The unity and continuity of Indian civilization is both a commonplace and a problem. It is usually taken for granted as a truth too evident to require proof. Yet when scholars begin to inquire into the exact nature of this unity and continuity and into the ways in which it is attained, they quickly encounter many unanswered questions. In a recent paper on “The Content of Cultural Continuity in India,” the American indologist Professor W. Norman Brown concludes that, while there has been a highly developed civilization on the Indian subcontinent since the third millennium в. с. with many elements of cultural continuity, it remains a problem to say what has given this Indian civilization its distinctive character and vitality. He himself does not believe that this question will be answered by making a catalogue of the hundreds of cultural traits (such as the use of the swastika, the sacredness of the pipal tree and of the cow, the joint family and the caste system, ascetism, the doctrines of karma and rebirth and of ahinsā) which persist across large spans of Indian civilization. Even if the historical and ethnic origins of these traits could be traced, this knowledge would not be sufficient, he thinks, to discover the vitalizing principle of Indian civilization. That principle, he suggests, lies in the field of values and attitudes and not in the material productions of arts, literature, and the sciences, or in particular skills, customs, institutions, or forms of thought. He analyzes, as one example of such a basic value, the notion of duty and the stress on correct action.

The study of the modernization of non-Western cultures has been dominated by the metaphor of the ‘take-off’ introduced by the economists and by the assumption of incompatibility between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ cultures. These interpretations of modernization are shared by both those who view it as a process of diffusing Western culture and by those who view it as an internal process of development which may require an external stimulus to ‘trigger’ the ‘take-off’. On either view, modernization becomes a problem of suddenly transforming a ‘traditional’ type of culture, society, and personality into a ‘modern’ type. This view of modernization is supported, and perhaps suggested, by the classical nineteenth-and early twentieth-century social science theory of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ societies as opposed types, a theory associated with the names of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Maine, and Tönnies, among others.

Civilization, it has been said, is the management of complexity. One ingredient of complexity is the plurality of social groups divided by language, race, religion, caste, and class. The political arrangements that enable plural groups to live together is one aspect of civic management.

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).

During a visit with my wife to India in 1954–1955 I had an opportunity to do a methodological field study in South India. The purpose of this study was to chart an intellectual map of some of the researchable territory that lies between the culture of a village or small community and the culture of a total civilization. This study is not easy to classify in terms of prevailing conceptions about “research,” since it is something that falls between the intensive anthropological field study and the purely conceptual types of methodological analysis. But despite its unorthodox character, it seemed an appropriate type of study to undertake in a new and not well known field. Although the study was primarily designed to serve the methodological purpose of giving an empirical content to some very general ideas and to suggest concrete hypotheses for further research, it also turned up some substantive findings which have importance on their own account. In this report I shall mention some of these in passing but will in the main confine myself to the problems of method posed by the study. A more detailed and documented account of the entire study is in preparation.