India’s Economic Might Rests in its Villages by Rahul Goswami

India’s Economic Might Rests in its Villages

We have long had our socio-economic guides and for just as long have respected and listened to their interpreters and practitioners, those whom our era call ‘green activists’. May their tribe increase!

There was a time, a longish period of our history, during which those who could have been termed a Bharatiya ‘bourgeoisie’ (had Marxists existed then) in our society did not reach dominant levels of political and economic strength. The consequence was that capitalism did not become, during this period, the primary economic system. “For these reasons,” wrote KS Shelvankar in ‘The Problem of India’ (1940), “the invincible toughness of the village and the political impotence of the bourgeoisie, the evolution of Indian economy was inhibited and the spontaneous emergence of a capitalist order was rendered impossible.”
The point of interest in Shelvankar’s penetrating observations of pre-British India is not the inhibition of economy but the strength of the village. The industrial and mercantile classes of our towns could not and did not bring under their orbit the ‘gramas’ because of what he called the almost impregnable balanced economies of our self-sufficient villages. This quality was, to condense drastically a lengthy tale, both the strength of the ‘gramas’ in Bharat and a constraint to what in our era is called ‘human development’. But even this constraint (which Dr BR Ambedkar complained about famously) must be seen against the autarchic characteristic of our villages, in which nonetheless considerable activity occurred with social festivals, stagecraft and theatre, religious gatherings, and other forms of collective activity.
The mystic revolutions fostered by Shankaracharya and Chaitanya, by Ramanuja, Nanak and Kabir, took place against the stable background of the self-sufficient village and its social economy, which successfully survived political storms and war. But colonial rule set about to alter that fabric and the essentially extractive nature of colonial occupation was gradually able to upset the ancient equilibrium of the ‘gramas’, for the British evolved in India a gigantic administrative apparatus which eventually ensnared every village and hamlet. And that has been the administrative model which, with minor modifications and the fragile varnish of ‘modernity’, independent India adopted and continues to steer.

I have provided this little précis in order to help the reader gauge the depth of and the sincerity of those who more recently have claimed to invent an economics for India. Grama Bharat and dynastic Bharat – Chalukyas, Cholas and Guptas, Hoysalas, Kakatiyas and Kushans, the Magadhas, Marathas and Mauryas, or the Mughals and the Satvahanas – did not have a single economics for the Indias and the Bharats they ruled (the Arthashastra was not a text as commonly read or as commonly available as it tends to be assumed to have been). But the macro-economists of our era, as inadequately schooled in history as they are in culture, are unaware of this long-lived consequence of the self-sufficiency of the village.
Instead, they prefer to be accomplices of the project to dismantle the village as the economic unit and so put an end to what the globalists consider is a troublesome history. The autarchy that was balanced – at times well, at other times ill – by the administrations of all these dynasties and smaller satraps, for so long, began to slip, perhaps when the first struggles for our independence were waged in the mid-19th century (1857 being one signal event amongst several) and perhaps earlier when the ‘chatuspathis’ and ‘vidyalayas’ began giving way to ‘modern’ education. But if there was a Wood’s Education Dispatch of 1854 there also was a Deccan Education Society established by Tilak and Agarkar, an outstanding example of educational institutions started by nationalist Indians.
Had we the clarity and honesty to recognise a homespun economics that continues to suit ‘grama’ Bharat as much as it does the labour and informal sector workers in our 4,041 statutory towns (large cities included) and 3,894 census towns, we would then have macro-economists who would value the protection of ‘prakruti’ as much as they may value the contribution of our many thousands of handicraft forms and many lakhs of artisans, for there is no reason why the economics of self-sufficiency cannot continue to be practiced and encouraged.
From such a point of view, such a macro-economics for Bharat will include – to a far more intimate and constructive degree than 68 years of Independence have hitherto proven – the schools in our 640,930 villages and enlist as practicing local economists our 2,645,880 panchayat members (a good number of them women, who care about how many children go to school). There is good reason to dispel the macro-economic fog (much of it generated by the universities of the West, and mainly the USA, and unfortunately for us, consumed uncritically by our countrymen and women who continue to go there to study and find lucrative jobs, often with the World Bank and similar organisations) that grew thicker during the ten years of UPA misrule.
Our panchayats, after all, manage between them 159,591,854 hectares of land that are planted with crops that help feed Bharat (rotis and kheer, idlis and biscuits) thanks to the labours of our ‘kisan’ households which care for these crops in 138,348,461 farm holdings. The socio-economic self-sufficiencies that supported early dynasties as well as later ones (but which could not bear colonial plundering) allow many economies to thrive in ‘grama’ Bharat as well as urban India. We have many economies, not one welded to the mechanistic and destructive globalised economy, and these are all dear to us. And the health of these economies – which lie beyond the calculations of poverty lines and direct benefit transfers – is best tended to by those who have been unfairly and disparagingly referred to as ‘green activists’ and as ‘green lobbies’.
“Trees have five sorts of kindness that are their daily sacrifice,” a passage in the Varaha Purana has explained. “To families they give fuel, to passersby they give shade and a resting place, to birds they give a home, to the sick they give medicines with their leaves, roots and bark.” We have long had our socio-economic guides and for just as long have respected and listened to their interpreters and practitioners, those whom our era call ‘green activists’. May their tribe increase!
(Rahul Goswami studies agriculture practices, food policy and their impacts on costs and prices. He has written extensively on the subject and has worked for the National Agriculture Innovation Project.)