Critically examine Dube’s contributions to the study of Indian villages. (UPSC CSE Mains 2019 - Sociology, Paper 2)
Shyama Charan Dube took forward the tradition of field study and structural functional perspective introduced by M.N. Srinivas in studies of village. He provided descriptive exploratory account of village studies.
- He provided interdisciplinary attitude to village studies. He during his study of Shamirpet village collected data from geographical, historical, political perspectives alongside with sociological perspective.
- He gave deductive – positivistic dimension to village studies.
- He divided Indian villages into
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- Single settlement villages
- Nucleated villages
- Dispersed villages
- He advocated that to conduct village study one must examine various units through which village community is organized.
- He gave the idea of village being part of wider social network rather than being autonomous and independence.
- He added dimension of economic structure to village studies. He studied different occupations of people in village.
- He studied religion in village beyond the traditional Hindu angle and found major type of religious services and festivals in village like family ceremonies , village festivals and also focused on Hindu – Muslim interaction during festivals.
- Going beyond the myopic caste based status differentiation in village. Dube identified six factors that contributed to status-differentiation or inequality in the village community.
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- Caste and religion
- Land-ownership
- Wealth
- Position in government service and village organisation
- Age
- Distinctive personality traits.
- He adds to concept of dominant caste by exploring the idea of leadership and dominant individual. He finds political power concentrated in few individuals rather than diffused in caste. In each village there are some dominant individuals who have decisive say in political participation of the members of village.
- He added wider dimension to gender aspects of village studies. He studies women in term of five actives.
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- Domestic work
- Agriculture
- Festivals and ceremonies
- Birth ‘marriage and death
- Village administration and politics
- He established the importance of study of villages for development viewpoint. He pointed out the importance of human elements in community development
Criticisms
- His work has also faced criticism for its limited engagement with issues of caste, class, and gender, which are central to understanding rural inequality and dynamics.
- Critics also argue that his reliance on qualitative methods could sometimes lead to anecdotal evidence and a lack of statistical rigor.
- He is criticized for focusing on structures which reproduced order and change and conflicts are largely undermined.
- His method of participant observation for village studies is criticize for its requirement of acceptability of researcher in village , which can breed to biasness in the viewpoint.
- Dube occasionally romanticized traditional village life and overlooked the agency of rural people in shaping their destinies.
Despite the criticism s. C. Dube provided extensive work on village and he expanded the scope of village studies from the study of ritual and tradition to economic, political and planning and development view point. C. Dube’s work highlighted the complex web of social, economic, and cultural factors that contribute to status differentiation in Indian villages, and these factors continue to be relevant for understanding rural dynamics in India.
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