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Agrarian and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri: Shubhra
Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik (eds) ( New Delhi : Tulika Books , 2017 )

Article in Journal of Contemporary Asia · December 2019

DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2019.1703206

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 Journal of Contemporary Asia

ISSN: 0047-2336 (Print) 1752-7554 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjoc20

Agrarian and Other Histories: Essays for Binay

Bhushan Chaudhuri
Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik (eds) (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2017)

Kenneth Bo Nielsen

To cite this article: Kenneth Bo Nielsen (2019): Agrarian and Other Histories: Essays for Binay
Bhushan Chaudhuri, Journal of Contemporary Asia, DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2019.1703206

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JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ASIA

BOOK REVIEW

Agrarian and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, Shubhra
Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik (eds) (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2017)

Agrarian and Other Histories is a festschrift in honour of the historian Binay Bhushan
Chaudhuri. Chaudhuri was Professor of Economic and Social History at Calcutta
University, where he taught for nearly four decades until his retirement in 1997. His areas
of expertise were colonial Indian history with a particular geographical focus on Bengal, and
his research explored themes such as the commercialisation of agriculture, the peasantry and
agrarian relations, de-peasantisation and dispossession and tribal movements and rebellions.
As co-editor Shubhra Chakrabarti states in the book’s introduction, “there is no area in the
agrarian history of eastern India that Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri has not traversed” (xiii). The
extensive list of Chaudhuri’s academic publications – included in the book as an appendix –
published over 55 years shows the breadth and depth of his work.
The book comprises a preface, a short introduction, and 13 essays, all written by authors
who are established authorities in their respective fields. The preface contains extensive
summaries of the individual chapters, while Shubhra Chakrabarti’s introduction identifies
the central themes around which Chaudhuri’s work gravitated. The introduction offers a
useful compass with which to navigate the five articles in the first section that concern the
Bengal peasantry under colonial rule. Since this is also the section that most explicitly engages
Chaudhuri’s work and his intellectual legacy, the better part of this review shall be devoted to
that section.
Dietmar Rothermund discusses peasant differentiation and the emergence of “peasant
landlords” among India’s rich and middle peasantry. Peasant landlords occupy dominant
positions in the villages and generate a surplus by exploiting labour. While some such peasant
landlords channel their capital into lucrative moneylending, others embark on more entre-
preneurial paths and diversify into agricultural processing or manufacture. Historically, this
has included for example the Kammas of Andhra Pradesh and the Gounders of Kongunad,
whose entrepreneurial efforts have been so successful that they now figure prominently in the
list of “India’s New Capitalists” (Damodaran 2008). Rajat Datta focuses on processes of
agrarian commercialisation from the micro-perspective of the village economy. By situating
the village at the centre of dynamic agrarian commercialisation, he argues that the early
modern period in India was in fact characterised by a much higher degree of commercialisa-
tion than what is conventionally assumed. Shinkichi Taniguchi also engages the question of
peasant differentiation, starting from a theoretical analysis of the general conditions that
bring peasants into being in the first place, namely protection of life and property, techno-
logical innovations that enable settled agriculture, and the emergence of markets or other
exchange systems (44). In Bengal, Taniguchi argues, these conditions emerged with the
introduction of wet-rice cultivation, the break-up of tribal systems of production, and the
formation of the state. The broad sweep of Taniguchi’s theoretically informed longue durée
analysis of peasant differentiation in Bengal makes this a particularly valuable contribution.
David Ludden turns to Sylhet of the 1780s as an example of the “Bengal Frontier” in the
colonial period, when forest was converted to farmland at a high speed, and the accelerating
expansion of permanent farming eliminated more and more jungle (66).
2 BOOK REVIEW

The last essay in the section by Neeladri Bhattacharya stands out in several respects. In
terms of empirical focus, it is one of the few in the collection that is not concerned with
Bengal; Bhattacharya instead focuses on the development on the Canal Colonies in the Punjab
as a case of “agrarian conquest from above.” In terms of conceptual language, Bhattacharya
also mobilises a very different vocabulary compared to the preceding articles. Although he
finds inspiration in Lenin’s well-known arguments about the different paths to capitalist
transition (122), his vocabulary resonates more closely with contemporary discourses within
critical agrarian studies, human geography and anthropology, even if the affinity is not
explicitly established via references to this more recent literature. The article draws on
concepts or ideas related to sovereignty, territorialisation, spatialisation, legibility, the colo-
nial imagination and enclosure and dispossession to shed new light on agrarian transforma-
tions in late colonial Punjab. In this sense, Bhattacharya’s essay constitutes a bridge between
Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri’s detailed agrarian history and current trends within critical
agrarian studies and confirms the status of the former’s richly textured and empirically
nuanced historical approach as an enduring source of inspiration for the latter. In combina-
tion, the five essays in the first section constitute a formidable and fitting tribute to
Chaudhuri’s work. Along with the preface and introduction, the section spans 160 pages
and could easily have been published as a book in its own right.
The next three sections are les directly engaged with Chaudhuri’s work, even if they remain
thematically resonant. Section two contains three articles on different aspects of Bengali
history. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay writes about the complicated and shifting relations between
Dalits and Muslims during the decades before and after Partition; Gargi Chakravarty
describes the heroic struggle of the women of the Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti in
Chittagong during the devastating Bengal famine of 1943; and Shubhra Chakrabarti analyses
the emergence of a new commercial elite in Bengal after 1757, when men could rise from
humble beginnings to transform the world of indigenous business. Importantly, this was an
era in Bengali history when social mobility was altering the traditional structure of society by
loosening rigid caste hierarchies (175).
Section three contains three articles on Rabindranath Tagore by Uma Das Gupta, Tanika
Sarkar, and Anuradha Roy respectively. The insights derived from the interrogation of
Tagore’s critical engagement with nationalism and Hinduism remain as relevant as ever
today, when the Indian polity is governed by a party that is staunchly committed to the
chauvinist ideology of Hindutva that seeks to re-cast India as a Hindu nation. The two articles
in section four embark on a more conceptual mission. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya presents
competing conceptualisations of poverty in colonial India, while Utsa Patnaik revisits the
“drain of wealth” theory associated with Dadabhai Naoroji and R. C. Dutt in order to perform
an impressively elaborate number-crunching exercise geared towards estimating the magni-
tude of this drain. While we are here dealing with very large numbers indeed, the significance
of Patnaik’s contribution lies not in the numbers themselves. It lies rather in the demonstra-
tion – through rigorous analysis – of how capitalist industrialisation in Europe and the
diffusion of capitalism to regions of more recent European settlement were built on wealth
drained from India and other tropical colonies.
Although the volume covers a diversity of topics, the integration of agrarian and “other”
histories within a single book is mostly successful. As such, it comes across as more coherent
than what is often the case with edited collections. Given its focus on colonial India, and
colonial Bengal in particular, Agrarian and Other Histories is likely to appeal first and
foremost to historians working within either of these two fields. However, it is significant
that the book arrives at a moment when renewed calls are made for “resurrecting scholarship
on agrarian transformations” (Shah and Harriss-White 2011) in India. While much of this
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ASIA 3

emerging scholarship has a somewhat different orientation compared to the book under
review, in so far as it concerns itself with understanding agrarian change within contemporary
India’s varied and uneven capitalism, the debates on agrarian change resurrected and
reinvigorated in and through the festschrift are well worth revisiting at the current
conjuncture.

References
Damodaran, H. 2008. India’s New Capitalists: Caste, Business and Industry in a Modern Nation. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Shah, A. and B. Harriss-White. 2011. “Resurrecting Scholarship on Agrarian Transformations.” Economic and
Political Weekly, 46(39), 13–18.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Norway
k.b.nielsen@sai.uio.no
© 2019 Kenneth Bo Nielsen
https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2019.1703206

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