Culture of Small Town India

2018

In the present day undoubtedly, Indian cities and towns are the most important subsets that pimarily contribute to the country’s piercing growth. In line to the rapid Indian Urbanization today, the Indian towns are also emerging in a unique way. They not only house good deal of population but may also be seen as evolving business hubs. The pace of development in towns has however, started to throttle the living conditions posing a threat to the original habitation of these towns which are not in line with the race of urban progress. In such a context, small towns can be exemplery places in terms of having their own social and cultural identity and a special way of life for their residents. Although they may be places with enliven public realm where pedestrians can be unhindered from moving traffic, promote and encourage local arts and crafts as well as traditional bindings to the past through local cuisine and local place specific produce, act as a platform where inhabitants may thi...

This literature review aims at summarizing the state of knowledge related to small urbanised settlements. The significance of researching these localities can be inferred from the fact that a growing share of urban population lives in such agglomerations with a population above 10,000 and below 50,000 to 100,000 inhabitants. This fact is not limited to India and a large share of the urban population worldwide lives in small and medium cities, which are understudied. The same dearth of research applies to the Indian context, as will be evident in this review, despite the importance of the resilience of an urban system comprising a large number of small towns and the diversity of these settlements in terms of their economic base and their social structure. This literature review is structured around five themes: A) the first section lays out issues related to estimating the magnitude and sources of demographic growth in order to infer the contribution of small towns to urban dynamics; B) the second section on Small Towns: Sources of Growth explores the economic processes supporting the expansion of small towns, and debates the dominant vision of the relationship between urbanization and growth, as explained by the New Economic Geography; C) the third section focuses on the transformation of small town economies and social structures while examining practices of entrepreneurship, circulation of labour, social mobility as well as caste and gender inequalities; D) the fourth section on Land and territorial transformations focuses on the relation between property and entrepreneurship; and E) the last section on Governance makes sense of the literature on decentralization, government schemes, governance and the political economy of small towns. This review constitutes one of the steps undertaken within the Subaltern Urbanization in India project (www.suburbin.hypotheses.org) to bring back to the fore the research on small towns.

Refugee Watch: A South Asian Journal on Forced Migration; V50, 2017

This paper takes note of the recent spurt in non-metropolitan urbanisation unearthed by the Census of 2011 in India to refocus attention on the ‘small town’ as an object of research. It takes stock of the research on urban formations in India to highlight how the category of the ‘small town’ has been the discursive casualty of the epic modern separations between the urban and the rural. Further, following recent trends of research, the paper tries to establish the ‘small town’ as a critical entry-point into the larger discipline of urban studies and not simply as an absence within its rubric. To this effect, it takes up the studies grouped under the ‘subaltern urbanisation’ thesis that has sought to reflect upon the rise on non-metropolitan urbanisation in India, to explore its problems and possibilities. The paper argues that a reincorporation of historically produced regional-spatial variability, an attention to human migration and a critical take on the criteria of built-up area with a designated population density as a measure of the urban, might allow a more nuanced posing of the concerned thesis. This posing, it is further argued, could help in two further ways to move away from a notion of the ‘small town’ simply as an unit of economic dynamism: to more directly incorporate the question of power/politics within an understanding of ‘small town’ formations, and to think of a trajectory of capital accumulation as a total process that does not necessarily support the continuance of an arena of ‘need-economy’ as presumably functioning in ‘small town’ economies and other urban margins.

2003

This study investigates patterns of interaction between villages and rural towns, with an emphasis on village households and the nature of their visits to larger settlements. This report addresses the following questions. First, what are the types of towns visited by village households in Bolangir District? Second, what are the different purposes of such visits and their relative importance? Third, how frequently are towns visited, generally and for specific purposes? Fourth, to what extent does gender and caste affect people’s mobility? Finally, what are the main factors (other than gender and caste) constraining households’ ability to access towns?

Sociology Today: A Journal of Contemporary Sociological Research., 2018

According to 2011 Census, the number of Indian towns has increased from 2001 census. 2011 census shows a tremendous increase in the number of statutory towns and census towns. Their contribution to urban population is around 75% but they did not get any spotlight. Only metropolitan cities get the attention of researcher, policymaker, and academician. Therefore, scholars emphasize on Metropolitan cities as it offers a set of economic, political, social and cultural power. In the liberalization of market and the flow of funds in big cities increase the size of population, business activities, new cultural and social pattern. In this small towns also transform in term of economy, politics, demographic and cultural and social level. The focuses of researcher are basically big settlement and they neglect the small towns. In this corporatist socioeconomic structure in small town gave the importance to small towns and also become a site for study which raise some basic question. Can small towns become a research agenda? Can they have same experience such as metropolitan cities? Can small towns break the myth of shadow towns and explore their aspiration to achieve urban status? How the term 'small' defined? This paper try to build a portrait how the urban studies change their path and include new themes and major focus given to big settlement and small settlement neglected.

2013

Ethnographic representations of the country and the city in India have changed drastically in the last hundred years. Pre-Independence ethnographies of India focused primarily on the village as a self contained and self-sustaining unit, and connections to the outside world were left largely unexamined. With Indian Independence in 1947, the village became a site of rapid change, and the city began to figure as the source of that transformation. Urban-rural interactions became key to understanding the social, economic, and political transformations ethnographers were attempting to explain. In the tradition of Raymond Williams' The Country and the City (1973), this paper explores the emerging relationship between urban and rural India as witnessed through mid-20th century ethnographic representations of village India. In engaging these ethnographies both as sources of empirical evidence and particular forms of knowledge production, this paper gives historical context to conceptuali...

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2013

Deep into the second half of the twentieth century the traditionalist definition of India as a country of villages remained dominant in official political rhetoric as well as cultural production. In the past two decades or so, this ruralist paradigm has been effectively superseded by a metropolitan imaginary in which the modern, globalised megacity increasingly functions as representative of India as a whole. Has the village, then, entirely vanished from the cultural imaginary in contemporary India? Addressing economic practices from upper-class consumerism to working-class family support strategies, this paper attempts to trace how 'the village' resurfaces or survives as a cultural reference point in the midst of the urban. "Village women wear such fabulous clothes. Really, I think they know how to dress like nobody else. Villages are beautiful. They are the real India": This praise of rural chic comes from Bina Ramani, up to her self-chosen retirement in 2005 one of India's most prominent fashion designers, lifestyle professionals and glamorous socialites (qtd. in Tarlo 1996, 301; emphasis in original). Of course, Bina Ramani has never actually lived in an Indian village. Nor have her creations ever been rustic. Instead of Gandhian homespun, Ramani offered "ancient fabrics-modern designs," and catered to the tastes and desires of the late-twentieth-century urban high society in India's megacities, an elite with an apparent yearning for precisely that kind of rural flavour that Ramani's fashion seemed to provide. Bina Ramani's success apparently bespeaks an upper-class nostalgia for the village in the heart of the metropolis. Her enthusiastic endorsement of village India as "the real India," however, will come somewhat unexpectedly at least to the European reader familiarised with a wholly different notion of subcontinental culture today. After all, the most prominent and powerful genres that shape the image of contemporary India in the West emphatically construct India as buzzing and chaotic but metropolitan and urban. With few exceptions, 1 high visibility Indian fiction-at least the one that is mostly received in the West, i.e. Indian fiction in English-virtually omits the existence of villages altogether and is instead set in fast-paced, buzzing megacities like Mumbai, Delhi or Kolkata: the mythologisation of Mumbai, in the wake of Rushdie, by writers like Vikram Chandra, Sukethu Mehta, Kiran Nagarkar, Vikas ___________ 1 The most prominent of such exceptions-Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, and the village chapter in Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance-relentlessly demystify village India as a dystopian site of underdevelopment, stifling caste oppression, and destitution.

2017

The introduction to this edited volume seeks to decenter and enlarge our conception of urbanisation, shifting the perspective from large agglomerations to smaller urban settlements in the specific case of India, and to discuss the main results produced by the collective research team that participated in the Subaltern Urbanization Research project. This chapter defines the notion of subaltern urbanisation and argues in favour of reclaiming research on small towns. The recent increase in interest in urban studies in the global south, and particularly in South Asia, around the dynamics of urban change mainly concerns the large agglomerations, which are perceived as the main sites of economic development and social and demographic changes. This research project and the resulting edited volume positions itself vis-a-vis a vision of planetary urbanisation reduced to metropolitanisation and competition between global cities. It aims at challenging the usual approach which tends to conside...

2018

Drawing on fieldwork in Bikaner and Thalassery, this chapter discusses the tremendous influence of neighbourhoods in everyday life. Moving away from a focus on social problems and poverty in neighbourhoods, Abraham explores the implications of a proximity that allows for various kinds of face-to-face interactions and a sensorial intimacy. She discusses everyday practices that make up the web of relations that constitute the neighbourhood—social control, social approval, legitimacy and support, with a focus on how gender is produced in everyday neighbourhood life. Abraham argues that the emphasis on caste, class, ethnic or religious identity has been at the cost of other influences such as the neighbourhood, which needs to be taken seriously as a social formation crucial to social life and as an important arena of social and cultural influence.

Review of Urban & Regional Development Studies, 2016

To investigate the growth dynamics of small towns in India, we examine functional and spatial determinants. Urban growth is a concentration of the population in response to the availability of diverse amenities and facilities in urban centers. Subsequently, the urban population is distributed among settlements of varying sizes. Although the share of the urban population accounted for by small towns (less than 20,000) in 2011 in India was 12.83%, their relative share of proposed capital expenditure in urban infrastructure for 2012-2031 is estimated at only 6.8%. This calls for a major policy shift toward the development of small towns. The significant growth of small towns and their increasing decadal growth rate and percentage share in the total urban population of India calls for a substantiation of their significance. Because any settlement is usually concentrated on its center, which can be described by both functional and spatial determinants, the spatiofunctional determinants of small towns are investigated to determine their centrality.