The labour process in agrarian production marked by its familial character was encumbered by various forms of appropriation imposed upon it. The extraction of surplus value produced by peasant labour in the forms of rent, interest and profit occurred during the century following the grant of the Diwani to the Company in 1765 within a primary framework of the colonial state's land revenue demand. The impact of the colonial land revenue demand on the well-being of India's peasantry has been a subject of political and scholarly disagreement ever since the later nineteenth century. The involvement of money lending landlords in the rice market blurred the distinction between trading and usury capital. Straddling the domain of the economic and the political, shifting relations of appropriation both sought to define and were acted upon by the mental world of the exploited. A mode of exploitation, even during an apparently unchallenged period of its domination, did not preside over a pulverized consciousness.