The Labour Market and the Standard of Living

The high standard of living of weavers as well as other labouring groups in South India (and more generally in the Indian subcontinent) was rooted in the traditions and practices of the labour market.

other producers possessed to pick up and move, which gave them enormous flexibility and power.

The mobility of producers has been best documented for South India. Perhaps most famously, several writers have remarked upon the peripatetic habits of South Indian weavers, who were known to leave whole villages deserted in a night, to the dismay of merchants and political officials. Weavers were also well aware of the power their ‘freedom to migrate' gave to them in dealings with merchants. As an East India Company official put it in the late eighteenth century: ‘[The weavers] know how necessary they are to the Company and think if they become turbulent they need fear no severe treatment for their insolence lest they should desert, which they are ever ready to threaten if not dealt with according to their pleasures.'²

The ability to move was no less true for South Indian producers in agriculture. The mobility of these labourers is perhaps most apparent in the dry zones where in several areas of South India a period was set aside every year during which peasants could migrate. In the area around Bellary this period lasted from early April to mid-July and was known as the ‘kalawedi' season. At this time, producers moved to new villages, and sometimes even to new revenue divisions (taluks), and took up land for cultivation. The same practice was found in the Baramahal where according to a description from Alexander Read, an early British revenue official, producers ‘are commonly hired for the year or the season only, [and] are at liberty to move where they please, in quest of new services, during the “Calliwaddies”, or “spring months.”³ Similar movement was reported in North Arcot and Chingleput. In the latter, Lionel Place estimated that around 13% of the population shifted villages annually.⁴

Mobility of the producer may be less apparent in the areas of rice cultivation, where the group involved in much of the activity of cultivation, adimai in Tamil, has typically been portrayed as tied to the land or to an agricultural superior, either as slave, serf, bonded labourer, or in other unfree relationships.

A pariah, the slave of his landlord, may with his permission, enlist in the army, or in the service of a European gentleman, as a servant (and many have done so without their permission), exercising all the rights of free men. Indeed, even if he remains with his master as a slave, I apprehend that as regards all acts between him and strangers, he possesses the same rights as free men.⁵

The other major category of cultivators in the wet areas was ‘porragoodies' or ‘pycarries'. These were a mobile class of cultivators who entered into annual sharecropping contracts with holders of superior rights. According to F. W Ellis, an early nineteenth-century revenue official, these contracts could be renewed, but if the two parties reached no agreement, the pycarries were free to enter into others

in the same or different village. Pycarries were especially critical for the restoration of rice cultivation after political turmoil or devastating droughts, when labour was in very short supply. In the late eighteenth century, an influx of pycarries allowed Tanjore to recover quickly from the loss of labourers due to out-migration during the Mysore Wars.⁶

3.