‘The Cultural Economy of Land’ review: Beyond dates and numbers

Tracing the agrarian past of a ravaged Bengal district from colonial to nationalist times

The book under consideration substantiates the fact that agrarian history is an inalienable part of the economic history of India, especially of the colonial period. Indeed, as the ‘Introduction’ states, the tradition of recording agrarian history existed since the days of the East India Company. In the 20th century it acquired a new dimension even as nationalist reformulations of the Indian past placed emphasis on peasant protests and land-based movements, augmenting economic data with studies of living standards and of patterns of exploitation and protest.

Land and the people

Sinha Roy’s volume, while situating itself in the latter tradition of broad-based historiography, aims to improve upon the politically inflected parent model by bringing out the “ways in which communities inhabit the agrarian space”. Adopting a methodology modelled on Walter Benjamin’s

Small History of Photography , it aims to throw light on the “nature of relationships (land-based) livelihoods generate between land and people,” on the material culture of an agrarian community, and on the political and gender structures that emerge in a society defined by land-centric power or the lack of it. The naturally and politically ravaged district of Birbhum from the time of ‘high colonialism’ to ‘incipient nationalism’ provides the author with just the right setting for delineating such an enmeshed “cultural economy of power based on land.”

One particular example of the contingent historiography the book advances is the depiction of a particular custom prevalent among the lower-caste Baghdis of Bengal whereby a high-borne man has to share a meal with the family of the Baghdi woman whom he has taken sexually: food here becomes a symbolic marker of a temporary shift in the social relations of power.

Diverse strands

This ‘small history’ of colonial Birbhum is spread over five chapters. The first deals with the socio-economic impact of the Permanent Settlement while the second dwells on the creation of rural knowledge from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. The third chapter traces the trajectory of political resistance in colonial Birbhum, notably depicting the agitational politics of Santal resistance, and the clash between the Communist protesters on the one hand and the dissident Ganavani group led by Soumendranath Tagore on the other. The fourth chapter thrashes out issues of conformity, defiance and difference in everyday rural social life, and the final chapter is devoted to appreciating the literary ethnography of Birbhum offered by the works of novelist Tarashankar Bandyopadhyaya, ‘the chronicler par excellence of Birbhum.’

The language of the book could perhaps have been a little more fluid: the sentences could have been unpacked a bit, so to say, in the theory parts. That said, this reviewer has no hesitation in hailing The Cultural Economy of Land as a worthy contribution to agrarian historiography in general and the colonial history of Birbhum in particular. That such a conventionally male-dominated sub-field of the social sciences has started to bear prominent marks of female intellectual labour is rather heartening. The editor’s dedication of her mother’s book to women academics whose tireless work often goes unrecognised is a fitting tribute to the author and to women’s scholarship at the same time.

The Cultural Economy of Land; Suhita Sinha Roy, Edited by Mallarika Sinha Roy, Tulika Books, ₹595.

The writer is an academic based in Bengal.