Saturday, May 05, 2007
Dr Ambedkar on Villages
Responding to our Mint op-ed, a couple of IEB readers wrote to me asking what exactly Dr Ambedkar had said about villages and life in villages. Well, Dr Ambedkar said a lot of things about villages and those who glorified it, including Mahatma Gandhi, but I did some quick digging around and found some of the most trenchant comments in Edward Luce's excellent book, In Spite of the Gods.
"The love of the intellectual Indian for the village community is of course infinite, if not pathetic....What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism?"Anyone who reads about Dr Ambedkar at length cannot but come to the same conclusion he did, that the best way out for the rural poor in India is urbanization and consequent economic growth.
