Abstract
Santosh K Singh (Ed.), Remembering India’s Villages, Aakar Publications, 2021, 266 pp., ₹895, ISBN 978-93-5002-720-2 (Hardcover).
Since 1916, when the first known village studies were conducted in India in the ‘Slater’ villages in Tamil Nadu (Harris, 2016), they have always been a rich source of knowledge and interesting accounts on varied socio-economic, cultural and political aspects of rural India. The decline in the focus on the ‘rural’ in the neoliberal economic model adopted in the early 1990s led the villages to disappear from the policy landscape and consequently in academic writings (Harris et al., 2010). Intensification of the agrarian crisis due to indolence on the policy-front towards the agricultural sector, which resulted in farmers committing suicides in huge numbers since the late years of the 1990s, led the ‘rural’ to re-emerge in the policy and academic discussions at the turn of the twenty-first century. Consequently, there is a renewed thrust on village studies. Remembering India’s Villages, a welcome contribution to the existing body of knowledge on various aspects of ‘rural’ and village lives, foregrounds the continued significance of the ‘rural’ with all its old and new complexities.
The chapters in the book look at the village from three different vantage points and hence can be clubbed into three distinct segments. The first segment, foregrounding the theoretical and conceptual contours of the idea of ‘village India,’ comprises first three chapters and highlights three important points: first, how M. K. Gandhi, B. R. Ambedkar, and Rabindranath Tagore explored the holistic imagination of a village in India. For Gandhi, the idea of the village provided an ideal model that the new India or Gram Swaraj would be configured around. Ambedkar, on the contrary, negated the idea of village republics as they have no place for democracy or room for equality, liberty or fraternity, particularly for dalits. Tagore saw the village neither as a signpost of ideal Indian-ness nor as an abode of idle slumber. Hence, he argued for rural reconstruction (which is different from rural development). Second, the ‘rural’ has always been understood as something which is not urban or not yet urban or the past of the urban. However, this distinction is problematic as villages show a wide range of labour and production relations, some of which are within the circuits of global capital while others are pre-capitalist or communitarian. The coexistence of these production processes indicates that villages are not our past but offer a roadmap for our future. Third, the representation of the rural as both a concept and an empirical reality has gone through considerable change in the mainstream Hindi cinema, which in the initial decades depicted the village as the core of the Indian society and thus needed to be protected from external influences. With rapid urbanisation and modernisation of society, however, the focus of the mainstream cinematic lens began to shift from the rural towards the urbanisation and the emergence of a new middle class.
The second segment of the book consists of the chapters based exclusively on village studies, that is, using the village for generating substantive discussions around transition in the agriculture knowledge system, sociocultural dynamics of agriculture, multispecies ethnography, the role of social inequalities in influencing developmental outcomes, and changing employment structures around caste and gender. The segment comprising six chapters (fourth, sixth, seventh, ninth, tenth, and eleventh) brings to the fore a couple of important ideas. For instance, for a better understanding of the village lifeworld, it also needs to be studied from the lens of multispecies ethnography and must include the sociality that human beings enjoy with the non-human world. Second, the neoliberal economic model or the capitalist modernity has expanded livelihood opportunities in the villages that have mostly been hegemonised by men while women have experienced the reinforcement of traditional structures, relations, and processes. Thus, the occupational freedom faced by male workers has occurred at the cost of increased unfreedom for women. Third, social and economic inequalities across social groups lead to the creation of newer forms of inequality and poverty in other spheres for the marginalised social groups. This also includes inequality of access to the distribution of electricity for the socially marginalised communities of dalits and adivasis, leading to the generation of inequality and poverty of energy among them.
The new market-driven model of agriculture involving the intensive use of capital and technology has increased uncertainty in agricultural output which in turn has not only economic but cultural implications too for rural households. This transition is termed as the one from the polyvalent (which emphasised on a balance among the integral components of agriculture such as land, seed, water, people, and fertilisers) to the monovalent knowledge (focusing only on the economic aspect of agriculture). While agriculture for long has been more of a cultural and social activity for most farmers rather than purely an economic activity, the increasing difficulties in eking out livelihood from farming, particularly by small-marginal farmers has increased the incidence of leasing out or selling of land. In such a scenario, the acquisition of land for infrastructural development projects has facilitated upward economic mobility for the farmers through monetary compensation for their lands but the landless and other marginalised workers who were dependent on erstwhile landowners for agricultural employment have become even more marginalised due to the loss of agricultural employment.
The two chapters (fifth and eighth) in the last segment are neither based on village study nor contribute to the idea of the village, yet they make important contributions to the book. The continued systematic and brutal violence against dalits in spite of centuries of collective action foregrounds the limitation of the Dalit Movement that appears not to have a plan of action to intervene in the power dynamics of the village or to overhaul the social structure in village society in India for the benefit of dalits. Therefore, the Dalit Movement needs to re-imagine the village as a space for a potential-hegemonic politics, which requires a discourse that rejects the homogenisation of village as an innocent geographical landscape. The section also highlights, in the context of Andhra Pradesh, the damaging impact of the entry of giant multinational companies in agri-business and seed trading on the self-sufficiency of farmers. The monopolisation of seed trading/selling by multinational corporations has led the farmers not only to lose their own seeds but also their freedom to share the same.
The book suffers from a couple of flaws, some of which are highly conspicuous and run through all the chapters. For instance, the lack of references and citations, footnotes, spelling errors, etc., are visible across all chapters. The reader also comes across arguments that are at times confusing and sometimes sweeping. Some chapters also contain incomplete sentences or poor expressions which increase the labour of the reader to glean meaning. Meticulous editing from the editor or the publisher could have saved the book from the above flaws, along with removing the redundant details and descriptions in many chapters which would have shortened its length and added to the flow of reading.
In spite of all these shortcomings, the book is worth reading for those who wish to understand or work on Indian villages. It is a welcome addition to the existing body of literature on ‘village India’.