ABSTRACT
Rarely are agricultural labourers included within discussions of the peasantry. There seems to be some confusion as to whether they are to be included among peasants or classed as ‘rural proletarians’. There are, of course, well-founded reasons for this confusion: the nature of life and work of agricultural labourers does, indeed, put them among peasants, but the fact that many of them have no land and few other assets and work with means of production owned by others puts them among those who have nothing but their own labour.
If the exclusion of agricultural labourers from discussions of the peasantry is common, it is more so in the context of peasant movements. Again, the reasoning is understandable for the issues that agitate peasants and agricultural labourers are different and sometimes even mutually contradictory. Rarely have agricultural labourers been included in peasant organisations or their demands among the demands of peasant movements.
And yet, as agricultural labourers constitute an important section of the rural population, their lives and struggles are integrally and organically linked with peasants and peasant struggles, although often it has been implicitly or explicitly held that peasants and agricultural labourers are the two poles of agrarian reality.
It has also been averred that agricultural labourers are the product of the penetration of capitalism into peasant economies. While this makes a neat dialectical model, de-peasantisation and rural proletarianisation, like capitalism itself have not always followed predicted courses. Our study of agricultural labour in the most backward part of a ‘semi-feudal’ state in India tries to trace the growth of this class historically in the context of developments in the political economy of the region in general and tries to understand the present-day agrarian situation in the light of the conditions and actions of agricultural labourers, the poorest and most exploited section of a generally poor and exploited rural population in a socially and economically backward but politically turbulent region.
