Masculine World
The name of the chapter is ‘Engineering a Masculine World’. The time has come for us to resolve the paradox that has haunted our investigation: that in the very decades (1850-1870) when female infanticide was discovered, investigated and legislated against, the marked preference for sons progressively deepened. The resolution of this paradox is to be found by examining the economic activity of the colonial state, and the large-scale, long-term effect of its agrarian development and revenue policies that purported to modernize the world of the Punjabi peasants, yet succeeded in creating a masculine society where fewer women would survive. Declining female ratios during the last century affirm this assertion (Mayer 1999).
The political economy of colonialism rested on two contradictory principles with different social implications. On one hand it promoted the emergence of free market relations in land & its produce and on the other it codified religious law to preserve ascribed status and I think, it stiffened the patriarchal framework of Indian society. Free market meant that Indian merchants were not allowed to trade directly with an international partner and even land, the newly created community, was fettered by political conditions for its alienation or sale. Little or no modern industry was encouraged in a period when Britain was reaping the fruits of the industrial revolution. The British chose to let India be a captive market for its products promoting its own economy period. While Punjab land tenures were modernized into proprietorships, its economy became increasingly agrarian in the age of industry, producing food and raw materials for exports to Europe.
I will not get more into economic issues but concentrate on the social ramifications of these policies. Change 1 – land was declared as a marketable commodity capable of private ownership so that fixed and settled land revenue in cash could be recovered on every plot of land in two annual installments on two fixed dates. Annual assessments which had been customary in preceding native regimes were abruptly discontinued for encouraging corruption & being expensive. British ordained that their revenue settlements stay in effect for two or three decades without regard to the situation in a given year be it drought, famine or plenty. The system created zamindars, as all proprietors including peasants with smallholdings were vulnerable to the risk of losing his land. Non-payment of land revenue could mean sale, auction or foreclosure of land.
Change 2 – is the codification of custom as ad judicable law in the Punjab countryside. These two processes worked in tandem and tell us how the gender equation came to be skewed further. Land a hitherto communal resource became private property, property of the man of the house, through this we can recapture the moment’s women’s voices and customs were erased as men’s rights and voices were recorded with singular clarity. The shared control formerly accorded to all those who worked the land came to be replaced by the arbitrary privileging of tillers as owners of the soil. Women who earlier sowed, weeded, harvested etc who had implicit copartners in precolonial landholding arrangements found themselves tenuous legal dependants of men with their economic resources subordinated more and more to the will of their husbands.
The British had not granted their own women right to property so it was unlikely that they would introduce progressive measures here. They granted rights exclusively to men so that they could collect their taxes from male proprietors who could be taken to court or sent to jail if they defaulted. What made these two initiatives doubly powerful was the fact that they were deployed simultaneously. At the same time that land titled were formalized and revenue settlements made for each district, revenue officials went further by collecting, organizing, and constituting oral, informal custom from male heads of each tribe or caste. The officials themselves redefined these categories and reworked the information unto a formal set of laws adjudicable in the new court system. Punjab acquired a fully codified set of customary law, which was laid out in a manual for each of the 31 districts of the province. By 1880 the revised recension of these laws was completed. They were operating in lieu of Hindu & Muslim personal laws that had been instituted by Warren Hastings in 1772.
Settling Revenue, Unsettling People - What mattered to the British was not the welfare of the rural population but the interests of colonialism. It is important for us to grasp this statement of British priorities before I can further my own argument, which assumes this base. Obj 1 of colonial policy was to enhance agrarian commercialization and its link to world trade. The following changes were made to achieve this objective A) establishment in law of private, alienable property not only in Bengal with the zamindari settlement but everywhere in British India and it client princely states. B) The reinforcement of class differentiations among rural people through legal & administrative protection to the richer section by privileged ownership-rights and local administrative offices. C) The monetization of the heavy revenue demand and the timing of its collection in such a way as to require a massive expansion of rural credit and money lending by professional lenders and rich peasants, which resulted in crisis borrowing by small producers. D) Direct compulsion in the cultivation of indigo & opium but indirect pressure for cultivation of jute, sugarcane, oil seeds and irrigation schemes intended to increase the acreage under cash crops.
This created proprietors of land such as zamindar or taluqdar – former revenue collectors who were transformed into powerful landlords in Bengal & Oudh or the Ryots or peasants who became individual landowners in Madras Presidency and in Punjab. E) A fifth change was that everywhere ownership of land was recorded in individual titles of males, so the rights of women got erased. Women came to be legally construed without determinate property rights across region, class and caste, and were dependant on the goodwill of their husbands, sons and brothers.
In Punjab these changes plus the physical attributes of Punjabi men, which had attracted British attention even before the conquest of Punjab became the foundation for an exclusively masculine economy in which men alone managed family resources.
So suddenly peasants were not able to pay land revenues, forced to mortgage or sell their land, become landless a condition they had not known ever. However, in the official mind, the dowry infanticide connection so painstakingly constructed after the British conquest of Punjab, also conveniently explained the new blight. Default in revenue payments happened because the culturally ordained improvidence and wasteful social expenditure at daughter’s weddings that drive despairing families to favor sons and murder their infant daughters also led to crushing indebtedness and inability to pay the revenue owed to the govt.
Property & its Meanings - The idea of property underwent a sea change in the new regime. The notion of private property, though, not new to the Punjab countryside, but its peculiar English & modern legal constitution certainly was. British perspectives on women’s property rights in the mid19th century need no comment: women not only did not own property in England at that time but were considered property of their husbands. Our exploration of this issue will determine what was customary about women’s control of property, and in the process will lay bare the mechanics of codification that reveal much about the assumptions and biases of the colonial regime and its close collusion with the males of the castes & tribes for whose alleged judicial benefit these codes were retrieved. The other obvious area is to examine the new job opportunities that British defense and development needs brought to the martial races of Punjab, which created both poverty and prosperity in patches. Punjabi manpower filled the ranks of Britain’s Indian army, slashed provincial forests to add some 14 million acres to enhance the revenue base and constructed canals, railways & roads. But these opportunities virtually excluded women although it brought prosperity to the Punjabi household.
Thorburn’s Critique - he was a scholar & vigorous defender of the primitive precolonial arrangements of land tenure. I wish to tell you the dislocations experienced by the average peasant under the colonialist’s own new system. Particularly disastrous in Thorburn’s view was the introduction of landownership by title and inflexible assessments of revenue on every plot of land. He was partisan to the natives but was concerned about the damage the impoverishing & alienating policies might have on a martial race whose support & loyalty were the anchor of the British regime & gave it legitimacy. He knew that if the Punjabi soldiers mutinied there would be no hope of quelling the revolt. Friends note that the Punjabis supported the British in the mutiny of 1857.
He was not fond of Sikhs, developed a paternal affection for the indebted Muslim zamindars and loathing for the Hindu moneylenders. He saw a growing gulf between Hindus & Muslims since the former were moneylenders and the latter were constrained in this respect because of religious grounds. He wanted Muslim chiefs to be the anchor of the Raj. Through his reading & investigations he found that rural indebtedness was virtually non-existent prior to British rule, he became an admirer of the Sikh revenue system. Unable to rouse his fellow civilians he put his findings into a published book.
Pre-colonial system - In precolonial Punjab land was collectively held by patriarchal families whose members held shares. In these villages, called bhaichara (brotherly relations), the idea of individual rights in land as private property in the capitalistic form was wholly alien. There were many co-sharers in every field, from the kind to women. Land was best controlled, protected and tilled in the plurality of relationships, its produce shared as was determined by customary practice and the ebb & flow of people who occupied it. Land could be lost through being defeated in war, a fight or deciding to settle elsewhere. Thorburn described the Sikh revenue system was sensitive to the annual vagaries of the weather in a particular growing cycle, and allowed the hefty 50% share of the government to be paid in either cash or kind. Demand was limited by the farmer’s ability to pay. No rights between those of the cultivator and collections were recognized except in cases where policy made it expedient to use middleman generally influential locals; a collection fee of a quarter to a tenth was made to them.
In Punjab what was known was not individual rights but those of the tribe & village collectively. Ranjit Singh used this rule by levying other cesses such as taxes on date & mango crop, on cattle, a poll tax on artisans and town duties. However, Banias never paid a tax at all because they were except in towns merely dependants of the cultivating classes. This relationship changed dramatically under the British system.
Further Mughal or Sikh revenue officials never dealt directly with the land owner but dealt with the village headman aided by the village elders who made up the village panchayat and the patwari, the village records keeper, who was paid from village funds and had the interests of the villagers not those of the imperial administration at heart. Village panchayats were held in full view of the village including women.
Colonial system - Change 1. The British made the patwari or village record keeper a paid servant of the colonial revenue establishment. British Courts of law replaced the village headman and panchayat. These radical changes struck at the root village government went unremarked by Thorburn except for the corruption that developed in the patwari system. These scribes now fielded enormous power as salaried officials who kept land records of titles of ownership & landholdings, as it was these records that were presented in court, as the final word on land disputes.
Change 2 - These changes were already in effect in 1853. The headman dispensed the common cost incurred by village residents and the patwari disbursed them keeping a full record too. Revenue for summer harvest was to be paid in July and winter in February, months that appear too early to complete harvest, convert the produce into cash and pay revenue. Common village cost included those for weddings, funerals and festivals, for maintaining guest house, sweeping & watering common areas, lighting extra lamps etc were to be limited to 3.5% of revenue. If expense exceeded that number it could be paid only after approval of district officer. Officers rarely passed more expense. Further since most officers were from Oxford or Cambridge the revenue demands were outrageously high.
Friends what existed earlier was a nearly self-sufficient village that paid for its needs, where one villager helped another during time of need. What the colonial system did was to limit common expense to 3.5% thereby increasing cost to be incurred by individual families. It sowed the seeds for change from collective to individualized living.
The demand was calculated as the average of the preceding three years and was converted into cash at market rates of the day less a deduction of 15 to 20%, and it was applicable for a fixed term of years. With a fixed revenue demand, the scheme might have worked well had prices remained stable, but droughts, bad harvests created problems. The cultivated area was expanded enormously, presence of a large military force and construction of great public works doubled the money in circulation, reduced the money value of agricultural produce from 50 to 100%. The result was cultivator’s ruin.
This entire process was, in Thorburn’s estimation, arbitrary, corrupt and an error that generated a great deal of peasant indebtedness. By making land a marketable product it transformed the relationship between the moneylender and the farmer. Earlier the latter could borrow money to the extent of surplus produce now it was limited by the value of the land. Moneylenders exploited the change to fixed cash assessments that gave them the opportunity to raise interest rates. Introduction of civil laws framed on the European model to enforce payment of debts were alien to the poor farmer who was no match for the moneylender.
Having forced down fixed payments down the farmer’s throat, the govt blamed the growing indebtedness on the thriftless zamindars and their marriage customs that put them at the mercy of the moneylenders. Officials disregarded the consequences on the farmers and were unaware of the social consequences on the status of women.
Thorburn and others saw the harm but sought to treat the symptoms rather than the cause. After persuasion was passed the Land Alienation Act of 1900 that sought to save the agricultural tribes from the nonagricultural money lending ones overlooking that the inflexibility of the British revenue system was the root cause of peasant indebtedness. The Act did not bar transfer altogether but restricted moneylenders from purchasing or foreclosing land belonging to agricultural tribes. Hindu moneylenders were considered outsiders while agricultural tribes are gazetted by name in each district and land sale was restricted to between agricultural tribes. Besides its communal implications in the making of Pakistan, the act also contributed to the creation of rigid and intenable boundaries between the agricultural and trading castes.
Extent of peasant indebtedness, revenue defaults were contained in the Report of Famine Commission 1877-78. Between 1871-91, 2.9 million hectares of land changed hands by sale for nearly Rs 55.5 million. This represents 10% of land area in Punjab, 11.6% of land revenue and 9% of land was under mortgage. These numbers would give us an example of the debt, mortgage, and landlessness during half century of British rule. A survey ordered by the Viceroy Lord Dufferrin to find out the reasons for increasing poverty amongst India’s peasant pointed out reasons for poverty. One the old line that the peasant could not control social spending but the new causes for impoverishment were more important.
1. Disease which prevents or enfeebles work is often the cause of new earnings and consequent poor diet. The new canals had become breeding ground for mosquitoes and epidemics like malaria, cholera spread during the monsoon season. Better standard of sanitation & migration to less populated parts of the province were suggested as solutions. A report of G Ahmad, the extra asst commissioner of Rawalpindi said a number of expenses were of recent origin, a result of colonial policies.
2. A drought could bring a farmer to ruin since he had to pay revenue in good & bad times on a fixed date.
3. The large-scale use of mill-made cloth imported from England and long cloth & calico which is expensive, instead of cheap native cloth was another cause of extravagance not known in earlier times.
4. Further British courts had brought most landowners into the ambit of ruinous litigation for the lands they were desperate to keep in their possession. Farmer’s ruined themselves by heavy legal and pleaders fees and could not look after their lands properly. Thus the people are involved in debt, and the moneylenders got nearly all the produce of the harvest, leaving very little for the cultivators. High cost of litigation became a key reason for debt and brought a large number of Punjabi peasants into their present state of impoverishment. A farmer’s only hope of getting out of debt, I would add, was to depend on the labor of his sons, and many more sons would be needed to accomplish this task.
Rai Karam Chand, a Punjabi officer pointed out that in kingdoms ruled by native rulers, the peasants were far better off, as were the peasants of Punjab before British rule simply because they could not borrow any money on land or interests in land and even now in native states they are not so much in debt as in British ruled territory.
5. Since farmers borrowed to pay revenue interest rates went up as compared to Sikh rule. Since the limitation period (to repay a debt) has been reduced to three years, moneylenders compound their interest every year leaving no recourse to the farmer but to involve his lands as collateral & finally loose it. Also increasing monetization under the British aegis and government export of grain from Punjab had cause a steady rise in base prices.
Precolonial times – the security that Punjabi peasants had that land was unalienable, timely remissions – grain reserves and village malba were instrumental elements of insurance policy. In the colonial era title to land was marketable, land revenue was fixed and there was no village insurance of the type that existed earlier. Thus the entire context in which farmers planned their families and lives was altered, forcing a greater reliance on a larger number of sons to supply the safety net for their future. More sons meant more security for the future.
J Wilson the deputy commissioner of Shahpur researched the matter and was left with no doubt that the want of thrift for weddings, funerals and circumcisions was decidedly a Muslim trait. The Jats of Rohtak & Sirsa meaning Hindus showed wonderful prudence by storing up grain or jewels. Such a curiously reversed analysis demonstrates that two departments of the same government could happily contradict each other’s cultural findings about the natives. In Montgomery’s Minute on Infanticide Hindus were described as spendthrifts and Muslims as prudent.
The British created peasant proprietor. If a farmer defaulted on the fixed revenue demand in a bad season he ran the risk of taking a loan that he would not be able to pay back, if he managed to hold on to the land, it would be divided amongst several male heirs resulting in fragmenting of holdings into smaller plots that would not sustain his son’s families.
Thorborn’s inquiry at the behest of the govt made clear the reasons for peasant indebtedness i.e. land alienation, fixed revenue. Social expenses were not the cause of indebtedness. He found that debts were small before 1870 and loans were raised with jewelry or livestock, the first serious embarrassment date from 1876. Many debtors were carrying their father’s debts with no relief in site. He also found that of the debt incurred by the 742 families in four circles that marriage expenses were the cause for debt in only 8.75% of the cases.
I must mention that dowry was not the cause for increasing preference for sons and there is no mention of dahej as the reason for incurring death in the above inquiry. On the contrary, in most cases pawning gold or silver or livestock raised the initial loan. This changed in the last quarter of the century. The value of land went up enormously because it was now a marketable product. Dowries were sucked into this inflationary spiral. Since no farmer wanted to mortgage his land while he or his wife had other assert like gold, the demand for these assets grew meaning asking wife to be to get more gold. One-way of doing so was to have more sons because they meant more wives more dowry.
On the other hand, British also created prosperity in Punjab and those who profited under it i.e. traders, merchants, retailers in Lahore, govt contractors, moneylenders, soldiers all could afford to give bigger dowries. Newly rich men gave larger dowries. Now a brother saw himself as an individual proprietor of the land and would not part with a quarter of his share of saleable land to his unmarried sister, who would perhaps continue to live with her brother’s family, but only at his and his wife’s sufferance. The return of an unhappily married women to her natal home thus became problematic.
IMP - Inspite of all these criticisms the govt came out with a legislative masterstroke, the Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1900. The act enabled the govt not to change its inflexible revenue policies but blame the peasant proprietors misfortunes on Hindu moneylenders. The act was not done out of concern for peasants but to pacify the landowning classes and deflect a rebellion and to aggravate/exploit any tension that existed between Hindus & Muslims so as to keep their own grip on Punjab. Peasant discontent was converted into fresh & deep religious antagonisms that smoldered dangerously in 1907 that eventually resulted into the flames that ravaged Punjab in 1947.
This piece of legislation created a favored, dominant, agriculturalist class i.e. Hindu & Sikh Jats and Muslim tribes and non-agriculturists were Hindu Brahmins, Khatris and Banias. This act made tribe & caste the basis of land ownership to stem the acquisition of lands from the agriculturists by the moneylenders who were believed to be greedy. If only the British had made revenue demand elastic to match the quality of the harvest and provide enough time to the farmer to pay revenue such an act would not be required. This act also mocked the principle of market and legality of mortgages when it prohibited moneylenders from acquiring land at auctions. The Muslim lobby of landowners in the northwest was particularly aware that the British apprehended its potential for rebellion and potential danger. These tribes also were employed in large numbers in the army so that had to be courted. The British branded the Hindu moneylender as the villain of the piece and the Muslim landholder as the victim although Thorburn knew they Hindus were in debt and there were many Muslim moneylenders too.
It is important to bear in mind that the insistent use of ‘Hindoo’, Mahomedan and Sikh to qualify their Punjabi subjects in a cultural sense, particularly in the process of codifying customary laws was not without a political fall out. It helped to shape the cultural & religious identities and differences that the existence of alien rule brought powerfully to the surface of Punjabi society. British sought to anchor itself in Punjab by playing the distinctions between Hindoo and Mahomedan while nurturing the Muslim and Sikh Jats as loyal subjects.
Friends what was the impact of this, some thoughts – it created two classes of people the agriculturists & others dividing society in the process, meant that Jats only owned land in modern day Punjab, wrongly branded the Hindu as a greedy moneylender thereby increasing friction in society. These divisions contributed to the full blown communal incidents that partitioned Punjab in 1947 on religious lines. Two recent implications of this Act. One of the reasons why the Punjab terrorist problem of the 1980-90’s in India started was because the Jat Sikh farmer refused to let the govt give Haryana’s farmers the waters of the Bhakra Nangal Dam (constructed between 1955-60). Two the 1900 Act resulted in the non-agriculturist class migrating to urban areas. So today you find other caste as Khatris & Aroras (trading caste) in mainly urban areas and Jats owning nearly all the agricultural land in Punjab.
