ABSTRACT
The smallholder economy of Brassika is based on the production of rice in irrigated terraces. Most people are engaged in agriculture, and most men and some women describe themselves as farmers (wong tani). The hearthhold is the unit of production and consumption, and there is usually a married couple at the heart of this unit. Two important qualifications must be attached to this statement. It cannot be said that the married couple is the unit of ownership, for ownership of the main means of production lies with married men. Land is most frequently passed on through patrilines. Access to productive land is clearly inequitably distributed, most starkly by gender, though this is never remarked upon in the literature. Secondly, despite the fact that most villagers identify themselves as farmers, many are actually landless; land is not evenly distributed among households, and in particular there was considerable concentration of land in the hands of the Puri, a concentration which has weakened since the 1960s. These economic inequalities will be mapped and their tragic social and political ramifications analysed in the two chapters in this section. This chapter begins with a consideration of the significance of land, the most important factor of production, to the villagers, and then explores the changing patterns of land ownership in the mid-late twentieth century. The chapter ends with a brief consideration of access to land through sharecropping practices.
