Introduction

India remains, at its core, a rural society, even as urbanisation accelerates — the 2011 Census still counted 69 per cent of the population in rural areas, most of them dependent on agriculture or agriculture-linked work. That makes farmland India's single most valuable productive resource, and its principal form of property. But treating land only as an economic asset misses something: agriculture is a way of life as much as a livelihood, and much of India's regional culture traces directly back to its agrarian roots.

Because farming practices differ sharply from region to region, so do the cultures built around them — social structure and culture in rural India are both, in this sense, agrarian at heart.

Agriculture remains the largest single source of rural livelihood, but 'rural' has never meant only agriculture. Villages have long supported potters, carpenters, weavers, ironsmiths, goldsmiths and other artisans, along with storytellers, priests, astrologers, water-carriers and oil-pressers — occupations the caste system itself reflected, through hereditary 'service' castes tied to particular crafts. Many of these livelihoods have thinned out since colonial times, squeezed by an influx of factory-made goods. At the same time, growing links between rural and urban economies have opened up newer, non-farm livelihoods — government service (in the postal or education departments, for instance), factory work, or the army — so that a rural household's income today is rarely tied to the land alone.