Whoa! Unfair.
An aspect of living in the city is, you can never imagine the other side of the coin - the rural or village part of life in India. Even visiting a village in Filmcity, Goregaon can not help but produce the already existing imagination of the village being a place where people do not want to talk to others, specially those they don't know and this is constantly fuelled by the infamous all-glamorising reels that Bollywood leaks. What movies and pictures or actors cannot, only real humans can.
Interaction is the single key process to understanding the life of a villager. Do they actually hate interference? Are women really oppressed? Are people unaware of their society, state and improvements in welfare? Is life all that hard or is it just said to be?
If you think of a village the first few images that come to your mind could be split. There might be two types of image.
1. A village with a lot of kids running around, cornfields (ganne ke khet) populating every direction you can think of, shy girls giggling away to God's plight and every night people celebrating festivals or dancing. A possible addition could be a mela or a village fair.
2. The other image that is possible is the image of rude people, keeping to themselves and shooing you away every time you come nearby and huddling their women and children indoors all the time. And men sitting in small certain parts of the village smoking up over the Everest.
To be honest, none of these are true nor false. They are both stereotypes created by images and movies. Yet there is some truth to both of these ideas. In some villages of Punjab that might be more ideologically forward the first image may stand true, while in rural Rajasthan there might be villages that might depict the second image more strongly. Whatever it is, there cannot exist an image of "An Indian Village" as being universal or stereotyped. I know of villages that do not fit into either of the above two more commonly known images of villages. like the villages in the hills, where women are known to get a lot more freedom and cornfields? Well, no.
So then I come back again to where I abruptly changed topic. Interaction is the only way to understand the village life. Since there is no such common life - the villagers in Filmcity or Sanjay Gandhi National Park lead a lifestyle similar to that of the urban population, whereas some tribes in Orissa may be absolutely unaware of the existence of a State. So it depends from place to place.
While we city folks can still be grouped and huddled, villagers cannot simply because they have each formed their identity (as a village) and governing systems. Even if, these identities or methods might overlap among villages, majorly amongst those that are located in the same region each village (or if you like - group of villages) is different from others in many ways unique to itself (the region). And that is why India cannot be fathomed as only one idea. In what E. M. Forster tried to show through his book "A Passage to India" that there is no one single India or even anything as A "Real India" only ideas that keep changing everywhere.
So how is it possible to take into account this large part of India that is labelled rural. In many ways it more advanced than the "Urban" and that of course should be more known. The culture of India lies within this idea of rural and I may be wrong at that, considering there is no universal thing about the rural life of India.
So is it fair that these villages are stereotyped into one man's image and perception (which may or may not be narrow-minded)? Perhaps not, yet it is OK if they are because as ideas are, they can be insanely large, yet can be represented in small parts.
However what would be unfair would be the accepting of this representation as the universal truth. Not everything is the way you think of it to be. There can be layers and differences to the same thing.
Interaction is the single key process to understanding the life of a villager. Do they actually hate interference? Are women really oppressed? Are people unaware of their society, state and improvements in welfare? Is life all that hard or is it just said to be?
If you think of a village the first few images that come to your mind could be split. There might be two types of image.
1. A village with a lot of kids running around, cornfields (ganne ke khet) populating every direction you can think of, shy girls giggling away to God's plight and every night people celebrating festivals or dancing. A possible addition could be a mela or a village fair.
2. The other image that is possible is the image of rude people, keeping to themselves and shooing you away every time you come nearby and huddling their women and children indoors all the time. And men sitting in small certain parts of the village smoking up over the Everest.
To be honest, none of these are true nor false. They are both stereotypes created by images and movies. Yet there is some truth to both of these ideas. In some villages of Punjab that might be more ideologically forward the first image may stand true, while in rural Rajasthan there might be villages that might depict the second image more strongly. Whatever it is, there cannot exist an image of "An Indian Village" as being universal or stereotyped. I know of villages that do not fit into either of the above two more commonly known images of villages. like the villages in the hills, where women are known to get a lot more freedom and cornfields? Well, no.
So then I come back again to where I abruptly changed topic. Interaction is the only way to understand the village life. Since there is no such common life - the villagers in Filmcity or Sanjay Gandhi National Park lead a lifestyle similar to that of the urban population, whereas some tribes in Orissa may be absolutely unaware of the existence of a State. So it depends from place to place.
While we city folks can still be grouped and huddled, villagers cannot simply because they have each formed their identity (as a village) and governing systems. Even if, these identities or methods might overlap among villages, majorly amongst those that are located in the same region each village (or if you like - group of villages) is different from others in many ways unique to itself (the region). And that is why India cannot be fathomed as only one idea. In what E. M. Forster tried to show through his book "A Passage to India" that there is no one single India or even anything as A "Real India" only ideas that keep changing everywhere.
So how is it possible to take into account this large part of India that is labelled rural. In many ways it more advanced than the "Urban" and that of course should be more known. The culture of India lies within this idea of rural and I may be wrong at that, considering there is no universal thing about the rural life of India.
So is it fair that these villages are stereotyped into one man's image and perception (which may or may not be narrow-minded)? Perhaps not, yet it is OK if they are because as ideas are, they can be insanely large, yet can be represented in small parts.
However what would be unfair would be the accepting of this representation as the universal truth. Not everything is the way you think of it to be. There can be layers and differences to the same thing.
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