Images of the village community: a study in Anglo-Indian Ideology

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Abstract
To a degree exceptional even in that age of historical recovery and sociological discovery, awareness of the village community was a creation of the later nineteenth century. With due allowance for the contribution of the German historical school, it was—within the English-speaking world—an Anglo-Indian creation. In England, save for a handful of ‘survivals’, the village community was a purely historical phenomenon, studied by historians; but in India it was an omnipresent reality, utilized by revenue officials in assessing and collecting the land revenue. From the efforts of these groups—historians and revenue officials—to comprehend substantially similar institutions two intellectual traditions derived. Originating in complete independence of one another, both traditions converged in the third quarter of the nineteenth century for a brief, intense, period of cross-fertilization—only to separate as totally again. What made their convergence possible was the rising popularity of evolution and ‘comparative method’—which insisted on the essential identity of the defunct English village community and the living Indian village, separate in space and time, but co-existent in the same phase of social evolution. Then disillusion with unilinear evolutionary schemes and the exhaustion of comparative method—its apparent inability to produce any fresh discovery—drove them apart.

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