Write short note: Market economy and Agrarian social structure. (1990)
Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation, 1944) argued that land, labour and money are fictitious commodities: treating them as things produced for sale disembeds the economy from society and forces social structure to reorganise around price. Indian agrarian history is a long illustration. Each extension of the market — colonial commercialisation, the Green Revolution, liberalisation — has redefined who owns, who works, who commands and on what terms.
Colonial commercialisation
The Permanent Settlement of 1793 made land saleable, mortgageable and attachable. Ramkrishna Mukherjee called this a social revolution: a rentier proprietorship appeared, much of it traders and merchants with no interest in cultivation. Revenue demanded in cash, forced cash crops — indigo, cotton, opium, jute — and harvest-time distress sales drove peasants to the moneylender, and debt transferred land to non-cultivating creditors. Commercialisation here produced not capitalist farming but indebtedness and dispossession, the ground of the Deccan Riots (1875) and later peasant movements.
The Green Revolution: land as capital, labour as wage labour
From the mid-1960s, purchased inputs — seed, fertiliser, tubewell, tractor — made cultivation capital-intensive. Patrons became employers, tenants became labourers, and payment in a customary share of the harvest gave way to cash wages. M. N. Srinivas observed that market forces, monetisation and mobility dissolved jajmani, the hereditary service order William Wiser documented in The Hindu Jajmani System (1936). Jan Breman, in Patronage and Exploitation (1974), traced the decay of the hali bond between Anavil Brahmin masters and Dubla labourers in south Gujarat and showed that its end produced not freedom but neo-bondage — advances and debt tying workers to contractors, harsher because contractual and stripped of the patron’s obligations.
After 1991
Contract farming, corporate retail and agri-value chains shifted appropriation from the landlord to the buyer and the input seller. Inequality widened between irrigated and rainfed regions and between crops. Land itself became a speculative asset, tenancy went oral and unrecorded — the NSSO’s 70th round (2012–13) put leased-in area at 11.1 per cent against under 1 per cent in the Agriculture Census — and labour became what Breman’s Footloose Labour (1996) names: circulating, casualised, outside enumeration and protection. Market risk borne by households with no insurance shows in the National Crime Records Bureau’s count of 11,290 suicides in the farming sector in 2022, of which 6,083 were agricultural labourers.
The theoretical debate
Karl Marx expected capital’s penetration to polarise the countryside into capitalist farmers and proletarians. India’s modes of production debate tested this: Amit Bhaduri (1973) argued semi-feudalism, where the landlord-cum-moneylender profits from the tenant’s poverty and resists innovation; Utsa Patnaik held capitalist development was underway and must be judged by production relations, not market sale; Ashok Rudra found Punjab’s big farmers failing the capitalist test. Kathleen Gough concluded that modes coexist regionally — the sound verdict.
Conclusion
The market has not abolished caste or hierarchy; it has changed their idiom, from customary obligation to contract, and their currency, from grain to cash. Its clearest political expression is that agrarian conflict has moved from tenancy to prices: the farmers’ movements of the 1980s and the 2020–21 mobilisation that forced repeal of the three farm laws in November 2021 were market-facing struggles of propertied cultivators, not of the landless.