268

INDIA

amongst the people, that very large sections of the
agriculturists are certainly better off than they were
twenty-five years ago. They live in better houses, wear
better clothes, have more brass pots and cooking utensils,
and their wives and daughters go about decorated with
more bangles and ornaments than formerly. I have
already pointed out that, under stress of circumstances,
the aboriginal people of the jungles, the Bhils and the
Gonds, will revert to the natural resources of their forefathers,
 and live on jungle products—wild fruit and roots,
bamboo shoots and grass seeds. There are, indeed,
tribes in Gondwana who habitually live on this sort of
fare to this day. In the days of the Moghuls it is
probable that the percentage of the then comparatively
scanty population who thus supported life was enormously
larger than it is now. We have no reliable source of
‘nformation about those days, and no direct comparison
ls possible ; but we may quote what the Abbé Dubois has
put on record as the standard of living which prevailed
at the beginning of British rule in India: “In most
provinces those who cultivate rice do not eat it, but sell
it to pay their taxes. During the four months the Sukha
Kala (the time of prosperity) lasts, they live on the pulse
and millet which they cultivate in their fields. During
the rest of the year their only daily sustenance, in almost
all cases, consists of a plateful of millet seasoned with
a little pounded salt and chillies. When, after paying their
taxes and debts, they come to the end of their store of
grain, supposing there has been any remnant, they are
reduced to living from hand to mouth. Some of them
borrow grain, which they promise to repay with interest
after the next harvest ; others explore the woods and the
banks of the rivers and tanks in search of leaves, bamboo
shoots, wild fruits, roots and other substances which help
them to exist, or rather prevent them from dying of hunger.”
This was the standard of living amongst the cultivators ;
below them was a class comprising, perhaps, a half of the
entire population, “ whose standard of living was even more
abject. They go and seek for food on the banks of rivers