I am reminded of the way one of my best teachers, the late Professor Nirmal Kumar Chandra, introduced the peasant question and there’s no better way I know of to pose that concern. “How can the mass of peasantry be drawn into a revolutionary movement spearheaded by the socialists, representing above all the proletariat?” And he goes on: “The difficulty, at bottom, stems from the fact … that the peasant possesses ‘two souls,’ one of the proprietor, and the other of a worker.”73 What immediately came to mind when I read this was another difficulty, this in the Indian context. Here this combination of the proprietor and the worker—the Indian peasant—is imbued with caste consciousness, which drives him/her to strive to give up the use of family labor in tilling the soil and in other manual tasks.
How then will the Indian peasant, especially the poor and middle one, develop solidarity with the landless laborer, who, moreover, is most probably a Dalit? As I have hinted at earlier, in the Indian case, the institution of caste impedes class solidarity and class consciousness, and as far as the rich peasant goes, it induces him to behave like the landlord. The Naxalites are yet to resolve such matters in their political practice even as they continue to learn from their actions. The movement cannot be written off though, however much the establishment might wish that one day it will, this in the face of concerted state repression over the last five decades. Public memory of the aborted/defeated peasant/plebeian struggles of the colonial and post-colonial periods, and contemporary conditions on the ground, seem to compel present-day peasants and proletarians to plod on.
LONG TRADITION OF PEASANT INSURGENCY
The historian Ranajit Guha, in his 1983 classic, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, has done much to understand the rebel political consciousness of the peasant insurgents in India during the period 1783–1900. As Guha puts it: “One of the direct consequences” of the British colonialist creation of “a highly centralised state … that brought into focus the refractory moments of semi-feudalism in the countryside in a manner unprecedented in Indian history” was “the fusion of the landlord’s and the moneylender’s authority with that of the sarkar” (the government), and this is “what provided insurgency with the objective conditions of its development and transmission.”74 So also was Kathleen Gough’s historical perspective on peasant resistance and struggles in colonial and post-colonial India. In a 1974 essay on Indian peasant uprisings, she wrote:75
Indian peasants have a long tradition of armed uprisings, reaching back at least to the initial British conquest and the last decades of Mughal government. For more than 200 years peasants in all the major regions have risen repeatedly against landlords, revenue agents and other bureaucrats, moneylenders, police and military forces. During this period there have been at least 77 revolts, the smallest of which probably engaged several thousand peasants in active support or in combat. About 30 of these revolts must have affected tens of thousands of peasants, and about 12, several hundreds of thousands. The uprisings were responses to deprivation of unusually severe character, always economic, and often also involving physical brutality or ethnic persecution.
… [T]he fact that at least 34 of those I considered were solely or partly by Hindus, causes me to doubt that the caste system has seriously impeded peasant rebellion in times of trouble.
…
… The revolts … amply illustrated the remarkable organising abilities of the peasantry, their potential discipline and solidarity, their determined militancy in opposing imperialism and exploitative class relations, their inventiveness and potential military prowess and their aspirations for a more democratic and egalitarian society [my emphasis].
The peasantry had been affected adversely in multiple ways (listed below)76 during colonial rule, and thus the armed struggles involving peasant partisans against those who exacted their surpluses were warranted. These included:
| (i) | Ruinous taxation during the early decades of East India Company rule before and after the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa in 1793; the revenue used to maintain and expand the colonial system and pay for the imports of commodities for Britain, mainly Indian textiles that were earlier paid for in bullion.77 |
| (ii) | The land settlements created “bourgeois” private property in land. However, the landlords were deemed to be the owners of the land only if they paid the heavy incidence of tax on the assessed rent collected,78 of course, with their tenants’ “rights” highly circumscribed. Later, the British colonialists gave up much of the potential revenue from the land tax, settling for a much lower incidence of that tax than the Mughals had exacted, thus to secure the landlords’ support for their rule. Tenancy reform laws79 eventually came into force in the face of peasant struggles. The peasants’ surplus was, however, by now appropriated by other “agents” besides the landlords—moneylenders, non-cultivating intermediary tenants, merchants, and lawyers. |
| (iii) | There were encroachments on tribal hilly and forested territories and tribal oppression by planters, British and Indian, the colonial government, and landlords, merchants, and moneylenders from the plains. |
| (iv) | The process of de-(proto)industrialization in the nineteenth century drove craftspersons deprived of their traditional livelihoods back upon the land as tenants or landless laborers or into the lumpenproletariat. |
| (v) | Peasants got increasingly drawn into the cash nexus with merchants, moneylenders, landlords, and revenue officials, more so with the turn to the cultivation of indigo, opium, cotton, oilseeds, jute, pepper, and other exportable crops in the plains, and tea, coffee, cinnamon, and later, rubber plantations in the highlands. The railways connected the port cities with the hinterland and thus brought British manufactured goods, cloth, for instance, within reach of even the peasant whose produce, as raw material, was exploited by British industry. |
| (vi) | Speculation and investment in land by merchants, moneylenders, landlords, bureaucrats, and rich peasants/farmers, the increasing commercialization of agriculture, and the growth of absentee landlordism led to an impairment of patron-client relations between landlords and tenants/landless laborers. |
| (vii) | The famines of the colonial period were its most brutal feature, beginning with the Bengal famine of 1770 and culminating again with the Bengal famine of 1943 (the latter reawakened collective memory of the former devastation), in between twelve serious famines before the Great Rebellion of 1857, and yet more devastating ones thereafter, the most severe in 1896-97. Using B. M. Bhatia’s figures,80 Gough has estimated 20.7 million famine deaths in India between 1866 and 1943. |
| (vii) | From the 1920s onward, with a growing population in the midst of stagnant per-capita net material product, and with modern industry incapable of absorbing even a fraction of the growing reserve army of labor, rural misery unfolded on an unprecedented scale. Such extreme distress was also a consequence of extreme fragmentation of land-holdings,81 intense competition for sharecropping and other tenancies leading to rack-renting, chronic rural indebtedness, and greater prevalence of debt bondage. What was being witnessed over the longterm was a reduction in the proportion of rich and middle peasant households with a corresponding increase in the proportion of poor and landless peasant households. |
Rightly, Gough includes the Great Rebellion of 1857 among the seventy-seven peasant revolts, for as Eric Stokes, in his posthumously