Fragments for the Future: Selective Urbanism in Rural North India

Abstract

Scholars are increasingly rethinking the urban, the rural, and the urban–rural binary. This article advances understanding of rural and urban imaginaries through examining how young people in a village in north India develop practices that they regard as “urban” to protect rural futures. Young adults (aged eighteen to thirty) in the village of Bemni, Uttarakhand, develop urban-style educational facilities and agricultural practices as well as performances of gender empowerment imagined as urban with a view to improving the functioning of their village and preventing migration to cities. Through analyzing these practices of “selective urbanism,” we point to the production of ideas of urbanism and rurality beyond the metropolitan and large city regions usually studied and the importance especially of the performance of urban fragments in people’s conceptions of rural futures. We also examine how value is attached to ideas of the rural and urban and how people deploy as well as problematize the rural–urban binary.