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CONTENTS
Vol. 13, No. 4: OctoberDecember 1981
Geoffrey D. Wood - Rural Class Formation in Bangladesh 1940-80
James K. Boyce and Betsy Hartmann - Who Works, Who Eats?
Willem van Schendel - After the Limelight: Longer-term Effects of
Rural Development in a Bangladesh Village
Ben Crow - Why are the Ganges and Brahmaputra Undeveloped?
Politics and Stagnation in the Rivers of South Asia
Gavan McCormack - North Korea: KimilsungismPath to
Socialism?
Jonathan Addleton - Tahers Last Testiment / A Review
Saundra Sturdevant - Kagemusha by Akira Kurosawa / Film
Review
Greg Guldin and Laurel Kendall - Old Madame Yin by Ida Pruitt /
Two Short Reviews
Roger Bowen - Empire and Aftermath by John W. Dower / A
Review
BCAS/Critical AsianStudies
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CCAS Statement of Purpose
Critical Asian Studies continues to be inspired by the statement of purpose
formulated in 1969 by its parent organization, the Committee of Concerned
Asian Scholars (CCAS). CCAS ceased to exist as an organization in 1979,
but the BCAS board decided in 1993 that the CCAS Statement of Purpose
should be published in our journal at least once a year.
We first came together in opposition to the brutal aggression of
the United States in Vietnam and to the complicity or silence of
our profession with regard to that policy. Those in the field of
Asian studies bear responsibility for the consequences of their
research and the political posture of their profession. We are
concerned about the present unwillingness of specialists to speak
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suring American domination of much of Asia. We reject the le-
gitimacy of this aim, and attempt to change this policy. We
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perverted scholarship and alienated many people in the field.
The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars seeks to develop a
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CCAS wishes to create alternatives to the prevailing trends in
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nity for the development of anti-imperialist research.
Passed, 2830 March 1969
Boston, Massachusetts
Vol. 13, No.4 / Oct.-Dec., 1981
Contents
Geoffrey D. Wood
James Boyce and Betsy Hartmann
Willem van Schendel
Ben Crow
Gavan McCormack
Jonathan Addleton
Saundra Sturdevant
Greg Guldin and Laurel Kendall
Roger Bowen
2 Rural Class Formation in Bangladesh, 1940-1980
18 Who Works, Who Eats?
28 After the Limelight: Longer-Term Effects of Rural
Development in a Bangladesh Village
35 Why Are the Ganges and Brahmaputra Undeveloped?:
49 List of Books to Review
50 North Korea: Kimilsungism-Path to Socialism?
61 Errata
62 Taher's Last Testament/review
64 "Kagemusha" by Akira Kurosawa/cinema review
67 Old Madam Yin by Ida Pruitt/two short reviews
71 Empire and Aftermath by John W. Dower/review
73 Index
Contributors
Geoffrey D. Wood: Centre for Development Studies, School of
Jonathan Addleton: graduate study, Fletcher School, Tufts
Humanities and Social Sciences, Univ. of Bath, Bath, England
U ni v. , Medford, Massachusetts
James K. Boyce and Betsy Hartmann: c/o Magdalen College,
Saundra Sturdevant: Beijing, People's Republic of China
Oxford, England
Greg Guldin: Sociology and Anthropology, Pacific Lutheran
Willem van Schendel: Anthropologisch-Sociologisch Centrum,
Univ., Tacoma, Washington
Univ. von Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Laurel Kendall: Dept. of Psychiatry, Univ. of Hawaii, Hono
Ben Crow: Third World Studies, The Open Univ., Milton
lulu, Hawaii
Keynes, England
Roger Bowen: Dept. of Government, Colby College, Water
Gavan McCormack: Dept. of History, La Trobe Univ.,
ville, Maine
Bundoora, Victoria, Australia
Cover photos: Hartmann/Boyce
BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
Rural Class Formation in Bangladesh, 1940-1980
By Geoffrey D. Wood
Introduction
Rural class fonnation in Bangladesh is not a straightfor
ward and unifonn process of polarization between expanding
capitalist farmers and poor peasants/tenants who are being
steadily pushed off their land. There is certainly a rise in the
incidence of landlessness but it cannot simply be attributed to
rural capitalist expansion or the rapid increase in population,
although the latter is a significant variable. 1 This paper argues
that during the last four decades of political upheaval and
development efforts in East Bengal other uses of rural capital
have been more attractive than its investment in transfonning
and expanding the scale of agricultural production. This implies
that the descripti0n of rural Bangladesh as merely consisting of
millions of small peasants, destined to become unifonnly
pauperized unless aid is forthcoming, is also not accurate. At
anyone time it is of course possible to identify a high proportion
of small peasant households, but their condition is not stable.
The ways in which they decline varies in different regions of
Bangladesh, revealing distinctive patterns of rural class rela
tions. Each variation has sometimes been generalized to apply
to the whole of Bangladesh either through the dogmas of politi
cal analysis, or because a researcher or commentator has ex
trapolated from studies in a particular area. The purpose of this
paper is to see whether these distinctive patterns can be con
tained within a single framework which does justice to the
common as well as varied experiences within Bangladesh. In
doing so it will be necessary in this introduction to consider: the
weaknesses of previous accounts; the use of class as a tool of
analysis in this context; opposing analyses of class relations; a
framework for analysis; and the role of unproductive capital in
the processes of accumulation and polarization.
Weaknesses of Previous Accounts of
Agrarian Structure in Bangladesh
Until the mid-seventies the accounts of rural and more
specifically agrarian social relations in Bangladesh could be
criticised in three ways: for being ahistorical; for their commit-
I. W. B. Arthur and G. McNicholl. "An Analytical Survey of Population and
Development in Bangladesh." Population and Development Review, Vol. 4
No. I, March 1978, pp. 23-80.
ment to homogeneity; and for their methodological bias in using
Comilla District in East Bangladesh as the basis for general
izations.
First, any discussion of class fonnation in Bangladesh
cannot be separated either from the general history of class
relations in East Bengal or from the particular conditions under
which the independent state emerged: the Partition of Bengal
into West Bengal and East Pakistan in 1947; the economic and
cultural subordination of most classes in East Pakistan to the
interests of a combination of propertied classes in West Pakistan
represented mainly through a military and bureaucratic leader
ship;2 and the participation ofIndia (with USSR support) in the
"liberation" of Bangladesh in 197 J.3 During these events, the
connection should not be overlooked between emerging
nationalist ideology and the way the agrarian structure of East
Bengal was presented "as a peasant economy based on small
family farms operated primarily with family labour."4 This
became the language of nationalist struggle for an autonomous
Bangladesh against the "landed aristocrats" of the dominant
Western wing of Pakistan. It was also consistent with an earlier
picture within East Bengal of Hindu zamindars (landlords)
dominating Muslim raiyats (pennanent occupancy tenants) and
bargadars (sharecroppers) before partition in 1947.
Secondly, most of the attempts to generalize relied on
aggregate data collected in the 1960s about the distribution of
landholding and tenure which emphasized the unifonnity of
landholding patterns and disguised important regional varia
2. See Hamza Alavi, "The State in Post-Colonial Societies," New Left Review
74, July-August, 1972; R. Nations, "Pakistan: Class and Colony," New Left
Review 68, July-August, 1971.pp. 3-26; Arjun Sengupta, "Regional Disparity
and Economic Development of Pakistan, in Economic and Poltical Weekly VI
45, Sept. 6, 1971, pp. 22792286 and VI 46. Sept. 13, 1971,pp. 2315-2322.
}. "Bangladesh: An Unfinished Revolution," in Journal ofAsian Studies Vol.
XXXIV, No.4, Aug. 1975, pp. 891-911; and Lawrence Lifschultz. Rang
ladesh: The Unfinished Revolution (Zed Press. 1979).
4. Abdullah and Nations, "Agrarian Development and IRDP in Bangladesh,"
Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies .nimeo. May 1974; S. Bose, "The
Strategy of Agricultural Development in Bangladesh," Development Dialogue,
No. I, 1973.
2
BANGLADESH
tions with related ecological and historical specificities.
5
It is
interesting that even the Bureau of Statistics (Government of
Bangladesh) Land Occupancy Survey 1977-1978
6
(financed
and led by USAID) conducted its analysis almost entirely in
aggregate terms, never presenting a breakdown on a district or
some other regional basis.
Thirdly, the content of these generalizations had been
biased by a concentration of research in the densely populated
and fertile region of Comilla, based on agro-economic surveys
inducted by the Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development
(BARD).7 The Comilla findings formed the basis of extrapola
tions for Bangladesh as a whole, providing an image of an
homogeneous agrarian structure described in terms of small
holding farmers.
These weaknesses gave rise to two standard but misleading
generalizations about the absence of a substantial class of land
lords and landholders and the low-level of absolute average size
of holding. As a result the Comilla co-operative program from
the early sixties was predicated on the ideological assumption
that class division within the "peasant economy" was structur
ally insignificant. This program was later extended in 1973
throughout rural Bangladesh in the form of the Integrated Rural
Development Programme (lRDP), and today still constitutes the
principal "instrument" of rural development policy in Bang
ladesh despite modifications, distortions and takeovers.
s
Fur
thermore, the IRDP itself is a crucial ideological apparatus of
the state, representing and reproducing a view of class merely
by persisting in a form of intervention based on "farmers
cooperatives" (Krishi Samabaya Samitis). An investigation of
the process of rural class formation in Bangladesh is therefore
also an important act of political criticism.
Use of "Class"in the Analysis of Rural Bangladesh
There is dispute over whether it is possible to employ a
concept of social class at all in describing the dynamics of rural
Bangladesh. Thus, when some pattern of rural differentiation
hilS been recognized, class analysis has been rejected because
the differentiation was not regarded as structurally significant.
For example, even in the Comilla area a distinction was
accepted between "surplus" peasants on the one hand and
subsistence and below subsistence peasants on the other, based
on minor variations in landholding. 9 But such a distinction was
not credited with long term dynamic implications for changes in
the pattern of landholding distribution, since surplus peasants
5. For sources. see A. R. Khan, "Poverty and Inequality in Bangladesh" in
POI'erty and Landlessness in rural Asia (Geneva: ILO, 1977).
6. Government of Bangladesh. Land Occupancy Sun'ey (Bureau of Statistics
and USAID. 1977).
7. H. Blair, The Elusiveness of EqUity: Institutional Approaches to Rural
Development in Bangladesh (Ithaca. NY: Rural Development Committee,
Cornell Univ .. Nov. 1974) page 122; Willem van Schendel, Bangladesh: A
bibliography with Special Reference to the Peasantry Univ. of Amsterdam.
1976.
8. G. D, Wood. "Rural Development in Bangladesh: Whose Framework?" in
the Jourllal o.fSocial Studies, Dacca, No.8. April 1980, pp. 1-31; and my "The
Rural Poor in Bangladesh: A New Framework?" in No. 10. pp. 22-46.
9. Abdullah & Nations; Peter Bertocci. "Community Structure and Social
Rank in Two Villages in Bangladesh." Contributions to Indian Sociology, New
Series No. VI. Dec. 1972, pp. 28-52.
The Institl/tefor Food and Del'elopment Policy
can only temporarily extend their control over land. An im
portant aspect of this proposition is that surplus peasants (the
rural elite) do not constitute a class since they cannot easily
reproduce their economic position in the society. The prevailing
system of multiple inheritance requires a division ofthe holding
between sons and ensures a process of cyclical mobility, or
indeed the "cyclical Kulakism" of Peter Bertocci.
lo
Differenti
ation in this perspective is analysed as stratification, i.e., cate
gories of wealth, income and status through which families
move up and down. I have elsewhere refuted this analysis of
"cyclical Kulakism" on the basis of evidence that surplus
peasants are able to reproduce and even expand the conditions of
their own class situation at the expense of other classes. II
In a subsequent paper, Bertocci regards class as a blunt
instrument of analysis, arguing that it fails to express the
"structural fragmentation" of rural social relations and as a
consequence is a bad guide to the formation of consciousness
which ought to be implicit in the notion of class. But Bertoc
ci's understanding of structural fragmentation involves a Webe
rian distinction between class and status, a distinction which
10. Bertocci. 1972.
II. G. D. Wood. "Class Differentiation and Power in Bandakgram: The
Minifundist Case" in A. Huq (ed.). Exploitation and the Rural Poor (Comilla:
BARD. 1976).
3
enables him to be concerned about the failure in Bangladesh and
elsewhere in the subcontinent "to correlate economic indicators
of class with non-economic, culturally significant markers of
relative prestige or social rank. "12 Thus for Bertocci, and the
mode of analysis he represents, structural fragmenttion is a
system of status frameworks 13 which allows for the possibility
of individual households occupying assymetrical positions in
different hierarchies-economic, lineage, ritual, education.
Fluctuating economic fortunes of the individual peasant family
through multiple inheritance need not therefore affect the fami
ly's ability to reproduce and maintain its lineage status, or
maintain other indicators of social rank. Thus class expressed in
terms of economic indicators is not regarded as a determining
principle of rank, and is not therefore the basis of consciousness
or solidarity. Indeed the patron-client relation is identified as the
With the rapid rise in landless rural population and
the relentless process of pauperization for many other
poor peasant classes either through usury, changes in
tenancy arrangements, the availability of land to lease
and distress sales of goods and land, the obvious ques
tion to ask is why rural Bangladesh does not burst
asunder in organized revolution or chaotic anarchy.
main form of social solidarity at the village level, with a conse
quent fragmentation of loyalties and attachments on a vertical
basis undermining the potentiality for class solidarities on hori
zontal, class lines. These forms of solidarity competing with
class are further reinforced by the religious ideologies of the
Bengali Muslim involving notions of brotherhood. It is this
analysis which enables Bertocci to make use (out of context) of
the problematic distinction between "classes in themselves"
and "classes for themselves" employing both Marx and Mes
saros 14 in his support:
One might cite a variety ofcomplexities in the rural political
economy which hinder the transformation of' 'peasant clas
ses" thus far identified in local power structure and stratifi
cation research from "classes in themselves" to "classes for
themselves." IS
There are two problems with Bertocci's logic here. First
his own Weberian view of class contained in his understanding
of structural fragmentation outlined above precludes the neces
sity of occupying a class position and one's consciousness being
12. See Peter Bertocci. "Structural Fragmentation and Peasant Classes in
Bangladesh" in Sixth Annual Wisconsin Conference on South Asia. Nov. 4-6.
1977, 15 pp.
13, F. G. Bailey, "Closed Social Stratification in India," Archives of ElIro
pean Sociology 4, 1963. pp. 107-124.
14. I. Messaros, "Contingent and Necessary Class Consciousness," in Mes
saros (ed.), Aspects of History and Class Consciousness (New York: Herder
and Herder, 1972),pp. 85-127.
15. Bertocci, 1977.
primarily determined by it; and secondly, he assumes that Marx
ist class analysis requires that objective conditions must always
involve a corresponding subjective awareness of those condi
tions, and that the absence of such awareness is evidence offalse
consciousness.
The notion of class which is employed in such approaches
is really superfluous, since it does not arise out of a primary
concern with characterising the exploitative, contradictory and
therefore dynamic aspects of the social relations of production
and exchange in which both rural-economic activity and forms
of rural culture and political relations are located. The Marxist
concept of class is distinctive in that it cannot be defined by
reference to internal attributes. It is a relational concept. A class
only exists in relation to another class either through struggle
and opposition or through domination and bondage with it.
Collective action involving a collective consciousness is only
one (advanced) form of such struggle and opposition. Marx
never insisted that collective action or consciousness was a
necessary part of the definition of class-only that such collec
tive consciousness of common exploitation was a distinguishing
feature of the proletariat under conditions of advanced capital
ism. To demand otherwise would make nonsense of any refer
ences by Marx to feudal, landed, yeoman, peasant, serf
classes. 16 Marx made use of the distinction between "classes in
themselves" and "classes for themselves" in The Eighteenth
B rumaire to compare the peasantry in 1850 to the situation of
the Paris proletariat in 1848. This was a precise, historically
located comparison referring to the relationship between the
social conditions of production and the development of a collec
tive consciousness. It was certainly not a denial of class strug
gle, merely a statement of its necessary form under the condi
tions of transformation in mid-nineteenth century France. Once
consciousness is accepted as a contingent rather than necessary
expression of class in this relational sense, then it becomes a
concept for explaining structural fragmentation instead of being
regarded as an alternative social form. Vertical solidarities of
the patron-client type become the form of class relations under
the conditions of agrarian underdevelopment in Bangladesh
throughout this period. In this way the analysis can go beyond
the level of appearances and provide an account not only of
where different categories of people are located in a system but
how they are located in terms of these features of structural
fragmentation.
Opposing Analyses of Class Relations in Bangladesh
The use of class as a tool of analysis for rural Bangladesh is
not entirely resolved, however, by designating it as a relational
concept indicative of a wider set of social conditions and rela
tionships. The essence of this relational concept is the particular
relation between capital, labor and accumulation with implica
tions for the reproduction of transformation of the class relation.
In Bangladesh among the handful of Marxist oriented academ
ics and political party theorists the interpretation of this particu
lar relation between capital, labor and accumulation was di
vided into two principal opposing accounts.
16. K. Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (Lawrence and Wishart.
1964).
4
Siberian Organizing
Development China
and East Asia
The Problem of
G
Bureaucracy
Threat or Promise?
1949-1976
Allen S. Whiting. A probing analysis of
the strategic, economic, and political Harry Harding. Adetailed history of the
implications of future Soviet develop- development by Chinese Communist
ment of EastAsian Siberia's vast natural leaders of an administrative apparatus
resources, emphasizing the area's po-
Stanford
that has exercised tighter control over
tential as an arena for international en- Chinese society than any previous gov
terprise and the roles open to China, University ernment in the country's history and
Japan, and the U.S. in further develop- that remains a topic of constant con
ment. $22.50 Press cern and often strident debate. $29.50
Some groups like the Marxist-Leninist Party of East
Benga]l7 described this relation as being feudal or semi-feudal.
In particular they focused on the relations of exploitation such as
sharecropping and bonded labor, and pointed especially to the
classes of landlords which remain significant in the North and
West regions of the country. 18 Elsewhere, they maintained,
sharecropping is still seen as an important component of many
of the small farms, even in the densely populated Dacca
Comilla region including Noakhali.
Others, however, such as the Jatiyo Samajtantrik Dal (The
Revolutionary Socialist Party) argue that the rural economy is
becoming pervasively capitalist.
19
Historically they cite the
impact of dominant capital from the Western wing of Pakistan in
commercializing agriculture through the development of jute
production, and indeed view the liberation struggle of 1971 as
the "progressive" assertion of infant East Bengal capital
against the foreign capital of Pakistan's Western wing. They
emphasize evidence on the polarization of landholding. And
finally they refer to the ways in which agricultural programs
have become big-farmer oriented both through the extension of
the Comilla co-operative strategy into other, more differentiated
regions, and through the more recent privatization and com
mercialization strategies of the Second Five Year Plan en
couraged by the World Bank and USAID.
17. Maniruzzaman. 1975.
18. For a discussion of the distinction between relations of exploitation and
relations of property see: J. Banerji, "For a Theory of Colonial Modes of
Production" in Economics and Political Weekly VIII 11, March 23, 1972.
19. Lifschultz, 1979.
A Framework for Analysis
How can such contradictory analyses be reconciled with
out simply dismissing them as ill-informed dogmatisms? As
with any analysis in terms of structural fragmentation the prob
lem is that relationships are being abstracted out of context and
asked to .be.ar whole weight of theory. It is then not surprising
that varIatIOns m the relations of exploitation will be found
throughout Bangladesh-landlordism here, commercial mar
ket transactions there-but conclusions about the nature of the
agrarian system cannot be achieved by identifying which
one IS numencally dominant. The task is to account for these
variations in the relations of exploitation within a consistent
framework which will at the same time reflect the uniform
aspects of Bangladesh's recent history from 1947 and which
a recog.n.iti.on of the historical specificity of Bang
ladesh WIth a sensItIvIty towards its internal regional variations.
This requires for Bangladesh an appreciation of the role of
unproductive capital in the processes of accumulation and class
formation the opportunities for any class to develop capital
as a productIon relation in agriculture were severely con
stramed. In summary, with the colonial domination of East
Bengal by Pakistan involving restrictions on Bengali capi
tal accumulatIon, the formal destruction of the zamindari
landlo:d-t.enant did not bring about a direct development
of capItalIst relatIOns of production in the countryside. Instead
other fOfl,?s of unproductive rural capital expanded, involving a
prolIferatIOn of rental income based on insecure leasing arrange
ments between rich peasant/petty landlords and sharecroppers
with little production input by the owner, the development
of usurious moneylending connected in some areas to land
mortgaging, and an increase in petty commodity trading ac
5
tivity.20 Those forms of capital characterized the relations be
tween different classes of Muslims after the Hindu landlords and
moneylenders departed.
While the general expansion of unproductive rural rela
tions reflects the uniform experience of Bangladesh as a colony
of West Pakistan, significant regional variations in the relations
between classes can also be gleaned from available data. For
example, the regions in the North and the West of the country
are characterized by a greater differentiation in landholding,
larger landlords, more sharecroppers (at least of the conven
tional, dependent type) and higher landlessness
21
This pattern
is associated both with specific historical conditions and a lower
density of rural population than in the Eastern regions of the
country. Thus while a general picture of unproductive (or "an
tediluvian") capital prevails, the precise forms of that capital
and its effects vary-more petty leasing in the North and West,
more usury and petty commodity exchange in the East. Because
these regional sub-forms of unproductive capital involve the
appearance of different relations of exploitation they en
couraged the different accounts of class relations noted above
and also provoked Bertocci's structural fragmentation thesis.
But this paper is proposing that such sub-forms of unproductive
capital are as the outcomes of regional conjunctures the various
class expressions of Bangladesh's uniform history, and they
determine the precise circumstances of structural fragmenta
tion,i.e. the specific expressions of dependency, contlict and
struggle.
Polarization and Accumulation:
The Role of Unproductive Capital
The final question to be considered in this introduction is
the role of such unproductive, antediluvian capital in transform
ing Bangladesh rural society. The historical role of such
capital has been hotly debated for the Indian subcontinent and
elsewhere
22
While Marx considered accumulations of mone
tary wealth derived from trade and usury as an essential part
20. A. Rahman. "Usury Capital and Credit Relations in Bangladesh Agri
culture: Some Implications for Capital Formation and Capitalist Growth."
BIDS (Dacca: Mimeo, March 1980), 57 pp.: 1. Arens and 1. van Beurden,
lhagrapur: Poor Peasants and Women in II Village in Bangladesh (Third World
Publications, 1977); K. Westergaard, "Mode of Production in Bangladesh,"
Journal oj".'iocial Studies (Dacca) 2. 1978, pp. 1-26; Wood, 1976; M. Hossain,
""Desirability and Feasibility of Land Reform in Bangladesh." Journal ofSocial
Studies (Dacca) 8, April 8, 1980, pp. 70-93,
2 I. Bangladesh: Agricultural Research Council (ed) "Incidence of Landless
ness and Major Landholding and Cultivation Groups in Rural Bangladesh."
Agricultural Economics and Rural Social Science papers, BARC NO.5 (BARC.
May 197R).
22. U. Patnaik, "On the Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture: A Reply."
Economic and Political Weekly VII (40), Aug. 30, 1972; Paresh Chattopad
hyay, "Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture: an Anti-Knitik," Economic
and Political Weekly VII, Dec 1972; H. Alavi, "India and the Colonial Mode
of Production," Socialist Register (Merlin Press, 1975) and "Structure of
Peripheral Capitalism" in T. Shanin and H. Alavi (eds.), Introduction to
Sociology o{the Developing Societies (FOl1hcoming, 1981): A. Rudra, "Class
Relations in Indian Agriculture," Economic and Political Weekly, June 3,
1978, pp. 916-923, June 10, 197R,pp, 963-968 and June 17, 1978, pp. 998
1004; R. Hilton (ed.), The Transitionfrom Feudalism to Capitalism (London:
New Left Books, 1976); R. Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development:
A critiqueofNeo-Smithian Marxism," New Left Review, 104, July-Aug. 1977,
pp.24-92.
of the development of capitalism out of feudalism in Europe,
such accumulations "belong to the pre-history of bourgeois
economy" and they do not automatically produce capitalist
development-otherwise", .. ancient Rome, Byzantium etc.
would have ended their history with free labour and capital."23
In Bangladesh such monetary wealth (including land rents)
has not been invested in the development of productive ag
ricultural capital and has not entailed a transformation of the
labor process itself through increasing the productivity of labor
and therefore its relative surplus value. 24 Instead this pattern of
wealth stimulates the attempt among tenants and labors to
achieve a rise in the level of absolute surplus-value of their
labor, where they try to work longer or harder without any
capital-assisted increase in their productivity to meet their debt,
rental and purchase obligations. 25
This process is circular and cumulative. Under the condi
tions of a rapidly increasing labor force due to population
growth, the opportunities for tenants to rent more land or labor
ers to find the necessary additional employment are continually
undermined. Their efforts to do so have the function of displac
ing other labor and weakening other tenants, Furthermore,
interest rates, rents and prices continually outpace either wages
or incomes from distress sales of subsistence commodities
which have to be repurchased at higher prices elsewhere in the
year. In this process tenants and poor peasants arc steadily
alienated from their land, being obliged to sell off portions to
meet debts and consumption requirements or losing it through
mortgage arrangements which are impossible to redeem. Such
land is acquired either for multiple inheritance purposes or for
recirculation in rental markets, The explanation for the failure to
invest in expanded agricultural production can thus be found
within this form of consequent polarization whereby the rise in
landlessness and rural unemployment reduces the level of effec
ti ve demand for domestic agricultural output at market prices, 26
And in this process there has been a stimulus toward the acquisi
tion of non-agricultural assets, although incomes thus derived
are often "re-invested" in land acquisition and rural money
lendingY
It is crucially important to recognize that the development
of these relations, even under the "minifundist" agrarian condi
tions of the Dacca-Comilla region, pre-dates the government
and aid agency strategies of attempting to intensify the level of
capital in agricultural production through credit and subsidies.
As a result these strategies, which dominate the Government's
Second Five Year Plan and the contemporary thinking of the
World Bank and USAID, have only a limited impact (so far at
least) upon the creation of the capitalist production relations
advocated by these agencies.
23. Marx, 1964. Also see introduction by E. J. Hobsbawm, p. 46.
24. K. Marx. Capital, Vol. I. (Lawrence and Wishal1, 1970).
25 For a comparison between the Punjab and West Bengal in this respect see:
A. K. Ghose, "Institutional Structure, Technological Change and Growth in
Poor Agrarian Economies: An Analysis with Reference to Bengal and Punjab,"
World Development 7, Nos. 4/5, April 1979, pp. 385-396.
~ 6 . S, de Vylder and D. Asplund, Contradictions and Distortions in a Rural
Economy: The Case of Bangladesh (SJDA, May 1979); Wood, 1980, "Rural
Poor, "
27. Wood, 1976; S. Adnan and others, "A Review of Landlessness in Rural
Bengal: 1877-1977," Univ. of Chittagong Workshop on the Research Project
"Socio-Economics of Landlcssness in Bangladesh," Aug. 21, 1978 (mimeo).
6
Topography, Population, and Regional Variations
Bangladesh primarily consists of a low-lying fertile delta
region, which is the flood plain of two rivers: Ganges and
Brahmaputra. Together with other rivers, these two bring down
silt and deposit it on the plain-both enhancing soil fertility and
extending the delta into the Bay of BengaL These 'new' land
formations are known as char lands. The annual combination of
fertility replacement, flooding and warm humid climate pro
vides good conditions for unirrigated rice growing.
At the same time these conditions have contributed to the
emergence of one of the most densely populated rural regions of
the world: now approximately 89 million-an all Bangladesh
average of nearly 1500 persons per square mile of cultivated
land with the average for the East-Central area (the Dacca
Comilla belt) ranging from 2245 to 2643. The population
growth rate is also one of the world's highest at around 3 percent
(World Bank 1981) under conditions where private gain con
flicts with social cost. 28 The ramifications of population growth
throughout the agrarian structure are pervasive: larger families
living off the same size or reduced size of holding; fragmenta
tion of holdings; dispossession of infrasubsistence peasants;
decline in availability of land for sharecropping; increase in the
number of landless; enhanced value of children as income
earners and providers of old-age security; depressive effect on
wages; undermining of patron-client dependency relations
which offered minimal security to labor, as a reserve army of
labor contributes to the commercialization of labor relations.
An estimated 91 percent of the population live in rural
areas, and approximately 80 percent are considered to be di
rectly dependent on agriculture for their income. The ownership
of land has become increasingly concentrated. Eleven percent
of rural households own more than 52 percent of all land, while
over 30 percent own no land at all; they and those owning less
than half an acre constitute about 48 percent of the rural popula
tion. This situation is accompanied by high rural underemploy
ment and a decline in real agricultural wages. The per capita
income was reported in 1980 as equivalent to U.S. Dollar 90,
but if the concentration of incomes in urban areas is taken into
account then the average rural income would be considerably
lower. It has been estimated that 62 percent of rural people
receive only enough income to satisfy 90 percent or less of the
necessary daily intake of calories. By the end of the 1970s the
production of major agricultural crops was only 7.3 percent
higher than 1970.
29
The land is flat and low with few parts of the country being
more than 50 feet above sea level. The only significant eleva
tions are the Sylhet hills in the North-East and the Chittagong
hills in the South-East. Rainfall varies from 50 inches a year in
the North-West to up to 200 inches in the North-Eastern region
of Sylhet, below Assam. The rivers flood from late July until
mid-September, during which the main traditional unirrigated
ricecrop is transplanted (Aman). The pattern of flooding is
complex and brings out the ecological heterogeneity of the
28. Arthur and McNicholl, 1978, pp. 46-59.
29. Government of Bangladesh, 1977; E. J. Clay. "Employment Effects of the
HYV Strategy in Bangladesh: A Rejoinder" ADC. Dacca (mimeo), 1978;
International Labor Organization, "Landlessness and Inequality in Rural
Asia." ( 1977).
apparently homogeneous delta due to minor variations in eleva
tion and proximity to flooding rivers. Some of this variation has
been represented in a thana based map reporting susceptibility
to famine based on 10 criteria: flooding; growth; population
pressure; food deficit; lack of employment opportunities; low
crop yields; poor land transport; river erosion; incidence of
cyclones; and maldistribution of agricultural inputs. 30 The areas
south and west of the rivers Ganges, Padma, and Lower Meghna
are the worst affected, but almost all thanas bordering the
major rivers of the Ganges,Teesta, Dharla and Brahmaputra are
at risk.
East Bengal had a virtual world monopoly in jute
production, but the foreign exchange earned by the
export of this peasant-produced cash crop was re
directed by the military-bureaucratic oligarchy in
West Pakistan on behalf of the development of its
indigenous, industrial capitalist class.
However, there are regional patterns too which reflect
significant differences in soil fertility, poulation density, histor
ical circumstances, or incidence of owner cultivators versus
tenancy and wage labor. In Comilla, where soil fertility and
popUlation density is high, owner cultivators predominate (34.6
percent); landlessness there is the lowest in Bangladesh (26. I
percent); the proportion of sharecroppers is smallest at 13.0
percent; and the smallest (but one) proportion of big farmers
(more than 5 acres) is there (6.3 percent).3l A similar though
less extreme pattern holds for other districts in the Dacca
Comilla belt: Noakhali, Dacca and Tangail. Dinajpur, in the
North-West, by contrast has 31. I percent landless; 25.6 percent
sharecroppers; 28.5 percent owner cultivators; and 14.9 percent
big farmers. Here and in other Northern and Western Districts
such as Khulna, Kushthia, Rajshahi and Rangpur soil fertility is
poorest and population densities are far lower.
It would be unwise to attach too much significance to these
patterns because the BARC data does not arise from a rigorous
sample, but the variations noted do conform to other pictures of
regional variations gleaned from village studies.
32
In the con
text of these variations it is important to note that in Comilla
Kotwali thana (the most heavily researched area during the
sixties and the basis of the cooperative model which has been
replicated all over Bangladesh through IRDP) owner cultivators
represented 74.5 percent of the cultivating population (i.e.
30. Government of Bangladesh, "Bangladesh Areas Liable to Famine,"
Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, 1976.
31. Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council, 197R.
32. Arens and van Beurden, 1977; M. A. Jabber, "Farm Structure and Re
source Productivity in Selected Areas of Bangladesh," BARC No.3, Dec.
1977; S. Adnan and others, "The Preliminary Findings of a Social and
Economic Study of Four Bangladesh Villages," Dacca Univ. and BIDS, Vil
lage Study Group, 1974; B. K. Jahangir, Differentiation, Polarization and
Confrontation in Rural Bangladesh Centre for Social Studies, Univ. of Dacca,
1979.
7
excluding landless) and the Comilla District mean was 73.7
percent.
33
The equivalent figure for Dinajpur is 41 percent
which certainly belies the 'peasant economy' description for all
of Bangladesh.
Aman rice (referred to earlier) represents approximately 60
percent of the annual rice crop. But cropping patterns vary too
by regions and within them, mainly on account of elevation but
also climate. The other cropping seasons areAus and Boro. Aus
(25 percent of total rice production) is primarily a broadcast
crop, dependent upon the caprice of early monsoon rains, and
harvested just before the main flooding in July. Boro refers to
the dry winter season which lasts from late November through to
June; in this season only those with some form of irrigation can
plant boro (rice) which is harvested around April. The same
applies to the rapidly expanding winter wheat crop, although
less water is required. The planting of boro has traditionally
been more prevalent in the Southern and Eastern regions of the
country where the winter climate is warmer and there is a higher
proportion of low-lying land which retains some moisture. State
intervention in agriculture, with international assistance, has in
the past focused primarily on the expansion of the boro season
(i.e. the Comilla program, etc.) through the provision ofirriga
tion and other inputs. This is still the case but with the critical
addition of wheat to the program which allows the North-West
to be included. The area under wheat has doubled between
1975-80, and the output in 1980-81 exceeded 1975 levels by 5
times to reach approximately I million tons.
The main cash crop is jute. During the sixties the acreage
under jute was always higher than for boro rice, though never
more than twice as high. Acreage under jute reached its peak in
1970 and since then has been overtaken by boro rice. 34 Jute was
an important export earner for Pakistan as a whole and its
production by peasants in East Bengal provided the basis oftheir
exploitation by the bourgeoisie in West Pakistan (see below). In
Bangladesh jute has provided about three-quarters of the
country's export earnings and remains (precariously because of
competition from synthetic substitutes) a vital crop in the
economy as a whole.
Landholding and Tenancy Before 1950
Under British rule the province of Bengal was a 'Perma
nently Settled' area where most of the land was divided among
zamindars-a hereditary class of tax farmers and 'super land
lords' taken over by the British from the declining Mughal
empire during the eighteenth century. The cultivator with per
manent occupancy rights was a raiyat and might in tum rent out
all or part of his land to under-raiyats or sharecroppers (bar
gadars). Between the zamindar and the raiyat, intermediaries
or tenure-holders proliferated as zamindars sub-divided the
rent-collecting functions. Apart from the State, then, the classes
variously connected with the land were: zamindars, tenure
holders, raiyats, under-raiyats, bargadars and landless labor
ers. Bargadars and landless laborers were the main classes of
labor on the land with raiyats occupying the structural position
of aggregating the surplus from sub-tenants and labor and trans
33. Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council, 1978,pp. 20-21.
34. Bose, 1973.
mitting it upwards in the form of rent.
35
The pervasiveness of
this system, and therefore its structural importance for the social
formation after 1950, is demonstrated by noting that in pre
partition East Bengal (1938-40), out of a total of 28.8million
acres, approximately 18 million acres were held by raiyats and a
further 2 million acres held directly by under-raiyats, i.e. ap
proximately 70 percent. This zamindar system was formally
abolished in 1950 by the East Bengal State Acquisition Act,
although the partition of India in 1947 had already undermined
some of its features.
The Report of the Land Revenue Commission, BengaP6
reveals regional variations within this overall zamindari structure
of rural social relations which undermine the assumptions of
homogeneity based on national level averages which comprise
the more recently published data of landholdings. The Report
gives a breakdown for the 14 districts of what was then East
Bengal, and which along with Sylhet and the Chittagong Hill
Tracts were subsequently included in East Pakistan. From the
sample data (11,314 families) the overall percentage distribu
tion in 1940 is shown in Table 1.
Table 1
Percentage of Family Holding
a
Average
holding per Less than 2-3 3-4 4-5 5-10 10+
family (acres) 2 acres acres acres acres acres acres
4.02 45.8 11.0 9.3 7.5 16.1 7.7
b
(a) Unfortunately the distribution of land involved is not available.
(b) Percentages do not add up to 100 because of rounding off.
The district breakdown of this data (see Table 2) shows that
the districts in the North and West of East Bengal were distin
guished from elsewhere in the province by greater proportions
of sharecroppers and landless, and that classes of raiyats and
tenants were more differentiated than elsewhere by variations in
the .size of landholding in the Rajshahi Division (Dinajpur,
Rangpur, Bogra, Rajshahi and Pabna) with the exception of
Pabna district and the addition of Jessore district.
The districts in the North and West (Dinajpur, Rangpur,
Jessore, Rajshahi) fall significantly below the 'less than 2 acre'
average, with percentages ranging from 24.2 to 31.8 percent
and rise significantly above the 'more than 10 acres' average
with percentages ranging from 15 to 11.2 percent. Bogra district
which is also in the North-West falls below the 'less than 2
acres' average with 34.5 percent, although it falls below the
'more than 10 acres' average with 7. 1 percent. There is a similar
distribution for Mymensingh district, although it drops out of
35. G. D. Wood, "From Raiyat to Rich Peasant," South Asian Review. Vol. 7,
No. I,Oct. 1973,pp. 1-16.
36. Government of Bengal (G.O.B.), Report of the Land Revenue Commis
sion. (6 vols.) (Allipore: Bengal Government Press, 1940).
8
Table 2
Summary Table showing: 1) Distribution of Families by size of landholding 1938-39
2) Distribution of land cultivated by family member, bargadars and laborers
3) Percentage of families living mainly as sharecroppers and laborers.
3
2 Percentage of families
Districts Percentage of families with Percentage of land cultivated by living mainly
Less than More than Av. acreage Family Bargadars Laborers As Bargadars On Agri
2 acres 10 acres per family member cultural Wages
Dinajpur 24.2 15.0 6.38 72.0 14.5 13.6 13.8 23.5
Rangpur 24.6 11.2 6.67 72.2 22.8 5. I 19.1 12.9
Jessore 28.5 13.6 4.78 71.3 22.1 6.6 4.2 7.9
Rajshahi 31.8 14.6 5.52 81.0 15.0 3.9 13.0 23.8
Mymensingh 34.1 6.5 3.86 78.2 10.3 11.5 7.3 20.0
Bogra 34.5 7. I 4.28 80.8 16.0 3.2 13.4 25.6
Khulna 55.6 7.6 4.78 47.7 50.2 2.1 13.2 41.9
Chittagong 60.3 4.3 2.45 78.1 11.9 10.0 1.8 11.6
Bakerganj 61.8 1.2 2.17 55.3 44.7 7.1 23.6
(Barisal)
Dacca 62.4 3.5 2.13 60.9 22.9 16.2 6.9 22.2
Tippera 63.9 2.9 2.22 70.6 12.4 17.0 1.1 4.8
(Comilla)
Pabna 64.1 2.4 2.39 77.6 19.4 3.0 26.1 15.2
Noakhali 65.3 2.8 2.41 70.5 16.8 12.7 2.2 17.9
Faridpur 81.5 0.6 1.63 80.5 11.4 8. I 23.8 15.7
Total 45.85 7.68 4.02 73.42 18.57 8.01 12.39 18.59
Sources: Report ofthe Land Revenue Commission (Bengal: Government of Bengal, 1940), Vol. II.
I) Table VIII(b), p. 115.
2) Table VIII(e), pp 118-19.
3) Table VIII(d), p. 117.
the grouping of North-Western Districts when the incidence of
sharecropping and wage labor is considered (see sections 2 and
3 of Table 2).
The total percentage of families living mainly either as
sharecroppers or agricultural laborers in 1938-9 was 3 I percent.
The districts which exceeded this average were in order of
magnitude: Khulna, Pabna, Faridpur, Bogra, Dinajpur, Raj
shahi and rangpur. All of these districts are situated on the
Western side of the North-South river complex (Brahmaputra,
Jamuna, Ganges, Padma, lower Meghna). Thus the landless
population ranged between 32-41 percent in the North-Western
region of the province to be contrasted to Comilla with 5.9
percent, Jessore with 12.1 percent and Chittagong 13.4 percent
at the other end of the scale. To these proportions of landless
tenants and laborers must be added a proportion of small peas
ants with insufficient holdings who were obliged to enter share
cropping arrangements or sell their labor. Where there existed a
high proportion of peasants withholdings of less than 2 acres,
the demand for additional sharecropping or labor opportunities
would be high but the availability would be low.
From Table 2 there do appear to be some inconsistencies
between the amount of land and the number of families involved
in sharecropping and wage-labor relationships. The'labor' col
9
umns for Bakerganj and Khulna stand out particularly; as does
the sharecropping column for Bakerganj, although this may be
explained by the higher proportion of land held by tenure
holders who would have cultivated through bargadars rather
than directly with their families or with laborers. Furthermore, it
The sharecropping columns for Jessore, Dacca and to
some extent Khulna suggests that some sharecroppers
might have relatively large holdings which should re
mind us that the sharecropper is not always the suppli
cant in the exchange.
is interesting that Faridpur had such a high proportion of share
croppers (23.8 percent) with its distribution of landholding,
confirming that sharecropping occurs even where the absolute
average size of holding is low. There is more recent evidence for
this from some studies in Comilla, although sharecropping is
frequently connected to indebtedness and land mortgage deals.
The sharecropping columns for Jessore, Dacca and to some
extent Khulna suggests that some sharecroppers might have
relatively large holdings which should remind us that the share
cropper is not always the supplicant in the exchange. How
ever, these figures do not of course reveal what proportion
of the sharecropped land is cultivated by raiyats-cum-bargadars
(i .e. not living 'mainly as sharecroppers'). This may explain the
low numbers of families living mainly as sharecroppers or
agricultural laborers in Jessore. The relatively high amount of
land which was available for sharecropping in Dacca district
perhaps reflects its status as an urban center (although only a
small provincial center at that time) with associated absenteeism
of landholders involved in various forms of urban employment.
Together with the data on the larger holdings of raiyats in
the Rajshahi Division, there are descriptions of Muslimjotedars
(petty landlords/rich raiyats) in Dinajpur in the 1942 Dinajpur
Survey and Settlement report. 37 This lends weight to the prop
osition that there were Muslim 'surplus' farmers in certain areas
of East Bengal before and during the emergence of Pakistan, as
against the more familiar notion that these classes developed all
over East Bengal solely as a result of West Pakistan colonial
policy or in response to the opportunities created by Comilla
type agricultural development strategies.
The explanation for this regional variation in the extent of
differentiation among the raiyat classes must in part refer to the
historical specificity of the 'border' districts during the I 940s .
These districts were more exposed to communal tension which
developed as a prelude to the Muslim League's campaign for a
separate Islamic State. This communal factor restrained the
excesses of (Hindu) zamindar oppression over Muslim tenants
(e. g. 'illegal' charges in addition to statutory rent), thus retain
ing more surplus at the level of raiyat for accumulation and
consolidation of holdings. Also, as the rural population in
border districts was more evenly distributed between Hindus
and Muslims than in the predominantly Muslim districts further
East in the province, the impact of inter-caste relations on the
pattern of landholding and tenancy was greater. And after 1947,
the departure of Hindu raiyats as well as zamindars and tenure
holders created more' illegal' opportunities than further East for
the remaining rich Muslim peasants to appropriate the land
vacated by the Hindu raiyats as well as landlords. As a result. in
this region, which in any case received the greater proportion of
new immigrants, the newcomers became sharecroppers and
landless laborers rather than raiyats more frequently than else
where.
Although the data are not available there is every reason to
believe that these regional variations in differentiation increased
after 1947 and certainly after 1950 when the Zamindari estates
were formally abolished. The East Bengal Acquisition Act
legalized this de facto appropriation of land by classes of
Muslim jotedars in the 'border' districts. As part of this histori
cal specificity, the variations in ecology and the subsequent
variations in the density of the population will further contribute
to the development of rural social relations along different paths
in Bangladesh. The high density of population in the Dacca
Comilla belt is related historically to the fertility of the soil and
37. F. O. Bell. Final Report 011 the Survev alld Settlement Operations ill the
District of Dinajpur. 1934-1940 (Allipore: Government of Bengal, 1942).
favorable climatic conditions for growing rice during the
winter. This together with the absence of the 'border' character
istics noted above must account to some extent for the long
history of lower absolute average size of holding in the Eastern
region, and a much greater concentration of holdings at the
lower end of the range.
The evidence on jotedrs is important for several reasons.
First, it indicates a structure of rural class relations very diffe
rent from the Comilla model which has been generally ap
plied-i.e. an homogenous structure of undifferentiated, small
holding peasants. Second, it undermines related assumptions
about the nature of power in East Bengal which has traditionally
been analyzed solely in terms of the aspirations of an urban
petty-bourgeoisie leading an undifferentiated mass of the peas
antry against the common oppressor from West Pakistan-e.g.
the language movements and the rise of Bengal nationalism.
38
Third it focuses our attention on the role of these classes in
transforming the entire social formation both through their sup
port for the Muslim League and the quest for an independent
Pakistan, and through their subsequent influence over agrarian
legislation and state policy in agriculture. The Muslim League's
Policy of Partition had the advantage of removing the stratum of
Hindu landlords from their stultifying int1uence over the aspira
tions of the Muslimjotedars. At the same time as in the neigh
boring states in India, the attack by jotedars on feudal rural
relations had to be contained at the point where the conditions
for their own appropriation of land and surplus had been
fulfilled.
Class Relations and the East Pakistan
Colony 1947-1971
The political significance of this class of Muslim jotedars
in the North and West of Bangladesh can only be considered in
conjunction with that of the Bengali petty bourgeoisie consist
ing of small traders, shopkeepers, professionals, teachers,
junior officials and clerks in the provincial services. In a country
where the entire urban population was never more than 10
percent, this class had close kinship and other connections with
the economically stronger classes of raiyats and jotedars in the
countryside. It is not difficult, therefore, to see the relationships
between the frustrated aspirations of a Bengali petty bourgeoisie
whose language (and thereby career prospects) and was threa
tened and those of the larger Muslim farmers and peasants
whose own development was restricted by West Pakistani colo
nial policy. In this way the language movements could expand
into broader Bengali nationalism and lay the foundation for the
creation of a reformist nationalist party (the Awami League).
This successfully combined the respective concerns of the larger
rural petty commodity producers and the urban petty bourgeoi
sie with the intention of reproducing West Pakistani capitalism
in the East through a constitutional bourgeois-democratic trans
38. Alavi. 1972; Maniruzzaman, 1975: F. Ahmed. "The Structural Matrix of
the Struggle in Bangladesh." in K. Gough and H. Sharnla (eds.) Imperialism
and Revolution in South Asia (New York: Monthly Review Press. 1973) pp.
419-448; T. Ali. "Pakistan and Bangladesh: Results and Prospects" in R.
Blackburn (ed.). Explosion ill a Sub-Continent (Pelican. 1975); R. Jahan,
Pakistan: Failure in Nationallntegratioll (New York: Columbia Univ. Press,
1973).
10
formation. This would involve associated career prospects for
the Bengali intelligentsia in the private and public sectors. A
combination of populist rhetoric and rural vote banks
39
steadily
increased support among the poorer classes of Bangali peas
antry, culminating in the League's overwhelming victories of
1970 and 1973.
Despite the contemporary significance of these two classes
- jotedars and urban petty bourgeoisie-and the alliance be
tween them, they remained economically weak from 1947 to
1971 as a result of East Bengal's status as a colony of West
Pakistan. This has been well documented elsewhere by Sengup
ta (1971) and Nations (1971).40 The Muslim League and the
Movement for Pakistan had been led essentially by classes
outside East Bengal-landlords from Punjab, Sind and Central
India; trading communities from Gujarat and Bombay which
formed the basis of the Pakistani industrial capitalist class; and
westernized Muslim elites from similar regions who constituted
a professional middle class and who had staffed the bureaucratic
and military apparatuses of the colonial state. East Bengal had
been dominated by Hindu traders and officials (as well as
landlords) as part of the Calcutta hinterland. Thus Muslims of
East Bengal were historically disadvantaged at the time of
Pakistan's formation in 1947. This facilitated their colonial
exploitation by the western region up to 1971, and accounts
for the restricted and underdeveloped nature of a bourgeois class
indigenous to East Bengal.
East Bengal had a virtual world monopoly in jute produc
tion, but the foreign exchange earned by the export of this
peasant-produced cash crop was redirected by the military-bur
eaucratic oligarchy in West Pakistan on behalf of the develop
ment of its indigenous, industrial capitalist class. 41
The compulsory purchase of West Pakistani manufactures by
the East at inflated monopoly prices led to a further outflow of
capital which might have been deployed locally. Further aspects
of this colonialism indirectly restricted the development of
Bengali classes. West Pakistani capital and its entrepreneurs
were significantly present and in control of east Bengal in
dustry, with Bengali Muslims owning less than 2.9 percent of
private industrial assets. Thus much of the wealth created in
East Bengal industry was repatriated to the West in the form of
salaries, dividends, interests and profits; and the related op
portunity for multiplier effects from indigenous capital accumu
lation was also lost. Add to the picture the evidence from the
First and Second Five Year Plans, in particular, that the greater
proportion of funds for development was allocated to the west
ern province and the failure of an East Bengali bourgeoisie to
emerge is hardly surprising. The dominant classes in West
Pakistan were engaged in an exercise of primitive capital accu
mulation.
The development of social relations of production in Bang
ladesh and the pattern of rural class formation cannot be isolated
from these colonial effects. The principal contradiction was that
the appropriation of East Bengal's rural surplus by the emerging
39. M. Ayoob, "From Martial Law to Bangladesh," in Pran Chopra (ed.), The
Challenge of Bangladesh (Bombay: Popular Prakashan Bombay, 1971) pp.
40-59.
40. Sengupta, 01'. cit.; Nations, 01'. cit.
41. Alavi (1972).
capitalist classes of the West (accompanied by an unwillingness
to re-invest in East Bengal's agriculture) jeopardized the repro
duction of the social relations required to produce that surplus
by denying the capital for investment in: intensifying food
production,and diversification out of agriCUlture into industrial
production. In short the effect was to disarticulate the East
Bengal economy-stimulating food crises, vulnerability to dis
asters, landlessness and mass underemployment.
During the 1950s agricultural output virtually stagnated.
42
For example, rice production increased at 0.7 percent per an
num compared with a population growth of nearly 3 percent per
annum. Even the production of jute declined in the 1950s,
picking up in the 1960s only because of a large increase in the
acreage, since yields were declining. This evidence on jute is
consistent with the tendency for landholding to polarise, with
land being transferred out of the hands of small, mainly subsist
ence and rice-cultivating peasants. The squeeze on agriculture,
both through adverse terms of trade and the low level of state
investment, restricted the capacity of richer peasants to expand
their control directly over productive assets. However, this
squeeze, together with increases in population, increased the
vulnerability of the poorest peasants. Without the dubious ad
vantages of a zamindari system to rely on, their urgent require
ments for credit, for land to sharecrop, or to sell their labor could
only be met by the richer, surplus peasants-at a cost.
Landholding Patterns, 1960-1977
Data on landholding cannot reveal all these relationships,
both because of the level of generality, and because the data are
based upon reported legal titles to property which are unreliable
and misleading guides to the real relations of appropriation. But
with these caveats, are the data on landholding during the 60s
and 70s consistent with the arguments presented here? At the
very least the data are not consistent with the development of
capitalist agriculture on a wide scale despite state intervention to
that purpose since the late 60s. The data reflect the increasing
pressure on the land throughout the period through showing a
dramatic rise in the landless, a decline in the mean size of owned
farms from 3.5 in 1960 to 2.0 acres in 1977, of owner-cum
tenant farms from 4.3 acres to 3.0 acres, of tenant farms from
2.4 acres to 1.5 acres, and an increase in households owning up
to 5 acres from 78 percent in 1960 to 93 percent in 1977,
representing a shift from 43 percent of total cultivated area to 58
percent in this category. 43 Other sets of comparisons are margi
nally affected by the different units of classification in the
surveys involving 5.00-7.5 acres and 7.5-12.5 acres in the 1960
and 1968 surveys, and a series of one acres units 5.00-6.00 etc.
in the 1977 survey. 44 In the middle' range of 5.00-12.5 acres
there was a decline in the number of holdings from 18.6 percent
of total in 1960 to 14.4 percent in 1968 with a corresponding
I
drop in acreage from 38.4 to 33.2 percent.
45
The 1977 survey
I
I
42. Bose (1973), p. 35; Government of Bangladesh. The First Five Year Plan I
(Dacca: Planning Commission, 1973), p. 84 passim.
I
43. Government of Bangladesh, 1977; Government of Bangladesh, Agricul
I
ture Census ofPakistan, 1960, Vol. 1& 2, (Gov. ofPakistan, 1960), Table 3, p.
J
29.
I
44. Government of Bangladesh, 1977.
45. Government of Bangladesh, 1960, Table3,p. 29.
!
II
t
I
reported a dramatic decline in the number of holdings in the
5.00-12.00 acre category to 5.46 percent involving an acreage
of 26.2 percent of total. With the same marginalIy affected
problem of comparison the number of holdings above 12.5 acres
fell from 3.5 percent in 1960 to 2.6 percent in 1968 and con
tinued to faU for an above 12.00 acres category in 1977 to 1.2
percent. This picture of continuous fall is not repeated, how
ever, when acreage is considered: 18.9 percent in 1960 to 15.4
percent in 1968, but holding up at 15.5 percent (for above 12.00
acres) in 1977. This pattern is reflected in the figures for average
size of holding per household in this richer category: 19.2
percent in 1960, 18.6 percent in 1968, and 19.4 percent in 1977.
The dynamic process indicated by these figures is com
plex. The dramatic weakening of the 'middle' range (5 to 12 or
12.5 acres) is not the result of a simple process of polarization
since it is accompanied by a more or less constant average
size of holding in the above 12.5 or 12 acre catgegory through
out two decades rather than an increase which would reveal a
process of concentration and perhaps consolidation of land by
richer peasants and landlords. At the same time the numbers of
households in such a category has shrunk to 1.2 percent, sug
gesting that the pressures for fragmentation of holdings among
sons may still await those families who have not diversified
through their sons into income generating activities unrelated to
the direct or indirect exploitation ofland and the labor expended
on it. Of course there is some concentration of landholding
among parts of this class which distinguishes those who are
vulnerable to multiple inheritance from those who are not.
Furthermore during a period when population has risen by 35
percent from 1960 to 1974, such aggregation dangerously ig
nores regional variations which along with population growth
provides the explanation of how a smaller proportion holding
above 12.00 acres maintains both the acreage under the class's
control and the average size of holding for the households in the
class.
On the basis of these figures combined with the arguments
outlined earlier in the paper, the 'regional' hypothesis would
maintain that the Dacca-Comilla belt was mainly responsible for
the collapse of the 'middle' range of landholding and the
expansion of the below 5 acre 'minifundist' category; whereas
the 'North-West' represented the picture of some concentra
tion accompanied by loss of holdings by others at alI levels
resulting in increases both in landlessness and tenancy (the latter
rising nationally from 18 percent of total holdings in 1960 to 23
percent in 1977), as well as contributing to the general picture of
redistribution downwards. In this way it is not correct to argue
that all categories of landholdings are fragmenting steadily, and
reducing all classes to the lowest common denominator. A small
but significant class of jotedars remains, and when the range of
landholding to be considered is widened to conform to the
government's classification of 'big farmers' with more than 5
acres, the regional concentration ofjotedars and 'big farmers' is
clearly associated with the Northern and Western districts,
displaying a continuity with earlier patterns 46
Processes of Class Formation
Such a picture gleaned from the only available though
imperfect macro-data does provide some background to the
numerous variations in the real relations of appropriation re
ported by different micro-studies. The tendency to make ex
travagant claims of nationwide relevance from such studies has
produced sterile exchanges between protagonists advancing
their particular thesis. But it should now be possible to recog
nize where there are common threads to the process of class
formation, mediated through precise historical, ecological and
local economic variables, and where room for debate still exists
over the interpretation of local data. A further problem of
analysis has been the unweighted relativism shown by some
commentators who, as Rudra has done in a discussion on class
formation in India, have successfully identified an extensive list
of relationships without commenting upon their significance.
Thus Bertocci attempts to refute a class analysis based upon
landlord-tenant relations by pointing out that poor peasants also
rent out their land; likewise that poor peasants acquire tempor
ary control over mortgaged land by lending money in order to
establish viable farms in land-scarce situations; and finally that
poor peasants employ both casual and permanent wage labor.
However, it is unsafe to conclude that' 'those facts would seem
to imply myriad, dyadic, owner-tenant, creditor-debtor, patron
client relationships within as well as across the lines of 'peasant
classes' as may be conceptually delimited with reference to
landholding size and/or tenure type alone. "47 Such lists are
never an adequate substitute for analysis, especially when ac
cess to and control over land is such a crucial variable as in
Bangladesh. The fact that so many are landless, and many more
(70-80 percent) assumed to be living below established poverty
lines
48
does not mean that the scramble for tiny pieces of land is
insignificant. On the contrary its value is greatly enhanced both
in monetary, economic and status terms. This was a mistake
made in Camilla where the range of landholding was very
narrow, by those who assumed that the absence of a starkly
unequal pattern of landholding was evidence of class harmony.
But assuming constant family size, the difference of a few
decimals in area under such conditions can make all the differ
ence between survival and successful diversification, and a
family's collapse and disintegration through a relentless process
of land dispossession. 49
Apart from the issue of the relati ve significance of relation
ships, there is also the question of the meaning or interpretation
to be given. For example, to return to the case of poor peasants
taking land in mortgage-does this amount to a refutation
of mortgage as a class relationship of structural significance?
Nadigram in Mymensingh District provides some interesting
case material. 50 The most common land transaction is girbi
(mortgaging), where a landowner in need of money transfers the
right of use of one or more fields to the highest bidder.
This system functions as a 'banking-system' for landowners
who give out land on girbi when they need money for other
expenditures, mainly to buy land, or for consumption needs
during a difficult period (sickness for example) or to pay for
the higher education ofa son.
46. Bangladesh, Agricultural Research Council, 1978.
47. Bertocci, 1977, p. 9.
48. Salimullah and A.B .M. Shamsul Islam, "A Note on the Condition of the
Rural Poor in Bangladesh" in Bangladesh Development Studies IV(2), pp.
267-274, cited by Bertocci, 1977.
49. See my critique of Bertocci's "cyclical Kulakism" in Wood, 1976.
50. Ann-Lisbet Am, "A Case-Study from Bangladesh: An Integrated Village
in Mymensingh District" in Centre for De"elopment Research, Copenhagen,
12 Dec. 1978, p. II
The general trend within this kind of land transaction is that
the richer and middle peasants give out more land on girbi,
and the small. poor and landless peasants take in more land.
For these last categories the girbi is one way of
acquiring land to cultivate under circumstances where land
for sale is rather scarce and expensive. When land isfor sale
they can seldom compete with the richer peasants who will
give out some of their lands on girbi in order to be able to
buy.
Under these conditions where a market for land exists, the
mortgage relationships assists richer and middle peasants in
obtaining the money to enter that market and accumulate land
for the family's use in this generation or the next. Although poor
and landless peasants are technically the moneylenders in this
situation, they are unable to charge interest, the land has to be
returned within twelve years and it is usually redeemed earli
er.51 These arrangements reveal the structural weakness of the
poor peasants, which has to be attributed to their lack of control
over land and a desperation for it which encourages such tem
porary solutions that divert their own savings away from long
term accumulation. And remember, it is cash hungry peasants
who are providing land for this market in the first place.
In Comilla my own study in Bondokogram (1976) reported
a high incidence of mortgaging (bondok) where, in the absence
of a market for land (its increased value in the context of the
Comilla program placed it beyond the reach of open/market
i
purchase by locally richer but still 'minifundist' peasants), the
I
I
acquisition of land in mortgage from cash-hungry poor peasants
-with accompanying high rates of interest resulting in perma
nent transfers of the plot after a few years-constituted the main
I process of land accumulation. The richer peasants were in a
,
I
strong position to impose these high rates of interest, since they
controlled through their land the labor opportunities for peasants
who needed to sell their labor. Along with greater opportunities
for diversification among rich or peasant families this process
contributed to offsetting the 'cyclical kulalism,' whereby fam
ilies were supposed to decline through multiple inheritance,
allowing others to replace them in the hierarchy. 52
Thus, two 'directions' of mortgaging may appear to have
opposing implications for class formation, but only if arbitrarily
isolated from other features of the local agrarian system. Taken
in context, both reveal fonns of dependency consistent with the
terms of exchange and patterns of landholding which character
ize their respective loyalties. It is in this sense that Peter Bertoc
ci's notion of structural fragmentation is useful-not to deny
class situations, but to lead us all to specify them more clearly.
The forms of struggle that are implied vary crucially between
Nadigram and Bondokgram; for example, a campaign against
moneylending and high interest rates would make little sense to
poor peasants in Nadigram.
This example of interpreting the meaning of relationships
beyond the level of appearances applies with equal force to
tenancy. The evidence from Ihagrapur (Kushthia District) reveals
several 'class-directions' of sharecropping relationship.53 Al-
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most 40 percent of all families in Ihagrapur were reported as
sharecropping some land, but of all the land which is sharecrop
ped only one-third was cultivated by small peasants,54 since
they had no drought animals or sources of credit. Fifty percent
of sharecropped land was cultivated by sixty percent of the
middle-peasant families. Fourteen percent of the sharecropping
families in Ihagrapur were from rich peasant classes for whom
the relationship was not a necessity. The pattern of subletting
did not only involve rich landlords, since the authors found that
15 percent of all small peasants sublet some or all of their land.
To this extent, Bertocci' s caveats about the 'directions' of such
relationships are justified-but is the content of the relationship
51. Am, 1978. 54. Arens and van Beurden, 1977. See for their classification of small. middle
52. Bertocci. 1972.
and rich peasants.
53. Arens and van Beurden. 1977.
13
the same in these different cases? Small peasants who lease out
their land did so from a position of weakness-the plots were
too far away to be personally cultivated and supervised, the
small peasant was a widow (40 percent of the land involved); the
small peasant has no cash for renting a plough or animals and/or
was disabled (25 percent of the land involved). Rich landlords
who lease out land for sharecropping conform to the more
familiar pattern: they receive a 50 percent share; employ the
surplus in construction, land acquisition and moneylending; and
fail to make any investment either in the inputs on the share
cropped land or on agricultural innovations on their own land. 55
There are other micro-studies on Bangladesh which sub
stantiate such observations. 56 The problem is whether they can
be reconciled within an overall thesis, or must be left theoreti
cally (and politically) undigested. An examination of landhold
ing statistics might be suggestive but in themselves they can
neither specify the process of class formation nor, in their
aggregate form, reveal the structural fragmentation contained in
the micro-data.
The common thread both historically and spatially can be
found in the issue of rural capital formation-of central concern
both to those attempting to characterize the mode of production
in Bangladesh and to policy-makers. While Westergaard gives
much explanatory significance to usury as a constraint to the
development of productive rural capital, the work of Atiqur
Rahman qualifies this perspective on the basis of survey ma
terial both from Comilla and Phulpur Thana in Mymensingh
District in 1975.
57
(According to the BARC (1978) Survey,
Comilla Kotwali thana had 26.6 percent landless, 12. I percent
sharecroppers, 54.6 percent owner-cultivator and 6.7 percent
'big farmers'; and the respective figures for Phulpur was 41.7
percent, 23.2 percent, 26.6 percent, and 8.5 percent.) His main
observation for both areas was that landlords did not have
significant credit relations with tenants, and that usury income
to landlords was much smaller than that derived from rental
income so that increases in rental shares were more significant
than raising interest rates in appropriating the surplus from
labor. Moreover, there was little participation by landlords in
input-sharing with their tenants, and when tenants did innovate,
the share arrangement was replaced by a fixed rent which left the
tenant bearing all the risk. Credit from other non-institutional
sources-rich peasants, relatives, friends-was not always
linked to land mortgage arrangements, but it was observed that
the' 'rate of return on moneylending in unorganized rural credit
market was, in many cases, higher than returns from productive
investment. "58 In addition to the motive of lending in order to
appropriate mortgaged land, Rahman suggested three other
reasons: to ensure the reproduction of debtors' labor, to ensure
55. Arens and van Beurden,pp. 106-107, 123, and passim.
56. For a bibliography, see C. Pray and Chitrita Abdullah ... A Select Biblio
graphy on Agricultural Economis and Rural Development with Special Refer
ence to Bangladesh," Supplement II. BARC, No.8. March 1980.
57. A Bhaduri, "A Study of Agricultural Backwardness under Semi
Feudalism" in Economic Journal. vol. 83, No. I, 1973: H. P. Prasad, "Reac
tionary Role of Usurer's Capital in Rural India" in Economic and Political
Weekly. Vol. IX, Nos. 32-34, Special Number, 1974, pp. 1305-1308;
Westergaard, 1978: Rahman, 1980.
58. Rahman, 1980, p. 52.
the supply of labor to creditors when demanded and to maintain
cohesion among the creditors' local political factions. On the
basis of the landholding variation between Comilla and Phul
pur, one would expect Rahman's landlord-tenant explanations
of constraints to rural capital formation to have more relevance
to Phulpur and the labor-securing motives for lending to apply
more closely to Comilla. If so, then Rahman's findings would
constitute a microcosm of the general thesis concerning regional
variations in the forms of antediluvian rural capital in
Bangladesh.
Mahabub Hossain reinforces this theme about the de
pressed rate of rural capital formation in his argument for land
redistribution in Bangladesh. He maintains that although the
marginal rate of saving is higher for the large landowner, the
savings are not employed for productive purposes.
In the Bangladesh case a common finding is that a large
portion ofthe surplus ofthe rich basically finances the deficit
ofthe poor, through land purchases and sales and pro I'is ion
of consumption loans. Also the better off families use a
portion of their surplus for conspicuous consumption like
expenditure on social ceremonies and construction of
houses, andfor investment in trade and business. 59
This description by Hossain hints additionally at a crucial
feature of class relations in Bangladesh. With the rapid rise in
landless rural population and the relentless process of pauper
ization for many other poor peasant classes either through us
ury, changes in tenancy arrangements, the availability of land to
lease and distress sales of goods and land, the obvious question
to ask is why rural Bangladesh does not burst asunder in or
ganized revolution or chaotic anarchy. The structural fragmen
tation of class relations perhaps accounts for the absence of
revolutionary struggle since localized conditions have gener
ated localized and narrow forms of class struggle around crop
share and wage disputes. That is, the form ofimmiseration is not
universal. But why not chaos? The post-liberation State in
Bangladesh has not been effective in maintaining rural law and
order either in its repressive or ideological forms; and it has
certainly been unable to guarantee the rights to property and
work of vulnerable classes. Indeed there have been times when
the State had no contribution at all to make toward securing
peace; under a rural petty bourgeois order-such as the 'period
after the floods of 1974 through the subsequent famine to Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman's death in August 1975.
Such rural stability as exists under these conditions of
differentiation has been maintained through vertical. segmen
tary alliances in the form of extended families and lineages in
which the poor households are pauperized through unrepayable
loans but finally cushioned against destitution. The typical
result is servile bondage for some household members (mostly
children and adult females) while others (adult males) must
migrate on a long and short-term basis in search for employment
at wage levels sufficient for their own subsistence but not for
reproduction. Vertical kinship relationships of this sort are often
described as factions and their existence cited to deny the
existence of class relations. But such dependency relationships
59. Hossain, 1980. pp. 70-93. The quote is from page 82.
14
in their different expressions all over Bangladesh are precisely
evidence of pre-capitalist, localized relations of real appropria
tion which, until recently, at least have provided a means for
responding to the imperative of securing a supply of labor
during peak periods of demand through localized institutions of
either debt or tenancy. While it would be wrong to deny an
element of compassion among family members of different
class positions, it is equally unwise to become trapped in the
ideology of 'cultural solidarity' in Bangladeshi rural life.
Bengali Muslim peasants are not falsely conscious, but some
anthropologists, with their fanciful notions of a moral commun
ity, are! The participation of landlords and rich peasant money
lenders in the maintenance of rural order is a pragmatic, struc
tural rather than ethical imperative.
Conclusion
By considering the pre-liberation history of Bangladesh
and drawing attention to its extended experience of imperialism
up to 197 I (at least) this paper has argued that in general, rural
class relations have been characterized by the use of capital in
the sphere of exchange rather than production which has effec
tively raised the level of absolute surplus value accruing to
certain classes, but which is not currently contributing to the
generation of productive agricultural capital and the real sub
sumption of labor under capital. Secondly, it has argued that this
failure to develop productive agricultural capital resulted in a
form of polarization during the sixties and seventies which
involved a dramatic rise both in the numbers of landless and the
levels of rural unemployment, thereby creating a problem of
effective demand. That process also entailed a decline of middle
peasant categories where the marginal rate of saving is highest
and most likely to be diverted into capital formation.
Thirdly, the precise forms of this pre-capitalist capital
(antediluvian) have been structured by a host of particular and
regional conditions, too numerous to discuss separately here,
but including soil fertility, structure and elevation, flood vul
nerability, drainage and waterlogging, rainfall, temperature,
population density and composition, cropping systems, patterns
of livestock ownership, and migrant settlers on marginal land.
These historical and other variables have been responsible for a
fragmentation in class relations typified by regional variations
in the incidence offormal tenancy, the use of non-family labor,
productivity, land values, nature of indebtedness, patterns of
migration, scale and direction of diversification from agricul
ture, family size and lineage structures, and receptivity to vari
ous forms of technology having different capital-labor ratios.
The picture which emerges, though not fully documented
here, is that the North and the West have more landlords,
sharecroppers and landless laborers than in the East; that land
lords may have better access to inputs than owner-cultivators
but cultivate intens;vely on small proportions of their land; that
sharecroppers and owner-cultivators are being slowly dispos
sessed of their land, or in the case of sharecroppers, are being
forced to cultivate higher proportions of marginal, less produc
tive land in their holdings. The holdings of poorer classes are
fragmenting and they are increasingly mortgaged, eventually
transferred or sold as those classes descend the downward
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spiral. This process is accompanied by some concentration and
polarization as this land is being transferred to other classes
which are either rising or managing to offset the effects of
fragmenting their holdings for multiple inheritance through this
land acquisition. * 15
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17
Who Works, Who Eats?
By James K. Boyce and Betsy Hartmann
One evening, shortly before our departure from Katni,
Bangladesh, we sat talking with our neighbor Aktar Ali. The
conversation turned to our writing plans, and he asked if we had
chosen a title for our book. "You need something that will catch
the eye," he advised us. "Something that will make a person
stop and think." He furrowed his brow in concentration, and a
stream of beautiful Bengali titles came pouring forth. One of
them-"Who works, who eats?" cut to the very heart of the
relation between rich and poor in rural Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is often described as "a land of small farm
ers," but in Katni we learned that the reality of the villages is
more complex. True, the average farm size is about two acres,
but this average conceals wide disparities. A 1979 study com
missioned by the United States Agency for International De
velopment (AID) reveals that fewer than 10 percent of Bang
ladesh's rural households own more than half of the country's
cultivable land. Meanwhile 60 percent of rural families own less
than 10 percent of the land. Almost one-third own no cultivable
land at all. 1
Based on their different relationships to the land, the vil
lagers of Bangladesh fall into five basic classes:
-Landlords do not work on the land themselves, except
sometimes to supervise their workers. Instead they hire labor or
let out land to sharecroppers.
-Rich peasants work in the fields but have more land than
they can cultivate alone. They gain most of their income from
lands they cultivate with hired labor or sharecroppers.
-Middle peasants come closest to our image of the self
sufficient small farmer. They earn their livings mainly by work
ing their own land, though at times they may work for others or
hire others to work for them.
-Poor peasants own a little land, but not enough to
support themselves. They earn their livings mainly by working
as sharecroppers or wage laborers.
I. F. Tomasson Jannuzi and James T. Peach. "Bangladesh: A Profile of the
Countryside." United States Agency for International Development April
1979, Table E-U. See also the original Jannuzi and Peach study. "Report on the
Hierarchy of Interests in Land in Bangladesh," USAID. September 1977.
Pointing to the difficulties of collecting reliable data. the authors of the study
note that their figures probably underestimate the actual extent of landlessness
and the true level of concentration of landownership.
-Landless laborers own no land except for their house
sites, and sometimes not even that. Lacking draft animals and
agricultural implements, they seldom can work as sharecrop
pers and must depend on wages for their livelihoods.
Bangladesh's land ownership pattern does much to de
termine who works and who eats. A study for the International
Labor Organization (lLO) reports that Bangladesh's landless
laborers consume only 78 percent as much grain (let alone
fruits, vegetables and meat) as those who own more than seven
and one-half acres of land. Yet the same study notes that
landless laborers "probably require at least 40 percent more
calories" than the large landowners, *because they work harder. 2
The small minority of families who own over half the
country's farmland are, in the words of the AID study's authors,
, 'at the apex of the structure of rural power in Bangladesh. ' '
3
Land is the key to their power, power which in tum brings
control over other food-producing resources such as irrigation
facilities and fertilizer, which are often heavily subsidized by
the government. Similarly, large landowners often have access
to credit on favorable terms. Landlords in Katni's vicinity, for
example, can receive low interest loans from a government
owned bank in the nearby town of Lalganj. Their land serves as
collateral, and they know how to deal with Bank officials: how
to fill out the necessary forms, and when to propose a snack at
the nearest tea stall. But when a poor man needs credit, he must
borrow from a moneylender at high interest rates or mortgage
his land, losing the right to cultivate it until he repays the loan.
Not surprisingly, the village moneylender is often the same
large landowner who receives low interest government loans. 4
* In this study the term "large landowner" is sometimes used to refer to
landlords and rich peasants, and the term "small farmer" to refer to middle
peasants and poor peasants.
2. Azizur Rahman Khan, "Poverty and Inequality in Rural Bangladesh," in
Poverty and Landlessness in Rural Asia (Geneva: ILO, 1977) p. 142.
3. Jannuzi and Peach, 1977, p. 70.
4. Commenting on the Bangladesh government's latest rural credit scheme, the
World Bank notes: "As usual for such programs, the small farmers demon
strated a better repayment record but did not get a large share of the credit
olltlays." (emphasis added) World Bank. Bangladesh: Current Trends and
Development Issues, March 1979, p. 3.
18
Even the government's agricultural extension agents, who
are supposed to teach improved farming techniques to the peas
ants, in practice usually serve the rural elite. A month after our
arri val in Katni, an excited band of village children ran to tell us
that a "foreigner" had come to visit. It turned out to be the local
agricultural extension agent. No one in the village had ever seen
him before, and his immaculate white clothing and upper-class
accent had convinced the children that he was not a Bengali. The
extension agent had heard about us, and curiosity had prompted
his first (and probably last) visit to Katni. He told us that he
spent most of his time in Lalganj town, but toured
the union* on his bicycle. When we asked what he dId on these
excursions, he explained that his main task was to apportion a
quota of subsidized fertilizer among the largest landowners of
the union.
Siphoning the Surplus
Just as Bangladesh is often described as a land of small
farmers, so the country's agriculture is sometimes referred to as
"subsistence farming." The implicaton is that the peasants
grow just enough food to meet their own needs, with little left
over for anyone else. Once again, the reality is more complex.
Much of the wealth created in Bangladesh's fields flows into the
hands of large landowners, merchants and moneylenders. The
plight of the country's poor majority is intimately tied to the
ways in which this "surplus" is siphoned and used.
Some of the surplus is siphoned via trade and moneylend
ing, through the markets for cash crops, consumer goods and
credit. 5 In the production process surplus is siphoned from poor
peasants and landless laborers via the two mechanisms of share
cropping and wage labor. According to the AID land survey,
"Most of the cultivable land in Bangladesh is not tilled by
owners ofthe land. "6 Sharecroppers cultivate about a quarter of
Bangladesh's farmland; wage laborers apparently cultivate an
even larger percentage. 7
Sharecropping is most widespread in the northwest, where
Katni is located. For example, Nafis, a landlord who together
with his younger brothers owns 60 acres of land in Katni's
vicinity, cultivates three-fourths of this land by means of share
croppers and the remaining fourth with hired labor. The land
owner and the sharecropper generally split the crop equally, but
in some distric!s the landowner takes two-thirds.
8
In Katni the
costs of seed and fertilizer are usually deducted before the
* For administrative purposes, Bangladesh is divided into roughly 4000
unions, each comprising about 15 villages.
5. For more on the dynamics of exploitation through the market. see Betsy
Hartmann and James Boyce. Needless Hunger: Voice from a Bangladesh
Village (California: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1979) pp.
22-26, and Boyce and Hartmann. "Bangladesh Market: Pyramid of Power."
Food Monitor, March/April 1979.
6. Jannuzi and Peach, 1977, p. 45.
7. Precise data on the amount of land cultivated by wage labor is lacking; its
measurement complicated by the mixture of wage labor and family labor on rich
and middle peasant holdings. Jannuzi and Peach (1977) report that only 10.5
percent of Bangladesh's cultivable acreage is tilled "exclusively with family
labor." Ibid .. p. 6.
8. This is said to be typical in Barisal District. Ibid .. p. 45.
Photo: Hartmann/Boyce
division of the crop, but the AID study reports that in most cases
the sharecropper bears these costs alone.
9
Katni's middle peasants speak disparagingly of sharecrop
ping. "Why should I bother to sharecrop?" says Mofis, who
farms two acres of his own land. "My share would barely cover
my costs." Mofis differs from his poor neighbors, however, in
that he owns enough land to keep himself busy, To sharecrop
additional land, he would need to hire laborers, and their wages,
in addition to the costs of seed and fertilizer and the landowner's
share of the crop, would leave him with little or no profit.
Poor peasants, on the other hand, generally prefer share
cropping to the alternati ve of wage labor. The rewards of share
cropping may be meager, but the rewards of wage labor are even
less. The rich peasant Kamal estimates that hired laborers cost
him only a quarter to a third of his crop, whereas a sharecropper
receives one-half. The standard wage for male laborers in Katni
is about 33 U.S. cents per day; women laborers who process the
crops earn even less. Sharecropping not only pays better than
wage labor, but also offers more security. The sharecropper is in
effect hired by season. Although he has no permanent claim to
9. Jannuzi and Peach (1977) report that less than one percent of Bangladesh's
landowners supply any agricultural inputs to their tenants (Ibid., Table D-VIII),
but other studies report that landowners do often share in input costs (see M.
Raquibuz Zaman, "Sharecropping and Economic Efficiency in Bangladesh,"
Bangladesh Economic Review, vol. I, no. 2, April 1973).
19
the land, at least he doesn't face the uncertainties of the wage
laborer, whose plight was summed up by Dalim: "I can't say
today where I'll work tomorrow. "
Sharecropping does have its drawbacks, however. The
sharecropper needs oxen and plow, and he pays dearly if he
must rent them. He cannot reap the rewards of his labor until the
harvest, and in the meantime he may have to borrow money to
feed his family. If his crop is damaged by floods, drought or
pests, the sharecropper might end up earning even less than a
wage laborer. The costs and risks of sharecropping, and the
delayed rewards, make it almost impossible for the totally
landless families of Katni to sharecrop. Instead, they earn their
living by wage labor.
Bangladesh's land ownership pattern does much to
determine who works and who eats. A study for the
International Labor Organization (ILO) reports that
Bangladesh's landless laborers consume only 78 per
cent as much grain (let alone fruits, vegetables and
meat) as those who own more than seven and one-half
acres of land. Yet the same study notes that landless
laborers "probably require at least 40 percent more
calories" than the large landowners, because they
work harder.
The number and proportion of landless laborers in Bang
ladesh has grown tremendously in the last 30 years. According
to the previously cited ILO study, the number of landless labor
ers more than doubled between 1951 and 1966. Much of this
increase was due to small farmers losing their lands: overall the
country's population grew by less than 50 percent. Landless
laborers rose from 14.3 percent of total cultivators in 1951 to
19.8 percent in 1967-68.
10
Ten years later, in 1977-78, the
detailed AID land survey found that 28.8 percent of the house
holds in rural Bangladesh owned no cultivable land. I I The
dramatic growth in landlessness has not been matched by a rise
in employment opportunities, and as a result real wages for
agricuiturallaborers have declined. 12 During the high rice prices
of 1974, agricultural wages fell to less than two-thirds of their
19631evel.
13
10. Data on landlessness from Khan. op. cit.. p. 156. Overall population
growth from the World Bank. Ban/?Iadesh: Development in a Rural Economy.
Vol. II. Statistical Appendix. July 31. 1974. Table I. I.
II. Jannuzi and Peach. 1979. Tables E-II and E-IV.
I:!. From 1960-76 rural population grew at approximately 2.6 percent annually
(and landlessness grew more rapidly); meanwhile labor demand in crop produc
tion is estimated to have grown at an annual rate of only 1.2 percent. World
Bank. Ban/?Iadesh: Current Trends and Development Issues. March 1979, p. 38.
13. Khan, op. cit .. p. 151; also Edward J. Clay, "Institutional Change and
Agricultural Wages in Bangladesh," Bangladesh Development Studies. No
vember 1976.
In Katni a day's work earns two pounds of rice, one taka*
and a morning meal. The laborer Dalim explains: "With that
taka I used to be able to buy two more pounds of rice, with a
little left over for oil, chilis and salt. But today one taka won't
even buy a single pound of rice. Employers used to give their
workers a few free vegetables when they went home in the
evening, but nowadays they aren't so generous. I tell you, times
are getting harder for men like me. "
The morning meal gives the laborer strength to work all
day in the fields, but as wages decline so does the quality of the
meal. Aktar Ali recalls, "In the old days, when I had so much
land that I needed to hire laborers, I gave them all they could
eat-rice, dal** and curry." Today the standard meal consists
of a carefully measured pound of rice, with salt, a green chili
and perhaps a spoonful of dal.
At times of peak agricultural activity-the weeding of the
spring rice, the transplanting of the rainy season rice, and the
rice and jute harvests-wages for hired laborers sometimes rise
slightly. Strong young men like Dalim will often work on a
contract basis, agreeing for example to harvest an acre of rice for
a set fee. The faster he works, the more the laborer earns in a
day. Dalim likes being able to set his own pace, a freedom
normally restricted to those who till their own land. "If the sun
gets too hot," he explains, "I just head home for a rest!"
During the slack seasons, however, many landless laborers
face unemployment. Some tum to petty trade, buying vege
tables in the villages and selling them at the local markets or in
the Lalganj bazaar. In the dry winter season, the younger men
sometimes find work at a nearby brickworks or at construction
sites in Lalganj, but we often heard the complaint, "No work,
no rice."
"Today I've gone to three villages looking for work,"
Ameerul, a landless laborer, told us one morning. "I found
nothing. No work means no rice. Yesterday I couldn't find
work, and I ate nothing all day. Finally in the afternoon I ripped
three bamboo poles out of the wall of my house, chopped them
up and sold them in town as firewood. With the money I bought
three pounds of wheat flour. I had half a taka left over, so I
bought a cup of tea and a handful of puffed rice. Last night we
ate the flour. I have six mouths to feed. Even when I find work, I
only earn two pounds of rice and one taka. Two pounds of rice
won't even fill the stomachs of two people-for six it's
nothing. And what can you buy today with one taka? Each day I
ask myself: How will I live? How will my chidren live?"
As wages decline, large landowners find it more profitable
to cultivate with hired labor than by means of sharecroppers.
The landlords and rich peasants in Katni's vicinity are shifting
more and more land to wage labor, but the change is slow. It
takes time and effort to manage a workforce of hired laborers,
whereas with sharecroppers the landowner's only concern is to
collect his half of the crop at harvest time. If he cultivates with
wage labor, the landowner assumes all the risks; in a bad year he
could conceivably lose money. Moreover, landowners often
* Approximately 16 taka = $1 U.S.
** Dal. a lentil sauce, is the main source of protein for most of South Asia's
peasants.
20
I
I
Photo: Hartmann/Boyce
rely on their sharecroppers for political support, and many are
reluctant to break the economic ties which ensure their clients'
loyalty.
These considerations slow the shift from sharecropping to
wage labor, but they do not prevent it. In some areas of Bang
ladesh and in other countries, this change has been associated
with the "green revolution"-the introduction of new crop
varieties which are highly responsive to fertilizer and irriga
tion-which by raising yields also makes wage labor more
attractive to the landowner than sharecropping.14 In Katni,
however, the green revolution has had little impact. The main
reason for the shift to hired labor is not that yields are going up,
but rather that wages are going down.
Although Bangladesh's poor peasants and landless labor
ers devote most of their lives to growing and processing food,
their labor does not fill their stomachs. They are caught on an
economic treadmill: no matter how hard they run, they keep
14. Examples of displacement of sharecroppers and reductions in crop share
may be found in Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins. Food First: Beyond
{he Myth ofScarcity. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. pp. 125-129.
21
I
!
i
slipping backwards. The siphoning of the surplus makes it
virtually impossible for them to save enough money to buy land
of their own. Instead, unemployment and illness often force I
them to part with their few meager possessions. The poor
t
peasant Abu cuts down his young jackfruit tree to sell as fire
!
wood; his wife Sharifa sells her gold wedding nosepin in order
to buy food for their children. In the lean season before the
harvest, they sell their rice, still standing in the fields, to the
I
local moneylender at half the market price. They mortgage their
tiny plots of land to the landlord Mahmud Hazi, hoping that
someday they will save enough money to reclaim them. Mean
while Ameerul, who has no land to mortgage or sell, rips apart
his house to sell the bamboo as firewood. Each of these painful,
humiliating actions, born of desperation, brings the family a
step closer to utter destitution.
Occasionally the anguish of the poor explodes into rage. A
few miles from Katni, there lived a landlord who was notorious
for squeezing as much as he could from his sharecroppers. One
day, when he went to a sharecropper's home to harass him about
an overdue loan, the sharecropper grabbed a hoe and killed him
with a blow to the head. We asked the peasant Husain, who
brought us this news, what he thought about the landlord's fate.
"Allah will judge him, " he shrugged. "The murderer? He will
go to jail. But a dead man is a dead man, after all."
The continual transfer of wealth brings hunger to Bang
ladesh's poor majority and slow starvation to the poorest. What
is bought at this terrible price? If the surplus were used produc
tively, the suffering of the poor might not be entirely in vain.
After all, any society must generate some surplus for investment
if the economy is to grow. But little of the surplus which passes
into the hands of Bangladesh's large landowners, merchants and
moneylenders is invested productively. Luxury consumption
absorbs much of it; the landlord Nafis, for example, bought a
new Japanese motorcycle while we were in Katni, paying more
than a laborer working on his land would earn in twenty years.
Apart from buying land, the rural elite is seldom
enthusiastic about investing in agriculture. Large
landowners do not mind reaping the benefits of gov
ernment subsidies on fertilizer and irrigation, but they
are reluctant to invest their own money in land im
provements. Farming, after all, is a difficult and risky
business. Trade and moneylending, both of which
leave the production process untouched, otTer easier,
safer and more lucrative avenues for investment.
The rural elite uses some of the surplus to buy more land,
but this is simply a transfer of resources which adds nothing to
the nation's productive base. Many of these transfers are from
hard pressed small farmers-poor and middle peasants. One
study, based on sample surveys in 14 of Bangladesh's 19 dis
tricts, found that peasants who own less than one acre sell half of
their remaining land every year. IS The result is a vicious spiral:
by recycling surplus into the purchase of land from small farm
ers, the rural elite is able to extract even more surplus in the
future. An ILO study reports that in rural Bangladesh between
1964 and 1975, "a minority improved their standard of living
while the great majority became even further impoverished. "16
In the absence of significant social change, this trend is likely to
continue. A 1978 memorandum by AID's Dacca mission pre
dicts that by the tum of the century, "the majority of the rural
population will be functionally landless," while the class of
"owner managers" who cultivate by means of hired labor will
grow rapidly. 17
Apart from buying land, the rural elite is seldom enthus
iastic about investing in agriculture. Large landowners do not
mind reaping the benefits of government subsidies on fertilizer
15. Cited in Khan. op. cit.. p. 159. On land sales. see also M. Rezaul Karim.
"Land Transactions in a Comilla Village." Journal ofthe Bangladesh Academy
of Rural Development. July 1976. cited in Khan. p. 421; and Rizwanul Islam.
"What Has Been Happening to Rural Income Distribution in Bangladesh?"
Development and Change. vol. 10. no. 3. July 1979. pp. 385-401.
16. Khan. op. cit .. p. 153.
17. USAID Mission to Bangladesh. "AID Development Strategy for Bang
ladesh." January 1978. for submission to a meeting in Washington, D.C., Feb.
6-7. 1978.
and irrigation, but they are reluctant to invest their own money
in land improvements. Farming, after all, is a difficult and risky
business. Trade and moneylending, both of which leave the
production process untouched, offer easier, safer and more
lucrative avenues for investment. Little surplus is mobilized for
investment elsewhere in the nation's economy through taxation
or savings. The government is reluctant to tax the large land
owners for fear of losing their political support, and the interest
paid on savings deposits at the local bank does not compare
favorably with the profits to be made in trade and moneylend
ing. Most of the surplus squeezed from Bangladesh's peasants is
thus dissipated on luxuries, or else recycled into land accumula
tion, commerce and usury. IS
The Inefficiency of Inequality
Bangladesh's landownership pattern not only determines
who will have enough to eat, but also affects how much food the
country produces. The squandering of the surplus-wealth
which could potentially be used to finance development-is
one side of what has been termed the "inefficiency of in
equality. "19 The other is the chronic underutilization of existing
resources: land, labor and water.
Several studies indicate that in Bangladesh, as in many
countries, small farms have per acre crop yields equal to or
higher than those of larger farms. A study based on farm level
data from Mymensingh and Dinajpur Districts found that the
value of agricultural output per acre declined steadily as farm
size rose. Per acre output on small farms (up to two acres) was at
least 75 percent higher than on large farms (over 7.5 acres). 20
As one report observes, "This may be considered remarkable in
view of the heavy discrimination against marginal farmers as far
as distribution of modem inputs is concerned. "21 Even though
they reap the advantages of subsidized fertilizer, irrigation and
credit, Bangladesh's large landowners still don't outproduce
their smaller neighbors!
18. A study of rural capital formation, based on farm level data from samples in
Comilla and Mymensingh Districts, found that large owners (with more than 7.5
acres) devote 12-18 percent of their surplus to productive investment in ag
riculture, whereas small owners (with less than 2.5 acres) devote 51-64 percent
of their surplus to such investment. Atiqur Rahman, "Agrarian Structure and
Capital Formation: A Study of Bangladesh Agriculture." Ph.D. thesis, Cam
bridge University, England, 1979, cited in MahabubHossain, "Desirability and
Feasibility of Land Reform in Bangladesh," The Journal of Social Studies
(Dacca), No.8. April 1980, p. 83.
19. Lappe and Collins, op. cit., pp. 164 ff.
20. A study based on farm level data from Mymensingh and Dinajpur Districts
found that the value of agricultural output on small farms (up to two acres) was at
least 75 percent higher than on large farms (over 7.5 acres). Mahabub Hossain,
"Farm Size, Tenancy and Land Productivity: An Analysis of Farm Level Data
in Bangladesh Agriculture," The Bangladesh Development Studies. vol. 5, no.
3, July 1977, pp. 285-348. Data are reproduced in Hossain's "Desirability and
Feasibility of Land Reform in Bangladesh," The Journal of Social Studies
(Dacca), no. 8, April 1980, pp. 70-93. Other studies are cited by Abu Abdullah,
"Land Reform and Agrarian Change in Bangladesh," The Bangladesh De
velopment Studies. vol. IV, no. I, January 1976, p. 96. For examples from other
countries, see R.Albert Berry and William R.Cline, Agrarian Structure and
Productivity in Developing Countries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press. 1979).
2 I. International Technical Assistance Department. Netherlands Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, Bangladesh: Rural development in four thanas in Kushtia
District. February 1978, p. 38.
22
The reasons for this are not hard to fathom. Large land
owners like Nafis tend to cultivate their lands less intensively
than small owners. The small landowning peasant, who tills the
soil with his own hands, knows that his work determines how
much he and his family will have to eat. He invests more labor in
his agriculture, striving to use every bit ofland and every drop of
available water to its utmost. His extra yields derive mainly
from the intensity of his and his family's labor. 22 The additional
(or "marginal") returns to each extra hour of labor are small,
but the effort makes sense when the alternative is unemploy
ment. The small farmers' more intensive labor is coupled with
more intensive use of the land: their cropping intensity (number
of crops per year) often exceeds that of larger landowners. 23
The sharecroppers and wage laborers who till the large
farmers' land have less incentive than the small farmer. The
sharecropper saves his extra effort for the little land he owns
himself. 24 He has less incentive to invest in agricultural inputs
for the sharecropped land, not only because the landowner will
reap half the benefits, but also because next year the sharecrop
per himself may not be around to enjoy the returns to his
investment. Large landowners frequently change sharecroppers
or shuffle them from one plot to another. The AID land survey
found that more than 70 percent of Bangladesh's sharecroppers
have cultivated their tenant lands for three years or less, leading
the authors to conclude: "It may be reasonably assumed that
with such a high turnover in tenant operated areas tenants might
be less than enthusiastic concerning the need to invest in im
provement in such land-including the use offertilizers having
residual impact in succeeding years." The study also found that
the landowners, for their part, seldom provide any inputs to their
tenants. 25
Hired laborers have even less incentive to produce than
sharecroppers: they worry about their wage, not about the land
owner's yields. Since the landowner must pay for this labor, he
uses it more sparingly than the small farmer uses his own and his
22. Hossain. op. cit., reports that small farms (up to two acres) used approxi
mately 65 percent more labor per acre than large farms (over 7.5 acres). Higher
labor inputs in small farms in other countries are also reported by Berry and
Cline. op. cit.
23. Hossain, op. cit.. found cropping intensities on small farms to be 26-30
percent higher than on large farms. Since irrigation permits a winter rice crop
and large landowners generally have preferential access to water, the spread of
irrigation may reduce or reverse this differential.
24. Several studies of Bangladesh agriculture indicate that yields on share
cropped land exceed those on owner-cultivated land. "Owner-cultivated land"
here includes. however. large holdings cultivated mainly by wage labor. The
higher yields on sharecropped land simply reflect the smaller operational hold
ing size and higher labor input of the sharecropper. When the large owner
cultivated farms are excluded, the apparent yield advantage of sharecropping
disappears. For data. see Hossain, 1977 and 1980, op. cit. Since most share
croppers in Bangladesh own some land of their own, a more relevant compari
son is possible between yields on their sharecropped land and yields on their own
land. Hossain found yields on the latter to be 9- 14 percent higher.
25. Jannuzi and Peach, 1977, pp. 43-44. Recent years have seen the emer
gence of a new form of sharecroppin!. in which rich peasants lease land on a
sharecrop basis, hoping to take advantage of both the higher yields made
possible by . 'green revolution" technology and the availability of cheap wage
lahor. Such cases clearly differ from the traditional situation in which the
sharecropper is a poor peasant. For a description of a village in Comilla District
in which the "new" form of sharecropping predominates. see John Briscoe.
"Energy Use and Social Structure in a Bangladesh Village," Population and
Development Review, vol. 5. no. 4, December 1979, pp. 615-641.
I
KAMPUCHEA
DEBATE
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Vietnam's occupation of Kampuchea
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against each other' Are national sovereignty
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Southeast Asia Chronicle staff members
I
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sary by considering some of the more
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what should be done in Kampuchea.
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Also available INDOCHINA 1980
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Three Issues with in-depth reports on the
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t
family's labor. Moreover, large landlords often disdain the
lowly task of farm management, preferring to devote their
entrepreneurial energies to more refined pursuits. The landlord
Nafis spent most of his time running a medicinal spirits shop in
Lalganj town. "Nafis understands nothing about farming,"
I
Katni's peasants told us. "He seldom even goes to the fields.
t
His workers cheat him all the time, and laugh at him behind his
back."
!
,
,
Since small farmers cultivate their land most intensively,
they also tend to make more efficient use of agricultural credit
and inputs-when they can get them. But most of these re
sources flow to the large landowners by virtue of their political
power. In areas where the green revolution has taken hold, large
landowners who farm with hired labor and have preferential
access to credit and inputs such as fertilizer, irrigation and
improved seed varieties, may outproduce their small farmer
THE
~ -
(
;
23
neighbors. In such cases, it is often argued that large farmers are
"more efficient." But if small farmers had access to the same
inputs, their yields per acre would once again probably be
higher than the large landowners', because of the extra labor
they invest in their agriculture.
Aid donors have belatedly recognized the efficiency of
small farmers, and on paper many of their agricultural projects
are now "targeted" to them. In practice, however, the political
realities of the Bangladesh countryside mean that large farmers
continue to monopolize these scarce and subsidized resources.
In Katni, for example, we saw a World Bank irrigation tubewell,
ostensibly destined for a cooperative of small farmers, wind up
in the hands of the landlord Nafis. 26 Even if by some stroke of
political magic, one could bypass the large landowners and
channel resources to poor and middle peasants, this would still
leave out the large and growing numbers of landless rural
families.
The chronic underemployment of Bangladesh's landless
and poor peasants represents a tragic waste of the country's
greatest resource: the labor of its people. Taking seasonal fluc
tuations into account, a 1977 United Nations study found that
the unemployment rate in rural Bangladsh was a staggering 42
percent. 27 Mobilized for labor intensive development projects,
the underemployed rural poor could be transformed into a pow
erful productive asset. Although labor intensive rural works
projects are frequently endorsed as a key to development in
Bangladesh, efforts to implement them run aground on hard
political realities. In 1977, rural works projects absorbed only
4-5 percent of the unemployment in the agricultural sector. 28
The projects are plagued by administrative indifference and a
lack of technical expertise, and as a result, many works fall apart
soon after completion. A 1979 report by the Swedish Interna
tional Development Authority (SIDA) estimates that 15-40
percent of all works funds "disappear on their way through the
system, appropriated partly by officials, partly by locally
elected bodies. "29 The rural poor meanwhile have no incentive
to undertake such projects on their own because they do not own
the land to be improved by their labor.
Massive underemployment also means that millions of
families cannot afford to buy basic consumer goods, and this
lack of what economists call "effective demand" is in itself a
cause of economic stagnation. Industry cannot grow without a
market, but families who can hardly afford to eat are not about to
become consumers of even basic items such as footwear and
2h. For more on Nafi's World Bank tubewell. see Hartmann and Boyce.
Needless Hunger: Voices from a Bangladesh Village. pp. 48-50. and "De
veloping Bangladesh: A Tuhewell for the Village Landlord." Food Monitor.
May/June 1978.
17. Government of Bangladesh-United Nations Development Program/Food
and Agriculture Organization Mission. "Agricultural Employment in Bang
ladesh." April 1977. cited in a cable from USAID/Dacca to USAID/Washing
ton. "Agricultural Unemployment in Bangladesh: Prospects for the Next De
cade." September 27. 1977.
28. E.J. Clay and S. Khan. "Agricultural Employment and Underemployment
in Bangladesh: The Next Decade." Working paper. mimeo. Dacca. June 1977.
cited in Stefan de Vylder and Daniel Asplund. "Contradictions and Distortions
in a Rural Economy: The Case of Bangladesh." Policy Development and
Evaluation Division. Swedish International Development Authority. 1979. p.
193.
29. De Vylder and Asplund. op. cit.. p. 198.
soap. Indeed, their lack of purchasing power may even act as a
brake on food production. Pointing to the prospect of rising
unemployment, an AID cable remarks: "These findings in tum
cast doubt upon current foodgrain production strategies, imply
ing as they do a general reduction in the level of demand." 30
The economy is trapped in a vicious circle: production stagnates
because people cannot afford to buy goods, and people cannot
buy goods because they don't have jobs.
The rural elite's stranglehold on Bangladesh's agricultural
resources thus contributes to unemployment in three ways: it
results in a lower labor intensity in crop production than would
be the case if the same land and inputs were in the hands of small
farmers; it impedes the mobilization of the poor for labor inten
sive rural works projects; and it reduces the level of demand,
leading to less production and fewer jobs. The result is an
unhappy paradox: while millions go hungry for lack of work,
labor which could be used to increase food production rests idle.
Cooperation vs. Competition
Bangladesh's landownership pattern hinders the use of
another precious agricultural resource: water. Although Bang
ladesh has vast surface and ground water resources, only 12
percent of the country's farmland is presently irrigated.
3t
An
expansion of irrigation could bring tremendous production gains
in the dry winter season. It would also insure the spring and
rainy season crops against drought, and allow earlier plantings
of these crops, reducing the risk of flood damage. Although the
taming of Bangladesh's rivers would pose formidable engineer
ing challenges, there is great potential for the construction of
dams, embankments and canals to provide irrigation, drainage
and flood control for millions of acres.
But there is a catch: the development of Bangladesh's
water resources to their full potential would require cooperative
efforts. In the words of the SIDA report, a large-scale works
program to harness the rivers and protect the lowlands from the
sea "would not only require millions and millions of manyears
of labor but also accuracy, collective responsibility, sacrifices
and sustained efforts. "32 The bitter competition for control of
land and its fragmentation into many individual holdings today
pose great difficulties for any large or even medium-scale water
development scheme. No one wants to sacrifice their precious
land to the construction of canals and irrigation channels which
will benefit others. And while Bangladesh has no shortage of
labor, its mobilization for water control projects is highly prob
lematic as long as land and political power are monopolized by
the rural rich.
Indeed, Bangladesh's landownership pattern undermines
even modest efforts to provide irrigation by means of tubewells
and low-lift pumps. Nafis's World Bank tubewell, for example,
has the capacity to irrigate 60 acres, but not even Nafis and his
brothers own so much land in a single block. Moreover, few of
the smaller farmers who own land within the tubewell's com-
JO. Cable from US AID/Dacca to USAID/Washington. op. cit.
31 Chris Edwards. Stephen Biggs and Jon Griffith. "Irrigation in Bangladesh:
On Contradictions and Underutilized Potential." Development Studies Discus
sion Paper No. 22. University of East Anglia. February 1978.
32. De Vylder and Asplund. op. cit.. p. 208.
24
mand area can afford the price Nafis charges for access to the
water. The genuine cooperation needed to use such a well to its
full capacity is hard to come by so long as a few individuals
control irrigation resources for their own benefit. This helps to
explain why a 1977 survey found that the average deep tubewell
in northwestern Bangladesh irrigates only 27 acres-45 percent
of its potential command area. 33 The landownership pattern not
only blocks large-scale irrigation works; even the use of a single
tubewell is problematic!
Although village-level cooperatives exist in Bangladesh
today, they simply serve as conduits for government-supplied
resources. For example, the cooperative headed by Husain, an
enterprising middle peasant in Katni, has received several thou
sand taka in low interest government loans. The money is
distributed to the cooperative members ostensibly for agricul
tural purposes, though in practice there are few strings attached
to the loans. Cooperative members also receive subsidized
fertilizer from time to time, and they can use Husain's spray
machine if they want to apply pesticides. As secretary of the
cooperative, Husain receives a commission on each loan. Hu
sain's position as secretary also gave him the necessary personal
contacts to obtain a loan for a shallow tubewell from a Lalganj
bank.
The 31 members of Husain's cooperative include a land
lord and merchant from a nearby village, Katni's two rich
peasants, a number of Husain's middle peasant relatives, and a
few rich and middle peasants from adjoining villages. Only two
of the 31 are poor peasants: Husain's brother, Alam, and his
brother-in-law, Talep. There are no landless laborers in the
cooperative, for as Husain explains, "They have no worth,"
meaning no land to put up as collateral.
On several occasions we met a man named Shah, who lived
in a village beyond the local Ketupur market. He was involved
in numerous cooperative schemes, and had a reputation as a
"first class crook. " Husain and his brother Aktar Ali neverthe
less voted for him in a board election at the Lalganj cooperative
bank. Aktar Ali explained, "If someone from another area
wins, that place will receive more loans. " Shah lost by a narrow
margin and claimed that the bank officials had cheated him.
Husain seldom talked about the rather mysterious inner
workings of the coperative system, but on one occasion he ran
into difficulties and confided in us. A new manager had been
appointed at the bank, and when Husain refused to bribe him,
the manager withheld authorization for a loan to his coopera
tive. Husain told us, "I am a KrishakSamiti* man-I don't pay
bribes!" He threatened to bring a lawsuit against the manager,
and boasted that the clerks at the bank, with whom he was
friendly, had gone on strike in his support. In the.end he brought
his politically influential friend, the Lalganj lawyer Khaled, to a
meeting with the bank manager. The manager backed down and
agreed to the loan. Husain had scored a victory.
* Husain's Krishak Samiti (Peasants' Society) was the peasant organization of
his party, the Moscow-oriented NAP-Muzaffar.
33. M.A. Hamid, "A Study of the BADC Deep Tubewell Programme in the
Northwestern Region of Bangladesh." Department of Economics, University
of Rajshahi. Rajshahi. Bangladesh. November 1977. pp. 29. 64.
The best-known cooperative experiment in Bangladesh
was carried out at the Bangladesh (formerly Pakistan) Academy
for Rural Development in Comilla. Founded in 1959, the
Academy introduced credit cooperatives to Comilla Kotwali
thana** in the 1960s. The village cooperatives, linked by a
thana federation, were intended to mobilize savings, but in
practice they served mainly as channels for a large infusion of
subsidized resources: credit, irrigation pumps, fertilizer, im
proved seeds, pesticides and agricultural extension services.
Crop yields registered impressive gains. At first, small and large
farmers alike benefited from the cooperatives, although the
landless were excluded. The larger farmers were in fact slow to
join because they were, in the words of one observer, "more
interested in the quick returns of moneylending than in the slow
process of increasing yields through investment in new ag
ricultural technology. "34 The Academy's founder, Akhter
Hamid Khan, explained, "Initially we worked quietly around
them. "35
If hunger in Bangladesh is man-made, then it follows
that people can also put an end to it. The key is land
reform, which could break the structural barriers to
increased agricultural production and ensure that the
poor majority shares in the benefits of development.
Whether the goal is a small farm siructure as in Japan
or Poland, or cooperative land use as in China and
Vietnam, the basic principle of land reform is the
same: those who work the land must control it.
Over time, however, as the advantages offered by the
cooperatives became more evident, control increasingly shifted
into the hands of the rural elite. At the same time, the dedicated
administrative supervision which had contributed to initial suc
cesses gradually deteriorated as the program expanded in size.
The economist Azizur Rahman Khan describes the result, "The
rich and powerful not only allocated much of the institutional
credit to themselves, but they also accounted for a dispropor
tionately large number of loan defaults. "36
In 1974, the Planning Commission of the Government of
** A thana is a local administrative unit. analogous to a county. There are 434
thanas in Bangladesh. [See Willem van Schendel's article on the "Comilla
experiment" elsewhere in this issue of the Bulletin. Editors]
34. Harry W. Blair. "Rural Development. Class Structure and Bureaucracy in
Bangladesh." World Development. vol. 6. no. I. January 1978. p. 67.
35. Akhter Hamid Khan. "The Comilla Projects-A Personal Account."
paper presented at the Development From Below Workshop (Addis Ababa:
October 1973). cited by Azizur Rahman Khan. "The Comilla Model and the
Integrated Rural Development Programme of Bangladesh: An Experiment in
'Cooperative Capitalism ... World Development. vol. 7. no. 4/5. April/May
1979. p. 398.
36. A.R. Khan. "The Comilla Model. ." pp. 412.414.
25
Bangladesh declared that the cooperatives had turned into
"closed clubs of kulaks, "37 a reference to the rich peasants of
nineteenth century Russia. Nevertheless, the Comilla model is
being extended under the government's Integrated Rural De
velopment Programme (lRDP): by mid-1978 more than 25,000
cooperatives had been established in 250 of Bangladesh's 434
thanas. The flaws of the Comilla pattern have been repeated on
a grander scale, leading a Bangladeshi researcher to conclude,
"The benefits of the IRDP cooperatives, if there be any, have
largely gone into the pockets of the big farmers. "38 In addition,
a sizeable share of the IRDP budget provides office buildings,
housing and vehicles for a growing army of government offi
cials.
39
Instead of encouraging peasants to work together, Bang
ladesh's official cooperatives simply funnel outside resources
into the village. Not surprisingly, the cooperati ves have become
"institutions for competition rather than for coopera
tion. "40 They do not challenge the rural elite's stranglehold on
the country's agriculture; on the contrary, they very often re
inforce it.
Rural Bangladesh is a scene of relentless struggles, pitting
villager against villager. Above all, villagers compete for con
trol of land. To the poor man, land means the ability to reap the
rewards of his own labor. To the rich man, land means the
ability to profit from the labor of others. The competition is
unequal, with winners and losers largely determined in ad
vance. Those who command land, resources and markets pros
per, while those who have only their labor to sell slowly waste
until they die. Those in the middle enjoy a certain amount of
mobility. A few aggressive individuals, like Husain, may man
age to rise in the economic hierarchy. But for each middle
peasant who rises, many others fall.
Yet the notion of cooperation is by no means alien to the
peasants of Katni. They cite a Bengali proverb: "One bamboo
alone is weak, but many bamboos lashed together are unbreak
able. " During the plowing, transplanting, weeding and harvest
ing of the crops, the peasants often work together in informal
mutual aid groups. Five or six men may join together for a week
or two, working one day on one man's land, the next day on
another's, and so on. Such groups are mainly formed by middle
and poor peasants, but landless friends sometimes join, being
paid by whoever owns the land that is worked on a particular
day. Similarly, village women often help each other in the
processing of rice and other crops.
Aktar Ali's son Anis, who often works in mutual aid
groups, explains, "When you work alone, time passes slowly.
Working in a group, we talk and sing and the work gets done
much faster." Throughout rural Bangladesh, informal mutual
aid teams demonstrate the peasants' potential for cooperation.
But as land becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the
groups one sees working in the fields of Bangladesh are more
likely to be wage laborers employed by a large landowner.
Within the limits imposed by their poverty, most villagers
try to help one another in time of need. Sometimes the help is a
gi ft or an interest-free loan, sometimes an offer of employment.
"When we see a poor man with no work, " Aktra Ali explains,
"we try to find something for him to do." During the 1974
famine, Aktar Ali had to sell a mango tree near his house as
firewood in order to buy rice for his family. Although he could
have easily chopped the tree himself, he hired two landless
laborers to do it. "We were hungry," he recalls, "butthey were
even hungrier. "
On occasion, well-to-do landowners like Nafis help poor
villagers in times of hardship. Nafis may give rice to a poor
relation or an interest-free loan to one of his permanent laborers,
or he may provide work for some of his neighbors. But many
poor villagers echo the words of the middle peasant Jolil: "The
rich people of this country don't want to help the poor-they
want the poor to die. Last year, during the famine, a poor man
went to the landlord Mahmud Hazi and begged for food. He told
him he had not eaten in eight days. Mahmud Hazi's warehouse
was full of rice, but he replied. 'I have nothing, I can't help you.
00 away!' Two days later the man was dead."
Hunger in Bangladesh is not inevitable. In the words of a
United States Senate study, "The country is rich enough in
fertile land, water, manpower and natural gas for fertilizer not
only to be self-sufficient in food, but a food-exporter, even with
its rapidly increasing population size. "41 There is no natural
barrier to the satisfaction of the basic needs of Bangladesh's
people, but there is the man-made barrier of a landownership
pattern which is both inequitable and inefficient. The surplus
squeezed from the peasants is either squandered or used to
deepen their exploitation; the country's most basic agricultural
resources-land, labor and water-are not used to their full
potential; and cooperation is thwarted by a social order which
benefits a few at the expense of many. These are the bitter roots
of hunger in a fertile land.
What Is the Alternative?
If hunger in Bangladesh is man-made, then it follows that
people can also put an end to it. The key is land reform, which
could break the structural barriers to increased agricultural pro
duction and ensure that the poor majority shares in the benefits
of development. Whether the goal is a smalHarm structure as in
Japan or Poland, or cooperative land use as in China and
Vietnam, the basic principle of land reform is the same: those
who work the land must control it.
In Bangladesh, the need for cooperative use of the land
seems inescapable. In part, this is due to population pressure. If
a land ceiling of ten acres per family were implemented and all
excess holdings redistributed to the landless, each landless
37. Cited in de Vylder and Asplund. p. 153.
41. "World Hunger, Health and Refugee Problems: Summary of Special Study
38. M.A. Hamid. "Rural Development: What, For Whom and H o w ~ " paper Mission to Asia and the Middle East," report prepared for the Subcommittee on
presented at the Third Annual Conference of the Bangladesh Economic Associa Health, Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, and the Subcommittee on
tion,June 1977, cited in de VylderandAsplund, p. 154. Refugees and Escapees, Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate,
January 1976, p. 99.
39. See A.R. Khan, "TheComillaModel ... ," p. 146.
40. De VylderandAsplund, op. cit., p. 153.
26
family would receive less than four-tenths of an acre. A more
drastic four-acre ceiling would provide each landless and near
landless family with a total of 0.86 acre.
42
But even if such a
thorough land refonn were implemented, over time lands would
be subdivided among children, and for one reason or another
some peasants would end up selling out to others, so that
eventually a landless group would reemerge. Fragmentation of
landholdings would also continue to impede irrigation and
drainage development. Land redistribution, although necessary,
would thus not be sufficient to overcome the roots of poverty in
rural Bangladesh. Access to the land is only half the answer to
the needs of the rural poor; the other half lies in cooperative use
of the land.
Cooperation in agricultural production would enable the
peasants of Bangladesh to undertake self-help development
projects which remain impossible as long as agriculture is or
ganized on a fragmented, individual basis. Through labor
intensive construction of irrigation facilities, drainage canals
and embankments, the peasants could collectively begin to
master the forces of nature in the face of which single individu
als are powerless.
A transition to joint fanning in Bangladesh would neces
sarily pass through stages, perhaps building at first upon the
existing tradition of mutual aid groups, It would have to rely on
the peasants' own initiative-it could never be imposed upon
them. Once convinced that change was possible, the landless
and small fanners could be expected to support actively land
redistribution and the growth of agricultural cooperation, for
42. Food and Agriculture Organization, Progress in Land Reform, Rome,
1975. p. III-82, cited in Lappe and Collins. op. cit.
these would bring them improved living standards and greater
control over their lives and labor.
Rich landowners and their urban allies would no doubt be
less than enthusiastic about such changes, and force might be
necessary to break their resistance. Coercion and the violence of
state repression, as well as the more subtle violence of starva
tion, are today routine in Bangladesh. What would be extraordi
nary about any coercion involved in a social reconstruction
would not be its scale but rather that it would be employed
against the wealthy minority, instead of against the poor
majority.
Who would exercise the force necessary to bring about a basic
land refonn? Only the poor themselves, whose numbers give
them strength. The act of joining together to bring about social
change would help to set the stage for cooperation in agricultural
production itself. Industry as well as agriculture would benefit
from such a social reconstruction, since those who today are too
poor to buy consumer goods would be transfom1ed into a vast
internal market.
To suggest that the road to development in Bangladesh lies
in this direction is not to say that the Chinese or Vietnamese
"models" can or should be exactly duplicated. The people of
each country must chart their own path of development. Other
countries can provide important lessons, but not patent solu
tions. Cooperative agriculture is certainly not free of problems,
but the Chinese and Vietnamese have demonstrated that change
is not impossible and that starvation is not inevitable in densely
populated Asian countries. Bangladesh faces great challenges,
for which there are not easy answers or instant remedies. The
mobilization of the poor for land refonn and social reconstruc
tion will be a long hard task, requiring patience, dedication and
organization. *
CURRENT ISSUE #9 (1981)
Michael Burawov. "Staff' and ReI'o/lilron in South Africa: Reflections
on rhe ( omr;aralit,c Pen-pectin's of Greenberg and Skocpo/"
James O'Connor, "The Fiscal Crisis oflhe Stafe Revisiled- F:cOflOmic
Crisis and Reagan's Budgerar.}, Policy"
Colin Sumner. "The Rule of Law and Civil Righ1.\' in Contemporary Marxist Theory"
Patricia A. Morgan. "From Battered Wife (() Program Clienl: The
Slale's Shaping of Social Probfem\"
Jonas Pontussen. "Apropm Millerrcmd: Stare POI1,'t'f, CIa,\'\" CoaiitlOfI.<;, and
Electoral Poliltc.\' In PO,\'t War FnuKe"
Budley Burton, "The Polltlc,,1 Economy 0/ EnVironmentalism: Rejf(,c/lOtls
. on Ecology As Polilin by Andre Gorz"
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27
After the Limelight: Longer-Term Effects of
Rural Development in a Bangladesh Village
by Willem van Schendel
The "Comilla experiment" is by far the best-known rural
development program in Bangladesh. It started in 1959-60 as a
field project for government officials following a course in rural
development at the Academy for Village (later: Rural) Develop
ment near Comilla town. This Academy (together with its twin
in Peshawar, West Pakistan) was created in 1959 after an earlier
program for rural development, the Village Agricultural and
Industrial Development (V-AID) Program, had floundered. The
Pakistan government' and the Ford Foundation both provided
funds for the new Academy.
The Comilla Academy for Rural Development was conceived
initially by the government as a training center for public
officials responsible for rural development programs, with
the primary objective ofhelping the government officials put
to more productive use the administrative and technical skills
they already had, and ofaiding them in the acquisition ofnew
skills needed in rural development programs. Especially
needed was increased understanding ofvillage life and com
petence in the techniques of guiding constructive change.
The overall plan for the Academy was developed around the
needs of Pakistan public administration as identified by
government officials. with major advisory assistance from a
team of social scientists from Michigan State University
(MSU). (..) The director and staff of the Academy early
began to realize that if the Academy was to fulfill its basic
function of training provincial officials for developmental
activities, the trainers themselves had to learn the realities of
what villagers were up against, and that this could best be
done by themselves being actively involved in developmental
work.
2
Their first perceptible achievement was the creation of
village cooperatives in one thana, "even though the past record
of local cooperatives in the area was essentially a record of
dismal failure."3 The new cooperatives, however, were or-
I . Bangladesh was a province of Pakistan from 1947 to 1971. During this period
it was first known as East Bengal. and later as East Pakistan.
2. Arthur F. Raper, Rural Development in Action-The Comprehensive Exper
iment at Comilla. East Pakistan (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University
Press, 1970), 11-13.
3. Raper, 47. A thana is an administrative unit comparable with a county.
Earlier generations of cooperatives were set up (and failed) in the 19 lOs, the
1930s and the 1950s.
28
ganized on somewhat different lines and the program soon
included several other activities as well-family planning, rural
works and pump irrigation projects among them.
The main objectives of the Comilla program, beyond the
obvious one of providing the officials with field training in rural
development, came to be:
a) to step up agricultural production by introducing or
ganizational and technological innovations;
b) to take away obstacles to development such as in
debtedness among village cultivators and economic de
pendence on moneylenders and middlemen; and
c) to improve the precarious economic condition of the
smaller cultivators, both in absolute terms and vis avis
the bigger cultivators.
Within a few years the program became a political show
case. It was praised as the key to rural development in the whole
country, in Asia and even in the entire Third World; and some
considered it a superior counterpart to the people's communes
of China. 4 Later on, however, the program increasingly came
under attack when initial successes were not repeated. As one
observer puts it:
In all of South Asia over the almost three decades since
independence, the Comilla programme has been the most
successful ofall the schemes and projects designed to further
rural development. For a time in the early 1960s it did
promote a substantial increase in agricultural production
while at the same time insuring that the smaller farmers
participated fully. It was in all probability inevitable. how
ever, that sooner or later the realities ofrural class structure
would make themselves felt at both village and national
levels, and result in the same domination by rural elites that
has characterized all the other South Asian rural develop
ment programmes. Certainly, this is what happened. 5
By now this failure of the Comilla program to break
4. See Rene Dumont. Paysans (!Crases. terres massacrees-Equateur. Inde.
Bangladesh. Thailande. Haute-Volta (Paris: Laffont. 1978).240; Raper, 96-97:
Azizur Rahman Khan, "The Comilla Model and the Integrated Rural Develop
ment Programme of Bangladesh: An Experiment in 'Co-operative Capital
ism,' " Agrarian Systems and Rural Development. eds. Dharam Ghai et al.
(London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979), 113-114.
5. Harry W. Blair, "Rural Development, Class Structure and Bureaucracy in
Bangladesh," World Development 6: I (1978),77.
through existing patterns of power and distribution has been
well documented. The result has been that at the village level it
became an instrument in the hands of the rich.
6
Since the late
1960s rich villagers generally started controlling the village
cooperatives and related projects. A central function of the
cooperatives was to provide credit to small and medium cultiva
tors, but the domination of the village rich re-directed most of
this credit to themselves and their proteges. The cooperatives,
created to stamp out usurious moneylending by rich villagers,
instead came to be dominated by this very group. In spite of this
negative development the program was expanded to adjacent
thanas in the mid-1960s. It was renamed "Integrated Rural
Development Programme" (IRDP) and under this name it was
in the early 1970s even adopted as the major government institu
tion to bring about rural development in the entire country.
In this note I will outline the longer-tenn effects of the
Comilla program in a single village.
7
This village. Dhoneshor.
was the only one to be studied for the purpose of . 'utilization of
the up-to-date data for local planning and action" just prior to
the start of the Comilla program. 8 Dhoneshor village. inhabited
by 426 people in 1960 (and by 559 in 1978). lay at a distance of
less than a kilometer from the Academy and at a distance of
about two kilometers from the outskirts of Com ilia town. On all
sides it was surrounded by flat cultivable land on which a double
rice crop (and little else) was grown. A re-study of this village
after eighteen years afforded a unique opportunity to gauge the
impact of the program over that period. Dhoneshor was one of
I N 0 I A
Photo ofDhoneshor: van Schendel
the "original" villages in which cooperatives, the core of the
Comilla program, never were very successful. The first cooper
ative, started in 1962, soon collapsed "as a result of misman
agement and lack of interest from the members." In 1968 a new
cooperative was set up because well-to-do villagers wanted to
acquire a deep tubewell for irrigation during the dry winter
season. For this they needed the cooperative as a front; it was
never more than a paper organization and the managing commit
tee at all times consisted of the few most powerful landholders in
6. See K.M. Tipu Sultan, Problems Associated with Democratisation of Co
operatives in Bangladesh (Kotbari, Comilla: Bangladesh Academy for Rural
Development, 1974); Exploitation and the Rural Poor: A Working Paper on the
Rural Power Structure in Bangladesh. ed. M. Ameerul Hug (Kotbari, Com ilia:
Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development. 1976): and Blair.
7. Fieldwork in this village was carried out together with Aminul Hague Faraizi
and Md. Mahbubar Rahman on a grant from the Netherlands Foundation for the
Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) in 1977-1978. A more detailed
account of the village can be found in my Ph.D. thesis. "The Odds of Peasant
Life: Processes of social and economic mobility in rural Bangladesh." Univ. of
Amsterdam. 1980. [ wish to thank OUo D. van den Muijzenberg for helpful
advice on this note.
8. S.A. Qadir. Village Dhanishwar-Three Generations ofMan-Land Adjust
ment in an East Pakistan Village (Camilla: Pakistan Academy for Rural De
velopment. 1960).2.
Map l7y Willem van Schendel
29
the village. About half of the money needed to obtain the
tubewell was contributed by just one villager and he was there
fore in the position to have it installed next to his homestead, not
the best place from the point of view of irrigation. Management
of this second cooperative was poor and internal quarrels were
common. In 1976 it was reorganized to ensure a better use ofthe
tubewell, but after one fairly successful season (1976-77) the
tubewell was again idle for a long time in 1977-78 and winter
cultivation failed dismally that year.
Although cooperatives were not successful, the impact of
eighteen years of high-powered extension work was clearly felt
in Dhoneshor. The most spectacular results had been an increase
in rice production, particularly after high-yielding varieties of
rice (HYV s) were introduced in 1967, and the addition of a third
rice season with the arrival of the tubewell. By 1978 HYVs
covered about 50 percent of the total rice acreage in the village
and they yielded about twice as much as local varieties. Winter
rice covered roughly 15 percent of the village land and all of it
was HYVs.9
The early planners of the Comilla program were fairly
confident that their brand of enlightened paternalism
combined with lavish amounts of money could in time
overcome any constraints there might be.
The first objective of the Comilla program, increasing
agricultural production, was met in Dhoneshor. Clearly an
active cooperative was not a precondition to attain growth in this
field. It was technological rather than organizational innovation
which caused it. Quite contrary to its stated objectives, the
Comilla program did not improve the economic condition of the
smallest cultivators. Instead it reinforced the existing economic
polarization of households in Dhoneshor. Existing inequalities
in the village were not altered as the technological changes were
introduced, and the richest and most powerful villagers were
able to benefit most.
Before 1960 there had been a long-term tendency for
Dhoneshor as a whole to decline economically. This deteriora
tion, which probably affected all of rural Bangladesh, resulted
from a complex interplay of processes of population growth.
state formation and economic stagnation. 10 Since 1894, a per
iod for which we have reliable data for Dhoneshor, the propor
9. See Blair and A.R. Khan for information on the impact of HYVs on
productivity in Comilla district. particularly Kotwali thana. In Dhoneshor,
according to Qadir's (pp. 59-60) estimate, only 71 percent of the total paddy
yield was needed to feed the entire population in 1960. By 1978, its population
increased by 31 percent and its annual paddy yield by some 70 percent,
Dhoneshor as a whole needed only 48 percent of its yield to feed its population
However, as a result of a very unequal distribution of the yield among house
holds, an increasing proportion of the inhabitants of Dhoneshor faced starvation
during part of the year.
10. See' 'The Odds of ..." for a discussion of these processes and a compari
son of the dynamics of rural economic differentiation in three areas in Bangla
desh.
tion of rich households in the village gradually decreased, and
the average wealth per household also diminished. Thus,
whereas three out of five Dhoneshor households produced large
surpluses in 1894, by 1960 only one out of six did so. Mean
while the deterioration among the poorest households was even
more rapid. In the pre-1960 period, then, the economic polari
zation of households increased as a result of rapid pauperization
at the bottom and much slower impoverishment at the top. In
1960 almost 14 percent of the village households were unable to
provide for themselves for twelve months a year and, at the
other extreme, 16 percent produced large surpluses. (See the
Table.) After 1960 the condition of the poorest households
continued to deteriorate and their numbers increased. In 1978
households unable to provide for themselves for twelve months
accounted for 24 percent of all Dhoneshor households. How
ever, among rich households a spectacular reversal of the earlier
process occurred. After 1960 their surpluses started to increase
and so did their numbers. By 1978 households with large sur
pluses accounted for 26 percent of all households in the village.
After 1960, therefore, increasing polarization by pauperization
Table
Households by economic category, Dhoneshor village,
1960-1978 (percentages of total)
1960 1971 1978
Category A 13.6 17.4 23.6
Category B 37.0 34.8 27.8
Category C 33.3 28.3 22.7
Category D 16.1 19.5 25.9
Total 100.0 100.0 100.0
(N=81) (N=92) (N=97)
Source: fieldnotes
N.B. Category A = Households unable to provide for twelve
months at a very low standard of living.
Category B = Households just managing to provide for
twelve months at a very low standard of
living.
Category C = Households able to provide for twelve
months at a moderate standard of living
and even from one to three months in
excess.
Category D = Households able to provide for twelve
months at a comfortable standard of living
and for more than three months in excess
These categories are based on all sources of income per house
hold, not just on agricultural income. II
I I. Calculations were made on the basis of both agricultural and non-agricul
tural income. Between 1960 and 1978 the number of households increased and
cultivable land per household decreased. The median for 1960 was 1.4 acres and
the median for 1978 was 0.9 acres. The largest holding was almost 10 acres in
1960 and almost 8 acres in 1978. The surpluses of the 1960s and 1970s enabled
most well-off households to start lucrative businesses or take well-paying jobs.
Landownership as such is an even less reliable indicator of household wealth in
this thana than it was before 1960.
30
was replaced by polarization resulting from both pauperization
at the bottom and economic improvement at the top. This
sudden reversal started soon after the beginning of the Com ilia
program and then occurred in the "laboratory area" only; it can
only be ascribed to the influence of the program.
While this increased polarization meant failure from the
point of view of the Comilla program, the inhabitants of Dhone
shor were not as sharp in their criticism as some outside critics
have been. One reason for this was that the goal of greater
economic equality was given more emphasis in presentations to
outsiders than to the villagers themselves. A second reason was
that the people of Dhoneshor, whatever their economic posi
tion, continued to view the program as a government scheme
imposed upon them, not their own. In many talks with us they
stressed the fact that they were never asked in 1960 whether or
not they wanted the program in their area. Their thana was
simply selected as a "laboratory area" to test new formulae of
rural development. Although the local population (i.e. chiefly
the richer and more powerful villagers) were allowed to discuss
certain policies, mainly regarding their own village, outsiders
(government officials at the nearby Academy and foreign ad
visors) remained in control of the program. It should be real
ized, however, that many of these outsiders, particularly in the
beginning, were very eager to listen to what different groups of
villagers had to say and to act in what they considered the best
interest of these groups. But their professional optimism and the
fact that they approached the village through its "leaders"
generally led to underestimation of what they called the "con
straints of the situation. " 12 When they came across scepticism,
particularly among the poorer villagers, it was swept away as
"peasant fatalism" rooted in centuries of life with a limited
horizon. The early planners ofthe Comilla program were fairly
confident that their brand of enlightened paternalism combined
with lavish amounts of money could in time overcome any
constraints there might be.
12. One of the weaknesses of the V-AID program had been the key role of
outside "village workers," high-school graduates who generally showed a
dislike of village life and little interest in rural development. (M. Nurul Haq,
Village Development in Bangladesh (A Study ofMonagram Village), (Com ilia:
Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development, 1973). 59). As an organizational
innovation the Comilla program would only work with local people. Thus the
"cooperative organizer" and the "model farmers," and later the " manager, "
were to be elected by and from among the cooperative members. In practice
these prestigious and potentially lucrative positions were generally divided
among a few powerful villagers, often even including one or more of the
shordars, traditional village leaders. (Haq. 91-95; S.M. Hafeez Zaidi, The
Village Culture in Transition: A Stud\' ofEast Pakistan Rural Society (Honolulu:
East-West Center Press, 1970). 13R-139; Peter J. Bertocci, Elusive Villages:
Social Structure and Communi'" Organization in Rural East Pakistan (Ph.D.,
Michigan State University, 1970), 157-160; Geoffrey D. Wood, "Class Dif
ferentiation and Power in Bondokgram: The Minifundist Case," in Exploitation
and, ... 125-128).
Under the Comilla program cooperative leaders were certainly no longer
disinterested, but their interest often lay with their family or faction , not with the
cooperative. As the liaison between the village cooperative and the Academy
they were given extensive training (on the understanding that they would take
back the ideas they learned to the entire membership (Raper, 50-53)) and they
were entrusted with the weekly cash savings of the members. Since the Acad
emy's staff concentrated most of its energy on this " leadership, " it could not
sufficiently correct the over-optimistic view of cooperative achievements pro
vided by these leaders,
Those who were to benefit from the program, on the other
hand, were far more cautious. While most of them were cer
tainly interested in both higher yields and a less unequal dis
tribution, they were also far better aware of the facts of village
life and how these militated against equalization. The Comilla
program, with its empahsis on cooperatives aimed at boosting
the economic strength of the middle groups (mainly small and
medium cultivators) and at breaking their dependence on the
village rich, hardly seemed adequate. Not only were the land
less excluded from any future gains, 13 but the rich were also not
effectively barred from joining the cooperatives if they wished.
Since most Dhoneshor people from the start doubted
the capacity of the Comilla program to bring more
equality to their village, they were not so deeply dis
appointed when the utopia promised by the officials
did not materialize. Many of the cooperative members
soon lost interest and quietly retreated even before the
adverse effects of the program became clear; some
others considered the personal gain of the program
sufficient to continue their participation.
Despite these basic weaknesses the program did not meet
with an outright boycott in Dhoneshor, although at first the
richest people felt threatened by it. Even they, however, thought
it wiser to humor the authorities than to protest; they felt that the
power of government was such that it was safest to go along with
anything it proposed unless it was downright harmful.
"/ admit / was scared when / first heard all this t(Ilk about
helping the small peasant," says Fozlul Korim, one of the
wealthiest inhabitants of Dhoneshor, "but what can you do
when these officials come in and act as if they own the place?
/ was quick to make friends \1/ith them-ask them to tea and
so on-and it took me no more than afew weeks tofind out
that this new cooperative might be a bother, but no more than
that. And in the end, ofcourse, it was not even a bother, buta
great thing. What else do you think could have given us such
increases in rice yields and such a rise in the value of our
land?" 14
Meanwhile the government officials concentrated on or
ganizing the cooperative. They paid unprecedented attention to
the problems of cultivation and they listened to the opinions and
suggestions of those who spoke during village meetings. 15 This,
13. In the words of the long-time director of the Academy: "For the landless
laborers the cooperative is no solution at all. It has nothing to offer lhem."
(Akhter Hameed Khan, Rural Del'elopment ill East Pakistan: Speeches by
Akhter Hameed Khan (East Lansing. Mich.: Asian Studies Cenler. Michigan
State University, 1964),32).
14. Source: fieldnotes. Cf. Qadir, Ill.
15. During village meetings most talking and all decision-making is done by a
small group of well-to-do and high-status men; poorer men are usually tolerated
as listeners and may make an occasional remark, but their influence is minimal.
Women are not allowed to attend meetings, although they sometimes listen from
behind the nearest bamboo wall.
31
the promise of a better life and the apparently unlimited amounts
of money available to the program made going along with it all
that easier. Thus, while the village rich looked on and the
The Australian Journal
landless were not invited, small and medium cultivators joined
the cooperative in fairly large numbers, keen to be in on it if it
proved only half as lucrative as the officials claimed. They no
doubt reasoned that if it did not do any good, neither would it do
any harm.
Who were these "small and medium cultivators"? Did
they form a distinct class? I have argued elsewhere that the
Bangladesh peasantry is neither a static, undifferentiated mass
nor has as yet a clearly defined class structure; it is a population
characterized by both enduring economic inequalities and re
markable mobility between positions of abject poverty and
affluence. 16 In Dhoneshor the picture is further complicated by
the vicinity of a town offering non-agricultural employment.
Thus most households not only have several sources of income,
By now this failure of the Comilla program to break
through existing patterns of power and distribution
has been well documented. The result has been that at
the village level it became an instrument in the hands
of the rich.
but they enter into different relations to the means of production
at the same time. Class positions, far from being neatly crystal
lized, are blurred, complicated and capable of differing in
terpretations.
17
Thus the "small and medium cultivators" who
became cooperative members were not a class. Some of them
were sharecroppers, others owned the land they cultivated;
some cultivated the land themselves, others employed laborers
for this work while they themselves spent most of their time on
town-based business or industrial labor. All they had in com
mon was the fact that they cultivated a small to medium amount
of land, that they depended on village moneylenders for ag
ricultural credit, and that they were eager to improve their
economic position.
Thus those who joined the cooperative generally did so for
narrowly personal material gain instead of to promote the in
terests of a "middle peasantry." First of all, they never con
sidered the cooperative to be theirs; rather it was seen as a
government body set up in their village. Second, the coopera
tive did not consist of one class: the members saw themselves as
several vaguely defined groups each with its own economic
interests. Third, although the moneylenders (rich local villagers
investing their surpluses in this profitable way) were hated for
their high rates of interest, it soon became clear that they also
had a number of advantages as credit-givers. Unlike the cooper
ative they could provide a loan at short notice, without ad
ministrative bother, and without the entire village knowing
of Chinese Affairs
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32
Courtesy ofWill em van Schendel
about it. Members of the cooperative therefore continued to
borrow money from moneylenders, and the cooperative as an
organization was powerless against the moneylenders even be
fore the latter started to join. It never turned into the envisaged
"middle peasant" instrument to break the power of the money
lenders. On the contrary, in the later stages it even strengthened
the position of the moneylenders because they joined, took out
large cooperative loans, and used them as moneylending capital
for much higher rates of interest, often not bothering to repay the
original loan .
Since most Dhoneshor people from the start doubted the
capacity of the Comilla program to bring more equality to their
village. they were not so deeply disappointed when the utopia
promised by the officials did not materialize. Many of the
cooperative members soon lost interest and quietly retreated
even before the adverse effects of the program became clear;
some others considered the personal gain of the program suffi
cient to continue their participation.
Eighteen years after the start of the program, two particular
groups stood out in this respect: the village rich and the village
women. The village rich remained interested in the program
chiefly because it provided an easy, regular channel for acquir
ing heavily subsidized agricultural inputs. As a result of the
foreign attention and the aid money involved in the program,
and therefore the political importance of the program, both the
central government and the local authorities made sure that new
fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, HYV seed, irrigation
pumps, tractors and other technological innovations reached
this area of the country first. 18 Maintenance services were also
better in the thana than elsewhere. Most of these inputs and
services mainly benefited the rich landowners. As they became
increasingly involved in the new technology, they also became
more and more dependent on external inputs and services and
therefore had a stake in the continuation of the Comilla program
itself. Aside from its economic advantages the program also
enabled the village rich to forge links with officials and urban
businessmen and thus to strengthen their position as power
holders both inside and, increasingly, outside Dhoneshor
village.
18. Even so, the program suffered time and again from' 'the most fantastic red
tape" leading to serious delays in the release of allocated funds. (See Akhter
Hameed Khan, Tour of Twenty Thanas: Impressions of Drainage. Roads.
Irrigation & Cooperative Programmes (Kotbari, Comilla: Bangladesh Acad
emyforRuraIDevelopment.1971l.12-13l.
.,..
~
Photo ofDhoneshor: van Schendel
One example may illustrate how in the late 1970s the Comilla
program actually served the village rich-and how the rich had
no qualms about swindling the program out of some money if
they could.
Unique for Bangladesh, one of the government bodies
implementing the Comilla program put a few tractors with
drivers at the disposal of cultivators in the "laboratory"
area. 19 These tractors were hired out to agents in the villages
who had to apply well in advance for the ploughing ofat least
four acres. The agent would in turn hire out the tractor to
individual cultivators, making a 15 percent profit.
In Dhoneshor the agent was a wealthy young man who
doubled as the (much-distrusted) manager of the village
cooperative. He had a deal with the tractor driver that after
ploughing the applied-for land they would also plough some
plots' 'illegally. " The plot cultivators often did not know that
their plot had not been applied for and paid the agent the full
sum. This extra money was then split between agent and
tractor driver, who only had to invent a story about leakage
to explain the loss offuel back at the office.
Several risks made tractor ploughing an innovation
only wealthier cultivators could afford. Due to the scarcity of
tractors, ploughing could often not be done at the right
19. For an account of the tractor program in the 1960s see Raper. 77-82.
33
moment, when the soil was moist enough to start rice trans
plantation right away. Tractor ploughing also required a
considerable amount ofcash money (TK.75 per acre) and it
was better suited for large plots because it ruined the minia
ture embankments round smaller plots. In practice it was
consequently a thing for the rich.
It was moreover ironic that the Comilla program, from
the beginning bent on eliminating village middlemen, should
in fact create the "tractor agent," a new species ofmiddle
man recruitedfrom the ranks ofthe old. 20
The only other group of Dhoneshor people still showing
interest in Comilla program activities in the late 1970s was a
small grop of women. Although the family-planning program
had been a fiasco in Dhoneshor, a few women still took part in
the women's programs.
Despite years of visits by family-planning officials both
male and female, not one villager was using contraceptives in
1978. Initial enthusiasm for the program was dampened when
the supply of contraceptives turned out to be erratic and several
Dhoneshor couples had babies while using the oral pill or
condoms. Since the pill was distributed without any medical
supervision, side effects were legion, particularly dizzy spells,
bloatedness and irregular bleeding. Several officials, saddled
with a responsibility far beyond their ability and pressured to
make the family-planning program a success, had tried to force
contraceptives on the villagers and had finally turned the latter
against family-planning altogether. 21
The women's program, on the other hand, still attracted six
Dhoneshor women. They regularly walked to the nearby Thana
Training and Development Centre (TTDC) where they could
follow women's courses on such subjects as vegetable garden
ing, and hygiene, pond re-excavation and fish-breeding,
local self-government, nutrition, and knitting. The
Impact of these well-meant courses on the village, however,
was hard to detect. And this could hardly be a surprise in view of
the attitude of the participating women. All six of them regarded
the women's program simply as an easy way of earning for their
household the equivalent of an agricultural laborer's daily
wages. Each woman participating in a class was given both
attendance. and travel money which, though a trifling incentive
from the vlewpont of the program officials, was in the eyes of
the women good pay for little effort. They just sat vacantly
through class and when we quizzed them upon their return to
Dhoneshor they were unable to recall what had been taught in
any detail. "What's the point of knowing about fish-breeding,"
one of them challenged us, "if we don't even have enough
20. Source: fieldnotes.
21. Although they had not told the Family Welfare Assistant to stay away from
Dhoneshor ("It's the poor girl's job, and she's a widow, you know"), the
village women tried to avoid her. In her seven months on this beat, she had not
sold anything in this village, although she reported several regular users to her
superiors. Despite a one-month training she was unable to answer our elemen
tary questions about the use of contraceptives and their effects: when a woman
should start taking the pill ("At the onset of menstruation"); how it works ("It
kills the semen' '); what to do in case ofserious side effects (' 'The woman should
see a good doctor"; but few women can afford that); what an I.V.D. is ("It is a
coil fixed to the clitoris which keeps the semen from entering"), and so on.
For a discussion of the contraceptive inundation program in Bangladesh,
money for rice cultivation?" Some of them followed the same
times over with no intention of ever using the
mformatlon offered to them. As a young wife put it: "My
husband can use the extra income and besides it's nice to have a
chat with friends and relatives from other villages once in a
while. But this talk about fancy food and bugs everywhere is
good for townspeople, not for us villagers who eat nothing but
dal-bhat (lentils and rice) anyway. "
The Comilla program started out with great hopes on the
of officials and with some hesitancy on the part of the
10 the selected area. Its early success in increasing
agncultural production was impressive. It was, however, based
on exceptional circumstances: the relatively small scale of the
program, the cooperation of the authorities, the available funds
and expertise, and the enthusiasm of the staff formed a unique
combination. But equally important was the fact that the area
had been producing a surplus of rice even before the Comilla
program started, suggesting that a more equal distribution rather
than yield increases were required to stamp out rural poverty in
the area. Close to town and economically more diversified than
most areas in the country, the thana, far from representing the
rock -bottom of rural poverty in 1960, was in fact one of the most
prosperous rural areas in the country at that time. Its usefulness
as a "laboratory area" for rural development on a national scale
was therefore doubtful from the beginning. Predictably, since
1960 the thana has grown even less representative of the coun
try as a whole, an example of reinforcement of regional dis
parities by a rural development effort.
!Many planners of rural development turned away from the
ComIlla program as soon as its defects started to show. Yet it
.seem that they could have learned more from this expen
sive faIlure than most of them did. The errors ofCo mill a are still
repeated in the newest programs: the formation of cooper
atives on the assumption that they will undermine the power of
moneylenders and middlemen and will bring an improvement in
the economic condition of "small and medium farmers'" a
hea.vy reliance on innovation in order to step 'up
. productIOn; and a conviction that public village
meet10gs wIll somehow ensure that decision-making will be
democratic and in the common interest of all attending mem
bers. Perhaps the main lesson to be learned from Comilla is that
rural development programs, however "intensive," "integrat
':sel.f-reliant," are but weak weapons against existing
mequahtles 10 rural Bangladesh. The understanding of these
inequalities is still limited, both among planners and among
scholars, with the result that many programs are on paper
promoting equality but in practice with yield
to even larger inequalities. The task of prom
ot1Og equahty IS often relegated to "fringe programs" like the
Comilla women's program whose equalizing effect is question
able, while the main thrust is directed at the benefit of the rich
and powerful who would otherwise not tolerate the program at
all.
This situation leaves little room for confidence in the
ultimate success of present-day development programs trying to
reach the poor or underprivileged in order to promote develop
ment "from the bottom up." These programs run a great risk of
ending up like the Comilla experiment: the short-term results,
achieved with tremendous effort, may look promising but the
longer-term effects are more likely to tum out quite the opposite
*
see Stephen Minkin, "Bangladesh: The Bitter Pill," Frontier (27 October
of what the program planners had in mind.
1979),7-9.
34
Why Are the Ganges and Brahmaputra Undeveloped?:
by Ben Crow
Every year hundreds are killed and millions made homeless
by floods in the Ganges and Brahmaputra Basins. Every year
millions go hungry because of the low productivity of agricul
ture in the region and the unequal distribution of its benefits.
Some thirty percent of the world's poorest 800 million people
Ii ve in the Basins of the Ganges and Brahmaputra. Their future
prosperity depends both on changed agrarian relations and on
the development of the resources of the two rivers. While co
ordinated development of the rivers could increase agricultural
productivity and provide enonnous quantities of hydroelectric
ity for the three main countries of the region-India, Nepal and
Bangladesh-for the last thirty years such development has
been precluded by intergovernmental dispute over the sharing of
the Ganges. The conduct of the dispute is frequently detennined
by the immediate political needs of the factions in power in India
and Bangladesh. * As long as that remains the case, proposals
for the regulation and development of the Ganges and Brahma
putra are likely to stagnate.
The Rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra are highly seasonal:
in the monsoon months of August and September nearly a third
of Bangladesh and large parts of India are flooded; by the
following April the flow in the Ganges has fallen to about five
percent of its maximum. This is not a trickle, but neither is it
enough for all the needs of India and Bangladesh. Coordinated
development of the rivers could reduce the extremes of flow,
mitigating flooding and increasing the availability of dry season
water. Such development could also generate enonnous quanti
ties of hydroelectric power. The governments of India and
Bangladesh are aware of the potential, but instead of developing
what could be, they squabble over the sharing of what is.
This article examines the history of the Ganges water
sharing dispute, its origins and the way in which it has been
conducted. In essence, it is an exploration of the politial
priorities of the Governments of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh
as they have been expressed in this conflict.
The dispute can be divided into three phases, as follows:
(i) 1961-1971: the focus of the conflict was India's Far
*For simplicity the tenns "India" or "the Indian Government" and "Bang
ladesh" or the Bangladesh Government" are used interchangeably. The context
should indicate whether the state apparatus or the geographic entity is intended.
akka Barrage project and the central question was
whether or not East Pakistan had a right to receive the
waters of the Ganges;
(ii) 1971-1977: negotiations between India and Bangladesh
concentrated on the sharing of the dry season flow of
the Ganges and culminated in the Ganges Water Treaty;
(iii) 1977-1980: discussions centered on alternative propo
sals for increasing the dry season flow of the Ganges but
little progress was made and, at the beginning of 1980,
the emphasis reverted to the sharing of the existing
flow.
This article starts with a description of the proximate cause
of dispute, the Indian Government's Farakka Barrage Project,
and an investigation of some of the misrepresentations which
have been used to legitimate the project. Then, we shall see that
an examination of the first phase of the dispute suggests that the
Indian Government was following a strategy of procrastination
during this period which denied Pakistan any influence in the
design or construction of the Farakka Barrage.
The creation of Bangladesh in 1971 ended the first phase of
the Ganges conflict: thenceforth India entered into genuine
negotiations about sharing the waters. Nevertheless, the negoti
ations did not proceed smoothly. It is suggested that an op
portunity to resolve the dispute may have been missed as a result
of a factional struggle for the leadership of Bangladesh.
That government was overthrown in a coup d' etat in 1975
and for the next two years the Ganges dispute was an interna
tionally publicized conflict in which the two governments re
verted to positions which had characterized the first phase of the
dispute. During the dry seasons of 1976 and 1977, India denied
Bangladesh a substantial proportion of the flow of the Ganges.
The Bangladesh Government claimed that his caused serious
damage to the economy and ecology of Bangladesh. The claim
is investigated in the light of new evidence which suggests that
Bangladesh did suffer serious consequences. However, during
1976 and 1977, both governments in their conduct of the dispute
seem to have been pursuing immediate ends unconnected with
the sharing of the water.
Soon after the election of the Janata Party in India in 1977 a
five-year Ganges Waters Treaty was agreed. That Treaty ended
the second phase of the dispute and turned the focus of the
negotiations to the question of augmenting the dry season flow
of the Ganges. The progress of the discussions since 1977 is
examinee: in a final section of this paper. The evidence suggests
35
that neither government is able to rise above a concern for
national sovereignty in order to embark upon developments
which could harness the subcontinent's rivers.
The Farakka Barrage
In the early India started constructing a 11/2 mile
long diversion structure across the Ganges at Farakka, I I miles
upstream of Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). This, the world's
largest barrage, was completed in 1970, but construction of the
26-miles of feeder canal linking the barrage to the River Bhagi
rathi was delayed by the corruption and bankruptcy of some of
the construction companies involved and the whole project was
not ready for use until late 1974 or early 1975. The purpose of
the US 100 million project is to divert water down the Bhagirathi
to "flush" silt from the River Hooghly which connects Calcutta
Port to the sea (see Figure I). It was not therefore, an ag
ricultural development, but a project intended to improve condi
tions for Calcutta's import and export trade.
The Farakka Project was the focus of the initial stages of
the Ganges conflict. Spokespersons for the Government of
Pakistan and subsequently for Bangladesh, said that the project
threatened the economy of East Bengal because it would give
India the ability to divert more than half the minimum flow of
the Ganges. The Government of India replied that the project
was a purely technical response to the physical problem of
siltation afflicting the estuarine entrance of Calcutta Port, and
that it would not injure East Bengal.
To legitimize its argument that the Farakka Project is a
straightforward technical measure, the Indian Government
turned for support to British colonialism and expert opinion.
According to the Indian Government, the project had its origins
in the middle of the nineteenth century and, had British rule
continued just a little longer, would have been built by the
colonial government. Further all those who had studied the
problem of siltation in the River Hooghly were convinced that it
was the correct remedy. In a widely distributed booklet defend
ing the Farakka Project, the Indian Government claims:
There are few examples in history where a river problem has
been investigated so thorouf?hly and over so long a period,
and where so many experts applying their minds to the
problem came to the same conclusion regarding the solution. I
These assertions are not wholly correct. Calcutta was for
Figure 1
General Map Showing the Location of the Farakka Barrage
LEGEND
bO.Ma., _.-:::
Hiver
Gorroge
&ridge
50 40302010 0 !50
::.::::::.:::::::=
SCALE IN HI
-
1M' \..0"",
.... ,.. B HUT AN
,
.'\._ ....... '" _oJ
..............,./ ............. .
tr
N D
ASSAM
A
36
many years the commerical center of British India. Much of the
surplus extracted by the British was exported through its port.
When, in the middle of the last century, the depth of water
available to ships entering the port began noticeably to decline,
British shipping and commercial int,erests became worried. The
l25-mile long channel to the port is subject to a variety of
complex forces, however, and technical opinion was divided
about both the cause of the problem and whether a problem
existed at all. Right up to the end of British rule, there was
considerable debate about the problem. This debate has been
well summarised by another Indian Government publication:
... general serious deterioration of the Hooghly is a con
troversial issue on which no two experts are in agreement.
2
The idea of a barrage across the Ganges to divert water
down the Bhagirathi was suggested, as the Indian Government
claims, by a British military engineer in 1854. But General Sir
1. India, External Publicity Division, The Farakka Barrage (New Delhi,
undated, circa Oct/Nov 1976).
2. India Central Water and Power Research Station, Annual Reports
(Technical) 1951, Tech Report 36, pp. 160-72.
Arthur Cotton, one of Britain's more benign imports to the
subcontinent, proposed diversion of only a small quantity of
water and it was not to overcome siltation in the Hooghly. Cotton
wanted to make the upper reaches of the river, the Bhagirathi,
navigable so that there would be a waterway from the Ganges to
Calcutta. Significantly, Cotton was also conscious of the pos
sible downstream consequences of his proposal, in a way that
the Indian Government never has been
3
. Cotton's idea was not
accepted by the Government of British India, and the con
troversy over the deterioration of the Hooghly continued right
up to 1947. In that year the Government of Bengal started
I
research into a Ganges Barrage Project, but the idea was not ~
investigated with any seriousness until after independence.
Even after independence, technical unanimity was absent.
A number of alternative ways of improving access to Calcutta
Port were suggested and one engineer in West Bengal appears to
I
have lost his job for opposing the Farakka Project. Neverthe-
I
f
I
3. Cotton, Public Works in India, Wm. H. Allen and Co., London, 1854,
and A memorandum on the water communication between Rajmahal and Cal I
cutta (Calcutta: A1ipore Jail Press, 1858) I
I
I
t
Figure 2 r
Plan of the Farakka Barrage Project
j
!
~
!
1
I
1
I
j
1
I
Source: India, Preservation of the Port of Calcutta (Report), Delhi, 1961. 37
[
I
less, the project gradually gathered support and was formally
sanctioned by its inclusion in the Third Five Year Plan published
in 1961.
The evidence suggests that at this time the technical ration
ale for the project was inadequate, alternative projects had been
only superficially investigated and the downstream conse
quences of the project had hardly been considered. Two eminent
American hydrologists, engaged by the Pakistan Government to
investigate the project, concluded that:
The diversion ()ffresh water into the Hooghly River through
the construction of the F arakka Barrage will not contribute
to the solution of but is likely to accentuate the serious
shoaling problems in the river . ...4
The leader of a World Bank mission to the port wrote, "so little
is known about the results of this barrage."5 Presumably in
recognition of this ignorance, the Bank decided to provide
finance for the setting up 'of a Hydraulic Study Department
which commenced a detailed investigation of sediment behav
iour in the Hooghly. 6 That this investigation had not been
completed before sanction of the project is rather surprising.
If the technical basis of the project was inadequate, how
did it come to be sanctioned? Without access to contemporary
Indian Government papers this question can only be answered
speculatively. Members of the Pakistan Government, who had
been informed by experts that the project would not improve
navigation between Calcutta Port and the sea, have sometimes
believed that the project was an expression of India's hostility
toward Pakistan. This improbable, conspiratorial explanation of
the Farakka Project is generally only expressed in private but it
lends an edge of animosity and distrust to the conduct of negoti
ations over the Ganges.
Alternatively, the project may be interpreted as a response
to the relative economic decline of the state of West Bengal
since independence. Ranajit Roy has argued that the decline was
the result of financial discrimination by the central government. 7
Whether or not that was the cause, the Farakka Barrage Project
may have seemed a useful panacea for the decline of the state.
Diagnoses which located the cause of the decline in the structure
of the economy or the distribution of power would have
threatened the broad, nationalist base of the Congress in the
state, whereas blaming the Hooghly and demanding central
government help threatened only Pakistan.
There is no conclusive evidence for this hypothesis, but
some explanation is required for India's decision to build the
project: there certainly appear to have been reasonable grounds
to doubt that the project would remedy the deterioration of the
Hooghly. Two Indian academics have described the decision to
huild the project as a step into a "trap of contingent specu
-l Ippen and Wicker. The Hooghlv RiI'er Prohlem. Septemher 1962.
l11il11eo. pp..'!{--l0.
'i Po,thuman. Report on the del'elopmelll o(th,- Port o(Calclllla, 191i I
Ii. World Bank. Rcpon No TO-280h. Appraisal o(the Port o(Calmlla
ril'l-r maintellallce alld port imprOl'emel1l project, Depanment of Technical
Operation,. June 27. 190 I
7 Roy. The o( West Bengal' a study in Union-State relations,
(Calcutta: New Agc. 1971)
lation, "7. by which they mean that there was wishful thinking
involved.
It is as a symbolic "panacea" that the Farakka Project
suceeded where its alternatives looked likely to fail. It is a
dramatic intervention in the physical environment which few in
India have opposed. Potential technical alternatives were likely
to stir opposition within India. An alternative port nearer the sea
could not be suggested without raising the spectres of unem
ployment and wasted investments. Dredging of the Hooghly
was being tried without obvious success. A ship canal scheme to
link the port to the sea threatened industrial areas, and a proposal
to reinstate the full tlow of the Hooghly's Western tributaries
could only have been implemented against the opposition of the
Damodar Valley Corporation and its industrial and agricultural
beneficiaries. Finally, the Farakka Project could offer secon
dary benefits, salinity control in the Hooghly, a bridge across
the Ganges in a strategically important position and inland
navigations. All these factors may have compensated for the
doubts about the efficacy of the Farakka Project. Circum
stances, that is the anxiety of commercial interests, required that
something be done; the Farakka Barrage was the best available
contender. The fact that the project would arouse the wrath of
East Bengal seems to have been ignored.
In the early sixties India started constructing a 1%
mile-long diversion structure across the Ganges at
Farakka, 11 miles upstream of Bangladesh (then East
Pakistan). This, the world's largest barrage, was com
pleted in 1970, but . . . the whole project was not
ready for use until late 1974 or early 1975. The pur
pose of the US 100 million project is to divert water
down the Bhagirathi to "flush" silt from the River
Hooghly which connects Calcutta Port to the sea.
The Farakka Dispute
The first contlict over India's diversion of the Ganges arose
during the chaos of Britain's precipitate departure from the
subcontinent in 1947. Mountbatten had decided, unilaterally,
that partition should take place on August 15th. He liked that
date because it was the second anniversary of the surrender of
Japan, in which he had played a part. x After Mountbatten's
announcement, ten weeks were left for all the procedures of
dismemberment: division of assets and territories, drawing of
7a. S.R Ba,u and S.C Chakrabony. "Some con,ideration, on the
dccay of the Bhagirathi drainage system." in K. Bagchi (ed.). The Bhagirathi
Basill o( 'Ill interdisciplillan' Snnposiwn) (Calcutta:
Sihendrenath Kanjilal. 1972) pp. 59-77
8. Mountbattcn in an interview for the BBC World Service programme
"Outlook." re-hroadca,t in "Pick of the week." BBC Radio -l. 20/8/77 See
also H. V Hodson. The Great Dil'ide (London: Hutchinson. 19(9) pp. 318-21
38
boundaries, wholesale removal of communities and. the justifi
cation for haste, the attempt to prevent communal vengeance.
By the time all fonnalities had been completed, less than a
month remained for the complicated work of dividing the prov
inces of Bengal and the Punjab. In the midst of this hasty
operation emerged a forerunner of the Ganges dispute. In the
hearings of the Bengal Boundary Commission, counsel for the
Congress, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League argued
at length about the merits of controlling the headwaters of the
River Hooghly. On this point depended the fate ofMurshidabad,
a Muslim-majority District. Radcliffe awarded it to India. He
gave little explanation, but it seems that he decided that which
ever state was assigned Calcutta should also be given control of
the Ri ver Bhagirathi and the other headwaters of the Hooghly. 9
In 1951, in the wake of newspaper reports about the pro
posed barrage, Pakistan sent a fonnal complaint. Planning of
the project continued in India throughout the fifties, but Pakis
I
;
tan's objections were kept at bay with a response that the project
was in a preliminary stage and objection was therefore' 'hypo
thetical. "
As the time came for the project to be fonnally sanctioned
I
and for initial site-preparations to be made, this tactic was
replaced by a more sophisticated strategy of procrastination
I
I
which detennined the course of the dispute throughout the
sixties. On the one hand, India entered into fonnal but insub
!
stantial talks with Pakistan and, on the other, statements by
publicists for the Government of India reverted to an outdated
interpretation of the law on international rivers. This combina
tion proved subtle and effective. It provided a facade which
protected India from international condemnation and prevented
the Pakistan Government from making effective and vociferous
protest.
It was made clear within India that "talks" did not mean
"negotiations." In this context, as in other areas of Indian
foreign policy, notably the discussions with "talks"
meant procedural wrangling. The minister of Irrigation and
Power told the Lok Sahha in August 1959 that India had agreed
to a meeting:
for the limited purpose oj" discussing procedural details and
arrangementfor exchange of information. 10
When an External Affairs Ministry spokesperson told the Lok
Sahha eighteen months later "work on the project will not be
stopped because of this" (the talks), he was asked by an MP:
If the project will continue as before, may I know what is the
use ofhaving these negotiations?
I
9. Radcliffe's line bisects Maida District in such a way as to divide the
Ganges at each of the Nadia Riverotltakes. with the left bank in Pakistan and the
right in India. It is not clear why this was done. Possibly Radcliffe intended that
1
any works constructed to divert water down one of the Nadia Rivers (of which
1
the Bhagirathi is one) should be jointly operated. India only avoided such an
arrangement by building the barrage some way upstream and comtructing a
feeder canal which would not have been required by a project further down
stream.
9a. N. Maxwell. India's China War (Penguin. pp. 142-44 and
264-67
10. Lok Sabha (LS) Debates. 25/8/59. "'lndoPak talks on Gangetic
Basin." s2. 33. col 4324.
The spokesperson replied:
Negotiations are alwa\'s good. It is good to talk things over in
a general way. II
lawarhalal Nehru and Ayub Khan met inforn1ally in Lon
don in 1961, soon after Pakistan had been told that the project
was going ahead. This was the ony substantive meeting between
Pakistan and India in the whole dispute. It was not specifically
arranged. The two leaders just happened to be in London forthe
annual meeting of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers.
According to the account of this meeting which Nehru gave
to the Indian parliament, he suggested to Ayub that the two
countries should co-operate: "Let us do it in such a way as to
benefit each other ... and let us decide this at ministerial level
... " Nehru went on to tell the Lok Sabha:
I hope that after the next meeting. which is going to take
place fairly soon, both parties would be in possession of
these facts. Then the time will come, if it is considered
necessary. for ministers on both sides to meet and discuss.
that is. not to allow matters to be dealt with h}' officials who
cannot decide these things. 12
This imprecise, verbal agreement was the only one Pakis
tan ever obtained from India on this subject. It provided a degree
of hope that India would. at some time in the future, recognise
Pakistan's interest in the waters of the Ganges and in the Farakka
Project. The future never came. By 1971, when Pakistan was
superceded by Bangladesh, no ministerial meeting had been
held.
The Pakistan Government repeatedly claimed during the
sixties that the Indian Government was prolonging the talks
about technical matters in order that a fait accompli, a com
pleted and operating barrage, could be presented as a finished
and irrevocable step. A fonner Indian High Commissioner to
Pakistan (1958-62) and fonner foreign secretary (\967-68).
Rajeshwar Dayal, has now implicitly confinned that this was
the case. I asked Dayal, in an interview in 1978. if it was wise
for India to go ahead without Pakistan's agreement. He replied:
There were only two ways to handle it. Asuming that the
project was essentialfor the Port ofCalclitta, ;'v'hich is what
the technicians told us, ij"you start negotiations and come up
against a stone wall, thefirst thing would be they'd applv an
injunction. In that case, what would happen to the Indian
econom.v? I 3
Dayal did not spell out the second approach. which India took.
but the implication is clear that India was playing for time to get
the project completed.
The second element in India's strategy of procrastination
involved the law relating to international rivers. In order not to
be seen to be breaking international law. with regard to the
Ganges. the Indian Government was forced into facile and
contradictory interpretations of the applicable rules. In the early
II. LS Dehates. 6/4/61. "Indo-Pak talks on East-West Bengal Rivers."
s2. 53. col9SH I
12 LS Dehmes. 16/H/61. "International situation." ty. cols 24()S
2560.
13 Dayal. interview. Delhi. 28/9/78
39
The Bangladesh Government has alleged that, as a
result of the Farakka diversions, industrial, agricul
tural and ecological disruption took place in 1976 and
1977 which threatened the lives of people in Ban
gladesh and "the very survival" of the country. The
Indian Government has denied or played down these
charges.
1960s Indian statements took shelter under the slightly absurd
contention that "the Ganges is not an international river." 13a
Alternatively, recourse was made to what lawyers call the
principle of territorial sovereignty. This principle suits up
stream, or upper riparian, states because they are, under this
doctrine, free to use water flowing through their territory as they
wish, without concern for the damage which this may cause to
downstream states. The fact that the Indian Government had a
history of having supported a rather more progressive interpre
tation of the law, known as "equitable distribution," was for
gotten, 14 as was the embarrassment that by the 1950s, India was
one of only a few states supporting the principle of territorial
sovereignty. IS The main precedent for the Indian Government's
interpretation is an assertion by an American Secretary of State,
General Harmon, in 1895 when the United States wanted to use
the waters of the Rio Grande to the detriment of Mexico. As
Hassan has written in the Harvard International Law Journal:
It is ironic that while not accepting United States judicially
established norms, Indian publicists h(/\'e rather apologeti
call.v relied on the Harmon Doctrine . ... The principle
found limited support among early United States publicists
and has been abandoned by the United States itself. Some
Indian publicists. while denying its applicability to Indian
interstate relationships, continue to regard it as a rule of
international law. The limitedforce, if any, of such a partlv
accepted rule, which has been abandoned hv the very countrY
\\'hich gave birth to it, is obvious and needs no further
comment. It is further diminished bv the fact that even some
Indian scholars have questioned the principle. 16
13a for example. The flil/dll. 3/6161. and Teesla are not
intcrnatinnal Nehrll Ayub Khan's suggc\tioll .,
I-+' Most of India's rivers cross state houndaries and there is a long
hlSwry of inter-state wa1er The principle of territorial s()\
has not heen accepted for Ihe settlement of Ihese As the
Adl1lini'lrative Rct(JrTllS COllllnis.s"", has commented: "Ihe nOlion of 'equit,,'
has come to prevail the upper states Imm drawing such quantities of
waler as would injure the lower states" (quoted in Sid Guatam. "Inter-state
water disputes: a case .study of India." Woler Resollrces Blll/elill. ". Oct 76.
pp.I061-69.1
15 See]. Lipper. "Equilahle ulilisation." pp I-L in A. H. Garretson
L'I al. Fhe 1<1'" 1I/'illtl'l'IIlIli{!/wl hllSills. (New York: ()ccana. 1967). ThL'
Indus Walers Treaty hetweL'n India and Pakistan cfkclL'd. in 19(JO. an equitahk
distrlhution ofthewalers ollhl'lndus Rivers. hut it a clause saying il
,lid nol count as a precedent
16. Tariq Ha"..,an .. "Gange" water.., treaty .. HlIlTlIrd Inlenlllliol1({/ /.(/\1'
./11111'1101 !Y. pp. - 23
An Opportunity Missed?
Between 1947 and 1971, there was one period when relations
between the Governments of India and Pakistan were such that
progress might have been made on the Farakka question. There
was a relative cordiality in relations starting soon after Ayub
Khan took power in Pakistan in 1958 and ending, in the first
months of 1961, as progress ground to a halt in the negotiations
over several areas of dispute between India and Pakistan. The
two lasting achievements of this period are the demarcation of
most of the border between India and Pakistan and the negotia
tion of the Indus Waters Treaty. Two areas of dispute which
could have been the subject of negotiation, but were not, were
the Rann of Kutch, where India and Pakistan had competing
claims for territory, and the Farakka dispute.
Rajeshwar Dayal, at this time Indian High Commissioner
to Pakistan, thinks that it might have been possible to negotiate a
co-operative division of the Ganges:
... my own feeling is that in the early years of Ayub' s time
when agreements were being made. then perhaps we could
have reached agreement on Farakka. but we had already
started work by that time. 17
Dayal's recollection is incorrect. Construction of the Farakka
Barrage did not start in earnest until 1963/64, and a final
decision on the project was not taken until 1960/61, but in 1959
the strength of feeling behind the project might have made it
difficult to amend, postpone or cancel.
Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar has reported indications
that Pakistan was aware of the opportunity for a settlement in the
wake of the Indus Waters Treaty:
In a communication to New Delhi, Dayal also drelv Nel\'
Delhi's attention to indications in Government circles in
Pakistan that it Ivould extend the principle ofsharing \Vaters.
as agreed upon in the Indus Waters Treaty, to the Ganga
Basin. Dayal warned that India should never agree to Paki
stan's claim to the waters of the Ganga as a riparian State
IX
What happened to Dayal's communication? Nothing came of it.
The Indian Government decided not to pursue the matter further.
At about this time, the Pakistan Government suggested
co-operation in the fonn of a joint barrage. How seriously
Pakistan took the proposal is not known, but such co-operation
might have been technically feasible. The South-West of East
Bengal could be irrigated by gravity canals fed from a ban-age
across the Ganges. A potential site existed, at Lalgola. which,
superficially at least. could have served the purposes of both
countries. That site would have put the barrage equally in India
alld East Pakistan. Acording to the Pakistani newspaper Dm\'ll.
the idea was brus4uely rejected by India:
considerohle work had already been done on the Fara/.;ka
Barrage and the Indian GOl'ernment did not intend to gil'e it

17 Dayal JTlIerview . op cit
IH Nayar. OillWII llei"hhofS, Vikas. Deihl. 197<;. p. 75 iBelll'tiili(lnl
19 /)11\1'1/, Paki.stan proposal cold-shouldered .. [t is not quite
clear w hen the proposal was made The article appears to he referring to talks
held In Dacca in Octoher 1960.
40
The Pakistan Government continued opposition to the
Farakka project throughout the sixties. The issue was brietly
raised at the UN, attempts were made to involve superpowers. 20
and a threat of retaliation was made.
21
Towards the end of this
period some slight progress occurred in the technical talks but
the first of the ministerial meetings Nehru promised Ayub Khan
did not take place until after the creation of Bangladesh. This
first phase of the dispute. from 1961 to 1971, was dominated by
the Indian Government's strategy of procrastination.
The Sheik and Mrs. Gandhi
At the end of 1971, when the new Awami League govern
ment of independent Bangladesh came to power. they were
presented with an unusual opportunity. The strength of popular
commitment to the struggle against the Pakistan Army was
inherited by the new government and gave them carte blanche
in their internal affairs. Popular and governmental goodwill
toward India was also at an historically unprecedented high
level. The political inclinations and class origins of the new
government were similar to those of the government in New
Delhi and, more significantly, the role played by the Indian
Government and military forces in the birth of Bangladesh left a
debt of gratitude of which the new government was acutely
aware.
The Government of Bangladesh was in a position to imple
ment the promise they had made in their manifesto for the 1970
election:
Every instrument of foreign policy must be immediately
utilised to secure a just solution of this {the FarakkaJ prob
lem.
22
Within four months of the surrender of Pakistan forces in
East Bengal. it was announced that India and Bangladesh had
agreed to establish a Joint Rivers Commission.
23
This an
nouncement. and the ministerial and prime ministerial meetings
which preceded it, marked the end of the first phase of the
dispute about the Farakka Barrage and the standing of East
Bengal in the sharing of the Ganges. The quid pro quo for
India's acceptance that Bangladesh had a right to negotiate on
this matter was Bangladesh's acceptance of the Farakka Bar
rage. Not only was the atmosphere propitious for a co-operative
division of the waters, but a forum had been created within
which discussion could be held and the way cleared for a
20. The interest of the USSR was brietly engaged. Mr. Kosygin sent a
letter to Mrs. Gandhi urging a settlement on the lines of the Indus (Dawn.
[6/7/68. "[ndia rejects Kosygin's suggestion on Farakka ... )
21 A Ganges harrage was proposed within East Pakistan. It could have
irrigated large area, of that country hut would also have tlooded Indian territory
Arshad Hossein. then Pakistan Foreign Minister. told this writer:
Purely as ({ tactical measure. our experts were considering building rhe
[Ganges harrage I. I( rhey do cur off water. we will build a barrage {It
Harding' Bridge which will submerge their project. We didn't otficliIllltell
them. we threorened ir primtel.'" and it ctlused much concern in India
(interview. Lahore. 14/917X)
22. India. Ministry of Extnnal Affairs. Bangladesh docl/mellis. p. 81.
undated. New Delhi.
23. "Joint declaration on the treaty of fricndship. co-operation and
peace." in Salish Kumar (ed.). DoclImenrs 011 India's Foreign Policy 1972.
Welhi: Macmillan. 1975).
political settlement. However, the promise of amicable inter
governmental relations was denied.
Discussions continued for the next two years. Ministers
came and went and the Joint Rivers Commission held a series of
meetings. And when, in 1974. the two prime ministers. Sheik
Mujibur Rahman and Mrs. Indira Gandhi, met to discuss
amongst other things the sharing of the Ganges, an observer
might reasonably have predicted that substantial progress would
be made toward a settlement. In all other areas there was
success: boundary disputes were resolved, trade co-operation
agreed, establishment of joint industries agreed and new Indian
credits were made available to Bangladesh. But there was no
progress on the Ganges. 24
In 1978, a Bangladesh official with direct knowledge of the
negotiations gave me this account of the aftermath of the meeting:
Mujib was flot well-informed by the people he took Ivith him.
Mentally he was troubled. When he returned he chastised the
officials that Bangladesh's officers could not reply to the
Indian questions. Mujib had the impression he was being
undermined. When he returned he asked for a report to be
prepared by people not connected with the Ministry ofPower.
Water and Flood Control. 25
The report was to answer the questions: How much water does
Bangladsh require? and What is the validity of the Indian claim? It
is a serious criticism of the previous two and a half years of
negotiation if these. the most basic questions, remained unan
swered in May 1974.
This Bangladesh official's acount is partially confirmed by
Mrs. Gandhi's recollection. During an interview with me in
September 1978, she said that she and Sheik Mujib were unable
to reach a settlement of the issue at the May 1974 meeting
because:
Sheik Mujib felt that his experts should look again at the issue,
and they were not here. 26
The public record of the meeting shows that at least three of
Mujib's water experts were present. Asafoduwlah. acting Secre
tary of Inigation and Power was there. B.M. Abbas. Advisor to
the President, was there. Even Khondakar Moshtaque hhmed.
who had just been transferred from being Minister of Water and
Power to being Minister of Commerce, was there.
The two prime ministers realised at this meeting. possibly
for the first time. that the dispute had not been a figment of the
Pakistan Government's imagination. There was a genuine conf
lict of interest. Why had this contlict not emerged during the
ministerial meetings and the meetings of the Joint Rivers Com
mission? Kamal Hossein. Bangladesh's Foreign Minister for
most of this period. remembers that during the preparations for
the meeting of the prime ministers he noticed that the problem had
not been dealt with by the Joint Rivers Commission, nor by the
ministerial meetings:
24 Indo-Bangladesh ioinr declaration o( Ifi/5/74. Foreign Aflilirs
Record. May [974. p. 155
25 My intervicw with Bangladesh official. [978
26. Interview. Delhi.
41
I had taken the JRC to be the instrument that would explore the
technical options, but by 1974 we had just reached the point
where the matter had to go back to the Commission. 27
It appears that the sharing of the Ganges may have been set
aside for the settlement at prime ministerial level at a meeting of
the two irrigation ministers, K.L. Rao of India and Khondakar
Moshtaque Ahmed of Bangladesh , in April 1972.
28
In view ofthe
complexity of the issue and the existence of the Joint Rivers
Commission, this was an odd decision. Kamal Hossein is puzzled
why the issue should have been taken out of the Commission:
There was a question mark left in one's mind ... why this
opportunity should not have been taken. 29
It is possible that a realisation of this missed opportunity was
behind Sheik Mujib's decision to transfer Khondakar Moshtaque
in Ma!ch 1974. Moshtaque himself apparently believes that he
was transferred because he was "too hard on Farakka". 30 And
there is a suggestion that Moshtaque was prolonging the dispute
to further his political career. This is the thesis of Enayatullah
Khan, then editor of the Bangladesh weekly Holiday and subse
quently a minister under Ziaur Rahman:
{MoshtaqueJ was not a hardliner. He was trying to make it
big with the issue, trying to make his career out ofit. He had
almost capitalised on it ... the tussle between Mujib and
Moshtaque was not ideological. There was a potential ri
valry. Only two people could historically have challenged
Mujib: Tajuddin Ahmed {Finance Minister and leader ofthe
government-in-exileJ... and Moshtaque. 31
Moshtaque was leader of the right-wing faction within Mu
jib's government. In August 1975, if not earlier, he gave his
support to the group of majors who staged the coup d'etat in
which Mujib and many of his family were killed.
32
For three
months in 1975, Moshtaque was President of Bangladesh. In
November he was overthrown and later jailed on corruption
charges.
Temporary Agreement
After three years of negligible progress, India and Bang
ladesh agreed in April 1975 to divide the waters of the Ganges for
an experimental forty-day period. The agreement was, however,
flawed and short-lived, cobbled together to allow India to use the
F arakka Project in the first dry season after the completion of the
project's feeder canal.
The agreement was reached by two new ministers, Jagjivan
Ram, for India, and Abdur Rab Serniabat, Sheik Mujib's brother
in-law, for Bangladesh. Under the agreement, India was able to
:'7. My interview. 311179.
:'8. The Hindu. 115172. "Parakka: Bangia doubts cleared." That the issue
of the Ganges was taken out of the .Joint Rivers Commission is confirmed in
Bangladesh. White pilper on the Gilnges It'afer dispute. Sept. 1976. p. 14.
29. My interview.
30. This is what Moshtaque told Profesor Talukder Maniruzzaman of
Dacca University Politics Department in early 1976.
31 Enayatullah Khan's statements should be treated with caution. He has
taken many sides on many issues.
.'2. Lifschultz. Bangladesh: The Unfinished Rel'OlllIiol1 (London: Zed.
1979) pp. 101-3.
divert between 28% and 40% of the water they had been demand
ing, whereas Bangladesh was given between 90% and 100% of
what they wanted. 33 It is a reasonable assumption that this prog
ress in the dispute was primarily as a result of an Indian conces
sion. However, the agreement was vague on two points, whether
it constitued a precedent for subsequent years, and whether all
Indian diversions from the Ganges should cease at the end of the
period of agreement (May 31st 1975). Bangladesh negotiators
believed that it was a precedent and that diversions were only
pennissible during the stated duration of the agreement. India
acted otherwise. Diversions increased during June and July 1975
and continued throughout 1976 and 1977.
In the second half of 1975, two coups d'etat and a revolu
tionary mutiny swept away the bourgeois nationalist order in
stalled by the 1971 war of independence and brought to power
General Ziaur Rahman, a populist leaderwho chose an overtly
capitalist path. * Rapid shifts in the clientele of the state and the
contradiction between Zia's choice of a capitalist road when he
had achieved power as a consequence of a leftist mutiny, required
Zia to rely heavily on the support of the military and to seek to
create a civilian political base.
During the first months of 1976 newspapers in Bangladesh
were replete with accounts of the devastation wrought by a
reduced flow of water in the River Ganges. The Bangladesh
Government produced a film Ganges Oh Ganges which closed
with a dramatic sequence showing a daughter desperately search
ing for water in the sandy desert of a dry river bed while her
grandmother lay dying of thirst at home. Subsequently Bang
ladesh sent a delegation to the UN Conference on Desertification
to claim that Bangladesh, an area of the world adjacent to Cher
rapunji which boasts the highest rainfall in the world, was in
danger of becoming desert.
There can be little doubt that the Bangladesh Government
sought to create a "moral panic" about the reduced flow of water
in the Ganges during 1976. During 1976 and 1977, the Govern
ment of India used the Farakka Barrage to divert on average fifty
percent of the flow in the driest months of March and April. We
shall see that this appropriation of Ganges water caused signifi
cant consequences, but not the ubiquitous devastation, heart
rending drama of desertification implausibly claimed by Bang
ladesh. The Bangladesh Government orchestrated a level of
public concern about this diversion which verged on a state of
national hysteria. Where other governments may encourage con
em about "muggings" in order to justify increased expenditure
on the forces of law and order, the Government of Bangladesh
magnified and dramatised the threat India's diversion of water
posed for Bangladesh's agriculture and industry, in order to rally
nationalistic support behind the new regime.
Enayatullah Khan, who was a minister in Ziaur Rahman's
government in 1977 and 1978 and (as a private citizen) member of
the Bangladesh team which took the Ganges dispute to the United
*Ziaur Rahman was assassinated on May .,0. 1981. in Chinagong. Editors.
33. The press statement given after the talks is reproduced in Bangladesh
Observer. 19/4/75. Quantities of water are compared with what appear to he the
then current demands of the two countries: India-40.000 cusecs; Bangladesh
49.000 cusees.
42
Nations in 1976, told me in 1978 how the dispute was used to
meet political needs:
We made Farakka first into a national issue. We tried to
transform the issue, so that it was no longer just about water,
into a symbol ofnational resistance. . .
Then the demand arose to take the issue to the UN. The
main purpose of that was not to solve the problem, it was to
internationalise the issue in its totality with the other relevant
issues. It helped us in breaking the barriers in the international
community. The Bangladesh profile was not very good after
1975. It gave us a forum where we could defend ourselves and
win over other countries with similar experience in river
disputes . ...34
An official in the Bangladesh foreign office was rather more
guarded, but he did agree that the whole issue was: "made more
prominent. The Indian Government wanted to test our new gov
ernment. They did not like the present government, they wanted
to destabilise it ....35 This is the Bangladesh Government's
explanation for the resurgence of open disputation over the
Ganges after the relatively quiescent years of Sheik Mujibur
Rahman's rule. Bangladesh argues that India's appropriation of
the Ganges was part of a conscious campaign of destabilisation
mounted by Mrs. Gandhi's government against the new Bang
ladesh regime. While this explanation corresponds to the Bang
ladesh Government's need to postulate an external threat to the
nation, at the same time there is evidence that the Indian Govern
ment was providing some support for guerrillas hostile to the
Ziaur Rahman regime. Mrs. Gandhi has denied this suport,36 but
a civil servant in the Indian Ministry of External Affairs con
firmed to me that India gave at least sanctuary for the guerrillas. 37
Further implicit confirmation is perhaps provided by Morarji
Desai's agreement the following year to "see that no shelter was
given to criminal elements from across the border, whatever
might have taken place under the previous [that is, Mrs. Gandhi's]
regime. "38
In the conflict over the Ganges, the Indian Government's
statements and actions, from early 1976 until the change of
Government in March 1977, indicate a reversion of the pre
Bangladesh position: a policy approaching the doctrine of territo
rial sovereignty. Bangladesh was no longer accorded standing in
decision about the Ganges; talks took place but they were not
negotiations. Comparing the Indian response to that of the
preceding year, there is a clear difference. There was no offer to
repeat the 1975 agreement (or anything in a similar spirit),
although it has been plausibly argued (by Kamal Hossein and
34. My interview with Enayatullah Khan when he was Minister for pet
roleum and Natural Gas in 1978 and thought to be one ofZiaur Rahman's closer
political confidants.
35. My interview. October 1978.
36. She told me:
India in her long history has always given asylum. [Butl we have not allowed
them the freedom ofindulging in political acts. It was only to save their lives.
I do not approve of'the politics ofmurder. The Western press objected that it
was against democracy when I arrested some people but they did not notice
the murder ofMujib.
37. Interview with me.
38. The Hindu. 1116177.
others) that such a repeat was implicit in the negotiations of
1975. Instead, Mrs. Gandhi offered only a unilateral conces
sion. This concession gave Bangladesh less water and defined
the lean season as a shorter period. 39 The frequently agreed rule
that the Farakka Barrage could not be operated without mutual
consent was defied.
Several rounds of talks took place between India and Bang
ladesh but little or no progress was made. The sense of grievance
felt by Bangladesh's chief negotiator was heightened by two
snubs he received at Mrs. Gandhi's hands in September 1976 and
January 1977. In the September 1976 meeting, according to a
Bangladesh account, M.H. Khan wanted to raise two issues, the
cross-border guerrilla attacks and the Farakka problem. The
border issue came first, Farakka was to come second. After
hearing Khan outline Bangladesh's case on the border issue, Mrs.
Gandhi turned to discuss it with Jagjivan Ram, evidently decided
that what M.H. Khan was saying was incorrect and dismissed
him. Farakka was not discussed. 40 The second snub was reported
as follows in the Far Eastern Economic Review:
As the Bangladeshis reached Delhi [Mrs. Gandhi] was head
ing for the Kumbha Mela (fair) about 500 miles away. On arri
val, the delegation's leader, nmy Chief Rear Admiral MH.
Khan, met the then-Agriculture Minister, Jagjivan Ram, in
what was described as the opening offormal talks. He was told
that the Indians had nothing new to offer. Khan was flab
bergasted . . 'What was the sense ofasking us to come to Delhi
then?" he asked Ram. The veteran Indian politician said he
was sorry he could not reconsider the Indian position as the
Premier was away from Delhi . ... Before the Bangladesh
team left for home, Ram and the head of India's Policy
Planning Division, G. Parthasarathy, called on Admiral
M.H. Khan to tell him "off the record" that the Indian
Government could not initiate any new move on its own, and
could not consider any proposal presented by Bangladesh
because' 'such a move may have serious adverse effects on the
Congress Party's election chances," especially in West
Bengal.
4t
According to another Bangladesh account, Mrs. Ghandi
took a violent dislike to Khan and several messages were sent to
Ziaur Rahman, one via the Bangladesh military attache in Burma
who was close to Zia, suggesting that progress might be possible
if Khan was dropped from the Bangladesh negotiating team
42
~ 9 . The Hindu. 30/3/76. "PM stresses Indo-Bangia amity in talks with
envoy." Mrs. Gandhi told the Bangladesh High Commissioner that:
India is taking steps to keep up the downstream/low at the March 15 level
during the rest of'the two-month lean season fO the extent possible on the
hasis ofthe al'ailability o!'waters ..
According to my interpretation, this concession allowed India to divert water at
more than twice the rate permitted by the 1975 agreement. The lean season is
defined as two months rather than the four month lean season implicit in the
1975 agreement.
40. This account comes from this writer's interview with a Bangladesh
diplomat who was involved in the negotiations at the time. The meeting is hardly
mentioned in contemporary accounts: Foreign Affairs Record. Sept. 76. "Official
statement on Indo-Bangladesh talks"; Holiday (Dacca). 12/9/76, "We want
solution: Admiral Khan"; Statesman Weeklv. 18/9/76, "Delhi talks on Farakka
fail." .
41. Far Eastern Economic Review (PEER), 4/3/77. "Talks meet a watery
grave
42. My interview with a Bangladesh diplomat.
43
M.H. Khan was one of the few senior officers who had played no
role in the Bangladesh liberation struggle. He was somewhat
pro-Pakistani, a committed anti-Indian and given to making in
temperate statements.
Between Khan's two snubs, Bangladesh raised the Ganges
dispute at the United Nations. The grievances of both sides were
aired in the Special Political Committee, and Bangladesh was
heard with the condolence due to a small state with a serious
problem. However, the consensus statement which emerged from
the discussions was essentiaIIy a defeat for Bangladesh. It simply
stated that the two sides should meet again. Bangladesh found
that the major powers were predominantly upper riparian states,
as were the majority of member-states. They were therefore
loathe to provide tangible support to a lower riparian state like
Bangladesh.43 Discussions in the Special Political Committee
dwindled because no state was willing to give support to either
India or Bangladesh. A face-saving consensus statement was
prepared behind the scenes. It met almost none of Bangladesh's
aims.44
Bangladesh was forced back into bilateral negotiations, hav
ing gained almost nothing at the UN. The remedy of the last resort
had been tried and found ineffective. Bangladesh suffered the
effects of Indian unilateral diversions for the dry season of 1976
and most of the dry season of 1977. It was almost powerless for
this period.
The Effects on Bangladesh
The Bangladesh Government has alleged that, as a result of
the Farakka diversions, industrial, agricultural and ecological
disruption took place in 1976 and 1977 which threatened the lives
of people in Bangladesh and' 'the very survival" ofthe country. 45
The Indian Government has denied or played down these
charges.
46
In 1977 the World Bank provided a loan so that
Bangladesh could employ outside consultants (the International
Engineering Company of San Francisco) for a study of the effects
of Farakka.
47
The study was made, and a four volume report
called Special Studies
48
was published, but presumably because it
does not provide support for all of Bangladesh's aIIegations it has,
at the time of writing, been given only a very restricted dis
tribution.
Even with the very considerable resources of the Special
Studies team, it was impossible for Bangladesh to establish all of
the alleged consequences of Farakka diversions. In some cases
this is certainly because they do not exist or are exaggerated
beyond measure. But, in other cases, an independent observer
might reasonably decide, as I have done, that the effects are very
probable even though the measurements provided in Special
Studies are unsatisfactory.
43. Interview with Bangladesh diplomat in New York.
44. The consensus statement can be found in UN document A/31/359 and
in A/31/PV.81 pp. 66-8.
45. Bangladesh, White Paper . . "op. cit.
46. India. The Farakka Barrage. op. cit.
47. Technical Assistance Credit 622-BD. The study is sometimes
euphemistically referred to as the South West Regional Study.
48. IECO Ltd. and Special Studies Directorate, Special Studies, San
Francisco and Dacca, September 1977. Even the World Bank had difficulty in
obtaining a copy of this report, despite the fact that they funded it.
There is no doubt that the Farakka diversions had a signific
ant effect on the volume of water flowing in the Ganges in
Bangladesh. The Special Studies investigations indicate that in
March and April 1976, India was diverting about 55 percent of
the water in the Ganges. This is more than Mrs. Gandhi's
statement of March 29, 1976 implies. In March 1977,47 per
cent of the flow was being diverted. 49 Low flows of water were
also observed in 1976 and 1977 in the major distributary of the
Ganges, the Gorai River. It is probable that Farakka diversions
caused a reduction in the flow in this river, but it is not abso
lutely certain.
The South West of Bangladesh suffers the effects of sea
water intruding up the thousands of channels and estuaries ofthe
region. In 1976 and 1977, there was unprecedented saline
intrusion which caused major problems for water-consuming
industries in Khulna, Bangladeh's main industrial center, and
problems for agriculture dependent on this river water. Special
Studies provides a plausible explanation, in the fonn of a quirk
of river channel fonnation, why changes in the quantity of water
tlowing in the River Gorai might cause large changes in the
salinity of the rivers in that region. 50 If the Farakka diversions
caused the reduced Gorai flows, then these very important and
expensive effects can be blamed upon India.
My conclusion is that the Indian withdrawals are the most
likely cause of the exceptional salinity intrusion in western parts
of South West Bangladesh (that is, not in all the area claimed by
the government) in the years in question. Special Studies con
tains an estimate of the cost to Bangladesh of the industrial
disruption in 1976, Taka 118 million ($8 million). This is
almost certainly a high estimate but may be the right order of
magnitude.
As a result of salinity and changes in water supply, the
Bangladesh Government claims that there was a large drop in
agricultural production in the area. Special Studies estimates
that 650,000 tons of food production was lost due to Farakka
diversions in 1976,51 This compares with total annual produc
tion for all of Bangladesh of about 12 miIIion tons. Unfor
tunately,the survey methods used by IECa Ltd. and the Bang
ladesh Government's Special Studies Directorate leave some
thing to be desired. While there can be little doubt that there
were pockets of severe hardship which caused distress to share
croppers and small peasants and losses for larger farmers, it is
very doubtful if 650,000 tons of food production were lost.
The evidence of disruption to navigation, caused by re
duced river depths, is also inadequately documented in Special
Studies, but the direct chain of causation between the Farakka
diversions and reduced river stages make the effect incontro
vertible. This disruption of communication probably cost the
Bangladesh economy about Taka 1.5 million ($100,000) and
many inland transport workers their jobs.
The "moral panic" initiated by the Bangladesh Govern
ment in January and February 1976 had little basis in disruption
to industry and agriculture until March of that year. Neverthe
less, while the consequences of Indian diversions were neither
so widespread nor so dramatic as those aIIeged by the Bang
49. Special Studies (SS), Table III- 10.
50. SS, vol. C, p. VI-25.
51. SS. Table VIJ-36.
44
ladesh Government, it is my conclusion, from the evidence
presented in Special Studies, that lower water levels and a
corresponding increase in river water salinity caused significant
losses of agricultural and industrial production in the months of
March, April and May, 1976 and March of 1977.
The Ganges Waters Treaty
The March 1977 Indian general election, in which the
Janata coalition supplanted Mrs. Gandhi's Congress Party, also
rescued Bangladesh from its nadir of powerlessness. The in
coming government was pledged to a policy of good-neighbour
liness and it chose to redeem this pledge in the early days of its
reign. This is the explanation given by a civil servant in the
Ministry of External Affairs:
The new government was willing to make more concessions.
They wanted to project an image ofhaving achieved success
in foreign policy in a short time. The test of that success was
our relations with our neighbours. What they did with Paki
stan and Nepal amounted to getting over some mental blocks.
But with Bangladesh there was a calculated sacrifice of the
national interest with a view to achieving wider purposes.
We thought that if the biggest irritant was removed, the
climate would change. More significant, if you want to see
the political level, India undertook the cessation ofhostilities
on the border. 53
A limited verbal understanding was reached in Dacca in the
month after the elections. This understanding probably laid
down that in the period of lowest Ganges flow the water should
be shared five-eighths to Bangladesh, three-eighths to India. Six
months of bargaining followed to fill in the details of the
agreement, but on the 30th of September 1977, the Ganges
Waters Treaty was initialled in Delhi. 54
The Treaty resolved the dispute over sharing the existing
flow in the dry season. But it did not resolve the related dispute,
which had been in existence since 1973, when the two govern
ments started discussing ways of increasing the dry season flow
in the Ganges. In Article 10, the Treaty says, "The two Govern
ments shall consider and agree upon a scheme or schemes . . .
and take the necessary measures to implement it or them. " This
clause provided something of an escape route, allowing the
difficult choice of engineering projects with subcontinental sig
nificance to be put off for the time being. Unless the Treaty is
extended, which it may be, preliminary decisions on these
proposals have to be made by November 1980 and final choices
made by November 1982. No decisions had been announced by
the end of 1980.
53. Interview with me, Delhi 1978.
54. On the morning of Wednesday September 28th, a full meeting ofZiaur
Rahman's Council of Advisors was discussing the final instructions to be given
to B.M. Abbas (who had replaced M.H. Khan as chief negotiator) before he
returned to Delhi. They were interrupted by the news that a hijacked Japan
Airlines plane was asking permission to land in Dacca (Sunday (Delhi), Octoher
1977, "The Coup Coup land"). In the subsequent chaos surrounding the hijack.
two rebellions were tempted, one in Dacca, one in Bogra. Neither succeeded
and although few people were killed in the attempts, several hundred were
executed later (Amnesty International, "Report of a mission to Bangladesh,"
February 1978). Despite all this, the instructions were given to B.M. Abbas and
he got hack to Delhi in time to initial the Treaty on the 30th.
In its assumption that the primary features of augmentation
proposals are technical rather than political, this Treaty con
tinues a tradition established by earlier periods of negotiation. In
its definition of problems to be solved by these engineering
proposals, the Treaty also builds on tradition, rather than intro
ducing an "ideal" solution. The sole definition of the nature of
the proposals is that they should relate to the augmentation of the
dry season flows in the Ganges. On the one hand, the reasons
why such augmentation is desirable are omitted and, on the
other, more general objectives for control and regulation of the
river are excluded. Presumably, the two negotiating teams were
not in agreement on the priority to be given to alternative uses
for the increased flows so they could not provide direction in the
Treaty. Similarly, future negotiations may be restricted because
desirable objectives for river development, such as flood con
trol, power generation or silt limitation, have been excluded
from the letter of the Treaty. It cannot be regarded as an ideal
agreement for the development of an international river. It is the
product of its historical circumstances, the disputes which
forced the two governments to enter into negotiation.
In the three years since the signature of the Treaty, little
progress has been made. Each government has put forward a
proposal-India has suggested a large canal to link the Brahma
putra with the Ganges, Bangladesh prefers that 12 or more large
dams should be built in Nepal to store the monsoon flow for use
during the dry season-but there has not been adequate agree
ment to start even feasibility studies of these proposals. The
main obstacle to progress is India's trenchant objections to
anything other than bilateral negotiations. With something ap
proaching 60 percent of the dry season flow of the Ganges
originating in Nepal, India's view that negotiations involve only
Bangladesh and India appears, to an outsider, untenable. If the
Brahmaputra is to be included, then there is also a case for China
taking a seat at the table. For obvious reasons that is not a
possibility readily envisaged by the Indian Government.
In May 1979, at the 17th meeting of the Joint Rivers
Commission, there was agreement that the Nepalese Govern
ment should be "approached." Prime Minister Desai had ap
parently suggested this, when he visited Bangladesh just before
the meeting, as a concession to break the stalemate. However,
the concession was made on the understanding that it did not
prejudice the "basic bilateral character of the problem of
augmentation of the flow. " 55
There was in January 1978, an unexpected intervention
which almost broke the pattern established by the preceding
twenty-five years of negotiation. Jimmy Carter, then President
of America, and James Callaghan, then Prime Minister of
Britain, visited South Asia in that month. Both men, ostensibly
acting independently, gave public speeches in which they of
fered to provide assistance for the development of the Ganges. 56
In Bangladesh, Callaghan appeared to be acting as a salesman
for British oil and gas technology and as a bidder for Bang
ladesh's large natural gas deposits. There was a suggestion that
the two issues were linked. Bangladesh was getting assistance
55. The Hindu, 13/5/79, "India's gesture to Bangia ... "
56. USIA, Delhi, "Toward our common goals," 1978, p. 18. Financial
Times, 4, 6, and 7/1/78. The Times, 17/1/78, "PM Reports his tour of Indian
subcontinent: good prospects for British firms to increase trade."
45
from Britain toward the resolution of its major political problem
on the Ganga (as well as military and political support) in return
for contracts associated with the development of the gas fields
and a first option to buy. 57 The intervention was welcomed in
Bangladesh but rebuffed by India, and nothing further has been
heard of it.
The Proposals
If either of the schemes proposed by India and Bangladesh
for augmenting the low-flow ofthe Ganges is built, it will be one
of the largest river development schemes in the world. In 1978,
Indian engineers tentatively priced their scheme at Rs 61,000
million ($7.000 million). This is roughly equivalent to Bang
ladesh's GNP at market prices in 1978. or about 10 percent of
57 Economi(' and Political Weeklv. 18/1-4/2/78. "Harnessing Ganga
and Brahmaputra: of Anglo-American mov'." pp. 129-30.
Indian's GNP in 1976.
India argues that the Ganges Basin is short of water whereas
the basins of the Brahmaputra and Meghna have a surplus. It
is, therefore, sensible to transfer water from the Brahmaputra
and Meghna into the Ganges. To do this they propose to build a
barrage across the Brahmaputra at Joighopa in Assam, 70 miles
downstream of Guahati, and a 200 mile-long canal to link this
with the Ganges at Farakka (see Figure 3).58 The canal will be
about the width of the River Thames at Tower Bridge in London.
Subsequently, Indian engineers want to build three large dams
in the Assam foothills of the Himalayas, to inrease the dry
season flow of the Brahmaputra and generate power. The res
ervoir behind the dam on the Dihang would be roughly the size
ofthe reservoir behind the Hoover Dam in USA.
For India, this link canal provides a great opportunity. If
58. India. Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation. Department of Irriga
tion. Proposalfor au/?mentin!? the dry season flowofGan/?a. New Delhi. March
1978
Figure 3
India's Proposed Ganges-Brahmaputra Canal
r

..
... .. , ..... J
I l NASA 0
N
of
8 A Y OF 8 ENG A l
r:: . - -----
.. 4.,.,.,.. ...... Mto*,*d I
A
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I '::v \

'\
8 U R M A
"
....... \
\ '
,"- \
,
, ...... , ............ ..." '",""" . '
j , ...... . ................ hoM t_ ......,....... ...
f
". l --'
46 BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org

enough water can be transferred from the Brahmaputra, water
can be released upstream in the Ganges for transfer to drought
areas outside the Ganges Basin. It is clearly in India's national
interest to bring the apparently surplus waters of the North East
into wider use. But in doing so, there is a threat to the sovereignty
and ecology of Bangladesh. The Government of Bangladesh is
reluctant to allow the country's second major river to fall under
the physical control of India, or to contemplate a second round
of economic disruption if the low flow of that river is signifi
cantly reduced.
Instead, Bangladesh argues that the augmentation can be
carried out entirely within the watershed ofthe Ganges. There is
little doubt that the Ganges has at present got water to spare. The
question is whether enough of the monsoon water can be stored.
The Bangladesh Government's proposal 59 identifies 51 poten
tial reservoir sites within the Ganges Basin in India and a further
31 in Nepal (see Figure 4). If Bangladesh's calculations are
correct, there is just about enough water within the Ganges
59. Bangladesh. Ministry of Power. Water Resources and Flood Control.
Proposal for augmentation ofthe dry season flow ofthe Ganges. Dacca, March
1978.
Basin to meet the demands of all three countries: India, Bang
ladesh and Nepal. 60 India disagrees with the Bangladesh calcu
lations, and doubts that the projects are politically and techni
cally feasible. Will the Government of Nepal (that is, at present,
King Birendra) be willing to allow the submersion of large areas
of valley-bottom land?
There are alternatives to these two governmental propos
60. Comparison o(some Bangladesh and Indian estimates otwater supply
and demand in the Ganges Basin:
Country Bangladesh Indian
estimate estimate
Demand (cusecs) (cusecs)
Bangladesh 55,000 55.000
India 240,000
to
360,000 Nepal
SupplY
By storage in Nepal 88,000 (50.000)
to
130,000
By storage in India 181,000 (30,000)
(Bangladesh and Indian Proposals, op. cit.)
Figure 4
Reservoir Sites in Nepal Proposed by Bangladesh
,,' ,

p
.'
"
"
A
":0 O. "",..oUt (I:[(;\I"ION
..
A r t1 '(, A
() IE$ "
"
.'.
""

' .
.,.
e"
GANGES BASIN
.. 000 000
\,
t
o
" . " ' - ~ ~
J
'!>.jOEx t.l4P SHOWf"-V t.>. ..
tPfTI1t"G4I1>tGE';, - "
1-. PtE PAl.. 4">1' ~ ~ , t:.
47

also Work being carried out at the Harvard University Center for
Population Studies has given rise to a proposal known as "the
Ganga water machine." This futuristic idea would involve
widespread pumping out of groundwater during the dry season.
and induced groundwater recharge during the monsoon.
61
A
more realistic and small-scale alternative has been suggested by
a team of Chinese experts visiting Bangladesh. Their report
seems to have been suppressed but. according to one account. 62
they said: "China does not want to come forward with a fat
purse of assistance like the Capitalist world. It wants Bang
ladesh to be self-reliant in this matter." Undoubtedly,there are
labour-intensive projects which could be built with local initia
ti ve and co-ordinated for the overall development of the basin. 63
At the moment such schemes are bound to hang in political
limbo. The two governments are discussing only two alterna
tives because, despite reservations, those two alternatives are
the ones which most serve their interests and the interests of
those groups on whose support the governments depend.
The two governmental alternatives are in no sense ideal.
Elements from both schemes will be required if the Ganges is to
be controlled and the agriculture and economy of the Ganges
Basin developed to its potential. But at the moment the tussle
between India and Bangladesh is primarily about control of the
Brahmaputra. India cannot consume much more water from the
Brahmaputra in Assam. If it is to benefit large areas of India,
61 Revelle and Lakshminarayana. "The Ganges water machine." Sci
ence, 915/75. IflfI, pp. 611-616; Chaturvedi. Revelle and "Ganga
water machine II." (in Waterfor human needs. Second world congress of water
resources. Delhi, 1975, Vol. III).
62. Haq Katha. 27/8/76. "Why apathetic in ac<;epting the Chinese sugges
tion for flood control?"; The Hindu, 30/8/76, "Farakka: Peking experts dispel
Bangia tears."
63. Abu Taher. the revolutionary leader who was executed hy the Ziaur
Rahman Government in 1976. believed that Bangladesh could resolve its water
problems without being dependent on India or World Bank-dominated foreign
aid. He believed seasonal labour could be mobilised to clear river channels (this
writer's interviews with Lawrence Lifschultz. previously South Asia Corres
pondent of FEER). From time to time. the present government have tried to
implement such a plan using food-for-work methods. Their plans appear to have
been ilkonceived and rarely successful.
In India and Nepal. labour intensive schemes might concentrate on soil
conservation. afforestation and small reservoirs. The Chipko movement in Uttar
Pradesh. an organised popular resistance to excessive logging. is possibly a
significant move in the right direction.
the
****
IIY!BS*
Myths are a powerful, yet subtle, cultural force in all societies. They
act as deeply rooted supports for injustice and war. Myths have
Dr(>VI(]ecl us with visions of a happier, more satisfied life.
e Melting Pot', 'Columbus America', Women are
Because They Ask For It', 'Nuclear War is Winnable'. These
and others THE AMERICAN MYTHS 1982 CALENDAR
ks through colorful, creative, sometimes humorous illustrations
red by progressive artists. Positive myths, or visions, are also
rtrayed in the Calendar including 'This Land is Our Land', 'The
rsuit of Happiness', and 'Let the Bird of Earth Fly!'
Printed on heavy stock, the Calendar is 14"x22" on your wall.
THE AMERICAN MYTHS 1982 CALENDAR is an aesthetic and
some must be carried to the plains of the Ganges. Some such
transfer makes reasonable long term sense, but Bangladesh is
rightly wary of the political weapon this could put in the hands
of an Indian Government.
While the fate of the Brahmaputra is unresolved, India is
continuing desultory bilateral negotiations with the Nepalese
Government. India is eager to finance large hydro-electric pro
jects in Nepal in order to meet the energy deficit in Northern
India. These projects are attractive for Nepal, but Nepal has
suffered Indian domination for a long time. The Nepalese Gov
ernment will not lightly enter into another bargain from which
most benefits accrue to India. At the same time, the only
obvious benefit to Nepal of co-operation with Bangladesh is a
political one. The two countries can probably obtain better deals
from India if they present a united front. Bangladesh has also
dangled a bait for Nepal in the form of a Nepal-Bangladesh
navigation canal giving Nepal direct access to the sea (at present
almost all imports and exports have to transit Indian portS).64
Since the project looks unrealistic, it is doubtful if the bait is
tantalising.
Inclusion of Nepal in the Joint Rivers Commission appears
to be a necessary first step before a decision can be made on
alternative projects. There is no indication that the Indian Gov
ernment is willing to make that concession. The government of
Mrs. Gandhi, to the contrary, has hinted that even the sharing of
the existing flow, as laid down in the 1977 Treaty, is un
satisfactory. A preliminary review of the Treaty was due in
November 1980, but in September the Indian Government for
mally requested that the conflict be referred to a meeting of
heads of state.
65
Ministerial meetings held in November and
December reported no substantive progress.
While a stalemate continues, it is most unlikely that any
serious attempt can be made to regulate and harness either the
Ganges or the Brahmaputra. Stagnation will not continue indefi
nitely. While it does, there is need for a debate to develop an
alternative plan for the development of the rivers, and to identify
the political circumstances which would allow such a plan to be
implemented. *
64. FEER. 7/4/78. "Letter from Dacca."
65 The Hindulllternatiollal Editioll. 6/9180. "India wants Ganga flow
augmented"
political challenge to your year. It is a shameless ode to a hni<t.'rn,,<1
people's culture! And in these perilous times it is also a fiery call to
join the struggle - or to rekindle the passion - for a caring and hopeful
world.
With each Calendar is a mai I ing envelope and Flowers of liberation,
an attractive 16page, 8"x11" cultural booklet.
By mail it's $6.25 {retail $5),3 for $17.50. We'll send gift cards.
The Calendar is designed as a fundraiser for progressive groups so
excel I ent bulk rates are available for groups and bookstores. Special
offer -- 5 or more copies for $4 each plus 15% for shipping to one
address only. SPC, 924 Burnet Ave., Syracuse, NY 13203.
48
Books to Review
The following review copies have arrived at the office of the
Bulletin. If you are interested in reading and reviewing one or
more ofthem, write to Joe Moore, BeAS, P.O. Box R, Berth
oud, CO 80513. This is not, ofcourse, an exhaustive list ofthe
available books in print-only a list of books received. We
welcome reviews ofother worthy volumes not listed here.
Laurence Binyon: Asiatic Arts (Humanities Press, 1981).
John H. Barton and Ryukichi Imai (eds.): Arms Control II: A New Approach to
International Security (Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain. 198 I).
Edwin G. Clausen and Jack Bermingham (eds.): Pluralism, Racism, and Public
Policy: The Search for Equality (G.K. Hall & Co., 1981).
Tony Gilbert and Pierre Joris: Global Interference: The Consistent Pattern of
American Foreign Policy (Liberation, 1981).
Wilbur Schramm and Erwin Atwood: Circulation ofNews in the Third World: A
Study ofAsia (The Chinese Univ. Press, 1981).
Frank H. Tucker, The Frontier Spirit and Progress (Nelson-Hall, 1980).
G. Apalin and U. Mityayev: Militarism in Peking's Policies (Progress Pub
lishers, 1980).
Freddy Braumann: Partizipation und Betriebsorganisation in China (Brock
meyer, 1979).
Theodore Hsi-en Chen: Chinese Education Since 1949: Academic and Re
volutionary Models (Pergamon, 1981).
Y. V. Chudodeyev (ed.): Soviet Volunteers in China, 1925-1945 (Progress
Publishers, 1980).
Ralph N. Clough: Island China (Harvard Univ. Press, 1978).
Edmund S. K. Fung: The Military Dimension ofthe Chinese Revolution: The
New Army and Its Role in the Revolution of 1911 (U.B.C. Press, 1980).
Ed Hammond: Coming of Grace: An JIlustrated Biography of Zhou Enlai
(Lancaster-Miller, 1980).
Ed Hammond: To Embrace the Moon: An J1/ustrated Biography ofMao Zedong
(Lancaster-Miller, 1980).
Raphael Israel: Muslims in China: A Study in Cultural Confrontation (Human
ities Press, 1980).
Hyung I. Kim: Fundamental Legal Concepts of China and the West: A Com
parative Study (Kennikat Press, 1981).
N. H. Leon: Character Indexes ofModern Chinese (Humanities Press, 1981).
Xue Muqiao: China's Socialist Economy (Foreign Languages Press, 1981).
Paul S. Ropp: Dissent in Early Modern China: Ju-lin wai-shih and Ch'ing
Social Criticism (Univ. of Michigan, 1981).
James R. Townsend and Richard C. Bush (compilers): The People's Republic of
China: A Basic Handbook, Second Ed. (The Asia Society, 1981).
Bruce Cumings: The Origins ofthe Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence
ofSeparate Regimes, 1945-1947 (Princeton, 1981).
Bernier, Chang & Ricketts (eds.): Le Japon: Problemes economiques et sociaux
de l'apres-guerre (Centre d'etudes de I'Asie de l'Est Univ. de Montreal,
1980).
Roger W. Bowen: Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan: A Study of
Commoners in the Popular Rights Movement (Univ. of Calif. , 1980).
Franco Gatti (ed.): La Ricostruzione in Giappone 1945-1955 (Stampatori,
1980).
Kenneth A. Grossberg (ed.): Japan Today (I.S.H.I., 1981).
James Kirkup: Insect Summer: An Introduction to Haiku Poetry (Hokuseido,
1981).
Yoko Matsuoka McClain: Handbook of Modern Japanese Grammar (Hoku
seido, 1981).
Brett de Bary (trans.): Three Works by Nakano Shigeharu (Cornell Univ.,
1979).
Susan J. Pharr: Political Women in Japan: The Search for a Place in Political
Life (Univ. of Calif. , 1981).
Kazuo Sato (ed.): Industry and Business in Japan (M. E. Sharpe, 1980).
Michael Chamberlain (ed.): East Timor International Conference Report (East
Timor Program, 1981).
Jill Jolliffe: East Timor: Nationalism & Colonialism (Univ. of Queensland,
1978).
Heri Akhmadi: Breaking the Chains of Oppression of the Indonesian People
(Cornell Univ., 1981).
Indonesian Documentation and Information Centre (ed.): Indonesian Workers
and their Right to Organise (INDOC, 1981).
Chr. L. M. Penders (ed.): Indonesia: Selected Documents on Colonialism and
Nationalism, 1830-1942 (Univ. of Queensland, 1977).
Alfons van der Kraan: Lombok: Conquest, Colonization and Underdevelop
ment, 1870-1940 (Heinemann Educational Books, 1980).
Pardy, Parsons, Siemon and Wigglesworth: Purari: Overpowering PNG? (Inter
national Development Action, 1978).
Joan K. McMichael (ed.): Health in the Third World: Studies from Vietnam
(Spokesman Books, 1976).
Lloyd I. Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, et al.: The Regional Imperative:
The Administration of u.s. Foreign Policy Towards South Asian States
Under Presidents Johnson and Nixon (Humanities Press, 1980).
Selig H. Harrison: In Afghanistan's Shadow: Baluch Nationalism and Soviet
Temptations (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1981).
Nancy Peabody Newell and Richard S. Newell: The Struggle for Afghanistan
(CorneIlUniv., 1981).
Erik Baark and Jon Sigurdson (eds.): India-China Comparative Research:
Technology and Sciencefor Development (Curzon Press, 1981).
Deryck O. Lodrick: Sacred Cows, Sacred Places: Origins and Survivals of
Animal Homes in India (Univ. of Calif. , 1981).
John W. Mellor: The New Economics ofGrowth: A Strategy for India and the
Developing World (Cornell Univ., 1976).
Gregory L. Possehl: Indus Civilization in Saurashtra (Humanities Press, 1980).
Miriam Sharma: The Politics of Inequality: Competition and Control in an
Indian Village (Univ. Press of Hawaii, 1978).
David L. Snellgrove and Tadeusz Skorupski: The Cultural Heritage ofLadakh,
Vol. 2 (Humanities Press, 1980).
Ranjini Obeyesekere and Chitra Fernando (eds.): An Anthology of Modern
Writing from Sri Lanka (Univ. of Arizona, 1981).
Critical analysis of key
social trends and issues
Berkeley Journal
of Sociology
A Critical Review Vol. XXVI 1981
Ann Holder on The Structure of Female Wale Labor
John DeBrizzi on Cia .. Formation and the City
Richard Wolin on Benjamin, Bloch, and Lukacs
Spencer Cahil "Cross-Sell Paeudocommunicadon"
Ron Rothbart "Science and Practice in Marll's
Political Economy"
Tom Long on the Cla.s Nature of Soviet-Type Sociedea
And More
Now accepdng manuscriptS for Vol. 27. 1982
Propoeed theme: Women. The Family. and Work
Individuals: $5.00 Discounts on Back Issues
Institutions: $10.00 and MultiNolume Orders
BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
Univ. of CaUf. "S8A Barrows Hall Berkelev. CA 9..720
a non-profit association
49
North Korea: Kimilsungism
Path to Socialism?
by Gavan McCormack
North Korea (or the Democratic People's Republic of
Korea-DPRK), more than any other industrial country, is a
terra incognita in the Western consciousness. Most commonly
it is abhorred as the embodiment of the irrational, the fanatical,
and the threatening, and even among Western progressives it is
dismissed as grotesque and/or irrelevant. Yet it is an important
country and one that deserves close attention.
I visited the country only once, for ten days in May 1980,
as guest of the Korean Society for Cultural Relations with
Foreign Countries, although I have been reading and writing
about Korea for a number of years. It is a highly pardoxical but
deeply fascinating country, and in what follows I can only hope
to stimulate discussion and further study, not to develop any
conclusive analysis. * My perspective is that of a professional
historian and a socialist, with a concern as the former not only to
know the contours of present-day North Korean society but also
to understand the course of its evolution, and with a concern as
the latter to try to locate this society within the overall context of
the worldwide development of socialism. ** In what follows I
will move from some general personal impressions of the soci
ety to some matters that are relatively well agreed, particularly
in the social and economic fields, and then attempt some much
more problematic hypotheses relating to the political
dimension.
* An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Second National Korean
Studies Conference. held at La Trobe University. Melhourne. Australia. on
Novemher 20-22. 1980. [am grateful for various critical comments and sugges
tions to Gregor Benton. Helene Bowen. Pat Flanagan. Jon Halliday. Joe Moore.
and to Mark Selden for some helpful remarks in a private communication
unrelated to this manuscript. I am grateful also for the critique of a number of
Korean and Japanese friends. who had best he left unnamed. [ alone alll
responsible for all the views expressed A Japanese translation of this article
appears in Gendai 110 Me in July 1981
** The word "socialist" is used in this text. as in Illuch common parlance. in
two distinct senses. In the one. which should be clear frolll the context. it refers
to the theory and practice of those post-revolutionary states which are controlled
by Communist Parties. the category which Rudolf Bahro descrihes as "already
existing socialislll." In the second. it refers to what I take to be the central core
of the socialist tradition: the maximization of democratic. participatory, direct
control over the social order by freely associating producer organizations, and
its correlative. the minimization of state and bureaucratic forms of alienated
government. The cleavage between these two usages is profound. hut this is not
the place to attempt to resolve it.
Most of my time in the country was, by choice, spent in the
capital, Pyongyang, though I also visited Anju, Kaesong, Pan
munjom, and various areas adjacent to the capital and departed
by train across the Yalu River via Sinuiju. I visited the Supreme
People's Assembly, the People's Economic Institute, academic
institutions, kindergartens and institutes, museums, factories, a
collective farm, a hospital, and various urban locations. I saw
a circus and films, and had interviews or discussions also with
officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Democratic
Front for Reunification of the Fatherland, the Army, the Head of
the History Department at Kim II Sung University, a member of
the Academy of Social Science, representatives of families
divided between north and south, representatives of returnees
from Japan, some survivors of wartime massacres, and with one
prominent sportsman. I also spent at least one hour every morn
ing running, unescorted, around the parks and residential areas
of the city,
In general this is a highly disciplined, prosperous, hard
working, proud, intensely nationalistic country, in which ele
ments of nationalism, traditional East Asian Confucianism and
Leninist party dictatorship have been combined in a peculiar and
uniquely dynamic way. It has achieved a great deal in a short
time and there exists the potential, I believe, of building upon
existing achievements, correcting distortions, and creating a
socialist society.
Economic Achievements
Living standards are clearly high, though precisely how
high is not easy to say. Harrison Salisbury, after a visit in 1972,
estimated they were much higher than in China, and at least as
high as in European Russia, I and since then, growth rates have
been consistently much higher in North Korea than in the Soviet
Union. A Japanese scholars delegation in 19RO concluded that
the claim to a 1979 per capita national income of S 1920 was
probably accurate. This would put N0l1h Korea on a par with
Singapore or Malaysia, which one member of that delegation
with long experience of life in Malaysia felt was probably an
I Salisbury. Harrison E .. To Pdillg and Beyolld: A Rel'OrT Oil rhe Nell' Asill
(New York: Quadrangle. 19n1. p. 205
50
accurate comparison. 2 A Japanese banker who visited the coun
try at about the same time concluded that the figure of $1920
was very likely to be an under-statement. He also concluded that
the economy was growing at between 12 and 15 percent per
year, which if true would have North Korea leading the world in
1980.
3
As of the beginning of the 1980s,the comparison with
South Korea is sharp. The much acclaimed "successes" of
South Korea's export-led growth strategy of the 1970s have led
it into spiralling trade deficits, serious problems of inflation
(approximately 40 percent in 1980) and unemployment. stagna
tion or actual contraction in the economy as a whole (-5.9
percent GNP "growth" in 1980), problems oflabor unrest that
the London Times describes as a . 'time bomb" (21 February
198 I). an agricultural sector in which output declined by 22
percent in 1980, necessitating massive emergency rice imports
from Japan. and a heavy industrial sector that the Japanese
economic journal Toyo Keizai described on February 21. 1981.
as being "on the verge of collapse." It is of course possible that
General Chon will find a solution to all of these problems. Even
if he does. however, the structural contrasts between the two
societies will remain sharp.4
The free health, education and welfare in the North. to
gether with good quality, heavily subsidized housing. heating
and transport are very positive achievements peculiar to the
North. where there appears also to be no real poverty, un
employment. or inflation. In the South, on the other hand. the
living standards of the productive and successful are clearly
high by any standards and the quality and variety of consumer
goods available is superior. 5 But the priority given by the
society in the North to the broad field of social welfare is very
striking: everywhere, the most splendid buildings-the show
places-are the schools, universities, hospitals, clinics, kinder
gartens, theatres, halls, sports centers, and the public library
(known as the' 'Grand People's Study Center under construc
tion in Pyongyang in 1980).
This point is worth stressing. since it is sometimes sug
gested that North Korea is the barest of Spartan societies, in
which all other goals are subordinated to the military or the state
cult of the leader. The following figures give some indication of
the depth of the social orientation of the society:5
a
Table
North Korea South Korea Australia Japan
Doctors
(per 10,000) 233 5.7 15.5 12.4
Students
(percent of 27.0 25.0 23.0 200
population)
(primary to tertiary)
Health and education in the DPRK are completely free. Stress
on the former has resulted in a rise in life expectancy from a very
backward country level of 38 years in 1945 to a very advanced
The year-end account settlement ofa cooperative farm.
~ . Seki Hiroharu. "Mieta kita KitaCh6sen no jittai" (The real circumstances of
the North Korea I visited). Ekonomisuto, 5 August 1980. (part one). p. 52.
comparison with Singapore and Malaysia must be intended in a rather loose
sense. since the figures for per capita GNP in these states vary considerably.
According to Far Eastern Economic Review. Asia 19R I Yearhook (Hong Kong.
19R I). these figures are: Singapore. <;4.150: Malaysia.. 1 . 5 ~ 3 .
3. Fujimatsu Masanori. Board Chairman of Ashikaga Bank. interviewed in
People's Korea. 13 August 19RO.
4. Comparisons of GNP are misleading for the simple reason that Marxist
accounting includes in national income only material production. omitting most
services other than transport. communications and trade. and is thus auto
matically understated by a figure of perhaps 20 percent as compared with
capitalist societies. See. for example. Gerhard Breidenstein. "Economic Com
parison of North and South Korea." Journal ofContemporary Asia, 5.2. 1975.
p. 169; also Jon Halliday. "The North Korean Model: Gaps and Questions." in
AMPO. Vol. 13. NO.3. 1981 (or a shorter version in World Development.
19R I). This latter article is an invaluable reference. I am grateful to the author
for access to a manuscript version. It will be cited hereafter as Halliday/AMPO.
'\. For a recent assessment by a Japanese journalist familiar with South Korea
after a visit to the North. see the reports by Oguri Keitaro in ASlIhi Shinbun. May
16-22. 1979. translated English version in The Korell-Scope. June-July 1979
(available from International Human Rights Office. P.O. Box 1986. Indianap
olis. Indiana 46206. U.S.A.).
Sa. Fi)!ures other than for North Korea taken from Far Eastern Economic
Review. Asia 19RO Yearbook. Hong Kong. 1980. North Korean figures on
students in Koreal/ Re\ie\\,. Pyongyang. 1979. p. 187: and on doctors from a
briefing given the author in Pyongyang. May 1980. Doctors here means gradu
ates of a four-year university medical course. not paramedical or "bare-foot"
personnel.
51
country level of 73 years in 1980. Adding a year to the average
citizen's lifespan every year for 35 years is, as Seki Hiroharu
points out, an unparalleled accomplishment. Sb Stress on educa
tion is such that, starting from virtually zero after the Korean
War. by 1980 there were one million graduates from
162 universities and a current tertiary student population of
400, O()(). SC
The economic profile of the country is very "modem."
Industrial output makes up 76 percent ofGNp6, from being 16.8
percent in 1946. But agriculture deserves attention since, as
development economists are well aware, the development of a
correct policy toward the rural problem during industrialization
is always an acute problem. In the two principal models of
"socialist" industrialization, the USSR and China, the process
of eliminating the landlord/rich peasant class, socializing ag
riculture, and drastically improving productivity, was accomp
anied by a high level of social violence and in terms of pro
ductivity still remains a good deal less than satisfactory.
In North Korea, the task of collectivization was simplified
by some factors-such as the high concentration of land in
Japanese hands up till 1945* and the flight of many surviving
landowners in the early years of the new regime or during the
Korean War. Such was the devastation due to U.S. saturation
bombing that collectivization may have been the only means of
survival anyway. Nevertheless, the successful way in which it
was carried out was due to the particular policy choices taken by
the regime. When landlords were expropriated, they appear not
to have been physically eliminated, but to have been allowed to
move to other parts of the country and to enjoy the same
entitlement to land as the peasants.
7
Collectivization was ac
complished between 1954 and 1958, and despite the urgency
and scale of the task ofcapital accumulation for industrialization
the regime was careful not to squeeze the rural sector too hard.
Despite some fluctuations, collectivization was accompanied
by generally rising yields and improved living standards and by
evidence of the application of massive state resources to im
provements in the agricultural infrastructure-by irrigation and
electrification and provision of machinery like tractors-while
state tax levels were gradually reduced to a figure of 8.4 percent
of harvest in 1959, and then, in 1966, eliminated alt-ogether.
8
Irrigation of paddy fields and electrification of the countryside
have been universal for some time now; the application of
chemicals is quite intensive (fertilizer application: 1.5 tons per
hectare in 1979) as also is the degree of mechanization (7
tractors per 100 hectares in flat lands; 6 in intermediate and hilly
lands);9 and the application of scientific principles in agricul
tural planning and administration is very evident in the collec
tive farms. The claimed average rice yield figure of 7 tons per
hectare in 1979 would appear to be a world record. \0 The
achievement of food self-sufficiency, particularly in a terrain
and a climate as hard as North Korea's, is certainly remarkable.
It points to a more successful resolution of the agrarian problem
than anywhere in either the socialist or developing worlds.
Intensity of chemical fertilizer application might not be
universally accepted these days as a necessary index of .ag
ricultural advancement. I was not in a position to assess pOSSible
* Twenty percent o""the land was concentrated in Japanese hands. This strikes
me as being a high concentration because its redistribution-affecting most of
the best rice land-could be accomplished without opposition.
Defying conventional bourgeois economic logic of
economy of scale and comparative advantage, and
evidently defying also socialist pressures for Comecon
type bloc integration under which North Korean raw
materials would have been exchanged for Soviet
machines and consumer goods, the North Koreans
insisted on going their own way, and they appear to
have done it successfully.
environmental consequences but could note at least an aware
ness of the problems and what appeared to be careful monitoring
of soil, water, plant, fish and animal life at the collective farm
level. According to Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)
estimates, in 1977 the DPRK was third in Asia in terms of
intensity of application of chemical fertilizer to agricultural
lands (2763 kilograms per hectares, as against 3299 in South
Korea and 4281 in Japan). In per capita terms, the DPRK was
number one. II Unlike the petroleum-based fertilizers common
in developing countries, as for example in South Korea, the
North's are all produced from locally-available limestone and
coal. North Korea is therefore immune to the inflationary effects
of constantly rising material prices.
The chairwoman of one collective I visited insisted that the
urban/rural imbalance of traditional society had been reversed
in North Korea so that urban young men now aspired to marry
country girls in order to enjoy the higher living standards of the
countryside. Iftrue, this is a claim of some significance: indeed,
gi ven the general tendency for industrialization to be accomp
anied by chronic population drain from country to city, it may
represent a unique achievement.
5b. Seki. p. 55.
5c. Ibid .. p. 54.
6. Briefing. Pyongyang. May 1980 (1978 figure).
7. The Historical Experience of Agricultural Cooperation in Our Country.
Pyongyang. 1975. pp. 60-73; Scalapino. Robert A .. and Lee.
Communism in Korea (Berkeley. Los Angeles and London: Umverslty of
California Press. 1972). 2 vols .. p. 1067; Brun. Ellen and Jacques Hersh.
Socialist Korea (New York: Monthly Review Press. 1976). p. 210-11.
8. Nahm. Andrew Coo North Korea: Her Past. Reality. and Impression (Kala
mazoo: Western Michigan University. Center for Korean Studies. 1978). p. 66.
9. Kim II Sung. Report to the Sixth Congress ofthe Workers' Party ofKorea on
the Work of the Central Committee (October 10. 1980). (Tokyo: The Central
Standing Committee. the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan.
1980). p. 12. "Tractor" is said to mean a 15 horsepower. one or two-seated
vehicle. i.e. not a simple cultivator.
10. This is the figure in unhusked rice terms. The equivalent figures for Japan
and South Korea (in 1976 and 1978 respectively) are approximately 5.4 and 5.8
tons respectively (i.e. 4.3 and 4.7 tons in husked tonnage). It should be made
clear. however. that FAO does not recognize such a claim. Although it does
concede very high DPRK per hectare rice yields (5.7 tons). it gives a higher
figure to a number of countries. including South Korea (6.5) and Japan (6.2).
FAO Productio/l Yearbook 1978. Rome. 1979. vol. 32. pp. 98-99.
II. FAO Fertiker Yearbook 1978. (Rome. 1979). p. 16.
52
In terms of industry, North Korea also exhibits several
striking features. First is the contrast in the basic line ofdevelop
ment followed by the North as compared with the South of the
country: South Korea, particularly since the early 1960s, pur
sued a line of maximum integration with the world capitalist
economy, particularly the United States and Japan, involving
heavy dependence on outside resources, especially fuel, mar
ket, technology, and capital, and concentration on export
strength as the motor ofgrowth. North Korea, on the other hand,
determinedly resisted outside pressures and adhered strictly to a
line of autonomous development. Following apparently dia
metrically opposite models, both sections of the country were
extraordinarily successful, possibly the outstanding achievers
of the capitalist and "socialist" world respectively.
Of course, the North enjoyed more of the country's mineral
and energy resources to start with, and for the decade or so after
the end of the Korean War it received substantial aid from
socialist countries. Yet neither of these factors can diminish its
achievement of long sustained industrial growth, involving the
husbanding and harnessing of these resources through careful
planning, and following a path independent of any existing
model. Gross industrial output grew by an estimated average of
23.5 percent between 1954 and 1970, and a rate of 14 to 16
percent is claimed for the 1970s.1
2
Lest these figures should be
scoffed at as empty braggadocio it should be noted that the
American CIA, an institution with little obvious reason for
wanting to exaggerate the accomplishments of North Korea,
reported in early 1978 that in almost every respect North Korea
was, as of 1976, out-producing the South in per capita terms in
virtually every major sector of the economy, from agriculture
through electric power generation, steel, cement, machine tools
and trucks. \3 The South was conceded superiority in passenger
vehicles and in television sets. Defying conventional bourgeois
economic logic of economy of scale and comparative advan
tage, and evidently defying also socialist pressures for
Comecon-type bloc integration under which North Korean raw
materials would have been exchanged for Soviet machines and
consumer goods, the North Koreans insisted on going their own
way, and they appear to have done it successfully. With a
population of around 17.5 million today, they produce their own
locomotives, tractors, 100-ton lorries, 300-horsepower bull
dozers, 6000-ton power presses, 30,ooo-ton ships, 3,000
horsepower high speed engines, and also their own televisions,
radios, washing machines and wrist-watches.
It is of particular contemporary interest to note that their
high level of industrialization is not tied to a comparable high
level of consumption of imported energy resources. Only 5
percent of North Korea's primary energy consumption is de
rived from imported materials (oil, from China and the Soviet
Union); 77 percent comes from coal. which is possessed in
12. Average of 16.3 percent for the 1971-76 6-year plan period; industrial
sector growth of 17 percent in 1978 and 15 percent in 1979. See for discussion of
the economy Halliday/AMPO. op. cit.. and Aidan Foster-Carter. "North Korea.
Development and Self-Reliance: A Critical Appraisal.' in Gavan McCormack
and Mark Selden, eds . Korea North and South: The Contemporary Crisis (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), pp. 115-149.
13. U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, National Foreign Assessment Center.
Korea: The Ecollomic Race between the North and the South. (ER 78-100(8)
(Washington, D.C.. 1978). at pp. 4. II especially
abundance, and 18 percent from hydroelectric generation.
14
Through careful planning to minimize external dependence,
planning which long predates the oil crisis of the 1970s, the
North Koreans have, for example, developed a public transport
system that makes maximum use of underground railway and
trolley buses, both run off the central power generating grid, an
urban residential heating system run off the hot water from the
thermal power stations, and local rural water systems that com
bine the functions of electricity generation, irrigation, flood
control, supply of water for industry, fish cultivation, boating
and leisure facilities locations, and drinking water supply. IS
The Debt "Crisis" ofthe 1970s
The general impression of economic success is difficult to
square with the evidence of the widely publicized debt' 'crisis"
in which the country became embroiled in the mid-1970s.
Without attempting any comprehensive analysis of the matter
here, several key points can, however, be noted. 16
I. The total debt involved seems to have amounted to about $2
billion, on a small proportion of which the DPRK actually
defaulted, and that portion has since been renegotiated.
2. In the world financial turmoil that began in the mid-1970s,
many countries experienced acute balance-of-payments prob
lems, problems arising either from the skyrocketing price of oil
or the stagnant or declining prices of various raw material
exports, or the contraction of world trade, or all of these. The
massive general escalation of Third World debt to the industrial
countries as well as to the OPEC countries is an expression of
this crisis.
3. The specific DPRK crisis was caused by a combination of
factors, which at least included:
a. the decision that the limits to growth under the existing
highly autonomous and self-reliant economy were near.
b. the judgment that basic self-reliance needed to be com
plemented and at the same time reinforced by increased
linkage with the world economy, especially the world capi
talist economy.
c. the decision to implement this goal by purchasing technology
and industrial plant, on a relatively large scale, from ad
vanced industrial capitalist countries like Japan, West
Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland.
d. the sharp fall of export prices of important North Korean
exports like tungsten, tin, and zinc. This was particularly
important in the case of North Korea since, in the absence of
any Eximbank or deferred payment terms for DPRK trade
with capitalist countries, purchases must be paid for directly
out of goods sold.
4. While many countries, especially in the Third World, ex
perienced acute debt and balance-of-payments problems, the
North Korean response was in some ways unique. It did not win
the country any friends, but there may be some positive aspects
to it. Jon Halliday comments:
i4. Central Intelligence Agency, p. 12. There may justifiably be some doubt
a/lout these figures. Kim II Sung himself claims only a figure of 50 percent for
thermal power generation. Kim II Sung. op. cit.. p. 15.
15. Kiyang irrigation project and Taesong reservoir. visited by the author. May
19.1980.
16. Analysis based mainly on Foster-Carter. Halliday/AMPO. and Seki.
53
When it got into debt it did not do the things that other Third
World countries, like Zaire or Jamaica (or even Britain)
have done. It did not let in the IMF to go through the books; it
did not make cuts in public spending and the social services
... it held off its international creditors, who have ended up
rolling over the DPRK's debts. The state did its job. main
taining high growth through the recession, while cushioning
its citizens from external pressures. 17
And because of the very low level of foreign trade dependency
of the North Korean economy, the problems of debt, recession,
inflation, etc., have actually been much less than elsewhere in
the developing world, even than much of the developed world.
Even if the adulation for Kim II Sung were spontan
eous, the relation of such a phenomenon to democracy
would remain highly problematic; but the evidence
that it is at least in substantial part the expression of a
deliberately contrived state cult, designed to reinforce
central authority, is very strong.
A second problem, and one which I think no one in North
Korea would deny, is the constant drain of resources into
non-productive, military ends. Pyongyang, for obvious rea
sons, does not put a figure on this, but South Korean sources
claim that it amounts to 22.4 percent of GNP (or approximately
41 percent of the budget), 18 while the American CIA in 1978
thought it might have amounted to "between 15 and 20 per
cent" average per annum over the previous decade. 19 Either
figure is very high and would be hard to imagine not represent
ing a very serious drag on the economy in general. Sources in
Pyongyang, however, pointed out that the tremendous increases
in military expenditure attributed to them in recent years would
be difficult to sustain without substantial curtailment of some of
the massive engineering and industrial projects that the state is
also engaged upon. Yet of that there is no sign. The construction
of highways, harbors, dams, even a huge project to cut a canal
right across the country, and various large construction projects
in the capital, continue unabated. The industrial sector is said to
have grown at the rate of 17 percent in 1978 and IS percent in
1979. The economy can hardly sustain the rate of development
it apparently does, maintain the sort of educational and social
commitments already outlined, and engage on the massive
military program claimed in Seoul unless it is actually even
more successful than anyone has so far imagined. 20
The Politics of "Kimilsungism"
The key to understanding the economic and social accomp
lishments of North Korea lies in the political dimension. yet it is
here that the greatest difficulties arise. Where does power and
authority lie') How are decisions made? Is the country socialist'?
Is it democratic? The problem is clear from the fact that even the
official statements of the regime are contradictory on these
points.
On the one hand, official presentations themselves use the
word "monolithic" as an attribute of which they are positively
proud, and every attainment is represented as emanating from a
decision taken by the country's President Kim II Sung. The
1979 edition of the official Korean Review, published in Pyong
yang, concludes its chapter on the "Building of Socialism"
with the words:
All this is the great victory of the immortal Juche idea
authored by the respected and beloved leader Comrade Kim
II Sung, by the revolutionary genius. and is the brilliant
resuit of his intelligent leadership. The Republic's progress
and prosperity and our people's honour and happiness are
unthinkable apartfrom his leadership. 21
The London Guardian (16 April, 1977) quoted from the paper
People's Korea the following:
The whole party. the whole country, and the entire people
are firmly united like a monolithic organism. breathing.
thinking and acting only in accordance with the revolution
ary idea ofthe great leader.
Statements in like vein are positively legion.
The notion of"luche" has a cluster of meanings, stretch
ing from "independence," "self-reliance," "autonomy,"
"creativity," to "the attitude of man as master of creation,"
and is contrasted with its opposite concept of' 'sadae," meaning
"serving the great" or "flunkyism." The same general princi
ple is enshrined in Article 27 of the Constitution in the formula
tion, "The working masses are the makers of history." A senior
state official in Pyongyang described to me the underlying
principle of 1uche as the" awakening of the creative potential of
the masses to remake nature and society." Although the notion
of the "masses" as an apparently all-inclusive and undifferen
tiated social category is quite foreign to the thought of Marx, the
vision of unalienated, creative, spontaneous human expression
suggested in this passage does resemble somewhat Marx's
vision of the communist man to be realized beyond class
society.
It is, however, clearly inconsistent to hold at one and the
same time both that such a condition has been attained in North
Korea and that everything is due solely to Kim II Sung. It is the
more puzzling to note that authorship of the idea of luche is
universally attributed to Kim II Sung in North Korean official
publications, and increasingly is used interchangeably with
"Kim II Sung thought" or even' 'Kimilsungism," while Kim II
Sung is himself on record as denying authorship of the idea. 22
17 Haliiday/AMPO.
18. "ROK Economy Beats North Korea," News Review (Seoul). October 18.
1980. p. 20.
19. Op. cit.. p. 6.
20. There may be a non-contradictory relationship of a kind between intensity
of military preparedness and succe"ful economic growth. and the record of
countries like North and South Korea. Taiwan. and Singapore alone would be
enough to suggest the need to explore such a hypothesis. In the case of North
Korea. it is possible that the mobilization ofKPA (Korean People's Army) men
in large infrastructural tasks (or even in tasKS such as rice transplanting, in which
thcy wcre very conspicuously engaged at the time of my visit in May 1980) may
represent a cheap and efficient method of accomplishing large-scale public
works. so that while the weapons clement of the military budget represents a
drain of resources from the constructive economic field. the personnel compo
nent might not.
11 Op. cit.. p. 114.
12. Answers to Questions Raised by Foreign Journalists (Pyongyang. 1974).
p.186.
54
The problem is that of the relationship between the Korean
Workers' Party-which has 2 million members and to which all
other adults in the society are indirectly associated as members
of some other officially sanctioned organization-and the Pres
ident or "Great Leader." Is policy determined solely by one
man, the Leader, so that all attainments become "unthinkable
without his leadership," or is it the expression of the creative
initiative of the masses?
I suppose that official Pyongyang spokesmen might object
that to pose the problem in such "either-or" terms is unfair, and
the appearance of opposites is reconciled in a higher, complex,
and dynamic unity. The difficulty with such a proposition,
however, is that, at least in official literature, there is virtually
no discussion of the ways in which mediation might occur
between the l;reative, autonomous masses and the all-powerful
leader. Official formulations which do refer to it are less than
reassuring. Thus Aidan Foster-Carter notes:
Kim Il Sung recently (in 1975) calledfor an intensification of
the 'ideological revolution' in order that people 'will think
and act the way the Party wants them to, anytime and
anywhere' (yet in the same sentence they are also admon
ished to '(give) full scope to their revolutionary spirit of
self-reliance in the attitude of masters ofthe revolution'). 23
In an important speech in October 1980,24 Kim II Sung made his
(ritual?) references to the working masses as "the masters of the
state and society" (pp. 27, 76), but concentrated on insisting on
the importance of the "monolithic ideological system" (p. 97)
and on the need to strengthen further that monolithic character,
and on the subordination of party, state and country to "the
party's lines, policies, decisions, and institutions as an absolute
truth" (p. 98). A very "top-down" kind of mass-line is implied
here, in which the experience of the masses is of a fragmentary
and untheorized kind, requiring the party (and the leader) to give
it form and coherence, whereupon it is returned to them as
theory or as absolute truth.
The North Korean media carries no reports of debate on
policy at any level, nor does it appear to recognize the possibil
ity or the legitimacy of promotion of alternatives in decision
making. It does, however, devote a great deal of attention to a
somewhat ritualized encounter between masses and leader in
what is described as "on-the-spot guidance." On these occa
sions, and they occur frequently, Kim II Sung visits factories,
farms, mines and construction sites and discusses with the
cadres and workers whatever problems may have arisen,
whether technical, administrative or political, after which he
issues appropriate guidance. Reports and photographs of this
process leave a very strong impression that the pIincipal aspect
of the phenomenon is direction or guidance from above; the
attitude of deference, even reverence, on the part of the masses
suggests that their participation is of a ritual kind, designed to
reinforce the image of benevolence of the ruler rather than to
assert their creative and autonomous political rights.
Nowhere in the material produced by Pyongyang is there
any discussion of the relation between the direct, unmediated
contact of leader and masses of this kind and the institutional
structures of party and state, so that, if democratic initiatives do
work their way up through some systematic, institutionalized
structures, the outside world is told nothing of it. If not, of
course, the system is certainly centralist, but it is not democratic
and therefore not socialist either. If the citizens of the country
enjoyed the same degree of creativity as their president, there
would have to be some specific institutional provision for medi
ating differences, for creativity implies difference; yet it is
precisely that difference which DPRK insistence on "mono
lithicity" (their word) seems to deny. Creativity in the full sense
would seem necessarily to be the prerogative of one man only,
the president. Although "monolithicity" is proclaimed by the
regime to be the equivalent of luchl,Sit is also described by Kim
II Sung as meaning "iron discipline" and the "solemn duty" of
carrying through the Party's decisions. 26 It is thus the opposite
of luche, since it implies the quiescence or political passivity of
the masses, a state of contentment with the existing system and
the absence of desire to go beyond it.
The likelihood that luche in practice is given an extremely
narrow construction is strengthened when attention is turned
from political institutions to the broad cultural sphere. Here,
expressions of adulation of the leader are intense and continu
ous. His image, whether in the form of statue (occasionally of
colossal dimensions), photograph, or badge, or the record of his
words, in books and pamphlets or in plaques, and simply the
record of his once having been present, in the form of a plaque or
shrine-like room attached to countless institutions, is in
escapable. In schools, children constantly sing his praises; in
museums and theatres, his exploits are celebrated; in factories
and collective farms, everything, inevitably, is attributed to
him.
The phrase "cult of the leader" is resented in North Korea,
but these facts, and the language which is used to refer to him,
often reminiscent (to me) of the Catholic litanies of God, his
mother, or the saints, is such as to leave little alternative. He is
known most commonly as great leader, but also, variously, as
wise creator and builder, genius of thought, lodestar of our
times, ever victorious and wise general, supreme brain of the
nation, leader of the third world, hero of the 20th century, sun of
the world, greatest leader in 1,000 years, and by many other
such titles. The party newspaper, Nodong Sinmoon, stated in
1975 that' 'his tactics and strategy amaze even God.' '27 Litera
ture prepared for distribution among English audiences includes
many powerful examples of the same phenomenon. Thus, in a
large and expensively-produced book entitled The Path ofGreat
Love (Pyongyang, FLPH: 1977) there are included poems like
"We live in the bosom of the leader" (p. 139), of which a short
sample goes as follows:
His love is boundlessly warm
It is the brilliant sunshine
We live in the bosom ofthe leader
We boast ofthis happiness to the world
Oh, the heavenly leader Marshall Kim Il Sung
The people look up to him swearing allegiance.
2.1. Op. cit.. p. 131.
24. Op. cit.
25. Thus luche Korea (Pyongyang). September 15. 1976. proclaimed:
"Through untiring and persistent stnIggle to strengthen the unity of the Party.
tlie Workers Party of Korea has completely got rid of sectarianism and flunkey
ism which had done enormous harm historically and achieved the iron unity and
solidarity of the whole Party on the basis of the monolithic idea, the Juche idea."
26. Kim II Sung. op. cit.. p. 98.
27. According to Far Eastern Ecollomic Review, July 4. 1975.
55
Such a poem, indeed such a book, has no place in the Marxist
tradition of scientific humanism, Marxist socialism, or even in
the broader democratic, rationalist and humanist traditions
stemming from 1789. How is it, and the general phenomena it
represents, to be explained?
The search for analogy leads one in the direction of im
perial cult. ancient and modem (was not the late Shah known
variously as King of Kings, great and glorious leader, light of
the Aryans, and so on?), and of the cults built up around other
modem dictators like Stalin and Hitler. Of course, any such
analogy would be fiercely resisted by officials in Pyongyang,
who would most likely argue that the essential difference lay in
the spontaneous character of reverence for Kim II Sung by the
People on the one hand, as part of an expression of popular love
and gratitude, and his benign and fatherly attitude on the other.
They might perhaps add that the Korean people had suffered a
long and demoralizing phase of subjection and exploitation, and
that their emergence from it is an experience as profound as that
of the emergence of the ancient Israelites out of Egypt into the
promised land-a liberation inconceivable without their
Moses, Kim II Sung.
But even if the adulation for Kim II Sung were spontan
eous, the relation of such a phenomenon to democracy would
remain highly problematic; but the evidence that it is at least in
substantial part the expression of a deliberately contrived state
cult, designed to reinforce central authority, is very strong. The
tiny school and pre-school children reciting elaborate panto
mimes about the heroic genius of the \eader, often in special
"Kim II Sung rooms," are not expressing spontaneous infant
feelings but being taught the first steps of an official cult.
Despots, particularly East Asian despots. always strove to
appear benevolent. In the traditional Confucian order, as ap
parently now in North Korea, political power and moral virtue
are inextricably entwined. The stress on virtue, status, duty, the
divine/absolute character of the ruler, even the special qualities
of blood that set apart his entire family line, all are at odds with
the notions of representativeness, recallability, constitutional
ity, rationalism. equality. liberty, fraternity that mark the so
cialist idea. The projection of Kim II Sung as patriarch of the
extended national family even bears some ironic resemblance to
the imperial cult of pre-war Japan. Whatever explanation may
be given of the phenomenon. it must be' seen as something
fundamentally antithetical to socialism, and as something to be
overcome.
Once again, however, it should be stressed that the stan
dards of evaluation here are those of socialism, therefore of
democracy. By the more flexible standards of comparison with
elsewhere in the developing world the North Korean phenom
enon is not so surprising, and is a good deal more defensible
than the "developmental dictatorships" believed by many
bourgeois scholars to be a necessary part of the development
process under capitalism in much of the Third World. The
corruption. venality, brutality and compradore spirit bred under
these conditions appear not to exist in North Korea.
The extraordinary adulation which surrounds the leader in
North Korea leads to certain other distortions in political prac
tice in both domestic and foreign policy. The history of the
Korean revolution as it is presented to the Korean people. and
even much contemporary world history and politics. is seriously
distorted in order to legitimize and reinforce the domestic politi
cal system. The history of the Korean revolution is narrowed to
eliminate or minimize the contribution of individuals or groups
One does indeed hesitate to criticize a country which is
and has for so long been the object of such intense
economic, political and military pressure from the
forces of the "free world" led by Washington. Yet the
fact is that the DPRK itself contributes to its own
isolation.
other than the "Kapsan" or Manchurian partisan faction of Kim
II Sung and his associates, and the international connections of
the revolutionary movement, whether the relations with the
Comintern in the 1920s and 1930s or the contribution made by
Korean revolutionaries to the revolutionary movements in the
Soviet Union, China or Japan, or the historically crucial foreign
support which enabled the revolution either to attain power (the
Soviet Union in 1945) or to avoid defeat (China in 1950).
Internally, the Korean revolution has become the history of that
strand which became eventually victorious, the contribution of
all other than the "Kapsan" group having either been elimi
nated or turned into an example of factionalism, bureaucratism,
or even treason. The communists whose original base was in
South Korea, or those who had strong connections in China or
the Soviet Union, have been eliminated from any positions of
authority or place in the record, some of them (like Pak Hong
Yong
28
) physically eliminated-in his case on the unlikely
ground of having been a Japanese spy from the 1920s and aU. S.
spy during the Korean War. Museums, educational and cultural
institutions lend massive reinforcement to the view that the
history of the Korean revolution was coterminous with the
history of Kim II Sung, his family and his close associates. Of
course, it would be wrong to deny the contributions of Kim II
Sung and his group, but it does violence to the historical record
to attempt to eliminate everything else.
Education
Earlier in this paper, brief mention was made of the ex
traordinary attention given to education as a priority of the
regime and the society. In October 1980. Kim II Sung made
reference to the goal of "compulsory higher education," a goal
which no state has ever adopted. 29 Yet it is not possible to reach
an unambiguously positive assessment of this phenomenon.
From the lowest to the highest levels, the education system is
heavily burdened with the task of promoting officially sanc
tioned "socialist" or "collectivist" values. Child socialization
is more a collective (state) enterprise here than anYWhere, and
the process begins earlier, in a planned way, in some 60,000
state-run nurseries which are entrusted with the political as well
as physical care of infants. This system was born partly of
28. South Korean communist leader. executed in Pyongyang in December
1955.
29. Kim [I Sung. pp. 38-39.
56
1
I
since labor shortage problems made it necessary to to Japanese shunga (erotic paintings) or Chinese erotic novels
i
lIberate both parents for full participation in the workforce, but (by a historian). This suggests an extaordinary, romantic (ob
It also reflects the belief that consciousness can be created, that sessive?) puritanism, combined with passionate nationalism.
I
what the historical development of the economy has not been
able to accomplish-a self-conscious proletariat-can be made
good by planning and effort, by an act of collective will. Yet
I
political domination in the effort to create the "new" man can
look sometimes very much like traditional Confucian authori
tarianism. A visit to a DPRK nursery or educational institution
can be very disconcerting: children seem cheerful and spontan
I
I
eous, yet there is a strong underlying sense of constraint, of
spontaneity carefully channeled, whether in the disciplined,
organized and intense classrooms, in the carefully organized
performances to which guests are treated, or in the bands of
i children to be seen marching and singing on their way to school
I
or to the performance of some social task.

l Kimilsungism, inevitably, plays a central role in political
I
education, and in it are distilled what evidently are taken by the
party to be the central principles of collective morality to which
t all must conform. In nurseries, kindergartens and schools which
.1
I visited it was clear that the room set aside for teaching' 'the
revolutionary acts of the great leader" or "the boyhood of the
I
1 great leader" played a central part in the education process. In
the girls' senior middle school I visited, the curriculum item
"Ideological and Political Education" was explained to mean
"the revolutionary acts of the great leader," and the class was
conducted in the utmost solemnity in a room dominated by a
.1
large white plaster bust of the leader. At the Kim II Sung
!
1
University, according to Andrew Nahm who visited it in 1972,
!
65 percent of l300 class hours were devoted to teaching the
j principles of Juche and the ideas of Kim II Sung. 30 Juche, which
is treated as if it were a revelation of absolute truth, constitutes
in effect a denial of the basic Marxist principle of the dialectic.
The DPRK is, of course, not the first post-revolutionary state to
try to freeze the dialectic into a particular orthodox exegesis.
But the tremendous effort at the inculcation of "socialism" at
all levels of the education system is oddly combined with a very
conservative, puritanical attitude to family life, such that a
Japanese observer could write:
to the eyes ofJapanese who live in the spreading ethos ofthe
nuclear family and individualism. there was an antiquarian
atmosphere. which may be termed as "confucian. "31
It is not only the family but the whole society that seems to
be imbued with a strict puritanical moral ethos, sealed by the
dominance of the society by the great patriarch. Other revolu
tionary societies have shared this general trend. but probably not
to the degree of intensity which exists here. I was assured, while
in Korea, that pre-marital sex, divorce, prostitution, homosexu
ality. drunkenness, and crime were unknown. that even blind
ness and deafness among children were pre-revolutionary phe
nomena (by the director of a kindergarten). that schools never
experience any problems of discipline or truancy (by the princi
pal of a girls' middle school), that serious illnesses were un
known (by the chairperson of a collective farm), and even that
the Korean tradition was of a degree of purity superior to other
East Asian countries- its literature and art having no equivalent
:10. Op. cit.. p. 86.
31. Oguri Keitaro. op. cit.
The DPRK in the World
Internationally, the subordination of diplomacy to the goal
of enhancing the legitimacy and prestige of the ruler has many
unfortunate consequences. In the Non-Aligned Movement, the
DPRK has a certain undoubted prestige: it has been outstand
ingly successful at constructing an independent industrial econ
omy and it has carefully avoided taking sides in the Sino-Soviet
dispute; as an opponent of colonialism and neo-colonialism it
has the best of credentials. Yet its message to the Third World is
an ambiguous one: its Juche/self-help/independent industriali
zation and social welfare programs are attractive to left-wing
and regimes, while its leader-exaltation principle is
potentially very attractive to right-wing authoritarian regimes.
Indeed the latter is something with which it is hard to believe the
late President Park or the current President Chun in South Korea
would have much quibble. Because of this leader-exaltation
principle, even the most hated and despised of Third World
rulers, the "Emperor" Bokassa of Central Africa, could be
feted in Pyongyang in May 1978, when Kim II Sung announced
that the two countries enjoyed "an identity of the aspirations for
the building of an independent new society. "32 What much of
the progressive forces in the Third World is looking for is
effective democratic constraints to prevent the emergence of
dictators like Bokassa.
In relation to the advanced capitalist countries too the
continuous stress on the excellence of the great leader has been
positively disastrous in its effects. Given the insistence by
Koreans that Juche-self-reliance or independence-is the
basic principle of the revolution, it is sad and ironic that so much
its diplomat.ic effort abroad should be devoted to the promo
tion of f1unkylsm and sycophancy. Socialist stomachs can be
guaranteed to tum at the sight of the purple prose that emerges
from the International Institute for the Study of the Juche Idea or
from Kimilsungism in its various Western or Third World
manifestations. Currently Pyongyang is sponsoring an interna
tional essay competition, of which the principal suggested
theme is
On the patriotic and revolutionary family of the respected
and beloved leader President KIM IL SUNG {sic] and the
epochal significance ofhis birth.
Inevitably, the common response, at least in the West, has
been very negative. with the result often that the Korean revolu
tion and its many positive achievements are dismissed alto
gether. Lunacy, fanaticism, and Stalinism are some of the
categories to which the DPRK is often consigned. Partly, to be
sure, this reflects the complacent ignorance or racist dismissal
of the developing world, even of the non-European parts of the
developed world, like Japan, that is common in the West. And
one does indeed hesitate to criticize a country which is and has
for so long been the object of such intense economic, political
and military pressure from the forces of the "free world" led by
Washington. Yet the fact is that the DPRK itself contributes to
its own isolation. The great leader. who speaks to Western
32. Korean Central News Agency. Korea Daily News. May 4. 1978.
57
audiences occasionally out of the columns of paid advertise
ments in their newspapers, 33 is dismissed as a joke. The disas
trous foreign impact is directly tied to domestic political prac
tice, since the advertisements-statements or interviews given
by Kim II Sung, excerpts from the constitution or legal code,
totally devoid of any context and incomprehensible to the best
intentioned of readers-are published not so much to influence
foreign readers, it seems, as Korean, since advertisement mate
rial is relayed back to the Korean readership in such a way as to
suggest that leading western papers carried the items as news. 33.
The practice is highly offensive, therefore, since it amounts to
using the public funds of the Korean people to mislead those
same people into thinking that their leader is also universally
recognized as a world leader, genius, hero and stateman, while
actually exposing both the leader and the country to ridicule and
contempt and undermining any serious attempt at solidarity with
the Korean revolution and people.
An impartial, critical assessment of the DPRK must
include enormous gains as well as serious costs and
distortions.
As serious as may be the consequences of Kimilsungism
for the foreign relations of the DPRK in general, when attention
is turned to the impact on policy toward the other half of the
country the effects may be even worse. On the one hand,
southerners who share the nationalist desire on the part of the
North for reunification, even southerners who see socialism as
an attractive or necessary system, may well hesitate about
responding to northern overtures precisely because they seem so
closely intertwined with the business of promoting Kim II Sung.
On the other hand, the way in which people in North Korea are
taught to think of the other half of the country is also scarcely
likely to promote understanding or reconciliation. Serious anal
ysis in Marxist terms of the social and economic formations of
South Korea appears to be non-existent: its per capita GNP was
described in 1974 as being $50, the lowest in the world
34
(the
1979 edition of the same text omits this figure, but gives no
estimate at all); the society is one in which' 'Most of the workers
live in board shanties, tents and dugouts";35 pictures of half
starved people squatting miserably in what looks like wartime
ruins are still presented as representative images of the soci
ety;36 and the masses of the southern people are represented as
33. Most recently in a 2,000 word advertisement in the Melbourne Age (Sep
tember 9. 1980): "The technical revolution is an important component of the
Three Revolutions."
33a. See. for example. BBe. Summary of World Broadcasts (25/1/1978)
quoting KCNA (Korean Central News Agency) (23/ 1/ 1978) radio: "The British
paper The Times wrote that President Kim II Sung is. indeed. the benefactor who
liberated the Korean people ... the ever-victorious iron-willed commander
.... etc."
34. Korean Review (Pyongyang. 1974). p. 149.
35. Kim Han Gil. Modern History ofKorea (Pyongyang, 1979), p. 533.
36. See. for example, the pictorial journal Democratic People's Republic of
Korea. inside back cover. 1977. Nos. 1.2. and 3.
longing to be reunited under Kim II Sung. Thus, for example,
the KCNA (Korean Central News Agency) ran an item on
September 5, 1980, that commences "Today South Korean
compatriots openly express their ardent desire to be embraced at
an early date in the bosom of the great leader Marshall Kim II
Sung, the sun of the nation," followed by examples of high
school teachers, peddlers, workers, and people in prison who
had openly proclaimed their allegiance to Kim II Sung.
Achievements by southern compatriots that have no bearing on
politics, that might be acclaimed as reflecting credit on Koreans
in general and used to begin creating a bridge of North-South
understanding transcending the political differences of North
and South, achievements in the fields of culture, science, and
sport, for example, go unreported.
The combined effect of all this is to create a distorted and
unbalanced picture of the south (whether equivalent distortions
exist also in the south is beside the point), even one consistent
with the idea that the southern masses are so miserable in their
oppression as to be longing to be liberated by Kim II Sung. That,
of course, could have rather dangerous implications. It should
be added that the formal policy of the North on reunification is
quite different, and includes a commitment to strict respect for
the autonomy of the people of the south to choose whatever
political system or leader they wish. But the cause of reunifica
tion is damaged and confused by the co-existence of two dif
ferent lines.
Stalinism?
How is one to understand all the contradictory evidence on
the nature of the North Korean phenomenon? It has pioneered
for the Third World the path of independent and self-sustaining
industrialization, but for all its economic and social achive
ments it is hard to detect in it any political model.
It has been attacked as Stalinist, and clearly there are
aspects of Kimilsungism that resemble the cult of Stalin. The
following assessment of the Stalin period, published in Pravda
as the process of reassessment got under way in 1956, could be
applied, mutatis mutandis, to Kim II Sung's Korea:
In this atmosphere the only one who could develop theory,
have it advanced, and state anything original and new was
Stalin. It was considered the function of everyone else to
disseminate the ideas pronounced by Stalin and to interpret
the formula laid down by him. 37
The broader, cultural ramifications of the phenomenon of the
cult, again in this case as experienced under Stalin, are spelled
out in the following passage, by the Soviet writer, A. Kron: 38
Any cult is organically hostile to Marxism-Leninism, the
scientific Weltanschauungg of the working class. Wherever
there is cult, scientific thought must retreat before blind
faith, creativeness before dogma, and public opinion before
arbitrariness. The cult generates a hierarchy of its own
servants . . . it is incompatible with criticism . . . it is
essentially anti-popular. The cult humiliates the people and
37. Pravda. March 28. 1956. cited in Masao Maruyama. "A Critique of
De-Stalinization." in Maruyama. Masao. Thought and Behm'iour in Modern
Japanese Politics (London: Oxford University Press. 1963).
38. Quoted in Isaac Deutscher. "Steps to a New Russian Literature." in Ironies
()f History: Essays on Contemporary Communism (London: OUP. 1966). p.
241.
58
makes it view as a gift sent from above that for which the
people has paid afull price in its own toil and blood. Even the
cult of the People (with a capital P) has its obverse side-it
degrades the individual. The Leader was supposed to be the
People's servant. But when millions ofmasters had to rise to
their feet at the mere mention of their servant's name, there
was in this something profoundly alien to the democratic
traditions in which the revolution and our social order have
brought us up . ... Literature and art could not escape the
destructive impact {of the cult]. Artistic creation is in
separable from social initiative and from the striving for the
new. Yet an innovator, in whatever epoch he lives, is always
somehow ahead ofthe understanding ofhis contemporaries.
... With one's head bowed down, one cannot look ahead.
And yet, the word "Stalinism" implies a complex phe
nomenon of which the cult of the leader is only one part. The
obverse side of the Stalinist cult was massive purges and terror.
For this too is there an analogy in the DPRK?
The simple answer seems to be no. Even a highly critical
account of the country ,in the most extensive Western language
study so far undertaken of it, concedes that the regime is able to
"command the allegiance of the great majority of the North
Korean people at this time. "39 True, there have been purges,
during the Korean War quite extensive ones. but since then
apparently only of a limited kind as factions struggling for
control of party or state have been eliminated,40 but apparently
without any wide-scale repercussions in the society at large.
But there almost certainly is political repression, however
difficult it may be to assess its scale and severity. The experi
ence of the Venezuelan communist poet. Ali Lameda, may
represent the tip of an iceberg, though it may of course also be an
isolated phenomenon.
41
In 1966 Lameda was employed in
Pyongyang as a Spanish language consultant in the foreign
language section of the Department of Foreign Publications. He
was arrested the following year, and held in solitary confine
ment for more than 6 years. The Amnesty International assess
ment of his case is that
His trial was a parody of justice; he was sentenced to 20
years' imprisonment for allegedly having attempted to sabo
tage, spy and introduce infiltrators while in North Korea. 42
He was released only after considerable international pressure
had been brought to bear on his behalf.
The reasons for his detention remain a mystery-at least
if Amnesty was right to dismiss the charges made-though his
trial seems to have been closely connected with that of a French
man, Jacques Sedillot, whose offense (according to Lameda)
may have had to do with suggestions that the DPRK's foreign
presentation was ineffective hecause of its exclusive stress on
the leader. Sedillot died in Pyongyang, shortly after release
from prison. in 1976. At all events. Lameda's account of prison
life in North Korea and of the scale of prison population, is a rare
:'9. Sculupino and Lee. p. 84.1.
40. See. for example. Koon Woo Nam, The North Koreat/ Commlit/ist Leader
ship, /945-/9(,5 (Alabama: University of Alabama Press. 1974).
41. Lameda. Ali. Ali Lamet!a: A Personal Account of the Experience of a
prisoner of conscience in the DPRK (London: Amnesty International. 1979).
42. At p. 9.
document and, if accurate, points to the number being large
(150,000 in prisons and camps) undergoing rigorous punish
ment for often trivial offenses, such as that of a woman who
persisted in smoking. The Amnesty report has not, to my knowl
edge, elicited any response from Pyongyang; nor were my
queries on the matter while in Pyongyang answered.
Certainly the general impression gained by the visitor
notoriously unreliable as such impressions, based on short visits
and filtered through a language barrier, may be-is that Scala
pino and Lee were right and the regime does enjoy wide general
support. There is, after all, plenty of reason why such should be
the case, both because of its record in defending state and people
against the most extreme pressures and threats (i.e. its nation
alist credentials), and because of its success in the economic
task of creating and distributing with manifest equity the neces
sary goods to make possible enormous improvements in the
living conditions of the people within a single generation. De
fectors are a rare phenomenon. Perhaps, as a recent and very
critical observer noted, "The fact that North Koreans appar
ently believe they do indeed live in paradise is the biggest
success of the regime.' '43
The categories for understanding this country must at least
include nationalism. Korean nationalism was the first to mature
in Asia (excluding Japan), and its struggle for national unity and
independence has lasted longer than any country. Yet still the
division ensues, and part of the country remains occupied by
U . S. troops and the harbor of U . S. nuclear weapons. Korean
nationalism is a very powerful force that has sustained the
Koreans through a series of extraordinary adversities: Japanese
imperialism, division, war, occupation (briefly, but traumat
ically, in 1950) and the constant hostility and threat from the
most powerful of enemies ever since. The achievement of
having survived so much has bred an exaggerated stress on
unity,44 the price of survival; and that monolithic instinct has
also been exploited by the group in party and state which has
become bureaucratic and authoritarian, a benevolent technoc
racy of which there are few examples elsewhere.
The defeat of imperialism, and the mobilization of the
people in the process of economic development, even when the
mass violence is avoided and a high degree of equity and
equality is maintained, both need nevertheless to be distin
guished from socialism and democracy. The accelerated mobili
zation-industrialization process in itself leads to the power
monopaly of the party state, and leaves little or no room for
dissent or for the independent articulation of the interests of
peasants, workers, women, or other groups. As Raymond Wil
liams has observed. concerning Eastern Europe:
there is equally no reason to believe, from the experience of
Eastern Europe, that any simple removal of capitalist prop
erty relations is sufficient to alter the realities of monopoly
state power and the imposed authority of the plan; indeed it
may lead directly to them 45
4.1. Tiziano Terzani. "Pyongyang 'Paradise': A Deified Ruler rules a 19H4
Society," Internatiot/al Herald Tribune. October 6. 1980.
44. Bruce Cumings, "Kim's Korean Communism." Problems o.fCommu
nism, March-April 1974, p. 28.
45 Raymond Williams. "Beyond actually existing socialism." New Left Re
\'iell. 120. March-April 1980. pp. 12-13.
S9
At the root of the problem is the fact that the Korean
revolution has had to be carried out in a country in which
capitalism itself existed only in a backward and distorted form,
and in which liberalism and bourgeois individualism were virtu
ally unknown. The factors which appeared to Marx to be the
necessary preconditions for the transition to socialism simply
did not exist.
The analysis of the category of "already existing social
ism" put forward by the East German Marxist, Rudolf Bahro.
has opened up considerable debate in the context of Eastern
Europe. and would appear to be quite relevant to Korea too. 46 In
conditions where the forces of production-or the material
foundations-are extremely undeveloped or underdeveloped at
the time of revolution and the establishment of "socialism,"
then the lack of basic material and human conditions for social
ism must be made up "by the revolutionary people themselves.
by creating the labour discipline they need in the course of their
struggle. "47 The state. therefore, has to constitute the organiz
ing force for industrialization, and such a state "can be nothing
other than bureaucratic. "48 Labor is bound to be alienating and
compUlsive.
The urgency and enormous scale of the task of transforma
tion which revolutionaries in the Soviet Union (but equally in
the DPRK) had to assume as a result of the historic backward
ness of their societies was reinforced by reason of "the tech
nological superiority of the imperialist countries, enforced by
their policy of military intervention and encirclement. "49 And
when the revolution effects profound cleavages in such back
ward and unprepared societies, the outcome is bound to be
complex. Bahro again:
Antonio Gramsci coined the concept of revolution-restora
tion to express the way that the political leap must always be
followed by a settlement with the past. hecause the new social
forces never immediately embrace the totality of economic
relations and the productive forces that bear these, and are
therefore constrained to compromise precisely for the sake of
their own hegemony. The averting of political restoration
and the defence ol'the state had to be paid/or with important
concessions to the old way of life and ideology. The people,
including a working class for the most part newly recruited,
were waiting for their nachalniki (bureaucrats). 50
Thus for Bahro there is the anomaly that "our countries are
ruled by a state machine such as Marx sought to smash in the
revolution," and that "The ruling party apparatuses have as
little in common with communism as the Grand Inquisitor with
Jesus Christ. "51
But the successful carrying out of the process of industriali
zation, capital accumulation and technological transformation
creates the conditions for such a bare and ascetic' 'socialism" to
transcend itself. It is not only the material forces of production
46. Bahro, Rudolf, The Alternatil'es in Eastern Furope, (London: New Left
Books. 1978).
47. Ibid. p. 60.
48. Ibid .. p. 129.
49. Ibid.. p. 131.
50. Ibid.. p. 132.
51. Ibid .. pp. 32. 357.
that have been enormously developed but the human resources
too. A huge scientific and technical intelligentsia and a modem
working class have been created; as it gradually deepens its
consciousness of its own alienation it will begin the process of
overcoming it. The DPRK. under the leadership of a bureau
cratic dictatorship, has performed enormous historical tasks.
and in comparative historical terms it would have to be con
ceded that the costs have been less heavy than might have been
expected and less severe than experienced anywhere else. It is
not to be attacked for not having leaped painlessly and directly
to a socialist utopia. The birth of socialism. like the birth of
capitalism. is bound to be a painful and contradictory process.
An impartial, critical assessment of the DPRK must include
enormous gains as well as serious costs and distortions.
Conclusion
The conditions may now be ripening for the transfornlation
of existing society so that the role of state and bureaucracy can
be progressively diminished, which is of course not to say that
this must or will happen. However, it is remarkable in the
Korean case that this necessary goal has long been perceived as
desirable and was enshrined-long before the material condi
tions for its realization had matured-at the center of the Ko
rean revolution. For what, after all. is the essence of luche but
the dream of a society that gives maximum play to the creative
energies of the common man? It is close to the classic liberation
goal of organizing social life around self-governing communes
of free and creative men, In Marx's terms
The working class, in the course 01' its development, will
substitute for the old civil society an association which will
exclude classes and their antagonisms, and there will be no
more political power properly so-called, since political
power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in
civil society. 52
To advance along this path. the aspiration expressed in the
notion of luche will have to be translated from slogan to reality.
Glorification of central authority will have to give way to its
limitation and eventual abolition, This will very likely involve
struggle, if only for the reason that the process of divesting
bureaucrats of their status and power will seem to them to
threaten the revolution itself.
Yet this struggle, when it emerges, will be one directed at
the fulfillment of a goal constantly recognized and proclaimed,
often by Kim II Sung himself. 53 It has so far been recognized
rather in the ritual form of denunciation. occasionally of scape
goating; whether it can henceforth be implemented by the crea
tion of new structures based on democratic mass initIative and
cooperative organization remains to be seen.
The attainment of a relatively high level of development of
the natural and human forces of production, the creation of a
52. Marx, "The Pover1y of Philosophy." quoted by Istvan Meszaros. "Politi
cal Power and Dissent in Post-revolutionary Societies." II Manifesto Confer
ence, Power and Opposition ill Postrcmlutiollarv Societies, ed. Rossana
Rossanda (London: Ink Links. 1979). p. 105.
53. See. for example. Cumings. p. 30; Lee. Chong-Sik. Koreall Workers'
Party: A Short History (Stanford. California: Hoover Institution Press). pp.
88-89.
60
society with high and equal standards of welfare and education,
and the commitment, at the center of the revolutionary process,
to pursuit of luche and anti-bureaucracy, are distinct plusses in
any assessment. To them should be added, as a force of consid
erable significance for the future, (1) a value system in which
performance and achievement are superior to acquisition and
consumption-though the security of that attainment will only
be known when it is tested as isolation is reduced, and (2) a
sense of social priorities which appears to place high premium
on the harmony of man and nature, on the avoidance of massive
conurbations, the preservation of a careful balance of town and
country, and the provision ofadequate space and light and green
for the nourishment and refreshment of the human spirit. In the
context of deepening ecological crisis in the industrial coun
tries, the aspect of North Korea which Harrison Salisbury noted
as "a love for trees that must be almost druidic" must be noted
as another positive. 54
The negative aspects which cannot be ignored in any as
sessment of the Korean revolution have already been discussed.
The principal problems now to be overcome by the Korean
revolution, if it is to move towards socialism, are those summed
up under the two words coined by the regime: "Kimilsungism"
and "monolithicity. " Yet the institutions that sustain the pres
ent system appear solid. However little we know of the thinking
of the common people in North Korea, it is hard to imagine a
Korean Gdansk, since, at least at present and in theory, the
possibility of organizations of workers or farmers which are
independent and not integrated into the monolith does not exist.
If the impression of political passivity is correct, it may be
due to two distinct, but related factors. On the one hand, the
degree of centralized control of information exercised by the
regime is extraordinarily high, and a break in that monopoly will
almost certainly be necessary for other advances along the path
of luche to be made.
The opening of an enormous public library-though it
remains to be seen whether it will be completely open and
whether political constraints will operate in selecting and mak
ing available books-and the gradual introduction of foreign
films on television, represent small but necessary ways in which
the existing paucity of information on the outside world can be
supplemented. Many more will be necessary-and the opening
to public scrutiny of the processes of internal decision-making is
a goal that looks still a distant one in Korea.
The other factor is one which warrants extended treatment
but which can only be mentioned here. That is the location of
North Korea in the context of an unresolved national division, in
which all the major powers have interests, and which will
clearly be difficult to resolve. The present context within which
North Korea exists is one of tension, confrontation and fear. In
the north, just as spokesmen for popular democratic movements
in the south have always recognized, democracy and national
unification are integrally related goals. The greatest possible
stimulus to the kind of internal transformation of the DPRK to
which I am here alluding would be through deepening detente,
denuclearization, demilitarization, and maximum international
cooperation in the construction of a framework within which the
goal of eventual reunification could be recognized and con
54. Salisbury. p. 195.
scious steps begun towards its realization. They would do more
than anything to weaken the information monopoly of the pres
ent regime, to undermine its very plausible stress on "monolith
icity" as essential to national defense, while the process of
dialogue with the democrats of the south and the socialists of
other countries would open the hot-house variety of Kim II
Sung-ist "socialism" that exists today to the wider democratic
and socialist tradition. *
Errata
A general note about typographical and other mistakes in
the Bulletin: We are always glad to acknowledge any errors that
are likely to confuse or mislead. In all such cases, we request
your indulgence and wish to explain that we have neither proof
reading staff nor time or funds to mail galleys to authors who
reside in many parts of the world.
* * *
Aug. 12,1981
To the Editors:
Just received BCAS 13:2. Still a great journal.
On p. 43 there is a huge error in the next to the last
paragraph of my review essay. Please print a correction in the
next BCAS. It should read:
China has made great human gains in the last few years.
But the new openness and the beginnings of democratization in
China are opposed by many peasant nativists who hate and fear
things such as Orville Schell proudly sitting on a park bench
next to a young Chinese woman. The corpulent PLA officers
whom Schell nicely ridicules.
Thank you.
Ed Friedman
Sept. 7, 1981
To the Editors:
A typo in the last sentence of my article, "Market, Maoism
and Economic Reform in China" (Vol. 13, No.3, p. 41) exactly
reversed the meaning. I wrote: "If administrative planning is
now strengthened. . . the road ahead for structural reform may
be rocky, indeed." As printed, "now" was changed to "not."
Since the point of this concluding paragraph is that the
restoration and improvement ofcentral, administrative planning
weakens the prospects for market-oriented reforms, the typo, by
making the last sentence say the opposite, makes nonsense of
the whole paragraph.
I would appreciate it if this letter, by way of correction,
could be printed in the next issue.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Carl Riskin
61
Taber's Last Testament
A Sbort Review
by Jonathan Addleton
Lawrence Lifschultz's Taher's Last Testament: Bangla
desh the Unfinished Revolution* gives as detailed an account as
we are ever likely to have of the unsuccessful Bangladesh
uprising of November 1975. The text, first published in
Bombay in The Economic and Political Weekly, revolves
around Abu Taber, the army officer who played a major role in
the uprising and was later executed by the present regime. At a
personal level, the book is an intensely moving account of the
life and death of a brave military officer. At a much broader
level, the book provides a useful overview of the Left in
Bangladesh and indirectly suggests a number of reasons why
revolutions, at least in the short term, fail.
Four coups occurred in Bangladesh during the second half
of 1975. The first, in August, resulted in the death of Mujib and
the emergence of a regime which tilted toward both the United
States and Pakistan. The next three coups-on November 3,
November 7, and November 24-reflected the power struggles
which followed the death of Mujib. The November 7 coup
(described in the press as "sepoy mutiny" because it involved
junior officers and enlisted men) was led by Abu Taher and very
nearly resulted in what would have been a first for South Asia:
the emergence of a revolutionary military regime. Taher himself
was acting as part of the Biblopi Gono Bahini (' 'Revolutionary
Soldiers Organization"), the official armed branch of the J at yo
Samajtantrik Dal ("Socialist Nationalist Party", or JSD), one
of Bangladesh's major Marxist parties. The twelve demands
issued at the time of the uprising included the call for a
"revolutionary" and "classless" army. "Our revolution is not
simply to change one leadership for another," the paper de
clared. "From today onwards the armed forces of the nation
shall build themselves as the defender of the country's op
pressed classes."
Lifschultz correctly traces the emergence of a revolu
tionary element in the Bangladesh military to the events of
1971. The civi! war and the brutal manner in which the Pakistan
army sought to suppress it united almost all East Pakistanis.
Initial armed resistance came largely through remnants of the
East Bengal regiment and the border security forces. As less
conventional forces joined the resistance, an intense debate
grew over how the "war of liberation" should be conducted.
* Book title differs on Zed Press edition, which includes Taher's Last Testament
plus additional material. -Editors
BANGLADESH: THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION
by Lawrence Lifschultz. London: Zed Press, 1979.
Many regular army officers, with Indian support, advocated the
formation of regular battalions and a conventional command
structure. Taber, who had joined the resistance in India after
deserting his army post in West Pakistan, urged a much more
total war involving a peasant army and only limited assistance
from India. "Stress was put on capturing enemy equipment
rather than relying on foreign supplies," Lifschultz writes.
"Only through a form of people's war, which relied upon the
mass mobilization and overwhelming support of the Bangladesh
population, could the numerically greater Pakistan forces with
its superior firepower be overcome." The resistance, while
never completely becoming a "people's war" (to Taher's great
regret, the Pakistan army in Dacca surrendered to Indian of
ficers rather than Bangladeshis), did involve a broad range of
Bengali society, and Taber and other regular officers were for
the first time able to look beyond the narrow post-colonial
military tradition in which they had been trained.
The Indian intervention prematurely brought indepen
dence to Bangladesh, but it did not end the differences facing the
various factions within the independence movement. Most East
Pakistanis had been nationalists; as Bangladeshis they had to
come to grips with what "independence" really meant. Mujib,
who had returned from a jail cell in Pakistan to become Ban
gladesh's first head of state, began by seeking extensive foreign
aid from abroad. At home, he made few attempts to dismantle
the internal economic and political structures which had been
inherited from both Pakistan and the British. Progressive Ban
gladeshis, appalled at the widespread corruption and the politi
cal direction of the country, became disillusioned and believed
the struggle for liberation had been betrayed. "Independence
has become an agony for the people of this country," wrote
Ziauddin, a military colleague and close friend ofTaher's, in the
summer of 1972. "The whole of Bangladesh is either begging
or singing sad songs or shouting without awareness. The hungry
and poor are totally lost. This country is on the verge of falling
into the abyss,"
Taher proposed a policy of "self reliance" for the newly
independent Bangladesh, and he very briefly had an opportunity
to put his suggestions into practice. His Comilla Brigade be
came known as the' 'Plough Soldiers" because it was involved
in agriculture, irrigation, flood control, and other productive
activities. However, within a year Taher and Ziauddin were
relieved of their posts, along with other officials who opposed
foreign aid and argued for a more austere and self-reliant form of
national development. Some, including both Taher and
62
Ziauddin, gravitated toward active politics. Ziauddin, sending a
one sentence note to a friend which read simply' 'I have crossed
the line," disappeared completely and joined the Marxist under
ground. Taher was less drastic and his association with the
Marxist JSO became known only with the November 7 coup.
The first few hours of the coup were a time of euphoria,
with large street processions and political discussions in all
sections of the military. However, a counter-coup began almost
immediately and by November 23 Taher was under arrest.
Lifschultz's discussion of the reasons for the unsuccessful upris
ing is interesting but it is not completely adequate. The most
obvious mistake, which Lifshultz describes in detail, was ap
pointing Major General Zia Rahman to a position of power.
Taher and other JSO members had initially believed Zia was a
nonpolitical general who would lend credibility to the new
regime, insuring national elections. They believed he was sym
pathetic to their goals; only later did they discover he was "an
ambitious man and lacked a progressive personality." A com
plete acceptance of this explanation is not adequate because it
suggests the attempted revolution failed merely because of the
treachery of one man. In fact, the situation appears more com
plex and leads to a broad range of other questions which
Lifschultz barely touches on. How strong were the lSD's links
with the intellectuals, workers, peasants, and other segments of
society? Was the JSO moving events or merely being moved by
them? If Zia had not been installed as a "figurehead," would
the revolution then have been successful? Recent events in
Afghanistan point to a kind of complexity which should be
critically examined. Would Taher, despite his unquestioned
bravery, good intentions, and revolutionary commitment, have
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turned out to be another Babrak Karmal or Haffizulah Amin?
Would the JSO have become another Khalq or Parch am party,
and would the factional in-fighting have been at least as severe?
Although the 1971 civil war may have made parts of the Ban
gladesh military truly' 'revolutionary," the record of military
inspired revolutions elsewhere in Asia and Africa is not reassur
ing. Taher himself made much about "history"; at times,
one suspects, individuals in the military try to take history much
too forcefully into their own hands.
Nevertheless, Lifschultz does a service in preserving the
final testimony of Abu Taher, and his description of Taher's
trial and execution is moving and very complete. Although
Lifschultz, who had been filing dispatches from Bangladesh for
the Far Eastern Economic Review, The Guardian, and the
BBC, was expelled from the country 17 days before Taher's
trial ended, he still managed to obtain a transcript of Taher's
statements to the military tribunal and copies of his final letter
home. Both are printed in Taher's Last Testament: Bangladesh
the Unfinished Revolution and, by themselves, make the book
worthwhile. "No one can kill me," Taher wrote. "I live in the
midst of the masses. My pulse beats in their pulse. If I am to be
killed, the entire people must also be killed." Although the
self-righteous anger and Abu Taher's strong sense of being "a
part of the goal of the nation" closely parallels Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto's prison testimony from Pakistan, Taher's statements
somehow become more believable and sincere. His hands were
never bloodied by the politics of those in power and, in death, he
stood among those Bangladeshis who saw that most of Ban
gladesh had not been liberated by the "war of liberation" of
1971. *
PRAXIS
Contents of #5: "Art and Ideology," Pt. I (now available)
Materialist LiterarY'Theory in France, 1965-1975 by Claude BOllci,e
"Marks of Weakness"; Ideology, Science and Textual Criticism by lames H.
Kal'allag/r
literature as an Ideological Form: Some Marxist Propositions by Pierre
Maci,erey arid Etie,me Bafibar
Artistic Practice by EIlriqlle Gamalez Raio
The School of Althusser and Aesthetic Thought (commentary) by Stefall
Morawski
Ideology, Production, Text: Pierre Macherey's Materialist Criticism by Frallcis
Barker
SHORT REVIEWS
Althusser: Self-Criticism as Non-Criticism by Mark Poster
Constructing a Critical Ideology by lames H. Kavarlagh
Class Struggle in Literary Form and Deformation by Bill Langen
On language Requirements by Tom Carl ley
linguistics and Ideology by Robert D'Amico.
A Sociology of Texts by Robert Sayre
Single copy: $4.S0 Subscription (2 issues): U.S. $7.00
Distributed in the U.K., Europe and the Commonwealth by Pluto Press
Praxis, P.O. Box 1280, Santa Monica, California 90406 USA
63
Cinema Review
by Saundra Sturdevant
"Kagemusha" is set in the 1570s during the Warring
States period (sengoku) at the end of the Ashika ga, the first
period of Japanese feudalism. The 260 feudal lords (daimyo) on
or near the great plains of Honshu have been in constant warfare
with one another since 1467 with the Onin War. Consolidation
of fiefdoms is taking place. Rice is the medium of exchange:
peasants pay taxes in rice to the lord and he in tum pays his
warriors (samurai) in rice. It is the agricultural productivity of
the peasants that sustains the magnificent array offeudal armies,
the rich silk costumes and beautiful castles of the lords which we
see in "Kagemusha." It is the last period in Japanese history
where agricultural production determines economic power.
Nobunaga, Ieyasu and Hideyoshi will emerge victorious in
the early l600s and establish the Tokugawa with their capital at
Edo (Tokyo). From this time forward the economic base will
broaden. The Tokugawa will build their magnificent castles on
the great plains of Honshu and a strong merchant class will
develop to provide the goods and services demanded by the
elite. In 1600 Edo is a town of 100 houses of farmers and
townspeople. By 1710 its population will be half a million.
Similar spectacular growth will occur in Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto,
Nagoya, the major cities of modem Japan.
So "Kagemusha," then, is set at the close of one major
period in Japanese history and before the beginning of another.
Few people make their living as merchants or craftspersons. The
vast majority are peasants and we have seen how they live in
"Rashomon" and' 'The Seven Samurai. " "Kagemusha" is the
other side of the coin. Here Kurosawa shows us the viewpoint
and warrior life-style of the elite whom Kikuchiyo in "The
Seven Samurai" (played by Toshiro Mifune and the only sam
urai of peasant class origins) blamed for the devastating poverty
and desperate life-style of that class: "Farmers are miserly,
craven, mean, stupid, murderous beasts. But then, who made
animals out of them'? You. You did-you samurai. All of you
damned samurai. Each time you fight you bum villages, you
destroy the fields, you take away the food, you seduce the
women and enslave the men. And kill them if they resist."
Kurosawa takes as his historical focus one of the most powerful
members of the elite, the Lord Takeda Shingen (1520-1573).
Shingen is an imposing figure in Japanese history. His fief
had an excellent defensive position since it was situated in the
Kai Mountains. This meant, however, that campaigns had prob
lems of transportation and supply. Thus, they were short and
swift, usually no more than five days' duration. He did not build
64
"Kagemusha," a film by Akira Kurosawa. Toho/
Kurosawa Production (1980). Twentieth Century-Fox
Distribution. Running Time: 159 minutes.
fortresses as other lords did but met his enemy in an open field
and depended upon his tactical powers for victory. His cam
paigns thus necessitated large amounts of men and material.
Accordingly, Shingen gave a great deal of attention to adminis
trati ve efficiency. He kept the roads well maintained and had an
efficient courier system. Whereas most lords taxed only peas
ants, he taxed warriors and temples also, and he allowed peas
ants to pay taxes in money and rice. Most lords demanded
payment in rice. And he allowed peasants to pay fines instead of
suffering the horrendous and public punishment that was meted
out to members of their class. Kai's rich gold deposits gave him
the economic leeway to be a progressive lord. The upshot was
that Shingen had better relations with the peasants in his fief
than other lords and it was in part for this reason that he first used
the light-footed peasant soldiers (ashigaru) in his armies. It is a
sign of his ability that Ieyasu, after uniting Japan, employed and
refined most of Shingen's policies. Shingen combined the mili
tary prowess of Nobunaga and the administrative ability of
Ieyasu. Had he not been killed in 1573, Shingen could very well
have been the lord who unified Japan.
Kurosawa's first scene succinctly sets the scene for the
~ n t i ~ e film. It is night. Shingen is seated center stage; to his right
IS hiS loyal and non-competitive brother, Nobukado. Center
right front and at a forty-five degree angle to Shingen is a thief
dressed in Shingen's clothes. The thief is a man who will be
Shingen's double. Nobukado has just discovered him in prison
where he was awaiting death by crucifixion. Tatsuya Nakadai,
the villain in "Yojimbo" and "Sanjuro," plays both Shingen
and his double.
Kurosawa shows us a distant, thoughtful, ruthless and
powerful Shingen whose fifty-three-year-old body is showing
the effects of a lifetime of battle. Shingen is ill and Nobukado
has been acting as his double. Shingen and Nobukado discuss
the situation and its possibilities. The thief looks down and away
during this matter-of-fact discussion until Shingen expresses
mild indignation that someone who looks like him is a common
thief. In body language reminiscent of the courtyard scene in
"Rashomon" where Tajomaru, bound and sitting on the gravel,
kicks his heels and laughs at the thought of the dishonor he did to
the samurai. here Nakadai laughs and kicks his heels. He whirls
around and accuses Shingen of killing hundreds and robbing
whole domains.
It's a great scene: here's a thief who's sentenced to be
crucified for stealing a few coins and he's accusing the powerful
Shingen of being not only a thief but a murderer too ... and on
a huge scale. And how does Shingen respond? He is used to
control. His position as lord allows-conditions-him to use
sanctimonious verbal garbage: "War is everywhere ... there
are mountains of dead ... I will do anything necessary to stop
the killing ... " Those deeds necessary, by his own admission,
include banishing his father and killing his first-born son. There
is not a word about power. The scene ends with Shingen telling
Nobukado to train the thief to be his double. He then rises
slowly. We see how he moves. Shingen remarks on the coolness
of the weather and the flare-up in an old wound. We know
Shingen's death will be a matter of time. The film will be about
the transformation of this lumpen thief of peasant origins into a
powerful lord. Kurosawa will again focus on the relationship of
illusion to reality.
Within a matter of months a sharpshooter's bullet fells
Shingen. Kurosawa shows us Shingen's last council with the
Takeda clan generals. Mortally wounded but expressing his
determination not to die, Shingen nevertheless prepares for
death. He orders that his death be kept secret for three years and
warns of the ruin of the clan should its armies leave Kai and go
on the offensive. When he dies on the way back to Kai, his death
is kept a secret. Shingen was a powerful lord.
In a beautifully executed scene Kurosawa shows us how
the double learns of Shingen 's death. We haven't seen him since
the opening scene. It is night. Dressed in silken clothes but
wrapping them around himself so as to cover his face and
walking like a thief, he slips into a room and skillfully opens a
five-foot-high urn marked "treasure." The contents prove not
to be treasure but the greenish body of Shingen dressed in full
battle armor. It is Shingen's burial urn. Terrified, the thief
scrambles to get away. He is noisy and is caught. It is clear to
everyone that it won't work. The thief is a thief.
And then a very interesting thing happens. Although he's
turned out, the thief doesn't leave. Dressed in his old clothes, he
hides in a broken-down hut on the beach and witnesses the burial
of Shingen's urn in Lake Suwa. He overhears spies working for
Nobunaga and leyasu who see the same things as he. He tells the
generals. It is a beautifully composed and photographed scene.
Fog on the lake engulfs the boat carrying the urn. On shore the
Takeda clan generals are in attendance. The thief rushes up. tells
what he's overheard.
Their response throws us off. We expect them to rush to the
hut, slay the spies. But that doesn't happen. Instead. coldly the
generals say: "So what? We're going to tell our troops as soon
as we've buried Lord Shingen ... you refused to help ...
scram ... what are you hanging around here for? Want pay
ment for the information? ... Scram." Then another unex
pected thing happens. The thief grovels on his hands and knees
in the wet sand and begs to be of some service to the dead
Shingen ... not to the generals themselves. He pleads, "Make
use of me." They do. From now on the thief will try to be
Shingen. There will be no more night raids to rip off clan
treasure.
The problem here is that we know what happened and how
it happened. We don't know why. Kurosawa fails to give us any
insight into the thief's motivation. Up to the time he's caught
trying to rip off treasure. we've seen a gutsy fellow who owes
loyalty to no one. He agrees to be Shingen's double, for he has
no choice. It's either that or crucifixion. But the reality is that
he's a thief. He can't give up old habits and is ousted because of
it. Next we see him witnessing the burial and begging to be
allowed to be of service. It doesn't make much sense. He owes
nothing to the Takeda clan. He's not from Kai. Moreover. he's
tried but failed at illusion-creation. He's free. Is freedom the
problem? There's no evidence to support this contention. We
know too little. Is it that the process of being someone else had
already proceeded to the point where there is no turning back? It
is hard to support this analysis for it is clear that the thief's
intention was merely to warn.
It is the generals' reaction to his news, their disdain and
hostility, that he responds to. They "guilt-trip" him. Why does
it work? He's servile. We see the anguish and desperation as his
hands clutch and squeeze the wet sand. We feel sure that the
period of equivocation is over. Kurosawa's story-telling is weak
here. If we are to understand the transformation of the thief into
Shingen, we must have more to go on than this. This is a major
turning point in the film. From now on the thief begins the
process of deceiving those outside the intimate circle of clan
generals. The thief must dominate, extinguish the reality of his
person. He must create the illusion that he is Shingen. Why does
he do it? Is it that he has consciousness neither of his own
self-interest nor of his class position? It would appear so.
The process of illusion-creation begins in earnest with the
return to Kai. The double must deal with Shingen's grandson
and heir, Takemaru, who upon greeting his grandfather, says,
"You're not my grandfather." He must deal with Shingen's
horse and his concubines, both ridden only by Shingen ... the
one Japanese verb noru accommodates itself to these two situa
tions and, as such, always brings peels of laughter. And he must
function as head of the Takeda clan when clan leaders assemble
to discuss Ieyasu's probing attacks of outlying castles. In hand
ling each of these situations, the double shows himself to be a
person of resources and wit.
The price he pays is a heavy one. In a visually brilliant
dream scene marked by periods of silence and music, we wit
ness the double's inner turmoil. It is again the shore at Lake
Suwa. The colors are vivid orange, red, green, purple, blue,
yellow, pink. They run across the whole of the screen and they
melt into and out of one another. Kurosawa, the painter, de
signed the set as he did approximately 300 others in the film.
Shingen is in his armor and the thief in his own clothes. The thief
alternately runs towards and away from Shingen. He is both
pursuer and pursued. He is anguished, terrified, indecisive.
Then Kurosawa pans in on the sleeping double. His body
movements reflect the dream state: he struggles to get away, he
sweats, he cries out awakening himself and his attendants.
Masterfully Kurosawa succeeds in showing us the conflict be
tween the inner reality and the outward illusion.
The conflict is resolved at the Battle of Takatenjin in May
1574. The illusion wins: the double becomes Shingen. Seated
on a hill surrounded by a personal bodyguard, the double sees a
battle scene for the first time. He is not from the samurai class
and is unaccustomed to the death he sees before him. He leans
forward for a better look. Corpses are everywhere. The slaugh
ter horrifies and scares him. Then there is a sequence of attacks
on his position. His men form a human wall around him.
Gunfire picks off many. The double wants to run. An attendant
commands, "Keep calm." He does. There is a lull in the
fighting during which the bodies of those who died shielding
him are unceremoniously dragged off and placed in a pile
nearby. Swords are placed in the hands of those on top of the
pile. Their eyes stare and blood winds down out of the mouths of
many. The double takes a good look. Then there is another
attack. This time it is the double who commands, "Don't
65
move." Shingen is in charge. Against grand orchestral back
ground music Katsuyori, Shingen's son, bums Takatenjin cas
tie. Reds and purples flow across the screen. The Takeda clan is
again victorious.
War is the situation which ultimately tests the double's
ability to create the illusion he's Shingen. Or, to put it another
way, war is the situation which forces the thief to lose any hold
he has over his own identity, to lose touch with reality. He has
been posing as Shingen for approximately one year. Kurosawa
has shown us some successes. At home in Kai he copes with
Takemaru's questions, Katsuyori 's attempted manipulation and
his concubines' expectations. A battle situation requires more
effort. At Takatenjin a field of soldiers die trying to advance the
Takeda clan's interests and a good-sized mound of samurai die
believing they are shielding Shingen. The double sees the flesh
and blood costs of maintaining the illusion. The illusion too
becomes his reality. The reality of his life as peasant, as thief. as
a personal being have no relevance to him, to anyone or any
thing else. That reality is dead.
Back in Kai others see the transfornlation. Clan generals
comment that since Takatenjin it seems as though Shingen were
inside the double. They are anxious. Attendants, too, see the
difference and relax their vigilance. But the telling point is the
double himself. He tries to ride Shingen's horse. The horse's
reality is not infused with illusions. He throws the double and
thus exposes him as an imposter. The generals can no longer use
his services. He's given some money, his old clothes and put out
in the rain. He's dazed by the quickness of it all, and so are we.
Kurosawa does not deal as effectively as he could with the
transformation or the denouement. The transformation is the
climax of the film, but we see only one shot of the double as
Shingen. That's at the Battle of Takatenjin. The camera shot is
too short, the camera too far away and the angle indirect.
Moreover, it is clouded by battle din. It passes too quickly,
leaving too small a visual trace. Back in Kai, while the generals
and attendants verbalize this transformation, we see nothing of
it. As for the denouement, Kurosawa gives us a very rushed
sequence of events: the double on the ground, curled in pain
from the horse having thrown him ... Katsuyori's return to
claim his right as clan head (and thus no further need for the
double anyway) ... the double being turned out of the castle
. . . part of a ceremonial burial scene for Shingen ... and
finally, Nobunaga performing a Noh dance and singing, "Life
is but a dream. a vision, an illusion; life can't last forever." Too
much is going on here. The film's focus is scattered.
We see the film's conclusion through the dazed presence of
the thief-as-Shingen. Having neither the reality of his being a
thief nor the illusion of being Shingen, he is disfunctional. We
can neither imagine him slipping into a room at night to steal
clan treasure nor sitting majestically on a hill overlooking a
battlefield slaughter and saying, "Don't move." As the final
scene unfolds. he goes from this dazed presence to a ghost-like
presence. Psychic death precedes physical death.
In the final scene we witness the defeat of the Takeda clan.
There are significant problems with its execution. Ignoring the
strategic wisdom of Shingen and leaving Kai, Katsuyori attacks
and besieges Nagashino castle on June 16, 1575. As they are
leaving Kai, the generals remind Katsuyori of Shingen's warn
ing not to leave. Disaster is ahead. Kurosawa tells us it's a
disaster about which nothing can be done. It is a disaster which
has its roots in Katsuyori's character: he's a rejected son trying
drive the point home, dirge music provides the background as a
gorgeous rainbow lights up the sky. The generals' mild warning
literally pales into insignificance. It's superb use of visuals, but
it tells us little about what is going on.
Kurosawa is not interested in the conflict between the
generals and Katsuyori. He completely leaves out their urging
Katsuyori to withdraw from the siege once it was known that
Nobunaga with 30,000 and Ieyasu with 8,000 were coming to
relieve the castle. Katsuyori' s supply lines are overextended and
he has 15,000 men. Instead, Kurosawa shows us the generals
knowingly participating in the destruction of the Takeda clan.
Indeed, the senior and fierce Yamagata, head of the clan arnlies,
says he'll be the first to die. He then leads his final charge.
Kurosawa neither prepares us forthe generals' defeatism nor for
their rationalization that, once dead, they'll be united with
Shingen in the Great Buddhist Bye-and-Bye. The result of
leaving out Katsuyori's strategic and tactical errors is a one
sided view of the clan's defeat.
Kurosawa focuses on Nobunaga's skillful use of Western
firearms as the determining factor. While this was certainly true
once the battle began, by leaving out the strategic and tactical
conflict between Katsuyori and the generals. Kurosawa leaves
us with the view that Western technical superiority was the
victor. Moreover, nowhere in the film does Kurosawa show that
Nobunaga used Japanese-manufactured firearms. Indeed. the
impression is that these were Western-manufactured fireanns.
That was not the case. Japanese ability to manufacture their own
arms dates from the Kyushu lord Tanegashima's decision.
shortly after the Portuguese arrived in 1542, to exchange his
daughter for gunmaking lessons. The technology spread from
Kyushu to Honshu. Sakai, south of Osaka and under Nobun
aga's control, became famous for making fireanns. By 1565
firearms had become a major weapon in Japanese warfare. The
inclusion of the Sakai foundry in an earlier scene would have
provided us with some of this information and would have lent
more to the film's cohesion than footage of three Western priests
blessing Nobunaga or Nobunaga drinking Western wine.
The Battle of Nagashino began at dawn on June 29, 1575.
To defend the castle Nobunaga built high palisades and out of a
total force of 10,000 matchlock soldiers chose 3000 of the best
shots. He lined them up behind the pal isades in three platoons of
1000 each. Drums pound the time as the matchlocks, function
ing as cannon, slay successive waves of the Takeda assault.
The thief-as-Shingen sees it all. At the beginning of the
battle he has an intense, expectant look. After the first assault by
the swift mounted samurai of Takeda and their immediate
slaughter as the deadly matchlocks find their mark, he stands
and tries to wave away sucessive charges of lancers and horse
men. As the slaughter proceeds his eyes become redder. his face
whiter. The death of the clan warriors is also his death.
The battle is over and in slow motion we see the extent of
the defeat as the camera pans across the battlefield. Dead and
dying soldiers are everywhere. Wounded horses writhe on their
backs and paw the empty spaces above them. The thief-as
Shingen picks up a lance and runs through the carnage toward
the palisades. Three shots ring out. He too writhes and dies. It is
really a coup de grace. The water's current carries his body face
down to a point beside a Takeda Shingen banner. It reads:
"Steady as a mountain. Attack like fire. Still as a wood. Swift as
the wind. In heaven and earth I alone am to be revered." It is
submerged in the water. A period in history has ended. A
* to prove he's as good a military leader as Shingen was. And to Western trumpet plays the requiem.
66
Two Short Reviews
OLD MADAM YIN: A MEMOIR OF PEKING LIFE,
by Ida Pruitt. Introduction by Margery Wolf. Stan
ford University Press, 1979. 129 pp.
by Greg Guldin
Old Madame Yin did not write this "memoir of Peking
life." Ida Pruitt did, and herein lie both the strengths and
weaknesses of the work. Ida Pruitt, head of the Social Service
Department of Beijing Union Medical College Hospital from
1918 to 1938, was an American who had lived in China for
decades. Her close contact with Chinese enabled her to attain
insights but, no matter how sympathetic she was, she was not
Chinese. Her interpretation of Madame Yin's life is thus a
second-hand account of what she presumed to be the workings
and patterns of Mrs. Yin's mental and social life.
Pruitt's years of exposure to China does, however, enable
her to make some quite valid observations of Chinese culture.
She effectively highlights the kinship-centric nature of Chinese
culture-how Chinese bridge the kin/non-kin gap by expanding
the kinship idiom outward to encompass friends, employees and
neighbors. The role that these fictive kinship roles play in
Chinese human relations is crucial and Pruitt nicely illustrates
this process with examples from Madame Yin's life. To
Madame Yin "all problems were problems of human relation
ships" (p. 65), and Pruitt treats us to realistic descriptions of the
use of indirect comments and third-party intervention by Chi
nese to mediate social conflict. For those readers unfamiliar
with the finely tuned etiquette of Chinese social relationships,
Pruitt's speculative dissections of Madame Yin's social calcula
tions are both fascinating and instructive.
As a Westerner, Pruitt is also sensitive to, and comments
perceptively on, questions involving Chinese in-group bound
ary maintenance. When one of Madame Yin's sons brings home
a foreign fiancee after studying abroad in France, the family
painfully adjusts to this violation of ethnic endogamy rules by
resolving to accept the new daughter-in-law if she plays the
daughter-in-law game by Chinese rules. When the daughter-in
law refuses the implicit Yin offer of "honorary Chineseness,"
Pruitt handles well the ensuing family crisis.
In choosing to focus on Madame Yin, of course,Pruitt
presents a portrait of a very wealthy member of Beijing's class
of resident gentry families whose wealth derived from landhold
ings and twentieth century commercial enterprises. Ida Pruitt's
other work in a similar vein, Daughter ofHan, was a portrait of
by Laurel Kendall
Ida Pruitt's earlier work, A Daughter of Han: the Auto
biography ofa Chinese Working Woman, is a rare, special book
fairly bursting with all its loquacious narrator's humor, tribula
tions and lore of living. If the reader anticipates another Dauf(h
fer ofHan, the slim volume of Old Madam Yin is something of a
disappointment. But the author did not intend to give us here
another full-blooded biography. A few intriguing bits of Yin
Lao Tai-tai's past life are culled from a servant's memory. As
for the rest, Pruitt muses, "The present was always too interest
ing and too much alive, and the plans for the future too im
portant, for Lao Tai-tai or anyone with her to dwell on the past"
(p. 80). Instead, Pruitt writes a memoir of her friendship with an
old Beijing lady, and she writes from the vantage point of her
own ninety years. The setting is still urban China in the early
decades of this century, but the perspectives have shifted.
In Daughter of Han, Ning Lao Tai-tai works in gentry
households and, as a semi-invisible domestic, she is privy to
some indecorous moments behind the walls. The military offi
cial's wife, in a rage, flings a basin of foot-bindings-what no
man should see-at her flabbergasted husband's feet. The serv
ants choke back their laughter. The civil official's daughter
gives birth to an illegitimate child, and Ning Lao Tai-tai is paid
to take the child away.
In Old Madame Yin, our observer is Pruitt herself, and she
visits the Yin compound as a guest. Everyone is on best be
havior. Many polite cups of tea are drunk during seemingly
endless discussions of old Chinese furniture, architecture, and
gardens. The rarefied atmosphere breeds a few cliches: the
streets of Peking hold a "never-ending pageant" (p. 16), a visit
to the Yins' house is "an afternoon in the China of many
centuries past" (p. 46). These stand out among Pruitt's other
wise clear and commonsensical prose. As in her other books,
her keen perception of Chinese mores is checked, just short of
cynicism, by her connoisseur appreciation of the players' skill.
This is a sentimental book, an old woman' memoir of her active
years in a city now much changed; but the memory remains
sharp, and sentiment never descends to, say, the treacle of Lin
Yutang's Moment in Peking.
Although she visits the Yin compound as an admiring guest
67
a working-class woman. In Old Madame Yin, however, we find
none of the working-class (or lumpen) perspective that perme
ated Daughter of Han; Madame Yin instead expectedly takes
positions as befits her class (e.g., students should not get in
volved in politics but prepare to join officialdom). Madame
Yin's class bias, though understated in Pruitt's telling of her
story, is a key element of her world-view.
The "Introduction" by anthropologist Margery Wolf
makes much of the fact that, contrary to Chinese patriarchal
traditions, Madame Yin is the head of the household. Madame
Yin-independent, strong-willed, and self-reliant-makes
"the conflict between gender stereotype a reality" (Wolf: vi).
One can also appreciate Madame Yin's perceptive, "anthro
pological" adjustment to her French daughter-in-law: "some
times principles were worked out differently in different
places" (p. 65). Her deceased husband probably would not have
been so understanding of such a serious violation of the norm.
Furthermore one even wonders at Pruitt's own off-hand asser
tion that' 'the burden of making a mixed-marriage a success ...
was always on the wife" (p. 49).
Although the narrative flows easily on the whole, some
portions are quite slow-moving, sounding almost like a "Better
Chinese Homes and Gardens." On these occasions Pruitt bogs
down in page-long descriptions of the architectural, floral, and
faunal minutiae of a wealthy Chinese home and its surrounding
gardens. Non-sinologists will also puzzle over culturally ob
scure items like "bone or ivory book fasteners." Such exotica
need either to be eliminated or explained.
If Pruitt has a tendency to assume her readers are as
familiar with Chinese culture as she is, one might explain this as
natural for a woman who has lived for much of her 90-odd years
in a Chinese environment. No unfeeling observer of China's
rape and exploitation by internal and external parasites, Pruitt
comments favorably on the Taipings and Boxers and reflects
sourly on the Japan-European "interference" in China and on
the gross social inequalities of the Republican Period. Yet even
so, Pruitt's view remains that of an outsider, and despite her
long familiarity with China, the reader of Old Madame Yin
never hears directly what Chinese themselves are thinking or
OTHER BOOKS WRITTEN OR
TRANSLATED BY IDA PRUITT
FLIGHT OF AN EMPRESS, by Wu Yung, (trans
lated by Ida Pruitt). Yale University Press, 1936.
222pp.
A DAUGHTER OF HAN: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF A CHINESE WORKING WOMAN, by Ida
Pruitt. Stanford University Press, 1967 (first pub.
1945).254 pp.
THE YELLOW STORM, by Lau Shaw (Lao She),
(translated by Ida Pruitt). Harcourt Brace and Co.,
1951. 533 pp.
and sympathetic friend, she never idealizes family life amid the
tasteful harmonies of house and garden. Third Master and his
wife smoke opium. Third Master takes a concubine to keep
parity with Second Master. After a quarrel, the concubine
swallows opium, but not enough to kill herself. "No, she does
not really want to die. She wants to make us trouble. She is no
more unhappy now than she has always been," is Lao Tai-tai's
judgment (p. 55). Youngest daughter bobs her hair and marries
a parallel cousin against her mother's wishes. Fourth Master
returns from his Parisian studies with a glamorous French
model as a bride, and the foreign woman refuses to live in the
family home.
Mao Dun or Ba Jin could have used this material for the
scathing fiction they wrote in these same decades and of this same
class. Pruitt avoids direct confrontation. Hers is a Rosencrantz
and Gildenstern vantage point; from a co-worker's gossip and
Lao Tai-tai's confidences, she keeps abreast of action just off
center-stage. But the focus is on Yin Lao Tai-tai, the head of the
house, mediating conflict and circumventing future crises
through a keen sensitivity to interpersonal relations and with
exquisite tact. An example of Lao Tai-tai's matriarchal dip
lomacy occurs when she advises Pruitt to cut a favorite pair of
trees lest she block positive geomantic forces, but:
She saw my face before f had time to turn away so as not to
hurt her. She walked down again into the courtyard and
looked again at the roofand at the trees. "f was wrong, " she
said when she again joined me on the veranda. 'The trees
are not higher than the ridge pole ofthe Main House after all.
f have now looked carefully and see that they do not cut off
the good infiuencesfrom the south" (p. 73J.
Pruitt's own sharp eyes and ears have captured the skills,
strategies, and perceptions of a gentry woman-perhaps our
only glimpse outside fiction-and this is the work's special
value.
In her introduction to the book, Margery Wolf suggests
that Chinese have recognized and admired strong character only
in old women. "But if they were dependents and incompetents
before their hair turned white and their husbands died," she
asks, "how did they suddenly acquire the skills and attributes
necessary to dominate a household?" (p. vii.). In her own work,
Wolf suggests that Chinese women learn early to size up a social
situation and manipulate more overtly powerful players.
"Women learn to assess moods and evaluate the consequences
of their own and others' actions in the domestic setting and,
having refined these skills, continue to practice them in their
own interactions with people outside the domestic unit." she
speculates. I The peasant wife holds a powerful negative sanc
tion; she can jeopardize a family's good name by publicly airing
grievances.
2
In DauRhter ofHan, Ning Lao Tai-tai did this. She
recalled the times she how led out her protests in the public
street. Indeed, she may have spilled forth her tale to Pruitt as one
loud purging of a long aggrieved life. But by the time Pruitt met
her, Ning Lao Tai-tai had become, by Wolf's criterion, a suc
cess: ". . . the loud, confident, often lewd old woman who has
outlived her mother-in-law and husband reflects the tests met
A CHINA CHILDHOOD, by Ida Pruitt. Chinese and passed by not strictly following the rules and by making
Materials Center, Inc., 1978. 205 pp.
purposeful use of those who must. " 3
Yin Lao Tai-tai is mistress of the same basic skills-keen
68
I
believing. One feels that the Chinese an! nearby, outside the
gate, across the room, next door-but somehow beyond
reach-as we remain firmly within a Western cultural frame
while in the heart of Beijing.
In a curious sense Old Madame Yin-for all its immediacy
and on-the-spot recording of detail-is a study of Chinese
culture at a distance. It's the distance of the Westerner in
Asia-at one time within and above the local society. Although
friendly with Madame Yin and her own servants and patients,
Pruitt's understanding of Beijing life is incomplete. When it
comes to urban workers like rickshaw' 'boys," she confesses
she can only guess at what's on their minds or by what criteria
they judge themselves (p. lIS). For those familiar with Lao
Shaw's Rickshaw Boy, the 1930s classic on the life of a Beijing
rickshaw driver, the sense of Pruitt's social distance from the
walker carting her around is acute. The ambivalence-with
Pruitt physically near but socially distant from the Chinese-is
also expressed in Pruitt's occasional tendency to romanticize
traditional Chinese life and to criticize those Chinese adoptions
of Western ways that do not meet with her personal tastes. Thus
when Madame Yin displayed her Western-style set of bedroom
furniture, Pruitt "groan[s] inwardly" because Madame Yin and
other Chinese have made the mistake of not learning "to keep
that which was eternal in their way of life" (p. 45). Elsewhere
she speaks highly of Madame Yin's well developed bargaining
ability, "a quality she shared with all her countrymen . . ."
(p. 12).
Old Madame Yin is thus best read as an historical example
of how a sympathetic Westerner viewed the cultural and social
patterns of Beijing during the 1920s and 1930s and the sense
such a Westerner tried to make of the life of one of her Chinese
friends. The Beijing life in Old Madame Yin is Ida Pruitt's, not
Madame Yin's, and as such it tells us as much about Ida Pruitt
and the West as it does about China. For those interested in such
a perspective, I can readily recommend it.
Those looking for an insider's view ofChinese culture-to
appreciate Chinese without viewing them through a Western
cultural screen-must, however, look elsewhere. There seem
to be all too many books written "about" the Chinese and too
few books that consistently bring one to grips with a Chinese
reality. But this is not a new phenomenon. Books as diverse as
Pearl Buck's The Good Earth and the more recent Woman
Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston have both purported to
present Chinese culture from the inside and both have failed to
do so accurately. The former failed because of its ethnocentric
paternalism and the latter due to its embittered second-genera
tion-American rejection of a Chinese cultural tradition known
only in an emaciated and caricatured form.
Chinese literature and anthropological studies of Chinese
communities offer far meatier slices of Chinese life for readers
to sink their sinological teeth into. Far better would it be to read
Lao Shaw's Rickshaw Boy or Lu Xun or Mao Dun or other
Chinese writers or even Margery Wolf's own The House ofLim,
a case study of a Taiwanese farm family. Such stories and
studies convey the Chinese reality much more accurately than
do studies at a distance. *
)
c
)
C'-----') c
\
perception and a knack for manipulation. Pruitt first meets her
when Lao Tai-tai visits the hospital to adopt a baby for her
Second Daughter-in-law. Yin Lao Tai-tai is quick to size up the
situation and take bold, decisive action when it suits her purpose.
She did not talk ofthe weather or the meals we had eaten, or
ask about my health or family tree. She did not need this
period ofsparring to work out her plans, nor did she need it
to sense the situation. All was settled in Lao T' ai-t' ai's mind
. . . I was to learn that she was always direct and also that
she hadalready taken my measure as I had taken hers (p. 6).
But Yin Lao Tai-tai lacks the working woman's defensive
abrasiveness. She does not need it. She can afford the lUXUry of
elegance and charm. With sensibilities akin to those of whom
she writes, Pruitt presents Yin Lao Tai-tai in all her delicate
shades of nuance. When Yin Lao Tai-tai surveys a room full of
"large-footed" Western women and states that none has feet so
large as those of her French daughter-in-law, Pruitt under
stands.
,
l
To say that her daughter-in-law' s feet were big was to criti
I
I
cize her. The size of a woman's feet in old China was
something the women and especially their mothers, and so
their families, could control . .. To criticize her feet was to
indicate that something else was wrong, something she could
have controlled. Also to compare her feet with ours was to !
say that what was wrong was something Western about her
I
and at the same time to hope that she would be Western in the
I
I
way we were Western, that in time she would perhaps under
stand the ways ofher new family and accept them as we did
(p.61).
Yin Lao Tai-tai is not a product of genteel' 'breeding, " but
t
rather of gentle circumstance. Pruitt reminds us that both Yin f
Lao Tai-tai and Ning Lao Tai-tai were born the daughters of I
petty shopkeepers. Both women relish a show of good manners;
r
they spar in a deferential ritual over who should take the seat of
honor at Pruitt's tea table. The two women might themselves
attribute their contrasting circumstances to "destiny, " but even
a favorable destiny slips away without skillful exploitation. This
was Yin Lao Tai-tai's skill: "She had had a lifetime of experi
ence in dealing with people within that pattern of well-worked
out human relationships. All problems that came within the
scope of her life were those of human relationships. To her, all
problems were those of human relations" (p. 65). And this is the
point behind all those discussions of gardens and architecture;
they are digressions upon the proper arrangement of people in
space. More than an aesthetic consideration, persons, build
ings, trees, and walls should harmonize with geomantic princi
ples to insure the tranquility and prosperity of the house. "It's
bad luck for the Head of the House to sleep anywhere except in
the chien east of the Central Chien of the main House. The
dominant force should be in the northeast comer of the house,"
Yin Lao Tai-tai advises Pruitt when she inspects her new home
(p. 74).
Like Yin Lao Tai-tai, Pruitt is mistress of a compound and
several people reside within her walls. Pruitt uses the parallel,
and her administrative position at the hospital, to suggest a basis
of empathy between two busy, responsible, gracious women,
each with a taste of power in her own sphere. A measure of the
"Chinese" side of her own experience, Pruitt uses house
69
imagery-"the third and outermost of the shells that encase
us" (p. 69)-to structure her accounts ofChinese life. Ida Pruitt
was herself born in a Chinese house, a mission station in
Shandong Province in 1888. In A China Childhood. she de
scribed that house as a series of nested compartments opening
outward with the girl child's expanding knowledge ofthe world.
She recalls that a pond dug in one of the courtyards upset her.
This muddy hole broke the building's integrity. "I did not like
to look at that hole. Even the thought of it hurt me-hurt as
though it were my flesh that had been cut into-that the pattern
of the courtyard and of the bricks and pebbles had been dis
turbed and broken."
In Madame Yin, she tells us that in her own Chinese house
in Beijing, though she installed a western kitchen and plumbing,
she did not alter "the shape or form of any structure" (p. 69).
She shares another conceit, that she was one of very few long-term
foreign residents to penetrate the courtyards and gardens behind
Beijing's walled streets. For a refugee benefit at the Pacific
war's start, she leads a tour through the Yin gardens. This may
be the proper analogue of her writing; she would guide the
reader past the "outermost shell" of Chinese life. Daughter of
Han begins with a description of the house where Ning Lao
Tai-tai was born, then follows her to her husband's hovel and
behind the walls of the households and yamens where she was
employed. Pruitt's translation of Lao She's The Yellow Storm,
the story of a "house of four generations" set during the Second
World War, gives western readers another window on life
behind Beijing's walls some decades ago. The Flight of an
Empress, her translation of Wu Yung's Boxer Rebellion
memoir, is another foray into guarded territory, the council
chambers of antique statemen and royalty. Again, Pruitt man
ages to translate not just the Chinese words but the subtle
nuances of diplomatic parrying where a breech of propriety
could bring swift and dire consequences.
In all of her writing of time lived and time gone by, does
From resistance to rebellion (',
ASian and Afro-Canbbean h cJli So
struggles in Bntam ..
A Slvanandan .... ....
The police agamst the people E' ._
Tony Bunyan ..
Keepmg the lid on
Bnush urban SOCial pohey, 1975-1981 Ell
L.ee Bridges ,
Parameters of BritISh and h
North Amencan racism
Lou Kushmck
You can't fool the youth
the politics of race in the 19805
Paul Gilroy
Documentation on The 'riots' -...;jJt.
Community defence committees. Police harassment: ... ,....4l
Racial violence: British 'pass laws' New Nationality law:

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Pruitt cast a rosy haze of memory over life in pre-revolutionary
China? Pruitt's work suggests a dilemma that would confound
many a sympathetic latter-day area specialist. As head of the
social service department of Beijing Union Medical College
Hospital, she had daily acquaintance with the raw side of Bei
jing's life. A progressive in her own time, she saw old China's
social cost and gave us some of that in Ning Lao Tai-tai' s story.
But Pruitt also assumed the inevitability of change, assumed
that Yin Lao Tai-tai's delicate web of relationships was spun out
of the values and sensitivities of an "agricultural society" now
being undermined by "industrialization." Scrupulously toler
ant of "Chinese" perceptions and sincerely enamored of the
land of her birth, Pruitt could lament the certain loss of tradi
tional arts, handicrafts, and Madame Yin's charm.
Sometimes her rationalizations seem a bit thin. After view
ing Lao Tai-tai's exquisitely embroidered burial clothes she
ponders the waste of "putting so much work and beauty into the
earth to molder away." Perhaps an archaeologist might find
them she suggests; besides, "In a period when the agricultural
handicraft way of life was ceasing to be able to care for' the
people and the new mechanized-industrial way had not yet come
in, it was useful to have the flourishing industry of making grave
clothes to give a living to many families" (p. \09).
But Pruitt is a responsible reporter who early on and with
frank good humor acknowledges her vulnerability to Janus
faced China's allure. Pruitt is reluctant to send a child for
adoption in a wealthy home where the baby will become a
"pampered pet." Li Kuan, the social worker, champions the
Yins' cause and explains that the family has not long been
wealthy.
"It is the Second Master who counts. He is the one who has
made the money . ... He now runs a uniform factory here
and he has other businesses besides." Li Kuan was trying to
hurry past this topic. She knew that I did not like the uniform
factories and the pittances they paid the women who worked
in themfrom daybreak to sunset . ...
"He has a wonderful collection ofpaintings and ceram
ics." Li Kuan knew my love for the beauty of China. its
physical beauty and that made by its men and women of
genius and that made by its ordinary people also. (pp. 2-3)
Pruitt winces at the row of tenements that Yin Lao Tai-tai
had built just beyond the garden wall and visible from a minia
ture decorative mountain. The tenements would finance the
granddaughter'S education. Pruitt struggles here, "Why after
all should I expect Lao Tai-tai to go beyond the pattern of the
way of life in which she had been brought up and in which she
lived? Why should I expect her to think of people outside her
family, her own circle?"
Another writer might have simply left the dissonant build
ings out of the pleasant garden landscape; Pruitt paints them in,
accounts for their presence, and completes the picture. *
Notes:
I. Margery Wolf, "Chinese Women: Old Skills in a New Com.:xt," in M. Z.
Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds.), Women, Culture, and Society (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 164.
2. Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1972). pp. 39-41.
3. Wolf, p. 41.
Send to thP Inst,tute Of Race Relations, 247 Pentonville Road, London N1 UK
4. Ida Pruitt, A China Childhood (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center,
lp!ease send caSh With order, cheques made PBvable to 'The Institute of Race
Relations'). Inc . 1978), p. 36.
70
A Short Review
by Roger Bowen
"History," Tolstoy supposedly said, "would be an excel
lent thing if only it were true." According to Sir Isaiah Berlin,
Tolstoy was referring to the kind of history written by "pro
fessors" and "peddlars of ideas" who tend to describe only the
"flowers" of the past, the colorful and obvious, and to ignore
the "roots" of history, the deeper, more substantial, enduring
but less accessible taproots of life. The vast majority of his
torians, Berlin said of Tolstoy'S views, avoid the kind of hard
digging necessary in order to relate "the sum of the actual
experience of actual men and women in their relation to one
another and to an actual, three-dimensional, empirically ex
perienced, physical environment. "
Though Tolstoy might frown upon John Dower's choice of
subjects because Yoshida Shigeru's life is, in Dower's own
words, "history ... seen from the perspective of elites and
decision-makers" (13), I think that Tolstoy (and Berlin) would
nevertheless praise John Dower's monumental Empire and Af
termath as a most extraordinary and serious effort to dig deep
into the dirt of the Japanese past and find the many and complex
intertwined roots of Japanese imperialism. However, they
might wonder in the end whether Dower's views are those of the
hedgehog or of the fox ("The fox knows many things, but the
hedgehog knows one big thing," reads the epigraph of Ar
chilochus from which Berlin took the title of his essay on
Tolstoy's views of history). Regardless, though I shall return to
this issue later, by anyone's standards Dower's book on Yo
shida Shigeru and Japanese imperialism is without question the
finest study on the topic of Japanese imperialism to appear in
recent years, as well as being the definitive study in English of
Japan's most famous postwar Prime Minister. Hereafter we
must reread all accounts of modem Japanese history, and espe
ciallyofOccupation history, with Tolstoy's words in mind. By
writing a "true" history in the Tolstoyan sense, Dower forces
us to reexamine critically the works of "professors" who ped
dled soft-headed assumptions regarding the "pendulum theory"
of Japanese politics (swinging back and forth between authori
tarianism and democracy); Yoshida's alleged "antiwar" senti
ments; and the Occupation as a sharp break or watershed with
prewar Japan (Dower calls the Occupation a "controlled bour
geois revolution "). Dower forces revision of our thinking, and
he does so in the most skillful manner possible: his writing is
flawless, his sentences are beautifully crafted, his content or
ganization is superb, and his documentation is as solid and as
full as a Yankee storehouse in early Winter.
Dower is a most skilled revisionist and a debunker who
throws stones with remarkable accuracy at many of the ideologi
cally tainted windows through which historians and political
scientists have viewed modem Japan for so long. Dower shows
that Yoshida was not the simple-minded Winston Churchill he is
often made out to be, but instead is only an ocasionally compe
tent diplomat, a frequently outspoken reactionary politician,
and always a testy egotist whose personality and world view was
EMPIRE AND AFTERMATH: YOSHIDA SHIG
ERU AND THE JAPANESE EXPERIENCE, 1878
1954, by John W. Dower. (Cambridge, Mass.: Coun
cil on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1979),
pp. xiii, 618.
severely limited by an exaggerated sense of his own abilities to
best represent the supra- indi vidual Kokutai ( .. national polity" ).
Just as Dower rejects the benevolent, democratic, peace-loving
grandfather image of Yoshida, so too does he question the claim
that prewar and postwar Yoshida, and Japan, were really very
different. Rather, Dower argues, in speaking of Yoshida's pol
icies, "both prewar and postwar, both internationally and do
mestically, the integrated policy was paternalistic, conserva
tive, counterrevolutionary, and often repressive" (3). Postwar
"democratic" Japan is simply the same old bottle with fewer
active ingredients or, otherwise viewed, containing the same
active ingredients but ineffective without the hand of U.S.
imperialism to stir them and then tip the bottle.
Neither is Dower willing to endorse the notion offundamen
tal East-West cultural differences- "the tenacious Kiplinges
que dichotomy" -as a factor which can help explain and distin
guish Japan's modem imperialistic experiences. Dower argues
instead that Wan Man ("One Man") Yoshida, the strong indi
vidual that he was, is proof enough that there exist' 'universal
istic patterns of behavior and response." The suggestion here is
that the Weberian reason of individuals is so narrowly defined
by situations and events that national, cultural, religious and
other differences among different peoples are naturally negated
in the rational process of decision-making. Yoshida, General I
MacArthur, President Truman-they all are cast in the same
I
mold of strong-willed individuals who would react in a similar
manner to the same situation: rational Japnese are no different
from rational Westerners.
l
For Dower, Yoshida is symbol; he is a symbol of the rise of
Japanese imperialism, its temporary setback, and its resurgence
under American leadership; he is a symbol of incompetent
bureaucrats and politicians (nonetheless rational) whe more-or
less enthusiastically supported militarism; he is a symbol of an
under-appreciated individualism in Japan; he is a symbol as well
of the continuity of a "democratic" elitism or a paternalistic
. 'democracy"; and he is a symbol of the universality of rational
ity in policy-making. Yoshida is also the symbol of something
else, though Dower never makes this explicit, and that is the role
of Chance in determining historical outcomes. Yoshida's rise to
power, in the postwar period especially, is a reminder of how a
second-rate diplomat, a bureaucratic functionary, and a third
rate politician can, if he is in the right place at the right time, be
catapulted into the rank of national leadership. Cynics might
argue, however, that Chance had nothing to do with Yoshida's
phoenix-like rise, that he prospered in the postwar period pre
cisely because he was second-rate, because he could easily
adjust to serving as MacArthur's handyman in setting aright the
wartom political landscape by weeding out "alien" influences
like communism.
Dower chose Yoshida as the subject of his study of Japan
ese imperialism because he feels through a study of Yoshida's
activities "it is possible to gain insight not merely into the elite
71
consciousness in prewar Japan, but also into the dynamics and
contradictions of Japanese imperialism" (34). This may be true,
but I suspect that many will be left with the uncomfortable
feeling that Yoshida is far from being the best representative of
the nature of elite consciousness and Japanese imperialism.
Dower himself shows, for example, that even among the so
called "realists" of the foreign ministry in prewar Japan, Yo
shida stood apart because of his policy positions and not least
because of his personality. Together, these served to discredit
him even among the "realists," showing Yoshida to be the
proverbial Japanese lone wolf, prowling the corridors of power
only to be excluded from entrance into the clanish main den of
power-hungry carnivores. There is little question that had it not
been for the Americans, Yoshida in his twilight years would
have remained excluded from the pack.
Yoshida's value as a subject of study, and Dower clearly
shows this, is that cooperation among the imperialists in the
prewar period (but no less in the postwar period) came all too
easily to ., realists" such as Yoshida and Anthony Eden. Exploi
tation and warmongering in China, important to furthering both
Japanese and English interest, was justified in the most cynical
terms as benefitting the Chinese people. Realpolitik for Yoshida
and Western imperialist powers consisted of using diplomacy as
a nonviolent means of acquiring outside acquiescence if not
practical support for committing crimes against other peoples.
This imperialist cooperation was called' 'pragmatism. "
Yoshida serves Dower well as a mirror of imperialist
consciousness and cooperation, but not well enough in the end.
When Dower finally builds up to a discussion of the "repressive
roles of the state and monopoly capital in Japanese imperialism
and the 'total war economy,' or 'national-defense state,' he
stops short, saying that' 'these developments are too complex to
be discussed here" (287). The reason he stops short, I would
suggest, is that while Yoshida's life and activities do help to
clarify the differences of opinions among imperialists, ultim
ately they do very little to help explain "the dynamics and
contradictions of Japanese imperialism." Yoshida is a symbol
of differences among imperialists with regard to particular pol
icies, alliances, and worldviews, but he is not a symbol of' 'the
respective roles of the state and monopoly capital in Japanese
imperialism." Hence, Dower permanently postpones an unin
terrupted, integrated discussion of the latter and simply retreats
into straight biography.
The guts of the book, for a political scientist, begin half
way through, starting with Chapter 8 which is entitled" Revolu
tion" with inverted commas; it begins with the postwar period
when Yoshida finally made a name for himself with Westerners
other than Joseph Grew and his "Japan Crowd." Up until the
end of the war Yoshida had led, in Dower's words, "an eventful
if peripheral public career" as a diplomat of questionable dip
lomatic abilities. Clearly, for his first 67 years (1878-1945),
Yoshida was in no way "exceptional," if by this we mean one
who manages to transcend the petty chauvinisms of his era.
Nothing in his background, it seems, could have prepared Yo
shida for an "exceptional" career. He had been the beneficiary
of a classical Chinese education, worthy of a young man of
samurai background, and then later an education that "took
place within the crucible which produced the ideology of the
Japanese empire, with all its complex and contradictory ingre
dients of economic expansionism, military security, chauvin
istic mission, and idealistic Pan-Asianism." Most important in
ese generation deliberately primed for both emperor-centered
nationalism and resolute imperialistic expansion" (28). Yo
shida, Dower makes clear, never unlearned his "emperor-cen
tered nationalism" and only accommodated himself to the loss
of Japan's ability to expand militarily in the postwar period, by
accepting on behalf of Japan a supportive role to America's
expansionism. Longtime pro-Westerner and anti-communist
acti vist, Yoshida realized that by making his country a military
base for a supplier of the U.S. imperialistic machine, Japan's
kokutai could do very well for itself in the Cold War period.
Yoshida didn't do too badly for himself either. Dower makes it
very clear that the chief beneficiary of the Occupation was
Yoshida and his conservative stalwarts. The "controlled bour
geois revolution," which was the Occupation, was anti-com
munist in motivation and pro-American in effect. "The occupa
tion legacy was a new conservatism" (314), Dower reminds us,
and Yoshida became its chief oligarchical director. Until his fall
from power, this aging lone wolf led the pack, and with a couple
of noticeable exceptions in resisting American fiat, served as the
chief lapdog of American imperialism and counterrevolution in
Asia.
The main weakness of this most impressive piece of schol
arship is the absence of a conclusion. For Dower the end of
Yoshida's public career in 1954 is the end of an era. This can be
argued, and should be. In many respects the Yoshida legacy of
counterrevolutionary conservatism lives on today, or at the very
least lived on until the Tanaka government in the early seven
ties. Yoshida's chief cronies-Kishi, Ikeda, Sato,-continued
the basic Yoshida line during their governments. Even as late as
the Miki, Fukuda and Ohira cabinets, factions in the Liberal
Democrat Party have been identified as "mainstream" if they
could trace their political lineage to Yoshida and "anti-main
stream" if they could not. Further, Japan's economic expan
sionism and its ongoing remilitarization and nuclear develop
ment programs certainly harken back to the policies, spirit, and
effects of the Yoshida years. Indeed, insofar as Japan's un
abashed economic exploitation of Southeast Asia and other
underdeveloped regions, its trade and investment ties with fas
cist regimes like racist South Africa, and the neverending
"democratic" elitism and "money politics" (kinken seiji) of
'the LDP continue to oppress people in and outside of Japan, the
Yoshida legacy and all it entails-continuity in prewar and
postwar policy, ideological conservatism, etc., -surviVes to
day and flourishes with, of course, American support.
Dower was remiss for not concluding his book with some
sort of reminder of these dismal facts. Instead, he abandoned
thoughtful analysis and backed up into the more comfortable and
reassuring embrace of historical narrative. As a result, "One
Man" Yoshida nearly becomes "No Man," just a symbolic
representation of what has happened, and not of what continues
to happen.
For all of its value to historians of Japan, diplomatic
historians, political and social scientists, and biographers-be
cause Empire and Aftermath is a "true" history in the best
Tolstoyan sense-we hedgehogs are left a bit bothered by the
fox-like quality of Dower's many enumerated statements in the
body of the book and by the absence of an integrating conclu
sion, especially since in his earlier writings on E.H. Norman
and on the "American Lake" Dower is one of the most dis
criminating and perceptive hedgehogs to have walked down the
Japanese garden path in quite some time. Still, whether hedge
* terms of its lasting effect, Yoshida' 'belonged to the first Japan- hog or fox, read the book; you'll like it.
72

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