Agrarian evolution in a multiform structure society : experience of Independent India

New productive forces and production relations do not develop from nothing... they develop within the existing production set-up and in the struggle against it and against the inherited, traditional relations of property.' Marx's analysis of the dynamics of socio economic evolution explains the fascinations that the processes taking place within the agrarian economies of developing countries hold for the student of society. India in the 1950s and 1960s, with its diversity of economic structures and different levels of regional development, offers a unique opportunity to explore a wide range of agrarian evolution within a multiform society.

Basing his study on an extensive survey of the existing literature as well as on fieldwork conducted in India itself, Victor Rastyannikov analyses the roots of present day Indian society and suggests the directions it might take in the future. He argues that India, like many Asian countries, exhibits tendencies peculiar to an economy evolving on the basis of dependent capitalist development. It is a country caught at the point of transition: the old, semi-feudal economy has been eroded, but the conditions for a new, bourgeois economy have not yet been formulated. Hence issues of vital interest to the socio-economist can be investigated: What are the stages in class formation? What factors are involved in the genesis of a society?

Victor Rastyannikov goes on to show how the state, in seeking to ease the teething problems of development, has assumed a decisive role, expressed in terms of the nationalisation of certain sectors of private exploitative property, and in the supersession of private interests by public ones. The historically inevitable progress of Indian society is therefore a paradoxical one: because its economy exists on the periphery of its system-moulding structure-world capitalism - it has special problems reconciled only by state intervention, this in turn makes the development of a capitalist society impossible. The result is a unique study of a society which is assuming increasing importance in world affairs.