Textualizing the agrarian: plots and forms in British India

ABSTRACT

This essay establishes interrelations between three apparently different kinds of texts on agrarian India produced in the nineteenth century. The first of these are government documents on agrarian governance, the second consists of analytical essays, on the conditions of peasantry and land legislation in nineteenth-century Bengal, authored by two eminent thinkers of that society, and the third is a novel on the intrigues of an agrarian society, set in Orissa. The essay argues that in their own ways, each of these types of texts played around, recast, and disrupted foundational imperial universals, like state, society, and property and the relationship between them. The essay mobilizes a conversation between different productions of universals in these texts. It concludes by reflecting upon these discursive strategies in the light of a debate on the difference between ‘literature’ and ‘history’ in late-nineteenth century Bengal. It suggests that Rabindranath Tagore’s framing, in this debate, of the ‘historical rasa’ can help us understand the transactions between ‘social theory’, ‘history’ and ‘literature’ in these texts on agrarian India.

KEYWORDS:

• agrarian
• history
• literature
• textuality
• empire
• despotism

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Sandipan Mitra for directing my attention to the debate on ‘history’ and ‘literature’ in Bengal. The comments of two anonymous readers of the essay helped in clarifying the argument. I remain thankful to Siddharth Satpathy for his invitation to contribute to this collection. The observations of Sukanya Sarbadhikary, as always, refined the thoughts of this experimental piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest and Chakrabarti, “The Work of the Local” for a critical summary of these shifts.

2. See Sartori, Liberalism in Empire and Pandian, Crooked Stalks as examples of newer lines of inquiry in agrarian studies of South Asia. Sartori’s book analyzes peasant articulations of agrarian property in Bengal in the image of a reconstituted Lockeanism, thereby introducing a new framework of thinking about possible conjunctions between social histories and histories of idea, beyond diffusionist models. Pandian’s work, on the other hand, considers the histories of agricultural life in South India as grounds of certain moral-ethical ways of being, which emerge out of, yet exceed, colonial and indigenous life-worlds.

3. The permanent settlement was rooted in an official perception of the agrarian society of India which considered big landlords as sovereign proprietors of land. There was an equally dominant perception which considered the state, or the monarch, to be the absolute owner of the soil. The permanent settlement emerged out of a long battle between these two rival perceptions of Indian agrarian society, and property-ownership in it, where the latter won over the former in fixing the policy. With the Fifth Report, a new understanding of agrarian society and property emerged in the official discourse, which was informed by the debates surrounding the permanent settlement, but went beyond them. See Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal.

4. The Fifth Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, 136.

5. Harrington, Minute and Draft of Regulation, of the Rights of Ryots in Bengal.

6. “Memorandum by the Secretary regarding the past settlements of the Ceded and Conquered Provinces, with heads of a Plan for the permanent settlement of those Province, 1 July 1819.” In Selections from Revenue Records, North-West Provinces, 1822–1833.

7. Bentinck, “Minute on Land Tenures, Enclosure to Circular No. 190, 12 November 1833, To Commissioners of Revenue.” In Circular Orders of the Sadar Board of Revenue at the Presidency of Fort William; Including the Rules of Practice for the Guidance of the Board and of the Commissioners of Revenue, from the year 1788 to the end of August 1837, 317–351.

8. See Report of the Indian Famine Commission.

9. See Voelcker, Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture.

10. Some important works argue that governmental imagination in nineteenth century British India understood the ‘village’ as an insular and static entity. See Dumont, “The “Village Community” from Munro to Maine” and Srinivas, The Dominant Caste and Other Essays, 20–59. The ‘village’ was, however, perceived as a much more complex and dynamic entity.

11. Chatterjee, Bankim Rachanabali, 303

12. See Chatterjee, Bankim Rachanabali, 297.

13. See Harrington, Minute and Draft of Regulation, of the Rights of Ryots in Bengal, 3–15.

14. Ibid, 307.

15. The classic work in this field is Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India. For more recent approaches, see Mehta, Liberalism and Empire.

16. One can find some clues of these differences in an essay, which discusses the teaching of political economy at the Haileybury College, and its relationship to governance. See Tribe, “Professors Malthus and Jones”.

17. Chatterjee, Bengal Ryots, 19–20.

18. “Minute of Sir C.T. Metcalfe, 7 November 1830.” In Selections from Revenue Records, North-West Provinces, 1822–1833, 214, emphasis mine.

19. For older historical scholarship which reproduced the colonial understanding of ‘misrecognition’ in analysing the effects of the Permanent Settlement on Bengal’s agrarian society, see Ray, Change in Bengal Agrarian Society. For a notable recent work which analyses the effect of such historiographic conclusions on the conceptualization of colonial law and property governance, see Chaudhry, “A Rule of Proprietary Right for British India”.

20. The particular version used is, Senapati, Six Acres and a Third. See the ‘Introduction’ to this novel by Mohanty, to understand the ironic character of Fakir Mohan’s discourse.

21. See Mukhopadhyay, The Agrarian Society of Orissa for a discussion on these conflicts. Although Mukhapadhyay argues that the big landlords managed to oust the village-level proprietors in most of these battles, statistical representations of land-ownership in Orissa at the end of the nineteenth century show different results. For these figures, see Padhi, Land Relations and Agrarian Development in India, 107–8. More than these estimates, what is important for us in this essay is the focus of the novel on the figure of the ‘village-proprietor’, as the quintessential source of agrarian power. This focus, as we have already noted, is shared by the different kinds of texts discussed here. Around this figure, these texts develop different frames of agrarian power invested with different conceptualizations of the relation between state, society and property.

22. Gaganendra Nath Dash argues persuasively that the figure of Ramachandra Mangaraj was closer to that of a moneylender compared to a zemindar. Given the period in which Fakir Mohan wrote, it is highly probable that, in describing Mangaraj’s evil designs, he was referring to the village-based moneylender’s totalizing grip on the peasantry. In fact, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the colonial government too became particularly concerned about the oppressive paramountcy of such figures in Indian villages. This does not, however, run counter to my argument about Mangaraj being a village-based land-controller, a type which rose to importance in both the colonial discourse on agrarian governance, and the villages of Orissa around the first half of the nineteenth century, often doubling up as the village-moneylender. Even if Mangaraj resembled a moneylender, therefore, the more important point is that his power was in and of the village, a position made possible by discursive shifts within the understandings of agrarian power across European and indigenous textual sites. Dash, “Rediscovering Ramachandra Mangaraj”

23. Guha, “Neel-Darpan”

24. Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, 67–76.

25. Ibid, chapters 6, 13–17, 22–24.

26. Ibid, chapter 19.

27. Ibid, 174. See also chapters 20–21.

28. Chakrabarti argues that the ‘public’ life of the discipline of history in India was shaped over ‘lively contestations and exchanges across the public domain and the institutional space of the university’. See Chakrabarti, The Calling of History, 12. He notes that Akshaykumar Maitreya was amongst the earliest of the Indian scholars to take an interest in the academic practice of history (Ibid, 39).

29. For a wide-ranging and insightful examination of some of these reflections and debates in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Bengal, see Chaudhuri, “History in Poetry”.

30. Maitreya, “Mir Qasim”.

31. Sen, “Bankimchandra O Musalman Sampradaya,” 68.

32. Tagore, “Sirajaddaula”.

33. Tagore, “Oitihashik Upanyas,” 98.

34. For an important argument which demonstrates the colonial origins of world literature, and, therefore, serves as an important point of reference for the problem of the relation between ‘history’ and ‘literature’ in a colonial context, see Bhattacharya, “On Comparitism in the Colony”.

35. Andrew Sartori, in a recent essay, makes interesting observations about conceptual possibilities of writing histories of economic thought in south Asia. Drawing upon his earlier work on the Bengal peasantry’s articulations of a critique of property from the standpoint of labour, and comparing it with a well-known essay on the agrarian relations of Bengal by Peary Chand Mitra, he argues that such histories should focus on the variegated social conditions of possibility enabling the production of an analytical language of political-economy amongst different kinds of indigenous actors – ‘structured by a rationality that was instrinsically commensurable with the epistemic logic of political economy’ – instead of considering them all as derivations of a liberal-imperial discourse. My essay is, however, keen on understanding this field of production of categories of social theory and political economy in nineteenth century south Asia as marked by complex intertextualities disturbing the imperial-indigenous opposition, and the consequent idea of ‘derivation’. See Sartori, “Empire.”

36. Kaviraj, while discussing the emergence of modernity in Bengali literature, argues that ‘In the West the primary form of this kind of historical reflection was social theory…In India, reflection on modernity came primarily through literature…’ See Kaviraj, “Laughter and Subjectivity,” 381. This essay argues against such oppositions between ‘history/social theory’ and ‘literature’ in relation to the ‘West’ and the ‘East’. I have shown how these different kinds of texts were powerful sites for the production of a kind of historical social theory which disturbed the conflict of ‘history’ and ‘literature’.