Feature: Electronic Media and the Village

VOTARIES of a national culture often ask the question: where do the rural masses come in when the various manifestations of culture are practiced by the people?

It is a fact of life that these manifestations are mostly confined to the educated elite, but the common urbanite is not debarred from them and does have a share in their enjoyment.

But it is also a fact of life that the villager continues to live in a culture of his own which is sometimes far removed from the culture of the city man.

It is interesting that this question is asked on behalf of the rural population by thinking enlightened people in the cities and not by the village men, women and children themselves who are too engrossed in making a success of their lives.

But it does display a yearning on the part of the former that their hard-working brethren should be visible in the country's cultural stream. This yearning is good for national integration.

Social workers who have researched this aspect of life in Pakistan say that our village folk are not completely devoid of the enjoyment of culture, and that they do so through the medium of radio and television.

While radio, and particularly the transistor radio, did a wonderful job in introducing the national language in the rural environment, television went a step further by providing entertainment and education.

According to these researchers, the two media have made the present young generation in the villages completely different from boys and girls of their age group thirty to forty years ago. They are more aware, much nearer to their city youth in outlook tastes and concepts of enjoyment and know a lot more of the world not only outside the village but also outside Pakistan.

While their forebears through there were an old woman in the moon, they know that man has conquered that planet, and find nothing surprising in it.

As it is, urbanization and the spread of modern ideas are daily narrowing the gulf between the city and the village. Because in Pakistan a majority of its population resides in the rural areas, the difference is still noticeable.

In fact some experts believe that the culture of the village is the real culture of Pakistan. It is quite another matter that most people living in the village don't even know what the word means.

However, because of the diminishing dividing line, we have the strange phenomenon of two cultures, grounded on the same base but divergent in detail and environment, flourishing among the same people in the same country at the same time.

So much so that a city man and the village man, both speaking basically the same language, may come times not comprehend each other fully, ad the modern village youth has to act as interpreter.

The two cultures exist side by side, but the attitude towards life, the style of living, the idioms of the language, the customs and manners, he music and poetry, the appliances and furniture, and even the personality and psyche of the two sets of inhabitants are still different.

As stated above, radio and television have done much to narrow down this cultural gap but the traffic of ideas and acceptance of changes has been one-sided.

While the villager and his children have eagerly grasped what comes from the city, they had nothing to give in return, or if they had, it was not wanted by the slick city folk.

Village manners and customs were always a novelty for city people, and vice versa. In a play by Ashfaq Ahmed on PTV in its early days, a villager asks his city friend what the 'wicker chhaaba', used in the village for rotis, is doing on the wall of his baithak. The reply is, "You won't understand. We call it culture".

This is true. In fashionable homes you find articles of everyday rural use being used as decoration a fancy hookah, the spinning wheel, the one string guitar, the butter-making contraption, even a pair of gold-thread khussas, the village shoes.

Sociologists and the anthropologists are worried how to preserve these artifacts, since the villagers are themselves not too keen to retain them. It has become the sacred duty of institutions like the beautiful Lok Virsa Museum in Islamabad to house them for city folk to admire.●