2006 Volume 58 Issue 2 Pages 125-144
How is an Indian rural village changed from the viewpoint of globalization? This paper analyzes changes in an Indian village based on Giddens’ theory of “modernity”, particularly the ideas of de-territorialization and re-territorialization. The G village, a rurban village in the suburbs of Bangalore city in Karnataka, is taken as a case study. Spatial changes in the interactions among social groups and changes in local community are examined focusing on the economic and social structure of the social groups which have various attributes of the newcomers / local inhabitants. Expansion in the suburbs of Bangalore city and the industrial estate development resulted in the inclusion of G village into the edge of the Bangalore metropolitan area. Some local inhabitants with a high level of education became casual industrial laborers, for example, and most of the agricultural land became sites for apartments as well as store sites for the newcomers such as casual industrial laborers and guards. The rest of the agricultural land became used for animal husbandry to supply un-pasteurized milk in accordance with the increased demand or land lying fallow. As a result, G village, which was adjacent to the industrial estate, was included economically into the edge of the Bangalore city bloc by specifying it as a residential area for laborers and a supply area for manpower and food. The village society, which used to have a nucleus as a large landowner, gradually lost its autonomy resulting in a community with no center. In terms of these processes, the local context of the rural village has a significant meaning, for example, the infrastructure conditions and inhabitant’s caste composition in the newcomer’s residence choice, a factory location is related to the quality of the worker looked for, and the location of the educational facilities and existence of the social restrictions on women’s employment.
It is true that globalization gives rural villages on a local scale a great influence on the economic activity and politics of the national scale and on the regional scale which forms the metropolitan region. However, this study shows that local rural villages are neither subordinated nor prescribed one-sidedly by the upper space scale; still less, they are not homogenous in accordance with changes on the upper space scale. The more integrated into the upper scale the local rural village is, the more specialized in terms of the function fitted to each survival condition in the upper space. Globalization, as “the consequences of modernity”, draws the rural village, which exists locally, apart from the local context and restructures it in the time-space which has unlimited expansion (i. e. de-territorialization). At the same time, the local context is used again, and a restructured social connection remodels it (i. e. re-territorialization).
Generally speaking in Indian villages, globalization strips off “the place” put in the local context and de-territorializes the rural village by giving it a new meaning, for example, judged on the economic value on the upper space. At the same time, the process of change itself is put in the local context again, and re-territorializes the Indian village. Globalization is the process that pushes “the compression of the time-space” increasingly and faces local existence by placing a local social act on the unlimited time-space, and continues de-territorialization and re-territorialization without any break. A local rural village is gradually included into the edge of the global space through both processes.
