The India that is Bharat

As you climb onto your vehicle on your way to work, you dwell occasionally on what seems beyond realizing—a serene life spent in the quietitude of a village; a quiet home; a river nearby; the warmth of nature. You then brace yourself to another day in the air-conditioned bowels of your office, knowing how it aggravates your cold; you clamp on the air mask to keep the smog away; and your hair turns lifeless with the belching fumes of those trundling buses.
There is a timeless charm to living life in the liberating green expanse of the village. Or so we think.
Writes Dipankar Gupta in an eye-opening exposition on the Indian village: “Rural life has been portrayed in a variety of ways in the past. For example, Do Bigha Zameen, a 1950s classic gave a moving account of a poor peasant eking out a living in the harsh environs of a metropolis as a rickshaw–puller so that his family could survive back in the village. The film begins with a song in praise of the rain gods, but when the monsoon fails, the protagonist of the film has no other option but to seek work in the cities in order to pay back the loans he had taken. Shyam Benegal, ideologically committed to a radical revision of a placid village commune, directed films that brought to the fore the colours of rural violence. It is usually the landlords or their henchmen who are the perpetrators of such violence. If in movies such as Mirch Masala or Nishant, or Ankur, Benegal gives a vivid picture of exploitation in rural India, other films such as Manoj Kumar’s Upkaar glorifies the village, the agriculturalists, and the rural way of life in general.
“The village is presented largely as a homogeneous community where the moral economy thrives. The agriculturalist is the salt of the earth in more ways than one, and mother India yields food in the villages for her millions. The hit song, Mere Desh ki dharti sona ugle, ugle heere moti exemplifies this sentiment.
“The city is where the undesirables live with their crass and immoral ways. The city is the home of the black marketer, the cheat, the swindler. Villagers do not drink smoke or play the fool in nightclubs like city people do. Khotay Sikke and Adalat are two other films which got across a similar message. Lagaan, among the recent crop of films, also showed the village as a community, where everybody pulled as one against the extortionate demands of a bunch of British administrators in an exaggerated colonial era. In this case, even the native upper crust was presented with sympathy.
“The pull and tug between town and country, or between India and Bharat [Manoj Kumar scripted himself to be Bharat in more than one film], is a fairly recurrent theme where Indian cinema deals with the village. In Bimal Roy’s other great classis Devdas, the hero Devdas lives in idyllic enchantment with his lover in a serene village setting. Until, that is, he is forbidden from marrying the woman he loves. He then takes off for the city of Kolkata; it is there that he gives himself up to alcohol with vengeful zeal. In Mehboob Khan’s Mother India, the heroine looks [played by Nargis] for her husband who has run off to the city and consequently can hardly keep track of his disintegrated character.
“Today the bucolic characters of the Indian village rarely attract viewers any more. It is hard to recall a film made in the late 1990s that extols the India village, or glorifies it at the expense of the city. In fact, these counter–positions no longer seem to resonate.”
Now if that interesting extract from Dipankar’s presentation that originally appeared in The Economic and Political Weekly, does not give you an idea of the rumblings of change that is cutting across an entire swathe of the India that is Bharath, you should then bite into some of the delectable features that this edition offers.
We talked in the March edition of the shocking spread of urbanisation that is now sweeping the urban world. Not just in this country. We will have nearly two billion more people living in the cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the next twenty-five years.
The changes, as you will see in this edition, in the ruralscape are no less worrisome, even alarming.
—Editor.