The Indian Peasant as an Analytical Category

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.

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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

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"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


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


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


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 indefatigable 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.

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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


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


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 is 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


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 general 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


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


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


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-cult ivating 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?

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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

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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


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.

The Indian Peasant as an Analytical Category

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