Writer Akash Kapur grew up in rural India, and has seen many changes in his area with the growth of devel­op­ment in the coun­try. But when he is asked about what he thinks of the growth, he’s uncer­tain if it’s good or bad. Along the devel­op­ment, resent­ment and vio­lence has also been intro­duced into Kapur’s homeland.

From Kapur’s lat­est col­umn for the New York Times, he describes some of what he has seen.

But devel­op­ment has also dis­rupted exist­ing ways of liv­ing. It has strained the social and cul­tural fab­ric of the vil­lages. Kuila­palayam, a vil­lage at the head of the road lead­ing to the beach, has had at least seven mur­ders in recent years. Gangs of young men roam the vil­lage, extort­ing money, exact­ing revenge. Once, the pan­chayat, a tra­di­tional assem­bly made up of vil­lage elders, would have con­trolled the vio­lence. But the new gen­er­a­tion has mod­ern ideas; they don’t heed their elders, and the pan­chayat mem­bers are pow­er­less, too scared to step in.

Devel­op­ment has led to new resent­ments and torn apart fam­i­lies. Farm­ers who used to toil over bar­ren patches of land sud­denly find that that land is worth a small for­tune. They’ve built new houses, sent their kids to school, bought motor­cy­cles and maybe even cars. A cou­ple of uni­ver­si­ties up the road have widened people’s horizons.

But neigh­bors who didn’t own land, who watched their friends get rich, often don’t feel quite as san­guine about the changes. And long-forgotten rel­a­tives have appeared, per­haps return­ing from the cities to make a claim on the land. The papers are full of often vio­lent sto­ries about dis­putes over property.

A real estate con­trac­tor I know grew up in one of the vil­lages around here. He started when he was 16, a dropout from school, as a helper on con­struc­tion sites. He now has 75 peo­ple work­ing for him. He has built man­sions for the newly rich, and even a cou­ple of beach resorts.

He told me recently about his hopes for his chil­dren. His eldest son wants to be a doc­tor; his mid­dle boy plans to be an aero­nau­tics engi­neer; and his daugh­ter wants to be a teacher. He’s excited for their futures, happy to know they won’t have to leave the coun­try to build bet­ter lives.

But he told me, too, about his fears. He wor­ries about the vio­lence in the vil­lages; he won’t let his son go to school alone. He’s con­cerned, also, because his son refuses to go to the tem­ple. He knows that his chil­dren will prob­a­bly move to the cities. That makes him sad. He feels they’ll lose their sense of community.

Like

Unlike