THE RETURN OF THE ‘VILLAGE COMMUNITY’Received wisdom, corresponding with the emphases recognisable in the
public statements of the Congress under Nehru, is that India in the 1950s
was obsessed with heavy industry, technological change, machinery and
centralised planning. But there was also the recognition of the importance
of decentralised initiatives and rural welfare, an obvious concern in a
country whose population was still predominantly rural and agricultural,
and where employment had to be created. These were embodied from
1952 in the so-called ‘Community Development’ schemes, which incor-
porated Gandhi as a crucial legitimating icon; thus, even as the remaining
genuinely ideological Gandhians gradually began moving into the oppo-
sition to the Congress, the Congress discovered new uses for Gandhian
ideas.
Such schemes required local officials to encourage villages to organise
their own local initiatives for welfare or developmental purposes, hopefully
to be expressed in the organisation of rural cooperatives and some form
of voluntary collectivisation that might solve some of the problems of
landholdings too small to be economical (even by the Second Five-Year
Plan this had not got very far, but already ‘creeping collectivisation’ was
being denounced by some). They might also organise cottage industries
based on local labour power, under-employed due to the seasonal nature
of agriculture or disguised unemployment in the area. Community
Development acknowledged its debts to both public and private ‘village
uplift’ or ‘rural reconstruction’ initiatives under colonial rule. These pre-
decessor schemes, which had much in common with Gandhian attempts
at rural social engineering, also shared with the latter a benevolent
paternalism that was most often well-meaning, if at times misdirected and
out of joint with the wider political economy. The genealogy of the idea
of the ‘village community’ and its alleged ancient autonomy can be traced
back to early British attempts to understand Indian history. Allegedly,
India was a country of autonomous ‘village republics’ which ran their
own affairs and changed little even as the wider political world changed
around it: dynasties came and went, but the ‘village community’ remained
unscathed. For the Orientalists, this demonstrated that if the ‘village
community’ (as they understood it) could be preserved, ruling the larger
entity that was India could proceed with less friction. Later versions,
from the nineteenth century onwards, built on what was in the main a194 CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55