This excellent set of essays departs from viewing India’s villages either as eulogized utopias or as complete wastelands. The volume offers very readable essays and opens our eyes to the entanglements of socialities, politics, history and economies that make contemporary village India a vigorous site, straddling past and present. - Radhika Chopra. Formerly Professor of Sociology, University of Delhi



This book is a reminder to those who no longer wish to see the realities of the nation beyond their gated communities and its selective/seductive media-images. Two-thirds of India continues to live in its villages, numbering more than half a million. Covering a wide range of themes, the essays in the volume provide a rich variety of engagements with the emerging and diverse realities of India’s rural lands. - Surinder S Jodhka, Professor of Sociology, Jawaharlal Nehru University



In the time of agrarian crisis and movement, Remembering India’s Villages centralises the wholesomeness of rural India examining its stubborn past and the dynamic present. Departing from the myth of little republics it sees villages in cinema, development discourses, and debates among the founders of modern India like Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore and Ambedkar. Empirical research, multidisciplinary perspective, and cross-cultural insights are useful aids in this book toward understanding the reality of the rural that comprises structural anomalies and social possibilities. The book remembers India’s villages under the trope of reconstitution rather than disappearance.

The book adds to the renewed interest in village studies, rural sociology, development studies, and intellectual history.