Indian Journal of Economics. July 1952

The clues to the evolution of this class are therefore to be found in the factors that led to the disintegration of the traditional agrarian society—that is in the land policies pursued by the British in India since the closing years of the eighteenth century in particular and in the general economic evolution of India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in general. [...] The Deccan Riots Commission of 1876 noted that "the instances of redemption of mortgage are almost unknown ; a mortgage is equivalent to a transfer of the ryot's title."25 In his evidence to the Indian Famine Commission of 1901 the Chief Secretary of the Bombay Government stated that twenty-eight per cent of the land in the BiEoach district had passed into the hands of the money lenders ; on the b [...] To say therefore that marriage and the advance of money which is generally used for it are the cause of the institution of bonded labour is like saying that echange of wedding rings between a man and a woman is the cause of their marriage:11 Thus the disintegration of the village communities brought about the "liberation" of depressed classes from the traditional self-perpetuating form o [...] Such an analysis of the nature of bondage leads us to the conclusion that the greater the opportunities of earning a livelihood without accepting bondage the smaller the basis for the existence if the system of bonded labour despite the continuation of marriages and at times of borrowing money for marriages. [...] In village after village layers of middlmen interposed between the cultivators and the Zamindars."" The Indian Statutory Commission of 1928 found cases where the number of intermediaries each of them fattening at the expense of the cultivator = exceeded fifty.5° The results underlying this process were emphasized by the Royal Commission in these words : 51 The lack of alternative means of sec