Agrarian Class Structure in India: A Note

 

Agrarian Class Structure in India: A Note

Gaurang R. Sahay

The issue of agrarian class was not discussed in social science till late nineteenth century. Even Marx and Weber did not at all pay attention to classes in an agrarian society because they believed that the development of capitalism in the countryside will lead to a countryside reflecting the class profile of industrial society. However, when agrarian society differentiated itself and continued to survive along with the industrial society, it attracted attention from the scholars particularly from those ones who were involved in concrete Marxist politics such as Lenin and Mao. Lenin and Mao are the first scholars who developed the schema of agrarian classification. Land and Labour have been the main basis of the classification of agrarian society. Using these criteria it has been observed that some own land but do not work on it, some work on land but do not own it, some own land and work on it, and some own land and work on it too but they also used hired labour to work on land. This observation has resulted into categorisation of classes in agrarian structure.

Lenin used three related criteria to classify peasants into classes in the Preliminary draft Thesis (1920). The criteria are: 1. The possession of land, 2. Labour hiring vs. self employment, and 3.Subsistence vs. surplus above subsistence that can be invested and reinvested and can lead to capital formation in agriculture. On the basis of these criteria he differentiated agrarian society in Russia into six classes: 1. Agricultural proletariat or wage labourers, 2. The semi-proletariat and dwarf peasants, 3. The small peasantry, 4. The middle peasants, 5. The big peasants, and 6. The big landowners.

Mao Zedong did not use the term agricultural proletariat because, given the colonial character of China, the creation of a class of agricultural proletariat was substantially the result of pauperization of poor peasants under colonial oppression, rather than the proletarianization of poor peasants and workers accompanying the growth of capitalist production. Mao also argued that because of the low level of capitalist development in rural China rent exploitation and loan interest (usury) also played an important role in the formation of agrarian classes along with possession of land and labour hiring. Thus, Mao, on the basis of mainly labour power exploitation, rent-based exploitation and loan interest, talked about five agrarian classes in How to Differentiate Classes (1933): 1. The Landlord, 2. The Rich Peasants, 3. The Middle Peasants, 4. The Poor Peasants, and 5. The Workers.

There are scholars such as K. N. Raj argued that the concept of class is irrelevant in India because India is a complex society characterized by the coexistence of both capitalist and pre-capitalist features. It is also irrelevant because the institution of caste has been the primary institution everywhere in India. Besides caste is not coterminous with class, and more important social structure to explain the existing structural situations and their dynamics.

This position has been criticized quite a lot in India social science. It has been argued that class and caste can coexist in the same social formation. They reflect on the two different realities. Caste exist in the realm of ideology whereas class exist in the realm of economy. This apart, historians like D. D. Kosambi, Irfan Habib and sociologists like Dipankar Gupta argue that it is not the caste but class which has been the primary institution in India, and therefore class reality has always affected or shaped the nature of caste in India.

Before the debate started on the nature of mode of production in agriculture in India scholars, there were a few social scientists who had reflected on the nature of agrarian classes. Daniel Thorner on the basis of his surveys of rural India in 1950s argued that agrarian India is characterised by three agrarian classes: Maliks (owners), Kisans (peasants) and Majdurs (wage labourer). Maliks are those landlords who do not cultivate land but lease out to kisans and derive rent from them. Kisans are the peasant who cultivate land employing majdurs. Majdurs are the agricultural labourers. Ram Krishna Mukherjee in his study of six villages in Bengal observed that there are agrarian classes in rural Bengal. He conceptualised agrarian classes on the basis of household’s income level and amount of land. The criteria should therefore be one which has traditional recognition in the society. For him, there are three agrarian classes in rural Bengal and they are 1. Landlords, 2. Peasant-proprietors, and 3. Bargadars (sharecroppers) and labourers. Peasant-proprietors is a heterogeneous category consisting of Jotedars, Rich farmers, and Big Ryot.

Understanding of agrarian classes started systematically with debate on the nature of mode of production in agriculture in India. There is a number of scholars such as Joan Mencher, Nirmal Chandra, Utsa Patnaik, Ashok Rudra, Pranab Bardhan, Pradhan Prasad and John Harris who presented a description of agrarian classes in rural India during the course of the debate. For Joan Mencher, an important reason for understand the nature of agrarian classes in rural India is to try to find an explanation of why peasant organisations have developed in certain regions of India, but not elsewhere, "why people in one area are involved in continual revolt, while those in another area are relatively quiescent". (Mencher 1974) Looking at village India in recent years, Mencher concludes that movements have occurred "where there is a strong polarisation between landless and all others". In effect, these are areas with a large agricultural labour class, although peasant organisations are not strong in all such areas. In the South Indian context, Mencher asserts, Eric Wolf's hypothesis that it is middle peasants who constitute the pivotal groups for peasant uprisings does not hold. Rather it has been the possible ties to the land" who have been the main agitators or strikers.

Mencher contrasts developments in two regions known for successful organisation of landless labourers and sharp agrarian conflicts – Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu and Kuttanad in Kerala - with Chingleput district, also in Tamil Nadu. In Chingleput, Mencher points out, there is a large proportion of agricultural labourers, but in any given year a handful of these landless families may become share-croppers "on a 50/50 basis if they have bullocks; if not, on a 1-to-6 basis". Competition for obtaining land on crop share acts to inhibit unity among the landless, as also between peasants with small plots of their own who equally hope to rent in additional fields from the same land-owners. The rural bigwigs, for their part, are quite capable of juggling tenancies not only to prevent the actual cultivators from being able to claim customary rights but precisely to keep the poor divided and leaderless. ‘Thus, one way of handling a potential organiser of the landless or of the small peasants has consistently been to threaten that he might not get any share-cropping land for the next season or for the next year’. (Mencher 1974)

Mencher calls attention to the use of caste allegiances "by people in the system, as well as by outside observers. to mask class differences". For example, well-to-do members of middle-ranking castes may give land preferentially- to their own poor caste mates, who are thus led to identify with the village landed. On the basis of detailed information which she gathered in 10 villages studies in 1966-67 and 1970-71, Mencher proposes "a very rough socio-economic classification of the rural population of Chingleptit District". She talked about six agrarian classes which are as follows:

(1) The landless - "those who primarily derive their livelihood from working in agriculture either as day-labourers, as attached permanent labourers for particular landlords, or as ... a kind of share-cropper, receiving one portion for every six retained by the landowner".

(2) Poor peasants - "those who own small pieces of land, between 1 and 2.5 acres, small enough to require that on occasion some of the members of a household do day-labour."

(3) Middle peasants - "those who are clearly self-sufficient and able to sustain themselves without ever doing coolie-work…. Households with over 2.5 acres of land are employers of labour, and rarely go out as manual labourers themselves."

(4) Rich farmers - "those having between about 7.5 and 15" acres, "not only self-sufficient they are also able to store surplus for a bad year, and still have enough grain to sell to obtain cash for the purchase of cocisumer goods. (Most have a transistor set or a regular radio, and if possible, electricity)."

(5) Rich farmers, capitalist farmers, and traditional landlords - "households owning between 15 acres and approximately 30 acres of land. In this category there are three types of agriculturists:

(a) "rich farmers who, apart from giving small parcels of land to share-croppers, cultivate most of the land themselves with the help of coolies and actually go into their fields and do some of their manual work...."

(b) "capitalist farmers ... who do not do physical labour themselves...."

(c) "traditional landlords of the old school. I hesitate to call them 'feudal' because this is an area that has been subjected to capitalist penetration for a long period.… Mostly this category consists of landowners who give their land on various kinds of tenancy to labourers who look after their land for them."

(6) Indeterminate class of large landholders - "a few households in the over-3S-acre category.... I frankly question whether it would even be useful to decide if they are 'capitalist farmers' or 'feudal landlords'." (Mencher 1974).

Putting together Census of 1971 figures for Chingleput District and her own survey data, Mencher provides an idea of the relative strength of the six classes. According to the Census, 43 per cent of all working males in the rural population of the district were recorded as agricultural labourers. Another 32 per cent were returned as cultivators. The vast majority of these latter, Mencher judges on the basis her survey villages, belong to her categories 2 and 3, So far as concerns the three upper classes, "Those owning more than 7.5 acres, even of dry land are quite rare...". It is these same well-to-do households in which more family members tend to be employed outside of the village or to have additional sources of income "which add to the households' resource base and serve to raise them further in the socio-economic sphere". (Mencher 1974)

In the Chingleput villages studied by Mencher, class and caste hierarchies overlap to a considerable degree. Landless households (those owning less than one acre) were mostly Vanniyars (low-caste) and Paraiyans (untouchables). Proportionately fewer untouchables were to be found in the second, poor peasant, category. Large landowners (over 30 acres) belonged almost exclusively to Brahman, Reddiar and Mudaliar castes (these last two considered locally to be agriculturalist castes). Although majority of households holds in each of these castes had smaller holdings.

Caste loyalties tend to blur class boundaries, as does the fact that owners of even tiny plots become employers of labour at peak moments for transplanting and harvesting rice. Thus "on the whole the well-to-do Vanniyars have managed to keep the Vanniyar poor politically isolated and segregated from the untouchable poor". On the other hand, "families in category 3 (middle peasants), and even many in category 2 (poor peasants), do not see a commonality of interest with the landless - not even with their own landless relatives". (Mencher 1974)

Nirmal Chandra, in the Frontier articles to which we have already referred, delineates the rural classes in his Burdwan (West Bengal) villages in somewhat different fashion, and also considers the implications of the class structure for political action. He defines as "upper classes" landed families which do not depend to any significant extent on income from agricultural wage-labour. These classes include landlords "who depend mainly on their rental income,", jotedars "those funectioning in a capitalist manner", rich peasants who are dependent upon non-family labour although engaging personally in some major field operations, and middle peasants who cultivate with only marginal help from workers outside of the family. He proposes two separate estimates of class strengths which we can set out in tabular form. (a) taking into account only household agricultural income, and (b) according to households income from all sources.

In other words, the villages are split almost into equal halves between those with unearned incomes, i.e., all who lease out land or hire in worker the one side, and the poor peasants and agricultural labourers on the other. Given this quasi-equality, a struggle launched by the exploited half against the exploiting half "would never get off the ground". (Nirmal Chandra 1975b)

An alternative political approach implicit in the two giant waves of peasant struggle, for the reform of the tenancy system in undivided Bengal in 1946-47, and for the recovery and distribution among the poor of surplus land in West Bengal in 1967-70, was to concentrate on a struggle against "one particular feudal remnant". The difficulty encountered was that in both cases "the exploiters were sometimes men with very small means, and had close friends and supporters among sections of the middle and poorer peasantry". Too many enemies were created. This enabled the "most powerful sections in rural society" to create divisions among the ranks of the militants and their followers, and eventually to defeat the movements. Nirmal Chandra proposes instead a two-stage approach with left-wing political hegemony as the first goal. Once this has been achieved, the main task becomes the elimination of all forms of exploitation. He foresees the possibility of a number of sub-stages in the course of the movement "when the lines between 'friendly' and 'hostile' elements may have to be redrawn". (Nirmal (handra 1975b)

Utsa Patnaik returns to the centre of the debate on the nature of mode of production in agriculture in 1976 with an article on class differentiation among the peasantry. Citing evidence from successive censuses of landholdings, she emphasizes the extent of "concentration of the means of prodcuction". This high degree of concentration, Patnaik reasons, implies "a correspondingly high degree of economic differentiation within the cultivating population". Thus, there is no single representative type of holding, but rather a series of qualitatively distinct types, "which differ in the way their production activity is organised". (Patnaik 1976)

At one end of the scale, Patnaik continues, a small minority of households have resources so great in relation to family size that they must rely primarily on labour from outside the family. At the other pole, a large proportion of households "which may be the majority" have so few resources that in order to meet their family consumpion needs they must rely primarily on working for others whether as labourers or as tenants. In between these extremes we may expect to find a middle category of petty producers neither employing others nor employed by others. Taking together the National Sample Survey figures on landholding and the results of various Farm Management Surveys, Patnaik finds that "the majority of holdings in most regions do not fall into this category". The bulk of agricultural holdings, she argues, are so small that peasant families must hire themselves out or take in land at high rents in order to make ends meet. (Patnaik 1976)

Reiterating her earlier contention that the size of landholding is insufficient as an indicator of class status among the peasantry (see Patnaik 1971b), Patnaik elaborates a composite "labour-exploitation criterion", This ratio, to which she assigns the letter E, takes into account for each household hiring in, hiring out, renting in, renting out, and use of family labour. Her E ratio, Patnaik stresses, "has been formulated as an empirical, and therefore descriptive approximation to the analytical concept of economic class". (Patnaik 1976) In much the same manner as Nirmal Chandra, Patnaik distinguishes between the exploiting classes -landlords and rich peasants - and the exploited classes - poor peasants and labourers.

Within each of the first three categories she further specifies two different strata or divisions on the basis of the predominant form of exploitation, whether wages or rent. The resulting array of classes and divisions is as follows:

(1) Landlord

(a) Capitalist (Labour hiring greater than rent)

(b) Feudal (Labour hiring at most as high as rent)

(2) Rich peasant

(a) Proto-bourgeois (Labour hiring greater than rent)

(b) Proto-feudal (Labour hiring at most as high as rent)

(3) The Middle Peasants (No hiring in or hiring out labour)

(4) Poor peasant

(a) Agricultural labourer operating land-owners (hiring out greater than rent payment)

(b) Petty tenant (hiring out at most as high as rent payment)

(5) Full-time labourer (hiring out only form, no rent payment)

Distinctions among the five main classes are those familiar to the Marxist classics. Thus in the case of big landowners, whether feudal or capitalist, family members do not per- form manual labour in major farm operations. Supervision or operating machinery, Patnaik specifies, is not considered manual labour. Rich peasants do participate in manual work; however their resource position is such that appropriation of others' labour is at least as important as use of family labour. The middle peasantry is primarily self-employed since on the average the resources per capita just suffice to employ adequately the supply of family labour and to provide a living "at a customary subsistence level". The poor peasant family must hire out its members for wages or lease in land no matter how high the rent, or combine these two expedients. Typically these families "cannot make ends meet and have to depress consumption standards below customary levels". The same is true of full-time labour families; some of these may own small strips of land which they do not cultivate, but lease out. But the labour equivalent of the rent received is not large enough to balance, let alone outweigh, the amount of family labour hired out. (Patnaik 1976)

Patnaik explains that her labour-exploitation criterion is designed to bring out the necessity for the different classes within the peasantry to enter into relations with each other in the process of production. Ashok Rudra makes a very similar point in the first of three 1978 articles on class relations in Indian agriculture. Classes, he understands, "are defined by class contradictions". The relations between classes are relations of production, but (here Rudra diverges) "not all relations of production define classes". They define various "social groups", but "only some social groups are classes" (Ashok Rudra 1978a)

Having thus ruled out any theoretical obligation to fit the whole of the agricultural population into one or another class category, Rudra proceeds to argue that there exists in Indian agriculture today two, and only two, classes. These are "a class of big land- owners and a class of agricultural labourers". The latter include landless labourers, landed labourers, and poor tenants who do not hire any labourers. (Rudra 1978c) So far as the big landowners are concerned, Rudra can discover no contradictions between those with capitalistic features and those who operate along feudal lines. There may be co-existence of more or less feudal and more or less capitalist farmers "in the same region, or in the same village, or even in the same family". There may in fact be co-existence of "some traits typical of capitalists and some other traits typical of feudal land-owners in the same farmer". Rudra also rejects the classical distinction between 'landlords' and 'rich peasants' on the basis of participation in the manual work of cultivation. In India, he maintains, this criterion is negated by the caste factor. In some cases even very small and impoverished landholders will not take to the plough because they belong to upper castes. On the other hand, with the introduction of mechanisation, one may find, for example in the Punjab, women members of families owning several hundreds of acres who do not hesitate to drive their own tractors. The class of big landowners, in Rudra's view, is "a single class" and also "a hybrid class: part feudal, part capitalist". He refers to it as the "ruling class in Indian agriculture". Apart from the big landowners and the agricultural labourers, the rest of the population may be disregarded: "they do not constitute or belong to any class or classes". This classlessness results from the fact that, while they have contradictions among themselves, they do not have clear contradictions with the two principal classes. Or such contradictions "are of a subsidiary nature". Only the struggle between the two main classes "can provide the motive force for any changes in the agrarian structure". (Rudra 1978c)

In his conclusion Rudra spells out the political implications of his class analysis. Since he lumps together landlords revealing a preponderance of capitalistic traits and those displaying a more feudalistic prose, Rudra sees no justification for "those who believe in progress" to support "the assumed capitalist forces against the assumed feudal forces in an assumed struggle between the two". He rejects scornfully the concept of "an alliance of the entire peasantry from landless labourers up to capitalist farmers against the feudal landlords". Such a political line, he pronounces, "cannot but objectively betray the interests of the peasantry not belonging to the ruling class", and in particular the interests of the agricultural labourers. In point of fact, Rudra tells us, this is what has happened in previous peasant movements, "led by the political parties of the country" which have "by and large benefited the middle and rich peasants, but not the landless or the landed labourers". By contrast, the line of political action which would follow from Rudra's thesis "is one of struggle by the class of agricultural labourers against the class of big land' owners, without making any reservation on account of some members of the ruling class revealing more capitalisic traits than some others". (Rudra 1978c)

Rudra's rather drastic disposal of commonly held notions of class structure draws a comment from Pranab Bardhan, who had previously worked together with him in a largescale survey of land, labour and credit relations in West Bengal, Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. (Bardhan and Rudra 1978). While listing five main points on which he wishes to state his agreement with Rudra, he specifies two major disagreements. Essentially, Bardhan approves Rudra's proposition that the most important contradiction in Indian agricultture is that between big landowners (including rich peasants) and labourers (landed or landless), and Rudra's criticism of the political line adopted by Left parties. But he takes Rudra to task for denying the significance of the middle peasants - who do not hire themselves out very often, or hire in much labour of others, as a separate class. For this purpose he cites data compiled by his wife, Kalpana Bardhan, from Farm Management Surveys carried out during the years from 1967 to 1972 in four states: Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. Observing that the numerical strength of the middle peasantry varies sharply from one part of India to another, he calls for a more extensive investigation of the phenomenon. Bardhan also takes exception to Rudra's assertion that within the hybrid class of big landowners the feudal elements do not have any contradictions with the capitalist elements. (Bardhan 1979)

Pradhan Prasad, writing in 1979 and 1980 about Bihar in particular and, by extension practically the whole of the North-Indian Hindi-speaking belt (Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh), provides yet another array of agrarian classes. As Mencher did for South Indian, but with less precision, Prasad indicates which castes tend to be found in which classes.. His three categories are as follows: (1) Top peasantry, including land- lords, who deem physical labour even on their own lands below their dignity - upper castes. (2) Middle and poor-middle peasantry, who do manual work on their own farms but do not labour for others. The middle peasants hire in agricuttural labourers; the poor-middle do not - these are essentially “middle-caste Hindus (i e, backward castes other than scheduled tribes)". (3) Agricultural labourers, "a sizeable number of whom have small operational holdings"; these are drawn "mostly from scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and some middle caste Hindus". Prasad points to sharp contradictions between the middle peasants, whose landholdings have increased and whose overall economic position has become stronger over the years, and the top peasants - doubled and made more acute by conflict between the "rising" middle castes and the "traditionally dominant" upper castes. He also speaks of an "emerging contradiction" between the "landlords, cultivators and big peasantry on the one side and the poor peasantry on the other". This antagonistic relationship arises "out of semi-feudal "bondage", and is destined to become less important "as the semi-feudal set-up disintegrates". It will be replaced by "another contradiction between new upper caste Hindu kulaks and the poor peasantry". At this stage, Prasad predicts, the landlords and big peasants will retract their earlier resistance to modernisation and "will take steps to dynamicise their cultivation". In his words, “The fanning of caste passions which at one time led to a diffusion of class contradictions, and thwarted agricultural growth, now turns out to be a factor which may sharpen the contradiction and cause the disintegration of 'semi-feudal' production relations in Bihar. (Prasad 1979, 1980)

At the other end of the subcontinent, John Harriss provides a version of the rural class structure on the basis of his field work in the dry districts of Tamil Nadu. He defines his classes according to two criteria - size of production resources (including land) in relation to household livelihood requirements, and labour relations. This gives four categories as follows: (1) Capitalist farmers, with assets capable of realising more than four times basic livelihood requirements, employing a permanent labour force, not contribulting personally more than a very little family labour; (2) Rich peasants, with assets yielding 2-4 times household requirements, possibly employing permanent labourers,, but substan- tially dependent upon family labour; (3) Independent middle peasants, whose assets yield 1-2 times household needs, employing principally family labour, may sometimes do wage labour for others; (4) Poor peasants, whose assets do not cover their livelihood requirements, so that they must depend primarily upon wage labour, this group includes marginal farmers and agricultural labourers. In the North Arcot village which Harriss studied intensively, he found evidence of all the features of a well- established capitalist mode of production. He emphasises the dominant position, consolidated since the end of nineteenth century, of a class of "landowning moneylender merchants", belonging preponderantly in this region to the Agamudaiyan Mudaliar caste. These landowners operate in classical capitalist fashion. "Money has been invested in agricultural production and profits reinvested; and farmers sold a large portion of their output; and farmers employ wage labour...." (Harriss 1979) Despite the fact that some 80 per cent of the households of the village may be indebted, Harriss insists that the "dominant mode of appropriation of surplus in Randam is capitalist." (Harriss 1979) The distinctive element in Harriss' contribution to the debate is his characterisation of the local dominant class as merchants as well as landowners and moneylenders.

An analysis of agrarian classes was not limited to the scholars who participated in the debate on the nature of mode of production in agriculture, a number of scholars such as D. N. Dhanagare, P. K. Bose, Carol Upadhyay, Jan Breman, T. Byres and Gaurang Sahay who did not participate in the debate have also presented the nature of agrarian classes in their studies.