Why Some of the Poor Get Richer: Economic Change and Mobility in Rural Western India [and Comments

Abstract

To the extent that peasants, particularly Indian peasants, are ever considered to be economically mobile, they are generally seen from one of two perspectives: either the Malthusian perspective, which predicts that most landholdings will shrink over time, due to partitioning among multiple heirs; or the Marxian perspective, which predicts that a few landholdings will increase in size at the expense of the vast majority-the latter diminishing, in many cases, to nothing at all. These two perspectives can be used to generate a number of specific hypotheses concerning changes in the distribution of land in rural India. Naturally, some of the Malthusian hypotheses contradict Marxian ones, but there are others which are mutually congruent (the poor will generally get poorer, from either perspective, though the rich also get richer, according to the latter). In this paper, historical and contemporary data collected from a highly commercialized and densely populated village in western India are used to test a number of these hypotheses. Where the Malthusian and Marxian hypotheses are congruent, they sometimes appear to fit the data. However, most of these data are better explained by exogenous factors, such as migration, than by the hypotheses which they appear superficially to confirm. In addition, where the Malthusian and Marxian hypotheses contradict each other, the former show a better fit with the data. The reason is simply that the largest landholdings did not get larger, they got smaller. Moreover, while many of the smaller holdings also diminished, some got larger. The concentration of landholdings has not increased, contrary to the Marxian hypotheses. Most interestingly, neither set of hypotheses can explain the significant amount of upward mobility which has ocurred among smallholders, and even among those who were landless. Coupled with frequent downward mobility among landholders of all sizes, this means an unexpectedly low correlation between the size of a family's holding in 1920 and its size in 1970. The distribution of land is neither rigidly fixed by a static social system nor deteriorating according to a pattern predicted by the Malthusian or Marxian perspectives. Since the village in question has undergone intensive commercialization, this implies that commercialization as such is not necessarily a cause of increased poverty and inequality.