A Brief History of Incivility in Rural Postcolonial India: Caste, Religion, and Anthropology EDWARD SIMPSON School of Oriental and African Studies University of London ALICE TILCHE London School of Economics and Political Science TOMMASO SBRICCOLI University of Siena PATRICIA JEFFERY University of Edinburgh TINA OTTEN Ruhr University Bochum As recently as 1982, V. R. Bhattacharaya introduced his New Face of Rural India with the Gandhian-inspired words, “To an Indian, a village means more than its synonym. On its definition stands the political shape of the country, on its interpretation depends the economic progress of the nation. The description of an Indian village means the narration of the face of the Acknowledgments: Research was funded by the UK’ s Economic and Social Research Council (ES/ I02123X/1). We are grateful to Maddalena Chiellini, Lucia Michelutti, Chris Fuller, Anne Gold, Pinakin Patel, David Mosse, Johnny Parry, Sunny Suna, Mohamed Vohra, and Susan Wadley. The anonymous CSSH reviewers gave us much to consider and curtailed some shortcomings. Our greatest debts are to Adrian Mayer and F. G. Bailey for opening their archives and lives. Comparative Studies in Society and History 2018;60(1):58–89. 0010-4175/17 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2017 doi:10.1017/S001041751700041X 58 use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700041X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Warburg Institute, on 27 Feb 2018 at 19:10:31, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of