DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

388 LABOURING CLASS POVERTY [10.5
they had the right to claim free labour (begar veth) from the villagers for
their own manorial holdings. These holdings were generally
familylsized plots or fields, and two or three days’ labour by the combined
villagers sufficed to get the work out of the way. Sometimes, the provincial
governor might, with his own hand, publicly execute a small tenant
for not cultivating the land that produced revenue for the state, but
the real force was hunger, lack of enough land. Thus the labourers
were paid either in cash with food-supply for the working days, or
by shares. This never sufficed to keep them for the whole year, so
had to be supplemented by other work. Grierson noted :
“ If we exclude other sources of income, 70 per cent of the holdings of the
district do not support their cultivators. Those of them who have sufficient clothing
and two meals a day must, in addition to cultivation, have other sources of livelihood...
.All persons of the labouring classes, and 10 per cent of the cultivating and artisan
classes, may be considered, as insufficiently clothed, or insufficiently fed, or both.
This would make about 45 per cent of the population of the district, or, to use round
numbers, a million people... .The poorest classes cannot indulge in a (full) meal, even
in the most prosperous localities and seasons, more than once or twice a week....
Except poms, men of all castes, even the poorest, own at least one metal plate and a
metal pot. The cooking utensils and waterpots are of earthen ware. Metal utensils are
among the first things to be sold off in years of bad harvests, and as these have been
rather frequent of late, their use is decreasing.... In hot weather the cattle spend the
day licking the dry roots of the grass on the parched-up common land, and in the
evening when they are driven home to the byre, they are only given some dry and
uncut paddy straw... .(Labourers were emigrating to cities) as darwans, peons, and
the like, and as weavers in the jute mills. Men of the Jolaha caste take specially to the
latter occupation. The Howrah mills are full of Gaya Jolahas.” (NDG. 95-126).
The people described, in the Gaya district at the end of
the 19th century, were not worse off than for several centuries
preceding. The British had fixed land tenure and taxes by
permanent settlements, perpetuating the misery. That the
Howrah jute mills, whose profits went then entirely to British
shareholders, needed cheap labour might have had something
to do with the little publicity Grierson’s careful survey has
received. He himself spent the rest of his days compiling the
Linguistic Survey of India. The British ruling class preferred
to read Kipling, who brought home to them the glories of an
empire over ‘lesser breeds wihtout the law’.