Do you agree that the agrarian class structure in India is changing? Justify your answer with illustrations. (2022)
Yes — but the change must be specified, not asserted. The baseline is Daniel Thorner‘s scheme in The Agrarian Prospect in India (1956), which sorted the agrarian population by income type, rights in land and fieldwork done into maliks (rent-receiving proprietors), kisans (working peasants) and mazdoors (labourers). Measured against that baseline, three of the tiers have altered beyond recognition, while the caste lining underneath them has not.
Directions in which the structure has moved
- The rentier malik has largely gone. Zamindari abolition removed the intermediary stratum; what survived did so by resuming land as “personal cultivation” after evicting tenants. Rent-receiving gave way to self-cultivation with hired labour.
- A middle-caste rich and middle peasantry rose in its place. The chief gainers of intermediary abolition and then of the Green Revolution were the upper tenants — Jats, Patidars, Kammas, Reddys, Vokkaligas — who became the dominant castes M. N. Srinivas described and whose agenda is price and subsidy, not redistribution.
- The peasantry has differentiated. Utsa Patnaik‘s labour-exploitation criterion (“Class Differentiation within the Peasantry”, 1976) separates households that are net hirers of labour from net sellers, a division invisible if one looks only at acreage.
- Ownership has separated from cultivation. Land increasingly rests with non-cultivating owners — salaried, urban or absentee — while the tilling is done under unrecorded oral lease, so the working cultivator holds no recorded right at all.
- The base has swollen rather than shrunk. Fragmentation has produced a mass of marginal cultivators who are really part-time wage workers. The PLFS shows the workforce share in agriculture rising from 44.1 per cent in 2017-18 to 46.1 per cent in 2023-24 — the reverse of the classical transition.
The categories have blurred
Thorner’s tiers assumed a household occupied one of them. The characteristic household today is pluriactive: it owns a little land, sells labour locally, and sends a member on circular migration to the city. The NSS Situation Assessment Survey (2019) confirms the inversion — agricultural households earned more from wages (₹4,063 a month) than from crop production (₹3,798). A cultivator by self-description is a labourer by income. Jan Breman‘s footloose labour names the resulting type: neither peasant nor proletarian.
New entrants and the counter-case
Contract farming, corporate buyers and value chains have shifted the point of appropriation from the landlord to the buyer. Yet change can be overstated. André Béteille held that agrarian class in India is never a clean Marxian category because caste, family labour and tenancy cut across it. The SECC 2011 finding that nearly 30 per cent of rural households are landless and live mainly on manual casual labour shows the floor of the structure intact. Surinder S. Jodhka‘s Haryana restudies find caste not dissolving but reorganising.
Conclusion
The structure is changing in composition rather than in principle: the personnel at the top are new, the tiers have multiplied at the bottom, and income sources have diversified — but the coincidence of landlessness with Dalit status persists. This is agrarian recomposition under capitalism, not the agrarian transition that either Marxist or modernisation theory predicted.