8 - The Need to be Indebted

Summary

Because rural and tropical communities in which cash circulates are innately inegalitarian, so it is inevitable that the impoverished (in particular) need to borrow and that richer people should wish to put their surplus funds to work. It is mistaken to assume that such borrowing and lending as takes place within a village community necessarily enhances inequality (it may, indeed, reduce it), or is bound to be ‘bad’ for some other reason. As Baker has put it in relation to the history of rural Tamilnad, credit-granting reflected the fundamental inequalities of local societies but did not create them, borrowing between cultivators being best considered as part of the hierarchically ordered system of distribution within the village, big men being expected or even obliged to provide credit. ‘Just as the village leader was expected to distribute grain to keep the village alive, so he was expected to distribute capital resources to keep the village lands under cultivation’. Those impoverished people who are too poor to borrow have, as it were, fallen beneath the community and are therefore without hope. Borrowing and lending are necessary for the health of any rural community, ‘an intrinsic part of the system of production’ – hence the provocative title of this chapter. To cite Baker again, the expansion of local debt may well be evidence of the ‘rapid growth of a commercial economy’ (p.258), rather than of any submission to rapacious creditors.