We are the inheritors of rural civilisation. Explain with the light on Harappan Civilisation
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South Asia has long been viewed as a region well suited to rural lifeways, and while this rural nature has been overly idealized, this view is also grounded in some underlying truths. Of the 717,549 settlements recorded in the 1891 Census of India (covering India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar) 715,514 were classified as villages (Baines 1893, 42). Writing of India 18 years before Independence and Partition, Gandhi (1929) wrote, ‘We are inheritors of a rural civilisation. The vastness of our country, the vastness of the population, the situation and the climate of the country have, in my opinion, destined it for a rural civilisation.’ It has since been argued that it was under British colonial rule that this essentializing of India as a land of villages took place (e.g. Inden 1990, 30; Jodhka 2002, 3343), as it fed into Orientalist narratives of stagnant societies and the unchanging East, and helped justify colonial rule as an external modernizing force (e.g. Kraemer 1963, 88–89; Said 1978). This troubled history has made the task of unpicking the realities of South Asian rurality from what has historically been idealized somewhat challenging.