What If, the ‘Rural’ is the Future; and Not the Past?

What the paper says

This chapter is based on the study of economic qua labour qua class processes in a village, called Emaliguda, in the Rayagada district of South Odisha. Based on the study of class processes in the village among single women farmers, the chapter revisits the division ‘urban’/‘rural’ and the capitalist/pre-capitalist, developed/backward, modern/traditional divide that has become paradigmatic for much of our self-description as also a description of the Other 1 ; the chapter critiques this description of the rural as lacking/lagging other and the other as pre-capitalist or under-developed. The tentative hypothesis the chapter foregrounds through a close study of the class processes in the village is the following: would it be enabling to move beyond the first world/ third world, urban/rural, capitalist/pre-capitalist, developed/backward framework to a new framework ‘circuits of global capital’-‘world of the third’ in a hyphenated (not slash) relation of mutual and dynamic constitutivity, which in actuality is not a relationship between two entities, which is not a new dualism, but is an overdetermination amongst a multiplicity of contradictory class processes— some deep inside or within the circuits of global capital, some at the margins but hooked to the circuits forming a kind of dynamic borderline, and some outside—some exploitative, some non-exploitative—in interminable flux and transformation. What however is circuits of global capital and world of the third shall emerge through the study of class processes in the village. The framework of circuits of global capital and world of the third is important because what was hitherto known as rural is now split and splintered in many directions; or perhaps it was always already split in an infinite multiplicity of possibilities; it was we who had rendered the real infinity and the multiplicity hostage to a homogeneously pre-capitalist, underdeveloped, backward and superstitious bloc: the rural. This is an attempt to not lapse into the either/or that is currently dominating us: either the rural is a homogeneous presence, somewhat eternal, pure and pristine—a largely postdevelopmentalist position, risking reduction; or the rural is slowly getting annihilated and erased from existence—representative of unthinking modernist positions. The chapter argues that what was known as rural is now being re-written as the unresolved and unfinished dialectic between the circuits of global capital and world of the third. This is changing the given map of the world. This also helps us redraw our relationship with the rural. Further, this paper argues that the redrawing of the cartograph of the rural (and by default that of the rural-urban divide) creates conditions or ground for the political. The rural has hitherto been seen as our past; a past to be transcended. The redrawing of the cartograph helps us see the rural as the future; not the whole of the rural; not the rural as a homogeneous entity; but a fragment of the rural—a fragment, following Chakrabarti, Dhar and Cullenberg (2012), we call ‘world of the third’; or perhaps, not even world of the third, but a fragment of the world of the third; a fragment that is cocooned in the rural, but which, however, is also crypted. Cocooned designates presence; that which is cocooned (is) inside. Crypted points to absence; that which is crypted is hidden, veiled, occulted from hegemonic view, from consideration. The chapter argues that which is cocooned yet crypted in the rural constitutes the future. The study of economic qua labour qua class processes in Emaliguda takes us to the doorstep of that which is ‘cocooned yet crypted’.