Migration in colonial India: The articulation of feudalism and capitalism by the Colonial State

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Migration in colonialIndia: The articulation offeudalism and capitalismby the Colonial StateGail Omvedt aa Poona, IndiaVersion of record first published: 05 Feb2008.

To cite this article: Gail Omvedt (1980): Migration in colonial India: Thearticulation of feudalism and capitalism by the Colonial State, The Journal ofPeasant Studies, 7:2, 185-212

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Migration in Colonial India:The Articulation of Feudalism and Capitalism

by the Colonial State

Gail Omvedt*

In this article a particular factual model of the way in which imperialismworked with respect to the Indian economy, which is widely accepted, iscontested. The model in question assumes that though imperialism acts totransform agriculture—disintegrating and dissolving the traditional villagestructure—because it also thwarted industrialisation, backwardness inagriculture and dependence were maintained: the transformation of agrarianrelations of production is contrasted with the stagnation of industrialgrowth, and the latter is held to be the causal factor. Against this it is arguedthat an examination of colonial migration reveals both the specific charac-teristics of the colonial working class it produced and the continuingexistence of feudal ties of dependence in agriculture. The situation is bestconceptualised in terms of the existence within the Indian social formationof feudal (agrarian) and proto-capitalist (mines, plantations, factories)modes of production, articulated in such a way that the main costs ofreproduction of labour power that was sold in the capitalist sector wereborne in the non-capitalist agrarian sector. The article concentrates on theperiod from the 1880s to the 1930s.

A recent study of the Indian working class1 describes the origins of this class asfollows: 'Millions of agricultural labourers rendered surplus by the decayingagrarian economy of India formed the source of supply of labour for thisdeveloping industry'.

This statement assumes a certain factual model of the way imperialismworked on the Indian economy as a whole, agriculture as well as industry. Thismodel is approximately as follows: (1) Colonial rule imposed bourgeois privateproperty in land and subordinated Indian agriculture to the world market, ieestablished commodity production, with the general result of impoverishingand proletarianising a large portion of the peasantry. (2) Nevertheless the vastmajority of such proletarianised peasants, though they were agriculturallabourers freed from 'feudal' ties or rights to the land, could not find workbecause of the limited development of industry and the lack of capital accumu-lation, ie real capitalist development in agriculture; therefore they remained

*Poona, India. Paper read at the Seminar ' Under-development and Subsistence Reproduction in South-east Asia', 21-23 April 1978.

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186 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

'bound' to agriculture itself and, continued to be dependent, often throughdebt, on landlords and moneylenders. The model thus assumes that thoughimperialism acts to transform agriculture—ie it 'disintegrates' and 'dissolves'the traditional village structure —it is precisely because of its thwarting ofindustrialisation that backwardness in agriculture and dependence is main-tained. The transformation of agrarian relations of production is contrastedwith the stagnation of industrial growth, and the latter is held to be the primarycausal factor. As a typical statement by Jairus Banaji puts it, 'A key element inthis enhanced dependence on the land . . . was the atrophy of manufacturing....Thus the growing expropriation of the colonial peasantry did not lead to theconstitution of a proletariat'.2

The interesting point here is that in spite of their disagreements about theconceptualisation of the colonial economy, this factual description is acceptedby most of the participants in the well-known 'mode of production' debate,including Utsa Patnaik, Jairus Banaji, Hamza Alavi and apparently HarryCleaver; only Paresh Chattopadhyay has openly challenged it.3 The purpose ofthis paper is to show that this factual model is wrong; that an examination ofcolonial migration reveals both the specific characteristics of the colonialworking class it produced and points to the continuing existence of feudal tiesof dependence in agriculture. The most adequate way to conceptualise thissituation is in terms of the existence within the Indian social formation offeudal (Agrarian and proto-capitalist (mines, plantations, factories) sectors ormodes of production which were articulated in such a way that the main costs ofreproduction of the labour-power that is sold in the capitalist sector is borne inthe noncapitalist agrarian sector.4 This generally implies also a sexual divisionof labour between the sectors in which women and families remain in thevillages while males (and to a certain extent adult working women) migrate tobecome workers; it also implies the lack of a family wage which is the mainmechanism through which cheap labour and thus cheap raw materials andconsumer goods for developing European capitalism can be maintained. It iscontinuing ties to the land, including ties of feudal dependence, that make thispossible, and thus imperialism in its colonial phase maintains a situation ofdependent and blocked production not only through the direct thwarting ofnative industry but also through the maintenance of agrarian feudalism. Thecolonial state is thus crucial here; though it may be called a colonial bourgeoisstate in the sense that it furthers the development of the capitalist mode ofproduction in the imperialist centres (ie England, and indirectly elsewhere),nevertheless it directly maintains feudal relations in agriculture and thus theirdominance in the colonial social formation.5 The destruction of this statethrough class struggle—including the national movement as well as directworking class and peasant struggles—is thus a prerequisite to any movementforward even in the development of capitalism; and it is in this sense that the'primary contradiction' in the colonial as well as post-colonial period is withimperialism, and not feudalism.

This paper deals only with the colonial period of imperialism, ie from themiddle nineteenth century to 1947; more specifically it focuses on the period

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MIGRATION IN COLONIAL INDIA 187

from the 1880s to the 1930s, the height of the first phase of imperialism andbefore a rising nationalist movement began to force some concessions (onemethodological symptom of this, interestingly enough, is the nonexistence ofcensus data—a primary source of information for this paper—before the1880s and the uselessness of the 1941 census which was taken at a time whenthe national movement was at its height). The basis for this is that imperialism—the worldwide system of finance capitalism—and colonialism—the directpolitical rule of an alien power—must be rigorously distinguished.6 This hasnever clearly been done in the 'mode of production debate'. The result of this isthat while the debate developed in the context of changing class strugglesbrought about by developing capitalist relations and new, specific agriculturallabourer and poor peasant militancy; and while it was based on solid empiricalresearch on recent transformations in agriculture, still its participants had atendency to throw around concepts universally and generally. Not only wereconcepts like the 'colonial mode of production' used (which blurred thedistinction between the colonial and post-colonial period), but there has been acarelessness about the empirical nature of the colonial period. The participantsvery often did not examine critically the generalisations they used; nor did theyrefer to recent empirical studies (mainly by bourgeois scholars)7 on land tenureand land relations during the colonial period. This is an additional reason forfocusing on this period.

Finally, a focus on colonial migration makes it clear also that any discussionof the Indian working class must be a holistic one—that is, it must not onlyexamine workers as such, but also the working class family, and in particularthe role of women, who have usually maintained the strongest connection withagrarian society. It has also been a longstanding Marxist cliche to point out thatcolonial workers are derived from a peasant origin and continue to keep theirpeasant connections. But the full implications of this have only begun tobecome clear recently with the development of analysis centering aroundwomen's work and the reproduction of labour power.

Colonial migration, which produced the colonial working class and whichexpressed in concrete form the link between agriculture and industry, was anew and specific phenomenon. It was unlike earlier movements of populationsin pre-colonial or feudal societies, and it was unlike the concurrent 'settlermigration' of Europeans abroad to North America and elsewhere. It is thismigration and its specific characteristics in India that provide the basis for thispaper.

ImmobilityThe first characteristic of Indian migration that is forced on our attentionduring the colonial period is its limited character. Not only do labour recruitersand employers frequently complain about the 'scarcity of labour', but nearlyall the census reports of the period stress the general immobility of thepopulation. Typical is a reference in 1921 to the 'home-loving character of theIndian people . . . the immobility of an agricultural population rooted to theground, fenced in by caste, language and social customs and filled with an

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innate dread of change of any kind'.8 Nearly 50 years later, in a study ofmigration to Malaya, the theme is not much different: there was 'a strongrepugnance to emigration in general.. . the traditional conservativism of theessentially agrarian society of India. Social customs and institutions militatingstrongly against emigration further reinforced this stay-at-home attitude'.9

What were the facts? In terms of internal migration (which includes Burma),Census statistics between 1881 and 1931 showed approximately 90-91 per centof all Indians as being born in the districts they were enumerated in; of theremainder, two-thirds were born in continguous districts.10 In other words,long distance migration represented about 3 per cent of the total population.Most of this was a cyclical work migration. Roughly following the censuses, wecan classify all migration into five basic types: marriage migration (whichincluded short distance migration between villages as well as much of thatbetween contiguous districts and in which women predominated); temporarymigration or travel for business, fairs, pilgrimages etc; seasonal migrationduring which poor peasants left during the slack seasons of their own agriculturalcycles to work on harvests or short-term contract projects elsewhere; long-distance work migration of working adults for one or more years; and settlementmigration in which entire families moved permanently.

Settlement migration was the only form in which ties to the land werecompletely broken, and it was extremely rare. Some of the 3 per cent migrationbetween concontiguous districts was for seasonal agricultural work (for instancefrom north Bihar to rural Bengal) but the vast majority of it was long-distancework migration. This migration involved both petty bourgeois upper castes(traders, clerks, some skilled workers) and low-caste labourers; and it was thisthat provided the work force for the new capitalist sector—for the Bombaytextile mills, the Calcutta jute industry, Bengal and Bihar mines, Burmese ricemills, the plantations etc. What is significant is that just as much as withseasonal work migration, the workers maintained their connection with theland; their family members remained on it, they returned home periodically,once a year or more often if possible and often at the times of harvest—even inthe case of the Assam tea gardens where migration was considered by census-takers and migrants alike to be more permanent, the workers preferred ashort-term arrangement and the institution of short-term recruiting provokeda greater labour supply"—and they went back for retirement.

Migration out of India had a similar character. Kingsley Davis has estimatedthe total number of Indians leaving India between 1834 and 1959 at under31,000,000, or less than 11 per cent of the total population in 1900—comparedto 43 per cent for the British Isles including Ireland, or 31 per cent for Italy.More significant was that it also had a cyclical character: compared to 30 percent of Europeans returning home after emigrating to the US between 1821and 1934, over 60 per cent of Indians going to Malaya during the whole periodreturned home.12 Gross emigration in all cases far exceeded net emigration.Gross emigration out of Madras between 1881 and 1901 was about 5-6 timesnet emigration; gross migration to Burma between 1913 and 1929 was fourtimes net migration; and gross migration to Burma, Ceylon and Malaya

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between 1927 and 1935 ranged from 7 to 15 times net migration.13 Three to fiveyears was the estimated annual stay in Malaya, the most distant source oftypical colonial period work migration;14 in other cases it was frequently less.

Betweeen those who stayed in the countries of their work and those whoreturned were those who were unable to do either because they died in theprocess. Of a total of about 4,250,000 gross Indian emigrants to Malayabetween 1886 and 1957, nearly 750,000 were estimated to have died; and ofabout 1,447,000 emigrants to Ceylon in the early years of 1843-1867 350,000were unaccounted for and presumed dead.15 High mortality rates also markedearly work in Assam and mid-century shipments to the West Indies."5 Boththis high mortality rate and the high return rate—ie the cyclical nature ofIndian labour migration—differentiated colonial migration from the Europeansettler migration of the same period. While the European settlers succeeded inpopulating and in the end dominating societies in three continents, the Indianlabourers, after over a century of work migration, left only about 5-6 millionpeople behind them of South Asian origin living outside their own country.1?

In contrast to the Europeans, Indian lowcaste labourers not only suffered longhours on ship journeys, toiled in disease-ridden conditions to provide sugar,coffee, tea and raw materials for the industries of Europe, and built up themajor export industries of several countries—they also ended by having only aprecarious basis as a low-status and distrusted minority in the societies theyentered, and sometimes no citizenship at all. The end of the colonial periodbrought not more settlement, but only a higher return rate and frequentpolicies of repatriation: Indians sent home from Burma in the 1930s after raceriots and nationalist agitation, Tamil plantation labourers in Ceylon deprivedof citizenship rights and language rights, Indians sent back from Malaya whoseratio of Indian plantation workers dropped from 73.5 per cent in 1931 to 48.5per cent in 19651S—such expulsion of labourers came long before the 1960sexpulsion of Indian merchants from several African countries. The temporarynature of Indian work migration and the continuing social links maintainedwith the agrarian home society also distinguished it from African slave migration—though the Africans were equally exploited and with as high or highermortality rates, their ties with their original homeland were decisively brokenand they ended with a larger population abroad who had firmer roots in thesocieties they entered.

In this sense the Indian labour migration of the colonial period—particularlyof the imperialist phase of capitalism (for the migration under indenture toWest Indies sugar plantations of the middle 19th century was in some ways atransitional phenomenon)—was a new phenomenon in history. If anything itwas similar to the Mexican supply of labour to the U.S. and to the workmigration to European countries and the U.S. today, a migration whichdepended essentially on the fact that the migrant workers maintained theirroots elsewhere and did not become settlers and citizens of the society theyentered.

Finally, the work migration to countries outside of India and the migrationwithin India to new industries, mines and plantations were essentially of the

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same temporary character in which the continuing link with the village wascrucial. And this link was maintained not because of the 'homeloving' and'traditionally conservative' nature of the Indian peasants—after all the Irishand Italian peasants who became settler migrants in the same period also hadsuch homeloving and traditional qualities—but because of crucial features ofagrarian society itself and the needs of imperialism whose colonial statesfostered and maintained the migration process.

Sex Ratio

The continuing ties with the village home that were crucial to colonial labourmigration were embodied in the fact that families remained at home. Workmigration, whether it was out of India or to industrial centres within India, wasa migration of adult males; where women were included they were includedprimarily as working adults and not as 'wives'. Even where there were largenumbers of women migrant workers—for example to the tea gardens of Assamwhere the sex ratio was nearly equal—the workers themselves continued toreport that they had left children, wives and brothers behind to take care of theland 'in our country'.19 The tables below, of the sex ratio of various groups ofmigrants and population of various cities, help to show the degree to whichonly adult male workers came to work. Colonial work migration, in otherwords, was specifically not a 'family migration'.

FEMALES PER 1,000 MALES20

TABLE 1

EMIGRATION FROM MADRAS, 1921

TABLE2

MADRAS-BORN,

in MalayaBurmaBombay

to BurmaMysoreHyderabadTravancoreAssamBombayBengalCochinBihar-Orissa

1931

502233597

208820617

1,0181,019

567936

1,1251,275

TABLE 3

MAJOR INDIAN CITIES, 1931

BombayRangoonCalcuttaLahoreDelhiMadrasHyderabad

554447468565694897886

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Year187218S118911901191119211931

TABLE4

BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA

Bombay Calcutta552

664 556586 526617 507530 475521 470554 468

TABLE 5

MIGRANTS TO CALCUTTA;,1921

from Burdwan division beyond HowrahBihar and OrissaUnited ProvincesRajputanaPunjabBombay ProvinceCentral ProvincesMadras

TABLE6

MIGRANTS TO BOMBAY,

from RatnagiriSataraU.P.AhmednagarPoonaNasik

1921

526471167785716765

Other Bengal industrial

542183327467346396635813

towns798767685605582537

The figures are insufficient in that they do not show, for cities, the distinctionbetween working class and middle class populations; and they do not show, formigration streams, the distinction between different types of migration (forexample, between lower caste labourers and higher caste traders, professionalsetc; or between marriage migration and other types). But they do clearlysuggest a pattern: the more a city was a center of colonial industry, the lower itsratio of females; short-distance migration between contiguous areas (cf Table1) had a higher ratio of females because it was to a large degree marriagemigration; migration to Calcutta from the main areas of labour supply outsideof Bengal showed a much lower sex ratio than the city population as a whole,and so forth.

Beyond this, there are clearly other patterns suggested among the labourmigrants themselves—for instance, the higher proportion of women going to

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distant Malaya as compared to nearby Burma (Table 2), the higher portion ofwomen going to Assam plantations which was about equal to men whether itwas from Madras (Table 1) or from the adivasi population of Chota Nagpur.21

These proportions, we can argue, were the result of whether women couldmigrate as workers, and this was determined almost entirely by the labour needsof the receiving plantation or factory industries. Because women could do agreat deal of the work on tea plantations their proportion in Ceylon andespecially Assam was relatively higher; because rubber planters in Malayacould use only a limited number of women (an ILO study indicated thesedifferentials in labour requirements) their proportion remained lower eventhough the Indian government imposed never-implemented regulations requiringa certain proportion of females.22 The proportion was lower still in nearbyBurma because there were no plantations but only rice mills, transport andrickshaw work that tended to employ only men. Of the two major waves ofmigration from the northern districts of Burma in 1931, women were Ve ofthose who went to the jute mills and factories surrounding Calcutta wherethere was relatively little work available for them; but they were 40 per cent ofthe migration which went to help bring in the harvests in rural Bengal wherethey had specific agricultural tasks.23

Generally, women in the classes and castes from which the migrant workerswere drawn almost always had productive work to perform in agriculture;whether or not they joined their husbands to migrate away from their homesdepended on whether they could also earn a wage in the cities or plantations. Inother words, the primary underlying fact—which shall be elaborated later—was that the migrant workers were not paid a 'family wage' which allowedthem to bring nonworking wives and establish themselves permanently; theywere paid a wage only sufficient to maintain themselves and that only for thelimited time in which they worked.

Organisation of Labour

The way in which this new colonial working class was recruited and the way inwhich it was organised in its area of work was also connected with the fact ofcontinuing rural links.

During the middle of the nineteenth century, labour migration was organisedthrough legally-enforced debt bondage or indenture, which came to replaceslavery as the primary method of supply and maintenance of labour on theWest Indies sugar plantations and was extended from there to newly developingplantations in Ceylon and Malaya. Hugh Tinker describes this as the 'newsystem of slavery'; it was supplemented by a system of licensed recruiters andagents who scoured India looking for recruits.

Tinker, however, is wrong in seeing indenture as the typical form of organ-isation of migration and labour control. In fact, long before its formal abolition(he dates the ending of the system at 1920), it was in fact replaced by a differentsystem of labour-contracting. In this, formal debt bondage to planters wasreplaced by informal debt bondage to intermediary labour contractors (kanganis,

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mistris, sardars, jobbers) who were drawn from roughly the same social back-ground—ideally from the same district and village—as the labourers, whospoke their language, and who controlled both their recruitment and theirwork on the plantations or in the factories themselves. The kangani systemapparently developed first in Ceylon; with the widespread establishment ofcoffee cultivation in Malaya in the 1880s and 1890s it came to replace indenturethere and it then became the main method of organising rubber plantationcultivation in Malaya. Thus, for Malaya, kangani migration was 62 per cent ofall total assisted labour migration (and 44 per cent of total labour migration)into Malaya between 1844 and 1938—but after its acceptance as a method bythe government in 1897 it grew rapidly and by 1907 kangani recruits were 75per cent of the total, by 1912 over 95 per cent of total migration.24 Sardarsplayed the same role for Assam tea gardens and mistris did the equivalent forsouth Indian plantations.

Plantation owners preferred the system because it provided better labourcontrol on the plantation itself; the labour-contractor took over most of theemployers' functions of control and supervision, and the labour force—oftenrecruited from the same village and family group—worked as a more tightly-knit unit.25 In addition, it appears that the open, widespread recruiting associ-ated with the indenture system could not (at the level of wages paid to theworkers) produce sufficient labourers in the way that the labour-contractorscould through their links with the village areas of recruitment. As one writerput it, 'Indenture proved economically unsuccessful and socially unsatisfactory.Furthermore . . . it did not satisfy the great demand for labour'.26 Ideally, thekangani or sardar was supposed to be an ordinary employee, who went back tohis own village and district home and helped to bring friends and relatives toestates that would be 'familiar' to them. As one planter romantically describedit, 'The kangani or mistri system at its best is probably the best system evolved. . . . It is strictly patriarchal. The men brought only their relations from thevillages and were responsible for looking after members of the family . . . thehead kangani . . . is practically the father of the estate'.27 In fact the contractorwas a labour boss, who could find workers partly because he took over then-debts from the landlords, who kept the workers continually in debt to him,who quite frequently took his whole work gang with him from one estate toanother, and who appropriated a large portion of the wages even when hehimself did not get the whole pay for his work-gang directly. (A large proportionof Ceylonese workers, most of the Santals working in Assam, and many of thelowcaste labourers on south Indian plantations were paid not directly butthrough their kanganis who got the wages from the planters; in Malaya,according to Sandhu, the wages were given directly to the workers and so thehold of the kangani was weaker).28 In regard to south India, the governmentreporters felt that 75 per cent of the workers' pay went to the moneylendingmistri; the planters contested this but nevertheless described an elaboratesystem which involved a head mistri who contracted with the planters for 100labourers and had sub-suppliers under him with gangs of 15-20 people each; asystem of advances and debts went all down the Une.29 As Kumari Jayawardene

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has described the result in the case of Ceylon, 'The worker was not a free agentin the capitalist sense that he could sell his labour on a competitive labourmarket . . . . Plantation labour in many respects was semi-wage labour. Bymeans of certain "feudal" practices such as part payment in rice, housing tiedto employment, the estate or kangany-owned shop, ties of indebtedness andlimitations on mobility, the freedom of these workers was severely restricted'.30

In the case of Malaya and Ceylonese kanganis, Assam sardars and southIndian mistris, their recruitment tasks were organised through planters' associ-ations and frequently supervised by the government. But such labour-contractorsalso existed for the non-plantation sectors which had no such organisation andsupervision. Thus, though there was never any systematic effort by officials oremployers to organise or control labour for Burma, still the workers werealmost universally in debt to gangleaders or maistris; wages were normally paiddirectly to the maistri for dock work and in the rice mills; and south Indianlabourers (Tamils, Telugus and Oriyas) were recruited through advances andindebtedness by the maistris in contrast to the 'freely' recruited north Indianworkers (who in fact held different types of jobs). Andrews, indeed, describedthese Burmese workers as servants of the maistri and not of the rice mill orcompany they worked for.3 ' Jobbers played a similar role in the Bombay textilemills, as did sardars in Calcutta.

There has been little study of these labour-contractors as a significant socialstratum, a kind of 'labour aristocracy' that often arose from the ranks of theworkers themselves. There is little knowledge, also, about the exact links theyhad in the rural areas with the landlords and headmen who 'released' thelabourers to them for recruitment—though Chesneaux suggests in the case ofChina, where a similar system operated, that the contractors, while themselvesof peasant origin, usually enjoyed the encouragement and support of the localgentry.32 It is quite possible that they monopolised whatever savings, whateverprosperity, whatever social advance could be attributed to labour migrants as aclass. For instance, Assam workers testifying to the Royal Labour Commissiontended to say that sardars often held significant amounts of land and cattle, thatonly workers wh'o were sardars or held some other especially skilled or privilegedjob could afford to send back money, and that those who attended plantationschools were usually the children of sardars or daffardars.33 Again, the variationin the degree of control by the labour-contractor has been little studied. Itappears, though, that the most oppressed sections of Indian migrants—themainly untouchable labourers from south India, the tribals from Chota Nagpur—were most bound to labour-contractors, while the slightly better off andmore 'freely' recruited north Indians were less bound.

What deserves to be stressed, though, is that the predominance of thissystem, and the switch from indenture to labour-contracting, coincided withthe development of monopoly capital and corporate forms of control (asopposed to individual ownership) of plantations, factories etc. In the case ofplantations this switch was marked: individual planter ownership was givingway to corporate ownership in West Indies sugar plantations by the latenineteenth century; corporate ownership developed in Ceylon and Malaya tea

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and coffee plantations after only about one generation of individual planterownership, and the Malayan rubber industry, which was so 'typically' a fieldfor kangani recruiting and organising, was organised from the very beginningthrough agencies and well-known big houses which raised capital in Europe.34

Thus the development of fully fledged imperialism and the control of plantationsby metropolitan business corporations coincided with and even appeared torequire the 'semi-feudal' labour-contractor method of organising the supplyand control of labour. This intermediary form of control may have beennecessary because of the very alienness of the plantation and factory corporateowners; it may also have been made both necessary and possible because of thefeudal nature of agriculture with which it was linked and the dependent statusof the workers who were recruited.

In any case, labour-contracting was inherently connected with the growth ofsophisticated forms of imperialism, and it only began to come to an end whenunion organising among the workers themselves developed to combat thesystem. For, however much planters or employers may have idealised thesystem, however much government officials may have found it inevitable, theworkers themselves apparently did not take such a benign view and as theyorganised into unions, the unions fought the labour-contractors. But the onlyplace in India where this was becoming a significant factor by 1930, ie wherejobber influence was reportedly on the decline as a result of militant strikes,was in the Bombay textile mills.35

Wages, Remittances and Advances

It was argued above that a crucial characteristic of colonial labour was that theworkers were not paid a 'family wage', ie that their wage was sufficient only tomaintain themselves as workers during the period of work while the cost ofmaintaining the rest of the family—wives, children, relatives—was borne inthe agrarian sector that remained their home. This statement would have to bequalified to the extent that there was a 'reverse flow' of money into the ruralareas in the form of cash advances for recruits, remittances sent home byworkers, and savings brought back. However, there is no evidence to indicatethat any of this was substantial.

Let us take remittances first. In regard to Ceylon, for instance, DharmaKumar cites figures showing that in 1901 about 437,000 persons of Indianorigin sent back a total of slightly under Rs 40 per person in remittances.36

Concurrently British officials frequently asserted that workers returned withsavings. In 1921 there was about 725,000 emigrants from 6 districts in northBihar, most of whom went to Bengal, including Calcutta; these districts receivedabout Rs 107 million in remittances from 1915 to 1920, or about Rs 30 perperson per year. At the same time about 500,000 emigrants from five ChotaNagpur districts, mostly adivasis going to Assam, sent back Rs 32,500,000 infive years or about Rs 13 per person per year.37 In Calcutta, money sent fromthe Titaghur Post Office (where an estimated 45,000 jute mill workers wereemployed in a stable situation during a nearly twenty-year period) ranged from

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Rs 433,000 in 1910 to Rs 852,000 in 1920 and then sank slightly to Rs 759,000in 1928; this works out to from Rs 10 to slightly under Rs 20 per worker.38 InBombay, the Labour Office estimated official family budgets for workers thatincluded monthly remittances home of Rs 1% for married workers and Rs llVzfor single workers; however the Textile Labour Union contested these figuresand argued that the budgets were not representative.39

The trouble with such general figures is that they fail to distinguish betweenpetty bourgeois migrants (traders, professionals, clerical workers) and workingclass migrants—or for that matter between ordinary workers and labour-contractors. For example regarding Ceylon, 1931 estimates described 'twostreams of emigrants', the assisted estate labourers and the nonassisted non-labourers, with the latter often representing more than half the total.40 The Rs40 per head could well have been Rs 80 per head per petty-bourgeois migrantand none for the rest. That this may well have been true is indicated by a 1916survey of savings brought back by returned emigrants in five ships from theWest Indies: of a total of 2175 passengers, 306 brought back Rs 150 or moreeach, while 1,654 brought back nothing.41 This should be the context toevaluate such statements by British officials as the estimate of the collector ofSouth Arcot in 1850 that returning emigrants brought back Rs 50 to Rs 200 inready cash from Ceylon and Mauritius and thereby helped to raise the wagesfor agricultural labour in his district!42

In the case of the Assam tea gardens, the lowest paying area of recruitment,there was general testimony by labourers and owners alike that they could notsave. As one manager said, 'From my experience the 6 annas and 5 annas whichI give are not sufficient for them to live on! It may be sufficient for a man andhis wife, butif they have children it is a case of starvation'.43 The only labourerswho admitted to saving anything were sardars or those with non-coolie jobs. InMalaya, Ceylon, Burma and in the mills of Calcutta and Bombay wages werehigher and there may have been cases of workers who scrimped to send back atleast something by lowering their standard of living to almost below survival,for example living 20-40 in a room in 'dormitory' type housing as theycontinue to do today. But by and large it seems that the higher wage ratessimply reflected higher costs of living, higher prices of basic foodgrains. Forinstance, Mann and Kanitkar's Deccan village study showed practically nothingsent back in remittances.44 Similarly, a report from Vizagapatam district on theeffects of Rangoon labour testified that while Rangoon immigrants broughtback some money on their return, they remained out of the labour force andlived off these savings, while women continued to carry on the agriculturalwork (such as rice transplantation), and that family Ufe throughout the yearwas often disturbed due to 'nonremittance of money or the remittance of verysmall amounts'.45 In this case the higher Burmese wages apparently onlyallowed the workers to maintain themselves, but not their families, for thenon-working period.

In terms of remittances in the post-independence period, the more detailedrecent studies tend to show that where remittances are sent back, it is primarilyfrom the uppercaste, petty bourgeois migrants, while the lower caste labourers

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send back little or nothing. For example Savla's study of Kutch villages showsa tradition of migration in which a strong correlation between per capitahousehold income and increase in income resulting from remittances exists;the higher castes tended to send back savings and increase their wealth andpower in the villages.46 In this sense, the effect of remittances would be tointensify inequality in the villages, helping already dominant castes to increasetheir landholdings and their control over the poorer labourers. This is preciselythe conclusion of a recent survey of migration studies.47 One interestingquestion remaining is to what extent remittances sent back by the various typesof labour contractors and used for land investment might have resulted inincreasing differentiation among the medium and lower castes and the emergencewithin them of a rich peasant stratum.

There are more indirect but still strong indications that nothing like a familywage was paid. For example, the Royal Commission on Labour report indicatedthat both estate owners and the government were reluctant to enforce compulsoryprimary eduction on the plantations because they were unwilling to pay a highenough wage to compensate for the loss to family income caused by the loss oflabour of the children, who worked from the age of 11 or earlier.48 Similarly,much of the reluctance to ban female labour in the mines—which was expressedin terms of yielding to the social customs of the miners who were habituated tohave their wives working—was due to the unwillingness to pay a high enoughwage to allow a worker to maintain a non-working wife. More significantly,doctors frequently testified that workers, even in the higher-wage areas ofBombay and Calcutta, could hardly maintain themselves on their wages. Thus,the official memorandum to the Labour Commission by the Assistant Directorof Public Health suggested that workers should be allowed to go to theirvillages every three months to 'recoup their health'. As the doctor said, 'Itwould be to die advantage of the employers and employees because the workerkeeps in better health if he goes to his village. People who live here for a longtime deteriorate physically. That is because the workers here do not get freshair and sunlight, fresh vegetables and milk which they get in their ownvillages'.48 The Bombay Textile Labour Union made the same argument,claiming that workers 'go out of Bombay to recoup their health" and cited amedical report to the effect that 'The very general practice of Bombay millhands of returning to their upcountry homes has a beneficial effect upon theirgeneral health as reflected by weight; and counteracts to a very large extent theeffects of working and living conditions in Bombay'.49 To the extent that it wastrue that workers had to return home to recover their own health, it impliesthat the costs of reproduction of labour power were borne in the village not onlyin terms of supporting the workers' family, but also in terms of maintaining to acertain extent the worker himself (or herself).

The system of cash advances paid by the labour contractors to the prospectiveworker-migrants is of particular interest. These were widely given, from the'coast advances' of the Ceylon kanganis to the money given to sardars whobrought labour to the Assam tea gardens. It was also almost universallyadmitted that while the money was sometimes said to go for 'expenses of the

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worker' at home or for a village feast etc., a constant factor was that much of itwas necessary to clear the debt of the migrant. Thus a south Indian planterrepresentative described the complex system of advances and noted that thelabourer, who was in debt in the village, would not be allowed to leave until thedebt was cleared, saying casually, 'That is village influence'.50 In the case ofSouth India, contractors not only had to clear village debts, they also had to getthe prospective migrant certified by the headman before he or she could leavefor Malaya, Ceylon etc. In the case of adivasis recruited to Assam, the TeaDistricts Labour Association estimated Rs 20-40 as an average figure to clear adebt, with Rs 100 being the highest 'for a good family batch'.51 For similarrecruitment from Ganjam district, the maximum debt was estimated at aboutRs40, the average Rs 8-10; these were primarily for Khonds indebted underthe gonti marriage-debt system; in the case of tribals indebted under thekhambari system the debt was not paid off, partly because the money often raninto hundreds of rupees and partly, according to the testimony, because thezamindar often simply refused to accept payment and release the worker.52

Several points can be made about this necessity of debt-clearance, which wasuniversally true for the lowest caste south Indian recruits and for the adivasis.First, it indicates that much of the 'reverse flow' that went into the rural areasfrom the plantation or factory sector actually went not to the subsistence ofthe workers themselves, but to the feudal sections; that is, it was part of thesurplus extracted from the rural poor and not part of their subsistence earnings.Second, the function of advances was simply to transfer the bondage of theworkers from the landlords to the labour-contractor himself, so that theworkers traded one type of servitude for another. And finally, of course, itindicated that some of the most important recruits to the plantations and mineswere not 'free labourers' thrown off their land and looking for work; rather thatthey existed in a state of bondage from which they had to be freed. The systemshows the lack of mobility, not the mobility, of the Indian rural poor during thecolonial period; and it indicates the degree to which a large proportion of thoseclassified as 'agricultural labourers' were in fact debt-bonded semi-serfs. (Asimilar point is made by Dietmar Rothermund who argues that there was littlesettlement migration precisely because the peasants of depressed areas likeChota Nagpur were not free to leave for new lands but could only migrateunder the special conditions in which recruiters paid their debts to landlords.)53

SpecificityWhen set against the whole of India, colonial labour migration drew off aminute percentage of people. But, connected with its temporary and cyclicalnature, the role of labour contractors and the system of debt-advances was itsspecificity: specific areas of recruitment drew on specific groups of people fromspecific districts of specific provinces. This was particularly true once the morerandom organisation through licensed recruiters and indenture stopped, andthe pattern of labour contracting began, i.e. once the specific nature of labourorganisation in the period of imperialism set in.

For example: Workers in the Assam tea gardens were primarily the adivasis of

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Chota Nagpur and some neighbouring areas (Central Provinces and its states);these were supplemented by some workers from U.P. but by the middle 1920swhen a labour shortage was beginning to be felt and a supply from Madrasprovince opened up, these were again mainly adivasis, Savaras from thesouthern hills of Ganjam district. The Bombay textile mills recruited theirworkers primarily from the nearby Konkan districts—practically the only caseof mainly 'local' recruitment for an industry—and especially from Ratnagiri(and not the closer Kolaba!) which supplied 50 per cent of the workers in 1911,36 per cent in 1921, 25 per cent in 1930; outside workers came mainly fromU.P., their numbers growing from 3 per cent to 12 per cent in the same period.Burma drew workers from all over India, but in a patterned form: Bengalisprovided clerical workers and some mechanics; sweepers came from Nellore;north Indians were peons and watchmen; middle class Tamils worked as clerksin railways and for the government; Telugus from the Coromandel coastprovided the bulk of labour in the mills and factories and were rickshawpullers; Oriyas from Ganjam district provided railway labour and other industrialwork; while the Tamil low castes worked in agriculture and the rice mills. TheCeylon tea plantations as well as the south Indian plantations in Coimbatore andelsewhere got their labour mainly from the Kaveri valley and delta of Madras,which included Thanjavur district, southern Salem, eastern Coimbatore, westernTrichinopoly and northern Madura. Trichinopoly was an especially importantdistrict of recruitment—over the decade of 1921 to 1930 it supplied 35 per centof total estate labour to Ceylon, Salem about 16 per cent and Thanjavur 10 percent. In contrast, the non-assisted emigrants who were traders and city workersin Ceylon came more from Tinnevelly (40 per cent) and Ramnad (15 per cent)in the same period. The Kaveri valley districts supplied their recruits from thelowest castes: in 1931 the Ceylon migration was described as an 'Adi-Dravidianphenomenon'; it was said that in earlier years they were half and in later yearsat least a third of the total migration (which would imply that they were nearlyall of the plantation labourers); while in 1921 it was reported that of 744,621Madras emigrants in Ceylon, 619,000 were Paraiyan, Kalian, Vellala andPallan. Migration to Malaya was also mainly from south India. Of labourmigrants between 1844 and 1941, 99.2 per cent were south Indians, of which85.2 per cent were Tamils, 6.8 per cent Telugus, and 6.4 per cent Malayali.There was a slight difference from Ceylon, however, in districts of origin: oftotal assisted labour emigration (1844-1938), over 15 per cent came fromNorth Arcot, while Trichinopoly and Tanjore supplied 10-14.9 per cent andother Tamil districts supplied up to 10 per cent. Finally, Calcutta jute millsdrew their workers disproportionately from Bihar-Orissa and U.P.: of skilledworkers in 1921,39.10 per cent were from Bengal itself and 56.5 per cent werefrom Bihar, Chota Nagpur, Orissa and U.P., while of unskilled workers thecorresponding figures were 28.35 per cent and 63.7 per cent.54

What this meant was that while the total volume of migration was insignificantwhen looked at in terms of India as a whole, for the specific districts andpopulations of recruitment it was very important indeed. For Trichinopoly,for example, during the decade of 1921—31 there was a total movement of 27

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per cent of the population, while 17 per cent were estimated to be absent onFebruary 1931.5S Given that most of these were from western Trichonopoly andfrom the Adi-Dravida agricultural labourers, the incidence is great indeed. ForThanjavur the same Census gives an estimated total movement of 11 per centand an estimated 6 per cent living abroad in 1931 ; but Kathleen Gough's recentstudy puts the figure abroad at 12 per cent and notes that at its height theemigration flow removed about 30 per cent of the able-bodied workers.56

Similarly, Bihar-Orissa figures show that emigrants to Assam and to the minesfrom the main supplying Chota Nagpur districts in 1921 ranged from 11 percent to 26 per cent of the total population.57 Again the fact that these wereoverwhelmingly adivasis—who were a minority of the district's population—would indicate that the migration was central to their lives and economy.

The cyclical nature of this migration should be remembered. Labour migrationwas not a one-time affair that 'siphoned off elements of a free and dispossessedrural population and left the rest alone; rather it set up long-term stablerelationships between the place of work and the area of recruitment. Theserelationships interlocked the two areas solidly in terms of labour organisationand linked the needs of the 'modern' plantations and mines and factories withthe 'feudal' and traditional ongoing structures of the agrarian region. Labourmigration was the concrete form of the specific articulation of the two sectors(more generally of course the relationship between agriculture and industry ina colonial or post-colonial social formation should be described as one of'disarticulation'; what we have to remember of course is that this was anarticulated disarticulation)—the agrarian region, whose relations of productionwe shall argue were primarily feudal, and the new, imperialist-dominatedmines, plantations and factories which were capitalist in the sense that workerssold their labour-power to capital, though they sold it under conditions thatcould hardly be described as 'free'. Furthermore, a primary characteristic ofthis articulation was similar to that which has been discussed for labourmigration in Africa and for the relationship between subsistence agricultureand cash-crop export agriculture and industry in Latin America: the families ofthe workers were maintained primarily in the 'traditional' agrarian region, andto that extent the major part of the cost of reproduction of the labour power sold tocapital was borne in the linked, non-capitalist sector.

Feudalism in Agriculture

The characteristics of labour migration described here point to an agrarianstructure rather different from the assumptions of the 'factual model' describedat the beginning of this paper. Far from being an indication of labour mobility,of 'proletarianised' peasants 'dispossessed' from the land, they reveal theopposite, the relative immobility of peasant society, in which labour migrantsretain their ties and claims to the land, keeping their families on the land andreturning to it, and in which their lowest strata—the adivasis and Adi Dravidas—were clearly tied to the landlords as well through debt-bondage.

The other points of the 'factual model' can also be contested. First, though

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colonial land settlements recognised many elements of private property (landtransfer, mortgageability, hereditability), the establishment of 'bourgeoisprivate property' in land was, as Daniel Thorner has brilliantly argued, 'preciselywhat Cornwallis and his successors did not do'.58 Like the Indian rulers beforethem, the British rulers in India claimed a right which had been abandonedcenturies before in Europe itself, the right of being the primary holders of theland with a claim to a major share of the produce as 'revenue' or rent, notsimply as taxes. Zamindar, ryotwari and inam holders alike were treated asholders from the state, their privileges restricted by recognition not only of thestate's rights above them but also of tenancy rights below them. In addition,the very nature of land settlements shored up an uneven structure of privilege;in a way similar perhaps to the feudal classes under European absolutism, thenew landlords lost their political autonomy but had their economic power andtheir local village political dominance maintained. This was true not only in thezamindari areas, but also in most of the ryotwari areas where the 'ryots' wereoften a small village minority of 'managerial castes' who were in fact landlords,and where in addition extensive areas under inam holdings (20 per cent ormore) provided a further basis for the rural dominant landlords.59

Second, though Indian agriculture was brought into the world market andcommodity production grew, the latter was highly limited. According toChattopadhyay, by the end of the colonial period only about 35 per cent of thetotal produce was marketed, and two thirds of that remained in the villageitself.60 Further, participation in the market as such is by no means inconsistentwith feudal relations of production. The question is: does the peasant cultivatorhimself make the decisions and control the marketing and production ofgoods, or is this done by landlords or moneylenders to whom he is bound andfor whom he is forced to work? The available evidence indicates that while insome areas (the Godavari delta, Khandesh in Maharashtra, parts of Gujarat)such production and marketing was done by dominant peasant cultivators,even here they were a minority of the rural working population with lowcasteand tribal labourers working for them and indebted small peasants intermingled.In contrast, in many other regions, apparently the majority (e.g. the dryregions of Madras, the Kaveri delta, most of north India, the areas of Maharashtrawhere moneylenders had actual control), it was basically non-cultivatingmoneylender-landlords who not only benefited from the marketing of theproduce, but controlled most of the decisions about what to plant and sell andtook charge of the marketing of the crop itself.61 This was not, then, primarilyan economy of 'petty commodity production' where peasants themselves wereinvolved in the market.

Third, 'free wage labour' was also minimal, even though significant sectionsof the rural poor existed through casual labour and through agricultural labourpaid in 'wages' (which nearly always included wages in kind). That is, generalisedcommodity production, which includes precisely the sale of labour-power itself,(something many of the 'mode of production' debaters appear to ignore) wasalso not characteristic of the Indian colonial economy. Here it is surprising tofind that statistics for India or other colonial societies on the percentage of

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'agricultural labourers' or percentage of 'landlessness' are taken uncritically.To talk of 'free' and 'landless' labourers in the Marxist sense has a doublemeaning—that peasants were forced to sell their labour power because theywere thrown off the land, 'free' of any ability to claim it; and that they were ableto sell their labour power because they were 'free' of bondage to the land and itslords. In thecase of India, even if we should accept S. J. Patel's computation ofa growing number of 'agricultural labourers' through the colonial period (andthese are disputed by Krishnamurti)62 the evidence shows that the vast majorityof these were not 'free' or 'landless' in the above sense. Many of those classed asagricultural labourers had claims to small plots of land, too small to supportthem; still others were unrecognised tenants, working for moneylender-landlords on land that had once been theirs and to which they still had acustomary claim (this seems to have been true for instance of the Deccan andBerar districts of Maharashtra which had abnormally high proportions ofagricultural labourers in 1931—contributing to the all-India inflation discussedby Patel).63 Finally, a large number of the very poorest—probably most of theuntouchable castes and tribes—who had no effective claim to plots of land andwho were formally paid in wages or other perquisites, were bound by debt andtraditional relationships of servitude to particular landlords. The fact thatmany from these groups were often paid in cash wages, that they migratedduring certain seasons to work elsewhere in agriculture or on contract projects,that members of their famines spent enough time working for others to beclassed as 'wage labourers', or finally that they sent some family members tocity factories, mines and faraway plantations, did not change their ties to theland. The same was true in other colonised societies: though Jairus Banajiwants to argue that most of the lower peasantry in countries like Egypt, India,Indonesia were 'either completely landless or nearly so', in fact the vastmajority of Javanese peasants were very small holders involved in sharecroppingand ties of dependence to landlords and rich peasants, while the 50-75 per centof the rural population in different areas of Vietnam classified as 'landless' wereprimarily sharecroppers and tenants, not wage labourers.64 Such 'semi-proletarianisation', which meant in fact greater immiseration and pauperisationwithin a framework that remained traditional, was qualitatively different froma true proletarianisation.

The argument made by Patnaik, Patel, Banaji and even Bagchi—thatbecause industry did not develop to absorb the rural poor in employment, theytherefore turned away from a hypothetical free market to the 'security' of debtbondage and other tied relations, or that they were 'bound' to agriculture if notto particular agriculturalists—is not valid. Chattopadhyay argues, correctly Ithink, that it is both illogical—in implying some degree of full or near-fullemployment as normal or necessary for capitalism—and empirically false, inthat during the development of capitalism in Europe there was in fact a longperiod of time before the workers dispossessed from the land were absorbedinto industry. Those thrown off by the enclosures etc. in England becamevagabonds, vagrants, beggars, thieves and died in large numbers long beforethey could find sufficient work to enable them to survive—and yet they were

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thrown off the land in a way that the equally pauperised Indian poor peasantswere not; they did not turn to debt bondage or tied relations in agriculture.

Finally, though Chattopadhyay himself argues that capitalist relations inagriculture were developing, though slowly and haltingly, throughout thecolonial period, there is still limited evidence on this. Capital accumulation(that is, some advance of productive forces, which is what he shows) is not itselfinconsistent with feudalism; the rise in the proportion even of agriculturallabour as described above has been questioned. It seems most accurate to arguethat the basic non-capitalist character of agrarian relations of production retainedits dominance until the end of the colonial period.

These agrarian relations we would describe as feudal—and in fact colonialIndia remained so dominated by the feudal mode of production that it affectedthe forms of exploitation existing in factory and plantation sectors and affectedthe whole process of the reproduction of capital. This characterisation relies onà specific definition of the feudal mode of production—a concept Marxistshave been debating from the time of Dobb and Sweezy to the present. It isnecessary, then, to take a position on this. Feudalism is not a system of'naturaleconomy' (subsistence reproduction within an estate) as Sweezy and Alavi tendto see it; it is not a system defined in terms of legal 'serfdom' or politicalcoercion or the 'dominance of the political' in a simple sense as Dobb and othershave tended to see it (this approach implies that production is primarily that ofa small peasant economy while the lords, who play no role in production,appropriate the surplus through force). It is not a system of purely demesneproduction, to be identified with its labour-rent form as Banaji claims; and itshould not be identified with particular political forms or state relations such aspolitical decentralisation or the 'parellisation of sovereignty', as the bourgeoishistorians of medieval Europe and Perry Anderson (the latter inconsistently)define it.

Feudalism rather describes relations of production in which the surplus isextracted through rent given to landlords who claim this on the basis of theirmonopoly of land; though peasant producers have some claim to the land andimplements, they are still in a sense individually separated from it as a result ofthe landlord's claim to the land and ability to exclude individual peasants fromit. Thus they have to pay some form of rent for the use of the land.66 Rent maybe in cash, kind, or labour-services; and in fact all three existed in India duringthe colonial period. There were also groups of pure wage-earners; there werealso small peasants oppressed by and indebted to moneylender-merchants whowere essentially outside the production process—but this was not the mainphenomenon; in most cases moneylenders and landlords merged and it wasprecisely the landlord's control over land and thus the poor peasant whichbacked up the moneylending power. The nature of feudal relations is such thatlandlords directly exercise force in the rule of the peasantry; this was the case incolonial India, where landlords often maintained their own gangs of thugs aswell as having recourse to the power of the colonial state, and treated tenantsand lowcaste labourers as people under their control and domination, notsimply as hired employees.

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Feudalism is not inconsistent with some significant development of theforces of production (as Anderson has pointed out, there were significantadvances in medieval Europe) and, though feudal relations must be overcomeat some point to truly release such forces, still a feudal mode of production as awhole can be seen as one which helps to lay the foundation for a transition tocapitalism (thus much of the early Marxist debate on European feudalismargued that because of the feudal character of European society, capitalismcould develop there rather than elsewhere). It would, therefore, be incorrect tosay that simply because Indian colonial agriculture was feudal, this feudalismby itself was the primary factor blocking development or blocking a transition. Toanalyse fully these blocking factors, one has to examine the specific character ofIndian colonial feudalism, ie the subjugated and transformed form in which itwas maintained by imperialism, and in particular the role of the colonial statemust be examined.

Though agriculture remained basically feudal throughout the colonial period,the primary cause of this was not the 'thwarting of industrialisation' as such.Rather, the main causes were the political alliances with the landlord classeswhich the colonial state maintained, and its lack of any motivation to transformagriculture coupled with high extraction of resources from agriculture—landrevenue being its basic source of funds. In addition, the price structure of theimperialist system and the productivity gap between agriculture and industry(due to the fact that capitalism developed in India during its monopoly stage inthe world as a whole, when productivity levels were relatively high and whencompeting Indian industrialists were forced to compete at the same level oforganic composition of capital)—also maintained by the colonial state—madeany truly agriculturally-linked industrialisation practically impossible. All ofthis points to the crucial role of the colonial state—and as we shall see, thisstate was also essential in controlling, supervising and maintaining the labourmigration process which provided cheap labour for the imperialist-dominatedcapitalist sectors.

The Colonial State and Migration

The colonial state was not a 'night watchman', laissez-faire state even thoughits own ideology usually stressed that it was neutral and unconcerned tointerfere in such 'commercial transactions' as labour migration. In fact itmaintained a constant concern about the supply of labour, even when it did notactually legislate. As one official remarked in 1898 regarding the state's role inimmigration, 'If we make a pilgrimage back through the desert of debate anddiscussion, we find the route mapped out for us by bleaching skeletons of itspredecessors. Amended Ordinances, suspended Ordinances, repealedOrdinances—Ordinances which strangled themselves by the complexitiesand congruities of construction Ordinances of every sort and description'.67

The main concern of the colonial state was to maintain the supply and flow oflabour, at the low price which the migration system made possible and with aslittle governmental trouble and expense as possible. During the period of theindenture system with its licensed recruiters there was little need to supervise

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immigration within India itself; at the other end of course the colonial govern-ments in the West Indies, Ceylon and elsewhere enforced the maintenance ofindenture contracts—one result being, as Tinker has shown, a very high rateof imprisonment in the West Indies.68 In Ceylon the result was that the first'labour legislation' of the colonial state concerned plantations and involvedprimarily the enforcement of contracts, in the 'master-servant' legislation of1841 and 1865.68 In India itself there was no official legislation on migration,but in practice the government officials were instructed to render all possibleassistance to labour migrants but to discourage 'nonlabour' migrants such asSikhs; and in fact north Indian immigrants were forbidden entry to Malayaafter a concern developed in the 1890s that overseas emigration was conflictingwith labour supply for agriculture and developing industries within Indiaitself.70

This concern over labour supply can be seen in the continuous 'labourenquiry commissions' which were set up from the 1890s onwards—the LabourEnquiry Committee of Bengal (1896), the Assam Labour Enquiry Committee(1906), the Report on Labour in Bengal, the Report on the Supply of Labour inthe United Provinces, and of course, the most famous Royal Commission onLabour in India (1933), to mention only those in India itself. The contradictionmany of these reports indicated between the supply of labour to West Indiesplantations and the supply to the coal mines and mills of Calcutta—both oftenwith their sources in Bihar and U.P.—was one factor motivating the governmentto end indenture and halt the flow to the sugar colonies.71

With the adoption of the labour-contract system, the colonial state took asomewhat more direct role in the recruitment process itself. Kanganis, sardars,mistris were in most cases licensed by plantations under associations andcommittees of the plantation owners, and the local colonial state (that is, thegovernments of Malaya, Assam etc) frequently set up semi-official committeeswhich brought together bureaucrats and planters to oversee the whole process.Emigration depots were set up in south India—at Madras and Negapatam forMalaya, at Mandapam for Ceylon. Here the 'assisted emigration' which wasthe primary element in estate labour, was supervised. The labour flow wasdirectly controlled by several methods: the number of licenses granted forrecruiting, the degree of assistance given; the acceptance or rejection ofemigrants at the depots. As Sandhu describes it, 'Stringency in applying therules for rejection appears to have varied with the demand in Malaya. Forexample in 1928, owing to a temporary lull in demand for labour on rubberplantations . . . more than 42 per cent of the labourers entering the Malayandepots in Madras and Negapatam were rejected, compared to 21 per cent in1924 and less than an estimated 10 per cent in 1912. The number of kanganilicenses issued in 1928 also dropped from 7,882 to 2,913, while the number ofvoluntary migrants assisted similarly decreased from 32,302 to 10,980 in thesame period'. The following year licenses issued and immigrants helped bothwent up; while during the Depression no kangani licenses were issued at all,assistance to voluntary migrants was stopped, and nearly 250,000 labourerswere repatriated.72

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Subsidiary to the concern about labour supply was the concern for thesurvival and quality of labour-power itself, ie for health and education. Discussionsin the various labour enquiry reports, the passage of some legislation (e.g. inCeylon the first medical ordinance was passed in 1872, the first educationordinance in 1920 which made primary education compulsory on plantations),the appointment of health inspectors etc. all reflected this. In addition the stateresponded to agitation: to the nationalist agitation against indentured labourwhich was spearheaded by Gandhi from South Africa and taken up by Cokhalewithin India, to the growing strikes, desertions and threats of labour organisingin the 1920s; in fact with the history of English labour behind it, it was onoccasion ready to pass factory legislation ahead of working class agitation for it,and to try to promote 'reasonable' types of unions. But there is no evidence thatany such responses of the colonial state—or any legislation resulting fromthem—at any point contradicted the needs of plantation owners and factoryowners for cheap labour. Thus, for example, however strong the nationalistagitation may have appeared, the indenture system in fact ended when it wasoutmoded and relatively useless for the changing needs of the plantations,while legislation which went contrary to such needs (for example the require-ment for a certain proportion of women migrants to Malaya) was simplyunenforced. The main role of the colonial state thus was clear: even when it wasnot directly and obviously visible to the migrants, it maintained their conditionsof work and travel as much as it served to hamper the development of nativeindustry or to extract funds from agriculture.

Effects of Articulation

What were the effects of this articulation maintained by the colonial state? Itsmost crucial aspect, of course, was that it made possible the low wages thatwere paid to workers in the plantations and new industries. These low wageswere not simply the result of the existence of lower standards of living in Asia ascompared to Europe (though the plantations in particular drew their workersfrom some of the most impoverished regions) and they were not simply a resultof some undefined 'superexploitation'. Rather, they represented the specificfact of a lack of a family wage. This did not necessarily mean that the usuallyforeign owners of plantations, factories and mines made 'super-profits'themselves; it did mean that the raw materials (rubber, tin, jute) and someconsumption goods (sugar, tea, coffee) could be provided to the industries andindustrial workers of Europe at a low cost. This undoubtedly was a major factbehind what is sometimes described as 'unequal exchange'. Its result was tocheapen the cost of labour-power and raw materials for European industry andthus to raise the profit rate and aid the accumulation of capital in Europe itself.In this sense the benefits to imperialism were immense. In addition, of course,the lack of a family wage (whether this is interpreted as meaning the value oflabour-power was lower, or labour-power was being sold below its value)meant that because necessary labour-time was less, the rate of exploitation, s/v,was higher in the colonies—and this was a major counteracting factor which

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those who argue that metropolitan workers are more exploited (because theyproduce under conditions of higher organic composition of capital) forget.

When employers or government officials expressed concern about the'scarcity of labour power', the concern was real, and so was the scarcity—but itwas related to the low wages given to workers. This was not simply due to thefact that wages were not high enough to give an 'incentive'. What made theoverall low wages possible was the existence of feudal relations in agriculture,which hampered free migration but at the same time made it possible for thecapitalists and labour contractors to lock into them, recruiting workersthrough transfering their debt bondage from the landlord to the contractor andhence the plantation, mill or mine. Where wages were relatively higher (as inCalcutta and Bombay) and where workers were recruited from strata that werenot so extremely dependent or tied to landlords, there was less of an elaborate,government-supervised and organised recruiting process; but the sameorganisation of labour through the contracting system and indebtedness, thesame maintenance of families on the land continued to be prevalent. Ingeneral, the extreme and continuing dependence of the labourers, which wasstrongest in the plantations and mines, made it extremely difficult for them toorganise and fight, to win higher wages, to achieve the ability to maintain theirfamilies in the place of work and in a sense to constitute themselves as a workingclass. The European working class had successfully waged a fight for a 'familywage' quite early; whether or not it was a correct fight (it institutionalised thenuclear family in which the ideally non-working wife was kept 'in her place' inthe home) it did succeed in raising the value of labour power. Indian workerswere unable to make any significant steps in this direction under colonialconditions.

What were the effects of labour migration on the districts of recruitment andon the low caste rural poor who were the bulk of labourers? The very fact thatthe rural sectors had to carry the cost of reproduction of labour power, ofmaintaining the workers' families and the workers themselves in old age,would indicate that the effect was one of impoverishment. The lack of anysignificant remittances to the workers' families contrasted with some cash flowinto the hands of dominant landlords through debt-clearance, and contrastedwith remittances sent back by higher-çaste emigrants would also indicate thatthe effect of long-term articulation was to heighten inequality in the ruraldistricts of recruitment.

Most arguments about migration contradict this. It is said that migrationbenefited the workers and their districts by (1) reducing population pressure;(2) helping to put pressure on for higher wage levels in the home districts as aresult of lowering the supply of labour; and (3) aiding the migrants and theirfamilies to free themselves from traditional ties of feudal bondage, to improvethemselves economically, and to learn modern social customs and habits. Thislast pictures labour migration as a modernising force, 'weakening the bonds ofsemi-serfdom', as Patel put it.73 Or, as Utsa Patnaik argues, 'migration probablydid more to modify the severer forms of agrestic servitude than any amount oflegislation'.74

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While there is some evidence for the reduction of population growth for thesouthernmost districts of Madras," this in itself implies nothing further aboutthe welfare of labourers in that area. Generally, it may be added that there is nocompelling logic to the argument that migration opportunities reduce the rateof population growth (the relation of Mexico to the U.S. is a powerful counter-example); instead the awareness of the existence of such opportunities over thelong term may be an additional motive for continuing to have children.Husbands who return home every one to three years are perfectly capable ofimpregnating their wives.

As for wage levels, Dharma Kumar can show no evidence of any effect:wages in the main Tamil districts of emigration remained as low and decliningas any others during the last decades of the 19th century; the most she canargue is that the migration mitigated the decline, a statement by itself difficultto prove or disprove.76 Generally, the logic of the argument about wages restson a rather Utopian supply-and-demand model implying a free market. To thecontrary, if the workers were not in a position to organise themselves; if theeffects of articulation were to strengthen the land control and domination ofthe landlords, then the fact that some labour was siphoned off and somemembers of labouring families could maintain themselves by working elsewherethrough the greater part of their lives could merely mean that landlords were ina position to pay lower wages (assuming the same level of employment) to thosewho remained. The existence of alternate work meant that the survival of somemembers of the family did not have to be included in the 'cost of labour power';the remaining members could 'afford to' work for less—in the sense that theycould afford to not give the bitter and desperate struggle that confronting thelandlords' power might require. As a census report puts it, with a slightlydifferent meaning, 'Ceylon and Malaya, we may say, act as safety valves toSouth India'.77

After decades of such migration, finally, it is noteworthy that almost none ofthe primary districts of its supply is noted for rural prosperity or advance. AsGough describes the situation for Tanjore (which has the biggest claim to be a'highproducing' district of any of them), 'Despite its trade and emigrationpatterns, Tanjore's agrarian relations show an extraordinary continuity duringBritish rule. Landlords, fixed rent tenants, sharecroppers, tied labourers andcasual workers or 'coolies' were present under the same names in 1800 as in1947. Customary economic and cultural rights and obligations among themunderwent only a minor change'. Tenant cultivators in 1921 received about thesame share of the gross produce as they did a century earlier; families of tiedHarijan labourers received about the same amount of paddy per year and thesame minimal clothing, small change and space for a mud hut in 1951-3 as inthe 1870s.78 Ratnagiri, the biggest supplier of labour to the Bombay textilemills, remains among the most backward districts in Maharashtra; Bihar ingeneral and the Chota Nagpur districts in particular—the biggest source ofout-migration for so long—are among the poorest regions in India today. Theevidence seems clearly to stand against any feedback or 'modernising' effects.

Rather, labour migration was part of a system of imperialist-imposed exploi-

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tation, not a phenomenon that by itself helped to loosen the bonds of thatsystem. What loosened these was class struggle. In spite of the barriers againstorganising, workers in Bombay and Calcutta, plantation labourers in Assamand Ceylon did begin to move beyond sporadic violence, desertions and strikesand to unionise themselves by the 1920s and 1930s. As this began to develop, itbecame possible for the links these workers had with rural areas to be 'trans-mission belts' for struggle also—though little is known about this process inIndia (for instance, was the fact that Bihar had the biggest kisan sabka movementin the 1930s and 1940s related to its role as a labour supplier? Was Tanjore'sagricultural labour organising in the 1950s and 1960s related to returned andrepatriated plantation workers with some experience, finally, of class struggle?).In addition, both working class and peasant organising became linked with thenational struggle against the colonial state, which was after all the linchpin ofthe system. It was this struggle that eventually destroyed the system. Once thishappened, though, the stage of specifically colonial labour migration andexploitation was replaced (in the case of India) by a new 'national' andindependent bourgeois state, new mechanisms of imperialist exploitation, andnew waves and forms of class struggle. But these are beyond thé scope of thispaper.

NOTES

1. Sukumal Sen, The Working Class of India (Calcutta; Bagchi and Company, 1977), p. 59.

2. Jairas Banaji, 'For a Theory of Colonial Modes of Production' Economic and Political Weekly(hereafter EPW), December 23, 1972, p. 2501.

3. Utsa Patnaik, 'Development of Capitalism in Agriculture, 1', Social Scientist (September1972); 'On the Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture: A Reply', EPW (September 1972);Banaji, op. cit., Hamza Alavi, 'India and the Colonial Mode of Production', EPW (August,1975); Harry Cleaver, 'Internationalisation of Capital and Mode of Production in Agriculture',EPW (March, 1976); and Paresh Chattopadhyay, 'Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture:An "Anti-Kritik",' EPW (December, 1972). Outside the 'mode of production' debate,Surendra Patel, author of the earliest study of agricultural labour; and Amiya Bagchi, themain- analyst of the development of industry in colonial rule, apparently also accept thismodel ; see Patel, Agricultural Labourers in Modern India and Pakistan (Bombay: Current BookHouse, 1952), pp. 144-145, and Bagchi, 'Foreign Capital and Economic Development inIndia' in Kathleen Gough and Hari Sharma, ed. Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia pp.53-54.

4. On the concept of articulation, see, Carmen Diana Deere, 'Rural Women's SubsistenceReproduction in the Capitalist Periphery', Review of Radical Political Economics 8, 1, Spring1976; Alain de Janvry and Carlos Gammon, 'The Dynamics of Rural Poverty in LatinAmerica', Journal of Peasant Studies 4, 3, April, 1977; and Henry Bernstein, 'Under-development and the Law of Value: Critique of Kay' in Review of African Political Economy 6,May-August, 1976.

5. See Bharat Patankar and Gail Omvedt, 'The Bourgeois State in Post-Colonial Sodal Formations',EPW December 31, 1977, for an elaboration of the theoretical concepts used here.

6. Ibid., and Lenin, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism and 'A Caricature of Marxismand Imperialist Economism', Collected Works, Volume 23.

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7. Such recent studies include Elizabeth Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); D. A. Washbrook, The Emergence of ProvincialPolitics: The Madras Presidency, 1870-1920 (Cambridge, 1971); R. F. Frykenberg, ed., LandTenure and Peasant in South Asia and many others.

8. Census of India, 1921, Volume I, Part I, p. 83.

9. Kernial Singh Sandhu, Indians in Malaya; Immigration and Settlement, 1786-1957 (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1969), p. 53.

10. Compiled from the Census of India, 1881-1931.

11. Census of India, 1931, Volume II, Part I, p. 48ff.

12. Sandhu, p. 152.

13. Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India (Cambridge University Press, 1965),p. 134-6;E. J. L. Andres, Indian Labour in Rangoon (Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 222; HughTinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830-1920 (Oxford:Institute of Race Relations, London, 1974), p. 380.

14. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, p . 185.

15. Ibid., p. 171; Tinker, New System of Slavery, pp. 114-15.

16. Ibid., and Percival Griffiths, The History of the Indian Tea Industry (London: Weidenfeldand Nicholson, 1967), p. 351.

17. Tinker, The Banyan Tree; Overseas Emigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (Oxford,1977), p. 1.

18. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, p . 257; Michael Adas, The Burma Delta: Economic and SocialChange on an Asian Rice Frontier University of Wisconsin Press, 1974.

19. Royal Commission on Labour in India, Volume VI, Part II, p. 100f.

20. Sources: Census of India, 1931, Vol. I, Part I, p. 48; 1921, Vol. Part I, p. 9; 1931, Vol. XIV,Part I, p. 79; Royal Commission, Vol. I., Part I, pp. 5-8; Vol. V, Part I., p. 7-9.

21. Census of India, 1931, Vol. VII, Part I.

22. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, pp. 98-99.


24. Sandhu, pp. 90-97.

25. Ibid., pp. 90-91.

26. Charles Gamba, The National Union of Plantation Workers: History of the Plantation Workers ofMalaya, 1946-1958 (Singapore: Eastern University Press Ltd., 1962), p. 5.

27. Royal Commission..., Vol. VII, Pan II, p. 388.

28. Ibid., Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, pp. 90-91.

29. Royal Commission..., Vol. VII, Part II, pp. 196, 200.

30. V. K. Jayawadene, The Rise of the Labour Movement in Ceylon (Duke University Press, 1972),p. 21.

31. Andrews, Indian Labour in Rangoon, pp. 37-39, 89.

32. Jean Chesneaux, The Chinese Labour Movement (Stanford University Press), pp. 54-62.

33. Royal Commission..., Vol. VII, Part II, pp. 328ff.

34. George Beckworth, Persistent Poverty, Oxford, 1972), pp. 102-8.

35. See the discussions in the Royal Commission report; also Chesneaux on China.

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36. Kumar, Land and Caste. .., p. 142

37. Census of India, 1921, Vol. VII, Part I., p . 83.

38. Royal Commission..., Vol. V, Part I, pp. 302-3.

39. Ibid., Vol. I, Part I, P. 73,344-5.

40. Census of India, 1931, Vol. XIV, Part I, p. 85.

41. Tinker, N ecu System of Slavery, p . 175.

42. Kumar, Land and Caste. . ., p. 141.

43. Royal Commission..., Vol. VI, Part II, p. 110.

44. H. H. Mann and Kanitkar,45. Royal Commission..., Vol. VII, Part I, p . 295.

46. Cited by Kalpana Bardhan, 'Rural Employment, Wages and Labour Markets in India: ASurvey of Research', EPW June 1977, p . A-46.

47. John Cornell, et. al. Migration from Rural Areas: The Evidence from Village Studies (OxfordUniversity Press, 1976), pp. 197ff.

48. Royal Commission ..., Vol. V, Part II, p . 36, 208.

49. Ibid., Vol. I, Part I., pp. 305-6, 317.

50. Ibid., Vol. VII, Part II, p . 200.

51. Ibid., Vol. VI, Part II, p . 275.

52. Ibid., Vol. VII, Part II, p . 26.

53. Rothermund, 'A Survey of Rural Migration and Land Reclamation in India, 1885', Journal ofPeasant Studies, 4, 3, April 1977, p. 236.

54. Morris David Morris, The Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force in India, pp. 63-65;Andrew, Indian Labour in Rangoon, pp. 32-39; Census of India, 1931, Vol. XIV, Part I, p.85-6; Vol. III, Part I, p . 49ff; Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, p . 159; Royal Commission..., Vol.V, Part I, p. 12.

55. Census of India, 1931, Vol. IV, Part I, pp. 85-6.

56. Gough, 'Colonial Economics in Southeast India', EPW, March 26, 1977, p. 549.


58. Daniel Thorner, The Agrarian Prospect in India (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1976), p . 12.

59. Ibid., see also Frykenberg, Land Tenure and Peasant, and Perry Anderson, Passages fromAntiquity to Feudalism (New Left Books, 1974) and Lineages of the Absolutist State (New LeftBooks, 1974).

60. Chattopadhyay, op. cit., p. A-190.

61. See Banaji, 'Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: Deccan Districts in the Late 19thCentury', EPW August 1977; Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: TheNon-Brahman Movement in Western India (Ponne: Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1976),Chapter V; Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics, pp. 68-96; and Whitcombe,Agrarian Conditions..., pp. 170-191.

62. J. Krishnamurti, 'The Growth of Agricultural Labour in India—A Note', Indian Economicand Social History Review, 9, 1972, pp. 327-332.

63. Omvedt, Cultural Revolt, pp. 87-91.

64. Banaji, 'For a Theory of Colonial Modes. . .'; Ngo Vinh Long, Before the Revolution (Boston:MIT Press, 1973), pp. 14-97, Ernst Utrecht,

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65. On feudalism, the original debate by Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy and other articles arecollected by Rodney Hilton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (New Left Books,1976); see also Anderson, op. cit.; Alavi, op. cit.; Banaji, 'Peasantry in the Feudal Mode ofProduction', Journal of Peasant Studies, 3, 3, 1976.

66. See Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledgeand Kegan Paul, 1976); Samir Amin, Unequal Development (New York: Monthly ReviewPress, 1976), Chapter I; John Martin, 'A Reply to Banaji on the Feudal Mode of Production',Journal of Peasant Studies, July 1977; Goran Therborn, Science, Class and Society (London:New Left Books, 1976), pp. 378-9.

67. Quoted Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, p . 141.

68. Tinker, New System of Slavery.

69. Jayawardene, Labour Movement in Ceylon, pp. 22-23.

70. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, p. 142; Tinker, New System..., pp. 279-80.

71. Ibid., pp. 279-301.

72. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, p . 156.

73. Patel, Agricultural Labourers..., p . 124-5.

74. Patnaik, 'Development of Capitalism . . . ' , p . 20.

75. Kumar, Land and Caste. .., p. 143.

76. Ibid., p. 142.

77. Census of India, 1931, Vol. XIV, Part 1, p . 93.

78. Gough, 'Colonial Economies', p . 549.

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Migration in colonial India: The articulation of feudalism and capitalism by the Colonial State

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