70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST The debate between Lenin and Chayanov, or between those who embrace a position broadly alike to Lenin or Chayanov has not lost its relevance nor its force in the context of poor countries like Bangladesh.5 The issues pertaining to differentiation of the peasantry thus posed continue to call for careful scrutiny in differing concrete situations. And this is what has been attempted in this paper. Differentiation of the Peasantry in Bangladesh The major hypothesis of Leninist class differentiation postulates an acute concentration of the means of production over time in a few hands with simultaneous dispossession of the same from the majority of the owners. Land, being the principal means of production, will naturally get the greater emphasis. The analysis primarily emanates from the data relating to ownership and use of land in two of our study villages (one in the district of Jamalpur using a larger quantum of modern inputs and the other in Bogra district with relatively lower usage of HY inputs) often supplemented by national statistics. Information on the ownership of other means of production and the changing social relations of production will be used whenever necessary in order to grasp the process of differentiation. Even though, we concentrate on three cut-off periods, the 1950s, '70s and '80s while focussing on land relations, we often go back to the 1940s to construct the appropriate historical canvas. The Evolving Agrarian Structure The Bengal peasantry had been differentiated even during the British period and a distinct group of surplus Muslim raiyats had come into being. Various means of exploiting the peasantry such as money-lending, trading etc., were utilized and the stability of the peasantry was affected consequently. Thus a process of disintegration had already started even before the partition of 1947. By 1938 the Ploud Commission recorded the high degree of disintegration and differentiation of the Bengal peasantry. Five acres of land were considered by the Commission as the minimum size of a viable holding ; substantial sections of the peasantry were found to be living below subsistence level according to this yardstick. A sample survey carried out by the Commission in 1938 found that 74.6 per cent of the households in rural Bengal had holdings below the subsistence level $ only 25.4 per cent had more than 5 acres of land.6 The survey also showed that 45.8 per cent of the households had less than 2 acres of land ; while only 7.7 per cent households had holdings larger than 10 acres. It also showed that the percentage of families mainly dependent on share-cropping or agricultural labour for their livelihood in 1938-39 was 31 per cent. The districts which exceeded the average were Khulna (55 per cent), Pabna (41 per cent), Faridpur (39 percent), Dinajpur (37 per Qent), Rajshani (36 per cent) and Ran^pur (32 per cent).7 The findings of