ABSTRACT
The shift in India’s economic orientation during the early years of the 1990s has had diverse implications for different sectors of the Indian society/economy. Notwithstanding the growing influence of resurgent urban India, it is hard to ignore rural realities for long. In contrast to the booming urban centres, rural India was seen as a site of gloom and despair, where real incomes were declining and farmers were committing suicide all the time. Enthusiasm for globalization and liberalization brought the urban middle classes to the centre-stage of Indian social and cultural life. Mediated through the institution of caste, rural society in Haryana had a system of patron—client relations within which the agrarian economy was socially organized. The social-science literature on the subject has invariably pointed to land and caste as being the two major sources of power in rural India.
