4 Theoretical Debates: An Overview

Manish Thakur

Introduction

You have already got a sense of varied conceptualisations of peasantry. Likewise, you have got an idea about the development of the field of agrarian/village studies. We have also discussed the genesis of various intellectual traditions engaged with the studies of peasants and the agrarian question. Based on your previous introduction to the said scholarly literature, in this module, we attempt to give you a sense of the diverse approaches toward the understanding of agrarian social structure and change. It presents a synoptic overview of the related theoretical debates in the field of agrarian studies. Much of this debate revolves round the development of capitalism in agriculture, the relative appropriateness of Marxist and non-Marxist categories of analysis, the nature of class formation in agriculture, and the intermeshing of land-based social relations with other axes of social stratification. While discussing these larger theoretical issues, we will try to bring in the complexity of the agrarian social structure in India.

Diverse Approaches

The agrarian question in India has been approached through diverse theoretical standpoints. Many social scientists are of the opinion that Marxist class analysis is not a suitable theoretical framework for an understanding of India’s agrarian and social structure. In general, one finds two types of arguments regarding the limitations of or rather inapplicability of Marxist categories to the agrarian question in India:

i. Indian society is a complex society where capitalist and pre-capitalist features co-exist. Therefore, it is not amenable to the two-class scheme underlying the concept of the mode of production. Remnants of bonded labour and the Jajmani system pint towards the pre-capitalist features in the Indian countryside. One can attribute this line of arguments to the late K. N. Raj.

ii.The institution of caste remains of vital importance in India. Caste is not always co-terminus with class, and at times, caste may be more important than class in explaining the existing social structure and its dynamics. We keep hearing ad nauseum that caste as an institution is unique to India, and this institution far from withering away with the advent of modernity (as many believed), has demonstrated a tremendous capacity for survival and adaptation.

Besides, one can discern the elements of a third approach in the writings of UtsaPatnaik. According to her, the complexity of the socio-economic situation in India calls for the use of Marxian tools for the analysis of the given social formation and the processes of change therein. She lays emphasis on the character of the pre-capitalist economy at the time of the British conquest and the impact of colonial rule in altering that structure. Further, this type of arguments highlights the fact that state-promoted capitalist industrialisation has expedited the process of replacement of the pre-capitalist relations of production by capitalist ones. In the field of agrarian relations, this view emphasises on the absence of a concerted attack on the total abolition of feudal forms of production and exploitation. Likewise, it underlines the character of the changes which tends to promote capitalist production in the wake of land reforms and Green Revolution. The ultimate argument is that continuing capitalist transformation of Indian agrarian structure can very well be grasped in a Marxist framework.

In a related vein, the Marxist historian D. D. Kosambi extends the mode of production framework to ancient India as well. According to him, the origin and historical function of caste in India cannot be understood without an analysis of its economic basis, and hence changes in the caste system itself through the nearly two millennia of its existence must be necessarily related to the transitions from one mode of production to another. He traces the origins of caste to the Aryan’s transition from pastoralism to a food-producing economy in late-Vedic and post-Vedic times in conjunction with the conquest and exploitative assimilation of non-Aryan tribes (Dasa and Shudra). In his reading, the long-drawn transition to food-production (Circa 800 BC-A.D. 400) was marked by a parallel transition from tribe to caste. Kosambi argues that the specific character of the caste system and its ideological counterpart Hindu religion, reflecting tribal acculturation, as well as the centralised absolute monarchies from the Maurya to the Gupta periods, were necessitated by the material requirements of expanding food production in a hostile environment. The subsequent endless proliferation of sub-castes or jatis and the ever-growing Hindu pantheon of gods and goddesses reflected the developing division of labour within the settled village, combined with the continued acculturation of the tribal elements. Tribal endogamy and commensality was now continued as caste endogamy and commensality within the new food-producing economy. Even today in few tribal pockets, as food-gathers and shifting cultivators find their former environment being destroyed they are integrated into the established village as outcastes performing labour for others or as yet inferior sub-caste i.e. exploitative integration of aboriginal food-gathers into a food-producing economy.

The Question of Class Structure

Following from the above, and expectedly, much of the scholarly discussions in agrarian sociology have revolved around the economic and social characteristics of classes in rural India. A large number of economists and sociologists in India have contributed to these theoretical debates on the basis of both ethnographic field studies and large-scale survey data. We will attempt to give you a flavour of such scholarly endeavours in what follows.

In one of the earliest studies of agrarian class structure, Ramkrishna Mukherjee in his Six Villages of Bengal classified households under different categories on the basis of household occupation. Mukherjee notes economic differentiation, decline of average size of holdings except among landlords and professionals, slow disintegration of middle group of self-employed peasants and artisans, and the swelling of the ranks of bargadars (share-croppers), labourers and the destitute. Employing Marxian framework, Mukherjee posits the following classification of different agrarian classes:

• Jotdar and big raiyats
• Rich farmer
• Ryot
• Non-cultivating owner, petty employer, rentier, artisan
• Ryotbargadar

  In another instance, Andre Beteille in his much talked about monograph Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a TanjoreVillage focuses on the organisation of production, that is, the relations which are entered into by the members of the village, among themselves and with outsiders, for the purpose of production. Essentially, he explores the agrarian class structure of the village concerned for class system is a system of social relations entered for the purpose of production as manifest in a given productive organisation. Since the economy of the village is primarily based upon agriculture, the relations of production consist of relations between categories of persons contributing in different ways to the process of agriculture. Viewed thus, he puts forth three-fold class structure: landowners, tenants and labourers.

Yet, this way of looking at the agrarian classes confounds Marxist understanding of class. As a consequence, Beteille has been criticised for the deployment of the three-fold class stratification as juridical-descriptive categories, and not as analytical categories. The fact of owning land, or the fact of cultivating leased-in land does not by itself confer class status in the Marxist sense. What does define class status in the Marxist sense is whether the producer exploits the labour of others through obtaining profit, rent or other means.Or whether the cultivator is self-employed, or whether he himself is exploited. A landowner can belong to any of the several distinct classes in the Marxian sense. He may be a poor peasant or a landlord. In much the same vein, a tenant can also be poor peasant, small peasant, middle peasant, rich peasant or capitalist.

Although Beteilleclarifies: “…that landowners and tenants constitute distinct entities only as conceptual categories, and not as concrete groups of individuals. One and the same person may be, and not infrequently is, both an owner of land and a tenant on somebody else’s land. It is essential to appreciate this multiple class affiliations, since because of it one and the same person is often pulled by conflicting interests in different directions. This has the general consequence of preventing class interests from becoming sharply focussed and classes from being clearly ranged against each other.

Even otherwise, Beteille considers three types of factors which have had effect on the agrarian hierarchy: Market forces; Governmental Measures such as land reforms, minimum wages; and Political action. Market forces have brought about changes in the association between caste and landownership in most parts of the country whatever be the pace of such changes. Way back in the 1950s, F. G. Bailey in Caste and the Economic Frontier noted the marketization of land in Orissa. Once land came into the market it was common for some castes, whose members did not own any land in the past, to be able to buy it. Concomitantly, there was a decrease in the percentage of land owned by the traditional landowning castes. In fact, in the 19th century it was fairly easy to discern a high degree of correspondence between caste and agrarian hierarchy. For example, in Beteille’s field village of Sripuram, Brahmins were the landowners, Non-Brahmins were generally the tenants, and AdiDravidas were the labourers. This symmetry started getting dented once the Brahmins started selling land and Non-Brahmins started buying it. Also, the Adi-Dravidas took to tenancy. This is the case of movement from harmonic sort of inequalities to disharmonic ones. That is, a change from a system of cumulative inequalities to one of the dispersed inequalities, or from a relatively closed to a relatively open system of stratification. Indisputably, there are two trends that can be discerned:

a. Transfer of land from landowning to cultivating castes.

b.A high concentration of land within a single caste, for example, Vokkaligas in Karnataka

In general, wherever land was held by castes such as Brahmins and Kayasthas, they have often sold it and moved to the cities in search of careers in the professions and the services. They have always been the non-cultivating owners. Wherever it was held by those who were cultivators by tradition such as Jats or whose traditions did not lead to urban employment such as Rajputs, they have retained it and in some cases strengthened their control over the land. Coming of land into the market does not mean that it will come to be more widely distributed among the different castes. More often than not, it could be a case of land being bought and sold by the members of the same caste. There is little evidence of land being bought by the lower castes in a big way. One also comes across the reverse process where the transfer of land is from the small holders to large proprietors. However, one should not forget that owner is socially superior and tenant is socially inferior.Likewise, tenants are socially superior as compared to labourers. Jats would prefer to be sharecroppers than labourers.

Beyond Class: Chayanov and Agrarian Populism

Even as there has been large number of studies inspired by the Marxian framework, there has always been the contending tradition of agrarian populism pioneered by Chayanov. Chayanovian understanding of the peasant economy subsequently informed dominant anthropological understanding of peasant society and culture. We present below some of the salient aspects of Chayanov’s agrarian populism:

i. Peasant economy involves an intrinsic social relation: self-exploitation of labour power. The measure of self-exploitation is the number of days in the year which the peasant ‘compels’ himself to work. The inequalities within peasant society spring from this subjective relation and do not involve exploitation of some people by the other.

ii. Peasant economy reproduces itself through the family. The family is the progenitor of family life-cycle and of population growth. It is the owner of property. As such, it expresses the fact that the aim of production is household consumption, not feudal rent or bourgeois profit. In other words, peasant world signifies subsistence motivation and static economy.

iii. Peasant economy embodies a contradiction between human needs and the forces of production. This is what generates the laws of motion of both household and economy and which propels agricultural production towards more highly developed system of cultivation and more valuable products. But, this contradiction is not antagonistic. Not only is the scale of peasant production technically appropriate, it is also more appropriate, more efficient and more competitive than capitalist production. Peasants do not need to earn a profit; where capitalists go bankrupt, peasants survive.

In sum, Chayanov had a definite theory of the relationship between peasant labour-power and means of production. It was based on a non-social view of human nature – sometimes utilitarian man, who exercises choice and whose behaviour is analysed as a set of revealed preferences; sometimes man as the agent who determines the goal of his own labour, in the sense of production for the sake of consumption, sometimes quite specifically for the sake of subsistence.

Chayanov belonged to the neo-populist tradition – Russian populist tradition in social science and rural statistical agronomic and extension work which can be dated roughly from the turn of the century. The neo-populist tradition stressed the viability of peasant agriculture and its ability to survive and prosper under any circumstances. For the peasantry had no necessary tendency to develop the increasing economic inequalities and class antagonisms of bourgeois industrial society. There was no tendency to create increasing groups of rich and poor or landless peasants with a more and more unstable group of middle peasants in between. The village was an overwhelmingly homogeneous community, able constantly to reproduce itself both economically and socially. Consequently, Chayanov, saw the modernisation of traditional small farming as lying along neither a capitalist nor a socialist road but as a peasant path of raising the technical level of agricultural production through agricultural extension work and co-operative organisation, at the same time conserving the peasant institutional framework of the family small holding.

Existence of Personal Bonds in Agricultural Communities

Scholars of the agrarian scene in India have often debated the ramifications of the continuance, decline or disappearance of personal ties binding different groups and classes which are engaged in agriculture. Personal ties of dominance and dependence, Jajmani system, customary obligations on the part of landlords and the landless labourers and similar other non-contractual and personal bonds have historically characterised the life of the agricultural communities in India and elsewhere. Small face-to-face groups, close-knit social networks, social life centred within the community have given rise to multiplex social relations among the various constituents of agricultural communities. Kinship, caste, locality, and the values of paternalism weigh heavily on purely economic relations. In a certain sense, horizontals links of kinship and caste very often temper the vertical hierarchy based on ownership and control of land. Of course, there is no denying that there has been decline of the communitarian dimensions in recent times and the personal bonds have been reorganised to a large extent. Therefore, one finds the interpenetration of two systems in the countryside: patronage-based morality and instrumental-rational and contractual relations. One may not find the presence of conscious identity like that of Zamindars or Brahmins at the top. But, there definitely is the identity of material interests reflected in the unity of caste and class interests.

There has hardly been an agreement among scholars of the Indian scene if inequalities of wealth, power and status emanate from class or caste. We know for certain that social inequality has both material and non-material (ideological) aspects,and there is mutual reinforcement between the two. The received sociological wisdom has been to reiterate the axiom that the class inheres caste, and caste inheres class. However, there is no doubt that the distribution of land in India has been the most important material basis of inequality. As Gunnar Myrdal rightly remarked, ‘inequality is, in fact, mainly a question of land ownership with which are associated leisure, enjoyment of status, and authority’. The fact remains that a small class of people own and control much of the land where large number of people sit at the bottom of agrarian pyramid as landless agricultural labourers. In between, there exists a wide variety of tenancy relations. This inequality in the material domain is coexistent with a host of other inequalities. The truth remains though, as Bailey argues that there are many kinds of relationships that can be studied independently of caste, for example, the ownership and control of land and the relations deriving from it.But then, even in these studies, castes, and not individuals and groups are taken as the units of interaction.In general, the study of social class in India has not received the same direct attention that has been given to the caste in Indian society. One could say that the categories (such as landlords, owner-cultivators, tenant-cultivators,and agriculturallabourers) in terms of which an Indian villager thinks and acts, are not exhausted by caste. Who owns how much land is equally a relevant question in a society where land is highly concentrated among some caste groups and is in short supply among others. Of course, Marxist scholars have emphasized the fact that wealth, power, and privilege in a rural setting are invariably associated with landownership. Thus, Daniel Thorner came up with his three-fold classification of agrarian hierarchy in terms of Malik, Kisan, and Mazdoor. The stress here is on land as a fundamental basis of social cleavage.On the whole, agrarian relations in India reveal a complex and diverse picture with curious mixture of values and practices deriving from caste, customs, community traditions, market, and the state. According to P. C. Joshi, the complexity of the agrarian structure can be segregated as follows:

i.  There are areas where absentee landlordism still persists in various guises.

ii. There are areas of non-cultivating landlordism; open or disguised.

iii. There are areas of change-over from non-cultivating landlordism to commercially oriented landlordism or the large scale farming by landlords.

iv.  There are areas of transfer of land from landlords to a section of the peasantry and the emergence of a Kulak economy.

v.  There are areas of predominance of self-employed small and middle peasants.

vi. There are areas of landlessness as distinguished from areas of wage labour.

At all events, economic change cannot be adequately understood in isolation from the social framework within which it takes place. In India, economic organisation has a lower degree of autonomy. It is closely intermeshed with a variety of social institutions (kinship, caste and locality) whose functions are partly economic and partly non-economic. Major changes in economic activity also involve changes in values of social organisations. Ideally, modernisation leads to decline in values of hierarchy and sees the growth of an impersonal structure of organisations, values and norms. In India, historically speaking, there has been a remarkable association between caste or caste like organisations and the agrarian way of life.

Agriculture is not merely an economic enterprise. It has been a way of life with characteristic forms or patterns of values, and organisational configurations. Land is not only a means of production. It is a cultural asset as well. It has symbolic value. It determines one’s status in the hierarchy. Naturally, one has to factor in the social setting where agricultural operations take place. In a village or rural social system in general, caste has been important in the social system centring onagricultural production, especially the control and use of land. Land (property income) has been the objective basis of traditional hierarchy whereas caste system has provided ideological justification for social inequality. There has also been an inverse relationship between landownership and manual labour. Status considerations, style of life and the cultural norms associated with certain status groups have ensured that the high caste groups remain distant from the actual business of cultivation. Thus, Indian agrarian structure presents a curious amalgamation of agrarian hierarchy and the hierarchy of castes.

Conclusion

In a way, we can think of three approaches to the understanding of agrarian change. For us, agrarian change means change in the total systems of relationships obtaining in agrarian economies and societies. This system includes technological and environmental factors and relationships as well as social cultural ones.

System’s Approaches: This approach stresses environmental, technological and demographic factors and seeks to explain their interrelationships with the farming system. They perceive agrarian system as of inter-dependent socio-economic elements geared to the dictates of family calendar and with in-built mechanisms to ensure its survival in the face of recurrent natural hazards. The peasant communities are represented as stable systems. Many features of peasant economy and society may be understood as mechanism which function in such a way as to share resources to prevent the development of gross inequalities and thus roughly to maintain a state of equilibrium with the community as a whole. The natural environment supplies one set of factors affecting agrarian systems –of more immediate and direct relevance – and these and the way they work are intimately related to the technologies employed by people in making use of natural resources. Demographic factors, the density of population and the trends of population growth are also likely to affect these relationships.

The difficulty with such approaches to the study of agrarian societies is that because they emphasise the systemic quality of the local community, regulated by values, they can only really explain change as something which comes about as the result of external forces only acting upon the local community. Thus, Scarlett Epstein’s famous study of economic development and social change in south India describes and explains the contrasting responses in two villages to the development of an irrigation system by the state. Here, the villages are held to be encapsulated by wider society or the state. It is an approach which both ignores the relationship of mutual determination between localities and state-in which each exercise some determining influence on the other – and neglects processes of change which may be internal to peasant society.

Decision-making models: This approach is concerned with the allocation of resources on the farm and with the farmers’ responses to markets and innovations. Individuals are seen as making choices about their values and actions, and thus as changing their own societies. It takes cognisance of the concept of entrepreneurship.The approach is good at explicating the success or failure of individual within the systembut the system itself is left out of analysis

Structural-historical approaches: This approach starts with the examination of the production itself. They are thus concerned with the interrelationships of people and natural environment and with the interrelationships of people in the process of production. In fact, natural environment is also seen as the creation of the interactions of people and physical environment over historical time. This approach places ownership and control of resources at the centre of analysis. The structures of social relationships and of conflict – or the social classes which are based upon differences in the ownership and control of resources by different groups of people are critically important in this approach which may be seen as one of the major sources of change. This approach also considers exchange and sales of input and the marketing of products within the agrarian economy, and a strong historical theme is that of the commercialization of agricultural production. Incorporation of the small scale producers into the market (whereby instead of producing mainly for their own use or to satisfy the requirements of those with political authority, small producers begin to produce for exchange, and come to depend upon purchases for at least some of the things that they require. The process of commoditization and the development of capitalism, or the linking up of rural households producers with capitalist production in various ways, is perhaps the dominant process of change in contemporary agrarian societies.

This approach is thus concerned with the relationships between expanding capitalism and other non- or pre-capitalist forms of production. One school of thought holds that it is the very nature of capitalism to absorb or abolish other forms or modes of production. Other scholars argue that there are often circumstances in which capitalism does not destroy other forms or modes of production and they speak of the ‘articulation’ of capitalism with other modes of production. Articulation means that there is some intervention by the social practices of capitalism within those of the other modes of production and vice versa. The approach also seeks to grasp the relationship between ‘whole’ and ‘the part’ in such a way as to comprehend their mutual determination. It particularly considers the relationships between agrarian society and the rest of the state of which it is a part.

References

• D Kosambi 1965. The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline. London:
• Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Mukherjee, Ramkrishna. 1971. Six Villages of Bengal. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
• Lerche J., Shah A. and Harriss-White B. (2013) Introduction: Agrarian Questions and Left Politics in India, Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 13 No. 3, pp. 337–350.
• Beteille, Andre. 1974.  Studies in Agrarian Social Structure. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• Patnaik, Utsa.1990.     Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: “Mode of Production debate” in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy (with a new Introduction by Theodor Shanin).
• Manchester: Manchester University Press.