kardars fixed for silt clearances, he was beaten so badly by the kardars’ men that he never failed to turn up again. The stupid British, with their squeamish aversion to this kind of violence and their excessive respect for property, substituted cash payments for the days of labour—and the canals, as a result, fell into disrepair. The abandonment of the labour quotas was one of the great scandals of early British rule in the south-western Punjab.

There was no nonsense about property rights or security of tenure on the Muslim and Sikh canals. Sawan Mal’s kardars seized whatever land he wanted to irrigate, without compensation, and if a settler failed to pay his assessment, he was brusquely evicted in favour of a newcomer who would pay whatever was demanded. At their most considerate, the kardars arranged for loans from the local moneylenders, fellow-banias, to tide settlers over some temporary crisis; then they collected the repayments with the same rigour as the revenue. There was no possibility of resistance, because there was no possibility of solidarity. There were no village communities, no tribes or castes and no large estates: there were only isolated peasant families. But no one wanted to resist; they were so grateful for the water. They knew that water was life: their life. All Sawan Mal had to do, to become a legend in his lifetime, was to keep the canals flowing and his kardars under control.

Two papers by Dietmar Rothermund and Shinkichi Taniguchi revisit the perennial question of peasant stratification. They do not, unfortunately, go straight to the heart of the matter: the cosmic conflict between the two great models of stratification no one can ignore. Was the progressive polarisation of the peasantry inevitable, as Lenin argued, as a result of the ‘cumulation of advantages’ conferred by the ownership of land and capital, once agriculture was commercialised? Or did families move continuously up and down the social scale, as Chayanov insisted, as the ratio of producers to consumers fluctuated with each phase in the family development cycle? Did a small elite of rich kulaks expropriate their poorer neighbours by exploiting them? Or did families take turns to be rich and poor, in a gigantic game of snakes and ladders, largely driven by chance?

There is only the briefest reference to social mobility in Rothermund and there are no references to it in Yaniguchi. Their omission reflects the glaring gap in their predecessors’ work, and the glaring gap in their predecessors’ work reflects the limitations of their sources and the narrow range of their reading. Official records in Bengal, by-products of the collection of the revenue, rarely reach the individual peasant family. It is extremely difficult to reconstruct the hierarchy of a village at any given moment, much less track the fate of families over generations. The richest source in other provinces, the settlement literature, was non-existent in Bengal until a relatively late date, because there were no settlements. Instead of struggling to make bricks without straw, historians of Bengal could learn from the more sophisticated literature on stratification produced by anthropologists and historians working on regions and periods that have the advantage of far richer data. Again and again one runs up against the problem of tunnel vision: how little they know of Bengal, who only Bengal knows.

There are, out there, scores of studies on peasant mobility that are superior to anything produced by a historian working on South Asia, and the long-term studies, as distinct from the profiles frozen in time, show just how much social mobility there was. A family with four brawny sons under the control of an exceptionally competent peasant entrepreneur rose, inexorably, towards the apex of the village hierarchy; the family of a drunkard with a well that ran dry slithered, inexorably, towards the base. There were very few ‘village controllers’ able to control the destinies of their poorer neighbours, and a family’s pre-eminence rarely lasted very long. The ‘cumulation of advantage’ had definite limits. It was hard, if not impossible, to transmit assets from one generation to the next. Holdings patiently accumulated over a lifetime of astute judgement, gruelling labour and personal austerity were divided between multiple heirs through partible inheritance as a matter of routine—and some of the heirs, at least, were such incompetent managers that they soon dissipated their shares. A large holding might be broken up in the course of a single famine. The family farm, large or small, was nothing if not a high-risk affair.

The two papers on poverty—Sabyasachi Bhattacharya on the concept of poverty and Gargi Chakravartty on the Bengal famine—are thought-provoking as far as they go. Professor Bhattacharya shows, convincingly, how much the Indian famine codes owed to the British poor law and ultimately to Bentham: a major gap in Stokes’ work on the utilitarians. The labour test for admission to famine relief works comes straight from the test for admission to a workhouse in Britain. But beyond that insight, there is still a huge topic to be explored. Professor Bhattacharya praises the nationalist intelligentsia, not least Naoroji and Dutt, for ‘widening the debate on the causes of poverty’ by attributing it all to British rule. Harsher critics might wonder whether they did more than use poverty as a battering ram against their political opponents. The debate was already as wide as it could get. Then there is the most interesting issue of all: how did the poor see poverty? Professor Bhattacharya deserves five stars for raising this question. It is a pity that he has no means of answering it. A single poem by a rural poet during the Orissa famine of 1866 is no substitute for a trawl through every conceivable source, the work of a lifetime.

Professor Chakravartty’s case study of the political response to the Bengal famine of 1943–44 must be the definitive treatment of the Nari Samiti—a largely communist women’s organisation—in Chittagong. The Samiti recruited volunteers and raised funds; then it set up kitchens for the starving, refuges for women, orphanages for children, hospitals for the sick and cottage industries for the destitute. We shall never know how many lives they saved: it must run into several thousands. But compared with state famine relief, it was all on a miniscule scale, and the state relief was far too little and far too late to prevent appalling mortality. Professor Chakravartty is right to acclaim the dedication of the individual activists. They do deserve ‘a special place in gender historiography’. The real moral of the tale, however, is as sad as ever: the complete inadequacy of charity, confronted by such a catastrophe.

The editors of Agrarian and Other Histories justify the inclusion of three papers on Tagore—by Uma Das Gupta, Tanika Sarkar and Anuradha Roy—on the ground that Professor Chaudhuri is attached to Tagore’s poetry and personality. It is hard, sometimes, to share his enthusiasm. In the most sympathetic view, Tagore was ‘a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’. At his worst, the sage of Santiniketan was a guilt-stricken landlord salving the consciences of the guilt-stricken bhadralok by proposing completely impractical solutions for the deprivation of his tenants, the most effective way of keeping them in their place, and peddling poems expressing remorselessly high-flown aspirations in a poetic diction that loses everything in translation.

The Sriniketan Experiment worked wonderfully well as a public relations exercise, just as F.L. Brayne’s rural reconstruction worked wonderfully well as propaganda. The problems of the peasantry captured the imagination of the socially conscious bhadralok. Tagore’s example inspired hundreds, if not thousands, of voluntary workers to go out into the villages to ‘uplift’ the tenants whose rents filtered through to them in distant towns. So far, so good. But there was no possibility of Sriniketan-style self-help transforming village India, even if a reserve army of activists invaded each hamlet. What the peasantry wanted were decent incomes, not communal latrines or cooperative societies or even ‘readings from the epics’; and the only way to give them decent incomes was to suck labour off the land, through the rapid development of every other sector of the economy. The low productivity of family farming on minute plots condemned the great majority of the population to perpetual poverty under any conceivable agrarian regime, and as the population grew the situation could only get worse.

The solitary escape from this poverty trap was the conversion of the beautiful and beloved landscape of Bengal—the golden cows plodding out to graze, the lush green paddy ripening in the fields, the palm trees gently swaying in the breeze, the wells creaking and splashing in the sun—into a vast, hideous building site: the industrial estate. There were no proposals for the ‘uglification’ of Bengal in Sriniketan. In fact, there were no proposals for industrialisation at all. It was the sweetness and light of the arts and craft movement transported from the Cotswolds to Birbhum, and it was just as effective as an antidote to destitution.

Despite Partha Chatterjee’s admiration for the realpolitik of the winners, Tagore’s critique of the nationalist movement—his sensitivity to the cleavages in the most plural of plural societies, and his pleas for mutual toleration as so many nation-building activists degenerated into Hindu supremacists or Muslim separatists—is probably the most valuable element in his legacy today. He saw, at an early date, what was going wrong, and unlike the majority of his class, he had the courage to say so. He was not a monomaniac. He did not feel that replacing a White ruling elite by a Brown ruling elite was worth every conceivable sacrifice, and if he had lived long enough to witness the partition massacres, he would have known that he was right. For Tagore, humanism trumped nationalism every time.

The three papers on the British economic penetration of Bengal—David Ludden on Sylhet, Shubhra Chakrabarti on the emergence of a mercantile elite and Rajat Datta on the commercialisation of agriculture—are accomplished pieces with increasingly subversive implications. Professor Ludden’s meticulous study of the economic activities of some rapacious nabobs—one specialised in speculation in the currency in cowries—deserves to rank with the detailed case studies of the frontier of administration in Kolff’s See You in Court. It shows just how predatory the employees of the Honourable East India Company could be, exploiting every profitable opportunity that came their way, without dislocating the wider economy. They skimmed off a surplus without, apparently, reducing the population to starvation. Professor Chakrabarti goes a little further than this. He produces a portrait gallery of the merchant millionaires whose irresistible rise, as the greatest collaborators of the British, offset the decline of more ‘traditional’ houses like the Jagat Seths. The advent of this elite, with Dwarkanath Tagore at their head, strongly suggests that Bengali traders could make immense fortunes from the commercial revolution, as long as they adapted to the new dispensation. The nabobs’ allies were buying zamindaris in Bengal, just as the nabobs were buying estates in Britain. Their wealth is proof that someone in the Ganges basin was doing well out of British rule; it cannot have been all misery and decline.

Then comes the time bomb. Professor Datta states his credentials as a rebel with reckless candour. Far from being a period of economic crisis following a prosperous precolonial past, he argues that the eighteenth century in Bengal was a period of expansion. The impact of commercialisation on agriculture was wholly beneficial. As demand grew, crop prices doubled, and as they doubled, mobile settlers on the frontiers of cultivation expanded the sown area and reaped the usual rewards. It was only after the peasants ran out of waste and forest to reclaim, as a result of population growth, that the market turned in favour of the land controllers. Rents rose, holdings shrank and productivity per worker fell. If this sequence could be proved, colonial growth after precolonial stagnation, the whole nationalist–Marxist interpretation of the initial British penetration of Bengal would shiver with the shock. The steps in Professor Datta’s analysis are so incisively argued, they are so consistent with the macroeconomic changes that took place in eastern India at the time and they correspond so closely with what we know of the commercialisation of agriculture elsewhere, it is difficult to resist his iconoclasm.

The last of the 13 papers in this sequence, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay’s study of the Dalits and partition in Bengal, is the most touching departure from the nationalist–Marxist orthodoxy. His subject, the scheduled castes and partition, is a classic old-guard trope. The Dalits are victims by definition; partition was the product of the colonialists’ strategy of divide and rule. Stick the two things together, and we should—by now—know what to expect. But this is not, in the event, how it turns out. In 1947, the Dalits were trapped between the Muslims who rejected them as incompletely converted Hindus, and the Hindus who rejected them as polluted sub-mensch who had forgotten their lowly place in the natural order of things. Pakistani politicians drove them out of East Bengal, and West Bengali politicians dispersed them all over eastern India. It was the final solution for the scheduled-caste problem. The low-caste groups that provided the support for the original Scheduled Castes Movement, the Rajbansis and the Namasudras, were broken up. The disruption silenced the Dalits, and their silence produced the comforting illusion that ‘caste does not matter in Bengal’. There was a moment of truth in the refugee camps, as the great deportations began: a moment when it was no longer possible to blame the annihilation of the Dalits as a political force on the Raj. They were among the first victims of the freedom struggle, and they were by no means the last.

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After Agrarian and Other Histories, it comes as something of a relief to read Tilling the Land. The 12 contributors escape from the locked ward of the nationalist–Marxist orthodoxy, even if they show incipient signs of developing collective illusions of their own. The main thrust of their work is the farmer and the Raj. Four papers dissect attempts to improve peasant farming by the colonial state; two analyse attempts to improve peasant farming by a benevolent landlord and Christian missionaries; one examines the official response to agrarian distress during The Great Depression, and one takes the interaction on, after independence, to the onset of the Green Revolution. Which leaves three exceptionally illuminating case studies on farming in very different milieux—the forests of the Khasi–Jaintia hills, the islands in the Sunderbans and the paddy fields of Burdwan—and an odd man out, an account of the distinctly derivative discourse on agriculture in Hindi periodicals.

The papers on the state and the cultivator (by Deepak Kumar, Arnab Roy, Samiparna Samanta and Himanshu Upadhyay) have a striking family resemblance. All four authors condemn the official improvement projects as abject failures, and there is very little doubt that they are right, at least in Bengal. Far from transforming rice growing or cattle breeding, official schemes hardly impinged on peasant practices. The question is, why? Why were the agricultural improvers so ineffectual? There are two possibilities. One is obvious, the other less so. The obvious possibility is in danger of hardening into a new orthodoxy, so it is worth questioning it, before the concrete sets.

The explanation of the failure of the state that every contributor gives, either by implication or in so many words, is that no one tried hard enough. We get detailed narratives of the planning and implementation of official projects taken straight from the official files. They set out a standing conflict between the good guys and the bad guys. In one corner, there are the enlightened crusaders: the agricultural scientists, the enthusiastic officials, the voluntary workers and even the traders; anyone who ever asked the government to spend money on a pet project. In the other corner, there are the reactionary, short-sighted, penny-pinching administrators who turned the knight errants’ applications down. The drift is clear: if only the wretched government had been prepared to devote more resources to agricultural research and development, how prosperous the peasantry would have become. They would have doubled their output and tripled their standard of living. Poverty would have disappeared. But what could one expect from a colonial state, even if the majority of the state’s revenue came from agriculture and the profits of imperialism came from the extraction of primary produce?

The other possibility—the possibility that not one contributor seriously explores—is that there was nothing to be done. The improvers had nothing to teach the farmers they pretended to uplift. They had no solution for the poverty of the average farmer. If the long debate over the rational peasant has shown anything at all, it has shown that small farmers generally know their own business best. Far from being hidebound by ‘ignorance’ or ‘lethargy’ or ‘tradition’, they are as acutely sensitive to the profitability of their activities as poor people living on the verge of hunger always are. After centuries of growing similar crops in a slowly changing environment, their collective experience—the ‘wisdom of the ancestors’—makes them astute judges of innovations.

Peasants are, as a result, discriminating consumers. If there is a profitable improvement to be made, they make it—often after very short delays and without any official help. Crop patterns are routinely adjusted to shifts in prices after the lag of a single harvest. New crops, witness jute or indigo, are incorporated in existing rotations. If an improvement, on the other hand, is purely technical—if the cost of producing more rice or better rice exceeds the additional sum a farmer gets for his harvest—they leave it to the hobby farmers at the heavily subsidised agricultural research stations. They are nothing if not realists; they know when to ignore the counsels of perfection that are the breath of life to salaried agricultural experts who will never have to make a living from a tiny family farm.

There are several reasons to suspect that the do-gooders had very little to offer the peasants. It is quite impossible to accept, on trust, the assurances of the agricultural scientists that their research could transform peasant farming. Unless they conducted objective trials under realistic conditions on peasant holdings and the cultivators endorsed their findings by adopting their innovations, there is no proof that anything they offered was worthwhile. Government scientists had, as a class, a strong vested interest in increased government expenditure on applied science; their jobs depended on it. Their most vociferous spokesmen tended to plug the bees in their bonnets, and a few of them were shameless empire builders. I have never come across a scientist in India who believed it was possible to spend too much money on science—the concept did not exist. They were like the mad scientist in a white coat in Dr Strangelove, who uttered the immortal words, ‘Give me a government grant, and I will rule the world’.

Agricultural science was a dismal failure in the UK, despite the existence of a powerful agricultural lobby and a class of farmers with the intelligence and the capital to adopt any innovation, until the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics and the design of experiments in accordance with Fisher’s statistical tests transformed the output of research stations such as Rothamsted between the wars. If the most talented agricultural scientists in the world failed to produce revolutionary results in a scientific hothouse like Rothamsted, why should the rejects hurled to the periphery by some professional centrifuge make dramatic breakthroughs on some desolate experimental farm in a lost place in the mofussil? The most sincere and dedicated men had difficulty developing an instinctive grasp of the economics of the peasant family farm, which determined the realism of their research.

Far and away the best works on this crucial issue, the economic returns to financial investment in agricultural research in South Asia, are the superb papers by Carl Pray. Professor Pray showed how Punjabi peasants selected the improvements that made money and rejected the improvements that were loss leaders. The new Pusa wheat produced significantly higher yields and the long-staple American cottons fetched significantly higher prices, and they only required modest additional inputs of labour and water; so the stampede for seeds was so great, the Department of Agriculture was unable to keep up with the demand. The soil-inverting iron plough, on the other hand, was a definite no go. It cost several times the price of a traditional wooden plough, it took a much stronger bullock to drag it and it exposed the moisture in the soil to evaporation just as it was most needed. It was useful in heavy clay soils that were easily waterlogged; it was of very little use anywhere else. It is a standing reproach to the contributors to this volume that the only reference to Pray’s research is a bare citation in a cosmetic footnote added to a chapter originally written 35 years ago.

The second argument for ‘there was nothing to be done’ is the evidence provided by the case studies of landlords and missionaries as agricultural improvers in Tilling the Soil. If it was simply the official projects that failed, that would be proof there was something wrong with the state. But everyone failed: the landlords and the missionaries as well as the government. The Sriniketan Experiment was the most famous and the most sustained attempt, by a landlord in South Asia, to improve the farming of his tenants. Bipasha Raha’s chapter in Tilling the Soil is the best account of Tagore’s work I have ever read or ever expect to read. The beauty is in the detail—and still more, in the honesty. Professor Raha sets out the astonishing number of experiments Tagore conducted—with seeds, fertilisers, rotations, livestock, fruit, machinery, irrigation, the consolidation of holdings and the creation of cooperatives. Every conceivable innovation is there, often on an imposing scale.

But then comes the reckoning. Productivity in the core villages only increased marginally in small pockets. The standard of living did not rise significantly. The estate, a gigantic hobby farm, ran out of money. Sriniketan exposed the limits of agricultural improvement in Bengal far more vividly than it exposed the potential. If the most charismatic landlord in the region, with the power of a great estate owner over his tenants and the moral support of thousands of bhadralok, failed to make a lasting impression on 85 villages, how could a motley collection of poorly paid and poorly motivated officials, thinly spread over a vast province, transform millions of peasant farms?

Rajsekhar Basu’s account of Christian missionaries as agricultural pioneers strongly suggests that they did no better than the rare improving landlords. Sometimes muscular Christians with far too much energy frittered their resources away on a wide range of petty programmes, from breeding poultry to the ‘Scindia plough’. Sometimes they pursued joint programmes with the provincial departments of agriculture, becoming extensions of government research stations. And sometimes they concentrated on their strongest suit, agricultural education. Sam Higginbottom and his colleagues at the Allahabad Agricultural Institute taught converts how to operate machines and process crops, on the ground that the only barrier to mechanisation was a shortage of skilled labour: a highly improbable premise.

There is no comprehensive evaluation of the impact of the missionaries’ work on peasant farming. In fact, it would be hard to find a single follow-up study of a missionary initiative in Bengal. But it is impossible to escape the impression that the dissemination of their ‘discoveries’ was spasmodic and superficial to the nth degree. The only projects that made a difference to people’s lives were the settlements intended to turn low-caste converts into farmers and reclaim criminal tribes. They worked, on a small scale, because they were subsidised. Provincial governments gave them land and donors paid part of their running costs. They never reached, they were never intended to reach, the mass of ordinary peasant farmers.

Finally, there is the most compelling evidence of all. The dramatic success of peasant entrepreneurs all over Bengal shows, as nothing else can, how little they had to learn from outsiders. Whether they were practising shifting cultivation, reclaiming marshes and jungles or pursuing classic paddy culture, as soon as they were presented with profitable opportunities, they exploited them with their own resources.

Slash-and-burn cultivation in the Khasi–Jaintia hills, the chapter by Sajal Nag, was everything the wicked colonialists, stuck in their ‘development paradigm’, said it was. Swidden cultivation condemned swidden farmers to an equality of poverty in a human zoo. Implements, hoes instead of ploughs, were crude. Incomes in cash were derisory, because so little produce was sold. Above all, productivity per acre was low. It took a large area of land to support a single family at a low level of consumption. So in the long term, the system was doomed. As population pressure rose, the cycle of burning and cultivating speeded up, the forests no longer had time to regenerate, yields went down and erosion went up.

There was, however, one irresistible advantage to slash-and-burn as long as there was plenty of forest. The productivity of labour was high, and it was the productivity of labour that mattered to the tribesmen. If there were cash crops suited to the hills, which could be grown without too much effort and sold for good prices, they adopted them. Potatoes were one of their star products: a crop produced entirely for sale; they did not eat potatoes. When fungus wiped out the potato crop, they fell back on rain-fed rice because there was too little flat land with irrigation for paddy. They resisted terrace cultivation on the hillsides, because terrace cultivation was too labour intensive. Why work like slaves for the sake of a marginal increase in the consumption of imported goods? There were regular official inquiries into the possibility of encouraging or compelling the tribesmen to adopt intensive cultivation. In every case, the eventual decision was the same: let them settle down at the pace dictated by the density of the population.

The reclamation of the Sunderbans, as Sutapa Chatterjee shows, was the peasant entrepreneurs’ finest hour. Millions of mobile settlers, often from long distances, drove the frontier of cultivation towards the sea, across a hundred islands. Wherever the rivers running through the delta deposited enough silt to raise the surface of the land above the high tide mark, they felled thousands of clearings in the ‘impenetrable’ forests and settled down to engage in sedentary farming. At the cutting edge of their advance, in the saline mangrove swamps close to the shores, they combined small plots with fishing and spasmodic hunting-gathering. They achieved all this despite everything that man and nature could do to stop them. Cyclones and floods flattened their crops, drowned their livestock and demolished their flimsy huts; the snakes, tigers, crocodiles and wild pigs added a frisson of danger to everyday life; and the British favoured large leaseholders until the First World War. If immigrant peasants could flourish in an environment as challenging as this, it is hard to see what they had to learn from scientists, officials or well-meaning graduates fresh from the lecture rooms at Presidency College.

Achintya Dutta’s treatment of conventional paddy cultivation in Burdwan is vitiated from the outset by his acceptance of the official crop statistics. He assumes that because they show stagnation, therefore stagnation is what he has to explain. It may be so. But it seems inherently improbable. The population of the district grew from 139,000 in 1891 to 219,000 in 1951, not far short of 60 per cent. That kind of growth in the labour force, in a district that was already densely cultivated, should increase yields over area and reduce yields per capita. You have to explain growth and decline at the same time. Simple stasis is the least likely outcome of all. If Professor Dutta had read the literature on the reliability of the official agricultural statistics, especially the figures for yield, he would have realised that the inertia of the system of collection was so pronounced, they could easily show stagnation whether the reality was growth or decline. The first large-scale random sample crop surveys anywhere in the world—the surveys conducted by Mahalanobis and Sukhatme in Bengal and Bihar—would shake anyone’s confidence in the official yields for permanently settled areas without an agency capable of conducting enough crop experiments or appraising enough fields.

In any case, no one needs official yields to show that agriculture had reached a classic high-level equilibrium trap in Burdwan. The peasantry turned the district into ‘a granary of India’, producing large surpluses for export to Calcutta, by exploiting a fertile alluvial plain as systematically as anyone could do. They experimented with potatoes, sugar cane and jute, but nothing could replace rice. There was a slow intensification of traditional practices in the paddy fields as the labour supply grew; that was all. The experimental farm financed by the Burdwan Raj and run by the Government of Bengal could not popularise its innovations. The scientists and officials in charge blamed peasant ‘prejudice’. It was the usual excuse: the customer is always wrong. Cattle breeding ran into the same impasse as the attempts to breed superior varieties of rice. A sterility barrier stopped scientists from cross-breeding pure varieties of rice. Cross-breeding Indian cows with imported bulls produced higher milk yields in the short run and disastrous deterioration in subsequent generations. The only solution, according to the scientists in charge of the programmes, was to go on financing their schemes in the hope that something would work out at some dim and distant point in the indefinite future. Professional Indian breeders were capable of producing famous breeds that retained their key characteristics indefinitely. Like the cultivators, they knew their business best.

The one exception, the one significant missed opportunity, may have been irrigation. There was nothing like the same potential for irrigation in Bengal as there was in the Punjab. The Punjab, in the late nineteenth century, was the perfect environment for gravity-fed perennial canals. It had vast volumes of water in the five rivers, running to waste in the Indian Ocean, and vast areas of arid wasteland, flat plains sloping imperceptibly to the sea. With minor exceptions, the parts of Bengal that were suited to irrigation were already irrigated—in the main, from tanks. If the landlords and the state had maintained and extended this system, it would have made a difference. Instead, they let it run down. The zamindars were paralysed by the joint family, subinfeudation and land reform. The state was paralysed by the permanent settlement, the courts and the nationalist movement.

Multiple inheritance without the actual division of estates turned individual landowners into corporations of kinsmen that were riven by factions fighting out lawsuits in the courts and competing for the allegiance of estate officials and intermediate tenants in the villages. The outcome, at the highest level of estate management, was a kind of general paralysis of the insane. Subinfeudation, as chief tenants divided their holdings among subtenants, and the subtenants divided their holdings among sub-subtenants, created layers of intermediaries between the nominal owners and the actual tillers of the soil. By giving these intermediate tenants the three Fs—a fixed rent, security of tenure and the freedom to sell their holdings— the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 produced the worst of all possible worlds: parasitic zamindars without the right to intervene, powerful jotedars without the incentive to invest and ryots who were tenants at will.

Freezing the land revenue in 1783 bankrupted the Government of Bengal. As inflation reduced the land revenue to a tiny fraction of its real value, the government ran out of money to maintain the most elementary public services. The subsidies from the imperial government that stopped the administration from collapsing outright were bitterly resented by the more heavily taxed provinces. It was pointless drawing up policy wish lists in the secretariats when there was no agency in the rural areas to carry anything out. The separation of the judiciary from the executive was the final blow. It pitted the judges against the district officers. A zamindar or jotedar could hold up an official initiative forever by challenging it in court. Nationalist agitation diverted scarce resources into containing unrest, stopped politicians working effectively with officials in power-sharing ministries, and turned British members of the ICS into demoralised time-servers.

There was no popular opposition to weak landlords and weak officials. They suited the peasantry down to the ground. If there was one thing cultivators hated, it was an improving zamindar. They had no wish to be told what to grow or how to grow it. All they wanted was to be left alone. The visits of the rent collectors after each harvest were more than enough contact for them. Their aversion to the state was the same as their aversion to the estate. In the permanently settled areas there were no officials outside the towns. The peasants’ only face-to-face contact with the government were the police. The sound of a squad of policemen battering on his door was the most ominous sound a Bengali peasant ever heard. It was the prelude to beatings, extortion, feuds and trials.

The Great Depression, the subject of S.M. Mishra’s paper, exposed the weakness of the colonial state more vividly than any other test could do. After the price of crops fell by 50 per cent in five years, there was next to nothing that the provincial government or the Government of India could do to relieve the distress. The land revenue was so low, there was no possibility of reducing it by a margin large enough to give the peasant revenue payer significant relief. ‘Nation-building activities’ were already cut to the bone. Financial orthodoxy forced the Government of India to prop up the rupee (which overpriced exports) and avoid deficit spending (which would have accelerated recovery). If it had let the rupee float down or if it had printed money, the loss of confidence would have been so great, the currency and the government’s credit rating would have collapsed. The ‘home charges’ payable in the UK would have gone up just as the government’s ability to pay them was contracting, and it would have become impossible to borrow large sums at low interest to renew the existing public debt or raise funds for new public works. Just to make things a little worse, the industrial lobby demanded high protective tariffs, so the price of manufactured goods only fell half as far as the price of crops. Agricultural provinces like the Punjab protested bitterly against this shift in the terms of trade; but the mill owners funded Congress, industry was sexier than peasant farming, and tariff barriers against British imports were a public display of the nationalists’ anti-British credentials, so the peasants lost.

The only effective form of relief was the reduction of agrarian indebtedness—and even that had serious long-term drawbacks. Historians have assumed that if the peasants’ disposable incomes fell by more than a half, the real burden of their debts must have more than doubled. In fact, the peasantry defaulted on their debts en masse and the village moneylenders, accepting that their loans were irrecoverable, moved to the towns. Debt relief acts, exempting the debtors’ assets from seizure, stopped them getting back to business as usual during the Second World War. The alleged oppressors, the rural moneylenders belonging to occupationally specialised commercial castes, were wiped out; the alleged victims, the peasant debtors, evaded their obligations.

This expulsion of the most enterprising element in the rural population, the only element with capital to invest, was probably an important precondition of the urban economic growth after 1939. It was bad news, however, for poor peasants. Their existing loans were written off, a great thing under the circumstances; but they lost their best source of credit, and in many cases, their only source of credit. They were dependent, in the future, on loans from the kulaks. The professional moneylenders were not, generally speaking, keen on expropriating their debtors; they were happy keeping a peasant debtor in business, on his holding, taking their share of his harvest heap. As long as a debtor serviced his debt, they rarely foreclosed. The new peasant moneylenders, however, did want their poorer neighbours’ land—and they took it. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; the Debt Relief Acts were among them.

The last article in Tilling the Land is the final condemnation of the facile optimism of the critics of colonial indifference to the improvement of peasant farming. In ‘Hunger and agricultural technology in India 1955–1967’, Madhumita Saha retells the tale that no one now denies. Twenty years of Nehruvian socialism —of scientific research and economic planning, cooperatives and community development—produced a famine. The monster that could only exist under colonial rule stalked the land. No one, it seems, could eat Five-Year Plans. The shock was so great, it precipitated the technological turn in the Government of India’s agricultural strategy. The state, like Stolypin, put its wager on the strong: on the peasants who were capable of implementing the new Green Revolution package of high-yielding varieties, chemical fertilisers, tube wells and even tractors. You could have growth or you could have equity. But you could only have growth and equity in the pipe dreams of the intellectuals who would never have to put their prescriptions into practice. So Congress let the devil take the hindmost. The spin that Sen put on the Bengal famine—‘entitlements’—was good enough to persuade Swedish academicians to give him a Nobel Prize for his revolutionary discovery: rich people rarely starve. He was not, however, a prophet in his own country. Output was all that mattered as famine-preventive measure.

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The Marxist–nationalist consensus has proved remarkably resilient. Crucial lines of inquiry have run into the ground without weakening its grip. The search for the elusive village controllers, the tiny elite of kulaks who sucked all their poorer neighbours’ blood, failed to find them. Suspicion grew that they might not exist: that their families were too unstable, the village economies were too open and the poor were too mobile for permanent hierarchies of exploitation of this kind, in closed communities cut off from the outside world. The moneylenders, supposedly exploitation personified, proved to be far more efficient suppliers of rural credit than the idealised cooperatives. They could lend larger sums at lower interest to poorer debtors than any of their competitors, and they could lend to debtors who were such bad risks no one else would touch them, because their judgement of risk was so much better and their methods of recovery were so much cheaper. A bania was often ‘the one thrifty man’ in his village. His pool of savings insured his debtors against life crises and enabled them to make investments at much lower cost than if each of them had had to save for himself.

The victims, once so clear-cut, have suffered from the same kind of complication as the villains. The heroic peasant rebel has bitten the dust. Every successful revolt, every revolt that actually changed something, was led by rich peasant thugs with the cunning to sense that the forces for order were weak and the confidence to extract some advantage from their weakness. They demanded rights in land, tax breaks and subsidised inputs—and as long as they formed alliances with opportunist politicians in the towns, they got what they wanted. Poorer peasants followed them into battle because they admired them, not because they were coerced. They looked up to the big daddies as superior versions of themselves. They respected their financial success, their force of personality. They wanted to be like them; they wanted to be strong. The tribesmen, the chouchoux of the nationalists and Marxists reinventing themselves as Green historians, in their insatiable quest for fresh instances of exploitation and resistance, are no longer as fashionable as they once were. They are not really credible tree-huggers. Their carbon footprints may be low, but their taste for consumer goods—given half a chance—is depressingly strong. They hunt endangered species instead of preserving them, and their flocks have deforested as many hillsides as the ultimately evil timber contractors. At their most formidable, they have no need of bourgeois protectors. The sedentary cultivators they molest have more need of protection than they do. In Pakistan, the thought of having gun-toting Pathans for neighbours is not a particularly entrancing one.

So how has the old orthodoxy survived the steady erosion of so many of its favourite stereotypes? The reason, surely, is the ideological appeal of the nationalist–Marxist ideologues to their clients. The function of every historian is to reinforce the prejudices of his class and generation. If he succeeds, his work is applauded and rewarded. A ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ protects his assertions from criticism. If he fails, his work is disparaged or ignored. There are no consolation prizes for unfashionable dissidents who question the-cant-in-the-air. Patronage-hunting collectives like Subaltern Studies captured chair after chair in a tsunami of hype because the study of exploitation and resistance was exactly what the market, supposedly their bete noire, required. The poor and their predators became, in Arthur Daley’s immortal phrase, ‘a nice little earner’. Every academic, every sixty-eighter, every Guardian reader choosing his political outlook with the same care that a model chooses a Vuitton bag or a Hermes scarf, according to the same criterion—will it make me look good?—knew that the insistence on exploitation and resistance must be a vital, relevant truth. Rescuing all the victims in history from ‘the massive condescension of posterity’ became a mission, even if posterity was blithely unaware that the victims ever existed.

If the nationalist–Marxist orthodoxy swept into dominance on a wave of vaguely left-of-centre sentiment, it can only be destroyed by a counterrevolution in the zeitgeist. That revolution is already far advanced. The whole intellectual environment in which Indian history is written has been transformed. Inside the subcontinent, the explosion of the Indian economy since the demolition of the Permit Raj and the disillusion of the intelligentsia with the possibilities of state action since the rise of the BJP have changed the rules of engagement. Nehruvian socialism stopped holding out the hope of a social democratic nirvana half a century ago. The exploiters of yesterday have become the entrepreneurs of today: the sources of poverty have become the sources of wealth. The only feasible escape route from deprivation is enrichissez-vous. At the same time, the love affair with the peasantry and the proletariat is in full retreat. The success of Hindu supremacist parties has turned the sacrosanct ‘people’ into misled ‘populists’ who refuse to be rescued from themselves by more enlightened elites.

In the wider world, the collapse of communism has made Marxist historians an endangered species. The march of mind has moved on since the days when scholars kept dusty busts of Lenin in their studies and dusty copies of Das Kapital in their minds. Phrases that were once on everyone’s lips, phrases like ‘modes of production’ or ‘inherent contradictions’, look impossibly dated now. National history—the history of nation states and their homogenous subjects—is almost as deliquescent. The emergence of plural societies in Western Europe, as a result of mass migration, subverts the very idea of nationality. If assertive minorities are going to be integrated, historians will have to adapt their ‘national stories’ to the new diversity. They will have to jettison the misfits, the dead White males who have no appeal for the new rainbow coalitions.

Historians will take half a lifetime to absorb the implications of these sweeping changes. The profession is inherently conservative: it lags behind the disciplines that study the present. But newly joined recruits have sensed the shifts in the climate of opinion and are already tempering their research to the prevailing wind. When a Muslim mayor of London replaces the statue of Nelson on top of Nelson’s column with a statute of Nelson Mandela, and a Hindu vice chancellor at Cambridge renames Churchill College after the half-naked fakir who walked up the steps of a viceregal palace, ‘this island story’ will be definitively dead. You laugh? The ‘freedom struggle’ may be the next to go.