PEASANT DIFFERENTIATION 5 be greatly modified in the light of these serious disruptions. One viewpoint is that land in pre-British Bengal was communally owned and cultivated, that the society was egalitarian with very little differentiation within the peasantry, and that the village economy was largely self-reliant. These "little republics" maintained their existence in this form for hundreds of years, and continuously reproduced themselves, and were more or less unaffected by the making and breaking of the empires around them. While surplus was extracted from them by way of rent-revenue by the Zamindars, the state was virtually nonexistent as far as the daily life of the villagers was concerned.16 The main proponent of this view, in the context of Bengal, is Ramkrishna Mukherjee, who holds that under this system "there was very little scope for the development of landholder-cum-sharecropper and supervisory farmer-cum-agricultural labour relationship".17 The Zamindars were in the main collectors of taxes, and when they transferred land, what they actually transferred was the right to collect revenue, while leaving the existing production structure undisturbed.18 He then approvingly quotes the fifth report of the Select Committee on the affairs of the East India Company in the British House of Commons to make the point that "the sale of land by auction, or in any other way, for realising arrears of land revenue appears to have been unusual, if not unknow in all parts of India, before its introduction by the British government into the Company's dominion".19 Mukherjee makes interesting distinction between revenue rights and rights on soil. While he concedes the former to the Zamindars and emperors, the latter was very much the property of the village community as a whole; and according to him, in the absence of private property, there could be no class of landlords.20 Mukherjee's assertions are, however, not backed by factual information. Apart from the partial settlement of Todarmall with individual raiyats, at least in some parts of Bengal, folklores are full of accounts which indicate that the peasants were in actual possession of individual plots whatever be the nature of ownership of land, and once in possission they could not be easily divested of it, either by the village community or by the Zamindar.21 The society was certainly not as undifferentiated as the above account suggests—a major element in such differentiation was caste, a point to which we will return in the latter part of the paper. Some peasants were richer than others, and some had to spend a part of their time cultivating the land owned by others in exchange for wages or a portion of the produce. In addition, as the story told by the poet Mukundaram suggests, the village moneylender—known as Poddar—was a much dreaded person, and those indebted could be punished by death;22 and the difference between the rich and the poor among the peasants was more marked in the areas which came under the impact of the towns or trade centres or were otherwise prosperous.23