LAND TENURE FROM 1800 TO 1947

LAND TENURE FROM 1800 TO 1947 The pattern of land tenure in India at the beginning of the nineteenth century was far from egalitarian. A substantial portion of India's agrarian population comprised a class of agricultural laborers who neither owned arable land nor held any customary rights to occupy and cultivate it. In South India, about 20 percent of the agricultural population, mainly Dalits and other low caste members, were employed by landowners to cultivate their land. In Bengal, also, there is considerable evidence that during early British rule, a system of agricultural labor prevailed. Landless agricultural laborers were reported to form about 20 percent of the agricultural population in Dinajpur in 1808, although the rate of the landless population was likely to be lower in some other regions, especially in eastern Bengal, where the majority of villagers were peasants cultivating their lands. In western India, while agricultural laborers were few in the Deccan, there was nevertheless a system of hereditary farm servants in some districts of Gujarat.

Those who either owned land or had customary rights to cultivate it were not homogeneous in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the Tamil district of South India, a handful of village elites called mirasidars, very often belonging to Brahman and other high castes, asserted their rights of ownership over the land of the entire village and controlled village affairs. Under them was a group of farmers who either held permanent rights to cultivate village land or were temporary tenants belonging to other villages. Under the ryotwari settlement system, the government recognized mirasidars as the sole proprietors of land, dismissing tenants' rights completely. Only in villages where no mirasidar system existed were those villagers holding permanent occupancy rights recognized as landholders responsible for the payment of land revenue. In Bengal, under the zamindari settlement, zamindars who had ruled a wide area covering a large number of villages were recognized as the proprietors of land, collecting rents from farmers (ryots), paying only a small fraction of those revenues to the government. In some regions, like Dinajpur, in addition to a group of small peasants who cultivated their land mainly with family labor, there was a class of rich ryots who held many acres of land, which they leased to sharecroppers. In North Indian districts, where a system of joint holding of village lands called bhaichara tenure was prevalent, shares of the holdings were unequally distributed, even by the 1820s.

Even though the aggregate result of changes in the size of landholdings appears negligible, the composition of each landholding-size group seems to have changed over time, hinting at transformations in village agrarian structure at least in some regions of India. In South India, some merchants, moneylenders, and other nonagricultural interests expanded their landed property and grew to be large landlords, who let their lands to tenants, whereas the previous large landholders of Brahman and other high caste origins gradually moved to urban areas and decreased their holdings in rural areas. The aggregate result of these mixed changes was that there was no substantial expansion of large landholdings. At the other end of the landholding scale, migration to overseas plantations provided landless agricultural laborers with a chance to emancipate themselves, and some among them acquired tiny pieces of land, whereas a new group of agricultural laborers appeared as a result of the dispossession of the landholdings of small peasants. A similar change in the composition of agricultural laborers has been reported for Bengal. A reduction in the number of landless laborers as a result of their migration to cities was witnessed in British Gujarat between 1911 and 1931. For the eastern part of Bengal, the occupancy ryots seem to have disintegrated into village landlords and sharecroppers with no occupancy rights. Taking into account these different trends in landholding, sometimes counteracting one another, the process of the differentiation of landholding peasants may not be ruled out, and it may have been actually witnessed, at least in some regions.

Another change noticed in some areas of India was a decline in communal land tenure. In some regions, landholders collectively held village land, each owner holding only a share at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Such collective landholding was divided among shareholders over the next several decades. While the direct cause for this division was the government policy to settle land revenue on the individual holder for each plot of land, a gradual loosening of unity among landholders also contributed to this end.

Various factors contributed to these changes in land tenure. The impact of the commercialization of agriculture on the peasant classes was complex. It sometimes strengthened small peasants by providing a higher income, but often the growing fluctuation in prices led them to disintegrate into a group of richer peasants, who benefited from the fluctuation, and others who came under the grip of moneylenders and merchants. In general, it contributed to the expansion of landed property by the nonagricultural population, though the extent of such transfer differed by region. The trend among high-caste landowners to move to urban areas resulted in reducing their landownership, whereas the migration of laborers provided them with opportunities to purchase small pieces of land.

Jajmani System

In the 1930s, Willam H. Wiser found a system of hereditary obligations of payment and of occupational and ceremonial duties between two or more specific families of different castes in the same locality. Each member of the village service castes had his own client families to whom he was entitled and responsible to serve and who, for his service, gave some stipulated amount of remuneration. He called this dyadic type of relationship the jajmani system. The dominant view presupposed that the system was rather dominant before the nineteenth century but was gradually declining in the twentieth century.

Peter Mayer, however, questioned the presupposition and argued that the jajmani system is of recent origin and is essentially a feature of the Gangatic Plain. According to him, the system that prevailed widely in North India, at least until the second half of the nineteenth century, was one in which the artisans and others, like Chamars, had general obligations of service to the entire class of village landholders and were compensated for these services by all cultivators, either directly by payment at harvest time or indirectly through grants of village land.

Evidence from western India of the pre-colonial period provides an interesting case, indicating a mixture of collective and individual remunerations to service providers. Washermen served an entire village body and were rewarded for their services by the village as a whole. At the same time, they could get perquisites from individual peasants when they provided a specific service to them, indicating that there existed a dyadic and individual relationship between each service provider and each peasant, operating within the framework of the holistic system of dividing labor in a village. An 1811 report from South India describes a case in which the share of harvested grain to which servants of landholders were entitled was insufficient for their subsistence, so they were to receive further payments in grain by their masters until the total reached a stipulated amount. This also seems to indicate the existence of a dyadic relationship together with a collective form of remuneration.

Even if it would be an exaggeration to deny the existence of an individual and dyadic relationship between service providers and other villagers, there is no doubt that a holistic system of dividing labor predominated in pre-colonial India. The loosening of the village community in the nineteenth century surely weakened such a holistic system. The colonial land policy was generally to deny the collective landholding system that had prevailed in some regions of India, and it was reluctant to recognize revenue-free land having been granted to members of service castes, though the policies differed by region. As the result of the decline of the holistic remuneration system, the jajmani system gradually came to be the dominant form of remuneration in the course of time.

Haruka Yanagisawa

See alsoAgricultural Wages, Labor, and Employment since 1757

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Guha, Sumit. "Agrarian Bengal, 1850–1947: Issues and Problems." Studies in History 11, no. 1 (1995): 119–142.

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Kumar, Dharma, ed. The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2: c. 1757–c. 1970. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Mayer, Peter. "Inventing Village Tradition: The Late Nineteenth Century Origins of the North Indian 'Jajmani System.'" Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 2 (1993): 357–395.

Nakazato, Nariaki. Agrarian System in Eastern Bengal, c. 1870–1910. Kolkata: K. P. Bagchi, 1994.

Ray, Rajat, and Ratna Ray. "The Dynamics of Continuity in Rural Bengal under the British Imperium: A Study of Quasi-Stable Equilibrium in Underdeveloped Societies in a Changing World." Indian Economic and Social History Review 10, no. 2 (June 1973): 103–128.

Yanagisawa, Haruka. A Century of Change: Caste and Irrigated Lands in Tamilnadu, 1860s–1970s. New Delhi: Manohar, 1996.