Finally, Finally, Finally!

Becoming India: Western Himalayas Under British Rule, Delhi, Foundation Books (CUP India), 2007, pp. xx + 334, ISBN: 978-81-7596-564-5, has finally been published.

Here is the cover.

Please check at your local bookstore. You can also order it from

Cambridge University Press India Private Limited,

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Unfortunately the version which survives with me is without footnotes. There were, if memory serves me right, more than a 100 footnotes to this paper, for which I spent a week in the Himachal Pradesh State archives as well as many days in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

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UNFREE LABOUR UNDER COLONIAL IMPACT:

“Beth” in the Shimla Hills.

Introduction

Unfree labour was central to agricultural production in pre-colonial India. Under colonial impact, these forms of unfree labour, while retaining their outward form, were radically changed in content. In medieval times, the subjects of the king were never `free’ as in the modern sense and all social classes and groups were linked to each other vertically and horizontally in ties of bondage, dependence and patronage. Under colonialism these ties got removed from their socio – economic context of origin and existence, and functioned differently in the new environment. It would be an attempt of this paper to see how and what changes were brought about in the institution of `Beth‘ – forced labour of unfree lower castes – in the Simla Hills under the impact of British rule.

Beth and its cousin category of Begar were forms of unfree labour of the agricultural castes. While the latter was given by practically every State subject for community and administrative works, the former was only given by the lowest castes to the higher castes and it usually took the form of semi-serf agricultural labour. When the British gained physical control of the Cis-Sutlej hills in 1815, they gave Sanads to the petty States of the region confirming their formal independence under British Paramountcy. These States, eighteen in all, were given almost complete independence in their internal matters. Begar was the only exaction of the colonial state from most of them in the absence of any proper tribute

There has been almost no attempt to study the agrarian economies, social structures and political institutions of the Western Himalayas except in the few ecology centered works on the region. Beth ( or other forms of the labour of the lowest castes ) has never been considered worthy of even the most preliminary study, though there have been one or two exceptions. Before we begin any discussion of unfree labour in the specificities of the Simla Hill States, it would be useful to place it in the wider context of unfree labour in colonial situations.

Unfree Labour in Colonial Conditions

Being generic to pre – modern economic regimes, an understanding of the function and importance of unfree labour in all its forms has been central to studies of medieval and ancient social formations. In modern societies, dominated as they are by `free’ wage labour, this has not been the case. The only exception to this pattern have been Marxist and other radical scholars for whom questions of unfree labour have more than academic interest. In the specific context of societies under colonial rule this question gains added importance since almost all of them experienced the continuation in a fossilised form of institutions of unfree labour, mostly under the general domination of metropolitan capital and control by imperial policy.

Historically the most studied and debated form of unfree labour has been `serfdom’ whose essence was defined by Rodney Hilton as

the transference to the use of the lord of the labour of the peasant family which was surplus to that needed for the family’s subsistence and economic reproduction.

or by Geoffrey de Ste Croix as

the tenure of land whereby the tenant is by law, custom and agreement bound to live and labour on land belonging to another person and render some determinate services to such other person, whether for reward or not, and is not free to change his status.

It would perhaps be useful for our argument to take note here of the distinction that Alan Knight (1988) makes between “forms of surplus labour” and ” mode of exploitation”. He looks at Latin American debt bondage and finds both aspects — slave and wage — hidden in it. Many forms of debt bondage ( which closely approximates the second definition of serfdom given above), were complex forms of wage labour and debt was a disguised form of wage. He, therefore, argues that one must be able to find an element of coercion beyond what is natural to `free’ wage labour before labeling it unfree in the sense of bonded labour.

Utsa Patnaik (1985) says that colonial India can also be classified as `feudal’ since an enserfed peasantry had to part with its surplus to a class of landlords who monopolise property in land. The forms of labour may be labour rent, kind rent and/or economic rent but the obligation to part with the surplus is based on extra – economic coercion. The major difference between Indian and Western feudalism that she identifies, is the presence in India of a large class of ritually landless agricultural labourers and menial workers who exist in hereditary servitude. These sections are not just servile to the landed gentry but even to the revenue paying middle caste peasant proprietors. In colonial India the surplus extracted from these sections was in reality appropriation of slave / labour rent and not profit. Thus the existence of landless labourers in agriculture was not an indication of the emergence of capitalism in agriculture ( as it was in Europe ) but precisely the continuance of a pre – capitalist social institution. With the growing pressure on land there was a corresponding increase in the number of landless agricultural labourers in colonial India and this indicates a pauperisation of the peasantry and not its proletarianisation (Patnaik 1985:4-5).

Along with this trend there was a growing demand for labour in plantations and in foreign countries as indentured labour, which cut at the roots of traditional servile labour. With the spread and universalisation of cash relations, traditional bondage was replaced by debt bondage which now included traditionally `free’ peasants in its ambit. Here Patnaik is arguing contrary to Dharma Kumar’s estimate that the number of landless labourers did not increase in the colonial period. Not only, it seems, did bonded landless labour increase, it also was transformed with the erosion of the paternalistic ties between master and bonded labourer.

Begar and Beth as Forms of Unfree Labour

Begar was the labour which all subjects had to provide the state for fixed periods during the year. It was unfree because there was no choice about wanting to give labour or not. Since agriculture was backward and most areas were not monetised, only a small part of the surplus could be appropriated through cash or kind. It was for this reason that direct labour services were the predominant form of surplus appropriation by the Hill States. There were basically two types of begar taken by the State; one, the regular labour extracted throughout the year and two, the contributions in labour and kind made during special occasions like birth, death and marriage in the Chief’s family. These types of labour had to be provided by all peasant proprietors and other agriculturalists, exceptions being made for members of the royal family, certain Bramhin and Rajput families and most of the village devtas and divinities. This labour service was taken by the State through its officers and the members of the royal family.

Labour which had to be performed regularly was called Athwara Begar and included

i) Porterage, including the carrying of revenue in kind to the chief’s household.

ii) Manning the Chaukis (watchposts) along the village roads and providing village watchmen.

iii) `Postal’ service within the state and carrying official communication to other states and the British town of Simla.

iv) Road construction and maintenance.

v) Providing labour, food and personal attendance to British officials on Shikar. This also included participating in the `chase’ and drum beating.

vi) Service in the royal household and kitchen, including provisioning grass, fuel wood, etc.

vii) Service to the village deity which included almost everything that was provided to the royal family.

The other form of begar was called Hela begar, and was part labour and part cash/kind contribution. This was a levy uniformly applied to state subjects and at times included those Bramhins and Rajputs normally exempted from begar.

Begar was recognised by the British authorities right from 1815, and all the Sanads granted to these Hill States recorded in detail the types, quantities and other requirements of the labour to be provided by the hill people to the British authority. British records of this period have no mention of the term Beth, or other forms of unfree labour, in the Western Himalayas.

Beth was a system of forced labour where the lowest castes like the Kolis, Doms, Chamars, etc., provided agricultural labour and other menial and `polluting’ services to the chiefs, the leading families and the village divinity. They also provided agricultural labour to the Kanet peasant proprietors ( “cultivating, inferior Rajputs” ), though only seasonally. Customarily debarred from land titles, they were dependent on their patron castes (clans?) and families for survival. They were not from the same ethnic stock and had different mythic-historic origins than the dominant groups in the villages. Their inferior position was reinforced through the various rituals and ceremonies that embodied the power structure of the village. Situated outside the Bhaichara of the Bramhins, Rajputs and Kanets, the Bethus (those who give Beth) were outside the decision making bodies of the villagers.

Reference to beth is rare in British records and it was more often than not collapsed as a form of begar, or as another form of tenancy. There is not much reference to the social class, political and economic status and/or function in the village society of the bethus. This, it seems, was primarily because beth and British interest hardly ever came into contact with each other. It was only in the last decades of the 19th century that the British first came to know about beth but were able to distinguish it from begar, in their policies, only in the last few years of their rule.

Beth and the Bethus

Bethus were basically the lower castes in the villages who, it is claimed in their origin myths, were the first inhabitants of the Western Himalayas. They were displaced and subordinated by the incoming tribe of the Khash, a part of the Aryans, who now constitute the overwhelming majority of the population of these hills. The Kanets, the Bhat Bramhins and some Rajputs claim their descent from this tribe. The tribes that the Khash subdued are collectively called the Nagas and the reference to the Karavaras in Smriti literature is also attributed to this same group. The Kolis who form the largest section of the Bethus and other low castes are supposed to have descended from them. Their social role, as given in the Smritis, was to carry conveyances, provide agricultural labour for the higher castes and do other menial work. Some Smritis also identify a caste/tribe in the Western Himalayas called the Kol who live in the forests.

In the area under study, the Kolis/Bethus were generally agricultural labourers bonded to the chief’s land which was known as Bassa. While they were ritually tied to their lord and his land, they could not own any land. They mainly worked in the fields and were recorded in Settlement reports as “hardworking cultivators”. Other than agricultural labour, they also gave labour in their chief’s household on a daily basis. Physical transfers of Bethus and transfer of their ownership was also prevalent as in the case of land being donated by the ruler and when he gave them as part of the dowry of his daughter / sister.

The Kanet proprietary peasants also took Beth labour for agricultural work on their land and also for community and domestic purposes. But they usually did not have similar semi – proprietary control over the Bethu’s person. Their appropriation of Beth labour was mainly through institutions similar to the Jajmani system, whereby certain Khash clans took specified, seasonal labour from local Koli groups. The latter were also responsible for doing all the menial work (and some ritually important work in the local religious ceremonies) for the village Bhaichara. Even during Begar distribution the Kolis got the more strenuous and polluting duties.

The Kolis have been put variously at 1/4, 1/5, 1/7 of the population in the different regions of the Simla Hill States by the Settlements and Gazetteers. The 1911 Census says that tenants ( this was the term used interchangeably with Koli, Bethu, agricultural labourer, and later, tenant-at-will in all British records) account for 17.1 % of the population of the Punjab Hills. The Simla District Gazetteer of 1888-9 says that about a fifth of the land was being cultivated by the Bethus. While this may not tell us much about their exact population in the region, it certainly shows their importance in the agricultural economy even in these areas of the Simla Hills which were directly under British administration and where the local chief’s had been dislodged. In the Simla district ( as distinct from the Simla Hill States which were formally under the local rulers ), if we look at the figures for Kotgarh and Kotkhai areas, which are fully rural, we find that the Kolis formed 23.5% of the population. In comparision the Kanets formed about 69% of the population.

In Kotkhai, since it was under direct British rule, no land was classified under the category of `State land’ and therefore we find that proprietary peasants tilled 96% of the cultivable land. The remaining 4% land was held in Jagir and Muafi grants and this was all worked by tenants who paid labour rent on exactly half the land and cash/kind rent on the other half. Payment of money for rent or revenue purposes was done by the Kanets and this tendency can be seen in most parts of the region under study. It does perhaps hint at the relative exclusion of the Bethus from the emerging money economy in the Simla Hills.

Comparatively, in the state of Rampur – Bushahr Kanets held much less land and the importance of Beth labour, which was used to cultivate the Bassa, Jagir, Muafi lands, was much more. Beth labour also became important in areas where there were large reserved forests worked by the British since the Kanets resisted working in these forests.

In the Simla Hills, labor rent was important to surplus appropriation mainly due to the low level of agricultural productivity and the virtual absence of money in large areas. The coming of colonial rule changed this in two ways. First, it assessed and preferred collection of land revenue in cash. Second, the stationing of army garrisons and emergence of hill resorts, specially Simla, in this region monetised the surrounding areas in its own peculiar way.

All the British land revenue settlements, whether in the Princely States or the directly controlled areas, calculated not just revenue but the value of commodities, services and ritual obligations in cash terms. A record from the mid nineteenth century speaks of the loss, due to ignorance and confusion, that the peasantry of Rampur-Bushahr had to bear after the settlement of 1853 since no one could calculate the various demands in cash. This change to cash was paralleled by another shift. Assessment and collection was now done on each plot of land and individual holders of land titles had to pay revenue which was totally contrary to the traditional practice of the peasant household ( which included all the brothers and their collective wives ) forming the basic economic and political unit of society. And we have references to resistance to cash assessment and collection by the peasantry from the time of the first `cash’ settlement itself. (See f.n. 4 above).

By the 1920s and 30s it seems that cash payment became common not only among the cultivating peasant proprietors but also increasingly among the `tenants’. By 1939 and later, the resident of the Simla Hill States was able to `advice’ the local Chiefs to convert Bethus into occupancy tenants or proprietary peasants (adna- malik) and charge compensation in cash — without foreseeing many “practical problems of cash collection”.

Traditionally, `payment’ for Beth was given through Chhak and a share in the harvest. Chhak consisted of daily food of about two seers of bread and two suits of clothing annually and the share in the harvest was usually in the range of 1/12 to 1/10 of the crop. At places even the Chhak was slowly converted into cash payment by the fourth decade of the present century, at three annas per day. The share of the harvest was also converted into cash payment at Rs.12 to Rs. 18 per year.

Simla and the cantonments at Kasauli, Dagshai, Sabathu and Jutogh employed an increasing number of villagers in various services paid for in cash. Almost all the menial jobs were done by the Kolis or by the immigrant `untouchable’ castes from the plains. So much was the preponderance of these “urban Kolis” in these menial jobs that the 1911 Census called them “scavengers of the hills”. By the twentieth century there were peasants employed in these British enclaves from every village if not every family. In the 1939 firing incident in the Hill State of Dhami, it was found during investigations that more than 600 of a total population of slightly over 5500 was employed in Simla, Jutogh and Sabathu. Some of these jobs were permanent positions in the municipalities and Imperial establishments, and some were seasonal as in rickshaw coolies, load coolies, etc..

Money was not the only thing that penetrated the rural hill society. Political ideas too flowed in. Resistance to oppression was as old as the institutions of Begar and Beth and was expressed through the Dumh. Resistance to the exactions of Begar and Beth was related to two factors, one, the economic and political context, and two, the social cultural milieu where there were specific limits to the legitimate and the illegitimate — the Jayaz and the Na-Jayaz. People rebelled when they felt that illegitimate demands were being made on them. This resistance was basically non – violent non – cooperation with the agents of the state by the peasantry. This would usually take the form of the peasantry declaring a specific action / demand of the state as illegitimate or a certain official/s as `tyrannical’ in the village or clan general body (Khumri). They would usually refuse to pay revenue or give any Begar and at times the entire village would leave their homes and migrate to the mountain tops and camp in the forests there till an acceptable solution was found to their grievance. At times these Dumhs turned violent when there was excessive pressure from the state. But what ever the course it took, it was always the Kanets who were in the lead in the planning and execution of these Dumhs, and we have no evidence, either in British records or in local traditions of an independent initiative being taken by the Kolis/Bethus. It also seems unlikely that the concept of `everyday resistance’ can be usefully applied in studying the Bethus since all records which speak either of the tenants or the Kolis/Bethus talk of them as “hard working” and “industrious cultivators” who would be central to any “scheme for the improvement of cultivation” in the Simla Hills. Conversely, these very records speak of the Kanets as bad cultivators, who are “lazy” and “not industrious”.

It also seems that the notion of legitimate and illegitimate demand of the state changed during the colonial period. While the acceptance by the peasants of labour demands lessened, the Simla Hill States too were strengthened by British Paramountcy vis-a-vis their constitutive social classes and groups. The State was, in the changed conditions, less willing to compromise on its demands, which were now enumerated with monetary exactitude in the documents of the Settlement Reports. Opposition by its subjects, the Begaris and the Bethus, to these demands heightened the possibility of a confrontation with the state which had the administrative and military backing of the British. This peculiar strengthening of the Hill States led an immediate worsening of the situation of the peasantry but also did open up possibilities of winning the struggle at a more radical level.

Resistance to Forced Labour

Uptil around the 1930s the revenue demands in the Hill States was assessed at around 22% of the total produce, plus the payment to the agricultural labourers and menials which amounted to around 12% , plus Begar and certain other cesses. The resistance to British revenue system was first recorded in Rampur – Bushahr in 1854 when peasants left their fields in protect. This was peacefully settled. Some Dumhs though became violent like the Sirmaur Dumh of 1880 where the peasants reacted with suspicion against the new revenue system with different rates of assessment. This coupled with official high – handedness, led to a major armed uprising where peasants barricaded their positions and fought pitched battles against the `pacifying’ British army. The land and other property of the leading rebels was confiscated.

The Bilaspur Dumh of 1885 too was against the increased rates of the new settlements and the oppressive behavior of the officials. Here too an armed confrontation developed between the state and the peasantry which required British armed intervention for its solution. These Dumhs were successful in forcing the Hill States to retreat and compromise with the peasant proprietors inspite of the British presence. By this time we find that in most cases the peasants too were appealing directly to the British, rather than to their rulers. But this `lobbying’ with the British, usually the Superintendent of the Simla Hill States, did not bring any succour to the peasantry.

In 1905 there was a Dumh in Baghal state against excessive Athwara Begar, due to frequent Shikar trips by British officials, against the doubled revenue demand of the new settlement and against certain imposts even against the `superior’ Rajput families. While the British intervened to end the Shikar `burden’ and the imposts on the Rajputs, there was no attempt to lighten the revenue demand since it was considered proper. Similarly, unrest in Rampur – Bushahr against excessive assessment during the settlement of 1906 was crushed by sending the police.

The last major upsurge against labour and revenue demands and against `oppressive’ officials in the pattern of the traditional Dumh was in the State of Mandi in 1909 where over 20,000 peasants are reported to have converged on the palace to seek justice from their king. Even though the State of Mandi does not form a part of the Simla Hill States it would be of relevance to our discussion to note this rebellion in some detail as the conditions were very similar. This Dumh was led by an ex-sepoy Sobha Ram who came back from the army and found the political, social system “oppressive and unjust”. He formed an organisation to agitate against this “oppressive and unjust” regime and against the misrule of the Wazir the highest official of the State. Initially the opposition took the form of petitioning the Raja and marching up to Mandi Town for an audience with him. Rebuffed the first few times, they reorganised themselves and came in a large group, 20,000 proprietary peasants, tenants and others. The Raja and his officers ran away and the state fell into the hands of these rebels who started organising a “people’s government”.

The Raja appealed to the Commissioner at Jullandhar who marched towards Mandi with two companies of the 32nd Pioneers. The rebels were not prepared for armed combat of this magnitude, even though the local tradition has it that the rebels had been given military training by Sobha Ram the ex-sepoy. The British army had little difficulty taking control of the town after putting down whatever sporadic resistance they met. Sobha Ram, his father and twenty four others, mostly Kanets and some Kolis, were tried and jailed — Sobha Ram to Kalapani, the others to Multan. All that the British did after the `pacification’ in response to popular demand was to remove the Wazir. No changes were brought in the Begar system or in the assessment of land revenue, which were the basic demands of the peasants.

This rebellion, more than anything else, shows the working out of the twin processes whereby the Hill States, buffeted by the British, became increasingly insensitive to the demands of their subjects and were able to get away with it. On the other hand, the people were getting more conscious of their rights and were redefining the bounds of legitimacy of state action. In other words, this was part of the process by which the peasantry was on its way to transforming itself from subjects to citizens.

This process should not be viewed in isolation and must be contextualised in the general situation of the country as a whole. The balance of forces between the Indian people and the colonial state along with its collaborators was changing in favour of the former. Thus it was becoming increasingly difficult to ride roughshod over the demands of the people by the end of the First World War.

Beth Reforms

On 4th October, 1941, the Political Agent of the Punjab Hill States sent an enquiry to all the states and estates in his jurisdiction about “Begar service” which included all forms of forced labour. The questions related to the amount of Begar levied, the number of holdings giving Begar, the types of Begar, the proportion of Begar to land revenue, the problems foreseen with the commutation of Begar into cash payments and ways of overcoming these problems. This information was needed “in view of the attention that begar service [had] attracted in the recent years”. Apart from the Praja Mandals which had come into existence at around this time and their growing agitations under the banner of the All India States’ People’s Congress, the “attention” on the issue of forced labour came from two other quarters. One, the demand by sepoys for commuting the Begar of their families, (one must remember that this was the time of the Second World War). Two, the independence movement, which took up the issue of Begar in the hills after the firing and casualties at the Dhami State satyagraha of the Praja Mandal. The All India States’ People’s Congress met in Ludhiana,Punjab, in 1939 where Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru was elected president and the INC too changed its position of non – intervention in the `internal’ matters of the princely states. All of these combined to make it imperative for the British to `soften’, if not abolish Begar and other forms of unfree labour in their present form, in the hills.

On 24 August, 1943 the Resident of the Simla Hill States called a meeting of all the Durbars to frame a model policy to abolish Begar and Beth in these areas Beth was defined “as an obligation to render personal service in return for certain cultivating rights”. There were two types of Bethus which were classified, (i)Bethus employed by the state, and (ii)Bethus employed by the cultivating peasant proprietors. The first class of Bethus was “opposed to the public conscience as having an element of slavery….”. This was therefore, recommended for immediate abolition, except for “palki service”. All services had to be henceforth paid for at the scheduled rates. Those Bethus who had been cultivating the same plot of land for three generations and more were to be made occupancy tenants while others were to be made tenants-at-will on a cash rent. Since the Bethus were not liable to render service to the ruler anymore, they were to pay revenue at double the rate plus cesses and usual contributions.

It is obvious that Beth was not being abolished but was rather `reformed’ by turning it into cash payment, more suited for the new context of a monetised and market integrated society. The question of Bethus under the proprietary peasants was totally ignored. It appears that this was so because the second form of Beth labour did not concern the income of the rulers and more importantly, the communal forms in which the peasant proprietor Bhaicharas took Beth, made it much more difficult to commute it to cash payments. It is also evident from our earlier discussion that the agitations since the coming of the British were centered around Kanet proprietary peasant demands and in that context, it was neither necessary nor easy for the British to tamper with the rights of the Kanets.

A third variety of Beth is also recognised, that of Beth service due to indebtedness. But the major concern of the Britishers, the local rulers and the Kanet peasantry was Begar and it was reduced considerably under pressure from the Praja Mandal, the national movement and the sepoys in the British Indian Army. The files pertaining to the reforms of Begar / Beth contain many petitions by the Bethus asking for an end to their hardships.

The discontent of the Bethus came out forcefully a few years later during the movement launched by the Praja Mandal at the time of India’s independence for the amalgamation of the Hill States into the Indian Union, for the complete abolition of Begar and for representative government in the region. The Suket State Satyagraha launched on 16 February, 1948 on the above demands saw a large Bethu participation in a movement which comprised almost all sections of the population though the leadership was still in the hands of the Kanets. The Satyagraha consisted of a Padyatra through the length of Suket State during which the marchers took control of all the organs of the state without any serious opposition. With the undermining of the power of the ruling families and their officials, their power to extract Beth was equally undermined. The subsequent abolition of land revenue removed the basis for taking cash Beth which now stood abolished. The requirements of Beth to the village community continued and in some areas is still prevalent.

A similar Satyagraha started in Rampur – Bushahr in March, 1948 saw a greater and more militant Bethu participation. Here the agitation developed into a violent confrontation between the Praja Mandal activists and the police and officials of the State. The latter were `arrested’ by the Praja Mandal activists and Rampur town passed into their control. The Diwan of the State rushed up from Shimla with armed reinforcements and managed to crush the uprising. There are local accounts of how the rebels were killed and their bodies were thrown into the Sutlej, of how villages were attacked, houses broken into and looted, of women raped. It seems that the Kolis came in for the most severe attack and were the main targets, perhaps due to their `audacity’. The State was amalgamated into the Indian Union in a few weeks from this and the agitation ended for all purposes.

Conclusion

To sum up the argument put forward till now, one can make three broad generalisations about the effect on Beth of British policy and administration.

One, the role of money became central to the social and economic processes of the hills. The assessment, collection and commutation of kind and labour rent in cash transformed the nature of the surplus extraction. This growing monetisation of the economy was not the result of internal dynamics but dependant on colonial intervention. Therefore, the forms of social, economic and political interaction did not change when their substance did. The manner of monetisation of hill economy did not lead to a “dissolving” of the social relations but rather ossified them. The implications of this on the political and cultural expression of the people and on the future development of the economy are areas on which much thought and effort have to be given.

Second, the efforts of the British to `reform’ and `abolish’ Beth led to a transformation in the manner of surplus extraction from labour rent to cash rent but the perpetuation of the system nevertheless. Not only is there evidence that points to the reluctance of the Bethus to accept cash commutation, the local states stood to gain from this change. This last point was very much in the knowledge of the local rulers and the British agents. While kind and labour rent was commuted to cash, there is no evidence to show that the Bethus were emancipated from the various disabilities they suffered from.

The third generalisation follows from the earlier two. It has been the accepted wisdom to look at the the reforms of Begar and Beth as one single process which enabled the final abolition of the systems of forced labour in the Western Himalayas. But one finds that rather than one there were two parallel processes at work. These have different causes, affect seperate social groups and have unrelated consequences on later events.

Begar abolition was mainly due to the pressures of teh rising assertion of the Kanet proprietary peasantry and the necessity of the colonial state to face the nationalist challenge while sttill recruiting soldiers for the Second World War. The controlled reduction in Begar dues led to its final abolition and the creation of the conditions which enabled the Kanets to take full advantages of the democratic set up of independent India and advance economically and politically so that today they not only are in the forefront of the horticultural revolution but also command immense political clout in Himachal Pradesh.

Beth reform was mainly due to the necessity of rationalising the tenancy structure and bringing it at par with the Punjab Tenancies Act. There is no evidence of an anti – Beth agitation, either on the part of the Praja Mandal, the local Indian National Congress, or by any organised group during the entire period of British rule. The British, on their part, kept referring to teh need for Beth reform since it was considered a type of “slavery” and since it was part of the process of `rationalising’ the land relation in the Simla Hills.

As the evidence so far seems to suggest, Beth reform led to a reconstitution of the same relation and not its abolition. Abolition possibly took place after the destruction of princely land rights and the ending of collection of land revenue after independence ( but I have not been able to study this period as of now). The main cause for the reform of Beth was the necessity of the local cheifs and big landed elements to convert their surplus into cash in an increasingly monetised economy.

The social classes touched by these reforms were also different. The Kanet proprietary peasantry in the case of Begar reforms and the Koli, Dom, Churah, Chamar, Turi, etc, in the case of Beth reforms. While the former were considered part of the Khash tribe and thus shared similar descent as the Rajputs and Bramhins, the Bethus were of a different ethnic group.

In the process of reconstitution of land relations that has been described above, the ownership of land played a crucial role. Those who had occupancy rights on land or those who were not ritually barred from holding land, gained as a result of the abolition of the system of forced labour. Conversely, those who were landless and who had ritual obstacles to the ownership of land, continued in servility and bondage. In the end, I would hazard the proposition that the change of a paternalistic non monetary relation into a purely monetary one, as the Beth reforms effected, probably led to a worsening of the position of the Bethus and their more intense exploitation, even though there does not exist any concrete evidence of this.

.

Environmental Economics, edited by Ulaganathan Sankar, Oxford University Press (Readers in Economics), New Delhi, 2001, pp.viii + 469, Rs. 595 (hardback).

Concern with environmental issues is not a new phenomenon as would appear with a importance it seems to get in the media and public discourse. Almost all pre-modern productive systems integrated a conservationist practice and ideology in their ambit. Often it was the necessity of preserving those natural resources on which the economic community was dependent, rather than a self-conscious act, which impelled the conservationist tendencies of these productive systems. It was only with the ‘Industrial Revolution’ and later that the productive system became free of its immediate dependence on conservation of natural resources. This happened primarily due to two reasons—the ‘secondary’ nature of industrial production, and the availability of non-local, colonial markets for raw materials. This, combined with the necessity of constant rise in productivity both at the level of the firm and the national market, created conditions where all other considerations were cast aside. Specially when ideas and practices of environmental protection and conservation were so strongly associated with a stagnant productive system like Mediaeval agriculture and a society equally stagnant and restrictive.

Even during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were voices which warned about the wantonness with which the industrial age approached nature and humanity but they almost always belonged to either subversive economic and political ideologies or to apologists and romanticists of a by-gone idyll. Productive forces were straining to break free and their agents were men in a hurry. Perhaps because of this, these alternative voices were not heard in the cacophony of clanking machines and clinking cash registers.

It was the post-Second World War boom in babies and consumption in Europe and North America that brought questions of environmental degradation and natural resource sustainability to the fore in these countries. This spawned a certain type of ‘environmentalism’ which has come to be associated with post-industrial societies of the developed world. Here concern for environment is expressed in terms of preservation of natural habitats free from human touch. It has also stressed issues of pollution and ecological degradation caused by the pressure of their growing cities.

Outside the regions of the developed world, environmental concerns are often perceived as luxuries of the rich. But the truth is that control over, use of and preservation of natural resources have been sites for major contests between different social strata in almost all developing countries. During the colonial period forests became the prime focus of popular struggles over natural resources in India. In the last few decades, there have been contests over forests, water, mineral resources, fish and other marine resources and many such matters, which have all involved large masses of people.

It is in this context that one can see a growing concern for environmental issues in the literature of almost every social science discipline. This is the third book to have been published by OUP in the ‘Readers in Economics’ series with Kaushik Basu and Prabhat Patnaik as its general editors. The book comprises of thirteen articles, a useful introduction and an annotated bibliography meant to introduce the reader to other important works in this field. Almost all the articles were published earlier and have been collected here to give an introduction to different works on this topic. Some of them, like Harold Hotelling’s “The Economics of Exhaustible Resources”, Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Robert M. Solow’s “Sustainability: An Economists Perspective”, W. Michael Hanemann’s “Contingent Valuation and Economics” and William D. Nordhaus’ “To Slow or Not to Slow: The Economics of the Greenhouse Effect” have attained the stature of ‘classic’ works in the neo-classical tradition of economics. Their influence on generations of economic students, government and donor agency policy and even public understanding has been enormous. And between themselves these thirteen essays cover much of the ground in their discipline over the last three decades.

The problems one faces with a collection like this are primarily two. First, it restrict itself to a specific ideological trend within the economic discipline and second, it attempts to understand and tackle environmental issues by “obtain[ing] money values of the damages”. In other words, it foregrounds the desirability of “a policy regime which relies largely on economic/market-based instruments to achieve environmental policy goals” (1). The limitations of such a perspective are clearly seen are many essays. Let us take as an example the essay by Nordhaus. In figure 1, he plots the ‘marginal damage from greenhouse warming’ against the ‘marginal cost of greenhouse gas reduction’ along axis of marginal damage / marginal cost of abatement and of percentage reduction in greenhouse gasses. This establishes a certain equilibrium point for the concerned economy where the cost of reducing greenhouse gasses meets the reduction in the amount of these gasses. This misses the point altogether. The issue is not of finding the equilibrium between the cost of reduction and the amount of gasses produced but of finding the point where the production of greenhouse gasses, primarily carbon compounds, does not damage our environment.

Similarly, when environmental damage is included in the economic costs of a product or an economy, it remains a futile exercise since it is impossible to account for the liability on future generations. How does one account for the disappearance of biodiversity, or even a seemingly small thing like the ecological system of a small lake, which is filled to build apartments, in its effects on future generations? None of the essays included here can hope to answer this. Apart from this, a central problem, which needs to be tackled by ‘environmental’ economics of any sort, is the unfeasibility of replicating the present consumption patterns of the developed world in developing countries. There just aren’t enough resources in this world to enable a sustainable economy where everyone drives a car, consumes thousands of gallons of fuel and kilowatts of electricity and produces waste in the tons. Unfortunately, the economics showcased in this book promises this illusory goal to all societies and therefore remains intrinsically anti-environmental in its core.

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The Himalayas, specially their Western part, have for long been a part of India, but only as the geographical origin and mythological culmination of our religious imaginations. They were seamlessly transformed, during the period of British colonialism, into ‘little Switzerlands’ through European nostalgia and Indian imitation. Few academic works have attempted a fuller understanding of the region and its history distinct from the anecdotal accounts of the hill stations and the dalliances of the British elite. The exceptions to this trend were a few studies by Hutchison and Vogel in the thirties of this century, the works of D.N. Majumdar and G.D. Berreman in the sixties and Ramchandra Guha and Shekhar Pathak in the eighties. Most of these studies have confined themselves to specific institutions or processes like polyandry, Begar or commercial forestry, or like Berreman to an intensive study of one village. After the pioneering work of political history by Hutchison and Vogel, there has been no attempt to study this part of the country as an interconnected region with a historicity of its own. After a gap of about sixty five years there has been another study which attempts to historicise the region and study it in its completeness. If only for this reason, this book by Chetan Singh deserves to be read not only by those who are interested in the Western Himalayas and in contemporary debates about ecology and colonialism, but also by a more general public.

This focus on the region as an historical unit and the study of its distinct aspects as inter related parts of the whole have enabled the author to come up with a host of important insights. Our understanding of the origin and structure of the hill state, the environmental limits on the development of agriculture and the possibility of settled life, the importance of nomadic activities, specially pastoralism, are enhanced by the discussions in the book. Singh has been able to bring out the minor intricacies of peasant life and its relation with the local environment through detailed descriptions of the different activities which, though they may seem insignificant to an observer located in a market context, were essential in putting together a subsistence and often a surplus produce. All the chapters are heavily footnoted from a wide variety of official documents and have useful sub-headings which would enable future research to make this a base study.

While the chapters dealing with the hill state, agriculture and pastoralism have broken new ground, those dealing with forests and wasteland are the most important contributions of this book. Singh introduces the concept of ‘intermediate spaces’ for the land classified as waste in British land settlements. The ecological and economic importance of this waste land to that under direct cultivation has been well brought out, showing the dependence of agriculture to the proper utilisation of these intermediate spaces. The chapter discusses the process by which land was classified as waste and the difficulties faced by the Settlement officers in defining it, deciding its ownership, and assessing the government demand on it. Similarly the chapter on forests and the use of natural resources begins by making a crucial distinction on the type of natural resources that were used by the hill peasantry and that which was of commercial importance to the colonial state. This distinction enables Singh to nuance his account of the impact of colonial forest policy and its effect on local peasant economy and life. This chapter also follows the various shifts in attitude and policy of the British officials towards the forests, specially with regard to the species of trees targeted, the rights of the hill peasantry, and the long term objectives of forest policy. In a context where a majority of scholarship on forests, British forest policy and peasant response to it has assumed a simple model of the destruction of traditional village communities and their usufruct rights by the colonial state, these two chapters will hopefully make the debate more nuanced and historically specific.

Singh, in fact, questions the very notion of resources held in common by the village community ( he even raises doubts about the existence of a village community on the basis of various official sources). He indicates that even in the ninth and tenth centuries there are references to land grants to individuals which included all the forests, pastures, and other lands which were classified as wastes by the British. The related questions of the possibility of ‘private’ ownership of land in a situation where there is no proper market, either in land or in its produce would have enriched the argument but has been left unattended. While it is possible to argue that there are frequent references to individual holdings of land, this by itself does not discount either the existence of village communities and their common claims to natural resources, or even the absence of ‘private property’.

It is often that the author touches on important historiographical debates of this nature but does not carry his arguments beyond an initial questioning, leaving it to the reader to work out the larger argument(s) on her own. While this may be an acceptable feature of the book if it were a deliberate discursive strategy, but it is not clear that it is meant to be so. Let us take, for illustrating this point, the discussion on irrigation in chapter 2 and that of trade routes in chapter 6.

The discussion on irrigation is set in the context of a larger discussion on the nature of agriculture and its importance for ‘assembling permanence’ of settlements. Singh has included much detailed information about the construction of the irrigation water channels, the difference of size and structure in the different ecological and topographical areas, their importance to agriculture. He shows clearly that in the lower river valleys these are longer, covering fields in many villages and involving large amounts of communal labour. On the other hand, the upper river valleys had ‘micro’ irrigation channels which often watered only one peasants fields, involving correspondingly less labour and maintenance. The consequence of this on the structure of social relations and the exercise of political power is left unexplored. Irrigation also had a very important role in deciding the nature of crops cultivated, the yield of the crops and also the manner of meeting the demands of the hill state and other surplus extracting agencies. These in turn would influence the level of monetisation of the area and its internal composition of economic activities. While many of these issues are discussed in different parts of the book, their inter – relation is not made explicit.

In the discussion on trade routes, despite an abundance of information on the different types of roads and tracks used, the different methods of transport, and such other like, there is no attempt to analyse the importance of river valleys in providing traders from the plains access to the interiors of the mountains. Singh talks about the populations of the agricultural belt of the lower hills and those of the trans Himalayan cold desert where there was little agriculture, being more integrated with the market than the populations of the middle Himalayas where agriculture was combined with pastoralism. The former paid their taxes in money whereas the latter paid it in kind. But this does violence to the historical reality of the region. The Sutlej river valley was one of the most important trade routes and also quite monetised. It was in regions just above the Sutlej, in the Saraj region of Kullu district and in what came to be called the Simla Hill States by the British, that one finds the most ‘natural’ of economies and the least monetisation, and a parallel lack of development of proper state institutions. How does one explain this phenomenon. It is not possible to understand or explain these in terms only of the interaction of the environment and society.

Here one notices the weakness of the interpretative framework that Singh uses. Throughout the book there has been an attempt to use historical tools and concepts which owe their origin to the Annales historiography, specially Fernand Braudel’s works. This in itself is unexceptionable. The difficulty arises at two levels. It may be useful to explore these at some length. Singh continuously stresses the need to move away from environmental or geographical determinism and repeats often his claim that the interaction between nature and man in the Western Himalayas was not unidirectional. Rather, this relation was a complex embedding of different processes where one can identify equally the imprint of human actions on the environment as much as one can find social adjustment to natural conditions. This understanding of nature – culture relation does not reflect in the text where there seems to be a greater emphasis on the environmental conditions determining the specificities of human actions. As an illustration of this point let us examine his discussion of the origin and structure of the hill state.

The geographical factors which determined the formation of the State in the hills is looked at closely. These definitely add to our knowledge of the hill State, but they do not in themselves fully explain either the origin of these States or illuminate their distinct structures. The area south of the Dhauladhar range did not only have relatively small States able to exploit the surplus from larger agricultural yields due to the milder monsoons enabling two harvests a year. They also had large areas where lineage based clans controlled undisturbed political power and State structures were very under – developed. These came to be called the Simla Hill States by the British, but the use of that term was a legal figment. One can find similar exceptions in other areas, Dodra-Kawar in Bashahr State, ‘Poondur’ on the borders of Jubbal and Bashahr, Saraj in Kullu, which showed marked differences in their political organisation from the dominant forms in the same climatic, environment zone. It is somewhat surprising that Singh uses the works of Karl Polanyi and Andre Gunder Frank, apart from Braudel and E. LeRoy Ladurie, to understand the relation between ‘environment, territoriality and the state’ but ignores work closer home, like Romilla Thapar’s work on the transition from lineage to state in ancient India, D.D. Kosambi’s pioneering works on the emergence of state formations, or even D.N. Majumdar’s work on the region of Jaunsar-Bawar. There is an unfortunate absence of involvement with anthropological and political theories on the origin and functioning of the state which has even led to confusion over use of concepts like political power, government and state. A form of environmental determinism has crept in unwanted because of the author’s primary reliance on environmental factors in understanding and explaining historical processes.

In any attempt to use the framework of historical geography developed by the Annales school, and specifically Braudel, two things are imperative. First, a very careful definition of the ‘region’ and second, a selection of a ‘long duree’ and a comprehensive use of sources.

The title of the book defines the region of study as the Western Himalayas. Though there are differences among geographers about the correct definition of this region, Singh reduces it to the political boundaries of the present State of Himachal Pradesh. This is unacceptable. There can be no basis for the inclusion of the low lying areas of the Kangra valley in the Himalayas, either geographically or historically and the trans – Himalayan regions of Lahul and Spiti are again by no stretch of the imagination part of the Himalayas. The inclusion of these areas in the defined region reduces the historical focus of the work and strains the argument too often. Almost all the discussion of the trans – Himalayan areas is relegated to the end of each sub-section or chapter. Mere connections between traders and nomadic pastoralists of the different regions do not allow for such blurring of borders. On the other hand, the author totally neglects areas of the Western Himalayas which are outside the boundaries of Himachal Pradesh, like Garhwal which share much in common, both historically and environmentally.

Singh states that he has attempted to understand the dialectic of continuity and change in the relation between environment and the peasant’s life. The period of his study are the years which correspond broadly to British rule. This in itself is not long enough to achieve this objective, specially in a region where the sheer magnitude of geography make historical changes tortuously slow. But it is not an impossible task. For that one has to use a wide array of sources. Unfortunately, much of the book revolves around official British records, which in their present state of maintenance are scattered thinly over the historical ground. it is not possible to reconstruct both the processes of continuity and of change from only these. The use of anthropological sources, oral traditions, whether recorded in official documents, or available in songs and rituals, that would enable one to reconstruct a fuller account of the interaction of man and nature.

Many of the above mentioned methodological problems get noticed specially because Singh’s book is full of insights which would be of use to historians, ecologists, and others concerned with the region. A more rigorous involvement with these problems would have enabled the author to bring out his central argument much better and this, in turn, would have helped highlight many of his contributions which may pass an inattentive reader by. All this does not take away from the merit of this book. It is closely argued, attentive to details, and has recovered for scrutiny and interpretation a whole region of our country, ignored for too long by ‘mainstream’ historical research. This review is merely an indication of that singular contribution.

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Preface

In August, 1990, when V.P. Singh, the Prime Minister of India announced the partial implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations, large scale student protests erupted in many campuses of North India. These protests challenged the move to reserve a chunk of government jobs for candidates from, what were called, the “Other Backward Classes” (OBCs), based on the recommendations of the Mandal Commission. While these student protestors received much support from the urban middle classes of North India, no political party came out in formal support, nor did any institution of the State or Government. This was primarily because the OBCs represented the large mass of agriculturalists, artisans and rural service providers – the Shudras according to Hindu caste hierarchy. More often than not a clear demographic majority in any given geographical region. In a context of universal suffrage, it would have been electoral suicide to oppose a move which purportedly benefited them.

Except in Himachal Pradesh. The Himachal Pradesh Government seemed to fly in the face of such basic political logic and filed a petition in the Supreme Court challenging the implementation of these OBC reservations. These reservations also evoked strong protests in the neighbouring regions of Garhwal and Kumaon and fed into their long standing demand for a State separate from OBC dominated Uttar Pradesh. What was striking was that in these Himalayan regions, the muscle of the anti-reservation protests was provided by the agriculturalists. It was perhaps the only part of India where one could say with some certainty that a majority of the people opposed reservation.

The open and strong support from all political parties in Himachal to this agitation against OBC reservations was attributed by the media, and much of academia, to some form of popular indignation based on moral and political principles and against an assault on “merit”.

My first research interest into the social history of the Himalayas began at this time, when I felt that such explanations were, at best, puerile.

Most of my childhood and adolescence was spent in Shimla. Through my college and university years, Shimla became for me an idyll to which I retreated from the heat and dust of Delhi. Its pleasant weather, forest draped mountains, quaint English cottages and childhood memories had obviated any critical look at its history or society. The agitations opposing the Mandal Commission recommendations forced the first rupture in my romantic notions about the Himalayas.

Looking back at my years in school in Shimla, I realised that there were no Himachali OBCs in my class. In fact, I could not recall any Himachali OBC friend or neighbour. That made me sit up. On enquiry, I was told that in most parts of the Western Himalayas the social composition was bereft of Shudra castes. Apart from the Scheduled Castes, there are only Brahmins, Rajputs and Vaishya castes[1]!

The popular history of the region states that the people in the Western Himalayas descended from the Aryan tribe of the Khash and that this origin explains their uniform upper-caste status. Those who were classified as the Scheduled Castes, were supposed descendents of pre-Aryan groups, now referred to as the Nagas. Further, I was told about the many struggles waged by this Khash peasantry against Begar imposed on them by the Hill States and the British. The stories of these struggles are still alive in popular memory and are intertwined with the memory of the struggle for independence.

A few years later, when I had to work on a seminar paper for my Masters in the university, I decided to study the colonial history of the Western Himalayas. My initial foray at studying the history of the region was on a form of forced, unfree labour (Beth) prevalent in that area. I began my doctoral researches with the intention of broadening the scope of this initial foray into the history of the region by studying the entire gamut of social relations and agricultural practices which supported the different forms of unfree and forced labour I had been able to identify during my seminar paper. If my initial researches into the social formations of the region had shaken my romantic vision of these mountains, which I shared with numerous others, my doctoral research delineated the obstacles, daunting like the high mastiffs of the Himalayas, to writing the history of this region.

The first problem I faced was a paucity of secondary sources on the history of the region which would have helped me place my research into the perspective of a larger debate. The one and only researched history of the region, on which I could bank for verifiable accounts, had been written in 1933 and covered regions to the west of the Simla Hill States[2]. Apart from this there was one work on the history of resistance to forest laws in Garhwal and Kumaon[3] and a handful of Ph.D.[4] and M.Phil. theses available in the library of the Himachal Pradesh University. The only secondary sources available in abundance were the anecdotal histories and accounts of Simla as a town of colonial trivia and sundry European charms. I was warned by a historian friend of mine, who was in the midst of his own researches into the Western Himalayas, that trying to work on the history of the region was like floating on a rudderless raft in a sea without even a compass for guidance.

Apart from the lack of proper sources to write a full scale account of the history of unfree labour in the Western Himalayas, I came up against conceptual barriers too.

I am no apologist for unfree labour, and there are enough sources to indicate the opposition to such labour by the region’s peasantry. But it seemed to me that unfree labour in the Western Himalayas was linked as closely to reciprocal labour as it was to the commonly understood form of servile unfree labour. Further, this unfree labour was located inside the matrices of the polyandrous Himalayan family, the egalitarian clans and imperfect Hill States, all subsumed under the overarching structure of colonialism. Sociological and historical literature on India under colonialism seemed to provide diminishing conceptual clarity the deeper I delved into the social history of the Western Himalayas. Not only had the Western Himalayas never been a political part of any Indian entity throughout history, there was a clearly discernable sociological gap between the plains of North India and this region.

I realised that to write a contextualised history of unfree labour in the Western Himalayas, I would need to understand the local dynamics of social and economic transformations during the colonial period separate from the general history of India under colonialism. It was through this effort that I finally decided to shift the focus of my research from unfree labour under colonial conditions to a mapping of the colonial encounter in the region by foregrounding its exceptionalism and focussing primarily on transformative processes.

While the thesis mapped out the broad history of the Western Himalayas, this book takes the argument further. The thesis traced the history of the region from the time of its conquest by the British in 1815 till the coming of political independence in 1947. In its somewhat ambitious attempt to study the consequences of colonial rule in the Western Himalayas over a period about 132 years my doctoral thesis treaded lightly on the historical ground, surveying the field and marking the signposts for future study, rather than delving deep into any single issue.

This book takes bases itself on my doctoral research to but takes my argument further in two significant ways. It questions the implicit historical unity of the geographical space we call India today. By foregrounding the distance of the Western Himalayas from the rest of India at the beginning of the colonial encounter, it argues for a more nuanced history of colonial India. India was a product of the processes unleashed by colonialism, and different regions—like the Western Himalayas—which constituted India at the culmination of the colonial encounter each had specific histories of their colonial encounter. These specificities need to be studied independently of any general history of Indian colonialism and not merely as a sub-set of that general history. Hence the title of this book.

This brings me to the second departure this book makes from my doctoral thesis. It argues that such a particularist reading of the history of the Western Himalayas would suggest that the colonial encounter here was non-cataclysmic, unlike for much of the Indian sub-continent. This is not some lame-duck attempt at revival of the historiography of colonial apologia. It is not an argument regarding the intentions of the British rulers nor does it claim credit for colonialism for whatever beneficial consequences there may have been as an outcome of this encounter. What it argues is that given the geographical, social and economic contexts of the Western Himalayas, colonialism did not introduce a sudden rupture in the economic or political life of the people as it did in most other places. This non-cataclysmic nature of the colonial encounter in the Western Himalayas then had a significant bearing on the way in which the Himalayan people responded to its transformative processes. It is a result of these that the desolate, foreboding and violent social geography of the Western Himalayas emerged as the touristy idyll at the conclusion of the colonial encounter.

This book, therefore, is not a general history of the colonial period in the Western Himalayas. Rather it narrates the story of the transformation of the social formation of the Western Himalayas during the period of British rule. It focuses on the basin of the Sutlej river for its narrative. Complimentary evidence and sources are taken from the two neighbouring river valleys of the Beas and the Tons.

The first chapter lays out the nature of the region’s geography and how it impacted on the pre-British social formation. The second chapter studies in some detail the economic, political and sociological features which constituted this social formation. Chapter three takes a close look at the foundations of British rule in the region and the impact they had on the extant social formation. Chapter four surveys a series of peasant rebellions over a century to identify the changes in ideology and political practice of the peasantry and chapter five looks at the indicators of this changing social formation. The final chapter details how the processes unleashed by British rule finally played themselves out at the twilight of independence as the Himalayan peasant constituted himself into a member of the Indian nation.

As I have mentioned above, this book is the culmination of a long process of discovery and I have accumulated intellectual and personal debts too many to fully recount and acknowledge. I must begin by acknowledging the academic guidance provided by my doctoral supervisor, Prof. K. N. Panikkar who gave me the space to pursue divergent ideas which have finally blossomed to form the core arguments of this book.

My father, Javeed Alam, provided the initial inputs which started me off on this journey of discovering the Western Himalayas. Mohar Singh provided innumerable insights and has always been a ready bank of information and ideas for me to draw on. Chetan Singh, with his easy charm, helped me find my feet in the world of Himalayan history. Their ideas and inputs lie scattered throughout this book and are too numerous to fully footnote.

Sumit Sarkar, Hari Sen, Kumaresh Chakravarty, Emma Flatt, Tanika Sarkar and the late Ravinder Kumar read many of the drafts. Their comments and criticisms have been crucial to both strengthening the arguments of this book as well as for providing much needed encouragement. I must thank Vasudha Pande for sharing her experiences of research on the Western Himalayas and introducing me to L.D. Joshi’s work. Kaushik Dasgupta not only read the entire draft of both the Ph.D. thesis and this book, but also gave valuable editorial advice.

The research on the thesis took me to various libraries and archives and I would like to thank the staff of the JNU library, the Nehru Memorial Library, the H.P. State Archives, the H.P. Secretariat library, the H.P. University library, the National Archives of India, the British Library’s Oriental and India Office Collection, the SOAS library, the library of the South Asia Centre, Cambridge and the library of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

The Senior Research Fellowship of the University Grants Commission made it possible for me to pursue my Ph.D. and I record my thanks for their help. I also thank the generosity of the Indian Council for Social Science Research who financed my air ticket to London which enabled me to refer to documents housed in the Oriental and India Office collection of the British Library.

Often I have wondered whether I ‘wasted’ my time while I was busy with SFI work and if not for that, whether I may have completed the thesis and this book much earlier. But, today when I look back at my years in JNU, I am sure that my political associations, the vibrant political atmosphere and academic culture of the University have been important contributors to my academic interests and intellectual development. The University has not only provided some enduring friendships and political associations, it has also moulded me as a person. All the late nights, the arguments and discussions, the endless cups of tea and the fun we have had together are embodied in the following pages. A big thanks to all my comrades and friends. I must also acknowledge the fine academic atmosphere provided by the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU from where I pursued my research.

My wife Manjari has been a constant friend and companion during my research and writing. Her constant support, encouragement and affection, not to mention editing and discussions, have added greatly to my work. My parents have put in so much of their emotional energy into my research that it seems too formal to merely thank them and I don’t have the words to express all that I have to say. Not only my parents but also my grandparents have always stood behind me in all that I have done and together they have provided me with the confidence and strength to pursue my academic and other interests. My daughter, Sara Aparajita, is too little to know that her father has finally finished his book. I only hope that when she eventually gets to read it, she would feel it worthy of her father!

[1] Actually this is true only of the higher mountainous areas which in Himachal Pradesh are commonly referred to as “Upper Himachal”. The social composition of the sub-montane regions and lower Shiwaliks (like Kangra and Hamirpur districts of Himachal, or the Doon area of Uttarakhand) is somewhat different and one does find the presence of some OBCs there.

[2] Hutchison, J. and Vogel, J. Ph., History of Punjab Hill States, 2 Vols. Lahore, 1933.

[3] Ramchandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, Delhi, 1989

[4] Mohan Singh Rathore, Nineteenth Century Cis-Sutlej Hill States, H.P. University, Simla, 1987, (unpublished Ph.D. thesis).

The Nation and its Borders

A note on the historiographical struggle to constitute India

This paper uses the historiography of colonialism in India as an illustration to argue that there is a significant fault-line, or disjunction, in the manner in which India has been conceptualised as a Nation. The paper argues that not only is this a methodological weakness, it has also closed to doors for a more inclusive notion of Nationhood from developing.

The paper shows that while historians, and other social scientists, have convincingly argued that India became a Nation during, and in opposition to, colonialism, they have used the social formations of the riverine plains as the default template for defining the Indian Nation. The social formations of the agricultural communities around the great Indian rivers have implicitly been accepted as representative and sociologically normative for “India” as it emerged between the battle of Plassey and Partition. This normative template of “India” has been used to underwrite the histories of the peoples and territories of the British Raj. At most, qualifications are allowed but no space is left for the existence of a history outside this “India”.

This paper argues that about half of the geographical space today called India, was located outside this normative “India”. At best these areas can be termed border areas. It will look at the institutions of family, caste and at the process of State formation in one border area, Western Himalayas, to illustrate the manner in which non-Indian features were appropriated into the Indian Nation. It will also explore the possible consequences, both for academic enquiry as well as for politics, of this surreptitious inclusion of border areas into “India”.