Customer Reviews

The Remembered Village (Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies, Uc Berkeley)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Neither anthropologists nor men come much better than M.N. Srinivas, who passed away not long ago. One of the first Indians to write on the ethnography of his own country, he studied in England with both Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard, now deities in the hagiography of Anthropology. Back in 1948, Srinivas studied a village in what was then Mysore state, investigating everything he could, from agriculture to caste relationships, from religion to village politics. It was the classic style of field study. In succeeding years, Srinivas published a large number of important articles and several books, including "Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India", "Caste in Modern India and other essays" and "Social Change in Modern India". He never actually got around to writing up his old village study. In 1970, he was a fellow at Berkeley and finally was about to finish the work. An arsonist burned his office and all three copies of the work. THE REMEMBERED VILLAGE, then, is literally "remembered" because the bulk of the work went up in flames, though some notes were saved and the original data was in Delhi. What emerges is a wonderful portrait of an Indian anthropologist's time in the field, his relationship with the various villagers, and a lovingly detailed picture of the village itself, covering all the usual aspects of an anthropological study. Perhaps adversity and misfortune combined to produce a greater work. As an anthropologist who has worked on India for many years and as a person who was impressed with the warmth and humanity of Prof. Srinivas (though I only met him briefly many years ago in Australia), I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know the feel, the look, and the inner workings of an Indian village back in the days before the Green Revolution, television, and globalisation. This is Anthropology without jargon, India from the inside.

I had never heard of M.N.Srinivas before seeing
this book, since I am an not a "humanities" person,
and Srinivas is apparently India's most distinguished
anthropologist, well-known mostly in academic circles.
The book is an account of life in Rampura, a village near
Mysore in South India in the year 1948: it describes in detail
people, customs and relationships in this village of
about 1500 people. It reads like a long, engrossing
story, with only occasional lapses into academic language.

Srinivas spent the year of 1948 doing "field work" in Rampura,
a village about 20 miles from Mysore. His goal was to research
and document village life from a social anthropologist's point
of view. Srinivas himself is a well-off, progressive Brahmin
from the big town (Mysore) and shares almost nothing with
the villagers. He views the village and its customs
with the inquisitive curiosity of an outsider -- which makes
his perspective valuable for the modern reader. However, Srinivas'
perspective and sympathies are uniquely Indian, and cannot be
duplicated by Western researchers writing on the same subject.

After spending the entire year living among the villagers,
eating, sleeping and going to the toilet like them, he
establishes deep bonds with the village, which lead on to
repeated visits in later years. Throughout the book emerge
the simplicity and innocence of the villagers, alongside
their often contradictory earthy and religious sides.
Though Srinivas occasionally provides his own perspectives, he
does not allow these to interfere with the raw description
of his days, at once hilarious and touching, in the remembered
village.

The book has too many important insights into Indian village life
to list. You will have to read it yourself to enjoy them.
People who understand Kannada will enjoy this book even more
because they may be able to relate to some of the typical
village expressions (sometimes written alongside in parantheses).
However, the book is by no means accessible to the reader from
Karnataka alone. In fact, it manages a unique balance between
genericity and specificity. It would have been even nicer if
Srinivas had published some of the very many photographs he
reports he took of the village and the villagers; one hopes
that future editions of this book will try and include them.

A book such as this can only become more valuable with the
passage of time. It is a must-read for the modern Indian
reader, especially the urban reader. It will make Indians
understand better the parts of their culture which have
roots in the villages. I wish such books existed about
all regions in all parts of the world: it is the perfect
kind of book to read about a culture one doesn't fully
understand -- even one's own.

I read in the previous review that Srinivas is India's most distinguished anthropologist, and I would like to say that he most emphatically is NOT. Try Appadurai.

Srinivas is guilty of essentializing and exoticizing village life all throughout the book. He's clearly in search of the 'other', and not focused nearly enough on trying to achieve an unbiased, academic approach to interpreting culture. One example: "I looked about for villages which satisfied certain other criteria such as a multiplicity of castes, which grew rice as a major crop, were small enough to be studied by a single person, and finally, were not too 'progressive' or 'modern'....I had a feeling that the growing of rice would make my village more 'Asian' than it would be without rice...I wanted my village to be away from the main road, and to be without electricity and piped water."

Clearly, he's in search of an 'untouched primitive', and anyone who has spent even a day in India knows that such a person is nonexistent, and was not existent, even at the time his research was conducted. Furthermore, he lost all of his research findings when his office burnt down, so he wrote the entire ethnography from memory. It may be a good study of memory for a curious psychologist, but not for someone interested in learning about a culture.

However, I still recommend that all anthropology students buy it, if only to learn how one should NOT do ethnography. It is somewhat interesting, and if you have studied some anthropology you will probably be able to get around the generalizations and sweeping statements, and suck out some information.