Question

essay on colonialism and its impact on indian peasantry ?

Answer 1

With reference to Permanent Settlement, Sumit Sarkar says that after 1850s British policies tried to bring into being enterprising raiyats on the model of English Yeoman farmers and provided them with the legal protection in 1855 and 1859 from arbitrary eviction but they resorted back to the old practice of shifting the burden to groups below them. And the direct producers were too oppressed to go for any improvement in agriculture. In Ryotwari areas tenants’ trouble enhanced due to the fact that they were unprotected by the law. Below the landholding peasants were the mass of landless labourers, whose number swelled to 52.4 millions in 1901 (Sarkar 2008: 34). Even while referring to the later period of  twentieth century with regard to colonial demands, Mridula Mukherjee points out that the incidence of land revenue at constant prices (1913-14) from 1906-7 to 1938-39 shows that there was no consistent trend of decline in the incidence of land revenue per acre in the twentieth century. And in the period 1929-39, the incidence of land revenue had stabilized at a substantially higher level compared to the earlier period (Mukherjee 2005: 5).
The Pauperisation of cultivators could be witnessed in the growth of the landless labourers to 1/3rd or even ½ of the agricultural population. In reality the condition of the large section of small peasants on uneconomic holding, of tenants was not far removed from that of the landless labourers as the distinction between the two was extremely shadowy one. In 1927, N. M. Joshi in All India Trade Union Congress, estimated 25millions to be the number of agricultural wage earner, and 50 millions more to be partly working wage earners on the land (Dutt 1992: 242). Habib asserts by quoting Crawfurd that ultimate poverty was reached could be witnessed in the diet of rural classes. As the British decided to elevate its revenue demand on individual it bypassed the Village community as revenue paying unit and hence the destruction of the Village community. As regards the agricultural labourers, so far as they depended on upper section of peasantry, naturally the burden passed on to them (Habib 1975: 35).