In one standard version of Indian economic history, fi-om some point (not always clearly specified) in the nineteenth century, peasants have been increasingly dispossessed of their land: all over India the growth of commercial agriculture and the monetization of the economy led to the rise of moneylenders and the impoverishment of the peasant; the village economy was further weakened by the destruction of village handicrafts, and the new legal system facilitated the transfer of lands. An additional burden of high taxation was imposed on the peasantry in thc raiyatwari areas of the south. Millions of once self-sufficient peasant families were turned into agricultural labourers, and were joined in this fate by village artisans. Within the group of landholders, the ownership of land became concentrated in the hands of moneylenders and large farmers.1

Indeed, the Government of India itself sometimes took a gloomy view of agrarian developments. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the authors of the Memorandum on the Resolution of the Power to Alienate Interests in Land predicted that

as time goes on and the development of the country progresses, the tendency must surely be for the transfers which are pernicious to increase more rapidly than those which are beneficial. As population increases, cultivation extends, the area available for its further extension diminishes, communications improve, and new markets are opened, the competition for land will be keener, prices and rents will rise, the profits of the landowner will increase, and the land itself become more valuable, and there will thus be a stronger inducement to the moneylender to acquire it, while its occupants will, owing to the sub-division of holdings and the pressure of population on the land, be in a worse position to resist. The process of transfer has already worked such terrible evil in some parts of India, that the burden of proof lies on those who contend that in other parts it has done no ill, and still more on those who say it will do none in the future.2

They were speaking of the transfer of lands to non-agriculturists, particularly moneylenders, and not of the increasing concentration of land ownership per se, but the two are connected.

Scattered references from official reports are frequently cited in support of this view, but there has been no systematic analysis of landholdings, partly because we do not have information on the distribution of actual area held under raiyatwari at different points of time. What we do have for Madras at least are land revenue data. This paper attempts to extract from the land revenue statistics for Madras Presidency information on changes in the pattern of landholdings, and in particular on the question of increasing concentration in landholdings and shows that there is little evidence in the land revenue statistics for the view that ’the rich grew richer', at least in terms of land, in Madras Presidency.

• 1. This view has been discussed in Dharma Kumar, Land & Caste in South India, Ch. XI. There is a strikingly similar version of Russian history described in T. Shanin’s The Awkward Class (Oxford, 1972, p.1) except that there is no reference to handicrafts.
• 2. Government of India, Nole on Land Transfer & Agricultural Indebtedness in India, no date, probably 1895, para 56.