Authors: Nikita Singh, Seema Singh
Abstract: Rural life has long been an aspect of Marathi literature that has not been considered as setting, but as a social world that is in motion, with caste, labour, gender, ecology, market forces and the state coming into conflict. This paper discusses how the image of rural Maharashtra is altered as the genre of Marathi writing itself alters its form, as the image of the rural school of short fiction give way to Dalit autobiographical testimony and along with the changes in the form of agrarian distress, migration, media convergence. The paper utilises a qualitative, historically informed textual analysis of a purposeful corpus of representative works (novella/novel, short story, autobiography, poetry, and essay) to identify four major representational turns, which are (1) rural life as moral-cosmic order and everyday ethics; (2) rural life as community system (village institutions, custom, scarcity) as described through realist means and marked by regional speech; (3) rural life as crisis ecology, which is characterized by debt, precarity, feminised labour, seasonal migration, and policy Findings are given in form of thematic matrices and frequency-type mappings (tables), and contextual graphs based on the indicators of Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) of India shedding light on the changing rural labour participation, particularly in women- a vital background to understanding rural work, dignity, and survival in the literature. The paper contends that form is important: every genre has its various abilities of social critique, be it satire and irony, documentary realism and testimonial urgency. All these changing representations make up a long-term cultural record of rural change and challenged modernity.
