What, according to André Béteille, are the bases of agrarian class structure in India? Analyse. (2024)
André Béteille rejects holding size as the basis of agrarian class. He builds the structure on three relations to land — ownership, control and use — because in modern agriculture title, decision and labour come apart and lodge in different persons.
The three bases
| Basis | Class it defines | Sub-types |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership — title and right to rent | Owners/landlords | Traditional (land as status and emotive attachment), enterprising (profit-seeking, mechanising, reinvesting), absentee (urban-migrant, collects rent, indifferent to productivity), cultural (Brahmins entitled to land but barred from the plough, so they lease out) |
| Control — managerial decision over cultivation | Controllers | Owner-cultivators, tenants, sharecroppers — using family labour or hiring in |
| Use — actual expenditure of labour on the soil | Users | Agricultural labourers, and mixed positions such as user-owners |
The scheme grows out of Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village (1965). In Sripuram, Béteille found the three dimensions of stratification — caste as ritual status, class as economic position, power as political control — once cumulative, with Brahmins holding rank, land and authority together, and now dispersed: land had passed to non-Brahmins, adult franchise had moved power to the numerically strong, and high ritual status coexisted with modest local power. Caste, class and power must therefore be held analytically distinct — neither collapsed into class as the Marxists do nor dissolved into caste as the Indologists do.
Analysis
- What it captures that others do not. Daniel Thorner’s malik–kisan–mazdoor triad rests on income from land, right in land and fieldwork performed; Utsa Patnaik’s labour-exploitation criterion rests on the ratio of hired to family labour. Both largely assume the cultivator owns. Béteille’s separation of control from ownership names the positions between — the managing tenant, the absentee owner, the capitalised lessee. NSSO 2013 recorded 13.65% of farm households as tenants against the Agriculture Census figure of 2.39%: control is routinely exercised without recorded ownership.
- Where it falls short. The scheme is land-centric. It says little about the market, about credit, or about non-farm income — yet the NSS Situation Assessment Survey (2019) found the average agricultural household earning wages (₹4,063) in excess of net crop income (₹3,798). A class position settled off the field cannot be read from relations to land alone. Nor does the scheme weight gender, though female operational holders are 13.96% of the total.
Conclusion
Béteille’s three bases remain the most supple Indian scheme because they anticipate the separation of title from tillage. Supplemented by market position and non-farm earnings, they describe the agrarian structure better than holding-size classifications do.