Essay On Indian Village

An Essay on Indian Villages of The Future

There are many in our country who idealizes our villages. Gandhiji was one of them. Rabindranath also had a yearning for the quiet countryside where one could vegetate or ruminate according to one’s fancy. And yet, perhaps, few of us today would wish to be permanent dwellers in a village. We like to be swept forward in the current of modern life even at the risk of being rendered dizzy with the whirl of perpetual motion. We do not wish to be left in the back-water of a bygone age which is what life in a village is no one will, for a moment, undervalue the quietness, the sweetness, and even the poetry that the green fields, the blue skies, the colorful scenery of a village present to our eyes. But modern life is full of activity. There is so much to do all around, so much to change and to build anew. In the past, man was the slave of an unknown destiny, the victim of chance events. Today, as the poet sang “man is the master of things,” and therefore man has to work in order to build up a ‘brave new world’ which, he feels, is for him to make or to unmake. The city and not the village, is the place where most of this work has to be bone.

As long as the earth has to be cultivated to give us our daily bread, we must have villages – small, semi-self-contained settlements where the tillers of the soil live in close touch with the earth, and in intimate and fruitful cooperation with their fellowmen who cater to their small needs in many ways. But the villages of the morrow will not be at all like the villages of the past or even of today. They will have to be urbanized. They will have to be something between a village and a town, - a snug little town in the midst of orchards and gardens and surrounded by green