Agrarian Change and Class Conflict in Gujarat, India

ONLY A FEW DECADES AGO RURAL INDIA was described in terms of poverty and stagnation, a society imprisoned in tradition. Gunnar Myrdal's well-known study published in 1968 provides a prominent illustration of this school of thought, which dominated Western debates on development around the middle of the twentieth century. While his Asian Drama had a wider setting, the author based his argument mainly on the southern part of this populous continent, more precisely on the incapacity for self-transformation that seemed to characterize former British India. Myrdal noted with concern that development efforts were largely nullified by the enormous population growth caused by a fall in the death rate and a continuing high birth rate. Major institutional reforms were urgently needed, in his opinion, to overcome the underutilization of labor, which hindered any increase of agrarian production. What he had in mind was a radical redistribution of agrarian resources, which would place land in the hands of the tillers. The objectives of such a basic reform were twofold: a political one, namely, reduction of the rigid inequalities in the social structure; and an economic one, namely, the optimal use that a much greater mass of owners would make of the means of production allotted to them. A closer and more realistic assessment of policies and politics, however, convinced Myrdal that government lacked the will and the capability needed for transforming the rural system in this way. In his opinion, the failure to introduce any fundamental change into traditional property relations and the ingrained attitudes of agrarian people who were perceived not to be development-oriented, was due to the soft character of the Asiatic state. That social dynamics were nevertheless not entirely lacking was shown by the concentration of landholdings among a comparatively small village elite, mostly members of upwardly mobile peasant castes who had in recent times gained political power. Myrdal was well aware of the growing weight of this class and the concomitant deterioration in the position of sharecroppers and agri

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