“Village people are innocent and ignorant”. Do you agree with this prejudiced statement?
Answers
Answer:
By treating protesting farmers as if they’re ignorant, government is repeating an old colonial idea
The old rural-urban binary continues to dog a large section of India’s urban elite and hinders their capacity to make sense of the farmers’ assertions.
Surinder S Jodhka
Jan 12, 2021 · 06:30 am
By treating protesting farmers as if they’re ignorant, government is repeating an old colonial idea
Farmers protest against India's new farm laws in New Delhi. | Sajjad Hussain / AFP
India lives in its village. It was Mahatma Gandhi who popularised this image of India. Most of his contemporaries agreed with him.
Even BR Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru, who disagreed with Gandhi on the social composition of the village and the path that India ought to choose for its economic development, accepted nearly completely the underlying demographic claim made in this statement. This was despite the fact that a great many Indians had, in fact, lived in urban settlements, almost forever.
ADVERTISEMENT
At the time of India’s Independence, urban Indians made for nearly 15% of the population, or approximately 60 million people. However, in popular nationalist common-sense, city dwellers did not represent the “real” India. For Gandhi, urban residents were not only a demographic minority but were also “inauthentic” Indians. Villages were where the soul of India lived.
Gandhi also went much further than this. He also founded his theory of India’s colonisation and its freedom around the idea of a village. Cities, for him, accompanied western civilisational influence and thus was a symbol and signifier of colonisation, both of mind and space. In his view, therefore, cities symbolised moral corruption. India’s true independence could only be through the recovery of its “lost” self, the village.
Gandhi was obviously being ideological in his celebration of the village life. He would certainly have known that cities had been a part of Indian life even much before the British landed on the western coast. He was himself not born in a village and his family had perhaps always been urban. So was the case with Nehru.
However, there were serious problems with Gandhi’s advocacy of the idea of “village as India”. As Ambedkar had pointed out, his conception of the village as a cohesive, harmonious community had been borrowed from the British colonial administrator, Charles Metcalfe. For the colonial rulers, India was a land of “village republics”, small, isolated and independent of outside influence. According to them, the Indian villages had seen no change or dynamism for centuries in their internal social and economic organisation.
Explanation:
Answer:
not all but some are need
Explanation: