Serfdom As a Category in Historical Analysis

Serfdom as a Category in Historical Analysis Vishwa Mohan Jha ARSD College, University of Delhi Radha Krishna Choudhary Memorial Lecture Mithila ltihas Sansthan, Darbhanga Second Biennial National Conference, April 2-3, 2011 0 Mr. President, Colleagues, and Friends, It is indeed a privilege to be associated with the memory of a worker of such tireless application as Professor Radha Krishna Chaudhary. I am grateful to Mithila ltihas Sansthan for bestowing upon me this honour, and should like to use this opportunity to speak on one of the concepts in which Professor Chaudhary had a lifelong interest, i.e. the concept of serfdom as a category in historical analysis. The occasion furnishes a chance also to revisit, in line with the universalist vision of Professor Chaudhary, the works of some of the greatest names in the discipline of history, especially Marc Bloch. Of the trio 'slavery, serfdom, and wage labour', the problem of serfdom is unique in a very real sense. Identifying the slave or the wage labourer in history is hardly considered problematic by historians, generally speaking. By contrast, defining a serf has probably been the single most important issue in the scholarly studies on serfdom, as it has been in the past in the disputes about who the serf was. It is an issue oflong standing. As early as 1925, Bloch asked: 'Who was a serf?', and pointed out: ' Today's historians often ask this question, aqd rarely agree on the answer.' 1 The reason for this is that in the past serfdom meant very different things in different periods and places, and was liable to create false impressions about itself even at any given time and place (men and women 1 Marc Bloch, 'The Transformation of Serfdom: Concerning Two Thirteenth-Century Documents Regarding the Parisian Region' ( 1925), in Bloch, Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages, translated by William R. Beer, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975, p. 159. could be regarded as serfs by their neiighbours even when they were not in fact); for long ]periods the same terms servus was used to denote the S<erf as well as the slave; under the influence of revived Roman Law, many a theoretical mind tended to assimilate the serf to the slave; and so on. It is only natural that this muddled past should have created a mix-up in the present, that the accumulated totality of variations should have given rise among the later scholars to an immense diversity of opinion about the concept of serfdom. However, the labours of Bloch, and ofPaul Vinogradoffand Frederick Maitland, did succeed in clarifying the concept to a considerable extent, and a part of the present state of uncertainty about the concept must be attributed to our failure to learn from them as much as. we should. I For our purposes, the problem is perhtaps best introduced through a discussion of the various senses in which serfdom is used by Indian historians, as well as of the relevance of such an exercise by looking at the alternative terminologies that are sometimes employed to represent similar relations. The charge of Eurocentrism, i.e. using terms like serfdom that are originally derived from European historical experience amounts to denying Indian history its: individuality, must also be considered in this context. Two distinct meanings of 'serfdom' are clearly seen in the work of Indian historians. First, i1t is equated with labour rent, whereby the peasant is gnven land by the landlord and in return is obliged to work for certain specified days and/or certain specified tasks on the land under the direct management of the I and lord. But the term serfdom is also used to descri be: a peasantry tied to 2 the land. Thus D. D. Kosambi repeatedly drew a contrast between feudal Europe with "'demesne-fanning, on tbe lord's estate, often on a considerable scale, by compulsory labour service"', and lndia ('this is decidedly not true oflndia ')/ and called the European practice 'serfdom' or, significantly, 'proper serfdom': Why have we no large-scale chattel slavery in the classical period, no proper serfdom in the feudal?3 India showed a series of parallel forms which cannot · be put into the precise categories, for the mode based on slavery is absent, feudalism greatly different from the European type with serfdom and the manorial economy.4 At the same time, serfdom for Kosambi could also stand for legal restriction on peasant mobility: 'The freedom [during the Gupta period] to stay on the land or to go would signify the absence of serfdom.' 5 While revising his Introduction to the Study ofIndian History, Kosambi evidently thought that this statement did not sufficiently distinguish the two distinct senses of serfdom, and accordingly, in the revised edition this is rephrased as 'the absence of bond-serfdom'. 6 The dual usage, as also the primacy attached to the first meaning as 'proper serfdom' as distinct from the secondary meaning of 'bond-serfdom', has been widely followed subsequently (though apparently without 2 Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study ofIndian History, Popular Book Depot: Bombay, 1956, p. 327. 3 Ibid, p. 13. 4 Ibid, p. 1Snl4. 5 Ibid, p. 279. 6 Kosambi, An Introduction, second revised edition, Popular Prakashan: Bombay, 1975, p. 300. 3 reference to Kosambi's usage). Thus :in a section entitled 'the question of serfdom' as well as elsewhere in an article, R S. Sharma agrees on labow· rent as the main meaning of the term, 7 but refers to its other sense too, 8 and can in fact move somewhat unobtrusively from one meaning to the otber.9 The first meaning is the only correct meaning for Harbans Mukhia10 as well as Irfan 11 Habib ; the latter would prefer to call 'semi-serf the peasantry tied to the land. 12 7 Sharma, 'How Feudal was Indian Feudalism?', in T. J. Byres and Harbans Mukbia, eds., Feudalism and Non-European Societies, Frank Cass: London, 1985, pp. 30-31, 24. 8 Ibid, p. 32. 9 Ibid, p. 21: 'peasants might be compelled to work as serfs on landlord farms in addition to working on their own farms .... But serfdom should not be considered to be identical with feudalism. lt was, after all, a form of servility that kept the peasant tied to the soil and made him work on the farm of his lord.' 10 Mukhia, 'Was There Feudalism in Indian Hlistory?' (1979), in Byres and Mukhia, eds., op. cit., p. 268. 11 Habib, 'Classifying Pre-Colonial India', in Byres and Mukhia, eds., op. cit., p. 50. 12 Habib, The Agrarian System ofMughallndia, 1556-1707, second revised edition, Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 1999, p. 134. In the first edition of the book (Asia Publishing House: Bombay, 1963, p. 118), such a peasant was 'really a near-serf~. The vocabtalary of 'semi-serfdom' is followed by D. N. Jha too t.o describe the restrictions on peasant mobility (Jha, 'Editor's Introduction ', in Jha, cd., The Feudal Order, Manohar: New Delhi, 2000, p. 17). However, IJ1e sense of serfdom in Indian historical studi.es is not always clear. Thus, while it is obvious that labour rent is seen as constituting serf labour by Romila Thapar ('Nor was the labolllr used parallel to that of the serfs. The peasant ... was not necessarily required to cultivate the land of the grantee in addition to his own.' Thapar, Early India. Allen Lane: London, 2002, p. 295), she also refers to two other definitions the ambiguity of which makes them problematic. First, some kind of 4 There could of course be more than one form of attachment to the land of the peasant. Apart ffom the ) state imposing restrictions on the mobility of a tax paying peasantry, there was thus the widely prevalent practice of debt-bondage. A number of such practices have recently been studied meticulously, and it is important to look at the terminologies deployed therein. Thus, in the context of 'forms oflabour attachment to the surplus lands of a richer peasantry', Sugata Bose refers to 'the krishani form of labour attachment in Birbhum' ' under which tied indebted labourers were paid with one-third of the crop', and argues against the attempts to see it as part of a 'semi-feudal' arrangement: 'Krishani, however, was an atypical and localized form of labour attachment'. 13 In a comparable context in the Gaya region of Bihar, Gyan Prakash has preferred to describe the relationship between the lord and the labourer as kamiauti, i.e. one between the malik and the 'contractual relation' is stated to be nece!;sary to defining the tied peasant as a serf: 'the peasants working the land were transferred together with the land. This created a category of tied peasantry . ... But this was not the equivalent of serfdom as the contractual relation between peasant and grantee was not identical with the generally accepted pattern ofserfdom [?)'(ibid, emphasis added). Second, a criterion of serfdom among some historians, questioned by others, is stated to be aggravation of peasant exploitation: 'G~antees began to acquire fiscal and judicial rights that could aggravate the burden of labour, dues and [other] demands on the peasants. TI1ere is sqme disagreement [?] on whether this constituted serfdom' (ibid, p. 444). 13 Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770, New Cambridge History oflndia, III.2, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1993, pp. 106, 107, 137n59. 5 kamia, and has in fact argued that to s•ee it as debt bondage is to subscribe to a form of colonial discourse. 14 Krishani or Kamiauti would be perfectly acceptable categories of social analysis, however,. if only their applicability could be tested for the situations where the terms are not found.

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