Is Indian peasant society a non-modern society? Evaluate with suitable examples in support of your answer. (2006)
The question assumes that “modern” and “non-modern” are exhaustive alternatives. Testing Indian evidence against the classical criteria of modernity shows that the Indian peasantry satisfies neither description, and that the dichotomy itself is the weakest part of the question.
What “non-modern” would mean
Robert Redfield‘s folk–urban continuum places the peasant between the isolated folk community and the city, as a part society with a part culture — a formulation A. L. Kroeber had used earlier. Ferdinand Tönnies‘s Gemeinschaft (1887) describes relations that are personal, ascriptive and total; Max Weber calls the corresponding legitimation traditional authority; Talcott Parsons‘s pattern variables make the non-modern pole ascription, particularism, diffuseness and affectivity.
The case for calling it non-modern
- Production is still substantially for subsistence, on family labour, with the household as the unit of production and consumption.
- The division of labour remains ascriptive: caste governs who may plough, who may not own land, who handles carcasses. Residues of jajmani survive in life-cycle ritual.
- Idiom remains ritual and often fatalistic; disputes are still settled by caste elders and khap-type bodies rather than courts.
- National Crime Records Bureau data record 57,789 cases of crime against Scheduled Castes in 2023, most of them rural — evidence that ascriptive coercion has not lapsed.
The case against
- Indian agriculture has been commercialised since the colonial revenue settlements; cotton, sugarcane, soya and basmati are grown for national and world markets.
- Legal-rational institutions are pervasive: land records, cooperative and commercial banks, crop insurance, civil courts, and statutory panchayats under the 73rd Amendment (1992), with over 14.5 lakh elected women representatives, about 46% of all panchayat representatives (2026).
- Universal franchise has made the peasant a political actor rather than a subject; the Election Commission of India has repeatedly flagged “urban apathy” and convened municipal officials before the 2024 general election precisely because city turnout lags the countryside.
- The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India counted 405.33 million rural internet subscribers by September 2024; digital payment, weather and price information now pass through the peasant’s own handset.
- Circular migration ties every village to construction and service labour markets, and organised farmer politics — the 2020–21 movement that secured repeal of the three farm laws in November 2021 — displays modern repertoires of mobilisation.
Rejecting the dichotomy
M. N. Srinivas showed through Sanskritisation and Westernisation that tradition is itself a vehicle of change. Yogendra Singh, in Modernization of Indian Tradition (1973), argued that modernisation in India proceeds through traditional structures rather than against them. Milton Singer found industrial entrepreneurship in Madras carried by orthodox Brahmin families; S. C. Dube insisted on alternative paths of development; Dipankar Gupta, in Mistaken Modernity (2000), warns that adopting the consumption markers of the West without the dignity of labour or substantive equality is not modernity at all.
Conclusion
Indian peasant society is not non-modern; nor is it modern in the Western sense. It is a structurally distinctive formation in which modern institutions — markets, franchise, schools, banks, courts — are operated through traditional social capital of caste, kin and patronage. The interesting sociological question is not where it sits on a continuum, but why caste has proved so serviceable a vehicle for modern institutions.