ASSIGNMENT 2

SHAMBHAVI VARMA

1510110349

How does Environmental and ecology feature in David Ludden understanding of

Agrarian System in South India before and after Ryotwari Settlements?

The village settlement that ravaged the country from 1808 to 1814 badly affected cultivation

as well as revenue.

In the period after the Permanent Settlement an alternative method was attempted in a

number of other districts, beginning in Madras. The conception was put forward that the

government should make a direct settlement with the cultivators, not permanent, but

temporary or subject to periodical re-assessment, and thus avoid both the disadvantages of the

Permanent Settlement, securing the entire spoils itself without needing to share them with

intermediaries.

Ludden emphasized that the ryotwari system was imposed by the Government on the

different production systems i.e., the wet land (Nunjah) which contributed most of the

revenues of the district and large area of dry lands (Punjah). While discussing the subsistence

production and the community maintaining strategies, he also explained the tensions between

them.

Because water flows downhill, conflict of interests would have flowed across boundaries

between irrigated communities. If channels clogged with silt because of neglect in one

village, villages downstream would be deprived of their just due. Field farthest from the

source of local irrigation were at a natural disadvantage, as were fields on high ground.

The contrast between wet and dry communities demonstrates that peasants living standards,

wealth, political power, and social status came to depend not on caste status above all, as a
conventional image of traditional India would suggest, but rather on family access to

agricultural assets with a specific milieu.

Comparing wet and dry communities, caste status by itself predicts peasants living conditions

only where it became equated historically with the ownership of fixed capital, that, in

irrigated communities.

To own a well in the wet land zone meant little compared to what it would mean in a dry

zone village. Everywhere the value of land as capital depended on its water supply.

The wet community evolved as a highly stratified social milieu where access to the means of

production was thoroughly identified with caste status. In stark contrast with the dry zone, the

wet zone was not a land of rustic warrior-peasants, but of two distinct peasant strata: one

owned land but did not labor; the other laboured without owning even, in most cases, rights

to its own labor power.

Sharecropping seems to have been most common on less well irrigated land; the share of the

crop paid to the landowner would increase, the more adequate the water supply. On the very

best irrigated land, where sufficient water for paddy was certain, landowners could demand a

fixed grain rent, called pattam. The poorer the tenant, therefore, the more he would rely upon

mirasidar capital and food advances; and hence the more dependent his position.

Power within communities centered on the most resourceful mirasidars, for though the

villages were collective entities, they were anything but egalitarian. Unlike the situation in

the dry zone, village office did not become a base for power in the wet zone in the centuries

before 1800. Mirasidars became official revenue contractors and merchants; indeed,

mirasidars were the government in the wet zone.

Mirasidar wealth, education, and cultural refinement depended on freedom from work in the

fields. Over centuries, landowning in wet communities became more and more detached from
agricultural labour, and landed families could thus turn their minds toward more exalted

achievement.

The nutritional security of wet land has induced independent landowners to forfeit ownership

for irrigation on their land. For those with only their labour to barter, client status might have

seemed a tolerable price to pay for a position, however lowly, in the wet zone economy.

Dry land farmers would pay a cash fee annually for the privilege of farming land within a

mirasidar village domain. That this fee continued to be customary into the nineteenth century

testifies to the fact that state authorities continues to patronize the Pandya elite in their

dealings with the mixed zone.

Whatever the case, mixed zone mirasidars from the north to the south were much more

vulnerable to harsh political winds than their wet zone counterparts, and winds blew hard

after the fall of the Nayakas.

Bibliography/Sources:

David E Ludden, Peasant History in South Asia, Chapter 3.