Bonds Lost: Subordination, Conflict and Mobilisation in Rural South India

The author argues that relations between landowners and agricultural labourers in rural south India cannot be understood without considering both the economic and social logic of the relationship. They analyse the transformation of rural social relations in the central parts of the highlands in western Tamil Nadu between c. 1900 and 1970, focusing on the farming community of Goundar and the agricultural labourers of the Madhari leather-working community. The two groups have been closely related, but there has been an uneven dependence between them, with the farmers dependent on the skills of leather workers to manage irrigation and the Madhari dependent on the farmers for their survival. Competition for labour scaled up in the region until the 1930s, leading to agricultural labourers being increasingly tied by advance payments to work for a farmer. Economic expansion gained support and social control was upheld.

Format: Hardback
Length: 276 pages
Publication date: 06 December 2023
Publisher: Manohar Publishers and Distributors

Social relations in rural south India have often been studied from either a perspective of labor and economic exploitation or one of dominance and subordination in terms of caste or exercise of political power. In Bonds Lost, the author argues that relations between landowners and agricultural laborers cannot be understood without taking account of both the economic and the social logic of the relationship. From a variety of government, mission, and oral sources, the author analyzes the transformation of rural social relations in the central parts of the highlands in today's western Tamil Nadu between c. 1900 and 1970. Throughout the expansion of commercial crops in agriculture, in particular of the cultivation of cotton, the farming community of Goundar and the agricultural laborers of the Madhari leather-working community have been closely related to each other. There has been a mutual, however, uneven dependence between the two; the farmers being dependent on the skills of leather workers to manage the irrigation, the Madhari equally dependent on the farmers for their own survival. Until the 1930s, competition for labor scaled up in the region and agricultural laborers were increasingly tied by advance payments to work for a farmer. On account of this, economic expansion gained support and social control was upheld.

Weight: 452g
Dimension: 147 x 228 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9788173041938