• Villages are central to Indian national identity, and under colonial rule the British derived most of their revenue from land, making village administration crucial to empire maintenance, which led to extensive village studies first by administrators and later by ethnographers and anthropologists, and after independence these studies became important for the government’s development agenda.

• The colonial view treated the village as a closed and orthodox unit, but this perception was challenged by Indian scholars, and even today land remains a major source of income and social status in rural areas, which is why post-independence governments have emphasized land reforms.

• Rural social structure consists of institutions like caste, class, kinship and religion and their interrelationships, while agrarian social structure specifically refers to social institutions and relations directly connected with land and agriculture.

• After independence, village social structure and leadership have undergone change due to factors such as land reforms, social legislation, Panchayati Raj, parliamentary politics, development programmes and agrarian movements.

Idea of Indian Village

• India has historically been regarded as a land of villages, and the village is not merely a spatial unit but Indian society in miniature; according to Andre Beteille, the village has a design that reflects the basic values of Indian society, and is not just a place of residence.

• Since ancient times, Indian villages were understood mainly through Indological and literary sources, and in the pre-British period they were seen as the microcosm of traditional Hindu social organisation, interpreted largely in cultural terms.

• The early academic understanding of the village was shaped by the book view of British administrators and scholars, who portrayed the Indian village as unchanging, with officials like Metcalfe describing villages as “little republics”, monolithic, atomistic and self-sufficient, a view shared by Maine, Munroe and Baden Powell, where religion was seen as orthodox and caste as central to village life.

• This colonial perception was also influenced by colonial economic interests, as land revenue was the main source of income and control over villages was necessary to control the masses.

• In contrast, Nationalist scholars glorified the village as the authentic model of true India and the storehouse of Indian culture and civilisation, selectively using Indological sources and over-romanticising village life as simple and morally pure.

• Gandhi adopted a balanced view, appreciating the simplicity of village life while recognising its decay over time, and emphasised the centrality of villages in the development and upliftment of Indian society.

• B.R. Ambedkar provided a sharply critical perspective, viewing the village as a sink of localism, a den of ignorance and narrow-mindedness, marked by communalism, exclusion, exploitation and untouchability, while Marxist scholars saw the village as a bundle of contradictions dominated by powerful classes.

• The colonial image of the village was later corrected by scholars like Ghurye, and by economic surveys such as the Punjab Board of Economic Enquiry (1920s) and the Bengal Board of Economic Enquiry (1930s).

• J.C. Kumarappa, a Gandhian economist, prepared A Survey of Matar Taluka in the Kheda District (1931) at Gandhi’s request, strongly supported village industries and promoted Village Industries Associations.

• With the establishment of Sociology as a discipline, the understanding of villages matured, highlighting colonial oppression, peasant struggles, and the impoverishment of peasantry, and demonstrating that villages were not isolated due to **migration, village exogamy and inter-village economic ties such as the jajmani system.

• After independence, especially in the 1950s, the book view gave way to field studies, producing a more realistic and holistic understanding of villages by analysing cropping patterns, agrarian structures, economic conditions, and social and cultural life, and by acknowledging the prevailing social evils.

• According to Dumont, a village is far more than a locale or a collection of houses and fields, and Andre Beteille, in Sripuram: A Village in Tanjore District (1962), observed that villages were never fully self-sufficient, especially in the economic sphere, and other scholars also note that due to vast structural and cultural diversity, villages cannot be rigidly typologised.

• After Independence, supported by civic reforms, land reforms and the rule of law, traditional village inequalities came under strain in the 1950s, abolition of land revenue altered relations with officials, and Panchayati Raj and Community Development programmes transformed the traditional village structure.

• Today, competition for resources and conflicts have increased, power dynamics have changed due to universal adult suffrage and elections, the role of caste panchayats has weakened except in ritual matters, and the 73rd Constitutional Amendment (1992) introduced a uniform Panchayati Raj system that opened power struggles to all sections, giving voice to the numerically strong and previously voiceless.

• The spread of communication media has rapidly altered village culture, with urban and modern values penetrating rural areas, and according to Dipankar Gupta, the village is shrinking as a sociological reality though it still exists as a spatial unit, making the colonial idea of the village as a closed system almost redundant.

• A realistic understanding remains essential because the 2011 Census shows nearly 70 per cent of Indians still live in villages, yet village life has become less romantic in academic and popular imagination, with fewer village studies and declining depiction in Bollywood.

• Ashis Nandy argues that the village is now a counterpoint to the city, a fantasy village, no longer a living presence in mainstream intellectual life, and is increasingly reduced to a demographic or statistical category.

• In Whither the Indian Village (2005), Dipankar Gupta states that the twin shackles of caste and agriculture no longer decisively shape rural life because agriculture is no longer the mainstay and caste is no longer the sole determinant of status, weakened further by occupational mobility and identity politics.

• Harriss and Nagraj, in Land, Labour and Caste Politics in Broad Tamil Nadu in the 20th Century: Iruvelpattu (2010), also show that caste has weakened as Dalits have delinked from agrarian labour and non-farm employment now constitutes 40 per cent of total employment.

• Although villages may no longer contribute significantly to the economy, they remain a repository of cultural and social values, most government schemes retain a rural focus, and contemporary issues such as agricultural distress, farmers’ suicides, rural–urban inequalities and honour killings have brought the idea of the Indian village back into sharp focus.

Village Studies

• Village studies are field-based studies of rural areas and represent a departure from the earlier Indological arm-chair approach, which relied on interpreting the present through the past, by using participant observation and ethnographic methods to produce a more empirical and contemporary understanding of village life.

• Although some fieldwork existed before Independence, village studies became a prominent feature of Indian sociology in the 1950s–60s; earlier studies were mainly conducted by colonial administrators and Indologists, and systematic village studies had begun as early as the 18th century through surveys of landholdings, largely shaped by the book view to serve colonial economic and cultural objectives.

• The colonial purpose of village studies was to make economic assessments and to prepare a cultural map for governance, but early landmarks based on intensive fieldwork included W.H.R. Rivers’ study of the Todas (1906), regarded as the first modern anthropological monograph on an Indian community, and “Behind Mud Walls” (1930) by William H. Wiser and Charlotte Wiser, along with Wiser’s work on the Hindu Jajmani System based on his 1925–30 studies in Karimpur near Agra.

• Village studies marked the shift from book view to field view, rejected the myth of the isolated village, corrected colonial stereotypes, and became crucial because sociologists viewed the village as the foundation of Indian society and as the social base of the peasant economy, also enabling the study of caste, inequality and rural social evils.

• After Independence, village studies aimed to map the socio-economic structure of rural India for realistic policy formulation, combining economic surveys (quantitative) with anthropological studies (qualitative), and expanded to include structure, culture and change.

• In the 1950s, many Indian and foreign scholars undertook village studies because rural development was a major state priority, official colonial data was considered unreliable, urban Indians retained kinship links with villages, and most Indians lived in villages.

• A pioneering work was “Village India: Studies in the Little Community” (1955) edited by McKim Marriott under Redfield, containing studies by M.N. Srinivas, Kathleen Gough, Bernard Cohn, Oscar Lewis, Mandelbaum and others, covering eight villages in seven linguistic regions and five provinces, analysing caste, community structure, religion, worldview and processes of social change, and introducing the concepts of Sanskritisation and Parochialisation.

• M.N. Srinivas compiled essays in India’s Villages (1955) and produced a classic field study in The Remembered Village (1976) based on nearly a year of research in Rampura near Mysore, showing through historical and sociological evidence that villages have undergone considerable change, were never self-sufficient, and were always linked to wider economic, social and political networks.

• Andre Beteille, in Sripuram: A Village in Tanjore District (1962), similarly argued that villages were never fully economically self-sufficient, and such studies helped dismantle earlier stereotypes of Indian society.

• A.R. Desai offered a contrasting view, treating the village as relatively isolated in economic terms, and introduced a Marxist perspective in Rural Sociology in India (1969) and Peasant Struggles in India (1979).

• Village studies demonstrated that colonial stereotypes were misleading, showing that villages were historically integrated with regional economies and societies, and provided an alternative to the Indological book-view, rejecting the notion of the village as a completely closed unit.

• These studies established that the village is not homogeneous, is internally differentiated, and has a complex social structure, with scholars like Karve and Kolenda highlighting variations in kinship and family.

• Although the main focus was on social and ritual life, village studies also deepened understanding of political and economic processes in rural society.

• The village was shown to be a crucial source of identity, with villagers attaching honour and pride to it; Srinivas compared insult to the village with insult to close kin, and Adrian Mayer termed this sentiment village patriotism.

• Despite caste and community diversity, villages were found to be bound by mutual and reciprocal obligations, though studies also exposed dysfunctional and conflictual aspects of village life.

• Village life was often characterised as essentially religious, yet scholars like F.G. Bailey, Oscar Lewis and Andre Beteille warned against an over-harmonised view, highlighting divisive and coercive caste relations, and Beteille emphasised that villages are only weakly social units and are also class and gender conscious.

• Key sociological concepts such as Sanskritisation, dominant caste, segmental structures, harmonic and disharmonic systems emerged from village studies.

• According to Yogendra Singh, village studies had limitations because of their micro-level focus, lack of broader theoretical generalisation, and constraints of participant observation, including restricted access to dominant groups, avoidance of sensitive issues, conservative bias due to the need for community acceptance, and multiple village perspectives that made a single narrative difficult.

• Studies in the 1980s–90s were fewer but more focused, revisiting villages and examining issues like women’s status, Dalit problems and the impact of the Green Revolution.

• Surinder S. Jodhka, in Village Society (2012), called for reorientation of village studies to include gender and ecology, suggesting a multi-stage ethnographic approach that studies new ruralities beyond village boundaries.

• A.M. Shah criticised the decline in large-scale village studies after the 1950s, especially on horizontal caste groupings, marriage and gender, while recent works such as Leela Gulati’s Male Migration from Kerala (1987) and Mukul Sharma’s Everyday Life of Musahars in North Bihar (1999) explored women’s roles in migration and Dalit struggles for social transformation.

Indian Village:

• S.C. Dube published a landmark full-length village study, Indian Village (1955), based on Shamirpet near Hyderabad, which was the first holistic monograph on a single Indian village and is considered a milestone in the tradition of village studies.

• As a social anthropologist at Osmania University, Dube worked within a multidisciplinary team involving agricultural sciences, economics, veterinary sciences and medicine, and the project aimed not only to study but also to develop the village.

• Shamirpet functioned as a laboratory for rural development, where experiments in designing development programmes were undertaken.

• Dube identified six factors shaping status differentiation in the village: landownership, position in government service and village organisation, wealth, age, religion and caste, and distinctive personality traits.

• The study followed the methodological lines of Robert Redfield’s village study in Mexico (1930).

• In 1958, in collaboration with the Cornell–India Programme, Dube published India’s Changing Villages, advocating an interventionist role of social sciences in rural development.