Of peasants migrants and paupers
Material type:
- 305.56 BRE
Item type | Current library | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds |
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Gandhi Smriti Library | 305.56 Bre (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 29598 |
This is a major work in the area of agrarian relations.
Jan Breman maintains that with the introduction of the capitalistic form of farming, the feudal pattern of agrarian relations has been replaced by something which combines the worst of both the systems with of course rare individual exceptions. The legal abolition of bonded labour has resulted in the hall or the bonded labourer being deprived of his traditional right of employment and other benefits in his master's house. Greater monetization of the economy has also gone against him. While the minimum wage payable itself based on extremely conservative estimates is rarely paid, the hali has lost his right to payments in kind, which helped him in the past to barely survive. The capitalistic form of farming has not brought in greater equality in the countryside. It has resulted in greater polarization of classes-between the landowners who are mainly Patidars (a middle caste of cultivators) and the landless labourers. NAA Yet this large pauperized rural mass has not become a class in itself. The presence of a high proportion of migrant labourers from the tribal hinterland has defused the potentially volatile situation. Antagonism has been diverted towards the 'strangers', who live in the shadow of village life. The landlords have succeeded under the new system in creating surplus labour in a situation of scarce resources. Instead of uniting, the halis and the migrants, both victims of exploitation, remain divided.
Set in a historical perspective, Breman's delineation of the dynamics of the agrarian class structure, the interrelations of caste and class and the entire social world which governmental regulations have brought about is penetrating and sensitive.
This book should be read with his earlier work Patronage and Exploitation (University of California Press, 1974), based on research in the same area. It deals with the relations between the Anavil Brahmins, aristocratic, upper-caste landowners and their traditional farm servants, the Dublas.
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