South Asia’s Feudalism
by Ishtiaq Ahmed
Daily Times, 30 June 2002
There can be no doubt that the struggle for democracy requires that big feudal holdings be abolished and a peasant-proprietor structure established in much of South Asia
Karl Marx believed that his theory of historical materialism had uncovered the primary contradiction which propelled human societies forward. It was the class struggle between the owners of the means of production and the dispossessed working masses — slave-owner versus slave; feudal lord versus serf; capitalist versus proletariat — and in that historical order.
According to Marx, at certain moments in time class struggles resulted in social revolutions and society entered a higher phase of civilisation, albeit still divided by social injustice and domination of the property-owners over the alienated masses. The last stage of such antagonist class relations was capitalism. Once capitalism had revolutionised the production processes and things could be produced in sufficient abundance for the rational needs of all, human history will undergo the final struggle to discard the obsolete system of private property. Thenceforth, humankind would enter a period of social harmony, cooperation and
peace and the history of classes would give way to the history of the emancipated individual under communism.
History has not moved in the direction he predicted. In his own lifetime he had to come to grips with the fact that class struggle was not a universal phenomenon. He found that two regions of ancient and continuous civilisation, the Indian subcontinent and China, had stagnated at the level of an extractive agrarian economy. Marx came up with the supplementary Asiatic Mode of Production to solve the puzzle. According to the Asiatic Mode of Production, an all-powerful state expropriated the wealth of society through various coercive and cultural systems and concentrated it at the centre where the king and his immediate associates frittered away the wealth in the pursuit of warfare, conquest and merry-making. No meaningful public services were provided to the peasant or opportunity given to master craftsmen to establish independent production. Thus the whole system preyed upon the labour of the oppressed classes and was parasitical through and through. In contrast, although Western feudalism was thoroughly exploitative the various tiers of feudal vassals resulted in a fragmentation of power and thus kept the state within the bounds of customs and laws. This provided opportunity for capitalism to gradually emerge as manufacturers and others could balance one power against the other.
One can dispute Marx’s thesis about oriental despotism and his belief that no progressive change occurred in Asiatic societies for hundreds of years. But there is no doubt that the Hindu and Muslim ruling class of India had little or no interest in public works, exceptions like the fascinating Sher Shah Suri and some others, notwithstanding. In fact each time the emperor or king died, the existing incumbents of the military-feudal land-holdings risked losing them because they had no right of ownership and the new ruler preferred to place his own men in such places. Consequently, any chance to occupy such holdings was precarious and was used to acquire as much wealth as possible. This resulted in a rapacious system of exploitation.
After the British had ruthlessly crushed the 1857 uprising, they established a more stable structure of landlordism by conferring property rights on those who remained loyal to them. This class became the mainstay of the colonial system and most of them (maharajas, zamindars, khans, and pirs) opposed the freedom struggle. The radical and popular scholarship described this class with the term feudalism.
In the post-independence politics of India and Pakistan, the feudal lobbies opposed democratic reforms. Radical land reforms in some of the Indian states such as Punjab and Haryana broke the hold of the traditional landlords over politics, but in Bihar big land-holdings survived and that state became notorious for the exploitation and cultural oppression of landless peasants most of whom were low caste or dalits. The existence of democratic institutions, however, provided an opportunity for these castes to move up the political ladder. Laloo Prashad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav are two well-known names representing the rising power of the so-called Other Backward Castes.
In Pakistan, the feudal class retained most of its privileges and despite a series of land reforms Sindh (interior), southern Punjab, much of Balochistan and many parts of the North West Frontier Province remain bastions of feudal tyranny. The failure of democracy to take root was partly the result of the fickle politics of the feudal lords. The suppressed Sindh Hari Report of the 1950s prepared by the senior civil servant Masud Khadarposh and the classic work of Malcolm Darling from the 1930s ‘The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt’ tell the woeful tale of millions of poor peasants and other rural workers crushed under the deadweight of economic, cultural and political feudalism.
Fifty-four years later, the promise to relieve the peasant from feudal oppression and the economic stranglehold of the baniya and moneylender, which the erstwhile Muslim League made to the people, has not been fulfilled. Instead the feudal lord now combines the role of employer and patron with that of lender of loans on most oppressive conditions.
It is interesting to note that the feudal system received its greatest support from the fundamentalist ideologue Abul Ala Maududi who argued that in Islam there was no limit on the ownership of land if it is ‘legally’ acquired. Considering that almost all the big landholdings were bestowed by the British on the landlords, Maududi’s arguments were flawed from an Islamic viewpoint. But no other major authority on Islam tried to prove that, or that Maududi’s interpretations of Islam could be wrong. In fact the head of the rival Rabawa-based Ahmadiyya sect (since declared non-Muslims) furnished almost identical sources from his version of Islam to support unlimited ownership of land.
Looking around South Asia, it appears that feudalism is strongly entrenched in Nepal and Bhutan while the tea plantations of Sri Lanka maintain their own system of exploiting the workforce. Bangladesh probably has the most egalitarian structure of agricultural land ownership.
There can be no doubt that the struggle for democracy requires that big feudal holdings be abolished and a peasant-proprietor structure established in much of South Asia. However, economic prosperity of the region requires that environmental-friendly industry and a progressive agriculture be protected against predatory global actors looking for new ways and means to exploit South Asia’s working people.
The author is an associate professor of Political Science at Stockholm University. He has authored two books and written extensively for various newspapers and journals.