The acclaimed and indefatigable journalist P Sainath recently launched a unique web based “breathing archive” called PARI — People’s Archive of Rural India. A beautiful and diverse record of rural life — farming and crafts, economy and labour, forests, fields and mines, caste and famine, struggle and song, indeed the spectrum of lived life in the Indian countryside by nearly 850 million Indians.

These are images and stories from an India that seem to be vanishing from the imagination of India. Just as many countries of the global south (or the Third World) mostly show up in the Western press in terms of catastrophe, disaster or ‘heinous traditional practices’, so the rural shows up in urban media, quite the same way: a foreign country of disaster and backward tradition resulting in violence.