Breaking down the question
The question asks about classes in agrarian society in India — a broad, open prompt on rural class structure. Unlike an attributional question it does not name a single theorist, so the candidate must organise the answer around the major schemes that classify agrarian classes and the criteria that underlie them.
At 10 marks the answer should present a clear classification, ground it in a defensible criterion — the relationship to land — and reflect on how agrarian class intersects with caste. Breadth must be balanced against the tight word limit, so a well-chosen framework beats an exhaustive list.
For fuller treatment, see the note on agrarian class structure.
How to approach it
Open by stating that agrarian classes in India are best understood through people's relationship to land — its ownership, control and use. This gives the answer a single organising principle.
Then present the principal classifications: Daniel Thorner's threefold scheme of maliks, kisans and mazdoors, and André Béteille's bases of ownership, control and use. Follow with the class-caste intersection and the effects of land reform and the market. Close with a brief evaluative note.
Model answer
Agrarian classes in India are most usefully defined by the relationship of groups to land — how they own it, control its cultivation and use their labour upon it. This relational criterion, rather than ritual status alone, allows the rural population to be sorted into distinct classes with different interests and life chances.
The classic classification is Daniel Thorner's, which divides the agrarian population into three broad classes on the basis of income from and rights in land, and the labour they perform. The maliks are proprietors whose income derives chiefly from property rights in the soil; they include large absentee landlords and substantial owners who do not themselves toil. The kisans are working peasants — small owners and tenants who cultivate the land largely with family labour. The mazdoors are the landless or near-landless agricultural labourers who earn their living by working on the land of others. This maliks–kisans–mazdoors scheme captures the essential hierarchy of the countryside.
André Béteille refined the analysis by identifying three bases of agrarian class — the ownership, control and use of land. Ownership concerns proprietary rights; control concerns the management and direction of cultivation, which tenants and supervisory cultivators may exercise without owning; and use concerns the actual labour of tilling. These may combine in one person or be dispersed across several, producing a layered structure of landowners, cultivating tenants and labourers.
A distinctive feature of the Indian case is the overlap of class and caste. In the traditional order the upper castes tended to own land and the lower castes to labour, so that class and caste broadly coincided. But Béteille and others have shown that the correspondence is loosening: land reforms, the spread of the market, tenancy legislation and mobility allow some lower-caste households to acquire land and some upper-caste households to decline, so that agrarian class and ritual rank increasingly diverge.
Post-independence changes — the abolition of intermediaries, the Green Revolution and the rise of a prosperous middle peasantry — have further differentiated the countryside, producing new tensions between rich farmers, small cultivators and landless workers. The strength of the land-based classifications is that they capture this material differentiation and its dynamism; their limitation is that ownership, control and use can be hard to disentangle in practice, and regional variation is considerable.
Examiner's perspective
At 10 marks the examiner rewards a clear organising principle. The strongest scripts frame agrarian classes around the relationship to land and deploy Thorner's maliks–kisans–mazdoors scheme accurately, ideally supplementing it with Béteille's ownership–control–use triad.
Higher marks come from the class-caste discussion and from noting post-independence change — land reform and the Green Revolution reshaping rural classes. A short evaluative line on the framework's limits and regional variation completes a balanced answer.