11 - Peasants, moneylenders and colonial rule: an excursion into Central India

Summary

It is still widely supposed that the introduction of modern transferable title destroyed or fundamentally distorted peasant land rights in India and allowed the moneylender and middleman trader to gain a novel and portentous hold over the countryside. This hold, it is urged, was largely parasitic, direct investment in farm production being scorned for the easier and richer profits of rack-renting, usury, and the marketing of crops obtained at ‘distress’ prices. Middleman agency thus siphoned off the enhanced value of agriculture which resulted from increased cash-cropping and the price rise from the late 1860s. So far from peasant farming developing, a ‘depeasantisation’ took place that reduced the mass of agriculturalists to cultivators working for the barest subsistence return under a form of debt peonage. This picture is not one original to latter-day Marxists but was drawn by the British colonialists themselves. In essentials it was already complete by 1852 when Sir George Wingate wrote bitterly of the moneylender in the Bombay presidency being intent on reducing the ryot ‘to a state of hopeless indebtedness in order that he may be able to appropriate the whole fruits of his industry beyond what is indispensable to a mere existence…should the present course of affairs continue it must arrive that the greater part of the realised property of the community will be transferred to a small monied class, who will become disproportionately wealthy by the impoverishment of the rest of the people’.