South India is a region of great physical diversity. This is also a region of great social and historical diversity. This chapter starts with a description of the agrarian structure as the British found it. Next, it describes changes in agrarian relations and government policy affecting them, particularly as regards the land revenue, between 1792 and 1855. Three regions are described separately: Madras Presidency excluding British Malabar and south Kanara, the west coast, and Hyderabad and Mysore. Since there are much more data available on such matters as agricultural prices, wages, rents and conditions of tenancy from 1855 onwards, the section covering the period 1855 to 1947 is organized rather differently. After a discussion of changes in governmental policy, the chapter describes the changes in the fortunes of the main agricultural groups including landowners, tenants and labourers.

This chapter emphasizes that despite certain elements of continuity, the pre-British agrarian society and system was not quite the same as that which evolved during British rule. The continuity of the small peasant economy as the basic organization of agricultural production, and the continuities in terms of certain agrarian institutions, and of the numerical sizes of some economic groups, such as sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, concealed a significant process of change. Initially, throughout eastern India, the most decisive influence was the British policy of maximizing land revenue, which gradually lost its first potency, particularly in Bengal and Bihar, with the share of the state in the total agricultural produce eventually shrinking to insignificance. In other parts of eastern India, too, the old order could scarcely be wholly preserved, and the composition of the landed society considerably changed, mainly as a result of the growth of a land market, an altogether new development in the rural society.