By Amitabh Ranjan

The Indian Village: Rural Lives in the 21st Century

Aleph Book Company

Pp 296, Rs 799

The Community Development Programme (CDP) was an extremely ambitious initiative of rural development at a time when villages housed almost 85% of India’s population. Introduced a year after the First Five-Year Plan with 15 pilot projects, it had been extended to most parts of the country by the next decade. Soon, however, the CDP came to be seen as a failed project. Its key objective of increasing India’s foodgrain productivity at a time the country needed more food to feed its rising population remained far from realised.

The reason: a flawed underlying philosophy. The programme called for approaching the village as a culturally evolved social and communal universe rather than a politico-economic formation. Questions of caste, class and gender, though acknowledged, were seen to be of little significance for its functioning. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Non-recognition of social divisions within the village resulted in its benefits being cornered mostly by the rural elite. Such thinking, in fact, has been a bane of many well-meaning government schemes.

This is an example of how the Indian village has had a long history of never being understood in its complex totality and what it has meant for policy decisions for the better part of the country’s independent existence.

How is it that the country, which had substantially more people living in towns and cities (17.6 million) compared to the total population of Great Britain (10.5 million) at the beginning of the 19th century, came to be known as a land of homogenous ‘village republics’ existing in perpetuity with harmony and interdependence among different groups inhabiting it?

It is this construct of India that Surinder S Jodhka, a professor of sociology at JNU, in his book The Indian Village: Rural Lives in the 21st Century, examines in detail, bringing to the fore findings of his extensive research in rural settlements of Haryana, Punjab, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat and travel in south Indian states.

Overwhelming proportions of the Indian population have always lived in rural settlements and nearly two-thirds continue to do so even now in the 21st century. However, it is also a fact that from the time of the Harappan civilisation and well into the 18th century, flourishing cities, fed by land revenue and rural labour, were an integral part of the region’s social, cultural and political formations. Villages also were not isolated in a socio-cultural sense, with inter-village interactions and village exogamy being the norm rather than an exception.

What then explains the fixation with the idea of the autonomous village among middle-class Indians, the political elite, and even academics while thinking about the pasts of social life in India? Why does the village alone carry the burden of being traditional and authentic? Why have the narratives of rural life come to be largely framed in metaphors of ‘negatives’ and ‘declines’, when the rural in India continued to grow and expand?

Across nine chapters of this cogently written book, Jodhka provides elaborate answers to these fundamental questions, peeling off the veneer of homogeneity, self-containment and autonomy that the ‘rural’ in India has been painted with. His village story starts from a casual conversation over tea when one of his friends, a retired bureaucrat, lamented the demise of the village as he had known it. This nostalgia, a sense of personal loss and even a concern is a common refrain for many Indians who have lived in cities but have been umbilically attached to their rural roots through occasional visits to or tidings from home. For them, everything else changing would be fine but not the village life in India. As a cradle of the presumed Indian culture, it was imagined as a never-changing peaceful place.

The author says such a static view of Indian village was a colonial construct created to present India as a land of hopelessness that needed intervention for progress. Surprisingly, the Indian nationalist leaders, too, found such a framing of the village life politically useful and morally tempting, invoking such an image to argue for its civilisational unity and a call for independence. Despite the ground realities being considerably different, social anthropologists, too, saw in the village a microcosm of Indian tradition and larger patterns of its socio-economic and political life. It also fitted well into the narrative of the industrialised West and emerging elites in developing countries. The dominant idea of development saw village as the relic of the pre-modern past and prescribed urbanisation as a panacea of all ills of the Third World. A burgeoning urban economy in the 1990s gave rise to the consuming middle classes. The rural was expected to die a natural death.

The resilience of the rural is Jodhka’s central theme. The idyllic and cohesive Indian village, a faulty idea to begin with anyway, has over a century segued into a changing national and global order. Though many of the disparities of caste, gender and land ownership persist, phenomena like the Green Revolution, Panchayati Raj, migration, rural jobs scheme and, more recently, the march of technology have shattered rural stereotypes. Though agriculture’s share in the national income has been on the wane, India’s countryside still houses a much larger population than its cities.

At a time when sustainability and eradication of multi-dimensional poverty form part of the latest development paradigm, the book is a wonderful read for enlightenment, research and policy decisions. The tale of the Indian village has been akin to the blind men and the elephant parable. The author tries to tell a much more realistic story. He succeeds in no small measure.

Amitabh Ranjan is a former journalist who teaches at Patna Women’s College