Paper short abstract:

Survival of labour tying arrangements, its re-enforcement and embellishment, increasingly experienced by the female agricultural class, emerges from social control and power within rural societies. Have such experiences under agrarian capitalism altered labour relations in Tamil Nadu?

Paper long abstract:

Debates surrounding the agrarian question in India highlight the importance of understanding the concept of free and unfree labour. This dual understanding of labour relations needs to be replaced with the notion of varied degrees of unfreedom and tied labour arrangements. These labour tying arrangements are a result of interlocking transactions that comprise of mechanisms of social control and power within rural society. The interplay of class and power relations needs to be placed within the broader political-economic system, in order to understand the formation and re-enforcement of labour tying arrangements.

Drawing from my field work of two villages in the district of Puddukottai (Tamil Nadu), I look into how structures of power and privilege operate over land to recruit and manage labour. In Tamil Nadu, earlier work (Kapadia 1994) on the region highlights relations between the landlord and labourer to be profit oriented, working along the lines of an optimal business transaction. If such is the case, are the labourers actually in a position to negotiate with the landlords and how does this explain the growing reliance of the landlords' personal knowledge of the workers, in order to extract work? This knowledge affects the extent of migration within this region, and the greater reliance on middleman to recruit labour; however this again can be traced back to older social relations that have been maintained. This paper will look into the relations between labour and land, and how these result in the growing incidence of tied labour.