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To cite this Article Brass, Tom(2000) 'Labour in post-colonial India: A response to Jan Breman', Journal of Peasant Studies,
28: 1, 126 — 146
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/03066150008438760
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Debate
TOM BRASS
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Tom Brass formerly lectured in the Social and Political Sciences Faculty at the University of
Cambridge, UK. e-mail address: tom@tombrass.freeserve.co.uk
The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.28, No.1, October 2000, pp.126-146
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
LABOUR IN POST-COLONIAL INDIA: A RESPONSE TO JAN BREMAN 127
which I term deproletarianization - but also to the form of the argument itself.5
Accordingly, this response to Breman is divided into four sections. The
first highlights the inaccurate nature of his accusations against me, while his
claim that he has believed all along that debt bondage is a capitalist relation
is examined in the second. The link between deproletarianization, coercion
and worker agency is scutinized in the third, with particular reference to the
contradictory nature of claims made by Breman in this regard. In the last
part of the article the focus is on the concept 'assertiveness', and in
particular why it is important to be clear about what in political terms it
prefigures. It is an unwillingness to do this - a result of regarding
assertiverness per se as good - that lands Breman in difficulties.
obligations have also undergone change, points which have been and are
central to my case about deproletarianization. So much for the view that I
see no difference between historical and existing forms of bonded labour.'9
Breman accepts that the many references contained in his second monograph
to the presence of a 'landless proletariat' were mistaken, due to a fundamental
misunderstanding on his part of the fairly basic theoretical fact that a
proletariat is composed of free and not unfree labour, or else he must
recognize the unbelievability of his post-1990 claim that it was his contention
all along that such labour was unfree. It is not possible to maintain, as he
seems to want to do, that the term 'landless proletariat' is conceptually
compatible with claims about the widespread existence of debt bondage.
Recent claims to the effect that the decline of hali signalled neither the
end of unfreedom nor a transition to free labour are also undermined by the
presence in his second monograph of abundant statements to the contrary.
That Breman regarded not just hali but also unfreedom per se as having
ended is evident from the section in his 1985 book entitled 'Bonded labour?',
in which he specifically addresses 'whether or not [capitalism] led to the
disappearance of bonded labour'.25 There Breman sets out clearly his own
views about three interrelated issues: the presence/absence of bonded labour,
whether or not it applied to particular categories of worker, and the link
between capitalism and unfree labour. On the first point, not only does
Breman dismiss the views of those (Patel, Vyas, Maria) who maintain that
unfree labour continued to exist in rural Gujarat, but he also endorses another
study which in his opinion 'showed clearly that there is no longer any
question of labour bondage', adding that he himself 'hold[s] the same view'.26
About the free/unfree nature of particular categories of worker Breman
was equally clear. It 'is no longer the case' he argued in his second
monograph, that permanent farm servants are bonded, 'even when ...
indebtedness is a persistent feature of the labour relationship', and although
casual workers receive loans and maidservants live in the house of their
employers, '[nonetheless [he] maintain[s] that their situation does not
constitute an unfree working relationship, either'. As to the question of a
link between capitalism and unfreedom, his conclusion to this same section
contains the following categorical and unambiguous statements. 'To my
mind', Breman asserted, 'it is unsound to deduce from this [the existence of
LABOUR IN POST-COLONIAL INDIA: A RESPONSE TO JAN BREMAN 131
debt] that unfree labour continues in either the same form or a new one ...
[t]he binding which accompanies this cannot...be equated with unfree
labour' (emphasis added), and similarly 'I shall regard as unfree only that
form of debt-labour which is rooted in non-economic coercion...this
relationship has nothing to do with the essence of present-day control over
agricultural labour' (emphasis added).27 Later in the same book he noted
that the legislative prohibition of bonded labour in the Twenty Point
Programme marked 'the transition from a traditional agrarian economy to a
free labour market in the countryside [and] the acceleration of a capitalist
mode of production in agriculture' (emphasis added).28
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prevent an indebted labourer from defaulting, since they 'are no longer able
to call on the authorities for help', then how is it possible for them to
reproduce the 'new regime of bondage' which Breman now accepts is
widespread?36 Once again, he cannot have it both ways: either coercion -
and with it unfreedom - has ceased, because it is no longer enforceable; or
bondage continues, because it is enforceable by means of coercion. It is
impossible to maintain, as he implies, that bondage continued but somehow
enforcement and coercion did not.37
If the suggestion is that the capacity to coerce vanished along with pre-
capitalist landlords, and that capitalist producers (commercial farmers, rich
peasants) can no longer count on the support of the state, then clearly this
too is wrong.38 Evidence reveals the opposite to be true; thus the new
farmers' movements which emerged in the Green Revolution areas of India
during the 1980s underline the extent to which the power of agrarian
capitalists has increased.39 Not only have these rural mobilizations become
a focus for the political interests and ideology of landholders, many of
whom employ bonded labour, but they also serve to express antagonism
towards and consolidate power against agricultural workers in these
regions.40 In short, the capacity of capitalist producers in rural India to
enforce debt-servicing labour obligations has most certainly not diminished.
To say, as Breman does, that, because there is 'no legal basis in the new
political order' for 'preventive and repressive sanctions', the latter are no
longer applied, is rather like saying that murder no longer takes place
because it is illegal.41 This is a palpably illogical and unsustainable argument,
and one which countless empirical data recording violence and threats of
violence undermine. Such a claim also ignores more subtle and nuanced
forms of coercion - such as those exercised by a landholder indirectly -
about which I have written extensively, and on which my views about the
enforcement of deproletarianization are based. The reason that debt bondage
remains effective, therefore, is that coercion is exercised - and unfreedom
enforced - from within family and kinship networks. This is the argument I
made some time ago with regard to bonded labour in Haryana, where I
134 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES
showed how the class identity of those who enforced debt-servicing labour
obligations had shifted, from the landholder to fellow caste members of an
indebted worker.42 Since he now makes the identical point, that the most
effective form of enforcement operates within the kinship domain, one must
suppose that it is an argument of mine with which Breman agrees.43
Claims to the contrary nothwithstanding, therefore, the situation
described by Breman in his survey is rather obviously one of
deproletarianization. Hence the growth in India of trade unionism over the
1928-51 period led to a fear on the part of employers of the urban working
class, which in turn led to the contraction of the formal sector economy,
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where the industrial proletariat was based, and the expansion of the informal
sector economy.44 Although Breman claims that '[s]caling down
employment in formal sector enterprises improved the bargaining strength
of the permanent workers who were reaffirmed in their job security', it
emerges subsequently that the exact opposite was true.45 This process of
restructuring was designed, much rather, to undermine the bargaining power
of permanent workers belonging to the industrial proletariat, by
demonstrating to them just how easily they could be replaced by temporary
workers who, possessing little or no bargaining power, could be paid less for
doing the same amount of work.
And what, precisely, were the relations of production governing the
employment of these informal sector workers? About this there is no
ambiguity whatsoever. Informal sector employment is characterized by an
absence of trade unions and protective legislation; labour contracting is rife,
as is child labour.46 Most significantly, however, is the admission that
'[w]ork in dependency, expressed in a debt relationship, is a common
phenomenon in the informal sector milieu'." If this is so, then the most
common production relation encountered in the informal sector of India
must be unfree labour which, when combined with the additional process of
formal sector contraction coupled with informal sector expansion, permits
only one conclusion: the situation to which Breman refers is one in which
work in the formal sector, and with it free labour, is being replaced with
employment in the informal sector, where unfree working relations prevail.
In other words, a process of deproletarianization.
No one, least of all Breman, disputes the rising incidence in
contemporary India of landlessness, a consequence of which is that the
labour force is composed for the most part of workers who sell not the
product of labour but labour-power itself. Where such workers, who earlier
have personally commodified their own labour-power, subsequently become
unfree (their labour-power either ceasing to be a commodity, or being
recommodified by someone other than themselves), what has occurred is a
relational transformation that corresponds to ^proletarianization.48 Such
LABOUR IN POST-COLONIAL INDIA: A RESPONSE TO JAN BREMAN 135
workers are still landless, they still work for someone else on a permanent,
seasonal or casual basis, they can still be employed in conjunction with
advanced productive forces, they still receive cash wages, they may be
migrants or work locally, and (under the control of a contractor, or in the
form of changing masters) their labour-power can still circulate in the labour
market, but - and this is the crux of the issue - they are no longer able
personally to sell their own labour-power. In short, because they do not meet
the second of the two criteria laid down by political economy as necessary
for the existence of free labour - freedom from the means of labour and also
freedom personally to sell their own labour-power - they are now unfree
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but were unable to escape, due to the lack of alternative employment.53 This
of course is untrue: a closed village society was exposed as a fiction long ago,
notably in the two classic studies by Mukhtyar and Shukla of rural Gujarat in
the 1920s and 1930s; it is also a stereotype that Breman himself has
criticized.54 And second, he does not see this limited success as possessing
any implications for the existence/growth of class consciousness; instead, an
indicator of the latter is for Breman 'a basic unwillingness to seek security in
bondage'. The difficulty'with this view is that an attempt to differentiate the
presence/absence of class consciousness simply in terms of a corresponding
transformation from a situation in which workers 'seek security in bondage'
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J.-P. Platteau, and Robert Fogel), all of which are deeply hostile to
Marxism.51 Because debt bondage was regarded by Breman as a non-
capitalist relation, and equated by him with patronage landlords extend to
their unfree workers, he not only equated capitalist development with
depatronization but also interprets the latter as a process of material erosion.
Contemporary free labour in Gujarat is accordingly perceived by him as
worse off economically than its historically unfree equivalent.58 Much the
same is true of the way in which Gyan Prakash, James Scott and Robert
Fogel have interpreted different forms of unfreedom.59 What all of the latter
regard as empowering are the smallscale forms/acts of resistance (=
'assertiveness') undertaken by slaves and unfree labourers.60
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CONCLUDING COMMENT
Given the overwhelming extent and unambiguous nature of the evidence to
the contrary, a central question remains why Breman persists in denying a
discontinuity between the views expressed in his first two monographs
(where it is clear that because he regarded it as incompatible with
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unfree labour and its link to capitalism. Such a view is not dispelled by the
numerous errors contained in his account of the theoretical positions
occupied by the protagonists in the debate. Accusations levelled against me
by him, that I make claims about a rise in the incidence of debt bondage
which are empirically unsustainable, and that my analysis makes no
distinction between past and present forms of unfreedom, are similarly
fallacious. All these elementary and avoidable blunders do not inspire
confidence in Breman's argument generally, and more particularly leave
one wondering how many more empirical inaccuracies and misattributions
lurk undiscovered in his text, and how much of his overall analysis is built
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NOTES
1. See Breman [1999a, 1999b]. The two parts of the survey are virually indistinguishable from
his two contributions to an edited collection published in the same year [Breman, 1999c;
1999d].
2. The link between bonded labour, unfree relations of production and capitalism is considered
in each part of the survey [Breman, 1999a: 254-6; 1999b: 463-9]. Part of the difficulty lies
in the somewhat baffling tendency on Breman's part simply to adduce every new text about
debt bondage in India as supportive of his own earlier views on the subject. When
considering the findings of others, therefore, he frequently asserts that new arguments/views/
data are either compatible with his own research findings or, indeed, ideas that he himself
has held all along. Absent from such an approach is a sense of contradiction, or a recognition
that empirical data and/or theory are not merely incompatible with his own research findings
but in fact undermine earlier claims made by him on this subject. Such a position also fails
to appreciate the extent to which approaches to the issue of debt bondage by neo-classical
economists or postmodernists are epistemologically and politically incompatible with
Marxist analyses of this same relation.
3. For example, in the first part of the survey [Breman, 1999a: 255-6] my views are
characterized as an 'extreme position' amounting to 'doctrinal zeal' sustained '[i]n
controversial fashion', while in the second [Breman, 1999b: 465-8] I am accused of
conducting an 'ad hominem diatribe' and - again - of defending my viewpoint (about
deproletarianization) 'with more obstinacy than plausibility'.
4. This reply was originally written for and submitted to the journal which published Breman's
two-part survey [1999a, 1999b], as a response to the latter. Despite the fact that the survey
was replete with error (some of them, such as confusing Epstein with Harriss, laughable
mistakes), and also a thinly-disguised attack on my views about unfree labour (a point
recognized by Parry [1999: xv] in connection with other versions of the same argument
140 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES
[Breman, 1999c, 1999d]), the editor of that journal refused to publish it. Although printed in
the UK by Cambridge University Press, the journal in question is edited out of Amsterdam.
Readers can form their own conclusion as to why no reply was published.
5. My arguments about the nature of deproletarianization, and the reasons for its reproduction
by capital, are set out most recently in Brass [1994, 1999].
6. See Breman [1999a: 255].
7. The inference is that my ideas derive from those of Mundle, Patnaik and Prakash, all of
whom were making the same points long before I did. As even Breman surely knows, and as
both chronology and substance underline, such an inference is of course nonsense. The
assertion that my 1986 article on unfree labour was the first I had written on the subject is
wrong: it was preceded by six articles, all on the same subject. The first of these was
published in 1980 (in this journal), almost at the same time as the book by Mundle, whose
ideas on the subject I encountered only later, when I began fieldwork in India. That my own
ideas about bonded labour could derive either from the semi-feudal analysis of Patnaik or the
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postmodernism of Prakash, both of which in their different ways are hostile to the notion of
unfreedom-as-a-capitalist-relation (see below) is quite simply laughable, and a ridiculous
assertion. Mundle, Patnaik and Prakash have yet to mention - let alone endorse - the concept
deproletarianization which informs my work.
8. The recognition of the many and varied forms of unfree labour in India, together with
objections to the underreporting of attached labour, are outlined by Daniel Thorner in
Thorner and Thorner [1962: 21ff., 173ff.]. Case studies from Andhra Pradesh and Bihar
during the mid-1960s also suggest that he recognized the acceptability to capitalism of unfree
labour. In Andhra Pradesh, therefore, a context described by Thorner as 'an affluent area'
where high yields were generated by modern agricultural production based on advanced
technical and mechanized inputs, he also noted that 'big owners would sometimes advance
cash or grain and get repaid in labour on their home farm'. Similarly, he noted that in Patna
district, Bihar, rural producers combined advanced productive forces with the employment
of unfree permanent workers [Thorner, 1980: 222, 231-2]. The Thorner reference cited in
Breman [1999a: 255] to support the latter's view that the former regarded unfree labour as
being on the decline, and thus incompatible with capitalist development, actually refers to
begar, a form of forced labour which is not the same as debt bondage. See Brass [1999: 15].
9. That Patnaik's view about bonded labour is actually the opposite of that attributed to her by
Breman ('the further development of capitalist forces in agriculture will cause the
augmentation of semi-feudal forms of labour bondage') is clear from an earlier exchange
between her and me on this very issue. The extent both of the difference between my own
position on the issue of unfree labour and that of proponents of the semi-feudal thesis, and
consequently also of Breman's mistaken assumptions about this, emerge most clearly from
Patnaik [1995] and Brass [1995]. Rather worryingly, this is not the first time this has
happened. On a previous occasion Breman [1993: 301-2] wrongly accused me of regarding
debt bondage as being incompatible with capitalist production, and thus as a semi-feudal
relation; consequently, he maintained that my views were no different from those of Utsa
Patnaik. As even a superficial acquaintance with what I and Utsa Patnaik have written on this
subject would reveal, both my view and hers are the exact opposites of those attributed to
each of us by Breman.
10. It is in this sense, as emblematic of a pre-existing and therefore authentic Indian identity, that
bonded labour is for Prakash a culturally empowering relation (= 'the economy of
gentleness'). For a critique of the way in which Prakash interprets unfreedom, see Brass
[1999],
11. Breman [1999a: 255].
12. Breman [1999a: 255]. The text referred to is Harriss [1982].
13. The fact that these data refer not to Harriss, Areot District or Tamil Nadu but to the study by
Epstein of two villages in Karnataka is information clearly presented in Brass [1986: 55-6].
14. In her restudy during 1970 of two villages in which she had conducted fieldwork during
1955, Epstein [1962: 74ff.; 1973: 137] found not just that the number of peasant households
employing contract labour had increased in the economically more advanced village, but also
that in the latter context many wealthier households now employed more than one such
worker. Contract servants who owed money to their employer were obliged to repay this debt
LABOUR IN POST-COLONIAL INDIA: A RESPONSE TO JAN BREMAN 141
in the form of labour-service. The increase in this category of bonded labour, from 14 to 48
over the 1955-70 period, does indeed represent a 243 per cent rise.
15. See Harriss [1992: 207-8; 1994: 183].
16. For this claim see Breman [1999b: 465], where I am accused of arguing that bonded labour
has never changed, and how for me the unfreedom now occurring is 'the same unfree regime
that existed in the past', as a consequence of which I am also said to have 'rejected
forcefully' the view that 'very significant changes have been brought about in the social
relations of production'.
17. Elements of this argument (about deproletarianization) have been applied by me not just to
India but also to Peru, the Caribbean, the United States and Australasia [Brass, 1999].
18. This phenomenon, known as 'changing masters', is examined by me elsewhere [Brass,
1999].
19. About the difference between past and present forms of unfreedom, Breman's own views are
not only in a constant state of flux, and subject to equally continuous process of revision, but
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also (and therefore) far from clear. For example, noting that old/new forms of bondage do
indeed share common characteristics, he then goes on to say that for this reason the
differences between them must 'be understood in an ideal-typical sense' [Breman, 1999b:
467]. Either old/new forms of bondage are the same, or they are different. Breman cannot
have it both ways, and say - as he now does - that they are different, that I am wrong for
thinking they are the same, that in fact they are the same, but only in 'an ideal-typical sense'!
20. 'My own opinion continues to be that earlier forms of bondage in agriculture have
disappeared but that they have not always been replaced by free labour', and '[i]n the
reporting on my initial fieldwork I stated that, although the hali system indeed no longer
existed, in the transition to agrarian capitalism the bondage of farm labourers had certainly
not been changed into a free labour system'. See Breman [1999a: 256; 1999b: 464].
21. The term 'landless proletariat' appears not only throughout the text of his 1985 book,
therefore, but also in some chapter headings and/or sub-headings [e.g., Breman, 1985: 66ff.,
115ff.]. That he equated the term 'landless proletariat' with free labour-power is evident
from, for example, the subsequent description in Breman [1996: 237] of its components as
'free of the subjugation to a master', and 'not conditioned by attachment...and dependency'.
'Wage hunters and gathers', he concludes, 'are free'. His 1960s fieldwork findings are
presented in Breman [1974].
22. Significantly, in describing proletarianization as 'incomplete', Breman [1985: 55-6] means
not that debt bondage relations persist but that not all tenants have been separated from their
means of production.
23. The list of Marxist and bourgeois economists (and non-economists) for whom economic
growth in the Third World was the sine qua non of development theory is a long one, and
would include Lewis [1955], Ward [1961], Kotovsky [1964], Kaldor [1964], Balogh [1966],
Dobb [1967: 50ff.], Myrdal [1968], Barraclough [1973], Kalecki [1976], Ladejinsky
[Walinsky, 1977], and Rastyannikov [1981]. Many of the latter also perceived unfree
relations of production (whereby traditional/non-capitalist landowners extracted labour-rent
from tenants) as an obstacle to this economic growth. See, for example, Myrdal [1968:
1039ff.], Balogh [1966: 52; 1963: 37], Kotovsky [1964], Barraclough [1973: 7-9,33ff.], and
Walinsky [1977].
24. Some lessons, it seems, are finally being learned, albeit slowly. The term 'landless
proletariat', which was used by Breman in his 1985 book to describe rural workers he then
regarded as free, was also used by him in his 1993 and 1996 books to designate rural workers
he subsequently accepted were unfree, and to whom the concept 'neo-bondage' or 'new
bondage' was now applied [Breman, 1993: 297ff.; 1996: 101ff., 162ff., 214ff]. In an earlier
article [Brass, 1997] I pointed out that a proletariat cannot be composed of unfree labour. In
the text under consideration here, and in contrast with all his previous post-1990 books,
therefore, the term 'landless proletariat' is replaced by Breman [1999a: 253-4] with concepts
such as 'agricultural labour', 'rural under-class', and 'army of agricultural labourers'.
25. For the section about bonded labour, see Breman [1985: 306-13]. The importance of the
latter as a place where the free or unfree character of labour would be considered is signalled
earlier in the book [Breman, 1985: 130]. For this reason, it is impossible to claim that these
statements are in some sense a-typical or unrepresentative of Breman's views on the subject.
142 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES
26. Breman [1985: 307-8]. The texts with which Breman disagrees are Patel [1964], Vyas
[1964], and Maria [1981].
27. Breman [1985: 311].
28. Breman [1985: 443-4].
29. This claim is advanced in Breman [1999b: 466].
30. Terms such as 'neo-bondage', 'the new bondage', 'bondage in a new guise', or 'the new
regime of bondage' surface in and appear extensively throughout all the post-1990 texts
published by Breman [1990: 572ff., 595; 1993: 300; 1996: 169; 1999a: 256; 1999b: 466;
1999c: 4; 1999d: 421]. Apart from me, few have questioned the meaning and origin of these
concepts. In a recent collection about labour in India [Parry et a., 1999], for example, a
contribution by de Neve [1999: 400ff.] accepts at face value all Breman's claims about 'neo-
bondage' without bothering to investigate its provenance or epistemology. In support of his
assertion that Breman recognizes that bondage 'can continue to exist along with capitalist
modes of agricultural production', therefore, de Neve [1999:402] cites only a post-1990 text
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[Breman, 1993], thereby failing to note not just that its author had earlier espoused the
opposite view, and thus changed his mind about this issue, but also (and consequently) the
profound implications of this unacknowledged about-turn for the theoretical coherence of
Breman's arguments.
31. Whereas in his earlier monograph on rural Gujarat Breman [1985: 127] stated categorically
that '[d]ebt bondage was essential to [the pre-capitalist halt relationship] from the
beginning', now by contrast he states no less categorically that 'neo-bondage has proved able
to go hand-in-hand with capitalist labour practices' [Breman, 1999a: 256], and that
'[indebtedness continues to be a crucial aspect of the capitalist work regime which I have
ultimately defined as new or neo-bondage' [Breman, 1999b: 466].
32. Details about the interrelationship between on the one hand the decommodification of
labour-power, the employment of unfree labour, capitalist restructuring, and workforce
decomposition/recomposition, and on the other the process of deproletarianization are
outlined in Brass [1994, 1999],
33. Breman [1999b: 467].
34. Breman [1999b: 467].
35. Hence the view that a reduction in the frequency/intensity of coercion has led Breman
[1999b: 465] to doubt the viability of debt bondage. This is a common mistake, which
assumes that where coercion appears to be absent from the process whereby rural workers
repay debts in the form of labour-service, it does not actually exist. Such a view ignores the
fact that it is the (all-pervading) knowledge about and fear of the consequences following
default that constitute coercion, rather than the (perhaps infrequent) operationalization of the
consequences themselves. It is easy, therefore, to interpret the absence of the latter as
evidence for the non-existence of the former.
36. Breman [1999b:469].
37. This is in keeping with the contradictory and inconsistent nature of past claims made by
Breman concerning the presence/absence of coercion, about which see Brass [1997: 353 note
35].
38. Referring to the operation of extra-economic coercion associated with the pre-capitalist hali,
Breman [1999b: 465,468] states that 'the exercise of power by landowners has been checked
in major respects...extra-economic coercion with which to ensure compliance with the
agreement entered into is contrary both to law and to the virtual inability of landowners to
enforce their authority', and further, that resistance to unfree labour and debt bondage stems
from the fact that 'the hegemony [sic] of dominant landowners has come to an end', which
does indeed suggest that the successful exercise of coercion is equated solely with pre-
capitalist landlords.
39. For the power and political influence of the new fanners' movements, see Brass [1995] and
Varshney [1995].
40. For an example of the employment of bonded labour by members of the new farmers'
movements, see Assadi [1995].
41. Breman [1999b: 468].
42. Pressure is exercised by a landholder not directly on an indebted worker but rather indirectly,
via livestock-owning fellow caste workers who are themselves dependent on farmers for
LABOUR IN POST-COLONIAL INDIA: A RESPONSE TO JAN BREMAN 143
supplies of fodder [Brass, 1999: Ch.3]. If nothing else, this shows just how wrong Breman
is in attributing to me the opinion that bonded labour has never changed (see above).
Although the point about the enforcement of debt-servicing labour obligations from within
the family/kinship domain was made with reference Haryana in 1987, it was actually raised
by me initially with regard to Peru in the mid-1970s.
43. See Breman [1999b: 469] for the argument that the enforcement of debt bondage is now
carried out most effectively by the labour contractor 'who belongs to the same milieu as the
worker', and, where family labour is concerned, by the household head. That Breman has not
previously made this connection between the enforcement of unfree labour relations and the
kinship domain is hinted at by Parry [1999: xii-xiii], who notes that 'what is nevertheless
occluded by [Breman's] account are the kinship and neighbourhood ties through which ...
migratory groups are mobilized'.
44. Breman [1999a: 290, 296]. In contrast to my view, which blames the absence or
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58. That bondage-as-patronage is for Breman a form of worker empowerment is evident from
what he himself has written on the subject, the details of which are outlined in Brass [1997:
350 note 12].
59. Significantly, revisionist interpretations of unfree labour by neoclassical economic
historiography derived in part from what it saw as an empowering capacity on the part of
slaves to reproduce their culture. According to Fogel [1989: 392], therefore, his own
confidence in the view of slavery as oppressive was undermined by the research of cultural
historians, who 'found more scope for... culture than convention dictated. Mistreatment was
not excluded from the new histories of slave culture, but its role was considerably
diminished.' In other words, as for Scott and Prakash, the fact that culture was not crushed
but flowered was for Fogel evidence of slave empowerment, which in turn licensed the view
that slave labour was reproduced more by consent than by coercion.
60. For his endorsement of Scott's 'everyday forms of resistance' framework, see Breman
[1999b: 470]. As I have pointed out before, such a positive view about the empowering
nature of 'resistance' or 'assertiveness' cannot explain either the inability of such agency to
eliminate historical forms of unfreedom (= the longevity of slavery) or the capacity (even the
willingness) of masters to accommodate such resistance.
61. Many examples of this kind of process are presented in Brass [1999: Chs.3, 5 and 8].
62. These kinds of ideology indicate the extent to which 'assertiveness' and 'resistance' can be
the result of false consciousness. That Breman [1999b: 470-71] disagrees with this is evident
from his view that the 'facile conclusion that all social formations that deviate from
unadulterated class alliance are an expression of false consciousness [fails to appreciate] the
complicated conditions that determine the changing and fragile existence of wage labour in
India at the end of the twentieth century'.
63. This contention is perhaps best illustrated by the case of Fogel [2000], who has now extended
the concept of from-below 'assertiveness'/'resistance' to the religious right in the USA.
Equating the latter with a much broader process of religious revival, Fogel categorizes the
religious right as one of the 'great awakenings' in American history, and as such a
mobilization which in his view corresponds to an egalitarian (new social) movement. To the
objection that the religious right cannot be regarded as egalitarian, Fogel answers that
inequality itself has changed, and poverty is no longer about material but spiritual
deprivation. The similarity between this position, in which material deprivation is
discursively (and politically) banished, to be replaced by a concept of cultural empowerment,
and that of the 'new' populist postmodernism is too obvious to require further comment.
64. The reasons for this are examined in Brass [2000].
65. This is especially true of Prakash and Scott, both of whom utilize a postmodern framework
to analyse unfree labour.
66. It is indeed ironic that Breman [1999a: 257ff., 262, 268] now criticizes many of those writing
about employment in India during the pre- and post-colonial era on the grounds that they,
wrongly, categorized urban workers from rural backgrounds as essentially peasants (= 'the
familiar cliche dating from colonial times'), and also emphasized this rural/urban continuity
in terms of the jajmani system. By characterizing the hali system as a form of 'subsistence
guarantee' reproduced from within a framework of patron-client relations, and its loss as
LABOUR IN POST-COLONIAL INDIA: A RESPONSE TO JAN BREMAN 145
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