3 - Land is to objectify

Summary

The history of landed property, which would demonstrate the gradual transformation of the feudal landlord into the landowner, of the hereditary, semi-tributary and often unfree tenant for life into the modern farmer, and of the resident serfs, bondsmen and villeins who belonged to the property into agricultural day-labourers, would indeed be the history of the formation of modern capital.

Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 1973

During the nineteenth century, the agrarian world of warriors and dependents represented in the Bhuinya oral traditions and medieval records was fundamentally transformed. Although elements of this transformation were evident even in the eighteenth century, the colonial context of the following century provided a firm basis for significant changes in the agrarian structure of south Bihar. For one thing, south Bihar itself became visible as a region in place of the mythic warrior-fiefdoms of oral traditions and historical kingdoms of medieval texts. Historical records, too, changed in their orientation: instead of primarily chronicling the deeds of emperors and their vassals, the nineteenth-century texts documented land rights and revenue obligations, outlined administrative arrangements and political control, and monitored economic fluctuations and demographic changes. Of course, the change in the orientation of records and their systematic nature reflects the fact that the British had replaced the Mughals as rulers of the subcontinent. Constructing an empire fundamentally different from that of the Mughals, the British also came to know, administer, and control India through a different set of records.