In Pursuit of Peasant Histories and Futures

The Wire

30-07-2025

Navyug Gill
The narrative of a benevolent colonialism championing a stalwart peasantry in Punjab is belied when examined through the prism of how caste, labor, and capital transformed the equation of rural power.
An excerpt from Navyug Gill, Labors of Division: The Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab (New Delhi: Navayana, 2025).
How did the peasant become dominant in Panjab? This book investigates the history and politics of the emergence of the peasant and its implications for a new form of hierarchy in northwest colonial India and the globe. British officials regarded Panjab as a quintessential agrarian province inhabited by a uniquely diligent, prosperous, and 'martial race' of cultivators. They understood the peasant to be 'the predominant unit of society,' insisting that the 'most important consideration of all' was to implement policies designed to bring about agrarian improvement and uplift. This discourse of what I term 'colonial benevolence' was underpinned by an ostensibly moderate land revenue demand and protective legislation in favor of those deemed to be peasants coupled with the massive expansion of canal irrigation and extensive recruitment into the military. Such a claim can be found in other contexts too where select forms of patronage and infrastructure are still hauled out as ironclad signs of progress regardless of their authoritarian conceptualization, implementation, and deleterious long-term impact. At its center is the enduring notion that this peasantry experienced nearly a century of unparalleled prosperity. Rather than the immiseration, displacements, and insurgencies that mark other regions of British India, Panjab is seen in much of the popular and even scholarly literature as a bastion of loyalty enjoying an unrivaled period of stability and growth.
Yet the narrative of a benevolent colonialism championing a stalwart peasantry is belied when examined through the prism of how caste, labor, and capital transformed the equation of rural power. The claim that peasants remained largely unscathed if not deliberately empowered under British rule takes for granted both the category of 'peasant' and the nature of agricultural production, as well the intent and operations of the colonial state. At a deeper level, it normalizes particular class and caste hierarchies by presupposing a continuity of social and economic relations from the pre- to the postcolonial.
Navyug Gill
Labors of Division: The Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab
Navayana, 2025
One indication of this process is the dominant interpretation of caste-based land ownership in contemporary east Panjab. According to the 2011 census, over 30 percent of the population are Dalits mainly of the Chamar and Mazhabi castes, the highest proportion in all of India. Despite mostly engaging in the labors of cultivation, however, they own less than 4 percent of the total cultivated area. Instead, the vast bulk of land is held by members of the Jatt caste, which accounts for around a third of the population. A similar situation exists in the rest of pre-1947 Panjab, in Haryana, and to a lesser extent in Himachal Pradesh (India) and in west Panjab (Pakistan). Such disparities are usually explained through the ahistorical alignment of identity with occupation: Jatts are peasants while Chamars and Mazhabis have been landless laborers since antiquity. The postcolonial distribution of economic and political power in the countryside is thus reinforced by colonial assumptions about the inherent and timeless qualities of rural Panjabis.
I challenge the givenness of this agrarian order and the surreptitious denial of its modern transformation by asking three interrelated questions: How did colonial racial, fiscal, and legal policies align the category of 'peasant' with hereditary caste identity? What kinds of contestations over collective status, access to credit, and land ownership did this generate among different groups of Panjabis? And what did this mean for the ways that global capitalist processes became implicated in local forms of knowledge and power?
In the following chapters, I de-familiarize the idea of the division of labor through an examination of the labors involved in creating and sustaining a series of ideological and material divisions: from the colonial separation of agricultural and non-agricultural tribes to the dissonance between Panjabi, Urdu, and English meanings for various aspects of cultivation, the antagonism between so-called upper- and lower-caste Panjabis, the actual division of crops between landholder and laborer, and the global conceptual split between peasant and proletarian. This book uncovers the tangled politics of how and why colonial officials and ascendant Panjabis together disrupted existing conceptions of identity and occupation to generate a new form of hierarchy in the countryside masked as traditional. The result was the creation of a modern group of hereditary landowning peasants alongside other groups engaged in cultivation yet relegated to the status of landless laborers.
Writing a history of the division of labor opens up possibilities for rethinking the conventions of at least three avenues of historical research. The first is that this book questions the very category of 'peasant.' Perhaps the most prominent and durable figure in modern history, peasants have long been a fount for a vast assortment of global arguments in virtually every discipline in the humanities and social sciences. All manner of colonialist, nationalist, socialist, developmentalist, and now environmentalist discourses have sought to analyze, condemn, extol, corral, and improve peasants at each position along the political spectrum. Dedicated publications such as The Journal of Peasant Studies and later the Journal of Agrarian Change rose in prominence in the 1970s due to the increasing importance of their object of inquiry. After a brief intellectual interregnum, the peasant dramatically reappeared in the global public imagination in late 2020 with the massive farmer and laborer protests against a proposed set of neoliberal laws in India, leading to an outpouring of new thinking and writings. Still, underlying much of this literature is the notion that the peasant simply exists everywhere, a general if not generic figure traced backward from the contested origins of modernity to the recesses of primordial times.
Yet these two claims—ubiquity and antiquity—at the very least ought to provoke a pause. The obviousness of the peasant is precisely what demands reexamination in terms of what this category meant in different historical contexts, which groups came to occupy it, and how it shaped not only rural political economy but what we think we know about the past. It also means that contemporary calls for sympathy or solidarity relying on supposedly ancient pedigrees need to be critically assessed and, where appropriate, established on another basis altogether. The taken-for-granted status of the peasant is itself an element in its historical emergence.
This book also calls into question the centrality of the colonizer-colonized divide for histories of the colonial world. Such a stark, totalizing binary was in fact generated by the racial logic accompanying European conquests from the late fifteenth century onward that regarded societies in Africa, Asia, and America as inherently inferior. While anticolonial movements inverted this logic as part of their struggle to resist and expel foreign domination, generations of thinkers and writers drew on this inheritance to contest the justificatory discourses of colonialism by demonstrating the opposite, that colonized peoples were rational, accomplished, dynamic, civilized, and worthy of freedom. Indeed, postcolonial critique can be seen as an attempt to challenge the obvious as well as insidious arguments, values, and narratives that emerged through the prolonged colonial encounter.
Yet, as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire trenchantly remind us, there have always been doubts about the presumed unity and coherence of those deemed 'colonized.' Not only did certain elite local actors ally with European powers, but others partially benefited in limited ways from colonial rule, while internal fissures over class, caste, religion, ethnicity, and language were fitfully subsumed (though never silenced) as part of most mainstream anticolonial nationalisms. This book confronts the chimera of the colonized by foregrounding the competition and contradictions that developed within Panjabi society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is therefore not another account of colonized versus colonizer, a repeated instance of heroic peasants fighting against the British Empire. Instead, I explore how colonialism generated a sustained, multifaceted, and unpredictable societal conflict from which certain groups identified as peasants emerged atop a new agrarian hierarchy to the exclusion and exploitation of others who were consigned to a fate of landless laboring. Racial unity might be every bit as hollow as racial inferiority.
Lastly, this book offers an alternative genealogy of the emergence and operations of global capital. If the transformative quality of the bourgeois mode of production is indisputable, the debate over its provenance, essential features, and trajectory has been equally inconclusive. Over a hundred years of intense political and scholarly writings have in various ways explored what actually constituted capitalism proper, how and where it began, and what it meant for people in different parts of the world. Much of this revolved around competing interpretations of key texts from the oeuvre of Karl Marx alongside the supposedly exemplary experience of western Europe. Rather than attempt to settle this debate or dismiss it out of hand, I take inspiration from the diversity of perspectives and embrace the contingency it suggests as inherent to all forms of radical change. This requires drawing on Marx differently, not as an authoritative means to adjudicate the truth of capitalism, but as a historical figure offering profound and penetrating yet inescapably elliptical insights into the changing world he was able to witness. 'Marx foresaw the foreseeable,' remarked Antonio Gramsci, and not everything, everywhere, and for all time.
The burden of expectations—of capital to behave in universal ways and of Marx to provide universalist answers—is called into question by attending to the specificity of the transformation of Panjabi society under colonial rule. This book traces how the domains of economy and culture were in fact constituted and intertwined to generate a new, unusual, and variable form of capitalist accumulation and social hierarchy. Its point of departure is to engage in the temptation of comparison without smuggling in a modern version of the scale of civilizations. Far from a simple criticism, Labors of Division tries to think with as well as across and through Marx to make sense of a distinctive global context.
Perhaps a final contribution of this book lies in the scope as well as approach toward historical sources. At first glance, much of what I rely on will appear familiar to historians of colonialism and agriculture: settlement reports, government circulars, famine commissions, census data, and legislative acts. I also make use of less common materials such as nineteenth-century dictionaries, statistical surveys, Christian missionary texts, local newspapers, and Panjabi proverbs. The old adage about interpretation—that two scholars can reach different conclusions from the same piece of evidence—should be conspicuous. My aim has been to critically engage this conventional archive by contrasting it with other kinds of sources and posing different kinds of questions. On the one hand, in the course of research I have uncovered certain untapped materials, from vernacular petitions for changing status and a contract between a landholder and laborer to intimate details about rural family consumption patterns. On the other hand, I draw on Sikh and Bhakti sacred verses as well as insights from a range of twentieth-century individuals such as Bhimrao Ambedkar, Mangoo Ram, Harnam Singh Ahluwalia, Muhammad Hayat Khan, and Kapur Singh. In this way, juridical rulings and quantified data are put alongside poetic supplications and personal recollections from archives in Chandigarh and New Delhi to London and beyond.
Near the end of the book, I analyze the writings of Marx along with Adam Smith, Vladimir Lenin, and Karl Kautsky as theory rather than history. A non-Europeanist engaging with ostensibly European thinkers is a deliberate gesture of refusing the boundaries of both discipline and geography, especially when those ideas have so profoundly shaped the material perception of regions such as South Asia. Indeed, their concepts have an import beyond mere accuracy; they circulate the globe through the very grammar of political economy. In this way, I confront the fundamental questions of access—Who reads whom, and writes about what?—in order to defy a hierarchy of knowledge that masquerades as neutral expertise. Monopoly has no place in historical inquiry. I therefore claim neither an entirely novel archive nor an entirely novel method. Rather, this book is an attempt to critically read across diverse genres to produce a narrative—empirically grounded and theoretically apt—that reinterprets major issues in modern Panjabi society in conversation with larger themes in global history. The tension between what constitutes the particular and the general remains abundantly indivisible.
Navyug Gill is a professor of history at William Paterson University, USA. His first book, Labors of Division: The Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab, was published in South Asia by Navayana in 2025. He tweets at @navyuggill.
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