Agrarian Structure: Caste and Class in Rural India

The single most important resource in rural India is agricultural land. It is not just a means of livelihood; it is the primary form of property. Yet this resource is distributed very unequally. In some regions, the majority of rural households own at least some land — usually very small plots. In other areas, as many as 40 to 50 per cent of families own no land at all. These landless families depend entirely on agricultural labour or other kinds of work for survival. At the other end, a small number of families are well-to-do, while the majority live just above or below the poverty line.

Women are almost always excluded from land ownership. The prevailing patrilineal kinship system and mode of inheritance mean that even though the law gives women an equal share of family property, in practice they have only limited rights and access to land — and that too only as part of a household headed by a man.

The Agrarian Structure and Class

The term agrarian structure refers to the distribution of landholding. Because agricultural land is the most important productive resource, access to it shapes the rural class structure. It largely determines what role a person plays in agricultural production.

• Medium and large landowners can earn sufficient or even large incomes from cultivation. However, this depends on fluctuating agricultural prices and factors like the monsoon.
• Agricultural labourers are usually paid below the statutory minimum wage. Their incomes are low, their employment is insecure, and most are daily-wage workers who do not have work for many days of the year. This is called underemployment.
• Tenants — cultivators who lease land from landowners — have lower incomes than owner-cultivators because they must pay a substantial rent, often 50 to 75 per cent of the income from the crop.

Agrarian society can therefore be understood in terms of its class structure. But this class structure is itself shaped by the caste system.

The Caste–Class Relationship

The relationship between caste and class in rural India is complex and not always straightforward. One might expect that higher castes have more land and higher incomes, and that there is a direct correspondence between caste and class all the way down the hierarchy. In many areas this is broadly true, but not exactly.

For instance, in most areas the highest caste — Brahmins — are not major landowners, and so they fall outside the agrarian structure even though they are part of rural society. In most regions, the major landowning groups belong to the upper castes. In each region, there are usually just one or two major landowning castes, who are also numerically very important. Sociologist M.N. Srinivas termed such groups dominant castes.

Examples of dominant landowning groups include:

• Jats and Rajputs in Uttar Pradesh
• Vokkaligas and Lingayats in Karnataka
• Kammas and Reddis in Andhra Pradesh
• Jat Sikhs in Punjab

While dominant landowning groups are usually middle or high ranked castes, most of the marginal farmers and landless belong to lower caste groups. In official classification, they belong to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC/STs) or Other Backward Classes (OBCs).

In many regions, the former ‘Untouchable’ or dalit castes were not allowed to own land. They provided most of the agricultural labour for the dominant landowning groups. This created a labour force that allowed landowners to cultivate the land intensively and get higher returns.

Implications for Rural Economy and Society

The rough correspondence between caste and class means that upper and middle castes typically have the best access to land and resources, and hence to power and privilege. In most regions, a ‘proprietary caste’ group owns most of the resources and can command labour to work for them. …