What if, the 'rural' is the future; and not the past?

This chapter is based on the study of economic qua labour qua class processes in a village, called Emaliguda, in the Rayagada district of South Odisha. It often happens that the standard ‘answer’ to a particular question only appears to be an answer. The genealogy of the term ‘rural’ shows that one of the origins of the term can be traced to the Latin noun rus, meaning an “open area”, at times described as a “space that lay outside the cities”; in other words, that which was outside4 the urban. In addition, what remains paradigmatic of rural myths, idylls, descriptions, prescriptions, characteristics, and representations (whether these be imagined, material, social construct, understood through rural practices, or a category of thought), is that rural has always been rendered as that which is not-urban or not-yet-urban.