Ishan BhatnagarAIR 5 · CSE 2025 · 199 wordsTheir whole copy
Opening
Village studies in India were pioneered by M.N. Srinivas and envisaged prolonged stay in villages and use of participant observation method.
Body · points
Methodological Challenges
Problem of generalizing insights from one village to all-India level owing to heterogeneity of social structures (Yogendra Singh).
Problem of access: Andre Beteille in his study of Sripuram could not access to Dalit community owing to caste dynamics of village.
Problem of essentialization: Dipankar Gupta in 'Whither Indian Village' argues against essentialization and states the Indian village is disappearing as a discrete sociological reality.
Issues of participant observation: researchers seeking acceptance by villagers may lead to over-conservative analyses.
Changing village dynamics: Surinder Jodhka in 'India's Villages in the 21st Century' (2019) argued about methodological insufficiency of present tools in studying - (i) extent of digitalization in villages: needs census & survey insights (ii) evolving agrarian relation in neoliberal India. (iii) revisiting village class structure studies - largely left in 1970s.
Dominant Perspective: Omvedt argues that bias of researchers can lead to dominant, savarna perspective marginalizing Dalit voice.
Close · a way forward
Hence, village studies must be rejuvenated with subaltern perspectives, triangulation, support from all-India level data and research into new issues like digital transformation.