Behind Mud Walls: Seventy-Five Years in a North Indian Village

The book traces the initial awkwardness between the Wisers and the villagers and the years of friendship and welcome that followed. It sketches the social and economic changes brought on by the increasing encroachment of the outside world and describes the day-to-day life of people who live in the village–the education of the young, women’s lives in the courtyard, castes and the loss of the jajmani system the changing patterns of marriage, family, and occupation, including the effects of the green revolution in the 1970s and the more recent shift to men (and sometimes unmarried girls) seeking jobs in Delhi and other nearby cities. Karimpur has changed vastly in the seventy-five years since the Wisers first described it and Wadley’s two updates portray a world that would have been unimaginable in the 1920s. Whether a rejection of purification of ritual space by cow dung or unmarried daughters in their 20s or girls working in telecom factories in Delhi, the changes are profound and shed light on social change in rural India.