A Town in The Rural Milieu Baruipur, West Bengal

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The Anthropological Survey of India, an organization under the Department of Culture, Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Government of India, has earned a national prominence as a premier institute for anthropological research. Since its inception in 1945, this organization has devoted itself to studies in anthropology and allied disciplines. During the Ninth Five Year Plan the Survey undertook a project in Urban Anthropology. A team of six researchers of the Survey, both anthropologists and geographers, had undertaken the studies on some selected towns of the country. The presernt study of Baruipur town, 24 Parganas District (South), West Bengal, is the first in the series.

The tradition of urban study, which was initiated in the late 60's and early 70's in the Survey under the guidance of late Prof. Nirmal Kumar Bose and late Prof. Surajit Chandra Sinha, has been more or less followed in the study. It appears that even though Baruipur town, which was declared as a municipal town for more than hundred years back, has retained some of its primordial social bonds and cultural traditions side by side with its changing land use pattern. This resulted in the change of economic character of the town. Besides, Baruipur had already earned its prominence in the social history of the district.

The result of the present study, though limited in its scope and operation, will be of immense help to the researchers, scholars and the planners of the country. I must put on record the initiative and encouragement that was taken by Dr. R.K. Bhattacharya, our former Director, for completion of the present publication.

The history of studying urban towns is not very old in the academic tradition of the Anthropological Survey of India. The studies of Indian Census during 1961 to 1971 had evolved some strategies of covering about two hundred urban centres which continued till 1991. Their definition of urban centre mainly depended on the total number of population, the density of population and the occupational structure and so on. According to them, any metropolis having municipal bodies, towns, etc. would come under urban centre. In addition to this, 75% of the total main working force should be primarily engaged in non-agricultural occupations and the density of population should be around 1000 per square mile.

While undertaking the present survey under the Ninth Five year Plan by the Anthropological Survey of India, the criteria adopted by the Indian Census for identification, classification and functional categorization of urban centres were followed. Initially, some small and medium towns were identified for close study under this project. The advantage of taking a smaller universe is that the size of the population there is small and is almost encapsulated in a common mode of social and economic interaction with lesser divergence in the wider economic and political network and so on. Moreover, these units are directly observable and immediately discernible.

The basic assumption of the present study was to look for a morphological contour of a town along with the continuation of traditional cultural affiliation of people and their social commitment in the culturally rooted traditional customs. Further, it is theoretically assumed that the physical space has been confronting a constant change in terms of its variety of land use patterns. Consequently, there seems to be some kind of inverse relation between the physical space and the social space. It is, therefore, necessary to enquire into what happens when a space changes its character in terms of the basic mode of production and concomitant social relations.

In all the available studies on urban centres and towns, some crucially important indicators are generally used, e.g. rural-urban linkages, the social morphology of town, various kinds of occupational shifts including some specific urban problems like social disorganization, urban poverty and so on. Coming back to the discipline of anthropology, our reference to urban studies in the Survey perhaps immediately goes back to Bose's study entitled Calcutta-1964: A Social Survey (1968). It was the study of a combined team of anthropologists and geographers. The essential emphasis was on how do various social categories of population make a segregated living in terms of their language and religion placed on location, occupation and voluntary association. Apart from this, during the 70's Sinha conducted a seminar on the city of Calcutta (1972), the proceedings of which is already published. Almost close to that there were studies on cultural profile of Mysore city (Misra:1978) and Shillong city (Goswami:1979) by the Anthropological Survey of India.

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