Production Relations and Social Classes in HistoryManjeet Baruah MEDIEVAL AND EARLY COLONIAL ASSAM: SOCIETY, POLITY, ECONOMY By Amalendu Guha Anwesha, Guwahati, 2014, pp. 309, Rs. 450.00 VOLUME XXXIX NUMBER 4 April 2015 It is heartening that after a gap of a decade
and a half, Amalendu Guha’s Medieval
and Early Colonial Assam: Society, Polity,
Economy is once again available in
bookshops. The twelve chapters originally
published as articles between the 1960s and
1980s, were compiled and published as a
book in 1991.
The first two chapters identify and study
the region in Indian history. The following
four chapters broadly deal with the period
from the thirteenth to early eighteenth century,
the medieval period of Assam. The last
six chapters deal with the colonial period,
especially the nineteenth century, and the
making of colonial Assam.
Unlike Guha’s widely discussed Planter
Raj to Swaraj, Medieval and Early Colonial
Assam has received relatively less attention.
The book, nevertheless, is important for several
reasons, of which three are underlined
here.
First, one line of investigation that runs
throughout the book is that of productive
relations and formation of socio-economic
classes in Assam. To investigate the issue for
both the precolonial and the early colonial
period, Guha makes use of concepts such as
tribe, peasant and caste. These concepts are
used to understand whether the organization
of society can be framed in terms of formation
or historical development of socio-economic
classes. Guha’s argument is that social
differentiation remained rudimentary. In
other words, if on the one hand, distinction
between tribe, peasant or caste remained
blurred, especially for the precolonial period,
the production process too (i.e., technologies
of production, monetization of economy,
etc.) has remained rudimentary.
The question Guha poses is, what explains
such a nature of society and production
process? He provides two sets of answers,
for the precolonial and the colonial periods.
The general rationale for ‘backwardness’ in
the precolonial period is shown as due to a
combination of three factors: the peculiarity
of geographical location of the Brahmaputra
Valley (resulting in the tribe-peasant continuum
throughout), slow Sanskritization
(i.e., coming of technologies of production) and relative isolation of the area from larger state making processes. As a result, land relations remained entangled between control of forms of the state apparatus, ‘feudal’ lords and community. Though the individual was entitled to use productive land, the entanglement inhibited the development of true forms of peasant, feudal lord or monarch. In the process, what it also prevented was the growth of a system of surplus appropriation which was revenue centric. At the same time and ... Table of Contents >> |