The State, Agriculture, and the Labour Market

If standards of living in India and Britain were at least comparable in the eighteenth century, why were Indian cotton textiles so cheap? I have argued elsewhere that although wages calculated in terms of grain were more or less equal, in India money wages were far lower because the price of grain, the single most important item in the consumption of labouring households, was far lower in India.

[I]n rice countries, which generally yield two, sometimes three crops in the year, each of them more plentiful than any common crop of corn, the abundance of food must be much greater than in any corn country of equal extent...The same super-abundance of food...enables them to give a greater quantity of it for all those singular and rare productions which nature furnishes but in very small quantities; such as the precious metals and the precious stones. (Smith 1976: 228)

In this passage, Smith implicitly attributed the superior productivity of Indian agriculture to the climatic and geographic conditions that permitted double- and triple-cropping. While not wanting to ignore the importance of these conditions, the limitations of such an explanation become evident if one examines agricultural productivity data for the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, as a consequence of major technical advances wheat output per acre in England had equalled or surpassed that of rice in South India, where paddy productivity had stagnated or even declined.

Of course, the institutional and political context has not been lost in writings on Asian agriculture, but constructions such as Oriental despotism and agrarian bureaucratic empires continue to loom over these issues. David Landes, for instance, has recently revived the despotism of Asia, and made it central to rice cultivation in China:

the management of water called for supralocal power and promoted imperial authority. This link between water and power was early noted by European observers, going back to

Montesquieu and reappearing in Hegel, later copied by Marx. The most detailed analysis, though, is the more recent one of Karl Wittfogel, who gave to water-based rule the name of Oriental despotism, with all the dominance and servitude that implies. (Landes 1998: 27)

Writings on agriculture in medieval South India have provided important correctives to the Wittfogel thesis and have pointed to the local institutions, most importantly the temple and councils of local notables (the nadu and mahanadu) that constructed and maintained irrigation works and oversaw the sharing of water (Stein 1984a, b; Ludden 1985; see also Bray 1986: 63—8). Evidence from the late eighteenth century continues to highlight the importance of local institutions for agricultural development in South India. In the 1790s, Lionel Place noted that a fraction of the harvest in each village was set aside as ‘tank morrah' for the maintenance and improvement of irrigation works.⁷

Nevertheless, the following account of repairs conducted on a major dam on the Cauvery River shows that regional political authorities, in this case the king of Tanjore, also were pivotal for the construction and maintenance of irrigation systems:

When I arrived at the annacathy [annicut or dam] I found the Rajah's people employed in repairing the damage from the bank and masonry sustained last year.

Admittedly the annicut was the largest and most important structure in the vast South Indian system of water control, but state activities shaped the agrarian landscape in countless, less dramatic ways as well. This is suggested by the location of agrarian activity in eighteenth-century South India, which cannot be explained solely by local initiative.

The distribution of zones of highly productive agriculture indicates a close correspondence between political authority and agricultural improvement and investment. This was in part a result of medieval activity in agriculture at which time political authority legitimated itself through presentations of land and cash to temples. These institutions then funnelled these gifts into agriculture, especially for rice cultivation, as this was a sure way to receive a high and reliable rate of return on these funds. Less is known on the institutional and political arrangements that promoted agricultural development in post-medieval centuries (after 1600) when temples declined in importance, but this link between political power and agricultural improvement continued to exist, albeit on a different institutional basis. The distribution and location of cotton cultivation in late eighteenth-century South India clearly illustrates the continued importance of political authority in the shaping of the agrarian landscape.

Cropping patterns in South India have most commonly been attributed to geographical and ecological factors such as the location of soils and the availability of water (Baker 1984: ch. 1; Ludden 1985: 51—67). These factors, however, are not sufficient to explain the pattern of cotton cultivation. Cotton in South India was

cultivated under two very different regimes, intensive and extensive, and each form of cultivation was found on very different soils.

This pattern becomes explicable when political power is incorporated into the picture. Extensive cultivation required very little capital. Red soils were easily ploughed and the peasant-cultivator put up his supply of seed. Although intensive cultivation was far more lucrative, it depended upon the availability of abundant supplies of capital. Funds were needed to clear and plough the heavy black soils and to hire the labourers who carried out essential tasks such as ploughing and picking. According to Thomas Munro, who served as the revenue officer in Bellary in the early nineteenth century, political and revenue authorities provided a significant fraction of the capital necessary for cultivation on black soils. This took the form of taccavi, or advances for the financing of production:

These lands, after having lain waste eight or ten years, cannot be broken up without a large plough drawn by six yokes of bullocks, and they must afterwards be cleared of the roots of the long grass with which they are overrun, by a machine drawn by seven or eight yokes. The expense of setting a single plough in motion is about 150 pagodas, so that it can only be done by substantial ryots, or by the union of two or three of those whose means are less. A considerable portion of the bullocks employed are from Nellore, and it is absolutely necessary that the yoke next to the plough be of that breed.

The areas where intensive cultivation was concentrated, Madurai and Bellary, formed the cores of major political formations. Being politically important, they were the focus of state activities to improve agriculture, with the goal of increasing the revenue potential of territories. Outside these two areas, mainly in Coimbatore and Tirunelveli, although black soils were plentiful, they were not brought under the plough until the nineteenth century and the new cotton economy that emerged, which linked South Indian peasants with China, Bombay, and eventually local cotton mills. Coimbatore and Tirunelveli lay outside major South Indian political centres. Coimbatore was a frontier region from its initial settlement in the medieval period. Its status was to change only from the late nineteenth century when it became a dynamic and booming agricultural, and later industrial, centre (Arokiaswami 1956; Baker 1984: 93—5). The black soils in Tirunelveli were similarly a frontier zone and until the nineteenth century investment in the Tirunelveli region was directed towards paddy cultivation in the valley of the Tambraparni River (Ludden 1985: ch. 1—3).

The connection between political authority and high agriculture was not unique to South India, but was found also in other areas of the subcontinent. Perhaps most

strikingly, in the case of Mughal North India even by 1600 much of the land in the heartland of the empire, around Agra for instance, had been brought under cultivation. As one moved to the peripheries of Mughal power, far less of the arable land had been cleared and brought under the plough (Moosvi 1987: 39—73). Similar connections between political authority and agricultural development have been identified for North India, western India, and Bengal in the eighteenth century (Gordon 1978; Bayly 1983: ch. 2; Eaton 1993: ch. 8).

Why did political authorities in South Asia engage in agricultural improvement? First, it was essential for the successful pursuit of political power and statecraft, and even came to be seen as an obligation of political power.

Compelling evidence for the importance of agriculture for kingship comes from texts produced in South India between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The Amuktamalyada, a Telugu work attributed to the Vijayanagar Emperor Krishnadeva Raya (reign from 1509 to 1529), imparted the following advice to a sovereign: ‘The extent of a state is the root cause of its prosperity. When a state is small in extent then both virtue (dharma) and prosperity (artha) will increase only when tanks and irrigation canals are constructed'. Similar sentiments on the importance of agriculture were contained in the Rayavacakamu, a Telugu text on statecraft that is dated to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. It instructed the king to ‘beget the sevenfold progeny, which are a son, a treasure, a temple, a garden, an irrigation tank, a literary work, and a village established for Brahmins'. Elsewhere the Rayavackamu states: A broken family, damaged tanks and wells,a fallen kingdom, one who comes seeking refuge,cows and Brahman, and temples of the gods—supporting these is four times as meritorious.Similar ideas persisted until the late eighteenth century, and under Islamic rule in South India. In particular, very much in the spirit of earlier writings on statecraft, Mysore under Tipu Sultan sought to promote agricultural improvement and expansion. Inducements to invest in agriculture, including reductions in revenue and privileged forms of land tenure such as exemptions from taxation, were offered. In addition, the Mysore state itself supplied capital in the form of taccavi. The granting of taccavi was widespread in late eighteenth-century South India. In Tanjore, English East India Company officials reported that ‘advances for cultivation are made in grain and occasionally in money, and when it does not suit the convenience of the circar to make any, the inhabitants are allowed to borrow money, and to

charge in their final settlement with the Circar at the rate of 1% monthly on the amount of the customary advance'.¹⁰ John Gurney's work (Gurney 1968) on the Nawab of Arcot abundantly shows the importance of taccavi for the functioning of the agrarian and revenue order within his territories.

Taccavi and state participation in agricultural improvement was found in northern India as well. In the case of the Mughal state Irfan Habib has identified both fiscal measures to promote agriculture as well as direct administrative undertakings for the construction of irrigation works, including the digging of wells and the building of dams and canals (Habib 1999: 296-7; see also Chandra 1958: 35-51).

Customs of statecraft was not the only factor propelling political participation in agriculture. These activities were also propelled by the structure of the labour market in eighteenth-century South India. As we have already seen, agricultural producers in South India, and elsewhere on the subcontinent, were highly mobile and this mobility translated into competition for them. Thomas Munro witnessed this competition in the Ceded Districts during ‘kalawedi' season when village headmen offered low revenue rates to attract cultivators. The political competition for labour was intensified by South Indian political traditions, which did not extend to kings' coercive power to limit the mobility or right to migrate of labouring groups. The exercise of political power in this way was not considered a legitimate exercise of sovereign power.¹¹ In this political order, incentives such as reduced revenue and the financing of improvements in production systems were the means by which political authorities could attract cultivators and labourers. Agricultural improvements were especially important as they made it possible to offer the favourable conditions, in particular higher and more secure incomes, which could draw in hands for the business of cultivation. The importance of agricultural improvement for access to supplies of labour is suggested by Lionel Place, who observed the following after the repair of a tank in a village near Madras:

Previous to the repair of the tank—it is not know how long—the lands had been uncultivated, but so soon as this work was completed, the descendants of many families who had formerly been the hereditary servants of the Brahmins claimed, and were admitted to their inheritance, although in the intermediate time they had taken up other occupations, and might be supposed to have forgot it. (Bayley and Huddleston 1862: 47-8)

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