Dynamics of Rural Class Relations

Jonathan Pattenden’s Labour, State and Society in Rural India: A Class-relational Approach is an important book, drawing on his long-term fieldwork in the South Indian state of Karnataka, on the nature of class relations in rural India and its implications for rural labour. The book consists of nine chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the focus of the work, which is to understand poverty in rural Karnataka through class analysis. It also goes into the conditions of working people and the extent of rural poverty in Karnataka and India, and provides a description of the fieldwork locations and the methods of field research employed by the author.

The author’s theoretical framework, which he describes as “a class-relational approach”, is set out in Chapter 2. As a part of this effort, the author also provides a critique of alternative non-class approaches to the study of poverty which inform policy discussions as well as the work of Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu and Amartya Sen.