Evolving realities of rural landscape

Social life in rural settings is popularly imagined as being very different from its counterpart, the urban milieu, in its nature and patterns. As discussed earlier, such an understanding of the difference in the modes of living between the two types of settlements has been popular not only among social scientists but also with laypeople, a part and parcel of our common sense. Most middle-class urban Indians, for example, would assume that villagers always live in joint households where married brothers and their families live together with their parents, often under the command of an authoritarian patriarch, a father or grandfather. Simultaneously, most educated middle-class Indians would also endorse the view that in urban settlements everyone lives in nuclear households, where a husband and wife live with their unmarried children, and without the presence of other kin or an overarching patriarchal authority.

According to this popular view, life in the Indian village is also organized around the institution of caste. The village provides an ideal and appropriate ecosystem for caste divisions and hierarchies to function effectively. As is popularly assumed, caste curates and conditions nearly everything in an Indian village. Everyone grows up within the habitus of their caste and kinship community, from where they acquire notions and sensibilities of what is good or bad and what is right or wrong. The patriarchs in families arrange marriages as per the rules and restrictions of caste endogamy and exogamy. Its patriarchal social order very neatly demarcates the roles and statuses of the two genders as per the rules handed down over centuries.

In this commonsensical view, economy and occupations too are determined by caste. Everyone learns the craft and skills required for performing their caste occupation while growing up within their families and the larger kinship circle to which they belong. Cultivators, potters, barbers, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers, sweepers, toddy tappers, sweet makers, moneylenders, priests, healers and midwives, all acquire the skills of their craft while growing in their households, from their elder kin, and they join them as full-time workers once they are old enough to do so.

Rural social lives are thus presumed to be lived and organized collectively. Questions of individual choice or taste are simply irrelevant to them; so is the idea of individuality or an individual’s identity. Such a patriarchal social order could also be oppressive, particularly for rural women, young children, and for those living on the margins of the village society.

However, as is suggested in these presumptions, rarely do people complain about caste divisions or contest the authority of the male heads of the households or that of the village patriarchs. Such situations of conflict normally do not arise because everyone in the Indian village lives by their tradition. They grow up imbibing its values and norms. An absence of such existential anxieties and individual choices also makes their way of life simple and fairly predictable.

Even though such stereotypical images of rural social life are often constructed and invoked by middle-class urban Indians to convey the superiority of their lifestyle, they may occasionally also attribute a positive value to such an imagination of the village society: the villagers may often be ignorant and rustic but their lives are simpler and easier to live because they have a kind of stability, which urban folks have lost and often long for. Rural residents are also seen as living closer to nature, in consonance with its flows and without any conflict with it. They are viewed as being free from an excessive greed for material goods. Enticed by such a stereotype, many urban Indians long to go and live in the village, away from the hustle and bustle of urban life.

In preceding chapters of this book, I have repeatedly questioned the validity and value of such a contrasting view of rural and urban societies. The size of settlements and spatiality in general are indeed significant and they do play a role in shaping or structuring social relations and ways of thinking and being. Further, villages, towns, cities do differ in distinct, definable ways. For example, the size of a settlement would have implications for the way in which identities of caste, kin, and community tend to function in everyday life. The anonymity available to those living in the bigger urban centres also brings about a different kind of social and cultural diversity, which is generally absent in a smaller settlement. However, a contrasting view of rural and urban settlements, or an idealized imagination of the Indian village as having been ever stable and harmonious or of a farmer as a ‘simpleton’ is completely flawed and ahistorical. Its counterpoint, the popular stereotype of the city being free of ascription-based hierarchies, lived solely through individualized identities and rationally organized economic life, and above any kind of active identification with ethnicity, caste, or religion in public life is equally flawed.

As noted earlier in the book, such a view of the Indian village, or this binary mode of framing rural and urban settlements is also not very old. It has its origin in the evolutionary theories of human species, applied uncritically to human society by functionalist sociology and some romanticist Western thinkers who did not like the changes produced by modernity and industrialization in their societies. Gandhi’s romantic view of the village was also drawn from a similar imagination.

As I have discussed in the previous chapters, such a view of the Indian village was also invoked and popularized by the British colonial rulers. Such a view also presented the Indian village as having been static for ages and an undifferentiated form of social reality, which helped them legitimize their presence in India as benevolent rulers, who were working hard to introduce a spirit of change among the Indians, particularly among those living in its innumerable village communities. As the British claimed, the Indian villages had been eternally stagnant and had no capacity to change on their own; they had to be invaded and disrupted from outside for their own ‘progress’.

This also made it easier for them to persuade members of the emerging middle class in India about the superiority of the Western way of life, which was also the urban way of life. The Western city emerged as a model of modern life. The contrasting imaginations of the Indian village on one side and Western city on the other became a source of theorizing social and economic change. This imagination underlay much of the development thinking with which the native elite of India visualized its future after freedom from colonial rule. Even when the nationalists mobilized popular opinion for Independence, they accepted the colonial framings of India being a backward country, a land of never changing villages. Besides accelerating economic growth, state policies and programmes were to also change the presumed social organization of the village, developing it and making it more like the city.

Social Life in the ‘Actually Existing Villages’

As mentioned above, social life in villages indeed tends to follow a different pattern when compared to that in the towns and cities. This difference at times could also be quite significant in terms of their institutional arrangements and cultural values. However, as also alluded to in previous chapters of the book, the two—village and city—have evolved together and they tend to shape each other. This has been the case almost everywhere. Thus, the ‘actually existing villages’ need to be seen in their regional context, in relation to the larger historical processes of power, economy, and ecology.

(Excerpted with permission from Surinder S Jodhka’s ‘The Indian Village’; published by Aleph Book Company)