Write short note with a sociological perspective: Classes in agrarian society in India. (2013)
Agrarian classes in India are defined by relations to land — ownership, control, use and the labour expended on it — not by occupation. Yogendra Singh noted that wealth and property had long produced mobility across caste lines; what colonial rule added was a legally fixed, rent-extracting hierarchy.
Colonial origin
The zamindari settlement created three classes — zamindars as non-cultivating tax-gatherers, tenants as the real cultivators without secure tenure, and agricultural labourers close to bondage. The ryotwari settlement produced two, the ryot-landlord and the ryot-peasant. Both had a feudal character and survived until independence despite recurrent peasant unrest.
The classification traditions
| Scholar | Criterion | Classes |
|---|---|---|
| Daniel Thorner (Land and Labour in India, 1962) | Income from land, right in land, fieldwork performed | Malik, kisan, mazdoor |
| André Béteille (Caste, Class and Power, 1965) | Ownership, control, use | Owners (traditional, enterprising, absentee, cultural landlords), controllers (owner-cultivators, tenants, sharecroppers), users (labourers) |
| Utsa Patnaik | Labour-exploitation — ratio of hired to family labour | Big landlords, rich, middle, small peasants, agricultural labourers |
| Kathleen Gough | Relation to capital | Big, medium and petty bourgeoisie, semi-proletariat, pure proletariat |
| Ramkrishna Mukherjee | Supervision and self-sufficiency | Landholders and supervisory farmers; self-sufficient peasantry; sharecroppers and labourers |
| D. N. Dhanagare | Holding size plus labour use | Big landlords, big farmers, middle farmers, small and marginal farmers, landless labourers |
Dhanagare’s five-fold scheme is the most used, but he himself warned that the relations among classes and the social composition of those occupying them are too diverse for any single national scheme. Simple holding-size classifications fail for the same reason: a hundred arid acres are worth less than ten irrigated ones.
The structure today
Classes have recomposed rather than levelled. Béteille described the movement from cumulative to dispersed inequalities — caste, class and power no longer coincide in the same persons. Agriculture Census 2015-16 counts 146.45 million holdings averaging 1.08 hectares, with 86.08% small and marginal operating 46.94% of the area, so the middle and small cultivator, not the landlord, is now the modal figure. At the base, the landless labourer remains disproportionately Dalit and Adivasi.
Conclusion
Sociologically, the interest of agrarian classes lies in their overlap with caste: the dominant landowning castes hold the upper positions and the ex-untouchable castes the lowest, yet the relation between them is now a wage contract rather than a ritual obligation. Class has not replaced caste in the countryside; it has become the idiom through which caste inequality is now carried.