The village is such a commonplace subject that it hardly generates any curiosity. What is there to know about the village? Despite occasional hype about it signifying the “real and authentic India”, the village has hardly ever been a subject that generates much excitement. Perhaps the most celebrated moment for the village was at the height of the Gandhian imagination when it was presented as a possible alternative to city-centric Western modernity. Interestingly, such an idea has had a wide appeal and, in a way, continues to have currency among a section of urban activists and environmentalists.
The Indian Village: Rural Lives in the 21st Century.
Aleph Book Company, New Delhi, 2023
Pages: 296
Price: Rs.639
Many of them continue to swear by Gandhi’s romantic view of the village and advocate the virtues of a traditional rural life. Beyond the Gandhians, romanticising the village also has a wider appeal among urban residents. It is often invoked as the true “home”, a bygone tradition signifying a sense of stability and moral authenticity.
Against such a romantic imagination there are negative views of the Indian village that are far more widespread. Many associate village life in India with rigid patriarchal values, an oppressive caste hierarchy, and the denial of individual freedom. The village is also condemned for a presumed sense of ignorance among its populace, mostly attributed to a general lack of education. The lack of formal, Western-style education presumably implies a complete inability to think and act rationally. Rural residents are thus predestined to be seen by the wider world as following a “backward” way of life, socially and culturally. A village is thus a place “left behind”.
Such a view of the rural and its residents is further reinforced by the popular and mainstream thinking on its economy. Villagers are all presumed to be cultivators of land, peasants engaged in a low-value occupation. Even those who may not own any agricultural land, such as those working as farm labourers or local artisans providing other services to farming households, are presumed to be tied to the agrarian economy of the village and ipso facto dependent on it. Even worse, unlike the village, the agrarian economy does not even carry any moral weight, except in a few pockets of the country. Its value as a contributor to the national income has also been declining, both in terms of its sectoral share as also its attraction or status as an occupation. This decline is often seen as desirable, as evidence of India’s growth story. The persistent “agrarian crisis” evidenced by the growing indebtedness of cultivating farmers and the statistics of increasing suicides among them are mourned but rarely evoke a sense of guilt or concern among the urban middle classes or state actors.
Two imaginings of the village
Interestingly, a closer look at these two imaginings of the village—the “traditional-romantic” (village as lost home) and the “developmental-progressive” (village as backwardness)—would show that they are not very different from each other. They are, in reality, two sides of the same coin.
Even when the traditionalists look at it romantically, they too, quite like developmentalists, take its loss for granted, on its way to being a thing of the past. Their grudge is often about it no longer working as a normative frame for organising social and economic life, or as a moral compass. Such a traditionalist view is also mostly held by sections of the urban middle classes who have moved away from the village and rarely bothered about its empirics, the actually existing villages, of past and present.
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The negative view of the village has a far greater purchase. Those who hold it are the ones who truly matter in the India of today. For a large majority of them, the future of the country lies in its cities, where strategies for its progress are being scripted and translated. The growing urban centres and their diverse economies are also a blessing for the village, they suggest. Urban growth and prosperity will pull out more and more people from rural areas, for education and jobs in the cities. Migration implies urbanisation. And the growing size of cities indicates development.
As the dominant narrative goes, the labour coming into cities enables the growth of modern manufacturing, which also implies labour moving from the primary to the secondary sector of the economy. The growing service sector also requires working hands with a variety of skill sets. Cities are where centres for higher education and skill training come up. They produce engineers, doctors, scientists, and other skilled professionals. Their growing numbers imply a consolidation of the urban middle classes. The expanding middle classes imply lower poverty and higher consumption. India’s vibrant middle classes have been generating value and wealth through their high-end service sector employment. Their educated children are spread globally as software engineers, tech managers, doctors, and neo-entrepreneurs. Many of them have come to occupy top managerial positions in some of the leading corporates of the world. This is how industrialisation and economic growth became possible in the West, and that is what is happening in India.
Highlights
- The village is often romanticised by urban activists and environmentalists. It is also associated with rigid patriarchal values and oppressive caste hierarchy.
- Despite a significant rise in India’s urban population, the rural demographic continues to be robust. The proportion and absolute size of those cultivating agricultural land remain significant.
- The rural is to be seen as a diverse and dynamic reality with a distinct identity, capable of engaging with the world on its own terms and confronting the challenges it faces.
The hegemonic middle class: The narrative of the village as a site of deficit is not completely new, but it acquired a much greater salience after India introduced economic reforms in the 1990s. The post-1990s middle classes were far more invested in private corporate-led notions of economic growth. Even when in terms of its size the middle class continues to be a minority, it managed to acquire a kind of moral majority. Their views came to be the dominant common sense of how life was to be. Even the younger generations of rural residents began to aspire for a life in the city, hoping to be a part of the middle class.
However, despite a significant rise in India’s urban population and a hegemonic rise of middle-class values, the rural demographic continues to be robust. The proportion and absolute size of those cultivating agricultural land also remain significant.
Urban-rural distribution
As I show in my book, the proportion of India’s urban population has grown nearly threefold over the past century, from 10.29 per cent in 1911 to 31.16 per cent in 2011. The absolute numbers are even more impressive. While only 26 million lived in India’s urban settlements in 1901, their numbers had touched 377 million by 2011 and would certainly be above 400 million now. Urban settlements went up from 1,827 to 7,935 in the same period. Two Indian cities, New Delhi and Mumbai, figure among the top 10 largest cities of the world. If we were to count only the urban population, it would be significantly larger than the total population of any other country except China. This is not merely a number, it also has policy implications and indicates the consumption potential of India’s urban middle-class.
During the Pongal festival at Dharavi, one of the world’s largest slums, in Mumbai on January 15. The rural and urban, or village and city, are social constructs. | Photo Credit: RAFIQ MAQBOOL/AP
However, the expansion of the urban demographic does not imply a shrinkage of the rural population. Even when the magnitude of the rural population has declined in relative terms, its absolute size has been going up quite significantly. India’s rural population saw a near fourfold increase over the past century (from 212.5 million in 1901 to 833 million in 2011). Further, every decadal census reclassifies a good number of rural settlements into towns, yet the absolute number of rural settlements has not seen a decline. On the contrary, it has gone up from 5,67,000 in 1901 to 6,40,867 in 2011. How do we make sense of these numbers and engage with the ground realities of demographic processes?
Beyond the imperative of disappearance: The rural is no longer considered a relevant demographic category in the West. Even though farming survives as an occupation and agriculture remains important in many parts of Europe and elsewhere in the global North, the idea of a distinct rural universe has nearly disappeared. This is what has been translated into theories of economic growth and demographic change: what happened in the West will eventually happen everywhere. Urbanisation, in this imagination, is a function of economic growth and development.
However, if we wish to make sense of India’s trajectories and engage with the rural for what it is, we need to abandon such assumptions emanating from a Eurocentric mode of thinking. The rural and urban, or village and city, are social constructs. The meanings and values they have come to acquire stem from a kind of knowledge politics, the purpose of which is to normalise inequalities of power and the hegemony of the urban elite and middle classes over the rest of society. While villages change over time, they need not disappear. The urban and the rural are simply types of settlements, and neither needs to be necessarily superior to the other.
A Tiwa woman uses a home-made bamboo dustbin in Bormarjong village in West Karbi Anglong district of Assam, a 2018 picture. Rural residents are predestined to be seen by the wider world as following a “backward” way of life, socially and culturally. | Photo Credit: RITU RAJ KONWAR
The presumed binary of rural and urban oversimplifies the actually existing range and variety of human settlements and the possible trajectories of their change. Human settlements do not need to follow a pre-given path of evolution. They are shaped by their regional ecologies, sociocultural histories, and politico-economic processes. A singular view of the “rural” or “urban” should be discarded in favour of a plurality of rurals. Just as there are a plurality of urbans, and the quality of life in a small mofussil town of Karnataka or Maharashtra is not comparable in any meaningful way to the social and cultural realities of Bengaluru or Mumbai, so also are the rurals plural. Also, villages and cities are internally differentiated and diverse. While the internal differentiation of cities is widely recognised, the fact that villages are also differentiated on caste and community lines is often overlooked in popular discourse.
The Indian Village: Rural Lives in the 21st Century is thus an attempt at an alternative mode of engagement with the rural realities of contemporary India. It explores “the changing dynamics of village life, without presuming that the only destiny of the rural is to become urban, either through migration or through a non-agrarian expansion of its economy or the sources of livelihoods”. The objective is to develop an understanding of human settlements that questions the prevalent common sense and presupposes that urban ways of life are naturally superior to the rural way of being.
The idea is not to celebrate the rural, as is often done by the “traditionalist-romanticists”, but to see it as a diverse and dynamic reality with a distinct identity, capable of engaging with the world on its own terms and confronting the challenges it faces. To be able to do this, we first need to recognise some elementary facts about rural life that run contrary to the commonsensical views on the subject.
For example, while agriculture has always been an important economic activity for rural residents, not everyone in the village is or was a peasant. Many pursue(d) other occupations and actively participate(d) in the flow of commodities going beyond the village and the province. The craft of cultivation has also been changing over time, with newer technologies and communities coming in.
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The rural has always been divided on class, caste, gender, community, and ethnic lines. While it is generally located in a subordinate position to the urban elite in the larger structures of domination, it also has its own dynamics of power.
Such an approach could help us visualise possible futures of the rural beyond the teleological imperatives of its inevitable disappearance. The village of today’s India is not a drag on the national economy, always seeking welfare from the political class in return for votes. It lives on and has not given up on itself. Despite receding from the national self-imagination, rural India keeps returning to the front pages of national dailies and the chat rooms of television channels.
A recent instance of this was in how they effectively mobilised against the three farm laws (2020). Their objective was to convey a simple point, that as citizens of the country, their opinions should be considered by those legislating on their behalf to alter their lives or livelihoods. And, in doing so, they also proved that the common kisan of India is capable of being as cosmopolitan as the educated city-dwelling professional.
Surinder S. Jodhka is a professor of sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His recent publications include The Indian Village: Rural Lives in the 21st Century, Aleph, 2023, and The Oxford Handbook of Caste, OUP, 2023 (co-edited with Jules Naudet).
