Peasants and capitalists in Northern India: Kisans in the cane commodity circuit in Gorakhpur in the 1930s

Abstract

This paper is apart of a larger study of the peasantry in north‐eastern lndia caught up in the production of an important cash crop and the growth of capitalist enterprise on the basis of that crop, a theme not adequately explored in the Indian context so far. Central to the argument is a belief that distinctions between ‘subsistence’ and ‘market orientation’ or between food and non‐food crops, when made in the context of a multi‐crop raising peasantry in India tend generally to be analytically weak. Admittedly, certain crops could not be consumed by peasant producers and had to be sold to realise cash values, but for a multi‐crop raising peasantry they made sense only in relation to the other crops that preceded and followed them.

It seems that a more meaningful way of highlighting the involvement of the peasantry in a particular cash crop network ‐ sugarcane in this case ‐would be not by isolating it from all other crops that a peasant household produces put by locating it within the overall cropping pattern. If such an approach is adopted, then exchange and production relations that appear at first sight to emanate from demand of a particular cash crop assume their full significance only in the context of their role and place within the overall production process and the economic conditions of a peasantry within a given harvest calendar.

In other words, a much more systematic investigation of the structure of petty peasant commodity production in terms of the rhythms of crop regimes, expenditure of ‘peasant time’ and their connection with the seasonal reconstitution of the household economies of the smaller peasants is required. Excessive emphasis on the notional monetary returns from peasant‐produced commodities or an abstract preoccupation with the power and hold of usury capital can at best result in a partial understanding of the widespread phenomenon of petty peasant commodity production in colonial India.

Notes

Junior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Oxford.

An earlier and much shorter version of this paper was presented to the VI European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies held at Paris in July 1978. I am indebted to Ranajit Guha, Frank Perlin, Tapan Raychaudhuri and Alice Thorner for their criticism and suggestions. Subsequent versions were discussed at seminars in London and New Delhi where Charles Curwen, Niladri Bhattacharya, Bipan Chandra and Basudev Chatlerjee demanded, and hopefully received, additional clarifications.