AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS IN INDIA 5 All pre-capitalist economic formations are characterised by systems of hierarchy or ranking, since they are all based on direct relations of appropriation of surplus, ultimately relying on extra-economic coercion (in contrast to the capitalist system, where the formal equality of the marketplace is reflected in the legal equality of all individuals and classes). As "social estates" expressed the hereditary, institutionalised inequality of European feudalism, "castes" arc the specifically Indian expression of institutionalised inequality. Japanese feudalism also had its rigid hierarchy (the warrior nobility and Emperor at the apex and the artisans and peasants at the base without any political rights) as well as its own 'untouchables', termed the burakiimin. (Kosambi suggests that the evolution of caste meant that the process of exploitative assimilation was perhaps marked by less open violence, and India avoided the rigours of slavery, unlike classical Greece or Rome v^here conquered tribes were always enslaved. This proposition regarding the relative 'mildness' of caste assimilation, we feel, is rather dubious: since the oppressed do not have historians, we have no means of knowing whether tribal and shudra discontent and revolt were not perhaps as endemic as slave revolts in European antiquity). The pre-capitalist employer-labourer relation existed throughout medieval India, but its quantitative and qualitative importance appears to have been greater in South India notably in the Malayalam, Tamil and Tdugu speaking regions. Habib points out that in the Mughal Empire cultivation of khudkasht land of zamindars etc was carried on with landless labourers of bereditarily servile status: since ample easily cultivable land was available at that time (hardly one third to one half of the land presently under cultivation in the Ganges-Jumna basin was then under the plough), a servile landless class could only exist if they were forbidden to hold and cultivate land.6 In South India, at the beginning of the colonial period in the 18th century, it was found that the large estates of the local gentry {mirasdar, Janmi) were cultivated with labourers in hereditary servitude belonging to the 'untouchable' castes, and this had been the practice for centuries. Benedicte Hjejie, in an important paper, has shown that the extent and severity of bondage varied. In Malabar the hereditary labourer could be treated as a chattel slave, being bought and sold apart from the land. The East India Company's records of the I8th century show the purchase of slaves by it in Malabar, and such trafficking was quite common among the landed gentry. In the Tamil and Telugu speaking areas however labourers were tied to particular leading families and their estates and were not normally transferred to others except when the estate itself changed hands. Everywhere they were only given their bare subsistence in kind, were termed 'outcastes' and 'untouchable'. Apart from agricultural