Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century Jairus Banaji This paper argues that the positions of those who hold the view that the Indian countryside is still to a large extent dominated by 'precapitalist' relationships of a 'semi-feudal' variety rest on an erroneous conception of 'intervention in the process of production, on a failure to explore and understand properly Marx's view of the relationships in question and, finally, on a failure to analyse concretely the systems of production that actually prevailed in various parts of the country as early as the nineteenth century.