Rethinking indian villages: a sociological appraisal

Community has been generally associated with those modes of social organization that are considered fundamental to traditional Indian society like jati, religion, village, panchayat etc. The primary aim here is to re-think and re-present one such category i.e. the conventional constructs of “village community” with the belief that presently, after around half a century of India’s Republic, it is conceived as disharmonic, fractured, contested, contradictory and continually in flux. By reviewing various village studies, it is realized here that Indian village could not retain its originality owing to various external forces like Colonial rule, State intervention and LPG, thus leading to structural transformation in the life style of village India. These agents were seemed as having positive and negative juxtapositions on simple rural society and thus leading to complexity of images and issues in contemporary village setting. Few glimpses of emerging picture of modern Indian village have also been referred in the paper.