Breaking down the question
The command word is critically examine — you must set out D.N. Dhanagare's views on agrarian movements accurately, then assess their strengths and limitations, arriving at a reasoned judgement. This is not a summary task; the examiner wants both exposition and evaluation in balance.
Dhanagare's Peasant Movements in India, 1920 to 1950 is a landmark study, so the answer must demonstrate familiarity with his central arguments — his class-analytic and regionally grounded approach, his engagement with the middle peasant thesis, and his insistence on the specificity of Indian conditions — before weighing them against rival positions. A confident critical verdict, rooted in his actual scholarship, is what twenty marks demand.
How to approach it
Introduce Dhanagare and the scope of his study. Present his key theses in turn — the primacy of agrarian class structure, the value and limits of Wolf's middle peasant thesis for India, the importance of regional and historical specificity, and his critique of both nationalist and simplistic Marxist readings.
Then move to critical assessment: what his framework illuminates and where it has been questioned. Structure the answer with clear analytical headings, cite his engagement with Eric Wolf and Kathleen Gough, and close with an overall judgement of his contribution. See the note on peasant and farmers' movements.
Model answer
D.N. Dhanagare is among the foremost sociologists of Indian agrarian mobilisation. His major work, Peasant Movements in India, 1920 to 1950, examines a series of struggles — the Moplah rebellion, the Bardoli satyagraha, the Tebhaga and Telangana movements, and others — through a class-analytic yet historically sensitive lens. His approach seeks to explain not just that peasants revolted but which strata revolted, over what, and why outcomes varied across regions.
Primacy of agrarian class structure. Dhanagare insists that peasant movements can be understood only against the specific agrarian class structure of each region — the configuration of landlords, rich, middle and poor peasants, tenants and labourers. Movements arise from the contradictions within this structure, so their character depends on which class leads and which grievances dominate.
Engagement with the middle peasant thesis. He engages critically with Eric Wolf's and Hamza Alavi's argument that the middle peasant — economically independent yet squeezed by commercialisation — is the most revolutionary stratum. Dhanagare finds the thesis partially applicable to India but resists mechanical transfer, showing that in movements like Telangana the poor peasants and agricultural labourers were decisive, while elsewhere rich peasants led. Indian reality, he argues, is too varied for a single formula.
Regional and historical specificity. A hallmark of his work is the refusal to generalise. Each movement is embedded in its own agrarian, cultural and political setting — Moplah mobilisation drew on religious and tenancy grievances in Malabar, Tebhaga on sharecropper demands in Bengal, Telangana on feudal oppression in Hyderabad. Dhanagare thus combines Marxist class analysis with attention to caste, religion and regional history.
Critique of received interpretations. He challenges both the nationalist reading that folded peasant struggles neatly into the freedom movement, and reductive Marxist accounts that ignored non-class factors. Peasant consciousness, he shows, was often shaped by religion, caste and locality as much as by class position.
Critical assessment. Dhanagare's strengths are considerable: an empirically rich, comparative and non-dogmatic framework that respects Indian specificity and avoids both nationalist romanticism and economic reductionism. His integration of class with caste and region set a standard for later agrarian studies.
Yet limitations have been noted. His account, focused on 1920 to 1950, predates the new farmers' movements of the 1980s over prices and terms of trade, which his class-conflict frame captures less easily. Critics argue he sometimes leans on the very categories, such as the middle-peasant thesis, that he qualifies, and that questions of agency, culture and the subaltern voice — later foregrounded by the Subaltern Studies scholars — receive less emphasis. Kathleen Gough's broader typology of peasant revolts offers an alternative classificatory approach.
On balance, Dhanagare's contribution remains foundational. His insistence that agrarian movements be read through concrete class structures and regional specificity corrected earlier oversimplifications and gave Indian agrarian sociology a rigorous comparative method, even if the transformed agrarian politics of recent decades calls for extending his framework.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners expect genuine familiarity with Dhanagare's actual arguments — vague answers about peasant movements in general, with his name attached, score poorly. The candidate should be able to name his engagement with the middle-peasant thesis, his regional comparative method, and his dual critique of nationalist and reductionist readings.
The word critically is decisive: the top band goes to scripts that both expound and evaluate, situating him against Wolf, Gough and the later Subaltern and new-farmers'-movement literatures. A balanced closing judgement — acknowledging his foundational method while noting its temporal and theoretical limits — demonstrates exactly the critical command a twenty-mark question rewards.