One of the major trends in social anthropology has been a substantial shift from the study of the more or less isolated tribal people, who are now, for many reasons, altering their way of life radically, especially in those aspects, which were once anthropologists’ most prized raw material, to the study of the peasants, who, from the view point of structural relationship rather than occupational, are part society and part culture. Such a change in the academic trend of social anthropology had been brought about by American anthropologists, among whom the name of Robert Redfield deserves to be mentioned, as he was the first anthropologist, who carried out systematic village study in a Mexican village, called, Tepoztlan. He, thus, provided a model for village study, which was later followed by anthropologists in the study of village life in different parts of the world. In India anthropologically, oriented village studies became popular through the works of the theoretically sophisticated anthropologists like Morris Opler, Oscar Lewis and Mc Kim Marriott, who used the high level scientific methodology developed by Redfield and others.
W.H. Wiser, an American missionary, who lived in a U.P. village, Karimpur, situated near Lucknow, doing field works for five consecutive years, was the first person, who carried out anthropologically oriented village studies in India. His two books Hindu Jajmani System and Behind the Mud Wall published in 1936 and 1930 respectively may be specially mentioned as the pioneering work of anthropological tradition. In Behind the Mud Wall, though there are some minor shortcomings, he depicts the impact of the caste system on the total way of life of the villagers. In his other book he endeavors to depict an analytical
description of the complex interdependence of twenty-four different castes including the Muslims and the Christians, in terms of goods and services. This complex relatedness of different castes was first conceptualized as Jajmani system. He, however, does not discuss the concept in terms of pollution—purity basis. Despite some of his defects, Wiser may be credited for being the first person who carried out the analytical village study based on intensive field work. Wiser’s studies, though analytical and systematic rather than ethnographic, did not make any impressive effect on the then academic field of Indian anthropology.
Anthropologically oriented village studies gain their momentum in India after national independence and it becomes academically fashionable in the postindependent period through the academic works of American anthropologists like Morris Opler, David Mandelbaum, Mc Kim Marriott, Oscar Lewis and Indian anthropologists like M.N. Srinivas, S.C. Dube and D.N. Majumdar. The year 1955 was the most important turning point in the history of village studies in India. Indian Village by S.C. Dube, Village India (ed.) by Mc Kim Marriott and India’s Villages(ed.) by M.N. Srinivas were published in this year and these publications created a great sensation to the Indian as well as foreign anthropologists, who had evinced keen interest in village study. Dube’s book Indian Village is the first of its kind in anthropological research, which describes a complete picture of Indian village life. This study is based on the field enquiry conducted in a south Indian village, Shamirpet, situated at a distance of about 25 miles from Hyderabad. He depicts an integrated and comprehensive picture of the village describing the historical, geographical and sociological perspectives of village life. “If Redfield is credited for making the first village study in 1930 in Mexico, it was for Dube, to describe a Deccan village in India more or less on the same line in 1955” (Vidyarthi 1978:12).
Marriott’s Village India and Srinivas’s India’s Villages, are collections of different papers written by different American, British and Indian social anthropologists, who did field works in different parts of the country with a view to testing their specific theoretical concepts.
Village India comprises eight papers, of which seven were written by American anthropologists like Beals, Cohn, Gough, Lewis, Marriott, Mandelbaum and Steed and one by Indian anthropologist, Srinivas.
- A.R. Beals, in his paper “Interplay among Factors of change in a Mysore Village”, describes, on the basis of his diachronic study on a village, Namheli, located near Bangalore, the external factors responsible for change in the social structure of the village.
- In his paper entitled “Changing status of a depressed caste” B. Cohn depicts the process of caste mobility.
- Kathleen Gough brings out, as recorded in her Tanjore village, the break—up of the traditional social structure of the village.
- Oscar Lewis, the American anthropologist, who, after getting field experience in Mexico, came to India as a consultant of Ford Foundation and made village studies academically popular in India, formulated the concept of “rural cosmopolitanism” in his paper.
- Mc Kim Marriott, who edited the book, Village India, postulated the theoretical concept of “parochialisation and universalisation” basing on the “little and great traditions”, which are regarded as the academic trademark of Robert Redfield, in his paper “Little communities in an Indigenous Civilisation”, which is based on the study at Kishan Garhi, a village situated in Aligarh District of Western Uttar Pradesh.
- David G. Mandelbaum‘s study concentrates on the analysis of the world view of Kota villagers. In her paper “Personality formation in a Hindu village in Gujarat” Geital P. Steed, on the background of her psychological knowledge, tries to analyse the personality formation in a village.
- M.N. Srinivas, the only Indian scholar, who contributed a paper in the book, describes a village as a “vertical entity made up of several horizontal layers each of which is a caste” in his paper “The Social system of a Mysore Village“
Srinivas’s India’s Villages : though the papers contributed by anthropologists from India, the United Kingdom and the U.S.A. are free from technical terms, for they were written with a view to making them readable to laymen, all the essays are the results of the field works, carried out by the contributors in different parts of this subcontinent. The volume comprises sixteen essays written by Indian anthropologists like M.N. Srinivas, S.C. Dube and Jyotirmoyee Sarma and American anthropologists like Allan R. Beals, David G. Mandelbaum, Kathleen Gough, Mc Kim Marriott and Marian W. Smith and five British anthropologists like F.G. Baily, Collin Rosser, Eric J. Miller, G. Morris Carstairs and W.H. Newell.
- David G. Mandelbaum has contributed two papers, namely, “Social organisation and planned culture change in India” and “Technology, Credit and Culture in a Nilgiri Village”. In his former paper, which is written on an all India theme, Mandelbaum points out the impact of large scale development plans on Indian joint family and caste system. He, however, admits further modification and amendments on his views. The latter paper concentrates on the economic interrelationship of the Kota of Nilgiri hills with their neighbouring tribes, the Toda, the Kurumba and the Badaga. The paper also analyses the breakdown of the traditional economic interrelationship due to the advent of new comers.
- Kathleen Gough, in her paper “The Social Structure of a Tanjor Village” describes the different caste groups of a Tanjor village, called, Kumbapettai, what she describes as “Brahmin village”. She outlines the interdependence of different caste groups like the Brahmin, who own land, and the non-Brahmin castes, such as, the Konar, who are tenants to the Brahmin landlord. She further discusses the unity of the individual caste groups as well as of the village as a whole. Her essay concludes with the discussion on the present imbalance of unities and antagonisms between caste and kinship groups.
- In his paper “Social structure and change in a U.P. Village” based on the data collected from Kishan Garhi, a village located in the Agra division in the upper Ganges-Janina Doab with 160 mud houses and 850 souls, Mc Kim Marriott analyses the progressive fragmentation of the economic groupings, the kinship and ranked groupings, which intersect and complicate the former, and the convivial groupings of the village along with the present problems faced by the villagers.
- Alan R. Beals, in his paper “Change in the Leadership of a Mysore Village”, describes, after depicting caste system and economic organisation, a direct conflict between the conservative traditionalists, who believe in the feudal type social hierarchy based on religious tradition and hereditary privilege, and the urban oriented middle class people, who are influenced by English and Gandhian ideals of democracy and social equality, in the context of a ceremony called Ayudha Pula, as found in a village fictitiously called Hattarahali for obvious reasons.
- In the essay, “Social structure in the Punjab” Marian W. Smith describes the different structural aspects of a Punjabi village. Mention may be made of the sub-divisions, conceptual boundaries, exogamous units of the village, the Sikh and the Muslim caste of the village and their economic interdependence, the economic dislocation brought about by the partition of Indian subcontinent resulting in shift in specialisation and increase in inter-village dependence. The affinal ties which go beyond the village boundary and the communal organisations of the village do not escape from the academic discussion of Dr. Marian. She observes, “in terms of economic and social organisation, marital ties, and religious and political organisation the structural unit is larger than the village.”
- G. Morris Carstairs, the British anthropologist, who has contributed two essays in the volume, describes a rapid social change, as recorded in a Rajasthan village, Fatehpur, by describing the disappearance of the old regime, characterised by the autocratic rule of the Jagirdar in his first paper “A Village in Rajasthan A Study in Rapid Social Change” and in his second essay “Bhil Villages of Western Udaipur : A Study in Resistance to Social Change” he describes the conservative Bhils, who are still commanded by their traditional social, religious and administrative outlooks.
- In the essay “Village structure in North Kerala”, Eric J. Miller has attempted to give a general picture of village structure, rather than to concentrate on the detailed organisation of a single village. He has pointed out the distinction between the twentieth century desam and the preBritish desam. He also has recorded the extension of the vertical unity of different castes over the village. He writes, “village unity in North Kerala is a somewhat nebulous conception”.
- A paper “Gashen – A Gaddi village in the Himalayas” contributed by W.H. Newell, has devoted to the description of the land, where the good natured Gaddi live, the material and economic factors responsible for few infringements against caste rules, a probable thesis about the formation of new caste as recorded in the village, and three important institutions – marriage, kin, and Briton which have brought people together at different levels.
- Collin Rosser, in his essay, entitled, “A ‘Hermit’ village in Kulu” highlights the formation and functioning of the partly democratic and partly hereditary village council, which has both political and judicial power, as well as the physically isolated settlement pattern, which has bearing on the unique sovereign of the Malanis, who inhabit a village of Kulu, called, Malana, what he describes as ‘hermit’ village for its geographically isolated and socially insulated characteristics.
- In his first paper “An Oriya Hill Village: I“, F.G. Bailey describes the changing economic life and village unity of the village Bisipara, specially highlighting that a village becomes less united as it integrates in a larger economy. His second essay “An Oriya Hill village—II” concentrates on the study of the effect of economic change on caste as an institution highlighting the conflicts arising in the internal structure of the village.
- M.N. Srinivas, who edited the volume, has analysed the different aspects of village unity and the kind of ties that bind together the members of the village in his paper “The social structure of a Mysore village”. He also has postulated the concepts of the “vertical unity”, which means the unity of different castes within a village, and the “horizontal unity” which means the unity of castes of same social cadre outside the village. He writes, “the village is an interdependent unit, largely self-sufficient, having its own village assembly, watch and ward officials and servants”.
- In her essay “A Village in West Bengal”, Jyotirmoyee Sarma, the American trained Indian sociologist, depicts the rural life in West Bengal describing housing, agricultural pattern, caste hierarchy, village administration, religious activities, festivals etc. as observed in her village of field work.
- S.C. Dube, in his paper, “A Decan Village“, outlines the social structure of a mixed village, Dewara, as well as the social symbiosis of the different tribal, caste-Hindu and Muslim groups, who inhabit the village.
- H.S. Dillon’s book Leadership and Groups in a South Indian Village, published in 1955, also deserves special mention as the book is based on the field data collected from a single caste village Haripura in the Mandya District of the then Mysore state. Here he delineates the factors responsible for the formation of six factions in the village and the leadership pattern, symbolised by a group having its own leader, of the village.
- G.M. Carstairs’s The Twice Born: A Study of High Caste Hindus published in 1957 may also be mentioned as the outstanding and pioneering work on the sociopsychological study of Indian villages. The book is based on the data collected from a village, situated in the foothills of Aravalli near Udaipur, Rajasthan. He, on the basis of his psychological knowledge, has analysed the social character and personality formation of three high castes the Brahmins, the Rajputs and the Banias, of Deoli by discussing the basic facts responsible for the formation of Hindu personality.
In the history of village studies in India, the year 1958 was witnessed.by the publication of D.N. Majumdar’s Caste and Communication in an Indian Village, Oscar Lewis’s Life in a North Indian Village, F.G. Baily’s Caste and the Economic Frontier and S.C. Dube’s India’s Changing Village: Human Factors in Community Development.
- D.N. Majumdar, being an Indian anthropologist who made village studies in India popular, described the inter-caste relationship, religious beliefs and practices, leadership, factionalism and economy of a village Mohana near Lucknow. He also discussed the fission and the fusion which are responsible for the formation of various social groups and recorded that caste mobility is both vertical and horizontal. What is more important is his view on the Indian village. To him “an Indian Village is a concept because it is a constellation of values which change slowly so that the village retains its identity. It is a way of life because the people still live more or less as they did before.”
- In his book Oscar Lewis, the American anthropologist, who was trained for village studies in Mexico, has analysed the Jajmani system, factions and festivals of village Ramapur at a high level of abstraction. He also compares Ramapur with Tepoztlan, a Mexican village, to show the different cultural forms of peasant society.
- F.G. Bailey, in his book, analyses the changes occurring in the internal organisation of an Oriya village, Bisipara, owing to the extension of economic and administrative frontiers. He deals not only with the synchronic appraisal of the situation but also with the diachronic appraisal of the change taking a time perspective of about one hundred years. The economic and political implications of Sanskritization are also analytically discussed in the context of the village and the wider economy of the state of which the village is a part. The study also shares the view of other anthropologists that “in studying the microcosm, they
are studying the macrocosm”. - S.C. Dube, the pioneering Indian anthropologist in the field of village study in India, basing on the data collected from two villages of western U.P., attempts to show the impact of externally induced community development plans on the technologically under-developed Indian villages.
F.G. Bailey, in another book, Tribe, Caste and Nation, published in 1960, attempts to discover the interaction of political organisation of the tribal system with its non-tribal counterpart. He presents a comparative study of Bisipara and Bedari, a Khond village. The study is concerned with the political cleavages found within not only the Khond villages and the Khond tribes but also the Khond and other castes.
A.C. Mayer’s Caste and Kinship in Central India, published in the same year, concentrates on the study of social structure in the context of caste and kin links. Another highlight of the study is the distinction between the internal aspect, which exists within the population of various adjacent village caste groupings and the external aspect, which only exists within the village, of castes.
In his book, after a Century and A Quarter, published in 1960, G.S. Ghurye attempts to test the concept of folk urban continuum as well as to depict the socio—economic changes experienced by a village of Hawaii Taluka of Maharasthra since 1819. He describes the unity of the village in the context of the working of village council, common shrine and mutual participation in the festivals of the village.
F.G. Bailey, in his third book on Orissa village, titled Political and Social change: Orissa in 1959, published in 1963, tries to focus the relationship of three levels of political activities – the state, the constituencies and the villages — in Orissa. The study also concerns conflict and social change in general.
G.S. Ghurye, in his Anatomy of a Rural Urban Community, published in 1963, attempts, in addition to his statistical analysis, to present the influence of urbanisation on the socio—religious and socio—economic lives of the various communities of Hawaii Taluka in Maharasthra. Henry Orenstein, one of the pioneers in village study in Maharastra, on the basis of the data collected from Gaon, a village in Maharastra, has depicted the changing aspect of castes due to Sanskritization, wester¬nisation and secularisation in his book Gaon: Conflict and Cohesion, which came out in 1965.
Over and above the aforesaid studies on the widely separated villages, distributed almost all over Indian subcontinent, innumerable papers, written by both Indian and foreign anthropologists, on the widely ranged Indian villages inhabited by different communities, had also been published in different academic journals and books.
As to the papers dealing with the approach to village study, mention may be made of Morris E. Opler’s “Extensions of an Indian Village” published in Journal of Asian Studies and H.A. Gould’s “The Peasant Life: Centripetal and Centrifugal” published in Eastern Anthropologists. In his paper Opler presents an analytical description of the network of a village Senapur, U.P. in terms of its extension, and in the context of the larger units of Indian civilisation. Gould characterizes the self-contained and autonomous characteristics of a peasant village Sherupur, U.P. as centripetal and the dependency of the same on the urban centers as well as on the various processes of national culture as centrifugal. In the light of the data collected from the village, he also has coined a novel academic terminology “proletarianization” which means the process of absorbing lower caste people as labourers in industrial complexes as they are being defunctionalised in rural areas. In this connection Rudra Sing, Opler’s collaborator, who locates the unity of the village in the village shrine, the village Panchayat, the sentiment of the villagers, the inter-caste relationship etc., also presented his view in his paper “The Unity of an Indian Village” published in Journal of Asian Studies.
Among the papers which deal with the economic interdependence of different castes within a village, as it is reflected in Jajmani system, and its changing aspects owing to various factors, mention may be made of H.A. Gould’s “The Village Jajmani system” and “Jajmani System of North India : its structure, magnitude and meaning” published in South Western Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, respectively, T.O. Beidelman’s “A Comparative Analysis of Jajmani System” published in Journal of Augustine 1959, P.M. Kolenda’s “Toward a Model of Hindu Jajmani System” published in Human Organisation, A.B. Bose and N.S. Jodha’s “The Jajmani System in a desert village” published in Man in India, Lewis and Barnow’s “Two Systems of Economic exchange in Village India” published in American Anthropologist.
As regards the papers that concern the traditional and emerging power structure, factionalism, leadership and group dynamics of Indian village life, Yogendra Singh’s “Changing power structure of village Community” published in Aural Sociology in India (Ed) A.R. Desai, 1961, A.B. Bose and S.P. Malhotra’s “Studies in Group Dynamics, Factionalism in a Desert village” published in Man in India, T.J. Hitchcock’s “Leader-ship in a North Indian Village : Two case studies”, Henry Orenstein’s “Leadership and caste in Bombay village, W.Mc. Cormack’s “Factionalism in a Mysore village”, A.R. Beals’s “Leadership in a Mysore village” and E.B. Harper’s “Political Organisation and Leadership in a Karnataka village” all published in Leadership and Political Institutions in India (Ed) Park and Tinker 1959 (60) deserve special mention.
Among the studies that are concerned with the interaction of great and little traditions as well as similar interactions in religious beliefs and practices, Indrapal Singh’s “Religion in Deleke: A Sikh village” published in Aspects of Religion in Indian Society (ed). L.P. Vidyarthi 1962, T.R. Singh’s “The Hierarchy of Deities in an Andhra village” which was also published in Vidyarthi’s (ed) Aspects of Religion in Indian Society, 1962, G.M. Carstairs’s “Pattern of Religious Observations in Three villages of Rajasthan” and Yogesh Atal’s “The Cult of Bheru in a Mewar Village and its vicinage” which were published in Journal of Social Research, 1961, are worth mentioning.
M.N. Srinivas‘s “The Dominant Caste in Ramapur” published in American Anthropologists, S.C. Dube‘s “Ranking of Caste in Telangana Village” published in Aural profile of India, E.K. Gough’s “Cult of the Dead among the Nayars” and “Criteria of Caste Ranking” published in Journal of American Folklore, 1966 and Man in India, 1950 respectively, G. Chattopadhyay’s “Carak Festival in West Bengal” published in Aspects of Religion in South East Asia, P.M.Mahar’s “Changing religious practices of an untouchable Caste” published in Economic Development and Cultural Change and “Changing Caste Ideology in a North Indian Village” published in Journal of Social Issues, 1958 are among the papers that concern the caste system of Indian villages.