Breaking down the question
The command word is analyse, which asks you to examine A. R. Desai's position critically rather than merely describe it. The subject is his reading of India's path of development — the trajectory the Indian state chose after independence and the class character of that choice. Desai is the foremost Marxist sociologist of India, so the answer must foreground his dialectical and historical materialist method.
The key is to show that Desai judged India's development not by growth figures but by whose interests it served. He rejected the official self-description of India as a socialist, welfare-oriented mixed economy and argued instead that the path was capitalist, dependent and structured to benefit propertied classes. A strong answer reconstructs his argument, names his major works, and weighs the strengths and limits of his framework.
How to approach it
Open by placing Desai within the Marxist tradition and noting his method — the study of society as a totality in motion, driven by contradictions between classes. Then set out his substantive claims about the Indian path: the class basis of the nationalist movement, the character of the post-colonial state, and his critique of the Nehruvian model of planned mixed-economy development. Move to his verdict on the outcomes — persisting inequality, agrarian distress and the myth of welfare. Close with an evaluation that acknowledges both the analytical power and the criticisms of economic determinism. The note on Marxist sociology and A. R. Desai supplies the conceptual grounding.
Model answer
A. R. Desai was the most systematic Marxist interpreter of Indian society, and his assessment of the country's path of development flows directly from his method. For Desai, society is a totality whose motion is governed by the contradiction between classes rooted in the relations of production. He therefore refused to treat development as a neutral technical process and insisted on asking a political question: which classes shaped the path, and whose interests did it advance?
His starting point was historical. In his early classic on the social background of Indian nationalism, Desai traced the freedom movement to the transformations wrought by colonial capitalism, arguing that the emerging bourgeoisie became the leading force of the national struggle. Independence, on this reading, transferred power to a coalition of the indigenous capitalist class and the landed interests rather than to the labouring masses. The class character of the post-colonial state was thus set at the moment of its birth.
From this premise Desai launched his central critique — of the model of planned, mixed-economy development associated with Nehru. The state described itself as socialist and welfare-oriented, pursuing a middle path between capitalism and socialism. Desai regarded this self-description as ideological. The mixed economy, he argued, was in substance a form of state-supported capitalism in which public investment built the infrastructure and heavy industry that private capital could not, thereby subsidising and strengthening the very propertied classes it claimed to restrain. Planning, land reform and the language of socialism masked the consolidation of capitalist relations.
Desai read the outcomes of this path as confirmation of his diagnosis. Development was uneven and disarticulated, concentrating wealth while reproducing mass poverty. In agriculture, the Green Revolution and partial land reforms enriched a stratum of capitalist farmers and left the landless and marginal peasantry dispossessed, deepening rather than dissolving agrarian class contradictions. He documented how welfare provisions remained thin and how the state increasingly resorted to coercion to manage the discontent that uneven development generated, a theme he pressed in his later writings on state repression and violations of democratic rights. Growth, in short, was real but its fruits were appropriated by a narrow class.
Desai also located India within the wider circuit of global capitalism, viewing its development as dependent and subordinate rather than autonomous. The path did not break with imperialism so much as renegotiate the terms of integration, leaving the economy vulnerable to external capital and constrained in its capacity to serve the poor.
The analysis carries genuine strengths. Desai supplied a class perspective at a time when much Indian sociology was culturalist and village-bound, and he refused to accept the state's account of itself at face value. His insistence on connecting development to power, and on judging it by distributive outcomes, remains a corrective to purely economic measures of progress. His work on agrarian classes and on democratic rights gave empirical weight to the framework.
Yet the position is open to criticism. Desai's economic determinism underplays the relative autonomy of the state, the force of caste, religion and region, and the agency of political institutions and democratic mobilisation that a strictly class reading struggles to accommodate. The Indian trajectory has proved more complex than a single capitalist logic predicts, with electoral democracy, welfare expansion and lower-caste assertion reshaping the terrain. Even so, Desai's central contention — that India's path of development served propertied interests behind a rhetoric of socialism — retains considerable analytical force.
Examiner's perspective
For a 20-mark answer the examiner expects command of both method and substance. Marks accrue for correctly locating Desai in the Marxist tradition, naming works such as the study of the social background of Indian nationalism, and stating his thesis that the mixed economy was state-supported capitalism rather than socialism.
The higher band rewards a genuine analysis — connecting the class character of the nationalist movement to the post-colonial state, tracing uneven agrarian and industrial outcomes, and situating India in dependent global capitalism, before closing with a balanced critique of economic determinism. Disciplined British prose, accurate attribution and an evaluative conclusion separate a first-rate script from a descriptive one.