RURAL LIFESCAPES

Architecture, Technology and Community

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“For me, India begins and ends in the villages”

—Gandhi in a letter to Nehru written on August 23, 1944

“What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism” 

B.R Ambedkar , 4th November 1948

The rural as a category is omnipresent in some of the major political, economic, cultural, and social projects of the last century, employed in various imaginations of nation, empire, and society. Despite this, there seems to be a consensus in thinking about ‘rural’ as one that signifies ‘authentic native life’ (Jodhka, 2002), positing it as the repository of tradition. The Indian village becomes a conduit through which to understand the ‘real’ India. The essentialization of the country as a ‘land of villages’, it must be noted,  is enmeshed in orientalist historiography serving imperial interests. 

‘Rural’ is marked with change and continuity. In popular imagination, its evocation is nostalgic and its renunciation almost certain. Both these tendencies to celebrate the rural and to escape it have simultaneously shaped conversation on and about the rural. In the early years of the Republic, a project of modern industrialisation steered migration from the rural and contemporary governance initiated the project of revamping the rural itself. New development projects–like ‘malls in villages’–and conceptual categories like ‘global village’ have redefined our understanding of rural areas from what was seen as a protector of the sacred and pure to what is now an eyesore for progress. Recent scholarship has come to recognise the transformation of the rural from “stunted growth to complete rupture” (Abraham, 2024). In climate governance and infrastructure capitalism, ‘ecological restoration’ has found renewed currency to address this gap. The rural, therefore, is being argued as a socio-spatial site in flux consisting of multiplicities. What would be the future of landscapes and lifescapes in rural India, where it is increasingly becoming an arena of political contestations and contradictions? 

Rural geographies and ‘place making’ is a product of processes anchored in the rural architecture and community, which tend to be co-constitutive of each other. While often dismissed as redundant in dominant narratives of technocratic design, structure and space, rural architecture has been and continues to be a fertile ground for social movements, literature and art. 

Structures of the rural world, such as homes, courtyards, wells, granaries, and shrines, are shaped by and help shape social organisation, gender roles, kinship, and ritual life. These spaces are often the product of collective labour and shared knowledge, reflecting a high degree of community cohesion. Apart from the functionality aspect and the emphasis on local belief systems, the rural structures serve as the foundational unit in making histories and identities of an entire people, thereby echoing  Doreen Massey’s idea of “spaces as a meeting place of history” (Massey, 2005, p. 9).  

The challenges of modernity and technocratic life, social isolation, abstract alienation, commodification of relations, but also the sustainability and environmental crisis, need immediate attention and possible solution. Against this backdrop, considerable spotlight is thrown on the romanticised idea of the rural, where returning to the village or looking at the village seems to be a solution to the problems of urbanisation. 

Rural, however, has been a site of class inequalities, caste hierarchies, gender discrimination and superstition. The community is woven into the everyday life of the rural; the self deeply embedded in family, kinship and caste. This has prevented the pursuit of non-traditional knowledge and curtailed individual freedom. The nature of these collectivities, as Kaviraj has shown, has changed over the course of history, especially with the coming in of modern state power and its peculiar apparatuses. Modern technology and capital have also pervaded the inner courtyards of the rural household, creating a fertile ground for transformation both of architecture, space and meaning-making practices, but also of intra and inter community ties, of ideas of leisure and friendship. 

These challenges, therefore, may require more than just returning to a pristine imagination of the rural as opposed to the urban. What is the role of capital and advanced technology on public spaces, the community relations these spaces have fostered, the engagement of the self in the social, and rural as a whole? What complexities await the dynamics of assertions and violence in rural India? What role does rural architecture in its traditional form play for ecological sustainability? What are the contests of modern architectural projects, and how is the rural sustaining its pressure? What is the role of governance in puncturing and plastering social and political relations? Which ecological knowledge systems can provide an out from the climate conundrum? Against this backdrop, if we were to return to the countryside for knowledge, learning and shared community living, what shall we hope to find there? 

Possible sub-themes :

(a) Spaces negotiated through labour

(b) Rituals, Festivities, and Everyday

(c) Loss, Environment, and Indigenous Survival 

(d) Rural Tourism

(e) Memory and Migration 

(f) Political Economy of Rural Communities 

(g) Governance in the Village

(h) Rural in a Globalised World

(i) Self and Community in the Rural 

(j) Caste and Capital in the Rural

(k) Built Environment 

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Editorial Team

TheDaak