In November ’25 I attended a 10-day course—”Nature, Culture & Economy | प्रकृति, समाज और अर्थव्यवस्था“—which was offered by Pagdandi Collective at the Jeevika Ashram, Jabalpur. It was attended by about 20 participants. The course has changed the way I look at history, understanding of village ecosystems, economics, and much more. Following are some of my learning from the course.
Businesses/Businessmen find their way to bend the rules
Before going India-specific, we discussed the Enclosure Movement in Europe (16th and 17th centuries). Before the 16th century, land in Europe wasn’t privately owned. Multiple communities used the same land for different purposes—one for farming, another for collecting wood, another for grazing. But then city merchants (burghers/bourgeois) wanted to raise more sheep for the lucrative wool trade. They just put fences around common lands and declared them private property to avoid village regulations. This displaced many people who depended on common lands for their livelihoods. Merchants influenced the parliament to legalize enclosures and criminalized those who entered enclosed lands as “trespassers.”
To support all that, philosopher John Locke provided an intellectual justification, arguing that land becomes private property through labor—even just putting up a fence. His ideas (life, liberty, private property) became foundational to liberalism and influenced documents like the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
This tells us that it is not new for businesses and businessmen to find their way to influence the people in power to amend the rules for their own benefit. In the current times, we are seeing it all around.
Was India Ever Truly “Agricultural”?
A general narrative we have been listening to is that agriculture was the primary occupation for Indians for many centuries. The truth is before colonial intervention, India accounted for roughly 20% of the world’s population and 25–30% of its international trade. It was not an agricultural backwater—it was highly industrialized through village-based craft production. To make a single plough a carpenter was required to build a wooden frame, an ironsmith for the metal blade, a leather worker for the rope, a bamboo worker for the sowing attachments, and much more.
Our villages were not just a farming settlement—they were a tightly woven industrial ecosystem. After catering to the village needs, the additional production was sent to export across the globe. India was a major manufacturing hub before colonization.
The Machinery of Erasure
The British arrived in a country where artisan communities were the backbone of both local economies and international trade. What followed was a systematic dismantling, accomplished through law, taxation, and deliberate criminalization. They made laws criminalizing a community like the Waddar community. The Agariya tribe, which could produce high-quality steel by using small iron core deposits and local furnaces. But the British declared iron ore the property of the state, which made Agariya’s practice illegal overnight. The forests were no different; they declared them state property and extracted timbers from them after displacing the traditional forest communities who lived by a principle of usufruct—take only fruits and dead wood, never cut living trees from their roots.
The Triple Rupture That Changed Everything
The craft economy, which made India do 25-30% of the world’s trade, was dismantled using three interlocking changes, which are
- Separation of Home and Work
- Individual Income over Community Wealth
- Monetization of Wealth
The shift to factories made males (primarily) members leave home to go out for work, which created ego in them that I earn and the rest of the family members depend on. Earlier, everyone at home worked together and contributed to the household incomes. If I recall collectively there is a saying from Ravindra Sharma Ji: When production setup is small, then society is at the center and it governs the production. But when we have large factories, factories govern the society. How true is that!!
Traditional wealth existed in multiple forms: grain (Dhanya), cattle, horses, and knowledge (Vidya). Grain, notably, was perishable—it forced circulation, gifting, and redistribution. Cash, by contrast, accumulates. The switch to currency as the primary medium of exchange made hoarding not just possible but rational and concentration of wealth inevitable.
Above is what we call the mainstream or real world and how proud we are. Today, people only gravitate toward professions where the monetary return is high—indicating a total loss of respect for other essential trades. The ironsmith, the weaver, the potter — their knowledge, which integrates ecology, physics, and deep craftsmanship, is dismissed as unscientific and pre-modern. Rural youth flee their traditional work not because it is inferior but because it carries a social stigma that colonialism attached to it and that we have never meaningfully examined.
The Myth We Inherited
How did it happen that most of the Indians got trapped into the mainstream (so-called real-world) mentality and resist even thinking about alternatives that existed and still exist in some form or other? Any guesses?
This happened because of the colonization of our education system. Macaulay’s education system was explicit in its aims: to produce a class that was “Indian in blood, but English in taste”—people who would administer the empire on its behalf and find no contradiction in doing so. Education became a pathway to government employment, not character formation. The measure of a good school became its examination results, not the wisdom it cultivated.
What’s unfortunate is that we continued with the same education system even after independence!! What was given in the school books was considered the blind truth, which has shaped the mindset of all the working class we see. I remember reading that because of the British government, we got the railways in India. The truth is they build the rail network to transport the goods from one place to another, so exports can become easy and streamlined.
Treating Symptoms, Ignoring the Disease
While discussing this topic, the example of Kota came up. To reduce the suicide of students, the institutional response was to put springs on ceiling fans so they could not be used as an instrument of death. Here we are treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease.
Similarly money seems to be considered a default answer to every problem, be it farming, migration, unemployment, or lack of food. Take examples of microfinance, government schemes where money is given to so-called uplift the life quality in villages. Using that money, villages are now becoming small cities, and we are now bringing city problems to villages and then again trying to solve them using city methods.
When a factory or a highway displaces a village, the state calculates compensation only for landowners and not for artisans or anyone who is part of that tightly knit ecosystem. Again, by fixing the symptoms, we increase the disease manifolds.
If we look at the jajmani system, which was there in villages, it guaranteed every artisan/farmer a livelihood and a fixed clientele. There was no unemployment, no marketing problem, no bargaining.
What We Owe the Past
None of this is an argument for romantic nostalgia or for returning to some imagined golden age. Pre-colonial India had its own hierarchies and injustices, and they must be honestly examined. But there is a difference between examining a system and erasing it—and colonialism did the latter so thoroughly that most Indians today genuinely believe the British built the country’s beautiful architecture and modernized its farming. We do not even know what was taken from us, which means we cannot begin to reckon with the taking.
The Way Forward
While the course was progressing, we all were waiting to see what was going to be the way forward. A lot of different thoughts were exchanged, like
- leave everything and move to villages
- do what you can do from where you are
- form a small community at the place of your current residence to discuss and work together to help each other, local farmers, artisans
There is no one solution that would work for everyone, but each of us shared what steps we are going to take forward. After a few weeks of the workshop, I built an activity, The Choice Between Two Lives, to let participants experience OPPORTUNITY through COMPETITION and SECURITY through COMMUNITY and then have a discussion around it. This activity helps participants to choose their custom way forward. Anyone can run this activity.
The course was really heavy, with a lot of content. We kind of covered a full-semester course in just 10 days. But the venue, hospitality, weather, and participants made it engaging and meaningful. We went for river, jungle, and hill walks; did pottery and bamboo work; made brooms and much more.
Grateful to Jeevika Ashram and Pagdandi Collective for holding this space. What they offer is not just a course — it is a chance to see our history, culture, and economy without the colonial filter we have all inherited. I’d encourage everyone to seek out such experiences. The unlearning is uncomfortable, but what grows in its place is worth it.
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