social structure of indian village essay

The Complex Social Hierarchy of Indian Villages: Caste, Class, and Gender Dynamics

Table of Contents

Have you ever wondered what life is like in the heart of India’s rural landscape? The Indian village is not just a place of residence but a canvas where social structures paint a complex picture of daily life. While we often hear about the urban sprawl, let’s take a journey through the social fabric of Indian villages, where caste, class, and gender play pivotal roles in shaping experiences and opportunities.

Understanding the caste system in rural India

Caste has been a fundamental aspect of Indian society for thousands of years, deeply ingrained in the social consciousness. In villages, the caste system dictates much of social life, including occupations, marriage, and social interactions. But how does this age-old system manifest in contemporary rural life?

• Occupational linkages: Historically, caste affiliations have been closely linked with particular occupations. Although modernization has led to some changes, many rural communities still see traditional occupations passed down through generations.
• Social hierarchy and power dynamics: The caste hierarchy significantly influences power dynamics within a village. Those belonging to higher castes often hold positions of power in local governance structures, like the Panchayati Raj institutions.
• Access to resources: Access to communal resources, such as village wells, grazing grounds, and temples, can be heavily influenced by one’s caste, often leaving lower caste individuals with limited or no access.

The influence of class and landownership

While caste is a significant determinant of social status, class, often intertwined with landownership, is a force that cannot be overlooked. In rural economies, land is more than just property—it’s a symbol of wealth, influence, and survival.

• Wealth distribution: The ownership of land in Indian villages is often skewed, with a small percentage of families owning the majority of arable land. This unequal distribution leads to a class divide that impacts social relations and economic opportunities.
• Agricultural laborers and tenant farmers : Those without land, typically from lower castes and classes, work as laborers or tenant farmers for the land-owning elite, perpetuating a cycle of dependence and socioeconomic disparity.
• Impact on social mobility : The intersection of caste and class can either hinder or facilitate social mobility. For some, owning land can lead to upward mobility, albeit limited by the overarching caste system.

Gender relations and the role of women

Gender is another axis along which village social structures operate. The roles and status of women in Indian villages are shaped by both caste and class, but they also have unique challenges and cultural expectations.

• Women’s work and economic contributions: Women play a crucial role in the rural economy, engaging in agricultural work, animal husbandry, and household labor. Yet, their contributions are often undervalued and go unrecognized in formal economic measures.
• Social restrictions and empowerment: Traditional gender roles can impose restrictions on women’s mobility and decision-making. However, initiatives like self-help groups and women’s involvement in local governance are gradually empowering women in rural communities.
• Marriage and family dynamics: Marriage practices, such as dowry and arranged marriages, have significant implications for women’s status and autonomy in villages. The family structure often dictates the extent of women’s participation in public life and access to education and healthcare.

Challenging the homogeneous village stereotype

The notion of an idyllic, uniform village community is far from reality. Village studies by social anthropologists have revealed the diversity within rural societies, with each village having its unique social order.

• Inter-village variations: While caste, class, and gender structures are common across villages, their specific configurations can vary widely, leading to different social dynamics and cultural practices.
• Impact of regional histories: The historical context of a region, including colonial legacies and local power struggles, shapes the unique social fabric of each village.
• External influences and change: Factors like urbanization , migration , and government policies continuously influence and alter the traditional structures of village society.

Through this exploration of the intricate social hierarchy of Indian villages, we’ve uncovered layers of complexity that govern the lives of rural inhabitants. The interplay of caste, class, and gender creates a vibrant yet challenging tapestry of social relations, deeply rooted in tradition yet evolving with the times. As we reflect on these dynamics, it’s clear that understanding rural India is crucial to comprehending the nation’s broader social landscape.

What do you think? How can the understanding of these social structures inform policy-making and initiatives aimed at rural development? To what extent do you believe modern influences can alter these traditional hierarchies?

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Sociology in India

1 Social Background of the Emergence of Sociology in India

• The Historical Roots of Indian Sociology
• The Heritage of Social Thought in India
• Sociography in Classical and Arab-Persian Accounts
• Socio-economic Conditions of India at the Advent of British Rule
• Three Major Approaches of the Westerners to Indian Society and Culture
• Official View of the British Regarding Castes and Tribes
• Growth of Associations and Institutions Promoting Social Inquiry
• Responses and Reactions of the Indian Intellectuals
• Early Sociological Beginnings
• Sociology and Independent India

2 Emergence of the Discipline -Issues and Themes

• Historical Roots of Sociology in India
• Growth and Development of Sociology as a Profession
• Sociology in the Post-Independence India
• Some Major Research Trends During the Seventies
• Theory and Methods Used by Sociologists in India

3 Village Studies in India

• Historical Background
• The Context
• Field and the Fieldwork
• Perceived Significance of the Village
• Social Structure of the Village: Caste Class and Gender

4 Brahminical Perspective

• Varna-Jati Theory
• The Ideology of Purity-Impurity
• Jajmani System
• Emergent Concerns

5 View from the Field

• An Overview of Caste Situation in Different Societies
• Field Based Studies

6 Ambedkar and Lohia on Caste

• B.R. Ambedkar on Caste
• Ram Manohar Lohia on Caste

7 Census Perspective

• Caste in the Census
• The Census and Identity Politics
• The Debate over Inclusion of Caste in the Census

8 The Household and the Family

• Meaning of the Terms: Family and Household
• Joint and Nuclear Family in India
• Views on the Family in India
• The Myth of Disintegration of the Joint Family
• Types of Family Structure
• Changes in Family Structure
• Perspectives on the Family

9 The Household as a Cooperative—Conflicting Unit

• The Socio-economic Dynamics of the Household
• Capabilities Well-being Agency and Perception
• Social Technology Cooperation and Conflicts

10 Marriage and Its Changing Patterns

• Is the Institution of Marriage Universal in India?
• What and Why of Marriage
• Age at Marriage in India
• Rules Regulating Marriage
• Patterns of Spouse Selection
• Marriage Rituals and Status
• Dissolution of Marriage

11 Descent and Alliance Approaches to the Study of Kinship in India

• Application of Descent Theory to the Study of Kinship System in North India
• Application of Alliance Theory to the Study of Kinship System in South India

12 Agrarian Classes and Categories

• Marx and Weber on Class
• Notions of Agrarian Societies
• The Classical Notion of Undifferentiated Peasant Society
• Feudalism as a Type of Agrarian Society
• Contemporary Agrarian Societies
• Class Analysis of Agrarian Societies
• Agrarian Social Structure and Change in India
• Agrarian Changes during the British Colonial Rule
• Agrarian Changes after Independence
• Agrarian Class Structure in India

13 The Working Class

• Defining Working Class
• A Brief History of The Working Class
• Working Class: The Indian Scenario
• Growth of Working Class in India
• Social Background of Indian Working Class

14 The Middle Class

• Concept of Class
• Concept of the ‘Middle Class’
• Evolution of the Middle Class in India
• Modernity and the Middle Class in Contemporary India
• Values Related to Family Marriage and Women’s Status amongst the Middle Class

15 Gender, Caste and Class

• What is Gender?
• Gender and Caste
• Gender and Class
• Regional Variations in Gender Caste and Class

16 Tribe, Territory and Common Property Resources

• Early history
• Mixed economy and the commons in India
• Population growth and impossibility of commons?
• Culture of the commons

17 Tribe and Caste

• Transformation to castes
• Sanskritization
• Hinduisation
• Basis for misconstruction
• Tribe as community

18 Elwin and Ghurye’s Perspectives on Tribes

• The Framing of the Tribal Question: Elwin and Ghurye
• A History of the Tribal Voice
• Nationalist Freedom Struggle and Tribals
• Constituent Assembly Debate and Tribal People

19 Social Differentiation among Tribes

• Social Differentiation by Kinship and Descent Groups
• Social Differentiation by Sex
• Social Differentiation by Age
• Social Differentiation by Rank and Hierarchy
• Social Differentiation by Occupation
• Social Differentiation by Education
• Social Differentiation by Religion
• Social Differentiation by Language
• Social Differentiation by Association
• Social Differentiation by Territory and Physical Environment

20 Religion and Politics

• Understanding Religion and Politics
• Approaches to the Study of Religion
• Religion and Politics in India: A Historical Overview
• Religion and Politics in Contemporary India
• Fundamentalism

21 Religion and Culture

• Theoretical Explanation: Bond between Religion and Culture
• Sociological Explanation: The Three Approaches to the understanding of the Sacred and the Secular Order
• Culture and Religion in India

22 Cohesive and Divisive Dimensions of Religion

• Religion and its Various Dimensions
• Rivalry Schism and Integration
• Religion in India: A Unity in Diversity
• Multiple interpretations in Indian Religions

23 Secularisation

• Introduction
• Secularism and Secularisation: A Definition
• Secularism in India
• Secularism and the Indian National Movement
• The Constitution and Secularism

24 Urbanization

• Urban and Urbanism
• The Process of Urbanization
• Urbanization in India
• Theories of Urbanization
• Social Effects of Urbanization in India
• Problems of Urbanization

25 Migration

• Understanding Migration
• Types of Migration
• Migration Streams
• Factors of Migration
• Impact of Migration
• Migration Trends

26 Industrialisation

• Understanding Industrialisation
• Historical Background of Industrialisation Process
• Social Thinkers on Industrial Society
• Industrialisation in India
• Post-Industrial Society

27 Globlisation

• Different Ideas on What Constitutes Globalisation
• Globlisation and The Ideological Positions
• Features of Globalisation

28 Social Movements- Meanings and Dimensions

• Concepts of Social Movements
• Origin of Social Movements
• Components of Social Movements
• Transformation of Social Movements

29 Types of Social Movements

• Nature of Social Conflict
• Types of Social Conflicts
• Old and New Types of Movements

30 Peasants Movements

• Conceptualizing Peasants and Peasant Movements
• Peasants and the Revolutionary Movements
• Radical Peasant Movements in India
• Emerging Agrarian Social Structure and Peasants Movements
• Change in Collective Mobilization

31 New Social Movements

• New Social Movements: The Background
• New Social Movement: Concepts and Features
• Distinguishing Old from the New
• New Social Movements and Quest for New Identity
• Autonomy of New Identity
• New Social Movements and Resistance against Domination

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• Life in an Indian Village Essay

Essay on Life in an Indian Village

The villages are the souls of our country, and more than 60% of the population lives in villages. There are more villages and small towns in India than in metropolitan areas. Census 2011 reports the number of villages in our country is 6,49,481. In this essay on Life in an Indian Village, we will further explore the life one leads in a village and how it is different from city life and the advantages and disadvantages of the same.

Short Essay on Life in an Indian Village

The villages of India are major contributors to agriculture, thus making India an agricultural land. Life in an Indian village is called rural life and city life is considered urban life. Life in an Indian village for students and children is different from those growing up in urban households. The children are often led to their family occupation of agriculture and work as farmers. Farmers are the most undervalued people in our society. They work doubly hard to supply food on our plates and don't even get paid half of what they deserve. They work without any modern machines, for long days starting even before sunrise and end their days long after dusk. They toil in the scorching heat and in the rain. The most difficult aspect of a farmer's life is mostly dependent on climatic conditions. Also, one of the other ways of earning a living in the villages is by housing cattle like cows, sheep, goats, and poultry.

People's attraction to rural life

The agricultural lands and open fields and rustic lifestyle makes the villages more scenic and peaceful. People living in metropolitan areas often go on holidays to such scenic countryside locations where they can breathe fresh air due to its unpolluted environment. The village life is slower and not steadfast, unlike the city life, this is one of the main reasons for millennials now who when on holiday from work prefer this kind of lifestyle for a short period of time and take such breaks. On the other hand, organic food has now gained much popularity and this also encourages others to adapt to the countryside way of living where one eats more nutritious food and lives a healthier lifestyle.

Long Essay on Life in an Indian Village

Life in an Indian Village for Students and Children

There are other aspects of living in an Indian village where one has to deal with scarcity on a regular basis. Scarcity, be it lack of electricity, good connecting roadways, transportation; homes built with mud or clay which can be unreliable, along with lack of proper healthcare facilities. Life in an Indian Village for Students and Children is especially hard as along with the aforementioned problems, they are also deprived of basic education, due to which they lack career opportunities.

In some parts of India, there is only one primary school that children from the nearby villages attend. Even gaining primary education is very difficult because the parents are not very keen to send their children, especially girls and want them to join them in their family's line of occupation to earn some extra money for their livelihood and girls are held back from attending school as they are required to support their mothers in household chores.

The importance of primary and secondary education should be spread in villages, highlighting the fact that it creates several career opportunities for both boys and girls. There is not much growth in the agricultural sector as well due to lack of education and training in modern ways to enhance the agricultural produce.

Cultural & Traditional Values

Unlike the cities, the villagers don't live their lives secluded; they enjoy getting together, living like a close-knit family, and helping each other in adversities. This sense of community and belonging is greatly valued. Even with so many problems, life in an Indian village is one to look forward to, as the Indian culture is very much intact and the celebrations are huge. When all as a community celebrate together, with folk music, dance, and songs, all festivals are celebrated with a lot of zeal, especially the harvest season. India should take pride in such rich culture and traditions.

In Life in Indian Village Essay, it is also important to explore the advantages and disadvantages of leading such a life.

Advantages of Life in an Indian Village

One experiences a stress-free life surrounded by beautiful nature and leads a happy life in the Indian villages.

The air is pure and fresh due to low levels of pollution and no release of harmful gases as their mode of transport is usually a bicycle or a bullock cart.

Life in an Indian Village is a healthy one as one is always doing some chore which keeps one fit and the seasonal fruits and vegetables grown naturally in the villages keep one energized.

Disadvantages of Life in an Indian village

Lack of good infrastructure, lack of schools and well-trained and experienced teaching staff hinder the progress of the few children who attend the school.

It is very difficult to break old customs and traditions and change the mindset of the elders of the family, who are usually the decision-makers and their rigid attitude makes it harder for newer generations of children.

The villages are in dire need of basic amenities like hygienic sanitation facilities, electricity, etc.

Many such issues can be resolved when the government, along with citizens, take accountability and encourage education, especially in agriculture and farming, as it is the main occupation in villages and in ways to incorporate modern technology with traditional tools. With the help of many government programs that can primarily focus on the building of schools and hospitals, education could help them earn a living which will eventually lead to a reduction in the poverty rate and increase productivity, thus increasing the GDP of our country.

In today's world, most of the people from villages leave their homes and move to cities to either study or earn a living. But the fact is life in the village area is actually enjoyable and more peaceful than in any other metropolitan city. Villages have a natural beauty to them, and they are simple, calm yet beautiful. The people living in the villages mostly go to the fields to earn their daily living, they are generally hardworking and their day starts very early than most other people living in the cities or town. They work hard in the field the whole day and just get some rest when it is dawn.

The one most relaxed thing about villages is that they are free from the heavy traffic of city life. Villages are found to be more peaceful, calm, quiet, and full of greenery, where one can always breathe fresh air and stay healthy without any pollution problems. Most of the handcraft labor people are from villages such as farmers, other works as potters, carpenters, blacksmiths, etc. The Bulls are used for farming and other activity in the field and, are also considered as their sacred god since they are the ones who help in ploughing the field, cultivating crops, and earning money for them.

FAQs on Life in an Indian Village Essay

1. What are the Advantages of Moving to an Indian Village?

There are many advantages of living in an Indian village; the quieter and calmer surroundings help to lead a simple and peaceful life. Clean air boosts mental and physical health. The consumption of freshly produced food helps maintain fitness naturally. With the least amount of living cost, one can truly enjoy life when one is surrounded by nature.

2. What are Some Beautiful Indian Villages where One can Visit?

There are many beautiful villages in our country be it Gokarna Village in Karnataka located in the southern part of India, Janjheli in North of India, i.e., Himachal Pradesh, Nainital in Uttarakhand, Lachen Village in the Northeast, i.e., Sikkim, and Cherrapunji in Meghalaya.

3. What is the importance of village life?

Villages are important because they are the actual backbone of our country's economy and other traditional cultures that are evolving around. They are the primary source of the agricultural sector of the country and help in exporting crops to various countries, which will fetch a good economic status to our country. They also maintain the most important part of the ecological balance of the living environment. Economic growth may mainly contribute to rural areas, as the agricultural field will help in food production and job creation opportunities. As growth in industry and service areas are comparatively slow mainly during this pandemic, many developing countries will not be able to absorb this massive number of new job seekers.

4. Is village life better than city life?

Villages will be seen to be better when it comes to mental relaxation and healthy lifestyle but, anyway city life is seen as generally better than village life because of convenience and open opportunities around because, in the city, you can get whatever you want and quickly in this fast-moving world where everything has become digital. The village life is not that bad like how we always imagine; however, there is the issue of scarcity which is yet to be resolved.

5. What is the importance of rural development in the Indian economy?

As of India, the majority of the people below the poverty line reside in the rural areas and this contributes to a maximum percentage of the population, unfortunately. Hence, the prime goal of rural development is to improve the quality of life of the rural people by alleviating their poverty situation through providing them opportunities for self-employment and wage employment programs, by providing community infrastructure facilities such as drinking water, public toilets, etc.

6. How can we improve the lives of people in villages?

It is possible to improve the quality of rural life since they contribute the maximum of the population in India. For that, we should  Identify people's needs and priorities in the rural villages. Plan and define activities or necessary opportunities that can mobilize the complete involvement of the community. Government should plan the structure of resources allocated in their current schemes according to their needs. Draw a plan, then repair and renovate existing infrastructure with good schools, toilets, etc., which will improve their current status. Strengthen the Panchayat team in every village to be responsible and take necessary actions according to the people's needs. Promote transparency and accountability for any action taken and make them understand what is going on and how it will benefit them.

7. What are the most backward villages found that need immediate light and action?

There are many such villages, but still some are considered the most backward in the society with more number of uneducated people, no employment opportunities and many other serious problems which need immediate action by the government.

A village, now known for its house and even banks without doors - Shani Shingnapur, Maharashtra.

India's first fully solar-powered village- Dharnai, Bihar.

India's first bamboo economy consists of tribal people who have access to deep forest - Mendha Lekha, Maharashtra.

A village where everyone speaks only Sanskrit and follows their own specific culture and tradition for generations - Mattur, Karnataka.

From among India's poorest villages to prosperity, this village is now actually developing on its own - Achala, Odisha.

A village with top-notch innovative and unique facilities yet poor - Punsari, Gujarat.

A village with 60 millionaires but then no one to help the village grow - Hiware Bazar, Maharashtra.

Asia's cleanest and most beautiful village - Mawlynnong, Meghalaya

A village where 111 trees are planted every time a girl-child is born yet finds it difficult to cope with economic status  - Piplantri, Rajasthan.

Essay on Life in an Indian Village

Students are often asked to write an essay on Life in an Indian Village in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Life in an Indian Village

Introduction.

Life in an Indian village is a blend of tranquility and hard work. It’s vastly different from the hustle and bustle of city life.

Simple Living

Villagers lead a simple life, free from the complexities of urban lifestyle. They follow a routine of waking up early, working in fields, and retiring at sunset.

Unity and Harmony

Indian villages are symbols of unity and harmony. People of different religions and castes live together, sharing joys and sorrows.

Agriculture is the main occupation. Villagers work tirelessly in fields to yield crops, which are the backbone of our economy.

250 Words Essay on Life in an Indian Village

Life in an Indian village is a unique blend of simplicity, serenity, and cultural richness. Despite the lack of urban amenities, it offers an environment that is starkly different from the fast-paced city life, characterized by close-knit communities, traditional customs, and sustainable living.

The Rural Landscape

Indian villages are typically surrounded by lush green fields, rivers, and dense forests. The sight of farmers toiling in the fields from dawn to dusk reflects an intimate bond with nature. This connection is not merely economic but deeply spiritual, with nature worship being an integral part of rural life.

Social Structure

Village communities in India are often organized around caste and occupation. However, this traditional structure is gradually changing with education and modern influences. The Panchayat, a local self-governance body, plays a crucial role in decision-making and conflict resolution, fostering a sense of democracy at the grassroots level.

Cultural Richness

Villages are the custodians of India’s rich cultural heritage. Folk dances, music, arts, and festivals add vibrant colors to the rural canvas. They are not just entertainment but a medium to pass on historical narratives and moral lessons to younger generations.

Challenges and Opportunities

Despite its charm, rural life is fraught with challenges like lack of infrastructure, healthcare, and quality education. However, these challenges present opportunities for sustainable development. Initiatives like digital literacy, solar power, and organic farming can transform villages into self-sustaining units, blending tradition with modernity.

500 Words Essay on Life in an Indian Village

Life in an Indian village is a unique blend of simplicity, tranquility, and cultural richness. Unlike the urbanized, fast-paced city life, Indian villages offer a glimpse into the country’s heart, where traditions are preserved, and life unfolds at its own pace.

Traditional Lifestyle

Villages in India are marked by a distinct lifestyle that revolves around agriculture. The day starts early with villagers tending to their fields, and the rhythm of life is dictated by the seasons and the cycle of crops. The sense of community is strong, with everyone participating in village activities, from sowing to harvesting. This lifestyle, though physically demanding, provides a deep sense of satisfaction and connection with nature.

Despite the idyllic charm, life in an Indian village is not devoid of challenges. Limited access to quality education, healthcare, and basic amenities like clean drinking water and sanitation facilities are common issues. The agrarian economy is often vulnerable to the uncertainties of weather and market fluctuations, leading to economic instability.

However, these challenges also present opportunities for constructive change. Initiatives like rural entrepreneurship, organic farming, and eco-tourism are gradually transforming the rural landscape. The advent of digital technology is also opening new avenues for education, healthcare, and commerce, bridging the rural-urban divide.

Preservation of Traditional Wisdom

Life in an Indian village is a rich tapestry of simplicity, hard work, community spirit, and cultural heritage. While there are challenges, the resilience and ingenuity of the villagers offer hope for a better future. As India strides towards progress, it is imperative to ensure that this progress is inclusive, benefiting the villages as much as the cities, and preserving the unique ethos of rural India. After all, the soul of India truly lies in its villages.

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Village community in india: characteristics and change of indian villages.

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Village Community in India: Characteristics and Change of Indian Villages!

Villages play an important part in Indian life. From the prehistoric times, the village has been enjoying an important place as the unit of Indian social structure. India can righty be called a land of villages. The bulk of her population lives in the villages. According to the census of 1991, about 75 per cent of the total population lives in villages.

There are 5, 75, 721 villages in the country, 26.5 per cent of the total rural population lives in small villages (under 500 persons). 48.8 per cent in medium sized villages (between 500 and 2,000 persons), 19.4 per cent in large villages (between 2,000 and 5,000 persons), and 5.3 per cent in large villages (over 5,000 persons).

The figures of the villages classified according to their population are given below:

Characteristics of Indian Villages:

(i) Isolation and Self-Sufficiency:

Almost till the middle of the 19th century, the villages in India were more or less self-contained, isolated and self-sufficient units. The inhabitants of the village had very little to do with the people outside. All of their essential needs were satisfied in the village itself. This feature of the Indian village is described graphically as follows:

Each village tends to be self-contained, in each will be found persons with permanent rights in the lands as owners or tenants with hereditary occupancy rights; of these some cultivate all they hold, others with large areas at their disposal rent out to tenants on a yearly agreement a part or whole of their lands; below these in the scale are agricultural labourers…. some have a field or two on rent, some work in the fields only at times of pressure and are mainly engaged in crafts, such as leather work, or in tasks regarded as menial.

In all but the smallest village, there are one or two skilled artisans, carpenters or blacksmiths who provide and repair the simple agricultural implements, bullock gear and water-lifts. The household requirements are supplied by a shop or two whose Owners usually provide the first market for the village produce and add to their earnings in money-lending.” In short, it was more of a society within itself.

However, changing political and economic conditions are putting an end to the isolation and self-sufficiency of the Indian village. The rapid development of the means of transport and communication has broken the barriers between the village and city. The former is now socially and even economically connected with the neighbourhood city or town. Political parties have made village the centre of their activities as much as die city.

(ii) Peace and Simplicity:

The second feature of an Indian village is the atmosphere of simplicity, calmness and peace prevailing therein. In the village there is no noise and little sophistication. The humdrum activities of modern civilisation are rarely seen there. Though occasionally a car or a bus rolling along the kutcha road enveloped in thick clouds of dust may be seen there, but, on the whole, life in the village moves with traditional quietude and peace. The villagers lead a simple life, eat frugally, dress simply, and live in mud-walled houses completely lacking in the trappings of modern civilisation.

But here also the old order is yielding place to a new one. The mud-walled houses are giving place to well designed buildings. Fashion is making its inroads in the life of young men and women of the village. Here and there notes of music issue from drycell radio. However, this change is gradual and slow.

(iii) Conservatism:

The inhabitants of the village are strongly attached to old customs and traditions. Their outlook is primarily conservative and they accept changes with extreme reluctance. They love old ways and are less eager to follow the advice of zealous social reformers regarding their marriage and other customs. Writing on Indian villages, Sir Charles Metcalfe wrote, “they seem to last where nothing else lasts. Dynasties tumble down; revolution succeeds revolution. Hindu, Pathan, Moghul, Marathe, Sikh, English all the masters change in turn, but the village communities remain the same.”

(iv) Poverty and Illiteracy:

Probably the most glaring and also depressing features of Indian villages are the poverty and illiteracy of the village people. They are generally poor with a very low income. They take coarse food and put on rough clothes. The pressure on land is high resulting in fragmentation of holdings and poor productivity.

Besides poverty the village people are steeped in ignorance and illiteracy. The opportunities for education are meagre in the villages. The village school is generally in a dilapidated condition. Facilities for higher education are practically nil. Due to poverty the villagers cannot send their sons to city for education. Due to illiteracy they cannot improve upon their agriculture or supplement their income by other means. Poverty is thus the cause and effect of illiteracy and the backwardness of the villagers.

However, recently the need has been realised for rural reconstruction. An all India organisation under the name of All India Kissan Sammelan’ has been formed to focus the attention of the government on the problems of peasantry class. There is greater realisation now that the country can march ahead only if its villages are prosperous.

The governments, both at the centre and states, have launched numerous schemes like total literacy programme, fertilizer subsidy, crop insurance, free power, concessional water-rate, minimum procurement price and low- interest loans for liquidating illiteracy and removing poverty of the people living in the villages. Agricultural production is becoming more and more mechanized and agricultural products are fetching high prices.

(v) Local Self-government:

The villages in ancient India enjoyed a considerable measure of autonomy or self-government. The villagers managed their own affairs through the traditional institution of Panchayat. The central government had neither the inclination nor the means for interfering with the self-government of villages.

With the advent of Britishers in India and their introduction of a highly centralised system of administration the importance of Panchayats began to decline. Their judicial powers were taken over by the British courts and the officers were appointed to look after the administrative affairs of the villages.

This change produced unpleasant results. Since the times of Lord Ripon attempts were made to revive the old system of village local self-government, but the progress was very slow in this direction. With the attainment of freedom now fresh efforts are being made to strengthen the panchayat system and make Panchayats play a better part in the work of national reconstruction. The 73rd Amendment Act, 1993 has laid the foundation of strong and vibrant Panchayati Raj institutions in the country.

Change in Village Community:

Change is the law of nature. It is the need of life. Change is but natural in human communities. The village community is less susceptible to change than the urban community; but it does not imply that village community undergoes no change. It is also undergoing change though the speed of change as compared to urban community is slow.

The change in village community may be seen in different spheres:

(i) Caste System:

The British rule in India gave a serious blow to the caste system in the villages. The economic policy and the laws of British rulers induced the different castes to adopt occupations other than the traditional ones. The hold of caste panchayat was loosened.

The status of a village man was determined on the basis of his economic position and personal attainments. The restrictions on food, dress, mode of living and other matters imposed under caste system were removed. Even untouchability was weakened. Thus caste system has now lost its traditional hold in the villages, however, casteism is getting strengthened on account of selfish political interests.

(ii) Jajmani System:

‘Social Stratification in India’ the “Jajmani” system, a feature of village community in India has now weakened due to the governmental efforts to raise the status of the lower castes and impact of urbanisation. The occupations adopted by the village people are not entirely hereditary or based on caste system, nor the payment for services rendered by the lower caste is in kind; it is now mostly cash payment.

(iii) Family System:

The joint family system is no longer the peculiar characteristic of the village community. Nuclear families have taken its place. The family control over its members in matters of diet, dress and marriage has weakened. The family is no longer an economic unit. Several activities which once were carried within the family are now performed by outside agencies. The education of village girls has raised the status of rural women.

(iv) Marriage System:

Change can also be seen in the institution of marriage. Although inter-caste marriages are rare and parents continue to dominate the mate-choice, yet the boys and girls are consulted by the parents in the matter of mate- choice. Love marriages and divorces are almost non-existent. The individual qualities like education, economic pursuit, beauty and appearance of the marriage partners are given preference over the old family status. There is now less expenditure on marriages. The marriage rites also have been minimised. The custom of child marriage is being abolished.

(v) Living Standards:

The standard of living in the village community is gradually going higher. The rural diet no more consists of coarse food only. It now includes vegetables, milk, bread, tea and vegetable ghee. The dress is getting urbanized. The youths put on pants and the girls put on frocks and Bell Bottoms.

Even the old ladies put on blouses instead of shirts. The mill cloth is used in place of handloom cloth. Gold ornaments have replaced the old heavy silver ornaments. The young boys live bare-headed with well combed long hair while the girls use cosmetics. There are now ‘pucca’ houses to live. These are now better ventilated, well furnished, and in some cases electrified too. The ceiling fans can also be seen in some houses. Lanterns have replaced the earthen lamps in most houses. Gobar gas plants have also been installed in some houses. The sanitary habits of the people have improved.

They now use soap for bath and washing the clothes. The safety razors are used for shaving. The drainage system is also better one. The primary health centres have made the villages people health conscious. The threat of epidemics has lessened due to the vaccination and other preventive measures taken to the villages.

The family planning program has been understood by the village people who now adopt measures to limit the family size. Schools have been opened. In some villages degree and post degree colleges can also be found. Agriculture Institutes and other Rural Institutes have also been opened in some villages.

(vi) Economic System:

Change has also taken place in the economic field. The educated rural youth seeks jobs in the cities rather than settle on the land. The demand for new scientific instruments of agriculture is increasing. The farmers have been taught new methods to raise their production. The rural cooperative societies have lessened the woes and miseries of the village people in getting seeds, fertilizers and credit.

The ‘Sahukara’ system is on the wane. More and more banks are being opened in the villages. The Government gives financial assistance and other facilities for setting up industries in the villages. The per capita income has increased. Economic exploitation has decreased and the farmers get good price for their products.

(vii) Political System:

The setting up of ‘panchayats’ has led to the growth of political consciousness among the village people. The newspapers, radio and television in some areas have added to the political knowledge of the villagers. However, the political parties have divided the people into groups and led to groupism among them. Caste conflicts and. group rivalries have increased. The community feeling has decreased. Selfishness and individualism are growing.

It is thus evident that the Indian village is not a static community. It is dynamic. Sir Charles Metcalfe was wrong to hold that the village communities in India seem to last where nothing else lasts.

The villages in India are at present passing through a transitional period. From the sociological point of view the old social relations, bonds and ties have disappeared. The community consciousness is steadily decreasing. Politics of the country has made deep in roads into the peaceful life of the village people and has divided them into political and sub-caste groups. The joint family system is fast disintegrating and morality has gone down. The only feature of the village community now left is agriculture.

In India the task of rural reconstruction is a big and complicated affair not to be accomplished easily. As we have seen above, 75 per cent of population lives in villages. To raise the standard of living of 64 crores of people is no easy task. However, the trends show that considerable progress is under way despite great difficulties.

A Ministry of Rural Development has been formed at the centre to look after the overall task of rural development and co-ordinate the different schemes in this direction. Agricultural development along with irrigation and generation of electric power had the highest priority in the First Plan.

Both the short term and long term objectives of the First Plan were by and large achieved. In the Second Plan new targets of agricultural production were laid down which have been more than achieved. In the Third and Fourth Plans also adequate importance was given to the task of rural reconstruction.

The successive plans also have given due attention to the programme of rural development. Various schemes like Small Farmers Development Project (SFDP), Marginal Farmers and Agricultural Labourers Project (MFAL), Drought Prone Areas Programme (DPAP), Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), Applied Nutrition Programme (ANP) and finally Jawahar Rozgar Yojna Programme have been in vogue for the upliftment of rural masses.

The rural school is undergoing transformations under the impact of Operation Blackboard. It is now better equipped and adequately staffed. The introduction of labour-saving machinery has shortened farm hours, decreased the difficulty of labour and increased the amount of leisure time. Link roads are being constructed in the villages, electricity provided, sanitary conditions improved, health facilities provided and well-equipped hospitals with qualified doctors opened.

Many of the conveniences and comforts of the city are being introduced into rural homes. The 73rd Amendment Act, 1993 has sought to make the Panchyati Raj System more effective and role playing in the field of rural development. With the passing of the unattractive, barren and drudgery features of village home, it is hoped, there would come a new appreciation of the deeper rural values so that the young men would not flee to the cities, depriving the village of energetic and educated rural leadership.

Related Articles:

• 9 Main Characteristics of a Village Community
• Village Community: Evolution, Features and Growth of Village Community
• Top 7 Socio-Cultural Features of Village Community in India
• Village Community: Definition, Evolution and Growth

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Essay on Life in an Indian Village for Students and Children

500+ words essay on life in an indian village.

One fact of which we are all made aware is that India is an agricultural country. This means that the majority of the population practices agriculture either for self-sustenance or as a commercial activity. So there are far more villages and small towns in India that cities and metros. In fact, as per the last census two-thirds of the Indian population still lives in rural areas. The life of a villager and the environment of a village are distinctly different than the urban environment we grow up in. Let us explore this further in this essay on Life in an Indian Village.

The Farmer Life

Farming and agriculture are one of the most difficult jobs. The Indian farmer , in particular, is a hardworking and diligent man. The land and the crops need close attention and efforts day and night for a successful harvest. Life in an Indian village is not a walk in the park by any means.

The farmer will usually start his day before sunup and work throughout the whole day. It involves a lot of manual labor and persistence. They plow the land, sow the seeds, harvest the crops, etc. And a lot of the farmers do not enjoy the luxury of machines or tractors and have to rely on intense manual labor. Rain or shine, they can never take a day off.

And even after all these efforts and sacrifices, the financial conditions of farmers in India remains dire. The rising costs of living, frequent crop failures due to climate changes, insufficient support from the government and many other factors are contributing to their mistreatment. India in fact also faces the shameful problem of rising farmer suicides as well.

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Infrastructure and Environment in Villages

As one can imagine, villages are far less congested and polluted than cities. Due to lack of urbanization, they are able to main their natural habitat and environment to a large extent. There is a green cover around the village and overall a calm, clean and beautiful environment. Generally, there is also a water source close by, like a lake or river.

One disadvantage of living in an Indian village is the lack of infrastructure that plagues. Although, since independence, our government has made many efforts to provide these villages with basic infrastructure facilities, we have a long way to go still.

The houses of the villagers are usually made of thatched roofs and mud or clay. These are not permanent structures. There is maybe one school and one hospital shared among 3-4 small villages and usually involves a long commute. The roadways are not well maintained and usually not well connected either. Transportation facilities are also generally lacking and inadequate.

Cultural Life in Villages

The village life, however, is not all work and no play. Villagers often gather for festivals, fairs, harvests, and other religious and cultural functions. Indian villages have a rich history of culture and tradition. Art is celebrated in the form of dance, songs, plays, etc. In fact, some of our most famous dance forms and songs come to us from these traditions practiced in various villages from India.

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Prof. Jodhka: ‘Colonial powers produced theories of society that placed Europe at the centre of their experience and others had to follow’

Civil Society News, Gurugram

Stimulating rural areas should be part of any script for economic growth in India. Even as younger generations seek to move on, agriculture deserves to be made more rewarding and sustainable and linked to national strategies for better nutrition. Much value awaits to be unlocked by promoting livelihoods aligned to agriculture.

Getting people off the land and out of agriculture has been shown up as being easier said than done — especially when those in rural areas account for 70 percent of the country’s population. There aren’t the cities to absorb them efficiently or the industries to provide jobs.

But a robust vision of villages begins with an understanding of what they are all about. It means going beyond the entrenched view of a rural-urban divide. Among many deleterious consequences, it has led to rural areas being environmentally exploited to serve the cause of development. Escaping from such regression is not just costly, but is mostly impossible.

So much better to see rural and urban as being interconnected in a single mosaic, transforming and prospering in tandem and to a collective advantage. Surinder S. Jodhka’s book, The Indian Village: Rural Lives in the 21st Century, encourages such fresh thinking.

Prof. Jodhka teaches sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is  a scholar and researcher who travels extensively in rural India. His book puts many myths to rest.

Villages have never been static, he argues. Historically villages and cities were dynamic, globally connected and not backward. They have been changing and continue to do so. The city-village binary is therefore a false one thrust upon the Global South by European colonizers to assert their worldview. Civil Society spoke to Prof. Jodhka about his book and his understanding of rural India’s aspirations based on his research. An edited version of our conversation:

Q: You have said in your book that colonial powers deliberately, to a strategy, as it were, portrayed villages as being static and backward whereas cities were positioned as being forward-looking and symbols of development. Could you explain this a little?

There were many things happening at that time. With the development of capitalism in Europe and colonization of the rest of the world, Europe, in some sense, took charge of defining the world. It built narratives of what is good, what is bad, what is the future, what is the past, what is Europe and what is the rest.

India was colonized by Europe along with many countries of the Global South. The colonial powers produced theories of society which placed Europe in an advantageous position, as a region that had already developed and the rest of the world had to follow. Social theories were constructed with Europe as the centre of their experience. And then they treated all this as history.

Well, the fact is that before the 17th and 18th centuries, when Europe underwent the Industrial Revolution, the world existed in different forms. And Europe was not really ahead of other regions. China, India, the Middle East and many other regions were very advanced civilizations with a lot of wealth.

Colonial powers came to India for its wealth, which they wanted to acquire. Most of the riches of India were not being generated in Bangalore or in Hyderabad. They were being generated in villages. Just take spices as one example.

But, according to the narratives of the capitalist bourgeoisie, created by the Industrial Revolution, cities were sites of production. Orientalism, attached with the white man’s burden, generated narratives that the Global South — India, China and Africa — consisted of primitive places or traditional societies and cultures which didn’t have the capability of growing on their own.

So India got conceptualized as a land of villages, as if there were no cities here. The Indian village was shown to be kind of stuck in time and incapable of growing on its own. It needed to be disintegrated and connected with the city.

Our own nationalists bought these theories. They were mostly urban, middle-class Indians who kind of replaced the colonial elite. They felt that they now had the responsibility of developing everyone else. They regarded themselves as knowing everything because they were ‘educated’ and others were illiterate and living in primitive times or less developed.

Well, the reality is that the world was always integrated in some way or the other. And so were villages. It didn’t happen in the 21st century. Population flows were always there. There were kinship connections, people travelled from villages to cities and beyond.

Cities flourished in India. There was Agra, Delhi, Jodhpur, Jaipur, Jalandhar, Amritsar. Every 100 miles there was a city, these were also centres of culture, villages were closely integrated, there were pilgrimage centres. Populations were always mobile. Obviously, there were poor people. There have always been poor people in cities.

Q: In fact, as you say in your book, at one point, India had more people living in urban spaces than Europe had, right? So, in a sense, India was more advanced. Remnants of efficient urban systems are proof. But this was not asserted, taken forward. Why?

The urban middle class began to see itself in a ‘we-know-it-all’ kind of category, that we know what is good for you. That’s what provoked me into writing this book. I started thinking about it in 2020, when farmers were sitting on the borders of Delhi. They were speaking a very cosmopolitan language. They were talking about the entire world. They were talking about the dynamics of corporate capital. They were talking about their own internal livelihood patterns and what would happen once corporations came in.

On the other hand, middle-class Indians were condescending. They had no idea what these farm laws were. People were not even looking at the texts. They were just passing judgement publicly on television channels and amongst themselves that farmers have gheraoed us and they don’t understand anything.

When I went to the farmer protests, I saw they were holding classes. They had set up libraries on the borders. They were talking about not just their agriculture, but about the world, about jurisprudence, how global flows would function after 50 years and what is happening to infrastructure. They were very sophisticated and very knowledgeable.Urban folks just assume that they know better. Privilege is hard to shed.

Q: You’ve been travelling to villages in Punjab and across the cow belt. Villages must have evolved over time?    

We now have plenty of historical work. And I have a whole chapter on this in the book which talks about actually existing villages. All these agrarian economies were constantly under transformation. You know, there were surpluses being produced. Villages were connected to cities and villages were connected to the world. There was a process of change happening all the time.

There were new communities coming in. For example, in northwest India, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan you have flows of Jats coming in.  South India was undergoing a complete change. You have canal irrigation coming in. New technologies and new crops. Potatoes, tomatoes perhaps from Brazil, Latin America. New kinds of spices too.

These were not localized economies. They were integrated into the larger world. Things were going from here to elsewhere and coming from elsewhere to here. Villages were always changing in every sense of the term.

If you look at power hierarchies, once you have new land and new systems, new rulers come, there’s a drought, people will move from one place to the other, just for the sake of livelihood. Then they have to negotiate with a new terrain. So, villages were always changing.

Secondly, in the past 100 years, particularly after Independence, villages were integrated into the systems of the nation state and democratic politics. We didn’t have that earlier. That makes a lot of difference because with democratic politics you have a representational system which didn’t exist before.

We have people voting. Votes made a lot of difference even to people who were completely marginalized whether it was in the cow belt or Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand or down South or the interiors of northeast India. There was a process of national integration in a very political sense of the term.

A new bureaucracy comes in, a developmental bureaucracy, with development programmes and electoral processes. The Green Revolution brings in a certain kind of development in some pockets. The Green Revolution was not confined to Punjab, Haryana or Western UP or parts of Gujarat and Tamil Nadu.

You also have population flows. In the 1970s itself, labour begins to migrate from Bihar to Punjab. I have done field work in Bihar. You go to Madhubani district and villagers will tell you that when they began to migrate for work to Punjab they felt liberated — they were not dependent on the local landlords anymore. It gave them alternative possibilities of livelihood.

And then you have the rise of OBC politics. It played a very significant role in creating further democratic aspirations. People began to go wherever employment was available. You have taxi drivers from Punjab working in Calcutta or Bombay, early on. Security guards from all over the country. And tribal labour migrating.

But along with migration flows, there are commodity flows and a new kind of consumption culture. Take ATMs which play an important role in the lives of migrant labour and their families. Or mobile phones — you can stay in the village and work in the city. If you are, say, an electrician you don’t have to stay in a slum if your village is 10 km away.

Rural livelihoods have changed. Agriculture does not give livelihoods to more than 15 to 40 percent of rural households across the country. The remaining livelihoods come from the non-farm economy, a very generic term.

Democratic politics has played a very important role. It has produced a new local elite, which is connected, knowledgeable and linked to the developmental bureaucracy. It also then produces a kind of clientele politics where the regional political elite also develops connections with the village and forms an electoral constituency.

People don’t vote on the basis of caste identities alone. Caste is also an urban process, right? These identities are being mobilized from cities, and then you have associational formations of caste. We think of caste as a village reality. But villages also get integrated through those new caste elites, which are actually elites of our modern-day democracy.

Q: You point out in your book that the rural population has actually increased. This is contrary to what economists find desirable. Can you explain this?

Economists know this. In India, we obviously have many more people living in urban areas now than we did 100 years back. The proportion of the urban population has gone up from, say, around 10 to 11 percent in the early 20th century to perhaps 35 to 37 percent — we don’t have figures of the last Census. It’s only in relative terms that the urban population has increased. It’s still very large. I mean, India’s urban population is more than the total population of any country in the world other than India and China, right? We have nearly 400 million people living in India’s urban centres, which is larger than the total population of the United States.

But the rural population has also increased to nearly four times what it was 100 years ago. So, the absolute size of the rural population is perhaps, you know, 850 to 900 million people living in rural areas, which is obviously more than double the urban population of India.  It’s a huge number.

That’s why I keep emphasizing, look at the facts, at the ground realities. Unless you are constantly engaging with those, you will end up producing narratives and prescriptions. Not only do such narratives not work, they also create problems. They create more inequalities. We unnecessarily lose out on skills that are there in this large 70 percent of our population.

We don’t consider them worth anything. We think they’re a lag on us, the urban middle class, because we pay taxes and they don’t. Everyone pays taxes indirectly, right? They are part of the consumer economy. Also, they’re skilled people. They are knowledgeable. You need to visualize your population demographics very differently, more regionally.

Q: With connectivity, migration, Panchayati Raj, surely caste equations must have undergone change in villages? Don’t women have more agency with Panchayati Raj?

Absolutely. Caste equations have changed but caste has not disappeared. Earlier structures of hierarchy that integrated everyone are not required any longer. Rural economies are quite mechanized. People are quite mobile. Agriculture doesn’t need too many people. And not too many people work in agriculture any longer.

In some contexts, women have agency, but mostly it is nominal. It is a complicated question. My own theory is that women have been given reservations in panchayats because the erstwhile dominant sections of the village have moved out so they don’t have too much stake in rural panchayats.

Panchayats have become delivery systems of state-led development. They are not the kind of panchayats that Gandhi had visualized. These are more like bureaucratic channels to disperse developmental schemes.

That kind of representation is required but the structure of relations needs to change. There is very little discussion in villages on patriarchy, on male dominance. It varies from region to region. So Kerala is very different from Gujarat which is different from western UP. They also vary vertically. Dalit communities have a different kind of patriarchal arrangement or structure from, say, the Jats or Rajputs.

Take what happens to rural families when men move out. If you go to a village in Bihar, 75 percent of households have at least one to four persons working outside. And most of these men are actually married. Their wives stay back and run the household. What kind of empowerment does that bring to women there? Obviously, things are changing when men are not around.

Earlier, it used to be only in Kerala when men went to the Gulf. Those dynamics are also interesting. Empirically, there are varieties of processes across social stratum. We need to map those and that can happen only by taking the village seriously. 

Q: We have also had NGOs working in Rajasthan, MP, and UP telling us very bitterly that governments have deliberately not spent on rural infrastructure across the cow belt to force distress migration. How far is this true? 

Absolutely true. Both infrastructure and also in imagining rural livelihoods. Post the 1990s everything is led by corporate interests. If companies like some areas to be developed, it happens. Companies are also willing to develop infrastructure, storage facilities, provided you hand over agrarian economies to them. In parts of South India, agriculture is very well integrated because farming interests have shrunk.

I went to do field work in Bihar and travelled from Patna to Madhubani. This is a wonderful place. I mean, agriculturally this land in the Gangetic plains is one of the most fertile in the world. But there is no infrastructure and no irrigation.

There is water, it causes floods, but there’s no canalization. And it did not happen partly because the dominant agrarian interests did not want development in Bihar. And after that there was simply State neglect.

Who is going to develop this kind of infrastructure in Bihar? These are all small holdings. Why should you invest in developing irrigational networks? There is no thinking, no investment, in such regions. And agrarian plans have to be region-specific, ecology-sensitive.

Q: Why has rural India lost political heft?

Historically and sociologically, in the 1970s and post the 1980s, the local rural elite, because of democracy and the new Green Revolution technology, became prosperous. They used those channels of mobility to move out of the village. They sent their children to schools and colleges. The aspirations of their children changed. Some became MLAs or got into other political positions, which took them out of the village to the local capital city.

Even in Jharkhand you will find half the population in urban areas are new migrants from villages. Some would be poor, but many would be the erstwhile rural elite. So who will speak for the village in a loud enough voice to be heard in Parliament? You don’t have a Charan Singh or a Devi Lal any longer. You have farmer lobbies only in regions like Punjab which had relatively larger holdings.

In some sense, land reforms also made agriculture a politically unviable voice. The farmer lobby, farmer movements were very active in the 1980s. After that their children began to move out and diversified into urban occupations.

With new liberal development, the middle class began to reproduce itself in the urban corporate economy. Earlier, the Nehruvian middle class still felt it had the onus of taking everyone along. But that is not ‘in’ anymore. Villages have become unfashionable, even for academics like us. They think it is a waste of time. Why do you want to study villages, they ask, who reads about villages these days? ν  

Gauri - Dec. 15, 2023, 9:37 a.m.

I found this interview particularly insightful. The sad reality as Prof. Jodhka put it is - 'earlier, the Nehruvian middle class still felt it had the onus of taking everyone along. But that is not ‘in’ anymore.' As a country this is shameful to say the least. Villages are the roots of any society, intrinsic to the social fabric of India.

Naresh Kumar - Dec. 6, 2023, 10:27 a.m.

Thank you Prof Prof. Jodhka, I like your thought on rural economy, sociology and politics. The conversation highlighted a true picture - how rural India has been narrated by external socio-political thinkers and capitalists. Being part of the rural folk I completely agree with his thought of rural governance and panchayat system as well. Its a completely new insight about how migration works as a liberation for Bihar youth. Thanks again for very sound thoughts with a new perspective. We need more voices and narratives around this.

Kanchan Mondal - Dec. 3, 2023, 8:15 a.m.

It is a thought provoking interview.

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B1 Rural and Agrarian Social Structure

Topics of interest for cse:.

• The idea of Indian village and village studies.
• Agrarian social structure – evolution of land tenure system, land reforms.

Village occupies an important place in the social and cultural landscape of contemporary India. Notwithstanding India’s significant industrialisation in the last six or seven decades, and a considerable increase in its urban population. A large majority of Indians continue to live in its more than 6,00,000 villages and remain dependent on agriculture directly or indirectly. In the 2011 census, rural India accounted for 68% of the Indian population . Similarly, the share of agriculture and allied activities has come down to about 16% of the GDP , while employing about 42% of India’s working population.

The Idea of Indian Village

A village has been defined in a multitude of ways:

• Geographers say it’s a territorial space,
• Indologists/orientalists maintain that it’s the heart of Indian culture and civilisation,
• Marxists maintain that the village is a reflection of economic equality & inequality,
• Anthropologists claim that it represents part society and part culture.
• Sociologists, consider the village as the foundation to understanding the dynamic social life of India.

Colonial scholars like Munro and Metcalfe offered a stereotypical and biased explanation of Indian villages that they were autarchic, self-sufficient and politically independent little republics . The idea was that wars, revolutions, or change in centralised rulers had minimal impact on village life. Over time the colonial approach to study Indian society died out but this colonial ideology lingered for a while in Indian sociology.

VILLAGE STUDIES

Louis Dumont considers that the Indian village is not an empirical reality. Dumont says that it’s a geographic conception based on the idea of caste purity/pollution norms. He says that caste produces a hierarchy and the village offers a shelter to it, thus, village studies are nothing but studying caste inequalities .

Dumont maintains that Indian values, whether in rural or urban India, are pessimistic, non-innovative, culture bound, non-reflexive, and hierarchical which is the reason why European societies produced stratification (Homo aequalis) while Indian society produced hierarchy (Homo hierarchicus). He says that this is something that can be understood without even conducting village studies. This shows that the colonial ideology had infected Indian sociology and put a dent the size of Europe in the idea of objectivity/value neutrality.

Advent of village studies in Indian sociology is a testament to the rise of Indian sociology from the formal stage to the substantive stage. The structural functionalist school of thought here has been in conformity with the American anthropological tradition where scholars like WHR Rivers and Robert Redfield took interest in village studies. Rivers considered that peasants constitute part society and part culture while Redfield spoke about the folk-urban continuum (Little & Great traditions) indicating that villages and urban civilisations regularly share a harmonic relationship.

Village studies were introduced in Indian Sociology to gauge whether all villages located in different parts of the country are equally exposed to the larger urban society or not (Srinivas' idea of searching for a macro generalisation).

Apart from this village studies were seen as useful tools which would offer insights to policy makers about the dreams and aspirations of the village people. It can also be said that village studies were essential to study the impact of public policy on the everyday lives of the people.

The village studies tradition glorified empiricism, objectivity, and value neutrality to establish an equitable relation between European sociology and Indian sociology in a few short decades. Thus, village study is not just a method used by sociologists studying indian society, rather it can be considered the core of Indian sociology that took it from a nascent field of study to maturity pretty quickly.

MN Srinivas and AM Shah in their early contributions to the field of sociology tried to dispel the colonial understanding of villages as little republics. They proposed that the idea of village self-sufficiency was a myth . Colonial scholars, being armchair thinkers, glorified it because they were unaware of the ground realities and had a colonial perspective. In the 50s and 60s a number of books on indian villages were published by sociologists:

• Indian Villages by MN Srinivas,
• Village India by McKim Marriot,
• Indian Villages by SC Dube,
• Rural Profile by DN Majumdar, etc.

These village studies reflected on various aspects of village social life such as organisation of caste, family and kinship, landholding patterns, economic inequality, gender status, etc. Most significantly A Beteille’s study of Sripura, FG Bailey’s study of Bisipara village, MSA Rao’s study of Yadavpura, AM Shah’s study of Radhaganj are classic examples of social transformation of caste in India . From these studies emerged concepts such as Segmentary system, Sanskritization, Westernisation, harmonic & disharmonic social systems, AJGAR, dominant caste, etc. These conceptual developments indicated that Indian sociology was finally catching up to European sociology in terms of theories and methodologies.

Pioneering studies by Bidelman, MN Srinivas , and William Wiser helped us better understand the Jajmani relations . A Betielle calls them vertical ties ( vertical solidarity as opposed to caste based horizontal solidarity) between families of different castes that contribute to continuing inter caste negotiations.

David Hardiman on the other hand disagreed and said that Jajmani relations were disharmonic with the lower classes offering maximum skills for minimal returns. Thus, he said that caste relations were asymmetrical and this was institutionalised in the Jajmani system.

A number of studies in the 50s and 60s explained the interlink between caste and land holding to explain caste structure. A Beteille defined agrarian class structure on the basis of ownership, control, and usage of land. Kathleen Gough in her study of Kumbapetti village spoke about the rise of capitalist classes like rich farmers, big bourgeoisise, petty bourgeoisie, semi-proletariats, and pure proletariats.

Village studies also explored the caste-politics nexus and the influence wielded by so called dominant castes on local and regional politics. Apart from this studies by Leela Dubey and MN Srinivas demonstrated that village studies could also be useful for getting insights into gender role deviations .

Regional variations in kinship relations were also highlighted by numerous studies done by scholars such as Irawati Karve, TN Madan, Kessinger, AM Shah, Pauline Kolenda, etc. They spoke about the inter-linkages between caste and kinship relations, gender roles in kinship systems, family transformations and other related spheres of social change. Such studies contributed to the branching out of Indian sociology into various fields of study.

Critique of Village Studies

The Structural Functionalist approach is often criticised as a methodology that cannot guarantee objectivity and this holds especially true for village studies. MN Srinivas admitted that a village is not representative of the entire society, thus, an induction based approach to policy formulation would not be facilitated by village studies as different villages may respond differently to policy overtures.

MN Srinivas, A Beteille, and Leela Dubey clearly mentioned that during their field studies they never wanted to antagonise the upper castes, zamindars, or patriarchs who were often their hosts.

Yogendra Singh criticised the SF approach to village studies as conservative since it can only consider changes which take place inside the structure rather than changes to the structure itself .

Subaltern sociologists such as Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak and other dalit sociologists reject the SF approach outright as most of the field reports are biased towards the dominant culture.

In contemporary India the impact of globalisation, development-displacement, plight of women, protests and movements, etc. require a much more holistic approach to understand the phenomenon. Thus, critical approach, feminist approach, post-modern approach, etc. are developing as alternatives to SF methodology in contemporary sociology. These approaches which are diverse in scope and usually macroscopic in their breadth speak about maturity of Indian sociological thought. In that statement, they point to SF and modernisation theory as the substantive stage while orientalism and Indology are being referred to as the formative stage of Indian sociology. Thus, seeing that Indian sociology caught up to 200 year old European sociological thought in a matter of decades one should remember the critical contribution therein by the SF method.

EVOLUTION OF LAND TENURE SYSTEMS

In ancient times the land ownership pattern in India has been a matter of debate. It is generally assumed that the king had rights over land taxation but the community had rights over the land too. During the Mughal periods that the land tenure pattern was dramatically changed due to innovations introduced by the rulers.

The Mughals made the following changes to the land tenure system:

• Divided the country into paraganas and took into account the fertility of the soil, productivity of land, as well as threat of natural calamities.
• Appointed zamindars and talukdars in charge of collecting the tax in various paraganas. The “leisure class” expanded rapidly due to this.
• Special areas were designated as Mughal bandhi areas under direct control of the emperor. They also introduced the patta system that converted hereditary rights over land into legal rights.
• Introduction of the Jagirdari system. Most of the lands assigned as jagirs were rent free but the right over land was also temporary in character.

During the British era the land tenure system changed to conform to western standards of individual land ownership . The tenure systems were developed to ease the administrative pressures on the British who were confused by the system of communal ownership in India. By initiating these reforms, they outsourced the revenue collection to the new class of landowners and fundamentally changed the landholding pattern in the country. The motive behind the reforms was to increase the revenue and profit for the EIC.

1793 Permanent/Zamindari settlement in Bengal. British imposed a fixed amount to be paid by all zamindars hoping that the fixed nature of the tax would allow the zamindars to reinvest the saved money on the improvement of land. It quickly degenerated into absentee landlordism , and led to the development of multiple layers of intermediaries as rentiers. It must however be noted that whatever thought was given to improvement of land was a secondary consideration to increasing and regularizing the land revenue .

1820 Ryotwari settlement in Madras and parts of Mysore initiated by Alexander Read and Thomas Munro . Seeing that the south did not have any zamindars as were typically found in the north, Read and Munro felt that the settlement should be made with individual cultivators instead. Here too the British hoped that a fair assessment would allow reinvestment in land improvement but usually the assessed rent was so high that many ryots were unable to pay and usually fled.

1822 Mahalwari system in UP initiated by Holt Mackenzie . Here the assessment of all the plots in the village were added up and the amount was imposed on the Mahal/Village as a whole, in keeping with the old ways of functioning of the Indian villages. The village headman was in-charge of collection .

AR Desai pointed out that MoP and RoP sufficiently influenced the history of India in the colonial context.

LAND REFORMS

The Indian national movement was largely a product of kisan sabha movement that was founded on the farmer and peasant movements in colonial India.

Bardoli, Eka, Champaran, Moplah, Kheda, and other movements served to bring peasants from different parts of the country together. The congress leaders and communists highlighted the suffering of the peasants and their plight, and it was perceived that in an independent country the state would take the responsibility of eliminating the intermediaries between the tillers of the land and the state.

Soon after independence most states felt the need for land reforms and they were launched with varying success in all parts of the country.

Their objectives were:

• Control of land to the tiller so that agricultural productivity could be increased, employment guaranteed, and poverty reduced.
• Land reforms were important to justify India’s commitment to a socialist ideology .
• To put an end to class divisions in agrarian India.
• Tenancy rights reform.
• Consolidation of fragmented holdings.
• Updating land holding records.
• To break the linkages between caste and class as perceived then.

While land reforms started out with noble intentions, they were not implemented well.

Land reforms had three major components :

• Land to the tiller (redistribution)
• Removal of intermediaries and zamindars as absentee landlords.
• Land ceiling norms.

Other than these the Bhoodan, Gramdan movement started by Vinobha Bhave was also responsible for redistribution of land in many places.

The zamindars, landlords, rajas, and nawabs had joined the congress and by 1947 held considerable sway in policy matters due to their power as an influential lobby. They feared that their land interests would be sacrificed if the land reforms were ever implemented strictly and thus made sure that their implementation was lax and loopholes plenty .

AR Desai called the ineffectiveness of land reforms in India a testimony to the shift from the external colonialism to internal colonialism .

Daniel & Alice Thorner conducted studies in over 250 villages in 1978 and found that 80% of the villagers were still small and marginal farmers who did not benefit from the land reforms. They listed some common methods used to circumvent the reforms:

• Benami transactions,
• shifting ownership from one member to the multitude of the HUF, and
• bribing officials

The Thorners found that the nexus between caste and class was still quite strong as evidenced by the fact that maliks, kisans and mazdoors come from upper castes, middle castes, and lower castes respectively.

10th Agri Census 2015 found that 86% of farmers are small and marginal now.

Sunil Sen indicates that in case of Bengal and Kerala the strong presence of communist parties ensured that the peasants were more mobilised, better organised and their needs better articulated. The political parties were determined for reforms in these states and as a result of this, the two states show a large middle farmer segment and a decline in the number of landlords.

A Beteille in his study of Tanjore finds out that the non-Brahmins mostly benefited from the political decentralization program and captured power in both the village and state levels. MN Srinivas maintains that the Brahmins of South India were the first to go for westernisation and thus, it was not land reforms rather social change that gave way to land redistribution in these areas.

Thus, land reforms had a diversified impact on agrarian class structure in India.

• Marxist sociologists consider that India has a mix of feudalism, semi feudalism, capitalist and semi-capitalist MoP.
• In contrast liberal sociologists hold that land reforms coupled with green revolution have had a transformative impact on the agrarian class structure of modern India.
• Both groups however conclude that since the impact of land reforms has been so diversified on the field therefore, stereotypical European theories and models would not necessarily be applicable to the Indian situation.

Gail Omvedt says New peasant movement is emerging in areas of capitalistic agrarian development (PB, KA, West UP, GJ, MH) which aims to represent the totality of farmer interests above caste and class divisions and engages in organised gheraos, rail and road blockages. (Current farmer protest an example of this)

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Village, caste, gender, and method : essays in Indian social anthropology

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1 The Beginnings:Village Studies Tradition in India

Professor B. B. Mohanty

Introduction

The tradition of village studies in India is as old as the tradition of empirical research in social sciences. Scientific understanding of Indian society began with village studies. Though traditionally study of villages was common to many social science disciplines, the idea of the village as the unit of investigation turned out to be central to sociologists and social anthropologists. In fact, the development of sociology and social anthropology in India has its origin in the village studies. Although village studies started during the colonial period, it continued to dominate the anthropological-sociological studies till the 1960s and beyond. However, village studies in India do not have a uniform tradition in terms of style and temper. It has undergone significant changes over the decades in response to national and global concerns. The interest in village studies in India was greatly influenced by both colonialism and planning.

Colonialism and the Village studies Tradition

Social anthropology and sociology in India originated in response to the realisation on the part of the colonial government that knowledge of Indian social life and culture, which was mainly organised and shaped in the villages, is essential for its smooth administration. The British administrators as well the social scientists were encouraged to study village communities to have first-hand comprehensive information, particularly on the caste system and tribal life, and the associated socio-economic and political organisations. As noted by Jodhka (1998), village was recognized as a “natural” entry point to the understanding of the traditional Indian society and for documenting the patterns of its social organization and it emerged as the ultimate signifier of the authentic native life, a place where one could observe the “real” India and develop an understanding of the way local people organized their social relationships and belief systems. Hence, the survey reports of Francis Buchanan, the Gazetteers of Walter Hamilton and Edward Thornton came out in the beginning of the nineteenth century and subsequently routine Imperial as well as District Gazetteers were written which depicted mainly the Indian village life. With the introduction of new land revenue policy, studies were undertaken to understand the village communities and the prevalent land tenure systems, as they were necessitated primarily for determining revenue assessments and demarcating boundaries of revenue villages. The study made by Charles Metcalfe in 1832 could be cited as an example in this respect. Besides, a surgeon named Thomas Coats conducted a survey of village Lonikand, near Pune in Maharashtra, in 1819 and published his data in 1823. The writings of Karl Marx, Henry Maine  and Baden-Powel in the later part of the eighteenth century provided insights into the sociological aspects of structures and change in Indian villages. Marx (1863) evinced a keen interest in the nature of village communities in India as self-sufficient communities exercising communal ownership of land.

The publication of the report of Royal Commission on Agriculture 1926 which revealed the miserable conditions of the farm population made the colonial government aware of the need to intervene in the village affairs and drew attention of the leaders of the freedom struggle. Hence, the first wave of village studies emerged with a view to collect detailed and comprehensive information on villages. This prompted economists like Harold Mann and Kanitkar (1921) to investigate into land ownership, cropping pattern, and other agricultural practices, occupational structure and the like which laid sound foundation for village studies and stimulated many scholars and government agencies to undertake studies in other parts of India. Subsequently, many village surveys were also made by several institutions1 and individual scholars2 which motivated further studies on village India. There was growing recognition of the fact that in order to understand the facts of village life independent studies are crucial rather than depending on reports and surveys made by the colonial administrators. Moreover, most of the early studies were confined themselves to the aspects of village economy. Village studies focusing on socio-political organisations and cultural dimensions were conspicuously absent till Wisers wrote their little classic Behind Mud Walls (1930). Little later Wiser’s Hindu Jajmani System (1936) analysed the social relationships among caste groups in a north Indian village. The methods adopted by Wisers were quite different from that of the economists. It was noted by Srinivas (1975) that the quality of information gathered by Wisers was rich and superior to the information collected earlier as they stayed years together in Karimnagar and talked to inhabitants in local language and participated in their activities.

• Gibert Slater (1921), Head of the newly established Department of Economics at the University of Madras and E.V. Lucas (1920) of Punjab studied villages. Surveys were also undertaken by the Punjab Board of Economic Enquiry, Bengal Board of Economic Enquiry, Visva-Bharati Rural Reconstruction Board and Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Poona. For details see, Manish Thakur (2014: 95)
• For example, Ranade’s A Social and Economic Survey of a Konkan Village (1926) Mukhtyar’s Life and Labour in a South Gujarat Village (1930) Shukla’s Life and Labour in a Gujarat Taluka: Oplad (1937) and Mukherjee’s  Fields and Farmers in Oudh (1929). For details see, Manish Thakur (2014: 96)
• In a nutshell, the village studies done during colonial period were mostly descriptive and less analytical. They were designed to gather information on socio-cultural life in the villages. Arguably, village studies in India during this period were buttressing colonial interests.

Post-colonial Changes and the Village Studies

After independence, with the transfer of power from the British to the Indians, there was an attempt to reshape the rural society in terms of framework, stratification system, modes of economic production and types of socio-cultural institutions under the impact of development planning. The main thrust was to attain an all-round development at the village level. The village which was treated as a mere unit of colonial administration emerged as a unit of development and change. A variety of development programmes were designed to transform the villages. As necessitated by the peasant struggles, land reform became the foremost priority of the government for ensuring agricultural growth and social justice in the villages. Each state without exception formulated measures for abolition of intermediaries, tenancy reforms, fixation of ceiling laws and redistribution of ceiling surplus land, protection and prevention of land from scheduled caste and tribes to non-scheduled groups, etc. Besides, the community development programme, which was rooted in Gandhian idea of village community, American experience of agricultural extension service and the influence of British paternalism was introduced in 1952 to attain sustainable economic progress at the village level through active participation of various categories of rural population (Moore 1967: 392). Thus, since the 1950’s the rural society of India has acquired new significance among social scientists and the changing situation made the sociologists and social anthropologists inclined more towards village studies. Moreover, it was considered that village studies would provide authentic picture of Indian social reality as they offer “field-view” based on “scientific method” as against the “book-view” which was constructed by the Indologists using the classical Hindu scriptures usually identified with the Brahmins indicating a biased, upper-caste, notion of the Indian civilization.Besides, in the post-Second World War period, consequent upon the emphasis laid on ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ as common programmes in most of the Third World countries, there was growing interest in village studies in these countries with the increasing participation of the peasants and rural population, who mainly lived in villages, as understanding their way of life and working out ways and means of transforming them were recognized as  being the most important priorities. Therefore, ‘development studies’ intended to provide relevant data and prescriptive knowledge for socio-economic transformations, and as an interdisciplinary field, emerged as one of the most important areas of academic interest. A number of village studies were undertaken across the countries as a part of this academic programme3. The emerging socio-political and academic environment at the national as well as global level stimulated village studies in India. However, the nature of village studies underwent a radical change when Indian social anthropologists, trained aboard, and their foreign counterparts, began making systematic studies of villages in different parts of the country. Village studies at the early phase were classified by Oommen (1985) into three types: informative studies for launching development programmes; studies in the context of development measures; and evaluative studies.

A series of village monographs were published in the 1950s. Most of them provided a general account of social, economic and cultural life of the rural people though some of the later studies focused on specific aspects of the rural social structure, such as, stratification, kinship, or religion. The first full length sociological study of an Indian village called Shamirpet (near Hyderabad in the Telangana region) by S. C. Dube ( Indian Village ), and the three other edited volumes India’s Villages (M. N. Srinivas), Rural Profiles (D. N. Majumdar) and Village India (Mckim Marriot) were published in 1955.

Based on the field work done in 1951-52, Dube gives a clear picture of some salient factors in village life. It describes the village setting, composition of its population by caste and economic groups, customs and rituals of the people, their family life, inter and intra group relations. He notes that urban and administrative influences have long affected the villages and these influences are now felt in increasing strength. In this study, Dube raises many interesting questions including the one on the nature of the relations between the Muslims and the rest of the villagers who are Hindus. Rural Profiles (D N Majumdar) offers a description of some specific villages and some of the general discussions of the method and purpose of village studies  3 Redfield’s Tepoztlan: A Mexican Village, A Study of Folk Life; Chan Kom: A Maya Village (with Villa Rojas); and The Folk Culture of Yucatan; Arensberg’s The Irish Countrymen and Family and Community in Ireland (with Kimball); Chapman’s Milocca: A Sicilian Village; Embree’s Suye Mura: A Japanese Village; Fei’s Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley; Lewis’s Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztldn Restudied (1951); Beals’s Cherdn: A Sierra Tarascan Village (1946); Foster’s Empire’s Children: The People of Tzintzuntzan (1948) are some of the examples. emphasizing the practical and theoretical value of holistic descriptions of villages though few chapters avoid holistic approach in favour of detailed presentation of economic and demographic data. In a sense, this volume provides access to rare information which was not available elsewhere. McKim Marriott’s Village India is a collection of papers originally given at a seminar: the eight studies cover Uttar Pradesh (two), Delhi, Madras, Mysore (two), the Kota tribe of the Nilgiris and Gujarat. Each study is the work basically of a single scholar. It provides diverse facts, concepts and flavour about village India with varied approaches. In this volume, while Srinivas focuses on the village unity in Rampura, a village of the plains of Mysore District in Mysore State, Gough deals with the threats to this unity in Kumbapettai, a village of the Tanjore District of Madras State; Cohn looks into the efforts at upward mobility in a single caste of a village of eastern U.P; Beals accounts for the external factors as mediating force for internal change in Namhalli, a village near Bangalore; Lewis seeks for typologies in Rani Khera, a north Indian village; and Marriott himself points to existence of both the great tradition and the small tradition in Kishan Garhi, a village of Aligarh District, Uttar Pradesh. In India’s Villages, M. N. Srinivas puts together a series of short essays published earlier in The Economic Weekly later came to be known as Economic and Political Weekly between October, 1951, and May, 1954 . It consists of an introduction by Srinivas, a general article on social structure and planned culture change in India by D. G. Mandelbaum, and descriptions of 14 Indian villages by 13 different authors including some of the British and American scholars. Most of the essays were written during the first surge of post-war anthropological field work in India, and many of the accounts were composed before the fieldwork on which they were based was completed. India’s Villages presented a composite picture of the Indian rural community in terms of caste structure, settlement patterns, and work arrangements, degree of isolation and self-sufficiency, rigidity of social stratification, mechanisms for social control, and many other characteristics. The forces which are stimulating change in Indian villages, particularly the planned programs of the state are given considerable attention. A good number of the studies placed major emphasis on the social structure of the communities and the modifications which were occurring or were anticipated in the social sphere. All the three edited volumes have many contributors in common and to a very large extent they confirm and supplement each other. A clear picture of Indian village society as a whole comes out of these studies which are in a sense the first fruits of the new interest in  sociology and of the new application of sociological techniques to Indian context. Subsequently, many more village studies were published such as Bailey (1957), Dube (1958), Mayer (1960), Epstein (1962) and Béteille (1965). It is rightly commented that there was a virtual explosion of village studies in the sixties and seventies (Jodhka 1998). Besides social anthropologists who were pioneers, scholars from other discipline — political science, history, economics, and so on  — were also attracted to village studies (Béteille, 1996:235). The focus in these studies was mostly on inter-caste hierarchy, factionalism, jajmani relations, relation between caste and class, etc. Both village and caste studies went together in this research framework. Caste emerged as the core area of sociological research as it was considered to be the central and defining institution of Indian society and village was considered as the ideal locus for understanding caste  in its various dimensions4. The village was treated as a functional whole with different caste groups constituting its parts and assuming different roles and positions. The analysis made by Mayer (1960) on landholding, labour relations, trade and money-lending in a Malabar Village, Katheleen Gough (1955) on rural socio-economic changes in a Tanjore village, Bailey (1957) on caste, land transfer and social mobility in an Oriya village, Scarlett Epstein (1962) on irrigation and social change in two villages of Mysore indicated how caste can be considered as a useful perspective for looking at the village economy and change. However, Béteille’s work Caste , Class and Power marks some departure from earlier line of studies in the sense that he  introduced Weberian categories of ‘status’ and ‘power’ in his study of stratification in a Tanjore village. Béteille recognises how functional caste has often been used as an excuse to avoid the analysis of conflict between interest groups in the villages. However, Mukherjee’s study (1971), originally undertaken in 1940s, which analysed the productive organisation in the villages was also a study of different orientation. It challenged the widely prevalent myth of egalitarianism and looked at the villages from class lenses, though it did not make a substantial impact on subsequent studies.

Nevertheless, the social organisation of production, class structures, conflict and tension among various groups in the villages were taken up by the subsequent studies undertaken in 1970s and thereafter (For example, Epstein 1973; Djurfeldt and Lindberg 1975; Pathy 1975;

 However, Dumont and Pocock (1957) in review article questioned the relevance of treating the village as a unit for understanding caste which subsequently generated a debate in the pages of Contributions to Indian Sociology. For Dumont, village was not a social reality transcending caste.

Breman 1976; Mencher 1978; Harriss 1982; Gough 1989; Jha 1991; Baboo 1992). Overall, the village studies provided a panoramic view of the structural diversity of village communities in rural India which subsequently, set the foundation for systematic studies on contours of rural/ agrarian socio-economic transformation and change.

Perspectives and Methods

Perspectives

The village studies in India were based four major socio-anthropological perspectives:evolutionary, ethnographic cultural, structural-functional and Marxian.The studies based on evolutionary perspective concentrated on the stages through which village communities and their various institutions passed in course of their growth in Indian society. This perspective centres on two main lines of enquiry. They are: the reconstruction of specific development of agrarian systems using archaeological and historical data that help us to search for repetitive processes and patterns of agrarian transformation; and the process by which evolution takes place. Here emphasis was put uniformly on the factors which contributed to the origin and growth of village communities and their institutions. In most of the cases, the generalizations are based on the data derived from myths, epics, folklores, etc. In the studies of this perspective villages and land systems were either to find out the historical stage of growth or their comparative evolutionary sequence and succession of forms (Maine 1890, Baden-Powell 1892, 1896, 1908). Maine was particularly concerned with placing the Indian village into an evolutionary scheme through which its linkage with the village communities in the west could be established. In his treatment of the process of feudalization he clearly postulates a transition from ‘village community’ to manorial group which generally succeeds in an evolutionary sequence. Similarly, Baden-Powell emphasized the ‘origin and growth of the village communities in India. In his analysis of both land systems and forms of village communities he attempted to formulate an evolutionary scheme by which villages emerge in India from communal ownership to that based on joint-sharing and single landlord-ownership. According to him, types of villages based on joint-zamindari and jagirdari systems could have evolved through a process of succession of dominant groups of conquest and settlement. By this the less dominant are gradually pushed back to landless categories through the process of marginalization and differentiation. There are also a few studies in this vein which have highlighted the typical characteristics of Indian village community and its evolution in different phases (for example, Mukherjee 1958; Kosambi 1956; Malaviya 1969). A number of empirical studies were also available that describe the inter-play of economy and social structure of villages. Mann’s (1921) study of Deccan village and Wiser’s study (1936) of the jajmani system and rural social structure can be included under this category.

The studies following ethnographic-cultural perspective are generally known as community studies. They tend to highlight the totality of the community, social institutions and cultural sphere of people studied in rural and tribal India. Most of the studies have adopted Redfield’s analytical model applied to the study of village social structure (Singer 1959, Marriott 1955). Singer has attempted to understand the Indian social structure in the ‘Little tradition’ and ‘Great tradition’ model. Marriott also terms the mode of interaction between the ‘Little tradition’ and the ‘great tradition’ in Indian villages as ‘universalisation’ and ‘parochialisation’. While the former refers to the process whereby the elements of ‘Little Tradition’ circulate upward to the level of the ‘Great tradition’, the latter represents the downward percolation of great tradition. Here a continuum of ‘Tribe ’to ‘Emergent Peasant’ or ‘Proto Peasant’ to ‘Peasant’ is developed. Bhandari (1978) coined the term ‘Emergent Peasant’ for a tribe which practices settles cultivation without being involved in the ‘Great tradition’ of the wider society. He justified the term as the Hinduized and Christianized settles agriculturalist tribals who maintain their social boundary and do not participate fully in the ‘Great tradition’. Goswami (1978) called the ‘Emergent peasant’ of Bhandari as ‘Proto-peasant’ for the same reasons. The ‘great tradition’ of the caste structure was taken as the point of reference to analyse the change in tribal societies. Put it precisely, the studies so formulated were confined to the construction of typologies of peasant and tribal societies where cultural factors were considered central to the understanding of village society.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the structural–functional method emerged as a distinct theoretical line in the analysis of first-hand material about single villages and castes. Here the units of observation are not ideas, sentiments and values, but the order of roles and statuses which form the basis of social relationship. It hinges on the assumption that the regular pattern of behaviour are perceived as having some function in relation to the creation and maintenance of order in societies and thus tries to maintain a state of equilibrium within the community as a whole. It is primarily concerned with the identification of emerging principles, new rules and the consequent differentiation and transformation in the institutionalized forms of social relationship and their  ordering in village society. For example, the abolition of intermediary rights in land was intended to alter the pre-existing modes of power asymmetry in the villages. The extent to which this asymmetry has been reformed may be an instance of change in the system. Thus, studies developed by the sociologists and social anthropologists under this perspective try to explain change as something which comes about as the result of external forces acting upon the villages (Bailey 1957; Epstein 1962,1973). Bailey in his study of an Orissa village has explained how the internal organization of the village has been changed as a result of extension of economic and administrative frontiers (1957). Scarlett Epstein (1962) in his study of economic development and social change in Wangala and Delena, the two villages of Mysore, describes the contrasting responses in these villages to the development of an irrigation system by the state. In a further study (1973) of the same villages, she has explained how the extension of irrigation, the package programs and price-boom of the jiggery accelerated further the growth into an already expanded economy. Both the villages changed considerably in appearance since she made her visit. In addition, there are also a number of other studies which were based on this perspective5. The village functionalism and the distribution of power have also been discussed at length in many of these studies. The factional subdivision articulates tension arising out of the vertical and horizontal cleavages in the social stratification especially under the impact of the measures of social and economic reforms. The question as to how this process really begins, functions and affects the structural form of village community has been studied by many social anthropologists and sociologists (Bailey 1963,McCormack 1959, Mayer 1966, Nicholas 1963,1965,1968, Orenstein 1965, Singh 1971). Srinivas has also analyzed this process in Rampura a village of the plains of Mysore District in Mysore State, South India. He used the term ‘dominant caste’ to interpret the knowledge of new mode of power relationship that emerges when new forces of social change begin to operate in the social system of the village (Srinivas 1955 and 1959). He describes how peasant control over land and its products makes the elders of the peasant caste virtual arbiters for the whole village, often displacing caste panchayats (councils) and even the outside courts.

Notable among them are Sinha 1969; Patnaik 1969; Wisers and Wisers 1971; Iswaran 1936,1971; and Kessinger 1974. Village studies based on Marxist perspective till recently were quite few. Studies of this variety focused on class differentiation in the peasantry, social relations of production, and patterns of mobilization, conflict and tension in the villages. The structure of social relationships and conflict based upon the differences in ownership and control of resources by different groups of people is critically important in the studies of this kind. They try to understand peasantry within the broader framework of larger socio-political and economic order which subsumes the peasant. The first village study of this tradition was undertaken by Mukherjee (1957, 1971) in six villages of Bengal that described the differentiation among the peasants which provides a useful model for agrarian class analysis. Kathleen Gough’ study of a village of the Tanjore District of Madras State also followed Marxian line of enquiry. She concludes that the social structure of the village is changing from a relatively closed, stationary system, with a feudal economy and co-operation between ranked castes in ways ordained by religious law, to a relatively ‘open,’ changing system, governed by secular law, with an expanding capitalist economy and competition between castes which is sometimes reinforced and sometimes obscured by the new struggle between economic classes. This study also noted the breakdown of the feudal economic system, the emergence of lower-caste groups in economic rivalry, and the widening range of social relations beyond the village which have endangered the power of the traditional caste based unity and dominance. Jan Breman’s Patronage and Exploitation – about the breakdown of the hali system of labour relations in south Gujarat, was an analysis of rural society and agrarian relations, based on village studies (the two villages Chikhligam and Gandevigam) belong to this tradition. A little later, based on village studies, Goran Djurfeldt and Staffan Lindberg ( Behind Poverty: the Social Formation in a Tamil Village, 1975) made an ethnographic analysis of agrarian class relations and of the differentiation of the peasantry in the context of the then on-going ‘mode of production’ debate. Anand Chakravarti’s study (1976) of a village in Rajashtan on local political process and change, though initially formulated with Weberian conception while revealing the pattern of conflict and contradiction it implicitly indicates a new departure and his subsequent study (2001) on north Bihar village which documents the everyday class relations follows Marxian perspective. Many of the subsequent studies which concentrated on the political economy of agrarian change in the Indian villages (for example, John Harriss, J P Mencher) were based on Marxian line of analysis.

Methods of Village Studies

Most of the village studies provided “holistic” account of the social and cultural life of the village people based an intensive field-work, generally by staying with the “community” for a fairly long period of time in a typically selected single village. The most important feature of these studies was the fieldwork component and the use of “participant-observation”, a method of data collection that anthropologists in the West had developed while doing studies of tribal communities. Becoming a participant observer through intensive fieldwork was considered as the most fruitful method for gaining access to the life-world of village people. The “participant-observation” method was seen as a method that ‘understood social life from within, in terms of the values and meanings attributed to it by the people themselves’ (Béteille, 1996:10). The day to day observations of patterns and rules of village socio-cultural life were recorded with camera, note book and tape recorder. Thus intensive fieldwork tradition was considered as integral part of village studies particularly among the social anthropologists. Emphasizing the significance of fieldwork M N Srinivas noted, ‘intensive fieldwork experience was of critical importance in the career of an anthropologist. It formed the basis of his comprehension of all other societies, including societies differing greatly from the one of which he had first-hand knowledge. No amount of book-knowledge was a substitute for field experience’ (Srinivas, 1955:88). Participant observation provided continuity between the earlier tradition of anthropological studies of the tribal communities and its later preoccupation with the village. Béteille writes, “In moving from tribal to village studies, social anthropologists retained one very important feature of their craft, the method of intensive fieldwork…. Those standards were first established by Malinowski and his pupils at the London School of Economics in the twenties, thirties and forties, and by the fifties, they had come to be adopted by professional anthropologists the world over” (Béteille, 1996: 233-4). However, despite this continuity with the earlier tradition of anthropology, the historical context of the village studies was very different from the tribal studies.

The early village studies were based on simple description and there was hardly any presentation of data around a well-defined theoretical frame. However, the studies undertaken in the 1960s and thereafter represent an intimate linkage between field work and theory. Though most of the early studies were based on singe village later a shift was made towards studying  multiple villages for a comparative analysis and wider generalisation6. Although by and large, majority of the village studies in India have omitted a systematic treatment of past history of the village which were vital to understanding not only the village economy but also its culture and social organization, a number of studies have made historical analysis. In fact, the village studies had two types of orientations. While the early studies undertaken by the social anthropologists who followed ethnographic-cultural or structural functional approach oriented themselves towards cultural aspects, the later studies made within Marxian or political economy approach had orientation towards economic issues relating to agrarian society. While the former emphasized on caste as the central category of analysis the latter focused on class. Studies on cultural issues were usually more descriptive, ahistorical and based on intensive fieldwork in a single village, the agrarian based studies were made on two or more villages using simple quantitative methods linking historical with contemporary information.

Scarlett Epstein (1973) studied two villages in Mysore to analyse the impact of irrigation on social change. Jan Breman’s Patronage and Exploitation (1976) on changes in labour relations was based on the two villages. Many recent studies covered multiple villages, for example, Hetukar Jha’s (1991) Social Structure of Indian Villages; Balgovind Baboo’s (1992) Economic Exchanges in Rural Orissa . Among the early studies Ramakrishna Mukherjee also studied six villages of Bengal.

To summarize, village studies in India generated a systematic, rich and vast corpus of sociological knowledge on socio-cultural and economic life of diverse groups representing different regions of India. Many concepts were evolved and methodological refinements were arrived and debates and discourses were started through these studies which became useful in studying the process of social change at the macro level. However, it is commented by many that despite volumes written, village studies in India hardly contributed to the major theoretical discourses in social sciences. Nevertheless, these studies stimulated further sociological research and provided a strong base and insight for understanding and interpreting the varied aspects ongoing process of social change in Indian society in general and its rural society in particular.

Further Reading

• Beteille, A. (1974) Six Essays in Comparative Sociology , Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• Beteille, A. (1980) The Indian Village: Past and Present’ in E.J. Hobsbawm et. al. eds. Peasants in History: Essays in Honour of Daniel Thorner , Calcutta: Oxford University Press.
• Beteille, A.(1996) Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore  Village . Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• Breman, J. (1987) The Shattered Image: construction and Deconstruction of the Village in  Colonial Asia , Amsterdam: Comparative Asian Studies.
• Dube, S.C.(1955) Indian Village , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Dumont, L. and D.F. Pocock. (1957) Village Studies, Contributions to Indian Sociology , 1(1):23-41.
• Jodhka, S. S. (1998) ‘From “book view” to “field view”: Social anthropological constructions of the Indian village’. Oxford Development Studies , 26 (3): 311-331.
• Majumdar, D.N. (1955 ed.) Rural Profiles , Lucknow: Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society.
• Marriott, Mckim. (1955) Village India: Studies in the Little community, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Srinivas, M. N. (1975) ‘Village studies, participant observation and social science research in India’. Economic and political weekly , 10(33/35): 387-1394.
• Srinivas, M.N. (ed.) (1955) India‘s Village , London: Asia Publishing House.
• Thakur, Manish (2014) Indian Village : A Conceptual History, New Delhi: Rawat.

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Power structure of indian villages: tradition and change.

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Power Structure of Indian Villages: Tradition and Change!

Who holds power in the villages? What was the traditional power struc­ture and what is the new power structure that has emerged?

The power-holders may be classified in four groups:

(a) Those who have power based on the ownership and control of land,

(b) Those who have power based on their caste,

(c) Those who have power based on numerical strength, and

(d) Those who have power because of the positions they hold, e.g., in panchayats, etc.

In the traditional power system, the main dimensions of power system were: the zamindari system, the caste system, and the village panchayat. The villagers referred their social, economic and other prob­lems either to the zamindar or to their caste leader or to the village panchayat. In a state like Rajasthan, traditional power structure was feudalistic.

In other states also, zamindari was hereditary. The jagirdari and zamindari systems were in fact land revenue systems. The kings granted lands to their favourite chosen men like ministers, courtiers and military commanders, etc.

The jagirs were bigger estates than the zamindaris. The jagirdar was an intermediary between the tiller of the soil and the state but he behaved practically as the owner of the land in respect of peasants. He collected revenue from peasants for their support and also of the mili­tary force which he maintained. The zamindars were big landlords but possessed no title.

The jagirdars levied number of taxes and took a great portion of the produce as land revenue. They discouraged reforms and so­cial awakening. The zamindars were those who were assigned land by the feudal chiefs and had to pay tribute to the ruler. They used to give their land to tenants whom they exploited in every respect. Thus, ownership of land and their economic status were the fundamental sources of jagirdars’ and zamindars’ power in a village.

The caste leaders had social status in a village. Since caste councils were very powerful through severest sanctions, they could even ostracize defaulters from the caste. The leaders enjoyed great power over members. The village panchayats consisted of village elders from amongst all the major castes in the village. These were informal organisations. The members gathered whenever issues involving the interests of the village were to be decided.

After independence, the jagirdari and zamindari systems were abol­ished and many land reforms were introduced which weakened the traditional power structure and created a new power structure. In place of hereditary and caste leaders, elected persons with political backing be­came leaders. Individual merit and not caste or class became an important factor in leadership.

Yogendra Singh (1961) in his study of changing power structure in Uttar Pradesh villages concluded that the power system has a tendency to incline in favour of the groups which fulfill the economic expectations of the people in the village. Some studies in Haryana and Rajasthan villages conducted in the 1970s and the 1980s have also shown that linkages with politicians and officials have strengthened the already privileged position of the upper classes in rural stratification.

Andre Beteille noted in his study that power has become independent of class to a greater ex­tent than in the past. Ownership of land is no longer the decisive factor in acquiring power. A.R. Hiraman (1977) has pointed out that the distribu­tion of power and authority in the village does not show any correlation with landholding or caste.

Iqbal Narain and P.C. Mathur’s study in Rajasthan (1969) concluded that the upper class continues to have a monopoly of leadership but new leadership of younger age group has also emerged at the village level. Sirsikar (1970), Carrass (1972), Inamdar (1971) Ram Reddy (1970), Ishwaran (1970), and Yogesh Atal (1971) also studied the impact of elections on finding base by the political parties in villages and the introduction of Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) on the nature of change in leadership pattern in the villages. Oommen (1969) also pointed out the influence of decentralised decision-making process on rural leader­ship and the character of the village community power structure.

Related Articles:

• Power Structure in Assam (Useful Notes)
• Indian Culture: Little Tradition and Great Tradition

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The Nostalgia for the Village: MN Srinivas and the Making of Indian Social Anthropology

1998, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

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Sujata Patel

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Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 35, No. 24 (Jun. 10-16, 2000), pp. 1998-2002

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There is need of a rigorous and comprehensive history of Indian sociology-anthropology, constituted as a full-fledged research area, to study the material, ideological and institutional context in which these disciplines developed. A report on a national workshop on the issue.

Patricia Uberoi, Nandini Sundar and Satish Deshpande (eds.), Anthropology in the East: Founders of Indian Sociology and Social Anthropology, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2007.

Satish Deshpande

Prof. Manish A . Thakur

Gandhi’s writings and contribution occupy a marginal place in mainstream anthropology, including what has come to be known as the ‘Indian anthropology’.Besides Gandhi’s views on tribal people with the study of which the anthropologists are most concerned, some of Gandhi’s ideas have great anthropological relevance.Gandhi staunchly believed in what in the language of anthropology is called ‘learning from the field’. He would shun pre-conceptions and stereotypes about the people or events, thus form his understanding from the sustained interactions he had with people.

‘Sociology of/in India’ is arguably a vexed issue expressed in an overused phrase unless it is cast in a new light. The enormity of volumes, of debates and writings, adds to the phrase an uncanny posterity and illusive exoticness despite the fact that there are only eight (nine on stretch) decades in the backdrop. The neophytes of the discipline learn of it with a sense of disciplinary pride and scholars speak of it with due prejudices. It hinges upon the key term that is self-reflexivity innate to the discipline that invites every old and new scholar to ‘sociologise sociology’ by (re)visiting the debates and historical-intellectual trajectory of the discipline. The selfreflexivity of a discipline is indeed a point of celebration. Arguably, a little too self-reflexive a discipline as sociology is also likely to degenerate into self-fulfilling prophecies. The blowing of trumpet, to count the brownie points pertaining to the ‘glorious past of the discipline’, or the mourning of the end of the glory in the time of the banality in the institutional and disciplinary practices, both refuse to reckon with the spontaneous growth in the nature and scope of sociology. On the other hand, yet another attempt at ‘sociologising sociology’ could also aid in putting the contemporary, with reference to the bygone, in the right perspective.

Almost two decades into the twenty-first century, in a somewhat uncertain phase in the history especially of anthropology but also of the social sciences in general, "anthropology in India" needs to be reassessed in its current global context. Much more is now known about the history of the discipline in other non-Western and ex-colonial contexts, not to speak of the West itself. Having gone through an extended period of turbulence in the last quarter of the twentieth century, anthropology is still assimilating the cumulative impact of numerous powerful interventions telegraphed through book titles and labels such as Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, Orientalism, Writing Cultures, colonial discourse, postcoloniality, multiple modernities, the politics of location, and, most recently, the world anthropologies project. Needless to add that "India," the stage on which anthropology has been (and is being) enacted, has also been changing rapidly and comprehensively. Given so much change, it is necessary to begin by reexamining the older reasons why anthropology in India seemed so distinctive. This disciplinary history needs to be framed within a broader history of ideas that is itself embedded in the story of the subcontinent's successive encounters with colonialism, nationalism, the developmental state, the neoliberal market, and globalization. However, issues of content and scope need to be settled before proceeding further. This entry offers an overview of a field that would be called social anthropology in contexts outside India (and especially in the West). In India, much of social anthropology is practiced under the disciplinary label of sociology, and influential voices in the academy beginning with M. N. Srinivas have insisted on the indivisibility of the two. The main argument offered in defense of this stance is that the conventional division between these disciplines based on the distinction between "primitive" and "advanced" societies is no longer tenable even in the West (where it originated) and has never made sense in non-Western contexts such as India. However (as acknowledged by Srinivas himself), in the mid-twentieth century, educated Indians disliked anthropology because they saw it as a condescending colonialist discipline eager to portray "natives" as backward, and so it was also expedient to rename anthropology as "sociology." In terms of institutional practice, the two disciplines lead parallel lives without much explicit interaction. Of the "four fields" of traditional (Boasian) anthropology, the Indian discipline today focuses on variants of physical and cultural anthropology, with archaeology and especially linguistics having become separate disciplines. Historically, physical anthropology has been a strong subdiscipline in India, particularly anthropometry.

Saurabh Dube

Saurabh Dube (ed.), Historical Anthropology (Oxford in India Readings in Sociology and Social Anthropology). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiv + 427 pp. Notes, index. `595 (hardback). DOI: 10.1177/006996671004400314 At the very first glance, Saurabh Dube’s volume tells us that on offer here is a very unusual mix of essays under the rubric of ‘historical Downloaded from cis.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on January 30, 2015 432 / Contributions to Indian Sociology 44, 3 (2010): 425–466 anthropology’. Clearly, much thought has gone into the choice of what is ‘representative’ of the field and why. Indeed, by his very choice of essays, Dube has effectively told the complex story of how, through time, an interdisciplinary domain is produced by a variety of academic practitioners, sometimes consciously, sometimes in spite of themselves.

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Sociology Optional Mains Paper 2 for UPSC | Year 2023 | Village Studies in Indian Sociology | Triumph IAS

“the decade of the 1950s was the       golden period of village studies in indian           sociology. explain the statement.”.

Section: A Sociology Paper 2023 Analysis (Paper 2: Unit-12 Rural and Agrarian Social  Structure )

Question: 1 (b) “The decade of the 1950s was the golden period of village studies in Indian Sociology. Explain the statement.”

Introduction:

The study of villages in India holds a unique and significant place in the realm of sociology. Sociologists and social anthropologists carried-out a large number of studies focusing on the social and cultural life of the village in India . Most of these studies were published during the decades 1950s and 1960s. These “village studies” played an important role in giving respectability to the disciplines of sociology and society in India.

Reasons for focus on village studies during the time period of 1950s and 1960s

• Colonial Perspective: The earliest studies of Indian villages were driven by colonial rulers and scholars, primarily for the purpose of land policies and control. During this period, villages were often perceived as isolated and unchanging units. For instance, scholars like Metcalfe described Indian villages as monolithic, atomistic, and unchanging entities, almost independent of foreign relations. This colonial perspective laid the groundwork for later village studies.
• Post-Independence Shift : With India gaining independence and undergoing industrialization in the 1950s, there was a paradigm shift in how villages were studied. The focus transitioned from control to transformation, as the stagnant agrarian economy needed revitalization.
• Agrarian Transformation : Village studies emerged as a means to understand and reform agrarian structures, which was a top priority in the context of development studies during this period.
• Conceptual Focus: Scholars turned their attention to comprehending the complexities of rural life, including aspects such as peasantry, folk culture, and traditional practices . These studies aimed to provide a deeper understanding of the dynamics at play in rural India.

Importance of Village Studies in India :

• Realistic Assessment: Post-independence, empirical field studies replaced earlier theoretical views. Researchers delved into the economic underpinnings, cropping patterns, and agrarian structures of villages, offering a more realistic understanding of rural life. André Béteille, for example, emphasized that villages were not just places where people lived; they had designs that reflected the basic values of Indian civilization.
• Social and Cultural Insight : Village studies provided holistic accounts of economic, social, and cultural conditions. Gender and caste emerged as critical factors shaping labor divisions within villages. These studies highlighted that villages were not only caste-conscious but also gender-conscious . According to S.C. Dube, gender was a pivotal determinant of labor division in villages, alongside caste .
• Development Planning: Village studies played a pivotal role in creating comprehensive profiles of rural India. These profiles, grounded in empirical data, proved invaluable for formulating accurate policies. Village studies authenticated traditional social orders while also tracing their transformation, a necessity in the post-independence era.
• Government Interest: The Indian government, committed to rural development, sought reliable data to guide its policies. Given the scepticism about post-colonial officials, academic surveys conducted through village studies provided the trustworthy information needed for policymaking .
• Community and Networks: Village studies explored the intricate web of close-knit communities and social networks within rural areas. They shed light on social interactions, cooperation mechanisms, and conflict resolution practices . Insights into social capital and collective action emerged from these studies. For instance, Oscar Lewis’s study of Rani Khera village highlighted how villages were part of larger networks based on kinship groups. M.N. Srinivas argued that villages offered a crucial sense of identity to their residents.
• Developmental Interventions: The data and insights generated through village studies directly influenced policies related to rural development, poverty reduction, and education, healthcare, and infrastructure program For example , Oscar Lewis worked with the Ford Foundation in India to develop an objective evaluation scheme for the rural reconstruction program.
• Interdisciplinary Approach: Village studies enriched the understanding of economic growth and development planning by bringing together sociological insights with the quantitative methods of economists . This interdisciplinary approach proved fruitful in comprehending the complexities of rural India.
• Historical Continuity: Villages, with their historical continuity and stability over centuries, offered a microcosmic view of India . They provided invaluable insights into on-going social processes and problems within Indian society.
• Important Administrative and Social Unit: Villages were not just subjects of study but also important administrative and social units. They were closely tied to the lives, livelihoods, cultures, and identities of their inhabitants . Villages significantly influenced behaviour patterns within their communities.
• Stability and Continuity: Villages’ stability and continuity over centuries made them ideal subjects for studying cultural patterns, behavior dynamics, and socioeconomic structures over extended periods.

Constraints of Village Studies:

• While participant observation was strength of village studies, it also had limitations. Researchers often limited their perspectives to gain acceptance within the community, resulting in conservative accounts of village life .
• Researchers sometimes approached villages through dominant sections of society, restricting their access to other perspectives. Avoidance of sensitive questions due to fear of offending dominant interests further limited the depth of data collection.
• Indian villages were internally differentiated with diverse worldviews . Researchers often aligned themselves with dominant caste groups, which limited their access to the perspectives of lower castes and raised suspicions among these groups.
• Dominant theoretical perspectives of the time tended to focus on social structure and stability rather than change and conflict. This bias influenced researchers to emphasize the reproduction of social order over the examination of social transformation within villages.
• S.C. Dube critiqued village studies for being unrepresentative, exaggerating the unity and self-sufficiency of villages, and imitating Western methods and concepts.

Conclusion:

Hence the decade of the 1950s indeed marked a golden period for village studies in Indian sociology. These studies provided a comprehensive understanding of rural life, social structures, cultural practices, and economic patterns. Despite their limitations, village studies offered valuable insights for policymakers, researchers, and sociologists working towards inclusive development, social justice, and the overall well-being of rural communities in India .

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Village studies, Village studies sociology, Village studies in India, Indian sociology, S.C. Dube, 1950s, patriarchy, rural life, development planning, social capital, interdisciplinary approach, social justice, policy formulation, André Béteille

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