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Ideas in agrarian history: some observations on the British and nineteenth-century Bihar*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
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With the death of Professor Eric Stokes we lost above all a delightful man, unassuming and helpful, intellectually vital and original. He helped inspire a new emphasis upon social and economic history among a whole generation of historians of South Asia. There are many people more appropriate than I to reflect this legacy in a memorial lecture. My only claim to speak may seem to be my continuing admiration for and dependence upon Stokes's work. If I have a wider claim, it must be in the emphasis which I place in my own research upon an empirical study of ideas and their impact; there is some justification for identifying members of the School of Oriental and African Studies with this approach, and it may be associated with us even more in future. If so, our starting-point must be Stokes's great pioneering effort, in The English Utilitarians and India, to identify the intellectual basis of Indian policy-making in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet in South Asian studies generally Stokes has had relatively few followers along that path. Among Cambridge historians this first love (if ever they felt its charms) has tended to be supplanted by a positive distaste for flirtations with the impact of ideas. If Stokes is their model, it is in his role as an analyst of agrarian society, as may be enjoyed in his contribution to the Cambridge Economic History or in The Peasant Armed, and in parts of that arguably transitional collection, The Peasant and the Raj.
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References
1 See Stokes, Eric, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959)Google Scholar, The Peasant and the Raj. Studies in agrarian society and peasant rebellion in colonial India (Cambridge, 1978)Google Scholar, and The Peasant Armed. The Indian rebellion of 1857 (ed. Bayly, C. A.; Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar, and Kumar, Dharma, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar.
2 Said, Edward, Orientalism (London, 1978)Google Scholar, and Inden, Ronald, “Orientalist constructions of India”, Modem Asian Studies, xx, no. 3 (1986)Google Scholar.
3 “Hierarchy and resources: peasant stratification in late nineteenth century Bihar”, Modern Asian Studies, xiii, no. 1 (1979)Google Scholar.
4 Guha, Ranajit, ed., Subaltern Studies. Writings on South Asian history and society. 6 vols. (Delhi, 1982–1989)Google Scholar.
5 Washbrook, David, The Emergence of Provincial Politics. The Madras Presidency 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1976CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and Bayly, C. A., Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars. North Indian society in the age of British expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar.
6 The Peasant and the Raj, ch. 12, also published in South Asia 6 (1976)Google Scholar.
7 It was this stable world which British and Indian governments successively sought to protect and restore, as the fount of order and economic interdependence. It is interesting that, though the elements seem logically connected, it is possible to have one of them without the other. The subalternists more or less accept modernization theories while insisting on the autonomy of peasant life; that is, they acknowledge the cultural and political milieu provided by the élites but they prefer to isolate supposedly independent initiatives among the subalterns. Moore, Barrington Jr, however, in his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (London, 1967)Google Scholar, depends utterly upon modernizing theories, but also stresses above all the importance of what élites did to peasantries. Both these approaches overlap at points: see their survival for example very recently in another large and well-publicized book, by Lal, Deepak, on the so-called Hindu Equilibrium (2 vols., Oxford, 1988–1989)Google Scholar.
8 None the less, in the case of the Indian village, I believe one key which unlocks the contradictions of older notions is not just Stokes's division between the exploiter and the exploited, but the distinctive role of the intermediary. That, to my mind, also explains much of the Indian experience of long-distance trade, capitalism and empire. I have made this argument on other occasions, particularly in my “Peasants' choices? Some conditions of agriculture in nineteenth-century Bihar”, paper read to the Economic History Society (Exeter, 1989).
9 The memoranda discussed below may be found with the Government of India's Revenue and Agriculture Proceedings, Revenue Branch, A series, nos. 16–46, July 1883. Some further references are included in my “Law and agrarian society in India: the case of Bihar and the nineteenth-century tenancy debate”, Modern Asian Studies, xxii, no. 2 (1988)Google Scholar. This paper also discussed some other features of the Tenancy Act and the pro-raiyat school, for example the emphasis on the “magic” of property and the arguments for state intervention (pp. 322–6).
10 See Baden-Powell, B. H., The Indian Village Community (London, 1896), ch. 1Google Scholar.
11 Chaudhuri, Pramit, The Indian Economy. Poverty and Development (London, 1978), ch. 9Google Scholar.
12 There are dozens of such pamphlets preserved in the India Office Library, London, several of them being reprints from newspapers, others reports of the proceedings of public meetings, for example of the East India Association or of the London Committee formed to oppose the Bengal Tenancy Bill, and yet others studies commissioned by interested parties such as the Central Committee of Landholders. Leading pamphleteers included Ashutosh Mookerjea, Henry Bell, Roper Lethbridge and W. S. Seton-Kerr. Extremely full government papers were also published, in reports or as supplements to the Calcutta Gazette.
13 The work of Clive Dewey is most important here, and a notable continuation of Stokes's: see his “The official mind and the problem of agrarian indebtedness in India 1870–1910” (Ph.D. Cambridge, 1972Google Scholar) and “Images of the village community: a study in Anglo-Indian ideology”, Modern Asian Studies, vi, no. 3 (1972)Google Scholar.
14 This view of British taxation was suggested in a lecture given by P. K. O'Brien to the Economic History Society (see above, n. 8).