of Doing Village Studies Village studies became the main preoccupation of Indian sociology during 1950s and 1960s. But long before this time, a very well known village study, Behind Mud Walls, was written by William and Charlotte Wiser, a missionary couple who lived for five years in a village in Uttar Pradesh. The Wisers’ book emerged as a by-product of their missionary work, although William Wiser was trained as a sociologist and had earlier written an academic book on the jajmani system. The village studies of the 1950s grew out of a very different context and were done in many different ways.
The classical social anthropological style was prominent, with the village substituting for the ‘tribe’ or ‘bounded community’. Perhaps the best known example of this kind of field work is reported in M.N. Srinivas’s famous book, The Remembered Village . Srinivas spent a year in a village near Mysore that he named Rampura.
The title of his book refers to the fact that Srinivas’s field notes were destroyed in a fire, and he had to write about the village from memory. Another famous village study of the 1950s was S.C. Dube’s Indian Village . As a social anthropologist at Osmania University, Dube was part of a multi- disciplinary team — including the departments of agricultural sciences, economics, veterinary sciences and medicine — that studied a village called Shamirpet near Secunderabad.
This large collective project was meant not only to study the village but also to develop it. In fact, Shamirpet was meant to be a sort of laboratory where experiments in designing rural development programmes could be carried out. Yet another style of doing village studies is seen in the Cornell Village Study Project of the 1950s. Initiated by Cornell University, the project brought together a group of American social anthropologists, psychologists and linguists to study several villages in the same region of India, namely eastern Uttar Pradesh.
This was an ambitious academic project to do multi-disciplinary studies of village society and culture. Some Indian scholars were also involved with this project, which helped train many Americans who later