The Remembered Village (Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies, UC Berkeley)

Neither anthropologists nor men come much better than M.N. Srinivas, who passed away not long ago. One of the first Indians to write on the ethnography of his own country, he studied in England with both Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard, now deities in the hagiography of Anthropology. Back in 1948, Srinivas studied a village in what was then Mysore state, investigating everything he could, from agriculture to caste relationships, from religion to village politics. It was the classic style of field study. In succeeding years, Srinivas published a large number of important articles and several books, including "Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India", "Caste in Modern India and other essays" and "Social Change in Modern India". He never actually got around to writing up his old village study. In 1970, he was a fellow at Berkeley and finally was about to finish the work. An arsonist burned his office and all three copies of the work. THE REMEMBERED VILLAGE, then, is literally "remembered" because the bulk of the work went up in flames, though some notes were saved and the original data was in Delhi. What emerges is a wonderful portrait of an Indian anthropologist's time in the field, his relationship with the various villagers, and a lovingly detailed picture of the village itself, covering all the usual aspects of an anthropological study. Perhaps adversity and misfortune combined to produce a greater work. As an anthropologist who has worked on India for many years and as a person who was impressed with the warmth and humanity of Prof. Srinivas (though I only met him briefly many years ago in Australia), I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know the feel, the look, and the inner workings of an Indian village back in the days before the Green Revolution, television, and globalisation. This is Anthropology without jargon, India from the inside.