The perspective developed and forwarded was that India was primarily composed of villages which were self- sufficient and independent. The writings of James Mill and Charles Metcalfe and their notion of the Indian village community influenced the later scholars of Indian village. Metcalfe (1810) had said that, ‘the Indian village communities were little republics, having nearly everything they wanted within themselves and almost independent of foreign relations. They seemed to last where nothing else lasted. Dynasty after dynasty tumbled down; revolution succeeded revolution but the village community remained the same’(quoted in Cohn, 1987:213). This was similar to Thomas Munro’s ‘mini republics’ description for the Indian villages.
In the colonial discourse, the Indian village was described as a self-sufficient community which had everything within its periphery. Caste system through its division of labour provided this view a practical functionality which meant communal ownership of land was marked by a functional integration of various occupational groups in the village. The famous attributes of Indian civilization of timeless continuity, simplicity and social harmony were attributed to the village. ‘Each village was an inner world, a traditional community, self-sufficient in its economy, patriarchal in its governance, surrounded by an outer one of other hostile villages and despotic governments.’ (Inden, 1990:133). For Gandhi, India’s soul lived in her villages. He imagined that every village would be a republic or panchayat, self-sustained and capable of managing its own affairs (Gram Swaraj).
The year 1955 saw some very serious studies on Indian Villages: M.N. Srinivas in the form of a book with the title India’s Villages(1955), McKim Marriot’s book Village India appeared in the same year. The first volume of Rural Profiles by D.N. Majumdar also appeared in 1955. Full length study of a village near Hyderabad, Indian Village by S.C. Dube was also published in the same year Village Studies in India were 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).
Village as a Social Units:
Village social life is organised around caste, kinship, economy, politics and religion. People’s social lives are mostly confined to their villages, their livelihoods and lives revolve around the rural environment and resources. The village is thus a point of prestige and personal identity. Along with caste, class or locality, village provides an important source of identity to its residents. According to Srinivas, 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).
Village studies from M.N. Srinivas’s study of the Coorgs (1952) to A.M. Shah and I.P. Desai (1988)’s works discuss how the solidarity marks inter-caste and intra-caste relations, to maintain stability within the village.
Similarly, S.C 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; 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). Thus, Srinivas (1955), Dube (1955) and earlier Wiser (1936) emphasised on the unity of the village.
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, 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 (1958) and Bailey (1960). 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, Bailey (1960) says that the degree of interdependency and harmony between castes in the caste system is highly exaggerated. Since interdependency means reciprocity and consequently some degree of equality, that is not the case when we analyse caste system and relationship between castes. He says that the “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)
Caste System and Kinship Networks
The world of caste society is based on hierarchy. People were divided into higher or lower groups based on birth, their food, their dresses, ornaments, customs and manners were all ranked in an order of hierarchy. The first three Varna, namely, Brahmins (the priests or men of learning), Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors) and Vaishyas (traders) were regarded as dvijas or the twice born. The fourth category was that of Shudras, composed of numerous occupational castes that were regarded as relatively ‘clean’ and were not classed as “untouchables”. In the fifth major category were placed all the “untouchable” castes. Within each category there were several sub-groups (jatis or sub-castes), which could be arranged in a hierarchical order within them. The empirical studies pointed out that ‘in fact only the two opposite ends of the hierarchy were relatively fixed; in , and especially in the middle region, there was considerable room for debate regarding mutual position’ (Srinivas, 1994:5). Mutual rank was uncertain and this stemmed from the fact that mobility was possible in caste’ (Srinivas, 1976:175).
Attempts to claim a higher ritual status through, what Srinivas called sanskritisation, was not a simple process, and could not be achieved only through rituals and life-style imitation. The group had to also negotiate it at the local power structure. Similarly, stressing secular factors, ‘There was a certain amount of overlap between the twin hierarchies of caste and land. The richer landowners generally came from such high castes as Brahmins, and Lingayats while the Harijans contributed a substantial number of landless labourers. In contrast to the wealthier household, the poor one was almost invisible (Srinivas, 1976:169).
Little Traditions and Great Traditions
McKim Marriott, takes the concepts of ‘great tradition’ and ‘little tradition’ from Robert Redfield (1955) and has given the terms universalisation (elements of village culture being incorporated into a wider regional or even larger society) and parochialization (cultural elements of a panIndian nature filtering down to the village level through various modes of communication such as story-telling and folk drama) respectively to refer to the two aspects of this double process of interaction between the little and great traditions.
M.N. Srinivas’ (1950) concept of Sanskritisation also shows the interaction between religion at the local level and all India Hinduism which is varna based. Sanskritisation is also about ‘universalization’ or identification with the larger religion, the identification of a local God or Goddess with some deity of the Hindu pantheon. Thus among the Coorgs, Ketrappa is identified with the Vedic deity Kshetrapala while the local cobra deity is identified with Subramanya or Skanda, the warrior son of Shiva. This helped the Coorg religious community to become incorporated in the wider Hindu religious community.
Pilgrimage centres have attracted people from distant places in India. In traditional India, temple towns and sacred cities like Gaya, Mathura, Ajmer, Varanasi, Puri, Tirupathi and Amritsar attracted pilgrims even though roads were very poor and unsafe. Thus we see a continuous interaction between the little and great tradition in the religion of the village.
Caste endogamy (marriage within caste) and village exogamy (marriage outside village) were widely practiced. Relations outside the village meant travel to those areas where kins/ relatives lived at the time of festival or special occasions.
Social networks of the village through caste, kinship, marriage meant social relations with the outside world and thus, villages were not isolated units socially.
VILLAGE AS AN ECONOMIC UNIT
Indian village as an economic self-sufficient unit was a long held myth. Even for Marx agreed it as Asiatic Mode of Production. It was William and Charlotte Wiser (1936/1969) who had conceptualised the social relationships among caste groups in the Indian village in the framework of ‘reciprocity’ in their study of Western UP village of Karimpur in the 1930s, regarded as one of the earliest work on the ethnographic study of village life in rural India, and of the jajmani system,.
Kathleen Gough’s study of Kumbapettai (1989) village in Tanjore, Andre Beteille’s study of Tamil village of Sripuram (1965), demonstrate how the structures of traditional caste hierarchy were getting replaced by class based categories of stratification. Gough (1989), over a period of three decades, studied caste and class relations and found that the castes of Brahmins, Non- Brahmins and Adi-Dravidas were also owners, tenants and laborers. The new classes of petty bourgeoisie, independent entrepreneur and semi proletariat came up, with the commercialisation of agriculture, achievement and skill criteria came up instead of the ascription based categories.
Outside the Village:
Village markets that are to be distinguished from capitalist markets not only serve an economic purpose but also political, recreational and social purposes. The weekly markets or Haats that exist all over rural India from ancient times form major links with neighbouring villages and towns. They are important nodes for drawing in goods not available locally including, silver and gold which were essential for weddings in rural India. The annual camel fair in Pushkar,is an example of a rural market that has existed from times immemorial. The institution of weekly markets are cultural institutions with significance beyond mere economic exchange and still prevail even though considerable improvements in transport and communication have made towns with regular markets accessible to villagers.
The institution of caste based specialisation means that only some people can do certain tasks, like only those of potter caste can make pots, those of blacksmith caste can make iron implements and so on. All the artisan and servicing castes did not live within a single village, especially in the case of the smaller settlements. Certain castes provide services to a number of villages and were shared amongst the villages like, barbers, priests, doctors, etc. Again the urban sector depends on the rural hinterlands for its basic needs of food grain, raw materials for processed food, and handicrafts.
The village market became linked to the formal market networks when the capitalist system penetrated the rural areas. The availability of new economic opportunities differed in different villages especially with processes of industralisation and urbanisation, which made the village a part of the wider economic system.
Following are some examples from the relevant case studies:
i) S.C. Dube’s Indian Village (1955) was the first full length study of a village, Shamirpet. It devoted one full chapter to the nature of changes coming in rural life which include increasing economic ties with the city of Hyderabad, even for social groups like the washerman.
ii) McKim Marriot in the study of Kishan Garhi in Aligarh district of Uttar Pradesh (1955) gives an elaborate description of interaction between the people of different villages. He talks about how castes of Brahman priests, barbers, potters, carpenters, washermen and sweepers who live in Kishan Garhi go out to serve hereditary patrons (Jajmans) in some fifteen other villages and derive about one half of their income from these outside patrons.Traders, wage workers living in Kishan Garhi regularly traveled many miles Village India of the country side to other areas.
iii) M.N. Srinivas in his study of village Rampura in Karnataka (1955) observes how World War-II brought increased cash for the dominant landowning Okkaliga caste with wartime rationing and shortages, which encouraged black marketeering. The profits of the wartime were used in different ways, as village was electrified, two rice mills were set up, bus lines were also started which made contact with Mysore City much easier.
iv) Kathleen Gough’s study of Kumbapettai village (1955), situated in the Tanjore district of Tamil Nadu, describes how dominant Brahmin groups migrated to towns for education and employment and the immigration in Kumbapettai of lower castes from the neighbouring and less fertile areas was responsible for Kumbapettai coming in contact with the wider economic system.
V) M.S.A. Rao in his study of Yadavpur (1974), a village situated on the fringe of Delhi, observed that growth of the city of Delhi created diverse opportunities of urban employment in sectors like gardening, dairy and poultry farming, trading, transport, etc.
Finally, we can conclude that the Indian villages were not economically selfsufficient even in the British times. Processes of industrialisation and urbanisation which began with the British colonial rule and gained further impetus after independence have made the village a part of the wider economic network. Rural economy has been even more affected with the planned development and welfare programs being introduced by the government.
In India, no two villages are same, even though they may share some similarities on various socio-economic scales. Welfare and development programs aimed at co-operative banking, commercial farming, Green Revolution techniques of farming, democratic processes, growth of Self-Help Groups for women, and various other progressive development programs by government have been attempted as village became the template for nation building exercise in postindependence India.
VILLAGE AS A POLITICAL UNIT
Many ethnographic studies, based on fieldwork, have explained that the Indian village have always been a part of the wider society and civilisation and not selfsufficient units. British administrators in the early nineteenth century described Indian villages as ‘little republics’ with their simple form of self-government and almost no interference from the higher political authority. The state only demanded young men to serve in the wars and also claimed a share in the produce of the land as revenue for the state. This description of Indian villages was over-simplified and stated that the villages functioned unconcerned about who occupied the throne in the kingdoms of which they were a part territorially. The assumption that in pre-British India the village was autonomous politically (i.e. roughly the period just before the consolidation of British rule in India) except for paying tax to the local chief or the king and providing young men for wars is incorrect. The relationship between the king and his subjects was a complex one. There were several duties performed by the king towards his subjects. Roads, tanks and canals for irrigation were built along with temples. He also granted gifts of land to learned and pious Brahmins. The king was the head of all caste groups and panchayats. Any disputes regarding mutual caste rank and other inter-caste conflicts were ultimately settled by him. This task was not confined to just the Hindu rulers but even the Mughal kings and feudal lords settled questions affecting a caste.
In pre-British India, the villages enjoyed an active relationship with the State (mostly the Princely States or the Native States). The common people were concerned about who occupied the throne as they preferred a king who would protect them from raiding troops and thugs. If the chief or king belonged to a dominant local caste, his fellow caste members would help him in a crisis. It was not an unequal relationship with the kings as villagers could rebel and support a rival to the throne. The villagers could also migrate collectively in response to oppressive rule. If such mass-migration took place, the ruler lost out on revenue as land was available for settlement while labour was scarce. At the same time villages enjoyed a significant amount of independence as well as discreetness from the higher levels of the political system due to the absence of roads and poor communication. In day-today matters, the kings let the villagers govern themselves. The dominant caste formed the village panchayat to exercise authority
in local matters, settled inter-caste disputes and maintained law and order in the village.
The relationship between the village and the ruler changed with the British colonial rule. British established an effective administration as development of communications followed the political occupation. Power of the village panchayat was greatly reduced by the system of modern law courts as major disputes and criminal offences were now settled there. Other government employees like the police, revenue officials, etc. came to the village.
Panchayati Raj System
The introduction of parliamentary democracy and adult franchise has made the village even more fully integrated with the wider political system in the post-Independent era. In the present system, villagers elect members of local bodies like the Gram Panchayat and also elect members of the state legislature and Parliament. During election campaigns, regional and national political parties become active in the village and mobilise support for their parties. As we have discussed previously, government policies and programs like the Community Development Schemes affect the village.
The study of Rajasthan village, Devisar (1975) by Anand Chakravarti analysed concepts of power and authority and studied how land reforms and Panchayati Raj based political processes influenced and brought changes in social and political relations in the village.
The 73rd amendment of 1992 introduced SC/ ST reservation as well as 1/3rd reservation in seats for women in the Panchayats and made elections compulsory after every five years apart from other provisions, as road towards self-governance. Various schemes could be monitored through the Gram Panchayat bodies. Although the village is a political unit with an elected panchayat to run the day-to-day administration, it is part of the district or zilla, which is part of the state. The state is part of the Indian Union. There is interaction between these different levels of the political system.
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Before the British rule in India, Indian villages enjoyed considerable amount of autonomy from the higher level of the political system. This was because of the poor communication facilities and the lack of road connectivity. Kings allowed villages to govern themselves in day to day matters. Village panchayats used to settle disputes and maintained law and order in the villages.
In the early nineteenth century, British administrator Metcalf described Indian villages as ‘little republics’. They opined that Indian villages have a simple form of government and are economically self-sufficient units. Villages of India have to give a share of produce to the king and need to send their young men to serve in the wars. Other than these two restrictions, Indian villages have no interference on the higher levels of political authority and they are unconcerned about who are ruling them, according to British administrators.
However, it is incorrect to say that Indian villages are little republics. Even before the British rule, the relationship between the king and the villages is a complex one. Villagers are actually concerned about who sat on the throne. They preferred a king, who would protect them from criminals. In the times of crisis, King’s caste fellows used to help him. If the king tried to oppress his subjects, villages used to rebel against him and would support his rival to take over the throne. They also used collective flight as a protest against oppression.
It is also wrong to say that villages are completely independent and are disconnected from the neighboring villages. There was a exchange of goods and produce between villages. There were also kinship ties in between the villages, especially because of the exogamy practiced by the north Indian villages. Caste system also played a major role in the relationship between the villages.
Kings in Pre-British India performed several duties towards his subjects. they built canals and tanks for irrigation, and roads for transportation. Kings were also actively participated in solving disputes and in gifting the lands to priests.
After Britishers started governing India, they improved the communication facilities and established administration in villages. Revenue officials and police were appointed in villages. They also established law courts and implemented uniform law throughout the British India. This reduced the power of villages and their panchayats, but increased the integration of Indian villages in the wider society.
After Independence, democracy and the universal adult franchise allowed villages to elect members to the panchayats as well as the members of higher levels of the government. This enabled the villages to take part in the state affairs, bringing them into the mainstream.
Indian villages has been a part of the wider society, and their role in the state affairs is increasing. Hence, it is incorrect to treat Indian villages as little republics.