Elites and Power Structure in Rural India

Power trends attract and motivate all types of people, but its analytical study remained empirically unexplored till U.S. scholars like Floyd Hunter and Robert Dahl laid down the foundation of "Community Power Structure" studies in small American towns. This generated several conceptual and metrical innovations which made it possible for students of political science to analyze "Power" in its political dimensions in small communities. For reasons not very clear, the focus of such studies remained urban and very few studies of rural communities are available even today. During the sixties and seventies, several eminent political science scholars tried to analyze community power structure in India also but very few could prepare accurate power maps of Indian Villages even though India was (and is ) a "Land of Villages." This pioneering ‘Village Study’ delineates the contours of power structure in Shergarh, a village in Haryana, an agriculturally dynamic economy with a bull in bias in favour of the persistence i.e. continuing dominance of persons who enjoyed a dominant status in British India on account of convergence of social and economic contours in villages. This pioneering study would be of considerable interest to not only social scientists but all types of policy analysts.