From Illusions to Impressions: The Urban-Rural Schism

The schism existing between the rural and the urban is chiefly ideology. Ideology is employed here not in the sense of contrived distortions foisted upon an innocent rural populace by a corrupt and cynical urban group. On the contrary, the ideology the city perpetuates through the medium of the films is consciously assimilated by the rural psyche in its search for the materialization of economic and social aspirations.The city as space for living is only a carrier of ideology and not its creator. The ideological schism of the urban-rural division speaks itself out in the mode the city urbanizes the rural psyche through the import of Indian cinema. The Cinema is an opiate of the rural people which the city uses to make the rural relegate the oppressive social order.The cinema is one among other “ideological state apparatuses” which endeavor to circulate and mobilize the urban-rural encounter. The cinema serves to represent and reproduce dominant myths and beliefs to induce the psyche to inculcate consent. This mobilization of consent is a major reason that accounts for the circular movement from the rural to the urban and back to the rural. The Indian cinema becomes the effective pulse of imagination for the poorest Indian men and women.The rural individual faces subjectivity when his/her psyche is convinced of the pervasive ideology of the urban. In the gap formed by the rural-urban division, one can locate the unconscious psyche of the rural masses subject to impression formation.

The rural psyche mobilizes itself into the city in the faith of economic betterment as they witness it materializing on the silver screen. With the discovery of their concretized dreams and desires in the film, the rural psyche translates the clean image of the hero of the tinsel world unto its entry into the political sphere. But when the hero is identified as part of the establishment the adulation in the rural psyche temporarily fades until the return of the hero as the crusader of evil on the silver screen. So it is a subjectivity that the rural psyche is conscious of because the impression formation of the actor as hero does not alter. It is only when the hero is cast against the established institution that the psyche loses its thrill of the city. So subjectivity is consciously lived by the rural psyche in its awareness of the ideology created by the state apparatuses. Moreover, with the entry of the hero from the tinsel into the political, the rural masses meet with the conflict of illusion and reality with their first impressions dominating their perception. But when the rural psyche experiences an inner conflict with the urban it foregrounds the creators of ideology in the city. Therefore urbanized ideology does not shape rural constituents into a forced subjectivity.