This book examines the nature of power in rural India, where class and social power are conditioned by caste, and where class and social power are conditioned by caste, and where poverty is inextricably linked with notions of hierarchy. Through intensive fieldwork in a single village in Bihar, Anand Chakravarti shows the linkages between class, caste, and social power in an environment governed by forces of agrarian capitalism.

The author analyses the significance of both technical factors and class conflict for transforming agrarian relations of production. He finds that the forces of agrarian capitalism have led to a polarisation between the dominant land-owning class (Known as maliks) and a vast underclass comprising petty cultivators and landless labourers. By exercising social power-which signifies the conjuncture of ideological dominance and preponderant land control-the maliks are at once both a dominance caste and a dominant class