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*Please find attached details of three post-doctoral research positions in
the Social Anthropology of South Asia to be based at the Department of
Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS. Full descriptions of these positions can
be found on the SOAS website.
*

*
*

Details of the ESRC-funded project (RES 062-23-3052) are as follows:*
*

*
*

*RURAL CHANGE AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IN POST-COLONIAL INDIA: A
COMPARATIVE 'RESTUDY' OF F.G. BAILEY, ADRIAN C. MAYER AND DAVID F. POCOCK*


The focus of the project is on the changing role of the village in
post-colonial South Asia.

In 1950, the children of newly-independent India were born into a world
where there was no refrigeration, television or internet; there was no
electricity for most. They could expect to live for an average of forty
years. Metalled roads, combustion engines and plastics were rare. India had
yet to go to war with Pakistan, and the IR8 rice seed of the so-called Green
Revolution was over a decade away.

After the Second World War, came a renewed interest in the languages and
cultures of Britain's colonies. In India, there was a particular interest in
villages, as Gandhi's romantic portrayal of the importance of village life
merged with post-colonial paradigms of state welfare provision and
centralised developmental planning. Research funded by the British
government in the 1950s established new standards of fieldwork for social
anthropology, and set the tone for debates that remain very widely taught
and discussed today.

The anthropologists who made the voyage to India documented sophisticated
agrarian society ordered by caste and institutionalised inequality - where
the division of labour mirrored the ritualised and hierarchical exchange
relationships of caste. The accounts published at this time now also form an
unprecedented and intimate historical account of what life was like in rural
India in the years after independence.

Since then, Nehru's socialism, influenced by post-colonial and cold-war
politics, has given way to the forces of (neo)-liberalisation and
globalisation. Various waves of development policy have been unevenly
implemented across the country; political devolution has passed some
responsibility for economic development, social justice and taxation to the
village level; affirmative action ushered in caste-specific and gendered
'reservations'. Land-reforms and new technologies have transformed
agriculture, whilst public health programmes enhanced children's chances of
survival.

This project will 'restudy' three of the villages documented in the 1950s in
order to compare life in village India then with life in village India
today. The original studies were undertaken independently by F.G. Bailey,
Adrian C. Mayer and David F. Pocock (deceased) in the first half of the
1950s. The three went on to have distinguished careers as exponents of the
post-colonial sociology of India. Bailey and Mayer have granted the project
access to their original fieldnotes and are willing to discuss these with
the new researchers.

The villages selected for this study, in Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat
display the legacies of post-colonial development and political policies,
consequences of economic and land reform or consolidation, and effects of
technological and media expansion. They are also sites in which novel and
significant sociological processes are being played out today. In each
location, there has been a growth of grassroots Hindu chauvinist politics.
In Orissa, land rights and tribal identities have become burning issues, as
people have been brought into conflict with transnational corporations and
rapacious extractive industries. Rapid industrialisation in Madhya Pradesh
has brought villagers into wage relations with India's industrial houses. In
Gujarat, the village has become part of the transnational networks and
nostalgic and nationalist politics of migrants in East Africa and UK. Life
in these villages is clearly not the same as it was in the 1950s.

What are the new sociological realities of life? What has happened to the
caste, patron-client and religious systems, segregated gender roles, and
popular religion? What will new fieldwork in places studied more than half a
century ago tell us about the changing role and form of the village? What
new ways of looking at India sociologically might be suggested by research
conducted in the footsteps of the pioneers of the modern discipline? What
methodological innovation will emerge from the comparative use of
anthropological
material as historical data?


Dr Edward Simpson, SOAS

Professor Patricia Jeffery, University of Edinburgh

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