Behind Mud Walls: Seventy-five Years in a North Indian Village, Updated and Expanded Edition

by William Wiser, Charlotte Wiser, Susan S. Wadley

In 1925, William and Charlotte Wiser arrived in the North Indian village of Karimpur. Over the next five years they wrote one of the first studies of village India, originally published in 1930. Charlotte Wiser continued to observe and write about the village until her death, when Susan Wadley picked up the narrative. With updates from the 1960s, 1970s, 1984, and 2000, this expanded edition now encapsulates seventy-five years of continuity and change in the village.

The book traces the initial awkwardness between the Wisers and the villagers and the years of friendship and welcome that followed; 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, life in the courtyard, castes, marriage, and family. The book now stands as a personal and insightful story of the village and the people who came to study it.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology, History, India, Asia, Sociology

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

Reviews

[Jay Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Behind Mud Walls is a fascinating read. It is rare to have observers follow their subjects across generations like the Wisers and Dr. Wadley do. The Wisers’ discussion of the caste system at work in Karimpur struck me the most. I had to read this book for a history of India college class and despite the instructor's best efforts of teaching us the caste system, one can not truly imagine how it works. In this book, we see the caste system in action. We see how it is instilled in children at an early age. We see how people from different castes interact and function as a community. Although the focus is on a single village in rural India from 1925-2000, Behind Mud Walls provides a good vantage point in how history affects one community at a very personal level.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

I began reading this book, knowing it's age, but slightly frustrated at it's structural functionalism-esque portrayal of a village fixed in a seemingly immobile set of social institutions. However, as I progressed I found that the book dealt with this almost explicitly for example in a chapter dedicated to the villagers engaging with the development and innovations brought by the Wisers in their first stay in the village.

The later additions to the book help create one of the most interesting approaches to ethnographic fieldwork I have seen in showing the development and social change of the village and change over 4 periods 50 or so years apart. The way change happened supports the arguments made by Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.

This book is a fascinating anthropological approach to development and is one of the strongest examples of replicability in social science research I have seen.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an account of a couple's experiences in a village in India. It is not the typical village in India, which the authors make clear, but serves as a guidepost for our understanding of the changes in the village and the country as a whole in the last seventy-five years.

[Ajeng Puspitasari · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was painful going through this book in my India and South Asia class with Prof. T, but now that I think about the book, it is actually pretty interesting..