The convenient fiction of the simple villager

Our clan hails from Patuligram, in the Hooghly district of Bengal. Our ties to this place are at least four centuries old. For years, I accompanied my parents to our ancestral village for short visits.
Though not a village boy, the village was not altogether alien to me. It wasn’t ‘exotic’ or other things as villages apparently  are. There are as many types of villages as there are villages.

In my urban Bengali childhood, neighbourhood Boshe Ako (Sit and Draw) painting competitions were common. Today, such neighbourhood mingling ain’t ‘cool’, especially among Anglo-Americanized segments. A ‘village scene’ was among the most popular items drawn. It would include a hut, a river, a few coconut trees, a lot of empty land, sometimes a few humans, and curiously, a few sharp triangles in the background signifying hills with peaks, with the sun peeking out from behind like the DMK symbol. This was a make-believe idea of the village drawn by scions of a generation that could not completely deny their erstwhile origin from villages but were mostly clueless about what they might look like. The tiny producers of these kitsch villages have grown up to form that generation that wears rootlessness as a badge of honour.

That urban kid was expressing a very distilled form of an ideology. It would draw a city scene as a complex site of human activity with more things. The village was undifferentiated. Simple. So were the villagers. Simple-minded. The lack of a human connection with the village (not the recent yuppie quasi-touristic ‘exploration’ type of thing) enabled the construction of a certain idea of the rural. Now that rural lands are the primary targets for unsustainable and parasitic urban expansion, this idea becomes most handy. In ‘development’ discourse, the simple villager idea helps getting broad ethical consent and support from crucial urban sectors for village-destruction and land-acquisition. The other ‘simpleton’ is, of course, the tribal.

The more shameless part of this sector partakes in ‘traditional cuisine’ in an ‘authentic’ village setting, sets up false ‘village-like’ props during their marriage ceremonies, de-stresses at ‘traditional’ spas (the notorious ‘Vedic Village’ is one such) and seeks a pollution-free ‘green’ life ‘away from the city’. The obscenity of it all is beyond these ‘21st century Indians’ but is not lost on the evicted who hover around their erstwhile homes and lands as menial help. A documentary called Aamader Jomite Oder Nagari (Their Township on Our Land) by Promod Gupta makes it clear. My suspicion is that after death, they continue to hover ‘like dark geese’ on Rajarhat and ‘NCR’ skies.

But the villagers were not always so ‘simple’. Though literary representations are a poor approximation of life, for what they are worth, the villagers in the works of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay or Rabindranath Thakur were far from simple. The ‘simple’ villager fiction wouldn’t have sold amongst folks whose fathers were from the village and weren’t quite simple. Whatever be the virtues of village-boy Manmohan Singh, ‘simplicity’ isn’t one of them.

The propaganda product called the ‘simple’ villager needs to be protected against his own ‘simplicity’. He is invoked when the obstinate and the rooted opposes his own eviction for the ‘greater good’. Apparently, his ‘simplicity’ makes him easily excitable by manipulative ‘outsiders’ to protest against power. He, thus, has no agency. His opposition is false. His protest is false. His simplicity is true. We find the ideology of elite power at work, saving people from their own ideas.
The simple village was born in a gluttonous and complex metropole without an umbilical cord. The children’s paintings were not that simple.

The author is a brain scientist at MIT