Studies in agrarian social structure c.4

In 1968 the author was awarded a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship to work on the problem of agrarian social structure. This book is a product of that work. The subject is vast and has been left almost completely unexplored by sociologists and social anthropologists in India; at the same time, it is of considerable importance and lends itself peculiarly well to investigation by the methods of sociology and social anthropology. The author has therefore selected a number of topics and examined each in a sociological perspective, contributing in this way to the development of a new area of inquiry in the discipline. What is offered here is a set of interconnected studies; this is not a book with a Conclusion.

The author's main concern in this work is with patterns of inequality and conflict as these arise from the ownership, control and use of land-a subject of crucial importance to an understanding of conditions in India. In terms of the conventional divisions of sociology, the studies in this book belong where the domains of social stratification, economic sociology and political sociology intersect.

André Béteille is Professor of Sociology at the University of Delhi. The author of Caste, Class and Power; Inequality and Social Change; Castes Old and New: Six Essays in Comparative Sociology and Inequality Among Men, he has edited a volume on Social Inequality and written articles for several journals.