ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical examination of what recent critics have described as some of the constraints imposed by the “field view” that may have distorted our understanding of Indian society and its structure in many ways – especially that of the village-caste systems, that became the main focus of the “village studies”. The chapter addresses some basic questions such as: what constitutes the field and where are its boundaries? It may be ironic that despite his criticisms of the myth of the self-sufficient village, in his own fieldwork M. N. Srinivas downplayed, if not altogether ignored, the larger economic, social, political and historical contexts within which the village was encapsulated, especially at a momentous juncture of a newly independent India introducing many changes, including fundamental rights, guaranteed in the new constitution. The significance of his constraints becomes clear when his field view is compared to the field views provided by a few scholars who chose to view the field from the perspective of those in the subaltern part of the field. The chapter explains how, while the “field view” made significant contribution to move beyond colonial, orientalist (also Hindu-nationalist) views of Indian society, it also suffered from several flaws from which Indian sociologists following his method are still not fully free.
