The propounder of this concept is Oscar Lewis and this is the outcome of his comparative study of a North Indian Village, Ranikbera near Delhi and Tupoztaan, a village in Morelos, Mexico.
In 1953-54 Robert Redfield, Mickim Marritt and Milton Singer organized a Seminar on Indian Village Studies at the University of Chicago, to which they invited eight outstanding social anthropologists to discuss their respective field studies in eight different regions of India. The two central questions that were addressed to were:
(1) To what extent is the Indian Village an isolated and self-sufficient ‘little community”?
(2) What can be learned from village studies about Indian Civilization as a whole?
In the paper submitted by Oscar Lewis to this Seminar, he brings out contrasts between these two villages of India and Mexico. He found the Mexican villages ‘Inward looking’; it’s people marrying within the village. The inter-village networks of relationship are constituted of trade and not of other cultural bonds such as pilgrimage to shrines, etc. Morever, the Mexican villages are “relatively self contained nuclear groupings or pockets of a small number of villages centrally located within municipolis.”
In contrast, each Indian village was linked to other villages in it’s region and to towns and cities by complex networks of social relations based on caste, kinship and marriage, trade and occupation, religious pilgrimage, and administrative and political organization. In the words of Lewis himself, “a village in India is part of multiple inter village networks and where a single village is related by affinal and lineage ties with over four hundred other villages, thereby making for a kind of Rural Cosmopolitanism.” Thus, we find that the concept of Rural Cosmopolitanism is largely based ·on the villager’s social relations beyond the village and it further extends his cultural horizons.