EDITORIALS

Myths, Rural and Urban

We do not have sound knowledge of urban society and its relation to rural society.
A M Shah writes:

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ndia is getting urbanised rapidly but knowledge and understanding of urban society and its problems remain woefully inadequate. Throughout the period of the independence movement and for several decades afterwards the village was the

primary focus in the discourse on economic and social development while the town remained on the fringe. In the social science research launched after Independence, the village continued to be the preferred unit of inquiry, leading to a large volume of excellent
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research. This massive effort to know the village laid a strong foundation for understanding the social life of nearly 90% of Indias population at that time, but it also meant relative neglect of the town, the inuence of whose population on the rest of the society far exceeded its small proportion. It led to a number of misconceptions about rural versus urban society in essence, to a partial view of Indias holistic reality. This imbalance is one of the reasons behind difculties in coping with problems created by rapid urbanisation. British colonial rulers and their ideologues called India a land of villages. Although they knew of cities all over India, they thought these were overgrown villages compared with the cities in Europe. They also considered urbanisation a process caused by industrialisation, therefore recent. Indigenous, pre-industrial urbanism was therefore rarely a subject of serious inquiry. On the other hand, villages were viewed as self-sufcient, autonomous, and free from urban links by such inuential European thinkers as Charles Metcalf, Henry Maine and Karl Marx, and following them, by such Indian leaders as Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan. Although this view has proved to be mythical, it surfaces frequently even now as self-evident truth in public discourse. The Indian village is widely described as an agrarian or peasant community. Of course, every village includes peasants or agrarian people: landowners, sharecroppers, and agricultural labourers. But, it also includes members of many artisan, craftsman and service castes, such as carpenter, blacksmith, potter, weaver, leatherworker, barber, drummer, scavenger, trader, priest, etc. Although these non-peasant castes are each represented in a village by a few households, sometimes only one or two, all their households put together constitute a large proportion, often about one-fth of the total number of village households. The members of the same non-peasant castes are found in urban centres also, and in larger numbers. With modern economic development there are many new non-agricultural workers; some like bicycle repairer, electrician, and tractor mechanic work within the village, and others reside in the village but commute to work in the city. These facts negate the view calling the village a community of only peasants. Scholarship on such a fundamental feature of Indian society as caste has remained largely village-based. One eminent scholar said that he ignored urban caste for the sake of a universal formula, a rule without exception. Some others said that castes are rural in origin; therefore, even if they occur in the city they are considered essentially rural. A recent general book on caste has hardly anything to say on urban caste. One reason for ignoring urban caste is that it has certain features that do not t into long accepted theories. For example, the principle of hierarchy considered as the basic feature of caste competed with the principle of division, difference or separation of caste even in the pre-industrial city. The relations between some of the urban castes were characterised by juxtaposition placed side by side rather than higher and lower. Throughout the colonial period the joint family, another structural feature of Indian society, was believed to be of rural origin, therefore stronger in rural than in urban areas, and urbanisation was believed to be weakening it. New sociological research after Independence, however, found the joint-family household stronger in towns than in villages. The old myth nevertheless continues to rule the discourse on the family. When the household data released by the Census of India in March 2012 showed that the percentage of households with two or more married couples in urban areas is
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high and even increased from 14.5 in 2001 to 16.3 in 2011, the media ashed stories of surprise and offered imaginary explanations, expressing once again their blind faith in the myth. Similarly, many intellectuals are surprised when told that more than 90% of economic enterprises are based on the joint family. Myths prevail about many other aspects of urban society. The main problem is that, while a great deal of knowledge has developed about the physical architecture of indigenous cities since the time of Indus Valley Civilisation, there is meagre knowledge about their social architecture (see A M Shah, The Structure of Indian Society: Then and Now, Delhi: Routledge, 2010). In the case of small towns, although they existed in the past as at present they existed even in tribal areas they are rarely a part of historical scholarship. It is necessary to understand the social architecture of the entire spectrum of indigenous urban centres and its role in the social architecture of urban centres of the modern spectrum. The present impasse in handling the mind-boggling problems of megacities seems to lie partly at least in ignorance of their relation with the rest of the urban spectrum as well as with villages. Demographers dene urbanisation as an increase in the proportion of urban to total population in an area, and attribute this increase mainly to migration of rural population to urban centres. This denition, however, does not take into account migration from urban to rural areas, which might transform a village into a small town. When a village becomes prosperous, its people emulate urban lifestyles, which attract urban artisans, craftsmen and servicemen to settle in the village. This process could be observed even in the pre-industrial times, and has become widespread in modern times, resulting in an increase in the number of small towns. In the Census of India, usually a settlement is considered a town if it satises three criteria: more than 5,000 population; population density of at least 400 per square km; and at least 75% of male workers engaged in non-agricultural work. In applying the rst two criteria, the census rarely, if ever, takes into account the complication of the village as a residential settlement, and the village as a territorial unit recognised for land revenue administration. In most parts of the country the village settlement is almost as densely populated as a town. However, the census takes into account the village population and its density only in the revenue unit, which makes the density gure low. The third criterion is even more problematic: why should only the male non-agricultural workers be considered and the female ones excluded? That women do not get engaged in nonagricultural work is an old myth. On the whole, these three criteria are likely to lead to an undercount of small towns. There is one more complication: a settlement considered a town by the census may not be given statutory status as a town by the state government. Therefore, we have now two terms, census town and statutory town. Under the Constitution, municipalities are a state subject, and the power to recognise statutory town lies with the state government. Since the level of grants given by the central government for rural development is usually high, the states are reluctant to recognise a village as a town even after it acquires urban characteristics. This is one more factor behind the undercount of small towns and their population. The old belief that a town is only an overgrown village seems to be working all the way. All in all, India does not have even reliable numbers of urban centres and urban population, leave alone sound knowledge of urban society and its relation with rural society. This situation is bound to hamper the formulation of proper policies and their execution.

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vol xlviII no 38