Agricultural Production and Indian History.
Edited by David Ludden
Preface to second edition.
13 September 2004 (version sent to OUP)
NEW TITLE:
Agricultural Production, South Asian History, and Development Studies
Contemporary trends have produced a distinctly new setting for the second edition of
Agricultural Production and Indian History, which now merits a new title to highlight India’s
South Asian context and the progressive merger of agrarian history and development studies. We
can now see the twentieth century more clearly as history. The 1980s now appear as a watershed
decade, dividing our present-day from earlier times.1 The age of national independence is now
firmly ensconced in the history of modernity, where liberalization and globalization appear as
recent trends propelled by market forces, interests, ideas, technologies, and conflicts that arrived
in the nineteenth century, which we can embrace loosely but usefully by the term “capitalism.”2
Until the 1980s, national governments endeavored to lead economic development so as to fortify
independence and sovereignty by guiding, constraining, and promoting capitalism in the national
interest. Since then, however, most politicians have come to believe and most students have
learned in school that nations can only develop successfully by letting markets lead the way and
joining the world of free market competition.
In this new context, agricultural production is not the subject it was twenty years ago.
Farm produce provides an ever-diminishing proportion of national income, reducing academic
interest. Planners no longer aspire to organize production, and academic interest has turned away
from production to study wealth and poverty.3 Nehru’s agenda has lost its former centrality, and
so has influence the influence of national parties. Collections of regional parties now form Indian
governments; and this, combined with the intellectual impact of liberalization and globalization,
has dissolved the cohesiveness of national debates about economic development. The brains of
global capitalism seem to have all the answers and national planning seems a passé modernist
elite project. Progress appears endlessly fragmented among groups defined by gender, race,
religion, region, caste, and ethnicity, which compete for national resources amidst a rapid decline
in the state’s capacity to determine economic outcomes. Thus, agricultural production no longer
seems the core of the nation’s political economy, as it did in Nehru’s day; indeed, the national
economy seems to have no centre at all.
History is a capacious bridge among disciplines that necessarily change with the times.
Agrarian history has found one new productive niche in environmental studies, where scholars
have shifted research agendas toward the exploration of entanglements among ecology, states,
1
Chandra et al 2000. Ludden 2002a. Martinussen 1999.
2
Ludden Editor 2004.
3
Mahbubul Haq Human Development Centre. 1999. Singh, I. 1990.
markets, and social life.4 The social sciences of development increasingly use historical methods
and research in agrarian history helps to reorient studies of development amidst changing times.
In this light, we can now read the essays reprinted here as case studies in uneven development.5
They all consider how agriculture in South Asia came to include the spatial and social disparities
that typify capitalism.
These essays also indicate how ideas that people use to explain economic disparities
infest policies that provoked persistent disparities among regions, localities, and groups. Under
British rule, policy makers and analysts embraced the idea that racial, ethnic, and cultural
differences explain disparities in wealth and power. Such ideas became unacceptable under
national regimes, which instead embraced the idea that the kind of capitalism introduced under
British rule produced economic backwardness in South Asia. In response, national plans guided
state investments in development; land reforms and other redistributive programs sought to ease
disparities and stimulate progress. Such strategies became unacceptable under liberalization and
globalization, which spread the idea that only markets generate prosperity. Today, economic
disparities appear mostly in the guise of excess, extreme poverty, which appears to result from
failures to foster economic growth sufficient to bring all people and places into the convergent
upward trajectory of wealth promised by neo-classical economics.6
Six essays in this book (by Stokes, Kaiwar, Satyanarayana, Bose, Raghavan, and Bates)
consider economic inequality as a spatial phenomenon. They help to explain uneven growth in
its horizontal, spatial dimension. Patterns of uneven development discussed in these chapters
persist today. The Indo-Gangetic pattern that Eric Stokes describes now spans international
borders to include Rajasthan, Haryana, and Punjab in India and Pakistan in the relatively wealthy
west, and Bihar, Orissa, Northeast India, and Bangladesh in the much poorer east. Rural regions
filled only with farms remain “backward” compared to “advanced” regions filled with urbanism,
factories, and services. In this respect, South India is today’s analogue of the nineteenth century
western Gangetic growth zone.7 In much of the south, growth linkages among farms, industry,
village, town and city enable financiers to move among opportunities in various sectors.8 Intense
agro-industrial linkages also characterize Gujarat.9 The poorest farm regions lack such linkages.
The regional poverty that Vasant Kaiwar describes now spans the dry Deccan from Marathwada
east across Telengana and south across Rayalaseema, where what he calls “agrarian crisis” has
lasted over a century. In these regions, farmers burdened with huge debts and facing crop failure,
foreclosure, and destitution have killed themselves in the hundreds since 1997, when booming
4
Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan. Editors. 2000. Buchy 1996. Rangarajan 1996. Singh, D. 1996.
Sivaramakrishnan 1999.
5
Bhalla 1992. Jenkins 1987. Smith 1991. Sundaram 1986.
6
World Bank 2001.
7
World Bank Development Policy Review for India: website.
8
Chari 2004, Harriss-White 1996, 2003. Parthasarathi DATE. Ludden 2004, 1996.
9
Breman 1996, 1993. Breman, Das, Agarwal and Datta. 2000. Breman, Shah, Rutten and Streefkert.
2002
2
tur dal prices crashed and drought, flood, and insect hordes followed. Suicidal farmers typically
poison themselves with pesticide, symbolic of green revolution that left them behind.10
Spatial disparities in economic development leave some regions consistently worse off
than others. We can use comparative historical methods to explore spatial divergence in
economic trends that cause spatial disparities. Stokes and Kaiwar employ the most popular
method, which treats areas independently. A less popular but important method treats each area
contextually, inside a system of resource allocation. Independent and contextual comparisons
yield explanatory problems that irritate but enrich one another. For instance, wealth disparities
between the richest and poorest countries in the world increased over six-fold between 1870 and
1985, and are still increasing.11 Comparing countries independently indicates that rich countries
succeed in generating more wealth for citizens; thus, differential rates of national development
success become the explanatory problem. But contextual comparisons indicate that a global
system of resource allocation has long benefited rich countries disproportionately; thus, the
explanatory problem becomes how this system came into being and where it is heading. 12
Together, these two methods generate the interesting idea that increasing wealth also increases
inequality. Recent research indicates that contemporary trends in economic growth and
inequality began with the onset of nineteenth century industrial capitalism, which simultaneously
enriched industrial economies and installed a modern system of global resource allocation.13
Spatial disparities in modern South Asia deserve much more attention. History indicates
they have serious political impact. Today’s tendency in policy circles to give markets freer reign
seems likely to aggravate spatial disparities, because markets tend to encourage investors to
concentrate assets in places where dividends promise to be fulsome and secure.14 Capital
eschews conditions of high risk that promise low returns, which typify poor places, where, as
Kaiwar argues,15 local modes of using capital also undermine local accumulation. State policies
and social decisions that follow market signals thus tend to encourage a clustering of capital
accumulation around profitable sites where capital is already accumulating.16 Systems of
resource allocation organized by states, business, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
can thus effectively discriminate spatially, without anyone intending to do so, by simply
following market signals, in a manner that parallels and often overlaps patterns of discrimination
based on ethnicity, class, race, caste, and gender.
The history of Indo-Gangetic uneven development includes disparately endowed regions
and also systemic spatial discrimination in recourse allocation. In the nineteenth century, Punjab
became a major site for state investments in agriculture.17 Imperial investments in infrastructure
10
Shiva 2000.
11
Pritchett 1995. UNDP 1998.
12
Tabb 2002
13
Gunder Franke 1998. Ludden 2002b.
14
See Dilip Mookherjee, “Markets versus State: A Sterile Controversy,” in Basu et al 2003, pp.110-143.
15
See also Guha 1993. Kaiwar 1993.
16
Dreze and Sen 1998. Subrahmanian 2003.
17
Islam, MM. 1997
3
clustered in west, and when planted in the east, favoured Calcutta and plantations. Private
investment followed the same pattern. Investors discriminated systemically in favour of western
provinces, Calcutta, and plantations, against the east, rural lowlands, and tribal mountains. The
impact is still with us. It began to appear in 1905, when the fact that investors ignored the far east
of British India became public knowledge in the Legislative Assembly of Eastern Bengal and
Assam (1905-11), where political support for the province centred in Dhaka, facing opposition
centred in Calcutta. In 1943-44, famine deaths in rural Bengal derived partly from public and
private efforts to secure Calcutta.18 Between 1905 and 1944, private capital drained steadily from
east to west Bengal, following bhadralok interests that moved wealth from eastern lowlands to
Calcutta; while in the east, peasants used capital for basic needs, including rental payments to
bhadralok landlords and interest payments to moneylenders to secure peasant property and
family survival. The pursuit of security also led peasants out of eastern Bengal into Assam,
where Bengali Muslims opened agricultural frontiers and entered Assam politics.19 In 1947,
Pakistan yoked together extremes of Indo-Gangetic spatial inequality. Partition refugees in India
met much better treatment in the west, where they became part of the mainstream, while in the
east, they languished and radicalised the margins.20 By 1954, gross inequalities between East and
West Pakistan effectively killed the “two nation theory.”21
After 1947, the spatial history of British India22 generated novel national territories that
obscured long-term, interconnected trends in spatial disparity. Uneven development in the IndoGangetic basin dropped out of sight when its extremities fell into Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Inside each new nation of South Asia, places remote from the heartland faced continuing spatial
discrimination, above all, mountain regions. Northeast India and Chittagong Hill Tracts -- like
mountain regions in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Burma23 -- still pose political problems
for national integration. Alienation, separatism, rebellion, and meagre state investments in
development still characterize mountain ranges and valleys formerly in the far east of British
India.24 By contrast, big cities from Rangoon to Karachi and Kabul represent urban histories of
spatial privilege.25 Urban-rural economic disparities are still increasing, now in fact more rapidly
than ever,26 and they seem to be separating urban and rural economic interests so as to reinforce
opposing political preferences for globalisation and free-market liberalization in big cities and
for state investment, subsidies, and safety nets in the countryside. India’s 2004 Lok Sabha
18
Sen 1981.
19
Doulah 2003.
20
Ashok Gupta et al, “East is East; West is West,” in Jasodhara Bagchi, and Subhoranjan Dasgupta.
Editors. The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India. Kolkata: Stree, 2003,
pp.235-52.
21
Kamal 1989. Islam, S. Editor. 1997.
22
Goswami 2004.
23
Tucker 2001.
24
Adnan 2004. Baruah 2005, 1999.
25
Lipton 1976.
26
Urban-rural disparities increased more rapidly in Bangladesh in the 1990s than ever before. Khan and
Sen 2001, p.15. For urbanization trend comparisons, see Ludden 1999, pp.217-220
4
elections indicate this kind of urban-rural division sharpened in Andhra Pradesh under Chandra
Babu Naidu, who became a golden boy of globalisation and then lost power to the force of rural
discontent. Reflecting the policy impact of the 2004 rural political upsurge, the new Karnataka
state budget has allocated much more funding for agrarian debt relief and crop insurance.27 A
very different kind of rural upsurge is now responding to extreme spatial disparities in Nepal,
where Maoists are in part waging a mountain war against the concentration of national wealth
and power in Kathmandu.28
Big investments in the physical infrastructure of development have dramatic spatial
affects. Calculating net benefits has long preoccupied scholars, who typically use cost-benefit
analysis to hold investors accountable to standards of market efficiency, utilitarian benefit, and
social justice. Today, the costs of major state water works, road projects, and such are more
politically charged than ever, and popular movements routinely rally in opposition.29 Ian Stone
lays out a cost-benefit account that vindicates one big nineteenth century irrigation project, and
Stone concludes that these canals brought uneven development, “unequal gains, rather than gains
and losses.”(p.143) Other scholars have found similar patterns of unequal yet overall positive
gains at the local level in short-term before-and-after studies of new irrigation30 and in aggregate
longitudinal studies of economic development in India since Independence.31 That economic
development always delivers mixed results now seems standard wisdom.
Yet we might conceptualise – though we cannot calibrate precisely – an empirical scale
of “unequal gains.” It might indicate, at the low end, benign discrimination that merely follows
existing lines of inequality,32 and at the high end, extreme additional inequity. Development
programs seem in general to follow existing inequality, but they can exaggerate, distort, or
ameliorate established patterns, and some investors in development have clearly delivered severe
losses to poor, politically weak groups in marginal places and huge benefits to richer, more
powerful groups in privileged places. Union Carbide’s Bhopal disaster is the worst case of severe
“unequal gains” imposed by the private sector.33 Big dams would certainly dominate the list of
public sector entries at the punitive end of our inequality scale. Nevertheless, corporations rarely
provide compensation for their actions, and cost-benefit analysts can still mount compelling
arguments for huge hydraulic projects, which remain popular in the highest echelons. 34
A long-term view of agrarian history shows why big dams are increasingly inequitable
and persistently popular with government. Since the early days of farming in South Asia, most
27
Deshpande 2004
28
Blaike, Cameron, and Seddon 1980.
29
Adnan, Narrett, Alam, and Brustinow 1992. Baviskar 1995. Clark, Fox, and Treakle 2003.
30
Epstein 1961
31
I.Singh 1990.
32
As portrayed for instance by Alice and Daniel Thorner in their famous essay, “The Weak and the
Strong on the Sarda Canal.” In Daniel and Alice Thorner, Land and Labour in India. Bombay: Asia
Publishing House, 1962, pp.14-20.
33
Chouhan 1994.
34
The World Bank has now restarted lending for big dam projects in India. See the Global Policy Forum
website: http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/bwi-wto/wbank/2004/0422dam.htm
5
additional farm output has derived from agricultural expansion, that is, from the creation of new
farmland, which brings new land under the plough or crops land more often. Increasing net farm
productivity per acre became a major source of new output only after 1960. Building dams,
canals, and related transport and energy infrastructure has preoccupied states in South Asia for so
long because irrigation increases farm acreage and productivity, while dams can also produce
electricity. Since 1880, acreage and cash value productivity has increased rapidly where big
irrigation projects have opened dry land to new cultivation, in Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab, Sind,
Gujarat, and Karnataka. All this strengthens the argument for big irrigation and hydropower
projects, which have become more massive, productive, unwieldy, expensive, debatable, and
fraught with punitive impact on mountain habitats.
Mountain regions are old agrarian frontiers whose inhabitants have long faced severely
inequitable incorporation into dominant lowland states, societies, and economies, as Crispin
Bates indicates in his essay in this volume.35 Modern development regimes have tended broadly
to disadvantage native peoples in the mountains, where rapid agricultural expansion has come
along with increasing settler immigration from the lowlands. From 1880 to 1980, the highest
rates of increase in the proportion of farmland to total area in India appeared in Tripura (903%),
Sikkim (698%), Nagaland (405%), Assam (333%), Rajasthan (326%), Mizoram (288%),
Arunachal Pradesh (271%), and Orissa (206%).36 During this period, the native tribal population
in Tripura shrank from over 50% to under 30%.37 Population density in the Chittagong Hill
Tracts increased from 4 to 388 persons per square kilometre; and then, in the early 1960s the
Karnaphuli Multipurpose Project raised the Kaptai Lake behind the Karnaphuli Dam -- now a
tourist site generating substantial electricity for urban Bangladesh – which submerged 400 square
miles and 54,000 acres of farms in the mountains, forcing 100,000 Chakmas off their land. 38
Likewise, today, the Government of India’s Sardar Sarovar Project pursues national benefits by
punishing mountain peoples in Madhya Pradesh, forcing thousands off ancestral land above the
Narmada River, destroying homes, towns, livelihoods, and heritage, to benefit lowland farmers
and urbanites in Gujarat.39 Under contemporary conditions, it seems impossible to execute large
dam projects without aggravating spatial inequity.
Canals that Stone considers came into being during the age of infrastructure investment
that laid the physical frame for modern economies in South Asia, between 1857 and 1914. New
technologies, controlling the mobility of water, labour, capital, people, ideas, information, and
products -- on a scale never known before -- launched the modern age of agrarian globalisation
by incorporating villagers across South Asia into the world market economy. During the early
adolescence of industrialism, the expansive acceleration of the time/space of capitalism began to
35
Ludden 1999.
36
Low figures from 103% to 122% appear in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and
Kerala. Calculated from data on the internet produced for J.F.Richards and E.P.Flint (R.C.Daniels,
editor), Historic Land Use and Carbon Estimates for South and Southeast Asia, 1880-1980, Carbon
Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Experimental Sciences
Division, Publication No. 4174.
37
See Meenakshi Sen, “Tripura: The Aftermath,” in Bagchi and Dasgupta 2003, pp.
38
Adnan 2004, pp. 23, 44.
39
Baviskar 1995. A. Roy 2004. Talati and Shah 2004. Ranade and Kumar 2004.
6
cover the globe with commodity production. B.B.Chaudhuri and A Satyanarayana track this
process in two regions of British India. Agrarian commodities had travelled far and wide for
centuries, but in the steam age, commodity crops came to define rural space, as a new transport
system produced new urban spaces and sites of industry and mining. Spatial specialization
multiplied interactively across the globe, as commercialism permeated farm life. This was a
once-and-for-all process: there is turning back. It was, moreover, a global process: the time/space
of capitalism made South Asia a new kind of region in a new kind of world.
Uneven development in the space/time of capitalism changed the spatial identity of
agrarian environments; but spaces defined by commodities were not themselves inventions of the
steam age. In eighteenth century Bengal, coins had marked commercial geographies for East
India Company observers. In 1787, the Rupees in Rangpur were mostly French Arcots from
Pondichery and Cooch Behar, because Rangpur did heavy trade with Chandranagore and Cooch
Behar. English Arcot Rupees prevailed in Mymensingh, because Mymensingh merchants sold
loads of rice in Calcutta. Specific coins also attached to individual commodities in specific
places: in Dinajpur, merchants used Sonaut Rupees to buy rice and other grains, but they used
French and English Arcots to buy ghee and oil, and they used only French Arcots to buy hemp
and gunny. Long-distance connections were part of local economies in Bengal, where metal
coins came mostly from Arcot and Pondichery,40 and cowry shells that provided the cheapest
coins everywhere and the only coins in Sylhet came from the Maldives.41
The composition of agrarian space changed in the steam age when commodity chains
gave a large number of local products geographically expansive identities. Opium, jute, and
indigo are prime examples of nineteenth century Bengal farm products generated by world
markets where the ups and downs of prices impinged sharply on local experience in some locales
but not others. Such uneven spatial and temporal effects indicate that narrating a general history
of commodity production or analyzing the general effect of commercialization ignores spatial
specialization and crop-specific price movements across seasons and years that constitute the real
space/time of capitalism. By 1900, commodity production defined South Asia as a region of the
world economy, defined regions in South Asia, and defined localities in regions. Ceylon,
Malaysia, Assam, Fiji and Mauritius were for plantations. Ceylon first produced coffee; then tea,
rubber, cocoanut, and cinchona. Assam was tea country. Ceylon and Assam replaced China as
top suppliers of English tea. Fiji and Mauritius meant sugar plantations. Labour supplies posed
the major constraint for plantation capitalists who found the solution in eventually permanent
indentured labour migration from labour export specialty areas in Bihar, Bengal, and southern
Tamil districts.
Sites of commodity production demanded more commodities. Circuits of moving
commodities linked commodity producers and consumers to one another in spaces that surpass
the spatial imagination of national history. Modern Indian history has circulated in the space/time
of capitalism, in the manner of globalization today, for over a century. Far-flung plantations in
Malaysia, Fiji, Mauritius and the West Indies, as well as cities and farms in Burma and Africa
developed circuits of commodity production and capital accumulation anchored in India. Tamil
Chettiyars became local financiers on the rice frontier in Burma’s Irrawaddy River delta, which
40
41
Mitra 1991, pp.70-90.
Ludden 2003.
7
generated huge exports of rice for world consumers, including Indian cities that needed Burma
rice so much that when Japan’s conquest of Burma cut rice exports, it precipitated the 1943-4
Bengal famine. In 1930, Indians composed almost half Rangoon’s population. In East and South
Africa, Gujarati merchants and workers arriving from Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras provided
labour and capital for railways and import-export dependent urbanism. The Indian diaspora was
well underway a century ago: between 1896 and 1928, seventy-five percent of emigrants from
Indian ports went to Ceylon and Malaya; ten percent, to Africa; nine percent, to the Caribbean;
and the remaining six percent, to Fiji and Mauritius.
By 1914, most goods arriving by train in South Asia port cities -- the most economically
privileged places in British India -- left the ports by ship. Though coal, coke, and ores came from
mines, and tea came from plantations, most goods -- cotton, wheat, rice, oilseeds, jute, gunny
bags, hides and skins, and wool -- came from farms near the railway lines that defined the spatial
architecture of commodity space in South Asia. Most cotton came to Bombay from Maharashtra.
All tea came to Calcutta and Colombo from British-owned plantations in Assam, Darjeeling, and
hills around Kandy. Most export rice came to Rangoon. Wheat came primarily from fields under
state irrigation in Punjab (60%) and western Uttar Pradesh (26%). Oilseeds came to Bombay
from Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra. Coal, coke, and ores came from
mines around Jharkhand into Calcutta and Bombay, where they stoked local industry. Eastern
Bengal gave the world jute, which went mostly to Scotland, at first, but then to Calcutta, where
jute cloth output had surpassed Dundee by 1908.
By 1914, industry had taken off in British India and manufactured goods comprised
twenty percent of Indian exports, valued at ten percent of national income, figures never since
surpassed. In 1914, India was the world's fourth largest cotton textile producer. Cotton mills
numbered 271 and employed 260,000 people, 42% in Bombay city, 26% elsewhere in Bombay
Presidency (mostly Nagpur), and 32% elsewhere in British India -- all at major railway junctures.
Coal, iron, steel, jute and other industries likewise produced specialized regional concentrations
of heavy industry, around Bombay, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Kanpur, Calcutta, Jamshedpur, and
Madras. Between 1854 and 1914, jute mills around Calcutta multiplied from 1 to 64; the number
of looms and scale of employment increased twice as fast.
Early in the twentieth century -- a hundred years ago -- two sets of historical processes
that continue to animate economic development in South Asia today were well entrenched in the
agrarian countryside. They seem to contradict one another, but do not: they are two faces of
uneven development in the time/space of capitalism. On the one hand, spatial differentiation and
integration produced a diverse, unified national economy, physically, institutionally, and
ideologically, the geographical basis for national identity, national interest, and national politics.
On the other hand, a profusion of commodity chains, flows, circuits, specializations, and
interdependencies merged into the global economy as a collection of self-interested regional and
local domains. A.Satyanarayana shows how these two processes interacted in Andhra Pradesh,
where nature’s geography and state investments in irrigation articulated the space/time of
capitalism quite differently in the interior and on the coast. He indicates how India’s internal and
external markets sank different kinds of local roots amidst India’s advancing industrialization.
In spaces of uneven development, social inequality maps unequal economic opportunities
and dividends; and the vertical hierarchy of social inequality takes a particular local and regional
form inside each horizontally differentiated geographical space. The last four chapters in this
book consider overlapping elements that generate uneven development in social space. Crispin
8
Bates and Sugata Bose explicitly map spatial differences, respectively in Central India and
British Bengal. Bates considers the incorporation of mountain people in Madhya Pradesh into
lowland agrarian power structures described by T.C.A. Raghavan. Shahid Amin considers sugar
production -- which variously occupied agrarian space in the Americas, South Asia, and
Southeast Asia -- in the specific context of Gorakhpur, in eastern UP, near Bihar. These chapters
indicate how spatial forms of social power particularize uneven development geographically.
If any South Asian country consisted of only one kind of society, it would be much easier
to understand the agrarian history of economic development. If policy-makers did not have to
cope with spatially specific patterns of inequality -- which now constitute electoral constituencies
-- policy could more easily apply theories of efficiency and justice. But the reality of South Asia
is that localities and regions have their own ways of working. Places have their own histories of
incorporation into states, empires, and the nation. The nation’s myriad local legacies of social
authority and legal rights have always made their impact on political systems, but now more than
ever, through elections. Whether we think it accurate to call elections “democratic,” in fact,
depends largely on how we interpret the meaning of votes cast in constituencies imbued with
histories of local power like those described in our last four chapters.
These chapters all consider regions where the British instituted landlord property, which
made the verticality of uneven development especially deep and complex, in Uttar Pradesh, West
Bengal, Bangladesh, and Madhya Pradesh. Adding Bihar would fill out the list of regions where
land rights have been most contentious.42 Scholars, policy-makers, and politicians have long
considered South Asian landlordism and its attendant institutions and attitudes as obstacles to
development.43 These chapters turn our mind, however, to the intricacy of agrarian inequality,
which includes property rights; but also includes social power in markets for produce, land,
labour, and credit; includes direct political influence, like that of sugar capitalists and landlords;
and includes culturally embedded discrimination by caste, ethnicity, and gender. Landlordism is
a visible instrument of power that by virtue of its British legal constitution became amenable to
nationalist critique and legal reform. By the 1980s, however, land reform had run its course,44
and by then, scholars had focused research on other instruments of power, which underlay,
survived, and blunted land reforms, and which organized production in regions where the British
instituted Ryotwari peasant property. The resulting academic debates (which Sugata Bose refers
to in his chapter) have hinged on precise descriptions of everyday social controls over the means
of agricultural production in specific areas.45 Interlinked markets46 imbued with social power and
cultural meaning thus entered the study of agrarian political economy; they appears prominently
in chapters by Shahid Amin, Sugata Bose, and Crispin Bates.
42
On Bihar, see Jannuzi 1974, 1977. On Bengal, see Hashmi 1994. On UP, see Reeves 1991.
43
Neale 1969. Boyce 1987. Rogaly, Harriss-White, and Bose, Editors 1999. In this volume, see Eric
Stokes; Introduction (p.14) for William Moreland’s complaint in 1920 about unproductive UP
landlords; and Shahid Amin’s account (pp.239-44) of early proposals for UP land reform by sugar
capitalists in the 1930s.
44
Herring 1983. Sobhan 1993a.
45
For ensuring debates see Robert 1983, Washbrook 1993, Guha 1993, Kaiwar 1993.
46
Rudra 1984,1992.
9
Since the 1980s, digging beneath formalities of property rights into deeper constituents of
inequality has preoccupied historians.47 Gender has emerged as a fundamental axis of uneven
development.48 A gender lens reveals intractable structures of inequality. Extreme discrimination
against females -- depicted vividly by excess female child mortality -- distinguishes the lowlands
of northern South Asia, including Gujarat, Rajasthan, Pakistan and Bangladesh.49 In South Asia
and also internationally, spatial differences in the Gender Development Index do not follow
patterns of wealth and poverty. Gender disparities are in fact most severe in some of South
Asia’s richer states, while gender equity is relatively high in some very poor northeast mountain
states. Economic growth thus does not by itself reduce gender inequity.50 Property rights seem to
be the best guarantor of female benefits during economic development. Where women have more
secure property rights, other measures of gender equity generally improve. 51 Gender-insensitive
policies of social asset redistribution -- such as land reform -- may actually aggravate gender
inequity, even in Kerala,52 the Indian state most famous for equitable economic development,
where all “achievements were possible because of mass literacy and because traditional patterns
of gender, caste, and class dominance were transformed.”53
Other intractable vertical inequalities that seldom attract attention also lurk inside spatial
disparities in South Asia. For example, monsoons discriminate against some regions, and against
people in the vulnerable locations, typically poor, low status, and politically marginal people.
Monsoons in 2004 showed that drought and flood can simultaneously savage regions of
perennial water scarcity and excess, disadvantaged by monsoons even in normal years.
Manipulating nature to benefit one place can also make matters worse in others. In Bangladesh,
the Buriganga River is now washing away one village near Dhaka because a private brick kiln
built across the river, encroaching on the riverbed, has forced the river to tear at the opposite
shore, destroying villagers’ ancestral property. On a vastly larger scale, the Government of India
now plans a massive river link project to channel water from northeast regions of water-excess to
dry Deccan regions of water-scarcity, which would deprive people in Bangladesh of water they
need to survive. Upstream advantage is a literally vertical relation of power built into territorial
systems of control over nature.
India’s 2004 Lok Sabha elections indicate the public is today more insistent that policymakers take seriously everyday economic problems. Historical research can play a constructive
role toward this end by explaining present-day reality as a process embedded in temporal and
spatial dynamics of change. This volume indicates that dynamics of change all around us today
47
Ludden 2001. Ludden Editor 2002.
48
Chowdry 1994. Clark 1994.
49
Mamla Murthi, Anne-Catherine Guio, and Jean Dreze, “Mortality, Fertility and Gender Bias in India: A
District-Level Analysis,” in Dreze and Sen 1996, pp.357-406; map of gender bias in child mortality
rates, p.367.
50
Oldenburg 2002.
51
B.Agarwal 1994. S.Basu 1999. Monsoor 1999.
52
Kodoth 2004.
53
V.K.Ramachandran, “On Kerala’s Development Achievments,” in Dreze and Sen 1998, p.328.
10
have long historical trajectories. History is thus vital in development studies.54 Bridging
conceptual and empirical gaps that separate times and spaces of British rule from those of
national Independence provides a better understanding of our present. Yet we are afflicted by
the idea that the past is a different world; and in addition, historians’ professional preference for
description over prescription tends to alienate history from development studies. In thus seems
apt to conclude by indicating some prescriptive implications of the history in this volume.
Markets energize economic growth and deliver aggregate benefits. Markets also abide
inequality; they often raise incomes disproportionately for privileged groups; and they often
concentrate wealth and opportunity in privileged places. When visible hands of policy obey the
market’s invisible hand, the resulting harmony makes it appear natural to favour people and
places where investments pay secure dividends. Intentionally equitable development can thus
seem odd and impractical. In such settings, pursuing equity is fraught with disquiet, disharmony,
and even disrespect for established norms and respected traditions. Pursuing equity cuts against
strong currents of mainstream wisdom; it would seem to require the mobilization of people in
places disadvantaged by uneven development. Pursuing equitable systems of property rights
remains a viable goal, and land reform, a useful policy option.55 Histories of land reform in
Kerala,56 Uttar Pradesh,57 West Bengal and Bangladesh58 indicate land reform’s positive
potential, which is far from exhausted.59 Mores modestly, we might address inequalities by
establishing entitlements to protect people against unacceptable “uneven gains,” for example,
against falling into poverty amidst market-driven economic growth.60 Such efforts need local,
state, and national attention, but also international organization, as India-Bangladesh water issues
indicate. Productive cooperation among South Asian countries will benefit from a richer
appreciation of their shared history,61 quite visible in this volume. I hope this new edition and
additional bibliography will be useful for students and scholars who strive to improve our future.
David Ludden
Philadelphia
16-Feb-16
54
Adnan 1991. Agarwal and Sivaramakrishnan 2000. Atchi Reddy 1996. Breman et. al. 2002. Chari
2002. Clark 1994. Guha 1999. Harriss-White 2003. Kaur 2004. Ludden 2004. Martinussen 1999.
D.Singh 1996. I.Singh 1990. M.Singh 1995. Sobhan 1993a. Subrahmanian 2003. Yanagisawa 1996.
55
Sobhan 1993a. Ghimere 2001.
56
Franke 1993. Morrison 1997.
57
Hasan 1998. Herring 1983.
58
Rogaly, Harriss-White, and Bose 1999
59
Dreze and Sen Editors 1998.
60
Krisha, Kapila, Pathak, Porwal, Singh, and Singh. 2004.
61
Sobhan 1999.
11
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