From ‘rural labour’ to ‘classes of labour’: Class fragmentation, caste and class struggle at the bottom of the Indian labour hierarchy

Employment relations in rural India have undergone major changes in recent decades. Agriculture now requires fewer labour inputs; and the growth of the non-agricultural sectors has created alternative employment opportunities. From the 1990s, new rural and urban employment, often linked to migration, has become an increasingly important income source for former agricultural labourers. Close-knit patron-client relations between low-caste agricultural labourers and their landowning caste Hindu employers have loosened. As pointed out by Heyer and a number of other researchers, this has not always led to free labour relations, but it has, by and large, signalled a change from the rural poor mainly being ‘agricultural labour’ to their being ‘rural labour’ (Breman 1996; Byres, Kapadia and Lerche 1999; Heyer 2000).