Description of the Module

Items Description of the Module

Subject Name Sociology

Paper Name Agrarian Relations and Social Structure in India

Module Name/Title The Beginnings: Village Studies Tradition in

India

Objectives This module looks at the origins of village

studies in India. It outlines the major intellectual
traditions and their historical background that
fed into the growth and development of village
studies tradition in India.

Key words Village, Village Studies, Sociology, Social

Anthropology, India

Module Structure

The Beginnings: Village Studies Tradition Introduction, Colonialism and the Village
studies Tradition, Post-colonial Changes and
in India
the Village Studies, Perspectives and Methods,
Conclusion.

Role Name Affiliation

Principal Investigator Prof. Sujata Patel Dept. of Sociology,

University of Hyderabad

Paper Coordinator Dr. Manish Thakur IIM, Calcutta

Content Writer Professor B. B. Mohanty Dept. of Sociology

Pondicherry University

Content Reviewer Manish Thakur IIM, Calcutta

Language Editor Manish Thakur IIM, Calcutta

1
Introduction
The tradition of village studies in India is as old as the tradition of empirical research in social
sciences. Scientific understanding of Indian society began with village studies. Though
traditionally study of villages was common to many social science disciplines, the idea of the
village as the unit of investigation turned out to be central to sociologists and social
anthropologists. In fact, the development of sociology and social anthropology in India has its
origin in the village studies. Although village studies started during the colonial period, it
continued to dominate the anthropological-sociological studies till the 1960s and beyond.
However, village studies in India do not have a uniform tradition in terms of style and temper. It
has undergone significant changes over the decades in response to national and global concerns.
The interest in village studies in India was greatly influenced by both colonialism and planning.
Colonialism and the Village studies Tradition
Social anthropology and sociology in India originated in response to the realisation on the part of
the colonial government that knowledge of Indian social life and culture, which was mainly
organised and shaped in the villages, is essential for its smooth administration. The British
administrators as well the social scientists were encouraged to study village communities to have
first-hand comprehensive information, particularly on the caste system and tribal life, and the
associated socio-economic and political organisations. As noted by Jodhka (1998), village was
recognized as a “natural” entry point to the understanding of the traditional Indian society and
for documenting the patterns of its social organization and it emerged as the ultimate signifier of
the authentic native life, a place where one could observe the “real” India and develop an
understanding of the way local people organized their social relationships and belief systems.
Hence, the survey reports of Francis Buchanan, the Gazetteers of Walter Hamilton and Edward
Thornton came out in the beginning of the nineteenth century and subsequently routine Imperial
as well as District Gazetteers were written which depicted mainly the Indian village life. With
the introduction of new land revenue policy, studies were undertaken to understand the village
communities and the prevalent land tenure systems, as they were necessitated primarily for
determining revenue assessments and demarcating boundaries of revenue villages. The study
made by Charles Metcalfe in 1832 could be cited as an example in this respect. Besides, a
surgeon named Thomas Coats conducted a survey of village Lonikand, near Pune in
Maharashtra, in 1819 and published his data in 1823. The writings of Karl Marx, Henry Maine

2
and Baden-Powel in the later part of the eighteenth century provided insights into the
sociological aspects of structures and change in Indian villages. Marx (1863) evinced a keen
interest in the nature of village communities in India as self-sufficient communities exercising
communal ownership of land.
The publication of the report of Royal Commission on Agriculture 1926 which revealed
the miserable conditions of the farm population made the colonial government aware of the need
to intervene in the village affairs and drew attention of the leaders of the freedom struggle.
Hence, the first wave of village studies emerged with a view to collect detailed and
comprehensive information on villages. This prompted economists like Harold Mann and
Kanitkar (1921) to investigate into land ownership, cropping pattern, and other agricultural
practices, occupational structure and the like which laid sound foundation for village studies and
stimulated many scholars and government agencies to undertake studies in other parts of India.
Subsequently, many village surveys were also made by several institutions1 and individual
scholars2 which motivated further studies on village India. There was growing recognition of the
fact that in order to understand the facts of village life independent studies are crucial rather than
depending on reports and surveys made by the colonial administrators. Moreover, most of the
early studies were confined themselves to the aspects of village economy. Village studies
focusing on socio-political organisations and cultural dimensions were conspicuously absent till
Wisers wrote their little classic Behind Mud Walls (1930). Little later Wiser’s Hindu Jajmani
System (1936) analysed the social relationships among caste groups in a north Indian village. The
methods adopted by Wisers were quite different from that of the economists. It was noted by
Srinivas (1975) that the quality of information gathered by Wisers was rich and superior to the
information collected earlier as they stayed years together in Karimnagar and talked to
inhabitants in local language and participated in their activities.

1
Gibert Slater (1921), Head of the newly established Department of Economics at the University of Madras and E.
V. Lucas (1920) of Punjab studied villages. Surveys were also undertaken by the Punjab Board of Economic
Enquiry, Bengal Board of Economic Enquiry, Visva-Bharati Rural Reconstruction Board and Gokhale Institute of
Politics and Economics, Poona. For details see, Manish Thakur (2014: 95)
2
For example, Ranade’s A Social and Economic Survey of a Konkan Village (1926) Mukhtyar’s Life and Labour in
a South Gujarat Village (1930) Shukla’s Life and Labour in a Gujarat Taluka: Oplad (1937) and Mukherjee’s
Fields and Farmers in Oudh (1929). For details see, Manish Thakur (2014: 96)

3
 In a nutshell, the village studies done during colonial period were mostly descriptive and
less analytical. They were designed to gather information on socio-cultural life in the villages.
Arguably, village studies in India during this period were buttressing colonial interests.

Post-colonial Changes and the Village Studies

After independence, with the transfer of power from the British to the Indians, there was an
attempt to reshape the rural society in terms of framework, stratification system, modes of
economic production and types of socio-cultural institutions under the impact of development
planning. The main thrust was to attain an all-round development at the village level. The village
which was treated as a mere unit of colonial administration emerged as a unit of development
and change. A variety of development programmes were designed to transform the villages. As
necessitated by the peasant struggles, land reform became the foremost priority of the
government for ensuring agricultural growth and social justice in the villages. Each state without
exception formulated measures for abolition of intermediaries, tenancy reforms, fixation of
ceiling laws and redistribution of ceiling surplus land, protection and prevention of land from
scheduled caste and tribes to non-scheduled groups, etc. Besides, the community development
programme, which was rooted in Gandhian idea of village community, American experience of
agricultural extension service and the influence of British paternalism was introduced in 1952 to
attain sustainable economic progress at the village level through active participation of various
categories of rural population (Moore 1967: 392). Thus, since the 1950’s the rural society of
India has acquired new significance among social scientists and the changing situation made the
sociologists and social anthropologists inclined more towards village studies. Moreover, it was
considered that village studies would provide authentic picture of Indian social reality as they
offer “field-view” based on “scientific method” as against the “book-view” which was
constructed by the Indologists using the classical Hindu scriptures usually identified with the
Brahmins indicating a biased, upper-caste, notion of the Indian civilization.
Besides, in the post-Second World War period, consequent upon the emphasis laid on
‘modernization’ and ‘development’ as common programmes in most of the Third World
countries, there was growing interest in village studies in these countries with the increasing
participation of the peasants and rural population, who mainly lived in villages, as understanding
their way of life and working out ways and means of transforming them were recognized as

4
being the most important priorities. Therefore, ‘development studies’ intended to provide
relevant data and prescriptive knowledge for socio-economic transformations, and as an
interdisciplinary field, emerged as one of the most important areas of academic interest. A
number of village studies were undertaken across the countries as a part of this academic
programme3. The emerging socio-political and academic environment at the national as well as
global level stimulated village studies in India. However, the nature of village studies underwent
a radical change when Indian social anthropologists, trained aboard, and their foreign
counterparts, began making systematic studies of villages in different parts of the country.
Village studies at the early phase were classified by Oommen (1985) into three types:
informative studies for launching development programmes; studies in the context of
development measures; and evaluative studies.
A series of village monographs were published in the 1950s. Most of them provided a
general account of social, economic and cultural life of the rural people though some of the later
studies focused on specific aspects of the rural social structure, such as, stratification, kinship, or
religion. The first full length sociological study of an Indian village called Shamirpet (near
Hyderabad in the Telangana region) by S. C. Dube (Indian Village), and the three other edited
volumes India’s Villages (M. N. Srinivas), Rural Profiles (D. N. Majumdar) and Village India
(Mckim Marriot) were published in 1955.
Based on the field work done in 1951-52, Dube gives a clear picture of some salient
factors in village life. It describes the village setting, composition of its population by caste and
economic groups, customs and rituals of the people, their family life, inter and intra group
relations. He notes that urban and administrative influences have long affected the villages and
these influences are now felt in increasing strength. In this study, Dube raises many interesting
questions including the one on the nature of the relations between the Muslims and the rest of the
villagers who are Hindus. Rural Profiles (D N Majumdar) offers a description of some specific
villages and some of the general discussions of the method and purpose of village studies

3
Redfield's Tepoztlan: A Mexican Village, A Study of Folk Life; Chan Kom: A Maya Village (with Villa Rojas); and
The Folk Culture of Yucatan; Arensberg's The Irish Countrymen and Family and Community in Ireland (with
Kimball); Chapman's Milocca: A Sicilian Village; Embree's Suye Mura: A Japanese Village; Fei's Peasant Life in
China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley; Lewis's Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztldn Restudied
(1951); Beals's Cherdn: A Sierra Tarascan Village (1946); Foster's Empire's Children: The People of Tzintzuntzan
(1948) are some of the examples.

5
emphasizing the practical and theoretical value of holistic descriptions of villages though few
chapters avoid holistic approach in favour of detailed presentation of economic and demographic
data. In a sense, this volume provides access to rare information which was not available
elsewhere. McKim Marriott’s Village India is a collection of papers originally given at a
seminar: the eight studies cover Uttar Pradesh (two), Delhi, Madras, Mysore (two), the Kota tribe
of the Nilgiris and Gujarat. Each study is the work basically of a single scholar. It provides
diverse facts, concepts and flavour about village India with varied approaches. In this volume,
while Srinivas focuses on the village unity in Rampura, a village of the plains of Mysore District
in Mysore State, Gough deals with the threats to this unity in Kumbapettai, a village of the
Tanjore District of Madras State; Cohn looks into the efforts at upward mobility in a single caste
of a village of eastern U.P; Beals accounts for the external factors as mediating force for internal
change in Namhalli, a village near Bangalore; Lewis seeks for typologies in Rani Khera, a north
Indian village; and Marriott himself points to existence of both the great tradition and the small
tradition in Kishan Garhi, a village of Aligarh District, Uttar Pradesh. In India’s Villages, M. N.
Srinivas puts together a series of short essays published earlier in The Economic Weekly later
came to be known as Economic and Political Weekly between October, 1951, and May, 1954. It
consists of an introduction by Srinivas, a general article on social structure and planned culture
change in India by D. G. Mandelbaum, and descriptions of 14 Indian villages by 13 different
authors including some of the British and American scholars. Most of the essays were written
during the first surge of post-war anthropological field work in India, and many of the accounts
were composed before the fieldwork on which they were based was completed. India’s Villages
presented a composite picture of the Indian rural community in terms of caste structure,
settlement patterns, and work arrangements, degree of isolation and self-sufficiency, rigidity of
social stratification, mechanisms for social control, and many other characteristics. The forces
which are stimulating change in Indian villages, particularly the planned programs of the state
are given considerable attention. A good number of the studies placed major emphasis on the
social structure of the communities and the modifications which were occurring or were
anticipated in the social sphere.
All the three edited volumes have many contributors in common and to a very large
extent they confirm and supplement each other. A clear picture of Indian village society as a
whole comes out of these studies which are in a sense the first fruits of the new interest in

6
sociology and of the new application of sociological techniques to Indian context. Subsequently,
many more village studies were published such as Bailey (1957), Dube (1958), Mayer (1960),
Epstein (1962) and Béteille (1965). It is rightly commented that there was a virtual explosion of
village studies in the sixties and seventies (Jodhka 1998). Besides social anthropologists who
were pioneers, scholars from other discipline — political science, history, economics, and so on
— were also attracted to village studies (Béteille, 1996:235). The focus in these studies was
mostly on inter-caste hierarchy, factionalism, jajmani relations, relation between caste and class,
etc. Both village and caste studies went together in this research framework. Caste emerged as
the core area of sociological research as it was considered to be the central and defining
institution of Indian society and village was considered as the ideal locus for understanding caste
in its various dimensions4. The village was treated as a functional whole with different caste
groups constituting its parts and assuming different roles and positions. The analysis made by
Mayer (1960) on landholding, labour 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, Scarlett Epstein (1962) on irrigation
and social change in two villages of Mysore indicated how caste can be considered as a useful
perspective for looking at the village economy and change. However, Béteille’s work Caste ,
Class and Power marks some departure from earlier line of studies in the sense that he
introduced Weberian categories of ‘status’ and ‘power’ in his study of stratification in a Tanjore
village. Béteille recognises how functional caste has often been used as an excuse to avoid the
analysis of conflict between interest groups in the villages. However, Mukherjee’s study (1971),
originally undertaken in 1940s, which analysed the productive organisation in the villages was
also a study of different orientation. It challenged the widely prevalent myth of egalitarianism
and looked at the villages from class lenses, though it did not make a substantial impact on
subsequent studies.
Nevertheless, the social organisation of production, class structures, conflict and tension
among various groups in the villages were taken up by the subsequent studies undertaken in
1970s and thereafter (For example, Epstein 1973; Djurfeldt and Lindberg 1975; Pathy 1975;

4
However, Dumont and Pocock (1957) in review article questioned the relevance of treating the village as a unit for
understanding caste which subsequently generated a debate in the pages of Contributions to Indian Sociology. For
Dumont, village was not a social reality transcending caste.

7
Breman 1976; Mencher 1978; Harriss 1982; Gough 1989; Jha 1991; Baboo 1992). Overall, the
village studies provided a panoramic view of the structural diversity of village communities in
rural India which subsequently, set the foundation for systematic studies on contours of rural/
agrarian socio-economic transformation and change.
Perspectives and Methods

Perspectives
The village studies in India were based four major socio-anthropological perspectives:
evolutionary, ethnographic cultural, structural-functional and Marxian.
The studies based on evolutionary perspective concentrated on the stages through which
village communities and their various institutions passed in course of their growth in Indian
society. This perspective centres on two main lines of enquiry. They are: the reconstruction of
specific development of agrarian systems using archaeological and historical data that help us to
search for repetitive processes and patterns of agrarian transformation; and the process by which
evolution takes place. Here emphasis was put uniformly on the factors which contributed to the
origin and growth of village communities and their institutions. In most of the cases, the
generalizations are based on the data derived from myths, epics, folklores, etc. In the studies of
this perspective villages and land systems were either to find out the historical stage of growth or
their comparative evolutionary sequence and succession of forms (Maine 1890, Baden-Powell
1892, 1896, 1908). Maine was particularly concerned with placing the Indian village into an
evolutionary scheme through which its linkage with the village communities in the west could be
established. In his treatment of the process of feudalization he clearly postulates a transition from
‘village community’ to manorial group which generally succeeds in an evolutionary sequence.
Similarly, Baden-Powell emphasized the ‘origin and growth of the village communities in India.
In his analysis of both land systems and forms of village communities he attempted to formulate
an evolutionary scheme by which villages emerge in India from communal ownership to that
based on joint-sharing and single landlord-ownership. According to him, types of villages based
on joint-zamindari and jagirdari systems could have evolved through a process of succession of
dominant groups of conquest and settlement. By this the less dominant are gradually pushed
back to landless categories through the process of marginalization and differentiation. There are
also a few studies in this vein which have highlighted the typical characteristics of Indian village
community and its evolution in different phases (for example, Mukherjee 1958; Kosambi 1956;

8
Malaviya 1969). A number of empirical studies were also available that describe the inter-play of
economy and social structure of villages. Mann’s (1921) study of Deccan village and Wiser’s
study (1936) of the jajmani system and rural social structure can be included under this category.

The studies following ethnographic-cultural perspective are generally known as

community studies. They tend to highlight the totality of the community, social institutions and
cultural sphere of people studied in rural and tribal India. Most of the studies have adopted
Redfield’s analytical model applied to the study of village social structure (Singer 1959, Marriott
1955). Singer has attempted to understand the Indian social structure in the ‘Little tradition’ and
‘Great tradition’ model. Marriott also terms the mode of interaction between the ‘Little tradition’
and the ‘great tradition’ in Indian villages as ‘universalisation’ and ‘parochialisation’. While the
former refers to the process whereby the elements of ‘Little Tradition’ circulate upward to the
level of the ‘Great tradition’, the latter represents the downward percolation of great tradition.
Here a continuum of ‘Tribe ’to ‘Emergent Peasant’ or ‘Proto Peasant’ to ‘Peasant’ is developed.
Bhandari (1978) coined the term ‘Emergent Peasant’ for a tribe which practices settles
cultivation without being involved in the ‘Great tradition’ of the wider society. He justified the
term as the Hinduized and Christianized settles agriculturalist tribals who maintain their social
boundary and do not participate fully in the ‘Great tradition’. Goswami (1978) called the
‘Emergent peasant’ of Bhandari as ‘Proto-peasant’ for the same reasons. The ‘great tradition’ of
the caste structure was taken as the point of reference to analyse the change in tribal societies.
Put it precisely, the studies so formulated were confined to the construction of typologies of
peasant and tribal societies where cultural factors were considered central to the understanding of
village society.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the structural–functional method emerged as a distinct theoretical
line in the analysis of first-hand material about single villages and castes. Here the units of
observation are not ideas, sentiments and values, but the order of roles and statuses which form
the basis of social relationship. It hinges on the assumption that the regular pattern of behaviour
are perceived as having some function in relation to the creation and maintenance of order in
societies and thus tries to maintain a state of equilibrium within the community as a whole. It is
primarily concerned with the identification of emerging principles, new rules and the consequent
differentiation and transformation in the institutionalized forms of social relationship and their

9
ordering in village society. For example, the abolition of intermediary rights in land was intended
to alter the pre-existing modes of power asymmetry in the villages. The extent to which this
asymmetry has been reformed may be an instance of change in the system. Thus, studies
developed by the sociologists and social anthropologists under this perspective try to explain
change as something which comes about as the result of external forces acting upon the villages
(Bailey 1957; Epstein 1962,1973). Bailey in his study of an Orissa village has explained how the
internal organization of the village has been changed as a result of extension of economic and
administrative frontiers (1957). Scarlett Epstein (1962) in his study of economic development
and social change in Wangala and Delena, the two villages of Mysore, describes the contrasting
responses in these villages to the development of an irrigation system by the state. In a further
study (1973) of the same villages, she has explained how the extension of irrigation, the package
programs and price-boom of the jiggery accelerated further the growth into an already expanded
economy. Both the villages changed considerably in appearance since she made her visit. In
addition, there are also a number of other studies which were based on this perspective5. The
village functionalism and the distribution of power have also been discussed at length in many of
these studies. The factional subdivision articulates tension arising out of the vertical and
horizontal cleavages in the social stratification especially under the impact of the measures of
social and economic reforms. The question as to how this process really begins, functions and
affects the structural form of village community has been studied by many social anthropologists
and sociologists (Bailey 1963,McCormack 1959, Mayer 1966, Nicholas 1963,1965,1968,
Orenstein 1965, Singh 1971). Srinivas has also analyzed this process in Rampura a village of the
plains of Mysore District in Mysore State, South India. He used the term ‘dominant caste’ to
interpret the knowledge of new mode of power relationship that emerges when new forces of
social change begin to operate in the social system of the village (Srinivas 1955 and 1959). He
describes how peasant control over land and its products makes the elders of the peasant caste
virtual arbiters for the whole village, often displacing caste panchayats (councils) and even the
outside courts.

5
Notable among them are Sinha 1969; Patnaik 1969; Wisers and Wisers 1971; Iswaran 1936,1971; and Kessinger
1974.

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 Village studies based on Marxist perspective till recently were quite few. Studies of this
variety focused on class differentiation in the peasantry, social relations of production, and
patterns of mobilization, conflict and tension in the villages. The structure of social relationships
and conflict based upon the differences in ownership and control of resources by different groups
of people is critically important in the studies of this kind. They try to understand peasantry
within the broader framework of larger socio-political and economic order which subsumes the
peasant. The first village study of this tradition was undertaken by Mukherjee (1957, 1971) in six
villages of Bengal that described the differentiation among the peasants which provides a useful
model for agrarian class analysis. Kathleen Gough’ study of a village of the Tanjore District of
Madras State also followed Marxian line of enquiry. She concludes that the social structure of
the village is changing from a relatively closed, stationary system, with a feudal economy and
co-operation between ranked castes in ways ordained by religious law, to a relatively 'open,'
changing system, governed by secular law, with an expanding capitalist economy and
competition between castes which is sometimes reinforced and sometimes obscured by the new
struggle between economic classes. This study also noted the breakdown of the feudal economic
system, the emergence of lower-caste groups in economic rivalry, and the widening range of
social relations beyond the village which have endangered the power of the traditional caste
based unity and dominance. Jan Breman’s Patronage and Exploitation – about the breakdown of
the hali system of labour relations in south Gujarat, was an analysis of rural society and agrarian
relations, based on village studies (the two villages Chikhligam and Gandevigam) belong to this
tradition. A little later, based on village studies, Goran Djurfeldt and Staffan Lindberg (Behind
Poverty: the Social Formation in a Tamil Village, 1975) made an ethnographic analysis of
agrarian class relations and of the differentiation of the peasantry in the context of the then on-
going ‘mode of production’ debate. Anand Chakravarti’s study (1976) of a village in Rajashtan
on local political process and change, though initially formulated with Weberian conception
while revealing the pattern of conflict and contradiction it implicitly indicates a new departure
and his subsequent study (2001) on north Bihar village which documents the everyday class
relations follows Marxian perspective. Many of the subsequent studies which concentrated on
the political economy of agrarian change in the Indian villages (for example, John Harriss, J P
Mencher) were based on Marxian line of analysis.

11
Methods of Village Studies

Most of the village studies provided “holistic” account of the social and cultural life of
the village people based an intensive field-work, generally by staying with the “community” for
a fairly long period of time in a typically selected single village. The most important feature of
these studies was the fieldwork component and the use of “participant-observation”, a method of
data collection that anthropologists in the West had developed while doing studies of tribal
communities. Becoming a participant observer through intensive fieldwork was considered as the
most fruitful method for gaining access to the life-world of village people. The “participant-
observation” method was seen as a method that ‘understood social life from within, in terms of
the values and meanings attributed to it by the people themselves’ (Béteille, 1996:10). The day to
day observations of patterns and rules of village socio-cultural life were recorded with camera,
note book and tape recorder. Thus intensive fieldwork tradition was considered as integral part of
village studies particularly among the social anthropologists. Emphasizing the significance of
fieldwork M N Srinivas noted, ‘intensive fieldwork experience was of critical importance in the
career of an anthropologist. It formed the basis of his comprehension of all other societies,
including societies differing greatly from the one of which he had first-hand knowledge. No
amount of book-knowledge was a substitute for field experience’ (Srinivas, 1955:88). Participant
observation provided continuity between the earlier tradition of anthropological studies of the
tribal communities and its later preoccupation with the village. Béteille writes, “In moving from
tribal to village studies, social anthropologists retained one very important feature of their craft,
the method of intensive fieldwork.... Those standards were first established by Malinowski and
his pupils at the London School of Economics in the twenties, thirties and forties, and by the
fifties, they had come to be adopted by professional anthropologists the world over” (Béteille,
1996: 233-4). However, despite this continuity with the earlier tradition of anthropology, the
historical context of the village studies was very different from the tribal studies.

The early village studies were based on simple description and there was hardly any
presentation of data around a well-defined theoretical frame. However, the studies undertaken in
the 1960s and thereafter represent an intimate linkage between field work and theory. Though
most of the early studies were based on singe village later a shift was made towards studying

12
multiple villages for a comparative analysis and wider generalisation6. Although by and large,
majority of the village studies in India have omitted a systematic treatment of past history of the
village which were vital to understanding not only the village economy but also its culture and
social organization, a number of studies have made historical analysis. In fact, the village studies
had two types of orientations. While the early studies undertaken by the social anthropologists
who followed ethnographic-cultural or structural functional approach oriented themselves
towards cultural aspects, the later studies made within Marxian or political economy approach
had orientation towards economic issues relating to agrarian society. While the former
emphasized on caste as the central category of analysis the latter focused on class. Studies on
cultural issues were usually more descriptive, ahistorical and based on intensive fieldwork in a
single village, the agrarian based studies were made on two or more villages using simple
quantitative methods linking historical with contemporary information.

6
Scarlett Epstein (1973) studied two villages in Mysore to analyse the impact of irrigation on social change. Jan
Breman’s Patronage and Exploitation (1976) on changes in labour relations was based on the two villages. Many
recent studies covered multiple villages, for example, Hetukar Jha’s (1991) Social Structure of Indian Villages;
Balgovind Baboo’s (1992) Economic Exchanges in Rural Orissa. Among the early studies Ramakrishna Mukherjee
also studied six villages of Bengal.

13
Conclusion

To summarize, village studies in India generated a systematic, rich and vast corpus of
sociological knowledge on socio-cultural and economic life of diverse groups representing
different regions of India. Many concepts were evolved and methodological refinements were
arrived and debates and discourses were started through these studies which became useful in
studying the process of social change at the macro level. However, it is commented by many that
despite volumes written, village studies in India hardly contributed to the major theoretical
discourses in social sciences. Nevertheless, these studies stimulated further sociological research
and provided a strong base and insight for understanding and interpreting the varied aspects
ongoing process of social change in Indian society in general and its rural society in particular.

14