The Structure of Indian Peasantry: Caste, Land, and Labor Dynamics

India’s countryside is far more complex than it appears on the surface. Beneath the landscape of fields and villages lies a layered social and economic structure that has governed the lives of millions for centuries. This structure is shaped not just by who owns land, but also by caste, ethnicity, religion, and language – factors that together determine who works, who earns, and who commands. To understand Indian peasantry, one of the most useful frameworks remains the three-class model developed by American economist and historian Daniel Thorner, which categorizes rural society into Maliks (landlords), Kisans (working peasants), and Mazdoors (agricultural laborers).

Why the traditional classification failed 🔗

Before Thorner’s intervention, the standard way to describe rural India was simple: landlords, tenants, and laborers. But Thorner rejected this three-way division on a straightforward ground – one and the same person could belong to all three categories simultaneously. A farmer might cultivate land he owns, lease additional land from a larger owner, and in difficult seasons hire himself out as a day laborer. Rigid categories could not capture this fluid economic reality. Thorner instead built his classification around three concrete criteria: the source of income from land (rent, cultivation, or wages), the nature of rights over land (ownership, tenancy, or none), and the degree of physical field work actually performed. This made his framework both more realistic and more analytically precise.

The three agrarian classes 🔗

Maliks: the landowning class 🔗

Maliks are the big landlords and considerably wealthy landowners who constitute the relatively affluent class in the village. Their income is derived primarily from property rights in the soil – they collect rent from tenants, sub-tenants, and sharecroppers. Their common economic interest is straightforward: keep rents high and wages low. Within the Malik category, Thorner identified two distinct sub-types.

The first are absentee landlords – typically large landholders whose estates extend across several villages. They have no direct involvement in managing or improving their land; they are essentially rentiers who live away from their holdings. The second are resident landlords, who live in the village where their land is located. While they may have more day-to-day contact with cultivators, their primary income still comes from property rights rather than personal labor. The Malik may also have subsidiary income from business or other professions, further widening the economic gap between them and those who actually till the soil.

The Malik class has historically overlapped strongly with upper-caste groups. In most regions of India, the major landowning groups belong to the upper castes, and dominant landowning castes tend to be numerically significant within their region. This overlap between caste status and land ownership is not incidental – it reflects centuries of social hierarchy encoded into property rights.

Kisans: the working peasants 🔗

Kisans are the working peasants who own small plots of land and work mostly with their own labor and that of their family members. The key distinction between a Malik and a Kisan is not just the size of landholding, but the fact that the Kisan and one or more family members actually perform field labor. This is the defining characteristic of the Kisan class – they are not just landowners or tenants, they are cultivators.

Thorner divided Kisans into two sub-categories. The first are small landowners, who have sufficient holdings to sustain their family. They neither receive rent nor regularly employ outside labor, though they may hire help during particularly demanding seasons. The second group are substantial tenants – those who may not own any land at all but cultivate large enough holdings under lease to support their family without needing to work as wage laborers. When the Kisan’s income is so low that it cannot sustain the family, members may be forced to supplement earnings by working as agricultural laborers, which shows how blurred the boundary between classes can become in practice.

Most Kisans are thought to belong to what are broadly called intermediary castes – neither the dominant landowning castes nor the lowest laboring castes. This middle position in caste hierarchy often mirrors their middle position in the economic order.

Mazdoors: the agricultural laborers 🔗

Mazdoors are the landless villagers who work as laborers on a wage basis, obtaining their livelihood primarily from working on other people’s land. They occupy the lowest rung of the rural economic hierarchy. Unlike Maliks and Kisans, they have no rights over land whatsoever. Their class may include poor tenants, sharecroppers, and the completely landless.

Mazdoors receive wages in cash and sometimes in kind. When they cannot find enough work in their own village, they migrate to neighboring districts or states – such as laborers from Bihar migrating to Punjab, or those from Uttar Pradesh moving to Maharashtra – to work in agriculture, construction, or industry. This seasonal and permanent migration is a direct consequence of the insecurity embedded in their position. Work is available for roughly six months of the agricultural year, leaving Mazdoors economically vulnerable for the remainder.

Thorner also observed that the three-class structure reflects the social order, with most Maliks drawn from upper castes and most Mazdoors from lower castes. This observation is backed by hard data: according to the 2015-16 Agricultural Census, 92% of Scheduled Caste landholdings are marginal holdings under 2 hectares, comprising just 9% of total agricultural land, with an average holding of only 0.78 hectares. The Census of India 2011 further shows that 71% of Dalits are landless laborers working on others’ land.

Caste, class, and the agrarian hierarchy 🔗

The overlap between caste and class is one of the defining features of Indian rural 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 rice-growing regions with intensive irrigation, this inequality was especially pronounced, producing large numbers of bonded or semi-bonded Dalit laborers tied to dominant landowning castes.

The relationship is not perfectly symmetrical – Brahmins, the highest-ranking caste, are often not major landowners in most regions, so they fall somewhat outside the agrarian class structure even while remaining part of village society. The major landowning groups are typically upper-middle agricultural castes such as Jats, Patels, Marathas, Reddys, or Lingayats, depending on the region. But at the bottom, the correlation is strong and consistent: lower castes are disproportionately landless laborers, and the former “untouchable” or Dalit castes were often prohibited from owning land entirely, providing most of the agricultural labor for dominant landowning groups.

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar articulated this connection with particular force. He recognized that in India’s largely agrarian society, land ownership was as much about dignity as it was about social and economic freedom. For Dalits, landlessness was not simply an economic condition – it was structural subordination enforced through caste norms. Ambedkar argued that without access to land, Dalits would remain economically dependent on and socially subordinate to landowning castes.

Relationships between classes: cooperation, exploitation, and power 🔗

The economic relationships among Maliks, Kisans, and Mazdoors are not neutral transactions – they are deeply unequal. Rich peasants and trader-moneylenders exploit poor tenants and landless laborers to such a degree that relations among these groups are consistently strained. The Malik class, controlling land and often credit, wields considerable economic, social, and political power. Even land reforms introduced after independence have not fundamentally reduced this power.

Before independence, rent paid by tenants was exorbitant. Tenants paid between 35% and 75% of their gross produce as rent throughout India during the pre-independence period. Even after tenancy reforms fixed rents at 20-25% of gross produce in most states, implementation was uneven and large landlords found ways to evade restrictions. At independence, just 7% of landowners controlled 53% of agricultural land, while 28% of farmers with tiny holdings owned merely 6% – a stark picture of concentrated rural wealth.

At the bottom, the Mazdoor class faces not just economic insecurity but also social vulnerability. Contemporary rural labor markets are increasingly characterized by casual wage labor, seasonal migration, and rural-urban movement for non-agricultural employment. Mechanization has further reduced the demand for farm labor in prosperous agricultural regions, intensifying competition for what work remains.

Alternative frameworks and critiques 🔗

Thorner’s three-class model, while influential, has been subject to scholarly critique and refinement. D.N. Dhanagare argued that Thorner’s classification lacks a strong theoretical foundation, and proposed a five-class model: landlords; rich peasants who are self-cultivating and generate a marketable surplus; middle peasants with medium-sized holdings; poor peasants with insufficient land who are forced into tenancy; and landless laborers. Dhanagare’s model pays closer attention to the gradations within the peasantry and the differential capacity of these groups to withstand exploitation.

Andre Beteille focused on ownership, control, and usage of land as the defining criteria for agrarian class, while Hamza Alavi emphasized the role of colonial capital and the integration of the rural economy into a broader capitalist system. These perspectives all share the recognition that Indian agrarian structure cannot be understood through simple binaries – it is a layered, region-specific, and historically shaped formation.

Land reforms and their limits 🔗

Post-independence India attempted to restructure the agrarian class system through a series of land reforms. The zamindari system – which created layers of intermediaries between the state and the actual cultivator – was formally abolished. Tenancy reforms regulated rent, provided security of tenure, and in some cases conferred ownership rights on tenants. Land ceiling laws set limits on how much land a single family could own, with surplus to be redistributed to the landless.

However, many landlords evaded these reforms – evicting tenants before laws took effect, transferring land to relatives, or claiming personal cultivation while actually hiring laborers. States took four to nine years to implement ceiling laws, giving landowning interests ample time to adjust. The structural overlap between caste and class ensured that those with social capital – upper-caste landowning groups – were better positioned to navigate and circumvent the new legal landscape. The agrarian hierarchy was reformed at its edges but remained largely intact at its core.

Where reforms were more seriously implemented – as in West Bengal under Operation Barga – the results were meaningful. Rural poverty declined sharply, wages increased, and marginalized communities including Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes received significant benefits, improving their social and economic standing. This suggests that the Thorner hierarchy is not immutable – it is the product of specific historical and policy conditions, and can be altered when political will is present.

The agrarian structure today 🔗

The categories of Malik, Kisan, and Mazdoor remain analytically relevant even as India’s rural economy continues to change. The Green Revolution of the 1960s introduced high-yielding seeds, chemical inputs, and mechanization – transforming agricultural productivity but also widening inequalities between regions and classes. Wealthier farmers with resources to adopt new technologies prospered, while smallholders and landless laborers often faced declining economic security. Access to capital and technology increasingly determines agricultural success alongside land ownership.

The persistence of agrarian distress is also well documented. All categories of farmers have been in distress, particularly since the adoption of the New Economic Policy in 1991, with tens of thousands of farmer suicides occurring annually due to indebtedness and economic stress. The rural poor – concentrated in the Mazdoor class and the lower strata of the Kisan class – remain acutely vulnerable, caught between insufficient land, low wages, seasonal employment, and the absence of adequate social protection.

Understanding the structure of Indian peasantry – with its intertwined dynamics of caste, land, and labor – is essential for any meaningful engagement with rural inequality in India. Thorner’s framework gives us a clear lens for identifying who benefits and who bears the cost in the agrarian economy. But the structure is not static. Land, as Ambedkar recognized, is not merely an economic resource in India: it is dignity, power, and the foundation of social freedom.

What do you think? If the overlap between caste and class is so deeply entrenched in India’s rural economy, can land redistribution alone break the cycle of agrarian inequality – or does structural social change need to come first? And given that Thorner’s model was developed in the 1950s, do the categories of Malik, Kisan, and Mazdoor still capture the full complexity of India’s contemporary rural labor relationships?

References

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