Relevance: Sociology: Paper I: Rural and Agrarian society
Indian sociology as the real or perceived ontological entity without necessarily being an explanation in sociological research.
The village is no longer the convenient methodological site for ethnographic fieldwork in the old ways thanks to the thickening and deepening of the state apparatuses in our times, and the attendant processes of migration and mobility.
To understand ruralities today new sites and modes of enquiry is required.
Introduction: The Village and Its Avatars
Interestingly, the Indian village not only occupied a pride of place in colonial social morphology, but also became enmeshed in the leading theoretical and historiographical debates of the day. Henry Sumner Maine, Karl Marx and B. H. Baden-Powell could look at the Indian village more as a unit of knowledge about Indian society than a mere unit of colonial administration. Not surprisingly, the Indian village became the theoretical site where conceptual knots of some of the grandest evolutionary schema of the nineteenth century were sought to be resolved.
The demands of a national identity necessitated the projection of the village as the repository of civilizational ideals of the Indian nation.
Once the village became an emblem of the nationalist movement, there was no stopping the ritual incantation of the great virtues of the village (Dumont 1970). The true India now lived in its villages. The village became the epitome of India’s ‘golden past’ with its suggestions of egalitarianism (overt or covert), primitive democracy and pristine harmony.
In ideological terms, the village, with all its inflated virtues, provided a counterfoil to the much-criticised hierarchic and undemocratic notions of caste. It provided the nationalists with a sturdy confidence in their inherited legacy of a ‘nation’ and thus served a vital ideological function in course of the nationalist movement.
Post-Independence period witnessed the projection of the village as a template for nation building.
The village gained in political salience even when it continued to be the ultimate destination of the sociologist’s/social anthropologist’s quest for a suitable locale for the study of ‘peasant society and culture’ (Redfield 1955).
The Declining Significance of the Village
Gupta (2004: 11) avers, ‘the village is no longer a site where futures can be planned’. He adds further, ‘the village is shrinking as a sociological reality, though it still exists as space’ (Ibid: 9). He discerns the declining importance of the village in India’s national culture as also in contemporary political debates in the country which do not have a rural character at all: ‘though the majority of Indians live in villages, the village leaves little impress upon the national culture today’ (Ibid.: 20).
Likewise, Jonathan Parry’s ethnographic evidence in relation to the long distance migrant labourers working in the public sector Bhilai Steel Plant too lends credence to Gupta’s characterisation of the village.
The village has turned out to be more of a dystopia. At any rate, the village is no longer a living presence in mainstream Indian intellectual life, and is gradually taking on the form of a demographic or statistical datum. Much like Gupta and Parry, for Nandy as well, the vivacity of an Indian village is not part of the various visions of future floating around in South Asia.
Yet, there are scholars whose faith in the inherent worth of the village studies is too entrenched to be shaken so easily. For example, the economist Barbara Harriss-White (2004: xxii) writes, ‘village studies are far too important to our understanding of economy and society to have atrophied in the way they seem to have done over the last decade’.
It must be re-emphasised that the ‘village’ is not just a domain of study, but also the outcome of sociological discourse. This recognition demands an examination of the village as a discursive space which constitutes the meeting ground of political/administrative strategies, while serving to contest several socio-cultural representations of Indian society.
Expectedly, the village is seen to be a viable analytic construct with an empirical referent in reality by most sociologists/anthropologists. It has seldom been treated as an explanandum in sociological research.
The socio-cultural dimension refers to a property space whereby the village becomes a proxy for provincial, socially conservative, slow changing, traditional and somewhat fatalistic values and ethos. Indeed, these are the well-established co-ordinates for defining the village in sociology textbooks.
The socio-cultural dimension refers to a property space whereby the village becomes a proxy for provincial, socially conservative, slow changing, traditional and somewhat fatalistic values and ethos. Indeed, these are the well-established co-ordinates for defining the village in sociology textbooks.
The New context
While entailing a hegemonic version of the village, reconfigures the meanings of village in our social imagination. Irrespective of whether rural development programmes fall short of accomplishing their goals, or succeed in meeting the desired targets, they lead to a certain transformation of the terms in which village is talked about. Village becomes a marker of social difference in the overall context of development and modernisation. It is employed as a term of social classification with connotations of the presence, absence or degrees of development. Yet, rural development is the medium in which village is placed in relation to national development. In this sense, the theories and practices of rural development alter conceptualisations of village for the villagers as well.
Perhaps, village is not merely an ontological category reflecting the morphology of a society where the vast majority of the people are villagers. Speaking of village in the context of rural development rarely refers to the actual villages. An implicit opposition between village and development informs rural development discourse: village is something that is characterised by the absence of development. It is simply a backward place by virtue of its being at a remote distance from development. This is precisely why it eminently qualifies to be the recipient of the rural development programmes. In other words, the acceleration of rural development programmes has reconfigured the images of village over time. The association of village with development leads to a definite alteration in the earlier ways of conceptualising what a village is.3 Village as a kind of place (underdeveloped/undeveloped) comes to stand for a kind of people – the villager (backward). The very phrase rural development suggests that villages are in need of development towards some ideal that they have fallen short of attaining.
Rural development discourse, thus, facilitates the spread of development vision of society as more and more people lay claims to it. At times, the ideologies of development come handy while segregating the village from the non-village. They also serve political interests and, at times, the polarised images of the village and city become the co-ordinates of political idiom as in Bharat versus India debate (Joshi 1985, 1988). The ways of imagining social difference get associated with political uses of identity as underdeveloped or undeveloped. Indeed, rural development becomes the medium in which the villages also start expressing their location vis-à-vis the historical trajectory of national development. Thus, an un(under)developed village (‘an infantilised village’ a la Nandy 2001: 134) waits to pass its developmental milestones to join the ranks of developed villages.
These propositions assume salience assume salience as the studies of Village India have been intimately tied to the developmental aspirations of the Indian state. Undoubtedly, the village studies constituted the primary interface between the professionally trained sociologists and the demands of the project of national development. The histories of the development and growth of Indian sociology unambiguously point out the close connections between the expansion of the discipline and the expectations placed on it by the state (Singh 1986).
Conclusion
Notwithstanding the eminence that the village studies acquired in the discipline in the past, it has undergone a definite decline in contemporary times. Its routine entrenchment in the overall disciplinary field and its formulaic (and less rigorous) adherence by subsequent generation of scholars led to the waning of village studies tradition.
There is little appreciation of the representation of the village in the historical sense of something that is constructed and ideologically deployed. The latter not only helps us to examine the methodological limitations of the village studies tradition but also suggests the methodological promises of the newsites of fieldwork that transgress the village.
Such a transgression does not underplay the fact that the vast majority of India’s population still has powerful links to villages (Jodhka 2012). It merely brings to the fore the new methodological premise that villages need not be considered to be ontologically bounded entities any longer.
The new tradition of scholarship need to graft theoretical concerns like gender and ecology, migration and mobility, everyday state and state-making, the decline of peasant and farmer movements and populist mobilisations, the diasporic ambitions of the burgeoning middle classes, and the new cultures of consumption and the attendant recasting of ruralities under globalisation and liberalisation onto the existing preoccupations.
One could approach the village as an entry point to understand the history and character of colonial forms of knowledge by demonstrating as to how the exercise of power and the accumulation of knowledge were both parts of a larger colonial project.
Secondly, one could go for an exposition of the Indian nationalist appropriation of the idealised village, its historicity as well as its contemporary articulation.
Thirdly, a possible way of approaching the village might lay in the revisiting of the hitherto existing assumption of an unproblematic equation between the village and the peasantry.
Lastly, one could undertake the more challenging task of unravelling current instances of appropriation/romanticisation/essentialisation in spheres that go beyond the nationalist label.
In the ultimate analysis, our studies have to reflect the changing political cultural reality of the village and the attendant representational mutations of the idea of the village that we call ruralities. We have to highlight the denial of temporal coevalness to the village in the context of rural development as well as its framing as the counter-city and an escape from the city amidst globalising discourses on environment. Also, we have to be alive to the creation of ‘authentic’ villages in the very heart of metropolitan India (see Tarlo 1996).