78 SOCIAL SCIENTIST labour was in fact nothing but a specific form of the formal subsump-tion of labour under capital in Palamau's agriculture" (p 88). For defining the term he uses a relatively little known appendix to Karl Marx's Capital (Vol I) published by Penguin in 1976, in which he noted that "capital subsumes the labour process as it finds it ... developed by different and more archaic modes of production. For example, handicraft is a mode of agriculture corresponding to a small, independent peasant economy. If changes orcur in these traditional established labour processes after their takeover by capital, these are nothing but the gradual consequences of that subsumption", which becomes real when capital "also revolutionises their actual mode of labour and the real nature of the labour processes as a whole". But even for formal subsumption we require "a form of compulsion by which surplus labour is exacted by extending the duration of labour time—a mode of compulsion not based on personal relations of dominance and dependence, but simply on differing economic function" (quoted in-Mundle p 85). To strengthen his argument further Mundle makes it appear that the system of bondage is something new. At the outset be claims that "the Kamiuti system of debt bondage originated towards the end of the 19th Century in the wake of capital penetrating into agriculture" (p 4), a point he reiterates many times, making it appear that its origin coincides with the special order of 1895 "by which the then existing . . . land grants and other existing tenures were converted into permanent, heritable, transferable and non-resumable estates . . . .Land now became a piece of private property to be bought and sold like any other commodity in the market" (p 88). He asserts that "the Kamiuiti system followed the penetration of capital into agriculture and was in fact a result of it. ... In this context it is important to distinguish the new relationship of Kamiuti or debt-bondage from the traditional relationship of begari of forced labour" (pp 95-96). However, here Mundle appears to be factually incorrect when we refer to D R Banajfs Slavery in British India (1933) which is included in the bibliography where the author has noted that the terms "Kamia" and "Sevak" for "bondsmen who sold themselves for life" were reported by Captain T Wilkinson in 1826, and that as early as 1836, J Davidson reported that "this system of slavery prevailed very extensively in Ramghar, Kurruchkdea, and Palamau, where men generally become slaves by falling into arrears to their landlords, or by borrowing money for the performance of marriage ceremonies. When they were unable to pay, they were forced to write "scwaknamahs* (contracts) for the amount