India: Uttar Pradesh – Village tour

Leaving Agra behind, we were heading east towards Ranthambore National Park, where a couple of days of tiger safari awaited us – because apparently watching large predators at close range seemed like a perfectly sensible holiday activity. The schedule, sensibly, allowed for a couple of stops along the way.

The first of these was a visit to a local village. The idea was to get a proper feel for Indian village life, away from the grand monuments and the tourist treadmill. So off we went, driving out into the countryside, threading through a handful of scruffy small towns, past a truck stop that looked as though it hadn’t been swept since the Mughal Empire, and eventually pulling over next to some unremarkable fields at the side of the road.

I won’t pretend that, for one fleeting moment, the thought didn’t cross my mind that we were about to be dragged from the car and shot. It wasn’t. A perfectly pleasant young man was waiting for us instead, there to serve as our guide, which was considerably more reassuring.

He led us across the fields, where freshly planted crops were just beginning to poke through the soil in neat, hopeful little rows. India has, of course, been an agricultural civilisation for well over five thousand years – the Indus Valley settlements dating back to around 3000 BC were already farming wheat and barley – and you could feel something of that deep continuity standing there in the morning quiet. We soon came across a family hard at work in a basic lean-to structure attached to the side of their house, which appeared to be mid-way through some building work of uncertain vintage. They were preparing food, as families in this part of Rajasthan have done for generations, and warming themselves around a small fire against the morning chill – the fog was still thick and the air was properly cold, which I found oddly comforting.

Further on, we reached the main part of the village itself. As it happened to be a Sunday, the local children were not in school – India made primary education compulsory under the Right to Education Act in 2009, though attendance in rural areas remains patchy at best – and they were entertaining themselves playing badminton in the lane. Not a mobile phone in sight. Not a screen of any description. Just children, a shuttlecock, and a considerable amount of shrieking. And they looked, against all reasonable expectation, utterly delighted with life. Beaming smiles, the lot of them.

This, I should say, was a theme throughout our time in India. Again and again, we came across children living in conditions that would alarm a health and safety inspector into early retirement, and yet they seemed genuinely, robustly happy. It was quite disarming.

As we wandered through the village – which, like most of rural Rajasthan, had grown up organically over centuries around a central well and communal spaces – we passed small shops displaying their goods on makeshift shelves and people going about their morning routines with complete and magnificent indifference to our presence. It was slightly surreal, in the best possible way. Here we were, a group of obvious foreigners looking as out of place as a Greggs in the Louvre, and apart from the children, nobody gave us a second glance.

Our guide then took us to the village mosque, which he described as very ancient. Islamic communities have had a presence across Rajasthan since at least the 12th century, when the Delhi Sultanate began extending its reach into the region, and the mosque here – modest in scale but clearly well-maintained – served Muslim worshippers from the surrounding area for miles around. There was a quiet dignity about the place.

And then came the detail that rather stopped me in my tracks. With evident pride, our guide pointed out two public toilets. Two. For a village of around five hundred people. I’m aware that doesn’t sound like cause for celebration by any reasonable measure, but in rural India it genuinely is – even after the Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission launched by the government in 2014 made sanitation a national priority, the provision of basic facilities in villages like this one remains woefully inadequate. None of the houses had any connection to a sewage system whatsoever. Two toilets for five hundred people. I didn’t say anything, but I thought quite a lot.

For our final stop, the guide took us into a small building used by various NGOs operating in the village. The focus was primarily on health care education – maternal health, vaccination programmes, that sort of thing – the kind of quiet, unglamorous work that doesn’t get much attention but matters enormously. India has made genuine progress on rural health over the past two decades, with significant reductions in infant mortality and improvements in access to basic medical information, though there remains a very long way to go.

After days of great cities, imperial forts, and magnificent temples, spending a morning in an ordinary Indian village felt like an entirely different kind of privilege. No grandeur, no crowds queuing for photographs. Just real life, lived at close quarters. Highly recommended – even if the car journey there did briefly make me contemplate updating my will.