Write short note : Agrarian social structure. (1995)
Agrarian social structure is the enduring arrangement of social relations built around the land — who holds rights in it, who works it, how labour is recruited and paid, how the resulting authority is exercised, and by what ideas the arrangement is made to seem right. It is therefore wider than agrarian class structure, which describes only one of its dimensions.
What the concept covers
- Rights in land: ownership, tenancy, sharecropping and landlessness, each a distinct bundle of entitlements rather than a degree of wealth.
- Organisation of production and labour: family labour, attached servants, casual wage labour, exchange labour.
- The caste–occupation link, and the jajmani order that tied artisan and service castes to landholding patron households by hereditary obligation and a customary grain share.
- The household as the unit of production, consumption and inheritance, within which a gendered division of labour operates.
- The structure of authority: the dominant caste, faction, village panchayat, and the patron’s command over dependants.
- The legitimating ideology — purity and pollution, the doctrine of karma, the language of patronage and service.
The classic form and its determinants
Three determinants shaped the structure India inherited. Colonial land settlement created its property base: zamindari produced a rentier landlord class, subinfeudation and rightless tenants; ryotwari made peasant proprietors on paper while high cash demand drove them to the moneylender; mahalwari preserved the co-sharing brotherhood and, with it, the dominant peasant castes. Caste supplied the labour hierarchy, and the joint household supplied the productive unit. William Wiser‘s The Hindu Jajmani System (1936) read the resulting exchange as reciprocal; Thomas Beidelman (1959) demolished that reading, showing the relation to rest on the landowner’s monopoly of land, with reciprocity serving as the ideology of a coercive arrangement.
How each element has altered
- Rights: intermediaries abolished; tenancy driven into unrecorded oral leasing; holdings fragmented by inheritance.
- Labour: the customary grain share replaced by cash wages; Jan Breman‘s South Gujarat work traces the hali bond decaying not into freedom but into contractor-mediated neo-bondage.
- Jajmani: dissolved by monetisation, market-supplied goods, migration and Dalit refusal of degrading hereditary service; only its ritual segment survives.
- Authority: M. N. Srinivas‘s dominant caste now rests on numbers and land rather than ritual rank, and is fragmented by party competition and panchayat reservation.
- Ideology: André Béteille describes the shift from a harmonic structure, whose own values legitimated its inequality, to a disharmonic one professing equality while practising hierarchy.
Dependence, however, has been reorganised rather than removed. NABARD’s NAFIS 2021-22 found 52 per cent of rural households indebted, up from 47.4 per cent in 2016-17 — the creditor is now more often a bank or a trader than the landlord, but the leverage remains.
Conclusion
Agrarian social structure is best understood as an institutional complex, not a ladder of classes. Its property base has been legislated away, its ritual sanction withdrawn and its patronage dissolved; yet because land, caste and credit still move together, the structure reproduces its inequalities through new institutions.