Remembering India S Villages

In the time of agrarian crisis and movement, Remembering India’s Villages centralises the rural India—examining its stubborn past and dynamic present. Departing from the myth of little republics, it sees villages in cinema, development discourses, and debates among the founders of modern India like Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore and Ambedkar. Empirical research, multidisciplinary perspective, and cross-cultural insights are useful aids in this book toward understanding the reality of the rural that comprises structural anomalies and social possibilities. The book remembers India’s villages under the trope of reconstitution rather than disappearance. The book adds to the renewed interest in village studies, rural sociology, development studies, and intellectual history. This book is co-published with Aakar Books. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

In the time of agrarian crisis and movement, Remembering India's Villages centralises the rural India--examining its stubborn past and dynamic present. Departing from the myth of little republics, it sees villages in cinema, development discourses, and debates among the founders of modern India like Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore and Ambedkar. Empirical research, multidisciplinary perspective, and cross-cultural insights are useful aids in this book toward understanding the reality of the rural that comprises structural anomalies and social possibilities. The book remembers India's villages under the trope of reconstitution rather than disappearance. The book adds to the renewed interest in village studies, rural sociology, development studies, and intellectual history. This book is co-published with Aakar Books. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

"The author has managed to combine successfully the professional approach of an anthropologist with that of a novelist to the description of an Indian village community. . . .Srinivas has made a virtue out of the misfortune of losing all his field notes: The Remembered Village is a piece of art which is bound to become a classic of Indian ethnography."--T. Scarlett Epstein, Times Higher Education Supplement "The real virtue of this most recent contribution by Dr. Srinivas is the consistently human, humane, and humanistic tone oft he observations and of the narration; the simple, straightforward style in which it is written; and the richness of anecdotal materials. . . . He writes modestly as a wise and knowledgeable man. He restores faith in the best tradition of ethnography. Without being popular, in the pejorative sense, it is a book any uninitiated reader can read with pleasure and enlightenment."--Cora Du Bois, Asian Student "Few accounts of village life give one the sense of coming to know, of vicariously sharing in, the lives of real villagers that this book conveys. . . . The work is holistic in the best anthropological manner; the principal aspects of Rampura life are lucidly sketched and the interrelations among them are cogently considered. . . . our collective knowledge and its practical relevance become enhanced."--David G. Mandelbaum, Economic and Political Weekly "[Srinivas] has described and analyzed life in Rampura in the late 1940s with charm and insight. His book is enjoyable as well as illuminating. . . . In addition to the rich detail of village life and of a number of individual villagers, Srinivas gives us valuable insights into the nature of ethnographic research. He relates how he came to study this particular village. He tells us how he got established in the village, and describes vividly his living quarters. . . . He describes, at various places throughout the book, his reactions to the villagers and his perceptions of their reactions to him. He freely admits his own negative reactions to certain things and certain behavior. He discusses the factors that could and did bias his research. . . . illuminate[s] both the problems and the rewards of the ethnographer. . . . must reading."--Robert H. Lauer, Sociology: Reviews of New Books

This book revisits South Indian Christian communities that were studied in 1959 and written about in Village Christians and Hindu Culture (1968). In 1959 the future of these village congregations was uncertain. Would they grow through conversions or slowly dissolve into the larger Hindu society around them? John Carman and Chilkuri Vasantha Rao s carefully gathered research fifty years later reveals both the decline of many older congregations and the surprising emergence of new Pentecostal and Baptist churches that emphasize the healing power of Christ. Significantly, the new congregations largely cut across caste lines, including both high castes and outcastes (Dalits). Carman and Vasantha Rao pay particular attention to the social, political, and religious environment of these Indian village Christians, including their adaptation of indigenous Hindu practices into their Christian faith and observances.

This book brings together Marxian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that the hegemonic form of global capital is founded on the foreclosure of class and world of the third. The authors counterpose the world of the third to the mainstream notion of the third world, seen as a lacking other in desperate need of aid and development. Thus, for them, the hegemonic form of global capital is engendered through the foregrounding of the poor, victim third world and the foreclosure of the non-capitalist world of the third. Building on what they characterize as an ab-original reading of Marxian historical materialism and the Lacanian real, the authors seek to conceptualize a counter-hegemonic revolutionary subject as a basis for postcapitalist alternatives to the hegemonic form of global capital.