REVIEW OF RURAL AFFAIRS october 26, 2024 vol lIX no 43 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 80 Agrarian Transformation and Commercialisation An Overview of Change in a Banana-growing Village in Maharashtra R Ramakumar, Karan Raut In the mainstream literature, commercialisation of agriculture is studied in a linear fashion as a process of growth of surplus. However, the advance of productive forces that follow commercialisation is also associated with changes in the relations of production and has important distributional implications in the rural economy and society. Through this case study of long-term agrarian change over half a century in a village in Maharashtra, it was found that agrarian differentiation had intensified, intermediated with demographic changes and migration. The share of landless households in the village had increased, and ownership and operational holdings were increasingly concentrated with the dominant caste group. Income and wealth inequalities across classes and caste groups were built on these inequalities in landownership and possession. Views are personal. R Ramakumar (rr@tiss.ac.in) teaches at the School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Karan Raut (karan.samarpan@ gmail.com) is with Plantix Agritech India. I n the post-war phase of rural development in India, the expansion of agrarian capitalism and the growth of com- mercialisation of agricultural production were concurrent processes. The growth of commercialisation in agriculture is defined variously, and sometimes together, as a rise in market- able surplus, intensive use of purchased inputs, the expansion of trade and markets, the extension of money relations, and growth of the land market (Habib 2006; Raj et al 1985). At the same time, these aspects of postcolonial commercialisation— individually or together—were also a part of wider mechanisms of capital accumulation and surplus appropriation in the Indian countryside (Harriss 1984). Commercialisation of agriculture in India after independence was a departure from the way it developed during colonialism. Throughout the colonial period, India witnessed a change in the commodity composition of the agrarian surplus, the creation of a new landlord class, the growth of rack-renting and usury, the forced trade of produce, a rise in the cash nexus, and a closer integration with the global agricultural markets (Raj et al 1985). The colonial experience with commercialisation was, then, one where investments were disincentivised, development of productive forces was stunted, and agricultural production was stagnant (Nanavati and Anjaria 1947)—where all potentials of modernisation were stymied by the “built-in depressor” (Thorner and Thorner 1962)—and where the state acted as a direct exploiter through the collection of taxes and other forms of tributes (Bagchi 2010). However, in the post-independence era, commercialisation of agriculture advanced on different terms. Even as the remnants of the “built-in depressor” persisted and continued to be a drag on agrarian modernisation as well as on human freedoms, there were major changes too. The end of statutory landlordism led to the development of a new class of capitalist landowners alongside the old class of landlords (Ramachandran 2011). The impetus to the cultivation of non-foodgrain commercial crops continued to come from the state, but in the form of subsidies, incentives, and support via different government schemes and export promotion initiatives (Mehta 1990). Public investment in irrigation and research, however limited in quantum and uneven across space, created room for a rise in productivity in a range of crops (Ramakumar 2023). Regulated rural markets expanded under state supervision and regulation, which helped streamline the functioning of markets even as traders