Agrarian class structure refers to the ordering of rural society by groups defined through their relation to land and to labour — who owns land, who cultivates it, who hires labour and who is compelled to sell it. Unlike caste, which is a status hierarchy sanctioned by ritual, agrarian classes are economic positions in a system of production, though in India the two orders overlap so persistently that neither can be studied alone.

The decisive criteria are ownership or control of land, participation in manual cultivation, and the direction of labour flows. A household that owns land but never touches the plough occupies a different class position from one that works the same acreage with family labour, and both differ from a household that owns nothing and survives on wages. Andre Beteille insisted that class in the countryside be located in these relations rather than inferred from income or acreage alone.

Thorner's three-fold scheme

Daniel Thorner (1956) gave Indian sociology its most durable classification, built from indigenous categories:

  • Malik — proprietors whose income derives from property rights in soil, who lease out land or have it cultivated by others and who do not work it themselves. Thorner distinguished big absentee landlords from rich working proprietors.
  • Kisan — working peasants who cultivate their own or rented land largely with family labour, ranging from secure small owners to precarious tenants.
  • Mazdoor — those who earn their livelihood chiefly by working on others' land, whether landless labourers, sharecroppers reduced to wage dependence or attached workers.

The finer gradation

Later scholarship refined this into a five-fold scheme now standard in Indian agrarian sociology: the landlord who lives on rent; the rich peasant who owns substantial land, hires wage labour and produces primarily for the market; the middle peasant who is broadly self-sufficient, neither hiring much labour nor selling much of his own; the poor peasant whose holding is too small to sustain the household so that he must also work for wages — a semi-proletarian position — and the landless labourer who owns no land at all. The Marxist tradition, represented by A. R. Desai, read this hierarchy as the rural face of colonial and post-colonial exploitation, formed when British revenue settlements created a parasitic rentier class over the actual cultivators.

The caste-class overlap

In rural India, class positions are historically caste-loaded. Dominant peasant castes — Jats, Patidars, Kammas, Reddys, Marathas, Vokkaligas and others — became the principal proprietor class, while Dalit communities are heavily concentrated among the landless and Adivasi communities among marginal cultivators in the uplands. The overlap is strong but not identity: Beteille's Sripuram study showed caste, class and power as distinct dimensions that had begun to pull apart, so that a Brahmin could be poor and a middle-caste cultivator locally powerful. This partial decoupling — greater class differentiation within castes alongside continuing caste concentration between classes — is the key analytical point.

Zamindari, abolition and land reform

The colonial state created three broad tenures — zamindari, ryotwari and mahalwari — of which the Permanent Settlement in eastern India produced the most entrenched intermediary class. Post-independence reform proceeded in four strands: abolition of intermediaries, tenancy regulation, ceilings on holdings and consolidation. Intermediary abolition was the one substantial success, transferring superior rights to a broad layer of former occupancy tenants. Ceilings and tenancy reform largely failed, defeated by benami transfers, resumption for personal cultivation, voluntary surrender by frightened tenants and the classification of unrecorded sharecroppers as trespassers. Operation Barga in West Bengal, which registered sharecroppers rather than redistributing land, remains the notable exception.

Market forces and the mode-of-production debate

The green revolution, deepening commercialisation and post-1991 liberalisation transformed rather than levelled the hierarchy. Tenants were evicted so owners could cultivate directly with hired labour; wage labour expanded; service tenancies gave way to cash rents and reverse tenancy, in which the rich lease in land from the poor. The mode-of-production debate of the 1970s asked what this amounted to. Amit Bhaduri argued that debt-tied sharecropping under semi-feudalism blocked productive investment; Utsa Patnaik and others found accumulation, wage labour and market dependence sufficient to speak of emergent agrarian capitalism; Alice Thorner surveyed the whole controversy. The debate's lasting contribution was to make class relations, not technology or output, the centre of agrarian analysis.

New rural elites

The clearest outcome has been consolidation of a middle-peasant proprietor class — market-oriented, politically organised, drawn from dominant intermediate castes — which converted agricultural surplus into education, contracts, transport, trade and legislative influence. These are the new rural elites behind farmers' movements over prices, tariffs and procurement, and behind the shift in rural politics from deference to bargaining. At the other pole, poor peasants have been pushed into casual and circular migration, so the rural class structure now extends well beyond agriculture itself.

For the UPSC answer

Anchor the answer in Thorner's malik-kisan-mazdoor scheme, then move to the five-fold gradation to show command over the finer categories. Use Beteille to argue that caste and class overlap without coinciding, and give the concrete mechanisms by which ceiling and tenancy laws failed rather than simply calling them unsuccessful. Frame change through the mode-of-production debate, naming Bhaduri and Patnaik as the two poles. Conclude with the rise of the middle-peasant proprietor and the depeasantisation of the poor — a structure that is being differentiated, not equalised.

References & further reading

  1. Thorner, D. (1956). The Agrarian Prospect in India. Delhi: University Press.
  2. Beteille, A. (1974). Studies in Agrarian Social Structure. Oxford University Press.
  3. Desai, A. R. (1948). Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
  4. Bhaduri, A. (1973). A Study in Agricultural Backwardness under Semi-Feudalism. Economic Journal, 83(329).
  5. Patnaik, U. (ed.) (1990). Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The Mode of Production Debate in India. Oxford University Press.
  6. Thorner, A. (1982). Semi-Feudalism or Capitalism? Contemporary Debate on Classes and Modes of Production in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 17(49-51).