BACKWARDNESS AND BONDAGE 79 of their debts, thus becoming slaves frequently for life. Very often the same miserable condition extended to their children" (pp 70-71). Thus it would appear that bondage in Palamau was neither new nor divorced from the existing traditional Moghul forms referred to by Banaji. The 1836 account also notes that these bonds were executed for "very small sums" indeed, the least being one rupee and the average around Rs 20 a piece. In^the modern context too, the loans appear trival—15 percent averaging Rs 33.83; 28.83 percent averaging Rs 76.01; 48.33 percent averaging Rs 175.89 and only 10 percent averaging Rs 470 (p 120). Thus even quantitatively, taking into account the price rise since 1836, there seems to be little difference. Moreover, even today marriage loans constitute the largest percentage of loans, 63.33 percent (p 108). In fact, the author himself appears to realize that he has overestimated the development of capitalism in Palamau when he states that "the relatively high rate of capital formation, in particular irrigation, during the post-colonial period, however is yet to reflect itself in increases of productivity". However, this attempt to see capitalism advancing where it is not makes him miss the main thrust in the eradication of bondage, radical land reform to break the power of the classes on whom bonded labour depends and into whose clutches, he himself admits, they will/all. The main point here is that "the surplus value the new type of landlord and the well-to-do peasant are garnering today is determined mainly by virtue of their title to these lands, rather than as returns on invested capital in farming as such. The rural wage-labourer ... is neither really a free wage-labourer in the strict economic sense of the term nor is an overwhelming majority of them able to secure even a subsistence wage for their work". It is, in fact, a "landlordism which combines in itself both the features of capitalism as well as fedualism". And "this fedual and semi-fcdual relationship in agriculture cannot be abolished without at the same time abolishing capitalist landlord relations".3 Instead of this the author ends up proposing credit schemes, alternative employment, a literacy scheme and resource grants. SUNEET CHOPRA 1 L Alacv, The Role of Landless Labourers in the J^orth-Western Provinces of India in the .nineteenth Century, Moscow, 1976, p 66. 3 P Sundarayya, Certain Agrarian Issues, Calcutta, National Book Agency, pp 4 and 6«