The land and the peasantry had been an object of attention by the colonial officials since the early days of colonial rule. Land revenue was the most important source of government’s income and the peasants were the people who worked the land and occasionally rose in rebellion against the landlords and the government.

The dependence of the colonial government on land revenue necessitated that the peasantry was kept under close scrutiny. Several early works, therefore, focused on the land-revenue systems. In the course of time, academically oriented and impartial studies about the land settlement and the peasantry, both for the colonial and pre-colonial periods, began to appear.

The industrial working classes were of more recent origins the establishment of modern factories and their ancillaries, the railways, ports and construction activities were the source of the new working class. Studies related to the themes of the modern industries and the modern working class began to appear since the early 20th century. The evidences generated by the colonial government on various aspects of labour in different regions of the country helped the scholars in this field.

The Leftist movement in twentieth century Indian politics bought the focus to bear upon peasants, workers and their movements during the freedom struggle. Attempts to write the histories of these movements involved a closer study of class relation in Indian society, especially peasant-landlord relations and worked capitalist relations.

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There had been earlier studies of related aspect especially a voluminous historical literature on industry. The aim radical historiography, however, was to treat the peasants and worked as historical subjects in their own right. Soon, it became evident the history of workers and peasants might not be grasped fully without taking their evolving relationship with the superior classes into’ account.

As these realizations dawned, the new labour historian emphasized the importance of treating labour and capital together. B the very nature of the subject, moreover, the older colony. Historiography had tended to treat agrarian relations as a whom keeping in view the mutual relations of tenants and landlords in an investigation of the condition of peasants. The left identified the working class as the vanguard of the class struggle and the most progressive political force in Indian society. The overwhelming mass of the population still lived off agriculture, and the leftist historians were therefore induced to pay some attention to the peasantry.

They came up with a paradigm, or framework of understanding, in order to make sense of change in agrarian society during the colonial period. The paradigm was worked out soon after independence in such works as S.J. Patel, Agricultural Workers in Modern India and Pakistan (Bombay, 1952) and Ramkrishna Mukherjee, The Dynamics of a Rural Society (Berlin, 1957).

On this view of the matter, colonial rule in India produced a series of related changes in agrarian society: the creation of landed property by law; forced commercialization of crops; land brought to the market as a commodity; the spread of peasant indebtedness and land alienation; the disintegration of the peasantry into rich peasants and poor peasants depeasantisation, landlessness and the emergence of a pauperized class of landless labourers; the collapse of the village community of self-sufficient peasants and a far reaching process of social stratification in the countryside.