BACKWARDNESS AND BONDAGE 77
of land or more" (p 111). Yet, rare though they may be, they hold a significantly larger number of bonded labourers, 16.20 on an average in comparison with 5.40 for the 50-100 acres holding size group, 2.^ for those holding between 20 and 50 acres, and 1.83 for those holding between 10 and 20 acres (p 114). In short, the landlords of Palamau are the major source of credit for the bonded labour.
However, the author makes much of the fact that "there is still a substantial proportion of nearly 20%" (18.60 percent to be precise) of landowners of 10 acres or less land who own bonded labour. Yet, when one sees their caste origin, it is clear that such landowners either belong to the strata who do not normally cultivate land themselves or have some other major source of income. Two are Brahmins, fourBaniyas, one Muslim and one Gwala (p 112). This pattern is met with in traditional bondage as described by the Soviet scholar L Alaev. He points out that "the employment of hired labour was in reverse proportion to the concentration level of property in land and the extent to which land was leased," and also that "the feudal or even semi-slave dependence of the labourers in the 19th century indicates at least that this was a noncapitalist stratum".1 Also, the geographical distribution of such labour "shows its links with the rural community" where 40 to 50 percent of the land was worked by the owners themselves, who generally lived in "communities of small proprietors".
This phenomenon did not die out in the nineteenth century, for a recent survey of bondage conducted by the Gandhi Peace Foundation (1978) lists those very districts of the Gangetic Doab namely, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Bijnor, Bareilly, Saharanpur» Bulandshar, and Moradabad as areas where "High" or "Very High" degree of bondage may still be found (from 10.000 to 20,000 per district). Palamau too comes under the category of "Very High" incidence of bondage, according to this survey. Moreover, in all the areas cited above, the bonded labourers are generally the Scheduled or artisan castes, or tribal populations, while those who hold them in bondage are traditional landowning classes, whether they are Brahmins, Rajputs, Baniyas orjats. Intact, Mundle himself makes a special mention of this when he states that these maliks are really the "modern descendants of the old Hindu Jagirdars" (p 113). However, while the evidence of both Mundle and Alaev is similar, the former's treatment of his material is indeed novel. He ignores the persistence of the traditional patterns of exploitation and dependence of labour inherent in bonded labour and claims that "the appearance of the system of bonded