Abstract
My lecture is about the study of transforming peasantries, in two senses: both as the subjects, as well as the agents of societal transformation. The differential development performance of rural India and China is explained through stylised micro-comparisons drawn from longitudinal village, and synthetic field studies conducted by the author in both countries since the 1970s, highlighting the salience of contrasting rural institutional factors, using a string of binary contrasting features displayed by the Indian village vis-a-vis the collectives of rural China. The micro-cosmic comparison poses a puzzling paradox: Chinese rural development performance easily outstripped Indian achievements in the first three decades of its collectivist path, from 1949–1978, despite the upheavals associated with the Great Leap Forward and the large-scale famines of the time. But, if the initial conditions of the two countries were remarkably equivalent, and if the external factors, state macro and inter-sectoral policies were no more, and in some respects, considerably less favourable in China than in India, how can one explain the superior Chinese performance in the countryside virtually across the board for this early high-collectvism period that laid the foundations for the subsequent high-growth trajectory at the national level? Why did rural China pull ahead, why did India lag behind? The micro-cosmic comparisons of rural institutions are used to resolve this paradox. The answer lies in the crucial differentiated role of the institutional dimension in the two countries. Chinese advantage originates not in the market reforms era, but in the socialist period when the countryside was organised in rural collectives. In India, rural institutions were generally obstructive, sticky, and posed a constraint to policies of rapid transformation; in China, the institutional profile, far from setting a constraint, was itself converted into a policy instrumental variable, where institutional features were designed and periodically redesigned primarily using the criteria of their functional appropriateness for generating rural accumulation and growth.
Highlights
1.1 Radha Kamal Mukerjee, 1889–1968‘‘I was trained’’, Radha Kamal Mukerjee says, ‘‘to think in large terms
I use a set of longitudinal village studies to investigate the interplay of technological change and institutional profiles in the case of rural India, using the studied village as a prism for an exploration of these linkages
The production brigade, with its intermediate and micro-level enterprises, and the production teams with their agriculture, form a performance outstripped Indian achievements in the first three decades of its collectivist path, say from 1949–1978, despite the upheavals associated with the Great Leap Forward and the large-scale famines of the time
Summary
‘‘I was trained’’, Radha Kamal Mukerjee says, ‘‘to think in large terms. Right from the start, I had accepted the synthesis of the social sciences, and it has followed me ever since’’ (cited in Hegde 2011, p. 50). A visionary of panoramic perspectives, a polymath of prodigious productivity, the Indian founder of the subject of social ecology, Radha Kamal Mukerjee was a promulgator of paradigms, and a builder of institutions The other side of the coin of exclusion can be liberty; and rejection had its silver lining in the form of freedom to practise social science as he thought fit He defied the artificial boundaries of conventional disciplines; he was undisciplined, unbounded, but not ungrammared, as should be evident for instance from his foundational work on human ecology and the environment, though his subject, of which he is justly regarded as a pioneer, was largely ignored by academicians and policymakers of the time and that sadly continues to this day. – cited for instance, could be: for some, his proclivity towards Hinduism; his treatment of the dimensions of gender and population in his oeuvre; or his construction and espousal, in resonance with Tagore and Gandhi, of an indigenous, intrinsically ‘‘Indian’’ development path or model – the latter drawing a significant early critique in Indian versus Western Industrialism, the title of a work by his contemporary Brij Narain in 1919 (discussed and reproduced in Krishnamurty 2009)
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