Revisiting agrarian questions of capital: examining diversification by capitalist farmers in Punjab, India

Abstract

While economic diversification by capitalist farmers in India is a commonly accepted fact, it is rarely analysed through the lens of agrarian questions of capital. This paper argues that questions about the movement and transformation of agrarian capital continue to be significant in understanding contemporary processes of agrarian change and rural development. However, these need to be studied by looking beyond the agrarian transition debate in contexts where agrarian capitalism has consolidated itself and non-agricultural capitalist development is not fuelled by agrarian capital. Using the case of the state of Punjab and drawing on intensive field research, the paper examines a broad spectrum of non-farm investments and activities of large capitalist farmers, including agriculture-based business, non-agricultural business, education-based diversification and international migration. It shows that both industrial investments and mobility through education have been limited. International migration is a preferred, but also risky, channel for the utilisation of agrarian surplus. The analysis takes seriously experiences of failure of non-agricultural businesses, resulting in the circulation of agrarian capital across the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. This both further strains accumulation within agriculture and reveals the limits to productive investment in the non-agricultural economy imposed by historically specific social, political and economic conditions.

Keywords:

• Agrarian change
• capital
• economy
• diversification
• Punjab
• India

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the four anonymous reviewers and the editor for their engaged and constructive feedback. I would also like to thank Shray Mehta and Neha Margosa for comments on earlier drafts. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

There is no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 Banaji’s (2020) work suggests that this has been a feature of capitalism historically too.

2 Other changes included the emergence of wage labour and increasing class differentiation (Frankel 1971).

3 Some also point to the political considerations of the party in power at the centre (see Rajshekhar 2015; Jain 2016).

4 An operational holding of 10 acres was also the marker for a ‘tagda zimidar’ (strong farmer) in the field.

5 The continuous shift towards nuclear families in rural Punjab (Wasal and Singh 2018) is likely to constrain this possibility further.

6 Raju (2015) has shown that Punjab has one of the lowest rural female work-participation rates in the country.

7 Aga (2018), in his study of Maratha input retailers in Maharashtra, argued that gains from the business were too unstable to allow consolidation.

8 Solvex plants are mills that extract oil from grains and their by-products.

9 This is supported by other studies on international migrants from the Doaba region of Indian Punjab, which argue that remittances were largely invested in displays of consumerism (eg Taylor et al. 2007).

10 Six survey respondents reported such failure across different types of diversification, while two reported consistently declining profits in their tractor dealership and transport business, respectively.

11 Rutten (1995) described how a grasp of such links was crucial to the transformation of potato farmers into rural entrepreneurs in Gujarat.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shreya Sinha

Shreya Sinha is a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. She works on questions of agrarian political economy, political ecology and regional development in India. She is currently involved in a GCRF-funded research project, TIGR2ESS, on the political economy challenges of building sustainable agricultural and food systems in India across different agro-ecological regions. She completed her PhD in development studies development studies at SOAS University of London. She is also the Reviews Editor for the Journal of Agrarian Change.