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5 - All the Disabilities Which Peasant and Land Can Suffer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2018

Benjamin Robert Siegel
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Summary

India’s independence came bundled with the promise of agrarian reform that would rationalize a byzantine system of colonial land holdings. The popular call of “land to the tiller,” however, and the state-led project of abolishing zamindari, or hereditary landlordism, was at odds with the national aim of greater food production. Small landholding and peasant cultivation represented a victory for citizens’ equity, but flew in the face of the best recommendations of planners and agricultural economists. Furthermore, the call of India’s socialists and the left wing of the Congress for collective farming along Soviet or Chinese lines drew the ire of India’s wealthy peasants and free-market champions. This chapter examines debates over agrarian reform, and visions of how Indians might best plant, work, and harvest in the interests of food for all. It suggests that as agrarian capitalists found new ways of organizing in the wake of Congress' political overreach, the popular vision of small peasants working alone or cooperatively to produce food for a hungry nation began to lose its luster, setting the stage for the Indian state to abandon its claims to equity in agricultural planning.
Type
Chapter
Information
Hungry Nation
Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India
, pp. 152 - 182
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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