Village Studies Tradition in India

Introduction
Colonialism and the Village studies Tradition
Post-colonial Changes and the Village Studies
Perspectives and Methods
Conclusion

Introduction

In India, the tradition of village studies is as old as the tradition of social science empirical research. Village studies were the first step in understanding Indian society scientifically. While many social science disciplines have historically studied villages, sociologists and social anthropologists have come to view the village as the core unit of their research. In fact, the village studies are where sociology and social anthropology in India first emerged. Village studies were first conducted during the colonial era, but they dominated anthropological and sociological research until the 1960s and beyond. The style and temperament of village studies in India, however, are not standardized. In response to issues on a national and international scale, it has undergone significant changes over the years. Colonialism and planning had a big impact on Indian interest in village studies.

Colonialism and the Village studies Tradition

Indian social anthropology and sociology were born out of the colonial government's realization that understanding Indian social life and culture, which was primarily organized and formed in the villages, was crucial for efficient administration. Both British administrators and social scientists were urged to study village communities in order to gather detailed information first-hand, particularly regarding the caste system, tribal life, and related socio-economic and political organizations. According to Jodhka (1998), villages were recognized as a "natural" entry point to the understanding of traditional Indian society and for documenting the patterns of its social organization. Villages also emerged as the ultimate signifier of the authentic native life, a place where one could observe the "real" India and understand how local people organized their social relationships and belief systems. Thus, at the start of the nineteenth century, Francis Buchanan's survey reports, Walter Hamilton's and Edward Thornton's gazetteers, and later routine Imperial and District gazetteers, which primarily depicted Indian village life, were published. With the implementation of a new land revenue policy, studies were conducted to comprehend the village communities and the prevalent land tenure systems, as these were required primarily for calculating revenue assessments and defining the boundaries of revenue villages. An illustration in this regard would be Charles Metcalfe's 1832 study. Additionally, in 1819, a surgeon by the name of Thomas Coats conducted an investigation of the village of Lonikand in Maharashtra, close to Pune, and released his findings in 1823. The writings of Karl Marx, Henry Maine, and Baden-Powell in the latter half of the eighteenth century gave insights into the sociological aspects of structures and change in Indian villages. Marx (1863) demonstrated a keen interest in the characteristics of Indian village communities as self-sufficient groups that practice communal ownership of land.

The colonial government became aware of the need to get involved in village affairs after the Royal Commission on Agriculture's 1926 report was published and the leaders of the freedom struggle were alerted by it. It also revealed the appalling conditions of the farm population. As a result, the first wave of village studies appeared with the intention of gathering thorough and in-depth data on villages. This led economists like Harold Mann and Kanitkar (1921) to look into land ownership, cropping patterns, and other agricultural practices, occupational structure, and the like, laying the groundwork for village studies and inspiring many academics and government organizations to conduct research in other regions of India. Many village surveys were subsequently conducted by various institutions1 and individual researchers2, which sparked interest in additional research on India's rural areas. There was a growing understanding that independent studies are essential for understanding the realities of village life rather than relying solely on reports and surveys created by colonial administrators. Furthermore, the majority of the early studies were restricted to the elements of village economy. Before Wisers wrote their little classic Behind Mud Walls (1930), village studies emphasizing socio-political organizations and cultural dimensions were conspicuously absent. A short time later, Wiser's Hindu Jajmani System (1936) examined the caste groups' social interactions in a village in north India. The methods used by Wisers were very dissimilar from those used by economists. As Wisers spent years together in Karimnagar, conversing with residents in their native tongue and taking part in their activities, Srinivas (1975) observed that the quality of the information they gathered was superior to that gathered earlier and was richer.

In summary, the village studies conducted during the colonial period tended to be more descriptive than analytical. They were made to collect data on the sociocultural aspects of village life. In India during this time, village studies may have served to advance colonial objectives.

Post-colonial Changes and the Village Studies

Following independence and the handover of power from the British to the Indians, there was an effort to reshape rural society in terms of its framework, stratification system, means of economic production, and types of socio-cultural institutions under the influence of development planning. The primary goal was to achieve comprehensive village development. The village, which was merely treated as a unit of colonial administration, transformed into a unit of growth and change. To transform the villages, a number of development programs were created. In order to ensure agricultural growth and social justice in the villages, land reform became the government's top priority as a result of the peasant struggles. Every state, without exception, developed policies for the elimination of intermediaries, tenancy reforms, the establishment of ceiling laws and the redistribution of surplus land under the ceiling, the protection of scheduled castes and tribes, the prevention of land transfers to non-scheduled groups, etc. In addition, the community development program was introduced in 1952 to achieve sustainable economic progress at the village level through active participation of various categories of rural population (Moore 1967: 392). It was based on the Gandhian idea of village community, American experience with agricultural extension service, and the influence of British paternalism. The rural society of India has thus gained new significance among social scientists since the 1950s, and the altering context has caused the sociologists and social anthropologists to lean more toward village studies. Additionally, it was believed that village studies would give an accurate picture of Indian social reality because they offer a "field-view" based on "scientific method" as opposed to the "book-view" that was created by indologists using the classical Hindu scriptures, which were typically associated with the Brahmins and showed a biased, upper-caste, notion of Indian civilization.

In addition, in the post-World War II era, due to the emphasis placed on "modernization" and "development" as common programs in most Third World countries, there was growing interest in village studies in these countries with the increased participation of the peasants and rural population, who primarily lived in villages, as understanding their way of life and working out ways and means of transformation were recognized as 5 being the most important. As a result, "development studies," which emerged as an interdisciplinary field with the goal of offering pertinent information and knowledge that could be used to guide socioeconomic transformations, became one of the most significant areas of academic interest. The emerging socio-political and academic environment at the national and international levels encouraged village studies in India, as well as other nations, as a part of this academic program. When Indian social anthropologists who had received their training abroad and their foreign counterparts started conducting systematic studies of villages in various parts of the nation, the nature of village studies underwent a significant change. Oommen (1985) divided early village studies into three categories: evaluative studies, studies that served as background information for the introduction of development programs, and studies that were conducted in the context of development measures.

The 1950s saw the release of several village monographs. Although some of the later studies concentrated on particular aspects of the rural social structure, such as stratification, kinship, or religion, the majority of them offered a general account of the social, economic, and cultural life of the rural people. Shamirpet, an Indian village near Hyderabad in the Telangana region, was the subject of the first comprehensive sociological study conducted by S. C. Indian Village), along with the three additional edited volumes India's Villages (M. N. Srinivas) and Rural Profiles (D. N. Published in 1955 were India (Mahumdar) and Village India (Mckim Marriot).

Dube provides an accurate depiction of some key aspects of village life based on the fieldwork carried out in 1951–1952. The village setting, population breakdown by economic and caste groups, societal customs and rituals, people's family lives, and relationships between and within groups are all described. He points out that village life has long been impacted by urban and administrative influences, which are now becoming more pronounced. In this study, Dube poses a number of intriguing queries, one of which concerns the nature of the interactions between the Muslims and the other villagers, who are Hindus. The book Rural Profiles by D N Majumdar provides descriptions of a few particular villages as well as some general discussions of the methodology and objectives of village studies, placing special emphasis on the theoretical and practical value of comprehensive village descriptions. However, some chapters forego the comprehensive approach in favor of a more in-depth presentation of economic and demographic data. In a sense, this volume gives readers access to unique knowledge that wasn't previously available. Eight studies from Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Madras, Mysore, the Kota tribe of the Nilgiris, and Gujarat make up McKim Marriott's Village India, a collection of papers that were originally presented at a seminar. Each study is essentially the creation of a single researcher. It offers various facts, ideas, and flavors about village India using various methodologies. In this volume, while Srinivas focuses on the village unity in Rampura, a village in the plains of Mysore District in Mysore State, Gough discusses the threats to this unity in Kumbapettai, a village in the Tanjore District of Madras State, and Cohn examines the attempts at upward mobility in a single caste of a village in eastern U.S. P; Beals explains how outside forces act as a balancing force for internal change in Namhalli, a village close to Bangalore; Lewis looks for typologies in Rani Khera, a village in north India; and Marriott himself mentions the existence of both a large tradition and a smaller tradition in Kishan Garhi, a village in Aligarh District, Uttar Pradesh. The village of M. N. in India. Between October 1951 and May 1954, when The Economic Weekly became known as Economic and Political Weekly, Srinivas compiles a number of brief essays that were previously published in it. It starts off with an introduction by Srinivas and then moves on to a general essay by D. G on India's social structure and deliberate cultural change. Mandelbaum, as well as descriptions of 14 Indian villages by 13 different authors, including some British and American academics. In India, the majority of the essays were written during the initial wave of post-war anthropological fieldwork, and many of the accounts were written before the fieldwork on which they were based was finished. In terms of caste structure, settlement patterns, and employment arrangements, level of isolation and self-sufficiency, rigidity of social stratification, social control mechanisms, and many other aspects, India's Villages provided a comprehensive picture of the rural Indian community. The factors causing change in Indian villages, especially the state's planned programs, are given a lot of consideration. Many of the studies gave special attention to the social makeup of the communities and any changes that were taking place or were anticipated in the social sphere.

Numerous contributors to the three edited volumes are shared, and they greatly complement and confirm one another. These studies, which are sort of the first results of the renewed interest in sociology and the new application of sociological techniques to the Indian context, provide a clear picture of Indian village society as a whole. Many more village studies followed, including those by Bailey (1957), Dube (1958), Mayer (1960), Epstein (1962), and Béteille (1965). According to Jodhka (1998), there was a virtual explosion in village studies in the 1960s and 1970s. Scholars from other disciplines, such as political science, history, economics, and so forth, were drawn to village studies in addition to social anthropologists who were pioneers in the field (Béteille, 1996:235). The inter-caste hierarchy, factionalism, jajmani relations, caste and class relations, etc. were the main areas of focus in these studies. In this research framework, caste studies and village studies were combined. As caste was recognized as the central and defining institution of Indian society and the village as the ideal setting for understanding caste in all of its manifestations, caste emerged as the focus of sociological research. The village was viewed as a functional unit with various caste groups making up its constituent parts and occupying various positions. Caste can be viewed as a useful perspective for examining the village economy and change, according to analysis by Mayer (1960) on landholding, labor relations, trade, and money-lending in a Malabar Village, Katheleen Gough (1955) on rural socio-economic changes in a Tanjore Village, Bailey (1957) on caste, land transfer, and social mobility in an Oriya Village, and Scarlett Epstein (1962) on irrigation and social change in two villages of Mys. The introduction of Weberian categories of "status" and "power" in Béteille's study of stratification in a Tanjore village, however, marks a slight departure from earlier lines of research. Béteille is aware of how the functional caste has frequently been invoked as an justification to sidestep analyzing the conflicts between interest groups in the villages. However, Mukherjee's study from 1971—originally conducted in the 1940s—which examined the productive organization in the villages—was also a study with a different orientation. Although it did not have a significant impact on subsequent studies, it challenged the widely held myth of egalitarianism and examined the villages through class lenses.

However, the subsequent studies conducted in the 1970s and afterwards (for example, Epstein 1973; Djurfeldt and Lindberg 1975; Pathy 1975; Breman 1976; Mencher 1978; Harriss 1982; Gough 1989; Jha 1991; Baboo 1992) focused on the social organization of production, class structures, conflict, and tension among various groups in the villages. The village studies overall gave a comprehensive view of the structural diversity of village communities in rural India, which laid the groundwork for more in-depth research on the contours of rural/ agrarian socio-economic transformation and change.

Perspectives and Methods

Perspectives

The village studies in India were based on four main socio-anthropological viewpoints: evolutionary, ethnographic cultural, structural-functional, and Marxian. The studies that took an evolutionary perspective were primarily concerned with the stages that Indian village communities and their various institutions underwent as they developed into fully-fledged institutions. Two main lines of inquiry are the focal point of this viewpoint. They are the process of evolution and the reconstruction of specific agrarian system development using historical and archaeological data that aid in the search for recurring agrarian transformational processes and patterns. The elements that contributed to the emergence and development of rural communities and their institutions were consistently emphasized in this passage. The vast majority of the time, generalizations are founded on information taken from myths, epics, folklore, etc. In studies of this perspective, villages and land systems were either examined to determine the historical stage of growth or their comparative evolutionary sequence and succession of forms (Maine 1890, Baden-Powell 1892, 1896, 1908). Maine was especially interested in incorporating the Indian village into an evolutionary plan so that a connection could be made between it and the western village communities. He clearly postulates a transition from "village community" to manorial group in his treatment of the feudalization process, which generally succeeds in an evolutionary sequence. The origin and development of Indian village communities were also stressed by Baden-Powell. He made an effort to create an evolutionary model of how villages in India transition from communal ownership to joint-sharing and single landlord ownership through his analysis of both land systems and types of village communities. He asserted that the joint-zamindari and jagirdari systems, which are the foundation of certain types of villages, may have evolved through a succession of powerful groups settling and conquering. As a result, the marginalization and differentiation process gradually relegates the less dominant to landless categories. A few studies in this vein have also emphasized the typical traits of Indian village communities and their development over time (see, for instance, Mukherjee 1958; Kosambi 1956; Malaviya 1969). The interaction between a village's economy and social structure is also described in a number of empirical studies. This group includes studies like Mann's (1921) investigation into the Deccan village and Wiser's (1936) investigation into the jajmani system and rural social organization.

Community studies are the general term for studies that adopt an ethnographic-cultural perspective. They frequently focus on the entirety of the community, social structures, and cultural realm of the subjects in rural and tribal India. The majority of studies (Singer 1959, Marriott 1955) used Redfield's analytical framework when examining village social structure. With the "Little tradition" and "Great tradition" model, Singer has made an effort to comprehend the social structure of India. The way the "Little tradition" and the "Great tradition" interact in Indian villages is described by Marriott as "universalization" and "parochialization.". The former describes the process by which the components of "Little Tradition" move up to the level of "Great Tradition," whereas the latter depicts the downward percolation of Great Tradition. This develops a continuum from "Tribe" to "Emergent Peasant" or "Proto Peasant" to "Peasant.". A tribe that engages in settled agriculture without adhering to the "Great tradition" of the larger society is referred to as an "Emergent Peasant" by Bhandari (1978). He defined the term as "the Hinduized and Christianized settled agriculturalist tribals who maintain their social boundary and do not fully participate in the "Great tradition".". For similar reasons, Goswami (1978) referred to the Bhandari "Emergent Peasant" as a "Proto-Peasant.". To analyze the change in tribal societies, the "great tradition" of the caste system was used as a point of reference. To put it more precisely, the studies as they were formulated were limited to the creation of peasant and tribal society typologies where cultural factors were viewed as being crucial to the comprehension of village society.

The structural-functional method first became recognized as a distinct theoretical approach in the 1950s and 1960s when it came to the analysis of primary sources about specific castes and villages. The roles and statuses that make up the framework of social relationships serve as the units of observation in this case rather than concepts, feelings, and values. It is predicated on the notion that recurring patterns of behavior serve some purpose in relation to the establishment and maintenance of order in societies, and as a result, it seeks to preserve a state of equilibrium within the community as a whole. It is mainly concerned with the identification of new principles and rules as well as the differentiation and transformation of institutionalized social relationship structures and their ordering in village society as a result. For instance, it was intended to change the pre-existing power imbalances in the villages by eliminating intermediary rights to land. The degree of this asymmetry's reformation may be a sign of system change. Accordingly, studies created by sociologists and social anthropologists from this point of view attempt to explain change as something that results from outside forces acting on the villages (Bailey 1957; Epstein 1962, 1973). In his investigation of an Orissa village, Bailey (1957) explains how the expansion of economic and administrative frontiers has altered the village's internal structure. In his investigation of economic growth and social change in Wangala and Delena, the two villages of Mysore, Scarlett Epstein (1962) describes the divergent reactions in these villages to the creation of an irrigation system by the state. She has detailed how the expansion of irrigation, package programs, and the price boom of the jiggery accelerated further growth into an already expanded economy in a later study (1973) of the same villages. Since she last visited, both villages have undergone significant aesthetic changes. The village functionalism and the distribution of power have also been extensively discussed in many of these studies, along with a number of other studies that were also founded on this viewpoint5. In particular, under the influence of social and economic reform measures, the factional subdivision articulates tension resulting from vertical and horizontal cleavages in social stratification. Numerous social anthropologists and sociologists have examined how this process actually gets started, operates, and affects the structure of village communities (Bailey 1963, McCormack 1959, Mayer 1966, Nicholas 1963, 1965, 1968, Orenstein 1965, Singh 1971). In Rampura, a village in the plains of Mysore District in Mysore State, South India, Srinivas has also studied this process. When new forces of social change start to operate in the village's social system, Srinivas (Srinivas, 1955; Srinivas, 1959) used the term "dominant caste" to interpret the knowledge of the new mode of power relationships that emerge. He explains how peasant control over the land and its products turns the elders of the peasant caste into virtual arbiters for the entire village, frequently replacing caste panchayats (councils) and even external courts.

Up until recently, there weren't many village studies using a Marxist perspective. These studies centered on the social relations of production, patterns of mobilization, conflict, and tension in the villages, as well as class differentiation in the peasantry. In these kinds of studies, the structure of social interactions and conflict based on variations in resource ownership and control by various groups of people is crucial. The larger sociopolitical and economic order that encompasses the peasant is the context in which they attempt to understand the peasantry. Mukherjee (1957, 1971) conducted the first village study of this tradition in six villages in Bengal, describing the differences among the peasants and offering a useful framework for agrarian class analysis. Marxian research was also used in Kathleen Gough's study of a village in Madras State's Tanjore District. She comes to the conclusion that the village's social structure is transitioning from a relatively closed, stationary system, governed by religious law, with a feudal economy and cooperation between ranked castes, to a relatively "open," evolving system, governed by secular law, with an expanding capitalist economy and competition between castes that is occasionally accentuated and occasionally obscured by the new struggle between economic classes. The study also noted the dissolution of the feudal economic system, the rise of lower caste groups engaged in economic conflict, and the expansion of social ties outside of the village, all of which have threatened the traditional caste system's dominance and unity. An analysis of rural society and agrarian relations, based on village studies (the two villages Chikhligam and Gandevigam belong to this tradition), can be found in Jan Breman's Patronage and Exploitation, which is about the collapse of the hali system of labor relations in south Gujarat. Later, on the basis of village studies, Goran Djurfeldt and Staffan Lindberg produced Behind Poverty: the Social Formation in a Tamil Village, 1975, which provided an ethnographic analysis of agrarian class relations and the differentiation of the peasantry in the context of the then-going "mode of production" debate. Although initially conceived with a Weberian conception while revealing the pattern of conflict and contradiction, Anand Chakravarti's study (1976) of a village in Rajashtan on local political process and change implicitly indicates a new departure, and his subsequent study (2001) on a village in north Bihar that documents the everyday class relations adopts a Marxian perspective. Numerous later studies (such as those by John Harriss and J. P. Mencher) that focused on the political economy of agrarian change in Indian villages were founded on a Marxian line of thought.

Methods of Village Studies

The majority of village studies offered "holistic" accounts of the social and cultural lives of the villagers based on extensive fieldwork, usually by staying with the "community" for a sizable amount of time in a typically chosen single village. The fieldwork component and use of "participant-observation," a technique for gathering data that anthropologists in the West had developed while researching tribal communities, were the most significant aspects of these studies. The most effective way to gain access to the lives of villagers was to engage in extensive fieldwork and take on the role of participant observer. According to Berteille (1996), the "participant observation" approach "understood social life from within, in terms of the values and meanings attributed to it by the people themselves.". With a camera, a notebook, and a tape recorder, daily observations of the patterns and laws governing village socio-cultural life were documented. Because of this, social anthropologists, especially, regarded the tradition of intensive fieldwork as a crucial component of village studies. In a statement highlighting the value of fieldwork, M. N. Srinivas stated that "intensive fieldwork experience was of critical importance in an anthropologist's career.". It served as the foundation for his understanding of all other societies, even those that significantly diverged from the one he was familiar with. Field experience was always preferable to book knowledge, according to Srinivas (1955:88). Participant observation provided continuity between the earlier tradition of anthropological studies of the tribal communities and its later focus on the village. Social anthropologists kept one key aspect of their practice—the method of intensive fieldwork—while transitioning from tribal to village studies, according to Béteille. In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Malinowski and his students at the London School of Economics created those standards, and by the 1950s, professional anthropologists all over the world had adopted them (Béteille, 1996: 233-4). Nevertheless, the historical context of the village studies was very different from the tribal studies, despite this continuity with the earlier tradition of anthropology.

Early village studies relied primarily on simple description, and there was little data presentation based on a clear theoretical framework. The studies carried out in the 1960s and afterward, however, show a close connection between theory and fieldwork. Although the majority of the early studies were based on a single village, later research shifted to studying multiple villages for comparative analysis and wider generalization6. Despite this, some studies have made historical analyses. By and large, however, most village studies in India have omitted a systematic treatment of the village's past history, which was crucial to understanding not only the village economy but also its culture and social organization. In actuality, there were two different orientations in the village studies. As opposed to the later studies made within the Marxian or political economy approach, which had an orientation towards economic issues relating to agrarian society, the early studies were conducted by social anthropologists who followed an ethnographic-cultural or structural functional approach. The latter placed more emphasis on class while the former placed more emphasis on caste as the main category of analysis. The majority of studies on cultural issues are descriptive, ahistorical, and based on extensive fieldwork in a single village, whereas studies on agrarian issues are made on two or more villages using straightforward quantitative methods that link historical and contemporary data.

Conclusion

In conclusion, village studies in India produced a systematic, rich, and enormous body of sociological knowledge about the socio-cultural and economic life of diverse groups representing various regions of India. Through these studies, a number of concepts were developed, methodological advancements were made, debates and discourses were sparked, all of which were helpful when studying the macro-level process of social change. Many have, however, noted that despite voluminous writing, Indian village studies haven't made much of an impact on the main theoretical debates in the social sciences. Nevertheless, these studies sparked additional sociological investigation and offered a solid framework and perspective for deciphering the various aspects of the ongoing social change in Indian society in general and its rural society in particular.