The Transformation of Authority in Rural India

Abstract

Who or what constitutes the dominant power and/or authority in village India today? This sort of question is hardly ever amenable to any generally agreed answer for any society, and the Indian case is no exception. But to say this is already to have made a comment on the main stream of post-independence scholarship on agrarian India. Very soon after independence an academic orthodoxy hardened as to the character of agrarian social structure and power. The argument of this paper is that this orthodoxy is no longer valid and that it obscures what is a profound transformation in the character of agrarian India.

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