One of the first acts of the newly installed regional government of Yogyakarta was to abolish the economic system which had been at the heart of the peasants' hardship. Household tax was abolished in 1946, followed by land tax in 1951. Instead of land tax, the regional government instated income tax to which villagers who had paid more than Rp 6.00 of land tax (equivalent to approximately 0.4 hectare of the second class sawah) were liable (Selosoemardjan,1962:225). The glebagan system was annulled in 1948 (Soemarjo,1959:21). These measures helped to remove the negative value on land. Land was no longer a burden but the most reliable source of income and precious capital (Soedjito,1957:146).

In the 1950s, 0.2 hectare of sawah could produce about 500 kg. of unhusked dry rice per cropping. ^[36] When a household cultivated this amount of sawah with its own family labour, the production cost would amount 70-80 kg. of unhusked rice ^[37] , leaving 420-430 kg. as net yield. If unhusked rice was converted to husked one at the rate of 1:0.65 (Fox,1991:80) and pounding was done by family labour, the household could secure about 275 kg. of rice. As double cropping was possible, this amount of rice could be harvested once every six months. This shows that 2000 m² of sawah could give its holders about 1.5 kg. of rice per day, an amount which was large enough to meet daily rice consumption of a family of five members ^[38] , although not enough for other needs.

The benefits of this new economic system in the 1950s were distributed evenly to all landholders. Decreasing land tax and a longer period to use sawah provided large landholders with a chance to become wealthier, middle landowners with a better opportunity to secure their livelihood solely from the cultivation of sawah and small landholders with a better opportunity to survive without selling their land. The affluence which middle landowners could enjoy in the 1950s was reflected in the influx of bicycles into rural villages, which had once been possessed only by government officials, the well-to-do village officials and a few merchants in the colonial period (Selosoemardjan,1962:256). About half of the total households in a Yogyanese rural hamlet is reported to have owned one or more bicycles, which cost 100 kg. of rice in the mid-1950s (Soedjito,1957:157). This changed the prestige symbol of wealthy villagers from bicycles to motorbikes (Soemarjo,1959:24), a situation which also applied in Kolojonggo.

Rising profitability of sawah cultivation in the 1950s brought a negative impact on the differentiation of peasants in terms of their landholdings. The abolition of land tax and of the glebagan system strengthened the economic position of small landholders while the changing value of land from that of burden to the most precious resource encouraged them to retain land, whatever size it might be. In the case of large landholders, a few constraints emerged which had a potential to block their economic capability to further the process of accumulating land. Before these will be discussed, the structure of land tenure in 1960 will be described:

Source: Records kept in the kelurahan office
^a The statistics for 1943 include the cases of inheritance and salary land, so that it is different from the data presented in table A-1.
^b As was the case in 1943, temporary transactions of sawah by way of tuku tahunan and tuku musiman were not included in the statistics for 1960. Accordingly, the actual size of sawah that each household cultivated at that time may not coincide with the size of sawah presented in this table.

One of the most remarkable features in table A-2 is the increase in the number of households owning less than 0.3 hectare of sawah. Nineteen households were newly added to this group in 1960 and the size of sawah owned by this group rose from 21.3 percent to 34.9 percent. The increase in the number of small holders had also been a process characterising the colonial period. Compared with this, however, the process in the 1950s was different in that the increase in small landholders was not accompanied by the concentration of sawah among large landholders. On the contrary, the total area of sawah that landholders of more than 0.5 hectare owned declined from 51.2 percent in 1943 to 48.7 percent in 1960. The most important factor behind this change was inheritance. According to the Javanese custom, all children have the right to their parents' estates and valuables while no rules are systemised to give preferential right to the eldest child or the male (Koentjaraningrat,1960:105-6). When applied to the inheritance of the sawah, this rule implies that, upon parents' death or even before it, the parents' sawah is inherited by each child rather than being kept by one of them. As a result, the inheritance of land in the family of large landholders meant the creation of several smaller landholders. In the 1940s and 1950s, thirteen cases of inheritance, of which nine involved the division of the sawah ^[39] , were reported in Kolojonggo and 7.5 hectares of sawah previously owned by nine villagers were distributed to 26 villagers, 19 living in Kolojonggo and 7 living in neighbouring hamlets.

The second factor which changed the structure of landholdings was the commercial sale of sawah. However, the size of sawah which was transacted in the 1950s was far less than that in the colonial time. Two villagers sold 2190 m² of sawah while four bought 5535 m². ^[40] With these transactions, the ownership of 4.6 percent of sawah was shifted from one to the other. To understand better the impact of land transactions on the structure of land tenure, the same data were collected in five other hamlets in Sumber, which cover 70.1155 hectares of sawah and 41.9750 hectares of pekarangan. The result is as follows:

Source: Records kept in the kelurahan office.

Table A-3 indicates that 42 cases of land sales in the 1950s covered about 1.8 hectares of sawah and around 0.7 hectare of pekarangan or 2.6 percent of the total sawah and 1.7 percent of the total pekarangan in the five hamlets. These figures imply that accumulation of sawah by large landholders by way of land purchase did not take place on a mass scale. The size of landholdings of land purchasers, as is shown in table A-4 below, also suggests that large landholders were not the major group to buy land. Of the 58 known cases of transaction, only two cases were carried out by landholders with more than 0.5 hectare. In this respect, the polarisation of landholdings by way of land sales which had dominated the colonial period was largely halted in the 1950s.

Source: Records kept in the kelurahan office.

The change in the structure of land tenure raises the question as to why the process of concentration of land in the late colonial period was largely stopped in the 1950s, although the economic condition of large landholders had not worsened. The first constraint to hinder the process of concentration of sawah was inheritance. In many cases, those who accumulated a large amount of land were middle aged in the colonial period, and the process of inheritance in their households started in the 1940s and 1950s. When large landholders had many children, inheritance meant a creation of several middle or, in some cases, small landholders. Although each heir was fortunate enough to receive more than one hectare of sawah, which was large enough to yield profits to purchase more land, however, inheritance worked in a negative way. On the one hand, the inexperience of the heirs in managing sawah might make it difficult for them to be directly involved in the expansion of their landholdings after inheritance. On the other hand, the higher education that many large landholders' children had received helped them to find jobs in non-agricultural sectors which were valued higher than those in the agricultural sector (Soedjito,1957:138). Irrespective of whether they stayed in the village or not, employment in non-agricultural sectors decreased their interest in agriculture and land accumulation.

The second factor was the improving economic condition of small and middle landholders. The abolition of land tax removed the expensive cost of holding land in the colonial period while the abolition of the glebagan system provided them with the right to cultivate sawah all year round, resulting in a rapid increase in the yields from the same size of sawah. These measures, then, made the holdings of sawah more advantageous than before and helped small landholders to maintain a certain degree of economic equilibrium in managing their household economy without resorting to selling their land.

In brief, the segmentation of land in large landholders' families, increase in the size of sawah that landholders could utilise, and the removal of outside pressure on landholders were some of the factors which hindered the process of polarisation of peasants in the 1950s. As a result, the previously differentiated structure of land tenure was largely maintained throughout this period or, considering inheritance in the families of large landholders, the gap between large landholders and smaller ones was narrowed.

The politico-economic developments in the first half of the 1960s had no major impact on the structure of land tenure. The high inflation rate in this period, although deprived the peasants of the sense of economic stability, played a role in reinforcing the importance of holding sawah as a safeguard against price fluctuation. On the other hand, the acceleration of the communist activities in the countryside worked to discourage large landholders' involvement in land purchase.

In Kolojonggo, the major change that the communist activists tried to achieve in the first half of the 1960s was to improve the economic condition of small landholders and tenants. Their campaigns aimed to reduce the interest rates on debt, to abolish the ijon system ^[41] , to change the sharecropping ratio from 5:5 to 4:6 (owner:sharecropper), to return the sawah which were sold for a fixed term (tuku tahunan) to its original owners, to collectivise agricultural working practices and to establish a cooperative. These programs, although backed by mass support from villagers, did not bring any tangible results to change the economic conditions of their supporters. Substantial concessions such as the replacement of sharecropping ratio and nullification of tuku tahunan could not be achieved due to severe opposition from large landholders, while the most fundamental issue of land reform was not located at the center of the communist program in Kolojonggo. This was because the size of sawah held by large landholders in Kolojonggo was, seen from the national standard, too small to be subject to redistribution. In Kolojonggo as well as in Sumber, no one had more than 5 hectares of sawah, the maximum size of landholding promulgated by the land reform act (Huizer,1972:33). On the contrary, the size that the largest landholder in Kolojonggo owned was just above 2 hectares, the official guideline used in the land reform as an appropriate landholding for a family (ibid.). ^[42]

Although the land reform was not a central issue in the communist programs in Kolojonggo, the stipulation of the national land reform law worked as a factor to discourage the involvement of large landowners in land transactions. They could not be certain whether another agrarian law would be introduced in the future to lower the limit on maximum landholding and whether the radical slogan of the communist activists, 'to return land to the peasants', would be realised forcibly to redistribute land to the tenants or not. In these circumstances, it was probably more advantageous for them to maintain the status quo than to purchase more sawah, agitating the heightened consciousness of the communist activists. Their reluctance to purchase land was reflected in the size and frequency of land transactions in 1960-64 (see table A-3). Compared with 1955-59, the size and frequency of land transactions in this period decreased.