RURAL SOCIOLOGY

India has a euphoria for rural society. Our national leaders and great personalities such as Rabindra Nath Tagore, Gandhiji and Prem Chand had a great fascination for villagers. Rural sociologists and anthropologists have spent decades in accumulating data about village life. Whatever may be our status, we are all concerned with the development of our villages. Let us believe in the idiom given by Gandhiji—if our villages prosper, we also prosper, and if our villages go to ruin, who can save us?

The village society, so rich and diverse in its culture, is undergoing tremendous economic and cultural transformation owing to the massive developmental efforts. In our enthusiasm to make our villages self-sufficient and link them with a wider society at regional and national levels, we should be intelligent enough to understand thoroughly the rural society.

The present work contains the generalizations of the empirical findings in the form of evaluation and analysis given by sociologists. These conceptual abstractions would help students, trainees, agriculturists, social workers, NGOs, planners and politicians develop an insight for the rural people.