No dacoits. No chulbuli village belles eating sugarcane when not getting molested by the evil son of the landlord. No shahari babu leaving a pregnant Dhanno pining hopelessly at the bus stop. No thakur masticating evilly while leaning on a double bore rifle. The village, as we knew it, is no longer the same on the big screen. The earlier rural narrative was clear?it set the na?ve innocence of the protagonist against the crude primitivism of those wielding power and told us the story of heightened injustice giving way to a return of the feudal order.
Now, of course, the village is mostly absent from our imagination. From the multiplex-enabled perch that most urban audiences sit on, the small town is the new village. In cinematic representations, in the small town, innocence gives way to the rawness of desire and is accompanied by a native sense of one?s self-interest. If the village protagonist was a simpleton, the small-town hero is na?ve, but unlike the former, sets no limits to his ambition.
The disappearance of the village from our screens for a period of time had something to do with our pre-occupation with hyper-real spectacles. The village was simply too slow, too boorish and was full of people who wore too many clothes to be of interest to multiplex audiences. It neither remained a site for nostalgic fantasy, having been replaced by the small town, nor did it allow for spectacular story telling. It was excised from our consciousness as it any case was a burden for the India that shone and for that exciting new formulation called Brand India.
The village has returned to the screen, but increasingly in its hyper-kinetic avatar as India?s political nether land. The institutionalised evilness of the zamindar has morphed into the cultivated rapaciousness of the politician. Along with this new arena, has come a new aesthetic and a distinctive dialect which has made a place itself in all elements of popular culture. The protagonists in this genre are never ordinary or na?ve; they fight evil with spectacular violence, blurring the lines between good and bad.
The village has become cinematic again, and an imagination-enhanced Bihar has come to the rescue. The other face of the village is that of a giant unfinished project. This is as yet a marginal narrative, but one that promises to gather strength in the time to come. Here the village becomes the repository of our theories about change, and is the recipient of our experiments with middle class activism.
What is common to both kinds of rural representations is that they exist for the consumption of urban audiences. The village is no longer the market?it is merely a setting that is useful to narrate the stories urban India wants to see. The village is a location housed not by people who matter to us, but by props that help us see the world the way we imagine it. The village is an externalisation of our imagination about it; its reality is of little interest to most of urban India.
This is most striking in the use we put to rural India on television. Here it exists purely as a consumer product, dressing up in costume jewellery so as to look the part. Whether it is as a representative of tradition that is stifling or a reality show playground for urban-bred beauties to encounter traditional ways of life, the village is an empty shell we stuff with our ideas about the world.
?The writer is MD, Future Brands