9 The Peasant and the Raj II

Manish Thakur

Introduction

Continuing the discussion presented in Module 2.2 A, in this module we talk about the discursive effects of the Raj’s land revenue polices and the increasing salience of colonial forms of knowledge. We also offer you an overview of how the Raj’s growing involvement with Indian peasant life catapulted some of the basic categories of understanding of Indian socioeconomic institutions in the domain of social theory of the day. Throughout our discussion, we try to integrate the changes in land revenue policies and land settlement practices with the concomitant changes in our ways of looking at how Indian peasants have historically organised their economic and community life. We also introduce you to different ways in which the Raj’s understanding of peasant life seeped into general theoretical understanding of Indian social institutions.

The Making of an Agrarian Territory

It is misleading to assume that the village has always been the basic unit for revenue collection. At times, revenue would be settled on the basis of smaller estates within the village. Likewise, many a times, larger estates comprising several villages would be the basis for revenue settlement. Marriott (1955a: 184) has shown how for the first time the whole countryside was divided into village units for administration with reference to mahalwari system of land tenure. In his ‘Directions for Revenue Officers’ (1844-1848), James Thomason (1804-1853) directed that wherever possible, the whole body of proprietors in each village should be made individually and collectively responsible for paying the land tax. This was a novel requirement, as the previous Mughal policy had often been to recognise estates as units even when they cut across several villages it. In the new system, one finds some sort of a disposition to treat each village as if it were a great family. In this sense, the modern ideas of territorial organisation of land (based on the revenue village) are said to be derived from colonial times. In fact, this was true for the whole of colonial Asia. Thus, in India, as in much of the colonised world, village became a lynch-pin in the overall colonial regulation of agrarian territory. It helped the new rulers in the settlement of farming regions in synch with their laws of landed property and polices of revenue collection.

By 1815, the colonial rulers had settled upon the village as the basic unit of agrarian administration. While overhauling the earlier territorial organisation and erasing the traces of the previous forms of territorial organisation, the British rule enshrined the village community as the core economic, political, and social unit. This projection of the village as the elemental unit of Indian socio-economic organisation subserved several functions. In ideological terms, the village came to represent a survival of agrarian tradition and the administrative foundation of agrarian modernity… The territory called ‘India’ became traditional and the village and family farm became its elemental units. The cultural construct called ‘India’ came to rest on the idea that one basic cultural logic did in fact organise agriculture in all its constituent (village) territories from ancient to modern times (Ludden 1999: 34.).

This attempt to create a new type of unified agrarian territory around the idea of the village was bound to dislodge earlier conceptualisations of the village. As the British went about mapping and surveying every inch of the agrarian territory, and organise it in terms of the cellular units of the village, they inflicted enormous violence on those conceptualisations that considered villages as locales of social power outside the state. Even today there is a persistent discrepancy between what the state calls ‘village’ and what the villagers think is ‘village’ (see Daniel 1984).

A survey of historical literature tells us that, in terms of local political and power structures, the village per se was not universally the key unit. In olden days, powerful notables determined where one revenue village ended and another began. The state did not have so direct a say in deciding the land rights. Until the 1870s, many struggles for the control of land occurred outside the purview of the state. In a few cases, land rights were granted as part of the remuneration of state functionaries. There was a curious amalgam of land rights and official status. Moreover, people with rights to land exercised various types and degrees of power over the local territory and its inhabitants. In other words, the boundaries remained fuzzy among local politics, society, law, police and administration as land rights were the chief lever of power. In a restricted sense, those who controlled land also controlled much of civic and judicial administration. In brief, historically the village has not been a unit for economic administration or political representation (see Cohn 1987; Bremanet al. 1997).

Under the colonial dispensation, the definition and delimitation of localities were no longer the handiwork of powerful families and caste groups. They assumed an official institutional form. Even when village communities were organised around socially dominant landed families, they became part of the administrative jurisdiction of urban centres that housed government offices. Village thus organised was thought appropriate for modernisation under the joint auspices of the market economy and state policies. It was remoulded in the hope of unleashing its progressive potential while dismantling old bottlenecks, such as the ambiguity and confusion about land rights, prohibitive social controls, and the dominance of caste, sect, and other forms of cultural collectivity. The then-prevailing theories of culture and modernisation fuelled the distinctive shaping of the Indian village and tried to naturalise it as an essential component of the new agrarian social order. The shaping of the village was largely the outcome of the supposed theoretical opposition that had thus emerged between ‘Europe’s competitive, individualist rationalism and Asia’s collective, traditional, peasant community consciousness’ (Ibid.: 178, 222). This theoretical dualism has always highlighted the co-operative and harmonious aspects of the ontology of village while underplaying its internal diversity and conflict. In the colonialist reading, village communities formed solid collective identities with closed unitary moral economies.

There were other factors which made the village the basic unit of Indian society. In consolidating their rule over India, the British encountered an all-pervasive customary rights and practices associated with the land. The control of land was at the core of an unusually long and complicated chain of patron-client relationships. These multi-layered claims on land, and the control of the landed gentry on a proportion of the levied taxation, and their appropriation of undue politico-administrative powers at the local level appeared to be dispensable nuisances to the highly technocratic character of the colonial bureaucracy. Firstly, the British were inspired by a quest for an orderly exercise of authority and a determination to prevent the siphoning of the obligations in cash and kind from the population by the supra-local lords. As their intervention in the native society and economy increased, they were forced to encounter a complex social arrangements and institutional frameworks criss-crossing the village. The latter’s mechanistic adherence to rules and regulations left little allowance for the customs of the land. Projecting village as the key unit helped them get rid of a ‘feudally-structured intermediate third sphere between state and the people’ full of a wide range of large and small middlemen. Furthermore, ‘Village reified in a closed and inwardly oriented agrarian settlement helped them justify their efforts as a means to restore the original bipolar situation’ (Breman 1997: 18).

Secondly, by making the village the organising principle of society, the British assured themselves getting back the local administrative and political overheads from the village as collectivity. As Breman (Ibid.: 19) puts it, ‘restoration of so-called tradition can thus be explained, with some justification, as a principle of cheap government’. Lastly, the projection of local economy and administration as a village avoided the need to split up the rural habitants into various categories with different or even contradictory needs and interests. In retrospect, the singular absence of the internal affairs of the village as subject of research and policy-making corroborates this. Colonial research came to a halt at the village boundary and did not penetrate its inner domain, notwithstanding many administrative instances where more concrete information was hastily and superficially collected.

Colonial Typology of Civilisations

In the charged nineteenth-century debate, the village was seen not merely as a historical relic but was imbued with much contemporary relevance. For the Westerners, the village community stood for a world that they had lost, thanks to the industrial revolution and the changes it had generated. Since it was a world almost lost, depending on one’s ideological predilections, it could be embedded in one’s version of ‘progress’ or ‘degeneration’ in relation to the present. For romantics, idyllic village communities of the past realised those qualities of life that they highly valued and craved for, and which could indeed be realised in some future utopia. Those who were on the side of progress, and there were many, set out to debunk the idyllic image of the past village community by associating it with economic inequality, a rigidly stratified and stagnant society and its historic subordination to arbitrary powers. As history and progress were unremitting preoccupations of the nineteenth-century Victorian mind, the conceptualisation of village in this framework was itself only an instance of a larger problematic that turned on a (lack of) commitment to progress.

In effect, the Raj tried to legitimise their presence in India by designating the village community as the basis of colonial policy. That is, the colonial construction of village was embedded in the principle of territoriality which formed the basis of colonial organisation of power. By making village all-important, they could frequently claim to restore a pristine institution that had fallen from grace by the tyranny of the native despotic rulers. This also imparts to the British the credit for having brought to fore a tradition which was unknown to Indians themselves. In this sense, colonialism as a form of knowledge has shaped much of the modern history of colonised places and peoples. It went to amass knowledge to enable itself ‘to classify, categorise, and bound the vast social world that was India so that it could be controlled’ (Cohn 1997: 5).

Inden (1990) gives an ideological explanation for the new preoccupation with the village as the basic formation of Indian society. He argues that the Orientalist perspective that gained currency during the nineteenth century placed European modernity in a hierarchical relationship with Asiatic tradition. Seen thus,The constitution of India as a land of villages was also due to the efforts of the British to deconstitute the Indian state. As they were composing their discourses on India’s villages, they were displacing a complex polity with an ‘ancient’ India that they could appropriate as an external appendage of a ‘modern’ Britain. The essence of the ancient was the division of societies into self-contained, inwardly turned communities consisting of co-operative communal agents. The essence of the modern was the unification of societies consisting of outwardly turned, competitive individuals. Just as the modern succeeded the ancient in time, so the modern would dominate the ancient in space (Inden 1990: 132).

Thus, India’s unchanging institutions based on family, caste and the village communities were construed as empirical indicators of the presence or absence of progress. In other words, Indian village was seen in the light of general concerns animating Western historiography. Certain universal features constructed as markers of progress (the presence of private property in land, for instance) were vainly looked for in the historic constitution of the village. It was this empirical quest for the markers of progress or (the lack thereof) which made India and Europe appear as braided concerns, and which, in turn, also signals the entry of Indian village into the domain of European social theory. Not surprisingly, the Indian village, as a unique institution inhabited by Indian peasants, came to inform the intellectual currents of the British society itself.

Maine and the Discovery of the Aryan Village

From the early decades of nineteenth century, village community has embodied ‘a remarkable interaction between Western and Indian minds and data’ (Dumont 1970: 112). In fact, it had never ceased to be a ‘shuttlecock to radical and conservative battledores’, mostly administrators and revenue officials (Dewey 1972: 295). However, it was Sir Henry Sumner Maine (1822-88), along with Karl Marx, who should be credited with drawing the Indian village into the mainstream of English thought. The continuing debate over the historical primacy of the village community in India turned out to be decisive impetus of academic elucidation of village in general social theory. Towards the end of the century, the debate initiated by Maine led to ‘encyclopaediclabours and muddled thinking’ of Baden-Powell (1841-1901) (Stokes 1978: 4). In a way, with Baden-Powell the discussion surrounding the Indian village concludes.

According to Maine (1861: 272-77, 1871: 103-30), India had a curious relationship with Europe. In his Rede Lecture on ‘The Effects of Observation of India on Modern European Thought’ at Cambridge in 1875 (Maine 1876: 205-39), he convincingly argued that India shared with Europe a ‘whole world’ of Aryan institutions, customs, laws and beliefs. India was thus part of that very family of mankind to which the Europeans belonged. Yet those Aryan institutions had been arrested in India at an early stage of development. As a consequence, unlike civilized Europe, India remained at the level of ‘barbarism’ despite its intimate connections with Europe of the yore. So India and Europe were fundamentally implicated with each other in a common origin yet paradoxically different.

For Maine, societies were different and history had shaped the path each had followed. He reasoned that India’s ancient institutions, linked to those of Europe by their common Aryan origin, became the germs out of which the social and political systems of modern Europe had emerged. Seen thus, Indian institutions were not merely curious anachronisms but contained in themselves the making of the successive phases of one on-going process of development. However, in order to justify making inferences from India’s present to England’s past, Maine had inevitably to assume that India had had no history since the time of the early Aryan invasions. In effect, as he gave India with one hand a history linked to that of England, with the other he took it away. The dichotomy between India’s static society and England’s progress ultimately overwhelmed any sense of parallel development that he could have argued otherwise.

Central to Maine’s analysis alike of India’s similarity and its difference was his conception of the village community. By Maine’s time the notion of the village community had already acquired an extended history both in India and in Europe. Several currents fused. German Romantics sought their national origins in the Teutonic forests. Victorian liberals too concerned of the Saxon village community as the training ground for all subsequent self-government.

At the level of practice, Maine was in favour of curbing the movement which was endeavouring to precipitate Indian society from status to contract at one bound; in his theory of the Indian village he remained imprisoned to the growth of evolutionary thought which had characterised his age. He described India’s brotherhood villages as marking out the earliest phase of an evolutionary process whose end point was to be found in contemporary England. He went on to pronounce India’s present village communities to be identical with the ancient European systems of enjoyment and tillage. Like Metcalfe’s vision of the village republic, Maine’s theory also had little place for the state or for caste. Thus, for Maine, the institution of village embodied that which at once intimately linked and yet separated India and Europe.

The fact that Maine had a unilinear scheme of evolution for the village community and that he suppressed inconsistencies in his own data have frequently been pointed out. What mattered to him was, in the end, not India but Europe. We should note that, for Maine, village was subsumed under the history of property regimes. His principal objective was always to explain Europe’s historical development in a way that inextricably connected civilisation, progress and private property rights. He looked at India’s village as a corporate body having common ownership of soil. This meant that this village has not progressed beyond the infancy of the civilisation. Logically, Maine treated them as survivals from the Indo-European past and evocative of Roman gens, for co-ownership of soil marked the infancy of law and civilisation. This is not to say that he had contempt for them. Rather, as an organised society, the village community ‘… besides providing for the management of the common fund, it seldom fails to provide, by a complete set of functionaries, for internal government, for police, for the administration of justice, for the apportionment of taxes and public duties’ (1861: 274).

To Maine, simple forms of the village are joint brotherhoods. Also, he sees village communities as democratic and egalitarian in the political sense. His preoccupation with community as an independent institution was largely responsible for his neglect of the state in relation to the village. And, finally, he always confused between the co-shares of the soil and the village population as a whole despite empirical evidence to the contrary. Since Maine believed that the movement of all progressive societies had been a movement from status to contract, village community presented itself as a primitive social organisation to him. It was primitive because it was characterised by the primitive form of property, that is, land was held in common. Thus, in Maine’s line of reasoning, village community and collective property were seen as inseparable. After all, ancient law did not recognise the individual. It knew only of groups and the typical property-owning groups in olden times were the village community. By virtue of equating village community with the communal ownership of land, Maine could add a sharp edge to his thesis that the historical movement of property in land has been a movement from collective to individual forms. At any rate, Maine’s theory of the village did not arise from any intrinsic interest in the history of India as such, but was inspired by the assumption that a local system could be found in the Orient similar to that which had existed in Europe’s distant past. His analysis of the development of legal traditions in the East and the West should be seen against the background of the evolutionary theory that had such pre-eminence in the late nineteenth century.

Marx and the Asiatic Stagnation

Maine had a predecessor in Karl Marx, for whom social stagnation was the hallmark of the peasant community. Marx’s discussion of the Asiatic mode of production too betrays an evolutionary reading of Indian history (see Avineri 1969; Anderson 1974; Thorner 1980). His views on the village community appear primarily in his newspaper writings on the British rule in India, save a few passages in Capital (see Volume I: 350-52). Specifically, on the subject of the village community, Marx says, Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious, patriarchal and inoffensive social organisations disorganised and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilisations and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though, they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns with no events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindustan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste, and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never-changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalising worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow (in Feuer 1959: 68).

Despite his utter contempt, Marx did consider Indian village to be the heart of the Indian social system. This explains his rejoicing over the British rule in India. He believed that, while previous conquerors had effected no more than political change, England had brought about a social revolution by striking at the heart of the social system – the Indian village: ‘English interference … dissolved these small semi-barbarian communities by blowing up their economic basis, and thus produced the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia’ (in Avineri 1969: 93). For him, the laying of the material foundations of Western society in India/Asia was linked to the dissolution of the village. Since the village was the repository of all those characteristics that lay at the root of Asian stagnation, ‘the work of regeneration’ of India had to proceed ‘through a heap of ruins’, that is, the village communities (Ibid.: 112ff). Clearly, Marx was not for any shoring up of ancient traditions and institutions of India, least that of the village community:…    The simplicity of the organisation for production in these self-sufficing communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form…this simplicity supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies, an unchangeableness in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic states, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the economic elements of society remains untouched by the storm-clouds of the political sky (cited in Anderson 1974: 338-39).

Marx held that pre-colonial India had no history: ‘Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society’ (in Avineri: 1969: 132). However, as Anderson has argued, Marx’s explanation of the situation varied somewhat between his different writings (Anderson 1974: 473-83). For instance, in a famous passage in Capital his description of the Indian village is more sober and less contemptuous:

Those small and extremely ancient Indian communities…are based on possession in common of the land, on the blending of agriculture and handicrafts, and on an unalterable division of labour…The chief part of the products is destined for direct use by the community itself, and does not take the form of a commodity. Hence, production here is independent of that division of labour brought about, in Indian society as a whole, by means of the exchange of commodities. It is the surplus alone that becomes a commodity, and a portion of even that, not until it has reached the hands of the state, into whose hands from time immemorial a certain quantity of these products has found its way in the shape of rent in kind (Marx 1954: 337).So, for Marx, there was no separation of the cultivating householder from the village to which he belonged. Secondly, there was an absence of a division of labour in the village. That is to say, the village could manage within itself almost all the trades and crafts required for it to survive and reproduce itself. This was the major reason for the unchanging character of the Indian village. Finally, there was no notion of private property in land. Village was not separate from the land held in common. In effect, Marx reinforced the widely prevalent idea that in the Indian village, and in Asia in general, community is the real substance of which the individuals are mere accidents (see Inden 1990: 134-37).

The empirical inaccuracy of Marx’s description of the village has often been noted. Like Maine, he did not allow the then available empirical evidence to affect his theory: in his characterisation of Indian society as static, incapable of significant internal development, and devoid of history, he studiously overlooked Campbell’s account. The latter was a serious empirical challenge to Marx’s general theory on ground rent and the consequences of money rate (Fuller 1989: 53). According to Marx, the all-pervasive ‘rent in kind’ provided the basis of stationary social conditions in Asia (Avineri 1959: 796). Nonetheless, Marx’s idea of unchanging Asia and unchanging Indian village contains contradictions (see Avineri 1969; Anderson 1974: 484-95). They point out that Marx’s denial of the possibility of significant indigenous historical development in India only continued a strong European tradition. Anderson (1974: 481) writes, ‘the mature Marx of Capital itself thus remained substantially faithful to the classical European image of Asia which he had inherited from a long file of predecessors. He shows that the image of a stagnant Asia cannot be justly sustained and the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, with which the idea of unchanging Asia is intimately linked, should ‘be given the decent burial it deserves’ (Ibid.: 548).

Baden-Powell and the RyotwariVillage

Though   Baden-Powell’s   evolutionist-tainted   classifications    also   suffered  from   Orientalist prejudice (see Breman 1997: 19-20), his contribution to the study of the Indian village is seminal (see Dewey 1972: 320-23; Inden 1990: 140-42). On the basis of the data contained in the mass of gazetteers and land-settlement reports of the 1870s and 1880s, he insisted that the Indian village community had never enshrined communal ownership of land and was not an Aryan institution. Also, there was no single ideal type of the Indian village. Highlighting the heterogeneous patterns of landholding, he posited that there was a bewildering variety of village communities in India. He grouped these villages in two broad categories: joint and several. In joint villages a strong joint body, probably descended from a single head or single family, hold superior titles to land and extract rent and services from the tenants. In the several villages individual cultivators own their landholdings separately and make no claim as the joint body to the estate of the village.

Following his conviction that India was fundamentally a Dravidian rather than an Aryan culture, Baden-Powell argued that the ryotwari (i.e. the several) village had originated in a ‘tribal stage of society’. This type of village had come into existence much before the arrival of the Aryans in India. In fact, the ryotwari village was the result of the decay or dissolution of a pre-Aryan Dravidian clan system. He further believed that the several village was shaped by the social requirements of indigenous Dravidian and aboriginal peoples. More importantly, by asserting that the typical Indian village was a Dravidian institution, he reversed the sequential precedence of joint village over the several village, as Dravidians as an aboriginal people precede Aryans in India. He asserts (1896: vi-vii):The joint-village of India is not the universal or the most ancient form; and …the common holding of land (where it is not the result of some special voluntary association) is traceable only among the superior tenures of the Hindu-Aryans and the later tribes who settled in Northern or Upper India…the so-called joint-village followed, and did not precede, the village of separate holdings, …in those cases where it represents a section of a tribal or clan territory, it derives a rather elusive appearance of being held ‘in common’ from certain features of clan life and union; while in the very numerous cases in which it is a small estate connected with an individual founder, the joint-ownership depends solely on the existence of the ‘joint-family’ – i.e. on the law or custom of the joint-inheritance of a number of co-heirs in succession to an original founder or acquirer. How and when the joint inheritance and the joint-family came to be invented may be a difficult question; but if the idea of the joint-family is not primitive, nor found among all tribes or races, and is rather the special creation of the developed ‘Hindu’ law and custom as such, and if it is only found among other tribes after more or less contact Hindu-Aryans, then the joint-village cannot be demonstrably a primitive, still less a once universal, form of land-holding.

Furthermore, Baden-Powell broke with the idea that the village was inherently democratic or republican in its constitution. He challenged the notion of communal landholding in the village and disputed the assertion that all the members of the village were, at least in origin, members of a single clan or brotherhood. He writes (1896: 443):

Those who have hoped to see in the joint-village anything of a communistic or socialistic type will, I fear, be disappointed by a study of the real facts. By far the larger portion of the joint villages were in origin the result not of communism but of conquest; of tribal and caste superiority, and of family pride in the common descent from a house that once held sway in the country round. Not a few are the descendants of successful ‘farmers’, auction-purchasers, and land-speculators, who in common with others acknowledge the joint-family law…Even among the ‘democratic’ tribal settlements of Jats and the old free ‘cultivating fraternities’, the sentiment of equality is all within the brotherhood and not in the least for the outside, their tenure is as much a ‘landlord’ tenure as any other form of joint-village community For him, the village was in its essence a community of separate cultivating holders and other village functionaries organised as a small monarchy or oligarchy.

Thus, Baden-Powell advanced two interrelated arguments: (1) There are two types of village in India, and (2) the jointly held villages of the Aryans, taken to be the universally and essentially Indian type – the ideal-typical Indian village – is quite misleading. Contrary to what Marx and Maine had said, for Baden-Powell, joint villages were not the widely distributed type of the village, rather they were confined mostly to north India. What had been typical instead was the ryotwari (several) type of the village.

Conclusion

The regulation of peasant life, and the constitution of the village as a well-circumscribed area amenable to revenue assessment, has been an inevitable part of the state’s mapping of the agrarian territory. Since the state has always been concerned with various aspects of agricultural organisation, it has wielded its authority to regulate and monitor the territorial units of agricultural organisation. As Ludden (1999: 34) asserts, ‘organising agriculture in the circumscribed spaces and legitimating state authority in them have historically been the central concern of the state’. It is equally true that the state has historically been powerful in relation to the individual village. It has shaped property rights and revenue demands with respect to land in whatever form.It is noteworthy that, as the village was being made the basis of a new type of territorial organisation, some of the British administrators also found in the Indian village a repository of ‘authentic’ tradition and culture. It was invested with a romantic aura that subsequently led to the recurring characterisation of the village as the self-sufficient little republic. Since then, stable, traditional village societies have been taken to be territories of ancient agrarian civilisation which had survived basically unchanged over the millennia before colonialism. According to Ludden, ‘the modern invention of civilisation territories continues a very old elite project of using narration to organise agrarian territories’ (Ibid.: 173). By projecting the map of British India back into history of ancient times, the British sought to legitimate its authority over all the villages in this agrarian territory. Also, this projection helped achieve a continuity of discourse where the village represents a constant unit of agrarian order from ancient times to the present: ‘village becomes that part of agrarian space which can be effectively bounded physically and culturally and marked as a spatial domain for organised state power and activity’ (Ibid.). Thus, under the colonial dispensation, the revenue village became the elemental unit of agrarian administration.

References and Further Readings

• Avineri, Shlomo. (ed.). 1969. Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernisation. New York: Anchor Books.
• Breman, Jan. 1997. ‘The Village in Focus’, in Jan Breman et al. (eds.). The Village in Asia Revisited. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 15-75.
• Breman, Jan, Peter Kloss and Ashwini Saith. 1997. ‘Introduction’, in Jan Breman, Peter Kloss and Ashwini Saith. (eds.). The Village in Asia Revisited. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp.1-15.
• Inden, Ronald. 1986. ‘Orientalist Constructions of India’, Modern Asian Studies, 20 (3): 401-46.
• —–. 1990. Imagining India. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Ludden, David. 1985. Peasant History in South India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• History). Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• —–. 1999. An Agrarian History of South Asia (The New Cambridge History of India: IV.4).
• Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• —–. 2000. ‘Agrarian Histories and Grassroots Development in South Asia’, in Arun Agrawal and K. Sivaramkrishnan. (eds.). 2000. Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 251-64.
• —–. 2001. ‘Subalterns and Others in the Agrarian History of South Asia’, in James C. Scott and Nina Bhatt. (eds.). Agrarian Studies: Synthetic Work at the Cutting Edge. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 206-31.
• Thorner, Daniel.1980. The Shaping of Modern India. Bombay: Allied Publishers.