Between accumulation and immiseration: The partiality of fieldwork in rural India

This article examines the dilemmas faced when pursuing fieldwork in rural India‐and, by extension, in the rural areas of any poor country ‐ in circumstances of sharp opposition between dominant and subaltern classes. Such research is all too likely to be geared to the concerns of dominant classes. The author has conducted extensive research, as a participant observer, in the Indian state of Gujarat, and has concentrated upon the poor, and especially upon agricultural labourers and rural migrant labour. He here considers the extreme difficulties associated with research which takes subordinate classes as its focus. When introductions take place via the locally powerful, such research faces formidable obstacles: both because of the mistrust of the poor and the opposition of dominant classes. The problems he himself has faced and his own research procedures are discussed in detail. From these certain general methodological lessons are drawn.