Introduction

The study of agrarian change in rural Bihar owes a great deal to the research of Pradhan Harishankar Prasad, with whom the author worked in the 1980s. Some early results of his fieldwork in Bihar villages were reported in an Economic and Political Weekly article titled ‘Production Relations: Achilles' Heel of Indian Planning’ (Prasad, 1973), in which he investigated the notion of semi-feudalism as a way to understand the agrarian system. Among the intellectual challenges that he explored, an important one concerned the relative importance of caste, class and land holding in determining economic behaviour. For a pure Marxist, caste is superstructure and subordinate to class. But Pradhan had a finer understanding. In his study of caste and class in Bihar, he explored how far caste and class hierarchies were aligned and how far caste might play a separate role. Writing in 1979, he stated that:

This chapter explores how caste and class have interacted in Bihar's rural economy over the subsequent 30 years, drawing in part on collaborative work between Pradhan Prasad and the author in the 1980s.