Lecture and Explanation, Reading to be covered:
Breman, Jan, 1997, The Village in Focus, in Jan Breman, Peter Kloos, and Ashwani Saith (Eds.), Ch. 1, pp. 15-75
Keywords: Indian Village
The University of Delhi, Bachelor of Arts, Sociology of India: Images and Reality
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| The Village in Focus by Jan Breman, 1997, Image Credit pexels-alok-uniyal-6396960 |
Pg. 15
The colonial ruler wanted to rule Asia with a strong footprint in the rural area. Soon they realized that they cannot enter the village area without having knowledge of village society, their structure, and function.
The exercise of overland and peoples become on the principle of territoriality.
This could be only possible with the systematic study of the village society. British Government did many village studies to understand rural life in India.
On the basis of these studies, the British Government did some reform at the village level.
For example, in a trend-setting report on the Ceded District of Madrsa Thomas Munro had laid the foundations for introducing the Ryotwari system of taxation which acknowledge no middleman between peasant and government. The report was published in 1808
Pg. 16
According to the Fifth Report (1813) of the British Government, Indian village was the Mini Republic
Charles Metcales’s Report (1833) had said that village societies are ascribed order, which means society was based on ascribed status.
Metcalfe (1830) – The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything they want within themselves and almost independent of any foreign relations.
Mountsturat Elphinstone (1841) – Indian village was a large degree of political-administrative autonomy, self-sufficiency that crystallized into a local inter-weaving of subsistence agriculture and a wide variety of low-technology crafts and services; finally, immutability over time accompanied by a lifestyle which tied the people to the land and to their habitat, immobility that continued from generation to generation.
Pg. 17
To rule India the European rulers tried to legitimize their presence in Asia by designating the village community as the basis of colonial policy. Like
Other people are living in your society to both Hindus and Muslims
Their ideological explanation like the idea of modernity
Eg. the Orientalist perspective which gained dominance during the nineteenth century placed European modernity in a hierarchal relationship with Asiatic tradition.
#MEANING: An Orientalist is someone from the West who studies the language, culture, history, or customs of countries in eastern Asia.
Pg. 18
Pg. 19
Pg. 20
Karl Marx – Asiatic Mode of Production – the theory was based on colonial sources of information
Pg. 21
British Scholars raises the question of – politics in the village, and >> Social Relations of the Distribution of Wealth
But later on, Colonial Researcher halts at the village boundary and did not enter into that determined the daily lives and work of the population.
The Village Nationalized
Nationalist movements reject the colonial regime and come with a fundamentally different view of the long historical route.
E.g. Aryan Theory that they come from outside >> many studies also suggesting they were originated in India itself
The notion of nationhood in the village was against foreign domination.
The conquerors were unable to dismantle this original nucleus of Asian Civilization. The Village thus become a symbol of national resistance, as in Vietnam.
Pg. 22
Colonial reports suggested that the Panchayat System was no village forum but functional exclusively in a seminary capacity as a caste council were ignored.
Jajmani System: exchange of services without money. Almost all economic transactions were carried on without the use of money.
Pg. 23
Pg. 24
D. D. Kosambi (1956) authored an important study in which he fitted the formation of the peasant economy into a feudalized state system whose dynamics might have differed from those of western societies but which nevertheless could not be understood without considering trade and urban life.
Andre Beteille (1980), in a retrospective of the village in the past, suggested that it had always been more than merely a place in which to live. The agrarian settlement was founded on a social contract that reflected the core values of Indian Civilization. According to Andre Beteille, its character was determined by an elaborate division of work that had crystallized into a system of multiple gradations (the caste structure) and, related to this, the acceptance of a hierarchically structured value pattern.
#NOT-ACCEPTABLE: Andre Beteille (1980) has said that the caste hierarchical structured value pattern was accepted, is not acceptable. This statement is similar to Prof Dipankar Gupta which can be seen here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz_BTIduSus (2010)
Pg. 25
#READ first paragraph of page No. 25
Pg. 26 village as a single unit
Pg. 27 Jajmani System
Pg. 28
Comparing the Nationalist Movement with Other Countries
Netherlands Indis - nationalist movement had less interest in agrarian questions
Indonesia – nationalist movement was concerned about co-operative farming
Pg. 29
Pg. 30
Pg. 31
Indian Marxism and Agrirarian Society
For author in India the richness, complexity and heterogeneity of Indian rural conditions were never fully grasped by Indian Marxists nor were they adequately reflected in their studies or programmes. Indian Marxists by and large accepted without critical appraisal what Marxists had done in other countries as a ready-made framework for their own situation. Their analyses of the Indian agrarian problem, therefore, were somewhat mechanical and derivative; they were not based on painstaking investigations of agrarian conditions and their variety in a vast country like India. The lack of filed investigation and poverty of innovativeness on the part of the Indian Marxist made them incapable of developing a meaningful model of the class structure of the peasantry (Joshi: 1975: 22).
Mahatma Gandhi
MK Gandhi has said that the real India is living in the Village. In the traditional habitat, he sought the key to establishing a modern society after independence. In Gandhi’s view, national liberation was an empty formula unless efforts were simultaneously made to free the mass of the population from its conditions of poverty, disease, and illiteracy. In Gandhi’s programme of social reconstruction, the village played a central role, eulogized by his as a collectively based on fundamental equality.
BR Ambedkar on Village Society
Some members of the construction assembly have wanted the village to be the basic unit in the new social and political order. Ambedkar would have none of this and silenced his critics by pointing out that the Indian village was and always had been a den of inequality and a cesspool (a filthy, evil, or corrupt place or state) of factionalism. His intervention was unheeded by the major part of his audience.
Pg. 32 - 33
The government wanted to strengthen Panchayati Raj. The direct cause for the Panchayati Raj model was the alleged wish for the population’s active involvement in implementing the national development policy. This political mobilization followed in the launch of the Community Development Programme in 1952.
Pg. 34
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Pg. 36 - 37
For village development government brought some reform and changes like Land Reform, Co-operative Development, and Community Development.
The land reform was not mentioning the landless labourers and agricultural labour.
Gunnar Myrdal in his book “The book Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations” (1968) has observed that there was no question of any radical redistribution of land ownership and that neither land collectivization in the hands of the state (nationalization) nor of the actual tillers (Co-operative) were realistic options.
Pg. 38 - 39
S.C. Dube, Indian Village, 1955
S. C. Dube, India’s Changing Village, 1958
In the 1950s, the ambition of the Indian state to bring about planned social change gave an enormous incentive to socio-economic research.
Many Agricultural Universities and Agro-Economic Research Centres were established for agricultural development on the one hand and other institutions like The National Sample Survey, and the National Council of Applied Economic Research were established for other concerned research.
Pg. 40
The Village Anthropologized
[40-41] As we have already seen earlier that the colonial government initiated various research and study to understand the subject that is Indian population, their social structure and social relations.
[41-43] After independence many Indian scholars also launched many village study and research programme to understand the village. Most of them are tried to understand the cast and agrarian relation in the village.
You can find a list of a major study on the page No. 43-44.
A. R. Desai is one of the prominent scholars who did village study. He comes with a book Rural Sociology in India, in which he elaborates the past and present situation of the village.
[45] Louis Dumont and D. F. Pocock wanted to see the village as a caste society. Both understood the village from a caste perspective. They analyse the village from caste institution, caste structure, and caste relations.
In the post-independent India D. G. Mandelbaum also come with the anthropological and sociological study of India.
McKim Marriott comes with the study of economic activities, kinship organization, religious practices, and political structures of the village.
[46] McKim Marriott comes with the idea of the little and great tradition.
[47] After independence, the village also changed from the economic perspectives, because of the several government programs. The development, seen as a process of change control of even initiated by the government, forced non-economists such as sociologist and anthropologists, to pay attention to planned intervention and social reconstruction in their village research.
[48-52] The village economy becomes enhanced, developed, and become complex for various resins including the Green Revolution. These Green Revolution not only changed the economic level of the village but also changed the social relations.
[53] The Village Revisits
[55] Village loses its distinct character because of the changes brought by the various factors in the village. The author is seeing these changes for the last two decades (1979-1996) as follows-
[56] Firstly, the intimacy that marked economic, political and social life in the small-scale habits has come to a definite end. The rural economy is undergoing a process of scale-enlargement. The village economy is affecting rural life as well as urban life.
Secondly, contacts with the outside world have increased greatly in frequency, intensity, extent and spread.
Thirdly, Property and power are the organizing principals of a social division in the village, separating and distancing the strong from the weak. Erosion of the traditional distributive mechanism that was inherent to the hierarch ally-structured peasant community, have considerably sharpened already existing conflict of interest which are made manifest in class like configuration of antagonism.
[57] Fourthly, development policies during the past few decades have made an enormous and perhaps even decisive, impact on the course of social transformation.
[58] Fifthly, the promise to improve the living conditions of the masses was made more concrete in the ‘land to the tiller’ but the land-less poor peasants and more particularly, the landless proletariat continued to be excluded from the redistribution of agrarian capital.
Sixthly, every section of the farmer did not get the benefits of the green revolution because of the policy and structure biasness.
Seventhly, poverty becomes the biggest issue and the political leadership fail to address it. In another word, the agrarian income of the state itself is very low to fulfil the political promise to eradicate poverty. In simple words, state income was not sufficient to address this issue.
[59] Eighth, and finally the village was not changing because only internal or external causes, because at this time state were present in the village but the village was also present in the state, through political participation.
[60] The village changes rapidly after capitalist development in Asia. Earlier Indian villages were considered as autonomy but after capitalist development, the village also becomes dependent on other economic systems for their needs, which means they become dependent on others for sustain needs.
[61] But a large part of the South Asian village still exists the traditional way because of the persistence of the Patron-Clint relationship.
[62-64] The Village Globalisation
In this section, the author is talking about how the village has changed after various interventions in village life. The village social and economic structure was affected by the British Government and the Indian Government’s various plans, programmes, policies, administrative reform and political reform. The village is also changed after various developmental programmes. These programmes open up the sky and horizon for the Indian village. Apart from these policies and programmes the television and media also play an important role in village globalization.
The author says that the village migration ware not only started from one region/ state to another region/ state but also from the Indian village to the Gulf Countries, USA, UK etc.
This video can be useful to compare Indian village with US village
Local US Mela https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6EgJk1ZxyA (on the page No. 41, author is also talking about US village.)
My STORY Part 1- कैसे सब्ज़ी और चाय बेच कर किया पढ़ाई, अमेरिका पहुचने में हुई मददगार https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSwYAejvaiY (watch this to the video carefully, how a village boy become a scientist in the USA)
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