Agrarian Social Structure and Peasant Movements: Emerging Trends

India’s countryside is not a static world. It has been in constant flux – shaped by colonial land systems, post-independence reforms, political movements, and the quiet desperation of millions of cultivators who have seen the ground beneath them shift, sometimes literally. Understanding how India’s agrarian social structure has changed, and how those changes have fueled or frustrated peasant movements, is essential to understanding rural India itself. Two states – Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal – offer particularly instructive windows into these dynamics, where the story of land, power, and resistance has played out with dramatic intensity.

The colonial inheritance: a structure built on exploitation
Land reforms: promise, implementation, and limits
The emerging agrarian structure: growing marginalization of cultivators
West Bengal: Operation Barga and its significance
Andhra Pradesh: from Telangana to new agrarian struggles
The Naxalite movement: radical mobilization and its dimensions
Political parties, NGOs, and new forms of peasant mobilization
From radicalism to institutionalization: the long arc of agrarian struggle

The colonial inheritance: a structure built on exploitation

Before exploring what changed, it helps to understand what post-independence India inherited. At the time of independence, India’s agrarian structure was characterized by parasitic, rent-seeking intermediaries, insecure tenancy arrangements, and a small number of landholders controlling a large share of cultivated land. Under the zamindari system – dominant in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa – landlords collected revenue from peasants and passed a portion to the colonial state, exploiting their position to extract excessive rents while contributing nothing to actual cultivation.

At independence, just 7 percent of landowners controlled 53 percent of agricultural land, while 28 percent of farmers with tiny holdings owned merely 6 percent. Tenants paid rents amounting to anywhere between 35 and 75 percent of gross produce. The gap between a landlord’s accumulated wealth and a sharecropper’s bare subsistence was not just economic – it was social and political. The landed class dominated village life in all its dimensions.

Land reforms: promise, implementation, and limits

The newly independent Indian government moved quickly to address these inequities. Post-independence land reform focused on abolishing exploitative systems like zamindari, redistributing surplus land to the landless, and providing secure tenancy rights to cultivators. The policy had two stated objectives: removing structural impediments to agricultural growth inherited from the past, and eliminating exploitation to provide security for the actual tiller of the soil.

In practice, however, the outcomes were deeply uneven. One estimate is that tenancy reform laws led to large-scale evictions, resulting in the rural poor losing access to about 30 percent of the operated area in India. Landlords used legal loopholes – vague definitions of “personal cultivation,” fictitious transfers to family members – to circumvent ceiling laws. The total land distributed under ceiling laws was less than 2 percent of total cultivated land, making minimal long-term impact on land equity. Meanwhile, concealed tenancy became widespread; estimates suggest that anywhere between 15 and 25 percent of tenancies in the country are informal and legally unprotected.

The structural result was not the dismantling of the old agrarian order but its partial reshuffling. The abolition of zamindari only removed the top layer of landlords in the multi-layered agrarian structure, leaving intermediate layers intact in many states. The landed class changed its face but retained its power.

The emerging agrarian structure: growing marginalization of cultivators

A critical consequence of incomplete land reform was the increasing fragmentation and marginalization of cultivating households. Over 60 percent of holdings in India are now under one hectare – often too small for viable farming. The average holding size shrank from 2.28 hectares in 1970-71 to 1.08 hectares by 2015-16. This fragmentation, combined with population growth, the withdrawal of state subsidies, and the push of Green Revolution technology that favored better-off farmers, produced a new class landscape in rural India.

Over 76 percent of rural households in West Bengal are landless, semi-landless, or marginal cultivators facing economic insecurity. The sharecropping system’s decline was accompanied by a sharp rise in agricultural wage labor – from 15.3 percent of rural workers in 1961 to 26.2 percent in 1971. This shift reflected a deeper reality: millions of rural poor were losing their toehold as independent cultivators and slipping into precarious, wage-dependent livelihoods.

The emerging agrarian class structure in states like Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal was therefore not simply a continuation of the old feudal order. It was something more complex: a combination of residual feudal practices, rising capitalist agriculture driven by richer peasants, and a swelling mass of landless and near-landless laborers with diminishing access to credit, inputs, and markets.

West Bengal: Operation Barga and its significance

West Bengal stands out as the most significant example of reform-driven agrarian change in the post-independence period. When the Left Front government came to power in 1977, it launched an intensive drive to register sharecroppers under what became known as Operation Barga. Launched in June 1978, it bestowed on bargadars legal protection against eviction by landlords and entitled them to their due share of the produce. Crucially, the reform guaranteed sharecroppers 75 percent of the crop if they provided non-labour inputs, and 50 percent if the landlord provided them – a significant departure from the exploitative 50-50 or worse arrangements that had prevailed.

53.2 percent of the families benefitting from land reforms across the entire country came from West Bengal, a striking statistic that reflects the depth of implementation there compared to other states. The fraction of registered sharecroppers rose from 23 percent to 65 percent between 1978 and 1990, and rural poverty declined sharply while food intake and wages in the countryside increased significantly. Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities were among the primary beneficiaries – people who had historically sat at the very bottom of the agrarian hierarchy.

Yet the achievements of Operation Barga had clear limits. Critics pointed out that it distributed poverty rather than creating prosperity, given Bengal’s high population density and the inability to resolve deeper structural problems like access to credit, markets, and agricultural inputs. The program was criticized for not accounting for the high population-to-landmass ratio and the small, highly segregated landholding patterns in Bengal. Even registered bargadars remained dependent on non-institutional lenders, and the spread of Green Revolution technology in Bengal lagged far behind states that claimed no equivalent reform tradition.

Andhra Pradesh: from Telangana to new agrarian struggles

Andhra Pradesh’s agrarian history is marked by a far more radical and turbulent trajectory. The Telangana Rebellion of 1946-1951 was one of the largest peasant uprisings in Indian history. Peasants in the Telangana region fought against feudal landlords and the Nizam’s rule, demanding better wages, land rights, and an end to exploitation. The movement forced the government to implement land reforms and abolish the jagirdari system. Led by the Communist Party, peasants formed armed squads that not only defended villages but also redistributed land and dismantled traditional hierarchies in liberated zones.

The agrarian struggles in Andhra Pradesh did not end with Telangana. The state became one of the key zones where Naxalite movements later took root. The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War was founded in Andhra Pradesh in 1980 by Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, taking inspiration from the Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal. The persistence of these movements in Andhra Pradesh reflected the incomplete nature of agrarian reform and the continuing marginalization of tribal communities and landless laborers in the region.

More recently, post-liberalization development pressures have generated a new wave of agrarian mobilization. The Sompeta movement in Andhra Pradesh (2010) was rooted in local agrarian concerns but attracted broader support from civil society actors, including NGOs, and gained national visibility through information and communication technologies. These newer protests mark a shift from older demands for land redistribution toward resistance against land acquisition for industrial and infrastructure projects – a reflection of how the nature of agrarian conflict has evolved.

The Naxalite movement: radical mobilization and its dimensions

No discussion of India’s changing agrarian social structure is complete without examining the Naxalite movement, which originated in Naxalbari, West Bengal in 1967. The Naxalbari uprising was not only a spontaneous reaction against exploitative agrarian practices but also a turning point that inspired a pan-Indian insurgency. The immediate trigger was the failure of post-independence land reforms to protect sharecroppers from eviction and the continuing stranglehold of landlords over rural life.

Naxalite groups have generally claimed to represent the poorest and most socially marginalized members of Indian society – notably tribal peoples and Dalits – adhering to the Maoist doctrine of sustained peasant-led revolution. Their agenda went beyond land redistribution: it sought to overthrow existing social hierarchies altogether. The movement sought to transform – even eradicate – existing hierarchies in India, a project with the potential to build support in a society acutely aware of its own inequalities.

In areas where state institutions were absent or predatory, the Naxalites performed state-like functions, including enacting policies of redistribution and building irrigation infrastructure, running healthcare initiatives, and preventing exploitation of tribal forest communities by traders and contractors. This practical presence in neglected rural areas helps explain their enduring appeal among the most marginalized communities, even as the movement attracted severe criticism for armed violence and its costs to civilian populations.

Political parties, NGOs, and new forms of peasant mobilization

Beyond the Naxalite movement, India’s agrarian landscape has been shaped by a diverse ecosystem of mobilizing actors. Political parties – particularly left-wing formations – have played a central organizational role, channeling peasant grievances into electoral and legislative arenas. The Left Front’s record in West Bengal exemplifies how party-driven mobilization can translate into concrete agrarian reform, even when the outcomes remain partial.

NGOs have increasingly entered this space, particularly since the 1990s. Agrarian struggles have attracted support from NGOs and civil society actors who help articulate issues of gender and caste equality, leading to evolving peasant identities. Women’s participation has been a particularly significant new dimension – women actively participated in the Telangana movement and the Tebhaga uprising, and since the late 1960s, the agrarian struggles have had an increasingly explicit caste and gender dimension, as class-based exploitation intricately intertwines with caste and gender-based exploitation.

Research shows that peasant movements have evolved from radical to institutionalized forms, significantly affecting collective identity formation over time. This trajectory – from armed insurgency to organized electoral pressure to civil society advocacy – reflects the broader transformation of India’s political landscape and the increasing sophistication of peasant mobilization strategies. Where earlier movements demanded land and survival, contemporary mobilizations also address minimum support prices, debt relief, access to water, and resistance to corporate agriculture.

From radicalism to institutionalization: the long arc of agrarian struggle

What the trajectory of peasant movements in Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal reveals is a long and unresolved tension between radical and reformative impulses. Radical movements – the Telangana rebellion, the Tebhaga agitation, the Naxalite insurgency – challenged the very foundations of agrarian hierarchy through non-institutional and often violent means. Reformative movements, channeled through political parties, state programs like Operation Barga, and NGO networks, sought incremental change within existing frameworks. Neither approach alone has resolved the fundamental inequities of India’s agrarian structure.

The incomplete nature of land reform, the growing marginalization of small and marginal cultivators, the persistence of caste-based exclusion, and the arrival of new threats from land acquisition and agricultural liberalization have kept the agrarian question alive and volatile. Contemporary farmers’ protests, including the nationwide mobilizations against farm laws in 2020-2021, demonstrate the continued relevance of organized peasant action, drawing inspiration and tactical lessons from historical precedents while adapting to modern challenges like globalization and climate change.

India’s agrarian social structure is not frozen in the past. It continues to evolve – and so do the movements it generates.

What do you think? Land reforms in West Bengal succeeded more than in most Indian states, yet rural poverty and marginalization persisted – what does this tell us about the limits of state-led reform without accompanying economic opportunity? And as agrarian movements increasingly shift from demands for land to demands for price support and debt relief, does this signal a genuine transformation in the nature of peasant politics, or simply a new vocabulary for the same underlying struggle?

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Table of Contents

The colonial inheritance: a structure built on exploitation 🔗

Land reforms: promise, implementation, and limits 🔗

The emerging agrarian structure: growing marginalization of cultivators 🔗

West Bengal: Operation Barga and its significance 🔗

Andhra Pradesh: from Telangana to new agrarian struggles 🔗

The Naxalite movement: radical mobilization and its dimensions 🔗

Political parties, NGOs, and new forms of peasant mobilization 🔗

From radicalism to institutionalization: the long arc of agrarian struggle 🔗