The Indian village is changing. During its long journey through the colonial and post-colonial periods, almost nothing has remained the same in the village society of India. In 1975, the pioneer anthropologist of India, Srinivas, observed profound changes taking place in Rampura when he revisited the village after a gap of 20 years. Further, he commented that ‘It looks as though the day was not far off when Rampura would be a dormitory of Mysore’ (Srinivas, 1976: 233). In recent times, things have changed in such a fashion that one Indian scholar argues that the Indian village is vanishing; that it ‘is shrinking as sociological reality, though it still exists as space’ (Gupta, 2005a). The changes in the village society in West Bengal, a state of India, have probably been more spectacular in the Indian context, particularly during the last three decades. During this period, as a scholar says, ‘rural West Bengal has been subjected to extensive governmental intervention in the form of land reforms and democratic decentralization’ (Bhattacharyya, 2009: 59).

A section of social science researchers, both from India and across the globe, have taken keen interest in studying different aspects of these changes in rural West Bengal. The specificities of West Bengal that have been mainly addressed in these contemporary researches are the roles and impacts of the deeply entrenched Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) and organized party machineries in the countryside and the effects of various land reform measures on the agrarian structure of the state (Bhattacharya, 1998; Bhattacharya, 2002; Lieten, 2003; Rogaly et al., 1999; Webster, 1992).