The books in The New Cambridge History of India series are meant to provide broad overviews of the existing literature, organized around a coherent set of common themes and accessible to the nonspecialist reader, and to stimulate further research. David Ludden's book achieves its objectives very partially.
Chapter 1 opens with an overview of the agrarian history of India, outlining the changing contours of this discursive practice from mid nineteenth century to the present day. What seems to be the primary thesis of the book is spelt out: `a fallacious assumption still remains that basic stability characterized the agrarian world before colonialism. This sturdy idea leads many authors, even today, to imagine the nineteenth century as . . . a time of radical disjuncture and discontinuity imposed on stable village society, culture, and economy by European conquest and colonial domination. Agrarian history has other stories to tell' (p. 7). The author then moves on to a (somewhat rambling) discussion of seasons, patterns of migration and geography of the subcontinent.
Chapter 2 begins the story/stories at the beginning. Traditional historiography of South Asia tended to project the view that ancient states began to evolve, in the ®rst millennium BC, with the progress of Aryan conquest, and with the assimilation and subordination of indigenous peoples into the Aryan socio-political framework. Citing new research, the author argues that, in fact, a number of connected cultures would seem to have been developing separately in many parts of the subcontinent. The meta-narrative, if one, of South Asian agrarian history from the Guptas (4th century AD) to the Mughals (17th Century) is framed in terms of a process of state supported expansion of permanent ®eld cultivation which increasingly displaced and marginalized pastoral, nomadic and tribal peoples. Many of these groups entered and were assimilated into agrarian society in subordinate positions.
Land taxation increased sharply in the `early modern period' (c. 1550±1850). Traditionally, historians have tended to view this primarily as the outcome of state coercion. In Chapter 3, Ludden argues that this period was also marked by an expansion of trade, commercial farming, and urbanism. Furthermore, the possibilities for expanding zones of settled cultivation began to disappear. All these raised the value of land and, thereby, the willingness to pay for its control and use. The book concludes with a short discussion of the modern (post-1850) period. A useful, quite extensive, bibliography is appended.
Unfortunately, the discussion at times tends to lose analytical clarity and coherence. The treatment of agrarian political economy in the modern period is particularly loose and sketchy. Some omissions are quite strange. While `new social movements' are valorized (almost an entire page is devoted to the movement against the Narmada Dam project), over ®fty years of Kisan Sabha activity under communist and socialist leadership is dismissed without any serious discussion. Nevertheless, readers, both lay and specialist, will ®nd much in the book, especially in Chapters 2 and 3, that is useful and interesting.