Changing pattern of Agrarian structure in India: A Preliminary Note

[Citation: Gaurang R. Sahay, Changing pattern of Agrarian structure in India: A Preliminary Note (2009, Unpublished)]

The term agrarian structure denotes a framework of social relationships in which all agricultural activities such as production, marketing and consumption are carried out. The institution or the framework of social relationships determines how and by whom land is cultivated, what kind of crops can be produced and for what purpose, how food and agricultural incomes can be distributed, and in what way or in what terms the agrarian sector is linked to the rest of economy or society.

Agrarian structure or its various dimensions and dynamics such as land reforms, Green Revolution and agriculture labour have been the major concerns of Indian social scientists, particularly sociologists and social anthropologists. They have tried to understand and analyse them in different forms by using different concepts right from the time of independence. To present a systematic and detailed picture of the Indian agrarian structure and its various dynamics it has been proposed to divide the trajectory of the problem into three phases: pre-colonial phase, colonial phase, and post-colonial phase.

1. Agrarian Structure during the Pre-colonial Period

The discourses on the pre-colonial Indian agrarian structure are quite homogenous in terms of the ideas and lessons that they provide. The main concepts which were developed and used to understand the pre-colonial Indian agrarian structure are: 1. Oriental Despotism (Montesquieu, Hegel, Bernier and James Mills), 2. Asiatic Mode of Production (Karl Marx) and 3. Prebendal Patrimonialism (Max Weber). The concepts are, more or less similar, similar to each other in terms of their contents and meanings. They bring out following features of the pre-colonial Indian agrarian structure:

1. Absence of private property in land
2. Possession and use of land on communal basis
3. State or king as the absolute owner of land
4. Torrid climatic environment
5. State controlled irrigation or public hydraulic works
6. Division of agrarian society into self-sufficient, autonomous and isolated village communities or village as idyllic little republics
7. All kinds of relationships organized around the institution of caste or, to put in different words, caste system as the basis of self-sustaining and self-producing Indian village communities
8. Surplus labour as tribute to the despotic king
9. Absence of classes leading to servile social equality
10. Absence of hereditary nobility
11. General slavery or exploitation of the people directly by the despotic state or king without any relationship of dependence and exchange at the lower levels and juridical restraints

These structural features made Indian society, which was overwhelmingly agrarian, ever static and historyless. Marx writes, ‘Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of the successive invaders who founded empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society’ (Marx 1968: 185).

Colonial ethnographers and British administrators-cum-sociologists such as Baden Powell, Henry Maine and Charles Metcalfe followed both in words and spirits such an ‘orientalist’ understanding of Indian social formation and its agrarian structure. To quote Metcalfe, ‘The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything they want within themselves, and almost independent of foreign relations. They seem to last where nothing else lasts. Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down; revolution succeeds revolution; Hindu, Pathan, Mughal, Maharatta, Sikh, English are masters in turn; but the village communities remain the same’ (quoted from Cohn 1987: 213).

However, historical research by Indian scholars, particularly in post-independent India, has convincingly contested this orientalist understanding of Indian socio-economic structure, and proved that

1. Everyone had no equal rights over land or land produce. The village did not hold its land in common. Common were its officials and servants (Neale 1962: 21).
2. The land rights could even be purchased and sold. The agrarian society was internally differentiated in terms of class, and was unstable and not self-sufficient (Habib 1963:154).
3. There was a sizeable population who worked as labourer (Dharma Kumar 1992).
4. The authorities discriminated between the different sections of landowners while fixing the revenue demands. The large landowners were required to pay less (Dharma Kumar 1992).
5. Pre-colonial agrarian relations were also not free of conflicts and tensions (Habib 1963; Moore 1966; Dhanagare 1983).

f) Production of crops, particularly cash crops, for market (Habib 1982).

2. Agrarian Structure during the Colonial Rule

The British colonial rule did many things and introduced many measures to reorganize rural/agrarian society in a framework that make governance easy, profitable and manageable. Most important noteworthy measures with far reaching consequences are following:

a) The Land Tenure/Revenue System

1) The Permanent Settlement System

Under this measure, the intermediary Zamindars (the tax collecting officials in earlier regime) was granted ownership right over land from which they previously only had the rights to collect revenues.

2) The Ryotwari System

Under this, the actual land tillers were given formal property rights over land. The Royat was a tenant of the state, responsible for paying revenue directly to the state treasury, and could not be evicted as long as he paid his revenue.

3) The Mahalwari or Malgujari System

Under this system, the village was identified as unit of assessment. Though an individual cultivator in a village was made owner of the land, the villagers were asked to pay the revenue collectively. A member of the dominant family of the village was generally given the responsibility of collecting the revenue.

These colonial measures introduced ‘more intensive and systematic exploitation’ (Guha 1983: 7) and forced the peasants to become increasingly involved with the market, even when they did not have the capacity to produce surplus. These measures brought about major changes in the agrarian structure. The most significant ones are following:

b) Commercialization of Agriculture

It means a shift in the agrarian economy from production for consumption (food crops) to production for market (cash crops). The demand of raw material in British industries and the manifold increase in the land revenue compelled the peasantry to shift to cash crops (Blyn 1966). One obvious consequence of this shift in cropping patterns was a significant increase in the vulnerability of local population to famines (Kumar 1982; Sen 1976).

c) Commodification of Land

Due to colonial policies land began to acquire the features of a commodity. The moneylender, who until then lent keeping a peasant’s crops in mind, began to see his land as a mortgageable asset against which he could lend money.

d) De-industrialization of the Indian economy

The influx of cheap goods from England after the industrial revolution hastened the process of de-industrialization by ruining the village artisans that also resulted into the massive pressure on cultivatable land.

e) Land Alienation

It was a pan-Indian phenomenon irrespective of the system of revenue settlement: Zamindary, Ryotwari, or Mahalwari (Dhanagare 1983). In the past the professional moneylenders generally did not evict the peasant from his land but made him tenant if he did not pay back the debt, whereas the landlords evicted him from the land and made him landless. Thus tenancy and landlessness grew significantly (Bhattacharya 1985; Bailey 1958).

f) Conservation and/or Dissolution of the elements of Pre-colonial Agrarian Structure

There is almost a consensus among scholars that while colonial rule destroyed some pre-colonial elements of agrarian structures, it also preserved many. It broke down earlier structures without reconstituting them, and, as Utsa Patnaik argues, the ‘bourgeois property relations’ developed without corresponding development of capitalist relations of production and forces of production in agriculture (Patnaik 1990; Banaji 1990). Alavi argues that colonial rule brought about peripheral capitalism in India which generated a disarticulated form of ‘generalised commodity production’ because the surplus agriculture produce was reinvested not in the local economy but in the metropolitan centers (Alavi 1990: 170).

3. Agrarian Structure in Post-colonial India

Independence from the colonial rule marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of agrarian structure. The main objective of the Indian state was to transform the stagnant and backward economy and to make sure that the benefits of transformation and growth were not monopolized by a particular section of the society. Keeping this in background the govt. of India introduced various measures. Significant ones are following:

a) Land Reforms

Land reforms in independent India finds its raison d être in the constitution which begins with the Preamble that is based on the four cornerstones of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity, and further strengthened by certain specific provisions, particularly the directive principles of state policy, which set out that the state shall, in particular, direct its policies such that:

1. The citizens, men and women equally, have the right to an adequate means of livelihood;
2. The ownership and control of the resources of the community are so distributed as to subserve the common good;
3. The operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and other means of production to the common detriment.

Land reforms measures were among the most significant efforts of the state to achieve these goals. The govt. of India directed its states to abolish intermediary tenures, regulate rent and tenancy rights, confer ownership rights on tenants, impose ceilings on holdings, distribute the surplus land among the rural poor, and facilitate consolidation of holdings. A large number of legislations were passed by the state governments over a short period of time.

The actual implementation of these legislations and their impact on the agrarian structure is, however, an entirely different story. Most of these legislations had loopholes that allowed the landlords to tamper with the land records, evicting their tenants, and using other means to escape the legislations (Joshi 1976; Radhakrishnan 1989).

Despite over all failure, land reforms succeeded in weakening the hold of absentee landlords over rural society and assisted in the emergence of a class of substantial peasants and petty landlords as the dominant political and economic group (Bell 1974: 196; Chakravarti 1975: 97-8; Byres 1974). However, it was only in rare cases that the landless, most of whom belonged to class of dalits, received land. The beneficiaries, by and large, belonged to middle level caste groups who traditionally cultivated land as a part of the calling of their castes. Otherwise, the land holding structure continued to be fairly iniquitous.

b) Provisions for institutional Credit

The govt. of India introduced various provisions of Institutional credit to weaken the hold of traditional moneylenders over the peasantry. According to the RBI Report 1969, approximately 91per cent of the credit needs of the cultivators were being met by informal sources of credit. 69.7 per cent of it came from usurious moneylenders. The govt. asked cooperative credit societies and commercial banks to lend to the agricultural sector on priority basis. However, the studies showed that much of their credit went to the relatively better off sections of agrarian society and the poor continued to depend on the servile exploitative sources (Thorner 1964; Oommen 1984; Jodhaka 1995).

c) The Community Development Programme (CDP)

This programme, which was patterned on American experiences, was launched on 2 October 1952, and its objective was to provide the substantial increase in agricultural production and improvement in basic services, which would ultimately lead to overall development of the all sections of agrarian society. However, it failed in its objective and resulted in helping only those who were already powerful in the village.

d) The Green Revolution

Green Revolution is an agricultural development project that includes higher yielding variety seeds (HYV) and other fertility enhancing inputs i.e. chemical fertilizer, controlled irrigation facilities and pesticides. The components of the project consisted of providing cheap institutional price incentives, marketing and research facilities.

The idea of Green Revolution was based on the ‘trickle down’ theory of economic growth. It carried the conviction that agriculture could be peacefully transformed through the quite working of science and technology without the social costs of mass upheaval and disorder (Frankel 1971: Chat. V).

The Green Revolution led to a substantial increase (at the rate of 3 to 5 per cent per annum) in the agricultural production (Byres1972). However, it did not mean same thing to all sections of the agrarian society. While bigger farmers had enough surplus of their own to invest in the new capital-intensive farming, for smaller farmers it meant additional dependence on borrowing, generally from informal sectors (Jodhaka 1995: A124; Harriss 1987: 231). The Green Revolution also resulted into a totally new kind of mobilization of surplus producing farmers who demanded a better deal for the agricultural sector (Dhanagare 1991; Brass 1994; Gupta 1997).

Did the benefits of Green Revolution ‘trickle down’ to agricultural labourers? It has been one of the most debated questions in the studies on agrarian change in independent India. It is an almost accepted fact among the scholars that the Green Revolution has made the countryside prosperous in general terms, however, it has also increased economic inequalities in the villages (Bardhan 1970). The wages of agricultural labour has gone up but, due to increase in the prices, their purchasing power has gone down (Bagchi1982; Dhanagare 1988). The proportion of agriculture labour to total population increased mainly due to depeasantisation (Aggarwal 1971). The Green Revolution also helped in making the agricultural labour free from relations of patronage and institutionalized dependency (Bremman 1974; Beteille 1971; Gaugh 1981; Bhalla 1976). It increased the ‘proletarianisation’ of labour (Brass 1990). Over all, it has been assessed that due to the Green Revolution a smaller class of big peasants established dominance over the larger class of agriculture labour.

The changes brought about by the Green revolution and other measures of the govt. of India in the agrarian structure generated a debate among the Marxist scholars on the nature of mode of production in Indian agriculture. The debate was started by Rudra’s (1970) claim that agrarian India is still feudal. Most of the participants in the debate, such as Chattopadhyay (1972a, 1972b), Gough (1980), Banaji (1972, 1973, 1977), Harriss (1982) and Breman (1985) argue that capitalist mode of production indeed is on its way to dominating the agrarian economy of India and most certainly that of the regions which has experienced the Green Revolution. Some others, like Bhaduri (1973a, 1973b), Pradhan Prasad (1973, 1974), N. K. Chandra (1974) and Ranjit Sau (1973, 1975, 1976) hold a different view about the nature of agrarian society. They opine that agrarian mode of production in India exhibits some features of capitalism; however, its basic nature is semi-feudal.

Basic Readings

Bardhan, P. 1970. Land, Labour and Rural Poverty: Essays in Development

              Economics. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Beteille, A. 1974. Studies in Agrarian Social Structure. Delhi: Oxford 

              University Press.

Frankel, F. R. 1971. India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and 

              Political Costs. Bombay: Oxford University Press.

Joshi, P. C. 1976. Land Reforms in India: Trends and Perspectives. New

              Delhi: Allied Publishers.

Lehman, D. (ed.). 1974. Agrarian Reform and Agrarian Reformism: Studies

              of Peru, Chile, China, and India. London: Faber and Faber.

O’Leary, B. 1989. The Asiatic Mode of Production: Oriental Despotism,

              Historical Materialism and Indian History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Patnaik, U. (ed.). 1990. Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The ‘Mode of

              Production Debate in India’. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Raychaudhury,T. and Irfan Habib (ed.). The Cambridge Economic History

              of India, vol.1. Delhi: Orient Longman.

Shanin, T. (ed.), 1987. Peasants and Peasant Societies. London: Blackwell.