Agriculture and the “Literati” in Colonial Bengal, 1870 to 1940

Abstract

This paper attempts to understand the engagement of the literati in Bengal with issues relating to agriculture in colonial Bengal between 1870 and 1940. The outbreak of the Pabna Tax Revolt in 1873 led to a debate within intellectual circles on the crippling exactions levied on the peasantry by zamindars. They identified this as the primary reason for Bengal’s agrarian backwardness. From the 1880s, however, the debate underwent a change, with a section of the intelligentsia shifting it away from the issue of landlordism as a bottleneck to rural development. This group argued for agricultural modernisation as the way ahead for the agrarian sector. In this new productionist discourse, the vanguard role of introducing new technologies into agriculture was to be played by forward-looking sections of the wealthy and educated urban middle class, who were called upon to take to cooperative farming for the purpose. The advocates of such productionism believed that such progress could be achieved within the framework of existing production relations, dominated by the zamindars of rural Bengal. From the middle of the 1930s, another distinct viewpoint on agrarian relations emerged as part of the Kisan Sabha-led peasant movement. Formed in 1936, the Kisan Sabha took up popular demands that included land reform and abolition of the zamindari system. It sought to improve the material conditions of the peasantry. However, its views on agriculture did not include a demand for the modernisation of agriculture through the application of new and scientific techniques and practices. The issue of agricultural modernisation was thus left to the intelligentsia.