8 The Peasant and the Raj I

Manish Thakur

Introduction

‘To effect a settlement of the land revenue’ was the first major administrative act of the British government, so wrote Sir Henry Sumner Maine (1871: 19) way back in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, the land revenue settlement did more than determine revenue. It defined rights to land and devised different mechanisms for revenue assessment and collection. It was also an exercise in how best to fit the disparate facts of India’s social order into the proper modes of British explanation. In the process, it signalled a new level of involvement of the (colonial) state in the village.

In fact, land revenue settlement was an exercise of historic significance which brought the colonial state (the Raj) and the peasants face to face. The processes and practices of land settlement drew Indian village (along with the peasants) into the British conception of the rule of law. Although the village remained the primary site for the constant administrative interface between the ruler (British) and the ruled (Indians), it acquired larger associations in the ruler’s idiom. This module is an attempt to understand the contours of the relationship between the Peasant and the Raj.

The New Nexus

The new relationship between the peasant and the Raj has had implications for the history and character of colonial forms of knowledge. Since the colonial state significantly affected the basic structures of Indian life by regulating peasant life in new ways, the exercise of power and the accumulation of knowledge were both parts of a larger colonial project. The British attempt to regulate the peasant life was inseparable from their effort to design an ideology that would sustain their rule over it. The larger point is that the administrative practices of the colonial regime cannot be separated from the colonial construction of Indian society. An understanding of the relationship between the peasant and the Raj thus presupposes an appreciation of the fact that colonialism has been as much about policies as about theories and strategies of representation.

As the British went along comprehending India, using their own forms of knowing and thinking, they altered the nature of Indian knowledge. Their engagement with the village, howsoever concerned it was with the practical problem of setting agrarian policies, was not a matter simply of endorsing whatever relations of production were existing within the village. Instead, it also involved active social engineering. As Smith (1996) has shown, in his remarkable study of the changing nature of village records (from 1822 to 1887) in the Ludhiana district in Punjab, village statistics contained great details not only of land rights but also more general aspects of social organisation. In effect, the registration of rights in the land revenue settlements meant fitting people into pre-determined legal categories and pressing the management of village affairs into a uniform mould. And, the exact shape of the legal mould was not determined overnight but entailed detailed negotiation with the past revenue collection practices.

The Raj facilitated increasing importance of the British conception of India and the Indian institutions. In due course, and more so after gaining in confidence with the annexation of the last vestiges of native rule such as those of the Marathas and in Punjab, the British became the authoritative and effective giver of value to things Indian. For example, it was the British who defined the value and meaning of the Indian village in a way that its echoes are yet to die down. As Smith (1996: 3) remarks, ‘the discourse of knowledge about Indian society is still to some extent trapped by the terms under which official records and reports were produced during the period of British rule’.

Until the early twentieth century, Indians were largely bystanders to the discussions which established meaning and value for the British, be it village, caste or Hinduism. Even when Indians entered into the discussion, both the agenda and its terms of discourse were already set. Arguably, the nineteenth-century debate on the nature of the Indian village community and peasant life has determined the nature of the discourse on the Indian village since then (see Parasher 1992: 17-42). In this module, we consider the colonial ideas regarding the peasant, and by implication, of the village. In a larger sense, this also reveals as to how the British conceptualised India, and its past and present, within the terms of their intellectual thought. Our specific focus is on the works of the colonial scholar-administrators.

Thus, the specific career of the term ‘peasant’ or ‘village’ is presented here as part of the history of colonial knowledge about India and the use of that knowledge in official projects. This module should offer you a sense of the capacity of the colonial state to reconstruct fundamental aspects of Indian society.

The Raj and Its Stereotypes of Indian Peasant Life

A seasoned historian like Stokes (1978) has expressed his despair at extracting the village out of the historical morass caused by interlocking of land tenures with tax collection structures in an ancient order of civilisation. Admittedly, the force of subconscious ideology and the practical need to stabilise the tax system within an impersonal bureaucracy prompted the British at the outset of colonial rule to refashion the village. Nonetheless, the village as the working unit of rural society was reconstituted during the British rule.

In effect, the village was the proclaimed basis of colonial rule. However, there was nothing natural about the village as the basic unit of territorial organisation. A close historical scrutiny reveals it to be a discovery of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. As Mukherjee (1996: 70) argues,It is significant to note that although there were in the eighteenth century a number of officers who were equally eager to rule India according to the ‘Indian constitution’, they did not consider state in India to be a congeries of ‘little republic’. It would seem that the British officers of the Munro school idealised the Indian villages to make a model of the Indian constitution which corresponded with their romantic conservative notion of an ideal polity. In other words, they used the ‘village community’ as a peg on which to hang a theory of British-Indian administration.

In fact, the literature on the nature of the Indian village community and peasant life traces back to Thomas Munro’s reports on Madrasand the first decade of the nineteenth century. The discovery of this cornerstone of society started mundanely, as the colonial administrators felt the need to collect and compile factual information about land settlements and revenue collection. Indeed, most of the characterisations of the village are contained in the despatches of senior British officers engaged in land revenue administration. One such despatch, which formed the basis for discussions in the British House of Commons in 1812-13 on the renewal of the East India Company’s charter, outlined the idea of the village as a mini republic. More particularly, it is in Thomas Munro’s report on the Ceded Districts of Madras (1806) that one comes across the initial stereotype of the village as a little republic.

Like his contemporaries, Munro was less concerned with the village as such than the mode of land settlement. His primary interest was to plead and win the case for ryotwarisettlement in the Madras Presidency as against Bengal Presidency’s permanent settlement. In his acrimonious debate with Francis Ellis, he showed that his advocacy of ryotwarirespects the principles of native tradition and that he was merely adhering to indigenous precedents. Once Munro became the Governor in 1820 and established ryotwarias the definitive legal basis for land settlements in the Madras Presidency, his formulations became part of the official wisdom.

Some of these administrative reports set the tone for future debate on the nature and character of Indian village and peasantry. In the subsequent literature we find repetitions and variations on the same set of themes which formed part of the Fifth Report. What is noteworthy,however, is that their celebration of the Indian village is guided more by the ideology of particular administrator/s than the characteristics that the peasants or the village actually displayed. Stokes (1959) identifies administrators, such as Munro (1761-1827), Malcolm (1769-1833), Elphinstone (1779-1859) and Metcalfe (1785-1846), who served under Lord Wellesley, the Governor General (1798-1805), as the chief proponents of the republican nature of the Indian village. Munro was the leader and founder of their particular school of thought. While sharing a certain emotional kinship with the heritage of the past, these Romantic Paternalists, as Stokes labels them, were horrified at the wanton uprooting of an immemorial system of society. In their general political orientation, they were antithetical to the liberal attempt to anglicise, assimilate and reform Indian society. From their attitudes of romanticism and paternalism flowed a certain conservatism of thought which made them challenge and resist the policy of applying British constitutional principles to the Indian administration. In terms of routine administration it meant countering the spirit of Cornwallis system.

Whereas Munro was in favour of the ryotwari (cultivator-wise) system of land settlement, Metcalfe made a powerful advocacy of the mahalwari(village-wise) settlement. Madras and Bombay Presidencies largely followed ryotwari, but, in the North-West provinces, Metcalfe ensured that the village communities were made the basis of revenue settlement. Clearly, their advocacy for a particular type of revenue system was contingent on their political philosophy. Their opposition to the utilitarian laissez-faire was reflected in their attempts to preserve something of the methods and institutions of Indian society. To the extent that they were against remoulding India in the image of the West, they can be regarded as the true conservative elements in the history of British India. Their opposition to the Cornwallis system was, in essence, an opposition to the imposition of English ideas and institutions on Indian society. In their attempt to cushion the impact of foreign dominion they resuscitated ‘unchanging village republics’ as a sign of their benevolent paternalism. Village communities provided them with a system of indirect rule without much meddling in Indian affairs. They firmly believed that the ultimate objective of their variant of land settlement was the protection of the (village) community by the government and not against it. Fearful of the social effects of the sudden dissolution of the co-sharing village community, they were in favour of fitting the colonial administration to the native frame of society. Their awareness of the wholly artificial and foreign character of administration made them hesitant and wary of interfering with the prevailing forms of society. They were convinced that once law and order had been established and property rights in the soil defined and land revenue fixed in cash, there was no need to subject the village to disruptive changes and disastrous effects of the Anglicisation drive. For them, Anglicistswere responsible for setting aside the immemorial institutions of the native people and erecting in its place an incomprehensible technical form of law which was unsuited to the native genius. In other words, these paternalists were all set to challenge the dominion exercised by utilitarianismand show that utilitarian principles were not of absolute and universal validity. Since utilitarianism and its underlying principles were conditional truths by virtue of their historical origins, there was the urgent necessity of restraint in pressing Western reforms upon an oriental society like India. To them, unbridled utilitarianism only increased the danger of a rapid disintegration of Indian society. Munro went to the extent of advocating the restoration of the jurisdiction of the village panchayats so as to prevent the further erosion of this mainstay of the social order (see Ibid.: 14-18, 119).

It is difficult to make out how much of the Indian village was the British construction in terms of empirical facts. It is possible that a phenomenon one labels as the product of foreign impact may have actually been Indian in origin. The intrusive institution, especially when it is backed by political power, may reinforce the indigenous institution, when they both share something in common, giving a prominence it did not have under the old system, for example, the ryotwari (Embree 1969: 50). Thus, at most we can talk of the nineteenth-century Indian village more as an idea than a fact. Yet, the independent momentum of administrative systems once under way ensured that there was no going back.

Also, the village got implicated in the differing perceptions of the unit of land measurement of the British and the Indian. In place of the English idea of ‘estate’ as a unit of land management, paternalists like Metcalfe favoured the Indian idea of ‘mahal’ as a unit of land measurement. In fact, one difficulty facing Westerners – whether nineteenth-century administrators or twentieth-century economists – while analysing the Indian village is the number of differences in units of thought between the people in control of the Indian countryside and the Englishman who ruled them. There were differences in thought about the objectives of secular life and about how these objectives fitted together, and in the situations in which they reasoned (Neale 1990: 14-15). The contending perceptions of the village emanated from these fundamental differences in the categories of thought as well.

Ironically, the village community was, used as an argument against the generalisation of Munro’s ryotwari, both in Madras and in Delhi. Those who were in favour of mauzawari or mahalwarishared the apprehension that direct engagement for revenue with each separate landholder or cultivator (that is, ryotwari) might lead to the destruction of the original constitution of the village. Though the early administrative literature of the nineteenth century does not talk of the community, the stereotyping of the village emanates from its community character.

This emphasis on the village community as a political entity tended to ignore or, at least, underplay the facts of dominance and hierarchy within the village. The stability and isolation of the village and its political independence from the state were over-emphasised. Given the political fluidity that was evidenced at the macro-level, the permanence of the village held a great attraction. This nearly self-sufficient and almost independent character of the village community led Metcalfe declare, ‘I admire the structure the village communities’, and add stylistically,The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything they want within themselves, and almost independent of any foreign relations. They seem to last when nothing else lasts. Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down; revolution succeeds to revolution; Hindoo, Patan, Mogul, Mahratta, Sikh, English, are masters in turn, but the village communities remain the same. In times of trouble they arm and fortify themselves: an hostile army passes through the country; the village communities collect their cattle within walls, and let the enemy pass unprovoked. If plunder and devastation be directed against themselves and forced employed be irresistible, they flee to friendly villages at a distance; but, when the storm has passed over, they return and resume their occupations. If a country remains for a series of yeas the scene of continued pillage and massacre, so that villages cannot be inhabited, the scattered villagers nevertheless return whenever the power peaceable possession revives. A generation may pass away, but the succeeding generation will return. The sons will take the place of their fathers; the same site for the village, the same positions for the houses, the same lands will be re-occupied by the descendants of those who were driven out when the village was depopulated; and it is not a trifling matter that will drive them out, for they will often maintain their position through times of disturbance and convulsion, and acquire strength sufficient to resist pillage and oppression with success. This union of the village communities, each one forming a separate little state in itself, has, I conceive, contributed more than any other cause to the preservation of the people of India through all the revolutions and changes which they have suffered, and is in a high degree conducive to their happiness, and to the enjoyment of a great portion of freedom and independence (cited in Dewey 1972: 297).

Yet his romanticised vision of the village was difficult to reconcile with the community it described. Although the disruptions of the later eighteenth century had enforced a great degree of self-reliance upon the Indian village, it was much less isolated from the state and the market, and much less egalitarian than Metcalfe’s rhetoric implied. The community of co-sharers in the land rarely encompassed the entire population. Nevertheless, Metcalfe’s text resonated through the years. Neither the decline of romanticism, nor that of the independent village community itself could dislodge Metcalfe’s characterisation of the village. Surprisingly, when village was being substantially incorporated into a system of general law and colonial economy, its alleged virtues of political autonomy and economic self-reliance were gaining ground. This clearly reveals the elements of nostalgia in the way village was perceived by administrators like Metcalfe.

Viewed thus, the stereotyping of the village lay in the quantum leap from the economic self-sufficiency and internal organisation of the village as an economic-political group to the supposed political independence of the village (Dumont 1970: 118). One finds in these early administrative accounts of the village no reference to the existence of inequality. This could be because inequality and hierarchy were considered to be natural and in tune with the spirit of the age. However, the village tends to acquire a metaphoric content as a ‘republic’, ‘commonwealth’, or ‘state’ by virtue of its being an ordered society in miniature. Thus, Elphinstone, in one of the most forceful articulation of the village as political society, proclaims: ‘these communities contain in miniature all the materials of a State within themselves, and are almost sufficient to protect their members, if all governments are withdrawn’ (cited in Ibid.: 117).

The village community’s apparent ability to preserve amidst the disintegration of larger forms of political and social organisation gets corroborated by Malcolm, another romantic paternalist, in his memoirs of Central India:Never did a country afford such proofs of the imperishable nature of this admirable institution. After the Pindarry war, every encouragement was held out for the inhabitants to return to their desolate homes. In several districts, particularly those near Nerbudda, many of the villages had been waste for more than thirty years. The inhabitants who had been scattered, followed all occupations: many Potails, who had been obliged to leave their lands, had become plunderers, and remained at or near their ruined villages; some of their relations and friends followed their example; others cultivated grounds at a distance of several hundred miles from their homes; while a great majority went to the large towns, where they found a temporary asylum, and obtained subsistence by labouring in gardens or fields. But there is no people in whose hearts the love of the spot where they were born seems more deeply implanted than the Hindus; and those of Central India, under all their miseries and dispersion, appear never for a moment to have given up the hope of being restored to their homes. The families of each village, though remote from each other, maintained a constant communication – intermarriages were made, and the links that bound them together were only strengthened by adversity. When convinced that tranquillity was established they flocked to their roofless houses. Infant Potails (the second and third in descent from the emigrator) were in many cases carried at the head of these parties. When they reached their villages, every wall of a house, every field was taken possession of by the owner or cultivator, without dispute or litigation amongst themselves or with government; and in a few days everything was in progress as if it had never been disturbed (cited in Dewey 1972: 297-98).

The second aspect of the village stereotype, namely, that of a corporate body of persons sharing right in a common territory, is linked to the first one, for the idea of the village as a political community presupposes economic self-sufficiency. This view of the village finds its initial articulation in Ellis’s Report on Mirasi Rights (1814). Also, it is this aspect of the village community which was catapulted to the arena of high theory by Maine and Marx (see Chapter 3).

Thus, the essence of all such characterisation of the village was a euphoric celebration of its inner elasticity as a system. Romantic conservatives were attracted to its permanence, more so when it was seen in relation to highly volatile and fluid character of the Indian state. Its high degree of internal cohesion and enduring solidarity, and its constitution as the sum total of mutually dependent groups rather than mutually antagonistic classes, provided the romantics the raw material on which to construct their image of the Indian village. In the inner-directed, tranquil, unchanging rhythm of the Indian village lay the secret of the wisdom of Indian civilisation.

However, it should be noted that the enthusiastic reception accorded to the Indian village by these romantic paternalists was not shared by one and all. In a way, the village was caught in the larger political battles of the day between ‘conservatives’ and ‘radicals’. For James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894), the fact that the creation of private rights and the elimination of custom was leading to the decline of the village communities, should not give rise to any false sentiment of regret:The fact that the institutions of a village community throw light on the institutions of modern Europe, and the fact that village communities have altered but little for many centuries, prove only that society in India has remained for a great number of centuries in a stagnant condition, unfavourable to the growth of wealth, intelligence, political experience, and the moral and intellectual changes which are implied in these processes. The condition of India for centuries past shows what the village communities are really worth. Nothing that deserves the name of a political institution at all can be ruder or less satisfactory in its results. They are, in fact, a crude form of socialism, paralysing the growth of individual energy and all its consequences. The continuation of such a state of society is radically inconsistent with the fundamental principles of our rule both in theory and in practice (quoted in Stokes 1959: 280).

Stephen denounced the sentimental outcry of the conservative paternalists as regards the break-up of the village communities and had no love lost for the simple communities. He thought that the task of insulating the Indian village from further change was well-nigh impossible. Similarly, John Strachey (1823-1907) criticised the ‘fashion of commending the Hindoos, their laws, their government’. He wondered, ‘…till these late discoveries it was generally admitted that the native system of administration was oppressive and vicious and that the faster we departed from them the better’ (quoted in Dumont 1970: 117). He adds, No great changes can be brought about without some cause for regret. That the full recognition of individual property rights will bring with it the dissolution of the ancient village institutions seems indisputable, but they were necessarily doomed to decay with the establishment of good government and the progress of civilisation. The objects which they were so admirably adapted to fulfil are gradually passing away. The power which their constitution gave them of passive resistance to oppression is now no longer needed. As long as these institutions form the basis of society, any large amount of progress is impossible (quoted in Dewey 1972: 299-300).

Administrators like Stephen and Strachey distrusted the sentimental attachment of the paternalists to the Indian village. For them, moreover, as a matter of conviction, the truths of political economy should triumph over sentiment, and that only in a system of free exchange and completely free individual property rights could the prosperity of the people be fully secured. Naturally, this meant stringent application of utilitarian doctrines to India irrespective of its effects on the village community.

Conclusion

In a way, the Raj’s understanding of the peasant life in India was inseparable from its understanding of Indian village. And, the colonial stereotyping of the village community had two principal ingredients: (1) the portrayal of the village as an idyllic and utopian political community of peasants – a society of equals, and (2) its characterisation as a body of co-sharers of the soil. In fact, the idealised Indian village community, whether derived from a certain romantic imagination or subject to utilitarian onslaught, was used to serve purposes of a very different order. The idea of the village community emerged out of fiscal and administrative concerns of the British rule in India. Romantics used it as part of the defence of the award of revenue collection rights to these corporate village bodies rather than landlords or individual cultivators. For officials like Metcalfe, it was easier to rule by incorporating rather than destroying such entrenched institutions. Even the utilitarians, who disparaged the village community, acknowledged its cohesion and independence. They only feared that the village might act as an impediment to their plans for an agrarian revolution in India. Thus, all of them agreed that the Indian village has failed to grow after a certain stage of development largely because of India’s isolation. For them, the sole purpose of the British rule in India was to improve it, albeit they had differing prescriptions for it. In either way, the Indian village was used to rationalise the British rule in India. The similarity between the proponents of the two schools of thought has been noted by Dewey (1972: 296):

Proponents of the two systems [the romantic conservatives favouring mahalwari settlement of the North-West provinces and the utilitarian radicals favouring ryotwari settlement of Bombay Presidency] conflicted; and from their conflict two distinct images of the village community emerged. These images were ideal types; abstracts of the aspects of the village community which their authors wished to emphasise. But despite the fact that they were intended to justify two very different revenue systems, both images were surprisingly alike; for conservatives and utilitarians disagreed not so much over what the characteristics of the village community were as over whether an agreed set of characteristics was or was not desirable.

Thus, policy and ideology combined to embed the Indian ‘village republic’ in the broader framework of the British colonial enterprise. With the consequent desire to dampen the pace of social change, more so after the Mutiny, the village community served the imperial need to fall back upon an unchanging and unthreatening institution. It came handy for imbuing the Raj as a protector of native institutions. The ideological assertion of its enduring permanence fitted well in the colonisers’ quest for a secure agrarian order. It could be seen as an ultimate refuge against those forces of disorder which the Mutiny had unleashed.

One has to remember is that on one’s attitudes to the village community depended the future direction of a given civilization, so, at least, it seemed to colonial scholar-administrators. If the village community was an approved form of organisation, then its conservation became the primary duty of the state. Conversely, if it was condemned, then the state was called upon to hasten the pace of its dissolution through a laissez-faire-induced social revolution. In any case, attitudes to the village community were not so much direct responses to its empirical characteristics as were the outcomes of the corollaries of attitudes to the great political doctrines of the day, namely, utilitarianism. Thus, the very description of the village community’s characteristics was conditioned by one’s general political orientation (Dewey 1972: 292-94). In the next module (Module 2.2 B) we will see how the discussion of the village community and Indian peasant was propelled from the lowly politico-administrative concerns of the contending administrators and revenue officials to the high ground of social theory, courtesy Maine and Marx.

References

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• Dumont, Louis. 1970. ‘The “Village Community” from Munro to Maine’, in Louis Dumont.
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