Emerging Ethics in Rural India *

This paper explores the ethical dimensions of some of the current issues engaging rural India, affecting 600 million people. It uses the evolutionary framework of Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga, and also tags on to it the rights concepts of Amartya Sen’s ethics. It attempts to take a balanced view between Ambedkar’s perception of the ancient Indian village as a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism, and the more common and traditional, but historically untrue, idealized view of the Vedic times. In this process it also steers clear of the pitfalls in the Marxist writings or positivist research, which has taken a wrong position that there was no rule of law and therefore no ethics as understood in modern times. It then attempts to show the more eternal features of perennial ethics in India, the idiom, institutions and the instruments it has nurtured, and the manner it is getting integrated with and is supportive of evolving modern values of democracy and social justice in Indian villages. The Structure of the Paper The paper has five sections. The first is a brief observation on the need for a specific and closer understanding of ’rural ethics ’ in India and the reasons for the patent urban bias and paucity of attention to rural matters on the part of the best of modern thinkers in India. The second section explains the paper’s frame-work for understanding ethical developments in Indian society, which broadly follows the line of Aurobindo, not as a unique and only proponent of the evolutionary school of ethics, but as part of worldwide ontological schools of thought. Like Aurobindo, the paper also understands ’values’ not merely as disjointed bits and pieces of con-cepts but as part of a well-orchestrated set of insti-tutions, instruments and idioms that add up to a vigencia, a word coined by the Spanish sociolo-gist Ortega Y. Gasset Jose. However, the paper’s s approach departs from Aurobindo in more strong-ly emphasizing democracy, fundamental rights, social opportunities and social justice, where it follows the leads provided by Karl Marx, Gauta