ABSTRACT
The region of Bengal saw agrarian development with sub-regional diversity throughout its history. The present chapter delineates the changing patterns of agrarian development in Varendra, North Bengal, through the analysis of the inscriptions pertaining to this sub-region in the period from the second quarter of the fifth century CE to the end of the twelfth century CE. The change was the one from the small-scale reclamation of waste/fallow land with limited family labour to the agrarian expansion and settlement formation in marshy low land and riverine tracts through the mobilisation of subject cultivators by ascendant landed magnates. It corresponded to the growing social stratification and the enhanced control of political powers observed around rural society. It was a process in which a limit on agrarian development imposed by contradictions in a particular social formation was overcome in a changed power relation which brought out a new relation of production. The development in the twelfth century CE, on the other hand, shows that the form of agrarian development which had overcome a limit would reach another limit to be overcome in the following period in a new social formation with different power configuration and technological development.
