Lecture 2

Rural Sociology in Bangladesh

 Village study
• The major area of social research in
Bangladesh has remained the village studies.
This has been an area where professionals
from various disciplines and from various
countries joined hands.
• Sociologists using ethnographic techniques
have conducted some of these studies.
• Anthropologists, economists, political
scientists, scholars from other disciplines, and
journalists have taken part in exploring the
rural society of Bangladesh. This has given rise
to an impressive body of research on rural
society.
• One bibliographical study found 594 items -
including books, articles and research reports
between 1942 and 1986 (Saqui and Akhter
1987).
• Shapan Adnan (1990) found that most village
studies were conducted between 1974 and
1986. In fact, there has been a marked decline
in village studies from the mid-1980s and the
trend continues.
• It was Ramkrishna Mukherjee (1971) who
undertook the first land mark work in rural
sociology in 1942-43 in six villages in the
northern part of the country. Although his
works were published in the 1940s and 1950s,
they were hardly known until the 1970s.
• From 1960 on, the impetus for rural sociology
came from the Bangladesh Academy for Rural
Development at Comilla.
• The Academy became operational in 1960 and was
soon able to draw international attention under the
dynamic leadership of Akhter Hamid Khan.
Particularly important was its relationship with the
Michigan State University (Bertocci 2002).
• Several of these early studies in Comilla were path
breaking. S.A. Qadir (1960) traced three generations
of land-use pattern in a Comilla village. S.A. Rahim
(1965) undertook a pioneering study in the area of
diffusion of innovations.
• Hafez S.M. Zaidi (1970) undertook a socio-
psychological study of cultural change in two
Comilla villages in the late 1960s.
• In the mid-1960s, Peter J. Bertocci was one of
the Michigan State University students to
arrive in this hinterland of former Pakistan and
he produced the most influential ethnographic
account of rural Bangladesh in 1970.
• After independence, there grew a strong
interest in the study of villages. These studies,
however, were more anthropological than
sociological in nature. A number of young
economists and historians established a
Village Study Group and undertook studies
focusing on the village power structure.
• The Bangladesh Institute of Development
Studies and the Institute of Bangladesh
Studies at the University of Rajshahi played an
important role exploring the rural society.
Some of the young Bangladeshi sociologists
also undertook to look back at the villages.
• At the same time, a young British sociologist,
Geoff Wood, came to Comilla and began his
long personal association, later through the
University of Bath, with Bangladesh studies.
Wood and his students have produced some
of the most important studies on Bangladesh
society. Although many of these studies were
anthropological in nature, they provided
powerful sociological accounts of the Rural
Society.
• Several of the key themes, which emerged in
the course of these researches, were the
nature of informal social structure - shamaj,
dynamics of agrarian change, and the pattern
of power structure.
• Bertocci (1970) developed the idea of institutional
atomism - an essentialist and static analysis - that
seems to have powerfully influenced the
subsequent studies of rural social structure. He
argued that the ecology of Bengal delta did not
allow the formation of villages with fixed
boundaries and institutional development in village.
The informal shamaj or council of elders was the
only institution that served as the fulcrum of rural
life.
• A.K.M. Aminul Islam (1974) used the
functionalist perspective to map conflict and
cohesion in village.
• Jennek Arens and Jos van Beurden (1977) and
Betsy Hartman and James Boyce (1983)
provided an account of the fragile livelihoods
in deltaic plains.
• Another concern that attracted the attention of some
social scientists, especially Marxists, was the direction
of agrarian change and the nature of mode of
production in agriculture. B.K. Jahangir (1979) and Atiur
Rahman (1986) undertook to show the process of class
differentiation and polarisation in the rural society.
• B. K. Jahangir (1977, pp. 2063-2066) has shown the
major class categories in rural Bangladesh such as: rich
peasants, rural entrepreneurs, unban investors in
agriculture; poor peasants, landless laborers, and wage
laborer.
• Willem van Schendel (1981) and Shakeeb
Adnan Khan (1989) took an opposite stand on
the issue. The debate ended inconclusively.
The issue of power became of particular
concern as some studies found that traditional
elites or youth gangs were dominating the
countryside, making the delivery of
development inputs difficult.
• Several of the villages have been restudied and they provide
significant data on recent changes in rural Bangladesh .
• Shapan Adnan has provided an important account of the
changing nature of shamaj and shalish in the villages of the
northern part of the country.
• Siddiqui has meticulously documented the changing poverty
situation in a Jessore village over two decades.
• Westergaard and Hossain have traced the impact of Green
Revolution on rural life and changes in the power structure.
• S. Aminul Islam (2000b) has also indicated the key aspects of
recent changes in the livelihoods of four villages in Bangla
desh through a rapid appraisal study.
• A large number of these studies, however, are
in the form of action research and evaluation
reports. Md. Afsar Hossain Saqui and Khaleda
Akhter (1987) report that most of these
studies were descriptive and they mainly used
univariate statistical analysis. Saqui and Akhter
found only one study that used multivariate
statistical analysis.
• A more serious shortcoming of these village studies was
that they provided disjointed snapshots.
• These studies have not contributed much towards under
standing of the macro context of rural social structure
and its change, and trends and patterns of rural
livelihoods and development of micro-macro theoretical
integration.
• In spite of a promising start at the Bangladesh Academy
of Rural Development, a rigorous research tradition in
rural sociology has failed to develop in Bangladesh.
Thank You