Seeds of Rebellion

How socio-economic inequities in Indian villages incubated mass disaffection

Prof. Surinder S. Jodhka

Caste was never about ritual hierarchy alone. Power too was its constitutive feature, always. Empirical studies of village life from across the country reported this extensively. Relations of power tended to overlap with ritual hierarchies. The mediating factor was control over agricultural land. The caste groups that tended to be in possession of land also held power. Notwithstanding significant regional differences, these tended to be all from upper or middling castes. Reporting form Tamil Nadu where traditionally Brahmins were the big landowners, sociologist Andre Beteille writes:

‘Up to the 1940s, the Brahmins enjoyed a great measure of power in the village. Their power was based upon ownership of land, high social and ritual status, and superior education… The panchayat president was a Brahmin, the panchayat room was in the Agraharam (the locality where Brahmin and other dominant groups in the village lived), and initiative in all important matters was in the hands of Brahmins… Non-Brahmin members… had the position of second-class citizens.’

Likewise, reporting from Rajasthan, Anand Chakravarti found that until around the early 1950s, the Rajput jagirdars nearly completely dominated village life. Even though their numbers were not large in the local populations, they owned as much as 84 per cent of the agricultural land. They were also locally seen as ‘upholders of the traditional social order’. The other caste communities lived in the village under their command.

However, the introduction of Land Reforms after Independence and the accompanying process of political democratization weakened the exclusionary power of the traditional upper castes, such as the landed Brahmins or Rajputs, in the village settings. In the Rajasthan village, for example, after the introduction of Land Reforms in 1954, the share of agricultural land owned by Rajputs came down from 84 per cent to 29 per cent. Likewise, the Brahmin lost their position to the non-Brahmin in Tamil Nadu because of the powerful mobilizations against them during the later decades of British colonial rule. The Brahmins of rural Tamil Nadu were among the first to move out of the villages to the emerging urban centres, such as Madras, or what is now known as Chennai.

The Land Reforms transferred land mostly to the middle castes of tenants and actual tillers of the land. As we have discussed in the sixth and seventh chapter, rarely did the Land Reforms transfer land titles to the Dalits, though many of them worked on the land as sharecroppers and labouring hands. Thus, the logic of rural power still revolved around caste. The middling castes emerged as main landowning groups. They also tended to be numerically larger groups within the rural demographics. In most regions of the country, therefore, they began to emerge as holders of rural