The choice of the word ‘perspective’ in the title of this lecture exploits the ambiguity to which the English language so happily lends itself. For the lecture will, on the one hand, look back over the valley of the years at the research project on technology and agrarian change in two rice-growing areas, one in Sri Lanka and the other in Tamil Nadu, which was organized from the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridgejust over ten years ago, remembering some of its findings (see Farmer, 1977) and discussing certain further changes that have taken place in the study area and elsewhere in South Asia in those ten years. The project, it should be said, was inter-disciplinary; involved both sample surveys and studies in depth; and can claim to have attained the fruitful relationship between disciplines and between techniques of field study that some have described as ‘hard to achieve’ (e.g., Hoben and Timberg, 1980).

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