Article

The Displaced Review of Development and Change

24(1) 31–54, 2019
Threshing Yard: © 2019 Madras Institute of
Development Studies
Involutions of the Rural Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0972266119831541
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A. R.Vasavi1

Abstract
In understanding contemporary rural India, it is important to go beyond rendering
the rural as synonymous with villages and agriculture or focusing on the ‘agrarian
question’. Given the multiple contradictions that the varied ruralities of India
are exhibiting, it may be relevant to locate the rural as being constituted by the
triangulated structures of reproduced caste, an economics of neglect, and a politics
of rescue. The result of such triangulation is evident in the range of involutions
that are manifesting across rural India. These include not only a sharpened
differentiation of classes and households, but also forms of separation-integration
of key rural institutions and structures, and the erosion of rural citizens. All these
have implications for liveability and the nature of democracy in rural areas.

Keywords
Economics of neglect, politics of rescue, rural involution

The Displaced Threshing Yard: Involutions of the Rural

As an undergraduate student in Stella Maris (1977–1980), I distinctly remember
attending a graduation ceremony in college where Dr Malcolm Adiseshiah was
the Chief Guest and had delivered the valedictory lecture. Although my recollection
of his full lecture is hazy, his exhortation to those stepping out of the portals of the
college to be conscious of their citizenship roles and responsibilities has stayed
with me. That nearly four decades later I would receive this recognition made in
his honour is indeed a privilege and I thank the Trustees of the Malcolm and
Elizabeth Adiseshiah Trust for conferring this honour on me, and I thank Stella
Maris College, my alma mater, for hosting this lecture at its premises. And in
tribute to Dr Adiseshiah’s call to citizenship responsibilities and his scholarship
that represented engaged social science research and education institution-
building, I will focus on the involutions in rural India in which the citizenship
1
Independent Scholar, Bengaluru, India.
Corresponding author:
A. R.Vasavi, Independent Scholar, Bengaluru, India.
E-mail: [email protected]
32 Review of Development and Change 24(1)

rights of its residents are now in a state of freefall. At a time of hyper-globalisation

and intense delocalisation of economies, the restructuring of rural economies and
societies has rendered the rural into an involuted space characterised by
contradictory and complex conditions.

The Displaced Threshing Yard

These contradictory and complex features of the rural are perhaps best encapsulated
in the displaced threshing yard which many of us have experienced while travelling
on rural roads that have turned into threshing yards—where piles of harvested
grains are laid out on tarmac roads, and village residents exhort vehicle drivers to
go over them. The threshing yard—once a key agrarian and ritual site that was
made on the agricultural field, in which rituals of worshipping the grain heap,
threshing it and then distributing the grains were conducted—is now a displaced
entity. Small and marginal agriculturists, with handkerchief-size plots and little or
no new technologies or capital, no longer consider it worth their time and effort to
make the threshing yard, or to subject their grains and the land to ritual propitiation.
Instead, grains, typically the staples of rice, wheat, a variety of pulses and millets,
find their way to the roadside where they are crushed under the wheels of passing
traffic. The sight of this displaced threshing yard is symbolic of the changes that
India’s agriculture and rural worlds are experiencing and indicates the persistence/
resilience of small and marginal agriculturists—their dislocation from the cultural
networks of agriculture, and their desperate strategising in the face of changing
production conditions. In sum, it encapsulates the very foundation of changes in
rural India: the retention of old, foundational structural characteristics while
incorporating a range of new forces, structures, processes, agents and practices.
While the ideas of continuity and change in rural and village domains and in
the general socio-cultural fabric of India have been well accepted, there is a need
to pay attention to the multiple contradictions that such complex changes have
generated. The key contradictions in the rural include the following:
• Although real wages have increased, poverty levels have declined and
improvements in living conditions (in terms of housing and civic facilities)
are evident in most regions, there are extant forms of malnutrition,
displacement and pauperisation.
• There is a deepening of the structures of democracy through the expansion
of the panchayat system and the regularity of elections. But the question of
political representativity/representation and the deficits of democracy
persist and are growing.
• The decline of women’s participation in agricultural labour is matched by
an increase in the ‘feminisation of agriculture’ in some pockets of the nation.
• As the regime of rights (to food, education, housing) is formally promulgated,
the citizenship rights of rural residents are being challenged.
These emerging contradictory and/or mixed trends encapsulate the complexity of
changes in rural India and require us to have a comprehensive and holistic
Vasavi 33

approach to understanding the rural. In addition, it is important to go beyond the

deficit definition of the rural in official/government terms as that which is not
urban and to dislodge the rendering of the rural as synonymous with agriculture.
As scholars1 have indicated, the focus on the ‘agrarian question’ overlooked the
historical specificities of agrarian contexts and overemphasised the role of capital.
This view has been reinforced by the Lewisian paradigm of the inevitable
transition from agriculture to industrialisation based on Eurocentric models.
Overcoming these limitations, any understanding of India’s rural worlds needs to
factor in not only the state of agriculture but also other questions related to issues
of caste-class dynamics, ecological sustainability, gender, labour, rights,
citizenship, governmentality etc. Although there is a volume of literature,
including my own work, that has sought to understand and represent rural India
through the prism of the ‘agrarian crisis’ or suicides2 this is inadequate to
understand the complexity and contradictions that mark the rural as a space and
an entity. Instead, paying attention to the varied structuring factors, processes and
trajectories of rural India must also compel us to reckon with the rural as ‘a
constantly unfolding, mutating, unruly process and an infinitely intricate order of
evanescent, often enigmatic relations’ (Mertz, 2002, p. 358).
Drawing on a relational and processual perspective, I will consider the rural as
consisting of a multiplicity of worlds in which specific physio-geographic
characteristics have been marked by historical social formations which are now
being integrated into larger political-economic structures and forces to impact the
processes of rural production, reproduction, accumulation, appropriation,
expropriation, identity formation and belonging. Issues of livelihood, relations
and mobility of labour, political and other movements, inter caste-class relations,
decentralised governance, promulgation of a regime of rights, issues of
environment/ecology, gender relations, patterns of development and
maldevelopment all have significance. Within this framework of analysis, it is
pertinent to recognise the rural as consisting of and representing not only the
predominant agricultural worlds of caste-based villages, but also that of tribals/
adivasis, forest dwellers, fishing communities, plantations, and a range of
greenfield production sites that are enclosed rural spaces. As the body of revisit
studies3 has highlighted for us, the rural is no longer predominantly agricultural,
and there is now the growth of households with non-farm incomes (Sharma,
2015), new rural-urban linkages, and a mosaic of agricultural practices ranging
from subsistence cultivation to those integrated into the circuits of international
capital and labour. Factoring in such trends requires us to see the rural not merely
as a site of key developmental programmes or nation-building exercises but as
also pertaining to the issues of ‘rights, respect, recognition, and representation’
(Fraser, 1997) of its residents.
Locating the rural as a space that has been and continues to be constituted by
triangulated forces is to highlight the impact of these structuring forces on the
household/family, the village, and the rural as a region, and to identify the reasons
for the complexities and contradictions and hence the involutions4 in the rural. As
a force field of triangulated structures, it is a combination of societal factors
interacting with state, capital and market forces that mark the rural.
34 Review of Development and Change 24(1)

Retention and Reproduction of Caste as the Key

Organisational Structure
Although largely delinked from hereditary caste-prescribed occupations, the caste
system continues to be the key structure that marks not only social relations but
also determines life opportunities and therefore access to resources, assets,
political power and social status. Largely coterminous with class, the caste system
has reached a level of what Wimsatt (1986), in the context of analysing biological
processes, calls ‘generative entrenchment’, a reproduction of characteristics that
are intensified over generations and constitute the grid on which the foundational
processes of inequality—hierarchy, exclusion, differentiation and discrimination
(Therborn, 2013) —are reproduced over generations. The resulting entrenched
caste structuring, processes and orientation are linked to a naturalisation of
inequality, which Jan Breman (2016) identifies as central to Indian society and
accounts for the widespread acceptance of exploitation as inevitable.
A body of literature now substantiates the fact that caste continues to play a key
role in economic opportunities and outcomes. Barbara Harriss-White’s writings5
that focus on rural economies and their interlinks to urban worlds indicate the
centrality of caste in defining economic opportunities and activities. Similarly,
Deshpande (2011) provides further evidence of the continued hold of caste on
wider economic terrains, and Munshi’s (2016) observations on caste networks that
enable occupational and spatial mobility indicate the absence of such caste-based
social capital for a larger proportion of low-ranked castes and tribes/adivasis.
That caste, as a social and cultural system that regulates both social relations
and economic transactions, continues to have currency and is the grid on which
everyday rural life is constituted is visible in the extent to which residential
layouts in villages continue to be formed on caste-based segregation. This is valid
for even new layouts built with support from government agencies but in which
caste-based allocations are common. Caste hostility and violence continue to be
the key form of social control exercised by dominant castes against possible shifts
or alterations in caste-prescribed relationships and status. The hold of caste
affiliations and alliances is now expressed in the hostility and violence that inter-
caste/jati marriages invoke in villages. The alarming growth in ‘honour killings’
of young couples6 indicates the upholding of jati endogamy, the bedrock of caste’s
mode of reproduction. The spread of dalit consciousness and the new wave of
Ambedkarism among low-ranked caste groups have only strengthened the
hostility and antipathy of upper caste persons to the new social and economic
mobility of low-ranked persons and to the emerging ruptures in their hierarchical
relationships. The reinvocation of caste panchayats, such as the khap panchayats
of Haryana and Punjab, the khatta panchayats of Tamil Nadu and jati panchayats
of Karnataka are reactions to the threats that new, decentralised democratic
structures and processes pose to the power of dominant caste groups and indicate
the hold of caste-based institutions.
Vasavi 35

Economics of Neglect
Over the past seven decades, the logic and rationale of economic planning and
programmes for rural India have altered their orientation from state-led growth to
a more market and capital-based one. Yet underlying all these policies in both the
immediate independence period and since the neoliberalisation period, there has
been the oversight of the structural deficits of rural India, its caste-based social
and agrarian structure that is reflected in the allocation of resources, opportunities
and life chances. In addition, there is an oversight of the multifunctionality of
agriculture (International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology
[IAASTD], 2009; Losch, 2004), its linkage to a larger world of work, resources,
institutions, life-worlds, knowledge and socio-political networks. The continued
emphasis on agricultural productivity as the key goal and indicator of economic
growth and rural development has failed to take note of the requirements/needs of
the majority, which include small and marginal agriculturists (including landless
but cultivating groups), a range of non-agricultural groups, adivasis/tribals, forest-
dwelling and fishing communities, plantation workers, itinerant and skilled
specialists, and a plethora of communities that produced a range of non-industrial
and ‘hand-made’ goods or once provided vital rural services.
Instead, a hegemonic model of agricultural productivity has been promoted
that has largely overlooked ways to address historically constituted and socially
reproduced forms of disadvantage. Consequently, agriculture is defined and
assessed by primarily production parameters and directed by technological and
market interventions in which the state plays a role only at the time of crisis. This
reductionism fails to recognise the embeddedness of India’s agriculture in
iniquitous social structures of resource distribution and use, which produce uneven
allocations based on caste and gender, and the larger rural social and cultural
context in which issues of capital, labour, knowledge and risks are managed.
The vast body of literature on the Green Revolution highlights the extent to
which these policies and programmes have exacerbated the already skewed
distribution of resources and further eroded the capabilities of most agriculturists to
rise above the poverty line. That there is now a ‘Long Green Revolution’ (Patel,
2013)—a continuity between the early Green Revolution and the second Green
Revolution, and or the ‘evergreen revolution’—which continues to be endorsed and
called for despite the glaring problems of production and the subsequent production
of problems, indicates the entrenched economic interests that promote such a
model. The hegemony of this ‘productivity-economic growth-high technology’
spectrum that is the focus of all recent major agricultural and rural policies has
several implications for the viability of India’s agriculture, the sustainability of its
ecological base, the social bases of rural life and the sovereignty of the nation.
Official data sources indicate that the volume of small and marginal cultivators
has grown, and 86.58 per cent of agricultural households have less than 2 ha of
land, with the landholding size diminishing over the years to the current average
holding size of only 1.4 ha.7 This combined with the fact that small and marginal
cultivators do not have access to capital, technology and to the range of new
know-how and networks to markets means that their production is marked by a
36 Review of Development and Change 24(1)

web of risks. As a result, small and marginal cultivators are now trapped into a
‘debt-low sales price-loss’ circuit, making it the single most important source of
agrarian distress and suicides. A large proportion of rural citizens have borne the
brunt of such priorities, and their overall livelihood sustainability has been
subjected to declining levels of income, exposure to multiple forms of risks, and
worsening of their vulnerabilities to poverty and distress. As analyses have shown,
a combination of all these factors accounts for the fact that the average monthly
income of rural households is only ` 6,426, while the basic income recommended
by the 7th Pay Commission is ` 18,000 (Basole, 2017). Little wonder then, that
indebtedness marks a significant proportion of rural households.
Despite the onset of such trends and conditions, policies and programmes
related to the rural and the agricultural continue to be piecemeal and lackadaisical.
These policy gaps and negligence account for the failure to develop and provide
comprehensive policies that can interlink the ecological, economic and social
needs of rural citizens. These in turn are reasons for the reproduction of significant
problems such as the iniquitous agrarian structures, extant forms of maldevelopment
(explicit in widespread malnutrition and low indices of social development),
serious environmental degradation and even the large number of suicides by
agriculturists.
Over the years, national agricultural policy documents have also begun to
reflect guidelines from international aid and development agencies. Many of
these set the tone for the reproduction of ‘agroscepticism’ (see Akram-Lodhi,
2009, p. 613) in which the rural and agricultural are seen and represented as
lacking any worth, and must, therefore, transit towards an urban, industrial or
service economy. Such attitudes account for repeated statements by leading
policymakers, think tank members8 and administrators that agriculture as the key
source of employment and income cannot cater to the overpopulated rural regions,
and that an overhaul in the very working of the land is non-negotiable. While each
of these has legitimised the increasing externalisation of agriculture, it has also
become the bases for calling for the inevitable movement of rural populations to
urban areas and for industrialising agricultural production.
Added to such perspectives are the problems in the investment and
administration processes of the rural. As Vaidyanathan has shown, contrary to
popular perceptions, investments into agriculture have not declined over the past
two decades, and ‘the total volume of investment is in fact large and growing’
(2017, p. 3) but the problems are primarily in the type of investments, and are
results of the ‘deficiencies in their functioning and achievements’ (2017, p. 10).
State investments in infrastructure, especially irrigation, communication and
credit have largely benefitted new entrants such as agri-business, marketing
agencies and large agriculturists. Subsidies that support large and commercial
agriculture have received priority over meeting the needs of small and marginal
cultivators including their access to credit and remunerative prices (Basole, 2017).
The failure to regulate the seed, fertiliser and pesticide industries, which have
only exacerbated the problems of poor quality inputs and the subsequent cost
burden and environmental degradation are added burdens on agriculturists.
Vasavi 37

Despite evidence of the negative fallout of the Green Revolution, now fully
expressed in the deep problems that key pockets of the Green Revolution are
exhibiting and experiencing, it continues to be extended to the arid and semi-arid
regions. Spectres of population growth, starvation and the country’s dependency
on external food aid are invoked constantly to promote and support new external
inputs of high-technology and science, such as genetically modified seeds. All of
these are at the cost of losing the specificities of India’s diverse agricultural
complexes, inducing further ecological degradation and economic dependency,
and integrating rural societies into a national and international grid where external
finance, energy and technology play dominant roles (Fairbairn, 2014; Wise &
Murphy, 2012). Large swathes of rural India are affected drastically by global
warming and climate change, yet a lack of preparedness and an overall failure to
promote policies that could address the issue or enable people to understand and
handle it are also indicative of the economics of neglect.
The integration into and submission to national and international capitalist
demands include the state facilitating access and extraction of natural resources;
vast tracts of the nation have now become subject to land and resource grabs
leading to the formation of ‘new enclosures’. That near civil war conditions exist
in the central belts of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand is testimony to how such
resource extraction has become anathema to the norms and processes of democracy
and human rights (Kumbamu, 2017; Sundar, 2016).

Neglect of Health and Educational Services

The economics of neglect is also evident in the domains of health and education—
two sectors which are central to marking the quality of life and liveability of
people. Although education is supposed to be a leveller, a highly differentiated
schooling system, consisting of at least nine different types of schooling systems,9
the most varied and class differentiated in the world, has buttressed the inequalities
and injustice generated by caste and class systems. The rural schooling system,
especially those for adivasis, forest-dwelling communities, and itinerant groups
such as nomads and denotified tribes, is particularly dismal and largely consists of
basic institutions which act more as feeding centres rather than learning centres.
And as reports10 have consistently indicated, most rural schooling is marked by
dysfunctionality and poor learning standards. Far from enabling equality of
educational opportunities and equality of quality education, educational
institutions for the masses in general and for rural masses in particular are
increasingly sites of humiliation, and fail to cater to the abilities of youth.
Incidences of suicides among educated, unemployed rural youth are significant
and indicate the failure of the education system to either enable youth to gain
formal employment opportunities or be oriented to a life in the rural areas.
Much like the poor and inadequate education system, the rural public health
system and its institutions have also failed to be priorities in economic planning
and administration. Although research indicates that health expenditure constitutes
38 Review of Development and Change 24(1)

the single most common reason for households/families to fall back into poverty
(Krishna, 2011) and ill-health one of the key factors for poor work participation,
most rural areas and the surrounding towns are underserved by health facilities
and personnel. Missions such as the National Rural Health Mission have largely
failed to cater to the growing needs and requirements of the population. Health
and education expenditure at the household level continues to be one of the key
articles of expenditure that prevent families from making improvements to their
land and housing, and enhancing their standards of living.
Few cases better represent the economics of neglect than that of the imposition
of demonetisation, a strategy made acceptable by a political narrative that sought
forbearance for long-term national good. A measure meant to integrate the large
mass of people, most of whom are outside the formal economy (Harriss-White,
2003), into a new techno-financial regime, the demonetisation act indicated the
nexus between the state and corporate interests and the distance of the state from
the working, especially rural, classes. The onerous burdens that demonetisation
triggered among the rural population included loss of wages, income and savings.
Many fell prey to the cunning of commissions that came into force. A mass of
people, already in various states of precarity, faced debilitation (Reddy, 2017;
Vijayabaskar, 2017) and further erosions of their limited resource base. Horrifying
and gut-wrenching stories,11 results of the poorly designed and administered
system of demonetisation, will become historical markers of the burdens that
were imposed on a rural populace.

Politics of Rescue
Complementary to the ‘economics of neglect’ is the politics of rescue, which is the
political system’s way of handling the rural in a competitive electoral democracy.
Despite the continued and popular rhetoric of the ‘kisan’ as the mascot of the
nation and the periodic invocation of catering to rural interests, political agendas
have not effectively addressed the structural deficits and complexities of the rural.
Over the years, a problem of representation has risen, in which the interests of
rural citizens have not been adequately represented in the parliament and state
assemblies. For one, the running and consolidation of political and electoral
processes on predominantly caste alliances and affiliations has led to the
fragmentation of representatives who then fail to come together on issues related
to the rural and agricultural domains. Second, those elected also tend to represent
the interests of larger and predominantly dominant castes while issues of equitable
resource distribution, equality of access to public institutions, etc. have not been
considered priorities. In lieu of formulating and implementing policies that can
effectively address the economic neglect of the rural, the political apparatus has
deployed schemes and programmes that seek to address periodic crises but which
in reality do not address structural deficits. Instead, the plethora of programmes
deployed only as part of electoral promises or to stem mass dissent has only created
or added to the structural problems of rural India. As Sanyal (2008) has articulated,
Vasavi 39

a regime of ‘welfare governmentality’ has been deployed to camouflage or

compensate for policies that enable ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Programmes
such as the moratorium on agricultural loans and the implementation of the
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS)
were promulgated at a time of increased criticism against the agrarian crisis (or
suicides by agriculturists) and rampant corruption, and the government was
preparing for parliamentary elections. MGNREGS has been successful in
challenging dominance by landowners and has enabled agricultural workers to
become more assertive and question subordination and exploitation. But, in its
impact it has re-ordered rural class interests but not necessarily class relations
(Jakinow, 2014), nor has it enabled the rural disadvantaged to forge viable
economic alternatives outside the purview of the power and interests of the landed
class. In first promoting economic policies that ruin plural and viable livelihoods,
erode the ecological bases of sustainability and overlook the structural deficits of
a hierarchical social structure, and then deploying measures to synthetically
alleviate the distress that results from these measures, the state has largely produced
programmes that camouflage the foundational problems of rural India.
A plethora of development and welfare missions have created a large
development bureaucracy which, in turn, has become self-serving. Dev (2004)
and Sarma (2004) highlight how most government programmes that seek to
provide the poor with either foodgrains, housing or employment are also subject
to rent-seeking behaviour, in the form of commissions, bribes and misallocation,
which means that the benefits barely reach the most deserving. The working of
these programmes through these agents and entrepreneurs renders the
disadvantaged further into the hands of these development middlemen, and has
created new forms of patron-client relations and dependency. In such a context,
the deployment of numerous and fragmented welfare programmes—ranging from
providing housing, toilets, supplementary food for children, to those targeted as
‘relief packages’ for indebted agriculturists—has only compounded the gains
made by middlemen and development entrepreneurs, leading to their rise as
members of the ‘new rural middle class’. The inability of most rural settlements
and citizens to demand accountability from local leaders and the bureaucracy
(Ruud, 2000) compounds the systemic inequities and results in the continued
reproduction of these problems. In a context where only a small group or number
of leading families, development agents or political entrepreneurs have access to
the state and its apparatus of programmes and benefits, the very absence of
participation and the voice and representation of the majority renders such a
politics of rescue ineffective.
Several regional/state agricultural and rural development policies are also
primarily regional populist measures. For example, provisioning of free electricity
to agricultural sites (primarily for pumpsets) has gained popularity even at a time
when neoliberal policies stipulate withdrawal of such subsidies. Such populist
policies defy both economic rationale (Balakrishnan, Golait, & Kumar, 2008) and
environmental safeguards, and those who do gain are large farmers, new
entrepreneurial agriculturists and agribusiness industries. Schemes such as the
moratorium on farm loans, provisioning of minimum support prices (MSPs) for
40 Review of Development and Change 24(1)

crops, and the Rytu Bandhu scheme, announced recently for Telangana and which
encompasses both monetary transfer and administrative measures, indicate the
need to appease agriculturists for political gain.
The expansion of democratic structures, primarily through the Panchayat Raj
Act, has not had an even record. While its potential has been realised and the Act
has made significant contributions to decentralising democracy and enabling
people’s participation and development in some states, in most cases the panchayat
system has become an extension of the bureaucracy. The establishment of parallel
structures and agencies that govern the functioning of the panchayat means that
they bypass the decisions of elected representatives, and the democratic deficits
continue. What Nancy Fraser (1997) identifies as ‘the parity of participation’ is
largely missing in most states and regions and the promise of decentralised
governance remains a mirage.
The politics of rescue includes the promulgation, under pressure from
movements and/or civil society groups, of acts and policies that seek to provide
relief, sustenance or address major grievances of rural citizens. Yet, in most cases,
the failure to implement these either in spirit and/or through the governance
mechanism renders them empty acts and legislative processes that have no impact.
One such case is the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers
(Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, that has largely not been implemented,
and much of the process remains truncated either through disputes and or litigation.
The impact of these triangulated structures and processes on the rural is evident
in the range of complex and contradictory characteristics and conditions of the
rural at the macro/regional level, at the village/hamlet level as a site of social and
political reproduction, and at the household level, in which people devise strategies
to negotiate their immediate and larger worlds. Three processes, of separation-
integration, differentiation, and erosion, all interlinked, and which manifest in
various ways, are the results of the impact of the triangulated structuring of the
rural. In various combinations and in different contexts, they constitute involutions
of the rural.

Separation-integration, Differentiation, Erosion

Separation-integration
Forms of separation from and within the rural contexts and then integration into
capital and market networks, the state regime, or the urban/industrial or non-farm
economy have been triggered in the rural.12 These include the separation of
agriculture from ecology; of individual cultivators from locally-similar/shared
cultivation patterns; of production from provisioning; and production from social
reproduction.
Using productivity as the key trope for agricultural, rural and economic
development of the nation has meant the promotion of dominant (external input
and capital-based) forms of agriculture, which defy the established agro-ecological
Vasavi 41

patterns of India’s agriculture. The cultivation of commercial crops such as wheat,

rice, cotton, groundnuts, and more recently soyabean, turmeric, ginger and
vegetables and fruits, has been promoted (using a range of technical and external
inputs) by defying ecological specificities and has led to the separation of ecology
from agriculture.13 Over the past decades, such a separation of agriculture from
ecology and its impact (both economically and ecologically) has been sharpened
with the reliance on the tube well as a key source of production.
Complementing the 1960s promotion of Green Revolution and now the
increasingly commercial and financialised agriculture, the tube well has become
an icon in India’s rural landscape.14 It represents the promotion of a capital-
technological apparatus and can also be seen as ‘one of the most clandestine
modes of extracting groundwater’ (Acciavatti, 2017, p. 206), creating not only
new bio-political realms but also engendering significant shifts in the meaning(s)
of agriculture, enhancing the skewed agrarian structure, and inducing drastic
ecological changes. The spread of groundwater irrigation, used primarily by
larger owner-cultivators, has facilitated what Dubash (2002) describes as
‘groundwater-driven accumulation’ and ‘tube-well capitalism’. This hierarchical
access to groundwater has led to the emergence of ‘water lords’ who not only
gain additional power and position in their areas but who also act as catalysts in
introducing new crops and new agricultural practices into their areas. In
addition, many of the water lords access more land via sales, leases and other
arrangements. Far from promoting agricultural productivity and economic
growth, rendering agriculture into extractive economies via the tubewell has
also initiated ‘Distress-Inducing Growth’, which Vakulabharanam (2005)
describes as the need for constant investments to sustain growth levels, leading
both to indebtedness of cultivators and/or to making agriculture an economically
negative proposition. Unregulated use (Kulkarni, Shah, & Vijayshankar, 2015)
has resulted in the depletion of groundwater, including that of deep and ancient
aquifers. Much of this has led to what is now known as the ‘groundwater
drought’ (Goldin, 2016), a condition that is fostering a ‘tragedy of the
groundwater commons’15 in both rural and urban areas, with serious implications
for the future of water security and quality. Agriculture has become, subsequent
to such technological interventions, an extractive economy failing to ensure
either ecological sustainability or economic viability.
Linked to the promotion of commercial agriculture is the separation of
individual agriculturists from local shared/similar agricultural practices, which is
locking them into the larger circuits of capital, input dependency and risks of
market instability. Several cases of suicide by agriculturists, predominantly small
and marginal cultivators, are the result of their ‘adverse integration’ into the
commercial and new technology and input-based agriculture which then enmeshes
them into a ‘web of risks’ (of capital, technology, know-how, market and climate)
and leaves them without the social and psychological scaffold that shared/similar
agricultural practices used to provide. The continuation of the tragedy of suicide
by agriculturists indicates both the failures of the dominant agricultural model and
the schisms and tensions that economic isolation and individualisation of
agriculturists creates in an agrarian society.
42 Review of Development and Change 24(1)

Inasmuch as there has been the spread of provisioning of foodgrains (at

anganvadis, public distribution systems (PDS), monthly allocations for below
poverty level (BPL) families, seasonal food provisioning for the scheduled tribes
(STs), etc) via programmes that seek to address issues of food security and
poverty, there is an increasing separation of local food cultures from local
production practices and content, which has serious implications for shifts in food
cultures, staple grain cultivation and nutritional levels. Even as they experience
such separations from local food regimes, these food-security dependent/food-
insecure households are integrated into state structures and mechanisms for state-
based provisioning.
A final form of separation relates to the separation of economic production
from social and familial reproduction. As rural out-migration becomes a key
channel through which life opportunities are defined and strategised, there are two
streams of migration that indicate a separation of production from reproduction. A
smaller proportion but those who generate a surplus (considered the elite or the
middle classes) seek to have the urban as their base of social reproduction but
retain the rural as their site of production. A larger proportion of rural residents,
primarily small and marginal cultivators, the landless, and those in difficult
economic circumstances, resort to urban migration but retain the rural as their base
of reproduction while the urban/peri-urban becomes their source of production.
Even as the middle class and elite locate their families in towns and cities (as
lifestyle choices, for education and health purposes), the working poor, absorbed
into the informal and formal economies of the urban and peri-urban, lead a life of
circular and seasonal migration, working in the urban areas and returning to their
rural homes where their families reside. These forms of separation-integration
have significance for the sense of belonging or distantiation that families and
individuals have for/from their village and the rural and for their political
engagement or disengagement.

Differentiation
A significant impact of these triangulated structures on the rural is the growing
differentiation that is evident at multiple levels. There is now a differentiation of
villages16 that is represented by two extremely varied types of villages: the remote
adivasi villages which continue to be largely outside the ambit of capitalist
production or are now caught in the ambit of global and national extractive
economies, and the diaspora villages populated predominantly by a returning
diaspora that has been integrated into national and global capital, labour and
consumption circuits. At the level of agriculture there are sharp variations best
represented by the extremes of pockets of subsistence agriculture and the
increasingly commercialised agricultural belts whose agricultural processes are
marked by high technology and capitalised and commercialised agriculture. More
specifically and of sociological significance is the differentiation between
households and classes and castes, signalling variations in economic and social
mobility. Such household differentiation is markedly different from what has been
Vasavi 43

the standard and simplistic three-layered structure of landless labour/coolie, malik

or middle peasant, and zamindar or landlord that was identified as typical for most
of rural India. Instead, what has become the pattern is a wide spectrum of
households and classes which include households such as landless labourers,
agriculturists who combine own cultivation with sale of their labour, small
cultivators, large landowners with zamindari backgrounds, or large landowners
who cultivate with hired labour; small landowners who combine commercial
work (shops, hotels, service work), government employees, and private sector
employees, including a large body of youth who are now employed in varied
service sector jobs. This differentiation of households indicates the growing
presence of both state and capital in the lives of rural residents and their integration
into the larger circuits of labour, capital and markets. The implication and
understanding of this differentiation of households is reflected in the trends and
conditions of three sharply differentiated classes: a small class of rural elite, a
growing and highly differentiated body of new rural middle classes and a
marginalised majority representing mostly the low-ranked caste and tribal groups
who are small and marginal agriculturists or landless labour.
The rural elite, consisting primarily of the landed classes, and those who have
gained from the commercialisation of agriculture and governmental policies, and
representing what Balagopal (2011) called the ‘provincial propertied class’, with
characteristics of also being the dominant castes, have largely consolidated their
position. With surplus invested in trade, business, construction and real estate, and
with additional incomes from urban and governmental jobs, many have also
emerged as regional satraps with significant positions in local, regional, and
national political processes and power.17 Their search for distinction in society is
expressed primarily through consumption patterns and practices that reinforce
caste-class boundaries and differences.
The New Rural Middle Classes
A spectrum of new rural middle classes has emerged consisting of those who have
benefitted from commercial agriculture, urban and government jobs, and an
engagement with a new rural service economy or larger external economies. Once
engaged primarily in agriculture (as owner cultivators or combining owner
cultivation with labour, or even once landless groups), the new rural middle
classes have emerged and grown since the onset of neoliberal policies and are
currently engaged primarily in construction activities, which absorb a large
proportion of these classes (Krishnan & Hatekar, 2017), small trade and business,
and in varied activities of the new rural service economy. Accounting for about
19.20 per cent of the total rural population18 (Ahalya & Paul, 2017), the new rural
middle classes are themselves a heterogeneous class and are marked by their caste
variations. Although most of the new rural middle classes represent the middle
castes, a smaller proportion is from the Scheduled Castes and Tribes.
The new rural middle classes are marked not only by their caste and class
markers but are also increasingly being constituted by religious identities and
boundaries, made more significant in contexts of intense economic competition,
political contestations and social animosity. Inter-caste and inter-religion
44 Review of Development and Change 24(1)

hostilities have spread to make caste/ethnicity/religion the key source of identity.

Shifts in caste boundaries, contestations over resources, defiance of caste
boundaries and alliances constitute the new forms of tension and conflict that
have spread in rural areas. Subscription to larger networks of support drawn from
caste and religious organisations has facilitated a culture of impunity, especially
among the dominant groups, and has resulted in incidents and events such as those
that have most recently emerged in Una, Kathua, and Unnao.19
The failure of the rural economy to keep pace with the ambitions and aspirations
of the elite and middle caste-classes also accounts for the growth of a culture of
resentment. The demand for reservations by dominant castes (for example, the
Marathas in Maharashtra, Jats in Haryana, Meenas in Rajasthan, Patidars in
Gujarat) and the demand for a separate religion status as among the Lingayats in
Karnataka (now qualified in the post-2018 election scenario into a demand for
recognition of Other Backward Classes (OBC) status for all Lingayats) highlight
the new tensions created by a decelerating rural economy and the larger non-rural
ambitions of these groups.
Marginalised Majority
In contrast to the new rural middle classes and the elite, a large majority of the
rural population is now located in what Sanyal (2008) identified as the ‘need
economy’, in which households are unable to create surplus for their own
sustenance or to generate new capital and, therefore, require external support for
their basic survival. Representing a heterogeneous group of people which
includes small and marginal cultivators, the landless, the fishing community,
adivasis, forest dwellers, plantation workers and itinerant workers, and former
service caste groups who have been pauperised or rendered destitute, the
marginalised majority are marked by conditions of precarity which include
indebtedness, uncertainty, high risk, low security, and overall dismal conditions
of living. The cumulative effect of these forces and conditions largely accounts
for the fact that despite large-scale deployment of new funds in the mode of
rescuing the rural and retaining rural votes, positive and poverty-alleviating
impacts on the everyday lives of the rural agricultural poor have had a mixed
record across the nation. A majority of cultivators continue to be locked into
conditions of marginality, with economically unviable holdings and lack of
political clout, and are held in positions of subordination to the regimes of
biotechnologies, capital and markets.
Drawn primarily from middle- and low-ranked caste groups, most of the
marginalised majority are small and marginal agriculturists, have inadequate
income, lack access to a range of natural resources and public service institutions,
and are subject to processes of pauperisation, displacement and disenfranchisement.
It is among this population that what Guerin (2013) describes as the rise of new
forms of debt bondage—resulting from new capitalist relations and ‘adverse
integration’ into the market and capitalist system rather than being vestiges of pre-
capitalist relations—highlights the lack of economic and political scaffolding that
renders such a large mass of people into conditions of near destitution. Breman’s
(2016) description of this as ‘new pauperism’ (a combination of both exploitation
Vasavi 45

by capitalism and exclusion from key sources of welfare and well-being) is

apposite here and underscores the reasons for the high incidence of malnutrition
amongst this population. Data and details about new forms of slavery linked to
human trafficking not only of children and women but also of young working men
further highlight the results of an economy of neglect. As a large body of
marginalised persons with ‘awkward class positions’ and tenuous relations to
capital and markets, the key problem they face is not merely loss of autonomy but
also their ‘inability to reproduce a life worth living’ (Narotzky, 2016, p. 311).
While much literature has been devoted to understanding the plight of small
and marginal farmers in typical, multi-caste, plains villages, the condition of
adivasis/tribals and forest-dwelling communities needs to be explicated to
highlight the worsening conditions of their lives and the violations against their
citizenship rights. Two types of reterritorialisation are affecting the adivasis. One
is the reterritorialisation of the forests into ‘sanctuaries’, ‘reserved forests’ and
‘animals only’ or people-free spaces by policies which in rationale and terms are
antithetical to the biological evolution of the forests and to the citizenship rights
of its inhabitants. Although reliable figures for the nation as a whole are not
available,20 studies indicate the displacement of a large number of forest dwellers
and their forced resettlement into poor-quality dwellings and colonies
(Gopalakrishnan, 2012; Pathak-Broome & Fanari, 2018). Displaced without
adequate compensation, most of the original forest inhabitants are now proletarians
who are increasingly integrated into local and national wage labour circuits, and
face dire hardships (Sen, 2016). Rendered ‘environmental subjects’ (Agarwal,
2005), original forest dwellers are now largely de-rooted inhabitants of alien and
resource-poor spaces. The second type of reterritorialisation is the ‘acquisition’
for national purposes of adivasi areas/regions in order to facilitate extractive
mining and industries. In addition, the situation of plantation workers (Vijayabaskar
& Vishwanathan, 2016), especially those left to fend for themselves in abandoned
plantations, and that of the fishing communities whose access to coastal belts and
the ocean is increasingly being threatened, indicates the spread of impoverishment
and the loss of rights among the most marginalised.
Such adverse conditions account for the fact that the marginal majority must
resort to a range of survival strategies, which are manifested most prominently at
the household/family level. These include the degree to which the marginalised
must resort to self-exploitation only to make a bare living. As studies indicate,
such households spend enormous number of hours working21 (on an average of
about 17.5 hours in some districts in Uttarakhand) but continue to be in precarious
economic conditions. The growing proportion of agricultural land that is
abandoned, leased out or sold is also a sign of the inability of the marginalised to
continue in cultivation or to sustain themselves economically. Such conditions
also account for the fact that an anti-agriculture attitude has set in among the
marginalised and as the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data22 indicated,
nearly 40 per cent of those interviewed asserted that they wanted to be out of
agriculture. Analysing this data, Agarwal and Agrawal (2017) qualify that most of
those who want to be out of agriculture are those with smaller holdings, younger,
and women.
46 Review of Development and Change 24(1)

Erosion
These interlinked triangulated structural inequalities produce not only ‘structural
violence’, evident in widespread poverty, malnutrition and pauperism (Breman,
2016) on the national template but also, at a deeper level, forms of erosion among
the marginalised and disadvantaged. These forms of erosion include the loss of
local knowledge systems not only in agriculture but also in the domains of
medicine, architecture, and ecological conservation, which results in deskilling23
and the loss of autonomy of these populations. Additionally, there is a withering
of existing social institutions, for example the loss of conservation institutions
(such as those that regulated the use and management of natural resources, forests,
lakes, tanks, wells and grazing grounds) that were meaningful and provided social
scaffolding. The disassembling of social institutions is evident in the dissolution
of the practices of sharing labour, building collective threshing yards and storing
food grains that prioritised food self-sufficiency. At the social and familial level
such disassembling of social practices is evident in the shift from bride-price to
dowry and in the withdrawal of women from agricultural and manual labour,
which has significance for the decision-making power, autonomy and well-being
of women. A culmination of these multiple forms of erosion is visible in the extent
to which there is an interiorisation of disadvantage and an acceptance of one’s
condition as given. Over the years, I have witnessed several instances in which
this interiorisation of disadvantage is manifested. It includes cases of people
accepting worm-ridden PDS rice as edible, the unusual forbearance towards
everyday abuse, negligence and corruption which marks their transactions with
the larger world, and the submissive acceptance of punitive regimes such as
Aadhaar and demonetisation. A consequence of this is that rural citizens as a
collective have not been able to challenge the multiple burdens that they bear or
the infringement on their citizenship rights. Far from resistance and mobilisation
against the multiple forms of depredations that they are subject to and the failure
to recognise their citizenship rights, much of the mass of the rural population is in
a state of political disarray.
A key reason for this emanates from the fact that macro policies have generated
a ‘differentiation among farmers without consolidation’ (Aga, 2018, p. 2), and
much of rural society is deeply fragmented.24 That rural differentiation has fed
into the larger hierarchical and exclusionary regimes of inequality and
undemocratic structures is evident in the conditions in the new states of Jharkhand
and Chhattisgarh. Both states were forged on the idea of catering to the needs of
adivasi populations, but, in reality, have seen a transfer of state power into the
hands of a small elite class among them. The ongoing violence in these two states
best represents the extent to which regional rural elites have now deployed their
political power to support capital’s expropriation of resources. That the mass of
the marginalised majority in these regions, primarily adivasis and forest dwellers,
must resort to or subscribe to other forms of political protectionism (such as anti-
state or naxal activities) that has resulted in the near civil war conditions in these
areas is testimony to the deep erosions that have occurred in these regions. Class
fragmentation, evident in the inequality between castes, differences between
regional groups, and multiple forms of erosion at the household and individual
Vasavi 47

levels, account for the inability of rural classes and groups to forge unitary or
collective fronts to challenge the depredations deployed against them.
Over the past two decades there have been only a few cases of successful
mobilisation against expropriation of public and collective natural resources or
land grabs, unfair policies and programmes, and myopic policies for the rural.
Barring the case of Singur and Nandigram, the successful mobilisation (backed by
international environmental groups) against Vedanta over mining in Odisha’s
Niyamgiri hills, the agitation against Coca-Cola in Plachimada in Kerala, and the
movement against and withdrawal of special economic zones (SEZs) in Goa,
there have been no significant rural and/or agricultural movements that have
challenged the violence that the state and capital have deployed against the rural.
The sporadic and periodic demonstrations and agitations across the nation
have not yielded much success and indicate how rural and agricultural issues have
been dismissed or deferred by ruling political parties and/or the state. Ekta
Parishad’s march for land rights, which resulted in the setting up of a Land
Reforms Council, and which took two years to meet, has not produced any
substantial policy on land reform. The Tamil Nadu agriculturists’ demonstrations
in New Delhi went unheeded, and the protest in Rajasthan’s Sikar was successfully
quelled. The demonstrations by agriculturists in Madhya Pradesh’s Mandsaur led
to the death by police firing of six agriculturists and the state government’s form
of political rescue was to initiate a new MSP scheme, which in turn has been
largely garnered by traders. The ‘Long March’ from Nashik to Mumbai, led by the
Communist Party of India (Marxist), received favourable media attention
primarily in terms of a public response to the good behaviour of agriculturists, but
has not resulted in any significant gains to agriculturists. The Bharatiya Kisan
Union-led march on 2 October 2018, to press for the addressal of a range of
agricultural issues, faced police action and water cannons and the farmers were
prevented from entering Delhi.
Although these sporadic demonstrations and movements have gained
momentum and spread across the country, they are yet to gain an all-India
presence. A coalition of farmer organisations and civil society groups is now
leading the demand for more just and equitable shares to rural India,25 and a small
but concerted group of civil society actors are now seeking to implement post-
Green Revolution, organic/sustainable agricultural models. How the key questions
of land and resource access, the deficits and structural limitations of rural society,
and the integration of even these new models into larger financial networks will
be addressed are questions that are still moot. They also pose challenges to the
ability of these alternative models of agriculture to address the entrenched
problems of inequities in resources, capital and networks in the rural.

Significance of Rural Involutions

The triangulated structuring and the processes of separation-integration,
differentiation, and erosion, place the rural into conditions of subordination and
subsumption to the demands of capital, market and political regimes. In addition,
48 Review of Development and Change 24(1)

the spread of larger cultural and religious networks feed into the involutions and
make for an even more fractious rural public space. As capital and market take
predominance in marking the rural, and land and labour become commodities, the
relationship between the state and rural citizens becomes more tenuous. Reflecting
and negotiating these tensions in a competitive, electoral democracy, rural society
forges new boundaries and contestations within society itself.
The processes of separation-integration, differentiation, and erosion also result
in involutions that make the rural a site of deep contradictions: islands of economic
prosperity coexist with extant tracts of pauperism; pockets of pristine nature are
conserved at the cost of dislocating large numbers of forest dwellers; non-
agricultural income enables a section of the population to continue to live in
villages, and a decelerating agricultural economy forces many to seek a life out of
the rural. As populism and welfare governmentality spread, they effectively stem
political dissent and ensure the reproduction of the triangulated structures and
their structuring. Far from being a majority or predominant body of citizens who
can influence political processes and outcomes, rural residents are increasingly
rendered supplicants who must periodically appease, demand, and stage
demonstrations to call attention to their needs. Even as state responses to their
supplications/demands are largely deferred with false promises or compromised
deals, rural residents are treated either as recalcitrant subjects whose activities
(such as stubble burning in Punjab, bull-racing or jallikattu in Tamil Nadu, etc.)
must be curtailed, or as anti-state actors who are violently put down. The
deployment of a spectrum of techno-financial instruments that includes Aadhaar,
demonetisation, general sales tax (GST), and the amalgamation of rural banks,
indicates how the rural marginalised majority are sought to be fitted into the new
financial regime in which the capital of the non-formal sector is to be absorbed
into and by larger capital interests. Such a financial regime that combines identity
surveillance, governance, and capital absorption, is a problematic (in both its
technological and administrative processes) instrument and is now the most recent
‘whipcord’26 against rural and working-class citizens. The techno-financial regime
encapsulates the combination of the economics of neglect and the politics of
rescue in which the state, in collusion with big techno-capital, creates ‘illusions of
inclusion’ (Jakobsen, 2018) and incorporates the marginalised into the ledgers of
capitalist accounts, and also largely stems any tide of protest or resistance.
What the involutions of the rural indicate to us is the need to rethink dominant
development paradigms (with their emphasis on agricultural productivity, income
growth, technology and capital-based programmes) and assert the need for new
imaginaries and attendant policies. Such policies and programmes need to
recognise a range of possibilities that the rural holds. These include the recognition
of agricultural diversity the foundation on which the pluralism of the nation rests
and the importance of agro-ecological zones with the potential of low-external
input agricultural practices to address the problems of ecological degradation and
climate change. In terms of addressing the severe land and social fragmentation,
the possibilities of forging new models of rural-based production and distribution
and a recognition of the range of rural innovations that contribute towards
appropriate technologies. New urban–rural linkages especially in post-industrial,
Vasavi 49

post-urban production models are required to that can build on the resilience and
sense of belonging of rural citizens, and the centrality of the rural to a democratic
society and nation.
The displaced threshing yard, now located on tarmac roads, bereft of its earlier
sociality, technologies and sacrality, signifies not only the state of agriculture and
village India but also the state of rural citizens. As evident in their labour and
strife at the displaced threshing yard, marginalised cultivators, representing a
majority of rural dwellers, must resort to a range of bricolage strategies to eke out
a living. Such strategies, which are increasingly forms of ‘make-do’ adaptations,
a fine balancing act between precarity and penurity, represent what one former
agriculturist, now a driver told me: ‘life was just jugaad’ (jeevan vohi jugaad
hai)—strategies of merely making do with what was possible without attention to
the problems inherent in them.
In the impact of the force field of triangulated structures—of an overarching
and reproduced caste system, an economics of neglect, and a politics of rescue—
are forms of rural involution which result in the processes of separation-integration,
differentiation, and erosion. These forms of involution indicate that research
needs to go beyond the established ‘agrarian question’ in India so as to factor in
the complexities and contradictions which mark rural India. Whether the transition
to a standard urban/industrial base will take place or the rural will persist over the
long run is a moot question. But in the immediate future, the rural as a social
space, a political entity, and an economic site will persist, and far from the death
of ‘village India’, we will see the continuity of the rural as an involuted space in
which its citizens will strategise in innumerable ways to make their life liveable
and which will continue to be the defining character of India as a civilisation.

Acknowledgements
Some of the ideas and descriptions in this lecture have been elaborated by me in
earlier work such as in Vasavi (2012). Here I focus on identifying the triangulated
structures and the more recent processes that are manifesting in rural India.
Thanks are to Kala Sunder for editing this at short notice and for her support and
friendship and to all the members of the ‘Network for Rural and Agrarian Studies’
for their continued engagement in all rural and agrarian issues.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or
publication of this article.

Notes
1. A recent update on the ‘agrarian question’ is the essay by Moyo, Jha and Yeros (2015).
Jun Borras (2009) provides a summative overview or call for new approaches to
understanding rural changes.
50 Review of Development and Change 24(1)

2. Work on agrarian suicides includes a wide range of essays and books, and the most
comprehensive ones include that by Reddy and Mishra (2010) and the recent one
by Nilotpal Kumar (2016). My work on agrarian suicides can be reviewed at Vasavi
(2012).
3. Revisit studies have been conducted primarily in and for the states of Tamil Nadu,
Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and more recently in Bihar.
4. I draw on the term involution not only from Geertz (1963), but also from a broader
definition that calls attention to the multiple complexities that entanglements between
society, capital-market and state entail or initiate. For an earlier discussion of this see
Vasavi (2012).
5. Barbara Harriss-White’s writings are a comprehensive body of studies that indicate
the hold and persistence of caste as agricultural economies absorb or are absorbed into
capitalist systems and networks.
6. ‘Honour killings’ in North India include the prohibition of marriage within village and
intra-gotra marriages. And the South and North share similarities where young couples
defy inter jati and inter-religion choice of partners.
7. 70th round survey of the NSSO (2014), Government of India.
8. An example of such assessments and recommendations can be found in Ahluwalia
(2011).
9. For details on the ‘differentiated schooling system’, see Vasavi (2015).
10. Reports by PROBE, ASER and several other studies have consistently indicated the
low learning levels (see Vasavi, 2015) at schools.
11. For details about the impact of demonetisation in various regions of India, see Hot
Spots (2017).
12. My deliberations on the processes of separation are very brief here but the idea is
part of a larger theoretical study that takes note of the manifestation of these forms of
separation at the ecological, social and political levels.
13. For an excellent study of how such a separation of agriculture from ecology has been
promoted and its impact, see Richa Kumar’s (2015) study of soyabean cultivation in
Madhya Pradesh.
14. The spread of tube wells is evident in their scale and presence in the rural landscape.
There were about 5 million wells in 1950–1951 and their number has now (2018)
increased to about 12 million. Tube-well irrigation accounts for more than 60 per cent
of the net irrigated area in the country against 29.2 per cent of canal and only 4.6 per
cent of tank irrigation (Gandhi & Namboodiri, 2009).
15. I owe this phrase to David Poston (personal communication).
16. For regional variations in agricultural patterns see Lerche (2015); Agarwal and
Agrawal (2017) identify three different types of agricultural regions: Region 1:
mainly commercial—Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir,
Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh. Region 2: subsistence + commercial—
Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu. Region 3: mainly subsistence—
Arunachal, Assam, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland,
Orissa, Sikkim, Tripura, West Bengal.
17. Social science research has, unfortunately, not paid sufficient attention to understanding
how the rural elite and middle classes deploy economic, political, and social capital
to generate and sustain configurations of power that endow them with better access to
state and capital. New research, including in-depth and ethnographic studies of rural
elite and the non-poor are required for us to better understand rural class dynamics.
Vasavi 51

18. Ahalya and Paul (2017) draw on a mixed approach (combining monthly per capita
expenditure and household assets) and indicate the following rural class differentiation:
those below poverty: 80.42 per cent; middle classes: 19.20 per cent; and the upper
classes 0.38 per cent.
19. These incidences of upper caste violence against dalits and of rape of young girls and
women are only the most recent cases but inter-caste/jati violence in villages has been
reported in almost all parts of India and is intensified by inter-family and inter-political
tensions.
20. Gopalakrishnan (2016) estimates around 600,000 forest dwellers have been displaced
but these figures are not verified.
21. See Singh (2015) for details on work load and time. She indicates that Kumauni women
spend an average of 17.5 hours per day on home and agricultural-horticulture-animal
husbandry.
22. See Government of India (2005) for details on the NSSO data and response to the
choice of occupations.
23. See Stone (2007) on deskilling, especially among small and marginal cultivators and
the problems they face in the misuse and overuse of chemical inputs and seeds.
24. Joshi (2017) describes class differentiation in rural Uttar Pradesh as accounting for
the inability of agriculturists to mobilise themselves on collective grounds (unlike the
1980s when mass agrarian mobilisation was possible) and Swaminathan and Baksi
(2017) indicate three types of inequalities (between small farmers in a village, between
small and large farmers in a village, and between small farmers in different regions) as
accounting for such social and political fragmentation.
25. For example see the Jai Kisan Andolan, ASHA, & Swaraj India (2018) manifesto for
agriculture.
26. The reference is to Phule’s (1881), which is one of the earliest treatises to elaborate on
the caste and colonial exploitation of the shudra cultivating castes.

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