Populistic community and modernization in India

Two general concepts, Westernization and modernization, have been generally used to characterize the social changes that have been taking place in India since the beginning of the century. Before a profitable analysis of such changes or the processes that underlie such changes can be attempted, however, a preliminary theoretical issue needs to be re examined; namely the conceptualization of the rural communities, the most important foci of these changes. While substantial empirical information about these societies has accumulated, theoretical literature has yet to come to grips with the nature of these communities as a sociological category in order to do away with such loose concepts as the "peasant community," "village society," "traditional system" and "Little Tradition."
This study, on the basis of data about a south Indian village community, conceptualizes India's rural communities as populistic communities, elaborates what constitutes a populistic community for purposes of this study, and then establishes a theoretical linkage between the populistic community and the modernization process in order to specify the concept of "populistic moderdization,"