“Write short note: Changing concept of property.” (1984)
Sociologically, property is not a thing but a socially recognised bundle of rights over things: to use, exclude, transfer and inherit, backed by custom or law. What counts as property, who may hold it and what limits apply have all changed as modes of production, kinship and the state have changed.
From communal to private property
- Tribal and pre-industrial societies: land and forests belonged to the lineage or community, and individuals held rights of use.
- Friedrich Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884), building on Lewis Henry Morgan, linked the rise of surplus and private property to the patriarchal monogamous family, male inheritance and the state. He called this the “world-historical defeat of the female sex”.
- Henry Maine (Ancient Law, 1861) traced a movement “from status to contract”, in which property passed from the family estate to the free individual who could buy and sell.
- Justifications diverged. John Locke grounded property in labour, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (What Is Property?, 1840) declared “property is theft”, and Karl Marx made private ownership of the means of production the root of class exploitation.
Corporate and intangible property
- Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means (The Modern Corporation and Private Property, 1932) showed the separation of ownership and control: dispersed shareholders own the firm and salaried managers run it.
- Ralf Dahrendorf therefore made authority, not property, the basis of class conflict. Marxists replied that managers share owners’ interest in profit.
- Wealth has shifted towards intangibles such as shares, pensions, patents and copyright. Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2019) shows personal behavioural data being appropriated as a new raw material.
- Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons, 1990) showed that communities can manage shared resources without either privatisation or state control.
The Indian trajectory
- From coparcenary to individual and gender-equal rights: the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 made daughters coparceners by birth. In Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020) the Supreme Court held that this right does not depend on the father being alive in 2005. Bina Agarwal (A Field of One’s Own, 1994) had argued that independent land rights are central to women’s status.
- Property subordinated to social justice: after zamindari abolition and land ceilings, the 44th Amendment (1978) removed property from the Fundamental Rights and made it a constitutional right under Article 300A.
- Recognising customary tenure: the Forest Rights Act, 2006 grants individual and community forest rights to forest dwellers.
- Formalisation: under SVAMITVA, drone surveys had produced about 3.19 crore property cards across 1.94 lakh villages by mid-2026. Customary possession in village settlements becomes a title that can be mortgaged, in line with Hernando de Soto’s argument about unlocking “dead capital”.
- Data as property: the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 gives individuals rights over their personal data.
Conclusion
Property has moved from kin-held use rights to individual ownership, then to corporate and intangible forms, and is now being re-socialised through commons, gender equality and data rights. It remains a social relation of power. The key question is always who is excluded by a given property regime.