The new interest in the village social life during 1950s and 1960s was a direct offshoot of the newly emerged interest in the study of the peasantry in the Western academy. Emergence of the so- called “new states” following decolonisation during the post war period had an important influence on research priorities in the social sciences. The most significant feature of the newly emerged „third world‟ countries was the dependence of large proportions of their populations on a stagnant agrarian sector.
Thus, apart from industrialisation, one the main agenda for the new political regimes was the transformation of their “backward” and stagnant agrarian economy. Though the strategies and priorities differed, “modernisation‟ and “development‟ became common programmes in most of the Third World countries. Understanding the prevailing structures of agrarian relations and working out ways and means of transforming them were recognised as the most important priorities within development studies. It was in this context that the concept of “peasantry‟ found currency in the discipline of social anthropology. At a time when primitive tribes were either in the process of disappearing or had already disappeared, the “discovery” of the peasantry provided a new lease of life to the discipline of social anthropology.
The “village community‟ was identified as the social foundation of the peasant economy in Asia. It is quite easy to see this connection between the Redfieldian notion of “peasant studies‟ (Redfield 1965) and the Indian “village studies‟. The single most popular concept used by the anthropologists studying the Indian village was Robert Redfield’s notion of “little community‟. Among the first works on the subject, Village India: Studies in the Little Community (edited by M. Marriot, 1955) was brought out under the direct supervision of Redfield. He even wrote a preface to this book. Having found a relevant subject matter in the village, social anthropologists (many of whom were either from the West or were Indian scholars trained in the Western universities) initiated field studies in the early 1950s. During October 1951 and May 1954 the Economic Weekly (which later became Economic and Political Weekly) published a number of short essays providing brief accounts of individual villages that were being studied by different anthropologists. These essays were later put together by M.N. Srinivas in the form of a book with the title India‟s Villages in 1955. As mentioned above Mackim Marriot‟s book Village India also appeared in the same year. Interestingly, the first volume of Rural Profiles by D.N. Majumdar also appeared in 1955. S.C. Dube also published his full length study of a village near Hyderabad, Indian Village in the same year. There was a virtual explosion of village studies in the sixties and seventies.
The relevance of studying the village was viewed more in methodological terms.
- Village occupies an important place in the social and cultural landscape of contemporary India. A large majority of Indians continue to live in its more than five lakh villages and remain dependent on agriculture, directly or indirectly. According to the 2011 Census, rural India accounted for nearly 69 per cent of India’s total population. Similarly, though the share of agriculture has come down to around one-fourth of the total national income, nearly half of India’s working population is directly employed in the agricultural sector.
- Village has also been an important ideological category, a category through which India has often been imagined and imaged in modern times. The village has been seen as the ultimate signifier of the “authentic native life ”, a place where one could see or observe the “real” India and develop an understanding of the way local people organise their social relationships and belief systems. As Andre Beteille writes, “The village was not merely a place where people lived; it had a design in which were reflected the basic values of Indian civilisation‟ . Institutional patterns of the Indian “village communities” and its cultural values were supposed to be an example of what in the twentieth century came to be known as the “traditional society”. Thus village and its hamlets represented “India in microcosm” (Hoebel and Hiebert, 1971).
- Earlier writings of James Mill, Charles Metcalfe‟s notion of the Indian village community set the tone for much of the later writings on rural India. Metcalfe, in his celebrated remark stated that “the Indian village communities were little republics, having nearly everything they wanted within themselves, and almost independent of foreign relations. The Indian village, in the colonial discourse, was a self-sufficient community with communal ownership of land and was marked by a functional integration of various occupational groups. Things as diverse as stagnation, simplicity and social harmony were attributed to the village which was taken to be the basic unit of Indian civilisation. Each village was an inner world, a traditional community, selfsufficient in its economy, patriarchal in its governance, surrounded by an outer one of other hostile villages and despotic governments.‟ (Inden, 1990:133).
- Gandhi celebrated the so-called simplicity and authenticity of village life, an image largely derived from colonial representations of the Indian village. The decadence of the village was seen as a result of colonial rule and therefore village reconstruction was, along with political independence, an important process for recovery of the lost self (see Jodhka 2002) . Thus for economic and political development, in the post-Independence India also “village‟ has continued to be treated as the basic unit of Indian society.
- For the anthropologist, they ‘were invaluable observation-centres where he/she could study in detail social processes and problems to be found occurring in great parts of India’ (Srinivas 1955: 99). Generally basing their accounts on first-hand fieldwork, carried out mostly in a single village, social anthropologists focused on the structures of social relationships, institutional patterns, beliefs and value systems of the rural people. The publication of these studies also marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of Indian social sciences. They showed, for the first time, the relevance of a fieldwork based understanding of Indian society, or what came to be known as “field-view” of the India, different from the then dominant “book-view” of India, which was developed by the Indologists and orientalists from classical Hindu scriptures.
- Villages were supposedly close to people, their life, livelihood and culture and they were ‘a focal point of reference for individual prestige and identification’.
- As ‘an important administrative and social unit, the village profoundly influenced the behaviour pattern of its inhabitants’.
- They seemed to last where nothing else lasted. Dynasty after dynasty tumbled down; revolution succeeded revolution but the village community remained the same.‟ (as in Cohn, 1987:213).Villages were supposed to have been around for ‘hundreds of years’, having ‘survived years of wars, making and breaking up of empires, famines, floods and other natural disasters’. This perceived ‘historical continuity and stability of villages’ strengthened the case for village studies (Dasgupta, 1978:1).
- Carrying-out village studies during the fifties and the sixties was also important because the Indian society was changing very fast and the anthropologist needed to record details of the traditional social order before it was too late. Underscoring this urgency Srinivas wrote ‘We have, at the most, another ten years in which to record facts about a type of society which is changing fundamentally and with great rapidity’ (Srinivas, 1955: 99)