Wouters/Subba, Srinivas

REVISITING SRINIVAS’S ‘REMEMBERED VILLAGE’

JELLE J.P. WOUTERS AND TANKA B. SUBBA

Introduction
Srinivas had the rare opportunity to call both Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard his
supervisors. He arrived in Oxford, in the academic year 1945-46, Radcliffe-Brown’s last at
the university, after first completing his PhD at Bombay University, where he worked under
Ghurye. It was Radcliffe-Brown who repeatedly suggested to him the scientific importance of
making a field study of a multi-caste community in India (p. 1).1 The existing body of writing
was, he felt, mainly concerned with the institution of caste at the all-India or at least
provincial level, and it did not reflect day-to-day social relations between members of
different castes living in the same community. When Radcliffe-Brown retired from the Chair
in July 1946, Srinivas was transferred to Evans-Pritchard, and in his own words, ‘no two
teachers were more different’ (p. 2). Srinivas writes about Evans-Pritchard’s highly personal
and unorthodox but effective teaching methods and says that he was ‘generous with his time
and ideas’ (p. 2). In the end it was Evans-Pritchard who offered Srinivas a University
Lectureship in Indian Sociology and Anthropology, with the additional ‘payment’ of being
allowed to spend his first year in post carrying out field research in India (p. 4). It was in this
year – after finishing his doctorate in Oxford, in which he completed his analysis of the South
Indian Coorgs, but before taking up his lectureship – that Srinivas carried out field research in
a village in Karnataka, South India, which in 1948 he baptized ‘Rampura’. This would result,
almost thirty years later, in his monograph, The remembered village (1976).
This somewhat quaint title demands a brief explanation. In 1970 Srinivas joined the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University as a fellow,
with the aim of completing a ‘much-postponed’ (p. xviii) monograph on his field study in
Rampura in the late 1940s. On 24 April 1970 the Center was set on fire by an arsonist, and all
three copies of his fieldwork notes were reduced to ashes. Modern technology enabled some
fragments to be recovered, and luckily his original field diaries, though without the data being
processed and analysed, were still intact in Delhi. Depressed by the loss of his precious notes,
Srinivas decided to abandon his undertaking altogether. It was Professor Tax who deserves to

                                                             
1
Pages references are to Srinivas 1976 unless otherwise stated.

44 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

be thanked for reassuring Srinivas that the book was potentially of such value that it had to be
written, albeit, due to the circumstances, largely based on memory: hence the title The
remembered village (p. xiv).
Professor Tax’s remark about the potential importance of Srinivas’s pursuit proved
correct. The remembered village has turned into a hallmark of post-colonial Indian sociology
and anthropology. Through this book, Srinivas introduced, or at least popularized, what are
now influential ideas and concepts like ‘the dominant caste’, ‘sanskritization’ and
‘westernization’ in the context of inter-caste relations. Generations of Indian sociologists and
anthropologists have been educated with Kulle Gowda, Nadu Gowda and the headman, the
three main figures in Srinivas’s monograph. His book is still widely taught in universities in
India and abroad and remains a ‘must-read’ for all social scientists studying the subcontinent
in one way or the other.
The approximate location of Rampura can be guessed by the few directions Srinivas
provides in his book: ‘a few hours from Mysore’, ‘located on the Mysore-Hogur bus road’,
with ‘an official population of 1519 people’; a small map added by Srinivas shows that the
village is bounded to the west by a canal and is in the vicinity of a big tank. However, the real
name of the village and where it was located were for long known only to a few individuals
like A.M. Shah, who accompanied Srinivas during his second visit to the village in 1952,
Srinivas’s student and research assistant V.S. Parthasarathy, Srinivas’s nephew and former
Professor of Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Panini, and of course Srinivas
himself. Many anthropologists from Mysore in the state of Karnataka reportedly asked
Srinivas for the real name and exact location of the village, but they failed to obtain the
necessary information from him. These details remained ‘unknown’ until a group of
anthropologists working with the Department of Anthropology, Mysore University and the
Anthropological Survey of India’s Southern Regional Office in Mysore were finally able to
identify the village.2
Not too sure yet about the ‘discovery’, one of the present co-authors travelled with a
group of anthropologists from Mysore down to the ‘discovered’ village to see if it was really
the village where Srinivas had done his fieldwork from January to November 1948. The

                                                             
2
There appears to be an element of heroism in the claims made by some anthropologists in Mysore. It is true
that Srinivas was reluctant to divulge the real name of the village and its exact location for whatever personal or
professional reasons, but his former assistant A. M. Shah, now a well-known professor of sociology at Delhi
University who accompanied Srinivas to the village in 1952, or Professor Panini, Srinivas’s nephew, could
certainly have been contacted for this information too.

45 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

famous ‘pipal’ tree that Srinivas mentions nostalgically in his book did not exist anymore, but
he was more than convinced that Kodagahalli was none other than Srinivas’s Rampura. The
sketch maps of the village and the house where he lived inserted between pages 10 and 11 of
his book were a great help in this regard. Srinivas’s house had not changed structurally,
although the post office had moved out of the house, which itself had deteriorated
considerably because no family was living there any longer. The area where bullocks were
sheltered at night at the time Srinivas lived in the house was now used to store bamboo
wickers used in the growing of silkworms, but the rooms occupied by Srinivas and his cook
and the veranda where he received the villagers and interviewed them were still clearly
identifiable. As if all this was not enough, an old man living next to the house remembered
enough about Srinivas to confirm the village as the location of Rampura.
On 1 January 2008, a group of 29 students under the supervision of one of the co-
authors boarded a train in Guwahati in India’s northeast to travel south to Kodagahalli,
Srinivas’s Rampura, to carry out fieldwork as part of their MA or MSc degrees in
anthropology. Three days in the train passed before a short two-hour bus ride dropped us off
at the headman’s house, curiously right in front of the house Srinivas had stayed in during his
period in the village. Our writing here will be ethnographically informed, comparing
empirical observations of Srinivas’ with our own , rather than theoretically dense, as we aim
to provide some insights about continuity and change in the village sixty years after
Srinivas’s departure.

Re-studying monographs
Taking a group of students to a distant village and staying there for about a month or so for
their fieldwork training as part of their master’s degree requirements in anthropology is a
practice almost a century old in India, starting with the establishment of an Anthropology
department in Calcutta University in 1918. Group fieldwork is also a central tool of the
Anthropological Survey of India, the largest government research organization in the world,
which has carried out several national projects like the All India Anthropometric Survey and
All India Material Trait Survey after carefully training groups of field investigators on the
tools and techniques of data collection and sending them in groups to different parts of the
country for the purpose of collecting data. Such fieldwork undoubtedly has its disadvantages.
It needs a lot more planning and preparation than fieldwork by an individual does. If the
research unit is relatively small there may be researcher overkill, ‘the one commits, all suffer’

46 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

syndrome may be at work, and there is always the risk that researchers end up interacting
more among themselves than with the people they are there to study. On the positive side,
group fieldwork can accomplish a lot more work in less time and for less expenditure. When
research activities like taking measurements and recording them or interviewing and audio-
visual recording of interviews are done by many individuals instead of just one, it can lead to
greater efficiency of work. Secondly, provided a research group consists of both male and
female researchers, gender issues in fieldwork are largely overcome, as respondents of both
sexes are equally approachable for the collection of data, something that an individual male
or female anthropologist may not always be able to achieve (for more discussion of group
fieldwork, see Subba 2009).
Anthropologists are often better known for the communities they have worked on than
for their specific ethnographic and theoretical contributions. Malinowski is associated with
the Trobrianders, Evans-Pritchard with the Nuer and Fortes with the Tallensi. In the context
of India, Rivers is linked with the Todas, Radcliffe-Brown with the Andaman Islanders,
Elwin with the Baigas and the Gonds, Burling with the Garos and Fürer-Haimendorf with the
Apatanis and the Konyak Nagas. Indeed many anthropologists prefer to have their ‘own’
fieldwork site to which they may return, though often for shorter spells than their initial
fieldwork, during the course of their professional careers. Re-studying a village has been a
popular pursuit in the anthropological tradition, although an anthropologist re-studying his
own field site is more common than an anthropologist re-studying someone else’s. This is
evident from the rather long and vibrant tradition of re-studies or diachronic studies, or as
Firth called them, ‘dual synchronic’ studies in anthropology found in the works of Carstairs
(1983) and Gowloog (1995). Their reflections on their own diachronic studies in
anthropology clearly show that such studies differ not only in terms of who conducted the re-
study and after how many years, but also in terms of the number of field trips made for the re-
study. It is also apparent that there is no uniform method or technique followed in such
studies, whether by the original anthropologist or by a new one.
Diachronic studies have some marked advantages (Sarana 1973, Epstein 1978). They
provide us with ethnographic data, which, in comparison with the initial work, can be
analysed diachronically and may therefore be a useful tool for investigating social change.
Furthermore, a re-study may provide multiple perspectives on the same research unit.
Especially in caste India, it makes quite a difference whether an anthropologist studies a
village through the eyes of the Brahmans, the dominant caste, or, for example, a low caste. A
re-study of the same village but from a different angle may provide illuminating additional

47 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

information. Of course, an embarrassing situation may arise if the re-studying anthropologist

comes up with totally different conclusions to the original one, especially if the time-span
between the two studies is not very great.
One factor a re-studying anthropologist may have to cope with is the image which his
predecessor has left behind. In the case of our fieldwork, there were not many people who
remembered Srinivas, and even fewer, if any, who had read his book on the village. Thus, we
were not constrained by what Epstein writes – ‘wherever possible it is desirable to have the
same researcher conduct the later restudy’ – because, according to her, a new investigator
takes time ‘to develop full empathy for the society he studies’ (Epstein 1978: 128-9).
Furthermore, Epstein writes that the new investigator should contact the original researcher
and make use of his unpublished materials, but when we arrived in Rampura Srinivas had
long been dead, and his unpublished materials had been consumed by the fire that broke out
at Stanford University mentioned earlier in this essay.
On the other hand, if the time span between a study and a re-study is quite short, and if
local people have been able to read what has been written about them, the re-studying
anthropologist may end up carrying the burden of his or her predecessor’s behaviour and
writings, especially if the former anthropologist was not that popular or if the locals do not
agree with what has been written about them. In building rapport with the villagers, a re-
studying anthropologist may have to mediate between existing memories and contributions of
his predecessor, and his own unique background, personality and research interests.
Re-studying a monograph also appears somewhat like a flash-back. Although none of
the students had been in the Indian state of Karnataka before, when our bus passed a big pond
on the right of the road and a Hindu temple on the left we knew, having read about Srinivas’s
arrival in the village, that we had arrived. Wandering through the village with every detail
Srinivas had written carefully ordered at the back of our minds was indeed an extraordinary
experience. We could name the various temples without asking the villagers, we knew how
many acres of land the headman was supposed to have, or at least had in his possession in the
past, and we already had some idea about which castes had settled in the village and their
traditional occupations. Furthermore, we could tell when the school had shifted from the
panchayat building to its present location, locate the mosque and the Urdu school, and easily
identify the Harijan ward. Moreover, we already knew that ragi (a kind of millet) was the
staple food and oxen a valuable possession.
A central question we asked ourselves was whether Rampura and Kodagahalli were
indeed the same village. Geographically speaking, Kodagahalli and Rampura are the same

48 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

village, although as a settlement Kodagahalli is considerably bigger than was Rampura. The
other methodologically important question was whether we were studying the same people
that Srinivas had studied? Most people alive in the village today are the children,
grandchildren and even great grandchildren of the people Srinivas writes about in his
monograph. Although striking continuities may abound, we cannot fully assume that, six
decades after the initial research took place, we are studying the same people. Furthermore,
the village does not exist in isolation of wider developments, and indeed much has changed in
India over the past sixty years or so. There are theories suggesting that the caste system is
weakening if not dying out. Other voices suggest that processes of sanskritization,
secularisation and modernisation have transformed the caste system. Furthermore, there are
claims that Harijans, Untouchables, Dalits, Scheduled Castes or whatever other name be
given to them have enjoyed upward mobility, or that caste is gradually being replaced by
class. At the same time, there are counter-claims stating that caste rigidity is not declining but
reinforcing itself, though perhaps in novel ways. All of this made it improbable that social
relations in Kodagahalli have remained unchanged since Srinivas studied the village in 1948.
Arguing that Rampura and Kodagahalli are no longer the same, however, does not
mean that we entered the field as if it had not been studied before. The ultimate purpose of
our study is to compare present-day findings with those recorded by Srinivas sixty years
earlier. Secondly, and perhaps somewhat debatably, Srinivas has set the agenda for our
research: since we selected those aspects of village life which Srinivas extensively writes
about as the focus of our own re-investigation, we may have missed some new phenomena in
the village simply because they did not occur to or were not noted by Srinivas. One example
might be the presence of labour migrants staying in make-shift camps in sugarcane fields a
mile or so from the village settlement, who come to the village when local landowners are in
need of labour and depart when their presence is no longer desired. However, we hope that,
by focusing on the same topics that Srinivas did sixty years ago, we are able to provide some
indications of continuity and change in the village.

Categorizing outsiders
Srinivas writes that without categorization social relations in the village are not possible (p.
165). He narrates how, during a visit of the Adult Literacy Council to the village, the castes
of the two delegates were identified within seconds and food preparations arranged
accordingly (p. 37). However, if social categorization was of such importance, then how
should we cast Srinivas in the village? First of all he was a Brahman, and not one from a

49 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

distant, anonymous part of India: indeed, his ancestral village was less than ten miles from
Kodagahalli (p. 8). Due to this spatial proximity, it did not take the villagers long to find out
that Srinivas belonged to a landowning family. Together this made Srinivas a landowning
Brahman, which elevated him straight into the highest socio-economic stratum of the village.
The fact that he had spent many years in Bombay and abroad did not alter his caste position,
at least not according to the villagers. It had affected Srinivas himself, however, and he
defined himself as an ‘odd kind of Brahmin’ who did not perform daily rituals, did not
uphold the custom of painting the namam (the caste-symbol of the Iyengars or Sri-Vaishnava
Brahmans) on his forehead and had broken, while in England, the dietary rules of
vegetarianism and teetotalism (p. 34). Srinivas had to deal with a sharp disjuncture between
his perception of himself and the role of an orthodox landowning Brahman in which he was
cast by the villagers. This disjuncture not only occasionally translated itself into Srinivas
being laughed at and at times even reprimanded for his indifference to rules of purity and
pollution (p. 35), but more seriously it prevented him from building a rapport with the
Harijans3 and Muslims in the village, as this, Srinivas thought, might not be appreciated by
the village establishment (p. 47).
In contrast with the rather straightforward way in which Srinivas could be categorized
by the villagers, our own arrival in Kodagahalli created a problem of categorisation for them.
Whereas Srinivas arrived with Nachcha, his personal cook, and twenty-six pieces of luggage
(p. 11), we arrived in a group of thirty researchers and had arranged a whole bus and a van
for the occasion. Our arrival must indeed have been a much more impactful event than when
Srinivas quietly stepped off the Hogur-bound bus. Our group consisted almost entirely of
Mongoloid tribes from northeast India, and we were all initially mistaken to be some of the
Tibetan refugees who have been living in the Mundgod and Bylakuppe settlements in
Karnataka since 1959, whom the villagers had seen before they met us and who very much
resembled most of us. As we started to interact with the villagers, one of the first things they
wanted to ascertain was our community backgrounds, but when they realized that they had
not heard of names like Khasi, Mizo, Hmar, Ao and Tangkhul, they soon gave up and
categorized us into Hindu and Christian only. They also soon came to know that several of us
ate the meat of cow, dog, snake, pig and frog. The villagers may have taken this information
                                                             
3
We are aware that the term ‘Harijan’ is regarded as somewhat old-fashioned these days, and over the years
many other names have been coined to label the lowest ritual layer of the caste system. However, we have opted
to use the term in this article for conceptual clarity, precisely because Srinivas consistently applied it in his
monograph.

50 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

with a pinch of salt, but what really shocked them was their discovery that one of the female
students smoked, as did the sight of the male students taking a bath in just their underclothes
at the Kaveri River Canal that separates the settlement area of the village from its cultivation
area or at the huge lake where Srinivas went to enjoy the beauty of the setting sun. One of the
elderly villagers requested the professor in charge of the students to ask them to wear proper
knee-length shorts while bathing. Whereas Srinivas was blamed for not behaving as a
landowning Brahman ought to do, some of our habits and practices were ridiculed as not
abiding with Hindu customs in the first place, despite the fact that we were there six decades
after Srinivas first lived there. In a little while, however, the two sides became acquainted
with each other, and as soon as the villagers realized that we had humble and good intentions,
we were categorized as ‘respectable outsiders’ and treated as such.

The changing village

Srinivas devotes a whole chapter to ‘the changing village’ and reflects: ‘looking back, I find
that I was lucky to have lived in Rampura at a crucial period in its history. In 1948, it still
retained enough continuity with the past while the potential was building up for radical
change’ (p. 232). It was indeed an eventful period. India had just won its independence,
Gandhi had called upon all Hindus to embrace Harijans, and the state and politics had started
to impact on villages in a big way. However, the discussion of what is traditional and what
may be called modern, or in other words the mingling of forces of continuity and pressures
for change, is not, of course, restricted to the first years of India’s independence. Riding a
bicycle or listening to film music over the radio (p. 253) was considered modern in Srinivas’s
time, but these activities are now associated with earlier times. Today it is motorcycles and
cable TV that are judged modern. It is true that Srinivas lived in the village at a rather unique
time in history, yet one could claim that, with market capitalism, identity politics,
technological innovations, reservation policies and mass education all having entered the
village on an unprecedented scale in recent years, the interplay between tradition and
modernity is as ‘real’ now as it was during Srinivas’s time.
Srinivas observes that, although villager’s relations with the external environment were
mediated through agriculture, relations with other human beings were mediated through caste
(p. 164). It was not caste in the sense of the all-India category of varna that mattered in the
village, but caste in the sense of jati, local endogamous groups. A stranger’s caste was
immediately inquired about, and this little piece of information determined, to a large extent,
how the villagers behaved towards him (p. 164). Knowing a person’s caste, Srinivas

51 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

continues, was enough to know about his occupation, diet and life-style. While not every
caste member was able to make a living out of his traditional occupation, there was a general
feeling in the village that fulfilling one’s ascribed occupation was the proper, if not natural,
thing for any person to do (p. 165). Further, Srinivas writes about the omnipresence of ideas
of hierarchy. Each person belonged to a caste, which, in turn, formed part of a system of
ranked castes, which together constituted a local hierarchy. Srinivas observes how cultural
elements such as diet, occupation, custom and ritual were distinguished between higher and
lower. There were thus higher and lower diets and superior and inferior occupations (p. 167).
Contacts between castes were regulated by ideas of pollution and purity, the widest ritual
distance being between an orthodox Brahman and a Harijan: for the former, even the
presence of the latter was considered polluting. When castes occupied ritual positions
relatively close to each other, the structural distance between them was usually emphasized
less (p. 187). Although notions of purity and pollution were all-pervasive in the village and,
to a large extent, determined the movements of the villagers, Srinivas notes that they were
gradually relaxing. He discovers, for example, how inter-dining between Brahmans,
Lingayats and Vokkaliga Gowdas on occasions such as weddings had become more frequent
(p. 275) and how a few Brahmans had even developed a taste for meat, a departure from
tradition that was not appreciated by their orthodox counterparts (p. 276). However, this
relaxation primarily concerned the higher castes of the villages and not the Harijans, who
were treated differently from every other caste group in the village (p. 198).
This division seems to hold still today, though an ethnography of a village teashop
reveals how caste discriminations have been remapped. Whereas Harijans were earlier
excluded by teashop owners, these days they are allowed to order tea in one of the stalls
located on the Mysore–Hogur road. Some Harijans have grasped this opportunity and can be
found near the tea stalls early in the morning. Caste discrimination is reproduced, however, in
them not being allowed to sit on one of the wooden benches inside the teashop but being
obliged to sip their tea standing outside. Further, the low castes are served in disposable
plastic cups which are thrown away after use, as opposed to the high castes, who are served
in glasses which are cleaned and reused. The compounds surrounding the tea stalls in the
village are dirtied by an enormous amount of plastic waste, revealing an unexpected link
between caste practices and environmental pollution.
Not all shopkeepers in the village follow caste practices, however. A few months before
our arrival, a Keralite entrepreneur opened a bakery-cum-tea shop in the village. He has a
keen eye for business opportunities as his badam (almond) milk and pastries have proved

52 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

very popular, and throughout the day a quite sizable crowd can be spotted around his shop.
For commercial reasons – or perhaps, being an outsider, he did not know who was of high
caste and who low – he serves all his customers in disposable plastic cups. Most villagers do
not object to his indiscriminate service, yet for a few high-caste individuals the idea of being
served in the same manner as the low castes is too radical a change. They demand special
treatment, which the shopkeeper satisfies by rushing to a nearby teashop to borrow some
glasses.
Talking about religion, Srinivas was confident that the villagers lived in a theistic
universe in the sense that all the villagers had a deeply grounded belief that gods, deities and
spirits existed. Faith in a particular deity might occasionally be shaken, for example, after
prolonged misfortunes despite extensive ritual sacrifices, but that merely prompted
individuals to worship another deity, not to abandon their beliefs altogether. Any atheistic
argument in which deities were rejected did not make sense to the villagers (p. 323). In fact,
Srinivas annoyed his friend Nadu Gowda by countering his religious inquiries with questions
such as ‘Why should people believe in God?’ (p. 323). On the whole the theistic universe as
Srinivas describes it appears to have remained generally unchallenged. However, a number of
outspoken atheists have come to the village, among them a secondary school teacher who
argues without hesitation that Hinduism is only meant to serve Brahmans in order to
safeguard their authority and status at the expense of lower castes. Hence a lower caste
person like himself, he argues, is better off without Hinduism. Keshavam, a self-proclaimed
film-maker, may be regarded as another ‘odd’ figure in the village. He is outspoken in his
detestation of village life and claims to live there only because he is financially broke,
supposedly due to his having been cheated by a co-producer. For Keshavam there are only
two castes: men and women. Existing caste boundaries in the village, he maintains, are no
longer enforced upon Harijans: on the contrary, Harijans are placing restrictions on
themselves by not interacting with higher caste villagers. Keshavam substantiates his
rejection of caste discriminations by maintaining friendships with Harijans, including visiting
their houses, although his views are not widely shared in the village.
Turning to technological changes, Srinivas mentions the establishment of two rice
mills, the construction of a middle school (p. 233) and plans for a hospital (which has never
materialized, a modest health centre having been built instead). He also talks about how the
villagers were overawed when they saw a bulldozer levelling six acres of land belonging to
the headman (p. 238). He further describes how motorized vehicles started to contest the
monopoly of the ubiquitous bullock cart as a principal means of transportation. An increasing

53 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

number of bus lines had started linking rural and urban areas, and Srinivas writes with
anticipation that ‘it looked as though the day was not far off when Rampura would be a
dormitory of Mysore’ (p. 233). Srinivas’s prediction has turned out to be correct, and further
technological innovations, despite the aggravating side effect of traffic jams, have reduced
the distance from Kodagahalli to Mysore to just one and a half hours or so. Regular buses
between the village and the city have further reduced the structural distance between them.
For the bulk of villagers in Srinivas’s time, Mysore was seen as a faraway, unknown if not
somewhat dangerous place. Srinivas narrates how a villager named Kulle Gowda had created
a job for himself as a broker between the village and urban areas. Villagers entrusted him
with buying city goods such as saris and jewellery, and it was Kulle Gowda who often
accompanied them to Mysore if they wished to see a lawyer, doctor or government official.
He calculated a commission for his work and made quite good money at it (p. 83). Brokers
between the individual and the government still exist, yet someone like Kulle Gowda,
personifying the extension of the rural into the urban, would be harder to conceive today.
Students in Kodagahalli usually take a morning bus to their colleges or Mysore University to
return by the late afternoon bus that arrives home just in time for dinner. The same goes for
those villagers who are employed in Mysore or the other nearby urban centre called Bannur.
Furthermore, housewives know where in Mysore the cheapest goods can be found and which
sari-maker has the reputation for using fine materials for a reasonable price. If they are not
going to the city for purposes of education or employment, many men in the village can tell
you where the best meat is served or in which ‘teashop’ you can drop in for a cheap local
brew. Knowing Mysore has ceased to be an opportunity for a privileged few. It has become a
place next door, a place to roam around in one’s free time, a place from which new ideas and
products filter down to the village.
Nor has agricultural mechanization passed Kodagahalli by. The declining utility of
bullocks may be seen as an indicator of this process. Srinivas writes about the importance to
the villagers of possessing a handsome pair of bullocks. Without bullocks, a man was just a
labourer or a servant placed in the lowest category of the rural economic hierarchy.
Possession of a pair of bullocks brought social prestige and was vital for an individual aiming
to climb the social ladder (p. 131). Possessing a healthy and muscular pair of bullocks still
brings social prestige and status in the village, but now more on the symbolic and ritual level.
At the yearly Sankranti festival, bullocks are gaily decorated, paraded through the village and
forced to walk over burning straw as a form of ritual cleansing, thus acknowledging their
social and ritual significance. A good pair of oxen cost a fortune even today. Some small

54 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

farmers continue to use bullocks for ploughing and to transport materials from their fields to
the village and vice versa. However, they are regularly pushed aside by motorbikes and cars,
which are present in moderate numbers in the village. Also their agricultural utility is
increasingly being taken over by tractors, while trucks arrive empty but leave the village
crammed with sugarcane or other harvested crops.
However, not all technological innovations have been readily adopted by the villagers.
Sanitation is one such area in which age-old habits are not being replaced by modern
technology. Srinivas was told to answer calls of nature under the protective shade of a big
tree about two hundred yards behind his house. This was therefore not meant to be a private
affair, and Srinivas was rather astonished when villagers kept asking him at what time of the
day he went to the toilet. This experience, among others, made him conclude that the human
biological dimension of life characterized rural culture (p. 16). Today some houses have an
attached bathroom, yet most of the men, though less so the women, continue to prefer to
defecate in the open. Early morning at dawn you find men squatting down on either side of
the highway with their lungis lifted up and a piece of cloth covering their heads, sitting side
by side answering the calls of nature, as well as queries and jokes from one another. A World
Bank development project provided free-standing bathrooms to a number of houses in the
village some years ago, yet most of them are not used for their intended purpose but as
storage rooms instead. Indeed, the World Bank has probably overlooked Srinivas’s
conclusion that the biological dimension of human life is an important aspect of rural culture
in the region and treated the village as a model village instead.

The foot of the ritual hierarchy in Kodagahalli

Srinivas devotes a separate section of his book to the Harijans because they were treated
differently from all other caste groups, particularly where ritual matters were concerned. At
the same time, he was clearly aware that his was a high-caste view of the village. At different
points in his monograph he admits his shortcomings in not having built enough rapport with
the Harijans and Muslims of the village (pp. 49, 319), a lack he regrets but could not avoid, as
he needed to preserve cordial relations with the headman and other high-caste villagers to
ensure a smooth stay in the village (p. 49).
The headman may have been a source of technological innovation in the village. He
was a conservative in social and religious matters and vehemently disapproved of Srinivas
when the latter, upon being asked by the headman whether he thought Harijans should be
allowed inside temples, replied in the affirmative (p. 65). Their eating of beef alone, the

55 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

headman argued, was already reason enough for excluding them from temples (p. 65). Since
the Mysore Government had passed the Mysore Temple Entry Authorization Act in 1948,
which legally granted Harijans access to any temple (p. 200), this was not just a random
discussion: the headman’s reaction may have reflected a widespread feeling of anxiety among
upper-caste individuals.
Despised yet vital was how Srinivas saw the position of Harijans in the village. An aura
of ascribed pollution floated around them, which made even their physical nearness
inauspicious for the higher castes. From an economic point of view, their contribution to the
village economy was important, if not crucial. Harijans provided an abundant supply of
agricultural labour, while in the off-season they were employed in carrying out canal and
road repairs and all other off-season chores (p. 199). Furthermore, they performed certain
essential services during festivals such as whitewashing the outer face of the temple walls,
beating the drum and removing the leaves on which the villagers had dined (p. 198). Their
economic significance notwithstanding, it was their perceived polluted being that largely
structured their movements in the village. Their polluting touch had to be controlled, which
resulted in restrictions and prohibitions being placed upon them (p. 186).
Nor can the Muslim community in the village be excluded from this discussion.
Srinivas notes how relations between Muslims and Hindus were intimate if not occasionally
so close that Srinivas wondered how much Hinduism had gone into them (p. 204). Most of
the Muslims were landless and made a living out of trade, which made them dependent on
their primarily Hindu customers (p. 205). Not all was tranquil between them, however.
Muslims were criticized for their indifference to pollution because of their willingness to visit
the Harijan ward (p. 207). Although relations between individual Muslims and Hindus were
ones of trust, relations between them as collective groups were occasionally marked by
suspicion in light of the Indo-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir and the Indian army marching
into the princely state of Hyderabad (p. 210).
Their separate Muslim identity was, and still is, partly reproduced by the enrolment of
all Muslim children in the small Urdu primary school in the village. The right of Muslims to
be taught in Urdu is recognized by the government, yet Srinivas notes that resources for such
schools were often too meagre to provide satisfactory teaching. In 1948 the Urdu school had
fewer than thirty children and only one teacher (p. 250). These days the number of teachers
has doubled, from one to two, yet with classes one to five all taught at the same time in the
same room, it is no secret that the quality of education is lower than in the general primary
school in the village. The village Muslim community is aware of this, yet providing their

56 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

children with Urdu education is prioritised, even if that implies their children receiving a
relatively lower standard of primary education. The location of the Urdu school, at the end of
the Harijan ward, appears symbolic of their ritual status in the village. They are categorized
as a caste, well below the Shudra artisan castes yet above the Harijans. The Muslims in the
village seem to occupy a non-existent category in the all-India varna system, yet this is not
something the villagers seem to be worried about. Jati hierarchies are sufficiently localized
and flexible to incorporate any group, be they Hindu or non-Hindu. Srinivas’s observation
that the distinction between Muslims and Hindus is occasionally blurred holds true still today.
When, during our brief farewell ceremony, a Hindu devotional song was performed, no
villager was surprised that the singer was actually a Muslim. He was acknowledged as the
best singer in the village, and this was, at least on this occasion, more important than his
Muslim background. On the whole it seems that the mutual cordial relations noted by
Srinivas may have declined somewhat. Though our time in the village was not long enough to
make a profound judgment, on several occasions we heard Hindus talking in a negative, if not
insulting terms about Muslims, we heard Hindu peasants saying that they do not appreciate
their children hanging around with Muslim children, and we witnessed a Muslim boy being
chased away by a Hindu peasant for playing in front of his house, whereas he did not object
to a group of Hindu boys doing the same.
On the whole, Srinivas describes inter-caste relations in the village as cooperative, if
not friendly (p. 245). Although we are not in a position to dispute his claim, the life-histories
of elderly Harijans made us wonder whether the phrase ‘cooperative relations’ was not a
euphemism for the practice of the higher castes in enforcing docility upon Harijans. Now in
his eighties, Ramanma was a young man in the late 1940s. Like many other Harijans, he
worked as a jita servant4 for a high-caste patron. For most of the time he was employed in the
fields, but he also narrated how he had to clean his master’s house, take care of the buffaloes,
collect firewood and perform all other sorts of chores. Ramanma remembers the working
conditions as harsh and recalls how he was beaten when he did not complete his allotted tasks
in time. It was his patron’s duty to give him food, yet it was usually ‘yesterday’s food’, and
                                                             
4
Srinivas defines jita servants as having a ‘contractual’ servantship. ‘Under it a poor man contracts to serve a
wealthier man for one to three years. The terms of the service, including the wages to be paid by the master, are
usually reduced to writing. His master advances, at the beginning of the service, a certain sum of money to the
servant or his guardian and this is worked off by the servant. […] Frequently, before the period of the service
runs out, the servant or his guardian borrows another sum of money and thus prolongs the service. Formerly it
was not unknown for a man to spend all his working life between ten and seventy years of age in the service of
one master’ (p. 13).

57 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

the portions bore no relationship to the drudgery of his labour. It is fair to say, however, that
Srinivas was aware of the depressed working conditions of many Harijan jita servants: ‘both
Nachcha and I woke up to the headman giving instructions in the raspy tone reserved for
them. Occasionally there was a burst of abuse including the usual obscenities’ (p. 59); ‘I
could not help watching how they were being treated and the more I watched the more I
realized how wretched their condition was’ (p. 60). Turning our conversation to rules of
purity and pollution, Ramanma calls to mind how he was obliged to squat with his head
bowed almost to the ground in front of his patron. Furthermore, he was not allowed to wear
sandals, was compelled to wear black clothes only, and was not allowed to use Gudi Street,
the main road in the village. Reflecting back, Ramanma told us that, although untouchability
was still an everyday reality in the village, changes for the better had taken place, and Harijan
youngsters today, he felt, enjoyed certain freedoms which were beyond the imagination of
their grandparents half a century ago.

Pressures for change, forces of continuity

Srinivas notes how the potential for radical change was building up in the late 1940s (p. 233),
and not infrequently Harijans were the subjects of those changes. With the introduction of the
adult franchise, politicians started to see Harijans as vote-banks, and voices for caste-equality
grew louder. Progressive reformers were urging Harijans to refuse to remove the carcasses of
dead animals, not to beat the drums during festivals and not to perform any other degrading
tasks (p. 201). The by now independent government of India judged caste discrimination to
be a problem, and efforts were made not only to abolish untouchability, but also to facilitate
Harijans in improving their often poor economic conditions. These ideological changes,
which manifested themselves in pro-Harijan policies on the part of the government,
percolated all the way down to Rampura, but they were resented by upper-caste villagers,
who felt their dominant position being threatened. Srinivas narrates how the headman
manipulated a government scheme directed at the Harijans. The scheme was intended to fund
Harijans in replacing their thatched roofs with tiles, and the budget was to be disbursed
through the headman. Instead of providing the necessary budget at one go, however, the
headman distributed only tiny sums of money at a time, which the Harijans used for their
most pressing needs, and in a few instances for toddy (a local alcoholic brew). The
government scheme did not deliver, and Srinivas reports the talk among the villagers that the
Harijans had misused the money (p. 255). Caste foundations were seen as being shaken and

58 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

harbingers of change as abounding, yet the proposed reforms had not quite materialized in the
village.
Pro-Harijan legislation and voluminous government schemes have continued ever
since, yet legislative changes and public opinion on the state level still seem far ahead of the
everyday practices and ideas held by most villagers in Kodagahalli. Upper-caste villagers,
particularly the educated ones, are quick to assert that untouchability has retreated somewhat
into the distant past. They explain it as something which took place in earlier times but which
has been eradicated by the advancement of education and modernisation. A number of
college students belonging to the locally dominant Vokkaliga Gowda caste supported their
claim that this was an untouchable-free village by offering to assist us in collecting our
census data from the Harijan ward, and, indeed, they did not seem to have any reluctance to
enter lower-caste houses. This does mark a significant shift from earlier times, of which
Srinivas writes that upper-caste villagers rarely if ever visited the Harijan ward, but rather
used Muslim mediators if an important message, usually a call for labourers, needed to be
conveyed there (p. 208). However, the fact that upper-caste individuals may today enter
lower-caste houses should not come as too great a surprise because what was not possible in
the past and still is largely not so even today is the entry of the lower castes into the houses,
and even the tea shops, of the upper castes. If upper-caste members did not enter the houses
of the Harijans, as Srinivas notes, it was not due to any restriction but was a choice they
exercised. Srinivas’s comment on the use of Muslim mediators thus seems to reflect a
Brahmanical concern. Some visible changes notwithstanding, in more general terms there
seems to be a disjuncture between public opinion as expressed and daily practice in the
village. Most villagers condemn untouchability, and indeed it is punishable by law today, yet
restrictions and prohibitions on the lower castes abound to the extent that, if the law were to
be strictly enforced, the majority of the villagers would be convicted for practising it in some
way or the other.
The most visible form of caste discrimination in the village is the spatial separation of
the Harijan ward from those of all the other castes in the village. Located at the opposite side
of the Mysore-Hogur road, the Harijan ward is situated on the outskirts of the village, where
members of higher castes need not be and need not pass through. Indeed, the road seems to
function as a line of pollution manifested in asphalt. True, the question is valid whether
Harijans are still largely living separately together because caste rigidity requires them to do
so or because people cannot easily move house, particularly where an ancestral house is
concerned. Either way, the pervasiveness of spatial exclusion seems to have a rather

59 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

singularizing effect. When evening falls, all Harijans, regardless of their educational
achievements, forms of employment and social status in the village, return to the same colony
from which the stigma of inferiority and pollution has still not been removed.
In addition to the spatial division and the restrictions in the tea shops mentioned earlier,
Harijans are prohibited from using the big tank a short way outside the village settlement or
any well not located inside the Harijan ward. They are only allowed to wash their clothes
downstream so that they do not pollute the higher castes, who wash upstream. Moreover, the
village washerman and barber continue to refuse to render their services to Harijans, so that a
haircut usually means a trip to Bannur, the closest urban centre, were anonymity allows them
inside a barber’s shop. One can occasionally also come across passionate caste orthodoxy in
the village. A Harijan interpreter was once assisting a group of students during a village
census, but when they approached a house which obviously belonged to an upper-caste
family, he insisted on waiting outside on the veranda. The students went inside and left after
obtaining their data, followed by the Harijan interpreter. Soon afterwards a lady marched out
of the house with a bucket of water in order to purify the exact spot on the veranda where the
Harijan had squatted. That caste rigidity is not merely in the past was also pointed out by the
only Harijan shopkeeper in the village. Describing his business, he sadly admitted that his
clientele was rather small: ‘higher castes only occasionally buy some beedies (tobacco
wrapped in leaves for smoking) here, but for all their other necessities they turn to shops
owned by upper-caste villagers’. Yet another observation concerns the secondary school in
the village. The headmaster claims that as soon as students enter the school compound they
shed their caste identity and become equals. A look at the school register, however, revealed
that two colours of pen are used to register the pupils: red for Harijans and blue for all others.
The headmaster explained that the names of Harijan students need to be marked so that
educational officials visiting the school can easily count the number of Harijans enrolled
there and dispense grants meant for them. Although his explanation sounds practical enough,
one should not forget that discrimination starts with identification and with openly marking
the names of Harijan pupils, even though it is supposedly meant for their own benefit.
Significant continuities notwithstanding, some tangible changes in social relations seem
to have taken place in the village. However, Harijan ‘uplift’ movements are patchy and affect
individuals rather than the caste as a whole. The Indian Constitution treats all Harijans
equally and has allocated benefits and reservations to them as a group. However, they have
not all been able to grasp the benefits assigned to them. This is perhaps nothing unusual, as
achievements are made by individuals, and a community receives its socio-economic status

60 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

depending on the number of such achieving individuals. Furthermore, not every member of a
caste can benefit equally because people always outnumber the available resources, and the
benefits allocated to a Scheduled Caste are no exception. What remains at the village level is
that, although a number of Harijan individuals have been able to improve their social-
economic status, as whole castes Harijans are still far behind their upper-caste counterparts.
This is an important observation to keep in mind when discussing the multiple changes that
may nonetheless have taken place at the lowest ritual layer of the village.
When looking at the question of Harijans and literacy, a trend is found in the village in
which Harijan grandparents are illiterate, Harijan parents finished primary school and some
of them a few classes higher, while a rather large number of the present generation have
passed the SSLC (Secondary School Leaving Certificate) and have been, or presently are,
enrolled in colleges or universities. Srinivas writes that prior to 1948 Rampura had produced
four graduates (p. 250). Today a couple of dozen are enrolled in higher educational institutes,
among them a sizeable number of Harijans. This boom in education, combined with
reservation policies and other acts of positive discrimination, has resulted in a rising number
of Kodagahalli Harijans holding government jobs, something largely reserved for the higher
castes in earlier times. However, this does not necessarily mean that they hold high and
influential posts. Most of them are employed in petty jobs at the lower levels of the
bureaucracy. Nevertheless Srinivas was confident enough to write that Harijans were chiefly
landless labourers (p. 169), whereas today we find them holding diverse jobs such as train
conductors, teachers, forest rangers, office clerks and various other blue collar jobs, although
a large number continue to hire themselves out as agricultural labourers as well.
Some Harijans in the village have visibly fared well. Having benefitted from the jobs
and government schemes on offer to them, they have been able to use their newly earned
financial resources in the acquisition of land. Hence the distinction between the upper castes
as landowners and lower castes as landless labourers, noted by Srinivas, has become
somewhat blurred, and occasionally even turned upside down. One or two Harijan families
have even acquired more land than they can cultivate themselves, and during the agricultural
peak season they need to employ people to get the work done. Labourers have to be hired,
and these are not necessarily fellow Harijans but may include upper-caste individuals,
something that would have been practically unheard of in Srinivas’s time. This was not only
because Harijans were predominantly landless, but also because it was considered natural that
Harijans labour for the upper castes in what usually took the form of patron-client

61 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

relationships5 (p. 216), and certainly not the other way around. Nonetheless this changing
economic reality does not entail the the blurring of caste boundaries as such. Although it is
customary for a landowner to provide lunch for his employees, an upper-caste person
working for a lower-caste one will generally not accept food from the latter but rather bring
some ‘clean’ packed food from home. Indeed, the mingling of economic forces with the caste
system is not to be equated with a proportional decrease in notions of purity and pollution.
Economic changes may not parallel changing perceptions of purity and pollution, yet
socio-economic upward movement does not come in isolation. Rather, it provides achieving
lower-caste individuals with proportionally more social space and prestige than those of their
caste fellows who have remained largely impoverished. Srinivas already had this in mind
when he wrote that landownership and wealth could occasionally mitigate if not overcome
the effects of birth in a low caste (p. 111). Revanna, a Harijan college graduate, may illustrate
the point Srinivas made, and we wish to follow it up here.
Having graduated, with Russian language as his major, Revanna is not only among the
most highly educated Harijans, he also belongs to the upper intellectual layer of the village as
a whole. With his family possessing a few acres of land and living in a concrete, well-
furnished house, Revanna’s educational achievements seem to match his economic position
in the village. At the time of our field research he happened to be jobless, yet he was busy
commuting back and forth to Mysore to apply for various government jobs and was quite
confident that it would not take him long to find one. Despite his low inborn caste status,
Revanna seems to enjoy a considerable amount of recognition and respect in the village, and
his movements are not confined to the Harijan ward alone. He seems to be well acquainted
with many villagers and in good standing with the headman, while he also maintains multiple
inter-caste friendships. These observations are particularly relevant when one sees the
opposite happening with ‘un-achieving Harijans’. They do not enjoy the same social
freedoms as are granted to Revanna, and Harijans employed as agricultural labourers largely
move between the fields and the Harijan ward alone, hardly ever crossing over to the main
village. Arguing that Harijans are restricted from entering the main village might perhaps be
rather strong a statement, as the higher castes claim that Harijans are not prohibited from

                                                             
5
Patron-client relations emerged out of the possession of differential rights in land, and although the client was
inferior if not often subordinate to his patron, the latter did have obligations towards his clients. As Srinivas put
it, ‘a big patron attracted clients as a magnet attracted iron filings. The poor and the weak felt unsafe without a
patron. The latter provided a source of livelihood as well as a sense of security. Forces in the local culture were
such as to encourage the weak to seek protection from the strong’ (p. 217).

62 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

doing so. Harijans may nonetheless hesitate to enter the main village because as a self-
imposed restriction, a remnant of years of suppression.
A conclusion one may draw from the above is that Harijans are, contrary to Srinivas’s
observations in 1948, by no means homogeneous. Of course internal differences have always
existed, yet these diversities were largely ignored or did not make any sense from the point of
view of the upper castes, for whom the Harijans were, so to speak, principally a uniform
labour force. This perception seems to have altered, and although as a caste group the latter
are ritually looked down upon, room for individual recognition and upward socio-economic
movement has opened up. For the achieving Harijans themselves this may not all be a matter
of satisfaction, and they may actually find themselves in an ambivalent situation, but being
the most educated, they may also be the most critical of caste practices. A number of them
have not only abandoned beef-eating and drinking toddy, they are also urging their caste-
fellows to do so, and they may blame them for ‘backwardness’ and ‘stubbornness’ when their
pleas are not followed. Srinivas’s concept of sanskritization applies here, and it is ambitious
Harijans who attempt to set this process in motion. They may also resist existing caste
practices by, for example, refusing to drink tea in one of the teashops or by using razors to
shave themselves rather than travelling to the next urban centre to have it done for them. This
is not the whole story, however, and we heard Harijans accusing the higher castes, though
covertly, for being hypocrites by condemning Harijans for their habits of eating beef and pork
and for drinking alcohol, while they themselves are supposedly at least as fond of meat, not to
speak of their taste for alcohol. We noticed this when Raghunath, a dominant caste member
living in front of the Rama temple and working in the alcohol factory in the village, actually
drank alcohol manufactured in the factory every evening and sometimes even during the day
sitting at his home and in full view of his wife and daughter. However, most upper-caste
individuals, some Harijans argued, do not dare to drink or eat forbidden meat in the village,
but travel to Mysore where they can satisfy their needs in anonymity. Being progressive,
critical and eager to move upwards, achieving Harijans may find themselves in an ‘in-
between situation’. By criticizing, if not at times accusing, their own caste fellows, they may
have disentangled themselves somewhat from their caste roots. Nonetheless, although upper-
caste villagers may be quite willing to make some concessions to them here and there, they
are still not quite ready to accept them on a totally equal footing.

63 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

Encapsulated change
Changes have taken place in the village, and, as mentioned above, certain technical
innovations which the villagers in Srinivas’s time considered modern are today thought of as
traditional. Furthermore, caste restrictions seem to have loosened, and an individual’s
potential and achievements are bound less by his caste background today than they were
during the late 1940s. On the whole, however, it was not the changes that struck us so much
as the striking continuities, though some of them have been remapped between Srinivas’s
description of the village and ‘our’ village sixty years later. Local hierarchies and notions of
purity, pollution and untouchability may now be reproduced differently, but they continue to
shape the social landscape of the village. Nevertheless the reproduction of social boundaries
today might not be as obvious and self-evident as it was in earlier times, when Srinivas could
generalise the Harijans as impoverished, landless and generally immobile. Today the Harijans
in Kodagahalli can no longer be seen as a homogeneous group: mass education, reservation
policies and other government schemes have percolated down to the village, yet their effects
are patchy, and only a privileged few have been able to grasp some of the benefits assigned to
them as a group. Nonetheless individual achievements and merits can, to a certain extent,
overcome one’s birth in a low caste, and a number of achieving Harijans enjoy proportionally
more social freedom and status in the village than their uneducated caste fellows
Yet socio-economic upward movement does not amount to the total abolition of caste
practices. There seems to be a disjuncture between the public rhetoric of politicians and
government officials, as well as of the villagers themselves, in which untouchability is
condemned, and the everyday practices by which Kodagahalli Harijans still remain excluded
from certain social spaces. It seems that the caste system, at least on the village level, has to
a certain extent been able to absorb wider changes within Indian society. Changes in both the
economic and social spheres are affecting the village, yet the path chosen, or more accurately
perhaps the path into which these changes are being directed by the upper castes, is rather a
long one. Being ranked at the foot of the ritual hierarchy in the village, the Harijans are not in
a position to control the changes they desire themselves but still seem to be largely dependent
on the social space that has been granted to them by higher castes. It may therefore take
another few generations or more before the forces of ritual exclusion become negligible, or at
least less effective, in governing the destinies of Harijans in the social and ritual structure of
the village. Although greater social freedom has been granted to the Harijans of Kodagahalli,
the changes taking place are encapsulated in an upper-caste framework that still does not

64 
 
Wouters/Subba, Srinivas
 

enable them to change their ritual position in accordance with their educational, economic
and political achievements.

Acknowledgments
We would like to express our gratitude to the anthropology students of the North-Eastern Hill
University who formed part of this project and provided us with their data. We are also indebted to the
Department of Anthropology, Mysore University, and the southern regional office of the
Anthropological Survey of India for facilitating our stay in the village. We would also like to thank
the villagers of Kodagahalli for their hospitality and patience in answering our many queries. It goes
without saying that Srinivas’s outstanding insights inspired us to undertake this project.

Bibliography

Carstairs, G.M. 1983. Death of a witch: a village in north India 1950-81, London: Hutchinson.

Epstein, T.S. 1978. Re-surveys and re-studies of rural societies, in Biplab Dasgupta (ed.), Village
studies in the third world, Delhi: Hindustan Publication Corporation, pp. 127-31.

Gowloog, R.R. 1995. Lingthem revisited, New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications.

Sarana, G. 1973. Studying change anthropologically, in K. S. Mathur et al. (eds.), Studies in social
change, Lucknow: Ethnographic & Folk Culture Society, pp. 11-23.

Srinivas, M.N. 1976. The remembered village, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Subba, T. B. 2009. Group fieldwork: revisiting an old anthropological practice in India, in Peter
Berger et al. (eds.), Fieldwork: social realities in anthropological perspectives, Berlin: Weissensee
Verlag, pp. 487-506.

65