• Shyama Charan Dube (1922-1996) was a renowned anthropologist and sociologist in India.
• He applied the structural-functional approach to study the Indian village community, gaining significant repute.
• Dube acknowledged the semi-autonomous nature of the Indian village but rejected the idea of it being static, timeless, and changeless.
• He argued that no single village can be considered representative of rural India as a whole or its cultural area.
• His study of Shamirpet provides a detailed description of the social, economic, and ritual structure, as well as family-level living.
• Dube was born on 25th July 1922 in Narsinghpur, Madhya Pradesh, and passed away on 4th February 1996 at the age of 73.
• He completed his Master’s degree in Political Science from Nagpur University and then conducted research on the Kamar tribe in Madhya Pradesh.
• Dube taught social anthropology and sociology at various universities in India and abroad.
• He began his professional career as a lecturer at Bishop College, Nagpur, and Maharashtra, before joining the Department of Political Science at Lucknow University.
• During this time, he published his book on the Kamar tribe and interacted with D.N. Majumdar, assisting him with the journal Eastern Anthropologist.
• Dube moved to Osmania University, Hyderabad, as a reader in the Department of Sociology, succeeding Von Furer Haimendorf.
• He also studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the London School of Economics, interacting with academics like Raymond Firth, which influenced his work on the Indian village.
• Dube was a gifted speaker in both English and Hindi.
• He later became Deputy Director at the Anthropological Survey of India in Nagpur and Professor of Anthropologyat the University of Saugar, Madhya Pradesh.
• He served as advisor for the National Institute of (Rural) Community Development in the early stages of his career.
• From 1972-1977, he was Director at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla.
• He served as President of the Indian Sociological Society in 1975-76.
• Dube was Vice-Chancellor of Jammu University from 1978-1980.
• He was an ICSSR National Fellow from 1980-1993 and held important positions in UNESCO and the UNO.
• He also served as Chairman of the Madhya Pradesh University Grants Commission.

Theoretical and Methodological Approach

• S.C. Dube, a product of Lucknow, played a key role in studying India’s Changing Villages.
• His later writings, such as The Study of Complex Cultures (1965), Explanation and Management of Changes(1971), and Contemporary India and its Modernization (1974), continued to reflect his insight into India’s social reality from a macro-perspective.
• Dube emphasized the importance of precision in theoretical formulations and the empirical verification of propositions.
• He was an advocate for interdisciplinary orientation and promoted research interest, showcasing his multidimensional personality.
• Yogesh Atal commented on Dube’s personality, highlighting his constant movement, both geographically and intellectually, and his focus on exploring new territories and extending the frontier of knowledge.
• In 1965, Dube proposed a comprehensive frame of reference for studying ‘complex cultures’ to understand Indian reality, applying a deductive-positivistic approach.
• Dube’s work on Indian Village (1955) was significant as the first full-length account of village social structure in post-1950 India.
• He described rural social structures and institutions in a lucid style, making the work a model for later descriptive-exploratory studies of macro-settings.
• However, Dube’s Indian Village did not offer analytical insights or propose an alternative conceptual framework for studying Indian rural society.
• Dube’s interest in rural studies grew as the Community Development Programme (CDP) was accepted by the Government of India, leading to a shift from studying structure to studying change in India’s villages, as reflected in India’s Changing Villages (1958).