Village Studies in ‘Indian Economics’: The Making of an Empirical Tradition

The past decade has witnessed a resurgence in interest towards village studies, a classic genre of academic writing in Indian economics and sociology. In this article, I contribute to the growing literature on village studies by situating the method within the historical context in which it first emerged. The emphasis on village studies was closely tied to efforts by economists working in India to bridge the wide gap between economic theory, as taught in colleges, and the lived economic realities of Indians. I demonstrate that village studies provided a useful staging ground for translating political disputes regarding the benevolence of British rule in India into economic controversies regarding the causes of Indian poverty. Present-day scholars, including some practitioners of village studies, find the empiricist tendencies of village studies troubling. However, based on a careful examination of the work of Gilbert Slater in India (1916–1922)—one of the pioneers of this method in Indian economics—I argue that the appeal of village studies lies in the possibility of a more inductive mode of knowledge production in economics. Such an inductive approach, though it could be easily conflated with empiricism, offered a useful way out of the impasse between advocates and critics of mainstream Western economics in the early twentieth century.