The Remembered Village

Abstract
This book is about Rampura, a multi-caste village in princely Mysore (now part of Karnataka) as it was in 1948, the year when M. N. Srinivas did fieldwork there. As so often in human affairs, and in scholarly and scientific history, an accident opens the path to a solution; in this case, a fire that destroyed the author's notes led him to write this book. Professor Srinivas's monograph, based on the human mind's extraordinary capacity to bring forth significant details of the past, is a major ethnographic portrait woven from a sea of original data and purposeful seeking after a description of a village in its own terms. The book’s success suggests people should not let accidents and failures destroy one's art. The importance of the its study could not be overstated as caste represented a unique form of social stratification, and millions of human beings had ordered their lives according to it for over two millennia. The book describes Rampura's village life, agriculture, the sexes, relation between castes, classes and factions, and the quality of social relations.

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