22 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Ownership of more expensive and productive devices, better cattle, more fertile land. This again may partly overlap the other classifications. The 'stratification' that we would be meeting with can be viewed in the context of all these three criteria, and it will be noticed that I would be using evidence of any of the three kinds of classifications to establish differentiation within the peasantry. While landless labourers are not peasants, they form with the peasants the working agricultural population, and their history too (which in many ways has been different from that of the peasants) remains for me a part of peasant history. Finally, any study of the peasants must involve an enquiry into how they pay rent or surrender their surplus. This necessitates the shifting of the focus, from time to time, from the exploited to the exploiters. But without seeing the peasants in their actual relation with the exploiting classes there can be no peasant history; the relationship is crucial. The Origins: The Indus Basin The stage at which peasants originate within a society must naturally arrive only after the pursuit of agriculture is established as a major provider of food. A family can then spend the larger part of its labour-time on the cultivation of plants and the harvesting of the seed. In this process not only do the food-gatherers (mainly hunters) turn into producers; the monogamistic family itself evolves as a basic unit of social organisation, When plant seeds are gathered in the wild, there is of course no agriculture. Mesolithic communities like those of Chopni Mando (in the valley of the Belan, a tributary of the Son) among the Vindhyan foot-hills, who consumed wild rice, belong to the pre-history of agriculture. Domesticated plants came with the Neolithic Revolution; and two zones where crops were raised have been identified within the India of the pre-1947 frontiers. The first is in the Belan valley itself (Kodihwa and Mahagara) where grains of cultivated rice and bones of domesticated "cattle" and "sheep-goat" have been found with the period B. C. 6500 to 4500. The second zone is that of the Kachhi plain south of the Bolan Pass—an arid area but experiencing seasonal floods from hill torrents. Here at Mehrgarh (6th to 3rd millennium BC) have been found remains of barley (two-row as well as six-row) and wheat of three varieties (corn-wheat, emmer and bread-wheat). The lowest levels give bones of wild animals only; but the top two metres yield those of domestic cattle, sheep and goats.1 1 For the information used in this paragraph, I have relied on my colleague Dr. M D N Sahi's paper "Early History of Agriculture in Pre and Proto-historic India", read at the Indian History Congress, Bodhgaya, 1981 (cyclostyled).