Breaking down the question

The question is deceptively open. It names no directive verb — no examine, discuss or critically evaluate — but simply asks the candidate to account for the changes that the agrarian social structure in India is undergoing. That very openness is the trap: a weak script will drift into a narration of agricultural policy, while a strong one recognises that the examiner wants a sociological analysis of how rural classes, their relations to land and labour, and the wider fabric of caste and power are being reconstituted.

Two terms anchor the answer. Agrarian social structure is the organised arrangement of rural groups defined by their relation to land and labour — landlords, rich, middle and poor peasants, tenants, sharecroppers and landless labourers — together with the caste order that overlays it. Change here is continuous and present-tense: the structure is undergoing transformation rather than having been transformed once and for all.

The analytical task is therefore twofold. First, to identify the forces driving change — land reform, the green revolution, commercialisation, mechanisation and liberalisation. Second, to weigh transformation against persistence, for the deepest inequalities of land and caste have proved remarkably durable. The best answers refuse a simple story of modernisation and show that the structure is being reshaped far more than it is being equalised.

The note on the agrarian class structure supplies the descriptive base.

How to approach it

Build the answer as a movement from baseline, through the forces of change, to a critical assessment of what has and has not shifted.

  • Establish the classic post-independence structure using Daniel Thorner's categories of malik, kisan and mazdoor and the caste–land correspondence.
  • Trace each modern force — land reform, green revolution, commercialisation, mechanisation, liberalisation — and its specific effect on the class map.
  • Register the emergent features: a capitalist farmer class, a new rural elite, casualisation and depeasantisation.
  • Turn to the counter-current of persistence — land concentration, caste–class overlap, agrarian distress.
  • Locate the debate in the mode of production controversy and close with a balanced verdict.

Model answer

The agrarian social structure of early independent India was, in Daniel Thorner's influential scheme, organised around three broad relations to land: the maliks, who drew income from proprietary rights; the kisans, who cultivated their own holdings; and the mazdoors, who lived by wage labour. Overlaying this were tenancy and sharecropping and, crucially, a dense correspondence between caste and land, with dominant castes commanding the productive land and lower castes and Dalits supplying labour. This was the structure that reform and development set out to change.

Land reforms struck first. Zamindari abolition, tenancy regulation and land ceilings removed the top layer of intermediary rentiers and, in principle, transferred rights to actual cultivators. Their real effect was uneven. Intermediaries were dispossessed, but the chief beneficiaries were the upper and middle peasantry rather than the landless, since ceilings were widely evaded and tenants evicted or informalised. The outcome was less a levelling than the consolidation of a strong class of owner-cultivators — the seedbed of later change.

The green revolution was the most decisive force. The new seed–fertiliser–irrigation technology of the late 1960s rewarded those with capital, secure tenure and access to credit, producing a confident class of capitalist or rich farmers, especially in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. P. C. Joshi traced how surplus-oriented commercial cultivation displaced subsistence farming and sharpened the differentiation between an accumulating farmer class and a growing mass of wage labour. From this stratum emerged a new rural elite whose power rested on the market and the ballot box rather than on inherited ritual rank.

Commercialisation and mechanisation deepened the shift. As agriculture became market-oriented, land was increasingly worked as a business. Tractors, threshers and later mechanised harvesting reduced dependence on attached, semi-feudal labour and expanded free wage labour — a process of casualisation. The old ties of patronage and bondage weakened, and the labourer became a mobile, seasonally hired worker, often migrating across regions.

Liberalisation since 1991 added fresh pressures — volatile prices, contract farming, corporate entry into inputs and procurement, and a mounting squeeze on small and marginal holdings. This has driven depeasantisation: small cultivators, unable to sustain viable farming, drift into casual non-farm and migrant labour, blurring the line between poor peasant and rural proletarian. The distress dimension of this shift is visible in indebtedness and, at its most acute, in farmer suicides.

Alongside these class transformations, the wider rural fabric has changed. The spread of education, panchayati raj institutions and reservation has given lower castes a political voice; assertive backward-caste and Dalit mobilisation has begun to challenge the older idiom of deference. The decline of the jajmani system and the monetisation of village exchange have loosened, though not dissolved, the ritual-economic ties that once bound castes together.

Yet a full account must register powerful continuities. First, land concentration and landlessness persist. Ceiling legislation redistributed little; the landless and near-landless remain a vast rural underclass, and dominant castes largely retain command of land. André Béteille's study of Sripuram showed how, even as the ritual, economic and political dimensions of dominance began to separate, the underlying advantage of the landed upper castes endured.

Second, the caste–class overlap has not dissolved. Dalits remain concentrated among agricultural labourers, so that class exploitation is still experienced through the idiom of caste. Modern forces have reshuffled but not erased this correspondence.

Third, the character of the change was contested in the mode of production debate. Utsa Patnaik argued that green-revolution agriculture was generating genuinely capitalist relations — accumulation, wage labour and reinvestment — while others held that semi-feudal fetters, indebtedness and unfree labour survived. The realistic conclusion is a mixed, transitional formation in which capitalist and pre-capitalist elements coexist unevenly across regions.

On balance, then, the agrarian social structure is unmistakably in flux. Modern forces have dissolved intermediary tenures, created a capitalist farmer class and a new rural elite, casualised labour and set depeasantisation in motion. But they have done so region by region, and have left the deep structures of land concentration and caste–class inequality substantially intact. The structure is being reshaped rather than equalised.

Examiner's perspective

Examiners reward the candidate who reads this bare question as an invitation to analyse rather than to narrate. The strong script sets a clear baseline with Thorner's categories and the caste–land overlap, then works through the modern forces analytically — land reform, green revolution, commercialisation, liberalisation — showing precisely what each did to the class map.

What separates a first-class answer is the turn to persistence. Béteille on enduring dominance, the unbroken caste–class correspondence, and the survival of landlessness demonstrate that the candidate can hold change and continuity in tension. Situating the discussion within the mode of production debate, and naming Patnaik and P. C. Joshi, lifts the script from descriptive to genuinely analytical. The most discriminating conclusion refuses both a triumphal modernisation story and a static one: agrarian change is real but uneven and incomplete. Weak answers either recite agricultural history or assert wholesale transformation without confronting how durable the old structure has proved.