Unlike all but one (Chapter XVI) of the other chapters in this book, this chapter is almost entirely concerned with one of the continents only – namely with the question of how the erstwhile untouchables, and other near-destitute people, managed to survive in south-eastern Karnataka in (say) 1900.

We idealise our childhoods, the long summer afternoons of yesteryear – and the conditions of the weakest elements of rural tropical communities in ‘earlier times’. We share the common conviction that rural poverty today is not merely more intense (as, indeed, it may be owing to the unprecedented rate of growth of the population as well as to inflation), but somehow different in kind owing to greater ‘individual’, i.e. household, insecurity. Whereas the past is seen as ordered, rigorous and harmonious, the present is regarded as chaotic and disorderly. Of course all the dates get mixed so that ‘disorder’ may be attributed to the arrival of the British, to increasing urbanism, to the decline of rural crafts, to the sale of land, to the degradation of the soil, to increased monetisation – and so forth. However this may be, the condition of the weakest elements today is always seen as essentially more precarious than formerly. I am sure that this is a serious fallacy and that unless we come to understand that the poverty of the present springs directly from the poverty of the past we shall make no intellectual progress.