Agrarian Class Structure in India

From Caste to Class: The Historical Transition

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• Pre-British rural India was organized primarily around self-sufficient village communities in which agrarian relations were governed by the norms of the jajmani system — a network of hereditary economic, social, and ritual ties between landowning patron castes and serving castes, who exchanged specialized services for payment in cash and kind. Because caste, occupation, and land control were fused together in this system, a distinct “class” structure separate from caste is difficult to identify for this period.
  • This does not mean pre-modern India was undifferentiated or static — the “static India” hypothesis, associated with some Western scholarship, has been directly criticized by P.C. Joshi, Yogendra Singh, B.S. Cohn, and Romila Thapar. Priests, feudal chiefs, merchants, artisans, peasants, and labourers all existed as distinct classes even in early India, and merchants in particular did not occupy a uniformly low position — their caste status did not always align with, or constrain, their economic class status.
  • Yogendra Singh notes that the relative position of many castes altered over time, with wealth and property playing a significant independent role in status mobility, especially among merchant communities. From roughly 1000 CE onward, and continuing through the Mughal period, cities saw the growth of trader and artisan classes, while villages retained a parallel class structure of cultivators — meaning a stable, if regionally variable, merchant and banking class coexisted with agrarian classes well before colonial rule.
• Colonial rule fundamentally disrupted this arrangement. British trade and commercial policy undermined artisan classes, driving many into rural migration; favoured treatment of port towns, discriminatory taxation, and new land-settlement policies together eroded the traditional economic structure. At the same time, colonial land-settlement policy actively created the foundations for a new feudal agrarian class structure, laying the institutional basis for the zamindari and ryotwari systems discussed below.
• Even though land in most parts of India continued to be owned by traditionally cultivating caste groups, their relationship with landless menials gradually stopped being regulated by caste norms alone — landless members of lower castes increasingly worked simply as agricultural labourers for cultivating farmers, a shift often summarized as “caste giving way to class” in the countryside, even as caste’s broader social significance persisted.

Colonial-Era Class Formation: Zamindari and Ryotwari Systems

• The agrarian system that crystallized in rural India under British rule rested on one of two land-settlement frameworks, each producing its own class configuration.
  • The zamindari system produced three main agrarian classes: zamindars (non-cultivating owners and tax-gatherers), tenants (the actual cultivators, frequently without secure tenure), and agricultural labourers (who often held the effective status of bonded labour).
  • The ryotwari system produced a simpler two-class structure: ryot landlords and ryot-peasants.
• Across both systems, the resulting agrarian class structure had a broadly feudal character, sustained by state power, and this highly exploitative arrangement persisted right up to independence despite recurrent peasant unrest and organized peasant movements.

Post-Independence Transformation: Trends and Contradictions

• Independence brought comprehensive land reforms and rural development programmes aimed at dismantling this feudal structure — most visibly through the abolition of the zamindari system, which stripped zamindars of their intermediary powers and, in principle, gave rise to an agrarian class structure independent of caste hierarchy.
• Yogendra Singh identified several persistent trends in the post-independence agrarian class structure that complicate any simple story of reform-driven equalization.
  • A wide and persistent gap exists between the land-reform ideology articulated during and after the freedom struggle and the actual measures implemented — a gap Singh attributes to the class character of the political and administrative elite carrying out the reforms.
  • The economic prosperity of the rich peasantry has increased even as the economic condition of small peasants has deteriorated, producing growing rather than shrinking inequality between the top and bottom of the agrarian class hierarchy.
  • A capitalist-style lease-labour or wage-labour system has emerged within agriculture itself, and agricultural workers specifically have not shared proportionately in the benefits of land reform.
  • The dominant sociological process underway in the villages combines the embourgeoisement of some strata (upward movement into a propertied, market-oriented position) with the proletarianization of many others (downward movement into wage dependency) — a dual movement rather than a single uniform trend.
• P.C. Joshi, examining the same period, pointed to two related trends: the decline of older feudalistic tenancy arrangements and their replacement by more, not less, exploitative lease arrangements, and the rise of a distinctly commercially oriented landlord class investing in agriculture as a business rather than a status marker.
• Andre Beteille captured this shift through the language of “cumulative” giving way to “dispersed” inequalities — meaning that where economic, ritual, and political power once concentrated in the same hands (cumulative inequality), post-reform agrarian society increasingly shows these forms of advantage distributed across different, only partially overlapping groups (dispersed inequality). Even so, the underlying agrarian social structure remains marked by considerable regional diversity, and D.N. Dhanagare observed that the relationship among classes and the social composition of specific class positions vis-à-vis land control are too diverse and complex to force into any single general scheme.

Competing Frameworks for Classifying the Agrarian Population

• Despite this diversity, sociologists and economists have repeatedly attempted to build workable general classifications of India’s agrarian population, and the differences between these frameworks reveal genuinely different theoretical starting points.
• Andre Beteille’s ownership-control-use model. Beteille classifies the agrarian population along three criteria — ownership, control, and use of land — yielding owners, controllers, and users, each further sub-divided.
  • Owners/landlords include traditional landlords (who treat land as a symbol of status and power, prioritizing emotive attachment over productivity calculations), enterprising landlords (profit-oriented, innovation-adopting, often mechanized), absentee landlords (who have migrated to cities but retain land ownership, visiting only to collect rent, taking no interest in productivity or land condition), and cultural landlords (who hold land through customary obligation rather than active cultivation — Brahmins, for instance, traditionally barred from ploughing but granted land for subsistence, who lease it out).
  • Controllers include owner-cum-controllers, sharecroppers, and tenants, who deploy either their own or hired labour.
  • Users include user-controllers, pure users, and user-owners — agricultural labourers being the paradigmatic case, using land purely to meet subsistence needs without ownership claims.
• Daniel Thorner’s malik-kisan-mazdur model. Based on extensive fieldwork (roughly 250 villages surveyed between 1972 and 1976, published as Agrarian Prospects in India), Thorner classified the agrarian population using three economic criteria: the source of income from land (rent, fruits of own cultivation, or wages), the nature of rights held in land (proprietary, tenancy, sharecropping, or none), and the extent of actual fieldwork performed.
  • Maliks derive income primarily from property rights in soil, collecting rent from tenants and sharecroppers while keeping wages low; they perform little or no labour themselves.
  • Kisans, or working peasants, own small plots and work them mainly with family labour, occasionally supplementing with hired labour.
  • Mazdoors own no land and earn their livelihood entirely through wage labour, tenancy, or sharecropping for others.
  • This model correlates loosely with caste position — maliks are typically upper-caste, kisans middle-caste, and mazdoors drawn disproportionately from lower castes, tribes, and Muslims — a correlation visible in patterns of housing, clothing, and lifestyle, and one that underlines how caste and class continue to reinforce each other in practice even as they have formally separated. Thorner’s scheme has proved influential enough that later capitalist development in agriculture is often narrated against it: maliks increasingly becoming enterprising farmers, and many tenants and sharecroppers shifting into pure wage labour, while — contrary to some Marxist predictions of sharpening polarization — the ranks of middle-level cultivators have actually swelled.
• Class-from-labour and class-from-capital models. Utsa Patnaik’s study of Haryana identified five classes viewed from the standpoint of labour deployment — big landlords (living on hired labour), rich peasants (occasional family labour alongside hired labour), middle peasants (reliant on family labour), small peasants (who sell their own labour after finishing domestic cultivation), and agricultural labourers (living entirely on wages) — a framework subsequently supported by Ashok Rudra, Pranab Bardhan, and Arvind Narain Das in studies of Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and Karnataka. Kathleen Gough’s Tamil Nadu study instead classified from the standpoint of capital, identifying big bourgeoisie, medium bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, semi-proletariat, and pure proletariat. Kotovsky used a simpler four-part scheme of landowners, rich peasants, landless peasantry, and agricultural labourers.
• Landholding-size approaches, and their limits. Some economists classify by holding size directly — big landholders (10+ hectares), small landholders (2–10 hectares), and marginal landholders (under 2 hectares), alongside agricultural labourers. The NSSO, similarly, has used 50 acres and above as an “upper class” threshold and 10–49 acres as “lower class.” This purely quantitative approach has an acknowledged weakness: it ignores land quality and irrigation access, so that a hundred acres of arid, unirrigated land can leave a household worse off than ten irrigated acres in western Maharashtra or Punjab — in many regions, landless labourers with steady wage employment are in fact better off than marginal landowners. Landholding size alone, in other words, cannot fully explain agrarian class position.
• Dhanagare’s five-class scheme. The most widely used classification among students of Indian agrarian change is D.N. Dhanagare’s five-part division: big landlords (some holding over a hundred acres, increasingly organizing farms along industrial lines with managers and wage labour, though their numbers are declining and now concentrated in backward regions), big farmers (15–50 acres, personally supervising mechanized, input-intensive farms, generally drawn from locally dominant castes with real influence over village and state-level power structures), middle farmers (5–15 acres, socially similar to big farmers but relying mainly on family labour supplemented by hired labour at peak season, and now the largest single segment among cultivators), small and marginal farmers (under five acres, farming almost entirely with family labour, among the most heavily indebted rural populations, and a growing share of the countryside as landholdings continue to fragment across generations), and landless labourers (a majority drawn from Dalit caste groups, ranging from roughly 20–30% of the rural workforce in states like Punjab and Haryana to as high as 50% in states like Andhra Pradesh, among the poorest and most insecure of all rural Indians, historically bound into informal bondage through debt even after the formal end of bonded labour).
• Ram Krishna Mukherjee’s simpler three-class scheme — landholders and supervisory farmers, self-sufficient peasantry, and sharecroppers/agricultural labourers — is a further, less granular alternative within the same broad tradition.

Liberal, Marxist, and Neo-Marxist Readings of Agrarian Class

• Three broad theoretical schools have shaped how Indian sociology has analysed agrarian class, each foregrounding a different axis.
  • The liberal view emphasizes the nature and form of landholding (big, medium, minor, marginal, small), the right held over the produce (owner, tenant, or sharecropper — themselves divided into bonded, contractual, and free arrangements — versus non-owning labourers), and the kind of association a person has with agricultural land. Kishan Lal Sharma, working within this tradition, proposed upper (50+ acres), middle (15–49 acres), and lower (under 15 acres) categories; G.D. Berreman used dryland-versus-irrigated distinctions for similar classification purposes.
  • The Marxist view, represented by Thorner, Gough, and Patnaik among others, insists that agrarian class must be studied in relation to land, labour, production, and returns (profit and use-profit) as a connected set of economic relations — and, as noted above, treats the resulting class positions as substantially correlated with caste, since production for profit, income, and mere livelihood map fairly closely onto upper, middle, and lower caste status respectively. P.C. Joshi, writing from a related standpoint, observed that land in contemporary India has ceased to be merely a means of production and has become a status symbol in its own right.
  • The neo-Marxist view foregrounds the jajmani system as itself a class-relevant institution, embedded at the family level and enforced through caste panchayats (Mandelbaum). The jajmani tie was durable, exclusive, hereditary on both sides, and extended well beyond simple exchange of grain for service into ritual obligations around marriage, birth, and death — yet it simultaneously carried real dominance, exploitation, and conflict (Beidelman; Lewis and Barnouw), with powerful patrons able to coerce and exploit dependent service-caste clients. Bailey and Hardiman go further, arguing the jajmani system was fundamentally exploitative, using caste hierarchy specifically to legitimize control over the means of production. Over time, the system has weakened under pressure from market forces, urban contact, migration, and rising education and political awareness among service castes.
• Changes in village power and leadership since independence have been real but adaptive rather than transformative. M.S.A. Rao identified three distinct patterns of urban impact on villages: villages whose emigrants remit urban earnings back home (raising local social prestige and investment even without physical proximity to a city); villages near industrial towns that lose land to acquisition while absorbing an influx of immigrant workers; and villages on the fringe of expanding metropolitan areas that lose land to urban growth altogether, with displaced villagers either investing compensation elsewhere or migrating to urban employment.
  • Singh (1986) found that upper castes today exercise power less through traditional legitimacy and more through manipulation and co-optation of lower-caste groups — the underlying power structure has been adapted rather than dismantled. B.S. Cohn’s comparative study of twelve villages found a close fit between landownership and the degree of group domination, even as younger, literate individuals have increasingly begun assuming leadership roles.

Contemporary Trends: Fragmentation, Distress, and Feminization

• Landholding fragmentation has accelerated sharply in recent years: NABARD survey data shows the average landholding size falling from 1.08 hectares in 2016–17 to just 0.74 hectares in 2021–22 — a reduction of roughly 31% in five years. Small and marginal holdings (under 2 hectares) now account for over 86% of all operational holdings nationally, though they cover under half of total operated area, meaning Dhanagare’s “small and marginal farmer” category has become numerically dominant even as its members individually control less and less land.
• The 2020–21 and 2024 farmers’ protests — centred on Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh, and among the largest sustained protest mobilizations in recent Indian history — illustrate the continuing political salience of agrarian class conflict. The three farm laws of September 2020 (intended to deregulate agricultural trade and expand contract farming) were repealed in November 2021 after sustained resistance; a renewed 2024 protest wave has centred specifically on a legal guarantee for Minimum Support Price (MSP) across 23 crops and comprehensive farm-loan waivers — demands that remain unmet and that map closely onto the interests of the middle and rich-peasant categories in the classifications above, for whom MSP-linked crops are the primary source of marketable surplus.
• The agrarian workforce is also undergoing a marked feminization: PLFS 2023–24 data shows women now constitute over 42% of the national agricultural workforce, with rural female labour-force participation in agriculture rising sharply (from 41.5% to 47.6% between 2022–23 and 2023–24 alone), driven substantially by male out-migration to non-farm work. This shift has not been matched by land rights — only around 12–13% of operational landholdings are owned by women — meaning a growing share of actual cultivation work is performed by women who remain structurally classified, in most of the frameworks above, as unpaid family labour rather than as landholders or controllers in their own right.