19 Village studies in India

Anurekha Chari Wagh

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction

2. Section One: Why is the village significant in the imagination of India?

3. Section Two: How does the Indian state perceive the ‘village’ and what is the nature of its interventions with regard to it?

4. Section Three: How have the social scientists, especially social anthropologists and sociologists perceived ‘Village’ in their analysis of India?

5. Conclusion: Is there still relevance for Village Studies in India?

Introduction

It is important to recognize that for the social scientists in India, village has been not only an important objective empirical reality, but also a critical sociological reality, the base of a number of methodological and theoretical conceptualizations. The genre referred to as ‘village studies’, has given a very significant identity to sociology practiced in India, which is reflected in the vast body of sound academic debates engaging with the ‘sociological reality of villages in India’. Within the history of sociology in India, the decades of the 1950s and 1960s is recognized for its stimulating, insightful and academically enriching conceptualizations referred to as ‘village studies’, that has played an important role in establishing a sound disciplinary tradition of enquiry. Drawing upon the works of the scholars, part of the ‘village studies’ genre and others who have engaged with it, this module on Village studies in India deals with four broad questions:

• One, why is the village significant in the imagination of India?
• Two, how does the Indian state perceive the ‘village’ and what is the nature of its interventions? and
• Three, how have the social scientists, especially social anthropologists and sociologists perceived ‘Village’ in their analysis of India?
• Four, is there still relevance for Village Studies in India?

Engaging with these questions will help students of sociology to understand:

• To what extent does the ‘village’ in India plays a role in creating, legitimating and representing its identity
• Mapping the growth of sociology discipline in India, through the rich intellectual debate on village studies.
• Help students of sociology to examine the way sociologists in India, engaged with ‘India’ as a category of analysis.
• It will help students understand the ‘politics’ of process of creating an image representing the diversity of a country like India.

It is important to understand that engaging with the Indian state, especially its policies, programmes and visions, specific to the village, will help us to conceptualise where and how the village fits in the larger framework of the Indian nation. Finally, an analysis of the works of scholars working on ‘villages’ in India, will reflect on how they have dealt with issues of caste, kinship, gender, economy, religion, culture, power and politics structured within villages, and what are the methodological challenges and theoretical contributions made by the scholars. Further, it will also help us in mapping the manner in which, sociology in India, furthered and developed. This module will have three sections each one dealing with the questions posed above and will be followed by a concluding section, which will discuss the relevance of village studies in India.

Section 1: Why is the village significant in the imagination of India?

The idea of village as the signifier of Indian society is a result of colonial ‘investigative modalities’. What does the process refer to? In his book Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British In India, Cohn defined ‘investigative modalities’ as a ‘..… definition of a body of knowledge that is needed, the procedures by which appropriate knowledge is gathered, its ordering and classification and how it is transferred into usable forms such as published reports, statistical returns, historians, gazetteers, legal codes and encyclopedias’ (Cohn 1996: 5). The knowledge produced and classified facilitates control over the vast complex diverse social, economic and political world of India. Thus village came to be represented within the colonial social morphology and had a prime place within the theoretical and historical debates of the day.

Thus it is important to recognize that the ‘idea’ of village in terms of its ideological character had colonial origins. Breman (1997: 16) argues that the idea of village was institutionalized by the colonizers as representing:

1. Archaic and primary nucleus of Indian society

2. An autonomous politico-administrative unit

3. Economically self sufficient entity

To the above were added features such as subsistence agriculture, low technology crafts and services, timelessness of life styles and immobility of people tied to land. Such a perspective influenced nationalist thinking and one could see national identity as a projection of ‘Village’ as representing repository of civilizational ideals of Indian nation. Village thus became the epitome of India’s golden past with its suggestions of egalitarianism (overt or covert), primitive democracy and pristine harmony (Thakur 2014).

The ‘village in national imaginations’, was the product of the British colonial rule and through the writings of the colonial administrators that India was constructed – as the land of ‘village republics’. India was essentialized into a land of villages, where the British colonial rulers-imputed qualities of autonomy, stagnation and continuity to the village life in the subcontinent. It thus helped to justify their rule over the subcontinent. The idea of village- was accepted as given, characterizing the ‘essential’ Indian realities. It acquired the status of signifier of the authentic native life, a social and cultural unit uncorrupted by outside influence (Mines and Yazgi 2010).

Thus it is important to recognize that at the time of independence 1947– more than 85 percent lived in villages, majority of Indian population depended directly on the agrarian economy for their livelihood. The nationalist movement had emphasized on the resurrection of the agrarian economy through the Land Reforms legislations and other measures. In the popular imagination of the people the emblematic kisan (the cultivating peasant) along with the Jawan (the soldier) was looked upon as a source of strength and stability of the new nation. Within this the Indian village was a central category in the popular imagining of India, by the Western rulers as also by the native middle class elite. It was the village, its social structure and economy that signified the native life and cultural traditions of the subcontinent. In this context one could analyse have the nationalist leaders have perceived villages, and what this perception implies for their sense of India?

In this module we shall discuss and analyse three important thinkers and nationalist leaders of the freedom movement, M.K Gandhi, J. Nehru and B.R Ambedkar. Though in their perception with regard to the village, they had divergent views, but all three of them believed that villages are significant in Indian social life, and it is important to analyse it if one wants to understand ‘India’.

For M. K Gandhi, village represented the essential core of Indian-civilization. For him it is a site of authenticity, where ‘real India lives and dies’. Thus for Gandhi India begins and ends in villages. Drawing heavily from the romanticization of the village, from the colonial and orientalist constructs of the Indian past, his idea of village was based on reformist agenda which had an inbuilt critique of Western modernity. Gandhi believed that though political freedom could be achieved by overthrowing the colonial rule, the real Swaraj or self- rule as Gandhi imagined could be achieved only by restoring the civilization strength of India through revival of its village communities. ‘The uplift of India depended solely on the uplift of the villages (Jodhka 2002).

J. Nehru, though he recognized the significance of village, for him it represented a ‘traditional’ and ‘backward’ aspect of Indian society, which did not gel with the idea of a modern industrial India that he hoped to build. Unlike Gandhi, Nehru did not argue for the revival of village rather emphasized on the need to develop agriculture using technology and by changing the structure of social relations in the agrarian economy, so as to empower and motivate the peasants (Jodhka 2002).

B.R Ambedkar, presented a Dalitist view of the village, where he argued that the village in India represented rural civilization based on oppressive social order of caste. For Ambedkar, the village was ‘the working plant of the Hindu social order, where one could see the Hindu social order in operation in full swing’. The Indian village for him, did not include the untouchables who lived outside the village in the margins, in a ghetto. Ambedkar theorized on the fragmented nature of ‘space’, within village, where it was structured in terms of caste. For Ambedkar the life in the village was marked by experiences of exclusion, exploitation and untouchability. Thus Ambedkar did not celebrate the village in India, but did recognize its cultural and political centrality in the traditional social order (Jodhka 2002).

Ambedkar argues, “This is the village republic of which the Hindus are so proud. What is the position of the untouchables in this Republic? They are not merely the last but are also the least……… in this Republic there is no place for democracy. There is no room for equality.

There is no room for liberty and there is no room for fraternity. The Indian village is a very negation of republic. The republic is an empire of the Hindus over the untouchables, it is a kind of colonialism of the Hindus designed to exploit the untouchables, the untouchables have no rights… They have no right because they are outside the village republic; they are outside the Hindu fold” (Moon 1989:23-26; cited in Jodhka 2002: 3351). Thus it was Ambedkar, who referred to the village as a cesspool of degradation, corruption and violence. That village India was able to continue, was because, people had no other option but to stay within the spaces of the village (Gupta 2005).

Through the colonial encounters there was a perception of the village as representing the glorious past of India, in post independence India, there was two major developments: one the scholars who questioned the myth of self-sufficient village republic, and engaged in rigorous field work in villages, through participant observations, which was the base of the genre of village studies in India. Two, efforts by the Indian state to deal with ‘underdevelopment’ within villages in India, so as to make them ‘modern’, a vision to build ‘modern India’, this demanded of social scientists including sociologists to undertake analysis of villages so as to generate data that could be used for planning by the Indian state.

Section Two: How does the Indian state perceive the ‘village’ and what is the nature of its interventions with regard to it?

For the newly emerging Nation states- Third World Countries- dependence of large proportions of their populations on their stagnant agrarian economies. The primary agenda for the new political regimes was the transformation of their ‘backward’ and ‘stagnant’ economies. Though the strategies differed, ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ became common programmes in most of the Third World countries, including India. In the post-independence period, the village project became a template for nation building. Thus the village came to be the ‘laboratory of directed cultural change’ (Dube 1992).

Thus in the post Independent India, the centrality of village in the nationalist writings was translated into concrete programmes and policies for the rural and social change after India’s independence from the British colonial rule in 1947. The major programmes; such as Land Reforms, Community Development Programme, Green Revolution, Integrated Rural Development Programme were implemented to usher in a era of development and modernization. The need for systematic rural development come to be all the more emphasized when the planning commission draw up the community development programmer as an important component of the five year plan (Dube 1992). In this endeavour social scientists played an important role. Srinivas (1975) argues that since independence the need for information, data and facts from the rural India by the Planning Commission and departments of Central and State government, pushed the social scientists, especially the economists, sociologists and political scientists to go to the rural areas, the villages and gather information scientifically. This information was important as the machineries of the government planned how to allocate resources for development and analyse how and whether different sections of people were benefitting from the development programmes. Breman (1997: 15-75) argues that state led rural development was critical. According to him the discourse on ‘rural development’, that is ‘village developmentalised’, encompasses – ‘the village colonised’, ‘the village nationalized’ and ‘the village anthropologised’.

Thakur (2014: 11-12) develops an interesting argument, where he states that the intervention of the state through the policies of rural development has changed the empirical and conceptual nature of village in India. It is important to realize that village studies in India have to engage with different parameters of defining village, as the rural development discourse is changing the very meaning of village. In India, village is employed to describe a state of either presence, absence or as degrees of development. Thus, rural development is the medium in which village is placed in relation to national development. What is interesting is that, the state through its policy of rural development conceptualizes ‘village’ as a typical common ‘the village’- for the purpose of rural development.

According to him, villages in India are structured as ‘statist’ projects of rural development, thus focusing only on the underdevelopment/undevelopment aspect of it and obliterating its diversity and specificity. It encourages the formation of a unified, monolithic village India- dependent on policy initiative from the state. In this context it is important to focus on the nexus between sociological representation of village and policy making exercise in the context of rural development.

It is important to add the argument of Breman (1997:59), to this. According to him though the state through its policies creates a ‘monolithic village’; we need to recognize that the village also redefines the state. Thus the ‘state is not only present in the village but the village also penetrates into the state’. Thus as sociologists interested in village studies, one could intervene and engage with the changing political cultural reality of the village (Thakur 2014). The question here is how the scholars have perceived ‘village’ in India thereby building up the intellectual debate on village studies in India.

Section Three: How have the social scientists, especially social anthropologists and sociologists perceived ‘Village’ in their analysis of India?

For social scientists village became a convenient methodological entry point into the social, cultural and economic life of the nation. It came to represent India in a microcosm- an ‘invaluable observation centre’ where one could see, observe and participate. Based on such participant observation, reflect and theorise. Beteille (1966, 1974), while analyzing the intellectual tradition of village studies in India, argues that the importance of the village within Indian civilization is to be understood not simply in demographic but also normative terms. The village was not merely a place where people lived; it had a design in which were reflected the basic values of Indian civilization. A large number of village studies were carried out by social anthropologists during the 1950s and 1960s which tried to understand the fundamental nature of social relations in the Indian society. According to Beteille the two important focuses of village studies include; one documenting the nature of traditional social life of the non-western world and two, the concern in the social sciences for the agenda of development study the ‘real;’ India, its social organization, and cultural life (Beteille 1966, 1974, 2006).

An important issue to be dealt with is the question; whether a village in India has a ‘sociological reality’? Sharma (1969) based upon the debate between Louis Dumont and David Pocock and F G Bailey in the Contributions to Indian Sociology, discussed the critical question whether village in India has a sociological reality. According to Sharma, both Dumont and Pocock deny ‘sociological reality’ to the village in India. According to them, the primary factor of social organization is kinship and caste, and not the village. Sharma counters that by drawing upon the works by sociologists S.C Dube and M.N Srinivas and argues that despite multiple group membership of the people, a village in India has its distinct entity and we cannot deny sociological reality. What does one mean by sociological reality? It is an abstract idea in the mind of the sociologist, which is formulated on the basis of one’s observations of the whole complex of social relationships that exist in a unit such as village (Sharma 1999: pp 1351).

In post independence India, one of the earliest push towards village studies was the demand of planning machinery for data on the villages for the purposes of designing development programmes. Srinivas (1975) argues that the focus of these studies were the economic lives of the people- so as to document the imminent economic problems of the rural people. The economics and material well being of the village became the focus of village studies undertaken. By the 1950s the minimum of basic knowledge had been accumulated, at any rate, to attempt estimating the national income of rural India with reasonable precision, to formulate plans and programmes for India’s rural development, and to sponsor studies on an all-India scale for the planned development of India. It was unfortunate that the economists have ignored socio-cultural matrix of village community and the sociologists and social anthropologists have ignored the economic and class matrixes while conducting village studies. According to Srinivas this mechanical exclusion of one or the other aspect of social reality and dichotomizing of social world of village life has created a peculiar distortion in our comprehension of rural social structure and rural social change (1975).

The earliest village studies in India, were done by agricultural economists, which included scholars like H H Mann and Gilbert Slater (Hockings 1999). Srinivas (1975) argues that it was the work of W.H.Wiser and Charlotte Wiser, on the ‘Hindu Jajmani System’ (1936, Lucknow) and ‘Behind the Mud Walls’ (1960), which was very important. Why? The reason is that they used participant observation and spend years in the village, Karimpur, to gather insights farmed within larger macro framework. For Srinivas, such work presented ‘a picture of the village life in the subcontinent, the microcosm reflecting the macrocosm’ (1975:1387).

The period around 1950 was very significant from the point of view of village studies in India, where the focus was to select one village and examine and analyse it. S. C. Dube was engaged in the study of two Deccan villages Dewara and Shamirpet, M.N Srinivas was engaged in the study of Rampura in Mysore and had completed the study of Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India. David G. Mandelbaum was engaged in the Kota village of the Nilgiri Hills, Morris E .Opler in the village of Senapur in the Eastern Uttar Pradesh, Kathleen Gough in the village of Kumbapettao in the Tanjor district of Madras state, Mckim Marriott in the village of Kishan Garhi in Utter Pradesh, F.G Bailey in the village of Bisipara and Bolscoopa in the hills of Orissa, Alan R. Beads in the village Hattarahalli in the Mysore state, G.Morris Carstairs in the village of the former state of Udaipur, Marian W. Smith in some Punjab village, Jyotirmoyee Sharma in a village in West Bengal, W.H Newell in a Gaddi village in Himalayas, Eric J. Miller in the countryside in north Kerala and Colin Rosser in the remote village of Malana in the far-off Kula valley of the Himalayas (Jodhka 2012, Singh 2009, Shah 2005, Rao 1974).

Scholars in India who have done commendable theorizations on Villages include M.N Srinivas, S C Dube, Yogesh Atal and Ramakrishna Mukerjee. These have highlighted the need for methodological, scientific and extensive study of Agrarian India, experiencing transformation under the impact of directed social change ushered in by the Government since Independence. As far as village studies are concerned the year 1955 was extremely important with immense significance for Indian anthropology and sociology, when seminal books on Indian villages were published. It included S.C Dube’s Indian Village, D.N Majumdar (ed), Rural Profiles, M. Marriot’s (ed) volume on Village India and M. N Srinivas (ed) India’s Villages (Beteille 1974, Hockings 1999).

M. N Srinivas’ works on villages focuses on the idea that; as villages represented the ‘microcosm’, by studying a village, one could generalize about the ‘social processes and problems to be found occurring in greater parts of India. Srinivas (1975) generally, warns sociologists against the assumptions that what is written is true and the older the manuscript, the more true its contents. For Srinivas, Indology can develop only if along with ‘book view’ of India, comprehensive study of contemporary Indian reality is carried out through field view. He strongly argues for scientific, empirical village studies to correct the ‘book view’ and ‘upper-caste-view’ of many phenomenon of Indian society (1975). Srinivas, while reflecting on field work, especially participant observation argued that social sciences in India, does not have a strong field work tradition and this reflects on its growth and development. Such a perspective has a number of impacts: one has alienated social scientists from grassroots reality and two, made them ignorant about the complex interaction of economic, political and social forces at local levels. This had made the ‘educated elites’ of India, who generally make up the class of social scientists regard the ‘peasant as ignorant, tradition-bound and resistant to progress (Srinivas 1975: 1389). Gupta (2005) argues that social anthropology was challenged of its ‘romanticised’ notions of village in India, especially with the institutionalization of ‘field view’ perspective.

S.C Dube on village studies in India, justifies for the change in focus of the Social Anthropologists from tribal studies to village studies by arguing that there is a need for a clear conceptual framework for studying both the structural matrix of the Village community and the change it is experiencing. For Dube, a systematic study of village communities will provide the requisite background data from which more purposeful planning can emerge. Dube argues that S.C Dube in his seminal work Indian Village 1955, by presenting the physical, demographic and historical details and linking it to the social, economic, caste, political, ritual structures to the ethos and ambience, is able to provide a vivid portrait of the village (Dube 2007: 497). For Yogesh Atal, the two questions that were his main concern, include one the issue of representativeness of a village- can a village represent the whole nation? And two, the challenges faced in developing a conceptual framework of a village. In situations where a village in the neighbourhood of Delhi is compared with a village in Tamil Nadu, the utility of such a comparision is uncertain and representativeness of the compared villages is very much open to question. Further one also needs to recognize that provinces are organized for administrative purposes and their boundaries are defined mainly geographically- but cultural boundaries do not necessarily coincide with the geographical (Atal 1993). Thus one has to work towards developing Indian Village as a conceptual category. Ramakrishna Mukherjee, had a very different approach to village studies. Mukherjee provides a historical evolution of village studies in India. He focuses on rural discontent over poverty and squalor– forced the British government to take into consideration the agrarian crisis- appointed the first Royal Commission on Agriculture 1926. According to him, ‘Village studies’ should be used to collect data to understand rural life for better administration purposes (Mukherjee, 1981).

In the year 1957 important works include F.G Bailey’s (1957) caste and the Economic frontier, Ramakrishna Mukherjee’s (1957) The Dynamics of Rural Society, analysis using a historical perspective and Morris G. Carters’(1957) The Twice Born : A study of a community of high caste Hindus. Further the year of 1958 saw the publication of three remarkable village studies: S C Dube’s (1958) India’s Changing Villages was the first full length study of the impact of planned economic development and directed social change on an Indian village. Second, D. N. Majumdar’s (1958) Caste and Communication in an Indian Village is baseline study seeking to provide the benchmark data on rural progress and social awareness. Third , Oscar Lewis’s (1958) Village Life in North India this was the study seeking some understanding of those aspect of village life which would be germen to the problems facing the community development projects and the program evaluation organization (Jodhka 2012, Singh 2009, Shah 2005, Atal 1993,Rao 1974).

T. Scarlet Epstein’s (1962) Economic and Social Change in South India was important study using economic anthropological study of the peasant community (Hockings 1999). Other important works include Alan R. Beals’s (1962) Gopalpur and Y. B. Damale and Iravati Karve’s (1963) Group Relations in Village Community. The year 1965 witnessed the publication of some significant village studies which broke new ground in the field of exposed new potential and possibilities of Indian village studies by exploring newer horizon. These are Andre Bêteille’s (1965) “caste, class and power’’, T.N.Madan’s (1965) “Family and Kinship’’. In 1969 important volume “Rural sociology in India” edited by A.R. Desai (1969) was published. In 1970 there are five books that engaged with the debate on village studies in India. It included works such as M.S.A. Rao’s (1970) “Urbanization and Social Change –a study of a Rural Community on a Metropolitan Fringe” K. Ishwaren’s (1970) edited volume “Change and Continuity in Indian’s Village”, Y. M. Sirsikar’s (1970) ‘The Rural Elite in a Developing Society –A Study in Political Sociology’, David G. Mandelbaum’s (1970) “society in Indian” and Louis Dumont’s (1970) “Homo Hierarchicus” (Jodhka 2012, Singh 2009, Shah 2005, Atal 1993, Rao 1974).

The aim for presenting a limited chronological order of village studies in India, is to highlight that in the decades of 1950s to early 1970s, the focus of sociologists and social anthropologists was on villages and through the genre of; village studies in India’, a rich intellectual heritage was being built up. Since mid 1970s the focus on villages was lost. It was as if in the words of scholars like Diane P. Mines and Nicolas Yazgi (2010) “villages are desperately lost objects in anthropology of India, due to history of ideas beginning with Dumont but continuing through contemporary theoretical concerns that emphasis the deterritorialization that accompanies broader cultural flows, it has become tantamount to taboo to write about village as such even though, the vast majority of Indian population still has powerful links to villages, either as their primary locus of action, or through more widely embedded nexuses of practices and representations”. Thus the question is, are village studies still relevant in India?

Conclusion: Is there still relevance for Village Studies in India?

Increasingly there is a debate with regard to the relevance of village studies in India. Gupta (2005) in his analysis argues strongly that in recent times there is withering of the village. According to him “the village is no longer a site where futures can be planned’ and further ‘the village is shrinking as a sociological reality, though it still exists as a geographical space. For Gupta, one can observe the declining importance of the village in India’s national culture and also in contemporary political debates in the country do not have a rural character at all. Such a lack of focus reflects an idea that ‘though the majority of Indians live in villages, the village leaves little impression upon the national culture today”. Further this change in the shift of focus on villages can be observed in all forms of village life. Additionally, Gupta argues that the implementation of Panchayati Raj and the provision for the participation of women in the local self-governing bodies has certainly affected the nature of leadership, pattern of group dynamics and factionalism in the village social structure. It is thus important to examine the processes by which villagers are leaving their agrarian pasts for an uncertain non-agrarian present.

Singh (2009) observes this fact in a similar manner that “the traditional notion of village studies as being a study of the one end of the rural-urban continuum has now increasingly become unviable due to the rapid change in the rural economy, and the forces of migration, information revolution, and the globalization taking place. In most Indian villages the need for new innovation, mixes of theoretical paradigms, methods of research, and conceptual categories has never been as imperative as it is now”. Notwithstanding, Shah (2005) still has enthusiasm and faith in village studies when he writes “the rural sector is of course shrinking, but is still quite huge and occupies a crucial place in the national economy, polity and society. It is also changing in many respects. We need to understand the reality of both continuity and change’.

In conclusion one could argue that that we need an interdisciplinary research on villages in India, where the focus would not only be of application but also of theorization. Further, as Thakur (2004), argues we should recognize that the vernacular literature – represented in the form of poetry, short stories, novels and other genre, has engaged with the rich diversity and complexity defining villages in India. It is quite surprising that professional sociologists and/or historians have not dealt with this literature in their conceptualizations.

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