Essay on “Villages of India” Complete Essay for Class 9, Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Villages of India

Scattered throughout India are approximately 5,00,000 villages. It is in villages that India’s most basic business—agriculture—takes place. Here, in the face of vicissitudes of all kinds, farmers follow time-tested as well as innovative methods of growing wheat, rice, lentils, vegetables, fruits, and many other crops in order to accomplish the challenging task of feeding themselves and the nation. Here, too, flourish many of India’s most-valued cultural forms.

Viewed from a distance, an Indian village may appear deceptively simple. A cluster of mud-plastered walls shaded by a few trees, set among a stretch of green or dun-coloured fields, with a few people slowly coming or going, ox-carts creaking, cattle lowing, and birds singing—all present an image of harmonious simplicity. Indian city dwellers often refer nostalgically to “simple village life.” City artists portray colourfully-garbed-village women gracefully carrying water pots on their heads, and writers describe isolated rural settlements unsullied by the complexities of modern urban civilization. Social scientists of the past wrote of Indian villages as virtually self-sufficient communities with few ties to the outside world.

In actuality, Indian village life is far from simple. Each village is connected through a variety of crucial horizontal linkages with other villages and with urban areas both near and far. Most villages are characterized by a multiplicity of economies, castes, kinships, occupations, and even religious groups linked vertically within each settlement. Factionalism is a typical feature of village politics. In one of the first of the modern anthropological studies of Indian village life, anthropologist Oscar Lewis called this complexity “rural cosmopolitanism.”

Indian village dwellings are built very close to one another in a nucleated settlement, with small lanes for passage of people and sometimes carts. Village fields surround the settlement and are generally within easy walking distance. In hilly tracts of central, eastern, and far northern India, dwellings are more spread out, reflecting the nature of the topography. In the wet states of West Bengal and Kerala, houses are more dispersed; in some parts of Kerala, they are constructed in continuous lines, with divisions between villages not obvious to visitors.

In northern and central India, neighbourhood boundaries can be vague. The houses of Dalits are generally located in separate neighbourhoods or on the outskirts of the nucleated settlement, but there are seldom distinct Dalit hamlets. By contrast, in the south, where socio-economic contrasts and caste pollution observances tend to be stronger than in the north, Brahman homes may be set apart from those of non-Brahmans, and Dalit hamlets are set at a little distance from the homes of other castes.

The number of castes resident in a single village can vary widely, from one to more than forty. Typically, a village is dominated by one or a very few castes that essentially control the village land and on whose patronage members of weaker groups must rely. In many areas of the south, Brahmans are major landowners, along with some other relatively high-ranking castes. Generally, land, prosperity, and power go together. In some regions, landowners refrain from using ploughs themselves but hire tenant farmers and labourers to do this work. In other regions, landowners till the soil with the aid of labourers, usually resident in the same village. Fellow villagers typically include representatives of various service and artisan castes to supply the needs of the villagers—priests, carpenters, blacksmiths, barbers, weavers, potters, oil-pressers, leather-workers, sweepers, water-bearers, toddy-tappers, and soon. Artisan ry in pottery, wood, cloth, metal, and leather, although diminishing, continues in many contemporary Indian villages as it did in centuries past. Village religious observances and weddings are occasions for members of various castes to provide customary ritual goods and services in order for the events to proceed according to proper tradition. At slack seasons, village life in India can appear to be sleepy, but usually villages are humming with activity. The work ethic is strong, with little time out for relaxation,  except for numerous  divinely sanctioned festivals and rite-of-passage  celebrations.

Residents are quick to judge each other, and improper work or social habits receive strong criticism. Indian villagers feel a sense of village pride and honour, and the reputation of a village depends upon the behaviour of all of its residents.