Breaking down the question
The question is specific and attributional. It asks what, according to André Béteille, forms the bases of agrarian class structure in India, and then instructs the candidate to analyse. The first task is expository — reproduce Béteille's criteria faithfully. The second is analytical — assess how these bases relate to one another and to the caste order.
The verb analyse signals that a bare list will not suffice at 10 marks. A strong answer names Béteille's bases precisely, shows how they generate an agrarian hierarchy, and reflects on the vexed relationship between class and caste in the Indian countryside.
For fuller treatment, see the note on agrarian class structure.
How to approach it
Open by placing Béteille within the study of agrarian stratification, distinguishing his relational, land-based approach from a purely caste reading. Then state his bases clearly — the relationship to land expressed through ownership, control and use.
Devote the analytical portion to two points: how these criteria yield distinct agrarian classes, and how class overlaps with but does not simply mirror caste. Close by noting the value and the limits of his framework.
Model answer
André Béteille, in his influential studies of agrarian society, argued that class in the Indian countryside must be understood through people's relationship to land. Agrarian classes are defined not by ritual status but by the way individuals and groups are positioned with respect to the land and its produce.
He identified three interlocking bases. The first is ownership of land — who holds proprietary rights, from large landlords to petty owners to the landless. The second is control of land — who manages and directs its cultivation, a category that includes tenants and supervisory cultivators who may control land they do not own. The third is use of land — who actually works it, the labouring cultivators and agricultural workers whose relationship to the soil is through their labour alone.
From these bases emerges an agrarian hierarchy: at the top, landowners who neither control nor work the land directly; in the middle, cultivating tenants and owner-cultivators who both control and use it; and at the base, landless labourers who only use it. Ownership, control and use may combine in one person or be spread across several, producing a layered structure of agrarian classes.
Analytically, Béteille's central insight is the distinction between class and caste. In the traditional order the two broadly coincided — upper castes owned, lower castes laboured. But he showed, notably through his study of Sripuram, that the correspondence is imperfect and loosening. Land reforms, market forces and mobility allow some lower-caste households to acquire land and some upper-caste households to decline, so that class position and ritual rank increasingly diverge. Class is a relational and changeable category; caste is ascriptive. Their intersection, not their identity, defines rural stratification.
The framework's strength is that it captures the material basis of rural inequality and its dynamism, correcting a purely caste-centred view. Its limitation is that ownership, control and use can be hard to separate cleanly in practice, and Daniel Thorner's related scheme of maliks, kisans and mazdoors offers a parallel, more economistic reading. Even so, Béteille's insistence that agrarian class rests on differentiated relationships to land remains foundational.
Examiner's perspective
At 10 marks the examiner looks first for accuracy of attribution — Béteille's three bases of ownership, control and use of land must be stated correctly, since a misremembered scheme sinks the answer. Precision here signals genuine reading rather than guesswork.
The analytical marks lie in the class-caste relationship: the strongest scripts note that class and caste once coincided but increasingly diverge, ideally citing the Sripuram study. A brief comparison with Thorner and a line on the framework's limits round out a top-band response within the tight word count.