A Colonial Profile

Seventy percent of Thanjāvūr's population depended mainly on agriculture for their livelihood in 1951, by comparison with 65 percent in Madras State as a whole. Eighty-one percent of the people lived in villages and the remaining 19 percent in towns of more than 5,000. The high proportion of the agricultural and the rural populations reflected Thanjāvūr's extreme dependence on paddy cultivation. A further 2.4 percent of the people, not counted in the census as “agricultural,” depended on fishing, raising sheep, goats, or cattle, or worked in forests or on plantations with specialties such as ground nuts.

The towns were mainly administrative, religious, and marketing centers, heavily dependent on the land. Four percent of the population lived in towns but depended on agricultural work or incomes, while another 1 percent lived in towns but derived part of their income from agriculture. At least another 5 to 6 percent of the people lived from the trade, transport, storage, or processing of paddy, even omitting railroad and trucking workers, who were involved in paddy export or transport. About 4 percent depended on trade in or transport of commodities other than paddy, chiefly fish and livestock. Primary production, or trade in and processing of primary products, thus accounted for roughly 82 percent of Thanjāvūr's income earners, some 77 percent being involved with paddy, the dominant crop.

Of the roughly 18 percent of the people not directly concerned with these pursuits, 3.6 percent were in government and professional service mainly connected with education or the collection of revenue (itself chiefly from the proceeds of paddy lands).