Write short note : Agrarian Unrest. (2007)
Agrarian unrest is collective protest arising from the relations of production on land — over rent, tenure, wages, prices or dispossession. D. N. Dhanagare defines peasant movements broadly: attempts by any stratum of the peasantry to change an exploitative system or redress grievances, without necessarily seeking to overthrow it. Across two centuries, Indian agrarian unrest shows a clear migration in both its axis of conflict and its leading stratum.
Classifying agrarian unrest
- Kathleen Gough’s typology of Indian peasant revolts distinguishes restorative rebellions (restoring a lost order), religious movements for liberation, social banditry, terroristic vengeance by the deprived, and mass insurrections aiming at structural change.
- A. R. Desai, in Peasant Struggles in India (1979), separates pre-independence struggles against colonial revenue, zamindar and planter from post-independence ones waged within a democratic state against its development model.
- Dhanagare’s Peasant Movements in India, 1920–1950 (1983) periodises them and asks which class actually carried each one.
- Eric Wolf (Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, 1969) and Hamza Alavi held the middle peasant — secure enough to act, squeezed enough to be angry — to be the typically insurrectionary stratum, not the destitute.
The historical sequence
| Phase | Movements | Core issue |
|---|---|---|
| Colonial, early | Indigo revolt (1859–60), Pabna (1873), Deccan riots (1875), Moplah (1921) | Forced cropping, rent, moneylender |
| Nationalist | Champaran (1917), Bardoli satyagraha (1928) | Revenue enhancement; folded into freedom struggle |
| Late colonial radical | Tebhaga (1946–47), Telangana (1946–51) | Sharecropper’s share; vetti forced labour, jagirdari |
| Post-1947 | Naxalbari (1967) and after | Land to the tiller; armed seizure |
| 1980s | “New farmers’ movements” under Sharad Joshi and Mahendra Singh Tikait | Prices, inputs, subsidies, loan non-repayment |
| Contemporary | Dalit labourers’ struggles in Tamil Nadu and Bihar; the 2020–21 farmers’ movement | Wages and dignity; procurement and markets |
The shift in the axis of conflict
- Early unrest concerned the appropriation of the product — rent, share, revenue — pitting tenant and sharecropper against landlord, jotedar or deshmukh. Amit Bhaduri’s semi-feudalism describes the structure that generated it.
- Zamindari abolition removed the intermediary; the Green Revolution then created a surplus-producing class whose grievances lay outside the village, in input, credit and output markets. The new farmers’ movements were non-party, regional, anti-state and anti-urban, and involved farmers rather than peasants — market-involved as both sellers and buyers.
- The leading stratum thus moved from the poor peasant and sharecropper to the propertied cultivator, and the target from the landlord to the state.
- A separate, weaker current runs alongside: labourers’ struggles over wages, homestead land and dignity, from Kilvenmani in Tamil Nadu to the caste senas of Bihar. Lacking the resources of landowners, it stays fragmented — a limit Gail Omvedt stressed in reading caste and class together.
Conclusion
The shift reveals an agrarian transition that has stalled. The workforce share in agriculture, instead of falling, rose from 44.1 per cent in 2017–18 to 46.1 per cent in 2023–24, while over two-thirds of operational holdings are marginal, working under a quarter of the operated area. Agrarian unrest is therefore less a rebellion against feudal residues than a protest by those an incomplete capitalist transition has left on land that can no longer sustain them — which is why its loudest voice is the farmer’s and its unresolved grievance the labourer’s.