VILLAGE STUDIES (KEY POINTS TO REMEMBER)

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SOCIOLOGY UPSC SYLLABUS

PAPER 2 – Chapter 1 – Part B
Social Structure:
(i) Rural and Agrarian Social Structure:
(a) The idea of Indian village and village studies
(b) Agrarian social structure – evolution of land tenure system, land reforms.

Village in India is not merely a spatial unit, but it is Indian society in miniature.

According to Andre Beteille – ‘Village was not merely a place where people lived. It had a design in which were reflected basic values of Indian society’.

THE COLONIAL IDEA OF INDIAN VILLAGE

  • Early idea of Indian village was developed by mainly using book view by British administrators and scholars. Indian village was understood and portrayed as unchanging by British officials like Metcalfe.
  • He saw Indian villages as ‘little republic’ – monolithic, atomistic and unchanging.
  • He wrote – ‘Village communities are ‘little republics’ having everything they want within themselves and independent of any foreign relations’.
  • Western writers saw in the Indian village a remnant or survival from what was called ‘the infancy of society’.

THE INDIAN SOCIOLOGISTS’ VIEW ON INDIAN VILLAGES

  • The colonial idea of Indian village was greatly corrected upon by later Indologists like Ghurye and other scholars.
  • Some rural survey done post 1920s to get an economic picture of hinterlands also helped in formation of a new picture.
  • Oppression of British rule was highlighted. Peasant struggles and impoverishment of peasantry was also highlighted.
  • It was showed that villages were not as isolated as British had projected.
  • There was migration, village exogamy, inter-village economic ties in form of Jajmani system and so on.
  • According to Dumont, ‘a village is far more than a locale, more than just a collection of houses and fields’.
  • It was not as isolated as the British had projected. Similarly, according to Andre Beteille in his study ‘Sripuram: A Village in Tanjore District, 1962’, ‘At least as far back in times as living memory goes, there was no reason to believe that village was fully self sufficient even in economic sphere’.
  • Observations by others like B R Chauhan indicate that due to enormous structural and cultural variations among the villages, they cannot be confined in strict typological terms.

VILLAGE STUDIES

  • Though some field work was done in pre-independence period also, village studies became a prominent feature of study of Indian society in 1950s-60s.
  • Earlier they were either led by colonial administrators or Indologists.
  • Study of Indian villages began in 18th century itself with intensive survey of land holdings.
  • Early approaches included those influenced by the book view and such studied formed a textually informed orthodox view of Indian villages.
  • Purpose of such colonial studies was either to make an economic assessment or draw a cultural map of India for rulers. Village Studies marked a shift from book view to field view in Indian sociology and rejected static view of village and corrected colonial stereotype.
  • Since sociologists consider village as foundation of understanding of Indian society, village studies are important.  The ‘village community’ was identified as the social foundation of the peasant economy in India.
  • Village studies also meant study of caste and inequality. M.N. Srinivas compiled many essays in the form of a book with the title ‘India’s Villages’
    in 1955.
  • Perhaps the best known example of field work is reported in M.N. Srinivas’s famous book, ‘The Remembered Village, 1976’. Srinivas spent a year in a village near Mysore
    that he named Rampura.
  • S C Dube also published his full length study of a village Shamirpet near Hyderabad, ‘Indian Village’ in 1955.
  • A R Desai added a new dimension by using Marxist perspective in his works ‘Rural Society in India’ and ‘Peasant Struggle in India’.

However, village studies were also constrained by a number of factors. They were limited in their focus and didn’t develop any new theoretical perspective which could be applied in other villages as well. The method of participant observation that was the main strength of these studies also imposed certain limitations on the fieldworkers. It also limited their access to the dominant groups in the local society. They chose to avoid asking all those questions or approaching those subordinate groups, which they thought, could offend the dominant interests in the village.