Both ethnography and literature have been considered practically distant from each other. Very few studies have been done on literature in anthropology. Literature has already started the work of bridging the gap between ethnographies and literature. In the beginning of the 20th century, the work done by anthropologists to understand society and culture were assimilated in literature. T S Eliot, in his epic poem The Waste Land, published in 1922, notes that the anthropologist James Frazer and his work The Golden Bough had a great influence on him. An anthropological perspective is clearly visible not only in western literature but also in Indian literature. The literature from Premchand to Shrilal Shukla, Amrit Lal Nagar, Mahasweta Devi, etc. stands at par with anthropological ethnographic studies. For a long time, literature remained an untouchable area in anthropology, but in the sixth–seventh decade of the twentieth century, the interest of anthropologists in this area increased. There is an overlapping between the boundaries of Ethnographies and Fiction. Both of them give shape and meaning to each other. The interrelationship of both disciplines may be observed in the work of renowned anthropologist and famous poet Ruth Benedict.
In such a situation, there is no use in debating whether ethnography is science or fiction; rather, the effort should be to fill the gap between the two so that both can benefit from it. In the present article, the interrelationship between ethnography and literature has been discussed. Along with this, an attempt has been made to bring out the existing anthropological perspective in Hindi literature. Analysing the popular Hindi novels Ragdarbari and Nachyo Bahut Gopal in the form of ethnography, an attempt has been made to know the Indian rural society and the caste system at its centre from an ethnographic point of view.
