Elaborate A. R. Desai’s perspective to the study of Indian society. (2020)
A. R. Desai‘s perspective is not a doctrine announced in the abstract but a research programme carried, with one set of questions, across every major domain of Indian life. The questions are always the same — what is the prevailing mode of production, which classes does it create, who appropriates the surplus, and what does the state do about the resulting conflict. That consistency across domains, rather than any single book, is what makes it a perspective.
Nationalism
Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948), written as a doctoral thesis under G. S. Ghurye, argues that Indian nationalism is a modern phenomenon, not the reawakening of an ancient nation. It was produced by conditions colonial rule itself created: a unified market, common law and administration, railways and the press, English education and, above all, a new class structure. Desai maps it in phases, each defined by which class enters and whose leadership sets the terms — a thin intelligentsia to 1885, educated middle class and merchants to 1905, the lower middle class with Swadeshi to 1918, a mass base under bourgeois leadership to 1934, then socialist and All India Kisan Sabha currents.
Agrarian structure and the village
Rural Sociology in India (1959) is deliberately built around agrarian class relations rather than caste ritual. Against the village-studies tradition, his charge is that a unit of administration was mistaken for a unit of society, and that what is described as ritual interdependence is surplus extraction. The village he studies is the one the revenue settlements and commercialisation produced: landlords, tenants, sharecroppers, moneylenders, labourers.
The state and the critique of modernisation
State and Society in India: Essays in Dissent (1975) argues that modernisation theory smuggles in modernisation on the capitalist path as a value premise, serving as an ideological vehicle for the ruling class. The post-independence state is a capitalist state whose apparatus performs twin functions: protecting the propertied classes and suppressing the struggles of the exploited.
The path of development
India’s Path of Development: A Marxist Approach (1984) extends this: the “mixed economy” describes who gets subsidised rather than a third way. Desai broke here with the orthodox communist parties over alliance with a “progressive bourgeoisie” and the parliamentary road to socialism.
Struggles and democratic rights
Peasant Struggles in India (1979) and Agrarian Struggles in India After Independence (1986) draw a distinction that still works: colonial struggles were against landlordism, while after 1947 the newly propertied peasantry fights for a larger share of development’s fruits and the agrarian poor fight for survival. Violation of Democratic Rights in India (1986) made state repression a sociological object.
Assessment
The 2019 Situation Assessment Survey found the average agricultural household earning about Rs 10,218 a month, only Rs 3,798 of it from crops, with 50.2% indebted — appropriation has shifted to credit and the value chain, as his framework predicts. Yogendra Singh‘s objection stands, though: the assertions outrun the empirical support, and caste has proved far less derivative of property than Desai expected.
Conclusion
Desai gave Indian sociology what neither the textual nor the village tradition could: India as a structure of appropriation with a state attached. Its errors are those of an argument that risks a causal claim rather than avoiding one.