Capitalist Agriculture and Rural Classes in India

in India Gail Omvedt The debate over the 'mode of production in Indian agriculture' grew out of a milieu where scholars steeped in classic Marxist notions of feudalism, capitalism and imperialism confronted a changing empirical reality. In retrospect, it now appears that the data base of the whole debate was scanty, though by the 1960s, important economic changes in agriculture had been initiated, and the process of destroying pre independence forms of landlordism and laying the foundations of an industrial and in- frastructural development that could supply inputs to agriculture was beginning to produce real changes. But though Indian agriculture was becoming capitalist, the debate on the mode of production centred itself on the colonial period and failed to analyse the qualitatively different processes at work in the post- colonial phase.