Paper short abstract:

Analyzing household survey data from a Maharashtra village in 1975 and 2012, the paper examines the relationship between family composition, wealth, and status to compare various conditions mediating economic change and to recognize structural factors affecting who benefits and who suffers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes data from complete village household surveys conducted by the author in 1975 and 2012 in one village in Satara District, Maharashtra. It reports continuities and changes in social differentiation by considering the size, composition, and property holdings of each household in relation to the village's class, caste, and clan divisions. Specifically, the analysis seeks relationships between the size or form of domestic units and indices of wealth or status. Household attributes take into account the unit of production, consumption, co-residence and property holding, along with nuclear or joint familial structure, the number of generations, and the number and gender of siblings in each generation; relevant indices of wealth or status include the size and quality of house and land holding, household amenities, occupational activities, education, and caste and clan affiliation. Attending particularly to changes in village residential patterns (especially new house construction) and land-holding (both transfers and fragmentation/consolidation), the study tries to discover the most significant factors affecting the differential distribution of material and cultural resources. By examining effects of these factors over recent decades, it assesses the extent to which class and caste matter for contemporary village social structure. This fine-grain longitudinal research will reveal who has most benefited and most suffered over the past third of a century, and its focus on class, caste, kinship, and other conditions mediating the impact of socio-economic change will begin to explain the forces that allocate gain and loss in an agrarian community.