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State, Peasant and Money-Lender in Late Nineteenth-Century Bihar: Some Colonial Inputs
No full textAmong external influences on nineteenth-century India, those attributed to the colonial state have assumed major significance; but they have been subject to opposing interpretations. In the case of Bihar, it is clear that the British government had no reliable information about population, cultivated area, cropping patterns, output, rents and so on, before the present century at the earliest. Nineteenth-century Bihar already represented therefore in many senses a highly-developed society and economy. Similar points may be made about the court of wards and the administration of government estates. The importance of work reflected the region’s social composition: the dominant Rajputs and Brahmans almost invariably employed field-workers. In Darbhanga the cost of grain changed relatively little over eight months of scarcity in 1892, remaining at 14 to 12 seerer rupee for common rice, though marua hit a peak of 30 per cent above normal
The Impact of British Rule on Religious Community: Reflections on the Trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah of Patna in 1865
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Ideas in agrarian history: some observations on the British and nineteenth-century Bihar
No full textI wrote ten years ago about the need to employ the idea of resources rather than structures in understanding Indian rural society.3 I had discovered in nineteenth-century Bihar both the extreme variability of ranking year-by-year according to anyone criterion (outside, that is, of very broad categories), and the conditionality and changing fortunes of particular advantages over time. Behind this idea-though I do not guarantee that I appreciated it fully at the time-lay others about the essential ambiguity and multiplicity of roles and functions in all societies. This is to assert that there is no such thing, in absolute terms, as, say, 'economics', and that different peoples have different pictures in their minds, and organise themselves according to varied principles and categories. The word 'peasant', for example, has spawned a vast academic industry, based on the premise that there is a kind of person or society common to many parts of the world and conforming more or less to certain characteristics. The peasant is an individual producer using family labour, concentrating on his subsistence, and (though subordinate to external elites) living among others of his kind. The problem with this definition occurs when researchers discover peasants who do not conform. In much of India, I believe, it is not true to say that the dominant mode is a peasant one. Though we all go on using the term in a more popular sense, we do not mean that we find everywhere family-farm production, homogeneity, and a lack of involvement in the market. On the contrary we find employment of labour, social differentiation, and the production of crops for sale
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