Abstract
These essays are in honour of Professor Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, the recognized authority on the agrarian history of Bengal and a noted contributor to the economic life of the Advisasis of eastern India. The volumes consist of valuable essays on agrarian and tribal history by Dietmar Rothermund, Rajat Dutta, Shinkichi Taniguchi, David Ludden and Neeladri Bhattacharya; ‘other histories’ (nevertheless relevant) by his admirers and former research students: Shekhar Bandyopadhyay on Dalit–Muslim relations in Bengal (thoughtful), Gargi Chakravartty on the work of the Chittagong Nari Samiti during the Bengal famine of 1943–44 (interesting), Shubhra Chakrabarti on prominent Bengali merchants from Cantoobabu to Dwarkanth Tagore (an important survey), Sabyasachi Bhattacharya on the indigenous concept of poverty in colonial India (original and important material) and Utsa Patnaik on the drain of wealth to Britain (analytical and controversial); and Uma Dasgupta, Tanika Sarkar and Anuradha Roy on Rabindranath Tagore (illuminating essays on a major figure in rural reconstruction). In the limited scope of this review, however, I will concentrate on agrarian and peasant history, in line with the thrust of Professor Chaudhuri’s formidable research output on the peasants and the tribal cultivators of the old Bengal Presidency.
The voluminous work is well integrated despite the inclusion of histories other than agrarian, a virtue not always found among similar works in honour or memory of distinguished scholars. The value of the work is enhanced by a thoughtful piece on Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri’s historical research by his student Shubhra Chakrabarti and a chronological list of his writings (which only fills me with regret that, to date, there is no list of PhD theses supervised by BBC, a truly formidable affair). His long career in research began tentatively with an essay on the Bengal peasantry after the Permanent Settlement in the Jubily Number of the Bengal Past and Present of 1956 while he was still a research student; moved through ‘Growth of Commercial Agriculture in Bengal, 1757–1900’ (1964), ‘The Process of Depeasantization in Bengal and Bihar, 1885–1947’ (1975), the chapters on agriculture and agrarian relations in Eastern India in The Cambridge Economic History of India (1983) and ‘Peasantry as a Category in Indian History’ (2001); and culminated in the edited magnum opus on Peasant History of Late Pre-Colonial and Colonia India (2008). The last piece listed in this book is ‘Radical Adivasi Movements in Colonial Eastern India, 1856–1922: Origins, Ideology and Organization’ (2011), but his admirers expected more from him. It may be noted that he belonged to an exceptionally brilliant batch of students of the old Presidency College of Calcutta, which included Amartya Kumar Sen, Sukhomoy Chakravarti, Parthasarathi Gupta, Barun De, Sisir Kumar Das et al. He held his own in this formidable company by virtue of his meticulous scholarship and mastery of the sources. He was appointed as a teacher of the History Department of Calcutta University in1961, and he became known to generations of postgraduate students as a lucid and yet thorough-going teacher for every student in an assorted class. As a research guide, he holds a unique record, as would be evident from the contributions of his own PhD students in this and other works.
Agrarian history begins with the emergence of the peasants. Who were the peasants? That is logically the first question in historical studies of the peasantry. As Shubhra Chakrabarti points out, this is a question that engaged Binay Chaudhuri’s mind fundamentally, along with a couple of others: how did the emergence of the market in crops affect the peasants? And how did the growth of the peasant mode of agriculture, based on the production of crops for the market, affect the older groups of aborigines, forest tribes, shifting cultivators and pastoralists? Binay Chaudhuri’s own classic essay (1975) on the danger of the loss of peasant identity in eastern India implies that, if the production of crops for the market had earlier made possible the emergence of a peasant society, then, at a later date, when the market penetrated deeper into subsistence agriculture, a debt trap initiated what he calls ‘the process of depeasantization’. By that he seems to mean the lowering of status within the ranks of the peasants: owner-cultivators, tenants and sharecroppers. What he shows at work is a process of the depression of many peasants to the rank of sharecroppers on their own plots or leaseholds of plots owned by others, rather than absolute descent into the class of agricultural workers. Dietmar Rothmund points out the general agreement of scholars, including Professor Chaudhuri himself, that ‘tenants and share-croppers are also peasants’, but not, by implication, the landless labourers. By contrast, as Binay Chaudhuri has it, the Adivasis faced a greater threat from the expansion of the peasant mode of production, a distinction arising from his marking out of ‘Peasant Insurgency’ from ‘Tribal Revolt’.
The festschrift itself throws important light on these agrarian processes. Shinkichi Taniguchi’s important essay titled ‘Rethinking the Bengal Presidency in History’ dwells on a fundamental shift in history: from shifting slash-and-burn cultivation (jhum) under the communal landownership of the tribe to settled agriculture under a system of small individual peasant holdings. The system made possible a breakthrough to transplanted wet rice cultivation with iron ploughs and drought animals. The process was driven by the increase of population—an increase from around 21 or 22 million in 1800 to 37 million in 1881 pushed the frontiers of agriculture in Bengal.
This was a period of steady expansion of the peasant societies on many border lands, in Bengal and beyond. David Ludden’s study of Sylhet during the 1780s is an interesting exploration of how Bengali peasants pushed the Khasi, Garo and other tribal jhum cultivators on the Bengal–Assam border up into the hills. The Khasi dwellers on the plains were obliged to withdraw from the lowlands by the more numerous Bengalis. This was not an isolated instance; similar processes were at work in many other places.
To take another instance, the Punjab canal colonies engineered by the British displaced the earlier nomadic herdsmen and brought in the sturdy peasants of the settled tracts of Punjab. Neeladri Bhattacharya’s solidly researched essay on the canal colonies—which were earlier dry pastoral highlands inhabited by nomadic tribesmen alone—shows the mixed results of this colonial enterprise. The nomads became aliens on their own grazing lands, which became ploughed fields planted with crops. Their response was to burn the crops, but over time, the agricultural colonists consolidated their hold. Eventually, in 1907, the immigrant peasants themselves revolted against the high canal water rates, and the tract did not quite become the peaceful garden expected by the Punjab school of administrators, meant as it was to produce an assured supply of loyal soldiers for the British Indian army.
The agrarian processes described by Shinkichi Taniguchi, David Ludden and Neeladri Bhattacharya helped reproduce in colonial India one of the largest peasant societies of the world. There is a diversity of views on whether this peasant society formed an egalitarian community of small cultivators or a highly differentiated peasantry. Taniguchi and Rothermund, referring to this debate, note that Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, while believing in the numerical predominance of small peasant producers, has nevertheless continuously pointed out the existence of some rich peasants in both precolonial and colonial Bengal. This makes sense in view of his belief in the process of depeasantization in the colonial period.
It is now well understood that this enormous peasant society was based on a deep penetration of the market in the countryside in the eighteenth century and earlier. Thanks to the published researches of C. A. Bayly, Kumkum Chatterjee and others, we know of the existence of an extensive and well-connected indigenous inland trade in country produce and manufacturers. Rajat Datta, in his contribution to this volume, has added detailed and useful information about the commercialization and monetization of rural Bengal in the eighteenth century. More needs to be done on rural credit flows and long-distance inland credit transfers: there are glimmerings of this in his insight into the extensive external relations (financial, monetary and commercial) of the far-from-self-sufficient villages. These complex entities formed points in a dense network of aratdars (wholesale grain traders and commission agents) and sarrafs (money changers), who are noted by him as residents in the countryside. His focus on the village is a welcome addition to the literature. What needs to be added to this is that the network was linked to overland caravans and seagoing vessels serviced by hundi bankers and wholesale merchants (arhatiyas) in country produce and manufacturers. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw them operating from money markets in Dacca, Murshidabad and (later) Calcutta in the east coast region; Patna, Banaras, Agra, Lucknow, Delhi, Lahore and entrepots further north; and Sironj, Ahmedabad, Surat and (later) Bombay in the west coast region (Ashin Das Gupta, Christopher Bayly, Lakshmi Subramaniam, Kumkum Chatterjee, Stephen Dale and others). It is my impression that these credit-transfer (hundi) networks suffered from interruptions caused by Mughal decline and English aggrandizement. Interestingly, however, the evidence gathered by Rajat Datta seems to suggest sustained and increasing density of the networks at the lower levels in late eighteenth-century rural Bengal. Whatever be the truth (Rajat Datta sides with C. A. Bayly and against Kumkum Chatterjee on this point without referring to either of them), his rural market-density theme undoubtedly links these agrarian and other histories to a wider world system narrative.
Overall, the ‘essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri’ seem to me to reveal the vast distance agrarian and other related histories have traversed since his first essay in 1956. I should mention, however, that Rajat Datta, in his contribution entitled ‘Towards an Economic History for Bengal in the Eighteenth Century’, appears to have a contrary view of the matter. The title of his paper ‘emphasizes’, in his own words, ‘the word for [italics his] instead of what would be more commonly expected “of” ….’ Confronted by this unusual title, the editors have remarked: ‘Rajat Datta … directs attention to the inadequacy of earlier scholarship regarding the village in eighteenth century Bengal’. This is a cautious comment. The author himself is more forthright:
Much of what passes as the history of the agrarian economy is at best a history of tenurial relations or at worst a history of land-revenue administration …. Therefore, what is often characterized as economic history, and this is of particular applicability to eighteenth-century Bengal, is revenue history, or at best a history of changes in the structure of landed property between 1765–1793.
As an example, he cites N. K. Sinha’s The Economic History of Bengal, volume 2 (1965). There are, however, two other volumes, 1 and 3, in Sinha’s ‘economic history’, and perhaps the perusal of the whole work may induce Datta to take a more favourable view of the work. The reason why he calls his essay a contri-bution for, rather than of, the economic history of Bengal, is that the latter does not exist in his view, his effort being the first in this direction. Presumably, B. B. Chaudhuri is exempt from this comprehensive judgement.
In conclusion, we may note that Indian society figures numerically as one of the three largest peasant societies of the modern world, the other two being China and Russia. It is a matter of debate whether the Indian peasantry was a highly differentiated class in economic terms, but what is not in doubt is its peculiar fragmentation on account of the ubiquity of caste and community in its constitution. This is a point that stands out clearly from the ‘Other Histories’ (especially Sekhar Bandopadhyay’s essay) appended to the ‘Agrarian’ history in this book. This differentiates India’s history from those of China and Russia, despite the fact that all three are counted as backward societies in the colonial era. The essays for B. B. Chaudhuri have gained much from this binding together of agrarian and other essays.