In his reckoning, the village represented ‘authenticity’, for Jawaharlal Nehru it was centre of backwardness, and for B R Ambedkar the village was a place of oppression where the institution of caste presented itself in its most brutal and inhuman form. Notwithstanding their differences on the nature of the Indian village, there are many ways in which the three great visionaries seemed to agree. ‘Village’, for them, represented the real India.
