REEMERGENCE OF LAND LEASING IN KERALA 65
radical redistribution of land in favour of landless agricultural workers. Instead, the beneficiaries of land reforms have been largely the intermediary tenants, a sizeable number of whom were large-scale owner cultivators belonging to upper castes of Hindus and Syrian Christians. A stage has come in Kuttanad where a majority of these earlier tenants (or present significant land owners) are no more pure agricultural households. It is against this background that the new leasing tendency has emerged which combines in itself the characteristics of both subsistence and commercial farming in a peculiar manner.
Even though tenancy has been legally abolished, oral and unrecorded leases have been reported in many parts of India. Share cropping is still the predominant form of tenancy in the North and East India, while cost sharing and fixed rent tenancies are becoming predominant in the Southern regions of India.1 It seems that in those areas the existing lease arrangements are largely a continuation of the earlier systems without a noticeable break in between. In Kerala, a few years even before the legal abolition in 1970 tenancy was virtually extinct. Thus the reappearance of tenancy in a new form in Kuttanad is essentially a phenomenon of the 1980s, after a gap of more than ten years. In this period, only owner cultivation was practised there. Even in early times large scale owner cultivation was a characteristic feature of the Kuttanad region. While the present leasing tendency is a reversal to an earlier farming arrangement it has definite deviations from the latter.
In the case of other regions in India cost sharing and fixed rent tenancies are considered as an advancement over the existing shaye cropping system.2 It is also maintained that the trend of increased cost-sharing and the larger role of land owners in cultivation may gradually lead to owner cultivation.3 But this does not appear to be true of Kuttanad, where it is a retreat from owner cultivation that is taking place.
Before taking up a detailed analysis of the emerging trend of land leasing in Kuttanad, it may be useful to give a brief account of the changes that have taken place in land relations in the region before and after the land reform measures initiated in 1970. We also present a description of the general agricultural setting of the region in which both cultivators and agricultural labourers coexist and interact.
LAND RELATIONS BEFORE AND AFTER THE REFORMS
As in the rest of Travancore the system of land relations that existed in Kuttanad prior to the land reforms of the 1960s was a combination of tenancy system and peasant proprietorship. But alongwith this there was large scale owner cultivation. This could perhaps be a special character of Kuttanad. Large scale owner cultivation came into being in Kuttanad in the wake of reclamations of backwaters for paddy