This book is about changes in the political and economic structures of two villages in Thanjāvūr district of Tamiḷ Nāḍu State in southeast India. It is an attempt to view the villagers' changing internal class relations in the context of change in the larger structures of the district, state, and nation, in which some members of each village participate and which affect all of them.

I use the term “class” in this book in the Marxian sense. Thus, to quote Lenin's formulation, “classes are large groups of people distinguished by the place they occupy in an historically defined system of production, by their relations … vis à vis the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labour, and by the modes of obtaining and the importance of the share of the social wealth of which they dispose.”

The present volume concerns the two villages as they were when I first studied them in 1951–3. At that time, shortly after the independence of India, the villagers' lives were much affected by the impact of one-and-a-half centuries of British rule. In Part I, I deal with this heritage as it affected Thanjāvūr district as a whole, especially with reference to the economic impact of colonial rule and the resultant changes in the class structure. This involves examining Thanjāvūr's transition from a relatively self-contained and prosperous small kingdom to an agrarian hinterland that exported rice and labor to British plantations in southwest India, Ceylon, and Malaya and to the modern cities in the southern part of the Madras Presidency, which now forms the state of Tamiḷ Nāḍu.