VILLAGE MAN, CITY MAN

RA91 Col.  37 mins.
Project Director: Joseph W. Elder
Research and Filming: Mira Reym Binford and Michael Camerini
Contemporary South Asia Film Series (University of Wisconsin)

As the title indicates, this film deals with the way in which one man, Shripal, views his life as a city man whose kinship ties and duties still bind him to his natal village. Shripal now works in a New Delhi cloth factory, 400 miles west of his village in central Uttar Pradesh, India, sending home a third of his wages to pay a family debt. For several weeks of each year he leaves the walled factory in the city and returns to the village world where his wife, children, parents and other relatives live.

Shripal is shown at work in the cotton factory and at leisure in the city, going to the movies, talking to friends and participating in an impromptu song festival. In interviews Shripal discusses how he sees his life in two worlds and points out the personal advantages of life for him in the city. The contrast between city and village is made as much by change of pace and movement as by Shripal's own comments. In the village, life goes on at a different pace: women prepare food, care for children, and talk and work together. Shripal shares in the family's farm work and listens as a family group discuss legal problems concerning their rights to land. The particular problems of village life seem in sharp contrast to Shripal's city environment where he experiences the problems of a factory worker.

The use of interviews with Shripal and his friends allows the sequences of village and city to be situated in the context of a series of factors ‑ personal, familial and economic ‑ which makes the analysis interesting and informative. The level of analysis is, however, kept simple.

J.W. Elder, 1975. Village Man, City Man: A Film Guide. South Asian Area Center, University of Wisconsin.

G.A. Finnegan, 1978. Review of the film. American Anthropologist, Vol.80, pp.202-203.