Peasant and farmers' movements form one of the longest continuous threads in the study of collective action in modern India. Sociologists read them as barometers of agrarian change — of how land relations, market forces and state policy reshape the countryside and provoke resistance. A useful distinction runs through the literature: the older peasant movements of the colonial period, rooted in questions of rent, revenue and bondage, and the newer farmers' movements after the 1970s, driven by market grievances such as prices, subsidies and terms of trade. Understanding both, and the continuities between them, is essential for this segment of the syllabus.
Colonial-era peasant movements
The colonial period witnessed recurrent agrarian unrest as revenue extraction, indebtedness and the commercialisation of agriculture squeezed cultivators. Early revolts such as the Indigo rebellion in Bengal, the Deccan riots against moneylenders, and the Pabna agrarian leagues expressed grievances against rack-renting landlords and usurers. In the twentieth century these were increasingly organised — the Champaran and Kheda struggles under Gandhi, the Bardoli satyagraha, the Moplah rebellion, and later the Tebhaga movement in Bengal demanding a larger crop share, and the Telangana armed struggle against the Nizam and feudal landlords.
Scholars have debated how to characterise these movements. A. R. Desai read them through a broadly Marxist lens, stressing class exploitation and the anti-feudal, anti-colonial content of peasant struggle. Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies collective, by contrast, recovered the autonomous consciousness of the peasant rebel, arguing that revolt drew on community, religion and kinship rather than merely elite nationalist leadership. D. N. Dhanagare offered a differentiated account, showing how participation varied across rich, middle and poor peasants in different regions.
The new farmers' movements
From the late 1970s a qualitatively different mobilisation emerged, often called the new farmers' movements. Bodies such as the Bharatiya Kisan Union in the north, the Shetkari Sanghatana under Sharad Joshi in Maharashtra, and the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha framed their demands not around land redistribution but around remunerative prices, lower input costs, loan waivers and better terms of trade between agriculture and industry.
Sociologists interpreted this shift in contrasting ways. Sharad Joshi's own framing pitted Bharat, the exploited countryside, against India, the privileged urban economy. Scholars such as Tom Brass and Gail Omvedt debated whether these were genuinely class movements or coalitions dominated by prosperous, market-oriented farmers of the Green Revolution belt. Many observers read them as new social movements — non-party formations, using novel repertoires of protest and appealing to a broad rural identity that cut across, and sometimes masked, internal class divisions.
Caste, class and identity
A persistent analytical tension is whether these movements are best understood as class struggles or as identity assertions. The newer movements were frequently led by dominant landowning castes, and their gains often bypassed landless labourers, many of them Dalits. Feminist scholars, notably Omvedt, further asked where women cultivators stood within a mobilisation that spoke in the name of the farmer household. This overlap of caste, class and gender complicates any single reading and links this topic to backward-class and Dalit assertions elsewhere in the syllabus.
Contemporary relevance
The recent cycle of agrarian protest — the large mobilisation against farm laws that began in 2020 — revived many of these themes: prices and procurement, distrust of market deregulation, and the capacity of cultivators to organise across state boundaries. It demonstrated the continuing salience of agrarian collective action even in a rapidly urbanising economy, and confirmed that questions of who speaks for the farmer, and which farmers benefit, remain unresolved.
How to use this in the exam
Structure answers around the colonial versus post-1970s distinction, and always name theorists — Desai, Guha, Dhanagare, Omvedt, Brass — rather than describing movements generically. Use the Tebhaga and Telangana struggles for the colonial phase and the Shetkari Sanghatana and Bharatiya Kisan Union for the new phase. When a question asks about the nature of these movements, deploy the class-versus-identity debate and note the exclusion of landless and Dalit labour, showing awareness of internal differentiation. Close with a contemporary reference such as the farm-law agitation to demonstrate that the analytical categories still apply, and link the topic to agrarian structure and rural transformation covered elsewhere in Paper II.