ABSTRACT
India is rapidly becoming urbanized but knowledge and understanding of urban society and its problems remain woefully inadequate. British colonial rulers and their ideologues called India a land of villages. Although they knew of cities all over India, they thought these were overgrown villages compared with the cities in Europe. Indigenous, pre-industrial urbanism was therefore rarely a subject of serious enquiry. Throughout the colonial period the joint family, another structural feature of Indian society, was believed to be of rural origin, therefore stronger in rural than in urban areas, and urbanization was believed to be weakening it. Demographers define urbanization as an increase in the proportion of urban to total population in an area, and attribute this increase mainly to migration of rural population to urban centres. Since the level of grants given by the central government for rural development is usually high, the states are reluctant to recognize a village as a town even after it acquires urban characteristics.
