A village is the most ancient form of human life togetherness. According to Desai “The village is the unit of the rural society. It is the theater wherein the quantum of rural life unfolds itself and functions.’
He further adds that “Like every social phenomenon the village is a certain stage in the evolution of the life of man, its further growth and development in subsequent periods of human history, the varied structural changes it experienced during thousands of years of its existence, the rapid and basic transformation it has undergone during the last hundred and fifty years since the Industrial Revolution all these constitute a very fascinating and challenging study.”
Rise of Villages
Historically, the rise of the village is linked with the rise of the agricultural economy. The emergence of the village revealed that man passed from the nomadic mode of collective life to the life of settled individuals, basically due to the ‘improvement of tools of production which made agriculture easy and hence settled life on a fixed territorial zone possible and necessary”.
It has been one of the most complex problems of social research to find out “How humanity, in different parts of the world, passed from the nomadic hunting and food gathering stage to that based on roving hoe agriculture and thereafter on settled plow agriculture carried on by means of draft animals.”
The invention of the plough and its use led man to develop stable agriculture, the basic source of assured food supply, and man’s nomadic mode of life disappeared. No longer had men roamed in herds from place to place in search of means of subsistence on the contrary they settled on a definite territory and organized villages based on the agricultural economy. There emerged the agrarian communities with villages as their fixed habitation and agriculture as their main occupation and these developments marked a landmark in the history of mankind, inaugurating a higher phase of social existence. Agriculture assured the community, for the first time, a relatively stable food supply in contrast to previous stages of social life. While food supply derived from such sources as hunting, fishing, fruit gathering, and migratory hoe agriculture had always been insufficient and precarious, grain and other types of food products derived from plough agriculture could be counted upon and also be stored for use in periods of emergencies, thereby assuring relative food security for the future.
The development in the field of agriculture brought the struggle for existence to a relatively low level. Consequently at a certain stage of the development of the agricultural economy, due to the greater productivity of agriculture, a section of the community could be liberated from the necessity of participating in food production and could therefore concentrate on the secondary industrial or ideological activity. This gave momentum to the growth of technology, art, sciences, and philosophy, it also brought about, though slowly, the significant transition in the social organization of humanity, from an organization funded on kinship and clan to that based on territorial ties. With the development of agriculture at a certain level, mankind took a leap from optimistic collectivist clan society to territory civil society with its distinct multi-class social structure and the resultant institution of the state.”
This is how Civilization began with the development of agriculture and the village which is the first settled form of
‘collective human habitation and the product of the growth of agricultural economy’ pared the way for the rural society, and from the surplus of its food resources, nourished the town which subsequently came into existence.’
Reference
Rural sociology by Dr. G. Das
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