bengaluru by all accounts it was a mythical village the exact coordinates remained unknown till a group of anthropologists from mysore university teamed up with specialists from anthropological survey of indias to locate rampura not satisfied professor tanka b subba now vicechancellor of sikkim university went with mysore anthropologists in 2007 to make sure that it was indeed the same place before bringing a group of eager students to see the placekodagahalli around 30km from mysore is no el dorado but just another dusty village off hogur road however social scientists from across the world might disagree they know it as rampura the village that was studied by renowned sociologist mn srinivas the man who delved deep into indias caste system and social structure to come up with bynow popular coinages like votebank dominant caste and sanskritizationjust in time for mysuruborn srinivass birth centenary this year november 16 professor david gellner of oxford university dropped in recently at rampura i wanted to see the famous the remembered village the lucid account of the village field study says professor gellner who hopes that the karnataka government will help fund a srinivas chair at oxford university his alma mater gellner spent only a few hours but was struck by the relative prosperity of the villagesubba and his students consider themselves lucky as they spent about a month at the village trying their best to study the place and note the changes what struck the professor was srinivass observation skill everything was just as he had described 60 years ago the cauvery canal the nearby lagoon sugar cane farms closely packed houses and tiled roofs he says and of course caste was omnipresent there as a dalit ghetto and a street exclusively for the high caste time seemed frozen there my students were shocked to see open caste discrimination he recallsrampura achieved mythical status because of the breadth of srinivass work the impact wasnt limited to the academic world it will be difficult to think of any other intellectual with whom the public associates particular concepts like sanskritization a process of emulating lifestyles and habits of dominant communities and dominant caste says chandan gowda sociology professor at azim premji universityin this election year votebank remains the most relevant he had used it to mean in an essay in the mid1950s the number of votes a village patron who had cultivated ties of financial and other kinds of dependence with villagers could enlist in favour of a candidate says gowdathis too came from rampura says former student and sociologist gopal karanth he took a long time to process his field notes from 1948 in 1952 when elections were around he happened to be there says karanth former professor of sociology at institute of social and economic change isec bengalurusrinivas noted that a young man a rebel otherwise didnt seem to question the old authority structure when it came to the election he followed the existing authority system as leaders always looked after the