Write short note : Agrarian class structure in India. (2001)
There is no agreed map of Indian agrarian classes, and the disagreement is itself the subject. Rival schemes divide the same population differently because each chooses a different criterion — source of income, rights in land, labour hired or sold, or simply acreage. D. N. Dhanagare‘s caution holds: agrarian relations are so regionally diverse that no single scheme absorbs them all. What follows is the argument between the schemes.
The competing classifications
| Scheme | Criterion used | Classes yielded |
|---|---|---|
| Daniel Thorner, The Agrarian Prospect in India (1956) | Source of income, nature of right in land, extent of fieldwork done | Malik (rent), kisan (own cultivation), mazdoor (wages) |
| Utsa Patnaik (1976) | Labour-exploitation or E-ratio: labour hired in against labour hired out | Big landlord, rich, middle, small peasant, agricultural labourer |
| André Béteille, Studies in Agrarian Social Structure (1974) | Ownership, control and use of land | Owners (traditional, enterprising, absentee), controllers, users |
| Ramkrishna Mukherjee | Supervision and self-sufficiency | Landholders and supervisory farmers; self-sufficient peasantry; sharecroppers and labourers |
| Kathleen Gough, southern India | Relation to capital | Big, medium and petty bourgeoisie; semi-proletariat; proletariat |
| Census / NSSO | Size of operational holding | Large, medium, semi-medium, small, marginal |
A. R. Desai and the Marxist tradition read these divisions as class relations produced by the mode of production, insisting that the agrarian question is one of property and surplus, not of acreage. The modes-of-production debate of the 1970s turned precisely on this: Amit Bhaduri found semi-feudal relations in eastern India, Patnaik found capitalist development, and the classification one adopts follows from the answer one gives.
Why size alone misleads
The official categories are administratively convenient and sociologically thin. A hundred acres of arid, unirrigated land is worth less than ten in western Maharashtra; some landless households with non-farm skills are better placed than marginal owners tied to a failing plot. The Agriculture Census 2015-16 shows small and marginal holdings at 86.08 per cent of holdings but 46.94 per cent of operated area, and NABARD’s NAFIS 2021-22 records average landholding of agricultural households down to 0.74 hectares from 1.08 in 2016-17. The numbers describe fragmentation; they do not identify who exploits whom. Patnaik’s E-ratio does, which is why it remains the sharper Marxist instrument.
Béteille’s objection
Béteille held that class in agrarian India is not a tidy Marxian category. Caste supplies closure, corporate identity and ritual boundary that class lacks; family labour blurs the hirer–seller line; and concealed tenancy hides the actual relation of production from the record. In Caste, Class and Power (1965) he therefore kept caste, class and power analytically separate, arguing that in Sripuram they had moved from cumulative to dispersed alignment rather than collapsing into one another.
Conclusion
No scheme travels everywhere. Thorner’s triad remains the best teaching device and still organises fieldwork; Patnaik’s E-ratio best identifies exploitation; but for contemporary India, where title, decision and labour sit in different hands and most households draw income from several sources at once, Béteille’s three-fold criterion of ownership, control and use is the scheme that bends least under the evidence.