DEFINITION OF THE CONCEPT OF COMMUNITY

George A. Hillary Jr., of the University of Kentucky, Lexington, collected 94 definitions of community to analyse their content and produced an excellent paper titled ‘Definitions of Community: Areas of Agreement’.⁵ Hillary did not attempt to find out the number of times any particular definition has been used,⁶ but concentrated on various formulations. He identified 16 different concepts in 22 combinations in these definitions. He discovered that 69 of the 94 definitions were ‘in accord that social interaction, area, and a common tie or ties’ are important elements of community life; of these, the first two, namely social interaction and area, have a much higher frequency. In another study, Hillary Jr. attempted to find common characteristics of a community in 15 different settlements in different countries.

From all this, he concluded that a community is a field of social interactions, covering all aspects of social life, for people of known membership. Its visibility is enhanced when the members occupy the same habitat. In other words, a common habitat may give rise to community life, or a series of social interactions create a mental space for this special group–which may ultimately begin to live together. This can also be seen in big towns in India. People who come from the same region tend to live in the same area and the place also gets a name that reflects this linkage. In Delhi, to take just one example, people from Bengal generally prefer to live in a colony called Chittranjan Park (or CR Park); similarly, Ramakrishnapuram was initially inhabited by people from South India. In a study of Pols⁷ in Ahmedabad, Harish Doshi⁸ mentioned that people hailing from the same village tend to live together in such Pols. These settlers have created institutions identical to those prevalent in their parent village, and have thus re-created the village community in the midst of an urban conglomerate. Since such settlements meet most of the social needs of the inhabitants, they function as ‘islands’ in the town, but remain linked with the wider community in several ways, mainly through their participation in the urban economy as workers or as petty shopkeepers.

A community is in some ways, a replica of the wider society. In this sense, one can say that a Society is a community of communities. For small societies, where the members live in a limited space and have mostly face-to-face contacts, ‘society’ and ‘community’ are used interchangeably.

Robert Redfield enumerated the following characteristics of the Little Community:⁹

1. Quality of distinctiveness: where the community begins and where it ends is apparent. The distinctiveness is apparent to the outside observer and is expressed in the group consciousness of the people of the community.
2. Smallness: ‘So small that either it itself is the unit of personal observation or else, being somewhat larger and yet homogenous, it provides in some part of it a unit of personal observation fully representative of the whole….A compact community of four thousand people in Indian Latin-America can be studied by making direct personal acquaintance with one section of it.’
3. Community is … ‘homogenous’. Activities and states of mind are alike for all persona in corresponding sex and age positions; and the career of one generation repeats that of the preceding. So understood, homogenous is equivalent to ‘slow-changing’.
4. As a fourth defining quality, it may be said that the community we have in mind is self-sufficient and provides for all or most of the activities and needs of the people in it. ‘The little community is a cradle-to-the grave arrangement.’

Redfield’s definition of the Little Community is aptly applicable to small societies–particularly tribal societies, but Indian scholars working on villages have also found it useful. Combining it with his definition of peasant society, sociologists have treated the village as a Little Community that is ‘isolable’, although not completely isolated or insulated from other units of the wider society. This definition helped scholars to carry out holistic studies of the villages in India, as an extension of the anthropological approach. It may be noted that even a small tribe lives in a number of small settlements–which can be called villages–and they are studied holistically in terms of the area in which these settlements are spread. The small settlement is not the unit of study, and the entire tribe spread in a number of such hamlets is regarded by the anthropologists as constituting a community. Those who studied Indian villages also talked of the ‘unity’ and ‘extensions’ of the village to take account of the interactions of the distinctive village community with other villages in the region, and with the country as a whole.

To sum up, a community, understood as a group of people living together in a given geographical space, does not cater to ‘this or that particular interest’¹⁰ but provides for ‘the basic conditions of a common life’. It is a miniature form of society. In fact, small societies are generally referred to as ‘communities’ because their members are spread over a limited area and they virtually maintain primary relationships with other residents of that area. For most primitive tribes, authors have used the term tribal communities when in fact they were talking of societies. One can say that a large society consists of several local communities–villages, towns and cities—and even regions whereas a small society is a community by itself.

The word community is also used as an extension of the same phenomenon, for people with a common ethnic origin, but dispersed from the original habitat. What unites them is the community sentiment. Thus, we may say that locality, or community sentiment, or both, are the bases for defining a community. It is in this sense that people also talk of caste, or a group of castes, having the same name but hailing from different parts of the country, as a community. References to Yadavs or the Muslim community are instances of this phenomenon. Ethnic communities, or religious groups, or local communities are thus examples of what some sociologists call ‘ascriptive solidarities’. The Indian Diaspora in any country are referred to as an Indian community, particularly when they are substantial in number and share a common colony or a ward. In the same sense, people talk of the Italian community in the city of Chicago, or the Bengali community in the city of Delhi. A regional community known by the region (Bengali or Marwari or Tamil) from which it originates is an ascriptive solidarity. Other people living in the same neighbourhood, however, do not form part of that regional community and feel somewhat alienated. In such communities, one can also find a replica of the regional culture.