N. Ram, Chairperson, Kasturi and Sons Ltd, and a special friend of the Foundation, has presented a first-edition volume of Some South Indian Villages, edited by Gilbert Slater, to the Library.

Gilbert Slater, Professor of Indian Economics, University of Madras, was one of the pioneers (along with Harold Mann) of academic studies by economists of villages in India. In the Introduction to her book Economics of Development in Village India, Margaret Haswell wrote:

On taking up his appointment as Professor of Indian Economics in the University of Madras in December 1915, Gilbert Slater determined to direct the attention of students towards the study of particular villages.

In February 1916, he had his first opportunity of seeing something of Indian village life, when he accompanied one of the senior students, E. V. Sundaram Reddi, on a visit to his native village of Eruvellipet.

On the basis of his observations in Eruvellipet, he drew up “a village questionnaire,” had notebooks with the questions typed, interleaved with blank pages, and dealt them out to students who undertook to make surveys of their native villages during the long vacation.

He had found on reaching Madras that students looked upon economics as a “fairly easy option for degree getting, and consisting of a series of unintelligible theories to be learnt parrot fashion from Marshall’s Principles, with no relation to actual life in India, if anywhere else.” He wanted to make his students regard economics as “concerned with ordinary contemporary Indian life, with its central object of study the causes of, and remedies for Indian poverty.”

In 1918 Slater published his book Some South Indian Villages, in which he included a detailed analysis of economic conditions in twelve villages.

The copy of the book presented to the Library is in excellent condition. It will be placed in a special section of the new wing of the Library.