The Indian villages had a considerable degree of diversity i.e both internal as well as external. The village was internally differentiated in diverse groupings and had a complex structure of social relationships and institutional arrangements. There were also different kinds of villages in different parts of the country. Even within a particular region of the country, not all villages were alike.
The stereotypical image of the Indian village as a self-sufficient community was contested by anthropological studies. Beteille, for example, argued ‘at least as far back in time as living memory went, there was no reason to believe that the village (he studied) was fully self-sufficient in the economic sphere (Beteille, 1996:136-7). Similarly Srinivas too contested the colonial notion of the Indian village being a completely self-sufficient republic. The village, he argued, ‘was always a part of a wider entity. (Srinivas, 1960:10).
However, despite this contention about the village having links with the outside world and explicating the diversities that marked the rural society of India, it was the ‘unity’ of the village that was underlined by most anthropologists.
While villages had horizontal ties, it was the vertical ties within the village that governed much of the life of an average person in the village. Village provided an important source of identity to its residents. Different scholars placed different emphasis on how significant the village identity was when compared to other sources of identification, such as those of caste, class or locality. Srinivas argued that individuals in his village had a sense of identification with their village and an insult to one’s village had to be avenged like an insult to oneself, one’s wife, or one’s family (Srinivas, 1976:270).
Similarly, Dube argued that though Indian villages varied greatly in their internal structure and organisation, in their ethos and world-view, and in their life-ways and thought-ways, on account of variety of factors, village communities all over the Indian sub-continent had a number of common features. The village settlement, as a unit of social organisation, represented a kind of solidarity which was different from that of the kin, the caste, and the class. Each village was a distinct entity, had some individual mores and usages, and possessed a corporate unity. Different castes and communities inhabiting the village were integrated in its economic, social, and ritual pattern by ties of mutual and reciprocal obligations sanctioned and sustained by generally accepted conventions. Notwithstanding the existence of groups and factions inside the settlement, people of the village could, and did, face the outside world as an organised, compact whole (Dube,1960:202).
It was W.H. Wiser who had initially, in his classic study of The Hindu Jajmani System, first published in 1936, had conceptualised the social relationships among caste groups in the Indian village in the framework of ‘reciprocity’. The framework of reciprocity implied that though village social organisation was hierarchical, it was the ‘interdependence’ among different caste groups that characterised the underlying spirit of the Indian village. Reciprocity implied, explicitly or implicitly, an exchange of equal services and non-exploitative relations. Mutual gratification was supposed to be the outcome of reciprocal exchange. Each serves the other. Each in turn is master. Each in turn is servant (Wiser 1969:10). Though the later studies were much more elaborate and contained long descriptions of different forms of social inequalities and differences in the rural society, many of them continued to use the framework of reciprocity particularly while conceptualising ‘unity’ of the village social life. However not everyone emphasised the unity of the village the way Srinivas and Dube or earlier Wiser did.
Some of the anthropologists explicitly contested the unity thesis while others qualified their arguments by recognising the conflicts within the village and the ties that villagers had with the outside world. For instance, Paul Hiebert in his study of a south Indian village(Konduru: structure and integration in a South Indian village), although arguing that the caste system provided a source of stability to the village, also underlined the fact that ‘deep seated cleavages underlie the apparent unity of the village and fragmented it into numerous social groups’ (Hiebert, 1971:13). Similarly, Beteille had argued that his study of village ‘Sripuram as a whole constituted a unit in a physical sense and, to a much lesser extent, in the social sense’(Beteille, 1996:39).
Among those who nearly rejected the idea of the communitarian unity were Lewis and Bailey. F.G. Bailey, for example provided a radical critique of the ‘unity-reciprocity’ thesis and offered an alternative perspective. Stressing on the coercive aspects of caste relations, he writes: … those who find the caste system to their taste have exaggerated the harmony with which the system works, by stressing the degree of interdependence between the different castes. Interdependence means that everyone depends on everyone else: it means reciprocity. From this it is easy to slip into ideas of equality: because men are equally dependent on one another, they are assumed to be equal in other ways. Equality of rank is so manifestly false when applied to a caste system that the final step in the argument is seldom taken, and exposition rests upon a representation of mutual interdependence, and the hint that, because one caste could bring the system to a standstill by refusing to play its part, castes do not in fact use this sanction to maintain their rights against the rest. In fact, of course, the system is held together not so much by ties of reciprocity, but by the concentration in one of its parts. The system works the way it does because the coercive sanctions are all in the hands of a dominant caste. There is a tie of reciprocity, but it is not a sanction of which the dependent castes can make easy use (Bailey, 1960:258). However, this kind of a perspective did not become popular among the sociologist anthropologists during 1950s and 1960s. They continued to work largely within the ‘unity-reciprocity’ framework, with varied degrees of emphasis.