Independence, Land Reform and Agrarian Change in Bihar

Detailed chapter description

Independence did not reset Bihar’s countryside to a blank slate. The new constitutional state inherited the Permanent Settlement, great estates, occupancy raiyats, under-raiyats, sharecroppers, agricultural labourers, moneylending networks, fragmented plots and flood-prone ecologies formed over the colonial period. What changed after 1947 was the political legitimacy of that order and the institutional capacity to alter it. Bihar became one of the earliest laboratories of postcolonial land reform, but ‘land reform’ was never one measure. It included protection of homesteads, abolition of rent-collecting intermediaries, constitutional change, preparation of revenue records, voluntary Bhoodan transfers, consolidation of fragmented holdings and, eventually, statutory ceilings. These interventions reshaped the relation between state, landlord and cultivator without eliminating inequality. This chapter reconstructs that transition as an institutional history. Chapter 75 will examine the abolition of zamindari and its uneven consequences in greater depth; Chapters 76–83 will turn to production, river projects, credit, cooperatives and specialised regional economies. The transfer of political power in 1947 created an expectation that the social relationships underpinning colonial revenue extraction would also be transformed. Congress programmes before independence had repeatedly attacked intermediary landlordism and promised greater security to cultivators. Yet the state that inherited these promises also inherited the records, courts, administrative categories and property claims of the colonial regime. Agrarian reconstruction therefore began as a contest over how far political independence would alter legally entrenched interests in land. The central issue was not merely who owned a field in everyday speech, but how several layers of rights—proprietary, tenure-holding, raiyati, under-raiyati, mortgage, lease and service claims—would be translated into the law of the new republic.