The following three papers were read in a symposium on “The South Asian Village” at the eighth annual meeting of the Far Eastern Association in Philadelphia on April 3,1956. A fourth paper, on “The World View of the Punjabi Villager,” contributed by Miss Zekiye Eglar, is not here included because its publication was committed elsewhere. The Opler, Singh, and Dube papers are based on field research sponsored by the India Program of Cornell University and directed by Professor Opler. Comprehensive reports of this research are now in preparation. Since the application of community studies to the study of complex, historic civilizations is still in an exploratory phase, a few words of explanation about the theoretical problems to which all three papers contribute may be in order. The reader will also find it helpful to refer to the earlier symposium in this journal, “Community Studies in Japan and China” (FEQ, XIV, Nov. 1954).

A Villager in India, besides being a member of a distinguishable local community and interacting with many of its other members, has important ties of a more extensive nature, and participates in practices and understandings characteristic of wider areas. In discussions of the independence, viability and future of the Indian village it may be useful to keep the nature of these ties to the outside in mind and to consider their past history and the present trends in respect to them. So that concrete material may serve as a basis for discussion, data from Senapur, a village of Northcentral India in the Jaunpur district of Uttar Pradesh will be utilized. Senapur, as do all individual communities, presents some unique features, but we know that it is much like other villages of the region and we know that in respect to principal institutions, social structure, and most of the attributes that will be reviewed here it shares much with other villages of North India which have been described in the literature.

The current interest of anthropologists in the scientific study of the rural life of India has been faced from the very beginning with the question of comprehending the meaning of discrete village studies in the context of the universe of Indian society and culture. Various attempts have been made to analyze the social structures and patterns of organization in Indian villages. Many scholars have noted the existence of intra-village factionalism, inter-caste struggles and several other apparently disintegrating features of the village community. Extensive social and religious ties of the villages with the outside and their economic and political dependence on organizations which do not have their roots in the community have also been noted. In the face of such evidence one begins to wonder whether an Indian village can be characterized at all as a functioning social unit distinguishable from others and whether studies of individual villages can help us in understanding India.

Experiments in the field of technological change and rural community development in many underdeveloped areas of the world have brought into sharp focus the importance of cultural factors in the acceptance or rejection of the programs of directed change sponsored by external agencies. There has been a growing realization among rural extension experts and technical assistance workers that even some of the less involved technological or economic innovations have latent cultural and social dimensions that need careful consideration if the success of these programs is to be assured. Detailed case studies of specific action programs have revealed that the secondary and tertiary ramifications of given innovations are of critical significance in determining their ultimate acceptability. With this understanding planners and their staff members no longer approach an underdeveloped community with the naive assumption that it will enthusiastically adopt superior tools and techniques when they are placed within its reach; instead, considerable emphasis is now laid on adapting modern techniques to the culture and values of the community in which the program has to operate.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 constitutes one of the great turning points in Japanese history. Standing as the culminating events of the political struggle which agitated Japan in the years following the forcible “opening” of the country to the Western world, it signaled the end of the Tokugawa hegemony and the establishment of a new central authority under which Japan was to embark upon an era of unprecedented national development. Few episodes in Japanese history have been so voluminously recorded or so thoroughly studied as the Meiji Restoration. The events of the several decades on either side of 1868 have been traced and retraced, and their implications analyzed by succeeding generations of historians both Japanese and Western.

This paper is an analysis of certain aspects of recent Communist thought in China. By “recent” thought is meant that of the last two decades, and in fact this study is concerned essentially with developments from 1937 to 1949. The study is not based on an appraisal of the whole body of Chinese Communist writing in this period, nor even on a representative selection of it, but it does bring together for analysis some very interesting examples of Chinese Communist treatment of problems germane to the Confucian ethical tradition. The analysis thus, perhaps, indicates ways in which the Peking regime in the future may relate its ideology to the great corpus of traditional Chinese thought. My assumption has been that writers of the new regime, at least some of them, show a tendency, in developing the new thought, to incorporate into it, and synthesize with it wherever possible, native Chinese intellectual traditions and doctrines. This traditional intellectual background is often of extraordinary antiquity; but while writers such as Liu Shao-ch'i quote the words of Confucius because this has been the idiom of Chinese philosophy, there has nonetheless been a sophisticated effort to mesh a new Communist ethic with those aspects of Confucian thought which are especially characteristic of the last three or four centuries, and to present Communism as in effect the latest stage of this thought. This has been done deliberately and as part of a well-understood world-wide tactic in Communism to strike local roots and to fit Communist “theory” to national situations.

The Chinese Communist program of szu-hsiang kai-tsao or “thought reform”is unique both as a social experiment and as a laboratory for cross-cultural psychiatric study. Applied to Westerners and Chinese, to professors, students, and peasants, it combines a remarkably widespread dissemination with impressive emotional force and depth.

The second national or parliamentary elections in Burma for the Chamber Deputies were held on April 27, 1956. The Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League, the majority coalition party in power since independence, predominantly socialist in orientation, ran against the Communist-led National Unity Front and several right-wing opposition coalitions. The AFPFL and allied vote did not measure up to pre-election predictions but it again overwhelmingly captured control of the Chamber. The AFPFL, whose president was Prime Minister U Nu, conducted a vigorous campaign, running on its record. During the campaign rally U Nu urged his party to acquaint “the people with our activities.” In fact, he went on to say, “we have not been successful in putting across even one tenth of our accomplishments to the people. In the short period of seven or eight years since independence, the AFPFL have made very remarkable achievements in the fields of education, health, national economy, national unity, public morality and rehabilitation, while at the same time we are busily engaged in the suppression of the general insurrection.” Toward the conclusion of his address he spoke of foreign policy. On this issue he scored the opposition parties as “advocates of one bloc or other [which] will plunge Burma into a holocaust of war as in the case of Indo-China and Korea.” He defined the elements of this policy as “not aligning Burma with any power bloc…establishing friendly relations with all countries…pursuing the cause of world peace…a line of action receiving the approbation of even those persons and those countries which had in past criticised our neutral policy and suspected our motives.”