Capitalism is a unique economic system, and its emergence is arguably the most important turning point in the history of humanity, transforming how societies function and the physical environment in unprecedented ways. Nevertheless, it is critical to acknowledge that far from emerging onto a blank slate, capitalism has been built upon the foundations of much older economic systems which date back thousands of years. The purpose of this chapter is to review the well-established literature on the transition to capitalism within the context of an agrarian society while emphasising the need to acknowledge the ‘pre-capitalist’, as both an impediment to the expansion of capitalism and a mediating factor, which shapes how transition is taking place. In doing so, the conceptual framework for the book is introduced – in particular, the key concept of the mode of production.

The origins of capitalism date back to the early modern period – developing in the context of a crisis within feudalism in early modern Europe (Dobb, 1948). However, if one is to understand what lies inside of capitalism and what lies outside, it is useful to clearly define what this system actually entails. How we define capitalism has always been open to debate (see, for instance, recent contributions by Hodgson, 2016; Harris and Delanty, 2023), although Marx (1974), in the volumes of Capital, still gives by far the most comprehensive characterisation of the system, key features of which are still fundamental today.

The English East India Company first acquired a foothold in southern Panjab during the second Anglo-Maratha War with the signing of the Treaty of Surji Arjungaon in 1803. This treaty gave the Company formal possession of the Maratha domains west of the Yamuna River. The Marathas’ role as agents and protectors of the Mughal emperor likewise passed to it. These provisions secured an important strategic aim, namely that the region and the symbolically powerful Mughal court be prised from the grasp of the Marathas and, more importantly, from that of their powerful French generals. In the global context of the Napoleonic wars, this would, it was hoped, prevent the French from attacking the Company's Indian possessions via its western frontier.

From 1803 onwards, the Company began the long process of determining just how much of southern Panjab had been under Maratha or Mughal rule and how much of this territory it in fact wanted to govern. Since much of the region was thought to be arid and unproductive, Governor-General Wellesley initially adopted a policy of indirect rule. Lord Lake, the Commander-in-Chief of the Company's Indian armies, and his assistant, Charles Metcalfe, were given the authority to issue charters (sanad) to the various jagirdars as well as autonomous chieftains who held land in the newly acquired domains, confirming their grants and associated privileges in return for their acceptance of the Company's supremacy.

This epilogue chronicles the changes to the city–cinema relationship in Hyderabad after the new millennium.

The Telangana Movement

The discontent among the people of Telangana against the hegemony of people from Andhra and Rayalaseema in social, political, cultural, and economic spheres had been simmering since the stubbing down of the Telangana movement in the 1970s. The movement gained new force in the late 1990s. There were renewed protests against the sidelining of the region, which took the shape of a demand for a separate Telangana movement. The Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) party was formed with a single point agenda – to create Telangana state – in 2001. This became the moment for reevaluating the dominant historiographies of the region on various spheres, including film. In the demand for a separate Telangana state, activists and agitators pointed out that the Telugu film industry was almost completely comprised of coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema (collectively called as Seemandhra) stars and capitalists. In Noorella Therapai Telangana Atma, Mamidi Harikrishna, a prominent Telangana activist, argued that Telugu cinema failed to represent Telangana. There was a rewriting of histories by rediscovering actors from the region. For example, Paidi Jairaj was discovered and celebrated as the first hero from Telangana (Hyderabad State).

Film was also used as a campaign vehicle for the Telangana movement. Films like Jai Bolo Telangana and Inkennallu narrated the manifesto for a separate Telangana. Separate statehood activists appeared in some films. The film industry went through serious turmoil during the Telangana agitation.

There is a widespread academic acknowledgement, much of which was covered in Chapter 2, that the classical ‘semi-feudalism’ which was the focus of Indian debates in the 1970s and 1980s is of limited relevance in the twenty-first century due to market expansion, labour migration and the subdivision of landlord estates (see Lerche, 2013). Even Nepali leftist commentators have suggested that the declining power of landlords and monetisation of wages mean that agrarian relations are now ‘capitalist’ rather than ‘feudal’ with the exception of a few pockets (see, for example, Sharma, 2019). However, a critical finding of this book is that landlordism has remained remarkably resilient through decades of change, which have included land reforms, the expansion of industry and a state-led modernisation agenda. While the old Tharu landlords’ economic power may have declined in the ways documented in some other parts of South Asia, the absentee landed elite retain considerable control over its holdings, and rent and usury continue to act as the so-called depressor (Harriss, 2013) – constraining the development of the productive forces and pushing households into extreme food insecurity.

Nevertheless, intensifying articulations with the capitalist sector in the wake of economic liberalisation, and rising dependence upon wage labour, on a theoretical level could undermine dependency on tenancy or merchant capital amongst the landless and small landholders. Expanding capitalist markets could also simultaneously open up new avenues for capital investment amongst the urban and rural elite, reducing the incentive for landlords to hold on to their estates.

Paddy, or dhan, is the most important subsistence crop produced by farming households across Nepal's lowlands, regardless as to whether they are farming as tenants or as independent peasants (see Figure 5.1). Not only is it viewed as an essential food staple, but its production is central to the culture and way of life of the Tarai-Madhesh and the larger Eastern Gangetic Plains. This, it should be noted, is a food culture in which Morang's Adivasi peasantry has been integrated into since the clearing of the forest frontier and their transition from forest-based shifting cultivation to sedentary agriculture. It is planted in the monsoon month of Ashadh (June–July), and ropai, or transplantation, is a time of peak labour demand – a process which entails extensive exchange of labour between households, albeit usually in a monetised form. During the mid-monsoon months, labour is limited to periodic weeding and irrigating in the run-up to harvest as the rains subside in the autumn.

After the paddy harvest with the onset of the cooler, drier months of winter known as the rabi season, the farmers plant a crop of dhal, mustard or more often wheat (see Figure 5.2), the flour of which is used to make chapatti (unleavened bread), a secondary staple. Wheat is harvested prior to the pre-monsoon storms in April. The severe heat and thunderstorms of the pre-monsoon months, known as the pre-kharif, mark a quiet period in the agricultural calendar nowadays.

The sub-Himalayan lowlands which make up the historic region of Morang have been shown to have a complex history, yet have emerged today with a clear geography of inequality. With waves of migration from the hills, the development of successful owner-cultivator communities to the north has been paralleled by the perpetuation of feudalism in the original Tarai- Madhesh settlements of the south – albeit with the rise of an absentee rather than local landlord class. However, even within the southern belt, which is the focus of this book, the peasantry is shown to be far from a unitary entity and is divided by land ownership status as well as a complex matrix of caste and ethnicity. These divisions are crucial to explore if one is to understand the contemporary interaction between the capitalist and pre-capitalist – and that is the focus of this chapter.

Before that, it is worth offering a bit more social and cultural context of the core field site and its diversity. The seven villages are located in the former Jhorahat, Bhaudaha and Thalaha VDCs, which in 2017 were merged into Gramthan and Katahari rural municipalities (see Figure 4.1). Travelling northeast from Biratnagar towards this cluster of villages on the recently widened road, the Singya Nadi river marks the northern boundaries of the built-up area. One passes some ribbon development, including new housing plots catering to urban dwellers, and a number of large agro-processing mills, and after 4 kilometres one reaches Jhorahat Bazaar (see Figure 4.2), the first settlement which is included in the study.

A well-wisher advises Aasman-ud-Dowla, the erstwhile Nawab of Hyderabad, presumably at the cusp of the fall of the Nizam's state, in K. A. Abbas's 1965 film Aasman Mahal (Figure 3.1). To this provocation, Aasman-ud-Dowla says that Hindustan is his mother, it has Taj Mahal, Bibi ka Maqbara, Ajanta Ellora, his ancestors’ graves, and his friends. This scene gives a glimpse into the communal politics of Hyderabad in the decade of the 1940s. The political events of those times are key to understanding the development of the film industry and their implications on Hyderabadi Muslims.

The 1940s were transformational on many fronts for the Indian subcontinent, and Hyderabad and the film industries of the subcontinent were also a part of these changes. In the context of the film industry in Hyderabad, the events we discussed until now slowly start moving into the background as other pressing socio-political conditions take centre stage. The nationalist movement and its politics shape Hyderabad in this period. This shift serves as a precursor to the post-colonial remaking of Hyderabad. The chapter first discusses these matters to place changes in the film industry in context.

This song from the 1957 film MLA, made almost immediately after the formation of the linguistic state of Andhra Pradesh with Hyderabad as the capital city, introduces the city to the Telugu public who until then did not really consider it as a part of the Telugu imagination. The song narrates the history of the city from its establishment by the Qutb Shahi Dynasty. However, interestingly, it omits the Asaf Jahi dynasty out of it. After the Police Action, several historical and cultural traces of the Asaf Jahi dynasty were erased.

Hyderabad, the capital city, was a new geography for the Telugus in Madras Presidency. The Telugus were politically active in several civil society organizations in Madras such as the Madras Native Association and the Madras Mahajana Sabha. They also played an important role in the Justice Party. Most prominent Telugu newspapers were published from Madras. The city for Telugu people was Madras until 1953 when Andhra state was formed. The Telugus made a claim for Madras as their capital city with the slogan ‘Madras Manade’, meaning ‘Madras is ours’, while the Tamils raised the slogan ‘Madras Namade’, also meaning ‘Madras is ours’.

The PSB's collection of paintings found its way to the Bhai Mati Das Museum through the efforts of Baba Harbans Singh Kar Seva Dilli Wale (1920–2011). He was a much-respected Sikh who organised kar seva (voluntary service) for the construction of gurdwaras, including the historic gurdwaras in Delhi, Darbar Sahib at Amritsar, Gurdwara Tarn Taran and Gurdwara Paonta Sahib, among others (Khatri n.d.). It appears that it was on his initiative that the building of Majestic cinema at Chandni Chowk was purchased by the DSGMC and replaced by a museum. The bank donated its paintings for the purposes of display, and the Bhai Mati Das Museum opened in 2001. There is little information available on the process of selection of paintings, curation of the display and the people involved. Initially, artist Amolak Singh (1950–2006) was in charge of the museum, but at present there is no artist or curator associated with it. The sevadars of the gurdwara act as caretakers of the museum, and their role is limited to opening, cleaning and closing it.

Bhai Mati Das Museum has 169 history paintings, each provided with a description in three languages, English, Hindi and Punjabi. Here, Sikh history is presented in chronological order, beginning with Guru Nanak (in the fifteenth century), covering the ten Gurus, the events of the eighteenth century that saw conflict with the Mughals and Afghans and subsequently the emergence of Sikh misls and Ranjit Singh's kingdom in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Beyond this, the story is patchy, with a few canvases on the bhagats, whose verses are included in the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikhs’ struggle against the British and their contribution to the army of free India.

It is clear thus far that rural poverty in southern Morang has complex roots. Unlike in many villages of the Eastern Gangetic Plains, there is not a local landlord class or a traditional caste-based land ownership hierarchy, where villages are divided into neighbourhoods by caste, with clear disparities of wealth in terms of housing and asset ownership. The region also does not experience the open political and ideological subjugation by a local dominant caste or landlord class at a local level, such as those which garnered support for the Naxalite struggle in Bihar in the 1980s and 1990s (Kunnath, 2017) or in the central Tarai-Madhesh during Nepal's People's War. However, the largely Adivasi peasantry experiences a silent drain of resources through a more complex and ‘distant’ network of feudal exploitation, with rents being appropriated in parallel by urban-based landlords and merchant capital.

It is important to now understand what this means for household livelihoods and the reproduction of rural poverty in southern Morang, as well as the long-term opportunities for ‘accumulation’ within the peasantry. The first section of this chapter explores the ability of households to meet their minimum subsistence needs or produce a surplus in the context of ground rent, distress commerce and usury. The second goes on to look at the implications of this drain of resource for investment on the land – in other words, it explores the constraining role played by the relations of production in developing the forces of production at a time of economic liberalisation and state-promoted commercialisation.