Description:
This preface explains why this project has been addictive—question 1—and will
attempt to answer the common man’s reasonable question about its purposes, after
which we will attempt to respond to question 2 about its practical relevance.
On question 1, ever since 1973 the economic and social dynamics of urban
growth and urban–rural relations have been being tracked every ten years or so in a
long-term research project involving business histories in a South Indian market
town, Arni. While towns have been the object of study in sociology, geography,
politics and urban planning,1 we have been told by urban studies experts that this
project on a small-town economy is now uniquely long-lasting. It has been closely associated with the long-term village studies of agrarian change in northern Tamil
Nadu (Maps 1, 2 and 3). These randomly selected villages were part of Tamil
Nadu’s rice bowl in the 1970s. Several of these villages were in the hinterland
of the market town—off the beaten track of the Madras-Bangalore highway (now a
globalized industrial corridor) but at the dynamic centre of the Green Revolution on
Tamil Nadu’s Coromandel plain. Over four decades, this research has explored a
rolling agenda of questions about ‘Middle India’, non-metropolitan India’s economic and social development, which cannot be answered in any other way than
through sustained or long-term rural and urban field research. In so doing, it has
been compelled to engage with a great range of theoretical ideas from social science
disciplines.