Idea of Indian village

The study of the Indian village began in the 18th century with intensive survey work regarding landholdings. Intensive empirical studies of village social life became popular in the 20th century. The studies by Munro, Metcalfe, Maine and Baden-Powell considered the Indian village as a closed and isolated system. Sir Charles Metcalfe considered the Indian village a monolithic, atomistic and unchanging entity. He observed: “The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything that they want within themselves and almost independent of any foreign relations” Further, he stated that ‘wars pass over it, regimes come and go, but the village as a society always emerges ‘unchanged, unshaken, and self- sufficient’.

1. Though one may find detailed references to village life in ancient and medieval times, it was during the British colonial rule that an image of the Indian village was constructed by the colonial administrators that was to have far reaching implications – ideological as well as political for the way Indian society was to be imagined in the times to come.
2. Recent historical anthropological and sociological studies have, however, shown that Indian village was hardly ever a republic. It wasa never self-sufficient. It has links with the wider society. Migration, village exogamy, movement, inter-village economy and caste links and religious pilgrimage were prevalent in the past, connecting the village with the neighbouring villages and the wider society. Moreover, new forces of modernization in the modern period augmented inter-village and rural-urban interaction.
3. But, as pointed by Mandelbaum and Orenstein, despite increasing external linkages village is still a fundamental social unit. People living in a village have a feeling of common identity. They have intra-village ties at familial caste and class levels in social economic, political and cultural domains. In fact, village life is characterized by reciprocity, cooperation, dominance and competition. Not all colonial administrators shared Metcalfe’s assessment of the Indian village. It never became the most popular and influential representation of India.
4. The Indian village, in the colonial discourse, was a self-sufficient community, with communal ownership of land and was marked by a functional integration of various occupational groups. Things as diverse as stagnation, simplicity and social harmony were attributed to the village which was taken to be the basic unit of Indian civilization. ‘Each village was an inner world a traditional community, self-sufficient in its economy, patriarchal in its governance, surrounded by an outer one other hostile villages and despotic governments’.
5. In many ways, even in the nationalist discourse, the idea of village as a representative of authentic native life was derived from the same kind of imagination. Though Gandhi was careful enough not to glorify the decaying village of British India, he nevertheless celebrated the so-called simplicity and authenticity of village life, an image largely derived from colonial representations of the Indian village. The decadence of the village was seen as a result of colonial rule and therefore village reconstruction was, along with political independence, an important process for recovery of the lost self.
6. In the post-Independence India also Village’ has continued to be treated as the basic unit of Indian society. Among the academic traditions, the studies of village have perhaps been the most popular among the sociologists and social anthropologists working on India. They 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 social in India. Generally basing their accounts on first-hand fieldwork, carried out mostly in a single village, social anthropologists focused on the structures of social relationships, institutional patterns, beliefs and value systems of the rural people. The publication of these studies also marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of Indian social sciences. They showed, for the first time, the relevance of a fieldwork based understanding of Indian society, or what came to be known as “field view” of the India, different from the then dominant “book-view” of India, developed by Indologists and orientalists.

What was the context of Village studies in India?

1. During 1950s and 1960s the new interest in the village social life was a direct offshoot of the newly emerged interest in the study of the peasantry in the Western academy. Emergence of the so-called “new states” following decolonization during the post-war period had an important influence on research priorities in the social sciences. The most significant feature of the newly emerged ‘third world’ countries was the dependence of large proportions of their populations on a stagnant agrarian sector. Thus, apart from industrialization, the main agenda for the new political regimes was the transformation of their “backward” and stagnant agrarian economy. Though the strategies and priorities differed, ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ became common programmes in most of the Third World countries. Understanding the prevailing structures of agrarian relations and working out ways and means of transforming them were recognized as the most important priorities within development studies. It was in this context that the concept of ‘peasantry’ found currency in the discipline of sociology. At a time when primitive tribes were either in the process of disappearing or had already disappeared, the “discovery” of the peasantry provided a new lease of life to the discipline of sociology.
2. The Village Community was identified as the social foundation of the peasant economy in Asia. It is quite easy to see this connection between the Redfieklian notion of ‘peasant studies’ and the Indian ‘village studies’. The single most poplar concept used by the sociologists studying the Indian village was Robert Redfield’s notion of ‘little community’. Among the first works on the subject, Village India: Studies in the Little Community edited by M. Marriot was brought out under the direct supervision of Redfiekt.
3. In India agriculture and village are integrated and almost the two sides of same coin. M.N. Srinivas who edited a book of Indian village studies found that even in mountain villages, the major occupation was agriculture. This was the case with tribal communities who are supposed to follow non-agricultural activities like hunting. and gathering. Therefore, It is appropriate to say village India as agrarian India.
4. The idea of Indian village community – villages have been given different names including a term used by many as Rurality. Probably in one of the latest estimations of village in India, Deepankar Gupta said, most of academics are is time warp, still living in old times villages have changed They should be called ‘Rurban’. He says village India is integrated with other structures including urban areas. Rural population is not dependent but are reciprocally attached to urban economics.
5. Another appraisal of village in India is a revisit by Aurinder Jodhka to two Haryana villages near Panipat is 2011 which he studied in 1988-89 earlier for his Phd He says, village India despite its regional variations and the variation on the development ladder today are more integrated to the urban economies and liberalized economy of India. Everything is not modern. Castes remain important and probably have become more important. In occupational terms, there is a caste relationship. One thing has happened that Dalits are not confined to village. They work as sanitation workers in the city but they do not want to do the same work in villages on other hand there is more interdependent relationship in villages agriculture where attached labourer are working in cordial terms. The conceptions that attached labour is a tragic thing and refers to deprived conditions of agriculture labour is wrong. Jodhka does not share the rosy picture presented by Deepankar Gupta of village India.
6. Having found a relevant subject matter in the village, social anthropologists initiated field studies in the early 1950s. During October 1951 and May 1954 the Economic and Political Weekly published a number of short essays providing brief accounts of individual villages that were being studied by different anthropologists. These essays were later put together by M.N. Srinivas in the form of a book with the title ‘India’s Villages’. Interestingly, the first volume of ‘Rural Profiles’ by D.N. Majumdar also appeared in 1955. S.C. Dube also published his full length study of a village near Hyderabad, ‘Indian Village’ in the same year.

Importance of village studies in India

1. To prepare a profile of village India, provide authentic and scientific account of traditional social order and there transformation: In the emerging intellectual and political environment during the postwar period, sociologists saw themselves playing an important role in providing authentic and scientific account of the “traditional social order”, the transformation of which had become important concern. Many of the village monographs emerged directly from the projects carried-out by sociologists for development agencies.
2. Evaluation of rural reconstruction programme : Lewis was appointed by the Ford Foundation in India to work with the Programme Evaluation Organization of the Planning Commission to help in developing a scheme for the objective evaluation of the rural reconstruction porogramme. According to Lewis, who studied a village near Delhi, the main concern of there study were what the villagers felt about need of housing, education, health, land consolidation programme and newly created Panchayats.
3. To assist economists in planning process: Majumdar has stated the importance of village studies in the following words, “sociologists, unlike his economist counterpart, saw the village ‘in the context of the cultural life lived by the people’ and the way ‘rural life was inter-locked and interdependent’ which ‘baffled social engineers as it could not be geared to landed economy. It was here that the economists needed the assistance of sociologists and anthropologists”
4. According to M.N. Srinivas, the sociologists viewed their perspective as being “superior” because they alone studied village community as a whole. Their knowledge and approach provided an indispensable background for the proper interpretation of data on any single aspect of rural life. Their approach provided a much-needed corrective to the partial approach of the economist, political scientist and social worker.
5. For qualitative analysis of economic growth : According to Epstein while economists used quantitative techniques and their method was “more scientific”; the sociological approach had its own advantages. Sociological studies provided qualitative analysis. The method of sociology required that its practitioners selected a small universe which could be studied intensively for a long period of time to analyze its intricate system of social reactions’.
6. Study of historical continuity and stability of village : Hoebel has stated that the village and its hamlets represented “India in microcosm”. For Srinivas, they ‘were invaluable observation-centres where sociologist could study in detail social processes and problems to be found occurring in great parts of India’. Dasgupta has stated that ‘Villages were supposedly close to people, their life, livelihood and culture’ and they were ‘a focal point of reference for individual prestige and identification’. As ‘an important administrative and social unit, the village profoundly influenced the behaviour pattern of its inhabitants’. Villages were supposed to have been around for ‘hundreds of years’, having ‘survived years of wars, making and breaking up of empires, famines, floods and other natural disasters’. This perceived ‘historical continuity and stability of villages’ strengthened the case for village studies.

However not all sociologists were involved with development programmes. Most of them saw there work in professional terms. Srinivas argued that ‘the anthropologist has intimate and first hand knowledge of one or two societies and he can place his understanding at the disposal of the planner. He may in some cases even be able to anticipate the kind of reception a particular administrative measure may have. But he cannot lay down policy because it is a result of certain decisions about right and wrong’. Thus maintaining a “safe” distance from the political agencies was seen to be necessary because, unlike economics, social anthropology did not have a theoretical grounding that could help them become applied sciences.

Defining features of Indian village

1. The Indian village had a considerable degree of diversity. This diversity was both internal as well as external. The village was internally differentiated in diverse groupings and had a complex structure of social relationships and institutional arrangements. There were also different kinds of villages in different parts of the country. Even within a particular region of the country, not all villages were alike.
2. The stereotypical image of the Indian village as a self-sufficient community was contested by anthropological studies. Beteille, for example, argued ‘at least as far back in time as living memory went, there was no reason to believe that the village was fully self-sufficient in the economic sphere. Similarly Srinivas too contested the colonial notion of the Indian village being a completely self-sufficient republic. The village, he argued, ‘was always a part of a wider entity.
3. The fact that the village interacted with the outside world did not mean it did not have a design of its own or could not be studied as a representative unit of Indian social life. While villages had horizontal ties, it was the vertical ties within the village that governed much of the life of an average person in the village.
4. Village provided an important source of identity to its residents. Different scholars placed different emphasis on how significant the village identity was when compared to other sources of identification, such as those of caste, class or locality.
5. Srinivas argued that individuals in his village had a sense of identification with their village and an insult to oneself, one’s wife, or one’s family.
6. Dube argued that though Indian villages varied greatly in their internal structure organization, in their ethos and world-view, and in their life-ways and thought-ways, on account of variety of factors, village communities all over the Indian sub-continent had a number of common features. The village settlement, as a unit of social organization, represented a kind of solidarity which was different from that of the kin, the caste and the class. Each village was a distinct entity, had some individual mores and usages, and possessed a corporate unity. Different castes and communities inhabiting the village were integrated in its economic, social, and ritual pattern by ties of mutual and reciprocal obligations sanctioned and sustained by generally accepted conventions. Notwithstanding the existence of groups and factions inside the settlement, people of the village could and did face the outside world as an organized compact whole.
7. Jonathan parry who studied Bhillai industrial complex said today villages have greater interaction and closer relationship with cities and nearby urban areas. Jodhka tells the same thing about his village of Haryana where a power plant was established One important thing in both the studies was that village people now have an unfavourable idea of the village.
8. Village communities still has a social structural feature, in that the daughter of one village feel freer than daughter in laws. There is still a tendency to call each other by fictitious kin terms. Villages within themselves have become very competitive. The earlier dominance of one or two castes is not existing now. Caste is important and most competitions and co-operations are on the basis of caste. Classes have also emerged as important divisions, they co-operate and co-exist in caste and class terms.
9. Though the later studies were much more elaborate and contained long descriptions of different forms of social inequalities and differences in the rural society, many of them continued to use the framework of reciprocity particularly while conceptualizing ‘unity’ of the village the way Srinivas and Dube or earlier Wiser did Some of the anthropologists explicitly contested the unity thesis while others qualified their arguments by recognizing the conflicts within the village and the ties that villagers had with the outside world For instance, Paul Hilbert in his study of a south Indian village, although arguing that the caste system provided a source of stability to the village, also underlined the fact that ‘deep seated cleavages underlie the apparent unity of the village and fragmented it into numerous social groups’. Similarly, Beteille had argued that his study of village ‘Sripuram as a whole constituted a unit in a physical sense and to a much lesser extent, in the social sense’.
10. Manish Thakur in his debate said that the development discourse has changed the view of village because they wanted attract funds for their village. Surinder Jodha says that the different welfare schemes like benefits for the below poverty families have produced a kind of new social construction attempts among the village.

Note : The Indian Context of Rural Sociology

1. In India the importance of rural sociology gained recognition after independence. The agrarian context occupies special status both in the social scientific literature on India and in the literature on agrarian societies in general . However unlike studies on caste, kinship, village community, gender, study of agrarian relations did not occupy a central position in Indian sociology. The first systematic study of rural India was done by D.N Majumdar followed by N.K Bose, S.C Dubey, M.N Shrinivas. However it was with the publication of Andre ‘Be’teille’s Studies in Agrarian Social Structure in 1974 that agrarian sociology gained professional respectability within the two disciplines.
2. Peasant studies in a way arrived in India with village studies. The collection of essays, Village India, edited by Marriot with its emphasis on little communities and great communities was brought out under the direct supervision of Robert Redfield. By defining little communities not in relation to land but through other social institutions such as kinship, religion and the social organization of caste there was a shift away from looking at the rural population in relation to agriculture and land Caste hierarchy came to be defined in terms of ritual or social interaction over institutions of commensality and marriage.
3. According to Nelson up to the comparatively recent times the story of man is largely the story of rural man. So rural society is the basic foundation of human life, the keystone of the developmental process and the basic unit of social structure. Villages have been in existence since time immemorial unlike cities which are of more recent origin. In the Indian context rural sociology is of greater significance of the following reasons.
4. According to S.C Dubey from time immemorial village has been a basic and important unit in the organization of Indian social life. Unique nature of transformation of Indian society where elements of traditional and modern cultures have been juxtaposed For rural development and solution of rural problems according to A.R Desai this systematic study of rural organization of its structure; function and evolution has not only become necessary but also urgent after the advent of independence. Growing influence of industrialization and urbanization. Village as the basic unit of study. Scientific study of village community is a prerequisite for democratic decentralization.
5. In modern India, the need of rural sociology is very urgent and it is progressive social science gaining importance.

Changes in social organization of villages due to market economy

1. Indian villages are in a state of flux. Change is coming into all the areas in villagers’ lives. Agriculture and allied activities are the basis of village economy and they require the active participation of all caste groups.
2. Urbanization, industrialization and democratization are breaking up the traditional structure of Indian villages in caste, economy and political organization etc.
3. There has been an economic change in village life from the expansion and spread of the market economy. The economic frontier has some important consequences on village organization. It is seen in several studies that money economy has permitted some castes to move quickly up the status ladder and forced traditional high caste to move downwards.
4. The spread of money and new opportunities tend to reduce the role of large kinship and place more emphasis on smaller familial units.
5. Production of cash crops have reduces the nutritive value of food and reduces the connection between the farmer and his land. There is over exploitation of natural resources, resource disagreement and pressure politics to secure use of resources all that have affected social organization of a village.
6. The market economy has brought changes in other ways like opening up consumer product markets in rural areas, service provision and other symbols of modernity that may not require land and hence are open to more people. This changes the social equation within the villages. The village organization is thus undergoing metamorphosis in the wake of its exposure to a highly competitive market economy.

M.N Srinivas and S.C. Dube’s Perspective on Indian village

1. S.C Dube identified six factors that contributed towards the status differentiation in the village community of Shamirpet -religion and caste, landownership, wealth, position in the government service and village organization, age and distinctive personality traits. Attempts to claim a higher ritual status was not a simple process. The group had to negotiate it at the local power structure. Dube pointed out the manner in which the caste panchayat of the lower or the menial castes worked as unions to secure their employment and strengthen their bargaining power with the land owning dominant castes.
2. To Srininvas the social world of the woman was synonymous with the household and kinship group while the men inhabited a more heterogeneous world. In the Telangana village Dube observed that women were secluded from the activities of the public space. It was considered a mark of respectability in women if they walked with their eyes downcast. The rules of patriarchy were clearly laid out. After caste gender was the most important factor that governed the division of labor in the village. Masculine and feminine pursuits were clearly distinguished.
3. Srinivas pointed out that the two sets of occupations were not only separated but also seen as unequal. It was the man who exercised control over the domestic economy. He made the annual grain payments at harvest to the members of the artisan and servicing castes who had worked for him during the year. The dominant male view thought of women as being incapable of understanding what went on outside the domestic wall. 

The End of the Blog : Idea of Indian village