Role National Coordinator Subject Coordinator
Name
Affiliation
Prof Sujata Patel
Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad IIM Calcutta
Paper Coordinator Content Writer
Content Reviewer Language Editor Technical Conversion
Manish Thakur Dr. Shoma Choudhury Department of Sociology Lahiri St. Xavier's College, Kolkata Manish Thakur Manish Thakur
IIM Calcutta IIM Calcutta
Module Structure
Typology of Peasant Movements
Introduction, The need for a typology, The basis of typologies, Typologies of Peasant Movements, Limits of typologies.
Description of the Module Items Subject Name Paper Name Module Name/Title Module Id Pre Requisites Objectives
Key words
Description of the Module Sociology Agrarian Relations and Social Structure in India Typology of peasant movements 5.6 Variety of forms of peasant movements, the need for an order. This module seeks to analyse the uses of typology in sociology. It throws light on the typology of peasant movements in India. Typology, Peasant, Movement, Limitations
Typology of Peasant Movements Key Words: typology, peasant, movement, limitations. Introduction Historically, a wide variety of peasant movements have characterised the Indian landscape. Some of these movements have witnessed mass violence whereas some others have been part of the general mobilisation characteristic of the Indian national movement. Moreover, there has been differential participation of different agrarian classes in these movements. These movements also differ in the scale of their mobilisation, the levels of political awareness, strategies, and goals and objectives. True, most of these movements have been localised phenomena. Yet, the resonance of peasant discontent and the general causes of their misery have found articulation in the nationalist agenda and the development policies after Independence. The plethora of legislative measures to achieve land reforms can very well be seen as the political response to popular upsurge of the peasants exemplified in the various movements. You have already studied some of these movements in considerable detail in the previous modules. You would have also realised that peasant movements have been studied extensively by scholars belonging to different disciplines. Sociologists and historians have generally taken the lead though they have been joined by other social scientists as well. Substantive studies of particular peasant movements apart, some of the scholars have developed strategies to make sense of the wide variety of peasant movements by developing typologies of different kinds. This module intends to introduce you to some of these typologies. But before you go into the various forms and bases of classification, we think it appropriate to tell you a little bit about the functions of typology as such. You will find it perhaps useful and a worthwhile exercise to dwell upon the nature and the need for a typology in social science. The need for a typology A typology is an attempt at a structuring social reality and perceiving it through categories in order to achieve a clear and precise understanding. In fact grouping and classification of objects into distinct sets or types is also inculcated as a basic human activity from childhood and marks the growth of more complex behaviour patterns. In an essay by Durkheim and Mauss published as early as in 1903 (cited in Tiryakin: 1968), there is a suggestion that sociology needs to develop a branch of study called 'social morphology' whose primary role would be to develop systematic classifications of social types or species in relation to social structure. Presumably, this would allow sociology to develop as a scientific discipline as well as avoid the problems that arise due to an oversimplified understanding of social phenomena. According to these theorists, types are more than just logical categories; they are affective, collective symbols of classification. Sociology must also be concerned with 'natural typologies' i.e. the symbolic classifications of entities into types, or 'folk classifications' that are found in various societies for they reflect the conditions of the human subjects themselves.
Typologies, thus, occupy a very important place in conceptual understanding that they bring a certain order within empirical science. 'Since science is grounded on the assumptions of orderliness of natural phenomena and the rational apprehension of this order by man, the systematic classificatory grouping of phenomena and the explication of the rationale for the classification are indeed tantamount to the existing codification of the existing state of knowledge in a discipline' (Tiryakin 1968: 183). Thus, disciplines resort to typologizing because it encourages precision, and makes a body of knowledge scientific. According to the International Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences, 'the methodological function and significance of typological classification are basically two-fold, namely, codification and prediction. A typology goes beyond sheer description by simplifying the ordering of the elements of a population and the known relevant traits of that population into distinct groupings, in this capacity a typological classification creates order out of the potential chaos of the discrete, discontinuous or heterogeneous observation. But in so codifying phenomena, it also permits the observer to seek and predict relationships between phenomena that do not seem to be connected in any obvious way.' (p. 177). In other words, with the potential for codification, prediction and precision, typology enables the making of a more scientific social science. This penchant for typologising phenomena in an attempt to be 'scientific' does betray a positivistic urge among sociologists. As the goals and frameworks of the discipline undergo change, sociologists today have moved away from this imperative to typologise the phenomena that they study. Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, typologies, and typologies of peasant movements in our case, have their uses and it is worthwhile to know about them.
Social Movements: The basis of a typology Peasant movements are but social movements. A preliminary way of understanding peasant movements is thus to look at them in terms of social movements. So, you will be given a short introduction to typologies of social movements before you start looking at the typologies of peasant movements in India. Social scientists have used a variety of ways of creating typologies of social movements. According to M.S.A Rao (1984, 2006), though social movements have been classified according to various criterion, the classification poses definitional problems. Thus classifying movements on the basis of their consequences constitutes one form of classification. Therefore we have reformist movements aimed at bringing about change in some area of life or the other, 'involving new relationships, activities, norms and values.' (p. 3). Other movements which are labelled as transformative are those which bring about change in the relationship between super-ordinate and subordinate. Still other movements work towards bringing about revolutionary changes in different spheres of life. In general, movements may be classified according to their locus or the segments of population, sector or setting in which they originate. Accordingly we have movements which are classified as linguistic, religious, sectarian, caste, peasant, worker, tribal etc. This criterion then enables us to understand the section of the society which is involved in the movement. Movements may be classified on the basis of their scale and spread. Accordingly, some of them may be all India, others may be regional or local. However, according to Rao, 'the criteria of ideology and the nature of consequences are critical' in defining the nature and
scope of the movement… While locus provides the substantive aspect, the criteria of ideology and consequence provide the analytical foci of a movement' (2006: 3). We come across another form of classification on the basis of the change-orientation of social movements as suggested by Partha N Mukherji (1979, 2006) in his study of the Naxalbari movement. He says that social changes can be understood as, a) changes occuring within the given structure (s) b) changes occurring from an emergence of additional structure (s) c) changes occurring due to the elimination or loss of structure(s) ; and d) changes occurring as a result of replacement of existing structure(s) by alternative structure(s). Following the above, changes of the first variety could be classified as accumulative; those of the second and third variety are alternative, whilst changes of the fourth type are transformative. (Mukherji 2006: 20) Likewise, T K Oommen, on the basis of his study of the Bhoodan-Gramdan movement puts forth a three-fold classification of movements: charismatic, organisational and ideological. In his classificatory scheme, the emphasis is on the prime mover of a movement, i.e., what propels and sustains a movement and mobilises the rank and file. For example, given the charismatic role of Vinoba, the Bhoodan could well be regarded as a charismatic movement. Naxal movement, on the other hand, will be an example of ideological movements. And, peasant movements launched under All India Kisan Sabha would be the case of organisational movements. Moreover, these are heuristic categories, and the same movement can go through these phases in its life history. How this can be seen in relation to the Bhoodan movement, please refer to Module 5.2 and the references cited therein.
We should also remember that none of the typologies suggested here are beyond criticisms. Of necessity, they stress on certain attributes of a movement that they consider to be important. In the process, certain other attributes, which other scholars may treat as equally important, if not more, may not find resonance in a given typology. Typology of Peasant movements Scholars who have studied peasant movements in India have classified the phenomenon along several axes. According to Ghanshyam Shah (2004) so far as peasant movements are concerned, classification on the basis of movements’ chronological emergence in different periods of history has been quite popular. Therefore, we very often refer to peasant movements by the rough historical period such as peasant movements in pre-British India, peasant movements in the colonial period, and/or peasant movements in the postindependence India. Peasant movements in the post independence period again, have been classified as pre-Naxalbari and post-Naxalbari or pre-green revolution and post-green revolution. Obviously, in this classification, there is an assumption that Naxalbari movement or the green revolution is moments of great historical significance as gar as changes in the agrarian social structure are concerned. The latter has been further subdivided into movements occurring in the pre and post Emergency period. Observers of the agrarian scene have termed movements occurring in the post green revolution period as farmer's movements. This replacement of the ‘peasant’ by the ‘farmer’, however, is not an arbitrary choice on the part of the scholars. There is an abundance of
literature to justify this conceptual shift in terminology. The shift in the nomenclature is also indicative of the differentiation in the nature of demands, ideological orientations, the emergence of new actors in the Indian countryside and their changing social (class) character. More importantly, it has been demonstrated by the researchers that the issues and demands of the farmers’ movements primarily reflect the class interests of the rich farmers who emerged more strongly in the post-Green revolution period in certain parts of the country. You can read Dipankar Gupta (1997) to have a detailed account of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) movement in western Uttar Pradesh. In the characterisation of a movement as a farmer’s movement, a set of larger theoretical issues are at stake: the nature of agrarian capitalism, the place of free/unfree labour in Indian agriculture, the role of the Indian state and its disposition towards the agrarian bourgeoisie depending on the changing character of the ruling coalition. Tom Brass (1995) is a good source to understand some of the larger issues from an orthodox Marxist point of view. Interestingly, Gail Omvedt has classified the peasant struggles into 'old' and 'new', whereby the former is known by the term peasant movements, and the latter as farmers’ movements. To her, farmers’ movements exemplify ‘new’ social movements in the Indian case. For a distinction between, ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movements you can refer to relevant modules in the paper on social movements. Gail Omvedt’s claim apart, there is no denying that farmers’ movements have certain distinguishing features even when the addressee for both – the peasant and the farmers’ movement – continues to be the state. Farmers’ movements generally display utter indifference to the plight of the labouring classes. Issues relating to the general well-being of the landless agricultural labourers hardly find any place on their agenda. In fact, it is the ownership of the land that qualifies one to the status of a farmer. Moreover, the sectional demands of the class of the owner-cultivators turn out to be the general demands of the entire rural population. This gives the impression of farmers constituting a homogenous class and thereby underplays the internal differentiation of the class of farmers in terms of caste and/or their differential access to land. The focus is generally on the access to resources provided by the state such as subsidies on power for irrigation, fertilisers, pesticides and insecticides, agricultural implements like tractors and threshers, cold storages, minimum support prices, credit at cheaper interest rates etc. Farmers’ movements generally take recourse to the essentialised distinction of Bharat versus India – the former referring to the countryside and the latter to the urban-metropolitan India. They claim that the development policies of the state tend to develop India at the cost of Bharat. They invoke in a popular language what economists call terms of trade arguing that the latter is biased against the rural India. To put it differently, the farmers have to sell off relatively more quantity of food grains to procure a given piece of agricultural implement, or a given bag of fertilisers from the urban market. And, the farmers’ movements have been demanding the rectification of the biased terms of trade through policies favouring farmers. In India, the Shetkari Sangathana movement in Maharashtra led by Sharad Joshi and the Bharatiya Kisan Union movement led by Mahinder Singh Tikait in western Uttar Pradesh are seen as the textbook cases of farmers’ movements. Scholars have also looked at Karnataka Rajya Raiyatha Sangha movement in Karnataka that was at its peak in the 1980s under the leadership of Prof. M D. Nanjundaswami. Most of these movements testify to the increasing country-town nexus and the growing hold of capitalist relations in Indian agriculture. Farmers are the ones who produce for the market (as against peasants who are generally seen to be producing for subsistence) and thus are intimately involved with the processes of commercialisation of agriculture and the vagaries of the global commodity production. On the one hand, this dependence on the market makes them prosper as agriculture becomes a lucrative economic enterprise; on the other hand, it also makes them extremely vulnerable by exposing them to the global
dynamics of agricultural commodity production, particularly cash crops. The incidence of farmers’ suicide and/or the phenomenon of Bt. Cotton or Mansanto have to be understood in relation to the increasing reach and depth of capitalism in Indian agriculture. In his study of peasant struggles, A. R Desai (1978) classified colonial India into ryotwari areas under British territory, zamindari areas under princely authority and tribal areas. He felt that the struggle in these areas had a different character, different goals and involved different strata of the peasantry. Desai called the struggles in the colonial period 'peasant struggles' and those in the post independent period 'agrarian struggles'. The usage of the term agrarian struggles is to indicate a broad category consisting of the peasants and other classes in these struggles. Desai further sub- divides struggles in the post independence period into two categories- 'the movements launched by the newly emerged proprietary classes comprising of rich farmers, viable sections of the middle peasant proprietors and the landlords and the movements launched by various sections of the agrarian poor in which agrarian proletariat have been acquiring central importance' (cited in Shah: 2004) Kathleen Gough (1979) records 77 uprisings and cites massive historical data regarding tribal revolts during British rule. These revolts were primarily launched by tribals who cultivated land, and were already peasants in terms of their occupation. Gough classifies such peasant movements on the basis of their goal, ideology, and the method of organisation. According to her, there are five types of revolts: 1. Restorative rebellions to drive out the British and restore earlier ruler and social relations. 2. Religious movements for liberation of a region or an ethnic group under a new form of government. 3. Social banditry 4. Terrorist vengeance with the idea of meting out collective justice 5. Mass insurrections for the redressal of a particular grievance. (Singh 2001, Shah 2004) Ghanshyam Shah is critical of the above classification because he feels it places undue focus on the goals rather than upon the nature of the peasant actors involved or the strategies that they adopt in attaining their goals. Inspired by the framework of class analysis, D. N. Dhanagare (1983) believes that the peasant movement in India can be understood through the model of agrarian classes. He draws upon and extends the Marxist tradition of the study of peasantry in terms of agrarian classes. As you already know this tradition of understanding peasant stratification goes back to Lenin’s classic work titled Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899). This was further enriched by the contributions of the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong. Later, an entire subfield of peasant studies emerged along the lines of Marxist class analysis. D N Dhanagare’s classic work on peasant movements in India belongs to this tradition. According to him, the studies of peasantry need to be both historical and comparative in nature. Employing the historical and comparative framework, Dhanagare (1983) analyses a range of peasant movements in India between 1920-1950 such as the Moplah Rebellion in Malabar, the Tebhaga movement in Bengal, the Bardoli Satyagraha in Gujarat, and the peasant struggles of Telengana and Oudh to establish two broad patterns of interdependence between the type of movement and the strata of peasantry. According to him, the poor peasantry generally participates in the insurrectionary and millenarian movements,
and the rich and middle peasants, on the other hand, generally involves itself, in the nationalist non-violent resistance movements. Even now, Dhanagare’s typology of peasant movements remains the most comprehensive and useful tool for understanding peasant movements in India. More importantly, Dhanagare advances a major revision of the ‘middle peasant’ thesis in the Indian case. For the middle peasant thesis, you can refer to the other relevant module in this paper. Privileging goals, ideology and methods of organisation in his classification of peasant movements, Dhanagare (1983) talks of the following six types: 1. Nativistic movements or rebellions: they were primarily aimed at driving out the British and maintaining earlier ruler and social relations. Such movements are essentially revivalist and their ideology is generally backward looking. These movements did take place in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The process of British annexation of Indian territory and the imposition of alien land revenue administration in different parts of the country saw the emergence of such movements. 2. Religious or Millenarian movements: these movements are meant for the liberation of a region or an ethnic group under a new pattern of authority. Their collective orientation is towards a futuristic religious ideology, totalistic goals or messianic leadership. For example, the Santhal rebellion in the Chhota Nagpur plateau led by the tribal leader Birsa Munda falls under this category. 3. Social Banditry: This is a category drawn from the works of the historian Eric Hobsbawm. It refers to the rebellious activities of the peasant outlaws whom the lord and the state regard as criminals. Social bandits remain within the bounds of peasant society and are considered their heroes – leaders of liberation. They emerge in times of general peasant pauperisation and economic crises such as famines, drought, floods, and civil wars. Social bandits inhabit remote and inaccessible areas. Their goals are narrow and they exemplify Robin Hood syndrome. They would loot the granaries and wealth of the rich peasants and distribute them among the poor. Even the Chinese revolution led by Mao has had its share of social bandits. In India, the fictional works of Phaneeshwarnath Renu contain references to some of the social bandits like Nakshatra Malakar in the Purnea region of Bihar.
4. Mass Insurrections: Peasants go for mass insurrections for the redressal of specific secular grievances. Such insurrections do not have a single charismatic leader. They may be initially reformative involving peaceful demonstrations but may end up with mass violence. Tebhaga and Telengana movements in India are seen as mass insurrections. 5. Terrorism: This involves actual use and threat of violence coupled with vengeance and ideas of meting out collective justice to the chosen few. Terrorists’ acts by their very nature are sporadic, diffused and spontaneous. Naxalbari movement in its phase of decline saw such terrorist acts though such acts also accompanied peasant rebellions in Oudh and Moplah revolt.
6. Liberal-Reformist movements: They involve violation of specific law through symbolic protests. They do not question the very structure of legitimate authority. Likewise, they do not aspire for or aim at fundamental transformations in social relations. Peasant movements in Kheda, Bardoli, Champaran and Oudh fall under this category. In general, liberal-reformist peasant movements emerged as part of the nationalist mass mobilisation. They employed strategies such as no tax campaigns. Or they would protest against particular piece of legislation that they would consider exploitative such as compulsory indigo farming. The first two types of the above-mentioned classification are transformative in the sense that they aim at total change while the last four basically refer to reformative partial changes, intra-systemic changes and modifications in the existing social relations. You should also realise that none of the peasant movements in India seem to conform to a single ideal type in concrete reality. In fact, in their actual unfolding, some of these movements may have had elements of more than one particular type. Yet, heuristically, these types help us understand the phenomena of peasant protest. Complex social forces and peculiar historical conditions shape the form and substance of peasant resistance. In fact, most of the peasant movements never assumed an all-India character. They were fragmented, either regional or local and were generally oriented towards local-regional demands. In class terms, in millenarian and insurrectionary movements, the principal participants are poor peasants, insecure tenants with small holdings and share-croppers. Mass insurrections may have the participation of landless labourers as well. Terrorism as a type witnesses the mobilisation of the same agrarian classes as mass insurrections. What distinguish these two types are their ideological differences. Some of the peasant movements like the Moplah rebellion and the Oudh revolt in Uttar Pradesh (1920-21) have been regarded as pre-political in nature given the dominant religious overtones of these movements. What make peasant rebellion a mass movement are levels of political mobilisation and the degree of political consciousness. In this reading, Tebhaga and Telengana turn out to be overtly political peasant movements as they involved revolutionary mobilisation by the Communist Party of India (CPI). Dhanagare’s analysis clearly demonstrates that rich and middle peasants generally act either against the government or landlord. These categories also responded to Gandhi’s call for political agitations for national independence. They also adopted his ethics of non-violence and peaceful satyagraha. Hamza Alavi relates the failure of Tebhagha and Telengana movements to the presence of the poor peasants as the peripheral actors. These movements also saw the alienation of the middle peasants in the later stages of the struggle. Dhanagare is of the view that middle peasants are too vulnerable and marginal to be considered as revolutionary vanguard in revolutionary peasant movements. They display withdrawal symptoms in a movement. Moreover, they are deeply attached to land, and too dependent on rich peasants for credit and other types of support to carry on with any revolutionary zeal. In fact, they did not make any outstanding contribution to Moplah or Telengana insurrections. They are much closer to rich peasants in terms of economic interests and political aspirations than has been supposed by the proponents of ‘middle peasant’ thesis. T K. Oommen (1985) observes that there are peasant movements that have continued till today irrespective of the change in political power. These movements started during the pre-
independence period but they continue till today, though their goals have undergone change. Ghanshyam Shah (2004) feels that peasant movements differ according to the variability of agrarian regimes or structures and as the latter undergo changes, the nature of the peasant movement also varies. For example, a contrast can be drawn between the actors and the goals of the peasant movements under the British and those during post-independent India where the nature of the peasantry and their demands/goals became more differentiated. In recent times, scholars also include the struggles of the agricultural labour under the general rubric of peasant movements. After all, agrarian labour as a category is intimately linked with the general framework of the ownership, control and the use of land. Thus, K. P Kannan divides the rural labour struggles according to the development of class consciousness among them. Therefore, there are, a) protest movements based on caste or religious identity and consciousness but those which are basically a response generated by the emerging capitalist mode of production b) secular movements arising from category (a) that reject caste identity and consciousness but appealing to the 'rationality' and 'brotherhood' of man. c) the nationalist movement culminating in radical political consciousness, the seeds of which were in category (b) culminating in 'class consciousness' and class based movements (cited in Shah 2004: 42-43) Another way of looking at the peasant movements is the way Ranajit Guha does in his book Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983), where he examines peasant insurgency from the perspective of peasant consciousness for revolt. Guha delineates the underlying structural features of tribal consciousness of peasants, namely negation, solidarity, transmission, territoriality etc. These features can enable us to understand why and how peasants have rebelled in the past. However, Guha represents a more recent trend where scholars are moving away from typologies. He believes that peasant struggles cannot be categorised because they have an element of arbitrariness. Social reality is complex and it is misleading to divide them artificially. However, Guha’s study is confined to tribal rebels and to the rebellions that had occurred during the colonial period. Some of Guha’s collaborators, namely, Gynendra Pandey and Shahid Amin, though have worked on other peasant movements in considerable detail. Collectively, these works get designated as subaltern historiography. The essential thesis of subaltern historiography posits the autonomy of peasant consciousness in terms of their political action. The limits of typology Although sociologists have devoted a lot of time to the creation of typologies there are several limits that typologizing imposes on our understanding of social reality. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, the urge to create typologies that would enable generalisation and prediction is a little farfetched, because social reality appears to be more dynamic to be encapsulated within such typologies. Secondly, some movements have participants from different stratas of society. For example, if the issue of conservation of forests is raised by tribals, should the movement be treated as a tribal movement or ecological movement? They can be regarded as both, as sustenance of forests is important for the livelihood of tribals. Issues like ecology or civil liberties are not class based movements, though they might affect some class of people more than the others. This tells us about the limitation of typologies to comprehend the complex social reality. In fact M.S.A Rao (1984, 2006) provides a balanced understanding of the act and purpose of
classification when he rightly emphasises that classification helps to identify the main features of the movement; it does not fully explain its origin, growth, dynamics and consequences. Any classification is bound to remain inadequate, for a movement tends to acquire new features during its course and any classification can only be relative to a particular phase in its development. In Brief This module has, hopefully, offered you a preliminary understanding of the different types of peasant movements in India. It has also sensitised you to the larger issues of development of capitalism in agriculture, the role of the state and the differentiated interests of the peasantry. At the same time, it has introduced you to some of the scholars who have worked on these issues. It will be better if you complement this module by going through some of the works listed under references and other essays which are available online. You would realise that there is no dearth of literature on the theme of peasant movements in India. Rather, we have an abundance of them. Typologies are a good way of making sense of voluminous literature that exists on varied peasant movements by equipping us with conceptual distinctions along different axes.
