M.N. Srinivas on the Village

The Indian village stayed at the centre of M.N. Srinivas's work for his entire career, but it was not until he spent a full year doing fieldwork in a village near Mysore -- the study that became famous through his work on Rampura -- that he gained real first-hand knowledge of village society; that year of fieldwork proved decisive for the rest of his intellectual life. Srinivas went on to help organise and encourage a wider collective effort at ethnographic village studies through the 1950s and 60s, and, alongside scholars such as S.C. Dube and D.N. Majumdar, was largely responsible for making the village the dominant object of study in Indian sociology during this period.

His writing on the village took two distinct forms. One was straightforwardly ethnographic -- detailed, first-hand accounts of fieldwork in particular villages. The other was more conceptual and historical: a sustained argument about whether "the village" was even a defensible unit of sociological analysis in the first place. Here Srinivas found himself in direct disagreement with social anthropologists such as Louis Dumont, who argued that institutions like caste mattered far more than the village as such -- villages, in this view, were merely places where people happened to live, and could be founded, abandoned or left, while an institution like caste travelled with a person wherever they went; treating the village itself as a meaningful category was therefore misleading. Srinivas pushed back on both historical and sociological grounds. He argued that villages had, in fact, functioned as a genuine unifying identity in rural life and that this village-level unity mattered sociologically in its own right. He also directly challenged the older colonial-administrator picture of the Indian village as an unchanging, self-sufficient "little republic," showing instead that villages had undergone real historical change and had never been self-sufficient -- they had always been tied into wider regional networks of economic, social and political relationships. …