Agrarian Classes in Contemporary India: Illustrations from a South Indian Village

Madhura Swaminathan

 

After several decades of economic growth, India remains an economy with a rural population of over 840 million people, the majority of whose livelihoods are linked to the agrarian economy (to crop and livestock farming and multiple allied activities). With such a large agrarian population, the study of agrarian relations is fundamental to the study of economic development. Since 2005, the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS) has attempted to study the development of capitalism in the countryside and accompanying changes in the nature of classes, using detailed empirical evidence drawn from village studies. Our understanding of agrarian classes in the contemporary countryside is built on data from 27 villages across 12 States, with the first of these efforts published in 2010.

In this Note, I provide illustrations from Palakurichi village in Tamil Nadu, a village located at the tail-end of the Cauvery irrigation system, a region that was known both for “its cultivation of rice and agricultural surplus, and for the particularly harsh and cruel forms of exploitation and oppression forced on the working people by feudal landlords and the state (Ramachandran and Swaminathan, 2023, p 2).” Palakurichi has been the site of scholarship for over a century: first studied by students of Gilbert Slater in 1916, it has been resurveyed four times in the last century, most recently by FAS in 2019. For a detailed account of the nature of classes in Palakurichi village, please see the chapter by Das, Mahato, Menon and Ramachandran (2023).

At a very general level, the framework we use is Lenin’s famous definition of social classes:

large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation . . . to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it.

At the same time, we are acutely aware of the enormous diversity – from State to State, and indeed, often from village to village — in the level of development of the forces of production and in the relations of production in rural India.

That’s the challenge, then: in practice, the criteria we use include the ownership of the means of production and other assets; the use of labour and the extent to which people’s labour is exploited and the extent to which they exploit other’s labour; rent exploitation; the net income and sources of income of households (Ramachandran 2011). There are also criteria and observations specific to individual villages in our studies – more on that another time.

At the top of the village social hierarchy are capitalist landlords and big capitalist farmer households. The latter are households whose members do not work at the major manual operations in agriculture, but who differ from traditional landlords in that they have emerged from rich or middle peasant families, from “cultivating castes” who gained land by acquisition. In short, their position is not on account of “inherited property and status” but emerged from “accumulation,” holding now the same social and economic power as households from traditional landlord families (Study Group, 2016). This section has now, in practice, fused with the class of landlords. In Palakurichi, there were eight landlord and big capitalist farmer households in 2019, of whom six came from traditional Naidu landlord families and the remaining two were from the Padayachi caste (a non-Brahmin caste classified as “Backward Class” in Tamil Nadu). Comprising 2 per cent of the population, they owned 38 per cent of agricultural land in the village, with an average holding of 26 acres, or ten times the average among all land-owning households.

Manual workers or those dependent on incomes from wage labour constitute the class at the other end of the socio-economic hierarchy. It is no longer possible, we argue, to separate a class of purely agricultural workers from other wage workers, as most households receive earnings from agricultural and non-agricultural laboring out. In 2019, wage workers comprised 46 per cent of all households in Palakurichi, further disaggregated as skilled (12 per cent) and unskilled and semi-skilled workers (24 per cent). Even among the latter group, less than a quarter of household incomes came from agricultural wages. The majority of wage workers (60 per cent) were from Scheduled Caste or other oppressed caste households that constituted the core of agricultural workers and farm servants in the past. There were no old-style permanent labourers or farm-servants in the village in 2019.

The peasantry in India remains an important social class even as it transforms over time, and the difficult task has been to examine differentiation among the peasantry. The application of these criteria are contextual and need to take account of the specific features of capitalist development of agriculture in the region. There are two important features of Palakurichi and other villages we have studied. First, the widespread participation in output markets although the extent of marketed output depends on many factors, and varies across peasant households. The second factor is the nature of the labour process being such that almost all households hired labour for crop operations, especially for major operations such as transplanting and harvesting of rice. At the same time, the peasantry was a big source of labour for crop cultivation as a whole.

As data on incomes for a single year are not a good proxy of long-term economic status, and all households have diversified sources of income, the two key criteria we selected were the labour ratio and ownership of the means of production and other assets (though we did correlate these with other criteria to ensure consistency). The labour ratio was defined as the ratio between the sum of number of days of family labour, and the number of days of labouring out by members of the household in agricultural and non-agricultural work (in the numerator) and the number of days of labour hired in by the household (in the denominator) (see Ramachandran 2011).

The peasantry comprised 42 per cent of all households in Palakurichi. Poor peasants, the majority of peasants, owned assets of less than a million rupees and had the highest labour ratio (of around 10). They were predominantly Scheduled Caste households with an operational holding of 1.6 acres on average. Middle peasants had a lower labour ratio (around 8) and assets valued between 1 to 2.5 million rupees, and rich peasants had a labour ratio that was positive but less than one (mean: 0.5) and assets above 2.5 million rupees (cultivating 15 acres on average). There were clear differences among rich, middle and poor peasants in respect of extent of land owned and cultivated, ownership of means of production, and level of crop incomes (and overall household incomes).

An important feature of rural society is the growing proletarianisation of the peasantry. First, all poor peasant households and most middle peasant households participated in the market for hired labour, receiving earnings from wage labour in agriculture and outside the agricultural sector, including in towns outside the village of residence. Secondly, even poor and middle peasants hired in labour to work on their farms, often exceeding the extent of family labour expended on the farm, a phenomenon reflecting growing mechanization and the need for time-bound completion of crop operations. Indeed, “if the labour power deployed by a poor peasant household in a year is divided in to three parts – family labour on the farm, farm work for wages, and non-farm work for wages – the share of the first element in the total is low” (Study Group 2016).

Further, “there are specific and identifiable gender dimensions” to the process of proletarianisation (see the chapter by Ramachandran 2020). Gender-disaggregated data on family labour and hired labour from FAS village surveys shows that women’s labour on own farms or family farms is usually lower than men’s labour on own farms. But, of labour hired to work on a peasant farm, women’s labour usually exceeds that of men. Women’s participation in wage labour is also distinct from that of men, as it is largely in agricultural operations within a village or its environs as compared to the huge expansion of non-agricultural wage labour among men (at much higher wages). We have argued that statistical observations of low work participation reflect the lack of employment available to women not their choice to opt out of the workforce (see the Introduction by Ramachandran and Swaminathan 2020).

Looking back over a century, we find elements of continuity and change in agrarian relations in Palakurichi village. The class of landlords now includes traditional landlords operating as capitalist landlords and big capitalist farmers who have emerged from among rich and middle peasants. Although fewer in number and with less social and political control over the village than earlier, this class stands apart in terms of level of incomes and assets and diversification of income and assets. The class of manual workers, the biggest section of the village, comprised households dependent on wage labour, though no longer as “pure” agricultural workers. While the majority of wage workers were Scheduled Castes, this was the most caste-heterogeneous class in rural society. The peasantry exists but is clearly “a class in transition,” as members of the peasantry relied increasingly on wage earnings from a variety of non-agricultural jobs. There seems to be a distinct gender dimension to the process of proletarianisation, with women (more than men) in peasant families engaged in wage labour in agriculture alongside women from manual labour families. These gender differentials in patterns of rural work need further study.

Madhura Swaminathan is Professor and Head, Economic Analysis Unit, Indian Statistical Institute Bangalore. She is also a Trustee of the Foundation for Agrarian Studies. 

 

This is part of a series of specially curated blog posts in which authors are invited to reflect on the theme of ‘Agrarian Questions’, highlighting different, even novel, ways of interpreting and engaging with the core questions of agrarian political economy in different historical and contemporary contexts. The posts will be released over the coming months as part of the 25th year celebrations of the Journal of Agrarian Change. You can find the full series of blog posts here.

Image by Michael Foley via Flickr