For the most part, myths about an idyllic country life of pastoral contentment are just that – myths. Bucolic scenes, pastoral settings and rustic tranquillity; poetic descriptions of tranquil village life, its simplicity and innocence, have a powerful hold on our imaginations. To some extent this remains true today, but recent decades have also seen a marked change in our collective perceptions about the Southasian ruralscape.
For instance, let us trace this change in literary depiction of village life. At the turn of the century, Rabindranath Tagore's acerbic comments on the inequities of gender and caste, against a backdrop of colonialism in rural Bengal, are immortalised in stories such as Shasti (Punishment). In the classic stories of Premchand, the pioneer of modern Hindi literature, the village is seen through a more realistic lens, in all its beauty and ugliness. Writing in the 1930s, Premchand was unsparing in portraying the darker underside of village life: the ubiquity of caste, condemning those of lower status to a life of degradation and penury; oppressive feudalism; chronic indebtedness; bonded labour, et al. But he also saw the positives, celebrating the natural rhythms of rural life, its closeness to nature, and the honesty and simplicity of the common villager. This tradition continued in later decades, through the writings of Phanishwarnath Renu in Hindi and others in all the languages of the Subcontinent.
But there was a discernible literary shift during the 1960s, as the tensions between the city and the village, their conflicting pulls and pressures, came to the fore. For instance, in Bhalchandra Nemade's novel Kosla (The Cocoon), the protagonist Pandurang Sangvikar is a young man from a fairly prosperous rural background who comes to the city for his college education. Unable to find meaning for his life there, he eventually returns to the village – where he is no longer able to fit either. Pandurang ends up as an alienated good-for-nothing, idling away his time with the village loafers. From the other side of the divide, Ranganath, the city-bred, college-educated protagonist of Shrilal Shukla's Raag Darbari (1968), takes a break from the city and moves to a village, where his uncle is the sarpanch. From there, he flees back to the city, unable to cope with the feudalism, ignorance, political chicanery, oppression and injustice of rural life.
Continuing on its path, the pendulum has now swung to the other extreme. In Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008), the village is a repository of evil, and all relationships, including the closest family ties, are exploitative in nature. Feudalism, married to modern democracy, reigns supreme; those who continue in the village are condemned to lives of unending misery. While such a characterisation can be dismissed as a grotesque caricature of B R Ambedkar's trenchant criticism of the village as 'a cesspool, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism', it potentially underscores the shift over time in the worldview about the village in the Subcontinent.