Land tenure and peasant in south asia / edited by Robert Eric Frykenberg

Minds tend to boggle at the immensity and complexity of questions relating to land and peasant in South Asia. Nowhere on earth are relationship between man land land more complicated and seemingly intractable. At the centre is India, some six hundred million people, of whom three out of four must work the land for a living. Generation after generation has known famine and scarcity on a scale unknown elsewhere. Such conditions mock all other human achievements and threaten world peace.
What went wrong? What may the remedies be? Papers in this book look at land, tenure, and peasant in different ways. Each, from a different discipline -history, anthropology, economics, geography, political science, sociology provides its own unique angle of vision. Each draws upon altogether new data and furnish fresh insights on discrete localities and sets of problems. Each is the work of a specialist who is preoccupied with the intricate ways is which forms of land and lord and labour have been combined and with how such combinations can be changed.

Poverty and scarcity are distinguishable. Attempts to abolish poverty by economic development alone, without coming to grips with the deepest levels of human, ideological, and institutional conflict, can but beg the question and must surely end in futility. Essays contained in this book serve to emphasize the fallacy of the common notion that, with just little more fertiliser and technical know-how (too often transferred directly from an alien environment) problems of land tenure and of distributing wealth equitably can be quickly solved. Efforts in socio economic engineering however well intentioned, have been continuosly prone to frustration and failure. This book attempts to show how this happens.