Discovering Boundaries, Building Dialogues: Historical Sociology, Economics, and the Evolution of the Dominant Caste in Western India
June 2023 | Apurva Apurva
Introduction
This paper uses the lens of historical sociology to examine the social formation and economic differentiation within a dominant agricultural caste–Maratha Kunbi–in Western Maharashtra in the successive transition period from colonial to post-independent to neoliberal economic expansion. It argues that relative economic prosperity and political supremacy of the dominant caste cluster of the region are outcomes of the twin processes of capital accumulation and political accommodation. It further demonstrates that while social and economic hierarchy always existed, neoliberal economic processes in the region have weakened the hold of the dominant caste structure and widened the class differentiation within the caste cluster.
In light of the argument, reassessing the debate on transitioning from feudalism to capitalism is useful. The transition narrative from feudalism to
Apurva Apurva, Visiting Lecturer, Department of Sociology, SUNY Oneonta, NY 13820, Email: apurvaa@oneonta.edu
I thank Sujata Patel for encouraging me to write this paper. She had read multiple drafts of it, and her insightful comments and suggestions helped clarify and articulate the theme and argument of the paper.
capitalism in the West takes two diametrically opposite forms. Brenner (1977) argued the development of capitalism and its future in terms of the presence (or absence) of modern productive forces, the emergence of new class relations, and the specificity of class conflicts. Brenner’s emphasis on internal factors responsible for capitalist development in Western Europe came in response to Frank (1969), Wallerstein (1974 and 1979), and Amin’s (1976) arguments that relied on external factors. They all claimed, in one way or another, that the development of capitalism in colonial countries (the core) produced under- development in the colonized economy (the periphery) through unequal trade relations and the transfer of surplus value from the periphery to the center.
Deliberating on the transition question, Thorner (1982) assembled the views of scholars, including economists, to determine whether India is a semi-feudal or capitalist country. In this debate, scholars concurred that colonialism led to a distorted capitalist development, and semi-feudal relations of production still existed in some parts of India (Bhaduri 1973, Prasad 1974, Chandra 1974). However, they overwhelmingly agreed that in the post-independence era, capitalist tendencies – use of agricultural machinery, appropriation of surplus from wage labor, reinvestment of profit for further accumulation – dominated Indian agriculture (Patnaik 1976). While the debate settled some of the issues, such as the preference for the term non-capitalists (Patnaik 1971) over ‘pre-capitalist’ and rejection of a ‘dual mode’ of the economy, it is compelling to notice the conspicuous absence of the social category of ‘caste’ in the transition debate in India.
In contrast, the discussion about India’s political-economic development remained short shrift in early sociological discourse. Sociologists, particularly social anthropologists, were preoccupied with studying inter-caste and kinship relations and the adaptability of caste ranking in villages and towns without necessarily participating in a more extensive debate about the economic transition and emerging classes within caste categories. For example, M.N. Srinivas introduced the concept of ‘dominant caste’ in the 1950s without discussing the class composition of Indian society. He defined the dominant caste in terms of high numerical strength and ritual status, large landholding, and a group keen on adopting a western lifestyle, non-agrarian occupations, and modern education (Srivinas 1987). Later, Béteille (2007) and other sociologists noticed the omission of ‘class’ in sociological literature. Consequently, they incorporated the necessary language of ‘material forces of production’ in explaining the class formation and the evolution of capital-labor relations in India’s industrial center (Patel 1987).
In the post-independent period, Bardhan (1984 [1998]), an economist by profession, examined the caste and class relationship to describe the nature of the Indian state and the constraints on the country’s economic growth. He demonstrated how the state accommodated ‘dominant proprietary classes’ through ‘patronage’ and ‘subsidies,’ which bolstered the economic position of dominant classes and castes in India. However, Bardhan’s analysis neglects the discussion about social formation, economic differentiation, and schism within a regional caste group in India’s social and economic transition.
Since the 1980s, India’s march towards capitalist development has continued, albeit in altered political and economic conditions. First, neoliberal capitalism has enabled the new condition; however, its characteristics and mode of operations are different from the Global North. In the North, neoliberalism is tantamount to the withdrawal of the ‘welfare’ state and the promotion of the free market in allocating goods and services for economic and social development (Harvey 2005, Stiglitz 2002). Such conceptualization hinders the understanding of neoliberal conditions in the South.1 For example, in India, the state introduced neoliberal reform by ‘stealth’ (Jenkins 1999) and played an active role in the economy by following a ‘pro-business’ approach to economic development (Kohli 2012). Second, instead of an agrarian model of development, a dominant form after India’s independence, the current mode of capital accumulation hinges on the commodification of urban land in the forms of Special Economic Zones (Kennedy 2014, Levien 2018), construction of urban infrastructure and corridors (Anand and Sami 2016, Balakrishnan 2019) real estate development and speculation (Goldman 2011, Searle 2016) and the development of the tertiary sector of the economy such as Information Technology and Information Technology Enabled Services (Upadhya 2016).
Is the new mode of capitalist development good for Indian society? The mainstream economists believe it is and affirm a two-fold strategy for India’s rapid economic and social development: first, accelerate economic growth through liberal labor laws, incentivize private players through economic concession, build modern urban infrastructure, and create global investment opportunities, and two, redistribute the fruits of growth to alleviate poverty and forge an “inclusive” society, that is, a better economic and social future for all Indian citizens (Panagariya 2008, Bhagwati and Panagariya 2012).
This article challenges the ideas of mainstream economists and the Indian avatar of “trickle-down economics.” It shows that such economic wisdom is ahistorical because it fails to recognize the enormous chasm between the two steps:
a) accelerated economic growth and b) the redistribution of resources. The paper formulates arguments against mainstream economics by building on Bardhan’s political-economic analysis, but for a neoliberal India. It presents historical evidence that reveals consistent political and economic accommodation of the powerful rural elites who, in turn, have used the conditions for economic diversification, capital accumulation, and consolidation of their position in society. One of the paper’s main findings is that at the present conjuncture of neoliberalization and urbanization, being a dominant caste of a region may not necessarily yield economic benefits, as evident in the case of Maratha-Kunbis, in Western Maharashtra. In fact, only those subgroups, such as Magars, within the dominant caste have achieved upward class mobility and bourgeoisification of their lifestyle, whose land happened to crisscross neoliberal agendas of urban zoning and spacing in the Pune region. Moreover, the condition galvanized other groups within the Maratha community left behind by the neoliberal development process to demand reservations in education and jobs in Maharashtra.
Methodology
The paper focuses on the case study of Magarpatta City in the context of changing economic, political, and social structure of Western Maharashtra. It begins by asking how and why a farming community, Magars, was able to build a real estate development in the shape of Magarpatta City. The broader research examined Pune’s peripheral urban development, where agricultural lands were converted into SEZs, Integrated Townships, or a combination of both in the early 2000s. To find an answer to the question, I conducted structured and unstructured interviews with various actors: The Magar leadership and the other landholders, real estate developers, planners and architects, and real estate journalists of Pune. Most interviews were conducted in 2006-2007 and a few others later in 2014-2015 when my research focus moved to the western peripheral development of Pune at Hinjewadi. This ‘bottom-up’ approach to studying neoliberal urban transformation is complemented by the historical sociological method that examines the structure and processes of the Western Maharashtra spanning from the colonial to post- independent to the liberalization period. The method of historical sociology reveals how political and economic processes over the time limit or enable choices for social groups, Maratha-Kunbi in general and Magars in particular, leading to intended as well as unintended outcomes in the capital accumulation process and caste-class relations.
The article is divided into three sections: The first part contextualizes the Maratha caste cluster under neoliberal economic development. It focuses on the rise of the landowning Magar community at the periphery of Pune city and demonstrates a contradictory development within the community. On the one hand, the paper observes the ascendancy of the Magars’ class position and economic diversification of elite Marathas; on the other, one notices the demand for reservations for the other community members who once exercised their caste hegemony in the region. Parts two and three historicize the formation of the dominant Martha community in the post-independent and colonial era. In the post- independent period, the Maratha hegemony rode on the Congress party’s plan of political accommodation, bringing together the political elite and the Maratha- Kunbi caste cluster. But, the dominance of the Maratha caste cluster, a significant regional social development in India’s transition to capitalism, has its root in colonial Deccan agrarian policies. The British rule introduced a new land revenue model, promoted the commercialization of agriculture, and built canals to cultivate sugarcane crops.
I Neoliberalization and the ‘Urban Turn’
Beginning in the 1980s, the Indian state recalibrated its developmental role and redefined the vision for the human betterment of its people. Since the past decades’ restrained industrial growth and agricultural reforms yielded economic crises, a service-oriented economy, and urban-infrastructural development became the torch bearer for a new ‘shining India.’ In the framework of liberalization and privatization, the state started promoting Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and Information Technology (IT) parks. In addition, it extended an invitation to global financial investments, legislated new laws that commodified the land market, facilitated private real estate development, and encouraged wild speculation on land, housing, and other infrastructural development projects. With this, India entered a new regime of accumulation based on an accelerated urban transformation, although it remained confined to specific regions and cities. The overall rate of urbanization is still slow, but one notices an ascendancy of peri- urban development as well as greenfield projects all over India (Kennedy and Sood, 2016), such as Electronic City – Bengaluru (Karnataka), Amaravati (Andhra Pradesh), Dholera (Gujarat), Gurugram (Haryana), Greater Noida (Uttar Pradesh), New Town-Rajarhat – Kolkata (West Bengal) and Hinjewadi and Magarpatta City
– Pune (Maharashtra).
Urban projects, such as building SEZ and IT parks, required land acquisition. After independence, the developmental state acquired land for public-sector infrastructure projects and was able to dispossess landowners and workers without facing much opposition. The owners agreed to give up their land rights as they perceived this as a service to the nation and an unavoidable condition for India’s economic growth. In comparison, since the 2000s, farmers from all parts of India have vehemently opposed land acquisition for the SEZ and other urban-industrial projects. The anti-dispossession movements have successfully halted many multi- million-dollar SEZ projects in Goa, Haryana, Odisha, and West Bengal (Jenkins, Kennedy, and Mukhopadhyay 2014). The defiant farmers have been holding up against the land acquisition because they have observed how their land is used for speculation, upscale gated residences, private-commercial, and corporate development. On the one side of the story are small farmers and agricultural laborers facing forced eviction and showing resistance — dispossession and anti- dispossession movements. In this vein, Levien (2018) examines dispossession as a means of accumulation. On the other side of the story are the landed elites, who have used their caste-class privilege to gain a better deal in the redistribution of resources in the growing urban market. For example, ushering into the era of economic liberalization, many affluent Marathas undertook new business opportunities, particularly investments in wineries, education, and real estate (Damodaran 2008).
Marathas under Economic Liberalization: Exploring the Urban Market
In the new economic context, the economically powerful Marathas started participating in the broader capitalist market. This participation was simultaneously mediated by changing political alliances and a partial decline of Maratha hegemony in Maharashtra (Deshpande and Palshikar 1999). Yet, elite Maratha entrepreneurship remained on the rise. With the opening of the market, Western Maharashtra’s rural elites adopted commercial and cash-rich agro- activities (floriculture, horticulture, and viticulture). For example, a Maratha entrepreneur Shamrao Chougule founded Maharashtra’s first winery at Narayangaon on the Pune-Nasik road, which now produces wine and champagne for the global market. The other two Maratha business moguls in wineries are Rajeev Samant, who supplies from Sula Vineyards, and the Pune-based realtor (earlier an irrigation contractor) Avinash Bhonsle (Damodaran 2008). Still, others ventured into the leisure industry and private educational institutions establishing medical, engineering, management, and polytechnic schools. In a few cases, elite Marathas simultaneously owned educational institutions and held ministerial positions in the state education department (Damodaran 2008, pp. 239-40).
Landed Elites and Peri-Urban Development in Pune
The agrarian landowners, the Magars, at the edge of Pune, have been part of neoliberal urban expansion since the late 1990s. They have responded favorably to the commodification and privatization of land development and have benefitted the most from the peripheral urbanization of Pune. The implementation of neoliberal policies brought unique economic opportunities not available earlier to this group who belonged to the Maratha caste cluster.
Making the neoliberal space—decorated with SEZs, gated communities, and IT parks—like the one in Magarpatta City, Pune, requires the acquisition of common and fertile agricultural lands. For liberal scholars, particularly economists, land acquisition for urban and infrastructural projects is a necessary step to transcend the tag of India as an “emerging” or “developing” economy. But the landed farmers whose land is at stake may not share the same enthusiasm. Land dispossession has become one of the highly contentious issues in contemporary India. One observes a fierce opposition to the appropriation of land in which the state transfers the acquired land to private corporations. In past decades, accounts of anti-SEZ movements have been found in West Bengal, Odisha, Haryana, and Goa, where militant farmers have successfully opposed or stalled developmental projects (Sampat 2015, Levien 2018). Even in Maharashtra, the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) led SEZs development has faced opposition (Kale 2008). But the emergence of the state-supported land cooperatives (Balakrishnan 2019) and the desires of the landed elite to leave behind the “low-status” agricultural work explain new economic trajectories appropriated by the agrarian bourgeoisie in the context of neoliberal urban expansion. 2
The case study of Magarpatta City, a much sought-after sub-urban terrain filled with high rises and service sector industries, shows that caste is a significant axis through which structures of accommodation and accumulation play out in peripheral urban development in Pune. Dominated by the Maratha caste cluster, the urban expansion in the Magarpatta area allowed the elite strata of the group to reproduce its dominant status, unlocking new avenues for capital accumulation.
From Farmers to a Business Class: Magars of Magarpatta City
In 1997, a delegation from Pune’s chapter of the Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Industries, and Agriculture (MCCIA) went to San Jose, California. The group primarily consisted of representatives from the IT sector of Maharashtra, but it also had members with varied business interests. One of the members was Satish Magar, an agricultural graduate from the local farming community who wished to become a real estate entrepreneur. After arriving in San Jose, he visited the local urban planning department, met experts, took notes on the city’s spatial organization, and returned with one unique concept: “walk to work.” Later, he would visit cities in Malaysia and Singapore to find a similar and ubiquitous pattern of “corporate-cum-residential” urban settings. Satish Magar noticed this emerging global trend of the urban spatial organization and tried to reproduce his newly acquired knowledge on the agricultural land he and other farmers owned for generations outside Pune’s city limits. After the initial planning and various government approvals, he built a 430-acre integrated township: Magarpatta City – a “walk to work-home-recreation lifestyle” infused with sports, leisure, shopping, and other facilities.
Until the early 1980s, Magarpatta was an agricultural zone where Magars, the most prominent clan group owning 40 per cent of the land strip (patta), and others cultivated sugarcane and vegetables. Of the Magarpatta community, the Maratha caste cluster constituted more than 90 per cent, and many drew their ancestry from landholding in the area for more than three hundred years. In 1982, Pune’s draft development plan declared the Magarpatta area as a future urbanized zone; however, till the next plan was formulated in 1987, the site primarily remained agricultural. In the early 1990s, the central government, as a part of neoliberal reforms, passed the 74th constitutional amendment, which gave local municipalities the power to conceive urban planning under the framework of urban-rural integration. The decentralization of power allowed the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) to expand and incorporate twenty-three fringe villages within its boundary. However, the integration of Magarpatta into the city led to increased unauthorized constructions in the area, and farmers began to negotiate or, in some cases, sell their land rights to private real estate developers. In this context of inevitable urbanization and perhaps insecurity over livelihood, the Magar community, the largest landholders in Magarpatta, took a strategic decision in 1993, under the leadership of Satish Magar, to quit farming and embrace real estate development. This deliberate move resulted in the coming together of around 120 families, who combined their land to build Magarpatta City Township (Apurva 2007, Ganguli 2013). In 1995, Maharashtra’s Department of Urban Development and the PMC approved the Master Plan of Magarpatta City, and in 2006, Magarpatta acquired the status of the (IT) SEZ.
While the Magarpatta model as a new form of urban spatial organization has evoked a favorable response in the popular press, the scholarly discussion on building Magarpatta City is limited to analyses of power and politics around urban processes in Pune. Sami (2012) emphasizes how Satish Magar was able to mobilize temporary alliances and form “urban coalitions” toward building Magarpatta City. The scholarly accounts term the farmers’ role in Pune’s urban development process unprecedented. At one level, such analysis provides a useful perspective on contemporary urban actors and political processes in making the urban periphery. However, it lacks historical insights into the long association of big farmers with the urban areas and the continuous investments of rural elites in towns and cities. From the historical perspective, Magar’s role in urban development is not unique. Instead, it shows one of the many possible business opportunities for wealthy farmers that was swung open by the logic of neoliberal development. From Sami’s perspective, it appears as if the transition of Magarpatta from an agricultural to an urban zone and the transformation of a farming community into a real estate developer needed a few political nudges here and a few schematic alliances there.
This paper shows the transition from farming to real estate development does make sense if we put Magarpatta and the landholding caste of Magars within the evolving regional history of economics and politics dominated by Maratha elites. It is in the context of the regional history of Western Maharashtra, successively shaped by the colonial policies of irrigation, postcolonial politics of sugar cooperatives, and neoliberal imperatives of the urban, that one can begin to understand the ways in which Satish Magar was able to mobilize external political networks and organize finances for Magarpatta City. Of course, internal economic disparity existed within the Magar community since big farmers such as Satish Magar and his family collectively owned around 150 acres of land, and small farmers landholding was limited to an acre or, in some instances, half an acre (Sami 2012). Nevertheless, the economic standing of the Satish Magar – often respectfully referred to as Satish ‘dada’ by fellow clan members – allowed him to wield power over smaller farmers whose lands were further divided among brothers into smaller plots known as pattas. So, when pattas—narrow strips 20 feet wide and 1000 feet long land—had to be pooled for the real estate development, knowledge of sugar cooperatives, an emblem of the region, laid out a solution to them. The Magars and the others assembled their land to form a farmer’s cooperative in which each agreed to receive proportionate shareholdings against the size of their ownership. As a result, the Magarpatta Township Development and Construction Company (MTDCC), established in 1994, moved from being a farmer’s cooperative to a private limited and then to a public company.3
Many popular depictions of Magarpatta City are in awe of Magars, a group of farmers who created a real estate wonder. However, examining the social and cultural capital of Magars, especially their leader Satish Magar, puncture the claims of building a real estate wonder on the farmland by inexperienced farmers. Such claims are only partially valid since Satish Magar’s father was an engineer who managed his enterprise in civil construction. Familiarizing with the construction business became convenient for Satish Magar, who presented a plausible land development plan to other kin members. It helped the cause that Magar families were not only the dominant clan and the largest landholder but also had deep familial connections within the state’s politics. The close relationship with Sharad Pawar strengthened the development project and secured Satish Magar’s ascendancy to entrepreneurship. In many public interviews, the farmer- turned-entrepreneur has boasted that “politics is in my blood” and that his family had close ties with the Congress party for four decades. For example, his mother’s father was Pune’s first mayor, and his uncle Anna Saheb Magar played an instrumental role in establishing the Pimpri-Chinchwad (a suburb of Pune) Municipal Council in 1970. These prior political links enabled Satish Magar to approach the right people and the right desk in the otherwise highly inaccessible corridors of India’s bureaucratic labyrinth. He first approached the renowned architect from Mumbai, Hafeez Contractor, who drew up the preliminary master plan of Magarpatta City. After that, he proposed the plan to the then Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Sharad Pawar, B.G. Deshmukh (a retired Cabinet Secretary), and
D. T. Joseph (secretary of the state’s urban planning department). All showed a special interest in the project and ensured that various approvals and permissions were met quickly. Moreover, the promotion of Magarpatta City was legitimized in public eyes as a model development that can reduce unauthorized urban growth at the periphery of Pune. Like many other urban development projects of the time, the strategic alliance of the state and real estate portrayed Magarpatta City as yet another neoliberal spatial purifier, a project that was supposed to correct and sanitize the collective irrationalities of post-independence urban planning in India. If the mobilization of political and administrative networks were part of one wheel that rolled the project, then access to liquid capital and guidance to operate real estate markets propelled the other wheel forward. Both came from Deepak Parekh, then the managing director of the Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC). The initial inhibitions of the lenders, regulatory hurdles over bank loans, and a general mistrust to fund farmers’ real estate projects gradually yielded to a personal acquaintance and mutual interest that benefitted both the Magarpatta Township Development and Construction Company (MTDCC) and HDFC. Parekh initially offered a loan of ₹2-crore for the construction project, while Satish Magar agreed that the HDFC would have the right to preside over financing home loans to the property buyers in the township.
The former farmers appear to be enjoying their newly acquired status of “entrepreneurs.” While still owning land in their name, they claim that the land is their stock and they are now “venture capitalists.” However, a closer look tells that some of them have found non-venture sources of income by renting out their spare apartments and other properties. In contrast, some have taken up variegated occupations in urban gardening, food catering, internet, cable TV providers, and the transportation business. To help get a proper transition from a farmer to a businessman, the MTDCC trains farmers and teaches them new practical skills.
The transformation of farming land into urban real estate at the periphery of Pune has caught the eyes of the popular media and liberal intelligentsia. The success of the township has become a widely circulated case study for management schools in India, all of which have since touted Magarpatta City as a national model to be imitated for India’s urban development. In the context of the anti-dispossession movement, the central government recommended farmer’s cooperatives for developing integrated IT townships in other states. Whether there can be many Magarpattas in India is an irrelevant question partly because such development depends on the size of the landed community, their socio-political influence, and landholding history in the region. What is significant is that India will urbanize with or without the Magarpatta model because of at least two reasons: a) neoliberal urban development puts a high premium and returns on the commodification of land, and b) there is a tacit consensus among farmers at the periphery of a city that urbanization is the way forward. In the case of Magarpatta, what is demonstratively true is how the social and political capital deeply intertwines with the commodification of agricultural land, a phenomenon that can be attributed to the state’s pro-business strategy and structural changes brought to the Indian economy since the1990s. The business-friendly policy, access to finance, and expansion of municipal limits provided new incentives for private real estate development in Pune. While conditions turned out to be beneficial for all real estate developers, it was exceptionally profitable for Satish Magar and his farmer allies because they could mobilize caste networks, make political connections, muster business contacts, forge temporary alliances with other influential actors, and most importantly could use landownership to further capital accumulation in the brewing neoliberal urban economy of Pune. 4 As this paper shows, the emergence of a new wealthy class, such as Magars, within the Maratha caste cluster is not new, and so is the internal stratification between the Maratha elite and the rest of the community. Still, the neoliberal developmental model has created division and cemented a schism within this caste cluster so that only some clans or groups, particularly those bordering cities, can reproduce their privileged caste and class position. Despande and Palshikar (2017) argue the growing division among the Maratha community and demand for reservation is the result of the new political economy that aggressively pushed the agenda of economic liberalization and urban-centric growth model in Maharashtra at the expense of agrarian interest.
The demand for reservations has dented the image of Maratha hegemony, but in what ways was the internal division between the elite and masses addressed before the period of a neoliberal form of economic development? How did Magars, who formed a farmer’s cooperative for real estate development, learn the tricks of the trade? The paper looks beyond the neoliberal phase to find the answer.
II The Developmental State and Capitalist Farmers
5 In contrast to the urban-centric neoliberal development model, the newly independent Indian state visualized agricultural modernization as a way to build a better life for all. It formulated agrarian policies assuming it had to rebuild a new rural order that extractive colonial rule had defiled. In order to reconstruct the rural economy, the state initiated land reforms, promoted a cooperative model of agricultural development, and later introduced the Green Revolution. Yet, the rural development and social change that followed continued to mirror the image of colonial times. The rich peasants (varied regionally but often landowning local dominant castes) remained the beneficiaries of the new reforms even when some legislations appeared pro-poor. The rich peasants continued to invest in agriculture-based industries but also diversified their agricultural surplus in retail and distributorships, contracting and trade, transport business, small-scale industries, and in some cases, even financed film industries and educational institutions. The economic power that rich peasants gained during colonial times was used to mine the inner workings of political power to their advantage in the post-independence period. They aimed either to seize control over the ruling Congress party or through political mobilization and movements against state power. Both strategies, however, accomplished one aim: securing further capital accumulation for the landowning dominant agrarian caste of the region. Various scholarly accounts show that land reforms and the Green Revolution empowered the capitalist farmers in North and South India6. But its impact was less consequential for Western India, particularly in Gujarat and Maharashtra. In this region, rural cooperatives emerged as a defining entity having their roots in the region’s history and colonial policies.7
“Cooperative Capitalists” and the Political Dominance of Marathas
The spread of sugar factories in the canal districts of Western Maharashtra led to the establishment of Cooperative Sugar Factory by influential Maratha peasant leaders—Vithalrao Vikhe-Patil and Ganpatrao Rabhaji Autade—in the early 1950s (Baviskar 1980). Many conditions allowed the expansion of sugar cooperatives from the 1950s onwards. First, economically, it provided a reliable market for cane growers because cooperatives controlled the price of sugar. To extract maximum sucrose from cane to make white sugar, a high volume of steady and timely supply of sugarcane was necessary (a “techno-economic” compulsion to make sugar cooperatives economically viable). Since big Maratha farmers could not alone produce a high quantity of cane, they struck a partnership with the small and medium cultivators (Damodaran 2008). This alliance had implications for the politics of Maharashtra in the following decades because big farmers had to accommodate the interests of small farmers. Second, socially, such partnerships were possible and convenient in the sugar belt of Western Maharashtra because Maratha-Kunbis constituted 41 per cent of the total population in the region and had established kinship networks within the caste cluster from pre-colonial times. From the 1950s, what changed between the elite Marathas and common Maratha Kunbis was the expansion of the elite’s patronage to the Kunbis from the socio- cultural sphere to the political domain. The need for political patronage arose due to profit motives and compulsion to operate the sugar cooperative industry in specific ways. For the elite Marathas of Western Maharashtra, who were soon to become a dominating force in the state’s politics, the sugar cooperatives (also panchayats and Employment Guarantee Scheme[EGS]) became the instrument through which both (patronage and profit) could be realized after independence. 8 The last point needs to be politically contextualized and elaborated.
From the mid-1930s, the Congress Party (hitherto dominated by the Bombay bourgeoisie consisting of Gujarati traders and upper caste Maharashtrian brahmin) gradually began incorporating the dominant Marathas into its fold because of the rising influence of Marathas in rural Maharashtra. As a result, within a short span (1935-1938), there was a more than seven-fold increase in the Party’s rural constituencies (Lele 1990). Congress’s support to Marathas continued even in the post-independence period. The state and the central government favorably granted a license to sugar factories that were part of cooperative enterprises. As a result, the sugar cooperatives became a hub for political grooming and Maratha leadership (Baviskar 1980). However, in the early1950s, a militant Maratha leader, Keshavrao Jedhe, left the Congress party to form the Peasants and Workers Party (PWP) since he realized that the local Congress unit was still under the influence of the bourgeois class and the Maharashtrian brahmins. Later, the PWP supported the Samyukta (United) movement that demanded a separate Marathi-speaking state of Maharashtra. That demand was met in 1960, and the Congress candidate Yashwantrao Chavan, a Maratha, became the new state’s first Chief Minister, who soon strengthened the Party by incorporating the rebel Maratha leaders into the Congress regime. For the next three decades, under the power and influence of three Maratha politicians: Yashwantrao Chavan, Vasantdada Patil, and Sharad Pawar—all Chief Ministers under the Congress party rule —the sugar cooperatives in Western Maharashtra flourished.9 To be sure, it was not only Chief ministers but also the other Maratha elites who occupied powerful positions at different levels in rural politics and the state legislature.10 The democratic setup opened up a political space that allowed Maratha elites to control, accommodate, and manipulate the majority of Maratha Kunbis under the contrived Maratha status “at will and whenever necessary” (Lele 1981, p. 55).
By the late 1970s, the effect of elite Maratha’s patronage on cooperatives manifested in the increased sugar production in Maharashtra. The factories operated as modern industrial units, and membership of each factory ranged from 2,000 to 4,000 cane growers, covered between 50 to 100 surrounding villages, crushed 200,000 to 400,000 tonnes of cane annually, employed around 1000 workers directly and 3000 to 5000 indirectly, and an average factory earned over
₹10-crore annually (Baviskar 1980, p. 6). In the early 1980s, the value of total sugar production produced by sugar cooperatives was almost equivalent to the production value of the iron and steel industry in the state. By the end of the 1980s, the sugar cooperatives of Maharashtra produced nearly a third of total white sugar production from sugarcane in India. Damodaran (2008) estimates that of the total 175 cooperative sugar factories in Maharashtra, the Marathas actively promoted at least 140 of them.
It is also imperative to notice the economic diversification that has taken place along with the growth of sugar cooperatives in Western Maharashtra. The surplus from sugar production often found a way into building distilleries for alcohol production from molasses, chemical plants, paper production, and dairy and poultry farms (Attwood 1992, pp. 225-228). In the neoliberal period, the Magars relied on the Maratha community’s past economic experience and accumulated social and political capital to launch themselves as real estate developers.
The following section digs deeper into the transition to capitalism in the western Maharashtra region and asks what led to the formation of a dominant Maratha caste during the colonial period and how this social formation is connected to the building of canals and sugarcane cultivation in Bombay Deccan.
III The Maratha Community in the Colonial Period
Traditionally, Marathas are an agricultural caste in rural Maharashtra. They appear as one homogeneous group but are composed of several clusters ranked internally based on socio-economic status. Scholars generally agree that Marathas are the dominant caste in Maharashtra. However, Vora (1999) argues that only one or two dominant lineages in each village have power and influence within the Maratha community. Historically, Karve (1968) claims the social roots of all Marathas lie in Kunbis, which means peasant. However, some Marathas believe they are descendants of Kshatriyas, the ruling caste, and claim hereditary entitlements to high offices and higher social positions than the majority Kunbis peasants. Nonetheless, the Maratha caste cluster interacts as one social spectrum glued together through kinship networks, cultural codes of balutedari (patron-client relationship), and hypergamy (the exchange of brides between the rich Kunbis and poor aristocratic Marathas).11 Such social practices and maintenance of kin relations between Marathas and Kunbis have enabled them to reproduce as a dominant caste cluster in Maharashtra (Carter 1974, Lomova-Oppokova 1999). Attwood (1992) argues that the reason for flexibility in social relationships and the possibility of mobility within the Maratha cluster is due to the geographical specificity of Maharashtra as a semi-arid agricultural zone.
The social and geographical uniqueness met with another distinctive feature of the Marathas: the demographic strength of the caste group. According to the 1931 caste census, Maratha-Kunbis were 31.2 per cent of the total population, making them the single largest caste group not only in colonial Maharashtra but in the whole of India. The proportion of Marathas in Bombay Deccan (forming most of Western Maharashtra) was even higher, 41 per cent, and the caste cluster possessed an extensive amount and relatively better quality of agricultural land (Lele 1990, Vora 1999). Some argue that these salient features—a typical social composition and close kinship relations, climate condition of Bombay Deccan, and ownership of agricultural land—are central to reproducing the dominant status of Marathas. However, this paper demonstrates that these features are insufficient to explain the rise of Maratha landed elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Instead, it shows that colonial agrarian policies, the building of irrigation canals, the promotion of sugarcane cultivation, and the formation of credit and cooperative societies during colonial times economically empowered Maratha elites, who later mobilized other Marathas to build political domination in the democratic framework of postcolonial India.
Irrigation, Cane, and Sugar Industry in Bombay Deccan
After defeating Peshwas in 1818, the British imposed the ryotwari land revenue system, built railway networks and roads in Deccan, and paved the way for the region to be incorporated into the capitalist world economy. However, the commercialization of land, labor, and agricultural products resulted in a) the emergence of moneylenders and b) heightened indebtedness among the poor peasantry. In response, the British administration established credit societies in villages to “protect” poor peasants, but rich peasants took control of credit institutions and reaped the economic benefits (Kumar 1968). Before 1818, Kumar argued the dominance of Marathas was restricted to the social sphere. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the rich peasants accumulated capital at an increased rate, sold crops at the highest price, became moneylenders to small peasants, and invested money in improving their possession of landholdings in villages. These rich peasants predominantly belonged to the traditional landowning elite of the Maratha caste, which held high offices during the Peshwa rule.
Charlesworth (1985) accepts Kumar’s thesis and argues that the spread of railway networks in remote areas, capitalist markets in agriculture, irrigation schemes, and cultivation of cash crops during British rule led to the formation of distinct strata of rich peasants by the end of the nineteenth century.12 But, he adds, that this is truer for the Deccan districts around Pune than the other parts of Bombay Precedency. The construction of irrigation works in the canal districts of Deccan changed the socio-economic structure of the area in the early decades of the twentieth century. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the British administration began constructing irrigation canals in the Deccan’s famine-prone regions, which relied upon expensive and inefficient well irrigation. The canal systems were built originally to safeguard farmers’ interest in drought years so that they could use irrigation water to cultivate staples of the area: jawar and bajra. However, eventually, Deccan irrigation works ended up making Maharashtra a sugar bowl of India and the Deccan region heaven for peasant entrepreneurship (Attwood 1992, pp. 50-51).
The transformation of canal districts into a sugarcane belt relates to the “problem of unwanted water.” In the typical monsoon season, the demand for canal waters would reduce as peasants depend heavily on rainwater. As a result, the Deccan canals started accruing economic losses for the colonial administration. In response, M. Visvesvaraya (then an executive engineer in Pune working for the Irrigation Commission) recommended a policy solution that favored the cultivation of sugarcane which needed ten times more water than jawar and bajra. To make the canal systems profitable, Visvesvaraya proposed a “sugarcane block system” in which cultivators would sign a contract to consume canal waters for a particular block (area) for six years at a fixed rate (Damodaran 2008). The policy accelerated the sugarcane cultivation in the canal region, which rose from 3500 to 8000-acre at the turn of the twentieth century. By the mid-1920s, the value of canal-irrigated sugarcane land rose ten times compared to the previous decade. By 1936 all six major canal systems in the Deccan had been irrigating 40,000-acre of the sugarcane field, making the Deccan cane the most profitable cash crop grown in India (Attwood 1992, pp. 58-75). In this context, scholars of Bombay Deccan generally agree that by the second decade of the twentieth-century one observes an undisputed economic rise of elite Maratha peasants (Baviskar 1980, Chithelen 1985, Attwood 1992 and Mohanty 2009).
Later, the Marathas realized profitmaking in gur (jaggery) businesses from the malis. However, the worldwide economic depression of the late 1920s led to a drop in gur prices, under-used canal waters, and a decline in sugarcane cultivation. The Deccan Canals Financial Improvements committee in 1932 proposed tariff protection on imported sugar. In addition, it encouraged the “establishment of sugar factories by offering potential entrepreneurs certain facilities and concessions in securing land on lease, fixation of rents, and supply of canal water at low cost” (Baviskar 1980). The tariff protection on imported sugar and promotion of entrepreneurship manifested in a sugar boom as over a hundred power-driven cane-crushing sugar factories began operating. By the 1940s, the rich Maratha peasants started “organizing themselves co-operatively as owners of a factory would have been the best possible way to refine their cane into sugar” (Chithelen 1985). The cooperative eased capital investment for the individual peasant, subsidized expensive technological facilities for factories, and allowed collective sugar marketing.
In the span of over a hundred years (1818-1947), the British agricultural policies in Western Maharashtra transformed the socio-spatial structure of the region. The policies led to the rise of distinct strata of the prosperous peasantry (belonging mainly to Maratha-Kunbis), who were set to make significant impacts in guiding the course of the politics and economics of Maharashtra in the post- independence era. After the 1950s, the Maratha-dominated sugar cooperatives remained at the helm of the politics of development in Maharashtra; nonetheless, a noticeable trend to diversify their investments in rural and urban areas created new avenues for Marathas to accumulate more capital.
Conclusion
How to rethink caste-class relations as the capitalist transition continues apace in India? As discussed in the paper, while sociologists such as Srinivas (1987) introduced the concept of the ‘dominant caste,’ he failed to analyze the class dimension of the caste structure. Similarly, economists often ignored the social category of caste while engaging with India’s economic transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy. Although Bardhan (1998) examines the formation of dominant proprietary classes and castes, his analytical frame eschews economic differentiation and rift within a regional dominant caste cluster. This paper addresses this lacuna by historically contextualizing formation, and subsequent strife within the dominant Maratha community as capitalist development evolves in the western Maharashtra region. It demonstrates that securing the dominant position depended on the Maratha-Kunbi’s numerical strength, forging kinship network, and, most importantly, the British agrarian policies in the region. The building of water canals, cultivation of commercial crops such as sugar cane, and establishment of credit unions allowed a rich peasantry class to emerge during colonial times. While internally stratified, the Marathas maintained the cohesion of the group by building coalitions, especially in the democratic framework of post-independent India. This was evident in the 1960s when the political economy of the Congress regime in the state further strengthened the colonial dominance of the Maratha caste cluster. The congress rule, synonymous with Maratha dominance, protected agrarian interests, promoted agro-based industries, and supported rural cooperatives. However, as India moved to new political-economic conditions in the 1990s dictated by neoliberal norms and urban imperatives, the Maratha dominance was challenged. Politically, with the decline of the Congress party, one observes the political fragmentation of the Maratha community (Deshpande and Palshikar 1999). Economically, as demonstrated in this paper, landholding Maratha clans in the urban development corridor hugely benefitted from contemporary capitalist development. One of the outcomes of this developmental process in Maharashtra is factionalism within the Maratha community and the demand for reservations.
As the neoliberal capitalist trajectory unfolds in other regions of India, do we encounter a similar social puzzle in which a relatively prosperous community with a dominant caste status claims backwardness and demands reservation? Although the regional context may vary in each case, the two dominant castes in Karnataka
– Lingayats and Vokkaligas – have appropriated the ‘backwardness for their own benefits’ (Deshpande 2014). Similarly, Shah (2015) notes the claim of
backwardness and demands for reservation by the Patidar community in Gujarat as economic opportunities diminished in rural and urban economies.
The framework of historical sociology, 150 years of the regional history of economic transition, social formation, and economic differentiation within the dominant caste group, provides methodological insight into how to integrate the ‘social’ with the ‘economic’ analytically. However, the data and policy-oriented mainstream economic thinking, lacking interdisciplinary vision, appears narrow, incomplete, and even farce. It often rehearses a black-and-white, oversimplified, cropped story of capitalist transition devoid of historical and sociological analyses. In an attempt to build an interdisciplinary dialogue, this paper invites economists to observe a complicated and contradictory picture full of unresolved caste and class predicaments as neoliberal economic development unfolds in India.
Endnotes
- To understand the difference between neoliberal policies and programs between the Global South and the Global North and the argument regarding the origin of neoliberalism in the Global South, see Connell and Dados (2014).
- From Bourdieu’s economic field perspective, such opportunities of transcending low status are not a rational choice (as classical and neoclassical economists would see it) but a reasonable response to an individual’s socioeconomic circumstances.
- One can find similar instances in other parts of India. For example, in Gurgaon, Delhi Land and Finance (DLF) Corporation developed a private township–a 3500-acre DLF City. Like Magars, the dominant agricultural caste of the region, Jats and their caste affiliation and network prove to be extremely fruitful to the DLF’s success. For details, see Srivastava (2021).
- Compared to Magarpatta City, the urban process in Hinjewadi and Maan –another suburb of Pune where many landholders also belonged to the Maratha-Kunbis caste cluster– took a different route. The difference lies in the following: Hinjewadi and Maan form a relatively larger area with a more significant population. The state and the market forces played a dominant role in the successive acquisition of agricultural land. Unlike Magarpatta, this intervention by external forces drew complex responses from the farmers, from supporting the project to organizing resistance against the land acquisition. See Sathe (2014 and 2015) and Apurva (2020) for details.
- The rich and capitalist farmers are conceptualized as those who accumulated capital not necessarily by exploiting agricultural wage laborers but by investing agricultural wealth and profit into a wide array of non-agricultural activities opened by the expansion of the capitalist market and urbanization.
- See Bardhan (1984) for the failure of land reforms and the ascendancy of rich peasants belonging to the middle caste. See Frankel (1971), Dasgupta (1977), Bagchi (1982), and Dhanagare (1987) for the adverse impact of the Green Revolution on socio-economic inequality in rural India.
- See Rutten (1995 & 1999) for the case of Gujarat, where one of the main beneficiaries of early twentieth-century economic development and agricultural modernization enabled patidars to turn into the hyphenated identity of farmers-traders-industrialists and allowed them to accumulate wealth.
- For how the implementation of the populist EGS program, that is, “right to employment,” to address rural poverty, initiated in the 1970s by Yashwantrao Chavan, served the interest of the Maratha political elite, see Jadhav (2006) and Patel (2006).
- For the regional politics and disparity within Maharashtra (i.e., Western Maharashtra, Vidarbha and Konkan), see Mohanty (2009, pp. 63-9).
- Marathas constitute 31 per cent of the total population of Maharashtra, and they have consistently occupied around 45 per cent of seats in the state assembly. Vora (2009) has shown that the social composition of the Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) of Maharashtra has not dramatically changed since the 1960s.
- Like the ‘homogenous’ Maratha-Kunbis caste cluster consisting of internal hierarchy, one finds similar integrative and differentiating tendencies within the Patidar community in Gujarat. The economic rise of the dominant agricultural caste, Patidar (erstwhile Kanbi), in the nineteenth century led to economic differentiation within the caste group, and marriage, preferably hypergamy, became a tool to maintain or prove one’s true Patidar status in the community. For details, see Pocock (1972).
- See Upadhya (1988) for a similar colonial project of canal irrigation systems in coastal regions of Andhra resulted in the formation of dominant kammas as new “rich peasant” class.
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