M. N. Srinivas: Village

Besides religion and caste, the third traditional component of Srinivas’ study of the village. Srinivas got the seed idea of studying India’s village from his mentor Radcliffe-Brown in 1945-46. When he settled in India after his return from Oxford, he conducted the study of Rampur – a Mysore village – which gave him the concept of ‘dominant caste.’ The study has been contained in The Remembered Village (1976); it is here only that Srinivas takes some time to discuss social and economic changes which have taken place in Rampura. Although he had made short visits to villages to conduct surveys and interviews, it was not until he did fieldwork for a year at a village near Mysore that he acquired first-hand knowledge of village society. The fieldwork experience proved to be decisive for his career and intellectual path. Srinivas helped encourage and coordinate a major collective effort to produce detailed ethnographic accounts of village society during the 1950s and 1960s. Along with other scholars like S. C. Dube and D. N. Majumdar, Srinivas was instrumental in making village studies the dominant field in Indian sociology during his time.

Srinivas’ writings on the village were of two broad types. There were, first of all, ethnographic accounts of fieldwork done in villages or discussions of such accounts. The second kind of writing included historical and conceptual discussions about the Indian village as a unit of social analysis. In the latter kind of writing, Srinivas was involved in a debate about the usefulness of the village as a concept. Arguing against village studies, some social anthropologists like Louis Dumont thought that social institutions like caste were more important than a village, which was, after all, only a collection of people living in a particular place. Villages may live or die, and people may move from one village to another, but their social institutions, like caste or religion, follow them and go with them wherever they go.

For this reason, Dumont believed it would be misleading to give much importance to the village as a category. As against this view, Srinivas thought that the village was a relevant social entity. Historical evidence showed that villages had served as a unifying identity and that village unity was significant in rural social life. Srinivas also criticized the British administrator anthropologists who had put forward a picture of the Indian village as unchanging, self-sufficient, “little republics.” Using historical and sociological evidence, Srinivas showed that the village had experienced considerable change. Moreover, villages were never self-sufficient and had been involved in various kinds of economic, social, and political relationships at the regional level.

The village as a site of research offered many advantages to Indian sociology. It provided an opportunity to illustrate the importance of ethnographic research methods. It offered eyewitness accounts of the rapid social change that was taking place in the Indian countryside as the newly independent nation began a program of planned development. These vivid descriptions of village Indians were greatly appreciated at the time as urban Indians and policymakers were able to form impressions of what was going on in the heartland of India. Village studies thus provided a new role for a discipline like sociology in the context of an independent nation. Rather than being restricted to the study of ‘primitive’ peoples, it could also be made relevant to modernizing society.

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