Jan Breman analyses labour bondage in India's changing political economy from 1962 to 2017. Focusing on what has happened since Independence, he argues that colonial rule changed the country's agrarian economy. Capitalism has led to progressive inequality, lack of welfare and the exclusion of the dispossessed from mainstream society.
Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India
Rural sociology field study on production relations between landowners and landless agricultural workers in South Gujarat, India - looks at historical background of bonded labour and landowner patronage; describes the traditional hali system of servitude founded on caste; based on data collected from 1962 to 1963, describes agrarian structure and social structure in two villages. Bibliography.
Labor bondage is discussed as a major feature of the peasant economies which have dominated the subcontinent of South Asia from an unrecorded precolonial past until the postcolonial present. Discussing when, why and how servitude originated on the tribal-peasant frontier in West India, the research undertaken moved on from a historical perspective to investigating the collapse of bondageby engagement in anthropological fieldwork from the 1960s onwards. Thecapitalist economy which has taken shape does not allow for the transition tofree labour. Because of lack of employment and income the workforce at thebottom of the pile remains stuck in neo-bondage.