Write short note : Peasant Society. (1999)
The concept of peasant society was built for pre-industrial Europe and Latin America and then imported into Indian sociology. The productive question for India is not what a peasant is in the abstract, but whether India still has a peasantry — and if so, what holds it together when agriculture no longer sustains it.
The Indian peasantry is caste-embedded
The Western concept carries class and the state but not caste. In India, position in the agrarian order is simultaneously a position in a ritual order: who may own land, who ploughs, who is confined to wage labour and who is barred from touching produce have been caste questions. Daniel Thorner‘s categories in The Agrarian Prospect in India (1956) — maliks who draw income from property rights, kisans who work their own land, and mazdoors who live by wage labour — map loosely but persistently onto upper, middle and Dalit castes. Surinder S. Jodhka (“Agrarian Studies and the Caste Conundrum”, Agrarian South, 2022) argues that agrarian studies has consistently underplayed this materiality of caste.
Differentiation or reproduction?
- Utsa Patnaik holds that the peasantry is differentiating into capitalist farmers who accumulate by hiring labour and semi-proletarians who hire themselves out, and proposed the labour-exploitation (E) ratio to measure it rather than relying on acreage or market sale.
- Against this, others find the peasantry reproduced as petty producers: holdings fragment across generations, tenancy goes informal and unrecorded, and households survive by combining a shrinking farm with wages, migration and remittances rather than by becoming either capitalists or proletarians.
- Jan Breman‘s Footloose Labour (1996) names the resulting type: circulating, casualised, contractor-recruited workers who are neither peasant nor proletarian, and whose mobility is a condition of their exploitation, not an escape from it. The hali bond he studied in south Gujarat decayed into neo-bondage, contractual and without the patron’s reciprocal obligations.
Peasant identity outliving peasant agriculture
Landowning households increasingly diversify — one member manages the land, another a small-town business, a third a salaried job — yet continue to describe themselves as farmers. Jodhka’s Haryana restudies show village India integrated into urban and liberalised economies while caste becomes, if anything, more salient in occupation. Identity therefore outlives the occupation that produced it, which is why “farmer” in contemporary agitation usually means the propertied middle peasantry of surplus-producing regions, not the landless labourer who works their fields. The 2020–21 farmers’ movement that forced repeal of the farm laws in November 2021 was led overwhelmingly by such cultivators.
The de-peasantisation debate
Classical theory expected peasants to disappear into industry. India has not obliged: PLFS 2023-24 records 46.1% of the workforce still in agriculture, above the pre-pandemic 42.5%, because industry is not absorbing labour at scale and the village remains the shock absorber of last resort. What is disappearing is not the peasant but the viability of peasant agriculture.
Conclusion
Indian peasant society today is best read as a partially de-peasantised formation: fewer people can live by cultivation, yet more people depend on it; land has become more a source of status, security and identity than of income. The sociological puzzle is a peasantry that persists demographically and politically while dissolving economically.