Write short note: Class-conflict in the agrarian society. (1986)
Karl Marx doubted that peasants could become a class for itself: in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) he likened smallholders to potatoes in a sack — similarly placed but not connected, and therefore represented rather than self-organising. Indian agrarian conflict is the test of that scepticism, and the answer it returns is that conflict is chronic, localised, and fought in a language Marx did not anticipate.
Which stratum actually fights
- Eric Wolf (Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, 1969) and Hamza Alavi (“Peasants and Revolution”, 1965) converge on the middle peasant thesis: the stratum with enough security to act and enough grievance to want to, not the destitute, initiates revolt.
- Barrington Moore Jr (Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 1966) held that caste and village organisation made massive peasant rebellion unlikely in India; his deeper point is that revolutionary potential depends on the prevailing alignment of classes, not on peasant temperament.
- Antonio Gramsci‘s hegemony explains the quiet: subordination is secured by consent to the dominant group’s worldview, not only by force.
- Ranajit Guha (Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, 1983) recovers the insurgent as a conscious political subject, against both colonial and nationalist historiography.
- Kathleen Gough counted some seventy-seven peasant revolts in colonial India and classified them as restorative, religious, social banditry, terrorist vengeance and mass insurrection — decisive evidence against the “docile peasant”.
The Indian record
D. N. Dhanagare defines a peasant movement as any collective attempt by a stratum of the peasantry to change an exploitative system or redress a grievance. Tebhaga (1946-47) fought jotedars for two-thirds of the crop and fractured along communal lines; Telangana (1946-51) abolished vetty forced labour and redistributed land across thousands of villages before being crushed; Naxalbari (1967) shifted from mass mobilisation to squad action and lost its base. Against these stand the labourers’ struggles: the Kilvenmani massacre of 25 December 1968 in Thanjavur, where forty-four Dalit agricultural workers’ family members were burnt alive during a wage strike, and the killings by the Ranvir Sena at Bathani Tola (1996) and Laxmanpur Bathe (1997) in Bihar, over minimum wages and land earmarked for the landless. Vinoba Bhave‘s Bhoodan offered the Gandhian alternative of voluntary donation and yielded little cultivable land.
Conflict in the idiom of caste
The antagonists are rarely “landlords” and “labourers” in the abstract: they are a dominant landowning caste and Dalit labourers. This is why NCRB recorded 57,789 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes in 2023, a figure that is partly a record of agrarian class conflict. The distinction to hold is between peasant movements led by propertied cultivators over prices and inputs — from the farmers’ agitations of the 1980s to the 2020–21 movement that forced repeal of the three farm laws — and labourers’ struggles over wages and dignity, which command no comparable national voice.
Conclusion
Sustained class polarisation has not occurred because caste fragments the labouring poor into mutually separate jatis, patronage and factional ties bind the poor vertically to the powerful, and electoral politics absorbs grievance before it hardens. Agrarian conflict in India is therefore endemic but encapsulated — repeated, local and rarely cumulative.