Land, Feudalism, and Reform: An Agrarian History of Sikkim.

JASPER SUBBA

Sikkim, agrarian history, feudalism, land reform, British colonialism, peasant resistance, post-merger legislation.

This article traces the long agrarian history of Sikkim from the feudal structures of the Namgyal monarchy through colonial reordering under British political officers, the peasant uprisings of the 1940s, and the successive waves of land legislation that followed integration into the Indian Union in 1975. Drawing on primary archival sources, census records, legislative texts, and the works authored by Subba, Chakrabarti, Vandelhelsken, and others, the article advances three critical arguments. First, Sikkim's pre-colonial agrarian order was not a simple despotism but a layered system of delegated sovereignty in which ethnic identity, religious privilege, and spatial distance from the palace capital shaped the conditions of peasant exploitation in complex ways. Second, colonial intervention under the East India Company and subsequent British political officers did not dismantle this feudalism but instrumentalized and partially reconfigured it, substituting regulated extraction for unregulated tribute while opening the territory to Nepalese migrant labour that fundamentally transformed the ethnic composition and agrarian class structure of the state. Third, post-independence and post-merger land reforms, despite their legislative ambition, remained structurally incomplete because ceiling legislation was confined to agricultural land and did not touch the vast non-agricultural holdings of the former 'kazis' (landed elites), leaving the social foundations of the old, landed elite largely intact. The article concludes by situating Sikkim's agrarian trajectory within broader debates on the relationship between colonial property regimes, ethnic pluralism, and the limits of post-colonial land reform in the South Asian Himalayan borderlands.

Volume 13 Issue 4, April-2025

Pages : q789-q801