Describe the impact of land reforms on the peasants of Indian society. (2014)
Land reform did not affect “the peasantry” as a single body. Its impact was stratified, distributed along Daniel Thorner’s division in The Agrarian Prospect in India (1956) between maliks who live on property rights, kisans who work their own land, and mazdoors who work others’. Reform lifted the layer immediately below the landlord and largely passed over the layer at the bottom.
The former intermediaries
Zamindars, jagirdars and taluqdars lost their rentier income and their legal standing, though rarely their land: they retained all holdings shown as under “personal cultivation” and converted from rent-receivers into cultivating proprietors or urban professionals. In Rajasthan the Rajputs emerged with far less land than before, and local power shifted decisively away from them.
The upper tenants: the principal gainers
- Occupancy tenants holding directly from the zamindar became owners — roughly 20 million of them across India.
- These were middle and rich peasants, often of the cultivating middle castes, who had themselves sublet to tenants-at-will.
- Given assured title, they became the natural clients of the Green Revolution from the late 1960s: Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, in In Pursuit of Lakshmi (1987), named them “bullock capitalists” — self-employed proprietors, market-oriented, and politically formidable.
The middle peasantry and the squeeze of scale
Security of tenure without scale proved a thin gain. Subdivision and population growth have driven the average operational holding down to 1.08 hectares, with 86% of holdings small or marginal (Agriculture Census 2015–16), so a class created by reform is now sustained by wage and non-farm income as much as by land.
Sharecroppers and sub-tenants: the losers
- Anticipating tenancy legislation, landowners evicted tenants or extracted “voluntary surrender”. Protected tenants in Bombay fell from 1.7 million to 1.3 million between 1948 and 1951, and the 1961 Census found 82% of tenancies insecure.
- Tenancy did not end; it went oral and concealed. Agricultural Census returns show under 1% of operated area leased-in against the NSSO’s 11.1% (2012–13), leaving concealed tenants outside institutional credit, crop insurance and disaster relief.
- The exception was West Bengal’s Operation Barga (1978 onwards), which recorded about 1.5 million bargadars with heritable rights and raised registration from 23% to 65% by 1990, and Kerala’s 1969 reform, which gave kudikidappukars their homesteads.
Regionally the picture splits sharply: real gains where peasants were mobilised or a reforming government held office — Kerala, West Bengal, Jammu and Kashmir — against nominal change in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, where the legislating class owned the land.
Agricultural labourers, caste and gender
Ceiling redistribution reached under 2% of cultivated area. SECC 2011 found roughly 56% of rural households owning no agricultural land and 70% of Scheduled Caste households landless — the caste–class overlap that André Béteille studied at Sripuram was loosened, not broken. Meanwhile male out-migration has feminised field labour without conferring title: only about 14% of operational holdings had female holders in 2015–16, and Jan Breman’s work on footloose labour describes the circulating wage worker that many erstwhile tenants became.
Conclusion
The peasantry that emerged is differentiated, not levelled: a numerically dominant but shrinking-holding middle-caste proprietary class that converted land into political power, and beneath it a mass of unrecorded tenants and Dalit labourers. Land reform changed who commands the village; it did not change whether the landless own anything.