Barney Cohn had so many books that he commandeered two offices in the highest reaches of Haskell Hall, the temple of the University of Chicago's anthropology department. My graduate education took place in those two offices, whether while settling the books in the one room, or sitting amidst the studied clutter of the other room, listening to Barney ramble on about the state of the world, anthropology or his own life. There was something of the British subaltern in Barney's look, with his floppy safari caps and saggy moustache. His manner, however, was anything but. He was courteous, wearing his old-fashioned liberal grace in his diffidence.
In the midst of our conversations about his current projects (I was his research assistant), he would break off to give me primers on the history of the study of India in the United States. I often asked him why American scholars seemed so interested in caste, almost to the exclusion of other things. Barney's stories began with Cornell, where he studied rural sociology for his PhD. At Cornell, the leading anthropologist was Morris Opler, who had cut his teeth studying the Apache, the Native American tribe, working for a spell in the 1930s with the Bureau of Indian Affairs before settling down to teach in the College of Education at Harvard. Here, Opler asked his students to write an essay to present to their graduate seminar. One of his students was Rudra Datt Singh, who came to Harvard after working as a rural analyst with Albert Mayer in Etawah, Uttar Pradesh. Mayer was highly impressed with Singh, whose calm intelligence enabled the Americans to form a close relationship with villagers.
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In Opler's seminar, Singh wrote an evocative essay about his own village near Benaras. The descriptions of religion and caste moved Opler, who then worked with Singh in Uttar Pradesh on various field studies. Together, Singh and Opler published a series of important papers on the villages that they called Madhopur and Senapur. These were not romantic portrayals of static village communities. Both Singh and Opler were interested in the shifting power dynamics in the villages, driven both by the changes in land relations and in the constitutional provisions that benefitted the oppressed castes. As Singh wrote in "The Unity of an Indian Village", "The fact of political equality is being successfully used to support the claim of social equality by the low-caste people." Opler soon moved to Cornell, taking Singh with him as a research associate. A young Barney Cohn, recently out of Brooklyn, enrolled in rural sociology, and found himself in the company of Opler and Singh. Barney was much taken by the antiquity of Indian civilisation, and at the same time, the changes afoot toward equality. He soon found himself in a village in Uttar Pradesh himself, where he began to work on the struggles between Chamars and Thakurs.