There are approximately 500,000 villages scattered throughout India. Most of the Indian villages are small and according to the 1991 census, nearly 80 percent of them have less than 1,000 inhabitants. Agriculture, which is India's most basic business, takes place in villages. It is in these villages where most of the Indian valued cultural forms are flourished.
Most of the Indian villages are connected with other villages and with urban area through various crucial horizontal linkages. Each of the Indian villages are characterised by a multiplicity of caste, economics, occupational and religious groups that are vertically linked within each settlement. Anthropologist Oscar Lewis described this complexity as 'rural cosmopolitanism', in one of the latest anthropological studies of Indian village life.