How does A. R. Desai argue that Indian social classes must be studied through the colonial mode of production? Elucidate. (2026)
A. R. Desai reverses the usual order of Indian sociology. In Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948) he argues that the classes one meets in modern India — zamindar, tenant, agricultural labourer, industrialist, mill-hand, English-educated professional — are not survivals of an older order but deposits of colonial capitalism. Class must therefore be read from the mode of production colonial rule installed, not from caste or custom.
Dissolution of the pre-British village
Pre-British India rested on a near self-sufficient village combining plough agriculture with handicraft, where the community rather than the individual held land. Change was quantitative, not qualitative. British rule did not reform this order; it dissolved it, by turning land into private, alienable, revenue-bearing property.
Revenue settlements as class-making instruments
- The Permanent Settlement (1793) converted revenue collectors into proprietors under a fixed, heavy assessment, producing absentee landlordism and, through sub-infeudation, layers of tenants and sub-tenants.
- Ryotwari in Madras and Bombay assessed the individual cultivator, making him a proprietor whose land could be mortgaged and lost; mahalwari settled with the village body in the north-west.
- Commercialisation of agriculture tied cultivation to metropolitan demand and drew in merchants and moneylenders.
The result was an agrarian class map with no pre-colonial counterpart: landlords, tenants, sharecroppers, moneylender-merchants and a swelling mass of landless labourers.
De-industrialisation and the new classes
Tariff policy and machine imports destroyed handicrafts, pushing artisans back onto land, while the drain of wealth (Dadabhai Naoroji; quantified by Utsa Patnaik at roughly $45 trillion between 1765 and 1938) denied India the surplus for autonomous industrialisation. What emerged was a late, dependent industrial bourgeoisie, an industrial working class, and an English-educated professional middle class — the stratum that, for Desai, gave nationalism its first leadership.
Why the colonial specification matters
Indian classes cannot be read off European stage theory, because capitalism here was imported, subordinated and partial. Hamza Alavi‘s “India and the Colonial Mode of Production” (1975), alongside Jairus Banaji, made this explicit: agriculture was neither classically feudal nor freely capitalist but tied to metropolitan capital. The mode of production debate — Amit Bhaduri‘s semi-feudalism, Utsa Patnaik‘s capitalist differentiation, Ashok Rudra‘s scepticism — confirms that borrowed categories do not transfer. Desai’s limitation is that this lens can reduce caste to a shadow of property.
Conclusion
The structure has outlived the empire. The 2025 labour force survey finds 43% of workers still in agriculture, 56.2% self-employed and only 23.6% in regular wage work — proletarianisation without industrialisation — while the top 1% now holds 22.6% of income and 40.1% of wealth. Stratification read without the colonial mode of production remains a description in search of a cause.