Book review: Suhita Sinha Roy,The Cultural Economy of Land: Rural Bengal,circa 1860–1940

The author produced the volume while preparing her PhD thesis (2006) on the agrarian society of Birbhum, but her daughter, Mallarika Sinha Roy, a sociologist, has now edited and published the text.

The book, as a study of a ‘cultural economy of land’, takes up multiple issues. To begin with, it sees agrarian history as a chronicle of efforts to control, organise and institutionalise the system of land rights, but very soon goes on to investigate issues such as the hierarchical status associated with possession of land, the nature of social and cultural relationships, the role of ideas and knowledge of land and the institutional political cultures and even the real and imagined worlds of literature. All these aspects are interwoven in the narrative of the district of Birbhum during the last 80 years or so of colonial rule. In course of developing this narrative, the author concentrates on the multi-layered pattern of ‘everyday-life’ of the rural world and those ‘small voices of history’ which are not usually caught in standard surveys of agrarian history.

The first chapter on the cultural economy of land in rural Birbhum is an interesting intellectual exercise. It begins with the story of the rise of the Sarkar family (from a relatively lower caste origin) as a formidable holder of zamindari in Surul village, in the late 18th and early nineteenth century. It established a profitable system of itself leasing and then leasing out strips of land, continuously gaining from the system under the Permanent Settlement. The upward movement of the community was, however, hampered by the success of the high-caste Brahmin zamindars (‘Rajas’) of Hetampur. There also came about a crisis in the economy of Birbhum through lack of agricultural investment, and the remarkable transformation in the pattani system with far-flung effects on share-cropping and agricultural labour.

The author probes the contested question of colonial knowledge vis-à-vis rural society, following works such as those of Bernard Cohn, treating them in the frame of three distinct periods. The first saw the confrontation of the new colonial masters and local Indian officials, such as mandals, regarding the actual facts relating to the land and the revenue system. The second period (from the middle of the nineteenth century) was mostly concerned with modalities of obtaining accurate surveys. The third period (from the late nineteenth century) saw the evolution of issues of governance and ultimately that of the passage of reformative agrarian laws, accompanying the rise of popular movements.

The third chapter takes up the changing character of the Santal resistance. The emerging solidarity between the peasants and the rural bhadraloks in some of these movements is studied keeping in view the heterogeneous character of both the bhadraloks and the peasants. In its final part, the chapter traces in detail the conflict between the groups led by the Communist Party and the Ganavani group under the leadership of Soumyendranath Tagore.

The issues of conformity, defiance and deviance in rural society are analysed in the context of everyday life as delineated in the theoretical literature of Michel de Certeau and Mikhail Bakhtin. In the beginning, there is a description of an average village home, its staple food and prohibited items, the formal and informal education of the inhabitants and the use of everyday language of communication. There follows an account of the spatial distribution of caste groups and genealogies of caste mobility. Then follow the social and cultural implications of the presence of Vaishnavism, along with the impact on caste mobility, and formation of sects and gender relations.

The final chapter of the book focuses on a study of creative literature of the renowned novelist Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay (1898–1971) with special reference to the ‘real and imagined world’ that he created about Birbhum. In the novelist’s writings, the district emerges as ‘a lived space, connected to various contemporary historical junctures’. The social story is that of the novelist himself as a member of a zamindar family irresistibly declining in resources and status. The personal story is that of a rural bhadralok with his metropolitan connections in Calcutta, dreaming of a literary career while pursuing other avenues of livelihood.

The ‘cultural economy of land’ is the thread that binds the book’s story of Birbhum. The admirable part of the exercise is that it extends the boundaries of agrarian history by focusing attention on a number of variables. The historical and archival data presented in the first chapter guide much of the theoretical discussion that follows in the rest of the book. Very often in the other parts of the book the ‘facts’ seem merely to be ‘brought in’ from the desire to explain an ‘idea’, ‘concept’ or ‘theory’ derived from other disciplines. Even the evolution of the idea of cultural economy of the land is not properly explained, nor is its point of departure from the idea of moral economy prevalent in the 1950s and the 1960s really clarified. The book often refers to the ‘small voice of history’, but what about the larger voices? The district of Birbhum had a devastating experience of the famine of 1770, with effects lasting for more than thirty years. It is not mentioned at all. The same is true for the limited information available about rural society after the Permanent Settlement, and even in the second half of the nineteenth century. The book gives a fair amount of attention to subaltern studies, but the shape of everyday life as well as ‘cultural history’ would still need an analysis of contemporary major socioeconomic trends, which are not covered adequately merely by use of terms like ‘cultural economy’.