Based on a review of extant literature, this article entreats for thorough-going empirical investigation of rural-agrarian dominance in the context of the fundamental transformation of the ‘village’ from the spatial habitat of the traditionally ‘dominant’ to the ‘waiting room’ for the aspiring and the despairing.1 Against the backdrop of the cultural devaluation of agriculture as an unrewarding profession and the village as the dark underbelly of a shining India, it underlines the need to revisit the conventional political economy models of rural-agrarian dominance. We argue that the triad of caste, land and political power does not exhaust the emergent constituents of rural-agrarian dominance. The aspirational surge towards middle-classisation, even among the village dominants, has unleashed forces and processes whose ramifications have to be meticulously thought through. The three-class dominant social coalition model prevalent in the political economy literature largely fails to take into account the inherent dynamism of the village dominants and their deep-seated propensity for middle-classisation.
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