THE INDIAN PEASANT AS AN ANALYTICAL

CATEGORY*

B. N. GANGULI
Emeritus Professor, University of Delhi

I confess to a feeling of embarrassment by having been invited to

inaugurate the proceedings of your conference this year. While I am
deeply sensible of the honour you have done me, I am weighed down
by the heavy load of responsibility you have cast on me. It is easy
for an economist to go out of his depths in any effort that he may make
to align his sights to the insights of sociologists. At the same time, I
feel, as you do, that it is more necessary now than ever before, for
economists and sociologists to re-align their sights on as wide a
common ground as they can find, without sacrificing their specific
pre-occupations, in order to grapple with pressing national
problems—problems that form a structured whole, although their
manifestations may be usually labelled as either 'economic' or 'socio-
logical'. It is precisely for this reason that my presence in your
midst, even when you are assembled here as a professional body, is
perhaps not only not inappropriate but is also symptomatic of the
new urge in the social sciences to break down the inter-disciplinary
barriers.
These barriers did not exist when Political Economy was born or
when sociology had not quite crystallised into a special discipline.
The founding fathers of these disciplines in the West were philoso-
phers, or social thinkers, or statesmen, or even engineers who were
deeply concerned about social problems in an era of revolutionary
changes in the economic and political environment. It was the urge for
rational social action which brought together intellectuals from the
cloistered seclusion of their professional interests on a convergent
plane of social awareness and even social commitment. Even
*Inaugural address delivered at the 12th All-India Sociological Conference on October
28,1974 at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi.

SOCIOLOGICAL BULLETIN
Vol. 23 No. 2 September 1974
154 SOCIOLOGICAL BULLETIN

in India Western learning during the early formative period of our

social thinking transmitted the comprehensive sweep of the know ledge
acquired by Western political and social philosophers and political
economists, which was sharply oriented towards the analysis of
contemporary social problems. The university curricula in the social
sciences even fifty years ago bore the impress of this broad eclecti-
cism of social perception. You may be surprised to hear that for the
honours course in economics, our basic texts included
Mackenzie's Social Philosophy, Cole's Social Theory, Delisle Burns'
Political Ideals, Willoughby's Political Philosophy. At the postgra-
duate level, there was a widening and deepening of this broader context
of the social sciences. Sociology had not yet emerged as a unique
university discipline, but what a perceptive student of economics or
political science learned in those days enabled him to respond to the
challenge of contemporary social and political problems. My first ever
essay in economics was one entitled The Problem of Professional
Beggary in Calcutta which became the theme of a leading article in the
Statesman. I am, therefore, unabashed when I stand before you with
the hope that economists and sociologists, who have, strangely enough,
parted company and turned away from the pristine preoccupation of
both, viz. social action, will recapture the old inspiration of the social
sciences and correlate their insights at the present junc ture of our
national life—a 'crisis situation, as many of you may be inclined to
describe it.
The theme of my address has been so designed as to show how
economists and sociologists may realign their sights through a fruitful
interpenetration of their categories of thought. The peg on which I
propose to hang my reflections is the entity that we call the "Indian
peasant". How do economists and sociologists regard him as an
analytical category ? Where are our differences and points of contact ?
Can we learn from our differences or go our own ways ? What happens
when we do so ?
Let me at the outset define what I mean by "analytical category". In
logic, a category is a series or order of all the predicates or attributes
contained under a genus. The question that I ask is, what are the
generic attributes of the Indian peasant as we see him ? More simply
stated it would be, what is the concept that the Indian peasant stands
for ? "Category" is a word that we use to express the idea of
"situation". The word "predicament" is also used to express the same
idea, but with this difference that when we use the word
 THE INDIAN PEASANT AS AN ANALYTICAL CATEGORY 155

"predicament" we suppose that the situation is a bad or an unfor-

tunate one. The Indian peasant is an existential reality. How do we
understand his existential "situation", his "predicament" in the
Indian context today ?
Let me begin with the economist's image of an Indian peasant, or,
for the matter of that, of a peasant anywhere. It is that of an in-
dividual in a unique occupational group. The uniqueness of the
occupational group to which he belongs is realised, but he is regarded
as an individual economic subject, 'peripheral' or 'marginal' to an
urban market economy. He is subordinate to the latter, overborne in
varying degrees to the sway of capitalism. He may not be completely
market-oriented, not completely within the ambit of a monetised
economy. To that extent "economic friction" is supposed to distort
the economic process. Since he is an economic subject— a unit of
production or consumption (both viewed as economic pro-
cesses)—the focus is on the individual as a peasant and not on the
peasant society or peasant culture or peasant world -view or outlook.
The economist's attention is, however, directed to what he consi-
ders to be a more relevant problem—the uniqueness of agriculture
as a species of production. The consequences flowing from this uni-
queness for the stability or instability of the urban-oriented capita list
economy have been traced with a great deal of analytical care and
realism. The economist has discovered several striking contradictions :
(1) Agriculture is not one industry, but several industries rolled into
one. (2) While agriculture is broadly subject to diminishing returns,
manufacturing industry obeys the law of increasing returns. (3) Even
when this fundamental contradiction ceases to be a significant source
of economic disturbance, as the result of the application of modern
science to agriculture, there is the peculiar combination of an inelastic
demand for agricultural products with their inelastic supply. This
leads to a further contradiction : a comparatively static rural
community being convulsed from time to time by fluctua tions of
output and prices taking the form of what is called the "cobweb
effect"—an initial disturbance of price and output equilibrium leading
away from equilibrium, rather than towards it as in a fluid competitive
market. (4) Agriculture, contrasted with manufactures, is a kind of
depressed industry, there being a long-run trend for resources to be
transferred from agriculture to industry. Ricardo's Pessimism about the
increasing burden of the social surplus as rent is matched by this
equally pessimistic view of agriculture being a
156 SOCIOLOGICAL BULLETIN

depressed industry in an industrial civilization. The peasant's world

thus seems to be a cupboard in which a number of skeletons have
been quietly hidden away.
Two recent developments have, however, served to deepen the
economist's insight into the complexity of the peasant problem. First,
there is now a deep concern about the strategic disadvantage from
which the peasant suffers in an urban industrial civilization. This is
the consequence of the broad trend towards a direct impact of
politics on economic policy which is reflected in the economist's
wish to bring about better economic and social conditions for certain
sections of the population, or for national or other local groups. In
this connection, the nature of the economic units and the distribution
of management and rights of property are considered questions of
cardinal importance. This is a matter that concerns both indus try and
agriculture, and it is now better realised that the distribution of
management and rights of property are of crucial importance in the
agricultural sector of the economy.
Secondly, there is now a tendency amongst economists to talk of a
peasant household, not a peasant as an individual producer or
consumer. The 'household sector' now figures as a general
category in national income accounting. But the peasant household
has now acquired a wider significance. In an attempt to define it, the
economist imagines that the family is the unit of production and, in
some cases, the household may include hired workers and domestic
servants, if not serfs. The mixed occupational status of the peasant
household is frequently emphasized to take care of the fact that the
peasant family may be partly engaged in handicraft production or
hired labour. The economist also recognises that the peasant
produces not only for the subsistence of the household but also for
exchange. By successive steps that the economist has taken towards
actual reality, he has reached a position where he can talk of a peasant
economy, but not a peasant society. Some of you might think that
although a bridge of a sort now spans economics and sociology, it is
still a shaky and creaking structure that cannot carry heavy intellectual
traffic. Frederic Le Play said in the last century that the family, not the
isolated individual, is the significant unit for understanding society and
that the family organisation of workers must be studied in order to
understand society as a whole. This frame of reference gets blurred
when the economist thinks of a 'peasant economy' and not a 'peasant
society', although there is no doubt that
 THE INDIAN PEASANT AS AN ANALYTICAL CATEGORY 157

when his focus turns on family and household, he seems to be

tanta lizingly near the sociologist's territory,
How have the sociologists treated the peasant as an analytical
category ? Do they begin where the economists end ? I am reminded, in
this connection, of the remarkable methodological shift in socio logy
towards what may be correctly described as "economic sociology"—a
shift more specifically associated with Karl Marx and Max Weber.
Marx did not recognise any distinction between economic and social
aspects of human life and, according to him, even the simplest
categories like 'labour', 'exchange' or 'production', presuppose the
existence of the "structured whole" of society, each of these categories
being related to a determinate stage of social deve lopment. Similarly,
Weber's analysis ran in terms of the institutional structures of the
system of economic activity and he took care to indicate the range of
variation to which the structured whole is subject. Radically different
structures, such as those one notices in Oriental societies, were,
according to Weber, not arrested stages in unilinear development, but
were simply different. It would, therefore, seem to be logical to
understand the peasant, or, in our context, the Indian peasant, as a
category in the Marxian sense, i.e. in relation to the "structured
whole" of society in a determinate stage of social development. Or, if
one is a non-Marxist, a la Weber one has still to enquire how the range
of the peasant's economic activity is determined by the institutional
structure of the society in which he lives, and how far he represents
not an arrested stage of social or economic development, but a variant,
an institutional structure of a different kind.
While we reflect on "economic sociology" as the basis of the
two-dimensional image of the peasant, which sociologists have
fashioned, a common theme has been the economist's theory of
division of labour. Marx, Weber, Durkheim and many others have
treated this theory as a kind of matrix around which our ideas about
the generic characteristics of peasants have been moulded into shape
and certain distinctive sociological approaches have appeared in
fairly sharp outline.
As regards these generic characteristics, sociologists tend to accept
the economist's present day characterization of the peasant's house-
hold economy, but they have amplified their range of vision by
fastening on Le Play's emphasis on the significance of family as the
unit of peasant property, and on 'socialization' and 'sociability'. In
158 SOCIOLOGICAL BULLETIN

the Indian context, the significance of the family or the household

economy can be analysed in terms of its caste status. Our exercise
has not always borne either fruit or light in this direction, because of
the complexity of the phenomenon that the Indian peasant is. I am
not so sure that the notion of a self-sufficient peasant household does
not act as deterrent to fresh thinking. There is another uncertain
generic characteristic—the specific traditional culture related to the
way of life of small village communities. Sociologists seem to have
uncovered certain socially determined norms and cognitions in order
to fix the specific cultural features of the peasants. These features
are summed up as 'traditional' and 'conformist' attitudes, and, from
the policy-making point of view, they are implicit, in the slogan of
'tradition' versus 'modernity'. A considerable amount of slipshod
thinking has been generated in this context, which has even poisoned
the springs of correct social action. We have, by now, become familiar
with a number of generalizations about peasant psychology and
peasant culture, such as the following : (1) The peasant has the
attitude of withdrawal and unwillingness to make use of opportunities ;
(2) he is slow to change his pattern of behaviour; (3) he is resigned to
his fate and passive when he is faced with prospects ; (4) he is
apprehensive of the world outside his village, hostile in interpersonal
relations and resigned to the will of God. I do not think that you
agree that a peasant society has a consistent system of values in all
parts of India. Moreover, it is perhaps time that we seriously
examined the reality, or the lack of reality, underlying such
generalizations as I have mentioned. Indeed, we cannot lightly
brush aside Gorky's attempt to understand the Russian peasant of
old days. In the 19th century Russian literature, the Russian peasant
was depicted as good-natured and thoughtful and as an indefatiga ble
searcher after truth and justice. Let me quote what Gorky says about
his actual experience : "In my youth I searched for such a man across
the Russian countryside and did not find him. I met there instead a
tough, cunning realist who, when it was favourable to him, knew quite
well how to make himself out as a simpleton. By nature the peasant is
not stupid and knows it well (Gorky, On the Russian Peasantry).
There are three main theoretical structures which have a bearing
on the understanding of the peasant as an analytical sociological
category. They are rather the three approaches which, as I said,
have emerged in sharp outline.
 THE INDIAN PEASANT AS AN ANALYTICAL CATEGORY 159

First, there is the ethnographer's view, according to which peasant

societies represent an old tradition surviving as a 'culture lag', owing
to the inertia of these societies. Perhaps, as an offshoot of this, there
is the French sociologists' view of the peasant society as a 'system',
which, in its more modern version, is the structuralist-functional
conception of a peasant society. One may argue that this is an
inadequate model for understanding social change, for if a system
is really functional any change must destroy it. On reflection, I have
come to the conclusion that what a structuralist- functional view
implies is perhaps what some of the early economists understood by a
"stationary state" and the modern mathematical economists
understand by "static equilibrium". A "stationary state" does not
imply that it is changeless. The stationary solution of a dynamic
process is that, once established, it would repeat itself and the
equilibrium is ''static" in the sense that, once disturbed, the system
would move over time so as to approach it again asymptotically.
Economists lay stress on whether the system reacts to change
instantaneously or non- instantaneously. We may imagine, in this
connection, the behaviour of a pendulum obeying Newton's Laws of
Motion, perhaps with the additional complication of a pendulum
moving in viscous fluid, which encounters 'friction'.
Secondly, there is the Marxist theoretical structure, according to
which the peasant society is characterised in the following manner :
(1) that there is a dualism between the traditional (cohesive) peasant
society and the modern (organic) capitalistic society ; (2) that the
peasant society is a survival of an earlier social formation ; (3) that,
although it remains at the bottom of the social power-structure, it
stubbornly retains its archaic backwardness ; (4) that the political
subjection of peasants is interlinked with their cultural backwardness
and economic exploitation through taxes, rent burden, unfavourable
terms of trade and high interest charges, so that the peasants who
were the suppressed and exploited producers of pre-capitalist
societies have not succeeded in changing their role of
"underdogs".
A significant fact that is frequently missed is that Marx was intri-
gued by the stubbornness of the peasant and peasant societies some-
times taking the form of peasant revolts. The 'stationariness' of
peasant societies in Oriental countries claimed a good deal of his
persistent attention, although his main focus was on the development
of capitalism in Europe. Marx was impressed by the fact that the
 160 SOCIOLOGICAL BULLETIN

stubbornness of the Oriental peasantry was rooted in the stability that

the social system ensured on the basis of stable production relations
and the production of use-values, which prevented the accumulation of
capital and emergence of capitalism. As Marx said, the "disin-
tegrating action" of trade "hardly disturbed the ancient communities
of India, or Asiatic conditions in general" (Marx in Grundrisse).
Marx also noted (in Grundrisse) that of all the forms of collective
ownership, the form that constituted the Asiatic mode of production is
"the one that survives longest and most stubbornly". Marx
observed the combination of agriculture with craft industry as a
system of production that sustained the stability of basic production
relations. He even described the landowner as an "important func-
tionary in production in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages"
who was farthest from the bourgeoisie of today. Marx thus viewed
the peasant society as a stationary society which had considerable
regenerative power and repeated itself through the pendulum swings of
social, economic and political change. Nevertheless, it was not an
idyllic world. The foundation of this world was Oriental despotism,
patriarchal social relations and the abject subordination of the
masses of the rural population to the State and the community.
Marx took care to admit that in this world man was closely integ-
rated into the "natural conditions of existence", but he saw the fatal
flaw in the fact that man was integrated into the community "whose
property he was himself up to a certain point". Thus, according to
Marx, the only means of escape (not necessarily final) was "the dis-
solution of both free petty landownership and of communal landed
property, based on the Oriental commune" (Grundrisse).
Let me now mention the third approach represented by the
Durkheim-Kroeber thesis. It incorporates the "culture-lag" thesis
to the extent to which the lag represents the difference between the
traditional cohesive peasant society, on the one hand, and the organic
'modern' society, on the other hand. The implicit dualism is not the
same as the Marxian dualism between the pre-capitalist and capitalist
social formations. The uniqueness of the peasant society is recognised
a la Marx Weber. What is emphasized however, is the symbiosis
between the two segments of society—existence, side by side, of two
dissimilar organisms acting and reacting on each other through the
system of division of labour. This is, so to speak, a theoretical frame
of part-societies and part-cultures, peasant societies forming partly
open segments of a town-centred society. This is a
 THE INDIAN PEASANT AS AN ANALYTICAL CATEGORY 161

theory which is most congenial to the outlook of a town-centred

society, which also colours its city-bred planning for economic
growth and its current growth theories of which its economists have
been the most powerful exponents.
Most of us will be disposed to conclude that each of the three
approaches that I have reviewed represents partial truth and reflects
only part of the characterisation of peasants or peasant societies.
The reality is richer and more complex than the generalizations. But
the gap seems to be too wide even conceptually. We are not sure
whether the fact of duality is a permanent phenomenon or a passing
phase. We are not sure whether we should adopt a class approach or
non-class approach. We are not certain whether the peasant society,
as a part-segment, can, in reality, be 'peripheral' or 'marginal' in a
predominantly agricultural country like India. But can we easily
take care of the contradictions within a countradiction ? How long
shall we ignore the reality of a fragmented rural society fissured by
group conflicts, even if we hesitate to think in terms of the loose
expression "class conflict" ?
A number of awkward questions arise, as a matter of fact, in the
Indian context, to which I propose to turn now.
Is our peasant society a survival from the past, representing survival
of 'non-development'—the ethnographer's entity of a 'stationary state'
or 'static equilibrium' ? From the angle of Marxist dialectics,
non-development or stagnation is a contradiction, and every contra-
diction implies a principle of its development and disappearance.
This si how one must understand Marx's preoccupation with the
stubbornness of peasant societies. Even after a revolution, old
structures recreate themselves and develop substitute conditions of
existence and their reactivation depends upon the peculiar national
or even local, conditions. On a much lower plane, the so-called
agrarian transformation through land reforms and otherwise has not
prevented the older elements from recreating and reactivating them-
selves. We have in India the phenomenon, broadly speaking, of the
super- imposition of modern institutions and urban ideas of social
change on a social structure containing older elements. In the result,
one should expect distortions. The nature of these distortions is not
always clearly understood.
It would not be entirely wrong to maintain that the distortions
are perhaps exaggerated. Is not there an approximation between
the town and the countryside ? Is not there urbanization of the
162 SOCIOLOGICAL BULLETIN

countryside by proxy through the demonstration effects of urban

standards of consumption, urban ethics, or rather the lack of it, and
urban motivations devoid of sound work ethic ? Does not the black
market economy have its conduit pipes and transmission lines even
in the remote villages ? Have not the predatory, but subtle,
methods of economic exploitation and fraud become as much rural
as urban phenomena ? Do not we then find a rural-urban continuum
rather than 'part segments' and 'part-cultures' ?
In order to have a proper perception of the 'distortions' which one
should normally expect, one should imagine a disequilibrium due to
external shocks on a pendulum moving in viscous fluid. These shocks
have come from two directions and have reinforced each other.
First, a system of values, according to which the separation between
private interest and social function has become more or less complete,
Has upset equilibrium in the agrarian social structure more
profoundly than we imagine. The change is more profound than
was imagined several generations ago when we thought in terms of
Maine's theory of change from status to contract. Sharply diffe-
rentiated interest groups have emerged. Conflict or coalition of
these groups is a contradiction that operates within the basic general
contradiction represented by the caste system. This makes the gene ral
direction of the movement quite uncertain, depending upon cir-
cumstances. Secondly, there is the external shock of State policies
designed on the assumption that the peasantry is a homogeneous
class—an assumption flowing from the fact that the planners thought it
was enough for them to plan for the 'rural sector' or the 'agricultural
sector' (the two being often considered identical). The second shock, I
need hardly say, has created favourable conditions under which the
intensity of the disturbance caused by the first shock has been
accentuated-
Let me briefly mention some of the distortions as I visualize them.
Take land reforms. Our principal aim, as everywhere else, has been
to liberate the productive forces in agriculture by eliminating the
exploitative or parasitical 'feudal' elements and returning land to the
tiller of the soil. This aim has been frustrated to the extent to which
the creation of new peasant proprietors has meant increasing oppor-
tunities of obtaining a large social surplus for a more numerous
class without commensurate increase in productivity. The actual
tillers of the soil—the tenants or the share-croppers or the agricul-
tural labourers—forming the bulk of the rural society have been left
 THE INDIAN PEASANT AS AN ANALYTICAL CATEGORY 163

behind, if we take into account the uncertain burden of rent, insecurity of

tenure and the generally depressed levels of agricultural wages. There
has been no lessening of the inequality in the distribution of land. This
has been reflected in the widening income-gap between the haves and
the have-nots. From the sociological point of view, the distortions
have been diverse. A new "property-privileged class", as Max Weber
has put it , has arisen in place of the old class of landlords. The old class
was peripheral to the rural community, insofar as it had become an
absentee class ; or, if it was part of the rural society, while once it
owed certain hierarchical responsibilities of an archaic society, or
provided traditional leadership, it had later become effete and
functionless, on the whole. But the new class is very much at the
centre of the rural scene, exercis ing its money-power, privileges and
strategic position in its own interest and providing a kind of leadership
which often combines lack of scruple, cunning and predatory greed
with old time authoritarian leadership. I accept Max Weber's lead in
saying tha t "the differentiation of classes on the basis of property
alone is not 'dynamic'. It is not uncommon for very strongly privileged
property classes such as slave-owners, to exist side by side with such
far less privileged groups as peasants or even outcas ts without class
struggle" (Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic
Organization, Free Press Paperback, 1964, pp. 425-426). I feel that
today the rural community lacks 'dynamism' in Weber's sense.
Although there is no slave -owning class in free India , not only is the
status quo frozen in the wrong direction, but it is also so strongly
entrenched that the situation is anything but 'dynamic', in spite of so
much of surface tensions and oscillations.
Control of irrigation has been a perennial basis of stable rural
communities in the East. Marx had noted this, and although he
spoke of Oriental despotism, his sense of realism was so strong that he
saw the social significance of vast irrigation works constructed and
controlled by the State. He viewed the landlord as an important
functionary in the scheme of the Asiatic mode of production. In
India, the landlords had owned their social responsibility of main-
taining the local irrigation systems as well as the traditional control
of the supply of irrigation. When the landlords disappeared
maintenance of small irrigation systems became nobody's
responsibility and neither the State nor local democratic
organisations of peasants in general stepped into the breach in many
parts of India. Bihar is a
 164 SOCIOLOGICAL BULLETIN

conspicuous example). The tradition of community control of forests

and common land has also been eroded, leaving the field free for
predatory land-grabbers.
I need hardly mention the tragic fate of agricultural cooperation in
rural India. Special facilities and privileges extended to cooperative
societies for production, marketing, distribution of inputs and credits
have been more or less monopolised by the new privileged property
classes in the countryside. It is the new rural power-struc ture which
has taken advantage of the subsidies granted at the expense of the
nation as a whole and is now trying to fix its level of surplus by
controlling supplies and distribution and maintaining preferred levels
of prices of essentia l agricultural commodities. There is a clear
parallelism between this and the oligopolistic structure that one
finds in Indian industry. If symbiosis has any sociological meaning, we
witness it in an ample measure but I doubt whether it is really
co-existence and interaction of dissimilar organisms. It is, in fact, the
rural-urban continuum which appears as a unified field of force.
How have we reacted to this developing situation if you agree with
me that I have not painted too unrealistically dismal a pic ture ?
Some of us are now inclined to sharpen our perception through what I
may call a taxonomic approach—differentiating the peasants into rich
peasants, middle peasants and poor peasants. In theory, such a
classification is supposed to reflect the class contradictions in the rural
society. We should, however, bear in mind several important
considerations. 'Interest groups' should not be confused with
'classes'. Such groups do exist, but their composition and alignments
are fluid and different in different parts of the country. They are not
amenable to the oversimplified class analysis to which the radicals are
accustomed. One should not ignore the fact that the shifting interest
groups in the rural society form a contradiction within the basic and
general contradiction of a society fissured by castes. One is not sure
how the two kinds of forces work themselves out in an overall
correlation of social forces. Where the aim was the revolutionary
construction of a classless rural economy, the classification of the
peasants into rich peasants, middle peasants and poor peasants was
designed to emphasize the fact of class conflict and also to intensify it by
identifying the majority, and 'neutralising' the minority, as seen in the
scale of rural property relations. It was a rough and ready method of
identification. To rely on this principle of practice
 THE INDIAN PEASANT AS AN ANALYTICAL CATEGORY 165

in a situation which does not exist in India by any stretch of imagi-

nation cannot make such sense.
Rather it would be more fruitful to study the fluid Indian situation in
depth. In view of the spatial differences in the productivity of land
in relation to population density, there cannot be any single yardstick
by which one can classify peasants on the basis of the size of holdings
or locate the class of surplus peasants as distinguished from deficit
peasants. The mixed status of the Indian peasant makes the situation
far more complicated than we imagine. Whether he is a cultivating
owner or a non-cultivating owner is not always clear, and any
identification on the basis of this criterion is a slippery procedure. A
peasant may own a small plot of land and may cultivate not only his
own land but also somebody else's land as a share-cropper or as a
tena nt. The peasant may be partly a farm hand and partly
self-employed. He may be partly a farmer and partly some thing
else—cartdriver or a moneylender, or a trader or a person partly
engaged in some other non-agricultural pursuits. There is a twin
process of persistent upward and downward mobility in economic
status and levels of living short of complete polarisation or complete
proletarianisation. Marx's theoretical construct of "the dissolution of
free petty landownership" as a kind of decisive breakthrough does not
seem to be more than a theoretical construct in the Indian context
today.
Nevertheless, it is an unquestioned fact that there is a sharp dis-
parity between the rich and the poor peasants and between the land-
owners and landless agricultural workers, at any rate in many parts of
India. Sociologists and economists must pool their resources in order
to study the degree of this disparity in a regional setting, bearing in
mind the basic operative causes. A scientific study of the regional
differences may give us eventually a reliable typology in place of the
somewhat barren exercises which have so far held the field.
In this connection, I venture to place before you a practical problem
with which policy makers are currently wrestling. Is it possible to
stratify farmers according to the new terminology in current official
parlance, viz. (a) small farmers and (b) marginal farmers'? How do we
define these vulnerable groups as readily distinguishable types whose
economic position is sought to be strengthened by the rede ployment
of plan resources for the sake of better distribution of employment
and income?
166 SOCIOLOGICAL BULLETIN

In a non-technical sense, the context is that of peasants who are

hovering at the poverty-line and at the level of low economic viability.
If the distinction between the small farmer and the marginal farmer
has any meaning, the small farmer is supposed to be a little
better-off—how much so is not clear although both seem to be on a
precarious level of productivity. Perhaps we should think of a broad
band within which both seem to lie.
Nevertheless, some awkward questions arise. How do we define
the word 'margin'? Is it the economist's concept of 'margin'? If so,
has it any operational or empirical significance? Is there any other
sense in which we should understand the word?
First, can we think of 'margin' in the sense of 'periphery'? The
answer is in the negative, because small farmers and marginal farmers
form a very broad spectrum numerically; indeed they form the core of
the farm population, taking the country as a whole. Their number
runs into millions. Are they on the 'margin' of bare subsis tence? They,
indeed, are, and the margin does not mean that they cannot sink
lower.
The economist's conception of 'margin' may be a useful working
hypothesis provided that we do not lose our sense of concrete reality.
In fact, this conception has been implicit in the traditional analysis of
the changing agrarian situation in India during the last century and a
half. The analysis runs as follows: increasing population leads to
fragmentation of holdings, which makes small holdings non-viable, and
as the result of which owner-cultivators eventually become agri-
cultural labourers or migrate to towns to form the urban proletariat.
Consequentially, land has passed into the hands of non-cultivating
owners during the days of landlordism and the richer layers of the
peasantry (not entirely functionless owners) under a regime of 'land
reforms'.
In economics, a 'margin' is supposed to be a 'margin of indiffe-
rence'. In our present context, it should, therefore, mean that a
marginal farmer is one who is on the margin of doubt whether he
should continue as a cultivating owner or become a landless agricul-
tural labourer. I may add, however, that the more or less quick
adjustment which is implicit in the marginal analysis is impeded by the
concrete fact that there are two intermediate stages through which the
farmer may choose to pass, viz. the role of a tenant farmer and the
role of a share-cropper, before he sinks to the level of agricultural
labourer. From this angle, let us look at the other aspect of
 THE INDIAN PEASANT AS AN ANALYTICAL CATEGORY 167

the 'margin', as economists understand it, viz. that the margin is

also a 'margin of transference'—a position where there is a possi-
bility of transfer of labour from agriculture to non-agriculture, from
the entrepreneurial and management functions in agriculture to the
function of a mere farm hand. What we should reckon with is the like-
lihood that the peasant can have a mixed status. Even his fragmented
holding does not yield subsistence by itself. He can obtain land on
tenancy or become a share-cropper, so that he does not become a
pure landless labourer by a quick process of adjustment.
Indeed, both the upward and downward mobility of peasants in our
rural economy has to be understood in a far more complex setting in
which we have to allow for a good deal of 'friction' or 'inertia',
although one cannot go so far as to say that the blind forces of
demand and supply do not operate with full force.
Interesting questions arise in connection with the operation of
what economists would call 'friction' or 'inertia' and sociologists
would describe as 'social forces'. We should undertake empirical
regional studies to understand why and to what extent the marginal
farmer does not become a landless farm labourer and seeks an inter-
mediate position as a tenant or as a share-cropper. Where agricul-
tural wages are relatively high, one would very much like to know
who is economically better-off—the landless agricultural labourer or
the small owner-cultivator, or the tenant- farmer, or the share-cropper?
In the light of the answer that we get, it may be possible for us to
know how far factors like 'social status' or 'land hunger' or the
'peasant way of life' are really crucial elements of the situation, and at
what points we may productively re-deploy our resources—both
institutional and financial—to raise the levels of living of the lowest
strata of the agricultural population. We may, in fact, come to the
conclusion that, for the unprivileged' 'low caste' peasants, the transi-
tion to the status of agricultural labourers is easier than for others,
because such a change although it means loss of status for the higher
castes, does not do so in the case of those for whom agricultural
labour, or even the status of domestic farm servant, or of even agri-
cultural serf is associated with their normal caste status. We may, in
this connection, study the bearing of migration out of agriculture into
towns and plantation agriculture insofar as it relates to peasants who
lose ownership of land and at the same time belong to the lowest layers
of the rural society.
Attention has recently been drawn in sociological investigations
168 SOCIOLOGICAL BULLETIN

to the wider problem of what sociologists describe as "marginal

groups'. On the assumption, that there is a hard core of peasants,
there would be 'marginal groups' who share some, but not all, of the
generic characteristics of the hard core. In the Indian context, the
theoretically 'marginal' group, as I have explained, has a mixed
status, but, by itself, it forms the hard core and, although it is numeri-
cally significant, it has a good deal of instability. The analysis of
'marginal groups' in the Indian peasant society has thus its own
specific character and complexity. Indeed, the factor of mixture of
status has great sociological and economic significance. The character
of recent economic changes and the impact of planning have
themselves created what are analytically marginal groups that dem-
and the attention of researchers. There may be other local factors at
work. For example, I cannot forget the impact on my mind of a visit
to a frontier village whose peasants, both men and women, were
seen working in the fields with rifles slung on their backs.