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.

Conclusion

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. Peasantsin 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.