T The essays collected together in this volume by the Government of West Bengal appeared originally in The Economic Weekly October 1951 and May 1954. The enthusiastic welcome accorded to them by anthropologists, sociologists, welfare workers, planners and others has been responsible for their re-appearance here. The willingness of the Government of West Bengal to publish them in book form is yet another recognition of the usefulness of the articles. The contributors feel gratified that their slight effort should have met with such a welcome. Their grateful thanks are due to the Government of West Bengal for their enterprise in undertaking to publish them in a book.
It is necessary to stress the fact that these essays were written for laymen. The contributors have tried to make their articles readable, and to this end technical terms have been avoided as far as possible. It is also necessary to add that the essays are tentative in the extremes. Some of them were written after three or four months in the field, and while the field-work was still in progress. Field-work is a whole-time and consuming activity, and one is often under the spell of some fact or theory which facts which are collected in the latter half of one's stay are much fuller and more accurate than those collected in the first half. Frequently they modify, and occasionally even contradict, the facts collected in the first few weeks of one's stay in the field. This has induced two of our contributors, Mr. Bailey' and Mr. Newell, to completely rewrite their essays. The other contributors have allowed their essays to stand more or less as they originally appeared in The Economic Weekly. Prof. D. G. Mandelbaum has chosen to contribute a second essay on an all-India theme which has direct relevance to the work of planners and welfare workers.
While each contributor was invited to write on the social life of the village he had intensively studied he was given the freedom to write on an aspect of it which he either found most interesting or considered important. Villages differ from each other, especially so villages in widely-separated parts of the country For instance, the 'hermit' village of Malana is quite different from Dilwara in Rajasthan, or Kumbapettai in Tanjore, or Hattarahalli in mysore. The physical, social and linguistic isolation of Malana has enabled it to be more or less completely autonomous, and Mr. Rosser understandably concentrates on the manner in which the local forces of law and order, independent of the authority of any government, provincial or central, operate there, while the striking thing about Dilwara is the sudden effect of the abolition of Zamindari, and about Hattarahalli, the effects of nearness to a big and highly industrialised city. The difference between villages cannot all be reduced to the degree of proximity to the forces of urbanization, industrialisation and Westernisation. Each village has a pattern and mode of life which is to some extent unique. Villages next door to each other differ considerably, and this fact is recognised by rural folk. Besides, every contributor has his own special interest, and each essay is the outcome of the contact of a particular mind with a particular field-solution. This is not to deny regional or even all-India uniformities.
The villages described in these essays cover a wide range. Geographically speaking they cover the country between Himachal Pradesh in the north and Tanjore in the south, Rajasthan in the west and West Bengal in the east. There are, however, conspicuous gaps, e.g., Andhra, Maharashtra, Gujrat, and Bihar.
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