Site of deficiency and site of hope: the village in colonial South Asia.

The idea of the village as a self-sufficient, unchanging ‘little republic’, popularised in British colonial revenue literature since the early 19th century, was widely shared by Indian nationalists for whom the village represented the real India. The fiscal integration of villages within the Raj and the resultant socio-economic dislocations had a devastating impact upon the peasant economy, leading to peasant resistance. As nationalists focused on the stagnation and poverty in the countryside, various experiments in rural regeneration and reconstruction were undertaken to create the basis of the new India after Independence.