In the time of agrarian crisis and movement, Remembering India’s Villages centralises the rural India—examining its stubborn past and dynamic present.
Departing from the myth of little republics, it sees villages in cinema, development discourses, and debates among the founders of modern India like Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore and Ambedkar. Empirical research, multidisciplinary perspective, and cross-cultural insights are useful aids in this book toward understanding the reality of the rural that comprises structural anomalies and social possibilities. The book remembers India’s villages under the trope of reconstitution rather than disappearance. The book adds to the renewed interest in village studies, rural sociology, development studies, and intellectual history.
This book is co-published with Aakar Books. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)
Introduction
1. Imagination of Village: A Tri-logue with Gandhi, Tagore and Ambedkar
Dev Nath Pathak
2. What If, the ‘Rural’ is the Future; and Not the Past?
Bhavya Chitranshi and Anup Dhar
3. Rural Frames: Bollywood Imagination of Village India
Priyasha Kaul
4. Village Studies and Possibilities of ‘Multispecies’ Ethnography
Ishita Dey
5. Violence on Dalits in Village India: Metaphors, Marginalities and the ‘Problem of Exit’
Bidhan Chandra Dash
6. Traditional Modernity: Class, Caste and Gender in Occupational Patterns in Rural Uttar Pradesh
Ishita Mehrotra
7. Beyond Sadak, Bijli and Pani: Discourses of Infrastructural Power in Today’s Rural India
Anjana John
8. Sammamma’s Seeds: The Price She Pays
Shalini Bhutani
9. From Polyvalent Knowledge to Monovalent Knowledge: A Social Constructivist Account of
Agricultural Knowledge Transition in a Village in Telangana
Chandri Raghava Reddy and Prasanth Kumar Munnangi
10. From Grain to Gain: Mapping the Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Agribusiness in a Village of Uttarakhand
Santosh K. Singh
11. Infrastructural Development in Rural Punjab: Understanding Social Impacts of Planned Interventions on the Stakeholders
Sukhwant Sidhu
Contributors
Biography
Santosh K. Singh, PhD (JNU) is currently a faculty in the Sociology programme and Dean, School of Liberal Studies at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi, India.
