The Jati System and Localized Exploitation in India!
From the seventh to the twelfth century A.D., these features crystallized. Serfdom became a widespread phenomenon (Sharma 1965:57-60). The erstwhile officials of the king now began to keep the entire revenue and for all practical purposes severed their ties with the monarch by totally usurping his administrative authority. The feudal elites such as the samantas, petty village chiefs and lesser landholders began to exert greater rights over lands (Yadav 1976: 45).
This brought about the division of the entire territory of the kingdom, leading to several sub-divided clan monarchies of the Gujara Pratihara kind between the eighth and the tenth century A.D., and the Cahamanas from the middle of the eighth century to the early fourteenth century A.D. (Chattopadhyay 1976:64-69).
“Here the territory was parceled out by the ruler after retaining his own share among his kinsmen and clan chiefs. Each of the latter then set about dividing his territory among his own clansmen while retaining his own share, until by this process, every village was assigned to a particular man in return for a supply of troopers when needed by the assignor….The most common titles of the potentrates (i.e., the new landed aristocracies) are samantas, ranaka, rauta, thakkurra…2nd rajaputra” (Habib 1965:41-42).
The distribution of land among royal kinsmen and officers was a widespread phenomenon of this period (Gopal 1963-64: 75-103). The Harsa inscriptions of 973 A.D. at Jaipur are considered to be the earliest evidence of such distribution (Chattopadhyay 1976:71). This period is also characterized by the breakdown of large-scale commerce and trade which is evident from the paucity of coins of the era (Sharma 1965:270).
The towns and large trading centers which dotted the earlier Buddhist and Mauryan empires had also disappeared. The ruralization of the ruling class was accompanied by the ruralization of the artisans and handicraft workers. Never before had the peasants and craftsmen been subject to such direct control by local chiefs, his intermediaries and clansmen. As Sharma (1965:271-272) said:
“The main characteristics of European feudalism, the self-sufficient economy, buttressed by lack of commercial intercourse and the rise of intermediaries leading to the subservience of the peasantry prevailed in India….(and) the possessing class appropriated the surplus produce of the peasants by exercising superior rights over land and persons.”
Moreover, in the feudal structure of exploitation, the subordinate communities were not generally related directly to the state, but to the various local intermediaries and to the feudal lord. The officials of the Mauryan Empire were officials of the royal court, and the benefits they derived from the structure of generalized exploitation was routed via the state. In the feudal period, however, the intermediaries and clansmen of the overlord were paid not so much in cash by way of salaries—as in land grants.
This led to a hierarchy of direct exploiters in feudal societies as the noblemen held differential sizes of land, depending on their rank and closeness to the overlord, and a right to differential shares of the produce of the peasants, which they extracted through extra economic coercion in their respective demesnes.
In feudal societies, all the land generally did not belong to the overlord or to his intermediaries and clansmen. Some land was distributed to particular groups in return for their services during military campaigns. The rest was given over for peasant (ryot) cultivation. The landlord’s own land was either cultivated by serfs, or by ryots, who in addition to giving up part of the surplus on their own allotments, were forced to render labour service by the lords.
This localization of exploitation had several consequences. First, as we have already mentioned, was the decline of trade. Second, the exactions by the overlords and the nobility of the serfs, peasants and artisans increased. This was possible as the former held juridical rights over their area. Third, as land became the index of wealth and power it was highly prized and cultivation emerged in this period as the only viable occupation for the people.
Those peasants who had enough land to make a living out of agriculture were as a consequence held in greater esteem, than those who had to supplement agriculture by crafts and artisanry. This tied the ryot to the nobility. The nobility also took care not to dispossess or ruin the peasants uniformly, as they formed a guaranteed pool from where they could draw labour services.
As Lenin (1960:194) said, large pre-capitalist landlords need peasants attached to small pieces of land as they then become dependable sources of labour. Fourth, not only did stratification increase and deepen among the ruling class, but it also in turn differentiated the subordinate community who served them. The peasants are split into grades depending on the types of allotment, differing amount of payment, whether state peasant or tied and taxed by the feudal lord (Sharma 1966:183), and also on the status of their feudal overlord (Breman 1974:19).
Artisans were also ranked depending on the rank of their patrons or of their customers. An ironsmith, therefore, was lower than a goldsmith, a weaver even lower than an ironsmith, and so on. The other side of this tendency towards greater stratification in feudal societies is the greater integration and interdependence in the local village milieu between different communities. We no longer hear of villages belonging to any one artisan community. Each village now had not only its lords and nobles, its ryots and officials, but also its complement of goldsmith, weavers, ironsmith, potters, etc.
It was the progressive development of this economic structure of localized exploitation within the village nexus which brought about the elaboration of the jati or what is popularly known as the Indian caste system. The dependence of the lower exploited classes on each other and on their masters in a closed society and market necessitated a greater elaboration of the rules of exchange and intercourse.
The rationale of “natural superiority” which served the Varna scheme so well was not abandoned but on the other hand utilized fruitfully by the exploiting classes. This percolated right down the ranks, enabling the peasants and artisans to interact on the basis of the ruling class ideology.
The general exploitation of the Asiatic mode of production of the previous epoch whereby the rights and duties of the artisans and peasants vis-a-vis each other had not been elaborated now gave way to more clearly specified patterns of interaction due to the exigencies of localized feudal exploitation. Also the notion of “untouchability” originates around 200 A.D., especially in association with the chandalas. This institution takes on an extreme from by the twelfth century A.D., as revealed in the Parasasmriti.
It is not merely the proliferation of numerous occupational groups that distinguishes jati and varna. As we have pointed out, the belief that the Vedic age had only four orders of the varna scheme is incorrect. This belief led one to question the veracity of the various occupational groups in Megasthenes Indica (Kosambi 1975:193).
The Vedic society, however, did try to fit these diverse groups and communities into the Procrustean bed of the Varna scheme, though not always successfully. The failure to do so did not create any problems of controlling social relations of the period because exploitation was general and the exploited classes served only the superior community with few or no rights, obligations and economic intercourse among themselves.
The status of the numerous occupational groups of peasants, artisans, menials, etc., correspond generally to that of either the Vaishya or the Shudra. Further delineation of status and position among them was not necessary. The essential difference between Varna and jati is precisely this aspect which was brought about by a closed village economy.
With the level of productive forces remaining stagnant, any rise in population was accommodated in the feudal structure of medieval India at the cost of greater rigidification and further stratification of the jatis. As the facilities to utilize land were limited, and property rights over land were monopolized by a minority, population pressure did not expand the frontiers of land utilization, but led instead to greater differentiation within the confines of the feudal economy.
This resulted in a plentiful supply of skilled labour which was intensively utilized for the expropriation of use values and also for commodity production (Habib 1971:41). This inhibited in turn the use of labour saving devices and the manufacture of tools with higher productivity.
Habib (Ibid.:38) quite rightly says:
“(While) it is true that extensive development in technology can only occur when metal, particularly iron, replaces other materials, this change can be delayed in a particular situation for no other reason than that a tool of lower efficiency can be used to manufacture the same commodity by employment of cheap skilled labour.” Besides the abundance of skilled labour in a labour-intensive economy, the number of jatis was also enhanced by the continuing absorption of tribals, whose lands were annexed by the might of the nobility into the village nexus.
They were forced to render certain services to meet local needs, and were likewise placed in the hierarchy, usually at the bottom. Conversely, those tribes not within this nexus, due to either their inaccessibility or their indomitability, were driven to the extremities of established society and to the brink of survival. This can be seen even today in the tribal belts of India (Breman 1974:7). When trade resumed on a large scale in the eleventh century A.D., it did not disturb this village structure. Indeed, the needs of trade very often brought about new occupational groups, like the diamond miners of Karnataka (Habib 1971:38).
Similarly, during the Muslim period, the regeneration of powerful royal bureaucracies did not dismantle this feudal set-up (Singh 1973: 200), and contrary to popular British myth, as Alavi (1975: 186) has pointed out, all land did not belong to the great Mughal emperor.
These royal officials of the Muslim court were alternately paid salaries in cash, or were assigned the revenues of a particular area over which they exercised superior authority much in the manner of a feudal overlord. Such changes were rather by his successor, which usually left the existing village structure undisturbed (Siddiqui 1970:17-40; Habib 1965:54-55; Habib 1971: 14-15; Hassan 1963:118).
Therefore, the apparent similarity between the royal bureaucracies of the Muslim rulers and the notion of an “oriental despot” of the Asiatic mode of production should not mislead one, as Marx himself had been at one time, to identify the Muslim period with the Asiatic mode of production. To quote Marx (1945:58): “Bernier rightly considered the basis of all phenomena in the East—he refers to Turkey, Persia and Hindustan—to he the absence of private property in land.
This is the real key, even to the Oriental heaven.” Bernier was misinformed to say the least. The absence of private property rights in land is characteristic of the period prior to the Gupta Empire after which the accumulated contradictions of the epoch over many centuries slowly led Indian society towards feudalism. During the period in which Bernier lived and wrote of India, i.e., in the height of the Mughal period, private property rights in land were widespread.
Unfortunately, Marx had to depend on these wildly exaggerated accounts of European travellers, and if Bernier chose to misunderstand the situation, Marx cannot be held responsible. But the later-Marxists cannot claim such extenuating circumstances in their favour, since several noted Indian historians have more than adequately detailed the socio-economic conditions of India during the Muslim period. And yet we find several European Marxists like Shlomo Avineri (1969-29) still clinging to the antiquated notions of Medieval India.