Agriculture remains the base on which the majority of Indians still stand, and the way people relate to land — as owners, tenants, cultivators or wage labourers — defines one of the most enduring structures of inequality in the country. The agrarian class structure is not a single unchanging pyramid; it has been reshaped by colonial revenue systems, land reforms, the Green Revolution and the slow reach of capitalism into the countryside. Understanding it means seeing how control over land translates into control over the labour and lives of others.
The colonial inheritance
The classes we study today were partly manufactured by colonial land-revenue policy. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 created a layer of zamindars who owed a fixed revenue to the state and extracted rent from those below them. The ryotwari and mahalwari systems produced different configurations, but everywhere the effect was to sharpen distinctions between those who held superior rights in land and those who merely tilled it. A stratum of intermediaries, sub-tenants and sharecroppers grew beneath the recorded proprietors, so that a single field might carry three or four layers of claim.
A ladder of agrarian classes
Sociologists commonly picture rural society as a ladder. At the top sit the landlords, who own large holdings but often do not cultivate themselves, living instead on rent or on the surplus produced by hired hands. Below them are the rich peasants — the substantial owner-cultivators who farm commercially, hire labour and generate a marketable surplus. The middle peasants own enough land to feed their families with family labour, neither hiring much nor hiring out. The poor peasants hold plots too small to sustain a household and must supplement income by working for others. At the base lie the landless labourers, who own no land and survive by selling their labour power, frequently drawn from Dalit and Adivasi communities. Daniel Thorner captured this range with his categories of maliks, kisans and mazdoors — those who live on property rights, those who work their own land, and those who work the land of others.
The mode of production debate
Few Indian debates have been as sustained as the argument over the agrarian mode of production, which unfolded in the 1970s. The central question was whether Indian agriculture was capitalist, semi-feudal or something in between. Scholars influenced by Karl Marx asked what forces of production and what social relations governed the land. Ashok Rudra and Utsa Patnaik argued about the correct criterion of capitalism — was it the use of wage labour, the reinvestment of surplus, or the accumulation drive of the farmer? Amit Bhaduri described a semi-feudal order in which landlords locked tenants into debt and dependence, using usury and sharecropping to block productive investment. Others countered that the Green Revolution had already set a capitalist dynamic in motion. The debate mattered because the diagnosis pointed to the cure — land redistribution, technological modernisation or revolution.
Change and its limits
Land reforms after independence abolished the great intermediary tenures and imposed ceilings on holdings, yet redistribution was modest and evasion widespread. The Green Revolution enriched the rich peasants of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, who emerged as a confident, politically assertive class — the bullock capitalists described by Rudolph and Rudolph. Meanwhile mechanisation and casualisation left many labourers more insecure than before. Distress migration, agrarian indebtedness and farmer suicides testify that the old hierarchies persist beneath new economic forms.
Caste and class in the village
In the Indian countryside class rarely stands apart from caste. Upper castes have historically monopolised land, while the tilling and labouring classes are drawn disproportionately from the lower castes and Dalits. Yet the correspondence is imperfect: dominant peasant castes have risen through commercial farming, and some formerly landed groups have declined. This overlap makes agrarian mobilisation simultaneously an economic and a status struggle, which is why caste associations and class movements so often blur into one another.
How to use this in the exam
Anchor your answer in a clear typology — Thorner's maliks, kisans and mazdoors is the safest scaffold — and then complicate it with the mode of production debate to show analytical depth. Name Patnaik, Bhaduri and Rudra to signal command of the literature, and always connect the abstract classes to concrete change: colonial settlements, land reforms and the Green Revolution. Reserve marks by weaving in the caste-class intersection and a contemporary illustration such as agrarian distress, which lets you close on why this classical topic still speaks to present-day India.