Critically examine D.N. Dhanagare’s views on agrarian movements in India. (2011)
D. N. Dhanagare’s Peasant Movements in India, 1920–1950 (1983) is the most rigorous class-analytical account of Indian agrarian struggle. Against nationalist celebration and the assumption of peasant passivity alike, he asked one empirical question of every movement: which agrarian stratum actually rebelled, and who led it?
His position
- Definition. Any collective attempt by strata of the peasantry to change a system they experience as exploitative, or to seek redress for particular grievances, without necessarily aiming to overthrow it — violent or non-violent, organised or spontaneous.
- Method. Comparative case analysis — Moplah, the Uttar Pradesh Kisan Sabha agitations, Bardoli, Tebhaga, Telangana — each dissected by the class composition of base and leadership, on his fivefold scheme running from big landlords through middle farmers to landless labourers.
- Core finding. The poorest rarely initiate. Leadership came from richer cultivating strata or from outside the peasantry, and movements turned on whether a durable caste–class alignment could be built.
- Against Barrington Moore Jr. Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) claimed India lacked widespread peasant revolt. Dhanagare, with A. R. Desai and Kathleen Gough — who counted 77 revolts in two centuries — showed it rests on what historians overlooked.
- Against the middle-peasant thesis. Hamza Alavi and Eric Wolf (Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, 1969) held that the tactically mobile middle peasant initiates revolt, the poor peasant being too dependent to move. Dhanagare rejected this: the Indian middle peasant depended on landlord or moneylender for credit, was heterogeneous and historically transient, and in Bengal petty jotedars in the Kisan Sabha themselves employed bargadars, so tebhaga threatened them and they drifted away.
- On the new farmers’ movements. Their talk of the environment and of the poor peasant is a discursive device by which rich peasants secure hegemony over a movement that is theirs.
Critical evaluation
- Strengths. Sustained regional comparison, attention to leadership rather than slogans, and a corrective to Moore now taken as standard.
- Subaltern critique. Ranajit Guha (Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, 1983) rejects the framing itself: reading insurgency through class location misses the peasant’s own consciousness — negation, solidarity, territoriality — and makes rebellion a reflex of elite politics.
- Contrary evidence. David Hardiman’s work on Kheda found middle peasants supplying the bulk of support, so the blanket rejection of the middle-peasant thesis overreaches. On the new movements, Gail Omvedt (Reinventing Revolution, 1993) argues they reach well beyond rich peasants into poorer cultivators and small traders.
- Scope and silences. The core study covers only 1920–1950 and a handful of movements; caste is subordinated to class, leaving Dalit landless labour under-theorised. James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (1985) adds that a focus on open movements misses the everyday resistance that is the poor peasant’s weapon.
Conclusion
Dhanagare remains the necessary starting point because he made the class question empirical, and the 2020–21 farmers’ movement — led by surplus growers, silent on the agricultural labourer, who accounted for 6,096 of the 10,786 farm-sector suicides NCRB recorded in 2023 — confirms him. What his framework still needs is what Guha and Scott supply: consciousness, and the quieter resistance class analysis cannot see.