No PointersArup R. Banerji LAND CONTROL AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE IN INDIAN HISTORY Edited by R.E. Frykenberg Manohar Publications, New Delhi, 1979, pp. xii 277, Rs. 85.00 VOLUME V NUMBER 2 September/October 1980 The collection of papers under review was first published in 1969,
five years after they first felt the heat of discussion at a seminar, at the
University of Wisconsin. The continuing demand for them and the response
aroused by them are the reasons offered by the editor for the second edition.
Unfortunately, their usefulness as in-depth studies of three areas of India in
the nineteenth-century remain confined to the state of research on them at the
time of the first publication. Designed to include the proceedings of a seminal',
their value as a re-publication could have been enormously enhanced with the
addition of research effort concluded through the 1970s on Bengal, Oudh as well
South India. The only additional essay is the one by Frykenberg that seems to
have missed inclusion in the first edition.
Of the eleven essays, two are concerned with 'land' and the
influence of ideas on the formation of institutions related to it. Nurul Hasan's
paper is the only one devoted exclusively to the pre-colonial period. Of the
rest, Cohn and Metcalfe look at the fate of aristocracies in Benaras and Oudh
on both sides of the mid-nineteenth century divide, RayChaudhuri tackles the
intricate skein of zamindari rights in Bengal while Stein, Frykenberg and
Mukherjee subject different aspects of South Indian agrarian structures to
analysis. It should be pointed out that the title is somewhat misleading for
the grand canvas of expectations it suggests is eluding. 'Land Control’ is
viewed by almost all the contributors as control over land by the assertion of intermediary claims on its
produce and over its cultivators, rather than production activities on land or the social
arrangements of the direct producers. Land Control is related to Social Structure
in terms of the jockeying for power and the means deployed by the rural power
and land holders to bolster their position at the expense of the peasants and
the state. As a result, the rural universe, a pyramidal structure, is studied
with primary attention concentrated on its over-cumbrous middle. This is a
methodology that can be faulted on several grounds, but particularly in the
light of the fact that it seems to ignore the bases of wealth and status-power
of the middle layers, that emanated dually from the peasantry, that created the
output and the state that endorsed or endowed ... Table of Contents >> |